title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
829
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
| tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Haftanın Patent Raporu #22 | 017 - Rob McInnes explained technology transfer management
Listen to this episode from Patent Effect Podcast on Spotify. We had a great conversation with Rob McInnes who is… | https://medium.com/patenteffect/haftan%C4%B1n-patent-raporu-22-eafc23c60611 | ['Patent Effect'] | 2020-08-21 07:53:31.234000+00:00 | ['Girişimcilik', 'Patents', 'Teknoloji', 'Türkçe', 'Patentraporu'] |
Explained: The Difference Between an IPO, ICO and STO. | Part 1
Trading can be confusing, and beyond confusing — daunting. We’ve all experienced the scenario where we get excited about a concept, fire up the ol’ Google search and then it happens — you’re slammed with a seemingly foreign language, manifesting as a tsunami of investment terms and numbers… and let’s be honest, we’re not The Wolf of Wallstreet… yet…
Maybe after following this series though!
So many different ideas and concepts fly by at breakneck speeds as popular Youtuber’s rattle off investment lingo, and for the new trader, it can be absolutely terrifying.
But don’t worry, we’re here and we understand how terrifying it can be — because we were once in those shoes! This is why we’re introducing our community to these concepts at their pace, one step at a time. In this series we’ll be diving into what an IPO is, what an ICO is, what an STO is, and not only the differences between those, but how they affect your investment strategy and important factors to stay on the lookout for. Before we dive into these terms take a quick moment to familiarize yourself with our past blog 21 Terms to Understand Cryptocurrency!
What is an IPO? The IPO Basics.
At its core, an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is the very first time a sale of a company’s stock is offered to the public, as well as will begin listing on an exchange (think NASDAQ, NYSE, etc). In the early days of a company all of the stocks are managed internally, in a private format with a small group of people who are usually important to the company managing their distribution, commonly the founders. Until a company chooses to “go public” their stocks are closed off to every-day investors and groups seeking to exchange their capital for stock. In the past it was generally that only companies with a demonstration of strong financials and proven track-record could go public but as more exchanges have populated, an increase in leniency has followed.
So this begs the question — why launch an IPO?
An IPO acts as a phenomenal way for companies to raise much needed capital. Literally and figuratively it opens up companies to a whole new world of investment potential. Previously where companies were constrained to private deals and investors, through an IPO and eventually exchange listing they can now connect with millions of investors from around the globe.
It’s important to note that though once a company goes public they’ll be able to raise capital through their shares, they will forfeit much of the financial leniency they experienced as private, in now that they have to report all of their financials to the public quarterly, form a board of directors and ultimately adhere to every guideline laid down by the SEC or similar regulatory body.
“ Are IPO’s good investments for me?”
As with everything investing, we have to evaluate our risk-reward potential. An IPO might be riskier because we have absolutely zero data concerning its trade history, but it’s also a potential opportunity to get in at its very first and possibly lowest price ever. Traditionally it’s been found that big companies with big IPO’s tend to do poorly at first, but in some cases yield the highest returns over an extended period of time. Something noteworthy to consider is that to participate in an IPO an investor must be registered with a brokerage firm. Generally brokerage firms will have guidelines such as a member must hold a specific account balance or have numerous transactions, therein creating a higher barrier to entry than investing in already active stocks.
Always do your homework and make sure you can justify why you’re investing in ANY stock!
So to recap:
Before a company goes public usually the founders will manage the stocks privately.
IPO’s are the first time the public can purchase a stock
When a company goes public they become extremely regulated by the SEC and have to follow a strict set of transparency guidelines for their investors.
IPO investors must be partnered with a brokerage firm before investing, creating a higher barrier to entry than traditional investing methods.
IPO’s can be risky, but sometimes risky investments yield the highest rewards — Always do your own research!
In our next blog we’re going to discuss the basics of an ICO as well as compare and contrast the two, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of both. For more Coinstack content join us below in one of our many communities:
Telegram: t.me/coinstackapp
Facebook: facebook.com/coinstackapp
Twitter: twitter.com/coinstackapp
LinkedIn: linked.com/coinstackapp | https://medium.com/coinstack-app/explained-the-difference-between-an-ipo-ico-and-sto-ec8d48115f0b | ['Coinstack App'] | 2018-08-30 15:48:53.012000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Finance', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Life lessons I have learned in 2020 | In 2020, a lot has changed in my life. There are many important lessons I have learned in this year and I’m looking forward for more challenges. For my first blog in Medium, I would like to share my life lessons which I hope you could connect and find it interesting and meaningful to your life. Let’s get started! :)
LESSON #1 Know and Accept Who You Are
It is very important to know our personality and priority. As I grew up, I learn that knowing and listening to ourselves is essential for living life. Before we try to understand others, we must understand ourselves first. Some people might think that they know themselves really well, while others might not really do. One of the ways that I use to understand myself is that I listen to what I feel, monitor, and control my emotions. Once we listen to our thoughts towards certain things, we can accept how we feel, and control our emotions and behavior. What we think reflect who we are. We also have to understand our emotions and try not to be under their control.
LESSON #2 People’s feelings matter when it comes to communication.
Speak with the words you want to hear, and behave like someone you want to be treated. This year, I have an opportunity to get to know various types of people. I believe that everyone wants to be with people who are positive, rather than negative people who always talk without caring other people’s feelings. Be careful and selective with the words you use to communicate with people whether they are your love ones, acquaintances, or maybe people whom you barely known of. We all have feelings and limited ability to cope with other people’s words.
LESSON #3 Let go of the past and learn from it. They gave us precious lessons.
Some people may say, ‘Don’t look back’. But I have an idea that we can look back and see how far we’ve come which makes us become a person we really are, today. I value my past because I think they are important lessons which I could learn from as I have experienced it by myself. As a reminder, and self-note, we should learn from mistakes and not to do it again if it causes harm to ourselves and others. Some people may have habits that they eagerly want to get rid of, but can’t because they are not ready to change. But, honestly, there is only now or never. We all have potential to become better persons and create a beautiful society with graceful minds.
I wholeheartedly encourage people to think and act positively with less harm on others because we are matter in this beautiful world.
We will grow together :) | https://medium.com/@fonlalyn/life-lessons-i-have-learned-in-2020-194ed94c2f1b | ['Fon Lalyn'] | 2020-12-22 11:43:08.388000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Happiness', 'Life Lessons', 'Mindfulness', 'Wellbeing'] |
Malicious URL Detection | A malicious website is a site that attempts to install malware (a general term for anything that will disrupt computer operation, gather your personal information or, in a worst-case scenario, gain total access to your machine) onto your device.So it is necessary to detect malicious websites or URLs and it can be achieved by training a deep learning model to classify Malicious and Non-Malicious URL.
Photo by MOWE on Dribbble
Table of Content
Introduction to cAInvas
Source of Data
Data Analysis
Model Training
Introduction to DeepC
Compilation with DeepC
Introduction to cAInvas
cAInvas is an integrated development platform to create intelligent edge devices.Not only we can train our deep learning model using Tensorflow,Keras or Pytorch, we can also compile our model with its edge compiler called DeepC to deploy our working model on edge devices for production.The Malicious URL Detection model is also developed on cAInvas and all the dependencies which you will be needing for this project are also pre-installed.
cAInvas also offers various other deep learning notebooks in its gallery which one can use for reference or to gain insight about deep learning.It also has GPU support and which makes it the best in its kind.
Source of Data
While working on cAInvas one of its key features is UseCases gallery. Since the Malicious URL Detection model is also a part of cAInvas gallery we don’t have to look for data manually.We can load the data in a dataframe by using pandas library, we just have to enter the following commands:
Loading dataset for malicious URL
Running the above command will load the data in a dataframe which we will use for model training.
Data Analysis
Data Analysis involves looking at the number of null values in our dataset which is fortunately zero in our case, looking for any class imbalance which was present in our dataset and it can be visualized with the help of the graph:
To prevent the class imbalance we oversampled our data using the SMOTE module of imblearn library.We also got to know that some features were already extracted from the URL for classification and stored in ourcsv file.
Length Features
Length Of Url
Length of Hostname
Length Of Path
Length Of First Directory
Length Of Top Level Domain
Count Features
Count Of ‘-’
Count Of ‘@’
Count Of ‘?’
Count Of ‘%’
Count Of ‘.’
Count Of ‘=’
Count Of ‘http’
Count Of ‘www’
Count Of Digits
Count Of Letters
Count Of Number Of Directories
Binary Features
Use of IP or not
Use of Shortening URL or not
Once we are done analyzing our data we will create the trainset and testset which will contain the feature vector along with the labels for our model training.It can be done by executing the following commands:
Train test split
Model Training
After creating the dataset next step is to pass our training data into our Deep Learning model to learn to learn to classify URLs. The model architecture used was:
Model: "sequential"
_________________________________________________________________
Layer (type) Output Shape Param #
=================================================================
dense (Dense) (None, 32) 544
_________________________________________________________________
dense_1 (Dense) (None, 16) 528
_________________________________________________________________
dense_2 (Dense) (None, 8) 136
_________________________________________________________________
dense_3 (Dense) (None, 1) 9
=================================================================
Total params: 1,217
Trainable params: 1,217
Non-trainable params: 0
_________________________________________________________________
The loss function used was “binary_crossentropy” and optimizer used was “Adam”.For training the model we used Keras API with tensorflow at backend. .Here are the training plots for the model: | https://medium.com/ai-techsystems/malicious-url-detection-86b38166214e | ['Ai Technology'] | 2021-01-01 12:24:15.092000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Tinyml', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'IoT'] |
1 Big Mistake You Should Stop Making Now, How to Turn Anxiety into Excitement, & How to Avoid the Onset of Anxiety & Panic Attacks | 1 Big Mistake You Should Stop Making Now, How to Turn Anxiety into Excitement, & How to Avoid the Onset of Anxiety & Panic Attacks
SPOLIER ALERT: you will experience increased confidence, self-worth, ease of prioritizing your time, & an expanded capacity to love yourself & others if you follow the steps outlined in this article Elise Pearce Dec 27, 2020·8 min read
Elise Pearce - Occupational Therapist, Yoga Teacher, & Mindset Coach
I was just waking up after not quite four hours of sleep. Big day today! I needed to hurry as I was heading to represent a state organization at a national conference. I has just finished getting dressed up, doing hair and make-up, and was heading to the kitchen.
My body began feeling odd.. quite uncomfortable really. What’s going on? I wondered, why am I feeling so weak?
Motivational thoughts rushed into my mind: You’re just tired, but you’ve got coffee! Just push through it. People are counting on you!
I reached for my lunch bag while reminding myself how important it was to pack this meal — not worth being limited to only the unhealthy options that will be available there.
My heart started to beat faster and faster until it felt like it was pounding obnoxiously in my chest. What’s going on? I don’t like it.
I opened the fridge and noticed it was getting harder to breathe.
What is going on with me? That inner-voice, quite faint but still present, reminded me, Focus! Pack this lunch. You’re on a tight schedule!
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t think. My breathing was getting shallower and I was having to breathe more rapidly to get enough air. That weakness then set in more persistently all over my body. I felt completely drained. Everything started to feel a bit fuzzy.
Am I having a heart attack? I struggled to go as quickly as I could through the heart attack signs and symptoms, but even that seemed to take forever. No, I don’t think it’s a heart attack. Is this.. anxiety?
There I was. Standing in the kitchen. My lunch bag in hand and just staring into the fridge. I would get waves of hurry, pack your lunch!, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t know what to do to next in order to get lunch packed.
It’s like I was stuck in time.
This led right to my first experience of a full-blown panic attack. Unfortunately, It wasn’t my last one either.
I was determined to manage my anxiety and STOP experiencing panic attacks
I am an occupational therapist with a passion for mental health, and by that point in my life — I’d worked with hundreds of clients and helped them with anxiety! Never, though, had I experienced it myself.
I intellectually knew that I was in control of my own thoughts. I had learned so much about the brain. I’d helped so many people recover from brain injuries as well as de-escalate their own anxiety and panic attacks.
Why, then, can’t I stop my own anxiety and panic attacks from reoccurring?
My husband is a professional musician. He’s a singer and guitarist and has appeared on stages on national television performing to millions of people on multiple occasions now. He rarely gets nervous, but I knew he’d gotten nervous before these big televised shows. So finally I asked him how did he manage to calm his nerves: “Just turn the nervousness into excitement,” he would say.
“How?” I asked. “You just have to get your mind right. It’s not easy, but you can do it.” This answer of his would leave me hopeful (that if he could do it, I could do it!), yet also super frustrated — because I still didn’t know HOW to do it.
Had only I taken my husband’s advice literally at that point in my life, it would have saved me a lot of time and energy.
I Figured It Out, & I’m Sharing What I Learned
I did it, y’all! It took me years to figure out how to manage my anxiety, but I am now able to successfully de-escalated those sensations and avoid panic attacks — without medication!
I don’t want anyone to feel like there is no way out.
I want to help others get to this point in there journey in as little time as possible. | https://medium.com/@elisepearce/how-to-stop-a-panic-attack-turn-anxiety-into-excitement-28ec950536f6 | ['Elise Pearce'] | 2020-12-27 05:14:51.068000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Confidence', 'Anxiety Relief', 'Panic Attack', 'Anxiety'] |
Tribe-less in a World of Belonging | Tribe-less in a World of Belonging
“They are still my people, but I am no longer one of them.”
Photo by Tiplada Mekvisan on Unsplash
It is hard to realize that you don’t fit in. After 30 years as a Mormon, I woke up and didn’t belong. Your story and mine aren’t so different.
“They are still my people, but I am no longer one of them.”
This thought occurred to me earlier today. These last two weeks have been emotional. My wife’s grandfather died, and we had his funeral. He was more a grandfather to me than my own grandfathers were. He was a major influence in my life. I always looked up to him. He was a great man.
He had a tribe. He belonged. I never told him that I no longer belonged. I guess he knows now.
I grew up Mormon. We were, and continue to be, a communal people. We do everything together. We eat together, we serve together, we date each other, and we raise our families together. I love my people.
We have our own words like ward and stake. When we have a potluck, someone makes jello. We call each other brother and sister. Our kids play together after school. We fix each other’s roofs, and mow each other’s lawns. Everything we do, we do together.
My dad picks up a blind and deaf brother every Sunday to bring him to church. On Tuesdays, my mom teaches extra-curricular scripture classes for church members. During the school year, she teaches a youth seminary class at 6am every weekday. It gives her purpose and direction.
Being Mormon includes some weird rules. We don’t drink coffee. We don’t drink alcohol. No drugs, no sex before marriage, no bad language, no rated R movies, and no doubts.
That’s where everything took a turn for me. We’ll get there in a minute.
Growing up I loved the certainty of having a tribe. We could travel anywhere in the world, and be assured of finding people we shared a belief system with. This built instant trust and a network that was reliable.
The coming of age rituals were some of my favorites. At 8, you get baptized, and then at 12, you become a “young man” and receive the priesthood. For me, this was the coolest thing ever. They taught me that when I received the priesthood, I was receiving the authority to act in God’s name. It was humbling and powerful for me.
This weekend, at grandpa’s funeral, I heard story after story of how God had intervened in the lives of people. I heard testimonies of faith and surety. People spoke of a God that reaches out and fixes problems in the lives of individuals. It was moving. I missed that certainty deeply. I missed belonging.
