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How the best in class offer webhooks (examples) | Today we are going to take a look at the webhook offerings of a few top companies: Stripe, Slack, Twilio, and Github.
Stripe
Stripe’s webhook Dashboard
Stripe offers webhooks to notify developers when important events happen on the platform, such as when an asynchronous payment methods processes or when a new invoice is generated. Stripe’s webhook offering is quite comprehensive and they actually send events every time an important object is created or updated, so you can actually use their webhooks to sync Stripe’s data to your own database.
What’s cool about Stripe’s offering that we have not seen many other companies offer is that they include a CLI where you can test out webhook events to your local machine! No surprise given the company is known for being very developer experience friendly.
Slack
Slack’s most popular use case for webhooks is for the opposite use case which is incoming webhooks. If you want to create an application that posts messages to Slack when interesting events happen in your system, you can create a Slack webhook endpoint with a unique URL your system can make a POST request to. When you call that URL, you will see your message show up on the designated Slack channel!
POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Content-type: application/json { "text": "Hello, world." }
A Slackbot notification
Twilio
Twilio’s webhooks send information to your servers about events that have just occurred. For example, you may elect to get a webhook event every time a text message is sent to a Twilio phone number.
Twilio webhooks diagram
Twilio’s webhooks fall into two categories: one of which is simply informative and tells your application what has happened in the Twilio ecosystem, and another which requires your servers to take some sort of action in response.
An example that falls into the first category is Twilio might send you a webhook event when a voice mail is ready for download.
An example that falls into the second category, as depicted in the diagram above, is when your webhook server can respond to a Twilio event letting Twilio know programmatically how to respond when one of your phone numbers is called.
Github
Github’s webhooks allow you to build integrations that respond to various Github events such as when a pull request is reviewed or when a build is finished running. You can use these notifications for example, to update external issue tracking services you may use such as JIRA, or even block or kick off a code deployment.
Github webhook set up
Github does a good job of showing you a log of all your webhook deliveries and well as details into which ones failed, which is crucial in helping developers debug their integrations.
Github webhook delivery log
This was a brief tour of how a few of the most popular B2B applications on the internet utilize webhooks to give their developers a richer experience and create a more integrated and sticky platform. By supporting webhooks, these companies have no doubt enriched the ecosystem around their products, catapulting them into the behemoths they are today.
Looking to enrich your own developer platform by offering webhooks? Integrate with Gowebhook today to get a fully-featured webhook delivery platform based on best in class practices that can scale with you as you grow. | https://medium.com/@gowebhook/how-the-best-in-class-offer-webhooks-a62cf38775d8 | [] | 2021-01-24 20:40:54.096000+00:00 | ['Twilio', 'Webhooks', 'Slack', 'Stripe', 'Github'] |
Here’s How to Win Over Your Struggle With Vegetables Once and For All | National food guides around the world agree on the following dietary recommendations
Eat a variety of foods.
Drink plenty of water.
Get enough exercise.
Eat more vegetables.
Avoid too much fat — especially processed fats.
Eating more vegetables is one of the top five dietary recommendations. Sadly in 2016 only 30% of Canadians age 12 and older reported eating the minimum daily requirement of fruit and vegetables as reported by Statistics Canada.
The U.S. numbers are even worse reporting only 1 in 10 adults get enough fruits and vegetables as seen in the 2017 CDC Report.
The problem is with veggies, not fruit
It’s clear that most people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. I’ll step out on a limb here and say the problem is not as much with fruit but with vegetables. Most people enjoy fruit and probably come close to meeting the recommended daily intake.
The new Canada’s Food Guide 2019 suggests fruits and vegetables should make up a full 1/2 of our diet. Whole grains and protein make up the other half.
Most people just don’t like vegetables.
I get it! Veggies are not my first go-to either but I also refuse to live in denial. Facts are facts and we can’t dispute them. The first statement in the above noted Statistics Canada report states:
“Fruit and vegetable consumption provides an important source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, which may reduce the risk of heart disease and some types of cancer.”
I didn’t like vegetables either
Since the problem clearly lies with vegetables I will share what I have learned over the years. I wasn’t raised to like vegetables either. I learned their importance when studying health in my mid-twenties and quickly grew committed to finding ways to get them into my diet. I kept at it and I can now say I love all veggies. It wasn’t easy at first but I stuck with it.
Here are 3 habits that helped me add vegetables to my diet
1. Veggie stock/broth
Personal image by author Bett Harris
I keep a stock pot chock-full of veggies on my stove at all times. Each batch is good for 3 or 4 days. I start with fresh garlic and onions in filtered water. I sometimes add 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. This makes the stock acidic and helps pull nutrients out of the vegetable. Over the next 3 days or so I ladle broth out and drink it while adding more water and veggies.
I only drink the broth. All the veggies end up as compost.
The first day I may add some fresh or dry herbs, carrots, and celery. Day two greens like spinach or kale, fennel, and dulse (seaweed). Day three cabbage and okra. I also add sea salts and pepper to taste. The pot stays on low heat for up to four days. The last day I strain the broth into jars and store in the fridge for later use. I vary the mix each time so I get as much variety as possible. See more on my veggie and bone broth here.
2. Veggie smoothies
All you need here is a good blender or Nutribullet. I make this in bulk and freeze it in mason jars. I start with greens and lots of them. I vary my greens and use spinach, kale, collard greens, mustard greens, and all types of lettuce. I add parsley, celery, and cucumber. Water needs to be added to the mixture so it doesn’t get too thick. I used to add frozen berries or dried fruit to make it a bit sweeter but I no longer need the added sweetness. Feel free to add fruit if you desire. I drink this straight-up but it can also be used as a base for a morning smoothie by adding protein powder and/or yogurt, hemp hearts, ground flaxseed, and chia seeds.
3. Veggie juice
This requires a professional juicer which extracts all the juice and some of the plant material from most fruits and vegetables. My favorite fruit blend is pineapple, apple, lemon, celery, and red grapes. My favorite veggie blend is parsley, carrot, beet, celery, ginger, and cucumber. Though juicing removes most of the fiber from the food the juice still supplies all the vitamins, minerals, enzymes and other nutrients available from the food. I make this in large batches of about 4 liters and freeze in mason jars for later use.
By making one or more of these habits part of your daily routine you will develop a healthier lifestyle and guarantee you eat your veggies every day.
Our Koinonia pub headline
This story is published in Koinonia — stories by Christians to encourage, entertain, and empower you in your faith, food, fitness, family and fun.
We are a Smedian Publication. Find out about us and how to write for us. | https://medium.com/koinonia/heres-how-to-win-over-your-struggle-with-vegetables-once-and-for-all-f19210d2d72d | ['Bett Harris'] | 2019-05-13 21:04:30.693000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Health', 'Food', 'Self Improvement', 'Life'] |
Conversation with My Wife (98) | Conversation with My Wife (98)
Where we review the combustion triangle and cookies made in remote cabins
You may remember our previously mentioned virtual family:
Cast of characters (using initials to protect the innocent and easily embarrassed):
P: Wife, mother of two daughters, daughter of AUNT NORMA.
D: Husband to P of many years, boyfriend in college, father to her daughters.
C: College buddy of P & D. Still a good family friend, which makes me wonder what stories she would be able to tell.
DEB: My wife, for those of you joining us late. Just an observer for this Conversation.
AUNT NORMA: Not my wife’s real aunt, but she was Deb’s mom’s roommate in college and has known Deb since birth.
So when we get together we get to talking about… stuff. Old stuff, sometimes.
ME: Okay, wait, you were in some cabin off somewhere —
P: And I decided it would be nice to have peanut butter cookies! But all we had in the cabin was peanut butter, sugar, and Bisquick. So I mixed that together and baked them, but I forgot to move the oven shelf, which was still in the top position. And the Bisquick made them expand, which I had not counted on. So they caught fire.
ME: That makes no sense. They would have to come in contact with a heating element or something, and that would only happen if you turned to oven to broil. Which nobody would do.
P: I was just a student!
ME: In college!
P: You put something in the oven, you set the temperature, you turn the dial thing, the light comes on, you walk away. This was not my fault!
ME: But when you checked on the cookies —
P: Actually, there was smoke coming out of the oven. It kinda smelled.
ME: (pause) Okay, so when you check on the smelly smoke coming out of the oven —
P: I screamed and went to get D. He was taking a nap. (D is sitting with us while wearing an amused expression on his face that says, “I am in no way responsible for this woman’s actions.”)
ME: After closing the oven door.
P: I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.
ME: So you went to get D —
P: Only C was with us that weekend and was on the phone to her mom. So I screamed, “THERE’S A FIRE!” at her and hung up the phone. Which I found out later freaked out her mom.
ME: I have no idea why.
P: So I go wake up D, scream “THERE’S A FIRE!” and he gets out of bed still just wearing his boxers and comes downstairs. Doesn’t ask me anything. Doesn’t say anything. Just walks downstairs, where C is freaking out, walks over to the oven, gets a pot holder, grabs the pan, dumps it in the sink, turns on the water, then goes back to bed. Still hasn’t said anything.
ME: So what did we learn from this?
P: Peanut butter Bisquick cookies catch fire?
ME: (pause) Not what I was looking for. I would say that it’s more that you tend to panic, and your husband tends to keep a cooler head. Also that he must love you very, very much if he proposed to you and married you.
D: I think that’s a good summary!
P: No, I was just young! At least it wasn’t like high school chem class!
AUNT NORMA: What, dear? I am not sure I have heard this story.
P: Okay, it was 11th grade chem class, and there were burners going at the lab table, and I spilled some solvent, which kinda caught fire. So I got some paper towels to cover it.
ME: Okay, that was good! (going into geeksplain mode) See, you have the combustion triangle (makes triangle with my fingers) consisting of fuel, heat, and oxygen. By throwing the wet paper towels to cover it, you cooled the fire AND separated it from the oxygen, (removes two sides of the finger triangle) thereby stopping the combustion. Well done!
P: What made you think I wet the paper towels first?
ME: Because… no, you… seriously, you… (awkward choking noises) YOU PUT DRY PAPER TOWELS ON A SOLVENT FIRE?!
D: (makes a gesture that says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the woman I married!”)
AUNT NORMA: But wouldn’t that make it worse? (from other people this would be sarcasm, but Aunt Norma means it sincerely)
ME: (awkward choking noises meant to signal assent)*
P: Anyway, it’s important to be careful when making peanut butter Bisquick cookies.
Aunt Norma would like to have a peanut butter Bisquick cookie bake-off between me and P. In our kitchen, because she lives in a retirement community where people get upset when the fire alarm goes off.
Just for grins I made a test batch.
Actual homemade peanut butter Bisquick cookies, baked and photographed by the author. Not on fire, you will notice. Also not very good; I suspect there are ingredients other than “peanut butter” and “Bisquick” that P failed to mention. Or maybe it’s just as well the originals ended up soggy in the sink.
Nobody died.
Copyright © 2018 by Jack Herlocker.
*And no, I never asked how the chem lab fire got put out. | https://medium.com/the-junction/conversation-with-my-wife-98-be423105c3e7 | ['Jack Herlocker'] | 2018-05-23 14:21:33.075000+00:00 | ['Friends', 'Relationships', 'Combustion Triangle', 'Cooking', 'Pb Cookies On Fire'] |
How to Choose Your Next Marketing Job | Recently I’ve accepted one of the most exciting calls of my career: leading 3 departments with 35+ direct reports, being responsable for a hefty marketing budget, hyperdynamic marketing in a competitive industry, tons of expectations, and most importantly creating a new culture & bringing changes while not touching the working conveyor - surely not a piece of cake!
While juggling all the pros & cons of possible destinations I went through quite an uneasy decision-making process. Having lived that, I decided to share my experience with my fellow marketers and other like-minded buddies in a short post about how to choose their next marketing job.
Prefer projects to company names
My formula is simple:
When you are under 25 you work & study like crazy just to define your pathway. Better to work at marketing agencies, consulting firms, retail companies, or any sort of hot pots.
Between 25 and 30 you already know who you are and what to read. You are still in operations while experiencing the first wave of the managerial phase.
When you surpassed 30 better to undertake a tough project rather than petting your belly. You wanner be the captain of Ajax FC in the Champions League rather than sitting on Real Madrid’s bench in La Liga.
After 40 you can enjoy bringing quotes from your lovely books during the board meetings and scattering free advice at public events.
Go where they want you more
If you’re invited to Marketing Director or CMO roles but who phoned you first was a junior recruiter well… this is not the best sign. On several occasions, I’ve personally witnessed how smart CEOs snatched the best candidates in a casual coffee meeting. Do they want you badly? That must be the right place if your answer is yes. Rule out any option that smells hesitation. They can’t buy you as long as you say no to money.
Choose a company where the marketing is the locomotive
There are several industries where you wouldn’t notice any difference if their CMO passed away on Monday morning 🙂 But places like retail, marketing agency, FMCG, growing startups, etc. are very marketing sensitive. Talk to insiders about the importance of marketing within the organization before accepting the offer. Do they call it “cost” or “investment” when it comes to spendings?
Brand reputation is vital
Changing a company’s bad reputation to good is a costly business. It requires money, time, and iron nerves. People will always associate you with your company. Does your company sell crap? So you are the crap seller. Does your company treat customers badly? So you are an asshole. Thus, make sure you choose a company whose logo will decorate your resume, or at least you’ll not be ashamed to voice its name among your friends.
Resources matter
Let’s face it. You’ll not be publicly successful without sufficient resources. Even good marketing requires certain costs. You can pull your company with tweaks and talent to a certain extent but there are several factors that lay beyond your power. You might build a perfect SEO strategy, but it is gonna look placid in search results when your competitor’s bid is 10 times higher than yours. You can’t deliver sustainable and healthy results without an adequate team unless you are powered with an A14 Bionic chip.
Work for a leader
Almost in all the competitive markets, there are only 1 or 2 leaders and the rest. The more competitive the market, the more chances you’ll have to be forged as a professional. Want to be recognized publicly? Want to impact the market and influence the mass? Choose leaders. But be prepared for anxiety and some sleepless nights. Speed might sicken you.
Me in the eyes of my 4-year old son when I’m stressed :)
At the end of the day, life is a result of our choices. Take your time and make meaningful choices. A short agony of choices is better than a longing regret. Let me finish this article with Mr. Nobody’s invaluable quote: | https://medium.com/@vugarmehdiyev/how-to-choose-your-next-marketing-job-5e83d66b0fab | ['Vugar Mehdiyev'] | 2021-03-09 14:25:52.545000+00:00 | ['Choices', 'CMO', 'Marketing', 'Decision Making', 'Careers'] |
Syllabus | Syllabus
A Poem
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
And today we’re learning to eat with our fingers
the rings of dirt subtle invitations to tetanus
but none of the enthusiasm is rusted
the car that slides into the space you used to occupy
where you curled your hair before my coming
crushed legs and back that stretched
to try to deal well with taking you in
goes up and on and on till the bleeding is inseparable
from the moments that carry on without you | https://medium.com/scrittura/syllabus-4d9cf5e99e7d | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-09-18 11:43:16.032000+00:00 | ['Image', 'Misery', 'Poetry', 'Confusion', 'Heartbreak'] |
Day 130 — Publishing a New Update and 2 More Feature Designs | Day 130 — Publishing a New Update and 2 More Feature Designs Bob Weishar Apr 9·2 min read
Today I wrapped up the week with an update to our content and design of a couple new potential features.
Here’s what I did.
Publishing New Content
This morning I published a new content module to our app. We use Expo’s publish command, which allows the update to be “over-the-air” without actually requiring an app upgrade.
Publishing new app content
Download the app to check out the new “monitoring” module, plus 2 new spaceship games!
Feature Updates
Feature 1 — Points
One of the features I’m really excited will improve app usage — and fun — is implementing a points system. It’s something Duolingo does extremely well, so I riffed off their approach with our own unique superhero spin to it.
Levels and points have the added benefit that we can encourage competition between users and additional social features.
Here’s the dashboard view of the feature:
Gamifying the App
Feature 2 — Group Polls
Another social feature I thought might be interesting to try out is a group poll feature. So far, all of the question types in our app have a right or wrong answer. But life with diabetes and other chronic conditions includes a lot of “gray area”, too. So I thought we could show the spectrum of answers that users are answering, and in the process, show users they’re most definitely not alone in their perspectives.
Check out the prototype here.
What’s Next?
Time to test these features! | https://medium.com/@bobweishar/day-130-publishing-a-new-update-and-2-more-feature-designs-7f06b74dd44f | ['Bob Weishar'] | 2021-04-09 22:54:39.031000+00:00 | ['Founder Stories', 'Startup Lessons'] |
ByteSize: Infinite Scroll with Flask and React Pt.2 | The Code
We’ll start off by the components we’ll be using at the top of our Infinite Scroll component file (in app\static\src\InfiniteScroll.jsx)
Next we’ll create the GridList and GridListTile components in the returned portion of the InfiniteScroll function.
Feel free to play around with the cellHeight and cols (columns) attributes for your own projects, the cell height obviously adjusting the height and width of the image, and columns adjusting how many images are displayed per row.
The cols and rows arguments in GridListTile allow you to set the height and width of our images as increments of the cellHeight from the GridList component. This let’s you make certain images take up more space than others, giving a nice aesthetic.
I used the Modulo (%) operator in a ternary statement to make it that images will have the width of three slots on the tenth photo, and two slots on every twentieth.
We will also need to include the styling for these elements above as well.
The gridList class can be adjusted based on how wide you want the overall grid to be.
With that finished our feed currently looks like this:
While this is great, the coloring of the images can be a little conflicting and overwhelming, lacking a bit of coherence. We can change this by adding some grayscale to desaturate the colouring of the images and bringing it to a similar level. We can then make a CSS hover selector that removes the grayscale when a user navigates over a picture.
We can make these adjustments using the image class we already defined in our image tag using the makeStyles object. | https://medium.com/@spencerporter2/bytesize-infinite-scroll-with-flask-and-react-pt-2-a00db01a2a9b | ['Spencer Porter'] | 2020-11-24 17:13:25.711000+00:00 | ['React', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'Flask', 'Python'] |
Why Is It So Hard to Make Other Gay Friends? | Before our first — and final — date, the French man whom I’d been chatting to for the past 48 hours offered some comforting words to help calm my nerves.
“At the very least,” he assured, “we can still be friends.”
Possibly he meant well, but this flimsy promise made me realise I was already in trouble. I mean, who uses “least” and “friend” in the same sentence, as if acquiring someone to spend time with in a non-sexual manner is some sort of pathetic consolation prize?
Sadly, he’s not alone in this assumption.
In my bedroom, I have journal after journal filled with pages of yearning for people who disappeared, never to return, to come back or at least explain why they left. (To his credit, at least the French man was honest enough to let me know that “you are not the one for me.”) My words for all the others read a lot like heartbreak, even though they were written in memory of gay men I’d never so much as kissed.
I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to make friends with other gays, only to feel just as alone and outcast as I did as a bookish thirteen-year-old in a sport-obsessed, country high school. No one likes being rejected, but it’s certainly harder when the door is closed by somebody who promised you that they aren’t judgemental, and pride themselves on escaping the vexatious shallow stereotypes that have long plagued, and to some extent been perpetuated by, the gay community. In case you’ve never used an app or dating site before, let me give you some examples: “Masc4Masc”, “No fems”, “No Asians”, or “Gym-fit looking for same”. Crude and discriminatory as these sorts of self-descriptors are, at least I know where I stand. A million miles apart with no wish to edge closer, thank you.
For a long time, I believed it was only me who was in this predicament, and that my biggest failing was my appearance. If Instagram is to be believed, gay friendship is mostly muscled, tanned men smiling topless on the beach or in a club surrounded by an armour of hashtags. I figured that explained my struggle. I am shy, ugly and vegan, all of which pose a serious threat to anyone wanting to gain likes with the likes of #gaycute #gayhunk #gayhot. Moving through this glossed world in this wretched body made me feel like I was worthless; but moving in more intellectual crowds still made me feel like my brain and thoughts meant nothing so long as I had the same offensive face.
According to LGBT counsellor Clinton Power, there are in fact many gay men who find it hard to make friends and suffer from “deep loneliness and isolation.” Sadly, these feelings of despair are not limited to those who are closeted or in remote areas.
“There is enormous discrimination and judgment within the gay community itself. This is a sad reality because many gay men grew up being bullied and discriminated in some way,” says Clinton.
“There is a strong cultural pressure to have a muscled gym body and not fitting into this stereotype can lead to feelings of shame and self-loathing for some men. The reality is many ‘A gays’ (good-looking and gym-fit men) tend to form cliques with similar men and tend to exclude men who don’t fit their physical type.”
The pressure to be perfect takes its toll on many gay men.
But for every A, there are at least twice as many Ps, Qs and Rs. Michael Hobbes’ piece, “Together Alone: the epidemic of gay loneliness” addressed the elephant in the room by acknowledging that black cloud of loneliness that has come to define the modern-day gay milieu. He noted that “the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades.” Hobbes’ story — long overdue for most of us — spoke to those whose voices had been deafened or ignored, but the noise it created has been stifled — or suffocated — and those who struggle, continue to fight to be heard or seen. Perhaps it’s time for us to hijack social media and flood out the filtered photos with our own; the machine, after all, works better when it’s being subverted.
When dealing with clients who feel they don’t measure up to the perfection they see reproduced on social media, Clinton advises them to “surround yourself with good people and find a supportive tribe of people you connect with.” Friendship is, by nature, often a transient experience: people arrive and exit quicker than we would like them to, but I also believe we meet the people we were meant to.
For some time, I had a gay friend who made everything make sense. He quoted me from his bible, The Velvet Rage and, in return, I recited entire chunks from my favourite journalist, Elizabeth Wurtzel. (I still can’t help myself. Here you go: “I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.”)
We were alone together and his company made it possible for me to breathe underwater. Some nights, I fell asleep content just knowing that I knew him. We’d take ourselves off on imaginary trips overseas, transforming the bland city we lived in to somewhere sculpted by our own hands.
But this friend, who had more friends than I could ever imagine, was also deeply lonely. “Why does nobody want my love?” he sighed. It’s a question that’s been asked a million times before, and will continue to be repeated until the earth ends. I guess it was inevitable that this friend would leave, even though it upset me greatly at the time. I can’t help but wonder if, to many of the gay men I have known, I was just a passing distraction: someone who, at first glimpse, the thought might have been able to save them from themselves.
Perhaps it’s because gay men have long had to look to the internet to meet anyone that we romanticise — those behind the screen, or app — and hope that they might bring us the love we crave. Sometimes, that’s exactly what happens; other times, it falls flat. In offering my friendship, I have always felt like the beggar woman from Beauty and the Beast, pleading whoever opens the door to look beyond the gnarled flesh and rags and not turn me away dismissively once they find a lover.
But this isn’t a sad story, not entirely. After a journey of Tolkien proportions, I managed to find — and keep — two gay friends. If I wasn’t an optimist, I might have used adverbs like “just” or “only” — instead I just hope to know them for the rest of my life. In the beginning, I feared these friendships may evaporate or wear away into threadbare rag. Time has taught me to expect everything and nothing, and simply to enjoy the times we are together.
The desire to love and be loved is unequivocally paramount to human existence. Otherwise, Shakespeare never would have put ink to paper and we wouldn’t sit through humdrum office jobs without complaint simply because there’s someone waiting for us at home. But the belief that romantic relationships are the only ones worth fostering is a dangerous delusion that can only make the lonely even more alone. | https://medium.com/th-ink/why-is-it-so-hard-to-make-other-gay-friends-7e4765b6ba0 | ['Mitchell Jordan'] | 2020-05-09 05:34:42.215000+00:00 | ['Loneliness', 'LGBTQ', 'Gay', 'Identity', 'Friendship'] |
Is DISD a better school district than Highland Park? | First, I want to define what a ‘school’ is. It’s the teachers, the principal, the curriculum, the building. Most people see a good ‘school’ as a school with a bunch of high achieving kids. But this is a bit like judging the quality of the food in a restaurant based on who’s eating it. It’s a little like judging the quality of head coach in sports based solely on the players on their team. I could probably coach the Golden State Warriors right now and we’d at least make it to the Western Conference finals (my days riding the basketball bench growing up would at least have me in a familiar spot).
I’m not saying kids in HP are more talented than kids in DISD. But poverty is the single greatest indicator of student achievement at a district level and HP has zero poor kids, literally (0% economically disadvantaged as defined by free & reduced lunch federal government program — the only district in the state like that — whereas DISD is 88% poor (defining ‘poor’):
Poverty has all sorts of implications for kids and their academic achievement. 90% of child’s brain develops before the age of 5, and during those years nutrition, trauma, access to mind stimulating environments (including full day Pre-K) and simply the number of words spoken around them profoundly affect their future achievement:
The “30 million word gap” refers to a research study conducted by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley. Their study showed that children from lower-income families hear a staggering 30 million fewer words than children from higher-income families by the time they are 4 years old.
In his book ‘How Children Succeed’ Paul Tough tackles issue of poverty and wealth in childhood and their affects on success later in life. He relates something he calls Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and the allostatic load (fancy term for built up stress in the brain) with success later in life. Lack of stability during childhood — losing family members, parent getting laid off, single parent working all the time, not knowing where your next meal is coming from, constant movement from district to district — lead to this type of stress ‘plaque’ building up in the brain, much like playing football and constantly hitting your head leads to a build up of CTE which affects mental function later in life.
Kids who have this type of childhood often have more trouble controlling impulses impulses, focusing and relaxing — all of which are tied to academic success. As Tough explains:
It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids. It was the stress that went along with it.
This is one reason why social emotional curriculum is so incredibly important — something being done here in Dallas at the Momentous Institute (a true leader in this field across the country) and currently being implemented at DISD.
So…how do you compare districts with poverty levels that are so vastly different?
We have to pick similar kids in both districts to figure out how the same kid would do in either situation. HP also has very little diversity. It’s .7% black. Not 7%, but ‘point’ 7% — that’s 7 black kids per 1000 students for those counting at home. And we already saw they have 0% poverty.
So we have to look for white, ‘non-poor’ kids in DISD as comparison points and ask the question:
How do white, non-poor kids do in DISD?
Turns out, they do just about the same as they do in HPISD —there are 17 tests given between 3rd through 8th grade (see end for the charts) and HP scores higher in 9 of them, while DISD outperforms HP in 8 of them.
Given the median household income for the zip codes in HPISD of 75205 and 75225 are $125,269 and $158,418 respectively, while the zip codes where the majority of white students come from in DISD — 75206 and 75214 are $58,943 and $82,876 and you can understand the wealth disparities between the districts, even among the most affluent students. Yet the students perform about the same.
In other words, your same kid could very well do better if you sent them to DISD than to HPISD.
Perception vs. Reality
But this is not the reputation. HPISD is the greatest place in the world. Business Insider voted it the 6th best school district in the entire country last year!
DISD often gets destroyed in the media and panned by the public. It’s an easy target. It’s huge, bureaucratic and often a mess politically. But it must serve thousands of students of many different backgrounds across a giant swath of geographies and incomes. And if you look deeper into the actual statistics, it is on par with basically every other district in our area if not better (again, see bottom charts). They’re doing many great things there. They have an innovative teacher evaluation and payment system, increasing Pre-K enrollment (something HP doesn’t even have to offer because all parents go private), several great magnet schools and the top high school in the country. They are now offering many schools of choice including the idea school for Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship Academy and Solar Prep, the new all girls academy. | https://medium.com/themap/is-disd-a-better-school-district-than-highland-park-10db6ff26b17 | ['Robert Mundinger'] | 2018-06-27 14:38:57.823000+00:00 | ['Articles', 'Education'] |
Artist Spent 7 Years Hand-Lettering & Illustrating a New Divine Comedy | Just in time for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death
Artist George Cochrane exhibiting his work in Brooklyn, NY (2017). Photo Credit: Michael Sharkey
I first met George Cochrane in 2016.
At that point I had spent over 9 years in the luxury bookselling business, selling medieval illuminated manuscript facsimiles through my business, Facsimile Finder.
In today’s day and age, most illuminated manuscripts live behind closed doors in private collections or libraries. The most historically important books lie safely secured behind bullet-proof glass. For the sake of preserving our culture, access to the physical books is nigh impossible.
Facsimile Edition of the Divine Comedy of Alfonso of Aragon, Ltd Edition of 750 Copies, Binding: Pure-Silk Velvet Adorned with Gilded Silver and Enamel Work
This is where facsimiles can step in. They are a fascinating medium to bridge the gap between the reader and the original book. Personally, being able to provide university libraries and collectors with high-end copies of these culturally important books is very rewarding.
It was clear, however, from George’s first email to me that he was different from most of the clientele I was used to.
George (left) with me, Giovanni Scorcioni (right)
George was not just a collector, nor was he a special collections librarian, or even affiliated with a library — George was an artist on a life mission. He also had an intense passion for Dante and the Divine Comedy, similar to that of my fellow Italians.
George first inquired about how to get his hands on a copy of the Dante Poggiali facsimile. The original was considered to be the first illustrated Divine Comedy ever produced before 1350, very soon after Dante’s death in 1321. This was important to George, as there is no known autographed copy of the Divine Comedy by Dante’s own hand.
Facsimile Edition of the Dante Poggiali
At the time, George was working on a modern take of Dante’s Inferno: hand-lettered, beautifully illustrated, printed letterpress, and hand-bound. For this work, he needed to study the source material.
The following year, after trying to get his hands on every version of the Divine Comedy he could find, and over 1,600 hours of hand-lettering and illustrating later, George’s Inferno was finally published.
But George confided in me — he felt his mission was incomplete.
The Divine Comedy is, after all, not only considered to be the most pre-eminent work in Italian literature, but also one of the greatest triumphs of literature in the world.
How could he pay proper homage to such a masterpiece? George could only see one way forward— to complete the entirety of the Divine Comedy in original Italian. Beyond this, he wanted Facsimile Finder (based in Italy at the time, now in San Marino) to publish the completed work.
To say the least, I was not completely on board with the concept at first.
I was solely a bookseller, and my business had yet to venture into actually publishing a book. But George was persistent, and our relationship had grown into a solid friendship since that first email. I needed to know more.
George in his Brooklyn studio apartment, working on his new Divine Comedy.
Who was George, and why did he love the Divine Comedy so much?
I will never forget the first conversation I had with George about how his love for the Italian language and the Divine Comedy took hold.
He took me back to his high school days.
After disastrously failing his French class, George was told he had no capacity to ever learn a living language. Placing George in Latin class and hoping for the best, his teachers couldn’t have imagined the results. A few years later, George took up Italian and Spanish, and using Latin as his baseline, he began to overcome his supposed handicap.
Following this life changing experience, George met Dante Alighieri for the very first time. During his junior year abroad in Florence, Italy, George purchased his first copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
George in the studio, Florence, Italy, 1994
While he sensed the greatness of the Commedia, he had a hard time understanding the depth of its immortal message, and quickly gave it up.
He told me, “Well, I bought a copy that had very poor commentary, the most minimal notes you could possibly imagine. Of course there was no translation, and it was completely hopeless.”
But Dante kept re-entering George’s life like a flame that wouldn’t go out.
At the time, he was doing research for his graphic novel about Homer’s Odyssey, and began reading author James Joyce. Joyce swore that Dante was a greater writer than Shakespeare himself. George shared with me in astonishment as he recounted this memory:
“How can someone say that anybody’s better than Shakespeare? We’re trained to believe and understand that Shakespeare is the maximum. Maximum sophistication, complexity of language, all this stuff… and here James Joyce comes along saying Dante is better. Impossible!”
And so George was perplexed, and decided to give Dante another try.
Finding his current copy still impossible to read, George sought out a number of different copies to compare. And as he delved deeper into the world of Dante, he quickly fell in love.
George’s library of Dante sources
His new obsession led him to examine the complexities of Dante’s language, as well as to carry out extensive iconographic research. I was able to help him with by providing key facsimiles. With over 800 surviving manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, and several of them enriched by magnificent painted scenes, the source material he had to work with was substantial to say the least.
A page from the Facsimile Edition of the Divine Comedy of Alfonso of Aragon
So, George became familiar with seven centuries of art inspired by Dante’s poem. These included giants like Michelangelo, Botticelli, Gustave Doré, and William Blake, but also lesser known artists such as Manfredo Manfredini, Ebba Holm, and Antonio Zatta. | https://medium.com/@giovanni-facsimilefinder/artist-spent-7-years-hand-lettering-illustrating-a-new-divine-comedy-7ce6cde6b6a4 | ['Giovanni Scorcioni'] | 2021-03-19 14:13:14.491000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Culture', 'Books', 'Italy', 'Kickstarter'] |
Plutus Monthly Report — Last Ever Monthly Report (December 2019) | Welcome back to our last monthly report, over the last few weeks the team has been onboarding numerous users and distributing slick Plutus Cards across the UK and Europe.
Pinned Announcements
Our community has been granted Early-Bird access to our services.
Submit your email address to the ‘waiting list’ section of our website and you’ll receive access within 24–48 hours.
A complete public version of our services will be available to the public once the community is on-boarded. This will be completed in the coming weeks.
General Update
Onboarding Users
Last month, the team released Plutus 2.0 to our cherished community members, and we have received some incredibly supportive and positive feedback. We have been consistently onboarding users every day and proudly acquired hundreds of users. In these early stages, while we fine-tune any potential bugs and streamline all processes, our customer service and community manager, David Morrison, and the team have managed to upkeep 100% customer satisfaction in regards to our lean customer support.
Last Monthly Report
Now that we have a fully operational product, the team will be changing our content strategy and moving away from monthly updates. Instead, we will be releasing official announcements and newsworthy posts as they come. Users can stay up to date on the finer details through our various social media channels, most prominently our Discord channel.
Development Update
Android/iOS App Live
Our Plutus app is now fully live on both Android and iOS. Customers can sign up, manage their current account, order a card, and top it up all on-the-go. Since the mobile release, our app has been gradually climbing up the store rankings and achieved high star ratings across both operating systems.
Improving KYC Flow
The team has implemented procedures that will minimise re-checks of documents so users can enjoy an efficient onboarding process; greatly improving conversions from sign-ups to Plutus Card customers.
Mobile App Improvements
The team has made several improvements to our mobile application on both the aesthetics and operational side. We have ironed out the last of the remaining bugs and animated our opening logo on splash page for a more enjoyable user experience.
Additional Developments
The team has also covered countless smaller tasks such as:
troubleshooting card order flow with our banking provider.
cleaning up the database of our legacy members in order to transition them to 2.0.
improving the efficiency of conversions on our DEX platform.
Marketing Update
Emails Campaign
The marketing team has been progressively delivering thousands of emails to our established contacts list that we have acquired over several years in order to onboard as much of our community as possible. The email campaign has seen well-above standard benchmark results and our customer base is quickly growing.
Video Creation
The team has been continually creating video content that can enhance awareness and understanding of our products. Below is one of the recently released videos that showcases our Plutus dashboard; the team has several more prepared behind the scenes that we can release at the appropriate times.
End-of-Year Report
The team is currently working on our end-of-year report that we will release to the public in the coming weeks. This will highlight our achievements over the last 12 months and showcase our vision for the future of Plutus. Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/plutus/plutus-monthly-report-last-ever-monthly-report-december-2019-38fc2883c281 | [] | 2019-12-06 16:20:55.385000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Report'] |
Problems I faced(Part-1)-Authentication as Zuul filter or Servlet filter? | Recently, in one of projects I have been working on needed to introduce manual authentication mechanism — did not use Spring Security, rather manually handled JWT token validation and so on. For this purpose, what I had to do is to intercept requests to validate their authenticity before serving them.
As I was already using zuul for routing requests, I introduced a zuul pre-filter which basically intercepted requests to authenticate them before forwarding them inwards. It worked well as expected. But the problem arose when I sent requests using my own component’s APIs rather than other components’. As zuul was not routing these requests, these were not intercepted by my previously written zuul pre-filter.
What I came to know later that in Spring Boot 2, zuul servlet responsible for routing is placed after dispatcher servlet in the whole request path flow. So basically dispatcher servlet is the only front door that lets every request, one needed to route to another component or one in the same component as zuul is configured, in.
Typical request flow(Simplified)
So I relocated the previously written filter logic responsible for authentication before dispatcher servlet and voila!. It worked. However, this new filter is no more zuul filter rather servlet filter. How interesting is that! | https://medium.com/@samiulmushfik/problems-i-faced-authentication-as-zuul-filter-or-servlet-filter-2f85ad2767ff | ['Samiul Mushfik'] | 2020-12-23 10:57:10+00:00 | ['Spring Boot', 'Authentication', 'Netflix Zuul', 'Servlet'] |
It’s Not All About the Materials: Here’s How to Upcycle Using Minimal Energy, Resource and Expense | It’s Not All About the Materials: Here’s How to Upcycle Using Minimal Energy, Resource and Expense MINIWIZ Sep 23, 2020·6 min read
As waste and pollution levels increase across the globe, businesses will need to use new methods of production to reduce resource consumption, maximize energy efficiency, and support a sustainable economic and environmental future.
Upcycling can be much cheaper than recycling, since it does not require the additional processes that are involved in breaking down an item into its raw materials.
Upcycling can find a place in a variety of industries. From brewing and food to construction and electronics, businesses all over the globe can benefit from the reduced costs associated with harnessing and reshaping materials that already exist.
By reducing manufacturing costs, cutting resource consumption, and maximizing energy efficiency, companies will not only raise their bottom line, but also contribute to a more sustainable economy and a healthier environment.
Upcycling is the reuse of discarded materials to create new products of higher value than the originals. The process involves re-adapting, re-purposing, and re-engineering parts and processes in creative ways to give old items second lives.
Popularized by American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart in a 2002 book titled, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, upcycling has gained traction in recent years for its capacity to provide real value while reducing waste and material consumption across a variety of industries.
Why Upcycling?
As waste and pollution levels increase across the globe, businesses will need to use new methods of production to reduce resource consumption, maximize energy efficiency, and support a sustainable economic and environmental future.
Upcycling offers us a way to do exactly that. By reusing goods and materials that are already in circulation, we can avoid extracting new resources while still engaging in innovative production and creating huge amounts of economic value.
By its nature, upcycling is far more energy efficient, eco-friendly, and cost-effective than traditional product development and material creation methods:
Reusing existing materials requires fewer stages of processing.
Businesses can avoid using expensive, often toxic, manufacturing chemicals.
The cost of producing upcycled products is often much lower than the cost of producing traditionally manufactured goods.
Recycling vs. Upcycling
At this point, you might be wondering: what is the difference between upcycling and recycling?
As far as processes go, the two are distinctly different:
Recycling breaks discarded items down into their raw materials for the express purpose of being made into completely new items. For example, when plastic bottles get recycled, they are broken down into raw plastic, which can be used to make T-shirts, sneakers, carpeting, or new bottles.
breaks discarded items down into their raw materials for the express purpose of being made into completely new items. For example, when plastic bottles get recycled, they are broken down into raw plastic, which can be used to make T-shirts, sneakers, carpeting, or new bottles. Upcycling can be thought of as a form of recycling, but the process does not break down items. Instead, it focuses on the creative reuse and re-purposing of used products while still maintaining the quality and integrity of the original products’ constituent materials.
Upcycling can be much cheaper than recycling, since it does not require the additional processes that are involved in breaking down an item into its raw materials.
Upcycling Across Industries
Upcycling can find a place in a variety of industries. From brewing and food to construction and electronics, businesses all over the globe can benefit from the reduced costs associated with harnessing and reshaping materials that already exist.
In fashion, fabrics and textiles from discarded clothing can be used to create other articles of clothing or items like bags, curtains, and bookmarks. Nike, for instance, partnered with Miniwiz to create new shoe packaging made from 100 percent post-consumer waste such as juice containers and coffee lids. Nike also appointed Miniwiz to launch NikeLab, a project that reused production waste, recycled materials, and discarded Nike footwear/apparel.
Furniture can be repurposed in a similar way. Hops Chair, for instance, is a unique piece of furniture built entirely using post-consumer waste and production waste. Even at home, you can transform a shabby window frame into the perfect set of hanging photo frames for your living room.
There are even products like Pickmaster, a device that allows you to construct your own guitar picks using soft plastic waste from old credit cards, bottles, grocery bags, and product wrappers for biscuits, chips, and other food items.
In construction, Miniwiz began to build and design projects using recycled materials in 2005. The company’s portfolio features the prominent “House of Trash” in Milan, Italy, which made waves with its 2018 opening. Miniwiz also collaborated on projects such as the Nike Kicks Lounge X Xinyi A11, the SDTI E-Waste Recycling Facility, and the Jackie Chan Stuntman Training Center.
But there is always room for improvement. Miniwiz is committed to optimizing the process of upcycling with re-engineering — analyzing the systems involved in industrial upcycling in order to make adjustments that reduce waste and curb materials and energy usage. Among the many possible changes, improvements can include:
Upgrading or replacing the types of machines used
Changing how machines are used
Adjusting steps in the production process
Miniwiz has produced a number of projects that involved rigorous re-engineering practices that greatly reduced product, material, water, and energy waste. By prioritizing both the product and the process, the company doubles down on its commitment to support and encourage sustainable, eco-friendly manufacturing processes.
Ready-to-Use Upcycling Solutions
Our work showcases Miniwiz’s dedication to cost-effective, waste reducing, and energy efficient solutions that do not compromise product quality, style, or functionality. The company’s offerings are expanding rapidly — Miniwiz is currently preparing to launch Trashpresso, a ready-to-use recycling unit that converts plastic trash (such as bottles, caps, and ringlets) to “tiles” that can be used to construct a variety of housing products, including walls, floors, and architectural decor.
Transform Plastic Trash to Tiles (Image Source)
A single Trashpresso is made up of a 40-foot processing unit plus a 20-foot solar cell unit. The ready-to-go upcycling machine is not only capable of producing new materials from common waste, but also supported and sustained by a source of renewable energy. Trashpresso is also built to handle worst-case scenarios — Miniwiz has equipped the unit with a backup diesel generator for emergencies.
MiniTrashpresso 2020
Conclusion
Upcycling is an innovative and environmentally-friendly way for businesses to create new products and provide value for their customers without sacrificing environmental health. By reducing manufacturing costs, cutting resource consumption, and maximizing energy efficiency, companies will not only raise their bottom line, but also contribute to a more sustainable economy and a healthier environment.
Now, more than ever, the world needs sustainable, scalable business practices. Miniwiz stands on the front lines as a prime example of how companies should harness upcycling and use re-engineering to cut costs, find sustainable and responsible production methods, and create value in a variety of industries.
Interested in finding out what upcycling can do for your business? Check out our solutions today and learn more about Miniwiz’s projects here. | https://medium.com/@miniwiz/its-not-all-about-the-materials-here-s-how-to-upcycle-using-minimal-energy-resource-and-expense-719dea036786 | [] | 2020-09-23 12:32:30.247000+00:00 | ['Material Design', 'Recycling', 'Cradle To Cradle', 'Upcycle', 'Solutions'] |
Knowledge (KNW) Trading Live On BiteBTC! | KNW Token trading is now live on BiteBTC! Trade KNW with BTC, and ETH trading pairs.
The Knowledge team is pleased to announce KNW Token listing on BiteBTC. BiteBTC is a Top-100 cryptocurrency exchange according to CoinMarketCap’s volume rankings, with over 75 trading pairs.
TRADE KNW NOW: https://bitebtc.com/ | https://medium.com/knowledgeio/knowledge-knw-trading-live-on-bitebtc-4c63b7cdaa80 | [] | 2018-10-18 14:14:18.101000+00:00 | ['Knowledge', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Swipe to Refresh .. not showing. Why? | This is a quiz for you (with Answer beneath).
I have the following codes for my Swipe-to-Refresh. But there’s one problem. Whenever I perform a network call that invoke showRefreshProgressBar(), the swipe-to-refresh icon didn’t show. Normal user swipe-to-refresh works.
Can you find out why? (Stackoverflow doesn’t have the answer for it).
// Initialize my Swipe-to-refresh to perform the Network Service
private void initSwipeToRefreshView() {
swipeRefreshLayout.setEnabled(shouldEnablePullToRefresh());
swipeRefreshLayout.setOnRefreshListener(
new SwipeRefreshLayout.OnRefreshListener() {
@Override
public void onRefresh() {
beginNetworkService();
}
}
);
} // Call when the a network service is invoke. We should disable
// further swipe-to-refresh since we don't want a double network
// call
public void showRefreshProgressBar() {
if (swipeRefreshLayout != null &&
!swipeRefreshLayout.isRefreshing()) {
swipeRefreshLayout.post(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
swipeRefreshLayout.setRefreshing(true);
swipeRefreshLayout.setEnabled(false);
}
});
}
} // Call when the a network service is done. We should re-enable
// swipe-to-refresh as now we allow user to refresh it.
public void hideRefreshProgressBar() {
if (swipeRefreshLayout != null &&
swipeRefreshLayout.isRefreshing()) {
swipeRefreshLayout.post(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
swipeRefreshLayout.setRefreshing(false);
swipeRefreshLayout.setEnabled(true);
}
});
}
}
The Answer
Apparently, swipeToRefresh.enable(false) will reset everything and clear the animation and it’s visibility. The code as below
@Override
public void setEnabled(boolean enabled) {
super.setEnabled(enabled);
if (!enabled) {
reset();
}
} void reset() {
mCircleView.clearAnimation();
mProgress.stop();
mCircleView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
setColorViewAlpha(MAX_ALPHA);
// .... More Codes
}
So, to fix my problem, just fix the second function by swapping the position of setEnable and setRefreshing. | https://medium.com/mobile-app-development-publication/swipe-to-refresh-not-showing-why-96b76c5c93e7 | [] | 2018-01-23 10:04:13.234000+00:00 | ['Android', 'AndroidDev', 'Android App Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'Android Development'] |
Getting started with the Linked List | Welcome Back Readers,
Welcome Back
Introduction
I am Dhruv Trehan, Microsoft Student Partner and Coding Blocks Campus Representative from India. This blog brought to you, under the initiative started by me #10DaysofInnovation. I would be sharing my learning with students all across the globe, as a step towards learning in a community. In this blog, I would be documenting the information based on the self-made notes while, I was learning Linked List.
C++
Objective
The objective of the article is to acquaint readers with “Linked List in C++”.
Relatively, we would be covering the: Basics of Linked List Linked List Vs. Arrays Basic Operation in Linked List Insertion, Deletion, Search, Reversing, Building and Printing the Linked List
Implementation
Linked List is a linear collection of the data elements. It is data structure consisting of collection of nodes which together represents the sequence. Each node consists of:
Data Reference (Address to next node)
Linked List
Features of Linked List
· Structure of Linked List allows the efficient insertion or removal of an element at any position
· Access time is linear in Linked List
· Random access is not feasible in Linked List
· Arrays have better cache locality compared to Linked List
Cache Locality(Locality of Reference or Principal of Locality): Tendency of a processor to access same set of memory location repetitively over a shorter period of a time.
Benefit of a Linked List over an array
The list items could be easily removed or re-inserted without any reallocation or reorganization of an entire structure because data items could not be restored contiguously. In the disk, while restructuring in an array is a long process
Linked List are dynamic, so the length of the list can be increased or decreased depending upon situation. However, the length of the array remains same as that at the time of deceleration and cannot be changed.
Node
Node is a basic unit of a data structure such as linked list or tree data structure. Node basically comprises of the data and reference to be connected with the other nodes. Let us create a class node in C++.
Declaring a Node in C++
Most of you, would think why a constructor is created while declaring a node? The reason behind, this is:
· To dynamically allocate space for the node · To initialize data members of class · As the node is being used in multiple operations in a code, to make it reachable
Basic operations in Linked List
Now, we would discuss the basic operations of the Linked List
Counting the number of elements in the linked list
Here, we would calculate the total number of elements in the linked list.
Counting the length of the Linked List
DRY RUN:
· The loop would be executed, till the value of head is not equal to NULL · We have declared a count pointer whose value would increase, till the loop doesn’t terminate · The value of the count would be the length of the linked list
Insertion (Adding element in the list)
Insertion means adding a new node in a linked list. Insertion is of three types:
Insert at Head
The following code is implemented to insert the node at the head in the linked list:
Inserting at Head
DRY RUN
· LINE 1: The void function is passed with the parameters The first parameter is pointing to the NULL in the memory , used as a reference pointer to the the node The second parameter is a data to be added in the linked list · LINE 3: It is a dynamic allocation of a heap memory to the value passed by the main (Data) · LINE 4: ‘->’ is a reference pointer used to point to the members of the class. The value of is changed with the address of the head · LINE 5: The address of head would change to the address of the data passed
Insert at the tail
The following code is implemented to insert the node at the tail in the linked list.
Insert at the Tail in the Linked List
DRY RUN
LINE 4–8: In the above statement, the condition where only one element passed in list is checked LINE 10: A new pointer named “Tail” is declared with passing value of “Head” LINE 12–15: Loop runs until “Tail” reaches to the end of the Linked List LINE 17: With the help of constructor a new pointer named n is customized LINE 19: Value is added at the end of the tail pointer
Insert at the Middle
The following code is implemented to Insert the node in the middle of the linked list:
Inserting in the Middle of Linked List
DRY RUN:
· LINE 3–6: In the “IF” Statement, the base condition is check, if it has only one node, so “Insertathead()” function is called.
· LINE 7–10: In the “ELSE IF” Statement, the second condition is checked, if the length of the given linked list is more than the required length. In such a case, “Insertattail()” function is called.
· LINE 11–24: In the “ELSE” Statement:
A new variable “JUMP” is assigned with value 1 A new pointer “Temp” is assigned with value “head” A loop is customized till, the jump is not equal to the (entered position — 1) A new node (n) is dynamically allocated the memory using the constructor Now, n (node to added) would point to the node next to its position Now, address of next would point to the node that is no be inserted
Deletion (Removing the element from the list)
Deletion means removing the node from the Linked List. Deletion are of three types:
Delete at Head
The following code is implemented to delete at the head of the linked list:
Deleting at the Head
DRY RUN:
LINE 3–7: Basic condition is checked, that the element exist in linked list or not
LINE 8–14: In the “ELSE” Statement:
A new pointer name temp is declared with value (head) Head is made to point to next variable Finally the head which was assigned to temp is deleted Return statement is executed
Deleting at Tail
The following code is implemented to delete at the Tail of the linked list:
Deleting at the Tail
DRY RUN:
LINE 19: A new node named “Temp” would be pointing to head (the value is NULL) LINE 20–24: A loop is executed until the value of temp is NULL Prev is pointing to one less than a last node Temp is pointing to the last node LINE 25: Temp is deleted LINE 26: Prev which store last node, is made to point to NULL LINE 27: Finally, a value is returned
Deleting at the Mid
The following code is implemented to delete at the middle of the linked list:
Deleting at the Mid
DRY RUN
LINE 32–42 Variable “I” is pointed to 1 A pointer is declared in which stores the value “head” A loop is executed ; till the position where to delete the node is not found As, the loop is terminated The value of prev is changed to the node which is to be deleted The value of fast is changed to next of the deleted node Finally delete prev Return from the function take place
Searching in the linked list
Searching means finding the element in the Linked List:
Searching in the Linked List
DRY RUN
It is the recursive function to search the element in the Linked List
The three conditions are implemented in the DRY RUN
The “IF” Statement states that, “ the value at the head is 0” then return would be executed
The second “IF” Statement states that is a base case of recursive statement, if the data is found true is returned
The “Else” Statement is a recursive case in which the the value is passed again and again
Reversing the Linked List
Reversing the linked list, means changing the order of the given list.
Reversing the linked list
DRY RUN:
A normal reversal take place using swap of the variables
You can refer to swapping to understand the context
Building the Linked List
Here, we would learn a way to build a linked list.
Build a list
DRY RUN
In this code , data is asked from the user, till the user doesn’t input -1 The data is added in the Linked List in the sequential manner using insertatTail() method
Printing the Linked List
This code is used to print the linked list:
Printing the Linked List
DRY RUN:
· Value of head is stored at the local pointer, in the temp
· A while loop is executed until the NULL Statement is reached
· Simultaneously, linked list is printed and value of temp is changed
Conclusion
Here, we come to the end of this blog. In this blog, the author discussed the concept of Linked List, covering the basic operations in linked list like: Insertion, Deletion, Searching, Building a linked list, Reversing a Linked List, and Print the Linked List.
Acknowledgment
I have created a repository to share my daily code byte, I would learn in Data Structure and Algorithm.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/DhruvTrehan/Data-Structure-and-algorithm | https://medium.com/coding-blocks/getting-started-with-the-linked-list-8cae4e7aaa68 | ['Dhruv Trehan'] | 2020-06-10 18:14:17.488000+00:00 | ['C Programming', 'Linked Lists', 'Lists', 'Data Structures', 'Algorithms'] |
Introducing: Jose Aguinaga, developer and blockchain technologies evangelist | Hello world! I’m Jose Aguinaga, a web3 developer, a full-stack engineer, and a cryptography enthusiast based in Switzerland. I’m currently the Head of Engineering at HOPR, a privacy-first blockchain project, and a tech consultant at Enigma Technologies OÜ, an E-Residency Estonian company. I’ve been around the crypto industry for the past four years, and I’m excited to share my experience with Portis’ users and developers alike and work alongside them to create new and exciting content together.
Background and experience
While pursuing my degree in Computer Science, I focused my career on web technologies and started to write about my learnings. In 2016, I wrote my first article at Medium, a satirical piece that made fun of the state of the web industry then, which landed me a spot as the keynote speaker at the JSDay 2017 in Verona, Italy.
Sharing about my experience has been one of the most rewarding feelings I’ve had as an engineer.
Since then, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and engage with developers and startups across the world. I gave talks about web cryptography and payments, which quickly took me to the blockchain ecosystem. By 2017, I was already exploring storing data in the Bitcoin blockchain. Before the end of the year, I was sharing my experience again in Zug, Switzerland, which would shortly become the “Crypto Valley” of startups.
A receipt for the purchase of BTC from the train station at Zug, one of the first initiatives from the city to convert every train ticket machine into a Bitcoin ATM.
The 2017 ICO hype, MyBit and crypto winter
During what is known as the 2017 ICO hype, I had my first crypto-startup experience as the CTO of MyBit, a wealth management startup on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. I was brought in after their ICO to help them build the MyBit ecosystem, a series of smart contracts, SDK, UI libraries & APIs to allow users, investors, and developers alike to engage with physical assets.
At MyBit, I quickly learned about what it means to be part of a crypto startup and the challenges that such a volatile market introduces.
At that point in time, the ecosystem was pushing new projects daily. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but most of them were interesting or were trying to change the way some concepts, like money, identity, or governance, were being defined. At that point, gold was being tokenized, art was defined in NFTs, and governments were toying with the idea of “Digital Identity”. The bull market had created optimism in blockchain technologies that moved it away from just trading and Bitcoin.
The bull market created a new series of exciting events, from hackathons to conferences. Here I am participating in the “Digital Citizenship” hackathon organized in cooperation with Lykke, the Blockchain Buero Liechtenstein, and Holochain. Picture by the HUS Institute, who organized the event in late 2017.
However, within a year, a new bear market would halt the optimism in anything cryptocurrency-wise. By early as January of 2018, thousands of coins, including Bitcoin, would lose 30–60% of their value or more. Known as the cryptocurrency crash, it would be the beginning of the crypto winter that would last over two years. Before the end of 2019, MyBit AG would close down operations. Like most startups at the time, the challenges in terms of user adoption, token economics, and general UX limitations in the crypto market, alongside a newly found skepticism in the crypto industry as a whole, brought the company funds to zero.
A new start: marriage and HOPR
To recover from the bear market, I did the only thing that made sense: get married! (HODL!!). After being engaged for over one year with my wife and traveling back and forward between Switzerland and Mexico, I thought it was time to settle down. In September of 2019, we tied the knot and went on a month-long holiday. By then, I was still recovering from the economic and mental pressure the collapse of MyBit had done on my persona, so I let myself have a long holiday for the first time over the last two years.
My wife became my rock over the last years during all the crypto madness. For better or worse, the crypto crash finally gave us a break from all the excitement the 2017 hype has brought.
As luck would have it, my honeymoon included Osaka, where I re-synced with an old friend, Dr. Sebastian Büergel who was participating at DevCon5 in the same city (sadly I missed DevCon5, as surprisingly enough, my wife didn’t like it as part of our romantic getaway). Sebastian invited me to check out HOPR, an open-source Layer-0 mixnet, where users would be incentivized to work as nodes to relay traffic. After learning about the project and learning about their technology, I jumped on a few calls, and the rest, as they say, is history. As of today, I work with a skilled team on the open-source HOPR protocol, which relies on the powerful libp2p library, to change the concept of data privacy for good.
HOPR’s founding team: Rik Krieger, Sebastian Bürgel, and Robert Kiel. I took the picture! Multiple online publications will soon use it to share the news about Binance’s investment in HOPR.
Portis and what’s next
Throughout these years, I have been closely following many projects across the industry. I’ve been to DevCon4, participated in online hackathons, engaged in the open-source community, and even joined the online KERNEL fellowship. I’m particularly obsessed about cryptography, privacy, and identity, and I’ve always wanted to share some thoughts on how blockchain is impacting society, in both the physical and digital world.
So when Scott approached me and invited me to publish articles as a guest author within Portis, it was an easy decision for me to take. I’ve followed Portis since they implemented gas-relay on user wallets, and had found their non-custodial wallets architecture based on end-to-end encryption quite impressive. With their latest acquisition by Shapeshift, there are multiple avenues for enhancement which I am excited to participate in.
Together, we will be publishing posts on multiple topics around custodianship, identity, developer experience, and general know-how about blockchain and cryptography. We’ll be sharing some stories, and although we’ll be revolving around the Portis & Shapeshift ecosystem, we’ll also be creating exciting content for the industry as a whole.
It’s my pleasure to support Portis in their effort to increase content for the blockchain ecosystem, to benefit everyone in the industry. The creation of exciting, academic, and useful content is useful for both newcomers and veterans. Together, we are looking to take an in-depth look into the technology around blockchain, and leverage the Portis platform to engage with developers and users alike. | https://medium.com/portis/introducing-jose-aguinaga-developer-and-blockchain-technologies-evangelist-7a6461e4521a | ['Jose Aguinaga'] | 2020-12-14 20:36:17.611000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Ethereum', 'Programming', 'Blockchain', 'Developer'] |
German grammar phobia? We got your cure! | Are there grammar topics that you simply cannot wrap your head around? Then check out our German language blog with many posts explaining everything from the cases, pronouns, adjective endings to prepositiosn and German word order- you name it. Let’s make your German grammar phobia a thing of the past! | https://medium.com/@olesen-tuition/german-grammar-phobia-we-got-your-cure-fa4d32aa96da | ['Olesen Tuition', 'The German Lessons Specialist'] | 2021-02-19 15:35:45.527000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Grammar', 'Germany', 'German', 'Deutsch'] |
Its Your World by Goldsmith REVIEW | Upon pressing play the track (Its Your World) greets you with a soulful, feel good melody. The horns are so heavy yet triumphant. It feels as though we, the audience, have been granted access to a PJ for the very first time.
Gold instantly puts us in a dream-like state with his opening words, “If I could fly away”. And BOOM, like a slingshot, every word thereafter sends us deeper into this adventure.Feelings of FREEDOM and limitlessness invade my psyche.
Undoubtedly, it’s time to buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Doubt, Inhibition and Fear are prohibited on this journey. This adventure is built upon achieving the dream one sought after. No matter how big the dream, no matter how shitty the initial circumstances. We can imply that all challenges, obstacles, setbacks, etc. were all worth it.
If we didn’t know any better we would assume Gold already made it based on his travel destinations mentioned throughout this joint. We would also assume that he has already acquired the accolades of a triple platinum artist.
We measure success by ones access to wealth, control of one’s time and the means to go wherever one desires. We know exactly what will be on Golds itinerary as the success continues to grow. Hov called this phenomenon Now-n-later raps. Over here we call that the earliest stage of manifestation, which is to visualization.
One of the true treasures of Gold’s artistry is the fact that he is not selfish with the dream. He could have easily named the song, Its MY world. Instead, Bro invited us all the adventure. I believe that he is challenging us to dream big. I think Gold truly wants us all to get a slice of this freedom he alludes to in the song.
