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How does LunarCRUSH help you understand social metrics in Cryptocurrency Markets? | How does LunarCRUSH help you understand social metrics in Cryptocurrency Markets?
LunarCRUSH — Social Listening For Crypto
How do you value a cryptocurrency? Unlike traditional stock markets, cryptocurrencies do not have earnings reports, management, or borders, and markets are open 24/7.
We like to say; without a community, there is no crypto. To identify how valuable a cryptocurrency is, investors must pay attention to the traction it’s gained socially.
LunarCRUSH helps investors understand cryptocurrencies traction by listening to social media from across the web to uncover valuable crypto-specific data to make confident trading decisions.
Investors are inundated with too much data and cannot possibly see make educated decisions by scouring the web themselves. In a world where there are over 250 thousand pieces of crypto-specific content created a day, LunarCRUSH helps identify value in the crypto markets.
LunarCRUSH.com is FREE to use.
Enterprise API + Widgets are available for commercial use.
LunarCRUSH Dashboard
LunarCRUSH provides access to over 200 million collected social posts, all classified by coin using machine learning and displayed alongside unique insights. LunarCRUSH collects more than 150,000 social posts with 20,000 links per day.
LunarCRUSH supports more than 2000 cryptocurrencies. LunarCRUSH allows one to compare and share all collected metrics side-by-side on coins to determine which coins are performing better. LunarCRUSH collects data on influencers, social influencer activity and their engagement, frequency, and impact across thousands of cryptocurrencies. LunarCRUSH delivers community insights to crypto investors, funds and exchanges.
LunarCRUSH + Machine Learning = Deep Sentiment
LunarCRUSH trains machine learning algorithms to gather and access data to return back sentiment on that data. We then cross-train the machines in a never-ending cycle that allows for the most accurate return of data in the broadest data set available.
We train our machine learning based on crypto-specific data. We do not utilize standard natural language processing sentiment algorithms as we do not believe they correctly access the language used within the cryptocurrency community to express emotion.
Sentiment Ranking — How is Sentiment Ranked?
This score represents on a scale of 1–5 the average sentiment on all of the humans talking about a coin online in order to represent the general sentiment being spread about a coin.
5 = Very bullish
4 = Bullish
3 = Neutral
2 = Bearish
1 = Very Bearish
The language used in the cryptocurrency market can sometimes differ quite greatly from traditional stock markets.
For example: “Monero is currently mooning.” Is a Bullish statement. You probably will not hear an analyst on CNBC say, “Duke Energy is mooning folks!”
Bullish Sentiment Tweet by @Bitcoin on Twitter
At LunarCRUSH, we utilize machine learning to train content for it’s Bullish or Bearishness. This differentiates us from our competitors who utilize sentiment libraries that have not been trained on crypto-specific language.
Calculating Social Engagement — How is social engagement calculated?
Social engagement measures the depth of community interaction across social posts. It’s an important metric to look at when trying to determine how much participation the community has around a particular coin. All social engagement is calculated per coin across multiple social sources and excludes spam.
There are six elements that factor into how social engagement is calculated:
1. Favorites & Likes — The number of Likes on an individual social post that contains a relevant term. Likes must come from individual user accounts.
2. Comments & Replies — The number of comments from separate social accounts within a post that contains a relevant term.
3. Retweets, Quotes & Shares — Sharing of unique social posts that contain relevant terms.
4. Followers — The number of followers on the post that contains relevant terms from which engagement is occurring.
5. Shared URLs — Every time an identified relevant URL is shared within relevant social posts that contain relevant terms.
6. Karma — Reddit Karma score on individual posts.
LunarCRUSH Galaxy Score™ — What is a Galaxy Score?
The LunarCRUSH Galaxy Score™ is a proprietary score which is constantly measuring a cryptocurrency against itself with respect to the community metrics we pull in from across the web.
The goal of the score is to provide a leading indicator that allows algorithmic trading for institutional investors.
Calculating LunarCRUSH Galaxy Score™ — How is the Galaxy Score calculated?
The Galaxy Score is a combined measure of cryptocurrency indicators used to correlate and understand the overall health, quality, and performance of a specific project. In short, it indicates how well a coin is doing. The Galaxy Score can also be used as a signal when a project is entering a new territory, from very bearish to very bullish.
The overall score combines the total score of the following four key performance indicators:
1. Price Score — A score we derive from a moving average that gives the coin some indication of an upward or downward trend based solely on the market value.
2. Social Sentiment — A percentage/score of the overall bullishness or bearishness of what people are saying online
3. Social Impact — A score of the volume/interaction/impact of social to give a sense of the size of the market or awareness of the coin
4. Correlation Rank — The algorithm that determines the correlation of our social data to the coin price/volume.
Calculating Social Impact — How is Social Impact calculated?
LunarCRUSH is recording everything that is happening on social media networks in the public and private (paid) domains. We take this data and return it to you as simple, easy to understand metrics. Some of this data is simply totaled to give you an idea of volume, while other data is listened to by our machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. We return you the data based on thousands of hours of machine training taught to find patterns in sentiment.
Assessing Social Influence — How does LunarCRUSH calculate social influence?
The collection begins with crypto-specific tweets based on tuned search and filtering criteria. Social influencers with a minimum of 500 followers and at least minimal engagement on their tweets for the time period selected are taken into account. Additionally, spam filtering also takes place to reduce spammers and bots from influencer rankings.
Rankings are organized by the number of followers, engagement on tweets (retweet/quote, likes, replies) as well as by volume (number of tweets). These rankings can then be viewed across the entire crypto market (all coins) or by any coin (i.e. Bitcoin only). The number of followers, engagements, and tweets are all averaged and rank is giving to an individual social account. This logic closely resembles our AltRank calculations. We will continue to monitor and tweak our algorithms to improve our results over time.
Quantifying Correlation Ranks — How is Correlation Rank calculated?
Simply a measure of the strength of the correlation between our data and coin prices over time.
We wanted to add an emphasis on scoring if all of our indicators are moving in the same direction at one time. For example, on Galaxy Score, if our Price Score, Sentiment Score, and Social Engagement Score are all increasing at the same time, the Correlation Score will also start to increase. The exact same goes if the Scores are decreasing.
If none of our Scoring mechanisms are moving together in a direction, the Correlation Score will settle towards the center, or 2.5.
Regulating Social Spam — How does LunarCRUSH determine what social content is spam?
Spam is determined by analyzing the piece of content for parameters set through the training of the machine learning algorithm. The machine is first trained by a human, who can easily recognize a tweet that is Spam. And then the machine replicates that at a speed never achievable by a human.
Evaluating Price Score — How is a Price Score calculated?
With Price Score, we take the Technical out of Technical Analysis. Our Price Score automatically adjusts based on back-testing and the most profitable trading strategy will be derived combining RSI, Bollinger Bands, Exponential Moving Averages, and employing that into the overall score.
Price score is then scored based on the following:
1 = Very Bearish
2 = Bearish
3 = Neutral
4 = Bullish
5 = Very Bullish
Track my crypto portfolio in LunarCRUSH
You are able to input your cryptocurrency holdings into the LunarCRUSH dashboard. We recommend adding your holdings and favorite cryptocurrencies to your portfolio on your very first visit. LunarCRUSH learns about your holdings and returns more relevant data when we know a little bit more about your trading style.
For now, we think it’s easiest to manually enter your holdings. Let us know if you think otherwise and would like us to create exchange integrations. Chat or [email protected]
Analyzing News Volume in LunarCRUSH
LunarCRUSH collects the latest News article for supported coins. News volume for publications or stories written about the coin selected within the time period selected.
Analyzing YouTube Content in LunarCRUSH
LunarCRUSH collects the latest YouTube videos for supported coins. Video information is pulled from YouTube and listed on LunarCRUSH depending on the selected time period.
Analyzing Medium Post Volume in LunarCRUSH
LunarCRUSH collects the latest Medium Articles for supported coins. Medium post information is pulled from Medium.com and listed on LunarCRUSH depending on the selected time period.
Analyzing Reddit Post Volume in LunarCRUSH
LunarCRUSH collects the latest Reddit Posts for supported coins. Reddit content information is pulled from Reddit.com and listed on LunarCRUSH depending on the selected time period.
Analyzing Shared Links in LunarCRUSH
LunarCRUSH collects the latest shared links for supported coins. Shared link content information is scraped and listed on LunarCRUSH depending on the selected time period.
What market data sources does LunarCRUSH collect?
LunarCRUSH looks across the entire web for elements that will attribute to cryptocurrency insights. Cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Poloniex, Coinbase, Gemini, KuCoin, and many more are included.
LunarCRUSH Crypto Community Metrics + TradingView
Add LunarCRUSH community metrics to your existing TradingView charts. Powered by the LunarSTREAM™ real-time WebSocket API, add real-time metrics without having to adjust the user experience on your exchange or existing application.
What criteria does LunarCRUSH use to select which coins to display?
LunarCRUSH’s mission is to provide real-time human-driven insights to consumers looking to analyze and trade cryptocurrencies. In order to trade anything, the coin you want to trade must have a marketplace. A marketplace must have transaction volume in order to be a marketplace. If the coin you are looking for has multiple days of extremely low transaction volume, we most likely decided to no longer show the data in LunarCRUSH. We are still collecting and analyzing the data, and when that coin starts to increase in trading and data volume, we will automatically add the coin to LunarCRUSH. No need to e-mail us!
Why does LunarCRUSH display stablecoins?
Stablecoins are part of the cryptocurrency marketplace, therefore we’d like to show the stablecoins as part of the ecosphere of data. Some users utilize the stablecoins in their trading practices when included in a data set. Therefore until otherwise requested, we will continue to show stablecoins.
How Are Influencers Determined in LunarCRUSH?
View Twitter Influencer Activity and their impact across all coins and tokens.
All influencers are measured by the same metrics, which include followers, replies, favorites, and retweets. Metrics are evaluated across all collected posts during the timeframe selected. The actual influence will vary over time and will depend on user activity
How accurate are the predictions in LunarCRUSH?
LunarCRUSH is not making predictions on future prices. What we are doing is providing you data and insights at a speed not capable for human beings to collect, and distilling down the data to only real human insights by removing all of the spam and negligible data. We then take this data and formulate our own view of what we think is valuable. We are also providing customers with the rawest form of data to allow them to formulate their view of the world.
Additional Resources
Building a Twitter Bot to Automate Posting Cryptocurrency News with Python & LunarCRUSH
Add Crypto Community Widgets To your Website
LunarCRUSH provides advanced documentation into how to host widgets within your website.
Introducing LunarCRUSH for Developers + LunarSTREAM™
The Billion Dollar Industry Crypto’s Been Waiting For
<Our Vision/>
Our vision is a world where cryptocurrency education and research are simple and ubiquitous. Our mission is to provide the extremely passionate and talented cryptocurrency developer community the tools to build it.
🌎🔥🚀🌕 Your LunarCRUSH Team | https://medium.com/lunarcrush/how-does-lunarcrush-help-you-understand-social-metrics-in-cryptocurrency-markets-102fd9c5cb6e | [] | 2020-04-06 19:27:22.827000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Startup', 'Crypto', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
What’s the best way to whiten your teeth? | Who doesn’t want to have a bright white smile? This blog post will break down the main ways you can whiten your teeth safely and what the best, fastest and cheapest options are.
Photo by Candid on Unsplash
For the best long-term results
Professional home whitening is by far the best way to whiten your teeth. You’ll spend around 2–4 weeks wearing whitening trays with special prescription only gels at night whilst you sleep. The change in colour is gradual and once you get to the level you’re happy with you can stop.
The results from home teeth whitening will last years and to maintain the colour of your teeth, all you need to do is see a hygienist every 6 months for general cleaning and do some top-up whitening for a couple of days straight after.
Typical costs for home whitening by a dentist range from £350 — £550.
The cheapest way to whiten your teeth
There are many over the counter products that you can buy yourself, from whitening toothpaste to home whitening gel kits.
Whitening toothpaste won’t change the colour of your teeth but can be useful to get rid of light surface staining from foods, tea and coffee.
Over the counter whitening kits (such as Hi-Smile, a popular product advertised on Instagram) don’t contain enough peroxide gel so they won’t change the colour of your teeth much either, however, they will make your teeth look whiter for a short period of time by dehydrating your teeth.
These kits are much cheaper than professional whitening (starting at around £50) but you will need to use them almost every week to maintain a white smile.
The quickest way to whiten your teeth
You can whiten your teeth instantly at a dental practice that carries out in-surgery whitening. This involves sitting in the dental chair with stronger gel around your teeth and a light fixed into place to activate the gel.
In-surgery treatment usually lasts 1 hour and rapidly whitens your teeth.
The main issue with this method is that your teeth can fade back very quickly so you will want to supplement the treatment with some home whitening anyway.
In-surgery whitening is also the most expensive option with prices starting at £750.
Professional home whitening is the winner
So, the best way to whiten your teeth is to do it at home over 2–4 weeks with some prescription gel from your dentist. If you’ve got an event coming up next week and you’ve left it too late then in-surgery whitening will be the best choice.
Trying out cheaper pastes and gels will be cheaper in the short term but you won’t see a big difference in the colour of your teeth. If you do it is unlikely to last a long time.
If you want to know more about teeth whitening check out our other articles here.
Chat to a dentist for free
If you have any questions about teeth whitening, you can chat to a Nova dentist online, at your convenience for free! | https://medium.com/nova-smiles/whats-the-best-way-to-whiten-your-teeth-40df5e800f23 | ['Zaeem Jafri'] | 2021-10-28 13:08:39.970000+00:00 | ['Teeth Whitening', 'Health', 'Beauty', 'Dentistry', 'Fashion'] |
A House is not a Home | 610 North Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, California
A House is not a Home
Erased are the fingerprints marking my father’s closed door
Erased are the footprints stepping spiritlessly down the hall
Erased are the mirrors reflecting my damaged soul
Vacant before it crumbled | https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/erased-are-the-fingerprints-marking-my-fathers-closed-door-83dca9dc90de | ['Danna Reich Colman'] | 2017-07-14 06:27:34.174000+00:00 | ['Emotional Abuse', 'Nonfiction', 'Home', 'Abandoned House'] |
Adding Apple Carplay/Android Auto In F60 2017 Mini Countryman | So if you’re like me, you found a great deal on a 2017 F60 Mini Countryman. It has everything you want options wise…except it doesn’t have Apple Carplay or Android Auto. And now you’re researching to figure out if you can add it so you don’t have to spend $5k more on a newer model with the navigation package.
Google’s search results aren’t the best for this…hence why I’m writing this SEO-friendly Medium article to hopefully give you the answer faster than I got it.
Does 2017 F60 Mini Countryman have Apple Carplay or Android Auto?
No it doesn’t. Mini didn’t start including Apple Carplay and Android Auto until the 2018 models, AND they don’t offer a software upgrade for older models…I assume because they’re greedy and just want you to buy a newer model, but that’s just my capitalistic pessimism talking so maybe it’s for a legitimate reason.
Does my Mini Cooper need to have the touchscreen navigation package in order to install Carplay/Android Auto?
No, it doesn’t need it. The units I recommend below can be operated with just the xDrive controller. If you have a touchscreen navigation package, I’m pretty sure you just need a software upgrade from BimmerTech here.
What Mini Models does this work with?
The listing states it works with the F54 F55 F56 F60 aka all 2014–2018 NBT models.
What’s the difference between NBT and EVO units?
From what I can tell, NBT units are non-touchscreen older models with the smaller screen. The EVO models are touchscreen models with the wider screen.
Aftermarket Options To Add Apple Carplay and/or Android Auto To F60 Mini Countryman
You’ve got two options really…
EXPENSIVE US OPTION — Bimmertech CarPlay MMI Prime Retrofit for BMW — $650 + tax: This is the safe options. I didn’t buy it due to the price, but it’s from a trusted source and I’m sure it works. WHAT I ORDERED — AliExpress Aftermarket Apple Carplay + Android Auto for Mini Countryman — $250: I found this unit via a YouTube tutorial and due to its price, I decided to give it a shot. While a lot of people don’t trust AliExpress, I’ve bought from it quite a bit and have always had good experiences. To be honest, most of the products on it are exactly the same as what you buy on Amazon, just with an added middleman and Prime shipping up-charges. Is the Chinese government stealing all of your data and using it somehow? Who knows? Does it work and cost $400 less than the US alternative? For sure.
Can I Install the Apple Carplay Unit On My Mini Cooper Myself?
Yes, you can. Just follow the YouTube Tutorial video here.
I’m a tech person and know nothing about cars, and did it without issue in about 2 hours — most of which was me pulling out cables super slowly because I was worried I was going to break something. The unit comes with everything you need aside from a T20 Torx Screwdriver.
That video tutorial pretty much covers everything you need to know. Here’s a few other tips…
Watch this video tutorial on how to easily remove the head unit. The main video says it’s hard, but doesn’t point out that you can release the pressure easier with a screwdriver from up top like this other one does. You don’t need to include the external video cable that comes with the unit if your car already has a rear-view camera built in. I’d recommend getting some stick-on velcro or wall hanging stick and attaching the Carplay unit to the original unit on the inside. If not, the unit will just slip down into the abyss below. I don’t know what’s down there, and it may be okay, but my anxiety couldn’t risk it. It likely won’t require a software update. My unit worked right after I installed it, and I didn’t need to reach out to the seller for a separate USB software update.
Is Apple Carplay worth installing?
100% yes it is so worth it. Here’s why…
Navigation: Your default screen is split between live maps navigation and the music that’s playing. If this was the only thing it did, I’d still think it was worth it as it improves the driving experience so greatly. Siri: Just say “Hey Siri” and you can talk like you’re talking to your phone. It directs to all apps, can start playlists, update your navigation, etc. Spotify & Other Music: Mini’s App connections are hard to even find, let alone utilize. This makes it so easy to navigate between music apps, find playlists, and more. Texting: First off, don’t text and drive, but with Carplay it’s way safer though. When texts come in, Siri will read you the text out loud and then record your response through the car mic, translate it to text, and send it. Wireless Connection: You just get into your car and Apple Carplay connects wirelessly. The UX is seamless and so satistfying.
Any downsides?
Once in a while, the unit doesn’t start up right away when I turn on my car and I’ve had to restart my car to get it on. Also, once in a while if I reverse too soon after I turn on the car, it goes to the regular interface after the rear-view camera shuts off. Using the xDrive knob for navigating the OS is easy, but definitely not as good as having a touchscreen. At $250 vs $2–5k more for a newer year or a model with the Mini Technology Package though, it’s a steal and still super easy to use.
In Conclusion
I highly recommend the upgrade. Carplay is a massive improvement to the driving experience, and retrofitting your car is much cheaper than buying a newer model. | https://medium.com/@vosters/adding-apple-carplay-android-auto-in-f60-2017-mini-countryman-9afab5490a30 | ['Mike Vosters'] | 2020-12-25 22:45:50.694000+00:00 | ['Android Auto', 'Apple Carplay', 'Cars', 'Mini Cooper', 'Mini Countryman'] |
Wordpress SQL Injection, Making Wordprss vulnerable to SQLi (Capgemini Tech Challenge 2020) | Note: ORACLE specific SQL injections are at bottom.(Ctrl + F and search for “ORACLE”)
Hi, I have recently participated in a Penetration testing hackathon. This one is my proposed solution for the question given below, In short we first add the vulnerable SQLi code and then exploited that :(:
Question:
Assume you have been hired to test the security of a WordPress website: victimblog.com. You do not have access to the victimblog.com source code. Nevertheless, WordPress is a popular and well documented PHP-based Content Management System (CMS), which also allows inexperienced users to have blogs or personal websites. WordPress allows you to create different levels of privileges for users, including administrator privileges (e.g., to add or remove articles), and regular user privileges (e.g., to just post user comments in the blog).
You notice that there is a “Search” input textbox, which allows you to search for articles in
victimblog.com. Upon inspection, you notice that the search terms are passed to the server via an HTTP GET parameter named “search”.
Write an SQL injection (SQLi) which allows you to view all the information of the registered users. Specify also how could you identify the WordPress table names. Also, write at least two preconditions for a successful SQLi in the search bar.
At first I thought I had to find a SQLi in wordpress. So I just downloaded latest wordpress and started looking for SQLi but then I realized
I was trying to find a SQLi in latest wordpress which could get me a CVE if I succeeded, but then after reading question properly 4–5 times. What I understood was, here we need to recreate the given scenario:
Proposed Solution:
First I will be showing the steps to setup LAMP stack and installing latest WordPress 5.5.2 . I have used docker to host LAMP stack and directory of wordpress app is mapped to a directory on container using -v or –volume, this option allows us to mount a directory of host OS on the container.
1. Running docker container
docker run -p “80:80” -v ${PWD}/app:/app mattrayner/lamp:latest-1804 (PWD in my case is /root/Desktop/app)
(Here docker image will be first downloaded if it does not already exist, you can check downloaded images by docker image ls . You can find more details regarding versions of LAMP here https://hub.docker.com/r/mattrayner/lamp .
Here I got:
Apache: 2.4.29
MYSQL: 5.7.26
PHP: 7.3.6
phpMyAdmin: 4.9.0.1)
Fig. 1 Running docker continer
2. Installing wordpress :(Wordpress has some prerequisites i.e LAMP stack that’s why I did that in my last step)
a. Download the latest wordpress zip to /root/Desktop/app.
Wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
b. Setting up database named “wpdb” via phpMyAdmin.
i. First we need to know credentials for MySQL which can be seen when we started the container.
admin:hUrFylBqRXD1
ii. Finding IP address of container(optional step: this is required if there is no mapping of 80:80 i.e port 80 on host OS is maaped to port 80 of container.)
Finding Container ID via docker container ls (Fig.3) then retrieving IP address via docker container inspect — format ‘{{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}}’ <container id> (Fig.4)
Fig. 3 Finding Container Id
Fig.4 Finding IP address of container
iii. Then we login to phpMyAdmin using these to create new database for wordpress.(Fig. )
Fig.5 Creating new database
c. Installing Wordpress:
i. Creating a admin account. (Fig.6 and Fig.7)
Fig. 6
Fig.7
3. Making it vulnerable to SQLi
Now according to given scenario there is a “search field” for searching articles which is vulnerable to SQLi. So we need to either edit a existing theme or create a new theme from scratch. I have edited the existing “twentytwenty” theme. Steps are as follows:
(Make sure you are logged in wp-admin console with admin creds you have created in previous step)
a. Editing theme
Copy paste this link (“http://127.0.0.1/wp-admin/theme-editor.php?file=index.php&theme=twentytwenty") directly to be able to edit “/index.php” Location of this on drive is “/root/Desktop/app/wp-content/themes/twentytwenty/index.php” we can edit directly edit here also.
Mysql php code:
<?php $dbhostname='1.2.3.4';
$dbuser='username';
$dbpasswords='password';
$dbname='database'; $connection=mysqli_connect($dbhostname, $dbuser, $dbpassword, $dbname);
$query="Select Name, Description FROM Products WHERE ID='3' UNION SELECT Username,Password FROM Accounts;"; $results=mysqli_query($connection, $query);
display_results($results); ?>
$search= $_GET[‘search’]; //print_r(“Param s=”.$s.” “); $conn = mysqli_connect(‘localhost’, ‘admin’, ‘3gtTP6AdK2TW’, ‘wpdb’); if (!$result = mysqli_query($conn, “select * from wp_posts where id=$search”)) { echo(“Error description: “ . $conn -> error); } else { $result = mysqli_query($conn, “select * from wp_posts where id=$search”); //echo “Returned rows are: “ . $result -> num_rows; $jsonArray = array(); while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) { $jsonArray[]= $row; } echo json_encode($jsonArray); }
Fig.8 Theme editor
b. Add vulnerable code
Now we need to add vulnerable code which will parse our GET parameter named search and then gets incorporated in our SQL query as it is without any sanitization or escaping
c. Adding Search box
Till now we have made changes in our backend. Now we need to make changes in frontend to add HTML form for our vulnerable search field.
i. For this I have used “Customize widgets option” available in appearance option and added form in Footer#1.
Fig. 9 Adding Widgets
ii. Then added my custom html form here (Fig.10 )
<html> <body> <h3>Search articles</h3> <form action=”/index.php” method=”get” target=”_blank”> <label for=”fname”>Search box:</label> <input type=”text” id=”fname” name=”search”><br><br> <input type=”submit” value=”Submit”> </form> </body> </html>
Fig.10 Custom HTML
Fig. 11 Checking the HTML form
4. Now we are ready to exploit our SQL injection.
(Note: This might be hard to explain but I am trying my best. I am showing exploitation of UNION based SQLi)
a. Step 1- Finding injection point:
i. ‘
ii. “
iii. \ (output of this shows that in backend query looks something like this: select <something> from <something> where <something>=search_parameter and <something>; . In short this means parameter is being added as it(like id=1) not as (id=”1”) or (id=’1’) )
Fig. 12 Finding injection point
b. Step 2- Balancing or fixing the query.
Query used: http://127.0.0.1/?search=1%20%20--+ (From last step we know backend query is something like this id=1)
i. 1--+ (passing this fixed our query)
Fig .13 Balancing the query
c. Step-3- Finding number of columns.
There are two methods for finding no of columns which I am aware of 1. ORDER BY <no_of_columns> and 2. ‘ UNION SELECT NULL — . Here in this case I have used order by method. Till column 23 I was able to retrieve the results of query. By increasing it to 24 and more, I started getting error, telling no of columns in the current table are indeed 23. So now I can move to next step of fetching table values.
i. http://127.0.0.1/?search=1+order+by+23--+
Fig.14 Finding No of columns
ii. http://127.0.0.1/?search=1+order+by+24--+
Fig. 15 Got error meaning 23 columns were there.
d. Step 4-Findings name of table and name of columns containing relevant info :
Now we can proceed to fetch information from table but for this we need to know table structure i.e what type of information is there and from which table we need to fetch the information. As an attacker by doing some enumeration using online tools like builtwith.com(Note: this will not work as web app is locally hosted.) or using extension like wappalyzer we can find that this is wordpress site.
Fig. 16
With this information we can look for database structure used by wordpress and as wordpress is well documented it is a piece of cake to get it just by a google search. I have found this here https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description
Now according to Question we need to find information of registered users. By referring to database documentation attacker can find this info is stored in table named wp_users also in docs info related to columns and information they contains is explained very well this helped a lot in creating my query. https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table:_wp_users
e. Step 5- Constructing the query and fetching information:
For this we need to know how UNION works in sql. You can refer to this https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_union.asp
Main points for using UNION are:
i. Each SELECT statement within UNION must have the same number of columns.
ii. The columns must also have similar data types.
iii. The columns in each SELECT statement must also be in the same order.
Keeping these in mind I have created this query:
Fig 17.
This is the solution of first question of Scenario 2. Lets solve second one which is to identify table names in wordpress.
f. Identifying table names:
For this also we can simply refer to wordpress documentation or use the query given below:
information_schema is a standard database which can be used to fetch meta data. It is an ANSI-standard set of read-only views that provide information about all of the tables, views, columns, and procedures in a database.
g. Preconditions of SQLi in searchbox:
i. User input must be passed as it to the backend SQL query, means there should not be any input validation, sql escaping, filtering etc.
ii. No security plugins like Sucuri(https://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner/) or WAF(Web application firewall Note: It can be bypassed but having this is good practice) should be installed.
Thank you for reading! | https://medium.com/@pswalia2u/wordpress-sql-injection-making-wordprss-vulnerable-to-sqli-capgemini-tech-challenge-2020-db0a97f926d5 | [] | 2021-09-04 17:27:35.546000+00:00 | ['Capgemini', 'Penetration Testing', 'Sql Injection', 'WordPress', 'Bug Bounty'] |
How to Implement HyperLog With Kotlin in Android | How to Implement HyperLog With Kotlin in Android
A detailed guide on how to implement HyperTrack/HyperLog and log data to a remote server with Kotlin
Photo by Farzad Nazifi on Unsplash.
Logging is necessary when a developer needs to debug the issue in any part of the code. In Android, we have Log, which is super useful when it comes to looking for any error in the code. If you want to see or save the logs remotely to your server, then HyperLog is one of the popular options, as it’s built on top of Log.
Now, there are numerous blog posts that can help you understand what HyperLog is and how it works (like this one) using Java. Today’s article is a detailed guide for implementing it using Kotlin and an exploration of its features, so if you are struggling to understand it or convert the Java code to Kotlin, then this should clear things up.
Once the library is added into the dependencies in the build.gradle file of the application, you can start recording the log messages and push them to the remote server through the following code snippet:
Sample code snippet for HyperLog implementation using Kotlin
The code snippet above is from the launcher activity of an application where HyperLog has been initialized. The log level is set to show which type of logging will be done further. After specifying the log type with its tag and message, the URL has been set to validate the pushing of logs to the remote server (in this case, RequestBin). After the logs are pushed, either through a file or in plain text, the callback methods of success and error complete the task.
Below is a detailed guide of the HyperLog library in Kotlin. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-implement-hyperlog-with-kotlin-in-android-21f34a950c83 | ['Nishchal Raj'] | 2020-07-10 09:41:49.025000+00:00 | ['Logging', 'Kotlin', 'Android', 'Mobile', 'Programming'] |
How to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant & Save 10+ Hours a Week | 1. Document step-by-step instructions in a Google doc
Writing step-by-step instructions gave me a sense of how long each task should take.
Take podcasting. To produce Entrepreneurs Can Party, there are a bunch of tasks. These include promoting episodes on social media, emailing guests, and guesting on podcasts.
Now, I have a Google doc that documents every single task. My VA can access it anytime, and each task is broken into steps. For “producing a podcast”, there are over 30.
Documenting these steps out was the most tedious thing I’ve ever done. Now it’s in place, though, I’ll never spend time training future VAs.
You don’t have to write them down. One of my previous podcast guests does screen recordings using Screencast-O-Matic. He then links to these tasks in a Google Doc.
His VAs can find these training videos in one place and watch them in their own time.
All images by the author
2. Write a Day One Orientation Document
This document gives instructions to your VA on their first day of work. It tells them what tools to download, what documents to read, and an overview of your rules.
At this stage, it’s helpful to think about money. How much are you willing to pay? Will it be on a monthly basis?
Although it’ll feel a long way off, it’s important to consider these questions before you hire. You’ll be able to put the right systems in place.
3. Write a first-day email
You can send this to your assistant when they start working with you:
4. Load tasks into Asana
Asana helps teams organise, track, and manage their work. I’ve used their free plan from the beginning.
Similar platforms include Monday.com and Trello. You could also Notion or Clickup.
5. Create an account on onlinejobs.ph ($69)
I’m not affiliated with onlinejobs, but I wish I was with all the people I send their way!
I used onlinejobs.ph for a number of reasons:
Many VAs in South-East Asia are loyal, dependable, and well-mannered. They also speak excellent English. Because of the low costs of living in South-East Asia, wages are cost-effective. The time zone difference means I wake up to completed work from my VA.
It’s worth noting there’s a monthly fee of $69 for full access to the platform. (You only need it for a month.)
I’d recommend paying. It means you have more control over the hiring process and can message applicants directly.
If the fee’s an issue, you may want to use a different platform. Fiverr and Upwork are popular choices.
Here’s how I summarised the choice to one of my Udemy course students:
6. Post a job on onlinejobs.ph
Here’s a link to the job I posted in April 2020.
At the top, it specifies I’m looking for someone on a part-time basis. The salary is $200-$250 a month.
In the job overview section, I provide details and perks of working for me. I wanted to attract the best talent. For example, I made it clear the VA could work whenever they want. They would also have the opportunity to learn new skills.
I also gave instructions on how to apply. This separated those who tailored their applications from those who bulk responded.
By asking them to change the subject line, I was able to discount half of the applicants (over 20 people).
7. Create a sample project in a Google doc
Once I posted the job, I created a sample project. This contained four mini-projects.
I asked candidates to complete the mini-projects 24 hours before our interview. (I only sent the sample project to applicants who’d completed the previous tasks.)
The four mini-projects included:
Testing their internet speed. I wanted them to use speedtest.net and attach a screenshot. Internet speeds in South-East Asia can be slow, so I was looking for upload speeds over 5 MB. Producing a one-minute audio clip of them talking about their favourite hobby. This tested their audio-editing skills. Finding a specific piece of information from my website. This tested their ability to follow simple instructions. Including a link to their onlinejobs.ph profile. (Not really a project.)
8. Send a pre-interview message through onlinejobs
Once I received an application, I sent the candidate a pre-interview message.
This message provided a link to the sample project. I also asked them to select an interview slot from a Google Sheet (which I linked to).
Finally, the message informed them of the following: I’d only interview them if they’d completed the project to a good standard. It also had to be completed at least 12 hours before their scheduled interview.
As the sample projects poured in, I reviewed each one. I also kept an eye on the interview timetable to make sure there weren’t any clashes.
Having an interview timetable means you can batch your interviews in one day. I interviewed seven people back to back, giving myself a 15-minute break between each.
I’d recommend scheduling the interview day at least a week after you post your job. This gives candidates enough time to submit their applications.
9. Interview selected applicants
After whittling down the applicants, I conducted interviews over Zoom. Here are the questions I asked.
Some of the questions were practical, such as “tell me about your last job?” Others were more conversational: “If you could have a conversation with anyone — living or dead — who would you choose and why?”
Here’s what I made note of:
Did the applicant turn up on time? Note: Being an hour early (as one of my applicants was) and staying in the Zoom waiting room is just as bad as being late. In my opinion, candidates should be no more than ten minutes early.
Note: Being an hour early (as one of my applicants was) and staying in the Zoom waiting room is just as bad as being late. In my opinion, candidates should be no more than ten minutes early. How prepared are they? The VA I hired gave good answers and dressed smartly.
The VA I hired gave good answers and dressed smartly. Can you see yourself working with this person? This is one of the most important questions!
10. Respond to applicants after the interviews
Once the interviews were over, I knew who I wanted to hire. These were the next steps.
I messaged back the applicants I knew for sure I wouldn’t be hiring.
I thanked them for their time, gave them feedback, and wished them luck in their search.
I emailed the VA I wanted to hire
Once she accepted, I also messaged the applicants I had on my reserve list to tell them the bad news. I gave them feedback too.
I emailed my new assistant again after she accepted
I told her the good news!
11. Onboard your new assistant
I made it clear to my new assistant that she didn’t have to complete anything before our first meeting.
However, she’s the best! She checked the documents and emailed a day later with the following:
We had our first meeting on Monday. In it, we made sure she had everything set up. It took us less than twenty minutes.
These days, I spend less than 30 minutes a week communicating with my VA, either over Zoom or email. She also sends me a daily report. This details the tasks she’s done, how long they took her, and any notes I need to be aware of.
Below is a typical example. I’ll usually reply with something like, “Thanks for this. It looks great!”
We also have a weekly check-in. This Zoom call takes less than 15 minutes. It gives us an opportunity to raise any questions, schedule changes, or flag concerns.
They’re very informal. We usually spend the first five minutes catching up.
The First Week
I recommend keeping your schedule as clear as possible for the first week.
Why? You’ll want to provide your assistant with feedback, and this can take time.
I try and give feedback on tasks as soon as I can. It’s not always possible, but I aim for less than twenty-four hours. This way, my VA can quickly make amends.
I also recommend the “sandwich method”. I begin feedback with praise, layer improvements inside, and round it off with more praise.
It’s worth noting you don’t have to give feedback on everything. Once you get into a routine, your daily communications can be as simple as, “Your work today was great!”
By providing constructive feedback from the beginning:
1: It’s less likely your VA will make the same mistake twice. This will save you both time in the long run.
2: Providing detailed feedback signals you’re serious about the relationship.
3: You’re developing their skills which VAs will appreciate.
The first week is also a good time to finalise systems. For example, it took us a while to find a company to send money to Vietnam.
We also tweaked the work I gave each day. Initially, I spread it over the week. Now, it works better for us to front-load and not work on the weekends. | https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-outsource-to-a-virtual-assistant-save-10-hours-a-week-f804abbb3746 | ['Scott Stockdale'] | 2021-09-10 08:31:08.364000+00:00 | ['Outsourcing', 'Virtual Assistant', 'Productivity', 'Money', 'Startup'] |
Creating an Azure Kubernetes Cluster (AKS) with Managed Identities | By default AKS cluster is created with a Service Principal. Clusters using service principals eventually reach a state in which the service principal must be renewed to keep the cluster working. Managing service principals adds complexity, which is why it’s easier to use managed identities instead. Managed Identities are essentially a wrapper around service principals, and makes the cluster management simpler. Credential rotation for managed identities (MI) happens automatically every 46 days ( Azure Active Directory default setting).
Prerequisites
Valid Azure Subscription.
The Azure CLI, version 2.15.1 or later
Let’s get started
# Create an Azure resource group
az group create --name myResourceGroup --location westus2 #Create an AKS Cluster with MI
az aks create -g myResourceGroup -n myMIAKSCluster --enable-managed-identity
Use the following command to query objectid of your control plane managed identity:
az aks show -g myResourceGroup -n myMIAKSCluster --query “identity”
Once the cluster is created, you can then deploy your application workloads to the new cluster and interact with it just as you’ve been doing with service-principal-based AKS clusters.
Finally, get credentials to access the AKS cluster:
az aks get-credentials — resource-group myResourceGroup --name myManagedCluster
You can also update an existing AKS cluster to managed identities. This is in preview though.
az feature register --namespace Microsoft.ContainerService -n MigrateToMSIClusterPreview az aks update -g <RGName> -n <AKSName> --enable-managed-identity az feature register --namespace Microsoft.ContainerService -n UserAssignedIdentityPreview az aks update -g <RGName> -n <AKSName> --enable-managed-identity --assign-identity <UserAssignedIdentityResourceID>
Note: Once the system-assigned or user-assigned identities have been updated to managed identity, run the following on your nodes to complete the update to managed identity.
az nodepool upgrade --node-image-only
When I work with customers on AKS best practices Creating AKS clusters with MI is one thing that I always recommend. This best practice is often overlooked by most of our customers.
References
Pls review the limitations https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/use-managed-identity#limitations
Managed Identities in Azure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/managed-identities-azure-resources/overview | https://medium.com/@kumar-allamraju/creating-an-azure-kubernetes-cluster-aks-with-managed-identities-49e70c0cc4c0 | ['Kumar Allamraju'] | 2020-12-19 16:38:59.771000+00:00 | ['Managed Identity', 'Aks', 'Azure'] |
And Then, Mike Bloomberg | -CNN image
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 20, 2020
It is said that one needs a pretty big ego to run for president, what with all the pomp on the one hand and all the politicking needed on the other.
Still, it has been bracing even to other politicians, even to all the Democratic presidential candidates, even to Donald Trump to see the chutzpah of Mayor Mike Bloomberg to spend a reported $420 million to date for his late entry into the presidential sweepstakes to present a buffered and polished version of his own self to the field — to say nothing of earning himself seemingly substantial polling success.
So, when it turned out that billions of bucks indeed could change the debate rules enough to allow Bloomberg onto the debate stage, the pundits fell over themselves to hype the attack-from-all-others scenario for last night’s joint appearance before the Nevada caucuses this weekend.
That, of course, is what television journalism and the debates seem to be about — being the first to identify winners and endlessly setting up for drama over the prospects of electoral success or loss. We were said to be breathlessly awaiting attacks that acknowledged Bloomberg’s history bad-mouthing women, and stopping and frisking young black and brown New Yorkers with abandon, and buying his way with his billions to take on the (maybe) fake billionaire Donald Trump — attacks that pit “socialist” Bernie Sanders and regulation queen Elizabeth Warren against Bloomberg as defender of Big Money.
So, how’d it go, and what was there for any of us perhaps to learn?
*
It took about a minute for the first blows about the possibilities of trading one arrogant billionaire for another, for the other candidates to use Bloomberg’s record against him, and to remind him that they already are candidates not ready to step aside just because he showed up. For the record, Bloomberg came across as overly, if necessarily defensive, and basically struggling to project anything close to dominance.
The sharpest knives that Bloomberg faced were from Elizabeth Warren on issues related to women, from Bernie Sanders on Bloomberg’s wealth and Republican past, from Joe Biden on stop-and-frisk (with some errors along the way), and Amy Klobuchar on his Johnnie-come-lately status. Mayor Pete did the best job of keeping a debate eye on Trump rather than Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s presence was not the only source of dynamite in the room. Increasingly pressured candidates turned on one another to remind voters of the primacy of the other campaigns on stage. To promote themselves, it seemed necessary for each candidate to have to call out another on the stage.
Beneath it all, what presented itself as conflict of personality and policy masked a deeper discussion over income inequality, philanthropy and the future of capitalism, for example. “Socialism” was on trial with “regulated capitalism,” with a strong dose of populism being added to a prescription for change that is more evolutionary. That’s how to put the best face on the positioning over health care, banks, union benefits and other financial topics that arose. The oft-repeated refrains of Medicare for All was a stand in for a broader restructuring of regulation and profiteering under capitalism; at the other end was Bloomberg, a self-recruit just this week to regulating banks and taxing Wall Street, having to defend his newly hatched ideas to fight millionaires and billionaires.
Bloomberg managed to draw groans at one point by answering Bernie with sarcasm about how a Sanders nomination would guarantee a Trump reelection by promoting “communism.” That, in turn, prompted Bernie to denounce “socialism for the rich.”
Some topics, including Climate Change, won universal applause on stage, making it unclear exactly why it was a debate topic. There were differences only in how far, how quick and how to help workers who will be displaced.
Move aside all the hand-waving, and what you had was a nicely feisty stew of disagreement about how to structure change in this country. But once again, the candidates as a group forgot to underscore sufficiently that Donald Trump is against everything that they were arguing about.
*
In the end — all spin aside — the night’s biggest winner probably was Donald Trump, who could take glee in seeing disagreement among the Democratic field while his array of opponents turned on one another.
The Democrats disagreed among themselves not only about who would present the best case to unseat Trump, but also about how to determine who can boost turnout and about what case to present.
Anyone hoping that Bloomberg’s arrival on the scene would allow for a new view for Democratic leadership was probably sadly mistaken. Bloomberg was not the most knowledgeable candidate on stage, nor the most exciting, nor even the most believable. If anything, Bloomberg left an impression that he is aloof, just putting up with a necessary debate with lesser beings, and is thin-skinned about criticism from other candidates.
There was nothing wrong, really, about Bloomberg’s policy prescriptions, but the reason for his candidacy seems mostly to be because he lacks confidence in the others on stage.
As Mayor Pete said, it is great that Bloomberg is supporting Democrats as well as gun control and climate change efforts with his deep pockets, but there is no reason that his money should necessitate that he become President.
Debates are useful for helping to highlight difference, of course, but they don’t substitute for providing a rationale for why we want one candidate over another.
##
www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com | https://medium.com/@terryschwadron/and-then-mike-bloomberg-393d9c3059ef | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2020-02-20 11:59:35.427000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Democrats', 'Bloomberg', 'Debate', 'Fight'] |
digital clutter -#LetItGo. Apart from dresses and shoes, I don’t… | Apart from dresses and shoes, I don’t like to own much stuff; I prefer to have only things that relate to who I am as a person, and I can easily detach emotionally and get rid of things.
Reading and watching Fight Club was one of my eye-openers here, and I can never forget the very famous quote:
The things you own end up owning you
By no means am I a minimalist; I don’t count my things, nor do I raise the question, if a pair of socks is 1 or 2 items or if a complete drumset is 1 or 21 items. I do not find value in those discussions. But I think it’s worth investigating the impact of things in my life. And when I do so, I realize that apart from the things I have and heavily use, there is also clutter, AKA stuff.
What is stuff?
Stuff is every item that you keep for the sake of having it. Perhaps it served a purpose when you bought it, found it, or when someone gave it to you, but now you don’t have any use for it any more than just owning it. Some examples?
• the ugly mug that was a present from a college friend — you keep it because it reminds you of that friend. Last contact? 14 years ago.
• the nice mug that doesn’t fit all your other mugs, and you stopped drinking coffee — last use of that mug? Well, you first needed to dust it off…
• the books you bought that only serve as a credibility bookcase for your Zoom calls
This list could be a lot longer, but I will leave it by that as I think you got the idea of what I am talking about.
negative impact of hoarding
Technically, we know that clutter isn’t good for us. Clutter, both analog and digital, keeps our space, money, energy, and focus. It draws our attention from the things we want to DO to the things we HAVE. While a bit more space makes up room for new experiences and where we want to grow, a full space makes change and growth impossible as all areas are already occupied. Clutter shifts our drive from acting and growing to having and hoarding. And this represents living in the past or unrealistic mental images of yourself:
• You own a lot of sports gear but don’t exercise with them regularly? Then you just fell in love with the idea of being a sporty person, but you aren’t sporty.
• You have a whole collection of musical instruments but never play them? Then it is more your idea of being a musician that you like to become a reality than it represents who you are.
• Is your bookshelf full of books you never read? Well, still a great scene for your virtual meetings, but other than that: You fill up space in your surroundings to fill the void inside of you.
As clutter takes much space, there is less space for the things you love, which truly represents who you are. Why do we give things that don’t relate to our lives so much room?
Why do we keep everything?
Just in case. In case of what? In case we need it.
Although most of us grew up in the great luck of not having to experience any deficiency or lack of things they desperately needed; still we were raised with some beliefs, like ‘keeping stuff even for unlikely events is a good thing.’ We even have dedicated rooms in our houses for ‘stuff that we don’t regularly use’ like attics and basements. Storage room seems to be a significant advantage, even bigger than having room for yourself. All this represents your past, which you still want to hold in your hands. I am not talking about precious memories like family photos or practical things you need and use a few times a year (like a waffle maker or a drill). I am talking about the stuff we keep because something in us isn’t ready to let it go:
We keep stuff:
• for ourselves (in case I ever fit again into that jeans from 1992) → represents an unrealistic mental image of yourself and shows that you didn’t let go of what’s already past
• for others (these baby clothes will someday be for a kid in my extended family) → projection
• when we can’t admit that we failed in doing something (in case I restart to play chess which I lastly did in 1992 (you know, when that jeans fit))
• to remind ourselves that we didn’t always suck but also achieved some cool things (keeping that trophy of the 3rd place at the Junior District Championships)
• because we fear deficiency
• to impress others (bookshelf/zoom calls)
• to impress ourselves (mostly related to things we would like to do but don’t execute)
And yet again, a Fight Club quote comes to my mind:
We buy things we don’t need with money. We don’t have to impress people we don’t like.
You will probably say: But I don’t care about the stuff in the basement, about the things I keep for others, or about the 691 little things in drawers (your cable box? your lonely socks? your old phones?). Then I need to tell you that
1. you just learned to ignore stuff, but it still impacts you whether you like to admit this or not
2. whatever you ignore will somewhen return and miscue you, so it’s better if you care.
the perverted approach
Our idea is no longer ‘having something to do something with it,’ but ‘having something until it bothers me so much that I need to get rid of it.’ And we do a lot not to get bothered. We buy new shelves, new drawers. And then we buy decorations because the new stand looks so empty. And then we buy another rack, because all the decoration doesn’t fit anymore. And then we move into a bigger house. And we need a bigger basement, because of the stuff we need to outsource, and then we rent a storage room outside of the city… Or we build a carport, so that more stuff fits into the garage after the car moved out of it. Even if you didn’t need to buy new stuff to give other stuff a place to be, you would see that stuff seeks your time and attention. Every item needs a place to belong to (or you will be busy putting it from left to right and from right to left again), and it needs to be cleaned and maintained. Having a thing is always a commitment. Before I buy something, I do not only think if I can afford this, but how much time it will take me to act according to its purpose. Buying a book is easy, but how likely will I spend 10–20 hours in the next three months on reading it?
digital stuff
This brings me to some thoughts about stuff that doesn’t take much physical space but still increases our mental load. Enrolling a new course to learn something? Wow, it’s free. CLICK HERE. Yes, subscribe to the newsletter. How likely is it that I will not only not read this newsletter but also defer unsubscribing from it? How often will this draw my attention while it’s already hard for me to stay focused? How likely will I not just watch the intro of the new course? And how probably will this book, course, podcast end up in that pile of guilt? There are more examples:
• the app you never use
• the accounts that announce their blog posts on Twitter, I do not remember you finding time to read
• your 42 open tabs (but!)
• 16 variations of the same photo
• your email trashbin
• chats with your ex
• abandoned side projects
How do we declutter
This shouldn’t be a full list of where you can find clutter on your phone or computer. But once you are aware of WHY you unhealthily keep stuff, you will more easily recognize where you waste space and focus. Apart from the examples that I already gave you, it could be that
- you still have a lot of Bluetooth devices in the list that you don’t use anymore,
- you follow too many accounts on social media to follow what they post,
- you have contacts in your contact list you don’t even know who that is
You will find many how-to blog posts once you start to google ‘digital clutter’, but the key is to understand what triggers you to collect more and why it is hard to let things go: I am on my phone a lot. Some would say that I have a deep relationship with it. If you are a little like me, you will merely not use it as a phone, but as a remote control for your whole life (and with a remote control for the remote control aka Apple Watch. We quickly have 100+ apps installed, and because we need to record 4k video, have thousands of songs on our phones, and hoard all kinds of other data, we need phones with an insane storage capacity. And now that we have that capacity, we hoard even more. And then we pay cloud services to outsource apps and files…
Do you recognize a pattern? We repeat the behavior we show in our analog lives in our digital lives. So would it help if we asked ourselves why we keep the digital stuff? Why do we not delete chats of people we are not in contact with anymore? Why do we still maintain that domain we once registered but then never worked on it again? Same reasons as you keep physical stuff: JUST. IN. CASE.
Not that this case will EVER occur, though.
What happens once we dig a little bit deeper into what triggers us to keep and hoard? We will gain clarity about what drives us- and what holds us (back). Because, if we own everything, our hands aren’t free, we can’t hand-le anything anymore, literally. The perfidy of digital clutter is, though, that we can more easily hide it. But once we know if we want to impress ourselves, still live in the past, or want to produce a specific image of ourselves, it’s easier to get rid of that, be honest, and truthful with ourselves. It’s relieving to toss stuff that weighed a lot. And once you did, you feel alleviated and calmed.