You see, being a heretic is a funny thing. You remember what it was like to believe like everyone else does. Belonging was a gift that you loved. Sharing inside jokes, and deep moving stories was something you looked forward to every week. You know how to look like a member of the tribe, but you aren’t.
Inside you are different and you know it.
The difference for me was not complete disbelief, but an expansion of belief beyond the boundaries set by Mormonism. Where Mormonism sees facts, I see metaphors.
Adam and Eve became symbols of the life of man. Jesus was once my literal Savior from sin. Now I see him as a symbolic guide on my own journey to redemption through the death of my old mind and the resurrection of a higher consciousness. The words of prophets, both old and new, were the mind and will of God. Now, they are the attempts of men to describe that which is indescribable.
They are beautiful metaphors with life changing ideas. But in a world of certainty, metaphors are too weak. The heretic is seen as one who weakens the faith and surety of the tribe. They are a cancer worthy only to be cut out.
They are unacceptable.
Mormons are a jovial people, but if there is anything they are very serious about, it is their beliefs. Every two years, adult members of the church go before their local leaders and profess their beliefs in a one-on-one meeting. If the adult member answers all the questions correctly, they are given a temple recommend, which is a card, that allows them to attend the temple. It also serves as proof of faithfulness when you travel to a Mormon church outside of your area. You are literally a “card-carrying” member.
But I’m not. It’s been almost a year now. It hurts to say it out loud.
It all comes back to doubt. I had been taught to avoid doubt, and to fear it as something that could destroy my soul. Maybe they were right, and now I’m screwed forever. But that’s not how it felt. I had questions that I could not find good answers to. I looked for years. I prayed for years.
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
The tears I shed during that time haven’t stopped flowing. Every few weeks, I just start crying. I love my tribe, but I don’t belong.
As I searched for answers to those questions, I found more questions. I needed answers, but studying created more doubt. After years of studying and praying, I came to believe differently than my tribe.
And in Mormonism, different beliefs are not tolerated.
Sure, you can have different ideas about politics, or pizza toppings. These are trivial in comparison to what matters most. Beliefs surrounding the nature of God, and Jesus, the exclusive authority of the Church and fealty to the leadership of the church are sacred. These beliefs are the foundation of everything the church stands on. From where they stand, there can be no compromise.
They haven’t kicked me out yet. I still go to church most Sundays. The trick is to watch what you say. I’ve learned to be tactful. I love so much of what the church offered to me growing up. It was a wonderful, stabilizing force in my life. I learned about truth and honesty, friendship, love and loyalty. I want the lifestyle, but I don’t belong.
Heresy comes from an old Latin word that meant school of thought. In the early church, there were many different schools of thought. The ones that garnered power killed the others. The problem was that heresies kept coming back from within the flock of the faithful.
Heresies are like blooming flowers in a field owned by grass. Every time one springs up, they send in the lawnmower.
I’ve tried for years to be one of them, to fit in, and be a happy blade of grass.
But I’m a flower.
Watch me bloom.
Photo by Nabil Farook on Unsplash
Thanks for reading and sharing. If you’d like to continue the conversation, leave a comment below or email me at [email protected]
Love and peace,
Adam King. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/tribe-less-in-a-world-of-belonging-198934f2722b | ['Adam King'] | 2019-06-17 16:46:57.753000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Faith', 'Hope', 'Religion', 'Change'] |
10 things every man should know about miscarriage | 10 things every man should know about miscarriage
It’s not a “her” issue. You have a voice too, so use it.
My wife and I in Grand Rapids last month, celebrating our pregnancy with a silly photoshoot.
When my wife and I woke up on Oct. 21, we were pregnant.
Three hours later, we were not.
We had an appointment for our 10-week ultrasound, so we went in expecting to get our first glimpse at our son or daughter-to-be.
Instead, what we got was…blank. So we waited for something other than blank. I looked up at the screen at the medical center — through it, rather — keeping my presumptions on a tight leash.
After all, anyone who’s ever seen a live ultrasound knows it’s like trying to solve a puzzle with your eyes. “Is that it? Nope. Maybe that? Nope.”
The nurse finally broke what felt like 15 minutes of silence. “So, I’m not seeing a 10-week fetus.”
We heard what she said. But again, no presumptions. There had to have been an explanation for all of this. An inexperienced nurse. Poor lighting. An honest mistake.
We left in separate cars. Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was my wife. I answered, and she was in tears. Before she could say anything, I knew.
She’d received confirmation that the fetus had stopped developing weeks earlier and died. We had what’s called a “missed miscarriage.”
“Blindsided” is the only word that comes to mind. My wife had carried two healthy children to term. She was healthy. I was healthy. We knew that miscarriages happened. We have family members, friends that have had them.
But this wasn’t supposed to happen to us.
Wrong.
Our story is not unique. We’re not the first family to be caught off guard by a miscarriage, nor will we be the last.
I’m putting this out there, not because anything I write will make any other family feel less blindsided. It won’t. I’m writing this because the worst kind of pain is that which is compounded by the illusion that we’re alone in our pain.
We’re not alone. We’re never alone. My highest ambition in all of this is that other families, and men in particular, know that.
Why men?
Well, an estimated one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.
One in five.
And that’s a conservative estimate, given that many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn’t realize she’s pregnant, so it goes unreported.
Whether you know it or not, you probably know multiple people who have been impacted by miscarriage.
Yet, we don’t talk about it nearly enough. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen recently spoke out, and that sparked countless others to open up and share about their own pregnancy losses, which was encouraging to see.
But stigma doesn’t dissolve unless lots of us speak up and keep speaking up. You can’t fix a problem if the only ones addressing it are those who are suffering the most.
The truth is, women experience the most taxing parts of miscarriage. They endure excruciating physical pain that men simply don’t. They internalize deep shame, embarrassment and guilt that we can’t even begin to grasp.
But this isn’t a strictly female issue. So it shouldn’t fall squarely on their shoulders to break through the social taboo. In fact, we need to step up for the women in our lives. After all, we’ve been, on the whole, conspicuously quiet about this for far too long.
Just because it’s not your body, you still have your voice.
I’m sharing some of what I’ve learned over the past few weeks here, so that, God forbid, if other men do experience something similar to what I did, they can be informed, strong, supportive, vulnerable partners, and perhaps even, help others be the same.
Here are 10 things every man should know about miscarriage. (Note: parts of what I’ve written are graphic and may be difficult to read. They were difficult to write.)
1. If you have a hard time finding resources, that’s because resources are hard to find
After the shock of the initial news begins to settle, you start asking, “What, now?”
Thankfully, we’d been working with a certified nurse-midwife for several weeks and she was terrific every step of the way, coaching my wife, listening, and just being present. But when we asked her to point us toward some additional resources, even she was baffled.
No one hands you a playbook for how to deal with this. Not even a corny “What to do after a miscarriage” pamphlet. Nothing.
Turns out the Internet really doesn’t offer much either.
Think I’m exaggerating? Google “miscarriage support” or “miscarriage resources.” You’ll find, more or less, a black hole. It’s eerily sparse.
What you will find is a wealth of resources on child loss, bereavement, and stillbirths. But for miscarriage, specifically? It’s almost like, somewhere along the line, we collectively decided miscarriage didn’t warrant its own conversation. It was fine if we just grouped it in with all of the other crappy things parents go through.
Now, I did find a series of firsthand accounts on Medium and a few other websites and a handful of Facebook support groups.
But I saw few posts from men.
We’re quiet.
Let’s not be. Let’s speak up. Let’s make ourselves available to the people in our lives, so that when they’re going through a crisis like this, you’re one of the first people they seek out.
If you can’t find a resource, be a resource.
2. After a miscarriage, mind your words
A miscarriage is something for you to navigate together, as a family — not separately. If you’re a fiercely independent person, as are both me and my wife, this one might be tough for you.
Miscarriage is not the woman’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault. That’s why, when you’re talking about it, make sure you don’t inadvertently pin the blame on her.
In other words, you can’t tell her it’s not her fault, but in the same vein, say, “She had a miscarriage.”
You don’t get to say, “We had a baby,” but “She had a miscarriage.” You don’t get to claim the miracles but disown the tragedies. You’re not just a team when you’re winning. You’re in a partnership, for better or worse. Act like it, and be cognizant of the language you’re using.
3. Postpartum depression doesn’t just happen when babies are brought to term
You can be the best, most supportive, thoughtful partner ever, and she still may not respond the way you feel like she should.
That’s OK — just keep doing the work. Be steadfast. These aren’t normal circumstances. You’re not being supportive so she reciprocates or plans you a parade.
She, meanwhile, is going through hell. Women who suffer miscarriages can face a high risk of experiencing postpartum depression (PPD).
The birth of a baby can trigger a deluge of emotions, but PPD after miscarriage is discussed far less frequently — though the depression is every bit as visceral. After all, a woman’s body undergoes a massive hormonal shift, complete with harrowing lows, whether or not the baby is brought to term.
Postpartum Support International runs a toll-free helpline offering basic information, support, and resources: 1–800–944–4773
This is a dark time, so wrap her up in love, and don’t let go. You get to care for the person you love most when she’s in agonizing pain. That’s a privilege. Don’t forget it.
4. Life will keep moving, but make sure she slows down
There’s no maternity leave for miscarriage. Hell, in the U.S., there’s no maternity leave, period. But my point is, there’s an assumption that, after a miscarriage, things basically just revert back to the way they were before the pregnancy. You’re not pregnant anymore, so it’s like you never were.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a torrent of physical, emotional, and mental anguish to unpack after a miscarriage.
But alas, the world keeps moving, whether you’re ready or not.
Just because she can still kick ass as a parent and a wife and a boss, that doesn’t mean she should be doing so at her normal rate.
It’s your job to slow her down. Her body has gone through a lifetime of trauma, and she’s likely exhausted in every way imaginable, so make sure she rests accordingly.
5. Don’t just be there for her — be there with her
Instead of constantly asking what she needs, try something else: just sit with her.
We all process sadness and tragedy differently. If you’re a crier, then cry yourself a well. If you’re not a crier, then stare off into space, profoundly. Or whatever. Process it in a way that makes sense for you. But don’t do it in secret. Take time to be physically next to her. Even if she hasn’t explicitly requested it, she wants your presence, more than anything.
The grief process can’t be sped up by knocking out a list of chores for the other person. Maybe her love language is “acts of service,” and taking some of her load off does actually make her feel loved, but there’s more to it than that. You can’t just keep asking “What do you need?”
At a certain point, she just needs you.
6. Don’t pretend you’re fine
“Suck it up, pussy.”
While we’re talking stigma, seriously, we need to retire the “I’m fine,” toxic masculinity facade, once and for all. You owe it to yourself.
You’re not fooling anyone. It’s OK to be crushed. It’s not OK to downplay your sadness because you’re scared of looking weak. Pain that’s undealt with doesn’t just go away — it resurfaces, inevitably.
Saying you’re fine when you’re not fine doesn’t put other people at ease. It makes them uncomfortable, because they want to be there for you, but you’re essentially telling them you don’t need them.
It’s OK to need people.
You’re not unfazed.
You’re not too tough to talk about it.
You’re not too manly for therapy or counseling.
Time to silence that fiercely independent, bordering-on-crazy, cabin-in-the-woods survivalist. There’s a time and a place for him. This isn’t it.
The best thing I could’ve done was reach out to my friends and family soon after this all came to light. I have some unbelievable people in my corner, and knowing that made this all a little less daunting.
7. Make yourself a priority
If you want to be the best man you can be after a miscarriage, make sure you’re taking care of yourself, mentally and physically, and you’re carving out time each day to pray, meditate or just have a few quiet minutes. This isn’t time you’re losing — it’s an investment you’re making in your life and the lives of those around you.
A 2017 meta-analysis of 29 studies published in the journal BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth shows that the way most men respond to pregnancy loss is by immediately offering support to their female partners, often at the expense of their own well-being. It’s easy to slip into a pattern of self-neglect and disguise it as a stopgap. Yet, when we care for ourselves, we can better care for others.
It’s not selfish. It’s necessary.
8. (Well-intentioned) people may say things that come across as insensitive
Nothing anyone can say will make this better. Nothing can soften the blow or put it in perspective.
That said, people will try.
“God has a plan.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
And perhaps, the most tone-deaf of all tone-deaf statements: “You can always try again.”
What some people may not realize is, perhaps we could try again. But as one of our friends poignantly put it, “We didn’t just want a baby; we wanted that baby.” And we can never have that baby. There will never be another baby exactly like the one we lost, with that unique genetic coding, heartbeat and fingerprint. And that’s a terribly sad thought.
As best as you can, don’t react to these well-meaning platitudes — respond. Try to remember the intention behind their words. Nobody’s trying to maliciously attack you after you’ve experienced a miscarriage. They know you’re in pain.
At some point, we’ve probably all been shown ample grace by someone in our lives from whom we didn’t deserve it, but they did so anyway.
Be that person.
9. There may be things you will never know about her experience
Seeing my wife in crippling pain was the hardest part of this, for me. My wife is the toughest person I’ve ever met. Seeing her wake up covered in blood every day for almost a week and fighting through that pain was equal parts heart-rending and awe-inspiring.
One night when we were talking in bed, she said one of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard.
“No one tells you this, but there comes a time when you have to pass the embryo, and once you’re sure you’ve identified it, you realize the next step is to flush your baby down the toilet. Like a goldfish.”
I couldn’t move or speak for a solid 30 seconds after she said that.
And that’s when it really hit me: nobody goes into the bathroom with her. I’m not the one sticking my hand in a toilet bowl filled with blood behind a closed door, inspecting each individual blood clot, wondering which one will be the embryo and knowing damn well that that would be the only time our baby will ever be held.
But she did.
I didn’t know this until days after it happened. And if my wife and I didn’t have the openly communicative relationship that we do, I might never have known.
Every miscarriage is different. Still, there are things about her experience that you may never learn. This may take some time to accept.
10. This might always hurt
Again, there’s no universal grieving process, there’s no normal timeline for when it’s acceptable to start talking about trying again. Allow yourselves time to process this tragedy, however long that takes. Be there for each other, and when the time comes, open that door and walk through it, hand-in-hand. In the meantime, consider storing away any baby decor, clothing, or anything that may otherwise stoke unease.
By the same token, know that this isn’t hurt that will be nullified by the conception or birth of a future baby. This isn’t sadness that will be cured by anything. The sorrow may come in waves. It may be triggered by a trigger you didn’t know existed, leaving you feeling lost and helpless all over again days, months, and years down the line. You might not always feel it as intensely as you do at first.
But a part of you might always feel it.
My challenge:
Reach out to your family and friends. Some of them may not understand exactly what you’re going through, so let them know how, specifically, they can help. Again, you probably do personally know someone who’s experienced something similar. Start there.
Don’t have anyone who fits that description? Well, now you do. Here’s my Twitter. Guys, I’m part of your support network now. DM me. I’ll respond, and I’ll listen.
Seek counseling or therapy. Licensed professionals exist for this reason. They can help you process feelings of loss or guilt. If you don’t want to leave home, try BetterHelp or Talkspace.
Join an online community to find others who have been through the same situation. Here’s a page: Miscarriage Mommies and Daddies Unite Worldwide and a group: Pregnancy Loss, Stillbirth & Miscarriage Support Group that may be able to help.
Try the U.K.-based Miscarriage Association’s Zoom miscarriage support groups.