I am looking forward to Gold’s most recent project, Hear This, which is streaming on all major streaming platforms. I am honored to be one of the first writers to cover Goldsmith’s journey. The Hear This review is on thee way. | https://medium.com/@meauxzart/its-your-world-by-goldsmith-review-78d24a0950f8 | ['Meaux Zart'] | 2021-08-09 16:21:17.018000+00:00 | ['Songs', 'Music', 'Hip Hop', 'Art', 'Rap'] |
Code Smell 01 — Anemic Models | Code Smell 01 — Anemic Models
Your objects are a bunch of public attributes without behavior.
Photo by Stacey Vandergriff on Unsplash
Protocol is empty (with setters/getters).
If we ask a domain expert to describe an entity he/she would hardly tell it is ‘a bunch of attributes’.
Problems
No Encapsulation.
No mapping to real world entities.
Duplicate Code
Coupling
Solutions
1) Find Responsibilities.
2) Protect your attributes.
3) Hide implementations.
4) Delegate
Examples
DTOs
Sample Code
Wrong
Right
Detection
Detection can be automated with sophisticated linters ignoring setters and getters and counting real behavior methods.
Also Known as
Data Class
Tags
Anemic
OOP as Data
Encapsulation
Setters/Getters
Mutability
More info | https://medium.com/dev-genius/code-smell-01-anemic-models-f9fb5a1323b3 | ['Maximiliano Contieri'] | 2020-10-25 01:19:11.084000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Code Smells', 'Clean Code', 'Object Oriented', 'Programming'] |
A critical analysis of notification systems | What effect could the iOS notification system have?
iOS notification system respects the user’s behavior of ignoring a notification. It does so by pushing notifications to the lock screen once and if the user ignores it (by unlocking the phone without interacting with any notification), it resets the lock screen to its clean state. This; in my view, is a form of balanced interruption — it interrupts the user once but doesn’t keep getting in the way every time the user interacts with the phone.
However, it doesn’t do a good job at managing and organizing those notifications; especially important ones. Here’s a scenario –
Let’s say Bob is on an iPhone. He has a dozen Instagram notifications above a text message notification from mom. To worsen things; in a few hours, there are so many notifications in the notification center that he cannot go through each of them. He clears them all.
Badges are sprinkled across the springboard (image from https://images.homescreen.me/images/user5688/screens/screens_2x/564eb646544418ff.png)
This creates an imbalance — the most important notifications are lost in the shuffle as it is overwhelming to look at a huge stream of alerts in a single place (on top of that, iOS treats every notification as its own cell and does not group multiple notifications into one).
Now app badges are designed for this very purpose — so that each app can tell you that it needs your attention. However, too many badges could lead to divided attention, distraction and anxiety. Badges could have a similar effect to Android’s persistent notifications but only worse — they cannot be cleared easily.
How Might We...? Create a notification system that has balanced interruption but also provides powerful techniques for notification management. BONUS How might we..? Create a notification system that does not make notifications hard to manage by stashing them all in a drawer.
Triggers — what leads to a notification?
Currently, notifications are organized by time and by app. Android goes a step ahead though — in my observation over a few months, notifications seem to be organized by priority. For example, a call or a reminder may stay on top but other items get shuffled to the bottom of the list as more items accumulate over time.
In order to truly understand the different types of notifications, we must know the different types of triggers that cause a notification. A trigger (in this context) is any human or system that causes a notification on the end-user’s smartphone. When we look at a notification, we know the person or system behind it; and that is what makes triggers important.
Our smartphones do not categorize our notifications based on triggers. Here are some examples of the different kinds of triggers (and this just scratches the surface)– | https://uxdesign.cc/a-critical-analysis-of-notification-systems-4956ed86a804 | [] | 2017-06-14 16:09:57.814000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Design', 'User Experience', 'Android', 'UX'] |
Sex Work in The Digital Age: OnlyFans, Camgirls, Oh My! | In the case of eroticism and sex work women have often been denied autonomy; From “full service” sex workers to pornstars, these women have too often been taken advantage of. Today, however, things are seemingly changing. Enter OnlyFans, a website catered primarily to sex workers who wish to entertain their audiences on an exclusive site. Onlyfans allows customers to subscribe to sex workers’ profiles for a monthly rate of the performer’s choosing. They receive exclusive content such as photos and videos. Simple, right? Not so much.
While this can prove to be extremely lucrative it’s not without hard work such as promotion and catering to fans. Many sex workers use various platforms to promote their work, as to maximize client outreach. Some women cater to specific fetishes and kinks, while others have a specific niche they stick to. However, the more inclusive the more money you’re inclined to make. While this may seem like easy money to many it does come with its downsides.
There are of course people who subscribe to women’s OnlyFans accounts for the sole purpose of sharing the content with others. Somewhere, in a corner of the internet exists a sect of people that dedicate their time to violating women’s autonomy and privacy. If a woman is popular enough you can find her content on any hub or tube site dedicated to pornography. There are even sites and DropBox accounts dedicated to reuploading these women’s content. Although, OnlyFans isn’t the only medium for online sex work. Some women use social media to advertise their escort services. It varies.
In the context of an individual perspective from a female sex worker, I’ve interviewed one-Keira Kinner and asked her about her thoughts regarding starting out in the industry, the costs of production, telling family and more:
Q. Was starting out as a sex worker difficult? If so, how?
A. I would say yes and no to that first question; no because I’m a very open person with my sexuality and I love sex. It’s fun for me and I enjoy giving people pleasure. The most difficult part would be telling my parents and my family because I’m from a little town; once one person knew everybody knew. My parents have actually been been pretty fucking supportive so that’s great
Q. Would you say onlyfans is a more stable route than more freelance sex work?
A. Again, yes and no. OnlyFans has given sex workers the platform to be in charge. of their money and that’s amazing. They don’t have to go through anyone to get their money and I think it’s incredible. But also, they still have restrictions. You can’t talk about certain fetishes. I know full service sex workers who have gotten their accounts wiped because OnlyFans doesn’t want to be associated with full service sex workers. If you want to support us, support them as a whole. I feel like a lot of sites or businesses are for sex workers but not actually. They want the aspects of the glamor and the “easy money”; I say “easy money” because it’s not really easy at all. It’s really glamorized especially with this stripper movement. I wouldn’t say there is a stable route for sex work. I wouldn’t say there’s a stable route for sex work until we start decriminalizing it and that’s the sad truth of it. We have no laws to protect us. Everything is against use especially if you’re full service. And that’s just really shitty.
Q. How much money goes into your equipment, clothes, hair etc.?
A. When I was first starting out any extra money I made would go to lingerie or maybe a new toy. I did add up one time how much money I spent on things like lingerie, toys, equipment and stuff for customers and it was about $3,000 to $5,000.
Q. Do you think sex work will become more “mainstream” in the future?
A. I think it is being over glamorized right now. It’s- the industry is sort of over saturated by people who have this hope in their head that they’ll start OnlyFans and make $10,000 in their first month, which isn’t unrealistic or anything but most people don’t have the platform or promotion tools that they need to be successful. And their are serious consequences to sex work. You have to take into consideration that even when you do decide to stop, anybody has access to your nudes at that point. Bad people have access to your nudes and people love to doxx-to leak private information such as phone number, address, and information about family members- sex workers and people just don’t take that into consideration. I’m okay with having my nudes on the internet forever. I’ve dealt with that internally. But some people don’t realize that and it’s sad sometimes. It’s just don’t get into this if you genuinely don’t like most of the aspects of sex and you’re not comfortable in your body. Don’t do this, this is not for you. If you don’t feel like you have sex appeal this is not for you. I don’t know, I just love sex and love myself. To be honest I didn’t get into this for the money because I was not making that much money at first. I think it will continue to be mainstream because peoplethink we just make money all day, taking nudes and having sex all day, not realizing that we have to get off of our asses and edit and produce this beautiful content. | https://medium.com/@jsmnrn/sex-work-in-the-digital-age-onlyfans-camgirls-oh-my-28f41d337341 | ['Jasmine Renae'] | 2020-03-10 20:50:17.907000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Onlyfans', 'Sex'] |
Restaurant Industry In Economic Free Fall — Here Are Brutal The Numbers | Photo by Siyuan on Unsplash
The restaurant industry is in an economic free fall due to months of closings and dining limitations. For those who don’t know, restaurants are the nation’s second-largest private sector employer — with employees at independent eateries, regional and national chains, and franchisees.
The National Restaurant Association (NRA) has now published the results of a new survey that shows how big the problems are, „and the results should galvanize Republicans and Democrats alike to finally reach agreement on a compromise coronavirus relief package for our industry and employees, our suppliers, and the communities that rely on the strength of the industry ”, as they write here.
These are the brutal findings of the survey:
– 87% of fullservice restaurants (independent, chain, and franchise) report an average 36% drop in sales revenue. For an industry with an average profit margin of 5%-6%, this is simply unsustainable. – 83% of fullservice operators expect sales to be even worse over the next three months. – Although sales are significantly lower for most independent and franchise owners, their costs have not fallen by a proportional level. 59% of operators say their total labor costs (as a percentage of sales) are higher than they were pre-pandemic. – The future remains bleak. 58% of chain and independent fullservice operators expect continued furloughs and layoffs for at least the next three months.
In the letter the NRA also notes that the tide of restaurant closures and bankruptcies continues to rise — „sweeping away jobs in some of the most venerated independent and chain restaurants.“
– We predict that as of today, 17% of restaurants — more than 110,000 establishments — are completely closed. – The vast majority of permanently closed restaurants were well-established businesses, and fixtures in their communities. On average these restaurants had been in business for 16 years, and 16% had been open for at least 30 years. – Only 48% of these former restaurant owners say it is likely they will remain in the industry in any form in the months or years ahead. Our nation is losing a generation of of industry talent, knowledge and entrepreneurial spirit.
It goes on: „What these findings make clear is that more than 500,000 restaurants of every business type — franchise, chain, and independent — are in an unprecedented economic decline. And for every month that passes without a solution from Congress, thousands more restaurants across the country will close their doors for good.“
The Association hopes that the Congress will act fast: „In short, the restaurant industry simply cannot wait for relief any longer. Efforts in Washington to find the “perfect” solution are laudable, but the lack of progress in the meantime has led too many operators to give up on the government and close down for good. Since our last update to you, less than three months ago, an additional 10,000 restaurants have closed nationwide.“
Want to receive a daily newsletter about topics like this? Subscribe here. | https://medium.com/@jonahw/restaurant-industry-in-economic-free-fall-here-are-brutal-the-numbers-ac0ef1d9214 | ['Jonah Williams'] | 2020-12-09 09:39:17.462000+00:00 | ['Industry', 'Restaurant', 'Work', 'Economics', 'Coronavirus'] |
Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP | Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP Mark Rittman Follow Jun 2, 2018 · 1 min read
In this series of three blogs on Oracle Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition I’ve setup an object store data lake in Oracle Cloud using Oracle Big Data Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud, and ingested streams of real-time event data from IoT and social media sources into Oracle Cloud’s object storage service using Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service.
Read more at the new home of the MJR Analytics blog. | https://medium.com/mark-rittman/oracle-big-data-cloud-event-hub-and-analytics-cloud-data-lake-edition-pt-3-95d38c9e5148 | ['Mark Rittman'] | 2018-10-16 19:50:05.921000+00:00 | ['Oracle', 'Oracle Cloud', 'Data Lake', 'Analytics', 'Big Data'] |
Why Google’s new app logos are pretty (&) bad | The culprit: A very restrictive design system
After spending a while trying to create usable icon designs within Google’s icon design framework, I realised it’s just too restrictive for its purpose. Icons are often used in small sizes of just 16 x 16 pt in case of the favicon in the browser. For such a small area, an icon design system needs to leave enough flexibility to create clearly recognisable icons in at least one of the categories of distinction listed above. — Let’s look at the issues in Google’s approach:
Problem 1: Use all the colours
Most other brands use colours to differentiate between their apps. Each app gets one primary colour—a system that is established and works very well. Google misses this opportunity by forcing all of its primary colours into each icon. It’s nearly impossible to create distinct icons when every icon ends up being a rainbow.
Google could fix this by having a better distribution of colours, where each app gets assigned a primary colour which needs to make up around 80 percent of the colours in its icon.
Problem 2: Always use outlines
Every icon must be constructed using thick lines and all should have a negative space in the middle. — How many distinct shapes does this allow to create in the limited space of an icon? You’ll always end up with something square-ish or circle-ish. Not enough variety.
Google could fix this by allowing a greater variety of stroke widths, allowing more distinct shapes (as seen in the Gmail icon), creating a finer grid allowing for more weighted colour distribution, etc.
The core of the problems: Brand over Usability
The bottom line is simple and very surprising for Google: The icon design system is designed so users can easily differentiate any Google app from a non Google app. It’s not designed to differentiate various Google apps from each other.
I think that’s the wrong approach. Users are rarely using multiple providers equally. Google users will primarily use the Google tools, therefore primarily need to distinguish between the Google apps, rather than distinguish them from say Microsoft Office apps.
Such blunder is especially uncommon for Google, which usually priorities usability above almost anything else (apart from profit?). This goes to the extent where even shades of colours are tested instead of having a designer chose. It’s really surprising Google didn’t test and spot the issues with its new icons before releasing them. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/why-googles-new-app-icons-are-pretty-bad-10f1ec40ab04 | ['Markus Hofmann'] | 2020-11-03 06:15:16.520000+00:00 | ['UX', 'Branding', 'Logo Design', 'Icons', 'Usability'] |
Would Jordan have been a champion without Pippen? (a single view) | Grafiti
Grafiti is the first search engine for graphs & charts. | https://medium.com/grafiti/would-jordan-have-been-a-champion-without-pippen-a-single-view-617b7fff9227 | ['Farhan Mustafa'] | 2017-10-04 22:46:31.248000+00:00 | ['Basketball', 'Sports', 'NBA', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
Press Release Copywriting Guide (How to Write a Press Release) | Journalists are constantly on the hunt for good stories and leads.
That’s why writing press releases can be a great marketing move by your company.
Publications need stories, and you need exposure. It’s win-win.
But how do you write a press release? How do you promote one?
These are some of the many questions entrepreneurs ask themselves when dealing with news releases for the first time.
The best part about them is that they can be used for anything. This includes new product launches, business openings, or anything in between.
It doesn’t matter what stage or industry you’re business is in, as everyone can benefit from press releases.
Follow along as I teach you about press release copywriting, distribution, and go over some examples to learn from.
What is a press release?
Google defines a press release as the following:
an official statement issued to newspapers giving information on a particular matter.
They are typically brief reports that cover something important before it happens. This offers exclusivity to the publication and their audience. It is also an excellent way to build buzz and anticipation for a business.
Press releases come in two different forms:
Immediate release : Once the news is announced, any publication is freely available to share and republish it. This is good if you’re looking to get as much exposure as humanly possible.
: Once the news is announced, any publication is freely available to share and republish it. This is good if you’re looking to get as much exposure as humanly possible. Limited release: This style of press release is only available to certain publications it’s sent to or only allowed to be published on certain dates. If you’d like only a few select websites to promote your release, this is a good choice.
Types of press releases
Press releases aren’t one-size-fits all. They can be used for many different events and occasions.
Here are some for inspiration.
Did you just release a new product?
Just launched a new product or service? Perfect. Press releases can be used to get the word out.
Elaborate on the pricing, features, and benefits. Talk about the problems it solves and why it’s better than anything else on the market.
While press releases are for exposure and reach, they can certainly drive revenue with the right copywriting.
Mergers and acquisitions
If your company has recently merged with or acquired another company, a press release is an effective way to spread the news. It’s also used to inform current and future stakeholders about the organizational change. Use it as an opportunity to talk about how it will shape the future and growth of the business.
Include information about all of the organizations that were merged or acquired. Add quotes from executive team members.
Live events
Doing a live event online or in-person? Great! Press releases can be used to get more eyes on the event and that means attendees. Include information about the event, where it’s hosted, the price, who it’s for, and what they will learn. Include a link for tickets or where to register.
Related reading: webinar script copywriting.
Openings
Did you just open a new location, office, or business for the first time? Announce this with a press release. Talk about the date, location, who is involved, how it’s being celebrated, and the reason for the new location.
Strategic partnerships
Partnerships are the lifeblood of many large companies. If you’ve recently onboarded a new partner, use it as an opportunity to increase awareness through a press release. Include a summary of each company, how they will grow together, and details for stakeholders.
Hiring and promotions
New CEO? Just hired a new CMO? This is a great opportunity to share the news with the world. Include a biography of the new executive, their background, and what they bring to the table. Include a headshot and other important details or stakeholders.
Rebranding
Redoing a brand can be clunky and awkward. Will customers and the public still recognize you? Announce the rebranding through a press release to avoid confusion and explain to customers why you’ve rehauled the company image. Include details on what’s changed, why, when the changes go into effect, and quotes from the team behind them.
Press release format
It’s crucial that you properly format a press release to ensure that it’s easily readable and looks professional. If it doesn’t look the part, you risk the chance of losing out on publication opportunities.
Below is an example of a press release template. Let’s break down how you can format it exactly like this.
Logo
Include a high resolution logo at the top of the release. It is normally 200x200 pixels, and you may have to email the individual file to publications if they require it, so have it handy.
Release date
When would you like the press release to be unveiled to the public? State this, and the release type, parallel to the contact information.
Contact information
In the case of publications, investors, or other organizations are interested in what you offer, contact information needs to be easily accessible.
Include a contact name, phone number, email, and website URL at the top of the press release.
Headline
I’ll be teaching you how to write press release headlines in a moment, but you normally want it in a larger font, and easily legible. The subtitle will go directly beneath this.
Location and date
Before you begin writing what the press release is about, it’s standard etiquette that you include the location and date of your business.
Boilerplate
The boilerplate message at the end of a press release is a short biography on your company. Include a brief explanation of the company’s history and services here.
Notation and final message
The end of a press release, especially if it is multiple pages, needs to finish with three pound symbols. This is a signal to the publication where the content finishes, and should include a final message below it with further contact information or steps for readers to follow.
Writing a press release
Now that you understand what a press release is and how to format it, you can now write your own. Here are the steps to writing a great press release that gets picked up by publications.
Know your audience
If you’re a blockchain company that is releasing a new cryptocurrency related product, it doesn’t make sense to pitch health magazines.
It’s crucial that you understand the publication you’re pitching, and ensure that your business and them align. Furthermore, their audience needs to be interested in the news itself.
Take a read through any website you’d like to send a press release to, and get a feel for what they write about and who it’s geared towards. If it looks like a good fit, I’d recommend finding their contribution guidelines for further instructions.
Take a look at Fast Company, for example. They have a fast that clearly outlines that they look for in guest authors, and this could be used to create an excellent press release.
Guidelines like these regularly cover voice, word count, audience, style, and more that will influence you how piece together a release for them.
Not only that, but you need to target the audience’s emotions and pain points.
What are they feeling? What problems does your product or solution solve for them?
Keeping these things in mind when performing press release copywriting will generate the biggest impact.
Creating a press release title
Once you know the publication inside and out, and you’ve added the basic information like contact info and the release date, you can write the headline.
While the headline is the smallest component of a press release, it’s the most important. If it is generic, nobody will want to read the rest of the material.
In fact, six in ten people engage with content based on the headline.
That’s why you need to make it exciting.
Look at Salesforce. They helped create 1,000 new jobs with their Tower Chicago project, and made an interesting press release to cover the action.
The title sums up what readers can expect from the news, but leaves them anticipating the details.
Don’t be afraid to take a lot of time crafting an epic headline and do many revisions until it’s perfect.
Here are some effective strategies to consider.
Provide a clear benefit for reading
Why should people read the press release? What will they get out of it?
This is called the benefit.
The headline is the perfect place to convey a benefit.
For example, it might be to:
Learn why a new exciting product will change their business.
Learn how an executive change will impact stakeholders investments.
Why they should check out new locations to get special deals.
Use a sense of urgency
If you’ve made big changes in your business, it’s an incredible opportunity to create a sense of urgency.
Make readers feel like they have to click or they’ll miss out on something great.
This is effective when you’ve onboarded a new partner, hired new executives, rebranded, etc.
Look at this press release for example. It covered the acquisition of the AI and analytics company Absolutdata.
The headline explains this while the sub-headline suggests that “Customers Win” from the acquisition. Naturally, you might think “How?” and read the release.
Pique curiosity
Mystery is one of the greatest motivators for humans.
We naturally want to know everything when its withheld.
Hence why it makes such as great press release copywriting strategy. ;)
This is a press release about how Soriano Motori is reinventing the business model for the motorcycle sector.
If you’re in the industry, you’ll want to know what they’re doing but the headline doesn’t give it all away.
Write the hook
If the headline gets them reading the press release itself, the first paragraph gets them reading the remainder.
The hook should summarize the main point of the release, covering the who, what, when, where, and why. SugarCRM nails this in a recent press release they did after acquiring another software company.
The notable sentence in the introduction is:
These tools provide improved integration with email, taking another step towards SugarCRM’s vision to deliver the most intuitive and collaborative user experience whilst eliminating all data entry.
They clearly and concisely describe what the acquisition did for the company, and also how it will benefit their users. Those interested in becoming a SugarCRM customer would be hooked to read the rest, while investors or partners would also be eager to read more.
Include stats and data
Are there any key findings, data, or numbers that make up your release? For example, did you hit a certain market share, revenue level, or location count?
Don’t leave this out of a press release. The more specific you can be, the better.
Statistics, charts, graphs, and similar provide context and credibility. It makes claims and announcements authoritative.
Keep the body simple
Short sentences, paragraphs, and simply vocabulary are keys to great copy in general, and this applies to press release, too.
As soon as you start adding technical jargon, and making the news harder to read through large paragraphs, you’re reducing how many people you reach.
Keep in mind that 50% of all adults in the united States read at a 8th grade level.
You will be able to speak to a much larger audience by simplifying your writing, and it makes it easier to go through in general.
Use quotes to bring the press release to life
Storytelling is one of the best ways to connect with people and get their attention.
That’s why I recommend using quotes in your press release.
These can be short or long. They should provide more information and allow readers to see the people behind the business.
Reporters can also use quotes when they report on the announcement.
Don’t run around the office asking for 20+ different people to give you a quote.
A few key individuals from the executive team or involved in the event are ideal.
Press release distribution
You can write the most mouthwatering press release ever, but if it doesn’t get in front of peoples eyeballs, it won’t do any good.
That’s why promoting press releases is just as important as creating them.
Here are a few different ways you can start distributing a press release to get it used by different websites and blogs.
Take to social media
Journalists are constantly on the prowl for new stories, ideas, and inspiration.
Do you know what one of their go-to places is?
Social media.
It’s where all of the conversations are happening, so it only makes sense.
If you position yourself in the right spot, you can get seen by tons of these hungry journalists that are willing to eat up your press release like a juicy steak.
I suggest heading over to Twitter and promoting your press release with relevant hashtags. 74% of journalists use Twitter specifically for researching stories.
Heck, a quick search for #pressrelease shows that there’s a new press release promoted approximately every minute!
If you want to be ballsy, tag publications in your post to get their direct attention.
You can also find editors and writers for websites, and direct message them with a link to the release.
This brings me to my next point.
Reach out to publications manually
Nothing beats rolling up your sleeves and sending out a ton of emails.
Grunt work always pays off, and the result of having your press release picked up by large websites can have a serious ROI.
The first step in outreach is to find publications you’d like to pitch. Remember that their audience and them must match the content of your press release.
Let’s say that you wanted to pitch Forbes. Their page covering news stories clearly states press releases have to be submitted via the contact page.
After navigating to this said page, there is an email for press inquiries that can be contacted.
Ensure that you conduct research like this for every website you pitch or else you may send the release to an irrelevant inbox.
You will then need to send a press release pitch. The elements of a successful cold email are the following:
Personalization : Everyone and their mom can see through a copy and pasted email. Customize every message by including the contact’s first name, mentioning how you came across their site, and introducing yourself.
: Everyone and their mom can see through a copy and pasted email. Customize every message by including the contact’s first name, mentioning how you came across their site, and introducing yourself. The benefit : This interaction can’t be one-sided. Clearly explain the benefit of sharing the press release, such as their audience will enjoy it and return for more content in the future.
: This interaction can’t be one-sided. Clearly explain the benefit of sharing the press release, such as their audience will enjoy it and return for more content in the future. Following up: Don’t be afraid to follow up if you don’t get a response, unless the contributor guidelines clearly say no to follow up because some do.
Here’s an example of a press release pitch:
Hey John, I just read your recent piece on how Blockchain will change the healthcare industry more than most realize, and I completely agree with all of your points. I’m the co-founder at HealthChain, a blockchain healthcare company, and we recently integrated our software into 10 local hospitals. They are already seeing drastic improvements in patient care and budgeting, so we wanted to share our press release with you that covers the details. I believe it’d make an excellent follow up story to your article, and that your audience will love reading it. We’d be more than happy to share the published article on our social accounts afterwards, as well. Here’s a link to check it out: www.healthchain.com/press-release. Warm regards, Mike
Outsource your press release distribution
One of the most common strategies to ramp up PR is to simply outsource it.
There are tons of service providers out there that will take your press release and get it in the hands of journalists.
In fact, some of them will write the press release for you, too.
PR Newswire is a popular choice among business owners. You can become a member and start sharing press releases with one of the largest online communities.
Don’t be afraid to knock on some doors
Nothing beats a handshake. While we live in a digital age, physical networking is still key. 🤝
I recommend attending networking events, workshops, and conventions to get the word out about your announcement.
Become a guest on podcasts, YouTube channels, and other shows.
Visit local PR businesses and start a relationship with them.
This organic approach will open up a lot of doors and start relationships with people that can help promote your press release or future news.
You can also try using good ole snail mail by printing the press release and mailing it to journalists.
Promote media coverage you get
Once you do get media coverage, don’t let it collect dust!
Use it as a piece of content.
Share it across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels.
Tag the journalists or press release websites that featured you to generate more engagement.
Use relevant hashtags to increase reach.
Then, share it with your email list. This is great social proof and credibility.
Press release examples
With the meat and potates out of the way, let’s look at some examples of press release to give you inspiration.
OpenText and Webcor
This is a press release from OpenText about the construction company Webcor using their services to improve security.
Announcing this to the public does a couple of things.
Firstly, it creates social proof displaying a large company used their service and benefited from it.
Secondly, it proves that the product or service is effective.
Note how OpenText uses a clean and standard format. It begins with the headline and sub-headline.
Below this, it opens with the location and date.
OpenText summarizes the announcement and uses quotes to provide further context.
Links are provided to learn more about OpenText’s security services, a Webcar case study, and connecting with the business.
There’s a summary of the company at the end as well.
Apple Fitness+
Apple doing something unique. Who would’ve thought?
I really like this press release from Apple because it reads more like a blog post and is very visually appealing.
It’s a creative approach to announcing news.
The headline creates a sens of curisoty. What’s the next era of fitness and how do we join?
The sub-headline promotes the benefit which is being able to work out any time, anywhere, with a new experience built into the Apple Watch.
Apple talks about the new Apple Fitness+ app that brings studio-style workouts to users at anytime.
It goes in-depth into the features, benefits, and how to use it.
Not only does this announcement the new product but also helps sell it as the same time.
Pricing is discussed along with instructions on how to make the most out of the app.
Related reading: Apple copywriting examples.
Amazon and Twitter
This is a classic press release that touches on Amazon’s new partner, Twitter.
They recently begin use Amazon Web Services to power the global traffic coming to Twitter.
Announcing this to the public is great social proof and builds authority.
The press release details the benefits of AWS and how it will transform Twitter’s infrastructure.
This is good information for both stakeholders and prospects interested in using similar services.
Final thoughts on press release copywriting
Learning how to write a press release is a priceless skill for any entrepreneur.
When your business takes newsworthy action, being able to compose and send out a great story quickly will lead to incredible results.
This includes new customers, email subscribers, social media followers, and overall brand awareness.
It all begins with understanding proper press release formatting. Ensure that you include the fundamentals like:
A logo
Contact information
The release date
Headline
Location and date
Boilerplate
Notation and final message
From there, focus on writing the material in a simple manner, while making it exciting and relevant to the audience. Add any statistics or numbers that will give readers more context, as well.
Use social media or cold emailing to get it in the hands of publications once it’s completed. Some entrepreneurs may also want to consider outsourcing the process if they have the budget.
What are you waiting for? Start writing your press release today and get the exposure your deserve!
You can also reach out to me for copywriting services if you need a professional to take care of your press release.
This article was originally published at https://carminemastropierro.com/press-release-copywriting/ | https://medium.com/@carminemastro/press-release-copywriting-1b3786d31fef | ['Carmine Mastropierro'] | 2020-12-24 15:33:00.011000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Pr', 'Press Release', 'Press Release Writing', 'Copywriting'] |
The Greatest Thing Money Can Buy | The Greatest Thing Money Can Buy
Money can buy a lot of things. But one thing clearly stands above the rest…
Photo by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash
Money can buy lots of things, but the greatest thing it can buy is freedom.
Most people today spend their lives in what can only be called financial slavery:
The bank owns their house.
The dealership owns their car.
The credit card companies and student loan providers own a sizable chunk of their future income.
Their boss owns every hour between 9 am and 5 pm five days a week.
Perhaps the most clever and insightful observation of the futility of the rat race comes from Ellen Goodman:
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.
Is this all life has to offer?
Running out the clock five days a week as you try to stay ahead of your mounting financial obligations and try to scrape together a couple of vacations a year?
Slaving away to be able to afford things that you mostly don’t use?
There has to be something better out there.
Financial Freedom
What if you owned all your possessions free and clear? What if you had enough money coming in from outside your job to not need your job? What if you had enough coming in to not need to work at all?
In the online world, this is sometimes called FI (Financial Independence) or FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
In my book I preferred the term Financial Freedom which I think is a better fit.
This may sound like a pipe dream, but it is something that you can achieve if you set your mind to it.
The short version is that if you can get rid of your debt and save up 25x your yearly spending, you can walk away from your job.
How can a reasonable person hope to pull this off? The way I see it, there are four key pillars:
Avoid debt Control your expenses Increase your income Invest your extra time and money
1. Avoid Debt
When you get right down to it, debt is an agreement to pay more for something than it’s worth.
Is it slightly more complicated than that? Sure, but that’s essentially what you are doing.
It’s like going into a negotiation hoping you lose.
It makes no sense.
Are the ever reasons to borrow? Sure, the general rule of borrowing is that you should only borrow to build. This means that you should only take on debt if your expected long-term payoff outweighs the cost to you in interest.
Usually student loans, mortgages, and loans to start a business are seen as acceptable debt. I would caution that all debt is dangerous and if you aren’t careful, all three of those forms of borrowing can blow up in your face.
The only debt I’ve ever had is a mortgage which I have been systematically paying extra on every month since my very first payment. In fact, I’ve increased my extra payment three times already this year.
2. Control Your Expenses
This all starts with the big ticket items: your house (or apartment) and car.
Whether you buy or rent your home is not nearly as important as how much you pay. Especially since more expensive living situations usually come with plenty of hidden expenses (e.g. a larger house costs more to furnish and will likely incur higher utility bills)
Do yourself a favor and find a place that is way cheaper than what people tell you that you need. If your living arrangement is in the same ballpark as all the people who are shackled to their desk until their mid-60’s, there’s a problem.
When it comes to you car, buying 5–10 year old used vehicles with cash is the way to go. There are many costs of car ownership, but the biggest is depreciation, the difference between what you buy the car for and what you sell it for. The way to avoid paying for depreciation is to buy older vehicles.
I drive a 2003 Toyota Corolla with over 160k miles on it. Are there ever repairs that you wouldn’t have on a new car? Sure. Every five years or so something needs replacing and it generally runs about $100-$300.
Trust me, $100-$300 every five years or so is substantially less than buying a new car every five years.
You also need to keep your other recurring expenses low and always be on the lookout for ways to trim them.
Six years ago, My wife and I switched from paying $150 for two lines on AT&T to paying $90 for both of us on Straight Talk Wireless, a prepaid plan. Next we moved to paying $70 between the two of us at Cricket Wireless. We just switched to Red Pocket, another prepaid service that includes talk, text, and 5GB of high speed data for $37 a month for the two of us.
By the way, the $33 we are saving per month by switching to Red Pocket is going directly to paying off our mortgage faster.
The recurring expenses are the best place to trim the fat since you get ongoing savings without ongoing willpower, but it’s important to keep the rest of your spending under control as well.
For many people, eating out is an enormous expense.
When you eat out at a cheap fast food joint, you can probably get $4 for a meal. Move up to Subway or Panera and you’re probably looking at $5-$10 for a meal. Go somewhere relatively cheap where you are served and you are looking at $12+ (emphasis on the “+” — you can easily land in the $20-$50 a meal per person range by going out).
When you cook for yourself, $3 a meal represents the high end of what you can expect. Get a little bit efficient with meal planning, and you can get to $2.50 per person per meal. Utilize leftovers effectively and be smart about deals and you can get $2 per person per meal. If you really want, you can go for the frugal black belt of $1 per person per meal.
If you eat three meals a day, you’re looking at over a thousand meals a year. Those per meal costs really add up over the course of a thousand meals.
I’m not saying that you should never go out to eat, I’m just pointing out that the easiest way to save money on food is to cook. The best baby step available to you is to identify one meal a week where you always eat out, and come up with a plan to not eat out for that meal. Maybe it means cooking one extra meal this week. Maybe it means cooking extra the day before and having leftovers. Maybe it means eating the leftovers that are already in your fridge. Maybe instead of going to Subway two days in a row and getting the footlong each time you go once and split the sub over two days. Maybe *gasp* you have one day a week where you eat less than three meals. I’m not a doctor, but I promise this won’t kill you. You get plenty to eat.
3. Increase Your Income
I’m a big fan of frugality, but it has one notable drawback: you can only save as much as you currently spend.
If you spend $30,000 a year, the most free cash you can generate by cutting your costs is $30,000, and the odds are pretty low that you can actually slash your spending to zero.
On the other hand, you can increase your income by $30,000, $60,000, even $100,000+. It might not be easy, but it’s probably easier than being so frugal that you spend nothing.
Here are some options for increasing your income:
Negotiate a raise Get a promotion Find a better paying job Start a side hustle
The approach for the first two is going to be similar. Figure out what your boss and other people in power want, and work hard to help them get it. Remember, they have their own agenda which they care about far more than they care about you.
Make sure you are always learning new skills and taking on new responsibilities. Keep a record of all your accomplishments and progress so that you have something to talk about.
In terms of getting a better paying job somewhere else, make sure you are always on the look. You can let friends and professional acquaintances know that you are looking and browse job listings for your area online.
Probably my favorite way of increasing your income is to start a side hustle. There are tons of options here, but there is one approach that I really like that we will cover in the next section.
4. Invest Your Extra Time and Money
The goal of financial freedom is to stash up enough money to allow you to take control of your time. Ironically, the two resources at your disposal to make money to free up time are money and time.
Time
Time is an unusual resource in that it can’t be saved. Your life is passing by every second regardless of what you are doing.
This means that there are three things that you can do with time:
Waste it: activities that provide no current or future benefits (e.g. mindlessly scrolling Facebook for hours) Spend it: activities that provide a current benefit, but no ongoing benefits (e.g. working an hourly or salaried position — where you are literally trading time for money). Invest it: activities that may or may not provide immediate benefits, but can set up ongoing future benefits (e.g. writing a book that can keep selling for years)
Most people alternate between the first two uses of time.
The only way to make money is to sell something, and most people choose to sell their time for money.
A better approach is investing your time into creating something that you can sell besides time.
This was a core premise of my book on personal finance. Ironically, the book itself is a good example of this approach. The time spent writing it was an investment creating something I can now sell instead of time.
Money
If you want to build wealth, you don’t want to work for money, you want to have money work for you.
There are three major investments that have proven effective at building wealth:
Starting a business Real estate The stock market
The first two are amazing options, but also quite a bit of work. They are investments in the sense that they are places that you can put your money and potentially receive a handsome return (better than the stock market even), but they also involve an enormous investment of time and energy. They both represent at least part-time to full-time jobs.
My recommendation is to start investing in the stock market.
Here — as simple as you’ll ever find it laid out — is a winning strategy (note that it is America-centric because that is where I live, but the principles apply anywhere):
Start with your 401(k) or 403(b) plan at work. Many companies offer a match on your investment. For example, my company matches my investment dollar for dollar up until 6% of my salary.
This instant 100% rate of return is pretty much the best rate of return you’ll ever find.
But wait, your plan has so many options, what should you invest in?
The answer is the stock market itself, the whole market, by buying low-cost, broad-based index funds.
By “low cost” I mean a low expense ratio and the absence of any extra fees. In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. The higher your fees, the less money that stays invested working on your behalf.
By “broad-based” I mean as close to the whole stock market as you can get. This will likely be a total stock market index fund, but if that isn’t available, and S&P 500 will do just fine (the S&P 500 is 500 of the largest American corporations and represents something like 70 or 80% of the total market).
Here are some exact ticker symbols to look for which all come from my favorite low-cost brokerages, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity:
VTSAX — Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund
SWTSX — Charles Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund
FSTVX — Fidelity Total Stock Market Index Fund
VFIAX — Vangaurd S&P 500 Index Fund
SWPPX — Charles Schwab S&P 500 Index Fund
FUSVX — Fidelity S&P 500 Index Fund
My 401(k) plan doesn’t have my preferred VTSAX, but it has VFIAX so that is what I am invested in.
If you can’t find any of the funds above, be on the lookout for terms like “Index,” “Total Market,” and “S&P 500” and find a fund with a low expense ratio.
If all else fails, most employers have a “target retirement date” fund. Pick one with a date close to your theoretical retirement date and move on.
Once you’ve hit your employer match and are able to free up more cash to invest, you can either increase your contributions until you’ve hit your limit ($18,500 in 2018), or open an IRA (Individual Retirement Arrangement: $5,500 contribution limit in 2018).
If you max out both of those (or if your income is too high to contribute to an IRA), you’ll need to open a regular taxable brokerage account.
For both IRA’s and taxable accounts, I recommend opening an account with Vanguard and investing in VTSAX — if you can. The downside is there is a $10,000 minimum.
If you don’t have $10,000, no problem. Just head over to Schwab and invest in SWTSX (note: you have to first transfer money into your Schwab account and then go back in and use it to buy SWTSX. Make sure that you are aware that this is two steps).
When investing, you should invest as much as possible, as early as possible and not panic and sell when the stock market takes a dip. No matter what, stay the course for the long haul.
Since we’re keeping this post simple, we won’t go any deeper, except for answering a couple of burning questions:
Q: Isn’t investing in 100% stocks risky? Shouldn’t there be more diversification?
A: An index fund provides plenty of diversification. You are essentially buying every publicly traded company in America.
Sure, there is still some volatility in the stock market, but this is smoothed over a little by the fact that you are actively making contributions.
You could smooth the ride a little more by allocating your assets across a few different classes, but your best bet for growth during the time you are building your wealth is to invest in stocks.
Plus, you may be diversified beyond stocks already. If you own your home, that is another form of investment that you are holding.
Will you ever want to move away from 100% stocks? Sure, once you are no longer contributing and need to live on what you saved, you probably want to add some bonds in, which are more stable.
I won’t get into too much more detail, but you can see this post from the great Jim Collins if you are interested:
Q. You mentioned retiring early but then said to invest in retirement accounts. Aren’t there penalties for taking this money out early?
A. Yes, but there are (legal) ways around everything. They are beyond the scope of this post, but if you want an in-depth treatment, check out these posts from the Mad FIentist:
These posts are dense and are only for those who crave more info.
For everyone else, the path forward is simple, at least for now:
Invest as much as you can as early as you can in low-cost, broad-based index funds, prioritizing tax-advantaged retirement accounts and your employer match.
Conclusion
If you made it to the end of this lengthy article, congratulations. You have the first thing necessary to actually achieve financial freedom: the ability to learn and grow.
I tried my best to give you the basics, but there’s still a lot to be learned, and much of it will need to be learned the hard way: going out and trying things for yourself.
Like anything else worth doing, there will be some doubt and uncertainty. You can never be sure when you set off on your bid for financial freedom that you’ll actually be successful.
But you can do it.
Plenty of people have gone before you and there are plenty on the way.
Taking back your time is one of the most satisfying projects you can work on.
This is the tenth in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series. | https://thematthewkent.medium.com/the-greatest-thing-money-can-buy-5f6fd8dae1bf | ['Matthew Kent'] | 2020-03-30 18:17:58.593000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investing', 'Personal Finance', 'Life', 'Self Improvement'] |
Trading on Kyber Network | Distributed exchanges or DEX as they are popularly called will go mainstream in 2018. This year it would make sense to invest in cryptocurrency exchange coins and especially DEX projects as they will find mainstream adoption. If you want to know the details checkout my previous post on investing in cryptocurrency exchanges.
Kyber Network was one of the most hyped ICOs last year. I think rightly so. It was one of the interesting projects I was following up. They had promised the mainnet release and Q1 2018 and looks like they are sticking to their road plan. They recently launched their Pilot on Mainnet. The early is access is provided to KGT holders. As you can see there are only 39485 KGT tokens and these were distributed to all the participants in the ICO.
I had also participated in the ICO and was awarded a KGT. Since this was a project I was excited about I thought of giving the platform a try. I tried to exchange Ether of Gifto tokens and here are the steps with screenshots.
Import Address
Since this is a decentralised exchange you don’t need to sign up or login. No more providing your personal details to centralised exchanges which keep getting hacked every other day. You can trade or transfer cryptos without signing up or logging in. Isn’t that cool?
All you need to do is import the address using which you need to transfer or make an exchange. As you can see they support five popular ways for importing your addresses. I used https://metamask.io/
Supported cryptocurrencies
Currently 10 tokens are supported on the portal.
Aelf (AELF)
Basic Attention Token (BAT)
Decentraland (MANA)
EOS (EOS)
Gifto (GTO)
Kyber Network (KNC)
OmiseGo (OMG)
Power Ledger (POWR)
Request Network (REQ)
Status Network (SNT)
In the beta phase looks like only “Ether to Token” and “Token to Ether” exchanges are supported. I am looking forward to Token to Token conversion very soon. That would be the real game changer.
Checking the price
Since we are used to seeing the prices of token with respect to Bitcoin or Ether I chose the same order so that the interface looks similar.
Enter value 1 if you want to cross check the prices. I used Binance to compare the latest prices. Once you are done checking click on the arrows icon in between to switch the source and destination tokens.
Click on Advance options and you will have options to enter the minimum rate you are expecting(You need atleast 1987.32xxxx Gifto tokens for every ether you send) and Gas price.
Once you confirm to the popup, metamask asks for a confirmation.
As soon as you confirm. Your transaction is broadcasted.
Remember that your exchange is a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain. If you have participated in an ICO you can find the similarities here. You are transferring your tokens to Kyber Network provided address. Kyber network does the internal negotiations and provides you with the best possible deal. If the best possible deal is above the limit you set the exchange happens.
If the exchange doesn’t happen for some reasons you might loose out your transaction fees. If anybody has faced this please let me know in the comments.
In our case the transaction was successful and I received the tokens as you can see in the image above : TADA. You can checkout the smart contract here https://etherscan.io/tx/0x343fdc138f7e83399d7428e61ffe6decde4c1a74257ec23489a4ea0e5ad69876
As you can see the Actual Tx Cost/Fee was 0.002029644 Ether ($1.70). I had chosen the “Fast” option and hence the rates were on a higher side. If I had selected slow it would have been in the range 0.00033 ETH or $0.28.
What is interesting is this amount wouldn’t change with the number/value of transaction I am doing. It will only be dependent on the cost of running the smart contract. So in general for very small amounts it might be better to do the exchange on centralised exchanges. In all other cases Kyber Network can be a very good alternative.
My thoughts after using Kyber Network
It is like version 2 of https://blocktrades.us/ The UI/UX is neat and simple. The help texts are to the point. The time for transaction were very less. Since Kyber Network is taking care of the liquidity the limiting factor here will be the speed of Ethereum network itself. As long as krypokitties don’t screw us over we should be good. I will bet on Kyber Network until any other legitimate contender comes along. Bitshares has some serious competition in terms of DEX part. Waiting for Token to Token exchange going live. I hope the platform lives up to the expectations and will not have liquidity/scaling issues.
If you are planning on buying KNC tokens you can use this referral link https://www.binance.com/trade.html?symbol=KNC_ETH&ref=10117962
If you like this article please clap so that I know which articles you find useful. You can clap more than once and there is a limit of 50 claps. Check it out.
Disclaimer : The above article is not investment advice. I am just sharing my thoughts. | https://medium.com/bitfolio-org/trading-on-kyber-network-5ced0ff8835e | ['Gokul N K'] | 2018-02-11 22:55:00.601000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Kyber Network', 'Kyber', 'Decentralized Exchange', 'Dex'] |
Dear God, | Dear God,
I feel a little silly addressing this to you as if You exist as that puppet figure laying in a manger of straw. But play along with me for a moment and act like You are at the North Pole, or in Heaven and have angels like Clarence Goodbody on staff. It is much more humanizing to pretend You have a human form (Zeus was badass!) than the Force that pushes the grass up in the Spring with mute smiles of gratitude before I walk over it with the boot-soles of my feet.
I am writing to inform You that I would like to take a time out for a while. I read somewhere that it is good to set boundaries around potentially-abusive relationships and create a safe distance until I can begin to love myself a little more. This year--2020--that You sent us--well, me in particular--can go fuck itself. I didn’t say You, God, I said the year. I would like to send it back and get a refund. I would like to start over. I know, that’s a hard one. I have read the poet who wrote his note to You in the previous century,
“May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love.”
Earth really IS the right place for love. And if You’re anything like me, I don’t want You to be rash and pluck me out of my miserable existence for something else You might have cooked up...all because I am ungrateful.
This is getting confusing already so I will be blunt. I don’t appreciate losing my family, my friends, my means, my good habits, and my path. I am not Job, nor was meant to be. And while we’re on the topic of Job (I know, I brought him up), why do we pronounce his name in English, ‘jobe’ and not like it is spelled, ‘job.’ Every time I write a treacly note on a student’s paper, saying, “Good job!” I think Job has nothing to do with this; he’s stuck in the middle of the Old Testament.
My frustration stems from what I thought was a healthy trajectory I was already on before all this madness came with the year, 2020. Actually, You might recall, You sent it early, December 30th, 2019, to be exact. I thought I was making positive changes to my life already. Sure, my wife was growing increasingly distant and aloof but I was bringing in a respectable paycheck, had plenty of guys to have coffee with all the time, was active in theater, did service work willingly, and my kids were there.
Look at me now? I live in a different County by myself in a house near the school that I teach online for and don’t need to be physically close to because of a pandemic spawned in another continent by an imbalance between bats and humans caused from the indecent surge in disrespect that our culture has placed on the planet that ultimately is driving our species to extinction (I know this because I skipped ahead in the Book of Revelations--the only Sci-Fi book in the Bible--and read between the lines). How dare the consequences of previous generations and of the civilization to which I am a part of stress biological boundaries, causing this lethal disease, impact my life!
Your silence between that last paragraph and now is deafening. I can see Your Mona Lisa-like smile of irony behind the grey cloud covering your Consciousness. Also, I have an inkling that You have set a boundary between us Yourself; that You have isolated me because I am beginning to abuse the boundary in our relationship. Very funny!
And very humiliating.
What I need to ask You to do, Dear God--and I hope You are still reading this--is please remove from me my own defects of character: namely, my brash regard for self-pity, my insanely selfish desire for things to go my way, my yearning for intimacy with at least one person (anyone, someone), my urge to be right rather than to be kind, and my impatience in finding Your answers.
On a good note, God, I am learning how to live with my emotional self, although I know I still have a long way to go there too.
I hope You can find time to honor my requests. I admit that it is easier for me to perceive You “out there” in the Heavens than it is to know that You have been in me, indwelling, the entire time. But by ‘placing’ You outside myself, I can thereby ignore You because I am so busy. Knowing You are with me, a part of me, this entire time deflates the pomposity of my ego and devalues my selfishness; plus, it means I have never really been isolated at all. Now I am on even less solid ground in requesting You to remove this God Awful year because, well, what’s wrong with being intimate with You? Why can’t I accept this shit-tsunami of a perfect storm of a year as just another year to be alive and experiencing joy inside of pain? What is the difference between giving and getting when it all returns to You...and I will return to that great Ocean of You eventually too?
This missive is almost as long as the four shortest books in the Bible, combined (III John, II John, Philemon, and Obadiah, equal 1,229 words). I close by expressing my respect for boundaries and the opportunities they give in growing healthy lives. Remember that poet I mentioned earlier? He also wrote in another poem, “Good fences make good neighbors.” I hope we can at least become good neighbors, God, and in the spirit of Neighborliness, I close, with respect and sincerity,
Jack Squat
P.S. I am enclosing a photo of Ollie; she’s the cat You sent to me via the Shelter. She, like my family, shuns me most of the time but here is a rare photo of our togetherness.
P.P.S. I am signing off with this honorific, a nom de plume, that expresses my elevated status in the Grand Scheme of Things.
P.P.P.S. 1057 words | https://medium.com/@mark-valentine2/dear-god-32dc379bd942 | ['Mark Valentine'] | 2020-12-24 19:27:27.605000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Grief', 'Existentialism', 'Loneliness', 'Poetry'] |
Californias | A crowd gathers in Cole’s dorm room, contained in the gap between his desk and a pile of university-issued mattresses. The mattresses eat up half the floor. “It’s my super-bed,” Cole tells me with an open-mouthed grin. It’s dark. The only light in the room filters out through the printed scarf he’s tacked over the ceiling fixture. Everyone is wearing black, and in the dimness, the boundaries separating t-shirts from t-shirts and jeans from jeans give way. The crowd is a single kinetic body. It bulges and contracts as heads turn and hands gesture. It pulses.
At the center of the organism is an iPad with several lines of coke on it. From my spot on the super-bed, I watch my friends dip their heads and skim their noses along the touchscreen. I tug Quinn’s sleeve. “We all see the symbolism here, right? Like we acknowledge it?” I ask. He sniffs. “It’s the flattest surface we have.”
I made these friends freshman year, when everyone sprawled out on the field behind the dorms to smoke in the sunshine. The plastic blades baked in the sun and burned our feet. Uneasy electronica flooded out from a Jambox. Bits of rubbery turf stuck to the backs of our legs. The field was a scene. The most dedicated stoners made it a point to sit and smoke there every day at 4:20, until a campus cop caught on and appeared every day at 4:20 to write them a citation. Two hundred dollars later, they broke with tradition and resigned themselves to smoking every day at 3 instead. “But I have a medical card!” one stoner wailed. “I know,” I sympathized. “It’s totally fucked.”
My friend, Eduardo, pulls his admirably straight nose from the retina display. “Coke makes me feel like a sexy model,” he announces. The iPad is tugged from his hands by someone else eager to wipe their nose with 128 GB. He grins and dances in my face. “I am ready. I am ready.” He grabs my hands and moves them from side to side. “A boom. A boom. A boom-boom-boom.” He releases them and pauses. “Did you want any?” I shake my head, no. A week earlier, I clicked on an anti-drug ad circulating Facebook called, “Every Line Counts.” The ad was a step by step “recipe” for making cocaine with ingredients like “destroying an acre of rainforest” and “violence aimed at innocent South American villagers.” “Naw, I’m good.” I tell him, but he’s already turned away.
I’m not turning down the coke to protect the Amazon. I’m turning it down, because coke is for rich party kids. And because in gangster movies, the main character always gets addicted to coke. And then he gets careless and the police arrest him, and everything he’s ever worked for comes crashing down around him. But mostly, I don’t do coke, because when I lost my iPhone, my dad just bought me another. “Consider it an early birthday present,” he said. And I did.
On the floor, just inches away from my Keds, is a large bong. It’s two feet tall, clear, and several hundred dollars. I can’t take my eyes off it, because I’m so afraid of knocking it over. I’m thinking about it right now, but in five minutes I’m going to forget it’s there. I’ll turn to talk with someone and shift my body to the right. My knees will slide over and my left foot will trail behind. The foot will knock over the bong. It will shatter on the floor, and everyone will hate me. I stand up from the super-bed and move somewhere else. Will and two girls enter the room. Their hair is dark and wet from the rain. They are absorbed by the mass. It still surprises me that it rains in California.
Before I moved here, my mental landscape of the state was largely produced by the California Dairy Farmers Association. They made milk commercials with talking cows. My favorite one starts with a herd of lady cows meandering about lush green foothills and gossiping about some newcomer. “Where’s she from again?” one asks. “I think someplace called “Wisconsin,” another answers. “Shhh! She’s coming.” A new cow, notably dumpier than the others, wanders into the scene. Her tail flicks back and forth; her eyes are wide. “Don’tchya know, there aren’t any snow drifts here!” she marvels, flattening her a’s. She grins at her companions. She’s just excited to be here. One of the California lady cows turns to her friends and says in a mock stage whisper, “Sounds like someone’s been tipped over, one too many times.” They roll their soft brown eyes and laugh cruelly. The Midwestern cow hangs her bovine head in shame, and lumbers away. The camera pans across soft valleys bathed in thick golden sunlight, and a smug voiceover declares: “Happy cows come from California.”
Someone sets the iPad down. They are out of coke. “Alright. Downstairs?” Will asks the organism, opening the door to the hall. One by one individuals break off and file through the door, until it’s no longer an organism. It’s just people in a room. We scatter down the stairs and into the party, arriving at the landing in clumps. We were here 45 minutes ago. The music is still bad and there are still no guests anyone wants to meet. Only now the Gatorade cooler filled with fruit punch and Everclear is nearly empty, and people are tipping it over — to the point where it looks like it might fall — to fill their cups. Before escaping upstairs to Cole’s room, we’d lingered by the speaker with bored faces. But now my friends are on coke. They’re having fun. They commandeer a beer pong table.
It’s easy to pick out our group from the rest of the party, because everyone else is wearing colors. Eduardo and Stephen sink consecutive shots into a zipper formation. They do a high to low five, black sleeves pin-wheeling. “We’re the coolest people here,” my friend Will observes, whispering into my ear. Cole and Meredith are dancing. Eduardo abandons the game and once again grabs my hand. His eyes are closed. His elbows jut out and his lips are pursed. He stomps his feet and swivels his hips. “I’m feeling myself, I’m feeling myself!” I want to have fun, so I start dancing too. But after a few minutes, my arms drop and my feet are still. I’m tired. Eduardo dances over to someone else. I lean against the wall. This party sucks.
I leave our beer pong table and wander. I walk up stairs and down halls looking for people I know. I find them. The girl from my high school is in line for the bathroom; two kids from my poetry class are at the stairwell. I pause by each of them and lean in, slapping a hand on their arm. “All my friends just did coke off an iPad,” I confide. They laugh, unsure of what to say. “What?” I want them to get upset, because I’m upset. I don’t want to have friends who do coke off iPads. I don’t want to be at a party as a senior and feel lonelier than I did as a freshman. I don’t want to be here. I release my grip on their arm and (without bothering to respond) walk away. I make my way back downstairs through the throng of bodies to a chair where I’ve left my sweater. My friends are still by the beer pong table. I wave the sweater and point to the door, signaling my departure. Chelsea and her new boyfriend are standing on the porch. He is nice and boring. I grab their forearms and lurch forward a final time. “My friends do coke off iPads,” I tell them. “I know,” he says gently. “You already told us that.”
I walk the five blocks home drenched in rain and my own melodrama. I’m always upset by the littlest things. Along this path are walls of hedges. During the week, I stop to admire the white stars and yellow climbing roses billowing out of the leaves. I’ll take pictures and send them to my parents, because back home everything is dead and frosted. But tonight it’s dark and raining, so all I can see is the shine of slick leaves. It makes the hedges look wild. I pass under branches sagging with persimmons and step over the oranges rotting on the street. It feels like every house has a lemon tree. Even after four years, I’m still amazed that a fruit tree can grow in a front yard.
Mariah Oxley ’16 just graduated from Stanford.
Photo by Steven Tyler PJs. | https://medium.com/west-magazine/californias-9c5930044dab | [] | 2016-10-14 22:36:47.860000+00:00 | ['Stanford', 'West', 'School', 'California', 'Essays'] |
On BPM and the Enterprise (again) | On BPM and the Enterprise (again)
How Processes and Architectures can Benefit Companies
Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash
For the third year in a row, the BPM-EA track at the ACM SAC conference is hosting a set of interesting contributions in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architectures (EA) together.
Our rationale is that managing the information assets of a company is much harder than just applying a methodology. Multiple viewpoints should be considered. It’s a matter of time and experience to build up the appropriate mix of methods, solutions and technologies for solving the enterprise problems.
Business Processes, Enterprise Architectures, System and Software Modeling, are definitely important dimensions in designing and executing the company behaviour. We claim that these contributions are not being exploited to their best, because their complementarity and combination is rarely used. The aim is then to collect contribution that enable the integration and collaboration across these disciplines and methods.
I report here a quick summary of the contributions to the track.
Reliable Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes
Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash
We want to predict a PPI (Process Performance Indicator) that reports correct execution of a process, and we want to assess the reliability of these predictions, also considering the variability of the scenario. We want the prediction to come in as soon as possible, i.e., for instance at the beginning of the process execution. Instead of using a ML-based reliability definition (e.g., the accuracy of a binary classifier for successful and unsuccessful process execution), we consider reliability as a function of the number of possible paths that are still possible in the process execution, or the time passed since the beginning with respect to the estimated total time of the whole process execution.
Controllability of Business Processes using Temporal Variables
We wonder about satisfiability (existence: there exists at least one execution that satisfy the constraints?) and controllability (universality: can we prove that all executions satisfy the constraints?) of business process executions with respect to existing temporal constraints over the process (or task) execution. There is a trade-off between the expressive power of the temporal constraints, and their controllability.
The proposal introduces a simplified process language based on time and temporal constraints. This language allows for specifying temporal rules and patterns, and allows to check for strong controllability (defining the rules based on the exact timestamps) and dynamic controllability (a weaker but more realistic level of controllability).
A Hybrid Model for Behavioural and Data Perspectives
We aim at combining process constraints with data-related modeling features. This is a step towards multi-perspective analysis of the enterprise. Traditional process mining approaches are not focusing on the data aspect. Even within ERP systems, you miss the separation and model clarity that may be needed. The process case data (i.e., the executions) are not sufficient either, as they flatten the process into a sequence of events, forgetting about the structure:
Therefore, we introduce a hybrid model that explicitly considers the process model and the data model (as a entity-relationship or a UML class diagram), and we show how to bind them together.
Optimization of Customer Journeys with Process Mining and Sequence-aware Recommendation
Photo by Richard Kasperowski on Unsplash
We want to address the customer journey as a story describing the interaction between the client and the services offered by a company. Existing approaches do not look to the end-to-end process. Therefore, we focus the attention on extracting (from each case) all the relevant events that constitute important steps in the customer journey, and then by applying kNN algorithms we generate recommendations to users for further services or purchases.
Static Analysis of Process-Driven Applications
By process-driven applications we mean any software application that has an intrinsic process-based set of steps and conditional dependencies between tasks. Static analysis is widely adopted both for processes and code. But here we are addressing the connection between the two. We may have situations where the static analysis of a BPMN process is correct, and also the code analysis returns positive results. Vice-versa, the inconsistency can happen in the mapping between the two. For instance, versions of code vs. versions of processes, typing of the data, values, data flow anomalies. An integrated toolsuite would be optimal for letting process designers and software developers work together.
A Metamodel for Knowledge-Intensive Processes
Knowledge intensive processes are collaboration and goal oriented, event driven, emergent and unpredictable, flexible, and typically non repeatable.
How can we make process modeling useful for these processes? They cannot be fully specified at design time, also because most of the knowledge is implicit, and in many cases the reasons for the decision-making steps by the users are unknown. The most important asset in this environment is the Case, i.e., the status, context, and environment aspects, as well as the behaviour, related to an execution. The behaviour is defined at runtime, because you cannot enforce it statically. The second important asset is the Knowledge itself, which must cover objectives, metrics, tactics and business rules. A few other components are important and they compose a comprehensive metamodel that can help the specification of such cases, which are typically hard to assess.
Photo by Ani Kolleshi on Unsplash
Incremental Verification of Evolving Workflows
The fact that the workflow of processes evolve in time poses interesting challenges to verification. The ways the process can evolve can vary: change of objects, tasks, flows. We can define a set of possible constraints over the evolution and verify the model with different strategies: bottom-up construction (where changes are propagated from the root node), spin-based and incremental. Incremental techniques can build automatically a process tree model out of an input process, and then manage the evolution of the process by updating the tree model and verifying only the affected parts of the process (see figure below).
