title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
829
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
| tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
This is What Independent And Guarded People Don’t Tell You
|
This is What Independent And Guarded People Don’t Tell You
Not all of them are born that way.
Photo by Timothy Paul Smith on Unsplash
When you meet an independent and guarded person, it’ll be easy for you to think they are born that way. They seem so strong, so self-sufficient, so natural at being on their own doing their own things that you can’t see any way they’re ever needy and weak.
And you’re right. They’re not needy and weak. Not at all. They’re indeed strong and self-sufficient and genuinely good at being on their own doing their own things.
Well, they actually love it. They love their own space, their independence, their cautiousness, and they aren’t afraid of being alone, or even lonely.
But what you might be wrong is by assuming these characteristics are innate. Not all of them are born that way.
Like every other human being, the independent and guarded person first greets life with baby dove eyes and happy smiles, loudly needing to be cared for and loved. Once upon a time, they look at the world around them with purity and openness, spread their arms wide open to welcome affection, and eagerly give all back.
But then things change — subtly, slowly, gradually, or even abruptly. Before they know it, somewhere in their adolescence, they start taking on the role of their own parent, their own partner, their only someone. They have people around them but the safe environment which allows them to freely reach out and fearlessly ask for love is no more. It’s already too late.
This is when they learn their first lessons. They learn the hard price of every action they take, of their appearance, their youth, their optimism, their naivety. They learn what not to do, when not to speak, how not to be too loud, too big, too demanding. They learn to rely on themselves, to be okay, to not ask for love, to accept their lone existence and be happy about it.
And most of the time, they’re happy about it — It’s just a different way of life, for better or worse. In fact, they’re grateful for all the unique opportunities to grow and become incredibly more enriched and humbled. But if you ever share a private moment with them and ask them whether they wish life could be any different so that maybe they didn’t have to be so strong, so independent. They would tell you, honestly, sometimes they do.
They would lie if they said they had never looked at a conventionally happy family and not felt a pang of envy and self-pity. Or watched those kids who are surrounded by so much love and protection that heartbreak might just last as long as a good cry or a few nights out with the best mates, and not imagined how much less daunting their setbacks would’ve felt if they had had a portion of that same on-going support at critical stages of their life.
They would lie if they said being strong and independent had always been a choice, that they didn’t yearn to be held, to be kissed, to experience those mundane, corny love gestures. Of course, they do. They have human needs and desires and a universe of wonders in them to offer… if only they ever had a chance to show it.
The truth is, they would trade this extreme independence for some softness and helplessness in a heartbeat if it means being loved and treasured and never left behind. They wouldn’t consciously choose to toughen up all the time such that “No it’s okay” has become an automatic response whenever anyone offers some help.
But this is their reality.
Over time, they’ve successfully convinced the world, or even themselves, of this narrative. It’s now expected of them to take any pain and quietly move on like nothing got to them. They don’t get to be weak or vulnerable. They can’t bet on a superhero to come and save them — not that they would ever need it — or heck, even just a phone call or a text message to cheer them up when they run low of strength and energy.
But they will find a way anyway. They will pick themselves up again and again, and keep on going. Because that’s their best, and might well be their only, option.
The things independent and guarded people don’t tell you are plenty, but what they most likely keep to themselves is when they need you. They don’t tell you they miss you, they want you all for themselves, they long for happiness and security and being able to rely on the one they love just like anyone else.
But they do.
Don’t go, they inaudibly scream. Please stay, their heart quietly aches.
And when you go, when you’re so sure they can handle any goodbye and separation because look — they’re so strong and independent, their soul dies a little, and their shell hardens up a little bit more. Now, they’re even more strong and independent.
They believe this is their fate.
They continue to hold their head up high, confidently stride forward and casually act like they need nobody.
Deep down, they don’t know.
Sometimes they wish you could just tell it’s possibly nothing but a facade.
|
https://medium.com/tinglymind/this-is-what-independent-and-guarded-people-dont-tell-you-cf4937eec94a
|
['Ellen Nguyen']
|
2020-07-11 09:36:19.502000+00:00
|
['Emotions', 'Psychology', 'Love', 'Self', 'Life']
|
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
|
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
5 strategies that helped me win Nanowrimo and how they can help you
Photo by Alex on Unsplash
Nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month and takes place every November. It began in 1999 by Christ Baty in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the beginning there were 21 participants. Twenty-one years later there are more than 798,162 participants from all over the world. The goal is write 50,000 words between November 1st through November 30th. It’s a free annual event where aspiring novelists use this time to write an average of 1,667 words per day to meet their goal. If writers can write 50,000 within the month of November, they are declared winners after their words have been uploaded and verified.
Here are five strategies to helped me win Nanowrimo and they can help you, too: setting aside time to write every day, working in increments of time to help you focus when you can’t get moving, having a daily word goal, and “Writing with the door closed” a la Stephen King.
Set Aside Time to Write Every Day
When I began Nanowrimo 2020 I made a point to set aside time every day to write. I either made my word goal or I didn’t. I either wrote 1,667 words or maybe it was 254. It didn’t matter. I made time to write. I prefer mornings, but there were times when that wasn’t possible and I squeezed in a few words before bedtime. But as a general rule, once my four children were successfully online for school, I made myself a mug of hot tea and began writing. As the month went on, I found that it was much easier to conjure up ideas and sentences when it became a habit to sit at the same place, at the same time, day after day. Sometimes I hand wrote notes as I played with ideas. Sometimes I started my session by spending 15 minutes on the internet doing research and jotting more notes which lead to more ideas which lead to sentences which lead to paragraphs. By the end I was writing anywhere between 1,100 to 2,000 words a day. The suggested word count per day was to write 1,667 words a day in order to meet the 50,000 word goal by the end of the month.
Working in 15-minute time increments
When I struggled to stay focused, I set the timer for 15 minutes. This is a teaching strategy I used with my students when they couldn’t accomplish a task. The timer kept them on task or if they were off task, the timer would bring them back to their assignment. I followed this tactic throughout Nanowrimo and when I started meeting my time goals, I would extend the time increments anywhere between 15–20 minutes. Towards the end of the month I found that I had gotten into the habit of sitting down and writing and would forget to set the timer only to realize several paragraphs later I never heard the chimes. If I’ve been away too long from my writing, this strategy helps to bring me back. It was also a good way for my children to hold off disturbing my writing time. When they started to ask a question, if it wasn’t an emergency I’d tell them, “Give me x,y,z minutes to finish my thoughts and I’m happy to help you.” In this way, I was able to get more done, they interrupted less, and they learned to wait for the chimes before grabbing my attention.
Another benefit of timed increments is that if it rang in the middle of a sentence, sometimes I wouldn’t finish the sentence, but merely stop in the middle of my thought. I would highlight the words in another color to help me find it when it was time to come back. It sounds counterproductive, but I’ve found that when I stop midway through an idea, it’s easier to go back to it for the next increment in time. I always had something in the works and I wasn’t looking for inspiration to strike.
Daily Word Goal
The Nanowrimo site provides different graphs to help keep you motivated. In order to meet the 50,000 word goal by November 30th, you have to write 1,667 a day. Depending on how much you write your goal for the next day fluctuates with the number of words you need to write in order to meet your goal by the end of the month. There are also two other graphs to help motivate you: your overall progress graph and your daily word count graph.
Watching my daily word goal get smaller with each passing day encouraged me to keep writing more. I really like watching my ring close on my daily word count. And on the days that I could only get a few hundred words I still felt accomplished. Even minimal forward progress is still progress,
Write with the Door Closed
In his book On Writing, Stephen King gives the advice to write with the door closed. He suggests getting all the words and ideas down before sharing them with anyone else. There are many Nanowrimo groups where you can ask questions and pick someone’s brain. Ask questions that help you lead to character development, to find the right word, to describe the scenery, but don’t use Nanowrimo time to share pages of your writing to make big changes.
Save the Editing for When it’s Done
The idea behind Nanowrimo is to attempt to write a book or at least 50,0000 words by the end of November. Save the editing for when it’s over. The purpose is to move forward and get the words and ideas down on paper.
Benefits
By participating in Nanowrimo this year I gained the following:
Daily writing habit Writing became a priority on my to-do list Because I took the time to write everyday the ideas started to come more easily. My writing improved over all. Comparing the pages that I wrote at the beginning of the month to the those I wrote closer to the end shows my growth as a writer. The muse was able to find me more easily as I made time to write at the same time day after day.
For years I had watched Nanowrimo from the sidelines. In 2019 I hesitantly participated but lacking the confidence, I had a harder time getting my ideas on paper. After dedicating time to write articles and essays for over a year, I decided to give Nanowrimo another try. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The only way to get my ideas out of my head was to put them on paper. All of my excuses revolved around the lack of time. Nanowrimo gave me a reason to make the time. Even with four kids home full-time logging on for distance learning (thanks, COVID), I was still able to participate and win. The event is free and the only person you disappoint is yourself. No one cares what you write or how much you write. It’s the honor system. But there are hundreds of people who will cheer you on along the way as you share your progress, your triumphs, and your frustrations. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
|
https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year-b90dd1363bbe
|
['Heather Jauquet']
|
2020-12-06 20:02:59.380000+00:00
|
['Writing For Writers', 'Writers On Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'NaNoWriMo', 'Writing']
|
How a Bad LMS Made Me Drop Out of Grad School
|
(and Advice for Universities)
I’ve always been organized. I love spontaneity and the thrill of the unknown, but when it comes to staying on top of my “life” to do list, I’ve got it covered. Planned. Scheduled. Politely requesting a reminder from Siri. And maybe even written on the calendar in my kitchen for good measure.
Staying organized as a K-12 student and then as an undergrad had its challenges. Multiple courses and assignments, shifting due dates and agile syllabi were a lot to juggle. But, I got by like most of my peers. We were used to the paper-shuffle hustle because we hadn’t yet experienced how mobile technology would make staying organized and connected easier. We were accustomed to physically sitting in a classroom with our classmates and a teacher instructing, interacting and reminding us of upcoming assignments.
Following college, I worked as a journalist and public relations professional. My career path shifted to a marketing and business focus after I began working at a digital marketing agency in 2007.
At this point, you may have deduced that I’m an older millennial. Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook during my junior year of college in 2004. Three years later, the iPhone hit the market. :)
In 2008, I began working at a large corporation as a digital marketing manager. I knew that in order for me to have a better shot at a leadership position in the future, a master’s degree was in order. I thought having a marketing-focused MBA coupled with a bachelor’s in journalism would be a solid combination — especially for the content marketing path I wanted to eventually explore.
Thinking about going back to school felt overwhelming. I was working well over 40 hours a week at the time, and the thought of driving to a campus and having to be somewhere at a certain time wasn’t appealing. After some research, online graduate school sounded easier to manage — even though I never experienced an online learning environment.
Back to School
I enrolled in an online university (that shall go unnamed). During the admissions process, I received a high-level overview of the learning management system (LMS) or “virtual classroom” environment that I would be working in. The user interface seemed old school, but I was determined to get started on my master’s program.
Oh, how I wished I would have asked the admissions representative to do a “deeper dive” on the LMS. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.
My first class was Business Accounting. I had to purchase a book for the class, but it wasn’t a physical paper or hardback. It was an e-Book — and a terrible one at that. It was clunky, didn’t allow you to highlight, copy or paste text and the bookmarking feature didn’t work. Now math has always been something I’ve had to work especially hard at, and I was already feeling anxiety about this course. But then layer on top of that a clunky book that took more time trying to navigate than actually read, and an online learning environment that looked like it was straight out of 1993. Not to mention never meeting or even seeing a photo online of my classmates or my professor. I felt totally alone and disengaged.
I hung in there, though. Over the next two months, I logged into the archaic LMS during the assigned times for group discussions and assignment submissions. Staying organized was difficult. Nothing flowed. Nothing was easy. I felt bad emailing my professor if I didn’t understand something or couldn’t locate a document I was supposed to read or reference. I didn’t want my professor to feel like a customer service agent.
If only the LMS were mobile friendly and mimicked the experience of a social media platform. Things would have been so much better…
Peace Out
I gave it the ol’ college try, but online learning wasn’t for me. After some self reflection, I decided I needed some time to reevaluate my pursuit of a graduate degree.
My time management skills were solid, but I just couldn’t get over how terrible the LMS was. I probably spent nearly as much time trying to navigate that platform as I did actually reading and working on assignments. I dropped out of the Business Accounting course, and completely withdrew from the university.
A Few Years Later
Skip ahead a few years, and I found myself working on the marketing and communications team at an online graduate school. One of the perks in the benefits package was employees could earn a degree from the university tuition free! I still wanted to go back to school for my MBA, but my previous online learning experience scarred me. But, FREE.
I thought it would be silly to pass up an opportunity to get a free master’s degree (though I still had to pay for books and taxes). So I decided to give it the ol’ college try again. Surely LMS technology would’ve advanced by 2013 considering Facebook and other social media had gone mainstream. Um, yeah. Nope.
I found myself back in the 90s. I had to check to make sure my iPhone hadn’t turned into a Zack Morris-style-Saved By the Bell phone. “How were colleges so behind the times?” I thought. But, this time, I was determined to finish my degree. Because, FREE. And because, future leadership role.
The unfriendly LMS didn’t make it easy, though. I begrudgingly logged into that clunky LMS each week, each time mentally noting recommendations on how to improve the experience for students and faculty.
I’m happy to say I persisted. I received a conferred master’s in business administration degree November 2014 (and a new appreciation for beautiful customer-focused design). Because of both of these experiences, I have several recommendations on how an LMS can go from dreadful to delightful.
Advice for University Administrators, CIOs and Other LMS Decision Makers
Get With the Times
It’s 2017. If your LMS even remotely brings back memories of Windows 95, you better check yo self before you wreck yo self. Not only does an archaic LMS negatively impact student success and satisfaction, it also poorly reflects on your university’s brand.
Make the Investment
EBITDA, profits and revenues, oh my! If you’re a university administrator or CIO, you’ve got financial goals and KPIs you need to hit each year. While a large upfront investment (depending on your model) could potentially hinder you from hitting your financial targets for a fiscal year, don’t think short term. Make the case for change and the investment now with a long-term vision for student success, satisfaction, retention and completion rates.
Explore Outside of the LMS Industry Vets
There are no doubt a few gorillas in the learning management world with a large share of the market and brand recognition. But before you narrow your next RFP to these “big names,” explore some of the new solutions on the market today. Many of the newer LMS platforms are disrupting the old regime with user-friendly interfaces that feel more like social media than a learning management system.
Engage Students and Faculty in the Decision Making Process
Talk to the people who are actually using your learning technology. Set up focus groups and survey current students, ask your alumni and do user testing. It can be easy for administrators to make decisions in a vacuum when time is of the essence, but slow down and poll the people who are or were actual users. Having your own primary research data on your LMS will be even more compelling to make your case for change.
Get Social
Sure there are discussion forums on most LMS platforms. But don’t confuse that as being social. Today, students demand modern, simplistic and interactive social learning platforms that feel like the social channels they’ve been using for more than a decade.
University administrators should hop on Insta and Facebook. Explore the social media sites students (and faculty) are using. A social learning platform with customizable features, personalized photos and a Facebook-like experience is what students demand today. Especially in a 100 percent online program, it’s important for students to feel a sense of community. “Seeing” their peers and faculty connects them and facilitates engagement.
Email is Old School
If you’re a faculty member and feel like it’s pulling teeth getting your students to respond to emails, don’t worry. It’s not you; it’s them. Students barely check email! Today, they retrieve information from social news feeds, push notifications and messenger platforms.
Reduce email communication when possible, and check with your IT team to see what technology may exist to help you transform how you communicate with students.
Mobile First
Mobile is life as the Gen Z’ers and Millennials would say. If your LMS isn’t mobile responsive or you don’t have an app your students and faculty can log into, you are falling behind. Students want the ability to check assignment due dates, respond to an email, engage in a discussion and get push notification reminders whether they’re on the go or on the couch. Mobile first is the mantra for technology providers today, and it should be yours, too.
It Doesn’t Have to Be as Daunting as You May Think
Change is tough. We get used to things being a certain way and resist change even if we know the payoff will be worth it in the end. Thinking about implementing a new LMS for one course let alone an entire university can seem daunting. But, good news! There are several solutions on the market today with implementation that can be as simple as flipping on a switch. And, because many new platforms have fresh, intuitive interfaces, learning a new system doesn’t have to be scary.
The old LMS platform is being disrupted. With the proliferation of online universities and more traditional schools offering 100 percent online programs, it’s imperative to have a social learning platform that aligns with the technology trends and advancements of today. Those who invest in the student experience now will reap the rewards of increased student engagement, better student outcomes and a happy alumni community ripe for referrals.
|
https://medium.com/notebowl/how-a-bad-lms-made-me-drop-out-of-grad-school-48eea14715b3
|
['Alexis Castorina']
|
2017-02-24 21:54:30.328000+00:00
|
['Edtech', 'Social Learning', 'Education', 'Learning', 'Lms']
|
What is the Purpose of Life? — You Already Know the Answer
|
Photo by Sam Burriss on Unsplash
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here’s the truth, my heart used to pop right out of its sac whenever someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask “ What is it that you want to do with your life? “
If you think that this question is as simple as it’s complex — you are not wrong.
Life is very complex.
We, the humans are also very complex.
So, before you think that out of the 7 billion people in the whole world, you are the only one looking to grasp what you are supposed to do with your life — just stop.
The truth is, every Tom, Dick and Harry is facing the same problem — they’re all trying to find their purpose in this world.
Just like you, they question if they’re doing the right thing, if they’re on the right path, if they’re truly happy with the decisions they’ve made in their life.
Trust me on this, you will never again crave to be in the shoes of that young CEO, of that successful medical doctor and that your friend that became rich out of the blues — if you understand that all of us are in this maze of life together with no clarity of what’s going to happen.
Even though that life is a rollercoaster ride, a maze full of endless possibilities — it’s highly important that everyone understands why we are here in the first place.
What is the purpose of life?
Unlike life itself, the answer is not complex. But before we get to that, it’s of great necessity that we understand what the purpose of life isn’t.
Let’s take a deep dive into it.
Why the Achievement of Goals is NOT the Purpose of Life (And Why It May Destroy You).
Photo by Harry Quan on Unsplash
Once upon a time, there lived a wise man. He was the head of a small village. Everyone respected him and his views and opinions were well regarded. Many people came to him seeking for advice.
His son, however, was very lazy and wasted his time sleeping and spending time with his friends. No amount of advice or threat made any difference to him. He wouldn’t change at all.
The years passed, and with time faded the youth of the wise man. As he grew older, he began to worry about his son’s future. He recognized the need to give something to his son so that he can take care of himself and his family to be.
One day, he called his son to his room and said-”My son, you are no more a kid now. You must learn to take responsibilities and understand life.”
“I want you to find the real purpose of your life and when you find it remember it always and you will lead a life full of happiness and joy.”
Then he handed his son a bag. When the son opened the bag, he was surprised to see 4 pair of clothes, one for each season. There also were some raw food, grains, lentils, little money and a map.
His father continued-”I want you to go find a treasure. I have drawn a map of the place where the treasure is hidden, you need to go and find it.”
The son loved this idea. The next day, he eagerly set out on a journey to find the treasure. He had to travel really far across borders, forests, plateaus and mountains.
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. Along the way, he met a lot of people. He was helped by some with food and by some with shelter. He also came across robbers who tried to rob him.
Slowly the season changed and so did the landscapes along with it. When the weather was unpleasant, he halted for the day and continued his journey when the weather cleared.
Finally, after a long year, he reached his destination. It was a cliff. The map showed the treasure being placed below the cliff under the tree. Upon spotting the tree, he began to dig the ground. He searched and searched- around it, under it, on it- but found nothing. He spent two days looking and digging for the treasure. By the third day, he was so exhausted that he decided to leave.
Disappointed over his father’s lie, he headed back to his home. On his way back, he experienced the same changing landscapes and seasons. This time, however, he halted to enjoy the blooming flowers in spring and the dancing birds in monsoon. He stayed in places only to watch the sun set in paradise or to enjoy pleasant summer evenings.
Since, the supplies he carried were over by then, he learned to hunt and make arrangement for his meals. He also learned how to sew his clothes and shelter himself. He was now able to determine the hour of the day by the position of the sun and plan his journey accordingly. He also learned how to protect himself from wild animals.
He met the same people who had helped him earlier. This time he stayed a few days with them and helped them in some or the other way to repay them. He realized how nice they were to an ordinary passerby who had nothing to offer to them in return.
When he reached home, he realized it had been two years since he left the place. He walked straight into his father’s room.
“Father”, — He said
The father immediately jumped to his feet and hugged his son.
“So how was your journey my son, did you find the treasure” he asked.
“The journey was fascinating father. But forgive me for I wasn’t able to find the treasure. Maybe somebody took it before I reached.” He surprised himself by what he just said. He wasn’t angry at his father. Instead, he was asking for forgiveness.
“There wasn’t’ any treasure in the very first place my son”-father answered smiling.
“But why did you send me to find it then”, he asked.
“I will surely tell you why, but first you tell me, how was your journey to the place? Did you enjoy it?”
“Of course not father! I had no time. I was worried someone else would find the treasure before I did. I was in a hurry to reach the cliff.” He continued-”but I did enjoy the journey on my way back home. I made many friends and witnessed miracles every day. I learned so many different skills and the art of survival. There was so much I learnt that it made me forget the pain of not finding the treasure.”
The father said to him- “Exactly my son. I Want you to lead your life with a goal. But if you remain too focused on the goal, then you will miss out the real treasures of life. The truth is, life has no goal at all, other than to just experience it and grow with it every single day.”
Goals. Are. Awesome.
Or are they?
In a way, setting the right goals can help to make your dreams come true. And that’s why goal setting is hailed as the golden step to success.
But no matter how shiny, good, and glorious your goals may be, they should never be your primary purpose or aim in life.
Here’s why.
Did you know that goals work with the psychological principle known as hedonistic adaptation?
In simplest terms, this involves a condition where one has an unsatisfied desire, works to satisfy the desire and experiences pleasant but temporary feelings of desire-satisfaction as a byproduct when one reaches the goal.
What follows is a void.
And the vicious cycle continues again.
It doesn’t require the investigative super powers of Sherlock Holmes to decipher that goals place a verdict of eternal condemnation of chasing after desires — just like the Greek gods of Olympus did to Tantalus.
The Elusive Nature of Happiness And Why it’s NOT the Purpose of Life
Photo by Kat J on Unsplash
There once lived a King who, despite a life filled with luxuries, was neither happy nor content. One day, the King came upon a common pleasant who was singing happily while he worked. The happiness of a common man fascinated the King.
Why was the ruler of the land with all the luxuries, unhappy and gloomy, while a lowly peasant had so much joy in his life?
The King asked the man, “Why are you so happy?”
The man replied, “Your Majesty, I am a common man, but my family and I don’t need much, just warm food to fill us and a roof over our heads .”
The king was not satisfied with the man’s answer so, later in the day, he sought the advice from one of his most trusted advisers.
After listening to the King’s woes, the adviser said, “Your Majesty, I believe that the man, you saw, has not yet been made part of The 99 Club.”
“The 99 Club? What is that?” inquired the King.
The adviser replied, “Your Majesty, to understand The 99 Club is, you first need to place 99 Gold coins in a bag and leave it on the man’s doorstep.”
After tiring day working in the fields, the man was returning back to his house when the man saw a bag on his doorstep. He took the bag into his house and opened it. He let out a great shout of joy when he discovered that the bag was filled with gold coins.
He began to count all the gold coins. After several counts, he was convinced that there were 99 coins. He wondered, “What could’ve happened to that last gold coin? No one would leave just 99 coins!”
He looked everywhere he could, but he did not find the 100th coin. After a while, he was exhausted and decided that he was going to work harder than ever to earn that gold coin and complete his collection with the 100th coin.
From that day, the man’s life was changed. He overworked and turned horribly grumpy. He castigated his family for not helping him achieve his goal to earn the 100th gold coin. He stopped singing while he worked and only thought about getting the 100th coin to complete his collection.
The king witnessed the drastic transformation in the man and was puzzled.
The king asked the advisor why the man wasn’t happy and satisfied anymore. The advisor replied, “Your Majesty, the man is now a member of The 99 Club.”
He continued, “The 99 Club contains those people who have enough to be happy, but are not content, because they’re always striving for the extra one telling to themselves: “ will be happy if I get that one final thing in my life.”
Liars.
They told me that when I become very successful, my life will be filled with happiness.
Others whispered in my ear like Lord Varys’ sneaky birds in Game of Thrones that the purpose of life is all about happiness and enjoyment.
I disagree with both.
In fact, you can still feel very sad, depressed and hollow even after you’ve been tagged “The Best Achiever” by the whole world.
And of course, it’s more than possible that being in the Forbes “Top 10 Richest Men in the World “ won’t save you from that hollow feeling born from the deepest parts of Hades.
If you want to be happy — you have to stop chasing happiness. When you chase it, it will always elude you.
That is the paradox of happiness.
This is because the very principle of chasing happiness is all about attaching it to a particular event, object or achievement. Since you will always see better versions of what you have, you will never be happy until you get it.
And that is bad enough.
Therefore, if your purpose in life is to be happy — please stop right now.
Happiness is a byproduct of the main purpose of life which is to be useful.
The Ultimate Purpose of Life: The Life Changing Magic of Being Useful
Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash
A group of people gathered in a room attending a seminar about life and happiness to learn to find happiness in their lives.
They were being taught various skills and lessons about life. Suddenly, the speaker stopped and started giving each person a balloon. He asked everyone to write one’s name on it using a pen. All the balloons were then collected and taken to an another room.
Now, these delegates were let in that room and asked to find the balloon which had their name written, within 5 minutes.
Everyone was frantically searching for their name, pushing, colliding with each other, and there was utter chaos.
No one could find their balloons within the given five minute time and they all had to return to the other room empty handed.
Then they were told to go to the other room and randomly collect a balloon and give it to the person whose name was written on it.
Within five minutes everyone was carrying the balloon with their name on it.
The speaker began: This is exactly happening in our lives. No one is interested in being exactly USEFUL to another. Everyone is looking out just for their own benefits — caring less about others.
But that is wrong.
The purpose of life is to be USEFUL to others.
This in concordance with the words of Johnmicheal Okwuolisa when he viewed the purpose of life as the impact which you make in the world — the reason why God created you.
Always be useful.
Everyone is frantically looking for happiness, wealth and success all around, not knowing where it is. Our happiness lies in the happiness, our wealth lies in the wealth of others and our success lies in the success of other people. And all these originate from being useful to others.
Being useful can magically transform your life and make you to become who you never imagined that you would be.
Remember the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the beginning of this article, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
To sign off, I will reecho the words of Darius Foroux “Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t overthink it. Just DO something that’s useful. Anything.”
|
https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/what-is-the-purpose-of-life-you-already-know-the-answer-10a6d89cb413
|
['Lawrence Ozeh']
|
2020-07-08 21:06:05.967000+00:00
|
['Mindfulness', 'Life', 'Productivity', 'Self', 'Philosophy']
|
Mapas de Calor provam como sua homepage é o seu cartão de visitas
|
By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.
|
https://brasil.uxdesign.cc/mapas-de-calor-provam-como-sua-homepage-%C3%A9-o-seu-cart%C3%A3o-de-visitas-dbf455c18b4e
|
['Aline M Pagnossin']
|
2021-01-20 11:24:46.419000+00:00
|
['Heatmap', 'Graphic Design', 'UX Design', 'Website', 'UI Design']
|
As people get older, they tend to think that they can do less and less — when in reality, they should be able to do more and more, because they have had time
|
As people get older, they tend to think that they can do less and less — when in reality, they should be able to do more and more, because they have had time Ram R vs Mies A Live Tv Nov 19, 2020·6 min read
Life is a journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, mountains to climb and oceans to explore.
Good times and bad times. Happy times and sad times.
But always, life is a movement forward.
No matter where you are on the journey, in some way, you are continuing on — and that’s what makes it so magnificent. One day, you’re questioning what on earth will ever make you feel happy and fulfilled. And the next, you’re perfectly in flow, writing the most important book of your entire career.
https://www.deviantart.com/ncflive/commission/FREE-Ram-R-Salisbury-J-vs-Krawietz-K-Mies-A-Live-Stream-Free-1410812
https://www.deviantart.com/ncflive/commission/STREAMING-Krawietz-K-Mies-A-vs-Ram-R-Salisbury-J-Live-Stream-Fr-1410814
https://www.deviantart.com/ncflive/commission/LIVE-Krawietz-K-Mies-A-vs-Ram-R-Salisbury-J-Live-Stream-1410816
https://www.deviantart.com/ncflive/commission/Watch-Ram-R-Salisbury-J-vs-Krawietz-K-Mies-A-Live-Stream-free-1410817
https://www.deviantart.com/ncflive/commission/StreamS-watch-Krawietz-K-Mies-A-vs-Ram-R-Salisbury-J-Live-Stre-1410818
What nobody ever tells you, though, when you are a wide-eyed child, are all the little things that come along with “growing up.”
1. Most people are scared of using their imagination.
They’ve disconnected with their inner child.
They don’t feel they are “creative.”
They like things “just the way they are.”
2. Your dream doesn’t really matter to anyone else.
Some people might take interest. Some may support you in your quest. But at the end of the day, nobody cares, or will ever care about your dream as much as you.
3. Friends are relative to where you are in your life.
Most friends only stay for a period of time — usually in reference to your current interest. But when you move on, or your priorities change, so too do the majority of your friends.
4. Your potential increases with age.
As people get older, they tend to think that they can do less and less — when in reality, they should be able to do more and more, because they have had time to soak up more knowledge. Being great at something is a daily habit. You aren’t just “born” that way.
5. Spontaneity is the sister of creativity.
If all you do is follow the exact same routine every day, you will never leave yourself open to moments of sudden discovery. Do you remember how spontaneous you were as a child? Anything could happen, at any moment!
6. You forget the value of “touch” later on.
When was the last time you played in the rain?
When was the last time you sat on a sidewalk and looked closely at the cracks, the rocks, the dirt, the one weed growing between the concrete and the grass nearby.
Do that again.
You will feel so connected to the playfulness of life.
7. Most people don’t do what they love.
It’s true.
The “masses” are not the ones who live the lives they dreamed of living. And the reason is because they didn’t fight hard enough. They didn’t make it happen for themselves. And the older you get, and the more you look around, the easier it becomes to believe that you’ll end up the same.
Don’t fall for the trap.
8. Many stop reading after college.
Ask anyone you know the last good book they read, and I’ll bet most of them respond with, “Wow, I haven’t read a book in a long time.”
9. People talk more than they listen.
There is nothing more ridiculous to me than hearing two people talk “at” each other, neither one listening, but waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can start up again.
10. Creativity takes practice.
It’s funny how much we as a society praise and value creativity, and yet seem to do as much as we can to prohibit and control creative expression unless it is in some way profitable.
If you want to keep your creative muscle pumped and active, you have to practice it on your own.
11. “Success” is a relative term.
As kids, we’re taught to “reach for success.”
What does that really mean? Success to one person could mean the opposite for someone else.
Define your own Success.
12. You can’t change your parents.
A sad and difficult truth to face as you get older: You can’t change your parents.
They are who they are.
Whether they approve of what you do or not, at some point, no longer matters. Love them for bringing you into this world, and leave the rest at the door.
13. The only person you have to face in the morning is yourself.
When you’re younger, it feels like you have to please the entire world.
You don’t.
Do what makes you happy, and create the life you want to live for yourself. You’ll see someone you truly love staring back at you every morning if you can do that.
14. Nothing feels as good as something you do from the heart.
No amount of money or achievement or external validation will ever take the place of what you do out of pure love.
Follow your heart, and the rest will follow.
15. Your potential is directly correlated to how well you know yourself.
Those who know themselves and maximize their strengths are the ones who go where they want to go.
Those who don’t know themselves, and avoid the hard work of looking inward, live life by default. They lack the ability to create for themselves their own future.
16. Everyone who doubts you will always come back around.
That kid who used to bully you will come asking for a job.
The girl who didn’t want to date you will call you back once she sees where you’re headed. It always happens that way.
Just focus on you, stay true to what you believe in, and all the doubters will eventually come asking for help.
17. You are a reflection of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Nobody creates themselves, by themselves.
We are all mirror images, sculpted through the reflections we see in other people. This isn’t a game you play by yourself. Work to be surrounded by those you wish to be like, and in time, you too will carry the very things you admire in them.
18. Beliefs are relative to what you pursue.
Wherever you are in life, and based on who is around you, and based on your current aspirations, those are the things that shape your beliefs.
Nobody explains, though, that “beliefs” then are not “fixed.” There is no “right and wrong.” It is all relative.
Find what works for you.
19. Anything can be a vice.
Be wary.
Again, there is no “right” and “wrong” as you get older. A coping mechanism to one could be a way to relax on a Sunday to another. Just remain aware of your habits and how you spend your time, and what habits start to increase in frequency — and then question where they are coming from in you and why you feel compelled to repeat them.
Never mistakes, always lessons.
As I said, know yourself.
20. Your purpose is to be YOU.
What is the meaning of life?
To be you, all of you, always, in everything you do — whatever that means to you. You are your own creator. You are your own evolving masterpiece.
Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait. Paint yourself however you wish.
|
https://medium.com/@shitolliveonn/as-people-get-older-they-tend-to-think-that-they-can-do-less-and-less-when-in-reality-they-e16ede251e34
|
['Ram R Vs Mies A Live Tv']
|
2020-11-19 17:55:00.156000+00:00
|
['Technology', 'Sports', 'Social Media', 'News', 'Live Streaming']
|
Leading by Example | Georgi Malchev
|
Georgi looks down at his hands and starts laughing at my question about what makes him angry. “Actually, I think I’ve only yelled at people at work twice. And they were people who, in my opinion, led the others in the wrong direction. I am very sorry that I did it and I am not proud of it at all,” he says. He thinks that whether or not you get angry depends solely on you. Georgi believes in the idea of giving feedback instead, what you do with that feedback in the future, and that you have always done your best from your point of view.
“Lead by Example! Mentor. Entrepreneur. Lecturer. Teacher. Parent.” This is how Georgi Malchev describes himself on his award-winning website. Georgi graduated from the first cohort of the Executive MBA program at AUBG in 2004, only second in his class. Currently, he is a managing partner at the digital marketing agency Xplora, which consists of a team of 41 people. Georgi is also the vice president of the AUBG Alumni Association.
Georgi mentoring. Photo courtesy: Georgi Malchev
What helps Georgi with his emotions is NLP’s model that the only thing you can plan is the reaction. That is, you want a certain reaction, and you know how you can achieve it. “I believe that one really should set an example. And when people expect me to get angry, I use the situation to communicate to them why you shouldn’t be angry and how you should behave as a leader.” Georgi thinks it’s important to realize that the person you may be angry with at work is someone you’re responsible for developing and someone who has more to learn. He says that takes a lot of the anger away. This is one of his various methods when it comes to being a better leader.
When Georgi sets his sights on something, he works very hard towards achieving it. He says he enrolled in AUBG because he was pushed into it. He first visited the university for a lecture by the then Economy Minister Nikolay Vasilev. He says he was impressed by how cool and visibly motivated the people were, by the extracurricular life and the international environment at AUBG. “And I said to myself: ‘Wow, how did I miss out on this?’,” he says. Back then Georgi was working at the Ministry of Economics and Vasilev insisted that he and four other people enroll in the Executive MBA program.
Once he found out about the program and the people studying there, he put a lot of effort into getting in. “Zhoro [Georgi’s nickname] is a very consistent person, whether personally or professionally, he follows a certain path. He is also very persistent, pursues his goals, achieves them not at any cost, but only when they really bring some value,” says Vanya Ananieva, a long-term friend and collaborator of his. Georgi was in the top 3% in the world on his Graduate Management Admission Test and managed to graduate from AUBG magna cum laude, while still working a 12-hour day, six days a week, at the Ministry of Economics.
In the past decade, Georgi has been teaching classes in marketing, communications, and advertising in a few Bulgarian universities. His face lights up as he starts to talk about his teaching career. It’s something he’s very passionate about. He first began teaching because he believed he had valuable knowledge to give and the desire to do it. According to the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, Georgi is a Consul, and he thinks that has a big influence on his life. “Consuls are people who think it’s up to them to make the world a better place, that it’s up to them to put in more effort.” Georgi says his profile fits in with him being able to recognize teaching as something he wants to achieve and something that meets his values.
Georgi and Vanya during a charity initiative. Photo Courtesy: Predai Natatak Facebook Page
Making the world a better place is something Georgi strongly believes in. That’s why he organizes numerous charity and volunteer events and donates. Georgi and Ananieva founded the organization Predai Natatak, which they use to help people in need, be it with food or other supplies. Georgi is also a part of the campaign Caps for Future, the purpose of which is to collect bottle caps and use the money to buy equipment for smaller hospitals. “These are my values; I can do it and I will do it. I am responsible and that’s why I participate in various initiatives.” Georgi also tries to always maintain a positive outlook on life. He remembers one time when Lazar Radkov, founder of Caps for Future and Live to Lift, had teased him about something, and Georgi replied cheerfully, as he usually does. Radkov then jokingly said, “Hey, I hate this positive attitude you have towards everything.”
He’s not only dedicated to making the world a better place but bettering himself, as well. He tracks his positive habits every day and always sets aside time to work out. About eight years ago, he was looking through self-improvement blogs and learned about improvisational theater. Since then, he’s been doing improv twice a week and it’s helped him develop over the years. “I am generally quite cooperative, but before I went to improv theater, I hadn’t realized how much I think about things in advance and predefine them. And in improv, if you think things through, if you tell the other person everything, nothing is going to happen. Since then, I work much better in a team. Some people you can learn from and others you can help grow.”
Georgi at improv theater. Photo Courtesy: Georgi Malchev.
Georgi is also very dedicated to his family life. Ananieva thinks that he is the dream father because even though he’s very busy, he still makes time for his family, his wife and two sons. “He constantly educates his children, firstly through setting a personal example, secondly through various initiatives,” she says. “I really believe in the concept of leading by example. I think it is up to me to pass on the right values and principles to my children,” Georgi says. He wants his children to learn how to be responsible for themselves and their actions, as well as be able to take responsibility for other people.
This year he’s focused on helping his oldest son, who is 16, as he is interested in entrepreneurship and wants to have his own company one day. “This is the most unusual project for me so far, not to be the one leading things, but rather to mentor him in his own direction, in his own way of development. I think that the fact that I have mentored other people before helps, but here you have full responsibility and you have to figure out where, when, and how much to do.”
Georgi hopes to be known as an example of how you should treat others and how to be part of a team. He also wants to be remembered as an example of how to be a good parent, and how to make the world a better place in your own way. In his case, with teaching and charity initiatives. As Ananieva says, “There are people who set an example for others, and Zhoro is one of them.”
|
https://medium.com/bits-n-pieces-2020/leading-by-example-20575de9840
|
['Mihaela Miteva']
|
2020-12-02 07:12:46.621000+00:00
|
['Mentorship', 'Leadership', 'Charity', 'Profile']
|
Lagos to London: 2 years later
|
2 years ago, I made the decision to move to London. Here, I talk about what that has been like — enjoy!
Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels
I tried writing a 1 year later post but the lazy part of me couldn’t just get to it but following the feedback I got from my initial post and some questions I still get, I think doing a 2 years later post would be a great idea, I hope you feel the same way.
Looking back at the decision
I wrote about my decision to move here and after 2 years, I think I can look back at the decision and say I did well. I have absolutely enjoyed living in London for this period and I think I have grown to love the city and really consider it home. I absolutely love working with my employer, I have a fantastic partner, I can travel easily due to how accessible London is, and I experience a lot of different cultures — which is an absolute delight! While I have enjoyed my time here, I am going to talk about specific areas that I considered before moving here and how I have fared in those areas so far. I am also going to talk about some of my experiences settling in — and what I have learned since I moved.
Starting afresh
The best part about living in a new city is re-discovering yourself due to the new environment. You get to be aware of how you react to new situations that come up and how your old environment has shaped you. At this point, you start to question why things are the way they are and how easy quality of life improves when certain things are put in place. Take a simple example of electricity — because you don't have to worry about that going off, the way you think about mundane things like charging your phone or ironing your clothes feels different, you pretty much use up resources or do some certain tasks only when you need to and not just because it would soon become unavailable. Sigh, Nigeria.
Is it home yet? Can I go back home?
Of course, I miss home — there are times where I’ve felt really down because I couldn’t be with my family especially during celebrations. Eid al-Adha was a big one for me but I hope I get to see them more often. I miss the food (although, living in London does make it easier to get Nigerian food), I miss seeing so many black people around me. I sometimes miss the chaos — I’m not proud of it, but hey that was what I spent 26 years of my life in. People often ask if I will go back home after some time with the hope of settling or retiring in my home country, my answer is: I really do not think so. Unless Nigeria magically fixes itself (LOL), I think I’ll stay away till retirement and find some warm island to live on when I grow old. I really cannot cope with the struggles of that country anymore. However, I find it interesting to see that Nigerians who were born here do have stronger feelings towards the idea of returning home at some point later in their adult life — but I guess na because them never jam Nigeria, or Nigeria never jam them.
Public holidays, Social life — Is this Halal?
“Is it Halal?” — As a Muslim in Nigeria, I have never had to ask that back home. I was so embedded in the homogeneous environment I grew up in that I didn’t realize Halal was a dietary restriction. I’ve learned to ask that at restaurants now or to list that as a dietary restriction when I’m being given food. I used to understand Halal as anything that isn’t pork but the Halal board in the UK disagrees. I do miss the public holidays in Nigeria, the UK has about 8 public holidays compared to Nigeria which has about 13 in a year depending on when the minister of p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶c̶ ̶h̶o̶l̶i̶d̶a̶y̶ interior announces it. I enjoy the occasional brunch or picnic with friends that I have made here and it's good to see how we have been able to form a community of Nigerians who work in either tech or finance and enjoy similar interests. It gives you that link you miss with home and also helps you figure out this place as a “family”.
Work, work work.
Luckily, I have kept the same job that made me relocate here. I truly enjoy working with my employer and my team and it has been a really good journey so far. A good work-life balance is important to me and my current job affords me that. It's important to note that as a Tier 2 i̶m̶m̶i̶g̶r̶a̶n̶t̶ expatriate in the UK, when you want to change jobs, you do have to reapply for a new visa (crap! I know). The job has to be with an employer who can sponsor your visa and they have to go through the regular process of applying for a visa. Some employers are able to pay for super-priority applications which means you can get your new visa in less than 48hrs (what??!!). I haven’t needed to change my job so I do not have much experience in that department.
Travel
Living in a travel hub does afford you the ease of traveling to a lot of destinations. In the past two years, I’ve been able to do trips to New York, Berlin, Paris, Tenerife, Cancun, Lisbon, Barcelona, Milan, and some other cities within and outside of the UK. As a Nigerian passport holder on a Tier 2 visa in the UK, I believe it's relatively easier to get a Schengen or a US visa than it is in Nigeria. I have been able to get a Schengen VISA three times (the latest one I have would last a year) and I have also been able to renew my US visa without any difficulties. After a couple of my travels, I actually get asked fewer questions when I visit the Schengen area on entry— my last two travels, no questions, just stamps. I think it helps to get there at night as well, the immigration officers are usually tired at that time of the day ;). I do look forward to getting my ILR (that’s what they call PR here) and UK passport someday!
NHS
I actually didn’t care much for universal health care systems before I moved to the UK and not especially after paying the NHS surcharge for a Tier 2 visa mainly because I have never had to use it. That changed a couple of months ago when I woke up with sharp pain and had to go to the ER. It was quite a humbling experience because, under an hour of reaching the ER, I was being prepped for surgery. I had been attended to by two doctors and one surgeon to examine me and help me understand what was going on — this was at about 4 am! On waking up after the surgery (and after having a meal from the hospital), I was able to reflect on the episode and now I am a believer in universal health care! — especially because I got to walk out of the hospital after getting proper and timely care without paying out of pocket.
I was particularly glad this happened in an environment where things worked. I really cannot say how this would have turned out elsewhere.
Finances
Before moving, I spent some time reading about managing your finances in the UK — that was helpful but I had more to learn after I moved. One of the first things I did was to set up a Help to buy savings account to take advantage of the scheme where the government gives you some additional money up to £3,000 towards your first house. Another lesson I had to learn was the need to have good credit — because apparently, debt is a way of life. Another scheme that I started using recently is the lifetime ISA where the government gives you £1,000 for every £4,000 saved.
As a new resident, this can be difficult as you have no history here. I was able to use a combination of voter registration, credit card, utility bills, rent reporting to create and maintain an excellent credit profile (according to Experian). I’m still getting a hang of investing in the UK and the saving plans that are out there but the goal is to be able to plan to raise a family in the near future, plan for a secure retirement and still be able to live the baby boy life now.
I shared an exercise that I do monthly which helps me stay on top of my finances via Twitter a while back.
A thread showing some of the finance management habits
Planning for the future
At 28, I’m starting to think more about what the future looks like for me and the family I’d like to have. After getting through the initial phase of settling into my new environment, I’m starting to spend more time thinking about where I’d like to raise a family and how and that raises a lot more questions than I have answers for at the moment. Questions like; where do I want to live in the UK long term, do I want to start a business, do I need more income, how many kids, where would they go to school, do I need to buy a house, what type of house, where do I want to buy it in, etc. Luckily, I’ve got the best partner to help me figure it out :)
Excited about the possibilities with Z
COVID-19
You know what? Skip!
The next 365 days or the next 2 years?
The last 2 years have been a ride. A very good one at that. I’m really thankful for the new connections I have made, new communities that I have joined or helped create, and glad that a decision made 2 years still feels good. I’m really excited about the next 1, 2 years — and I can’t wait to write more about my journey!
As always, I’m always open to meeting new and exciting people so if you are new in London and would like to have a cup of coffee, please reach out!
|
https://medium.com/@ahmedmajeed/lagos-to-london-2-years-later-b1e31d53305d
|
['Majeed Ahmed']
|
2020-12-22 21:59:39.104000+00:00
|
['Relocation', 'London', 'Living In London', 'Lagos', 'Nigeria']
|
ReElivate — Creating Better Social Virtual Experiences
|
ReElivate — Creating Better Social Virtual Experiences
A marketplace connecting experience providers and companies to deliver unique, memorable, and virtual experiences
The Problem
The coronavirus pandemic has made companies pretty reliant on Zoom and virtual communication. While these virtual communication services have been life savers during this crazy time, they have not been able to replace in person social interaction. Virtual happy hours and coffee chats are redundant and people are looking for better ways to socialize virtually.
What The Company Does
ReElivate is a platform that connects companies with experience providers to help them create better virtual experiences. ReElivate is a marketplace to support companies in a coronavirus world, so companies can better engage their customers, teams, and clients. Events are centered around six categories including cooking, tasting, entertainment, crafts, care, and games. The platform also includes a concierge service if companies want higher levels of account management and assistance planning the experiences.
The Market
The company is serving a market that is smaller than traditional event management but focused on B2B. Some competitors include Airbnb and Kapow, but ReElivate believes the customers it is targeting are underserved by both competitors.
Business Model
ReElivate is a traditional marketplace that charges hosts a commission on the experiences that are booked.
Traction
ReElivate was founded in September and is working with more than 50 companies for their pilot, and with more than 20 local companies as hosts of experiences including Improv Asylum. The company has started to book experiences for November and will continue to add hosts and companies throughout the month. The self service marketplace will launch by the end of the year.
Founding Team Background
The founding team has over 30 years of experience in technology startups. Jon Conelias and Jason McCarthy were both executives at The Grommet. Conelias has been a CFO and operator for the past 15 years of marketplace companies focused on both B2B and B2C channels with multiple successful exits. McCarthy has been in marketplace operations for eight years. McCarthy founded The Grommet Wholesale business.
What They Need Help With
The company is looking for any hosts to provide experiences — the more interesting the better. The company is also looking to inform companies of its services to help connect them with the right experiences. Connect with the ReElivate team.
Subscribe To The Buzz To Get More Startups In Your Inbox
|
https://medium.com/the-startup-buzz/reelivate-creating-better-social-virtual-experiences-a8ef73a186dc
|
['Bram Berkowitz']
|
2020-12-22 20:02:47.666000+00:00
|
['Marketplaces', 'Venture Capital', 'Startup', 'Coronavirus', 'Social']
|
Kafka Learnings
|
Some notes I wrote about Kafka I wrote reading Kafka Definite Guide in pictures.
Uses of Zookeeper in Kafka : 3 Responsibilities
What is stored in Zookeeper
Broker Registry
Consumer Registry
- offset registry
- ownership registry
Is everything stored in Zookeeper ephemeral : No
Does consumer know when to rebalance automatically : Enter zookeeper watcher
Kafka Cluster with broker
Replication between cluster
|
https://medium.com/@sreeprasad/kafka-learnings-d6e0733a509d
|
[]
|
2020-12-27 22:23:11.643000+00:00
|
['Zookeeper', 'Kafka']
|
EOSIO Weekly Live on Christmas Eve?!? You Know It Baby!!
|
*Cover Image Santa credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/78039006014548286/
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of EOSIO Weekly where Corey and Jimmy D sometimes look at the news floating around the EOSIO space and sometimes don’t. You see, as we learned so long ago, it really is the creativity of it all that keeps life interesting and worth living. Or maybe that is just something musicians, poets, and writers tell themselves when they try to create a structured live space to bring about a Renaissance in blockchain, crypto, and specifically, EOSIO education.
In all seriousness though, there is so much to go through this week that we are just gonna treat this one like Christmas and unwrap them as they come as we roll with the ebb and flow of it all. It’s crazy times in the land of blockchain and crypto we all presently reside, and there is a lengthy list of those projects on both sides of the naughty and nice divide. And don’t forget, if you are willing and able catch us live, there are likely some surprises in store — and by likely we mean with complete and absolute certainly ;D
Featured News
Rubic, the DeFi multichain p2p platform enabling instant swaps, trades, and revenue share and generation is hosting a content competition on Trybe.One. 17,500 RBC in prizes up for grabs!! Read all about it here.
And with TRYBE being one of the tokens supported for interacting on Chirp, don’t forget to also post a link to your article in the Trybe Chirp channel.
🚀🚀BIG MISSION!!🚀🚀 Create a quickstart guide for Chirp that runs from logging in to earning your first cryptocurrency reward! Every submission that covers the basics will get 500 coins. The BEST submission will get 2000 COINS + 1Million SHipple + 10,000 DUST (https://chirp.la/posts/IKK5XuRiHN25Ulg59VDE)
Chintai Tokenized Real Estate: https://chintaieos.medium.com/tokenized-real-estate-on-eos-d5562d2f8fe9
Bitcoin Comes to Wombat: https://medium.com/wombat/bitcoin-comes-to-wombat-b4e870d5bb84
EOSX: The One Stop EOS DeFi Portal
“EOSX.io is an all-in-one block explorer and wallet allowing users to explore and search the EOS and other EOSIO blockchains for transactions, accounts, tokens, prices, as well as vote, create accounts, manage proxies, buy and sell RAM, and more.” The latest update even includes a virtually no risk way to gain exposure to the profits being made with flash loans, even for those that are merely staking EOS into the system. For the complete overview and mini tutorial have a read through the EOS Go post post below.
EOS Nation Releases the NFT Release Calendar
“As any WAX NFT fan will know, last week was jammed packed with NFT releases and we don’t expect this trend to slow down anytime soon! To help the NFT community better stay on top of all these exciting releases, we have put together an NFT Release Calendar that allows users to quickly see which release is coming up next. There are links to relevant websites and social media channels and we’ve even included an “add to calendar” button for those releases you absolutely don’t want to miss!” [https://eosnation.io/eos-hot-sauce-86/]
EOS Go Releases an NFT Trading Card Series
Pretty cool gamification aspect behind the new EOS Go Cards, A New WAX NFTs Collection just hit the market this week. Various levels of NFTs are available and then for the next month there are drops in line with the properties of those NFT’s. When the month is over and all NFTs have been dropped it begins anew with another series. And what’s more, it helps in the support of EOS Go which does a pretty great job at keeping those interested in EOSIO up to speed through their news stories, blog, weekly updates, and market caps, as well as doing their best to keep a bridge between the East and the West.
EOSIO This Week on Twitter
Greatest Tweet threads of the week — and of course we recognize that the greatness is everything to do with the interactions to these Tweets as much as it does with the Tweets themselves.
Uplift.Art December 23rd Mr. Spaceman Burn Instructions & Updates
Uplift Moon Day has officially commenced. Check out the post below for instructions on how to participate in this once in a lifetime opportunity from your friends over at Uplift.Art. And don’t forget, to best stay up to date on all that is up and coming follow us on Twitter and hop on into our official telegram for some communicative fun along the way.