Where do I start?
Well, I am a consultant, so the answer needs to be It depends. Here are some tips:
• Don’t just organize apps on your phone in groups.
• Ask yourself, which value an app, a contact, a chat, a connection still offers you. And if this is about lost hopes or reality.
• What’s the worst-case scenario if you delete something?
• this blog post is the first of a small series of posts around digital clutter. Read next week, how I tame my alerts and notifications
Feedback & What’s next
If you liked this post, leave a comment and tell me what resonated the most to you. How do you deal with digital clutter? Does it bother you? Do you have the feeling that stuff consumes too much of your attention? T I would love to hear your feedback. | https://regarding365.com/let-it-go-digital-clutter-9b6281591dbf | ['Luise Freese', 'Mvp'] | 2021-01-06 23:03:01.248000+00:00 | ['Clutter', 'Detox', 'Digital', 'Minimalism'] |
Japan’s National Police Agency to Devise New Software Program to Monitor Crypto Transactions | Following illegal activities in the use of cryptocurrencies, the authorities of Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA), has planned to devise new software that can monitor cryptocurrency transactions record in the country, according to NHK on 30th August. However, this motive is prompted to combat the rate of cryptocurrency illegal activities.
Although this project promises a safety use of cryptocurrency transactions, the NPA is expecting to budget at least 35 million yen by 2019, according to Cointelegraph. The NHK reported that the functions of the software include extracting transaction data and monitor transactions which can be used to show the activities of the crypto exchange operators.
Several illicit activities regarding cryptocurrency have been prevailing. Following the criminal activities last month, the commissioner of Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA), stated earlier this week that the cryptocurrency industry should “grow under appropriate regulation.” The FSA also made it clear that its objective is to develop the crypto industry in finding a balance between consumer protection and technological innovation.
As much as innovation is encouraged in today’s world, it is essential that security measures are necessarily taken to protect the beneficiaries of the 21st century of technology.
Let us know what you think about Japan’s FSA move to monitor illegal activities that might be occurring in the use of crypto exchange operators in the comment section below. | https://medium.com/bitkub/japans-national-police-agency-to-devise-new-software-program-to-monitor-crypto-transactions-12db2e5599b8 | ['Bernard Obiechina'] | 2018-10-22 19:18:46.670000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Japan', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
How to Stop Getting Annoyed at Yourself and Actually Get Motivated this Winter | 1. Stay close to your ‘why’
It’s easy to crawl back into bed when it’s cold and dark. It’s even easier when you tell yourself there is no need to get up. But there is a reason that you told yourself you needed to get up early in the first place. There is something you want to do, something you want to achieve by getting up this early.
When it’s cold and dark it’s easy to lose sight of that reason or make that reason feel less important. But it’s not less important now than it was in the summer. Arguably, working on your dream is one of the most important things in the world.
When you’ve just woken up make sure you stay clear on that reason, remember why you are doing this and what you want to achieve. The one thing you don’t want to be doing is having this same conversation with yourself in a year’s time because you didn’t commit.
To create a habit of getting up early, in the hard times, you need to remember why you are doing it. What’s your dream? Why do you need to get up at this time? Why does it matter?
Actionable tips:
Ask yourself why you wanted to get up early in the first place? What are you trying to achieve?
Ensure the first thing you look at in the morning is related to your goal and you're why.
2. Drink a big glass of water
Hydration gets the body started in the morning. It’s easy to fall onto the sofa, foggy eyed and drift off back to sleep. Instead, create a habit of drinking a big glass of water as the way to start your day. When you think about it, you haven’t drunk a sip of anything for the last 8 hours. Your body needs refreshment.
You’ll find that you feel instantly more awake and more alert for the day. There is really no better way to start the day than with a glass of water.
Part of getting up successfully in the winter is ensuring the first 5 minutes aren’t wasted. It’s about making sure that you don’t get back to bed and you don’t go back on what you promised yourself.
So it makes sense to feel as awake as possible as quickly as possible. That includes drinking a big glass of water as the first step. But it’s not limited to this. Everyone is different. Naturally, there will be things that make me feel more awake in the morning that might make you feel sleepy and vice versa. Experiment with different approaches, here are some ideas:
Meditation
Showering first thing
An early breakfast
Writing
Going outside and getting some fresh air
Having a coffee
Actionable tip:
Work on understanding the habits in the morning that make you feel most awake, experiment with different things.
3. Get dressed and do it early
There is something about being in your pyjamas that tells your body ‘this is rest time’. Of course, when you first wake up it’s easy to feel like staying in bed, you’ve got your pyjamas on, it’s cold, it’s dark. Everything is stacked against you getting back into bed and getting some more rest.
If you want to combat that, then get dressed. If you want to level up even further, get your clothes out the night before and put them in the bathroom. That way when you go to brush your teeth they’ll be there ready and waiting and it will be easy to get changed.
Getting changed changes your mindset and your outlook. ‘Dress for the occasion’ is said for a reason. If you dress for work you’re more likely to do the work. If you are sat in your pyjamas and cosy clothes your more likely to curl up on the sofa and go back to sleep.
Actionable tips:
Dress for the occasion, wake up and get changed.
Put your clothes in the bathroom the night before, brush your teeth and then get changed.
4. Create a morning routine that works
Part of the reason we get stuck for motivation is lack of structure. We wake up, sit down and then think ‘now what?’ That’s an issue because then you are forced to spend the next 30–40 minutes thinking about how to spend your morning and what to do. And if you don’t know what to do, the easiest thing is to fall back to sleep.
Which is quite frankly, a waste of time. In the morning, fresh out of bed, you are sleepy and barely functioning. It’s not the best time to decide on what to do for the day. The result is you overthinking how to spend your morning and ending up not being very productive. Instead, what works better is to decide the night before what you need to do with your morning or, if you prefer, stick to a morning routine that works.
Now I’m not saying you need to a drink of a cocktail of questionably sounding ingredients followed by a 50-mile run and a cold shower all whilst telling yourself you are invincible and will achieve your dreams. But what is quite a good idea is using the time in the morning to do the things that are important to you but that often get lost in the day.
Things like stretching, meditation, writing down any thoughts that have been bugging you. If you find a routine that works for you, try to stick to it the best you can, you’ll find that you’re spending less time than ever trying to decide on what to do and more spend more time doing.
Actionable tips:
Do not use the time in the morning to work out what to do with the day, you’ll be too foggy to think very clearly.
Plan the night before, work out exactly what you are going to do with the morning once you wake up.
Take it a step further and get specific. For example, if you are thinking of ‘writing’ in the morning, get clear on exactly what article you are writing.
5. Do something, anything
Action creates motivation. People are often mistaken in thinking that motivation creates action but it doesn’t. The result is that you wait and wait for motivation to fall into your lap so you can start with your day. What always happens is that the waiting continues and motivation never turns up.
Motivation is a lousy friend.
Instead, start by doing. It doesn’t have to be your hardest task, it just needs to be a task. It needs to be something that you have on your to-do list that can be ticked off. There are loads of things that fit into that category, things like:
Putting the wash away
Putting the washing in the washing machine
Hoovering the downstairs
Washing the pots
Cleaning the kitchen sides
Making a phone call
There are lots of things that take less than five minutes you can tick off your to-do list to make you feel more productive. Once you’ve ticked a few of these off you will find that you are ready to tackle the bigger things.
Actionable tips:
Create momentum by doing. Tick off some small, mundane tasks and you’ll notice you are ready for the bigger tasks.
Write a to-do list that you can get through quickly to get you motivated.
6. Schedule breaks that excite you
Taking a break will male you more productive and more motivated. Often you can fall into the trap of sitting, staring at the desk knowing that you are not doing anything. Yet you trick yourself into thinking you are being productive. By simply sitting at the desk, somehow it makes you feel like you are chipping away at your goals.
You’re not.
You’re wasting time. If you are not doing you have three options, sit there and do nothing, sit there and do something, or get up and take a break. It might sound counterintuitive to pick the third option but it’s not. After hours spent staring at the screen, taking a break and getting outside can only be a good thing. Your brain gets tired of the same old scenery. It gets stuck in that track of thinking.
Instead, get up and get outside. The different sights and smells change your train of thought and give you some rest bite for a little while. Changing the space will mean that when you come back to your work you feel refreshed and ready to go.
Not only that though, but you should also schedule breaks that excite you. Is there a Christmas film you’re dying to watch or Christmas decorations you want to put up? Use that as a motivation to get your work done.
Actionable tips:
Use the season to motivate you, schedule Christmas related breaks that excite you.
Understand that breaks actually make you more productive in the long run.
7. Schedule your time
Scheduled time is time that you don’t need to think about too much. It’s time that is already in the bag and assigned to a certain task. Now whilst you can dip into overscheduling and making life a little too regimented, scheduling time to work on the things that are important to you is key.
I find that if I schedule my important tasks on a Sunday it makes it clear what I need to achieve in the week. It makes it simple to follow because it’s broken down by day and by the task.
It means I can feel confident that if I stick to the plan I will be able to achieve all the things I want to in the time I’ve got. Having this plan takes the weight off and it gives you less of a reason to procrastinate. When you have unstructured time you can sometimes feel lost with how to spend it.
Actionable tips: | https://medium.com/curious/how-to-stop-getting-annoyed-at-yourself-and-actually-get-motivated-this-winter-5983d1a16544 | ['Eve Arnold'] | 2020-12-09 17:12:48.936000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Self Improvement', 'Self', 'Psychology', 'Productivity'] |
Data Vs. Ratings: Making a Real Impression with TV Advertising | TV advertising revenue is expected to exceed $70 billion this year, and the majority of that spend from brands and agencies will be transacted with Gross Ratings Points (GRPs) in mind. The GRP is how advertisers determine where to run commercials, and what TV networks use to prove their spots are worth the price. In the age of data-driven machine learning and AI, should we still be using a metric that has been around since a computer took up more space than most New York City apartments?
How GRPs Work
GRPs are calculated as a percent of the target market reached, multiplied by the exposure frequency. For example, let’s say you want to reach men between the ages of 18 and 49, and Nielsen informs you that 40% of that group watches NBC’s primetime programming on Monday nights. If the advertiser ran 3 ads during that primetime programming block, they would have a GRP of 120.
So, How Does Nielsen Determine GRPs?
Nielsen provides viewing estimates based on relatively small“panels”. A panel is a group of households that have agreed to participate and connect a Nielson box to their TV. The box monitors what they watch. Then Nielson combines that data with the demographics they know about each Neilson household, reporting TV viewing patterns — or GRPs on a daily basis.
However, Nielsen panels are small. Ratings are based on less than 1% of the country’s TV viewing households, which makes it almost impossible for the panels to accurately represent the (much) larger TV viewing public.
The GRP is essentially a branding metric, meaning that if a consumer was exposed to your TV ad a certain number of times you may be able to assume it drove them to point of purchase, but actually linking it to specific sales or attribution is near impossible. And buying based on GRPs doesn’t mean that the target market actually saw your ad. The audience could have simply went to the bathroom or gotten up to grab a snack from the kitchen. What it comes down to is that GRPs are not a precision targeting tool — or a measurement metric, but the industry now has the technology to deliver those capabilities.
Shifting To A Truly Data-Driven Narrative
Though GRPs are still the dominant metric in how TV advertising is bought and sold, the convergence of TV and digital in over-the-top TV (OTT) has resulted in not only much more granular measurement capabilities, but also more precise targeting. TV advertising on OTT looks more like traditional digital advertising — and is reported like that as well. You no longer need to use tiny (and questionably) representative samples. With OTT you can precisely target individual households based on metrics that matter. Couple that with glass-level viewing data from companies like Inscape, and suddenly TV advertising strategy starts to take on new life.
Today linear TV ad spend trumps OTT by leaps and bounds. According to a recent study, up to 29% of audiences have moved of linear to OTT, but only 3% of ad budgets have followed. And as cord-cutter and cord-never numbers grow, advertisers and publishers alike will follow the eyeballs.
Data-driven TV advertising will eventually all but transcend the traditional GRP metrics by enabling granular targeting on the TV screen, along with new forms of delivery verification and fraud protections. The smart money is betting that data is the future of TV advertising — and we’re with them. | https://medium.com/madhive/data-vs-ratings-making-a-real-impression-with-tv-advertising-190ae9c1bb30 | ['Rebecca Lerner'] | 2019-10-22 11:46:01.637000+00:00 | ['Programmatic', 'TV', 'OTT', 'Advertising'] |
Hypnotryst | From the Patient Case History of Susan Richards
Dr. Tamara Watkins, PhD, ABPP, APA
Tuesday September 30th, 2014
(EDIT: At this point in Susan’s narrative, she slides down lower in her chair and lifts her skirt. When she opens her legs, I can see a moist spot on her panties. She slips her fingers beneath the waistband and begins to masturbate — slowly at first, but with increasing vigor as the heat of her narrative rises. TW)
(Transcribed from voice recording.)
TW: What’s the woman doing?
SR: Nothing. It looks like she’s passed out. Ryan pulls me back away from her and lifts my ankles over his shoulders. I look down and I see his cock for the first time, the head swollen and purple, twitching and throbbing against my open pussy lips. I don’t know whether I’m ready or not, but I know I only have a few more seconds to decide. Ryan is stroking my breasts and lightly pinching the nipples. I can’t think straight and I’m having trouble focusing, but I know I want more control of the situation, so I reach between my legs and grab his cock around the middle. | https://medium.com/cream-shaboogie-cock/hypnotryst-f36504adb1b0 | ['Belinda Lapage'] | 2020-06-09 10:14:46.358000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Lesbian', 'Doctorpatientrelationship', 'Erotica', 'Hypnotism'] |
You Are Going to Die Soon | For a long time, I had a post-it note on my bathroom mirror on which I had written: “You are going to die soon.” I had put it there after reading a quote by Steve Jobs expressing a similar sentiment. “Soon,” of course, is a relative term. Statistically, it’s most likely that I’ll be around for another 44 years (I checked the actuarial tables), but if I thought that the end of the world was going to happen in 44 years, would I be justified in saying that it’s going to happen soon? I think that I would, and that will indeed be the end of the world for me. The note disappeared the last time I moved, but I still remember it every time I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning and at night before I go to bed, and my thoughts return to it throughout the day. Others who had seen my note found it morbid; I always found it inspirational. Regardless of what happens after, I know that that much at least is true, and it’s shown its value as a compass for directing my actions and decisions.
But while I don’t base my decisions on it (or believe that I don’t), I nevertheless often contemplate what might happen afterwards. This question lies at the heart of religion: what happens after we die?
It is commonly thought that the Bible details the blissful afterlife of the righteous in Heaven and the torturous existence of the damned in Hell; in fact, the Bible has nothing of the sort to say about Heaven, and has little to say on the topic of the afterlife in general. There is nothing at all to be found in the Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, which largely corresponds to the Christian Old Testament, save for a single reference to a place called Sheol (Deuteronomy 32:22), which is presented without explanation.
Later books in the Old Testament, in the Ketuvim (writings), we find more detail as to the nature of Sheol. Psalm 49 describes it as the abode of the dead. Ecclesiastes chapter 9 describes the quality of death: “The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun” (verses 5–6, NRSV), and this does not sound like an afterlife or any sort of existence at all. And in Psalm 6, which is addressed directly to God: “In death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” (verse 5, NRSV). So it seems very much that the ancient Hebrews believed that nothing followed death, and Sheol was a metaphor for this.
But in the writings of the prophets, we find something else: the dead will, at some time in the future, be physically resurrected: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2).
What about the New Testament? Jesus himself is surprisingly reticent on the matter, saying only: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:2). Jesus was a Jew who preached the message of the coming end times to Jews and taught them to repent and prepare for the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth (see my essay “In Search of the Religion of Jesus”). Given that we only have the one verse in the one gospel, we can dismiss this quote entirely as not being historical in the first place, but even if we accept it as a saying of Jesus and view it in the context of his message, it seems to be related more to the coming Kingdom of God on Earth than to an afterlife in Heaven.
Elsewhere in the New Testament there are several references to eternal life (John 3:16, Romans 6:23, and others), but these could just as well be references to an eternal life on Earth in a resurrected physical body when the Kingdom of God comes. The Book of Revelation as well seems to portray the afterlife as taking place on Earth rather than in another spiritual realm (21:1–3, and verse 3 in particular: “See, the home of God is among the mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them,” as quoted from the NRSV).
What about references to Hell? We at least have something on this topic in the New Testament that is more concrete than what we have on the subject of Heaven. According to Matthew 25:31–46, when the Kingdom of God comes to Earth, the Son of Man (there is no consensus among Christians as to whom exactly this term refers) will separate the righteous from the wicked. The righteous will be able to enter the Kingdom of God. “Then [the Son of Man] will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’” (Matthew 25:41, NRSV). And more in the Book of Revelation: “And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15, NRSV). This lake of fire is not directly equated with Hell. It certainly matches up with the common image of Hell, but one has to keep in mind that that conception of Hell came later, which means that it can only be applied retroactively to the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation. There’s no evidence that what the author of the book was referring to was indeed what we now think of as Hell; the verses may be referring to a physical lake of fire created on Earth when the Kingdom of God comes.
There are several references in the New Testament to Gehenna, which is often also equated with Hell. “Gehenna” referred originally to the valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem, where the kings of Judah (a rival Hebrew kingdom which once controlled Jerusalem) sacrificed their children (2 Chronicles 28:3). It was later thought to be cursed (Jeremiah 19:2–6). Given that Gehenna is an actual physical location, Jesus’ references to it may have been metaphorical, or may have been a reference to a conception of Hell that was transitioning towards the modern conception.
One of our earliest images of Hell that concords with the modern conception comes from the writings of the late 2nd and early 3rd century church father Hippolytus of Rome, who, in Against Plato, on the Cause of the Universe wrote:
But now we must speak of Hades, in which the souls both of the righteous and the unrighteous are detained. Hades is a place in the created system, rude, a locality beneath the earth, in which the light of the world does not shine; and as the sun does not shine in this locality, there must necessarily be perpetual darkness there. This locality has been destined to be as it were a guard-house for souls, at which the angels are stationed as guards, distributing according to each one’s deeds the temporary punishments for (different) characters. translation J.H. MacMahon, 1886
Hades was the god of the dead in ancient Greek pagan religion, with which Hippolytus, as a Roman fluent in Hellenistic Greek, would have been entirely familiar. And the Roman Christians would have been largely pagan converts, or descendants of converts still living in a largely pagan world, so it seems that there has been some transfer of beliefs from the old pagan religions to Christianity, and “Hades,” in this transition, shifted from being the god of the dead to the realm of the dead.
As to what the modern conception of Hell looks like in practice, we have the Catechism of the Catholic Church, article 1033, which states the following:
We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”
This seems as though it would neatly resolve the theological problem of how a god of infinite good and infinite mercy could punish someone eternally for transient actions enacted during a finite human lifespan. It isn’t punishment, but rather self-chosen exclusion from God’s love. Article 1034 cites the New Testament references to Gehenna, and then the description of Hell continues in 1035:
The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
So Hell remains a real place, the destination of the souls of “those who die in a state of mortal sin.” And it is indeed, somewhat in contradiction to article 1033, a punishment, which implies a deliberate action on the part of God.
This has been commented on extensively, but for the sake of thoroughness I’ll mention what seems to me to be the obvious problem here. A Catholic priest has the capacity to absolve one of mortal sin (defined by the Catechism as being sin “whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent,” and “grave matter” means a violation of the Ten Commandments of Moses). This means that a child rapist who is absolved of mortal sin by a priest before death goes to Heaven, while someone who only cheats on their spouse without being similarly absolved goes to Hell, and both for eternity. This contradicts and even offends our most basic moral intuitions concerning justice, and diminishes Heaven’s desirability as an eternal destination, if that’s the kind of company we must keep.
Does the Bible even indicate that we have souls? This is such common belief in modern Christianity that one would think that it would go without saying, but once again, we find that the actual contents of the Bible and what is said of it are two entirely different things.
When God formed Adam from the dust of the ground in the second creation narrative (Genesis 2:7), no mention is made of Their imbuing the creation with a soul; rather, God breathes “the breath of life” into his nostrils. Perhaps this is a somewhat poetic reference to a spirit or soul; after all, the word translated here as “breath” is נשמה, neshama and the word רוח, ruach, is often translated as “spirit” (the spirit of God in Genesis 1:2, for example) but also means “breath.” But this notion of a soul is a core concept; is there anything perhaps a little more specific that might not just be a reference to literal breath? How about נפשׁ, nefesh, which appears in Deuteronomy 4:29: “From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul” (NRSV). Looking at the Wikipedia page for that word, it seems that that might well be translated as something closer to “life” or “being.” Indeed, the word is translated elsewhere in that way. Still no clear statement of a purely spiritual aspect of our being, identical to our true selves, and it appears that, throughout the Old Testament, any word translated as “soul” comes from one of these three Hebrew words.
What about the New Testament? Matthew 22:37 says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (NRSV). This is a reference to Deuteronomy 6:5, which states the same thing, using the word nefesh. The Greek word that the author uses in Matthew is ψῡχή, psychē, which is, again, primarily “breath” or “life” in general.
Given the Jewish and early Christian belief that the resurrection would be physical, a separate, spiritual self seems entirely superfluous, and being that there are no clear references to the Biblical conception of the soul being otherwise, it seems that we may be mapping a modern notion onto ancient words, as we often do. The one verse I’ve been able to find that suggests a more modern conception of the soul is Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (NRSV, substituting the Greek transliteration for the word translated as “hell”). And “soul” again here is translated from the Greek psychē, but even this verse contradicts the modern notion of the soul being an immortal, enduring thing.
Eastern religions have a much different approach to the question of the afterlife. The phenomenal world is Samsara, a realm of suffering in which we are trapped in cycles of reincarnation (in Hinduism and Jainism) or rebirth (in Buddhism) until we achieve liberation. The difference between those two ideas, reincarnation and rebirth, is subtle but critical. Reincarnation posits a soul which is identical with the self, which is is reborn into a new physical body after death. Rebirth stipulates that no such soul exists, and indeed that there is no one thing that is identical with the self, and the elements of the aggregate of which the self is composed, after death, continue existing but go their separate ways. Reincarnation in particular is a little more complex than how I’ve just presented it, though, because the soul that reincarnation posits is identical with Brahman, the one and universal ground of being. Each of these ideas deserves its own exposition; in this work I’m primarily addressing Western beliefs of the afterlife but at least wanted to mention Eastern beliefs by way of comparison.
Beliefs in the afterlife in general are problematic because they can lead to religious nihilism. Much of what I’ve read in opposition to religion in general is in fact targeted at this specific and indeed problematic aspect of religion: the rejection of belief in anything of this world, in favor of belief in some other world. This is what we see in, for example, the Christian Science denomination of Protestant Christianity, which holds that the material world is an illusion born from mortal error and that only the spiritual world is truly real. Particularly devout adherents to this religion will often refuse medical care and even deny it to their children (I wrote of this in my story “The Tragedy of Christian Science”). Such thought is not limited to the Abrahamic religions; I’ve witnessed Hindus and Buddhists in Kathmandu spending their days circumambulating stupas in order to accrue good karma that will ensure a favorable rebirth or reincarnation, rather than working to improve the lives they’re already living. We’re also all painfully aware that people are willing, even eager, to annihilate themselves in large numbers in order to kill infidels for the promise of reward in the next life.
On this matter, Sam Harris writes:
What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition — you will not die — once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable. The End of Faith, 2004
The End of Faith is a problematic book, and I’ll be addressing some of its many issues in another essay, but Harris is on point here. This quote brings to mind the particularly virulent nihilism of suicide bombing, but this thought applies to more seemingly-benign actions and lifestyles as well. I could see myself content to toil away on meaningless labor for my entire life if I thought that it was just a prelude to a better one; as it is, the thought of my only life lived in such a way is terrifying. And in this, one might see how religious nihilism might be an advantageous tool for those to whom such labor is valuable. Karl Marx certainly thought as much.
Nietzsche compared the living to those waiting to board a ship.
People have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise — so covetous and certain of their prey. And all and everyone of them suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything; and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other. Everyone wants to be the first in this future — and yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future. How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. The Gay Science, 1882, §278, translation Kaufmann
Nietzsche was a fierce opponent of religious nihilism, and of nihilism in general. Concluding this section, he says, “It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.” He was opposed to a reliance on belief in the afterlife, but neither he did not advocate simply resigning oneself to death (which is nihilism as well); rather, he advocated impassioned living at every turn.
And what does the Satanist hold of the afterlife? In reverence to the icon of Satan the Adversary, who pointed humankind towards the way of knowledge, we must consider what it is that we really know about it, and the truth of the afterlife is that we simply don’t know what happens. We don’t know what happens after death, and perhaps we never will, but it seems that the best way to live is to accord our actions with the outcome that seems most likely: the final end of the self. Maybe the aspects of what I am will continue to exist beyond my death, but they won’t be me. Maybe there is self that will be reborn in a new body, but I can’t know that that’s the case. I can’t imagine what it would be like; everything I can think of that I accord with my identity — my thoughts, my memories, my beliefs, my body — these are all things that are part of my physical being alone and that I know will not withstand its dissolution unaffected. Thus the note to myself: “You are going to die soon,” a constant reminder for me to live. I can plan for my death, but I can make no plans for what will happen after, not if I can’t even assume that there’s an I that will continue to exist in any way at all afterwards. This raises the important question of what the self is anyway, and I’ll be turning to that in another essay. | https://medium.com/a-satanist-reads-the-bible/you-are-going-to-die-soon-6ef1b88baa8a | ['Todd B.'] | 2019-04-06 01:08:17.004000+00:00 | ['Afterlife', 'Christianity', 'Satanism', 'Bible', 'Death'] |
Personal, Music (& some Code) Highlights of 2020 | TL;DR: Unusual year! I spent some time doing normal things like slinging code and music. I spent a lot more time changing the way I see the world and my place in it. I also went micro viral on TikTok back in March. Thanks to all who were a part of it 👾
January
January 1st: New Year’s Eve party with my friends at Peter and Kyla’s apartment.
first selfie of 2020
January 10th: The Good Few played a sold out show at Bowery Ballroom.
The Good Few plays Bowery Ballroom
January 11th–12th: Recording session with my friend Katie Glasgow, working on some of her solo music.
January 22nd: My Ableton Live and the Push 2 bundle arrived. This was an important first step in re-examining my relationship with music this year.
January 29th: minikit SoFar show at Kinfolk in Williamsburg.
January 31st: minikit released ‘400 Coffees (Ursae Flip)’. Thanks Andrew!
February
February 14th: Modern Diet released ‘Post Grad’. A song about life after college. I played bass guitar on it.
‘Post Grad’ artwork by Camille Petricola
February 23rd: Covey played a sold out show opening for Summer Salt at Music Hall of Williamsburg — my final live performance of 2020.
Covey plays Music Hall of Williamsburg
March
March 19th: A TikTok I made of my dad playing basketball gets over 100k views.
March 26th: A second TikTok I made of my dad playing basketball gets over 110k views.
April
April 3rd: Cannon released “CONVERSATIONS”. I co-produced and co-wrote this track.
May
May 1st: launched badtheband.com — a landing page for the Queens, New York based electronic funk band BAD.
May 21st: Cannon released ‘BROKEN MIRRORS’. I co-produced this track.
May 23rd: I posted a remix of ‘i finally understand’ by Charli XCX to SoundCloud. This my first (and only, so far) production made with Ableton to be released.
July
July 4th: Great hang in Prospect Park to celebrate my friend Peter’s birthday.
July 5th: Initial commits on a LifeOS / external-brain side project I’m very excited to continue working on. Please ask me about this if you’re curious to know more!
August
August 6th: my 26th birthday :’]
26 :’]
August 13th: Katie Glasgow released ‘Tarot Cards’ from the recording sessions we did back in January.
August 31st: Started reading/doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
September
September 11th-15th: Late summer / early fall trip to Cape Cod with my cousin Jess to unwind and catch up.
late summer Cape Cod Bay sunset
September 16th: Celebrated my official one year anniversary of employment as Junior Front End Engineer at Thinx Inc.
October
October 31st: Halloween. I went as: “Bridget.”
November
November 13th: Panther Hollow releases Songwiring. I played bass guitar on two songs from this album: “Landslide” and “Maine Coast.”
Songwiring artwork by Bernardo Ochoa
November 21st: Zoom Thanksgiving. Grateful to have spent the day at home with my parents.
Me on my way to Zoom Thanksgiving 2020
November 26th: Officially completed The Artist’s Way (and I’m still doing the morning pages & artist date).
December
December 18th: Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016 by Maggie Rogers is released. I played bass guitar on six songs from this album: “Celadon & Gold”, “Together”, “Steady Now”, “One More Afternoon”, “James” and “Anybody.” | https://medium.com/@danhemerlein/personal-music-some-code-highlights-of-2020-bbcbc637a859 | ['Dan Hemerlein'] | 2020-12-23 17:26:44.128000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Music', 'Personal', 'Code'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/thursday-all-the-kinds-of-blue-2970c96253e | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2017-02-16 01:50:39.777000+00:00 | ['Jazz', 'Kind Of Blue', 'Thursday', 'Miles Davis', 'Illustration'] |
Is ‘Gone with the Wind’ a Classic? Or How Things Change | ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Warner Home Video)
As a kind of late-spring appetizer before the all-you-can-eat CGI buffet of summer blockbusters began, a few months back some unlucky moviegoers were treated to The Hustle. For those of you who have already forgotten, this was yet another tired retread of an Eighties movie everybody remembers from endless cable reruns (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, itself a remake of the long-forgotten 1964 Brando-Niven comedy Bedtime Story). Lacking in spirit or flair, The Hustle brought nothing new to the party besides gender-switch casting. Playing at the same time was the surprisingly sparkly romantic comedy Long Shot — which got a lot of mileage out of acknowledging and making a joke of the unlikeliness of its conceit: Secretary of State Charlize Theron falling for grubby Vice-ish writer Seth Rogen.
Both movies were a problem for Christian Toto, who penned a screed for The Hill decrying “the rise of political correctness” at the multiplex. For Toto, a quick calculation of A+B=15 got him from a throwaway gag in Long Shot where Rogen apologizes to Japan for using the atomic bomb to apoplexy over criticism of John Wayne and Kate Smith. After listing a few more potential victims of PC culture (Mel Brooks, James Bond), Toto gets to the main concern: If leftist culture warriors are not stopped, then “classic” movies like Gone with the Wind could be, well, gone with the wind.
A couple years back, a Memphis theater decided that, because of complaints, they were not going to show Gone with the Wind again. One would imagine conservatives would appreciate a small business not wanting to anger its customers. But by definition, conservatives tend not to like change. It’s in the name.
Reactionaries are panicked now about changes in the culture. This incorporates everything from female Ghostbusters to a female James Bond; witness the panic of Ben Shapiro, who bonded earlier in his career with Andrew Breitbart about the evils of Hollywood, over the latter development, using as his central argument Daniel Craig being “ripped beyond belief” in a way that a woman could apparently never be, ignoring Bond’s central appeal being his wiles and coolness, not ability to “beat the crap out of anyone.” No doubt somewhere on the Internet, somebody is very concerned about what it means that Natalie Portman is taking up Thor’s hammer. The desperate rearguard actions of Shapiro, Toto (whose website worries a lot about what “liberal” film critics and SJWs are up to), and others call to mind William F. Buckley’s line about standing athwart history, shouting Stop!
The determination that things need to stay the same generally assumes that something was better before the change. If one takes a lot of complaints about PC Hollywood to heart, then it stands to reason that the counter-argument says that it was better when movie heroes were almost uniformly white men. One could argue that Hollywood should just stop remaking hits of years gone by (the last Ghostbusters and The Hustle were bad, bad, very bad movies for reasons that had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with poor writing and a lack of inspiration). But just as grumbling about women and minority actors receiving greater representation is what conservatives do, grinding out variations on a theme is what Hollywood has always done. Remember, this is an industry that shot two different adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon before getting it right with the 1941 Bogart version.
Conservatives are not wrong to think that more one-time classics like Gone with the Wind are likely to attract controversy in the future as cultural mores shift. The National Review’s scrappy movie scold Kyle Smith worried that it would “disappear from sight.” But just as slippery-slope arguments against tearing down Confederate statues — the idea being that if one knocks down a Robert E. Lee edifice, then what’s to stop people from doing the same to other slaveowners like George Washington? — were frequently just smokescreens to hide the desire to leave celebrations of a white supremacist regime in place, arguments about whether or not to show certain old movies that now seem offensive frequently miss the point.
I first saw Gone with the Wind in the mid-1980s. Even in a decade rife with lamentable stereotyping, the movie’s celebration of the “Glorious Cause,” vilification of the Union, and its fantasy world of happy slaves (listed odiously in the credits as “servants,” implying an impossible level of agency) still felt like an ugly rewrite of what we had been taught in history class about the Civil War. The argument for showing Gone with the Wind would call it a pinnacle of the studio-system epic, calling out its glorious Technicolor cinematography and brilliant star turns by everyone from Clark Gable to Hattie McDaniel.
At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, the same can be argued about Triumph of the Will. Leni Riefenstahl’s record of the 1934 Nuremberg rally is a dazzling, virtuoso production whose technical mastery is still awesome to behold. The movie is also a key piece of Nazi propaganda. It is not hard to understand why somebody might think the latter point is more important to appreciate than the former. There are reasons why it and other movies produced by the Third Reich remain outlawed in Germany.
Nevertheless, Triumph of the Will is still shown, though mostly in academic settings as part of a course of study. Making a comparison to D.W. Griffith’s Klan rally of a movie, Birth of a Nation, Toto actually makes this argument about Gone with the Wind, wondering whether it couldn’t be shown along with “an informed dialogue.” This is a fair point. But calling censorship seems a stretch. It should be understandable that a theater might not want to present a long panel discussion about racism and representation as part of a summer series that tends to include things like Superman and The Wizard of Oz. Despite being technically sophisticated but also fairly insufferable, Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Triumph of the Will are all still widely available for viewing. Many, many other movies from their time are not.
Also this argument can also at times feel too close to the “teach the controversy” tactic used by creationists to smuggle their teachings into curricula. Under the guise of ensuring that ugly old cultural stereotypes are kept alive — which seems to undergird much of the reactionary hand-wringing over political correctness and the movies, more so than any genuine concern about censorship—some conservatives can make their revanchist plea for everything to stay the same and present a picture of history as it never was.
For those who are genuinely worried that changing tastes could lead to artistic treasures being consigned to history’s dustbin, they would be advised to choose better movies. | https://medium.com/eyes-wide-open/is-gone-with-the-wind-a-classic-or-how-things-change-21d5b102d134 | ['Chris Barsanti'] | 2019-08-06 17:40:51.539000+00:00 | ['Political Correctness', 'Gone With The Wind', 'Birth Of A Nation', 'Censorship', 'Movies'] |
The New Normal is Pretty Much Like the Old, with Scratches — W Lance Hunt | The New Normal is Pretty Much Like the Old, with Scratches — W Lance Hunt W Lance Hunt Jul 2·4 min read
It’s Just Normal
On April 24th, 2020, Kings County, New York, surpassed Queens County, New York, with 4,344 deaths from Covid-19, making it the deadliest county in the US. That day, Brooklyn was home to nearly 10% of the entire country’s coronavirus deaths. In fact, of nearly 2.5% of all deaths in the world. With only three hundredths of one percent (0.03%) of the world’s population-that’s 833 times what it should be for that many people.
Scary as hell living in Brooklyn, the deadliest place on earth for Covid-19. For a few grim weeks.
We all know what happened in NYC—Lockdown. Essential workers only. Schools closed. Public transit cutbacks. Masks. Hand washing.
No vaccine in sight. Only a vague idea of how to treat it.
We had tests, sure, but all they could tell is was “you’re sick” or “had been infected at some point in time.” Or weren’t now nor ever had been infected. That and assure you your cough wasn’t Covid-19. Is it?
If you found out you were infected, tough luck; the hospitals were full. Hell, even the morgues and funeral homes were overflowing. Refrigerator trucks, stacked full of the dead, sat in streets. (Yes, in Brooklyn, but several neighborhoods away.)
The bad times.
My family and I, though, were lucky. Stuck at home, yes, but wife, son, and I worked and did school. Just like in a sci-fi horror flick, we left only when necessary. Spoke the shibboleths: Be safe.Wear your mask. Did you wash your hands? Like a religion. For death lurked invisibly. Hiding. Someplace near. Ready to punish anyone for the sin of carelessness.
A steady stream of news showed body count rising. People wearing rubber gloves. Bottled water missing from shelves. No toilet paper. Forget Clorox or other heavy-duty cleaners- kills 99.9% of germs. We bought whatever we could. Washed hands when we got back home. Every time. Like penance.
Fortunately, we could get food delivered. Wine too. Restaurants and Liquor stores were considered essential. Along with grocery stores and pharmacies.
For our family, the virus nipped at our friends and family. One friend hospitalized in March for two weeks. Another suffered later and less but lost her sense of taste. It hasn’t returned, months after recovery.
We are grateful for our good fortune. That nothing worse has happened to anyone us nor anyone we’re close to. Here or in other cities around the world. We’re still hoping that our luck holds.
And yet, here, in Kings County, we have felt our breath come back.
With high vaccination rates and compliance to mask mandates, infection rates have fallen, and so hospitalizations and deaths. Restrictions have been lifted. Little by little. And now, restaurants have opened. Gyms. Theaters. At least those that could survive on carry-out, delivery, and zoom classes. School will return in the fall.
And with the whole family fully vaccinated, with the NY State Excelsior Pass active on our phones (proving both doses and waiting time), we started venturing out into the streets. Sans masks.
Last Friday, we three walked a couple of blocks to Lombardo’s, a small family-run pizza place. We sat indoors. With most of the tables full. Of maskless strangers. Laughing. Telling stories. Wine flowed. Pizzas came out, hot and steaming, landing on pizza stands. Almost like normal. Like before the virus-the staff still wore masks. Reminding us of the past 14 months.
Walking the streets the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen people out and about, doing what they did before. Mostly. There are many closed storefronts. A decent number of people sport masks up and over nose and mouth, or under chin.
But. They are taking Strolls. Going to the park. Shopping. Smiling. Nodding hello. Walking dogs. Shaking hands. Hugging Kissing cheeks. Complaining about the garbage. Petty arguments erupt here and there. All the usual stuff.
Or so it is here, in Kings County, the once deadliest place on earth.
We don’t know what will happen to all those empty office buildings and hotels in Manhattan. Tourists basically don’t exist. It’s strange being able to stroll along 34th street without being bumped into. And take your time at the MET. Think crowds. No one cutting in front of you to take a selfie or sit with sketchbook in hand. That will all come back in time.
As it did after 9–11, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, hurricane Sandy, the Civil and World Wars. Scratched up a bit. With new faces on the sidewalks. New storefronts lining the streets. But the same old city Frank and Mick sang about. You know, the Big Apple, “To live in this town, you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!”
I know my family is far luckier than many. But we, all of us here in this town, are resilient. Even if it feels like the world has changed into something alien. But, we’re not emerging into a new normal. Just normal. For change alone is constant. | https://medium.com/@wlancehunt/the-new-normal-is-pretty-much-like-the-old-with-scratches-w-lance-hunt-11d7a4221cd8 | ['W Lance Hunt'] | 2021-07-03 19:01:36.091000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'Brooklyn', 'Resilience', 'Personal Narrative'] |
Understanding ETL Pipeline | Example
Imagine that there is a database that contains web log data. Each entry in the data contains IP address of a user, timestamp, and the link clicked by user.
Think of a scenario where you want to run an analysis of links clicked by city and by day. You would need another data set that maps IP address to a city, and you would also need to extract the day from the timestamp.
With an ETL pipeline, you could run code once per day that would extract the previous day’s log data, map IP address to city, aggregate link clicks by city, and then load these results into a new database. That way, a data analyst or scientist would have access to a table of log data by city and day. That is more convenient than always having to run the same complex data transformations on the raw web log data.
Using ETL pipeline makes sense because, before the usage of cloud computing, companies and businesses used to store their data on private servers that were expensive and running queries on huge datasets could be very expensive in terms of time and economy. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/understanding-etl-pipeline-76718d299a08 | ['Chaitanya Krishna Kasaraneni'] | 2020-05-01 17:43:21.689000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Etl'] |
Aron | Aron paints a picture of a harsh cold winter night. The words conjure the image of a once-loved baby and the emotions felt by the father which look like teardrops mixed gently with ink. The blue color reminds me of an icicle which can be a metaphor of sharp pain and the brown color reminds me of autumn leaves which drifts without saying goodbye. Afsal shares the mother’s grief too “I can hear the mother scream” which tells the poet is sharing the grief of the whole family. For me, this poem is a poetic farewell for the departed soul and that wish is also there to be together. The poet is consoling himself with words but death separates us and leaves us with memories which we hide under our pillows. -Priyanka
Dig him a little grave
and bury him with care…
Here is the wonderful for your perusal. Read rest of the entries from Issue III:
I froze at the sight of my toddler
head down on the feet of the black peddler.
Ahh, his feet so cold, his lips a hazy blue,
eyes, his brown eyes, so round and lovely
just like his mother’s, rightfully.
But, Why do they look so bleak ?
I realize, his little heart is missing it’s beats.
A wave of darkness sweeps around me,
the world seemed to stop for a moment.
Kindly stand beside me ; in bestowment
the other day I sang ‘One for sorrow’
the nursery rhyme.
Today he has left me to whine….
Alas I have to fathom
My son, My Aron has died a brutal death.
I kneel down, helpless
in front of fate, cruel destiny.
With wholesome dearth
I can hear the mother scream
I the father ,as numb as my dear is ,
Dig him a little grave
and bury him with care…
I tell him, I wish I was
wherever you are my son ….
I wish I could be beside you
I wish you weren’t alone…
Edition III-Literary Impulse. Another edition of a bag, full of… | by Somsubhra Banerjee | Literary Impulse | A Literary & Philosophical Quarterly | Medium | https://medium.com/literary-impulse/aron-f3a3f56b11b5 | ['Editorial Literary Impulse'] | 2020-12-16 15:01:03.322000+00:00 | ['Winter', 'Literary Impulse', 'Excerpts From Li', 'Poetry'] |
DIY People Vs. The Rest Of Humanity | Sign up for Yapjaw
By Slackjaw
Yapjaw is Medium's #1 newsletter for all things humor, and we're sorry to say you'll only receive it a few times a month. Take a look | https://medium.com/slackjaw/diy-people-vs-the-rest-of-humanity-bd874bf6264e | ['Emery Schindler'] | 2020-12-17 17:27:32.256000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Satire', 'DIY', 'Culture', 'Humor'] |
Hustling for Self-Love | Hustling for Self-Love
“Dollhouse,” by: Jess Moor
“You’re something special,” said my client Don, sliding into a navy sport coat. I watched him from the bed, still donning the lacey lamé stockings and garter belt from the previous evening.
“Have a wonderful day,” I responded, breaking free from an entanglement of white sheets. As I wrapped my arms around him, I wondered why he felt so distant. The faraway look in his eyes seemed to serve as an omen for an outcome that I wasn’t prepared to face.
Since high school, I’ve had an affinity for older men, a sort of gravitational pull, derived from my inability to fit in with the kids my own age. In junior high, I was the only person at school who was out and proud, which was a frightening trek for a 12-year-old black boy in a conservative town. I grew up in the Triangle area of North Carolina, among a family of fervent Pentecostals. I lost my virginity at 16, to a man that was two-and-a-half decades my senior.
At 16, I didn’t trade sex for money. Instead, I bartered my body for more ethereal concepts, such as: confidence among more socially adept peers, misconceptions about love and worth, along with the occasional dozen of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to placate my loneliness. Too easy to please for my own good. My technical introduction to the world of sex work came at age 19, after my first semester of art school ended, a financial aid shortage leaving me homeless in a city 24-hundred miles from home.
It was following this foray against societal convention that I realized my lucrative effect on the hearts — and the loins — of older men. Whereas, I’d always felt ostracized at school for my nonconformist personality, my peculiar nature was revered by those that were willing to purchase my company. This made the commodification of my affection a logical outlet for self-expression. Being coveted by benefactors that fed me with the golden crumbs of their wealth provided a safe place for me, in a world where my existence had felt forbidden.
I opened the door to a stocky woman with a gracious smile, ready to sweep the room of dust and detritus. She reminded me of my mother, casually dressed in jeans and a gray t-shirt, but nonetheless dignified in the way she conducted herself. She walked as if possessed by a factory worker from Metropolis, on robotic feet, chin slightly elevated from an intrinsic nobility often perpetuated among those who — like my mother — have dedicated their entire lives to the blue collar vocation of serving others.
Service had led me to where I was on that day, the Intercontinental Hotel in Times Square. I’d been invited as a weekend companion for a man named Don, a venture capitalist who recently returned to the States, following a residency overseas. On my first date with the 50-year-old venture capitalist, we never made it past second base. He took me out for sushi and sashimi after watching me go-go dance at a bar in the Castro, San Francisco.
“I didn’t mean to intrude, but I wanted to catch a glimpse,” said the silver fox, his ice-blue eyes burning brightly against Irish skin.
“No intrusion,” I responded over the crowd. I’d changed into a mesh leotard, one that complimented my legs and showcased the glute workouts, newly incorporated into my fitness routine.
“From Rentboy,” he verified. Days prior, we began our correspondence on the infamous website that would fall prey to a government raid soon after, resulting in the subsequent shutdown of the melting pot for male escorts. “You’re an amazing dancer,” said Don, his Yankee accent thick and assertive. “Although, I do admit, this is the last place I’d expect to see someone like you.” He nodded his head, his eyes lingering, his body tense, his energy — all at once — contracting, yet fully engaged.
“Why is this the last place, of all places?” I asked, genuinely intrigued.
“Well, for one thing, you’re sober. How many manage to stay sober, while dancing all night at a bar?”
It was a good question, and “not many” was the answer. During my years as a hustler, I’d managed to pick up a vipassana practice, to which I’d become quite faithful. In addition to making me more aware of the polarities of reality (the false dual between forces of light and dark), it increased my sensitivity to external stimuli, especially alcoholic beverages or mind-altering substances. Later on, when a Buddhist mistress of the same style of meditation moved in across the hall from me, I gleaned valuable insight from our synchronistic exchanges. I came to understand that the guidance I sought in outward practice had been revealed within the caverns of my own heart.
For the first time in my journey as an escort, I was inspired to approach soul in tandem with the body; self-awareness became the foundation upon which my spirituality was built. Don became one of the first benefactors to embrace my conscious approach to sex work and started to explore the metaphysical perspective for himself, yearning for ways to imbue his material success with a deep-rooted sense of purpose and truth. We began using desire as a pathway to awakening, whereas it had once been feared and condemned as a weakness. Our time together became a sanctuary, a consecrated temple, where conversation, contemplation and intimacy were powerful outlets for communion.
Four years after my first meeting with Don, he reached out to me, insinuating a business proposition. Upon request, I sent him explicit compositions of my nether realms, self-portraits I shot in the apartment of a previous suitor. After a week of him ogling my photographs, he remunerated me with a 2,000-dollar apex of an allowance, rebooting the dalliance that had ended back when he moved to Italy with his wife and two children.
“I feel at home with you,” Don gushed from across the bed, as I reviewed the breakfast menu. The night before, we spent hours ruminating on eastern philosophical concepts, like vibration, chakra alignment and the deceptive glamours of maya. I professed my obsession with Osho and Alan Watts; we discussed my budding expertise in the fusion of sex and meditation, a form of magic, ascertained from years of research and practice. I persuaded Don to confess the type of details he’d never felt brave enough to discuss: his decade of marriage to a woman, the subsequent divorce, the co-parenting of pre-teen children. We discussed travel plans for the future, and for a moment we were headed towards something I’d always longed for — a permanent source of grounding and stability.
Shortly after leaving, Don texted me. “I want you to be mine.” Minutes later, he offered to rent me an apartment in New York City.
“Anywhere in Manhattan?” I inquired, my heart dancing to a giddy rhythm of its own. I took a pinch of the viscid honeycomb that resided beneath a glass covering on the dresser, a complimentary treat from the hotel.
“Anywhere,” he texted back with a row of pink hearts. A sudden frisson overcame me (part sugar rush, part thrill), but the excitement was quickly followed by grief. Somehow, I knew we were too good to be true — too good to last. The black rose of consternation in my chest bloomed like a portent.
Shortly after his departure, Don called a car to haul me off to JFK. As I was dropping my cell phone at the security checkpoint, I received an alert: two grand transferred to my account, with a note from Don: “Treat yourself to something special. You deserve it.” I nearly broke into tears on the way to my terminal. At 25-years-old, I felt more blessed than I ever did in the pews of my childhood church, in awe at this act of generosity that I was raised to believe wasn’t possible that this too was a form of God’s beneficence.
“Distance,” by Jess Moor
As a young boy, I was warned that — by being gay — I was opening myself up to grave danger, temporal, but especially metaphysical. I was taught by the church to believe I’d be shunned by the God of Abraham, that my peculiar nature would be a lifelong curse. I welcomed this danger as my daemon; I wielded the restrictions placed upon me as a road map of individualized will. I used my sexuality, my primordial disgrace, as a method of escaping my impoverished beginnings. To me, being born as a have-not — a person of color without social privilege — was a karmic noose that, in the haunting silence of solitary moments, threatened to snatch me back to origins of misfortune.
With Don, it wasn’t just about transactional intercourse; it was an opportunity to find redemption in an unlikely place. There was a mutual support that was extended, and it soared beyond the superficial or mundane. Not only did he remunerate me for my time, but he provided feedback on my writing, celebrated my aspirations, complimented my mind, and, most memorably, encouraged me to keep dreaming.