Write. Not a good writer? Who cares? It’s not the eloquence of your prose people will remember. It’s the honesty and vulnerability in your words. Write an article on Medium, or even a short post on social media. You never know how telling your story might change someone else’s.
If you have a suggestion for another resource, please comment below with the details. | https://jaredmckiernan-27972.medium.com/10-things-every-man-should-know-about-miscarriage-b7a6ba9420 | ['Jared Mckiernan'] | 2020-11-18 01:22:24.014000+00:00 | ['Pregnancy', 'Miscarriage', 'Grief', 'Lists', 'Family'] |
Where Is the Rush to Visualize the Public Health Crisis of Racism? | Where Is the Rush to Visualize the Public Health Crisis of Racism?
Data visualization designers can be anti-racist by raising awareness of inequities and finding ways to #VizResponsibly
For the last three months visualizations of COVID-19 case data — with all of its uncertainty and flaws — occupied the 24-hour news cycle and dominated home pages of every major media outlet.
We saw a rush to visualize COVID-19 case data by a wide range of analysts and designers. We talked about visualizing data responsibly. But most of the news stories I’ve seen over the past week are photos of the protests, not visualizations of the systemic injustices our Black community in America has faced. Photos are powerful and important, but so is the data that illustrates the disparities in our country.
Home pages for the Washington Post and New York Times as of June 5, 2020 3:25 PM.
As a public health professional who watched endless dashboards of COVID-19 daily case data get spun up across the data viz community, I still question how much that ‘real-time’ data influences our choices to follow recommendations like social distancing or wearing a mask.
In contrast, I’ve seen how sharing data around inequities can raise awareness and shift perceptions, like the statistics in the Data 4 Black Lives Statement of Solidarity with Minnesota and analysis of fatal police shootings by race. W.E.B Du Bois’s charts remind us just how long these inequities have persisted. Each chart can chip away at the layers of unconscious (or more overt) bias built up over years of social conditioning.
Data exposing inequitable access to education, housing, and other resources is out there. Racism is being discussed as a public health crisis. Many sources have data of better quality than COVID-19 case counts. But somehow it doesn’t seem to captivate our community in the same way that incomplete and flawed COVID-19 case data did. Why?
What can we do as data people
We need to bring the same energy and (more importantly) the same care that we rallied for around the pandemic as we find ways to be anti-racist in our data visualizations.
First, and most importantly, let’s amplify the visualizations and listen to the voices of the Black community. They are actively sharing knowledge, ideas, and needs. Listen to them and share their work.
Then, find ways to be actively anti-racist through your data visualizations. Being anti-racist can be more than just disaggregating data, though that may be one piece of the process. It requires that we actively think about our motivations, bias in datasets, and what stories are being told by whom.
What follows is a list of questions for data visualization designers thinking about their role in the current movement. Some are adapted from the considerations shared around COVID-19 (which still apply here) and others were shared by friends, colleagues, or based in past experience making my own mistakes — I’m still learning too.
1. Who can you amplify?
Amplify the visualizations and voices of Black analysts and designers. You can start by following this list and recommending additional people and organizations to be added.
Go further: Collaborate with Black analysts, visualizers, and organizers. Compensate them for their labor. If you don’t have the resources to pay them for their time, don’t count them out of the project: Make the ask, and leave it to their discretion to say yes or no. Be mindful of what you can learn on your own to be more informed on issues of race in America. Spend time reading and learning so you can be a thoughtful collaborator.
If you’re specifically interested in the intersection of race and health, check out #BlackEpiMatters. @askdrfitz is an excellent person to look to if you’re unpacking how these two issues intersect. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been calling attention to ways that systemic racism has paved the path to the disease’s disproportionate impact on Black people in America.
2. What are your goals?
Be clear on your intent: Is your aim information sharing or enabling action? Have you considered how the visualization or narrative could cause harm, particularly to those represented in the data?
Remember that intention is not as important as impact. Even if your intents are noble, if you receive feedback from a Black reader about your visualization, listen to them. I appreciated how many people sought input and advice from public health professionals, epidemiologists, and biostatisticians on visualizations of COVID-19 data. Now, the experts we need to listen to are those who have lived experience being Black in America.
Think big. Consider how you can use your time and visualization skills to explore and expose issues of systemic racism. Take a card from a site like Mapping Police Violence and dig deep into one specific issue in our country.
Focus on individual stories. Center individual stories and humanize the lives lost. Look to artists and designers who have created visual stories since long before the most recent set of protests, like Mona Chalabi.
Edit: I originally included a different artist’s tribute to Breonna Taylor rather than centering the large body of work Mona Chalabi has done on these issues— functionally not following my own advice and sharing the work of a white woman rather than a woman of color.
Create tools to find information. Instead of exploring systemic issues or individual stories, you could create tools to help people find Black-owned businesses or social justice organizations. Looking beyond donating to causes, changing our buying behaviors to support Black-owned businesses with our dollars is far more impactful than a black square on Instagram.
No matter your intention, include a clear call to action: where to learn more, donate, amplify, or otherwise support anti-racist movements. Give your readers something they can do to follow up on what they learn from your visualization.
3. What data to use?
Vet your data sources for bias with the same depth that a journalist would take when vetting a source. Who and what isn’t represented in the data? Here are seven big considerations to start with: the We All Count Data Equity Framework.
Reflect on where data disaggregated by race is not available. With the publication of books like Invisible Women and Data Feminism, we saw an outcry in the ways big data (and sometimes small data) does not represent all genders. When we don’t have disaggregated data available, you cannot always assess how representative the dataset is of the broad population or subgroups.
If you’re pursuing a data visualization project and cannot find race disaggregated data on your topic, that absence may be a story worth understanding more deeply. The data may be masked to protect the identity of those represented, particularly in small samples, or not be collected with that level of detail. We may not be able to analyze and understand how groups are disproportionately impacted by different issues without those breakdowns or more detail on the generalizability of a dataset.
Then, consider if data gaps are the story: In March, fewer than half the US states were reporting COVID-19 data disaggregated by race. Today, in early June, only two states continue not to report this breakdown. Public pressure seemed to be a key factor in the change in behavior on the part of the states who shifted to release disaggregated data.
4. What design choices are you making?
Think about the narratives we create with stock photos and ensure you have someone’s consent to be featured in your visualization. @pexels actually includes conditions on this use in their terms and conditions (see Section 6).
If you’re sharing visualizations that include photos of protesters, think twice if they identify someone and you don’t have their consent to use and share the image. See some of the photography “don’ts” here.
Always consider representation in the use of stock photos. Many sites primarily feature white photo subjects. Seek out more diverse photos, like on sites like nappy.co or TONL.
Think accessible. Many visualizations of COVID-19 were not accessible to those with visual impairments or cognitive disabilities. Design with accessibility in mind. Here are five tips to start with from @AmyCesal on the Storytelling with Data blog.
Reflect on language choices: Words can have coded meaning. Be open to feedback, particularly if it comes from someone represented in the dataset. Seemingly simple things like capitalization matter: here’s why using Black with a capital B is important, for example.
Consider cultural sensitivity of words, icons, and imagery, particularly in borrowing from Black culture. For decades, Black culture seems to have been something to consume but not engage with. It is not ours to appropriate as white designers.
5. What story does your visualization reinforce?
Add links, reading recommendations, and resources. For a lot of topics that might be addressed in these kinds of visualizations, your readers will need more context to make sense of the visualization. Given how underrepresented Black history and discussions of race (and colonialism) can be in our education system, we should not assume our readers have that knowledge. Find recommended reading, add the links to your visualization, and prioritize sharing sources from the people or communities represented in your data.
Ask for feedback, particularly on any text and headlines. How could they be misunderstood? Are you (perhaps unintentionally) reinforcing a stereotype by not considering the context within which data was collected or other peripheral sources you need for your analysis?
With COVID-19, we saw headlines pointing to the disproportionate burden of disease in Black communities. It’s not enough to state that there were more cases or deaths: We need to look at the social determinants of health, not just biology.
Think through a pessimistic lens before you publish. When amplifying a message, one difficult but vitally important way to think of risk and harm is to consider, “If I were to want to cause as much harm as possible with this information (as an analyst or viz audience), what would I do?” Then, work to make that misrepresentation a hell of a lot harder. Think of this like playing “red team” within the information security world.
A Time to Prioritize Feedback and Learning
Allies in the data viz community will make mistakes as we work to be anti-racist in our designs. We need to be open to being told we’re wrong. I asked for feedback on this list from a few colleagues before sharing. If I’ve given bad advice here, tell me — and recommend considerations I missed. This list is obviously only a start.
“Too often we present racial disparities as bare statistics and at best, give a vague nod to “structural racism” or “structural barriers” as sufficient explanations for racial gaps. To change our practices, we must acknowledge the reasons why we tend to avoid including this discussion in our work in the first place.” (Urban Institute) Misunderstanding structural causes of racism and fear of sparking conflict are two of many reasons we avoid getting specific in naming racism as a public health crisis.
Potential allies will repeat the concern that there are so many social landmines to get through with this work that’s it’s not worth trying. This is not the moment for white people to avoid talking about race altogether to divert from challenging conversations. We should be speaking out in our families, workplaces, and communities, rather than embodying the passive stance as white moderates that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lamented about in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
When we’re putting content — like visualizations — into the public sphere though, let’s remember the call to action that started this article: amplify the voices and visualizations of the Black community. Then, where our skills are needed, be thoughtful in how we approach designing visualizations that shine new light on these challenging but critical data stories about systemic racism.
We can’t expect a company or industry to change if we’re not willing to do the work ourselves. Maybe that starts with a few data points, highlighting racial inequity, that you share with your family to start a conversation. Maybe that means digging into a dataset and creating a visualization to share more widely. Maybe that means being more thorough in probing the bias in your dataset. But the change has to start with us.
Feeling stuck and looking for individuals and organizations who have been creating visualizations of racial inequities as part of their mission? The Pew Research Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation Disparities Policy Project are good places to start. Individual designers, like Mona Chalabi, have also been sharing pointed, hand-drawn visualizations of these issues.
If you have recommendations of organizations or designers who have created visualizations recently on issues of systemic racism., please add them in the comments to amplify their work.
Thank you to all who contributed to this article, whether with your ideas, feedback, or review of drafts, including Allen Hillery, Jason Forrest, and Nic Moe. We welcome DVS members to continue this conversation on Slack on the #topic-diversity channel. | https://medium.com/nightingale/data-visualization-racism-a4521a1864d1 | ['Amanda Makulec'] | 2020-06-10 01:08:51.473000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Data Visualization', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism', 'Ethics'] |
How to Stream (Push) Data to a Real-Time Dashboard API in Python | If you are building projects in Python or using Python for data analysis, there is a good chance you will want to capture different types of data. You might even want to create meaningful data visualizations out of those data sets. For example, a dashboard of performance data (CPU/memory/network usage). Or, a dashboard full of sensor data (temperature/motion/contact/energy). Maybe a dashboard displaying the status of critical processes (running/exited). If it is data you can access in your Python code, you can easily build a real-time or IoT dashboard from that data.
This tutorial will show you three different ways to use the basics of Python to stream/push different types of data to a real-time dashboard API. While this tutorial will leverage Initial State’s API as an example, you can apply the principles in this tutorial to interface similar APIs.
Background Info: Initial State’s Events API
Initial State is a streaming service that allows you to visualize and analyze data in your web browser. It’s a powerful tool to prepare data for analysis by putting it in a well-designed dashboard. You can enjoy a 14-day free trial to experience all features of the platform.
Interfacing the Initial State Events API is quite simple, which makes it a good API to use as an example. The basic concept of streaming data in Initial State is as follows:
When you create an Initial State account, you get a private account streaming access key (e.g. ist_TS0QPEcCQ8CLiahhFmB5EbEzPrCZACdr).
Data is streamed into a data bucket (Initial State’s organizational terminology … more info), which has a bucket key you specify when you create the bucket (e.g. abc123).
These two keys give you the ability to write data into that specific data bucket through Initial State’s Events API at any time. That means you can start/stop/append data from any number of applications as long as you have these two keys.
These two keys do NOT give you the right to read data for security reasons.
A data bucket can contain any number of data streams — a collection of time-series data points with a common name (e.g. temperature).
A dashboard is automatically created for you in your Initial State account when you create a data bucket and send data into that bucket.
You simply need two keys, some data, and knowledge of how to use the Initial State Events API to create a live updating, customizable dashboard.
Method 1: A Python Module
Once you have settled on a data service, the next thing you should do is check for an existing Python module you can use to interface their API. There’s a good chance a well-written, well-maintained module will contain several goodies that will save you lots of time and lines of code.
The Initial State Python Data Streamer module is a good example of what you want to find (github repo and documentation). You don’t have to look at any API documentation to use the Initial State events API if you utilize this module. One line of code will create/append to a data bucket and one line of code will push your data to that destination.
To install the ISStreamer module on a Unix based system:
sudo pip install ISStreamer
Below is an example script that uses the ISStreamer module to create a data bucket and send the number 7 into the data stream myNumber. You simply need to place your account access key on line 3 before running.
You can modify the script to stream different numbers into the myNumber data stream or create additional data streams such as
streamer.log("myMessage", "hi")
streamer.log("myLocation", "44.5013406,-88.0644023")
Log into your Initial State account and click on the newly created data bucket to watch the dashboard update as you run your script. | https://medium.com/initial-state/how-to-stream-push-data-to-a-real-time-dashboard-api-in-python-7a910e41c001 | ['Initial State'] | 2020-04-17 19:13:37.420000+00:00 | ['API', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Dashboard', 'Web Development'] |
Black Magic Astrologer In India | Black Magic Astrologers, black magic is one of powerful technique of astrology which can control a person as according your wants and or resolve the conflicts of people’s life and provides desired result as you wants. Our astrologer Amit Sharma is a well known personality in black magic specialist, he is rich and expertise in resolving the conflicts of peoples life therefore he has many years of experience in removing hurdle from the life of peoples. You can consult him to get rid out from your problem and get resolve you’re all the conflicts of life in a short span of time or instantly and effective in manner. | https://medium.com/@amishasharma110/black-magic-astrologer-in-india-1eed33d8a381 | ['Astrologer Amit Sharma'] | 2020-12-21 15:10:49.461000+00:00 | ['Astrology', 'Marriage', 'Love'] |
Fight Club for Divorced Parents | In my opinion when couples lawyer up it takes away something important. The ability to talk things out with your soon to be ex. It is like once we lawyer up we stop talking.
We never get to resolve the issues that started the downward spiral.
We never get to get things off our chest.
We never get to say out loud the things we need to!
Now there is a good chance it could be like a clip from Fight Club but at least the aggression and resentment would be let out!
Anyone wish they could have talked shit out first before jumping to lawyers, I am not saying to keep the marriage going but to end things with aired out! | https://medium.com/@samanthaboss/fight-club-for-divorced-parents-e87933fefcc9 | ['Samantha Boss'] | 2020-12-22 16:49:44.993000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Divorce', 'Kids', 'Fight Club', 'Coparenting'] |
Snippets of Fall 2020. | I was always a big lover of throwback memories — on Facebook, Google, Spotify — you name it. When that “On this day” headline pops, a part of me fills with happiness. Sometimes, there are things that I completely forgot about, so I’m rediscovering them in a way.
That was my intention behind starting these seasonal/monthly lists: to use them as a little reminder of the stuff I loved and enjoyed in fall 2020.