Also, be sure to check out this great piece by mBlu Crypto and Claudia of Uplift.Art for the low down on how NFT’s have the ability to empower artists.
This Week on Chirpcast with Corey Cotterell
AlienWorlds Walkthrough with AnyObservation and Michael of EOSUSA
R Planet with Roman of Crypto Lions
HODLGOD Just Dropped with Marc of Onessus
Featured Educational Content from Jimmy D
Bitcoin: How It Works!?!: Read the article for the full scoop on all that Bitcoin has to offer.
EOSIO Weekly
And don’t forget, every week you can interact with EOSIO Weekly on Chirp at https://chirp.la/channels/EOSIOweekly by dropping news stories you think worthy of coverage and a chance for some sweet Chirp Tips and other goodness depending upon the time and our mood.
Check out some of our past episodes: Featuring Special Guest Host mBluCrypto of Uplift.Art, Featuring Ricardo Schiller of BlockBase, Featuring Danny of Dark Country, Featuring Adrian Krion of Wombat, Featuring WAX NFT Guru Anders Bjork of Anyobservation, Featuring John Heeter of Boid.com, Featuring Jacques Whales of Discussions App, Featuring mBlu Crypto of Uplift.art, and of course where it all began with Episode One.
Don’t forget to tune in next week as we continue on the path towards perfection in our relay of the key news and issues to fine tune in the EOS and EOSIO space.
|
https://medium.com/@kansaikrypto/eosio-weekly-live-on-christmas-eve-you-know-it-baby-db9c58f0a550
|
['Jimmy D']
|
2020-12-25 17:01:54.718000+00:00
|
['Eosio', 'Eos', 'Nft', 'Waxio', 'Upliftart']
|
Mask off: I told you so!
|
The year 2020 was scary. We got through it somehow. Some days were harder than others.
Photo by Mika Baumeister
I spoke previously about my days as a mask Nazi, and my fear when the masks came off. Well, my worst fears have resurfaced and I’m completely terrified. But mostly I’m just angry. I’m angry with politicians and the everyday maskless person.
I hate that the word “maskless” has entered my everyday vocabulary. During the summer everyone promised that things would be alright. On the news I hear everyday about nurses being overwhelmed. There are hospitals turning folks away. I thought perhaps that would sway people into being safer. But all I see in the comments of YouTube videos statements saying, “there are tons of reports of hospitalizations, but why don’t they show the number of deaths.” Getting so sick to the point of needing to go to the hospital is a crisis.
Most businesses aren’t enforcing social distancing. They aren’t requiring masks. They aren’t asking if you’re vaccinated. Everything is an “honor system” but everyone is dishonorable.
Photo by Cyan
We are in a worse situation than we’ve experienced during this entire pandemic. Just a few weeks ago, a hospital in my native Houston had to airlift an infant out since there was no more room in any pediatric hospitals in the entire city. I checked Wikipedia, there are twenty-eight hospitals in the Houston area.
I want to beg and plead with every person I see without a mask on to please think of others. I don’t want to fight. I just want them to be cautious not only for their own sake but their children, their parents, their grandparents, and everyone else in their community.
The rest of us better pray that we don’t need the hospital right now because there may not be any room left.
|
https://medium.com/@cyanwrites/mask-off-i-told-you-so-f6a51cdfd60c
|
[]
|
2021-09-05 18:02:47.013000+00:00
|
['Public Health', 'Covid 19', 'Vaccines', 'Masks', 'Virus']
|
A Inteligência Artificial está fadada a ser racista e sexista?
|
Is AI doomed to be racist and sexist?
Once upon a time, humanity was using bias to survive — to assess potential dangers and keep us safe from the big wide…
|
https://brasil.uxdesign.cc/a-inteligencia-artificial-esta-fadada-a-ser-racista-e-sexista-f32d6cefa9dc
|
['Lia Rodrigues']
|
2020-07-20 19:20:09.867000+00:00
|
['Inteligencia Artificial', 'Bias', 'Preconceito', 'Ux Translations', 'UX']
|
You’ve Settled in as an Engineer. Now What?
|
You’ve Settled in as an Engineer. Now What?
How to avoid the plateau and continue to grow
Photo by True Agency on Unsplash
Congrats! You’ve settled in at your first job. You’ve made it past the initial wave of impostor syndrome and have some idea of what you’re doing and what you’re good at. You might’ve even received a promotion or two. You’re no longer wildly floundering every day and are able to at least flounder in the right direction. You might even be on your second or third job at this point. You actually feel like a real engineer now.
Now what?
It’s common to feel a sensation of plateauing after an initial few years of hypergrowth. This is only natural: Growth comes from new information, and the supply of novelty provided by a job quickly dries up as the years pass by. Up to this point, simply engaging with your job was enough to provide steady improvement; now, you must actively seek new information to keep growing.
Before proceeding, I want to clarify one thing: being happy with where you are is perfectly fine. You might feel entirely comfortable with plateauing, and that doesn’t make you any less of a person. If you’re content and have job security, congrats — you’ve won. It’s not worth it to burn yourself out trying to level up if you’re not motivated to do so.
|
https://medium.com/better-programming/youve-settled-in-as-an-engineer-now-what-b7f12c277131
|
['Tim Hwang']
|
2020-12-27 23:59:34.334000+00:00
|
['Personal Development', 'Startup', 'Software Engineering', 'Learning To Code', 'Programming']
|
HOW YOUNG MINDS CAN CREATE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES?
|
Why does our education system teaches us just the theoretical values? Is it all about learning and learning and never applying it practically?
The mindset of teachers and what they teach just stick to getting jobs and earn enough for their families. But less do we know that today’s generation is much more than we think and can-do wonders if they step in the field. It is just motivation, awareness and right education which can lead to their bright future.
Today’s fierce world cannot let us survive if we just depend on jobs. It is the growth of new businesses which can make the country develop.
“The young minds are like potter’s clay which can be made in the way in which it is molded ”
It is very necessary for our upcoming leaders to know the importance of entrepreneurship and how it makes a difference. With millions of startups building these days, how we do the business, defines us. Making know about the startup culture to teens can make their thinking step to a next level.
|
https://medium.com/@arnav29gupta/how-young-minds-can-create-successful-businesses-8c7f80c1b489
|
['Arnav Gupta']
|
2021-01-07 09:57:50.142000+00:00
|
['Skills', 'Schools', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Teens']
|
10 ways to figure out if (s)he really has ‘a black friend’
|
THE DONE-HUMORING-YOU “BLACK FRIEND” INVESTIGATION
Have you ever had to have The Talk with your kids?
This wouldn’t normally be a discussion to bring up in casual conversation. But in 2020, there are a lot of Randall-Kate conversations going on. (“This Is Us” is such an amazing show.) You already know that white parents don’t usually have to have this conversation. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know what it is. Some white folks are using their artistic talents to show how much they understand — years before Trump was in the White House.
But really what you’re looking for is for someone to not bat an eye if you bring up The Talk — because they’ve been there before and had to have a hard discussion with that “black friend.” If it trails off into “I don’t see color” or “everybody is so politically correct,” you’ve gotten your answer. This person only “sees color” when it means they can use their friend to prove just how not racist they are. It’s convenient but ineffective.
Photo credit: Unseen Histories/Unsplash
It’s a shame how the FBI treated MLK, isn’t it?
I have lost count of the number of times a “black friend” story has been followed up with a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote. They’re almost hand-in-hand and a dull mic drop after the “content of their character” speech. Somehow the one-sided rivalry with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is clean overlooked. But don’t elaborate. Just ask the question and let the “friend of a black friend” discuss how much they know about how this peaceful protester was treated. Or, does the MLK history lesson just summarize that one paragraph in history books?
What are your plans on Columbus Day?
Trick question. If this person still believes Columbus “discovered America” with natives already there, be skeptical of anything else (s)he says. It’s Indigenous People’s Day and nothing else. This is the same explorer who thought the Bahamas was Spain, Cuba was China and Hispaniola was Japan. Anyone who is still feeding into Columbus earning this holiday no doubt believes Africans were “workers” who traveled on a “cruise” and their captivators were “nice to them.” (They also cannot wait to tell you that Africans owned slaves, too, but conveniently leave out it was more like indentured work before the Portuguese got involved and not even slightly as horrific as what U.S. slavery is. Or, that in later centuries, freed slaves used it as a transaction to get their family members and friends out of slavery.) But while places like Ghana are owning up to the slave trade before the French Revolution, there are still U.S. states who want slave trade history removed from history books — all while gloriously celebrating the holiday for an explorer responsible for spreading 30 diseases, wiping out more than 236K indigenous people and killing 25 million people in five years.
I’m trying to figure out my plans for Juneteenth. What’d you and your friend do last year?
If this person doesn’t know what Juneteenth is, just walk away. Not only has the token black friend not done a good job of keeping this person up to speed, but it’s probably Diamond and Silk. And those two are ahead of schedule planning for Columbus Day anyway.
|
https://medium.com/i-do-see-color/10-ways-to-figure-out-if-s-he-really-has-a-black-friend-2e667b4cd734
|
['Shamontiel L. Vaughn']
|
2020-11-15 20:25:57.463000+00:00
|
['Thanksgiving', 'Race', 'African American', 'Racism', 'White Privilege']
|
Survivor: Island of the Idols Episode 10 Recap
|
Bring on the Bacon
I sadly do not have time for a full recap of last night’s episode so instead, I’ll give you some quick hits. Maybe if I deem it worth the time, I’ll go back on Friday and flesh out my ideas but likely, this is all you’re getting about this episode for the week.
· This entire episode felt like whiplash. We went through this brutal tribal council last week and suddenly, it’s like it never happened outside of Janet saying tribal council was rough. It’s not like I expected production to draw more light to their mistakes but it was still disappointing. It was made worse by the fact that Dan had a pretty big presence on the episode and we had to listen to him talk about strategy when he should have been removed two rounds ago. A very frustrating experience.
· I don’t like the Survivor: Fiji twists of splitting up the merged players into two groups for tribal council. At least, like in Ghost Island and unlike Fiji, everyone still had to attend tribal council. It’s just that it opens up a huge opportunity for people to get Michelle Yi’ed out of the game and that’s not a fun way to go.
· I would be lying if I said the results of both tribal councils didn’t please me. That’s my hypocrisy speaking of course. I don’t like this twist… unless it benefits my interest. Still, it’s hard to argue with the theatrics of it all. Elizabeth and Missy’s reactions to Aaron sitting over on the jury is one of the greatest reactions we’ve seen in a long time. Believe in it or not, karma eventually gets everybody.
· Throughout the episode, everything Missy did felt incredibly tone deaf. Maybe if I was able to ignore the previous episode and treat each one on a case-by-case basis, I could see that Missy was just playing hard. It’s just impossible to do that because this isn’t a sitcom where everything resets at the end of the episode. She just feels like a disingenuous person. It wasn’t pleasant watching her tell Karishma she’s not a bully at tribal council… by bullying her. Her attempt at denying that she went after Tommy when he saw 2 Tommy votes and 3 Missy votes was laughable. She came off as incredibly cold at best and sociopathic at worse. For a character who started off with a lot of potential, she had a steep decline and I am not be sad to see her out of the game.
· The full circle moment of Karishma ending Missy was beautiful. For so long, Missy has been saying she wants to use Karishma. Instead, she got finished by Karishma. Doesn’t matter though, somehow Elaine still got the credit. And for not being a bully, Missy telling Elizabeth to kill Elaine “slowly and methodically” sure sounded intense. Where is Elizabeth going to find Dexter-like plastic covers in Fiji?
· That said, I’m not sure Karishma made the right strategic move. Sure, Missy had no respect for Karishma and was only keeping her as a goat. But Karishma knew that and could have worked with that. She could have argued at final tribal council that she played into Missy’s perception of her so that Missy would keep her around. Isn’t it better to have someone in the game who wants to keep you than someone like Tommy, who has no allegiance to you? Especially because Tommy is such a big figure in the game dynamics. This was Karishma’s shot to take him out AND she would have gotten the credit for it as the swing vote.
· Which begs some mentioning: that was some incredible luck combined with playing her cards right to land in that role for Karishma. She needed that split to work out exactly like it did but when it happened, Karishma played everything right in terms of being in a good position at tribal council. I was very nervous she would get panicky and play her idol unnecessarily. I was happy to see her keep that pocketed because it will allow her some wiggle room (shout out Josh Wigler, forever that GOAT) in the future.
· Elaine (and Tommy, but particularly Elaine) tonight showed some great social gameplay. It’s always fun seeing people’s emotional intelligence. Elaine might be playing the brash redneck woman, but she understands people on a deeper level. She could see that Karishma was just done with getting stomped over and she played everything exactly right. Compassion and empathy will take you much further than any strategic ability ever will. She was impressive in how she handled Karishma’s feelings and made her feel validated. I suspect that was all Karishma needed to make that flip.
· I am 100% here for Janet and Karishma going on a Kill Bill-style revenge tour to honor Kellee, Jamal (and even Jack who is a kind soul). Last night, Aaron and Missy had to pay their invoices. Next up will be Elizabeth and Lauren, leaving Dan as the final and most-prized boot. Maybe Janet can apply that karate move that makes your heart explode after three steps. If anyone is badass enough to know it, it would be Janet. We all Stanet, Janet.
All credit for this amazing picture goes to Ryan Kaiser (@Ryan__Kaiser on Twitter)
· You have to love Dean. My favorite Dean moment of the night was when he was talking about not voting out Aaron. His reasoning? Because if he votes out Aaron, he will become the next big physical threat. This is the guy who has performed awfully in every single immunity challenge of the season, but you do you Dean. That was made even crazier when he told Dan that he would also become a physical threat. Dean, where have you been? Dan has been a physical threat since day 1… just not in the way that is appropriate for anyone.
· Tiny shout-out for Boston Rob throwing some shade at Detective Dean for showing off his guns. Dean is exactly the type of guy who would do such a thing and he deserves to be called out for it.
· Noura had a great episode being Noura-like. She got to rag on Karishma for not working hard enough. Her confessional where she mimicked shooting Tommy with a gun, because he’s a deer of course, was great. She won immunity! And got so excited she immediately threw away any chances of her team getting PB&J. The reaction from the other players was gold. I think it was Dean who was so frustrated he just said “stupid!” out loud. I greatly enjoyed that moment. More of Noura please.
· Speaking of confessionals, there were some great ones in this episode. The Noura and Dean ones I’ve already mentioned. There was also a great sequence with Karishma before she found the idol. The confessional was so up close and personal and Karishma was staring right into the camera. It felt so different than any we usually see, and it felt very natural. Karishma may not be the best at Survivor but she’s a very compelling television character.
· I hope Karishma made sure her husband watched this episode after the roommates debacle from the Applebee’s episode. I wish those two nothing but the best.
· The preview for next week got me excited solely based on Dean’s “goats alliance, assemble!” quote. Anything that might bring together Dean, Noura and Karishma, you can sign me up every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
There you go, that’s all I have the time to write right now. As a standalone episode, this was a good episode of Survivor. It’s just impossible to forget what came before it and that will cloud the entire post-merge.
|
https://medium.com/a-tribe-of-one/survivor-island-of-the-idols-episode-10-recap-6d042c2a6ec
|
['Ianic Roy Richard']
|
2019-11-21 13:34:13.392000+00:00
|
['Survivor', 'TV Series', 'Culture', 'Television', 'TV']
|
How do you value success?
|
Regardless of the way we are approached by any potential client and hear their “ask”, we won’t shut out any opportunity. We simply have our own way of digging in and determining if an opportunity is one where we can cultivate a true partnership, move the needle over and above expectation, and be as invested in its success as its the creator.
Is there Chemistry?
This one many rub against the money-making business person inside many of us, but it is not something that should be overlooked. Success is not a solo endeavor and a potential client who comes to us looking to tap into our knowledge and expertise, for the express reason that they don't understand the moving parts as well as we do, is a potential client we can hop into the product building vehicle with, and go on a long rocky road-trip with, knowing we will look after each other well.
Can we believe in the mission?
Every good idea has a reason for being. In almost all cases, that mission and passion will be a true indicator of future success. Drive towards a passionate goal, and the dollars and cents to get there become pale in comparison to the need to reach that goal. If there’s a smart and fast way to get an envisioned product into market, that's where the real measures of success can begin. Of course, everybody is concerned with budgets and staying within their means. But product building is a long term relationship where the managing of costs, and stepping stones of investment, will steer you towards success. This is as much an element of the journey we can help with at Finlabs as delivering on design or development needs. By doing so, we are driving towards fulfilling a joint mission, in a financially conscious way, where ROI can be determined for every step of the process in order to stay within financial boundaries and build financial success at the same time as building a product.
Can we, and is there a desire to, add real value?
As I mentioned, even if the initial ask seems to be for a skilled resource or defined development build, we may still explore the opportunity in order to determine true needs and surface areas we can potentially add “real value”. If those opportunities are exposed, and there is a desire to pursue them, then the reality is that the potential client REALLY needs to engage Finlabs as an organization rather than the basic need of Finlabs skilled employee, John Doe Developer. We aim to add value, insight, and knowledge to the mix to take any project or idea to places that were not initially envisioned and push success far beyond expectations
|
https://medium.com/finlabsoy/how-do-you-value-success-bb56df82ad8f
|
[]
|
2020-12-02 15:21:30.909000+00:00
|
['Business Strategy', 'Software Development', 'Project Scoping', 'Pricing Strategy', 'Product Development']
|
NFL WEEK 15 Tuesday Double Header
|
A Double-Header Tuesday Night Football slate. That’s new!
Picks, Plays. Guest Pickers and Evaluation from me below. Enjoy!
7:00 PM ET
SEATTLE SEAHAWKS at LOS ANGELES RAMS (-7) ; O/U 46.5
Model Z Projection: LAR -15, 53.02 Total
Straight Up Pick: Los Angeles Rams
Spread Pick: LAR -7⭐⭐
O/U Pick: Under 46.5⭐
Zack’s Plays:
- Kupp 100+ Receiving Yards (-110)
- Kupp to score & LAR to win (+107)
- Beckham Jr 60+ Receiving Yards (+120)
- Beckham to score (+140)
- LAR -7 (-110)
Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I still believe this Rams team is a top tier team, and I still believe this Seahawks team is not quite right. When it comes to the inactives for Seattle, they’ll be without WR2* Tyler Lockett, RB1 Alex Collins, CB1 DJ Reed and RT Brandon Shell. For the Rams, the extra couple days actually helped them as it sounds like RB1 Darrell Henderson is back, but S Jordan Fuller is the only notable inactive. The model says this spread should be way up at 15, so I’ll take the Rams side at 7 with medium confidence.
7:00 PM ET
WASHINGTON FOOTBALL TEAM at PHILADELPHIA EAGLES (-9.5) ; O/U 40.5
Model Z Projection: PHI -7.5, 48.99 Total
Straight Up Pick: Philadelphia Eagles
Spread Pick: PHI -9.5⭐
O/U Pick: Over 40.5⭐
Zack’s Plays:
- Smith 60+ Receiving Yards (+154)
- Goedert 50+ Receiving Yards (+104)
- Goedert to score (+230)
- Goedert to score 2x (+1500)
Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: Garrett Gilbert at QB for Washington, eesh. Washington seems to have taken this covid week the worst, with a large handful of notable inactives out tonight. Where Philly, really only has one OLineman out. 9.5 is a lot, but I think I’ll play it. I don’t have any confidence in this Washington B-Team.
|
https://medium.com/@zack-nicol11/nfl-week-15-tuesday-double-header-c768cda52b9a
|
['Zack Nicol']
|
2021-12-21 21:32:07.314000+00:00
|
['Fun', 'Sports Betting', 'Football', 'NFL']
|
Mob Mentality and Anger Issues
|
Camaraderie and Joint Commitment
If you are angry and need to vent, there is always a willing audience to watch, listen and probably join you. There is a certain energy that is emitted from like-minded people who are angry.
It is slightly electrified and empowering. There is camaraderie and a sense of joint commitment to a united purpose. Mob mentality is so compelling because it is the ultimate emotional validator. People agreeing with your anger and encouraging your outrage feels good. It self-perpetuates and grows with great haste.
Contradicting Social Expectation
Another reason anger and mob mentality is so compelling is that it contradicts one of the basic tenets of social expectation; the idea that we should all behave and conduct ourselves stoically to avoid appearing “overly emotional.”
It is liberating to bust out of that confinement, particularly when you are doing so with likeminded people. That group decision to “act out” and misbehave from the cultural norm is, in and of itself an act of rebellion. Add in the passion about a belief in a particular cause and kablam, you’ve got legit mob potential.
Power of Social Media
Now more than ever before it is easy to find your people and rally the rage. Social media outlets are ubiquitous and loaded with specialized groups dedicated to topics of all sorts. Even without joining a particular group on social media, it is simple to express and propagate anger.
The use of status updates, opinion posts, sharing viral videos and dozens of other platforms express beliefs and feelings and garner support, all from the comfort of one’s own keyboard.
What is the risk of anger and rage?
Even though anger is a normal emotion in the wide spectrum, excessive anger for a prolonged period of time has physical, sociological and emotional consequences. Long-term chronic anger contributes to high blood pressure, higher rates of cancer, arterial tension and other negative health outcomes.
Cortisol increases with anger, which results in decreased serotonin levels; lower serotonin levels means decreased experiences of pleasure and joy in life. Depression results from low serotonin levels.
Chronic Anger
Chronic anger issues interfere with interpersonal relationships, disrupting the power balance and causing undue stress. Let’s face it, it’s hard to be around someone who is angry all the time. It’s exhausting. Unchecked long-term anger can result in avoidance of social situations; it wreaks havoc on immediate family, who often tip-toe around the angry person for fear of “setting them off.”
Justified Anger
There is a big difference between justified anger that spurs on social and personal change, and chronic anger that lacks direction and is a toxin to health and interpersonal relationships.
We need to listen to our anger and pay attention to the messages it sends us; it can be a powerful impetus for change if we allow it to shape us in positive ways. Anger isn’t the enemy, it’s what we do with it that counts. When we learn to embrace anger as a messenger for necessary change it becomes our friend and ally against personal and societal injustice.
|
https://medium.com/@drteyhousmyth/mob-mentality-and-anger-issues-141bb1ff2931
|
['Living With Finesse Dr. Teyhou Smyth']
|
2020-07-13 19:01:29.313000+00:00
|
['Self Improvement', 'Work Life Balance', 'Anger']
|
The Q — Astronaut James B. Irwin
|
This is the latest in an occasional series of posts about history of The Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls.
Local reporters seemed more interested in mystery than science when NASA astronaut James B. Irwin spoke July 18, 1979 at The Queensbury Hotel.
“Asked if he thought there was any other intelligent life on other planets,” Irwin answered, “Probably not,” The Post-Star reported the next day.
“Questioned on having seen any UFOs, he said he had, but thought most were ‘space junk,’ and if there were any such things they were probably of ‘earth origin,’ and he hoped they belonged to the United States.”
About 250 people attended the dinner that Glens Falls Mayor Edward Bartholomew hosted to commemorate the tenth anniversary man walking on the moon.
Irwin, who flew on the Apollo 15 mission, Irwin’s wife, and Jack Wyrtzen, director of Word of Life in Schroon Lake, spoke.
Irwin advocated for increased funding and public support for NASA.
Bartholomew gave Irwin a plaque, and Irwin gave Bartholomew a photograph of the astronaut placing a United States flag on the moon.
Click here to read the most recent previous post in the series.
|
https://medium.com/@writermaury/the-q-astronaut-james-b-irwin-7fa24a05496a
|
['Maury Thompson']
|
2020-11-02 23:07:11.083000+00:00
|
['The Queensbury Hotel', 'NASA', 'Space Flight', 'History', 'Glens Falls']
|
Kafka Consumer Retry
|
The ability for an application to retry is essential in order to recover from transient errors such as network connection failures rather than simply failing the processing. When a flow is triggered by the consumption of an event, then the consumer should be configured to retry on such retryable exceptions. However there are a number of factors and pitfalls to consider with consumer retry, which this article explores.
Retryable Exceptions
There are many situations where retrying an action that threw an exception may result in a success. Examples include:
A REST call to a third party service that returns a Bad Gateway (502) or a Service Unavailable (503) response, where the service may recover.
An optimistic locking exception on a database write, where another process has updated the entity.
A temporary database connection loss, or network connection error, both of which are considered transient errors.
Internal Kafka exceptions like an offset not being available as it is lagging will also usually recover on retry.
If such exceptions are simply allowed to fail the process, perhaps writing an event to the dead-letter topic, then the system is brittle, and much time and effort will be spent subsequently trying to replay, or retrospectively fix, events that have failed.
Retry Considerations
Retryable exceptions should not simply be caught and retried indefinitely. Instead there are a number of issues to consider when configuring consumer retry, including:
A topic partition is blocked while a message is being retried.
Sufficient time should be allowed for transient errors to be retried.
The risk of poison pill messages.
If the Broker believes the consumer has died while it is retrying it will re-deliver the event, resulting in duplicate events.
Retry Period Factors
Analysis is required to determine how long retryable exceptions should be retried. If the retry period is too short then this may not allow sufficient time for the problem to be rectified. For example, a third party service might go offline for several hours.
This needs to be weighed up against the consideration that an event being retried will block the topic partition, as events behind it will not be processed in order to preserve Kafka’s ordering guarantee. It is highly likely though that failing the message early in order to unblock the topic partition will not help as the next event will most likely fail for the same reason.
One option would be to retry retryable exceptions forever, until they succeed. However not having some kind of retry limit risks a poison pill message scenario. If the error scenario was never rectified, such as the third party system never coming back online, then the message would never be successfully processed, nor failed, as it continually retries. The application is not able to progress, the topic partition is blocked, and left like this the message would likely be lost once it exceeded the Kafka topic retention period. A maximum retry period should almost always be in place.
A happy medium is required between too short a retry period and the retry forever risking a poison pill message, but here there is another risk to mitigate. The consumer polls the message from the broker, and if it has not completed processing it before the configured poll timeout, then the Kafka broker considers the consumer as failed and removes it from the consumer group. It then re-balances the consumer group, with a new consumer being assigned to the topic partition. The new consumer now also receives the same message as it polls the topic partition. If the original consumer successfully retries and processes the message, we now have a duplicate message in the system. Of course the second consumer could also suffer the same fate, and a third, or fourth, and so on, re-delivery could occur.
Stateless Retry
The Java Kafka client library offers stateless retry, with the Kafka consumer retrying a retryable exception as part of the consumer poll.
Retries happen within the consumer poll for the batch.
Consumer poll must complete before poll timeout, containing all retries, and total processing time (including REST calls & DB calls), retry delay and backoff, for all records in the batch.
Default poll time is 5 minutes for 500 records in the batch. This only averages to 600ms per event.
If poll time is exceeded this results in event duplication.
Calculation of retries/time possible, but total retry duration will have to be short.
Stateless Retry Flow
The following diagram illustrates a service consuming an event, making a REST call to a third party service before publishing a resulting event to an outbound topic. There are two instances of the consuming service shown.
The consumer max poll interval is exceeded while the service is retrying.
The broker re-balances the consumer group, assigning the consumer in the second service instance to the topic partition.
Any downstream services consume both resulting events. Although raised from a duplicate consumed event, these resulting events are distinct, so attempting to deal with the duplication issue downstream is not a recommended approach.
Calculating Stateless Retry Periods
There is little room available to safely retry for any period of time before duplicate messages are introduced into the system. Imagine a flow where a batch of events each result in a database update and an HTTP call to another service, each potentially taking up many seconds. To add in retry, and make use of exponential backoff, some very careful calculations must be made to ensure that the consume does not exceed the time out. If every message in a polled batch is being retried several times, there will be a very limited time for retry available. It will often simply not be possible to give sufficient time for transient exceptions to recover that otherwise could. Consider the third party service that is offline for several hours. These events must either be thrown back to the topic to potentially retry forever until success (with the risk of a poison pill scenario), or marked as failed and be sent to the dead letter topic.
Mitigation Strategies For Stateless Retry
There are options to mitigate this short retry period that stateless retry offers:
A) Polling timeout / batch size
Polling timeouts can be increased and batch sizes reduced to give more time for retries within the consumer poll.
If a long poll is put in place, and the consumer does die, the broker will not be aware of this until the poll eventually times out, leaving messages not being processed in the meantime.
Reducing batch sizes comes at the cost of throughput.
Practically the retry period will still be severely limited.
B) Retry topics
Unblock topics by sending messages to retry to retry topic(s), with each subsequent retry topic having an increased back-off.
Adds complexity, more topics, more logic required, more to test, more to go wrong.
Message ordering is lost, likely adding need for further logic and complexity.
C) Idempotent Consumer pattern
Accept that longer retries will result in duplicate messages and implement the Idempotent Consumer pattern to deduplicate messages.
A mis-use of the pattern which should be used sparingly rather than as part of a retry strategy.
All consumer instances will soon block while retrying, as the consumer group re-balances and the message is re-delivered to each consumer instance, using up database connections for deduplication (depending on deduplication approach).
D) Retry from the broker
By throwing the Retryable exception rather than using the Kafka client library to retry, the message is not marked as consumed and is re-delivered in the next poll.
The poll will not time out, so the message will not be duplicated.
There is a huge risk of a poison pill message, as there is no means to limit the retry count.
There is no ability to configure a retry delay or backoff.
Each of these mitigation strategies come at different costs which would need to be carefully weighed up if using stateless retry.
Stateful Retry
Solving Stateless Retry
The problems discussed here with stateless retry are solved by using stateful retry. When a message should be retried it is not marked as consumed so is picked up again on the next poll. As only one Consumer polls from any one topic partition, this same Consumer will re-receive the message to retry. The Spring Consumer tracks the retries for the message so knows once the retries have exhausted. This is the ‘state’ in stateful retry, but it is tracked in memory, there are no other components such as a database in play here. Retry can safely be configured for a long period of time, knowing that if still not successful at the end of that period then the message can be dead-lettered. There is nothing like the same level of consumer re-balancing / message duplication concerns that come with the stateless approach. The only caveat is that the longest delay between any retry should not exceed the poll timeout, as that would cause a re-balance and duplicate message delivery. However this is far more manageable than attempting to ensure that all retries for all events in a batch are completed within the poll timeout.
Spring Kafka & Stateful Retry
Stateful retry is not offered by the Java Apache client by itself, but is available as a configuration option out of the box with Spring Kafka, using the SeekToCurrentErrorHandler.
@Bean
public ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory kafkaStatefulRetryListenerContainerFactory(final ConsumerFactory consumerFactory) { final SeekToCurrentErrorHandler errorHandler =
new SeekToCurrentErrorHandler((record, exception) -> {
// 10 seconds pause, 10 retries.
}, new FixedBackOff(10000L, 10L)); final ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory factory = new ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory();
factory.setConsumerFactory(consumerFactory);
factory.setErrorHandler(errorHandler);
return factory;
}
An additional feature of the SeekToCurrentErrorHandler is that those events within the batch that have successfully been processed prior to the event that results in a RetryableException being thrown are still able to be successfully marked as consumed, so are not themselves re-delivered too in the next poll.
Stateful Retry Flow
The same components from the stateless retry diagram are again drawn, but this time the consumer is configured to use stateful retry.
No poll timeout occurs, there is no consumer group re-balancing, and the message is not consumed by the second service instance.
Consumer Group Rebalance Impact
A consumer instance that is retrying a message using stateful retry could be unassigned from that topic partition during a consumer group rebalance. In this case the topic partition is assigned to another consumer instance which has no knowledge of the state of the retry. Therefore the retry attempts/period will be effectively reset.
In the following example ‘max retry attempts’ is configured to two. As a consumer group rebalance occurs after the first consumer instance has retried once and the partition is reassigned to the second consumer instance, three retries happen in total before the message is dead lettered.
For this to become an issue it would require both the unlikely event that frequent rebalances are occurring and the even more unlikely scenario that every consumer instance that is in turn retrying the message happens to be unassigned from that topic partition one after the other. The reassignment of the partition would then result in the retry attempts/period being reset each time, meaning that the total retry time could be theoretically unbounded. The message would eventually be expired from the topic once its age exceeded the retention period of the topic if the retries never successfully completed. So the message would never complete processing, rather than the expected retry attempts being exhausted and the message dead-lettered.
However, even if consumer group rebalances are occurring frequently, typically a healthy consumer instance that is retrying the message would not be unassigned from the topic partition, and so the state of the retry is retained. Unassignment of a partition is likely to only happen either if the consumer dies, or the instances are being scaled up so this partition is assigned to a new consumer.
Monitoring and Alerting
Retries should be monitored and alerts fired when retries are happening for long periods as this points to a possible system problem.
Consumer group rebalancing should also be monitored with alerting in place so that its frequency is understood. If it is occurring more frequently than expected (noting it does happen naturally when scaling consumers up and down) then this should be investigated. This would give confidence in the edge case that a message retrying via stateful retry is not at risk of expiring due to the retry attempts/period constantly being reset.
If the retention period of a topic is too short, and messages are being retried for long periods, be it with stateful or stateless retry, the messages blocked behind these could expire from the topic before they are ever consumed.
Conclusion
Stateless retry on a consumed event limits an application’s ability to retry for any useful length of time for most typical use cases, without the risk of message duplication.
Stateful retry solves this by not tying the total time for all retries to the consumer poll. Applications can be configured to retry transient errors for as long as required.
Source Code
The source code is available here: https://github.com/lydtechconsulting/kafka-consumer-retry
The project demonstrates the difference in behaviour between consumers using stateless and stateful retry.
It contains SpringBoot integration tests that demonstrate the retry behaviour. They use an embedded Kafka broker and a wiremock to represent a third party service. This call to the third party service simulates transient errors that can be successful on retry.
It also contains component tests that demonstrate the retry behaviour. They use a dockerised Kafka broker and a dockerised wiremock to represent a third party service. This call to the third party service simulates transient errors that can be successful on retry. Two instances of the service are also running in docker containers.
For More On Kafka…
Head over to Lydtech Consulting for this and many more articles on Kafka and other interesting areas of software development.
|
https://medium.com/lydtech-consulting/kafka-consumer-retry-646aa5aad2e4
|
['Rob Golder']
|
2021-12-18 14:09:12.954000+00:00
|
['Messaging', 'Resilience', 'Kafka']
|
Encrypting Kubernetes Secrets With Sealed Secrets
|
‘SealedSecret’ Scopes
From the end-user perspective, a SealedSecret is a write-only device.
No one apart from the running controller can decrypt the SealedSecret , not even the author of the Secret .
It’s a general best practice to disallow users to have direct access to read secrets. You can create RBAC rules to forbid low-privilege users from reading Secrets . You can also restrict users to only be able to read Secrets from their namespace.
While the SealedSecrets are designed in a way that it’s impossible to read them directly, users can work around the process and gain access to secrets they’re not allowed to view.
SealedSecret resources provide multiple ways to prevent such misuse. They are namespace-aware by default. Once you generate a SealedSecret using kubeseal for a particular namespace, you can’t use the SealedSecret in another namespace.
For instance, if you create a Secret named foo with a value bar for namespace web , you can’t apply the Secret on the database namespace — even if it requires the same Secret .
It’s by design, as we can’t allow a user who has access to the database namespace to see Secrets from the web namespace by just applying the web namespace’s SealedSecrets on the database namespace. SealedSecrets behave as if every namespace has its own decryption key.
While Sealed Secret’s controller doesn’t use an independent private key for each namespace, it takes into consideration the namespace and name during the encryption process, which achieves the same result.
Another scenario is we might have a user on the web namespace who can only view certain secrets and not all of them. SealedSecrets allow this as well.
When you generate a SealedSecret for a Secret named foo for the web namespace, a user who just has read access to the Secret named bar on the web namespace can’t change the name of the Secret within the SealedSecret manifest to bar and apply it to view the Secret .
While these ways help you prevent people from misusing the Secrets , they may give you a management headache. In the default configuration, you won’t be able to define generic Secrets to be used in multiple namespaces.
You might not have a large team, and your Kubernetes cluster might be accessed and managed only by admins. Therefore, you may not need that level of role-based access control.
You also may want to define SealedSecrets that you can move across namespaces. You don’t want to manage multiple copies of SealedSecrets for the same Secret .
SealedSecrets allow these possibilities using scopes.
There are three scopes you can create your SealedSecrets with:
strict (default): In this case, you need to seal your Secret considering the name and the namespace. You can’t change the name and the namespaces of your SealedSecret once you've created it. If you try to do that, you get a decryption error.
(default): In this case, you need to seal your considering the name and the namespace. You can’t change the name and the namespaces of your once you've created it. If you try to do that, you get a decryption error. namespace-wide : This scope allows you to freely rename the SealedSecret within the namespace for which you’ve sealed the Secret .
: This scope allows you to freely rename the within the namespace for which you’ve sealed the . cluster-wide : This scope allows you to freely move the Secret to any namespace and give it any name you wish.
Apart from the name and namespace, you can rename the secret keys without losing any decryption capabilities.
You can select the scope with the --scope flag while using kubeseal :
$ kubeseal --scope cluster-wide --format yaml <secret.yaml >sealed-secret.yaml
You can also use annotations within your Secret to apply scopes before you pass the configuration to kubeseal :
sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/namespace-wide: "true" for namespace-wide
for sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/cluster-wide: "true" for cluster-wide
|
https://medium.com/better-programming/encrypting-kubernetes-secrets-with-sealed-secrets-fe363149a211
|
['Gaurav Agarwal']
|
2020-06-15 17:46:30.775000+00:00
|
['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Kubernetes', 'DevOps', 'Technology']
|
Star Trek: Discovery 2020 [S3 — E11]- ON~{{CBS All Acces}}
|
⭐ Watch Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11 Full Episode, Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11 Full Watch Free, Star Trek: Discovery Episode 11,Star Trek: Discovery CBS All Acces, Star Trek: Discovery Eps. 11,Star Trek: Discovery ENG Sub, Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Star Trek: Discovery Series 3,Star Trek: Discovery Episode 11, Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11, Star Trek: Discovery Full Streaming, Star Trek: Discovery Download HD, Star Trek: Discovery All Subtitle, Watch Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11 Full Episodes
Film, also called movie, motion picture or moving picture, is a visual art-form used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations.[11] The word “cinema”, short for cinematography, is ofCBS All Acces used to refer to filmmaking and the film Star Trek: Discovery, and to the art form that is the result of it.
❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). There are challenges with streaming conCBS All Accest on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the conCBS All Accest. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain conCBS All Accest.
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet conCBS All Accest in real-time much as live television broadcasts conCBS All Accest over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the conCBS All Accest, a media publisher, and a conCBS All Accest delivery network to distribute and deliver the conCBS All Accest. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the conCBS All Accest before watching or lisCBS All Accesing to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio conCBS All Accest before the entire file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONCBS All AccesT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[11][11][11][11][11] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is inCBS All Accesded to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[11][11][11] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is ofCBS All Acces shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][11][3][3][3] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[3]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not exCBS All Accesd beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsisCBS All Accest.[3]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 3 to 11 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[11] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[3]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[11] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exCBS All Accessible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[11] Credit is exCBS All Accesded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.
‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ CBS All Accesween China, U.S.
CBS All Acces’s live-action “Star Trek: Discovery” was supposed to be a huge win for under-represented groups in Hollywood. The $11 million-budgeted film is among the most expensive ever directed by a woman, and it features an all-Asian cast — a first for productions of such scale.
Despite well-inCBS All Accestioned ambitions, however, the film has exposed the difficulties of representation in a world of complex geopolitics. CBS All Acces primarily cast Asian rather than Asian American stars in lead roles to appeal to Chinese consumers, yet Chinese viewers rejected the movie as inauthentic and American. Then, politics ensnared the production as stars Liu Yifei, who plays Star Trek: Discovery, and Donnie Yen professed support for Hong Kong police during the brutal crackdown on protesters in 31111. Later, CBS All Acces issued “special thanks” in the credits to government bodies in China’s Xinjiang region that are directly involved in perpetrating major human rights abuses against the minority Uighur population.
“Star Trek: Discovery” inadverCBS All Accestly reveals why it’s so difficult to create multicultural conCBS All Accest with global appeal in 2020. It highlights the vast disconnect CBS All Accesween Asian Americans in Hollywood and Chinese nationals in China, as well as the exCBS All Accest to which Hollywood fails to acknowledge the difference CBS All Accesween their aesthetics, tastes and politics. It also underscores the limits of the American conversation on representation in a global world.
In conversations with seStar Trek: Discoveryl Asian-American creatives, Variety found that many feel caught CBS All Accesween fighting against underrepresentation in Hollywood and being accidentally complicit in China’s authoritarian politics, with no easy answers for how to deal with the moral questions “Star Trek: Discovery” poses.
“When do we care about representation versus fundamental civil rights? This is not a simple question,” says Bing Chen, co-founder of Gold House, a collective that mobilizes the Asian American community to help diverse films, including “Star Trek: Discovery,” achieve opening weekend box office success via its #GoldOpen movement. “An impossible duality faces us. We absolutely acknowledge the terrible and unacceptable nature of what’s going on over there [in China] politically, but we also understand what’s at stake on the Star Trek: Discovery side.”
The film leaves the Asian American community at “the intersection of choosing CBS All Accesween surface-level representation — faces that look like ours — versus values and other cultural nuances that don’t reflect ours,” says Lulu Wang, director of “The Farewell.”
In a business in which past box office success determines what future projects are bankrolled, those with their eyes squarely on the prize of increasing opportunities for Asian Americans say they feel a responsibility to support “Star Trek: Discovery” no matter what. That support is ofCBS All Acces very personal amid the Star Trek: Discovery’s close-knit community of Asian Americans, where people don’t want to tear down the hard work of peers and Star Trek: Discovery.
Others say they wouldn’t have given CBS All Acces their $3 if they’d known about the controversial end credits.
“‘Star Trek: Discovery’ is actually the first film where the Asian American community is really split,” says sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who examines racism in Hollywood. “For people who are more global and consume more global news, maybe they’re thinking, ‘We shouldn’t sell our soul in order to get affirmation from Hollywood.’ But we have this scarcity mentality.
“I felt like I couldn’t completely lambast ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ because I personally felt solidarity with the Asian American actors,” Yuen continues. “I wanted to see them do well. But at what cost?”
This scarcity mentality is particularly acute for Asian American actors, who find roles few and far CBS All Accesween. Lulu Wang notes that many “have built their career on a film like ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ and other crossovers, because they might not speak the native language — Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Hindi — to actually do a role overseas, but there’s no role being writCBS All Acces for them in America.”
Certainly, the actors in “Star Trek: Discovery,” who have seen major career breakthroughs tainted by the film’s political backlash, feel this acutely. “You have to understand the tough position that we are in here as the cast, and that CBS All Acces is in too,” says actor Chen Tang, who plays Star Trek: Discovery’s army buddy Yao.
There’s not much he can do except keep trying to nail the roles he lands in hopes of paving the way for others. “The more I can do great work, the more likely there’s going to be somebody like me [for kids to look at and say], ‘Maybe someday that could be me.’”
Part of the problem is that what’s happening in China feels very distant to Americans. “The Chinese-speaking market is impenetrable to people in the West; they don’t know what’s going on or what those people are saying,” says Daniel York Loh of British East Asians and South East Asians in Theatre and Screen (BEATS), a U.K. nonprofit seeking greater on-screen Asian representation.
York Loh offers a provocative comparison to illustrate the West’s milquetoast reaction to “Star Trek: Discovery” principal Liu’s pro-police comments. “The equivalent would be, say, someone like Emma Roberts going, ‘Yeah, the cops in Portland should beat those protesters.’ That would be huge — there’d be no getting around that.”
Some of the disconnect is understandable: With information overload at home, it’s hard to muster the energy to care about faraway problems. But part of it is a broader failure to grasp the real lack of overlap CBS All Accesween issues that matter to the mainland’s majority Han Chinese versus minority Chinese Americans. They may look similar, but they have been shaped in diametrically different political and social contexts.
“China’s nationalist pride is very different from the Asian American pride, which is one of overcoming racism and inequality. It’s hard for Chinese to relate to that,” Yuen says.
Beijing-born Wang points out she ofCBS All Acces has more in common with first-generation Muslim Americans, Jamaican Americans or other immigrants than with Chinese nationals who’ve always lived in China and never left.
If the “Star Trek: Discovery” debacle has taught us anything, in a world where we’re still too quick to equate “American” with “white,” it’s that “we definitely have to separate out the Asian American perspective from the Asian one,” says Wang. “We have to separate race, nationality and culture. We have to talk about these things separately. True representation is about capturing specificities.”
She ran up against the Star Trek: Discovery’s inability to make these distinctions while creating “The Farewell.” Americans felt it was a Chinese film because of its subtitles, Chinese cast and location, while Chinese producers considered it an American film because it wasn’t fully Chinese. The endeavor to simply tell a personal family story became a “political fight to claim a space that doesn’t yet exist.”
In the search for authentic storytelling, “the key is to lean into the in-CBS All Accesweenness,” she said. “More and more, people won’t fit into these neat boxes, so in-CBS All Accesweenness is exactly what we need.”
However, it may prove harder for Chinese Americans to carve out a space for their “in-CBS All Accesweenness” than for other minority groups, given China’s growing economic clout.
Notes author and writer-producer Charles Yu, whose latest novel about Asian representation in Hollywood, “Interior Chinatown,” is a National Book Award finalist, “As Asian Americans continue on what I feel is a little bit of an island over here, the world is changing over in Asia; in some ways the center of gravity is shifting over there and away from here, economically and culturally.”
With the Chinese film market set to surpass the US as the world’s largest this year, the question thus arises: “Will the cumulative impact of Asian American audiences be such a small drop in the bucket compared to the China market that it’ll just be overwhelmed, in terms of what gets made or financed?”
As with “Star Trek: Discovery,” more parochial, American conversations on race will inevitably run up against other global issues as U.S. studios continue to target China. Some say Asian American creators should be prepared to meet Star Trek: Discovery by broadening their outlook.
“Most people in this Star Trek: Discovery think, ‘I’d love for there to be Hollywood-China co-productions if it meant a job for me. I believe in free speech, and censorship is terrible, but it’s not my battle. I just want to get my pilot sold,’” says actor-producer Brian Yang (“Hawaii Five-0,” “Linsanity”), who’s worked for more than a decade CBS All Accesween the two countries. “But the world’s getting smaller. Streamers make shows for the world now. For anyone that works in this business, it would behoove them to study and understand Star Trek: Discoverys that are happening in and [among] other countries.”
Gold House’s Chen agrees. “We need to speak even more thoughtfully and try to understand how the world does not function as it does in our zip code,” he says. “We still have so much soft power coming from the U.S. What we say matters. This is not the problem and burden any of us as Asian Americans asked for, but this is on us, unfortunately. We just have to fight harder. And every step we take, we’re going to be right and we’re going to be wrong.”
☆ ALL ABOUT THE SERIES ☆
is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[11] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exCBS All Accessible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[11] Credit is exCBS All Accesded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.
‘Hausen’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ CBS All Accesween China, U.S.
|
https://medium.com/star-trek-discovery-2020-s3-e11-on-cbs-all-acces/watch-star-trek-discovery-series-3-episode-11-online-1080p-hd-6a0b129bf119
|
['Sarah Whittaker']
|
2020-12-25 10:07:17.997000+00:00
|
['Technology', 'Lifestyle', 'Coronavirus', 'TV Series']
|
Hand Dryer Market. Hand Dryer Market Report, published by…
|
Hand Dryer Market Report, published by Allied Market Research, forecasts that the global market is expected to garner $1,350 million by 2022. Asia-Pacific region is anticipated to exhibit robust growth owing to rapid infrastructure development and awareness about environmental benefits in the region. Food processing and service industry would continue to maintain its dominance throughout the forecast period due to need to reduce their operation expenditure.
Factors such as technological advancement, price, and energy efficiency of hand dryers have significantly impacted the market growth. Automatic hand dryers have reduced the human interaction notably with improvement in consumer experience. Moreover, the reducing product prices facilitates their adoption across new areas such as educational institutes, office buildings, retail outlets, and public restrooms among others. However, rise in health concerns due to microbial cross-contamination and associated noise pollution issues are expected to hinder the market growth during the forecast period in some extent. Nevertheless, ongoing research and development to improve quality, energy efficiency, and reduction in noise is anticipated to increase the demand for hand dryers.
Download Sample Report: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/1688
Global hand dryer market is segmented based on type, mode of operation, end user, and geography. The market is segmented into two basic types — hot hand dryer and jet hand dryer. Hot hand dryers dominate in terms of volume owing to their low cost advantages. These are being increasingly installed at public restrooms, educational institutes, shopping malls, and others. However, the jet hand dryer segment would continue to maintain their leading position in terms of revenue generation with an increase in installation at commercial complexes, airports, hotels, and restaurants. Increased focus to avoid environmental loss with minimization of paper towels in commercial premises would help to fuel the market growth.
Depending on operation mode, the hand dryers are classified into push button and automatic. Fully automatic segment constitutes the highest market share owing to better convenience and consumer satisfaction. The growth of push button hand dryers would be supported by their demand from Asia-Pacific and LAMEA regions. Major end users of hand dryers include food processing and service industry, hotels, hospital and clinics, commercial complexes, and office buildings. Food processing and service industry leads the market followed by hotels in terms of market value. Healthcare premises such as hospitals and clinics would grow at the fastest CAGR of 15.1% during the forecast period owing to increased regulations pertaining to hygiene and cleanliness.
For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/1688
Geographically the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa. North America and Europe lead with more than 3/5th share owing to high living standards and increased health concerns. However, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA regions would exhibit the comparatively higher growth due to improvement in infrastructure development and growth in awareness. In particular, Asia-Pacific region would show promising growth owing to notable demand from the countries such as China, India, Japan, and South Korea among others.
Key Findings of Hand Dryer Market Study:
Hand dryer market witness significant growth across the globe with growth in awareness about hygiene and cleanliness among the populace.
In 2014, hot hand dryers shared nearly 70% market volume due to their cost-effectiveness as compared to jet hand dryers.
Food processing and service industry shares nearly 1/3rd market due to their increased installation at food parks, food outlets, and restaurants.
European region constitutes the highest market share with prominent demand from UK, France, Germany, and Italy among others.
Market players focus on product launch equipped with advanced features to meet the customer demands.
Key players profiled in the report include World Dryer Corporation, American Dryer Inc., Dyson Ltd., Palmer Fixture, Bio Jetdrier, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Hokwang Industries, Excel Dryer Inc., and JVD SAS. These players focus on product launch to improvise their market share and take leading edge on the competitors. For instance, recently in April 2016, World Dryer Corporation, a leading global high-speed hand dryer manufacturer, has launched VERDEdri as per GRAs environmental product endorsement standards. This energy-efficient hand dryer utilizes 950 watts with dry time of nearly 12 seconds.
|
https://medium.com/@nisha.dodeja_97586/hand-dryer-market-to-witness-an-outstanding-growth-by-2022-6bd8cd7e7820
|
['Nisha Dodeja']
|
2019-07-19 09:45:02.901000+00:00
|
['Consumer Goods', 'Hand Dryer Market Trends', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Hand Dryer Market Share', 'Hand Dryers Market']
|
KINDS OF POEMS
|
There are various kinds of poems,let’s carefully go through some….
LYRIC: A lyric poem was sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. it is a short poem to express some intense personal feelings I.e it’s a short,musical or rhythmic poem,in which a poet expresses his/her thought and emotions on any matter that interest him/her.
SONG/SONG LYRICS: These are poems that have been set to music.
SONNET: A fourteen line poem which rhythmic pattern is iambic pentameter, each line of fourteen lines bears five alternating beats of unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.
EPIC: A long narrative poem that celebrates historical events ,often mythical,it’s usually written in elevated languages and style.
LIMERICK: It is a funny or unserious short poem of five lines with the rhyme scheme aabba..
PANEGYRIC: Is a poem meant to eulogize the horoic deeds of an individual,it is a type of traditional African poetry.
DIRGE: Is a poem used in expressing grief on the occasion of someone’s death.
BLANK VERSE/FREE VERSE: A poem of no uniformity of rhythm and rhyme. it was originally composed in iambic pentameter.
LULLABY: A poem meant to be sung to children in order to make them sleep.
BALLAD: This is an anonymous narrative in verse passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth,meant to be sung and danced before a crowd.