When I got the news of his cancer diagnosis, it broke my heart. I was sitting on the back porch of my best friend’s home, my spirit soaring to the sounds of an avian chorus; bluebirds were sprouted across the lawn, like winged blossoms, nature’s depiction of the joy I felt on the inside, until it was pummeled to dirt and root by a plague of bad news. When he revealed the extent of his illness and his treatment, I knew we’d never meet again, and that affected me in a way I didn’t anticipate. I lost the joy that I heard in the bluebirds’ harmony and, for a while, the turbulence was overwhelming. After all I’d poured into the arrangement, the universe was taking it away. I was being returned to the place I strived to escape.
A period of darkness inspired me to pay attention to the positive aspects of what I’d endured. I reminisced on the conversations between us, on the harmony we shared. I reminded myself of what a progression this had been from previous arrangements, where I may not have received the level of respect that Don showed me, which I deserved, even in this field of work. With these good memories, I befriended my sorrow in meditation and honored what reality had revealed through this lifestyle. I fell in love with myself — my entire self — the accomplishments and, especially, the shortcomings. Discovering peace, I wrote myself back towards the light.
Before meeting Don, I wondered whether I’d be accused of playing the role of a slave. Would others view me as a disposable boy-toy to the white man in power, a prey (or a predator?) of the appetites of older plutocrats who, without wanting to admit it, partake in transactions of fraudulent affection? Personally, I see reality from a more complex light: deeper tones, with vivid hues and broader strokes. If I’m agreeing to submit, then it is but a figment of my character, a materialized facet of my own imagination — a longing for knowledge of self, a quest for enlightenment — to be endured on my own terms, not on the terms of the men who want me, despite the cost.
Sex work allowed me to find a place in the world of relationships; it taught me compassion and acceptance for the complication of a human soul. For that, I honor the space it’s created in my world, not just as a transaction, but as a valid pathway to healing the heart. I am no longer in San Francisco, although I am still often supported by the intimate friends I’ve come to know along the way. While I may not appear to be much further from where I began, I feel different, more aware than I did in the beginning. Perhaps, that wakeful awareness is the grounding and stability I originally sought upon landing on this path. Either way, I am the hero and the villain of my own tragedy — flowing in harmony towards resolution — and that, to me, is plenty cause for celebration. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/hustling-for-self-love-266fac0f3bd9 | ['Jess Moor'] | 2019-09-28 20:40:29.702000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Sex Work', 'LGBTQ', 'Philosophy', 'Sexuality'] |
What is the difference between organic milk and regular milk | With the American concept of “organic” gradually penetrating our lives, people’s living and eating habits have changed greatly. Especially when feeding infants and young children, organic milk powder is more popular. Parents who choose organic milk powder for babies will find organic milk sources more nutritious and pure. To let you better understand the organic milk source, let’s introduce the difference between organic milk source and ordinary milk source.
Milk powder produced in the organic milk source area has no residues of pesticides and insecticide and is more pure, healthy and safe. Milk powder from common milk sources contains pesticides, insecticide, and other harmful substances. Pesticides and insecticides can reduce the function of immune systems of babies, damage thenervous system function and immature reproductive system of babies, and have carcinogenic hazards.
Milk powder from organic milk sources does not contain antibiotics and growth hormones. Milk powder produced from common milk sources contains antibiotics and growth hormones. The overuse of antibiotics can affect people’s health, especially infants and young children. Every antibiotic has strong toxic side effects, which can damage hearing, kidney, liver, and also cause milk allergic. It also kills normal cells in the body, causing harmful bacteria to invade.
So what does cow eat? The dairy cows in organic milk sourced only eat natural grass and drink pure mountain springs. The dairy cows do not use any auxin and should not use genetic modification technology to ensure that raw milk is truly natural. But ordinary milk sources can not be truly natural.
Organic milk sources require cows to have a certain grazing time. Cattle grazing not only maintains the growth law and living habits of dairy cows but also effectively avoids the spread of disease. This is safer and healthier than ordinary milk powder from captive cows.
Milk powder produced from organic milk sources has strict requirements on sunshine, air, soil and water sources, including fresh forage for cattle must be guaranteed to be natural forage. Therefore, milk powder produced from organic milk sources is not only healthier and safer, but also more mellow and delicious, and has better taste than ordinary milk powder.
Milk powder from organic milk sources is more beneficial to health. Research shows that organic products contain more trace elements such as iron, magnesium, calcium and vitamin C, with high antioxidant content, while heavy metals and carcinogenic nitrates are lower. It can enhance the human body quality, more conducive to the health of the baby. However, the content of iron, magnesium, and calcium in milk powder from a common milk source is not as high as that of milk powder from organic milk source.
Organic milk powder is more easily absorbed by the human body. It is known that the content of antioxidants in organic vegetables and fruits is 40% higher than that in conventional products and 60% higher than that in organic dairy cows, so organic products are more conducive to improving people’s nutritional absorption.
More importantly, organic milk sources do not use the feed to feed cows, which makes milk powder avoid aflatoxin pollution. Aflatoxin is a highly toxic toxin that can cause cancer if ingested for a long time. One of the reasons for aflatoxin in dairy sources is that the dairy female cow eats feed containing aflatoxin. After aflatoxin B1 and B2 are eaten by dairy cows, a small part of aflatoxin B1 and B2 will be converted into M1 and M2 into milk, respectively. This is the source of aflatoxin in milk. So, if cows eat grass, there will be no aflatoxin milk.
In conclusion, in the choice of milk powder, milk powder from an organic milk source is more suitable for the growth and development of babies than that from ordinary milk sources. | https://medium.com/@ephrona.ballya/what-is-the-difference-between-organic-milk-and-regular-milk-e4682c5c1f9f | [] | 2020-07-20 05:45:25.263000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Organic Food', 'Growth', 'Milk', 'Organic'] |
Revamping, and Expansion of The Opinioc | Unsplash: Anatoliy Babiy.
Dear Readers,
We are highly appreciative of all the support, patience, and trust that you have showered on us. It bestows us with immense pleasure to announce that out of the number of projects that we are working on — climacteric of one among them has been accomplished.
Opinioc started its journey as a Medium-partnered publication, and within a short span of time, it set the Thames on fire and became one of the top publications on Medium.
But not to confine it there, a multivariate platform was envisaged in a comprehensive, concise way — where the evolving needs and challenges posed by the new generation will be maneuvered in a succinct, client-friendly, and target-oriented manner. This was only possible because of the support from our readers who had faith in the principles guiding our publication.
As our Opinioc family grew, a need was felt to expand our reach in order to be more inclusive. To cater to those demands, we have revamped and designed a full-fledged website — https://opinioc.com for our esteemed readers, and writers. Also, a new feature — ‘NEW VOICES’ was conceptualized and added, which hopes to provide an open-ended platform giving impetus to every voice out there. The section ‘NEW VOICES’ intends to be the repository of thoughts, ideas, and graphics.
Besides, the methodology for the submission has also changed — keeping traction with the on-going technological advances and not limiting it to the old-school. The writers can either mail their piece at [email protected] or create a Profile, and use the extensive dashboard provided to submit the same.
Apart from that, we would like to take this opportunity to share the great news with our Opinioc family that we have expanded and started Opinioc Services.
In the Services part of the Opinioc, we have collaborated with a team of highly skilled and experienced members who have to their glory — a number of projects and to fulfill the requirements of the time, we have devised this as a broad range platform where Content Writing, Digital Marketing, Web Development, and Designing needs will be addressed.
Together we started this journey and together we are growing. We do acknowledge the effort of every person in making this expedition interesting and successful. We are overwhelmed by your response, we also inform you that the Opinioc has now fully resumed its publication and services.
Warm Regards
The Opinioc Team | https://medium.com/opinioc/revamping-and-expansion-of-the-opinioc-dad001003723 | ['The Opinioc Team'] | 2020-12-23 04:50:19.147000+00:00 | ['Services', 'Publication', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Newsletter'] |
Ansible Tutorial — Learn How To Write Playbooks With Hands-On | Ansible Tutorial — Edureka
Ansible is an open source IT Configuration Management, Deployment & Orchestration tool. This tool aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. In this blog on Ansible Tutorial, you will learn the following:
You will learn to write playbooks
You will learn about different modules in Ansible
You will learn to write Adhoc commands
Hands-on with Ansible
For a better understanding of Ansible, you can check out this video.
Writing Ansible Playbooks
Playbooks in Ansible are written in YAML format. It is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files. It can also be used in many applications where data is being stored.
For Ansible, nearly every YAML file starts with a list. Each item in the list is a list of key/value pairs, commonly called a “hash” or a “dictionary”. So, we need to know how to write lists and dictionaries in YAML.
All members of a list are lines beginning at the same indentation level starting with a “- ” (dash and space). More complicated data structures are possible, such as lists of dictionaries or mixed dictionaries whose values are lists or a mix of both.
e.g. For a list of departments in edureka:
departments: - marketing - sales - solutions - content writing - support - product
Now let me give you an example of a dictionary:
-USA -continent: North America -capital: Washington DC -population: 319 million
Hosts And Users:
For each play in a playbook, you get to choose which machines in your infrastructure to target and which remote user to complete the tasks. To include hosts in Ansible inventory, we will be using the IP addresses of the host machines.
Generally, the hosts are a list one or more groups or host patterns, separated by colons. The remote user is just the name of the user account.
Variables:
Ansible uses variables which are defined previously to enable more flexibility in playbooks and roles. They can be used to loop through a set of given values, access various information like the hostname of a system and replace certain strings in templates with specific values.
Ansible already defines a rich set of variables, individual for each system. Whenever Ansible will run on a system, all facts and information about the system are gathered and set as variables.
But there is a rule for naming variables. Variable names should be letters, numbers, and underscores. Variables should always start with a letter. E.g. wamp_21, port5 is valid variable names, whereas 01_port, _server are invalid.
Tasks:
Tasks allow you to break up bits of configuration policy into smaller files. The task includes pull from other files. Tasks in Ansible go with pretty much the English meaning of it.
E.g: Install <package_name>, update <software_name> etc.
Handlers:
Handlers are just like regular tasks in an Ansible playbook but are only run if the Task contains a notify directive and also indicates that it changed something. For example, if a config file is changed, then the task referencing the config file may notify a service restart handler.
Let me give you an example of a playbook which will start the Apache httpd server program:
---
- hosts: webservers
vars:
http_port: 80
max_clients: 200
remote_user: root
tasks:
- name: ensure apache is at the latest version
yum: name=httpd state=latest
- name: write the apache config file
template: src=/srv/httpd.j2 dest=/etc/httpd.conf
notify:
- restart apache
- name: ensure apache is running (and enable it at boot)
service: name=httpd state=started enabled=yes
handlers:
- name: restart apache
service: name=httpd state=restarted
I hope the example will relate you to all the description of the playbook components that I have mentioned above. If it is still not clear to you, don’t worry all your doubts will be clear in the later part of this blog.
This is all about playbooks. The playbooks which will be written by you. But Ansible provides you with a wide range of modules as well, which you can use.
Modules
Modules in Ansible are idempotent. From a RESTful service standpoint, for operation (or service call) to be idempotent, clients can make that same call repeatedly while producing the same result. In other words, making multiple identical requests has the same effect as making a single request.
There are different types of modules in Ansible
Core modules
extras modules
Core Modules
These are modules that the core Ansible team maintains and will always ship with Ansible itself. They will also receive a slightly higher priority for all requests than those in the “extras” repos.
The source of these modules is hosted by Ansible on GitHub in the Ansible-modules-core.
Extras Modules
These modules are currently shipped with Ansible but might be shipped separately in the future. They are also mostly maintained by the Ansible Community. Non-core modules are still fully usable but may receive slightly lower response rates for issues and pull requests.
Popular “extras” modules may be promoted to core modules over time.
The source for these modules is hosted by Ansible on GitHub in the Ansible-modules-extras.
E.g: The one of the extras module in Remote Management Modules is ipmi_power module, which is a power manager for the remote machines. It requires python 2.6 or later and pyghmi to run.
You can use this module by writing an adhoc command like the one I have written below:
ipmi_power : name ="test.domain.com" user="localhost" password="xyz" state="on"
Return Values
Ansible modules normally return a data structure that can be registered into a variable, or seen directly when output by the Ansible program. Each module can optionally document its own unique return values.
Some examples of return values are:
changed: returns with a boolean value whenever the task makes any change.
failed: returns a boolean value, if the task is failed
msg: it returns a string with a generic message relayed to the user.
AdHoc Commands
Adhoc commands are simple one-line command to perform some action. Running modules with Ansible commands are adhoc commands.
E.g:
ansible host -m netscaler -a "nsc_host=nsc.example.com user=apiuser password=apipass"
The above adhoc command uses the netscaler module to disable the server. There are hundreds of modules available in Ansible from where you can refer to and write adhoc commands.
Well, enough with all the theoretical explanations, let me explain you Ansible with some hands on.
Hands On
I am going to write a playbook to install Nginx on my node/host machine.
Let’s begin :)
Step 1: Connect to your hosts using SSH. For that, you need to generate a public SSH key.
Use the command below:
ssh-keygen
As you can see in the snapshot above, the command ssh-keygen generated a public SSH key.
Step 2: Your next task is to copy the public SSH key on your hosts. In order to do that, use the command below:
ssh-copy-id -i root@<IP address of your host>
The snapshot above shows the SSH key being copied to the hosts.
Step 3: List the IP addresses of your hosts/nodes in your inventory.
Use the following command:
vi /etc/ansible/hosts
This will open a vi editor where you can list down the IP addresses of your hosts. This is now your inventory.
Step 4: Let’s ping to ensure a connection has been established.
The snapshot above confirms that connection has been made between your control machine and host.
Step 5: Let us now write a playbook to install Nginx on the host machine. You can write your playbook in the vi editor. For that, simply create your playbook, using the command:
vi <name of your file>.yml
The below snapshot shows my playbook to install Nginx written in YAML format.
The tasks of a playbook are defined in YAML as a list of dictionaries and executed from top to bottom. If we have several hosts, then each task is tried for each host before moving on to the next one. Each task is defined as a dictionary that can have several keys, such as “name” or “sudo” which signify the name of the task and whether it requires sudo privileges.
A variable server_port is set that listens on TCP port 8080 for incoming requests.
Here, the first task is to get the necessary package for installation of Nginx and then install it. Internally, Ansible will check if the directory exists and create it if it’s not, otherwise it will do nothing.
The next task is to configure Nginx. In Nginx, contexts contain configuration details.
Here, the template is a file you can deploy on hosts. However, template files also include some reference variables which are pulled from variables defined as part of an Ansible playbook or facts gathered from the hosts. Facts containing the configuration details are being pulled from a source directory and being copied to a destination directory.
Handlers here define the action to be performed only upon notification of tasks or state changes. In this playbook, we defined, notify: restart Nginx handler which will restart Nginx once the files and templates are copied to hosts.
Now, save the file and exit.
Step 6: Now let’s run this playbook, using the command below:
ansible-playbook <name of your file>.yml
We can see in the screenshot above that our task is getting executed; Nginx being installed.
Step 7: Let’s check if Nginx is installed on my host machine. Use the command below:
ps waux | grep nginx
You can see in the screenshot above, that different process ids 3555 and 103316 are running which ensures that Nginx is running on your host machines.
Congratulations! You have successfully deployed Nginx on your host using Ansible playbooks. I hope you have enjoyed reading this Ansible Tutorial blog.
If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Python, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of DevOps. | https://medium.com/edureka/ansible-tutorial-9a6794a49b23 | ['Saurabh Kulshrestha'] | 2020-09-10 09:10:09.320000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Configuration Management', 'Ansible', 'Playbooks'] |
Freelancers: Do Not Discount For Promises of Future Work | Freelancers: Do Not Discount For Promises of Future Work
Photo: Magnet.me/Unsplash
When you are a freelancer, you learn to find your own definition of customer service. Since it is your business, you are the boss. You are the person who is responsible for deciding what you can and cannot offer, and that includes discounts.
Now, in most cases, I advise against providing discounts. You deserve to be paid your rate, but even I have an exception to the rule: bulk orders. And that is where things get tricky.
“But, I’m Going To Bring A Ton of Work”
As a little baby freelancer, I heard this a lot. Clients would come by with big aspirations for their marketing efforts. They would be high on the promises of wealth from some LinkedIn article that said success was only one blog away. Search engine optimization (SEO) is breaking into every single blog space on the internet and making everyone feel like a marketing expert. So, yeah, your new client has plans. You know what they don’t have? Follow through.
“I will need twenty to thirty posts a month.”
So many people invest in the idea of SEO and make these grand plans to bring their business to that coveted first page of Google. And yes, it is absolutely possible. Unfortunately, it is not an overnight process. If all I had to do to take over any industry was post thirty posts as quickly as possible, I would be Queen of the Internet. Sure, plenty of my clients are on the first page of Google. Some of them are even the first option after those pesky ads, but the majority of them have been working at it for some time and are doing plenty on the back-end to support their website’s SEO efforts. But, those LinkedIn articles don’t mention any of that because then it might sound like work instead of an easy process that anyone can do.
“I have all of the article ideas planned out.”
Yes, they have some article ideas planned out. They have the top ten suggestions from Ubersuggest, and maybe a few ideas they stole from a competitor’s website. Since they came up with these basic ideas, they think it will be smooth sailing to come up with more. It’s not. They will ask you for input, which is fine, but it does bring additional work. So, now you’re doing more work for someone who isn’t paying full-price for an article in the first place. More effort, less money. That’s bad for business.
“We agreed on this price.”
Then, there comes the awkward part. Your client, the one who promised you work every single week and then ghosted for over a month, suddenly returns for their next order. So, what do you do? Do you offer them the discounted rate and honor your verbal commitment even though they did not follow through on theirs, or do you quote them the full price and wait for them to get upset or attempt to correct you? It’s a conversation that isn’t fun and it can lead to some unpleasant interactions. I’ve seen clients legitimately get upset over being asked to pay full price. Why? In their mind, they just got a little distracted and you are now overreacting. They will think that you are being greedy for wanting to be paid your actual rate when they know you could charge less. It’s not a fun talk.
The Facts
Right now, there are countless blogs designed to stress the importance of SEO. Why? For the sake of SEO. As ridiculous as it might sound, websites are posting about search engine optimization for the sake of search engine optimization. So, your clients are seeing a lot of it. They are seeing those pretty little promises of overnight success and how they can easily beat out their competitors — and they want in.
But, in the years that I have spent doing this, I can absolutely assure you that when a business owner gets distracted, their marketing efforts immediately get put on the backburner. The second their schedule gets too busy, you will be forgotten. They won’t care about the fact that you were promised work and did not receive it — which can be particularly terrible if you are at the point in your career where you don’t have a guaranteed lineup of work at all times.
Even a client with the best intentions can let you down, so focus on clients that show you in advance how committed they are to the process.
My Exception
Though time has taught me to always ask for my rate, I do give an exception for bulk orders. See, when someone places a bulk order, they are paying for my services in advance. Since I have that guarantee of commitment, I do generally offer a small discount. Now, what this looks like for you might look different than it looks for me. I’m not offering discounts for ten mini-blogs. These discounts are only given to those who are committing to several hundred dollars worth of content and paying for it in advance. I like to do nice things for my clients when I can, so I try to do my part.
For me, discounting on bulk orders is not just a matter of money. I’m at a point in my career where I’ve got a constant flow of work. I don’t need someone to buy out my time, but I do appreciate someone offering me a singular focus. While I do love the varying nature of freelance work, it generally takes less effort to write ten blogs on a single topic than to write ten blogs on ten different topics. They save me time, so I save them money.
Business Is Business
Depending on your freelance craft(s), you might be more prone to hearing these promises. Freelance writing jobs tend to be ongoing, which makes a lot of clients feel more entitled to discounts. But, the fact is that unless they contractually agree to bring that work, you might end up out in the cold. Instead of getting swept up in someone’s vision, remember that your entire business is just one part of theirs.
Whether you are a writer, designer, social media manager, or something else fun and groovy, you deserve to be paid for it. Stick to your rate and only give exceptions when you are gaining a clear advantage too. Business partnerships are meant to be mutually beneficial, so don’t sell yourself short. Dollars speak louder than words. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/freelancers-do-not-discount-for-promises-of-future-work-4b86a6baefbc | [] | 2020-12-16 16:21:04.994000+00:00 | ['Freelance Writing', 'Small Business', 'Freelancing', 'Freelancers', 'Customer Service'] |
dinCloud Hosted Workspaces — Highly Viable for Remote Work | Over the past few months, all of us would agree that remote work has now become a long term need for organizations. So, enterprises now require a platform for their remote employees that’s versatile and secure.
dinCloud Hosted Workspaces are one of our flagship cloud offerings. This is a remote work platform that ticks all the right boxes and is not only ideal for your immediate needs, rather its capabilities are equally good for the long haul, here’s why.
· dinCloud Hosted Workspaces are mounted with a fully virtualized Windows 10 desktop experience. This gives you access to the latest OS and productivity solutions.
· Whether your remote employees access them via a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop, the user will be treated to a seamless end-user experience.
· Our Hosted Workspaces are fortified against cyber threats through a multi-layered approach to security.
· Before your remote employees access dinCloud Hosted Workspaces, they will have to undergo a Two Factor Authentication (2FA) protocol for enhanced security.
· Via dinManage, which is our web-based cloud management portal, you can manage your entire Hosted Workspace environment from a single interface.
· Our Hosted Workspaces are offered at a flat-rate monthly subscription model, that’s both predictable and very cost-effective with no hidden costs.
To sum it all up, dinCloud Hosted Workspaces are a very strong and reliable platform for all your remote work needs. If you’re still not sure, then don’t worry, we are offering a 14 Day Free Trial as well. | https://medium.com/@dincloudofficial/dincloud-hosted-workspaces-highly-viable-for-remote-work-6516410bfadc | ['Din Cloud'] | 2020-12-22 18:16:45.018000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Dincloud', 'Virtual Desktop', 'SaaS', 'Cloud Computing'] |
Learn how to create great-looking, interactive maps with d3. | Learn with exercises not just examples
Most people learn d3 by looking at examples and changing parts of it to fit their needs.
They iterate on these examples, look at the documentation, maybe consult a book or look at videos on YouTube.
But people get frustrated using this method.
Here are people sharing their struggles on twitter, Slack, forums and stackoverflow:
“After looking at a few d3.js demos, I had thought that the above task would be trivially easy with d3.js, but in fact I have found it to be insanely difficult.” “Most of the resources I’ve found are either old (v3, I know I can still follow them, but I’d rather follow a v4 tutorial) or very convoluted. It seems like I spend half my time trying to figure out why the graph won’t compile.” “I want to just jump in, yet it seems like I need to know a bunch of the api to get even a simple graph up.”
Is there a better way to learn to create maps with d3?
What if instead of going through examples and changing them, you would learn by using real world exercises and creating your own projects.
Geospatial Data Visualization with d3 will help you take a more focussed approach learning d3.
This comprehensive video course will teach you how to create geospatial data visualizations with javascript and d3.
I taught this workshop at several geospatial conferences around the world and will be teaching two more this year.
Come, join me on this journey.
Sign up for the waiting list at: https://mappingwithd3.com | https://medium.com/@mila_frerichs/learn-how-to-create-great-looking-interactive-maps-with-d3-486289006df6 | ['Mila Frerichs'] | 2019-07-22 20:42:42.946000+00:00 | ['Mapping', 'Maps', 'D3js', 'Data Visualization'] |
Climate Change Communication in the times of Coronavirus: Insights from Google Trends | Climate Change Communication in the times of Coronavirus: Insights from Google Trends
As I mentioned in my earlier post, Coronavirus has made many scientists, environmentalists and activists anxious about its impact on the global climate change policies. There is a near-universal feeling of despair and helplessness since everyone is imagining that governments’ resolution to fight climate change will weaken as nations start to rebuild their battered economies. Indeed, if history provides any indication, these concerns are absolutely spot-on. Even though the carbon emissions decrease during the time of developmental crises (as has happened at the present time), the world economy tends to savagely return to the high emission trajectory in any post-crisis world. The years after the 2008 global financial recession recorded the highest annual growth in global carbon emissions. Viewed from this perspective, the Coronavirus pandemic could not have come at any worst time. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has now reached an all-time high of 414 ppm; January 2020 was the warmest recorded since the world history; for a day Antarctica recorded higher temperature than New Delhi during this year’s winter season and the window for action against climate change is fast waning.
However, some people have suggested that Coronavirus has also brought about an extreme shift in humanity’s paradigm and it can prove to be a turning point in battling Climate Change if the crisis can be utilized carefully. In this article, I look at changes in the way people searched for some key terms during the peak of Coronavirus pandemic in the google search engine to look for any patterns that can suggest future pathways for climate change communication and activism. In the past, statisticians have used the data from google trends to examine various phenomena like influenza-like illnesses, suicide occurrence, racism and the stock market. I start with graphical analysis and follow it up with a statistical analysis of trends of some of the search phrases to layout my narrative.
As you probably know, google trends provide data on long term trends (five years) of phrases searched in the google engine. In the following graphs, Y-axis depicts the intensity of search, in relative terms. So, the value of 100 percent denotes the timing of peak interest in that phrase in the 5-year period, other values in the graph are relative to this peak value.
A cursory look at the trends of lockdown, pandemic, Coronavirus and quarantine terms shows the quantum jump in their search history starting near last week of February and 1st week of March when the whole world started realizing the gravity of the disease. Indeed, there is no big revelation here and these terms do not need any statistical analysis to bring out the difference in trends.
Based on conjectured associations with Coronavirus, I analyzed following other phrases in google trends: family, love, travel, environment, nature, economy and climate change. Out of these terms, graphical trends on love are pretty clear — people are steadily losing interest in it!! There seems to be an annual spike around December-January each year, but even the peak of this spike is decreasing. What could be the reason for this annual cycle? I have no idea but will definitely like to know more about it :-)
Among the other terms, travel and family graphs show a clear deviation from the previous year trends. I did a statistical analysis — boxplot, ANOVA and Tukey test for these search terms (limited to the 1 March-17 May for 5 years). Here are the results,
Boxplot for Climate Change
ANOVA test for Climate change
TUKEY test for Climate Change
ANOVA test for Climate change suggests a statistically significant difference in the means of different years; TUKEY test confirms that the difference is coming mainly due to years 2019 and 2018. It seems that after a low of 2018, search for climate change gained high traction in 2019, but it has come down in 2020 (though not as much as the level of 2018). This can be confirmed from the box plot too.
Boxplot for Economy
ANOVA test for Economy
TUKEY test for Economy
Like climate change, search for economy too shows statistically different trends among the last five years as per ANOVA. TUKEY test confirms that the difference is driven by the year 2020, and a perusal of Boxplot shows people are searching a lot more about ‘Economy’ than the previous years.
Boxplot for Environment
ANOVA test for Environment
TUKEY test for Environment
All the three statistical analysis show that there is NO significant difference among the last 5 years in the search patterns for ‘Environment’. Hence, at least on the basis of google search, we can say that there does not seem to be any increase in concern for the environment during Coronavirus pandemic.
Box plot for Family
ANOVA test for family
TUKEY test for family
This is interesting. ANOVA confirms a statistically significant difference, which is confirmed by TUKEY test and the difference is being driven by the year 2020. As box plot show, people searched a lot more about family during pandemic months in 2020 than the earlier years.
Box plot for Nature
ANOVA test for Nature
TUKEY test for Nature
Here is another interesting result. ANOVA test shows that there is a difference between the search patterns of last 5 years, TUKEY test shows that the difference is driven by the year 2019 and 2020. Box plot suggests that people were searching for Nature in a fairly predictable fashion in the last 4 years, however, they suddenly started to search more during the pandemic months of the year 2020.
Box plot for Travel
ANOVA test for travel
TUKEY test for Travel
Search patterns for Travel show the exact opposite of nature, Boxplot shows that people suddenly started searching less for travel in the lockdown months of 2020 and ANOVA and TUKEY test confirm that this pattern is statistically different than the previous papers.
DISCUSSION
If google trends give any indication about what people are thinking most, it confirms the fear of climate change scientists that the increase in focus on climate change achieved in previous years has been lost in public psyche during the Coronavirus pandemic. However, the situation is not so hopeless, as despite the immediate crisis of Coronavirus, the search levels of Climate Change in 2020 were better than 2018 and about the levels of 2017. Statistical analysis also corroborates that comparatively, people thought very less about travel in these months. Instead, economy and family occupied their minds. Interestingly, there does not seem to be any increase (or decrease) in environment consciousness but definitely people searched a lot more about nature than in previous years.
For climate change communication, above investigation can provide important lessons. Behavioural science has four important things to say about the humanity’s willingness to change — we do not want to change fundamentally (status quo bias); we value losses more than gains (loss aversion); it is important how various options are framed (choice architecture) and we think about temporally distant events in a relatively abstract manner (construal level theory). Status quo bias implies two things — individuals stick to defaults, and the best time to change a person’s behaviour is when she is already experiencing a transition. In some respects, Coronavirus has changed our default behaviour in the most extreme way overnight. Secondly, the ongoing calamity has made people rediscover the fragility of many things which were earlier taken for granted. The well-being of near and dear ones and friends, a reliable job and simple joys of travelling and exploring the world are no longer secure. If climate change messaging can use the choice architecture provided by the Coronavirus to frame the future world, people will probably choose to avoid loss of these precious things over short term economic benefits accruing from a fossil-fuel economy. The Coronavirus pandemic has raised the credibility of researchers and scientists like never before, and this enhanced trustworthiness can be used to educate people about the perils of climate change. After all, there is a near scientific unanimity that global warming is likely to cause upheavals and tragedies at a much larger scale than what we are witnessing now. A surge in the outbreak of pandemics, unmanageable sea-level rise, unpredictable weather, erratic patterns of droughts and floods and increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires are some of the many extreme events predicted by the scientists. The unfolding catastrophe has shown humanity a glimpse of how such a world would look like, and hence brought the temporally distant impact of climate change much closer. As Winston Churchill said, ‘never waste a good crisis’, it is now up to policymakers and climate change scientists to exploit the turn of the events in a way that helps the cause of combating climate change. | https://medium.com/swlh/climate-change-communication-in-the-times-of-coronavirus-insights-from-google-trends-1b1ae0d7852a | ['Rohit Gupta'] | 2020-07-03 08:31:39.580000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Data Science', 'Coronavirus'] |
As a Mother | Motherhood and Mental Health
I will always be a mother first. A mother of three young blessings. A mother to our Earth, as well as a mother to those in our communities.
As a mother, I have chosen the responsibility of helping my family find the greatness they were born with. It’s the beautiful part of motherhood that can be pressed onto others to create a sense of love.
While my parents divorced at the age of 4, my mother spent most of my childhood working to provide for us. Our bond lacked the essence of quality time, and it was something that I always resented her for. It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I realized my mothers’ commitment to providing was for my betterment. I’ve faced hardships that my mother had gone through, which has instilled in me the debt I thought she owed. All I feel towards her now are honour and respect.
Mothering and Mental Health
For me, the hardest part of motherhood has been addressing the mental toll. There have been times I have let emotions take the best of me. I let frustrations turn me into a monster, sadness makes me feel like a stranger in my own skin, and anxiety rise to a thousand burning degrees. Getting a mental health break when I’m dealing with personal issues has been tough. Nevertheless, these emotions and experiences have made me who I am and have taught me lessons on how to deal with life. How to deal with the struggles and moments of joy, being grateful at all times, and enjoying the privilege of my situation.
What I’ve learned is that I can get through these emotional stresses with patience. Being patient allows us to hear and be heard. We can live in a world of peace, we just need to take the necessary steps. Establishing patience within ourselves is a learned process, and we need to take the steps towards preventing war within ourselves.
Adrienne Rich said:
“We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.”
We do all of this while fighting demons both physically and emotionally, yet a mother’s resilience is like no other.
As a mother, my passions have become ignited in wanting to make a change in this world with a strong desire to take action. The future of my children has become my motivation. I aim to leave behind a legacy for each one of them, making a difference and influencing future generations is the end goal.
As mothers, let’s think about the legacy we leave behind because we are the ones to create it. We hold the power to be encouraging, reflective, and involved. We can strengthen our communities through time with those around us.
As mothers, our souls yearn for relationships — connecting with others helps us to learn about ourselves and help one another grow. We can all thrive together as a society once we focus on the vulnerability of those around us. Mothers can lead the way. | https://medium.com/cry-mag/as-a-mother-a62e4d093492 | ['J Escano'] | 2021-01-23 13:36:45.377000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Depression', 'Creativity', 'Mothers', 'Parenting'] |
Understanding Asymmetric (Public Key) Cryptography | Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash
Asymmetric cryptography, also called public key cryptography, is an essential element of a secure cyberspace. However, understanding asymmetric cryptography can be challenging for people who are not familiar with computer science or cybersecurity principles. This article is written for the non-techie who wants to understand public key cryptography.
Symmetric Cryptography
When two parties (two people, two computers, two companies, etc.) wish to communicate sensitive information with each other, they will need some way to hide that information as it travels from sender to receiver. One way is to take the original data, which we will call plaintext, and convert it into a message that cannot be understood, which we will call ciphertext. Some type of method is used to make this conversion. It can be as simple as a set of steps “switch the first letter of the word with the last letter of the word,” to a more complex mathematical formula. The process of changing the plaintext into the ciphertext is referred to as encryption.
Once the message has been received by the intended party, that party can convert the ciphertext back to plain text. They must know the original method used to encrypt the message, and then they can reverse the process. The process of changing the ciphertext back to plain text is called decryption.
This process has been around for millennia. Generals going into a battle will know that they will need to communicate sensitive messages across distances. Before a battle, they may agree upon an algorithm for encryption and decryption. During the battle, one general may encrypt his future plans and then ask a courier (on foot, on a horse) to take this message to another general. If the courier is intercepted along the way, the enemy cannot make sense of the message.
Modern computing has made the process of encryption and decryption more complicated, but also easier. Computers use set mathematical algorithms to encrypt data. These algorithms may be known to everyone interested in encrypting messages. A common one is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), used by the United States Government.
These encryption algorithms incorporate a “key” when encrypting communications. This key is unique to each user, and therefore even if the encryption algorithm is the same, the output of encryption will be different for each user.
This can look visually like this:
Rod’s Key + RSA Algorithm -> encrypt the plain text “Cheese and Crackers” -> into ciphertext “Ecv777*!lll”
Kim’s Key + RSA Algorithm -> encrypt the plain text “Cheese and Crackers” -> into ciphertext “O5deaQm&”
Most discussions about encryption use the example of two fictional people, Alice and Bob. In the figure below, Alice is sending a message to Bob, where the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. Because the same key is used to both encrypt and decrypt a message, this process is called symmetric cryptography.
In sum, symmetric cryptography is an encryption system in which the same key is used to both encrypt and decrypt communications.
Asymmetric Cryptography
But what if Alice and Bob (or our generals) never meet each other to agree upon or exchange keys. How can they communicate securely? To give a real-world example, suppose you are a journalist wanting to get information from a source who lives in another country. The source has knowledge of some injustices in their country. Sending this information by e-mail or through social media applications can be dangerous. They cannot put their information on a USB and send it because that may be intercepted.
To deal with this problem, asymmetric (or public key) cryptography is used.
We can use the same general process as above (Key + Algorithm), except now the key is split into a public key and a private key. You can encrypt a message with the public key and decrypt with the private key!
Here is how the general process would work:
Bob uses an application to generate a public and private key. These keys are together called a key-pair. An example application of a website generating keys is here: https://pgpkeygen.com/.
Bob can then take his public key and “share” it. There are many ways he can do this. He can place his key in spaces that belong to her online — social media accounts, his website, even as a signature in his e-mail address. There are also several public repositories where people have posted their public keys. An example is the OpenPGP key server (http://keys.gnupg.net/). But he keeps his private key secure and no one has access to it.
Alice can find Bob’s public key on his website or a key server, encrypt a sensitive message using Bob’s public key, and then e-mail the message to Bob. Only someone with the private half of the key-pair can then decrypt the message.
So, when Bob receives the message from Alice, he can decrypt the message using his private key.
If the message happens to be intercepted in transit, it cannot be read
Like the symmetric cryptography discussed above, the algorithms used for asymmetric cryptography are widely known. The most widely used, and the one we will use is the RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) algorithm.
An example of this process is shown below, again using Bob and Alice:
Another aspect of asymmetric cryptography is that it can be used to increase data integrity by ensuring that a message has not been altered in transit.
Let’s say Alice also generates a key-pair. Like Bob, she can keep a secure private key and make her public key available. The key-pairs give Alice the ability to sign a message with this private key, which can then be verified with someone decrypting the message with Alice’s public key. In simple terms, if we believe that only Alice has access to her private key, then any message that can be decrypted with Alice’s public key must come from Alice.
Here is how the general process would work. I will incorporate the previous example of Alice sending an encrypted message to Bob:
Bob generates a key-pair and makes his public key available
Alice wants to send a secure message to Bob, and so she encrypts her message with Bob’s public key
However, she wants Bob to know that her message has not been altered in transit (for example, someone could intercept the message, and delete Alice’s original message and encrypt a new message with Bob’s key)
So, she makes a hash of the (encrypted) message and then encrypts that with her private key. This is called signing a message. Yes, it can be very confusing. A hash function is an algorithm that produces a small series of values from a larger block of data. It is quick and easy to produce a hash, and it does not take up much data space. The two most common hash functions are MD5 (Message Digest 5) and SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm).
of the (encrypted) message and then encrypts that with her private key. This is called a message. Yes, it can be very confusing. A hash function is an algorithm that produces a small series of values from a larger block of data. It is quick and easy to produce a hash, and it does not take up much data space. The two most common hash functions are MD5 (Message Digest 5) and SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm). Alice sends the encrypted hash (encrypted with her private key) and the encrypted original message (encrypted with Bob’s public key) to Bob.
Bob can then decrypt the original message (using his private key) and read it.
He can also check to see if the message was altered in transit. He does this by getting a hash of the decrypted original message. He then decrypts Alice’s hash (using her public key) and then compares the two hashes. If they are the same, they can be sure that Alice’s message was not altered in transit. This is called verification.
A visual example is given below:
Everyday Uses
The use of Alice and Bob are ways of explaining the logic behind both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. For most people, this process occurs without them even knowing it.
One use example is the Apple iPhone and the automatic encryption of the data on your phone. For someone to read your data, they need your passkey. If law enforcement collects your phone, and you do not give them the passkey, they will have tremendous difficulty reading the data. This is an example of symmetric cryptography.
A second example is HTTPS (HTTP Secure), which uses both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Imagine you decide to buy some books from Amazon’s website. When you enter www.amazon.com into the web address, your computer is essentially requesting data from Amazon’s server. There are four steps:
Amazon’s server will send that data along with its public key. Amazon and most companies have had their public key verified by some certificate authority so that we know the key actually belongs to Amazon.
Your browser then generates a separate symmetric key that will be used for the remainder of the connection (session). This symmetric key is encrypted and sent back to Amazon’s servers.
Amazon’s server can decrypt this new key with its private key.
Now the browser and server encrypt their subsequent communications with the symmetric key until the session ends. They have established a secure channel.
These four steps are shown visually below:
Further Reading | https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-asymmetric-public-key-cryptography-24092bcd7741 | ['Roderick Graham'] | 2020-08-28 16:43:37.137000+00:00 | ['Encryption', 'Digital Forensics', 'Cybercrime', 'Cybersecurity', 'Cryptography'] |
You’re Welcome: How Southern Democrats Can Continue to Save Our Nation’s Democracy | This op-ed was originally published via the National Newspaper Publishers Association Newswire.
I’m from Arkansas. So it’s not hard to imagine how I ended up running a political campaign in Texas. We can all agree now that the South will have a vital role in the future of politics in this country, especially now that preliminary Census results show population growth shifting south. The South has always been important to politics, but the shocking results in Georgia’s presidential and Senate run-off races means that national Democrats are paying a little more strategic attention to it. Even though we came up short, the Democrats’ closeness in the TX-06 race perfectly captures the changing political dynamics across the South and offers a glimpse into the near and bright future of this region.
As Republican legislatures across the country — and especially in the so-called “red states” across the South — try to ram through over 250 various voter suppression bills to shore up their grip on power, the South runs the real risk of falling back into the pattern of oppression and minority rule and taking the entire country with it. If Democrats want to get serious about building up their base in the South, they’re going to need to make the right choices right now.
Sharon McCutcheon via Unsplash
The first key point is that traditional Democratic institutions need to explicitly commit to recruiting and supporting diverse candidates of different races, genders, gender identities, socio-economic statuses, lived experiences, etc . The world is calling for representation that resembles them. Their identity, their existence, their story. Many are answering the call and stepping up, opening their lives and spaces for the opportunity to advocate for their friends, families and communities. And while we all wish we could live in a world where the best candidate wins, no matter how much money they do or don’t spend, that’s just not the way American politics currently works.
The second key principle is that Democrats need to seriously invest in diverse operatives for these candidates once they recruit them. Candidates like Jana Sanchez are everywhere, but they need major dollars to compete, and that can only be provided through a national Democratic strategy to provide support to the best candidates in these emerging districts. We have seen how investing in resources and support can make or break a candidate’s campaign. By providing staff to campaigns that are trained and ready to run and support campaigns makes a huge difference. There are a lot of groups doing training for candidates but we also need to see that support in operatives for competitive campaigns.
Jacek Dylag via Unsplash
The third and final key decision that Democrats need to intentionally build up their state parties and the infrastructure they can provide to great candidates. There’s been lots of hand-wringing in recent years about the decimation of state party chapters, and new DNC Chair Jaime Harrison has committed to investing in them. While a key and very important step, we also have to recognize the need for some reputation repair in some of these states. Many state parties have been torn apart from lack of activity and investment over the years. Candidates can only succeed if they have the right training, staffing, and support for their campaigns. State parties are uniquely positioned to equip and provide that for them. Just like Democrats need to think strategically about which candidates they invest in, they need to carefully plan out how those investments are deployed to rebuild some of that decaying infrastructure.
Many races end up close because of the through hard work, sweat, tears, and a whole lot of hope about the future of the South, and what it can do for the entire country. We know that Democrats simply can’t hope to maintain control in Washington without it, but we also now know the roadmap to success. It’s on national Democrats to follow that roadmap now.
If you don’t know how to make that roadmap or how to follow it — don’t worry, we can help with that. Set up a meeting with our Engagement Studio today to find out how. | https://medium.com/thinkrubix/youre-welcome-how-southern-democrats-can-continue-to-save-our-nation-s-democracy-4762eed8a0b8 | ['Rhonna-Rose Akama-Makia'] | 2021-09-07 17:23:14.330000+00:00 | ['US Politics', 'Democratic Party', 'American Democracy', 'Us South', 'Southern Politics'] |
Best Deals | Personalise your ColorFit Pro 2 and choose from a plethora of cloud-based watch faces from the dedicated NoiseFit app.
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Electronics Product | https://medium.com/@adhikoli2010/best-deals-2340bbbc4006 | ['Adhiraj Koli'] | 2020-12-15 15:41:20.076000+00:00 | ['Best Deals', 'Product', 'Online Shopping', 'Electronics'] |
Act Like An Adult | Election night; a week ago now
Act Like An Adult
And back away from me…
Who am I? I’m no one. Just a citizen who gives a damn. And since no one who’s anyone among your cronies seems willing to let you know this, I’m going to have to.
I never once argued that you were not legitimately the President of the United States for the last 4 years. And shame on the Senate Majority Leader for suggesting that I and many others who didn’t, did. And 4 years ago to the day, President Obama met with you in the Oval Office to talk about transition of power, so don’t give me any of this “we’re only doing what Democrats did with us”.
Regardless, you didn’t win 4 more years in office.
And you didn’t just lose in 1 or 2 states, you lost in a lot of them. By a little in some, by a lot in others. Even if a couple of states had gone the other way; still wouldn’t have been enough. Some places you were ahead at first, and then your lead slipped away. Other places you were behind from the get-go and it stayed that way. In all cases the reason is called counting votes.
Election map at time of publication of this column (Source: Fox News)
For election fraud to be this broad, and this varied, and this imaginative, as you contend, you’d have to believe huge swaths of Americans in many, many states are inherently dishonest. This may be easy for you to believe, since you are. It’s not for me.
You made it to the Super Bowl of politics. Twice. You won one, and you lost one. Not bad. You don’t get to say you won the one you lost just because you won the one you won. Each game ends when time’s up, and everybody looks up at the scoreboard. You don’t get to keep playing until you’re winning. Or perhaps more aptly in this case, run home with the ball and refuse to let go of it because your time just ran out and you’re not man enough to face the results.
If you want to exhaust yourself, and try to exhaust me too, do it by all means. We both know that’s what you do. Just stop shredding Democracy in the process.
Here’s another thing no one’s telling you: you know why Republicans did pretty well in the election, but you didn’t? Keeping a lot of their vulnerable seats in the Senate; narrowing Democrats’ margin in the House? Because a lot of what you said to voters across the land sunk in: a lot of the divisive fear-mongering about socialists and people from inner cities coming to get them. You know, that stuff…
So it’s not your ideas voters rejected. It’s you. And the daily multiple doses of crazy you require us all to endure.
You can spend the next 4 years doing rallies if you want, where people will adore you and you can criticize the hell out of the new president without actually having to do a thing yourself. Sounds about perfect.
And make lots of money selling merch; most all made in China, but for some reason nobody ever came to care about that, nor did you make any attempt to change that. Just like you gave corporations multi-trillion dollar tax breaks because you said that’d compel them to bring jobs back to America, but they never did, and you never took any further action to make it so.
Heck, You can even run again if you want in 2024. I don’t like the idea. But if enough Americans miss you that much by then, and think you are indeed what a true leader looks like, and not the polar opposite, and that rule breaking is always a show of strength and never a virulent corrosion of civil society... Then go nuts.
I can actually understand, I think, why some of the people who vote for you, vote for you. Because some of them are people I love and respect, for other reasons. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why people in your party seem to live in such terror of you.
You may think you’re fearsome. You’re just tiresome. GO AWAY.
I’ve avoided all caps until now. And I’m not gloating. Not at all. I want this place, this fine country, to work for everybody. | https://ericjscholl.medium.com/act-like-an-adult-1061f2e0d930 | ['Eric J Scholl'] | 2020-11-12 13:29:04.455000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Election 2020', 'Donald Trump', 'Politics', 'Joe Biden'] |
The Phenomenon of the Dog Avatar | The Phenomenon of the Dog Avatar
The #dogavi trend is just the beginning. Why are there so many racist pets out there?
It’s a simple phenomenon, but once you see it, it’s impossible to ignore. A large social media account posts something vaguely race-related, like, say, a CNN report on Colin Kaepernick. Scroll down through the replies and you’ll find thinly veiled or just blatantly racist statements. Note the profile photo (the avatar) on that trash opinion. What is it?
A dog.
The #dogavi was first popularized by ESPN’s Bomani Jones in 2013. Since then, the journalist has kept up his reputation as the phenomenon’s documentarian. When he sees a shit opinion coming from a racist pet, he quote-tweets it with #dogavi. Easy. Effective. (Jones didn’t respond to my interview requests.)
To be sure, there are good #dogavi accounts, like Luppe B. Luppen, better known as @nycsouthpaw, a lawyer and political reporter for Yahoo!. There’s also Racism WatchDog, which spots instances of racism and calls it out with dog sounds. (The account is also controversial in its own right, but that’s another story.)
But most #dogavi accounts are trolls. Calling them out isn’t about politics—it’s fighting back against the widespread practice of masking bad-faith arguments and harassment with online anonymity. Also, it’s not just dogs in the mix. The racist-pet phenomenon is so widespread there’s another popular account devoted to rounding up all the people who send bigoted tweets behind the cowardly mask of a kitten or fox.
Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch calls the #dogavi (and its kitten and fox brethren) a “small hum in the larger soundtrack of hate online.” He’s noticed it not just on Twitter but on forums like Gab, an alt-right Twitter alternative known for its lax rules around hate speech and for housing known harassers, where dog photos are often used on “accounts that express racist sentiment.”
Then there’s another, even more niche phenomenon, something that seems related: the Dog Right.
“There was a trend of #DogRight accounts in 2017, when the alt-right was fracturing after Charlottesville,” Holt explains. “The stated mission was to create propaganda using ‘doggos,’ ‘puppers’ and other dog memes that had become popular online at the time and pair it with propaganda for their cause. From what I can tell, that was a relatively small offshoot of the movement that fell apart in the months after its launch.”
Savvy Twitter users have known for years that if you see an egg profile photo (the default avatar, before you choose your own), you’re about to read some bullshit. The #dogavi is a more devious use of Twitter: It adds the veneer of legitimacy to an abusive account. It lets trolls be anonymous while not appearing to be anonymous. “When people log on to spew hate, they often do so under monikers that mask their identity,” Holt says. “The #dogavi accounts fit in to that pattern of obscurity.”
The same for classical imagery from ancient Greece and Rome, which represents the belief in the superiority of Western civilization, as described in an in-depth article from Miami University’s Denise McCoskey. She calls Greek and Roman art and culture “a shorthand for claims of white supremacy.”
What can you do about #dogavi trolls in your mentions? First and foremost, you can respond to #dogavi trolls by calling them out for the avatar, as Bomani Jones does. His name-and-shame tactic often leads to the person deleting their post or changing their profile photo, based on my observations.
Alternatively, you can tell these people to stop being a bitch. Maybe then they’ll have the courage to put a face to their shit views.
Ashwin Rodrigues is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He last wrote about Raffi, the anti-fascist activist.
More Ashwin: | https://medium.com/mel-magazine/the-phenomenon-of-the-dog-avatar-47ea237bd714 | ['Ashwin Rodrigues'] | 2018-10-09 16:22:20.084000+00:00 | ['Avatar', 'Racism', 'Race', 'Social Media', 'Twitter'] |
What To Do When You Don’t Know How To Make Decision In Your Life. | 2. Always keep learning
The more you learn, the smarter ways you know how to deal with the options.
Because when you have more knowledge and experience, it’s easier for you to make the decision because you can recognize more options and know which one can be the best option for you.
It likes the story of Little Frog in the Well we read when we are kids. You will always feel that you can make the best choice from what you have in your mind.