✸ Moodboard:
✸ Color palette:
✸ Instagram Accounts:
@giulianaflavia_cangelosi
@whylessisnotmore
@versunearchitecture
✸ Movie: The Social Dilemma
✸ Music:
Neon Trees — Sins of My Youth
Neon Trees — Nights
Halsey — Be Kind
Halsey — I’m Not Mad
Harry Styles — Golden
For more music: My Spotify FW 2020/2021 Playlist
✸ Podcast:
You’re Wrong About
(Especially their series about Lady Diana, the first thing I listened from them)
✸ Some Fall Photos: | https://medium.com/@ohhmarie/snippets-of-fall-2020-932ae41618a1 | ['Marija Stankovic'] | 2020-12-12 11:03:31.064000+00:00 | ['Memories', 'Favorites', 'Lists'] |
Running through the Google GCP Cloud Foundation Toolkit Setup | The above graphic skipped the bootstrap. I know, mean right? But the bootstrap is a one-time step while the other three steps will be adapted continuously (albeit less frequently at the bottom)
0-Bootstrap
First, I forked the repo. However, we are using Github Actions and that means our service account key is added as a secret and exposed to terraform as an ENV variable. Since forks must be kept public, this couldn’t work. So, delete the fork and create a new repo instead. Otherwise, before you know it, someone will write a simple terraform snippet that extracts your sudo service account credentials and writes them to STDOUT, meaning it will end up in a public github comment. Bad Idea! So private repo it is.
Next, I decided to unify some variables. Since we’re using a monorepo, symbolic links have proven a good tool for us to keep terraform code DRY. A folder universal contains files that are, well, universal. For this project, that’s mainly universal.auto.tfvars and providers.tf . The variables below are all that’s needed to run through the 0-bootstrap step
org_id = "Y" billing_account = "X" group_org_admins = "[email protected]" group_billing_admins = "[email protected]" audit_data_users = "[email protected]" default_region = "europe-west3"
So, as always
terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply
The first step however, is a bit special. After applying the code, a GCS bucket is created. Since the example repo comes with a commented out backend.tf , the README suggests to
Copy the backend by running cp backend.tf.example backend.tf and update backend.tf with your bucket from the apply step (The value from terraform output gcs_bucket_tfstate ) . Re-run terraform init agree to copy state to gcs when prompted
This is kinda neat. I have seen a lot of bootstrapping where people do a bunch of shell scripting to get started. This is cleaner.
This creates two projects (one for us, disabling the cloud build). More importantly, it creates a service account for which you can get an access key to use for the CI but also the manual applies for now.
gcloud iam service-accounts keys create account.json --iam-account [email protected]
make sure you DO NOT commit this file to git. a quick
echo "**/account.json" >> .gitignore
should suffice.
1-Org
Alright, at this point I was motivated. It went smooth, next step!
cd ../1-org
cat README.md
Here I hit the aforementioned “each step is a separate repo” discrepancy. But that’s fine, I like our approach. With the linked files from universal, the directory looks as such
$ tree ./
├── backend.tf
├── folders.tf
├── log_sinks.tf
├── org_policy.tf
├── projects.tf
├── providers.tf -> ../_universal/providers.tf
├── README.md
├── terraform.tfvars
├── universal.auto.tfvars -> ../_universal/universal.auto.tfvars
├── variables.tf
└── versions.tf
Of course, you have to fix the backend.tf to point to the bucket created before. But the code is pretty explicity about that. Make sure to always read the README of each substep ;-)
Applying this code base however gave me trouble. We’re in Belgium, so we naturally went for europe-west1 which is the Belgium data center. Well, that causes issues!
Service availabilities for different EU regions
Turns out BigQuery is not supported in the Belgium region. Well, damn! Adjusting the default_region variable in the universal variables file means that the bootstrap step will be impacted! In fact, the state bucket will be impacted. But at this point, I have the 0-bootstrap and the 1-org state files in that bucket. So choosing the wrong region in the beginning is annoying! Make sure you choose a region that supports all the services to save yourself the trouble.
To fix this, I used the steps below
Now, we have the bucket in the new location and we can apply step 1-org
apply failed!
Damn, what now? Ah! Well, best to apply these changes with the aforementioned account.json account
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=<path_to_account_json>
This should work right?
Turns out, they are using what GCP calls service account impersonation . This makes sense on cloud build but we’re already running these steps as the service account. It can’t impersonate itself right?
So I removed all occurences of var.terraform_service_account and voilà!
2-Networks
Same steps as above, fix backend, link universal files, remove service account references. init, apply. Done
3-Projects
Last step, wuhu! Defining which projects you want in your org. This is also the place where you can import any existing projects. The sample repo utilizes the project-factory module but it is still a bit rough around the edges. In brief, they are using local exec too much to create projects, relying on a local python, gcloud and jq installation.
Anyways, I’d think up a nice folder structure for your projects here and then apply the code. Aftewards, you can add existing projects to the repo by using the terraform import functionality. New projects on the other hand can be created with the project-factory which will give you best-practices out of the box.
Conclusion
The cloud foundation toolkit by Google allows any experienced engineer to set up an enterprise cloud setup in less than a day. But as always, that’s more of a sales pitch than a statement to rely on. Do your homework and read the source code! Also, don’t just blindly apply the best practices but also know what they are. Still, it’s nice not having to reinvent the wheel. The old pattern was that people share best practices in blog posts and technical guidelines and then you had to translate that into your specific environment and apply them. Today, we’re taking a codified description of the best practices from the Google engineers themselves and then we apply that to our infrastructure! I’m so happy to cut out the middle man (me) and focus on the really important things instead. Like our weekly facts and breakfast sessions or creating real business value for our clients | https://medium.com/datamindedbe/running-through-the-google-gcp-cloud-foundation-toolkit-setup-b4c5a912da56 | [] | 2020-04-26 21:34:59.296000+00:00 | ['Google Cloud Platform', 'Infrastructure As Code', 'Software Development', 'Terraform', 'Infrastructure'] |
How to Leverage NFTs as a Creator or Collector? | Learn how you can leverage the rising popularity of NFTs.
Image Source: CryptoRush
2021 is the year we have seen a rapid rise in the popularity of NFTs. Following the historical Christie’s auction on Mar 11 which saw Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” sold for an eye-popping $69.3 million, more and more brands and artists alike are joining the trend to release their own NFTs. Let us look at how we can leverage the power of NFTs.
Creators
For brands, platforms, artists, and content creators of some sort, NFTs open up a whole new avenue for which they can sell their works. Artists can easily turn their masterpiece be it a picture, song, gif, etc., into a NFT which will have several benefits. Firstly, people can easily verify the authenticity of the NFT in the marketplace as the blockchain which they are created on provides an immutable and transparent record of the ownership. This deters counterfeits and copycats, which preserves the value of the NFT. Secondly, now it is possible to program royalties into the NFT such that every time it is resold a percentage of the sale goes back to the creator as a royalty. Therefore, if their NFT appreciates in value or changes hands on the secondary market, creators will also benefit.
Collectors
On the other side of the coin, buyers can stand to gain from the appreciation in value of the NFTs. NFTs are inherently scarce, usually they are unique or only a small finite number of copies are minted in the collection. For big brands and reputable artists with huge followings, this means that the demand far exceeds the supply. This probably leads to a price appreciation in the secondary markets after the launch. Of course, all this is speculation with a risk of financial loss as well.
Another way of thinking of it is giving support to the creator whom you believe in. He/she might not be well known now, but in the future if they realize the potential you saw in them, you will also be able to benefit from their success.
Speculations aside, there is a whole other range of utilities of a NFT an owner can leverage on. Some platforms use it as a form of membership, as well as giving tiered discounts or bonuses on the platform for NFT holders. Other platforms use NFT as a deed to an ownership of digital land in which users have free choice on what to use the digital land for. Another upcoming area is the use of NFT in-games, traditionally in-game assets belong to the company and are hard to transfer. With in-game assets minted as NFTs, such as weapons, armors, equipment, etc., owners can utilize NFTs in game as well as cross over to another game if the ecosystem allows. In the event an owner does not want to continue playing the game he would be able to easily trade or sell it in the marketplace, getting some value for the time and/or money he spent in the game.
Leverage NFTs with Mars Panda
The NFT market looks to continue growing and more innovative utilities and use cases will emerge. One will have to take a closer look at the unique utilities each has to offer, to determine if it is worthwhile investment. But definitely there will be ample opportunities available for both creators and collectors to leverage NFTs using the Mars Panda NFT Marketplace and take part in this exciting space. Mars Panda NFT Marketplace offers a simple and easy way to navigate the world of NFT. With the vast payment options available, people new to cryptocurrency will still have access by simply using fiat for the transactions. Aside from being user-friendly, Mars Panda is Headquartered in Singapore, and while trying to best comply to Singapore Regulations, has commissioned an entity that has obtained a regulatory exemption under the Payment Services Act (“PSA”) for digital payments token services, Legatus Global Pte Ltd to be issuing the Mars Panda Token (MPT) as well as doing the KYC/AML during the private sales and distribution of tokens to private investors.
Why wait, come join us now in this brave new world of the future.
You can sign up to join Mars Panda NFT Marketplace here: https://www.marspanda.world/form
About Mars Panda
Mars Panda is a complete eco-system which consists of:
• Games, Social Media and Ecommerce Aggregation
• Yield farming DeFi
• Mars Panda game with NFT game elements
• NFT Marketplace
We aim to fuse mainstream eCommerce and Gaming to the crypto world of NFTs and DeFi, on one seamless, unified platform.
Find us at:
Website | Telegram | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Medium | https://medium.com/@marspandaworld/how-to-leverage-nfts-as-a-creator-or-collector-b91636485d62 | ['Mars Panda World'] | 2021-07-11 16:00:14.180000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Creators', 'Nft Collectibles'] |
Best Data Sources for Data Scientists | Database is the information you loose when your memory crashes — Dave Barry
Introduction
According to Wikipedia, a dataset or data set is collection of data. In the open data discipline , the dataset is the unit to measure the information released in a public open data repository. The most common format for datasets we will find online are in the form of csv and spreadsheets where the data is organized in tabular form. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables , where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the data set in question. The data set lists values for each of the variables, such as height and weight of an object, for each member of the data set. Each value is known as a datum. Data sets can also consist of a collection of documents or files.
The data present in the dataset can be in the form of images, videos, audio files, numerical data or textual data and are stored in different formats. It is not necessary that there should be only one file , the dataset can be in the form of zip file or folder containing multiple data tables with related data.
How the Datasets are created ?
The datasets are created in multiple ways. They have been collected through surveys. Some of the data are recorded from human observation. Data can also be scrapped from websites or pulled via API’s. Even data can also be machine generated data.
It’s always important to understand that how was this dataset created ? Where does this dataset comes from? It’s always recommended to understand the data we are working from with.
Where to find datasets ?
Some of the most commonly used datasets sources are listed below and are used by the data scientists :-
1. Kaggle
Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. It is a place where you can learn, practice and fine tune our data science and analytics skills. There are lot of open , public data and allow users of the platform to share codes so that we can learn best practices within the data space.
Link :- https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
2. UCI Machine Learning Repository
University of California Irvine hosts 440 data set as a service to the ML community. These data sets are good , cleaned and can be used for the analytics and modelling purpose.
Link: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php
3. Google Public datasets
Google Cloud Public Datasets facilitate access to high-demand public datasets, making it easy for you to access and uncover new insights in the cloud. By analyzing these datasets hosted in BigQuery and Cloud Storage, you can seamlessly experience the full value of Google Cloud with ease.
Google lists all the datasets on a page. On google cloud platform (GCP) , you can query using BigQuery to explore the datasets. We will need to sign up for the GCP account
Link: cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/
4. FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. It is an interactive news and sports site that has some exceptional data visualizations. They make lot of data in open for the public view, meaning that we can download and play with the data ourself
Link: https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/
5. Buzzfeed News
It makes the data sets, analysis , libraries , tools , and guides used in it’s article available on Github. Check them out to learn from some of the best
Link: github.com/BuzzFeedNews
6. data.world
data.world’s cloud-native data catalog makes it easy for everyone — not just the “data people” — to get clear, accurate, fast answers to any business question.A data catalog is a metadata management tool that companies use to inventory and organize the data within their systems. Typical benefits include improvements to data discovery, governance, and access.
Link:https://data.world/
7. Socrata
Socrata hosts cleaned open source data sources ranging from the government , business, and education data sets. The Socrata Open Data API allows you to programmatically access a wealth of open data resources
Link: https://opendata.socrata.com/
8. Awesome public datasets
This Github hosts a library of awesome, public datasets . They are sorted by category and link us straight to the hosting website.
Link: github.com/awesomedata/
9. Quandl
Quandl is a marketplace for financial, economic and alternative data delivered in modern formats for today’s analysts, including Python, Excel, Matlab, and R. Some of the datasets are available for free and some can be purchased.
Link: https://www.quandl.com/search
10. Data.gov
It allows us to download and explore data from US government agencies. Data can range from government budgets to climate data. The data is very well documented so it becomes easy to navigate through the resources.
Link: https://www.data.gov/
11. Academic Torrents
It is a site that is geared around sharing the datasets from scientific papers. We can browse the data sets directly from the website and can also download it .
Link: http://academictorrents.com/browse.php
12. AWS Public Data sets
Amazon has a page that lists all the data sets for us to browse. We need an aws account for this and amazon also gives free access tier for the new accounts.
Link: https://aws.amazon.com/datasets
Some other repositories
Jeremy Singer-Vine
Wikipedia Data Sets
World Bank Data Sets
Reddit — /r/datasets
NASA Datasets
Twitter Dataset via Twitter API
Github Dataset via Github API
CERN Open Data Portal
Global Health Observatory Data Repository
References :
— Machine Learning India
— 11 websites to find free, interesting datasets: interviewqs.com.
— 21 Places to Find Free Datasets for Data Science Projects: www.dataquest.io.
Hope you liked this information
Thanks ,
Saurav Anand | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/best-data-sources-for-data-scientists-ae742b42b457 | ['Saurav Anand'] | 2020-10-26 10:20:30.536000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Computer Vision', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Understanding and Using BLOBs in Your Application (Part I) | What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘blob’? Without any context, it sure sounds like an obscure, mystic object you are playing against in a game of Minecraft. I can almost bet we have all seen the horrifying manifestation of our definition of BLOB on the web somewhere. However, in the world of data, blobs are extremely powerful and have transformed the way data is represented and transmitted.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
Anything and everything that can represent information about an entity is data. Our name, address, cell-phone number, genetic-information, family-tree, all represent information about us, and hence all these fields can be called data. As we begin to think about using information collected from entities, we must also carefully think about representing this information accurately. Consider for example a mobile-app which stores the first name (data), last name (data)and phone number (data)of people (entity) I know. Every morning, this app would go through the list of people on it, and send them a greeting on their phone. The success of this app depends upon the fact that each data field contains what I expect it to contain. I am expecting first name and last name to be strings but I want the phone number to be an integer. What if my app was not able to store data correctly and some of the names were being stored as numbers instead of strings? It would break the logic and the functionality of the app. This is to give you a very basic idea of why data representation matters. As we scale-up into bigger applications with a complex architecture, data-efficiency is crucial and accurate data representation is the first step towards efficiency.