Incremental verification is much more efficient in the number of activities, as only the new change needs to be verified. Spin instead is more efficient with respect to time and edges.
In summary…
I think the most important message coming from this diverse set of contribution and the related discussion they raised is that there is plenty of opportunities for yet-to-be-exploited techniques to contribute to the optimization of the enterprise operations and of the business.
I look forward to collect more and share them all in the future. Meanwhile, if you found useful techniques you want to share, feel free to comment on this story and I’ll reach out to you.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +445,678 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here. | https://medium.com/swlh/on-bpm-and-the-enterprise-again-ed9c66079934 | ['Marco Brambilla'] | 2019-04-25 06:38:07.795000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Business Process', 'Enterprise Architecture', 'Bpm', 'Enterprise'] |
How can we better collaborate on social issues? | By Florentyna Leow
“How can we better collaborate on social issues?” A collaboration between Social Innovation Japan and Third Space Tokyo.
How do you solve social issues? What is the best way to collaborate across industries and sectors to tackle them? Are there differences in how cross-collaboration takes place inside and outside Japan?
These are questions without straightforward answers. But these are the issues worth exploring for anyone who wants to dive into tackling social issues and actually make an effective impact. That’s why we held a meetup at Shibaura House on 17 February 2019.
We invited Kenji and Lisa Hosokawa, founders of Third Space Tokyo, to talk about their Japan-specific and international experience in collaborative efforts to solve social issues. Bringing together 40 people from a variety of industries and backgrounds, this two-hour event saw illuminating insights from our presenters as well as plenty of lively discussion from our guests.
Social Issues vs. Social Problems.
Lisa kicked off the event with a few terms and phrases commonly seen in the social sector, encouraging us to keep these in mind throughout the next two hours.
One especially thought-provoking notion was the use of ‘social issues’ instead of ‘social problems.’
If there’s a problem, there’s a solution — but reality isn’t so straightforward most of the time. Reframing ‘problems’ as ‘issues’ allows us to see them as complex challenges, and therefore adopt a more nuanced approach from the start.
Venture Philanthropy and the Japanese Social Sector
Kenji Hosokawa introduces Social Venture Partners Tokyo’s work.
Following Lisa’s opening remarks, Kenji talked us through his work in venture philanthropy with Social Venture Partners (SVP) Tokyo. It was a fascinating insight into philanthropy spaces both in the States and in Japan.
For instance, he outlined how investors at SVP Tokyo work with NPOs in a collaborative, ‘side-by-side’ capacity, rather than the more traditional ‘top-down’ hierarchical relationship you see in philanthropy spaces in the States.
His closing thoughts on the Japanese social sector were especially interesting.
Money is not an issue — at least in Tokyo. Whether it’s from angels or Venture Capitalists, there’s no shortage of capital floating around. It could even come from dormant bank accounts holding money adding up to trillions of yen. But without initiatives that scale, or have a useful impact, having surplus capital doesn’t mean much. There’s a leadership deficit. Collaboration alone doesn’t get things done: organisations need effective leadership to focus their resources and make good decisions. Insularity. The Japanese social sector can be quite self-contained — language barriers are part of it — and bridging the domestic and international scenes would help bring about better collaborations overall.
Group Discussions
Participants split into discussion groups based on the issues they are most interested in.
After Kenji’s presentation, participants split into different groups for discussions themed around various social issues, such as gender in the workplace, environment, education, technology and Corporate Social Responsibility.
These are a few of the themes and insights that cropped up during the discussion:
1. The Importance of Leadership and Capacity-Building
Good intentions are all very well, but that doesn’t lead to effective outcomes. It’s like asking someone to build a house without any tools. To begin tackling social issues, you need to first have people capable of addressing them in the first place.
So, to do effective work in the social sector, stressed Kenji and Lisa, it helps to have other skills and background experience to bring to the table.
Just like any other industry or business, you have to ask the practical questions: Can NPOs and NGOs make full and effective use of money received? Are they staffed by those with enough experience in running organisations? Are their leaders able to make effective decisions? Are these efforts financially sustainable in the longer term?
Sustaining an initiative once it’s begun is even more important. Take education, for example — “schools are hard to die,” noted an audience member, meaning that there’s a real responsibility to the community to continue keeping a school open once you open one.
2. Impact: Why, How, Etc.
Wanting to make an ‘impact’ is just the start. It’s crucial for anyone wanting to tackle social issues to consider the kinds of impact they want to have, the scale of it, and why.
In other words, service and advocacy should always take precedence. Making an impact is ultimately not about “fancy terms” like “capacity-building” and “venture philanthropy,” but about the work done and effects felt at the grassroots.
3. Working Under Capitalism: Creating Win-Win Situations for All Stakeholders
Most social issues aren’t solved by a single organisation. Usually, it will take a whole web of stakeholders to solve a problem. Every one of them will have different interests, so engaging everyone and helping their interests align will be challenging. But it’s a much more effective way to generate real impact.
One of the best ways to solve a social issue under capitalism is to leverage economic self-interest. Or in other words, make it profitable to do so. It’s just good business sense!
4. Safeguarding vs. Innovation; Stewardship vs. Disruption
One group brought up another oft-forgotten idea when it comes to tackling social issues: how important it is to safeguard what already exists. This can include things like cultural heritage and linguistic diversity.
Innovation in the name of solving a social issue can sometimes leave existing communities behind. Sometimes it happens when their needs aren’t taken into consideration, or when innovation takes place too quickly.
Achieving social impact, they noted, should not come at the cost of communities or culture. Any endeavours tackling social challenges must include and work with the relevant communities to create effective, sustainable, and long-term impact. | https://medium.com/social-innovation-japan/how-can-we-better-collaborate-on-social-issues-80fa663b2950 | ['Social Innovation Japan'] | 2019-06-14 01:03:17.204000+00:00 | ['Nonprofit', 'Social Impact', 'Venture Philanthropy', 'Japan', 'Social Enterprise'] |
AllBodies.Com: The Sexual Wellness Community You Need In 2021 | The sexual wellness revolution is here and allbodies.com is leading the charge.
In 2020 for many of us it’s been hard to feel joy, pleasure, and liberation.
It’s been a year that our wounds have resurfaced with viciousness and we’ve questioned who the hell we really are to our core. We have been confronted with our shadow side and gotten a first-class seat to view how it has plagued us for far too long.
Our relationship with our bodies, our sexuality, and our trauma has been one area of our humanity that has needed some examination. Either from our own wisdom coming forth or brought on by events in our private world’s. This has been the moment our Soul’s have been manifesting, particularly those of us who are survivors of sexual assault and trauma.
To meet the needs for healing our wounds around intimacy, ALLBODIES.COM is here to graciously accept the challenge. It is a sexual wellness platform that was born at the right time.
As we enter into the Age of Aquarius while in the midst of the rubble that is 2020, there is an emerging desire for sexual healing. Our intimate lives extend beyond our genitalia and sexual acts, it is imprinted on how we navigate relationships as a whole. After trauma our minds become hardwired to embrace pain versus pleasure. This emerging platform is working sweet overtime to reprogram our mindsets around sexuality and sensuality in the aftermath of trauma.
ALLBODIES.COM has made therapeutic practices accessible to all, front and center in its mission.
It’s homepage boldly proclaims:
“Learn To Feel Good In Your Body”
Allbodies is a new approach to healthcare.
We make online health classes, led by trusted practitioners, that address our most important needs: healing trauma, sexuality, mental health, body literacy, and more.
On the platform one can attend virtual events and enroll in short online classes.
A Sampling of their Events Includes:
Surviving Sexual Trauma — Remembrance and Events
For Survivors in the LGBTQ+ Spectrum
Yoga To Get Grounded
BDSM For Beginners
Breast Health 101
Dirty Talk 101
A Sampling of their Classes Includes:
Orgasms
Dating as a Trauma Survivor
Intimacy and Sex After Trauma
Vagina and Vulva Masturbation
Open Relationships & Polyamory
Mapping Emotions To Release Trauma
The credentialed practitioners that lead the events and classes at allbodies represent a diverse cross section of genders and ethnic groups with a heavy lean towards women of color.
When many underrepresented individuals decide to take on the emotional trek of unpacking their sexual trauma, the landscape often looks very white cis-genered and heterosexual. The white folx tend to be the ones highlighted by media and other platforms as the only ones seeking sex therapy and as the available practitioners themselves. This narrative has played out for eons and has impacted the strides that underrepresented people could have been making in the way of healing their trauma.
At allbodies, representation matters and they are working to dismantle the bill of goods that we’ve been sold around therapy. ALL of us deserve healing, connection to our bodies, and nourishment, BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) and other underrepresented groups are no exception.
And in an effort to live that ethos, if you are a Black individual you can sign up for a membership to allbodies for free. Your complimentary membership is valid for one year.
They also offer a 7 day free trial for others and after that the monthly fee is only $17.99.
This shout out of an article wouldn’t be complete without a mention of their INSTAGRAM account.
It is straight fire. Full of irresistible knowledge on our bodies, our sex, our desires, our traumas, and our healing. The visuals are incredibly inclusive. No one has been left behind. Simply stunning imagery.
As we march into 2021 a community centered and healing forward platform such as ALLBODIES.COM, will without a doubt lead to your personal alchemy as a sexual being and expand the needed discussion around the sexual wellness revolution.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Cholia (rhymes with Sha-Leah) Johnson is a health and culture journalist that often pretends she was in the musical Dream Girls. She also recently launched a new YouTube channel that is all about embodying unapologetic self-love and practicing radical self-care as a Divine Feminine. Follow her on Instagram.
References:
2021 Heralds the New Age of Aquarius — Here’s What 5 Astrologers Want You To Know About It https://www.wellandgood.com/what-is-age-aquarius/
The Biggest Wellness Trend For 2019? Female Pleasure https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/sexual-revolution
How This Organization Is Making Space for Black Women To Heal From Sexual Trauma https://www.vogue.com/article/how-this-organization-is-making-space-for-black-women-to-heal-from-sexual-trauma
Emotional and Physical Pain Are Almost The Same: To Our Brain https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2020/02/14/emotional--physical-pain-are-almost-the-sameto-your-brain/?sh=2a87f6df46c1 | https://medium.com/@iamcholia/allbodies-com-the-sexual-wellness-community-you-need-in-2021-76a90a7a67e1 | ['Cholia', 'Cj'] | 2020-12-17 23:03:24.277000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Trauma', 'Wellness', 'Sexual Assault', 'Therapy'] |
Political satire: what is the other side of the coin? | When I am battling the blues, I resort to a good movie or a comedy show that makes me weep after a gut laugh as a therapeutic distraction.
Eventually, joyous communication is an art that people strive to master, we feel approved and validated when we bring a smile to others’ faces. But not every humour is sweet. Humour becomes bitter when we ridicule someone through bullying or satire.
In July 2017, Michael Moore called upon an Army of Satire in the United States to take down the president Trump. At first glance, it sounds strange to view grievance and humour as bunkmates. It feels indecent to laugh amid tragedies or mock someone committing the most heinous crimes. But this wondrous blend is called Satire. Megan LeBoeuf refers Satire to any form of humor, including particularly ridicule of authority, which consists of making what cannot be logically true in favor of a belief, rational.
Satire was busy in the Middle East over recent years especially in the form of Talk Shows. It all began with the kick-off of the so-called Arab spring. Bassem Youssef, named “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”, was the anchor of the most-watched show in 2011 “Al Barnamaj” (the Show), followed by many other satirists.
Bursts of laughter fills houses, political and cultural commentary of the absurd situation in the Arab region; political leaders, people displacement, and sectarian strife. The political discourse and the practices of hereditary republics helped satirists to rise to stardom.
But is satire as a craft a recent phenomenon in the Middle East? Let’s have a look on the modern history of middle eastern media. The Machiavellian dictatorial ideology of instilling fear among people to demonstrate the ruler’s superiority was incorporated by political regimes in the Middle East. The governments have given rein to all sorts of violence and persecution against those demanding political reforms, or even expressing their opinions. They imposed control over press publication and online outlets, detaining political and human rights activists, journalists, and bloggers. Although, these governments allowed satire. It has approved staging certain theatre plays containing an indirect critique of the government. We recall the play of ‘the leader’ starring Adel Imam, an actor who is known to be close to the government.
This strategy was twofold. It was a part of this of polishing-up the external image of the government and to conceal the censorship of theatrical productions, and as a form of momentary “breathing” and pressure relief from state control.
Though, Satire is still fun! It can be recalled to have many good sides.
First, humour is precious. Freud perceives humor as a release mechanism that provides the individual with a psychological balance. Laughter has been proven by Robert Provine to be a social behavior that creates and maintain social bonds. Also, the only certainty is that people really enjoy watching satire shows, they may like to see the big heads that seem to be unbeaten on the ropes. Humour is a significant communicative emotional strategy for social movements. Plato points to the “Superiority Theory” which consists of raising the community up by putting the criticized and mocked party down. This mechanism empowers collective identity in social movements communities. Third, satire communicate to less technically minded people, it makes politics more comprehensive even if it did not reinforce their political participation. Some people view satire as a key part in mobilizing youth politically with an amusing laughter and sharp insight, and a fuel for social movements to beat the dissatisfaction. The common ground between social movements and satire makes it look this way, as they are both culturally contextual. Palgrave Macmillan states in her book “Colbert’s America” that it influences young people to actively seek, and look for news and information, after watching an episode of the Talk Show. Satire reveals, ironically, the problems of the criticized behaviour, which requires people’s reflection after the laughter
But what is the flip side of satire? Imagine a giggling couch potato holding their phone with chips in their hands, commenting and interacting digitally, and then fall asleep, they have released all the anger that they might have felt towards a particular issue. Malcom Gladwell calls ‘satire paradox’, explaining that people are less likely to be changed by what they find funny.
The worse is when all what you can see is defamation, masquerading as a critique. All what we can hear is sophomoric insults against people who simply disagree with the satirist decidedly view. This view makes some satire work not only irrelevant to social movements, but also have a social effect. Some of satirists are attention seekers and are able to spread the politic of not accepting the existence of a different view, especially when it touches about deep beliefs. People are digitally loud and outlandish. These works can be marked as demagoguery, eroding our moral compass and sense of decorum.
Does humor really props up social movements? does it really embolden the audience to act upon what is ridiculed?
If it is not harmful, satire’s role to innerve social movements against oppressive dictatorial authorities works only to some extent. Otherwise, it can be a momentary breathing. Laughing is cool, but we need to roar back to life, we need a dramatic awareness-raising and a powerful strategy. The disasters around are never joyous. | https://medium.com/political-satire-what-is-the-other-side-of-the/political-satire-what-is-the-other-side-of-the-coin-f46923d69621 | ['Sara Ossman'] | 2020-11-27 13:44:46.728000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Satire', 'Comedy', 'Middle East', 'Social Movements'] |
Running multiple HTTP servers in Go | Server type
To create and configure a custom HTTP server, http package provides Server structure. This structure has below public fields (from the doc).
type Server struct { // TCP address to listen on, ":http" or ":https" if empty
Addr string
Handler // http.DefaultServeMux if `nil`Handler Handler
TLSConfig *Config // TLS configuration for HTTPS protocolTLSConfig * tls
// request, including the body.
ReadTimeout Duration // ReadTimeout is the maximum duration for reading the entire// request, including the body.ReadTimeout time
// writes of the response.
WriteTimeout Duration // WriteTimeout is the maximum duration before timing out// writes of the response.WriteTimeout time
// the base context for incoming requests on this server.
// If BaseContext is nil, the default is context.Background()
BaseContext func(Listener) context.Context // BaseContext optionally specifies a function that returns// the base context for incoming requests on this server.// If BaseContext is nil, the default is context.Background()BaseContext func( net // ErrorLog specifies an optional logger for errors accepting
// connections, unexpected behavior from handlers, and
// underlying FileSystem errors.
ErrorLog *log.Logger
}
We are familiar with the Addr and Handler fields. The ReadTimeout and WriteTimeout fields can be important for added safety. ErrorLog is crucial to log any errors thrown by the server while processing a request.
💡 There are other public fields that are not mentioned above but could be crucial for your use case.
The Server structure implements basic methods like ListenAndServe , SetKeepAlivesEnabled , Shutdown , etc. to configure and control a server.
Let’s create some custom servers and run them concurrently.
In the above program, the createServer function creates a ServerMux object and implements a fresh routing mechanism. The server object contains the implementation of a brand new HTTP server based on input arguments.
It then returns a pointer to the newly created Server object since most of the methods implemented by the Server structure has a pointer receiver.
In the main method, things are not so different. Instead of using http.ListenAndServe method to spawn an HTTP server with the default configuration, we are creating a brand new instance of an HTTP server inside goroutines and spawning it using Server.ListenAndServe() method call.
💡 Unlike http.ListenAndServe(addr string, handler Handler) method call, the server.ListenAndServe() method call does not need any arguments since the configuration of the server is present in the server struct itself. The server.ListenAndServe function internally creates a tcp listener on address addr using net.Listen function which returns a net.Listener and uses it with server.Serve function to listen to incoming connections using the server.Handler field value (a ServeMux object).
Let’s look at the common methods that can be invoked on the Server object.
SetKeepAlivesEnabled method
The Server.SetKeepAliveEnabled method enables the HTTP persistent connection. By default, this is enabled for better performance.
server.SetKeepAlivesEnabled(false)
Close method
Once we no longer need a server, we can close it without terminating the main program. This is achieved using the server.Close method. This method forcefully shutdown a server without gracefully closing the active TCP connection.
error := server.Close()
Hence, this method can only be used when a server needs to be shut down immediately without caring about active TCP connections.
In the above program, we have created a bare minimal server and spawned it in the main method. We have also created a exitSignal channel to block the main goroutine unless the server is closed. Even after server exits, the main goroutine is blocked until unless some goroutine writes a value to or closes the exitSignal channel.
Using time.AfterFunc function, we have launched another goroutine that executes a function after 3 seconds. In this function, we are calling server.Close() method which closes the server. This function call may return an error but before that happens, the server may close already and exit with an error.
This is why exitSignal channel is so important in this scenario. Once server.Close() is returned, we are closing the exitSignal channel using built-in close function.
Once the exitSignal channel is closed, this goroutine will be killed and control will pass back to main goroutine. Since exitSignal channel is now closed, main goroutine is no longer blocked and it will start executing the code below the read from channel ( <- chan ) expression.
Once you run this Go program, after 3 seconds, you will be able to see this result in your console.
$ go run go-server.go (took 3s)
ListenAndServe(): http: Server closed
Close(): completed! <nil>
Main(): exit complete!
The only drawback of Close method is that it can not close hijacked connections like WebSockets. But we will look into that in other lessons.
Shutdown method
The server.Shutdown method behaves exactly like server.Close method but with some added safety. If you want to gracefully close active TCP connections, then Shutdown() is better compared to Close method.
One good advantage of using Shutdown method over Close is that we can perform some cleanup operations after a server shutdown is initiated. This can be done by registering one or more cleanup functions using RegisterOnShutdown method.
server.RegisterOnShutdown(f func())
These cleanup functions will be run as separate goroutines and they will be invoked as soon as the shutdown process is started. Like Close method, Shutdown method can not close upgraded or hijacked connections. Hence this is a good place to close these connections gracefully.
This method needs a base context of the incoming requests. If you haven’t configured the BaseContext field of the Server structure, you can use the context.Background() since it is the default value for the BaseContext field.
The Shutdown method does not wait for cleanup job to be completed. Also, the server will return immediately once the Shutdown call is made. Hence it is mandatory to keep main goroutine alive until the server shutdown and server cleanup jobs are completed. For that, we can use channels or a WaitGroup like we did in the previous examples.
Let’s modify our earlier example and register a cleanup function.
In the above example, instead of using two channels to signal exit, we are using a WaitGroup . WaitGroup wg will wait for 2 goroutines to finish their jobs, one that closes the server and the other that performs the cleanup.
The ideal output of the above program should be as following. However, results may vary depending upon your system. But in all the cases, Main(): exit complete! will be the last statement.
ListenAndServe(): http: Server closed
Shutdown(): completed! <nil>
RegisterOnShutdown(): completed!
Main(): exit complete! | https://medium.com/rungo/running-multiple-http-servers-in-go-d15300f4e59f | ['Uday Hiwarale'] | 2020-09-01 06:42:04.870000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Golang', 'Go Programming Language', 'Golang Tutorial', 'Go Programming'] |
Creating reusable custom React Hooks | Since React 16.8 you no longer need class components to work with stateful logic. The way to do it now looks like this:
The code above works perfectly on a functional component (previously referred to as ‘stateless functional component’) and that brings lots of new possibilities for the way we structure projects.
The most commonly used hooks are useState and useEffect. In case you are not familiar with any of those, I suggest you read the official documentation on React Hooks.
But it doesn’t stop there. To get the most out of this new feature we can write custom react hooks in order to reuse logic amongst components. Let’s check it out on a few real examples.
You can use the codes below on an existing project or create a new one by running 'create-react-app custom-hooks-project' on the terminal.
Creating an Infinite scroll with react hooks
Suppose you want to render a table with lots of entries. You probably don’t want react to render it all at once, resulting in a very long page where users may not even get to the bottom of it. One possible solution is to implement an infinite scrolling table, to render new entries as the user scrolls down.
Edit file App.js (gist)
App.js
The above code loads some fake data from the web and displays it in an HTML table. All the row elements are rendered at once, which is bad if you have a long list of items. To solve the issue, we could render 30 items at once and render 10 more each time the user hits the bottom of the page.
If we were to implement this logic on the App.js file and then need to reuse it on another component, there’d be code redundancy.
Thanks to React Hooks, we can implement the logic on a separate custom hook and use it wherever needed.
The naming convention to creating custom hooks is to start it with the word “use” for instance useCustomHookName. This is important for react to check for violations of rules of Hooks.
2. Create custom react hook file useInfiniteScroll.js (gist)
useInfiniteScroll.js
This created hook accepts 2 arguments:
start : The starting number of elements to be rendered.
: The starting number of elements to be rendered. pace: The subsequent number of elements to be rendered.
By default, they are set to 30 and 10, respectively. Meaning you can call the hook without passing any arguments and those values will be used.
The logic is pretty simple: the value returned by the custom hook (which will be the number of elements we'd like to render) is increased by the pace variable each time the user hits the bottom of the page.
M ake sure the inital number of elements rendered allows for vertical scrolling.
Now all that’s left to do is use the newly created react hook inside the App.js component. Replace App.js' previous code with the following:
3. Update file App.js (gist)
Updated App.js
You can run 'npm start' on the console to test the app. It should work as follows:
Infinite Scroll hook in practice
Creating a real-time firebase database entry listener
Let's make it more complex with this one. If you haven't tried Firebase's real-time database, I recommend doing so. They've made it really easy to set up a free online database and backend as service so you can focus on front-end development.
If you need help with the setup you can follow the steps on this link.
In case you don't want to create a database of your own and yet try this example, you can uncomment the data I've provided in the configs file.
Assuming you have a firebase account with a real-time database it's time to create the configurations file. But first, install firebase on your project by running 'npm install firebase --save' .
Create configs file database.js (gist)
database.js
This file enables connection to your database, and from now on each time you want to perform a database action on a file such as inserting new entries, editing previous ones, etc, make sure you import firebase from "./database.js" file and not from 'firebase' package.
With the database configured, you can now access some of its methods such as push, put, remove, etc… you can read the full documentation if you need help, for this example you will need 'push' to insert data to the database and 'on' to retrieve such data in real-time.
2. Create file useDatabaseEntry.js (gist)
useDatabaseEntry.js
When retrieving data from firebase, you get an object indexed by the unique keys firebase automatically generates. The problem is that the .map() function is available for arrays only. What this custom hook does is retrieve data from firebase and convert it to an array, so that is can be then easily be mapped to our table.
3. Edit file App.js (gist)
App.js
In the App.js file, there's a button to push data to firebase, and the useDatabaseEntry receives the desired entry as an argument and returns an array with the data from the entry.
The advantage is that you can now use this new hook to retrieve real-time data from any entry of the firebase database directly as an array, which makes it easy to be mapped to a table for instance.
If you want to practice, try clicking the button a couple of times to insert more data and make use of the useInfiniteScroll defined in the above example.
Here's the result: | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/creating-useful-custom-react-hooks-2ad125e36a32 | ['Paulo Levy'] | 2019-11-19 17:08:27.917000+00:00 | ['Firebase', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'React Hook', 'Functional Programming'] |
Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With Science These Days? | Disconnected and Meaningless
Science would have us believe that things are random, dead, and meaningless. It wants us to think a virus will have the same effect on us all, our reaction to it is random and unpredictable, and there’s nothing in our control that we can do about it. It wants us to think that particles and waves are just a building block of the universe but it has nothing to do with our day to day life.
I don’t buy it.
Science doesn’t look at the universe holistically, and I’m sorry but I can’t get on board with that. (Actually, I’m not sorry at all.)
I don’t ‘believe’ in anything that tells me that the world and my body are comprised of unrelated parts that can be studied in isolation to tell me how to live my life. We intuitively know that this is not the way. Everything is connected.
If you meditate and look within yourself, you’ll see that we are all connected to everything and we are part of a oneness. Looking at the problems in one person without relating them to other people is absurd, the same way looking at your foot problems without studying what’s going on in the rest of the body is absurd. And if you only go that far, you’re still missing the connections in the mind and soul.
I recently read You Are the Universe by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos. In it, the world we know is explained as being full of meaning. Things aren’t random and separate, as science would have us believe. It is a conscious universe — being manifested and created by all of us. In the words of these authors:
The answers offered in this book are not our invention or eccentric flights of fancy. All of us live in a participatory universe. Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours either to embrace or to change.
If we give in and only believe in science, we will be compelled to think that our lives have no purpose. But if we allow science to inform our spirituality or vice versa, we can begin to live our lives with rich meaning. | https://medium.com/mystic-minds/why-is-everyone-so-obsessed-with-science-these-days-b1737475abc6 | ['Emily Jennings'] | 2020-12-29 02:09:32.877000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Science'] |
Mexico tariffs draw sharp response from auto industry, business groups | By Jessica Piper
A cargo truck near the US-Mexico border in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico (GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s latest announcement of increased tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico has quickly encountered pushback from a variety of business and manufacturing interests on both sides of the border — and continued lobbying in Washington, where trade has been a fraught issue in the last few years.
The president announced on May 30 a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico, effective June 10, adding that the tariff will increase every month until the migration crisis at the southern border is resolved. The Trump administration hopes that increased pressure will force the Mexican government to stop the flow of Central American asylum-seekers into the U.S.
However, business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were quick to decry the proposal, citing potential costs for American consumers and businesses. The U.S. imported roughly $346.5 billion of goods from Mexico in 2018.
Trump’s proclamation came just thirteen days after his administration declined to impose a long-discussed 25 percent tariff on automobile parts and revoked tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada and Mexico that had been in place since 2018. Both those measures had been the subject of significant lobbying efforts, with General Motors — which manufactures several of its models in Mexico — spending $3.8 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2019, on pace to double its 2018 lobbying expenditures. Though the latest proposed tariffs do not directly target car companies, the automobile industry will likely face the greatest impact. Vehicles were the top category for U.S. imports from Mexico in 2018, with a value of $93 billion.
Mexico has also become the United States’ second-largest foreign supplier of oil this year, and political turmoil in Venezuela combined with reduced production in Saudi Arabia leave American oil companies with few alternatives for heavy crude. Corporations including ExxonMobil, BP and Shellhave all lobbied Congress on tariffs this year.
Business groups from other industries have also poured their money into lobbying as the Trump administration’s rhetoric on trade has escalated. More than 1,000 clients have already lobbied the federal government on trade this year, after a record year in 2018 when 1,298 groups lobbied on the issue. A focal point of trade-related lobbying has been the ratification a renewed North American trade agreement, commonly known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). However, momentum for the USMCA’s passage has stalled in recent months, and both lawmakers and industry leaders have expressed concern that additional tariffs on Mexico would further jeopardize the deal.
“If the president goes through with this, I’m afraid progress to get this trade agreement across the finish line will be stifled,” said Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in a statement on Friday.
While the recently eliminated tariffs on aluminum and steel were authorized under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the proposed five percent tariff on Mexican goods is based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which dictates that, in a time of national emergency, the president has the power to regulate commerce. The Washington Post reported Monday night that GOP lawmakers had discussed the possibility of blocking the tariffs, but, to do so, Congress would need a veto-proof majority — something it was not able to obtain when Trump declared a national emergency in February.
Several trade-related bills have been introduced this legislative session, including the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act of 2019 (S.287), which would establish permanent measures to regulate the president’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs under Section 232. Groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Honda Motor Co. and Americans for Prosperity lobbied on the bill, but, despite bipartisan sponsorship, it has not left committee.
Some groups have also taken the battle over tariffs to the court of public opinion. The Consumer Technology Association, a group representing more than 2,000 technology companies, ran anti-tariff ads on Facebook in the two days after Trump’s announcement. The Koch brothers-affiliated Freedom Partners PAC has continued to run anti-tariff ads on the Facebook page “Trade Builds America,” and the Pass USMCA Coalition, a group of trade associations and corporations, is still running ads in favor of the USMCA’s passage.
The Texas Democratic Party has also made the new tariffs a campaign issue, with a Facebook adcalling the policy a “$17 billion tax.”
The Association of Global Automakers, Inc. (AGA), whose leadership includes longtime Mitch McConnell staffer Don Stewart, spent nearly $600,000 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2019. An AGA ad campaign launched in April includes four, 15-second digital ads and a 30-second broadcast spot which showcase “everyday Americans” end with the message “tell Washington to stop the auto tariffs.”
The most recent Mexico tariffs have not been mentioned by advertisements on the Trump campaign’s social media pages, though the campaign has capitalized on the administration’s ongoing trade war with China. Several current Facebook ads highlight the president’s record of “standing up to China’s unfair trade policies.” Trump recently raised tariffs on Chinese consumer goods to 25 percent. | https://medium.com/@OpenSecretsDC/mexico-tariffs-draw-sharp-response-from-auto-industry-business-groups-4f37ca5bfda3 | [] | 2019-06-06 12:44:20.875000+00:00 | ['Trade', 'Tariffs', 'Mexico', 'Politics', 'Lobbying'] |
GoLang : Dynamic JSON Parsing using empty Interface and without Struct in Go Language | 4. Parsing Embedded object in Array of JSON
Output:
Reading Value for Key : 0
Id : 1 - Name : Mr. Boss - Department : - Designation : Director
Address : Mumbai Maharashtra India
Reading Value for Key : 1
Id : 11 - Name : Irshad - Department : IT - Designation : Product Manager
Address : Mumbai Maharashtra India
Reading Value for Key : 2
Id : 12 - Name : Pankaj - Department : IT - Designation : Team Lead
Address : Pune Maharashtra India
Try it at : https://play.golang.org/p/P54UcFy4uJt
Code Explanation: /* First: declared array map of string with empty interface
which will hold the value of the parsed json. */
var results []map[string]interface{} /* Second: Unmarshal the json string string by converting
it to byte into map */
json.Unmarshal([]byte(empArray), &results) /* Third: Read the each item from an array of map using range */
for key, result := range results {} /* Fourth: To Read data from address node from each item we have to declare one more map with empty interface inside range loop */
address := result["address"].(map[string]interface{}) /* Fifth: Read the result value by its key inside range loop */
fmt.Println("Id :", result["id"]) /* Sixth: Read the address value by its key inside range loop */
fmt.Println("City :", address["city"])
Parsing JSON in go is very each and its depends upon developer preferences whether they want to use struct or they want to parse them raw using interfaces.
Will keep posting new articles! Thank you!!! | https://medium.com/@irshadhasmat/golang-simple-json-parsing-using-empty-interface-and-without-struct-in-go-language-e56d0e69968 | ['Mohammed Irshad'] | 2020-03-03 07:13:45.486000+00:00 | ['Parsing', 'Golang', 'Golang Tutorial', 'Json', 'Empty Interface'] |
Drawing on Images using Tableau’s Interworks tool | The idea to draw on images came to my mind while I did a course on Tableau which had modules and tutorials talking about how to draw shapes like Triangle, Rectangle, Square etc. using coordinates. The course I did also taught me to implement the same on floor plan images.
During the lockdown, people have come with social-distancing views and ideas where they have showcased the real world social distancing on floor plan images using the technique of drawing polygons in Tableau.
Ken Flerlage wrote a blog post talking about how to make a social distancing plan in Tableau. Here is the link to the blog post.
I really liked Ken Flerlage’s implementation. You can view his work here.
Avinash Reddy Munnagi also took inspiration from his idea and executed the same. His workbook can be viewed here.
I even liked Praveen Jose’s implementation which focused the same idea inside a bus. You can view it here.
I learned the technique and implemented the same using Tableau but not on floor plans. I thought, how nice it would be if I can use any other image??
This image of AGT I saw on Google and I found the perfect image to work on. Thinking and thinking, I came up with the idea of implementing Face Detection and Recognition like effect with Tableau. Hey???? Don’t worry. No coding involved.
Search and download the image from Google of your choice. After downloading the image, save the image in a folder or directory.
For implementation of the idea on the AGT image, I built the below dataset.
Shape, Path Order,X1,Y1
Howie Mandel,1,431,1208
Howie Mandel,2,685,1200
Howie Mandel,3,681,942
Howie Mandel,4,427,942
Heidi Klum,1,857,1202
Heidi Klum,2,1096,1200
Heidi Klum,3,1093,940
Heidi Klum,4,853,944
Sofia Vergara,1,1338,1204
Sofia Vergara,2,1608,1202
Sofia Vergara,3,1605,927
Sofia Vergara,4,1334,927
Simon Cowell,1,1786,1189
Simon Cowell,2,2052,1193
Simon Cowell,3,2044,919
Simon Cowell,4,1778,919
Terry Crews,1,1136,1560
Terry Crews,2,1406,1564
Terry Crews,3,1414,1273
Terry Crews,4,1138,1267
I plotted the coordinates manually by trial and error. This will consume time. Instead, using Tableau’s Interworks tool, your job becomes easy. After building the dataset, save the dataset as .xlsx or .csv file. After saving, bring it into Tableau.
Now, our job is to bring the background image into Tableau. So, go to the Map option -> Background Images and choose the dataset sheet. Then , select Add Image. Choose the image from the path where you had saved earlier. Your X coordinate starts from 0 and goes to the width of the image and Y coordinate starts from 0 and goes to the height of the image .( You can get the width and height by using an Image editor like Paint, Snagit, GIMP, etc). Another way is you can right click, select Properties, choose Details and scroll down to Image Section, There you will find height and width of image.
Click Ok and Click Ok.
Now we will build the viz, Change Mark type to Polygon.
Then, put X1 to Columns and Y1 to Rows. Your image should appear. Fix the axes if needed by editing the axes. Then, put Shape to Detail and Path Order to Path shelf. Reduce the color opacity to 0% and give a nice color to the Border in the Effects section.
You should see the following.
Face Detection
After, do a little bit of cleanup, edit the tooltips and remove all Dividers and Lines.
And Yes! your Face Detection effect in an image using only Tableau is done. You can download my workbook here.
For Face Recognition effect, the steps are the same. After doing Face Detection, You can filter the names on multiple sheets, bring the image to the dashboard and float the names on top of the squares. This is the method I used.
Face Recognition
Another method is you can create a dataset from the image itself. Andy Kriebel has explained the technique in this video. Using this technique, you can achieve the Face Recognition effect. You can download my workbook here. This technique can be used to even implement text detection , object detection , pedestrian detection etc.
You can connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Tableau-Public.
Thanks for reading.
Vignesh Suresh. | https://medium.com/@vigneshs4499/drawing-on-images-using-tableaus-interworks-tool-51f4213bd7ce | ['Vignesh Suresh'] | 2020-11-18 07:22:11.042000+00:00 | ['Facedetection', 'Tableau', 'Computer Vision'] |
Structural Adjustment in Africa | Structural Adjustment in Africa
International Monetary Fund headquarters, seen during IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2019. © 2019 Yuri Gripas / Sipa via AP Images
African decolonization from 1950–1975 was a multifarious operation that by no means ushered in a clean break between the continent and its European colonizers. Systemic dimensions of empire, like the core-periphery division, colonial bureaucratic structures, governing ideologies, etc., persisted in a transnational form through the process (to varying degrees in different national and colonial contexts).[1] It is in this sense that a historiographical taxonomy of the period commands the name “neocolonial” rather than “postcolonial”; African decolonization was ironically characterized by a reworking of empire.
European perspectives of the colonial era reveal that this reconfiguration was not simply pragmatic circumstance, but rather an intentional undertaking. Built into British colonialism was “a Whiggish teleological view of empire as a pax Britannica and decolonization as a benevolent British-led project, whether constitutional or socio-economic, or both.”[2] The French, similarly, held a “belief in a pragmatic ‘managed decolonization’ in sub-Saharan Africa — structurally similar though not identical to the British vision — that manifested in the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 and the creation of the French Union in 1946, leading to the Communauté of African states in 1958.”[3] The colonial viewpoint maintained its disregard for African agency through all phases of empire, preferring to execute a “project… directed from the cent[er]” even as it devolved control to formally independent African nations in the face of popular unrest.[4]
It is in this context that the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank must be understood and analyzed. The era immediately following African independence was characterized by development policies that centered on “large-scale industrialization, heavy government intervention, and trade [policies] aimed at protecting the domestic economy against competition on the world market.”[5] These “structuralist” ideas and their proponents emphasized the imperfections of the market, the overwhelming importance of fundamental structural changes in the economy (namely through industrialization), and the role of national capital accumulation in economic development, which ran counter to the neoliberal line of reasoning that focused on individualism rather than social structures, the self-regulating and efficient nature of markets, and the structural fluidity of developing countries.[6]
These policies brought economic growth alongside structural insecurities in effectively every country in which they were enacted, including Latin America. Orienting their economies internally led these countries to “depend… on volatile primary-product markets” and cultivated private sector rent-seeking which aimed to take advantage of government policies that targeted specific sectors of the economy (i.e. subsidies or nationalization). The 1970s exposed these insecurities when an assortment of individual commodity shocks and a massive global oil shock forced these primary-product economies to turn to international loans to sustain government spending and cover import costs.[7]
These loans were extended by the IMF and the World Bank and took several forms. The two credit facilities extended by the IMF to the very poorest countries were their Structural Adjustment Facilities (SAF) and Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facilities (ESAF), and their World Bank counterparts were Structural Adjustment Loans (SAL) and Sectoral Adjustment Loans (SECAL).[8] All of these required the borrowing country to adopt a policy framework paper (PFP) laying out the adjustments to be made in exchange for the loan, and the conditions of the PFPs were mostly dictated by the IMF and World Bank rather than the borrowing country.[9] In total, 42 African nations have taken up structural adjustment loans from the World Bank and/or the IMF.[10]
The implementation of structural adjustment programs took different forms in different countries, but four elements were present in every case, including “currency devaluation, the removal/reduction of the state from the workings of the economy, the elimination of subsidies in an attempt to reduce expenditures, and trade liberalisation.”[11] Effectively, structural adjustment ushered in a reversal of the aforementioned post-independence structuralist agendas in favor of the implementation of neoliberal policies aiming to decenter the state as a barrier to capitalist markets governed by transnational law and institutions (written and controlled primarily by the West). This neoliberal ideology was the driving force of an international Western project aiming not to liberate markets or roll back the power of governing institutions but to “[redesign] states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market”; in other words, structural adjustment was a consequence of a wider undertaking that intended to “encase” markets and shield them from intervention via international protections, with the IMF and World Bank playing key roles in this pursuit.[12]
The effects of structural adjustment are evident in individual case studies, but more difficult to analyze when generalized over the continent; however, there are clear trends that have emerged across national contexts resulting from those four elements existing in each of the cases. To begin, currency devaluation led to a reduction in standard of living by making basic necessities unaffordable to a bulk of African consumers. It also increased the costs of industrial and agricultural inputs, medicines, and piped water.[13] Currency devaluations had drastic negative effects on markets for domestic goods thanks to “knock-on” effects,[14] though many African countries avoided further negative impact thanks to a lack of a strong reliance on imports for basic needs, which became vastly more expensive after the change.[15]
The diminished role of the state in African economies, another common component of IMF and World Bank demands, led to unemployment for former public-sector workers (alongside broad wage cuts for those who were kept employed in government jobs[16]) and a complete decline in the quality of public services. Given that the public sector was the most common source of employment in adjusting nations, these effects were exacerbated greatly.[17] Decreases in the quality of healthcare, a core offering of the state in many African countries, came as a result of the World Bank’s blueprint for handling health services in adjusting nations that aimed at decreasing state participation via charging user fees, introducing private insurance, supporting non-governmental organizations’ and private groups’ provision of care and services, and decentralization.[18] By 1993, the World Bank had supplanted the World Health Organization as the driving force of global health policy,[19] and the decade saw a deterioration of health indicators across Africa and the growth of informal healthcare provision in countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe (though likely others as well) resulting from healthcare workers’ attempts to supplement their decreased incomes.[20] All of this intersected with the emergence of the HIV/AIDS and malaria epidemics, which produced a climate where “SAPs and neoliberalism exacerbated the social conditions that propelled the epidemic, and undermined the public infrastructure needed to scale-up AIDS treatment in poor countries.”[21] The marketization of healthcare under structural adjustment, which was a consequence of a wider aim of decreasing the state’s role in the economy, worsened humanitarian crises that took a particular toll on Africa’s poorest citizens.
The third aspect of structural adjustment advocated by the international financial institutions was a reduction in sectoral subsidies. Immediately after independence, many African countries took to subsidizing important goods like fuel and food in order to keep costs of living low for poor citizens, particularly in urban areas. The IMF and World Bank criticized these supports as a distortion of market operations and required their removal, which had a number of impacts. Increased fuel costs reverberated throughout economies and across class lines, which pushed up prices of other goods and services. Removal of food subsidies left basic subsistence out of the reach of massive swaths of the continent’s population and created irregular migration patterns to and from cities depending on whether subsistence farming was more economically viable than urban work and food purchases at a given time. [22]
The final universal element of structural adjustment was trade liberalization, which entailed removing capital controls and import tariffs. These policies were intended to insulate local businesses from exposure to competition against more-developed international markets and the unsustainable pricing that would come with that exposure. The reduction of these controls, aimed at creating an older international economic balance rooted in “the production of cheap raw materials for the developed parts of the world in exchange for more expensive processed goods,” led to the collapse of protections for local industries that were primed to become drivers of economic advancement due to how they advocated investment in other stages of production and, thus, economy-wide development. These industries were also key employers that were forced to conduct layoffs after becoming insolvent.[23]
The cumulative result of these layered and interconnected effects was the deepening of several existing problems in African societies. Inequality grew, access to land and water diminished further, gender disparities were accentuated, unemployment grew while incomes fell, and social relations and cultural elements were increasingly commodified.[24] These “kinks” in the neoliberal project were repeatedly written off by the international financial institutions as short-term logistical hurdles that would be overcome as countries approached economic stability and success in the long-run.[25] This flew in the face of findings that “countries with below average macro-policy implementations [that aligned with the World Bank and IMF’s prescriptions]… had above average growth performance” and that these nations ranked quite highly in growth performance relative to nations that had more readily adopted the international financial institutions’ policy proposals; overall, the relationship between structural adjustment and improved economic performance was, at the most generous and even when using the international financial institutions’ own publicly-released data to draw conclusions, a mixed bag that fell far short of supporting IMF and World Bank proclamations of success that would have warranted continuance of policy implementations.[26] Nonetheless, the structural adjustment period lasted for many decades and the debts from the programs persist to this day.
To return to the central point of argument, structural adjustment was not merely a byproduct of objective social-scientific postulations that went awry. It was the intentional realization of a “neoliberal vision of federation [which] held that national independence was acceptable as long as… ‘internationalism’ prevail[ed] with respect to commercial treaties, sanctity of contract, and property.”[27] This vision saw decolonization as acceptable, so long as “free nations remained snug within the bonds of world economic order.”[28] The Cold War saw Africa become a theater of conflict, and structural adjustment was one weapon in the arsenal of the capitalist West to buck the influence of socialism and expand its own sphere of power. In this sense, structural adjustment was an extension of a colonial-era attitude that completely rejected African agency and saw Western geopolitical goals as worth the economic costs of poor policies conducted in Africa (and across much of the global South).[29] Once again, the continent was reduced to how useful it could be in the struggles of larger world powers.
However, the complete history of structural adjustment cannot be understood without still centering the African agency it rejected. It spurred, much like the colonial era, popular resentment and demonstration against the West and its institutions; once again, Africans across the continent fought for democratization and national control of economic policy without foreign interference.[30] These demonstrations and demands were, of course, checked by resistance from the West and their African collaborators, but this local pressure, combined with the collapse of the USSR reducing the West’s interests in the programs, helped pave the way for democratizing reforms and the era of encouraging growth (mostly thanks to capital infusions from China and South Africa) seen across the region today.[31]
[1] Collins, Michael. “Nation, State and Agency: Evolving Historiographies of African Decolonization.” In Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect?, edited by Smith Andrew W.M. and Jeppesen Chris, 17–42. London: UCL Press, 2017. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/stable/j.ctt1mtz521.6.
[2] Collins, “Nation, State, and Agency.”
[3] Collins, “Nation, State, and Agency.”
[4] Collins, “Nation, State, and Agency.”
[5] Lensink, Robert. Structural Adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa. (London and New York: Longman, 1996).
[6] Lensink, Structural Adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa.
[7] Crisp, Brian F., and Michael J. Kelly. “The Socioeconomic Impacts of Structural Adjustment.” International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1999): 533–52. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600942.
[8] Note that SECALs were intended for use towards specific development projects. They were not for general economic support, unlike the other credit facilities.
[9] Lensink, Structural Adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa.
[10] World Bank, Adjustment in Africa: Reform, Results, and the Road Ahead. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994) and Riddell, J. Barry. “Things Fall Apart Again: Structural Adjustment Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 30, no. 1 (1992): 53–68. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/161046.
[11] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[12] Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[13] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[14] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[15] Hoogvelt, Ankie. “The Crime of Conditionality: Open Letter to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).” Review of African Political Economy, no. 38 (1987): 80–86. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4005899.
[16] Hoogvelt, “The Crimes of Conditionality.”
[17] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[18] Pfeiffer, James, and Rachel Chapman. “Anthropological Perspectives on Structural Adjustment and Public Health.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 149–65, p. 151. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25735105.
[19] Pfeiffer and Chapman, “Anthropological Perspectives.”
[20] Pfeiffer and Chapman, “Anthropological Perspectives.”
[21] Pfeiffer and Chapman, “Anthropological Perspectives.”
[22] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[23] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.”
[24] Pfeiffer and Chapman, “Anthropological Perspectives.”
[25] Riddell, “Things Fall Apart Again.” Also see publications like World Bank, Adjustment in Africa published in 1994 and the quarterly publication of the international financial institutions called Finance and Development (Washington D.C.) which heralded structural adjustment as a success waiting to be fully realized.
[26] Schatz, Sayre P. “Structural Adjustment in Africa: A Failing Grade So Far.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 32, no. 4 (1994): 679–92. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/161569.
[27] Slobodian, Globalists.
[28] Slobodian, Globalists.
[29] Bates, Robert H. “Democracy in Africa: A Very Short History.” Social Research 77, no. 4 (2010): 1133–148. Accessed December 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/stable/23347122.
[30] Bates, “Democracy in Africa.”
[31] Bates, “Democracy in Africa.” | https://medium.com/@justin-oconnor/structural-adjustment-in-africa-89061e4f3009 | ["Justin O'Connor"] | 2020-12-19 13:51:16.198000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Poverty', 'Global Health', 'Economics', 'Africa'] |
OceanONE Bug Bounty | To encourage community members to review OceanONE and report discoveries of bugs in SlowMist Zone, visit website and go to “Submit Bug Bounty” (URL：https://slowmist.io/en/bug-bounty.html) to submit a threat intelligence. (Status: to be review).
Mixin Network has launched the Bug Bounty program. The program is launched with the purpose of incentivizing developers community to contribute to the development of Mixin ecosystem and to show case unity in a decentralized era.
The Bug Bounty has officially started. Slowmist Bug Bounty program,
Rewards disbursed up to :
◇ 10 Xin
We highly welcome everyone to participate in the Slowmist Bug Bounty. For details of the program, please see: | https://medium.com/mixinnetwork/oceanone-bug-bounty-a944d18ab483 | ['Yasmine Moustatia'] | 2018-09-19 06:30:15.411000+00:00 | ['Oceanone', 'Mixinnews', 'Bug Bounty', 'Mixinnetwork', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Executive Summary | Summary of Stakenet (XSN)
Stakenet is a decentralized platform aiming to replace traditional banks, fiat currencies, payment gateways and more. Stakenet provides the infrastructure for instant and free transactions and delivers a much more convenient way to handle your preferred store of value through an ecosystem of decentralized platforms, products and services. The Stakenet blockchain is powered by its own native coin XSN, which is the money that will be used as the legal tender for the entire ecosystem. Keeping it smart and simple, Stakenet provides:
A suite of effective investment tools for institutional and conventional investors; and a platform for cross chain interoperability to service the blockchain industry; and the World’s first truly decentralized cryptocurrency bank
Trustless Proof of Stake (TPoS)
TPoS is a Stakenet invention that allows every XSN holder to securely stake his coins from a cold storage and validate the blockchain without the need of a trusted or voted authority. While crypto investors currently use offline storage, TPoS transforms these cold storage devices into profit generating devices. Rewards flow to the coin owner while the coins remain offline. TPoS is fully operational and available for everyone who owns XSN. This technology will be available for cross chain purposes upon implementation of CCPoS, described below.
Masternodes with Multiple Sources of Income
XSN Masternode owners will have three sources of income: regular blockrewards, the XSN Exchange’s trading fees and fees for running TOR-network services. Furthermore, additional revenue streams will come in the form of hosting DApps and other services added to the Stakenet Masternode network.
Investment Agility due to Cross Chain Proof of Stake (CCPoS)
Another Stakenet innovation under development is CCPoS. With this technology Stakenet aim to enable users to stake XSN and receive rewards in any other coin. This allows individuals to switch rewards on the fly to the new “hot coin”, if they so desire.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX) - Stakenet dx
Stakenet will create crypto’s first truly decentralized cryptocurrency exchange run entirely by masternodes. By doing so, our XSN Exchange cannot be shut down by any third party person or authority. Even Stakenet itself cannot quit the exchange once it is launched, what makes our DEX unique, because every other decentralized exchange can still be shut down by their creators.
Powerful applications - XSN DApps
Stakenet is more than just an ecosystem for XSN and other PoS coins. With cross chain interoperability Stakenet can host other chains, allowing them to add new features and applications without the dreaded fork. The backend code of these DApps will be running on the Stakenet peer to peer network, while the DApps frontend code and users’ interface can be written in any language that can make calls to the backend. Using Stakenet’s unique combination of a masternode network and hardware, developers can create powerful DApps. For example, a car manufacturer is able to monitor ownership and service level detail of the car as well as the owner is able to lock/unlock the car with XSN Hardware. Disclaimer: As with any crypto-currency, there is inherent risk. While XSN endeavors to implement to the best of their abilities, they make no representations as to future value and individuals purchase XSN at their own risk.
The Unique Stakenet Hardware Wallet - XSN Excalibur
XSN Excalibur will be a unique XSN hardware wallet with several features which no other device has. These unique selling propositions are summarized as: Cold storage exchange from a hardware device and earn CCPoS rewards while your coins remain offline. XSN Excalibur is a multi-currency hardware wallet which will interact with the XSN Wallet or XSN Light wallet. That way users will connect their XSN Excalibur to a phone or computer and will be able to send, receive, stake and trade by using one of the two XSN wallets.
Convenience due to the new Multicurrency Light Wallet - XSN Light
XSN Light will be a new desktop/mobile for the user’s device of choice without the need of downloading each blockchain for each coin. This wallet will enable users to send and receive any supported currency.
Blockchain Services - XSN Cloud
XSN Cloud will provide a lot of useful blockchain services for every member of the Stakenet ecosystem. First, XSN Cloud offers a trusted staking service for major proof of stake coins and a trustless Masternode hosting service. Furthermore, the Cloud includes a fee-less monitoring tool for Masternodes and a calculator for staking rewards and Masternode earnings. Finally, the XSN Cloud will host a merchant marketplace where coin owners can hire merchants to trustlessly stake their coins using TPoS, while the coins remain on the XSN Excalibur, Ledger hardware wallet, or in any other cold storage.
Profit-sharing, Buy-back-burns and Revolving Stake Bonus (RSB)
All profits will be given back to XSN coin owners one way or another, such as buy-back-burns or funding the treasury for further development. Additionally, Stakenet will reward XSN holders via an RSB mechanism, which is a proof of burn technology for third party businesses using the Stakenet network.
Security
Stakenet will initially be centralized but will thereafter managed entirely by Masternodes. This decentralization removes the risk of obstruction or being shut down by third parties. Furthermore, we created the highest level of network security and an individual user’s protection with the use of TPoS.
Privacy
XSN is building crypto’s first internal TOR network run by Masternodes. Whereas TOR has been utilized in crypto by coins like XVG, those methods are fundamentally flawed due to exit node relay detection. Our TOR Masternode network won’t have this vulnerability and will allow truly obfuscated transactions.
Coin metrics
Consensus: PoS, TPoS
Coinage: enabled, 24h
Algorithm: X11
Block time: 60 seconds
Blockreward: 20 XSN
Difficulty retargeting: 40 minutes
Launch date: fair launch at 6 th Mar. 2018
Swapped supply from POSW to XSN: 76.500.000
XSN Blockreward distribution: 45% masternodes, 45% staking, 10% treasury
Masternode requirement: 15,000 XSN | https://medium.com/stakenet/executive-summary-7bb47ee0a9ef | ['Stakenet Team'] | 2018-12-06 10:50:20.289000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Technical Documentation', 'Proof Of Stake'] |
The Side Hustles That Actually Worked For Me | The Side Hustles That Actually Worked For Me
A primer on money-making that doesn’t drive you mad
Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash
Everybody likes money — so much so that a lot of people spend hours upon hours just for a handful of cents answering surveys, doing menial work, and even solving captchas by hand.
This post is not that, it’s a list of side hustles that have actually worked for me. Better even: these are all things I either enjoyed or “didn’t hate".
Offline side jobs
Over the years I worked on a farm, in construction, in a warehouse — and I had a heck of a time (de-)constructing event locations back when those were still a thing.
Right now I’m driving around throwing pizza at people and somehow they give me money for being out and having fun.
To me that was always the key point: All of these jobs can be a whole lot of fun if you wrap your mind around them and learn how to enjoy work as a hobby. In each of these places I had coworkers who were like me and others who absolutely hated the work.
While the others complained about the free food being leftovers from the kitchen instead of five-star meals we were having a great time joking and laughing. And we enjoyed the best tasting sandwiches you could get after some long hours of tough, physical work that clears your mind.
And that is before you factor in how these jobs all paid surprisingly well, how you don’t have to pay taxes on anything up to 450€ in side income (at least here in Germany) and how the work was basically a free gym membership where they give you money to work out.
If you can get into that mindset and enjoy what the jobs can offer you this is easily the best way to earn money because the hard work is all on someone else’s part.
A moderately successful YouTube channel
For a long time I had lots of fun together with my best friend with a hobby-based YouTube channel about magnetfishing. This channel never had more than 8k subscribers, and yet it paid for all my power tools, afforded me a pickup truck that we used to get rid of all the scrap metal — and most importantly we enjoyed this hobby greatly.
That is the power of YouTube and I’m still bitter that magnetfishing is now outlawed in most parts of Germany, I would still head out every other weekend to pull scrap metal out of rivers and canals.
This is how my weekends looked for over two years. Good times.
Instead I’m now doing programming videos where I share my experiences and lessons from the last eight years, the woes of job hunting, and the joy of coding for fun. See if you like what I do:
Writing and translation
These days I obviously write here on Medium and my own site www.codingtofreedom.com — but for a great deal of my school years I worked as a freelance translator between German and English through Fiverr and private follow-up gigs that spawned from there.
Translation is great because it lets you focus on typing more than writing — a great way to unwind after a long day of six hours in school. I paid for my scooter this way and I used that to get to my first job interview which landed me my coding apprenticeship and later day job.
I had this odd little tool that showed text paragraph by paragraph and allowed you to easily translate them one at a time for rapid progress. I can’t seem to find that again no matter how hard I look, but I clearly remember it being shareware that looked like the good old Windows XP days, and yet it worked like a charm.
Monetized curation blogs
For a good three years I ran a network of monetized Tumblr blogs that curated niche-specific content, eventually reaching a total of two million followers. Eventually, Tumblr in their wisdom decided to change their rules, lose 30% of their traffic within months, and got sold for a fraction of what they had been acquired for.
But the idea of content curation is still valid if you stick to Tumblr’s new rules, definitely valid in many other places on the internet. Just think about mailing lists that digest and curate content, job offers, access to spreadsheets full of data — curation is evergreen if you figure out how to make it work for yourself.
The great part about Tumblr was that it was fully automated, with looping queues and completely hands-off and earned me more than my day job during good months. So definitely keep curation efforts in mind for the next time you dig through your life for monetizable skills.
Selling scrap art
Now this was built right on top of my Youtube channel and I also made sales online — but all of that was unrelated to the offline sales on flea markets.
There are exactly three things you need:
A 15$ angle grinder
A 30-150$ stick welding setup
A source of scrap metal
This is a very physical business, but at the same time also one that is great fun, easy to pick up, and that can be replicated in every city at least once and still find interested customers. Just try your hands at it with some scrap flowers made from old rebar and bicycle parts, those actually sell for ten or fifteen bucks.
Bottle openers, garden decoration, if you add a drill to your toolset you can also start making those birds from metal and stones that you can oftentimes see. In terms of material cost and business risks any of these “flea market businesses” will be extremely cheap to get into, but expect a substantial time commitment during the summer. Ideally you pair it with an Etsy store for the best of both worlds.
User testing
I know I just listed surveys as horrible in the intro — but user testing actually worked for me. You sit down, go through a website and record yourself struggling with certain elements. Fifteen minutes, no big drama, no big payment. Decent enough though, I always liked this work and wonder why I ever stopped.
Summary: earning money can be fun
I love earning money on the side, especially so of course when it’s on my own terms and time commitment like here on Medium, on YouTube, or on my own website. But when it comes to those physical, offline side jobs that I’ve held over the years those were great fun as well, perfect to clear my mind after a long work week and to have a physical balance to the desk job.
These days I make good use of my car license and deliver pizza with a company car which basically comes out to being paid to drive around and explore the city while somebody else pays for gas and maintenance. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-side-hustles-that-actually-worked-for-me-56b2d79e2350 | [] | 2020-12-19 15:32:15.172000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Work'] |
We do NOT live in a virtual reality! | We do NOT live in a virtual reality!
We love tricking ourselves with what we know.
The theory that we all live in an virtual simulation is booming. The evidence seems to grow day by day and youtube offers a host of video’s to spread the meme. But is it true? I think it’s not, for one huge, and, in my mind, compelling argument: We keep on projecting our (desired or feared) reality onto the universe. And in our descriptions, we’ll use metaphors referencing our own understanding. We see, what we expect to see. No wonder the flat-Earthers can believe so deeply in their ‘proof’, while ignoring counter arguments. No wonder racism is so hard to overcome.
How does this work?
I want to propose the “Self-referential Projection” principle. We tend to discover the reality of world fits the way we see it. Yes, there’s a mistake at the core of that logic. Like when I’m a fearful person. Lo, and behold, I discover everywhere in the news: “Life is scary and bad people are out to get us.” So we always tend to see the world as we personally experience it, mixing this mostly a bit with what helps me to fit in, be accepted by my (sub)culture. Our personal system hungers for explanations of reality that fit our personal experience and mindset. We can even become deadly (mostly for others) serious about defending such concepts. “Become Christian or die!”
God, the Clockmaker
When you look through the lens of your time and culture it’s easy to see how this works. Let’s take this grander and, I must admit, not very nuanced view over time. First God made man the center of the universe. What a shock it was then to see we revolved around the sun, not the sun around us. ‘We aren’t the center, shit, then what is true?’, people wondered. Then when science had its lift off, around Newton’s period, God became the ‘clockmaker’ who created a perfectly set universe with precise rules. We can even wonder if Marx wrote his theory attacking this concept, by challenging the rules of the game. He made clear: the clock or rather our man-made clock is flawed.