But the world is bigger than the well for the Frog, as the better options are always available for you. The important thing is can you recognize it or not.
And keep learning is the best way to help you go out of your “little well” to discover the world and make better decisions for yourself.
How to do it
So how you should learn to make a better decision in your life.
There are 2 main ways that I’m doing right now and believe that these are the 2 best ways ever for me to do it (for you, maybe you even can figure out some other ways to do it more effectively for yourself, who know!)
Having more life experience
Traveling more, make more decisions, and work on more projects to learn from real experiences.
The lessons from real-life will teach you more valuable lessons than just from your schools.
And it is easier for you to remember these lessons because it related to your emotions and actions in life.
It’s different from the lessons in schools, where you mainly just learn-by-heart from the book without adding the emotion to these lessons.
Reading and listening to more content from successful people to see the ways how they make decisions.
Books, videos, and podcasts from successful people are great sources for any of us to learn about the way how to create success and make decisions in tough situations from the top leaders.
With just $5–$20 bucks, you can easily buy great books from famous leaders like Jack Ma, Tony Robbins, Elon Musk, Brian Tracy,…who give us their intelligence in solving the issues that take them years to learn.
It also gives you more motivation to have bigger ambitions and making your own decisions.
Recently I read the book called “What’s Your Genius” by Jay Niblick. In his book, he said
Our thinking talents and decision-making styles comprise the very core of who we are. They make us the unique individuals that we see in the mirror each morning, and they hold the greatest potential for delivering our greatest levels of performance and success.
As it teaches me a big lesson about the value of our decision when we come up with making choices.
It means that when you can make the right one, it will help you to explore the greatest potential and perform successfully at a greater level and show who you are. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/what-to-do-when-you-dont-know-how-to-make-decision-in-your-life-b1bd60c58c59 | [] | 2020-09-18 07:09:52.400000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Decision Making', 'Personal Development', 'Life Lessons', 'Education'] |
開発部の新人がQAをやってみた | Our mission as a data empowerment company. Dramatically expands data utilization possibilities, from operational reforms to social issue solutions.
Follow | https://medium.com/wingarc/%E6%96%B0%E4%BA%BA%E3%81%AE%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BA%E3%81%8Cqa%E3%82%84%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6%E3%81%BF%E3%81%9F-bc6164b8562c | ['Yoshifumi Takeshima'] | 2020-06-24 10:57:34.146000+00:00 | ['Japanese', 'Software Development', 'Software Testing', 'Leadership', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Rust RPG: Introductory Tutorial of Rust, Unit Testing, and Continuous Integration with a Roguelike | Let’s talk about Rust. It is a statically-typed and strongly-typed programming language that can be used to build low-level programs, 3d video games, 2d video games, system utilities, and even web application servers.
Rust is an extremely useful and productive language. Since it is a “C-Like” language (or rather belongs to the C-family in programming history), it will be familiar to those who know C++, C, C#, JavaScript or Java.
Many programmers prefer Rust for its greasy-fast speed, flexible type strictness, optimized reference management, and memory safety-net. It also makes all variables immutable (read-only) by default, subtly forcing you to design with functional programming and composing many sub-functions into larger programs.
Rust Roguelike
We’re going to walk through a Rust application that I’ve built, which is essentially a basic Roguelike in most regards.
A Roguelike is:
… a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character
- Wikipedia
In our Rust application, I’ve made the beginnings of a roguelike: you can choose from five classes — each with their own types of attributes. Next, you can choose to attack the enemy or dodge the enemy’s attack.
As we break down the program, we will unravel the basic rules I’ve created for this game.
Disclaimer: This code is also for my own edification — I’ve done my best to follow Rust conventions and best practices, but I probably have about 10 hours of Rust experience total, so my code might be a little … Rusty. Feel free to send PRs for improvements or berate me below!
Tutorial
Build and Meta Files
Let’s look at the code — here is the link to the source code repo.
In the source code, we have some interesting items of note:
# rust_roguelike/
🗀 .circle/
🗀 src/
🗎 .editorconfig
🗎 Cargo.toml
Cargo.toml
The Cargo.toml holds the Cargo config that tells Rust and Cargo all about our application.
name = "rust_roguelike"
description = "Rust RPG Roguelike"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Cameron Manavian < [package]name = "rust_roguelike"description = "Rust RPG Roguelike"version = "0.1.0"authors = ["Cameron Manavian < [email protected] >"] [dependencies]
rand = "0.3.14"
text_io = "0.1.7"
.editorconfig
Next, I’d love to point out a file that everyone should be using, regardless of language — an EditorConfig, which is a universal file to tell just about any editor how we want to format and write our Rust code, allowing for consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. You’ll also see the configurations for YAML and TOML files:
root = true [*]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4
end_of_line = lf
charset = utf-8
trim_trailing_whitespace = true
insert_final_newline = true [*.toml]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4 [{*.json, *.svg}]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4 [{*.yml,*.scss,*.css,*rc}]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2 [*.rs]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4
Of course, Rust already has a linter and formatter built in and easily accessible, so .editorconfig is just there as a backup.
.circleci/config.yml
Finally, we have a config folder for CircleCI. CircleCI is my continuous integration service of choice.
Inside this folder, the main requirement is a config.yml , but you can also store shell scripts in here to do more complex builds steps.
Currently I have a basic config:
version: 2
jobs:
build:
docker:
- image: rust:1.29.0-slim
environment:
TZ: "/usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC"
steps:
- checkout
- run: cargo build
- run: cargo test
To start with, I tell CircleCI to use a Docker image that has Rust installed ( rust:1.29.0-slim ) and then I have some commands to run for my integration tests.
First we checkout git using the commit that triggered this build. Next, we run cargo build to build all the dependencies by downloading and installing based on the settings in the Cargo.toml . Finally, we run cargo test which will locate all unit tests inside the project and run them. Later on, we could add a code coverage step here as a final check to verify that all of the code is tested.
Source Code
Now let’s look at the architecture of our app, once again here is the link to the source code repository on GitHub.
We have three Rust source files ( *.rs ), which are:
# rust_roguelike/src/
🗎 character.rs
🗎 computer.rs
🗎 main.rs
As per Rust convention, main.rs is our entry point into the application and has a function inside also named main . We’ll come back to this file later.
character.rs
The character module is the central place for the user’s character actions, health, and other stats.
We have our Character struct (structure), comprised of some String fields for the name and RPG class, and a handful of i32 (integer) fields for health and stats. I went with the classic C struct style:
pub struct Character {
pub name: String,
pub class: String,
pub health: i32,
attack: i32,
dodge: i32,
luck: i32,
xp: i32,
}
In Rust, think of a struct as a way to have standardized data. But how do we work with that data? We use a trait !
You’ll also see the Player trait in the file, which is “essentially” equivalent to interfaces in other languages.
pub trait Player {
fn new(
name: String,
class_name: String,
health: i32,
attack: i32,
dodge: i32,
luck: i32,
) -> Character; fn select(&self, player_name: String, player_luck: i32) -> Self; fn damage(&mut self, damage_amount: i32); fn heal(&mut self, heal_amount: i32); fn attack(&self) -> i32; fn dodge(&self) -> i32; fn info(&self) -> String; fn stats(&self) -> String;
}
I love traits because they allow programmers to have zero-cost abstractions — traits are a huge feature in Rust.
All told, the trait system is the secret sauce that gives Rust the ergonomic, expressive feel of high-level languages while retaining low-level control over code execution and data representation.
- via The Rust Programming Language Blog
Next, we have our implementation, which is a way to define methods on an object such as a struct and can even implement according to the specifications of a trait .
You’ll see in the declaration that I denote that I am “implementing” the Player trait for the Character struct . By doing so, I am now required to implement all of the functions required by the Player trait . Take a look at the full implementation:
impl Player for Character {
fn new(
name: String,
class_name: String,
health: i32,
attack: i32,
dodge: i32,
luck: i32,
) -> Character {
Character {
name: name.to_string(),
class: class_name.to_string(),
health: health,
attack: attack,
dodge: dodge,
luck: luck,
xp: 0,
}
} fn select(&self, player_name: String, player_luck: i32) -> Self {
Self::new(
player_name,
self.class.to_string(),
self.health,
self.attack,
self.dodge,
self.luck + player_luck,
)
} fn damage(&mut self, damage_amount: i32) {
self.health -= damage_amount;
self.xp += 2;
} fn heal(&mut self, heal_amount: i32) {
self.health += heal_amount;
self.xp += 1;
} fn attack(&self) -> i32 {
self.xp + self.attack + self.luck / 2
} fn dodge(&self) -> i32 {
self.xp + self.dodge + self.luck / 2
} fn info(&self) -> String {
format!(
"{} \thp: {} attack: {} dodge: {} luck: {}",
self.class, self.health, self.attack, self.dodge, self.luck
)
} fn stats(&self) -> String {
format!(
"{} - hp: {} attack: {} dodge: {} luck: {} experience: {}",
self.class, self.health, self.attack, self.dodge, self.luck, self.xp
)
}
}
The new method is essentially a constructor. Of greater interest is the select method, which allows us to clone an instance of a Character and return it back, while also allowing name and luck customization.
The methods heal and damage are nearly identical, where one reduces the Character health and the other increases it, and both increment the total experience. Note that we must use &mut self to require a mutable version of the instance to be used in order to properly make the health and XP adjustments.
Likewise, you’ll see that the attack and dodge methods return an i32 value based on the Character stats, and use a normal &self instance reference since they don’t mutate the Character.
Finally, we have a couple of String formatting helpers, info and stats . The method info is more useful when listing out the base Character class information, which we’ll see in use inside main.rs . The stats method is a way to get relevant stats for the user to see mostly for when they start the game and when they die.
Lastly, at the bottom of the module file are my unit tests. We are required to wrap unit tests in a module closure in order for proper syntax:
#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
use super::*;
// unit tests here
}
Let’s take a close look at one of the tests, the specification for attack :
#[test]
fn test_attack() {
// arrange
const EXPECTED_ATTACK: i32 = 6;
let player = Character::new("".to_string(), "Rogue".to_string(), 1, 4, 1, 4); // act
let result = player.attack(); // assert
assert_eq!(result, EXPECTED_ATTACK);
}
When I write unit tests, I follow the style of Arrange/Act/Assert pattern, the benefits of which are best be summed up by:
- Clearly separates what is being tested from the setup and verification steps.
- Clarifies and focuses attention on a historically successful and generally necessary set of test steps.
Makes some TestSmells more obvious:
- Assertions intermixed with “Act” code.
- Test methods that try to test too many different things at once.
-via Arrange Act Assert
I like to insert comments to create a sort of template for later maintainers to follow along. Anyways, our test expects an attack power of 6 ( EXPECTED_ATTACK ), which we can figure out by looking at the source code and applying the values passed to the constructor into the equation from the method, like so:
// we constructed a player with 4 attack and 4 luck:
let player = Character::new(“”.to_string(), “Rogue”.to_string(), 1, 4, 1, 4); // our method code
fn attack(&self) -> i32 {
self.xp + self.attack + self.luck / 2
} // simplify -> plug in values -> PEMDAs FTW
xp + attack + luck / 2
= 0 + 4 + 4 / 2
= 4 + 2
= 6
Following the Arrange/Act/Assert pattern, we can easily set up a roadmap and then assert that the result of the method matched our expected result:
// assert
assert_eq!(result, EXPECTED_ATTACK);
computer.rs
Our Computer module is built in a similar fashion to the Character module, utilizing a struct , a trait , and an impl .
pub struct Computer {
level: i32,
difficulty: i32,
} pub trait Enemy {
fn new(level: i32, difficulty: i32) -> Self;
fn action(&self) -> (i32, i32);
fn level_up(&mut self);
fn stats(&self) -> String;
} impl Enemy for Computer {
fn new(level: i32, difficulty: i32) -> Computer {
Computer {
level: level,
difficulty: difficulty,
}
} fn action(&self) -> (i32, i32) {
(self.level, self.difficulty)
} fn level_up(&mut self) {
self.level += 1;
self.difficulty += 3;
} fn stats(&self) -> String {
format!(“level: {} difficulty: {}”, self.level, self.difficulty)
}
}
The code is pretty straightforward if you understand the Character module , as it has similar functions.
The method action inside the Computer impl is unique though, as we utilize a Tuple of two integers (i32, i32) as our return type:
fn action(&self) -> (i32, i32) {
(self.level, self.difficulty)
}
Using a Tuple here allows us to return two values and enable the main.rs file to create a range of action power for the computer, which in turn lets the computer grow with the player as they advanced throughout the game.
The lower bound of the range is the computer’s level, and the upper bound is the difficulty level. You’ll note that the difficulty jumps up by 3 points each round, making the game potentially much harder as the game progresses (as this is the upper bound).
main.rs
Now let’s cruise on over to the main file — our entry point to the app. It has two functions, and a bunch of importing statements at the top.
We load external crates from our dependencies, load our project’s modules, and state what types we intend to use.
fn main()
The main function starts with a little banner, which reads from our Cargo.toml file and shows our package version and description.
println!(
"=== Welcome to RRL {} the {}! ====
",
player.name, player.class
);
We instantiate a group of characters for the game: a Cleric, Warrior, Hunter, Wizard, and Thief using 25 total attribute points distributed based on archetype (feel free to comment on or criticize my allocation). We also generate a bit of random luck for the user’s session:
let characters: [character::Character; 5] = [
character::Character::new("".to_string(), "Cleric".to_string(), 7, 5, 6, 7),
character::Character::new("".to_string(), "Warrior".to_string(), 10, 5, 5, 5),
character::Character::new("".to_string(), "Hunter".to_string(), 5, 7, 7, 6),
character::Character::new("".to_string(), "Wizard".to_string(), 3, 10, 5, 7),
character::Character::new("".to_string(), "Thief".to_string(), 4, 5, 6, 10),
]; let _luck_amount = rand::thread_rng().gen_range(2, 6);
Next, we ask the user for their name and for them to select one of our character classes. Once the user has selected a class, we use our Character select helper method and pass the player’s name and their generated luck amount as parameters:
let mut player =
characters[character_index — 1].select(_character_name.to_string(), _luck_amount);
This clones out the selected RPG archetype into a new mutable version, leaving the sample instances intact. I did this because we could come back later to this project and enhance the game with a “new game” feature, which is why we don’t want to corrupt the original Character instances.
fn play()
The play function runs our game loop — typically, when you make a video game, a loop is used to wait for some “game over” indicator, often when the player’s health is equal or less than zero.
Before the loop we also create a new Computer enemy:
let mut enemy = computer::Computer::new(1, 16);
Inside the loop we retrieve the computer’s Tuple range for the action, and use it with the imported rand crate:
let _action = enemy.action();
let _cpu_action = rand::thread_rng().gen_range(_action.0,_action.1);
Be aware that the random range is inclusive on the lower bound but exclusive on the upper bound, so a level 1 computer with 16 difficulty will request a number between 1 and 15.
Then we ask the player what they want to do: they can either attack or dodge, and depending on their choice we retrieve their attack or dodge power from their Character and compare it to the Computer action power.
With that, we have enough to determine a win or loss for the round, which triggers a heal or damage respectively.
Take a look at the game in action:
And that’s it. That’s the entire game. For now at least!
Final Thoughts
What we have here is a unit tested game built in Rust.
We haven’t tested the main class as I am still looking for ways to test standard in / standard out based code, but we have a functional albeit limited roguelike built with Rust that you can play in the terminal.
Some eventual features that we could add (pull requests welcome!):
- A new game option, which could just take you back to the character selection
- More classes to choose from
- Multiple enemy types
- Boss enemies every 5–10 rounds or so
- Graphics, maybe even just Emoji or ASCII-art
Thanks for your time. | https://cameron-manavian.medium.com/rust-rpg-introductory-tutorial-of-rust-unit-testing-and-continuous-integration-with-a-roguelike-b7b86e90855c | ['Cameron Manavian'] | 2018-09-28 13:46:04.544000+00:00 | ['Continuous Integration', 'Rust', 'Unit Testing'] |
The Feedback-Centric Organization | Let’s consider two engineering managers, John and Jane. They have the same seniority, they both work on similar projects in similar conditions and their teams are both terribly smart.
John insists on personally reviewing and approving every change, no matter how small. This doesn’t just concern the codebase: if an engineer wants to try a new productivity tool with the team, they have to go through John. If the team wants to move an internal meeting to a time that better suits everyone, she has to go through John. Every little detail is scrutinized and torn apart to make sure John’s team don’t waste their time on “useless” initiatives.
Jane, on the other hand, is more comfortable with experimenting. She doesn’t require the team to ask her approval for everything, but she is there to support them when they want to try something new, and helps them validate initiatives by setting clear goals and metrics that make sense for them. Then, she takes successful experiments and acts as the team’s champion in the larger organization, implementing these initiatives at a higher level.
Which team do you think will be happier, more productive and more innovative — John’s or Jane’s?
Bottleneck Managers Create Permission-Centric Organizations
John is the typical example of a Bottleneck Manager. We all know at least a few Bottleneck Managers: they hoard information and authority and require teammates to go to them for every little thing. Want to try a new tool? Ask your manager. Want to move a meeting? Ask your manager. Want to change the name of a Slack channel? Ask your manager.
Put enough Bottleneck Managers together and you have an alienating workplace where there’s a process for everything and no way to change that process, until one day you realize you’ve just been doing the same thing for the past five years and you’ve become irrelevant two years ago anyway, but no one has told you because they were too busy writing code. You have, to put it briefly, a Permission-Centric Organization.
Permission-Centric Organizations are the natural result of one or more of the following factors:
Lack of trust: his goes both ways. Managers may not trust their teams to make sensible decisions, or teams may not trust their managers to make good use of the results of their decision-making. If a teammate wants to try a new technology but knows their manager will scoff at it, they may not even propose it, to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of rejection.
his goes both ways. Managers may not trust their teams to make sensible decisions, or teams may not trust their managers to make good use of the results of their decision-making. If a teammate wants to try a new technology but knows their manager will scoff at it, they may not even propose it, to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of rejection. Lack of time: managers want to make sure everyone on their team is using their time in an optimal way. In doing so, they may overly centralize the decision-making process, to the point where the team is not free to do anything but write code. In some companies, managers will allocate all of the engineers’ time to “busywork”, leaving no room for anything else.
managers want to make sure everyone on their team is using their time in an optimal way. In doing so, they may overly centralize the decision-making process, to the point where the team is not free to do anything but write code. In some companies, managers will allocate all of the engineers’ time to “busywork”, leaving no room for anything else. High cost of error: if you have a proven process and battle-tested tools in place, it’s scary to try something new. Sure, the new tool/methodology may improve your work by an order of magnitude, but what if it doesn’t work and you end up alienating your stakeholders? The more successful you get, the more this becomes a problem.
if you have a proven process and battle-tested tools in place, it’s scary to try something new. Sure, the new tool/methodology may improve your work by an order of magnitude, but what if it doesn’t work and you end up alienating your stakeholders? The more successful you get, the more this becomes a problem. Lack of competency: when team members are not competent enough to experiment in a safe, productive way, management may create constraints around experimentation and take the reins of the engineering process. This may also come from the team members themselves: if they are not (or don’t feel like they are) competent enough, they may avoid trying new ideas for fear of making a mistake.
These are all valid problems. If you’re running a successful company, you want to make sure innovators are competent, you want to trust them and you want them to trust you, you want to dedicate time to the things that really matter, and you want to eliminate or minimize any room for mistake.
However, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too. You can have all of the above, without hindering your team’s ability to come up with new ideas and validate them. The way to do it is to stop being a Bottleneck Manager and start being a Multiplier Manager.
Multiplier Managers Create Feedback-Centric Organizations
Unlike John, Jane is a Multiplier Manager. A Multiplier Manager supports their team, but also allows them to make their own decisions. They’re proactive in identifying opportunities, but let the team capitalize on opportunities in their own way. They create processes and boundaries for safe innovation and encourage the team to pursue their ideas. They are — by far — the best kind of manager you’ll ever work with.
Multiplier Managers are the bread and butter of Feedback-Centric Organizations. These are workplaces where you can — and are strongly encouraged to — run an initiative by your manager to get feedback on it, without first having to ask permission. They are workplaces where ideas move freely from one desk to the other, in continuous evolution.
Just like a Bottleneck Manager and a Permission-Centric Organization are identified by a particular set of dysfunctions, Multiplier Managers and Feedback-Centric organizations exhibit and promote most (preferably all) of the following virtuous traits.
Provide context about the business
Lack of transparency about the business context and business goals of their organization is one of the most common reasons why people don’t feel like they’re empowered to change their surroundings — withholding information may save your team some time, but it also prevents them from providing their perspective and putting their own twist to what you’re doing.
Multiplier Managers make sure to share all relevant information with their team. Not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it and whom they’re doing it for; any decisions that are made, and why they’re being made; who’s responsible for what; any processes the team follows and the rationale behind them, and anything else that might be of interest to other people.
Once the amount of information is too much to be pushed to all teammates all the time, they start publishing it instead and give their teammates an easy, clear way to access it, so that they don’t risk wasting the team’s time with anything they don’t find interesting. This may take different forms: a shared Google Doc, an entire shared folder, a company playbook, meeting recordings or a bunch of those — whatever works for the company and how people communicate.
Define what “good” innovation looks like
This is where bureaucracy and innovation meet: the best approach to innovating is by doing it within clear constraints and with a streamlined process. Constraints give your team members a way to frame their ideas in a way that makes sense for everyone, and process lets them validate and execute their ideas in a controlled way.
Here’s the stuff that Multiplier Managers are concerned with:
What kind of innovation is good innovation? Is it okay to propose rewriting a perfectly working project in a new, shinier technology? Is it completely forbidden, or should it just be a time-boxed endeavor?
How do we determine if an idea is successful? Do we need to set clear business metrics in advance, or do we use more qualitative metrics? Does it depend on the context?
What’s the process for collecting feedback? Even more important, what’s the process for understanding whom to collect feedback from in the first place? What kind of feedback should be asked for at what points during the process?
Your mileage may vary, but the mere act of creating a process will be beneficial to your team and make it known that not only is it okay to experiment, it’s encouraged and codified.
Use automation to create safeguards
If your organization is run by humans, someone is bound to screw up at some point. While Bottleneck Managers run from mistakes and pretend everything can be perfect all the time, Multiplier Managers embrace chaos and try to minimize the ways in which things could go wrong, the cost of things going wrong, or both.
Multiplier Managers use automation to their advantage: they know that systems are dumb and infallible while people are smart and fallible. This leads them to give their team ample freedom to innovate and move quickly without having to ask permission. At the same time, they create automated safeguards around the critical aspects of the company’s infrastructure to protect them from human error.
The most obvious example of this is creating a CI pipeline and setting up the proper telemetry to ensure developers can iterate on the codebase as quickly as they can think, without running the risk of breaking the app with a bad deployment. Removing the human element from the approval process is key to boosting speed and creativity in the organization.
Promote technical excellence and innovation
As you create more room for experimenting and taking ownership, you should also make sure you’re promoting technical excellence at all levels of the organization. Having the right skillset empowers individual contributors to spot and seize opportunities for improvement, and it empowers managers to recognize and support innovators.
Before you start firing people, though, make sure those “code monkeys” on your team are not monsters of your creation. Even the most proactive engineer in the world will stop coming up with new ideas when there’s no room for execution. Consider each team member’s history and their aspirations and, most importantly, talk to them about the kind of change you want to create to see how they react: are they excited, worried or indifferent?
If you’re trying to revive a stagnating team, a useful icebreaker may be to allocate time for intentional brainstorming and innovation. Try to put aside 20% or 10% of each iteration for the team to try their craziest ideas, and see how that pans out. This will give you time to get aligned on what innovation means to you, and how you want to go about it.
However, remember that this is still not ideal: “thinking time” is still you giving your team permission. Instead, you want to get to a point where they come to you spontaneously with their ideas, without waiting for you to tell them it’s okay to think. If you can get there and maintain that momentum, you’ll have a real Feedback-Centric Organization. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-feedback-centric-organization-f0873975b19f | ['Alessandro Desantis'] | 2020-12-22 15:36:12.473000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Organization Design', 'Feedback', 'Management', 'Engineering'] |
Rulers as the Subjects of Their Rules | “Shooting an Elephant” a short story written by George Orwell is about a police officer who shoots escaped elephants in Burma, India. The story gives us a vision of British Imperialism in India and its consequences. As a literary text, it embodies several dualities and paradoxes. However, in my point of view, the central paradox that occurs through the narration is although they seem to be rulers of the system, white men also become subject to the imperialist system like Indian natives.
There are several examples in the text which illustrate the central paradox. To begin with, in the second paragraph, the narrator’s political view on imperialism appears. He, the narrator, identifies himself as an anti-imperialist, opponent of the current discriminatory system in India. However, as a White police officer, whose responsibility is to guard British people and their privileges, he cannot speak out about his oppositional political views. In other words, he opposes the system but he is also the guardian of it. The result of this situation can be seen in the following quote from the text:
For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it, the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East.
As it can be seen, because of his job, which leads him to the contradictory situation of being both an opponent and a guardian, he cannot show his “true” position of the political position regarding India. The only thing he can do is to feel guilty and solve his problems in silence like every Englishman in the east.
In addition to that responsibility, all the other people, both natives and British people, and the system expect him to be imperialist just because of him being white. When we look at the passage below, we can find some evidences of natives’ expectations of the narrator and also see their behaviour towards him as a result of this expectations:
No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer, I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end, the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
Moreover, the third and the most important example of the central paradox is the scene of the narrator being in front of a native crowd. When he looked at the crowd, immediately, he thinks that he should shoot the elephant. The main reason behind his opinion is that narrator thinks the natives signaled, by their behaviour, that they wanted him to kill the elephant. As consequence of this mental narrative, in the end, the narrator found out that actually he is only a puppet in front of the native crowd. He does what they expect from him to only prevent himself looking the fool. After the narrator’s flow of thoughts which are summarized in the beginning of this paragraph, the passage quoted below is located and it is an adequate example of both the situation and the central paradox:
And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
As it can be seen, the narrator thinks that he is a puppet of the natives but it is a wrong deduction. We must see the fact that natives are the most powerless subjects of system and they are in a lower hierarchical position than the white men. Beside their position in the hierarchy, they also want the meat. They are hungry and poor. They may not have eaten any meat for a long time and if the elephant were shot, they will fill their stomach with its meat. Thus, the real ruler (or we can say “the real puppeteer”) over the narrator in this situation is the imperialism not the natives. Natives did what they have to do. And also, the narrator destroys his freedom when he turns into a tyrant who did what the system expects him to do.
To sum up, in the India under the British rule, a White police officer who was responsible for solving a case of escaped elephant starts to think about his position in the case. Firstly, he says that he cannot express his political views and he has to face with bad behaviour of the natives toward him just because of him being a white police officer. Secondly, he thinks that he does what the natives wants but we can see that it is a wrong deduction. The truth is that these two scenes demonstrate the fact that white men, besides looking like the ruler of it, also become subjected to the imperialist system. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/rulers-as-the-subjects-of-their-rules-6b236ff1062e | [] | 2020-10-09 05:33:11.690000+00:00 | ['Book Review', 'George Orwell', 'Literature', 'Essay'] |
Whiteness and Trump’s Attack on Portland, Oregon | Image from New York Post
When the moment of the dual contagions of the Coronavirus and anti-Black state violence that we are all currently living through one day make it into history books, part of that history will include when the American President attacked the city of Portland and its residents in the summer of 2020. Demarcating protesters in the “liberal city” of Portland as domestic terrorist, Donald Trump sent secret police to wreak havoc on its citizens and act violently towards people demonstrating democracy. Secret police are not secret in the sense that no one is aware of their existence. Rather, secret police are secret in the sense that they are accountable to no one. Trump’s agents can be factually categorized as secret police because they have been whisking protesters away in unmarked vehicles and detaining them for hours on end, failing to create arrest records documenting their actions, and disregarding basic legal standards of probable cause for detention. Further, it is not at all clear which federal agency these agents are working for. The agents appear to be a plethora from Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S Marshall Service, Transportation and Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The federal police agents are said to be following hushed, sketchy orders from acting government officials, such as Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who have not been confirmed by Congress. Congressional conformation of high level government officials is one of the strongest checks on executive government that our system of federalism provides.
While other American Presidents have sent federal police agencies into cities for much nobler causes relating to democracy, such as integrating public schools, this President will be noted as sending federal police forces to cities governed by his political opponents as a means of firing up his racist political base in the midst of the 2020 Election, an election that Trump is as of now poised to lose. Trump has declared that he is “solving” an emergency of violence in “liberal cities” that was in fact an emergency of his very own creation. It is a classic case of shock politics; create an “emergency” and then usher in anti-democratic policies under the guise of emergency action. Finally, not only are the President’s actions in Portland and other “liberal cities” anti-democratic, they severely breech state sovereignty, states’ rights and principles of federalism that republicans have been unsurprisingly quiet about.
However, it cannot go without noting that other presidents have used federal police agents and the military for nefarious purposes. FDR used federal police agencies to round up Japanese Americans during WWII and hold them in concentration camps, a racist reaction to the mythological dis-loyalty of that group. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Executive Branch’s operation of these concentration camps in United States v. Korematsu (1944), a stark hypocrisy to the notion that WWII was in part fought to liberate concentration camps in Axis held Europe. President Obama used federal agencies to deport tens of thousands of people to unsafe conditions in their home country. Andrew Jackson used the military (largely because his time in office was before the executive presidency created the administrative state we currently have) to genocidally displace Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and other indigenous peoples in the 1830's and 1840's. The FBI has been used to terrorize Black communities since its creation during Jim Crow. The Department of Homeland security was created after 9/11 and is used to largely surveil Muslim Americans, in many cases illegally detaining them under racist pretexts of “national security.” The entire institution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been used to visit violence onto Native Americans, and as recently as the 1960's had the express policy of “terminating” tribal culture, sovereignty and language. If you are concerned about what federal police agencies and the military are doing in Portland, I cannot wait to tell you about what happens at Guantánamo Bay.
The point I wish to make is that federal agencies of the US government have always been used to terrorize people. But as a collective we tend to be silent or fail to recognize the violence that these agencies visit on people that are not white. It appears that much of the widespread outcry and denouncing of the federal agencies in Portland over the last two weeks have been centered in whiteness. Far fewer white liberals denounce or become outraged when federal agencies such as ICE and CBP are used to terrorize nonwhite people living in this country by deporting them and displacing families. State attorneys’ generals and the ACLU are not so quick to file emergency injunctions when the bodies on the other end of state violence are primarily black or brown ones. In fact, the ACLU filed an emergency injunction on behalf of white supremacists to secure a permit to hold a Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017. The same Neo-Nazi rally that resulted in the murder of community activist Heather Heyer at the hand of an unashamed white supremacist. The same rally that President Trump declared the white supremacists to be “very fine people.” Portland (and Oregon, really) has its own troubling legacy of white supremacy and the current situation demonstrates the deep roots of white supremacy in Portland and other cities typically deemed “liberal” or “progressive.”
Heather Heyer
Unite The Right Rally For White Nationalism, Charlottesville, Virginia. August 2017. Photo from BBC News.
The national reaction to what has been going on in Portland has largely been centered around white people from the suburbs that have been the victims of the secret police violence. The Portland Moms, as they have come to be known, are projected by the media as innocent victims of state violence who have been peacefully singing lullabies near the federal courthouse that has become the epicenter of violence in the city. Similarly, the Portland Dads have received widespread accolades for their use of leaf blowers to force tear gas back onto the federal agents. The perceived whiteness of the nude “yoga woman” (who is actually not a white woman at all) has been used to exemplify the quirky, white “keep Portland weird” culture that, for all its weirdness, surely does not warrant state violence. The named defendant in one of the emergency injunctions for a restraining order against the federal agents is a white man. The media outrage about a white navy veteran who was beaten with clubs and suffered broken bones from the secret police was particularly strong. The white people who have hijacked leadership of the now sixty days of protest in Portland are actively blocking the participation of Black women who have been organizing in the city for far longer than the fifteen seconds of fame that the white people have been afforded.
“Naked Athena” photo from The New York Times.
“Portland Moms” photo from Forbes.
“Portland Dad” photo from Huffington Post
While we are at a revolutionary moment of national reckoning in our country, the old, tired tropes of white innocence that white supremacy keeps alive are roaring their ugly heads. So, yes, let us be outraged by Trump’s use of secret police to attack an American city. But let us also keep that outrage and public reaction when it inevitably happens to Black and Brown people as well. Because for as cliché as it may be to say that history repeats itself, it has been especially true when it comes to state violence of marginalized people in this country. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/whiteness-and-trumps-attack-on-portland-oregon-392858bee7f7 | ['Kyle D. Serrott'] | 2020-08-01 12:58:55.191000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Trump', 'Portland', 'Whiteness'] |
गोरखपुर एक शहर एक ख्वाब | I'm a blogger who not only writes but live with it. I feel "content is king" Profile www.linkedin.com/in/durgesh-bhatt-821b9b105 | https://medium.com/@bhattdurgesh94/%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8B%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%96%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B0-%E0%A4%8F%E0%A4%95-%E0%A4%B6%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%B0-%E0%A4%8F%E0%A4%95-%E0%A4%96%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AC-11bdd27b5ccc | ['Durgesh Bhatt'] | 2020-12-21 11:11:51.823000+00:00 | ['City', 'Loveforart', 'Loveforculture', 'Lifeofplace', 'Culture'] |
Can I Get Auto Loan Bad Credit Instant Approval? | It is quite difficult to get approved for an auto loan if you have bad credit. But, it is not impossible. Some lenders will work with supreme borrowers. If you have bad credit, maybe you have to pay a higher interest rate on your loans. There are some ways to improve your credit and also some ways of getting an instant auto loan with bad credit with friendly interest. To get an auto loan bad credit instant approval, you have to follow some tips.
Sometimes, many Internet sites are also providing instant loans and they have their own lending process. If you want to get an instant auto loan and you have bad credit and you need instant approval, you need not worry. This article will help you in that case.
Through some application processes, and fulfilling the minimum requirements of a landers company, it will be easier to get an auto loan for any purposes and especially for car loans. So, get in touch with landers companies and get auto loan instant approval with bad credit. Just go through this article, and you will be benefited definitely.
Instant Auto loans
Instant Auto loans
As it is said before that many companies will provide instant loans online. For these reasons, you have to collect a preliminary loan application. If they approve your application, they will contact you. The lenders will be connected to an applicant with loan offers, loan terms and the rate of interest.
Credit Scores
It is an important thing or factor for any loan, ether it is a car loan or any other loan. A credit score is a primary factor. Before applying for an instant auto loan, you should order a copy of your credit report. It will help you to review your current credit score and also to review any errors, incorrect information, or any missing information in your credit history. If you find any errors or missing information, you have to add positive credit information. By doing all these, you can improve your credit score and this will help you to get better instant auto loan offers from lenders.
How to Apply Online Lenders to Get Auto Loan?
If you get an auto loan instant approval, you can use it for immediate purposes. It is a great opportunity for you. To get instant auto loan approval, you have to follow some steps. Step by step, these are given below:
1. Select a Lender
According to your requirements, you can select a lender who can provide you the loan as your needs. There are many lenders and companies online from different websites, you can go through and read their offers, terms and conditions. From many, you can choose one if you think this is best for you. You can best loan offer according to your credit history and the type of loan you want to get. Those who have good credits will find the best loan offers for their credit score. But there are also some good loans for people who have poor credit. The lenders will give some situations and provide instant online approval for a loan.
2. Apply for the Loan
If you find a loan offer according to your information, you can start the application process. You have to give some basic information like your name, social security number, and monthly income and credit score. You have to complete the application and then they will provide you a loan agreement. It is a good option to apply for a loan online because the processing will be very short online rather than meeting face to face with the lenders.
3. Accept the Terms
After reviewing the terms of the loan, if you think this offer is as your requirements, then you have to sign the acceptance. After signing the acceptance, you have completed the instant loan approval.
Loan Approval
In spite of having bad credit, the lender's company will let you know within 24 to 48hours if your loan application has been approved or not. The loan manager will review your credit report and your ability to pay the rate of interest. If your loan application is approved, you can purchase the thing for what you take a loan.
Tips for getting approved for an auto loan with bad credit
There are few tips for getting approved for an auto loan. These are:
1. Be Realistic in Your Expectations
If one person with bad credit, he/she should not have high expectations regarding the amount of money that the bank/lenders will provide them. In that case, few companies will agree to lend a loan to a person with bad credit.
2. Review Your Credit Report
At first, you have to request a copy of your credit report from three major agencies and review it for errors. If you find any problem, you can file a dispute claim with the agency. This will help you to get a loan depending on your financial condition. If you can raise your score, it will improve your chances to get a loan.
3. Maximize Your Down Payment
Some lenders want to discuss your lending level. It is very important for you. In that case, you have to be honest and make a specific amount that you want to take a loan and you can afford. It will not make any problem of bad debt in the future due to the inability to make the monthly payment on this venture.
A higher down payment will save you money from the starting of the loan process. In that case, lenders will offer you a lower rate on financing with a better loan to value ratio and another thing, the more you put down the better that the ratio will be.
4. Organize Your Financial Documentation
You have to ready and available all the documents you need for taking a loan. The lenders will ask you for some basic information and needed documents. The documents will need for online and offline purposes. Driving license, social security number, your income, banking records, and copies of your credit report, electric bills, mobile bills, etc., these types of documents may be asked by the lenders. Sometimes, you are asked for some personal information if needed. If your credit score is good enough, you will be able to get a decent amount of loan.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, if you have bad credit and you want to buy a car or anything you want to purchase by loan, you need not worry about your bad credit. Because you can get an auto loan instant approval with bad credit and you can purchase whatever you want. You may face less favorable terms and process of lending practices. Your choice of lender’s companies will help you to find a loan with a much lower rate. First, find the loan that’s right for you and pay it off to help boost your credit score. At that point, consider refinancing; you might find a loan with even better terms.
Article Source: https://carsplan.com/instant-auto-loan-approval-for-bad-credit/ | https://medium.com/@carsplan/can-i-get-auto-loan-bad-credit-instant-approval-1694f6f0afad | ['Cars Plan'] | 2020-12-25 18:09:04.387000+00:00 | ['Loans', 'Fianance', 'Loans For Bad Credit', 'Cars', 'Automotive'] |
We Used To Just Live | I remember simpler times.
I remember a time when I woke up every morning and didn’t immediately know what time it was. Sometimes, I looked at the clock on my nightstand. Sometimes, I didn’t. I just…woke up. That was my task for the first few minutes of the day. Wake up. Realize that it’s another day. Another day that would be good or bad, long or short, slow or fast, but another day that would be, above all, full of life. Not devices and tools and to-dos. Life.
There was no sleep app tracking how I’d slept that night, and I wasn’t freaking out about what it meant for my long-term health if the stats weren’t good. There was no wristband on my arm, showing me my heart rate and alarming me to the fact that I had taken zero steps thus far. There was no sleek glass screen, behind the gates of which lay an entire universe to get lost in. A universe of unanswered messages, scary events in places I’d never seen, and more distractions than both heaven and hell could offer.
I remember mornings without music. I brushed my teeth, took a shower, made my hair, and got dressed. I was so bored with my routine that, magically, I started thinking about the day ahead. What subjects did we have in school today? What topics would we discuss? What do I know about those already? And what questions do I have? Which of my friends would I see at recess? What stories did I want to tell them? By the time I left the house, I was lost in thought all the same. But I was invested in the day. Fully engaged in what’s to come. Excited about the opportunities I’d get, the people I’d meet.
Since I had no time machine in my pocket, I couldn’t spend my commute longing for the past or hoping for the future. I had no investment portfolio to refresh by the second, no Amazon wish list, no 2,500 photos to scroll through. I couldn’t reminisce about a girl’s profile pic on WhatsApp, wondering why her last message came 67 days ago. I couldn’t check Telegram, hoping for a piece of news that would give me an edge. I was just…there. Sitting. Taking a 45-minute bus ride that would’ve taken 15 by car, but loving it anyway because it gave me time to think or be with my friends.
I remember working without computers. I still have some of my school and college books. I remember poring over them, flicking, marking, running my finger across the page. Trying so hard to find the right graphic, the right number, the right fact to extract the answer that I needed. I remember haggling for the last copy of a dusty old volume in our tiny school library, the contents of which the internet will never see. We had workbooks. Fill-in-the-blank texts. Empty sketches, waiting for us to label them.
Was it more efficient than googling? Of course not. But it was thorough. Learning required a love for detail, a commitment to completing the ordeal to get the lesson. Now, I can just watch a perfect 7-minute animation video on each topic. It’s faster and easier, but where’s the gumption in that? Where’s the stubbornness to see it through? Often, it’s not there. So I watch the video on 1.5x speed and don’t pay attention. Or skip to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, until I just give up, having learned nothing at all.
I remember calling my friends to arrange play dates. And actual dates. And Friday night slumber parties. I even remember calling them just to talk. Nowadays, the choice between a green and red button next to any person’s name on my display makes me look like a deer caught in headlights. Often, I don’t press anything. I just wait and text back. Oh, what my grandparents would have given to talk to their friends without restrictions. Meanwhile, I’m here rejecting the chance like a bad cup of coffee. “This? Really? No thanks.”
Getting pizza with your buddies or girlfriends shouldn’t feel like building La Sagrada Família, but since communication is so fast, easy, and cheap, no one feels obligated to communicate anymore at all. If you haven’t replied to the group message, no one can hold you to anything. Who knows? Something or someone better might show up last-minute. If and when they do, you only need to fire a brief “I’m out” into the ether, never having to deal with broken hearts and hurt feelings. But those hearts and feelings are still there. Of course we’re mad when no one responds! Of course we’d rather look forward to a date than anxiously wait to be let down at the last second. Technology might shield us from some of the fallout of poor relationships, but radiation is still toxic. If we don’t deal with it, our relationships will still be poor.
I remember spending my afternoons on whatever I felt like, not whatever felt most urgent. I didn’t prioritize my spare time, and I didn’t think of fun as something you could have in degrees. You can’t. You just have it or you don’t, and if you do, it doesn’t matter what the activity is. I played video games for hours one day and practiced soccer tricks till dusk the next. Everything was amazing because it was all one big journey, and I was the explorer in charge. I could steer the ship in one direction for a moment and then turn it right back around. No one would care, least of all me.
Now, I’m thinking, “What would give me the most satisfaction? How can I squeeze the most pleasure out of the little time I have?” and the only thing that does is ruin relaxation altogether. I have lists and lists of lists, and I feel trapped inside this bucket list video game without the ability to turn it off. Work is more fun than having fun because rewards don’t feel like rewards if that’s the main function they serve. Where is the reset button? I want my captain’s hat back.
I remember cherishing technology because it wasn’t ubiquitous. Every time I made another call or sent another text, a robot voice would tell me, “you have 43 cents left on your account.” I was thrilled at the thought that this message mattered because it would be the last one for a while. A green timer flared up whenever I logged on to the internet. It made me feel like I was entering the Matrix. So much to learn, so little time. Browse wisely, my friend. I’ll see you on the other side, offline again. Return with precious gifts.
That’s what it was, wasn’t it? We were traveling between two worlds. One minute you were online, the next you were off. A messenger, carrying information from the digital realm into reality. Now, the line between the two has completely disappeared. Which one are we in? When did we leave? How did we get here? Two universes, two parallel timelines, and we’re not in charge. No wonder it feels like we’re torn. Split minds, split attention, split presence. We need to unite again. Embrace our role as humans. Messengers. With sound minds, sound bodies, and an understanding of where borders lie. Where they should be. Why we cross them. Our own as much as technology’s.
I remember simpler times. I’m not saying everything was better. Just that life seemed less blurry. Not all days were beautiful, but a lot of them felt…lighter. That’s what I want. Not the moment or the people or the memory. The feeling.
I want my lightness back. That lightness is the truest feeling I know.
Maybe, that’s what this is about. Not peace or nostalgia but truth. When I feel light, I’m not concerned with how or what or who. I just am. Authentic. I do. Somewhere in that lightness hides the best version of myself. It didn’t use to, because at some point, it was my default mode of living. I don’t know how or when or why, but now, I’m concerned with finding it again. | https://ngoeke.medium.com/we-used-to-just-live-843d27153b7d | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2019-09-03 13:23:12.195000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Mental Health', 'Technology'] |
Americans, You Live in a Police State. | Americans, You Live in a Police State.
It’s time to wake up, and come to terms with this reality.
Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Elijah McClain.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the fact that a 23 year old, 140 pound, unarmed Black man who enjoyed playing the violin for shelter cats in his spare time was evidently such a threat to the police who stopped him on his walk home that they needed to put him in a choke hold, have him injected by a Medic with 500 milligrams of a horse tranquilizer even after he’s been robbed of his consciousness, resulting in two heart attacks and his death.
Like so many others before him, he pleaded for the state to let him breathe. Like so many others before him, we now know his last words as he begged for his life. As the cops were robbing his brain of oxygen, he cried:
“I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I’m a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly.”
Before this incident occurred, he “committed the crime” of wearing a ski mask, telling the officers he had the right to go where he was going, and allegedly say he was taking his power back when they agitated him. Evidently in the eyes of the state, that was enough justification to rob him of his life.
Just imagine if it had been a trained mental health professional who had been sent to approach him instead. As a four foot eleven 98 pound certified nursing assistant working in a nursing home for a measly twelve dollars and twenty cents an hour, I can say with confidence that I do a better job of de-escalating a situation than a significant portion of cops across the country do, and I know I’m far from the only one.
It’s about time for us as Americans to acknowledge and accept the fact that we live in a police state. How can we say otherwise when the NYPD has a fiscal budget of $5.6 billion while at the same time Andrew Cuomo cut $8.2 billion in localities? How can we say otherwise when the Aurora P.D. rolled right through and broke up the Violin vigil for Elijah McClain, the young man they murdered. A young man who was so distressed due to the interaction he was having with them that he began to vomit before losing consciousness, and apologized for doing so. What else are we supposed to call it when Los Angeles SCHOOL police were able to purchase grenade launchers and armored vehicles?
Even in the midst of all of these near constant reminders of the brutality people continue to experience at the hands of the state, a significant number of the masses seem to be satisfied by some toppled statues as opposed to taking meaningful action like a general strike. Meanwhile, the officers involved in the murder of Elijah McClain have been reassigned in an effort to protect them, and only one of the cops that shot eight bullets in to the sleeping Breonna Taylor has been fired. Still, no one has been charged with her murder.
The largest civil rights movement in history began in recent weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. I hope that energy remains persistent until the Police Departments across the nation are dissolved, and replaced with something that actually has the health, safety, and wellbeing of the communities in mind. After virtually every single flaw in our society has been laid bare in recent months by the current crisis’, I hope we use this opportunity to demand better. | https://xlauren-mx.medium.com/americans-you-live-in-a-police-state-444f7888f601 | ['Lauren Elizabeth'] | 2020-06-29 20:31:13.346000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Human Rights', 'Police', 'Government', 'Equality'] |
4 Software Development Techniques to Level up Your Data Science Project | Software development is the process followed by developers and programmers to design, write, document, and test codes. Regardless of what programming language you use or what your target application field is, following the specific guidelines of good software development is essential in building a high-quality, maintainable project.
Data science projects — may be more than other types of software projects — should be built with the mentality of maintainability. That is because, in most data science projects, the data is not constant and is frequently updating. Moreover, it is expected from any data science project to be extendable and to be crash-resistant. It should be immune to any mistake in the data.
Because every single part of the code in a data science project is build to fit a specific shape or form of data, if a wring data is given to the code, it might break it down. Of course, you never want your code to break, no matter what data it is fed. Hence, when designing and building the code, there are a few things to keep in mind to make your code more resilient.
There are many guidelines to follow to design and write good, stable code. However, in this article, we will focus on what I think is the 5 most important rules — or skills — needed to build a solid data science project.
So, let’s get right to it…
Documenting
We can’t talk about good software without mentioning documentation. Now, there are two steps to keep your code clean and well documented. The first step is commenting on your code. Comments are critical to walking people reading your code and — most importantly — your future self, through your thought process when you wrote the code.
Comments need to be simple, not more than two sentences, and straight to the point. Never forget writing a descriptive docstring whenever you define a class or a function or create your own modules. When writing comments, always remember:
Comments are not there to explain code to people; code is there to explain comments to the computer.
Once your codes and comments are done — well, for the time being since code is never done — you need to build sufficient documentation to your code. Documentations are external explanations of the code written — usually — in plain English. Documentations are often created using documentation processing tools, such as Sphinx and DocUtils. Documentations are often a part of your project’s website.
When it comes to best practices, it’s a good idea to start writing your documentation before you start coding. It will act as a guide to what needs to be done. Unfortunately, most of us — including myself — don’t follow this rule. However, we all need to start practicing it.
Testing
When we write code, we often write it based on some variables and datasets. However, it is very common that your code may contain some bugs that will only appear in some particular cases or with a specific dataset. Therefore, testing your application before deploying it can be crucial.
But, testing can get quite complicated, especially when it comes to data science projects. Often, data science projects are tested using reviews from other data scientists because most of the well-known testing methodologies are difficult to apply in case of data science projects.
That is because a simple change in data could lead to significant changes in the performance of the code. Through the years, researchers and developers have looked for the best way to test data science projects. They found out that the best way to test data science applications is through unit testing.
Unit testing is a type of testing that is used to detect changes that may break the flow of your program. They help with maintaining and changing the code. There are many Python testing libraries that you can use to perform unit testing.
Unittest is the built-in library in Python that is used to perform unit testing. Unittest is often referred to as PyUnit, and it is an easy way to create unit testing programs. Pytest is a complete testing tool — which is my favorite. Pytest has a simple straight forward approach to build and uses unit tests. Hypothesis is a unit test-generation tool. The goal of developing Hypothesis is to assists developers in creating and using unit tests that tackle the edge cases of your code.
Data Management
Getting a little bit specific to data science projects, when dealing with data, one thing we need to be careful with is managing our data. We need to consider many things, such as how are your data created? How big is it? Will it be loaded every time or stored in the memory?
