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Why I Decided to Stop Using a Pen Name | At the beginning of April, I decided to take a leap and start writing on Medium.
I hadn’t been on the site very long. Like, probably twenty-four hours.
But from the moment I made my account and started reading some of the articles, I absolutely knew I had to start writing too. This was the perfect place to start publishing, the perfect place to start a blog. I was so hooked I didn’t wait to figure anything out. I just picked a pen name, made a new email, and started writing.
Turns out, I still had quite a few things to learn (I still do!). But by using my pen name, I felt completely safe to publish anything I wanted. I could bare my soul and it would be fine because no one I knew would ever find it. I didn’t have to risk any embarrassment while I tried something new. And, if I quit, no one had to know about that, either.
The perks of a pen name were numerous:
Got to go by a much cooler name than my real one.
People could easily pronounce my pen name.
The pen name embodied a certain feel I wanted to portray as a writer (think J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien).
I got to write without fear of judgment while I figured out a new platform.
At the same time, I was also on a job hunt. It’s my senior year of college and I was starting to panic about what I was going to do when summer finally hit and I still hadn’t landed a full-time job. But then, through Medium, I discovered freelance writing.
It was like I had been trying really hard to focus on an image, squinting and blinking furiously, but the shapes wouldn’t form together. When I learned about freelance writing, it was like I blinked once and suddenly — there it was. All the images aligned and came into focus with dazzling detail.
Why was I desperately hoping someone would hire me? I know I’m qualified! I should hire myself!
Well, after watching as many Youtube playlists on the topic, reading a dozen articles, and downloading several ebooks, I soon realized I was going to need a website and a portfolio.
People were going to have to read my writing.
And attach my name to it.
Marketing yourself is the name of the game.
I now had a choice to make. Was I going to perpetuate this pen name deal into my actual line of work? Would I be using this name for clients? Having people call me by it in person?
As I thought more about the situation, I realized a few key things:
It’s going to be difficult to live my entire life as a different person. Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent know what the heck I’m talking about.
Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent know what the heck I’m talking about. People love to see faces. They don’t want to just think you’re writing is great, they want to fall in love with the person too.
And finally:
I can’t hide.
The truth is, if you want to be successful at something, anything, you’re going to have to start somewhere (usually at the bottom). And you’re also going to have to tell people about it.
As much as I may want to find a tiny corner of the internet, set up shop, and then never let anyone know what I’m doing, that isn’t a very honest way to live my life.
It’s much more important to let people know who I am, what I’m doing, and yes, that I’m going to make blunders along the way.
As much as possible, I believe that we should tell people the truth about ourselves for two reasons:
Because what kind of a person are you if you always hide your interests/goals/pursuits? and You’ll find so many like-minded individuals out there if you just let them know you’re out there too.
People need people. We can’t be islands and we can’t pretend to be something we’re not. Taking the leap to let other people know about something in your life is scary, but so often, once we’ve taken that leap we discover they either do the same thing too, or they want to help!
While I will be abandoning my old persona, I don’t regret using the pen name for a while. It helped me get started and hit the ground running without reservations.
But now I’ve decided to start telling everyone the truth about myself, and I’m never going back. I may find some people who judge me, yes. I’m also going to find ten more people for each of those judgy ones who are supportive and excited about my new endeavors.
Here’s to all the future blunders,
G.C. | https://medium.com/a-life-of-words/why-i-decided-to-stop-using-a-pen-name-88592ae4009f | ['Grace Claman'] | 2020-05-18 18:48:21.752000+00:00 | ['Pen Names', 'Writing Life', 'Freelance Writing', 'Writing', 'Personal Growth'] |
ของเล่นใหม่! เปิดตัว LINE OA STORE เลือกฟีเจอร์ Power-up ให้ LINE Official Account ของคุณเจ๋งขึ้นไปอีก! | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/linedevth/introducing-line-oa-store-702af0d491b0 | ['Warit Wanwithu'] | 2020-12-16 08:38:38.528000+00:00 | ['Linedevth', 'Chatbots', 'Line Api', 'Line Oa Store', 'Line Official Account'] |
Professional expertise is overrated | Today, like any other day, I came back here to share yet another pain point in my personal history that I am coming to make peace with:
I will probably never become an expert in a unique profession.
Accepting this was extremely difficult for me since the people that I look up the most, are really good at some things. Actually, saying that they are “really good” might be a huge understatement; there are simply people who seem to be created to become extraordinary in one field. One example is Jacob Collier.
GO TO 2.10 FOR GOD’S SAKE
If you don’t know him yet, you should. He is a musical genius and he is extremely fascinating. The amount of instruments he can play is beyond me. He reimagines traditional musical harmonies, almost creating new ways of understanding music. His Instagram -which is the only Instagram I believe to be genuine- shows that he lives, breathes and eats music 24/7. There is no way of even imagining what he is capable of hearing and sensing when he practices his craft. He is 25 years old.
When I am watching his videos, I always have a sense of admiration, a feeling that I am lucky to be alive to witness him doing his thing, and let’s be honest; a tiny wave of envy that is directed to someone who knows and excels in what they know they are brilliant at.
If you know exactly you want to do; think, rethink and then re-rethink.
Imagine with me a certain type of friend that you might have had:
Since primary school, they know exactly what they wanted to do. They are going to become a doctor. Saving lives and being praised in public motivates them. Hence, throughout their youth and their early adulthood, they do everything they need to do to get there. After a long and seemingly perfect ride, they are now a doctor and supposedly very happy.
Very accurate representation, thank you google search.
And you, my dear friend. You are sitting on your couch like a potato thinking “I don’t know what I am doing with my life, they tell me to focus on what I love doing, except that I literally don’t love anything that much to sacrifice my life to it”.
I mean, if you even use the word “sacrifice”, maybe it’s not going so good and I understand your struggle since I was that potato on regular bases until very recently. I am familiar with the deep pressure of having to know what to do and starting to take the necessary steps to become what you are envisioning.
Are you going to become a lawyer? Go to law school, pass the bar, start your practice.
You don’t want to go to school? That’s alright too, but then you should start working on developing the skills expected of you.
Nothing so far is original, it’s how we “achieve” short and medium goals.
Except, saying things like “I will become X, Y, Z” can create an enormous cage, starting from ages 8–9.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
This is the question we are started to get asked when we are in primary school. Maybe this is me, but even at that age, I took that question very, very seriously. It felt like if I say that I will be a ballerina, it’s some sort of verbal contract that I am signing my name upon. I then need to devote my life to my art; and if I even remotely consider another option like becoming a doctor, the cage doesn’t allow that. But it’s okay since, with the doctor option, I would need to be okay with the idea of seeing and smelling blood on daily bases. I am not sure I can handle that. Although doctors seemed to be getting a lot of attention so it’s worth considering.
When I think back, I think we all took the idea of those boxes very seriously. There was an “obvious truth” presented us in the following form:
If you love something, you spend more time on it.
If you spend more time on it, you become an expert on it.
If you become an expert on it, you will become successful.
And finally, if you become successful, you will maybe, eventually be happy.
This is the ultimate deal then: Love>Time>Expertise>Success>Happiness
Of course, different generations have different beliefs. Probably for the average Eurasian person in the 70s, love, by all means, wasn’t the primordial factor to kick off the cycle. We all have different paths presented to us when we grow up I think. The one above was what I believed in when I was in high school, which is a critical time -as they present it- to choose an area of expertise. Today, I am happy to say that this is all a big, huge, massive bullshit.
We understood expertise wrong.
When I finally understood this for myself, I felt a huge relief. My parents were a big fan of raising a kid with different interests and I was quite okay with that since I was enjoying the attention. Throughout my childhood I played the violin, the piano, played volleyball, danced ballet, went to reading competitions, drawing competitions. Somehow, I was above average in all I did *a little bragging here? Lol, but seriously I was a tired kid so, no.*
So when I reached a point where I was supposed to focus on the areas “I was good at”, I had no idea. I gave up on things for the wrong reasons, chose to keep on doing other things because of a lack of self-awareness and although I don’t have deep regrets, I think back every now and then to examine my patterns.
I always thought that it was the title and the profession that required expertise. I was deeply wrong. It was my behaviours, my character and my attributes that I needed to become an expert on.
Who around you is doing exactly what they thought they would be doing in high school, in university or even after they enter the professional life? Today, even if you are a doctor, you can choose to change your practice, become a researcher or a writer. If you are a neurosurgeon and you are thinking about it, please do. We all love reading about the brain nowadays.
Professional expertise is not the norm, but it is presented that way. As young people, instead of learning about our individual strengths, we are taught how each profession is performed and how we can get a diploma/internship/course to prove our “expertise”. We end up in a pissing war with our pairs, comparing CVs, LinkedIn accounts in times of high unemployment, instead of being confident about our part to play and collaborate with people to co-construct a better functioning society.
Beyond the macro, we let companies and schools tell us what we are good and not good at in their limited way, and we believe them so easily since we don’t have any fucking idea who we are.
:(
Becoming an expert on depending on your strengths and on managing your weaknesses is > professional expertise
Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to say you did everything wrong if you are getting expertise in an area, hell I personally am with you doing the same thing. I am talking about the end goal of choosing the next step and planning a career path for yourself. If you are solely focused on the expertise and lost sight of if you are on the right path for you, you are correct to question things. Hence, professional expertise is not the most important thing you should be focusing on right now.
To give an example from a personal experience, what brings personal satisfaction to me is being surrounded by creative people, working together on solutions that will have a positive impact on others. I know that my strengths fit this scenario and I am focusing on them as I sharpen my self-awareness, my agility and my creativity, but my stress management can benefit from an upgrade or two.
Since I am aware of my reactions, every time I find myself in a stressful position, I am also aware that it is a step I am taking for becoming an expert on managing one of my weaknesses.
When you adopt this way of seeing things, you can become a ballerina, a product manager, a chef and still continue becoming an expert on yourself.
Your favourite stoic said it first.
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
On a side note and to prove my point I really don’t think Jacob Collier is doing what he is doing just to become an expert on music, he is genuinely radiating while performing. *is this my open love letter to Jacob? Maybe.*
Whatever you are doing right now, remember to drink some water.
Peace and love,
Yaprak | https://medium.com/@yaprakboyacioglu/professional-expertise-is-overrated-23f7f373f101 | ['Yaprak Boyacioglu'] | 2020-12-17 09:05:07.409000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Growth', 'Professional Development', 'Expert', 'Strength Training'] |
2 Corinthians 9:14–15 | And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
There are many strongholds in our hearts that occupy various areas of our lives. The “arguments” Paul mentioned in verse 5 refers to our mind and thoughts, and “pretention” means the pride in our hearts, or our feelings; finally, he said that we’ll “take captive of every thought,” which is our will. In other word, strongholds can take place in our thoughts, feelings and will, which make up our soul, and the devil always attacks us in these three areas.
First of all, devil Satan often deceives our thoughts. The Bible says that the devil is the father of all lies. Satan often deceives the non-believers, making them feel that God doesn’t love them. Therefore, many Chinese do not believe in Jesus, because they think after they accept Jesus they will not be able to worship their ancestors, which contradicts with Chinese traditions. Actually, that is not the teaching of the Bible at all, because Bible takes honoring ancestors very seriously. The Israelites address God as the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” This shows that they respect the faith of their ancestors. It’s not that Christianity values respect for ancestors, but many have devil’s stronghold in their thoughts, which caused them not able to accept Jesus Christ.
Next, in our feelings, Satan likes to build a Tower of Babel inside us based on our pride and self-centeredness. People use any conceivable way to satisfy the old-self deep down inside us, and that’s why Bible says: “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.”
Third, in our will, Satan often attacks us through the circumstance. Circumstance of hardship can easily waver our will. We might be able to defend against one or two difficulties, but we can be defeated by repeated attacks. When John the Baptist was imprisoned, at first he said that “He must become greater; I must become less.” After a while, however, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Apparently, continued hardship can wear down our will. Accusation from the enemy, on the other hand, can also waver our will. Our hearts can be shaken by repeated accusations by the enemy and cause us not to follow the Lord.
Are there strongholds inside you? May the Holy Spirit shine into your hearts and cleanse you, and in the name of the Lord we shall defend all the work of the enemy!
Pray with Pastor Tong
Jesus, I thank you because you have given us the secret to winning the spiritual warfare. I ask that you open our eyes so that we can see the tricks of the enemy, and to rebuke all the work of the enemy by the power of God. I thank you and I pray in the victorious name of Jesus, amen!
River of Life Christian Church |
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Try email marketing for free today! | https://edevotion.rolcc.net/2-corinthians-9-14-15-a082c71bceb7 | ['Rolcc Daily Devotion'] | 2020-12-26 11:03:22.767000+00:00 | ['English', 'Devotion'] |
Flutter: Missing Purpose String in Info.plist when upload ipa | Sometimes, when you try to upload an iOS build for the Apple Store, some issues arrive at your email address. Some are blocking issues and some are not.
In the specific case, this particular issue is a little “tricky” and happens when the flutter permission_handler will be used to manage permissions like camera, location, access to the filesystem, and so on.
You need to explicitly fix your Podfile to be able to submit your App, otherwise seems your App will be developed to access full information of the End-User!
90% of the time you’ll need changes to the privacy form of particular additional information that causes the rejection of your App.
So, the solution is very easy and fast, patch your PodFile following this snippet in the pod_install script:
For each variable put 0 if the permission is not used by your App and 1 if you are using the permission.
For instance:
'PERMISSION_LOCATION=0', # Location disabled
'PERMISSION_LOCATION=1', # Location enabled
at the end run
pod install
and rebuild your archive before distributing your App with Transporter or XCode.
Enjoy! | https://medium.com/@giannideplano/flutter-missing-purpose-string-in-info-plist-when-upload-ipa-a329c9ad45b7 | ['Gianni Deplano'] | 2020-12-21 12:15:50.557000+00:00 | ['Flutter App Development', 'App Store', 'App Store Review', 'Flutter', 'iOS App Development'] |
A Short History of Data Visualisation | A Short History of Data Visualisation
With modern technology, visualising data has never been easier. A few clicks of the mouse, can more or less instantly turn a huge table of raw numbers into a visually appealing and easy to interpret diagram. Graphing data provides a high-speed shortcut to creating understanding and getting your point across.
Many of the visualisation techniques of today were invented during the industrial revolution, with the field making large strides in the mid-19th century. What may seem simple and obvious today, such as a bar chart or line graph, would have been strange and unfamiliar to someone 200 years ago. In this article we take a look at some of the major innovators in the graphical representation of data and some of their famous works.
Map-makers
Ptolemy’s world map — Source: Wikipedia
Arguably the first data visualisations were in the field of Cartography. Originally used for the purposes of navigation, land ownership and general human curiosity, maps have been around in some form or another for at least ten thousand years. In ancient times, information about the world, collated from eyewitness accounts (and a fair amount of guesswork) would be engraved into stone or clay. Over the centuries, instruments such as the compass (200 BC) and sextant (1731) allowed for more precise measurements and increasingly accurate maps, with the printing press enabling their mass production.
In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s map of the world marked a major development in how we depict the surface of the spherical Earth on a flat piece of paper.
In his Mercator Projection, local geography is preserved and straight lines on the map translate to lines of constant bearing when looking at a compass, making it ideal for navigation at sea. It proved popular, with several hundred copies of the original being printed and is still the most common world map projection we see today.
William Playfair
William Playfair has a pretty eclectic CV. In a meandering career, unthinkable today, he turned his hand to espionage, engineering (as PA to James Watt, of steam engine fame), drafting, accounting, inventing, metalwork, investment broking, economics, translation, publicity, land speculation, banking, blackmail and journalism. During the French Revolution he worked as a spy for the British government, ran a currency counterfeiting operation to collapse the French currency and took part in the storming of the Bastille. A bit of a rogue and a scoundrel he also ended up in debtors’ prison after several failed businesses. However, his lasting legacy is in the field of statistics, with the charts he designed forming the core of data visualisation today.
In Playfair’s day, data were typically displayed in dry tables, presented with little thought for their interpretation. If you wanted to understand something, there were no intuitive shortcuts, only the laborious task of poring back and forth through the numbers, remembering, copying and comparing figures as you went.
Then, in 1765, along came the above timeline chart from Joseph Priestley, showing the overlapping lifetimes of various classical statesmen and philosophers. Rather than just listing names, birth-years and death-years, Priestley plotted them on a timeline, making it immediately obvious which historical figures were contemporaries. These timelines proved a success and directly inspired Playfair’s invention of the bar chart, first appearing in his Commercial and Political Atlas.
William Playfair — Commercial and Political Atlas — Source
The chart shows the balance of trade for Scotland with various territories in Europe and the New World. By presenting data this way, it’s easy to spot Scotland’s strong economic links with Ireland and its trade imbalance with Russia.
For England, he had more data available and was able to produce time-series charts, showing how the balance of trade shifted over time. These charts were skilfully and painstakingly engraved into metal printing plates and copied by spreading ink into the recesses before pressing paper against them. It’s thought that on early reproductions, Playfair may have hand-coloured the charts himself. We have it pretty easy these days!
William Playfair — Commercial and Political Atlas — Source
Fifteen years later, he was at it again, this time with the sometimes controversial pie chart and various creative combinations. It’s astonishing to think, that more than two hundred years later, the ideas of one man still make up the bulk of the chart options in state of the art data visualisation software.
William Playfair — proportion of the Turkish Empire which falls in Asia, Africa and Europe — Source
Charles Joseph Minard
A few decades later, emerged a French civil engineer who made significant innovations in combining the fields of statistics and cartography.
In 1845 he created a “flow map” of the area around Dijon (of mustard fame) and Mulhouse in eastern France, displaying traffic data collected on roads through the area. This was distributed to dozens of stakeholders ahead of routing a new railway line through the area. Perhaps as a result of these maps, the modern day rail network roughly follows the lower dark line through Dole, Besançon and Belfort.
Charles Joseph Minard — road traffic between Dijon and Mulhouse — Source
He’s most famous however for his depiction of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. His flow diagram below graphically depicts the depletion of Napoleon’s armies from almost half a million to virtually nothing as it trudged, froze and starved its way to Moscow and back. It’s a stark illustration of the failure of the campaign and its human toll. These types of diagram are now commonly referred to as “Sankey charts”.
Chales Joseph Minard — map of Napoleon’s Russia campaign — Source
Florence nightingale
The rightly venerated founder of modern nursing, was also a talented mathematician who was a pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics. Building on the ideas of Playfair, she incorporated charts into many of her publications and is credited with the invention of the Polar Area Chart, or “Coxcomb”.
“Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East” — Source: Wikipedia
The chart depicts the different causes of death by month in the Crimean War, with the area of each wedge representing the size of the statistic. This type of chart lends itself well to cyclical data, although in this case Nightingale provided separate charts for the two years she covered.
Nightingale made several studies of the sanitary conditions in Crimea, India and the UK, and used charts like the above in lobbying for reform. Her work had great influence on the Public Health Act of 1875, which is credited by some as increasing the life expectancy in the UK by 20 years.
Francis Galton
The scatter plot is a mainstay of bi-variate analysis and there is no one person who can be claimed to be the inventor. One person who comes close however is the Victorian era statistician Francis Galton. A prolific writer and scientist, his contributions to the field statistics are immense, although now somewhat controversially due to his connection to eugenics.
In analysing the relationships between two variables, Galton devised a graphical technique where frequencies of each combination are plotted on a grid. Over this grid, contour lines are overlaid, showing the density of the data. For two correlated, normally distributed, variables, these contours should form an ellipse with the long axis acting as a form of linear regression.
A comparison of adult children’s heights, vs the average of their parents. Source: http://euclid.psych.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/images/galton-corr.jpg
The Information Age
Things progressed fairly slowly in the first half of the twentieth century, but then came the advent of computers. In 1981, the Xerox 8100 Star introduced the first commercial Graphical User Interface (GUI), and with it, applications like spreadsheets with the ability to automatically generate graphics from tables of information. What once took hours of careful etching or drawing could be done with a few clicks of the mouse, along with added ease of editing, formatting and updating. From there, the variety of charting techniques and styles has exploded, with countless software packages offering an array of methods for presenting your data.
Honorable mentions
Charles Dupin: Created the earliest known Chloropleth map, plotting illiteracy rates across France in 1826.
Charles Dupin — Carte figurative de l’instruction populaire de la France, 1826
John Snow: Mapped the Broad Street Cholera Outbreak of 1854 using a dot map, showing that the disease was spread via contaminated water, rather than the air as previously thought.
Mary Eleanor Spear: Developed the box plot in 1952 in her book Charting Statistics after working as a graphical analyst in the US civil service. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-short-history-of-data-visualisation-de2f81ed0b23 | ['Richard Farnworth'] | 2020-08-24 02:40:56.164000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Visualization', 'Graphic Design', 'Charts', 'Data Visualization'] |
4 Advanced Tricks With Python Functions You Might Not Know | 2. Using * and ** for Function Argument Unpacking
Some functions require a long list of arguments. Although this should be avoided altogether (e.g. by using data classes), it’s not always up to you. In such cases, the second-best option is to create a dictionary with all the named arguments and pass that to the function instead. It will generally make your code more readable.
You can unpack a dictionary for use with named keywords by using the ** prefix: | https://medium.com/better-programming/4-advanced-tricks-with-python-functions-you-might-not-know-d1214d751741 | ['Erik Van Baaren'] | 2020-11-21 08:18:49.767000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Data Science', 'Python3', 'Python', 'Software Development'] |
Options — Whether to buy or sell?? | “Risk is our business, that’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we are aboard her - Captain Kirk”
Before beginning to trade in options one should be completely aware that they are risky instruments. Be it buying or selling both of them have their own sets of risk. Such is the riskiness that if not taken care off it will lead to devastating losses. But then what I think is risk is not something that we can avoid. Better embrace it, manage it, and then use it to make big bucks!!
Option pricing is a pretty complex subject. Not the pricing per se. To some extent it is simple. It depends on the intrinsic and extrinsic value. Price change is where the complexity lies. This is where the five factors fondly called as Greeks take control. Price not only depends on the individual Greeks but also on the interaction among them and that is where the complexity begins.
Options price depends on 3 major factors
1. The direction of movement in the underlying (Delta and Gamma)
2. How fast the movement is (Vega)
3. Time to expiry (Theta)
These above-mentioned factors make buying options a tough task to do in my opinion. You need to be right on all three counts to make money here. Not only you need to be right on the direction but also on how much directional movement will be there and how fast it would be. And every single day when your view is wrong on even one front it will cost you in the form of theta decay. Yes, the risk is definitely less here. First, the downside is limited to the tune of premium paid. Second, buying means you go long on gamma which means when you win you win big but when you lose you lose small. But then to make money here I need to be an expert in predicting the markets which I am definitely not.
The above reason is why I was fascinated by option selling. The only thing that I needed to make sure in a crude sense is that even if I am wrong I should not be wrong enough (factor 1 and 2 mentioned above) and I still get to keep my profits. Because irrespective of what happens time value of money will always work in my favour. An efficient business strategy in my view which gives me enough bandwidth to concentrate on the most important factors in trading - Risk and Capital management. This is easier said than done. Because you don’t know how you will react when money is on the line!!
Options selling is not as rosy as it sounds. My derivatives professor once told me that it’s like picking pennies in front of the road roller. This statement was enough to make me aware of the risk involved. When you are writing options you are short gamma which basically means when you win you win small and when you lose you lose big. It sure sounds funny, right!! Well, then why any sane person will write options ever. It is because ~90% of options expire worthless. That means you will have positive expectancy on the trades. Let’s say that if you have a risk-reward ratio of 2 that is you are risking 2 to get 1 (Crazy RRR but conservative as this is options we are talking about!!) and a 70% probability of winning you will still end up making some money at a gross level. But those 30% of the losing trades can kill you if not taken care of. And this is where risk management comes into play.
Both buying and selling have their own disadvantages. In buying you need to be right on all counts and in selling a single trade is enough to kill the capital. Then what should one do? Well, I think instead of choosing sides it is better to be an opportunist and this is what I do. Eventually, one needs to make money. It doesn't matter whether it comes from only buying or only selling. One strategy that justifies this statement is deploying spreads while trading. Spreads hedge the downside losses as you end up buying a further OTM strike. Spread also lessens the effect of short gamma which basically gives more time to let the trade play itself out. Well, you will end up sacrificing returns due to the cost of reinsurance. But as everyone in the field of investing and trading likes to say, you will get a good night’s sleep which is totally worth it!! | https://medium.com/@akotangle/options-whether-to-buy-or-sell-1966e477f187 | [] | 2020-06-08 21:53:17.014000+00:00 | ['Options Trading', 'Risk Management', 'Investing And Trading', 'Finance'] |
Momentum | There are days that definitely seems like nothing is working. Sometimes those days becomes weeks or even months. You question yourself, your decisions and the even the future. Are you doing the right thing? Is it going to be always like this?
Who knows?
But the only thing I always say you cannot do, is not trying.
There will be days that will totally feel waste of time, like lost or even worthless, and those are the days that you just keep doing it what you are doing. Get out, show up and do the work, it doesn’t matter what.
It ain’t cool to keep trying and see no results. It frustrating at times, but if great things take time, and everything that worth doing requires patience and discipline, then the last thing to do is to give up.
I have had a lot of those days, but then you have those moments where everything seems to be in the right place. Everything makes sense. Everybody gets it.
Momentum.
These moments just happen, you cannot fabricate them, you cannot force them. They appear in front you, but they are not miracles, they are the result of all that work that you once almost stopped, all that work that you questioned many times. The result of commitment and belief that what you were doing was the right thing no matter what.
However, easy as these moments appear they can go away. They can vanish in the air even faster than when they arrived, but like anything else, like the work that brought them in the first place, is up to you.
You don’t own momentum and it doesn’t owe you anything either, but you can make it stay longer. Rather than satiate your ego and fill the voids for all those missing opportunities, for that long wait, treat it well and show it that you care.
Grab it and get hold onto it, not because that way it won’t escape, it will if it wants to, but because it is your opportunity to move away, far where you always dreamed to be, where you have always wanted to be. Don’t let it go. | https://medium.com/thoughts-on-the-go-journal/momentum-450122bbcb1b | ['Joseph Emmi'] | 2018-08-13 23:02:10.698000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Journal', 'Challenge', 'Personal Growth', 'Commitment'] |
3 Top Travel Stocks to Buy in November | The Motley Fool | Planning your next getaway is probably not high on your priority list these days. The pandemic is making vacations a challenge, and the global economic slump isn’t making it easy to pay for a potential escape. The storm clouds are everywhere, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some travel stocks worth buying these days.
Royal Caribbean (NYSE:RCL), Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS), and Southwest (NYSE:LUV) are three well-known travel stocks that you may want to consider adding to your portfolio. Cruise lines, theme parks, and airlines are facing stiff headwinds, but let’s take a closer look at why these three players are some of the top stocks to buy this month.
Image source: Getty Images
Royal Caribbean
Cruise lines have been losing a lot of money since the industry came to a grinding halt in March, and the three major operators won’t be taking on passengers again until next year. All three publicly traded cruise line stocks have surrendered more than half of their value in 2020 — and understandably so — but there are some good reasons why Royal Caribbean is the name to consider now as an investment.
Royal Caribbean has historically delivered the highest margins in the industry, and that’s going to help it turn the corner of profitability sooner than its rivals when cruises hit the open waters again. Royal Caribbean has also checked in with the lowest cash refund request rate on canceled sailings, as a larger percentage of its displaced passengers have opted to apply the proceeds to future cruises than its competition.
These are scary times, but Royal Caribbean has raised enough liquidity to stay afloat well into next year if cruises keep getting suspended. It will outlast the competition in this dry stretch and should sail faster than its peers when cruising is back on the travel menu.
Walt Disney
The world’s largest theme-park operator reports financial results in a few days, and it’s going to be ugly. California’s Disneyland remains closed. The turnstiles have been clicking at Disney World in Florida since July, but the resort isn’t profitable under current conditions. Layoffs keep happening, and international travel restrictions are keeping its most lucrative visitors away.
It’s still a good time to buy into Disney. This isn’t just a theme-park company, as the media giant actually posted a profit as strength at its steady media-networks segment helped offset the sting from its theme parks in its previous quarterly report. Disney+ has been a runaway smash in its first year of business, attracting more than 60 million paying subscribers.
This lull will also make Disney better when it resumes operations at the other end of this pandemic. It’s been able to improve everything from security screenings to mobile ordering at Disney World and has a pipeline of major new ride experiences on both coasts that will make it easy to woo visitors again when it’s safer to do so without capping attendance levels.
Southwest
You can’t blame investors for being skittish when it comes to transportation stocks, and airline stocks have historically been bad bets. Even Warren Buffett dumped his airline stocks this year after being burned by the industry earlier in his storied investing career.
You still have to like Southwest, though. It’s not going to wow you with growth. Even before the pandemic, it was merely plodding along with low-single-digit growth, and its gross margin was contracting in the four previous years.
However, it does have the strongest balance sheet in the industry, and it’s that rare airline that customers generally rave about. With analysts betting on a return to growth and profitability next year, Southwest will be a leader out of the air-carrier slump. It will also naturally benefit from any of its weaker rivals that will buckle under pressure.
Royal Caribbean, Disney, and Southwest are the best at what they do. If you’re buying into an out-of-favor industry, you may as well stick to the discounted leaders. | https://medium.com/the-motley-fool/3-top-travel-stocks-to-buy-in-november-the-motley-fool-f1a341242d04 | [] | 2020-11-09 19:10:10.005000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Cruises', 'Disney', 'Investing', 'Stock Market'] |
AYS Daily Digest 13/03/20: People removed from Greek islands without a chance to seek asylum | Growing Concerns about the Spread of Coronavirus // Illegal Returns in Greece // The Criminalization of Giving Assistance to People on the Move in Bosnia // Disastrous Conditions for Deported Afghans // & More
Growing concerns over COVID-19 in overcrowded refugee camps. Photo: MSF
FEATURE:
Refugees on Lesvos asked to sign documents in Greek, leading to their “voluntary returns”
Greek authorities on Lesvos seem to be returning people on the move to Turkey by having them sign their own voluntary return documents. It seems Greek authorities are giving Afghans, and others being kept in navy boats in the port of Lesvos, documents like the one in the photo below which outlines their “consent” to legal expulsion.
Trusted sources tell AYS that people on the move are being asked to sign these documents, despite the fact that they do not understand what it says and no one explains what impact it will have on them.
“The document makes reference to several provisions of Greek and EU law, as well as the EU-Turkey Statement, but makes no reference to the Presidential Decree in which the access to asylum procedures was suspended for one month”, AYS was told.
Under section 6, it clearly states that by signing this document, the person has been informed, in a language s/he understands, of their rights and the reasons of their detention. Section 8 states that the person has not appealed the return decision within the 48 hour deadline.
There are serious concerns among people on the ground that detained refugees were NOT informed of anything regarding their detention, expulsion or of their ability to appeal the decision. It appears they are not even informed about what this specific document states. Sources say they are sure that the detained people concerned have not been given any actual means to appeal their return decision.
Even though it may seem obvious, it is worth repeating that suspending access to asylum and collectively returning people back to Turkey is in flagrant violation of several EU laws, the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental rights all EU Member States are obliged to protect. Moreover, Commissioner Johansson has said several times that the right to asylum shall be respected at all times and for all cases. Yet, these actions continue occurring in the face of EU principles, laws and norms.
Following the departure of the military boat carrying 500 rejected people from Lesvos, we were unofficially told they would probably be moved to closed facilities in the northern part of Greece, possibly in a new migrant detention centre being established in the region of Serres, in the nearest proximity to the Bulgarian border. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-13-03-20-people-removed-from-greek-islands-without-a-chance-to-seek-asylum-93d1ea05091 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2020-03-14 18:07:32.885000+00:00 | ['Migrant Crisis', 'Digest', 'Turkey', 'Greece', 'Refugees'] |
Risk-adjusted token bonding curves | We need additional crypto-economic mechanisms for building more sustainable financing applications, such as tokenised impact bonds, that can dynamically adapt to changing risks over time within complex systems. Let’s begin this experimentation with a risk-adjusted token bonding curve pricing oracle.
Are fixed token bonding curves broken?
Most current implementations of Token Bonding Curves only support fixed (invariant) pricing functions. Variant parameters are constrained to the token supply and point-in-time demand (order quantity).
This may reduce complexity, compared to multi-dimensional curves. However, this limitation comes at the cost of informational asymmetries.
…prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have. (F.H. Hayek)
Uni-dimensional bonding curves might not be best suited to complex economies that could (or should?) internalise risks for the larger economy to be sustainable.
Current implementations of token bonding mechanisms cannot account for external systems changes over time, even when such changes can be calculated and have demonstrable probabilistic impacts or create emergent shifts in the economy. Buy and sell decisions are therefore only made on the basis of price which is constrained to unrealistic parameters. Prices can be artificially manipulated and token marketplaces can be shorted to benefit individuals who exploit information asymmetries, at the expense of other participants. Risks are externalised and must be paid for outside of the crypto-economic system. This can have negative impacts on the broader economy in which the crypto-economic system is operating and on which it is integrally dependant. This is not sustainable. The ICO marketplace has demonstrated how messy this can get!
Engineering token prices
To-date most implementations of token bonding curves take prospective design decisions (best guesses) about which pricing function to use.
Token engineers make largely untested assumptions about how incentives will play out in the real-world.
This typically starts with sketching out a curve that represents the desired behaviour of the crypto-economic system.
Thereafter a function is identified that seems to best fit this behavioural pattern.
At best, these designs have been formally modelled. A great example is the engineering work on Augmented Bonding Curves by Michael Zargham and his Blockscience team. Computer-aided design for complex adaptive systems (cadCAD) enables us to model and identify the mechanisms and policies that will define the ‘safe space’ in which a given crypto-economic design can play out.
But this is an abstraction of complex adaptive systems that leaves open a large (even if bounded) uncontrollable space, within which there is no information feedback loop mechanism built into the system, other than market demand.
Solving real-world problems
To try fix this, let’s take a real-world example such as Impact Bonds.
The ixo foundation is researching a tokenised impact bond mechanism to provide next-generation financing for development outcomes.
This work is being done in the context of a very large institutionally-financed development impact bond for quality primary education in India.
Impact bonds transfer the operational risks of a development intervention to capital investors. In return, these investors receive financial returns as compensation for the risks. This only fully pays out if the bond delivers predetermined outcomes. The risk premium is accepted as an ‘impact’ contribution (hence the parochial term ‘impact investing’).
The mechanism can also reward intervention implementers with bonus payments for achieving outcomes targets. This could be an effective use of behavioural economics, when the incentive mechanism actually works in practice.
Traditional impact bonds — such as the Development Impact Bond (DIB) for education, typically have invariant terms for duration, coupon value and performance triggers.
Bonds are only issued after the full capital subscription has been realised. This can delay implementation of the intervention whilst capital is being formed.
It also requires ex-ante conviction that the operational risks will be contained within acceptable (predictable) bounds. Risks incur underwriting costs based on assumptions that may or may not be valid.
Life teaches us that prior expectations often don’t play out in complex real-world contexts.
Almost all interventions funded by instruments such as impact bonds could (or should?) be seen as start-up initiatives with unproven assumptions. This includes replicated interventions which are implemented in a different place, time or with any other untested variables.
A new financing mechanism
We need a financing mechanism that responds to new information and changes in risks over time. A financing mechanism that adapts to complex systems with dynamic, risk-adjusted pricing.
Ideally, this should enable startup (seed) capital to be raised to demonstrate the feasibility and promise of the intervention. After the startup phase, this mechanism should provide continuous funding (or a series of funding events) for the project to scale towards achieving its desired future-state outcomes.
Alpha Bonds
We describe this adaptive impact financing mechanism as an alpha-bond.
The implementation requires a risk-adjusted bonding curve pricing curve signal, using a variant co-efficient (alpha) to statistically determine the probability of the bond achieving its targets.
In an ⍺Bond future-state outcomes programmatically trigger payouts to investors (and implementors) when milestones and targets have been reached.
Using this risk calculation at a given point in time could produce a risk-adjusted price for an ⍺Bond token by integrating the alpha coefficient as a modifier on the bonding curve.
If participation in a bond is liquid, investors can enter and exit the investment pool by trading their debt tokens (against an automated market-maker smart contracts, for instance), at a price that incorporates this risk information.
A novel pricing function
Variable power functions that are adjusted by an alpha coefficient could be a novel way of implementing Token Bonding Curves.
We want to build this as a trustless generic pricing oracle that can be called as a function by any application. The first software client will be developed and tested as a module in the Cosmos SDK, as an extension to our Cosmic Bonding module prototype. This will make the pricing oracle available to any application that implements the module in an application blockchain.
In a future article I will attempt to describe how risk can be deterministically calculated to derive the alpha coefficient by using the ixo protocol to measure and verify the performance of a project over time. | https://medium.com/ixo-blog/risk-adjusted-token-bonding-curves-eb4fffc86bf0 | ['Dr Shaun Conway'] | 2019-06-21 09:30:44.295000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Blockchain', 'Token Engineering', 'Bonds'] |
What Does It Mean to Be Fae as a Gender? | When I woke up one Thursday a couple of months ago, gender wasn’t on my mind. I’d been cis all my life, and that was never going to change. That’s just the way it was, and that’s the way it was always going to be.
At least, that’s what I thought.
I’d had no idea I would be genderfae by the time I went to bed that night. I’ve since decided to drop the gender prefix to just say fae to uncomplicate matters. But how did I get here?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
It started with a tweet a friend of mine sent. It chastised cis people who listed their pronouns in their Twitter bios but also specified that they are cis. My bio at the time read, in part, that I was a cis woman who used she/her. I replied to the tweet to clarify that I’d added cis to my bio because my somewhat androgynous appearance had led people to assume I was non-binary, and I didn’t want the appearance of appropriating a non-binary identity.
Someone else responded to me, and we began a conversation. The upshot was that they suggested that I might be afraid of appropriating an identity that was rightfully mine, but I just didn’t realize it yet. They told me that “nonbinary woman” was a gender. I liked the idea, so I decided to do some research on people who claim nonbinary woman as a gender.
I decided to “try on” the label of nonbinary woman, even putting it in my Twitter bio to see how it felt as I continued down the gender rabbit hole. There are fascinating resources out there! What ended up leading me somewhere I never thought I’d go was Gender Wiki, specifically the genderfae page.
I read the description, which boils down to sometimes feminine, but never masculine, and I felt gender euphoria for the first time.
I didn’t need to “try on” a gender anymore. I knew I was fae.
When I explain what fae means to people, I usually point out that it’s a nonbinary identity. The word I forget to use is genderfluid, although the “sometimes” part of the description does imply it.
To spoof on an old candy bar commercial: Sometimes I feel like a woman; sometimes I don’t. (But I also never feel like a man.)
So I am fae.
I did use “fae woman” as a transitional phrase that I thought would work for me, but then I was misgendered by people who dropped the fae and only referred to me as a woman, then doubled down on misgendering me because of it even after I explained that the fae part was the most important. So I’m still fine being referred to as a fae woman, but none of my social media profiles will use the word woman to avoid confusion. My first taste of gender dysphoria was really hurtful, and I don’t want to deal with that again.
I don’t know how other people of different genders deal with this day after day.
But I’ve found that claiming fae as my own isn’t just about gender. I never really understood how or why some of my fellow autistic people claimed they were autgender or autigender, with autism specifically informing their personal gender identities — I suppose I still don’t, even though fae encompasses some of that for me. Fae as a descriptor embodies a whole lot more than gender, and I’ll explain why the rest of it is relevant to me and not just a complicating factor in people understanding that I’m fae.
The fae are beings of legend, specifically in European folklore. They are also called fairies, the fair folk, etc., and for some people who would otherwise be genderfae, alternate terms like genderdoe and genderthil were created out of respect for people who believe in them. But it’s all part of why fae resonates with me so much.
In centuries past, folklore referred to certain types of disabled children as changelings. I have multiple disabilities ranging from mental to physical to neurological and otherwise, but autism is specifically related to changeling lore. People believed that changelings were fairy babies that were left in place of their “healthy” human babies when it became apart that a child was disabled. After all, it was not uncommon for babies who were visibly disabled at birth to be killed or left for dead when they were born. Infanticide was all too common. And so it was a shock to parents when their “healthy” baby suddenly appeared “sickly” or otherwise “wrong.” Clearly, this was not their child. It must be a fairy child instead. Their real baby was stolen by the fae.
I will not get into how this ableism is still entrenched today when parents of autistic children say that autism “stole” their children from them, except to mention that it exists. That is a topic for another time.
But…it’s also me. I’ve always been “different.” I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was married and had a child of my own. I’ve lived the life of a changeling without ever being called one. If only I had some of the supernatural powers ascribed to the fae! Alas, I must settle with the gender descriptor and the aesthetic I plan to adopt to fully recognize my true nature.
While some people who are fae use fae/faer as their pronouns, I prefer to keep the she/her pronouns I’ve gone by my whole life. It gives me the joke that my pronouns are sidhe/her, where sidhe (pronounced she) is the Irish word for the fairy folk. As genealogy is one of my special interests, I know I have Irish heritage, so I’m not appropriating lore that isn’t a part of my family history.
I can’t speak for anyone else who is genderfae. They may use different pronouns and shun terms like mother, wife and girlfriend that I still accept as belonging to me. The thing that ties us together, though, is that our gender is never masculine.
I know so very few others who are fae. If you are genderfae, or any of its related genders, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what being fae means to you.
And as an aside… | https://medium.com/@realkaristina/what-does-it-mean-to-be-fae-as-a-gender-205e2f4294c6 | ['Christina Gleason'] | 2021-05-10 20:19:31.078000+00:00 | ['Identity', 'LGBTQ', 'Gender', 'Faes', 'Gender Identity'] |
Attitude is Everything | Hope is your rock
My 2009 TED Global talk was about the power of hope. What I’ve realized since then is that hope, losing the “victim” mindset, and taking responsibility for your life beats whining about your situation over blaming others any day.
It’s NOT your fault Covid happened. It’s NOT your fault that the economy has shut down, you lost your job, you have no income, or that, for whatever reason you’re now homeless or about to become homeless. But whose fault it is doesn’t matter. It’s what you DO with what has happened to you that does. You can’t change the past. You can’t change fate. You can’t change bad luck or the actions of others. You CAN change what you do with what has happened to you. You CAN change how you THINK about what happened to you. You CAN lose your victim mindset. But you have to ACT.
VICTIMS ARE PEOPLE WHO GIVE UP THEIR POWER
THE VICTIM MINDSET
When I started working with homeless people to help them start a business, get off the street, do more, I learned not everyone who is homeless wants to get off of the street. Many of them enjoy the lack of responsibility. They like not having to pay bills or work. The tradeoff is having to live in a shelter, or in a tent in the woods, or stand at an intersection and beg for change. Many days their begging job pays closer to $50 an hour than $11 and can get them a hotel room on cold days. This blog is NOT for them. It’s for the 80% of the homeless who DO want a permanent residence, an apartment, a home, a place to live other than a shelter. And, most importantly, they want tips and resources on HOW to get what they want. They’re not sitting around drinking a poor me cocktail. They may feel stunned, or scared, or even terrified, but they KNOW they can survive this if they just learn a few tips and tricks to get through it. They have been knocked down, but not knocked out.
I don’t deal with the victim mindset, the person who says, “But someone OWES me.” or, “SOMEONE should DO something to help me!” I can’t help the people waiting on the calvary to arrive. I know there is no calvary. They don’t. And even when I tell them homelessness is a DIY thing, they refuse to believe me.
I can’t help the person who wants to sit back and let others start and run a business while they collect the checks. Look elsewhere. If you have a “Victim Mindset,” I can’t do anything for you. And I don’t want to waste my time trying to. Why?
Because I have a life I want to live and wasting time with people who are unwilling to work their own process only keeps me from accomplishing what I want to accomplish. Why tie a dead weight to your leg if you’re climbing a mountain?
The more people I can help who actually help themselves are more likely to help others. So, I invest in them. It’s called “triage.” At the scene of a bad accident, it’s NOT the people with the most severe injuries that responders help. It’s the victims who are MOST LIKELY to survive that get help first. Those expected to succumb to their injuries are left to die, and those who can survive with help are treated next. Those with bad injuries who can survive until more help arrives, or until they get to the hospital are given minimal care— enough to ensure they will survive while they wait.
I recently went to a hospital emergency room. The guy next to me was eating a lunch his wife brought him and telling everyone that he’d “been waiting” there for eight hours. Within 20 minutes my name was called and I was sent to a specialist. Why? I had a potential detached retina. I needed immediate care to save my eye. He had a sprained ankle. Did he bitch? You bet he did. He didn’t understand the concept of triage.
THE VICTIM MENTALITY
The victim mentality starts with these three beliefs:
Bad things always happen to me and will keep happening to me.
Other people or circumstances are to blame. I did NOTHING to bring this on myself. Life is not fair.
Any efforts I make, no matter how great or small, to try to create change will fail, so there’s no point in even trying.
Sound like you or someone you know? Yeah. Add homelessness to that, or addiction, or PTSD, or depression, or even more debilitating mental health issues and chances are very good nothing good will happen to you or for you.
NO ONE wants to be around a person with a victim mentality. It’s too emotionally and physically draining. I tried to work with a woman with a victim mentality and the only thing she was really good at was coming up with reasons why everything I suggested WOULDN’T WORK. So I stepped back and really looked at her situation.
She could get the things she really wanted. She could move heaven and earth to get expensive tattoos, or new clothing, or even a job, or a new motorcycle for transportation WHEN she wanted to. But if she didn’t want it, she couldn’t see a way or reason for going after it.
She couldn’t see the connection to taking responsibility for herself when it came to doing the hard stuff she didn’t want to do—like finish school, get an apartment, etc. She had someone to blame for everything going wrong in her life. Her mother, her lovers, the employers who expected her to show up for her scheduled shifts…all were to blame for her being homeless. Her alcoholism, drug addiction, and refusal to accept responsibility for her choices kept her on the streets. She’d find a way to get off of the streets and into an apartment or shelter when she got tired of the cold, but come spring, she stopped working, stopped paying rent, and hit the streets again.
Recognizing you HAVE a victim mentality to start with will help you learn how to lose it. At first, it FEELS right to blame others. THEY did “THIS” to you. Well, maybe they DID. But it’s up to YOU to change it. Start watching videos, reading articles and THINK about HOW to STOP BEING A VICTIM!
RESOURCES AND ARTICLES:
If you want to learn more about victim mentalities and see if you’re one of the ones who is a victim, here are some great articles and videos:
Do You Have a Victim Mentality? QUIZ
4 Signs You Have a Victim Mentality
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/move-away-from-the-victim-mentality.html#
How to Identify and Deal with a Victim Mentality
https://www.healthline.com/health/victim-mentality#causes
5 Ways to Lose The Victim Mindset | https://medium.com/@beckyblanton/attitude-is-everything-ee74c356b5bc | [] | 2020-12-11 14:44:44.885000+00:00 | ['Victimmentality', 'Homelessness', 'Homeless', 'Victim', 'Attitude'] |
Want to know the Thing you should not do while working out? workout mistakes, gym mistakes, fitness mistakes . | Working out is good only if done in a limit or done correctly. if you are working out on a daily basis, it is good for you. Ever wondered why you are working hard from years and not seeing any type of improvement in yourself physically ?? it is because of the things you are doing wrong. we’ve to keep some things in mind while working out , there are several principals of workout you need to follow in order to improve what you are thinking of achieving or what your gym goals are. Today ill show you the the “Things you should not do while working out” In order to go with the flow and achieve what you are thinking of .it will clear all your doubts about workout mistake |fitness mistakes | gym mistake.
Here are some of the workout mistakes, gym mistakes or fitness mistakes whatever you say
Don’t eat to much before workout.
Don’t drink too much water.
Don’t drink alcoholic drinks.
Keep your posture correct
workout with a goal.
Don’t repeat same exercise again and again.
Don’t overtrain.
Don’t workout in an empty stomach.
Don’t leave your weights.
Don’t skip stretching.
If you keep all this things in mind mind while working out or before working out it will help you a lot. It will also help you in changing yourself and be able to see the difference you always wanted t0 achieve. the focus that our muscle wants and the conraction it need to open up and increase its size to show the pump is only done if you workout properly and do everything correct and do whatever your body wants to achieve what you want and do workout properly. As it is said a good body is not made in comfort. workout mistakes, gym mistakes, fitness mistakes.
if you want to know about fitness and workout click the link below in order to stay updated.
www.thegoodvibefitness.blogspot.com | https://medium.com/@TheGoodFitnessVIbes/want-to-know-the-thing-you-should-not-do-while-working-out-5d69b74ad48e | ['The Good Fitness Vibes'] | 2021-12-31 11:18:44.507000+00:00 | ['Fitness Tips', 'Workout Tips', 'Workout', 'Fitness'] |
Introduction to Elasticsearch Using Node.js—Part 1 | What the Heck Is Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is an open-source, broadly distributable, and quite scalable search engine. Queries are significantly faster in Elasticsearch, which helps us search text across a huge volume of data. A key reason to use Elasticsearch is that it abstracts all the complexity of searching and indexing mechanisms from the developer while giving the developer enough tools to customize anything if needed.
Conventional SQL database management systems aren’t really designed for full-text searches. Therefore, one of the primary reasons people use Elasticsearch is to search text in a few milliseconds.
But that’s not all you can do with Elasticsearch. Following are some of the common things people use Elasticsearch for:
1. Auto completion and instant search
2. Fuzzy searching
3. Analytics and visualization using Kibana
4. Aggregating distributed log data
5. Application performance management (APM)
In this course, we will not go in depth into Elasticsearch, as we will focus more on the integration part. But we will cover some basics of Elasticsearch so that we understand how to use it.
This will also mean that the article will be long and filled with boring text.
I can’t really help it :(. That is why I decided to divide the article into two parts. One with only theory and the other one with fireworks :)
But I promise that you will have a clear idea about ElasticSearch once you go through this article.
I recommend going through the tutorials Elastisearch Reference and Elastisearch Answers to have a complete understanding of ES (Elasticsearch. Henceforth, I will refer Elasticsearch as ES.).
First, let’s see how ES stores data and what the key components are: | https://betterprogramming.pub/introduction-to-elasticsearch-using-node-js-part-1-164311327557 | ['Pankaj Panigrahi'] | 2019-08-26 18:44:15.401000+00:00 | ['Search', 'Elasticsearch', 'JavaScript', 'Nodejs', 'Autocomplete'] |
F1 2012 — A Retrospective Part 1: Pre-Season Testing and Expectation | The 2011 season was a disappointing follow-up to an intense 2010 campaign that saw a season-long battle between three teams and four drivers for the world title.
The drivers championship was won in Japan with four more races to go, and the constructors crown was won in the following race.
Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull became the youngest two time champion in F1 history. At 24 years and 98 days old he earned the record previously held by Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who was 25 years and 85 days old when he won his second title in 2006.
Those two made up a third of the former/current champions on the grid for 2012. For the first time ever, there were six drivers who had all won the title on the same grid.
Jenson Button, Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher were the other four. Between them they had earned 14 drivers championships.
They drove for five different teams all vying for the constructors crown, which Red Bull had also claimed in the previous two seasons alongside their German driver Vettel.
Red Bull had really set themselves apart as the team to beat in those last two years. McLaren and Ferrari were lagging behind as part of a Big Three that dominated the front of the grid. In 2010 and 2011 they made up 70% and 79% of the total points accumulated in those years.
The gap between Ferrari and Mercedes was stark.
Vettel himself dominated the 2011 season. He won 11 of the 19 Grands Prix and claimed pole 15 times, with teammate Mark Webber picking up three of the other four and winning once.
Following pre-season testing, the hype surrounding Vettel and the Red Bull team remained. Richard Williams, of the Guardian, spoke in their video preview of the season that they should certainly be considered the favourites again.
“Well the question that everybody is thinking about of course, as we look at the start of the season, is can anyone beat Sebastian Vettel and the Red Bull, the winners of the last two championships?” said Williams.
“There’s an expectation that [Vettel will] become the youngest ever triple world champion. He is phenomenal, and the car that he’s been driving is just as phenomenal, and maybe even more.
“Everybody is waiting to see what [Adrian] Newey has come up with for this season to give Vettel the chance of dominating as he’s done for the last two years.”
Vettel won comfortably ahead of Button, Webber and Alonso.
Button came closest to Vettel in 2011, but he was still some 120 points away by season’s end. The Briton won three races that year, the most exceptional of which was in Canada.
It was the longest Grand Prix event in F1 history, and he still holds the record for most visits to the pit-lane while still winning a race in F1 history — he pitted six times in victory — passing Vettel on the final lap.
He finished 12 and 13 points ahead of third and fourth place in the driver standings, and picked up 12 podiums. His worst race result was sixth place, showcasing a level of consistency that set him apart from his teammate Hamilton, who only picked up half as many podiums but the same amount of race wins.
Hamilton struggled in 2011, it was the most turbulent year of his career off-track, and it played a significant role in a drop-off in performance on-track. But McLaren were quick in pre-season testing and both drivers were optimistic of their chances of taking on the mighty Red Bull.
Button’s consistency in 2011, as well as his immense talent at managing his tyres, meant that pundits had him the slight favourite over Hamilton in the McLaren battle.
Button celebrates on the podium in Canada.
“On pre-season testing, which is again difficult to judge, I would be looking at Jenson [Button] especially to be challenging Sebastian Vettel,” said Giles Richards for the Guardian.
“What we have with Jenson is there were new tyres this year, still manufactured by Pirelli. They’re slightly softer compounds. We’re quite probably looking after [the tyres] a little bit better now, Jenson does that superbly. His driving style lends itself to that.
“He may well work the tyres a little bit better and if he has a competitive car from the off that may put him that tiny bit closer to Sebastian over Lewis [Hamilton].”
However, despite a difficult 2011, Hamilton can simply never be written off. The 2008 champion had shown many times by now that he was more than capable of bouncing back from any difficulties.
“Nonetheless, if Lewis gets a big start, he’s an extraordinary driver. He gets a good start, he builds some momentum, gets some points, he will begin to feel that he can beat Sebastian Vettel,” said Richards.
“Now he thinks he can already, once he sees the points on the board and he’s actually achieving it then he will have a feeling of superiority and the confidence that goes with it. That’s terribly important.
“Either of those two drivers, I would expect to be there or thereabouts at the end.”
Ferrari won just a single Grand Prix in 2011.
Ferrari as a whole struggled to match their 2010 form throughout 2011. Alonso picked up one win in the entire season, claiming the top step of the podium in Silverstone. He achieved 10 podiums, but lacked the pace to consistently battle for the race victory.
The car was still quick enough to easily finish in the top three of the constructors, but they were too far back on the Red Bull and McLaren.
Alonso’s consistency made up for a difficult year for Felipe Massa. The Brazilian failed to finish on the podium all season, his best result being a fifth place he earned at six different races.
Their start to the 2012 season indicated another tough year ahead. Pre-season testing went horribly, with many being surprised at their lack of pace. Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali reflected on this during the postseason calling it “the most difficult moment of the season.”
“The first day that we put the car on the track it was a little bit of, more than a little bit, but a big surprise. Expectations were a little bit different. There is no reason to mask that. For sure, I remember very well that we had a problem of speed, lot of drag, lot of instability and a problem of traction. So a lot of things,” said Domenicali.
Domenicali had a lot to answer for even before the season got underway in Australia.
“We know that this kind of competition is a psychological game. If you shout outside the problem you have inside it doesn’t help. It was a moment where we had to regroup and try to solve. Knowing that you don’t have any magic touch you cannot solve the things from one night to the morning after.”
Massa wasn’t masking his disappointment in pre-season interviews but, despite the poor performance, he maintained optimistic that things would be turned around.
“In the new car you always have [unwelcome surprises], you know. It’s just the beginning of a big job to have a consistent and competitive car,” said the Brazilian driver.
Since returning from injury in 2010, Massa struggled to re-find his form that saw him come so close to a championship victory in 2008. His 2011 season was marred by several incidents with Hamilton.
The two collided on numerous occasions. But most damningly for Massa, it was the fact Hamilton was behind him so often for them to crash that criticism was levied at the British driver so much that year.
Massa (left) and Hamilton (right) both fell off their 2008 form that saw them compete for the championship.
The Sky Sports season review for 2011 dedicated an entire section to the bizarre series of incidents between the two, with Michael Wise writing:
“It must be said that this so-called ‘feud’ was small fry in comparison with some of the flash points we’ve witnessed in recent years. From the McLaren/Ferrari spying controversy of 2007, to Renault causing a deliberate crash and even the relative small fry that was last year’s Ferrari team orders row, F1 in 2011 brought little in the way of scandal.
“The ruckus that wasn’t started in Monaco before further skirmishes took place in (deep breath) Monaco, Britain, Singapore (during both qualifying and the race), Japan and India — more than enough to suggest something ulterior was happening and yet the reality was more mundane.
“Hamilton’s approach does tend to polarise opinion and it’s easy to see why: when it works he’s brilliant; when it doesn’t, the 2008 world champion still tends to look a bit like a boy trying to do a man’s job. Alas for him, the latter has more often been the case this year.
“Thus, given Hamilton’s habit of leaving himself with much ground to make up during races, he would dispense with midfield runners before happening upon the slowest car fielded by a ‘big three’ team. That car would invariably be driven by Massa, who seems more on edge than ever with his Ferrari future once more open to debate.
“What tended to follow next would best be filed under the category of ‘racing incident’ and although words would be exchanged via the media afterwards, they were never particularly harsh. Indeed, each driver still insisted on the qualification of affording the other respect.
“Just about the worst thing Massa could say about his rival’s gung-ho-edness was that it suggests he “cannot use his mind”. Does that really suggest a genuine loathing? When they were team-mates at Williams, Nelson Piquet called Nigel Mansell an “uneducated blockhead with a stupid and ugly wife”. Now that’s fighting talk.”
In the meantime, Alonso asserted himself as the leader of the team in his two years since joining from Renault in 2010.
Failure to overtake the Renault in Abu Dhabi cost Alonso the 2010 championship.
He was four points off winning the championship in his first season at Ferrari and despite the team’s poor performances in 2011 he was still consistently proving himself to be one of the most talented drivers on the grid.
If Ferrari were to achieve anything in 2012 it would have to be at the hands of the Spaniard. But if pre-season was anything to go by, then it would be a massive uphill battle from the start.
Raikkonen was the man who Alonso replaced at Ferrari. The Finnish driver had a contract with the team for 2010 but instead the team paid that out for the following season after a disappointing 2009 campaign.
Instead, Raikkonen spent the two years away from the sport and took up rallying along the way. For 2012, he returned with the Lotus Renault team — renamed to Lotus F1 team for the coming season.
Renault had a disappointing 2011. They got off to a horrible start as driver Robert Kubica was involved in a terrifying rallying crash that meant he was out for the entire year — and wouldn’t return to F1 until 2019. However, their car was promising. Two podiums in the first two races was the reward for what David Coulthard described as “a great innovation” on their car.
Heidfeld celebrates Renault’s second and final podium of the 2011 season.
“They had a great innovation at the beginning of the year, blowing the front of the diffuser which then energised the whole under-body of the car. But for some reason they weren’t able to develop that during the course of the year so their performance stalled and they found themselves firmly at the back end of the top ten,” said Coulthard in the BBC’s 2011 season review.
Renault were stuck in the midfield battle, but for 2012 were looking to chase the front of the field and grab more podiums and maybe even a race win or two.
The French team ditched both of their 2011 drivers, Nick Heidfeld and Vitaly Petrov, and replaced them with Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean. The Frenchman initially joined the team in 2009 following the release of Nelson Piquet Jr. but, after two years away from F1, this would be his first full season with the team.
Their rivals in the midfield in 2011, Mercedes, were also expecting to close up the gap to the front pack. Between a shakeup on their engineering side, as well as their experienced driver lineup, the hope was that the German manufacturer could start delivering consistently and compete with the Big Three.
In the previous two years the team was comfortably quicker than the rest of the midfield but struggled to keep up with Ferrari, let alone McLaren or Red Bull.
Two German drivers, young vs. old, with a German manufacturer.
Since they returned to the sport as a constructor, they have managed just three podium finishes all of which have come from Nico Rosberg. Seven time world champion Schumacher simply didn’t have the pace he had before his initial retirement in 2006.
However, there was optimism in the team. Any side led by Ross Brawn was sure to have a few engineering tricks up their sleeve. Richard Williams had high expectations following pre-season testing that the changes to the team would bring them closer to their rivals.
“Mercedes is another that made big changes on their engineering side. Ross Brawn, the team principal, brought in three very experienced designers from other teams so they have a very very experienced superstructure on the technical side and Brawn is pretty confident that they’ll make the significant increase in performance that they need if they’re to justify Mercedes’ involvement in the team,” said Williams.
“If the Mercedes does turn out to be a front running car, it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens because they’ve got two extremely good drivers more or less opposite ends of their careers. Michael Schumacher now coming back in his early 40’s, having had two disappointing seasons.”
There was also optimism that Rosberg would be able to lead the team if Schumacher continued to struggle.
“I think Rosberg is a serious talent and is a potential world champion. He’s come up quite quietly with several unspectacular seasons with Williams, but in the last two years with Mercedes he’s looked very good.”
Adrian Newey is Chief Technical Officer at Red Bull and credited with their car’s stellar performance.
There were also some interesting technical regulation changes brought in for the 2012 season, which Williams of the Guardian also expected to play a big role throughout the campaign.
“There are rule changes practically every year and that the principle one this year is to ban the use of what are called blown diffusers. Adrian Newey made the first and best use of blown diffusers last year and that was really the fact that they gave last year’s Red Bull it’s great advantage,” said Williams.
“He’s not quite going to be able to do the same thing this year. All the designers have spent the winter working out how, while staying within the boundaries of the new rules, they can use the same thing to perhaps recover some of the effect that the rule makers wanted them to forfeit.
“I went to see Ross Brawn last week in Mercedes, and he admitted that loopholes are what Formula One is all about. They’ve got to find the loophole in this regulation, find a way of using the exhaust gasses to produce the downforce that they’d lost. That could be the key to the whole season, who’s got the best answer to that.”
There was also a change to the driving regulations for 2012.
“The change to the rules [is] around blocking maneuvers. You can make one move off the racing line in order to block another driver. However, if you then move back onto the racing line, say as you’re coming into the entrance of the corner where you’re looking to take your line again, you have to leave one car’s width between your car and the edge of the track,” explained Giles Richards.
“This is incredibly complex, it’s more complex when you’re in a motor racing car and you’re trying to decide how far it is exactly one car’s width between the edge of my car and the edge of the track. The purpose of course is to leave that car’s width so that you can move back towards the racing line but that a car who is following can still overtake on that racing line.”
With all of these factors going into the 2012 season, there was a lot of expectation that it would be an upgrade on the poor 2011 campaign. Not many people were thinking it could be as intense as the four-way championship battle of 2010, but there was certainly a hope that it would be a much closer contest between more teams throughout the year.
The season began in Australia and ended in Brazil. Who would ultimately come out on top, and what would be the big surprises along the way? The expectation was that it wouldn’t all be wrapped up with four races spare again but could it get to Sao Paulo with the championship still on the line?
Next week: Australia and Malaysia | https://medium.com/@cheesyhartepun/f1-2012-a-retrospective-part-1-pre-season-testing-and-expectation-7757aa776949 | ['Declan Harte'] | 2021-01-03 14:34:06.013000+00:00 | ['Sport', 'Retrospectives', 'Formula 1', 'F1', 'Nostalgia'] |
Essentia June Monthly Update | Things are heating up at the Essentia offices worldwide with so many new developments and announcements which are keeping us on our toes! Last month, for example, we added a new function to the multi-chain passwordless dAppstore which will help bring dApp developers and the best resources in existence to a vast amount of new users.
The implementation of our voting mechanism will allow the community to decide which dApps ought to be integrated into the Essentia protocol. Any single dApp can be added to the list and each participant can vote for one project a month.
We are incredibly excited to make yet another step towards global blockchain adoption. So to update you on all that has gone on in the last month, here is a summary of some of our most noteworthy achievements.
Development
dApps
Following the market’s tendencies, we have decided to replace EtherDelta with ForkDelta. The application offers a greater variety of currencies and tokens to exchange and has a higher credibility among the holders.
We also integrated another decentralized exchange called IDEX, which is considered to be fast, efficient without compromising security.
Wiki
We’ve been working hard on the creation of the Essentia Wiki page this month. It will contain a detailed overview of the project including information regarding our features, use-cases, development process and a whole lot more. Needless to say, we will keep updating the page as time goes on. Now though, the first version of Essentia Wiki is already available here.
dAppstore
As stated previously, at the end of each month, the two most popular services will be added to the Essentia ecosystem. Not only that — it will give our community an opportunity to contribute their own dApps and scripts for Essentia users. For more details, you can check our dedicated post here.
Other developments
We’ve also added a landing page to our Demo, which allows us to create a new account or to sign in to an existing one using different methods quickly and easily.
As you may recall, previously we announced that Essentia can now be safely accessed by such HW wallets as Trezor and Ledger. We have prepared a little video guide for you, where we explained every step of the sign in process, which you can watch here.
Community
Team
This month we were honored to welcome another world-class professional to our advisory board.
Ran Neu-Ner ranks among the most influential people in the crypto world, and he is now committed to our vision and the success of Essentia. Find more information about our cooperation in our dedicated article here.
After another successful pitch from our co-founder Mirco Mongiardino, the Essentia team locked in another invaluable asset to the advisory board, this time with Kenetic Capital — “a blockchain firm committed to expanding the development and adoption of blockchain platforms through investments, advisory services, community, and technology”.
(Essentia Co-founder Mirco Mongiardino with Kenetic Capital at Consensus 2018)
Events
The first event we attended was Consensus 2018, one of the biggest conferences in the crypto world. We had countless discussions with some of the most influential people, the results of which were new partnerships and further growth opportunities! Check out our little photo report from the event here.
You might have also seen us at t the ‘Block Show’ (link needed) in Berlin. This is where we had a fruitful discussion with our new partnered project! We will come back to that shortly.
Partnerships
Doing our best to expand the borders of our ecosystem, we continue to establish partnerships with valuable projects.
We are looking forward to cooperating with UUNIO, the decentralized Content Reward Platform where users are given the liberty to engage on social media and even receive rewards for their activity.
We are committed to making the framework accessible and effective for both end-users and enterprises. That is why we partnered with GANA — the blockchain company for the cannabis industry. Essentia will lend a helping hand to GANA to protect user data, as well as to establish and ensure GDPR compliance. For more information about the partnership check out the full post.
General Update
After careful consideration, we have decided to postpone the Essentia TGE (Token Generation Event). We want to set a benchmark on how ICOs in terms of transparency and compliance with new updates to the FINMA regulations. This move will ensure the stability and viability of Essentia in the long term. For more information, you can see our dedicated post here.
What is next?
As always, our calendar is overbooked for the next month as we have a lot of plans! Let’s take a look at some of them.
We are planning to update our Members Area by adding the new TGE information, charts, user’s referral data, and some other useful functions.
We are also working on adding another hardware device — Digital Bitbox — as a means of accessing Essentia. By adding another more users will able to access Essentia using this secure way.
We want to thank the Essentia community for the constant support and contribution towards the decentralized revolution. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to send us a message in the comment section below, or contact us directly on any of our social media channels!
Connect or Contribute
Website| Telegram | Twitter| Reddit | https://medium.com/essentia_one/essentia-june-monthly-update-1b20d4eea591 | [] | 2020-06-29 15:58:10.635000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Blockchain', 'Essentia', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Shark Quest: Are the World’s Most Endangered Rays Living in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea? | [Note: this commentary, which was originally published at The Revelator, is the sixth and final essay in a series by researchers with WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) during Shark Week documenting challenges and successes in shark and ray conservation today.]
“We saw two swimming past our canoe the other day as we came to shore!”
“Yes, we saw one over towards the mangroves not so long ago…”
“There was one in our net near the big river…”
Scientists love having a mystery to solve and gathering clues to find out if something is real or not. Since January 2019 my organization, the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been collecting evidence to confirm whether highly endangered sawfish and their relatives — the wedgefish, guitarfish and giant guitarfish (collectively and affectionately known as “ rhino rays “) — live in the coastal waters of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea.
Sawfish and their rhino ray relatives — all cousins of sharks — are some of the most threatened species on Earth due to their slow growth, vulnerability to capture in fisheries, and high value in international trade. Recent studies indicate that Papua New Guinea is (together with northern Australia and the southeastern United States) one of the last few strongholds for sawfish populations, making the country a global priority for shark and ray conservation.
Currently sawfish and rhino rays have been well documented along the southern shores and adjacent river systems of Papua New Guinea, and also in the Sepik River, which drains into the Bismarck Sea on the northern coast of the mainland. Sawfish have also been documented in several other provinces in the country, yet no official records exist in New Ireland Province.
Until now.
Papua New Guinea occupies the western half of New Guinea and is the largest of the South Pacific Island nations. The uplifted reefs, limestone terrain and adjacent islands that form New Ireland Province comprise the north-easterly region of Papua New Guinea. From January 2019 to March 2020, fisher key informant surveys were conducted in coastal communities in western New Ireland Province to determine whether sawfish and rhino rays were observed within the customary waters of each community. A total of 144 sightings were made, including 85 wedgefish (blue), 36 guitarfish and giant guitarfish (green) and 23 sawfish (red) sightings. Source: WCS.
The southwestern Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea is known for its renowned biodiversity, much of which lives nowhere else in the world. But that amazing animal and plant life is often both understudied and under threat.
This holds true in New Ireland.
The many islands of New Ireland Province, located in the Bismarck Archipelago, support coral reefs, mangroves, estuaries and tidal lagoons — typical habitats for rhino rays and sawfish. Some 77 percent of New Ireland’s human population also lives in the coastal zone, where they’re highly reliant on fish and other marine resources for food, livelihoods and traditional practices. Local communities also own most of this coastal zone through customary tenure systems, which may have been in place for centuries.
Human pressure, including population growth, could threaten potential sawfish and rhino ray populations unless sufficient management is in place — but local cooperation will be key to such action.
Over the past year and a half, WCS has conducted interviews in New Ireland’s coastal areas. Part of the interviews involved showing images of each sawfish, wedgefish and guitarfish species, allowing respondents to identify what they saw. To date residents from 49 communities reported that they had seen sawfish and rhino rays in their local waters. There were 144 separate sightings reported by 111 respondents, which comprised 23 sawfish, 85 wedgefish and 36 guitarfish and giant guitarfish. Roughly half the respondents stated they had seen sawfish or rhino rays either often or sometimes.
Wedgefish in New Ireland Province: documented by BRUVS during the FinPrint project (left) and by scuba divers (Dorian Borcherds, Scuba Ventures) (right)
When asked if the animals were targeted by local fishers, more than half the respondents said no: The animals were mostly caught accidentally. Only 9% of the sighted sawfish and rhino rays were reported to have been purposefully caught.
Respondents also provided information on where, and in what condition, they had seen the animals: 77% were seen alive, 10% at the market and 2% entangled in nets.
The results suggest that while sawfish and rhino rays are in the region, they are not a key fishery commodity, which is promising news for developing conservation approaches.
Large-tooth sawfish (Pristis pristis) rostrum, beside a ruler, which was harvested by local community fishers from the Tigak Islands that lie to the west of mainland New Ireland. This rostrum measured nearly 30 inches in length. Photo: Elizah Nagombi/WCS.
While physical and objective data has been lacking — I’m still waiting to see one of these animals in the water, myself — we have confirmed evidence of two large-tooth sawfish ( Pristis pristis) in the region (two sawfish beaks, also known as rostra, have been found in community villages since this study began), and we’ve received reports of additional sightings.
WCS also conducted baited remote underwater video surveys (BRUVS) in 14 locations in the region in 2019–20, following a 2017 BURVS deployment by FinPrint in western New Ireland Province.
Collectively the BRUVS documented 13 species of sharks and rays, including wedgefish (which have also been photographed by local dive operators), but no sawfish.
But with that success, we’re expanding our search. Over the next 12 months, a further 100 BRUVS will be deployed in areas with a sandy seafloor, where wedgefish and giant guitarfish often rest. Because sawfish typically live in estuaries — where water is often murky — BRUVS will not work due to the poor visibility of the water. In these areas gillnets that have been carefully positioned in river outlets by trained local community members will be monitored for sawfish that may be present. If any sawfish are present in the nets, they will be documented and carefully released.
Example of education and outreach materials produced by the WCS team. This poster presents management methods that can be used by community residents to help manage sawfish and rhino ray populations in their customary waters.
Despite the vulnerability of sawfish and rhino rays — with five of the ten documented species in Papua New Guinea classified as critically endangered — there are currently no protection laws in place. However, since 2017, WCS has worked with over 100 communities in New Ireland Province to establish the country’s largest network of marine protected areas.
The MPAs have been developed through a community-first approach, with extensive local outreach, engagement and education. In that way WCS has been actively informing local residents about the biology, threats and management opportunities for sawfish and rhino rays. We anticipate that new laws to protect and manage these endangered animals will be incorporated into the management rules for the new MPAs.
While the mystery as to whether sawfish and rhino ray populations are alive and well in PNG has largely been solved, they are still rare and in need of additional conservation efforts. We hope that this work will help bring awareness and conservation action to these highly threatened species — and make sure they don’t become mythical creatures of the past.
Jonathan Booth is Marine Conservation Advisor with the Papua New Guinea Program at WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Read the other pieces in this WCS series for Shark Week here:
Making Our Marine Environment Safe for Future Shark Weeks
Ground Realities of Shark Fisheries in India
Ocean Guardians Pave the Way to Save Threatened Sharks and Rays in Bangladesh
The Informal Blue Economy: East Africa’s Silent Shark Killer
First Signs of Hope for Critically Endangered Wedgefish and Giant Guitarfish in Indonesia | https://medium.com/wcs-marine-conservation-program/shark-quest-are-the-worlds-most-endangered-rays-living-in-new-ireland-province-papua-new-guinea-bfa048c79224 | ['Wildlife Conservation Society'] | 2020-08-29 21:07:38.782000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Papua New Guinea', 'Sharks', 'Oceans', 'Conservation'] |
How to turn 5 mBTC into 8,000 mBTC — thanks to one lucky punter! | How to turn 5 mBTC into 8,000 mBTC — thanks to one lucky punter!
Sportsbet.io gives punters the chance to #betbigwinbig, but not many players will have had a win as big as one lucky user this week.
Putting 5 mBTC on an 11-fold bet on Wednesday’s English football, one user scooped a win of over 8,000 mBTC at odds of 1,573/1.
That’s an equivalent of a €4 bet, with a win of over €7,000 — not bad the week before Christmas!
Each of the 11 bets, on the Premier League and Championship, came in, meaning it will be a very happy festive period for the lucky winner.
What a bet!
None of the bets, which were a combination of matchbets, double chances and both teams to scores, had an individual price of over 2.35, with a bet on Nottingham Forest v Preston the longest odds.
However, combining the bets in an 11-way accumulator paid dividends for the user, who is now 8,101.48 mBTC better off!
With hundreds of markets each day across a wide range of sport, including an in-play offering, Sportsbet.io is the perfect place to bet with Bitcoin.
This win goes to show that knowing your stuff can really pay off, and that Sportsbet.io is the best place to #betbigwinbig! | https://medium.com/@WillAtkins/how-to-turn-5-mbtc-into-8-000-mbtc-thanks-to-one-lucky-punter-6291abb5c032 | [] | 2016-12-18 13:09:50.255000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Betting Tips', 'Betting', 'Sports Betting', 'Premier League'] |
What are the good points about being a backend developer? | I think the best point about being a backend developer is to have the creativity to find a solution or make a system that it can work on everywhere on every device which accesses the internet.
Another huge point is you can make an application that your users can work on without having their own device. For example, imagine you would have a note application where you write your to-do list for a day, but you would forget to take your mobile to your office and you would miss your to-do list if that application doesn’t have a web application :). So you need access to your device to use the note application.
Another point is totally technical. But it is so easy to understand that you have the ability to use your favorite language, which you have a good feeling about. You can use Jave like me :) or PHP, Go, C#, Python, etc. But in other big platforms like Android or iOS, you will have the upper hand in the market. | https://medium.com/@mihandoost-parsa/what-are-the-good-points-about-being-a-backend-developer-4dcbc2d0f9ca | ['Parsa Mihandoost'] | 2020-12-18 15:33:56.370000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Backend Development', 'Java', 'PHP', 'Development'] |
How To Achieve Higher Frequency Customer Service | How To Achieve Higher Frequency Customer Service
Encouragement is the ultimate humaneness
Over the last ten years, we’ve had many cantankerous customers. These are the kind that will send multiple emails in a short amount of time, demanding a refund, or pointing out some small error on your website. They are generally nit-picky and might say things that hurt your feelings.
On multiple occasions, we’ve had customers that email or leave a voicemail with words that cut deep, probably not aware that there is a team of human beings on the other side of the screen or message.
If you’ve launched a business that sells directly to the public, there’s a good chance that someone, someday will be critical of your hard work in a way that hits a nerve.
I’ve had times when I’ve just finished putting in multiple, sleep-deprived days, eyes burning, tiny veins bulging, only to find an email from a customer the next day talking about how a kindergartner might have designed the changes I’ve made on the site.
Or something to that effect. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these experiences do add up over a decade. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-achieve-higher-frequency-customer-service-feaa4c9ce808 | ['Nate Rutan'] | 2020-10-07 19:47:47.609000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Humanity', 'Positivity', 'Customer Service', 'Encouragement'] |
The basics | In this series we will set up a basic three node Elasticsearch cluster to hold our data and use Elasticsearch’s built in redundancy and scalability features to make our cluster perform adequately and allow some failures to be tolerated.
Secondly we will install Metricbeat and Filebeat to generate some data and Kibana for visualizing our Elasticsearch data and to create dashboards and alerts.
In the third installment of this series, Ill guide you through the steps to create index templates and lifecycle policies so you can keep your cluster running smoothly.
Finally, we will set up alerting so we can be notified when something is wrong.
During this series we will be using Open Distro for Elasticsearch (ODFE). This distribution is based on the open source version of Elasticsearch and is fully open source too. It has several features that make it ready for its deployment in corporate environments like alerting and LDAP integrations for authentication and authorization.
To begin, let us get some definitions out of the way:
Node types
A node is an instance of Elasticsearch, it can be a physical machine, virtual machine or even a docker container. There are several types of nodes:
Master: Manages the overall operation of the cluster and keeps track of the cluster state.
Master-eligible: Nodes that can be elected as the cluster master.
Data: Performs all data related operations.
Ingest: Preprocesses data before storing it in the cluster.
Coordinating: Delegates client requests to the shards on the data nodes.
Indices
An index is a logical namespace that points to one or more shards that store your data. The equivalent of an index in the SQL world is a database.
Shards
A shard is a single Lucene instance. It is a low-level “worker” unit which is managed automatically by Elasticsearch. What you’ll need to know about sharding is that they help with performance by splitting data into pieces and storing it in different nodes and they can also be leveraged to achieve high availability by replicating shards in different nodes so that in the event of a node failure either the primary or a replica shard will be available.
Next Steps
In the next article we will get started with creating the elasticsearch cluster.
See other related articles.
Other useful information
ELK Terminology
Clustering
Open-Distro-for-Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch | https://medium.com/getting-started-with-the-elk-stack/the-basics-f2ad1c0fa87 | ['Franco Martin'] | 2020-10-15 01:02:25.411000+00:00 | ['Logging', 'Kibana', 'Monitoring', 'Elk Stack', 'Elasticsearch'] |
The Ruhrstahl Ru 344 X-4 World’s First Wire Guided Air-to-Air Missile. | The Ruhrstahl Ru 344 X-4 was the world’s first wire guided air-to-air missile. It was also the prototype to the Malkara, developed by the UK and later perfected for the US as the TOW missile. So a connecting wire spooled out behind the
The idea was a missile that could not be jammed, and so the wire guided method kept the controller in touch with his weapon until explosion. The flight obviously gave it extended range and once it to was launched from the outside of the bomber in jst moments it could be made to hit large slower bombers. The warhead was big enough so two dozen yards away from target was well within a kill radius that would be devastating. It was developed by Dr. Max Kramer at Ruhrstahl in June 1943.
It had a solid rocket propelled motor. It was about 6 feet long and the world’s first MCLOS missile, or Manual Command Line Of Sight, which means the operator had to see the missile while he guided it.
Tagged as: air to air, guided missile, The Ruhrstahl Ru 344 X-4 | https://medium.com/covilian-military-intelligence-group/the-ruhrstahl-ru-344-x-4-worlds-first-wire-guided-air-to-air-missile-bcad32654c29 | [] | 2019-05-12 02:09:27.535000+00:00 | ['guided missile', 'air to air', 'WIB History', 'The Ruhrstahl Ru 344 X-4', 'Wib Air'] |
4 Unique Approaches To Manage Imbalanced Classification Scenarios | We will be using the make_classification method in Scitkit-Learn to generate the imbalanced dataset.
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.datasets import make_classification
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
from sklearn.metrics import f1_score,accuracy_score
from sklearn.metrics import plot_confusion_matrix
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
We will be learning the five unique approaches to handle the imbalanced dataset of 5000 samples with one class comprising of 98% cases.
X, y = make_classification(n_samples=5000,weights=[0.02, 0.98],
random_state=0,n_clusters_per_class=1) ycount=pd.DataFrame(y)
print(ycount[0].value_counts())
The proportion of majority and minority class in-sample data set ( output of the above code)
Out of 5000 sample records, we have 4871 records for class 1 and 129 class 0 records. Lets us consider class 1 suggests normal transaction and class 0 as fraudulent transactions.
Sample dataset is split into two parts viz. training and test set. The training set is to train the machine learning model, and the test set is to check the prediction of the model.
We will train the model with 80% of the sample data set and the remaining 20% records which model has not seen before is reserved for the testing set.
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2,random_state=42,stratify=y)
To understand the effect of the imbalanced dataset even on the sophisticated algorithm like Random Forest Classifier let us first train the standard Random Forest Classifier directly with the imbalanced training set and without any weight parameters.
clf =RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=2,random_state=0).fit(X_train, y_train) print("F1 Score is ", f1_score(y_test,clf.predict(X_test)))
print("Accuracy Score is ", accuracy_score(y_test,clf.predict(X_test)))
The F1 Score and accuracy score of the trained Random Forest Classifier Model on the test dataset is high. But only considering only these metric to judge the prediction performance of the model can be very misleading in case of the imbalanced dataset.
F1 and Accuracy score of Random Forest Classifier trained on the imbalanced dataset ( output of the above code)
Deploying such a model only based on these two metrics and not understanding the areas in which the classification model is making an error can be quite costly.
A visual metric, like the confusion matrix, outshines other metrics in several ways. We get an instant view on the model performance in terms of classification areas the model excelled and the areas which require fine-tuning. Based on the business use case, we can judge quickly from the false positive, false negative, true positive and true negative counts whether the model is ready for deployment.
You can learn in-depth about the confusion matrix in the article Accuracy Visualisation: Supervised Machine Learning Classification Algorithms
fig=plot_confusion_matrix(clf, X_test, y_test)
plt.show()
As expected, the majority class has completely influenced the model, and the trained model has predicted the classification of all records in test dataset as the majority class. Such misclassification prediction in case of rare fraud detection or uncommon malignant disease prediction is very detrimental.
Confusion Matrix of test dataset prediction by Random Forest Classifier trained on the imbalanced dataset (output of the above code)
Fortunately, Random Forrest Classifier has a parameter “class_weight” to specify the weights of each class in case of an imbalanced dataset.
In the sample dataset, class 1 is approx 38 times more prevalent than class 0. Hence, we will mention the “class weights” in such proportion for the algorithm to compensate during training.
weighted_clf = RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=2, random_state=0,class_weight={0:38,1:1}).fit(X_train, y_train) print("F1 Score for RandomForestClassifier with class_weight parameter is ", f1_score(y_test,weighted_clf.predict(X_test))) print("Accuracy Score for RandomForestClassifier with class_weight parameter is ", accuracy_score(y_test,weighted_clf.predict(X_test)))
The F1 Score and accuracy score for Random Forest Classifier Model with class weigh compensated is also high, but we can ascertain the real performance by checking the confusion matrix.
F1 and Accuracy score of Random Forest Classifier trained on the class optimised dataset with class_weight parameter ( output of the above code)
We can see that the majority class has not completed overtaken the Random Forest Classifier Model with weight-adjusted.
fig=plot_confusion_matrix(weighted_clf, X_test, y_test)
plt.show()
Out of the total 1000 records in the test dataset, it has misclassified only 14 records. Also, it has correctly classified 20 of the minority class sample records out of 26 minority class records in the test dataset.
Confusion Matrix of test dataset prediction by Random Forest Classifier trained on the weight-optimised dataset (output of the above code)
We have learned the way to handle imbalanced dataset with class_weight parameter in Random Forrest Classifier and improve the prediction accuracy of the minority class.
Next, we will learn a different approach to manage the imbalance input training dataset with BalancedRandomForestClassifier in the imbalanced-learn library.
Install the imbalance-learn library with pip
pip install imbalanced-learn
In the below code, we trained the BalancedRandomForestClassifier with the training dataset and then checked the metrics scores on the testing dataset.
from imblearn.ensemble import BalancedRandomForestClassifier brfc = BalancedRandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=500,
random_state=0).fit(X_train,y_train) print("F1 Score for Balanced Random Forest Classifier is ", f1_score(y_test,brfc.predict(X_test))) print("Accuracy Score for Balanced Random Forest Classifier is ", accuracy_score(y_test,brfc.predict(X_test)))
Like the previous two examples, it also indicates high F1 and accuracy score.
F1 and Accuracy score of Balanced Random Forest Classifier trained ( output of the above code)
We can see in the confusion matrix that BalancedRandomForestClassifier handles the class weight internally quite well compare to RandomForestClassifier without weight_class parameter.
fig=plot_confusion_matrix(brfc, X_test, y_test)
plt.show()
Out of 1000 test records, it predicted the classification of 968 records correctly. It also performed slightly better than Random Forrest Classifier with class_weight by correctly classifying 21 records out of 26 records in the minority class.
Confusion Matrix of test dataset prediction by Balanced Random Forest Classifier (output of the above code)
Next, we will use a completely different approach of oversampling to manage the minority class in the training dataset.
Next, we will use a completely different approach of oversampling to manage the minority class in the training dataset. The basic idea is to randomly generate examples in the minority class to have a more balanced dataset.
from imblearn.over_sampling import RandomOverSampler
ros = RandomOverSampler(random_state=0)
X_resampled, y_resampled = ros.fit_resample(X_train, y_train)
print("Number of records for X_train is ", X_train.shape)
print("Number of records for X_resampled oversampling is ",X_resampled.shape)
Earlier we divided the sample dataset of 5000 records into training and test dataset with 4000 and 1000 records respectively.
Training dataset fit on RandomOverSampler generated minority class record at random and resampled balanced training data has 7794 records.
Training dataset count with oversampled strategy- generated minority class record at random to balance the training dataset (Output of the above code)
Once the training dataset is artificially balanced, then we can train the standard Random Forest Classifier without “class_weight” parameter.
oclf = RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=2, random_state=0).fit(X_resampled, y_resampled)
We see that standard Random Forest classifier trained on artificially balanced training dataset with oversampling could predict pretty good.
Oversampling helped the Random Classifier to overcome the influence of majority classifier and predict the test data record classes with high accuracy.
Confusion Matrix of test dataset prediction by Random Forest Classifier trained on the oversampled dataset (output of the above code)
Out of 1000 test records, it predicted the classification of 985 records correctly. It also performed nearly at par with BalancedRandomForestClassifier with classifying 20 records out of 26 records in the minority class.
Finally, we will learn about the undersampling strategy to handle the imbalanced dataset. It is a completely different approach than oversampling we learnt earlier. Randomly delete examples in the majority class. The key idea is to randomly delete the majority class records to have a more balanced dataset.
from imblearn.under_sampling import RandomUnderSampler rus = RandomUnderSampler(random_state=0)
X_resampled, y_resampled = rus.fit_resample(X_train, y_train) print("Number of records for X_train is ", X_train.shape)
print("Number of records for X_resampled undersampling is ",X_resampled.shape)
A number for majority class records deleted at random to balance the training data set with 206 records from 4000 data records.
Training dataset count with under-sampling strategy. Deleted majority class record at random to balance the training dataset (Output of the above code)
Once the training dataset is balanced, we can use it directly to train the model just like oversampling strategy discussed earlier.
uclf=RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=2,
random_state=0).fit(X_resampled, y_resampled)
It seems undersampling strategy enables to predict the rare minority class event with similar accuracy like other strategies discussed in this article, but in comparison to other strategies, it performed pretty badly in of predicting the majority class. It predicted incorrectly 82 majority class records from the test dataset.
fig=plot_confusion_matrix(uclf, X_test, y_test)
plt.show()
Confusion Matrix of test dataset prediction by Random Forest Classifier trained on the undersampling dataset (output of the above code)
Key takeaways and my approach
Most of the machine learning classification algorithms expect balanced training dataset. It is vital to check whether the training dataset is imbalanced and take appropriate pre-processing actions before training the machine learning model with the data.
GIGO — Garbage In and Garbage Out: If we train a model with imbalanced data, then there is a high probability that the model will miss to predict the minority classes in production.
Data is very valuable. I do not prefer the undersampling strategy as it forces to prune the data related to the majority class. We saw that due to this even though the model could predict the minority class records nearly with the same accuracy as other strategies discussed in this article it performed miserably in predicting the majority class records.
I prefer the Random Forest Classifier with ‘class_weight’ parameter and BalancedRandomForestClassifier in imbalanced-learn library.
I will suggest you check the training sample performance with all the strategies discussed in this article before selecting any one of them for your project.
You can gain insight into the imbalanced dataset with exploratory data analysis. To know more about it read the article- 5 Advanced Visualisation for Exploratory data analysis (EDA) | https://towardsdatascience.com/4-unique-approaches-to-manage-imbalance-classification-scenario-7c5b92637b9c | ['Kaushik Choudhury'] | 2020-09-09 21:25:57.297000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Scikit Learn', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python'] |
Meet the Mother Whose Son Joined ISIS | Meet the Mother Whose Son Joined ISIS
Son Rasheed & mother Nicola (Source: Wbur)
It’s one thing to know you have lost your kid to heaven but to lose them to radicalization — is a feeling that cannot be framed in words.
This is the story of Nicola Benyahia, mother of Rasheed Benyahia, a 19-year-old boy from Birmingham who joined ISIS and never returned.
Before 1996, when Rasheed was born, Nicola always wished to have a son. She was already a mother to 4 daughters by then, so giving birth to Rasheed was truly the most precious moment in her life.
Growing up, Rasheed seemed to be as normal as any other boy and was immensely loved by his family. He had a jolly nature that made him an absolute delight to be around. However, in his teenage years, Nicola realized that although he was full of energy, like teenagers are, for some reason he didn’t have the teenager angst in him. Instead, he channelized this energy into his favorite activities like Martial Arts, Karate, football, and Parkour.
Image of Rasheed (Source: The Independent)
Suddenly, he was not the boy his mother had always known
Mothers can tell when their kids aren’t being the slightest of themselves. That’s what happened.
Things started changing in 2014. Nicola noticed that her son transformed from his humorous and caring self to a more serious kid. He also began to withdraw himself from family activities, which were not at all like him. If anything, Rasheed was the kind of person who loved spending time and doing activities with his family. This change in his behavior seemed all the more strange but it obviously didn’t come off to her as radicalization just yet. But she could easily tell that something was up with him. Some sort of confusion in him which she hadn’t seen ever before.
On 14th Dec 2014, Nicola finds a present and a note on her pillow.
Note from Rasheed (Source: Birmingham Live)
She didn’t find it suspicious because she herself would often write notes for her children. But when she asked her son,
“Oh what’s this, why have you given me this diamond necklace?”
His simple answer (to cover the fact that he was uncomfortable) was,
“Just”
The day Rasheed escaped
29th May of 2015 was a normal day in the Benyahia family. Nicola and her eldest daughter went to work and her youngest daughter, to school. Even Rasheed went to work, like every other day. The only difference was, he never came back.
Normally, if he expected to be late even by 10–15 mins, he’d always inform his mom. But this evening, it was already half an hour past his return time so she phoned him to ask where he was.
There was no reply.
For that entire week, the long week, there was nothing from Rasheed. On the early morning of Monday, she finally received a long text from him. As a worried mother, she was relieved that he was safe and alive but as she went on reading the message, it seemed like something was very very wrong. She said,
“The message talked of paradise and warned me not to talk to the police, not to go to the media, which for me spelt something very very different.”
Rasheed describes his life in Syria
Image of Rasheed (Source: The Independent)
On 4th August 2015, around 10 weeks after he left home, he contacted Nicola for the first time from Syria.
As she walked on the streets of Birmingham, she received a video call from him. She instantly began shaking and her heart started to pound heavily.
As a mother, she was happy to finally hear his voice but she also had questions. She asked him how he was and where he was living to which he replied,
“I’m sure you must’ve guessed”
But that was the last answer Nicola was looking for. Not that she didn’t already have an idea but she wanted to hear him say it rather than do the guesswork. All this time, all she had to do was guesswork.
“I’m at Raqqa”
As soon as he said this, there was nothing more she needed to understand. To her, it was quite evident as to where he was and who he joined.
He had joined ISIS.
The only part she couldn’t understand was why.
The moment Rasheed contacted her, she knew she had to let the police know and hence, kept them involved throughout.
This was far from easy for a mother to process. She made sure to maintain a good relationship with him so he knows that even though she may be disappointed and angry with him, she loved him because he was her son.
Image of Rasheed (Source: Daily Mail)
Slowly, he began sharing about his new life in Syria. He would talk of the places he’d visit, the girl he was planning to marry, and his day-to-day life. One of the most disturbing facts Nicola found in the things he shared was the way people of ISIS treated him. Although they had convinced him to join them in “fighting for the bigger cause”, he was asked to buy his own protective gear and the bullets for the gun to protect himself.
“These kind of things, they don’t tell you when they’re recruiting you. All they tell them is that you’ll have a purpose, you’ll have a wage and you’ll be important but they don’t tell them that they’ll give very little money (Euro 40/week). They give them literally enough to live on.” — Nicola
Sometime around the same week, there were drone attacks in Syria and his mother was concerned. But as per what Rasheed mentioned, the daily bombardment of attacks was now the reality of his new life. Once, he also mentioned having heard a plane shaft open above them. It dropped drones and they had to run for their lives.
Knowing this, Nicola understood that each day he lived was just a miracle because the chances were very high that he was going to die.
Rasheed gets killed in a drone attack
He very well understood the fact that his mother was against what he did. But Nicola decided that she wouldn’t show even the slightest hint of disappointment or anger to him. This was simply because she didn’t want him to die knowing that his mother was angry at him. Although she had all the reasons to be mad — and she really was, she kept it away from him so he could face death knowing that his mother loved him unconditionally, irrespective of whether she agreed with what he did or not.
On 10th Nov 2015, Rasheed was killed.
Nicola’s husband received the call. The man on the other side said he was sorry to tell that Rasheed was killed after being hit by a drone on the Syrian-Iraq border. He died about 10 days before the call and as per his last wish — to inform his parents about his death, they called them as soon as they got hold of a phone.
For Nicola, what was the most upsetting about that phone call was when the man said,
“It was very evident how well you brought him up. He was a very respectful boy”
That’s when she thought, | https://aninjusticemag.com/meet-the-mother-whose-son-joined-isis-c6dbc3ae227c | ['Radha Kapadia'] | 2021-08-25 18:03:56.374000+00:00 | ['Syria', 'Terrorism', 'ISIS', 'Family', 'Radicalisation'] |
Why Visual Analytics is a solution to the data talent gap (and the data language gap) | Why Visual Analytics is a solution to the data talent gap (and the data language gap)
It’s more than just having data expertise in the organization
In recent years, more organizations are addressing the “data talent gap” and are responding to it by offering training programs in analytics and data science. Assuming more people go through training as analysts and data scientists and enter the workforce, more organizations may benefit from having more deep analytical talent in the next few years.
However, I am skeptical that the data talent gap problem will be solved by that alone. Rather, I see that the “gap” will shift from the gap caused by the lack of data experts in an organization to the gap caused by the lack of communication and understanding between data experts and non-data experts in that organization. In essence, the data talent gap becomes a “data language gap.”
Typically, not everyone in the organization is an analyst, and it can be difficult for data experts to communicate the value of an analysis to non-data experts who can potentially be the domain experts or even the decision makers.
This is where Visual Analytics (VA) can help tremendously. VA is “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces” (Thomas & Cook, 2005). In other words, it is a practice that combines our visual intelligence and data analysis techniques with interactive technology to get relevant information out of data. It allows data experts to walk through the analytical process with the non-data experts in the following three ways.
1. Visualizations enable us to see representations of the data that may not be easily understood just by looking at summary statistics
I am not proposing to replace statistics with visualizations (it is vitally important to look at the numbers), but to couple the delivery of summary statistics along with visualizations that show the shape of the data, it allows those who are less familiar with the data to understand what is going on. This allows the non-data experts to provide contextual input with ease.
A classic example of the value of data visualization is by Statistician Francis Anscombe. This table contains 4 bivariate data sets (4 lists of paired values). They are different, but almost all the summary statistics for each dataset are identical within 2 decimal places.
How are the datasets different? You can easily see that from the graphs of the four datasets.
2. Interactivity enables us to examine the data we need for the task at hand: “Analyze first, show the important, zoom, filter and analyze further, details on demand” (Keim, 2009)
Interactive visual interfaces allows users (both data experts and non-data experts) to switch between different tasks with nearly zero latency:
Looking at a summarized view or the “big picture”
Zooming into particular details (even individual records!) that are of interest by filtering or by drilling down
Examining relationships between different facets by linking visualizations, and have one act as a selector for another
Interactivity allows the user(s) to have a real-time “conversation” with the data — generate questions, make visual queries and get answers in real-time, (and come up with more questions. Rinse and repeat!). Interactive visual interfaces can be designed for different audiences — it can be designed for people who are not data experts, which makes the information much more accessible by non-data experts.
The video below is an example of wildlife strike analysis using an interactive visual interface (Tableau):
3. People trained in VA can talk to people on both sides
As mentioned earlier in this article, VA is a practice. In other words, it’s not only about the technology. Adopting VA tools may not be enough to solve the language gap problem, because ultimately a subject-matter expert or a decision maker would communicate with an analyst or data scientist — in essence, a person communicates with another person (at least for now).
Since collaborative analytics is an integral part of VA, people who are well-versed in VA come with the experience of talking to people with different skillsets and expertise, and can serve to bridge the data language gap between data experts and decision makers. | https://medium.com/visual-analytics/why-visual-analytics-is-a-solution-to-the-data-talent-gap-and-the-data-language-gap-1ef84b02daa7 | ['Candice N. Mcgowan'] | 2016-08-15 16:14:22.209000+00:00 | ['Visual Analytics', 'Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Big Data'] |
Intel Xeon 2696v3 Benchmark | Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash
Recently Spin Servers has put together a new build using the Intel Xeon 2696v3 to create a server that provides excellent computing power for encoding & rendering, shared hosting servers, virtualization, and many other web projects that require a large amount of computing power.
Let’s talk about the benchmarks and a few comparison CPUs. Using cpubenchmark.net, the 2696v3 scored an average CPU mark of 24701 with a single thread rating of 2232.
Comparing the 2696v3 to the AMD EPYC 7763, who wouldn’t love to have a few 7763s thrown into their build? Well, the people who don’t want to spend upwards of $14 to $15,000 on a dual chipset. Unless that is what your project requires, then more power to you!
The 7763 CPU clock speed and turbo are on par with 2696v3 in both base and turbo speed. This makes this CPU great for very large processing needs, but again, at a large cost. This is where the 2696v3 comes in. With a dual 2696v3, you will be utilizing 36 Cores with 72 Threads. Which brings the cost to performance really close.
In short, the 2696v3 is on the top 100 list of high-end CPUs. This CPU is sure to support you and any of your web project adventures.
We are proud to offer this CPU in our new build and hope to have many more setups in the future. If you are in the market for a high compute CPU build and need bulk quantities, contact us so we can talk about getting you set up.
You can get this build with a hefty discount for our Medium Blog users, with the discount code below.
Dual Intel Xeon E5–2696 v3
36 x 2.3GHz
512GB DDR4
4x 1.6TB SSD
20TB @ 10Gbps Monthly Bandwidth
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This promotion is a recurring discount for the life of the service. Valid for new customers only. | https://blog.spinservers.com/intel-xeon-2696v3-benchmark-bcad92d87e12 | ['Jesse Jacobs'] | 2021-12-20 20:17:52.250000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Web Hosting', 'Serverless', 'Web Development', 'Internet'] |
How to Analyze Facebook Ad Results | Facebook’s advertising platform is constantly changing. This is great in that new and reporting features are constantly being added, but it can be confusing when trying to understand the outcome of a campaign at a diploma in digital marketing. It’s time to learn how to analyze the performance of Facebook ads.