ODE: This is a meditative poem that addresses itself to a person or thing in which the good qualities of such person or object are highlighted and commended.
|
https://medium.com/@viapiece/kinds-of-poems-108f39616063
|
['Via Piece']
|
2020-07-07 11:42:12.038000+00:00
|
['Poem', 'Songs', 'Poems On Medium', 'Songs Lyric', 'Lyrics']
|
二分搜尋法（Binary Search）完整教學（一）- 基礎介紹
|
二分搜尋法（Binary Search）完整教學（一）
基礎介紹
Binary Search，中文又稱作二分搜尋法，大概是每個初學演算法的人最早碰到的課題。他的觀念極簡單，實作也不複雜，但隨著學習更加深入，會發現這東西版本很多，大家寫起來往往有細微差異，而可以應用的題型也多不勝數，但每個題型到底要使用哪個版本，又有一堆令人頭疼的小細節。
今天這系列文章就來聊聊這個經典演算法的許多眉眉角角，與藏在細節裡的魔鬼，最後帶大家看看 source code 與實戰題目。如果你是剛看懂 binary search 的初學者，希望看完本篇後能理解的更透徹，如果你已經很進階了，也歡迎一起討論或指出更多的想法。
實作
首先，來看看 Binary Search 的最簡易版本：
定義：在排序好的數列裡，找某 target，找到就回傳其 index，否則回傳 -1
int binary_search(vector<int> &nums, int target) {
int left = 0;
int right = nums.size() - 1; // array 長度 -1
while (left <= right) {
int mid = (left + right) / 2; // 用 int 的性質做無條件捨去
if (nums[mid] > target) {
right = mid - 1;
} else if (nums[mid] < target) {
left = mid + 1;
} else {
return mid; // 剛好找到 target
}
}
return -1;
} int main() {
vector<int> nums = {1,3,4,7,8,10};
cout << binary_search(nums, 0) << endl; // -1
cout << binary_search(nums, 1) << endl; // 0
cout << binary_search(nums, 3) << endl; // 1
cout << binary_search(nums, 4) << endl; // 2
cout << binary_search(nums, 5) << endl; // -1
cout << binary_search(nums, 7) << endl; // 3
cout << binary_search(nums, 8) << endl; // 4
cout << binary_search(nums, 10) << endl; // 5
cout << binary_search(nums, 11) << endl; // -1
}
註： 對 c 語言不熟悉的朋友， vector<int> 就是種可動態增長的 array，如同 python 或 javascript 的 [] 一樣。（細節差異在此先不用在意）
目前為止非常容易，但我們來注意幾個有趣的細節
問題
最上面的 while 迴圈裡面，為什麼我們要寫 left <= right，不能只寫 left < right 嗎？當 left == right 時，需要再跑一次嗎？ 我 right 的起始點為什麼是 array 的長度 -1，不能直接是 array 長度嗎？ 中間判斷時，為什麼是 right = mid-1 跟 left = mid+1，如果不要 -1 跟 +1 或只有其中一邊+-1，會出錯嗎？
有興趣的朋友可以試試看，很神奇的，如果只做 1 或只做 3 的改動都會讓你陷入無窮迴圈，2 更可能直接報錯，即使沒有也暗藏凶險。回答這個問題前，我們先釐清兩個觀念：
觀念
我們要先給 left 跟 right 一個精確的定義
先簡單介紹一下，我們一般定義區間時，會分開區間與閉區間，代表的是有沒有包含兩端點，數學上會分別用中括號和小括號表示，看個例子就很好懂
a. [3, 5]: 閉區間，代表 3, 4, 5 （包含 3、5）
b. (4, 9): 開區間，代表 5, 6, 7, 8 （不包含 4、9）
c. [1, 6): 左閉右開區間，代表 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 （包含 1、卻不包含 6 )
所以上面 binary search 的寫法中的 left 與 right 代表的就是：答案還有可能存在的區間的兩端點，並且這是個閉區間，也就是 left 與 right 這兩個端點都包含在區間內，數學表達式會是 [left, right]，如下圖。
註：開區間的寫法也有，在續篇會講到
2. 我們的 mid 算法，在除不盡的狀況，到底會選哪個位置？
今天的 int mid = (left + right) / 2，意思是我要取 (left + right) / 2 的 integer 值，而 integer 是沒有小數點的，所以他會被無條件捨去，例如當我要找 index 為 0 與 index 為 5 的中心點，我會找到 index 為 2.5，經過無條件捨去，最後就是 index 為 2 (也就是 value 是 4 的那個位置），也就是當我除不盡的時候，我要用中間偏左邊的那個位置代表中間點。如下圖。
註1：假如是 python，我們會寫 mid = (left + right) // 2，一樣是無條件捨去的意思。javascript 則是 mid = Math.floor((left + right)/2)。
註2：如果你想全部用中間偏右邊當 mid 值，也是可以的，但未來有些變化型會出現差異，留在續篇再談。至於改法，就留給大家想想。而選中間偏左邊是比較多人的習慣，畢竟稍稍好寫那麼一點點。
解答
現在我們可以來回答上面三個問題了，問題的答案其實都是一樣的：因為我們定義的 left 與 right 是閉區間，也就是包含 left 端點與 right 端點。
問題 1 的答案：當我們 left == right 的那一刻，例如 left == 3、right == 3 好了，那代表可能答案會在 [3,3] 之間，這是個合理的區間，且區間裡只有 3 一個元素，所以當然要再跑一次，確定他是不是我們要的答案，因此 while 的判斷式會是 <= 而非 <。
問題 3 的答案：為什麼要 +-1，同理，因為我們要的是答案的閉區間，假如 mid 不是答案，那 mid 必須被排除在可能是答案的區間裡，因此不需要再考慮他，直接用 [left, mid-1] 或 [mid+1, right] 當成新的區間即可。
問題 2 的答案：需要一點細心觀察，假如今天我們把 right 定義成 array 長度，也就是最大的可能 index + 1 的位置上，首先當然違反了閉區間的原則，因為最大的可能 index + 1 不可能是答案，不然就超出 array 範圍了。實際操作時，假如我們的 target 大於 array 裡面最大元素的值，例如 target = 11，我的左邊界就會不停的往右移動 mid+1, mid+1,…，最終他會跑到 left == right，且兩個都停在最大的 index +1，還記得 left == right 的時候我們要再跑一次，而此時 mid 的計算方式會讓我們得出 mid == left 的結果，最終我們的 nums[mid] 就會訪問一個超出範圍的位置，這顯然是很危險的，有些程式語言直接報錯，有的則會給你任意可能的回答，讓你以為沒問題，其實更加危險。
|
https://medium.com/appworks-school/binary-search-%E9%82%A3%E4%BA%9B%E8%97%8F%E5%9C%A8%E7%B4%B0%E7%AF%80%E8%A3%A1%E7%9A%84%E9%AD%94%E9%AC%BC-%E4%B8%80-%E5%9F%BA%E7%A4%8E%E4%BB%8B%E7%B4%B9-dd2cd804aee1
|
['Ding-Chi Lin']
|
2020-12-04 05:07:05.452000+00:00
|
['Algorithms', 'Programming', 'Binary Search', 'Software Development', 'Data Structures']
|
Creating a simple convolution neural network
|
Object detection
Object detection is a computer vision method in which an AI is trained to identify and locate objects in an image or video. This method can be broken into two major steps: object localization and object recognition.
Object localization is locating the presence of objects in an image and finding a bounding box for that object. Object recognition is classifying the objects that the model found.
Understanding and preprocessing the data
In this blog post, we will be using the Intel Image Classification dataset. It contains various images of Natural Scenes around the world. Our goal is to make a model that can take in an image and accurately return one of the six classes: buildings, forest, glacier, mountain, sea, or street. The first step in creating a machine learning model is to find patterns and trends in the data and visualize it.
Here is my Kaggle Notebook if you would like to follow along: https://www.kaggle.com/krish45732/intel-image-classification-notebook. (The output of the notebook and the output on this blog post may be different)
We will start by importing libraries that we will need later on
The data is separated into six folders: one for each class. We will make a get_images function to extract our images into one array. First, we make empty lists to store the images ( x_list ) and their labels ( y_list ). Next, the outer loop will cycle through each class (0–6). The inner loop will cycle through each image in the classes’ respective folders. We will use the cv2 library to read the images, resize them to (150, 150, 3) and append them to x_list . We also append the class number to the y_list variable. Lastly, we convert the python lists into NumPy arrays, shuffle the data, and return the arrays. The get_images_pred is similar to the function we just made, but it has only one loop and doesn’t have y_list . The to_onehot function will be used later to convert the y values to a one-hot array.
Next, we create a dictionary to hold a mapping from the number of the class to its name. Then, we use the get_images function to get the training and validation images. The validation dataset will be used to check if our model is overfitting or “memorizing” the training dataset.
Next, we will visualize the data using matplotlib. This lets us confirm that we got the right images with the right classes and preview the images we will be using.
The output images will vary since we shuffled the images before, but confirm that the labels match their images. Here is my output:
Now that we have taken a look at our dataset, we can get started with creating our model. First, we convert our label arrays into one-hot arrays using the to_onehot function we previously made.
Artificial neural networks (ANN)
Artificial neural networks are basically a complex math function. They are loosely based on neural networks in the human brain. Here is a broad overview of ANN’s. An artificial neural network begins with an input layer. This is where the input data — what the neural network is going to learn about— is fed in. Next, there are one or more hidden layers. These hidden layers are the bulk of the math function and find key features in the input images. Each hidden layer adds even more complexity to the function. In the image below, i1 and i2 are the two input nodes. The input is then multiplied by a weight (w1, w2, w3, w4) and the bias value (b1) is added on. This value passed through an activation function such as Sigmoid, ReLU, TanH, and more. These functions help normalize the output of the node into a 0 to 1 range or -1 to 1 range. This value is then passed on to the corresponding node in the next layer and the process is repeated. For the final output layer (o1 and o2), the values are passed through a different activation function and depending on the type of problem, it will return a classification, probability, or something similar. When training, lots of input data is fed into the neural network. The output is compared to the expected value to find the error of the model. Then, the model undergoes back-propagation in where the weights and biases of the neural network are adjusted to reduce the error.
Image from missinglink.ai
Convolution neural networks (CNN)
Image from towardsdatascience.com
A convolution neural network is an algorithm commonly used in object detection or object recognition. CNN’s usually perform better on images compared to regular perceptrons. It essentially reduces the image size while maintaining the image’s key features to make processing easier. As shown below, convolution neural networks can have convolution layers, max-pooling layers, flatten layer, dense/fully connected layers, and more.
In the GIF on the left, the leftmost image is the input; the middle image is the convolution filter, and the rightmost image is the output. In this example, the 3x3 filter is multiplied onto a 3x3 section of the image. The values are summed up and put in the output image. Some things that can change include the filter size, the stride (how many pixels the filter moves by), and padding (which can keep the image the same size). To learn more about convolution layers you can read this article.
Max-pool layers downsample the image into key features reducing the computation power needed. The max-pool layer takes the max value using a filter. The flatten layer takes the output from the last convolution/pooling layer and flattens it down into a one-dimensional array to be used in the dense layers.
Creating a convolution neural network
First, we create a sequential model since the data will pass through in chronological order. Conv2D layers are the convolution layers. MaxPool2D is a max-pooling layer that downsamples the image to highlight key features in it. After we pass it through a couple of convolution layers and max-pooling layers, we flatten the dataset so it can be used in the dense layers. Dense layers are fully connected neural network layers. The dropout layer helps reduce overfitting or “memorizing” the training images. The last dense layer gives out an array that sums to one with the decimal probabilities for each class. Next, we compile the model and print out a summary of it. Using the summary we can see the output shape of each layer, parameters per layer, and the total number of parameters. In this model, we have over 1.1 million parameters.
Training the model
Now that the model is created and compiled we can train it using the simple Keras fit function. We pass in the training data, the number of epochs, and the validation data. The number of epochs is the number of times it will pass through the entire dataset, in this case, 25. I suggest you train this using a GPU from Google Colab, Kaggle Kernels, or something similar to speed up the process. For me, it took roughly 25 minutes to train using Kaggle.
Analyzing the results
Now that the training is complete, we can take a look at the results. We will plot the training and validation accuracy. We will also plot a line for the best validation epoch and its accuracy.
Note that the graph will vary. Using the graph, we can see that our training accuracy and validation accuracy increased a lot in the first few epochs. Near the end, the training accuracy was still going up but started to flatten out. However, the validation accuracy was going down. This is called overfitting in which the model starts to memorize the training set. So, the training set accuracy will go up, but the validation set accuracy, which is not being trained on, will go down. According to the print statement and the graph, epoch 15 was the best epoch with a validation accuracy of 83.33%. In future articles, we will talk about how to reduce overfitting and increase accuracy.
Now, we can use our model to predict images it has not seen before. First, we load the prediction dataset using the get_images_pred function we made before. Then we use the predict_classes function from Keras to predict the classes. Lastly, we plot 16 images from the prediction set with their labels.
The output can vary but compare the labels to what you think that image is. Here is my output:
Conclusion
In this article, we created a simple CNN to recognize different “natural scenes.” We learned how to load in the images, plot them, create and compile a model, train the model, analyze the data, and make predictions! I hope you had fun and learned something new! In the future, we will look at how to reduce overfitting, increase accuracy, and transfer learning.
|
https://medium.com/@krish45732/creating-a-simple-convolution-neural-network-adfc8e322f22
|
['Krish Ranjan']
|
2020-11-20 00:52:55.493000+00:00
|
['Artificial Intelligence', 'Object Detection', 'Machine Learning']
|
Inputs and Outputs
|
Let’s go over some of the benefits of inputs and outputs, and some of the drawbacks of being unbalanced.
Benefits of input
Allows for improved outputs
For example, if you want to create beautiful designs in a particular program, you need to learn (input) about the design program itself. The more you learn, the more polished your designs are going to look.
Allows for more frequent/larger outputs
It’s easy to think about this with our food-exercise analogy. More food allows for more exercise. It works with money too, the more you earn, the more you can spend. But there’s a mental aspect to this as well. When you input new information, your perspective changes, you understand things differently. This means that the previous output you produced might not be relevant anymore. Inputting feedback about something you produced allows you to improve on it, which will then lead you to produce more.
Drawbacks of Disproportionate Input
Stuck in a feedback/input loop
As helpful as learning is, it also causes stagnation. You can learn passively, or you can learn actively.
Passive learning is input learning. It’s watching, listening, and reading.
Active learning is output learning. It encompasses everything from taking notes on information you input, producing drafts, and creating prototypes.
It’s important for me to drive a point here: switching between passive and active learning is the key. It’s immediate feedback, it’s skin in the game. It’s the only way you can figure out if you learned something or if you’re inputting information into a black hole.
No time for outputs
0 is a dangerous number. If you spend your whole day learning (input), you’ll produce nothing. It’s simple but crucial. You want to keep in mind that your likely end goal with learning is to produce something of value.
Benefits of Output
Produce value
As mentioned before, producing value means that you create something that helps you and/or others.
Collaboration/Feedback
When you produce something, you externalize a part of yourself onto an object. This might sound metaphysical, but what it means is that you allow others to interact with your thinking. This allows them to either shape the object with you or provide feedback to you (input), which you will use to create a better version of the object (article, product, etc.)
Drawbacks of Disproportionate Output
No feedback means no improvement or validation
If you find yourself enmeshed in creation — good for you. But being busy with producing puts you at risk of being stuck in your own head. In this case, make sure you receive some signal from other people. How is your creation received? Does it help them? Is there a way to make it better? Not inputting these signals will cause you to miss out on two things:
Feedback from others. You’re not listening to the signals others send you about whatever it is you’re outputting. Meaning, you can’t tell if it’s valuable to them or not. Feedback from yourself. Say your output is public speaking. Before you communicate your ideas to others, and before they provide you with feedback, you have to write, edit, practice and maybe even listen to your own recordings. All these inputs are feedback from yourself. These inputs allow you to correct and improve your outputs before they even reach other people.
Burnout
When you produce value, it’s tempting to simply keep going. Think long term here, and allow yourself to rest. It’s an obvious challenge, but make sure you don’t burnout. Fragment your day. Diversify your output. Take a walk.
|
https://medium.com/swlh/inputs-and-outputs-733f57854a52
|
['Ben Someck']
|
2020-05-02 14:28:34.868000+00:00
|
['Personal Growth', 'Personal Development', 'Learning', 'Productivity', 'Busyness']
|
Post childhood
|
I thought the trunk of me might split,
or leaves might sprout.
Starve and wither,
or uphold the world in a green coat.
Persistent I believed,
from decay I could rise again.
And all my scars,
Would disappear.
Instead, I mourn.
A tree cannot be sapling twice.
|
https://medium.com/@sigridt/post-childhood-f453d0b4f919
|
['Sigrid Tiera']
|
2020-12-20 12:58:37.376000+00:00
|
['Trauma', 'Recovery', 'Poem', 'Childhood', 'Poetry']
|
Shot your wife in the head? Don’t worry 2021 can still be your year.
|
As I share the same first name with him, this quote resonates inside me. Mr Bukowski didn’t have a great life. He also didn’t become ‘successful’ until later years. There was no internet to constantly remind him everyone else is successful. But he did have cinemas, newspapers, buildings, books and poems. All created by ‘successful’ artists (which effectively achieved the same anxiety). Did he give up? No. He chugged down beer after beer and kept writing until he made it.
There comes a point where you need to sit down with yourself. Stop making excuses, and lay the groundwork for the future. Grab that vintage device used for taking notes. Find a sheet of digested tree. Put them together and write your plan for the future. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month but really visualise what you want in the next ten years.
What are you wearing? What are you drinking? How big is your home? Who do you wake up next to? What are you doing? Who are you?
Visualise that strawberry daiquiri, the smell of your Cuban cigar, the fear of the Mexican drug cartel following you, the taste of the sea as you escape in your rubber dinghy while your best friend bleeds to death. The more you imagine, the more real it’ll become.
Then work backwards. How are you going to get there? What do you need to read, what do you need to do to make this a reality? Become the master of your own destiny.
“Brain eating birds patrol the low frequency brain waves.” ― William S. Burroughs, The Yage Letters
|
https://medium.com/@willmott-charles/shot-your-wife-in-the-head-dont-worry-2021-can-still-be-your-year-944ed47f2e24
|
['Charlie Willmott']
|
2020-12-08 04:57:49.861000+00:00
|
['Creativity', 'Writing', 'Drugs', 'Advice', 'Humour']
|
Blogmas: Family Christmas traditions, Part 1
|
Would you like to start new family traditions this Christmas? Blogmas is here to help! Here are 5 new ideas…
1. Elf on the shelf
Even if the kids do not believe, it’s still a fun time!
2. Baking cookies
Spend the day baking.
3. Share with your neighbors
Take some cookies to the neighbors!
4. Take a drive
Hop in the car one evening and go looking at Christmas lights in the neighborhood.
5. Go shopping
Go out together in search of a new Christmas tree ornament. Maybe get one with the year printed on it so every year you decorate the tree you can remember each one and where you bought it.
What is Blogmas?
Blogmas: Christmas gift wrap alternatives, Part 1
Blogmas: Christmas gift wrap alternatives, Part 2
|
https://medium.com/writers-tips/blogmas-family-christmas-traditions-part-1-4334675e05de
|
['Deanna Martinez']
|
2020-12-09 12:19:18.704000+00:00
|
['Friends', 'Holidays', 'Tradition', 'Christmas', 'Family']
|
Every Day, I Think About the 2020 UCI World Championship Men’s Road Race: The French Offensive
|
[Author’s Note: This is a piece about a bicycle race, however, it’s not meant to be a piece of sports journalism — rather it’s better classified as a work of creative non-fiction. We can never know what goes through a cyclist’s head when they race. We can never truly understand their motives, their inspirations — yet their actions tell a story, and my goal here is to distill those storytelling elements into a broader, if somewhat embellished narrative.]
Table of Contents:
Prologue/The Breakaway
The French Offensive
Slovenian Rhapsody, Part 1
Slovenian Rhapsody, Part 2
Tom Dumoulin’s 30 Seconds of Payback
The Victory
The French Offensive
Fact: The last time a Frenchman won the World Championship’s Mens Road Race was 23 years ago in 1997 when Laurent Brochard beat the Danish rider Bo Hamburger in the final sprint. Since then, Worlds marks one of the longest droughts in French cycling, on par with the Tour de France, which hasn’t been won by a Frenchman since Bernard Hinault took the maillot jaune in 1985.
Another fact: With 74 kilometers left to go of the 2020 UCI World Championships Men’s Road Race, Julian Alaphilippe feels pretty damn good today. So far, the Frenchman hasn’t drawn much attention to himself. He hasn’t needed to — there’s still a lot of race left, and for now, it’s still the breakaway’s moment in the sun. Thus, Alaphilippe chooses to quietly grind down the distance, biding his time in the anonymizing comfort of the peloton. Gradient increasing, he works his mouth into a subtle half smile. He won’t have to lay low for much longer.
The Situation
It has taken 184 kilometers for this race to really kick off, and despite the last five hours of grueling riding, the peloton is vibrating with excitement. Everything could blow up at any minute — they can just feel it.
Once Yukiya Arashiro, the breakaway’s tenacious hero, is pulled back, the bunch knows that the last two riders up ahead — the German Jonas Koch and the Norwegian Torstein Traeen — will soon also be assimilated into the mass of rushing wheels and colorful jerseys. The conclusion of a breakaway is a pivotal moment for any race, and the question each rider asks himself in anticipation of that moment is the same: Who is going to take control when it all comes back together, and how?
Seventy-four kilometers is still a long ways to go, however, and there are risks involved with making a big move so early on.
Where we left off: Traeen and Koch, still at the front of the race.
Julian Alaphilippe and his second-in-command Guillaume Martin sit in the middle of the pack. Flanked by their ready and willing domestiques, the two consider their options. The number — in seconds and in meters — separating the peloton and the breakaway is dwindling precipitously. Clearly, something has to happen and soon— but do they want to be the ones to set things off, or should they wait for someone else to take initiative?
One can easily imagine a hypothetical tête-a-tête between the French team’s two leaders as they take stock of the situation, join forces, and scheme:
Alaphilippe: Something is about to happen. Should we go, Guillaume? Martin: Perhaps, but it might be too soon. Alaphilippe: The breakaway is going to be caught. Someone is going to take the reins after that, may as well be us. Martin: Strategically speaking, it is a toss up. If we hang in the back for another ten or fifteen kilometers, we can conserve our energy, let other teams battle it out, show their cards — there’s a lot of race left, Julian. Alaphilippe: That’s true. However, when we are this far back, we’re at a disadvantage should there be any attacks. It’s very likely that the intensity will ramp up at the foot of the next climb, or after we reel in the breakaway, whichever comes first. Martin: The question then is: do we want to conserve energy or be in control? Fortunately, we’ve still got a while before we have to make that decision. How much time is there between us and the break? Alaphilippe: Surely under two minutes now — but if we act sooner, we can catch the break and set things up at the start of the climb. Think of it this way, if we are at the front, we can punish everyone else for around five kilometers or so of climbing, continuing on if needed. The peloton is still too big and many riders are hanging on solely because the pace has been relaxed all day. I’m sure we can thin things out with a short attack and then decide from there how to proceed. Martin: I saw some strong riders further back that we could definitely put the hurt into, surprise a little bit. Carthy, Dumoulin. A question for you, though: if we don’t go out front, who will? Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia — they’ve been on the front all day with nothing to show for it. Belgium is the strongest, and they are more than content to sit in the wheel, biding their time. Do we really want to take the wind for them? Alaphilippe: I see your point, but if we up the pace, we’ll still tire them out, regardless. As for strength, let’s be realistic. Slovenia has Roglič and Pogačar but they have been burning through domestiques one after the other. Italy and the Netherlands are behind us, will be later to react. Spain is a threat, and it would be wise to stop them from coming any closer. If we attack, the main goal should be to cause gaps within the larger teams and wear down the smaller ones. Once we succeed at that, we can cede the front to someone else and take time to recover. Martin: To that point, if we go before we catch the breakaway and before the climb, we’ll catch everyone by surprise. They’re all waiting for someone to make a move, but not at this particular moment. Perhaps it would be wise to send one of our men up to gather information and see if the groups ahead are planning anything suspicious. Peters is agile and nobody is expecting him. He should go. Alaphilippe: I agree. Send Nans, and, should we decide to act, we send Pacher with him — he’s aggressive, but not important enough to arouse suspicion when he heads towards the front. Martin: So, we’re going to make a move, then — that much is settled. It would be wise for us to split up and manage the effort, maintain communication. You ride closer to the front with Peters and Pacher and I’ll stay back here to keep track of what’s happening behind us. Alaphilippe: Good idea. We’re entering the feed zone soon and that’s the perfect opportunity for Nans to ride up alongside as though he’s planning on taking a musette. Meanwhile, the pace will slow and he can head to the front.
The two nod and separate with 74 kilometers to go. Alaphilippe smiles. Their plan is brilliant.
Nans Peters (#40) is the first to come up towards the front.
The Team
Julian Alaphilippe and Guillaume Martin are two very different people, both on and off the bike.
On the bike, Martin is more of a pure climber — a rider with great endurance but little explosivity. In contrast, Alaphilippe is a puncheur — that is, he specializes in rollicking courses with short but steep climbs, able to attack on the hills as well as compete in a sprint at the end, should there be one. As a person, Alaphilippe can best be described as a showman — bombastic, cocky, prone to public displays of emotion. Martin, on the other hand is demure, quiet, and shy.
Regardless of his apparent impulsivity, Alaphilippe is, in fact, very clever. This is something he shares in common with his compatriot, who, in addition to being a professional cyclist, holds a Master’s degree in philosophy and has written a successful book, Socrates a Vélo, which looks at cycling through the eyes of the great philosophers. Martin’s odd path in life has worked to his advantage in that he is a well-rounded and self-actualized human being with a decent backup plan in place should cycling not pan out for him. In some ways, however, his background has disadvantaged him.
Despite his talent, Guillaume Martin has been relatively overlooked as a cyclist until somewhat recently. In 2014, he spent a summer training with the prestigious French team Groupama-FDJ, who, for reasons unknown, did not call him back. Shut out of the big leagues, Martin spent four years on the less elite continental team Wanty-Groupe Gobert, before finally returning to the World Tour level in 2019 when he joined Cofidis, another French team, as a team leader. Since then, he has been slowly climbing up the general classification, winning bronze in this year’s Criterium du Dauphine and 11th in the Tour de France. 2020 is Guillaume Martin’s first time racing in the World Championships for France and — considering his cleverness as a tactician as well as the important role he will play later on in the race — his past omission from the roster will prove to be one of French cycling’s most glaring mistakes.
Unlike Martin, Julian Alaphilippe (whom we will discuss in greater detail later in this series) has ridden the World Championships for France since 2017, with mixed results, depending on the course and the composition of the teams he’s been on. So far, his best placement has been 8th, which he achieved in 2018, beating out his teammate Thibaut Pinot, who came in 9th. Another Frenchman from their team, Romain Bardet, won silver.
This year, however, Bardet and Pinot were both victims of nasty crashes at the Tour, and the vacancies left by them gave the French team an opportunity to rethink their choices. The 2020 team is composed of more riders better known for their aggression, such as Nans Peters and Quentin Pacher, and most of the cyclists on the roster are older — in their late 20s. Almost all of them ride as climbers or puncheurs, and for good reason: the Imola course is far too brutal for the sprint and time trial specialists. The 2020 team proves to be terrific in its composition, with great chemistry and much clearer hierarchies between its riders.
The French riders don’t know it quite yet, but their team’s new strategic pivot from endurance to aggression will end up paying dividends.
The Moment
Nans Peters and Quentin Pacher on the front of the peloton.
At 70 kilometers to go, Nans Peters slips off to the side and pulls himself to the head of the peloton. After a little bit of reconnaissance, he discovers that none of the other teams have decided to do anything. Denmark sits at the front simply because they were sitting at the front before. Peters lingers on the sidelines and Pacher and Alaphilippe understand through fleeting glances and pure body language that Peters is holding a place for them, securing an opening. With a quick burst of speed, they take it. Now, they are in control.
The commentators wonder if the French squad is going too early, and it’s a valid question, because France immediately ups the tempo. Slovenia makes an attempt to merge and regain their position — their heroes Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar clearly worried by the sight of Alaphilippe at the front — but the Slovenians are unable to maneuver themselves in time to neutralize the French threat. Roglič and Pogačar move up, impatient, anxious, both sensing that something important is about to happen.
The brinkmanship escalates. The Belgian team sends Tim Wellens, Greg van Avermaet following; Britain’s wunderkind long-shot Tom Pidcock claws his way up there with Luke Rowe; Poland brings forward their champion, Michal Kwiatkowski. Italy realizes the danger and furiously attempts to get riders where they need to be before this whole race blows apart.
Suddenly, the situation becomes very, very serious. Everything up to this point has been nothing but an overture, instrumentalists killing time while the stars of this four-part opera ready themselves backstage. Now, the final phrases of music tumble towards their feverish conclusion. The lights dim in the theater, the curtains are drawn, and the proverbial fat lady begins to sing.
Pacher, Peters, and Alaphilippe (FRA) at the front, with Pogačar (SLO) and Wellens (BEL) behind them.
The Attack
Immediately after the increase in pace, riders fall off the back of the peloton, drifting away into the dark zone of failure where the motorbikes don’t go. There’s so much happening ahead that the only comments the announcers make are the nationalities of the losers — one from Denmark, one from Switzerland, one from Luxembourg, and two from the USA.
Meanwhile, out at the front of the race, the lead of the two breakaway riders is eviscerated to under half a minute.
Young Tadej Pogačar, the unexpected winner of the 2020 Tour de France and one of the main protagonists of this story, grows restless. He wants to be at the front, needs to be at the front, and he acts on his need. With a little jolt in the legs, he grabs onto the wheel of Quentin Pacher. Pogačar’s presence adds a bit of kindling to the fire the French ignited a few moments ago, but more importantly, it escalates the anxiety of the riders behind him.
At 69 kilometers to go, the peloton reaches the base of the Cima Gallisterna. Almost all of the French team is there now, the stragglers having cleverly maneuvered themselves to the front, following the plan set in motion by Alaphilippe and Martin to a T. They fan out across the road, cutting off potential attackers like Pogačar and Wellens. Meanwhile, the Spanish team arrives, bringing all-rounder Mikel Landa with them. The French are unfazed by this. They’re calm, they’re fast, and they’re in control as the Cima Gallisterna begins to inflict its punishing gradient upon them.
France fans out at the base of the climb, maintaining control.
Pacher and Peters are careening up the climb, their tempo relentless. Pogačar and Wellens follow, sandwiched in by French domestique Kenny Elissonde. Landa makes his move and jumps across to Elissonde, sticks in his wheel, another Frenchman close behind him, keeping sentry. Within seconds, the last two members of the breakaway, Koch and Traeen, are caught, all but forgotten about over the course of the last few minutes’ madness.
At 68 kilometers to go, Nans Peters empties the tank, gives it everything he’s got in an attempt to wear down on his immediate pursuers and the peloton behind them. He’s out of the saddle, bike rollicking from side to side as he burns through every kilojoule of energy stored in that compact, powerful body of his. Peters is suffering — muscles aching, head down, teeth clenched — but there’s a joy in it. Nans Peters feels as alive as a cyclist can feel, for he’s accepting and fulfilling the domestique’s most noble, most heroic task: he’s sacrificing himself for his team leader.
Nans Peters in agony.
At 67 kilometers to go, Nans Peters seeks a brief reprieve and he drops back a position, taking comfort in the slipstream of Quentin Pacher, who now takes a turn at the head of the race. They’re still full-out sprinting, and the ensuing chaos has exactly the effect France predicted it would: it surprises and upsets the peloton. In other words, France has whacked this bees nest of a race with a broomstick, and the swarm is buzzing.
The peloton is stretched out like a rubber band, expanding and contracting at each corner, careening down the the other side of the climb. Small gaps begin to form within its strand and riders are desperate to try and close them, fervently praying that whatever’s happening up front will subside, that this insanity will all be over soon.
At 66 kilometers to go, Peters returns to the front and the Belgians begin to recover from the surprise of the French assault. More of their riders power their way forward, forming a contingent around Wellens and van Avermaet. The Belgian team, despite being caught off-guard by the recent turn of events, finds themselves rather pleased with them. They’re predicted to win this race, with several potential contenders among their ranks: Tim Wellens, Greg van Avermaet, Oliver Naesen, Tiesj Benoot, and, of course, the race favorite, Wout van Aert.
If, the Belgians think, the French want to waste their energy this far out, burn through their domestiques like children playing with matches, that’s perfectly alright. Why not let the French do the hard work of thinning the herd, taking the wind for the Belgians as they do it? It’s the best of both worlds, really. Thus, the Belgian team sits in the wheels of the French, both teams safe in their numbers, safe in their strength, unfazed by whatever’s unfolding further down the line.
The French lead the strung-out peleton into the autodrome. Two more laps to go.
The Mishap at the Autodrome
Now is the moment of narrative transition. Just as the concluding events of the last chapter and the initial events of the current one converged in the singular moment of Nans Peters’ attack, it is here, in the mishap at the autodrome where the stories told here and the stories to come overlap.
What happens in the beginning of the penultimate lap is, for the time being, rather vague. At 58 kilometers, the camera pans to the Slovenian cyclist Primož Roglič — second in this year’s Tour de France, and a favorite to win today. He’s suspiciously far behind in the peloton, legs spinning something fierce in his attempt to catch back up. Did he miss the attack? Did he get dropped? We do not know. Meanwhile, when the camera pans up to the front of the race, Tadej Pogačar is not there. At 57 kilometers, we finally see him, distanced behind the peloton, shoving his bidon in his jersey pocket, trying to get the attention of his team car. Has he had a mechanical? Is he injured? Again, we do not know.
Something has happened between the two Slovenian team leaders.
The camera jumps back to the front for a stint, the Belgians creeping towards the front as the race enters the autodrome. At 56 kilometers to go, it jumps back to Pogačar just in time to see him abandon his bike on the side of the road and hop gracefully atop a new one. He’s had a total bike change. Why? The reason is unclear, and too much is happening at the head of the race for us to wait for answers. For now, all we know is that Pogačar is going full gas trying to rejoin the tail end of a rapidly accelerating peloton. Fortunately, It doesn’t take him long.
With 54 kilometers to go, Tadej Pogačar arrives at the back of the bunch, his pursuit efficient and successful — effortless, even. Meanwhile, at the front, after a long campaign of fearless aggression, the beleaguered French team cedes control to the Belgians.
The Belgians, now at the front
Succession
The explicit goal of the French team’s aggressive strategy was to whittle the peloton down as much as possible as quickly as possible, splitting the other teams apart and knocking off their weakest links in the process. When Nans Peters goes on the attack, the peloton still has over a hundred riders counted within its ranks. Now, the main group numbers around fifty, with small gaps emerging here and there, depending on the tempo.
Guillaume Martin and Julian Alaphilippe are reunited in the middle of the bunch, neither quite sure whether the means of their attack justified the ends.
Quentin Pacher and Nans Peters allow themselves to get swallowed up, too. They try to hold on a little longer, try to fight the fatigue that reaches from their clenched jaws down to their numb, balled-up toes. In their exhaustion, they are satisfied. They have done their jobs to the best of their ability. The sight of suffering — evident in the knitted eyebrows and open mouths of every rider passing them by — brings the two Frenchmen glee. It’s suffering they’ve inflicted, hardship they’ve brought to fruition. In a race they have no chance of winning, schadenfreude is their only prize. They accept it with honor as they relax their legs and allow themselves to drift towards the rear of the pack, thankful for the respite of the wind.
Whether or not the French offensive was successful is irrelevant to the fact that it was necessary. Without it, the race would have stagnated for an indefinite amount of time in a stalemate between several powerful teams, each wary of the other. Alaphilippe’s decision to act when and where he did ignited the race, demonstrated his team’s strength, created a turning point at which many of the teams revealed their hands — with rather bad poker faces to boot.
Quentin Pacher drops to the rear of the peloton, totally exhausted.
Julian Alaphilippe and Guillaume Martin, in this embellished account, have gleaned several key pieces of information by way of their exercise in brinkmanship. First, they learn which teams are strong. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland seemed to struggle with recovering from the attack’s initial shock. Second, they learn which teams are less strong than they had anticipated. Italy and Spain, despite their star-studded rosters, failed to meet the French challenge in a way that demonstrated a legitimate threat, and Slovenia, though powerful, appeared to be totally disorganized. Finally, they learn which teams are downright weak. Neither the Dutch nor Colombians, once formidable opponents, established themselves as serious contenders at any point prior or during the attack.
Each of these kernels of knowledge will serve Martin and Alaphilippe well as they formulate a strategy to sustain them for the remaining 54 kilometers of the race. However, 54 kilometers is still a long ways from the finish line and so, for now, the French return quietly to the center of the pack, thankful to be relieved of the wind.
While the French team never quite fades into the background, the next chapter of this tale does not involve them. Similarly, while the Belgian team is, at present, maintaining strict control of the front of the race, the next chapter of this tale doesn’t really involve them either. What it does involve is a single, short-lived act — an act of bravery, an act of perseverance, an act of profound love.
The perpetrator of this act is the twenty-two year old boy gradually weaving his way back up through the peloton, blond-brown hair poking through the slats of his helmet. He lets out a deep breath and rests his hands calmly on the brakehoods of his bicycle. With 54 kilometers to go, Tadej Pogačar commits himself, eyes clear, cadence high, to the task ahead.
Part 3
|
https://medium.com/@mcmansionhell/every-day-i-think-about-the-2020-uci-world-championship-mens-road-race-the-french-offensive-42b5a4dee59b
|
['Kate Wagner']
|
2020-12-04 04:31:32.942000+00:00
|
['Cycling', 'Sports', 'History', 'Uci Worlds Mens Road Race', 'Creative Non Fiction']
|
Let’s vote!! — First vote — Art Skill Performance Change
|
About Governance
Anyone with an MCHC can vote from the voting page.
This page does not require a My Account login, and can be used by anyone with ETH authentication, regardless of whether or not they have an account.
Link to the voting page
Thank you for all your help! I’m Game-Senmu, the current producer.
This is the first round of governance, and I hope everyone will participate in further testing.
Now, what I’m interested in is the following.
The Future of Governance
There are still a few things that need to be finalized.
The reason why we didn’t go into too much detail in the last governance roadmap was to tell you “what you can do” without making it too rigid and difficult like the Terms of Service.
Rules are often a sexist way of poking holes in the system and preventing undesirable behavior.
It is also my intention not to set up a governance system for this time, because I think it would be better to build it together with everyone based on a good-faith theory.
Although I have my own personal opinions, I have not strongly decided what should be done. This is because I believe that now that governance is available, this is the phase where the users as a whole, including myself, can decide.
・How many times a month will governance be set?
・Will users have the right to suggest more than 1% of the time, or will they have the right to accumulate 1% of the time?
・Will Cp be granted to all governance? (We could have governance that is grantable and unimportant.)
I hope that we can first decide on these issues through governance with you.
There are some issues such as whether we can implement the user suggestion function, but we believe that we can start early with operations.
For example, those who have more than 1% of the coins will represent the users’ opinions and discuss them with the management team on Discord. There is a way for the development team to prepare a system based on the suggestions that are formulated there.
However, we are still in the process of building and getting used to the system, so there may be problems with the speed at which decisions are made.
For this reason, I believe that we will still be operating with some of the decisions made by the operation and development team, while making corrections and adjustments through governance.
I’d love to work with you all in a positive way to figure out how to better run and maintain My Crypto Heroes!
Please continue to help us out!
|
https://medium.com/mycryptoheroes/vote1-en-7d8da44381ef
|
['Wakao']
|
2020-12-24 06:50:29.775000+00:00
|
['English', 'Games', 'Mycryptoheroes', 'Dapps', 'Blockchain']
|
AYS Weekend Digest 5–6/12/2020 Greek (new) Democracy?
|
It is well documented that fascist and Nazi ideology is widespread among the Greek police. High ranking members of the police were actively involved in the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and on Sunday a policeman in Athens was spotted wearing a helmet with a symbol of XXXI Army Corps of the Wermacht. Among the arrestees were two lawyers who were working in the civil court case against Golden Dawn, arrested while trying to reach their client; Petros Konstantinou, head of anti-racist organisation KEERFA and member of Athens city council; members of the Rosa Luxemburg foundation; plus scores of anti-fascists.
According to observers, the very deployment of thousands of police in these last few weeks has already caused a spike in positive COVID-19 cases among the security forces and their families, and risks becoming a super-spreader in a country with a health system already under extreme pressure.
Press Freedom
Furthermore, videos show riot police charging journalists in the Exarchia neighbourhood in Athens. This is a highly symbolic ‘picture’ of the freedom of Greek press under this new government. The public press agency and public television have been brought under direct control of the Prime Minister office. Coverage of the pandemic is kept under close control, with health workers prevented from speaking to the media without official authorisation. During the pandemic, many media outlets “have become fully dependent on large grants that the Ministry of Information (Orwell lives!) dispenses at the minister’s whim.” As we have reported previously, this has lead to repercussions for those journalists covering the situation of refugees in the country. As Franziska Grillmeier stated on twitter:
After the fire in #Moria, we have been intermittently restricted from reporting (for over 5 days starting on 9 September 2020), especially inside the area where over 10.000 people had been stranded on the roadside without accommodation or sanitation.
In October, a German crew was detained and strip-searched without charges on the island of Samos. They were making a documentary on climate-induced migration. On the 17th of November, journalists were arrested in Athens while covering the demonstrations, and on Lesvos, “while trying to report on the landing asylum seekers & possible illegal “pushbacks” by Greek authorities.”
Right now, press is not allowed to report inside the Aegean camps without a special permission, that is very hard to obtain (including the new site of #Moria2). In order to avoid their contacts with #refugeesgr, police has limited the movement of journalists on Lesbos.
Over the weekend, one of the few twitter accounts held by a resident of Moria 2.0, on which they had been posting photos and videos regarding the situation inside the facility, was suspended.
Government Propaganda
The government carries on with its policies, unperturbed by the accusations of violence within the country and at its borders. Documentation on pushbacks piles up on a daily basis, involving — in a number of cases — the EU agency Frontex. On Saturday, 29 people were reportedly rescued by the Turkish coast guard on a life raft off the coast of Izmir, after being pushed back by Greek authorities.
In less than two years, the right-wing government have pursued the criminalisation of solidarity organisations and NGOs, have tightened the laws on asylum, have further militarised the borders, have provided de facto impunity for crimes committed in the Aegean and in the Evros region, have restricted access to camps and hotspots, and are now turning reception centres in unofficial detention sites. Officials have so far denied all such accusations, labelling them Turkish propaganda, and trying to shift the blame on to the NGOs and grassroots groups documenting these crimes. Greek authorities have pressured Frontex and the EU to include “hybrid threats” within the realm of the latest internal investigating sub-group on Frontex complicity in pushbacks.
While Greece descends into authoritarianism, EU institutions watch and applaud the country’s role in defending the Union’s external borders. Liberal values come in handy only when needed. Criticisms against Hungary and Poland, who now are vetoing the new EU budget, are rarely heard about Greece, a modern Cerberus at the EU’s gates.
|
https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-weekend-digest-5-6-12-2020-greek-new-democracy-eeeea849fc9e
|
['Are You Syrious']
|
2020-12-07 16:52:22.152000+00:00
|
['Refugees', 'Digest', 'Alexis', 'Illiberalism', 'Jamaica50']
|
Why UX is important to the online checkout process
|
Why UX is important to the online checkout process
As a gym enthusiast and possibly even a gym rat, products that will help me train and recover better are extremely important to my routine. That is why when I heard about Honey Stingers products I was super eager to try them and will admit I have now tried their honey, waffles, and protein bars.
Before going into the breakdown of the checkout process I experienced, I do want to be clear that I am not categorizing my positive experience with the physical product here. I am solely talking about my experience with purchasing the product.
Now that I have made that clear and I hope I have inspired you to try this awesome product, let’s understand the pain points.
After loading the website and exploring which products I wanted to try I added them to my cart and then clicked the checkout button under the cart icon in the navbar. Once on this Checkout page, my UX instincts came out.
Problem #1: Design Mimics an Infinite Scroll
Honey Stinger Checkout Page
As with any online order I had to input my shipping address, delivery method, payment method, and billing address. From an expectation standpoint, this was great as it included all fields I expected to fill out. However, my frustration occurred due to the sheer nature that all this information was on one long web page. I had to just keep scrolling in order to finally complete the last step.
Why It’s a Problem
It causes a user to feel as if the process will never end. Hence the title of this error, the layout mimics the design of a page that legit never ends.
How to Fix it
Honestly, pretty simple fix. If I were to redesign this checkout process, I would create different pages for each section. This way, the user can click a button that reads “Continue” or “Next” and allow them to differentiate between the different steps. By doing this, it allows the user to not feel like they are just continuously scrolling, and instead, they are able to get instant feedback that they have completed one step in the process and ultimately, that they are one step closer to receiving the product.
Problem #2: Location of Promo Code Input
Continuing off of problem #1, with the current design I have to scroll down towards the bottom of the page in order to fill out all the necessary information. However, the promo code form field is at the top of the page, forcing me to then have to scroll back up to fill it in.
Why It’s a Problem
The user flow here is confusing. We think left to right, so based on the current layout our brains will expect to fill in all of our information first since the form fields are all on the left-hand side. By doing this, the flow takes us to the bottom of the page where we are then prompted with a “Continue” button. When I clicked this button, I was taken to a page to review my order. At that point, it was too late to enter my promo code, so I was forced to hit the back button and go searching for this input field. I later found it hidden in the Summary section on the right-hand side of the original Checkout page.
How to Fix it
I would move the promo code to the payment section. This idea stems from the notion of similarity and that both the promo code and your credit card play a role in the payment of this product. This is important in UX as it allows for the user’s flow to feel seamless and consequential.
Problem #3: Hierarchy of color
Color plays a major role in our thought process, both consciously and subconsciously, and can be the reason why we click on a button. Honey Stinger has done a great job with creating a strong color palette and brand identity, however, I question the usage of color for their primary buttons.
Why It’s a Problem
On the checkout page, the left-hand side has the information a user has to fill in and on the right, it has the summary of the order. The problem here occurs with the fact that under the summary section there is a bright yellow button with the words “Edit cart” on it. This button in reality is not one a user will often need to click. Instead, at that moment the button to place an order is more important and that button is at the bottom of the page and is black. Just think about it for a second, which would catch your eye more, bright yellow or black?
With all the other black copy on the page, your answer is most likely the bright yellow button.
How to Fix It
That is why I suggest swapping the colors of the buttons. This way a user’s automatic instinct to click on the more aggressive colored button will allow them to follow the “correct path” at that moment.
As with any of my previous articles, and to reiterate what I said up top, I am only talking about how I would recommend fixing the user experience of the website. Each of the three areas I have called out are relatively small fixes, but each one proves the importance of UX and why more businesses should implement the UX process into their development processes.
_________________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading. Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
Want to know more about me? I am Frankie, a UX/UI Designer from New York City, passionate about building products within the Entertainment, Fitness, and Technology fields. Frankiekastenbaum.com
|
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/why-ux-is-important-to-the-online-checkout-process-b418da8cc00c
|
['Frankie Kastenbaum']
|
2020-12-23 06:02:03.179000+00:00
|
['UX', 'UI', 'Fitness', 'Online Shopping']
|
You Can Never Go Home — And That’s OK
|
Sparrows live here.
It stays warm all year, of course, and the crumbs of overpriced food dropped by passing travelers who eat from boredom more than hunger are enough to raise a family on. I know that the birds live here, raising chicks in the steel rafters and shitting on the polished floor, rather than it being a case of a few unlucky individuals getting trapped and lost inside the cavernous space of the airport. Because I’ve seen them before. I’ve been here before. I almost live here myself.
We’ve all been here before. The droning chatter. The manufactured smells. The facsimile food. The silent, highly decorous and utterly ruthless war for power outlets. It doesn’t need describing. One echoing departure hall mimics all the others. Even the languages hardly change. After so long abroad, my head turns by itself at the sound of English being spoken. At the airport, I hear it a lot.
It’ll be English and French in Edmonton, too. My phone, set on top of the half-empty case at my side, chimes regularly with updates. An ocean and most of a continent away, my brother is killing time in a place just like this, waiting for his flight while I wait for mine.
The sparrows drop quickly from their perches above the shops, tiny wings blurred by motion as they fall. That’s the look I was trying to achieve when I had a sparrow tattooed on my arm years ago.
The memory’s corners have become rounded from frequent replay.
Damp air rising from towering trees and a faint mist hovering over the dark water of the lake. My footsteps hollow on the small wooden bridge. The cloud of twittering sparrows bursting from the bushes and surrounding me in an instant. I can still feel one bird’s twiggy toes on my outstretched finger while the bright black bead of its eye stared into mine.
|
https://byrslf.co/you-can-never-go-home-and-thats-ok-29caa34e84a6
|
['Ryan Frawley']
|
2019-10-12 16:35:23.506000+00:00
|
['Travel', 'Family', 'Traveling', 'Short Story', 'Beyourself']
|
How to find the voice and tone for your UI/UX style guide?
|
How to find the voice and tone for your UI/UX style guide? Prasana Follow May 7 · 2 min read
image from unsplash
One way to write impactful content is to be conscious of the voice and the tone of your content. However, these two can go hand-in-hand, as you create the persona, purpose, intent and vision for your brand.
When designing a UI style guide for your brand, take time to find the exact tone and voice, and over the course of time to find ways to improve it.
Voice — Talk from the shoes of the customers
As content creators, each writer must have developed a unique personal voice over the years. This is the voice that we usually write when developing a story, or a piece, and your readers usually resonate with it.
But when writing a UI literal (error message), or a UX (onboarding texts), it’s ultimately the “screen” vs “reader”. Uniformity in the tone is crucial here. Because no matter if one or more than one writer is contributing to the content, it must be consistent throughout the pages and platforms.
Thus, create a style guide to direct your team to write with a voice in a way, your brand speaks with its customers.
Tone — Talk about situations, and not actions
As the voice remains unique for a writer, tone varies time to time. It varies with situations. For example, while writing an error text, you try to be formal and optimistic. Whereas, on an UX onboarding text you can be informal and cheerful.
The challenge lies in deciding when to pick what type of tone. To make your team easily understand this, mention explicitly in your guide on what tone to choose during the different situations.
An example for uniform vs non-uniform content
Key points to develop tone and voice:
|
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/how-to-find-the-voice-and-tone-for-your-ui-ux-style-guide-3ac7f9221c04
|
[]
|
2021-05-07 04:58:39.838000+00:00
|
['Style Guides', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Content Strategy']
|
Soul Seeker: 6th Knights Update Overview
|
Meet Rianna, the new SSR Warrior Hero, who comes in Darkness and Wind Element versions! Rianna is an incredibly powerful Hero who will slot right into the current metagame and will be an important Hero for Darkness and Wind players alike.
Rianna possesses powerful Skills such as Spell Bound Slice which deals damage while also stealing 3 seconds of the enemies’ cooldown time and powerful Passives like One with the Blade, which increases her Attack and Attack Speed by 35% with a 30% chance every time she attacks with a basic attack. She’ll slice her way right through your enemies!
As always, new Heroes are featured in Summon Chance Up Banners where there’s an increased probability that they will appear when you summon Heroes. Don’t miss out on your chance to acquire Rianna on her debut!
|
https://medium.com/playdappgames/soul-seeker-6th-knights-update-overview-40cc04b85aad
|
[]
|
2020-12-18 03:41:49.348000+00:00
|
['Rpg', 'Video Game News', 'Mobile Games', 'Gaming', 'Game Development']
|
Implementing a custom drag event function in JavaScript and THREE.js
|
THREEjs is a cross-over JavaScript library that allows us to unleash the potential of GPU driven graphics within the web browser. Although it provides both a orbitalControls and dragControls functions for object or scene manipulation, but what if we want a more personalised response on drag events? — this is what we shall cover here.
The code discussed within the article can apply to any HTML element, although the emphasis, in this case, is placed upon THREEjs. The only difference falls upon what goes into the dragAction function at the end.
— If you are new to the THREE.js library, have a browse through the following materials: here
— If you wish to apply the same principles to Data-Driven Documents (d3.js), have a look here
The Event Listener
To determine what is happening within our program we start by observing a number of mouse events. As the user ‘drags’, we need to know when they click, move and then release the object — in JavaScript, this is done through the use of event listeners.
Each Event ( mousedown , mousemove and mouseup ) is attached to a DOM element within the webpage. In our case, it is the canvas upon which the THREE libraries is plotting on. We can get this by using
let canvas = renderer.domElement
Default Variables
We begin by defining a set of default variables which our program will update. Here we have a logical ‘is the mouse down?’ mouseDown variable, and the cursor position variables.
var mouseDown = false,
mouseX = 0,
mouseY = 0;
Mouse Down
The first check we want to make is to see if our user has pressed the mouse button — as without this we do not have a ‘drag’ event. We do this by listening for a mousedown event on our canvas element.
canvas.addEventListener('mousedown', function (evt) {
evt.preventDefault();
mouseDown = true;
mouseX = evt.clientX;
mouseY = evt.clientY;
}, false);
When this happens we update our mouseDown logical variable and record the current cursor position.