When working with data, we need to be very careful with memory management and how the code is interacting with the data. One thing to consider is how Python functions call affect the memory usage of your code. Sometimes, function calls take up more memory than you realize.
One way you can overcome that is by using Python’s automatic memory management capabilities. Here’s how Python deals with function calls:
Every time you call a function and object is created with a counter of the number of places; this function is used. Whenever we use or reference this function, the counter is incremented by 1. When the code reference goes away form the function object, the counter is decremented by 1 till it hits 0. Once that’s done, the memory will be freed.
If you’re wondering how you can write code that uses this automatic memory management, wonder no more. Itamar Turner proposed 3 different way you can make your functions more memory efficient:
Try to minimize the use of local variables. If you can’t, then re-use variables instead of defining new ones. Transfer object ownership of functions that takes a lot of memory usage.
Using Domain-specific tools
Last but not least, to help you build resilient projects, make use of tools built specifically for data science. Of course, there are well-known tools, such as IPython, Pandas, Numpy, and Matplotlib.
But, let me shed some light on two not very known tools:
GraphLab Create: is a Python library used to build large-scale, high performing data products quickly. You can use GraphLab Create to apply state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, such as deep learning, boosted trees, and factorization. You can perform data exploration through visualization, and you can quickly deploy your project using Predictive Sevices. Fil: is a Python memory management tool for data science. You can use Fil to measure peak memory usage in your Jupyter notebook. As well as to measure peak memory usage for normal — none Jupyter-based — Python scripts, and debug out-of-memory crashes in your code. Moreover, Fil can help in reducing your memory usage significantly.
Takeaway
Nowadays, building a good data science project is not enough to make you stand out. You need your project to be crash-resistants and memory efficient. That’s why using some software development skills; you can take your data science project to the next level and make it stand out.
The software development skills we discussed in this article are:
Efficient documenting and commenting. Testing, testing, and then some more testing. Wise data and memory management. Special tools that can ease up your work and increase the efficiency of your project.
What we didn’t talk about, though, is the most crucial skill any developer must obtain, which is the ability always to be working on improving your skills and knowledge base, as well as keeping up to date with recent technologies and tools. | https://towardsdatascience.com/4-software-development-techniques-to-level-up-your-data-science-project-59a44498ca3f | ['Sara A. Metwalli'] | 2020-09-18 03:12:04.032000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Programming'] |
How to use Docker with Node.js: A Step-by-Step Tutorial | Both Docker and Node.js have risen in popularity in the past 5 years. Running Node.js on docker containers with docker-compose for local development is a great experience.
In this step-by-step tutorial, we will look at how Node.js docker and docker-compose with multi-stage docker build work in sync. Time to get cracking.
Docker the new norm
Docker has changed the way we software engineers work in the past 5–7 years.
Containers have made it easier to ship the whole stack including the OS, not just the code.
There is more than one reason to use docker everywhere, especially in the development environment. Docker was the second most loved platform in the Stack Overflow Survey 2020 same as 2019. The same survey 2020 edition also quotes
“We also see some year over year growth in the popularity of container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.”
Docker is used by 35% of all respondents and 39.2% of professional developers. It is safe to say 1/3rd or more software engineers are using docker. In 2020 and beyond, if you are not using docker as a developer you are missing out for sure.
Node.js on Docker with high scalability
Node.js was initially released in 2009. It has been used for high traffic web applications by big companies like Paypal, Netflix, eBay, and LinkedIn to name a few. It has surely been battle-tested in the past 10 years and has proven its mettle. It also works well with a big team where Spotify is an example. It was used by 90 teams and 600 developers at Spotify. As per W3tech, 1% of websites use Node.js.
1% of the websites tracked by W3tech might seem a small number, but Node.js is popular in websites with high traffic as mentioned above.
With high scalability in the picture, it becomes a lot easier to scale the application horizontally with Docker and Kubernetes. Using Docker with Node.js enables high scalability.
Assumptions for Docker with Node.js
You have some familiarity with using Node.js (express js or any other framework) You have some experience using Docker (local development, production environments preferred) I am using Docker version 19.03.13 and docker-compose version 1.27.4, I hope you have similar versions. For the first part of this tutorial, we will use Node.js 8 + with npm and npx installed.
Steps
Let’s dive deeper into the step-by-step details of this tutorial on how to run a Node.js express demo application on docker with docker-compose.
1. Setup express with express-generator
As the first step, it is time to set up a bare-bones Node.js express application. To generate the express js application we will use the express application generator.
1.1 Use express-generator to scaffold the app
To generate your demo Node.js express application for docker with Node.js, execute the following commands:
Notice that we are generating a web app not an API and using pug as the templating engine for the views. It should give you an output like below:
Now, let’s run the app to see how it looks on the browser, no Node.js on docker yet. To start the Node.js express application, please run the following commands:
After that, you should see something like below:
Hit http://localhost:3000 on a browser like Chrome to check if the app is running correctly. You should see something similar to this:
When you hit the homepage on the browser, you will also see some logs on how long the request took to respond on the command line.
At this point, I have added it to git, if you want to view the code it is in this pull request.
1.2 Edit the index to see the changes
You can edit the page to say something different like Express on Docker and Let's get started or something of that sort. To do this we will need to edit 2 files, /routes/index.js and views/index.pug , like below. You can get the file changes in this pull request:
It shows up on the browser like below:
For a better developer experience, it is best to reload the server when a file changes. To achieve this we use nodemon. There are 2 ways to use Nodemon. The first way is to install it as a global node module resulting in a global nodemon command. The second one is to have it as a dev dependency local to the project. We will be using the first way with the following command:
After you run your application index ( bin/www in this case) with nodemon it will restart the server on each file save. Below is an example of how it looks on server restarts on code change:
At this stage, you have the generated Node.js express app running. It can also be run with nodemon to restart the Node.js server on every file save. The next stage is to use Node.js on docker.
2. Use Node.js on Docker
To use Node.js on Docker, we will start with a Dockerfile . As per Docker's official website:
A Dockerfile is a text document that contains all the commands a user could call on the command line to assemble an image. Using docker build users can create an automated build that executes several command-line instructions in succession.
We will start with a simple dockerfile and move on to a multi-stage one. We will use a multi-stage build dockerfile so that we have one stage for development and another one for production. In the development stage, we will have Nodemon. There will be some optimization for the production docker container, one of them being the absence of not needed Nodemon.
Below is the simple Node Dockerfile for the express application:
The dockerfile is simple. It is:
using node:14-alpine as the starting point. We are using alpine because it is a small and secure base image for docker containers.
as the starting point. We are using alpine because it is a small and secure base image for docker containers. We first copy package.json and lock file to the WORKDIR /src to exploit docker's build caching
to exploit docker's build caching Then we run npm install --production to get only the needed application dependencies from npm
to get only the needed application dependencies from npm After that our application code is copied to /src
Consequently, the port is exposed, and the command to start the server is executed
With good use of Docker caching and BUILDKIT you can get faster docker builds. To build the above dockerfile to a Node.js docker image execute the following:
It will take some time. After it is done you should see an output like below:
Time to run the docker image and see the output for Node.js with Docker on the browser. To do this run the following command:
In the above command:
--rm is used to remove the container when it is stopped
is used to remove the container when it is stopped --name is used to name the container running Node.js on docker, it will be used later to see logs and stop the container
is used to name the container running Node.js on docker, it will be used later to see logs and stop the container -d is used to detach the container process sending it in the background
is used to detach the container process sending it in the background -p 3000:3000 means the local post 3000 is mapped to container port 3000
Now to know the container is running, run the following command:
You should see something like below:
You can view the logs from the container with the following command:
This will attach the command line (bash) to the container logs. Then hit the URL http://localhost:3000 on a browser. You will see some logs. Hit Ctrl+C to stop viewing logs. Now you can stop the container with the following command:
Below is a recap of running the docker container, viewing logs, and stopping it:
The above simple dockerfile is also available as a pull request for your convenience. At this juncture, we can proceed to make the Node.js dockerfile even better with a multi-stage docker build.
2.2 Multi-stage docker file to support Nodejs docker in production
We will create 3 stages from the above simple dockerfile. The stages will be as follows:
Base: This stage will have things common for docker with Node.js Production: This stage will have components useful for the production environment for Node.js on docker. It also uses npm ci in place of npm install. Dev: This stage will have nodemon which is only useful for developing Node.js on docker
Below is the modified dockerfile:
You can build the above Node.js dockerfile to run Node.js on docker with the following command:
The addition here in this docker build command compared to the above one is the inclusion of --target=dev . It tells docker to build the dev stage not production . If you want to build this multi-stage docker file for Node.js on docker use --target=production and it will create a docker image optimized for production.
To run the Node.js Docker image and attach it to its logs, you can run the following command:
The main difference here from the above docker run command for Node.js with Docker is -v "$(pwd)":/src . As we want the server to restart on every file change the current directory is mounted on the docker container's work dir. With this on each change, the sever will restart for Node.js on docker.
The multi-stage dockerfile for docker with Node.js can be found in this pull request. Below is a quick recap of the commands for Node.js Docker multi-stage build:
3. Node.js Docker made better with docker-compose
As seen, we had to run long commands like below:
It was not easy, to say the least. Stopping the running container also needed another docker stop command. The solution to these issues is using docker-compose with Node.js on docker. Docker-compose can be used effectively to sew up multiple services like a database with the application Node.js docker container.
With docker-compose, you can get the application running with just as single commands, docker compose up . It will build the containers if they are not built and run them for you. Next, we will see how to do it.
3.1 Build the Node.js docker-compose with dev target
To being with, below is the docker-compose.yml file that can run the application on docker with Node.js using docker-compose:
The docker-compose file has some parts to understand:
The version is latest at 3.8
In services, the web service has target:dev being sent so that we build only for the dev stage, not production
being sent so that we build only for the dev stage, not production The current directory . is mounted to the docker container at /src so the changes will be reflected in the container too.
is mounted to the docker container at so the changes will be reflected in the container too. We changed the npm start command in the Docker with Node.js to use nodemon as we will use docker-compose only for development.
command in the Docker with Node.js to use as we will use docker-compose only for development. We pass in only one environment variable NODE_ENV as dev other environment variables for instance database credentials can also be passed in as environment variables.
We will be using BUILDKIT to build docker containers with docker-compose too. To use BUILKIT with docker-compose while building the docker container we can execute the command below:
Here you see the output of the docker-compose build for docker with Node.js with BUILKIT in action:
After the containers are built it can be easily run with docker-compose up . After the Node.js Docker containers are built, it can be run with docker-compose up like below:
The changes for docker-compose addition is in this pull request. This is how you can run Node.js on Docker which works very well for Developing as well as putting the containers in the production environment.
TLDR; Give me a quick rundown
All the code is in a public Github repository. You can run the following commands to get started quickly:
Given you have git set up correctly, clone the repo with: git clone [email protected]:geshan/express-app.git Then execute cd express-app After that run COMPOSE_DOCKER_CLI_BUILD=1 DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker-compose build , wait for the build to finish. Consequently, execute: docker-compose up , wait for some time to see nodemon starting... on your console. Following that, hit http://localhost:3000 on a browser You should see the following output on your browser:
Enjoy! Now you can reverse engineer the Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml file. If you have any questions, search for a specific thing like say target in this post.
There are some considerations you should be aware of:
In my experience, containers on production are run with an orchestrator like Kubernetes. I believe Docker Swarm (and docker-compose) in production have lost the race by now. It is best to use Docker build caching and BUILDKIT for faster builds. Docker-compose makes it easier to use multiple dependencies in the development environment. For example, if your application depends on MySQL and Redis it can be easily put together in the docker-compose,yml file.
Using Node.js on Docker is a rewarding experience. If you want to upgrade Node.js, it is as simple as changing the version on the Docker file, rebuilding it, and using it. Node.js is also great for microservices. | https://medium.com/dailyjs/how-to-use-docker-with-node-js-a-step-by-step-tutorial-including-docker-compose-ac238c9e7778 | ['Geshan Manandhar'] | 2020-12-29 23:23:13.944000+00:00 | ['Nodejs Tutorial', 'JavaScript', 'Docker Compose', 'Docker', 'Nodejs'] |
Zugzwang and The Sensing Machine | Zugzwang on the brain, a chess term, German, when your only move helps your opponent, which I learned covering a programming competition calculating how many different states we can legally — and possibly — arrange a chessboard; then there was calculating how many possible chess games there are; from set to mate, how many combinatory paths can the pieces travel around the board; its ~70 trillion after ten turns; the final number felt like a practical joke.
But zugzwang. How many gamestates are zugzwang? That seemed like the trickiest q.
When your only move it to help your opponent.
When the best move is let your opponent move.
When any move makes your opponent stronger.
I was having the most detailed argument with an editor about it (as a sort of tapestry) and he was shouting after a journalist who had his jaw reconstructed with pieces of his fibula but this cop’s worried the journalist’s going to knife his dog as he chases him through the redwoods; the redwoods go away and the dog has the journalist pinned against a barn door and the dog runs off to terrorize the chickens, and the journalist slips into the barn and we’re surrounded by frozen food. Cop radios for backup. It begins to snow.
The inventor’s watching this from next door and decides he’s going to cook his pig for breakfast and the pig thinks fast. The pig claims the sun won’t rise the next day. If the inventor wants to survive, he’ll need a better sensing machine; and the inventor sets to work. But as soon as the inventor reaches the limit of his sensing machine, the pig suggests he build a better sensing machine and the inventor does, and the sun comes up, but the inventor doesn’t notice and the inventor keeps devising better sensing machines until he runs out of languages to read them, he’s exhausted every combination of word, and every combination of letters, so he invents new languages, but he runs out of shapes to represent them, so he invents finer instruments to write them, and better tools to tell the differences; and he’s amassing all this information, which he stores in larger buildings, but he’s inventing better storage; so sometimes the containers wrap the horizon and other times everything fits in a marble. | https://shorterletter.com/zugzwang-and-the-sensing-machine-f1497989efd7 | ['Caleb Garling'] | 2019-10-17 12:48:50.185000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Chess', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Featured'] |
How to do batch predictions of TensorFlow models directly in BigQuery | How to do batch predictions of TensorFlow models directly in BigQuery
If you have trained a model in TensorFlow and exported it as a SavedModel, you can now use the ML.PREDICT SQL function in BigQuery to make predictions. This is very useful if you want to make batch predictions (e.g., to make predictions for all the data collected in the past hour), since any SQL query can be scheduled in BigQuery.
Steps:
Train and export a saved model in TensorFlow
In BigQuery, create a Model, passing in the location of the saved model
Use ML.EVALUATE, ML.PREDICT, etc. just as if you had trained the model in BigQuery using its other (built-in) model types.
Note: this feature is currently in public alpha. Contact your GCP representative to get whitelisted.
1. Train and export SavedModel in TensorFlow/Keras
I’ll demonstrate using the text classification model that I describe in this blog post and for which the Keras code is on GitHub. I trained the model on Cloud ML Engine, but you can train it wherever and however you want. The important bit is the line to export the model as a Saved Model into Google Cloud Storage:
exporter = tf.estimator.LatestExporter('exporter', serving_input_fn)
2. Create Model
Creating the model in BigQuery is simply a matter of specifying a different model_type and pointing it at the model_path where the SavedModel was exported (note the wildcard at the end to pick up the assets, vocabulary, etc.):
CREATE OR REPLACE MODEL advdata.txtclass_tf
OPTIONS (model_type='tensorflow',
model_path='gs://cloud-training-demos/txtclass/export/exporter/1549825580/*')
I’ve made the bucket above public, so you can try out the query above as-is (create a dataset named advdata first). This creates a model in BigQuery that works like any built-in model:
In particular, the schema indicates that the required input to the model is called “input” and is a string.
3. Predicting with model
Predicting with model is quite straightforward. For example, we can pull some data from our BigQuery table and make sure that in our select, we name our columns depending on what the TensorFlow requires. In this case, my TensorFlow model’s serving_input_fn specifies that the model expects a single input string called “input”.
Given that, we can now do a prediction:
WITH extracted AS (
SELECT source, REGEXP_REPLACE(LOWER(REGEXP_REPLACE(title, '[^a-zA-Z0-9 $.-]', ' ')), " ", " ") AS title FROM
(SELECT
ARRAY_REVERSE(SPLIT(REGEXP_EXTRACT(url, '.*://(.[^/]+)/'), '.'))[OFFSET(1)] AS source,
title
FROM
`bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.stories`
WHERE
REGEXP_CONTAINS(REGEXP_EXTRACT(url, '.*://(.[^/]+)/'), '.com$')
AND LENGTH(title) > 10
)
)
, input_data AS (
SELECT title AS input FROM extracted limit 5
) SELECT *
FROM ML.PREDICT(MODEL advdata.txtclass_tf,
(SELECT * FROM input_data))
This provides the result:
Knowing the actual labels, we can make the actual query better:
SELECT
input,
(SELECT AS STRUCT(p, ['github', 'nytimes', 'techcrunch'][ORDINAL(s)]) prediction FROM
(SELECT p, ROW_NUMBER() OVER() AS s FROM
(SELECT * FROM UNNEST(dense_1) AS p))
ORDER BY p DESC LIMIT 1).* FROM ML.PREDICT(MODEL advdata.txtclass_tf,
(
SELECT 'Unlikely Partnership in House Gives Lawmakers Hope for Border Deal' AS input
UNION ALL SELECT "Fitbit\'s newest fitness tracker is just for employees and health insurance members"
UNION ALL SELECT "Show HN: Hello, a CLI tool for managing social media"
))
Note that this one provides the values directly in the SQL. The result:
That’s it! | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-do-batch-predictions-of-tensorflow-models-directly-in-bigquery-ffa843ebdba6 | ['Lak Lakshmanan'] | 2019-04-12 20:05:49.120000+00:00 | ['TensorFlow', 'Keras', 'Bigquery', 'Machine Learning'] |
photographers in Andaman | Fine Portrait Photography is one of the photographers in Andaman that are renowned in wedding photography corporate family, senior, and representations. They often travel in search of the perfect moment at the perfect location. From the shores of the ocean to the beachfront in Andaman as well as the Nicobar Islands and then some. We’ll be there for you all the time and your unforgettable moments will be cherished forever.
The island that is unique is part of the seven domains of association in India that is an island grouping situated at the intersection of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.
Photography is about people who are authentic and then giving us the opportunity to capture the moment that is memorable until the time is over. This is the most important story Real people with real stories, real moments.
Our photographer from Andaman, India — we have a large group of professional photographers and editors who have completed their masters with VISCOM MASSCOM ADVANCEPHOTOGRAPHY and ANIMATION, VFX as well as SOUND ENGINEER. Our group of experts took a crack at three important areas in Andamans including Port Blair, HAVELOCK, and NEIL. We regularly keep over 10photographers on the field daily.
No matter if you’re making promises to your guests and accumulated to host a family reunion or recording a major business event, we’re looking for a warm and pleasant interaction with you. We design and produce high-quality photo albums and coffee table books that are suitable for every occasion. Our aim is to help newlyweds family members, friends, and couples keep the tradition of printed photographs. Every one wedding album design is created entirely by hand without templates. The standard design for weddings service offers minimalist and clean designs. an ideal blend of contemporary and minimalist designs. | https://medium.com/@londone35/photographers-in-andaman-5b0d3b43de9f | [] | 2021-11-30 12:38:56.596000+00:00 | ['Andaman', 'Photoshoot', 'Photography', 'Photos', 'Photographer'] |
The Power Of Feedback — How Visual Comments Can Improve User Experience | You are in the market cashing out on the register. You are handling the stuff you bought but the cashier is not looking at you, smiling or saying anything. The feeling is quite unpleasant. How would you feel if you did not receive even a single feedback after the shopping? Would you ever go to the same register again? Would you go to the same market if all the cashiers were the same? Let’s switch up the scenario. You are in the market cashing out on the register. You are handling the stuff you bought and the cashier suddenly smiles and asks how you are. The cashier is so pleasant and kind that you wish to stay in the market. Would you go to the same register again? Would you go to the same market if all the cashiers were the same?
In a previous example the market is used as a metaphor for a product, while the cashier presents the experience you get while using the service it offers.
One of the most important factors that determines market’s attendance is the feedback it provides. The difference between good and a bad experience leis in small details that are usually skipped when designing a market itself. If skipped the market may be avoided.
The usage of visual comments may be trivial, but it is usually excused. Not long time ago I was trying to Register my new device on Samsung’s website. After the registration nothing happened. I got no feedback and was quite confused. Just to be sure that everything is all right, I registered the device one more time.
Lack of information can confuse and make users avoid the website on unconscious level.
Feedback is used to present if completed action is positive or not. Feedback is fulfilling the experience by providing users with a feeling of control.
www.dribbble.com
Conclusion
Feedback makes communication easier and helps with understanding the process. Never let users guess. Visually display the state of the elements and provide both sided interaction.
Always be a good cashier. | https://medium.com/dayone-a-new-perspective/the-power-of-feedback-how-visual-elements-can-improve-experience-718e543a9d9c | ['Aleksandar Pleško'] | 2017-10-16 08:38:48.427000+00:00 | ['Feedback', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'User Experience', 'UX'] |
How to reduce duplicated code by using dependency injection in Angular | In my current project, there’s a block of code that is used in many places. The code looks like this
@Component({
...
})
export class SomeComponent implements OnInit {
constructor(
private route: ActivatedRoute
) {} ngOnInit(): void {
this.route.params.pipe(
takeUntil(this.destroy$),
map(params => params.id),
filter(v => !!v),
// do something with this id
);
}
}
The above code gets a stream of id from the activated route. In other places, it would be getting the passengerId from activated route, or getting whatever id and do something with it.
So the pattern is that using the ActivatedRoute service to get something from the route parameters.
In fact, we can reduce this duplicated logic by using dependency injection. Here’s 3 steps to do that.
Declare injection token and factory function
First, we create a file named route-param.token.ts in a folder, for example core/tokens
export const ROUTE_PARAM_TOKEN = new InjectionToken<Observable<string>>(
'Stream of route param from activated route'
); // if you want to get :id from route, declare this token
export const PARAM_KEY_ID = new InjectionToken<string>(
'static string for :id param key',
// this is the second argument of InjectionToken constructor
// to produce the value, like when you use useFactory
{
factory: () => {
return 'id';
}
}
); // if you want to get :someId from the route, the token should look like this
export const PARAM_KEY_SOME_ID = new InjectionToken<string>(
'static string for :someId param key', {
factory: () => {
return 'someId';
}
}
); export function routeParamFactory(
route: ActivatedRoute,
paramKey: string
): Observable<string> {
// should use paramMap because route.params will be deprecated soon
return route.paramMap.pipe(map((param) => param.get(paramKey)))
}
Declare the token in the provider list of your component
Next is to declare the token you want to use in the providers list in your component.
@Component({
providers: [
{
provide: ROUTE_PARAM_TOKEN,
useFactory: routeParamFactory,
deps: [ActivatedRoute, PARAM_KEY_ID]
// if you want to get someId, the deps will be
// deps: [ActivatedRoute, PARAM_KEY_SOME_ID]
}
]
})
export class SomeComponent {
constructor() {}
}
Inject the token in constructor and use it in your component
@Component({
providers: [
{
provide: ROUTE_PARAM_TOKEN,
useFactory: routeParamFactory,
deps: [ActivatedRoute, PARAM_KEY_ID]
}
]
})
export class SomeComponent implements Oninit {
constructor(
@Inject(ROUTE_PARAM_TOKEN)
private readonly id$: Observable<string> // should use readonly as much as possible
) {} ngOnInit(): void {
this.id$.pipe(
// do whatever with this id
);
}
}
There are many benefits when you use this approach
It makes your code cleaner and easy to understand and maintain
Easier to test you component by mocking the dependency injection token
It helps reduce duplicated logic in your code
Thanks for reading. | https://medium.com/@phamhuuhien/how-to-reduce-duplicated-code-by-using-dependency-injection-in-angular-3e3d69949416 | ['Pham Huu Hien'] | 2020-12-11 09:05:48.797000+00:00 | ['Angular', 'Dependency Injetion', 'Clean Code'] |
El rol de producto en el discovery y growth de una Startup | 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/conversaciones-de-producto/el-rol-de-producto-en-el-discovery-y-growth-de-una-startup-210a33453846 | ['Nacho Bassino'] | 2020-12-23 21:59:36.849000+00:00 | ['Product Development', 'Podcast', 'Product Management', 'Startup', 'Español'] |
How I Use Tools Like Bear + Notion to Be More Productive | As I referenced in an earlier post, as a VP of Sales (or any leadership role for that matter), you have an endless amount of to do’s, thoughts and digital bookmarks you need to rely on. How do you organize all this and become efficiently productive?
After years of stretching and reaching to finding a process that I feel not only saves me time, but maximizes my productivity and efficiency — I feel like I finally found something I’m excited about.
I’ve had bits and pieces of this process for nearly a decade and tried almost every app for some period of time all to no avail. After mapping and executing this new flow (with some help from a few new tools ), I feel liberated to finally take whatever ideas, actions, tasks and thoughts and get them processed for safe keeping, or action with results that are working for me.
I’ve found a rhythm, peace and even joy in using Bear, Notion, Day One, Reminders and Pocket together to help me manage my personal and work life.
I’ve told friends, family and even engaged on Twitter, reddit explaining what my process is (and even inspiration behind it — Thanks @thesweetsetup).
Because I appreciated learning from how others work — I thought I’d post my process and how I work with today’s tools to help me out on a daily basis.
Here’s my quickly sketched, barely legible, hand drawing showing my process. I’ll explain more down below.
If you know these tools already, you know there definitely is some overlap here. Bear can do things Notion can’t and yet Notion is awesome at things that Bear can’t compete with as well. Pocket and Notion can do similar things. Bear, Notion, Reminders all have the ability to manage tasks. The truth is I probably could get by just using one tool — but I would give up some great features and process by doing so.
So…here’s my set up and how I work with each. | https://medium.com/stretchvp/how-i-use-tools-like-bear-notion-to-be-more-productive-a180b7d01a13 | ['Grant H'] | 2020-06-16 15:32:51.097000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Productivity Tips', 'Process', 'Productivity', 'Personal Development'] |
Taking 20/20 Vision Into 2021 | Contrary to popular belief, 20/20 vision does not mean perfect vision. 20/20 refers to clarity or sharpness of vision. We can have great clarity while falling far short of perfection.
The events and experiences of 2020 have undoubtedly changed everyone’s viewpoints to varying degrees. We see the world differently now. In other words, on a scale from 1 to 10, it’s likely that the value of importance placed on various areas of our lives has shifted.
My vision has certainly been altered this year, and I share here some of my thoughts regarding 2020’s 20/20 vision.
Family prevails. Family has always been important to me, but missing an event was never a big deal. In fact, I didn’t attend the 2019 Thanksgiving or Christmas gathering. In each case, when the holiday arrived, I was both sick and exhausted. Not a problem. There are always more holidays, and I could see everyone when the next one rolled around. Needless to say, that didn’t work out quite as I envisioned. No big family gatherings were possible this year, and so I very much look forward to spending time with my loved ones again en masse as soon as it is safe to do so. My 20/20 on family is to never again take for granted or toss aside opportunities to be with them.
Pets are crucial. I wondered how my cats would react to my presence 24/7. Would I be an infringement on their quiet time? The answer was no, and they have been my constant companions. I have had ample time to observe their antics, and they play and run about throughout the day more than I expected. Of course, this also means I have more time to witness their destructive behavior of furniture scratching. In those moments, as the irritation and frustration rise within me, I often let them know with raised voice exactly how I feel about their actions. When all is said and done, though, 20/20 insight clarifies that their love and companionship are two things that help me through every day, especially in the most difficult of times.
Friendship is a two-way street. This year highlighted the need for prioritization. Who was safe enough to be in your ‘bubble’ or ‘pod’ and who wasn’t? With whom were you willing to get together, and were you inside or outdoors, masked or unmasked, six feet apart or less? I entered no bubbles. There were friends I met outside while masked, and others with whom I shared a coffee while separated by the width of a deck or a firepit. Interactions with others were relegated to phone calls, texts, emails, and maybe a Zoom or two. Some decisions about getting together were easy, others more difficult, and the outcomes likely correlated to the choices that were made. There are connections that rekindled, some that deepened into more solid friendships, and others that have waned. Some of those choices were mine while others were not. I wasn’t always at my best and certainly could have put forth more effort at maintaining these relationships. It will be interesting to see how friendships evolve once again as we move forward into 2021 and are at some point free to gather at will. My 20/20 reminder is that friendships are delicate, and require attention in order to survive and thrive.
Coworkers are just coworkers. Most of my career was spent in office environments. When I opened my own healing business, the daily interaction of office life disappeared. I missed that aspect of working, but didn’t miss the office politics one little bit. To supplement income, I have also been a substitute special education paraeducator. From September 2019 through March 13, 2020, I subbed consistently, multiple days every week, in the same set of classrooms. I enjoyed being a part of something once again, and considered the people with whom I spent my days to be friends. The transition to virtual learning brought my subbing days to an abrupt end. And the physical separation quickly expanded to a silencing of communication from all but one of those coworkers. There’s no blame being assessed or, if there is, it falls on me just as much as anyone. The experience was a reminder of lessons previously learned but forgotten. Lifelong friends might be made on the job but, more often than not, we lose touch with coworkers as soon as the experience of shared employment has ceased. The 20/20 here is to maintain perspective regarding work relationships rather than view them as more than they actually are.
I have too much stuff. This year my mother relocated to an assisted living facility. My sisters and I were responsible for sorting through a lifetime of acquisitions. As anyone who’s already been through this knows, it’s overwhelming. Returning home from one of those difficult days, I began looking around. My place is uncluttered, and fairly Zen in appearance and atmosphere. But that doesn’t mean it’s sparse. I performed a closer inspection. Do I really need a dozen vases or the antique artwork that have been tucked away in the cupboard for years? What about those cookbooks, china and silver that I’m never again going to use? You get the idea. I have slowly been identifying items that might bring pleasure to someone else while freeing up — literally and figuratively — my space. 20/20 insight is that possessions can be weighty, and shedding the excess can be extremely cathartic.
Solitude wears thin. I’m an extrovert and enjoy time with others, but have always required time by myself. I currently live alone … except for the previously mentioned cats, of course. Solo living has its benefits as well as its detriments. I generally enjoy and appreciate the peace and the quiet. Yet without the busyness, without the distraction of events, without the warmth of family and friends, I deeply felt the essence of aloneness, and the lack of a romantic partner. I missed having another well-suited soul in residence. But living alone prior to the pandemic was in its own way good training for pandemic-induced self-isolation. Others have said that adjusting to the solitude has been extremely difficult, but I’m conditioned to and comfortable with spending time by myself. That said, there are limits to just how much time I want to spend alone. 2020 has given me 20/20 vision that solitude is most beneficial in moderation, and it’s imperative to maintain balance in this area of my life.
2020 was certainly an eye-opener. It brought clarity and many insights. I have grown and have hopefully become a better person for it. But rest assured, I will continue to work on that 20/20 vision. | https://medium.com/@bodyandsoulshepherd/taking-20-20-vision-into-2021-a263ae9bd079 | ['Donna Dangle'] | 2020-12-25 20:42:55.915000+00:00 | ['Vision', 'Growth', 'Insights', 'Mindfulness', '2021'] |
New snapshots | This is an email from Historical Snapshots, a newsletter by Historical Snapshots . | https://medium.com/a-moment-in-history/new-snapshots-719299d72800 | ['Roman Mikhail'] | 2020-12-17 19:01:05.523000+00:00 | ['Biography', 'Nonfiction', 'History'] |
We all have issues | Everybody has their own issues but when we tell ourselves that or we are told that, lets be honest we think “but mine is different.” I mean maybe but, back to the beginning we all have issues. which leads me on to mine. I am 13 years old and I have OCD. OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Excessive thoughts (obsessions) that lead to repetitive behaviors (compulsions). Obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead to compulsive behaviors. I have intrusive thoughts, that are very unsettling that lead me to believe if I don't do certain things something will happen. I end up doing the thing my OCD tells me to do to prevent what I think will happen from happening. I am in 8th grade now but, I have come a long way from where I started. follow me for more writings about my journey and my ability to trying to overcome OCD.
-Lola Sheff | https://medium.com/@lolasheff07/we-all-have-issues-7cf1786bc53b | ['Lola Sheff'] | 2020-12-18 03:56:38.245000+00:00 | ['Obsessive Compulsive', '13', 'Ocd', 'Journey'] |
I’m Spending This in Thanksgiving With My Close Relatives | When my daughter was three, she found a mouse outside in the grass. Without hesitation, she grabbed it by the tail and picked it up for us all to see.
‘Look!’ she shrieked, ‘A partly-dead, partly-alive mouse!’
Although she’s now 9, this moment remains one of her earliest memories, and the phrase ‘partly-dead, partly-alive’ has made it into our family lexicon.
This year, more than ever, I’ve been thinking of the phrase in terms of my family. My family — and yours, and everyone else’s — is partly-dead, partly-alive.
I don’t mean it in the morbid sense like we’re all just a moment away from a cat-attack that leaves us seizing out in the yard.
What I mean is that part of my family is dead and part of my family is still alive. When life feels full of gray areas like it does right now, it’s almost comforting to have something so black and white to think about.
In the alive column are my kids, my husband, and my mom and dad. I have three siblings and assorted aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. They are spread out across the country, wrapped up their own 2020 narratives. And they’re all fine — as fine as any of us are right now.
But since I won’t be seeing any of them over the holidays this year, I have found myself thinking a lot about the other part of my family. This includes the people who are no longer alive but are nonetheless, part of my family. In this category are all four of my grandparents, as well as many great-aunts and great-uncles. Also on this side is my mother’s baby brother, who died of cancer at 50, which is an age that seemed old at the time, but now seems tragically young.
I can’t complain about this balance. Life is inevitably a moving equation of subtractions and additions, and I’m lucky to have special people in both the dead and alive column.
Most of the time though, it’s my living family members that demand attention. The texts, calls, photos, zoom meets, and gifts all go to them. In a typical year, the week before Thanksgiving would be a volley of recipes, eating times, seating arrangements, and guestlists. I’d be giving my kids a crash course on table manners and making sure we all had at least one decent outfit to take on the long drive to my parents’ house in upstate New York.
This year though, we are making no plans. We are mashing no potatoes and playing no after-dinner card games.
And so, like many of you, I’m faced with an emotional and logistical void.
What I’ve noticed though, is that the other part of my family — the dead part — keeps creeping in to fill the void. More than ever, I’ve been thinking about my grandmothers. One died while I was in high school and the other passed away only recently, but both were a force to be reckoned with in my early life.
When I was young and they were both alive, I thought of them only as old ladies who made casseroles for church suppers and drove big long sedans — always five to ten miles slower than the speed limit.
But lately, I’ve been wondering more about other parts of their lives. I’ve been wondering which decade was their happiest and what their biggest regrets were. Both lived through many elections, several wars, and the passing of Roe v. Wade. There are things that I look up on Wikipedia that I’m sure either of my grandmothers would know off the top of their heads.
I’ve been wondering if they wished they had more children or if they wished they never had children at all. Did they feel fat when they looked in the mirror and suffer from deep-seated anxiety that was layered over in cosmetics from the Avon lady and knitted vests?
Were they happy in their marriages, or after five or six decades, were concerns about happiness pushed aside by the contentment that comes from predictability?
This leads me to think about my grandfathers. One was short, the other was tall. Both were dairy farmers and both were staunch conservatives. I know from their testimonies in church that they were single-issue voters: abortion. But I also know that they would have hated Trump for a hundred other reasons. And I wonder what they would have done in the voting booth this year.
One grandfather, in protest of the government, always refused to wear a seatbelt. I now wonder — would he put on a mask for the sake of all of us, or would he travel the countryside bare-faced, untethered by safety restraints of any kind?
Then my thoughts wander to his sister, my great aunt. Though she died in the early 2000s in her mid-80s, I’ve often wished for the chance to revisit our last conversation. It happened on Thanksgiving as we were all squeezing in one more piece of pie.
“I think Hillary Clinton will be president one day,” she said, beaming.
I regret not demanding an explanation. In an era defined by 9/11 and a second Bush in office, what gave her the audacity to suggest such an outlandish idea? Furthermore, in a family of conservatives, how did she — my great Aunt with two white pigtails and purple leather mocassins — end up a liberal Democrat? But I was a dumb college student, probably itching to leave the table so I visit my boyfriend or talk to my college friends over AIM on my desktop computer, so I didn’t.
On one hand, it’s sad to think of how many opportunities I missed with my dead relatives. But I also know it’s unrealistic to think that I would have spent my teenage years and 20s focused on drawing wisdom out of elderly people in armchairs instead of traveling, studying, and aggressively following the belief that I already knew all I needed to know about life. So instead of wallowing in regret, I’ve just been spending time thinking about them with love and nostalgia.
For the first thirty-five years of my life, the sight of my grandmother spilling food onto her bosom and then dabbing at it with a wet napkin was as common as seeing a squirrel or a bluejay out my window. The difference is though, that I’ll see squirrels and bluejays for the rest of my life, but I’ll never again see my grandmother’s face feign surprise when an errant cranberry plops down on her snowy white blouse.
But that’s ok. Trust me, with a 4 and a 9-year-old, there’s still plenty of stained shirts in my life.
And most of the time, I spend a lot more time thinking about my kids than my grandmother. But this year, I’m changing it up. Of course, I’ll feed my kids — I’m not a monster. But my heart, my mind, and my thoughts — they’ll be with my dead relatives, dropping cranberries, predicting elections, and trying to find answers to the questions I never asked.
If you like this type of story about partly-alive-partly-dead animals, try this:
The Joy and Sadness of Loving a Good Dog
How our dead dog Cooper gave us one final happy memory in the woods.medium.com | https://medium.com/@dhamody/im-spending-this-inthanksgiving-with-my-close-relatives-fe665b276451 | [] | 2020-12-12 18:02:10.009000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Health', 'Thanksgiving', 'Wellness'] |
Deploying a free, multi-user, browser-only IDE in just a few minutes | The indispensable stock IDE picture (photo by Clément H from unsplash.com)
Public and private clouds give developers the opportunity to run and deploy their software artifacts very quickly and scale computations — for example, Machine Learning training — to more-or-less indefinite power. How to bridge the gap between local development on the computer of the developers and the cluster is however a crucial open question.
This is a problem, that online, browser-only IDEs are trying to solve. Running the IDE directly on the cluster (no matter if public cloud or private company datacenter) has a large number of benefits
use the power of the cluster directly in your IDE, e.g. for compilation or quick tests
work entirely remote on any device without the need to set up anything on your local machine — all you need is a web browser
share the setup and the data across users in the same project reducing the risk for “it works on my machine” problems
There exist already a few products in this space, but not all of them can be deployed to your local private infrastructure or tailored to your own needs.
Therefore, we will create a quick-to-deploy, multi-user, browser-only IDE setup in this post using only the free open-source tools JupyterHub and code-server, which you can easily customize to your own needs and deploy to your own infrastructure, as long as you have a Kubernetes cluster.
The post is structured in three parts:
First, we will bring up the needed infrastructure on a public cloud provider (GCP in this case). If you have already a Kubernetes cluster (e.g. in your company), a persistent storage provider, and helm, you can skip this step.
Then, we will install a vanilla online-IDE setup built on top of Visual Studio Code.
In the end, the post will showcase how you can customize things like authentication, environments, or resource usage.
Bringing up the infrastructure: a Kubernetes cluster
Kubernetes (or k8s for short) is a way to run, schedule, and orchestrate large fleets of containers and is the de facto standard to run distributed applications today. Chances are high, you are already using k8s in your company. If not, or if you want to give the online IDE a quick test, you can follow one of the great guides from the “Zero to JupyterHub” project to spin up a k8s cluster on one of the public cloud providers.
For example, to start a small k8s cluster on GCP, enable the “Kubernetes Engine API” in the Google cloud console and run
gcloud container clusters create \
--machine-type n1-standard-2 \
--num-nodes 2 \
--zone <compute zone> \
--cluster-version latest \
<cluster name>
either in the cloud shell or on your local computer (if you have installed and configures the gcloud utility and kubectl). Make sure to choose a compute zone near you and a cluster name. After the deployment, you should be able to see two running nodes in your cluster with
kubectl get node
Last but not least, make sure to have helm installed by following the instructions on the project page (it is already installed in the Google cloud shell). Helm is a utility for installing and managing k8s deployments.
That’s already it! We are ready to start deploying!
Deploy an online multi-user IDE
The basis for our deployment will be JupyterHub, a highly configurable platform to deploy multi-user Jupyter Notebook setups. Using JupyterHub allows us to reuse its great ecosystem of predefined authenticators, settings, etc. However, we will replace the Jupyter Notebook part with a Visual Studio Code installation using the code-server project, which has ported VS Code to run in a browser. With this, every authenticated user gets its own VS Code instance and a home folder.
Simplified overview of the setup we are going to deploy.
We will follow the official documentation on how to deploy JupyterHub to k8s, except for some settings custom to the IDE setup. These settings are specified in a yaml file, that you can download from this github repository (to the cloud shell or your local computer):
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nils-braun/codehub/main/values.yaml
Open the file with a text editor and replace the proxy.securityToken (indicated with a TODO) with the result of calling
openssl rand -hex 32
Now add the JupyterHub helm chart from the official repository
helm repo add jupyterhub https://jupyterhub.github.io/helm-chart/
helm repo update
and you are ready for deployment:
helm upgrade --cleanup-on-fail --install codehub jupyterhub/jupyterhub --values values.yaml
That’s it, you have successfully deployed a browser-only multi-user IDE!
You can either visit it with its public IP (if you are using a deployment on a public cloud provider)
kubectl get services proxy-public --output jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'
or by creating a port-forwarding to your local computer,
kubectl port-forward svc/proxy-public 8000:80
and visiting http://localhost:8000. By default, any user and password combination will be valid. The result will look something like this:
The online IDE is up and running!
The deployment does not just look like VS Code, it is nearly a full-blown VS Code. The great group of the code-server project use the open-source part of VS Code, make it accessible for a web browser and package it into a docker image, which we are using here. They name the few remaining differences in their FAQ. You can even run web services for deployment and access them via your browser.
Configure the setup
So what’s next? Now you can start customizing the installation to your own needs and environment.
First, you should use a different authenticator, e.g. OAuth2 (and GitHub integration), LDAP, Active Directory, etc. instead of the default, dummy one. See here for more information.
Next, make sure to use HTTPS for encrypting the communication with the hub, if you are running in public. See here for more information.
You can also customize the resources for each user and the persistent storage (where the home folder and files are stored).
How about letting the users choose between different “profiles” (e.g. resources, predefined images, and settings)? See here.
And to not put too much strain on your luster, automatically remove idle servers, see here.
Learn how to monitor the status of your deployment.
The list can go on for a while, as the ecosystem of JupyterHub extensions is huge. You can even change the looks and run “normal” Jupyter notebooks alongside the IDE servers. In most cases, the only thing you need to do is to add some lines into the values.yaml file and re-deploy with
helm upgrade --cleanup-on-fail --install codehub jupyterhub/jupyterhub --values values.yaml
Happy Coding!
That’s it. You can now run an easily-managed browser-only IDE setup for your team or company and customize it to your needs. Once you are done, you should uninstall the deployment with
helm uninstall codehub
and undeploy the k8s server
gcloud container clusters delete <cluster name> --zone <zone>
If you like this setup, make sure to visit the pages of the two projects JupyterHub and code-server, and praise them for their great work!
You can also have a look into the repository of this deployment to read more information. | https://nils-braun.medium.com/deploying-a-free-multi-user-browser-only-ide-in-just-a-few-minutes-d891f803224b | ['Nils Braun'] | 2020-12-04 19:55:44.820000+00:00 | ['Ide', 'Online', 'Software Development', 'Cloud'] |
A Beginners Guide to R for Data Analytics | Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
If you are thinking of getting into R, this article will give you a starting point. Through this article, I have tried to give a basic insight into data analytics using R.
Installing R and R studio
You can download the setup file for R from “here”. Once this is sorted, you will need an IDE to start programming in R. RStudio will do just fine for an IDE and you can download a free desktop version from “here”. After downloading and installing the aforementioned software, you are all set to begin your programming journey with R. Now, you may open R Studio, click on File, New File, and lastly on R Script.
Let's begin Data analytics with R.
Installing Packages and Importing Libraries
You need not reinvent the wheel every time you build a car. So is true for programming as well. A library is a collection of functions that are developed to perform certain tasks. So each time a programmer writes a code, instead of writing tens and hundreds of lines just to perform a simple operation such as finding a square root, he/she and directly use the readily available function in the default library of R. Packages are a collection of libraries.
Since the purpose of this article is just to familiarize with the basics of the R, we will be generally focusing on data wrangling and data visualization aspect of data analytics. I will cover modeling and other high-level concepts in the follow-up articles.
For data wrangling we will be using the following libraries:
dplyr : The go-to package for data wrangling. used for manipulating rows and columns of data sets and even joining separate data sets together.
: The go-to package for data wrangling. used for manipulating rows and columns of data sets and even joining separate data sets together. tidyr : Pretty much as the name suggests, used for tidying the data.
: Pretty much as the name suggests, used for tidying the data. lubridate : Used to manipulate and re-format dates and time.
: Used to manipulate and re-format dates and time. forcats: Used to handle categorical variables. More on this in the follow-ups.
For data visualization, ggplot2 has pretty much everything you will be needing.
The list of useful libraries goes long, however, don't fret too much about memorizing the name of every library required for effectively. For this purpose, we have packages like “tidyverse”. This package has got all the aforementioned libraries and many more. So let's install this package to R and import it to our program with the below lines of instruction:
#Installs package
install.packages(“tidyverse”) #Load core tidyverse package
library(tidyverse)
Importing the Data set
For analysis, we will be using a data set of 1000 most popular based on IMDB reviews. The data has been collected from “Kaggle” and has been compiled by the data creator promptcloud. The data set was last updated in June 2017 therefore, the accuracy in today's scenario cannot be ascertained. However, we are using this data set for demonstration purposes only so it will serve just fine for our purpose. After downloading the data set from the above link and placing it in a directory of our choice, now we are ready to import the data to our R script.
mydata = read.csv("<path>") #Replace <path> with the path of file
If you have stored your file in the working directory, you can directly call out the file name. But before that, you will have to set up the folder where you have saved the file as a working directory. Post which you can directly call out the file name.
setwd("<path>") #Data set will be stored in mydata data frame
mydata = read.csv("IMDB_moviedata.csv")
In my case, the file is stored as “IMDB_moviedata.csv”. CSV means comma-separated values. In this format, each element of data is separated by a comma. Although other characters can also be used to separate the elements of the data. To get more detail you can go through the R documentation by using the following command:
help(read.csv) #or
?read.csv
Tidying up the data
Now we have our data set imported, but in most cases, we cannot use it directly as it may not be correctly ordered or it might contain some features which are not required for our analysis. Before doing that, let's first have a look at our data. You can use all or any of the below listed commands to do so.
head(mydata) #or
summary(mydata) #or
glimpse(mydata)
Below is a snippet of results from the glimpse function.
So let’s begin tidying up the data.
#removing Description column
mydata <- select(mydata, -Description) #Assign NA to all blank entries
mydata <- mydata %>% mutate_all(na_if,"") #Remove rows with NAs and store as mydata_cleaned
mydata_cleaned <- na.omit(mydata) #Renaming the columns
mydata_cleaned %>% rename(Runtime_mins = Runtime..Minutes., Revenue_mills = Revenue..Millions.) -> mydata_cleaned #Get the summary of clean data
summary(mydata_cleaned)
Data Visualization and Analysis
In this section, we will be performing some basic analysis of the imported data set. At first, let us compare the earnings of the top 10 rated movies. In our data set the movies have already been arranged as per their ranks. We will start by picking the top 10 movies from the data frame and comparing the revenue earned by them.
#selecting top 10 movies
top_ten <- head(mydata_cleaned, 10) #subsetting revenue variable
var1 <- c("Rank", "Title", "Revenue_mills")
revenue_data <- top_ten[var1] #viewing subsetted data frame
head(revenue_data)
Below is the data frame that we will be using to carry out this piece of analysis. Note that Rank 8 is missing. This is because rows with missing values were removed during the data cleaning process.
#Data visualization #Layer 1: column plot
a <- ggplot(data = revenue_data, mapping = aes(x = reorder(Title, Rank), y = Revenue_mills)) +
geom_col(mapping = aes(fill = Title, color = Title), alpha = .7, size = 1.1, show.legend = FALSE) +
labs(x = "Title", y = "Revenue in millions", title = "Earnings of top 10 movies") +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, size = 5, vjust = 0.4, hjust = 1), plot.title = element_text(size = 15, vjust = 2),axis.title.x = element_text(size = 12, vjust = -0.35)) #Layer 2: label to show rank
b <- geom_label(mapping = aes(label=Rank), fill = "red", size = 4, color = "white", hjust=0.6) #adding Layer 1 and Layer 2
p1 = a + b #printing the graph
p1 #Note: For more help on plots check help(geom_col) and help(geom_label)
The above graph is a combination of bar graphs and labels. I have used geom_col for bar graphs and geom_label to show the rankings.
Now, let’s compare who is the highest-grossing director. For this analysis, we will be taking the aggregate of revenue against each director using the aggregate function and also we will compare the number of films directed by each of them.
#Getting aggregate of the revenue
Director_agg <- aggregate(mydata_cleaned$Revenue_mills, by = list(Director = mydata_cleaned$Director), FUN=sum) #Renaming the aggregate column
Director_agg <- rename(Director_agg, Aggregate_revenue = x) #Reordering and filtering top 10 directors revenue wise
Director_agg %>% arrange(Aggregate_revenue) -> Director_agg #Filtering top 10
Director_top10 <- head(Director_agg, 10)
Director_top10
#Data visualization
ggplot(data = Director_top10, mapping = aes(x = reorder(Director, -Aggregate_revenue), y = Aggregate_revenue)) +
geom_col(mapping = aes(fill = Director, color = Director), alpha = .7, size = 1.1, show.legend = FALSE) +
labs(x = "Director", y = "Revenue in millions", title = "Earnings from top 10 directors") +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, size = 5, vjust = 0.4, hjust = 1), plot.title = element_text(size = 15, vjust = 2),axis.title.x = element_text(size = 12, vjust = -0.35))
Now, let us have a look at the performance of Top 1000 movies by drafting a histogram to show the relationship between the revenue earned vs the frequency against each earning range.