Tips for analyzing results To get started, and perhaps most importantly, to organize things, establish a campaign, ad group, and an ad naming convention early on to find out what a campaign, ad group, or ad is. Otherwise, you’ll regret it later when your ad manager has a lot of weird-named campaigns and you can’t rule out what you need. It sounds easy, but you don’t have to click inside a campaign or individual ad to understand what it is. It is also important to set up a custom report view in PowerEditor or Ads Manager in an advanced digital marketing course.
To Use This: If you are managing ads called “columns,” select the check box on the right. Select the Save as a preset checkbox to save the view. Always select this view when checking the results of your ad for pg in digital marketing.
Calculate ROI: The only reason to pay for Facebook ads is that you want to get some return on investment (ROI) from these ads. So how do you know if your Facebook ad results show a positive ROI? Recall the previous section of this post where you learned how to set up a custom report view to be practical in calculating this in Facebook Ad Manager. One of the custom report views you have set will help you calculate your ROI.
If you have multiple products, the purchase price will vary depending on the price range of each product, so you will need to calculate the Facebook advertising ROI for each of these products individually. This means you can spend more on an $800 product campaign than on a $40 product. This method of calculating the ROI is ideal if you are doing e-commerce or promoting an event, product, or service at a set price. For various campaign goals, such as awareness and lead generation, a customer relationship management system like HubSpot that can track where leads came from and when/how they were converted to customers is key to closed-loop reporting.
Farewell, You can see the overall metrics for your campaign, compare ad groups, and see the performance of individual ads. When analyzing the performance of a campaign, always compare campaigns with the same goal. For example, there is a lead form campaign aimed at generating new leads. The second campaign, on the other hand, allows you to run videos aimed at directing users to your website so that they can run retargeting ads. Measure the success of your campaign against the goals you set.
Display Set
What you look for here depends on what you’ve tested in different ad groups for your campaign. Consider the ROI description above when deciding which ad group is most effective. Other indicators to consider when making adjustments and deciding what to test next are:
Cost Per Outcome
The average amount paid for each action depends on your campaign goals (leads, clicks, etc.). Clicks: Total number of clicks received by the ad group Click-through rate: The number of clicks on an ad is divided by the number of user ads. To Sue You can click on one of the ad groups to see the individual ads associated with that ad group. The metric you want to check is similar to the one above. You should also consider the relevance score for each ad.: Facebook will rate your ad from 1 to 10 depending on how responsive your target group is to your ad. If you don’t see your score, it could be because your ad didn’t get enough impressions for Facebook consumers to estimate your score. You’ll find that ads with high relevance scores are the most effective.
Low Impressions
If your ad isn’t showing to a lot of people, it could be because your targeting is too narrow. Targeting takes place at the ad group level for their target audience. Therefore, switch to editing the audience targeting for the ad group with which this ad is associated. | https://medium.com/@niitwork0921/how-to-analyze-facebook-ad-results-6717af854e6d | ['Nilesh Parashar'] | 2021-12-14 06:55:20.667000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Analysis', 'Facebook', 'Facebook Ads', 'Facebook Marketing'] |
The Last Hundred Miles | The Last Hundred Miles
Author’s Note: I wrote this more than a month ago now, and am publishing it here as my first post on Medium. It feels like an accurate representation of who I am and what I’m about as a military spouse and aspiring social worker. It’s okay not to be okay, and I am one of many spouses who are here for you.
Image Description: A Japan skyline at sunset. There are apartments and other buildings in the foreground, with mountain ranges and Mt. Fuji in the background. The sky is orange along the horizon, lightening to a very pale eggshell blue with cirrus clouds along the upper portion of the photo.
Last night, while chatting with my husband, he asked if I was okay. And I told him that I was; just in a funk. And that I wasn’t really sure why. I didn’t have much to complain about. I added the qualifier that I certainly have not been working like he has been. Not under the conditions he has.
And in those few keystrokes and simple words, I unequivocally invalidated all my struggles over this deployment. Why on earth do we do that? (I thank therapy and meds for my self-awareness to have recognized this so quickly.) Further conversations with fellow spouses show the same. Normally, we have this tendency to minimize our daily struggles during deployment. This year it is perhaps even more critical to not minimize our struggles or our accomplishments, and yet here we are. We have shared woes and trials and held up minor accomplishments as though they are hard won, triumphant victories.
My kid wore their underwear the right way today!
We made it to nap time without tantrums!
I put on pants today!
I went to the commissary!
I interacted with people!
I did not cry!
It seems silly from the outside, doesn’t it? But these seemingly small, mundane accomplishments are victories in the middle of what has felt like a multitude of tiny failures cascading down around us since the first Shelter in Place Order came out.
We are closing in on homecoming. We can practically taste it. Visions of running into my husband’s arms keep dancing through my head. It helps that there are a number of scenarios under which he could come home: perhaps one daydream is pierside, another at a bus stop. Will I remember to remove my mask when I kiss him? Will I be too caught up? I hope I don’t shove the kids out of the way.
But before homecoming, we have to make it through the Last Hundred Miles. It should, realistically, only be a sprint or short run — maybe a 5k? listen, I’m not a runner — to the finish. One last big push. But it is dragging by. It has slowed to the kind of pace only found in nightmares; when you are running away from something and you‘re trying to move your legs, screaming at them to move, but you’re not going anywhere.
We’re all questioning ourselves. Are we crazy? Why is this so difficult? We’ve done this so many times before. We’re all criticizing ourselves. I should know better. I should be doing better. Why am I not meeting my usual bare minimum?
Because COVID. Because, literally, no amount of prior life experience can prepare you for surviving deployment in the ever changing world of a pandemic. Because the States are an absolute wreck and even if we wanted to go home we couldn’t. Who has time for a month of quarantine?
We have been managing ourselves, our children, our pets, work, life, trying to figure out some semblance of social activity, time for ourselves, personal development, professional development, all the development…
And we have only just recently been allowed outside of a tiny restricted area.
We have watched as people Stateside do whatever they please, perhaps wandering around as if there is no pandemic. And we are here, overseas, with restrictions aplenty, ever changing guidelines, never knowing what’s next. Supports have been minimal and, trust me, I have tried so hard. Nobody wants to risk anybody’s health and while I understand that I have cried over the helplessness I have felt. We have sent our spouses off while each and every one of our supports has been stripped away in the name of health and safety, with no concern for the mental health cost, and the maxim of, “Abide by these rules or we’ll kick you off base.”
That anxiety in the back of your brain, as if you’re waiting for a boot to drop and the gates to slam closed again? That’s normal.
The exhaustion you are feeling from managing everything? That’s normal.
The depression you are just barely warding off, armed with a plastic spoon you found under your couch? That’s normal.
And I need to tell you that I don’t know how to fix it. I love to write these missives with some sort of solution at the end. A science-based suggestion coupled with personal experience to help you relate and find hope. But I don’t have that right now. I don’t have an answer.
The truth is that none of us has an answer.
We live a lifestyle where we are told from the beginning that everything else comes first. Fleet first. Family… well, we weren’t issued with the seabag.
You will look toward the end of deployment right now and while you will tell yourself it is close, your body will go limp with exhaustion. You will likely find yourself welling up with tears because must it really be that much longer? Why, when I say it, it sounds short, but when it comes to living it, it feels like forever?
I don’t have the answers. I do have the wordsmithing ability to put it down as a Thing That Exists. I do have the ability and the education to tell you that your feelings are completely valid. They are real, they exist and I feel you. I am in the trench with you, dear friend.
And I will personally see to it that we cross this finish line if I have to. This year, this pandemic, this deployment has exhausted us and asked more of us than ever before, while consistently stripping away supports.
But I see you.
I love you.
I will walk beside you.
And when you can’t walk, I will carry you if need be. I will fight when you cannot.
And I promise you, sweet strong friend of mine, you are going to make this. | https://medium.com/@linclements/the-last-hundred-miles-81fb0ac94560 | ['Lin Clements'] | 2020-12-04 13:41:56.732000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Navy', 'Military', 'Military Spouse', 'Overseas'] |
India-Nepal Relations: A Way Forward for Strong Relations | 21 July 2020 Manish Jung Pulami
India and Nepal have a profound relationship, but the relationship is characterized by ebb and flow. In recent times, this bond has felt shocks in the form of border disputes and both the states cannot afford this shock to continue long. Thus, a way forward for a better future and a strong relationship can be realized through a high-level political dialogue and by the creation of the environment conducive for it.
India and Nepal share a “unique” relationship. India and Nepal are destined by the geography to be close to each other and are marked by socio-cultural, economical, and religious similarities. Moreover, an open border between the two states has strengthened the relationship.
Our relations with Nepal are as old as the Himalayas and the Ganga. Narendra Modi
Though India and Nepal share a deep-rooted and historical friendship bond, there have always been highs and lows in the relations. Recently, this strong linkage turned sour because of the border disputes between the two states. The dispute is in the area of Lipulekh, Limpiyadhura, and Kalapani, which both sides claim to be theirs. Both India and Nepal refer to the Sugauli Treaty but have different perceptions about the origin of the Kali River.
Besides, the ‘wolf-warrior’ media have played a significant role in fuelling the dispute. Nepal, in response to the border dispute, released a new map and amended the constitution of Nepal as well. Similarly, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli accused India to be against his government, and very latest “Ram-Ayodhya” debates have undoubtedly increased the bitterness, and in a deep sense has deterred the people-to-people sentimentalities more than a political relationship of both the states. For sure this has increased negative sentimentalities in both the states towards each other.
Way forward for a better future –
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can be only achieved by understanding. Albert Einstein
First of all, further escalation, either militarily or in terms of words, should be ceased immediately to make an environment conducive for the diplomatic talks. The blame game by India and Nepal against each other should be stopped. Both the states’ leaders should create a diplomatic and political environment suitable enough for the dialogues. If possible, an all-party national consensus is what a settling of disputes and a long-lasting friendship requires. For this, the media has a significant role to play. Instead of disseminating false news about both the states, facts and truths should be reported for easing the tensions between the people of both states and garner positive nationalism.
Instead of disseminating false news about both the states, facts and truths should be reported for easing the tensions between the people of both states and garner positive nationalism.
The border disputes between India and Nepal should be resolved bilaterally in a diplomatic manner. A Foreign Secretary Level meeting has been proposed between the states to resolve the boundary dispute. But, as the sensitivities of the disputes continue to increase, a high-level political dialogue between the two states is the best possible measure to settle the dispute permanently. A Foreign Minister Level meeting or, if possible, a meeting at the highest executive level would be suitable not only to resolve the border disputes but also to resolve all the dissatisfaction in the relationship.
Must Read: Beginning of a new Cold War
Both states are aware that diplomatic negotiations are the only way forward. Nepal is also familiar to use the “give and take” method to resolve claims and counterclaims in the territory as it has been practised while resolving border dispute with northern neighbour-China in the 1960s.
Furthermore, India should leave its traditional security angle towards Nepal and be proactive with innovative strategies and policies. Instead of viewing Nepal from the “Chinese lens“, concentrating more on the bilateral resolution of the conflict would help both the nations.
Since the dispute of Lipulekh, Limpiyadhura and Kalapani concerns China as well, trilateral discussions can be proposed. After resolving the dispute, a trilateral trade cum pilgrimage route can be devised so that both India and Nepal could benefit from the trade with China through this route.
Further, Nepal should also focus on resolving the intra-party conflict within the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) which seems to be related to the Nepal-India dispute. Thus, Nepal should focus on a strong national and all-party opinion regarding Nepal-India relations.
Way forward for Nepal and India is through a high-level diplomatic talk and creating an environment conducive for the dialogue.
Additionally, many experts have added several ways for resolving border disputes and strong India-Nepal relations such as a multilateral way through the United Nations (UN), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Also, ideas of creating international opinions and narratives about the disputes have emerged, but the only way forward for Nepal and India is through a high-level diplomatic talk, and creating an environment conducive for the dialogue is best for both the neighbouring states.
Thus, the leadership of both states should focus on a mutually beneficial strong relationship to ensure a peaceful and prosperous South Asia. A quick arrangement of such dialogue should be worked upon immediately by both the states so that a clear message of friendly relationship goes to the people and the international community as a whole.
Disclaimer: The article was originally published in The Rise. | https://medium.com/@manishjungpulami/india-nepal-relations-a-way-forward-for-strong-relations-e7d9a3bf51fd | ['Manish Jung Pulami'] | 2021-07-06 06:54:18.883000+00:00 | ['Foreign Policy', 'India', 'Conflict', 'Nepal', 'Bilateral Relations'] |
Markets in INDIA (Weekly Markets in INDIA) | We visit the Markets in INDIA to shop for several things — vegetables, soap, toothpaste, masala, bread, rice, dal, clothes, notebooks, biscuits, etc. If we tend to build an inventory of the products we tend to purchase, they’d belong. There are several forms of markets that we tend to might visit for our everyday needs: these will embrace retailers, hawker’s stalls in our neighbourhood, a weekly market, an outsized searching advanced, maybe even a mall. During this article, we glance at a number of these markets and look at to grasp the products that are oversubscribed there reach patrons, WHO these patrons are, WHO these sellers are and the styles of issues they face.
Weekly Markets in INDIA
A weekly market is alleged as a result of it’s remained a particular day of the week. Weekly calls don’t have permanent retailers. Traders created retailers for the day and so shut them up within the evening. Then they’ll make it to a unique place on a consecutive day. There are thousands of such markets in Bharat. Folks come back here for his or her everyday needs. Several things in weekly markets are obtainable at cheaper rates. Once retailers are in permanent buildings, they incur plenty of expenditure — they need to pay rent, electricity, fees to the govt. They even have to pay wages to their employees. In weekly markets, these look house owners store the items they sell reception. Most of them are helped by their family members and don’t have to be compelled to rent employees.
Weekly markets even have several retailers merchandising identical product, which implies there’s competition among them. If some merchant were to charge a high value, folks would move to a different look wherever a similar issue is also available additional cheaply or wherever the customer will cut-price and produce the weight down. One in each of the benefits of weekly markets is that most stuff you would like are general in one place. Whether or not you wish vegetables, groceries or material things, utensils — all of them may be found here. You do not get to visit different areas to shop for other things — folks conjointly like attending to a market wherever they need a selection and a range of products.
Shops within the neighbourhood
We have seen that the weekly markets supply a range of products. However, we tend to get things from different kinds of wants conjointly. Several retailers sell product and services in our neighbourhoods. We might purchase milk from the dairy farm, groceries from division stores, stationery, eatables or medicines from different retailers. Several of those are permanent retailers, whereas others are edge stalls like vegetable hawkers, fruit vendors, mechanics, etc.
Shopping complexes and malls
There are different markets within the geographic area that have several retailers, popularly known as searching complexes. These days, in several urban areas, you furthermore might have massive multi-storeyed cool buildings with retailers on totally different floors, referred to as malls. In these urban markets, you get each branded and non-branded product. Branded product are high-priced, usually promoted by advertising and claims of higher quality. the businesses manufacturing these merchandise sell them through retailers in massive urban markets and, at times, through distinctive showrooms. As compared to non branded product, fewer folks will afford to shop for branded ones.
Chain of Markets in INDIA
In the previous sections, you have examined different markets from wherever we tend to get the product. From wherever does one suppose shop-owners procure their goods? Product are made in factories, on farms and in homes. However, we tend to don’t get directly from the works or the farm. Nor would the producers be interested in merchandising America tiny quantities like one weight unit of vegetables or one plastic mug.
The folks in between the producer and also the final client are the traders. The wholesale merchant initial buys the product in massive quantities. For instance, the wholesale vegetable merchant won’t settle for a couple of kilos of vegetables. However, it can render massive ample twenty-five to one hundred kilos. These can then be oversubscribed to different traders. In these markets, they are shopping for and merchandising manifest itself between traders. it’s through these links of traders that product reaches faraway places. The merchant WHO finally sells this to the patron is that the merchant. This might be a merchant during a weekly market, a hawker within the neighbourhood, or an advanced searching look.
Markets everyplace
So far, we’ve seen different marketplaces wherever folks get and sell numerous product and services. Of these markets are during a specific neighbourhood and add a selected manner and time. However, it’s not forever necessary that one needs to visit the requirement to get the product. you’ll place orders for numerous things through the phone and lately through the web, and also the product ar delivered to your home. In clinics and nursing homes, you’ll have detected sales representatives looking ahead to doctors. Such persons are engaged within the merchandising of products. Thus, shopping for and merchandising manifests itself in several ways that are not essentially through retailers within the Markets in INDIA
The markets that we tend to check out on top of are those that we simply recognise. However, there are markets that we tend to might not be thus tuned in to. This is often due to an outsized range of products being bought and oversubscribed that we tend to don’t use directly.
People in urban areas will enter markets while not stepping out of their homes via the web. They use their credit cards to create ‘online purchases’
Key points of Markets in INDIA
Weekly market: These markets are not daily markets but are to be found at a particular place on one or maybe two days of the week. These markets most often sell everything that a household needs ranging from vegetables to clothes to utensils.
Mall: This is an enclosed shopping space. This is usually a large building with many floors with shops, restaurants, and even a cinema theatre. These shops most often sell branded products.
Wholesale: This refers to buying and selling in large quantities. Most products, including vegetables, fruits and flowers, have particular wholesale markets.
Chain of markets: A series of connected calls like links in a chain because products pass from one market to another. | https://medium.com/@kapish-kapoor/markets-in-india-weekly-markets-in-india-1c578f417d0f | ['Kapish Kapoor'] | 2021-04-09 17:44:30.278000+00:00 | ['Democracy', 'India', 'Market', 'Food', 'Education'] |
Poema de agua salada | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/el-circulo/poema-de-agua-salada-7e7094bcd208 | ['Samuel Cracia'] | 2020-08-08 07:01:48.959000+00:00 | ['Poema', 'Literatura Mexicana', 'Poesía', 'Español', 'El Circulo'] |
Pope’s Calendar for Christmas Celebrations | The Vatican Press Office releases details of Pope Francis‘ commitments for Christmas and New Year celebrations in the Vatican.
By Vatican News staff writer
Current Covid-19 precautionary measures have defined the times and the modalities of social living during the pandemic. Pope Francis’ Christmas and New Year calendar is no exception. Thus, Christmas Night Mass has been anticipated to 7.30pm Rome time and participation in person in all Vatican Christmas and New Year ceremonies will be very limited.
A communiqué released by the Vatican Press Office on Thursday revealed ceremonies for the Christmas festivities begin with Christmas Night Mass on 24 December in St. Peter’s Basilica. This will be followed by the “Urbis et Orbi” blessing on Christmas Day at noon, while on Thursday, 31 December, Pope Francis will celebrate the First Vespers and the Te Deum in thanksgiving for the past year at 5pm in St Peter’s Basilica.
On Friday, 1 January, on the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and the 54th World Day of Peace, the Pope will preside at Mass in St. Peter’s at 10am. Finally, on the Solemnity of the Epiphany, Mass will be celebrated at 10am.in the Vatican Basilica. All times indicated refer to local Rome time.
Noting that in compliance with Covid-19 protection measures, the communiqué specified that only a limited number of participants will be present, and that they will be screened according to methods used in recent months to curb the spread of the virus. Of course all celebrations will be broadcast live on the media and streamed live on social media platforms.
Prior to the holiday appointments, the Pope will preside over Mass for the 125th anniversary of the Coronation of Our Lady of Guadalupe in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, 12 December. Upon mandate of the Pope the Apostolic Penitentiary has extended the possibility of obtaining a plenary indulgence to the faithful across the world who participate in that Mass from home. | https://medium.com/ave-maria/popes-calendar-for-christmas-celebrations-f8c19953d4d | ['Vic Alcuaz'] | 2020-12-11 10:52:49.234000+00:00 | ['Rome', 'Church History', 'Christmas', 'Holidays', 'Catholic'] |
Steps to protect the future of the ecosystem | STEP 2 — More Sustainable & Long-lasting Home Products
As discussed also in the last post, reducing the amount of plastic consumption would benefit the environment. Are you wondering How?
Well, it is not new that plastic is one of the major problems that damages the ecosystem.
In fact, every day, 8 Millions pieces of plastic enter in the ocean.
79% of plastic that we produce goes to the ocean and landfill and just the 9% is actually recycled.
If this allarms you even a bit, there are plenty of solutions that you can adopt daily when it comes to save the planet.
For instance, the excessive consumption of single plastic items such as food packaging and home products from shower products to kitchen products can pollute enormously the environment that surrounds you.
The alternatives are already easily accessible and definitely are already near you maybe you don’t know where to buy them…Greens’ Mama is here to inspire you!
Let’s talk about the products that you can possibly change in your bathrooms which can be more sustainable. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and shower gel bottles are just few examples of what you can find online but in recycled materials and with a sustainable design.
Next time that you are on the Web while making a buying decision check out for instance brands such as UpCircle and Lush which give you optimal substitutes to plastic containers. This brands offer a variety of products made with natural ingredients and their packaging is mainly plastic free. Not bad as a first approach to a zero waste lifestyle!
Of course, these are just an example of the major brands in the market who offers those products but there thousands more that can satisfy your needs at best withouth wasting plastic in your daily activities.
Even for the kitchen there are long-lasting products.
In the 31 Best Products for a Sustainable Kitchen guide offered by the Strategist, dozens of products are included to make your kitchen more green for the planet. Don’t forget to check it out. | https://medium.com/@greens-mama/steps-to-protect-the-future-of-the-ecosystem-3f5ebbde9a69 | ["Greens' Mama"] | 2020-12-26 09:05:37.244000+00:00 | ['Documentary', 'Sustainability', '2021', 'Resolutions', 'Diet'] |
When the time gets lost | It was as if an hourglass broke. The pieces were scattered over the river. The glass shards cut into my hands and the grains of sand grazed open my face. The water dragged the escaped time with it, but I remained behind, forgotten on the banks. I don’t know how long I stood there, maybe days or years, or maybe I am still standing there. I don’t know whether I am capable of carrying such anguish. Nothing will ever feel the same again as when the hourglass was still whole. I can’t say anything else than I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I want to pull out the hairs from my head, cry my eyes out until they dry, I want to set fire to the forest, I want to throw bricks through the windows of ambulances, I want nothing.
It is said that God is the eternal, the eternal time, but then my memories of this night will be the devil. | https://medium.com/@lindem-klop/when-the-time-gets-lost-d3986e3c60d1 | ['Linde Klop'] | 2020-12-20 17:24:31.059000+00:00 | ['Drama', 'Pain', 'Time', 'Surrealism'] |
Top free Course to Learn React || ReactJs | What is React?
React is a javascript library developed by Facebook for building user interfaces. Over the past few years, React is getting more popular than any other Framework or Library. So, here is the journey of React from unknown to most popular.
Initially, React was introduced by Jordan Walke, a Software Engineer at Facebook. Later Facebook developed it further and deployed it on Facebook’s newsfeed and Instagram in 2011 and 2012, respectively. React was adopted because of most of the Developer Communities. Because of its reusable UI components, and it is ultra-fast at large web pages. ReactJS is an open-source library, and one of the trending libraries has more than 152,000 stars. You can visit the React repo to contribute anytime.
Main Feature of React.
Reuseable Components — React allows the reusing of components that saves time. Designers create Components like form, brand logo again and again. React deletes that repeating job completely. But it can be painful to bring change in a particular. But Updates can be the easiest part. You can update all the reused components at once without disturbing others. React Virtual DOMs — A regular DOM(Data Object Model) tree gets updated every time there is a change in elements. A DOM tree has thousands of Elements in this era. The process of updating the DOM affects Web Application. But React manages a virtual DOM of itself that increases the updating process. It updates even minute changes by the user without affecting the other parts of the interface. Data Binding- React uses downward data binding that prevents changes in the parent element if the child element got changed. Because of this, the code becomes more stable. But on the other hand, the JS-representation view model has a disadvantage of changing the parent element if the child got changed. React Hooks- React has two types of components that are: Functional and Class-Based. Only class components support local state or have to use state management frameworks like Redux for global state. In February 2019, React developers introduced a new feature called React Hooks.
List of Free Courses
Here is a list of courses to learn to React. All of these are free of cost but still have more value than many paid Courses. These courses not like 50–60 hrs courses with tons of projects in them. This list of courses is great to get an overview of React Environment. After going through a few of these courses, you will have enough knowledge to create your Projects to React.
Official Documentation
Learning Libraries or Frameworks from the documentation is the best way to understand the concepts from the developer side of the Library. React has a well maintain documentation about its terminology and working. It has a clear code editor sidewise to try out the concept. Whenever you are stuck on a big project must check out the documentation to render out the problem.
The Beginner’s Guide to React — Egghead.io
If you want to get an overview of React without touching the keyboard, then you should go through this course. This course will build a solid foundation of basic concepts in React. Each lesson in this 28-part course is a single index.html file. This thing keeps your focus on React instead of managing directories. You will also learn how to move into a more productive-ready development environment and deploying your app to Netlify.
Learn React for free — Scrimba.com
This course is the perfect starting point for any React beginner. The instructor, Bob Ziroll has covered key features of React in 58 lectures. This course has a different approach to practical implementation by editing the directory to the instructor’s code. You will learn JSX all the way up to React Hook that is a new concept in React. In the end, you come up with two simple but Amazing apps to React. Make sure to check this out.
React Crash Course — Programming with mosh
Youtube is the best way to learn without spending a penny. Programming with Mosh is a well-known instructor on the youtube Community. He has a 2hrs long crash course on React that covers the basics of React. It can be another video to learn about how React works in less amount of time. This course well explains the jaguars of React Environment. Check it out for understanding it.
React.js Tutorial — LearnCode.Academy
There is a React Rapid Course by LearnCode.Academy. A complete series of 23 videos explaining React, React Flux, Redux, and MobX. This series is a power back for those who want to deep dive to React in a little time. Make sure to check it out for building modern applications using React. The instructor also talked about how to avoid memory leaks and how to handle async requests.
Learn React & Redux With Cabin
This course is a series of 7 tutorials covering a social network app using React and Redux. You come up with a nice functional social network app after going through this course. This course offers production-level features. It will cover integration with mgIX, Keen Analytics, Mapbox, Algolia Search, and how to host it on DigitalOcean. The last section of this course includes React and Redux best practices with common React/Redux pitfalls that no React Course offered at free.
Full React Couse 2020 — FreeCodeCamp
FreeCodeCamp is one of the leading programming community that offers free courses and certification. FreeCodeCamp has 10 hours long course on ReactCourse hosted on Youtube. This course covers Setup, basics of React, react hooks, context API, React Router, and an App on Netlify. Must check out this course.
React Projects
If you know React.Js and want to do projects to sharpen your skills of building Interactive UI. Then must check out this list.
You can learn to react from any of the above courses, But for Learning React integration with other technologies like MongoDB, Node.js, Express.js go through any one of these projects. | https://medium.com/@theinfogeeks/top-free-course-to-learn-react-reactjs-7a86c36efe8f | ['The Info Geeks'] | 2020-12-23 07:47:14.014000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'React Hook', 'React Native', 'Programming Languages', 'React'] |
Ageism in Tech and Data Science | Observations on pay and career growth
I pull a lot from my personal observations having worked in Silicon Valley as an engineer for 12yrs, as a Wall Street technologist for another 12, and more recently in MBB consulting. I’ve managed and hired shy of 200 people in my career. That being said, a lot of this opinion or anecdotal but has some backing by research [5,6].
1: Demand is limited for high paid engineers
Engineers get paid well, but you hit a ceiling relatively quickly (a few outliers exist namely at FANG firms). Also important to know demand drops quickly as you move up the curve — it is natural you leverage talent in pyramid structure for most teams.
Common salary/demand for engineers
2: Pay curves for leadership are higher
Engineer pay largely cap out at Sr levels, overlapped by leadership including Tech Leads and Managers, up to CTOs. The lines start/end abruptly because roles simply don’t exist at some levels (Anyone hiring Jr CTOs?).
3: Senior leaders are overpaid (but are not technical at all!)
I’m sure we all joke about the clueless Sr Leader/CTO/CIO who hasn’t coded or done anything technical in decades. It is all too true in many industries. Their ability to get things done at scale is what distinguishes them and gets them the big $$$.
So what? What is the point?
If you care about keeping your job and making more money than timing your career moves is key. A 28 year old manager will have tremendous bias against them and their decisions, while an engineer at 48 will have people questioning your abilities. The trap that often happens is being stuck in middle management — no longer technical and also not developed as a strong leader.
Presented next is a playbook to help move up the ranks. Unfortunately even this playbook exhibits ageism and is intended for younger people! | https://towardsdatascience.com/ageism-in-tech-and-data-science-67c7f4c3039d | ['Doug Foo'] | 2021-03-05 16:18:36.786000+00:00 | ['Age Discrimination', 'Career Paths', 'Technology Management', 'Career Advice', 'Ageism'] |
The Dilemma of the Development Officer | A colleague and I were discussing what it means to be a Development Associate or Development Director. Though many organizations have these titles, often the jobs have vastly different expectations, job duties and roles within the organization. This depends not only on the size of the organization, how many staff are part of the development or outreach team, but what the goals and priorities of the organization is. I often encounter organizations who haven’t clarified that last point. There has long been a misconception in the sector, that all you need to do is a hire a “development” person and we all have secret gold keys that open the door of the room full of money.
There is often no organizational understanding of the time it takes to build a development program. Development staff are often asked to “prove their worth” almost from day one.
For someone who interviewed for a job for which they would be the first full time development staff member for this organization. They were hired to build the program then be responsible for growing it. In the interview the candidate mentioned that it would take three to five years to “be successful” and create a program, and that if hired, they were counting on this organization to make that investment. They left that job after two years citing lack of support.
Since the average tenure of a development person with an organization is less than two years, typically, it’s very hard to find consistency and continue to build a program when in that five-year timetable there may be several different people in and out. It’s especially hard when your development staff feels underappreciated and a huge amount of pressure to “succeed”. This Chronicle of Philanthropy article from last year, speaks directly to this. And that was before the COVID pandemic.
Added to the long list and vast differences in job descriptions, comes a pretty consistent challenge around roles. A few of these challenges that I see consistently in my clients are around organization charts, hierarchy and the careful dance of any development staff to be the right amount of supportive to the Executive Director or President/CEO, while soliciting money from the board, without stepping on toes. To be able to run the database, support the program staff, manage the grant writer, communications position or intern, but also represent the organization publicly. To be in a room with donor peers, while knowing you are not in fact a peer.
So how do we solve for this? That’s really the million-dollar question. I often tell clients that fundraising isn’t one person’s job. It is the responsibility of everyone who believes in the mission of the organization to be considering how and where resources can be found. If your whole organization believes this, and allows the development person to support the organization in that way, the organization will be much more successful than those who do not.
The organizations that I’ve worked with who are doing it best are empowering their development staff to act autonomously, trusting them to put the organization first above their egos, career path and status. Executive directors who are treating their development/advancement colleagues as partners in resource development, not the sole provider of it. | https://medium.com/@daniatoscanomiwa/the-dilemma-of-the-development-officer-2dafade56c35 | ['Dania Toscano Miwa'] | 2020-07-20 21:30:02.054000+00:00 | ['Philanthropy', 'Fundraising', 'Nonprofit', 'Development Director', 'Resources'] |
Manifesting Luck —Putting Yourself in Position to Get Lucky | This week I listened to another episode of The Science of Success podcast titled “Your Luckiest Year Ever — The Science of Luck with Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline” and I’ve decided to write an opinion piece instead of a summary.
Gay and Carol were on the pod to talk about their new book Conscious Luck: Eight Secrets to Intentionally Change Your Fortune. Gay is a psychologist and a NYT best selling author. Carol is also a best selling author. Both have focused their careers in personal growth. They address 8 “secrets” in their book, however, they discuss 4 qualities in the podcast. In my opinion, the points that they make are great, however, on the surface they do come off as no-brainers.
You can find the podcast episode here, it’s an hour listen.
I believe the points that they make are overall good, but what bothers me is that it seems that they have studied others’ luckiness as opposed to trying to get lucky themselves, which involves risk. I will try to relate and apply my personal experiences as much as I can into this piece.
The topic of discussion is how to “engineer” luck for yourself. Is this possible? I believe so, and feel that I have done so, especially in the last year or so. I will do my best to draw parallels between their thoughts and ideas and my personal experiences. Let’s get to it!
Be Bold — Bet on Yourself
“Fortune favors the bold” as the Latin proverb goes, and as Gay and Carol say. Those who are “lucky” are often those who are not afraid and are willing to take risks. Don’t be afraid to be yourself and to have your own convictions.
“It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hoards of people who appreciate your work. It is better to be loved by a dozen than to be liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general, and runs counter to conventional logic.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
I’ve been very inspired by Taleb’s Incerto Series over the span of the last two years, which is where this quote comes from. Taleb explains luck and how to put yourself into position to increase your chances of becoming lucky. Taleb exemplifies in his work his fearlessness to be bold and to be his true self. In many ways Gay and Carol mention the same things that Taleb does about luck and success, just in their own ways.
The most recent bold decision that I’ve made was to leave my full time job as an electrical engineer to become an online English coach/tutor. Leaving a salary and “benefits” was something that no one advised me to do. However, I knew from day 1 of working with non-native speakers that my days at my previous job were limited, and it was just a matter of time before I would leave.
The main issues of leaving my job were that I had no experience in helping anyone with a language. I was (and still am) very up front about this with everyone that I work with, and I initially set a price on my services that reflected this. I had to teach myself how to help others (I’m still learning everyday), which required me to continue working at my previous job to support this process. 80 hour work weeks became the new standard for me.
Weekends were the main times where I was free to work with people from LA to Hong Kong and the 13 hour time zone differences. Working 20+ hours a weekend was necessary for me to spend as much time as possible learning and improving my processes. In the beginning, after the time I invested outside of the classroom, I was on average making a little less than $1/hour. I chose to do this instead of hanging out with my friends.
4 Qualities to Being Luckier
There are four qualities that Gay and Carol gloss over in the podcast, and they made it somewhat difficult to put an exact title on each of them. I will do my best to cover each one, what they mean, and how I’ve applied these principles.
Have a Willingness to Be Luckier
Every decision that we make boils down to opportunity cost. If we play it safe, what will we potentially miss out on in both the present and the future?
“…the reality is that the most important economic decisions to any individual’s well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self” — Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard
The actions we take everyday have direct and indirect consequences. We make tradeoffs that involve time and money. We make these decisions based on both our present happiness as well as our future happiness. If we do not consider our future happiness and the impacts that our current decisions will have in our future, we have not properly assessed the risk of our decisions.
I’m admittedly not perfect, but I’m always trying my best to make decisions that involve delaying instant gratitude that will bring future gratitude. I look at risk as something that is unavoidable, as we are all guaranteed to die at some point, and see risk as something necessary to take in order to ultimately achieve the freedoms that I desire.
Looking at my future, I weighed the risks of staying in the same job for 5+ years, the skills I would develop for future success, and my present well being (financially and emotionally with regards to my happiness). I ultimately decided it was worth it to take a leap of faith and leave a steady paycheck to pursue a totally new venture that was, and still is, very uncertain.
At the end of the day, I’m willing to bet on myself in the long run, which involves making short term sacrifices of being paid sporadically (and potentially not at all). I’ve put myself in a position to be able to take this risk as I only have a dog that depends on me and have saved some along the way. As long as Buster is fed and happy, I’m happy.
Doing My Best to Keep Buster Happy
Being at the Right Place at the Right Time
We’ve found ourselves in what I think is the most exciting time to be alive. The world around us has almost completely evolved into a digital world. We have become cyborgs (we carry smartphones on a limb that give us the ability to connect with the minds of the entire world) in an age of a mature internet. There has never been a time in human history where there is so much opportunity to instantly plug ourselves into the global economy.
Taleb talks about increasing your probability to become lucky by moving to areas that have lots of people (big cities) and areas that are economic hubs. I am a firm believer that it only takes one person to completely change your life. You are probabilistically more likely to meet the one person that can change your life if you surround yourself with more people. Thus, I sold my house in Arkansas and moved to Dallas, Texas, which is the 4th largest populated area in the US.
A combination of working globally online and living in Dallas has led me to working with individuals in 40 countries and that speak 22 different native languages.
Locations/Origins of Past and Present Students
Have Luck-worthy Goals
A huge component to becoming luckier is having goals that set up a luckier future. Gay and Carol pose the question “would you do what you’re doing if you weren’t paid a dime for it?”
This is an extremely important question. I’ve asked myself this, and even told some of you my answer to this question.
I would certainly do what I’m doing in my free time, free of charge, if I was still working at my last job. I feel extremely lucky and fortunate to be able to have the opportunity to speak with such incredibly intelligent and wonderful people across the world. I personally don’t know any other individuals that are tapped into such a network of people. It is just an added bonus for myself that I’m able to support my everyday life by speaking with you all.
Insane Courage — Have Strong Convictions and Be Brave to Follow Them. Be Persistent.
I have quoted Calvin Coolidge before in my previous writing, so this won’t be the first time for me to do so, and I feel confident that it won’t be my last. Here is my favorite quote of all time from the 30th President of the United States, that I engrained into my memory roughly 10 years ago —
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. — Calvin Coolidge, Amherst, 1895
I do my best to press on each day no matter what each day brings me, be it good or bad. It is easy to become “fat and happy” when things are going well, and it’s easy to throw in the towel when negative things happen.
Without an extremely strong conviction in myself, a belief that I’m able to manifest my dreams, I would’ve given up back in April of 2019, roughly one year before I set sail on this venture of being a lone wolf.
In April I had just returned from a trip to South America to see my best friends marry each other in Bolivia. I was blown away by the people and culture in both Lima, Peru and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and knew that I would want to return in the future. Upon leaving Bolivia, I was determined to learn Spanish so that I could return one day and further connect with people.
I began taking online Spanish lessons within two weeks of returning to my everyday life in Arkansas. After the second lesson, I was ready to give up. My tutor spoke 0 words of English with me (while being completely capable of speaking English), and I only understood roughly 30% of what she said to me.
I had never had hour long discussions in a foreign language with a native speaker before. My brain was ready to break trying to comprehend what she was saying to me while my body was sweating profusely as I directed every ounce of energy that I had in me to my brain.
I didn’t give up, however, and this ultimately led me to understand that I could potentially help non-native speakers around the world by speaking with them in a similar manner. It would’ve been extremely easy to give up on learning Spanish, but I had just had a life changing experience in South America that created a burning desire within me for me to continue pursuing learning a new language.
This decision has ultimately led me to this office chair that I’m writing this article in here in Dallas, Texas.
Where will it lead me to next? I honestly have no clue, but I am certain it will lead me to long term happiness, which motivates me each day to be my best self. It has already led me to meet 4 of you in person, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that I end up meeting many more of you as I ultimately hope to travel the world.
Don’t Be Afraid to Say No to Certain Things
Tune into your physical response to people when you look at someone or think about someone; what is your initial reaction?
It is easy to want to do everything. Being able to say no is what Warren Buffet claims to be the most beneficial ability that he has and is what has led him to be one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.
For me, being able to say no to living “traditionally” and being more of a contrarian has already paid dividends. I said no to living what I feel others expect of me and instead I’ve placed an enormous bet on myself.
I feel it’s the proper time to insert my second favorite quote of all time here:
“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
It’s so easy to say yes to something because someone else thinks it is a good idea. It’s so easy to do something because we feel that others will view it as cool, sexy, smart, or all the above.
The realization that I’ve come to, though, is that I’m the only one that lays my head down on my pillow at night and puts my pants on each morning. That no one else has enough skin in my game to feel what I feel and to make those things pleasant, other than myself. I’m not afraid to do whatever it takes to make myself happy, regardless of what others think about it.
Show Gratitude
There are so many people that we come across and have an impact, big or small, in our lives. Starting with our parents and the place that they put us in the world, everyone plays some sort of role in our lives. Whether we decide to allow these people into our lives or decide to block them out, we can learn from everyone.
I understand that I’m extremely lucky. It’s very easy to think highly of ourselves and omit the credit deserved by all of those that have helped us when we experience personal success.
I’m beyond grateful that you all are willing to take time from your days and weeks to work with me. The fact that there are 40 of you actively working with me, spending your hard earned money, is something that is hard for me to wrap my head around when I think about it. Without your continued trust and belief in me, I’m just another guy in the world trying to make it. For this, I am forever grateful.
Speaking of showing gratitude, I should show some gratitude here to Shiri for leading me to this podcast. Thanks Shiri :)
Homework — Commitment: “I commit to being luckier everyday”
The homework that Gay leaves us with at the end of the podcast is for us to make a commitment to ourselves. Each day when we wake up we should say “I commit to being luckier everyday.”
Life is hard. The world is a dirty, dirty place, but it keeps on turning. Life is too short to not pursue your dreams. I believe it’s totally possible to create a luckier future for yourself, but it most certainly won’t be easy. The one thing I know for sure is that you gotta risk it to get the biscuit. If not you, someone else will do it, so why not try? Who knows, you might just get lucky! | https://medium.com/@talkwithtone/manifesting-luck-putting-yourself-in-position-to-get-lucky-af70a48a04a9 | ['Tony Sossong'] | 2021-02-02 20:33:51.062000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Risk Taking', 'Luck', 'Risk', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Mainframe Developer Cockpit Simulator | To date, mainframe developers have used native source code managers like CA Endevor, and editors like the green screens of ISPF or, more recently, Eclipse. While these tools have served mainframe shops admirably for decades, the next-generation of talent knows and loves different tools, and even Eclipse is considered primitive by today’s standards.
Today, 87% of developers use Git and appreciate its collaboration-centric paradigm, derived from its open source origins. Eleven million developers use Visual Studio Code and appreciate features like syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and embedded Git as well as the ability to personalize the environment. These tools, when combined with CLIs, CI/CD pipelines, etc., are the engine of digital transformation.
Should the next-generation of mainframe developers be required to adopt the legacy tools?
Modern developer tooling powered by Zowe
Software engineers are in perpetually high demand so, like others, mainframe teams need to find ways to attract and retain talent. Imposing legacy tools, as effective as they may be, may not be as attractive as allowing them to use tools they already know and love. Opening the platform to these tools makes the mainframe a more appealing career choice.
Now, with enabling technologies like the open source Zowe framework, VS Code extensions like Code4z and the CA Endevor Bridge for Git, a modern toolchain is available to developers of mainframe code, including sysprogs. Critically, these tools enable mainframe teams to modernize-in-place, without lifting and shifting code and without disrupting existing developers. They also offer the ability to easily leverage enterprise CI/CD toolchains including components like Jenkins, SonarQube and Jest that are also often familiar to the next-generation. To learn how Zowe opens the door to off-platform DevOps tooling, and offers value adds like Single Sign-On (SSO) and MFA, read “Z is for Zowe, the Open Path to Mainframe DevOps”.
Developer Cockpit Simulator
These Zowe-enabled tools help new-to-mainframe team members be productive immediately — even on Day 1 — by lowering the learning curve.
In the digital age, an organization’s codebase is its ‘crowned jewels’. It defines how they deliver value and how they compete. For companies running mainframe applications written in COBOL and other mainframe-centric languages, a modern toolchain is the first step to meaningful software modernization, including robust cross-platform applications and broader polyglot development.
In addition to being attractive to the next-generation of talent, these tools also provide a degree of future-proofing. New cloud-based IDEs like Eclipse Che, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces and GitHub Codespaces preserve not only the look and feel of VS Code but also innovations like the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP).
However, for both career mainframers and new-to-mainframe developers, understanding how the technology comes together can be challenging.
Developer Cockpit Simulator
To demystifying this new toolchain, Broadcom created an interactive simulator called the Developer Cockpit [link]. Featuring Visual Studio Code, Zowe and Git, the Developer Cockpit simulates a realistic environment for a COBOL/CICS/Batch/Db2 developer complete with relevant VS Code extensions, Zowe CLI plug-ins and sample scripts. It provides visibility into the holistic experience and the open source enablers behind-the-scenes. And access to a script library provides the cockpit with “autopilot” capabilities which are especially helpful for new team members.
Try out the Developer Cockpit Simulator and let us know what you think!
See the complete set of VS Code extensions
See the complete set of Zowe CLI plugins
Learn more about Zowe
Learn more about CA Endevor Bridge for Git
Learn more about LSP
Learn more about DAP
Learn more about Eclipse Che | https://medium.com/modern-mainframe/mainframe-developer-cockpit-simulator-6cc518193444 | ['David Mcnierney'] | 2020-11-19 17:44:06.216000+00:00 | ['Mainframe', 'Git', 'Github', 'Vscode', 'DevOps'] |
How do you form an opinion on Pakistan? | I was born during the year of the Kargil war. Now, this doesn’t signify anything personal to me. Although stories of bravery and posts about the death anniversaries of soldiers who gave their life during battle always crop up annually, I treated this like an event outside my own echo chamber with no personal stake. There are only so many things you can empathize about and this didn’t feel like it.
I grew up reading and studying very little about Pakistan, just like any other high school student in India. I don’t think the omission is intentional by the educational boards, most history books are sparse post ‘47. The last chapter you read is about the Quit India movement and a small blurb that Jinnah led the All India Muslim League to the creation of Pakistan. With this little context and no inclination to form an opinion, I moved on with my life.
Jinnah
Then during my fifth grade, I moved to Saudi Arabia for two years. It was definitely a change, moving from my Hindu-dominated country to a Muslim-dominated one. Apart from all the differences observed, I lived and interacted with Pakistanis who were my neighbours. I was too young to harbour any kind of embodied resentment and the family gave me no reason to believe that I should have one.
It is my firm belief that the general public doesn’t adopt the struggles of a government that makes it decisions under portraits of hard faced nationalists who fought battles 70 years ago. The Pakistani neighbours treated me like I was just another kid and we didn’t constantly fight about Kargil,1971 or even the Kashmiri Pandit exodus. The topics of conversation were often about the similarities: Bollywood, Food and a curiosity as to what lies beyond each other’s border.
Then I came back home and with puberty, I felt my ideologies mould into something concrete. It didn’t feel like I couldn’t have an opinion of what’s happening in the world today. I tried to adopt a stance, one aligned to what my parents thought or one opposed to it. However, I never felt connected to either side of the political struggle back home, on both sides. I kept floating, as friends posted their snarky comments on social media about something that hits headlines.
I keep thinking that it would be much easier if I was a staunch right-wing nationalist or a left-wing liberal. There would be a path for my emotions to flow through and I wouldn’t be so engrossed in constantly reading about political issues and trying to figure out my stance on those issues.
So I started following Instagram accounts related to Pakistani culture, like Bilal Hassan’s @mystapaki.I read up more on their history and I picked up a biography on Jinnah by Yasser Latif Hamdani. Reading more about our shared past really makes it seem like our countries are estranged siblings who parted ways a long time ago. There are constant inner struggles, times when I feel that as a society, we’re too harsh on Pakistan and others when our opinions are truly justified and valid.
Mystapaki
As I read more, the map gets blurrier with no real sense of direction. Maybe that’s not how it’s supposed to be but that’s fine by me. I think it’s better to not have an opinion on things than have an ill-informed, emotionally charged one. I’d like for my thoughts on these politically supercharged topics to change with the hope that I’m growing as they are. | https://medium.com/@pranavjagdish/how-do-you-form-an-opinion-on-pakistan-9b0410e08675 | ['Pranav Jagdish'] | 2020-12-27 17:47:46.108000+00:00 | ['War', 'Pakistan', 'Kargil', 'India'] |
The Enigmatic Death of Thelma Todd | Thelma found the perfect building located at 17575 Roosevelt Highway (Now Pacific Coast Highway). The lower floor became Thelma’s Sidewalk Cafe, and the upper level a ritzy nightclub she called Joya. The third floor was a spacious apartment that she lived in with Roland and his wife. Just the three of them.
Jewel Carmen, ca 1918, Public Domain
The cafe was a hit. Thelma would often appear as a waitress, cashier, or a hostess to the delight of her customers. Her appearances at the cafe were not ego, but a marketing move. She knew customers would pay higher prices if they thought they had a chance to see a movie star.
Trouble
Unfortunately, Thelma began to experience the dark side of fame and success. She began receiving threatening letters containing threats to “Wreck that Santa Monica cafe of yours,” and warned, “Our San Francisco boys will lay you out!” Some of the letters were traced to a man named Harry Schimanski on the East Coast. Harry threatened her life unless she gave him $10,000. He was arrested in August of 1935.
Edward Schiffert believed he and Thelma were involved in a love affair. He also sent threatening letters. A judge ruled him insane, and he was committed.
Extortion attempts weren’t the worst of her problems. According to William Donati’s book, The Life and Death of Thelma Todd, a group of local thugs desired to use a portion of Thelma’s restaurant as a gambling hall and attempted to strong-arm her for it. Thelma wouldn’t hear of it. Rumors abound that the man calling the shots for these local thugs was notorious mobster Lucky Luciano. There is no evidence that Lucky ever met Thelma.
With the two men behind bars, the threatening letters stopped. Thelma could relax a little. Even if things were too cramped for her liking on the home front.
Death
On Saturday, December 15, 1935, Thelma attended a party given in her honor by English comedian Stanley Lupino and his lovely daughter, Ida. The party was hosted at the swanky Club Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Roland warned Thelma the doors to the apartment would be locked at 2 AM sharp. She quipped that she would be home at 2:05.
Thelma was delighted to see tons of film-colony celebrity friends at the party. She wore a beautiful mauve gown with silver trim beneath a mink coat. Her neck, wrists, and fingers were dripping with diamonds. “She was dazzling,” Patricia Ellis said of Thelma.
Imagine Thelma’s surprise when who walked in, but her ex-husband, Pat DiCicco. On his arm, a woman younger than Thelma, who he claimed was his girlfriend.
Thelma was irritated but consoled herself that Pat and the new girl were patrons that night — not guests at her party. She decided to stay, so she sat at Sid Grauman’s table and chatted. She realized it was past 2 AM and had sid call the house to let Roland know she was on her way home.
At 3:15 AM, her chauffeur drove her from CLub Trocadero to her home. At 3:45 AM, she waved goodbye and declined his offer to escort her to the door.
Thelma’s maid, Mae Whitehead, went to work as usual on December 16, 1935. The first order of business was to drive Thelma’s car from the garage about a block away to the cafe. When she arrived, she saw the garage door was partially opened. Mae entered, and found Thelma slumped over in her Lincoln Phaeton. She thought Thelma was sleeping, but as she went to wake her, Mae made a grim realization; Thelma Todd was dead.
Investigation
The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, California
17 Dec 1935, Tue • Page 16
Immediately, May called the restaurant manager, Mr. Shafer, who lived in the apartment above the garage, and he called the police. LAPD investigators found Thelma dressed in the same mauve party dress and mink coat. Her expensive jewelry and purse full of cash — undisturbed.
The car’s ignition was switched on with the key. The vehicle idled in that garage until it ran out of gas, and the battery drained. Investigators agreed that she likely died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Surgeon AF Wagner did a partial autopsy which confirmed her blood contained as much as 80% carbon monoxide.