Mouse Move
Now we have a pressed button, we want to track how much the user drags the mouse across the screen. We can do this as so:
canvas.addEventListener('mousemove', function (evt) { if (!mouseDown) {return} // is the button pressed? evt.preventDefault();
var deltaX = evt.clientX - mouseX,
deltaY = evt.clientY - mouseY;
mouseX = evt.clientX;
mouseY = evt.clientY; dragAction(deltaX, deltaY,object); }, false);
This function is activated each time the user moves their mouse. If the mouse button has not been pressed, however, it does not do anything.
If the button is pressed, our user is ‘dragging’ across the screen. We therefore record the distance moved, and pass it on to a custom dragAction function, along with the object we wish to manipulate.
Mouse Up
Finally, we need to know when the user stops pressing the mouse button, and reset the mouseDown variable. This is done with the mouseup event listener:
canvas.addEventListener('mouseup', function (evt) {
evt.preventDefault();
mouseDown = false;
}, false);
The custom response function
So far we have looked at recording when the user applies a ‘drag’ event and how far they have moved the cursor throughout this. Now we create a function to pass that information to the part of our scene.
For the purpose of this example, we will be rotating a mesh object — or in my case a THREE.Group containing 5 objects (see here for groups). We do this by changing the x and y rotation as such:
function dragAction(deltaX, deltaY,object) {
object.rotation.y += deltaX / 100;
object.rotation.x += deltaY / 100;
}
Here deltaX and deltaY represent the relative change of the mouse cursor throughout the drag event. The actions however can be anything the user desires — for instance, if we wanted to translate the position, we could use object.position.x += X instead.
Putting it all together
As I plan to reuse this code, It is not within my interest to copy-paste each time I wish to apply it. Instead, I can package it into a module, place that within a shared folder and import it each time I desire to use it. The module contents are given below:
Importing the module
Now we have a module, we can import it within our script as :
import {dragControls,dragAction} from './dragTHREE.js';
and use it as
dragControls(renderer.domElement,dragAction,graphs)
Where renderer.domElement is my canvas, dragAction is a function which takes the mouse positions and an object as an argument, and graps is a group object containing all the individual components of each graph in the title image.
Using a personal function with the module
Since the module is available to edit, we can either change the dragAction function directly, or just pass a different one to dragControls :
|
https://uxdesign.cc/implementing-a-custom-drag-event-function-in-javascript-and-three-js-dc79ee545d85
|
['Daniel Ellis']
|
2020-11-24 12:33:30.375000+00:00
|
['JavaScript', 'Webgl', 'Drag', 'D3js', 'Threejs']
|
Living alone means living with yourself.
|
Image by tookapic from Pixabay
If you can live alone, then you can live with yourself.
You get to know yourself and your personal boundaries. You come to have a relationship with yourself. Ultimately, you come to have healthier relationships with other people.
When you live alone and really enjoy it, the decision to live with others becomes a very big deal. What may otherwise be a moment of opportunity becomes a moment of potential sacrifice. The optimistic “I get to share a space with someone and split bills,” becomes a precautionary “Do I really want to give up my space for someone else?”
The answer is a resounding “no”, although our arbitrary social norms might object.
Your space becomes sacred. You can do anything you like in your own space. You can chose who to let into your space. Most importantly, you come to rely on yourself rather than other people for your own happiness, which is the golden ticket for relationship success.
Healthy relationships allow space for each person to have their own lives separate from the other person. This is especially true in romantic relationships and marriages. You don’t have to live with your partner if you don’t want to. In fact, it might be better for everyone involved if you lived separately.
I have a few 30- and 40-something friends who are very comfortable living alone. They wouldn’t give up their space easily, even if partnered. Myself included. I’ve made that mistake before.
For most of my life, I have lived with other people. I only really started living alone in my late 30s, after my 11 year marriage ended, and it was a challenge.
The first obstacle to overcome was the fear of being alone. For me, this was especially the case at night and on the weekends. I was a pro at filling my time with distractions, and I didn’t even realize they were distractions at the time. The bar was a block down the street, and dates were a few swipes away.
Eventually, with some hard work, I became content with sitting by myself on my couch on a Friday night completely content and satisfied. I was free. Looking back on it, I felt compelled to go out, almost like a drug. I was distracting myself from getting to know the stranger in my house — myself.
Eventually, I came to know myself, and I’m still getting to know myself. I have much stronger boundaries (something that would frequently collapse before), and I have a much better idea of what I want in life and in relationships.
To illustrate, I met someone online a few months ago who I was considering dating. She was previously married, and her grown kids were living with her full time. She also let me know that she was dating with the intention of moving in together.
This was a red flag. She was avoiding being alone. She was filling the space with her grown kids and wanted to find a romantic partner with whom she could transition the space.
I let her know “I enjoy living alone and have no plans to do otherwise for the foreseeable future.” I put up a boundary and she didn’t like it, but that was fine. She was a reflection of my past self—a people pleaser with collapsed boundaries who was afraid of being alone.
Take it from me, that road ends in disaster.
We never went on a first date.
|
https://medium.com/@toddwardphd/living-alone-means-living-with-yourself-4cfe4d102222
|
['Todd Ward']
|
2021-09-01 20:01:20.443000+00:00
|
['Living Alone', 'Boundaries', 'Healthy Relationships', 'Dating', 'Personal Growth']
|
Watching Porn at 20 Versus 30
|
Watching Porn at 20 Versus 30
I was so naive
Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash
20: OMG. She is so hairless. She’s perfect. How did she do that? Her skin is so slippery, she literally looks like a Barbie. How can I look like that?
30: The kitty needs fur. What, like he’s never eaten a Starburst with the wrapper?
|
https://medium.com/sex-and-satire/watching-porn-at-20-versus-30-db4e40752e98
|
['Lisa Martens']
|
2020-12-26 04:16:51.413000+00:00
|
['Humor', 'Satire', 'Porn', 'Sex', 'Sexuality']
|
Recommending Trump’s Next Friend with Machine Learning
|
The How
We’ll demonstrate the concepts I outlined above with real life data. This time we’ll be working front-to-back.
Training Data
In my previous post I have shown how I constructed ‘social’ links by identifying pairs of entities which appeared in the same news article, on the 26th of March. I repeated the same exercise for the following 6 days, all the way up to the 1st of April. This netted me over 400,000 (non-unique) links, distributed across the week like so:
Total number of entity links by day
I deliberately didn’t visualise the 7th day, as we won’t be creating a graph from that, we’ll only check newly formed links compared to day 6.
We’ll do a walk through the exercise for the first day for demonstration’s sake.
Let’s build the training data set by importing the CSV with all the links, filtering on the first day and grouping the same links together, assigning weights to them based on the count. I’ll also be discarding any links which only occurred once to focus on the more prominent ones:
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np df_links = pd.read_csv('/content/drive/My Drive/News_Graph/links.csv') date = '2020-03-31' df_links_train = df_links[df_links['date']==date] df_links_train = df_links_train.groupby(['from', 'to']).size().reset_index() df_links_train.rename(columns={0: 'weight'}, inplace=True) df_links_train = df_links_train[df_links_train['weight'] > 1]
Next, we’ll build a graph structure from the resultant links, then find the largest connected subgraph — this is a requirement for calculating our features. We’ll find that over 95% of nodes are connected on all days, anyway.
import networkx as nx G = nx.Graph() for link in tqdm(df_links_train.index):
G.add_edge(df_links_train.iloc[link]['from'],
df_links_train.iloc[link]['to'],
weight=df_links_train.iloc[link]['weight']) subgraphs = [G.subgraph(c) for c in nx.connected_components(G)] subgraph_nodes = [sg.number_of_nodes() for sg in subgraphs] sg = subgraphs[np.argmax(np.array(subgraph_nodes))] df_links_sg = nx.to_pandas_edgelist(sg) G = nx.Graph() for link in tqdm(df_links_sg.index):
G.add_edge(df_links_sg.iloc[link]['source'],
df_links_sg.iloc[link]['target'],
weight = df_links_sg.iloc[link]['weight'])
The above steps yield us a graph, G, which contains a weighted and undirected network that encapsulates the largest connected sub-graph representing the ‘social network’ of the news on the 26th of March. Specifically, it contains 8,045 edges between 2,183 nodes.
Network plot of the news on the 26th of March
Beautiful, isn’t it? Not very useful, though. Let’s see if we can find out which of these pink guys will make friends the next day.
Similarly to before, we define a data set of links weighted by occurrence, but this time we also filter to links where both entities appeared in the network on the previous day. After that, we will remove all links from the network on the 27th which have already appeared on the 26th and therefore aren’t newly formed edges. Finally, we’ll label the remaining links with a 1, to represent a link that was newly formed:
date_target = '2020-03-27' df_links_tar = df_links[df_links['date']==date_target]
df_links_tar = df_links_tar.groupby(['from', 'to']).size().reset_index()
df_links_tar.rename(columns={0: 'weight'}, inplace=True)
df_links_tar = df_links_tar[df_links_tar['count'] > 1]
df_links_tar.reset_index(drop=True, inplace=True) # filter to only include nodes which exist in training data all_nodes = G.nodes() df_links_tar = df_links_tar[(df_links_tar['from'].isin(all_nodes)) & (df_links_tar['to'].isin(all_nodes))] # create edge columns and filter out those who also appear in training data df_links_tar['edge'] = df_links_tar.apply(lambda x: x['from'] + ' - ' + x['to'], axis=1) df_links_sg['edge'] = df_links_sg.apply(lambda x: x['source'] + ' - ' + x['target'], axis=1) # remove edges which exist in training data df_links_tar = df_links_tar[~df_links_tar['edge'].isin(df_links_sg['edge'])] # label remaining edges with 1 df_links_tar['label'] = 1
With the above steps we have produced a dataframe with 2,183 pairs of entities which have not yet formed a link on the 26th, but will form one on the 27th, and labelled them with a 1. What about those which won’t form a link on the 27th?
Well, theoretically any unconnected pair in our graph could form a link the next day, for all we know. So we need to find all possible combinations of two nodes in the graph from the 26th, which aren’t already included in the pairs we identified as forming a link on the 27th, and label them 0.
Let’s pause here for a second and consider something.
We have 2,382 entities in our graph and we know 2,183 pairs of them will form a new link. How many won’t then? There is an enormous number of possibilities: 2382-choose-2, to be exact. That number is nearly 3 million, which would mean that the ratio of positive to negative samples would be under 1:1000! That’s a very imbalanced data set to train a classifier on. We have a few options to deal with this, but for this exercise I opted for down-sampling my data, because I knew I was likely to have a fair number of rows by the time I finished the whole week.
Note: this may not be best practice — I primarily went with down-sampling for demonstrative purposes and to reduce feature engineering and model training times. Something like SMOTE might be more appropriate here.
We will find all possible combinations of nodes in the network, remove those which have a link on the 26th and those which will form a link on the 27th. We’ll then randomly take a sample of 9x2,183 (nine times the number of newly formed links) from these unconnected pairs, to give us a training ratio of 1:10 — much better.
from itertools import combinations combs = list(combinations(all_nodes, 2)) all_combinations = pd.DataFrame(data=combs, columns=['from', 'to']) all_combinations['edge'] = all_combinations.apply(lambda x: x['from'] + ' - ' + x['to'], axis=1) all_combinations = all_combinations[~all_combinations['edge'].isin(df_links_sg['edge'])] all_combinations = all_combinations[~all_combinations['edge'].isin(df_links_tar['edge'])] all_combinations.reset_index(inplace=True, drop=True) sample_size = 9*len(df_links_tar.index) all_combinations = all_combinations.iloc[np.random.choice(len(all_combinations.index),
size=sample_size,
replace=False)] all_combinations['label'] = 0
Finally, we concatenate the two dataframes:
edges_to_predict = all_combinations.append(df_links_tar[['from', 'to', 'edge', 'label']])
The dataframe edges_to_predict will be home to the list of all new links, labelled with a 1, and a sample of edge pairs which won’t form a link, labelled with a 0.
Feature Engineering
We’ll recall that to create features we need to calculate the number of common neighbours, the Jaccard Coefficient, the Adamic/Adar Index and the Preferential Attachment Score for each pair of our training data. The NetworkX library will be our best friend for this. All we need to do is create a bunch of node pairs, that is, a list of tuples to identify the source and target of each:
bunch = [(source, target) for source, target in zip(edges_to_predict['from'].values, edges_to_predict['to'].values)]
Feature calculation is then laughably easy:
# Preferential Attachment preferential_attachment = nx.preferential_attachment(G, bunch) pref_attach = [] for u, v, p in preferential_attachment:
pref_attach.append(p) edges_to_predict['preferential_attachment'] = pref_attach # Jaccard Coefficient jaccard_coefficient = nx.jaccard_coefficient(G, bunch) jaccard = [] for u, v, p in jaccard_coefficient:
jaccard.append(p) edges_to_predict['jaccard_coefficient'] = jaccard # Common Neighbours cn = [] for source, target in zip(edges_to_predict['from'].values, edges_to_predict['to'].values):
cn.append(len(list(nx.common_neighbors(G, source, target)))) edges_to_predict['common_neighbours'] = cn # Adamic Adar Index adamic_adar = nx.adamic_adar_index(G, bunch) aa = [] for u, v, p in adamic_adar:
aa.append(p) edges_to_predict['adamic_adar_index'] = aa
Finally, we have real features and real targets! The dataframe now looks like this:
Classification
We’re ready to train our machine learning model. Off-screen, we have repeated the above process for 5 subsequent days, with a slight modification for the 6th day, our training data: on the 31st of March, I did not down-sample the data, as it won’t be a part of our training set. We need to pretend like we don’t know what links will be formed on the 1st of April, therefore we need to use all the data available.
We’ve seen in our sample training data that our feature columns assume widely varying ranges of values. To enhance our learning model, we’ll scale them to values with a zero mean and a standard deviation of 1, using scikit-learn:
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler df_test = pd.read_csv('/content/drive/My Drive/News_Graph/edges_test.csv') df_train= pd.read_csv('/content/drive/My Drive/News_Graph/edges_train.csv') features = ['preferential_attachment',
'jaccard_coefficient',
'common_neighbours',
'adamic_adar_index'] X_train = df_train[features].to_numpy()
Y_train = df_train['label'].to_numpy() X_test = df_test[features].to_numpy()
Y_test = df_test['label'].to_numpy() scaler = StandardScaler() X_train = scaler.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test = scaler.fit_transform(X_test)
As a reminder, we are training a model on a slightly imbalanced data set and testing on a realistic, very imbalanced data set:
Ratio of positive samples in training set: 0.1.
Ratio of positive samples in test set: 0.00092.
We’re ready to initialise our model: logistic regression.
Yes, logistic regression. Not what you expected when I touted machine learning in my title, is it? I promise I tried — I really did. I tested a Random Forest model, a Support Vector Machine, I spent a week tuning Light Gradient Boosting and XGBoost models. I grid-searched a deep neural network. None of them could beat the ROC of logistic regression. So there you have it. I suppose it’s quite fitting for my old-school features.
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression clf = LogisticRegression(class_weight='balanced') clf.fit(X_train, Y_train) lr_prob = clf.predict_proba(X_test)[:, 1] lr_pred = clf.predict(X_test)
The class_weight parameter ensures that the error penalties in the model are proportional to the ratio of positive/negative training samples in our data, making the model more sensitive to getting a positive prediction wrong, and increasing performance overall.
Let’s see how we did on our test data.
ROC Curve of logistic regression model
We have a very respectable ROC AUC score of 0.9312. Let’s plot the confusion matrix.
Logistic regression confusion matrix
This allows us to calculate our precision and recall:
Precision: 0.0076
Recall: 0.8394
Not bad — not great, but not bad. We managed to identify almost 84% of future links. However, we identified so many potential links that less than 1% of our positive predictions actually came true the next day.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/recommending-trumps-next-friend-with-machine-learning-6317cdc640c3
|
['Marcell Ferencz']
|
2020-05-10 00:07:44.941000+00:00
|
['Link Prediction', 'Data Science', 'Imbalanced Class', 'Python', 'Graph Theory']
|
What’s In The Cards For You?
|
What is tarot, exactly? Explore the magic of using your intuition with this special deck of cards with an introduction to tarot basics.
At a basic level, the tarot is a system of 78 cards with (debated) origins all around the world. The cards are used for a wide range of purposes, including but not limited to: connecting with intuition, figuring out next steps, sifting through memories, and looking for guidance.
Split up into five suits, the Major Arcana and the four elements of the Minor Arcana, the tarot holds the full collection of human experience. Every card is meant to speak to you… if you know what it means.
Is tarot magic? Yes and no. That depends a lot on who you ask, but the cards are powerful either way. They’re designed to reflect the wide range of archetypes and experiences that every one of us can relate to. In that way, no, the cards are just an exhaustive and creative display of the human psyche. But that doesn’t mean tarot isn’t magical.
What’s really magical is YOU. Your intention and energy are the keys to the real power in the cards.
The cards are a powerful tool for reflection, the tarot can serve as an endless list of journaling questions. What memories, thoughts, and feelings come up when you pull a card? What does each card inspire in you? Pro tip: Break out your journal. You’ll want to write out your reflections to look back on later.
What do the cards have in store for you? Find out with a tarot reading, now in the Sanctuary app! Let our experts help you unlock the magic of the cards.
|
https://medium.com/sanctuarywrld/whats-in-the-cards-for-you-81792c72cc47
|
[]
|
2020-12-22 18:11:57.790000+00:00
|
['Sanctuary Astrology', 'Tarot', 'Intuition', 'Magic', 'Cards']
|
What Power Requires
|
What Power Requires
A breakdown of the power process
I came across a quote recently that stopped me in my tracks.
“Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.”
It’s from Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
I’m a sucker for a good “neither/nor” statement and it doesn’t hurt that it was paired with a rather NSFW Instagram post by a woman who makes the kind of racy, intellectual posts I’m partial to.
It first occurred to me to be a comment on raw, intrinsic power, an unapologetic claim of one’s place in the world. It was a reminder I didn’t know I needed. It surprised me, even in the couple weeks since the quote appeared in my life, how often I caught myself putting energy into getting people’s approval and sign off for things that frankly did not call for it. Apologizing for having my own legitimate feelings. Not only does power not require permission nor forgiveness, it can get lost completely as we prioritize these things instead of maximizing the impact we are seeking to make in the first place.
We just give it away.
This meaning alone has made the quote a bit of an anthem for me over the past couple weeks. But gradually, unprovoked, it revealed a profound and somehow gentler interpretation. In a world where we only have authority over our own choices and mindset, acquiring permission or forgiveness are two things we actually cannot control.
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be accountable to others and only do what we feel like doing. But power does not require the permission of others. If we seek it, we ought to be clear why we’re doing it and make sure it’s not a form of hiding or procrastination. And it doesn’t mean we can’t own up to missteps or hurtful things we’ve done. We can and we absolutely should. But it’s actually up to another person whether to grant that marvel of forgiveness. Showing remorse to compel forgiveness is manipulative. Remorse and forgiveness are separate actions taken by separate people and we shouldn’t conflate the two.
I think a big reason why we seek permission and forgiveness is fear — we want to eliminate the risk of failure from our lives and ensure our community won’t reject us. These are real possibilities, of course, but also surmountable. I’ve found that the people who are likely to withhold permission or forgiveness are people I probably shouldn’t entrust with my deepest confidences anyway. They’re too scared to feel safe with me. I wish happiness for them and appreciate that they’re doing their best, but I‘m not required to make my moves based on their opinions.
The good news is that there’s a genre of human who views failure very differently. And the better news is that they will become your new community. I’m talking about the fantastic weirdos who dare to enter the arena. In their mind, the only real failure is not even trying. We labor to come up with our ideas and work up the courage to go public with them. Getting mired in the unending task of getting everyone’s ‘go ahead’ would keep us from doing anything at all. And what kind of life is that?
These people may not always like what you do, but they will respect it because they know what it feels like to claim power in the absence of permission or forgiveness. They know what it feels like to stand seemingly alone with a controversial idea while the critics wail on about this oversight or that risk. Their empathy runs far deeper than the critics’ objections. Their support is the only thing you should seek, if you seek anything at all.
What if we lived in a world where we demanded initiative instead of permission? And took accountability for slip-ups in order to be more aligned with our values vs. needing those we’ve hurt to take care of us through their forgiveness? What if we stopped trying to control others by demanding they wait for our permission to swallow their fear and entered the arena? What if we reclaimed our power and encouraged others to do the same?
Ann Leckie’s gripping quote reminds me that some of our most foundational beliefs and processes are worth reassessing. If I can reframe power in a way that gives me more agency and momentum, what else becomes possible? And if this went unnoticed for 30-something years, where else am I limiting my potential?
I’m entering the arena, with or without your approval. Hope to see you there.
|
https://jemmajorel.medium.com/what-power-requires-c544c4b118b2
|
['Jemma Jorel']
|
2019-03-20 19:07:27.199000+00:00
|
['Empowerment', 'Inspiration', 'Forgiveness', 'Power', 'Permission']
|
Things That Piss Me Off
|
Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
|
https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/things-that-piss-me-off-de7371a6d2dd
|
['Fred Ermlich']
|
2020-12-26 13:02:26.027000+00:00
|
['Pissed Off', 'The Bad Influence', 'Christianity', 'Denial', 'Fred Ermlich']
|
Embracing JAMStack with Python: Generating a Static Website with Flask and Deploying to Netlify
|
JAMStack completely changes how individuals and entire organizations alike iterate on a web app. It decouples your frontend and backend workflow, so you can focus on speed to your end-user, worry less about how it’s served, keep separate iteration cycles, and best of all, enable easy feature branching.
I’ll show, step by step, how you can use the powerful, sophisticated tools of Flask and Python without bothering with specialized static-site generators.
Black lives matter.
We need diversity and women in tech.
Trans rights are human rights.
Reminder that we are quickly destroying the earth.
All I ask for this content is that you are mindful about applying technology. It is not ours to fix everything, nor must we take on every cause as an individual, but we are the modern-day wizards and we must remember that our actions matter.
And finally, if you struggle with this tutorial or the concepts herein, know that we all struggle. Tech is a deep, long journey, we all (at every level) get frustrated and doubt ourselves constantly. The best way is to keep going, ignore the haters, and reach out to others for help.
JAMStack is a terrible name. It sounds like a local event for jarring preserves. But it’s a great concept: Focus on a separation of Javascript, API, and Markup.
The frontend and the backend decouple, with the Markup becoming a static platform which the JavaScript builds on. Dynamic data is delivered from the API to the client via JavaScript. You can still do some dynamic Markup generation on the server, but that is now an edge-case and is done through the API.
Since our client assets are now all static, it lends itself to serving directly from a Content Delivery Network. This ensures your site is delivered as fast and efficiently as possible. This is where Netlify comes in. It makes deploying from your repository to a website super slick. And a real fire and forget solution. More on that later.
Keeping your frontend and backend decoupled is an amazing thing once you set it up. It’s easily worth the price of admission. Backend often requires a lot of tests, analysis, optimization, and generally way longer iteration cycles than frontend, which often wants to make changes and iterate by the minute with immediate results. When you are changing the border-radius of a button, you’d rather not wait for a backend build that’s often compiling a docker image, running tests, deploying, etc…
Testing frontend feature branches, without needing to create a whole new backend environment is game-changing. It revolutionizes everyone’s experience, from the developer all the way to business stakeholders. Netlify gives you a unique URL for every deploy meaning you can try out new features, review old deploys, and quickly test for production readiness.
Lastly, keeping things decoupled also makes it easy to slot in serverless endpoints or backendless options like Firebase or AWS Amplify.
Modularity… Composition… Wow! Who knew it was so great?
JAMStack has one place where classic markup generation is better, and that’s when you need to generate a lot of dynamic content, i.e. Markup that changes depending on the user viewing or some other trip to the database.
With something like a stock-ticker, that’s still doable, because it comes from an API. But for something like a CMS, where the content often changes via a database, then classic Jinja rendering is still where it’s at.
Still, a lot of the promises of database-driven CMSs have yet to materialize, and people are increasingly finding it easier to simply change the content in the source code and redeploy, especially when it’s done automatically and quickly.
Further, it’s simple to put some content generation behind an API endpoint if you don’t need a lot of that.
This technique allows you to generate a static website in much the same way you’d make a classic Flask app. And this example parallels examples shown by generators like 11ty, Gatsby, and Jekyll, but in my opinion is better because it allows us to use Python, Flask, and all the great tools that come with.
Some benefits of using Flask instead of other static site generators:
During development, we just get to use a Flask server, there’s no compile step.
No scaling problems when you get to lots of pages.
We can use the same tools and mindset we use to build standard servers and API servers.
No new domain-specific languages to do things like for-loops, and shoe-horn database querying into Markdown.
We can still integrate with any database Flask can, any remote api, and generally do anything Python can do, which is a lot.
Now, we could easily use Django, FastAPI, Starlette, or any other framework for this, but Flask has two extensions that make the process really easy: Frozen-Flask and Flask-FlatPages.
We’re going to break our endeavor into these goals:
Then afterward, I’ll show you how to deploy with Netilify.
Now to it!
First, we will set up our Git repository. Using Github here, cause it’s a big old standard.
Let’s create a new repository. I named it “flask-static-tutorial”. I checked “Initialize this repository with a README”, added a gitignore (Python), and a license (MIT). You do you.
Once it’s made, clone the repository locally.
I’m going to assume you have Python 3.6+ on your system. I like using Pyenv which manages the installation and selection of multiple Python versions. A great tutorial is available here.
We’re also going to use Pipenv for this tutorial. It will manage our Python dependencies. I’m using it mostly because Netlify supports Pipfile directly. So go ahead and install that.
Now that we have those installed, we’ll install our requirements:
$ pipenv --python 3.7 install flask frozen-flask flask-flatpages
Pipenv nicely creates a virtual environment for us, a Pipfile , and Pipfile.Lock , and installs our packages. We also tell it to use 3.7, because it is the default version for Netlify.
Now let’s commit it, and move on:
This part is basically just following the flask tutorial. The only little change is that we’re using Pipenv.
Let’s make app.py :
Basic Flask stuff. Of course, you can do anything here, even talk to a database, but you don’t want to add anything that is based on user interaction or state. Everything should respond to a simple GET request. Accessing the request global is a red-flag here. It's static content after all.
Now we run our server, and this is where using Flask is great, because we can develop our site as we go, without having to rebuild or run some command to do so after changes. We just pretend we are making any old Flask site. And really, we are.
First set up our environment, then run it with Pipenv.
$ export FLASK_DEBUG=True $ export FLASK_APP=app.py $ pipenv run flask run
We tell pipenv to run flask and flask to run . Hope you follow. Alternatively, you can create a pipenv script. But that's your bizzniss.
Now we can open our browser to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ and be greeted.
Great work! But don’t get arrogant, we have more to do.
Did you know you can make frozen ice cubes in the hot desert like the Persians thousands of years ago? Did you also know you can make a frozen Flask website in your computer? Even in the desert.
Earlier we installed Frozen-Flask. To get started, all we need is another file freeze.py :
And then run it:
$ pipenv run python freeze.py
You’ll see that it makes a directory build and the file index.html . Open it up and you'll see exactly what your browser gets when it goes to ' http://127.0.0.1:5000/' when our flask process is running.
Frozen-Flask is really simple. It just runs your app, gets every root endpoint (ones without a path variable), copies the Markup, and saves it to a corresponding file. To find other pages, it tracks every response from url_for() and adds them to its queue.
To find pages that are outside of your root tree, read more about how it finds urls here.
We are really close. Now we just need, you know content.
It is time. Time for you to look into your cold, frozen heart to see what kind of website you want to make. For me, it’s simple: A site for a pet detective agency. But you do you.
One of the things 11ty, Jekyll and basically every blog creation framework static site generator does is easily let you create pages with markdown. We’re going to do the same.
This is where Flask-FlatPages comes in. It lets us create pages in any format we want, process them, and then deliver them as HTML.
Let’s update our app.py :
Note, that we could make other routes to do whatever we want, but currently we just have one that works with Flask-FlatPages.
We’ve got Flask-FlatPages looking for pages in a pages directory as default. So let's create some pages. You can click on each one to copy them or make your own content. Any file you add here that has an '.md' extension will turn into a page, provided you also link to it on another page with url_for() .
browse files
pages/ content.md index.md team.md
At the top of each page, you’ll notice its “meta” section, which is YAML and looks something like this:
Title: Rare Pup Detective Agency Description: We sniff out the clues.
Within the pages, you might notice some HTML. Don’t forget, markdown lets us embed HTML! Use it.
Now let’s create our Jinja template, that serves as the wrapper for our pages templates/page.html :
Mostly we have a basic page here. There are a few things to note:
We use flask’s url_for() method to get the final url of our "team" page, also we have added an 'active' attribute to the <a> tag when we are on that page, for styling purposes.
Also in our content block, we do:
<h1>{{ page.meta.description }}</h1> {{ page.html|safe }}
We add an <h1> with the description from the page meta. And finally, we grab the page.html and run a safe filter on it because it includes HTML that we want to render unescaped.
Finally, any static assets like images, css, or js that we link to need to go into /static . Frozen-Flask will automatically grab them if they are used. For this example, I'm only using a few, but you might many more:
browse files
static/ images/ logo.png base.css
Alright, alright. That was a lot. Let’s check out how we did, make changes, etc. During development, we simply use the flask server, and it will auto-reload. We can pretend it’s just a normal flask site:
When we’re done, we can test the freeze, it should put all our pages and assets into the build directory:
build/ static/ images/ logo.png base.css content.html index.html team.html
As a final step, we’ll add some functionality to call an external API. In a real-world scenario, you’d create the API, and host it yourself, or use a serverless option. Here we are just calling out to the wonderful service Dog CEO, Dog Api.
We’ll add the script linked below:
static/js/dogs.js
It defines a custom element “dog-picture” which we’ve already spread through the site. If the user didn’t have JavaScript, the browser just ignores all of the <dog-picture> elements. Once this script is loaded, they spring to life. Custom Elements. Neat.
We link it in templates/page.html with a simple:
When we freeze, you’ll see, it gets added to build/ . If we need to compile our JavaScript with rollup, parcel, or webpack it's simple enough to run that before we do freeze.
Only one more thing, let’s deploy the thing…
Once we have the static content, we need somewhere to put it. Since it’s all static, we can basically put it anywhere: behind nginx, on an S3, whatever. But it’s best to put it behind a Content Delivery Network, where your data will live on multiple servers around the globe that are specially designed to cache and serve content quickly. The only trouble is managing that deployment process.
And that’s why we use Netlify. They have really figured out the process. Basically, it hooks into your repo, listens for updates, then runs a build command, puts it on a CDN, and routes to it.
Every build gets served by a unique url. This is key. It means we can create feature branches of our frontend without a thought.
And, nicely, it’s free for small projects like this.
First, we make our account: https://app.netlify.com/
Next, we make our first site: https://app.netlify.com/start
Connect it to Github, and select your repository. For the build options, tell it the command “python freeze.py”, and our build directory is “build”.
Note: Netlify’s basic build environment will look at our Pipfile to determine the python version, and requirements. Since it configures the base python environment we don't have to actually run it with pipenv.
Now press “Deploy Site”. You can watch the progress by clicking on the deploy item, it will give you a full output and status. If you get a big old “Deploy Failed”, go into the deploy and scroll down on the page to see why.
When it succeeds you will see “Published” at the top of the ‘Deploys’ screen you’ll see a link like “ https://infallible-beaver-cf7576.netlify.app". Click on it to view it.
As awesome as “infallible-beaver-cf7576” is, you can rename your site by going to Settings > Domain Management. You can also bring in a custom domain.
Now every time you commit, it will go live. You can also make it only publish a specific branch, setup triggers, etc. There are a million different options, so play around.
Netlify has a decent redirect feature, allowing you to remap a request like /api/* to wherever you want, including a custom API endpoint. Read about Redirects and Rewrites.
Our contact.md page has a form that doesn't go anywhere, but it has a data-netlify="true" tag, which is automatically processed by Netlify. It gathers all submissions, and you can read them in the site admin. Also, you can set up notifications for them. Read about Netlify Forms.
Light authentication can be done pretty simply with Netlify’s Authentication System.
The great part about this approach is we don’t need a build step, but sometimes you need JavaScript to bundle, by running Rollup, Webpack, Parcel, etc. There are two places you need this. One is during development when you make a change, and the other is during your publish step.
One is to change your Netlify build command to something like this:
$ npm run build && python freeze.py
Have your package manager build right into your static folder like /static/build , and then have your Flask template pick up the JavaScript file there. Flask-Freeze will then move it to the /build directory for Netlify to use.
I’ll encourage you to use a resource like open-wc.org or Snowpack so that you don’t have to build anything for development. ES6 being what it is, you don’t need to anymore.
That said, sometimes we don’t get to choose. In that case, we need to run our flask server and the bundler in watch mode.
The simplest way is to just run two terminals:
Terminal 1: $ pipenv run flask run Terminal 2: $ npm run webpack --watch
If you’re using Webpack, Andrew Montalenti (@amontalenti) wrote a bridge between Webpack and Flask that leans on Flask-Static, check it out at his gist:
https://gist.github.com/amontalenti/ffeca0dce10f29d42a82e80773804355
I hope I’ve shown how JAMStack can be an amazing way to develop, and how we don’t need to leave all the glorious wealth we have from Python to get there. From here you can look into Zappa for serverless endpoints, deploying containers to AWS Fargate, or using good old Google App Engine, for your API needs. I still prefer the latter for setting up quick Python APIs.
Do remember that the JavaScript part of JAMStack should be your last resort. Too much these days developers are pushing giant React bundles into clients, and our poor devices just can’t handle them.
Progressive enhancement is still, after all these years, the goal. Think as close to Markup as possible, and then move outward as needed. So much of our time is spent implementing doomed features that are overly complex and JavaScript nightmares. Meanwhile what the user really needs is just some web form. JAMStack can help us here, but it can also lead us to Single Page React App nightmares.
A great way to organize your apps is authenticated vs unauthenticated. Think of Markup as always anonymous, and then JavaScript adds functionality when they log in. And think of your APIs as private and public endpoints. That helps you a lot when you get to caching.
Netlify isn’t really doing anything special here. There’s nothing that necessitates it, and the adventurous might want to make their own deployment system. Static assets mean that you can put the hash in a filename and cache them indefinitely. Before Netlify I had a system that chunked my large JS bundles and placed them on S3 named by hash. When I made changes, clients only had to download the updated chunk files.
You can also publish right to GitHub Pages.
Host it on an NGinx server, and put CloudFare in front of it.
Django has Django-Freeze to create static content in much the same way you’d do it here.
Pelican is a python based static site generator.
Use 11ty if you want a full-featured specialized static generator written in Javascript. Especially check out Andy Bell’s course.
If you spot any problems, have any questions, or want to request further tutorials create an issue in the project repo: https://github.com/DeadWisdom/flask-static-tutorial/issues
Or hit me up on twitter: @deadwisdom
Also, I am available as a consultant, primarily in helping organizations streamline their innovation and development cycles, especially where product, design, and development need to communicate.
Thanks to those that helped me writing this, including @matteasterday, @DanielReesLewis, and @amontalenti.
And thank you!
|
https://medium.com/@deadwisdom/embracing-jamstack-with-python-generating-a-static-website-with-flask-and-deploying-to-netlify-d2c8fb6dbb6f
|
['Brantley Harris']
|
2020-11-17 19:40:00.427000+00:00
|
['Web Development', 'Jamstack', 'Flask', 'Static Site Generator', 'Python']
|
Think Circular
|
Earth climate had its changes throughout the history, with climate changes mainly related with variations on Earth’s orbit. But this time, this is not the case. NASA points out that the currently climate change has greater than 95% probability to be result of human activity since the 20th century.
Now, try to imagine a future where the human prosperity is not translated into sacrificing the sustainability of the next generations. Is it possible?
The human action and decisions are mainly based on how others have acted before, even if some of those methods failed. One of these logical beliefs is that going in a straight line is always the most effective path. The problem here is what is in the end of that straight line. Linear economy summarises the traditional commerce model (take, make, dispose).
A very known story of how linear economy works is the story of Osram, General Electric, Associated Electrical Industries and Philips. All together had a secret pact to manipulate the market. Light bulbs exceeded 2500 hours and improving was still advancing. But the companies were convinced that with the coming of an eternal bulb, it would spell disaster in the market. So, what did they agree? They promised that none of their light bulbs would ever exceed a lifespan of 1000 hours.
But what if we change it to a circular concept? The circular economy offers opportunities for a better growth through an economic model well distributed, diverse and inclusive. It is based on three principles: design waste and pollution, keep products and materials use and regenerate natural systems. When we recycle, we return that material to its raw state which means that it will be less useful that it would be if it was repaired, for example. The less we have to change a product, the better. Economically speaking, you are spending less energy, less material and labour. Therefore, we need to create cleaver business models and cleaver distribution and redistribution services to make sure that those components are kept as close as possible to the user.
To satisfy all global needs, we emitted 59.1 billion tons of Greenhouse Gases in 2019. 70% of GHG emissions are directly related to material handling and use, from the extractions and transportations to its processing and use. So, this means that by applying circular strategies, we can cut the excessive material consumption and reduce the tons of GHG emitted every year, unnecessarily. The emissions x-ray shows that, only by doubling circularity (from 8.6% to 17%) we could reduce global emissions by 29% by 2032, reduce total material footprint by 28% and ensure we steer below a 2ºC temperature rise. We are only talking about a branch of sustainability. Imagine this together with the penetration of renewables, for instance.
Despite some encouraging progress at the local level, the efforts to reduce waste and improve its management across the EU are still weak. EU is currently consuming more than its fair share of natural resources (three planets to support our consumptions). Circular economy rate is now around 11% in the EU, showing no significant improvement in the last half a decade. So, change must be done.
Exemplifying with a mobile phone: half of the periodic table is on your phone; the average use time of a mobile phone is 2,5 years and most of those phones end in a landfill (85%). So, there is a huge material loss with them not turning back into the system. So, what are the things you cando to reduce these losses? First, we have maintenance, which is much more beneficial that any other option, because you are keeping the material in the way they were designed. Secondly, reuse or redistribute, selling it. Thirdly, remanufacturing, you send back to the manufacture and it returns to the system as it was a brand new material. For obvious reasons, it requires more energy, labour and materials than it requires to repair. Lastly, recycle you lose quite a lot of the material, but much of the material that is not lost, ends up returning into the system as a virgin material.
In the EU, 85% of mobile phones were thrown away, 6% were reused and 9% recycled. That represents about $500M of material lost per year. If this average changed to 50% of phones thrown away, it would result in $1B manufacturing cost savings, $60M energy cost savings and 1.3M tonnes of CO2 emission savings. So, we can achieve a lot just by doing a few things differently, rethinking the economy.
You probably heard about the 4th industrial revolution, which is dedicated to automation, artificial intelligence…a new bust of technologies that help us to simplify the processes and that replace many human tasks by robots. Now, that we humans have time to learn and innovate more, it is important to develop new technologies that are important for a future civilization. It’s time for a 5 th revolution, a transition of our planet back to a sustainable future.
This new revolution is about transforming the value chain into a circular way of producing, transforming the thinking and behaviour of investors, leaders, organizations, markets and people. It is time for a new revolution where we design a positive impact for communities, nature, and society. We’ll protect species, we’ll create equality among humans, and we’ll protect the future of new generations.
The best way to change is now through circular economy. So, be the change and think circular
|
https://medium.com/@lg-coimbra-estiem/think-circular-3accbabb410d
|
['Estiem Lg Coimbra']
|
2021-06-07 09:32:39.134000+00:00
|
['Economy', 'Economics', 'Circulareconomy', 'Ecology', 'Sustainability']
|
Market Street March
|
Wednesday, November 4 — Several hundred protesters marched east on Market Street in remembrance of Walter Wallace Jr, to demand change from the Philadelphia Police Department and to call for the release of local organizer Anthony Smith
Organizers from the Black Philly Radical Coalition lead the march on Nov 4 (Photo by William T Ross)
Just days after the killing of Walter Wallace Jr in West Philadelphia and the subsequent unrest around the city, organizers from Black Lives Matter, the Black Philly Radical Collective, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation led hundreds of night-time marchers from City Hall to the mayor’s residence at 3rd and Race on Wednesday. Despite the fact that the video of Wallace’s murder spread widely and was discussed by top officials in the city, even including the release of further bodycam footage, the presidential election and its hinging upon Philadelphia drowned out much of the conversation about policing and Mr. Wallace. This march sought to bring focus back to Walter Wallace Jr and to remind the city of its ongoing struggle with police brutality and racial inequity, including the federal charges being pressed against activist Anthony Smith.
Workers preparing a store for riot damage stop to watch the march (Photo by William T Ross)
The march began at a symbolically significant place that speaks to the long history of this fight: the memorial to Octavius Catto on the south side of City Hall. An invaluable leader for people of color and the oppressed in Philadelphia during the American Civil War and into the Reconstruction period, Catto worked tirelessly to gain civil equality between races and to defend the freedom and dignity of black and brown people. He worked against the same injustices that activists are facing today, and he met his demise in an all too familiar way: on election day of 1871, Catto was shot dead in broad daylight by a white man on South street. The murderer, Frank Kelley, was acquitted years later by an all-white jury.
An organizer speaks from the Catto monument before leading the march east (Photo by William T Ross)
Nearly 150 years after Catto’s murder, America has made little progress in protecting the lives of black people and provide justice for those who have suffered. The stories of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace Jr, and countless others have been seared into the public memory, only to expose the ugly truth that Catto spoke of so many years ago. When connecting these modern reports to a long history of eerily similar crimes, the chant “No Justice, No Peace” echoed in protests around the nation seems louder than ever.
Marchers move east on Market Street (Photo by William T Ross)
With Catto’s memory in mind, the marchers began to move East on Market Street towards Independence Hall. Stopping in view of a massive police presence with the Liberty Bell in the background, organizers listed their demands for change from the Philadelphia Police Department, citing a long history of tense relations and centering on the release of Anthony Smith, a prominent organizer and activist for justice in West Philadelphia. “Free Ant Smith” was heard repeatedly through the organizers’ megaphones.
March stopped at Independence Hall to remember Walter Wallace Jr (Photo by William T Ross)
Anthony (Ant) Smith, an activist and organizer with the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial and Economic Legal Justice (Philly for REAL Justice), was arrested by FBI agents at his home on Wednesday, October 28 under arson charges related to the burning of a PPD cruiser on May 31 and was taken to the Lehigh county jail. A pawn in a larger political battle, Smith’s charges are being pressed by federal prosecutor William McSwain, who is attempting to capitalize on the local chaos and brand himself as tougher on crime than District Attorney Larry Krasner. While aggressively claiming Smith and two other men are guilty of arson, McSwain has offered little to no evidence which ties Smith to the crime, aside from some very vague social media posts.
Smith’s lawyer, Paul Hetznecker, is quoted in Philly Mag as saying that these charges are “weak and ill-conceived” and that they are “about cracking down on political dissent. This was a political decision. They are criminalizing dissent. Leftism has been demonized by the right wing law enforcement community.” McSwain denies any political or personal motivation for pressing these charges.
Organizers from the Black Philly Radical Collective call for the release of Ant Smith (Photo by William T Ross)
Smith’s family and friends have also expressed doubts towards McSwain’s charges, claiming that Smith is an honored grade school teacher, an activist committed to peace and is beloved in his community. This love and respect for Smith was shown not only in the march on Market Street, but also in over 70 letters that were sent to the judge overseeing his case which spoke of Smith’s character and selflessness. One such letter from Smith’s coworker read: “At his core, it is clear to me that Ant cares deeply about people, and about community. He individually greets everyone who enters his classroom or who passes him in the hallway… He is not interested in the spotlight. He is interested in the well being of a community.”
The march garnered major media attention, including the Vice News team seen here (Photo by William T Ross)
Along with the outpouring of support seen in the march, these letters seemed to influence the court’s thinking on pre-trial detention. After nearly two weeks in the Lehigh county jail, a federal judge approved Smith’s appeal to be released on bail on November 7. The news of Smith’s release on bail provides hope and his online supporters seem confident that the trial ahead will play out in Smith’s favor. In this sense, the march was extremely successful and should be emulated by organizers hoping for change, but the work to retain protections for politically active individuals and marginalized people is certainly far from complete. Like Catto, organizers and activists will continue to place their lives on the line in the fight against racial violence and injustice.
A woman exits her store to raise a fist in support of the marchers (Photo by William T Ross)
Knowing this, the organizers spoke about the planned events to follow up and maintain the directed energy of the city when they concluded the march at Mayor Kenney’s downtown residence. Coming up, there are multiple workshops in a “Philly Phreedom Weekend” being held by Black Lives Matter and the Black Philly Radical Collective including abolition seminars online, coordinated outreach to help the Wallace family, and a rally at Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia.
|
https://medium.com/@photosbywtr/market-street-march-7ef934552c55
|
['William T Ross']
|
2020-12-14 03:42:51.841000+00:00
|
['Politics', 'Police', 'Philadelphia', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Protest']
|
Laying the bases: Defining the structure of your new website.
|
If you are a startup or small business, this part of the story may sound familiar. At Bits Kingdom, we needed to reinvent our website, so it would match our growing and new point of view.
So, if you’ve gone through this need yourself, you’ve probably panicked a bit when you realized that your website is your visible face to your customers and potential ones. Don’t worry, don’t get all twisted up thinking about it. The important thing is not that everything is perfect, the important thing is to start, and here we help you define where.
The first step
The first thing was to meet and talk about this idea of renovating the site. What do we want to do? What do we want to offer? How do we want to be perceived? How do we perceive ourselves?
Then, we went on to think about concepts and content: What do we have to say? How do we tell it? What information should we include?
What led us to audit the site we had at that moment: what should stay? And what should go?
One debate led to another, and finally, we started writing, on ordinary Google Docs sheets, and bringing our new baby to life.
We wanted to avoid the typical structure of:
➡️Home
➡️About us
➡️What we do
➡️Portfolio
So, although we complied with that information, we decided that our site should be organized in the following structure:
A home page
A contact page
A page dedicated to development, another one to design
A products and customers page
A page for newcomers looking for solutions
A page for blog articles
A 404 page
For this, we defined a space theme: we would organize the main pages as planets or space elements. 👩🚀🛰👽
Thanks to the magic of custom fields, we can create “parts” or “sections” that can appear on different pages. Then, instead of uploading the information on the specific page for the team, we create fields and sections within the administration dashboard for each person, which we then choose on which page they will appear. Some will go to the development department, others to the content department.
Another great advantage of WordPress for the client is the possibility of having multiple users with different permissions.
So, this is how our pages were born:
The first sketch!
|
https://medium.bitskingdom.com/laying-the-bases-defining-the-structure-of-your-new-website-99a6b1cac686
|
['Bits Kingdom']
|
2021-08-04 15:43:29.840000+00:00
|
['Website Designing', 'Developer Stories', 'Website Development', 'Website Design', 'Design Process']
|
Garbage in, garbage out
|
A Practical Approach
Identity
To ensure that a data-generating device’s identity is protected, a set of public / private keys could be embedded into the device, and making the public key known plus making available onsite inspections of the actual hardware’s output are practical and practiced ways to ensure that the hardware is what it says it is. But that’s the easy part.
The tricky part is how do you make sure that this identity cannot be stolen and is known only to the device? You can use something called a secure element (SE), which is a piece of hardware that can generate public/private key pairs within the chip and is highly tamper resistant. A SE typically just does one thing: to sign messages, which is a fancy way of saying to provide proof of identity. If you’ve ever owned a credit card or a modern smart phone, you’ve benefited from the functionalities of a secure element.
Processing & Transmission
To protect that the data processing & transmission logic is secure, we make use of a microcontroller (MCU) with secure boot (SB). You can think of a microcontroller as a very simple computer.
SB ensures that only an entity with the right private key is able to load applications into the MCU. The application logic and associated checksums could be shared ahead of time with relevant stakeholders or simply open-sourced so they could be verified post loading.
What’s more critical next is that once the application has been thoroughly tested, we need to disable all modification functionalities from application and the MCU, including firmware upgrades. This is to ensure that the application logic is now absolutely immutable, not even changeable by the manufacturer at this point.
This creates obvious disadvantages, such as the fact that the application can no longer be upgraded. But in return, we have gained true device independence (in conjunction with the SE) from outside interference, with perfectly deterministic and unalterable behavior that could be trusted.
Digital / Analog Interface
This problem is tricky, and cannot be solved using hardware embedded on the data collection and relay device. Often creative mechanisms must be devised to ensure that the interface is not disrupted, but it is highly application-specific. Let’s use an example.
Suppose you have a refrigeration truck that’s part of a fleet from a cold chain logistics company, tasked with delivering fresh fish to local supermarkets. To ensure quality, the fish must remain within a certain temperature range. If the temperature is too high, the fish could spoil. If the temperature is too low, the fish could end up with inferior taste and texture. To ensure that the logistics company adheres to the contractual temperature range, the supermarket puts a temperature sensor in the truck.
But what if, the truck driver takes the sensor and puts it inside an ice cooler in front of the truck, while he dials up the temperature in the refrigeration unit to save energy costs? The sensor has no idea it has been moved, and keeps collecting and reporting data that’s within the contractually-agreed upon temperature range. The sensor has been duped.
One way to mitigate this risk is to hard wire the sensor into the refrigeration unit so it is nearly impossible to remove. But maybe this method could still be circumvented by say, wrapping a bag of ice around the sensor while keeping the rest of the truck above the contractual temperature range.
Another, potentially better (but far more expensive) way is to put a tamper-resistant seal on each package of fish, with separate a temperature sensor in every package. So if the driver tries take out the temperature sensor, they would need to break the seal, something that’s easily detectable and likely to break key terms of the contract.
As aforementioned, to resolve the problem of the digital / analog interface takes a lot of creativity, and the solutions tend to be highly application specific.
|
https://medium.com/taraxa-project/garbage-in-garbage-out-e87afd511b93
|
['Steven Pu']
|
2020-01-17 16:17:15.539000+00:00
|
['Blockchain', 'IoT', 'Auditing', 'Blockchain 101', 'Taraxa']
|
Extension methods in c# .Net Framework
|
Extension methods in c# .Net Framework
Extending compiled classes
an extension method is a method added to an object after the original object was compiled. The modified object is often a class, a prototype or a type
Extension methods are a very useful when you are developing applications with the .Net Framework. They give you the ability to add methods to classes that are already compiled and referenced in the project, so you don’t have to modify the original class to add a new method that solves something that is not included in that object.
When to use them?
The most common circumstance where you would need to use this, is when you need to do a very specific and small task that is applyable to an instance of an already compiled class, and this task will be used in more than one ocassion in the application. Think in some “function” that a already implemented class should have or you need that is not part of it. I will give you a very simple example.
Lets assume that you are in a situation where you need to evaluate if a integer variable called “number” is between other two integer numbers (“a” and “b”), you would code something like this:
Imagine that you need to do this same evaluation in a lot of places in the application. A lot of “if’s” right?. it would be great if the native type “int” had a method “isBetween” that evaluate this in a more simple and elegant way.
The int type don’t have this “inBetween” method, but…. you can make it yourself with the extension methods! (And without having to create your own “int” type or modifying the original implementation :D).
So, the first step to test this is create a new console project and add a “Extensions” folder where our extension will live. Then, create a IntExtension.cs file with a static class called “IntExtension” with a static method called “isBetween”. This method should have 3 int parameters and will return a boolean following the logic recently discussed:
But, this is just a class with a static method, how we transform it to an Extension method Easy! add the word “this” before the “int number” parameter. With this, you are telling to the method that he will be an extension of the int type and that he should pass the instance through the “number” parameter. It should look like this:
And for using this you need to add a “using” with the namespace of the class where the extension method is, and then just create a “int” variable and call the method:
A more complex situation
In a very recent work, I had to send a list of people (Partcipants) to a database. Every participant have a name, telephone number, email and a boolean that determines if that person was an administrator or not. The problem is that the Data Access Layer (DAL) only accepts basic types like strings, numbers, dates and arrays for each of those types. So, if you want to send a list of objects, you need to send arrays for each property of the object (One array of names, other for telephone and other for emails). And obviously, I needed to do this in a lot of places… every time I needed to save in the database a list of anything.
The solution?