#Plotting the histogram
ggplot(mydata_cleaned) +
geom_histogram(mapping = aes(x = Revenue_mills,) , fill = "#87ceeb", color = "#335DFF", binwidth = 10) +
labs(x = "Revenue in millions", y = "Frequency", title = "Revenue vs. Frequency") +
scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0,400), expand = c(0,0)) +
scale_y_continuous(expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.02))) + coord_cartesian(ylim = c(0, 80))
In the last example, we will try to visualize the relation between rank and meta score.
Note that to avoid duplication, I have introduced all the required parameters within ggplot, as the parameter will remain the same for both geom_point and geom_smooth.
#plotting line graph ggplot(data = mydata_cleaned, mapping = aes(x = Rank, y = Metascore)) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth()
The regression line in the above plot shows the relation between the rank and meta score using the loess method. This is the default method for geom_smooth for smoothening scatter plot. More on this in later posts. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-beginners-guide-to-r-for-data-analytics-ae72996faebb | ['Vipul Kumar'] | 2020-11-05 23:16:43.651000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'R Programming', 'Data Science', 'Beginners Guide', 'Data Visualization'] |
Best 40 quotes about failure to success. | Many people make goals to succeed in life and everyone have to make one goal without a goal man is useless. I hope, you have chosen a big goal in your life. Hare to start your struggle and failure in life. starting to achieve a goal lot of problems and failure comes. that’s why I’m going to share with you quotes about failure and success. These inspirational failure quotes are so helpful, so remember quotes about failure and success.
Best 40 quotes about failure to success.
“Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” — Gena Showalter
“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be” — John Wooden
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” — Robert F. Kennedy
“It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” — Ellen DeGeneres.
“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time,
give ourselves permission to excel.” — Eloise Ristad
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something.
But I can’t accept not trying.” — Michael Jordan
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again,
this time more intelligently.” — Henry Ford
failure is the part of life and success. if you are not fail then remember you’re going worn way. If you want see more to strong mentality to face the difficulty click the more | https://medium.com/@swemquotes/best-40-quotes-about-failure-to-success-4df856c3fe71 | [] | 2020-12-11 12:40:15.200000+00:00 | ['Inspirational Quotes', 'Failure', 'Motivational', 'Failure To Success', 'Inspirational'] |
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Students | Problem:
In Pakistan, students are encouraged for cramming academic books to score higher marks while no work is done for their Emotional Intelligence (EQ) affecting their personal growth, communication skills and social skills. Being emotionally literate will allow them to be confident, communicate better, identify their problems, face challenges and make decisions.
Background:
Students often find themselves imprisoned in a cage of anxiety, stress and confusion. They mainly focus on cramming the books while not being clear in the concepts only for the sake of high scores in examination. During assignments, assessments, project work, and exam week, they are mostly anxious pre-occupied and are unable to understand their impulses. They fail to control their emotions thus, behaving inappropriately afterwards. They find it difficult to know about their passion drives and choose a career. Their personality does not refine with time as they gain no self-awareness and self-regulation at academic institutions. For not having social skills, they cannot manage their relationships effectively with their families, friends, teachers, professional body, and not even with themselves.
Objectives:
My aim is to educate and create awareness about Emotional Intelligence in students.
I will be working on 5 skills devised by Daniel Goleman:
1. Self-awareness (Self-confidence, self-assessment, mood swings, emotional drives, personality type etc.)
2. Self-regulation (Acceptance, growth mindset, integrity, trustworthiness etc.)
3. Internal motivation (Commitment, aims, passion to achieve in the face of challenges, optimism etc.)
4. Empathy (cross-cultural sensitivity, Helping nature, service, team work compassion etc.)
5. Social skills (relationships management, leadership, persuasiveness etc.)
Due to COVID-19 situation, we are not allowed to step out rather instructed to work from home through online platforms. My plan involves to conduct Zoom sessions on this topic on weekends. Also, I will write blogs in this regard and make a page on social apps. When the conditions will be favorable, I will conduct seminars in the academic institutions in this regard. I also plan to devise a one-month course in future on Emotional Intelligence for students.
Initiative steps:
Being a student, I contacted my mates and cousins. They highly agreed to the fact of being anxious pre-occupied and having no insights about Emotional Intelligence. I also contacted with my professor, Sir Atif Mirza, who teach us on Personal Development subject. He is a life coach and trainer. He himself is working really hard for this purpose and has been successful for conducting number of seminars in schools, colleges and universities. He also shared his part of striving hard to include a course in universities for Personal Development (Successfully did it in Punjab University).
His YouTube Channel
Another professor and clinical psychologist, Ma’am Saima, happily shared her views in this regard. She shared her experience of researching on the mental health of students and adults. How they cope up with their relationships and career options. She encouraged me and also, offered her help whenever I need for this noble cause.
Experience:
When I interviewed my professors and some students, I was feeling happy and highly motivated head over heels. I had this spark in me that Yes! This is something extremely important. We can make a lot of difference by working on Emotional Intelligence. | https://medium.com/@shayza-majid163/emotional-intelligence-eq-and-students-b16ac771b4ba | ['Shayza Majid'] | 2020-12-25 21:34:00.028000+00:00 | ['Emotional Intelligence', 'Personal Development', 'Leadership Skills', 'Personality Development'] |
The Art of DIY Moving | Contributed by: Adam De Franceschi — Back2Back Removals
They say a losing your job, a family member passing, and moving house are three of the most stressful events that you can go through in your life; here at Back2Back Removals, we deal with the latter every day!
While from the outset the task of moving might seem “easy” to some, the logistics of actually moving the entire contents of a house can be a little more complicated than what you may have thought. Things such as — how I’m going to move my heavier items? How on earth do I deal with my inherited expensive dinnerware without breaking it? And what about the navigation of that large couch up that small stairwell? At B2B, we have years of experience; so I’m going to share with you some tips to make your next move that little bit easier!
Tip 1: Packing
Trust me, you never really know how much stuff you have until you move into a new house. The first thing you will need is boxes, containers, or anything that can be closed to hold various items. Don’t overpack your boxes- this is the number one rule that most of us seem to get wrong! Too much weight can lead to bottoming out which causes unnecessary breakages! Also, think about who’s lifting the boxes and the distance that needs to be travelled from home to truck, and then from truck to new space.
Tip 2: Packing fragile items
When packing fragile items, using a lot of cushioning paper is best- newspaper will usually do the job just fine. Plates should be stacked on their side, side to side, with cushioning in-between. This reduces clashing while in transit. Glasses should be individually wrapped and laid flat, with cushioning placed on both the bottom of the box/container AND the sides. For other fragile items, wrap them individually, placing lighter objects on top of the stronger, heavier ones. If in doubt more cushioning is better than less.
Tip 3: Packing the truck
So now you’re standing there, looking at the truck. The rental company has given you three ties and a couple of blankets (standard practice) and there is a big empty space. How best do you pack it?
There is no one size fits all here. You need to consider the number of items you have and the different sizes and pack the truck accordingly. Safe travel and space optimization should be at the forefront of your mind. By not packing efficiently, this will lead to multiple trips and places you at high risk of item breakage; something that you may not be insured for.
*When you use a professional, they’ve got the right insurance (and the skillset) to mitigate this and ease your frustrations.
Tip 4: The actual move
Now that everything is packed and you’ve managed to load all of the bulky objects (tv units, consoles, dining tables, beds etc), which are heavier than you first thought into this tiny truck, you now need to navigate through doorways, hallways and downstairs. The transition of house-to-truck then truck-to-house is where most of the damage to furniture is done.
So the biggest tip here is the plan. Plan your move strategy. Take a look at the object and where it needs to end up and plan accordingly from there. Talk with your moving partner (before moving the object!) about what the movement plan is, then lift and move. This is where moving becomes a bit of an art form.
At B2B we’ve seen it all, from lifting oversized fridges over marble tabletops, to fitting couches through windows (because that’s the only way it’s going to go), passing mattress’ over balconies and many other ambitious situations. All of these were successfully achieved with no damage, thanks to a movement plan.
It’s easy to see how moving can be one of the most stressful events you can go through in your life. If this all sounds too hard, that’s what we’re here for! Our team at Back2Back does this every day and we take pride in moving your items safely from A to B saving you all the stress in the world! We are a team of friendly and approachable workers who take pride in moving others like it’s our own family. That’s why we are the Back2Back family and we act like it. Our service is contactable 24/7, 7 days a week because we understand that sometimes life can throw a spanner in the works and understand how things can suddenly seem very overwhelming so we aim to make it as friendly and stress-free as possible.
To find out more about how we can help you, please check out our socials on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/b2bremovalist/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/back2backcbr/
Website: https://www.b2bremovals.com/
Adam De Franceschi
Back2Back Removals | https://medium.com/@jack_2342/the-art-of-diy-moving-7827ba3de4a0 | ['Jack Mohr'] | 2019-09-02 23:46:01.497000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Property Management', 'Moving', 'DIY', 'Property'] |
Creating a GitHub like website in Golang | Goal
The aim of this project was to setup a GitHub like website where I could upload my code, using HTTP for git operations on remote repository. (This post won’t cover what it takes to support SSH based git remote operations, and would implement the most basic functionality.)
I wanted to explore Golang language and I would be using the code snippets or examples written in Golang but the core logic/idea would remain the same irrespective of any language.
The Basics
You can follow any guide to setup a basic HTTP server to handle various routes in your preferred web framework.
For my project I used gin (http://github.com/gin-gonic/gin) to setup some basic routes.
To make things simpler I wrote my routes in such a way that all the git operations on repository happens on a URL with this format. http://domain.com/git/repo-name
This means the remote URL for the local repository would look like above and you would use this URL to clone a repository and for other git operations as well.
Adding Functionality
Creating a Repository
POST /repo
Content-Type: application/json {
"name": "repo-name"
}
We know that to start a git repository we do git init . Running this command creates a .git folder with all the required files.
What happens when you need to create a repository on your server?
We utilize the same command but we pass an additional option --bare .
Passing this option creates a git repository without a working tree, this created repository is different as it will prevent any changes to occur on the remote repository directly and one can’t run the usual git commit command directly in this directory.
Try running the git init --bare command on your system and see the file structure, you will notice that it is similar to what .git directory looks like but instead of all these files/folder being present in .git folder it is present in the root of your folder where you ran the command.
git init --bare file structure
You can look more into the --bare option to understand it even better.
Ref: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/setting-up-a-repository/git-init
Now that we know how to setup a repository on server we can create an endpoint which will let us create new repository.
Code for such an endpoint could look like below. Here I have stripped out the various check I implemented before actually creating a repository.
Create Repository HTTP Route
I created a small utils package which I used to handle all git specific operations. Code for the CreateNewRepo function used in above snippet is below.
We now have a endpoint set-up which when hit will create a new repository for us.
Now let’s implement the main git operations.
Implementing Git Operations support
When we do git clone git push git pull on our terminal if the remote repository URL is HTTP based git internally uses HTTP as the mode to perform the required operations for these commands to work.
This is a key piece of information as all we need to do now is make sure our server support all the endpoints git will use and also handle the response and request for these endpoints.
Luckily there are already tools/libraries which does this and we won’t need to implement them from scratch.
For my project in Go I came across this project https://github.com/asim/git-http-backend/blob/master/server/server.go
The author of this project had already implemented all the necessary endpoints and the core functionality for each of them using go’s default HTTP server as the base.
Since I was using Gin I had to tweak the code to make it work specific to Gin framework, which was comparatively easy as all the Handler function needed was Request & Response .
That’s it.
We now have the required endpoints created and we can now take our code for a spin.
Let’s Execute
Let’s say if your server was running on port 8000 and you had created a repo named test .
In your local terminal you could do git clone http://localhost:8000/git/test and it would clone the repository (it would be blank if you hadn’t pushed anything).
You can now do git commit and push the changes, the changes would now be present on your remote repository.
References:
To read more in-depth about git I’d recommend the official docs (for in-depth)/Atlassian’s version (for brief intro)
Some more in-depth resources below:
Next Steps
Git Hooks based events
I modified my server to setup a WebSocket connection on a route which looks like http://localhost:8000/ws/repo-name/ . This would now create a per repo based WebSocket connection between the clients and our server.
I could then use this connection to push various information to clients.
An example of such use-case is below:
Together with Git hooks ( post-receive ) I can now push messages on the WebSocket Connection to the clients whenever a new commit/ref is updated on the remote repository.
This would allow me to setup a front-end in future which can listen to these events and show a message to the user.
You can read more about the Git hooks here
For making the above feature you would need to setup Server Side Hooks.
Authentication
To implement basic authentication where a different user can not push to another user’s repository you can use the pre-receive git hook on server side and add the authentication logic and block the operations if access is denied. (There may be other ways to implement this feature this is something I thought of and haven’t implemented yet.) | https://medium.com/@kaushik.tech/creating-a-github-like-website-in-golang-d131ebc9e7ac | [] | 2020-12-26 16:52:19.154000+00:00 | ['Git', 'Github', 'First Post', 'Golang', 'Technology'] |
Day 16: An Introduction to Phase II | I’ve made it to Phase II, the last section in the 2D Game Development course! It’s honestly mind blowing to think about where I was two weeks ago, having no experience with Unity, Visual Studio, or C# coding, and where I am now. I’m grateful to have this blog as a time capsule to look back on and read in the future, wherever it may take me career-wise.
Lately I’ve been reading more about augmented reality and following designers that mesh AR with graphic design, a field I’m particularly interested in. Going through their portfolios and seeing them mix traditional design elements such as typography with AR is so inspiring and pushing me to think out of the box in terms of creative possibilities. It’s amazing to see all of my interests come together this way and I’m excited to watch the future of design unfold.
Today we had a company-wide meeting where we discussed the future after our internships, the different fields coding can lead you to, and where to get started in terms of looking for careers. I took some time to look up different augmented reality, virtual reality, and game development studios on LinkedIn just to get a sense of the job market and what skills companies are looking for. Although I’m not quite ready to jump into a developer position yet, researching prospective careers is serving as major motivation to refine my skills in coding with GameDevHQ and on my own time with graphic design.
On my own project, today I worked on programming a new enemy movement and spawning waves of enemies in sequences. Using Mathf.PingPong, a unique bit of code that propels an object in — you may have guessed — a ping pong motion, the enemy ships now travel downward in a zig-zag pattern. Previously, they would spawn at a random point on the y-axis and travel downward in a straight line.
I wasn’t able to fully nail the sequencing action and will have to continue working on that section in the morning. It seems that programming object motion and using physics isn’t my strong point, and I’ll be focusing on better understanding those concepts this week. | https://medium.com/@brittanymartin-hi/day-16-an-introduction-to-phase-ii-d96d3d70aab | ['Brittany Lumanlan Martin'] | 2020-12-15 19:05:28.081000+00:00 | ['Gamedevhq', 'Typography', 'Graphic Design', 'Augmented Reality', 'C Sharp Programming'] |
Rozemarijn, | Rozemarijn,
The more I learn about you, the more I like you!
I have heard a lot about TikTok lately, but honestly I don’t know much about it. I mean literally I just now Googled: “What is Tik Tok”. My search results did not help me in understanding what it is and why it has become such a buzz word that I hear from the other room on my my Mom’s TV. If not for my mom’s TV, I would have never heard the word, as I don’t watch TV.
The reason I don’t watch TV can be mathematically expressed as: TV + Me = Anxiety. Even more so while I’m on the subject of math and Anxiety, the expression:
Autistic Me + Being Hypersensitive to the World I See = Severe Anxiety.
But I digress into my love of programming, logic, numbers, and math. So, back to the Societal Mania with Social Media… | https://medium.com/@keira-leda-lees/rozemarijn-4589aa344608 | ['Keira Fulton-Lees'] | 2020-11-15 00:08:19.729000+00:00 | ['Identity', 'Transgender', 'Mental Health', 'Nonbinary', 'LGBTQ'] |
Why Tringy is The Best OTT App For VoIP Business? | Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a cost-effective solution…
…that many businesses are engaging in to make their communications effective, bring down their costs, and increase their revenue.
To realize this potent combination, Voxvalley has developed Tringy, which is by far voted as one of the best OTT applications.
Tringy is an appropriate solution for VoIP businesses intending to perform a large array of activities.
These activities could be directly impacting the revenue generation models.
Tringy is an over-the-top (OTT) solution that enables operators to provide feature-rich facilities by creating their own OTT apps.
The OTT apps thus developed aid the operators to set-up their IP communication incurring the least investment and risk.
Our solution is robust and quick to deploy, speeding the operators’ goals.
Now one may wonder why we need Tringy when the market is full of free OTT apps.
Here is one powerful reason –
Tringy’s soft-switch server that works in the backend, is an end-to-end solution to manage your users, billing, administrative issues, packages, routing, and other activities as required by your VoIP.
Know more: Read Full Article | https://medium.com/@tejaswini4digital/why-tringy-is-the-best-ott-app-for-voip-business-a701aaf115f4 | ['Tejaswini Kola'] | 2020-12-22 08:32:05.654000+00:00 | ['Telecom', 'Voip', 'Cloud', 'Unified Communication', 'Telecommunication'] |
This was such an interesting read! | This was such an interesting read! I hope some of my professors use this knowledge in the classroom. It’d be a fun new way to integrate learning, especially now. | https://medium.com/@elizabeth.golpariani/this-was-such-an-interesting-read-5385bbcaf239 | [] | 2020-12-24 20:36:01.115000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Fun', 'Games', 'Gaming'] |
Predict Euro Cup matches with simple statistics | Predict Euro Cup matches with simple statistics
We’re all just pawns until we win the friendly football pool [image by klimkin]
EDIT: by popular demand, the code and data are now available on GitHub, ready to use code can also be found on Kaggle. I also added parsed versions of datasets for World Cup and Euro Cup games. Feel free to use any or all that you like. — Sijmen
My friends and I start a football pool for every World and Euro cup. There’s not much on the line except for grandiose glory and an eternal feeling of victory. I guess you could argue there’s actually a lot on the line.
Anyway, I’m a data scientist, let’s use that for our football pool.
The idea
[Assumption 1] Football doesn’t change, and a similar distribution of scores will occur in every tournament.
[Assumption 2] FIFA ranking is a good indicator of a country’s performance.
I will look at a typical score distribution for a Euro Cup, and distribute the scores according to their occurrence and the difference in FIFA rank between countries.
For example: in a typical Euro Cup the most extreme score is 5–0, and it occurs once. I will predict this score for the match with the largest difference in FIFA ranking between the countries.
After that, I look for the second most extreme score and predict it for the match with countries having the second-largest difference in FIFA ranking.
I continue doing this until all matches have a predicted score.
If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, more examples below.
The data
I was hoping to find a website with an option to export all Euro Cup matches, but alas, I didn’t find it. OpenFootball looked very promising, but I ended up not using it because 1. their text files are in an annoying format and 2. I didn’t want to install their tools to build the DB.
For the match data I ended up using LinguaSport, simple format, easy to parse, seems to have everything on there. Love it.
For the FIFA rankings I used this Kaggle dataset, thank you very much, Alex.
Lastly, the games to be played… I entered this by hand.
Implementation
The main table looks like this:
+-------------+-----------------------+------------------+-------+
| edition | team 1 | team 2 | score |
+-------------+-----------------------+------------------+-------+
| 2016-FRANCE | Wales (Cymru) | Belgium (België) | 3-1 |
| 2016-FRANCE | Germany (Deutschland) | Italy (Italia) | 1-1 |
| 2016-FRANCE | France | Iceland (Ísland) | 5-2 |
| 2016-FRANCE | Portugal | Wales (Cymru) | 2-0 |
| 2016-FRANCE | Germany (Deutschland) | France | 0-2 |
+-------------+-----------------------+------------------+-------+
Each played match is in the table, using value_counts() and some formatting we get this cool heatmap showing which scores occurred most at each edition. Note that only the combination matters, i.e. 2–1 is the same as 1–2.
Occurrence of each score for each edition of the Euro Cup [image by author]
Below is the same data shown in a heatmap, normalized per edition.
Heatmap showing relative frequency of a match outcome for each edition of the Euro Cup [image by author]
We can easily see the scores which occur most often: 1–0, 1–1, 2–0 and 2–1. To be even more precise below is the percentage occurrence of each score of all Euro Cups:
+-------+--------+
| score | freq. |
+-------+--------+
| 0-0 | 9.6% |
| 1-0 | 16.25% |
| 1-1 | 13.87% |
| 2-0 | 15.49% |
| 2-1 | 14.41% |
| 2-2 | 3.3% |
| 3-0 | 6.6% |
| 3-1 | 5.4% |
| 3-2 | 6.02% |
| 3-3 | 0.73% |
| 4-0 | 0.98% |
| 4-1 | 0.81% |
| 4-2 | 1.47% |
| 4-3 | 0.17% |
| 5-0 | 1.78% |
| 5-1 | 1.09% |
| 5-2 | 0.69% |
| 5-4 | 0.23% |
| 6-0 | 0.41% |
| 6-1 | 0.29% |
| 6-2 | 0.17% |
| 7-1 | 0.23% |
+-------+--------+
Our goal is to create predictions that will have the same distribution of scores as we’ve found above. For this, our next step will be turning the percentage into the number of occurrences (we will call N from now on).
For the first stage of the tournament, we will predict 36 matches. Multiplying the values by 36 gives a good indication of N:
+-------+------+
| score | ~N |
+-------+------+
| 0-0 | 3.46 |
| 1-0 | 5.85 |
| 1-1 | 4.99 |
| 2-0 | 5.58 |
| 2-1 | 5.19 |
| 2-2 | 1.19 |
| 3-0 | 2.37 |
| 3-1 | 1.95 |
| 3-2 | 2.17 |
| 3-3 | 0.26 |
| 4-0 | 0.35 |
| 4-1 | 0.29 |
| 4-2 | 0.53 |
| 4-3 | 0.06 |
| 5-0 | 0.64 |
| 5-1 | 0.39 |
| 5-2 | 0.25 |
| 5-4 | 0.08 |
| 6-0 | 0.15 |
| 6-1 | 0.11 |
| 6-2 | 0.06 |
| 7-1 | 0.08 |
+-------+------+
Now we have to turn these into discrete values because we cannot predict a fraction of matches. We cannot simply round the values, because this would give the wrong total number. I.e. rounding [0.3, 0.4, 0.3] will give [0, 0, 0], which doesn’t have the same sum.
Instead, we will add the floor of the numbers with a fraction, then keep adding one to the largest fraction until we have reached the same sum, see the code below.
# get the floor of each value with fraction
n = [int(x) for x in e] # create a list with only fractions
f = [x % 1 for x in e] # loop until the right sum is reached
while sum(n) < 36: # find the largest fraction, add one to N there and set to zero
idx = np.argmax(f)
f[idx] = 0
n[idx] += 1
This results in our final N:
+-------+------+---+
| score | ~N | N |
+-------+------+---+
| 0-0 | 3.46 | 4 |
| 1-0 | 5.85 | 6 |
| 1-1 | 4.99 | 5 |
| 2-0 | 5.58 | 6 |
| 2-1 | 5.19 | 5 |
| 2-2 | 1.19 | 1 |
| 3-0 | 2.37 | 2 |
| 3-1 | 1.95 | 2 |
| 3-2 | 2.17 | 2 |
| 3-3 | 0.26 | 0 |
| 4-0 | 0.35 | 0 |
| 4-1 | 0.29 | 0 |
| 4-2 | 0.53 | 1 |
| 4-3 | 0.06 | 0 |
| 5-0 | 0.64 | 1 |
| 5-1 | 0.39 | 1 |
| 5-2 | 0.25 | 0 |
| 5-4 | 0.08 | 0 |
| 6-0 | 0.15 | 0 |
| 6-1 | 0.11 | 0 |
| 6-2 | 0.06 | 0 |
| 7-1 | 0.08 | 0 |
+-------+------+---+
The predictions
Now there’s just one step left: match the distribution of the scores with the matches to be played.
To do this, we will create a DataFrame with the matches to be played and add the FIFA ranks for the countries so we can sort for this. The table looks like this:
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------+-----------+
| country 1 | country 2 | rank 1 | rank 2 | rank diff |
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------+-----------+
| turkey | italy | 29 | 7 | 22 |
| wales | switzerland | 17 | 13 | 4 |
| denmark | finland | 10 | 54 | -44 |
| belgium | russia | 1 | 38 | -37 |
| england | croatia | 4 | 14 | -10 |
+-----------+-------------+--------+--------+-----------+
Rank 1 and rank 2 describe the country’s current FIFA rank, the rank diff describes the difference between the two.
Finally, we sort the scores N by goal differences and the matches by FIFA rank differences and we put them next to each other, obtaining our final predictions:
+-----------------+-----------------+-----+-----+--------+------+
| country 1 | country 2 | r 1 | r 2 | r diff | PRED |
+-----------------+-----------------+-----+-----+--------+------+
| turkey | italy | 29 | 7 | 22 | 1-2 |
| wales | switzerland | 17 | 13 | 4 | 0-0 |
| denmark | finland | 10 | 54 | -44 | 3-0 |
| belgium | russia | 1 | 38 | -37 | 3-1 |
| england | croatia | 4 | 14 | -10 | 1-0 |
| austria | north macedonia | 23 | 62 | -39 | 4-2 |
| netherlands | ukraine | 16 | 24 | -8 | 1-1 |
| scotland | czech | 44 | 40 | 4 | 1-1 |
| poland | slovakia | 21 | 36 | -15 | 1-0 |
| spain | sweden | 6 | 18 | -12 | 1-0 |
| hungary | portugal | 37 | 5 | 32 | 0-2 |
| france | germany | 2 | 12 | -10 | 1-0 |
| finland | russia | 54 | 38 | 16 | 1-2 |
| turkey | wales | 29 | 17 | 12 | 0-1 |
| italy | switzerland | 7 | 13 | -6 | 1-1 |
| ukraine | north macedonia | 24 | 62 | -38 | 3-1 |
| denmark | belgium | 10 | 1 | 9 | 2-2 |
| netherlands | austria | 16 | 23 | -7 | 1-1 |
| sweden | slovakia | 18 | 36 | -18 | 2-1 |
| croatia | czech | 14 | 40 | -26 | 3-2 |
| england | scotland | 4 | 44 | -40 | 3-0 |
| hungary | france | 37 | 2 | 35 | 0-2 |
| portugal | germany | 5 | 12 | -7 | 1-1 |
| spain | poland | 6 | 21 | -15 | 2-1 |
| italy | wales | 7 | 17 | -10 | 1-0 |
| switzerland | turkey | 13 | 29 | -16 | 2-1 |
| ukraine | austria | 24 | 23 | 1 | 0-0 |
| north macedonia | netherlands | 62 | 16 | 46 | 1-5 |
| finland | belgium | 54 | 1 | 53 | 0-5 |
| russia | denmark | 38 | 10 | 28 | 0-2 |
| czech | england | 40 | 4 | 36 | 0-2 |
| croatia | scotland | 14 | 44 | -30 | 2-0 |
| slovakia | spain | 36 | 6 | 30 | 0-2 |
| sweden | poland | 18 | 21 | -3 | 0-0 |
| portugal | france | 5 | 2 | 3 | 0-0 |
| germany | hungary | 12 | 37 | -25 | 3-2 |
+-----------------+-----------------+-----+-----+--------+------+
As you can see from the table, when there’s a large difference in FIFA ranking, a large goal difference will be predicted in favour of the country with the better FIFA rank. The matches where both countries have a similar FIFA rank are predicted to end in ties.
Now just wait until Belgium actually beats Finland 5–0 and I’ll look like a genius. | https://towardsdatascience.com/predict-euro-cup-matches-with-simple-statistics-2fc913678117 | ['Sijmen Van Der Willik'] | 2021-07-01 06:17:30.928000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Football', 'Data Science', 'Eurocup', 'Predictions'] |
Rethinking Separation of Concerns with React | Angular and React Separation of Concern
Rethinking Separation of Concerns with React
And how it differs from Angular
Understanding the true nature of separation of concerns is one of those topics that separates newbies from the seasoned developer. There’s more to code than just getting the syntax right. Beautiful code is one that is modular, loosely coupled and extremely easy to maintain. I’ve been thinking about long term feasibility of React and SoC over the past few days since my original deep dive into the framework.
When Angular 1 came out, everyone was excited because of how easy it was to do things. But as projects grew, complications started to arise — especially when there are multiple people working on a single code base. One could argue that it is the nature of programming — and perhaps it is, but it doesn’t have to be. Angular 2 came out and forced a stronger separation of concerns through explicitly requiring different types of files for different functionality. HTML lived in one file. Your component logic lived in another file. Relevant CSS is automatically localized to a single file and your services in another file.
React challenges this way of thinking by encouraging you to put everything into one space.
What is separation of concern?
separation of concerns (SoC) is a design principle for separating a computer program into distinct sections, such that each section addresses a separate concern — Wikipedia
Separation of Concern is supposed to help keep the code organized. A ‘concern’ is a particular set of information that is related to each other within the immediate vicinity. In short, separation of concern is a classification method.
If you think about your local supermarket, each item categorized into item types. The sorting of all oranges, apples, and bananas into their different and grouped arrangement makes it easier for shoppers to chose which fruit they want. However, efficiency and sales are increased when related products are grouped together — like pasta and pasta sauce or rice and butter chicken mix. There is less walking required and the grouping of ingredients makes it easier to determine what else you need.
From what I understand, separation of concern is all about organization and the conventional philosophy goes — group like and like together. Angular does this through file types. They don’t mix JavaScript and HTML together like React.
However, this isn’t the only style available when it comes to organizing code and separating out their domain of concerns.
Just because it’s a popular convention, doesn’t mean its right
React challenges the traditional models of thinking towards separation of concern.
The diagram below illustrates how MVC frameworks often structure their files and content. Separation of concern is determined by the file type and may be grouped together in a file of sorts.
MVC styled separation of concern
This structure is common in templating styled frameworks. However, the issue with this structure is that when problems or new features arise, it’s often implemented horizontally.
The point of SoC is so that code remains maintainable and is mentally digestible by the developer. There’s no point of splitting code into a million different files if no one can understand it. We’re only human and have a finite short term memory computing space. SoC is supposed to reduce the load by grouping like for like together.
Templating systems SoC
The idea behind grouping like for like is also to reduce code coupling and increase cohesion. This means that a piece of code is independent from each other and can easily be interchanged like lego parts.
However, that is often not the case — especially in templating frameworks like Angular. In large projects, this can actually increase code interdependency if you’re not careful. As we are forced to move horizontally and across multiple files, the structure and method behind this style of SoC make the code harder to maintain and understand. It gets even worse when an unmoderated junior enters the fray and it’s not their fault, not really.
Challenging traditional thinking for Separation of Concern
When Angular 1 came out, it was groundbreaking because it made view binding work like magic. It just worked.
Then projects grew and grew, and everything started to fall apart. The partials started to get used everywhere and the originally separated templates became unwittingly interconnected. If you wanted to change something, you also needed to trace horizontally across the files and figure out what else is affected.
Things get messy and soon, you’re more worried about breaking the code than writing it.
React challenges the traditional method of file silos by flipping it on its side and group their code based on relationship to each other. Language is not a hard line barrier but is seen as one cohesive and logically related block. With React, there is no templating — just components that can be created and destroyed as required.
relationship based SoC
When code is grouped together based on relationship rather than an arbitrary requirement, processing the block becomes easier.
The original mentality behind separation of concerns was created by the early pioneer in computing scientist Dijkstra in 1974, and in short, the purpose of SoC is the “effective ordering of one’s thoughts” React does this by turning grouping code into digestible blocks of code where the flow of logic can be easily traced.
We’ve since evolved from the long single files and coding styles of the 80s and 90s — but that doesn’t mean that the current and popular methods are 100% correct for our needs either. That’s why frameworks are created and the ones that solve major problems experienced in other frameworks are the ones that thrive.
Someone will still have to play the code janitor
The point of frameworks is that they provide a scaffold for how you write your code. React takes this scaffold away and you’re free to structure the code however you want. SoC is designed for you when it comes to Angular. React lets you design your own and there is no limitation on how you arrange your code.
You’re still going to need a code janitor nevertheless. It doesn’t matter how good a framework is, if not used properly, code will still fall apart. There still needs to be that one person that takes a step back, create the required conventions for the project and enforce it on everyone else. The code janitor plays an important role of keeping the code organized and ensure that modules and components remain cohesive rather than tacked on.
The code janitor usually comes in the form of the tech lead. There is usually a code review to ensure that the code fits the way its supposed to — structurally, stylistically and functionally. No one is perfect and someone is bound to inject or do something weird sooner or later. Projects usually fall apart in the long run without a code janitor to keep everyone in line and clean after their own messes.
The thing you must also acknowledge and remember is that all major and popular frameworks solves a problem of sorts — but the most effective one is the one that solves your problem. Every project and every team has their own personal styles and issues that they will encounter. Separation of concern works best when it serves the needs and future growth of the project, along with the team’s ability to understand and how much documentation they’re capable of processing. | https://medium.com/madhash/rethinking-separation-of-concerns-with-react-7e5de1b5c0f7 | ['Aphinya Dechalert'] | 2019-12-22 09:29:24.402000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'JavaScript', 'Startup', 'Productivity', 'React'] |
Dancers Who Defy Time across the Globe | Dancing is one of the most celebrated forms of art and culture across the globe. It is an expression of our mood, or pain and every emotion that we experience. There have been so many different forms of dance and each has captivated audiences and won their applause. Let’s take a look at some of the most celebrated dancers from all over the world.
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson is one of the legends in recent times. He created a sense of brotherhood and spread humanitarian values through his songs and dances. He amazed the crowd way back in the 1980s with his extraordinary moves such as the famous ‘moonwalk’, the tornado spin and balancing up on his toes. He has been a source of inspiration for many dancers worldwide.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
Mikhail Baryshnikov is a Russian ballet dancer who also choreographed his dances. He is universally known as the most famous ballet dancer of the 20th century. He began his career at Kirov Ballet in Leningrad and started working in Canada in 1974. He later became a dancer and artistic director with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in New York City. He has performed on stage, in films, and on television as well.
Joaquin Cortes
Joaquin Cortes is another classically trained ballet dancer who also excelled in flamenco, another dance form. He was from Spain. Elle Macpherson, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Naomi Campbell, and Mira Sorvino are among a few of the fans who admired his sensual moves and his expression as he danced in Ecstasy.
Shakira
Shakira is a multi-talented asset to the entertainment industry. She has shown her excellence in singing, dancing, as a lyricist, record producer, model, and choreographer. She has Belly dancing, Latin, rock and roll and Arabic influences in her perfect moves. She is a wonder and has continued to enchant us with her songs and albums flawlessly.
Hrithik Roshan
Bollywood Star Hrithik Roshan has rocked every stage that he has even danced upon. He is versatile, innovative and has no equal. He can perform very complicated steps with great ease. His facial expressions remain unmatched. He is graceful and very talented.
Martha Graham
Martha Graham is perhaps the first artist to perform for an event in the White House. She is a unique dancer and choreographer and choreographed over 150 shows in her life. She explored a wide range of human experience. She was the first to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador and to receive the highest civilian award which is known as the Medal of Freedom. She received many honors such as receiving the key to the City of Paris and Japan’s Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. Her work is always intense, passionate and transcendental.
These are some of the most eminent performers in the world. They have shown us how talented they really are by setting the stage on fire with their sizzling and suave moves.
I hope you liked this blog!
To book dancers for the New Year party or any other event, please visit StarClinch (India’s №1 artist and celebrity booking website).
Published on: — blog.starclinch.com | https://medium.com/@rastogishivam0803/dancers-who-defy-time-across-the-globe-d741e651ca13 | ['Shivam Rastogi'] | 2020-01-14 06:15:59.452000+00:00 | ['Dance', 'Choreographer', 'Starclinch', 'Artists'] |
Why our allies need to support the Raise the Wage Act | Why our allies need to support the Raise the Wage Act Irene Li Apr 6·5 min read
To our restaurant community,
We’re a group of Asian American women who own businesses in the restaurant industry, and we’re taking this moment of heightened awareness of inequality to ask for your help. We need your support.
At the beginning summer of 2020, we had hope that our industry and our country were finally becoming committed to building a more equitable future for us all. We hoped we would find allies, accomplices and partners in the work of justice and transformation. People were buying anti-racist books more than ever and posting about racial equality on their social media accounts. Surely this would lead to concrete change.
We are writing to you because it hasn’t — and because we need you, as allies, to do more than signal your support for Black and brown lives on your Instagram accounts and in your store windows. We need fundraisers for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations. But, we need more, we need you to act — and lead.
In our industry, the key place to start is to end the subminimum wage for restaurant workers nationwide, who are disproportionately Black and brown women.
If you care about women of color, you will support the Raise the Wage Act and fight as hard for it as you did for the Restaurants Act.
Truly believing in equality means seeing our fates as linked — that we cannot have justice and opportunity for restaurant owners without justice and opportunity for restaurant workers. And a healthy, whole America needs us all.
Seventy percent of tipped workers are women, and most are not in the fine dining restaurants where high check averages and tips are more common. Rather, they work in casual environments — your favorite Thai place, your go-to dim sum spot, or that one taco truck that does the best carne asada. Some of these women live in states where they are paid a base wage of $2.13 per hour. Often that income goes entirely to cover their taxes, meaning they take home zero dollars from their employers.
It should be no surprise then, that tipped restaurant workers use food stamps at twice the rate of any other sector and experience three times the poverty rate as the rest of the US workforce. Nor should it be a shock that the workers who are working full time and receiving government subsidies are disproportionately workers of color and women.
On top of that, women of color have to deal with how American society has hypersexualized them, forcing them to endure sexual harassment from customers in order to not risk losing a tip. Imagine the horrific situations they find themselves in to feed their families — not because of a single thing they have done, but because they simply do not make enough from their wages. Indeed, studies have shown that women restaurant workers paid the subminimum wage experience twice the rates of sexual harassment as women restaurant workers in states that pay One Fair Wage with tips on top.
To be an ally, you must act. Supporting a livable minimum wage is an example of a real, substantive step that all restaurants should support, which would truly demonstrate a commitment to women, to the AAPI community, and to working people everywhere. It is a real, concrete step towards addressing the root of systemic racism and misogyny. Click here to contact your Congresspeople and urge them to support the Raise the Wage Act. You can fight for justice by fighting as hard for restaurant workers as you fight for your own restaurant. Or, you can be just another bystander who remains silent and closes the door on us.
Believe us, we see who is ready to make real change, and who is not. We see that you are willing to give your time, energy, resources, and lobbying efforts to support your restaurants, but not our workers. We are restaurant owners and we will continue to fight to save restaurants, but as a community we cannot continue to support a system that oppresses our workers.
Restaurants need to commit to breaking this harmful system that only benefits the corporations and their pockets. Not to mention they, the most vocal opponents of the Raise the Wage Act, are the giant corporations whose anti-worker, anti-independent restaurant agenda hurt us all.
In addition to supporting the Raise the Wage Act, we are all members of RAISE High Road Restaurants and we’d encourage you to join us. We offer resources, peer to peer conversations, and have a free race and gender equity program to help you begin your journey in transforming your company. We can work together to lobby your representatives so they know that business owners care about not just our workers, but ALL workers in our sector.
We understand it can feel easy to post on Facebook, and more intimidating to truly throw your heart and muscle behind policy change. But, we don’t want to see another instagram post that says you stand in solidarity with us and are working on educating yourself. You’ve had since George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubery, Breonna Taylor and too many Black people were murdered by the police. You’ve had a year to learn why racists are killing and harming Asians and Asian Americans. You’ve had years to care about children being locked in cages at our border.
While we cannot stop police brutality or violence due to xenophobia, we can recognize that all issues of human dignity are linked. And, in our industry, we can stop violence against women in restaurants and lift millions of workers out of poverty. Let’s give people back their sense of dignity and remind the country that there is honor in labor. This is what we, as AAPI female-identified restaurant owners, are calling on you to do. If you are in the restaurant sector and you care about our lives, you need to publicly come out, advocate, and support the Raise the Wage Act. Full stop. Period. No one is free until we all are free.
In solidarity with our Black, Brown, and Indigenous family, we invite you to join us on the right side of history.
Alison Fong, Bon Me
Beverly Kim, Parachute and Wherewithall
Chera Amlag, Hood Famous Bakeshop
Claire Sprouse, Hunky Dory
Debra Russell, Eve
Evy Chen, Evy Tea
Irene Li, Mei Mei
Rumi Ohnui, Moshi Moshi Sushi & Izakaya
Vimala Rajendran, Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe
Yuka Ioroi, Cassava | https://medium.com/@ireneshiangli/why-our-allies-need-to-support-the-raise-the-wage-act-81e4bad97bd2 | ['Irene Li'] | 2021-04-06 15:28:24.750000+00:00 | ['Workers Rights', 'Restaurant', 'Asian American', 'One Fair Wage'] |
Bridge Academy Spring 2019: Fellowship Program🎖An Open Call 🗣 | We’re on the lookout for the top rising talent on the bleeding edge of technology development.
We started Bridge Academy in late 2018 as a solution to the problem of the talent and opportunity gaps that exist today specifically within the blockchain industry and on the edge of new technology development more broadly.
We believe that being open to the entire world’s supply of talent is a key to finding the next generation of developers that will push the frontiers of this technology, which is why Bridge allows participation from anywhere.
Today we are announcing a search for the next cohort of Bridge Fellows, who will be given full scholarships to our training programs along with their own personal mentor. | https://medium.com/the-spectrum/bridge-academy-spring-2019-fellowship-program-an-open-call-f17ea919c38b | ['Adam Breckler'] | 2019-01-23 22:37:57.080000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Fellowship', 'Startup', 'Bridge Academy', 'Blockchain'] |
Was Charles Manson a Scientologist? | Exploring the connections between the notorious killer and the Church of Scientology
Charles Manson is better known today as a deceased serial killer, a sex trafficker and cult leader, and a failed musician. In this article, I wanted to explore the extent of the influence of Scientology on the career criminal, long before the ‘Helter Skelter’ murders occurred.
Charles Manson was born in 1934 to a teenage unwed mother. He was raised by an aunt and uncle after his mother was incarcerated for armed robbery when he was just five years old. For the next three years he lived in McMechen, West Virginia where he was quickly labeled a troubled youth. He had behavioral issues, was combative with friends and family, quickly took to a life of petty crime, and was heavily influenced by white supremacist dogma, such as the KKK.
His mother was released from prison when he was eight, and although he was returned to her custody, fared not much better than he had while she was serving time. Kathleen Maddox saw that her son had become quite the manipulative delinquent and felt guilty for leaving him alone all those years. She thought what he needed was a father, and she went man-hunting, ultimately marrying a circus worker just out of the Army. But Charlie’s behavior continued to worsen.
In desperation, his mother enrolled him at the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. This was a Catholic school for wayward boys with strict disciplinary rules. Charlie later claimed it was a virtual torture chamber, and his tenure at Gibault heralded an astounding seven years in Manson’s young life in youth detention centers, reformatories and jail.
At the age of seventeen, Charlie raped another boy while holding a razor at his throat and was caught. He was sent to Chillicothe, a maximum security facility in Ohio.
But at Chillicothe, Charlie encountered the first of several prison mentors. He met the acquaintance of none other than gangster Frank Costello, former head of the Genovese crime family. Costello was serving time for tax evasion, and took the boy under his wing.
Charlie got out of prison a few years later, married and was expecting his first child when he stole a car and drove west to California. He was soon arrested and thus began another eleven year phase of his life in the penal system. This time he was doing hard time, in federal prisons. But he was bright and institutionalized enough to keep his head down and make use of whatever education the prisons could offer him: whether that be in the form of other mentors (like pimps and even music teachers) and the prison libraries.
Charlie liked to read. He read the Bible front to back several times, and a favorite book was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
“In prison there is every kind of belief imaginable. Some are good, some are bogus… If I saw a con who seemed to be on top of everything and in control of himself, I’d pursue his beliefs in an effort to see if I could strengthen myself through him… If I saw sincerity in the guys who were participating in group sessions, I’d find out which way they were headed. Though I wasn’t black, I picked up on what the Black Muslims were practicing. I did the same with the Indians. I found them solid in their beliefs so I watched them and began to appreciate their rituals and traditions. I studied hypnotism and psychiatry. I read whatever books I could find…” — Charles Manson quoted in Manson: In His Own Words as told to Nuel Emmons ©1986 Grove Press
While serving time at McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington State, Charlie got a new roommate named Lanier Raimer (sometimes known as Lafayette Rainer). Raimer/Rainer was a disciple of the Church of Scientology who had been been given permission to conduct auditing of other inmates in the prison system.
This was part of a larger campaign in Scientology that eventually morphed into a program known as Criminon. According to Scientology’s official website, Criminon: “is a volunteer criminal rehabilitation program which utilizes technologies developed by L. Ron Hubbard to help convicts recover pride and self-esteem. Today Criminon operates in more than 2,000 prisons, assisting some 100,000 inmates, through correspondence courses or delivering on-site seminars, with remarkable results.
Criminon provides inmates with the knowledge and skills to change their lives and become productive members of society. Inmates who have completed the Criminon program show dramatic improvements in compliance with conditions of probation — including restitution, fine payment and community service. Criminon is further known to cut 80 percent recidivism rates to zero and entirely eradicate cellblock violence. The program is so successful, in many cases it is mandated nationally across entire prison systems.”
Criminon was started in 1990, but it’s roots go back to the 1950s (not long after the publication of L. Ron Hubbard’s book Dianetics). and is considered to be something of a ‘sister’ entity to Narconon, Scientology’s drug rehabilitation program.
L. Ron Hubbard
There have been many documentaries, books, newspaper articles and podcasts detailing the history of Scientology including allegations of misconduct and abuse. In short, founder L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer who created a spiritual organization founded on the idea that men and women were immortal beings whose ancestors were extraterrestials. Scientologists believe that their thoughts and impulses are split into two sectors: analytical, and reactive (recording of pain and emotional trauma, storing the most painful images and experiences deep down where the average person cannot access them). These were ideas that they further explored when Scientology began to work with criminals and inmates. Can a person who is supposed to be serving time and atoning for terrible crimes recall the hidden experiences that may have led them into crime?
One of the tools used by Scientology in what they refer to as ‘auditing’ (somewhat of a confessional experience, where the individual answers questions, delves into their memories and emotions, and admits to the ways they have failed themselves and others). Auditing is performed with an Electropsychometer or E-Meter which reads energy through two devices that resemble metal cans, which are held by the individual who is being audited. The E-meter is supposed to measure resistance within the body to certain questions. How a person reacts tells the auditor whether they’re being honest and complete with their answers.
The Church of Scientology’s E-Meter
But founder L. Ron Hubbard was heavily influenced by the magick community such as English ceremonial master Aleister Crowley. Allegedly, Hubbard lived during 1945 with John ‘Jack’ Whiteside Parsons, a noted occultist who was part of a magical order known as Ordo Templi Oreintis (OTO). Charles Manson is also alleged to have connections to this same organization. He was fascinated by a number of religious sects including ones that have ties to Satanism.
Charlie was audited by Lanier. In fact, according to Lanier, Manson underwent 150 hours worth of E-meter auditing. And we know that some of the ideas of Scientology were adopted by Manson.
From Hubbard’s teachings, Charlie began to understand that he was ‘an immortal spiritual being’ rather than just a half-assed criminal from a shitty background. This not only elevated his confidence; it validated his sociopathic belief that he was better than other people. Charlie sometimes claimed to be ‘Theta Clear’ which in Scientology means someone free from the reactive mind’s negative effects. Later, he would crib together the flotsam and jetsam of each of his found belief systems into his own weird philosophy. — The Manson Family: More to the Story by H. Allegra Lansing ©2019 Swann Publications
One of the most noted ways that Scientology influenced Manson was in the idea of NOW. Charlie preached a lot about NOW during 1968 and 1969. Now was his interpretation of oodles of spiritual studies, from Native American myths to Buddhist practices, New Age thinking and even Scientology. NOW was based on the idea that Time was immaterial. Get rid of your watches, your clocks, your calendars. Be present in the NOW — not mired in the past or dreaming of the future.
“The whole idea was to let time disappear. There was no time.” — Manson Family member and convicted murderer Patricia Krenwinkel from the program “Turning Point” © 1994 American Broadcast Company (ABC)
We also know that when Charlie got out of prison in 1967, he made at least two significant attempts to officially join the Church of Scientology.
During his first days of freedom, Charlie visited San Francisco’s Scientology Center and asked to join the organization. He told them he was ‘Clear’ but they declined his membership. But this was not the end of Manson’s Scientology connections or his attempts to be embraced by an elite spiritual organization.
In fact, in the autumn of ’67, Charlie met Bruce Davis, a young man who was traveling around and got picked up while hitchhiking by Manson and a few women. Davis was a member of the Church of Scientology, and later spent several months the following year at the Church’s center in London. Bruce Davis was later one of the killers, after he returned to the Family from London.
On July 31st, 1968, Charlie visited the Scientology Celebrity Center in Los Angeles along with Paul Watkins, another member of the Manson Family. During their visit, Scientology administrators conducted a brief interview with Manson and (revealed in documents found years later) designated him as Ethics Type III — a psychotic. It doesn’t appear there is any further formal connection between Charlie and the Scientology organization after this incident.
In the aftermath of the Tate/LaBianca murders more than a year later, the press got wind of Manson’s Scientology connections and questioned the Church about it. As you might imagine, Scientology did not want to admit to any association with the man who ordered the murder of Sharon Tate and several other innocent victims.