Survival of the Fittest
Also understanding reality doesn’t mean (seek) control over it.
Then when Darwin’s findings became accepted we got to live in a world of principles that seemed to favour the fittest. And whaddayeknow, exactly around that time the British colonization machine was showing the world who was the fittest and thus had the ‘highest civilization’; according to the British that is. Model and culture fit each other smoothly.
Chaos and Complexity
Then came chaos and complexity theory. Born shortly before WWI, but going in overdrive after. Here we lived suddenly in an expanding universe, where chaos ruled. Because we, still lingering in ‘survival of the fittest’ model, wanted to understand the most essential laws of nature so we could use them to rule. Or if shocked by the war, find how order comes out of chaos? Nietzsche must have felt this time coming when he wrote ‘God is dead’, because this was the time the universe was all mathematical principles we just needed to understand. And it felt like a machine believe with a lack of meaning.
Evolving Consciousness
This theory then evolved to an evolving consciousness model. First churches due to increased mobilization started to empty. Many felt they didn’t need Church as safeguard community anymore and the age of individualism and consumerism started. Still many needed some afterlife principle and God wasn’t yet back in the picture, (Of course also many never left the God belief, but we are interested in those opening up the projections of their own time) Then also slowly the discoveries of the spiritual explorers of the early 20th century, who studied Sufism, Guru’s, and such became slowly more main stream. Hence this calming theory of expanding consciousness. ‘See we are growing all the time’. Can you feel the era this fits best? Yes, babyboom time. Right after WWII everything seemed to grow just fine and without limit. This also fits consumerism. ‘See, we are the center of the expanding universe’.
Law of Attraction
Then we saw the hippy church, going to India a lot, brought back reincarnation. What a relief for all those missing an afterlife, when there’s no heaven. This mixed so nice with the half understood truths of before. We now found we live in an expanding universe that shapes itself to how we perceive it. Oh my, the Law of Attraction happened! This is a kind a hopeful ‘Self-referential Projection’. ‘I can order what I want, because I’m the evolving center (preferably in wealth, health and spiritual consumerism) and I understand the laws of nature.’ (read a watered down version of these laws fitting my self centric convictions)
Rise of Virtual-Reality Reality
So recently the youth that was raised on video games grew up. They all saw the Matrix. They all had avatars they steered run around virtual game universes. So, guess what they see? Exactly. We all live in a Matrix, simulation. And from the old believes we keep: there’s an afterlife (‘I expect to return to my higher self who played me’). There’s higher laws (‘See, quantum physics exist because we’re in a super computer’). There’s no need to be too responsible with nature (‘We’re in a game, so why should I stop playing me to help the rest of the world?’). And in this last conviction we also see the self-centered consumer philosophy.
Projecting our reality onto reality actually strengthens the Matrix, and doesn’t help see the essence at all.
We now live in a time of making theories bitesize pop culture.
I discovered this idea, when I read for a while about the latest theories in physics. Somehow they always end up in the speculative realm, which reads more like a novel than science. Here scientists project their ideas, based upon their into the world. And what happens, like with the Law of Attraction, some normal people will pick up the speculative projection and make it bitesize and popular according to their convictions, hopes and cultural reality.
Using this view you can see it everywhere. One day our dead hero, Jesus, Arthur, will come return. Who believes that? What about endangered cultures threatened by others? These are the peoples longing for a supernatural answer, who’ll help overcome something they themselves have no power over. The Jews in their time dealt with the Romans and many neighbours. ‘Jesus come back please?’ The, just turned Christian, pre-English, dreamt of Arthur, during the Saxon and not long after the Viking invasions.
Are we part of nature?
It has been found that the hero returning from the dead myth is way more ancient than the Jesus story. It’s a trope that’s rediscovered over and over again, when certain troubles happen. Our biggest trouble now is climate change. No wonder the Churches are talking about end times and yes, there he is, ‘Jesus will be back soon’. Gaining in popularity is also the indigenous belief, ‘we’re part of nature’. I think that’s a fact. And if not, it feels like the best realization, to help us stop destroying our own environment. It’s probably the best paradigm: ‘we need to start fixing nature, by fixing ourselves’.
So can we see beyond our biases? Can we see beyond our culture? It’s hard. But we must try. With a general decrease in people having any intellectual skill, critical thinking education, we have more and more big decisions being taken by morons with a lack of true understanding. Sometimes they lie, ‘Climate change isn’t real! So, invest in oil.’ Sometimes they are too bloody ignorant. ‘Climate change isn’t real because my TV station, sponsored by big oil, says, “science sucks”.’
The Future of our Understanding of Reality
But, hey, the Quantum Computer is around the corner ready that change the playing field again. Once again it will seek to integrate all previous ideas, while mirroring cultures. I predict the ‘virtual reality’ believe will stay, but claim we are both virtual reality and reality. It will focus more on maintaining both flux and balance in systems. Because we’ll see way more unrest, big shifts around the world and no power being able to control it. We’ll rather feel part of the machine then in control, as we lose control over our own next advances, when they start thinking for us, or themselves. And finally people will predict the ‘end-game’ is on, because man, is shit complex and little nature left to go silent in.
Knowledge about nature isn’t being in nature, nor does help to experience nature. It’s preparation at best. Sadly when forests become abstractions, we actually train managers who don’t care about them.
Hope and Warning
So my guess is that the next iteration to mirror our society will show a lack of comforting higher meaning, and more surrender to higher principles ruling us. And this time to get control back, more voices will demand we use these principles to shape our laws by, in order to survive. I hope it will restrain the power of the corrupting corporate lobbies who for profit keep on destroying the environment and people, like the oil and arms lobbies. Remember that when those laws will written, they’ll not be the truth, they’ll be the truth of those who write them and their interests. And when those in power still prefer their own interests over the collective health get to write those rules, we know it’ll end up being a new way to suppress change and won’t give nature space to heal the planet. Better be awake when that happens.
Where To Go From Here.
And for those that hope to find the absolute truth. Sorry. I have no clue. But I do know the following: find ways to be aligned with your environment. Be a healthy part of it. Destroying more nature than can regrow because of your actions makes no sense, however slow the damage is done. It’s not for nothing that lions kill to eat, and don’t seek to perfect their kill production and kill as much zebra’s as they can. Destroying other cultures makes no sense either. We need a health ecology of diversity in nature, in cultures and approaches. At heart we can know one thing: Our ecosphere developed as a balanced culture of millions of interactions and creatures all interacting with each other.
Can you respect this as a living community of diverse life forms, with an ongoing million years old dialogue?
I think forests are communities where species intermingle and have century old dialogues we can’t yet understand. Better have respect for all we don’t know yet, rather than destroy of create watered down versions out of arrogance. Yes we can, but we shouldn’t. Jesus said, “Forgive them, lord, for they don’t know what they are doing.” 2000 years later we still don’t know. Acting as if we do has shown to end up in robbery, plunder and destruction of our eco-sphere. We should start listening to scientists who know at the least a little bit more, let alone listening to indigenous people living amidst nature who know best, Not doing so is becoming a crime against life on this planet, even when the laws of the land seem to prove it is all legal. Our hearts know different.
And that story, my friends, of importance of keeping real nature high in esteem is indeed ancient, and for good reasons. We need to come back of the arrogant idea, we’re above nature. It is literally killing us. We need to reconnect to our softer, humbler, nourishing side.
Can we learn the humility and care needed to be part of, in service of the living web we are part of? I dearly hope so. | https://medium.com/the-gentle-revolution/we-do-not-live-in-a-virtual-reality-55ec391854ba | ['Floris Koot'] | 2020-02-13 22:08:39.834000+00:00 | ['Scientific Method', 'Ecology', 'Virtual Reality', 'Science', 'The Matrix'] |
As a Data Engineer, I wish Postgres could offer these features | ON DATA ENGINEERING
Photo by abi ismail on Unsplash
Postgres as a database is a very versatile database, with a high degree of extensibility. It can be extended through extensions, UDFs, UDAF, UDT. There are quite a few features not currently available within the native implementation. Not all extensibility options are supported in PaaS (platform as a service) implementations, AWS for instance, doesn’t support PL/Python as part of AWS Relational Databases (RDS).
Some companies such as Uber have explained why they have been migrating their operating data stores (ODS ) off of Postgres, but for Data Engineers, different functionality for a database used as a data warehouse than one used as an operational datastores.
A data warehouse's feature needs come in different flavors; syntactic language simplifies analytical modeling, data structures, and data types that either simply data storage/retrieval or increase performance and general performance optimization for analytical workload.
Postgres has gaps in each of these areas. When choosing a database for an analytical workload, it is crucial to understand each database's key missing features to make an informed decision.
Syntactic language
Functions
Distinct supports in window functions: Currently, distinct count is not supported as part of window functions:
COUNT(DISTINCT ...) OVER () ... >> DISTINCT is not implemented for window functions
The lack of support of distinct in window functions forces the use of additional subqueries and joins in queries that could have been very simple if distinct was supported.
Map/Reduce and filter: Postgres still lacks ways to do transformations on arrays without unnesting,
DATE_DIFF: Postgres doesn’t offer a similar function natively to date_diff in SQL server. It provides a way to retrieve a time interval by subtracting two dates/timestamp but doesn’t provide the automatic unit conversion offered by the DATE_DIFF function.
NVL2: NVL2 provides a short-hand way to handle both cases when an expression evaluates to null and when it doesn’t. It would be necessary to create a CASE statement in Postgres to provide this functionality, much more verbose.
Clauses
MODEL Clause: Oracle, through the model clause, provides an interface for handling, updating, or complementing datasets. The model clause allows to creates specific rules to be applied on the datasets and provides a way to reference cells within the dataset to define these rules. The model clause can be particularly handy when providing summary time-series forecasts or making inferences on missing data.
FETCH Clause: Postgres implements the fetch clause, although it does not fully support it. One key feature missing is fetching by percent, FETCH PERCENT .
MATCH_RECOGNIZE: The match recognize clause provides a way to do pattern matching. It provides a more straightforward and concise way to define advanced association rules for records than traditional windows functions and CTEs. This can be useful for use cases such as sessionization.
Data Structure & Datatypes
Tables & Table Structures:
Temporal tables: They provide a practical way to handle slowly changing dimensions. Temporal tables offer, at the same time, the lastest view by default and the ability to query the data as of a particular time. Although an extension for Postgres exists with that name, its functionality is somewhat more limited than a native implementation. The features of temporal tables are particularly handy when dealing with training machine learning algorithms and needing to provide reproducible results.
Treatment of views: The treatment of views in Postgres isn’t the best. It lacks supports for predicate pushdown in CTEs containing aggregate functions [1] [2].
Incremental view maintenance (IVM): provide a way to manage better-materialized views. When changes are made in the underlying tables, unlike with the traditional view materialization, which requires a full refresh through the command REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW TBL_NAME; Incremental View maintenance calculates and automatically applies only the deltas. [1] [2]
In-memory tables: Some databases, such as MySQL, provide the ability to load entire tables into memory. They can provide significant performance when needing to leverage tables that can fit in RAM across multiple sets of operations.
Clustered index: This type of index forces the ordering of the data contained within the table, providing some performance benefits. Postgres does allow tables to be clustered through the CLUSTER command and does provide a flag for this within the metadata, but this ordering is not strictly enforced and the CLUSTER command need to be manually run.
Buckets: HIVE and Spark offer the ability to “bucket” tables, essentially providing a way to dynamically partition the data based on the values contained in a given column(s). In these big data tools, the use of buckets can yield improved performance when joining different datasets by 1) facilitating data locality 2) increasing the odds that the join will turn into a map join. In a traditional RDBMS, the need for buckets is significantly less, but some operations could still benefit from bucketed tables.
Datatypes
SQL2016 JSON Conformance: There are still quite a few features around SQL/JSON from the SQL 2016 missing from Postgres SQL. JSON_ARRAYAGG with ORDER BY, or support for the PASSING clause to query paths dynamically.
JSON JMSEPATH: Postgres 12 added some additional support for JSON by introducing JSON path query. It is, however, not always straightforward to deal with JSON data directly in SQL. Applying certain transformations requires to unnest the JSON data and recombine it at a later point. JMSE-Path provides a way to not only query the data within the JSON but also apply simple transformations.
JSON Explicit Schema: On Microsoft SQL Server, it is possible to define projections for JSON data using explicit schema. Postgres currently lacks a similar feature.
Generalized unstructured data type: JSON/JSONB offers limited type supports. A more generalized unstructured data types would allow retaining complete schema information. [1]
Optimization:
Query hints: Although available through an extension, query/optimizer hints are not available natively in Postgres.
Optimizer: There are a few optimizations that the optimizer currently doesn’t support, such as join elimination, predicate merging
Other
Query variables: Variables that can be used inside a single query without using procedural code. Postgres doesn’t currently offer this feature, which forces the use of CTEs or inlining these parameters in an external code template (e.g., using jinja templates). | https://medium.com/analytics-and-data/as-a-data-engineer-i-wish-postgres-could-offer-these-features-d964588b69de | ['Julien Kervizic'] | 2020-11-11 09:21:38.984000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Sql', 'Data Engineering', 'Database', 'Big Data'] |
There aren’t sector-specific startup hubs in Europe. Here’s the data | By sector-specific Hub I mean a location that has a higher presence of a sector in two ways:
The percentage of that sector in that location is higher than the percentage of the same sector in other locations.
than the percentage of the same sector in other locations. The percentage of that sector is higher inside the location than the percentage of other sectors inside the same location.
To analyze the relationship between an Industry and a region I use catscatter charts. The data used is the number of startups with headquarters in Europe (and then with a focus in Spain) that received seed capital between 2015 and 2019. There are two types of charts:
By percentage of Industry: given an industry, each circle represents the percentage of deals that each region takes. Each column must sum 100% (if all regions were included). So, vertically, it helps us see which regions are more important for the industry. Horizontally, it helps us compare the relative importance of an industry withins regions.
given an industry, each circle represents the percentage of deals that each region takes. Each column must sum 100% (if all regions were included). So, vertically, it helps us see which regions are more important for the industry. Horizontally, it helps us compare the relative importance of an industry withins regions. By percentage of Region: it’s the opposite of the above. Given a region, each circle represents the percentage of deals that each industry takes. Each row must sum 100% (if all industries were included). Vertically, it helps us see which industries are more important within a region. Horizontally, it helps us see which regions are more important for each industry.
Here is where things get interesting. There seems to be a general trend.
On charts divided by Industry we can clearly see horizontal lines, meaning that the the location on the left has the same importance for every industry. On charts divided by Region we can see clear vertical lines, meaning that the specific sector has the same importance in every location.
These two situations happen across top locations in Europe, meaning that we have hubs of many different sizes, but there’s a bit of everything in all of them. However, inside Spain you will see it’s not the case, which means that in Spain every location has its own particularities. Or maybe that they are not big enough yet to be diversified.
Let’s start exploring!
In Europe there’s everything everywhere
In Europe there’s one big hub
Looking at the chart below (Europe Countries By Industry) we can see clear horizontal lines. ~30% of all deals in Top 20 industries happen in the United Kingdom (from 35% of Fintech to 25% of Internet of Things), followed by France, Germany and Spain. We can highlight that Italy has slightly more presence in E-Commerce and Food and Beverages or Switzerland more Biotechnology.
We do mostly two things
In this one (Europe Countries by Country) we see vertical lines in some Industries.~5% of all deals in Top 20 Countries are in Software and ~4% in Information Technology. Then Internet, E-Commerce and Health Care. In the United Kingdom there is such a high number of deals that their leading presence in Big Data overall (30% of all deals) represents less than 1% of the deals inside the country. Switzerland doesn’t have bigger presence in Biotechnology than other industries.
London is the biggest hub
Looking at the same charts with cities instead of countries (Europe Cities By Industry), we can see that the United Kingdom really means London, except for Biotechnology. Germany is Berlin and Hamburg, France is Paris, Spain is Barcelona and Madrid, Italy is Milan, Switzerland is Zürich.
There’s everything everywhere
And if we divide now by cities (European Cities by City) we can see there’s more than 1% presence of every sector in almost every city. Except for Biotechnology and Medical (only 2 and 3 respectively). Biology people may not like big cities.
In Spain every hub has its own singularities
At Spain, 70% of the deals happen in two regions
Looking at the chart below (Spanish Regions by Industry) we see two clear hubs. Catalonia represents ~42% of all deals in every sector. Madrid ~30% of the deals, except for Biotech (with less than a 1%). Comunidad Valenciana is also becoming more active with ~10% of the deals, followed by Andalucía and Basque Country with ~4%. Cantabria is not represented because there were no deals between 2015 and 2019 on Crunchbase.
Spain hubs are different
But if we divide it by Region (Spanish Regions by Regions) we can see that no vertical lines appear, which means that every region has its own singularities. For example, in Galicia there’s more Software and Artificial Intelligence. In Asturias, Navarra or Canarias, there’s slightly more Software than other deals. In Islas Baleares there’s more Travel.
Barcelona and Madrid are the two big hubs
Looking at the same charts with cities instead of countries (Spanish Cities by Industry), Barcelona represents ~40% of deals in every sector. Madrid ~30% except for Biotechnology, with less than 1%. Valencia is winning some presence overall with ~8% of the deals. Bilbao and Seville are competing for the fourth place.
Spanish Startup Hubs are not homogeneous
And if we divide again by Cities (Spanish Cities by City) we can see that almost every city is doing something in Information Technology, however, this is not the leading category overall (3% of all deals). Cities like A Coruña or Malaga are more focused in Software and Artificial Intelligence. Donostia-San Sebastian is the hub in Basque Country for Biotechnology.
Conclusions
It’s true that the United Kingdom copes 30% of the deals overall Europe but it’s also true that there’s everything everywhere. As the majority of European countries have their own language and culture, European startup hubs can be of many different sizes, but they are all diverse. Maybe this is not the most efficient thing to do, but I’m sure it’s the richest.
It’s also true that Madrid and Barcelona combine for 70% of all deals in Spain. However, some other regions are developing their own startup hubs, wining importance within a specific sector.
The conclusion is that if you’re thinking of creating something and you have the resources... Think twice before moving to a “bigger hub”. Maybe where you are is big enough. If you are in a European location I’m sure it’s equally diverse and if you are inside Spain, maybe you are in the right place for your sector. | https://blog.kfund.vc/there-isnt-sector-specific-startup-hubs-in-europe-here-s-the-data-d97d37269ae6 | [] | 2020-04-23 14:14:14.838000+00:00 | ['K Analysis', 'Sector', 'European', 'VC', 'Industry'] |
All Said & Done | There’s nothing I can tell you anymore..
actually, there’s too much.
ever since we left and I
lost the ground beneath my feet,
it feels like I’m in free fall but I’m motionless,
falling in place and just waiting for it to hit me,
and you know how it comes.
But at least I spilled to you everything,
in letters, and poems,
and just under my lips when I’m alone
in the shower or the early morning drives to work..
At least you knew me like no one else will. | https://medium.com/pieces-of-yesterday/all-said-done-65d04ee9889d | ['Yaman Nimer'] | 2017-09-03 06:31:19.033000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Poem', 'Life', 'Breakups', 'Poetry'] |
Seeing the woods and the trees | Seeing the woods and the trees
For tree planting to have the necessary impact on mitigating climate change we must also preserve the trees that already populate our woods and line our streets. Chris King Dec 22, 2020·3 min read
Trees for Cities volunteers planting 5,000 trees in East London — Image: © Chris King
One of my favourite smells is that of a forest after rainfall — that distinctive blend of freshness and rejuvenation mixed with decay and decomposition. Walking through Queen’s Wood after Storm Ciara, I savour that very smell and the period of calm that follows any weather event that merits a name.
As I make my way past the Shepherd’s Hill allotments, slipping and sliding up the boggy hill on my way to the cafe, I can’t help noticing the number of trees that have fallen. Beautiful old relics that — until being unceremoniously uprooted — had collectively borne witness to many decades of walkers, joggers and dogs of all shapes and sizes.
Just a week earlier I had been helping plant 5,000 trees in neighbouring Hackney with over 500 other volunteers, supporting the amazing Trees for Cities — a charity working at both national and international levels to improve lives (as the name suggests) by planting trees in cities. It got me thinking about the possibility of all that work being cancelled out by a single storm. Storm Dennis, of course, arrived a week later, exacting even more damage and compounding the situation.
However, one is not equivalent to the other. Mature trees are capable of absorbing far more carbon dioxide than saplings, having many more leaves through which to absorb it and a far greater root network by which to sequester the carbon into the soil. They also have far more carbon embedded in their trunks and in those roots. Witnessing all the casualties of recent storms is therefore all the more concerning.
So, when the likes of Donald Trump declare participation in the Trillion Trees Initiative or President Erdoğan of Turkey actually oversees the planting of 11 million trees in just a few hours — as was the case on 11 November 2019 when the country celebrated National Forestation Day — these impressive numbers may seem like progress and make us feel hopeful. However, it’s only once we include the deaths that have also occurred — for whatever reason — do we gain a clear picture of the net impact of the world’s tree population on CO2 levels.
An assessment of the trees planted on National Forestation Day in Turkey — conducted only a few months afterwards — revealed that up to 90% of the trees had died. Combine this with the fact that worldwide — every year — an area the size of the UK is deforested purely for commercial gain with no regard given to the impact on biodiversity, soil health or the water cycle, let alone climate change — and it’s all too easy for any actual progress to be negated. This doesn’t take into account the recent fires in the Amazon or Australia which will have taken things to a whole new level.
Closer to home in Haringey, in the 12 months leading up to March 2019, 267 street trees were cut down while only 97 were planted — a trend that has been ongoing since 2016. In that same 12-month period 57 trees were removed from parks — and only 3 were planted.
Tree planting is seen as one of the most effective and viable methods of mitigating the impacts of climate change — but for a newly planted tree to have any impact on climate change it must survive to maturity. As Greta Thunberg pointed out in her speech at Davos during the World Economic Forum, planting trees — often carried out under the guise of ‘offsetting’ is simply not enough. It must go hand in hand with the protection of existing woods, forests and street trees the world over together with a reduction in emissions — both of which require a reduction in our consumption of goods.
We may not be able to hold Trump and Erdoğan to account or ensure their tree-planting endeavours prove more than just PR stunts but through considered purchases there’s so much we can do right on our doorstep. So what’s stopping us?
—
Originally published in Village Raw magazine — https://www.villageraw.com/ | https://medium.com/@chriskingphotography/seeing-the-woods-and-the-trees-df8b055ca6a7 | ['Chris King'] | 2020-12-22 09:07:38.522000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Climate Change', 'Activism', 'Nature', 'Politics'] |
Best Bluetooth speakers: Reviews and buying advice | There was a time when Bluetooth speakers were like jelly beans: They were cheap, they all looked the same, and they were invariably of dubious quality. Times have changed. Every major audio manufacturer has at least one model on the market today, and most have several.
If you haven’t listened to a Bluetooth speaker lately, you’re in for a very pleasant surprise.
Bluetooth speaker cheat sheet Best budget Bluetooth speaker: Tronsmart Element Force SoundPulse Bluetooth speaker Best mid-priced Bluetooth speaker: Fluance Ai60 Best high-end Bluetooth speaker: Bluesound Pulse Mini 2i Best bookshelf Bluetooth speaker: Edifier S2000 Pro Best outdoor Bluetooth speaker: Soundcast VG7 Best price-is-no-barrier Bluetooth speaker: Naim Mu-so 2nd Generation The industry’s progress doesn’t mean that every Bluetooth speaker justifies its price tag, no matter how inexpensive it might be. There’s still plenty of dreck floating around. Don’t worry, we’re here to help you steer clear of the junk and point you to the best speakers at the price range that fits your budget.
To that end, we’ve picked the best Bluetooth speakers (and runners-up in some cases) in six categories: budget, mid-range (up to $300), outdoor, bookshelf, high-end (up to $750), and—yes, there are ultra-high-end Bluetooth speakers—price is no object. Some of our picks can be used indoors and out, but we’ve also named our favorites that are designed primarily as outdoor speakers.
Updated January 1, 2021 to add our iLive Bluetooth Tailgate Party speaker. This is not one of the greatest-sounding speakers on the market, but it's light, easy to move around, includes PA capabilities, and it sounds better than you'd think a $50 speaker would.
Best budget Bluetooth speaker Tronsmart Element Force SoundPulse Bluetooth speaker Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $59.99See itThis mighty mite produces shockingly good sound for its size and price—but only in its Extra Bass EQ mode—and it's water resistant to boot.
The Bluetooth speaker market is a cutthroat business when you get to this price range. The good news for music lovers is that you can find some very good products here. If $60 is too much for your budget, consider our runner-up, the Aukey SK-S1 (see below). Otherwise, we can’t say enough good things about the Tronsmart Element Force SoundPulse, which features IPX7 weatherization, support for True Wireless Stereo (so you can operate two of them as a stereo pair), and absolutely fantastic sound (in Extra Bass EQ mode, that is). That’s a lot of speaker for just 60 bucks.
Runner-up Aukey SK-S1 Bluetooth speaker Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $39.99See itThis Bluetooth speaker is meant to look good on your desktop, not the pool. It also sounds quite nice at low volumes. Given the price, and speaker phone functionality, it's pretty much the perfect workplace audio accoutrement.
The Aukey SK-S1 doesn’t have all the features—or audio power—of our top pick in this category, but it is an attractively designed near-field speaker that’s fabricated mostly from metal, where you might expect to find ABS plastic. And it sounds very good—at least until you push it to the edge. It’s not the right choice to fill a room, and it’s not at all protected from the weather, but it is a great deal for the money,
Best mid-priced Bluetooth speaker Fluance Ai60 Read TechHive's reviewSee itThe Fluance Ai60 offers spectacular sound quality with amazingly deep bass for far less than I would have expected. They're large, but definitely in charge!
These Bluetooth bookshelf speakers blew us away with their impeccable performance for the price, comparing favorably with a competing pair that cost nearly four times as much. We were particularly impressed with their frequency range and their ability to dig deep into the low-frequency realm, all the way down to 35Hz. Highly recommended if you’re looking for high-fidelity audio on a budget.
Best high-end Bluetooth speaker Bluesound Pulse Mini 2i Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $499.00See itBetter sounding than the original, the Pulse Mini 2i can also now be controlled via Alexa and it supports AirPlay 2. For the price you can't do better.
In addition to Bluetooth, you can control this speaker over Wi-Fi with Bluesound’s apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows; it can be part of a multi-room audio system with other Bluesound speakers or other speakers that support Apple’s AirPlay 2 technology; you can configure two of them as a stereo pair; it supports the aptX HD codec for streaming high-resolution audio; and it features a bi-directional Bluetooth radio, so you can stream music to it and listen to music from it using Bluetooth headphones. It goes without saying this speaker sounds absolutely divine. Highly recommended.
Best outdoor Bluetooth speaker Soundcast VG7 Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $799.99See itYes, you'll experience sticker shock. But it's been nearly 10 years since we've heard a powered, portable, outdoor speaker as good as this one,
This is the best powered outdoor speaker we’ve heard since Soundcast introduced its Outcast speaker nearly 10 years ago. It’s built like a tank; splash resistant, so you can use it poolside or at the beach; and it delivers outstanding battery life. Most importantly, however, it sounds fantastic. Expensive, but worth it.
Runner-up Sonos Move Read TechHive's review$399.00MSRP $399.00See iton SonosThe Sonos Move is a fantastic portable speaker and a rugged, weatherized component of one of the world’s preeminent multi-room audio systems.
The Soundcast VG7 won’t fit everyone’s budget, and while the Sonos Move isn’t exactly inexpensive, it’s engineered to withstand the elements, it sounds fantastic, and it’s supremely flexible, being able to stream music via either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Highly recommended.
Best price-is-no-limit Bluetooth speaker Naim Mu-so 2nd Generation Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $1,599.00See itThe Naim Audio Mu-so 2nd Generation is a pricey all-in-home home audio solution, but it’s supremely capable, incredibly flexible, and it sounds like heaven.
The Naim Mu-so 2nd Generation is, of course, much more than a Bluetooth speaker.It has a dual-band Wi-Fi adapter onboard, so you can use it in a multi-room audio system with other Naim components, any speaker that supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 technology, or anything that’s Chromecast compatible. It can play music on any connected USB storage device, and it can connect to any UPnP server on your network. It’s Roon Ready, too. Finally, it supports Spotify Connect and you can stream music from Tidal without leaving the Naim app. Oh, and it’s capable of decoding high-resolution music encoded at up to 32-bit resolution and at sampling rates as high as 384kHz. All that and it sounds amazing.
Runner-up Shinola Bookshelf Speakers Read TechHive's review$1,500.00MSRP $1,500.00See iton ShinolaShinola’s compact, minimalist self-powered speakers offer big, bright, and bold performances from almost any source, analog or digital, hardwired or via Bluetooth.
The soundbar-like design of Naim’s Mu-so Bluetooth speaker isn’t for everyone. If you want elegantly designed high-end speakers you can connect to via Bluetooth (and lots of wired ways, too), Shinola (and its design partner, studio-monitor builder Barefoot Sound) have what you’re looking for. Named simply Shinola Bookshelf Speakers, these loudspeakers sound every bit as beautiful as they look.
Features to look for in a Bluetooth speakerNot convinced the picks we’ve listed above are exactly right for you? This guide will help you sort through the facts, figures, and specs to determine which speaker will best meet your needs. Your first decision will be to choose between mobile and stationary form factors. The majority of Bluetooth speakers are portable because they get paired with mobile phones, but more and more manufacturers are introducing models designed to remain inside the home.
Choosing a portable model gives you the best of both worlds in some respects, but a stationary speaker is more apt to blend into your home’s decor. And while we’ve heard some pretty spectacular portable Bluetooth speakers, a plug-in model is more likely to produce the sound you’re looking for if fidelity is priority one in your book.
Here are the features you’ll want to evaluate in a Bluetooth speaker:
Theo NicolakisApp support: Companion apps can provide lots of additional features to a speaker that wouldn’t be possible with just physical buttons on the speaker itself. The app might enable more than one person to be the DJ, queuing up songs to play on the speaker. An app might enable you to create customized EQ curves for different styles of music, create wake-up alarms, or power the speaker on and off remotely.
aptX support: Bluetooth audio must be squeezed down in order to stream over the airwaves, and the default codec use lossy compression that throws some of the musical data away. Qualcomm’s aptX codec is lossless, so none of the musical detail is lost in the process. But aptX must be present at both ends of the stream, in the playback device and in the speaker. Most Android devices support aptX, but Apple devices do not.
aptX HD support: This version of Qualcomm’s codec supports high-resolution audio files, but it’s hard to find even in the highest-end Bluetooth speakers right now. As with its sibling, the codec must be supported on both the audio source and the speaker in order to work.
Battery: Next to fidelity, a portable speaker’s most important feature is how long it can operate when it’s not plugged into the wall. You should expect a battery to last 10 to 20 hours, but remember that the bigger the battery, the heavier the speaker will be.
Michael BrownCharging options: If your speaker has a battery, it will need to be charged. Speakers that charge their batteries via a USB port are more convenient than models that require an AC adapter, but larger batteries might not offer that option. Some speakers also let you plug in a USB cable to tap their battery to charge your smartphone.
DSP: An onboard digital signal processor (DSP) lets you electronically change how the speaker is driven in order to compensate for speaker placement or the acoustical properties of your room, among other things.
Mounting options and accessories: A portable speaker should be easy to take with you. While some Bluetooth speakers count on their size to make them easy to grip, others provide a lanyard, carabiner clip, or a shoulder strap. It’s even more handy when the manufacturer provides standardized sockets and accessories for mounting the speaker to an object, such as your bike’s handlebars.
Altec LansingSome portable Bluetooth speakers are small enough that you can grip them in your hand, but it provide thread mounts so you can attach them
Speakerphone: Some Bluetooth speakers have built-in microphones that enable you to use the speaker as a speakerphone in concert with your smartphone. The sound quality will be much better than what you’ll get from your phone, and you’ll be able to turn the volume up much higher. This can be very handy for conference calls.
Stereo pairing: Some speakers let you create a left/right stereo pair with two speakers (this works best, of course, when the two speakers are identical).
Weatherization: Portable Bluetooth speakers can be used indoors and out, so the best models provide some protection from the elements. Ideally, the manufacturer will let you know just how much protection you can expect by providing an IP (International Protection) marking. The first digit rates the enclosure’s protection from particulate matter (e.g., dust) and the second digit rates its protection against liquids.
An IP64 code, for instance, indicates that the speaker is completely protected from dust (6) and from water splashed onto it (4). The higher the numbers, the more protection you can expert If either digit is replaced by an X—IPX4, for example—the code indicates that the speaker isn’t rated for protection from particles (this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not protected from things like dust, just that the manufacturer doesn’t rate its protection).
Wi-Fi: Higher-priced Bluetooth speakers also provide the option of connecting to your Wi-Fi network, so that you can stream music from a NAS box. Wi-Fi streams will offer higher fidelity than Bluetooth, even if the speaker supports the aptX codec. A speaker that provides for a hardwired network connection is all the more versatile.
Wireless range: A Bluetooth speaker’s range depends on the power class of its radio, and it can vary widely and is impacted by the environment that it’s operating in. A Class 1 radio offers range of approximately 100 meters, but the number of walls between the Bluetooth source and the speaker and the type of materials in those walls will have a significant impact on range. It’s much easier for radio waves to pass through drywall than masonry, for instance. Objects in the signal path, such as large metal appliances, will reduce that range even further.
Our latest Bluetooth speaker reviews 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/@erik92005244/best-bluetooth-speakers-reviews-and-buying-advice-9b51c18f1c93 | [] | 2021-01-16 06:59:10.604000+00:00 | ['Chromecast', 'Gear', 'Mobile Accessories', 'Services'] |
Enough promises on climate change — it’s time to pay up | Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash
Midnight Oil achieved global success in the ’80s with their single Beds Are Burning. You’d probably know it if you heard it. And you’d probably recognise the lead singer — Peter Garrett — with his characteristic shiny head, beanpole figure and wooden-push-puppet-esque dancing style.
Up until then, the Aussie pub rock band had steadily been building a cult domestic following with their politically charged lyrics on environmental issues, consumerism and militarism. But it was ultimately a song about the treatment of indigenous Australians that the world connected with. The chorus ‘how can we sleep while the beds are burning?’ was universally relatable — it was a proxy for the guilt and anger people felt for continuing to their lives whilst injustices happened all around them.
Today, this sentiment is more relevant than ever, as we face the prospect of runaway climate change. With each passing day, there seems to be a growing sense of unease; a feeling that we can no longer sit by as the world slowly burns. Awareness is building and protesters are becoming more fervent. We must take meaningful action to stop climate change — and fast.
The problem is, stopping climate change will require substantial investment and even those who support action on climate change have proven fickle at the slightest hint of the bill arriving.
In 2005, Jørgen Randers was asked by the Norwegian Government to chair a commission tasked with finding a way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by two-thirds by 2050. It was a tough brief, but the commission managed to produce a workable plan that would cost three hundred dollars, per person per year. Despite Norway being the world’s sixth richest nation, the plan received virtually no support from its citizens — people would rather go shopping.
While this reaction may seem selfish, it is consistent with the behavioural economics concept of hyperbolic discounting, where people instinctively discount a future benefit heavily when comparing against an immediate one. The discount tends to be larger still where the future outcome is more uncertain. Hence, the Norwegians felt that avoiding a payment of $300 today was preferable to suffering larger (but uncertain) losses from climate change over the coming decades.
When a more appropriate discount rate is applied, numerous studies — such as the landmark Stern Review — have shown that the benefits of mitigating climate change greatly outweigh the cost.
The Norwegian example highlights the inherent challenges with implementing the measures that are required to tackle climate change — asking people to defer consumption is a hard sell.
Setting a price on carbon
The most efficient and least disruptive way to significantly reduce GHG emissions is to use market-based mechanisms, especially carbon taxes. Nobel Prize winning economist Michael Spence emphasised the importance of carbon pricing in an interview with Business Insider, ‘there are relatively few things that are almost unanimously agreed upon among economists, but this is surely one of them.’
The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) October fiscal monitor report reiterated the efficiency of market-based mechanisms and cautioned that it would be difficult to achieve emissions reduction targets without them. The IMF concluded that global carbon taxes of $75 per tonne or similarly ambitious policy measures are needed to meet the Paris Agreement.
While carbon taxes are lauded by experts, some reject the concept of market-based mechanisms on the grounds that capitalism and the quest for unlimited growth got us into this mess in the first place.
Taking a more objective view, under a capitalist economy, markets are simply a collection of billions of actors making trillions of decisions to find optimal solutions within a set of constraints. Admittedly this can result in perverse and downright unjust outcomes. However, if we were to tweak capitalism to make it more inclusive, for example through adding new environmental constraints, then markets could be a powerful ally in the fight against climate change.
Despite the benefits of market-based mechanisms, most countries either do not price carbon at all or they underprice it. The global average carbon price is $2 per tonne, well short of the IMF’s $75 minimum. This amounts to a global market failure — participants are continuing to make decisions that would be sub-optimal if they were made accountable for the environmental cost of their actions.
How does a carbon tax work?
A carbon tax is essentially a market constraint that incentivises businesses and consumers to change their behaviours to minimise CO2 emissions. The tax is levied on heavy emitters, but the effects spread throughout the economy.
For example, let’s assume that one tonne of CO2 is emitted per tonne of cement produced. Now, let’s say that applying a new production method would enable a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions, but would increase production costs by $25 per tonne. In a competitive market with no carbon price and where cement is a homogeneous good, a producer would lose business if it went it alone and moved to the new method. However, if a $75 carbon tax were applied in this market, it would be optimal for all firms to adopt the new method — as they would save $12.50 per tonne — and the sector’s emissions would reduce.
In practice, until a global carbon tax applies, schemes need be designed to minimise ‘carbon leakage’. There would be little point in taxing the cement producers from the example above if it would just cause them to move to countries without carbon taxes.
Carbon tax designs to date have typically dealt with the problem of carbon leakage with exemptions or rebates, which does little to reduce emissions from the affected sectors.
A new top EU climate official has a better idea — apply a carbon border adjustment tax. That is, imports from countries with a lower (or no) carbon tax would be subject to an adjustment tax equal to the difference. This ensures local producers have a level playing field, but are still incentivised to reduce emissions. Further, it encourages trading partners to implement their own taxes; if their goods are going to be taxed anyway, they might as well be the ones to collect the tax revenue.
Now let’s consider a different example of how a carbon tax affects consumer behaviour. Let’s say you saw a great deal on a flight from London to New York for $225 one-way. By taking that flight you would be responsible for emitting about 1 tonne of CO2. If a $75 per tonne carbon tax were applied to the aviation industry, your flight would rise to $300 (assuming the tax is fully passed on) — a 33% increase. After the tax, the price would seem less attractive, demand would reduce and airlines would cut flights and increase their focus on hybrid and electric aircraft.
While the above example relates to discretionary spending, carbon taxes also increase the cost of essential goods, such as electricity and fuel prices. For this reason, there is a raft of practical challenges associated with implementing carbon taxes.
Carbon tax challenges
The IMF estimates that a carbon tax of $75 per tonne would increase energy bills by 45% and petrol prices by 15%. Unless carefully managed, such a sharp increase would be overwhelmingly rejected by the public and possibly cause riots.
Governments are acutely aware of the public backlash that even a modest carbon tax could trigger. This prospect makes them reluctant to implement such measures.
For example, the Gilets Jaunes protest movement was triggered by a planned diesel fuel tax increase of 6.5 cents per litre. The increase was a relatively modest 4% of the total cost per litre based on today’s prices, although this was in the context of much larger increase in fuel prices over the preceding 12-month period.
It would be wrong though to jump to the conclusion that these protesters do not care about the environment. For example, 93% of French citizens support targets for the EU to become carbon neutral by 2050. Further, a communique issued by the Gilets Jaunes demanded a fairer climate change transition and made clear that they are not against carbon pricing in general.
Governments should not avoid carbon taxes altogether, but rather they should be cautious as to how they design and implement them. Carbon taxes must include compensatory measures, to reduce the disproportionate burden on poorer households. These measures could include reducing taxes on lower income bands or providing rebates to households for energy efficiency improvements.
The Australian experience — where did it all go wrong?
The Prime Minister of Australia is a position that comes with all of the perks that you might expect — a large salary, two fully-staffed residences in prime locations, a limousine and an official aircraft. If that weren’t enough, the position also comes with the dubious honour of being immortalised in bust form on Prime Ministers Avenue at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens in Victoria. Or at least that was that plan.
Australian politics has generally been fairly stable. Power has shifted every 10 years or so between the two big parties — the Liberals, who confusingly are actually conservatives, and Labor, who are liberals, but sometimes also act like conservatives. However, after an 11-year stint by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, there was a volatile period, which saw the Prime Minister change 6 times over the next 11 years.
This unprecedented period of change caused such a strain on the Ballarat bust tradition that the bequeathed funding dried up and both the current and former Prime Minister remain absent from the park. And it is all linked to climate change, specifically the the quest to to put a price on carbon.
It all started when Kevin Rudd defeated long-standing Prime Minister John Howard in the 2007 election based on a platform of change. Rudd’s campaign promised action on climate change including ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and implementing an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett even won a seat and was made the Environment Minister.
Rudd commissioned a comprehensive review of climate change and worked to set a carbon price via an ETS, but ultimately he didn’t have the numbers in the Senate. After the bill was voted down, the opposition leader — Malcolm Turnbull — announced that he would support the measure, ensuring its success.
A vocal section of the Liberal party, however, was firmly against setting a carbon price and so they triggered a leadership challenge, which Tony Abbott — a self-professed climate sceptic — narrowly won. Abbott immediately withdrew support for the ETS and the bill was defeated a second time and subsequently shelved.
Meanwhile, public opinion of Rudd soured and the Labor Party had their own leadership spill. Rudd was replaced with Julia Gillard in 2010 prior to another election, which Gillard won narrowly by forming a minority government.
With a more favourable Senate position, Gillard was able to implement a simpler carbon tax, starting at AU$23 per tonne. However, there was a sustained lobbying campaign to undermine the tax, which successfully generated strong public opposition.
Rudd replaced Gillard again, but it was a lost cause, as Tony Abbott was swept to power in the 2013 election with the promise to ‘axe the tax’. The carbon tax was revoked on 1 July 2014, just two years after it started.
By 2015, Abbott was so universally disliked that the Liberals switched back to Turnbull who went on to win the 2015 election. However, Turnbull never quite managed to overcome resistance within his party to climate change action and was eventually replaced by Scott Morrison in 2018 — a man who once brought a lump of coal into parliament.
The 2019 election again focussed on climate change. Labor promised stronger action, Liberals ran a fear campaign on what that action would cost. The latter approach was ultimately more successful — particularly in coal-rich regional Queensland — and Morrison won with an increased majority. Perhaps the one consolation to climate-conscious voters was schadenfreude from hearing that Tony Abbot had lost his seat.
It shouldn’t have been like this. Australia has got a lot to lose from climate change, more than most. It faces more frequent and severe floods, heatwaves, droughts and bushfires and also faces the destruction of its national treasures like the Great Barrier Reef.
While the carbon tax design wasn’t perfect, it was effective and well-considered. In its second year, CO2 emissions reduced by 1.4%, which was the largest annual decrease in a decade. Emissions have steadily risen since the tax was abolished in 2014.
The initial design for an ETS was broadly based on recommendations from the comprehensive Garnaut Report and the subsequent carbon tax was a simplified design based on further advice from the Australian Productivity Commission.
The carbon tax included a number of the compensatory measures, such as lowering income taxes, direct offset payments for low-to-middle income households and exemptions for sensitive industries.
Labor’s fatal mistake, however, was underestimating the relative ease at which their opponents and lobby groups were able to influence public opinion. People soon forgot about the compensation they had received, but they were acutely aware of the increase in their energy bills. Meanwhile, they were subjected to a relentless fear campaign — the tax would bankrupt families, destroy jobs and kill the economy.
The very idea of a carbon tax is now so toxic in Australia that even the Greens Party don’t refer to it in their climate change policy. World leaders use Australia’s experience as a textbook example of what not to do.
Could global carbon taxes work in practice?
Fortunately, other regions’ attempts to introduce carbon pricing have fared better than Australia’s. The World Bank reports that 57 different carbon pricing initiatives have either been implemented or are scheduled for implementation. Some of these initiatives have been in force for over a decade. For example, British Columbia’s carbon tax was introduced in 2008 and is widely regarded as a success story.
Momentum seems to be building, which is encouraging, but there is clearly still a long way to go. Only Sweden and Switzerland have a carbon price higher than the IMF’s recommended minimum of $75 and their schemes have less than 40% coverage.
For carbon taxes to have any chance of success at the level required, they must have strong public support. Advocates of climate change action have an important role to play here — support needs to move to the next level of maturity.
It is not enough to demand that governments set ambitious emissions reductions targets, we must also challenge them on how they’ll achieve those targets. If carbon pricing is not a core element of their plans, we need to ask, why not?
If governments try to introduce (or increase) carbon taxes, we mustn’t baulk at the first hurdle. By all means question the fairness of the scheme design, but it would be hypocritical and counter-productive to reject carbon taxes entirely.
If we are genuinely committed to stopping climate change, we must be willing to pay our fair share to make it happen; we must be prepared to make sacrifices.
Or revisiting Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning: ‘the time has come to say fair’s fair; to pay the rent, to pay our share.’ | https://traviselsum.medium.com/enough-promises-on-climate-change-its-time-to-pay-up-1f8cf3cf62b2 | ['Travis Elsum'] | 2019-10-31 08:17:27.923000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Economics', 'Climate Change', 'Carbon Tax'] |
Cooking with the Library | Cooking with the Library
It’s not just healthy eating — it’s test kitchens and cookbook collections that build self-confidence and confidence EveryLibrary Follow Jun 8 · 5 min read
By Amy Rea for EveryLibrary
If it doesn’t seem logical to connect cooking with libraries, we have some news for you: Not only is it logical, it’s popular, even during the pandemic. Libraries across the country offered in-person cooking classes before COVID, and many of those have gone digital, providing much-needed fun, distraction, and camaraderie during lockdowns. Garden City Public Library in New York has Summer Recipes with Chef Rob Scott, a series of cooking demonstrations complete with recipes; St. Louis County Library combined book groups with mocktail recipes; The Verona library system in New Jersey has virtual kids’ cooking classes; and in Springfield, Massachusetts, the library coordinates an email-based cooking club. These are only a few examples of what’s out there.
To learn more, we spoke with Stacie Larson, director and CEO of the Maitland Public Library in Florida, and Kami Bumgardner, youth services assistant in Maitland, about the cooking programs they offer and why they’re important.
Maitland had an active roster of cooking classes long before the pandemic arrived. “They were in person, and in a very makeshift way,” said Larson. “We have these six-foot resin tables, and at their very highest level, they’re kitchen-counter height. We would put two of those together at the front of the room. We’ve improved since then. But in 2013 we had a three-burner hotplate, variable heat, an electric skillet, two toaster ovens and microwaves. In 2014, we got a grant to build a proper demonstration kitchen. It’s got a two-burner induction range built into the counter. We set the tables up facing into the kitchen, but it’s got an actual oven and an actual range. it doesn’t wobble when you chop vegetables.”
She noted that themes for the cooking classes range widely, from the American South to Caribbean to Italian to Ghanaian to gluten-free. They had a series called Healthy Chefs with Maitland, in which local restaurant chefs and owners would do a demonstration at the library, focusing on healthy recipes or how to make an existing recipe healthier.
Bumgardner picked up the concept and ran it with kids in a series called Fresh for Kids. Leading a children’s cooking class, especially in-person and hands-on, was not without challenges. “We had 75 or 100 [children] at one time,” she said. “Through the course of time, we made tweaks to it to try to get a more manageable scenario. And we put a cap on how many people would come because we were running out of supplies, and there wasn’t enough food for everyone to be able to try it. Once we put a cap on it, everybody would get something and everybody would get a turn at pushing a button on the food processor, or chopping the vegetables, whatever the recipes happened to be. And a lot of times it was whatever was in season, and when you’re using fresh veggies or produce, you don’t have to do a lot of cooking..”
Challenges and tweaking aside, Bumgardner said it was great fun, and a learning experience both for the kids and the adults in their lives. “I remember one time I wanted to do cabbage and everybody said, ‘Oh, no kids are never going to eat that.’ And I’m telling you, every single bite of food got eaten. If they make it with their own hands, they will definitely try it. And often, they realize they like it a lot more than they thought they did.”
Switching from in-person to digital took some trial-and-error. “We tried one Facebook Live cooking program, and the answer that came out of that was please never make me do that again,” said Larson, who works on cooking programs for adults. “It worked okay, but you need to have more than one person for Facebook Live. It’s very hard to do all the prep while also responding to the chatting with the Facebook Live aspect. So the others we’ve done have all been pre-recorded.”
The videos for adults are more sophisticated. The week before Valentine’s, Larson recorded a special dinner comprised of filet mignon, braised vegetables, and strawberry shortcake. “We’re not going out to fancy restaurants right now, but you still want to celebrate with your loved one,” she said. “Here’s something that sounds ridiculously fancy. But in fact, every piece of that was super easy to make. It looks good on a plate, it sounds romantic.”
How to proceed in the post-pandemic future is already under discussion. “It’s a question we’re asking for all of our programming right now, not just the cooking classes, because we have several book clubs as well that have picked up attendees that don’t live here,” Larson said. “We’ve got one where somebody remotes in from Baltimore. In my mystery book club, one of our regulars just moved away. She’s not very far, but she doesn’t drive at night, and that one meets in the evening. We’re looking at how can we make more of our programming, maybe not all of it, but more of it, hybrid. Some people will Zoom in, and some people will be in person.”
Regardless of the format, one focus that will continue is healthy eating. “The Winter Park, Eatonville, Maitland areas have very high rates of heart disease and diabetes, and one way to combat that is better eating,” said Bumgardner. “If we can get them eating better when they’re five, that’s a lifelong habit that they can take with them.”
And of course, when it comes to cooking with children, safety is an especially important factor. “We’ve got 20 sets of child-safe knives, where they’re not going to cut off their own finger. They all get a chance to learn to chop a carrot. And honestly, if you’re going to chop a lot of vegetables, and you have small children doing it, clean craft scissors is a lot easier than knives. They’re easy for kids to control, especially when you’re doing something like a carrot. There’s not a right and wrong way, as long as nobody’s finger gets chopped off. If you get your carrot into pieces, you’ve succeeded.”
Bumgardner noted that it’s not just healthy eating that’s learned in the process, but self-confidence and confidence in a kitchen setting. “The way to build confidence is just to practice basic skills. That’s definitely one of the things that I like to focus on and make it fun and not scary. Cooking is science-based, and kids love science. I try to pepper in facts as well, and sneak in some math, because measuring cups are just fractions. But they’re practical fractions. They’re not annoying fractions. They’re worthwhile, measuring cups. Suddenly, math makes more sense.”
Maitland has gone so far as to produce a video with handouts to teach other librarians what they need to know to start a cooking program in their own library. If you’d like your library to consider this, send this link: Adult Cooking Programs in the Library. | https://medium.com/everylibrary/cooking-with-the-library-3bd95ce3f42 | [] | 2021-06-08 16:03:24.348000+00:00 | ['Cookbooks', 'Library', 'Culinary Literacy', 'Cooking', 'Librarians'] |
Trustless Proof of Stake (TPoS) — A Stakenet Innovation | TPoS is a Stakenet invention and is fully operational and available for everyone who owns XSN. While crypto investors currently use offline storage such as Ledger or Trezor for mere storage, TPoS transforms these cold storage devices into profit generating devices which also secure the network by validating the blockchain. The Staking rewards flow directly to the coin owner while the coins remain offline. Furthermore, Trustless Proof of Stake allows people to offer Staking as a business, where a merchant can stake other people’s coins and generate a commission-based income from the rewards created, opening new opportunities for businesses to arise from our invention.
Introducing TPoS
Introducing TPoS One of the main criticisms of a PoS system has been that it is only maximally safe when all the coins are online and authoritative staking nodes are avoided. All previous staking and offline staking solutions could not meet these conditions. Stakenet has devised a solution to the problems being faced by users of decentralized networks today: Trustless Proof of Stake. TPoS essentially allows users to own a stake in Stakenet and use any other node to do the staking for them using their high bandwidth, continuous, connectivity, while not having to share any spendable balance or private keys with the node. Your funds are yours and yours alone. They will safely and securely grow over time and protect the network even while you sleep. This feature was created with the intention of allowing users to securely stake XSN coins in cold storage form a hardware device and produce, validate and move a blockchain at the same time. Increasing security for both the network and the user.
Stakenet was created to make an ecosystem that allows easy and secure offline staking to increasing security for both the network and the user. For this purpose, the basic characteristics of Bitcoin and Peercoin were assumed and in some cases slightly modified. XSN uses the same core as Bitcoin and an adjusted coinage, like Peercoin for the validation of new created blocks, down to 24h. The trustless staking is realized by the invention of so-called merchantnode. The requirements to set up a merchantnode offline staking are zero. In contrast to all previous solutions, the merchantnodes have neither an advantage in the block generation and the blockrewards, nor a decisive influence on the blockchain. They have only the right to validate the blockchain for you. Just imagine you are putting your money inside of a virtual bank that cannot fail, get robbed, go bankrupt, become insolvent or shut down. Just imagine you can withdraw or move 100% of your funds at any time, day or night, no questions asked, and no withdrawal limits imposed. With Stakenet you do not send over your money, you send the right to grow your money for as long as you like.
Purpose
An XSN TPoS contract is a special agreement made on our blockchain, which allows an owner of a given address (“owner”) to give staking permission to a separate address (“merchant”). The owner of this merchant address does not have permission to move funds in the TPoS address, only the right to stake the balance of that address. The owner can move his funds out of the TPoS address at any time, giving him complete control of his funds during and throughout the execution of this contract.
Technical Documentation of the TPoS Contract
The contract is a special transaction with OP_RETURN that holds data specifying the terms. The contract is created by a user sending 1 XSN to himself. This transaction will also broadcast the terms of the contract to the network. This 1 XSN needs to be made lowest priority when user spends XSN. To cancel the TPoS contract the user simply needs to move all his funds into a new address or just unlock and move the 1 XSN, which includes all contract information.
Required Information of the TPoS Contract
Required information in the contract are as follows:
tposAddress, Address owned by creator of contract (this balance will stake via TPoS) merchantAddress, owner of this address will have the ability to stake the balance in “tpos address” commission, (value between 1–99%) tells the protocol how to split staking rewards minted from tpos address (allowing owner to auto pay commission to merchants) signature, signature by creator of the contract showing proof that he is the owner of the tpos address
Sample Contract
A sample contract within the XSN blockchain looks like this:
out 0: { tposaddress : 1 XSN} (deposit)
out 1: { OP_RETURN XoX31nLRYeteYLHMibYmHALCV7bE2PPRH6 Xp944knpdSSWex2uH2he5CKZg2sN12 bbPS 10 65_bytes_signature }
out 2: { changeaddress: changeamount }
RPC Calls
We have created RPC calls to create a TPoS contract and submit it to the network:
RPC call 1 tposcontract create [tpos_address] [merchant_address] [comission] #this call will return a hex encoded contract, which can be sent to the network using RPC call 2.
RPC call 2 sendrawtransaction [hex encoded contract]
Staking as a Business
The Stakenet blockchain was created to be the world’s first truly trustless, profit-driven economy where everyone can offer TPoS services as a 3rd party to other individuals, who use the XSN blockchain. Therefore, the XSN TPoS protocol includes a commission features, which makes it possible for everyone to run staking as a business.
On the surface, the commission is simple. A merchant provides a service and charges a fee for said services. However, in our case this entire negotiation is handled directly on the XSN blockchain. The TPoS protocol itself is smart and knows exactly how to split the new minted coins. All done without any human involvement through a series of cryptographically signed messages broadcast when the contract first created. We engineered this feature to avoid predicting market rate or demand but allow the two parties to settle among themselves a split from 1 to 99%. This will also allow alternative forms of services to arise, such as willingly giving the merchant all the rewards in exchange for certain goods.
Use Case
Say a merchant wants to gain a competitive edge and offer added services on top of their regular staking. So, they could instruct the owner to input 99% commission at the time of their TPoS creation, then agree to send the reward in a currency of the owner’s choice to an address of their choice. The owner could not only be staking his assets while offline but also be exchanging securely and safely, without lifting a finger. The exchanged rewards could hypothetically be translated to any form, like a BTC address, ETH, or even fiat (directly into a bank account) and could be used as a means of “cashing in” to an owner’s local currency. Once these services are established, it will drive large amounts of traffic and attention to our currency as we will be the first and only one with this unique functionality. In a world with increasing regulations this effect will be even more dramatic.
Seller Ratings
Since the staking rewards would be in control of the merchant, this example of a hidden exchange would have to maintain a small degree of trust. We believe this will be easily mitigated by giving the merchant a rating based on the quality of service. Any dishonesty or under-performance would cost the merchant more in the long run than they would gain, like the effect of standard seller rating we are all familiar with before making an online purchase. This model works because the merchant will never be enabled Factsheet Disclaimer: As with any crypto-currency, there is inherent risk. While XSN endeavors to implement to the best of their abilities, they make no representations as to future value and individuals purchase XSN at their own risk. to make off with a significant amount of fund. The worst scenario is he steals a few small rewards but completely ruins his reputation in doing so, and if the owner is not comfortable with the service he can simply cancel the TPoS contract and redeem his funds at this discretion.
Join us on Discord to start staking via TPoS or learn more. Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with all our latest news and releases. | https://medium.com/stakenet/tpos-55ae6c56f434 | ['Stakenet Team'] | 2018-11-12 17:07:18.801000+00:00 | ['Passive Income', 'Innovation', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Technical Documentation'] |
Update: 2020-2021 Award Season Screenplay Downloads — 2 New Scripts, 13 Total | It’s that time of year again when studios and production companies make available PDFs of movie scripts for award season.
As in years past, I will be tracking the year’s movie scripts as links become available.
Current total of 2020 scripts for download: 13. Newly added scripts (2): I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The King of Staten Island.
Antebellum (Lionsgate)
Borat: Subsequent Movie Film (Amazon Studios)
Da 5 Bloods (via Deadline Hollywood)
Herself (Amazon Studios)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix)
I’m Your Woman (Amazon Studios)
The King Of Staten Island (Universal Pictures)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
One Night In Miami (Amazon Studios)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Fox Searchlight)
Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
Tenet (Warner Bros.)
The Trial Of The Chicago 7 (DreamWorks Pictures)
You should download the scripts ASAP because these links have a way of disappearing.
To access 100+ movie scripts made available by studios and production companies since 2009, go here.
Reading movie screenplays is absolutely critical to your development as a screenwriter. Along with watching movies and writing pages, it is a fundamental practice you should put into place. Make it a goal to read at least one movie script per week.
Where can you go to get access to many of the top movie scripts from 2020? Right here!
THESE SCRIPTS ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!
NOTE: Our annual Go Into The Story Script Read and Analysis series will begin in January 2021. If a 2020 movie script becomes available and you would like to read it and provide a scene-by-scene breakdown, let me know. This is a great tradition and provides a major benefit to the online screenwriting community.
Go Into The Story Script Reading & Analysis Series
Movie Script Scene-By-Scene Breakdowns
Here is the current slate of volunteers:
I’m Your Woman / Priya Gopal
Thanks to everyone who participates in this annual project! Please email me your scene-by-scene breakdowns: [email protected]. | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/update-2020-2021-award-season-screenplay-downloads-2-new-scripts-13-total-818d06f0e3b5 | ['Scott Myers'] | 2020-12-19 14:16:03.400000+00:00 | ['Cinema', 'Film', 'Screenwriting', 'Movies', 'Screenplay'] |
You are not a bad parent because you didn’t anticipate a global pandemic | Photo by Dimitri Houtteman on Unsplash
By Theodore Bozevelt
You are not a bad parent. You are not a bad person.
You are not a bad parent because you are overwhelmed by a situation that none of us anticipated. You are not a bad parent because you didn’t anticipate this.
I have seen some people express the following idea, either thinly-veiled or overt: If you didn’t want to take care of your kids 24/7, you shouldn’t have had kids. What did you expect?