May breaking the sad news to Pat Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California
17 Dec 1935, Tue • Page 3
But Coroner Frank Nance had questions. How did Thelma come to be in the garage at all? Why didn’t she have a house key to her own home? Beyond that, there was dried blood on Thelma’s face. Her nose was fractured, and her lip was busted. Just how hard did she hit that steering wheel when she lost consciousness?
The garage was only 1000 feet away from the home, but Thelma didn’t bother to knock. According to the autopsy report, Thelma died sober. She didn’t pass out from drunkenness. She was able to climb the 270 steps up the steep hillside to the garage, and she did it in heels.
Thelma had been dead for at least 12 hours when May discovered her body. Wallace Ford’s wife claimed Thelma called her at 4:10 PM — at least 12 hours after she died — and said she was bringing a surprise guest to her house in half an hour.
Jewel Carmin claimed she saw Thelma driving her car that morning on Hollywood and Vine accompanied by a dark, handsome stranger. LAPD Captain Bert Wallis of the homicide squad was suspicious enough to question Mrs. Ford’s guests.
Ernest Peters, somehow, was able to drive Thelma from Cafe Trocadero twelve miles to her apartment in around 20 minutes. How did he get her home so quickly? His response to that question only deepened suspicion:
“Miss Todd was afraid because she had been the target of an extortion plot,” Ernie answered. “She told me to drive at top speed and not to make boulevard stops. On the way to her cafe, I drove between 65 and 70 miles an hour.”
If gangsters or crazed stalkers were still harassing Thelma, she didn’t tell anyone about it, and she didn’t seem fearful. Her death certificate list cause of death as accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.
The Evening Times
Sayre, Pennsylvania
18 Dec 1935, Wed • Page 1
Aftermath
To this day, no one knows why Thelma Todd’s body was so battered, and likely never will. Her ex-husband, a man on the record as violent towards Thelma, was in town that evening. A plausible theory is that the two met to chat in the garage and had an altercation that went a bit too far. Pasquale refused to attend the inquest into Thelma’s death as well as her funeral. Thelma left $1 to Pasquale in her will. It was more than he deserved. | https://heathermonroe.medium.com/the-enigmatic-death-of-thelma-todd-4aa2e7e0a7bd | ['Heather Monroe'] | 2019-11-18 09:35:54.950000+00:00 | ['Hollywood', 'History', 'True Crime', 'Murder', 'Cinema'] |
Back Again | Back Again
50 word micro-fiction prompt — “She broke down and let me in”
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
I walked to the opened door with blood on my knuckles, bald patches where hair was ripped out, and a limp I feared I would not correct.
She stood covering her face while tears stained her shirt.
I was barely able to croak the one word I missed saying.
“Mom.” | https://medium.com/the-friday-fix/back-again-fde6b047d3fc | [] | 2020-07-31 11:01:01.495000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Fiction', 'Microfiction', 'Family', 'Writing'] |
「哼不就是停電吃飯嗎⋯⋯咦好像不太一樣？」——無光晚餐體驗心得邀約 | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/wumanru/dining-in-the-dark-1e027e2fef7c | ['曼努 Manzoo'] | 2019-06-23 08:26:15.532000+00:00 | ['設計寫實派', 'Review', 'Design', 'Writing', 'Experience'] |
Heard the Herd | Base photo: CHARLIE HAMILTON JAMES, National Geographic • Photo Illustration: Diem Jones
Not all mountains need to be climbed, or:
• Admired
• Desired
• Dreamt about
• Feared
• Lusted for…
Hear your herd
Hear your inner voice
Herd your hearing
Voice your inner thoughts
Not all mountains need to be lusted for, as there may be an illusion in the glitter.
Voice your inner thoughts and don’t burry them under your footsteps
Not all mountains need to be feared as our biggest fear is of what we create.
Hear your herd and believe in your power
Not all mountains need to be dreamt of, as you might be living the dream.
Hear your inner voice and make the appropriate choice
Not all mountains are worthy of have a place in your dream-scapes
Blend your desires with your admires and have faith in you
Not all mountains need to be climbed, yet there are some that need to be moved!
r.u. with US?
isUis or isUaint
O.N.E. [One Never Escapes]
Words: ©2020 Diem Jones aka Drs. Fladimir MS Woo & HM Joy | https://medium.com/@diemjones/heard-the-herd-f9f86f50432d | ['Diem Jones'] | 2020-12-26 12:05:33.412000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Faith', 'Life', 'Mindset', 'Poetry'] |
Masculinity in Time of Pandemic — Exploring Men’s Day in ‘New Normal’ | Masculinity in Time of Pandemic
Hooray! The International Men’s Day is here.
The day dedicated to the masculine lot among us is unique in 2020. They have been through a different year and diverse experiences causing a chain of lifestyle and behavioral changes. (Disclaimer: Yes, we understand that COVID has shown gender equality in affecting everyone’s lives and livelihoods. But let’s focus more on the macho gender on this special day).
In this blog, we are exploring ‘masculinity in time of pandemic’ on a lighter note. Here is an effort to discover the impacts this pandemic-induced lock-down and the ‘new normal’ have imposed on the gentlemen at Bridge Global.
As a top software development company, we have lots of technologically brilliant gentlemen with us. We are proud about each one of them as they make a lot of difference in our daily lives. They exude positivity and radiance in their daily tasks and in their association with their colleagues and clients.
We’ve simply asked them to give a statement on things that they are able to do just because of the pandemic. And here are their responses.
Before we dive into that, let’s take a quick peek at what is this International Men’s Day all about.
A Quick Peek into the International Men’s Day
November 19th of every year is dedicated to celebrate the positive values that the menfolk bring to the world, their families and societies. It is that day of the year when we accentuate the positive role models belonging to this masculine gender. This is the day to spread awareness about men’s well-being.
The theme for this year’s Men’s Day is “Better health for Men and Boys”.
It is true that Men’s Day does not get adequate importance when compared to the day dedicated to the other ‘obvious’ group. Therefore, this year we’ve decided to make it special.
Finding New Purposes During Pandemic Lock-down
The gentlemen at Bridge are revealing how they’ve discovered their purpose in the otherwise unexplored/under explored areas.
There is no doubt that surfers and cyclists around the globe are having a great time in less crowded beaches and roads.
Farming and exercising have become many men’s biggest COVID lockdown love affair. It is indeed a great option to ward off the loneliness after the working hours. Both are great relaxing and rejuvenating activities.
Culinary is a great artistry that men enjoy. It’s a great sign that they are pitching in to share the domestic workload along with upgrading their cuisine skills.Ladies at home are getting some rest and enjoying meals prepared by their male counterparts.
We were expecting some gender diversity champions, but only a few of them seemed to try their hands on the regular boring household chores that the feminine tribe do on a daily basis.
Wrapping Up
This COVID-19 lock-down has been a time to expand the view of what it means to be masculine. Now as the lock-down restrictions are being released, we hope that the men will stick to the healthy habits that they’ve acquired during this crucial time in history. | https://medium.com/@bridge-tweed/masculinity-in-time-of-pandemic-lets-talk-about-being-a-man-in-the-new-normal-46895697eb3b | ['Bridge Global'] | 2020-11-20 04:18:46.382000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Masculinity', 'International Mens Day', 'Covid 19', 'Lockdown'] |
It Matters What Scholars Think (and Why They Think It) | By Aidan Donovan November 17, 2020
Washington Post and Foreign Policy have published findings from TRIP surveys about presidential elections , impeachment , and American foreign policy s . Consensus support for a particular position among i nternational relations (IR) scholars might be a strong rationale for policy action. We know that policymakers demand and utilize academic work under certain conditions. On the supply side, there is a push within the academy to increase the rewards for producing policy-relevant research . It matters what scholars think about international issues. The challenge is that the reasoning behind consensus positions within the academy is often masked by political differences and the format of traditional survey research.
Scholarly research is useful to policymakers when the underlying logic is coherent and when policy prescriptions are clear. Policy relevance is stronger when many scholars have similar scholarly suggestions. In areas where there is a consensus among scholars, we should attempt to understand the underlying reason(s) for scholarly agreement. Understanding the logic of their positions, and whether this is consistent among scholars, is just as important as the conclusion.
For example, of scholars opposed President Trump’s decision to leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia. Some scholars likely believe that the treaty is an effective security tool, while others may view the treaty as ineffective (given alleged non-compliance) but view the departure as an unnecessary provocation . Scholars’ consensus opposition is clear, but the survey does not provide information on how each of the scholars reached this conclusion. Policymakers can also learn from scholars on topics where there is not a consensus, such as the effectiveness of economic sanctions . It would be worthwhile to know if scholars consider the same or different factors in evaluating the effectiveness of economic sanctions.
It is hard to learn from IR scholars without understanding why they think the way they do.
Learning from scholars can be challenging because scholars are overwhelmingly liberal, compared to a more divided electorate and policy community. In our 2017 Snap Poll , only 11 percent of scholars identified as conservative on economic or social issues. Almost two-thirds (62 percent) of international relations scholars self-identify as both economically and socially liberal. Survey questions and interpretations should reflect the complex relationship between ideology and expertise.
Scholarly credibility to speak on important issues needs to be accompanied by a coherent rationale for their consensus. On many issues, it is hard to know if the IR consensus is rooted in expert evaluation or political preferences. We asked scholars in whether President Trump’s unpredictable behavior has been an effective negotiation tactic, as he suggested in the campaign. Just 8 percent of liberal scholars say this has been effective, yet 45 percent of conservative scholars say it has been an effective negotiation tactic. There is both some theoretical support for projecting unpredictability or irrationality and a lot of skepticism from prominent scholars such as Stephen Walt. However, we are unable to determine whether theory and evidence, or politics, explains conservative scholars’ more favorable perspective on President Trump’s international negotiations.
“As a bargaining technique, the madman theory has a certain logical coherence to it … but the key lesson is that there is little or no evidence that the madman theory of diplomacy actually works” — Stephen Walt
The effect of politics on scholarly attitudes is exemplified by questions on the U.S. foreign aid budget. We asked in (2017) whether the U.S. is spending too little, too much, or the right amount on foreign aid. The question did not mention any politicians by name, so respondents are more likely to report their genuine views on U.S. foreign aid. IR scholars overwhelmingly support greater spending on Aid. Overall, 82 percent of scholars thought the U.S. was spending too little and just 4 percent thought the U.S. was spending too much. Just 2 percent of liberal scholars and 16 percent of conservative scholars thought the U.S. should spend less on foreign aid. IR scholars supported increasing aid and opposed reducing aid regardless of political ideology.
Do you think the U.S. is now spending too little, about the right amount, or too much on foreign aid? (October/November 2017)
When we ask scholars to evaluate Trump’s performance specifically, just 3 percent of IR scholars report that he has done as well or better than Obama on “development and foreign aid” even though the U.S. aid budget as a whole has been consistent across administrations. The president’s rhetoric on aid and development may be somewhat significant in aid effectiveness, but the single biggest difference is that we are now asking about Trump (an especially unpopular figure among scholars) specifically. The average during Obama’s second term was $49.5 billion. The average aid budget from Trump’s first two years in office was just three percent lower at $48 billion. Aggregate aid has essentially been steady despite President Trump’s isolationist rhetoric. We asked in September 2020 whether Trump has done as well as or better than Obama on a list of issues, including “development and foreign aid.” Just three percent of scholars reported that Trump has even been equally as strong as Obama on this issue. Not a single self-reported Democrat answered affirmatively, and just 6 percent of Independents and 16 percent of Republicans did as well. A partisan-proof result is expected since Republican scholars are nearly evenly split between supporting Biden and Trump in the upcoming general election. The most likely explanation for these diverging results is that scholars considered their negative opinion of President Trump in evaluating his performance on foreign aid. If we asked the general 2017 question on the US foreign aid budget, we would likely find that substantive attitudes on aid have not changed much in three years.
Can we encourage evidence-driven guidance from scholars?
Providing value-neutral questions and response options can encourage more substantive, and less political responses. In Snap Poll XI (2018), we asked scholars if the powers of the U.S. president have increased under President Trump, compared to the three previous presidents. This is potentially value neutral because a strong executive is not necessarily good, bad, liberal, or conservative. Liberal scholars were just slightly more likely than conservative scholars to answer that the president’s powers had increased under President Trump. Among conservative scholars, 5 percent say presidential power increased a lot and 15 percent say it increased somewhat. Among liberal scholars, 7 percent say presidential power increased a lot and 26 percent say it increased somewhat.
Have the powers of the U.S. president under President Trump
increased a lot / somewhat, remained the same, or decreased a lot / somewhatAidan Donovan is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in Economics and Government. He has worked as a Research Assistant for TRIP since February of 2019. His interests include law and economic policy, and he is particularly interested in understanding how scholars think and communicate with policymakers and the public. compared to the previous three administrations?
The poll also asked scholars if they thought President Trump overstepped the foreign policy powers of the Office of the President. While liberal scholars were only slightly more likely than conservative scholars to say that President Trump increased the power of the president, liberal scholars were overwhelmingly more likely to say that he overstepped his foreign policy powers. Just 13 percent of conservative scholars said President Trump overstepped his foreign policy powers, compared to 47 percent of liberal scholars. Scholars seem to be capable of putting aside their political values at times, but the question asked makes their political perspective more or less relevant to their responses.
It may be reasonable to assume that substantive knowledge and experience does, on average, make scholars more liberal. However, liberal substantially outnumber conservatives in a variety of fields. At least 80 percent of academics in english, history, and psychology are liberal, suggesting that self-selection may explain IR scholars’ liberalism as much as their subject-matter expertise. Conservative scholars will therefore be in the minority among academics on most political topics. Scholars as a whole could benefit from investigating whether observed divides are substantive or political when conservative scholars are in clear disagreement with the rest of the IR academy.
TRIP surveys of scholars, journalists, and think-tankers strive to gather expert opinions rather than politically-driven responses. Therefore, our survey questions must be designed in a way that intentionally attacks the issue of ambiguity in survey interpretation. Questions must be carefully worded to cue political beliefs and reactions only when intended. In our most recent snap poll, we asked scholars the following question: “Regardless of the substance of their foreign policy agendas, how effectively you believe each candidate would be in achieving his respective foreign policy goals over the next four years.” The phrase “ regardless of the substance of their foreign policy agendas “ reminds respondents to take each candidate’s goals as a given, which should produce more substantive responses regarding the candidate’s foreign policy capabilities.
Additionally, multiple-choice questions could be supplemented with open-ended questions requiring explanations allowing researchers to understand the underlying reasoning to their scholarly advice. Scholars are roughly split between thinking the threat of economic sanctions would decrease or have no effect on the probability of election interference from other countries. We know that scholars are also split on the effectiveness of sanctions overall. Asking for an explanation could elucidate if those the overall wariness toward sanctions, or something specific to election interference, is driving skepticism of the efficacy of using sanctions to discourage election interference. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business Economic Experts Panel is a useful guide. The survey provides on-the-record respondents the opportunity to explain their answers and identify their confidence level and the school tracks responses over time to allow for track-record evaluation. This methodology incentivizes substantive and thoughtful response and discourages and identifies unsound beliefs.
Expert surveys are a useful way to synthesize the research and impact within peer-review academic literature and to highlight analysis that may be useful to policymakers and voters. The success of survey responses in fulfilling this role is directly related to the proportion of each response that is a product of subject matter expertise and experience (instead of personal beliefs and ideology). TRIP surveys recognize the importance of careful wording and interpretation and the majority of IR scholars undoubtedly seek to provide impartial responses. Nonetheless, the academy could benefit from surveys that provide stronger incentives for careful reflection and substantive response. Policymakers need to be careful in using the results of expert surveys as justification for action in cases where the underlying logic is not clear. If scholars come to similar conclusions based on different reasoning, policymakers need to understand the differences and how each might apply to the present (real-world) situation. Surveys like TRIP can encourage policy relevance in the academy by incentivizing substantive and sufficiently-detailed responses that are directly useful to policymakers and politically-active citizens. | https://medium.com/trip-ra-blog/it-matters-what-scholars-think-and-why-they-think-it-3c0d8692828c | [] | 2021-01-14 17:14:52.672000+00:00 | ['International Relations', 'Surveys', 'Us Foreign Policy', 'Partisanship', 'National Security'] |
Top 10 Dangerous Things Women Have Done in the Name of Beauty | Top 10 Dangerous Things Women Have Done in the Name of Beauty
The pursuit of beauty throughout history
Photo by Gabriel Brandton Unsplash
Beauty standards have changed throughout human history, varying according to different cultures and traditions, but beauty standards and goals have always existed, putting a lot of pressure on women. In an attempt to reach a certain beauty standard, women have broken the bones in their feet, compressed the organs in their stomach and chest, applied poisonous makeup, and more.
Here are the top ten dangerous things women have done in the name of beauty:
10. Foot binding
The practice of foot binding is recorded to have begun in China around 960 A.D. and it wasn’t outlawed until 1912. Despite being forbidden, some women continued to bind their feet in secret up until the 1930s. Having tiny feet was a status symbol, and a way to secure an advantageous marriage.
“First, her feet were plunged into hot water and her toenails clipped short. Then the feet were massaged and oiled before all the toes, except the big toes, were broken and bound flat against the sole, making a triangle shape. Next, her arch was strained as the foot was bent double. Finally, the feet were bound in place using a silk strip measuring ten feet long and two inches wide.” — Smithsonian Magazine
The process was painful, and it resulted in terribly deformed feet that hindered mobility for the rest of the woman’s life.
9. Poisonous eyedrops
In Edwardian England, it was considered fashionable to appear with dilated pupils to emulate the look of being in love. To achieve this look, women used belladonna eyedrops, extracted from the poisonous plant of the same name (also known as deadly nightshade).
At best, the belladonna eyedrops caused blurred vision, at worst, irregular heartbeat, and blindness.
8. The tapeworm diet
Eating whatever you want without gaining weight, that is the dream of many women who are constantly pressured by beauty standards to remain slender at all costs. In the 1800s it was no different, and one solution for this particular problem seemed perfect: tapeworms.
The idea was simple, you would ingest a pill containing the tapeworm egg, which would hatch in your intestines and a worm would grow. As you ate to your heart’s content, the worm would consume most of it, and you’d stay thin and beautiful without any effort or sacrifice.
The complicated part was getting rid of the worm later since treatments for that sort of thing weren’t as efficient as they are today.
7. Lead makeup
Lead was used as an ingredient in makeup from Ancient Rome until the 1800s. It was used mostly to make women’s faces look paler, to cover blemishes, and hide pox scars.
Queen Elizabeth I, whose face was badly marked by pox in 1562, is known to have used lead-based makeup to cover the scars and achieve her white-face signature look.
Lead, however, is extremely poisonous. Applied to the skin, it slowly poisons the body and can lead to death, in the meantime, it causes dry skin, abdominal pain, constipation, and other unpleasant side-effects (Source: The Cut).
6. Face bleaching and arsenic creams
White skin was a beauty standard through much of human history, and women have gone to extreme lengths to achieve that pale look, including washing their faces with bleach, ammonia and using creams made of arsenic.
These products were particularly popular in Edwardian England. Before rigorous testing and labelling of beauty products were enforced, manufacturers had free rein to use any substance they wanted and claim their products were perfectly safe, which of course, they weren’t.
5. DIY Botox injections
Women have been engaged in the war against aging for centuries. Now, neither arsenic nor lead are used in beauty creams, but toxins are still used in cosmetic procedures to prevent aging, like in botox.
Cosmetic botox is made of a toxin, Botulinum A, which comes from the bacteria that causes botulism, a deadly disease. Mishandling botox is, therefore, extremely dangerous.
Even doctors run the risk of making a mistake and botching a procedure, so it would be dangerous for a lay person to attempt to do it herself. Yet, women buy botox online and attempt to do it themselves.
A badly applied botox injection can have severe consequences.
“If the wrong area of the face or neck is injected, the bacteria can disrupt those muscles that allow a person to breathe, chew or swallow.” — Plastic Surgery Specialists
4. Formaldehyde for straightening hair
Formaldehyde is a compound used in building materials such as pressed wood products. It’s also used for preserving corpses and in taxidermy. It is considered a carcinogen, meaning that long-term exposure to formaldehyde causes cancer.
Yet, women used it for straightening hair.
During the hair straightening process, a solution containing formaldehyde is applied to the hair. It’s later sealed in by heating, which causes the product to evaporate. These vapors can cause breathing problems, skin and eye irritations, and prolonged exposure has been linked to certain types of cancer.
3. Tight lacing corsets
In the 1800s, the desired figure for a woman was as slim-waisted as possible. To achieve the desired 17-inches-waist, women began using corsets at a young age and only tightened them up more as they grew up. Some women wouldn't even take off their corsets to sleep, or in pregnancy.
Tight lacing corsets can cause the internal organs to be squished, and even lose some of its functions. Breathing becomes more difficult, so you tire out easily, and there’s even the danger of piercing a lung with a rib.
2. Extreme dieting
The quest for being thin at all costs didn’t end in the 19th century, it still plagues women today.
Women will try all sorts of extreme diets to lose weight. From soup-based diets to simply refusing to eat, which can trigger eating disorders. Developing anorexia or bulimia are possible consequences of extreme dieting.
Anorexia is a disease that can lead to death.
1. Radioactive beauty creams
Radium was considered a wonder element when it was first discovered by Madame Marie Curie. It emanated energy, glowing in the dark, and it enticed the imagination of both scientists and inventors.
In the beginning, the long-term dangers of radium were unknown, which opened the door for it to be used in several areas of life, including the making of fluorescent paint and, eventually, beauty creams.
The idea of applying radium directly to the face seems completely insane to anyone in the 21st century, but back in the early 1900s, radium was seen as beneficial. Radium was used in all sorts of beauty products, from toothpaste to anti-aging creams. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/top-10-dangerous-things-women-have-done-in-the-name-of-beauty-5332cb277095 | ['Renata Gomes'] | 2020-12-14 09:03:26.096000+00:00 | ['Health', 'History', 'Life Lessons', 'Beauty', 'Lifestyle'] |
Women Safety at Risk!!! | Women Safety at Risk!!!
INDIA — The land of Goddesses. Indians worship the goddesses with utmost devotion and go back home to their daughter, mother, wife, and friends forgetting that the one they worshiped resides within these women.
Violence towards women has risen several times in India as women at any point of life are more exposed. Earlier, women were confined to the four walls of the houses and after globalization, took the ability and resources to stand equal to men in all industries. Women are now taxi drivers day or night, as well as top company owners.
It is great to see how the mindset of society has changed and how women as politicians, friends, and spouses have been accommodated in all facets of life. However, the way of thought has not shifted to the point it can.
This narrow thought of the few is the reason why women go out and work as a domestication method. The same way of thinking regards men as higher than women.
The man-dominated culture uses guns against women today as women are walking shoulder by shoulder, eve tearing, robbery, house abusive abuse, and matrimonial rape. This is one of the key reasons why violence is rising and the protection of women in India is a problem.
Despite the regulatory reforms and the attempts to ensure a healthy climate, legislation has not been able to protect women’s haven in this region. It has not been criminalized, particularly for the most vulnerable, for harassment and acid attacks and expanded concepts of abuse, justice, and recourse for survivors The reform legislation has not given punishment sooner or easier. In reality, it only added to the reaction of the women who report.
The fact that women feel vulnerable and unprotected not only on empty streets and parking areas but also in their own homes is a tragic reflection of our culture. Youth lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha was assaulted and killed in a position that ought to be safest — her own bedroom by her watchman! The case of Pallavi shaken the girls’ bravest confidence.
Following the horrible news, a friend in trouble asked, “Does that mean that nobody can trust us? “ Yeah, yes, it seems like that, but I hate to say it. Better safe… or worse than sorry. How does one woman guarantee their own protection as jobs and lifestyle determine women have to drive alone, live on their own, and travel alone? I believe that planning for the worst is necessary.
However dire it may sound, only steps against the worst will be used to protect yourself. Many of the girls have not been caught. Please remember the most insecure times in which you can conquer them and defend yourself from them. Confide the feminine impulses in people and circumstances.
Be vigilant and mindful of the initial signs of risk in your climate. Step into a busy area if anyone looks like he’s trailing you. To escort you back, call your mate or relative. Watch for someone who lurks around or a single guy in your car parked next to you when you enter or get out of your car. If you’re suspicious, run back to safety. Don’t look lost, do walk proudly. Criminals have been seen to strike at abandoned, terrifying women. I read a cop’s advice, saying that while the attacker has a pistol, try to get away; he can only get hit by 4 in a hundred chances! Feed the speed dial to the number of the police control room or 100. Often have a speed dial friend or relative. Have a pepper spray available in weak spots. Sprinkle it in an assailant’s sight. Healthy substitutes include a perfume bottle or hairspray.
Shilpi Jain, counsel for the Supreme Court, advises individual women to practice the methods of self-defense and apply for licentiate handguns and to keep up with neighbours and call a police patrol at the very first trouble sign. “The law shows you can attack anyone in self-defense, even if you must not hurt them as much as you need.” Collegiality could be your undoing. Never open a stranger’s door while alone or stop in a deserted place to support someone. Instead, please call the police. If you are a mechanic or plumber, ask a neighbour or acquaintance for work. Door keys in positions that are evident can never be left. Don’t drop them at the front door until inside. That’s Pallavi’s error. Dress properly, if needed. Clothing that might look suitable in a bar would look daunting in a deserted area alone. Know we live in a world of strong distinctions — of havens and the uncultured, the learned and the untrained. Flashing riches or flesh, or perceiving your favor freely, is an equilibrium and a dilemma! | https://medium.com/@vineethvasu25/women-safety-at-risk-ea49f81c4a24 | [] | 2020-12-15 09:58:41.645000+00:00 | ['Womens Rights', 'Safety'] |
Reflections on an Australian Foreign Policy Decision | Revelations of parliamentarians holding dual citizenship have recently been spewing forth like a torrential rain which shows no sign of easing. This may be an amusing diversion for the public, and a time for joyful ridicule amongst senators, but are there not more important matters to be considered beyond this laziness and petulance?
We now have Barnaby Joyce in the spotlight as his case is being decided by the high court, leaving the government in a very delicate position with their precarious majority of 1.
One cannot help but feel a slight schadenfreude at these happenings, especially considering the haughtiness and condescension that was unleashed from the liberal mouthpieces towards Green senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters. But this feeling of karmic redress can only loiter for so long, as it is distracting for both our parliamentarians and the public. Recently, there have been both frivolous and unnerving decisions undertaken by our Government; the creation of a Super-Industry headed by Peter Dutton; and possibly the worst foreign policy decision made to date by an Australian leader, the decision to authorise a blank check to America in the event of a conflict with North Korea.
Surely these arrangements deserve far more public attention than the comedic flailings of our parliamentarians’ citizenship woes. Rather than elaborate on Dutton’s new plaything let me attempt to show why Turnbull’s recent dedication to the ANZUS treaty is entirely antithetical to our foreign policy goals and objectives.
This decision to endorse America in their campaign of ‘fire and fury’ manages not only to be one of the most willfully damaging foreign policy decisions made by Australia but simultaneously lowers our standing within the global sphere; once again we are seen as nothing more than America’s lapdog, even when it is not in our best interests as a nation. It is understandable though, how one can be swayed by the arguments in favour: America being the strongest nation in the world both economically and militarily, it naturally follows that we would desire to promote this relationship. This line of reasoning, though seemingly proper, is reductionist and simplistic. One must also consider when traversing this topic, that regional cohesion and peace is a goal to be desired even urged.
Therefore, this decision to indiscriminately follow America’s lead, may further fracture peace and stability in the region. Has it made our position within the world stronger and more respectable? Has it, in the simplest of ways, made our nation safer? No, say I, to all the above. Rather, after over 70 years of peace and no threats being posed to us by another nation, we now have threats of attack directed at us from North Korea which is not because we are a democratic country and they despise our values, rather it’s because we are interjecting ourselves into an altercation, and antagonising an already rather erratic nation.
So once again one must ask, are we fulfilling our foreign policy goals with this decision, or just toeing the line with America? Some will argue we should be doing everything we can within our power as a nation to align ourselves with America, considering their place in the world. Although I agree to a point, this does not logically extend to supporting their aggressive, silly, petulant, bombastic decisions. With all this in mind, ask yourself dear reader: are we giving America this blank check because it is entirely within our national interest? Or rather, are we doing it to stay ‘pals’ with the white house and their blustering, blathering, ranting President. | https://medium.com/@brenalder/reflections-on-an-australian-foreign-policy-decision-37f39453bd64 | ['Brendan Alder'] | 2020-11-22 07:24:25.608000+00:00 | ['Foreign Policy Analysis', 'Politics', 'Australian', 'Australian Politics', 'Foreign Policy'] |
Worlds in the Windy City Day 1 (Featuring an Interview with SSG ADC Ruler) | Worlds in the Windy City Day 1 (Featuring an Interview with SSG ADC Ruler)
League of Legends fans descended on the Windy City for game one of the quarterfinal stage of the 2016 World Championship for League of Legends. The line wrapped around the block and was studded with Rammus hats and various jerseys for teams. Even teams not competing in the quarterfinal stage were represented. As fans pilled into the historic Chicago Theatre for the first match the spectacle began.
James “Dash” Patterson began the production, walking down the aisle announcing the start to the series. He joined his colleagues on the analyst desk as the teams were brought on stage. Cloud9 entered to a ring of cheers while the crowd did not welcome Samsung Galaxy with the same attitude. Chicago is known to have a history for booing the visiting team in traditional sports and the crowd chose to continue that tradition in Chicago’s first big esport tournament.
All the analysts picked Samsung to win the series, much to the crowds’ dismay. The first game started, but ended quickly as Samsung beat C9 in fewer than thirty minutes. After such a demoralizing loss, it remained to be seen how Cloud9 would react. The second game started off better for the North American team, but the result was the same as Samsung won the second game. With the Koreans on match point, Cloud9 were backed into a corner and pulled out the crowd-favorite Zac pick for Meteos. Unfortunately the blob could not carry Cloud9 to victory as Samsung completed the sweep. There was no Cloud9 patented reverse sweep this series.
For Samsung, Ruler, Ambition, and CuVee played great and helped carry the team to victory. Sneaky had an unusually bad series sporting a bad KDA meanwhile Meteos played too passively and did not have much impact on the game. North America’s last hope in the tournament has fallen out leaving no home team to root for in the rest of the series. Despite the unfortunate ending, the event was fantastic and the Chicago Theatre was an amazing venue to host the games. As fans were leaving the theatre, I had a chance to interview the Samsung Galaxy ADC, Park “Ruler” Jae-hyuk.
image from thescoreesports.com
Ruler has enjoyed Chicago so far despite the cold welcome from the crowd. He enjoys the beautiful skyline of the city and the people of Chicago have good personalities according to the player. When asked about his performance for the day, Ruler rated his play a 9/10 believing he had a great series. As a rookie, it may be understandable to have some nerves going into such an important tournament and series. But Ruler said he has no nerves at all and feels completely free to play his own style. Ruler was initially a little scared of Sneaky because of the Cloud9’s fame, but as the games started he quickly got over his slight nerves and played well against his lane opponent. I asked him about his confidence moving forward in the tournament and he said that he believes Samsung has a 55% chance of winning the tournament. In the semifinal stage, he would like to play against H2K because he believes they are the stronger team and will provide him more of a challenge. For his fans, he said that they should continue to watch and cheer for the team because he will play great. Despite only being a rookie, Ruler is extremely confident in himself, and his team. This first series has given him hope for the remaining stages, believing his team can win Worlds.
The first day of the quarterfinal stage proved to be as fantastic as advertised. Riot was able to use the Chicago Theatre effectively in putting on a production, and Chicago served as a great backdrop to the games. Tomorrow brings a match-up of two-time winners of Worlds SKT and a bot lane of a Worlds champion and a two-time World Championship finalist. SKT versus RNG will be an exciting series and will continue this great event. | https://medium.com/esports-now/worlds-in-the-windy-city-day-1-featuring-an-interview-with-ssg-adc-ruler-2d912f778290 | ['Joe Tortorice'] | 2016-10-14 21:07:47.765000+00:00 | ['Esports', 'League of Legends', 'Chicago'] |
Template Literals in JavaScript | Tagged Templates
Tagged templates allow you to call a function.
“Tags allow you to parse template literals with a function.” — MDN web docs
In the function above, all the string are passed to the string param and the a is passed to param1 .
Here’s another example:
Instead of using multiple params, you can use a rest parameter:
Here’s another example using destructing variables:
JavaScript Joel provided a real-world example using all of the above: | https://medium.com/better-programming/replace-string-concatenation-using-template-literals-in-javascript-fbdfd5e83bbe | ['Javascript Jeep'] | 2020-05-30 15:40:05.792000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Template Literals', 'String Literal', 'Javascript Jeep', 'Programming'] |
When 50+ lawsuits (including 2 at Supreme Court) are dismissed for lack of evidence, how can people… | When 50+ lawsuits (including 2 at Supreme Court) are dismissed for lack of evidence, how can people still believe the election results are wrong? | https://medium.com/@marcia-41118/when-50-lawsuits-including-2-at-supreme-court-are-dismissed-for-lack-of-evidence-how-can-people-7c44a1f61bbe | ['Marcia Frost'] | 2020-12-12 13:11:02.662000+00:00 | ['Votes', 'Election', '2020', 'President', 'Donald Trump'] |
Get involved into API testing in a new way with Katalon Studio | Hello all,
Katalon team is excited to announce the release of Katalon Studio v5.8, bringing you an all-new experience for your API/Web Service testing project:
Instantly import Web service requests with Quick Start Wizard
The Quick Start wizard allows you to quickly import Swagger 2.0/WSDL definition, create draft REST/SOAP requests to try out with variations of testing data requirements. When importing Web service definition, Katalon Studio will load specified information and populate into your project so you will never have to spend time converting them manually. This wizard can be launched and relaunched anytime in Help > Quick Start.
Retrieve Request History at any time
All Web service requests sent in Katalon Studio are stored in the ‘Request History’ panel, which you can retrieve anytime.
Add Web service request to new/existing Test Case
Web service request objects can be added directly to a test case from the ‘Object Details’ view with two available options: ‘Add to new Test Case’ or ‘Add to existing Test Case.’
Support PATCH HTTP method
Katalon Studio now supports the PATCH HTTP method to help you apply a partial modification to resources.
This release also includes new bugs fixes to advance the convenience and quality of your test automation:
Fix an issue in which local URL cannot be used for SOAP requests.
Remove an error message displayed when users create a new sample project.
We hope you enjoy your API testing experience with Katalon Studio v5.8. For further reference, you can check out this list on top API testing tools in 2020. Don’t forget to provide your feedback so that we can make Katalon Studio more suitable for your needs.
Thank you and happy testing!
Katalon team.
UPDATED: Katalon ver 7.x is available now. Click here to download the latest version. | https://medium.com/katalon-studio/get-involved-into-api-testing-in-a-new-way-with-katalon-studio-5-8-bfbc61b78d93 | ['Katalon Studio'] | 2020-07-02 06:15:47.566000+00:00 | ['API', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Continuous Integration', 'Testing'] |
Organizing the world’s information | Blackbird: Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
“Not only did the FBI wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. under J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO initiative, which began in 1956, it monitored black independent booksellers, which were deemed ‘propaganda outlets.’ American intelligence was responsible for the 1969 murder of activist Fred Hampton in his own apartment.
It cast Black Power as a Black equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Gender equity is not in nearly the same category as the oppressive castigation the political and judicial houses of our nation have subjected upon the Black communities, repeatedly, over the decades. Because gender equity is usually a coexisting paradigm within the structures of marital and property law, which for the foundation of nearly all citizen rights’ structures, tax, and monetary policy, very few parallels can be drawn from one problem of constitutional, legal, and societal legitimacy to the other, except by the best and most-skilled practitioners. These fights, like safety and security for the many subjugated communities within America, including the Jews, and immigrants broadly, form a multi-prong battery of initiatives, coalitions, and cultural armadas.
And yet…
Is Barack Obama the Ronald Reagan of the Digital Internet?
The United States has a system of administrative policies that assign a value of a human life to each branch of the system of government agencies. The values assigned differ from one government agency to another, and differ from one administration to another as new legislative policies are put into national law.
It would make sense, then, that insurance policies for every outcome of policy proposal and agenda would contribute to the good governance of the United States. After all, a robust system of governance would want to protect people before profits, but also ensure that no strange systemic confluences arise to incentivize the system itself from economically preferring the death of people.
This would be a sort of first law of good politicking, and the entry level exam any civics minded student or politician would want to be required to master before running for office. The GMAT entrance exam for Business School sets aside an entire third of the exam for students to demonstrate mastery of the rules of grammar; but these sophisticated problems are actually tests of the student to take a simple set of recursive logic rules and apply them within a construct. Grammar is simply a more approachable skill everybody will learn.
But, returning to the point, an effective and conscientious politician would build their platform around the policies that improve peoples lives, while putting maximum control against the injustices of the strange confluences of the government apparatus itself. The record breakers of this model of politics would probably be deeply in touch with the historical disenfranchisement of the American system of government, and have expert capacity to shape laws.
Because that politician would probably want a market based determination of the value of a human life, to maintain a maximum of independence from the vagaries of political sausage making, that politician might look at healthcare.
Healthcare benefits this politician even more, in that the industry has a robust system for individuals to improve their own analytic qualifiers of good health.
Neoliberalism is the control of the individual superseding the government; this is the Western model of the rights of the individual superseding the State.
Flatting the government accounting office model in the late 2000s would have also been particularly disruptive to the heavily leveraged American economy that the Goldman Sachs’ of the world built up in the development of the Iraq War. The development of Credit Swaps rapidly expanded insurance markets for everything from automobiles to houses to equity funds, but their core always operated on Foreign Currency interest rates, so as to be able to broker the relationships of the Coalition of the Willing. Inventing thousands of new ways to parameterize the value of human lives during any number of activities would have surely helped the war effort and the government offers made to international collaborators, no matter the collateral incentives left throughout the government system. Healthcare centered governance with a nod to its defense nationalization, and swift expertise of the digital security apparatus from a civil liberties perspective, would have been good politics.
That the Iraq War ensnarled (gifted) Republicans in to most of its economy, while leaving Democrats with civil liberties and climate concerns, would have made a crunch of the gears of Republican opposition when the insurance industry suddenly seemed on board to pass its legislation, leading to no more recourse than obstruction; the Gipper let the Democrats win a few rounds.
Which would have left the United States in pretty good position had Hillary Clinton won; when she didn’t, Trump had to pull us out of the Middle East.
To the best of the Democrats advantage they never saw this coming, and the crisis of national defense which was brewing by shoving national healthcare.
Which is the fundamental vulnerability to American society, and how Russia can get the upper hand, and China can rebuke efforts to cooperate with us.
This is the fundamental signature of an era of politics becoming outmatched by the information allowed to permeate freely across its democracy, when the politicians fool themselves into believing the transparency is their advantage.
Repairing the fundamental threat matrix of American democracy requires the rebuilding of a system of meritocracy for which individuals from any walk of life can rise through political expertise without destabilizing the economics of agenda that span ten to twenty to forty years. Building this system is the only way to confront American multi-generational challenges like climate change.
It also is the only way to preserve an American democracy which goes toe to toe with an eons old China; of which, Climate Change can be our test case.
Program A12: Reversing the Doomsday Machine
I hear babies cry. I watch them grow. They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know.
The Facebook Climate Truth Platform existed for a hot minute this summer before disappearing from my newsfeed. Facebook has said again and again that it does not want to be the arbiter of what is and is not true. There are serious questions of veracity and context which must be satisfied in order for Facebook to provide users a secure platform to deliver timely information in the context in which it must be provided. But, Climate Truth is a simpler subset of the world of media and news in part because climate information can be objective or, at least, scientific, in that observations can verify its truth.
Melt With You
Operation Warp Speed is one of the greatest achievements of the American defense capitalism model. Its use of large amounts of post-easing quantitative financing allowed expansion and transition of a large fraction of the United States distribution networks and prepared its defense community for the foreign transition and international cooperation of the global supply chain.
But the secret weapon of this historical vaccine development is a network of scientific advisors fueled by and plugged into a sophisticated scientific search and response system for achieving maximum group effectiveness without sacrificing individual achievement. This data and literature Library InterNet between advisors, corporations, and colleges has allowed important and serendipitous information to be transferred at timely opportunities; in effect, producing systemic advantage for delivering on the promises of scientific research in its most crucial economic and protection capacity, by design.
Because, as a scientist, I do it for the love of the quest and personal enjoyment of the searching for new truths; but, I recognize that not since the days of kings were scientists simply bought into indentured servitude to spend their whole lives studying the cosmos. (A common story in the canon of astronomy is that Tycho Brahe died from a burst bladder when the king would not let him get up from a banquet to pee. That sounds like indentured servitude to me.)
What is the essential nature of academic freedom and why is it necessary for the pursuit of truth?
To borrow an answer by Albert Einstein: “By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true. It is evident that any restriction of academic freedom acts in such a way as to hamper the dissemination of knowledge among people and thereby impedes rational judgment and action.”
The challenge for American national, state, and community leadership is the construction of a fair and equitable system of persistently consistent funding and training these scientists within a model that delivers on the economics and defenses inherent in a premier capitalism society. These two requirements seem oppositional to one another until we recognize that science is a process.
There are times when we are one Nation, and times when we are a collection of States. And that mediating difference is the administration of the President.
Scientists work to discover their own truths; and communicate their direction through a system of formal and informal publishing method, and will often be happy to tell you where they think their research is going, and what universal truths they believe, so long as they believe telling you will allow them to get back to discovering those truths. This provides more than enough feedback for a system administrator to begin making equitable choices for the future of government spending decisions which are in line with defense and capitalism.
Perhaps this system as it exists today has failed to scale. Perhaps the America I grew up in has lost its direction and administrators do not know how to make those choices. But America has an unprecedented duty to meet the obligations of the live choices millennials have made in their education, to provide every American with vital and viable vocational skills training for their lifetime, and to ensure the American leadership forges paths beyond Climate Change. This is the navigational North Star of some future President of the United States.
Hershey Kisses
The great advantage of Climate Change as the platform for veracity in the AI and post-AI phases of American leadership is that accurate observations on-the-ground requires human and sensor intelligences on-the-ground at more or less the same time to ensure factual accounting of important circumstances.
The classic problem in the field is that rain sensors in the drought-risk region of the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan region of Sub-Saharan Africa are prone to human interference.
This complicates critical, comprehensive measurements of rainfall throughout the season, so that famine and financial mechanisms can be activated months before the threat to the region has escalated into full blown conflict or famine.
To ensure that actual information and media are being published about this region on social media, say, Facebook, a small team of trusted on-the-ground observers are necessary to ensure that their handheld devices, the sensors in the region, and the observations made from Space align and are actionable.
In some ways, this is an excellent opportunity for the newly administrated United States Space Force to demonstrate its peace keeping administration.
What Facebook can do is administrate the backend exchanges of the Three Systems to one centralized receiver team who can act on the veracity claims of the information and establish the diligences to clear the veracity for action.
The TriForce, if you will. The system Bruce Springsteen sings for when he asks the American security apparatus to “better ask questions before you shoot.”
My intern believes he has constructed a suitable partnership for development.
These programs appear to also support the profitability of Facebook in its current troubles with the Federal Trade Commission, which claims its three messenger systems are a monopoly so long as they are integrated, and which appears to also run afoul of monopoly laws with Google in the ad markets.
Time After Time
Most importantly, we like this solution because this may provide lawmakers the allocation and legislative space they require to help Facebook with its calls for changes to regulation of the Internet platforms, whatever those may be.
We believe our system can create high voltage education opportunities for all Americans and contribute to the progressive calls for solutions to inequity.
David Bernat
December 17, 2020
Starlight | https://medium.com/@astrorobotic/organizing-the-worlds-information-3e4ba2045c1d | ['David Bernat'] | 2020-12-20 18:11:59.818000+00:00 | ['Climate Truth Platform', 'Barack Obama', 'Facebook', 'Google', 'Elon Musk'] |
The Art of Self-Motivation | Drawing a Conclusion
The above is an example of what is known as “slacking off”, which the best way to describe is losing motivation in life — losing the spark that drove you to reach beyond your limits and pursue useful endeavors. Believe me — slacking off gives you so much instant gratification and makes you feel so happy with yourself, until reality dawns on you.
What was the problem? Why did I slack off? Let’s define a few terms: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. If you break up those words, “ex” means outside and “in” means within , therefore extrinsic motivation is relying on external factors to keep you motivated and intrinsic motivation is relying on internal factors to keep you motivated. Here is a good analogy:
The left is extrinsic motivation, because the guy wants to work for a trophy. The right is intrinsic motivation, because the guy wants to work for happiness. Source: 1500 × 844 (google.com)
I relied on both however — external because I was seeking a reward (whether it would be a certification for a coding challenge, etc.) and internal because I was also doing it for the purpose of growth. Why did I lose motivation then, if I didn’t rely too heavily on extrinsic motivation?
The answer was that I relied too heavily on intrinsic motivation, and pushed my mind to its limits. I knew that certifications were a thing, but I wanted growth and enjoyment, which slowly started to wear off as time went on. | https://medium.com/@drvrajesh/the-art-of-self-motivation-af42607e7f19 | ['Dhruv Rajesh'] | 2020-12-12 00:36:33.349000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Inspirational', 'Motivation'] |
Why solar power in Uganda is not just about decarbonization | It was an exciting day in the village. Children and adults alike gathered around the Dairy Cooperative, not to buy fresh milk and yogurt, but to be witnesses to the workers’ results. The Cooperative had installed solar panels and batteries to power the refrigerators!
With a mostly inexistent national power grid in Uganda, organizations rely on diesel generators to power appliances — a noisy, polluting, and expensive solution, whose alternative is simply not to have access to electricity.
Cold chain management in milk — the process of keeping the dairy products at correct temperatures to avoid spoiling — is a tricky business if you do not have a stable source of power — such as a working energy grid. However, with solar panel prices plummeting in the past 10 years, suddenly this new paradigm is available to all these small players. The only thing missing is capital to invest.
But in everyone’s eyes at the village that day, the excitement was on the blueish sparkling solar panels and the silence of the diesel engine. As the workers closed the area with the fence and installed the low-consumption LED streetlights, to protect the installation from trespassers during the night, the crowd began to disperse.
Night came, and there was something new in town. The dark night had a few new lights! The saleswomen sat under the gentle white light and sold their wares. For the first time in their life, they felt safe, on the now illuminated roadside, passing cars could see them, and not risk being hit in the dark. And the children came back, to play a bit more with their friends under the lamps until they are called to sleep by their parents. | https://medium.com/goparity/why-solar-power-in-uganda-is-not-just-about-decarbonization-be5cfd4b5665 | [] | 2020-12-04 13:42:56.215000+00:00 | ['Goparity Project', 'Uganda', 'Cooperatives', 'Solar Energy', 'Dairy'] |
Al-Zarqawi: The man who turned an insurgency into Sunni-Shia civil war | ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’
The new phase of terrorism in the Muslim world is mostly started after the USA’s Iraq invasion when many new nongovernmental organizations appeared on the front to fight against the US army. The most influential of them all was one name in Iraq and that was ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’, the person who is believed as the founder of ‘ISIS’, the famous terrorist organization in the US list these days. Al Zarqawi was born in Jordan on October 30, 1966, and later became a jihadist after participating in the Soviet-Afghan war. In early life Zarqawi became a thug and criminal in Jordan and was wanted by the Jordan government, it was this time when he went to Afghanistan and joined mujahedeen’s. After the defeat of the Soviet Union, he came back to Jordan and in 1992 was captured in Jordan after guns and explosives found in his home In jail he gained popularity as a leader because of his radical Islamic beliefs and started giving fatwa’s to other jail members (Whitlock, 2006).
In 1999 he was released from jail and then he directly went to Afghanistan where he met Osama bin laden. He asked al-Qaeda to fund his training camps. After receiving the money he formed training camps near the afghan Iran border, this training camp attracted many jihadists coming from Jordan, it was this time when he formed his militant organization named ‘Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad ‘. After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he fled to Iraq, then Iraq became his base camp and he started making sleeper cells there in the response to expected US invasion of Iraq. Al Zarqawi assisted al Qaeda in Iraq, that’s why he was considered the leader of al Qaeda’s Middle East wing. He died in targeted killing by joint US forces on June 7, 2006, near Baghdad.
Influence in Iraq
He is responsible for many terrorist attacks held in and outside Iraq, including attacks on UN and US officials present in Iraq, he also planned the attack on UN headquarter present in Baghdad. One major thing he did was attacking Shia Islamic mosques and Shia scholars in Iraq which erupted and started the Sunni-Shia civil war. His actions and tactics which include the slaughter of Americans and making videos of it, kidnapping personals became popular among other extremist groups, (Gettleman, 2006). That’s also the reason al Qaeda separated his ways from Zarqawi due to ideological differences because they thought he had gone so far. Due to his act of terror against the Shia sect, an author in the New York Review of books describes al Zarqawi as been responsible for turning an insurgency in Iraq into Sunni-Shia civil war, (Anonymous, 2015). He is considered to take the acts of violence to a new level and was as important for America in Iraq as Osama bin Laden was. It was Zarqawi’s founded organization that after became and rose as ISIS the most organized terrorist organization.
A depict of Sunni-Shia conflict in an art piece
Doubts about his importance
There is no doubt that he was a big name during the US-Iraq war but several sources claimed that he was just a product of US war propaganda. He was just a leader of a terrorist organization whom the US gave so much importance to give power to their Iraq invasion instance. Many US generals who served in Iraq like Gen. Mark Kimmitt accepted that Zarqawi propaganda was most influential to date. Col. Derek Harvey who served as military intelligence in the US military said in a meeting “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.” (Ricks, 2006). Not even the American army personnel but many journalists also doubt the abilities of Zarqawi to become such a famous name as On June 8, 2006, on the BBC’s Question times program, the Respect party MP George Gallway referred to al-Zarqawi as “a ‘Bo0geyman’, built up by the Americans to try and perpetrate the lie that the resistance in Iraq is by foreigners and that the mass of the Iraqis is with the American and British occupation”. Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times supported this saying “several people who knew Mr. Zarqawi well, including former cellmates, voiced doubts about his ability to be an insurgent leader, or the leader of anything, (Gettleman, 2006).
References
Anonymous. (2015). The Mystery of ISIS. New York Review of Books. LXII (13) .
Gettleman, J. (2006). Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Lived a Brief, Shadowy Life Replete With Contradictions. The New York Times .
Ricks, T. (2006). Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi. The Washington Post .