Counterculture writer Paul Krassner (who spent time with some of the Manson women post-trial) also explored Charlie’s Scientology roots. Someone told him that there was an E-meter at Spahn Ranch, the place where the Family lived during 1968–69. He published an article mentioning this fact, and the Church of Scientology sued him for $750,000, claiming libel. He fought them on 1st Amendment grounds, and the Church dropped the suit. Lanier Raymer (or whatever his name was) pretty much dropped off the planet, and then died at the age of 48. The Church was quick to sweep any association with the guy who ordered Helter Skelter and themselves, and one can hardly blame them.
So was Manson a Scientologist? Hardly. He wasn’t a Christian, a Buddhist, a Scientologist, a Satanist or a member of any organized religion or group. He was a user, a charlatan, who cobbled together whatever he could find to get what he wanted. Scientology offered him a particular language that he found useful, particularly when he had the lives of a group of young people in the clutch of his hands and could mold them however he saw fit.
It’s a rare instance where the Church of Scientology goes against someone and comes out looking like the good guy, but this is one of those occasions. Charlie’s affiliation with them was incidental, unorganized, unofficial and apparently, very very brief. He used them, just like he used everything and everyone he ever met.
Let’s hope Charles Manson actually was just a half-assed criminal from a shitty background because the idea that this psychopath might be immortal, is one that even Scientology hopes isn’t true.
To learn more about Charles Manson, the Manson Family and their crimes, please visit MansonFamily.net. | https://themansonfamily-mtts.medium.com/was-charles-manson-a-scientologist-4c39db298b0f | ['H. Allegra Lansing'] | 2020-10-31 22:16:31.378000+00:00 | ['Scientology', 'History', 'Religion', 'Charles Manson', 'True Crime'] |
Nobody Likes a Turkey | We’d been at the pre-Thanksgiving breakfast at my aunt’s, catching up and listening to my mother, always prim, and aunt, in her holiday-moo-moo, gossip about how my sister’s husband, Amy’s father, had only just told them he wasn’t coming to dinner when he pawned Amy off early that day. My own husband, Jared, sat next to me taking mental notes — realizing that my family would likely forgive him for anything he ever did so long as he did it with my family. Amy sat beside him, playing with the rings on his fingers. She was odd for a seven-year-old, looked a bit like Orphan Annie, though admittedly more orphan than Annie; she was shy and somehow always dirty. She liked to crawl into dark places and count things — small things, dirt mostly, and dust, sometimes things no one could see.
My aunt and mother tacked their conversation into where to get a turkey this late in the game — they were complaining about all the stores being sold out, when my father cut in, “I know where you can get a turkey.”
We all turned to my father. Amy had placed Jared’s hand over her whole face and was looking out over the webs between the fingers. Then my Grandfather made a noise and we turned toward him — Amy steering Jared’s hand with two of hers wrapped around his wrist. The sound my Grandfather made was: harrumph.
He’d started harrumphing at people a lot in recent years, particularly at my father since the divorce. It was such a silly old man sound that I couldn’t help wondering if he’d read it in some book, like when a child sees someone cool wink on TV and goes around winking at everyone for weeks after. Was there some cool harrumphing Grandpa on the local news infecting the minds of the nation’s elderly men?
Grandfather had floppy, enormous lips so when he did it, there was a noticeable amount of spittle. I wiped a fleck off my arm and turned to Jared’s ear, “If I ever make that sound, kill me, yeah?”
He smiled, “I’ll cut your lips off first.”
Amy peeled Jared’s hand off of her face and started poking the spittle marks. She counted under her breath as she went. I didn’t notice at first, but each place she poked, the spittle seemed to get sucked up into the air and a pinprick of a black spot was left behind instead.
“Where?” my mother asked.
“Six,” Amy muttered.
Mother always talks with her left hand and she lifted it gently as she asked.
“Seven,” Amy continued.
My father said, “At our — I mean my house -”
Harrumph.
“Eight.”
“And, well, there-”
“Nine.”
“-there has been this turkey coming up the driveway every morning-”
Harrumph.
“Ten.”
“Would you stop that!” my mother cried. She batted her hand toward the table as if we were all a swarm of flies; it made a whoosh-whoosh. Someone coughed — maybe it was me. Grandfather sat, tight-lipped. Amy slid her hand off the table and went back to counting Jared’s rings.
Other than that, we all let my father finish the story. He continued, “Right — so there’s this turkey, keeps coming up the driveway and pecking dents in my Mercedes. It circles it like it wants to fuck it, and BAM! it pecks dents BAM! like that! I can hear it from my office — ”
“BAM!” Amy mocked.
“Yes, like that,” my father said.
Harrumph. “Why don’t you just kill it,” Grandfather butted in.
My father said, “I’ve tried — no really I have. I have my shotgun and I go out there as it circles and dings my Mercedes and it just looks at me but doesn’t seem to care. And I shot it. I did! I shot it like three or four times and it just gets annoyed and trots off. Then, sure enough, the next morning it comes back and ding — it goes at my Mercedes and I go out and shoot it again — the shotgun, my pistol, the .22 even.”
My mother sighed from beside the counter and I remembered a conversation we’d had where she said, “The only thing that man will hit with all those guns is the side of his own head.” It was the moment I realized that adults, for the most part, are not so different from children after all.
“So,” my father went on, “if you can figure out how to kill it, cook that baby up!”
Har —
“Don’t!” my mother warned.
“Oh, hush woman! I’ll kill that turkey for you no problem. I’ll do it the way it used to be done. I’ll kill it and I’ll bring the kid to carry it back for dinner.” He waved at me. “And we’ll bring the little one! We’ll show her how it’s done.”
Amy gripped Jared’s other hand, rings and all. She looked up at Grandfather, then to me.
My father crossed his arms and said, “Well, best of luck.”
Grandfather smacked the table, stood, and his knees cracked. “What do you think, kid? Little one? Why don’t you come along and we’ll get this done properly?” He turned and lifted his jacket up off the back of the chair.
I wondered briefly if Grandfather would still call me a kid if I told him my cock didn’t work like it used to and that I ate granola in the morning to stay regular. Jared squeezed my hand. “What do you say, kid?” he nudged. I gave Grandfather one thumb up and said, “Sure.”
Amy crawled under the table and started counting the granules between the tiles.
We gathered our things. Amy held on to me as I dressed her and myself in jackets. Before leaving, I turned for one last look at Jared — he was ready, sitting tall, a captain going down with the ship of my family. I eyed them all; they reminded me of those farm animal children’s toys. The father goes BAM, the Mother goes whoosh-whoosh, the Grandfather goes HARRUMPH.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re coming.” I lifted Amy and started toward the door. | https://medium.com/the-moss/nobody-likes-a-turkey-7ee39633d406 | ['Benjamin Davis'] | 2020-08-11 15:25:46.458000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Relationships', 'Fiction', 'Humor', 'Family'] |
A Simple Thing Every Dog Owners Neglect | Photo by Egor Lyfar on Unsplash
Starting to assess a dog’s physical well-being
What the owner and what a groomer experience with a dog is different
I worked for several years as a dog groomer. Many dogs got on my table the first time afraid and uncertain of how they gonna be treated.
The way their owner interacts with them and how I would interact is different. I will have to cut their hair, protect them from the scissors or blade, check body parts that may be the owner never touch (dog's private parts also need to be taken care of and need to be clean).
My main focus was to get them to accustom to my touch. I know the most thorough inspection of their body is not a normal occurrence. Having every single part of their body being touch is weird, so for many, it was a bit intrusive.
Right away I could detect a scale of negatives or positives: which dogs had no contact with a person at all, and which had all positive experiences with people.
Patience and safe maneuvers are needed in both cases, 1) to give the service needed for an aggressive dog, and 2) on the other positive side, tell the dog that is not time to play.
Talking with the owners of the dogs could give a glimpse if they had already a healthy interaction or not. I would give small assignments to help their dog lower their anxiety around being handled or touched in certain areas. Some agreed and never returned, but the best experiences were when they came back and saw an improvement. | https://medium.com/@dynamicerika/dogs-didnt-like-me-but-loved-me-when-they-stop-having-pain-ef8af49491ed | ['Erika Becerra'] | 2021-02-18 04:07:21.185000+00:00 | ['Pets', 'Pet Care', 'Dog Love', 'Dog Grooming', 'Dogs'] |
The ultimate FIZZBUZZ Challenge | I don’t remember the company name but one among the hundreds out there whose technical test I attempted had this different kind of question
the FIZZ BUZZ challenge
the question only stated,
you have to print the following series in whichever programming language you like
this was during 2015 when I was in my degree 2nd year
knowing nothing about these things except music and dance
the series was like -
1
2
FIZZ
4
BUZZ
FIZZ
7
8
FIZZ
BUZZ
11
FIZZ
13
14
FIZZBUZZ
16
17
FIZZ
19
BUZZ
any newbie would just go blank with this series
the only thing I was good at was thinking logically
which gave me a path — there’s something wrong with numbers divisible with
3 and 5
such that numbers divisible with 3 are FIZZ
numbers divisible with 5 are BUZZ
but what about FIZZBUZZ
that must be both 3*5 or 5*3
that’s what was my answer
but the real challenge was to code
which language to choose?
let’s choose C
……………..
let’s choose JAVA
……………..
let’s not waste time for choosing the languages,
we’ll directly code in python
the code began with a for loop with a range and my hands wrote flawlessly
# A for loop to take a range of number and process them one by one
for i in range(1,21):
# the first condition to check if the number is divisible by 3*5 or 5*3 i.e. 15
if(i%15 == 0):
# if yes ? print FIZZBUZZ
print(“FIZZBUZZ”)
# the second condition was to check if the number is divisible by 3
elif(i%3 == 0):
# if yes? print FIZZ
print(“FIZZ”)
# the third condition was to check if the number is divisible by 5
elif(i%5 == 0):
# if yes? print BUZZ
print(“BUZZ”)
# if none of the above conditions are passing, print the number itself
else:
print(i)
so, that code worked for me and I was successful in generating the FIZZBUZZ series within the given time
if you like this article,
don’t forget to give a like
also, in case you want me to write about something,
please suggest it in the comment box
Thank You !!! | https://medium.com/@pratiklahudkar/the-ultimate-fizzbuzz-challenge-7d945d9fb24e | [] | 2020-12-08 17:40:38.015000+00:00 | ['Hackathons', 'Python', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Python3'] |
~@#The realization that Covid-19 is primarily an autoimmune disease that is triggered by a virus | Even among people who have mild Covid-19 or who are asymptomatic, experts have found evidence of heart inflammation
Throughout the pandemic, doctors have noticed a confounding phenomenon: A lot of people infected by the coronavirus develop myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that can cause lasting damage and death.
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streaminglive-memphis-vs-florida-atlantic-live-free-23-dec-20-157737397/
Even among people who have mild Covid-19 or who are asymptomatic, experts have found evidence of heart inflammation. A July study published in JAMA Cardiology found that 60% of coronavirus patients had active myocarditis two months after their initial infection. Remarkably, the study found that this inflammation was as common among people who recovered at home as it was among those who required hospitalization. (Myocarditis can often go undetected; its symptoms can be subtle and include shortness of breath, chest pain, and a fluttering heart.).
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streaminglive-memphis-vs-florida-atlantic-live-free-23-dec-20-157737397/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/watch-memphis-vs-florida-atlantic-live-stream-reddit-free2312-157737399/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/watch-memphis-vs-florida-atlantic-live-stream-free-game-today-157737403/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/montgomery-bowlstreams-florida-atlantic-vs-memphis-live-tv-157737480/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/redditstreams-memphis-vs-florida-atlantic-live-stream-reddit-157737481/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/florida-atlantic-vs-memphis-live-stream-montgomery-bowl-2020-fb-157737486/
“We’re still questioning why we see this inflammation in the heart,” says John Swartzberg, MD, an emeritus professor of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “One of the hypotheses is that there’s an autoimmune process at work.”
“It seems that Covid-19 shares a similar inflammatory immune response with autoinflammatory and autoimmune conditions.”
“Autoimmunity” describes immune system activity — primarily inflammation — that is directed at healthy cells, tissues, or other inappropriate targets in the body. Autoimmune diseases, such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, are defined by this inappropriate inflammation and its resulting damage. When it comes to Covid-19 and myocarditis, Swartzberg says the autoimmune hypothesis posits that SARS-CoV-2 causes the immune system to misidentify something in the heart’s cells as dangerous. This misidentification leads to inflammation.
He’s quick to add that this theory is just one of several possible explanations. The presence of inflammation, even if it lingers after the virus is wiped out, is not by itself an indicator of autoimmune disease, he says.
But other researchers have made the case that Covid-19 is often driven by autoimmune processes. “It seems that Covid-19 shares a similar inflammatory immune response with autoinflammatory and autoimmune conditions,” write the authors of a recent study in the Journal of Immunology. They lay out evidence that SARS-CoV-2 may cause the body’s immune system to mistakenly attack its own cells and tissues — in the heart, in the brain, and elsewhere.
Autoimmunity, they suggest, may explain how the virus inflicts such widespread and unpredictable damage. Understanding these autoimmune processes may be the key to preventing that damage and saving lives.
In October, a study in Nature Immunology examined the activity of immune cells and antibodies among people with severe Covid-19. It found some striking resemblances to autoimmune disease.
“We observed the same type of B-cell activity we see in lupus flares, and also similar antibody activity,” says Ignacio Sanz, MD, co-author of the study and director of the Lowance Center for Human Immunology at Emory University. Sanz has also examined the immune systems of people with mild or persistent (aka long-haul) Covid-19; there again, he sees overlap with autoimmune conditions.
Sanz says it’s possible that the phenomena he has documented are simply indicators of an aggressive immune response to an invading virus. But he says that in at least a subset of patients, elements of autoimmunity are strongly implicated in the development of severe Covid-19.
How could the coronavirus cause a person’s immune system to mistakenly attack its own cells and tissues? Part of it may have to do with what biologists call molecular mimicry.
“There are a number of similarities between the amino acid sequences of [coronavirus] proteins and those of human proteins,” says Timothy Icenogle, MD, a cardiothoracic surgeon and author of a recent paper on the autoimmunity elements of Covid-19, published in Frontiers in Immunology. These protein similarities may confuse the immune system and cause it to attack its own healthy cells; in some people, this attack may continue even after the true virus cells have been wiped out.
Autoimmunity could explain why a robust immune response to the virus — one that includes the production of coronavirus-neutralizing antibodies — does not always correlate with mild Covid-19. It may be that in some patients, an immune response intended to eliminate the virus ends up also attacking healthy cells. These autoimmune phenomena could also explain why myocarditis and other forms of inflammation or injury show up weeks or months after a person has ostensibly recovered from a coronavirus infection.
“We’re gradually coming to the realization that Covid-19 is primarily an autoimmune disease that is triggered by a virus.”
How old weapons could fight a new virus
Icenogle is a cardiac surgeon. “So I’m about the last doctor you’d expect to be writing a paper on Covid-19,” he says. But he spent 25 years as director of a heart transplant program, which provided him with a good understanding of immunology — something he says is uncommon for cardiologists.
During the years he was running the transplant program, Icenogle occasionally encountered cases of viral myocarditis, which before the pandemic was a rare and often deadly condition. This led him to some surprising insights. “When we looked at the postmortem heart specimens from these myocarditis patients, it looked like they’d died of cardiac rejection,” he says. “We thought, gee whiz, how could this be? How could a virus cause you to reject your own heart like it was a transplant?”
Icenogle combed the research and found evidence that autoimmune processes — ones triggered by a virus — could be to blame. He later had success treating myocarditis with powerful transplant drugs that essentially turned off the immune system and therefore blocked the autoimmune processes from doing more damage.
Now, in the context of the pandemic, Icenogle speculates that some of these same transplant drugs may prove helpful in treating Covid-19. He mentions one in particular, rabbit antithymocyte globulin (rATG), which he has used to save the lives of some people with viral myocarditis. Not only does rATG calm the immune system, Icenogle says, but it also helps limit blood coagulation, which is another feature of severe and deadly Covid-19.
So far, there is no published research on rATG or similar heavy-duty transplant drugs for the treatment of Covid-19. “These are very powerful drugs, and there’s a risk you might endanger someone,” Icenogle says. Some doctors have been willing to test out comparatively mild immunosuppressant drugs, and at least one of those — dexamethasone — has worked. But Icenogle says that many in medicine regard the notion of depleting the immune system of a virus-stricken patient as “at least paradoxical, if not crazy.”
He thinks that will change. “We’re gradually coming to the realization that Covid-19 is primarily an autoimmune disease that is triggered by a virus,” Icenogle says. “I submit that eventually we’re going to treat these autoimmune processes with some of our big guns.”
Emory University’s Sanz says he also believes that immune-suppressing drugs, including some that have not yet been tried in people with Covid-19, will prove helpful. “Without any doubt,” he says. “But I think that only some patients will benefit.”
He emphasizes, again and again, that Covid-19 is a heterogeneous disease. It affects different people in different ways. Outside of a vaccine, there is unlikely to be a panacea or a single category of treatment that works for everyone. Still, Sanz says that a better understanding of the disease’s autoimmune facets, coupled with a broader deployment of immune-moderating therapies, could help improve patient outcomes — both in the short and long term.
“I think autoimmunity is part of the story,” Sanz adds. “It’s not the whole story.” | https://medium.com/@mustafamahdi_16190/the-realization-that-covid-19-is-primarily-an-autoimmune-disease-that-is-triggered-by-a-virus-63adbea6267b | [] | 2020-12-24 02:46:44.768000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Body', 'Covid 19', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'News'] |
Tribit QuietPlus 50 headphone review: Active noise cancellation on the cheap | Tribit QuietPlus 50 headphone review: Active noise cancellation on the cheap Sara Feb 1·3 min read
Tribit’s $60 QuietPlus 50 headphones sound good in normal mode, and they do a good job of cancelling noise when active noise cancellation (ANC) is enabled. Unlike pricier ANC headphones, however, noise cancellation robs a bit of the top-end frequency response in the process. Given that those pricier products cost many times as much, some listeners might consider the small dropoff livable.
Design and featuresThe QuietPlus 50 come in a basic flat black on flat black. I personally find them attractive, but I’m unconcerned wth fashion. If that means something to you, study the image carefully.
The ear cups are comfortable, but as with other Tribit headsets I’ve tried, I find the default fit a bit snug. That does help with the passive noise reduction, but the cups don’t swivel, so the fit isn’t perfect when you extend them. That said, I’ve certainly run across less comfortable headsets.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best headphones, where you’ll find reviews of the competition’s offerings, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.The big feature of the QuietPlus 50 is, of course, the active noise cancellation, which is effective—with the aforementioned cost in treble reproduction. There’s a mic in each cup for the ANC. The left cup hosts a USB-C charging port; a 3.5mm audio jack; a rocker switch for volume control and next track/previous; a multi-function button for power on/off, answer/hang-up, and summoning Siri); and buttons for enabling and disabling ANC. Tribit includes both a 9-inch USB charging cable and a 3-foot 3.5mm stereo analog audio cable in the box.
[ Further reading: The best high-res digital audio players ] Sound and battery Mentioned in this article Sony WH-XB900N Extra Bass, wireless noise-canceling headphones Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $248.00See it The QuietPlus 50 sound good with ANC disabled. I had no problems listening for a couple hours straight during testing. But there’s that loss of high-end with the ANC engaged. It’s not enough to ruin the deal, and you might not even notice with all the white noise in a plane, but the change is noticeable.
If you want barely discernible fidelity loss, you need something more along the lines of Sony’s WH-XB900N or the Phiaton 900 Legacy that I just reviewed.
Tribit Tribit’s QuietPlus 50’s do a good job of noise reduction, albeit with a reduction in high frequncy reproduction. Without ANC enabled, they sound quite good for the price.
The QuietPlus 50’s 40mm drivers generate quite a bit of bass. Not Sony Extra-bass amounts, but more than enough for the average listener. The high-end is decent (sans ANC), though not quite sparkly as I like it. Mid-range is likewise adequately defined, but not quite as punchy as better cans. Then again, punchy is tiring. Tribit claims 30 hours of play time from the QuietPlus 50. I was still going at about 10 hours.
How I test headphonesI evaluate all wireless headsets via Bluetooth and with a cable if such a connection is available. Listening material includes AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck;” Jerry Goldsmith’s title theme from Star Trek First Contact; Toto’s “Africa;” Green Day’s “Minority;” Young Jeezy’s “Put On;” Vladamir Ashkenazy playing Chopin’s Etude No. 5 in G-flat; and Mars, from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, performed by Pierre Boult and the London Symphony Orchestra.
In additon to music, I play pink noise, white noise, brown noise, low/high frequency bursts, variuous pulses, and frequency-sweep files to check response and to back up opinions formed during music-listening sessions. I use Windows Media Player and iTunes as media players, and an Honor V smartphone.
To evaluate latency, I connect a Soundcast VGtx Bluetooth transmitter to a 43-inch TCL 5-series smart TV and watch instrumental performances, where finger movements will reveal any issues with soundtracks falling out sync.
A good deal for the priceGiven that the QuietPlus 50 are only $60—and were going for $10 less at the time of this review—I consider them a good deal. They’re not top-tier in sound or comfort, but for the occasional plane trip, you shouldn’t have any complaints. And as I said, I had no issues spending a couple hours with them sans ANC. That said, I think Wyze Labs’ Wyze Noise Cancelling Headphones are an even better deal.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@sara35501107/tribit-quietplus-50-headphone-review-active-noise-cancellation-on-the-cheap-395cc9cade92 | [] | 2021-02-01 09:35:14.116000+00:00 | ['Consumer', 'Home Theater', 'Mobile', 'Lighting'] |
Corsair HS60 Pro Review | Corsair HS60 Pro Review
Photo taken by Alex Rowe.
When I first saw the “Pro” update of Corsair’s HS headset lineup in the store…I thought it was just a new box design.
Upon closer inspection of this full refresh, Corsair improved the materials, tweaked the sound, and enhanced the microphone, all without raising the price.
These changes make a great headset a little bit better, with only one drawback that had me missing the old models.
OVERVIEW
The Corsair HS60 Pro is a closed-back, wired, surround sound gaming headset. It retails for $69 and frequently goes on sale. Surround sound is PC-only, using a USB dongle, and the headset is compatible with any device using a 3.5mm connection. Find its official product page right here.
If you don’t need a USB sound card, you could opt for the cheaper $49 HS50 Pro. If you’d like to go wireless, check out the $99 HS70 Pro. Just like the older versions, all three share the same performance and offer a few different colorways.
I bought my HS60 Pro at Best Buy. Here’s my review policy.
SOUND PERFORMANCE
The sound was one of the best things about the original HS series, and the Pro lineup improves it a little.
This is a gently v-shaped headset. It has tasteful boosts in the bass and treble regions. The bass is creamy and pleasant, with neither the punch nor precision audiophiles want. The boosted mid bass makes the low end the most obvious feature of the sound. I think this sort of bass is fun for single player gaming and movie-watching, and not as great for competitive gaming or critical listening. I still like it, in spite of its lack of raw accuracy.
The mid range and treble received additional tuning in this new version. Both are more controlled and accurate than on the original model. The mid range is warm, making female vocals sound pleasant instead of harsh. The treble isn’t fatiguing to my ears even at higher volumes, though certain sounds might sound a bit sibilant to you depending on the material and your personal treble sensitivity.
For the low price these sound great. The boosts in the bass and treble are fine for a gaming product and less wonderful for music listening…but many listeners will enjoy them. This is one of the better-sounding headsets you can get for this price, especially if you’re okay with some bass thickness.
Photo taken by Alex Rowe.
COMFORT
I could wear the older version of this headset with three clicks of adjustment headroom, a plus on my larger head. However, the ear padding and the headband padding were merely adequate, preventing the headset from “vanishing” over a long listening session.
Corsair made a go of fixing this problem with the Pro refresh, but took a step backwards as well.
The headband pad is, unfortunately, nigh identical to the original model. It might be the tiniest bit thicker, but that could also be down to production variances. The foam is thin and sits atop a hard, dense frame underneath. If you squeeze the top of a HyperX headset, you’ll feel nothing but nice memory foam. Here, you’ll just feel a thick bar.
The ear pads on the Pro are brand new. They’re much thicker, and the padding inside is of a higher quality, though it’s still a quickly-rebounding memory foam. The thicker pads have more room inside for your ears to sit, and the odds of your ears hitting the back wall of the cup are low. The drivers are angled, but at the same angle designed for the original pads. Even without the angling, I don’t think my ears would touch anything, such is the massive increase in pad thickness.
However, on my head, I now wear these with only one extra click of adjustment thanks to the thicker pads. That changes the weight balance of the headset and lowers the point of contact on my face, which I don’t like as much. The thick pads feel more obvious on the sides of my head than the originals, and when combined with the hard headband, this headset still doesn’t hit the magical comfort zone that other pairs aspire to. In fact, I start to develop a hot spot on top of my head after around an hour.
I’d have preferred it if the original slimmer profile was retained but with a higher-quality slower-rebounding memory foam inside the pads. The full pad redesign seems like overkill to me.
BUILD/DESIGN
Build quality takes an objective step up compared to the older model, which already had an exceptional build.
The pads are still glued on. But nearly everything else gets an upgrade. The plastic cup sides are now covered in a soft-touch material. The headband stitching is color-accented even on the Carbon/Black models for a more premium look. The rubber cable is gone, replaced with a flexible braided version. The mic capsule is a little larger, and now includes a removable pop filter.
This design still screams “iconic headphone,” with none of the angular gaming headset design flair that makes you look like a geeky lighthouse in your local coffee shop. It’s nice!
If the cable were removable, I’d have nothing to complain about. But sadly, it’s still permanently-attached. There’s no excuse for this at any price point in 2020, and retooling production to add the soft-touch components and the braided cable was Corsair’s perfect chance to also make the cable removable. Oh well.
MICROPHONE
Mic performance doesn’t seem that different from the original version, in spite of the larger capsule. It’s a little bit thin and a little bit nasally, though the included pop filter makes positioning the mic easier and it’s sensitive enough for PC or console use.
Here’s a quick test I recorded, plugged into the surround dongle.
SURROUND SOUND
Corsair’s proprietary surround sound is great, but plagued by some weird digital compression that no doubt exists to help with latency. It’s like listening to a reduced-quality MP3. You’ll hear some digital warbling and other artifacts with surround turned on. If you can live with that, it’s a convincing multi-channel effect that properly supports surround data from games.
Or, you could just turn on Windows Sonic or Dolby Atmos, both of which sound a little cleaner. As the spatial audio platform gains more support on both PC and Xbox, I think hardware dongles like this may slowly die out.
The new pads seem like they’d be great, but they also grip my head more prominently than the old ones did. Photo taken by Alex Rowe.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Corsair HS60 Pro is similar to its non-Pro predecessor, but with thicker pads and slightly better sound. It’s not worth upgrading if you already love your older pair, but if you’re in the market for a well-built headset under $99, these are a strong contender.
The Cloud Alpha offers more comfort and a detachable cable, but costs more. The Arctis lineup offers more comfort and a detachable cable, but isn’t as exciting for bass lovers. The Cloud II offers more comfort and comparable sound, but the surround sound dongle isn’t as good.
The high price/performance ratio is still this headset’s best selling point. It’s impressive that Corsair spent money to improve this solid design, rather than just keep it or replace it. I hope that in the future they’ll take it even further.
In addition to launching this refresh late last year, Corsair also updated the aging Void Pro and launched the new Virtuoso, so it seems like they’re in the gaming audio space for the long haul. They consistently get enough right that I look forward to their future ideas. | https://medium.com/@xander51/corsair-hs60-pro-review-ded67b43b815 | ['Alex Rowe'] | 2020-02-17 15:40:01.088000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Gadgets', 'Headphones', 'Technology', 'Audio'] |
Social In 5 Easy Steps | Social In 5 Easy Steps
“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow..”
1. Build a Solid Social Strategy
In a world of digital white noise, the only way to get to your finish line is to have a detailed roadmap that’s not only looking to plan for the future in increments small enough to allow full agility and flexibility, but also one that looks at what’s happening, and has happened.
A solid Social Strategy will allow you to; predefine your goals, identify your target audience, target the appropriate platforms at the appropriate times, chisel out your brand voice and identity, work on a post schedule and define your USPs before you crash around the social stratosphere like a rampant bull in Harrods.
2. Competitor Analysis
“Data is the new Oil” as an old friend used to say, and I can’t deny the truth in this statement, albeit slightly menacing post Cambridge Analytica.
One of the easiest ways to signpost your way to a successful Social Strategy, is to analyse the competition. This information will be key to locating new customer pools, observing strategies that already work and which ones don’t and most importantly, where there are gaps in strategy and engagement to be firmly plugged by your brand.
For your FREE social media audit and competitor insights go to www.socialstrategy.media/freeaudit.
3. Be Consistent
Consistency is the fuel to your flame in a world of 8 second attention spans and is a surefire way to digital dominance. You have to keep “a’ knockin’” to break through the door of digital delight available to your target audience in the age of handheld tech (The Huffington Post estimated the average web user sees around 11,150 ads per month).
We’ve found that the best way to boost our clients’ presence is to have 2, 3 or more posts per day across each of the platforms that suit your businesses need most, and to team this with data analysis, immediate response times and creativite content to not only attract huge rises in engagement (we get increases of between 480 & 6000% for our clients), but maintain it long term.
4. Unique Content Including Ads
Now, I don’t want to be preaching to the choir here, and as you’re on Linkedin, I imagine you’re all digital dynamite, but as Instagram has just reached 1 billion monthly users (Up from 800,000 since last September) I feel obliged to make this my number 4.
Consistent, unique, and engaging content is paramount to keeping your brand relevant in the “brand stew” that is modern day digital marketing, there’s a reason Coca-Cola still advertise and Iceland have witty and sometimes controversial Twitter responses.
Growing your cross-platform following through sponsored content, ads, videos, pictures, articles, white papers, GIFs, podcasts and any other available medium can be the difference between mediocrity and massively popular interaction online.
5. Know Your Customer & Their Buying Journey
One of the beauties of putting all of the above points into practice, is that the data allows you to track the customer buying journey, if you don’t already know it.
With this piece of informational treasure that traditional marketers could only have dreamed of having access to, you can optimise the customer experience, streamline the buying journey, refine your content for specific demographics with pinpoint accuracy and more easily than ever before put your brand in front of potential clients.
So… How Ready Are You?
In the last half a decade, the changes in the landscape of the digital world have been amazing to say the least, even ordering the trusty takeaway is no longer recognisable with UberEats, Just Eat, Deliveroo and Hungry House dominating the market.
Digital has changed, and as it continues to change every industry, Social Strategy want to help you know where your business stands. Click the link below to find out more for FREE.
www.socialstrategy.media/freeaudit | https://medium.com/@hello_71225/social-in-5-easy-steps-c036ca277fdd | ['Social Strategy'] | 2019-02-06 16:30:50.530000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Insights', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social'] |
Saying “Goodbye” to “The Good Place” | [Author’s Note: The following article is spoiler heavy. If you have not seen the finale — or the series — and intend to, I encourage you to bookmark the article and revisit to it after you have.]
So imagine you’re a television executive whose career depends on keeping advertisement-sustained broadcast networks profitable and relevant in the streaming era. A creator comes to you and says:
“Hear me out, I have this idea for a single camera sitcom about what happens to you when you die. It will follow four very unlikeable people — one is an amoral white trash boozer from Arizona, one is a dim-witted Filipino criminal from Florida, one is an aristocratic Brit of Indian descent who rubs elbows with the rich and famous, and the other is a profoundly uptight moral philosophy professor from Senegal. There’s also two other characters. One is a Hell-dwelling demon who assumes human form to torture people and the other is an otherworldly being/supercomputer who contains all the knowledge of the universe and gradually develops emotional capabilities after she is destroyed and rebooted countless times.
Are you still with me? OK, so the plot will radically shift every few episodes as new revelations occur, but a strong through-line of the series will be extensive discussions of moral philosophy coupled with wacky humor and elements of satire. I promise, it will be funny. Well the finale won’t be that funny. In the finale, the majority of the characters will leave each other as they voluntarily do a death walk into an unknown dimension.
What? Who will star in it? Hmmm I’m thinking that perky girl who did Anna’s voice from ‘Frozen’ and the charming bartender from ‘Cheers.’”
It’s hard to imagine the creator would not get laughed out of the room by the executive, right? Yet, somehow, The Good Place made it to air on NBC and stayed there for four glorious seasons. One week ago today, the show signed off after 53 episodes (or chapters as the show called them). It capped off with a double episode that was deeply moving and provided a fitting end by remaining as surprising and bizarre as any episode that came before it.
A Brief History of “The Good Place”
Copyright: NBC
After producing The Office and co-creating Parks and Recreation, both long-running hits and award winners for their parent network NBC, it seems as though Michael Schur was reportedly given carte blanche by the network brass to do whatever he wanted for his next series. The result is this delightfully weird sitcom that is one of the strangest things ever to make it to network television. It is remarkably high concept, as it crams debates about moral philosophy, rich character development, emotional heft, dazzling visual effects, colorful art direction, an onslaught of puns, and rich cultural satire into nearly episode.
The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell of Frozen and Veronica Mars), a morally bankrupt woman from Arizona who dies in a freak accident and awakens to find herself being greeted by a man named Michael (Ted Danson of Cheers, Fargo, CSI, Becker, and Three Men and a Baby) who assures her that “everything is fine.” She is dead but she has made it to “The Good Place” (presumably heaven). She quickly realizes she doesn’t belong, especially when she meets the other residents: her “soul mate” Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), a moral philosophy professor from Senegal who devotes his life to living ethically; her neighbor Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a British socialate who has raised mind-blowing amounts of money for deserving charities; and Tahani’s “soul mate” Jianyu Li (Manny Jacinto), a Buddhist monk who has taken a vow of silence. Their stay in “The Good Place” is aided by supercomputer/deity Janet (D’Arcy Carden) who can instantly answer any question they have or produce any material object they desire.
But it quickly becomes clear that something is amiss. What follows from the exceptional pilot is dozens of twist-filled episodes where we learn that they are actually in the “Bad Place” (an experimental version created by Michael), they strive to earn positions in the real “Good Place,” and then eventually end up overhauling the whole corrupt system. Throughout the journey they tackle complex philosophical questions regarding what it means to be a good person in an increasingly complex social world, whether people should be judged on how they act or their capacity to change if provided the opportunity, and what exactly it is that motivates people to change.
Despite the heavy themes of death and morality the show is never maudlin or pretentious. It is kept charming, relatable, and hilarious by a brilliant group of writers headed by Schur that is not afraid to follow their weirdest impulses or their most cutting observation. Something this ambitious and off-kilter obviously misses the mark at times, with jokes that don’t land, subplots that don’t engage, and episodes that strike an awkward balance between the juvenile and the cerebral. But it never strays too far or too long from excellence.
The cast deserves as much credit as the writers for keeping things grounded. Kristen Bell is note-perfect as wise-cracking cynic Eleanor who slowly comes to realize that she is capable — and worthy—of love. Nearly matching her is the absolutely marvelous Jameela Jamil, whose precise line readings, nonverbal expressions, and innate elegance make Tahani the most interesting and funniest character in many episodes. (Seriously, if she doesn’t become a big star after this, there is no justice.) William Jackson Harper nails the “academic constantly on the verge of a panic attack” comic persona required for Chidi but is even better when he is allowed to show heart and vulnerability. Manny Jacinto is given the show’s silliest and least substantive character, but he nails even the most absurd, crass, and eye-rolling material. Much of the critical praise has gone to Ted Danson, whose Michael starts out as an amusing but largely peripheral and uninteresting character but quickly becomes one of the show’s central figures as he integrates himself with the group and tries to realize his own destiny. (And there are few things funnier than his razor-sharp observations regarding the absurdity and mundaneness of human existence.) Similarly, Janet starts off as a one-note joke generator but as she starts to develop emotions, D’Arcy Carden does remarkably nuanced work. And the vast array of recurring characters is an utter delight, with Maribeth Monroe (“Medium Place” resident Mindy St. Claire), Maya Rudolph (the supreme judge), Adam Scott (smarmy demon Trevor), and Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Chidi’s temporary love interest Simone) being the most memorable.
The Good Place was never a particularly big hit, as it never finished a season higher than #77 in the ratings. It was also not an instant hit at the Emmys considering it that only in its third season did it score a nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series. (Ted Danson and Maya Rudolph were both nominated for the second and third seasons, though.) Nevertheless, each season received near unanimous critical praise and the show developed a huge cult following.
Review of the Series Finale
Copyright: NBC
After so many plot twists and turns, so many deep philosophical explorations, and such astonishing character development, how could The Good Place possibly have an ending that was both intellectually and emotionally satisfying? That was the thought on my skeptical mind as I sat down to watch the supersized 53-minute finale last Thursday. But the show defied my expectations in a delightful way, just it had consistently for the prior 51 chapters.
In the penultimate episode, the gang finally arrived at the real Good Place and discovered that its inhabitants had turned into “Happiness Zombies.” Apparently living in paradise for all eternity gets old after a while and eventually it loses its luster, causing people’s brains to go to mush. Suddenly, Eleanor is reminded of a prior philosophical discussion and reminds the group that life is only meaningful because you know it won’t last forever. Thus the Good Place is utopian not because it is eternal, but because it gives you a chance to get everything you ever wanted and to enjoy it … until you’re satiated.
What follows is a wrenching finale in which the gang one by one becomes satiated. The new afterlife system they have concocted resulted in all of their loved ones eventually making it to the Good Place after being given the necessary guidance and opportunities to become better people. They were thus able to get everything they ever wanted with the people they love. Jason is the first to go, prompting a tearful goodbye with Janet. Tahani then leaves, not to the afterlife but to join the otherworldly architects. Chidi is up next and his separation from Eleanor is truly wrenching. Eleanor wishes she was ready but she’s just not. At least she isn’t until she convinces the Judge to make Michael’s dream of becoming human come true and permanently disaffected “Medium Place” resident Mindy St. Claire to come to the Good Place. Finally ready to go, she enters into the unknown. As she does, pieces of her soul drift down to earth and manage to reach a knowing Michael who utters one of his favorite human expressions, “Take it sleazy!”
In the week that has passed since I watched the finale, my affection and respect for it has grown much deeper. At the time I was bowled over by its ambition and fully realized vision but had trouble taking it all in. In the days since, I have had trouble shaking it from my mind and have repeatedly revisited its profound themes and moments moments of piercing emotion.
Even in the era of “Peak TV,” when emerging streaming platforms provide outlets for bold and innovative program that would never have made it to air in previous decades, The Good Place is something very unique and special. The fact that it aired on a broadcast network and lasted as long as it did makes it something of a miracle. | https://medium.com/rants-and-raves/saying-goodbye-to-the-good-place-d04c793b3a81 | ['Richard Lebeau'] | 2020-02-06 23:17:21.387000+00:00 | ['Media', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Entertainment', 'Television'] |
3 Reasons You need a natural Baby Bodywash | A newborn babies skin is so fragile and delicate and nothing but natural should be used to cleanse your baby
But do you really pay attention to the ingredients that go into making your baby’s body wash?
You would be surprised to see the chemicals and synthetics that are used to cut corners on manufacturing these products
But there is hope, there are also companies that are baby-centric and use all the best natural ingredients
3 Reasons to have a natural baby body wash:
To avoid chemicals
Sodium Lauryl Sulphate, Parabens, Sodium Laureth Sulphate, are some of the chemicals that produce lather, but these do more harm than good to your baby skin on the bright side organic body washes are just good in every way for your baby as they do not sweep away the natural oils for your skin. Natural body washes are rich in Antioxidants
Organic and natural ingredients such as avocado oil, organic chamomile oil, aloe vera gel etc present in baby body wash provide sufficient antioxidants to your baby’s skin and ensure the baby’s skin is well capable of protecting their body in the best possible way. Natural skin treatment properties
Skin conditions such as eczema and acne can be treated naturally if you pick natural body washes for your baby, hence organic body washes do more than just clean the skin.
Conclusion:
Natural body washes have been in use for ages their use diminished recently due to the introduction of cheap chemical alternatives,
Start using them today and you’ll definitely notice the change on your baby’s skin. | https://medium.com/@babyamore2021/3-reasons-you-need-a-natural-baby-bodywash-e6af509e88b6 | [] | 2021-06-22 09:22:45.378000+00:00 | ['Baby'] |
Building A Live Streaming Movie App & Live TV Website Part 2 — Live Video | Building A Live Streaming Movie App & Live TV Website Part 2 — Live Video Devin Dixon Follow Jul 22 · 7 min read
Welcome to the 2nd part of Building a Live Movie App & Live TV Website. In this part of the tutorial, we will implement the actual live streaming of films so that you, your friends, and attendees can all watch a movie simultaneously. Please see Part 1 here if you need to go back for steps that you might have missed.
Technical Overview
Required Developer Skills
We recommend that the developers ready this tutorial have the following skills:
HTML/CSS
Basic Javascript
Basic React
Topics Covered:
Uploading Video Content
Uploading Images
RTMP & HLS Streaming
Code Repository: Download and run the completed code at https://github.com/BingeWave/Build-A-Livestreaming-App-For-Virtual-Movie-Premieres
Estimated Timed To Complete: 30 Minutes
Difficulty Level: Easy to Intermediate
The Tutorial
Step 1: Creating Video Content
Continuing from part 1, we have the basics for our React Application setup; we can now tackle the first part of uploading videos. Let us start by making an upload page:
touch src/pages/UploadVideoPage.jsx
And inside that file , setup your basic react component:
import React from 'react'; import API from '../util/Api'; import Errors from '../components/errors'; class UploadVideoPage extends React.Component { render() { return (<h1>Upload Page</h1>); } } export default UploadVideoPage;
Import the component inside our App.js. In the top of the page include:
import UploadVideoPage from ‘./pages/UploadVideoPage’;
Copy and paste the code inside your <Switch> statement:
<Route path=”/upload” exact={true}> <UploadVideoPage /> </Route>
Let’s test it out. If your application is not running, use npm start to start it.
npm start
In your web browser, go to http://localhost:3400/upload, and your upload page will now display! Let’s start building out the upload page with the constructor inside src/pages/UploadVideoPage.jsx:
To review the setup, the super will pass any props to the parent, we are going to bind the submitForm action we will implement later, and we are setting the default values of the state. Next, we are going to add a function for submitting the form.
In this function, we will take the state that contains the form values and pass it to our API function createVideo we defined in the previous tutorial. If successful, our success callback, which the first function passed as a parameter into createVideo function, which will return a video object and attempt to call the uploadVideo function.
The failure callback function takes and errors and assigns them to the state. Now let’s get into the final part of our upload page, the render function.
Quite a lot to break apart here. Let’s start from the top and work our way down:
ErrorTag: The error tag changes depending on the state. If the state.errors is not empty, it populates using the <ErrorTag />, which we defined in the previous tutorial. Otherwise, it’s just an empty string. setState: Each form element uses the this.setState() in the form to assign the value to the state. submitForm: And the final function in the form is called when the submitForm button is clicked. And according to the previous code, this will submit set the state with all of its updated values to the API.
Step 2: Implement Videos Page And Test Uploading Files
We need a page to view all of the content that is created. Start by creating a ListVideoPage.jsx page:
touch src/pages/ListVideosPage.jsx
Setup the basics inside the component:
In the state, we are setting the videos to an empty array. Now let’s implement a life cycle function componentDidMount, which executes when the React Component has finished loading:
componentDidMount() { let that = this; API.listVideos(function (data) { that.setState({ videos: data }); }, function (errors) { }); }
When the component mounts, we are going to call our API and get the videos that have been created. Then we assign with the success callback’s data object to the videos in the state. According to the videos list documentation, this will be an array.
https://developers.bingewave.com/docs/videos#list
And finally, we can add our render function:
We are iterating through the videos array via a map function and using the <VideoListing> tag we defined in the previous tutorial.
Head back over to the App.js file and import the page:
import ListVideosPage from './pages/ListVideosPage';
Again, inside the <Switch> component add the above page to the /upload route.
<Route path="/upload" exact={true}> <UploadVideoPage /> </Route>
And the fun part begins; let’s test it out! We’ve provided some small publicly available sample videos you can download:
Download the files, make sure your React application is started, and head to the upload page. Try to upload a few files and notice the processing state of each video and how it changes (if you successfully uploaded a video file). Remember, the processing state is in our types definitions:
https://developers.bingewave.com/types#video_processing_states
Time to complete the rest of the application.
Step 3: Build Out The Other Pages Challenge(Wash, Rinse, Repeat)
From here on, there is nothing new but washing, rinsing, and repeating. Meaning we are going to take the same concepts and apply them to the others page. We ARE NOT going to cover how to build each page, but you can implement the following pages on your own; the associated code is in each link below:
Copy those pages directly into your app. Study the code, how they utilize the API, compare it the documentation, and test it in the query builder.
Some key take way when implementing the other pages:
Adding Pages to App.js: Each page must be imported and added to <Switch> statement in the App.js file. Refer To The Docs: Compare the data being returned to the code in the documentation and query builder. Does everything match up? EventsCreatePage: In the EventsCreatePage, the type is either a FEATURE or MULTIPLE. This matches our event types at https://developers.bingewave.com/types#event_types . Test both when you run your app.
Step 4 : View Events Page
The page that has to be reviewed is the ViewEventPage.js because it has the most unique with essential elements to make your application work. The full code of the page is below, and we will break it apart.
In the constructor, we are going to bind the handleStartStream and handleStopStream method.
this.handleStartStream = this.handleStartStream.bind(this); this.handleStopStream = this.handleStopStream.bind(this);
Below we’ve completed those two functions as such:
The functions are calling the API functions we defined in part 1, which will call the start and stop stream API routes shown in the docs:
https://developers.bingewave.com/docs/eventcommands#startstream
https://developers.bingewave.com/docs/eventcommands#stopstream
This will cause the video(s) associated with the live event to start and stop. If the event has multiple videos, you can specify the video_id of which one you want to start.
Moving on, let’s look at the componentDidMount function.
To succinctly review some of these elements:
The appendScript and removeScript will add and remove BingeWave’s connect script. We do not need the connect script on every page, and this will ensure it is only loaded when needed. We have the set script checked and called for inside a timeout. Javascript may take a few seconds to load, and the timeout gives a few seconds if the script hasn’t completely downloaded. When the init() function is called, is will parse all the embed tags on the page and display relevant content.
We will skip over the rest of the code and head to around line 131, with the usage embed_livestream .
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: this.state.event.embed_livestream }} />
What is the embed_livestream? If you head over to the documents of when a response is returned for a live event:
https://developers.bingewave.com/docs/events#view
This tag implements a fully functional player onto the website in which the content will play through. Remember to check for embed in the Response tab in the query builder:
https://developers.bingewave.com/queries/events#create
The difference between the Livestream embed and other embeds like the Video Chat Embed used in other tutorials is that the Video Chat creates a room where multiple people can join using the computers or phone camera. The Live Stream embed only shows pre-recorded content.
With the remainder of the pages implemented, a version of your application is complete! You still have to do the following:
Make sure the video files finish processing, which is viewable in ListVideosPage Create an event using the CreateEventPage Use the Play buttons at the top of the ViewEventPage
Try playing some of your videos with you a few friends who will all watch the same video simultaneously.
Bonus Challenge
Here are two challenge assignments for you to accomplish on this tutorial:
Chat & Online Users Widget: Can you implement the chat and online users widget for each screen?
Scheduled TV App Challenge: According to our documentation, we are creating two kinds of events:
Scheduled Event At A Set Date/Time A Scheduled Event With Plays Multiple Pieces Of Content
Can these be used to create a Scheduled TV Application that continuously plays content?
Part 3 — Live TV
For Part 3 of this tutorial, we are going to delve into how to add a Live TV section to your site.
If you want to review our other tutorials, please checkout our tutorials here! | https://medium.com/bingewave/building-a-live-streaming-movie-app-live-tv-website-part-2-fb4932721472 | ['Devin Dixon'] | 2021-08-03 14:56:38.109000+00:00 | ['React', 'Live Streaming', 'JavaScript', 'Development', 'Film'] |
How does AI enhance the power of IoT? | Technology around us is advancing faster every day, with machines and gadgets gaining human-like decision-making abilities, smart technology taking over every aspect of our lifestyle, and the gap between us and the entire world being bridged by a single click.
But what has made this progress possible? The two keywords that experts would give you are IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Understanding IoT in brief
The term Internet of things or IoT collectively refers to all the things and devices which have access to the internet and can make smart, human-like decisions by gathering and analyzing relevant data from the internet. IoT can be something as simple and familiar as the smart refrigerators at our homes or something more complicated yet familiar like fitness bands and intelligent home assistants.
IoT collects data in real-time and allows organizations or individuals to utilize that data for better, smarter, and more informed decision making. The popularity of IoT speaks for its potential, as according to Business Insider’s survey, by 2027, there are expected to be 41 billion IoT devices, more than five times the number in 2019.
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence is a broad spectrum of computer science that works to simulate intelligence into smart devices so that they can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence to be done. AI works in three phases, which are learning, reasoning and perception. In these phases, different algorithms help the machine learn and make decisions based on real-time data.
So, where do the two meet?
IoT services work in five primary phases: create, communicate, aggregate, analyze, and act. An IoT service’s ultimate efficiency depends on how well it can execute the “act” part. The general essence of the Internet of Things lies with the sensors built inside the devices that allow it to access a wide range of data from the internet.
To “act” precisely how a “smart device” is expected; it needs to analyze this data accurately. And this is where AI comes in. While IoT works as the provider of the necessary information, AI brings the analytical potentials to the table. It enables the devices to respond in ways that are both creative and relevant. In this regard, AI-enabled IoT testing also plays a major role in ensuring the proper and desired performance of the IoT device.
The use of AI in IoT enables:
Data management and analysis, leading to important insights
Quick but accurate execution of analysis
Finding the right mixture of localized and centralized intelligence
Customization of user experience without compromising confidentiality and security of data
Safeguarding the data from cyber attacks
How does AI empower IoT devices?