You expected difficulty. You expected challenges and rewards. You expected sleepless nights. You expected diaper blowouts and the terrible twos, some weird problem where the baby only sleeps when being rocked or listening to Paula Abdul, neighbors who are nosy about details but scant on providing help.
You expected to continue with your chosen plan of staying at home or going to work. You expected to find a babysitter and worry that the babysitter would hold the baby at a wrong angle when feeding and make the baby spit-up. You expected to be able to find a babysitter, and you’d worry that they’d let your kid watch a different TV channel than normal while they sat on their phone. You expected that, when worst came to worst, you could call a friend or aunt to hold the baby in the middle of the night. You expected that someday you’d need an hour away from your 5-year-old and 8-year-old, and you’d let some other parent take them to the park, and maybe your8-year-old would get a cut and bruise because they fell off the top of the monkey bars, and you’d feel guilty.
You expected that your mom or mother-in-law could come to “play with the baby,” and she’d end up doing laundry. You expected that you could drop them off at your dad’s place for a weekend and have a romantic night with your partner, just the two of you. You expected that your husband or wife could hold the baby when the baby got their shots because you can’t handle seeing them hurt even a little bit. You expected that you would cry when you bought their first backpack for pre-school, marveling at how the backpack was twice the size of them when they were born, and now they’re wearing it for a whole day away from you.
You did not expect that it’d be dangerous to go to the playground. You did not expect that you couldn’t get out of the house in cold weather because you didn’t expect indoor places to be closed or restricted. You did not expect that you would have to be a working parent AND a stay at home parent at the same time. You did not expect that Lysol and toilet paper would become scarce in March, and you’d have to explain to your recently-potty-trained 4-year-old that they can’t pull down the whole roll. You did not expect to see them in their child-sized mask, and you’d want to hold them because a kid in a mask is so, so fragile.
You did not expect that your 60-year-old mother or your 78-year-old aunt would not safely be able to take the baby if you needed it. You did not expect that every friend or coworker might be a risk. You did not expect that safety policies at the grocery store would spark political debates in your family. You did not expect that your spouse or family member who worked outside the house would either not be able to play with the kid or that you’d be terrified every time they played with the kid. You did not expect that hearing someone sneeze would fill you with fear because you did not expect someone else’s sneeze to be dangerous.
You did not expect that you would get annoyed at your spouse for how they acted while home 24/7 with you all day, because for most of history in most of the world, people got to leave and walk around and, at the very least, go to work or bicker at a market. You did not expect that you couldn’t call on your family or neighbors to help you because, for most of history in most of the world, your parents and your aunts and your neighbors could safely and easily step in, and you’d do the same. You did not expect that you had to play with your kid all day every day because, for most of history in most of the world, kids could entertain one another.
We didn’t anticipate this. Being fearful and angry in a world we didn’t anticipate doesn’t make you a bad parent. You are a good parent. Believe me, you are. Stay strong. | https://medium.com/modern-parent/you-are-not-a-bad-parent-because-you-didnt-anticipate-a-global-pandemic-f38d9caf8ef2 | ['Modern Parent'] | 2020-11-06 03:55:21.472000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Family', 'Parenting'] |
Gaudí for iOS: Theming and Dark Mode | Semantic Colors
This framework uses semantic color names to better adapt to dark mode and other possible themes living within the same app.
Work with your designer to get these right. As Apple recommends, don’t take shortcuts and don’t change the semantic meaning of the semantic color.
Gaudí’s SemanticColor enum provides a clear hint about what that color actually is:
public enum SemanticColor: CaseIterable {
case label(LabelColor)
case fill(FillColor)
case background(BackgroundColor)
case groupedBackground(GroupedContentBackgroundColor)
case separator(SeparatorColor)
}
Each one of these LabelColor , FillColor , BackgroundColor , and GroupedContentBackgroundColor have different specific semantic colors such as primary , secondary , tertiary , and so on.
Don’t use a LabelColor as a fill color. This will introduce entropy in your project. Work closely with your designer to adhere to this specification.
When, in your code, you will be using just SemanticColor s in the correct way, to re-skin your app will be as easy as change 20 lines of code. You will also be able to A/B test the different theme by creating a new theme object with the new colors.
Why semantic colors
By reading .red , one would expect as result a color that is a shade of red, while reading primary , there are no expectations.
This framework aims to make theming easy. If you are using a black color for a text it would be strange to see black actually rendered as a white color in a dark mode theme.
For this reason, I decided to adopt Apple recommendations about using semantic colors, not only to support Dark Mode, but also to allow different themes to work together, maintaining a layer of semantic abstraction from the theme color and the actual rendered color.
How to use it
label.textColor = .semanticColor(.label(.primary))
This simple line of code will set the textColor of a label to be the primary label semantic color of the current theme. If the theme changes, the color will change too.
You can also create your custom semantic colors just by extending the color enum of which it makes semantic sense to have a new color. For example, if the color is for a text label then you want to extend LabelColor like so:
public extension LabelColor {
static var myCustomSemanticColor: LabelColor {
return .custom(color: .color(fromHex: "#123456"))
}
}
I strongly recommend you adopt this “extension approach”, as it might be tempting to use the custom case of the enum directly but this will bite you in the future when you’ll have to repeat that color again for another label, or change it for all the labels with that custom color.
If your designer surprises you with a slightly different shade of grey, or a different color out of the schemes of the ordinary color palette originally agreed, talk to them to see if that extra color is necessary, and if it is, then make an extension. | https://medium.com/better-programming/gaud%C3%AD-for-ios-theming-and-dark-mode-86fe8fe60aeb | ['Giuseppe Lanza'] | 2020-02-13 06:32:31.796000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Swift', 'iOS', 'Mobile', 'Dark Mode'] |
Teach Me How to Love You Again | This was the best part of his day. This is what he looked forward to each day, his hour lunch break. He would sit, enjoy his food and think about happier times.
He would think of home, think of his family, of his life when he was a boy. He would reminisce on how much simpler life was back before he moved to this country.
For that hour he would get away from the tribulations of work, get away from the noise. For that hour he had his own corner of the world.
He had his life back.
But before that he had to conquer the microwave.
He took his newly bought Pyrex dish, which held his food, and placed it in the microwave.
He didn’t notice the fork still inside.
The microwave chirped at him as he opened the door. Closing it, he stared dumbly at the machine confused by all the buttons and pictures.
For a moment he wished for the old microwave. Back then it was only two buttons “Start” and “Stop” with numbers for the timer.
Defrost, deheat, reheat, recook. Dambele had no idea what these symbols meant.
Hesitating, he pressed “One” and hoped that it meant one minute. The microwave churned to life and he waited.
The pyrex plate twirled around like a ballerina. He stared at his reflection in the microwave. Looking back at him was a sad, tired, ancient body, with white hair, hunched over.
After about fifteen seconds, something popped in the microwave. The break room went silent. Everyone turned an eye to Dambele and the microwave, before warily continuing back to their conversations.
At the same time one of the managers came in, Bradley.
Bradley was a top director at the company. Handsome guy, fairly young and wore nice suits. Dambele liked him because even though he was a boss, he always made sure to say hi to everyone.
“Hey DB! What’s on the menu today?”
Dambele pointed at the microwave “Food from my country. My wife made it.”
Bradley smiled at Dambele.
“Smells good man. I might have to try some, your wife can’t keep spoiling you like this”
Dambele blushed at the showering of praise, slightly embarrassed but swelling with pride in his wife’s cooking.
There were twenty seconds left on the timer when Bradley walked out. As he left the breakroom, he looked into the microwave.
“Sure does smell good” he thought and walked out. Then he realized.
“Wait D did you leave your for-”
BOOOM
The microwave exploded, blowing Dambele back, throwing him against the wall, propelling him right out of his shoes.
People came rushing in to see what happened. They saw Dambele on the side of the wall.
His white hair was smoking, bewildered face charred, and his clothes slightly were burned.
Then they looked at the microwave and saw his food burned to a crisp, still smoking, and the fork he left, lying on the ground.
They all started laughing.
“Damn DB, you must really want that workers comp!!”
“Twenty years in and he finally had enough!!”
They laughed on the way out leaving Dambele alone.
He walked gingerly back to the microwave and looked at the mess. His food was ruined.
All that was left was a smoking pile of shit.
His last piece from home was gone.
And with it losing the only corner of the world he had left. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/teach-me-how-to-love-you-again-a6600c4a3139 | ['Jesse Ya Diul'] | 2020-11-11 13:50:55.638000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Immigration', 'Short Story'] |
4 Stress Inoculation Techniques For Healthy Living | Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
Manage your stress like a pro with these techniques
Gone are the days when stress was a plaque for only high aimers and productivity junkies. Right now, life on earth is stressful for everyone. You do not have to overload yourself with a to-do list to feel the heat.
Life has become a battle, financially, health-wise, social circumstances, recreation, and procreation. Nothing is exempted. It is important to acknowledge that stress itself is not a bad thing.
It only becomes toxic when it is not properly managed and left to run riots in our lives. Here are a few ways unhealthy stress can be controlled healthily. | https://medium.com/reflection-hub/4-stress-inoculation-techniques-for-healthy-living-6f7b91f6bcc3 | ['Belinda Adom Takyi'] | 2020-12-18 11:58:12.375000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Stress Management', 'Mental Health'] |
The Puerto Rican Nation: A Colonial Saga | The New York Times, two days after the US invasion of Puerto Rico
(A version of the present article appeared on August 13, 2019, on Enclave Magazine, Enclavemag.com. You can reach the author at [email protected]).
Puerto Rico is an Island in the Caribbean, surrounded by several islets, thus conforming a mini-archipelago. It is the Easternmost and smaller of the Great Antilles, comprised also of Cuba, La Hispaniola (currently the land of two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Jamaica. Christopher Columbus embarked on the Island in 1493, christening it San Juan Bautista. Spanish soldiers and settlers almost annihilated the native Taínos, who called their home Borikén.
Described by Spanish chronicles as hospitable and generous, most Taínos succumbed to European guns, germs, and steel, while many survivals fled to the mountainous interior. Mitochondrial DNA studies show that they live on. Taíno words do survive in the names of objects, plants, towns, and barrios.
Spanish Rule and the Emergence of a Distinct People
Until the late 18th century, Puerto Rico was acutely underpopulated. A series of monarchical decrees offered incentives to Europeans, who began to migrate to the Island. Other arrivals included those fleeing from South America in the early 19th century, when Spanish rule collapsed as a consequence of the independence wars. The migrations and reforms bolstered economic activity, but also resulted in the exploitation of laborers and small property owners, creating deep resentments.
By the middle of the 19th century, Puerto Rican society began to yield a small but boisterous professional and propertied elite, many educated in Europe, some in the United States. That sector organized and led the first political parties, despite a repressive colonial apparatus commanded by the military governors of the era, appointees of the Spanish monarch. Some among that elite led the first insurrection against Spain in 1868, declaring the Republic of Puerto Rico before their swift defeat. The repression was then turned not only against the “separatists,” but also against those who advocated for reforms, in the form of more self-government or “autonomy,” but no separation from Spain. Those two political factions –independentistas and autonomistas– also advocated for the abolition of slavery, which became a fait accompli in 1873. A third faction, the conservadores, preferred the permanence of the colonial, repressive, undemocratic status quo, with the Spanish Monarchy as its unifying element.
The 19th century also displayed an explosion of Puerto Rican artists, including writers, painters, musicians and composers. Puerto Rican literature was born, spawning the creation of novels, plays, poetry and essays. Puerto Rican music also exploded, displaying its richness, vibrancy and clear African roots. The music of the mountainous interior blossomed, with its use of guitar-like instruments and remnants of Taíno percussion, and influenced both by Spanish and African elements. The Island’s music displays since then a complex polyrhythmic cadence of clear African roots, present in the multiple Bomba rhythmic variations or toques, in the effervescent Plena, in the jíbaro music of the interior, and in the seemingly aristocratic, urban Danza.
Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos and the Revolutionary Flag. Old San Juan.
Puerto Rico, USA
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, and U.S. soldiers stormed the Island, Puerto Rico had 1 million inhabitants. Nonetheless, underdevelopment was apparent in every area. Puerto Rico had no universities, virtually no public schools, enormous levels of illiteracy, and scant infrastructure. By August, an armistice specified that Spain would cede Puerto Rico to the fledgling American Empire.
The Treaty of Paris, signed that December, established that “the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by the Congress.” Since then, the American judicial power has held that the Treaty gave Congress “plenary power” over Puerto Rico, which it also exercises under the authority provided by the Territorial Clause of the United States Constitution, which states in its pertinent part: “The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.”
In 1901, the United States Supreme Court held that “owning” overseas colonies and denying political rights to their inhabitants –depriving them from being governed with their consent– do not offend the Constitution. Puerto Rico, held the Court, “belongs to, but is not part of, the United States.” It is an “unincorporated territory” to be governed and, if need be, disposed of by Congress, which exercises exclusive power over the Island and its inhabitants. Those “principles” are part and parcel of American constitutional law to this day.
Moreover, added the Court in openly racist language, Puerto Ricans are members of an “alien race,” which makes them unfit for self-government, and also unfit for participating in the American political process. Those notions have stayed firm to this day, even though, in 1917, Congress declared that the people of Puerto Rico are “citizens of the United States.” Hence, still deprived of political rights, that statutory citizenship is deemed as “second-class.” Moreover, migrating to the United States allows exercising a right to vote, but it hardly means substantial equality. In the USA, Puerto Ricans have always partaken of “the others,” another group of societal outsiders, with their essential worth obscured in the eyes of ordinary Americans and policymakers by a cloud of prejudice, ignorance, bewilderment, condescension, and contempt.
Colonial Stasis
The Puerto Rico-U.S. “relationship” has changed only in some details. Its colonial nature remains unscathed. In 1900, Congress unilaterally established a governmental structure with a strong executive, headed by a governor appointed by the President. Known as the Foraker Act, that legislation was far more illiberal than Spain’s Autonomic Charter of 1897, which gave Puerto Rico wider self-government powers than those it currently enjoys. The Foraker Act established that all federal laws not locally inapplicable would be enforced in Puerto Rico, a provision that survives to this day in the Federal Relations Act of 1950, itself the reenactment of several provisions included in the Jones Act of 1917.
The Jones Act, which superseded the Foraker Act, unilaterally declared Puerto Ricans American citizens –they had been American “nationals” from 1900 to 1917. That declaration was meant, policymakers of the era made clear, to tighten the grip over Puerto Rico. The gambit has worked, as it has made easier the military recruitment of Puerto Ricans; has made most of them feel part of a nation that has been globally calling the shots for most of the past one hundred years; and has given additional credence to the aspiration of becoming a “State of the Union.”
By 1930, Puerto Ricans were poorer and more exploited than under Spanish rule. The post-war colonial reforms –modest and mostly cosmetic as they were–and a new wave of American capitalist investment, this time mostly industrial instead of agricultural, are explained by the post-war boom, the Cold War, and the pressures of the anti-colonial movement, legitimized by the U.N. Charter.
The pro-statehood Puerto Rican elite –and many American politicians– currently refer to Puerto Ricans as “American citizens living in Puerto Rico,” another way of ignoring the cultural vibrancy and separate identity of the members of a nation without a national state. Those citizens, elaborates the discourse of pro-statehood politicians, have a “civil right” to the equality that only statehood provides. But equality is a shallow slogan, as those who trumpet it evade the reality that millions of human beings, alive and dead, have struggled to this day to enjoy equality, that of the substantial, meaningful strain. The “right to vote” has never been enough for Women, African Americans, Asians, so-called Hispanics and Latinos, Gays and Lesbians, the dispossessed and abused, the most vulnerable, and on and on. Indeed, Puerto Ricans who have migrated to the United States have historically suffered inequality, mainly in the form of ignorance, prejudice, outright racism, contempt, and invisibility. Trumpism is making matters even worse.
The colonial dead end is due in no small part to the existence in Puerto Rico of two political factions which, despite insisting on chimeras, have monopolized power and public discourse since 1900. The statehood and commonwealth factions still fail to take into account 120 years of consistent U.S. policy of perpetual colonial subordination, with no interest in making Puerto Rico a State or in allowing the exercise of more governing powers than those enjoyed by the 50 States. That policy, it goes without saying, is rooted in the same racism articulated by the Supreme Court in 1901. As the mentality goes, Puerto Ricans are fit neither for self-government, nor for the merely formal equality of statehood.
Meanwhile, the last 50 years have seen the two factions alternating control of the government of Puerto Rico, while displaying greed and corruption, disdain for their fellow Puerto Ricans, and mismanagement. The unarticulated goal has been to get rich and enrich their fellow travelers, including many Americans and American businesses. The latest incarnation of the pillage has been the financial vultures, courtesy of Wall Street. For those Puerto Ricans who want profound changes, the challenges ahead are formidable. | https://rafernandezlaw.medium.com/the-puerto-rican-nation-a-colonial-saga-3a866203cfa4 | ['Roberto A. Fernández'] | 2020-03-10 15:30:43.941000+00:00 | ['United States Of America', 'Colonialism', 'Puerto Rico'] |
Dairying is a fillip to farmers during and post COVID-19 pandemic | Dairying is an important tool in the hands of farmers to sustain during natural calamities and equally so during current pandemic situations. A recent announcement of allocation of Rs 15,000 crores towards animal husbandry by Government is a step in right direction. With an extensive infrastructure created by the Government during Operation Flood for milk production, procurement ,processing and distribution, per capita consumption of milk in India stands at 375 g per day ,supplying approximately 14g protein per day. This itself speaks volumes about the progress achieved in dairy sector embodying the efforts of ICAR, Animal Husbandry departments of Central and State Governments and State Agricultural Universities. Farmers who toil hard in Agricultural fields for crop production are not necessarily rewarded proportional to crop yield. Rising price of milk fat paid to dairy farmers consistently over the past years is a glaring example of how Cooperative dairy industry helped farmers float through tough times. Organized dairy sector is currently paying price in the range of 10–15% over the base price of 2016,even during flush season, though the prices of other agricultural commodities fluctuated greatly.
In rural India, a small farmer or a marginal farmer or a landless labourer owns a cow producing 5 litres of milk and a buffalo producing 8 litres of milk, respectively. At the current prevailing prices , after keeping for domestic consumption one litre of cow milk his gross income will be Rs 122 (4.5% fat )for cow milk and Rs 435 (8.0% fat) for buffalo milk. Assuming that he spends 50% of this on feed and fodder, his net income will be Rs 278 per day. Besides he and his family is consuming 40 g animal protein from cow milk per day. If the farmer can add one or two more milch animals to his existing stock, economic benefits will no doubt be significant.
Current COVID-19 virus pandemic intermingled with financial pandemic has exhausted both the physical and financial resources at every stratum of society. It is necessary that every farmer should have a secondary income to supplement in the need of this hour. To strengthen the hands of farmers at village level (Do Not forget our villages almost free of Carona pandemic during Lockdown-I and II), let us revisit some issues concerning dairy husbandry sector.
Availability of good dairy animals to replace low producing animals with farmers in rural areas is an area of concern. Of course this issue attracted the attention of Indian Council of Agriculture Research long back. Through different All India Coordinated Research Projects , breed improvement in Indigenous cows and buffaloes initiated by ICAR is on the right track with more than 20% average increase in milk production in many of the indigenous breeds in second generation of animals. However, the coverage is limited to operational areas. Superior male germplasm is available for breed improvement with different government agencies for extensive use in the field. Farmers prefer high yielding animals (>15 litres milk per day) and the availability is limited. Breed improvement in dairy animals is a lengthy process and it takes at least 15- 20 years to achieve visible results. Use of Sexed semen doses from proven bulls with high conception rate are also supplied by agencies such as Gujarat Livestock Development Board and it is necessary to ensure the reach of this valuable genetic material to small and medium farmers and landless labourer. Though superior quality frozen semen(unsexed) available in the country, its spread is about 35–40% only. Dairy cattle breeding programmes should be totally monitored by Animal Husbandry departments to achieve higher success rate in improving genetic resources.
Farmers choice today is indigenous dairy breeds like Gir, Sahiwal and dual purpose breeds like Kankrej and these breeds should receive further attention for wider spread in the country.
Buffaloes contribute 55% of milk to the dairy industry they are hardy, produce more milk than cows and utilize low quality fibrous crop residues more efficiently than cows. Urban dairy industry is totally centred on buffaloes. Network Project on buffaloes sponsored by ICAR, has done praise worthy work with regard to indigenous buffaloes, especially Murrah, Nili-Ravi and Jafrabadi in terms of breed improvement as well as milk production potential.
Some entrepreneurial dairy farmers are marketing organic indigenous cow milk produced by A-2 allele containing Gir cows by creating niche markets in metro cities at a price of Rs 120–180 per litre. Such efforts should be encouraged and embody more dairy farmers.
Feed and fodder farms 50–60% of cost of milk production . Nutritious balanced quality feed is available through cooperative dairy sector . However , the reach limited to cooperative dairy sector. Dairy farmers are advised to feed such balanced concentrate feed , instead of individual feed ingredients which ultimately prove to be costly from production point of view. Practice of feeding Total Mixed Rations(TMR- Mix of concentrate and roughage ) which reduce methane emission in dairy animals need to be adopted by dairy farmers.
Green fodder production which is a critical factor in reducing the cost of milk production is always side lined. Strategies should be formulated , such that some of the gauchar land in villages be used for cultivation of fodder crops on cooperative basis and sold to needy small farmers and landless labourers.
Establishment of dry fodder banks at village level should be encouraged . Various crop residues such as wheat straw /rice straw ,instead of being burnt , may be used as cattle forage for feeding during lean season. Forest dry grasses which are harvested annually and stored need to be suppled to farmers during the year of harvest.
Government of Gujarat has announced an assistance of Rs 900/- for maintenance of indigenous cow under natural farming system subject to maximum ceiling of Rs 10000/- per year. For preparation of Jeevamruth under natural farming , 75% subsidy also was announced to cover the cost of Jeevamruth Kit. Dairy farmers engaged in Natural farming of dairying may avail this Government assistance.
In the present and post COVID-19 scenario, commercial dairy units with above 100 cows , individually or on cooperative basis , need to be encouraged for generation of employment and creation of wealth. Liberal financing to such units is a welcome step in right direction. This may encourage reverse migration from urban / semi urban areas to rural areas.
Let us take care of Kamdhenu and Kamdhenu will take care of us.
( Dr.k.S.Murthy, Research Scientist(Retd.), Cattle Breeding Farm, Junagadh Agricultural University, Junagadh,Gujarat) | https://medium.com/@ksm1994/dairying-is-a-fillip-to-farmers-during-and-post-covid-19-pandemic-d9ae104e2219 | ['K Sriramamurthy'] | 2020-12-09 16:18:36.056000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Farmers', 'Farming', 'Agriculture', 'Dairy'] |
The Team & Headquarter and Who to Follow on Torum | 1. Who are the teams?
There are two first things that everyone must but can do when considering any projects (not just cryptos) and that is (1) Narrative and (2) Fundamental. However, there are more things to know if we want to be safe investing in the project such as (3) the system. However, do you have the abilities to inspect the source codes and perform chain analysis? Even if you do, do you really have the time? For those who cannot, there are only two more things to rely on and those are the team and the community. Who are the teams in Torum?
If you have experienced the initial coin offerings (ICO) and decentralized finance (DeFi) craze, you probably have seen beautiful websites about the project but still even most of them perform an exit scam. You have probably learned that anyone can make a website that does not necessary mean you can trust the project but a good website does slightly increase confidence and trust but only slightly. What is important is the information contains in the website. On Torum’s about page, the team provides some social media links to their profiles which improves their trustability. After that, you can go to the end of their whitepaper to see their short biography. (For now I only take a screenshot of Torum’s about page where I originally wanted to write a section myself with grids and floating images but not all the blogging platform supports this. So what is the point of making something of less quality? I do plan to investigate and make a more detailed investigation profile about them but I am still in the phase of making articles for beginners about Torum. For investors, I may provide them far in the future but still I provided links in the 4th section.)
Eventhough the details about the team such as their profile pictures, personal informations, and certificates, they can all be fake. The next step to increase our trust in them is to make a voice call and evaluate their intentions. Even better, a video call. I was invited into their ambassadors program and got an opportunity to make a video call with some of the teams on December 2nd 2020 and here I provided some screenshots. Ofcourse, this is just my experience, if you want to verify yourselves, schedule a video call with them yourselves.
2. Where is Torum’s headquater?
Having a video call can greatly boost the trust in them but still, couldn’t we completely trust someone unless we know where they are? So, in their whitepaper, I found their company’s name to be TORUM Technology Sdn. Bhd. and searched it in Google to find their Google Map’s information which is an exclusive news because I cannot find this information on their website and whitepaper:
Up to this point, Torum have a much higher trust than most startup projects for me. For big investors, it is better to visit them if want to invest big. Once the COVID-19 Pandemic is over, why not take a vacation to Malaysia and visit their headquaters? Or if you know someone in Malaysia, why not ask them visit for you? If that is also not an option, call Malaysia’s authority and verify whether the information about Torum is true or not. Well, maybe I am considering a visit in the future when the COVID-19 Pandemic is over.
3. Almost no risk in joining Torum
The risk to be heard is only being an investor for example when buying their XTM token in their initial exchange offering (IEO). However, there is almost no risk in joining the Torum platform and giving it a try. If you do not like it now, I still recommend you to join and comeback later when it improves. To join Torum today, you need to use my invitational link https://www.torum.com/signup?referral_code=0fajarpurnama0 as it is still in Public Beta phase. Here, I am writing this article as Torum ambassador @0fajarpurnama0. Even if I’m not an ambassador, I will still be writing these articles but with a different time frame, maybe once a month or three months? I hope to see you soon in Torum.
4. Who to Follow Torum?
Landers! You have just landed on Torum. Welcome! Read my previous articles to enjoy daily missions, tip other landers, join a clan, and/or make a company. Moving on to the next mission, who to follow?
Sure you can just follow everyone but unless you are a strong man like our ambassador @fetinafety, you can be overwhelmed and may not be able to enjoy Torum which can be true for all social media.
4.1 The Team
No doubt the first ones you have to follow are the teams. I provided the hyperlink here and all you have to do is right click on them and open new tab:
Ah Go (CEO): @yfenggo, Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook.
Alwin Chang (CDO): @alwinc, Linkedin, Instagram.
Jayson Tan (CMO): @jayson, Linkedin.
Teddy Tan (CFO, COO): @teddytan, Linkedin, Instagram.
Lucas Go (Graphic Designer and Animator): @lucasgo, Linkedin.
Nelthan Ng (COM): @nelthan, Linkedin, Instagram.
Prabhat Kumar (Technical Lead, DevOps Manager): @prabhat, Linkedin.
Pardeep Sharma (Front-End Lead Developer): @pardeep, Linkedin.
Jacky Chong (Back-End Developer): @bugcatcherjacky, Linkedin.
Max Kwan (Back-End Developer): @maxkwan, Linkedin.
Ankit Metwal (Front-End Mobile Developer): @ankit.metwa, Linkedin, Instagram.
Chai Wan Xin (Front-End Web Developer): @wanxinc, Linkedin.
4.2 The Ambassadors
In my opinion, the second ones to follow are the ambassadors who are landers outside of the internal team. The first batch were chosen by @jayson and the team because they are positively active in Torum, popular crypto influencers, content creators, and anything else that bring quality which is why I am confident to announce that they are worthy to follow. Here are the latest list from December 1st, 2020:
4.3 Anyone else you enjoy
Mirrors | https://medium.com/torum-official/the-team-headquarter-and-who-to-follow-on-torum-6bd14ff1159c | ['Fajar Purnama'] | 2020-12-07 01:55:54.760000+00:00 | ['Torum', 'Ambassador', 'Headquarters', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Team'] |
Finding The Shortest Path, With A Little Help From Dijkstra | Finding the shortest path, with a little help from Dijkstra!
If you spend enough time reading about programming or computer science, there’s a good chance that you’ll encounter the same ideas, terms, concepts, and names, time and again. Some of them start to become more familiar with time. Naturally, organically, and sometimes without too much effort on your part, you start to learn what all of these things mean. This happens because either you’ve slowly begun to grasp the concept, or you’ve read about a phrase enough times that you start to truly understand its meaning.
However, there are some ideas and definitions that are much harder to understand. These are the ones that you feel like you’re supposed to know, but you haven’t run across it enough to really comprehend it.
Topics that we feel like we’re meant to know — but never quite got around to learning — are the most intimidating ones of all. The barrier to entry is so high, and it can feel impossibly hard to understand something that you have little to no context for. For me, that intimidating topic is Dijkstra’s algorithm. I had always heard it mentioned in passing, but never came across it, so I never had the context or the tools to try to understand it.
Thankfully, in the course of writing this series, that has all changed. After years of fear and anxiety about Dijkstra’s algorithm, I’ve finally come to understand it. And hopefully, by the end of this post, you will too!
Graphs that weigh heavy on your mind
Before we can really get into Dijkstra’s super-famous algorithm, we need to pick up a few seeds of important information that we’ll need along the way, first.
Throughout this series, we’ve slowly built upon our knowledge base of different data structures. Not only have we learned about various graph traversal algorithms, but we’ve also taught ourselves the fundamentals of graph theory, as well as the practical aspects of representing graphs in our code. We already know that graphs can be directed, or undirected, and may even contain cycles. We’ve also learned how we can use breadth-first search and depth-first search to traverse through them, using two very different strategies.
In our journey to understand graphs and the different types of graph structures that exist, there is one type of graph that we’ve managed to skip over — until now, that is. It’s time for us to finally come face-to-face with the weighted graph!
Weighted graph: a definition
A weighted graph is interesting because it has little to do with whether the graph is directed, undirected, or contains cycles. At its core, a weighted graph is a graph whose edges have some sort of value that is associated with them. The value that is attached to an edge is what gives the edge its “weight”.
The weight of an edge represents the cost or distance between two nodes.
A common way to refer to the “weight” of a single edge is by thinking of it as the cost or distance between two nodes. In other words, to go from node a to node b has some sort of cost to it.
Or, if we think of the nodes like locations on a map, then the weight could instead be the distance between nodes a and b . Continuing with the map metaphor, the “weight” of an edge can also represent the capacity of what can be transported, or what can be moved between two nodes, a and b .
For example, in the example above, we could ascertain that the cost, distance, or capacity between the nodes c and b is weighted at 8 .
We can represent weighted graphs using an adjacency list.
The weighted-ness of the edges is the only thing that sets weighted graphs apart from the unweighted graphs that we’ve worked with so far in this series.
In fact, we probably already can imagine how we’d represent one of these weighted graphs! A weighted graph can be represented with an adjacency list, with one added property: a field to store the cost/weight/distance of every edge in the graph. Based on our previous research on graph representation, we’ll recall that the edges of a graph in an adjacency list live in the “list” portion.
For every single edge in our graph, we’ll tweak the definition of the linked list that holds the edges so that every element in the linked list can contain two values, rather than just one. These two values will be the opposite node’s index, which is how we know where this edge connects to, as well as the weight that is associated with the edge.
Here’s what that same example weighted graph would look like in adjacency list format.
Weighted graph as an adjacency list.
Right off the bat, we’ll notice two things about this graph representation: first, since it is an undirected graph, the edge between nodes a and b will appear twice — once in the edge list for node a and once in the edge list for node b . Second, in both instances that this edge is represented in either node’s respective edge list, there is a cost/weight that is stored in the linked list element that contains the reference to the neighboring node (in this case, either a or b ).
Okay, so there’s nothing too wild that we need to wrap our heads around just yet, right?
Here’s where the weight of a graph starts to complicate things slightly:
finding the shortest path between two nodes becomes much trickier when we have to take into account the weights of the edges that we’re traversing through.
Let’s take a look at an example, and this will start to become more clear. In the simple directed, weighted graph below, we have a graph with three nodes ( a , b , and c ), with three directed, weighted edges.
What is the shortest path between nodes A and B?
Looking at this graph, we might be able to quickly determine — without much hesitation — the quickest way to get from node a to node b . There is an edge between a and b , so that must be the quickest way, right?
Well, not exactly. Taking the weights of these edges into account, let’s take a deeper, second look. If we take the route from node a to node b , it will “cost us” 5 . However, if we take the route from node a to node c to node b , then it will cost us only 3 .
But why 3 ? Well, even though it may intuitively seem like a longer path, if we sum up the edges of going from node a to c and then from node c to b , we’ll see that the total cost ends up as 2 + 1 , which is 3 . It might mean that we’re traveling through two edges, but a cost of 3 is certainly preferable to a cost of 5 !
In our three-node example graph, we could fairly easily look at the two possible routes between our origin and destination nodes. However, what if our graph was much bigger — let’s say twenty nodes? It wouldn’t have been nearly as easy for us to find the shortest path, taking into account the weights of our weighted graph. And what if we were talking about an even bigger graph? In fact, most graphs that we deal with are far bigger than twenty nodes. How feasible and scalable and efficient would it be for us to use a brute-force approach to solving this problem?
The answer is that it’s not that feasible. Nor is it really any fun! And that’s where Dijkstra comes to the rescue.
Rules of Dijkstra’s game
Dijkstra’s algorithm is unique for many reasons, which we’ll soon see as we start to understand how it works. But the one that has always come as a slight surprise is the fact that this algorithm isn’t just used to find the shortest path between two specific nodes in a graph data structure. Dijkstra’s algorithm can be used to determine the shortest path from one node in a graph to every other node within the same graph data structure, provided that the nodes are reachable from the starting node.
Dijkstra’s algorithm can be used to find the shortest path.
This algorithm will continue to run until all of the reachable vertices in a graph have been visited, which means that we could run Dijkstra’s algorithm, find the shortest path between any two reachable nodes, and then save the results somewhere. Once we run Dijkstra’s algorithm just once, we can look up our results from our algorithm again and again — without having to actually run the algorithm itself! The only time we’d ever need to re-run Dijkstra’s algorithm is if something about our graph data structure changed, in which case we’d end up re-running the algorithm to ensure that we still have the most up-to-date shortest paths for our particular data structure.
So, how does Dijkstra’s algorithm actually work? It’s time to finally find out!
There are many possible paths between node A and node E.
Consider the weighted, undirected graph above. Let’s say that we want to find the shortest path from node a to node e . We know that we’re going to start at node a , but we don’t know if there is a path to reach it, or if there are many paths to reach it! In any case, we don’t know which path will be the shortest one to get to node e , if such a path even exists.
Dijkstra’s algorithm does require a bit of initial setup. But, before we get to that, let’s take a quick look at the steps and rules for running Dijkstra’s algorithm. In our example graph, we will start with node a as our starting node. However, the rules for running Dijkstra can be abstracted out so that they can be applied to every single node that we’ll traverse through and visit in an effort to find the shortest path.
Steps and rules to run Dijkstra’s algorithm.
The abstracted rules are as follows:
Every time that we set out to visit a new node, we will choose the node with the smallest known distance/cost to visit first. Once we’ve moved to the node we’re going to visit, we will check each of its neighboring nodes. For each neighboring node, we’ll calculate the distance/cost for the neighboring nodes by summing the cost of the edges that lead to the node we’re checking from the starting vertex. Finally, if the distance/cost to a node is less than a known distance, we’ll update the shortest distance that we have on file for that vertex.
These instructions are our golden rules that we will always follow, until our algorithm is done running. So, let’s get to it!
First things first: we need to initialize some things to keep track of some important information as this algorithm runs.
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 1
We’ll create a table to keep track of the shortest known distance to every vertex in our graph. We’ll also keep track of the previous vertex that we came from, before we “checked” the vertex that we’re looking at currently.
Once we have our table all set up, we’ll need to give it some values. When we start Dijkstra’s algorithm, we don’t know anything at all! We don’t even know if all of the other vertices that we’ve listed out ( b , c , d , and e ) are even reachable from our starting node a .
This means that, when we start out initially, the “shortest path from node a " is going to be infinity (∞). However, when we start out, we do know the shortest path for one node, and one node only: why, node a , our starting node, of course! Since we start at node a , we are already there to begin with. So, the shortest distance from node a to node a is actually just 0 !
Now that we’ve initialized our table, we’ll need one other thing before we can run this algorithm: a way to keep track of which nodes we have or haven’t visited! We can do this pretty simply with two array structures: a visited array and an unvisited array.
Dijkstra’s algorithm: setting things up.
When we start out, we haven’t actually visited any nodes yet, so all of our nodes live inside of our unvisited array.
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 2
Okay, now we’re good shape! Let’s get started. Remember our four rules from earlier? We’re going to follow them, step-by-step, as we work through each vertex in this graph.
First, we’ll visit the vertex with the smallest-known cost/distance. We can look at the column that tells us the shortest distance from a . Right now, every vertex has a distance of infinity (∞), except for a itself! So, we’ll visit node a .
Next, we’ll examine it’s neighboring nodes, and calculate the distance to them from the vertex that we’re currently looking at (which is a ). The distance to node b is the cost of a plus the cost to get to node b : in this case, 7 . Similarly, the distance to node c is the cost of a plus the cost to get to node c : in this case, 3 .
Finally, if the calculated distance is less than our currently-known shortest distance for these neighboring nodes, we’ll update our tables values with our new “shortest distance”. Well, currently, our table says that the shortest distance from a to b is ∞, and the same goes for the shortest distance from a to c . Since 7 is less than infinity, and 3 is less than infinity, we will update node b 's shortest distance to 7 , and node c 's shortest distance to 3 . We will also need to update the previous vertex of both b and c , since we need to keep a record of where we came from to get these paths! We’ll update the previous vertex of b and c to a , since that’s where we just came from.
Now, we’re done checking the neighbors of node a , which means we can mark it as visited! Onto the next node.
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 3
Again, we’ll look at the node with the smallest cost that hasn’t been visited yet. In this case, node c has a cost of 3 , which is the smallest cost of all the unvisited nodes. So, node c becomes our current vertex.
We’ll repeat the same procedure as before: check the unvisited neighbors of node c , and calculate their shortest paths from our origin node, node a . The two neighbors of node c that haven’t been visited yet are node b and node d . The distance to node b is the cost of a plus the cost to get from node c to b : in this case, 4 . The distance to node d is the cost of a plus the cost to get from node c to d : in this case, 5 .
Now, let’s compare these two “shortest distances” to the values that we have in our table. Right now, the distance to d is infinity, so we’ve certainly found a shorter-cost path here, with a value of 5 . But what about the distance to node b ? Well, the distance to node b is currently marked as 7 in our table. But, we’ve found a shorter path to b , which goes through c , and has a cost of only 4 . So, we’ll update our table with our shorter paths!
We’ll also need to add vertex c as the previous vertex of node d . Notice that node b already has a previous vertex, since we found a path before, which we now know isn’t actually the shortest. No worries — we’ll just cross out the previous vertex for node b , and replace it with the vertex which, as we now know, has the shorter path: node c .
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 4
Alright, so now we’ve visited both node a and c . So, which node do we visit next?
Again, we’ll visit the node that has the smallest cost; in this case, that looks to be node b , with a cost of 4 .
We’ll check its unvisited neighbor (it only has one, node e ), and calculate the distance to e , from the origin node, via our current vertex, b .
If we sum the cost of b , which is 4 , with the cost that it takes to get from b to e , we’ll see that this costs us 6 . Thus, we end up with a total cost of 10 as the shortest-known distance to e , from the starting vertex, via our current node.
How did we get that number, though?
So, how did we get that number? It can seem confusing at first, but we can break it down into parts. Remember, no matter which vertex we’re looking at, we always want to sum the shortest-known distance from our start to our current vertex. In simpler terms, we’re going to look at the “shortest distance” value in our table, which will give us, in this example, the value 4 . Then, we’ll look at the cost from our current vertex to the neighbor that we’re examining. In this case, the cost from b to e is 6 , so we’ll add that to 4 .
Thus, 6 + 4 = 10 is our shortest-known distance to node e from our starting vertex.
Behind the scenes of Dijkstra’s magic
We’ll continue doing the same steps for each vertex that remains unvisited. The next node we’d check in this graph would be d , as it has the shortest distance of the unvisited nodes. Only one of node d 's neighbors is unvisited, which is node e , so that’s the only one that we’ll need to examine.
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 5
When we sum the distance of node d and the cost to get from node d to e , we’ll see that we end up with a value of 9 , which is less than 10 , the current shortest path to node e . We’ll update our shortest path value and the previous vertex value for node e in our table.
Dijkstra’s algorithm, part 6
Finally, we end up with just one node left to visit: node e .
However, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s nothing for us to really do here! None of node e 's neighbors need to be examined, since every other vertex has already been visited.
All we need to do is mark node e as visited. Now, we’re actually completely done with running Dijkstra’s algorithm on this graph!
We’ve crossed out a lot of information along the way as we updated and changed the values in our table. Let’s take a look at a nicer, cleaner version of this table, with only the final results of this algorithm.
The final values from Dijkstra’s algorithm.
From looking at this table, it might not be completely obvious, but we’ve actually got every single shortest path that stems from our starting node a available here, right at our fingertips. We’ll remember that earlier, we learned that Dijkstra’s algorithm can run once, and we can reuse all the values again and again — provided our graph doesn’t change. This is exactly how that characteristic becomes very powerful. We set out wanting to find the shortest path from a to e . But, this table will allow us to look up all shortest paths!
Retracing our steps to find the shortest path.
The way to look up any shortest path in this table is by retracing our steps and following the “previous vertex” of any node, back up to the starting node.
For example, let’s say that we suddenly decide that we want to find the shortest path from a to d . No need to run Dijkstra’s algorithm again — we already have all the information we need, right here!
Using a stack data structure, we’ll start with node d , and push() it onto our stack. Then, we’ll look at node d 's previous vertex, which happens to be node b . We’ll push() node b onto the stack. Similarly, we’ll look at node b ' previous vertex (node c ), and add that to our stack, and then look at node c 's previous vertex, which is node a , our starting vertex!
Once we trace our steps all the way back up to our starting vertex, we can pop() each vertex off of the stack, which results in this order: a — c — b — d . As it turns out, this is the exact path that will gives us the lowest cost/distance from node a to node d ! Pretty rad, right?
Dijkstra’s algorithm visualized, © Wikimedia Foundation
In many ways, Dijkstra’s algorithm is a sophisticated take on the typical form of breadth-first graph traversal that we’re already familiar with. The major differences are the fact that it is a bit smarter, and can handle weighted graphs very well. But, if we look at Dijkstra’s algorithm visualized, like the animation shown here, we’ll see that it basically functions like a BFS search, spreading out wide rather than pursuing one specific path deeply.
The most common example of Dijkstra’s algorithm in the wild is in path-finding problems, like determining directions or finding a route on GoogleMaps.
Dijkstra’s algorithm implemented for path-finding on a map.
However, to find a path through GoogleMaps, an implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm needs to be even more intelligent than the one that we created today. The version of Dijkstra’s algorithm that we implemented here is still not as intelligent as most forms that are used on a practical level. Imagine not just a weighted graph, but also having to calculate things like traffic, road conditions, road closures, and construction.
If this all feels like a lot to take in, don’t worry — it’s complicated stuff! In fact, it’s a hard problem that even Dijkstra struggled to exemplify well. As it turns out, when Edsger W. Dijkstra was first thinking about the problem of finding the shortest path back in 1956, he had a difficult time trying to find a problem (and its solution) that would be easy to understand for people who did not come from the computing world! He eventually did come up with a good example problem to showcase the importance of being able to find a shortest path. He chose — you guessed it! — a map as an example. In fact, when he designed his algorithm originally, he implemented it for a computer called the ARMAC. He used the example of a transportation map, which contained cities from across the Netherlands, in order to showcase how his algorithm worked.
Towards the end of his life, Dijkstra sat down for an interview and revealed the full backstory how he came up with his now-famous algorithm:
What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen? It is the algorithm for the shortest path which I designed in about 20 minutes. One morning I was shopping with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path.
So what’s the moral of the story? I’m pretty sure it’s as simple as this: there is no problem that can’t be solved with a nice cup of coffee.
Resources
For better or for worse, Dijkstra’s algorithm is one of the most well-known methods of graph traversal in the world of computer science. The bad news is that sometimes it can feel intimidating to try to understand how it works, since there are so many references to it. The good news is that there are plenty of resources out there — you just need to know which ones to start with! Here are some of my favorites. | https://medium.com/basecs/finding-the-shortest-path-with-a-little-help-from-dijkstra-613149fbdc8e | ['Vaidehi Joshi'] | 2017-10-17 05:28:26.571000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Data Structures', 'Programming', 'Computer Science', 'Algorithms'] |
Why I’m a ‘Doormat’ | I don’t understand fighting. I mean, I understand why people fight. I’m a liberal atheist feminist that openly hates capitalism. I’m also asexual, and I dream of a grand, sweeping romance with another woman. Fighting is something I do regularly in that regard. But I’m not talking about the fighting for your rights while a stranger screams at you kind of fighting. Those situations are easy for me at this point.
No, the fighting I don’t understand are the petty fights. The ‘can you do the dishes’ fights that turn into name calling and verbal gut punches. I don’t understand how they end up there, and I don’t understand how to get out of them.
I also don’t understand why it’s so common.
When you’re fighting for your beliefs, that’s one thing. I understand the desire to not be wrong — if your beliefs are wrong, your morals are wrong. If your morals are wrong, that means you’re the bad guy. No one wants to be the bad guy, and we will fight tooth and nail to be the good guys. Even many Nazis thought they were doing the right thing and actively taught the school children ‘hey, discrimination is grand.’ Even modern Nazis think they’re doing the right thing. They truly believe they are defending their lives. Note: They are not good people and their humanity does not excuse their behavior, but the point is that they don’t see themselves as villains. They want to be the heroes. So, while I may hate you and everything you stand for, I also know why you won’t back down. That’s why I typically try for a gentler approach, reaching out to the people that actually want to talk and blocking the vile scum. The vile scum being the ones that use ‘I just want a discussion why won’t you have a discussion with me’ as an excuse to harass and abuse others. I will never be too tired to fight for my beliefs.
So, I can recognize those behaviors very quickly. I see them every day. Yet, when they start to happen closer too me, when the people acting out those behaviors aren’t alt-right Twitter trolls but people that I see on a daily basis, and when it’s over dumb things like picking up the trash on the floor or doing dishes…that’s where I start falling apart.
Coincidentally, those are also the times when people are most likely to start calling me a doormat because, well, those are the times I start retreating. I don’t know how to defend myself when ‘can you please do the dishes’ becomes a shouting match. I don’t know how to defend myself over things that seem absolutely basic to me.
I’ve started to wonder lately if there are people out there that I could live with who wouldn’t behave this way. I realized recently that I’ve almost never lived in an environment without at least one person that could be viewed as abusive. Sometimes, that someone has been me, when my roommate was even mousier than I was. Well, then there’s also the people that I’m fairly certain are abusive who call me an abuser, though I’m almost positive I’m not being abusive in those situations. It’s not wrong, I don’t think, to stand my ground when the person who is supposed to be doing the dishes attempts to turn the conversation to my skills as a bathroom cleaner. Nor is it wrong to expect to be treated the way that others would like me to treat them. If you want to be an hour early to something that you don’t want to be late for, that’s fine, as long as I also get to be an hour early to something I don’t want to be late for.
But then, I only have my own perspective. I can’t speak for others. Am I abusive? Is everyone abusive? Or am I just spiraling again because of all the confusion?
I’m afraid of being an abuser. From what I understand, my father was abusive. I never met him, but that knowledge alone has me worried.
I also am not sure I completely understand abuse. I understand the examples, I know to trust the victims when they speak up, and I can recognize dangerous situations when they present themselves. But when it comes to my own life, I’ve always been notoriously terrible at recognizing what’s happening in the moment. I spent a decade in an abusive friendship (abusive relationships come in all flavors) because I didn’t know friendships could be abusive. How could they be? You choose your friends, after all. If a friendship was bad, wouldn’t you just let it go?
The short answer is No. For many of the same reasons you might not leave an abusive romance or marriage, people also often stay in abusive friendships.
But then, are relationships where fights are uncommon still abusive? After all, people can have horrible fights and come out alright on the other side. When do you draw the line? Should the line be drawn over petty things like dishes?
I keep coming back to the dishes, but they are code for ‘anything that involves shared spaces‘ and many, many tiny privacy things. ‘Don’t tell your friends/boyfriend that I lost my keys’ shouldn’t be a fight. It should be a ‘ok, I won’t do that’ and a following through on not doing that — doing it but not telling me is still not ok. Dishes are just the easiest to talk about because, funnily enough, every situation that has made me question myself has involved a person who picked a fight like this over dishes.
Because such tiny things can quickly become a fight, I tend to opt out. Oh, you don’t want to put any effort into cleaning? I guess we’ll live in a pigsty then. I may opt out of a fight, but I’m no one’s maid. I would rather live with dirty dishes, hoarding a clean plate in my bedroom for when I need it, than clean up for someone else. And that works better because then I never have to fall down the rabbit hole of ‘did I go to far? am I being mistreated?’
That abusive friend I mentioned above was the last person to call me a doormat, but she was the sort who would call me a doormat while behaving abusively. In one breath she would be berating me for not giving in to her demands, calling me names and picking at the deepest wounds she could find, and in the next she would be berating me for not standing up for myself when she thought someone had wronged me. She thought that this made her a great friend. Now, even though she’s gone from my life, I’m still haunted by the doubts and fears that she etched into my mind. Am I abusive? Am I a doormat? Where is the line in between? I don’t want to cross that line. I want to be a good person.
In the current political climate, there is a lot of advice being passed around about how to deal with trolls. And this sort of rolling-around-in-the-mud purposefully-aiming-for-the-gut-punches behavior is the sort of thing that is often associated with trolling. They want to upset you, they want to make you cry, they want to win. (Or, as noted above, they don’t want to be the evil ones.)
There has also been some talk on how to handle friends when you find out they’re ok with America having concentration camps for children, or are fully supportive of Trump, or whatever. And…well, I can handle that too. If I find out you’re complacent with or supportive of Nazi-like behaviors and you won’t budge from your position, then I am morally obligated to walk away from you.
What I can’t seem to find is advice for what to do when someone you care about and align with politically and by all senses of society should get on very well is the one behaving this way. I mean, there are tips on how to escape from logical fallacies when they are brought up, but they’re really hard to implement effectively.
I happen to be a certified conflict mediator. I spent weeks studying how people argue and learning how to be a third person that helps them find common ground. I guess the one thing they forgot to teach was how to save yourself when you’re at odds with someone else and there is no mediator.
When it happens, I’m just left fumbling around and asking myself: How did we get here? How can I escape? I can’t block a face-to-face interaction. I can walk away, and endure the belittling attacks that come with that. Well, I can happily say that the people in my life now don’t do that. I cut out the ones that did. Those that are left don’t quite go that far. But they do take my leaving as surrender, which, I think, is just as bad. Especially because then the thing that needs to get done still doesn’t get done and now we’re all hurt because of it instead of just me.
I want to share these musings both because I want help but also because I want to help others. I can’t be the only one struggling with these feelings. A desire to do good, a fear of being evil. There is a bit of fear involved in putting them down. What if someone in my life reads this? What if they know it’s about them? I can’t pretend it isn’t, either we’ve had fights like this or we haven’t. And, if we have, then this is about them.
I don’t want to be a doormat. But I don’t see how I have any other choice. My words are my only weapon, and I’m only even good at using them when I’ve had time to think and iron them out. So, I suppose, this is me, not being a doormat. This is me, hoping for something better. | https://kelainetaylor.medium.com/why-im-a-doormat-6e59d684a70d | ['K. Elaine Taylor'] | 2018-07-07 21:50:30.117000+00:00 | ['Behavior Change', 'Abuse', 'Relationships', 'Society', 'Life'] |
The Greatest Films You’ll Never Watch. | The Greatest Films You’ll Never Watch.
Photograph for El Pais
Every day we’re closer to watch the new film adaptation of the classic Frank Helbert novel Dune. But his is not the first time it’s been tried to be adapted to the big screen, and no, I’m not talking about the 1984 David Lynch project (we’ll be on that later).
This is not the first time it happens. Remember the 2003 film I, Robot? That’s a simple reflection of the original project that was set to be made by Harlan Ellison. You can actually find the illustrated script of what the film would’ve looked like.
These two examples are not the only times we’ve seen the second shot at a full length feature, in fact, many times we only hear the idea and never get at least a director try to recreate the piece with his own view.
So, we ask ourselves, why aren’t those films made if they have the talent and audience in their hands?
The first thing that might pop up in your head is “oh, the big bucks”, but some get produced later and, dare I say, with a few extra dollars thrown in. We can wander around on many reasons why this happens, but a better way to look at it by checking out some examples in the past, so let’s dive in a few times when we lost the chance to watch amazing projects: | https://medium.com/@sebasmayer/the-greatest-films-youll-never-watch-fa9e03248a06 | ['Sebastian Mayer'] | 2020-12-08 19:19:11.204000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Lists', 'Projects', 'Film', 'Movies'] |
Venture Debt — An attractive alternative for startups? | Raising capital for your business is an essential task for startups and is not only time-consuming but often nerve-wracking as well. A clear view of the available options is needed to make the right decision. One of the various options besides the frequently mentioned equity is debt — venture debt to be precise.
Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash
What is Venture Debt?
Venture debt is a form of debt that is given to startups to fund their businesses. It works like a traditional debt which means to simply repay the borrowed money plus the interest payments. While this sounds like a normal business loan that a company could obtain, there is an important difference. Venture debt is less dependent on factors like accounts receivable, inventory held, and cash levels. The focus of venture debt is on the relationship between founders and the company’s VC backer. The ability to secure additional funding rounds is an important part to manage the high-risk profile of such debt structures, the chances of receiving venture debt are higher for startups that are backed by a VC investor.
There is a clear difference between convertible debt and venture debt. While both appear to be the same, the biggest difference stems from the convertibility to equity. If a founder agrees to a convertible loan, the lender will convert the debt to equity at a specific point in time (usually the next funding round). This results in a dilution of the cap table.
Photo by Jan-Philipp Thiele on Unsplash
Who should use Venture Debt?
Venture debt is an attractive option for startups that are backed by a VC. The best time to raise venture debt is during while or shortly after a successful equity round, since the creditworthiness is higher, and the startup will have better bargaining power. In addition, the startup should already create revenues as there will be the obligation to pay interest on the borrowed money. The use of the venture debt is very similar to equity funding (e.g. sales teams, R&D or marketing). If the debt is used to make investments in factories or machines, the venture debt will most likely be secured by these assets.
Why should startups consider Venture Debt?
One of the main reasons to consider venture debt is that the startup is not giving away equity. After the debt is paid back, the relationship with the venture debt lender ends. The other advantage is that it is an infusion of cash to overcome unforeseen short-term market downturns or challenges during the fundraising process. Raising additional equity to extend the runway or to bridge such market downturns leaves the startup in a weaker position to negotiate with a VC. Venture debt gives founders the chance to balance the sources of funds between debt and equity. A mix between equity and debt can be healthy and will actually increase the ROE for the shareholders as there is no dilution from venture debt. It highly depends on the industry and founders to determine what debt to equity ratio is appropriate. While venture debt has clear advantages, it is important for the startup to be able to repay the debt. The business model of the startup should be stable and proven, otherwise, venture debt can become a dangerous burden for the startup. Further, entering long-term relationships in the form of an equity investment can also have positive effects as investors can support your business growth and the incentives are more aligned compared to a venture debt deal.
Venture debt is becoming more popular since the COVID-19 pandemic has forced startups to cut costs and extend their runways. Founders want to avoid additional dilution and hard fundraising negotiations given the economic climate (depending on the industry). Current low-interest rates are additional factors that increase the attractiveness of venture debt. | https://medium.com/bv4-startup-experts/venture-debt-an-attractive-alternative-for-startups-a9828f9072a5 | ['Christian Bueckle'] | 2020-11-26 11:27:14.410000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Fundraising', 'Startup Life', 'Venture Debt', 'Startup Lessons'] |
Weight Control Supplements Market 2019 Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2025 | The Weight Control Supplements Market Report provides key strategies followed by leading Weight Control Supplements industry manufactures and Sections of Market like- product specifications, volume, production value, Feasibility Analysis, Classification based on types and end user application areas with geographic growth and upcoming advancement. The Weight Control Supplements market report provides comprehensive outline of Invention, Industry Requirement, technology and production analysis considering major factors such as Revenue, investments and business growth.
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QAs Weigh In On Burnout Among Software Testing Professionals | Is it possible to fabricate a situation in a software development team so that a tester is very likely to burn out?
If yes, what can testers learn from such a thought experiment?
It turns out that burnout among software testing professionals is not just a thought experiment — it is a real and pervasive problem.
I dug into the issue of burnout in software testing, asking:
What creates systems where software testers burn out?
How can we break these systems apart — and fix it?
The answers — or at least the beginning of them — are here in this article.
Why Does Burnout Happen?
Literature enumerates many factors in the workplace that cause stress and increase the likelihood of workplace-related burnout. High workload, time pressure, unachievable goals and expectations, lack of control, heated up conflicts, fear of losing a job, dissatisfaction with the job, bullying, and mobbing, and more. We know them.
Individual factors play an important role as well. For example personal drivers like be perfect, hurry up, try-hard, be strong, or please others. Do some of these apply to you? Such drivers can prove helpful in many situations. But be careful: they will become problematic in high-stress situations if they start dominating your behavior.
Can we find such factors in the software industry amongst QA professionals? That is surprisingly easy. Just look at the responses from software testing professionals when asked about their challenges in their work and compare them with the factors mentioned just above.
“We have to prove our value. Teams tell me, they are agile, they do not need testers.” “Anxiety. It is hard for QA professionals not to worry ahead of a major release or feel responsible for any outcomes.” “Time Pressure. Testers are always the last ones. And I never get the time I need. And it is cut in half because developers overrun.” “Unrealistic expectations. I could test forever and would not be able to test it all. Tell this to a project leader. What good is a tester who does not find the bugs?!” “The waste is frustrating. Developers can’t reproduce a bug, or the backlog item is outdated, or they already fixed it.” “Many do not want an honest report and especially no bad news. When you insist, it can get personal.”
A Wicked Idea: The Burn-Out System
Some time ago I started looking at burnout from a systemic point of view and I created a simulation game where players can influence the fortune of a software development team. They can burn out the team members or create the most rewarding project ever. You can get a glimpse of the game on my blog.
The heart of the simulation is a burnout system, i.e. a system that is set up in a way that some members in a team will eventually burn out.
This systemic approach can also target specific roles in a team. I have done this for user experience professionals and was surprised how easy it is to push these folks into the hot spot of a burnout system. Especially when caring for users, they are willing to take an extra fight and risk going under.
Now that I am positive that I can fabricate a burnout system for QA professionals, let me introduce you to Alan and his story.
Alan has almost a decade of experience in software testing and especially in performance testing. He just joined a development team. The team has been working for ten sprints with another four to go to a first release.
How Was Alan’s First Day In The Project?
Alan: There is a lot to do for me. The software has low quality. I expect many undetected bugs and I fear trouble if I cannot find them by the release.
Markus: Identifying the bugs is then your top priority to improve quality?
Alan: That is one part. We also expect many users. The performance of the software is of utmost importance once we roll it out to the wider public. The team is eager to profit from my expertise there.
So far, Alan is quite optimistic that the measures agreed with the team will improve the quality of the software. Alas, one sprint later, with three sprints to go, Alan does not look too cheerful.
What Is The Matter?
Alan: I am not happy with my progress. I wanted to have a first, simple performance test, but I am far from achieving this.
Markus: What hinders you?
Alan: I need support from developers, but they are loaded. I also needed much more time than expected to get to know the software and reporting the bugs I found.
Markus: Were you able to test the newly implemented stories?
Alan: Not really, the team was busy polishing them. From the two days reserved for testing at the end of the sprint just half a day remained. I did stay longer and did work on Saturday, but I am far from done.
In the retrospective of sprint twelve, with just two sprints to go, testing is the number one topic: The product owner complained about the number of bugs Alan found.
Developer: Most bugs Alan found are either insignificant or no bugs at all. Let’s sift through them first before jumping to any conclusions.
Alan: Well it was difficult for me to understand what the software should be doing from the backlog items. A specification would really help.
Developer: Over my dead body! We don’t want Waterfall. It is mostly common sense. Just come and ask us. How is performance testing going?
Alan: I’m at a standstill. I cannot get the tool to run against the service layer with all that security. I need help.
Developer: We used another tool in the last project. Worked like a charm. I’ll send you the link.
Being brushed off like this, can you feel Alan’s frustration rising?