Whitlock, C. (2006). Al-Zarqawi’s Biography. The Washington Post , 2. | https://medium.com/@salmansaeed1961/al-zarqawi-the-man-who-turned-an-insurgency-into-sunni-shia-civil-war-41c22978959 | ['Salman Saeed'] | 2020-12-11 11:06:47.369000+00:00 | ['Iraq War', 'Humanity', 'International Relations', 'International Security', 'Terrorism'] |
“My friend was an Asian Hitman”: Season Pilot — “Not the Package Delivery Man!” | “Just when I thought I had the required time in country and streets-smart instincts to anticipate almost every weird thing that could possibly happen to me in Asia, something like this happens.”
Image by Pexel
One morning, instead of the Package Delivery Man, a local, top-rung Hit Man came knocking on my door — lucky for me, he was a friend?Background
Image by Pexel
We became friends about seven years ago when I “accidentally” beat up a guy in a bar that he had a contract to politely persuade or “remove”.
Two years later, he disappeared without a trace. I figured that he probably succumbed to the endgame of most Hit Men — someone else probably offed him while he was being cocky or careless.
But there he stood this morning, smiling at me on my front porch.
He looked more like a Tricycle driver than a Hollywood version of a successful, high-paid assassin.
Image by Pexel
And that’s why I was instantly suspicious.
Contrary to popular belief, the most successful assassins were gifted chameleons and made it a point to disguise themselves as non-threatening, ordinary people; just another working Joe lost in the crowd.
It’s akin to the contrast between the Rambo types portrayed in the movies and actual Special Ops Personnel.
Real life Special Warfare operators, when seen in public civilian settings, are usually reserved, almost painfully quiet, slimmer, and shorter — rather diminutive- compared to the loud-mouthed, aggressive, and muscle bound characters depicted in the movies.
In fact, the most lethal person I have ever known was a guy named “Saul” — a tailor by trade, he was a frail looking, tiny, ancient man who ran the Mossad’s Krav Maga Instructor-Trainer program I attended many years ago when I was still a Bad Ass Punk; truly believing that I was “an indestructible, young Superman.”
Image by Pexel
That little old man instinctively knew that I was my team’s Ring Leader.
So, on the first day of training, he called me out and simply said, “Son, kindly attack me.”
I hesitated for a second, then attempted to “close the gap” and subdue this elder as quickly as possible without embarrassing him too much.
What happened next made me look like a total idiot…
Image by Author
This is YOUR TORUM INVITATION!
Image by Author
Excerpted from: The Hitman That Found God — JaiChai 2017. Revised 12–24–2020. All rights reserved. | https://medium.com/@ijch/my-friend-was-an-asian-hitman-season-pilot-not-the-package-delivery-man-962309c7ce97 | [] | 2020-12-25 04:59:25.905000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Flash Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Fiction', 'Hitman'] |
HOW TO GET THROUGH LOSING A CHILD AND OTHER LIFE TRAGEDY’S AND STILL THRIVE! Part 4 of 5 | HOW TO GET THROUGH LOSING A CHILD AND OTHER LIFE TRAGEDY’S AND STILL THRIVE!
OUR OTHER CHILDREN AND MEDITATION
I like to start off each of these blogs in this series with a HUGE thank you. Thank you for taking the time to read them and for passing them along and sharing them. I have received so much positive feedback and have heard from so many parents telling me how helpful they have been so I am very grateful for that. Please keep sharing and if you have not read the others in this series, you can go back to part 1 and start from there anytime.
Losing your child is the single most horrific thing that can happen to you. BUT for those of us with other children, our pain is multiplied. I remember when the Sheriff gave me a picture of Sam to identify. I remember how cold the Sheriff was. He was completely careless about the fact that I had my younger son, 14 at the time, sitting right next to me. Without warning, the Sheriff just shoved the picture in front of my face without giving me a chance to shelter my other son from seeing it. Any chance or hope I had of softening the blow for my son that his brother had died, was gone. On top of having to hear that information, he now saw an image he will never forget that was unnecessary.
My boys are two years apart. Sam being the older one but Joey being the tougher one. I remember all of the times that Joey would make sure Sam was ok on the playground or the times that Joey stuck up for Sam when some bigger kids were trying to take advantage of him. It always made me smile and warmed my heart to see how protective he was over his brother. Like most siblings, they would fight like cats and dogs but if anyone else tried to mess with either of them, they would be the first to let you know you are messing with both of them, not just one of them.
It’s not just the child you mourn, you mourn the loss of your family dynamic ever being the same. The joys of watching them bond, play and laugh is gone. As a parent, we like to think we can fix every problem for our young children. A lot of our parenting pride comes from protecting our children and in this type of situation, you are just helpless. You can’t tell them everything is going to be ok because you know it won’t. You know that this has just changed their entire life and you have no idea how you are going to handle their pain or yours.
The same way we feel our heart has been ripped out of our body or a limb taken away, it must be very hard for their siblings to get used to not having a role as a brother or sister anymore too.
It is important to remember that not only are they going through pain as well but they deserve you to be here for them as much as your other child deserves you to mourn for them. At first, my response to mourning was all over the place. To be honest I could hardly take care of myself in the beginning, let alone understand the depth of the needs of my other son. It was like someone had given me psychedelic drugs. I can’t really explain the acceptance process in the beginning but it’s kind of like your body and mind cannot cope with the reality of that type of loss so you start to look for your child everywhere. You think you see them and hear them all of the time because you can’t process that they are actually gone from the Earth.
My younger son Joey, is the most happy go lucky kid you have ever met. He is generally happy most of the time and always looks at the brighter side of life. It was hard to gauge what he needed from me after his brother passed because he seemed to have it all in perspective but of course I knew he couldn’t possibly. I was very afraid that without therapy or some kind of outside help, he would end up imploding. But therapy just isn’t for him. So I decided I was going to teach him to meditate and I was going to do it in a way that wasn’t just related to losing his brother but as a tool to manage stress, grief and life. Because I felt if I had made it all about grief, Joey would not of been so open, because to emerge himself in grief, doesn’t work for him.
I was also and am also aware that the things I cannot bring myself to do, like hang pictures or look at pictures which is very very hard for me and can be a trigger, but for Joey, it is a joyful experience that seems to help him. So I had to find a way to be comfortable with that so I can be there for him and engage in the things he finds therapeutic which may not be the same things I find therapeutic.
MEDITATION
Meditation has been life changing for me. Especially in the last few years. To be honest, I had lost faith in God for a while and I know that is completely normal and I am sure a lot of you can relate to that. Eventually I found my way back to faith but I credit meditating as one of the tools that helped me to do that. I meditated on trying to understand how a God and tragedy can exist together. The answer I found for myself, was that I believe in free will. I believe we have free will and therefore tragedy’s and illness, poverty, violence, evil and starvation exist because these are things people cause having free will. But when a loved one is taken from you, I would like to believe their soul is now taken care of and they are with God, free of pain and struggle. I would like to and do believe that death can be God’s way of relieving a person’s pain. Whether it be emotional or physical or both. I chose to believe, because it feels right to me, that God can be there in your time of need to comfort but may not be able to control outcomes the way we think. I believe once our souls are in his hand, that is when his work comes in. I believe in many things that I once didn’t. Whether as a way to cope or because it feels true to me. I like to think God takes care of our souls after life and those souls become our angels who, if we have faith in them, can help take care of us while we are still here. Meditation has helped me to try and make sense of all of that and I am still learning what feels right to me to believe. There is no right or wrong thing to believe. But to believe God took your child as an evil act or there is no God when you once believed there was because you lost your child, can be damaging to you but it is also personal and up to you.
I started learning about meditation when I found out my Dad had inoperable pancreatic cancer about 10 years ago. I absolutely owe most good things and good relationships I have in my life to meditation. It has been the most valuable tool for me in life hands down.
Meditation is NOT as complicated or as difficult as it has been portrayed. There is no right or wrong way and there is no way one that is the ONLY way. You do NOT have to sit without having any thoughts. You don’t need any equipment and you can do it anywhere. I found learning and applying meditation to be the single most important tool for a mentally healthy life.
Before I get into the basics of meditation and how you can apply it, I do want to be open and honest as always and tell you that after my son passed away, It took me close to a year to be able to meditate again. I tried and tried but I just couldn’t get myself into a place where I could sit, alone in the quiet without the sadness and depression being overwhelming. Even though I know better and know that meditation is most effective during times of stress and tragedy, I had a hard time getting back into it but I persisted and eventually I did, and it transformed me again.
HOW MEDITATION CAN HELP WITH GRIEF
I think if you adopt a meditation practice that works for you, it is not going to lessen the grief but it will help you deal with it and it is a tool to help you function in a healthier manner and provide you with some internal peace.
HOW DO YOU MEDITATE
A lot of people shy away from meditation because they assume it’s something you have to be able to “clear your mind” of all thoughts to do. That you have to sit in a dark quiet room and cross your legs and breathe a certain way. It seems intimidating to some people but the truth is, there is no one way to meditate. It doesn’t require experience or to rid your mind of all thoughts. That is a misconception and it stops many people from ever trying.
I think the best way to start is for 2 minutes only everyday. Sit comfortably. Sit somewhere quiet. There is no pose that is required. Be comfortable. Sometimes for me it is lying down on a mat and other times I sit up. Do not worry about the thoughts going on in your head and don’t try to stop them but rather, try not to “hold on” to any one thought. Just let them flow. This does take practice so understanding that from the beginning will help you greatly. DO NOT put pressure on yourself. This takes time and cannot possibly be mastered in a few sessions.
The objective is to slow down your brain and the noise in it so you can sort through your thoughts properly and your feelings so you can deal with them. I also love the fact that meditation is a quiet time to connect with my son on the other side. We spend so much time wrapped up in grief and we have so many flooding emotions that it is hard to focus on just spending time trying to connect with them.
I like the idea that praying is talking to God and meditation is listening. Meditating gives your brain a chance to slow down so you can actually come up with solutions to problems, have constructive ideas and let creativity flow. It allows you to see hope again and have faith that you can live a life and that your life is still very very important here.
I read a book about 10 years ago called “The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy. This book REALLY helped me understand meditation from a scientific level. It was a great guide for me to get me started. I highly recommend it. There are a lot of books and “types” of meditation but if you are overwhelmed and not sure what is right for you. Just start with a couple of minutes each day, religiously, of sitting quietly and trying to allow your thoughts to flow through your mind without sinking into any particular thought. If you do this everyday, you will soon begin to find your meditation practice growing organically without stress.
Take your time and be patient with yourself. You are grieving and you need to allow yourself time and space to heal.
~ Be kind and gentle with yourself. You are a beautiful child of light. Precious as the stars in the sky. Keep peace in your heart during the chaos of life. ~ Chantelle Renee.
Written by Lily Jaffy | https://medium.com/@lilysimonjaffy/how-to-get-through-losing-a-child-and-other-life-tragedys-and-still-thrive-e67c36c9879e | ['Lily Maul Evolving Bodyz.Com'] | 2020-02-26 03:10:07.237000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Losing A Child', 'Mental Health', 'Parenting', 'Grief And Loss'] |
Merry Christmas To Me | Weekly Thoughts 81: Merry Christmas To Me
In my spoiled mood, I have to just say I miss my Mac. It’s so uncomfortable using this dell. I’m not even motivated like that on this dinosaur. I know it’ll all be worth it, but it’s really annoying right now. My whole setup has changed. It’s at a shop and I hope something wakes it back up. I haven’t made a new spoken word in months. I haven’t written one in weeks, and it’s killing me. I feel so defeated.
How was that review on Friday? I don’t think I write excellent reviews. Part of the reason I stopped doing book talks is that I don’t think it’s that good. I’m still studying book reviews. I wanted to give my opinion without telling the book that I so desperately wanted to tell. I wanted to tell what I learned and how it changed my writing. While also baiting the audience into reading this book to have an enjoyable moment like I did. Check that blog out and tell me how you think I did. 1st to die by James Patterson.
December 18th, I awakened from a nap to hear a truck outside. The type of truck that would make any kid jump out of bed to buy some ice cream. Yet this truck didn’t sell ice cream. It delivered packages to the adults. This package today was my MacBook, all fixed up and ready to go. After being in the shop for a couple of days. The joy I felt when I saw that logo pop up on the screen. Yesterday was a good day.
This week was kinda hopeless until Saturday arrived. I couldn’t get in the mood to create anything until then. Now we’re back to our scheduled programming after 8 long months. I’ll never take this machine for granted again. Still through it all I stayed blogging and kept going no matter what. I blogged through the word press app on my phone for a couple of months. My sister allowed me to use her computer for a couple of months. We were damn near swapping turns every day. My dell got fixed along the way, then that became my main computer. For my spoken word journey. My friend allowed me to use his MacBook for a couple of months. I never gave up. Thursday I had some doubt, but I came back to my senses as I released a book talk on Friday.
For this week, I can say we’re back. Hope you all enjoy your Christmas this week coming up. I’ll be back next Sunday for another weekly thoughts. We have been growing the last few days. Looking at 286 followers now. Would be sweet to hit 300 followers by the end of this year. Anyway see you all next Sunday. Merry Christmas To Me.
If You Haven’t Done So Already…
Stream & Download My New Spoken Word Single https://songwhip.com/k-exum/goodbye-text | https://medium.com/@founderofhitm/merry-christmas-to-me-299d0fcb0472 | ['K. Exum'] | 2020-12-20 16:00:18.904000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Merry Christmas', 'Present', 'Blog', 'Piecesofkblog'] |
Doing Service Design at the National Lottery Heritage Fund | Digital Service Design Weeknotes
June is here and we continue to work our way through the roll out of the new service, Get a grant for a heritage project. This week our weeknotes are written by Kerry, Abbie and Melanie with a strong mix of user-centred content design and cross-Fund collaborating. Without us all working across The Fund as a team, we couldn’t build a user-centred service. Here, we talk about how we’ve done it this sprint:
It’s been a long sprint this sprint. Three weeks to be exact. And we’ve been busy. We’ve built out the payment journey so that grantees can get paid. We’ve started to build out the legal agreement part of the service, that starts with grantees being awarded their grant, reading and agreeing to their grant contract and terms and conditions of contract.
We’ve also:
Collaborated with legal colleagues
We’ve worked closely with our colleagues in legal as we build out the legal contract part of the service. This has involved collaborating on shared documents and many Teams calls to work through the content together. In content design, we do something called pair writing, which is usually two brains — or more — working together to create content based on user needs. It often involves a content designer, and a subject-matter expert. This is how we worked with our legal colleagues to help to take the content in Permission to Start for small and medium grants and build it into the service. We worked towards making the content clear and easy to understand for our grantees. This involved us taking the current Permission to Start process and content and all the parts that make up agreeing a contract with The Fund and building an MVP (minimal viable product) version of this into the flow of the service. This is the part of the service where grantees receive and agree their grant contract, after they are awarded a grant.
Built payments into the service
This work involved the team taking an overview of the service flow for the payments part of the journey. We did this by looking at the flow created by our service designer, Rosa.
Snapshot of a Miro board showing sketches of individual pages of the payments journey
We agreed things like, what pages in the service need to be included, what the purpose of each page is, navigation, where users have come from, where they are going to next, what do they need, what does the organisation need. Once we knew the answers to these questions, content design worked closely with Jo, our user researcher, and Rosa to build out the content, thinking carefully about what we are asking people to do and what they need to know. Each page starts as a blank piece of paper — literally a blank piece of paper sometimes — and then, with the user need, or the purpose of the page, or content at the top, we start to build out what information is needed, and how it is presented and where.
We created a low-fidelity prototype in Miro, which consisted of each page in the payment part of the journey and marked it up for our developers Stu and Paul. This means that we noted what is a H1, H3, H3 for example, what content styles need to be, is it hint text, or normal text. In this way, when they build the pages into the service we can make sure that the content and design is accessible, consistent and clear.
Updated the website routing page for Small and Medium Grants roll out UK-wide
From Friday 28 May, applications for all Small and Medium grants across the UK started coming through the new service. As we open the service up to more applicants, we needed to make sure the website reflects the options users have so they can find what they need.
People will need to use the application portal if they already had funding from us for a project, so we still needed that on the routing page. However, we expect these numbers to reduce as people finish their projects, so it doesn’t need to be the top option.
We considered the readability guidelines to write the content and used HTML to mock-up an example of what the new page would look like once built into the website. We worked with the Welsh Language Officer, Liam, to offer the content in Welsh as well as English and made sure we linked to the relevant Welsh pages for those following the journey in Welsh.
HTML mock-up of the new routing page showing 2 navigation options. One to the new service, Get funding for a heritage project, and one to the application portal for previously funded grants
We worked with marketing and communications digital team to coordinate the updates for Friday 28 May ready for launch.
Said hello to our new interaction designer
We welcomed Kasturi (Kas) to the team. Kas will be developing the how of using the service; the link between the user having a task to complete and enabling people do the task in the smoothest and most efficient way. Before joining the Fund, Kas worked with the NHS on projects including developing digital infrastructure and flows to help people access different prescription services.
We’re looking forward to working together to build the Get funding for a heritage project service and adding another member of the user centred design part of the team. We asked Kas some questions to get to know her:
Why are you interested in the work you do?
I enjoy engaging both the creative and analytical parts of my brain. I love solving problems. Fuelled by my passion for people, places and new experiences, I would like to bring a level of empathy and attention to detail that’s critical to making intuitive user experiences.
I am a strong advocate of inclusive design. I want as many people as possible to access our services and use them. User-centred design techniques make this possible by understanding the reality of people’s lives.
I have previously worked in similar roles in the Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Services and the NHS. I believe my experiences will add to all the excellent work already being carried out by the Fund and enable more people to benefit.
What’s your favourite film & TV show?
I love films and TV shows which are fast paced, full of thrillers and suspense and are engaging throughout.
Do you have a hobby?
I love walking and listening to podcasts. And most times I do them both together. I am very lucky — I live near the Quayside, Tyne Bridge in Newcastle — so it is easy to convince myself to walk along one of the most beautiful parts of the country. I know I am biased!
Said hello to Alicia, our new senior developer
Alicia has been our contracted Salesforce developer since the end of 2020 and is very much part of the team. You might have even seen her in our show and tell videos explaining what Salesforce can do. Soon however, we will be saying goodbye to contract Salesforce developer, Alicia, and hello to senior developer at the Fund, Alicia! We asked Alicia a couple of questions to get to know our new (but not so new) colleague.
Why are you interested in the work you do?
Being a Salesforce developer is like being asked to solved puzzles all day for a living, sometimes it’s a riddle or crossword or Rubix cube. There’s always a new puzzle to solve, which is fun. Working at National Lottery Heritage Fund, it’s great knowing that all your efforts have wider social value. I recently discovered my local park has received Heritage funding as well as several other bigger projects in my hometown Preston!
What’s your favourite film?
Maybe it will always be my favourite film, I watched The Matrix as a teenager and it’s been my favourite ever since.
Do you have any pets?
A sweet little working cocker spaniel called Isla. She’s a bit camera shy but pretty much always sat next to me while I’m working.
Officially rolled out the large grants service
We launched the large grants service through Salesforce Experience UK-wide on 13 May. Whilst we were confident that the technical side of the service was working, we had to ensure that communications for staff and applicants were also ready, as the deadline for large grants application submission was 28 May. We created a three-step journey by email for the 41 applicants we were expecting to submit for this deadline, to access the new service and submit their application.
The first email we wrote was sent by staff to notify the applicant that we will create an account for them so that they can access the application form. The staff member then emailed our Product Owner, Jamie and Central Team Manager, Sinead, who created a new account for the applicant. The applicant was then sent an automatic email with a link to their account, an instruction to reset their password, and information on how to start the application.
Although this was a manual process as we needed a quick solution to enable access to the service, in future iterations we hope to automate and simplify this for applicant submission so that it is similar to how other grant level applications are received.
We also worked to make an accessible version of the application form questions, which helped staff to answer applicant queries, available on the Knowledge Hub. | https://medium.com/doing-service-design-at-the-national-lottery/11-may-1-june-ec9f96117b42 | ['Kerry Lyons'] | 2021-06-01 13:52:27.509000+00:00 | ['Content Design', 'Funding', 'Heritage', 'Product Management', 'Service Design'] |
A Search For The Beautiful | I showed up to a manicure appointment earlier this week drenched in sweat and desperate for water. It seems that walking anywhere in Bali for more than five minutes results in the kind of clammy flush that makes you look unwell. The nail technician, concerned, walked out with cool towels, water, and a little piece of paper with a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote on it. Precious, I thought. But, it was more than precious, it was ironic timing.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
This week I got what I’m going to refer to as ‘the feeling’. My first taste of this feeling happened about a month into my six-week sabbatical from work — nearly 10 months ago. The feeling? It’s one of complete contentment. Different from the bursting feeling of happiness, it’s a quiet stillness that overshadows any worry, or any doubt. It makes me feel light and joyful. It makes me feel undoubtedly connected to myself and what I’m doing. As someone who has a difficult time finding contentment, it is quite possibly the most pleasant emotion I’ve been touched by.
After settling into this newfound feeling on my sabbatical, I felt determined to bring it home with me. To keep the light airy feeling as I re-entered my real life. And I did for maybe a month, and then as most pleasant emotions do, it slipped between my fingers faster than I could cup my hands in a way that would allow me to hold onto it. My days were once again filled with things that didn’t feel like conscious choices, but more as burdens that kept my life afloat. The setup of my sabbatical allowed me a quick taste of the beautiful, but it wasn’t yet mine to take home with me. In order to figure it out, I needed to deconstruct how I landed where I did.
Most of my 20s were spent on a path I never thought to question. It was a decade filled with college parties, finding a husband, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, a house, a dog, and a corporate job. Each milestone felt like posing for a forced Instagram photo boasting an impressive view with cropped out imperfections. Despite my discontent, I trusted it. It was so beaten down by people who seemed to have it all, I hardly noticed the offshoots. The less-obvious paths. Instead, I kept walking, hoping I at least looked good while doing it.
I obsessed over making my life look like the lives of those I admired — of those who took good pictures in front of good views. I wanted to be a witty mom with cute kids whose friends thought I was a ‘cool mom’. I wanted a job that would make others think I was powerful. I wanted to have a house on Lake Washington others would envy. I wanted so many ideas of things, I stayed on course, forgetting to ask myself if any of the stops on the path excited my soul. I’m not saying the people living waterfront on Lake Washington aren’t happy — I’m sure many of them are — but I’m certain the ones who are happy are happy because they thoughtfully selected paths that filled their soul up. They didn’t chase the house, the house was a result of chasing things that mattered to them.
To build the idea of the life I thought I wanted, I chose my degree and optimized my life around money. I positioned marriage as an arbitrary finish-line that needed to be crossed — I even put pressure on its happening. My days were filled with things I thought I was supposed to do. Things the world told me I should do. Not things I loved.
Shortly before my 25th birthday, I was swallowed whole by a deafening cloud of anxiety. It infected my entire being, leaving me as a shell of who I was before. I felt unable to think. Unable to be happy. Unable to leave the path I had so intently walked down. This led to a distancing of my body and mind — a case of depersonalization that made it feel like I was no longer attached to the body that somehow kept moving. I forced myself to continue working, to socialize harder, to drink more, to be on a plane as often as I possibly could. Anything to distract me from the discomfort of not being whole.
I lived this way for close to 4 years. The alarms in my body were sounding, but I was too afraid to listen, because I knew that if I did, it would destroy everything I had worked so hard to build. To find contentment would surely lead me down a path that wasn’t my marriage. That wasn’t my job. That wasn’t my life. In absolute fear of what others would think, I put bumpers up in my lane. Letting myself fall into the gutter and past the pins I thought I was supposed to hit felt like too much for my ego to bear. I wanted a nice house, not to soul search.
I now call this the default mode. It looks different for every person, but it’s the mode where we detach ourselves from our true desires. It’s the one where we keep mindlessly walking. It’s the mode where we give too many shits about what those around us would think if we did anything different. If we’re lucky, our bodies will revolt. They’ll let us know when what we’re doing isn’t right. When I finally started to listen, I realized how much time was spent in this place. How my life had become an accumulation of choices and beliefs that were hardly my own. This awareness emerged slowly, but with a permanence that required action.
To figure out where I was going, I felt a burning need to go alone. Dragging someone else up and down different offshoots searching for the right path wasn’t fair. You can’t walk happily together if one is certain of their path and the other needs to wander. As it turns out, a relationship will never bring ‘the feeling’ if you can’t find it on your own. That old adage feels far too simple for the depth of truth it holds.
The impetus of me leaving my husband, my home, and my job wasn’t to find ‘the feeling’, it was to find and start doing what I truly wanted to be doing. But, in being so wrapped up in what I wanted to be doing, that glorious, wonderful feeling came back. While I know this feeling will always be a fleeting one, its presence in these opportune moments feels like enough to let me know I’m on the right path. This new one feels scary. It doesn’t feel safe or certain. Yet, I feel the most at peace I’ve ever felt. I can’t yet boast that I’ve found ‘the beautiful’, but I’m definitely a step closer than I was before. | https://medium.com/@katiethegreen/a-search-for-the-beautiful-a3ba3533e4fd | ['Katie Green'] | 2019-11-21 12:37:46.288000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Life Lessons', 'Divorce', 'Awakening', 'Breakups'] |
Every Action Has an Equal But Opposite Reaction | Modernism vs. Postmodernism
Modernism reflected the industrialization of western society in the 20th century, centering around the idea that people could shape their environment with the ultimate goal of progress. There was a focus on empiricism, function, technology, and growth. There was mass urbanization and the evolution of the middle class.
Artists mirrored this movement through cubism, impressionism, art depicting contemporary life instead of classical, Biblical imagery. The every day. The common man. Art was used to serve a function, to show progress and human ingenuity. Cue the era of vintage advertising.
There was emphasis on believing only what you could prove. Therefore, previously (relatively) unified religious values were replaced with secular institutions and the value of progress. And we can’t deny that progress was made. Efficiency meant affordability for almost everything — including food, household goods, and medicine. Industrialization led to increased life expectancy due to rapid declines in infant mortality. Development in transport increased mobility, connecting people to more opportunities. Advancements in appliances, particularly ones that reduced domestic chores, were a driving force in women’s liberation. The Age of Machines increased choice and individual agency, allowing people to make more decisions for themselves.
Humans have an evolutionary need to believe in something, however, and religious identity was replaced by concepts like nationalism, capitalism and communism. The growing attachment to incompatible ideologies culminated in the World Wars and the invention of nuclear weapons. These conflicts stirred disillusionment towards institutions. The same institutions promising progress had gone too far, disregarded morality, carried out mass genocide, and were threats to humanity.
Postmodernism encompasses this disillusionment. The movement encourages questioning everything about Western Civilization and breaking down conventions. Postmodernists believe that since everything is a social construct determined by an oppressive patriarchy, any empirical evidence is only a reflection of those same constructs. Instead of some overarching framework, we have infinite subjective realities, the freedom to choose our own philosophies and spirituality, rejecting objective truths, facts, and logic in favor of individual narratives.
We can understand why postmodernism is so influential in the arts and entertainment. Art is the ultimate form of expression and inspiration. It’s emotional, pushes boundaries and has given us a diverse artistic catalogue for nearly every narrative imaginable in the human experience.
Movements and counter-movements
The debate between Modernism and Postmodernism is nothing new: Every movement in history challenges the status quo of the previous one. We can see this dynamic playing out visually by studying Art History. Romanticism was an immediate reaction the Enlightenment, which brought about the scientific revolution, rationality, systems, logic and finding objective truths. Romanticism was the response: an appeal for emotion, subjectivity, going back to nature. Sounds familiar, right? Similarly, globalization pushes for a world where we have unified frameworks — where vastly different cultures live in harmony without friction or conflict. Populism is the reaction, desperate to preserve cultural individuality and local governance. Each movement rejects the previous framework and offers a new lens through which to view the world.
Image Sources: Wikipedia. Left to Right: Vitruvian Man (Leonardo Da Vinci, c. 1490) | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich, 1818) | Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), (Pablo Picasso, 1910) | Love is in the Bin (Banksy, 2018)
The more I think about Postmodernism and Modernism, the more I see the underlying tension as a timeless story that seeps into everything like design, parenting, business strategy and politics. You can observe the various iterations of this dichotomy playing out in countless stories, movies or music: structure vs. chaos, the group vs. the individual, the rational vs. emotional, technology vs. nature.
I actually see some overlap in both philosophies. Both arose from a desire to push boundaries and breakdown previous conventions. Both place emphasis on the value of the individual, although they disagree on how to empower the individual. In our own lives we can be postmodernists when we reject people fitting in boxes, but modernists when we want to show evidence that some injustice occurs to a particular group.
Postmodernism in politics
There are many things I like about postmodernist thinking. One of the limitations of classical economics, for example, is the assumption of rationality. We know that people certainly perceive the world subjectively based on their experiences. We know people value utility differently. The postmodernist lens allows for people’s decisions and actions to be fluid relative to their surroundings — to view things in a spectrum. I like the thought experiments it provides in questioning our realities and the humility in admitting that our understanding of the universe is currently limited. Even modern science supports the notion that maybe there is no universal truth. The Theory of Relativity teaches us that space and time are not fixed but rather flexible. Quantum Physics shows that multiple states (maybe even universes) can exist at the same time and the outcome of an observation may depend on the observer.
There are some limitations to postmodernism though, particularly when it comes to basing a political movement on its tenets. Infinite subjectivity means postmodernism lacks a unified identity, moral or value system by definition. Because of its flexibility, it becomes impossible to define and therefore struggles to offer guidance. The loneliness epidemic or rise in mental health issues could be explained in part by the lack of a cohesive societal narrative.
Contemporary political postmodernists openly call for an end to capitalism and a rejection of absolute truths. I’m always confused by movements that hope to eradicate capitalism in the name of democracy. I understand the narrative about the oppressive patriarchal hierarchy and inequality, but this ignores the fact that hierarchies precede capitalism. We can argue that just because we have some evolutionary predisposition for hierarchy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t change for the better in the name of equality. That’s a fair argument but then do we ignore the pivotal role capitalism plays in the emergence of democracies? In fact we could argue that democracy was only possible because of capitalism. Exploration led to global trade. Technological inventions like the printing press helped propel knowledge and philosophy to the masses. This led to revolutions against the aristocracy and the establishment of values for liberty, equality, tolerance, individual freedom and secular governments. I think we’d mostly agree that these challenges to the status quo were noble. At this time, suffrage was limited to landowners. We can argue that the distribution of wealth to the greater population was an essential driving power expanding suffrage. The distribution of wealth could not have happened without the Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Revolution could not have happened without capitalism.
The counter argument is that exploration, global trade and capitalism led to unprecedented exploitation and conflict. The issue of exploitation in capitalism has been widely contested, even by contemporary Marxists. The idea that globalization exclusively hurts developing countries is also not true. The notion that there was no internal conflict in areas before Europeans arrived is, unfortunately, also not true.
If exploitation is the only explanation for global wealth inequality, Thomas Sowell asks: “Why are those parts of the Third World least touched by contact with prosperous nations so often the most destitute of all?” For all the brutality that religion, global trade, or capitalism has caused, it’s much harder to measure how many wars were prevented by shared cultural or economic frameworks.
The fact that postmodernism has come to dominate in the social sciences and pop culture is no surprise. It’s the natural progression — a skeptical response to the Age of Technology. We’re disillusioned with big tech and consumerism. The pendulum swings, we overcorrect, hopefully we balance out somewhere reasonable. The thing is, we’ve now lived in a time of relatively unprecedented peace. (Some argue it’s ironically because of nuclear weapons). Let’s not forget, though, that the road to democracy was indeed very violent, and we certainly shouldn’t minimize the price we paid for our modern, industrialized world. While we shouldn’t overreact to divisions, we should also not take for granted that the pendulum can swing too far in our efforts to overcorrect injustice.
I’m happy to challenge the status quo but my questions for postmodernists are:
Let’s agree that everything is a social construct. How do we change these constructs? Is it enough to recognize them and change through culture? If not, who decides and implements structural changes? Wouldn’t structural change require an overarching narrative determined by someone? Isn’t that still hierarchy?
Who determines what’s a sufficient amount of income redistribution? Do we correct based on gender and race? Will we also correct for baldness, height, and attractiveness? Who will determine what constitutes equal work? What about people with no income but a lot of wealth? How will we correct for privilege globally?
What system should replace capitalism? Would we impose it on the rest of the world? Isn’t that “Imperialism”? How do we accommodate nearly 8 billion subjective realities?
What’s our ultimate goal? Is it longer life expectancy? Would we accept lower life quality but more equality? How do we measure quality of life if money isn’t the right unit?
Should we lower infant mortality or curb overpopulation? Who decides which populations are overcrowded?
What narrative would we choose when teaching history? Would the state determine this or is it left up to parents?
Who defines what should be produced or consumed? What if there’s a shortage of workers in an industry? Who should decide what professions we need?
How will we measure the success of systemic change if we don’t believe in objective data or empirical evidence?
Postmodernism is great for questioning our norms and encouraging changing our perceptions through culture. While it acts as an important check on unconstrained modernism, I’m not convinced of it as the basis for a political system. Modernism certainly has its own limitations and we experienced the horrific outcomes when so-called “progressive” ideas were hijacked by authoritative governments. I believe the problem isn’t the philosophies themselves but this incessant need that possesses every generation to socially engineer some form of Utopia. Enforcing conformity contradicts the entire premise of postmodernist philosophy.
A case for libertarian capitalism
Critics of capitalism say that it’s inherently selfish. I argue that’s one of its main strengths for longevity and does not mean that it’s not fundamentally compassionate. Governments promising utopia through excessive social engineering and bureaucracy do not have a great track record in modern history.
Raising awareness is important. But when we’re too aggressive; when we impose a new framework, compelling people to conform, we tend to push would-be allies further away. I believe Trump’s 2020 turnout shows that the aggressive push for top-down progress creates equally aggressive counter-movements — bringing us one step forward, two steps back. Societies that value the individual and freedom to choose their own path should be skeptical of change being imposed on them. I believe we underestimate the influence of change starting in the home; how progressive people can be when change happens of their own accord.
Calls for revolution lead to uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to anxiety. Volatility affects investments and can destroy the economies of developed nations. We need to stop downplaying the importance of economic stability in preventing humanitarian crises.
Inequality is a problem and we have to address it. But while capitalism is not perfect, wealth generation is still safer in the hands of business, where at least a bad policy or unpopular decision has to be corrected because of the bottom line. Nationalizing inequality leaves us worse off because it requires so much artificial social engineering, creating an expensive elite class of political bureaucrats. Secondly, governments have no incentive to admit when a policy isn’t working. I cannot overstate how skeptical we should be expanding the part of society in which people’s careers depend on perpetual conflict.
Ultimately, doesn’t demanding top-down structural change contradict the postmodernist rejection of hierarchy? I actually feel like the case for smaller government would be compatible with postmodernists because subjective realities could be managed more locally. In Switzerland, for example, majority of laws and taxation are decided on a cantonal level. Switzerland has a population of 8.5 million fairly homogenous people and even they figured out that something that’s relevant in one part of the country, makes little sense in another. | https://medium.com/bigger-picture/every-action-has-an-equal-but-opposite-reaction-e9d558807d44 | ['Dora Donaldson'] | 2020-12-02 01:04:08.442000+00:00 | ['USA', 'Politics', 'Trump', 'History', 'Psychology'] |
How neural networks actually work | You might have come here after reading an article on AI by Practicum by Yandex. Good choice! Let’s dig deeper into neural networks.
What is a neural network
A neural network is a kind of database. It stores data (basically, numbers) and can move this data between its cells. The only difference is the structure. In a regular database, cells are connected in rows and columns. In neural networks, cells are connected… you know… like in a network:
But the point of a neural network isn’t in the data that it stores. Most of the time, the cells are empty anyway. The point of a network is in the connections between the cells. See those arrows between the cells? That’s the most critical thing in a network.
As data moves through the network, it gets transformed. The arrows define how every bit of data transforms. In other words, you feed this network some numbers, the network does math to these numbers according to the arrows, and you get some numbers on output. That’s it. The neural network is just a lot of fancy math.
Example
In our last article, we gave an example of a delivery robot that crosses the street. Say, our delivery robot has to identify a car. It has a camera. A camera gives us an image that might have a car in it, or it might not. An image is mostly a pile of pixels, tiny dots with information about color. For simplicity, let’s say that our robot only sees in shades of grey, so for every pixel it sees, there is a number between 0 and 255. 0 is black, 255 is pure white, and everything in-between is shades of grey.
Again, for simplicity, let’s say our robot has a low-resolution camera that captures images that are 32 x 32 pixels, which is 1024 pixels per image. It’s a pretty small image, but for now, it will do. To us, these pixels make an image, and despite the low resolution, we can somehow identify a car (even guess the model). But to a computer, it’s just a bunch of numbers that represent shades of grey.
How does a computer tell which image is of a car? Can we create an algorithm that checks sequences of numbers against some template? Can we make a template that says: ‘These numbers definitely represent a car’? We can’t. Cars come in all shapes and sizes, and our template can’t account for all possible cars.
What we can do is this:
Get a bunch of photographs of different cars, of which we definitely know: yes, these are cars. Maybe even a bunch of photographs of stuff that’s not cars. Mark them as ‘not cars.’ Take the data from these photographs and put them into a database. For 1000 images we’ll have a little over 1 million numbers (1000 x 1024 = 1,024,000) Do some fancy math to that million numbers (we won’t go there just yet). Remember that computers are good at doing math to millions of numbers. As a result of that fancy math, we’ll have a very, very, VERY complicated formula. This formula takes in 1024 numbers and outputs a number between 0% and 100%. Magically, to us, this number between 0% and 100% represents how likely any given image is an image of a car.
So, what does this formula have to do with the network chart? This chart represents the fancy formula. You input the numbers into the input nodes, and the output gives you another number. This number says, ‘I am this much confident this data stands for a car.’
This chart is just an oversimplified representation of the logic behind the fancy math that goes on in step 4. In reality, you’ll have 1024 nodes on the left, and two or three ‘hidden layers’ in-between. There will be millions, possibly billions of connections between nodes, and trillions of mathematical operations.
All to identify a car in a small black-and-white photograph.
Why the network?
Network is just a graphical representation of the math that happens under the hood. In reality, it’s just math: billions or sums, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions. The only problem is that to us; it would make no sense, so we drew a network-style chart to try and understand what was going on.
What is going on is this: we have 1024 numbers that need to be summed and multiplied about a billion times to give us one final number. This is all there is.
What does it hide in the hidden layers?
As for the hidden layers — it has to do with the way this fancy math is done. We’ll cover it in-depth a future article, but for now, suffice to say that:
Humans do not program the fancy math of a neural network — a machine finds it through trial and error. This process of trial and error is called machine learning: this is how a neural network kind of learns proper math to tell a car from a cat. The machine needs to store its knowledge about this math somewhere. For that, it uses the hidden layer. It’s just a bunch of storage space for data and formulas. The problem with the hidden layer is that it is generated and regenerated randomly in the process of learning, and to an external observer, it will be just random noise. Humans can look into the hidden layer and even tinker with it, no problem. But it was designed for the machine to store temporary learnings, so there are no user-serviceable parts there.
In this aspect, it’s much like the human brain: we can cut it open and see what’s inside, but it will make no sense to us, with the level of complexity it has.
So, is the neural network a brain?
It is based on similar principles, but it’s not a brain. Here is what it has in common with the human brain:
It’s performance-oriented. The aim of a neural network is to give some useful results (for example, tell a car from a cat). The way it achieves that is of less importance. Its internal logic can be all messed up, as long as it gives an accurate enough result.
A neural network is like a muscle: it can do stuff, it can be trained, but it’s not specifically designed for a task. It just trains to perform that task and gets better at it with time.
It can learn (or train). There is an iterative process that shapes the connections in a neural network to make it produce useful results. Unlike a brain, however, it is not curious. A programmer is the one who makes it learn.
It’s unclear how it works. We understand the basic math behind a neural network, but once it starts machine-learning, we’re no longer so sure what it does. And we don’t need to, as long as it performs.
And here is how a neural network is different from a brain:
It’s just a file. All the formulas and the data that a neural network processes can all be saved as a file and copied onto a thumb drive — or emailed. It’s just some data and formulas.
It has a different topology. A neural network can have an unlimited number of connections. A physical neuron in a brain can only have so many. This affects how neural networks calculate and what results they create.
Compared to a human brain, it’s dead simple. There’s that. Current neural networks, even the most advanced and high-powered, don’t even come close to the size and complexity of a human brain.
Ok, how does a neural network learn?
Glad you asked. Join us next time for an in-depth on that. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-neural-networks-actually-work-f2c57ba0306 | ['Practicum Yandex'] | 2019-11-12 18:27:52.507000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Neural Networks', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Learning', 'Programming'] |
“Why am I here?” Looking within to find answers | I’ve had migraine attacks for as long as I can remember. But they got progressively worse between 2011 and 2014.
Part of me knew what was triggering the attacks. These three years were the darkest period of my life. My self-esteem was at its lowest and insecurity at its peak. I felt demotivated, ineffective, underconfident, and like I was sinking to the bottom of the sea. The company was going through many changes and it was an emotional rollercoaster for me. But this was also the period I learned a lot about myself and grew tremendously.
At the end of 2011, after I moved back to Mumbai from Tokyo (where I had spent about 3 years expanding our business in Japan), I took over the Customer Service team at Editage. It was clear to me that the customer was integral to our business. But our service communication was largely transactional. I wanted to revolutionize the way we interacted with customers and raise the bar in delighting customers. The team was restructured, and we had many workshops and discussions with them, culminating with us rechristening the team Customer Delight Department and changing my title to Customer Happiness Officer to indicate a renewed focus on the customer. The team was sold on the vision and was ready to experiment. But we were short on resources and every day was spent firefighting. Many good ideas had to be abandoned because they were too complex to execute. I blamed everyone and everything around me for this failure, but also took it as a deep personal failure! Little did I know that things were going to get even more challenging.
Around the time, CACTUS was aggressively entering new markets. We had established localized sales models for each market, but we needed some functions to be centralized at the headquarters in India. I had taken charge of forming these functions-R&D, thought leadership, and branding being some of them-which would be responsible for our global strategy. We had some fantastic ideas but were always struggling to get them done as we were on the fringes and anything we came up with meant work for others who already had their plates full. It was difficult to get the longer-term ideas prioritized over the short-term business goals. Eventually, most of the teams I helped build were disbanded and the resources were moved to other areas. This, again, to me was my failure because something I had started was abandoned. I also blamed others for not being able to look ahead into the future.
On the one hand, I was struggling to scale the impact of the functions I was supposed to be driving; on the other, our growth strategy required me to take on newer responsibilities like leading the technology and delivery operations of Editage. I had come to believe through my recent experiences and the stories I told myself that I am good with ideas but not with execution. I had started to lose confidence in myself and felt undeserving, and like an imposter who didn’t deserve to be where I was. I felt that everyone-my core team, Anurag, the rest of CACTUS-was judging me. I constantly felt angry with everyone and everything around me.
I found myself wondering why I was even doing this-I wanted to run away from all of it and lead a life where I didn’t have to struggle so much and wasn’t judged all the time. While I was going through this downward spiral, Anurag recommended that we do a business
coaching program together. I initially refused. I felt he thought I was not capable and needed help; I felt I didn’t need help. But he insisted that we meet the coach. I relented. And I’m so glad I did.
“Why are you so harsh with yourself?” the coach asked me during one of our talks after he heard me patiently. “Take responsibility for yourself,” he told me. “It is time to get out of this phase of self-pity and understand your situation to evolve.” With the coach guiding me through a process of self-discovery, I realized how I had gone from blaming people and situations around me to blaming myself. I was stuck in a cycle of negative self-talk and self-criticism and constantly compared myself with others. All the notions I had about being judged stemmed from my own insecurities that I was projecting on to others.
On the coach’s recommendation, I started maintaining an incident diary to improve my self-awareness. I wrote down my feelings every day and observed how I reacted to situations without trying to justify the way I reacted. I started being more conscious and aware of my emotions through daily meditation and affirmations.
These measures helped me take charge of my emotions and come out of this cycle of self-doubt. This journey was instrumental in helping me feel better about myself, take on greater responsibilities at CACTUS, and positively shape my relationships. I have learnt that your mind and emotions trick you and trap you in a vicious circle of denial, escape, rejection, justification, and aggression. Emotional reactions stem from your memories and experiences. Being more self-aware and conscious about my thoughts, emotions, and actions is key to self-realization.
When things aren’t going your way, it’s easy to place blame squarely on someone else, or if you are like me, on yourself. Neither is helpful. In fact, they will push you down a negative spiral of avoidance, judgement, and anger with others or with yourself.
Even today, managing my emotions consciously is a daily responsibility. And I have not had to take a day off due to migraines in almost 5 years now! | https://medium.com/@goel/why-am-i-here-looking-within-to-find-answers-4e2d9081ee73 | ['Abhishek Goel'] | 2020-12-10 03:20:11.160000+00:00 | ['Values', 'Organizational Culture', 'Guiding Principles'] |
Frequently Asked Questions About Foothills Park Opening to the General Public | Learn about recent actions by the City Council to open Foothills Park to the general public, including answers to likely questions from community members
In early November, a majority of the City Council voted to open Foothills Park to the general public. You can find more information about this decision in a recent blog post following several public meetings on this issue. This new blog post answers some likely community questions and helps to provide details on what could happen next.
NEW! WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE FOOTHILLS PARK REFERENDUM
(Released on December 9, 2020)
Opinion: What you need to know about the Foothills Park referendum written by Palo Alto Vice Mayor Tom DuBois and Council Member (and former Mayor) Eric Filseth that seeks to clarify several items for the community related to this complex community issue.
NEW! FOOTHILLS PARK VIDEO: SUMMARIZING THIS BLOG
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
This blog answers the following questions:
NEW! Who pays for maintaining Foothills Park? NEW!
NEW! If a resident signed the petition and changes their mind, is there a process to rescind their signature?
What does the recent Council decisions about Foothills Park mean?
How did the recent Council Action to Open Foothills Park to the General Public Come About?
Was there a democratic process used when the City Council acted to open Foothills Park to the general public?
Why are City tax dollars going to support the opening of a Palo Alto park for the general public to use?
What are the details of the Foothills Park lawsuit and is there a claim of racism?
How will the City manage Foothills Park visitors to ensure the natural environment continues to be preserved?
What is a referendum and will Foothills Park be open to the general public if electors (Palo Alto residents who are registered to vote) qualify a referendum on the recent ordinance to open Foothills Park to the general public?
Is it possible for some park amenities to include a provision so that Palo Alto residents will have first access to reservations?
With the opening of the park to the general public, how will the City monitor the number of visitors and what will happen if the maximum number at one time is reached?
NEW! Recent Community Questions Answered (posted on December 9, 2020)
Who pays for maintaining Foothills Park?
Generally, the City’s General Fund pays for all Palo Alto parks and nature preserves, including Foothills Park. This comes from residents, visitors and businesses. Specifically, the largest sources of General Fund are property tax, sales tax, and hotel tax. Property taxes are generated by both residential and commercial properties and last year generated $52M, that represents approximately 25% of the General Fund. Last year, Sales tax ($36.5M) and hotel tax (25.6M) are the second largest revenues representing 27.5% General Fund sources. Both residents and non-residents contribute to all these taxes.
If a resident signed the petition and changes their mind, is there a process to rescind their signature?
Yes, a resident who signed the petition but has changed their mind would need to notify the Palo Alto City Clerk in writing before December 16, 2020 by 4 p.m. Written notification must be delivered by the deadline noted above. The City Clerk can be reached by mail at 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA. 94301. For questions, please email the City Clerk at [email protected].
Existing Frequently Asked Questions
What does the recent Council decisions about Foothills Park mean?
The City Council voted on November 2, 2020 to open Foothills Park to the general public. This followed several public discussions and closed session consultations with legal counsel. The Council voted to temporarily reduce the maximum capacity to 750 visitors at one time (approximately 250 vehicles) for the first 90 days of opening to the general public, which could then return to the current maximum capacity of 1,000 persons at one time (approximately 370 vehicles). The Council action also ensures that Palo Alto residents have first access to reservations for Towle Campground, Oak Grove Picnic Area and the Interpretive Center Meeting Room. They also directed staff to return to the City Council and Parks and Recreation Commission with proposals on entry fees, capacity, and park management/environmental integrity studies and to follow the City’s renaming process to consider renaming Foothills Park to Foothills Nature Preserve.
On November 12, the City released a supplemental report sharing the Foothills Park litigation settlement documents and other related information about the City Council actions on this matter and next steps for public information. In addition, as required by the Brown Act, the supplemental report shared certain information about the Closed Session held on November 9, 2020, where the Palo Alto Council approved a settlement of the lawsuit NAACP, et al. v. City of Palo Alto, United States District Court, Northern District of California, Case №5:20-cv-07251-EJD. The Council voted 5 in favor of the settlement (Fine, Dubois, Cormack, Filseth, Kniss) and 2 opposed (Kou, Tanaka). Subsequent to the November 9 Closed Session, the remaining parties approved the settlement document. Go here for the supplemental report, which provides the Foothills Park settlement document which was released for public information in advance of the City Council meeting held on November 16.
These Council actions open Foothills Park to the general public on December 17, once the City’s ordinance goes into effect, and resolves the legal claim the City faced over the resident-only restriction at Foothills Park.
How did the recent Council Action to Open Foothills Park to the General Public Come About?
The opening of Foothills Park to the general public has been a topic of interest for many years and more recently since 2018. In 2018 the Palo Alto Parks and Recreation Commission (PRC) began discussing opening Foothills Park to non-residents. In November 2019, the PRC voted to recommend that City Council adopt a pilot program to open Foothills Park to the general public. On August 3, 2020, the City Council directed a series of actions including bringing back details for a pilot program to increase access to the general public and renaming the park.
On September 15, the NAACP and several Palo Alto residents and non-residents sued the City seeking to open Foothills Park to non-residents. Plaintiffs claim that the Park’s residency requirement violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly under the federal and California constitutions, as well as their constitutional right to travel. The City worked with plaintiffs to confirm that opening Foothills Park to the general public would enable a legal settlement and avoid protracted litigation.
The final action to open Foothills Park to the general public may have been expedited by the legal challenge, but the topic has been under consideration for several years with many opportunities for the community to weigh in and share their input.
Was there a democratic process used when the City Council acted to open Foothills Park to the general public?
Yes, the Foothills Park discussions by the City Council and by the Parks and Recreation Commission were transparent and were provided in several ways through an open and deliberative public process to gain community input.
As a representative body, City Council is elected by the community to vote on issues facing the community on their behalf. The City Council held discussions about this topic where the general public provided input on several different occasions. In addition to taking public comment at these open meetings, the City Council also weighed public comment received via email and through individual discussions. The Council has received several hundred emails on this issue since August.