Create a Method Extension for the IEnumerable interface that retrieves a Dictonary with all the arrays needed for each property of the class that is listing (the name of the property is the key of the dictionary). So, every time that I need to create the arrays based in a List<object>, just call the extension method:
Conclusion
I hope this helped you to understand how the extension methods works and when to use them. The full working example is in a repository in my GitHub account:
Also, you can read more about Extension Methods in the following links:
Please leave some comments if you have any doubt or sugestion about this post. It would be nice to have some feedback :)
Happy coding!
Gonzalo.
|
https://medium.com/codebase/extension-methods-in-c-net-framework-69106c213dcf
|
['Gonzalo P.']
|
2017-06-25 21:42:29.949000+00:00
|
['Tips', 'Software Development', 'Extension Methods', 'Good Practices', 'Tutorial']
|
Gingrich, Miller Want to Make America White Again, But U.S. Needs New Blood
|
One of my recent articles said that white nationalism was a crucial part of the Republican Party platform. At first, I thought that was too harsh, and then I read the news. Former President Donald Trump might be out of the White House, but white supremacy hasn’t left the Republican Party.
It’s always been there. For example, while we might think Trumpism was shocking, it was a more blatant version of the kind of far-right idealogy espoused by Pat Buchanan. He was the former White House insider and presidential candidate who said America would be better if we imported more Irishmen than Zulus.
He often railed against the increasing number of nonwhite Americans and claimed that it would lower test scores. Trump was more open and cruder than Buchanan. However, these kinds of views have not gone away. Consider these recent stories:
No immigrants = more white people
At the recent Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference, Stephen Miller, the Jew with neo-Nazi tendencies, said we need to ban all forms of immigration, both legal and illegal. In Miller’s eyes, that would give the country a “break.” (Meaning maintaining the white majority.)
Again, this is not surprising. Miller, a former White House advisor, has been a longtime white supremacist and racist which is documented in the book “Race Baiter.” During the presentation, he also bragged about the minuscule number of refugees admitted during the Trump administration.
Miller once said that he planned to make sure no refugees set foot in America, even though his ancestors were refugees from Russia. But go figure. Hypocrisy is also a main feature of conservative politics. The so-called advocates of family values elected a thrice-married predator whose current wife is a nude model. And Evangelical Christians loved him! That should have put a stake in the “family values” debate forever.
The Great Replacement lie
However, the reprehensible Mr. Miller wasn’t the only Republican to recently bolster white nationalism. Former speaker of the house and first-rate hypocrite Newt Gingrich recently backed Tucker Carlson’s twisted views when he said Democrats are trying to replace white people. He actually used the phrase “traditional Americans,” but wouldn’t that mean Native Americans, the original inhabitants of the North American continent?
But we all know what Gingrich meant. Even worse is the fact Gingrich is repeating a white supremacist conspiracy theory, amplified by Carlson. The Great Replacement Conspiracy theory is an idea straight from the pages of neo-Nazi message boards.
Republicans think that all those Black and brown immigrants and babies will vote Democrat. But there’s no guarantee of that. However, if the GOP keeps up its white nationalist rhetoric and policies, this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In their minds, Jews are importing people from the Third World to replace white people. Carlson substituted the word “elites” for Jews, but the implication is clear. And Jews took notice of Carlson’s neo-Nazi pandering.
“Tucker Carlson disgustingly gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory,’ the hateful notion that the white race is in danger of being ‘replaced’ by a rising tide of non-whites,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO and national director ADL. “While couching his argument in terms of what he described as the Democratic Party attempting to replace traditional voters with immigrants from third-world countries, Carlson’s rhetoric was not just a dog whistle to racists — it was a bullhorn.”
Newt Gingrich: fake conservative, real hypocrite
However, Gingrich’s adoption of Carlson’s poisonous rhetoric is problematic for another reason. He’s on his third marriage. Gingrich also suggested that he and his second wife engage in an open relationship, and his first wife was his former high school teacher. He also cheated on both of his previous wives and left them when they came down with serious illnesses.
There’s nothing traditional about his lifestyle. Gingrich has more marriages under his belt than Hugh Hefner! Even though I’m about as far left as you can get, I’ve only been married once. So does that make me more conservative than Gingrich?
Both Gingrich and Miller appeal to the GOP’s fast-shrinking constituency, white people and mainly white men. However, they ignore another reality. America needs more people. The birthrate is declining as young people struggle with stagnant wages and exploding college debt and opt to have fewer children or no children. According to figures from the World Bank, the national birth rate has steadily declined since 1960. Now it stands at 1.64. A thriving economy needs a 2.0 birthrate to replace the older people who are dying off.
Have more babies — if you can afford them
Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi just got the bill for birthing a child in America; it was $37,000. In Britain, Mahdawi’s homeland, new parents don’t receive any bill because of the National Healthcare System. And if you want the price of raising that child in America until it’s 18, add another 0 to that figure.
However, while Republicans complain about young people not having kids, they don’t want to do anything to make it easier for working families, such as reducing the cost of college (or make it free,) raising wages or providing affordable childcare.
Where do we get the new people? Those are people who are needed to teach our children, conduct research, fill orders, bathe and feed our elderly parents, fight our wars and police our streets? The answer is immigration, but most people coming to America are People of Color — precisely the kind of people Republicans don’t want.
Republicans think that all those Black and brown immigrants and babies will vote Democrat. But there’s no guarantee of that. However, if the GOP keeps up its white nationalist rhetoric and policies, this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s one of the reasons why Republicans are pushing hundreds of voter suppression laws around the country. They see what’s coming and envision a future where they can win elections with fewer votes!
However, immigration also produces a great number of scientific and academic minds. According to a paper by the National Foundation for American Policy, since 2000, 37 % of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics came from immigrants. Also, about a quarter of the medical professional is foreign-born.
So while Republicans constantly complain about the influx of people, it’s good for America in the long run. However, after sifting through the wreckage of the Trump presidency, it’s clear that Republicans are more interested in doing what’s good for them than what’s good for the country.
|
https://democracyguardian.com/gingrich-miller-want-to-make-america-white-again-but-u-s-needs-new-blood-2061455b1d14
|
['Manny Otiko']
|
2021-08-07 05:42:49.235000+00:00
|
['Birth', 'Politics', 'Race', 'Immigration', 'White Supremacy']
|
Can indigenous knowledge stop Australia from burning?
|
Can indigenous knowledge stop Australia from burning? We always think we can leave nature alone and she will be healthy and flourishing. Well, in my environmental studies I gained other knowledge.
People need nature to supply oxygen, drinking water, and food. But nature also needs people. Mindful collaboration works best. The prevention of Austrian bushfires is a great example.
“Before colonization, Indigenous Australians used fire not only to control the buildup of leaf litter and other fuel but also to maintain ecosystems and promote healthy growth.” — Brooke Boland
Firesticks Alliance is sharing knowledge on cultural burning, healthy communities, healthy landscapes. Maybe Americans can learn about this practice from the indigenous tribes on their continent too?
Here’s the full article.
Amazon Rainforest. Picture credit: PX-Fuel
© Désirée Driesenaar
|
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/can-indigenous-knowledge-stop-australia-from-burning-b78af82a676b
|
['Desiree Driesenaar']
|
2020-12-07 16:30:47.165000+00:00
|
['Nature', 'Australia', 'Indigenous', 'Environment', 'Fire']
|
Is Bitcoin the new global safe haven?
|
The trade war between China and the US, the Fed cutting interest rates again, rumours of the next global recession — as numerous distressing events unfold all over the world, the threat to global financial stability continues to rise.
In an attempt to hedge funds, investors are flocking to what they deem to be safer options such as government bonds, gold, and increasingly, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The rising price of cryptocurrencies as a result of such events calls into question whether or not Bitcoin and the like are becoming the new safe havens for calculated investors.
This article will look at the events that have lead to investors taking shelter under the Bitcoin bandwagon, along with other options and comparisons to other safe haven assets.
The escalating trade tensions between the US and China have struck fear into the global markets, threatening the occurrence of an economic recession bigger than the 2008 crisis. China has suspended purchasing agricultural products from the US, as a response to the American government imposing 10% tariffs to $300 billion worth of goods from the Chinese.
In light of these events, reports have surfaced about investors leaving the yuan for Bitcoin, as a hedge against the potential destabilisation of the global currency markets.
China devaluing its currency
Prompted by the tariffs and the escalation of the trade war, China has deliberately devalued the Yuan to make Chinese exports more competitive in the international market — a surprising but common move in global currency wars. At 7 yuan to 1 US dollar, the BBC reports that this is the lowest level the Yuan has hit since 2008. So, it’s no wonder investors are moving towards Bitcoin for which the price so far has been reasonably immune to the effects of political situations.
Reduction of basis points for interest rates around the globe
Further inflaming the market, and in a suspected move against the Chinese, the American Federal Reserve (the US Central Bank) cut interest rates by 25 basis points. According to President Donald Trump, the move was done to weaken the dollar and establish more interest around American exports.
While this is going on, the two warring giants aren’t the only countries causing fluctuations in the international markets. The Bank of Thailand announced in early August that they will reduce their rates by 25 basis points, while the Bank of New Zealand reduced its rates by 50 basis points around the same time.
Bitcoin will give asymmetric returns
As global crises unravel, more and more investors are turning to Bitcoin, further establishing itself as a safe haven asset. But why cryptocurrencies — especially since they’re known to be so volatile?
It all stems from the fact that Bitcoin is decentralised. Bitcoin has been mostly immune to geopolitical tensions, and has thus far managed to outmaneuver government interference.
Moreover, co-founder of Morgan Digital Creek Anthony Pompliano adds that Bitcoin is attractive due to its ability to provide asymmetric returns, citing that it has “proven to be non-correlated (with the ongoing trade war) and to provide an asymmetric return compared against traditional assets.”
Will Bitcoin replace gold?
Among all the safe haven assets, gold is arguably one of the safest, which is mainly due to how it has maintained its historical value over time. But with cryptocurrencies being introduced, the precious metal may just get kicked out of the running. In fact, fresh data from Bloomberg reveals that gold has shown strong correlations to Bitcoin since June, showing .0837 correlation. A correlation coefficient of 1 indicates that the two assets move together in tandem, while a -1 indicates movement in opposite directions. In other words, when gold moves up, so does Bitcoin.
While some financial investors are celebrating Bitcoin and the like, not everyone in the finance sector agrees that cryptocurrencies are the solution. In an opposing view, financial experts FXCM argue that the supply and regulations surrounding gold makes it a safer haven, given that it has a more certain supply and clearer regulations compared to cryptocurrency. They say gold is simply much more reliable and less volatile than Bitcoin.
However, perhaps instead of asking whether or not Bitcoin can replace gold, we should try to accept that the two assets can exist in a complementary fashion. With gold being a long-term safe asset, and cryptocurrency as a hedge for geopolitical tensions and other short-term situations, investing in both could be the safest choice.
Another cryptocurrency option to consider: stablecoins
While Bitcoin certainly serve as a way to make transactions easier, its volatility and high transaction fees aren’t always appealing to some investors. Fortunately, there exists a cryptocurrency that is less volatile in nature — stablecoins. These are tied to local currencies such as the Japanese yen, US dollar, and even the Chinese yuan, which solidifies their stability.
However, whereas Bitcoin and other cryptos are seen as viable investments, our article on the ‘ A To Z Of Stablecoins’’ emphasises that stablecoins are not an investment. Rather, they serve the conventional purpose of being a medium of exchange.
Furthermore, the conversion rates are never in question, as stablecoins are backed by real currencies. And as they are essentially one-to-one with real money, liquidity is not a problem. Furthermore, stablecoins promote financial inclusion, since economies that are based in cash can still use stablecoins and access the wider world of cryptocurrencies.
With the world economy in turmoil, finding safe-haven assets is vital to ensure an investor’s protection. Although cryptocurrencies are rising and claiming a place right next to gold and bonds, not all financial experts believe in hiding behind the volatile tendencies of the asset. Nonetheless, with stablecoins in the mix, cryptocurrencies can serve as a hedge against the chaos of the global political landscape.
|
https://medium.com/the-ledger-by-spark/is-bitcoin-the-new-global-safe-haven-b06fe4fced7d
|
[]
|
2019-10-09 00:26:01.770000+00:00
|
['Fintech', 'Bitcoin', 'Investing', 'Editorial', 'Stock Market']
|
How to Delete Photos from iCloud
|
Photo by Ron McClenny on Unsplash
With the pandemic at hand and quarantined, some of the memories better are deleted as keeping them can strain our mental health. Don’t you think?
If you are interested in how to delete photos from iCloud, stick with us as we walk you through several solutions for deleting photos on iPhone, iCloud website, and Mac. Moreover, there are two solutions to recover deleted photos from iCloud.
Let’s start!
How to Delete Photos from iCloud on iPhone or iPad
This section helps you to get an answer to an extensively asked question, how to remove photos from iCloud on the iPhone or iPad. Let us start with a simple solution:
Deleting Photos Manually
In this solution, the iPhone user has the option of the photos they want to remove. Just follow the steps given below precisely so that you can free some storage space.
1. First of all, you are supposed to open “Photos.”
2. Find the picture that you want to delete. Hold it longer. A pop-up bar appears where you will click on “Delete.”
3. But, if you want to delete multiple photos, find a “Select” option, which locates at the right corner of the screen. After that, choose the pictures to delete.
4. Find out the trash bin. Tapping on it will delete the photos from the iPhone or iPad.
This process will delete the photos from the iCloud website and other devices as well.
How to Delete Photos from iCloud on iCloud website
For this part of the article, we will answer how to delete all photos from the iCloud website without deleting them from the iPhone. Therefore, stay with us and follow the guidelines effectively to have favorable results.
You can turn off the sync of iCloud from the iPhone.
Deleting Photos by Turning off Sync
We have carved out specific steps for you that will allow you to save pictures on your iPhone. For this, it is essential to keep in mind that your sync with iCloud is off.
1. Open “Settings” from your iPhone.
2. Click on “Photos.”
3. Turn the syncing off by tapping on the toggle that says, “iCloud Photos.”
4. Now, open your iCloud website iCloud.com.
5. Login with your Apple ID and type your password.
6. From your “Photos,” select the pictures that you want to delete. If there is a small portion of them, use the CTRL key by holding it, and then select the images. However, you can use CTRL+A if you wish to remove all collections.
7. Tap on the trash bin located on the top right corner of the screen.
How to Delete Photos from iCloud on Mac
When the device storage is struggling, the user often questions himself, how do I delete photos from iCloud? Worry no more as we have planned out a solution for you. Let us have a look at it.
Using iCloud Photo Library on Mac
Here, you will know how to delete multiple photos on iCloud Mac.
1. First, you are supposed to open your “Photos” from Mac.
2. Under the Library section, located on the left side, click on “Photos.”
3. Now, if you want to delete multiple pictures, hold the CTRL-key, and select them. But if you want to delete all the collections, hold the CTRL+A button simultaneously.
4. Now tap on the “Delete” button on the keyboard, located at the top right corner.
How to Recover Deleted Photos from iCloud
Most often, we encountered data loss problems in our daily lives. If we have lost data from iCloud, we question how to recover deleted photos from iCloud? We have two solutions for your assistance that will help in recovering deleted photos and make your life easy and facile.
Using the iCloud Photo Library
Once you want to recover deleted photos from iCloud on Mac, you are at the right place. Just follow our lead, and you would not be left distressed.
1. First of all, you are supposed to go to iCloud.com.
2. From there, sign in to your Apple ID and insert your password there.
3. After that, click on “Photos.”
4. From the screen that appears, tap on the “Albums,” which is on the page’s top.
5. Your first selection should be on the “Recently Deleted Album” because we want to recover the lost data.
6. From there, select all the data that you want to recover. You can hold on to CTRL+A for the whole collection. If you’re going to recover some of the photos, use the command key and select the targeted files.
Conclusion
This article ensured that the audience has complete background knowledge of several solutions related to deleting photos from iCloud on iPhone, Mac, and iCloud website. Moreover, the users will recover their deleted photos from iCloud as well, which is a win-win situation. You should follow the guidelines precisely to have fruitful results.
|
https://medium.com/@eleanorreed/how-to-delete-photos-from-icloud-d10bebcb3c1b
|
['Eleanor Reed']
|
2020-12-03 02:01:29.136000+00:00
|
['Photos', 'iPhone', 'Mac', 'Icloud', 'iPad']
|
Lighting solutions demand 2020 | Emergence of advanced lighting technologies along with advent of smart components to impact the global industry landscape
|
Lighting solutions demand 2020 | Emergence of advanced lighting technologies along with advent of smart components to impact the global industry landscape Shankark Jan 8, 2020·6 min read
Source: pixabay
Lighting solutions — an intrinsic part of everyday life, have become even more prominent in recent times. Lighting technology has evolved to a great extent — to the point that it is being used for biological marvels like the production of plants.
Over the past few years, the lighting market has witnessed profound technological transformations. At present, the rapid emergence of new technologies is facilitating possibly the biggest strides in the advancement of lighting since the advent of the LED bulb.
The past few decades have proved to be an exciting period with respect to lighting technology progression and with the breakneck speed at which technology is evolving, this period is likely to become more fascinating in the years ahead.
Modern lighting technologies have observed great development across the whole spectrum, including fluorescent, metal halide, incandescent and LED, among others.
Solid State Lighting
Lighting systems that leverage LEDs (light emitting diodes), OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) or light emitting polymers are known as solid-state lighting or SSL. Even though LEDs have been in existence for over 50 years, it was the emergence of solid-state lighting technologies that took them beyond their initial use as indicator lights in electronic devices.
Solid-state lighting is a technology where LEDs replace traditional fluorescent or incandescent lighting systems. These lighting systems are used for general lighting applications. Solid-state lighting systems have numerous advantages over their conventional counterparts, given their low heat emission, low energy dissipation, absence of hazardous components and ability to withstand impact without shattering.
In the current scenario, solid-state lighting market has evolved to such an extent that LEDs are rapidly becoming the preferred lighting solution across myriad applications. Furthermore, the surge of technological innovations over the past two decades had allowed LEDs to transcend their initial purpose and expand their application scope to signal devices like traffic signs, limited lighting applications like flashlights as well as more general lighting solutions like industrial or residential lighting.
The latest development in the SSL market is the incorporation of IoT (internet of things) and 3D printing. For instance, the Lighting Research Center (LRC), which is a part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently collaborated with Eaton Corporation to create a completely 3D printed luminaire with integrated LEDs. This innovation is part of a DoE (Department of Energy) funded project, designed to study the application of 3D printing technology with respect to solid-state lighting.
LED Lighting
Even as multiple industries gain massive traction with regards to new trends and technologies, the LED lighting market is one of the eminent leaders of the pack. This leading role has been characterized by prolific developments in the LED sector over the years, ranging from the emergence of high brightness LEDs, to blue light to the upcoming white light LEDs.
Modern LED systems demonstrate a lifespan that is nearly 2–4 times that of conventional lights, without compromising on the quality of light and efficiency.
The Department of Energy is also taking consistent steps towards developing longer lasting and highly efficient LED lights. These efforts are backed by the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy’s claim that the use of LED lights could cut down lighting consumption in the U.S by half, ultimately presenting a possible solution to climate change. Studies suggest that widespread implementation of LED systems could save nearly 348 TWh of electricity by 2027.
The LED industry had undergone great transformations over the past decade, with higher efficiencies, lower costs and a broader application scope throughout. This transformation is in turn presenting various businesses several growth prospects for the years to come.
Leading LED technology innovator Seoul Semiconductor Co. Ltd.’s natural spectrum LED lights, Sunlike Series has recently been chosen by WalaLight™ to be integrated into its Healthy Circadian LED Lighting System. The Sunlike LED Series is known for its ability to emit light that matches the spectrum of natural sunlight, making it ideal for the passive adaptive nature of the Healthy Circadian lighting system. The system is able to deliver the ideal light spectrum with the use of an intelligent Kelvin-changing technology, designed to enhance human health, by replicating the sun’s spectral nuances.
Smart Lighting
The once-foreign idea that homes could not just match but adapt to changing human preferences is now a reality with the advent of the smart homes concept. Smart locks, video doorbells, voice assistants and a plethora of other technologies help homes become smarter and in turn make life easier. One of these systems is smart lighting.
The smart lighting market involves various internet-linked solutions that enable the management, control and monitoring of the home’s lighting systems. These solutions can include smart lamps, smart bulbs as well as smart plugs.
Since installing a complete smart lighting solution is relatively expensive, due to the need for special smart sockets and equipment, manufacturers have developed a more economical solution to give customers access to smart lighting, i.e. smart plugs.
Smart plugs enable customers to turn their regular light fixtures into smart lighting systems and experience the benefits of smart lighting, albeit at a more affordable rate. These plugs also offer customers a way to try out a smart lighting system in their home before they commit to a complete switch.
To illustrate, ConnectSense, which is known for its series of home automation products, dubbed HomeKit, have recently introduced a new Smart In-Wall Outlet. This outlet, compatible with HomeKit solutions, enables the control of plugged-in accessories by Siri voice commands as well as the Home application, effectively turning regular appliances into smart appliances. The product also delivers accurate power supervision, so that homeowners can track the amount of energy being used an appliance, in real-time.
Human Centric Lighting
As more and more benefits of light continue to emerge, mounting evidence indicates that light impacts not just human vision, but also the way they think, behave and feel. With these advantages coming to light, a new lighting technology has emerged — human centric lighting.
Human centric lighting refers to lighting systems that leverage the power of light to enhance the daily lives and health of humans. These systems help tune lights to facilitate the ideal circadian rhythms and emotional requirements to enhance human comfort, health and productivity.
To illustrate, studies have shown that primary school students exposed to 6000K — 100fc average maintained lighting showed a 36% improvement in oral reading fluency, in comparison with the 17% demonstrated by students exposed to control lighting. This is just one of many studies being conducted to unveil the benefits offered by human centric lighting to everyday lifestyles.
Many organizations are already working on testing HCL to gain a competitive edge. A notable example of this is the Seattle Mariners professional baseball team. The team’s locker room installed a human centric, circadian lighting system in 2013, to help alleviate the effects of jet lag and harmonize the energy levels of the team’s players, both pre- and post-game.
The prevalence of major players is bolstering the human centric lighting market outlook, with multiple R&D efforts, investments and product developments taking place.
For example, SCHOTT, a renowned lighting expert, is working in conjunction with jetlite, an on-board solutions provider for jetlag and MRO providers like Lufthansa Technik & Etihad Engineering to explore and develop a new technology for human centric lighting. The system, which will be jointly produced by all involved parties, will leverage SCHOTT’s HelioJet LED cabin illumination technology, to ensure even distribution of light and superior color stability across the entire cabin.
|
https://medium.com/@groundalerts/lighting-solutions-demand-2020-emergence-of-advanced-lighting-technologies-along-with-advent-of-4128ed2a46f4
|
[]
|
2020-01-08 09:41:27.107000+00:00
|
['Lighting', 'Internet of Things', 'Oled', 'Led', 'Led Lighting']
|
Ask Me Anything: 10 Answers to Your Questions About Working Remotely
|
Ask Me Anything: 10 Answers to Your Questions About Working Remotely
Image via Pixabay
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world make some adjustments that will likely become permanent even post COVID, one of those changes is the rising trend of remote working.
According to a study by Buffer, 44% of employees say that part of their team is full-time remote.
Even as the stay at home policy begins to lift, the possibility of the majority of workers choosing to work from home permanently is very high, as 99% of people would choose to work remotely, at least part-time, for the rest of their careers.
There’s also the case of the rise in freelancing, half of the working US population will turn to freelance work over the next five years, which means more remote workers.
Most employees are looking forward to opting for the choice of ditching their cubicles to get work done from their choice of location.
The ability to work wherever, whenever, and however with just the major requirement of a working internet connection is a concept that sounds very pleasing and has over time proven more effective.
This wish no longer seems far fetched for many due to the pandemic, in fact, it will become the norm,
There are many people who are still skeptical and downright confused with the whole idea of remote work, this article will answer some common questions that aspiring remote workers or curious individuals have about working from home.
1. There are a lot of remote job scams out there, how can I avoid them?
One of the downsides of remote job searching is the online scams that are available, however, this can be avoided by only looking at personally curated verified and trusted sites that have the least history or reputation of false job offers.
You should also be very critical while reading the job descriptions and take notes of red flags, if a job sounds a bit too good to be true with no serious requirements from job seekers then that may be a no-no.
Also, take note of your communication and conversations, if they sound shady, or unclear on what they want from you, then you should tread with caution.
If potential employers or clients are making unnecessary demands, asking for outright personal information that has nothing to do with working for them, please run and block all medium of communication.
Legit job sites include Flexjobs, Glassdoor, Weworkremotely, Jobspresso, and Monster.
2. Can I be hired by a company from a different country?
A resounding yes! That’s one of the beauties of working remotely, location and physical presence is not an obstacle. So yes, there are lots of companies that have teams working from different parts of the world.
As long as you have a working internet connection, have your timezones understood and a preferred channel of communication, then why not?
If your job is independent of your physical presence and everything can be done virtually, it’s not impossible to have co-workers all the way from Australia while you are perhaps based in Morocco.
3. How is my work going to be tracked by my employer?
The simple answer is the power of technology. There are different software that effectively keeps you and your employer in touch and posted with your activities.
You can update them with your work progress through your preferred medium of information exchange. Although, there will have to be a level of trust from the employer that you are actually getting work done and not messing around.
Also, you can be required to give daily reports of your accomplishments and assignments, this will be proof of your productivity.
4. What’s it like working with people that you won’t meet physically?
Interesting!
It all depends on the type of person you are, if you are an extrovert and love meeting people in person, then it might be difficult to just communicate virtually, however, video calls and zoom meetings do help in bridging the physical gap.
Whereas Introverts find this to be music to their ears, as they love minimal human to human interactions, but overall it is a terrific experience that won’t be a challenge as time goes on and it becomes a new normal.
There are upsides like learning about other people’s cultures, as you work with different people.
5. How do I get paid if I work for a remote company abroad?
PayPal is a common option, there are other alternatives such as Payoneer, Bank wires, being paid from a partner or subsidiary company within your own country.
This will be dependent on your mutual agreement with your employer, whatever works for both of you.
However, you will have to educate yourself on the issue of taxes and expenses that comes along with getting paid through your chosen platform.
6. Is working remotely only favorable for Introverts?
No! Although Introverts will find it more rewarding and easy to cope with in comparison to extroverts.
A lot of extroverts choose to work remotely as the decision isn’t primarily based on personality types but preferences and what they are more comfortable with, the perks that come with remote working like flexibility, distaste for commuting, etc.
Extroverts totally enjoy working remotely as they can work in cafes and travel the world while doing so.
7. What equipment do I need to work remotely?
You basically need a laptop, working internet connection, some software to manage your whole working schedule, like Asana for team collaboration, email software, Skype, etc.
A high-quality webcam, microphone, headset, desk, and chair are all part of the remote work setup.
You might also need a printer.
8. Do I have to work on a certain work schedule — Will I have to work set hours?
This again is dependent on your employer, and your mutual agreement. There’s flexibility in working remotely especially with companies adopting the Results Only Work Environment (R.O.W.E.) style, which means they are only concerned with your output and not the duration of your working hours.
You might need to have meetings, briefings, or calls at specific timings, but be rest assured that your schedule in the office will certainly differ from your remote schedule.
Try knowing your amount of flexibility from the get-go in your interview. You can also give them an overview of how your schedule is going to like and how you plan to carry out your work assignments, this is even a question asked in interviews.
Therefore, having a plan in place will really be helpful.
Regardless of the level of flexibility you have, you will still need a schedule personally for enhanced productivity.
9. Can I use my usual CV to apply for remote jobs?
Yes! But it’s better and more effective to tweak your CV to fit the criteria of remote working requirements.
You should acquire soft skills and be tech-savvy so that you can highlight them on your CV, it will broaden your chances of landing a job.
This will make your employer confident in your abilities to work outside the office.
You can also take certified courses related to remote work.
10. What are some common issues associated with working remotely?
Working from anywhere around the world is definitely the dream for many, but it’s not all nice and dandy or fancy-schmancy. Just with all things it has its downsides to it, especially depending on your type of person.
There’s the issue of setting boundaries with the people you are living with, the difference in time zones, not getting benefits of a 9–5 job, loneliness, getting too comfortable and lack of discipline are the major issues of remote work.
However, these are issues that can be smartly navigated with effective measures and as remote work becomes the trend there will be more improvement and support for remote workers, eliminating all forms of disparity between regular and remote workers.
Conclusion
Remote work is here to stay and will likely become the norm in years to come, companies are already making the necessary adjustments and changes required to accommodate and effectively practice the art of working remotely.
Doing your research and speaking to people who are experienced in this style of work will help you determine if working remotely fulltime is for you, also trying it out part-time at first will aid in giving you experience.
|
https://medium.com/@mufeedah/ask-me-anything-10-answers-to-your-questions-about-working-remotely-d1756d8efb9c
|
['Mufeedah Abdulsalam']
|
2020-07-17 14:07:00.279000+00:00
|
['Remote', 'FAQ', 'Médium', 'Remote Work', 'Remote Working']
|
Top 10 most harmful foods
|
Top 10 most harmful foods
Junk Food
We love to feast on delicious, almost ready-made products — they do not need to be cooked, peeled, cut, but can be either cooked immediately or eaten. Most often these are semi-finished products, ready-made ingredients for salads, snacks, additives, etc. What is called convenient today brings irreversible harm to health and the body.
Not a single meal is complete without these products, and even among the children’s kitchen you can find the so-called semi-finished products, created especially for babies. I have cited the top 10 most harmful food products, which are better to get rid of, or replace them with natural goodies, which are more useful and cheaper.
10. Alcohol
Alcohol
9. Carbonated drinks
Carbonated drinks
8. Croutons, sauces
Croutons, sauces
7. Chocolate, sugar, salt
Chocolate, sugar, salt
6. Ice cream, yoghurts
Ice cream, yoghurts
5. Chips, pastries, white bread
Chips, pastries, white bread
4. Canned food, smoked meats
Canned food, smoked meats
3. Sausages, semi-finished products
Sausages, semi-finished products
2. Chewing gum, sweets
Chewing gum, sweets
1. Fast food
Fast food
If you liked this piece why not check out some of my other pieces here.
|
https://medium.com/@everythingcj/top-10-most-harmful-foods-6254ca465ab8
|
['Everything Cj']
|
2021-02-06 20:40:25.075000+00:00
|
['Food', 'Top 10', 'Harmful', 'Top 5', 'Lists']
|
by Christina Vaughn: Nurse, freelance writer
|
Poems of any length on life, love, family, emotions, children, motherhood, or just about what you need to express (with taste, of course)
Follow
|
https://medium.com/all-the-worlds-a-poem/just-in-time-a-poem-of-charlie-3f451b566267
|
['Christina Vaughn', 'Nurse', 'Freelance Writer']
|
2019-08-09 20:30:27.450000+00:00
|
['Love', 'Parenting', 'Family', 'Poetry', 'Baby']
|
Equity in Recruiting: What we’ve learned so far
|
By Lindsay Stuiber, Senior Director of Talent at Change.org
Recently, Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf stated that the lack of diversity at Wells Fargo could be blamed on a “limited pool of Black talent.” Once his statements went viral, he quickly apologized. But since then, Black women have left the company in droves.
To combat this happening at their organizations, executives across the board have made promises to “do better.” Starting this summer, the trend of companies publicly committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion has exploded. But without a clear commitment to action, these pledges mean nothing. The numbers remain devastatingly poor across the board and yet organizations consistently get away with simply saying that they’re trying.
As a woman of mixed race, I have experienced hiring discrimination both explicitly and implicitly. I’ve been in the talent space for 7 years and spent 10 years in the education space leading and building teams. I’ve heard the coded language during roundtable discussions about candidates and I know this translates to the following:
people in power default to hiring those with whom they have chemistry and are comfortable with.
If teams are relying on the systems of hiring that aren’t rooted squarely in equity, then naturally that system is going to default to results that are homogenous.
Simply put, if your hiring system is not built to root out bias, inequity, and white supremacy, you need to tear down and rebuild your system from scratch.
It’s not that complicated: if you want to hire people of color, commit to developing an equity-based talent system. Like many companies, Change.org is on a journey to increase representation, and after committing to it we’re seeing real results: in 2019 alone, 70% of our hires across Engineering, Executive, Product, Campaigns, and Operations were women and people of color.
Developing a more equitable hiring system doesn’t occur in a week. In order to radically shift our results at Change.org we needed to shift the way we think about talent.
As the organization grew over the years, we faced the typical problem of unintentional homogeneity at tech companies and advocacy organizations across the globe. Like many, we are reckoning with the fact that representation of historically marginalized communities is severely lacking on our team. The first step to changing this was simple: recognizing, as a group, in a real way, that this is unacceptable.
As the head of the talent team, I focused on the data. What I saw is that we consistently focused on front-of-the pipeline goals with limited attention on how we were evaluating candidates. We often kicked-off roles that were poorly defined. The research shows that when hiring managers and teams lack clarity or alignment we all tend to gravitate towards comfort and familiarity. More often than not, comfort and familiarity means White male. What the data revealed at Change is that if there is only one “other” (a person of color or woman, for example) in the final stage with candidates from the dominant group (male or white), the “other” had an extremely low chance of getting the offer.
So my focus turned towards creating a shared language and standards for evaluation that were firmly rooted in equity. This meant experimenting, iterating, and breaking the interview process down into component parts. The hiring system we now employ is one that was developed with intention and embedded with equity principles. As a result, we’ve seen a steady increase in candidates of color reaching the onsite stage and receiving offers.
We also worked with hiring teams to ensure that interview questions always have a DEI lens. Even with limited resources, this simple implementation started moving the needle.
To date in 2020, 80% of our new hires so far have been women and people of color, and we have doubled representation of Black identified staff in the past 12 months. And this is just the beginning.
Achieving diversity is not complicated once a leadership team genuinely commits to it. Solve your DEI problem like you would any other business problem: articulate ambitious goals, interrogate the data, commit your time to making it happen, and just do it. If you truly value diversity, equity, and inclusion, you can move the needle and make progress. This is what trying can actually accomplish.
Great leaders are great because of their ability to achieve great results. If we all actually genuinely committed to diversity with the same level of seriousness as we do to any other business outcome we genuinely want, we’d figure it out. It’s a question of commitment, not the pipeline.
|
https://medium.com/@change-org/equity-in-recruiting-what-weve-learned-so-far-6cc0ab126576
|
[]
|
2020-10-27 13:33:45.660000+00:00
|
['Recruiting', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Equity', 'Talent Acquisition', 'Diversity In Tech']
|
How To Make a Website in 2021. Do you want to build a website from…
|
How To Make a Website in 2021
Over my career as a web developer, I’ve built more than 100 websites for clients including Bacardi, Toyota, and The Four Seasons. One time, I even made a website for a semi-famous goat in Virginia.
In this post, I want to answer the question, “What’s the best way to make a website?”
No doubt there are hundreds of options, but I can boil them down to one question that you need to ask when starting to build a new website:
Do you want it to be easy to build, or highly customizable when it’s live?
If you want the process to be easy — Making a new website will be inexpensive, but you’ll be limited in the number of customizations you can make.
If you’d prefer it to be customizable— It will be more expensive and it’ll take longer. The plus side is that, in the end, you’ll have a more customized and fine-tuned experience.
Here’s a breakdown of your options for making a website: easy vs. customizable vs. hybrid:
Option #1: The easiest ways to make a website
If you want a simple website, my suggestion is to start with easy.
What kind of websites is easy to make?
Think a band website, your web portfolio, photo gallery, a blog, pictures of your pet dog, a restaurant, etc. Basically, anything that needs to share information in the form of text or images, but not much else.
Top 5 easiest ways to make a website
Here are the five easiest ways to launch a website:
Squarespace — One of the easiest options for making a website. Squarespace has a number of templates and you can be up and running in a short amount of time. Wix — Similar to Squarespace. I’d say Wix is the leader in the “make a quick website” category. Whereas Squarespace has around 70+ themes, Wix has more than 500 themes. Whereas the Squarespace editor is very precise in making sure you don’t mess up the look and feel or your theme, Wix is a bit more lenient with how you design your site. Shopify — If you want an e-commerce store, use Shopify. The prices are reasonable, the themes look great, and if you know the basics of coding HTML you can use their Liquid Template Language to add customizations when you need them. Gumroad — Gumroad is wonderful if you have something simple you want to sell. For example, if you want to sell a t-shirt, book or some kind of arts & craft? The Gumroad is the easiest, and cheapest option to get started. WordPress.com — WordPress is probably my favorite option for creating a website, or a blog. Why WordPress? I like the company’s mission (to “democratize publishing”), I like that WordPress has been around for 20 years, I like that there is a free option available, and I like that if you start with the “easy” option you can later upgrade your site to a more customizable option (aka. WordPress gives you room to grow). You don’t need to know how to code to use WordPress, but if you know the basics you can really get a lot out of it.
Option #2: How to make a website from scratch (The Customizable Approach)
Customization means you can decide every last detail of the website: the colors, themes, fonts, and page layout. But it also means you’ll have to make choices about the programming language (Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP?), the database, hosting company, etc.
While customization gives you complete control over everything from site loading times, SEO meta tags, and security, the caveat is that customizations like these are going to cost time and money.
When starting out, you’ll need to look at the tradeoffs of having all these customizations, or whether the easy route is sufficient.
If you go the customization route you’ll need either hire someone or to learn the following:
Many people build their own website from scratch because they need something very specific and highly customizable. Keep in mind that you can always start with an easy website, and upgrade to something more customizable when you need it.
Option #3: The Hybrid Approach
The hybrid approach is somewhere in between easy and customizable. With the hybrid approach, you take an easy option and either learn to code so that you can customize it yourself to the maximum amount possible, or hire a developer to customize it for you. It’s sort of like getting a suit tailored instead of having to choose between wearing it off of the rack and going fully custom.
WordPress.org is perfect for the hybrid approach. WordPress has thousands of themes for you to launch a website in literally 5 minutes. From there you can add plugins for improved SEO, e-Commerce, security, and more. If you know the basics of HTML, CSS, and PHP you can even get under the hood and customize your theme! It helps to know that dozens of famous websites are built using WordPress.
Other examples of using a hybrid approach are using a coding framework like Ruby on Rails, Django, and Express.
Easy vs. Hybrid vs. Custom | How to choose?
Need help choosing? Let’s use the analogy of choosing a birthday cake.
If you need a birthday cake the easiest thing to do is buy one at the supermarket. But because it’s pre-made you’re limited by how customizable it can be.
Easy: just get a pre-made cake (aka. Squarespace)
This is Squarespace — it’s pre-made, quick and inexpensive.
If you want a very specific birthday cake (for example, an organic vegan strawberry cake with chocolate frosting and airplane liquor on top?) then you’ll probably want to make it yourself!
Customizable: If you want this cake, you’re probably going to have to make it yourself (aka. do it from scratch)
But as you know, this takes longer, you need a kitchen, and if it’s going to be a good cake you’ll probably need some cooking skills. This is what it’s like to make a website from scratch. It takes more time, and you’ll need to know all the ingredients that go into it.
Then there’s always Duncan Hines! This is the hybrid website.
The hybrid approach means using some “out of the box” recipes to start you off, but then you can customize it to your liking. The Hybrid approach is similar to WordPress or Ruby on Rails.
With Duncan Hines, you’ll still need some foundational ingredients like eggs, milk, and butter, but nearly everything else comes in the box. Once you have your foundation, it’s then possible to swap out some of the colors and flavors. For example, if you want to swap out cow milk for almond milk you can! This is what it’s like to use WordPress, Ruby on Rails, or an out of the box CMS.
Final Thoughts
Need to build a website and want to know which way to go? There’s no right answer or a wrong answer, just some that are easier, and some that are more customizable (but often pricey).
|
https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-to-make-a-website-in-2019-9b1b0066d73e
|
['Chris Castiglione']
|
2021-04-08 21:05:40.630000+00:00
|
['Hackernoon Top Story', 'Coding', 'Web Design', 'Website Development', 'Programming']
|
How the Pandemic Has Influenced Women in Leadership
|
The coronavirus pandemic comes when women are excellently performing in leadership roles for numerous sectors. The pandemic has seen innumerable women take charge of companies well.
The following are the role played by women in the workforce during the pandemic:
Women enhance inclusivity.
According to a 2020 report by Women in the Workplace, women leaders always stand for racial and gender equity at work. Compared to men, women leaders do sponsor and mentor other women. Women tend to hire other women of different intersectionality.
Women contribute to higher Emotional Intelligence (EI) in the workforce.
Women have a higher EI than men in the same workforce. In fact, according to research, minority women have a higher EI compared to their White counterparts. The high EI is the reason why women are the ones associated with caregiving roles. Women from minority groups have to navigate leadership against the majority by taking advantage of their higher EQ skills.
The pandemic requires women, who have higher EI, to take up the leadership mantle and lead organizations through the pandemic. Companies with a robust financial base have a workforce comprising people with a heightened self-awareness level, high EI people.
Women have shown leadership prowess since the start of the pandemic.
Women have been excellent in leadership positions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jacinta Ardern of New Zealand, Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan, and Angela Merkel of Germany have shown strong leadership during the crisis. Women have been excellent in multi-tasking, organizing, decision making, absorbing pressure, and showing empathy to their teams.
Women are a source of cultural change.
Women’s leadership is associated with empathy, compassion, and support. Workers require managers who will be concerned about their welfare. Women leaders have provided the necessary physical, emotional, and psychological support to their teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite women’s leadership prowess during the pandemic, gender equality gains are reducing. More than 79% of employees who left the workforce by September are women. The most affected are Black and Latina women when compared with the White. There will be a long-term impact on the economy as very few of these women will re-enter the workforce.
The figure shows that the number of women leaders will be affected soon. The women have cited parental roles and burnout as the main reason for quitting. In case they decide to come back to the workforce, they will only get lower positions hence a slower path to career progression. Companies, therefore, need to support women leaders during and post COVID.
|
https://medium.com/@brieneumann/how-the-pandemic-has-influenced-women-in-leadership-ceed25561dec
|
['Brie Neumann']
|
2020-12-24 18:42:02.670000+00:00
|
['Women In Business', 'Female Leadership', 'Brie Neumann', 'Leadership', 'Business']
|
6 things we can do to be the best role model for our child so they can kick ass in life.
|
6 things we can do to be the best role model for our child so they can kick ass in life. Vincent Chung Dec 18, 2020·8 min read
Be the parent your child will always look up to :)
Here you are.
You grew up. You went to college or university, worked hard and got a degree. You’ve donated the beer bong to your little brother. Paid off all your students debts perhaps even got a chance to travel and see the world, partied everyday like if it was day the world celebrated the official end of the COVID crisis and finally landed a stable career that you are fulfilled and happy with.
Now, here you are thinking about having kids or already having a toddler / young child running around.
Congratulations! Parenthood is perhaps one of the most rewarding and yet one of the most challenging experiences you will have in your life.
Changing diapers, getting shit on on your hands, feeding your baby and getting puked on and waking up in the middle of the night is downright exhausting but that’s nothing compared to raising your Generation Alpha and hope that somewhere down the road they become well-rounded, emotionally balanced adults.
(Vince’s random fact — Generation Alpha is the generation After Generation Z, mainly children born in the early 2010's)
I have consulted with some the elders, the people I have looked up to most of my life who have raised some pretty amazing kids and I’ve asked a few of my fellow parents who are on this parenthood journey as I am and here are 6 tips of wisdom that were common:
1 — Say what you do, do what you say
Be accountable. Whatever you say follow through and do it. No one likes someone who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk.
If you promise your kids to take them to the park and play do it. If you say you are going to get off work to spend time with them do it.
If you make a promise to your spouse, to a friend make sure you stay true to your words. Your child will mimic your integrity and accountability.
2 — Listen. Listen. Listen.
God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason.
Actually 2.
Listening to sweet wonderful music, eatting fried chicken and
Listening to people then talk.
“Seek first to Understand.” 5th Habit — 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Listening and understanding requires a lot of emotional intelligence and empathy. It means setting aside your own ego, your own needs, your own validation and putting yourself in the other person’s perspective and point of view.
For example instead if your child has a bad day at school and says,
“I had a bad day at school, I don’t want to go back I hate it!”
Instead of saying:
“I don’t care, you have to go, school is important it’s the foundation to everything in life, now sit down and let’s do your homework together!” )
Ask , understand and let them come up with a solution:
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that you had a bad at school. What happened?”
“James was bothering me at school today. he kept bothering me and made me angry.”
“Oh what did he do?”
“He wouldn’t throw the paper away.”
“That must really bother you…”
“Yeah, it did. I don’t like it I want him to throw the paper away.”
“You want him to the paper thrown away.”
“Yeah.”
“I understand how much that bothers you and that must of made your day really bad!”
“Yeah daddy.”
“That’s ok. Bad days are going to be happen not everyday will be good day. What do you think you can do to let it not bother you?
“Hmmm.. Not sit beside him? “
“Hmm you rather sit by yourself? “
“Yeah I will sit by myself I will be happier.”
“Sounds good son. Whatever works for you. Do you feel better now?”
“Yeah daddy.”
“Ok let’s go wash up and let’s work on your homework together.”
Not only have you validated your child’s feelings but you’ve also given them the power to make their own choices.
3 — The more you give the more you take
You brought a child into this world and you want to give them the best. Give them everything you’ve never had. You’ve had it tough growing up and you want to make sure they don’t go through the same hardships as you did.
As tough of certain parts of my life was, there was a lot of growth. I learnt to take care of myself. I was allowed to take risks and I was allowed to fail.
As much as I want to shelter my son at times from the hardships of life, and set him up for an easier path, I need to remind myself that he needs to fall on his own, to be independent and to make something out of his own life.
4 — Be radically open
Hi Son, your body is going go through your some changes….
Growing up I wish I was able to talk openly about everything with my parents. Now that I’m nearing my 40’s I’ve finally learnt that they grew up in a generation that was completely different than the one I grew up in. They grew up tending vegetables and raising chicken and ducks on a farm when they were old enough to hold a shovel and a bucket of feed whereas when I was their age, I was hunting ducks in Duck Hunt with my trusty Nintendo gun.
They had a hard life. They didn’t like to talk about their past and still have hard times talking about. I truly believe that my grand-parents didn’t give them a childhood that looked remotely like mine growing up or the way I communicate with my son now.
Like any well oiled and functional relationships, I want one with full transparency with my son. I want to be able to talk to him about anything and I want him to have to be able to do the same. I want him to be able to talk about his feelings and that those feelings are perfectly normal and human.
I want to be the dad who’s an open book and non-judgmental. No child should ever have to be embarrassed or ashamed or even feel unsafe about talking to their parents about taboo topics such as finances, dating, sex or drugs.
5 — Practice Self-Control
Let’s face it. As much as us parents boast to everyone about how having kids is the best feeling in the world and there is the best thing that could ever happen to you (which, it is), it can be a very challenging task that requires a lot of patience.
Not all parents have the luxury of having a maid or extra help with raising their kids.
I get it. You’re juggling a full time, doing your best to raise your child while balancing relationships with your spouse / partner. Life happens. You deal with irate clients and pissed off customers who complain about about their Uber eats food being late, You will have days that you feel that you’re going to lose your shit.
We will all have our days but it’s important we keep our cool and composure in front of our kids. By raising our voice, becoming hostile or angry you’re essentially giving them a hall-pass to react the same way in times of difficulty and dealing with life’s challenges.
Teach them to remain cool, level headed in any given situations. Bruce lee would approve.
Vince’s Random Fact — Not only could Bruce Lee kick your ass, he was also the Cha-Cha-Cha-Champ!
(1958 Hong Kong Champion)
6 — Be the best version of yourself
If you are like me, just an average working-class citizen, working a day job to provide for his family then going home to cook dinner for your child and spend some time helping them with their school work then spend your last ounce of energy playing hide and seek or jumping on the bed with them, it’s hard to find time for anything else.
But we must.
Not only to set a good example for our children, but mainly for yourself.
Your own well-being comes first. Your physical well-being. Your mental health and sanity.
So what are some steps we can take to make sure we ourselves are kick-ass parents so our kids can grow up kicking ass as well and crush it in life? Here are a few examples.
Take care of your body
Find the time to do something active everyday. Once you hit your late 30s it’s all downhill from here. Too many of us sit all day at a desk and that will be our undoing.
It’s a no brainer that taking care of your body will make you feel more confident, happier and a true bad ass.
Same goes with diet. I love fried chicken, pizza and chips they are my happy foods. However I need to make sure I try to eat healthy and clean 80% of the week.
Make time to move around more and be more physically active.
Take care of your mind
The brain is a muscle just like any other muscle in our bodies. It may not be as sexy as a nice pair of legs, arms, or the perfect ass, but it’s the most important.
It sends electrical signals to control all our physical movements. It processes all information that we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. It creates our perceptions and our reality so hence, the importance of maintaining the soft fleshy blob sitting inside our heads.
Take care of your mind by constantly sharpening your saw. Never stop learning and picking up new skills.
Conclusion
As parents we all want to see our children grow up and become successful in whatever they do in life and the best way to help them do that is by being the best version of ourselves and the best role models we can.
So my fellow parents or my soon to be parents… let us lead by example, by action and inspire them to be all they can be.
Got anything you would like add to this list or any comments? Drop a message below!
Stay blessed and Happy Holidays!
original blog:
6 things we can do to be the best role model for our child so they can kick ass in life. — (vincentchung.io)
|
https://medium.com/@vincentchungio/6-things-we-can-do-to-be-the-best-role-model-for-our-child-so-they-can-kick-ass-in-life-15a00bbe5557
|
['Vincent Chung']
|
2020-12-18 21:16:11.053000+00:00
|
['Parenthood', 'Single Parenting', 'Kids', 'Fatherhood', 'Personal Development']
|
Digital Business Card: The Best Gift for Coworkers in 2020
|
Photo by Daria Shevtsova via Pexels
The Best Gift for Coworkers in 2020: Social Master Digital Business Cards
Every December office co-workers of all sorts scramble searching for a good gift for their colleagues for the office holiday party or gift exchange.
Or perhaps you’re particularly close with one co-worker to whom you’d like to give a special gift.
Often, we end up settling for gift cards, coffee mugs, or other run of the mill gifts for our co-workers that don’t really reflect who they are or add much value to their lives.
We all love to know that we aren’t just giving them another immemorable trinket but something that they’ll cherish.
If you’re looking for a gift for your office holiday gift exchange that will actually stand out and that they will love, you’ve come to the right place!
Social Master: Digital Business Card
Social Master is here to answer your call this holiday season with the best gift for office colleagues or co-workers .
Social Master is often called a digital business card. Social Master is simple: users create a profile with the information that they would like to share with new contacts, similar to what would be found on a traditional business card.
To share their information, users simply bring their Social Master device near the back of the recipient’s smartphone device, and just like that, their profile is displayed on the recipient’s phone screen.
Social Master Products:
Social Master offers a variety of devices to meet the various needs of their users:
Buzz
Buzz: A sticker that can be placed on the back of a smartphone or any flat surface (think walls or checkout counters) to instantly share business or contact information.
Pop
Pop: An adhesive collapsible phone grip that doubles as an NFC-enabled digital business card.
BC Plastic
BC Plastic: A plastic card the same size as a debit or credit card with an NFC tag to share your digital business card. Perfect for replacing traditional paper business cards with a digital business card that fits in your wallet.
BC Metal
BC Metal: Similar to the plastic business cards, the BC Metal is roughly the same size as a debit or credit card with an NFC tag that allows instant and effortless contact sharing. The metal cards are an unparalleled and sleek way to network and an ideal gift for business professionals.
BC 24K Gold-Plated
BC 24K Gold Plated: The most premium Social Master device available. This card is the same size as its plastic and metal counterparts, but with an elegant 24 karat gold plating that gives the cardholder an air of prestige and professionalism that is without equal.
How Does it Work?
The way the Social Master digital business card works is by using near field communication (NFC) technology (The same technology used in Apple Pay and Google Pay).
Each Social Master device is embedded with an NFC chip that displays information based on how the user sets up his or her profile from within the Social Master app.
Users set up their profiles in the app by including a bio, profile picture, contact information (such as cell phone number or email address), social media (such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more), payment information (such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cashapp ), and up to four featured links (which can include links of any kind such as links to the company website).
That’s it- it’s really as simple as a single tap and new contacts have whatever information that the user would like to share.
Social Master as a Gift:
As a gift, Social Master, “the new way to network,” is the perfect choice.
Social Master is a new (established in 2020) company that is all the rage in the tech and business worlds.
By giving colleagues a Social Master device as a gift, you’re giving them something that stands out amongst a sea of forgettable coffee mugs and knickknacks, a newly available product that changes the way they connect with the world.
Not only does this gift stand out amongst the rest, but it does the same for the new Social Master user. Social Master allows them to set themselves apart and make a strong impression with new prospective clients and contacts, a crucial factor in the world of networking.