Where do blobs fit-in when we talk of data and representation? Before we get into that, let’s take a look at what a blob is exactly. Blob is an acronym for Binary Large Object. Restructuring the terms for a better understanding, a blob is nothing but a large binary object. Unlike an integer which represents numbers, or unlike a string which represents a sequence of characters, a blob is a stream of raw binary data which represents a “large” object (entity). We are able to understand what ‘Binary’ and ‘Large’ each mean individually. However, what do they mean in the context of an object?
Going back to talking of data: anything and everything can represent information about entities and therefore, anything and everything could be data. Text, numbers, images, audio — everything. Although, we do have ways of representing and working with numerical-data (data as integer, float), textual-data (data as characters and list of characters), but how do we represent images? Or audio files? We should be able to store them in a way which accurately represents each of these types, and can easily undergo further analysis.
Photo by Dan Farrell on Unsplash
Multimedia files (audio, video, gifs) are certainly produced in large quantities these days thanks to all the cool video streaming platforms and smart home-devices. Since our machines are not yet capable of understanding multimedia files as are, they need to be converted into a machine-understandable format before they can be processed and/or transmitted between systems. Stay with me, we are finally about to get to the end of understanding the fuss around blobs. What solution came to help to store huge “blobs” of data in the form of multimedia files? You guessed it! BLOBs!
So blobs represent multimedia files in a binary format. Representing and storing images, audio-files has become really easy with blobs. An application which allows users to upload their image and get a likability score on it or a simple speech-to-text service, both will be transferring data from the front-end (which the user interacts with) to the back-end (where the magic actually happens) in the form of a blob (or multiple blobs). In fact, for applications which use a constant streaming of data from front-end to the back-end (an interactive speech-to-text, for example), the audio is converted into not one but several blobs. These constituent blobs makes up the entire blob, which is nothing but the entire audio-file in binary form.
In the next part of this story, we will be looking at how blobs look like in real-applications, how blobs are transferred between front-end and back-end, and making use of the data that the blob represents. We will be looking at a web-app where the user will be able to record audio and get synonyms for nouns and adjectives in the speech. Here, data transfer between the front-end and the back-end happens through blobs. More fun things to come. Stay tuned folks! | https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-and-using-blobs-in-your-application-part-i-3b8a81806437 | ['Shruti Chaturvedi'] | 2020-11-25 07:15:02.747000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Nodejs', 'React', 'Data', 'Web Apps'] |
Data Analysis on US Foodborne Outbreak Incident in 1998–2018 | Food is one of the necessary things in our daily life. With economic growth, people value the safety of food more. Although the government had passed many acts related to food safety as time goes by, roughly one in six (or 48 million) people in the United States get sick from eating contaminated food every year. More than 250 pathogens and toxins have been known to cause foodborne diseases, and almost all of them can cause an outbreak. Through this analysis project, we can review the status of food safety in the US.
Photo from Yale School of Public Health (shorturl.at/beghC)
Outline
Introduction
Goal
Data Preparation
Exploratory Data Analysis
Model Training & Evaluation
US Heatmap
Conclusion
Introduction
A foodborne disease outbreak occurs when two or more people get the same illness from the same contaminated food or drink. While most foodborne illnesses are not part of a recognized outbreak, outbreaks provide important information on how germs spread, which foods cause illness, and how to prevent infection.
In this project, all the code was conducted on the Google Colab Notebook. The following links are the source code uploaded to Github.
FoodBorne Event Dataset
In all 50 states, public health agencies, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, and Freely Associated States have primary responsibility for identifying and investigating outbreaks and using a standard form to report outbreaks voluntarily to CDC. During 1998–2018, reporting was made through the electronic Foodborne Outbreak Reporting System (eFORS).
This dataset provides data on foodborne disease outbreaks reported to CDC from 1998 through 2015. Data fields include year, state (outbreaks occurring in more than one state are listed as “multistate”), the location where the food was prepared, reported food vehicle and contaminated ingredient, etiology (the pathogen, toxin, or chemical that caused the illnesses), status (whether the etiology was confirmed or suspected), total illnesses, hospitalizations, and fatalities. In many outbreak investigations, a specific food vehicle is not identified; for these outbreaks, the food vehicle variable is blank.
US Population dataset
The US population dataset comes from the US Census Bureau.
Goal
There are some question and goal we want to find out through this project: | https://cyc-tw.medium.com/data-analysis-on-us-waterborne-outbreak-incident-in-4814d6b682a3 | ['Chi-Yun Chen'] | 2020-12-22 20:18:43.060000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Food Outbreakdata', 'Public Health'] |
The Accidental Foreigner | The Accidental Foreigner
Let me take a moment to gush about how awesome it is living in Taiwan: food is good and plentiful here, people are friendly and polite, the internet isn’t blocked, and most importantly, COVID hasn’t taken over the country like it has others.
I can’t imagine still living in Los Angeles while COVID rages on almost a year after. What would it be like being absolutely alone for those nine months in my downtown apartment? What would I have felt watching and hearing the protests after George Floyd’s death roll through my neighborhood? And I probably would have contracted COVID by now according to this news report?
6,000 miles away, I feel like I live in Shangri-la having meals in restaurants, working out of cafes, gathering at friends’ apartments for dinner parties and poker games, and shopping for groceries at my leisure. The only caveats are that I’m required to wear a mask on public transportation and certain public venues, have my temperature checked at any time, and be sprayed with alcohol hand wash at any time. All of that is slowly starting to crumble as reports of locally transmitted cases begin to crop up, first by the horny New Zealand pilot and now by frontline healthcare workers.
To the Taiwanese people’s immense credit, no one panicked after the New Zealand pilot incident. Responsible parties came forward to help with contact tracing and undergo testing, and the case was dealt with efficiently. Now, with these new cases involving frontline healthcare workers, real concern is starting to ripple through the island, so much so that various cities have canceled their Lantern Festivals, celebrations that mark the end of the Lunar New Year festivities, which would take place on February 26, 2021, more than a month from now.
Admittedly, compared to other countries, Taiwanese anxiety over ten cases connected to frontline healthcare workers seems a bit of an overreaction. Yet, for a country that had a streak of 253 days of no locally transmitted cases in 2020, ten is a scary number, enough for me to bring back memories of how I lived during California’s first shelter-in-place. I’m already thinking of stockpiling coffee, alcohol, and grocery staples, I’m preparing to work from home for a while, and I’m looking forward to making significant progress in my video games backlog until all contract tracing and testing has been done. I see my staying at home as doing my part for the greater good, and honestly, I’m a homebody at heart.
Make no mistake — I didn’t find sheltering in place fun the first time around. Here’s what my Kubler-Ross stages of grief looked like in March 2020:
Denial — Omg, this is stupid. I’m so over the United States. I was right in wanting to leave. I’m still leaving, right?
Anger — I want to smash everything in this stupid house!!! Oh shit, I broke the coffee bean grinder. How am I supposed to have my coffee?!
Bargaining — Okay, if almost everyone in Los Angeles just stays put this week, we can all be out of this by end of April. Or May.
Depression — Maybe this Betty Crocker just-add-water muffin mix will cheer me up.
Bonus Anger Stage — Video call meetings really magnify how much I hate meetings.
Bonus Depression Stage — How come I’ve never truly appreciated an Oreo before?
Acceptance — Oooh, there’s something called Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition on the Apple App Store…
I think I’ll fare better this time around now that I’ve experienced shelter-in-place before, know my breaking points, and live alone (I sheltered-in-place with my elderly Taiwanese parents in LA). I also still have the freedom to go outside and run errands, go grocery shopping, and get my sweet treat fix since the situation hasn’t reached a critical point (at least at the time of writing this piece). I’m fairly confident the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control will have these cases under control and life will go back to Shangri-la normal soon. In the meantime, I’m firing up my PlayStation 4, and might I suggest you find a game to play, too? | https://medium.com/@juliactsai/the-accidental-foreigner-c2d4ea049606 | ['Julia C. Tsai'] | 2021-01-21 01:02:28.685000+00:00 | ['Covid Diaries', 'Covid-19', 'Taiwan'] |
6 Quotes by Nelson Mandela That Will Make You a Better Leader | 6 Quotes by Nelson Mandela That Will Make You a Better Leader
Words from one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century
Photo by John-Paul Henry on Unsplash
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela – regarded as the anti-apartheid revolutionary, was the first black president of South Africa. He served as President from 1994 to 1999.
He was imprisoned in 1964 for his attempt to overthrow the ruling minority government.
There, he spent 27 years.
But amid domestic and international pressure, he was released by President F. W. de Klerk in 1990.
While he was president, he focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by tackling institutionalized racism and fostering racial reconciliation.
He was given a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 – an award he shared with former president F. W. De Klerk for his work on the removal of the apartheid government.
Mandela died On 5 December 2013 from a prolonged respiratory infection at the age of 95.
By the time of his death, Mandela was widely considered in South Africa as the father of the nation. Globally, he is often cited alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King as one of the outstanding anti-racist and anti-colonial leaders of the 20th century.
No doubt, his words inspired many.
Here are six quotes from the extraordinary leader that will inspire you and make you a better leader. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/6-quotes-by-nelson-mandela-that-will-make-you-a-better-leader-bdee2ac3113b | ['Inspired Kema'] | 2020-10-20 02:14:07.914000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Productivity', 'Self', 'Leadership', 'Mindfulness'] |
Racial Equity at Work Isn’t Rocket Science | Racial Equity at Work Isn’t Rocket Science
Here are 10 steps to inclusion
Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash.
The past three weeks have been disorienting.
In the wake of the civil unrest after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent heightened racial tension, companies across the country (and the world) have developed a seemingly newfound sense of urgency when it comes to solving their lack of racial representation and inclusion.
From Twitter to Ben & Jerry’s, it’s been interesting to watch brands publish statements denouncing racism and inequity.
DEI consultants like myself have become inundated with inquiries from HR and business leaders who want to talk about rolling out diversity training to their employees and creating a long-term approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion overall.
Black employees have been brought into conference rooms to get a “pulse check” on “how they’re doing” and how their white counterparts can “help.”
Even with all of this activity, until there are systemic changes in the way our workplaces are structured — complete with a total shunning of the status quo — absolutely nothing will change.
Believe it or not, building an anti-racist workplace — one where white supremacy isn’t tolerated or upheld — isn’t rocket science.
Is it uncomfortable?
Yes.
Is it counter to what white people have likely grown accustomed to?
Absolutely.
But is it very difficult to learn or understand?
Not at all.
And yet, the vibe coming from most leaders and HR professionals makes it seem like the problem of racial inequity in the workplace is too hard to solve.
Here are 10 steps companies that are serious about building an anti-racist workplace can take right now.
Clearly define and publicly state why equity and inclusion are important to your organization beyond the “business case” for it and/or it being the “right thing to do.” Create uncomplicated and direct goals specifically designed to measure gains in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and openly share said goals (and progress against them) with all employees and the public. At least 20% of C-level positions should be held by individuals who identify as Black, Latinx, and Native American. These positions should not only be called Chief People or Chief Diversity Officer. At least 30% of senior-level positions (i.e. VPs, Senior Directors, Global Heads) should be held by individuals who identify as Black, Latinx, and Native American. Create an entire department (not just a lone D&I person) dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This department should report directly to the CEO and not to HR. All people processes (i.e. compensation, hiring, promotion, performance reviews) must be audited, re-configured, and measured regularly to ensure there is no disparity in outcome based on race. C-level executives, senior leadership, middle managers, and HR should be held directly responsible and accountable to the success of achieving DEI goals. Eliminate “unconscious bias” training and replace it with coaching, programming, and learning experiences designed to teach racial equity and the nuances of cross-racial interactions at work. Incentivize managers and leaders who work to build inclusive environments and remove managers who actively (or passively) work to erode it. Take the onus off Black people to solve the inclusion problem and cultivate an environment where white people actively engage in anti-racist advocacy.
Here’s the bottom line: If you truly want to build a company culture that actively and relentlessly indexes toward racial equity and inclusion, stop talking about how hard it is and actually start doing something about it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/racial-equity-at-work-isnt-rocket-science-here-are-10-steps-to-inclusion-c669bfe74e5a | ['Dorianne St Fleur'] | 2020-06-22 13:21:59.722000+00:00 | ['Diversity In Tech', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Programming', 'Inclusion', 'Racism'] |
Cyber-crime; How it affects our children and the role our children play in it | A few days back, we carried out a survey on our WhatsApp contacts and this revealed that at least 6 out of 10 people have an element of their personal lives (children`s names, own name or significant other`s details) in their passwords. That is a crazy 60% of the people in the survey have their lives at a major risk of being hacked and get their information stolen. We will not mention the 40% who said they use their children’s birth dates as a password. That on its own is a pulsating time fuse. Children, with their innocence and willingness to help are an effortless target for cyber-criminals and will play a pivotal role in assisting perpetrators achieve their goal. They can easily be manipulated into giving away information such as their mother`s maiden name, father`s high school name, their home address and even both their parents` birth dates. In this case, the child has become an incidental participant to crime.
On an average, children are 12,5 years old when they receive their first smartphone. At that age children barely understand the dangers of being on the internet.
Image is totally not mine by the way :) but I just had to share the stats
Perpetrators find it very easy to siphon information from children because they are not on the qui vive concerning cyber-crime perpetrators. What with being given access to the internet at such tender ages. We teach our children to be careful of strangers walking down the road and not say a single word to them but we do not tell them not click that ‘Confirm’ button on Facebook, not to follow or follow back that person on Twitter and on Instagram. We do not tell them never to attach their location to their pictures before clicking that post button. There is a lot that our children are not aware of concerning the internet and the caution they must exercise.
Children are not only incidental participants to crime but they, in some cases are the perpetrators of cyber-crime. With a staggering 43% of children being bullied online and 1 in 4 having being bullied more than once online, it is not a topic that we can ignore any longer. What`s worse is it isn`t adults doing this bullying. It`s classmates, school mates bullying their peers. Most of this bullying is done by other children. High schools have become a survival of the fittest type of establishment were its either you bully or you get bullied. Finding yourself trashed all over social media with demeaning captions has become the norm in the millennial`s life. Point number 10 in this article states that 71% of students have admitted to visiting a site just to bash another student! (insert shocked and sad emoji). Could your child be among the 71%? Is your child contributing to the 2 to 9 times more likely to commit suicide because of bullying statistic?
Did you know? Bullying and depression go hand in glove. Bullying can cause your child to have social anxiety and esteem problems that will stick with them way into adulthood. Some of the risks children face online as victims are:
Sexual solicitation
Exposure to problematic and illegal content
Harassment
Bullying
Sexual abuse online is easier to perpetrate compared with physical sexual abuse and is not freely recognizable. It starts as a subtle comment on certain parts of our children’s bodies and it escalates to nude photos being shared. The child can eventually be lured into performing sexual acts and find themselves on a porn site without their consent. Most children that are on porn sites will not have given their consent. Maybe it’s better to say this a bit louder: MINORS ON PORN SITES WILL NOT HAVE GIVEN THEIR CONSENT FOR THAT MATERIAL TO BE SHARED! Check out John Iptrafor`s article here https://medium.com/@iptrafor/pedophiles-among-us-b593fc3fff66
That’s all for this second installation of our series folks! Our next article will be on ways through which we can protect our children from cyber-crime. | https://medium.com/@tarirochagwiza/cyber-crime-how-it-affects-our-children-and-the-role-our-children-play-in-it-d9c58d8451af | ['Tariro Chagwiza'] | 2019-02-26 12:11:42.569000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Cyber Bullying', 'Internet Safety For Kids', 'Bullying', 'Cybercrime'] |
How I Live a Content Life | How I Live a Content Life
Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash
I got tired of my own shit and started to form new habits, thoughts, and behaviors that would take me to the next version of myself. Growing is one of the hardest things to do, but staying the same hurts so much more. — BossBabe
All it takes is a change of mindset.