The Council also held two publicly posted closed session meetings to confer with the City’s attorneys regarding the lawsuit. The public is permitted to speak to Council prior to every closed session and many residents sent in emails and shared public comment in advance of these closed session meetings. To protect the City’s ability to effectively defend itself in litigation, attorney consultations are conducted in private.
The Council also held two meetings which were open to the public on November 2 (first reading of the ordinance) and November 16 (second reading of the ordinance) where the public provided input and shared their feedback directly on whether the Council should open Foothills Park to the general public. On November 16, a majority of the City Council voted to open the park to the general public. The ordinance will become effective on December 17.
In addition to these public meetings, the City released information about the Council action in advance of the second reading of the ordinance to provide the public additional details about the Council’s decision-making process, ways to provide input, and more details on their upcoming actions. These proactive communications included sharing details on the City’s homepage and through the City’s digital newsletters, and posting information via social media and Nextdoor, where the City received significant input from the general public on this issue.
Why are City tax dollars going to support the opening of a Palo Alto park for the general public to use?
Generally, the City’s General Fund (or operating budget) funds all Palo Alto parks and nature preserves, including Foothills Park. The revenues that fund park operations and other City services come from a mix of tax revenues generated by residents, visitors and businesses, such as sales tax and transient occupancy taxes. Property taxes are not the only taxes supporting City services and park operations and maintenance.
Currently access to the park will be free. After studying entry fees, capacity limits and park management/environmental integrity, staff will return to the Parks and Recreation Commission and City Council for consideration on these items. There will be opportunity for community feedback as part of this iterative process. Staff anticipates returning to the Parks and Recreation Commission and the City Council in the spring, to plan for and consider additional park management opportunities and enact any changes before the busy summer months. The community could view this initial action as the first step in a series of future opportunities to monitor the natural environment of the park and better understand other potential impacts, that will be refined and evolve as uses of the park are known.
What are the details of the Foothills Park lawsuit and is there a claim of racism?
The plaintiffs are not claiming that the Foothill Park residency requirement discriminates against them based on their race. Rather, they claim that the residency requirement violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly under the federal and California constitutions, as well as their constitutional right to travel. The lawsuit notes, however, that because the number of Black and Hispanic people who live in Palo Alto is relatively small, the residency requirement effectively means that few members of those racial groups have access to the Park. The lawsuit makes an argument, which is subject to dispute, that these demographic characteristics are a result of discriminatory housing and lending practices of the post-war period.
How will the City manage Foothills Park visitors to ensure the natural environment continues to be preserved?
If the City’s ordinance goes into effect, the City Council and City administration will continue to manage the park and will ensure the natural environment of the park will be preserved through continuing management controls already in place and explore additional options to support Foothills Park.
In fact, as part of the Council action, the Council instituted a stricter visitor cap to monitor crowds and the potential impact on the natural environment at Foothills Park. The Council voted to temporarily reduce the visitor cap from 1,000 visitors to 750 visitors at one time (approximately 250 vehicles at one time) for the first 90 days of opening to the general public.
After studying entry fees, capacity limits and park management/environmental integrity, staff will return to the City Council and the Parks and Recreation Commission for consideration on these items.
How will the City monitor and protect the natural environment of Foothills Park?
The City has partnered with several local organizations to ensure the natural environment of Foothills Park is protected while ensuring an enjoyable visitor experience for everyone. These organizations include Grassroots Ecology, Friends of Foothills Park, and Environmental Volunteers. They will help provide environmental monitoring, interpretation, and stewardship opportunities.
In the past 17 years, visitation has been steady at approximately 152,000 persons visiting each year. One recent exception was 2011–2012 when the Park saw 202,000 visitors. Based on staff observation, the Park was a bit busier in 2011–2012, but that number of visitors did not negatively impact the Park’s resources and infrastructure.
What is a referendum and will Foothills Park be open to the general public if electors (Palo Alto residents who are registered to vote) qualify a referendum on the recent ordinance to open Foothills Park to the general public?
A referendum is a petition filed by a sufficient number of electors (residents who are registered to vote) requiring that a law recently adopted by an elected local council be repealed or placed before the voters for determination. In this case, if a referendum petition is submitted with a sufficient number of valid signatures, the ordinance adopted by Council opening Foothills Park to the general public will not go into effect. Instead, as required by the Palo Alto Charter, the Council will consider whether to repeal the ordinance or place it on a future ballot for the voters to determine. In the meantime, the residents-only rule will remain in the City’s Municipal Code.
Depending on when the Council decides to schedule a vote on the referendum, this could mean several months or years before the community could consider removing the residency restriction.
If a referendum qualifies, the Foothills Park legal settlement provides that either party may void the settlement and resume litigation. It is very likely that litigation would resume. Litigation costs and timing of the legal proceedings are uncertain but likely to be significant. In addition, under our system of governmental checks and balances, which endows courts with the authority to enforce constitutional requirements, it is possible that at some point a court order could be entered that would override the City’s Municipal Code and regulations regarding non-resident access and order the City to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys fees and costs.
Is it possible for some park amenities to include a provision so that Palo Alto residents will have first access to reservations?
Yes, part of the City Council action to open Foothills Park to the general public includes a provision so that Palo Alto residents will have first access to reservations for Towle Campground, Oak Grove Picnic Area and the Interpretive Center Meeting Room.
With the opening of the park to the general public, how will the City monitor the number of visitors and what will happen if the maximum number at one time is reached?
The historical maximum capacity of Foothills Park of 1,000 persons at one time (approximately 370 vehicles) is generally based on the number of parking spaces available inside the park. This limit has not been approached except in the case of a special event many years ago.
In recognition of the community input received in advance of the November 2 and November 16 City Council meetings, the Council voted to temporarily reduce the maximum capacity to 750 visitors at one time (approximately 250 vehicles) for the first 90 days of opening Foothills Park to the general public. This temporary visitor cap will provide staff an opportunity to monitor use and bring forward additional recommendations for City Council consideration in the spring.
Staff is implementing a visitor counter to assist with monitoring the number of visitors at one time. Staff will monitor the amount of vehicles that come into and exit the park and turn away cars if the maximum capacity is reached at any one time.
ONLINE RESOURCES
For the November 2, 2020 City Council meeting report on this issue, go here.
For the November 2, 2020 meeting agenda, go here.
For the Staff reporting with the Foothills Park legal settlement, go here.
For the November 2, and 16 City Council meeting videos and other meeting materials, go here.
For a recent blog post on the Council’s actions on this issue, go here.
For the City’s website on Palo Alto open space preserves and parks, go here.
To learn about the Parks and Recreation Commission, go here.
For a panel discussion hosted by the Parks and Recreation Commission about Foothills Park access, go here.
To follow the City on social media, to here and to sign up for the City’s newsletters, go here. | https://medium.com/paloaltoconnect/frequently-asked-questions-about-foothills-park-opening-to-the-general-public-6541eebe2dc9 | ['City Of Palo Alto'] | 2020-12-09 23:10:00.106000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Wellness', 'Silicon Valley', 'Environment', 'Community'] |
The Magical Shower | The Magical Shower
A shower is indeed magical don’t you think?
Nature has its own range of showers to offer.
Where rainfall is considered a marvel,
Meteor shower is termed as a disaster.
The waterfall is admired by us all,
but snowfall covered roads could be painful
for a man named Paul.
But we humans know how to create mini-natures,
and so we recreated nature’s shower in our bathrooms.
Basking in our own glory every single day,
Celebrating our ‘unique’ discovery
which is only a meagre way of imitating
one of nature’s yet another wonderful creations
— The One and Only Magical Shower of Nature. | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/the-magical-shower-51623e60eed4 | ['Bhavna Narula'] | 2020-12-28 00:13:31.533000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Nature Writing', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry Writing'] |
Two NFL Underdogs to Target Week 15 | Few picks in the NFL feel quite as good as cashing in on an underdog, and in a league that prides itself on parity and the mantra of “any given Sunday”, calling one of those upsets is great to anyone’s bankroll (and ego). The playoff picture is starting to fall into focus, with several teams in both conferences facing “do or die” contests down the stretch. Eliminated — or practically eliminated — teams come out of the woodwork this time of year to play spoiler.
New York Jets (+350) v. Miami Dolphins
Betting on the Jets to win has generally not been favorable to bettors, but Gang Green heads down to south Florida in an interesting spot. The Dolphins, coming off their bye, have reeled off five-straight victories to keep their playoff hopes alive. The Jets are 9.5 point underdogs in the match up, with two of their three wins coming as substantial dogs — 6 points to Tennessee and 11.5 to Cincinnati.
The Dolphins will be without several of their play makers that contributed to their winning streak, which includes a 24–17 victory over the Jets in November — a game which was tied going into the fourth quarter. Breakout rookie Jaylen Waddle is the most notable ‘Fin expected to miss the game on the reserve/COVID-19 list, as well as Safety Jevon Holland and running backs Myles Gaskin and Phillip Lindsay.
The Dolphins are still the more talented team, but a flyer on their division-rival in New York is worth a shot.
Houston Texans (+185) v. Jacksonville Jaguars
A match up of two of the worst teams in the league, the Texans have a decent shot to get one more in the victory column on the road in Jacksonville. The Jags are laying 4.5 at home days after canning controversy-prone first-year Head Coach Urban Meyer. Although this may be a good motivational factor for interim coach Darrell Bevel, both these teams lack top-end talent and fail to execute on the field.
Houston were victorious in their first bout with Jacksonville this year, securing a 16-point victory in the season opener. Sweeping a division opponent is never easy, but give me the dog against the team that has been crushed by over twenty in three of their last four. | https://medium.com/@kennethd.bates/two-nfl-underdogs-to-target-week-15-c640b657217c | ['Kenneth Bates'] | 2021-12-17 20:18:02.678000+00:00 | ['Betting', 'Underdogs', 'Sports Betting', 'NFL Picks', 'Football'] |
Improve legacy app: limiting the scope! | Never have I ever worked in a file/function/method of more than a hundred lines… That game would probably go sideways with many developers! At least I know I wouldn’t last long, as I pride myself on working on many legacy projects.
Long chunk of code are universally recognized a problem for readability, because one has to read it in one go and keep track of the many variables. Usually it’s almost impossible to really track it all, and requires the utmost concentration, which means the developer can only work correctly for a few minutes, in a very quiet environment that is!
How bad is it doctor?
Let’s start with a little static analysis tool: PHPLOC. The aim here is to face the truth: our code is quite bad as is, but we will only be able to spare money to improve some bits, the rest of it will continue to live its life, so we need to target the worst part!
For the following results, I have used it on a very small subset of a project I’m currently working on, here is the output:
phploc 7.0.1 by Sebastian Bergmann.
Directories 3
Files 10
Size
Lines of Code (LOC) 4776
Comment Lines of Code (CLOC) 1194 (25.00%)
Non-Comment Lines of Code (NCLOC) 3582 (75.00%)
Logical Lines of Code (LLOC) 1077 (22.55%)
Classes 798 (74.09%)
Average Class Length 133
Minimum Class Length 28
Maximum Class Length 218
Average Method Length 6
Minimum Method Length 0
Maximum Method Length 49
Average Methods Per Class 20
Minimum Methods Per Class 8
Maximum Methods Per Class 32
Functions 11 (1.02%)
Average Function Length 5
Not in classes or functions 268 (24.88%)
Cyclomatic Complexity
Average Complexity per LLOC 0.36
Average Complexity per Class 43.67
Minimum Class Complexity 6.00
Maximum Class Complexity 126.00
Average Complexity per Method 3.12
Minimum Method Complexity 1.00
Maximum Method Complexity 38.00
Dependencies
Global Accesses 21
Global Constants 19 (90.48%)
Global Variables 0 (0.00%)
Super-Global Variables 2 (9.52%)
Attribute Accesses 292
Non-Static 292 (100.00%)
Static 0 (0.00%)
Method Calls 196
Non-Static 196 (100.00%)
Static 0 (0.00%)
Structure
Namespaces 3
Interfaces 0
Traits 0
Classes 6
Abstract Classes 0 (0.00%)
Concrete Classes 6 (100.00%)
Final Classes 0 (0.00%)
Non-Final Classes 6 (100.00%)
Methods 121
Scope
Non-Static Methods 121 (100.00%)
Static Methods 0 (0.00%)
Visibility
Public Methods 121 (100.00%)
Protected Methods 0 (0.00%)
Private Methods 0 (0.00%)
Functions 2
Named Functions 2 (100.00%)
Anonymous Functions 0 (0.00%)
Constants 12
Global Constants 12 (100.00%)
Class Constants 0 (0.00%)
Public Constants 0 (0.00%)
Non-Public Constants 0 (0.00%)
Fear not, most of it does not matter for us in the context of this article, and this is some pretty messed up code too!
We can still see a few leads:
Not in classes or functions, 24.88%: we need to change that and make it part of smaller code parts.
Maximum Method Complexity, 38.00: this is way too much, early returns might be interesting…
Global Constants, 19: way too many, that should be about… 0!
Visibility: 121 public method, 0 private or protected. This can definitely be improved!
Another question: do we have tests, at least automated acceptance testing on the happy path? If not, proceed with caution when doing anything at all!
Apply SOLID and Object Calisthenics
This advice is for sure the best advice one can provide, mainly for new code bases though… Trying to blindly apply them on a legacy code base might be tricky, and could lead into a massive refactoring for which you probably have no time or budget.
From these principles, I would probably try to keep in mind single responsibility, early returns and no else / elseif , that’s what going to help you.
Consider the following code:
$variable = 'some value';
// ...
if ($variable == 'something') {
$result = 'a result';
} else {
$result = 'another result';
}
// ...
Obviously we are in a legacy code, so there’s a loose equality operator, and a if/else… But what really matters here is that we have $result set in the scope of a conditional statement.
If someone happened to add another case, and missed the $result assignation for some reason, it would result in a disaster at some point (one of the 3 possible paths).
$variable = 'some value';
// ...
if ($variable == 'something') {
//...
$result = 'a result';
} elseif ($variable == 'something else') {
// ...
// no $result assignation
} else {
// ...
$result = 'another result';
}
// ...
// What is $result?
Make it part of a script with a very high cyclomatic complexity and you’re done!
Now let’s consider what we know, what tool is available for us?
$variable = 'some value';
$handlers = [
'something' => function(): string { return 'a result'; },
'something else' => function() : string {
return 'the missing result';
},
'default' => function(): string { return 'another result'; }
];
$handlerToUse = $handlers[$variable] ?? $handlers['default'];
$result = $handlerToUse();
From that, you can improve the code by injecting the handlers array from somewhere, use an interface and handler classes instead of functions, and you’ve got some scoped subroutines rather than executing all of it in the same code.
You’re also implementing the Open/Closed principle as a side effect. Have a look at Improve your voters with the open closed principle by Vincent Monjaret if you want to see an implementation of this principle in a modern framework, and see where you want to go at the end of this improvement spree.
Too complex for you based on the first example?
$variable = 'some value';
// ...
if ($variable == 'something') {
$result = 'a result';
} else {
$result = 'another result';
}
// ...
Let’s use “inline” functions then! This way we can leverage an early return and be done with that.
$variable = 'some value';
// ...
$result = (function(string $value) {
if ($variable == 'something') {
return 'a result';
}
return 'another result';
})();
// ...
How do you fancy that? Any preferred way to use that yet? Leave a comment if you’ve got a personal preference here!
Array, iteration and scope
We’ve seen how to deal with long scripts by scoping parts of it using an anonymous function, or named functions and classes. Now let’s focus on one of the most common problem I usually encounter: array iteration!
Here’s how the code looks most of the time:
$array = [
0 => ['name' => 'example'],
1 => ['name' => 'another example'],
];
// ...
$counter = 1;
$values = [];
foreach ($array as $item) {
$name = $item['name'];
// if (...) {
// ...
// }
$values[$counter] = $name;
$counter = $counter + 1;
}
// what is the value of $counter here?
// what is the value of $name? Does $name exist?
// will we reuse $array? Should we remove it?
In the code above, if $array happened to be empty for some reason, $name would not be set at all. Also, the same would happen if a continue or a break was used before the assignation for each item…
$counter would always contain the last assigned value in the loop, which has absolutely no interest in the rest of the code… Should we unset it? Should we override it? How does that impact readability?
Let’s refactor it using array_* function. It will help us with scoping anything that’s inside the loop.
$array = [
0 => ['name' => 'example'],
1 => ['name' => 'another example'],
];
// ... array_walk($array, function($item, $index) use (&$values) {
$name = $item['name'];
// if (...) {
// ...
// }
$values[++$index] = $name;
}); // what is the value of $counter here?
// what is the value of $name? Does $name exist?
// will we reuse $array? Should we remove it?
To be totally honest, this code is far from being good, I just wanted to demonstrate the use of array_walk . Still, the $name variable is now scoped, and is used only in the context of a specific $item .
In all fairness, the function to use in our case would be array_map :
$array = [
0 => ['name' => 'example'],
1 => ['name' => 'another example'],
];
// ... $values = array_map(function($item){
$name = $item['name'];
// if (...) {
// ...
// }
return $name;
}, $array); // what is the value of $counter here?
// what is the value of $name? Does $name exist?
// will we reuse $array? Should we remove it?
Now now… The value of $array is not the same! Shame on me! The keys are not incremented as in the previous solutions… So you need to be aware of that at least!
Conclusion
Scoping is not as difficult as it may seem when you know how to find refactoring opportunities. Don’t try to change everything at once, but using self called anonymous functions such as (function() {})() will help you isolate parts of the code, and then you’ll be able to move them into proper structures.
What are your best tips and tricks to help scoping variables in legacy code? Do you find any of these solutions useful? I’m waiting for your comments! | https://medium.com/darkmirafr/improve-legacy-app-limiting-the-scope-ff36168330f9 | ['Thomas Dutrion'] | 2020-11-19 12:34:13.039000+00:00 | ['PHP', 'Code Quality', 'Solid', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
Stats essentials for data science | Hold on. Do I actually need to learn stats?
In the era of big data and machine learning, it’s tempting to shrug off learning any stats. When the average laptop is 2 million times more powerful than the computer that got us to the moon [1], it’s easier than ever to throw a dataset into a deep learning algorithm, get a coffee while it crunches the numbers, and then come back to some model that always delivers world-shattering insights. Right? Well… not quite. [2]
As data scientists, a core part of our job is to generate models that help us understand the past and predict the future. Despite the importance of getting models right, it’s easy to create models with serious flaws. It’s then uncomfortably easy to make confident recommendations to stakeholders based on these flawed models. The following quote usually refers to the quality of data going into an analysis or prediction, but I think it’s an apt summary for why we need to care about stats as well.
“Garbage in, garbage out”
A model is a simplified representation of reality. If that representation is flawed, the picture it paints can very easily be nonsensical or misleading. The reason people dedicate their lives to researching statistics is that condensing reality down to models is incredibly challenging, yet necessary.
It’s usually impossible or impractical to process every detail before making a decision; our brains, for example, constantly use processing short-cuts to interpret the world faster. You don’t need to memorize what clothes to wear for every possible temperature outside; you know that, in general, as the temperature goes down, you put on more layers. This mental model isn’t perfect − sometimes it’s windy or humid, and a different number of layers feels more comfortable − but it’s a great rule of thumb.
Image by author
When we build a model, the question isn’t how to make a model that isn’t flawed; it’s how to ensure the flaws don’t affect the conclusions. The fact that wind or humidity sometimes alters the best number of layers doesn’t change the fact that “the colder it is, the more clothes I should put on” is a good model. As statistician George Box (allegedly) said:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
The difference between a model that’s wrong but useful versus one that’s just wrong is often hidden in the details. Unlike in programming, hitting “run” on a half-baked model will output a result that qualitatively looks identical to a highly-polished, accurate model. But whether the model represents the reality we actually live in requires a trained eye.
Ok, so how much stats do I actually need?
It’s hard not to write an entire textbook when it comes to important stats concepts for data science. It’s also hard to identify which concepts are most relevant for data scientists, given the tremendous variation in depth of statistical knowledge expected.
You’ll need far more than intro stats if you’re expected to inform major decisions like public policy or the direction your company takes [3], but basic stats may be more than enough if your role is deep in the engineering side of data science.
Similarly, if you’re in a field where you actually do have access to all the data in a process, such as analyzing Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data or applying natural language processing to legal documents, then you’ll want a deep dive on additional stats skills, like time series analysis, clustering, and anomaly detection.
Consider the following concepts, then, as a starting point that you can then build off and tailor to your specific role. I’m assuming you have some basic familiarity with stats but maybe haven’t done a deep dive into the nuances of assumptions, coefficients, residuals, etc.
Here are (some! [4]) stats essentials I think any data scientist should feel comfortable explaining to both technical and non-technical audiences:
Experimental design: sampling and bias, control groups, correlation vs. causation
sampling and bias, control groups, correlation vs. causation Comparisons between groups: t-tests, ANOVA
t-tests, ANOVA Predictive modeling: regression, classification
regression, classification Model internals: coefficients, residuals, p-values, R²
We’ll go through each of these in the rest of the post. Let’s get started!
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
Experimental design
Broadly, experimental design refers to how we structure our data collection process. Do we poll our friends on Facebook, passersby at the mall, or random phone numbers? Does every patient get the drug, or do we give some a placebo?
Think of the quality of any analysis we run as a funnel starting from the quality of the data we collect. If we have solid data, we can ask more interesting questions and discover more meaningful insights. If we have shoddy data, there’ll always be that shadow of doubt for whether the results can truly be trusted. So, let’s make sure we can identify how to get good data.
Sampling and bias
One of the key concepts to understand is that when you collect data, you are sampling from a population. (Except in newer fields like IoT.) Because we’re condensing a large, diverse body down into a relatively small sample, we need to make sure the sample actually looks like a microcosm of the broader population.
Image by author
In the graphic above, for example, our sample isn’t really representative of the population − several colors aren’t present at all! We can’t run an analysis on this sample and then generalize to the population; we can only generalize to red, orange, yellow, and green. No matter how perfectly we model our sample data, our model’s scope is trapped. If we try to comment on the broader population, we’ll find that our seemingly accurate model suddenly makes embarrassingly inaccurate predictions.
A recent example of this sample-population discrepancy is the 2020 U.S. election forecasts. After President Trump’s surprise 2016 victory that defied the vast majority of public opinion polls, pollsters spent years tweaking their models, fixing blindspots in preparation for a 2020 redemption. Yet, as states started releasing results on November 3, we found ourselves yet again watching polls underestimate the number of Trump voters.
David Shor, the former head of political data science at Civis Analytics, believes the predictions were so off because their underlying samples are not representative of American voters. In short, the people who respond to polls tend to score high on social trust, which the General Social Survey indicates represents only 30% of Americans. Until 2016, this group used to vote comparably to low-trust voters who didn’t pick up the phone for pollsters − now, low-trust voters tend to vote more conservatively and are hence underrepresented in the sample.
If we’re aware of these discrepancies, we can try to implement fixes such as differentially weighting classes in the sample. But the best remedy is to make sure the sample is truly representative of the broader population. Note: this is often easier said than done!
Control groups
Another key concept to know for experimental design is control groups. Typically when we run an experiment, we’re looking to quantify the effect of some treatment. Does the antidepressant reduce depression? Did the new website layout increase sales? To understand whatever number we get for our effect size, we need a baseline to compare it to. This is where control groups come in.
Images adapted from Kumar et al. 2013
In the real world, innumerable factors affect every process we observe. We need a way to control as many of those factors as possible so we can zone in on the one factor − our treatment − that we’re interested in.
Think of a good control group as a (nearly) identical twin of our treatment group, differing only in our treatment. “Subtracting out” the control, like in the background subtraction above, lets the effect of our treatment pop out. (Or not, if our treatment actually doesn’t have an effect.)
Placebos are a classic example of controls. Medical studies examining the effectiveness of new drugs always contain a control group that gets a placebo rather than the real drug, as people often feel better just knowing they got a drug, even if the “drug” is just a sugar pill. Without the placebo group, our false positive rate would be off the charts.
Another classic control group is the treatment group itself, before receiving the treatment. Within-subject designs are incredibly powerful, as we have much finer control over all the external factors that could affect our experiment: they’re literally the same participants!
You can see this added power in the equations for a two-sample t-test versus a paired t-test: the t value will be larger for the paired test because the denominator is smaller, since you’re only counting the n of one (paired) sample. [5]
One final example particularly relevant for web development is A/B testing. To experimentally determine ways to drive higher user engagement or conversions, a company may present users with nearly identical versions of a webpage differing in only one aspect, like the color of a button. The company can then compare these webpage variants to one another, as well as the original webpage (the control group), to choose the most effective option.
Correlation vs. causation
When analyzing data, it’s common to see that two variables are correlated: when A changes, B changes too. We might notice that sales of ice cream and sunscreen neatly follow one another, for example, but does this mean that ice cream sales cause sunscreen sales? (“I’d like a scoop of chocolate chip, and hm… let’s get some sunscreen too.”)
Disentangling whether changes in ice cream sales are causing changes in sunscreen sales (or vice versa), there’s some hidden factor affecting both, or it’s just a random coincidence is a job for experimental design. To truly say that A causes B, we need to control for variation external to A and B, then carefully manipulate A and observe B. For example, we could have ice cream marketing blitzes throughout the year, driving up sales regardless of the weather, and see whether sunscreen sales then follow.
Note that there’s nothing wrong with saying that A and B are related. If there’s a correlation, it still tells us something about A and B. But the bar is much higher if you want to say one causes the other.
Photo by Ludemeula Fernandes on Unsplash
Comparisons between groups
A central question in statistics − and life, really − is whether things are the same or different. Do smokers tend to have higher rates of lung cancer than non-smokers? Does eating an apple in the morning make you more productive than eating an orange? When we collect data on our groups of apple-eaters versus orange-eaters, the means of our samples will inevitably be different. But do the populations of apple-eaters and orange-eaters differ in the productivity?
We need to use statistics to draw inferences about the populations from our samples. I’ll briefly cover t-tests and Analyses of Variance below.
T-tests
The main idea behind a two-sample t-test is to determine whether the samples are drawn from the same population. I’m going to assume this isn’t the first time you’re reading about t-tests (if it is, there are lots of great resources like this post), so I’ll instead focus on how to avoid misusing a t-test.
When you conduct a t-test, you’re assuming the following about your data:
The data in your sample are continuous, not discrete The data in your sample are independent from one another and were all equally likely to be selected from their population Your sample is not skewed and doesn’t have outliers (less important as sample size increases) For a two-sample test, the variances of the population distributions are equal
If these conditions aren’t met, don’t run a t-test! R, Python, and the t-test equation itself won’t stop you from generating a meaningless result − it’s on you to realize whether you should run the test.
#2 in particular can be devastating for unwary researchers; violating this assumption means you have to dip into some gnarly advanced methods or throw out the data and try again. #3 is more generous: it’s possible to use nonparametric alternatives like the Wilcoxon test or to transform your data to make it normally distributed.
ANOVA
If you have more than two samples you’re comparing at once, you’ll need to run an Analysis of Variance. Don’t run multiple consecutive t-tests! I did a deep dive here on how the false positive rate skyrockets when you run consecutive pairwise t-tests on multiple groups. I think the heatmaps below summarize the main message well.
Image by author
In short: if you’re trying to determine whether the means of the populations of multiple samples differ, first run an ANOVA, followed by Tukey’s method or Bonferroni’s correction if you find significant differences.
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash
Predictive modeling
Predictive modeling is about taking in data and trying to model the underlying process that generated that data. Once we understand the underlying rules, we can then generate predictions for new data. Thinking back to our weather outside vs. clothing model, we don’t need to memorize what clothes to wear for every possible temperature; we just need to use our mental model.
This section will cover regression and classification. But before we get started, a quick pro tip: always plot your data before you start building any models! This step can help you catch outliers, determine whether feature engineering steps like log transformations are required, and ensure your model is actually describing your data.
Regression
When we want to predict a continuous value, we use regression. Here’s the equation for linear regression. Learn it well!
Here h(x) is our predicted value and n is the number of features in our data. The equation for a model where we predict a student’s exam score (h(x)) based off their hours studied (x₁) and hours slept the previous night (x₂) would look like this [6]:
No matter where you work, it’s hard to escape the simplicity and convenience of a good linear regression model. Linear regressions are extremely fast to compute and they’re easy to explain: the coefficients give a clear explanation of how each variable affects the output [7], and you just add all the βjxj together to get your output. Make sure you have your “30-second spiel” ready for regression, since you’ll likely be explaining these models repeatedly to various stakeholders.
Once you’re comfortable, make sure to brush up on more advanced topics, like feature scaling, interactions, and collinearity, as well as model regularization and how coefficients are calculated. This might sound like a lot, but given how frequently you’re likely going to run and explain regressions in your work, it’s good to really understand what they’re about.
Classification
Classification models predict distinct output categories. A logistic regression version of the above model, where we’re now predicting whether a student passed or failed the exam based on the number of hours they studied and slept, would look like this:
Here h(x)=β0+β₁x₁+β₂x₂ and y is the event of passing the exam. [8]
Our model will output a probability of y occurring, given our predictors. We can work with these outputted probabilities directly (as in credit default risk models), or we can binarize them into 0’s and 1’s. In our student model, this would mean predicting whether the student passed (1) or failed (0) the exam. We typically use P(y) = 0.5 as the probability cutoff.
Let’s quickly go through two important concepts for logistic regression:
Understanding how values of h(x) translate into probabilities P(y) Understanding the decision boundary
Translating h(x) to P(y)
Setting h(x) to the extremes helps clarify its role in the equation. Let’s say h(x) is extremely negative. That would mean −h(x) would be positive, which would make 1+e^−h(x) huge. For example, if e^−h(x) is 10000000, we see P(y) is nearly zero.
On the other extreme, if h(x) is extremely positive, then −h(x) becomes tiny, meaning we’re essentially dividing 1 by 1. When e^−h(x) is 0.0000001, we see P(y) is pretty much 1.
Finally, what happens when h(x) equals zero? Any real number raised to the zeroth power equals 1, so e^−h(x) becomes 1.
When h(x) equals zero, P(y) equals 0.5. If we’re using 0.5 as the probability cutoff, that means we’ll predict the student passed if h(x) is positive. If h(x) is negative, we’ll predict the student failed. This leads us nicely into the next section…
Making sense of h(x)
So what’s up with h(x)? In short, when h(x) = 0, we get a line that best separates our data into classes. Training a logistic regression model is all about identifying where to put this line to best separate the classes in the data.
Image by author
In the figure above, we’ve plotted some fake training data of students who passed vs. failed the exam. The blue line is the model’s decision boundary, where it determined the best separation of the “passed” vs. “failed” classes falls, based on x₁ and x₂.
For any new data falling to the left of the decision boundary, our model will predict the student failed. For any new data falling on the right, our model will predict the student passed.
It’s not perfect − there are some “passed” students on the left and “failed” students on the right − but this is the best separation the model could come up with.
Once you’re comfortable with these topics, it’s a small step to move onto logistic regression models for more than two classes, such as multinomial and one-vs-rest classification.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Model internals
Once we’ve actually fit a model and it’s sitting there in R or Python, what do we actually have? How can we tell which features are significant, and if the model is actually explaining variation in our target variable? This section will examine coefficients and residuals, as well as the meaning behind p-values and R².
Coefficients
Let’s take another look at the linear regression model that predicts student exam scores.
The intercept (β₀), study multiplier (β₁), and sleep multiplier (β₂) are the coefficients of our model. These parameters convert our inputs (hours studied and hours slept) to the output (exam score). A coefficient of 10 for β₁, for example, means that a student’s score is expected to increase by 10 for each additional hour they study. An intercept of 30 would mean the student is expected to get a 30 if they don’t study or sleep at all.
Model coefficients help us understand the trends in our data, such as whether studying an extra hour versus going to bed would lead to a higher exam score. But we should always take a careful look at the coefficients before accepting our model.
I always try to mentally validate the strength and direction of each coefficient when I examine a model, making sure it’s about what I’d expect, and taking a closer look if it isn’t. A negative sleep coefficient β₂, for example, would indicate something wrong with our data, since sleep should improve exam scores! (If not, maybe our students or the exam they took are very strange…)
Similarly, if our intercept is above 100 and the study and sleep coefficients are negative, we likely have too little data or there are outliers hijacking our model. Make sure to plot your data to confirm the trends are actually what you think they should be.
Finally, we should always look at the confidence interval for our coefficient before accepting it. If the interval crosses zero, for example, our model is saying it can’t determine the direction our feature affects the target variable. Unless you have good reason to keep that feature (e.g. to specifically show its lack of impact), you should drop it from the model.
Similarly, if the interval doesn’t cross zero but is still large relative to the size of the coefficient, our model is indicating it can’t pinpoint the specific effect our feature has on the target variable, so we perhaps need more data or a different model formulation to understand the relationship.
Residuals
Once we’ve built a model, how do we tell if it’s any good? One way is to compare the model’s predictions to the actual values in our data. In other words, given some sample inputs, what does the model think the output is, versus what the output actually is? For regression models, the residual is the distance between the predicted versus actual values. [9]
Image by author
You can see this illustrated in the graphic above. The distance between the predictions (red line) and the actual values (black points) are the residuals. The goal with building a model is to get the predicted and actual values as similar as possible − to minimize the residuals, in other words. [10] A more accurate model will tend to generate predictions closer to the actual values than an inaccurate one.
Especially for linear models, the residuals should be normally distributed around zero, meaning our predictions are usually pretty good but sometimes a little too high or too low, and rarely way too high or way too low.
Image by author
As a third reminder in this section alone, it’s important to plot your data! R and Python won’t stop you from fitting a model that doesn’t make sense, and stakeholders will quickly lose faith in your recommendations if they find logical holes in your models that you didn’t catch. (It’s often already hard enough to convince stakeholders to trust a model with airtight logic… don’t make it harder!)
For example, let’s say you build a model predicting how happy a person is as a function of the size of their Pokémon card collection. You plot the data on top of the model’s predictions, plot the residuals, and see something like this:
Image by author
The double sets of points and the bimodal residuals clearly indicate there’s some unaccounted factor affecting our data… maybe whether the person is a child or an adult! A simple fix for this would be to add a “child vs. adult” feature in our model, or to split the model into one for children and one for adults.
Image by author
Much better!
p-values
p-values are a can of worms. Given their status as the gatekeepers of significant results, there’s tremendous pressure for researchers to “hack” analyses such that their models output a value below 0.05, the generally-accepted threshold. The below figure from Perneger & Combescure 2017, for example, is a distribution of 667 reported p-values from four medical journals. Note the fascinating difference between p-values below 0.05 and those above…
Figure from Perneger & Combescure 2017
But until everyone switches to Bayesian statistics, p-values are here to stay and you’ll need to understand them. The formal definition of a p-value is the probability of obtaining results at least as extreme as ours, assuming the null hypothesis is correct. Our null hypothesis is typically that the true effect size, difference in means between populations, correlation between variables, etc. is zero. p-values are the commonly-accepted method by which we say that the differences we’re observing are either:
Large enough to reject the null hypothesis (meaning our observed patterns are statistically significant) Not large enough to reject the null hypothesis (meaning our observed patterns are just noise).
Note the careful wording there. There’s a sort of humility you need to adopt with statistics; the conclusions from our current data are our best guess at what the broader population looks like, but maybe that guess will be proven wrong in the future when more data is available.
Even with a “significant” p-value, we may still be wrong! Our acceptance threshold is also our false positive rate. In other words, with a p = 0.05 cutoff, 5% of significant results are expected to actually be false positives. If the output of your analyses are informing crucial decisions, I’d set the p-value threshold at 0.01 or even 0.001.
Going back to our “study and sleep” model, if we see that the p-value for β₁, our study coefficient, is 0.0008 while the p-value for β₂, our sleep coefficient, is 0.26, we would conclude that studying affects exam scores and sleep does not.
R²
One final concept before we close out this massive post. R-squared is a valuable metric for determining whether our model is actually any good. In short, R² is the proportion of variation in our target variable explained by variation in our predictors. The metric ranges from 0 (our model explains literally nothing about our target) to 1 (we can perfectly predict our target).
The higher the R² the better… to a point. An R² of 0.8 for our “study and sleep” model would mean that study and sleep account for 80% of the variation in exam scores for the students in our dataset. Maybe an additional feature like whether they ate breakfast could bump up our R² to 0.85, meaning our model is a bit better at explaining variation in scores.
Indeed, if we have a lot of features to choose from, we could conduct feature selection to determine which features are most predictive.
But once we start getting an R² greater than ~0.97, I’d bet we’re hitting one of the following issues:
There are too many features in our model and the model is overfit to our data We have too little data to begin with Some feature(s) may be “peeking” at the target variable by being the target in another form (e.g. an engineered feature that included the target)
The real world is messy, and it’s hard to condense it down into a model. Unless we’re modeling the universe’s physical laws, there will always be variation we can’t account for in our model. Maybe a student’s pencil broke halfway through the exam and it threw them off their game. Maybe one student is actually an X-Man and could secretly read the answer key.
This again reflects that humility we need to have when talking about statistics: our model is a best guess at explaining the real world.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
Concluding thoughts
Phew, that was a whirlwind! To reiterate from earlier, it’s challenging to write out the statistics useful for data science without writing a massive textbook… but we can at least write a massive blog post.
Stats is a series of tools for parsing signals from noise in our data, and the more tools you have, the more types of problems you can handle. But of course, with so much stats out there, we need to choose what to learn first.
This post has focused on giving you the fundamentals rather than the latest cutting-edge libraries, as the fundamentals tend not to change much, and the advanced topics build on the core concepts. Understand these really well, and the rest will come naturally.
Best,
Matt
Footnotes
1. Hold on. Do I actually need to learn stats?
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4.096 KB of RAM. An average laptop in 2021 has 8 GB, which is 1.95 million times more powerful. If we use a memory-optimized AWS EC2 instance, we have access to upwards of 1.57 billion times more compute than the Apollo mission. And all to identify pictures of cats…
2. Hold on. Do I actually need to learn stats?
Rather than removing the need for statistics, big data exacerbates common statistical risks. I’ve linked some further reading below.
3. Ok, so how much stats do I actually need?
If people come to you for help making crucial decisions from data, you’ll want to account for statistical nuances like random effects, regression discontinuities, nonparametric or Bayesian alternatives to frequentism, bootstrapping and more.
4. Ok, so how much stats do I actually need?
While writing this post, I kept imagining stats gurus criticizing an omission here, or going into too little detail there. After weeks of writing, I’ve decided to not dive into AIC, clustering, distributions besides the Gaussian, and a few other topics. We have to stop somewhere! I’m just calling this is a non-exhaustive list. Consider it a starting point; add to your repertoire as needed!
5. Control groups
You can easily see this effect for yourself in R or Python. (I use R below.) Note: it’s critical to set g2 equal to g1 shifted upward, rather than just another rnorm with a higher mean, since the paired t-test looks closely at the pairwise differences between each element in the vector. The paired t-test will likely return a weaker result than a two-sample test if g1 and g2 are unrelated samples, since the distribution of g1 - g2 straddles zero. And an obligatory note after the #pruittgate fiasco… never fabricate data in scientific studies!! The intention of these demos is strictly to better understand how statistical tests work, not to game a system.
6. Regression
If you look closely (or have taken enough statistics to use linear algebra), you might notice that
expects a x₀ to accompany β₀, but there’s no x₀ in the equation for our example model h(x)=β₀+β₁x₁+β₂x₂.
This reflects a difference in whether or not we’re using matrix multiplication to generate our predictions. A necessary pre-processing step for using linear algebra is to add a column of 1’s for x0 to our feature matrix; otherwise, there’s a mismatch between the number of features (n) and the number of coefficients (n+1). Because x₀ is always 1 and is just a bookkeeping step, it’s usually omitted from the equation when you expand it out.
7. Regression
There is one important caveat to mention here regarding the ease of understanding a regression model’s coefficients. Yes, they do show the influence each input variable has on the output, but these coefficients are affected by all other variables in the model.
In our “study and sleep” exam model, for example, removing “hours studied” from our model will cause the “sleep” coefficient to skyrocket, since it’s now entirely responsible for converting “hours slept” into an exam score.
You’ll find that variables’ coefficients can shrink, explode, or even change sign when you add or remove predictors and rerun the model. Trying to understand these changes is where you need a deep understanding of your data.
8. Classification
Note that the concept of “success” versus “failure” is completely arbitrary. If in our data 1 corresponds to passing the exam and 0 for failing, our “success” is passing the exam, and our model outputs probabilities of passing, given our predictors.
But if we flip the 1 ’s and 0 ’s, then our “success” becomes failing the exam, and our model just outputs probabilities of failing rather than passing.
9. Residuals
The “distance between actual versus predicted” for classification models is simpler −the only options are whether the classification was correct or incorrect, even for multi-class classification. A great measure of accuracy for classification models is the confusion matrix, which provides a ton of info about your model’s accuracy, its false positive and false negative rates, etc.
10. Residuals
I talk about minimizing residuals at great length in this blog post, where I recreate R’s linear regression function by hand. Check it out if you’re looking for a deep dive into how coefficients are determined for linear regression models. | https://towardsdatascience.com/stats-essentials-for-data-science-cfcdee17af68 | ['Matt Sosna'] | 2021-05-10 18:46:11.228000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Regression', 'Data Science', 'Getting Started', 'Deep Dives'] |
You don’t learn to Juggle by learning to Juggle… | You need to be clear about and focused on executing the process in order to get the outcome that you want. Seth Godin gives the example of the process to improve your children’s writing. Writing better is the outcome, the process is just to write. And write. And write. Do lots of bad writing. Don’t worry about the structure or spelling or punctuation — they will come as an outcome of lots of good process.
Another saying — people who have lots of good ideas, have a lot more bad ideas. If you don’t have many good ideas then you need to start writing down anything and everything. Get into the habit of writing lots of ideas — they will likely be bad, but some where through the scraps, slowly, you will begin to accumulate a couple of good ideas. The process — writing down ideas — leads to the outcome — finding some good ideas.
James Altucher explores this further by suggesting you write down 10 ideas everyday.
if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with 20 ideas.
Extending the theme of trusting the process Cal Newport writes in “the Empty Sky Paradox” how
the path to becoming a standout includes a prohibitively difficult step. It’s this step that limits stars, as most people simply lack the comfort with discomfort required to tackle really hard things.
In other words, the discipline of learning to throw and learning to catch. And taking the time to executed this flawlessly. Newport continues:
… there’s no way getting around the necessity to clear your calendar, shut down your phone, and spend several hard days trying to make sense of the damn proof.
I can’t recommend Seth’s Akimbo podcast highly enough — and the Q&A on the following one
Let me know what you think? I’d love your feedback. If you haven’t already then sign up for a weekly dose just like this. | https://medium.com/10x-curiosity/you-dont-learn-to-juggle-by-learning-to-juggle-f82d8399c003 | ['Tom Connor'] | 2019-07-15 11:37:20.095000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Agile', 'Tom Connor', 'Learning', 'Leadership'] |
Branding and Logo Design Examples for Inspiration — #154 | Being a business startup is not that easy. It requires a lot of hard work and determination for you to reach your goals and objectives. And one of the things that you have to accomplish is a business logo. A logo is a representation of your business identity. The products or services you make available on the market are the solution you think people should use to ease their problems.
Since you need a logo, does it mean you have to hire the best logo design company? Without any doubt, the answer to this question is yes. You badly need that designer because he or she is professional in providing high-quality services. A logo combines 2 main elements: textual content and images. And only a professional designer can provide you with what you really need to have.
Best logo design company can produce great results
When it comes to logo designing, choose only the best design service provider. Why? There are certain reasons associated with this claim. First, you will get unlimited revisions. Other than that, the best logo design company gives you great value for your money. Moreover, you will meet the deadlines provided by your designer.
If you are still having doubts whether to hire a business logo design company or not, let me prove it for you why it is really necessary to do so.
There are 5 reasons why hiring the best logo design company is important:
1. Your brand identity is important for your business startup
The main purpose of having a logo is to be able to identify your company or organization on the market. And if that visual element is poorly designed then people won’t take your business seriously. Remember, your brand identity is the first impression of your business to your customers. If you don’t present a clear and memorable brand message, it will be hard for you to promote your products or services in the market.
2. No need to invest more on future projects
If you are planning to make other marketing materials for your business it means additional expenses. For instance, if you are going to make billboards or print ads, then why not hire the best logo design company to be able to support all of these activities? Hiring a professional designer is way better than hiring different companies that can produce poor results.
3. Good branding and logo will be the first thing people notice
If you want to do a business startup, then you need to stand out from the crowd. And only a professional branding company can help you with that. A great business logo must communicate what you really want to advertise. Why? People will learn more about your products and services by just looking at your logo. And for this reason, getting the best designer is very important because he or she knows how to make an appropriate design based on your company’s needs.
4. Your customers and clients will appreciate your efforts
Doing a business startup without a logo is like trying to start a car without having fuel in it. You can’t do it. Your customers are the fuel of your business. If you have a properly designed logo, it will be easy for you to communicate with them because they will immediately identify your company when they see it on the market. Moreover, when you have a unique logo all your competitors will never easily copy it.
5. You will impress everyone
Professional logo design company knows what font type is essential in answering the needs of your business startup. You can look at their portfolio and find out how great their previous works are. Aside from that, when people see your logo they will immediately think that you are a well-established company in the market because of how great it looks like.
Conclusion
So, if you want to have a great logo design made for your business startup, you need to hire the best logo design company. For this reason, if you don’t have a brand identity already, choose a professional designer out there. Why? You can’t afford to lose money or time by having an under-performing logo. A good designer will work with your current budget and timeframe and deliver very high-quality results. | https://theymakedesign.com/best-branding-and-logo-design-examples-for-inspiration-154-f64980486107 | ['They Make Design'] | 2021-09-13 08:37:41.002000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Branding', 'Inspiration', 'Logo Design', 'Business'] |
Do Short Stories Deserve the Same Negative Label as Fast Food? | Do Short Stories Deserve the Same Negative Label as Fast Food?
A scientific comparison
Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash
What do books have in common with food?
You can’t enjoy them during sleep by putting them under your pillow.
Eating and reading have more in common than most think. Size, taste and value are the qualities both share. We consume a good story with as much enjoyment as a delicious cake.
Yet, if you brought to me an encyclopedia-sized cake and told me to eat it all by myself, I would be full just by hearing your suggestion. No, thank you! One slice is enough.
When it comes to reading, I prefer shorter pieces. But when I write, I feel a necessity to write longer stories. I have the same relationship with food. I rarely cook fast food myself, but when I order, it’s unusual to go for a fancy meal. | https://medium.com/illumination/do-short-stories-deserve-the-same-negative-label-as-fast-food-5a3f7583ad41 | [] | 2020-12-14 11:49:45.602000+00:00 | ['Fast Food', 'Benefits', 'Writing', 'Stories', 'Reading'] |
Pascal Hufschmid: ‘humanitarian issues are part of everyone’s daily life’ | By Pascal Hufschmid. Published 28 November 2020 on GS News.
It was a spring day in 2003. I remember checking at which stop to get off before taking bus number 8 to the United Nations for the first time.
An art history student at the time, I had entered a selection process there to become a lecture guide. I went through the security gate and took the marked path to the meeting place, a few minutes away. I was nervous. I admired the park and the huge buildings. I had been living in Geneva for a few years, but this site was virtually unknown to me as I had only ever seen it from a distance before. That day, I was to discover a whole new district of my city. I was about to plunge into its intense international activity, but as I entered the imposing historic building, I wondered if I really belonged there.
I have never forgotten this feeling, which is probably shared by many people whether or not they have lived in Geneva for a long time. The Nations district is indeed impressive. Its large international organisations can make you feel very small, all the more so as they are difficult to access on a daily basis behind their security protocols. Should you be parachuted in from abroad and caught up in its daily frenzy of work, getting outside the cocoon to discover the city’s other neighbourhoods and local culture cannot be self-evident. That may be a valid observation, but I’ve never been satisfied with it. Rather, I see the immense potential for encounters and exchanges between people from all walks of life, both local and international, who perhaps lack a place and opportunity to get to know each other better.
I often think about this whilst making the same journey I did back in 2003, now every day and on my bike. I have recently taken over the reins of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, a wonderful institution and totally unique. I see it as an ideal space for such meetings and exchanges in the heart of international Geneva. Through everything we set out to do, my colleagues and I have taken the first step towards breaking the ice by asking a central question: how does humanitarian action concern us all, here and now?
Mainly viewed through media coverage, it can easily seem dissociated from everyday life. Although often making the headlines, it’s just one piece of news amongst many transmitted via a device (screen, newspaper, radio) which can be turned off and put away. It can thus give us the impression that humanitarian action is deployed elsewhere, far away, and that it only concerns others. Yet, humanitarian issues are part of everyone’s daily life in various degrees of intensity. The pandemic and climate change, to give just two examples, are disrupting our lives here in Geneva as well as everywhere else. Above all, humanitarian action is born out of deeply personal and lived experiences. These are neither abstract nor the prerogative of a few insiders. At 9:00 pm every evening this spring, it was indeed based upon the principle of humanity that we all applauded from our windows here in Switzerland.
So, how can we promote a more nuanced and embodied understanding of humanitarian action? My answer, as a museum director, is unequivocal: by listening to our visitors, whom we encourage to express their opinions freely. To do this, we invite the cultural and research communities in Switzerland and around the world, to question the issues, principles and current events of humanitarian action and to produce new content which we can then exhibit. Art, in particular, creates different spaces and times for reflection. Through its encouragement of dialogue, it allows us to grasp the complexity of humanitarian action and to open ourselves up to other points of view.
I am deeply convinced that a museum is not a space for a monologue. It is not an intimidating temple in which you have to remain silent and dare not say that you haven’t understood something. On the contrary, it is a forum, open and benevolent, where everyone can feel legitimate in participating in the debate, and all the more so if it concerns our shared humanity. Thus, one year ago, we invited 2,500 Geneva schoolchildren aged 8 to 14 to send a wish for the future, a cry of frustration or a dream of hope to the 2,500 participants in the 33rd International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
Whether delegate, diplomat or minister, each participant was given an authentic handwritten message on the back of a postcard reproducing posters from our collections. This started a very different, purpose-driven conversation between communities that hardly ever meet. To me, that’s what a museum can do. More recently, we launched the ‘Covid-19 and Us by Magnum Photos and You’ operation. This is a large-scale participatory project in which everyone is invited to share their personal story of the pandemic alongside exclusive images produced by some fifty Magnum photographers from around the world. Again, we are smarter together.