Social Master digital business cards help users avoid the trappings of traditional business cards, when contact information is shared, recipients can save the user’s contact information directly to their phone from the profile that was shared.
By instant contact sharing directly to the cell phone screen of new contacts, they’ll never lose your phone number or contact information as is common with would-be clients misplacing paper business cards.
Photo by Giftpundits.com via Pexels
By giving Social Master as a gift to the business professionals in your life, you’re truly giving them the gift of better networking- which will forever change their professional life for the better.
Why Social Master?
The average cost of business cards is $194 annually. Social Master is just device that does everything a traditional business card does and more, and is the last business card you would ever need to purchase.
Giving Social Master is not only the gift of better networking, but also the gift of never having to spend money on outdated, traditional business cards again and the freedom of networking without worrying about breaking social distancing.
Social Master makes it easier than ever to network and build clientele. It’s the perfect gift for any business professional, such as managers, sales professionals, realtors, small business owners, and entrepreneurs- anyone who regularly relies on networking and business cards in their professional life.
When it comes time to share, the only thing you have to do is tap your product to your recipient’s phone. It’s so easy can use it.
Compatibility : The person you share your digital business card with does need a Social Master device or any app in order to receive your profile. As long as they have either an iPhone 7 or newer or an Android smartphone year 2012 or later, their phones are inherently equipped with the NFC technology that Social Master uses.
: The person you share your digital business card with does need a Social Master device or any app in order to receive your profile. As long as they have either an iPhone 7 or newer or an Android smartphone year 2012 or later, their phones are inherently equipped with the NFC technology that Social Master uses. No strings attached: The one-time purchase of a Social Master device is the only purchase required for the full functionality of your digital business card.
Social Master is subscription-based : no monthly fees, no “premium” features to unlock. Social Master is free to use after purchase with no add-on fees
Security: No personal passwords or otherwise compromising information is required from the user by Social Master.
No personal passwords or otherwise compromising information is required from the user by Social Master. Integrity: Social Master does not sell or distribute your information to third parties: your data is safe with Social Master.
The Perfect Gift for Co-workers This Holiday Season
Photo by freestocks.org via Pexels
With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why Social Master digital business cards are the ideal gift for co-workers and office gift exchanges.
If purchasing for a team, there are even deals to save when you bundle this holiday season, with up to 45% off when you buy sets of Social Master digital business card devices.
Don’t settle for run-of-the-mill holiday gifts for your co-workers this year and instead opt for an unforgettable gift that will change their professional life forever by giving the gift of better networking with Social Master digital business cards.
Check out our shop to give the business professionals in your life a gift they will never forget.
|
https://medium.com/@socialmaster/the-best-gift-for-coworkers-in-2020-df528e4fa427
|
['Social Master']
|
2021-01-16 21:52:57.347000+00:00
|
['Work Life Balance', 'Christmas Gifts', 'Workplace Culture', 'Christmas Gift Ideas', 'Workplace']
|
AMAZING Commercial Christmas Decor
|
Create excitment & a sense of pride in your #city #municipality or #commercialproperty with AMAZING Commercial Grade #christmasdecor from Temple Display! Watch for our Biggest Sale of the Year coming in January 2021. Get ahead of the game & click here: https://www.templedisplay.com/catalog-request/ for our FREE Commercial Holiday Decor Catalog #WednesdayWisdom templedisplay.com
|
https://medium.com/@silkytdlseo/amazing-commercial-christmas-decor-2cd8093644c5
|
['Temple Display']
|
2020-12-23 19:50:38.414000+00:00
|
['Christmasdecor', 'City', 'Commercialproperty', 'Wednesdaywisdom', 'Municipality']
|
To Us
|
Good afternoon everyone. I am glad to see that everyone is prepared and has a drink in your hand because I will like to propose a toast to us.
Hold on! Don’t drink yet. Let me tell you why we should have to toast to ourselves so we can drink with satisfaction later.
2020 is a very challenging year. The pandemic affects us so deeply that most of us experience several huge changes in our lives. We thought 2021 will be very different. But, unfortunately, it was about the same.
Some of you may find it hard to believe, but honestly speaking, among all the changes that I found hard to deal with, the hardest challenge is Toastmasters.
I still remember the discussion among officers back in March regarding whether we should continue the momentum of running the program, or we should wait until the lockdown is over. Michael and Dave, our previous and current presidents pushed it hard and decided to have online meetings when people were uncertain about what to do.
Thank them both. It turned out that they led us in the right direction and made the right decision at that time because if we chose to postpone, we won’t have any meeting anytime soon until the end of 2021!
When we first switched to an online forum, we lost most of the regular members due to the working from home situation. But the new opportunities also open to us. We reached out to people from a broader scope who are not based in Santa Clara. And thanks to the people who stood up for roles, and the officers who had hung in there like Danielle and Emily, we ended up with more new faces. We have a new vibe, new energy, and new momentum. In fact, I will call it a new-born Toastrix.
Therefore, I would love to thank you and myself. Without you and me, this program will not survive. Our participation, our eagerness to learn, and our self-improvement mindset make this program active. Toastrix will thus have more chances to serve and provide learning opportunities to Citrites in the upcoming 2022.
In the end, I would love to quote Emily, our previous VP for Education and VP for Public Relations. As she always came up with brilliant table topics, she came up with a clever analogy. She said: “Joining Toastmaster is something like going to the gym, before going, you always hate it, but after going, you feel so good about it, because you know you are improving and it’s good for you.” With that in mind, please raise your glass: To our passion, to our persistence, to us! Cheers!
|
https://medium.com/@amychen_59433/to-us-ce96cb92a3bb
|
['Amy Chen']
|
2021-12-27 01:52:14.614000+00:00
|
['Toast', 'Public Speaking', 'Employee Engagement', 'Toastmasters', 'Citrix']
|
The Eightfold Path of the Legendary Trader
|
Like many traders, I read Market Wizards as a kid. If you don’t know it, it’s a collection of interviews with the most legendary traders of the 1980s.
Back when I first read it, I really had no idea what the hell I was doing. I read it, thought I got it and moved on.
But I didn’t get it.
The reason was simple. I didn’t have the life experience and wisdom to understand it. That would take many, many more years.
A few months ago I picked up my old, dog eared and highlighted copy and started thumbing through it. I expected to snag a few quotes and move on but pretty soon I found myself hooked, reading it cover to cover all over again.
Two things struck me immediately.
First, I’d highlighted all the wrong things.
Second, I saw instantly how much these men were alike.
No matter where they came from or how they got started, they all remembered one devastating loss early in their career. They all started with little to no idea what they were doing. All of them transcended false beliefs and developed an amazing ability to adapt and change their minds in a flash.
Their styles, politics and temperament all varied widely but the rest of their lives followed a remarkably similar path.
That’s when I realized I was seeing something bigger, a meta-pattern, a pattern of patterns.
Call it the journey of the great trader.
So what is that path and how can you follow it?
Let’s take a close look.
Number One: Start Out Clueless
No matter how good anyone gets at something they always start out clueless. Maybe trading is some innate gift but that doesn’t matter at all at first. Everyone starts at step one.
Nobody starts off a superstar.
Maybe it’s my fault
This Wizards excerpt from Michael Marcus is typical of most traders.
“Q: Did you know anything at all about what you were doing? Had you read anything about commodities or trading? A: No, nothing. Q: Did you even know the contract sizes? A: No, we didn’t. Q: Did you know how much it was costing you per tick? A: Yes. Q: Apparently, that was about the only thing you knew. A: Right. Our next trade, in wheat, didn’t work either. After that, we went back to corn and that trade worked out better; it took us three days to lose our money. We were measuring success by the number of days it took us to lose.”
You see the same story again and again. Somebody hears about how they can get rich quick in the market. Their friend tells them or they read a story about some king of Wall Street or the newly crowned crypto rich and they leap in hoping to make a quick buck, their eyes filled with stars.
Even if they do have some idea about the basic rules, like setting good stops and choosing a position size that won’t wipe them out they almost always ignore it.
Paul Tudor Jones, a super aggressive, hard charging trader, tells the tale of a horrible early trade where he made a spur of the moment “macho man” cotton buy leaving him seriously vulnerable. Immediately the other pit traders knew his mistake and he did too. The big whale of the cotton market started dumping on him almost instantly, driving the price down hard and locking him in.
He learned the hard way “Never play macho man with the market” as he wiped out 70% of his equity in a single trade.
Every single person thinks they’re smarter than the market. Even if they read the time honored rules of the best of the best they’re thinking “those don’t apply to me, I’m different.”
And that takes us to step two.
Number Two: Make the Same Mistakes as Everyone Else
Think you’re immune to making the same mistakes everyone else does?
You’re not. But don’t worry, you’re in good company.
Nobody is immune.
Inevitably new traders don’t understand why the rules are there to protect them even if they know the rules. Maybe after their clueless stage they read a few books or listen to some smart sounding traders on Twitter or take a course.
The problem is they don’t really understand what they’re reading and hearing. They can’t process it yet because they don’t have the experience to see the wisdom in it, even if they understand it partially at the intellectual level. Knowledge can’t be passed on passively. It has to be earned through personal experience.
And when you don’t understand the rules, what happens?
You screw up.
And what are some of those rules?
1) Don’t overtrade.
2) Keep your position sizes small.
3) Set stop losses.
4) Don’t make snap decisions.
5) Don’t get too high or too low emotionally.
Those are just a few of the essential pearls of wisdom that every trader eventually figures out.
Eventually.
The hard way.
In the beginning everyone just glosses over them.
Legendary currency trader Bruce Kovner tells a classic story about snap decisions. Kovner made his original money hedging spreads on contracts. He’d be long one contract and short another to reduce the risk but as soybeans rocketed to new highs in the 1970’s his broker got caught up in the euphoria and called him wild with greed:
“Soybeans are going to the moon…You are a fool to stay short the November contracts. Let me lift your November shorts for you, and when the market goes limit-up for the next few days, you will make more money.”
He agreed. Limit-up is a circuit breaker on the markets. If they went too high or too low the contracts locked and nobody could trade them. You were stuck. Limit-up meant you were making the absolute most money possible. Limit-down? You were losing the most money possible and even worse you were stuck and you couldn’t sell out.
Kovner perfectly describes the crazy euphoria every early market apprentice feels:
“It was a moment of insanity. Fifteen minutes later, my broker calls me back, and he sounds frantic. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but the market is limit-down! I don’t know if I can get you out.’ I went into shock. I yelled at him to get me out.”
By sheer luck he managed to get out when the markets ticked up past limit-down for a few minutes but not before eating a massive loss.
Afterwards, Kovner talks about the sickness every trader feels when they make a horrific trade and the market eats them alive.
“I was up about $45,000. By the end of the day, I had $22,000 in my account.”
And that brings us to our very next step on the journey of trader enlightenment.
Number Three: Take a Big Loss
Every single trader will eventually experience a catastrophic, heart breaking loss. Many of the best traders went completely belly up, more than once. The original great speculator, Jesse Livermore, lost multiple fortunes.
Kovner tells us the gut wrenching sickness of losing big money in the market.
“I went into emotional shock. I could not believe how stupid I had been — how badly I had failed to understand the market, in spite of having studied the markets for years. I was sick to my stomach, and I didn’t eat for days. I thought that I had blown my career as a trader.”
Michael Marcus tells a similar story of a disastrous sugar trade.
“Q: How much did you lose on the trade by the time you liquidated? A: I lost my own $30,000, plus $12,000 of the $20,000 my mother had lent me. That was my lesson in betting my whole wad.”
Every trader has a story like that to tell. For me it was NEO. I got in late in the bull run and bet big. I just knew it was going to the moon and a few days later I was riding high and I nearly doubled my money.
And then the empire struck back.
China started threatening the big exchanges. It seemed every single weekend there was a brand new story attacking crypto, a big banker saying it was worthless or insane, China cracking down, or another country looking to ban trading.
It didn’t take long for the markets to panic.
And there was no worse coin to hold at the time than a Chinese coin. That’s exactly what NEO was, red Chinese through and through.
I watched my wins vaporize over the course of two days and I just froze. I panicked. I liked the coin and the project, I thought it would turn around so I just hung on as it went down and down and down.
In the end I lost 68% of what I put in.
I was sick to death. I couldn’t sleep or eat for days. Working out didn’t help. Getting a massage didn’t help. Alcohol didn’t help. Whacking it didn’t help. Nothing helped.
Only one thing could fix it. The next step.
Step Four: Reflect and Come Back Stronger
Once you finally experience that soul crushing loss it’s not long after that you realize it was the absolute best experience of your trading life.
If you’re smart and you’re focused you start looking at everything you did wrong. You go over it with a fine tooth comb. You question all your beliefs and ideas. No longer are you willing to just take things at face value. You want to know what works and what doesn’t and so you finally get serious.
Paul Tudor Jones remembers reflecting on his mega-loss and getting so depressed he wanted to quit. But then it hit him:
“It was at that point that I said, ‘Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life the pursuit of happiness rather than pain?’ That was when I first decided I had to learn discipline and money management. It was a cathartic experience for me, in the sense that I went to the edge, questioned my very ability as a trader, and decided that I was not going to quit. I was determined to come back and fight.”
Real loss equals real wisdom.
Without that loss none of the lessons make any sense to you whatsoever. You’ll think you’re different and that the rules don’t apply to you.
But they do. They apply to everyone. No exceptions.
Step Five: Learn the Age Old Lessons the Hard Way
What is it about the human mind that makes us learn all our lessons the hard way? We read the great wisdom of the ages and promptly ignore it.
Be like water, my friend.
Maybe that’s just the meaning of life? We all have to go through the same struggles and make our own mistakes and live the great story again and again.
After my big NEO loss I reflected on everything I’d done wrong and it hit me like a diamond bullet between the eyes. I realized I didn’t know how to make decisions when I was under fire. I just froze like a deer in headlights. I knew the market had turned and that NEO was going down and I should get out but I couldn’t pull the trigger.
Internally, I just couldn’t accept the loss. I was in denial. I was a good trader and careful or at least I thought I was but now I was faced with a new reality.
I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And I couldn’t accept the reality in front of me. I couldn’t put it behind me and move on.
I should have sold that NEO shit stack long before it cost me a big chunk of change. Instead I road that loser all the way into Hell instead of cutting my losses.
As Tudor Jones says “losers average losers.”
People love to hang onto losers. They love the pain. Oh they won’t admit it but they do. Pain is drama. And people love drama.
Either that or they imagine the market merely lost its mind for a minute. The project is a good project. Things will turn around.
Except more often then not they don’t turn around or they turn around too late and because you held so long you can’t make up that loss.
And it doesn’t matter if gold is good or a company is good or a project is good. Sometimes that doesn’t mean a damn thing to the market and it just tanks. Saddling up that bomb and cowboy riding it to the bottom is always a disaster.
NEO taught me the most important lesson of all.
More importantly I now understood the lesson:
“Cut your losses, let your winners run.”
Step Six: Money Management
The ancient wisdom really boils down to two words: Money management.
Cutting losses is one of those key principles that everyone has to learn. It’s not enough to simply trade the market, you have to know you’re going to get things wrong a lot of the time. And that means you have to protect your money at all costs.
That’s just basic probability.
Paul Tudor Jones says “I am always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money…I have a mental stop. If it hits that number, I am out no matter what.”
Money management comes down to a few critical principles:
1) Keep your position sizes small to minimize risk
2) Ruthlessly cut your losses.
3) Always use stops.
4) Don’t use too much leverage
5) When you start losing, start trading smaller.
6) When you go on a bad streak, get out of everything and take a break.
7) If you get in a bad trade, get out immediately because you can always get back in later.
All of these principles work in tandem to protect your money.
I learned this the hard way yet again just the other day, when I went a little too heavy on a leveraged position after a strong winning streak.
The mistake was easy to see in retrospect.
What blinded me at first was that I’d gotten masterful at setting my stops. One of my tricks is to set a limit stop price far above or below the trigger so it always gets filled. I’d never had a stop not fill and I’d never gotten liquidated. I don’t get liquidated because I use just enough leverage to make a difference but not enough that the market would only have to move a few percentage points to kill me off.
I put in my trade, set my stop and went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning and checked in I saw I was down 29%. My stop never triggered. I wasn’t liquidated because I hadn’t over-leveraged but it didn’t matter.
I was sick to my stomach.
So what did I do?
Number two, ruthlessly cut loses.
After a few minutes of feeling sorry for myself and thinking I should hold on because maybe it would come back I shut that stupid voice up and sold. I cut that loss immediately. I took it and moved on.
That’s when I understood once more that all the principles work together in concert.
If the position size had been smaller the overall loss would have been smaller. But because I hadn’t used too much leverage I hadn’t gotten liquidated so I was still very much protected.
Low leverage, small positions and stops all work as one. Sometimes one of these risk management tools fail you and the others kick in to help. It’s like the seat belt and the airbag.
Sometimes the seat belt isn’t enough but the airbag is there to save you.
Step Seven: Stop Following Others
It may seem strange to say that I don’t follow other traders or the news but I don’t follow any of them anymore. I may occasionally glance at a chart of a trader who I really respect and see if it matches with my sense of the market but it’s incredibly rare. I might also check in with a trader who I know well and who’s had success over the long run.
And then I just do what I want anyway.
You can go your own way.
In the end you have to follow your own light.
You have to get so good that you trust your own analysis above all else. When you make a mistake you need to know you’re strong enough to figure out what it was and fix it the next time.
If you’re meant to be a good trader you will be. It’s as simple as that.
Ed Seykota is one of the best traders profiled in Wizards. He says is best:
“It is a happy circumstance that when nature gives us true burning desires, she also gives us the means to satisfy them.”
If you have that burning desire to trade and to win, you’ll find a way and you won’t need to follow anyone else once you get your feet wet.
I have my school of traders but my main lesson to them is simple. Learn from me and then move on. Become your own master. Don’t sit at the feet of gurus your whole life.
As for the news? Nothing but poison. Turn it off as fast as you can.
I highly, highly recommend every single human being take a news fast for a month. Disable anything related to news on your phone feed. Unfollow everyone on Facebook. Don’t read the Twitter stream. Get a site blocker for when you’re working and use it frequently.
I guarantee you, you will not miss out on anything. If something really, really big happens you’ll hear about it because people will talk about it. If it’s not big enough to be on everyone’s lips it’s not worth hearing about.
Here’s another thing I guarantee. You will be mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthier by an order of magnitude. Your anxiety will decrease as will your confusion and fear.
You’ll probably end up extending the news fast indefinitely. I know I did.
I could care less about Google News or which coin some random person on the Internet thinks is going to the moon tomorrow based on astrology and hope. Probably the last time I followed news was during the China crisis. And if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t read a word of it this time. I do occasionally read one magazine that I like with strong, consistent journalism but even that is less and less frequent, maybe once a month or every few months and mostly because there is one story I want to read in depth.
When you give up on the news you’ll be in fine company.
Ed Seykota said “eventually I became more confident of trading with the trend and more able to ignore the news. I became more comfortable with the approach.”
I have not met a single good trader who is a news junky even though the average trader is a hopeless news junky. They want a reason for the market to go up or down. They can’t face that it’s random chaos and the push/pull of a billion emotional monsters.
So writers come up with a good reason for why the market made a move. Interest rates changed. A trade war looms. A big soybean shortage struck. Some of these are probably factors but it’s really impossible to use that news in any effective way 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time it is but so what? Is it really worth watching 99% white noise to get that?
Even worse, news is about conflict and tragedy. It’s about pain and suffering. It’s about extraordinary events.
But the more you watch it the more you think those extraordinary events are normal events.
Plagues happen every day. People get shot up around the corner every few seconds. A baby is butchered every ten minutes in your town.
If you’re born in an insane asylum and everyone is screaming all the time you think it’s normal.
It ain’t normal.
You’re hearing about statistical outliers and it does nothing but warp and derange your mind.
The news is poison.
Bite your arm, suck that venom and spit it out for good.
Step Eight: Develop Your Own Style
If you make it this far, you’ve come to the final step on the journey of trading mastery.
What’s that?
Develop your own system.
I used to study Kung Fu. I noticed that most people were obsessed with lineage. Who was the great master that taught their great master in an unbroken line over five hundred years? Did the system change? Was it passed down perfectly and directly?
I soon realized this kind of thinking was total madness. Of course the system changed. Each master learned new lessons through his own life experience and added that to the system. It he didn’t, he was no master. In fact, he probably sucked horribly if he just photocopied what his teacher taught him and passed it down to you.
And I also found myself thinking about the first person in that line of legendary martial artists. If you go back far enough, eventually you get to someone who started the system. That brings up one inevitable question:
Who taught them?
The answer is obvious.
Nobody.
They taught themselves.
And that is what the absolute best of the best do in all fields. They don’t follow. They create.
The old Kung Fu masters didn’t just learn from someone else and regurgitate it. They took what they learned and modified and improved it. They studied nature and themselves. They watched the movement of snakes and birds and they tried to tease out the secrets of those animal powers. They wanted to move as fast as a snake and strike like a tiger. They had everything they needed by observing the world around them.
You must become the master. When you get there you’ll find there’s nobody handing out a belt. You’ll be the final judge in your journey.
And that means eventually you’ll need to develop a trading style that perfectly fits your own personality, your own strengths and weaknesses. If you’re just following someone else’s picks blindly you won’t have to strength to stay in a trade when the going gets really rough. That kind of confidence only comes from within.
To do that you’ll have to look deep inside and figure out what you really want from the world.
As Ed Seykota says, “Everyone gets what they want out of the markets.”
Some people like to lose. Some people like to play the Martyr. Some folks like to be popular. Others love to be contrarians and bet against the crowd. Still others like to sound smart at parties. But they don’t like to make money. They might even think it’s dirty or evil and they self sabotage.
Whatever your weakness the market will happily feed it to you. If you love the excitement of winning big and then losing it all and making it back again, you’ll get that too.
Ed went further: “I think that if people look deeply enough into their trading patterns, they find that, on balance, including all their goals, they are really getting what they want, even though they may not understand it or want to admit it.”
But the best traders do want to make money. They have a deep passion for the markets and a burning desire to win. To do it they all come to the same understanding eventually by reflecting deeply and transcending their own human limitations to become the best of the best.
And when they do they’re ready to walk their own path, a lonely path, but a joyous one too:
Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back
The path of the master.
They no longer need to read any more books or listen to anyone else or follow anyone else’s star.
They become their own guiding light.
They live and die by their own decisions. When they win they don’t get too high. When they lose they don’t blame anyone but themselves.
And they don’t need any outside validation or praise or judgement.
That’s because after all that time and effort and suffering, they finally know what they’re doing. It’s not arrogance. It’s an internal compass that is unflinchingly accurate, developed only through dedication, perseverance, persistence and passion.
It’s earned over time. A long time. Nothing else can give it to you.
It can’t be bought, bargained for, or cheated. There are no short cuts and there never will be.
And all the praise and validation the legendary trader will ever need will show up in the only place that matters.
Their bank account and crypto wallet.
###########################################
If you love my work please visit my Patreon page because that’s where I share special insights with all my fans. Top Patrons get EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to the legendary Coin Sheets Discord where you’ll find:
Market calls from me and other pro technical analysis masters.
from me and other pro technical analysis masters. Access to the Coin’bassaders only private chat .
only . Behind the scenes look at how I and other pros interpret the market.
look at how I and other pros interpret the market. You also get exclusive access to a monthly virtual meet up with me , where I’ll share everything I’m working on and give you a behind the scenes look at my process.
, where I’ll share everything I’m working on and give you a behind the scenes look at my process. I’ll follow each talk with a Q&A session. Ask me anything and I just might answer.
############################################
You can also stop by DecStack, the Virtual Co-Working Spot for CryptoCurrency and Decentralized App Projects, where you can rub elbows with multiple projects. It’s totally free forever. Just come on in and socialize, work together, share code and ideas. Make your ideas better through feedback. Find new friends. Meet your new family.
############################################
A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.
Readers have called my breakout nanopunk novel, The Scorpion Game, “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “Detective noir meets Johnny Mnemonic.”
##################
Lastly, you can join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more.
############################################
For some of my most exclusive stories and the best utility coin research on the planet, check out Strategic Coin!
############################################
|
https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-eightfold-path-of-the-legendary-trader-11b304db97c2
|
['Daniel Jeffries']
|
2018-03-20 20:09:28.330000+00:00
|
['Trading', 'Finance', 'Stock Market', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin']
|
Connected Max Smart LED review: Cree Lighting ups its game with a new line of color tunable bulbs
|
Connected Max Smart LED review: Cree Lighting ups its game with a new line of color tunable bulbs Mike Dec 24, 2020·2 min read
The lighting mavens at Cree Lighting are pushing further into the smart home with the launch of the Connected Max line, a series of bulbs available in both dimmable (but not tunable) white and color-changing options. Color bulbs are available in BR30, PAR38, A19, and (unusually) A21 form factors. The tunable white is only available as an A19 bulb.
Today we look at the color A19 bulb, which serves as both a full color-changing bulb and a tunable white bulb. The bulb offers a now familiar, traditional design, with a large heat sink and an Edison style globe on top, roughly the same size as a typical incandescent. The bulb draws 9 watts and offers 800 lumens of brightness, making for a 60-watt incandescent equivalent.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart bulbs, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.The bulb sets up initially via Bluetooth, but operates only on the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band. Initial configuration went quickly via the Cree Lighting mobile app, and I encountered no issues with installation. I especially appreciated its detailed setup process, which walks you through its various configuration modes instead of leaving it all for you to discover later.
[ Further reading: The best bias lighting kits for TVs and monitors ] Christopher Null / IDG Cree’s “follow the sun” mode can be infinitely fine-tuned.
Those modes include “light to sleep” and “light to wake” modes, which slowly fade out or in at bedtime and the waking hour respectively. There’s also a “follow the sun” mode which adjusts the color temperature throughout the day to keep you energized in the morning and relaxed after hours.
Naturally, there’s a full range of tuning options to play with, including a white color temperature range of 2200K to 6500K and a capable dimmer. As well, an intuitive color wheel makes it easy to light the room for a holiday—and the bulb’s colors are impressive in brightness and vibrancy.
A full range of scheduling and timer options are available, and the app connects with both Alexa and Google Assistant to let you control the bulb via voice.
For the most part, the bulb is responsive, though I did encounter more than a few brief disconnects, stutters, and delays during my testing, but rarely did I have to wait more than a few seconds for things to right themselves. That’s all perhaps to be expected given the pricing of this bulb at all of $10, which is definitely on the budget side (though not the least expensive model on the market, even among name brands). Despite some minor bugginess, it’s definitely worth the outlay.
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/@mike48068276/connected-max-smart-led-review-cree-lighting-ups-its-game-with-a-new-line-of-color-tunable-bulbs-7ca51971de0d
|
[]
|
2020-12-24 17:41:28.868000+00:00
|
['Mobile', 'Internet', 'Services', 'Cutting']
|
Deploy both ends of the MERN App to the same Heroku app
|
Setting up frontend
I used Create React App and set the PORT to 3001 for development because the backend would be running on the PORT 3000.
Setting up Backend
Backend has one script for production and one script for development.
make sure your express has these few pieces of code
the above code makes sure that your server uses the port given by Heroku or port 3000 during development.
To ensure that your app uses the frontend build created by CRA during production and redirects to the index if a path doesn’t exist.
Renaming API Routes
Heroku only gives one port for both the ends. So if you have clashing routes like ‘/users’ or ‘/about’ in both React and API endpoints in your express app, you will get errors.
You might be able to navigate to different routes such as yourapp.com/about because of how react is build, but when you refresh your page you would get an error
Cannot GET /about
A simple way to solve this is to rename your API endpoints ( for example )
Refactoring URLs for React
By default when fetching data through Axios in React from the backend, without specifying any URL it always sets the port to the current port, for us that would be 3001 (in development ). This default behavior works on production as both ends would be on the same port.
But during development, we need to make sure it fetches data from port 3000 and not 3001.
This assigns URL based on if the app is deployed on Heroku or is running on the localhost for development.
Root Package.json
Running both frontend and backend is annoying because I have to change directories and start the server EVERY TIME.
So I wrote scripts to manage it from the root without changing the directory.
Create a package.json file in the root directory, and add these scripts
Now you can run both frontend and backend (in different terminals) in development mode by running
npm run frontend and npm run backend
Deploying to Heroku
Heroku runs the start script on the build which installs and runs our backend, after that, it runs the heroku-postbuild script which installs and builds the react app for a production build.
|
https://medium.com/@kolsum24/deploy-both-ends-of-the-mern-app-to-the-same-heroku-app-6f9c0026c1b1
|
['Sumit Kolpekwar']
|
2020-10-25 09:52:23.497000+00:00
|
['Deployment', 'Full Stack', 'React', 'Heroku', 'Node']
|
SEO vs. React: Web Crawlers are Smarter Than You Think
|
Many people still worry that if you build a websites using tools like React, Angular, or Ember, it will hurt your search engine ranking.
The thinking goes something like this: the web crawlers that search engines use won’t be able crawl a page properly unless it’s completely rendered in the user’s browser. Instead, they’ll only see the HTML code delivered from the backend.
If that HTML code contains nothing more than a couple of meta tags and script tags, the search engine will assume your page is basically blank and rank you poorly.
I commonly see Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants recommend that you render your page on the backend, so that web crawlers can see a lot of nice HTML code that they can then index.
To me, this advice seems unreasonable and unrealistic. It’s 2016. Users expect pages to be dynamic and provide them with a snappy user experience. They don’t want to wait for a new HTML page to load every time they click on something.
So is the statement “client-side rendering hurts your page rank” still valid?
Doing The Research
First, a disclaimer: I’m by no means an SEO expert. But I did read up on the topic a bit, and here’s what I found.
Here’s an announcement from Google on their webmaster blog from October 2015:
Today, as long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, we are generally able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers. To reflect this improvement, we recently updated our technical Webmaster Guidelines to recommend against disallowing Googlebot from crawling your site’s CSS or JS files.
Here’s a Search Engine Land article from in May of 2015:
We ran a series of tests that verified Google is able to execute and index JavaScript with a multitude of implementations. We also confirmed Google is able to render the entire page and read the DOM, thereby indexing dynamically generated content. SEO signals in the DOM (page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, meta robots tags, etc.) are respected. Content dynamically inserted in the DOM is also crawlable and indexable. Furthermore, in certain cases, the DOM signals may even take precedence over contradictory statements in HTML source code. This will need more work, but was the case for several of our tests.
These two sources suggest that it is, indeed, safe to use client-side rendered layout.
The Preactjs.com Test
I recently tweeted a lament about SEO consultants nitpicking about my beloved React. To be precise, I’m in the process of migrating to Preact, a light-weight alternative to Facebook’s React. I got this reply from Jason Miller, one of the developers working on Preact:
Aside from the blog article from Search Engine Land that I’ve quoted above, Jason tweeted a link to a Google search for the Preact home page, which looks like this:
This page is rendered entirely client-side, using Preact, as a look at its source code proves:
<!DOCTYPE html><html><head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Preact: Fast 3kb React alternative with the same ES6 API. Components & Virtual DOM.</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,minimal-ui"> <meta name="mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"> <meta name="theme-color" content="#673AB8"> <link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.json"> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/assets/app-icon-192.png" sizes="192x192"> <script>(function(url){window['_boostrap_'+url]=fetch(url);})('/content'+location.pathname.replace(/^\/(repl)?\/?$/, '/index')+'.md');</script> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"> <link href="/style.6bae35e4ff9d687cb418.css" rel="stylesheet"> </head><body> <script>(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','//www. google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');ga('create ', 'UA-6031694-20', 'auto');ga('send', 'pageview');</script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/bundle.a0afd09fd48712ed0f26.js"></script> </body></html>
If the Googlebot were not able to read the HTML code rendered by Preact, it wouldn’t show more than the contents of the meta tags.
And yet, here’s what the Google results look like when searching for site:preactjs.com:
Another article by Andrew Farmer from March 2016 warns about lacking JavaScript support by search engines other than Google:
In my research I couldn’t find any evidence that Yahoo, Bing, or Baidu support JavaScript in their crawlers. If SEO on these search engines is important to you, you’ll need to use server-side rendering, which I’ll discuss in a future article.
So I decided to try out Jason’s test with other search engines:
✅ Bing
Andrew’s warning regarding Bing seems insubstantial. Here are the Bing results when searching for site:preactjs.com:
✅ Yahoo
And the Yahoo results when searching for site:preactjs.com:
✅ Duck Duck Go
And the Duck Duck Go results when searching for site:preactjs.com:
⚠️ Baidu
Chinese search engine Baidu does have problems with preactjs.com. Here are its results when searching for site:preactjs.com:
So it would seem that unless ranking high in what is essentially a China-only search engine is a priority for you, there’s nothing wrong with rendering your web pages on the client-side using JavaScript, as long as you follow some basic rules (quoted from Andrew Farmer’s blog post):
Render your components before doing anything asynchronous.
Test each of your pages with Fetch as Google to ensure that the Googlebot is finding your content
Thanks for reading!
Update 25th October 2016
Andrew Ingram ran the same tests that I ran an came to a different conclusion.
Quote from Andrew:
Here’s how many pages various search engines have indexed using the query “site:preactjs.com” Google: 17 Bing: 6 Yahoo: 6 Baidu: 1 One of the Google results is an error page, but it presumably can’t be de-indexed automatically due to there not yet being a way of declaring a 404-equivalent in SPAs. I’ve also read (I can’t recall where) that Google has a latency of a few days when it comes to indexing SPAs compared to server-rendered apps. This may not be a problem for you, but it’s worth knowing about.
His working hypothesis is that search engine robots other than Google are able to index client-side rendered pages, but not crawl them, i.e. follow links and index other pages of a website.
→ Follow the discussion on Hacker News
Acknowlegements
Thanks to Adam Audette (Search Engine Land) and Andrew Farmer for their excellent blog articles from which I quoted, Jason Miller for his input and inspiration, my colleagues from the eBay Classifieds Group for their support and Quincy Larson of Free Code Camp for publishing this article!
|
https://medium.com/free-code-camp/seo-vs-react-is-it-neccessary-to-render-react-pages-in-the-backend-74ce5015c0c9
|
['Patrick Hund']
|
2016-10-25 11:12:52.140000+00:00
|
['JavaScript', 'Web Development', 'SEO', 'Tech', 'React']
|
How to Manage Your Work Time Effectively
|
Photo by Lukas Blazek
You’re already running late for work. Your alarm goes off and you roll out of bed begrudgingly. You look at yourself in the mirror and let out a sigh.
The shower is cold, you want it to wake you up. You rush out the door and quickly say good-bye to your partner and children.
The 9 o’clock traffic grinds your gears. You think of your busy workday ahead and grunt to yourself. You can practically see the piles of papers on your desk.
A daydream sets in where you ponder how to manage your time more wisely. You already feel so behind and you haven’t had your cup of coffee yet.
Does this sound like you? Plenty of people suffer from time management. It seems the more you try to get ahead, the further and further you fall behind.
What gives?
You need a time management system for your life — especially your work-life. Control over our time is massively beneficial to our work-life balance. While you cannot control everything, you feel better when you are more in control of your time.
To master the clock, read our guide below. As you read you will gain more and more insights into this necessary skill. By the end, you will feel so rich in time abundance.
Rise and Shine
Are you a morning person? If not, you ought to become one. Waking up early is one of the best moves you can make when you want to improve your productivity.
Waking up early has a compounding effect on your day. It feels good on multiple levels.
You feel good because you woke up early but also feel good because it sets the tone for the day. You can now schedule your time with anything you wish. Positive ideas in the rise and shine department are exercise (specifically 45 min. of cardio), meditation, reading, and journaling.
Where Does the Time Go?
You can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where your time is already going. As an experiment, log your time for a week. Time tracking will have a birds-eye-view of your time and where you spend it.
The truth is you all have the same amount of time every day, week, month, and year. It’s up to us to make the best use of it. This can feel daunting at first, but once you understand this, you can work on it.
To see where your time goes when you are working, you need a time logging system. You can log our days and hours with pen and paper. Or for a more modern approach, you’re going to want to do some time tracking.
Use a Tomato to Ketchup
As an extension of seeing where your time goes, now you must have time limits for your tasks. By setting up time parameters, you now have a more manageable construct you can work within. One of the best ways to track your time is with the Pomodoro Method.
The Pomodoro Method breaks down your task into 25-minute intervals and a 5-minute break in between. This tomato method is simple yet highly effective. Committing to the task for only 25 minutes at a time makes it less daunting and more doable.
By learning how to manage your time more efficiently, your life will improve. The organization alone will do wonders for your psyche.
One Thing at a Time
Don’t multitask. Do one thing at a time. This sounds simple but in reality, it can be quite difficult to do.
The truth is that every time you switch from one task to the next, you are only making it more difficult for yourself in the long run. By focusing on your one task, your productivity will skyrocket.
Make this as simple as possible and avoid distractions.
Die, Distractions, Die!
Work is uncomfortable. Don’t make it more difficult by getting distracted. Easier said than done.
The internet is a vortex, and if you’re not careful you can get easily sucked in. From social media to chat to e-mail to phone calls — no wonder you can’t get anything done!
All of these things that feel good may be satisfying at the moment, but they come at a cost. Your work suffers, you spend a lot of time getting through it, and at the end of the day, you feel drained.
Again, focus on the task at hand. All of these time sinks do eat up an enormous amount of time. Be kind to yourself and do your work.
The key is to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. You have to get past the initial uncomfortable feeling that is the task. Once you get past the feeling, ride the task’s wave out to shore for as long as possible.
This requires self-discipline. A notable skill and habit to practice.
Aside from the internet, there are distractions in life and in our minds. If you get a pop-up in your mind, the best thing you can do is simply write it down. That way, you can store it somewhere in a physical place.
Say “Poof” to Perfectionism
When you say yes to being perfect, you also say yes to slowly working. The truth is that being perfect doesn’t exist. It’s just some made-up version of yourself that is unrealistic.
Attempting to be perfect is like pumping your brakes. Let’s say poof to perfectionism once and for all.
Action Is a Muscle
What is the action? Knowing the simple action you need to take next helps.
For example, say your job is a freelance writer. What is the action you need to take? What is the action muscle you need to exercise?
The action you need to take is typing keys on a keyboard. By simplifying down your task to a verb, you can do so faster. You can drop into your task quicker when you remember to just move your fingers and type.
Practice Your Craft
Pinpoint which tasks are of importance to you and practice them. As an extension of the paragraph above, you need to practice your craft. If you need proof of this, consider Michael Jordan as an example.
If you want to get better at something, you have to put in the time. You have to practice your craft. Keep pushing forward through the discomfort and you will be triumphant on the other side.
Learn How to Manage Your Time
Learning how to manage your time takes time. It also takes discipline and hard work. Be easy on yourself if you are wanting to schedule your time better.
Getting things done is a necessary skill to learn. We all have the same amount of time, but it’s how we use it that is important.
To better your time today, why not try a time tracking app? Start a 30-day challenge to get a grasp on your days. A worthy challenge to someone who deserves it.
Originally published at actitime.com
|
https://medium.com/@actitime/how-to-manage-your-work-time-effectively-c50de2c365ac
|
[]
|
2020-12-24 10:21:11.390000+00:00
|
['Productivity Hacks', 'Productivity Tips', 'Time Management Tips', 'Time Management', 'Productivity']
|
A Vaccine, Three Presidents, and Ending the Pandemic
|
Public distrust in government institutions and the pharmaceutical industry is high enough to where we need stunts.
For those skeptical, hesitant, or worried about taking the Coronavirus vaccine, three former presidents are here for reassurance.
According to CNBC; Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have said they will take a coronavirus vaccine once one is available, and may film it to build confidence in the U.S. about vaccine safety.
Why is this necessary you may ask? Recent polls on the mood of the country when it comes to vaccines provide insight.
Let’s look at the numbers
A Harris Poll survey in the summer of 2019, before the current pandemic, of 2,000 U.S adults revealed the following: Of those polled, 45 percent noted at least one source that caused doubts about the safety of vaccination. The top three doubt-causing sources were online articles (16 percent), past secrets/wrongdoing by the pharmaceutical industry (16 percent) and information from medical experts (12 percent).
The survey also asked Americans to choose a statement that best represented their feelings about vaccine safety and efficacy. While the vast majority (82 percent) chose in favor of vaccines, 8 percent selected responses expressing serious doubt. An additional 9 percent said they were unsure.
More recently (August 7th 2020), Gallup found 61% of Americans willing to receive a Coronavirus vaccine; this even if the vaccine was both free and FDA approved. Americans were evenly split when surveyed in September; with the most recent poll in November showing 58% in favor of being vaccinated.
These are important numbers to consider. According to Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, it is possible the United States could reach herd immunity by May 2021. To do so would require immunizing 70–80% of the population, not 58 or 60%.
That’s where three former presidents come in. They, and likely everyone within government and healthcare circles, hope to build public trust in this process.
Pfizer and Moderna, both of whom are leading in providing vaccines which are over 90% effective, have applied for FDA approval. Their trials are in no way small, Pfizer having studied over 40,000 patients and Moderna over 30,000.
With such large study groups, no severe adverse reactions to date, and a vaccine with an extremely high efficacy rate, you wouldn’t think former presidents are needed to increase public confidence. But, here we are.
Why the lack of trust?
When Gallup asked those opposed to being vaccinated, for their reasons why they would forgo a Coronavirus vaccine; 37% cite the rushed timeline for development, 26% want to wait to confirm the vaccine is safe. Both of which are understandable; having a vaccine in less than a year breaks the previous record of four years for Mumps.
Here’s where things get interesting; 12% don’t trust vaccines in general, 10% want to wait to see how effective the vaccine will be, and 15% had other reasons.
Vaccine resistance isn’t new
Such resistance is not unprecedented. When Gallup asked U.S. adults in 1954, who had heard or read about the then-new polio vaccine, “Would you like to take this new polio vaccine (to keep people from getting polio) yourself?” just 60% said they would, while 31% said they would not.
It was The March of Dimes, a non-profit founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to combat polio which made all the difference then.
Due to waining trust in government and other institutions, a public relations campaign is likely needed now. Will three former presidents, taking a vaccine live on air, be enough to push vaccination rates well over the 70 or 80% mark?
Only time will tell.
When the vaccines are distributed, it will be front-line workers, doctors, nurses, etc. who receive the first doses. Assurances and encouragement from them would likely go a long way in convincing a skeptical public.
Trust in them is likely higher than any current, or former government officials.
|
https://medium.com/discourse/a-vaccine-three-presidents-and-ending-the-pandemic-9600620de3ae
|
['Bashar Salame']
|
2020-12-04 22:24:16.883000+00:00
|
['Health', 'USA', 'Politics', 'Covid 19', 'Vaccines']
|
Fun, fun, fun, and funny. A hard act to follow.
|
I’m not trying to sell you anything; I’m just telling stories and sharing bits of my life and experience. Connect at [email protected]
|
https://medium.com/@kcwriter/fun-fun-fun-and-funny-a-hard-act-to-follow-de11ec188a3
|
['K.C. Knouse']
|
2020-12-25 01:08:43.614000+00:00
|
['Collaboration', 'Short Story', 'A Very Stark Christmas', 'Humor', 'Fiction']
|
Practical help for businesses to up the pace of SDGs progress
|
This year marks just ten years to go to the deadline for completing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These universally supported targets were always ambitious in their scope — yet what is clearer now than ever before is that quicker progress is crucial in the decade to come. If the world stays on the same pace as the past five years, the goals will not be met with worrying and serious consequences.
When launched in 2015, the SDGs ushered in a new era of global development objectives to address the world’s most pressing problems. At GRI, we have been closely involved in the SDGs from the very early stages — because we know that increasing the participation of business is a principle driver in achieving the progress needed to reach these goals.
Over the past five years, GRI has collaborated extensively with the UN Global Compact (UNGC) and others to recognize and assess the crucial role of transparency and corporate reporting as a driver for measuring and encouraging progress towards the SDGs.
This year will see a number of new projects to further support this work. That includes the new addition of Examples of Corporate SDG Reporting Practices to the resources from GRI, which is focused around 14 sets of examples on how businesses have measured and disclosed SDGs impacts. These examples are now freely available to assist companies and other stakeholders, including aligning the SDGs with business strategy.
The highlighted examples recognize that, in different markets and global locations, there are lessons to be learned and shared. Companies included represent a broad array of countries: Brazil, Denmark, France, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Philippines. Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, UK and USA. Likewise, they are drawn from many different sectors, including chemicals, construction, consumer goods, cosmetics, food & drink, energy, real estate, and telecommunications.
The examples cover key themes that are globally relevant for businesses, such as:
· How to disclose SDGs impacts in the value chain;
· Engaging stakeholders in prioritizing SDGs;
· Understanding interconnections between the SDGS, corporate objectives and KPIs.
These practical examples complement the existing guidance developed by the GRI-UNGC Business Reporting on the SDGs Action Platform. This resource covers three areas:
1. Analysis of the SDGs goals and targets
2. A guide for integrating the SDGs into corporate reporting
3. How to address investor needs in SDGs business reporting
Meanwhile, we are at the midway point in an engagement project in partnership with Enel, which has involved gathering perspectives from business and policy representatives to set a vision for how reporting and partnerships can advance corporate input for the SDGs. A series of interactive, online forums in the second half of 2019 provided input on the changes needed. The next stage will see this work inform regional dialogue events later this year, to translate the lessons learned into action.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to be launching the SDGs Corporate Tracker project in Colombia, developed with the Technical Secretariat of the ODS Commission in Colombia, the UN Development Programme and Business Call to Action. This bold and collaborative approach see equal involvement from the private sector, civil society, academia and governments around the principle that collective action is the only way to achieve sustainability and advance the SDGs.
The corporate tracker platform helps measure business contributions to the SDGs and was built based on the experience of the first pilot project in Colombia in 2018. This project mined and aggregated private sector data on selected SDGs, which informed the Voluntary National Review presented by Colombia to the UN to show their progress. We are exploring opportunities for similar projects in the African and South Asia regions.
|
https://medium.com/@globalreportinginitiative/practical-help-for-businesses-to-up-the-pace-of-sdgs-progress-138fc9ca8679
|
[]
|
2020-02-20 10:03:08.636000+00:00
|
['Sdgs', 'Sustainable Business', 'Transparency', 'Sustainable Development', 'Csr']
|
Get A Grip: The Top 10 Hand Clapping Songs of All Time
|
#2. (tie) “I Saw Her Standing There” by The Beatles: 5+5+3+3 = 16
“A one, two, three, fo’!” begins the hand-clapping rocker that launched the British Invasion of the 1960s.
While some people might think of The Beatles as elevator muzak, this group started out rocking harder than any other band in the world.
In 1963, The Beatles rocked the world with “I Saw Her Standing There” at a time when the Rolling Stones sound like a bluesy 1950s cover band or a vacuous pop band from 1960. In 1964, Mick Jagger covered a Beatles song. The Stones finally found Rock ’n’ Roll satisfaction in 1965, after they couldn’t get any.
By 1965, The Beatles had moved on and cycled through pop, rock, sitar, harpsichords, ballads, guitar reverb, and all the studio effects that created the psychedelics. Heavy metal would have to wait until 1968 to be born with “Helter Skelter.”
The question is not who ruled rock in 1963, but how well the music rocks today. Listen to the song when it’s sung by McCartney at age 21, not when he’s old enough to be your grandfather.
At 160 beats per minute (bpm), “I Saw Her Standing There” fits right in with punk rockers and 80s rock bands.
For context here are the beats per minute for several high energy tunes: “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones (163 bpm); the GoGos’ “Vacation” by the GoGos (157 bpm) “Heartbreaker” by Pat Benatar (156 bpm); “Born to Run” by Springsteen (144 bpm); and “Pride” by U2 (136 bpm).
How crazy is it that “I Saw Her Standing There” is ranked #139 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, but was only the B-side of the Beatles’ first single released in the United States?
Maybe not so surprising when you find out the A-side of the single was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” ranked #16 all-time by Rolling Stone.— 5 points.
The entire song is driven by hand clapping, almost to the point of it being too much of a good thing. The clapping is fast and frenetic, driving the beat at a hand-melting 105.1 claps per minute (cpm). — 5 points
The handclaps help drive the beat of the song like a drummer. But the clapping intermingles with Paul’s frenetic bass so it does not stand out as much as “We Will Rock You.” — 3 points
Clapping pattern: This is a simple 2-pause-1 pattern, a classic rock beat that adds an extra clap off the beat. — 3 points
|
https://medium.com/the-word-is-not-enough/get-a-grip-these-are-the-top-10-hand-clapping-songs-of-all-time-ffaeb65508b1
|
['Lon Shapiro']
|
2020-12-28 00:37:50.974000+00:00
|
['Humor', 'Advanced Analytics', 'Culture', 'Music', 'Hand Clapping']
|
Back to the Activities You Once Loved With Physical Therapy | Fitness Lab
|
Let Physical Therapy Help You Get Back to the Activities You Love!
Struggling To Live Life on Your Own Terms? Physical Therapy Can Help!
Your golf friends wonder if you’re ever going to join them for another nine holes. That oil painting you started way back when still awaits the finishing touches. You bought a guitar last year, but you can’t stand the thought of trying to play it. Your tennis game got rusty shortly after your elbow did the same.
Do these scenarios, or similar ones, strike a little close to home? Chronic pain, stiffness and injuries can draw strict lines governing what you can and can’t do.
It’s a situation that has been seen time and time again and that countless individuals suffer from daily. At times, the emotional pain of not being able to do the things you love with the people you love can be hurt more than the physical. Taking painkillers offers little more than a stopgap solution, while major surgery could actually set you back further instead of letting you get past your problem.
But what if I told you there is another option for returning to the activities you love and living the life you deserve? What if I told you you could skip all of the short-term solutions for your chronic pain and get to the very root of your pain and stop it in its tracks? Well, the good news is you can do all of that, and you can do it with physical therapy.
How Painful Problems Can Limit Your Freedom and Lifestyle
The human body is capable of an extraordinary range of physical actions, thanks to the muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints in your body that make motion possible. Unfortunately, this amazing structure is prone to run into problems from time to time — problems that restrict your range of motion, making even the smallest of actions too painful to contemplate.
Let’s look at how issues affecting different body parts can limit your lifestyle.
Lower extremities — Any physical activity that involves running, jumping, or even standing still can become impossible if your hips, knees, or feet are in pain. Osteoarthritis most notably affects weight-bearing joints. Another possibility could also be runner’s knee, sciatica, or plantar fasciitis.
— Any physical activity that involves running, jumping, or even standing still can become impossible if your hips, knees, or feet are in pain. Osteoarthritis most notably affects weight-bearing joints. Another possibility could also be runner’s knee, sciatica, or plantar fasciitis. Elbows and shoulders — Because of constant and repeated stress on specific parts of their bodies, athletes regularly struggle with motion injuries, bursitis, or tendinitis in the elbows or shoulders. 38 million Americans suffer from the two classic examples include golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow, two similar forms of chronic tendon damage and inflammation.
— Because of constant and repeated stress on specific parts of their bodies, athletes regularly struggle with motion injuries, bursitis, or tendinitis in the elbows or shoulders. 38 million Americans suffer from the two classic examples include golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow, two similar forms of chronic tendon damage and inflammation. Neck and back — Does your favorite activity require you to crane your neck or twist your back constantly? It may be impossible to do either if you’re suffering from a herniated disc, a strained back, overstressed neck muscles, or degenerative spinal joint issues.
— Does your favorite activity require you to crane your neck or twist your back constantly? It may be impossible to do either if you’re suffering from a herniated disc, a strained back, overstressed neck muscles, or degenerative spinal joint issues. Hands — It’s not easy to think of any artistic endeavor that doesn’t require limber hands and fingers. Arthritis can stiffen your digits to the point where you can’t play an instrument, draw, or create handicrafts. Carpal tunnel syndrome makes even holding a pen a painful and agonizing experience
The Goal of Pain-Free Function Is Attainable With Our Physical Therapists!
Physical therapy makes a natural first line of care for anyone looking to regain lost strength, dexterity, or range of motion. Many people turn to physical therapy to take away the limits imposed by chronic pain or injuries so that they can return to their favorite activities. Our physical therapist makes a point of going above and beyond physical exams and symptom evaluations, tailoring the treatment by speaking with you about your specific frustrations, limitations, goals, and hopes for relief. We can then arrange a detailed, personalized physical therapy plan that targets those ailments and objectives.
Physical therapy uses a variety of tools and strategies that work together to achieve a desired result. For example:
A combination of massage therapy, stretches, heat therapy and cold therapy can ease pain in your hands and wrists.
Strength training, chiropractic treatment, and corrective exercises may be recommended to soothe pain and prevent further injury in the neck or back.
Walking, cycling or swimming can improve the pain-free range of motion in your weight-bearing joints.