Alan’s Fatal Position
Alan’s position as the scapegoat gets more obvious after sprint thirteen, with one sprint to go. Here are the decisions from the retrospective:
Many bugs found in stories Alan should have tested the sprint before. No story shall be closed without Alan having tested it.
Still no performance test. We have an expert look at it. Alan is to brief him.
Could not finish two stories. We lost two days of discarding useless bug reports. Alan marks each bug with relevance. When in doubt, ask the product owner.
Have you spotted it? The team did not finish two stories and managed to put the blame on Alan!
Picture the next sprint, when stories are not closed because Alan did not have the time to test them! No wonder Alan looks weary.
Alan’s Achievement: Heading For Burnout
Alan: Only two weeks to the release and quality is a nightmare. Tell that to the product owner! And they did take performance testing away. This was the reason I joined the project at all. My boss is unhappy. He wanted me to set an example on how to include testers in agile teams. I will have to fight it through though, my reputation in the company is at stake.
Alan summarizes his achievements like this
Performance Testing: failed
Being recognized as an expert for performance testing: failed
Able to thoroughly test newly built stuff: failed
Able to thoroughly retest the already built stuff: failed
Incorporating testers in agile teams: failed
No critical bugs in the release: failed
Being recommended: failed
Working hard and getting blamed: achieved
Fear to lose job: achieved
Burn out: heading there with full speed
Alan is in a burnout system. The burnout system singles Alan out like a predator its victim. But what is this burnout system and how does it do it?
What Creates A Burnout System?
A burnout system is a constellation of people, drivers, and conflicts. Through a reinforcing cycle, it creates a situation so full of stressors that some people will burn out eventually.
1. Energy Follows The Drivers
In Alan’s story, we can spot some drivers:
Ambition and fascination for the pet topic performance testing makes Alan want to do it.
Anxiety of being responsible for a failed release makes Alan hunting for bugs.
Something makes team members build features before all.
Drivers change the course of action. People have a real hard time thinking clearly about what to achieve and how to achieve it. The energy people invest follows the driver, not where it is needed most.
Alan’s team never questions whether building all the features is the right thing to do. Neither does Alan question whether hunting for bugs is appropriate.
The difficult thing for most of us is to become aware that a driver has taken control. Good for us, that psychologists have studied them. For personal drivers, start with transaction analysis. On the team level, groupthink is a good starting point. You can find loads of advice there.
Relating to anxiety before a release, one of the experienced QA professionals advised: “You just need to let it go and be cool”.
With such a mindset, Alan’s top priority — rather than hunting down bugs— could be that the team slows down and delivers higher quality.
2. Conflicts Heat It Up and Get Personal
Conflicts flare-up in the team. For example, Alan needs more time from the developers than they are ready to spare. Result: Developers try to keep him off their back. Left with little help, Alan cannot meet expectations. He fears for his reputation, redoubles his effort, and generates even more noise.
The really bad thing is, that conflicts get personal. Having worked as a tester for ten years, Alan probably is quite an expert. Still, the team sees him as a lame duck and acts like it. The longer this goes, the deeper it gets. This even affects Alan: he starts questioning his competency.
How many times have you blamed someone? How many persons around you are not doing a good job? Every such thought points to a conflict that became personal.
Conflict management is an interesting field of study on its own. One important message: Teams need a culture where ideas can be openly exchanged, diverging views are welcomed as opportunities to create new things, and helping each other is appreciated.
3. Team Structure Impacts Team Dynamics
Alan’s team set apart the last two days of the sprint for testing, closing the sprint, and preparing the next sprint. The team simply assumed that Alan follows this structure. He would test the newly implemented functions at the end of the sprint and do some retesting in the next sprint as well as improve testing overall. Does not sound bad, does it?
Reality tells a different story. The software is available just on the last day of the sprint. Backlog items offer little help on how it should work exactly. While the team discusses the details of what they will do in the next sprint, Alan tries to figure out what to test from this sprint. He then asks questions just before the developers leave and tests over the weekend.
The team structure isolates Alan. The team does not see him struggle. They only notice stupid questions and late results with little value. What a lame duck.
Specification by example shows quite nicely how testing and testers can be an integral part of an agile team. Testers participate at refinements, help create a testable specification, focus the testing efforts on where it matters, improve team processes, individual skills, and tooling, and they even do some of the testings.
4. Ignore Fundamental Rules And Head For Trouble
Alan’s team ignores the fundamental rules of software engineering.
Here are four of them:
Unexpected things happen. Not having enough room for them leads to hurrying, short-cuts, stupid mistakes, heated up conflicts, and thus slower progress in the long run. Pressure delays. Pressure results in less room for unexpected things. Quality is emergent. The team needs to have a culture of quality. Testing is just one piece of the puzzle. And one team member alone against all the others usually fails. Defects are to learn. When a process produces too many defects, stop it, fix it, and learn from it. Do not blame and, most importantly, do not speed it up.
There are more such rules and whenever people ignore them, things will get worse. And so they did for Alan.
5. Perceived Tight Situation Triggers It
How come the team ignores such fundamental things? Easy one. Typical in a tight situation where the givens (deliverables, available time, and the team) do not leave enough flexibility to handle unexpected things.
Burnout systems exploit the only variable in a tight constellation: How hard the team works i.e. how much energy team members consume from their batteries.
The price question: is Alan’s team really in a tight situation and delivering all the features the best way to go? We can only assume. The team did the same and rushed off trying to build all the features.
It is the perception of tight situations that matters. The trigger for such a perception can be a contractual clause, an incentive, a great market opportunity, a strong demand from a boss, a promise made, a customer’s wish, a governmental regulation.
Alan expects masses of bugs and anxiety makes him hunt them. The price question for him: is finding the bugs really such an important step in this case? We can only speculate and so did Alan. He assumed yes.
The perception of a tight situation is an important lever to break a burnout system. Behind it is another fundamental rule of software engineering, and it’s coming up right next.
6. Too high expectations
Stakeholders — including the developers themselves — hope, expect, or demand more than a software team can realistically deliver.
Looking at the last 25 years of my project experience, I cannot recall a single one where this was not the case. The conflict between what is expected and what can be delivered is the hot spot. The success of a project depends on how well the people involved can resolve this conflict. I would recommend reviewing good practices about stakeholder and expectation management, conflict management, requirements engineering, agility, and the like.
In any case, the thing to do is to understand the exact nature of the conflict. How strong it is? What drives it? With whom do you need to work?
QA professionals are usually not in the position to lead this discussion. It may be more fruitful to manage the expectations they face personally. One interviewee told me her recipe: “Best define a time box and the priorities with the product owner. The priorities reflect the risk of not testing. When not happy, renegotiate the time box and the priorities.”
7. Agile Trap
A strong team that continuously adapts itself to the changing needs, a non-bureaucratic way of dealing with change, simple means of planning and progress control: The agile movement brought forward a wealth of innovations development teams are well-advised to profit from. Still agile seems to heat it up.
It starts with the naming: Sprint means fast, velocity means fast, one fails fast. The term scrum is from rugby, a sport, where athletes tackle each other at full speed. The language of agility promotes speed over quality. “Methodologies like Agile and DevOps encourage the idea of doing everything even faster”, is what one QA professional complained about.
The mechanics of e.g. scrum are even worse than the naming. It is not that those who created Scrum wanted to foster burnout. Scrum just leads the teams up the garden path.
For one, it centers the team’s attention on the backlog. The product owner’s job is to put things into the backlog. A team member’s job is to take them and do them one by one. The scrum master’s job is to make sure this goes faster.
Next, agile progress control needs small backlog items doable in a few days. Gurus also recommend precisely worked out acceptance criteria before the sprint. Thus team members get precisely defined and small chunks to implement.
Team members also report daily how much time they still need and the velocity tells everybody (at least so many teams believe) how well they perform.
Micromanagers are jubilating and controlling every minute: lack of control, no creative room, the pressure to get faster: a rat race.
Given this, in a seemingly tight situation, does it matter to developers if the product does something useful? No, that’s the product owner’s job. Is bug-free important? The tester’s job, once the acceptance criteria passed. What does matter to a developer? To finish the backlog item in time.
Do you see Alan’s position? Scrum leads teams to do all features. Quality is Alan’s job. The fundamental rule is violated, things are getting worse.
Alan’s team also obeys commitment. They fill the sprint with as many backlog items as indicated by the velocity. Then they take an oath to deliver it.
The next fundamental law hits them: unforeseen things happen. Rather than breaking the oath, the team takes short cuts and nicks a few bits from testing. Finished in time, well done!
Alan’s team has fallen into the agile trap. They apply Scrum without being agile. Compare the following two images, the first one is what Scrum is about, the second one is what agile is all about.
Scrum is about the process to turn backlog items into a product:
Agile is about creating an impact with a product and about the interactions of the persons involved: those who order a product, those who use it, and those who create it.
While Scrum is a great tool for intrinsically motivated agile teams, it is fatal in a top-down command hierarchy!
Takeaways
In the software industry, it is important to develop defense mechanisms against stress and burnout. In some companies more than in others.
Some situations are really tight, others are made tight on purpose. But mostly things seem much tighter than they are. Anyways, tight situations lead us to obey our drivers, to stop working on the conflicts, and to ignore fundamental rules — things are getting worse.
An experienced project leader told me: “I always try to understand the motives of those involved. This tells me where to be firm and what to change. In the end, it boils down to forming realistic expectations.”
I also asked an organizational psychologist for advice. He said: “Shared values is what protects us against burnout.” He continues: “However, being able to trust in others to do a good job and to help each other doesn’t come by itself. And many managers, through their decisions, impatience and incentives, act against the values they wish to establish.”
I encourage you to take the viewpoint offered by the concept of a burnout system. Take a step back, let your anxiety go, keep calm. Then look beyond commandments, processes, and tools. Dig deeper to understand the root cause behind the pressure you feel. Work on it — together in the team. And I hope you can focus on what really matters: how you as a QA professional together with your teammates create great products customers and users love. | https://medium.com/qa-lead/qas-weigh-in-on-burnout-among-software-testing-professionals-9f3a478112a9 | ['Markus Flückiger'] | 2020-12-23 12:34:58.557000+00:00 | ['Quality Assurance', 'Burnout', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Testing'] |
How Cryptocurrency Could Catapult You Over the Retirement Finish Line | And there are a lot of big Ifs baked into that number. The first is a joint life expectancy of only 30 years.
Did you know, according to the United Nations, there were nearly half a million centenarians (meaning people ages 100 and older) in 2015, more than four times as many as in 1990? And this growth is expected to accelerate: Projections are there will be 3.7 million centenarians worldwide in 2050!
I read something recently that said centenarians might end up being the fastest growing segment of the workforce in some year in the not too distant future! This is not your great grand-parents retirement, I can tell you that!
Another assumption is that you are healthy. I have my own hour stories about how my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at around 72, and had already run through a two million estate to pay for her care, before she died.
There is the sequence of returns problem, which refers to the detrimental effect of taking permanent losses of capital later in a portfolio’s life compared to earlier. I could go on…
Saving enough to live well in retirement, which is the goal for all of us, is hard. And the later you start, the harder it is.
For most of us, to get to these sorts of savings numbers, requires a 10–12% return, over our investing lifetimes.
And sadly, the U.S. stock market has typically returned more like 8%, over long periods of time. The typical diversified portfolio across stocks and bond somewhat less.
This is a big, big problem for a whole lot of people. One that I have thought about and worked on for over 20 years. I invented an investment method, in the late 1990s, designed to produce double digit cash flow from stocks, that helps to solve this problem.
Which is exactly why cryptoassets caught my attention.
In his book, Zero To One, the billionaire entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel talks about the question he likes to ask when interviewing someone:
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Most people believe cryptoassets are too risky for a retirement portfolio. But the truth is the opposite. I believe NOT investing in Bitcoin is the risk.
And I believe that so strongly, I came out of retirement to start Sane Crypto, to spread that message, and help Baby Boomers do it. Let me explain…
Here is what you have to know about Bitcoin…
The first thing is there is a legitimate range of future outcomes, anywhere from Bitcoin going to zero, to Bitcoin replacing gold and offshore banking, giving it a fair value of $1 million or more per Bitcoin. And everywhere in between.
And no one knows which it will be. No one. Not Warren Buffet who says its “rat poison squared”. Not billionaires, like Peter Thiel and Mike Novogratz, who own it mass quantities. No one.
Admittedly, when I say Bitcoin could go to $1 million, the first time you hear something so seemingly crazy, reasonable brains just dismiss that as impossible. Heck! It still sounds crazy to me every time I say it.
But do the research, like I have done, and you realize that is possible. Maybe not likely. Certainly not next year. But within the realm of real possibility.
At the moment, Bitcoin is selling for $7290. Whatever that number is when you buy it represents your maximum downside risk. That’s the most you can lose by owning Bitcoin.
Your upside, on the other hand, is basically unlimited. Forget a million dollars, if that makes you queasy. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin just supplants a reasonable percentage of the physical gold holdings and you can make a case for it being worth six figures. Regardless of the number, this is what we call an asymmetric bet. A lopsided upside:downside skew.
Ask any asset manager and they will tell you these sorts of bets only come along once in a lifetime. At least one’s that you and I can participate in. Because we typically don’t have the chance to be early round investors in Facebook or AirBnb.
So, Bitcoin has these massively skewed upside potential. And no way of predicting the outcome. No one knows. Everything everyone says is just a guess. Flip a coin. Heads it goes to $1 million. Tails it goes to zero.
What I have just described to you is a modern day version of what, in probability and game theory, is known as Pascal’s Wager.
As you read this description of Pascal’s Wager, when it says God, just think million dollar Bitcoin and you’ll see what I mean…
“Pascal’s Wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal about belief in God. The gist of the Wager is that, according to Pascal, one cannot come to the knowledge of God’s existence through reason alone, so the wise thing to do is to live your life as if God does exist because such a life has everything to gain and nothing to lose. If we live as though God exists, and He does indeed exist, we have gained heaven. If He doesn’t exist, we have lost nothing. If, on the other hand, we live as though God does not exist and He really does exist, we have gained hell and punishment and have lost heaven and bliss. If one weighs the options, clearly the rational choice to live as if God exists is the better of the possible choices. Pascal even suggested that some may not, at the time, have the ability to believe in God. In such a case, one should live as if he had faith anyway. Perhaps living as if one had faith may lead one to actually come to faith.”
God and religion aside, I think we can all agree, Bitcoin going to $1M would the financial equivalent of gaining heaven. And being 90 years old, broke, living under a bridge, eating cat food is the financial equivalent of hell. | https://medium.com/sane-crypto/how-cryptocurrency-could-put-you-over-the-retirement-finish-line-f849c2246f36 | ['Kim Snider'] | 2018-05-28 19:59:29.734000+00:00 | ['Retirement Planning', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Investing', 'Bitcoin'] |
Over half of institutional bitcoin investors believe market has bottomed | Fundstrat’s survey of 25 institutions and 9,500 public Twitter responses suggested big players think the bottom is in.
We’re always a little wary about surveys like this, because the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is an oxymoron: the herd is always wrong. Plus the ‘institutional’ part of this survey was a small sample of 25, even if the public Twitter poll was larger. With those disclaimers in mind, the results of Tom Lee’s survey were still interesting, and we’ll summarise them here.
54% of the respondents to the institutional survey believe bitcoin has bottomed for the year. That shows an interesting contrast to the ‘dumb money’ Twitter poll, in which only 44% of respondents said they thought bitcoin had hit its low. Just 40% of Twitter replies saw BTC heading to $15k or above by the end of 2019 — versus 57% of institutions.
If you want to watch Lee’s interview segment and can face the shame of visiting CNBC, it’s here. (Warning: it’s very poor sound quality, and the trading segment after that may lead you to tear your face off.)
Lee himself apparently is still sticking by his $20k+ prediction for 2018 — a number that currently seems unattainable given the lacklustre state of the market. He is also exceptionally bullish on Ether, predicting almost $2k by year end.
This kind of dramatic move would likely only be fuelled by institutional money gaining the conduits it needs to invest safely in BTC. Bakkt may provide one channel for that, but it would probably need the Shortseller Enrichment Commission (as Elon Musk now calls it) to approve an ETF.
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Benzos And Opulence: At The Marrakech Film Festival | Benzos And Opulence: At The Marrakech Film Festival
by Ray LeMoine
This year’s Marrakech Film Festival has been happening in Morocco all week. During my time there, I saw only one film, but the festival itself was pretty cinematic. Tons of amazingly photogenic people swanning around, lots of gorgeous scenery, mindbending architecture to gawk at, a group of desperate people plotting escape (journalists), the whole deal.
The opening dinner party was an Indian buffet at the new Taj Hotel, which had the stylings of a psychedelic Mughal palace. The food was disappointing, but the party proved great thanks to the cadre of Bollywood stars in attendance. This year’s festival featured a big tribute to Hindi cinema, and a slew of India’s biggest film stars came to town for the event.
This man, Shahrukh Khan, is the Tom Cruise cum Al Pacino of India. Only even more famous than those two combined. Actually, he’s the most famous actor on Earth. Suck it, Hollywood.
Around 1 a.m. at the opening party, I met some of the younger stars on the dance floor. A publicist with the group told me they were the Indian equivalent of the Twilight and Hunger Games kids. (Sorry for the this-is-what-it-would-be-in-America translation but that’s how I kept up.) Compared to young Hollywood, this contingent won on every count. Friendly? Yup. Beautiful? Indeed. Hard partying? Yes. They were pounding shots of Grey Goose at 3:30 a.m. When they handed me one, I puked on myself. They just kept drinking and dancing and laughing. No egos, no attitude. Young Hollywood, step it up.
The next night there was a formal tribute to Bollywood. Here is Amitabh Bachchan, the former “angry young man” of Hindi cinema, standing onstage next to Catherine Deneuve.
Working the red carpet is one of the most fun forms of journalism. You’re quarantined into a huddled pack with all the other journalists, yelled at if you move and harassed by publicists. It’s like war reporting, but with even more angry people. Arguing with publicists and asking famous people you don’t know dumb questions is super fun. Exhibit A: Ms. Monica Bellucci, the big star of the festival. “Monica, is it true about the boat?” I yelled, having heard a rumor about her early days in showbiz.
This netted me a strange look from this publicist, then a “Move on, please,” said in a sexy French accent.
The festival had an official disco called The So Lounge, which was only so-so in atmosphere but made up for it in generous free-booze policies and the deployment of an expat cover band doing Pitbull tunes. Marrakech has some serious discos. One could easily disco through 25 different insane party dens, amongst hookers, Euros and rich Arabs, until dawn in this town. There are casinos, too. And then the city is just amazing. Snails are sold on street corners and there are 26 local lamb varieties, all good. I also came away with distinct impression that you can buy hash from every single Moroccan male you meet. #hashtag #travelfact
It was at the discos that I learned about a rising young professional class called “fashion and style writers.” They’re not quite reporters, nor do they do much actual writing. They’re almost famous, being allowed access and proximity to the stars, making them semi-socialites. They wear colorful clothing including capes and scarves and get invited to things called “dinners,” which are like actual dinner but with less eating. (The dinner that Dior gave here was attended by Christian Louboutin, above, a humble cobbler from Italia.) Occupying the niche of fashionably stylish writer yuppie may represent the last hope for aspiring journalists to make real money. And as a bonus, you don’t even have to do any journalism. From my reporting, the greatest living young “fashion and style writer” is a gentleman named Derek Blasberg. He went to NYU. He’s now so almost famous that he hosts the aforementioned dinners, then writes about them. In effect, his beat is himself. Sweet gig.
The one movie I saw was a French film about a woman who kills a bunch of people with benzodiazepine, a.k.a Valium, the very drug I bought at the pharmacy here and was on the entire trip. And pills are also the subject of the only major Hollywood feature screening at the festival, Silver Linings Playbook, that Oscar-buzzy flick directed by David O. Russell and starring Bradley Cooper as a bipolar wigger. It’ll screen at the festival this evening. Above is Darren Aronofsky.
The anything-goes-ness of the festival felt odd, politically. Morocco is still ruled by a monarchy; and while the Arab Spring hit here and brought change, there remained moments where even a visitor like me would brush up against these invisible threads of control. Like, attempting to click on this video, I’d get the message: “This video not approved by this country.” Funnily, at the airport, I’d picked the only English magazine they had, some nerd rag called Foreign Policy. And! There was an article about Morocco by James Traub, who writes: “Constitutional reform, by itself, will not be enough. Morocco cannot become a democracy as long as it has both a government and a feudal court that claims not to govern and therefore is unaccountable to the public.” In conversations with many young Moroccans, mainly of the Ultra (soccer hooligan) variety, I’d hear this echoed along: the revolution will come if the king doesn’t make more changes soon.
Holding a film festival in an authoritarian country confused me — should I be involved in this? But a publicist at the event told me this: “I’m working with artists, actual artists, to create art and then we get to show the art here. This society needs that more than the West.”
Ray LeMoine was born north of Boston and lives in New York. | https://medium.com/the-awl/benzos-and-opulence-at-the-marrakech-film-festival-1efe4da6de58 | ['The Awl'] | 2016-05-13 18:18:58.504000+00:00 | ['Bollywood'] |
Subsidies and Regulation Hurt Small Farms | Our small farms are good for the world. They provide fresh, healthy food to their communities, they are responsible and caring stewards of their land, and their regenerative farming practices are more friendly to the environment than the practices of large farms growing corn or soy as monocrops with nitrogen fertilizer. But small farms are inherently less profitable than larger ones: the economy of scale means that growing thousands of bushels of corn is far more efficient than growing a few dozen acres of diverse vegetables. Thus, the owner of a small farm hoping to make a profit off of their hard work cannot charge the low food prices that big farms are able to offer and will become outcompeted without extra support from the community. The government could be a strong force to counter this inequity in order to promote the existence of successful small farms in the U.S., but instead its farm subsidies and regulations magnify the advantages of large farms and inhibit smaller ones.
The help the government does give to farmers goes disproportionally to large farms. In 2018, President Trump signed a bill renewing a $867 billion farm subsidy plan, giving the USDA money to renew its over 80 year old tradition of, among other things, allowing growers to apply for subsidies awarded based on production. These subsidies guarantee growers a minimum revenue per bushel of “program crops,” a term which the USDA Economic Research Service’s 2019 report on America’s farms describes as including “barley, corn, dry edible beans/peas/lentils, oats, peanuts, rice, sorghum (grain), soybeans and other oilseeds, canola, and wheat,” crops usually grown in monocultures and which small farmers are less likely to produce.
Since the money is allocated based on yield size without regard to the financial needs of the farm, it ends up supporting primarily huge agriculture companies which are already making large profit margins. According to the USDA’s 2019 report, 97.9% of U.S. farms are family farms, meaning that the “principal operator and people related to the principal operator…own a majority of the business.” The report shows that 69% of commodity-related payments went to the top 8.5% of these farms, and only 6% of the payments went to occupation farmers with gross cash farm income less than $150,000 (31.7% of U.S. farms fall into that category).
Millions of dollars of farm subsidy money doesn’t even end up going to real farms, but ends up in the hands of local governments, state universities, and even airports, according to data from the Environmental Working Group. The group’s report stated, for example, that between 1996 and 2001, the Walla Walla Regional Airport in Washington state received $67,222 of farm subsidy money. Some people who own land which used to be farmed for rice now get subsidies for their lawns, and historical societies receive tens of thousands of dollars of this money intended for farmers.
Many small farmers simply don’t have time or inclination to apply. The application process for farm subsidy money is necessarily bureaucratic, involving time-consuming paperwork, and while larger companies hire staff to do this kind of work, small farmers are busy doing the actual work of growing food. Moreover, receivers of subsidies have to grow their crops to government standards, using farming practices like antibiotics for animals and specific pesticides which the farmer may not wish to use. | https://medium.com/@satyajohnson/subsidies-and-regulations-hurt-small-farms-7ea8ce10244b | ['Satya Johnson'] | 2020-12-02 18:02:50.402000+00:00 | ['Small Farming', 'Regulation', 'Farm Subsidies', 'Beaurocracy', 'Big Government'] |
How to prepare to hike Sigiriya | Believed to be the capital of the 5th-century monarch of Sri Lanka, Sigiriya is a well-preserved example of urban planning of the time. Fittingly Sigiriya is now a world heritage site in recognition of its amazingly urban design concepts that took into consideration the natural elements at the site and the existing lay of the land.
Planning the Visit
It will be a pity to make a rushed visit to Sigiriya as there is so much to see and understand. Reading up on the site should help to put it in perspective. The success of spending a day there will depend on where visitors set off from as it takes at least four hours to get to Sigiriya from Colombo. Arrive early to beat the crowds and the heat and to have the time to walk around. Spend some time at the onsite museum to further understand the site. School holidays and long weekends should be avoided as Sigiriya tends to get very crowded.
Getting There
Staying overnight in Sigiriya and visiting the archaeological site the next day is the most advisable course of action for those wishing to spend a day at the site. It takes over 4 hours by car from Colombo to get to Sigiriya although the route through the Colombo — Negombo expressway is said to be faster. However, it takes only 30 minutes by air from Colombo and perhaps this mode of transport should be considered if spending the day there. Sigiriya can also be reached by public bus, minibuses, vans and tuk-tuks. Trains call at Dambulla from where visitors can take a bus.
Getting about
The surroundings of Sigiriya can be easily explored by car, a 4WD, by bicycle and tuk-tuk. Bicycles can be hired from hotels and many other places. Rates have to be negotiated before getting into a tuk-tuk.
The best time to Visit
The nicest time to visit Sigiriya is between October and February when it is dry, and temperatures are in the high and mid-twenties. The rest of the year the weather is hot and muggy. May to September is very wet due to the south-west monsoon.
Accommodation
Sigiriya, Dambulla 20 km away and Habarana 15 km away have a selection of accommodation to suit backpackers to posh tourists. They range from luxurious hotels with spas and pools to simple and cheap guesthouses and home stays. Look to stay at the best hotels in Sigiriya and choose a prominent local hotel the likes of Sigiriya Jungles to enjoy easy access to the archaeological site.
Travel Tips
If planning to spend only a day at the site buy tickets early from the Central Cultural Fund offices that allow the visitor to enter and photograph Sigiriya and other archaeological sites in Sri Lanka. They have offices in Colombo and four other cities including in Sigiriya itself. Don’t forget the sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat and remember to stay hydrated. Other things that may be useful are a bug repellent and a long-sleeved shirt to cover up during the day. A sturdy pair of walking shoes is a necessity. For the best photos of Sigiriya rock, climb Pidurangala a rock a few kilometres north of Sigiriya almost opposite the rock and of a similar height.
Exploring Sigiriya
Start the visit to the onsite modern museum. It will help to understand how the site was originally planned. If getting to the top of the rock to see the frescoes and panoramic views is the priority, do that first before the day gets too hot and as it may take some time. Once down from the rock give some attention to the extensive archaeological remains at its foot where water gardens with ponds, channels and gravity fed fountains, the cobra hood cave, the boulder gardens with an entranceway through a boulder ‘archway’ and a 5-metre-long hand carved seat in a comfy nook continue to amaze visitors. Other interesting things to see are the moat and old city walls. | https://medium.com/@peaushan/how-to-prepare-to-hike-sigiriya-ec1d7c9284e7 | ['Lucifer Goodman'] | 2019-03-18 06:55:36.278000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Sri Lanka', 'Vacation', 'Sigiriya'] |
Every Utopia becomes a Dystopia | A Map of Utopia
I remember Reagan saying to Gorbachev “Tear down this wall.” Sorry, that’s fake news. Or at least white lie news. There’s no way I could have heard a live conference in West Berlin in 1987. It was probably past my bedtime in Delhi. I also have a memory of reading it in some magazine or the other. Perhaps Time. Perhaps Newsweek. Or because it was international news, I might have even read it in an Indian magazine like India Today. Frankly, since the news conference has posthumous fame — after the wall actually fell — there’s a good chance that all my memories are from reading about the event years later. When I say “I remember Reagan saying…,” I mean that the perceived importance of the event combined with my imagination has created a vivid “memory” of an event.
Well, most memory is like that. We don’t store the facts as is; instead we compress and transform every event to suit our needs. Selective understanding is crucial to living a sane life today, when we are deluged with information 24/7.
So what is a true memory?
There’s a famous thought experiment in epistemology called the Gettier paradox. Here’s a version I like:
Imagine you’re watching the 1984 Wimbledon finals with McEnroe facing Connors. Unfortunately, the broadcaster has lost contact with his TV van and doesn’t have a live feed anymore. Someone has a clever idea: why not broadcast a recording of the 1982 final instead which had the same cast?
So you’re watching the 1982 final while thinking you’re watching the 1984 final. In this version Connors wins. You go to sleep thinking Connors has won. Let’s say that Connors won the 1984 final (actually, McEnroe won in 1984; for the record, I supported Connors) and when you open the newspaper in the morning, you read the headline “Connors defeats McEnroe again.”
Your belief that Connors has won is a true belief despite being arrived at via a flawed route. Something is wrong when you can arrive at true beliefs through mistaken means isn’t it? Of course, Gettier’s thought experiment is a contrived situation. How likely is it that exactly the same type of prior event is available as a substitute for an actual one?
Tennis match twins might be hard to find but the use of memories as evidence is all too common — in testimony, in arguments between spouses, in story telling. When I tell the jury that I saw that man pull the trigger, what if never saw him shoot the victim. What if I am combining the knowledge that the man is a known hoodlum, the actual experience of shots being fired and reading headlines in the local newspaper?
Here’s the question: even if the man was the murderer, is my testimony valid? Further, if much testimony is confabulation, is any testimony valid? Especially in a murder trial where the jury is one color and the defendant another? And the final dystopian possibility — what if our social media feeds are full of posts that prime our memories to be one way rather than another. Can we trust our own minds?
I want to explore that internal dystopia in future essays. For example:
can technology help us certify memories? what would a process of certification look like? let’s say it takes the form of “bitcoin meets the brain.” Is that a techno-utopia or a techno-dystopia?
But we aren’t there yet. I am still a few decades behind that brave new world. But it does seem as if every utopia becomes a dystopia sooner or later. And then replaced by the next utopia. Let’s start with 1945. The second world war had just ended. Hundreds of millions dead, entire populations genocided, atom bombs burst.
The Soviet Flag over Berlin
Never again they said. Let’s form the United Nations and give a seat at the table to everyone. Some more prominently than others, i.e., those who were on the winning side of WWII. Decolonization started in earnest; India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, though that utopian moment happened in parallel with its own dystopian partition whose effects we feel to this day.
Anyway, the European powers who brought us two world wars lay defeated; even the victors. In their stead were two confident new powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Each had its theory of progress, of delivering material prosperity to its citizens and eventually the world. When he said energy will become too cheap to meter we believed him. Unfortunately, that energy can flow smoothly out of an outlet or burn the sky. Even more so if you have ten thousand of them. That’s what led to:
US and Soviet tanks face off
I can’t believe how close the US and the USSR brought us to the end of times, but we were lucky; the nuclear winter never came despite several close runs. And then Reagan came to Berlin and asked that the wall come down. And it did, a couple of years after he asked!
When I first came to the US in the nineties it was an unrivaled power. For twenty plus years, it ruled the world, the most powerful country that has ever existed. It expanded market capitalism everywhere, most prominently in China but also in India. Globalization as we know it is a product of American power. I owe the writing of this essay in a cafe in Bangalore to the fall of the Berlin wall. Yes Brandenburg Gate, No Foxconn.
When 9/11 happened, the headlines across the world were “we are all Americans.” While that headline was meant as a mark of solidarity, it was truer than we think. The world of startups and markets, of Hollywood storytelling. The possibility of progress backed by global networks of influence and immense military power — who doesn’t want that in some form?
Fukuyama’s flawed masterpiece
So much so that it became possible to write a book called “The End of History” which claimed that market driven liberal democracy is the final solution to the problem of political order. In this reading, human history is a series of attempts at prosperity that collapse in violence (Rome, Han China, Gupta India) and we continue to look for a solution that combines peace and power in a manner acceptable to most.
Fukuyama thought that solution was found in 1989. Let’s call it EOH (End of History) liberalism. That we can all ride into the sunset in our Cadillacs.
Who would have thought in 1992 that the most powerful nation in history would elect Trump in 2016, that EOH liberalism would be replaced by ethno-nationalism in every major country in the world? That it would be possible for Vladimir Putin to declare in a recent interview that liberalism has “become obsolete.”
Why did that happen? Is there an intrinsic tendency for a utopian bubble to be succeeded by a dystopian abyss?
I don’t know if there’s a universal principle of that kind, but I believe it’s important to understand the internal and external contradictions that are bursting the EOH bubble. Of which two are the most important:
EOH Liberalism was deployed on networks — of goods and information — and these networks became instruments of concentration and inequality instead of decentralization and democratization that we were promised. Why? EOH Liberalism hastened the exploitation of the nonhuman world that supports all human life and economic activity. If I may say so, it is a UX designed for easy extraction.
Could we have predicted the two? Yes, and many did, but they weren’t heard loudly enough. Perhaps because we didn’t want to hear what they were saying or perhaps because they weren’t saying it the right way. | https://medium.com/swlh/every-utopia-becomes-a-dystopia-9f6513c7d493 | ['Rajesh Kasturirangan'] | 2019-06-29 16:51:09.296000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Utopia', 'Politics', 'Technology', 'United States'] |
This is Evolution | The modern banking system started in the affluent cities of Renaissance period Italy and slowly spread throughout Europe and from there to the entire world. As with any human-made system, it has evolved to stay in tune with the changing times. Today, the banking system, aptly called the financial services sector, has expanded its range of services and is set to reach $26.5 trillion by 2022.
________________________________
Kale99 Digital Bank
This is Evolution For Bank
“Bank” was originally created as the face of the financial services industry; physical locations where people will come to do financial transactions — save their money to keep them secure and capitalize on interest in them. They are also offered services such as loans and mortgages. Banks are seen as a safe haven for the wealth of hard-earned people. Over time, the way banks, and their services, are used depends heavily on the generation of people accessing the sector. Millennials are the world’s largest spending force and banks more than any other generation, according to the Bank Administration Agency.
To indulge millennials’ penchant for technology and their growing need for technology-supporting services, banks are starting to offer digital banking services. But as the world moves toward realizing the financial potential of Generation Z, born in the era of the Internet and social media, banks realize that they need to change dramatically or face extinction.
Today, a new generation of millennials is driving a sophisticated banking revolution the “digital bank.” According to research, nearly 60% of United State. Millennials will be digital banking users and more than half will shift to “digital only” banking. With three-quarters of the global workforce set to comprise millennials by 2025, the impact on the banking system as we know it will be remarkable.
The understanding of digital banks is a direct result of the needs of millennials and is very different from other generations — the way they interact with brands, different banking needs and less favorable bank opinions in general. And this is where Kale99 provides the solution.
Kale99 is a digital bank that understands the dynamic needs of millennials and Gen Z. By placing customers in the middle of everything it does, Kale99 takes a UX/UI approach to providing integrated solutions to make banking not only easier but also anticipates the increasing needs of its customers by providing personal and financial growth opportunities and strategies.
The kale99 concept is tightly integrated in its name. Kale is one of the fastest growing plants known to mankind. It is not meticulous in its needs and requires little help to grow, bloom and thrive. This is what Kale99 wants for its customers — to thrive and thrive in their personal and financial lives. 99 describes the involvement of 99% Kale99 in the process while leaving only 1% for customers to find out.
“ Kale99 is different from other digital banks because it not only creates a financial services platform, but an entire ecosystem for the growth and overall development of its customers through targeted communication, tailored to their interests, daily tips and strategies for making the right financial and life decisions. Kale99 is “green” in all its activities — we make credit cards from 98% recycled materials. We use industry-leading UX/UI benchmarks to create the most seamless and intuitive connections between users and apps”, Karl Goebel — CEO of Kale99, says.
Excellent security in the Kale99 ecosystem — all data, like any transaction, secured with blockchain technology and access via biometry rather than passwords alone, greatly reduces the risk of any hacking. In addition, customers are never far from help with customer service 24/7 via chat via the app. Book your Card now, and get these amazing features:
1. For withdrawals adjusted for zero charges
2. multiple IBAN accounts per user
3. secure biometric authentication
4. zero new card issuance fee
5. unlimited daily purchases
6. zero documents
Kale99 invites Ambassadors and Founders to begin this transformation.
Kale99 Ambassadors and Founders receive lifetime free special accounts and bank cards, priority services, and free tickets to exclusive events, in addition to many other in-app benefits. All these lifetime benefits for a small one-time amount of 100€.
Kale99 currently offers a Payback Rewards Program. To participate in the program, users must refer their friends and receive a refund.
Parting words
Kale99’s efforts are not only to provide banking services to its customers but also to create an ecosystem that eases all kinds of financial transactions while providing opportunities to grow financially and personally through carefully curated and tailored guidance.
Kale99 strives to be a brand that keeps its customers at the center of everything they do, brands that millennials can identify with. It strives for 360 degree service for real life. That’s Kale99’s vision. Take action and join us today.
Contact:
Address: 95 Mortimer street W1W7GB — London, UK
email: [email protected]
Website URL: www.kale99.com
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — | https://medium.com/@dindamayasi199/this-is-evolution-4d385a15f7a | ['Wasis Media'] | 2020-10-06 07:56:23.849000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Banking', 'Defi', 'Médium', 'Kale99'] |
Visualization and Analysis of Transportation in Barcelona | Cable car in Barcelona
Exploring the city
In this blog I am going to explore upon the Barcelona datasets on transportation.
In a city like Barcelona, transportation becomes very crucial and it serves as lifeline for many people.
In my previous two blogs (part-I and part-II) I have explored a lot with some visualisations covering the population, births,death,accidents, immigration and emigration. The dataset is available on kaggle
Transportation in Barcelona
In this section I will be analysing on two datasets i.e. the bus stops and transportation.
The bus stop gives a complete picture about Barcelona’s bus service and transportation covers entire transportation services in Barcelona.
Bus stops
This table gives an overall picture of Barcelona’s bus stops and stations
From this table we can see that
There are 3 different kinds of bus stops and bus stations (where buses are kept or, a bus terminal).
There are total 3146 bus stops + stations.
There are total 3 bus stations.
There is a separate bus service connecting airport.
Most no.of day bus stops are in Sants-Montjuic district
Most no.of night bus stops and airport bus stops are there in Eixample
Eixample has the day to night bus stops ratio least indicating that the no.of bus stops are even during day and night. Whereas in Sants-Montjuic this ratio is highest indicating the no.of night bus stops are very less as compared to no.of day bus stops.
The no.of Airport bus stops in Eixample is the most, indicating that most of the people from Eixample are accessing the airport bus services or, since this is the city centre so it is most likely that people who are coming from outside will visit Eixample.
Here a table is used to show this information as table makes the picture more precise and one can go through the data very easily as the no.of entries and the numbers themselves are not large.
Now let’s see the above information visually also
Eixample is leading the chart with most no.of night bus stops. One inference we can make is that as the city centre and most of workplaces are located here. So people may need the services late night in this district.
Since the dataset contains latitude and longitude for each bus stop we can actually perceive the data geographically and make certain inferences out of it. | https://medium.com/@sourinkarmakar/barcelona-part-iii-376c65b3aab1 | ['Sourin Karmakar'] | 2019-09-24 06:24:55.431000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Storytelling', 'Transportation', 'Charts And Graphs', 'Maps'] |
No One Knows What They’re Doing Right Now (and that’s okay) | I have been looking for a full-time job since April.
I have applied to roughly two jobs a day in three different states and two countries. I have written three different resumes and dozens of cover letters. I have been in the work force for more than a decade with seven years of management experience, I have a Masters degree, I am a published author. I am trying to find a job in Writing or Social Media. My degrees are in English, Literature and Writing and I have eight years of Social Media Management experience.
I cannot get a job in the fields I’m applying for. Instead, I am working part-time retail and continuing to apply for positions in the careers I’m interested in.
I have done Zoom seminars and meetings, interview preps and resume workshops. I have been told my resume needs zero to little work, I have been told I come across well virtually. I have been told to keep going, I have been told it will happen. These are all statements I can deal with, all statements that are true. What I cannot accept is when someone tells me: “I know, I’ve been there.”
Unless you’re more than 100 years old and were looking for work during the Spanish Flu Pandemic, you do not understand what applying for a new job, a career-changing job is like right now.
And that’s okay.
Photo by Ian via Unsplash
The fact is that even seasoned HR professionals, even people with decades of professional experience, people who were applying for jobs in the early 2000’s and then again about seven years later — do not know what it’s like right now.
This makes the situation more scary, I know. Believe me, I know. I have leaned on my siblings, my relatives, my seasoned career-hopping friends, for years. I have asked them to look over my resume, cover letters, I have asked them to put in a good word for me. But now, whose advice really matters, who really knows what to do?
I can’t answer that question. I can’t say what the future holds. What I can say is that every day I get up and I try again, it’s exhausting. Tomorrow, I will do it all over again. And that’s exhausting.
And that’s okay.
It’s okay because it’s the best I can do right now. It’s okay because this has been a really hard year with a few scattered and fortunate moments of wonderful. But this year, a year that will live in infamy, is my year to survive, not thrive. It has become my motto of 2020.
It’s scary to admit that our parents, our mentors, our teachers and professors, have not lived anything like this before. It’s scary to accept that the people you always leaned on for answers don’t necessarily have them right now. But it is necessary to accept that these times are beyond what has been lived in by the generations that are around us now. We need to depend on ourselves and each other to get through this.
When this is over, we will all be a little different, and we rightfully should be.
As we face further shutdowns, hiring freezes and the holidays, the anxiety is heightening. Now, I am hearing something new: keep going, just know it won’t happen till early 2021 — probably.
Insert eye-roll emoji.
I’m sorry to say that there is no happy ending to this article. I am still trucking away, battling depression and walking the thin line of hope and realism.
I’m not looking for pity, I’m looking to spread some awareness; for people to take a second and be considerate of what others are going through. It has been a long year, we all have felt it.
This essay is me trying to help people remember that these are not normal times, not normal circumstances. Be easier on one another than you once were. Be easier on yourself than you’ve ever been. Send messages of love and support, check in on one another. Furthermore, if you need help: ask for it.
Asking for help is more than okay, it’s a strength to know your vulnerabilities and when it all becomes a little too much.
We are all struggling and we are all in this together, even if we feel very much alone.
Suicide Prevention Lifeline | https://medium.com/@engstythea/no-one-knows-what-theyre-doing-right-now-and-that-s-okay-87973779f317 | ['Thea Engst'] | 2020-12-07 16:42:17.886000+00:00 | ['Job Search', 'Covid', 'Job Hunting', 'Economy', 'Writing'] |
The Sad Lives of the American Dollar Princesses | It was a mutually beneficial, cold-hearted transaction.
America’s nouveau rich of the 1870s were filthy rich but they still considered themselves ‘commoners’ as they did not have exquisite titles of Dukes, Duchesses, Earls, and the like. And this was not acceptable to them. They wanted an aristocracy attached to their names to elevate their statuses.
And on the other side of the Atlantic, British aristocrats had an ‘old world charm’. They are suave, cultured, and aristocratic with numerous titles attached as part of their family legacies. But they were desperate for cash with their fortunes getting dwindled rapidly such that even maintaining the old world grandeur proved to be an uphill task.
In came the ‘dollar princesses’ to fix this mutual problem amicably.
The rich Americans sold their daughters abroad, marrying them off to British aristocrats in exchange for a title. And the American brides carried along with them, some of the most lavish dowries in history.
And in a short time, more than $25 billion was sent to the United Kingdom, giving new lease of life to dying aristocratic families and infusing the European economy with new money. An entire matchmaking industry originated with people on both sides of the Atlantic earning high commissions in this lucrative business.
And the helpless pawn in this entire game were the American girls, called ‘the dollar princesses’ who did not have any choice in the matter and were forced to lead dreary, unhappy lives, in unfamiliar lands. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-sad-lives-of-the-american-dollar-princesses-8714b23b0f4a | ['Mythili The Dreamer'] | 2020-06-17 10:39:26.198000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Feminism', 'Equality', 'Women', 'History'] |
The Power of SaaS When Running Complex Operations | By Justin Hein
I was sitting with a very prominent VC the other day, and he said something that struck me. He said, “no one thought SaaS was going to be this big…”, and he’s right. Working in SaaS for the past six years, I haven’t really noticed how big it’s grown around me. Similar to visiting a niece or nephew, they seem to grow SO big between visits, but to their parents, the change is hardly noticeable.
Today, let’s dive into why SaaS is so powerful for complex operations (i.e: trucking companies).
The River You Stand In Is Not What You Stepped In
One of the larger benefits of SaaS for complex operations, is the software will continue to evolve and (ideally) get better the longer you’re a customer. This is in stark contrast to legacy software, where costly and time consuming upgrades are a major hindrance in business operations. Additionally, SaaS users benefit from the shared knowledge of all customers who will continually tweak features and requests. This allows for best in class learnings applied across the entire cohort of customers.
A Note on Security
Some customers might fear that sharing new features between SaaS customers will expose their data to the masses. Luckily, most of those concerns have been put at ease, now that reputable SaaS companies adhere to strict ISO standards for information security, and are subject to regular security audits.
Focus on Sales not Servers
This point is pretty self explanatory. Why waste valuable resources (both human and capital) by buying and maintaining servers. The moment you purchase them, they are already becoming obsolete. By switching to the cloud, businesses can quickly change the amount of service they’re paying for to match what they need at that moment.
Software Scales with You
The constant challenge of purchasing any asset for your business is walking the fine balance of buying enough without overspending on something you may never use. SaaS offers the best of both worlds. You can purchase less licenses or packages when you’re small, and expand you subscription as needed over time.
SaaS gives users a greater ability to flex to demand, bring on new customers, suppliers and upgrade service. With a leased solution, your business has the flexibility needed to reap the benefits of API connectivity. | https://medium.com/rose-rocket/the-power-of-saas-when-running-complex-operations-c860192a7540 | ['Jade Garrido'] | 2018-07-13 23:10:56.193000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'API', 'SaaS', 'Security'] |
Is Renting A House A Waste Of Money? | Is Renting A House A Waste Of Money?
By Ryan Luke / December 16, 2020 December 16, 2020
Some people believe renting is a good idea and others think renting is a waste of money. Those who think renting is a waste of money often have firm beliefs, as do those who have rented their entire life. However, these opinions are usually based on their specific personal circumstances rather than facts or mathematical equations.
When I was much younger, I vowed to never rent because I felt it was a waste of money. Why would I pay off another person’s mortgage when I could get a loan and buy my own home? Let me give you a little insight as to how that viewpoint punched me right in the face.
Table Of Contents show
1 My Dumb Mistakes Make Me An Expert!
2 Renting Is A Waste Of Money, Right?
3 Interest Only Loans Should Be Illegal
3.1 What I Should Have Done — Renting Versus Buying
4 Use A Renting V. Buying Calculator To Make Your Decision
4.1 So Is Renting A Waste Of Money?
My Dumb Mistakes Make Me An Expert!
It was 2004, and I was 21 years old. I was young and dumb and recently landed a pretty good career. Compared to my past job of waiting tables, this new career greatly increased my income. I was living with my parents at the time, and they were charging me minimal rent.
I wanted to move out and get my own place, as you can imagine, but I didn’t know where to look. I did know one thing — I wasn’t going to rent an apartment. I was going to get a loan and buy a home.
Renting Is A Waste Of Money, Right?
My opinion was that apartments and rentals were a waste of money. Why would I help pay off another person’s mortgage? I was no fool — or so I thought. If you remember the housing prices in 2004–2005, you remember how incredibly inflated they were. I found I could not buy the type of home I wanted because everything was so expensive.
At 21 years old, I couldn’t get pre-approved for enough money to buy a large single-family home as I wanted. Rather than giving up and renting something cheaper, I took my pre-approval letter and worked with my realtor to find the nicest thing I could buy at the top of my price point.
If you have been through the home buying process, you know that banks (at least 16 years ago) would pre-approve you for amounts much higher than you could afford. My 21-year-old self didn’t understand that, and there I stood with a letter saying how much money someone was willing to give me.
Interest Only Loans Should Be Illegal
After looking around for a relatively short time, I fell in love with a 2 bedroom, 1 bath condo. I had to have it, and it was right at the top of my pre-approval amount. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to put the 20% down for a conventional loan — so I did the next “best” thing. I got an 80–20 loan with a 5 year ARM ( also known as an interest-only loan).
I paid 80% of the total purchase price with one mortgage, and the other 20% was another bank loan to give me the down payment. For 5 years, I would be locked into a low-interest rate, making my monthly payment “affordable.”
After 5 years, the interest rate changes depending on the state of the market.
As I type this I want to punch myself in the face. I was paying only interest on my loans and nothing on the principle.
What in the world was I thinking?
I wasn’t — that was part of the problem. In reality, the interest-only loan was pretty much the same as renting. I was making the bank rich, and I wasn’t paying the home off.
I was 21 and very dumb — and definitely not thinking what could happen after the 5 years was up. What a moron I was (and sometimes still am!). Well, as you can imagine, after 5 years, my luck ran out, and my payment skyrocketed. I could not pay the higher monthly payment and was left with an embarrassing stain (forclosure) on my credit for the next 7 years.
What I Should Have Done — Renting Versus Buying
If I could tell my 21-year-old self anything about this process, I would tell him to use some common sense and stop relying on emotion during purchases. This would have been the best process for me:
Stay at my parents as long as I can until they kick me out and continue to stockpile as much cash as I can for a large down payment on a house. If I couldn’t take living with my parents anymore, find a place to rent with a reasonable lease that would allow me to stockpile cash for a large down payment on a house — or pay cash for the house!
I went out into the world thinking that renting was a stupid idea. Turns out I rented my small condo for 5 years and then left with a foreclosure on my credit report. If I had rented a home or apartment, chances are I would have been able to be smarter with my money and would have avoided the interest only scenario.
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Renting a small apartment would have allowed me to save up at least 20% to avoid paying extra each month to pay for private mortgage insurance.
Use A Renting V. Buying Calculator To Make Your Decision
It can be difficult to crunch all the numbers yourself to determine if renting or buying is right for you and your family. Luckily, there are smart people out there who design calculators for just this scenario.
The people over at MortgageCalculators.info have a great free Rent or Buy Calculator which helps you quickly decide if it makes more sense to rent or buy, depending on your unique situation.
Here is an example of the initial information you need to provide to see what makes the most sense:
Their interactive calculator allows you to put in anticipated mortgage details related to:
Monthly rent payment (used as total monthly home expense)
Mortgage term in years
Annual interest rate
Private mortgage insurance
After providing this information, the calculator allows you to add other important fields to show how affordable (or not) purchasing a home will be for you.
The next information you can calculate involves:
Annual property taxes
Annual Homeowners insurance
Monthly HOA fees
From here you can play with the numbers to see how much of a downpayment you need to make to get the monthly payment where you want it to be. In addition, the calculator shows how much money in interest you will pay over the life of the loan.
If you want to give the calculator a try for yourself, you can use it here for free.
So Is Renting A Waste Of Money?
It depends. If you do not have a substantial amount of cash saved up to make a significant down payment — renting for a few years is the smarter move. If you want a home and have a significant amount of cash saved up, you can either purchase a home or continue to save until you can pay for it in cash!
Yes, it is possible to pay for a home in cash without being a millionaire. It takes persistence and patience, but it can be done. Unfortunately, I did not start with a good financial choice, which hurt me many years later.
Even after my dumb mistake, I was able to purchase another home and pay it off when I was 36 years old! If you want to read more about how my wife and I paid off our mortgage in five years, and how you can too, head over to this post.
Are you a financial expert because you have made mistakes and learned from them? Or are you in the process of becoming a subject matter expert? Either way, I assure you it is possible to get out of your mess and to improve your current situation.
Before you purchase that home, understand that adding a mortgage on top of mounting debt is a recipe for disaster. Get that debt paid off first before you go into further debt with a home loan!
*Illustration by Freepik Storyset
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About The Author
Ryan Luke is a father of three, husband, financial coach, and full-time police lieutenant. His inspirational story about his struggle to make ends meet, to paying off his home in less than 10 years, has been featured on MarketWatch, Fox Business, MSN, and other media outlets. To learn more about Ryan, head over to his about me page.
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Is Amway A Pyramid Scheme? | https://medium.com/@arrestyourdebt/is-renting-a-house-a-waste-of-money-e65dbfb085a5 | ['Ryan Luke'] | 2020-12-21 19:39:56.011000+00:00 | ['Home', 'Renting', 'Rental', 'House', 'Mortgage'] |
Gianna Picioccio | Professor Wedlock
EN 221
13 December 2020
A More Fit Next Top Model
Fashion has been a potent influence in the modern world. For certain people in our everyday lives, fashion is something they learn about or buy in shops. Fashion, in a broad context, means all things and a multinational company representing a variety of business events, ranging from the unglamorous realms of mass clothing manufacturing to runway fashion shows and the related fashion press news. The modeling industry plays a huge part in the development of the world of fashion. Millions of people dream of being involved in the mainstream fashion industry, particularly these little girls. Their impression of modeling from what they see on social media and in magazines is that models have the best life ever. They are praised by viewers and bowed down to by society. They are the representation of their own “look” and self-expression which for various circumstances and particular customers and designs, often alter their output to project an acceptable image. In this context, considering the fact that these young girls have already pursued or achieved entrance into the world of fashion, they are now motivated to see the life of the fashion model as an ideal illusion. To say that many young girls regard becoming a fashion model as one of the most exciting and attractive futures possible is no misconception. A tall, beautiful runway model is the fantasy of any girl as this is the definition of a model seen. What an ordinary young woman sees as an ideal picture for a woman is long beautiful legs, slim body, and shiny hair. You immediately feel jealous of your own image if you don’t look like the photos of those beautiful Victoria’s Secret models. Models are praised as they have a big salary, fortune, enjoy time on yachts with popular celebrities and even get on the Vogue cover list, it’s a perfect life to have. In our young women’s lives, the fashion modeling industry has been the most prominent outlet. Young girls and young women are seen eating as little as they can, or sometimes starving to resemble the models themselves. What they are ignorant of is that history sees women doing whatever they can over the centuries to fit into the present cookie cutter mold of a mainstream, accepted culture. Girls flip through catalogues, feeds on social media, and shows on television and don’t see girls that look like them in the fashion industry. They then go on to compare themselves and pick apart how they look which leads to disorders and dysmorphism.
The average American woman weighs about 170 pounds which is labeled as above average weight in the modeling community (Marcin). We need to add models that are above the waist measurement of 22 inches and incorporate models that weigh more than 150 pounds to make the outside viewers of girls feel accepted in society since they are just as beautiful as the skinny models in the industry. It is clear that views towards fashion and form and size diversity are shifting, and a grassroots movement is being propelled by the growing presence and advocacy of plus-size models in the industry. This topic is a very important and relevant topic today because the fashion industry plays a very significant role in the development of the female appearance construct in culture. Not only can unrealistically slim models encourage a dangerous image of attractiveness for the millions of people who seek to imitate them, but the models themselves still have tough expectations. Due to the population of the United States becoming more diverse, in order to fix the problem of not incorporating plus-sizes and the cause of eating disorders and anorexia, marketers and advertisers will have to integrate models of different sizes and have a broader consumer demographic.
In the modeling industry, in order to be able to get the part of being a model in a company’s campaign, you have to fit the requirements. Many people when they think of modeling it means walking in a fashion show, but there are many outlets for the job of modeling. Yes, many different companies have different preferences and requirements for girls to model for them, however for the majority of them they have the same stereotypical model requirements. Runway (cat-walk) modelling, usually consists of filming for editorials, high-end brands, runway and lifestyle campaigns for high-end celebrities. Usually, the height is between 5'9"-6", the bust is between 32"-36", the waist is between 22"-26" and the hips should be between 33"-35". Many women of course, do not follow these expectations, which is why fashion designers are normally paid the most and work the most. Many women don’t fit these precise requirements, which means you can’t walk the runway and agencies don’t allow exceptions. Furthermore, if a little girl’s dream was to be a runway model, her dreams can’t come true unless she grows up to be a skinny tall woman. Another lucrative modeling genre that is slightly less restrictive than fashion modeling is print (catalog, editorial) modeling. The height is usually between 5'8" and 5'11" and typical measurements are as follows: 32"-35" bust, 33"-35" hips, and 22"-26" waist. The two most specific modeling genres are catalog and fashion. This is why they are the most lucrative. Lastly, models often tend to have specific measurement requirements for lingerie/swimsuit modeling. Typical measurements of lingerie are: height 5'7"-6", bust 32"-35" C cup, waist 22"-26" and hips 33"-35". A bikini model, but with a slightly larger bust size, will be similar to a lingerie model (Best Agencies). There are many little more side modeling jobs like for commercials or on for a specific job like having tattoos or piercings to advertise for that specific place, but these are just the mainstream modeling jobs that we are focusing on which require such elaborate and concise rules. Compared to the average measurements for a woman which are a waist size of 38.7 inches, the height of 5’3’’, and the weight of 170 pounds, there is a drastic gap in the measurements for becoming a model(Holland). With this information we can compare how many girls in the US can’t become a runway model or an editorial model due to these ridiculous requirements. Many girls’ dream is to be a model and they can’t accomplish this if they don’t fit the slim percent of girls that do to be in this industry. The percentage of women that have the sort of body type of tall, naturally lean, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, small-breasted, and long-legged is about 5% in the US. Most fashion designers are smaller than 98% of American women. Models weighed 8% less than the average woman twenty years earlier. Today in the 21 century they weigh 23 percent less and many fall into an anorexic spectrum of weights. An iconic model who is seen in many ad campaigns and on the runway is Kate Moss who is 5'7 “ and weighs 95 pounds. That’s 30 percent less than the average body weight (Levine and Smolak).
One of the biggest companies seen in stores and on television that leans towards the appeal of women is Victoria Secret. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is shown on TV every year. In high heels, skinny models with crystal-studded bras strut down the runway and women across the nation are all immediately body-shamed into an extreme dieting regime. The Victoria Secret Fashion Show is the most popular fashion show that people watch with a median of around 4 million viewers. Mostly all of those viewers were female. The big question is; why do women watch the Victoria Secret Fashion Show? To answer this question Spoon University did random interviews and spoke with women to ask them why they watch this fashion show on television. One woman. Claire Waggoner who was interviewed said, “It makes me feel fit by association, I think because I watch it over dinner usually and it makes me skip my nightly dessert, so then I go to bed feeling like an athletic goddess. But then the next day is usually a downer and I’m like, ‘wow, I look nothing like them’” (Suss). Many girls that watch this show feel either a personal connection with the models and look up to them as role models that they want to be. The whole concept of this fashion show is to show off the lingerie,scenery, and music, but that’s not all why they present this show. The response dates from the nineteenth century. Since the Victorian era, mass-market lingerie has become a thing that is decidedly male-oriented; fetishistic corsets made damsels swoon; petticoats kept them too far from straying. It was underwear imprisoning women. Established in 1977, Victoria’s Secret claimed to emancipate their buyers, but maintained the trend by enclosing them with ill-fitting underwire and constrictive bustiers combined with thongs and femine costumes. To increase the attractiveness of the product on show, beautiful models have been used in advertising. This whole concept was to pick out these skinny perfect body girls who had the body that was the definition of sex appeal created from society back then, so that men can enjoy watching these fashion shows. However, the use of a model category that currently represents just a small fraction of the population has become common over the past few decades. Ads today are packed with models that are exceedingly, if not dangerously, slim. If people use models in ads as comparison points for self-assessment, over-exposure to slim media models can contribute to a distorted image of appearance. Now, they tried to cover up that first idea by saying how these fashion shows are made for women to feel good about themselves and buy the pretty lingerie they see on these beautiful girls, hoping it will look like that on them. Razek added, “All of these women would be the best looking girl any guy had ever seen — guys are easy,” “Women have to say, ‘I want to look like that, I want to have that spirit or that confidence and strength.’’ While the brand has not disappointed Razek’s instincts, Victoria’s Secret has faced scrutiny, especially in the body inclusivity department. They have not worked for models of different styles of bodies (Opelka).