Clearly, the museum is not just a building on top the Colline de Pregny. It’s a catalyst within a social, cultural and economic ecosystem, a perspective on content that can extend far beyond its exhibition halls. This has enabled us to take up the pandemic challenge, which obviously puts us under exceedingly strong pressure. Although we have had to close our doors, we are still standing by our visitors and trying to be useful to them. We continue to produce innovative content that allows us all to make sense of the upheavals of everyday life. We do not offer online virtual tours. However well done they may be, they will never, in my opinion, replace the physical experience of the exhibition itself. On the contrary, we seek, as best we can, to produce content that is specific to digital spaces and modes of interaction. The current crisis has acted as an incredible accelerator in this field and the impact will be long-lasting. This does not contradict the onsite experience of the exhibition, but rather adds to it.
This said, I do think it is time to review the economic model of museums, especially private ones for which ticketing is an important source of revenue. The film and music industries have undergone a revolution to provide content to everyone’s fingertips. I feel museums should step up to this challenge. If you were to subscribe to a museum for a service, what would it be? If the museum arrived at your home, on your screen or in your mailbox, what would it look like? My colleagues and I are working on it, inspired and determined! Finally, when we can reopen and catch our breath again, we will be able to continue to make our physical museum a warm and welcoming place in the heart of a unique neighbourhood, open to everyone.
An art historian specialising in photography, Pascal Hufschmid believes that art and museums help us understand today’s world. He is the director of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum. | https://medium.com/geneva-solutions/pascal-hufschmid-humanitarian-issues-are-part-of-everyones-daily-life-eeb59f3f3ab7 | ['Gs News'] | 2020-12-01 12:15:58.213000+00:00 | ['International Relations', 'Museums', 'International Geneva', 'Humanitarian', 'Icrc'] |
10 Most Amazing Use Cases of WebSockets — Go Real-time!! | In today’s world consumers expect their apps to be faster and want things done in real-time by the touch of their finger on a smartphone or a smartwatch. Whether playing a game, interacting with colleagues at work, socializing with friends and family or even shopping online. Users expect to see things on their screen instantly and hence an application’s real-time nature plays a great role in building better user engagement and it’s a success.
Also, never ever before there has been a greater need for IoT Applications where in devices talk to each other in Real-Time. And the world is seeing a change with the emergence of IoT based consumer products. Scalable real-time delivery of artificial intelligence is another area world is looking at.
Be it a web application, a mobile app or an IoT app, Real-time nature seems to be an obvious thing to be a part of your technology stack.
But unfortunately going real-time is often not as easy as you may imagine it to be. There are multiple complexities to deal with starting from what frameworks to choose, what networking protocols to choose, building the reliability of delivery and worst of all is the scalability of the solution to consider since most applications designed today are for web-scale.
Evolution of Websockets
The traditional approach towards building web applications that require real-time communication between client and a server has required a rather intimidating use of HTTP to continuously poll the server to fetch updates and send upstream data via distinct HTTP calls.
The approach might have worked, nonetheless, it was still an abuse of the HTTP protocol. This resulted in a variety of problems.
In order to understand what are the benefits that come with the HTML Websocket protocol, first let’s try and understand what were the traditional approaches and what were some of the associated problems and how HTML 5 Websocket is not merely a solution but in fact a giant leap especially for real-time, event driven web applications.
Traditional Ways of Building Near Realtime Experience
Consider a web application developer developing a real-time stock prices web application, or an instant messaging app, or a news app, has to send an HTTP request to fetch data from the server. Now, this response is sure to get stale by the time the HTTP response arrives and the page gets rendered. In order to provide the most updated data to the user, the web developer will now need to constantly poll the web server in order to provide near real-time experience to his user.
Hence most approaches that attempt to provide real-time behavior over web application tend to implement one or the other hack using polling.
1. Polling
This was one of the early approaches to solve real-time problem. In this approach, an HTTP request is sent at regular intervals to the web server to get an immediate response. If you are familiar with JavaScript, you may imagine it like a setInterval function calling a callback function every T secs. The callback function sends and HTTP request gets the response and updates the page.
The problem is the nature of real-time data, that it is not predictable when an event will occur so you will end up making unnecessary HTTP requests flooding the network. And the number of network requests will only increase as the number of users increase. Not to forget each request will carry the HTTP header as well adding an overhead every time you poll for each user.
2. Long Polling
Imagine this technique as an HTTP request that does not get an immediate response, rather the server holds the request for a certain time period, during which it expects an event to happen. If an event of interest occurs during that interval the response is sent immediately, otherwise, an empty response is sent indicating that the request stands canceled.
This technique does not provide much improvement to the Polling technique. A web server could also potentially run out of request threads and end up discarding further requests.
3. Comet Approach
A more favored form of comet approach is streaming, in which an application opens a single HTTP request and keeps it open allowing a web server to push data to a web browser without any explicit requests being made for different data. Neither the server side nor the client side close this persistent connection.
The problem is that streaming is still encapsulated in HTTP messages so proxy sevrers may buffer the responses and thus increasing the message delivery latency.
HTML5 Websockets — The Life Saver
HTML 5 Websockets provides for a full duplex bidirectional channel for communications over the web through a Transport layer socket. As described in the websocket protocol RFC 6455.
Combined with the WebSocket API , web socket protocol provides an alternative to HTTP polling for two-way communication from a web page to a remote server.
With a full duplex bidirectional capability, there is no longer the need to exploit the HTTP by polling, long polling or comet approach to build real-time experience for your users.
This opens up space for endless possibilities for the Application Developers to leverage and build amazing applications.
Some Most Amazing Use Cases of Websockets
1. Real-time Feeds
Give your apps the ability to give real-time feeds, notifications, social likes, shares and instantly share all that with your users in real-time. Wouldn’t that be extremely engaging for your audience?
2. Real-time Multiplayer Gaming
Websockets API allow you to create the same gaming experience that users get on a mobile device. With the ability to send receive data at any given point of time without having to poll the webservers, creates space for building real-time multiplayer gaming.
3. Real-time Collaborative Editing
Now you all have used google docs and have wondered how this works. With emergence of HTML5 Websockets, creating collaborative applications that allow users to work on same document becomes greatly simplified.
4. Real-time Data Visualization
Be it marketing trends, sales graphs, analytics, or data science plots, with HTML5 Websockets you can create visually appealing data representations that will automatically update as and when new data arrives in your backend, and that too without having the need to poll the data.
5. Real-time Multimedia Chat
Let’s face it. If you are an application developer, you have always wanted to create a chat server, either as a college project or as one of your client’s project feature. But you hit the wall by adopting the traditional approaches that I discussed above. Well, try HTML5 Websockets of you want to build a chat server this time. Or connect with my team, they have developed one and are already using in production now. Contact me.
6. Audio / Video Chat with WebRTC
HTML5 Websockets are a best candidate to be used as a signaling mechanism for WebRTC. If you are not familiar with WebRTC, read my post “The Amazing Things WebRTC Can Do“. The WebRTC draft leaves the signaling layer as an abstract and offers the implementer to create his own signaling mechanism. Websockets are a great candidate for that as they offer full duplex communication.
7. E-Learning Applications
With HTML5 Websockets, E-learning is one industry that is being revolutionized rapidly than any other industry. With developers creating out of the box real-time features, transforming online learning as an extremely interactive way to engage students and offer remote classrooms just as real as a physical class room.
8. Real-time Location Apps
Building applications like location based intelligence, Geo fencing, track and trace becomes all the more simplified with HTML5 Websockets allowing developers to share location updates in real time and create amazing work flows with the real time data.
9. Real-time User Behavior
A lot of E-commerce space is using click stream data to analyze user behavior in real time and that is helping them analyze how user interacts with there web applications and instantly offer them recommended content. Another aspect of it allows error detection faced by consumers to be reported in real-time.
10. Real-time Sports / Event Updates
Users are so used to of real-time facebook and twitter updates, and that has set very high standards for other web and mobile applications. By using HTML5 Websockets you can use a common platform for all your channels to provide real time updates to your users and hence build better and more engaging apps.
Wrapping Up
I am quiet convinced that Websockets are indeed revolutionizing the way applications are built now and how HTTP is slowly becoming obsolete. The question is how soon are you going to include websockets in your technology stack? Need help with websockets, we are just a click away. Reach us for a free consultation and demo. | https://medium.com/the-developer-journal/10-most-amazing-use-cases-of-websockets-go-real-time-166b71e0e711 | ['Vikas Sood'] | 2019-09-09 13:57:25.408000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Web Development', 'Html5', 'Technology', 'Software Development'] |
7 Reasons Influencers Did Not Share Your Promotion | When you team up with partners or peers in your niche with bigger audiences than yours, who we might call “influencers”, you hope those people will promote your project — whatever it may be — so you can get a wider reach.
This is especially true of virtual summits, where the host partners with many peers / influencers in their niche. The success of a summit is almost entirely due to the speakers’ affiliate promotions of it to their own audiences.
As someone who has hosted many virtual summits for myself as well as multi-millionaire entrepreneurs like Russell Brunson, Julie Stoian, Steve J. Larsen and more, I’ve learned a thing or two about why speakers do or don’t promote collaborations they’re a part of and what we can do as the hosts/organizers to get them to share.
Whether it’s a virtual summit, podcast, launch promotion or something else entirely for which you want to partner with influencers, keep these reasons they might not share in mind, and avoid doing them!
#1: You came out of the blue.
The ‘law of reciprocity’ in relationships says that if you do a lot of stuff for someone else, they feel almost obligated to return the favor. So, as an influencer, I’m way more likely to do favors and share stuff for people who have already invested in my community a ton.
If you came out of the blue and asked an influencer to do an interview when you never engaged with them before, never joined their email list, never contributed to their Facebook group, they’re not going to feel “obligated” to “return any favors”.
You have to understand:
the influencer is doing YOU a favor by providing you content for your podcast, summit, etc.
That is already enough of a favor, so by asking them to share it, you’re asking for MORE favors. They need a reason to want to go that extra mile for you.
#2: You ghosted them after you got the content you needed.
If you ask an influencer to do an interview, then disappear for 3 months, then reappear telling them it’s been published and you want them to share it tomorrow, you can bet that’s not going to happen.
Bonus: you have to give people time to work their promotions into their calendar. The bigger the influencer, the further out their year is already planned.
#3: You made sharing your promotion a requirement.
People are always amazed when I tell them that I DON’T make it a requirement for speakers on my virtual summit to share it.
“Surely, that’s the way to really ensure that your influencers share it, right?”
Hardly!
Even if you make an influencer sign an agreement saying they will share it, how on Earth are you going to enforce that? You can’t. So don’t bother.
No one likes to be told how, where, when and what they should be sharing with their audience.
Instead of making it a requirement, the onus should fall on you to make your promotion actually worth sharing. If it really is, then they really will.
#4: You changed the details on them several times.
If you tell an influencer your virtual summit is going to be in August, and they’re prepping promotions for August, then you push it back and back again, you’ve lost them. You seem super unorganized. They’ve lost faith your promotion is going to be a good thing for their audience. They carved out time for you in August, but now that time is going to someone else, and they’re not bumping someone else in December for your thing.
#5: Your interview/collaboration did not produce content unique or valuable enough to share.
I really wish more people understood this: no influencer is going to spend valuable real estate in their weekly email newsletter to promote a 20 min podcast interview where they’re answering the same questions and telling the same stories their audience has heard a million times.
You need to ask yourself how you can make your promotion so good that the influencer would rather promote it over their own content.
#6: You didn’t remind them.
If you interview an influencer for a virtual summit, for example, but that summit doesn’t go live for 3 months? They’re going to forget when it’s about to go live, even if they wanted to share it. 3 months is like 3 years in entrepreneur time. A lot happens, and if the content is already done (if they already recorded their interview for you), it feels like project is finished in their eyes because so many things have occurred since, even if your event is not even close to being over.
The interviews get scheduled, but the promotions often don’t.
You need to make the promotion schedule clear, and remind them often.
#7: You didn’t provide them promotional materials.
If you make it hard for the influencer to promote by assuming they will write their own social media posts, email copy, etc, they probably won’t do it. Create assets they can copy/paste/post, and you increase your chances they will share.
Bonus: Don’t send your influencer partners a Google drive link where they have to go in and get the promotional assets. Don’t ask them to set up an account in your affiliate software so they can go dig around for their promotional assets. Send the files (e.g. social media graphics, documents with email copy) individually as attachments to an email that people can download with 1 click. Yes, you have to make it that easy. | https://medium.com/swlh/7-reasons-influencers-did-not-share-your-promotion-ee706fad2c64 | ['Bailey Richert'] | 2020-10-16 10:36:15.632000+00:00 | ['Online Marketing', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Online Business', 'Collaboration'] |
Intersectionality of race and gender in Hiring Algorithms | The internet has caused macrostructural changes in labor markets, institutional norms, and corporate organization with workers’ experience of the labor process, their investment in it, and their outcomes from it (Kalleberg, 1989). Hiring technologies have been evolving along with the internet. Internet services like Monster Jobs and search engines became the source for job listings because of their cheaper rates and greater outreach because their room to extend unlike newspaper classifieds. This then followed with online job applications, triggering a jump in the volume of applications for open positions as it became easier to apply for multiple jobs. This came with a price — employers now had to adopt applicant tracking systems to help organize and evaluate rapidly growing pools of candidates.
As the quantity of potential job candidates boomed further to include both higher volumes, some employers began turning to new screening tools to keep up. The conventional assessment would mean deviated team, resources and time. This gave rise to Hiring Algorithm vendors to increase efficiency, and in hopes that they will find more successful and diverse set of employees. With the outcry for Diversity and Inclusion, some vendors are exclusively catering the hiring process based on the diversity principle with promises to remove certain biases.
These hiring algorithms boast about it’s potential to remove bias from the hiring process. They argue that by making hiring more consistent and efficient, recruiters will be empowered to make fairer and more holistic hiring decisions but it is important to realise that what they promise is the interpersonal human prejudice, which is just one source of bias. Other biases like Institutional, structural, and other forms are equally important which are completely neglected in this case. Institutional bias in most cases refers to racial and sexual biases. Structural bias observes broader patterns of disadvantage stemming from contemporary and historical legacies such as race, unequal economic opportunity, and segregation.
When screening systems aim to replicate an employer’s prior hiring decisions, the resulting model will likely reflect prior social biases. Although it might seem natural for screening tools to consider previous hiring decisions, those decisions often reflect the very patterns many employers are actively trying to change through diversity and inclusion initiatives. Hiring is never a single huge decision but a series of smaller, sequential decisions. Siri Uotila, a research fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School says “language is gendered” and algorithms tend to pick these differences as features for selection. While automated phone interviews are “blind”, humans as well as algorithms can still infer information about a person’s race and other demographic factors, such as socioeconomic status, from the sound of their voice.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute say that even before hiring technologies there is a considerable amount of bias in ad services for these jobs. They found that fake Web users believed by Google to be male job seekers were much more likely than equivalent female job seekers to be shown a pair of ads for high-paying executive jobs when they later visited a news website. This is one subtle way that algorithmic advertising perpetuates an already existing gender divide in the job market. In another paper by Le Chen et. al., they conclude that even when controlling for all other visible candidate features, there is a slight penalty against feminine candidates large enough that masculine candidates receive a substantive increase in rank.
#BlackLivesMatter campaign and other recent events have made the reality of racial and gender based discrimination in our society painfully clear. In one famous experiment, job applicants with white-sounding names, such as Emily, received 50 percent more callbacks than those with African American–sounding names, such as Lakisha.
Sometimes this differentiation goes beyond just race and gender of an individual. Neighborhood, sensitivity of the job role, education of parents, socio-economic status, name of the applicant etc. Living in a wealthier (or more educated or Whiter) neighborhood increases callback rates. But, interestingly, African-Americans are not helped more than Whites by living in a “better” neighborhood.
Vendors have rolled out some promising features that reflect at least some awareness of the deep and systemic inequalities that continue to distort hiring dynamics. Measures like these could ultimately help pull hiring technologies in a more constructive direction, but much more work is needed. Vendors are rapidly releasing new features, and addressing flaws. Our hope is that by using detailed and specific examples to examine the equities and biases of predictive hiring products, we have highlighted common issues that remain unaddressed and unresolved — despite others’ calls for care and caution. There is an urge for advocates, lawmakers, employers, and vendors to confront the emerging questions posed by predictive hiring technologies, articulate principles for their responsible use, and take concrete steps to update regulatory frameworks accordingly.
REFERENCES: | https://medium.com/@t-ksai1998/intersectionality-of-race-and-gender-in-hiring-algorithms-f4b0020cdd6b | ['K. Tejas'] | 2020-12-16 18:11:54.141000+00:00 | ['Hiring', 'Algorithmic Bias', 'Bias', 'Gender', 'Race'] |
Reaching my Summit during my Strava internship | Hey there, my name’s Emmanuel. I’m originally from Puerto Rico, but I’ve spent the past three years studying computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m a head TA for an intro CS course and the treasurer for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. This summer, I worked as an iOS software engineering intern at Strava on the Premium team.
On August 1st — during my internship — the Strava Premium subscription was rebranded to Strava Summit: three separate packs that an athlete can subscribe to. This was a huge, company wide rebrand (even the Premium team got renamed to the Summit team) that took careful months of work and planning, and I was lucky enough to be a part of it!
Started from the bottom now we’re here
On my first week my mentor asked me what I wanted to get out of my internship. What I wanted was to be able to proudly look at something in the iOS app and say “Hey, I did that!” Of course, that definitely wouldn’t be happening on my first week, so I started out with some “easy” bugs to fix.
To me, the bugs were a huge struggle: I had suddenly been dropped into a codebase with tens of thousands of commits and a long list of contributors, and I had no idea how to do anything. I needed to ask my mentor for help with everything. On the first few days of my internship, I wasn’t sure if I should have accepted this position instead of letting someone more qualified get it instead. My mentor assured me that every new engineer starts out by bug bashing and needs a while to adapt to the codebase. The same was true for me, and after a bit, I did!
After I had adapted to the codebase a little and felt sort of capable, I was assigned my first task related to the Summit release. It was just a membership landing page, but it was really exciting to work on something that was relevant to the team and actually needed for the Summit release.
Once I completed that task, I started growing more adjusted to working on the iOS release of Summit, so I began being given more and more responsibilities every week. I felt myself slowly becoming an important part of the team, with my contributions actually helping get this huge release out by our deadline.
Summit subscription confirmation
By the time August 1st rolled around, I had worked on so many tasks for the Summit release. One of the most notable of these is the new Summit subscription confirmation page that literally everybody who joins Summit sees! Another example is the code for a user to get a free 1-month Summit trial during registration. That code affects everyone that signs up for a new account on iOS, and I got to write it!
Becoming a well-rounded developer
I definitely did get what I wanted out of my internship. When I look at the iOS Strava app, there’s a bunch I can point at and think, “Hey, I did that,” or “Hey, I fixed that,” and that’s a great feeling. By the end of it all, I worked on real code that is affecting real people, but I also learned a lot in the process. I learned how to work in a team on a large, high impact project. I learned a lot of good project/task management and context switching. And, technically speaking, I learned a bunch of Swift and Objective-C, and great architectural and design patterns for both languages. This wasn’t just through writing code, but also through reading and reviewing the code of other iOS engineers.
I learned all of this because on the Summit team at Strava, I was considered another full-time engineer.
Instead of having one personal project with virtually no risks, I was working on the same thing my whole team was working on. I got to understand the stress of a real deadline that affects a whole company and millions of active users. The code I wrote was crucial to the release of Summit, and all of it was actually shipped and is in the app right now. The most valuable thing my internship at Strava taught me is what it’s like to actually be a full-time employee, which I appreciated way more than just working on a small project for a summer.
The people and culture at Strava
I’ve spoken about the work I got to do at Strava, but I haven’t spoken about another great thing at the company: the general culture and environment. One of the core values at Strava is balance, and everybody employs that in their day to day. During my internship, I was never expected to overwork myself past my limit: both my manager and mentor made it clear that after I had worked 8 hours, I should go home and take some time for myself, and that ended up giving me a lot of time to explore San Francisco and spend time with friends. At work, nobody expects you to spend the entire time you’re there viciously writing code and doing nothing else. People are always welcome to take breaks to go for a walk with a friend or get a snack.
There’s quarterly three-day “hackathons” called Jams where everyone can work on anything they want. Teams have offsites: after the release of Summit, my team had went tubing down a river (one of my personal favorites). All of this promotes a healthy, stress-free environment that ends up with engineers working way more productively when they’re actually writing code, myself included.
And while Strava does treat its interns like full-time engineers, there are some nice exceptions. This summer, the intern class left the office and got to go to a Giants game, participate in an escape room, and even race each other on go-karts! And at the office we had AMAs with the CEO and with one of the co-founders of Strava, and we participated in the Guacamole Challenge: a tradition where employees make guacamole and then the interns judge it to determine who makes the best guacamole at Strava.
Overall, my summer at Strava was unforgettable and I am grateful that my internship experience was challenging, rewarding, and downright fun. | https://medium.com/strava-engineering/reaching-my-summit-during-my-strava-internship-a7fb1f47a940 | ['Emmanuel Suarez'] | 2018-11-07 22:52:05.532000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Internships', 'Strava', 'Swift'] |
Preparing your pet before the arrival of your baby | BY THABITHA DAVID · PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2020 · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
Introduce your baby to pets: You are anxiously waiting for the arrival of your new family member.
You have started preparation of the of the baby room. You have set the crib, painted the room. Baby proofed your house.
As that day comes nearer, you decorate your house with lights, balloons, and flowers. And the inside is crammed with baby’s stuff.
If you have a pet, he is watching all this.
Topics
Introduction
Your pet has been with you from the beginning. Your pet is watching and observing everything.
If you have a dog, he even takes it as his responsibility to guard and protect the house.
He senses the changes happening within your house and he does not know the reason for this change.
When the environment of a house changes dramatically, animals get stressed.
You love your baby and you love your pet too, but it does not mean they also love each other.
So, how to go about introducing your pet to your baby and help them love each other?
Preparing your pet before the arrival of your baby
Prevention is always better than cure. Adapting some simple changes beforehand can save you from stress, after the baby is born.
It is vital to show to your pet that nothing scary is happening or going to happen.
Never think to send your beloved pet to shelter, you can teach him whatever you want.
First, do all the decorations by keeping your pet in mind.
When you are working on baby’s room decor, make sure to have some space from where your pet can see inside. Otherwise, he will feel isolated and furious.
If your pet jumps and messes up, then install a security gate.
Leave space over that security gate so he can see and smell because escaping from a pet and shutting doors will make the situation worse.
Also, show him the space and the objects of the baby who is going to be born, from the cradle to the bathtub, from rompers to rattle.
Your pet will love the time you spend with him. But at the same time will get familiar with the new items in the house.
If you have a dog. He might sniff around a bit and then register it as part of the household items he might have to guard and protect.
I also played with my dog asking where the baby is. And trained him to the word baby room. He also got trained to come till the door and sit and watch and not enter inside.
By doing so the animal will not feel excluded.
Make changes in your pet’s feeding and walking and sleeping time. If he did not have one, make it into a schedule so it becomes easy or you and for your pet when the baby arrives.
Before the arrival of your baby, train your pet to spend more time alone so that he gets used to it and when the baby comes, your pet does not associate this less attention with the baby.
Communicate with your pet, even during your recovery. Make sure your other family members give proper time to your pet. My husband would show pictures of the baby to my dog.
If you have a dog:
If there is a dog within the house, you must act beforehand by gradually introducing the smell of your baby, before the first meeting.
My husband would let the dog smell the baby cloth bag when he brings it home for washing. When I was in the hospital.
It is important to familiarize your pet with the baby’s smell.
If you have a cat:
If there is a cat, however, this preliminary is not necessary. He is curious but independent, he likes to get things done.
The important thing is to ban him from jumping into the cradle because he could roll in the soft mattress laid out for your baby even when the baby is inside.
Best to train the cat not to enter the baby room. My cat’s egos were so high that she never entered even if I called her.
Even after the room was no more a baby room and became a guest bedroom she wouldn’t enter. | https://medium.com/@the-shades-of-yellow/preparing-your-pet-before-the-arrival-of-your-baby-b0377aab1df4 | [] | 2020-11-26 16:17:49.941000+00:00 | ['Kids', 'Mental Health', 'Baby', 'Pets', 'Parenting'] |
A Walk to Remember- First one after Lockdown | And after 3 months of house arrest, I finally decided to step out in the open. Well yeah, the craving for open spaces is analogous to a starved lion scrambling on even the slightest hint of food in its vicinity. After all, humans are social animals and as our evolutionary history characterizes us with a hunter-gatherer attribute, we can’t stay in confinement for very long. We are all-powerful yet helpless to change history. Before I could step out of my house, a set of daunting instructions from my Mom flooded the whole idea behind taking a walk in the open air. Last I remember, I received such instructions when I was joining the primary school. Anyway, as the old proverb goes, “prevention is better than cure”, as a matter of fact, that was the entire purpose of the lockdown you see. The bombardment of military-grade directives by Mom was so overwhelming that it would require a behavioral change and inadvertently calls for a change in my habits.
Turning the Non-declarative memory into declarative memory
Finally, I stepped out wearing a surgical mask, with earphones plugged in my mobile, a handkerchief (of course, even the slightest sound of a sneeze has the potential to trigger mob violence in India) and how can I forget the most important yet intangible asset, yes the right attitude! As I walked a few hundred meters, it seemed pretty normal outside there. A man taking a stroll with his German Shepherd, whose gilded eyes reflected its playfulness, whose skin whiffs off a scent of emancipation and whose wagging tail calls for unwavering focus to find something in the sea of tall grass. The man’s oblique stare puzzled me at once but then wearing a mask invariably gives you some confidence to stare back. I remembered the first commandment of physical distancing, be it a dog or his owner and I jumped over to the other side of the road to keep my radius secure.
As I walked along the link road connecting my residential campus to the Dam, which happens to be at a distance of half a kilometer from my house, the road was buzzing with traffic. The gas-guzzling machines are back in action and a meager number of pedestrians like me who could be counted on one’s fingers could be seen at the first glimpse. Walking along the narrow canal constructed beside the footpath, I chose to walk on the strip dumped with mud, pebbles, construction material, weeds, cow dung, and loads of junk which is quite difficult to understand unless you want to do research on roadside pavements. This strip ran along the footpath adjacent to it. My proposition was not to come in close proximity to the public walking on the footpath. Footpath’s so mainstream now right, try taking the road not taken :P. Let me then count it in some of the low key adventures of mine.
Have you noticed something odd here, all the things I have described till now right from getting out of my home to walking on the road, almost all the actions were implicit before Covid-19 struck. We needn’t think about how to walk, maintaining distance, observing each and every person around, every car or bike, in an apprehension that it could be carrying newly established thieves who would be eager to mug anyone on the streets or found away from the crowd. It’s terrible to think about all this while taking a stroll when I should actually be listening to the melodies and enjoying the weather. We are registering everything which was usual back then as unusual and that has changed the balance of the Non-declarative and declarative memory equation.
The Trust Deficit!
As I start climbing up the dam, there’s a sense of discomfort I begin to feel. I look up to realize all the eyes looking down upon me (No, I haven’t done anything wrong to them, just that they were descending the Dam). I don’t know why but it feels insecure and guilty walking beside strangers wearing masks with their eyes in the form of an X-ray scanner glaring at you. It gives a sensation of Big Brother from George Orwell’s ‘1984’, watching you and tearing you apart bit by bit. Just like there exists a minute gravitational force even between any two heavenly bodies in space separated by millions of miles, similarly there exist micro-units of trust even between two complete strangers. And I think the present situation over fears of contagion has destroyed that trust down to a fermi scale. It has created a void that would take months or even years to refill. The phenomenon called ‘asking help from strangers’ will not remain unscathed by the arrows protruding from a society in the post-COVID era.
The Long Walk back home…
As I begin to return to my home, I am reminded of the commandments. As I descend from the ramp of the reservoir, I construct a journey map (design thinking put to some good use here) imagining myself opening the entrance gate, sanitizing my hands in the porch followed by spraying disinfectant on the latch of the gate, entering the hallway and rushing towards the washroom with my mother blaring in the background, about the precautions I need to take. I quickly change and take a shower to wash away even the minuscule doubt of infection that might have crept into my mind listening to the news and the “educational content” from WhatsApp University spreading pervasively through Family groups.
This extent of imagination veers away the calm and sanity that a 40-minute walk had brought for a while. I keep on walking along the same worn-out strip of rubble, steering away from gas guzzlers, dogs as well as creatures from my own species (read humans). Later into that night, I think about going for a walk again the next day, however, the overload of involuntary actions turned into voluntary ones deters me to think about it. I feel I have been robbed off my freedom to even take a deep sigh in public.
Although I can’t even imagine what the migrants and people living below the poverty line would be experiencing right now, a quote from Percy B. Shelly’s Ode to the West Wind comes to my mind, “If winter is here, can spring be far behind”, which is quite apt in the current scenario. No matter how much we are hit by our predicaments, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, and it is imperative for us to be hopeful, to absorb the new normal, and to take care of ourselves and others in the best possible way.
And this saves another day for me… | https://medium.com/@aditya01/a-walk-to-remember-first-one-after-lockdown-f96537245440 | ['Aditya Nema'] | 2020-06-02 20:48:39.907000+00:00 | ['Freedom', 'Human Behavior', 'Lockdown', 'Psychology', 'Covid 19'] |
7 apps that can change the way you manage your business [2020 update] | There are different aspects to running a business, paying your staff, managing the inventory, assigning tasks, and much more. It would be hard to reach out to each of them by yourself as the business is growing. Don’t worry; there are wonderful apps that could assist you in each of these crucial tasks; we have done exhaustive research on each of these applications’ productivity as that could benefit you for better managing your jobs.
Evernote
It’s evident that we all need to take notes for many things; it might be a reminder for any tasks or even an important detail to remember. It’s not practical to carry a notebook with you everywhere you go. But, either way, you’re taking your smartphone to most of the places, considering that there are various applications in the app store and play store that could help you do these tasks but, if you need that compact and specialized note-keeping app, Evernote is your solution, It is a comprehensive note application that helps you create and save notes, photographs, audio clips, videos, PDF files, and to-do-lists on your smartphone.
SocialBot
If you’re active in social media sights, you know the work that you have to put into managing them. Well, SocialBot is a great application that could help you bring all your social media accounts under one roof. It can auto-reply to messages, auto-comment, work with customers, and much more.
If you want a simple application for managing all your social media tasks, I insist you download SocialBot.
DocuSign
Many businesses need their clients to sign documents, and it’s quite time-consuming to get all the tasks done. But, DocuSign makes that signing process much more easy and online. Yeah! You could get e-signed from your client, and DocuSign lets you upload contracts or documents that could be sent to your client for signature with the click of a button. If you send a form to a client through email, you can receive a signed copy of the document back from them in record time. There are no more delays or technical issues that you need to worry about.
Basecamp
If you have more than one employee in your business, it’s crucial to connect them and have a team collaboration. Nowadays, employees are from every part of the globe, making it obvious to communicate with them and delegate the tasks efficiently. Basecamp app could help you do that task easily. It allows the team members to share information, files, milestone dates, and other details with each other. It provides a project workspace where team members can conduct conversations at any time from any location.
The basecamp app could help you boost your productivity with effective management systems, so consider trying it with your employees.
QuickBooks
If you do any accounting or bookkeeping in your business, the QuickBooks app could help you do it much effectively. An advanced application with varying features for different customers; if your business needs complex accounting solutions well, QuickBooks has the solution.
It could be used to create and edit customers, invoices, sales receipts, and estimates. Your data is then immediately available in the app. QuickBooks Online is also an advanced reporting tool. It takes your data and develops your financial statement. The income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement become an easy quarterly or yearly task. The app is strong from a tax perspective. It also assists the business to develop illustrative charts and graphs.
SalesForce
It’s not an easy task to manage your customers and build strong relations with them. SalesForce is one of the big players in CRM — which is widely used by businesses of every category. SalesForce app helps you manage and track your customer profiles in every department, develop personalized marketing plans, respond to customer issues, and much more.
Salesforce has various plans considering your requirements, starting with $25 per month.
Delivrd
If you’re looking to manage your inventory for free, Delivrd could help you with that. An online-based inventory management application, where you can create a product catalog, count, receive and issue stocks, enable stock level alert, and even access your inventory transaction history.
A compact software system that could help you manage things, however, Delivrd is a web-only service, and it does not offer a separate mobile app. | https://medium.com/startupwriter/7-apps-that-can-change-the-way-you-manage-your-business-2020-update-57a0d213a100 | ['Midhun Areeckal'] | 2020-12-27 12:36:00.934000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Apps', 'Business Administration', 'Managing Business', 'Business'] |
Intersectional Environmentalism: A Crash Course | Photo by Mate the label via Instagram
Leah Thomas, or @greengirlleah on Instagram, defines Intersectional Environmentalism really comprehensively:
“This is an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. It identifies the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected. It brings injustices done to the most vulnerable communities, and the earth, to the forefront and does not minimize or silence social inequality. Intersectional Environmentalism advocates for justice for people + the planet.”
S. Ryder describes Intersectional Environmentalism as a bridge between Feminist & Gender Studies and Environmental studies. This theory stems from the term Intersectionality, first defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1991 which says that based on various identity characteristics, individuals may be oppressed and differently impacted by “a combination of interconnected social structures”. These structures are broken down into many categories, such as but not limited to, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability, and Class.
Intersectionality has been thrown around a lot lately, especially in the last
5–8 years, so we thought it would be useful to offer an accessible definition.
Intersectionality is often used as a lens to look at particular structures or social problems in our world. So, when you’re asking yourself if something is Intersectional, it comes down to asking yourself if what you’re examining utilizes a broad-spectrum worldview about the diverse experiences of different kinds of people.
You may be asking yourself: What’s a Worldview? Simply put, it’s the way you as an individual, develop your perspective on the world based on your lived experiences and the environments in which you grew up. It also has to do with the different ideas you were and are exposed to over the course of your life.
Still not so sure? Here’s a quirky example: making sandwiches. Even within the United States, attitudes and ideas about what makes a good sandwich are really different. Take New York and Louisiana — we’re talking about pastrami on rye vs. a po boy.
These are two very different takes on a sandwich, shaped by the accessibility of different ingredients and spices, cultures around food, and taste preferences. Similar to the idea of a worldview on the human relationship to the planet, this sandwich example simplifies and explains how, though we may be talking about the same concept (i.e., a sandwich), the attitudes and perceptions of that concept will differ on account of their influences and histories.
Knowing this definition is important because it will allow you to understand the fact that, especially in North America (i.e., Canada and the United States), due to the nature of how many people came to be on these lands, the population has developed an overwhelmingly Eurocentric and often Whitecentric worldview. Because of the racial hierarchy that has been established through colonialism, there is overwhelming power and privilege bias toward white and white-passing people.
Photo by BacktoZero
Photo by BacktoZero
You may have heard points like this in conversations about White Privilege. This is a term that explains how Whiteness as a concept and a construct privileges people who fall into this social category.
White Privilege doesn’t mean that white people don’t experience struggle or misfortune, but it does mean that white people are not disadvantaged by their skin colour.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Lots of definitions, but stay with us here. | https://medium.com/climate-conscious/intersectional-environmentalism-a-crash-course-6a0c495ace91 | ['Back To Zero'] | 2020-07-01 18:04:41.239000+00:00 | ['Social Justice', 'Activism', 'Climate Justice', 'Intersectionality', 'Environmentalism'] |
How Congress Can Leverage Action on New START | By Daryl G. Kimball,
Executive Director
Every U.S. president since John Kennedy has successfully concluded at least one agreement with Russia or the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear dangers. These agreements have helped to slash nuclear stockpiles, manage nuclear competition, and provide greater stability, thereby reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe between the world’s two largest nuclear actors.
The sun rises behind the U.S. Capitol on December 17, 2010, when the full U.S. Senate debated its Resolution of Ratification for New START. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In March 2018, President Donald Trump said he wanted to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin “to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.”
Since then, however, Trump and Putin have barged ahead with costly plans to replace and upgrade their massive nuclear arsenals. The bilateral nuclear relationship has gone from bad to worse.
The July 2018 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki yielded nothing, not even an agreement to resume “strategic stability” talks. The simmering dispute over Russia’s violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty reached the boiling point in October 2018 when Trump said he would terminate the pact, which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.
Worse still, the United States and Russia have not begun talks to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which caps each side’s deployed strategic warheads to no more than 1,550 and delivery vehicles to no more than 700.
Without the INF Treaty or New START, there would be no legally binding, verifiable limits on U.S. or Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972.
Because there is no realistic chance to negotiate a New START replacement by 2021, the logical step for both sides is simply to extend the treaty by five years to 2026, as allowed in Article XIV of the agreement. Putin has indicated he would like to begin talks to extend the treaty, but Trump remains undecided.
The U.S. military continues to see great value in New START. In a December 2018 report to Congress, the Defense Department said that, without the treaty “the United States would lose access to valuable information on Russian strategic forces, as well as access to Russian strategic facilities.”
Unfortunately, National Security Advisor John Bolton, who called for abandoning New START before he joined the Trump administration, is leading the ongoing interagency review on the treaty’s extension. Sources indicate Bolton, true to form, is pushing to nix New START.
With the future of New START in jeopardy, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle need to step in and use the power of the purse to attempt to prevent Trump and Bolton from blowing up the last remaining U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreement and to bring nuclear weapons costs under control.
As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, noted last September, “[B]ipartisan support for nuclear modernization is tied to maintaining an arms control process that controls and seeks to reduce Russian nuclear forces…. We’re not interested in writing blank checks for a nuclear arms race with Russia.”
To send a message to the administration, Congress this year should prohibit funding to increase the number of nuclear weapons above the limits set by New START, so long as Russia continues to stay below treaty ceilings. Such an approach would guard against a breakout by either side and help to maintain strategic stability.
As the Defense Department reported to Congress in 2012, Russia “would not be able to achieve a militarily significant advantage by any plausible expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, even in a cheating or breakout scenario under the New START Treaty, primarily because of the inherent survivability of the planned U.S. strategic force structure.”
Congress should also take steps to challenge the Trump administration’s excessive nuclear force plans, especially if the administration is going to default on its obligation to limit and reduce excess Russian and U.S. nuclear forces.
The Trump plans call for spending roughly $500 billion over the next 10 years to maintain and replace U.S. nuclear delivery systems and their associated warheads and supporting infrastructure, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This enormous and growing bill is unsustainable and unnecessary. According to a 2013 Pentagon assessment, U.S. strategic nuclear force levels are at least one-third larger than necessary to deter nuclear attack.
More realistic and affordable options to maintain a credible nuclear arsenal can and should be pursued regardless of whether New START is extended. But Congress must also make clear to the administration that the evisceration of arms control is unacceptable.
One option Congress could pursue is to freeze funding for the major nuclear delivery system and warhead modernization programs at today’s levels, which would force delays in the schedules for these programs. This would get the attention of the White House and Pentagon and put pressure on the administration to make the right decision on New START.
If Trump is not ready or able to take the steps necessary to prevent a dangerous new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race, Congress should be ready to do so. | https://armscontrolnow.medium.com/how-congress-can-leverage-action-on-new-start-24685ce62ac6 | ['Arms Control Association'] | 2020-10-30 16:47:56.082000+00:00 | ['Democrats', 'New Start', 'Republicans', 'Congress', 'Nuclear Weapons'] |
Twitter’s Redesign Isn’t About You | Something unusual happened this week: Twitter got a major redesign, and people hardly freaked out at all. That might be because most of the updates appeared cosmetic, even trivial. But the project’s true aim — according to its lead designer Ashlie Ford — was to make Twitter easier for Twitter to use. And that, in turn, could mean a better Twitter for everyone, eventually.
The long-awaited revamp of Twitter.com rebuilt the desktop website from the bottom up as a progressive web app and merged it with the former mobile website. The makeover was met with a collective shrug, and scattered snorts of derision. (Did they get rid of the Nazis yet? Still no?) But the updates start to make more sense when you realize that they aren’t really about changing how people use Twitter — at least, not immediately. They’re about changing the company’s internal culture, and in doing so, paving the way for Twitter to fix all kinds of problems, large and small, in the future.
Twitter, as a company, seems to spend most of its time in various stages of existential crisis. Lately it has been rethinking everything as it tries to figure out how to address rampant harassment and hate speech and how to make its platform more conducive to civil, human conversation as opposed to dunking, trolling, and general cacophony. So one would expect that the first overhaul of its website in seven years might try to tackle these problems in substantive ways. After all, a platform’s design draws the boundaries for its use.
Instead, we got a series of seemingly surface-level tweaks that passed with surprisingly little notice, given the long history of Twitter’s loyal users reacting with nearly comical outrage to almost any significant change to the platform. (Remember the fury over threaded replies? The algorithmic timeline? The move to 280 characters?) Among the updates: The main navigation bar moved from the top of the page to the side, there are a handful of new buttons and features ported from the mobile app, and the site as a whole became cleaner and more responsive.
The changes are modest, including minor features that could prove useful, like making it easier to find lists and bookmarks, navigate direct messages, or toggle between your algorithmic and chronological timelines. But the redesign is more consequential than it appears. It might even mark a quiet turning point for a social network that has long lagged behind rivals in improving and building on its core product.
The company rebuilt the technology underpinning the website because the old one had become kludgy and outdated on the back end, making every change an exercise in bureaucracy and frustration for the company’s own software engineers.
“The legacy site was built on an old tech stack,” Ford told me in a phone interview. “It was really hard to update, and because of that, it didn’t get updated very often.” The new site, she said, “was built entirely from the ground up, and so it is much faster to prototype, experiment, and roll out new features.” It is now what’s called a progressive web app, loading faster and adapting readily to different devices and screen sizes.
In the process, it has become much more similar to Twitter’s native mobile apps, which makes it easier for designers and product managers to sketch out how an idea would work on each. Previously, the company’s changes tended to come first to its mobile apps, migrating to the web only much later. A post on Twitter’s engineering blog underscored that the redesign’s number one priority was to “make it easier and faster to develop new features for people worldwide.”
Ford said the company hopes the rebuild will not only make life easier on existing employees, but help to attract new ones. That can be critical for Silicon Valley tech firms, which compete intensely for the most capable software developers.
If they work as promised, the changes could help Twitter shed its reputation for moving like molasses while its competitors seem to be in hyperdrive. The social media reporter Casey Newton observed in 2017 that Twitter couldn’t figure out how to build an edit button, while Facebook was working on ways to let you type with your mind and hear with your skin.
Of course, the inability to rapidly test and ship changes hasn’t been Twitter’s only problem. The company has also been notoriously slow to make hard decisions, which can be a virtue, but starts to look more like negligence when users have been suffering the consequences of its inaction on the same problems for years. Empowering the company’s workers to test out ideas will only help if Twitter’s top management is willing to give some of them the green light.
Twitter has already been toying with some interesting ideas in its mobile apps. While the desktop app makes lists more accessible, a current test version of the iOS app goes even further to make them an integral part of the platform: Swiping right from the home timeline toggles between a series of “pinned” lists, making Twitter feel more like its power-user-oriented subsidiary, TweetDeck.
Twitter wouldn’t say if or when it might make that change for all users, though Ford told me the company is interested in boosting list usage, and has already seen an uptick from the desktop redesign. That shift could help to make Twitter less of a single-room shouting match and more of an interest-based network — or it could backfire by encouraging people to circulate lists intended to doxx, intimidate, or harass. Either way, the back-end changes will make it easier for Twitter to quickly test out and implement these sorts of ideas for a wider range of users, without requiring people to download beta versions of the app.
In a similar vein, the new desktop site has incorporated a change pioneered in the mobile app that allows a user to switch between multiple accounts from their home timeline. Twitter told Wired that was motivated partly by users in Japan, where it has become common to create different accounts for different interests and purposes.
Some other changes previously tested in mobile apps, such as removing reply and like counters from certain views, have not been brought into the desktop redesign thus far. But there is one change in that general direction: The website no longer displays your follower count on your home timeline, forcing you to navigate to your profile page if you want to see how you’re faring in the great popularity contest.
Critics who point out that Twitter’s big redesign has done nothing to fix its fundamental problems are correct. But it should at least make the company a little lighter on its feet from now on — so it can move on to making the sorts of substantive changes that could really make a difference. Or at least really piss people off. | https://onezero.medium.com/twitters-redesign-isn-t-about-you-3dd710b0f9e0 | ['Will Oremus'] | 2019-08-27 01:14:15.160000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Tech', 'Twitter', 'Digital Life', 'Social Media'] |
Axial — New Medicines #30. Get these analyses to your inbox —… | Get these analyses to your inbox — https://axialobservations.substack.com/ This is a newsletter for rough-around-the-edges ideas. More well thought out work can be found at — https://axial.substack.com/
Axial partners with great founders and inventors. We invest in early-stage life sciences companies often when they are no more than an idea. We are fanatical about helping the rare inventor who is compelled to build their own enduring business. If you or someone you know has a great idea or company in life sciences, Axial would be excited to get to know you and possibly invest in your vision and company . We are excited to be in business with you — email us at [email protected]
New medicines #30 — November 28, 2020 — December 4, 2020
A weekly overview of the development of new medicines.
- Enlivex Therapeutics released interim data from its phase 2 clinical trial evaluating Allocetra in severe and critical COVID-19 patients, which showed all seven patients recovered from their respective severe/critical condition and were discharged after an average of 4.7 days following administration of Allocetra.
- Histogen announced preliminary data from its phase 1b/2a clinical trial of HST-001 in male patients with androgenic alopecia did not meet the primary endpoint of a statistically significant change from baseline versus week 18 in total hairs in the target area.
- Moderna announced that primary efficacy analysis of its COVID-19 vaccine phase 3 trial of mRNA-1273 conducted on 196 cases confirmed the high efficacy observed at the first interim analysis, indicating a vaccine efficacy of 94.1%:
The data also showed that all 30 severe cases of COVID-19 in the trial occurred in the placebo group with none occurring in the mRNA-1273 vaccinated group
The company also announced the submission to the FDA of a Emergency Use Authorization, which will be reviewed by the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Thursday, December 17, 2020
- Ovid Therapeutics announced after hours that its phase 3 Neptune trial of OV101 (gaboxadol) for the treatment of Angelman syndrome did not meet the primary endpoint.
- Sutro Biopharma announced updated data from its phase 1 trial of STRO-002 in patients with ovarian cancer:
Of the 31 evaluable patients, 1 patient achieved a complete response (CR) and 9 patients achieved a partial response (PR) — 3 confirmed and 6 unconfirmed
Twenty-three patients (74%) achieved disease control at 12 weeks, while 18 patients (58%) achieved disease control at 16 weeks
- Vanda Pharmaceuticals announced after hours that the FDA has approved Hetlioz (tasimelteon) capsule and liquid formulations for the treatment of adults and children, respectively, with night-time sleep disturbances associated with Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS).
Source: BPC (reformatted), SY, Bioworld | https://medium.com/@axialxyz/axial-new-medicines-30-9e538f98c448 | [] | 2020-12-04 04:23:09.037000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Biotechnology', 'Investing', 'Healthcare', 'Medicine'] |
Five Morrissey Albums That Deserve Reappraisal | British pop icon Morrissey reached the heights of music royalty when he fronted The Smiths, the band which catapulted him to fame in the late 80’s. After the band’s demise, the much-loved ringleader of the outcasts embarked on a solo music career, which has (so far) spanned an impressive four decades.
With classic tracks such as Everyday Is Like Sunday, Suedehead, The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get and Spent The Day In Bed, Morrissey has certainly proven his credentials time and time again as one of the greatest wordsmiths of a generation. A relentless talent, the singer refuses to rest on his laurels, prolifically moving forward with exciting new works as opposed to cashing in on the nostalgia gravy train of his legendary back-catalogue as so many of his contemporaries have.
Whilst many music lovers will continuously praise the genius of his albums such as Viva Hate and You Are The Quarry, here are five Morrissey albums that you may be guilty of overlooking, and they each deserve your reappraisal…
SWORDS
Since the days of The Smiths, Morrissey has been renowned for his quality B-sides and this collection (which spans his output from 2004 to 2009) shows that the artist has lost none of his quality control over the years.
Released by Polydor in 2009, this album contains a treasure trove of recordings that sit up there easily with the artist’s best.
From Ganglords to Munich Air Disaster, this 18 track compilation is not simply for completists — it features some of his most compelling work to date. Shame Is The Name -featuring guest vocals by Chrissie Hynde- is one of many memorable standouts that helps make this album more than worthwhile for any music fan.
At the time of its release, Morrissey condemned the music industry’s obsession with marketing and campaigns rather than with the music itself. On a statement made on his own website, he said, “Even though you see the death of culture all around you, you also want to raise whatever it is you do to a higher plane, yet there is no one, it seems, who can inch the Morrissey thing forwards.”
Despite his break with his then record label, Universal, and the problems he perceived with promotion, Swords stands up as a testament to an artist who never lost his vigour for artistic growth.
YOUR ARSENAL
The third release from the Brit icon landed in the hands of his eager fans back in July 1992 from record label HMV. Although it was still early days for Morrissey, he was already stretching his wings as a solo artist and proving his worth through tracks such as You’re Gonna Need Someone on Your Side and Seasick, Yet Still Docked — a dark, sombre tale that truly captivates.
Few artists find their works covered by the music elite such as David Bowie, but this is exactly what happened in 1993, when the singer released his own version of Your Arsenal’s I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday.
It’s a fascinating rendition and a highlight of Bowie’s uneven release Black Tie, White Noise, but few could contend that it stands up to the masterful original, which is quite simply the crowning jewel of Morrissey’s 1992 album.
This album, produced by Mick Ronson, is almost 30 years old yet still sounds bold and fresh.
I AM NOT A DOG ON A CHAIN
This is Morrissey’s latest release, having landed in March of 2020. Yet the strength of the eleven tracks on this tight, flavourful album give us more than enough reason to boast it’s worth here. Morrissey’s vocals in this eclectic collection of songs — along with the deeply poignant lyrics and heartfelt sincerity — make this not only a moving, personal album, but a bloody good listen.
The title track could serve as an anthem to the singer’s outlook on life, as he defiantly sings about his refusal to conform.
“I raise my hand, I hammer twice, I see no point in being nice…”
With tracks Once I Saw The River Clean and My Hurling Days Are Done, we find the singer in an introspective mood, singing about his grandmother, his experiences of growing up, nostalgic memories and his mother, whom he sadly lost earlier this year. “Mama, mama and teddy bear, were the first full firm spectrum of time,” he sings, his voice bold but the softness of his love for the woman who raised him more than evident.
Never one for overly-saccharine, maudlin songwriting, the reflective moments are almost always tinged with his trademark dry wit: “Time will mould you and craft you / But soon, when you’re looking away it will slide up and shaft you.”