After consistently applying these next habits in my everyday life, I live with more ease, in other words, a content life.
1. Be grateful.
Comparison is the thief of joy. — Theodore Roosevelt
We have this habit of comparing what we have with what others have. And what we have is never enough.
If you intend to live with more ease and be happier, then you need to start being grateful for what you already have.
As for me, I wake up every single day grateful as fuck, no matter what situation I am in.
I am grateful for having the fundamental: a roof over my head and food on the table, because in reality that all I actually need.
2. Try journaling.
Journaling is simply the act of thinking about your life and writing it down. That’s it.
Is one of the more effective acts of self-care. Journaling delivers surprisingly powerful benefits. It is therapeutic. It can help us manage better our emotions and improve our mental health.
With journaling, you can liberate all your thoughts, the good and the bad ones, on a piece of paper. You can freely vent about absolutely everything in there.
Is a place to confess our fears, struggles, and worries wild openly, without anyone making us feel our concerns are unimportant or invalidating our emotions.
Source:kalbo
So for me, journaling has been life-changing: it has helped me accept my feelings as valid. I journal daily. In fact, the title of my journal is “The Everyday Reflection”.
You can try it right now. Go ahead. Open a word document and write about your day. It doesn't matter if your day was trivial or the opposite, just write about it. Remember to add in some gratitude.
Experiment with this for a week or a month and let me know what are your thoughts on journaling afterward.
3. Live in the present moment.
According to a Harvard study, our mind wanders 47 percent of the time.
I don’t think I am breaking the news when I say that the majority of the time our attention is drifting and isn’t focused on what we’re doing at the moment.
“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, psychologists and conductors of the research, wrote.
“Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we’re engaged,” Killingsworth, added.
Staying present is not an easy task. It’s forming a habit and it does take time.
As for me, I learned to be present through mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is about being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without trying to judge it or change it, simply being aware of it.
It's about being the observer, the witness, the watcher of our thoughts. Merely that.
I also learned to be more present when I read the book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. This is a book that I highly recommend you to read.
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. — The power of now.
This is a saying that helps me stay present in the moment:
When thinking about life, remember this; no amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of anxiety can change the future.
4. Accept everything as it is.
I must make an important differentiation here. Accepting everything as it is isn’t about settling or giving up, it's about acknowledging we dont have control over other people's actions or on how they react and making peace with that.
Control is an illusion. The only thing we are in charge of is our actions. Everything else — from how someone feels about us to the success of our stories in Medium — is out of our hands.
Accept everything as it is it's about letting things be.
And it's about letting go too. Letting go of the “should have, could have, would have” and live in what is happening.
I assure you life gets so much better when you stop holding on to things or people that don’t longer belong to your present.
To conclude
Remember, most of your stress comes from the way you respond, not the way life is. Adjust your attitude. Change how you see things. Look for the good in all situations. Take the lesson and find new opportunities to grow. Let all the extra stress, worrying, and overthinking go. | https://medium.com/the-everyday-reflection/how-i-live-a-content-life-de1e8739e19d | ['Patricia Vilchez'] | 2021-06-08 08:21:13.639000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life Advice', 'Peace Of Mind', 'Happy', 'Let Go'] |
How banks use AI to catch criminals and detect bias | Imagine an algorithm that reviews thousands of financial transactions every second and flags the fraudulent ones. This is something that has become possible thanks to advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, and it is a very attractive value proposition for banks that are flooded with huge amounts of daily transactions and a growing challenge of fighting financial crime, money laundering, financing of terrorism, and corruption.
The benefits of artificial intelligence, however, are not completely free. Companies that use AI to detect and prevent crime also deal with new challenges, such as algorithmic bias, a problem that happens when an AI algorithm causes systemic disadvantage for a group of a specific gender, ethnicity, or religion. In past years, algorithmic bias that hasn’t been well-controlled has damaged the reputation of the companies using it. It’s incredibly important to always be alert to the existence of such bias.
For instance, in 2019, the algorithm running Apple’s credit card was found to be biased against women, which caused a PR backlash against the company. In 2018, Amazon had to shut down an AI-powered hiring tool that also showed bias against women.
Banks face similar challenges, and here’s how they fight financial crime with AI while avoiding the pitfalls.
Catching the criminals
Fighting financial crime involves monitoring a lot of transactions. For instance, the Netherlands-based ABN AMRO currently has around 3400 employees involved in screening and monitoring transactions.
Traditional monitoring relies on rule-based systems that are rigid and leave out many emerging financial threats such as terrorism finance, illegal trafficking, and wildlife and health care fraud. Meanwhile, they create a lot of false positives, legitimate transactions that are flagged as suspicious. This makes it very hard for analysts to keep up with the deluge of data directed their way.
This is the main area where AI algorithms can help. AI algorithms can be trained to detect outliers, transactions that deviate from the normal behavior of a customer. The data science team of ABN AMRO’s Innovation and Design unit, headed by Malou van den Berg, have built models that help find the unknown in financial transactions.
The team has been very successful at finding fraudulent transactions while reducing false positives. “We are also seeing patterns and things we did not see before,” Van der Berg explains.
Instead of static rules, these algorithms can adapt to the changing habits of customers and also detect new threats that emerge as financial patterns gradually change.
“If our AI flags a transaction as deviating from a customer’s normal pattern, we find out why. Based on the available information we check whether the transaction deviates from the normal pattern of a customer. If the investigation does not provide clarity about the payment, we can make inquiries with the customer,” van den Berg says.
ABN AMRO uses unsupervised machine learning, a branch of AI that can look at huge amounts of unlabeled data and find relevant patterns that can hint at safe and suspicious transactions. Unsupervised machine learning can help create dynamic financial crime detection systems. But like other branches of AI, unsupervised machine learning models might also develop hidden biases that can cause unwanted harm if not dealt with properly.
Removing unwanted biases
Data science and analytics teams at banks must find the right balance where their AI algorithms can ferret out fraudulent transactions without infringing on anyone’s rights. Developers of AI systems make sure to avoid including problematic variables such as gender, race, and ethnicity in their models. But the problem is that other information can stand as proxies for those same elements, and AI scientists must make sure these proxies do not affect the decision-making of their algorithms. For instance, in the case of Amazon’s flawed hiring algorithm, while gender was not explicitly considered in hiring decisions, the algorithm had learned to associate negative scores to resumes with female names or terms such as “women’s chess club.”
“For instance, when AI techniques are to be used to identify clients suspected of criminal activity, it must first be shown that this AI treats all clients fairly with respect to sensitive characteristics (such as where they were born),” van den Berg says.
Lars Haringa, a data scientist in van den Berg’s team, explains: “The data scientist who builds the AI model not only needs to demonstrate the model’s performance, but also ethically justify its impact. This means that before a model goes into production, the data scientist has to ensure compliance regarding privacy, fairness, and bias. An example is making sure that employees don’t develop biases as a result of the use of AI systems, by building statistical safeguards that ensure employees are presented unbiased selections by AI tools.”
The department that’s responsible for the outcome of the transaction monitoring analyses also takes responsibility for fair treatment. Only when they accept the work and analyses by the data scientist can the model be used in production on client data.
ABN AMRO’s transaction monitoring team measures potential bias upfront and periodically to prevent these negative effects. “At ABN AMRO, data scientists work with the legal and privacy departments to ensure the rights of clients and employees are safeguarded,” van der Berg tells TNW.
Balanced cooperation
One of the challenges companies using AI algorithms face is deciding how much detail to reveal about their AI. On the one hand, companies want to take full advantage of joint work on algorithms and technology, while on the other, they want to prevent malicious actors from gaming them. And they also have a legal duty to protect customer data.
“To safeguard algorithm effectiveness, like all other models within banks, there are several critical stakeholders in model approval: besides the model initiator and developers, there is Model Validation (independent technical review of all model aspects), Compliance (e.g. application of regulation), Legal, Privacy, and Audit (independent verification of all proper processes, including the integrity of the entire chain of modeling and application),” van der Berg says. “This is standard practice for all banks.”
ABN AMRO does not publish the details of its anti-crime efforts, but there is a strong culture of knowledge sharing, van der Berg says, where different departments put their algorithms and techniques at each other’s disposal to achieve better results. But at the same time, there are high restrictions on the use of customer data and statistics. ABN AMRO is also sharing knowledge with other banks with the same restrictions. Where there’s a need to share data, the data is anonymized to make sure customer identities are not revealed to external parties.
Banking, like many other sectors, is being reinvented and redefined by artificial intelligence. As financial criminals become more sophisticated in their methods and tactics, bankers will need all the help they can get to protect their customers and their reputation. Sector-wide cooperation on smart anti-financial crime technologies that respect the rights of all customers can be one of the best allies of bankers around the world. | https://medium.com/abn-amro-developer/how-banks-use-ai-to-catch-criminals-and-detect-bias-4a261f6de4ad | ['Abn Amro'] | 2020-12-07 15:57:43.076000+00:00 | ['Abn Amro', 'Innovation', 'AI', 'The Next Web', 'Future Of Finance'] |
We need to learn the laws of integral, living systems since we exist in one! | We need to learn the laws of integral, living systems since we exist in one! Zsolt Hermann May 22·1 min read
Question from the Internet:
“How are peace, human rights, and the right to self-determination interrelated?”
In order to understand the answers to such questions, first, we need to understand and actually feel what it means that we evolved into a globally integrated and fully interdependent system.
In this world, we are but individual cells of the same, Human “superorganism” which is also irrevocably integrated into Nature’s system.
In such an integral, interdependent system peace is the state of balance, homeostasis achieved by mutually responsible and mutually complementing interconnections above and despite the vast diversity, against the differences, tension between the seemingly incompatible parts, elements.
The only difference between other parts and elements in nature and human beings is, that while other elements, parts are integrated into the system blindly, instinctively, humans have to achieve this integration, mutual cooperation consciously, methodically above and against our inherently selfish, egoistic, and subjective nature, program.
This makes us the qualitatively highest part in nature, the only part with a conscious, analytical mind that is able to observe and partner nature with full awareness, actively participating in the creation and nurturing life.
In this system “human right and self-determination” means my conscious agreement and participation in this process, considering others and the natural system more important than my inherently egoistic, individualistic self, since they are my parts, my connection with them, my unconditional service towards them is facilitating, sustaining the life I also receive everything from. | https://medium.com/@samechphoto/we-need-to-learn-the-laws-of-integral-living-systems-since-we-exist-in-one-7ae5080aa949 | ['Zsolt Hermann'] | 2021-05-22 21:07:19.862000+00:00 | ['Connection', 'Peace', 'Integration', 'Nature', 'Education'] |
What Does a US Expat Need to do as the Year Comes to an End? | Full PDF download is available here.
US Expats living and working in the UK
If you are a US citizen you will be aware that as we are reaching the end of the financial year (December 31) it’s time to start thinking about your tax return for 2020, even if you live abroad.
Although it’s not normally due until April 15, or June 15 for those taxpayers living outside the US, last year’s filing deadline was extended to July 15 due to the pandemic. To date, no such extension has been announced for the 2020 Federal tax return season. State and local filing deadlines vary from State to State.
However, whether April or June, it’s never too soon to start preparing the information that you will require to ensure that the process runs smoothly. As usual, if you can’t meet the April or June deadlines, there is the option to file for an extension of time.
What do I need to do?
There are various pieces of information and documents that you will need to gather and prepare, if you are a US citizen residing abroad, as well as completing a tax return form. This information will include:
· Travel — A schedule of the countries (including USA) you have visited with dates of arrival and departure.
· Wages, salaries and compensation — All official documentation (e.g. W-2, P60, P45, payslips, etc.) as well as any self-employed records of income and expenses.
· Interest and dividend income — This is either from a foreign bank, domestic bank or other financial institution.
· Any other income — This could include income from partnerships, trusts, or other business interests that you have.
· Interest, taxes, and other deductible expenses paid — As a US citizen, mortgage interest, property taxes, and State income/sales taxes can count as a deductible expense. Other deductible expenses can include charitable contributions, alimony, and medical expenses.
· Foreign housing expenses — You may be eligible to deduct the cost of your accommodation outside the US.
· Dependents — You must provide information including, if available, Social Security Numbers (SSN) or Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITIN) of your dependents.
· Foreign financial accounts — You will need to provide information regarding your foreign bank and other financial accounts.
· Foreign trusts, companies, and partnerships — If you have an interest in a foreign entity such as a trust, company, or partnership, you may need to provide detailed information about that entity.
The sooner you start to gather the correct information the better, and if you are unsure what applies to you or what can be counted as a deduction contact your tax specialist who will be able to guide you.
Year-End Planning
In addition to preparing for next year’s tax filings, you might wish to consider a few simple year-end planning exercises to make your tax affairs run more smoothly:
· Paying any foreign taxes due before the end of the year — the default US tax rules on claiming credits for foreign taxes paid are to consider taxes actually paid during the calendar year. So, paying before the end of the year will mean the the credit will be available on the current year’s tax return.
· Realising capital losses — if you have realised capital gains for the year, you may also wish to consider realising any potential capital losses to minimise your tax exposure, as losses can be carried forward but not backwards. If this is something that you are keen to explore, you may wish to consult your financial adviser (if you have one) before taking any action.
· Consider whether to make other deductible payments, such as charitable donations and State tax payments during the current year.
· With a new Administration set to take over at The White House in January, there is abundant speculation around tax law changes that might be implemented, including reductions in gift and estate tax exemptions, and increases in income tax and long term capital gains tax rates. Whilst none of this can be predicted with any degree of certainty, you may wish to address how any changes might impact you.
Do the new laws affect you?
New US tax laws were passed in December 2019 extending a number of expiring provisions. Additionally, some new tax changes take effect from 2020 including:
· Changing the age for required minimum distributions from retirement plans from 70.5 years to 72 years.
· Repeal of the maximum age for traditional IRA contributions.
· More generous provisions for deducting charitable donations, including a repeal of the AGI limitation and an ‘above the line’ deduction of up to $300.
If you are uncertain which of these breaks could benefit you or your family when you file your US tax return, here at Everfair we are always available to advise you based on your personal circumstances.
Do I need a tax specialist?
Although as a US citizen living abroad it is not necessary to engage a US tax specialist to help file US tax returns, it will definitely save you time and give you peace of mind, and it could minimise the amount of tax you could ultimately pay by ensuring all the tax breaks, exemptions and deductible expenses are taken into account, as well as reducing your risk of double taxation.
Obviously the more time, stress and tax saved will vary on your personal circumstances and how complex your financial situation is.
For peace of mind, and a stress-free US tax return why not contact us today and ensure your tax return is as accurate and as beneficial for you as possible. | https://medium.com/@everfair-tax/what-does-a-us-expat-need-to-do-as-the-year-comes-to-an-end-85bb7c304cb | ['Everfair Tax', 'Uk', 'Us', 'International Experts'] | 2020-12-23 12:32:41.225000+00:00 | ['Expat', 'Taxes', 'Us Tax Return Services', 'Expatriation', 'Expatriate'] |
Build Your First Stellar App Using Python and Flask Pt. 1 | Build Your First Stellar App Using Python and Flask Pt. 1 Kolten Follow Nov 2 · 10 min read
This is part 1 of a 3 part series.