1. Better consumer experience: AI helps IoT devices learn consumer preferences and act according to those, thus creating a unique user experience for every individual.
2. Boosted efficiency: AI helps in decluttering IoT’s constant data stream and find definite patterns to help upgrade decision-making abilities. Machine learning fused with AI can also go as far as to foresee the conditions of operation and alter the parameters to the right levels to achieve ideal results every time.
3. Reduced unplanned downtime: Machine breakdowns and operational failures often cause organizations to lose out on a considerable amount of money and interrupt the user experience. But for IoT devices integrated with AI, this problem can be avoided as the device’s functionality is continuously being monitored, which AI can analyze and predict failures well in advance.
4. Risk management: Integrating AI into IoT helps organizations understand and test IoT along with the risks involved with it and design automated responses, which in the long run helps with handling financial loss, employee security, and threats of cyber-attack.
Even though these technologies sound futuristic, the truth is AI integrated IoT is already present in abundance in our daily lives. The most familiar examples could be self-driving cars and smart homes. All the devices here are connected and can be commanded through a digital assistant like Alexa or Siri or the Google Assistant, the face detection features in mobile phones, fitness bands with body sensors, and so on. Therefore, a quality assurance service provider plays a significant role here as it ensures proper integration and validation of the devices to enable the desired performance.
AI integrated IoT works to make life more convenient for human beings, whether at a personal or enterprise level. | https://medium.com/qualitest/the-role-of-ai-in-the-internet-of-things-iot-296ac2ce27b9 | ['Debjani Goswami'] | 2020-10-28 06:19:13.994000+00:00 | ['Iot Testing', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Smart Devices', 'IoT', 'AI'] |
Focus on Having a Good Time to Beat Your Procrastination | Focus on Having a Good Time to Beat Your Procrastination
Focusing on micro-managing our time, just creates more boring chores to procrastinate over!
Photo by Marcin Dampc from Pexels
Procrastination has been my archenemy for at least 2 decades, and it has led to problems in work, in my relationships, and in life in general. It took me years of research and trying different approaches to eventually solve my procrastination problem.
Most people find focusing on micro-managing their time is an important element in beating their procrastination. However, it does present two additional problems to the serial procrastinator. First, you have to beat your procrastination long enough to put the methods into action. Second, these methods are extra chores that your brain will procrastinate over.
After spending years trying to manage my procrastination, I looked at the root causes of my procrastination and the reasoning behind them. By addressing what I found and managing my periods of procrastination, I could master my procrastination.
Why Do We Procrastinate?
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
Most of us procrastinate because our subconscious brain is rebelling in some form or another. Your brain could be rebelling against;
Deadlines, including ones you have set yourself. (Your brain doesn’t like anything that holds authority over it or limits its choices).
Things it doesn’t enjoy doing.
Things it does not find stimulating enough.
Not doing something it enjoys, or it thinks is more important.
Other people will have other reasons for their brain rebelling and procrastinating but rarely is procrastination just laziness.
The one common thing that runs through all the reasons is that your brain craves a better quality of life for itself. So, it simply rebels against anything that gets in its way of a better quality of life. It rebels against meeting that deadline. It rebels against doing things it doesn’t like. It rebels against anything that stops it from getting an instant hit of fun.
Your brain is sulking like a naughty toddler who doesn’t get its way. For a more in-depth look at this phenomenon, I recommend reading the Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters.
In short, your brain is simply seeking a better quality of life and wants to ignore anything that gets in its way.
The Endless Procrastination Cycle
Procrastination can become an endless cycle that gets harder to break the longer it goes on.
Now a lot of us are working from home, we find procrastination is an easy trap to fall into. After all, no one can see if you are working or not. So, to make up for our procrastination, we work a bit longer than normal. Then we spend our evenings stressing about what we didn’t achieve during the day and how we will catch up in the morning. Eventually, the worry will start keeping you up at night.
Before you know it, all of your quality time has been eaten up by work and stress.
The tasks you procrastinated over now occupy your mind when you should be spending quality time with your friends and family. It keeps you awake at night and your brain’s quality of life declines further and further.
The more your brain’s quality of life declines, the more it will find things to procrastinate over while it seeks a better quality of life. And so, the cycle continues downwards.
Play Hard, Then Work Hard
Photo by Vincent Gerbouin from Pexels
So, I looked for ways of improving my brain’s quality of life and immediately ran into a problem.
My brain is conditioned to believe that rewards come after hard work, and not before. So, my first plan was to promise myself treats if I completed a task. For the brains of non-procrastinators, this works really well. Unfortunately, the brains of procrastinators don’t normally work that way. They want the rewards now.
My mind instantly rebelled against working for treats and started procrastinating again. It didn’t care what the size of my promised reward was, my brain kept on procrastinating because it wanted a better quality of life now, not later.
So, I flipped things on their head and just took all the rewards I promised myself, regardless of any tasks I had completed or not.
I made a conscious effort to fill my spare time with quality activities including;
Spending quality time with my family and grandchildren
Playing video games (something I have loved since the 80s)
Country walks
DIY / Gardening projects
Learning to cook
Blasting out my favorite tunes
Binge-watching TV shows and films
I also made other quality of life adjustments, such as removing my works email and messaging software off my phone. And I banned my phone from the bedroom and replaced it with a traditional alarm clock. This greatly limited how much my work life invaded my spare time and my quality of life.
By filling my spare time with these quality activities, I achieved two things. First, I improved my brain’s quality of life by giving it what it craved. Second, I starved my brain of time to stress over my procrastination stopping the endless procrastination cycle.
The first two weeks were hard, as I had to overcome decades of unhealthy habits. The biggest of which was a tendency to think work always came above and before everything else in life.
The results were amazing. After the initial two weeks of setting up better habits, it only took a week or two for my procrastination at work to drop. Then my ability to study improved, and finally my relationships improved.
6 months later my procrastination is all but gone. Like most people, I still have tasks I hate doing and I drag my feet over them, but now they are manageable with simple time management techniques.
With my brain experiencing a better quality of life, my time micro-management techniques stop being an extra chore to procrastinate over. Instead, they became more powerful and easier to implement and maintain.
The Takeaways
Photo by Blu Byrd from Pexels
For most people, there is a lot to be said for the phrase “Work hard, play hard”, however, for procrastinators it is backward. We need to play hard and then work hard.
If you use techniques to micro-manage your procrastination periods, hold on to them — they will play an even bigger role in the future. Improving your brain’s quality of life will make them as powerful as you initially hoped they would be.
By improving your brain’s quality of life, you remove the primary reason for your brain to procrastinate over chores. Time micro-management techniques will still help make more effective use of your time and get through those times when your brain sulks for no apparent reason. | https://medium.com/swlh/focus-on-having-a-good-time-to-beat-your-procrastination-8660c0bb34c4 | ['Sammy Jones'] | 2020-12-19 22:20:25.567000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Life Lessons', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business'] |
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If You Give A Mom A Minute | If you give a mom a minute, she’ll have a glass of wine and read that magazine from three months ago with Jennifer Aniston on the cover.
Ha ha! No!
Because if you give your mom a minute she’s going to grab the vacuum. When she does, she’ll go down to the basement. She’ll make a series of repeating lines in the carpet at a jaunty angle. When she’s done, she’ll admire her work and then walk slowly backward up the stairs so she can vacuum each one.
When she sees you coming down the stairs, she’ll say, “No, sweetie. Back it up. Not till everyone gets here. Go outside or play in your room.”
As she gets to the landing she’ll notice a smudge on the wall. This will make her sad. So she’ll stop vacuuming and get the Magic Erase sponge. The sponge will be all scrunched up and look like it should have been thrown away months ago. But she knows she’ll be able to make it work. She starts to go over the smudge with tiny dabs and then in tiny circles until she can make larger circles and create a blend effect.
But it only takes a second to remember that the paint on this wall is matte. The smudge is getting worse with each go round.
Your dad will casually pass her on the stairs and say, “Maybe use some soap and water,” which makes your mom counter with, “JUST GO!”
Your dad will hustle up the steps and hide, which makes your mom think of the contractor who really should have known better about the paint because who uses matte paint if you have kids?
Eggshell, she’ll think. Everyone knows it’s eggshell.
Of course, this makes her think of making cookies. Cookies make her think of the way they smell when they’re baking, which reminds her of how realtors will often set out a plate of fresh baked cookies to give the house a ‘warm and loving home’ vibe...
But honestly, can’t they get that smell in a candle? Or do people really want the cookie? Do people actually eat realtor cookies? Are realtors good bakers? Is that a thing? But how can anyone have a ‘warm and loving home’ vibe with that goddamn smudge?
She tries dabbing it as gently as she can with the cleanest part of what’s left of the sponge. It’s kinda helping. Maybe.
Once she convinces herself that it’s not any worse than when she first saw it, she finishes vacuuming the stairs. She brings the vacuum to the laundry room so she can charge it. In the laundry room she sees your dirty clothes on the floor. This makes her think of you. She calls out your name.
“Yes,” you say standing in the doorway.
“How many times have I asked you to inside-out your clothes? And to separate your underwear from your pants? Mommy can’t do it all, sweetie. You need to help, ok?”
“Ok,” you say. “Sorry.”
She pulls you in and kisses your head. Your hair smells like strawberries. It makes her think of your dad.
She yells up at the ceiling, “DID YOU MAKE THE FRUIT SALAD!?”
“NO,” shouts your dad. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DOING IT!”
“WHAT?! ARE YOU SERIOUS?! YOU ALWAYS MAKE THE FRUIT SALAD!”
“I’M KIDDING! IT’S DONE!”
Your mom shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Then she mumbles something under her breath.
“WHERE ARE YOU?!” she screams at the ceiling. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
“UNCLOGGING THE TOILET!”
“WHY? WHAT HAPPENED?!”
“OUR 6-YEAR OLD SON POOPS LIKE A LINEBACKER!”
Your mom smiles and laughs.
“Let’s go downstairs,” she says shutting the door to the laundry room. “Can you help me set the table? It will go faster.”
You nod and follow your mom downstairs. She gets out different stacks of plates and sets them on the counter. She watches as you take the last ones into the dining room.
“I can get the napkins,” you say. “You can take a minute to rest.”
“Thank you, sweetie,” she says sitting on the sofa. “I think Mommy will… take… a…”
But if you give a mom a minute, and the right angle, she will notice the rug under the dining table. It’s a nice rug and it helps define the space. But if she notices the rug then she’s most likely noticed all the crumbs. And if she’s noticed all the crumbs she will NOT take a minute. She will fly upstairs in a fast second and grab the vacuum even though it’s only barely had time to charge because “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO VACUUM UNDER THE TABLE! THEY’RE GOING TO BE HERE ANY SECOND!”
If the charge holds — which it will — and she feverishly vacuums under the table and gets all the crumbs, chances are she’ll have a minute to just chill. And have a Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which she prefers over wine. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll flip through that magazine from three months ago with Jennifer Aniston on the cover before anyone actually arrives… if she actually has a minute. | https://medium.com/@stephenhstein/if-you-give-a-mom-a-minute-9c0f0c414dbc | ['Stephen H Stein'] | 2020-05-10 12:05:58.068000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Mothers', 'Humor', 'Satire', 'Parenting'] |
Why a VPN is the First Thing You Need When Dealing With Crypto | Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin promote a free internet. An internet where people can interact without borders and value is generated on a global scale.
Does this sound similar to the motto of the Web? Maybe because this has always been the original intent of the internet. Before the rules got overwritten by governments and tech giants, the internet used to be border-less.
After all, the internet we are used to is limited to a handful of websites, which is actually more than enough for our needs. Things would be different if we’ve lost access to news outlets or services like Google.
The deep web is estimated to be 400 to 500 times larger than the surface internet.
However, the story is different when it comes to 96% of the remaining World Wide Web content. The bigger part of the internet is associated with censorship and cryptocurrencies make no exception.
No one can deny the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of cyber crime cases, and that is why installing a VPN on electronic devices has become imperative.
As with other forms of internet censorship, geo-blocking can be circumvented. When IP address-based geo-blocking is employed, Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and anonymizing services can be used to evade and escape geo-blocks.
How Geo-blocking works
Every device with access to the Internet has a unique IP address (short for Internet Protocol address). Based on the IP address, the Internet service provider knows the real identity, the websites visited (meaning literally every site), as well as your geographical location.
For example:
Say, you are traveling in Europe with a laptop in your backpack. If you are in Germany, you will be blocked out of U.S.-only region-restricted sites because your hotel has a German IP address. Travel across Spain, and you will likewise only be able to access Internet content available locally.
While the intent behind geo-blocking is to trim relevant content based on the country, geo-restrictions seem to be at odds with blockchain services and their philosophy. This was the case with Binance limiting access to Binance.org, or BitMEX banning traders from the United States.
Binance DEX claims to be decentralized. However, country restrictions reflect a different reality.
In spite of the so-called “ban advertisement,” in reality, many of the users can still unlock geo-restricted content by using a VPN. The key that makes VPN indispensable when dealing with crypto is privacy. Imagine that you can browse under a different IP each time, effectively concealing your identity and traffic.
How a VPN bypasses Geo-blocking
Redirecting your Internet connection through a secure remote server using a VPN tunnel hides your IP address. You can also appear to be browsing from a completely different location of your choice, with the added benefits of secure and encrypted communications.
Moreover, your Internet traffic can appear to be originating from a location of your choosing. You can instantly unblock any site from that location. The Virtual Private Network spoofs your IP, and your Internet service provider cannot detect the final destination of your traffic, nor interfere with it in any way, effectively resulting in an un-interrupted and private browsing experience.
How to choose the best VPN?
If you don’t have prior experience of choosing a VPN before, you should consult a friend or a professional who can help you in this regard, or at least has some experience to further guide you. A google search will reveal many options and opinions — some providers being good enough, others not satisfactory vetted, while others boasting breached servers.
We have decided to implement a Virtual Private Network in our browser extension in the future, further enhancing the protection of our users, so stay tuned for that! | https://medium.com/online-io-blockchain-technologies/why-a-vpn-is-the-first-thing-you-need-when-dealing-with-crypto-d18c457aa02 | ['Tyler B.'] | 2020-02-28 17:37:17.517000+00:00 | ['VPN', 'Online', 'Privacy', 'Internet'] |
Amazon finally reacts to the climate emergency: too little, too late? | IMAGE: Amazon
In a bid to improve a reputation tarnished by criticism of its environmental footprint, Amazon has announced The Climate Pledge, a commitment to help tackle the climate emergency as stated in the objectives of the Paris Accords but ten years early, and saying it will be using 100% renewable energy by 2030 and that it will be carbon neutral by 2040.
In February, the Company announced a $700 million investment in Rivian, an electric vehicle maker that has been has attracted relatively little attention since it began operations in 2009 and that has yet to rack up any major sales. As a result of the investment, Rivian will supposedly produce an electric delivery truck, and Amazon says it will buy 100,000 units, which it will deploy between 2021 and 2024 as part of its commitment toward zero emissions logistics.
For a Company the size of Amazon, committing to fight the climate emergency is a major event and the company has been preparing its plans over the last three years, during which time it has carried out analysis and research that has included creating models to evaluate the contribution to its carbon footprint of all its products and services, hoping to show leadership, albeit on its own terms, rather than responding to mounting media pressure. The company has avoided making any announcement until it had carried out extensive analytics and quantitative analysis and having put in motion its monitorization systems of all its objectives, as it has seen fit.
The problem with having set its own timetable in this way is evident: the company has kept silent over recent months, giving the impression that it was not concerned about the climate emergency and publicly ignoring demands from more than 8,000 employees at its annual general shareholders meeting earlier this year. If the company has been working for almost three years on this response, one can only wonder at the wisdom of keeping silent in this way and the damage it has done to its image. Jeff Bezos was clear on the matter:
“We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue — we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference. If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items a year — can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can”
The comment makes clear what the company has been doing in recent years: nothing more visible than greenwashing. This approach obliges it to take decisive and realistic measures going forward, while at the same time, taking initiatives that show leadership, that make other companies follow. This is positive, but something that the company so far has largely failed to capitalize on and that has impacted negatively on its image.
Now, commitments such as buying 100,000 vehicles or investing $100 million in reforestation, which are ambitious and are the result of three years’ work, now seem little more than cosmetic, given the company’s size and influence, and more like a public relations exercise than generating real change.
At the same time, the problem with setting objectives in relation to the Paris Accords is that it makes the announcement seem very conservative: we all know that the Paris Accords are too little and way below what we need to do if we’re to avoid reaching a point of no return. Amazon employees taking part in yesterday’s strikes and demonstrations are continuing to call for more radical measures, and have gone ahead with their demonstrations rather than celebrating the announcement. Now, after such a long period of doing nothing and not seeming to care, Amazon’s announcement has not been greeted with much enthusiasm, and instead by calls for it to do more.
That said, Amazon’s decision to take the lead in this regard and to make the announcement in Washington is good news, and if it pressures other companies to follow its lead, so much the better. But at this moment, with the Paris Accords consigned to the past thanks to the efforts of people like Donald Trump, what we need now are not commitments, but activism at the highest level and more decisive action. The climate emergency has changed everything, and things are now moving much more quickly, including communication. The next time Amazon or any other company decides to do something, it would be better if they were to forget about following their own agenda and instead adjust to society’s timetable. | https://medium.com/enrique-dans/amazon-finally-reacts-to-the-climate-emergency-too-little-too-late-f3010b217c4e | ['Enrique Dans'] | 2019-09-28 15:49:04.906000+00:00 | ['Renewable Energy', 'Csr', 'Climate Emergency', 'Climate Change', 'Amazon'] |
Girls who build: With user empathy, problem-solving skills, and a sense of ownership, the women of Meesho’s product team are making our entrepreneurs successful | Girls who build: With user empathy, problem-solving skills, and a sense of ownership, the women of Meesho’s product team are making our entrepreneurs successful Mangala Dilip Follow Sep 24, 2020 · 8 min read
There is a severe under-representation of women in the technology-product management population despite making up 40 per cent of India’s general public. And yet, the women working in the field of product and technology are doing a spectacular job at it, shattering the glass ceiling.
Take our women colleagues in Meesho’s product team for instance, who are great problem solvers, have a very good understanding of our entrepreneurs, are committed to making them successful and whose inputs and ideas are respected across the board. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their peers and help the company achieve its true north consistently — Making [Meesho’s] Entrepreneurs Successful.
Read on to meet Meesho’s product team crew — the ladies who build — and whose work directly impacts our women entrepreneurs:
Deepali Gupta
“Like most tech fields, product is also a male-dominated space. My previous experience of having gone from a data analyst’s position, a role where I was surrounded by other women, and then moving onto to product, was a bit of a shocker. What I noticed was the distinct shortage of women in product as compared to men.
I joined Meesho as a Product Manager virtually in April this year during the lockdown. And I was happy to see more women in Meesho’s product team than the norm. I also knew that at Meesho I would be able to take full ownership of my work and that has certainly been the case. The amount of learning in the last six months has been unparalleled. Here I take care of cataloguing and support and I have complete end-to-end ownership for it, and this means the freedom to come up with new ideas and having the authority to take the final call as well.” — Deepali Gupta, Product Manager
Prachi Bhoyar
“I grew up in a progressive Marathi family from Nagpur with a lot of doctors in the house! So, naturally, I was always encouraged to forge a path in the medical field, especially because of the belief that it was more suitable for a girl. But, I was always drawn towards logical thinking and knew early on that I want to work in a field that demands ownership, innovation and practical application of my knowledge. So, after completing my engineering from IIT Kharagpur, I started exploring the field of product and for the last two years, I have been working in this field.
It is a very male-dominated industry for sure and even though I haven’t experienced any first-person discrimination based on my gender at the workplace, standing in a room dominated by men, I feel the constant need to work twice as hard as everyone else. Many women in powerful positions still face imposter syndrome. Even Michelle Obama, one of the most influential people in the world, has spoken about it.
The truth is, as long as you’re confident and good at what you do, gender doesn’t become a priority and it never should.
At Meesho, for instance, I have a very supportive and helpful team and the environment here demands a steep learning curve that helps you become an expert in your field. I have been working here for the last six months and my favourite thing about the company is the freedom I have to Deep Dive and Solve Problems [ a core Meesho value]. My work in product here directly impacts our women entrepreneurs and that is an honour.
I highly encourage girls to consider Product as a career path over other conventional options. It is a very diverse and cross-functional role that demands multitasking and if anyone can excel at it, it’s us!” — Prachi Bhoyar, Associate Product Manager
Also read: Girls Who Tech — From automation to data analytics, meet the ladies who are leading from the tech front at Meesho
Priyanka Jain
“I grew up in Indore where most of my family members were in the medical field, and because of this, I grew up wanting to be a doctor too. Later on, my love for maths and science — specifically physics — bloomed and I decided to pursue an Electrical Engineering degree from NIT Bhopal instead.
During my time at NIT, there was a significant shift in me, and I became inclined to working (or volunteering) in NGOs, and planning and organising events as a part of literary and cultural society.
I believe that this is the period where I got acquainted with my own empathetic side and saw that I have an inclination to, and a knack for solving problems for other people.
At my very first job I worked in a project where we built robotics process automation solutions for banking clients. This stint required me to interact with several stakeholders regularly to understand their pain points and build solutions that streamline the process. At the end of the project, I knew I wanted to work in product. To sharpen my analytical skills and to understand how various business functions collaborate, I joined a Fintech startup as an analyst.
Having come with this background to the field of product, I shattered the norm that only people with a background in tech can thrive here. More than gender-based stereotypes, I would say, this is the stereotype I had to shatter. While tech is an important aspect of working in product, it is even more important to have user empathy, and skills of identifying and prioritising the right problem.
When I joined Meesho six months ago, I knew that I would be entering a competitive and dynamic environment where you are entrusted with responsibilities based on your performance and not on assumptions. And, this has exactly been the case for me.
The horizontal power structure has demolished the idea of power hierarchy at work and makes reaching out to the leadership easy and comfortable.” — Priyanka Jain, Associate Product Manager
Tanya Batra
“I studied Chemical Engineering at IIT Kanpur, where the men: women ratio were terrible, so going into a field like product this is not something that even crossed my mind, and hence there was no hesitation in entering a male-dominated world either. I was initially considering joining companies that dealt in oil reservoirs etc, where the situation is apparently worse.
During college, I got to attend sessions on product and even got a taste of it during my internships. Additionally, I spoke in-depth about the prospects of entering product with a few alums and realised that this is the field for me. Having my work impact the lives of users by solving their problems was extremely appealing to me. And so, soon after I graduated, I started working in the field and it has been two-and-a-half blissful years.
I joined Meesho a year back and one of my biggest aspirations for the job was to be in an atmosphere where I am constantly able to learn from the people around me. I wanted to work with people who inspire me, lift me up, and find mentors who would guide me in the right direction, while also giving me a sense of ownership. And, I am happy that reality has certainly matched my expectation. I have extremely talented peers and inspiring mentors here and am excited about my work here.” — Tanya Batra, Associate Product Manager.
Nivedita Manepalli
“I grew up mostly in Bellary, Karnataka, but moved about the country quite a bit owing to my dad’s job. From a very young age, I had a strong inclination towards science and that eventually led me to IIT Madras where I pursued aerospace engineering. It is here that my interest in startups and technology piqued.
After I started working, I understood where my interests and skills lie, and further conversations with friends, alums and colleagues helped me realise that I want to pursue a long term career in product management. I knew that the gender ratio in this profession is not ideal, but that never made me hesitate in getting on board because all my life, I have been in environments that are primarily populated by men. Fortunately, I didn’t face any discrimination at the workplace, but I have had (ex) friends who would undermine my achievements by insinuating that I got them because I am a girl.
I have been following Meesho’s journey for a while before applying to the company and found the idea of helping women financially independent both fascinating and inspiring. I joined the company just before the lockdown and in the last few months, I have really learnt what ownership truly means. Unlike in other companies where this word is freely thrown around, at Meesho we get to be the owners of our projects, and my learning here has been incredible — Nivedita Manepalli, Associate Product Manager
“Growing up I don’t think I knew that Product Manager was a career option. During the initial years of my career, I was an analyst crunching numbers and trying to identify insights. Seeing how a product or a business can act on those insights and bring about change in their users’ lives was the reason I got really interested in product management and there has been no turning back.
Tech industry, in general, is male-dominated, and so I have been used to this since college. Thankfully though, there have been very few instances where I’ve been stereotyped because of my gender. At the end of the day, your work speaks louder than your gender. I love that my team here at Meesho has a lot more women compared to my previous orgs which has been quite refreshing and empowering.
It’s been 6 months since I joined Meesho and the journey has been amazing. Here at Meesho we are entrusted to own a project end to end and have the freedom to prioritise and solve actual user problems. I really appreciate how helpful the entire team and my stakeholders have been.” — Lekhya Mylavarapu, Senior Product Manager
Why Product Managers at Meesho are the guardian angels of entrepreneur success
What Does it Take to Run Last Mile Operations at Meesho?
Are you following us on social media yet? You might want to head over to Life at Meesho’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages if you are a fan of fun and positivity. | https://medium.com/meesho-tech/girls-who-build-meet-the-women-of-meeshos-product-team-adfb053316ad | ['Mangala Dilip'] | 2020-09-30 12:22:37.101000+00:00 | ['Meesho', 'Women Empowerment', 'Product', 'Culture', 'Women In Tech'] |
Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra | What got you here won’t get you there.
Insight though introspection, reflection, and thinking won’t get you there — rather you need to try new things and learn through experience. Thinking won’t change your thought process, but by getting out there and experiencing new things.
Expand your Network
who you talk to, who you trade ideas with. Learn something
2. Try new things at your job and career
Get involved in something different, different projects and areas of your department or organization. Interact with different people.
This will help you learn through experience and build your other skills.
Try a different style, if your collaborative try something dictatorial — if your directive try step backing and giving space. If See what impact that has.
3. Act your way into a new way of thinking.
Do more, think less.
The people around you are a mirror to who you are. They see you as you have been and not as who you will be. That will lead you to pigeon-hole yourself as nobody around you expects you to be capable of doing the things you are dreaming of. This is really self-limiting.
Competency Traps:
We keep doing what we already are good at.
We get better at what we already do well.
We value authenticity in leaders | https://medium.com/@kalensk/act-like-a-leader-think-like-a-leader-by-herminia-ibarra-942dec2dcedb | [] | 2020-12-23 22:57:35.529000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Management', 'Jobs', 'Coaching'] |
Scylla University: Coding with Scala, Part 1 | by Guy Shtub
This post is based on the Scylla Specific Drivers, Overview, Paging and Shard Awareness lesson in Scylla University, ScyllaDB’s free resource to learn NoSQL database development and Scylla administration. You can find the lesson here in Scylla University.
In a previous lesson, we explained how a Scylla Administrator restores and backs-up a cluster. As the number of mutants is on the rise, Division 3 decided that we must use more applications to connect to the mutant catalog and decided to hire Java developers to create powerful applications that can monitor the mutants. This lesson will explore how to connect to a Scylla cluster using the Phantom library for Scala: a Scala-idiomatic wrapper over the standard Java driver.
When creating applications that communicate with a database such as Scylla, it is crucial that the programming language being used includes support for database connectivity. Since Scylla is compatible with Cassandra, we can use any of the available Cassandra libraries. For example, in Go, there is GoCQL and GoCQLX. In Node.js, there is the cassandra-driver. For the JVM, we have the standard Java driver available. Scala applications on JVM can use it, but a library tailored for Scala’s features offers a more enjoyable and type-safe development experience. Since Division 3 wants to start investing in Scala, let’s begin by writing a sample Scala application.
Creating a Sample Scala Application
The sample application that we will create connects to a Scylla cluster, displays the contents of the Mutant Catalog table, inserts and deletes data, and shows the table’s contents after each action. First, we will go through each section of the code used and then explain how to run the code in a Docker container that accesses the Scylla Mutant Monitoring cluster. You can see the file here: scylla-code-samples/mms/scala/scala-app/src/main/scala/com/scylla/mms/App.scala.
As mentioned, we’re using the Phantom library for working with Scylla. The library’s recommended usage pattern involves modeling the database, table, and data service as classes. We’ll delve into those in a future lesson.
First, let’s focus on how we set up the connection itself. We start by importing the library:
import com.outworkers.Phantom.dsl._
This import brings all the necessary types and implicits into scope. The main entry point for our application is the App object’s main method. In it, we set up the connection to the cluster:
Next, in a list, we specify the DNS names through which the application contacts Scylla and the keyspace to use.
Finally, we instantiate the MutantsDatabase and the MutantsService classes. These classes represent, respectively, the collection of tables in use by our application and a domain-specific interface to interact with those tables.
We’re not operating on low-level types like ResultSet or Row objects with the Phantom library, but rather on strongly-typed domain objects. Specifically, for this lesson, we will be working with a Mutant data type defined as follows:
You can find the file here: scylla-code-samples/mms/scala/scala-app/src/main/scala/com/scylla/mms/model/Mutant.scala
The MutantsService class contains implementations of the functionality required for this lesson. You can find it here:
scylla-code-samples/mms/scala/scala-app/src/main/scala/com/scylla/mms/service/MutantService.scala.
Let’s consider how we would fetch all the mutant definitions present in the table:
Phantom provides a domain-specific language for interacting with Scylla. Instead of threading CQL strings through our code, we’re working with a strongly-typed interface that verifies, at compile-time, that the queries we are generating are correct (according to the data type definitions).
In this case, we are using the select method to fetch all Mutant records from Scylla. Note that by default, Phantom uses Scala’s Future data type for representing all the Scylla operations. Behind the scenes, Phantom uses a non-blocking network I/O to efficiently perform all of the queries. If you’d like to know more about Future, this is a good tutorial.
Moving forward, the following method allows us to store an instance of the Mutant data type into Scylla:
Everything is strongly typed, and as such, we’re using actual instances of our data types to interact with Scylla. This gives us increased maintainability of our codebase. If we refactor the Mutant data type, this code will no longer compile, and we’ll be forced to fix it.
And lastly, here’s a method that deletes a mutant with a specific name:
We can see that Phantom’s DSL can represent predicates in a type-safe fashion as well. We’re forced to use a matching type for comparing the firstName and lastName.
We can sequence the calls to these methods in our main entry point using a for comprehension on the Future values returned. The code below is from the following file:
scylla-code-samples/mms/scala/scala-app/src/main/scala/com/scylla/mms/App.scala
In this example, we execute all the futures sequentially (with some additional callbacks registered on them for printing out the information).
With the coding part done, let’s set up a Scylla Cluster and then run the sample application in Docker.
Set-up a Scylla Cluster
The example requires a single DC cluster. Follow this procedure to remove previous clusters and set up a new cluster.
Once the cluster is up, we’ll create the catalog keyspace and populate it with data.
The first task is to create the keyspace named catalog for the mutants’ catalog.
docker exec -it mms_scylla-node1_1 cqlsh CREATE KEYSPACE catalog WITH REPLICATION = { 'class' : 'NetworkTopologyStrategy','DC1' : 3};
Now that the keyspace is created, it is time to create a table to hold the mutant data.
use catalog; CREATE TABLE mutant_data (
first_name text,
last_name text,
address text,
picture_location text,
PRIMARY KEY((first_name, last_name)));
Now let’s add a few mutants to the catalog with the following statements:
insert into mutant_data ("first_name","last_name","address","picture_location") VALUES ('Bob','Loblaw','1313 Mockingbird Lane', 'http://www.facebook.com/bobloblaw');
insert into mutant_data ("first_name","last_name","address","picture_location") VALUES ('Bob','Zemuda','1202 Coffman Lane', 'http://www.facebook.com/bzemuda');
insert into mutant_data ("first_name","last_name","address","picture_location") VALUES ('Jim','Jeffries','1211 Hollywood Lane', 'http://www.facebook.com/jeffries');
Building the Scala Example
If you previously built the Scala Docker, you can skip directly to the section Running the Scala Example below.
Otherwise, to build the application in Docker, change into the scala subdirectory in scylla-code-samples:
cd scylla-code-samples/mms/scala
Now we can build and run the container:
docker build -t scala-app . docker run -d --net=mms_web --name some-scala-app scala-app
To connect to the shell of the container, run the following command:
docker exec -it some-scala-app sh
Running the Scala Example
Finally, the sample Scala application can be run:
java -jar scala-app/target/scala-2.13/mms-scala-app-assembly-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
The output of the application will be:
Conclusion
In this lesson, we explained how to create a sample Scala application that executes a few basic CQL operations on a Scylla cluster using the Phantom library. These were only the basics, and there are more exciting topics that Division 3 wants developers to explore. In the next lesson, we will review the structure of an application using the Phantom library.
In the meantime, please be safe out there and continue to monitor the mutants!
*This lesson was written with the help of Itamar Ravid. Itamar is a Distributed systems engineer with a decade of experience in a wide range of technologies. He focuses on JVM-based microservices in Scala using functional programming. Thank you, Itamar!
TAKE THIS LESSON IN SCYLLA UNIVERSITY | https://medium.com/@scylladb/scylla-university-coding-with-scala-part-1-b73d984e94ce | [] | 2020-09-28 16:25:48.681000+00:00 | ['Scylladb', 'Scala Programming', 'Scala', 'Database', 'NoSQL'] |
Today’s post was my response to a client when he asked me for LinkedIn advice. | Today’s post was my response to a client when he asked me for LinkedIn advice.
Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash
First, the one-line email: “If you have any suggestions for a LinkedIn headline I’m all ears.”
Here’s what I said:
Show some personality, be genuine; LinkedIn’s way too stiff.
Write it with your audience in mind; what’s in it for them?
Here are 7 angles you can try.
Pass the caveman test with your summary. Can someone answer these questions in 7 seconds or less?
Who’s this for?
What problem does it solve?
How can they get it?
When all else fails, find a profile you like and [ethically] copy it. Search LI for people with similar roles, click their profile and then look at “People also viewed” on the right-hand side to find examples.
Write ten versions, then run them through a headline analyzer. I shoot for a score of 70+. | https://medium.com/@nolanb/todays-post-was-my-response-to-a-client-when-he-asked-me-for-linkedin-advice-bdc565ac7d6c | ['Nolan Bulger'] | 2020-12-10 20:04:25.717000+00:00 | ['Sales', 'Marketing', 'LinkedIn', 'Ideas', 'Copywriting'] |
Royalty | Royalty
A sonnet
Photo by Andy Newton on Unsplash
damsel in distress, my heart expanding
poet more or less, my words romancing
kingdom for your love, this night commanding
bodies of the night, our skin is dancing
chaos in the land, the moats are filling
swimming in our tears, we find our village
hearts break open wide, our eyes are spilling
homes burn to the ground, our families pillaged
holy war calls out, my time for battle
sword is my command, my glory storming
queen is in the tower, bed boards rattle
a night without control, a child forming
banished evil foes are finding cover
king arrives at home, impales her lover
Joe Barca | https://medium.com/scrittura/royalty-90a6c2bc5184 | ['Joe Barca'] | 2020-12-23 06:37:03.265000+00:00 | ['Sonnet', 'Poetry', 'Scrittura'] |
A note on Kindness | I have been meaning to write about kindness for some time, but I did not really know how to start. I guess that has more to do with the fact that I often fail to come across as a kind person. I am not saying that I am not a kind person, no. It is just that people tend not to expect kindness from me. Who really does expect kindness from anyone? I am writing these words without really knowing if I will succeed at getting the message across. I will try.
To quote the late Chester Bennington, “When life leaves us blind, Love keeps us kind.” Love keeps us kind. I was listening to one of his live performances, and I knew, I knew what to write. The how on the other hand was a different matter. The song messenger by Linkin Park is probably the love letter we should send to ourselves. A gentle reminder that we shouldn’t let the troubles of this world break us, make us less than what and who we are. It is hard, I know that very well.
I know it is hard to trust another person, it is especially harder when we feel like we are alone. You are not alone, remember that. For as long as there is one person out there who knows you, who remembers you, you will never be alone. Remember that. I say, please, remember that you are not alone. If I remember you, then you are not alone. I just wish you could see it that way. Kind people tend to not trust others, and who can blame them? It is difficult to keep the spirits up when we give more than we get in return. So when someone tries to give us something without asking for anything in return we raise the walls to protect ourselves, and we do not trust them. We do not give them a chance.
The hardest part of writing these words is knowing that I may not succeed. Why should I worry? I am writing these words, I am writing these words for you, and I am writing these words for me. So, even if I fail to get through to you, I may still be able to get them through to me, maybe. All this because if there is one thing that we failed, almost constantly, to do is remind ourselves that we are we not alone, remind ourselves that we are not less, that we should keep going, keep being kind to others. Why should I worry? I worry because if I fail to get these words through to you, who, then, will remind me when I can no longer keep going?
The instincts, that invisible thing that guides us, it is a tricky thing to understand, to interpret. Do you not trust someone because you do not know them, or because you are worried that you may get hurt if you let that person into your life? I know the dilemma. This is where the words, “love keeps us kind”, come to save the day. In spite of how you may feel, the greatest gift a kind person can give to another is a chance, a chance to do right, a chance to prove themselves wrong, a chance to help another person, a chance to no do anything at all. That is what kindness is all about. What the other person does has nothing to do with you. Do not close your door because you are scared or worried that you might get hurt. You might even surprise yourself.
I feel like I have sidetracked a little. I wrote earlier that we should remind ourselves that we are not less, I used the word less because if I had written that we should remind ourselves that we are more than others because we are kind, I would not be talking about a kindness. The one who gives away to profit, often thinks less of the ones who gives away without expecting anything in return. Yet, the kindness we show to others often rewards us with gifts that we cannot buy from other people: Joy, hope, love, kindness itself can only be acquired with kindness. Kindness does not keep tabs.
For you, the ones hiding, do not cut yourselves off from this world. You are not alone, and I need you to know that. They say that good people end with good people. If you believe in it, then you are a good person too, a kind one. If I found you, you must be a good person too. Do not let your bad experiences spoil your present with insecurities, do not stop doing good to others. Do not stop being kind to others because you fear you may get hurt in the process. Keep your door open, and good people will find you the same way I found you. | https://medium.com/@josue-ferreira/a-note-on-kindness-565ae462e8d2 | ['Josue Ferreira'] | 2020-12-27 01:42:01.241000+00:00 | ['Kindness To Others', 'Kindness Matters', 'Kindness'] |
The Little Boy Discovers His Home Is Gone | There comes a time when after all that you’ve been through, you realize that you’ve accomplished nothing at all. You have kept your hopes up. You have endured the night. You have decided to be strong. But in return for all of your efforts, all you could see is that you have failed. This was exactly how the little boy in our story felt the moment they were able to see what happened to his old home.
“Is this really your home?” the firefly asked.
“It used to be,” the boy sadly replied, for all they could see were the remains of his old house and his old garden. Where there used to be a house, they saw only a big hole. Where there used to be a lovely garden, they saw only dead plants here and there, unable to tell them whatever happened to his home.
“I–I thought I could see Mama again,” cried the boy. “I thought I could hear her say my name.”
The firefly could not think of anything to say. After all, what do you say to someone who has lost his home twice? What do you say to someone who is now left with only a big hole instead of a home?
Speaking of holes, neither the boy nor the firefly was prepared to see big rocks suddenly being thrown down the big hole where there used to be a house. After a few moments, they saw two more coming, and they ducked as they tried to see where the rocks were coming from.
“Look!” exclaimed the firefly.
The little boy turned and saw a very big man holding very large rocks. Without any effort at all, the big man was able to crush the rocks. He was about to throw what was left of the rocks when the little boy suddenly spoke.
“Were you the one who destroyed my home?” asked the little boy, clenching his fist and almost bursting into tears.
The big man, on the other hand, was a bit surprised. You’d think he’d get angry at the boy but he just stopped what he was doing, looking quite puzzled with what he saw and heard. After a while, the big man replied, “No, I was not the one.”
“Then why were you throwing those rocks? And why is there a big hole where there used to be my house?”
“I don’t know. When I came here, there was no house; there was just a big hole.”
With this answer, the little boy clenched his fist even harder. Was the big man telling the truth? If he was, who is now to be blamed?
“I hate you!” cried the little boy. “I just–hate you!”
The big man didn’t know just what to say. He was even more amazed now at the boy.
Meanwhile, the firefly flew about in circles, frantically thinking about what to do. He wanted to convince the boy to just let it go. To forget everything. But he has never seen the boy like this before.
“Why?” the boy suddenly asked. “If you did not destroy our house, why are you here? And why were you trying to destroy everything?”
The big man still didn’t know what to say. For a time, he looked at the sky as though he could see the answer there. Then, he sat, and he looked at the rocks he has just crushed with his hands.
“This was all I could do,” the big man finally said.
“What–what do you mean?” the boy asked.
“This was all I could do,” the big man repeated. “I’m really good at crushing rocks. I’m good at throwing them away. So I do what I can do. I can’t do anything else.”
Although the boy still felt angry, he couldn’t help but see the big man in another way. Somehow, the big man reminded him of himself. He was just someone who wanted to know he was good at something.
“Aren’t you good at anything else?” the little boy asked.
The big man merely shook his head. He was a bit ashamed and a bit sad also.
“But–but even if you’re good at this, are you happy with what you’re doing? I’m sorry that you couldn’t find anything else to do. I guess we’re a bit the same. But even if you’re good at crushing rocks, I think it won’t make you happy. You’re only destroying things. You’re not building anything.”
With this, the little boy and the big man spent some time in silence. It was almost dark when the little boy and the firefly decided to leave the big man, still deep in his thoughts, thinking about what he could possibly do.
You may also want to read: | https://medium.com/the-inspirer/the-little-boy-discovers-his-home-is-gone-d5966fc96c59 | ['Jocelyn Soriano'] | 2019-11-01 11:36:01.542000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Childrens Books', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Children'] |
Kyber is now officially on Discord! | Starting today (March 11th), Discord will be the Kyber Network team’s official community discussion platform. Our current Telegram groups will remain, but all official announcements and discussions will happen on our Kyber Network Official Discord server. Kyber community ambassadors DeFi Dude and Mark will be helping to moderate our current English Telegram group.
Building an informed, engaged, and empowered community has always been of paramount importance to us. Telegram has so far been a great platform for fun, engaging, and sometimes heated discussions about all things Kyber and we have established a strong Telegram community of over 15,000 users, including over 1100 developers!
However, we realised that for contentious topics that attract a wide variety of opposing perspectives, important conversations may come fast and furious yet it is very challenging to track and record them on Telegram. Given Kyber’s rapid growth and the upcoming launch of the KyberDAO, Telegram can no longer support our evolving needs. As such, we have made the decision to use Discord as our official community platform.
What will happen to the current Telegram groups?
Current Kyber Telegram groups will remain to help ensure a smooth transition, but take note that official Kyber announcements, discussions, and community polls will be in our Discord server. Our WeChat groups and private Telegram chats with various partners, reserve managers, and projects will continue as usual. For questions on KyberSwap, head to KyberSwapOfficial.
Why Discord?
Discord is designed for very large communities and allows for separate channels catered to the specific needs of different community groups — whether you are a KNC holder, developer, staking pool, trader, or reserve manager. As we prepare for the launch of Katalyst and the KyberDAO, we foresee this #channel feature being absolutely essential for discussions and achieving rough consensus regarding protocol and DAO-related topics. Discord will be a very important part of our governance process and host key discussions and polls around Kyber protocol parameters.
For example, prior to on-chain voting on the KyberDAO, the Kyber community will need a specific channel to discuss about the total network fee and the corresponding % fee distribution to staking rewards, reserve rebates, or burning of KNC. To keep discussions focused, another channel can be created to discuss topics and activities related to growing our network of DApps. These different channels can be navigated easily within the same Discord platform. Moreover, Discord has other useful features for online collaboration such as better moderation tools, convenient file uploads, easy search for past messages, group voice chats, video streaming, emojis😊and many others.
We have successfully utilised Discord for our #KyberDeFi Hackathon operations last year, and many of the top crypto projects in the space today are already using Discord, including Chainlink, Synthetix, Aave etc. After much research, and given Discord’s distinct benefits over Telegram in facilitating varied discussion topics, we have decided to make Discord our official community platform moving forward.
Discord will house our new Kyber #💻developers chat, and we will also have Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and other language channels. Admins are labeled as ‘Kyber Team’ or ‘Community Admins’, and they include Shane | Kyber Network#0042 and BBY (Bo) l Kyber Network#5991. We look forward to having an even more informed, engaged, and empowered community contributing to the success of Kyber Network.
We welcome the entire Kyber and DeFi community to join us in our new Discord server!
Discord Launch Contest! Win up to 1500 KNC (~$1000)!
We understand that this transition to Discord might take some getting used to. To kickstart our brand new Kyber Discord server, we will have a 1500 KNC (~$1,200) Discord Launch Contest from 11th March — 12th April 2020.
Let your creativity run wild! Join our new discord server and post ANY original article, infographic, meme, or suggestion that helps educate more people about Kyber, Katalyst upgrade, KyberDAO, or new KNC model. The Kyber team will pick the highest quality submissions to share rewards from a prize pool worth up to 1500 KNC! Winning submissions will be selected based on quality, creativity, and impact. Make sure to add #Katalyst2020 in your submission.
General prize guide based on categories (not guaranteed; up to Kyber to select the winners) #Katalyst2020
General guide only. Add #Katalyst2020 in your submission
Eligibility T&Cs
Must join the Kyber Network Official Discord Server: https://discord.gg/NfFMVz6
Submissions must be related to Katalyst, the KyberDAO, or the new KNC model and posted on our Kyber discord server. No price talk.
Submissions can take any form: article, infographic, meme, GIF, song, video, tweet, podcast, feedback etc.
Add a #Katalyst2020 tag on discord when you share your link, file, or comment
tag on discord when you share your link, file, or comment One user can win from multiple submissions and categories, but being the only submission for a category does not automatically make you a winner
Plagiarism is not allowed and affected submissions will be disqualified
Kyber team has full discretion in selecting the winners and our decision is final
The full 1500 KNC may not be awarded if there are insufficient quality submissions
Join Discord and participate now!
Contest Period: 11th March — 12th April, 2020 23:59 GMT+8
Let’s embark on this new Discord journey together! | https://blog.kyber.network/kyber-is-now-officially-on-discord-6b270d136618 | ['Kyber Network'] | 2020-03-18 09:32:10.450000+00:00 | ['Featured', 'English', 'Ethereum'] |
Acceptance & Its 3 Dimensions | The main concept for Acceptance is for us to accept ourselves just as we are, sitting here, in God’s world. The experts remind us that the number of us that will just sit here and accept ourselves nice and perfectly is most likely very low. It just seems at first that there are so many other options to consider instead. However, how many options do we really have realistically? It’s a good question when its take into massive consideration that we are the only person that we are ever gonna be. So, maybe there really aren’t that many options. That could motivate ourselves towards Self Acceptance.
We may change qualities about ourselves. We may remove or work through character defects. But, we really are not going to ever change the person that we are. So, when it comes to The first dimension of Acceptance, An Unconditional Acceptance of Myself; I can accept me for me. But I will also have to accept my faults, and the fact that part of me need changing. Accept those facts, and you can be well onto the road of self acceptance. And remember, though there are most likely many parts we want to change, don’t let shadows cast out the good, and even great accomplishments of our past. Take a trip far back, more then just a year or two. Look back far, and you may recall many a good things during the journey of life.
The second dimension of acceptance is usually called something like, Unconditional Acceptance of Others. I think it’s actually hard to say which one is more difficult for the majority of us, accepting us, or accepting others.The simplest statement I’ve seen when researching this, is that self acceptance of others is just us accepting the fact that other people are not us. I know that can be extremely difficult, because of things like personal values, morals, and prejudices. Even though most people don’t intend hard onto us as they go about their daily lives, there are times, when we may think otherwise.
There are times we can get offended, simply because a person is doing something differently then the way we believe it should be done. It’s not wrong. It’s just different. A great practice to master, is not only accepting that others have flaws, but also that if that’s the case, then we must also accept ourselves as being ones flawed as well. It’s a revolving cycle, of accepting that certain things about others that we can’t stand, are actually mirrored images of things that involve ourselves and others.
Accepting what we do not like about others, is a good way to lower and remove potential bouts of lacks of patience, and even bouts of hatred. A lot of the problems related to racism and prejudices also connect to this subject, because it stems from hating a certain type of person simply because they aren’t exactly like us. If someone were to ask me what the second dimension’s definition was; I could actually simply answer that by saying, “the definition of the second dimension of acceptance is the opposite of racism” (unconditional acceptance of others).
So, we get to the third dimension of acceptance, the Unconditional Acceptance of Life. Life is full of an infinite amount of things that we face in life. It’s hard to say how many we have control over, and how many we don’t. It is also hard to get into percentages of this and that, because it goes into many layer, because yes, there are plenty of events that may have a reputation of being unable to be changed, yet there are people who do find success when trying to change, or stop events that they perceive as negative. Something that may hold a person down, or perhaps even hurt them.
Accepting life, and all of its components and events, good and bad does not mean that we agree with, or believe in the bad things we shall face. Sometimes, to accept that there are some things in life, that are just plain shitty, allows to us to move forward in better ways. For this case in point, it is okay to just tolerate and accept what we have to, realizing that our acceptance doesn’t mean we have to have them in our lives. It’s quite possible that we can just brush to the side, as many negative things as possible.
We don’t have to allow acceptance to becoming something that’s disabling to us. I know that no matter what, there will most likely always be some kind of oppression, in life, as well as things that have a potential to harm What I believe is a good way to be, is to be sure and not to waste more energy then we have to, in unproductive ways. Sure, we may need to exert a little force in life, to avoid the negative. But, don’t lose focus. The way to not lose focus, is to actually maintain focus. Focus is a great guard that we can put up, and when utilizing that focus correctly, you will see that you aren’t exerting energy towards what doesn’t deserve it. This, is your unconditional acceptance of life. And these, are your 3 Dimensions Of Acceptance. | https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/acceptance-its-3-dimensions-d285168348b9 | ['Michael Patanella'] | 2018-09-28 15:11:54.452000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Self-awareness', 'Life', 'Life Lessons'] |
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