Orthotic shoe inserts can help you come back from plantar fasciitis.
With The Help Of A Physical Therapist, You Can Enjoy Your Favorite Activities Without Pain!
Chronic pain can be an unparalleled detriment to your life and the thing you want to do in it. Talking about your struggles and pain you’ve faced is the first step to taking your life back. Once you’ve taken that step, you are making a choice to not let the pain control you. Don’t settle for being a spectator where your favorite activities are concerned. Jump back into the things you love by contacting our physical therapist at the Fitness Lab for treatment today!
Sources:
|
https://medium.com/@hsophia848/back-to-the-activities-you-once-loved-with-physical-therapy-fitness-lab-4f2de0ec07af
|
[]
|
2020-12-28 11:04:29.250000+00:00
|
['Health', 'Physical Therapy', 'Pain Free', 'Exercise', 'Fitness']
|
Samsung SmartThings, Google Nest partnership kicks off
|
Samsung SmartThings is our current favorite smart home hub, and Google Nest cameras, smart thermostats, and doorbells are among our favorite smart home devices. As was announced in December 2020, the companies behind those products have forged a partnership that brings Nest devices into the SmartThings ecosystem via the Works with SmartThings certification program.
SmartThings users with Nest products can now incorporate those devices into SmartThings scenes and other automations alongside any other Works with SmartThings-certified products. Nest Camera and Nest Hello video doorbell users, for example, will be able to stream video to their Samsung TV or Family Hub refrigerator.
Google joins a host of other major brands in the Works with SmartThings program, including Arlo (security cameras), August (smart locks), Bose (speakers), First Alert (smoke detectors), Leviton (lighting controls), Lutron (lighting and smart shades), Ecobee (thermostats) Philips Hue (lighting), Ring (home security and lighting), Sonos (multi-room audio).
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/@steve20060965/samsung-smartthings-google-nest-partnership-kicks-off-ed76adc0e9b1
|
[]
|
2021-01-27 16:49:25.978000+00:00
|
['Tvs', 'Consumer', 'Home Theater']
|
Millennial Entrepreneur Who is Incentivizing People to Improve Their Health
|
By Angie Gallagher
In this series, we feature the stories of the companies who are using the BurstIQ platform to further their mission of providing new and innovative health-tech solutions to patients around the world. Today we had the pleasure of talking with SELF Platform Inc.’s Founder and CEO, Milan Cheeks.
Meet SELF Platform Inc.’s Founder and CEO, Milan Cheeks
Milan Cheeks, SELF Platform Inc.’s Founder and CEO
I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 11 years. I started my first business when I was 16, and now I am 27 with my 4th ongoing business. I always had an obsession with being better than I was yesterday, whether that was learning something new or accomplishing a hard work out.
In 2016, I decided to combine entrepreneurship with this obsession and created SELF.
The best way to get through any hardship is to work on yourself and keep going. So I wanted to provide the world this A.I. based system that will not only keep people healthy but will motivate and reward them as they go through their journey in life.
How will your company improve health access & equity while making the world a healthier place?
Our company is striving to become an all in one place for wellness. Whether it is education, fitness, or health data, we plan to reward users for their overall progress. Making our SELF Coin the representation of wellness.
Even if users are using a competitor like Sweatcoin, we will still reward them since they are working on themselves. Which we believe will incentivize people to continue to enhance, learn, and apply themselves throughout their lives. Which will, in turn, make the world a better place as people start to better themselves worldwide.
How does the BurstIQ (BIQ) platform help your application?
Burst IQ will be the home of all the data that SELF brings in utilizing Research Foundry to supply educational, health, and fitness data to those who participate in the Research Foundry. This will provide these organizations with a real-time analysis as people strive to earn more SELF Coins.
What are your final thoughts on an aligned mission to help the world?
My mission is to make the world a better place, not just say it! I do not plan on stopping with just health and education, as there is an influx of different problems that need to be solved, and I am dedicated to helping make changes in our world. As we start to accomplish improvements in wellness, I am planning to move on to other fields like agriculture, climate change, and medicine.
|
https://medium.com/@burstiq/millennial-entrepreneur-who-is-incentivizing-people-to-improve-their-health-894a68b9a73b
|
[]
|
2020-10-27 15:39:43.270000+00:00
|
['Health Data', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Wellness']
|
How to Talk the Talk (in front of hundreds)
|
Talking is simple. We do it everyday. But plop a group of people in front of you, and suddenly it becomes very, very difficult. Our inherent fear of public speaking is arguably one of the world’s great mysteries.
Does anybody truly enjoy public speaking? Some people seem to — but we can all agree that they’re weird and not to be trusted. That being said, I’ve been working on ZenHub for a few years now, and I’m always looking for new ways to grow and learn. I’ve learned the surest sign that you’re challenging yourself is when your stomach flops over and your palms get clammy. So a while back, when I decided it was time to target a new challenge, I thought about what made me feel uncomfortable. Top of the list was public speaking. So I determined that was exactly what I needed to do.
Sharing my journey
I hope it saves you time and spares you a headache. If nothing else, it should show hesitant speakers like myself that you can do it too.
To be totally transparent, at one point I did actually enjoy public speaking. At my high school every year each student had to write and deliver a five minute(ish) talk to the class. The best ones were selected to be given to the entire school. I was pretty good at it. Good enough that other students would pay me to write their speeches (what can I say, I’ve always been a hustler).
Since then I’ve forgotten most of my commissioned works, but a few highlights stick out. One, for a particularly petite friend, laid out an airtight case that sports are biased against short people. In another case, on behalf of a friend with terrible grades, I put together a thought-provoking treatise on why kids should drop out of high school. Somehow that one got selected as a standout that the entire school would enjoy.
A decade later, this upcoming presentation brought up much more dread. This was a more serious talk on a highly technical topic for a very specific audience. At fifty minutes, it was twenty-five times longer than my high school diatribes, and too lengthy a time slot to have something memorized. About a hundred people would be there, which is a considerable increase since the classroom-sized audiences I was accustomed to. Plus, it would cover my professional arena, so the stakes were higher than ghostwriting for pimply teenage slackers. Part of the talk would involve a live demo, too, so I needed to build something that I couldn’t accidentally break on stage with a live audience.
Despite (or maybe because of) my incredible nerves, I knew this was an important thing to do. I’ve got a lot of experience under my belt, and learning to share that knowledge for an audience felt like my next big challenge. With encouragement from my team lead Pablo, I got started preparing.
Identifying a topic
First off, I’d never given a talk before, so requests for speaking engagements and keynotes weren’t clogging my inbox. This girl needed to find a stage. And that meant I had to find something to talk about.
After some thought, I settled on Ramda, a library we’d recently incorporated into ZenHub. Although I’d have do more research, I already had a solid foundational understanding of the library. Plus, there’s not much material on Ramda out there compared to other JavaScript libraries, so I’d be able to get a good grip on it in a reasonable amount of time.
Armed with a topic, I applied to speak at DeveloperWeek, the huge tech conference held annually in San Francisco. I got accepted.
Once I got my breathing under control, I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on Ramda and watching previous DeveloperWeek presentations on YouTube. With that done, I had a ton of notes I needed to organize into a 50-minute talk.
So where to start?
To my surprise, information hierarchy proved to be one of the tougher aspects — I had plenty of material, but how should I shape it into something coherent?
I began by laying out the skeleton of the presentation slides. A central part would be the live coding demo (which would also take up a nice chunk of time). I needed to make the demo robust enough to illustrate my points, but not so complicated as to lose the audience or trip myself up onstage.
With my main points plotted out, it was time to add some flair to the technical stuff. I turned to Mack, our resident entertainer.
A hero and a villain
Ok. I already had those: noble clean code, the kind provided by Ramda, versus diabolical, complex, unreadable code. A battle waged since the earliest days of computing. I delegated an emoji to each as their avatar.
Once I had everything in good shape, I began practicing five-minute lightning talks at work and to friends. This was important; my co-workers could offer important technical feedback, while my friends outside the industry could give pointers on the talk’s delivery and clarity.
For my final dry run I gave a more substantial version of the talk at our office a few months later, cutting some of the novice intro material and beefing up the technical sections. At this point, everything was pretty much finalized.
Lessons already learned
In the months I spent preparing the talk, I discovered some surprising revelations. One of the biggest ones was that you need not be the foremost expert on your topic in order to speak on it. Sounds counterintuitive, but that’s a lot of pressure to lay on yourself and a great way to psych yourself out before you’ve even started.
A talk by Anjana Vakil from a 2016 conference dispelled the idea of topic mastery for me. Right up front, she admits she’s not a complete master of the subject, but that she’d like to share her journey with the audience. Whenever I started to feel overwhelmed in this process, I remembered Anjana. Pretty soon, I realized that an effective way to develop expertise on something is to commit to talking about it in front of a large group of people. Nothing motivates you more than sheer terror.
Another assumption was that I should have every line, beat, and quip committed to memory. Otherwise, I feared at first, I would stumble once, panic, and implode. However, it became clear pretty quickly that memorizing everything was not the best way to go about this. While I did have a solid script in front of me for reference, I made sure to leave room for flexibility. In the end, these more loose moments let some levity and personality shine through.
This isn’t to say I wasn’t incredibly nervous in the minutes before walking onstage. I pored over my notes again and again, ran through my coding demo repeatedly, and triple-checked my computer to make sure everything would run smoothly.
Then the time came. They called my name and I took the stage
I launched into the talk. It might not have been the world’s greatest presentation, but things went pretty well. For the first half I was nervous and it showed — but I quickly realized that wasn’t the end of the world. About halfway through, I took a deep breath and gave myself a pep talk. I reassured myself that I knew what I was talking about and had every right to be there.
My nerves began to dissipate, and everything smoothed out. I quit stressing about staying glued to my script. The tone grew more casual and relaxed, and I think everybody benefitted.
Early on, I’d worried that my topic was too basic, that ten minutes in, half the audience would be glued to their phones. But that never happened. After wrapping, there was a ten-minute Q&A packed with insightful, thoughtful questions — the sign of a successful and engaging presentation.
The biggest takeaway, for me, was that people are, at their core, good and kind. The audience laughed, they cried (okay, so nobody cried). My point is, they aren’t out to eat you alive. After my talk, several people told me they appreciated that I never tried to sell them anything, that I was there to share some information and insight. Two even said it was the best presentation they’d seen so far, two days into the conference. That alone made the entire endeavour worthwhile.
As you can guess, I’m so glad I did it. I’m proud I set this challenge out for myself and overcame it, and I’m looking forward to the next opportunity to speak. I hope anyone that’s thinking about it like I was will give it a try.
Written by Christine Legge
Edited by Grady Mitchell
|
https://medium.com/axiomzenteam/how-to-talk-the-talk-in-front-of-hundreds-62a6775fdb4
|
['Axiom Zen']
|
2018-04-12 17:29:00.892000+00:00
|
['Public Speaking', 'Engineering', 'Conference', 'Insights', 'Startup']
|
Nativity and all that stuff 🇬🇧
|
And more questions. “ “Mary said to the angel, “But how? I’ve never slept with a man.” Yes this one was expected.
If you’re struggling with Mary giving birth from the Holy Spirit, hang on, this is the basic and easiest definition of faith. Not even the faith to believe such unbelievable birthing process, no faith is actually believing that God would do the most incredible, and unexpected to ensure He can have a chance to build a relationship with you. This won’t avoid the natural suffering of giving birth, not even the doubt and troubles but it’s still a miracle paved by divine promises and accomplished prophecies. Faith is believing that God wants to be in a relationship with you, like actually considering it, see what it changes in you through you and welcoming His supernatural being while being you, a human that was always made for this.
Yet it comes with doubt. Mary was a bit troubled ( and imagine Joseph) when the angel Gabriel came to announce this good news. “She was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind … “
And countless promises and reassuring proclamation. You are beautiful inside and out” the angel reassured.
Then the big announcement. You will. give birth to the Messiah, the one we were waiting for ( speaking as a Israeli as they were expecting a military hero who will overcome over their enemies )
“ He will be great, be called ‘Son of the Highest.’ (…) – no end, ever, to his kingdom.””
And more questions. “ “Mary said to the angel, “But how? I’ve never slept with a man.” Yes this one was expected.
“The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Highest hover over you; Therefore, the child you bring to birth will be called Holy, Son of God.”
And these words, which will change our lives forever. Not only because it unfolds the supernatural birthing process that we were all questioning. but mostly because it sets the path for how God will be welcomed on this earth from now on, « The Holy Spirit upon us. ». Emmanuel (second name given to Jesus) God with us.
What is coming after ? More promises and prophecies being proclaimed. God knew Mary and Joseph would need it and us too.
From Elizabeth her cousin first , « You are blessed among women and your womb is blessed » Elizabeth whom the miraculous pregnancy is also shown as a testimony of God’s ability in birthing unexpected baby ( if you didn’t now you know ). Yes she also happens to be pregnant with John the Baptist, the Great Announcer of the Good news ( another story).
, « You are blessed among women and your womb is blessed » Elizabeth whom the miraculous pregnancy is also shown as a testimony of God’s ability in birthing unexpected baby ( if you didn’t now you know ). Yes she also happens to be pregnant with John the Baptist, the Great Announcer of the Good news ( another story). From the Sheperds. who were present. at Jesus birth. « A savior has just been birthed (…) wrapped in a blanket, lying in a manger ». They have repeated the exact words shared by the angel Gabriel to Mary and Joseph affirming the promises set around Jesus life and comforting them as the Messiah’s birth did not took place in a palace to say the least.
A savior has just been birthed (…) wrapped in a blanket, lying in a manger ». They have repeated the exact words shared by the angel Gabriel to Mary and Joseph affirming the promises set around Jesus life and comforting them as the Messiah’s birth did not took place in a palace to say the least. Then came Simeon « This child marks both the failure and recovery in Israel” . A figure misunderstood and contradicted …”
« This child marks both the failure and recovery in Israel” . A figure misunderstood and contradicted …” And Anna, rejoicing and professing over Jesus.
And they took great note of all what was being said. Mary embraced the promises from the first months, joining Elizabeth with joy and gladness “ I’m the most fortunate woman on earth (…) Its exactly what he promised, beginning with Abraham and right up to now. Also she kept every promise “ deep within herself, holding them dear” .
We knew these first years following Jesus birth were tough for the couple, with years of exile not knowing exactly for how long they will stay there. But God guided them along the way accomplishing prophecies and preparing their hearts before moving.
This is what faith is. This is how faith works. It’s not the easiest to believe, it comes with questions, doubts and uncomfortable situation to say the least. But God still came upon you, over you, around you. It’s quite difficult to escape. Your questions and doubts are responded even before you raised them, and more promises and testimonies will arise to comfort you and strengthened your steps.
This is how faith works even when you thought you had faith. You need to question get as much clarity as you could especially if it sounds unbelievable. You listened to surrounding testimonies around you as it’s an account for what will be replicated.
You take ownership over said promises and praise God for what has been announced. You write down, you memorize, you pray over every words that has been displayed before you.
💎💎 All Scriptures passages are quoted from Luke 2 – The Message version.
Much love to you and your loved ones it’s Christmas Eve y’all.
Ps : My faith today lies in the fact that whatever what you believe you will get to gather with your loved ones today ( hopefully for the best). Isn’t it the greatest gift ?
|
https://medium.com/@joanneandre_17652/nativity-and-all-that-stuff-514f4cfff05b
|
['Quilts.Ai Blog']
|
2020-12-24 09:00:58.189000+00:00
|
['Faith and Life', 'Advent', 'Christian Blogs', 'Mary And Joseph', 'Jesus']
|
A Guide to the Best Pitch Deck Ever
|
A Guide to the Best Pitch Deck Ever
The pitch deck is one of the most important documents a startup seeking funding will produce. Learn what investors want to see.
If you’re an entrepreneur, and you have a meeting with potential investors, congratulations! You’ve got your foot in the door. Now the pressure’s on not to screw it up. You only have a short window of time to wow them.
In order to get the investment you need, which will help get your company off the ground, you need an amazing pitch deck.
Keep in mind that a business plan and pitch deck are not the same thing. A business plan is a very detailed, 20- to 50-page document that lays out everything a loan officer or potential investor needs to know about your company. A pitch deck, also called a slide deck or pitch presentation, is MUCH shorter. It’s the presentation or slideshow that you play while telling investors about your company. Think of it as the Cliffs notes, the bullet points version, the “Greatest Hits of the 1980s.”
That said, don’t make the mistake of skipping a business plan and going straight to your pitch deck. I’ll explain more about that and why it’s such a terrible idea in a subsequent blog post, but for now, suffice it to say, doing a pitch deck without a business plan is putting the cart before the horse. Don’t do it! Your business plan will be the source material and foundation for your presentation. Additionally, when your pitch is well-received, investors will inevitably request a business plan. You only get one chance, so you can’t afford to be unprepared.
Speaking of being prepared, let’s discuss what to expect when you go into a business pitch presentation. Investors typically schedule pitch meetings in 30-minute intervals and assume your presentation to be about 15 minutes of that time. After the presentation, you can expect a 15-minute Q&A.
Most presentations happen in a conference room, though increasingly, more and more are happening remotely. Regardless of the setting, show up early and make sure your technology works so you’re ready to go when the investors get situated.
Remember that investors are on that side of the table for a reason; most have done what you’re trying to do, and your presentation is certainly not the first pitch they’ve heard. Treat them with respect and take advantage of their guidance; even if they opt not to fund your venture, they will provide you with invaluable feedback that can help you refine your business plan and pitch.
So, without further ado, here is the Masterplans guide to developing a fundable pitch deck presentation. You can see several examples of pitch decks on our website; for this article we selected one of them but if you review them all, you’ll see that the narrative unfolds similarly despite being very different types of businesses.
Before we get to the slides themselves, let’s first lay out some ground rules.
Less is more. A key mistake founders make is trying to put too much into their pitch deck. A commonly cited rule of thumb is to use no more than 20 words on a slide. Investors will also have your business plan, so there’s no need to regurgitate it. We usually suggest waiting until the end to pass out the business plan, so the audience isn’t distracted by it. Keep text to a minimum on each slide, because there’s only so much information the brain can take in. Investors are there to listen and absorb what you’re telling them, not to read. If there’s too much text on one slide, split it into two. Be heard. You can include lots of info in your personal speaker’s notes, but your slides should not be overwhelming. Don’t be afraid to have personality, but at the same time, don’t try too hard either. It should feel natural and authentic. The script for each slide, commonly referred to as “Speaker’s Notes,” should first highlight what is on the slide and then expound upon it. Keep your speaker’s notes to about 150 words per slide (the average person speaks around 130 words per minute). Go pro. A beautiful pitch deck is clean and easy to take in, with consistent design elements. If you have the budget to hire a professional graphic designer to format your deck, you should do so. If you’re going to design your pitch deck yourself, my recommendation is to keep it simple. Pick one main color and one accent color. They should match your logo, if you have one. And make sure you use a consistent font throughout. For imagery, people love photos, but only use licensed images.
The following is an annotated pitch deck we made for a fictional company called Rosa Caroline, designed to complement a sample business plan. (See the Rosa Caroline business plan.)
Slide 1: Cover Slide
The first slide is your cover slide. It sets the design tone for the rest of the presentation, and should very clearly state your company name and logo if you have one. If you don’t have a logo yet, that’s okay, but you should still establish a “look & feel” for your presentation. Often the first slide will be displayed as the audience assembles in the room. When it’s time for the presentation to begin, you should thank the audience for their time and introduce all team members who are present before transitioning to Slide 2, which is when the pitch truly begins.
Slide 2: The Problem/Trend
Your second slide should be a statement identifying the big change or trend in the industry or market. Is it widespread internet access, an app, or another technological development?
Speaker’s Notes:
From a simple facial to Botox to a full facelift, people want to look better, younger, and healthier. With costs decreasing as technology improves and the general public having increased disposable income, the world of medical spas is accessible to more and more people. Medical spas blend the relaxing and pampered experience of a tranquil day spa with expert procedures and services typically only found at a physician’s office.
Slide 3: The Opportunity
Slide 3 should talk about the change, trends, or other relevant data. How much revenue is the new Uber of your industry making? Or how many years have things been trending in this new direction?
Speaker’s Notes:
More people than ever before are seeking out treatments from medical spas as an alternative to more invasive traditional treatments. Over the past decade, the medical esthetics industry has seen incredible growth, with an estimated 4,200 med spas now operating in the U.S. The “medical spas and non-invasive medical esthetics” industry is quickly approaching a value of $10 billion, and the overall market value for health and wellness in the United States is also on the rise: in 2015, it was valued at about $166.5 billion and is expected to reach a staggering $179 billion by 2020.
Slide 4 (Optional): Sense of Urgency
If you choose to, you can then dedicate a slide to the status quo, industry losers, or why current options are failing the specific market. Then, you’ll want to point out winners or where the industry is headed. Back up your claim with trends or a relevant data point of how the market need is not being met.
Speaker’s Notes:
In the last 6 months, over 5,300 Greenville residents have visited a day spa, which forms the Target Addressable Market. It is estimated that approximately 10% of day spa users would also like the services of a medical spa, implying a Serviceable Available Market of at least 500 customers. Yet as of now, there are no medical spas in Greenville or the surrounding area. Stated simply, Greenville needs a medical spa to meet current consumer demand, and if we don’t act now, someone else will.
Slide 5: The Solution
At this point, you’ll transition from industry info to company-specific information.
Speaker’s Notes:
Rosa Caroline will be both a a medical spa and skincare and cosmetics manufacturer based in Greenville, South Carolina. Rosa Caroline will offer a wide variety of services, including: medical-grade skin care and treatments, anti-aging solutions, hormone therapy, and general wellness and support. In addition to med spa services, the Company will develop medical-grade products to be used and sold within the medical spa and non-medical-grade products sold directly to consumers via in-store visits and through an ecommerce website.
Slide 6: Features/Benefits
Point out the primary features, advantages, or values that set your company apart. Sometimes this can be separated into multiple slides if necessary.
Speaker’s Notes:
The space will be tastefully designed with high ceilings, modern décor, clean lines, and elegant finishes to create a calm and luxurious ambiance. The concierge and reception area will include a retail component that offers Rosa Caroline signature medical-grade products such as creams, cleansers, serums, lotions, and toners. Rosa Caroline will employ in-house certified nurse practitioners, registered nurses, and medical estheticians who specialize in cutting-edge medical spa procedures. A medical director/chief clinical officer will oversee, train, and advise on all treatments, procedures, and services offered at Rosa Caroline.
Slide 7: Products/Services
Expand on your features to show exactly what the product and/or service streams are.
Speaker’s Notes:
Rosa Caroline will offer a full ranch of traditional day spa services including facials, waxing, and massage. What differentiates a med spa from a day spa, however, is the full range of specialty services that can only be provided by licensed practitioners. LED Light Bed treatments have been shown to reverse signs of aging and promote well-being. Simply taking a 20-minute power nap in a light bed activates the body’s natural healing powers by stimulating cell turnover. Rosa Caroline’s nurses and medical estheticians will administer pioneering therapies such as Botox, microneedling and microblading, air sculpting liposuction, plasma pen treatments, and PDO thread lifts. Rosa Caroline will also offer IV therapy and hormone therapy, which includes blood draws and doctor consultations.
Slide 8: Business Model
Next, you should clearly show your business model or revenue model. How does your company make money? Is it freemium, subscription, B2B, premium-priced, or commodity-priced?
Speaker’s Notes:
Rosa Caroline will promote ongoing well-being and customer retention by employing a membership model. Each membership level will include brow maintenance, discounts on products, and discounts on any other esthetic or wellness treatment. The premium skincare membership offers a choice of microneedling, IPL, or chemical peels on a once-per-month treatment. Memberships will save patients nearly 40% off one-time treatments, while ensuring Rosa Caroline maintains a continuous and loyal customer base.
Slide 9: Competition
The next slide should feature your company’s competitive advantage. For example, it could list the competition and explain their weaknesses, or feature a side-by-side comparison of your business versus its competition. As an aside, so often we hear founders claim they have no competition. Even if your company is completely novel and there’s nothing else like it, there is some competition for your customers’ dollars. If you can’t figure out who that competition is, think harder.
Speaker’s Notes:
Rosa Caroline has carefully selected its locations to target its key demographic and tap into populations with a higher level of disposable income. By focusing on a high level of customer service, Rosa Caroline will ensure repeat business and drive referrals. In addition, a customer loyalty program will encourage clients to make Rosa Caroline their number one choice for medical spa treatments and services, and reward them when they do. Finally, specialty services and treatment programs will be uniquely tailored to each client. With an in-house staff that includes a medical director and nurse practitioner, Rosa Caroline will be able to administer higher-grade medical treatments than its competitors.
Slide 10 (Optional): Existing Performance
If you’re already operating, make sure to dedicate a slide to your success and outside investment to date (not sweat equity) if you have earned it. You want potential investors to know how much has already been invested, the status of your product or service development, any existing partnerships, sales to date, and number of users or early adopters.
Speaker’s Notes:
To date, the owners have invested $150,000 and control 100% of the ownership share. The owner investment has been used for legal expenses, consultants, and initial marketing and branding. The company currently has just shy of $100,000 in the bank.
Slide 11: Management Team
Next point out who’s on your team. List the top three C-levels at the company and give a two- to three-sentence bio on each. Keep it short and relevant to what value each key person brings to the company. Include professional photos.
Speaker’s Notes:
Janelle Lewis is a strong leader, problem-solver, creative thinker, team-builder, and exceptional collaborator who is passionate about the health and wellness industry. She has worked as a Project Manager for Michelin America since 2015. As part of the Innovation team, she has managed a team of engineers, chemists, and product developers charged with developing clean and bio-sourced materials both in Greenville and overseas at PT Synthetic Rubber Indonesia (SRI) in Indonesia. Theresa Lewis, a licensed esthetician and massage therapist since 2014, actively embraces the power of touch for healing the mind, body, and spirit. Mrs. Lewis attended Greenville Technical College. She is proficient in laser hair removal, IPL, resurfacing treatments, microdermabrasion, chemical peels, body contouring treatments, lymphatic drainage, and oncology facials and massage. Dr. Gomez has been practicing medicine for over 20 years in Florida and South Carolina. He is a certified Reiki Master/Teacher.
Slide 12: Investment Opportunity
Next, you should describe your sources & uses of funds. How much are you asking for, and VERY IMPORTANTLY, what will you do with it?
Speaker’s Notes:
These funds will be used for start-up expenses including marketing, supplies, professional fees, website development, utility and insurance deposits, lease deposit, and training, as well as startup assets including working capital, inventory, buildout, furniture and office equipment, signage, POS system, and security.
Slide 13: Financial Summary
Solid financials are the finishing touch in the best investor pitch decks. They should summarize the detailed financials from your business plan with clear metrics such as profit and margin.
Speaker’s Notes:
The Company plans to have multiple locations, with its flagship location launching in historic downtown Greenville, South Carolina. The tentative plan is to build out a second and third location in historic Charleston, South Carolina, and the up-and-coming Fort Mill/Indian Land, South Carolina. A key metric for the company will be memberships, as these comprise the most-loyal brand ambassadors and recurring income. Rosa Caroline is targeting 375 members by the end of year one, and aiming to grow to over 1,100 members across the 3 locations in Year 3. Top-line revenue is forecast to be $1.6 million in Year 1 and growing to a Year 3 target of $4.8 million. The Company forecasts a 76.9% gross margin percentage, and anticipates profit of 15% per location within 2 years of operations.
Slide 14: Conclusion
Finally, your last slide should include your name, phone number, and email.
|
https://medium.com/masterplans/a-guide-to-the-best-pitch-deck-ever-b353d9d90093
|
['Brent Butler']
|
2020-10-21 16:59:32.036000+00:00
|
['Funding', 'Business Plan', 'Investors', 'Entrepreneur', 'Pitch Deck']
|
Lecture — Creativity in the Age of Covid-19
|
Today we had a lecture that explored the ways in which creatives have been influenced and effected by the current pandemic.
I found this lecture to be genuinely really interesting — it was so interesting to see the different ways in which different creatives, from a variety of practises, were all impacted. For example, I found that during the first lockdown, I was particularly more creative, purely due to spare time and probably and aspect of boredom. According to Ally’s lecture, 45.3% of creatives thought the same, with Covid opening up more opportunities to creativity and ideation.
My personal favourite creative that was mentioned was Katie Tomlinson, a BCU graduate, who used lockdown to return to portraiture illustration alongside networking to create this beautiful series of sketches of strangers from across the UK. I just thought this beautiful, simplistic idea is a perfect example of where Covid has, in fact, brought us together in a way we wouldn’t have thought it would.
Overall, this lecture was a lovely way to close there semester in terms of lectures — it was delightful to see some familiar names on the call.
|
https://medium.com/@counsellannie/lecture-creativity-in-the-age-of-covid-19-6306b814c9f0
|
['Annie Counsell']
|
2020-12-13 16:30:38.775000+00:00
|
['Lecture Notes', 'Graphics', 'Graphic Design']
|
The Dark Side of the (NFT) Moon
|
TLDR: NGMI
So earlier this year my friend introduced me to NBA Top Shots. A magical world of imaginary cards, that live on the internet. “It’s the new baseball cards” he said “you can trade with anyone, anywhere, and the packs are so fun to open, it’s going to be big”. He was right, they are big, huge in fact. They may even be worth more than the NBA itself based on a recent valuation of 2.6 billion dollars. Little did I know I would be here 6 months later having lost 1/3 of the savings I took years to build, while my doctor faxes across a recommendation that I attend a gambling addiction group.
So here’s the thing. NFT (Non Fungible Token) land has absolutely exploded. The growth of wallets and action on the leading NFT Marketplace OpenSea has seen 3 billion dollars of sale volume in August it has nearly eclipsed the ‘real’ marketplace behemoth eBay. In this ever growing lush forest of money, there are people everywhere telling you just how much they made. Follow the ‘right’ people on Twitter and you will think this is a game you absolutely cannot lose.
A man’s resignation letter (due to pursuing his NFT dream) sold for over $54,000. A simple picture of a Column in the NY Times was purchased for $560,000 the interested parties stated that they bid simply to ‘show support for the NFT space’. Article after article, tweet after tweet, created a stratospheric rise and euphoric entry conditions.
However, this has not been the case for me, and I am sure many other more quiet individuals, and since my first purchase on OpenSea on (22 days ago) I have lost nearly 80% of my cryptocurrency entering a violently volatile game I had no idea I was even playing.
I started small, with a purchase of just 0.08 ETH ($250) it sold a day later for 0.12 ($375). I couldn’t believe it the money I had just made with a few clicks and waiting a few hours was more than I would have made working for the entire time in between. “Oh yeah, that project is hot” my friend would say, “it will keep going”. And it did, the floor (meaning lowest priced item of any available) of the project rose before my eyes to 0.2 ETH ($540). Well, I thought, this has to be a bubble right? So if it is a bubble, I need to get in and out, before it pops. I joined the Discord community for CryptoPunks, waited to see what they talked about and saw my opening.
“Stani is buying Sergs!” (Stani Kulechov, the creator of Aave)
“Sergs pumping!”
“Sergs to 5 ETH soon!”
“#sergsummer”
CryptoSergs. An item with a small cap of only 1,100 items. A 50%+ spread of owners (a good sign in the space). Stani, it seems, wouldn’t stop buying, he bought 60 and just seemed to keep going, the CryptoPunks were buying. I panicked and having seen a project from 0.8 to 2 ETH in a matter of minutes I tried to grab the lightning bolt. I grabbed all my ETH. Threw it into my digital wallet and purchased the item for 3.5 ETH ($13,200) after seeing it at 0.8 ETH merely minutes before, I believed this was my shot and I too soon would sell my resignation letter and bathe in my pools of ETH.
I made this decision in 5 minutes. I had saved, researched and dollar cost averaged into this Ethereum for 2 years. And I spent it in 5 minutes. I have never gambled, never been to a casino. I had checked the OpenSea site close to 5,000 times in the past 20 days. I thought I understood how the game worked.
What happened next, I could never have predicted. The floor (the price of the lowest item) froze… then fell. It fell so fast I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had mine listed at 4 ETH. Next thing, someone listed at 3.8… then 3.5. Oh no! I lowered my price. 3.4 ETH. I could make this out just taking a little hit.
3 ETH.
2.8 ETH.
2 ETH.
1.5 ETH.
I went numb. I reduced my price to 1.2 ETH and got out while I still had something. After the OpenSea and artist fees. I was left with approximately 1.1 ETH.
I checked back into the CryptoPunks Discord.
NGMI (not going to make it)
My pain, was nothing to those in the space. These people who have seen their values skyrocket, and plummet don’t feel pain watching moves like these. It’s implied the ‘NFT game’ is fairly simple, but it is more aligned with trading stocks with 100x leverage after an Elon Musk tweet.
Yet, it was the writer of the above comment (DappPunk) who suggested I write this article to share my experience to save, or console others in a similar situation (for example this seller yesterday saw their Damien Hirst piece sell for $20 instead of 20 ETH in a common OpenSea scam). It’s easy to see these big losses and assume it’s some millionaire on the other side, but it wasn’t, it was me.
One of my Paintings (FYI: There are not 10,000 variants of this with different fins and water colour)
I made a collection of my art to recoup my losses, made a Discord for those who lose like me to lick their wounds and discuss their big fails. There is just me in there now. But when this bubble pops, and it will. There will be more. Let’s share in the pain together. I have promised to never buy an NFT item again. If you want to, make sure it is a piece you want to keep forever, or money you are happy to not see again. Just be ready for the ride.
TLDR: NGMI.
Your journey starts here.
STATEMENT FROM METS PRESIDENT SANDY ALDERSON
In a post-game press conference today, Javy Baez stated that his “thumbs down” gesture during the game was a message to fans who recently…
Afghanistan Meant Nothing
A Veteran Reflects on 20 Wasted Years
Inslee announces educator vaccination requirement and statewide indoor mask mandate
Six Designs That White People Never Notice Are Racist
|
https://medium.com/@boldleondias/the-dark-side-of-the-nft-moon-a5a5386c84e4
|
[]
|
2021-09-06 23:24:39.572000+00:00
|
['Nft', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Gambling', 'Addiction']
|
Choropleth Maps using Plotly
|
I have been working as a Data Analyst for almost 5 years now but, in this time I have mostly used business intelligence software for all my data visualization tasks. So my experience with visualization has been limited to knowing when to plot a bar chart vs a line chart. To correct this, I have recently taken up to learn matplotlib and other plotting and graphing libraries. This is an attempt in that direction. You can use this as a guide to choropleth maps, or plotly, or both. Hope this helps.
Map by Our World in Data
Choropleth Maps are a type of thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to a statistical variable (from Wikipedia). This map for example shows the share of adults who were obese in 2016.
Plotly is a company based in Canada, that develops analytics and data visualization tools. They have created an open-source scientific graphing library for Python, which I am using here.
For this task, I am looking at data for Religious Adherents in the United States (Source: theARDA.com). The data contains County-level information for different religious groups for the years 1980, 1990, 2000 & 2010. It also includes the population of the counties in that year, along with some other information.
So let’s first load the data and the libraries we are going to need.
#import libraries
%matplotlib notebook
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import plotly.express as px
import plotly.graph_objects as go
from plotly.subplots import make_subplots #import raw data
df = pd.read_excel(‘RCMSMGCY.xlsx’, dtype={“FIPSMERG”: str})
df.head()
Now, the next 3 steps involve cleaning, filtering, and summarizing the data for analysis, so if you want you can skip this and move directly to the Choropleth maps.
Data Cleaning
To plot the US county data, I am going to use the FIPS code, stored in column FIPSMERG here. The FIPS code is a unique 5-digit code that identifies counties in the United States. As you can see from the data snapshot above, in the first 5 rows, the FIPSMERG has only 4 digits. This means, that the leading zero is missing. Let’s add that using the lambda function.
#adding 0 to FIPS code
df[‘FIPSMERG’] = df[‘FIPSMERG’].apply(lambda x: str(0)+str(x) if len(str(x))<5 else x)
Now, each religious group has been categorized into a religious tradition and family which is represented by the columns RELTRAD & FAMILY. I am adding the names of these categories and the State names to make the data more comprehensible.
#religious family name mapping (FAMILY)
rel_fam = pd.read_csv(‘religious_family.csv’)
#religious tradition name mapping (RELTRAD)
rel_trad = pd.read_csv(‘religious_tradition.csv’)
#merging the 2 dataframes on group Code to get the corresponding religious family name & religious tradition catgeory
df = pd.merge(pd.merge(df, rel_fam, left_on=’FAMILY’, right_on=’FAMILY’, how=’left’), rel_trad, left_on=’RELTRAD’, right_on=’RELTRAD’, how=’left’)
print(‘Shape: ‘+str(df.shape)) #state names mapping (STATEAB)
state_code = pd.read_csv(‘us_state_code_data.csv’)
#merging the dataframes
df = (pd.merge(df, state_code, left_on=’STATEAB’, right_on=’Postal
Code’, how=’inner’)).drop([‘Postal Code’], axis = 1)
Filtering the data
For the first part of the analysis, I want to look at the percentage of adherents in 2010 at the state and county level. For this, I need the population and the count of adherents.
#filtering data for only 2010
df_2010 = df[df['YEAR']==2010] #population at county level (year wise)
pop_county = df[[‘YEAR’,’FIPSMERG’,’STATEAB’, ‘State Name’, ‘CNTYNM’, ‘TOTPOP’]].drop_duplicates().reset_index(drop=True) #population at state level (year wise)
pop_state = pop_county.groupby(by=[‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’, ‘State Name’]).agg({‘TOTPOP’:sum}).reset_index()
Summarizing the data
The next step is to calculate the percentage of adherents at the state and county level. Using the pandas groupby function and the population estimates, I have created two dataframes, one summarizing the data at the state level and the other at the county level.
#creating state level data for %of adherents
adh_state = df_2010.groupby(by=['STATEAB','State Name']).agg({'ADHERENT':sum}).reset_index()
adh_state = pd.merge(adh_state, pop_state[['YEAR','STATEAB', 'TOTPOP']], left_on='STATEAB', right_on='STATEAB', how='inner')
adh_state['PER_ADH'] = np.round(adh_state['ADHERENT']/adh_state['TOTPOP']*100,decimals=1)
State-level summary
#creating county level data for %of adherents
adh_county = df_2010.groupby(by=[‘FIPSMERG’, ‘CNTYNM’, ‘STATEAB’]).agg({‘ADHERENT’:sum}).reset_index()
adh_county = pd.merge(adh_county, pop_county[[‘FIPSMERG’, ‘TOTPOP’]], left_on=’FIPSMERG’, right_on=’FIPSMERG’, how=’inner’)
adh_county[‘PER_ADH’] = np.round(adh_county[‘ADHERENT’]/adh_county[‘TOTPOP’]*100,decimals=1)
County-level summary
Choropleth Maps
Now, that we have the dataframes ready for state and county-level, we can plot the Choropleth maps. I am using the function choropleth from plotly.express.
The locations parameter of the choropleth function works in tandem with the locationmode parameter. For US State data, the locationmode = “USA-states”, and the location parameter will take the state code (AL, CA, etc).
#shows %adherents at state level for the year 2010
fig1 = px.choropleth(adh_state, locations=adh_state[‘STATEAB’], locationmode=”USA-states”,
color=’PER_ADH’,color_continuous_scale=”inferno”,
range_color=(0, 100),scope=”usa”,labels={‘PER_ADH’:’%Adherents’},hover_name=’State Name’,
hover_data={‘STATEAB’:False,’State Name’:False,’ADHERENT’:False,’TOTPOP’:False,’PER_ADH’:True}) fig1.update_layout(margin={“r”:0,”t”:0,”l”:0,”b”:0})
fig1.show()
To plot data for counties use the parameter geojson, which takes in a feature collection of polygons. You can find this collection for US counties here. Also, set the locations parameter to the FIPS code.
counties = json.load(response) with urlopen(‘ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/geojson-counties-fips.json' ) as response:counties = json.load(response) #plot %adherents at county level for the year 2010
fig1 = px.choropleth(adh_county, geojson=counties, locations=’FIPSMERG’, color=’PER_ADH’,color_continuous_scale=”inferno”,
range_color=(0, 100),scope=”usa”,labels={‘PER_ADH’:’%Adherents’},hover_name=’CNTYNM’,
hover_data={‘FIPSMERG’:False,’CNTYNM’:False,’STATEAB’:False,’ADHERENT’:False,
‘TOTPOP’:False,’PER_ADH’:True})
fig1.update_layout(margin={“r”:0,”t”:0,”l”:0,”b”:0})
fig1.show()
So now that we know how to create Choropleth maps, let’s try to add some more functionality to them. For the second part of the analysis, I want to look at how has the largest religious traditional group in each state changed between 1980 and 2010. I will add a slider to my choropleth map, and use that to change the years.
First I need to determine the largest traditional group in each state for each year.
df_ = df.copy() reltrad = df_.groupby([‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’,’State Name’,’RELTRADNM’]).agg({‘ADHERENT’:sum}).reset_index()
reltrad = pd.merge(reltrad, pop_state, left_on=[‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’,’State Name’], right_on=[‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’,’State Name’], how=’inner’)
reltrad[‘PER_ADH’] = (reltrad[‘ADHERENT’]/reltrad[‘TOTPOP’])*100 #adding Ranks and filtering Rank = 1
reltrad[‘RANK’] = reltrad.groupby([‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’])[‘PER_ADH’].rank(ascending=False,method=’first’)
reltrad_top = reltrad[reltrad[‘RANK’]==1].reset_index(drop=True)
To add the slider, use the parameter animation_frame of the function choropleth.
n = [‘Evangelical Protestant ‘,’Mainline Protestant ‘,’Black Protestant ‘,’Catholic ‘,’Orthodox ‘,’Other ‘]
cdm = dict(zip(n, [‘#003f5c’,’#444e86',’#955196',’#dd5182',’#ff6e54',’#ffa600'])) figz = px.choropleth(reltrad_top, locations = ‘STATEAB’, locationmode = “USA-states”, scope = “usa”,
color = ‘RELTRADNM’, hover_name = ‘State Name’,
color_discrete_map = cdm,
hover_data = {‘YEAR’:False,’STATEAB’:False,’State Name’:True,’RELTRADNM’:False,
‘ADHERENT’:False,’TOTPOP’:False,’PER_ADH’:False,’RANK’:False},
animation_frame=’YEAR’) figz.update_layout(margin={“r”:0,”t”:0,”l”:0,”b”:0})
figz[“layout”].pop(“updatemenus”)
figz.show()
I don’t think the slider serves the intended purpose here. It’s cumbersome to compare the states when you have to keep moving between the years. So, I think subplots would serve better.
Now because a choropleth is not referenced to a cartesian system of coordinates, we can’t use the plotly.express’ Choropleth function in subplots. So I will use the choropleth function from plotly.graph_objects here.
ndf = reltrad_top[[‘YEAR’,’STATEAB’,’RELTRADNM’,’State Name’]]
ndf = pd.merge(ndf, df_[[‘RELTRADNM’,’RELTRAD’]].drop_duplicates(), left_on=’RELTRADNM’, right_on=’RELTRADNM’, how=’left’)
ndf[‘text’] = ‘State: ‘ + ndf[‘State Name’] + ‘<br>’ + ‘Tradition: ‘+ ndf[‘RELTRADNM’] years = (ndf[‘YEAR’].sort_values(ascending=True).unique()).tolist() cscale = [‘#003f5c’,’#444e86',’#dd5182',’#ffa600',’#ff6e54',’#955196']
rows = 2
cols = 2
fig = make_subplots(rows=rows, cols=cols,
specs = [[{‘type’: ‘choropleth’} for c in np.arange(cols)] for r in np.arange(rows)],
subplot_titles = years, vertical_spacing=0.1, horizontal_spacing=0) for i, y in enumerate(years):
fig.add_trace(go.Choropleth(locations=ndf.STATEAB[ndf[‘YEAR’]==y],z = ndf.RELTRAD[ndf[‘YEAR’]==y],
locationmode = ‘USA-states’, zmin=1, zmax=6, colorscale=cscale,hoverinfo=’text’,
hovertext=ndf.text[ndf[‘YEAR’]==y]), row = i//cols+1, col = i%cols+1) fig.update_layout(title={‘text’:’Religious Tradition by Year’, ‘xanchor’: ‘center’,’x’:0.5},
**{‘geo’ + str(i) + ‘_scope’: ‘usa’ for i in [‘’] + np.arange(2,rows*cols+1).tolist()},
coloraxis_showscale=False, margin={“r”:10,”t”:70,”l”:10,”b”:0},
hoverlabel=dict(bgcolor=’#e6e6e6', font_size=12, font_family=”Rockwell”)) fig.update_traces(showscale=False)
fig.show()
And, there we have it. Hope this guide can help you in some way. You can find the data and the full source code here.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/choropleth-maps-101-using-plotly-5daf85e7275d
|
['Shreyeshi Somya']
|
2020-10-04 16:45:46.814000+00:00
|
['Choropleth Map', 'Plotly', 'Python', 'Data Visualization']
|
This Reddit Dude Says He Made Tacos Out of His Own Amputated Foot, and I Have So Many Questions
|
This Reddit Dude Says He Made Tacos Out of His Own Amputated Foot, and I Have So Many Questions John McDermott Follow Jun 8, 2018 · 5 min read
For most dudes, foot-in-mouth is just a metaphor for their unfortunate verbal gaffes. But for Reddit user IncrediblyShinyShart (or as I like to refer to him—ISS), the term is extremely literal. Earlier this week he achieved Reddit infamy with his story of cooking up a portion of his severed foot and eating it in a taco.
ISS was in a motorcycle accident two years ago that resulted in a gruesome compound fracture in his left foot — so bad that he would never be able to walk on it again. And so, he elected to have his foot amputated.
This part, at least, seems plausible according to the grisly photographic evidence ISS has provided. (Click through the photos at your own peril. They show a horrifically mangled foot, exposed tissue and depraved acts of cannibalism. They’re ghastly and not for the faint of heart.)
It’s what happened next that seems dubious. ISS says he invited some friends over, pan-seared his amputated foot and threw a taco party with his tibialis anterior muscle as the meat. ISS didn’t respond to my questions about his foot taco, and therefore, I must urge extreme skepticism — juicy as the story is.
The foot taco nonetheless raises many questions:
How’d he get the foot back from the doctor?
Is self-cannibalism a crime?
Is eating your own foot cannibalism at all, or is that like saying sucking your own dick is a homosexual act?
That said, I’m less concerned with the legal and social implications of this story than with gastronomic ones. Such as:
What does human foot taste like?
What’s the best way to prepare one (ya know, just in case)?
Is a taco really the ideal vessel? (According to ISS, his foot was lean but very beefy.)
Beyond foot, how should human meat be consumed?
Here then are my preferred methods if I had to eat my (or someone else’s) foot, should the opportunity ever arise…
Slow Braised Foot
MEL’s resident foodie Eddie Kim suggests you prepare human foot in a slow braise with garlic and white wine. Braising is good for tough, lean cuts of meat that don’t have much fat, and this applies to both human and animal feet — it’s mostly muscle tissue down there. In short, braising will make it fall-off-the-tibia tender.
Here’s how (thanks to our friends at Food Network):
Get a deep pot, such as a Dutch oven. Get it nice and hot and add some olive oil. Briefly sear your rotting amputated limb in the pot until it’s a deep, dark brown. Remove the meat (which used to be your foot, but is now your sustenance, weird) and set it aside. Add the classic mirepoix mix of vegetables — onions, celery and carrots, in equal parts — to the pot and cook until brown. Add the foot (your foot, or is it your “former” foot now that it’s detached, idk) back to the pot. Add white wine to halfway up the pot. Bring the pot to a boil, then back down to a simmer. Throw in the garlic. Cover the pot, and either leave it on the stovetop or put it in the oven at 350 degrees. Let cook for 1.5 to three hours. Enjoy extremely tender foot meat, you disgusting savage.
Smoked
A smoker is ideal for a sinewy cut of meat like the foot you used to use for bipedal locomotion. (Bet you regret taking your foot for granted all those years, huh?)
If you’re in possession of a smoker, such as the popular Big Green Egg grill, you can follow the recipe I derived from this Bon Appétit recipe for pulled pork. (Look, I’ve never cooked a human foot before, you maniac, I’m just trying to make do.)
Season your foot—easily the most disgusting body part, by the way, how could you ever even consider eating it? — with a dry rub of black pepper, dark brown sugar, paprika and cayenne pepper. Put it in the fridge overnight to sit (thus contaminating all the other food in there). Fire up your smoker and bring the heat to between 225 to 250 degrees. Place your seasoned, grotesquely colored foot on the smoker rack. Cover. Cook until the center of your foot steak reaches approximately 165 degrees, rubbing it down with barbecue sauce every 45 minutes. Should take about six hours total. Shred your foot into bite-size pieces and place between a bun, possibly with a little coleslaw for textural and flavor contrast. Serve to your friends, who are either demented enough to willingly eat your foot along with you, or whom you’ve tricked into consuming it.
Sauté
The foot-eater in question opted for this preparation, and it’s the preferred method for the self-cannibal on-the-go, as it doesn’t take nearly as long as braising or smoking.
Just cut some slices off your rapidly decaying body part and cook them on the stove in a sauté pan with butter or olive oil and aromatics, such as peppers, onion or garlic (you choose—it’s your foot, baby!)
It’ll look something like the below photo, which shows the Redditor’s finished product, before it filled a tortilla.
I’m disturbed by how delicious this looks. Tell me it doesn’t look like some delectable, medium-rare carne asada. *shudder*
According to the self-proclaimed foot-eater, this presentation tastes like “buffalo, but chewier.” Hope you like gamey protein!
John McDermott is a staff writer at MEL. He last wrote about how the new “Dress” is a Father’s Day card about filling dad’s huge underpants.
More John:
|
https://medium.com/mel-magazine/this-reddit-dude-says-he-made-tacos-out-of-his-own-amputated-foot-and-i-have-so-many-questions-36cf532ab1c1
|
['John Mcdermott']
|
2018-06-08 14:31:01.403000+00:00
|
['Reddit', 'Food', 'Tacos', 'Humor', 'Body']
|
Finding New Life in Your Anxiety
|
I have been working through Paul Miller’s excellent book J-Curve. It’s life-changing if you understand and then apply what he’s saying (which is really what the Apostle Paul is saying, which is really what Jesus is saying). As I read, I’ve been reminded of how anxiety, which I’ve long dealt with, can actually be a path to finding new life. Here, my aim is to explain how and offer an example. As strange as it sounds, your struggle with anxiety can actually be good news, if you approach it as a path that leads through the shadow of death and up to resurrection.
What Is the J-Curve?
Let’s start with the basics. What is this J-curve that Paul Miller talks about? Simply put, the J-Curve is a way of summarizing a biblical teaching that comes first from Jesus and is then reintroduced by the Apostle Paul. It’s a critical truth for Christians to embrace. So, let’s move slowly and carefully.
Over 2,000 years ago, Jesus walked a path, and that path was a path of suffering unto glory. He went down because of his love for us. He was despised, rejected, mocked, scolded, scorned, and eventually crucified (Isa. 53:1–5; Matt. 16:21; 17:22; Mark 8:31). Because of God’s great and giving love for us, he came down. He came down so that we could go up. He was misunderstood, abused, and ridiculed for love. That’s the descent of the J-curve.
Because of God’s great and giving love for us, the Son came down. He came down so that we could go up.
Jesus called his followers to tread in his footsteps on the same path. He told his disciples to take up their cross (their death) and follow him (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23). He said that anyone who loves his life will lose it, and anyone who hates his life will gain it (Matt. 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; 17:33). He said that his followers would be despised and rejected just as he was (Matt. 10:22; Mark 13:13; Luke 21:17). They would suffer for love. And yet that suffering love would lead to resurrection life, to exaltation, just as Jesus’s love would.
Paul picks up on this in many places in the epistles, but a good place to start is Phillipians 2:5–9.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name . . . Phillipians 2:5–9 ESV
Do you see the J-curve? Remember that this is the second person of the Trinity we’re talking about here. The eternal Son of God came down, took the form of a servant, was wrapped in muscle and bone. He took on a beating heart and lungs that would fill and empty. He would have humbled himself just to be in our presence, but he went further. He took on our nature. And that’s not the end of it. The humiliation went lower, down to misunderstanding, through false accusations, meandering through mockery, and finally falling to death on a cross, a criminal’s death. That’s the biggest downward J-curve the world has seen and will ever see. It goes even to the pits of hell (Eph. 4:9). Jesus didn’t just exemplify the J-curve; he is the J-curve.