It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote a tutorial, but with all the new Stellar Questers pouring in it seemed like good timing. If you’re new to Stellar and have been looking for an easy way to get your hands dirty, this is the tutorial for you!
Throughout this tutorial series we’ll be building a simple web app using Python, Flask, and the Python Stellar SDK that:
Takes your public address as input
Reads and displays your balances
Lets you generate a transaction to send a Path Payment from XLM to some asset for which you have a balance
Lets you sign that transaction using Albedo
My goal is to help you build your first Stellar app that can retrieve data from the network, construct transactions, and securely sign transactions using Albedo.
Quick aside: I’m not an engineer. I just make stuff that kinda works. That’s what we’ll be doing here. So don’t take anything you see in this tutorial as best practice, but as a starting point to further your learning!
Before We Begin
I’m going to assume you have some prerequisite knowledge in this tutorial series because it would be too long otherwise. I expect you to have most of the Stellar basics down, along with some understanding of Python, Flask, and maybe HTML. If you don’t, you’ll still be able to make it through the tutorial, but some parts might be confusing.
First things first:
The Github repository contains a requirements.txt file and a skeleton application that will save us both a ton of time. Once you’ve finished those two steps, you’re ready to begin!
Setting the Stage
Take the Github directory you downloaded and move that folder ( first-stellar-app-main ) to your Desktop. Next, open your command line and navigate into the folder:
$ cd Desktop
$ rename first-stellar-app-main first-app (rename the folder to something short)
$ cd first-app
Once in your first-app folder, create a virtual environment—this will make it much easier to manage the packages we need for this project. Run the following command in your command line: $ virtualenv env . This creates a virtual environment called env . If everything went according to plan you should notice a new folder inside first-app named env .
Head back to your command line and enter this command: env\Scripts\activate.bat (Windows) or source env/bin/activate (Linux/MacOS). After you run it, your command line should look something like this:
If so, you’re inside your virtual environment! Next, you can install the required packages for this series with pip install -r requirements.txt . This step might take a bit, but you should see a bunch of packages start installing like you entered the matrix — you’ll need these!
Create an Account
After you’ve installed the necessary packages, we need to set up an account on the Stellar test network that you’ll use throughout this series. Fortunately it’s pretty easy :)
Head over to the Stellar Laboratory (for test net) and navigate to the Create Account tab. Once you’re there, click Generate Keypair , copy your new Public Key , and paste it into the Friendbot: Fund a test network account field. After you’ve pasted your public key, click Get test network lumens . Here’s what you should be seeing now:
If your screen matches mine, congrats! You now have 10,000 test net XLM. Make sure to save your public key and your secret key somewhere like a .txt file. This is only okay on test net, please do not do this with main network keys.
🗒 Note: Stellar was made to support digital representations of any currency, but it also has its own built-in token, called the lumen (XLM), created to fill a special role in the network. By design, Stellar requires that each account hold a small number of lumens at all times. Lumens are also used to pay transaction fees on the network.
Next we’ll have to set up some trust lines to assets with active markets on test net. Before an account can hold an asset another account issues, it has to establish a trustline, which is a persistent account-level ledger entry created with a change_trust operation. A trustline is an explicit opt-in to hold a particular token, so it specifies both asset code and issuer.
One way to do this is to head over to StellarExpert’s test net markets tab and pick one or two “active” assets:
Instead, I’ll be choosing an asset called HACK that has an available market.
To set up the trustlines, head over to the Build Transaction tab on the Stellar Laboratory, input your public key as the Source Account and click Fetch sequence number . It should look like the following:
Then scroll down to Operation Type and start building out a change_trust operation. To do this, enter the asset code and the issuing account’s public key:
After adding your change_trust operation, scroll down to click Sign in transaction signer , paste your secret key into the Add Signer field, and scroll down to Submit in transaction submitter . Once you’re on the transaction submitter page, click Submit Transaction and you should see your transaction go through:
Phew, I know. That was a lot of steps, we won’t need to do it again for the rest of the series. Unless you lose your public and secret key… so don’t do that! Now that your account is set up, we can start building the application.
Getting Started
If you’re awesome at following directions, you have a folder called first-app sitting on your desktop. It should include: env , stellar-app , and requirements.txt .
Revisiting your command line, which should still be inside the first-app folder:
Type the following commands (Windows <> Linux/MacOS):
set FLASK_APP=stellar-app or export FLASK_APP=stellar-app
or set FLASK_ENV=development or export FLASK_ENV=development
The first command lets Flask know where your application is and the second command sets your Flask server to debug mode. Debug mode prevents you from needing to reload your Flask server every time you make a code change.
Next, type flask run into your command line and run it. Once you do this you should see Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit) . Copy http://127.0.0.1:5000/ and visit it in your browser — like a normal website. You should see the app magically appear:
Please, please. Hold the applause. I’m not accepting any web design rewards at this time. That said: If you’ve made it this far, you’ve done everything right! You might notice that pasting your public key and clicking Submit doesn’t do anything special right now, but we’re about to fix that.
Adding a Pinch of Stellar
We’re finally ready to start reading data from the Stellar network! In this section we’ll be adding the functionality to read and display the balances associated with a Stellar public key.
🗒 Note: In this section we’ll be interacting with an API called Horizon. This API serves as a bridge between Stellar apps and Stellar Core. Stellar-based projects use Horizon to submit transactions, query an account balance, or stream events like transactions to an account.
Inside the first-app > stellar-app folder you’ll find a file called __init__.py — that’s where the application lives. Open up __init__.py in an editor of your choice and at the top of the file you’ll find the following code:
accounts_url will be a global variable that we use to store the URL for the Horizon Accounts endpoint. Accounts are the central data structure in Stellar. They hold balances, sign transactions, and issue assets. All entries that persist on the Stellar ledger are owned by a particular account. The Accounts endpoint will let us grab information about a specific account — we’ll need that later.
Change the # (keep quotes) after account_url to https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org/accounts/{} . The curly braces {} will allow us to add parameters to the URL later.
Next we’ll need to fill in the server variable. server will store a Server object implemented by the Python Stellar SDK. Server handles the network connection to a Horizon instance and exposes an interface for requests to that instance. We’ll want to establish a connection to the test net Horizon instance.
Change the ‘#’ (remove the quotes) after server to Server(horizon_url='https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org') to create the test net Server object.
Now for path_url . In our application we’ll be using one of Stellar’s coolest features: Path Payments. Path Payments allow users to send an asset and have it converted into a different asset before arriving at its destination. I send dollars; you receive euros.
They also work when used in a circular fashion. You can simply send a path payment to yourself (from asset A to asset B) and this will have the same effect as making a trade. That’s how we’ll be using them in this application!
path_url will store the URL for Horizon’s Paths endpoint. Paths provide us with information about potential path payments. A path can then be used to populate the necessary fields for a path payment operation — which we’ll use later!
Change the # after path_url (keep quotes) to https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org/paths/strict-send?destination_assets={}%3A{}&source_asset_type=native&source_amount={} . Remember: The curly braces allow us to easily add parameters to the URL.
Making it Work
Just below the URL variables, you’ll notice code that looks something like this:
If you’re unfamiliar with Flask, create_app() functions as an application factory. Inside, app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True) creates a Flask instance and __name__ tells the app where the Python module is located while instance_relative_config=True tells the app that configuration files are relative to the instance folder.
The next line, app.secret_key = ‘super secret key’ , sets a secret key which is used to cryptographically sign cookies in a web session. We’ll use Sessions to pass data between pages in our Flask app.
Don’t touch any of this code.
After the Flask configuration you’ll notice the index() function with app.route('/') above it. This is what’s known as a route() decorator — which binds a function to a URL. In this case it binds index() to the home page of our app and returns index.html (the homepage you saw earlier).
Don’t touch this code either!
From this point on, I’ll skip the Flask explainers and get to the meat of the code. This is to save time and keep the focus on Stellar.
Now, with the warnings out of the way, scroll down a bit further and look for the following code:
The account() function allows us to get and present information about a public key’s balances on Stellar. It achieves this by taking the public key submitted in the HTML form on our app’s home page and sending a get request to the accounts_url variable we set earlier. It then renders that information in account.html .
To make the account() function work, set the r variable as follows:
r = requests.get(accounts_url.format(pub_key))
accounts_url.format(pub_key) adds a public key input to the end of the account_url variable. This is where those curly braces {} come in handy.
Then, decode the request in JSON format:
json_obj = r.json()
Lastly, pass json_obj into session[‘balances’] :
session[‘balances’] = json_obj
Decoding the Accounts endpoint request in JSON makes the account data much easier to access, while storing that JSON object in the session variable balances makes it accessible throughout the application.
When you call the Accounts endpoint, it returns a response like this:
You can see that the response contains balances and a host of other relevant information about an account — most of which will not be used in this tutorial series. For this tutorial we’ll mostly care about an account’s balances.
Test it Out
With your variables filled out, your ready to test the application! If you didn’t close your command line and your Flask app is still pulled up on http://127.0.0.1:5000/: Hit refresh, paste your public key into the form, and click Submit .
It should take you to account.html and show you your balances!
You can now enter any test net public key into the HTML form on index.html and see the account’s balances — try it out. The good news? We have way cooler functionality to add in Parts 2 and 3 of this series.
🗒 Note: If your Flask app is no longer running, scroll up and revisit the instructions in the Getting Started section. At this stage you should see a high XLM balance with 0 balances for any assets you set trustlines for.
What’s Next
Congratulations! You’ve finished Part 1 of this tutorial series. So far you’ve learned:
How to set up and fund a Stellar test network account
How to set trustlines for assets on Stellar
How to use the Horizon API to get balances of an account
That means we’ve checked two boxes on our series list:
Takes your public address as input ✔️
Reads and displays your balances ✔️
Lets you generate a transaction to send a Path Payment from XLM to some asset for which you have a balance ⬜
Lets you sign that transaction using Albedo ⬜
In Part 2 of this series (to be released soon), we’ll tackle the third item on that list and you’ll learn how to: | https://medium.com/stellar-community/build-your-first-stellar-app-using-python-and-flask-pt-1-f2761c9b94df | [] | 2020-11-13 19:09:08.324000+00:00 | ['Stellar', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Blockchain', 'Tutorial'] |
DeFine is coming on Polygon | DeFine will be integrating Polygon to bring its social profile system to the ecosystem and lower entry barriers to non-crypto users.
We are excited to announce that the NFT Social platform DeFine will be coming on Polygon! This integration will lower barriers of entry for users of the platform and allow all creators including artists, musicians, influencers, gamers, and athletes to engage and interact with their fanbase with digital assets like NFTs and socal/fan tokens.
With Polygon, users across the globe will be able to enjoy the platform without worrying about transaction fees, and this opens a whole new target group for creators for it is possible to onboard users for free using meta transactions.
Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, Validium etc and Standalone Chains like Polygon POS, designed for flexibility and independence.
DeFine will bring its social profile system to the Polygon ecosystem. DeFine social profile system is an NFT based social identity constructed for users based on their contribution and achievements in the digital world. With Polygon integration, users will be granted badges representing their activities in the ecosystem, such as crossing asset bridges, providing liquidity, participating in governance, purchasing artwork, and so much more. Platforms can also benefit from this, for they can provide special perks to a more targeted audience. Special staking programs with higher reward rate may be available for active governance participant badge holders, providing additional benefits for the token holders.
With the integrations, we will soon be providing special badges for the Polygon ecosystem users and expand our partnership with the services to provide perks for the badge holders. We look forward to the growth of the community through Polygon integration and the social profile system.
About Polygon
Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, Validium etc and Standalone Chains like Polygon POS, designed for flexibility and independence. Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 450+ Dapps, ~350M txns and ~13.5M+ unique users.
If you’re an Ethereum Developer, you’re already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your Dapp, get started here.
Website | Twitter | Ecosystem Twitter | Studios Twitter | Reddit | Discord | Telegram
About DeFine
DeFine is the NFT social platform for all creators including artists, musicians, influencers, gamers, and athletes. The platform facilitates all social interaction, engagement and communication for creators and their fanbase with digital assets like NFTs and social/fan tokens.
Join our community
Official Website: https://www.define.one/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeFinePlatform
Wechat: DeFineOne
Telegram: https://t.me/DeFinePlatform
Medium: https://medium.com/define-platform
Kakaotalk: https://open.kakao.com/o/gzSzdead
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/define_nft/
Contact Email: [email protected] | https://medium.com/define-platform/define-is-coming-on-polygon-645d90ae9fa9 | [] | 2021-08-10 08:28:28.434000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'English', 'Define', 'Polygon'] |
How to Look Interested on a Zoom Call | How to Look Interested on a Zoom Call
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
The easiest way to look engaged is to actually be interested.
Sadly, millions of meetings happen every day which don’t interest us at all. John veers off the topic to bring up his pet project. Georgina tells her whole life story instead of giving us the quarterly figures.
That’s frustrating, and while you can and should try to re-focus a meeting whenever it happens, everyone must act in concert for the nature of meetings to change.
Until that happens, there are a few things you can do to look more engaged in meetings. Think of these as “fake it till you make it” ideas: They might feel like hacks now, but if you turn them into habits, eventually, you’ll build real interest in the people you work with.
Here’s how to look — and thus become — more engaged in meetings.
1. Lean forward
Leaning forward is the business equivalent of scooting towards the edge of your seat while watching a movie: It literally shows you’re “drawn in” to the situation.
Leaning forward is a fundamentally human expression, even if, today, it’s mostly metaphorical. Our ancestors had to move closer to objects to examine them: plants, objects, animals. It was an act of caution. The berry might be poisoned, the object might be dangerous, the animal might suddenly move.
Today, we still “move closer” to better understand things — even if those things are mostly abstract concepts. We’ll “lean in” to a conversation because it brings us closer to the person talking — and thus closer to their ideas.
Leaning forward instead of leaning away is a strong, positive body language signal. You show people validation and trust, which is crucial, especially at work.
While leaning forward is most obvious when you’re sitting across one another directly, I find it also works on Zoom calls. I often lean towards my screen and sometimes tilt it, which makes it look a bit as if I’m “looking from above.” It makes me feel as if I’ve got a better overview, and it’s definitely better than being a small, pixelated face in one corner of the screen.
Zoom calls are like paintings: The closer you go, the more details you’ll find.
2. Nod
I nod along so much in conversation, you’d think I’m a bobblehead. I do it because it’s a nice, silent way of acknowledging what’s being said.
I do say “yes,” “mmhmm,” and “exactly” from time to time, but you don’t want to interrupt people every five seconds just to confirm you understand what’s going on. Just nod. Talking is silver, silence is gold.
This is especially true on a Zoom call. With out-of-sync audio, cross-talking, and background noises, the last thing you want to do is add more friction. You want to help smoothen the flow of the conversation. Nodding along does just that. It’s a nice, short, visual cue that the speaker can move on. Use it.
3. Smile
If you don’t smile a lot, making a grumpy face loses its power. A frustrated look can send an important signal, but if it’s the default on your face, no one will know when something is actually wrong. It’s a bit like a child lying about being sick too often — eventually, no one will believe him when it really hurts.
Smiling, on the other hand, isn’t just a nice reward for the well-prepared speaker, it’s also a signal of trust: When you smile, the other person knows they can expect you to assess their information in good faith.