MALADJUSTED
His sixth solo studio album - released August 1997 with Island records- is a masterful journey from beginning to end. If you’ve never heard Wide To Receive, Trouble Loves Me or Alma Matters, then you have some catching up to do. By this stage in his solo career, Morrissey more than owns it.
Produced by Steve Lillywhite and with several tracks co-written with his long-time guitarist, Boz Boorer, the album came when the landscape of the alternative music scene was largely dominated by Britpop bands. As always, Morrissey’s sound remained uniquely his own, competing with no one. The album may have slipped under the radar for some, but time has proven Morrissey right for holding his own, with many of his contemporaries from 1997 slipping into relative obscurity, whilst Maladjusted sounds better than ever.
WORLD PEACE IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS
2014’s release from Morrissey almost sounds like a prophetic soundtrack to these unsettled, troubling times. Dark, political, critical and powerful, World Peace Is None of Your Business packs a powerful punch.
His sole released with Harvest Records, World Peace has a distinctly world music flavour; a rich and varied collection of songs that highlight the diversity of the artist’s sound.
Not a weak track to be found amongst the album, the sonic treasures includes Mountjoy, Smiler With A Knife and I’m Not A Man. One of the standouts-the title track itself- is a scathing criticism of our modern world and the way in which we are enslaved by governments we no longer trust. It’s very Morrissey, and makes a bold and engaging start to what is, essentially, one of the artist’s best records.
W ant to see him live? Morrissey is playing a string of dates in Las Vegas during summer 2021.
Find out more at Ticketmaster | https://fionadodwell.medium.com/five-morrissey-albums-that-deserve-reappraisal-f03d606baa8f | ['Fiona Dodwell'] | 2020-12-03 15:21:39.467000+00:00 | ['Morrissey', 'Music', 'Reviews'] |
The Worst Night of My Life | The Worst Night of My Life
Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash
I don’t think about the worst night of my life every day. I don’t even think about it regularly. Most days I live in a reality in which that night never existed. I’ve managed to create a space for myself, in my mind, in my body, in my world, that is detached from that night.
But sometimes, if the atmosphere is just right — if it’s a Friday night and I’m home alone and I’m watching the raindrops fall and splash against the neighbor’s roof — I transport. Not into that moment, but into a world in which that moment happened. When it’s Friday and I’m home and it’s raining, I live in the world that holds the worst night of my life.
It was March. Not the kind of March day that feels like spring is coming. A cold, dark March night. Spring hadn’t begun to tease us yet. And as cold and dark as it was outside, March’s gloom couldn’t compete with the shadows that had been following me.
I had thought that a February night, a few weeks before, was the worst night of my life. I had thought that my worst nightmare had come true. And it had. I just didn’t know that my worst nightmare wasn’t half as bad as what reality could cook up. That February night didn’t hold a candle to this night. Because this night was when I learned that I hadn’t hit bottom yet. I wasn’t even close.
I walked up the stairs into the apartment. I was living with my mother. I didn’t hide the tears — I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to, so there was no use in trying. My mom saw my swollen eyes and lifeless demeanor, and it scared her. I could tell she was scared, and that scared me. I remember that she was talking — to me, it was a lecture; to her, it was words of wisdom and encouragement — but I don’t have any clue what she was saying. I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t even pretend to try. My mind was consumed by its focus on the pain I was in and committed to mitigating that pain by whatever means possible. My thoughts were fuzzy, and I knew it wasn’t a good or helpful or smart move, but I quite literally could not help it. It was instinct. It was survival. I just wanted to survive the pain, and I wasn’t sure I could unless I spoke to him.
I started texting him as my mom was talking. Can you call me?
If he called me, it would look like I had to answer an unexpected call, rather than that I was making a deliberate call while my mother was speaking to me.
He called.
That signaled to me that he cared, at least enough to wonder what I was going to say, and that gave me a shameful sliver of hope that my pain might be abated.
He called, and I begged him to meet me in person.
He couldn’t. He was with people.
Who are you with?
The first two or three names were harmless, innocent. The last name on the list, tacked on like an addendum, like maybe if he said it after an assumed ellipsis I wouldn’t notice, stopped me. That name told me that my sliver of hope had quickly put me to shame. It told me that I had to put to rest any inclination I had to believe that this might still be a good man. It told me that I can never again expect him to care. It told me my suspicions were right. It also told me that all of the other names, the innocent ones, had chosen a side. They knew this was a war that could not be civil — that they had to choose. And they did.
The name on the end of that list told me that I had lost love, my friends, and my future, the one I’d envisioned for us. And then, I lost my mind.
I can’t explain it, but I thought I might die. In one quick moment — the amount of time it took to say her name — I got hit with lies, infidelity, betrayal, one friend lost, and another, and another… Wave after wave after wave without the chance the catch my breath in between.
I had to get out fast. I had to get to where they were so they could hear me. See me. Acknowledge me and tell me to my face. I needed them to see me when I was broken. I needed them know what they were doing. I kept him on the phone and walked out of my room to grab my keys. They weren’t on the table by the front door where I’d left them. I searched and searched, becoming more frantic as I turned the house upside down. Then the thought crossed my mind, and I locked eyes with my mother.
Did you hide my car keys?
I did. She responded coldly, but I knew it was insincere harshness. I knew what she really felt was worry and pain, but that she thought I’d react better to tough love. I didn’t.
Getting in my car and going to where they were was the only action I knew to take that could possibly put a little bit of control back in my hands. And the pain was so sharp and unmerciful that I wasn’t sure I’d survive if I didn’t get out of that living room as fast as possible.
I ran down the steps and out the door into the oppressively cold air. I saw my sister pull into the driveway. My mother had called her. I was embarrassed. I told her to turn around and go back home because I wasn’t going back inside. She was scared, too. That scared me. A few minutes later my dad called me. My mom and sister had called him, their last resort at calming me down. It didn’t work either. I was resolute in my decision to stay outside in the cold night.
My only hope to get to the person who I wanted to scream at was that person himself. I called him again and begged him to come pick me up so we could talk. I made it clear that I wasn’t sure my mind would recover if the pain wasn’t quickly abated.
Lydia, I’m really done.
As he said those words, a familiar car drove by. An old friend who lived a street over. She had to have seen me pacing the driveway, sobbing. I was far beyond the point of embarrassment.
Finally, the cold caught up to me. I called my friend Emily and asked her to pick me up. When she arrived, I didn’t go back inside to get my keys, clothes, even a toothbrush. I was equal parts embarrassed and furious with my mom and sister. I couldn’t see them. I climbed in the car feeling like a shell of a human, barely breathing. Then I called another friend, Brooke, and asked her to meet us. We all went to Emily’s apartment. I cried. Deeply. From the viscera. I was worried that I would never stop. My friends were so startled by the depths of my pain that they wept, too. They were scared. That scared me.
My memory of this portion of the night is fuzzy, but at some point, I fell asleep, and the worst night of my life ended. The next morning was a turning point. There was no going back. There was no more maybe this time. I knew that now. The next morning was Day One of picking up the pieces.
I still think about how much I scared everyone that day. They don’t worry so much now. I don’t cry in restaurants anymore, or go days on end without sleep. They see me smile. They hear me laugh. They think, gosh, she has come so far. They tell me it seems like I’m doing great.
They’re right, in a way. I have come far. But what they don’t understand is that night wasn’t an incident that happened in one singular point of time. It is a moment that changed me. I don’t ever get to go back to before. So, sure, I don’t cry in restaurants. But they don’t see the shadows that still linger. They don’t know about the nightmares. They have no idea that I wince every time I see a silver pickup truck. Every single time.
I don’t think about the worst night of my life all the time. But I’ve never outrun its reach. It tells me things about myself, about the world. It tells me that if I’m not careful, I might once again hurt deeply. It begs me to do all I can to avoid that. I don’t think about the worst night of my life every day, but every molecule of me is shaped by it. | https://foundinmyjournal.com/the-worst-night-of-my-life-642251d822d2 | ['Lydia Waybright'] | 2021-07-20 18:03:20.658000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'Relationships', 'Creative Writing', 'Prompt', 'This Happened To Me'] |
Top Automotive Industries Using Mobile apps | Top Automotive Industries Using Mobile apps
Top Mobile Apps that are Using by Top industries in Default and let's get to know on top New developed Automobile Industrial app by the Top mobile App development Solutions
In the current generation of digital technologies, the automobile industry has achieved tremendous growth in our daily life. Mobile applications play a key role in leading all formats of the digital world that have influenced the automotive sector and the Internet of Things, with GPS indications for locations. The following content will help you to understand how mobile is related to the automobile industry.
Whoever said good things would come in small packages never talked about the auto industry.
Do you know your car companies? Today a glimpse of the 10 largest global automakers reveals unknown compounds, automakers connecting with each other to share technology and costs, with more factories producing more vehicles.
The automotive industry needs huge economies to cope with the research and development needed to create new models and stay competitive. After record sales in recent years, manufacturers are trying to realize slower sales and manage the transition to electric and automated vehicles.
Here are the top 10 players based on their global sales volumes in 2019, as well as how they will cope with the current financial climate in 2020. Pinning down sales figures is tricky — different manufacturers report numbers differently — so the totals shown maybe automobiles and light trucks, but not heavy commercial vehicles.
Volkswagen Group — 10.8 million Toyota — 10.5 million Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance — 10.3 million Hyundai Motor Group — 7.5 million General Motors — 8.7 million Ford — 5.7 million Honda Motor Group — 5.2 million Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — 4.8 million Groupe PSA — 4.1 million Suzuki — 3.2 million
Top Mobile Apps For Drivers And Car Lovers
As a driver or car owner, you can move from one place to another without letting the spring of traffic spring surprises on you and this brings us to mobile apps or drivers.
Some mobile apps provide information on traffic and alternate routes, while others act as guardian angels to help you find your way through unfamiliar terrain.
In this article, you will see 10 mobile apps that drivers, vehicle owners, and or car lovers should have on their phones and mobile devices. Here are the top 10 apps for drivers and car lovers:
1. Google Assistant
Google Assistant is available on Android Auto and Google Maps and you can start driving mode on any Android phone with the Assistant by saying “Hey Google, let’s drive”.
This prompt is what the company calls a “thoughtfully designed dashboard” that contains driving-related activities. This app can surface a shortcut to reach your destination or play media where you left off.
2. Android Auto
Android Auto takes all the features you like about your Android-powered smartphone and puts them directly on your car dashboard by replacing the local infotainment system.
The information is displayed in a familiar, easy-to-use interface and with clear menus and large icons. The main feature of this app is Google Maps-based navigation system; It provides step-by-step directions and finds alternative routes if any traffic is detected.
3. Waze
By using Waze, you become part of a community that shares real-time information about traffic conditions and road construction. Using this app allows you to share or receive traffic information such as accidents, police traps, blocked roads, weather conditions, and more.
Waze can mine this data submitted by customers and translate it into bits that provide other road users the most convenient way to their destination 24 hours a day. It is an app created for drivers around the world and greatly enhances the driving experience.
4. DriveSafe.ly
DriveSafe.ly is a mobile application that reads text (SMS) messages and emails aloud in real-time and responds automatically without drivers touching the mobile phone. The app was created to eliminate texting while driving.
It comes with amazing features like hands-free, one-touch activation, Bluetooth, and radio transmitter compatible and optional autoresponder.
This eliminates distractions while driving and helps keep your hands on the wheels and your eyes on the road.
5. Find my car
Tired of looking at where your car is parked in the parking lot? Then download the ‘Find My Car’ app. It is a very resource application that does not require maps or network connection.
It uses your phone’s GPS capabilities to navigate back to your car or any previously visited location.
6. Drive mode: Safe driving
This app has a clean UI with bold, colorful buttons for use while driving. Its voice assistant is functional and will guide you across the dashboard if you do not want to take your eyes off the road.
The app also has a great transparency mode that allows other services to work without interruption when you switch to navigation or music controls.
7. Car DashDroid
Car DashDroid is a car home dock replacement that facilitates driving while providing the best infotainment in the Play Store. It connects and manages apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger so you can listen and reply to messages without touching the device.
The app is great for Uber or ride-sharing drivers who want to focus while driving. It comes with features like Google voice command support, speedometer, and intuitive music controls for many players.
8. HERE WeGo Maps
This app is one in every of the strongest competitors to Google Maps within the navigation app space. it’s an easy but sleek interface with mapping options around the world.
It shows you traffic information, transportation maps and you’ll customize it by saving places for quick directions. it’s liberated to use and includes a Map Creator app that enables you to form maps.
9. GPS speedometer and odometer
GPS speedometer and odometer app to measures the cars and bikes speed accurately. it’s one in all the most effective GPS speedometer apps for measuring vehicle speed. Unlike many other speedometer apps, it works in offline mode and doesn’t take quite 20 seconds to attach you to GPS, it takes 2–3 minutes to try to so like other apps.
Read for Top 20 GPS Tracking Apps For 2020
10. Google Maps
This app helps you to navigate your world faster and easier. It has mapped over 220 countries and territories and has hundreds of millions of businesses and locations on the map.
The app also gives you real-time GPS navigation, traffic, and transport information and allows you to explore the neighborhood by knowing where you eat, drink, and go — no matter where you are in the world.
Top 5 Key Features For Successful Mobile App
Listing Up The Top 10 Android App Development Services for the Automotive Industry
With the growing dependence on smartphones and support apps for every task, it is imperative that companies seek expert help from top mobile app development companies. Vehicle owners also need support apps, not only to post them on current events but also a haven to search for, buy, or sell cars at affordable prices.
This blog brings together 10 Android app development services designed specifically for the automotive industry. They have unlimited features that will benefit car lovers as well as car owners.
1. MYFUELLOG2-CAR MAINTENANCE
With a 4.6 rating, the Android app MyFuelLog 2 is a must-have for any vehicle owner’s smartphone. Refueling and car cost tracking is conveniently done, the insertion is instantaneous. Both the time and location of the vehicle are well tracked, with the main screen, logo, and the specified vehicle name being customized. This app has the ability to manage backups, restore data to cloud servers, as well as other features such as Dropbox and SD card. It allows you to create and extract reports in PDF, Excel, or CSV format for further reference.
2. Car costs
Oops !! 4.6-Star Rating ?? This Android app development service is worth a shot for virtually all vehicle owners. Car costs and diversification costs are calculated along with the add-on cost that comes with owning a car. Monthly and annual statistics are calculated and saved in the app itself. Also, statistics can be shared across other devices by first saving the data on the SD card or syncing it with the Google account and storing it as a backup.
Also read: Top 12 must-have Android apps
3. Automatic application
This is a valuable Android app if you are looking for advice when buying new vehicles. This app promises to change the whole journey, all of which are simple and quick to change. Also, smartphone users do not have to spend time trying to run dealers and are given financial guidance when making purchasing decisions. Timely news and the latest updates will keep you up to date on the automobile industry.
4. Zigwheels
Multi-utility application, Zigwheels compares old and new cars. Experts are available to assist buyers in making the right purchase decision and to connect with a large number of dealers.
5. Cartrade
Another mobile application development service designed specifically for vehicle owners. There is a list of about a thousand used and unused cars for new buyers. Thanks so much for the in-depth information about the latest or upcoming vehicles on the market and also sell your old car through the app.
6. Automobile Magazine News Apps
One of the most popular mobile apps designed especially for car lovers. The app regularly publishes news and updates, videos, and press releases related to the car world. Users can also share images that have been tested or gooey before new cars are formally launched.
7. Vehicle logger
Rated on the n Play Store with 4.2, Vehicle Lager is an Android app that offers the simplest and easiest way to create vehicle logbooks for mileage, fuel, and cost. One can create specific reports and upload them directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and more. Reports can be exported as PDF or CSV data.
8. Vehicle Maintenance Guidance
Although this particular app has only a 3.5 rating, it teaches all car and bike owners the basics of vehicle maintenance. Vehicle management knowledge saves you a lot of money and makes driving safer. Every part of the vehicle should be routinely inspected, making sure riders ride smoothly and safely at home. The app also includes guidelines and other tips for operating vehicles in good, working conditions. The app is perfect for getting advice on improved fuel efficiency, maintaining vehicle value, and ensuring safe travel.
9. Driver
One of the most powerful car apps available for Android users, Drivo tracks everything. This app has multiple features like repair, maintenance, costs, miles run, gas mileage, and more. This app is well suited for those who drive to work on a daily basis. The app also tracks expenses for the tax season and allows you to set reminders to follow up on maintenance tasks. There is another option to choose cloud backup, data sync, data export, etc.
10. Android Auto
Yours seek for the most effective automotive Android app will stop at Android Auto. Quick access to Google Maps, messaging, and music apps additionally as other utilities. There are literally some vehicles that have a built-in Android auto app. Such a useful app is on the market at no cost. Android Auto isn’t included in all told vehicles and automobiles but can be expected in automobiles within the future.
CONCLUSION
Google Play offers endless options to choose from along with the ten names mentioned here. These select automotive or car apps are the perfect choices to take up a little more space from your smartphone. Such specific service requirements have forced companies to hire dedicated mobile developers to share their experience and lend a helping hand in application building. So, if you are one of those looking for the right app build solution, consult one of the top Android app development companies before you start your journey.
Find more Top mobile app development companies around the world on Fugenx Technologies. | https://fugenxmobileappdevelopment.medium.com/top-automotive-industries-using-mobile-apps-8a7d1b3cac9b | ['Priyanka Patil'] | 2020-11-09 09:15:45.109000+00:00 | ['Automotive', 'App Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'Automobile', 'Automotive Industry'] |
“Faded” | Faded
Cross my heart and hope to die
Don’t belong to any nation
If they find me facedown on the sidewalk
Will they look at my medical bracelet
Thoughts that cloud my mind
They’re all complicated
It’s 2020
Walking downtown with a faded twenty
In my wallet
Staring at all the closed shops
Remembering the time
My fingers used to fumble through the comics
It’s ironic
How I used to hate leaving the house
Now I’m trapped
And looking for a way out | https://medium.com/brian-the-man-behind-the-pen/faded-fb1f26c06dc6 | [] | 2020-10-01 12:49:01.146000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poem', 'Covid 19', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'LGBTQ'] |
Crawling Stock Data with AWS | Introduction
This March, I was traveling in New Hampshire and spending decent chunk of my time chatting with my host Dave during dinners. He’s this kind of creative person who spends a lot of time day-dreaming. Once he mentioned this investment plan to me: “This is the biggest trouble ever hitting the US, so gold and silver prices will go up. I’m going to invest in small mining companies and they will grow 2, 5, 10 folds”
Then I decided I should try to dip my toe in the water of trading stocks. Although I didn’t expand my income by trading stocks, I do get interested in the price data generated day-by-day. Say if I want to analyze where the market is going everyday by myself, or I want to train and AI to help me make decisions, then I NEED DATA.
Today’s topic is about how to build a software to automatically fetch stock prices everyday and build a dataset from that. Here are some top-level requirements of the software:
able to fetch stock prices of current day for a set of pre-defined tickers able to store the fetched stock data for later use able to run on a pre-defined schedule: since stock market is only open Mon-Fri from 9am to 5pm
First Thoughts
Looks like the goal is pretty clear now, the next biggest problem then becomes: where to read stock prices? Google told me there are many public available API vendors which I can call to get stock data. Doesn’t the work look straight forward here? We can simply pipeline several AWS services together and looks like that should solving the problem. We can use an EventBridge rule to trigger events on a defined schedule, a Lambda Function can be written to call stock API’s, then we can just dump whatever we get to S3. This is something looks like the following diagram.
Backend Throttling Issue
However, things rarely go smoothly. After dive into public stock API’s a little bit, I realized one major constraint: throttling.
Throttling is ubiquitous, many web services rely on throttling to protect their availability against things like buggy client side code, huge traffic spikes, DDOS and more. Similarly, the stock API vendors use throttling to stop people from bringing down their servers by sending humongous amount of requests. For example, I chose to call Alpha Vantage for stock data, while it limits my traffic to 5 calls/minute. This means that I can’t call the api with the same token I have for more then 5 times in 1 minute. If I make extra calls, I will get no data but an error message saying I just breached the throttling limit.
OK, I see, so I can’t call you too fast or else I will get no data. That’s fine we can deal with it. To limit my TPM(transaction per minute, btw transaction is particularly misleading as we are not sending anything like money, but that’s sometime how people call API requests), I can simply implement wait or retry in my Lambda Function right? True, that will work, but there’s 1 issue that makes me want to think a bit deeper on my approach: cost.
Lambda Function is priced on memory-time(e.g. GB-millisecond). This means that AWS is counting how much memory your function use and how much time it takes to run. The issue with wait/retry is that the time I spend on waiting and retrying is counted into my bill. Say that my function takes 5 seconds to make the 5 calls I’m allowed, then I need to wait for 55 seconds until I can make another meaningful call. In this case, only 5 out of 60 seconds of that minute my function is bringing me value. In other words, I’m spending 12 times more money on my function.
After some napkin math, actually waiting in my Lambda Function is not a big concern on my scale, it will roughly takes my $2 to crawl 2,000 tickers per month. However, I still want to think a bit more on how I can improve this. Why? It looks like a fun puzzle to solve.
Service Orchestration with AWS Step Function
Let me summarize the requirement posed by backend API throttling:
the software only makes 5 API calls per lambda function invocation the software is able to wait for ~60s between lambda invocations
One way to approach these requirements is to use EventBridge cron rule to trigger lambda function every minute. The biggest issue for this approach is we can’t easily specify inputs for each lambda invocation, we may need a DB table to store information like which tickers are already crawled and which are not.
The approach I want to share here is the one leverages AWS Step Function. The one-liner understanding of Step Function from me: Step Function is a service helps us to build finite state machine used to orchestrate other AWS services for application logic’s needs. In Step Function, a state machine is defined using ASL(Amazon States Language). Several relative core concepts are:
State: matches common understanding of state machine, we specify what kind of work the app need to do in a state. For example, in a state we can invoke a Lambda Function(Task state), branching based on outputs from previous state(Choice state), wait for a defined amount of time(Wait state), etc. Transition: we also need to specify how our app’s states flow by defining transitions. These can be pre-defined or conditional transitions.
The magic here is Step Function offers a state called “Map” state, which allows us to input a list of items and loop through each item and use it to trigger a “inner” state machine. For example, let’s say we specify 2 batches of tickers we would like to crawl in the following way:
{"batches": [ {"batch": ["AMZN", "MSFT", "GOOG", "BABA", "XOM"]}, {"batch": ["WORK", "NOC", "PFE", "BA", "NVDA"]}]}
Map state allows us to loop through each “batch” in the above input through a state machine. In our case this state machine will consist of 2 state: “Crawl” and “Wait”. In this way, the state machine will look like the following
In plain English, the app flow is this:
LoadTickers state(Type: Task): load batches of tickers from S3(a json file looks like the above sample) RunCrawlers state(Type: Map): split the loaded tickers into individual batches, pass each batch into the following state Crawl state(Type: Task): given 1 batch of tickers, make API calls to Alpha Vantage and store results in S3 Wait state(Type: Wait): wait for 60 seconds
The end results of the above example looks like the following:
Summary
AWS Step Function is a useful service to service integration if you have multiple components and tricky dependencies in your app. AWS console provides useful visualization and trouble shooting tools for Step Function to developers. My experience of building a state machine with console is pretty seamless. In summary it’s a pretty good learning for me. | https://medium.com/@yxiao96/crawling-stock-data-with-aws-ce133c05f67 | ['Yu Xiao'] | 2020-12-20 01:36:54.125000+00:00 | ['Aws S3', 'Aws Step Functions', 'AWS', 'Fun Projects', 'AWS Lambda'] |
Why Did So Many White People Vote for “Burn It Down” Trumpism? | Why Did So Many White People Vote for “Burn It Down” Trumpism?
By Peter Montague
At last count, more than 73 million people voted to keep Donald Trump in the White House. Of these, just over 58 million, or about 81%, were white, according to a CNN exit poll. To preserve and protect democracy, we all need to understand why so many white people favored Trump. What sustains Trumpism?
Of course, most of the KKK and the Proud Boys will never change. The Tea Party is another reliably pro-Trump faction, many of them well-off and racially motivated. And most white evangelicals are rock-solid Trump supporters, many of them racist; they represent only 15% of the U.S. population but cast 44% of Trump’s ballots.
Nevertheless, a significant portion of those 72 million Trumpers are not associated with white supremacy or evangelicalism or the Tea Party; they voted against “the system,” to give it the finger, or symbolically burn it down (to quote both Donald Trump and Steve Bannon), because they and their families have not fared well during the past 40 years. They are “the laborers, the line workers, the waitresses, the janitors, the shovel holders and anyone else suffering from holding up this country… people who feel unseen, and in desperation they reach out to anyone who even appears to care about them.”
This story starts with declining public health — the rising incidence of chronic pain and early death in the U.S. population. Given advances in labor-saving technologies and pain treatments, researchers expect pain to be constantly decreasing in the U.S. However, when Princeton economist Anne Case looked at recent data, she found the opposite. Today 100 million people in the U.S. — nearly one-third of the population — report they’re suffering from chronic pain, meaning they’ve been in pain most days for the past three months. People with less education report more pain, probably for three reasons: in general, their work is more physically taxing, their lives tend to be harder than the lives of people with a college degree, but also because physical pain can reflect psychological and spiritual distress.
When Case and her husband, Angus Deaton, also a Princeton economist, looked at the U.S. county by county they found increases in chronic pain correlated strongly with votes for Trump in 2016.
Case and Deaton also found that pain correlated strongly with rising rates of early death among non-Hispanic white people in their prime years (45 to 54); paradoxically, the same was not true of Black and Hispanic people (using Case and Deaton’s terminology). This was an astonishing discovery. For many decades, deaths in rich countries have been declining about 2% per year. Now suddenly the trend had reversed among U.S. white people in mid-life, but not in other rich countries and less so among Black and Hispanic people. Something truly unusual has been happening in the U.S.
Between 1999 and 2017 in the U.S., more than 600,000 “extra” deaths occurred among white people between ages 45 and 54. That’s 33,000 “extra” deaths each year for 18 years in a row — among people in their prime years. “Extra” deaths are deaths over and above those that are expected based on age and other characteristics of the population. These deaths went unnoticed until 2015 when Case and Deaton revealed them in a ground-breaking study, which then led to their 2017 monograph and then their 2020 book, Deaths of Despair.
What caused such enormous, unexpected loss of life? After 1980, Ronald Reagan’s ideology (“government is the problem”) led to the elimination of restrictions on corporations, creating the “winner take all” economy. Corporations began sluicing money upward to executives and shareholders while hiring low-wage workers overseas, eliminating good-paying, steady jobs for Americans.
Abandoned by their “hands off” government as their jobs disappeared, more people began abusing drugs and alcohol, and committing suicide. Meanwhile the Republicans’ drown-government-in-a-bathtub ideology led to steady cuts in public health funding. The stated purpose of public health is “to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy” but to succeed it has to be funded.
Deaths of despair are deaths triggered by joblessness and stagnant wages, which in turn corrode self-esteem, family structure and community life. Two of the mainstays of U.S. community life — churches and labor unions — are both in decline. Only about a third of white people still attend church regularly, and fewer than 11% of workers belong to a union, down from a high of 35% in 1954.
Some 98 million people — more than a third of all U.S. adults — were prescribed opioids in 2015. For many people, prescriptions led to addiction, which then led to illicit drugs such as heroin and Fentanyl. In 2016, nearly 29 million Americans ages twelve and over self-reported using illicit drugs in the previous month (including misused prescription drugs) and nearly a million (948,000) reported using heroin in the preceding twelve months. “Given that these are self-reports, from people participating in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number is likely to be an underestimate,” Case and Deaton write.
Case and Deaton dug deeper into these statistics, concluding, “…the increase in pain among less-educated Americans can be traced back to the slow disintegration of their social and economic lives. And that the pain is, in turn, one of the links through which disintegration leads to suicide and addiction.”
After detailed analysis, Case and Deaton concluded that the underlying explanation for pain and despair is not poverty and not inequality. It is the proportion of the local population that is jobless. Analyzed separately, suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver disease each rise in lock step with joblessness.
The true rate of joblessness is not reported in government data; about 11% of the U.S. workforce is not employed but not reported as unemployed in official statistics because these 18 million people have stopped looking for work. Another 6 million are unemployed — jobless but looking for work. In The War on Normal People, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang writes, “What Americans who cannot find jobs find instead is despair. If you care about communities and our way of life, you care about people having jobs.”
In his review of Deaths of Despair, surgeon and public-health researcher Atul Gawande explains, for white men without a college education, wages have declined since 1979, and available work isn’t as stable, with hours more uncertain and job duration shorter.
“Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States,” Gawande writes. And: “In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees — the majority of the working-age population — have found themselves ever less valued in our economy…. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.”
“Meanwhile, people whose life prospects have deteriorated respond, publicly, with anger (sometimes cynically inflamed) toward nonwhites and immigrants, whose prospects, though worse than their white counterparts’, may have improved compared with those of their forebears,” Gawande writes. But “the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness,” Case and Deaton tell us. Hopelessness and helplessness join with pain and anger, which are also widely felt. In 2019 an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington.” Trump promised (falsely) to take down those insiders and restore power to the people.
Gawande again: “When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you. When people discover that they can numb negative feelings with alcohol or drugs, only to find that addiction has made them even more powerless, it seems to confirm that they are to blame. We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and Deaths of Despair shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.”
What makes the U.S. unique? Case and Deaton offer five reasons:
(1) Easy access to the means for suicide — opioids and guns;
(2) The U.S. has adopted automation and globalization enthusiastically with few restrictions;
(3) Displaced workers get little protection or support; the so-called “safety net” is weak and short-lived and comes with social stigma;
(4) We’ve allowed capital to take a steadily larger share of profits compared to employees, causing wages to stagnate for 40 years. Case and Deaton write, “The declining labor share means that productivity growth in the economy no longer feeds one for one into growth in wages. Not only has productivity grown more slowly since the early 1970s, but wages have not kept up with the slower growth. Until 1979, productivity growth and worker compensation grew together, but from 1979 to 2018, productivity grew by 70 percent and hourly pay by only 12 percent.”
(5) Lack of health insurance correlates strongly with suicides, and our health-care system is complicated, expensive, and peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance. Lose your job, lose your health insurance. Furthermore, the high cost of health insurance gives employers a strong incentive to eliminate low-skilled jobs. Health insurance premiums that employers pay, about $15,000 per employee each year, is a kind of perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers because health insurance is such a large proportion of the cost of a hire. “The system practically begs employers to reduce the number of less skilled workers they hire, by outsourcing or automating their positions,” Gawande writes.
When government enacts effective programs to deal with these five realities, it will eliminate much of the appeal of middle-finger Trumpism. As Nathaniel Manderson puts it, “The true path to defeating Trumpism forever lies within the blue-collar, working-class poor of this country.” Fixing these problems (starting with a program to “Electrify America!”) would make life in the U.S. better for everyone. | https://medium.com/@petergmontague/why-did-so-many-white-people-vote-for-burn-it-down-trumpism-9d4760c57ded | ['Peter Montague'] | 2020-12-10 00:55:56.314000+00:00 | ['Solutions', 'Inequality', 'Left Behind', 'Working Class', 'Trumpism'] |
3 Ideas For Writing To Focus On For 2021 in A FEW WORDS. | 3 Ideas For Writing To Focus On For 2021 in A FEW WORDS.
Ideas for writing comes from the trends we see. There are dying trends and rising trends. These are the rising trends I have spotted as a content contributor.
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash
Interpreting trends as a content contributor is important. That is where we get eyeballs for our work.
I have 3 trends to share with you.
Technology
Embracing technology is inevitable. This is the best hedge against lockdowns and stay-home policies.
The internet is our portal to the World when we are stuck at home.
Social media allows us to reach out where millions of people are. Zoom allows us to have webinars and virtual conferences at home.
Teach people to use the necessary software tools and watch our readership explode.
Mental Health.
An extreme sociopath will deny this.
The husband of my college friend recently got diagnosed with suicidal intent.
The clue was in his journal. He showed my friend.
My friend rushed him to the psychiatrist. He has been under tremendous pressure to release people from his team. It broke him.
He cannot deal with the necessary business evil.
If you can identify tell-tale signs of people in distress — Share them.
I will be thankful.
Starting A Business.
Many people will start to strike out on their own.
I see that within my inner circle.
Many people have brilliant ideas and not exposure to business realities.
Are you able to impart accounting fundamentals through your writing? If you can, you help your readers save thousands of MBA spend.
Give to receive. That is the mantra.
Happy Writing!
Aldric | https://medium.com/afwp/3-ideas-for-writing-to-focus-on-for-2021-in-a-few-words-d4348698310f | ['Aldric Chen'] | 2020-12-22 13:43:28.660000+00:00 | ['Trends', 'Self Improvement', 'Writing On Writing', 'Thinking', 'Writing'] |
Tv Streaming Full HD Online The Caged Flower (2013) Come Back Download and Wacth Free | Tv HD Online The Caged Flower
Title : The Caged Flower
Genre : Drama, History
Stars : Misaki Morino, Uta Kohaku, Shingo Ota, Yumi Fukuda
Release : 2013–11–23
Runtime : 94 min.
Production : Shimamura Hirofumi
Wacth and Download here =>>> http://123.papystream.online/movie/435941/the-caged-flower.html
Movie Synopsis:
Yoriko Jun turned Miyuki Fukashi’s sensual novel with the same name into a movie. An ordinary office lady and a boy meet on the Internet, they get into a master-slave relationship and are drowned in a world of pleasure.
The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie , The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie Online, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, Watch The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie Download, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie Streaming, Watch The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, Watch The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, Watch The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie , The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie Free, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie HD 720p, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie HD 1080p Quality, Streaming The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie, The Caged Flower 2013 Full Movie | https://medium.com/@propilaqu/tv-streaming-full-hd-online-the-caged-flower-2013-come-back-download-and-wacth-free-4548023efae1 | ['Tv Movie Online'] | 2019-08-27 06:27:31.674000+00:00 | ['Korean Dramas', 'Poetry', 'Cinéma', 'Google', 'Japanese'] |
10 Seconds of Inspiration to Wrap Up Your Week | I’d love to connect with you! May I send a brief inspirational message every Saturday morning? Visit CreateTeachInspire.com/saturday to receive messages like the ones above.
Here’s a little more about me: | https://jacquelynlynn.medium.com/10-seconds-of-inspiration-to-wrap-up-your-week-1402014b1937 | ['Jacquelyn Lynn'] | 2020-12-06 21:58:13.441000+00:00 | ['Inspirational', 'Inspiration', 'Motivation', 'Motivational', 'Inspirational Quotes'] |
Forget Bitcoin. Stop Gambling and Start Trading Today! | Forget Bitcoin. Stop Gambling and Start Trading Today!
Bitcoin is a hot topic these days. The cryptocurrency that previously held almost no value whatsoever is now the most valuable digital commodity on Earth. With 1 bitcoin priced at nearly £13,000, it’s quite understandable why people want to invest in it. And as we speak, bitcoin value just keeps rising.
But Bitcoin is also very volatile.
What this means is you never know if the price is going up or down. It’s impossible to tell with certainty what would happen to bitcoin’s value in the next few minutes, hours, or days.
Yes, you do have the potential to make a windfall profit, or in simple words a lot of money in a short time. But then again, you equally have the potential to lose all you invested. The Bitcoin bubble is due to burst any time soon, and if that happens, every Bitcoin investor will go home with a huge frown.
Now you may be thinking, “is there an alternative?” Good news for you is yes, there is one.
Trading in greyhound racing does not carry as much risk as Bitcoin does.
It’s actually a technical matter, just like any other sport. There are stats to watch out for in each greyhound, for example. Each race’s outcome is affected by current weather conditions, track conditions, and others. Knowing how all these stats affect each race will allow you to make better choices. In turn, you’ll win more of your bets.
Once you master these winning strategies, you can win consistently in any race.
This will give you a lot more earning potential than investing in Bitcoin. Moreover, it carries much less risk. So if you’re concerned about where you put your money into, greyhound racing is certainly a good alternative.
And with a proven, well-researched system to help you, the more you shouldn’t worry. The Two Trap Greyhound System will equip you to win in the races each time, every time. With these consistent wins, your dream of making money from greyhound racing will finally come true. | https://medium.com/@peterbrighttheone/forget-bitcoin-stop-gambling-and-start-trading-today-541e18d194fb | ['Peter Bright Mybiztips'] | 2017-12-17 05:34:57.703000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Sports Betting'] |
Latest Computer Vision Trends from CVPR 2019 | Doing cool things with data!
The 2019 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) was held this year from June 16- June 20. CVPR is one of the world’s top three academic conferences in the field of computer vision (along with ICCV and ECCV). A total of 1300 papers were accepted this year from a record-high 5165 submissions (25.2 percent acceptance rate).
CVPR brings in top minds in the field of computer vision and every year there are many papers that are very impressive.
I have taken the accepted papers from CVPR and done analysis on them to understand the main areas of research and common keywords in Paper Titles. This can give an indication of where the research is moving.
The underlying data and code is available on my Github. Feel free to pull this and add your own spin to it.
CVPR assigns a primary subject area to each paper. The breakdown of accepted papers by subject area is below:
Not surprisingly, most of the research is focused on Deep Learning (isn’t everything deep learning now!), Detection and Categorization and Face/Gesture/Pose. This breakdown is quite generic and doesn’t really give good insights. So next I extracted all the words from the accepted paper and used a counter to count their frequency. The top 25 most common keywords were below:
Now this in more interesting. Most popular areas of research were detection, segmentation, 3D, and adversarial training. It also shows the growing research in unsupervised learning methods.
Finally I also plotted the Word Cloud.
You can use my Github to pull top papers by topic as shown below
Papers with research on “face”
I run a Machine Learning Consultancy. Check out our website here. I love to work on computer vision projects. Feel free to contact through the website or email at [email protected] if you have an idea that we can collaborate on.
Next in the blog I chose 5 interesting papers from the key areas of research. Please note that I picked select papers that appealed the most to me.
The human visual system has a remarkable ability to make sense of our 3D world from its 2D projection. Even in complex environments with multiple moving objects, people are able to maintain a feasible interpretation of the objects’ geometry and depth ordering. A lot of work has been done in depth estimation using camera images in the last few years but robust reconstruction remains difficult in many cases. A particularly challenging case occurs when both the camera and the objects in the scene are freely moving. This confuses traditional 3D reconstruction algorithms that are based on triangulation.
To learn more about depth images and estimating depth of a scene please check out this blog.
This paper solves this by building a deep learning model on a scene where both the camera and subject are freely moving. See gif below:
Depth estimation on moving people
To create such a model we need video sequences of natural scenes captured by moving camera along with accurate depth map for each image. Creating such a data set would be a challenge. To overcome this, the paper very innovatively uses an existing data set — YouTube videos in which people imitate mannequins by freezing in a wide variety of natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene. Because the scene is stationary and only the camera is moving, accurate depth maps can be built using triangulation techniques. This paper is a very interesting read. It solves a complex problem and is very creative in creating a data set for it.
The performance of the trained model on internet video clips with moving cameras and people is much better than any other previous research. See below:
Model comparison through the paper
You can read the full paper here.
2. BubbleNets: Learning to Select the Guidance Frame in Video Object Segmentation by Deep Sorting Frames
I saw several papers on video object segmentation (VOS). This is the task of segmenting an object in a video provided a single annotation in first frame. This finds applications in video understanding and has seen a lot of research in the last one year.
The location and appearance of objects in video can change significantly from frame-to-frame, and, the paper finds that using different frames for annotation changes performance dramatically, as shown below.
Bubblenets video demo
BubbleNets iteratively compares and swaps adjacent video frames until the frame with the greatest predicted performance is ranked highest, at which point, it is selected for the user to annotate and use for video object segmentation.
BubbleNet first frame selection
A video description of the model is shared on youtube and source code is open sourced on Github.
BubbleNets model is used to predict relative performance difference between two frames. Relative performance is measured by a combination of region similarity and contour accuracy.
It takes as input 2 frames to compare and 3 reference frames. It then passes these through ResNet50 and fully connected layers to output a single number f denoting the comparison of the 2 frames. To perform bubble sort, we start with the first 2 frames and compare them. If BubbleNet predicts that frame 1 has better performance than frame 2 then order of frames is swapped and the next frame is compared with the best frame so far. At the end of processing through the entire video sequence the best frame remains. The figure below shows BubbleNets architecture and process for bubble sort.
Overall the authors show that changing the way the annotation frame is selected with no change to underlying segmentation algorithm results in an 11% increase in perform on the DAVIS benchmark data set.
Bubblenets architecture
3. 3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image
3D hand shape and pose estimation has been a very active area of research lately. This has applications in VR and Robotics. This paper uses a monocular RGB image to create a 3D hand pose and 3D mesh around the hand as shown below.
3D hand mesh from single image
The paper uses Graph CNNs to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of the hand. Here is a good introduction to the topic of Graph CNNs. To train the network, the authors created a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. Manually annotating the ground truth 3D hand meshes on real-world RGB images is extremely laborious and time-consuming. However, models trained on the synthetic dataset usually produce unsatisfactory estimation results on real-world datasets due to the domain gap between them. To address this issue, the authors propose a novel weakly supervised method by leveraging depth map as a weak supervision for 3D mesh generation, since depth map can be easily captured by an RGB-D camera when collecting real world training data. The paper has rich details on data set, training process etc. Please read through it if this is an area that interests you.
One interesting learning for me was the architecture of the Graph CNN used for mesh generation. The input to this network is a latent vector from the RGB image. It goes through 2 fully connected layers to output 80x64 features in a coarse graph. It then goes through layers of upsampling and Graph CNNs to output richer details resulting in a final output of 1280 vertices.
3D hand mesh model architecture
4. Reasoning-RCNN: Unifying Adaptive Global Reasoning into Large-scale Object Detection
Reasoning RCNN output
Object detection has gained a lot of popularity with many common computer vision applications. Faster RCNN is a popular object detection model that is frequently used. To learn more about object detection and Faster RCNN checkout this blog. However object detection is most successful when number of detection classes is small — less than 100. This paper addresses the large-scale object detection problem with thousands of categories, which poses severe challenges due to long-tail data distributions, heavy occlusions, and class ambiguities.
Reasoning-RCNN does this by constructing a knowledge graph that encodes common human sense knowledge. What is Knowledge Graph? Knowledge graph encodes information between objects such as spatial relationship (on, near), subject-verb-object (ex. Drive, run) relationship as well as attribute similarities like color, size, material. As shown below categories with visual relationship to each other are closer to each other.
Knowledge Graph
In terms of architecture it stacks a Reasoning framework on top of a standard object detector like Faster RCNN. The weights of the previous classifier are collected to generate a global semantic pool over all categories, which is fed into an adaptive global reasoning module. The enhanced category contexts (i.e., output of the reasoning module) are mapped back to region proposals by a soft-mapping mechanism. Finally, each region’s enhanced features are used to improve the performance of both classification and localization in an end-to-end manner. The diagram below shows the model architecture. Please refer to the paper to get more detailed understanding of their architecture.
The model is trained and evaluated on 3 main datasets — Visual Gnome (3000 categories), ADE (445 categories) and COCO (80 categories). The model is able to get 16% improvement on Visual Gnome, 37% on ADE and a 15% improvement in COCO on mAP scores.
Training code will be open sourced at this link. Not available yet.
5. Deep Learning for Zero Shot Face Anti-Spoofing
A lot of progress has been made on Facial Detection in the last few years and now facial detection and recognition systems are commonly used in many applications. In Fact it is possible to build a system that detects faces, recognizes them and understands their emotions in 8 lines of code. See blog here.
However there is also continuous risk of face detection being spoofed to gain illegal access. Face anti-spoofing is designed to prevent face recognition systems from recognizing fake faces as the genuine users. While advanced face anti-spoofing methods are developed, new types of spoof attacks are also being created and becoming a threat to all existing systems. This paper introduces the concept of detecting unknown spoof attacks as s Zero-Shot Face Anti-spoofing (ZSFA). Previous ZSFA works only study 1- 2 types of spoof attacks, such as print/replay, which limits the insight of this problem. This work investigates the ZSFA problem in a wide range of 13 types of spoof attacks, including print, replay, 3D mask, and so on. The image below shows different types of spoof attacks.
Face spoofing can include various forms like print (print a face photo), replaying a video, 3D mask, face photo with cutout for eyes, makeup, transparent mask etc. The paper proposes to use a deep tree network to learn semantic embeddings from spoof pictures in unsupervised fashion. Embeddings here could model things like human gaze. It creates a data set of spoof images to learn these embeddings. During the testing, the unknown attacks are projected to the embedding to find the closest attributes for spoof detection.
Read the paper for more detail about the model architecture for deep tree network and process for training it. The paper is able to create embeddings that separate out live face (True Face) with various types of spoofs. See t-SNE plot below
This paper was awesome. A promising research into tackling a practical problem.
Conclusion
It is fascinating to see all the latest research in Computer Vision. The 5 papers shared here are just the tip of the iceberg. I hope you will use my Github to sort through the papers and select the ones that interest you.
I am extremely passionate about computer vision and deep learning in general. I have my own deep learning consultancy and love to work on interesting problems. I have helped many startups deploy innovative AI based solutions. Check us out at — http://deeplearninganalytics.org/.
You can also see my other writings at: https://medium.com/@priya.dwivedi
If you have a project that we can collaborate on, then please contact me through my website or at [email protected]
References: | https://towardsdatascience.com/latest-computer-vision-trends-from-cvpr-2019-c07806dd570b | ['Priya Dwivedi'] | 2019-08-09 17:45:03.421000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Trends', 'Computer Vision', 'Data Science'] |
How to Improve User Acquisition & Conversion using Location Analytics | How to Improve User Acquisition & Conversion using Location Analytics
For app-based delivery + logistics + mobility companies where “location” is critical.
An app-based delivery company delivers whatever users order through their app right at the user’s location, anytime. On-demand companies such as food delivery companies, supply chain companies like e-commerce companies, hyperlocal delivery companies, and mobility companies all come under this category.
With all these companies, there is one thing in common: they have operations and moving assets on ground. Hence, location becomes very important as a parameter to include in strategies and decisions.
But, how can we use location analytics to increase user acquisition, conversion, and retention? Believe it or not, geographic patterns about these metrics can tell us a lot about our business and users. For example:
Not everyone who installs your app uses it or opens your app orders. In that case, is there a location where the density of churn is very high?
In this piece, we are going to discuss how we use location analytics to understand how we can improve our user acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Case 1: User Acquisition
Acquiring users in locations where there is already demand will help us reduce our CAC (customer acquisition cost). Hence, in choosing the next location where you want to expand, a good question to ask is:
Where are the locations that I already see a lot of latent demand in terms of app installs, searches, orders placed etc.?
We can use this insight to decide which area we need to establish partnerships with stores or restaurants, or where to open up a new vehicle or charging station, or which location to become serviceable in.
Similarly, if you are a mobility company with a significant percentage of power users, the next question that is crawling in your mind is:
How do these power users move and where do come from and go to?
Understanding these characteristics can determine what kind of locations and user personas we need to double down on. For example, are these users office goers or students?
Locale.ai Supply Demand Gaps
Case 2: User Conversion
At the core of conversion, is the fact that there is churn. Today, when people do churn analysis, they only look at the persona and the step of the funnel. Every user that didn’t convert is revenue lost in front of us.
However, analyzing where the churn is happening is critical because that helps us identify where we need to improve operations, provision supply, or do offline marketing.
Between when users open the apps to when he finally makes the payment for the order, there are a large number of steps that occur in between in the app.
To book a ride:
Enter destination → searching the nearest bike → selecting the bike → starting the trip.
To order food:
Select cuisine → Select restaurant → Select the dish → Checkout → Make payment
For example, a grocery company that we are working with realized that people were churning out from the ordering process once they saw the SLAs and they realize they can get better SLAs somewhere else! When we plotted the churn data, we noticed some high-density clusters in cities, and the team started focusing on provisioning more delivery partners in those areas.
Case 3: User Retention
Cohort Creation: Locale.ai
Once you convert a user, how do you ensure repeatability and retention? After all, we all know that retention is one of the most important metrics for a company as it ensures consistent revenue. But, in a world where users can switch across multiple competitors at the tap of a button and with their demands of the highest quality service, it’s harder and harder to ensure retention.
Different companies have different strategies for retention. Some companies do up-selling: Getting users to order the same catalog at a higher frequency while some companies do cross-sell: Getting users to order across different categories and catalog.
Location can help in retaining users as well be pushing very targeted promotions based on the user’s location and behavior.
For example, let’s go back to our mobility company example. Suppose we figure out that our most valuable users are students who take our vehicles from hostels to colleges. We can run a campaign subsidizing these routes!
Real Time Monitoring, Locale.ai
Out of home (OOH) advertising is also a very popular marketing strategy to nurture and retain your users and the success of this strategy depends on the right messaging and the location. | https://medium.com/locale-ai/how-to-improve-user-acquisition-conversion-using-location-analytics-c67b8f39ab97 | ['Aditi Sinha'] | 2020-09-29 20:39:57.989000+00:00 | ['User Acquisition', 'Location', 'Geospatial', 'Retention', 'Conversion'] |
Iranian Government Lags Behind on Data Regulations | The Supreme Council of Cyberspace is supposed to meet once every fifteen days to discuss and formulate policy regarding internet security, data regulations, and the like. Although it has been unable to meet since October due to the ongoing global pandemic, President Rouhani did convene the Executive Council of Information Technology on December 4. Nonetheless, the Majles has repeatedly postponed its planned discussions of data regulation legislation.
The Supreme Council of Cyberspace was formed by decree of Supreme Leader Khamene’i in 2012, is led by the president, and is comprised of the parliament speaker, head of the judiciary, ministers of education, defense, information, and other offices whose purviews include the dissemination of information and law enforcement.
Despite delays caused by the pandemic, the Majles today, 19 Azar 1399/9 December 2020, proposed a bill that would transfer executive authorities over the publication, transmission, and dissemination of data and information to the judiciary. Cited as a move intended to better protect privacy and state secrets, this would ostensibly serve to broaden the power of the judiciary to censor information on the internet.
Politically, this can be seen as an effort to take power from the presidency, and put it in the reactionary hands of the judiciary, which is engaged in a broad and ongoing effort to silence political dissent on the internet.
That being said, state media have also been publishing guides on how to prevent hacking of personal computers and smartphones. Above all else, they recommend using secure passwords, changing passwords regularly, and refraining from entering personal information on the internet, especially on unfamiliar and untrusted websites. | https://medium.com/@steventerner/iranian-government-lags-behind-on-data-regulations-ff2e88075d19 | ['Steven Terner'] | 2020-12-10 00:57:48.307000+00:00 | ['Policy', 'Regulation', 'Iran', 'Internet', 'Data'] |
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