But the descent stops. The falling slows and turns to rising, the way a flock of starlings begins a subtle ascent. And up from the depths comes the Son of God. Brilliant. Glorious. Exalted. Blinding. That was God’s finest pen stroke, that stem of Jesus’s J-curve. The resurrection of Christ is where all of history is hinged.
The Anxiety J-Curve
So, how does all this relate to us? If Christ’s path is our path, then we follow in his J-curve steps. As Miller writes, “The normal Christian life repeatedly re-enacts the dying and rising of Jesus” (J-Curve, p. 20). You can apply the J-curve to nearly any area of suffering in your Christian life. In this article, I’m applying it to my anxiety.
If Jesus is right, and if Paul is right, then every encounter I have with anxiety is an opportunity to share in Christ’s death and then in his resurrection. This is very mysterious, but it’s such a precious truth that gets lost on many Christians whose main goal is to avoid suffering. And don’t get me wrong; I totally understand the impulse to flee. I don’t enjoy the heat flashes, the heavy heart beat, the hyper-vigilance, the pinhole throat, the racing thoughts, the detachment from reality. That’s not “my jam.” But I’ve learned over the years that something very special is happening in those moments: I’m sharing in the sufferings of Christ. I’m growing closer to him in his humility and pain. I’m growing closer. The downward curve of the J, for anxiety sufferers, brings fellowship with Christ in his suffering. That makes perfect sense when you think about it. “Union with Christ thrives under stress, because stress drives us more deeply into Christ” (J-Curve, p. 62). The more we suffer with anxiety, the more deeply we’re driven into Jesus.
The downward curve of the J, for anxiety sufferers, brings fellowship with Christ in his suffering.
That’s no small thing. Jesus Christ is the one whom I profess to love and serve above all else. I want to do whatever I can to know him more deeply, so that I can love him more faithfully. If sharing in his sufferings is what it takes, then I may not like it, but I’m going to walk through it with hope. And how many people can say that? How many people can say they plan to find hope in their hard things? If you’re going to suffer in life (and we all know that’s a given), isn’t it freeing to know that even our suffering is going to serve a good purpose (Rom. 8:28)? Isn’t it an encouragement to know that we’re going to become more like Christ as we believe in him through our suffering (J-Curve, p. 50)? We don’t have to run from our anxiety, not because of some general principle, but because of a person, because of someone we know. “When we embrace the fellowship of his sufferings, it changes everything. Instead of nourishing slights and running from the suffering inherent in life and love, we embrace Christ in the suffering. It’s all about who you know” (J-Curve, p. 71).
We don’t have to run from our anxiety, not because of some general principle, but because of a person, because of someone we know.
Then, my anxious friends, the curve starts to turn. As we commune with Christ in his sufferings, drawing closer to him in his death (and in that sense, we die with him), we recognize our complete dependence on God. And the Spirit then gives us the faith we need to begin ascending. He gives us new life, and that life emerges from the seed of love, a seed that we plant by sharing in the sufferings of Christ. “Love creates faith. But only as we enter into the dying of Christ does our faith grow” (J-Curve, p. 74). The dying we experience in love for Christ leads to the living we long for.
Rising Up
In my experiences with anxiety, the upward part of the J-curve feels a bit like the Spirit blowing air beneath my soul’s brittle wings. I have full dependence on Spirit-given faith that helps me see something very important. VERY important. Are you ready? You and I are called to serve and give ourselves to others. That’s how you know the J-curve is completing. When you can’t stop yourself from helping someone else because it’s become crystal clear that this is why you are breathing, then you know the pen stroke of the J is finishing. When I feel compelled to ask my wife how I can better serve her, for instance, then I know the J-curve is working. It’s calling me to give myself to others, just as Christ did. It’s a giving that’s been purified by suffering, a giving of love.
You and I are called to serve and give ourselves to others. That’s how you know the J-curve is completing.
I harp on this because we’re constantly confusing “peace” with “purpose.” Our purpose as Christians is not to have peace. We’ve already been given that in Christ. Our purpose is to give ourselves. To keep giving. To take the focus off of our own feelings. And anxiety is king of self-focus. It’s constantly prodding us to stare at ourselves. That gives me plenty of opportunities to walk out little J-curves each week.
Where Now?
What’s next for you? If you struggle with anxiety or know someone who does, where do you go from here? The short answer: you start looking for your J-curves. God has a whole lot of them planned for you, I promise. But if you can’t see them, then how will you walk on them? If you aren’t intentional about scanning the horizon for your next J-curve, how can you expect to grow closer to Christ and experience his resurrection life? We need to be thoughtful in looking for our J-curves. Those little J-curves are going to make a world of difference in our spiritual formation. If we don’t notice them, we’re missing out on the greatest path any of us could ever walk on, the path tread out for us by Christ. There’s no better place to put our feet.
|
https://medium.com/@pthibbs/finding-new-life-in-your-anxiety-e3b1f912e605
|
['Pierce Taylor Hibbs']
|
2020-12-09 11:53:05.751000+00:00
|
['Anxiety', 'Christianity', 'Christian Living', 'Christian', 'Mental Health']
|
One Small Step for a Future Astronaut
|
Photo courtesy of Honda
A random act of kindness can change someone’s life. When Marissa Valencia, a fourth grader at Brea Country Hills Elementary School, received a Random Act of Helpfulness from Honda Motor Company, she took one step closer towards her dream of becoming an astronaut.
Valencia was given an opportunity to attend Space Camp at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, located in Huntsville, Ala., by Honda’s Random Acts of Helpfulness, a regional advertising campaign dedicated to performing various community services and granting gifts to Honda consumers.
Valencia attended Space Camp from Sept. 1–5. Throughout the course of the program, she underwent several astronaut training activities, such as building and launching model rockets and using a G-force simulator, which controls the force of gravity upon the person inside the centrifuge. She noted that one of her favorite parts of the camp was taking part in a mission control where she had to monitor oxygen levels and solve an issue of a mock astronaut. The overall experience made Valencia “feel like a real astronaut.”
“I am so thankful to Honda for this,” Valencia said. “I’ve always loved looking at the moon and the stars. I got to live my dream of space camp.”
She was specially selected to participate in the space program after Columbia Memorial Space Center’s STEM Club in Downey, Calif. referred her to Honda. Valencia was then told that she’d be interviewed for a documentary about kids that love space by a Honda employee. When it was revealed that the “documentary” was actually for a commercial, Valencia was astonished as it was a “total surprise.” The commercial is currently being broadcast on television.
“I want to be the first woman to touch the moon,” Valencia said in her interview with Honda. “No ifs, ands, and buts — I’m going to be an astronaut.”
Not only was Valencia overjoyed with the surprise, but her parents were delighted as well.
“I guess Honda wanted it to be a surprise, using the excuse that it was a documentary. There was no script so everything said was all genuine,” Nina Valencia, Marissa’s mother, said.
Valencia continues to pursue her dream of becoming an astronaut upon her return from NASA’s Space Camp. She is determined to see space with her own eyes in the future.
|
https://medium.com/the-wildcat/one-small-step-for-a-future-astronaut-ba6472b6a877
|
['Choyun Lee']
|
2016-09-30 06:04:57.428000+00:00
|
['Space', 'News', 'NASA', 'Honda']
|
Quality Control vs Quality Assurance: Differences, Cooperation, and Risks
|
Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are two terms that are often used interchangeably. Although similar, there are distinct differences between the two concepts.
Quality Assurance is popularly known as QA Testing, is defined as an activity to ensure that an organization is providing the best possible product or service to customers.
Quality Сontrol popularly abbreviated as QC. It is a Software Engineering process used to ensure quality in a product or a service. It does not deal with the processes used to create a product; rather it examines the quality of the “end products” and the final outcome.
The main difference between QA and QC:
While doing ‘QA’, we define the processes, policies, and strategies, establish standards, develop checklists that need to be used, and followed throughout the life cycle of a project.
While doing QC we follow all those defined processes, standards, and policies that we laid down in QA to make sure that the project is maintaining high quality and the final outcome of the project at least meets the customer’s expectations.
Follow the guide below that explains the differences between quality control and quality management and provides definitions and examples of each.
https://jelvix.com/blog/quality-assurance-vs-quality-control
|
https://medium.com/@jelvix/quality-control-vs-quality-assurance-differences-cooperation-and-risks-936efeba73e
|
['Sasha Andrieiev']
|
2020-07-01 16:56:38.468000+00:00
|
['Quality Software', 'Qc', 'QA', 'Quality Assurance']
|
Hammermill Multi-Purpose Paper, FSC Certified- Umber Canada
|
•FSC Certified
•High-quality multi-purpose paper that runs well through electronic imaging equipment as well as conventional offset presses
•Ideal for copies, newsletters, flyers, forms, reports, price listings, manuals, correspondence and more
•Smooth surface and improved opacity helps produce impressive images on all equipment
•99.99% jam free guarantee
•ColourLock Technology
•Acid and chlorine free
•Brightness: 96
•Letter size (8 1/2″ x 11″)
•Paper weight: 20 lb.
•White
•500 sheets per ream
•Carton of 10 reams (5,000 sheets)
|
https://medium.com/@umbercanada/hammermill-multi-purpose-paper-fsc-certified-umber-cana-b4ae8958108
|
['Umber Canada']
|
2020-12-21 12:23:24.658000+00:00
|
['Canada', 'Office Supplies']
|
Novedades de JavaScript ES2019 con Ejemplos
|
Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
|
https://medium.com/puntotech/novedades-de-es2019-con-ejemplos-8c5796c7ca48
|
['Carlos Caballero']
|
2020-10-19 14:28:02.033000+00:00
|
['JavaScript', 'Desarrollo Web', 'Español', 'Es 2019', 'Programación']
|
Gram Slam of Mamms
|
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
My mamms
got jammed
and crammed
while grammed
this morning.
When Shorty
turns forty
Oh Lordty
it ain’t no party.
The memory
of my mammaries
getting puddled,
prodded, and pulled
sends my
epidermis into
retreat because
it ain’t no treat
knowing the
mammogram is
an annual repeat.
I need
more tissue
to sop up
the impact
of my chest
space getting
hijacked, whacked, and
smacked about by
plastic plates
trying to smash
images out.
There should be
a more pleasant
way to gram
the mamms.
Visual representation of story on @tolbert_on_medium Instagram
|
https://medium.com/@tolbertmbb/gram-slam-of-the-mamms-1e41034dfde7
|
[]
|
2021-02-27 14:11:20.422000+00:00
|
['Turning 40', 'Womens Health', 'Poem', 'Breasts', 'Mammograms']
|
Struggle with boundaries? This is for you.
|
Do you struggle with boundaries, asking for help, saying no or stating your needs?
When it comes to speaking up and asking for what you need, it’s virtually impossible when you don’t have a clear sense of that within yourself.
If you’ve ever struggled with burnout, exhaustion or overwhelm, you’ve probably realised that fuzzy boundaries had a big part to play in that process.
Learning to speak up and set limits or ask for adjustments can be one of the toughest parts of recovery.
Why should I get “special treatment”?
Asking for what you need — explicitly, precisely — and learning to be uncompromising in this is inherent to a healthy life.
This is all the more true when you’re highly sensitive, neurodivergent or in any way non-standard because people don’t automatically understand what life is like in your world.
One of the biggest pieces in my journey of learning how to thrive as a neurodivergent person is unearthing my sense of what’s ok for me and what’s not.
When you don’t fit, one of the ways society deals with that is to render invisible anything that doesn’t conform.
You learn to minimise your “ness” whether that’s blackness, queerness, transness, womanness, working class roots-ness, giftedness, disabledness (the list goes on) in an effort to conform to the white, ableist, capitalist norm.
I was lucky to grow up in a family that was really open to difference in a lot of ways. I had a parent who was pretty open about his mental ill-health, for example. No-one turned a hair when I recently came out as bi-sexual. As a white middle class woman I have a lot of privilege in this area.
Yet, part of my “ness” that was hugely minimised was extreme sensitivity, need for deep quiet, and a good amount of predictability, among other things.
Suppressing and ignoring core parts of your way of being can lead to a warped sense of self.
Because no one was paying close, deep attention to how I actually am, I had no idea what I needed.
As an adult, I had a compromised roadmap for making decisions, because I simply couldn’t tell what was ok for me.
I thought of myself as very go-with-the-flow, easy going, outgoing, resilient. These things are all true to an extent, but far from the whole story. I didn’t protect myself or assert myself around my extreme sensitivity, because I didn’t even notice it.
When I had an inkling, I doubted that insight.
It has taken me years and years of recovery, and now, finally someone IS paying good, close attention to my unique way of being: ME!
Even if you didn’t have this growing up, it IS recoverable.
My girlfriend has been crucially instrumental in this process of self-learning for me. It was her who flagged up early on that I wasn’t like other people she’d encountered and it’s been with her support, encouragement and acceptance that I’ve been fully exploring my own neurodivergence.
Rather than shaming me for it, she wanted to understand how I tick.
Each time she learned something new she made a note of it. She hasn’t just invited me to be explicit about what I need, she has encouraged it. We joke about developing a kind of “Alice operator Manual”. In fact, I discovered a while ago that she actually keeps notes….
We’re all special. We all deserve to have what we need.
You’re not propping up a cripple when you help me listen to what I need.
You’re priming a genius.
Learning to say what you need can be a long journey recovery. Be gentle with yourself as you embark. And know that this is the territory: first take the time to really listen to yourself. Develop your own set of operator instructions. Then be proud of asking the world to help bring forth your genius.
I’ve put together some of the most essential practices for you to rediscover what you need and design your life around it. So you can thrive while doing the things you care about.
–
DO LESS. BETTER. 11 Tools For Success Without Burnout. For highly-sensitive, ambitious women.
Here are some highlights:
◦ Simple, intuitive practices to help you feel confident about your boundaries.
◦ Harness your unique “ness” as a powerful lever for success.
◦ Make a lot more happen with a lot less effort.
If you struggle with boundaries, saying no, asking for help or stating your needs, can you pinpoint where this shows up the most in your life? Let me know your answer in the comments.
|
https://medium.com/@aliceirving/struggle-with-boundaries-this-is-for-you-6e8f14d8edec
|
['Alice Irving']
|
2020-12-15 19:15:23.740000+00:00
|
['Boundaries', 'Personal Growth', 'Burnout', 'Women In Business', 'Entrepreneur']
|
Switch to Flutter Development for 10 Major Business Advantages
|
Introduced a few years back in 2017, Flutter has gained rage and popularity as a software development kit in no time. Google being the creator has helped Flutter in coming to everyone’s note.
However, the tech giant’s name gave mainly an initial push to the cross-platform framework. Flutter has tons of features that have helped it become a preferred choice for both the investors and the developer’s team.
This blog lists the top 10 benefits of flutter development for enterprises. To truly understand the worth of switching to Flutter development, you need to analyze its multiple aspects.
Let’s cover the first things first.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a software development kit designed and developed by Google. It is an open-source, cross-platform software development kit and facilitates application development from a single code base for diverse screen sizes and browsers.
Whether it’s a web app or a mobile app, Flutter proves worthy to both the platform. Using the same code base, the application can be made compatible with iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, embedded systems, etc.
Top 10 Benefits of Investing in Flutter
1. Massive cost-saving option to go for
Flutter proves a boon to programming projects with a limited budget. The framework saves the development cost of the investment firms in the following manner:
First of all, it is an open-source platform, which means zero expense is necessary for purchasing a software development kit.
which means zero expense is necessary for purchasing a software development kit. It supports multiple platforms , which means you can reach a larger audience at a reduced cost.
, which means you can reach a larger audience at a reduced cost. Requires fewer man-hours for development which directly saves cost when you go for an Hourly model of Outsourcing/Out-Staffing. The hourly model requires firms to pay as per the number of working hours.
2. Comparatively faster time to market
The time to market software is the total time required for a programming project to complete once conceptualized.
When trying your hands on a new and innovative feature over simple software or building a complete software with a completely new idea, a faster time to market enhances the software’s success rate.
The SDK does not mandate the coding team to come up with platform-specific code. Moreover, in the case of mobile applications, they run on both Android devices and Apple devices.
Reaching a faster time to market gives the software product an ultimate edge in the market and can significantly boost the ROI up to 33%, as per McKinsey’s study report.
3. Customize UI as per business needs
The user interface of the software plays a crucial role in the overall likeability of the software. As per app development stats, a well-designed UI can boost the conversion rate by up to 200%.
The developer’s team spends a significant amount of time coming up with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. You can easily hire app developers for customizing simple to complex UI with attractive animations.
Flutter also offers a Skia graphic engine, layered architecture, a diverse range of tools supporting the dedicated development of advanced User interface.
4. Experience native app like performance
Google Ads, Xianyu (an m-Commerce app by Alibaba), Hamilton, etc., are some of the top world-class apps developed using Flutter. Running them over the phone will give you the experience of zero technical glitches and fast rendering performance.
It is feasible because, unlike other cross-platforms SDKs and frameworks, Flutter does not rely upon intermediaries. Flutter app development gets directly done into machine code, which helps to avoid performance issues.
5. Reliable support from the tech giant google
Being created by the top tech giant in the digital world, Flutter enjoys relentless support. Since its introduction in 2017, multiple custom software development companies have taken up the technology.
You will be surprised to learn this, but the amazing software development kit lies next only to React Native, in the list of most used cross-platform mobile frameworks. Notably, React Native was introduced two years before Flutter in 2015. Have a look at the infographic below:
Source: Statista
The above infographic depicts the popularity of the Flutter framework among the developer’s community worldwide.
6. Smooth maintenance of the developed software
Whether it’s a website, a web app, or a mobile app, expecting a 100% ideal product at one go is not pragmatic. Evan, a smooth-running software fulfilling all the desired features, requires updates once released into the users’ hands.
Mainly because of the fast-paced technology growth of the software. Maintenance plays a vital role in the long run of the software and decides its fate under tough competition.
At times the upgradation appears costlier than new software development and thus makes the old software obsolete. However, with Flutter apps, the developing team can easily upgrade the app by utilizing multiple plugins, widgets, etc.
Resolving technical glitches, bugs, etc., is also convenient for the developer’s team with Flutter as SDK.
7. Hot reload feature reduces code development time
A software development kit that lacks a hot reload feature requires the developer’s team to wait from a few seconds to long minutes for observing the applied code modification.
The availability of a hot reload feature facilitates the team to instantly look for applied code modification effects. It is possible because instead of rerunning the entire code, the machine acts in the following manner
The host machine checks for the library with the modified code.
Then it checks for the main library of the app.
Finally, the affected libraries of the app.
The new code is then uploaded into a running DVM (Dart Virtual Machine).
The framework automatically implements the ode modification to allow the implementation of the modified code.
8. Relies on a single code for front & back-end
Flutter relies on a single language for coding both the front-end and back-end software, which is Dart. The Dart language was developed to offer maximum convenience to developers and promote smooth & dedicated software development.
Dart itself has multiple benefits for the developed project as follows:
Apps and websites developed with Dart offer enhanced speed performance to the users.
It is a stable language for coding.
Dart is the preferred option for real-time apps.
It supports inheritance, interfaces, etc.
It comes with a simple learning curve.
9. Optimum level of scalability with firebase
Scalability plays a vital role in the growth of software. It is not pragmatic to go for software updates now and then with the growing business. So, scalability is one of the critical factors associated with software development for business enterprises.
Fortunately, Flutter comes with Firebase, which is renowned for performance and scalability. Firebase offers scalability by linearly scaling the software with the size of the data. This allows the developed software to cater to a few to a million users without any code modification.
10. Compatible with future OS fuchsia
Planning for the future scope is always exciting and part of an effective business strategy. Fuchsia is an open-source operating system being developed by the tech giant Google. It is a promising OS as it has the capability of running on all devices.
Flutter is compatible with Fuchsia OS, which secures your business project in the long run.
Final Words
That was all about the top 10 reasons why you should switch to Flutter. For affordable services, you can trust a flutter development company in India. Indian firms offer cheap rates owing to high market competition.
I hope the blog proves insightful to you.
|
https://medium.com/geekculture/switch-to-flutter-development-for-10-major-business-advantages-e6672f2af3b5
|
['Ajay Kapoor']
|
2021-04-26 04:36:03.181000+00:00
|
['Flutter', 'Flutter Development', 'Hire App Developer', 'Top Flutter Development', 'Flutter App Development']
|
About Me — Rusty Alderson. Beyond My Profile Bio
|
Things I Have Learned (You’re Welcome)
1. We are all exactly where we are meant to be
I fully believe in the wisdom of an intelligent and nurturing universe. I also believe that quantum mechanics holds the key to every physical phenomenon.
Every event and every occurrence, and every incident in our lives is the direct result of all that has come before it. There are no accidents.
2. Everyone has a story — most have many
My professional career spans many decades and many jobs. Early in this variegated history, I began to notice that the people I worked with weren’t just people — they were stories.
For example, a secretary (a.k.a. administrative assistant 😏) I worked with at Compaq Computers (1989–1993) was a Texas state ballroom dancing champion. She and her partner competed annually, all across the State of Texas in ballroom dancing tournaments, and one year they won it all! A woman who worked as a technical writer for the IT department at Compaq was the coach of a men’s semi-professional basketball team (note: she was The Coach, not the assistant coach, and not the trainer!) Over the years, she developed three players who went on to play in the NBA! My memory being what it is, I only remember the name of one of those players — Cadillac Anderson. Here is a line from his entry in Wikipedia "He attended and played collegiate basketball at the University of Houston , where he was one of the last original members of the famed Phi Slama Jama fraternity. He competed in the 1984 Final Four in Seattle while at Houston." A woman I worked with at Intel (1995–1996) went from being a secretary… errr… administrative assistant at Intel in Belgium, to being the project manager of a critical internal system project at Intel in Folsom, California (where I worked). She not only managed the project, but she did so: - without corporate approval. She created the project out of a twinkle in her eye and a dream in her heart, and evangelized a proposal to upper management. Management loved her idea, but had no budgetary leeway to shoe-horn it into the official strategic plan for that year. - without a budget (she begged and scrounged from various executives to loan her employees so she could staff the project, and called in various favors for other expenses) - while leading a rag-tag team of misfits and burned-out staff (when you beg for staff, you end up with the dregs, although the dregs at Intel were extraordinarily talented) to a widely recognized success. In fact, she was so utterly successful that, three months after the project had come online, Intel named her the Employee of the Year! (out of some 95,000 employees world-wide).
My point is manifold:
people are multi-faceted, and unless you take the time and make the effort to get to know them, you will have a very distorted understanding of them. You will miss all of the hills and valleys of their personal contour. You will miss all “the good parts” of their story and only know the public persona of that individual. Never underestimate anyone. In fact, never judge anyone! Chances are you really know nothing about any person, and any judgement you make would most likely be superficial and inaccurate.
3. Growing old gracefully and comfortably is simply a matter of fighting off laziness
This is a hard one for me personally, since I am starting to get “old.” But I have sworn to live to be at least 100 and maintain good health and stamina up until the day I die. This was my “new millennium resolution.”
Those of you who have children have undoubtedly heard them say, “Do I have to?!” That sentiment is one that we never seem to outgrow, because I often hear myself thinking that very thing.
“Do I really need to exercise today?”
“Do I really have to go to work today? I really don’t feel like it!”
That’s laziness talking, and it must be squelched.
The more you give in to this lazy attitude, the quicker you will succumb to “old age.” You see, old age is not a condition, it is an attitude. If the old age attitude is allowed to prevail, it will hasten your physical and mental decline.
Nip this in the bud, or soon you will hear yourself saying things like:
“Do I really need to get out of bed this morning?!”
4. The Secret to life is… that there is no secret!
Early in life we believe that there must be a secret to life. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe that other people have it so easy, and yet they don’t seem any different than us. They must know a secret!
From My Lost Reunion Essay:
"There were many whom I admired, many to whom I looked up, thinking that somehow they were privy to some secret recipe which made them immune to the fears and confusion swimming in my head at the time. So many seemed that they knew who they were, and knew where they were going. "Having now experienced many years of social observation, I believe that their reality was probably closer to my own experience of clueless bewilderment. But they were better actors, had better command of their karma, or understood that they were still quite early in the process of creating themselves."
There actually is a secret, and the sooner you learn it, the faster you can set about creating a wonderful life for yourself. The secret is…
…that there is no secret!
5. You truly can accomplish anything you want to!
I have accomplished several things in my life for which I am inordinately proud. I won’t recount them here, but you may get a taste of what I’m talking about in my essay How to Work. Pay attention to the story I tell about going back to school and changing my career path under the section heading, Tackle the Impossible.
|
https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-rusty-alderson-878eda85176a
|
['Rusty Alderson']
|
2020-12-05 15:03:13.431000+00:00
|
['Life Lessons', 'Introduction', 'Quotes To Live By', 'Wisdom', 'About Me']
|
Part 1: Beginners Guide to Natural Language Processing(NLP) on social media
|
EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS
I firstly performed exploratory data analysis to understand this dataset. Firstly, I tried to learn summary of the dataset and then checked which columns includes NA values. In fact, dimension of original data is 500x10 and it includes texts and numeric values. In addition, there exists blank rows and NA values in news data.
fb_posts.shape
fb_posts.info()
fb_posts.describe()
fb_posts.isnull().sum()
Then, I converted NA values in “reaction” columns to 0 and gathered number of total reactions into one column which is labeled as “Engagement” by reducing dimensionality.
fb_posts['Engagement']=fb_posts[['like','love','wow','haha','sorry','anger']].sum(axis=1) fb_posts_new=fb_posts.drop(['like','love','wow','haha','sorry','anger'],axis=1)
Before calculating total engagement, I analyzed types of engagement and it is obviously shown that although there are several kind of engagement, people prefer clicking ‘like’ button. The main reason was that liking is still as easy ever. You’ll see the ‘like’ button on each post, but now if you tap and hold on it, the ‘like’ will expand to engender a number of emotions: love, haha, wow, sorry, and anger. Also, ‘sorry’ and ‘anger’ button indicate which content of news are more intensive(negative news)
Figure 2: Distribution of Engagement
I just wondered whether length of message has a significant effect on engagement score.That’s why, I calculated word counts of every post and used Pearson correlation to understand relation between two continuous variables.
fb_posts_new['word_count'] = fb_posts_new['message'].apply(lambda x: len(str(x).split(" ")))
fb_posts_new['word_count'].corr(fb_posts_new['Engagement'])*100
output:-9.86 %
It can be seen that there wasn’t strong negative correlation between length of message and engagement.
Apart from that, I looked at which hours people have interacted with our posts more by using “created_time” column.
fb_posts_new['created_time']=pd.to_datetime(fb_posts_new['created_time'])
d = pd.to_datetime(fb_posts_new['created_time'], format='%y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
fb_posts_new['Time'] = d.dt.time
fb_posts_new['Hour'] = d.dt.hour
Then, I aggregated engagements based on hours and drew a line graph showing hour vs engagement. (Hours are based on UTC)
time_postengagement=fb_posts_new.groupby('Hour').sum()
time_postengagement=pd.DataFrame(time_postengagement)
sns.set()
time_postengagement.plot()
Figure 3: Hour vs Engagement
The line plot indicates that posts on Facebook which are published at 11 A.M or 5 P.M tend to be interacted by people more.
|
https://medium.com/@abdullahsaka/part-1-beginners-guide-to-natural-language-processing-on-social-media-a0534e0c1adf
|
['A. Tayyip Saka']
|
2019-09-12 16:17:15.632000+00:00
|
['Data Science', 'NLP', 'Social Media', 'Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Facebook']
|
Translate a Horse to a Zebra: CycleGAN
|
Translate a Horse to a Zebra: CycleGAN
Ideal horse-to-zebra translation achieved by cycleGAN. Image taken from the official cycleGAN Github page.
In this article, you will join our journey to build and train a cycleGAN(Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks) model to turn horses into zebras. We will first take a look at the structure of a cycleGAN as well as the four loss functions implemented to train it. We will also have a glimpse at the microarchitecture of each discriminator and generator deployed in a cycleGAN. Lastly, we will talk about how to train a cycleGAN with some very impressive translation outcomes attached at the very end. Before you start reading, it would be better to have some basic understanding in convolutional neural networks and GAN. This article is a summary of the Advanced Predictive Modeling course project accomplished by Josh Artmann, Yiming Jin, Kevin Cheng and Hao He at UT Austin.
Project Overview
As it is named, the goal of our project is simple: to build a machine which takes a horse image and translate it to a zebra image. Ideally, our machine will only change the pattern on the skin of the horse, while leave other features — such as background, the shape of the horse, other objects in the image etc. — totally unchanged. This type of task is called Image-to-Image Translation, which is a pretty mature research topic under neural network where there already exists a lot of paper about it.
Traditionally, to train an Image-to-Image Translation model, we will need a dataset of “paired samples”, that is, if we want to transfer a painting to a real photo, we will need hundreds of paintings and the corresponding real-life photos which the artworks were painted from. However, a challenge we are facing is, it is impossible for us to find the “paired zebra images” for our horses since such things don’t exist at all. This is why we are using a model called cycleGAN which doesn’t require such “paired samples” in training to achieve the transformation. Introduced by Jun-yan Zhu and his colleagues at UC Berkeley in 2017, cycleGAN presents a new way to do Image-to-Image Translation. While it still requires a set of horse images and a set of zebra images in training, the horse and zebra images don’t need to directly correlated with each other anymore.
To train a horse-to-zebra cycleGAN model, we need two sets of data: real-life horse images and zebra images. In our project, we are using a well-organized dataset grabbed from the official Github page for cycleGAN. The dataset contains two training folders each has about 1,200 horse or zebra photos. These photos are used to train the model. In addition, another 10 horse photos and 10 zebra photos are save in the test folders of the dataset to evaluate model performance.
Introduction to CycleGAN
A traditional Image-to-Image Translation could be achieved through a single GAN model, which is formed by two neural network units: one called the Generator, the other one called the Discriminator. For a cycleGAN model, it is in fact constructed by two GAN models. Before you ask why we need two, let first talk about how these two GANs are configured inside a cycleGAN.
The reason it is called a cycleGAN is that we will use the two GAN models to construct a cycle for some purpose which we will talk about soon. To make such cycle, we need to make the two GAN models to do exactly the same work, that is to do image-to-image translation, but in reversed directions. Specifically, we want GAN A to transfer a horse image to a zebra image, while GAN B has the ability to transfer a zebra image to a horse image. Each of the two GAN models is formed by a Conditional Generator and a PatchGAN Discriminator. We will talk about the structures of the generator and discriminators in the following section. To sum up, in our tool box we have two GAN models. Each of them contains one generator and one discriminator.
Visualization of the structure of a cycleGAN. Please forgive my terrible handwritings. Image by author.
Wait a minute, why the hell do we need two?
Let’s go back to the question raised previously: if we are only doing one-way image translation, or, horse-to-zebra without zebra-to-horse translation, why do we need two GANs in our model while one of them can get the job done? Well, to answer this question, let’s go back to the major advantage of a cycleGAN: it won’t require pair samples anymore in the training process. However, having paired samples is not always a bad thing. One merit of paired samples is that they put strict restriction on the generated images so that except the desired adjustments (e.g. zebra pattern), the rest part of the generated images will be unchanged from the source images. Although we take this restriction for granted when we have paired samples because it comes naturally with the strongly correlated paired images, it is not the case anymore when we switch to unpaired samples where there is no correlation between source images and target images. It might cause trouble if we continue to train a single GAN on these unpaired samples, that is, at some point of the training we might realize that our GAN starts to generate random zebra images which have little or no correlation at all with the horse images we feed it with. This is for sure the situation we don’t want to encounter. Therefore, to get rid of it, the ingenious creators of cycleGAN invented a concept called Cycle Consistency which will put the restriction back on generated images through an additional loss function. The creators themselves have made an excellent explanation on cycle consistency in their paper:
We exploit the property that translation should be “cycle consistent”, in the sense that if we translate, e.g., a sentence from English to French, and then translate it back from French to English, we should arrive back at the original sentence. —Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, 2017.
Say you want to translate a French sentence into English and you want to see how well you did the job. A good way to evaluate your translation is to re-translate the English sentence back to French and ideally, your outcome should be exactly the same with the original French sentence. The same logic could be applied here: to ensure our model is on the right way in keeping the generated image correlated with the input, we firstly let GAN A take a horse image and transfer it to a generated zebra image and then feed it directly to GAN B which , by its nature, will gives us back a generated horse image. Ideally, the final generated horse image should look exactly the same with the original horse image, in the same way the re-translated French sentence matches the original French sentence. If it turns out there is a significant difference between them, we then know GAN A might not did a good job and needs to be upgraded through training. All we need to do then is convert the difference between the two horse images to a loss function. This process is called Forward Cycle, a half of the cycle structure which focuses on evaluating GAN A. The other half of the cycle, which is called Backward Cycle, will have exactly the same workflow of its counterpart but in a reversed direction so that it could evaluates GAN B. Combining the two loss functions from Forward and Backward Cycles, we obtain a general loss function called Cycle Consistency Loss and we will involve it as a part of the final loss function which we will use to update the cycleGAN model.
Visualization of Cycle Consistency workflow. Image by author.
Identity Loss
With Cycle Consistency Loss implemented, it seems like we don’t need to worry about the naughtiness of our model anymore. However, from their experiments, the creators of CycleGAN found out that while the outcome zebras seem to have the same shape and other stuff with the input horses under cycle consistency restriction, the color profile consistency between inputs and outputs was not maintained very well by the model. To solve this problem, they invented another structure called Identity Mapping. This structure is again constructed by two components, just like Cycle Consistency, where one of them focuses on the performance of GAN A and the other one evaluates GAN B. To evaluate GAN A, for example, instead of feeding it with a horse image, we will give it a zebra image. By its nature, GAN A will generate a new zebra image based on the original zebra. Ideally, all the stuff laying on the two images, including the colors, should look exactly the same. Again, we convert the difference between the two images to a loss function and combine it with the loss function from the other components to form an Identity Loss function, which will also be a part of the final loss function.
Visualization of Identity Mapping workflow. Image by author.
Unit Architectures
After taking a look at the macrostructure of a cycleGAN, let’s dive into the microstructure of each discriminator and generator inside a cycleGAN.
Discriminator
Recall for a discriminator, its job is to take an image and output a binary outcome (True or False) which reflects its judgment on whether the input image is real or fake.
Structure of the discriminators deployed in cycleGAN is somewhat traditional: a fully convolutional neural networks with totally five layer blocks where each block contains a 2D Convolution Layer with kernel size of 4x4 and stride of 2, an Instance Normalization Layer and a Leaky ReLU Layer (except the output block which uses a Sigmoid Layer as activation). Every time an image is put into a discriminator, each of the first four layer blocks will shrinkage the size of the image into half and double the number of channels. Therefore after the fourth layer, the input will have a size of 16x16 with 512 channels (The model input has a size of 256x256). Lastly, the output layer block will collapse the 512 channels into one 16x16 matrix as the final output.
Structure of a PatchGAN Discriminator. Thanks to Sarah Wolf who created this visualization in her article.
Wait a minute, why are we having a 16x16 matrix instead of a binary True/False as the outcome? This is because in cycleGAN, we are using a structure called PatchGAN for the discriminator. Unlike a normal discriminator which takes an image as a whole to judge whether it is real or fake, a PatchGAN discriminator will first divide the input image into a number of “patches” and then make individual judgements on each of them. In our case, the input image is divided into 16x16 patches in the end where each patch has a size of 70x70. The elements in our output matrix stands for the possibility of real or fake prediction the model made on each patch. To obtain a final binary judgment, we could either simply average them or compare the output matrix with a matrix of expected values and calculate the difference. More details about PatchGAN could be found here.
Generator
For a generator, its mission is to generate a transformed image as output based on the input image. This is achieved by a neural network structure which is formed by three sections: an encoder, a transformer and a decoder.
The encoder shrinkages the size of input images while increase its number of channels. Similar to Discriminator, it is constructed by three layer blocks where each contains a 2D Convolution Layer, an Instance Normalization Layer and a Leaky ReLU Layer. The first layer block doesn’t change the size of image, it only creates 64 channels on the input. The next two layer blocks however, each shrinkages the input size by half while also double the number of channels. The adjusted input is then passed to the transformer.
The transformer adds desired features to the input while keep the size of it unchanged. It contains six residual net blocks, or ResNet for short. Each ResNet contains two layer blocks: the first layer block contains a 2D Convolution Layer (with stride=1), an Instance Normalization Layer and a Leaky ReLU Layer. The second layer block contains a 2D Convolution Layer (with stride=1) and an Instance Normalization Layer. The transformed input is then passed to the decoder.
The decoder enlarges the input back to the original size and collapses all channels into RGB to form the final output image. The enlarging process is achieved by a stack of two Transpose Convolution Layers. For simplicity, you could regard a transpose convolution layer as a combination of a 2D Upsampling layer and a 2D convolution layer with stride=1. Generally speaking, it will enlarge the size of input while decrease the number of channels. In the end, the 256x256 pixel data with 64 channels produced by the two transpose convolution layers will be fed to the output layer, which will collapse the channels into RGB and thus output it as the final output image.
Structure of a cycleGAN Generator. Thanks to Sarah Wolf who created this visualization in her article.
Train CycleGAN
The training process at each iteration for a cycleGAN model follows the general rule which is applied to other GAN models: train the discriminator alone, while train the generator using a composite model where the discriminator is involved but set untrainable. We will apply this rule twice to train our 2 GAN models.
Workflow of one training iteration for cycleGAN. Notice at each iteration, we update the generator first since we will use it to generate fake images to train the corresponding discriminator. Image by author.
We initially designed 100 epochs in the training process. Each epoch contains about 1,187 iterations, which is the size of our training dataset. At each iteration, one horse image and one zebra image is extracted from the dataset to train the model.
Update Weight for a Generator Through a Composite Model
The composite models we use here to train the generators in cycleGAN is more complicated than common cases. Traditionally, a composite model generates only one loss function — the adversarial loss which reflects how well the discriminator identifies fake images produced by the generator. For a cycleGAN generator, however, as we discussed before, there are three other loss functions should be involved — the identity loss and forward/backward consistency loss. As a result, in our composite model, there are four independent components which produces the four loss functions. While the adversarial loss is represented by L2 loss function, the rest three are represented by L1. Once the four loss function is calculated, they are weight averaged to obtain the final loss function where the cycle consistency loss has the highest weight while the effect from adversarial loss is downplayed. At the end of each iteration, we record the final loss function and use Adam SGD to update model weight of the generator.
Flowchart for the composite model used to train GAN A. Notice at every iteration the composite model is fed by two images: one horse image and one zebra image. Image by author.
Update Weight for a Discriminator Using Image Pool
To train a discriminator, at each iteration, we use one real image and one fake image generated by the corresponding generator. While we grab the real image from training dataset directly, we use an image pool to prepare the fake image.
An image pool is a set of at most 50 fake images produced by the generator in the past iterations. The goal of image pools is to prevent cycleGAN model from changing drastically from iteration to iteration, according to Sarah Wolf’s article. To achieve this, at each iteration, we will randomly pick one fake image from the pool to train the discriminator instead of feeding it with the one just made by the generator directly. A chart that shows how an image pool is implemented and updated is presented below.
Flowchart for an image pool used to select fake image for Discriminator A. Image by author.
Once we have the two images ready, all we need to do is put them to the discriminator separately and sum up the two loss functions represented by L2. We record the loss sum and update the weight of the discriminator using Adam SGD.
Workflow of one training iteration for Discriminator A. Image by author.
A nature of GAN models is that the values of loss functions for generator and discriminator will reach an equilibrium after significant amount of iterations, thus it is hard for us to tell whether the model has reached an optimal status only based on the two loss functions. To solve this problem, we can save the model and some generated images produced by the model after every five epochs. We then decide on when to stop training by reviewing the sample model outputs manually.
Sample outcomes for model trained after 30 epochs. Notice while the model was not sophisticated in zebrafication at this time, it started to figure out where it should put zebra patterns on. Image by author.
From our actual training process, we realized the model performance became stable after 50 epochs and we didn’t find out any observable improvement on transformed images after 70 epochs. We stopped the process at the 75th epoch and use the then updated model as our ultimate zebra-maker.
Screenshot of our training process at a very early stage. Image by author.
Outcome Display
The model obtained after 75 epochs in fact shows impressive ability to put zebra pattern to a horse naturally and precisely.
Image by author.
Personally, I’m mostly impressed by the first translation. You can see there is a cute lamb lays beneath the horse in the original image. Our model accurately recognized the shape of the horse and excluded the lamb and anything else in the background when trying to add zebra patterns on the walking horse. These four pairs of images demonstrate that our model is a good zebra maker when a complete shape of horse with an appropriate size is presented in the original photo.
Image by author.
Other than transforming horse to zebra, we are surprised that out model also has the power to “zebraficate” other creatures like humans.
Some Failures
However, from our test runs we also found that our model is not always powerful. It could get confused in some cases.
Cases where cycleGAN model failed to translate a horse to a zebra. Image by author.
As you might observed, our model performed not very well when the shape of the horse is not presented completely in an obvious way (at least from the perspective of a neural network model). The horses in the pre-transform photos here are either zoomed in or zoomed out to much so that our model failed to detect them.
Our model chose the Supreme Leader instead of his horse when doing translation. Image by author.
Translation failure also occurs when someone else is stacked too closed to the horse, such as the charming Mr. Kim Jong-un.
It turns out our model doesn’t watch cartoon very often. Image by author.
We also tried to feed cartoon horses to our model. However, it turns out our model was not very into cartoons. As shown above, it insisted to zebraficate Winnie’s red shirt instead of Eyeeyore, a depressed donkey who has, at least from our human perspective, a more horse-like shape.
Reference
Thanks for your reading! Please feel free to check out our Github page for the data and code behind this project.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/translate-a-horse-to-a-zebra-cyclegan-6c3e12e40f53
|
['Hao He']
|
2020-12-15 17:40:59.222000+00:00
|
['Neural Networks', 'Towards Data Science', 'Convolutional Network', 'Machine Learning', 'Cyclegan']
|
Compare & Contrast: Exploration of Datasets with Many Features
|
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
I just did a Kaggle competition with Gary Lu. We studied the dataset of Boston housing prices, and built up prediction models. The result turns out to be within top 9%.
Soon after getting started, I noticed that the datasets have many features (80 in total: 37 continuous and 43 categorical). Making sense of all of them definitely paves concrete path to feature engineering and model building process. However, there are also too many ways to do that, I was confused about the ‘right’ way for a while…
After some trial and error I feel that though there’s no absolute right way to do it, still, a ‘compare & contrast’ style analysis and visualization serves well to the final goal: Identify potentials quickly to improve prediction model.
Here I would elaborate on my practices to wave the idea of ‘compare & contrast’ into the exploration:
1. Compare Data Type and Nulls between Train & Test Data
For datasets with many features, summarizing data types and null values are important. Instead of only exploring training and test datasets separately, a comparative analysis can tells more on: Are the data types consistent across datasets? Are there more missing values in one dataset than the other? Below are the example and codes (Python):
# Data Type Comparison
s1 = train_data.dtypes
s2 = test_data.dtypes
s1_train = s1.drop('SalePrice')
s1_train.compare(s2)
Result: Features with Different Datatypes
So from above, we can easily see that there are 9 features having different datatypes across training & test data. Does it matter? it needs more exploration, in our case it doesn’t as they are both numeric types, but it may be an issue if one is an object type.
# Null Value Comparison
null_train = train_data.isnull().sum()
null_test = test_data.isnull().sum()
null_train = null_train.drop('SalePrice')
null_train.compare(null_test).sort_values(['self','other'], ascending= [False,False])
Result: Part of Features with Null Values
Here we can see that null values seem evenly distribute across two datasets, which assure us that we can go ahead dealing with these null values in similar ways for both data sets.
2. Contrast Distributions of Train & Test Data
Distribution of features is a key consideration for feature engineering, we always want to answer questions:
Are the continuous features normally distributed? Is there any categorical feature dominated by a single category which over shadows others? Again, instead of studying the questions separately for train and test data separately, we can contrast them.
For continuous features, we can apply Seaborn histograms as below:
# Distribution Comparison - Continuous Variables con_var = s1[s1.values != 'object'].index
f, axes = plt.subplots(7,6 , figsize=(30, 30), sharex=False)
for i, feature in enumerate(con_var):
sns.histplot(data=combined_data, x = feature, hue="Label",ax=axes[i%7, i//7])
Distribution Comparison — Part of Continuous Variables
The distribution above shows that:
The distribution of train and test data are similar for most features;
Some features can be reclassified as ‘Categorical’, such as ‘MSSubClass’;
Some features are dominated by 0/null (eg:PoolArea), thus we can consider to drop.
For categorical features, we can apply Seaborn countplot as below:
# Distribution Comparison - Catagorical Variables cat_var = s1[s1.values == 'object'].index
f, axes = plt.subplots(7,7 , figsize=(30, 30), sharex=False)
for i, feature in enumerate(cat_var):
sns.countplot(data = combined_data, x = feature, hue="Label",ax=axes[i%7, i//7])
Distribution Comparison — Part of Categorical Variables
The comparison of the categorical variables showed that:
Train data and test data distributions are similar for most features
Some features have dominant items, we can consider to combine some minor items into a group, such as ‘Fa’ & ‘Po’ in ‘HeatingQC’, ‘FireplaceQu’, ‘GarageQual’ and ‘GarageCond’
3. Compare Linearity between Response Variable and Continues Features
Linearity affects the quality of our model. Some features may have a positive / negative relation with the response variable but not linear, for such cases, transformation may help improve our model.
f, axes = plt.subplots(7,6 , figsize=(30, 30), sharex=False)
for i, feature in enumerate(con_var):
sns.scatterplot(data=train_data, x = feature, y= "SalePrice",ax=axes[i%7, i//7])
Comparison of SalePrice with Continues features — Part of Continuous Variables
Here, we can see that some relations seem positive but not quite linear:‘SalePrice’ VS.’BsmtUnfSF’, ‘SalePrice’ VS.’LotFrontage’ and etc, So we will consider transform such features into log forms to improve linearity.
4. Contrast Items of Categorical Features by the Response Variable
In process 2, we have identified the categorical features that we want to combine, then we would go ahead to confirm that these items we want to combine have similar prices (Response Variable). (So that we won’t re-group items causing diverse performances of the response variable)
f, axes = plt.subplots(7,7 , figsize=(30, 30), sharex=False)
for i, feature in enumerate(cat_var):
sort_list = sorted(train_data.groupby(feature)['SalePrice'].median().items(), key= lambda x:x[1], reverse = True)
order_list = [x[0] for x in sort_list ]
sns.boxplot(data = train_data, x = feature, y = 'SalePrice', order=order_list, ax=axes[i%7, i//7])
plt.show()
Part of Contrast of SalePrice within Categorical Features
Here, we could see that sale prices for ‘Fa’ & ‘Po’ in ‘HeatingQC’, ‘FireplaceQu’, ‘GarageQual’ and ‘GarageCond’ are similar, so we may consider go ahead and combine the items.
Summary
With the major four ‘compare & contrast’ procedures mentioned above, I quickly spotted areas to fix for feature engineering. I feel when conducting exploratory data analysis on data sets with many features, it is important to use our critical thinking pattern: instead of exhibiting all details, we should always focus on identify potentials quickly to improve prediction model. In this sense, ‘compare and contrast’ method can help us keep on the right track.
Relevant Articles From Gary Lu:
Links:
https://www.kaggle.com/garylucn/house-price
https://github.com/glucn/kaggle/blob/main/House_Prices/notebook/house-price.ipynb
|
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/compare-contrast-eda-of-datasets-with-many-features-f9665da15132
|
['Julia Yang']
|
2021-03-08 06:51:07.832000+00:00
|
['Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Visualization', 'Python', 'Kaggle']
|
Core Values for Web Development Teams
|
As a webdev team, we have several core values that help guide our decisions day-to-day. Here are a few examples:
Tests or it didn’t happen
A past refrain in internet culture when someone told an outlandish story is, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” We say the same thing here except for tests. Test provide 1) runnable documentation of business rules, 2) a great practical way to ensure devs ponder and cover edge cases, and 3) a guard against regression. We all know this though. Ask any developer anywhere if they think tests are good and necessary and they’ll say, “of course!” Then, ask them if they have greater than 90% test coverage on their projects. Most of them will balk at that. Here, however, we enforce it via automation, which touches on another of our core values, “automate all the things.”
Automate all the things (especially rules)
This is how you do much with few people and few errors. Automate build pipelines, testing runs, deployments, license checks, everything. Spending time up-front to set up a CICD script will save you countless hours of tedium. More importantly, it will boost your speed to market a.k.a value delivery (see “It doesn’t count until it’s released”).
Rules deserve special mention here. Development teams usually come up with rules around things like test coverage percentages, code style/formatting, branch naming patterns, and more. Developers are often under pressure and, being human, are wont to cut corners sometimes. It is natural. However, keeping compliance and quality consistent over time requires constant enforcement of the team rule. Enforcing these rules manually is like herding cats and is doomed to failure. Instead, automate these rules. Use linters, code formatters, coverage thresholds, SCM push rules, and others to make this enforcement automatic, constant, and unaware of any “fires” giving the humans, including the tech leads, stress enough to want to cheat. Rules: if they’re not automated, they’re not enforced.
It doesn’t count until it’s released
When we build features and push them to develop,the issue is closed, and the developer considers it “done”. They’ve created new value in the product. However,like potential energy, created value is not doing anything productive until it is delivered to a user. And, of course, delivering value to users is the name of the game in the software business. Merges to develop and sprint demos are not the goal. Releases are the goal.
Deleted code is tested code
Old, stale code can be the source of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Get rid of dead code, and if you can refactor 50 lines down to 5, do it. In the quest for code coverage, deleted code is tested code i.e. you get that code coverage for free. If you happen to need to refer to that code later, find it in your git history. There’s no need to keep it in the file commented-out “for reference”.
Work should be “edged”
With advanced in communication technology, we can read emails on the go. This gave rise to so-called “edgeless work” where you’re never really off. We don’t like that. We work hard during our work time and play hard during our play time. Our team respects people’s fun time, family time, exercise time, …, off time. Sure, some developers like to code as their hobby. That is, of course, up to them. But they should be able to work on their own projects during their own time.
Write code for humans, not computers
Computers are fast, and we have code minifiers anyway. Code that is a bit more verbose with longer, more descriptive variable names will help you and other developers return later to maintain that area of the codebase more quickly and with less stress, and fewer new bugs. Remember, head-scratching time costs money too.
We don’t have 1 team of 7, we have 7 1-person teams
We strive to train all the team mates to do all the things: dev, QA, ops, scrum master, release manager, etc. This is so mitigate key-person risk and to ensure that anyone can go on vacation without being bothered because there are multiple people that can perform any one task.
The only way to “have time” is to “take time”.
This is great quote from the Matrix movies. We understand that if left to their own devices, product managers would have the dev teams work only on business projects from the roadmap and not so much on internal projects like process automation, refactoring for maintainability, and the like. Many dev teams intend to get to those when they “have time”. Instead we choose to “take time” each sprint to tackle a “balanced diet” of issues covering business projects, internal projects, bug fixes, refactorings, and automated testing. This would never happen without conscientiously adding these other types of issues to each sprint backlog.
Coding time is sacred
Coders are paid to code, and it is difficult to get back into the zone once distracted. All developers are encouraged to protect their coding time from extraneous meetings and other distractions. If it is becoming a problem for the developer, it behooves them to alert the manager who’s job it is to help protect the developers’ time.
We may decrease grade, but we’ll never decrease the quality.
Sometimes there are external pressures and deadlines we cannot avoid. In these cases, we may have to reduce the scope of our work to fit within the time box. This is fine. Releasing features at a reduced “grade” may be necessary from time to time. However, although we reduce the grade of the feature set, we will not reduce the quality or test coverage.
Too much of a good thing is bad
How long should a feature request write up be? As long as it needs to be. If the developers, QA, etc. understand the intent of the feature, there is no need for the developer/manager/product owner to spend the time on writing out a novella in the issue description field. Some people look down on “incomplete issue cards”. We look down on wasted time and effort.
No matter how far you go down the wrong road, turn back.
Things evolve, lessons get learned, technologies fluctuate. We do not do things a certain way because they’ve always been done a certain way. We are always open to improving and refining our team processes and technologies.
|
https://zachary-keeton.medium.com/core-values-for-web-dev-teams-21eeb5d2c0db
|
['Zachary Keeton']
|
2020-11-30 10:32:02.164000+00:00
|
['Software Development', 'Leadership', 'Web Development', 'Tech Leadership']
|
I fell into this!
|
in The Bazaar of the Bizarre
|
https://medium.com/@dyspla/i-fell-into-this-c4410221fdda
|
['Lennie Varvarides']
|
2020-12-17 17:16:31.586000+00:00
|
['Critique', 'Critical Thinking', 'Poetry', 'Feedback', 'Appreciation']
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.