For decades, the fashion industry has argued that attractive women actually pay less to dress thinner models, which might be true, but this statement is losing relevance with plus-size clothes in demand more than ever and increasingly lucrative. One just needs to look at Aerie’s remarkable market growth with a range of shapes and sizes among its models with no picture retouching, iconic and well-known plus-size model Ashley Graham modeled for Sports Illustrated and Iskra Lawrence modeling for Aerie is evidence. By appealing to regular women through social media, Aerie is gaining market share in the intimate segment. For teen lingerie and clothing brand Aerie, comparable revenue rose 38 percent in the first quarter of 2018. In the next two years, American Eagle, the parent firm, expects that the brand will be worth $1 billion. CNBC wrote an article on Aerie and said that Jennifer Foyle the Chief creative Officer of the company got a two-page, handwritten letter from an Aerie customer which incorporated photos and thanks for what the lingerie and apparel company has done for her body image. Foyle recently told CNBC, “That’s something that happens every day in this brand and that’s what makes us so special” (Ell). In 2014, Aerie started their no filter “Aerie Real” campaign, using regular-looking models. Women shoppers may also use the hashtag “AerieReal,” Foyle said to share selfies of themselves with all their weaknesses. Now everybody is sort of doing it because it’s the latest thing to do because it’s fun to be body-accepting,” said Janine Stichter, an equity analyst at Jefferies, who tracks the intimate market. The campaign is a stark contrast from other lingerie brands that showcase near-flawless models” (Ell). As the new trend in this generation is all about uplifting body confidence, this is a great attribute to their company and Aerie is a proven result that when adding in plus-sizes to their clothing it adds up in the long run. As Aerie continues to grow, the company’s stock is up 114 percent year over year and is rising at a much faster rate. In the first year, the company’s same-store revenue growth grew 38 percent, on top of a 25 percent gain in 2017. Aerie was valued at $500 million last year, up from $200 million in 2017. Over the next five years the company is gunning for a $1 billion valuation. Other fashion companies should view these numbers and jump on the amazing bandwagon of including a wide spread of sizes. Just take a look at Aerie now compared to Victoria’s Secret. Victoria’s Secret has approximately 20 percent of the underwear and bra market which is down from a high of more than 22 percent in the past year, the organization is rapidly losing market share. Aerie continues to capture market share, smaller lingerie startups are still seeking to take some of the market, such as ThirdLove, LIVELY and True & Co. “And that is why it is important to compete,” Stichter said. “For a long time, [Victoria’s Secret] was the only player with significant scale in the intimates market. Now you see a competitor like Aerie that’s becoming sizable and a real threat.”(Ell). We will begin to shop from stores that share our values. We ought to support those in the struggle to win the battle for inclusiveness of body and appearance by proving to the establishment that compassion can be beneficial. Designers, editors and marketing companies do not describe perfection. It is characterized by us. Let’s make sure that we behave like that.
Continuing on the topic of adding plus-sizes to companies, in terms of revenue, during the projected time frame from 2020 to 2028, the global plus size women’s apparel industry stood at US$178.56 billion in 2019, rising at a CAGR of 4.3 percent (Dublin). The need for plus-sizes is increasing as we speak. Asia Pacific led the industry and was projected to see a similar pattern in the years that followed. Continuous spending on fashion goods by customers around the world is continuing. Among the clothing goods, the fastest growth over the projected period is anticipated for plus size apparels. Plus-size buyers are searching for choices that serve a luxury standard equal to women belonging to other ranges of size. With the increasing demand, distributors are concentrating on launching plus size clothing. Walmart, for example, launched a new line in 2018, Terra, and Sky for the plus sizes, in order to attract more buyer interest. In order to satisfy the demands of the buyers, high street stores such as River Island, Marks & Spencer, New Look stock a whole option for the plus size ladies (Dublin). Such a move was predicted by the corporations to boost the sales growth in the plus size apparel segment in the years that followed. In addition, the market for such apparels that complement the new fashion trends has also enhanced body morale among the plus size females. In order to satisfy customer needs and desires, manufacturers and retailers have observed an uptick in demand for plus size garments and should be and some companies are focused on new product releases. However, this can lead to an argument of how the rise of the plus size women’s apparel industry on the market is leading to a growing prevalence of obesity and overweight problems.
In claiming that the plus size clothing market is driving the obesity crisis, a doctor, Dr. Mirian Stoppard, has sparked a fierce discussion on Good Morning Britain. She spoke on the ITV breakfast show where she claimed that being overweight normalizes plus size models and a wider variety of clothing styles. Speaking on the program, she proposed that women who are overweight should opt for smaller sizes to enable them to lose weight. She said, “‘I think that the plus sizes and glamorous overweight models are actually making people think that it’s healthy to be like that and think that their weight is a sign of health and it absolutely isn’t. My concern as a doctor is that the obesity crisis which I think is being fuelled by plus size clothes is really a very dangerous phenomenon and we should try to be making it better not colluding with it because it’s deeply unhealthy to be overweight’” (Cliff). Dr Miriam recommended applying stickers on bigger sizes when asked what her answer would be, urging consumers to opt for a smaller size along with weight loss tips. Viewers watching at home were astonished by the opinions of the doctor who took their feelings on Twitter to share. One person said, One wrote: “‘This is a dangerous view. We’re just getting somewhere in tackling eating disorders, now you’re telling vulnerable young girls not only that they’re fat if they’re size 14 but unhealthy too’” (Cliff). Even though she has a claim, she includes no evidence towards this argument or supports it with any facts or statistics to back it up. If she wanted to validate this “fact” why didn’t she include statistics on how plus-sizes lead to obesity? Everyone has access to fashion no matter how big they are, we live in a free country and there is no specific weight you have to be. Yes, obesity is a problem, but the argument of adding in plus-sizes to fashion companies doesn’t mean this will lead to people becoming overweight since they have access to bigger sizes. This means people who are over the available sizes can wear those same clothes. The bottom line is, regardless of their weight, everyone should be able to feel beautiful in the clothes they wear. It’s rude, disrespectful, and inhumane to say you can’t because you’re overweight.
Experts and doctors like previous believe plus-size clothes fuels obesity, but because of their skeletal frame, the women we are all used to seeing on the catwalks encourage eating disorders such as anorexia. Former Vogue editor, Kristie Clements, made observations about some of the models she had worked with. She starts by explaining, “‘I began to recognise the signs that other models were using different methods to stay svelte. I was dressing a model from the US on a beauty shoot, and I noticed scars and scabs on her knees” (Clements). When she asked her about them she said, nonchalantly: “Oh yes. Because I’m always so hungry, I faint a lot.” She thought it was normal to pass out every day, sometimes more than once. On another shoot she was chatting with one of the top Australian models during lunch. Clements said she had just moved to Paris and was sharing a small apartment with another model and asked her how that was working out. The model stated, “I get a lot of time by myself actually,” she said, picking at her salad. “My flatmate is a ‘fit model’, so she’s in hospital on a drip a lot of the time” (Clements). A fit model is one that is used in the studios or workrooms of top designers and is the body around which the clothes are made. It is frightening that the perfect body form used as a starting point for a collection should be a girl on the verge of hospitalization from malnutrition. The more she worked with designers, the more apparent the deprivation of food became to her she said. Dietary staples were cigarettes and Diet Coke and the tell-tale symptoms of anorexia are often seen, where a girl grows a light fuzz on her face and arms as her body tries to stay warm. Clements has never heard a model say “I’m hot” in her entire career she added. Society is understandably concerned about the challenges around body image and eating disorders, and by fashion journals, the unhealthy and unrealistic images being sent to young women. Magazine editors are in the immediate line of fire when it comes to who can be responsible for the representation of excessively slim models, but it is more nuanced than that. The “fit model begins the fashion process: around a live, in-house skeleton, designer outfits are made. Few designers have a model with a curvy or petite suit. Then these collections are sent to the runway, worn by tall, pin-thin women, so the designer likes to see the clothes fall like that. Casting directors and stylists who have a view of the kind of woman they intend to wear these clothes will also be interested. They want her to be young, skinny, and very tall. On a casting, a model who puts on a few kilos will not get into a sample size and gets reprimanded by her agency. She starts eating, loses weight, and is congratulated by others for how fantastic she looks. But she believes losing more would make her much more attractive instead of remaining at that weight, and attempting to sustain it by a sensible diet and exercise. And nobody is asking her to quit. Girls who are unable to eat apart from their breasts may have surgical reductions. They then enter into risky conduct habits that continue to be recognized by the industry as par for the course. This questionable feat was normally followed by intense exhaustion, mood swings, self-harming, and binge feeding as a model who was having decent work in Australia hungered herself down two sizes in order to be cast in the overseas shows (Clements). Clements continues to tell stories of things she has heard from models on how they stay so skinny. This just demonstrates how having such harsh distinct requirements to be a model is horrible for not only the human body physically, but mentally as well. Everyone believes modeling is all sunshine and rainbows until they actually hear what some of these models have to go through to stay or get into these cruel modeling industries. These modeling industries also need to change their requirements to stop these disorders and harm to one’s body from occurring by extending and being more lenient.
There has been a small growth in plus-size styles over the past decade. It is crucial for young people today to be able to grasp where plus size fashion works in the fashion industry, whether it’s involved with luxury or fast fashion. In more modern years, however, body image and body positivity have grown to become confused with questions about morals and wellness. In their day-to-day lives, many experience this in combination with socially responsible minds who are readily influenced by pop-culture. Today, this issue is a very significant and topical topic since the fashion industry plays a very important role in the growth of the construction of female beauty in culture. Not only can unrealistically thin models cultivate a dangerous illusion of beauty for the millions of people who are trying to emulate them, but they also have tough perceptions of the models themselves. Since the population of the United States is getting increasingly affluent, retailers and advertisers would have to incorporate models in all types to have a wider target demographic in order to address the issue of not integrating plus-sizes and the cause of eating disorders and anorexia. | https://medium.com/@gp68666/gianna-picioccio-97a8da048673 | ['Gianna Picioccio'] | 2020-12-14 02:45:07.073000+00:00 | ['Modeling', 'Fashion', 'Plus Size', 'Body Image', 'Diversity'] |
Android Perform Two Animations Using ObjectAnimator — kotlin | private fun animationSet(v: View) {
val animSetXY = AnimatorSet()
val x: ObjectAnimator = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(
v,
"alpha", 1.0f, 0.0f
)
val y: ObjectAnimator = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(
v,
"translationX",0f, 150f
)
animSetXY.playTogether(x,y)
animSetXY.duration = 2000
animSetXY.setupStartValues()
animSetXY.start()
}
Here,
X is a animation and Y is an animation….. | https://medium.com/@gattemakhil/android-perform-two-animations-using-objectanimator-kotlin-762f88325d7e | ['Akhil Gattemaneni'] | 2020-12-27 13:15:44.523000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Apps', 'Mobile App Development', 'Kotlin', 'Android App Development'] |
Samsung’s 110-inch MicroLED TV brings The Wall to your living room | Samsung delights in scoring splashy headlines at CES with its mammoth micro-LED displays, with the company springing a humongous 292-inch model of “The Wall” on CES attendees back in January. But while its earlier micro-LED panels arrived in modules that needed to be professionally assembled, its new 110-inch MicroLED TV will come ready to watch, right out of the (giant) box.
Related product Samsung Q90T 4K UHD TV (55-inch model) Read TechHive's reviewSee it Slated to ship globally in the first quarter of 2021, the Samsung MicroLED TV is based on micro-LED display technology: self-emitting pixels that offer vivid colors and perfect blacks similar to OLED, because they can be turned on and off individually. Unlike the organic pixels in OLED panels, however, micro-LED panels are not susceptible to burn-in.
Samsung has been touting its micro-LED-based “The Wall” displays for a couple of years now, with the company offering sizes from a crazy-big 292-inch panel down to a more reasonable 75 inches.
[ Further reading: TechHive’s top picks in smart TVs ]Previous versions of Samsung’s micro-LED displays have been saddled with a couple of key problems. For starters, due to the difficulties inherent in micro-LED manufacturing, the displays usually arrive in separate modules that must be assembled by a professional installer. Second, Samsung’s micro-LED displays are prohibitively expensive (think six figures), which means they’ve been aimed mainly at business and luxury customers.
Enter the 110-inch MicroLED, a TV that promises to fix the first problem with Samsung’s micro-LED displays by eliminating the need to assemble multiple panels. Instead, the new TV comes as a complete, prefabricated unit, with Samsung boasting that it has developed a new production process to streamline micro-LED panel manufacturing. With this new set, you’ll need only to take it out of the box, plug it in, and turn it on—although, given that we’re talking about a 110-inch TV, removing it from the box could prove to be quite the operation.
Whether the MicroLED TV addresses the second problem with Samsung’s micro-LED displays—the exorbitant price tag—remains to be seen: Samsung has yet to reveal pricing. (Honestly, we’re not holding our breath for affordability.)
Samsung promises that the MicroLED will deliver “stunning,” “bright,” and “vivid” images, thanks to a new Micro AI Processor. It’s worth noting, however, that this 110-inch TV is only capable of 4K maximum resolution, not 8K like Samsung’s larger “The Wall” displays or its pricier LED-based QLED TVs.
The MicroLED will boast a near bezel-less display with a 99.99-percent screen-to-body ratio, Samsung says. In addition to watching one giant image, you’ll also be able to split the display into four 55-inch screens, ideal for NFL Sunday Ticket junkies.
Besides the images, Samsung says the TV’s integrated Majestic Sound System with Object Tracking Sound Pro functionality can crank out realistic (if virtualized) 5.1-channel sound without the need for external speakers.
All very impressive, but we’ve yet to see (or hear) the 110-inch MicroLED in action, nor do we know how much Samsung plans to charge for its giant new set. Given that Samsung’s 98-inch Q900 QLED TV, an 8K set based on traditional LED technology, goes for a breathtaking $60,000 (and that after a 40-percent discount), we’re steeling ourselves for the MicroLED’s eventual price tag.
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/@dusty48826784/samsungs-110-inch-microled-tv-brings-the-wall-to-your-living-room-ad69f7eec671 | [] | 2020-12-24 09:39:45.738000+00:00 | ['Security Cameras', 'Services', 'Connected Home', 'Cutting'] |
Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh announced his retirement from all formats of cricket | Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh announced his retirement from all formats of cricket Scienceofpolitics Dec 24, 2021·1 min read
On December 24, Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh (Bhajji) announced his retirement from all formats of cricket. He announced his retirement on YouTube. He remembered his cricket journey from the streets of Jalandhar to international cricket. He said that the Indian jersey gives him motivation, throughout his cricket carrier. He wants to announce his retirement from last year and today the time has come.
Though he was not playing active cricket because of the commitment with Kolkata Knight Riders he wanted to be with them in the IPL season. He also wanted to say goodbye to the Indian cricket in Indian jersey but fade had something else approved.
He thanked everyone who had been with him throughout his cricket journey. He felt nostalgic by remembering his match in Kolkata when he became the first Indian bowler who took a hat-trick in test cricket and also picked up 32 wickets in 3 matches, which is an unbreakable record so far. He said that he has no words to express his emotions about the victories of WT20 in the 2007 and 2011 World Cup. | https://medium.com/@scienceofpolitics123/indian-cricketer-harbhajan-singh-announced-his-retirement-from-all-formats-of-cricket-fe946055d8ac | [] | 2021-12-24 13:05:05.227000+00:00 | ['Retirement', 'Careers', 'Cricket', 'Indian', 'Thanksgiving'] |
Why a “Rushed” COVID-19 Vaccine Does Not Mean a Riskier One | The first vaccines against COVID-19 have arrived, and are being greeted with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. In some ways, it seems too good to be true. Can a “rushed” vaccine be as safe and effective as those that take years to develop?
The short answer is yes.
COVID-19 vaccines have cleared all of the same hurdles as past vaccines. Their compressed timelines do not reflect less rigorous testing; they reflect a running start, rapid trials, and much shorter (or no) gaps between development phases.
How did COVID-19 vaccine developers pull this off? With a lot of help.
To understand how COVID-19 broke vaccine development records, let’s see what it takes to develop a vaccine, and why COVID-19 is a special case.
How are vaccines normally developed?
Vaccine development begins with a search for the single best potential vaccine to test in humans — one that is both safe and effective. During this pre-clinical stage, scientists generate, tweak, and compare vaccine candidates using in vitro (cells in a dish) and in vivo (animal) experiments. This stage often lasts for years, as developers do everything possible to “de-risk” the steep investment needed to test in humans.
Once a lead vaccine candidate is chosen, additional animal experiments are conducted to further evaluate safety. These experiments, which involve giving different vaccine doses to several species (e.g rodents and non-human primates, like monkeys) can take months, and are typically conducted prior to the first human trials.
The last phase of vaccine development is human testing, which is achieved through a series of carefully designed clinical trials. The three sequential phases of human trials are progressively larger and more expensive, reaching tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. At each phase, developers must gain approval from regulators, like the FDA, before proceeding.
The New York Times Vaccine Tracker shows how many COVID-19 vaccines have reached each phase of clinical trials.
COVID-19 vaccine tracker (Source: New York Times, Dec 9, 2020)
Here is a quick summary of what happens at each phase:
Why is the story so different for COVID-19 vaccines?
The secret to speedy COVID-19 vaccines lies in five forces coming together: money, regulators, volunteers, timing, and science. Together, they helped developers clear the necessary hurdles more quickly than ever.
1. Money
Vaccine developers typically move very slowly and cautiously from one development phase to the next. They do so because every step forward is like an audacious Las Vegas gamble — one that involves placing a ton of chips on a bet with low odds.
I can personally attest to this arduous bet-making process based on my experience working at Genentech / Roche, a cancer drug developer, and the insights I’ve gained from my husband’s work in biotech venture capital. Drug, vaccine, and diagnostic developers all spend a lot of time and energy discussing the “Go No-Go” gates between each phase of development.
Thanks to deep pockets, vaccine developers have been able to move much more quickly. Rather than waiting to see whether or not a given phase works out before shelling out for the next phase, they are running phases back-to-back, and even overlapping them when possible.
For example, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were given permission to conduct their animal experiments at the same time as their human trials, rather than before Phase 1 trials, as is normally the case. Similarly, vaccine developers have already spent a lot of resources manufacturing millions of doses, rather than waiting for clinical trial data results, as is normally the case. Together, parallel processing, and “at risk” investments are saving months to years of time.
2. Regulators
When a vaccine developer wants to launch a human clinical trial, it needs a green light from regulatory bodies (like the FDA). Often, getting this green light involves a lot of of back-and-forth including requests for more data and tweaks to the study design. These exchanges between developers and regulators can add many months to timelines, simply because regulators don’t have the bandwidth to provide timely input to every product being tested.
Due to the urgency of the COVID-19 situation, regulatory agencies are making a point of not slowing things down; rather, they are working with developers to rapidly provide the input needed to move swiftly (yet safely!) from one testing phase to the next. Similarly, regulators are giving top priority to reviewing the extensive data packages that are being generated by each trial.
3. Volunteers
Trial duration is heavily influenced by how quickly volunteers can be recruited. With COVID-19 vaccines, recruitment has been “phenomenal”, according to one clinical trial operator. Thousands of motivated volunteers have eagerly stepped forward to roll up their sleeves in the name of public (and personal) health.
It is worth noting that Phase 1 volunteers for COVID-19 vaccine trials were particularly heroic. By enrolling in human trials before the usual suite of animal studies were completed, they took on more risk than most Phase 1 volunteers.
4. Timing
Vaccine trials must pre-specify how many “events” (confirmed COVID-19 cases) they will collect before trial data are analyzed and submitted for regulatory review. For example, current regulatory submissions for Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial will be based on the first 170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (of which 162 were in the group that received a mock vaccine). Clinical trial plans may also specify an event target for a sneak preview (interim analysis), such as Moderna’s interim analysis after 95 COVID-19 cases were confirmed (of which 90 were in the placebo group).
The more common the condition, the faster the results come in, and the sooner the data are unblinded to reveal how well the vaccine is working. Thus, soaring rates of COVID-19 rates around the world over past few months have allowed clinical trials to complete much more quickly than they would have had the virus been suppressed. Indeed, for a rare illness, it can take years to gather enough cases to trigger data analysis.
5. Science
It’s no surprise that the first two vaccines to emerge are both based on mRNA or messenger RNA. This novel approach to vaccines, which provides the genetic instructions for a small piece of virus, is both rapid and flexible. All you need is the sequence of the viral genome (now feasible in a single day!) and you can generate a candidate vaccine in weeks. According to Moderna’s timeline, the first clinical batch of mRNA-1273 (their vaccine candidate) was completed only 25 days after the target sequence was selected. By contrast, traditional vaccines, which are based either on live or killed viruses, or tiny fragments of virus, can be challenging to produce and optimize.
To be clear, while the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are the first to receive approval, this approach is not unprecedented. As described by the US Centers for Disease Control, first generation mRNA vaccines were piloted in early stage clinical trials for influenza, Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus (CMV). The latest mRNA vaccines leverage advances in RNA biology and chemistry to provide better stability, safety, and effectiveness.
Indeed, our collective war on COVID-19 has benefited greatly from recent scientific advances, as well as from remarkable global co-operation, including shared resources and information.
So… are the first COVID-19 vaccines safe?
While the safety of leading COVID-19 vaccines looks very promising based on large Phase 3 trials, there is a lot of nuance yet to be elucidated.
In the fifteen to twenty thousand relatively healthy adults tested in Phase 3 clinical trials, there were no serious adverse events, but several temporary, mild to moderate reactions. Press releases from Pfizer and Moderna reported that the symptoms affecting 2% or more of people included, fatigue, headaches, and soreness at the injection sites; media coverage of vaccine trials have mentioned the same symptoms, as well as fevers. These side effects are unpleasant, but they are not generally deemed dangerous, and experts have cautioned people not to avoid vaccines on account of them.
It will, however, take more time, more patients, and more trials, to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of the new COVID-19 vaccines, a picture that includes rare events (under 1 in 10,000) and groups of people not well represented in the Phase 3 trials.
The Bottom Line
There is no reason to be extra leery of COVID-19 vaccines simply because they were developed quickly. Their remarkable development speed is a testament to what we can accomplish when money, regulators, volunteers, timing, and science come together. These forces are acting like a jet pack propelling an ultra-marathoner to smash the world record.
In fact, the exceptionally short timelines for COVID-19 vaccine development highlight the inefficient nature of “normal” vaccine development, and give us hope that future vaccines will follow suit more quickly. As described in this insightful article in the Conversation, ten years to develop a vaccine is not a good thing!
We have no less information on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines than we did on the dozens of other approved vaccines when they were freshly minted (see the FDA’s list of approved vaccines). A year from now, we will certainly know a lot more, as the number of vaccine recipients grows from tens to hundreds of thousands, and spans more diverse populations. The recent warning by UK regulators to hold off on using the recently approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in people with severe allergic reactions, is a perfect example of learning as we go about rare events.
In medicine, every decision must balance the risks and benefits, often doing so with incomplete information. COVID-19 vaccines are no exception. The safety data to date are very encouraging, but incomplete, especially for rare events and specific sub-populations. At the same time, we can say with confidence that immunity to COVID-19 can save lives and help us return to normalcy.
My two cents? Now that Health Canada has approved the first of the COVID-19 vaccines (by Pfizer-BioNTech), I will be lining up to roll up my sleeve, and encouraging my parents to follow suit, as soon as they are available*.
*The risks of a COVID-19 vaccine, and any vaccine, varies depending on pre-existing conditions. Consult with your physician to determine whether or not you are in a high-risk bracket.
Disclosure: I have no conflicts of interest to declare. While I have worked for Roche in the past, I am not currently affiliated with any biotech companies. My husband invests in biotech companies (novel drugs) through Versant Ventures but does not have a direct link to COVID-19 vaccines. Neither of us stand to gain financially from the success of COVID-19 vaccines.
About Me
I’m a scientist and mother of three children, living in Vancouver, Canada. I completed my PhD in genetics at Stanford and spent the first decade of my career working in cancer research, drug development, and personalized medicine.
My new career chapter is dedicated to empowering others to make well-informed healthy choices, rooted in facts not fears. I’m also passionate about helping people to fall in love with the plants on their plates.
See more of my work, including articles, videos, podcasts, and healthy recipes at: https://FueledbyScience.com | https://medium.com/@brushleeeee/why-a-rushed-covid-19-vaccine-does-not-mean-a-riskier-one-d5ec0a1c24c4 | [] | 2020-12-10 09:47:43.608000+00:00 | ['Public Health', 'Covid 19', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19 Crisis', 'Vaccines'] |
Want to become a Data Scientist ? | So, read the interesting journeys of three successful data scientists to gain inspiration and lessons to excel in data science industry. ✌️
By : Fatemeh Renani ,Mohammad Mazraeh, Jaskaran Kaur Cheema
Infographic : Jaskaran Kaur Cheema
“Torture the data, it will confess to anything”-Ronald Coase
Due to the enormous generation of data, modern business marketplace is becoming a data driven environment. Decisions are made on the basis of facts, trends and analysis drawn from the data. Moreover, automation and Machine Learning are becoming core components of IT strategies. Therefore, the role of Data Scientists and Data Engineers is becoming increasing important.
In this blog, we have enumerated the journeys of three Data Scientists who have different educational backgrounds and career paths but have successfully curved a niche for themselves in the Data Science Industry.
We hope that their journeys will inspire you to excel in data science industry.
MANROOP KAUR, Data Engineer ICBC
Manroop Kaur, is a Data Engineer at ICBC Vancouver. She is a graduate of SFU’s Professional Master of Science in Computer Science program Specializing in Big Data.
Can you tell us about ICBC and your current role.
ICBC was built in order to provide basic insurance and managing claims which is the core component of the company. At present, the company is working on RAAP (Rate Affordability Action Plan (RAAP) project that will fundamentally change its business model to create a sustainable auto insurance system which would provide more affordable and fair rates for all. As a part of this project, I am working as a Data Engineer in Claims and Driver Licensing Teams in Information Management Department.
What convinced you to venture in to the Big Data field.
While working with Tech Mahindra, I heard about a project where data was being transferred from traditional database to Hadoop. This was the first time in my life I came across big data terminology and started exploring it by reading online articles. Since I already wanted to expand my education qualification, so I thought of venturing into this field. SFU’s Professional Master’s program was perfect fit so I applied and got accepted into it.
Can you describe your career journey after enrolling in Big Data program
While at SFU, I did my coop with WorkSafeBC. My work focused on Text analysis, doing advanced analytics and applying Machine learning algorithms. After that I applied at ICBC and it’s been a year of working as a Data Engineer with ICBC.
Any courses that you recommend to pursue to be successful in this program.
I believe that Big data program at SFU is structured so well that if you complete the assignments of Programming Lab 1 and 2 diligently, there is no requirement of any other course.
Can you describe any of your most interesting project.
I remember doing a project during internship of detecting the likelihood of claim to be fraudulent. We analyzed the claim data of past 5 years. Regular meetings with real field investigators were held to know about the red flags. Later, data was analyzed using those red flags. This project taught me that in academic setting we focus on obtaining high accuracy but sometimes in real life problems accuracy has different definition. So, the model that data science team was preparing would be termed successful if it was able to detect even 40 out of 500 claims to be fraud which are actually in real life.
Any interesting lesson that you learned after working in this field .
So, when I started learning about data science, I used to get very excited about applying ML algorithms to see the output of my model without spending much time on analyzing or cleaning the data . Later, I realized that data plays vital role and preparing it takes 90% of time but as performance of model depends upon the data being fed to it, preparation time is worth the effort.
How do you reflect on your decision of enrolling in this program.
I think decision of acquiring Master’s Degree in Big Data at SFU has proved to be worth my time and resources I invested in it. As it not only provided me the education in concurrent with the industry requirements but also has helped me securing a good job.
Any advice for people who wants to venture in this field.
I think focusing on one domain rather than doing everything in data science and updating your skills regularly will lead to a successful career. | https://medium.com/sfu-cspmp/want-to-become-a-data-scientist-ed309bdcc738 | ['Jaskaran Kaur Cheema'] | 2019-03-15 23:37:58.851000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Interview', 'Data Science', 'Education', 'Technology'] |
Resume Writing Example for a Computer Scientist Job | BASIC REQUIREMENTS:
All applicants must have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Must able to Perform system and network procurement, installation, administration and security
Able to develop and use basic computing environments for analysis
Skilled person who can stay current with major new advances in relevant technology-related topics; provides guidance on tools and methods related to these advances
Must able to Coordinate with private sector and other divisions to resolve technical and other relevant issues
Muhammad Hassan
Town Sultanabad
Street# 66, Gujrat, India
Professional Achievement
Quality-focused Software Specialist specializing in front end development. Experienced with all stages of development cycle for dynamic customer projects. Well-versed in several programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Ruby, HTML and C++. Proficient communication, leadership, and project management abilities.
Experience
September 2017 Hi-Tech Software Solutions
to Current Islamabad, Pakistan
Software Specialist
November 2014 BTT Software
to August 2017Islamabad, Pakistan
Updated documentation on all releases and errors.
Education
2014 PMAS Arid Agriculture University,
Sub Campus Gujrat, Pakistan
Computer Science. | https://medium.com/@chilljust098/resume-writing-example-for-a-computer-scientist-job-490e41131b01 | [] | 2020-12-21 15:50:43.641000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'Job Search', 'Blogger', 'Resume', 'Editing'] |
How Much Weight Should You Put On During Pregnancy? · Dr Dad | How Much Weight Should You Put On During Pregnancy? · Dr Dad Parenthood May 9·2 min read
Pregnancy and weight gain are two terms that go hand in hand in most cases. Gaining weight depends on the metabolism rate of the pregnant women, some women gain a couple of pounds, some gain as high as 30 pounds while there are a handful of lucky pregnant women who gain absolutely no extra pounds during pregnancy. The key is to increase the amount of calorie intake and not necessarily eat for two people, now that you are pregnant. On average, a pregnant woman requires an additional 300 calories than what she needed before being pregnant.
For most normal-weight pregnant women, the right amount of calories is: About 1,800 calories per day during the first trimester. About 2,200 calories per day during the second trimester. About 2,400 calories per day during the third trimester.
● A pregnant woman should gain an average of 2 to 4 pounds during the first trimester provided she is pregnant with one baby.
● In case she is expecting twins, the weight gain during the first trimester will be around 5 to 6 pounds.
The second and third trimester calls for a more steady weight gain of around 1 pound every week in pregnant women till she delivers her baby.
For women who are pregnant and have a higher BMI (body-mass index), they must measure their weight gain and try to limit it within a range of about 1⁄2 pound per week.
For a pregnant woman with twins, she will likely gain around 37 to 57 pounds throughout her second and third trimester, till she delivers the babies.
Conclusion
Gaining weight during pregnancy is very normal and natural. The trick here is to eat healthy and balanced food not only for the baby but also for the mother to remain fit. Pregnant women gain weight according to their body’s build-up, women with slow metabolism are likely to gain more weight compared to women who have a faster metabolism. It also depends on the number of babies one carries.
Related Tags:
Average weight gain during pregnancy, Causes of no weight gain during pregnancy, Pregnancy weight gain timeline, Weight gain during pregnancy month by month, Average weight gain in pregnancy, Baby weight gain during pregnancy chart, Pregnancy weight gain chart Indian, Not gaining weight during pregnancy | https://medium.com/@parenthood7/how-much-weight-should-you-put-on-during-pregnancy-dr-dad-36c38fb74b2 | [] | 2021-09-09 12:15:18.496000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Baby', 'Kids', 'Children', 'Pregnancy'] |
Scott Chappelle Strathmore Real Estate Group Assisting Retail Tenants | As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, local businesses and restaurants across the country are struggling to adapt their business models to “the new normal.” Part of that adjustment includes catering to consumers who no longer feel safe inside their stores. For many, drive-thrus may feel like the perfect solution. But in some cities, it’s an illegal one.
In August of 2019, Minneapolis became the latest city to pass an ordinance banning the construction of new drive-through windows in hopes of lowering vehicle noise and idling which lowers pollution and increases safety for citizens on the nearby sidewalks. Similar legislation restricting or banning the creation of new drive-thru windows for banks, restaurants, and/or retail businesses was also passed in Creve Coeur, Mo.; Long Beach, Calif.; and Fair Haven, N.J.
Scott Chapelle Strathmore Development Working to Help Local Businesses Pivot
Scott Chappelle Michigan businessman and President of the Strathmore Real Estate Group is leading an initiative meant to help a significant number of retail businesses and quick-serve restaurants (QSR’s) to address the problems of social distancing, health and safety regulations, and increased delivery and pick-up demand. The company makes each recommendation based on the client’s needs and existing assets, but generally, a business has two choices — either enhance capacity at the existing location or pivot to a new location that has drive-through capability.
“Most bans focus on curbing emissions, improving pedestrian safety and enhancing walkability, but ignore the realities of consumer tastes and the marketplace,” says Scott Chappelle Strathmore Development President . “Especially right now, when drive-thrus are about more than convenience. Now it’s an issue of health and safety.”
Minneapolis City Council President, Lisa Bender, says the ordinance that banned new drive-thrus is part of a larger growth and development plan that includes an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Back when the ordinance first passed, pre-pandemic, Scott Chappelle Michigan developer noted that while “The legislation is sometimes promoted as an opportunity to create healthier food environments and curb obesity” he found it to be oppressive for local business owners.
Ban Found To Be Counterproductive Says Scott Chappelle Strathmore Development
When asked for comment, Roland Sturm, a senior economist at nonprofit research firm Rand Corp. called the idea of banning drive-thrus “ridiculous.” According to Sturm, those who backed the ban tend to tout potential health benefits. It may seem simple — less idling equals fewer fumes — but no research has been done on whether drive-thrus add significantly to carbon emissions and pollution more than other modes of dining and shopping.
People who may otherwise have picked up food and gone home may travel further for food or decide to make a night of it and travel to another location, canceling out the small gains of reducing drive-thru traffic. Or they simply order delivery, which just replaces one car with another (while also taking money out of local restaurants’ pockets) points out.
In fact, the practice could actually be counterproductive to health and safety. Aside from the obvious COVID-era worries about going inside a store or restaurant, obesity rates actually went up in South Los Angeles after new stand-alone fast-food restaurants and drive-through windows were banned, according to Social Science & Medicine. Sturm was the lead author of the study and notes that obesity continued to climb for three years after the ban.
Scott Chappelle Strathmore Development Continues to Respond to COVID-19 Distress
Strathmore Real Estate Group continues to pursue the development and construction of over 46 properties with enhanced drive-thru capability in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Strathmore is simply responding to changing consumer tastes precipitated by the global pandemic,” says Scott Chappelle Michigan resident and businessman. The bans often don’t include existing drive-thru windows, so Strathmore aims to offer those pre-existing properties to businesses who are suffering without a way to serve their clients. | https://medium.com/@scottchappellestrathmore/scott-chappelle-strathmore-real-estate-group-assisting-retail-tenants-533fb963ba1 | ['Scott Chappelle Strathmore'] | 2021-01-08 18:32:17.925000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Tenants', 'Retail', 'Scott Chappelle', 'Strathmore'] |
Zero Annual Fee Credit Cards | Free Credit Card means card without any annual fees or charges. These types of cards are free to hold for the lifetime. In the other words, there are no annual fees or charges to hold this card. You just need to pay for what you use.
Free Credit cards help customers to reduce the overall cost of owning a credit card. However, mostly all credit card companies waive off annual fees only if customer spend a certain amount in a year. You should check terms and conditions before opting for a credit card.
If you want to save money of annual fees and joining fees here are 10 Free Credit Cards in India 2019 with No annual fees.
Types of Credit Cards
Credit cards give you free credit for 45–55 days after which it charges a monthly interest. Apart from this, there is an annual fee to pay, regardless of your usage pattern. Zero-fee credit cards, on the other hand, don’t levy any annual fee.
Then there are credit cards that are sandwiched between an annual fee and no-fee cards. These cards charge an annual fee initially but waive it off eventually after the user crosses a certain threshold of spends.
Top 10 No Annual Fee Credit Cards in India 2019
1. HSBC Visa Platinum Credit Card
Offers
Cleartrip voucher worth Rs.2, 000 upon conduction the first transaction. Up to Rs.2, 500 or 10% cashback on conducting 9 transactions of total worth Rs.10,000 within 90 days of the card issuance. 3X more reward points on select categories for first 12 months after card issuance
Features and Benefits
Earn 2 reward points for every Rs.150 spent on the card.
5X reward points after exceeding spend limit of Rs.4 lakh to maximum Rs.10 lakh in a year.
Fuel surcharge waived off (up to Rs.250 p.m.) for transactions between Rs.400 and Rs.4000.
Movie ticket voucher worth Rs.500 on monthly spends of over Rs.50,000.
15% off on dining bills at more than 1,000restaurants in major cities.
Rewards redemption options: Reward points can be redeemed for a wide range of products listed in the rewards catalog.
2. ICICI Platinum Chip Credit Card
In free credit cards list, one of the top credit cards is ICICI Platinum Chip Credit Card. This card is value for money as it provides multiple benefits and rewards. This includes annual fee waiver. Key benefit detail of this card is given below.
Features and Benefits
Annual fee waiver on an annual spend of Rs.50000 or above
15% saving on dining bill
Fuel surcharge 1% waiver
Earn 2 payback point on every Rs.100 spent
An extra PIN-based security feature
Eligibility for this card is stringent and it is offered to eligible corporates only
This card is most suitable for first-time credit card user and corporate employees.
3. Citibank Rewards Domestic Credit Card
The first free credit card in the list is Citibank Rewards Domestic Credit Card. No annual fee is applicable for this card if you spend annually Rs.30000 or above. If you don’t cross annual spend limit you need to pay Rs.1000 annual fees. The benefit offered by this card is given below.
Features and Benefits
10X Reward Points for every Rs125 spent at Apparel and departmental store
Up to 15% saving across participating restaurants
1000 bonus points on first Rs.1000 spend
Personal Concierge Services
Gift Vouchers Benefits
Citibank Rewards Domestic card is the Best card for Rewards.
4. SBI Card Unnati
Key Highlights: Issued against a fixed deposit amount of minimum Rs.25,000, the card is much suitable for people without a credit history.
Features and Benefits
1 reward point for every Rs.100 spent
Spend Rs.50,000 per year and get a cashback of Rs.500
1% fuel surcharge waiver valid for transactions between Rs.500 and Rs.3,000
Rewards redemption option: Redeem reward points against a wide variety of gifts from the rewards catalog.
5. HDFC Moneyback Card
HDFC Moneyback as the name suggests it is best suited free credit card in India for Money back purpose. Rs.1000 is annual fees applicable on this card. However, this fee can be waived off by spending Rs.50000 annually. Key features of HDFC Moneyback Card are given below.
Features and Benefits
2x Reward Points on online shopping
Redeem reward point as cashback
Zero liability on lost card
Fuel Surcharge waiver
Spend Rs.50000 in a quarter and get Rs.500 E-Voucher
HDFC Moneyback card is best for cashback. This card is offered to both salaried and self-employed.
6. ICICI Platinum Chip Card — Visa
This is a lifetime free credit card from ICICI Bank. It is a contactless credit card and offers amazing benefits.
Features and Benefits
Avail minimum 15% savings at over 800 restaurants under the Culinary Treats program of ICICI Bank
Enjoy 1% fuel surcharge waiver at HPCL pumps for fuel transactions up to Rs. 4,000
Earn 2 PAYBACK Points for every Rs. 100 spent on retail transactions except fuel
Redeem your accumulated reward points against a host of vouchers and products
Get the convenience and safety of contactless cards
7. IndusInd Bank Platinum Card
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FundsTiger.com is an Online Lending Marketplace. | https://medium.com/@surekhashetty658/zero-annual-fee-credit-cards-e03f2d19f9e6 | ['Surekha Shetty'] | 2019-08-06 09:53:49.730000+00:00 | ['Annual Fees', 'Marketplaces', 'Fundstiger', 'Credit Cards', 'Lending'] |
How to Improve Your Website Traffic Without Paying a Dime! | A mini guide on
Image by Firmbee from Pixabay
Paid advertising may increase your brand awareness but it is not the only way by which you can get eyeballs on your site.
There are a few ways which done right you don’t even need to pay for ads to promote your sites, we will discuss that here!
But, why do we need to promote our site, won’t google’s free tools do it?
Tools provided by Google and any other sites are good but not one-stop to every solution.
I would have mentioned SEO, and making your site mobile friendly, and other technical things but considering how some site owners hand those things to developers and freelancers… I have focused on ways you can do without major expertise and complications!
Here are a few things you can try to be discovered:
1) Creating Content On Social Media:
Without a doubt, this has to come first given that it is the face of personal media online with a billion users.
With that big of attention, you cannot miss this!
Now like I said you don’t have to pay for a social media team to advertise your business or create content, sites like Canva, Adobe spark, Kapwing offers a wide variety of content creation for free!
Remember not to get sidetracked while using social media as it happens very often!
Now, you don’t have to create social media accounts on every social media site you can find,
You, just need to select and create accounts on 1 or 2 social media platforms where you have your target audience aka people who like your stuff and are willing to know more about it.
Then create content around it on a regular basis, the quantity matters as platforms like IG, Facebook, Twitter have a wide crowd so creating and posting 1–2 times a day will result in more awareness than posting 3 times a week!
The quality of your content may be subjective to your readers but you will only know what works and what doesn’t when your readers see it and respond to it.
This is something that needs to be done regularly for it to work.
Also, it’s best to have a consistent tone of your content to make it more unique and familiar!
2) Working With Other Blogs:
Image by Nappiness from Pixabay
One of the major ways for blogs to establish good relationships and credibility is by helping other blogs.
Like guest posting is best known as writing for other blogs in your niche for free in exchange for getting exposure or getting more audience.
While some people might resist working for free, but this one is certainly worth it.
Blogs require content creations and creating content requires time, effort, and sometimes even money!
So by writing for them you would be doing them a favor and increase your brand awareness with their audience.
All you need to do is find blogs with great authority who produce great content and make a list and start asking!
It is a great win-win for new blogs to ensure great relationships while exchanging values.
3) The $1.80 Strategy:
Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay
Ok, I assure you it doesn’t require a buck it is just a representation!
The infamous $1.80 strategy for social media is all about creating “micro-connections” every day that leads to creating a more engaging community for a long time.
“The number of Instagram followers you have means nothing if you can’t build a community of like-minded people who care and engage.” — Gary vee
Building true fans may sound like a lot of work but it is better to have 1000 true fans who buy things from you rather than having a million who don’t!
Here is how you do it:
Search for a relevant hashtag for example #diving, #shoes, #technology, click on it.
Then go to the top 9 posts that are shown and after that see which posts have the highest engagement(number of comments, not followers) and then drop your most relevant and genuine comments related to those posts, these are your 0.2 cents.
Now do the same thing 90 times a day, 0.2 cents * 90= $1.80…get it!
You can apply the same thing on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
You might not get 100 followers a day, but each day having 10–20 followers will help you build a fanbase and therefore getting some exposure to your profile where you have the link to your site.
4) Engaging online:
Image by Hebi B. from Pixabay
Content creation is not the only way you can dominate online, there are a couple of simple things that with strategy can reap a lot of benefits for you!
List down the blogs in your niche, the ones with a solid fan base and good engagement,
if you are having trouble finding them, just google: “Top blogs in “your niche” in 2020” hit enter, consume and read their content then scroll through the comments section and either write a relevant comment or answer something their readers have asked.
Make sure that they can find you by leaving your profile link etc.
Do this for 10–20 blogs a week and their readers, as well as blog owners, will start to notice you and see what you have to offer.
Tip: It is better to make this a habit because every once in a while you need to learn things from other blogs so might as well engage with their audience!
5) Using Quora:
Hands down, Quora has a big and different base for over 300 million users who are asking or answering questions related to their niche.
Another thing to know is that you can find your target audience in Quora.
Now Quora is all about engagement as content creation is a bit different unlike other social sites like IG, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
How is Quora useful?
Well, you need to find and genuinely answer questions about things you know regularly.
Answering with the intent of helping others will help build your loyalty among your followers.
Also, avoid the copy/paste of your blog post to Quora answers as Quora will spam you or ban your account forever!
Instead, answer with the intention of helping and have your blog’s link on your profile so if the readers are curious they can see your site for themselves.
One another advantage you might have by using this is that you can directly answer questions from your prospective clients.
Which in turn gives you the opportunity to turn leads into customers and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Also by honestly answering questions regularly and gaining trust from your fans, you can be featured in Quora Digest or emails sent by Quora to people who have subscribed to their newsletter which may feature your answers.
6) Publishing On Medium:
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
Medium is an online publishing platform for articles also called “Stories”, It has gained a lot of popularity over the years and now it has over 100 million users.
And the best thing is you can re-publish your website articles here!
Which is totally ethical and SEO-friendly i.e. it won’t hurt your SEO score of the original website, you just need to re-publish after a time, you can refer to medium guidelines for more.
A lot of people including major blogs like “Hubspot” use this to gain more awareness of their original site.
And if you are worried about technical stuff… don’t,
because Medium makes it easy for writers to post their stories with ease for example they already take care of a few things about SEO and H1 and H2 tags that play a role in ranking your stories, so it’s easy!
Tip: Don’t just publish only your original website’s content, try to write exclusive medium stories, and try to apply for medium publications that have a high volume of readers, which will increase your readers and followers over time.
7) Share It On Social Media:
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
One of the best uses of social media is sharing your blog posts or content updates in a strategic way, making a plan to share your website content on social media while contextualizing it.
What does context mean here?
Simple, if you have a blog post create multiple pieces of that content and distribute it across multiple platforms while being aware of which platform has which type of tone.
Here’s how:
Publish your blog posts, create a sub-article, and post it on LinkedIn.
Publish the whole article after a week on Medium.
Post multiple tweets about the quotes or stats you used in your blog posts.
Take a screenshot of a particular section of your blog post and post it on IG with captioning your thoughts.
There are a lot of ways in which you can chop your post in pieces and distribute it across social media, just start with these.
8) Creating Or Joining Facebook Groups:
Image by Coffee Bean from Pixabay
What better way to talk about your stuff than having like-minded people around it.
Now Facebook ads are not the only way to promote your site, but if you already have a loyal group of fans and community, it might be a great idea to create a Facebook group and invite them.
It’s great to have a Facebook group to grow your followers talk about your blog post, things that you want to talk about, and spread the word along, but if you want a little control over things that can happen in your group be sure to mention some ground rules or group guidelines.
Note that I have mentioned Facebook group not Facebook page because groups have limited no. of members to join and as you are starting this would be fine.
Also, if you don’t have much of a fan base or any at all,
You can join FB groups that talk about things your site is all about like e-commerce, farming, cars, etc.
And bring value to their conversations and when convenient mention your blog posts.
Some of the FB groups do have self-promotion guidelines that you can use.
9) Using LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a great place to connect with your audience and grow with over 722 million users.
It has become a great place for professionals to become a thought leader over time by “posting content” or “publishing articles” and connecting with people.
Now like Medium this is one more place where you can re-publish your articles and create links for your site, but make sure to contextualize the platform and don’t become spam.
You can use the $1.80 strategy here too and grow your connections which in turn brings a lot of opportunities for you to build awareness about you.
“LinkedIn 2020 is like Facebook 2012” — Gary vee
What does this mean?
It means that the organic reach of LinkedIn is still here and can be used to create a massive long-term audience, period.
You can also create content for LinkedIn about things in your niche and engage with the audience over time to build loyalty.
Also, LinkedIn groups are a great way to share your content and build a community.
Do remember which type of content to post where
LinkedIn is a place for professionals so posting memes won’t do any good and Facebook has a more casual audience so you don’t want to talk business every time.
Mixing entertainment with business to create content is very useful here!
10) Having A Clear Goal:
Image by Suomy Nona from Pixabay
There is nothing more annoying than getting sidetracked and spending the entire day on social media and other things when you have a site to take care of!
A lot of times people can get lost in doing the other things which have absolutely zero impact on improving their goals.
Therefore it is important to set goals and time you will spend before doing these things.
In the end content and your service of the site do matter so you need to constantly improve that otherwise, people would not be regular visitors or would advise other people the same!
I really hope this gives you some new ways to explore word-of-mouth on the internet.
Thank you for reading! | https://medium.com/@ajaysingh-999/how-to-improve-your-website-traffic-without-paying-a-dime-fe6fa9275073 | ['Ajay Singh'] | 2020-12-19 07:41:06.480000+00:00 | ['Personal Brand Online', 'Website Traffic', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Social Media', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
Trump and the Poets — FORMA DE VIDA | Written in 1987, at the inaugural peak of Donald Trump’s popularity as a real estate tycoon, The Art of the Deal was initially thought of as an autobiography. But early on ghostwriter Tony Schwartz realized that Trump is not given to reflections on the past, tending mostly towards an absolutist view of the present.[1] The book took on a mixed form, somewhat between a business manual, a realistic first-person account of a mogul’s routine, and a classical biography, resulting in a work composed of mixed literary genres which Trump today calls, with characteristic exaggeration, his second favorite book following the Bible.[2] Most of its fragmented narrative resembles a handbook of practical advice on how to do business, but Trump’s felicitous account of his rise to fame is also meant to be a description of the American Dream, although the author was already born excessively fortunate and could not easily assume such a status. In both registers, the tone of the book is characterized by a gentleness of wording and a pleasantness in temper which contrast with the common image of the predatory businessman given to materialistic satisfactions, regarding business less as a pleasure in itself and more as a means to an end. While the book may be easily considered an exercise of pride and vanity, as these emotional temperatures are usually part of the author’s public persona, it may also be read more simply, and more benignly, as the elegy of a passion for doing business. Such two apparently different readings are not absolutely incompatible, and I will try to argue that in order to understand Trump it is necessary to understand this first. Another important duality in Trump’s mindset, played out through contradictory stances which often confuse his opponents, is the distinction between fact and fiction, a distinction presenting puzzling and unexpected forms in the author’s personal and public life, but which the account offered by the book helps us to formalize. Thus, in order to grasp the a priori conditions necessary to understand Trump, one must first entertain a pre-moral analysis of the mental ground in which he moves, setting aside common myths about businessmen and politicians. This analytical and non-judgmental stance is often lacking in many of his critics, which seem to depart from preconceptions and ignorance-precisely some of the traits which they accuse Trump of possessing. Besides The Art of the Deal, I will also base my analysis on The Art of the Comeback, another of Trump’s autobiographical exercises, and, additionally, on many other books on Trump as a person, as a businessman, and as a politician, mostly written after his election. I restrained from analyzing the immense torrent of critical content in the daily press about him, for that would surely outweigh the margins of this essay; besides, most of that content is critically useless and serves only as an example of a larger phenomenon of antagonism towards Trump from some professional and intellectual classes.
2. Truthful hyperboles
I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the greatest and the most spectacular.[3]
While it may seem obvious to categorize many of Trump’s distortions and exaggerations of facts as plain lies, he prefers to describe them as truthful hyperboles. This might seem to be, at first sight, another outrageous lie or maybe a kind of a self-conscious joke, according to the typical view of Trump as a charlatan who uses low-art rhetorical tricks in order to deceive his counterpart and obtain some sort of material profit. However, if subject to a rigorous case-by-case analysis, many-if not all-of Trump’s dubious statements might not be considered lies as we understand it, as most are grounded in wordplay epiphenomena derived from grains of truth, but seem instead to consist of rhetorical figures and tropes such as hyperboles, ironies, synecdoches, metonymies; a series of argumentative and formal flourishes, or just smart-even if arguably deceitful-perspectives of looking at things. Some examples of this may be found in the famous “alternative facts” quote,[4] in many accusations directed towards his opponents,[5] or in the millionaire/billionaire quarrel which pre-dates his presidency[6] (later in this essay, I’ll point out some more). This exercises in rhetoric, many of them assuming a bragging tone, are the most visible phenomena regarding his position towards truth. And this marks a fundamental difference from the typical mindset of some of his most visible antagonists, part of an intellectual oriented class who tends to see bragging and other modes of persuasive discourse as distasteful and dishonest; their tradition is in the form of intellectual logical proofs, with its much more contrived rhetorical license. The question is if Trump, not only as a private citizen but as a public businessman or as a politician, should be allowed to exert this type of rhetorical flourishes, or if, instead, these are not simply flourishes at all, but dishonest uses of rhetoric which amount to lying and deserve censure.
3. An intellectual’s dualist epistemology
Trump’s most typical antagonists are part of the American/European urban intelligentsia, culturally refined and politically progressive, in clear contrast with the rural workmanship and/or business-oriented principles of many of his supporters.[7] While the first set of people admittedly hold a social ethos dominated by various post-enlightenment creeds-Hegelian ends of history, class-based social views, and advocacy for central state planning, etc.-the second seem more attached to a sort of virtue-based notion of social relations and do not even tend to conceive of society as a quasi-organic whole. It is only natural that many of these rural types and their values-in which, interestingly, Trump is culturally included, despite being a real-estate millionaire from New York-are immensely alien to the intelligentsia. So, on the one hand, we have this epistemologically oriented view of man, stemming from a certain tradition of classical Greek thought which leads to idealism; on the other hand, a brand of American pragmatism that attempts to re-ground intellectualism in straightforward material practices, resorting to virtue, ethics, and theology to explain all things metaphysical.[8]
Several obvious epistemic differences between the aforementioned intelligentsia and Trump are at play here, but the main schism relates to a dualist conception of man and man’s relation with the world. This is denounced, for instance, by the frequent complaint that Trump doesn’t have an “inner” humane core, a psyche, only an outer action-reaction personality, which sounds like a strange accusation, as if having private-secret, or unknowable-reasons and intentions somehow makes a person better.[9] Perhaps such a trait is not seen as inherently immoral or even tending towards immorality, but only that it provokes a feeling of strangeness in these Cartesian intellectuals, who are used to a typical twentieth-century psychological reading of people, in which Trump clearly does not easily fit-and makes little effort to.
Contrary to the dominant mindset of post-Cartesian thought among the intelligentsia, Trump doesn’t come from a culture where perception is dominated by strict truth-value theories. He is much more open about the rhetorical qualities needed to reach the other in the cognitive negotiations about the world-which are, in his business tradition, mostly non-metaphysical-while in the intelligentsia community they belong mostly to metaphysical categories (in concepts such as ethos, absolute truthfulness/falseness, systematic thought, etc). One could entertain the idea that Trump is closer to pre-Cartesian theological justifications, as some of his supporters are; this is doubtful to be the case, or perhaps entirely disprovable, as his narcissistic and sectarian behavior denounces him as a probable atheist, although lately he has been trying to present himself, sincerely or not, as a religious man.
4. The merchant and the artist
For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that Trump is neither a mind-centered analytical creature nor a pious man, two intellectual stances which are ultimately rooted in some kind of metaphysics; his main mental mode seems to be, first and foremost, that of a merchant, a character whose dubious reputation goes back to patristic biblical exegesis.[10] Coming from the same walk of life as his father and his paternal grandfather, Trump spent his life dealing mostly in real-estate, having expanded later to other business ventures, and is, apparently, very passionate for what he does. In this craft, the way the product is presented is fundamental, and enhancing its appearance is not necessarily a fraud; but the typical intellectual creature who opposes Trump does not easily tolerate such rhetorical artifices outside of some pre-approved realms-for instance, the contemporary art world. While, for the merchant-and in a similar degree, for the politician-a criteria of ontological similarity between inner cognition and outer perception is demanded, which results both in a moral stance and an epistemological position, the same demand is not made in the fields of post-Romantic art in general. This goes as far as when the inner is free to occupy the outer, and such an adventure is morally tolerated through the teleology of art for art’s sake, which in many cases is exclusive to this practice and rarely admitted in other human activities.
Works of art, objects of admittedly fictional quality, are obviously allowed different criteria regarding the truth-value system in which they operate; but artists themselves, particularly post-Romantic ones, are given much more moral freedom in using devices of fiction, rhetoric, tropes, and figures, etc., in their private lives or in their extra-artistic works, where the frontier between artistry and citizenship is much more diluted, according to the post-Romantic paradigm. Take, for example, the social acceptance of some of contemporary art’s bad boys: the imaginative narratives of Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography, where this exercise of fancy regarding one’s own life is, or may be considered to be, poetic freedom[11]; Orson Welles, a bohemian admirer of forgers and a frequent con-man himself[12]; or Marlon Brando, whose famous unpredictable temper caused numerous riffs and explicitly equated acting with lying.[13] Examples like these are frequently analyzed with critical delight by the same type of intellectual persona that despises Trump; here, moral issues seem to be temporarily put aside to serve the motto of ars gratia artis.
Although the differences between the uses of tropology by the merchant and the artist appear to be mostly formal, additional substantial justifications seems to be inequitably demanded of the merchant. In material commerce, not distinguishing between fact and value is frequently seen as amoral by the intellectual critic, and the submission of the rhetorical artifice to the supposed end-goal of money generally deserves censure: the merchant’s use of fiction often means lie, it’s use of rhetoric-to a degree-means snake-oil-salesman tricks, and the art of forgery does not mean mimesis, but blatant conning. This moral categorization seems to apply not only to inner workings of the craft itself-whose ethics are framed in the appearance/contents dualism, where matters of material fraud could be raised, as in selling silver as it were gold-but also to the outer presentation of the produced goods. In that realm of mere appearance, the criteria of admissibility required of the merchant is frankly more severe than in art (if an artist intended to sell silver as if it were gold, the mental framework on which one would have to integrate this would be somewhat different to that of the merchant). Many justifications for this duality of criteria seem feeble: with the merchant, favoring certain angles and certain preconceived descriptions over others seems like a mere mutability of form-not only as in the art world itself, but also as in other artful practices such as flirting, pranking, etc.-and not so much a severe adulteration of content. Typically, this does not significantly alter the factual consensus of the given, and thus the craft of the merchant may differ only in degree and not in kind from everyday common practice; whatever tricks he typically uses for selling his product might not be lies as we strictly understand lies, but merely rhetorical exercises. So a distinction might be found here between a perhaps illegitimate language game, as part of pragmatist and/or rhetorical matters, and a potential straight lie, within a strict true/false value system. In that sense, Kellyanne Conway’s notion of alternative facts seems to be merely a shaping of the given within a legitimate language game-and not as in an illegitimate one where tropology surpasses blatantly acceptable limits, as in saying to someone: “you are a fish and that is an alternative fact”. This example, intentionally or not, recalls Stanley Fish’s work, much of which is precisely about the establishment of facts through the context and language-games of a given situation, and not the other way around. The so much vilified “alternative fact” quote fits perfectly within such a theory, as what Conway is ultimately saying is that her interlocutor is not playing the same game as hers.
Different social customs-maybe rooted in material contingencies-demand that, for each social practice, a different standard regarding the acceptance of rhetorical tricks is enforced. In the case of the merchant, a certain aggrandizement of the product is tolerated, but not to a degree that endangers epistemic contents. Trump tended to exert that aggrandizement to an extreme degree in his real-estate mogul career, but when he brought the same techniques to the realm of politics, the reaction of some of the public was severely antagonistic. Despite the fact that such hyperbolic tricks are tolerated in everyday language, literature, art, journalism, advertising, courtship, even in judicial language and in politics, Trump apparently overstepped the wall of its admissibility. It is not clear whether this stems from his overdoing of rhetoric, which breaks the reality of consensus, or mostly from a severe bias towards his personality, his politics, etc, from some of the public and the press. One could also more solidly ground this general objection to Trump’s antics in the fact that merchants deal mainly with material goods with clearly defined functions, whether artists, journalists and politicians deal mainly with ideas grounded in material goods, with not so clearly defined functions, so the question of subjectivity and fraud regarding both material and non-material transactions might be more clearly put in the case of the merchant. The question, however, is less whether artists, journalists and politicians are in fact subjective creatures, and more whether they are completely honest regarding the level of subjectivity and their volitive responsibility over that degree in the negotiation with the world on truth. But setting aside whether it is really conceivable if intellectuals deal mainly or solely with ideas, or if it is possible for such a thing as an idea to simply exist independently, it is not clear whether Trump, or the merchant in general, are conducting exclusively, or even mainly, material commerce, neither it is clear that obtaining material returns is his main interest. It is argued, in several passages of the book, that it is more important to do than to have, more important to compete and play the game than obtaining objective returns like money, happiness, and material goods.
I do not do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks. I do not say this trait leads to a happier life, or a better life, but it’s great when it comes to getting what you want. This is particularly true in New York real estate, where you are dealing with some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.
To “beat them,” in this context, sounds less than achieving end-results superior to their own and more like outsmart them; in fact, Trump frequently emphasizes the win itself, more than the results of the win. It may be thought, of course, that such statements are merely cosmetic and do not portray the actual truth, since Trump, as a typical tycoon-like character, sees as its ultimate end money and money only, money for money’s sake (if such use of a medium as the end in itself is actually possible). But it is surprising that someone who is seen as a loudmouth amoral creature, explicitly obnoxious towards his enemies, towards women, and towards political correctness in general, does not explicitly state that his ultimate purpose is wealth and material debauchery; there seems to be no reason why he would not do so. One gets the frequent feeling that, instead of presenting himself as someone who values material wealth in itself, Trump seems to self-delight more in the appearance of wealth (hence his well-known fetish for gold-plated goods): and this is closer to an attraction for fantasy, imagination, fiction, and farther from a raw materialism which exists for its own sake.
5. Trump and the politicians
As we have seen, the question here at stake is if Trump-the-merchant is simply using the artifices of rhetorical political combat to an extreme, unacceptable, and perhaps unethical degree, or if he sets aside these criteria and instead deals in pure charlatanism; in other words, if the difference between Trump and the typical politician in terms of rhetorical, epistemological, and ethical positions, is a difference in kind or in species. A serious objective study of many of his statements would have to be endured, but just a mere draft of such an analysis will find that most examples of Trump’s juggling with the truth are not actually flat-out lies.[14] Some examples: the boasting of the numeric improvements of his presidential administration (similarly to the boastful aggrandizement of his own accomplishments in his real-estate career) is generally made of rounding-up figures or selective picking of data[15]; accusations towards his opponents oscillate between attributing objective particular responsibility and the abstraction of general responsibility implied in the ethos of political hierarchies.[16] Other claims, which can be dubious or even blatantly dishonest-but not necessarily untrue-are probably the closest we can get to the traditional notion of lies.[17] Even so, it is certainly awkward that a man with a blatant reputation of lying can be so hard to catch uttering a blatant black-and-white falsehood. Indeed, those coming close seem to fit in line with other politicians of his time.[18] One could conclude that Trump, given the psychological profile so far laid out, would be perfectly capable of uttering a flat-out lie if the language-game in question would allow him that; but since, generally, it does not, he does not do it, which might indicate either that he is too smart for that or too afraid of the consequences (or that being afraid of the consequences and conscious of the rules, as a New York real-estate entrepreneur and tycoon should be, is being smart). Thus, it would seem that his opponents’ quest for lies, in the classical sense, is absolutely infertile; they would probably be better off denouncing him as a dishonest salesman, a cheap rhetorical artificer, more so than a liar. But even then, the question of whether Trump’s dealings with the truth are cheap or deserve to be called artful would be left open.
6. Characters and narrators
Favoring fantasy instead of fact, appearance over substance and/or virtue, should be a practice familiar to politics, but the particular brand of fictionalization that Trump uses places him in direct opposition with the status quo of most public actors. Part of this trend manifests itself in the expression of his large ego, which leads to the pervasive endurance of his political persona. Such a bigger-than-life personality, though not crafted for politics from the beginning, contrasts with the typical career politician: while a young and eager one can easily pretend to want to have knowledge of thousands of factors involving a political unit and possess a prism of rhetorical qualities different from the merchant, elderly aged billionaires such as Trump probably have differentiated experiences and motivations, manifested in the ways one is used to manage collective entities, whether these are companies or states. Still, it seems that the politician and the mogul are doing very similar things and should probably be expected to use very similar rhetorical skills. Particularly in rational debate, his confrontations with political rivals highlight how both sides of the argument eventually dilute themselves in the so-called swamp of the profession, for politicians are also perfectly used to employing language tricks to diminish their opponents, avoid the press, etc. So one gets the feeling politicians are playing the same rhetorical game as Trump, only with less nerve, less bravado, although it seems clear that, comparatively, he may feel less responsibility to an intellectual logical proof of his argument, and more interested in relying upon rhetorical devices.
However, in his relationship with the press, the most relevant public player involved in the establishment of a public fact in contemporary times, Trump’s attitude poses a lot more problems. As narrators of the journalistic real-which can be loosely defined as an attempt of scientific objectivity, a sort of distorted projection of common-sense realism, the given, the reality of consensus, etc.-, the press, similarly to their counterparts in science laboratories, requires mainly passive subjects. Trump does not easily fit in this role, and frequently prefers to assume co-authorship of the journalistic account, having no ethical issue with manipulating facts in his favor, mainly because he sees the report of the press as already pre-manipulated. Thus, in reacting to the description not with the acceptance of the given terms but with an aggressive counter-description, Trump, as a character of the 24-hours news cycle narrative, puts himself in an unusual position of equality before the author, and attempts to democratize the relationship between the active and the passive parties of the matter; from the point of view of the press, this is as if a character in a novel, gaining life and mental autonomy, demanded to play a more participative role in its author’s account.[19]
My people keep telling me I shouldn’t write letters like this to critics. The way I see it, critics get to say what they want to about my work, so why shouldn’t I be able to say what I want to about theirs?
Interestingly, there is an additional level of democratization Trump introduces in this field: the leveling of authorship occurs not only between the producer of contents-the press-and the passive subject of the report-Trump himself-but goes so far as to extend such freedom to the third-person recipient public. This is denounced by his often self-conscious humor, as the comments he makes about the press are occasionally accompanied by others which mock not only his own speech, but the whole setup of the situation (facts/subjects-of-facts/neutral-journalistic-reporting), as if encouraging a kind of free interpretation of events by the public, or, at least, keeping them in the suspension of disbelief that such a free interpretation is possible; this is highly unusual for a politician, and it seems to break the fourth wall that these public actors typically have to deal with.[20] Again, Trump’s- and other public actors -creative use of techniques in dealing with the press, seen in a metafictional light, seems to attract little interest from the people who often find the same topic in art extremely captivating.
As the press faces such a powerful co-author, one who was supposed to be a mostly passive party in the game of facts/subjects/reports, it is difficult to gauge the possibility of a consensus among the various parties involved. Nevertheless, neither Trump, nor the journalists, nor the public, ultimately deny that facts can exist, and everyone knows that a report of consensus can be reached; however, that consensus does not necessarily have to emerge in the form of an objective standard depending on apriorism, but instead as a deal. In this particular game, Trump, summoning his professional and non-political public figure background, positions himself as an extremely tough negotiator, with a purposely warlike stance towards his negotiating counterpart. Hence the legitimacy of the term fake news, that he likes to invoke, despite being frequently used to refer to any journalistic content that goes against his interest. Such an epithet, however, is not entirely unjustified, because false news do exist-as they should, because there is no inherently neutral journalism-and true fakeness in the press can assume multiple forms, such as bad objective reporting, a clear political bias, or ad hominem character assassination. Thus Trump, being highly dependent on appearance, therefore on the media, and therefore highly distrustful of the media’s errors, is unable to place himself in a passive position before the media’s construction of narratives, and puts himself instead in a position of equality with the interlocutor, in a proactive stance, moving the threshold of imagination according to the need of the interlocutor before him, as if he was an equal partner on the ongoing business of establishing truth.
The other thing I do when I talk to reporters is to be straight. I try not to deceive them or to be defensive, because those are precisely the ways most people get themselves into trouble with the press. Instead, when a reporter asks me a tough question, I try to frame a positive answer, even if that means shifting the ground.
7. The Republic: Plato and Wilde
The use of rhetorical devices such as these, both in the case of the poet and the merchant, would merit the reproach of the ultimate guardian of the republic, Plato-and hence the strong anti-Trump stance taken by many politicians since the beginning of his political career-but not of the quintessential defender of fiction, Oscar Wilde. But things are not this simple, either: Trump’s so-called lies may resemble boasts not compromised by facts, but, as we’ve seen, they are still grounded in a shadow or a speck of truth. However, to its most vocal critics, Trump’s truthful hyperbole, contrary to the common lie which purports to be true, should seem closer to a lie that seeks a circular justification in itself, constituting what Wilde treated as the noble office of the true liar, which is distinct from the semi-justifiable lie of the common politician (and this is again slightly puzzling, for many of his critics would surely admire Wilde’s witty take on perception and fiction):
I assure you that they [the politicians] do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind![21]
At this point, I tend to follow the thought of Professor António M. Feijó, who stated in a 2018 talk on the topic of fake news that Trump does not tell lies as if they were truths, like the common liar does: he tells lies as if they were lies.[22] Perhaps he does not simply intends to fool, but to actually be part of the fictional process itself, as a conscious actor. Such a metafictional role may have its origin in a mindset dominated by an epistemological position of radical subjective idealism, comparable to the immaterialism of George Berkeley. Trump, like Berkeley, does not deny the existence of things, but reduces that existence to his perception of them. And it is important to note how this is not the typical position ascribed to a pure materialist, as it is common to characterize merchant moguls, because, for Trump the subjective idealist merchant, abstract perception can actually be more substantial than a purely cerebral calculus of the material good in question.
[Changing his mind after having accepted a deal related to underground drilling] I called my friend back and I said, “Listen, there’s something about that bothers me. Maybe it’s that oil is underground, and I cannot see it, or maybe it’s that there’s nothing creative about it. In any case, I just do not want to go in. “
Here, the equivalence between seeing and knowing seems clear-an equivalence which might be expanded to negotiating and creating. Such a position is the opposite of the stereotypical investor who has a distant and non-palpable relationship with the abstractions of business, seeking only the purely quantitative monetary return. Trump’s sensitivity appears to require closeness and tactility, going as far as avoiding the programmatic abstraction of projects, calculations and opinion studies and preferring his own gut feeling. This sensitivity is apparently derived from the specific talents required by his specific craft, which involves selling dreams, ideas, ideals. Averse to risk, possessive, Trump does not easily fit the profile of a speculator without a safety net or a player who puts all the chips on the table-or, at least, that’s how he portrays himself. He seems more attracted to appearing to be wealthy than to actually being wealthy; more importantly, he seems to know that material possessions are volatile, that capital is always subject to fluctuations in value, unlike pure appearance, plain fantasy, imaginary creations, which possess a non-material quality that can be long-lasting. This is why the role that the perceptual agent has in creating extra-material value is so important.
By contrast, we took our strengths and promoted them to the skies. From day one, we set out to sell Trump Tower not just a beautiful building in a great location but an event. We place ourselves on the right place for a certain kind of person to live-the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy.
8. Conclusion
Going back to the initial topic of this essay, it is unclear whether in The Art of the Deal Trump is describing himself as he is or as he would like to be. Frequently, intellectuals seem confused and shocked with Trump’s priority on perception, a stance which is confirmed by other members of his inner circle.[23] But, as we have seen, the two concepts do not necessarily contradict each other. Only by assuming a theory that absolutely dualizes being and appearing to be (becoming), the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon, can one put them as antagonistic, and it is not clear that Trump moves on a terrain where this duality is so vivid. He appears to see himself at the same time as he is, assuming no real difference between a substantial interior and a superficial or accidental exterior. Ese es percipi, as Berkeley would have it. And since Trump sees himself not as an entity of definitely pre-established facts, but as an idea, a brand, his relation to product, material, is the same relation of fiction, or imagination, with a potential thing-in-itself. In this Trumpian world, one is only great if one looks great, and even if the relationship between substance and appearance is built by a salesman cheap trick, outer appearance still remains potentially more substantial than a potential inner substance. This is notorious in his repeated admiration for the art of rhetorical flourishing, from the facade of a building to the bullshit artists which he often praises.
The first thing we did was to invest in beautiful white shutters for the windows. That might not sound like a big deal, but what the shutters did was give a bunch of cold red brick buildings a feeling of warmth and coziness, which was important. I can always tell a loser when I see someone with a car that is filthy dirty. It’s so easy to make it look better.
At this point of conclusion, it should be remembered how, in May 1968, the children of the generation that returned from World War II were unsatisfied with the pacified and functional social order they encountered and invented, among some good ideas and much nonsense, a slogan to counter it: l’imagination au pouvoir. Curiously, the implicit detournement in this slogan, the revolutionary avant-garde character of the message, is subject, in the contemporary age, to a new detournement. Possibly, its authors have severely devalued what imagination and its limits actually mean, as so often happens in the workshops of politics. Having forgotten that the frontiers of the imagination may coincide entirely with the frontiers of perception, nowadays the relativists of 1968 have the answer to their wish, personified in the current president of the United States, which reminds us of the old maxim: be careful about what you wish for. To move towards a conclusion, we can quote the co-author of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, as an example of the current intellectual attitude towards Trump:
I don’t think Donald Trump has an inner life. I don’t think there’s something different going on inside him than you see going on outside him. It’s not just that he’s not introspective; there’s nothing in there to introspect about. Again, for me to label him is unreasonable, but he certainly strikes me as someone without much of a soul or a conscience or emotional range that you would associate with most human beings.[24]
While also exercising an artifice of the imagination, acting as if the problem-of-other-minds was already solved, the contemporary intellectual implicit in Schwartz’s view intends to find in the other an inner life, a thinking subject-recognizable as his own reflection, a mirror of his mental activity. This intellectual creature is mainly a craftsman not of material things but of ideas, and appears to primarily despise the low inner life of the rustic, the hand-worker, the merchant; intentionally or not, he seems to attempt to find in the peasant a poet, in the metallurgist a social critic, and in every human being a philosopher. Such an intellectual persona is able to distinguish an inner, mental, perhaps moral dimension, from an external, phenomenal, superficial dimension. He can also assume that, in art, the inner does not necessarily govern the outer, and in life there is no outer without the inner. But while establishing these moral hierarchies, at the same time he refuses to put himself into play in the plural negotiation of facts if the relativism in question does not serve the ends he prefers. Such a critic appears to attribute an absolute value to truth, and take figurative exercises as poetic ingenuity, when the author-subject of the act or work in question pleases him, while taking them for a lie when the same author-subject displeases him or deals in a craft which he disapproves of. It is particularly revealing to see how many works in the liberal arts in general have been authored in praise of mimesis, others in forgery, and even others on artful stealing and fraud, but regarding the fields of finance and politics, not much complimentary tones can be found. Thus, Schwartz’s accusation that Trump has no inner content but only form, when applied, for instance, to a contemporary artist, would be a great compliment. But when applied to the “common man”-since one of Trump’s major defects for most of his critics is to be a commoner and not a superior intellectual counterpart-it represents an insult, a degree in freedom of imagination that the intellectual apparently does not authorize.[25]
Summing up some main points of this essay, we can establish that an inequitable criterium regarding matters of truth and appearance seems to be used towards the merchant and the artist; that Trump does not seek exclusively material profit (in fact, who does?) and seems to be much more interested in the craft either of his business or of his political negotiations; that Trump’s argumentative arsenal is not fundamentally different in kind from the typical politician’s, only perhaps in degree (namely, in rhetorical resourcefulness); that many respected contemporary intellectuals recognize severe problems regarding the presentation of facts by the press, but cannot handle a character such as Trump as the spearhead of that confrontation; and that many of the traits brought by Trump to the political arena are tolerated and even admired in other activities. This essay also attempted to bridge some gaps between explanations for the terribly antagonistic treatment by the intellectual class that Trump is subject to, while at the same time receiving such a large popular support — in fact, titanically huge, for someone who has been in politics for only 5 years; in this respect, his polarizing character is very much comparable to that of his predecessor. Such a stark division might stem from deeply rooted social stances present in contemporary America — not necessarily in a dualist manner — which have no place to be discussed in this essay, but are certainly deserving of much critical study, which is already underway. Although the full nature of such divisions is not entirely clear, it is the press and the intellectual class who generally have the job to report and study this matters. As in this case both of those parties seem to be compromised by their own corporate interests, we should probably save thanks for Trump, both as citizens and as critics, for making those divisions come so visibly to the public light, and in such a debatable manner, although very much polarized-which would not have happened any other way, as the press and the intelligentsia have a sort of monopoly on the establishment and circulation of ideas. Most of this debate takes place, both in the media as well as in the vast literature already written on the subject, mainly in political terms, or with political biases, or, even if grounded in moral or psychological discussions, with political points to be made; all these are less interesting for classical humanities scholars for who this essay is mainly intended. The debate, however, can also raise superb philosophical puzzlements, some of which are particularly interesting and thoroughly refreshing for the intellectual climate among the intelligentsia in general and academia in particular; Donald Trump sounds very much like a creature who is not easily processable by philosophical thought in general, which seems to illustrate how far philosophers may be from understanding certain positions or crafts. This paper tried to approach and develop those perspectives, hoping that, in the future, non-traditional political and philosophical thought, farther from the business and the profession of politicians and philosophers, and closer to other crafts and trades such as Trump’s or his supporters, can be understood with more serious, more tolerant and open-minded critical analyses.
[1] Some pseudo-psychological/psychiatric literature has picked up this point-and others-in order to prove a mental disfunction of some sort in Trump, going against the American Psychiatry Association’s “Goldwater rule” that forbids long-distance diagnosis. Vd. Frances, 2017; Frank, 2018; Lee, 2017; McAdams, 2020; Samuels, 2016.
[3] Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, USA: Random House, 1987. Henceforth all unmarked citations will refer to this.
[4] This is one of the inaugural moments of Trump’s post-presidential feud with the press. Trump’s staff laid the bait, with a probably purposeful ambitious statement (“[…] largest audience to ever to witness an inauguration, period-both in person and around the globe.”), and the press bit into it, as they tend to do. Initial statements; presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway’s comments; press secretary Sean Spicer’s explanation.
[5] As in accusing his predecessor, Barack Obama, of ordering the wiretapping of his campaign; more on this further on.
[8] Contrary to common thought, early American pragmatists did not categorically deny metaphysics as a valid epistemic content; instead, their descriptions of categorical metaphysical entities such as virtue, ethics, and theological matters were largely empiricist in spirit, privileging function over substance, but not explicitly denying its epistemic value.
[9] Some examples of this complaints might be found in McAddams, 2020; Schwartz in Lee, 2017; Mika, in Id.
[10] Particularly in Matthew, further developed by the fifth/sixth Century commentary Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum and John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Mathew; this view, prevalent in the West but not in the Eastern churches, was carried on by medieval scholastic tradition; later, this feeling of moral disgust towards money was also carried on by one of its modern heirs, Karl Marx. Vd. Chrisman, 2012; Sanchez, 2016; Woyciechowski, 2014.
[12] War of the Worlds (Orson Welles, 1938), the purposely fraudulent radio broadcast, jump-started Welles’ national fame; among other legendary antics, he famously used a real ambulance with sirens on to commute between jobs; and his admiration for forgers is documented in his movie F for Fake (1973).
[13] Many examples can be found in the autobiographical posthumous documentary titled Listen to Me Marlon (Steven Riley, 2015).
[15] Other politicians have obviously always done the same; this rhetorical mode is frequently used in political propaganda, as abstractly claiming that the numbers regarding economic recovery or demographic improvements are the best ever-they can indeed be seen as such, depending on whichever concrete data one finds more important-which reminds us that all hard data is subject to interpretation in order to reach meaning.
[16] The Obama wiretapping of the republican presidential campaign, an accusation made “out of gut instinct”, according to Trump, is part of a political tradition: conflating and mistaking erroneous procedures, or event unethical behavior, for corruption is quite common in politics as well as in journalism; but such accusations are used in a less cautionary way by Trump against his opponents. An example: seeing Adam Schiff, chairman of some political inquiries against Trump, as corrupt, is a legitimate political accusation, as conducting political inquiries in an overly partisan fashion-a subjective matter-can be seen as a form of corruption.
[17] Such as his claims regarding the completed segments of the wall in the frontier with Mexico, and some ad-hoc comments where he imprecisely quotes adversaries or claims to have heard or witnessed things unlikely to have happened: a certain apologetic letter written by Joe Biden, the investigation request to Ukraine’s president, and having witnessed Muslims celebrating terrorism.
[18] Some recent examples: Barack Obama’s precipitous comments on the Trayvon Martin shooting or the costs of healthcare reform; Bill Clinton’s comments on the Lewinsky affair; Reagan’s denial of knowledge in the Contras scandal; George W. H. Bush read my lips campaign pledge; Lyndon Johnson pacifist campaign promises; John Kennedy’s infidelities; even more recently, Joe Biden’s statement that Republicans would put African-Americans “back in chains”, a rhetorical abuse that rivals Trump himself.
[19] The classical example of Don Quixote as the character challenging its author comes to mind; but many modern works have continued the general metafictional tradition, such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) and Calderon de La Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (1635); in film, some of Jean-Luc Godard’s work (Le Petit Soldat [1963] and Prénom: Carmen [1983] come to mind) and the very recent and famous Hollywood film The Truman Show [1998].
[20] This was evident in a discrete but shocking comment made by Trump, when he was already president, in one of his public rallies, on which he stated that if a given action by his part would not produce the intended effect, he would gladly admit his failure, quickly correcting this statement saying that he would instead probably make up some excuse and thus gaining the applause and laughter of the crowd in response; vd. Trump: “I’ll Find Some Kind of an Excuse” if Wrong About Kim Jong Un.
[21] Wilde, Oscar. The Decay of Lying. New York: Brentano, 1905 [1889].
[22] Conference: António M. Feijó on Fake News, Literary Theory Program, School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon, Tuesday, May 22, 2018.
[23] As in one famous quote by Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter: “Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn’t mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don’t go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.” in Trump, 2009.
[25] In that sense, of being nothing more than a common merchant, Trump receives similar antagonism to that of both Harry Truman, a shopkeeper from Missouri, and Richard Nixon, born in poverty within an evangelical family in a small Californian town — thanks to Miguel Tamen for pointing this out.
Bibliography:
Chrisman, R. D. (2012). “Can A Merchant Please God?: The Church’s Historic Teaching on the Goodness of Just Commercial Activity as a Foundational Principle of Commercial Law Jurisprudence”. Liberty University Law Review, 6(3), 2.
Frances, A. (2017). Twilight of American sanity: A psychiatrist analyzes the age of Trump (First edition). William Morrow.
Frank, J. A. (2018). Trump on the couch: Inside the mind of the president.
Lee, B. X. (Ed.). (2017). The dangerous case of Donald Trump: 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president (First edition). Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press.
Levy, J. (2014). “Bob Dylan: The Truth Is, There Is No Truth”. Medium. Com.
McAdams, D. P. (2020). The strange case of Donald J. Trump: A psychological reckoning. Oxford University Press.
Samuels, R. (2016). Psychoanalyzing the Left and Right after Donald Trump: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms. Springer International Publishing.
Sanchez, G. (2016). “Perjury, Lies, Charity, and the Market”. http://opuspublicum.com.
Trump, D., & Bohner, K. (1997). Trump: The art of the comeback (1st ed). Times Books.
Trump, D., & Schwartz, T. (1988). Trump: The art of the deal (1st ed). Random House.
Trump, I. (2009). The Trump card: Playing to win in work and life. Simon & Schuster.
Warmuth, S. (2008). “Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One”. New Haven Review, 6, 70–83.
Wilde, O. (1905). The Decay of Lying. Brentano.
Woyciechowski, M. (2014). “Economy And Business In The Bible”, in Benyik, G., & International Biblical Conference (Eds.). (2014). The bible and economics: International Biblical Conference XXV. ; Szeged, Ferenc Gal Theological College, 22nd — 24th August 2013. Jate-Press. | https://medium.com/@joaonsalmeida/trump-and-the-poets-forma-de-vida-7a4e001c69c9 | ['João N. S. Almeida'] | 2020-12-05 15:11:08.880000+00:00 | ['Trump Administration', 'Politics', 'Trump', 'President Trump', 'President'] |
Managing Ubuntu Snaps: the stuff no one tells you | The snapcraft.io site: where snap developers and users meet
Canonical’s Snaps are definitely the real deal. The secure and portable Linux package management system is more than a geeky tool for showing off your tech creds. Just consider the growing list of companies that have already bought in and are providing their desktop software through snaps, including Blender, Slack, Spotify, Android Studio, and Microsoft’s (Microsoft!) Visual Studio Code. And don’t forget that the real growth of the snap system is in the world of IoT devices and servers rather than desktops.
But as the popularity of snaps grows — some new Linux distros come with the snapd service installed by default — you might be forgiven for wondering how you’re supposed to make them work. Don’t get me wrong: there are all kinds of web-based guides for finding, installing, and removing snaps. And there are places developers can go for help building their applications as snaps. But right now I’m talking about configuring their behavior or troubleshooting when things go wrong.
Just for the record, you search for new snaps to install using something like:
$ snap find aws
When you find a package you like, you install it using:
$ snap install aws-cli
Oh, and you delete ‘em with remove.
$ snap remove aws-cli
There. You can’t say I never taught you anything. But that’s not what this article is about. What we are going to talk about is real management stuff, like changing configurations or troubleshooting things that broke.
Understanding the snap file system
Well, how’s that going to be different from the way you’d normally do it on Linux? Configuration files are usually going to be in /etc/, processes will reveal their deepest secrets through systemctl, and logs will find their way to /var/log/.
Not so fast there, pilgrim. That’s not always how things work in Snapland. You see, a snap is really nothing more than a single compressed file (named using the .snap extension) containing the entire file system needed for running a package. These files are never actually decompressed and “installed,” but are mounted dynamically at run time and exposed to the user as a virtual environment.
This means that the resources used by a program might not actually exist on the host system. Thus, for example, the Nextcloud snap creates its own versions of Apache and MySQL for its backend. So if, say, you want to configure a new virtual host in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ or create a new MySQL user the traditional way, you’re out of luck.
The advantages of this approach are significant: installation and setup will generally be much smoother and you’re far less likely to run into dependency issues and conflicts. But it also at least appears to mean that you get less access to the vital organs that power your software.
So, then, where does everything snappy happen? Take a look through your host file system for yourself: you’ll probably find more snap directories than you can shake a stick at (should you be so inclined). Here are the directories the snap install process probably created:
/snap/
/var/snap/
/var/lib/snapd/
/home/username/snap/
That many? What for? Let’s go through those one at a time. Feel free to poke around your own Linux machine to see all this for yourself.
The actual .snap files are kept in the /var/lib/snapd/snaps/ directory. When running, those files will be mounted within the root directory /snap/. Looking over there — in the /snap/core/ subdirectory — you’ll see what looks like a regular Linux file system. It’s actually the virtual file system that’s being used by active snaps.
$ ls /snap/core/current
bin dev home lib64 meta opt root sbin srv tmp var
boot etc lib media mnt proc run snap sys usr writable
And here’s a subdirectory containing (read-only) configuration files used by the Nextcloud snap. That’ll only be there, of course, if you’ve installed Nextcloud (snap install nextcloud).
$ ls /snap/nextcloud/current/conf/
httpd.conf mime.types ssl.conf
Ok. Now what about /var/snap/? Very much like traditional inhabitants of /var/, the files within /var/snap/ contain various forms of user data and log files — the kind of data that’s generated and consumed by applications during operations. This example shows directories for data used by some desktop-related snaps, including the AWS CLI and the Slack team communication tool. (OK, technically speaking, the AWS CLI isn’t a desktop tool.)
$ ls /var/snap
aws-cli core18 gnome-system-monitor gnome-calculator
brave gnome-3-26-1604 gnome-characters gtk-common-themes
core gnome-3-28-1804 gnome-logs slack
Dive deep into the subdirectories within /var/snap/on your machine and see what you can discover.
That leaves just the ~/snap directory that exists in a user’s home directory on at least some Linux file systems. It’ll contain directories using some of the names you’ll see in /var/snap. What’s going on in there?
$ ls ~/snap
aws-cli brave gnome-calculator slack
As far as I can tell, these directories are meant to store versioned data related to settings used by your user account.
Snap administration tools
So far I’ve shown you how to find various classes of data kept in configuration files (within /var/snap/), virtual file systems (/snap/), and collections of user settings (~/snap). I also showed you where not to look — /var/lib/snapd/ — which is where the .snap files themselves live; nothing to see here, move along now.
Now what about actual administration? This is a bit more complicated. Some snaps — like Nextcloud — expose a fully-featured admin interface. I talk about that in my Administrating Nextcloud as a Snap article. But it seems that the simplicity of snaps sometimes means that there just isn’t much hands-on configuration that’s possible.
However, that’s not always the case. But first, you’ll need to know about snap services. Some more complex applications require multi-layer software stacks. Nextcloud, for instance, creates and manages its own versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Redis. Each one of those “layers” is, in snap terms, called a service.
If any snaps installed on your machine have their own services, you’ll be able to list them along with their status using this snapd command:
$ snap services
Service Startup Current Notes
nextcloud.apache enabled active -
nextcloud.mdns-publisher enabled active -
nextcloud.mysql enabled active -
nextcloud.nextcloud-cron enabled active -
nextcloud.nextcloud-fixer enabled inactive -
nextcloud.php-fpm enabled active -
nextcloud.redis-server enabled active -
nextcloud.renew-certs enabled active -
You can also control the run and startup status of a service. This example will stop Nextcloud’s Apache service and ensure that it doesn’t launch when the system reboots (although, just remember that this will disable Nextcloud — you probably don’t want to do that):
$ snap stop --disable nextcloud.apache
You can also use systemctl to manage snap service processes:
$ systemctl status snap.nextcloud.apache
If your snap includes at least one service, you can view its logs using snapd:
$ snap logs nextcloud
You can also specify a particular service:
$ snap logs nextcloud.mysql
For some snaps (like Nextcloud), snapd makes useful configurations available from the command line. You can display available settings using snap get:
$ snap get nextcloud
Key Value
mode production
nextcloud {...}
php {...}
ports {...}
private {...}
Drop down a level by adding the name of a specific setting. This example shows us that Nextcloud is currently listening on only ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS).
$ snap get nextcloud ports
Key Value
ports.http 80
ports.https 443
You could change a setting using the set command. This one would tell Nextcloud to listen on port 8080 for insecure HTTP requests instead of 80.
$ snap set nextcloud ports.http=8080
Snapd also offers some system-wide configuration settings that are described here, documentation of environment variables is maintained here, and information on keeping your snaps updated can be found here.
All that’ll get you started when things need fixing. So get to it.
Looking for more? You might enjoy my books and Pluralsight courses on Linux, AWS, and Docker-related topics. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/managing-ubuntu-snaps-the-stuff-no-one-tells-you-625dfbe4b26c | ['David Clinton'] | 2019-04-17 12:31:09.338000+00:00 | ['Administration', 'Sysadmin', 'Snap', 'Package Management', 'Linux'] |
App Development Inspiration 54 | From authors
While mobile application is about efficiency and ease of use, you have to attract people to it first. That’s why the UI is just as important as the UX. The two are complementary and should go hand in hand. Make sure the firm you want has UI and UX designers and not just the generic web designers. Specialization is essential to make your digital product that best that it can be. It’s the dream job, all you need to do is to put your idea into a visual way.
UI designers put together the mobile app product and UX designers put together the app product. Don’t just get one in the team and let’s just hope that they are a good combination of the two. UI designers create the actual functional product while UX designers create the visual interface and interactivity.
We’re going to divide the UI and UX in this article into three different categories — usability, visual design, layout and interaction design.
1. Usability
Every action a person takes on a digital product has to be intuitive. You can easily extract the information you need from the interface. The user must be able to find unique information in the interface by him/herself. Users must able to know where the search bar is, how to zoom the image and how to navigate the page.
First Things First
Focusing on usability is the first thing you should always consider. You must make your design user-friendly. Make sure your design has a consistent foundation to it.
2. Visual Design
Visual design is essential. The visual design includes the layout, colors, brand elements, fonts and all the programs that go into the design for digital products. A good UI designer is not only a person that can execute with new ideas but a person who can make something look like it’s been made before, but never been done before.
Boldness and consistency
Make your design visually beautiful if you want to impress your clients. Don’t make the design too ‘in your face’. Everything is about balance. Your design should be bold enough to stand out from the crowd but not overbearing.
3. Layout
Layout for mobile applications is quite different from the layout of desktop applications. When designing for the application, you have to consider many factors. It will be different for every application. However, there are some basic considerations you could consider:
Navigation: You should have one home page. Usually, the home page will have all the share interactivity, and that page will open up to show other pages.
You should have one home page. Usually, the home page will have all the share interactivity, and that page will open up to show other pages. Call to action: You should have a call to action on all major touch points in the application.
4. Interaction design
Interaction design is about figuring out all the different ways that a person can use to back in and out of the application. It’s usually used to screen as possible actions or views. The objective of interaction design is to turn features and functions into interactive element in your application.
After you have the primary element, then you start going after secondary actions.
Ongoing progress is key
It’s critical to show a design progress in order to get feedback from the client. There is always room for changes in every part of the application. This is a continuous process. | https://medium.com/theymakedesign/app-development-inspiration-54-bfcf4c3e681f | ['They Make Design'] | 2020-12-16 07:02:51.985000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Visual Design', 'Design', 'Inspiration', 'Technology'] |
How can blockchain commercialize cleantech? | I have had the pleasure of spending the last few days surrounded by some of the greatest minds and hearts in blockchain. I had the chance to participate in the Cryptochicks hackathon and then attended the UN Blockchain for Impact summit in NYC. It was an inspiring experience to see how some of the brightest minds are working hard to develop solutions to help us achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. While there are 17 SDGs in total, almost all of them are intertwined. With gender equality and climate change being paramount in most of them.
Figure 1: Sustainable Development Goals
In this post I would like to highlight how blockchain can be a vital tool in achieving some of the key SDGs. I have been fascinated with blockchain technology for a few years now. When I learned about the technology I worked at a funding agency that helped entrepreneurs create new solutions for helping fight climate change. A cause that is deeply important to me. When it came time to commercialize these technologies though, time and time again we saw huge difficulty in bringing them to market. It would have been easy to dismiss this by saying that these technologies were not up to the task, but something more institutional was to blame. In this post I would like to highlight how blockchain can help governments modernize and help in the commercialization of technologies vital to reducing carbon emissions.
Let us consider the challenges that clean technologies face and how blockchain can be one critical solution to help our global economies move forward.
The Why-
Globally we seem to recognize that there is a need to act now to change momentum and lower global GHGs to limit the impact we have on the living ecosystem. But progress is marginal, hard, and the path is complex. We are stuck in an innovation loop- unable to break orbit. A substantial number of technologies developed to reduce carbon emissions have proven that they work in demonstration and pilot projects, however these technologies seem unable to make the shift into commercialization. This is despite there being an established need in the market and more favorable economics when it comes to technologies like solar and wind generation.
To have any measurable impact on global carbon emissions- clean technologies need to diffuse in the system quickly, so the natural question arises- are these technologies not proven or is something else holding back their diffusion. For this question, let us first look at how technologies develop.
Figure 2: Technology Development Cycle for Cleantech
Figure 2 illustrates the key stages that a technology goes through on the path to commercialization. These key stages for technology development are illustrated to be linear but often have some degree of overlap. For instance it is vital to ensure that market development for a product happens before you fully scale the development, this stage can begin as early as demonstration. But for simplicity these are presented as being sequential.
As a technology becomes more prevalent, the need to create standards for that technology become more obvious. Its impacts on society become more evident leading for the development of regulations. Illustratively, social media is a technology class that is currently going through industry maturation. As conversations about how to regulate platforms like facebook become mainstream- governments take positions on how to execute these mandates. Conversations about who will regulate the industry, what standards are developed for the industry lend themselves to considerations of which regulatory bodies to create and how to manage them.
One vital point to note is that when an industry becomes worthy of standardization and regulation, there are established incumbents. And our view of an industry is shaped by those incumbents. Facebook will be the main incumbent that is studied to understand how social media should be regulated. Therefore regulations will use established platforms to create an understanding of how to shape industries. Being an incumbent when an industry matures means that the incumbent becomes entrenched as the status quo. Changing an industry after this stage creates huge barrier to entry for disruptors because they may not fit within the regulated norm. This is one critical fact that shapes the challenges faced by cleantech companies.
Unlike facebook and social media, all cleantech would diffuse in established industries with strong incumbents and mature standards and regulatory environments. Cleantech tends to be disruptive, it does not fit within the norm and cannot be standardized based on prior standards. Adding to the challenge is how we created institutions that govern industries. It is often easy to dismiss these challenges by blaming “the government”- without studying the underlying reasons for developing those systems.
How do these institutions create barriers to entry for new firms?
In the current industry set up, cleantech companies face a huge barrier to entry. They are not only innovating to solve technical problems, but they also have to learn to maneuver the complex web of government institutions that govern their industry. And if they happen to intersect multiple industries…well their government relations have to get very sophisticated very fast for two polar reasons:
Governments incentivize development of cleantech through a patchwork of funding instruments through some government institutions. Another set of government institutions becomes barriers to the actual adoption and diffusion of those clean technologies being created.
To be a successful tech start-up you need a great idea, some investors, and engineers to build your product. To be a successful cleantech startup you need a great idea, engineers, a government relations person who understands regulations and standards for your industry, another government relations person who understands how the funding instruments work and very patient investors who understand that after the tech is built- the government regulations need to change before you can sell. Then you may not find yourself in the well known start up “valley of death”.
Figure 3: Canadian Public Sector
Even governments recognize the need for the constraints on companies trying to innovate in established industries. The idea of “regulatory sandboxes” is becoming prominent to encourage innovation in cleantech and fintech- two technology families looking to make a change in highly regulated and established industries. Regulatory sandboxes are essentially industry experiments that test out how certain technologies can lead to greater efficiency. However, when industries span jurisdictions, it can be hard to implement these experiments on a grander scale.
How can blockchain help?
The inherent challenge in these industries is in being able to align individual institutions, that are designed to be independent and autonomous, to one cohesive direction of change. Part of the reason we have built such a system is to ensure that checks and balances are maintained. Powers are spread between different government levels to ensure that no one actor can over-reach. However, in the interest of limiting political interference, often no information is exchanged between institutions and this creates greater division between them. Blockchain can serve to be the platform that, without centralizing, opens channels of communication between these groups and enables them to align and realize efficiencies.
Fundamentally all established industries need to make innovation easier, that is just good practice. But the burden of regulations, codes and standards and other similar instruments becomes onerous in these industries leading to a few big players emerging. Even Oil and Gas industries need to innovate, because until we create meaningful impact on new fuels and new sources of energy, we are all going to be taking planes, trains and automobiles that need some oil or gas in them for the foreseeable future.
One way to change the current architecture is to re-invent the system, to break it and re-create it in a more efficient way. Hulk smash the whole thing and re-do it ground up. But I do not like working harder than I have to. So, if you cant beat em- join em. Literally, the easiest thing would be to create a link between institutions that would enable audit-able, information to flow effortlessly between different parties. If you can ensure the authenticity and reliability of information that flows while maintaining privacy, then you can increase efficiency in the whole system. Part of the reason we regulate heavily is that we cannot trust actors to self-audit.
Here Blockchain offers a unique opportunity to connect different actors in the ecosystem with key information, while auditing that information at the individual transaction level. One challenge in the ecosystem is that the different government agencies responsible for parts of the industry operation are independent and autonomous. During steady state industry operation, this does not slow down the industry. However when industries are going through disruption and seeing an unprecedented amount of new technologies diffusing in this ecosystem, these silos can significantly hamper innovation. Blockchain can help connect these actors, while maintaining their autonomy.
Lets see an example
In Canada, for any technology to be used in the construction industry it has to part of the building code. The building code often calls for technologies and materials to meet the technical standards that are created by the Standards Council of Canada. It can take up to 25 years for a new standard to be created and socialized in all relevant jurisdictions in Canada. The intention of this process is to ensure the safety of the public an create cohesion across the sector. Construction is an industry that hasn’t seen too much innovation in a while and therefore this process doesn’t tend to impact many companies.
The building code may refer to a standard that a group of technologies has to fit, say for instance insulation- all insulation that can be put into a building in a living space should adhere to a standard that the SCC has created for insulation. If your technology can prove that it fits within that standard, you can sell into the market. You would do this by going to labs that are certified to test for SCC standard compliance. They would test your product and give you an essential report card to see if your product meets the test requirements.
Figure 4: How the construction industry adopts a code
To ensure steady operation and autonomy the Standards Council of Canada is not technically part of the federal government. It is rather managed by a board and separate from the political arm of the government. This becomes a key part when trying to change how the current ecosystem works.
Now, many technologies that fall within the cleantech classification are unique and often disruptive so no standards really exist for this class of technologies. For instance, the best building material that meets the standards has already been discovered, to create a more sustainable and clean building material you might have to do something unique, mix materials that have not been combined before. Hypothetically lets say you found a way to reduce the amount of cement needed in a building because you found a new adhesive that can be mixed with cement, reduces GHGs and is just as strong. This cement isn’t really cement anymore — it’s a cement-hybrid. Thus your product wont really fit the current standard for cement in the code, if you don’t fit the code builders cant really trust the product because it hasn’t been validated therefore it will be really hard for you to convince a builder to take the liability of using this product. The may violate the local codes if they use your product, that may impact how their building is insured. Etc etc. You as the product developer also don’t have 25 years of capital to wait and lobby the council to get yourself a standard.
So what is an entrepreneur to do? You can go to another group created within NRC to validate your claims of the technology. This process would indicate to the market that the Canadian government has tested the product and validates your claims. The steps for this are highlighted in Figure 5:
Figure 6: Shortcut to commercial test for product
Now bear in mind that the above process will grant you some assurance with builders because the CCMC process validates that your claims about your product are accurate. However, this does not imply you are in the building code. Additionally, this process is not linked to the development of standards.
Blockchain can help simplify and connect these processes. Since there are several independent and autonomous parties, a blockchain solution would not require any centralization of the process. Additionally, you would easily share only specific information about the technology and process and easily encrypt any sensitive information. Let us take a look at what information could be shared amount the different parties:
Figure 6: Information about the product that could be shared on the blockchain
By sharing the specific information indicated in Figure XX, you could leverage the process for granting a CCMC code to develop a standard. If the SCC has a view of the types of tests being done for new batteries being developed for home use, they can leverage that information to develop a standard for that category of product without creating added complexity for the company. The process could easily be executed with the blockchain technology highlighted in Figure 7.
Figure 8: Potential blockchain solution architecture
The solution could be executed without adding any additional data input requirements for the various actors by leveraging existing databases. This would both reduce human entry error and ensure data privacy is maintained. The following would be a breakdown of how this process could be executed:
Static AI Layer
The static AI layer would merely be an interpretive layer of the existing data. For instance when CCMC creates the panel of experts to develop the testing protocol, the names of those experts would be encrypted but select information about their credentials could be shared with SCC to ensure transparency. When a test protocol has been created, this can be automatically shared with the network to allow all participants to easily track the information flow. Additionally, while the actual test results may not want to be shared the end result and the completion of the test could be shared to help transparency.
Zero knowledge/ Signed Proof
The intention of this step is to automate some part of the analysis done by CCMC to create the final number as well as indicate to the other parties that a standard should be developed.
By digitally connecting parts of the process for development of the standards, entrepreneurs and innovators can see an easier and faster path to market. Canadian innovators are some of the best in class and Canada is often sited as an incubator of technology creation. Unfortunately, our entrepreneurs face the hardest path to market in their home country which can impede their ability to access other markets as well. Cleantech especially suffers this unfortunate challenge. Connecting actors that influence the path to market, while also maintaining their autonomy is the best path to ensure that new technologies are adopted and innovation is fostered throughout the ecosystem. | https://medium.com/@chahal-amandeep/how-can-blockchain-play-a-role-to-facilitate-cleantech-commercialization-6ca061f84da7 | ['Aman Chahal'] | 2019-06-18 16:04:29.006000+00:00 | ['Sdgs', 'Innovation', 'Climate Change', 'Government Innovation', 'Blockchain'] |
I Don’t Ghost Write For Boring Betty’s | Shout out to everyone named Betty (cool name- it was just for alliteration).
Fab image via Unsplash.com
I DON’T WRITE FOR BORING BETTY’S.
I should put that on a t-shirt and hop on ZOOM client calls with it emblazoned across my chest.
For close to a decade I’ve written my fair share of snooze fest fluff content for clients as a ghostwriter and copywriter.
Because 1. I had bills to pay (duh) and 2. That’s what the client wanted and thought their target market needed.
Now- I lovingly fight back.
I can’t write another sentence that includes the phrase, “I help you to…”.
After writing all sorts of content for clients such as obituaries of people that were still alive and kickin’ to adapting the memoir into a screenplay of a notorious drug dealer turned minister, I have a good feel on what gets people triggered.
NO ONE will be inspired to take ACTION by FLUFF.
Passive language and playing it safe is forgettable.
After all, you need your dream peeps on social media, your website, and emails to take ACTION.
ACTION is what gets you a new Mercedes SLK for your birthday. You paying for your kids private school tuition without an installment plan. Being the reason your hard werrkin’ Momma retires sooner than later.
Yeah sooooo, kill the fluff.
I want to inspire you to write to sell (or hire me to do it for you) so people can take ACTION.
Rattle them. Be confident in your claims. Be outrageous. Offer something no one else is offering in a way no one else is. Stand naked and sing to the High Heavens about your gifts during client phone calls (but don’t do this on ZOOM).
BE BRAVE. BE RELATABLE. BE EMOTIONAL. BE A RISK TAKER.
The longer I hang out in these freelancing streets the more I’m standing firm on not writing fluff (and safe) content for clients. Life is to short for using words such as; maybe, can, please, and if, in your marketing.
Storytelling is far too often missing in digital marketing, especially in social media marketing and email marketing. However, it’s such an easy marketing win. It’s a quick strategy that any brand can put to use to get them more connection, clicks, and cash.
So sorry, not sorry Boring Betty. I can’t write for ya! Only brave hearts need to apply! If you’re a brave heart then we can totally shift your entire biz sooner than later with words and strategy, even in a pandemic.
What color is your Benz gonna be?
The Holidaze are upon us, and on that note, I’m ready to whip up the social media captions and email marketing love letters that will get your tribe to feel their feels and press BUY NOW.
Click HERE to make at least an extra $5,957 to close out 2020! | https://medium.com/@iamcholia/i-dont-ghost-write-for-boring-betty-s-cf33fff800f2 | ['Cholia', 'Cj'] | 2020-11-20 22:28:52.643000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing Agency', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Digital Marketing', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
Make LinkedIn Great Again. A guide to optimizing your LinkedIn… | 1. Don't stop at posting your certification
You take a course and successfully complete it, as a result, you are now certified and eager to share it with your network via LinkedIn. Rather than posting how accomplished you feel, maybe go one step further by offering your insights and tips on how you went about achieving it. In addition, rate the course as a guide for everyone.
This technique will definitely help you stand out and portray you as someone who is willing to share experiences in support of others.
2. Achieved something? Offer free support for continual practice
Entrepreneurs educate where they share their knowledge with the rest of the world. They understand that success is through active engagement with the community which is the best way to learning the market needs.
You got certified, offer some valuable insights on what you learned. Maybe also offer to share your resources with a business or colleagues for free as a way to learn and practice. This will enhance your networking skills and introduce you to different opportunities you didn't know existed! Every interaction counts.
3. Don’t just add anybody, curate your circle of followers like you would in real life
There seems to be a trend of hitting the 500+ mark. In desperation, adding just anybody seems enticing but there is a cost to that.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying don't network with just anybody, but if you're looking to find a Job your chances as a marketer won’t lay in the engineering field unless they have a marketing department. Furthermore, adding just anybody out of your industry knowledge won't enhance your insights about the relevant marketplace.
You learn through people, and that is the power of LinkedIn.
Therefore, find the right active people that you know you can learn valuable knowledge from.
4. Don't neglect LinkedIn Stories
Video ranks above all in consuming content. Stories are a great way to organically share your interests and insights. Since its inception is still relatively young, start now before you get lost in the noise of many bigger brands or influencers.
Don't be afraid to get creative on LinkedIn stories, this is your chance to stand out.
5. LinkedIn is proof that a story sells
People love feel-good stories. LinkedIn is notorious for that. How often have you scrolled through posts of HR sharing a story about how they hired someone based on intuition rather than experience. Or how they hired someone young because the candidate showed determination.
People feed off hope. The idea that we all can someday be that someone who made it is what drives engagement.
Don't be afraid to share your story, however, stay genuine.
6. The tone of voice: choose empathy
Don’t use LinkedIn to sell yourself but rather humanize who you are.
It is obvious when someone gloats their achievements. There is nothing wrong with sharing accomplishments but the tone of voice is critical. Always start by addressing a general idea and move towards a personal story that is genuine and authentic. Sharing your vulnerabilities is not a sign of weakness, but rather it humanizes you and allows people to relate to you. Here is an example:
“During these tough times, it is without a doubt that accomplishing something can seem daunting. Feeling demotivated, I am proud to have finally completed the X course. After many days of procrastinating and finding excuses to avoid completing it… here are some tips I would like to share with you on how I went about maximizing my efforts in acclaiming the certification” | https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-truth-about-linkedin-35c3a66d036d | ['Haya Al Qadi'] | 2020-07-04 14:50:55.792000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'LinkedIn', 'Education', 'Social Media'] |
Pro Player Picks Sombra for the First Time in Competition, Stealths, and Immediately Dies | Pro Player Picks Sombra for the First Time in Competition, Stealths, and Immediately Dies
Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment
EscA’s Sombra pick against Mighty Storm at OGN’s Overwatch Apex tournament last night marks the first time the latest hacker hero has ever been played in a professional competition. The map was Temple of Anubis and EscA managed to stealthily infiltrate the enemy’s defenses until he took a sleep dart to the face, courtesy of SIP on Ana. With less than 30 seconds into the game, Sombra had stealthed, tanked a sleep dart, and proceeded to die. You can tell by EscA’s reaction that he’s just having fun and knows he’s being silly. See his reaction for yourself in the clip below:
Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment/OGNGlobal
However, EscA is not a quitter. He was determined to play Sombra and refused to switch off to another hero. Unfortunately, he ate another sleep dart to the face later in the match and died again. But to be fair, he was able to at least survive the entire duration of the sleep dart this time so progress!
Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment/OGNGlobal
EscA a.k.a .Kim In-Jae was a member of the South Korean Team that won the first Overwatch World Cup a few a weeks ago so we know he’s no slouch. However, that doesn’t mean he knows how to play a brand new hero within a day of her official addition to the game. Lesson learned: Don’t pick a new hero in a competitive setting before you’ve practiced with them. A lesson that no one in Competitive Mode is following right now. | https://esports.hollywood.com/sombra-picked-for-the-first-time-in-pro-setting-stealths-and-immediately-dies-7c37fd2942d1 | ['Sam Lee'] | 2016-11-18 16:46:49.744000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Overwatch', 'Blizzard Entertainment', 'Esports'] |
They Used to Like Me and Now They Hate Me: Becoming a Manager | From one day to the other, you became the person you said you were never going to be and realized it’s not so easy to be in charge.
A manager speaking to her team
Digital Marketing and possibly a lot of other professions are very competitive. How many times have you heard a marketer giving a completely different opinion from another marketer regarding a business problem?
Now, imagine being the leader of a marketing or communications team with which you shared the same level inside an organizational chart? It’s definitely not a simple task and you need to be prepared both mentally and emotionally.
The first thing you’ll realize is that you will start having empathy for some of the bosses, leaders, managers you have had in the past, as it’s nearly impossible to have everyone happy most of the time.
You are now the person that needs to speak for them, to defend their work, to move their efforts towards an objective. At the same time, you are going to be criticized by them as they won’t be trusting some of your decisions, or they are going to have contrary opinions between themselves which will confuse you throughout your time as a manager.
Here are some situation you’ll encounter with tips to survive the ordeal:
They will talk about your performance. And if they have an intense personality, they will probably share the criticism directly to you. Learn to listen, you can actually use some of their points to your advantage to improve your work. If they are offensive because they became too emotional, just… let it go… let it go.
And if they have an intense personality, they will probably share the criticism directly to you. Learn to listen, you can actually use some of their points to your advantage to improve your work. If they are offensive because they became too emotional, just… let it go… let it go. You will be suddenly a Human Resources person for them. You also need to hear why they are feeling unhappy during certain times as they will think you have the power to change the business decisions. Yeah, you’re a guardian too, share what you consider to be something that can be changed with your boss, you already have the no, just learn what is a priority and what is not.
You also need to hear why they are feeling unhappy during certain times as they will think you have the power to change the business decisions. Yeah, you’re a guardian too, share what you consider to be something that can be changed with your boss, you already have the no, just learn what is a priority and what is not. A fight intermediary. Yeah, you’ll be the voice of reason whenever there are clashed with your team. You need to keep neutral and be a balance for them to reconcile.
Yeah, you’ll be the voice of reason whenever there are clashed with your team. You need to keep neutral and be a balance for them to reconcile. Team events are key. Maybe you used to be that employee that hated participating in this type of activities, but probably you’ve learned why they are necessary, and at the same time, why you should respect those team members that prefer not to participate.
Maybe you used to be that employee that hated participating in this type of activities, but probably you’ve learned why they are necessary, and at the same time, why you should respect those team members that prefer not to participate. Some of them will try to compete with you. This is one of the most challenging situations, but you need to trust your knowledge and work. Most of the time, managers are there for a reason. You’ve proven yourself worth it.
This is one of the most challenging situations, but you need to trust your knowledge and work. Most of the time, managers are there for a reason. You’ve proven yourself worth it. Uh oh, they have reached your boss. This is quite unlikely, but it can happen. Be neutral if you need to speak with your boss and you’ll be fine. Some team members just want to be listened to, remind them you are open to hearing their worries and thoughts.
This is quite unlikely, but it can happen. Be neutral if you need to speak with your boss and you’ll be fine. Some team members just want to be listened to, remind them you are open to hearing their worries and thoughts. When it’s time to say goodbye to a team member. Whether if it was your decision or someone above you tells you there is no more money to pay this specific person or whatever reason behind this decision. Don’t close your doors with the person concerned, let her/him/them know you are there for a recommendation letter or whatever opportunity that could occur in the future. Everyone is a valuable asset and people are the most important resource of any business.
Being an intern, junior, senior, manager, director is a challenge, everyone needs to be humble and learn to share knowledge because a team is always better than a single person. Trust your skills and you’ll be fine. If this is too much for your mental health there is no shame in speaking with a therapist or even a friend.
Finally, remember, you may find friends within a work or maybe just acquaintances that will form part of your team and it’s fine. It’s humane liking or not liking someone, just separate this from work and everything will flow.
A random music video to enjoy the randomness of human relationships to close the cycle of this text: | https://medium.com/@michell-mor/they-used-to-like-me-and-now-they-hate-me-becoming-a-manager-74d33ecfb03d | ['Michell Mor'] | 2020-12-09 04:26:54.630000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Team Building', 'Communications Department', 'Management And Leadership', 'Human Resource Management'] |
Buy BitTorrent (BTT) in India — Step by Step Guide for Beginners | BitTorrent (BTT) Complete guide for Beginners.
What is Bittorent?
BitTorrent (BTT) is a cryptocurrency that operates on the Tron Foundation blockchain. It is connected to a renowned file-sharing service BitTorrent. It was created with an eye to tokenize BitTorrent, the largest decentralized file-sharing protocol in the world.
BTT is a TRC-10 utility token based on the blockchain that powers features of the most popular decentralized protocols and applications in the world. BTFS is a decentralized file storage system supported by millions of BitTorrent user nodes.
Key elements of Bittorent include:
1. Variety of services
BTT can be used for a variety of services in the ecosystem. Service requester can advertise bids and pay with BTT for more bandwidth to receive content while Service providers will be incentivized to distribute content to more people, ensuring more robust performance.
2. Delegated Proof of Stake
By running on the blockchain, which has a Delegated Proof of Stake method of processing blockchain transactions, BTFS addresses these limitations.
3. Decentralized storage system
BTFS represents the first decentralized storage system that can be used by decentralized application (DApp) developers. Soon, BTT will be introduced into the BTFS ecosystem to incentivize a fair and abundant file system.
How to Buy Bittorent in I?
BitTorrent (BTT) is a peer-to-peer network that allows content creators to connect with their audience, earn and spend digital currency without a middleman. Their mission is to
“ to build a better Internet. To work with people, industries, and nations to create better ways to move information. Better ways for creators to make money. New ways for fans to engage, on their terms. Ways to sustain the stuff we share.”
Buy Bittorent in India — Step by Step Guide For Beginners
BuyUcoin is an exchange that provides buying and to Sell Bittorent in India as well as other cryptocurrencies. Below is a step by step guide to buy Bittorent via BuyUcoin:
Step 1 — Open a Digital Wallet
A digital wallet is where you hold your cryptocurrencies and interacts with others via blockchain technology. There are many providers of digital wallets, however, it is important to make a deep research before you decide which one is the best for you. Currently, the most popular digital wallets provider is BuyUcoin.
Step 2 — Register & Open an Account
Once you enter buyucoin/signup, register and open an account that can provide you with their service. Select the type of your account either individual or corporate. Select your country and agree on the terms and conditions register your account for crypto trading.
Registered for buy BitTorrent (BTT) in India.
Step 3 — KYC
KYC and AML are mandatory for Indian jurisdiction. Your data is saved and encrypted and is stored in Indian data centers only. You will be redirected to a different URL to complete your KYC. Please be ready with your recent selfie. You will need the images of your pan card. You will need the mobile number with you which is linked with your Aadhar.
Step 4 — Google 2 Step Verification
To use 2FA you will have to install an Authenticator app on your smartphone or tablet. Once enabled you will be asked to provide an additional six-digit one-time password along with your email and password every time you login to your BF account. This works only when signing in with email and password. When using Facebook or LinkedIn you can enable 2FA with your social media provider settings.
Enable Google 2 Step Verification to secure your account.
Step 5 — Add Bank details
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Trade Bittorent
It has a current circulating supply of 659 Billion coins and a total volume exchanged of ₹10,694,543,184
BitTorrent has a great future. It is predicted that BTT may eventually be recognized as a top 10 cryptocurrency in the next couple of years. By around the year 2025, may land a high price of around $0.01 and may even further the gains into the next couple of years.
The trading volume data allows assessing the overall strength of the trend, which, in turn, provides means for a more precise BTT price forecast, and predicts the shifts in supply and demand that play a decisive role in price changes in both the immediate and distant future.
BitTorrent trading volume for the past 24 hours is $191 798 480 that constitutes the increase from the previous day. The current tendencies with regard to changes in the average trading volume reveal the increasing demand for BTT coins on the backdrop of the decreasing supply of the corresponding cryptocurrency.
Can I Use Regular Money to Buy Bittorent?
Yes, you can buy Bittorent with regular money using the BuyUcoin cryptocurrency platform. Just use the torrent program like normal, there is nothing else you need to learn or do. When a torrent file finishes downloading, your BitTorrent client can automatically earn BTT by seeding. The longer you seed torrents, the more BTT crypto torrent tokens you may be able to earn.
Getting a Bittorent Wallet
BitTorrent is the leading P2P communications protocol that utilizes economic incentives to enhance the speed of transferring huge files through the internet. Unlike other modes of downloading, BTT maximizes the transmission speed by collecting pieces of the file you want and downloading the bits from sources that might have them. The procedure helps most of the huge files like TV programs and videos download faster.
Very recently, Tron has launched a native token, called BitTorrent (BTT) after the acquisition that had happened in July 2018. BTT tokens (TRON based cryptocurrency), that would be issued by the BitTorrent Foundation and specifies TRX10 compatibility where they must adhere to the technical token standard, enabled by the TRON blockchain. During the launch of its first airdrop, BitTorrent tokens got sold in less than 15 minutes, netting more than 17 million.
Bittorent Exchanges
BTT is a TRC-10 utility token based on the blockchain that powers features of the most popular decentralized protocols and applications in the world. DApps powered by BTT includes BitTorrent Speed, BitTorrent File System, DLive, and others in the pipeline.
Bittorent Mining
You can keep using your existing client, as it’s fully compatible with the new generation of BitTorrent Speed enabled torrent clients. There is no support for mining. By connecting the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network to the TRON blockchain, we offer a new experience to over 100M+ users.
BitTorrent is built on top of the Tron protocol as a TRC-10 cryptographic token. This process, named BitTorrent Speed, helps with downloading speed and users to keep their files on the torrenting software, which, in turn, will give users the ability to download files that they want more easily. Furthermore, BTT tokens have monetary value, meaning that users can convert the tokens into fiat money or spend it to unlock benefits on the network.
Conclusion
Furthermore, BTT is incorporated as an incentive system within the BitTorrent ethos. The purpose of these incentives is to promote the BTT project to current and prospective participants, to allow for governance on the Blockchain, and to facilitate future discussions about protocol upgrades and extensions. | https://medium.com/buyucoin-talks/buy-bittorrent-btt-in-india-step-by-step-guide-for-beginners-9d40371eeddf | ['Rinkesh Jha'] | 2020-09-29 10:38:21.557000+00:00 | ['India', 'Beginner', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Buy Bittorrent', 'How To'] |
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