If you look skeptical every time someone gives you a fact or number, they’ll quickly get defensive when you later criticize said detail. So even if you are skeptical a lot, as you should be, don’t insta-reveal your doubts on your face.
Finally, smiling will make your day better. Smiling is always worth a try.
4. Use hand gestures
Using your hands will lighten the mood of a meeting and get important points across. Visuals intuitively allow us to process information faster, even if we don’t realize how it’s happening.
Charlie from Charisma on Command explains there’s a big difference between open palms with tensed but flexible hand muscles (good) and the classic, nervous, hands-folded-on-my-lap position (bad).
Language expert Vanessa Van Edwards says you should always highlight numbers with your fingers and that showing sizes (a “biiiig” achievement, a “tiny” problem) can help put things into perspective for the listener.
Our hands are never the focus of a conversation, but they must be a part of it.
This applies on Zoom too. Your hands bring movement into the otherwise stiff image of floating heads. Use them to break the tension with a funny gesture or help people visualize your ideas.
The next time you’re in a meeting, try a small gesture, then go from there. | https://medium.com/@ngoeke/how-to-look-interested-on-a-zoom-call-3011bf70e841 | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2020-09-21 11:46:45.877000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Meetings', 'Communication', 'Remote Working', 'Productivity'] |
Measuring Growth, Accepting Emotions and the Wrestle Between Self-Acceptance and Self-Improvement | Measuring Growth, Accepting Emotions and the Wrestle Between Self-Acceptance and Self-Improvement
KTHT reflection prompts, here I come!
Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash
I’ve always approached 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊.’s prompts as poetry prompts, because that’s the easiest way for me to get my thoughts and emotions out, especially when they feel like they’re stuck in little circles of rumination in my mind.
This time, however, I’m going to try something different. I was inspired by others who contribute to these weekly prompts, who take that step to share these thoughts without hiding behind the rhyme (though let’s be real, I never actually use rhymes in my poems). It’s brave because instead of showing the most distilled form of your thoughts, imperfections chiselled away, a lot of people share the rawest form that came up for them.
There’s value in showing up like that, in showing that the world shouldn’t be comprised of highlight reels, because we’re so often comparing our view of all our successes and our failures, to someone else’s publicized and polished successes.
So, here goes! This week, we’re tackling three questions instead of five, and I’m doing them all in one go.
Monday: How do you measure personal growth? How do you know when you’ve grown as a person?
Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash
Numbers
I think a lot of people shy away from this because there can be an obvious downside to this. In my poetry, I’ve reflected on how in the past, grades, how the number on a scale took over my definition of my life.
Back then, I had a “perfect” score that I needed to get, a perfect “weight” I had to be. That’s when numbers can make life miserable.
When I say I use numbers to measure personal growth, it’s more about visualization and seeing patterns over time for things that don’t seem to be tangible.
For example, I rate moods over time and rather than striving to have “the best mood”, I’m learning about the contexts, people, things that contribute to a foul mood versus a good one. I’m learning how these environmental factors and also how I respond to them accordingly can impact those moods over time. In visualizing that, I’m tapping into my strength in understanding the world through numbers.
Writing and documentation
Similar to numbers, writing is a complementary aspect of it. Encased in the words that I write at any time are the mannerisms, common phrases that I embody. Fifteen years ago, I didn’t talk or write like this. In fifteen years, I imagine my writing voice will also change.
One tangible way that I’m hoping will be a regular reflection point is the Proust Questionnaire. The saddest thing is that I did complete a bunch when I first entered high school, but I have no idea where they’re saved now. I started completing the questionnaire again this year. Here’s hoping that in documenting it on Medium that it’ll be easy for me to revisit these same questions next year and see my growth.
Even without a copy of the previous questionnaires filled out, simply writing and reflecting on these questions helped me see just how much I’ve grown. Peppered throughout the writing I was surprised to see myself truly and honestly write down thoughts like “I am perfectly happy now”, showing contentment and enjoyment in my life that I don’t ever recall ever having prior to this.
In answering these questions, I was able to name certain things that really helped me grow — setting boundaries, understanding things from my perception (e.g., others calling me lazy vs. understanding that I have different values and am channelling my effort into different priorities than others are).
In journalling for myself but also in writing for others, I see quite a similar set of messages come out. I value self-care now, I approach with curiosity rather than fight out of fear and scarcity.
In those words, I find empowerment within myself. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/measuring-growth-accepting-emotions-and-the-wrestle-between-self-acceptance-and-self-improvement-b216facee113 | ['Lucy The Eggcademic', 'She Her'] | 2020-12-21 07:43:32.375000+00:00 | ['Emotions', 'Growth', 'Lovethyself', 'Mental Health', 'Self'] |
All about Linked Lists in C++ | Linked lists are very important, useful and powerful data structures and are used for many purposes in C++. In this blog I am going to cover as much as possible from a beginner’s point, so let’s get started.
Linked list is a linear data structure in which data is stored in a contiguous manner, each element is stored in the form of a node, a node is created dynamically on run-time and these nodes are connected using pointers.
Linked lists are of many times
Singly Linked List.
Doubly Linked List.
Circular Linked List.
Circular Doubly Linked List.
Below is an image of a singular linked list to give you a glimpse of haw data is arranged in a singly linked list. Ignore the details we will cover them later.
Linked Lists v/s array
Yes, in some operations linked lists comes out to perform better than arrays. I am covering this because you should be aware of merits and demerits of linked lists over arrays, only then you would understand the necessity of linked lists.
Merits
Elements are added dynamically.
There is no need for continuous block of memory nodes are present at different memory locations which are connected by pointers.
Insertion and deletion operations are more efficient than array.
Demerits:
Node of Singly Linked List
Node of Doubly linked list
Linked Lists take more memory as it is required more memory for pointer block i.e. to store an element you need twice the memory for two blocks one for element itself and other for the address of next node.
In case of doubly linked list there are two extra blocks one for address of next node and one for previous block.
In linked list one can’t randomly access data element which is really easy in case of array.
Singly Linked Lists
In Singly linked lists nodes have only one pointer i.e. to the address of next node and due to having only one connected they are called so.
You use an analogy to visualize better, compare it to a train where engine is the head and every coach represents a block each block is connected to next block by a link.
Photo by Denis Chick on Unsplash
Now we will see how we can build a linked list in cpp all its basic operations then we will see some some inbuilt functions and modules to make which are very powerful and makes our work much easier.But first let’s how the node of a singly linked list is created.
Node
Well a node can be built using a structure as in C but in my opinion it is better to use the power and capabilities of classes in C++, hence I will show you how to create a node in C++ using class.
class node{
public:
int data;
node* next; node(int d){
data = d;
next = NULL;
}
};
So you can see we have got a class named node, there are two variable one is of type int for element of integer type(you can store any type of data in your list by changing the type here, you can also make a templated list and define the type later in main() ), and the other is of type node as you are aware of fact that a pointer to anything should be of data type same as that of the element which the pointer is pointing.
Now, in the constructor named node we have got an input and we have specified the input to data variable and set the address of next node to be null.
As you go on to functionalities of linked lists you will get a better understanding as then you will be able to see the bigger picture.
Insertion
Moving on to our next topic i.e. insertion in linked list, insertion operation can be done at head, at the end or at any other position. One important thing before moving on, we store the address of first node in a pointer named head to refer the list it is very important variable and at any point if you mess up with the head it might happen that your whole list might get lost.
So coming back to insertion I will show insertion at head, end and at any other position but it is advised to insert an element at head as it would take constant time and it is the easiest. Let’s dive right in to code.
Insertion at Tail
It requires to traverse over the whole linked list to insert at tail, we first declare a new node and put the input data in the data block using the constructor we have made it is most common step and you have to create a node every time so it will itself comes in handy.
First we check if the list is empty because if it is so then we have to just add new node as first element, if this is not the case then we will traverse by running loop till we reach the end of list and then add node.
End condition is checked by while(temp->next !- NULL), where NULL denote that end is reached and one more thing to consider is to use a different variable each time so that you wouldn’t mess up with the head node. Also notice that we have passed the head node as reference that’s why we don’t need to return the node.
void insertAtTail(node* &head ,int d){
node* n = new node(d);
if(head == NULL){
head = n;
} else{
node* temp = head;
while(temp->next != NULL){
temp = temp->next;
}
temp->next = n;
}
return;
}
Insertion at Head
It is pretty simply, we first create a new node which is same as done before then we check if the list is empty if it is then just add it as first element, if it is not then put the address of head in the next of new node and the address of new node in head.
void insertAtHead(node* &head ,int d){
node* n = new node(d);
if(head == NULL){
head = n;
}
else{
n->next = head;
head = n;
}
return;
}
Insertion at any position given
We create a node same as in above cases then we iterate to reach at position one less than given we do so because if it is needed to add a new node at fourth position then we need to be on third position then we connect new node using this node.
void insertAtOther(node* &head, int d, int position){
node* n = new node(d);
if(postion == 1){
n->next = head;
head = n;
}
else{
node* temp = head;
position = position-1;
while(position--){
temp = temp->next;
}
n->next = temp->next;
temp->next = n;
}
return;
}
Above is a figure showing insertion at third position. While working with liked lists it is often better to visualize everything in your mind beforehand it will make your work more easier.
Now you try to visualize insertion a head and tail and see how easy it becomes to understand the code.
Printing List
Traversing and printing list is pretty simple we create a temp variable store head in it and traverse using this temp variable.
void printList(node* &head){
node*temp=head;
while(temp!=NULL){
cout<<temp->data<<" ";
temp = temp->next;
}
return;
}
Deletion
Deletion operation is one of primary operations of linked list and are important in understanding linked lists better. Deletion can our at head, tail and at any given position. We will see code one by one but I am not going to explain everything as I have already done before and it would be better if you yourself try to understand you code to improve to understanding. Let’s get started
Deletion at Head
void deletionAtHead(node* &head){
if(head == NULL){
cout<<"List is empty"<<endl;
}
else{
node* temp = head;
head = temp->next;
free(temp);
}
return;
}
Deletion at Tail
void deletionAtTail(node* &head){
if(head == NULL){
cout<<"List is empty"<<endl;
}
if(head->next == NULL){
delete head;
head= NULL;
}
else{
node* temp = head;
while((temp->next)->next != NULL){
temp= temp->next;
}
delete(temp->next);
temp->next = NULL;
}
return;
}
Deletion at any other position
void deletionAtOther(node* &head, int position){ if(head == NULL){
cout<<"List is empty"<<endl;
}
if(postion == 1){
delete head;
head = NULL;
}
else{
node* t1 = head, t2;
position--;
while(position--){
t1 = t1->next;
}
t2 = t1->next->next;
free(t1->net);
t1->next = NULL;
}
return;
}
Doubly Linked List
Doubly linked list is very similar to singly linked list , instead of just one pointer it has got two pointers one for previous block and one for next block and we use a head and a tail pointer variable to point the head and tail of list use of two pointers makes it much easier to perform operations but it also costs us more memory.
class node{
public:
int data;
node* next, *prev; node(int d){
data = d;
prev = NULL;
next = NULL;
}
};
As you can see the node is very similar to singly linked list and the coding part is also very similar just you have to deal with another previous pointer. You can code it up yourself from the concepts you have and that’s I am not going to show you the code for operations in doubly linked list.
Circular Linked Lists & Doubly Circular Linked List
Circular and doubly circular linked linked are just singly and doubly linked list with its last element pointing to first node. It makes our work even more easier.
Above images will give you an insight about how they work and the coding part is similar to those discussed above just you have to point the last node to first node.
List STL
C++ STL is a powerful library which provides us many inbuilt functions and methods which makes our work much more easier. You can use the list STL by including “list”.
#include<list>
list<int> l;
We will see briefly the basic functions and methods available in C++.
Iterators:
begin → Return iterator pointing to beginning of the list.
Return iterator pointing to beginning of the list. end → Return iterator pointing to end pointof the list.
Return iterator pointing to end pointof the list. rbegin → Return reverse iterator pointing to reverse beginning of the list.
Return reverse iterator pointing to reverse beginning of the list. rend → Return reverse iterator pointing to reverse end of the list.
Return reverse iterator pointing to reverse end of the list. cbegin → Return const_iterator pointing to beginning of the list.
Return const_iterator pointing to beginning of the list. cend → Return const_iterator pointing to end of the list.
Return const_iterator pointing to end of the list. crbegin → Return const_reverse_iterator pointing to reverse beginning of the list.
Return const_reverse_iterator pointing to reverse beginning of the list. crend →Return const_reverse_iterator pointing to reverse end of the list.
Capacity:
empty → Test whether container is empty.
Test whether container is empty. size → Returns the size of the storage space currently allocated to the list.
Returns the size of the storage space currently allocated to the list. max_size →Return maximum size of the list.
Element access:
front → Access first element of the list.
Access first element of the list. back →Access last element of the list.
Modifiers:
assign → Assign new content to container of the list.
Assign new content to container of the list. emplace_front → Construct and insert element at beginning of the list.
Construct and insert element at beginning of the list. push_front → Insert element at beginning of the list.
Insert element at beginning of the list. pop_front → Delete first element of the list.
Delete first element of the list. emplace_back → Construct and insert element at the end of the list.
Construct and insert element at the end of the list. push_back → Add element at the end of the list.
Add element at the end of the list. pop_back → Delete last element of the list.
Delete last element of the list. emplace → Construct and insert element of the list.
Construct and insert element of the list. insert → Insert elements in the list.
Insert elements in the list. erase → Erase elements of the list.
Erase elements of the list. swap → Swap content of the list.
Swap content of the list. resize → Change size of the list.
Change size of the list. clear →Clear content of the list.
Operations:
splice → Transfer elements from list to list .
Transfer elements from list to list . remove → Remove elements with specific value .
Remove elements with specific value . remove_if → Remove elements fulfilling condition .
Remove elements fulfilling condition . unique → Remove duplicate values from the list.
Remove duplicate values from the list. merge → Merge sorted lists .
Merge sorted lists . sort → Sort elements in container .
Sort elements in container . reverse →Reverse the order of elements .
That’s all…..
That’s all, I hope you have learnt a lot linked list and I would suggest to try whatever you have learnt do try to code everything from scratch for a better understanding if you feel like that you are comfortable then you can shift to code entirely using STL otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand what’s happening under the hood.
Go get you hands dirty by code it up and try something new, try to code in your own style.
Have Fun, Keep coding and Happy Programming : — ) | https://medium.com/swlh/all-about-linked-lists-in-c-687d0945cb0 | ['Aman Kumar Goyal'] | 2020-05-28 19:57:16.425000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'Data Structures', 'Competitive Programming', 'Cpp', 'Linked Lists'] |
유프리즘 Meetings 대기실을 이용하여 상담서비스에 활용하기 | in On The Couch | https://medium.com/uprismio/%EC%9C%A0%ED%94%84%EB%A6%AC%EC%A6%98-%EC%95%84%EC%9D%B4%EC%98%A4-meetings-%EB%8C%80%EA%B8%B0%EC%8B%A4%EC%9D%84-%EC%9D%B4%EC%9A%A9%ED%95%98%EC%97%AC-%EC%83%81%EB%8B%B4%EC%84%9C%EB%B9%84%EC%8A%A4%EC%97%90-%ED%99%9C%EC%9A%A9%ED%95%98%EA%B8%B0-96b8494d7de0 | [] | 2020-11-12 00:37:49.581000+00:00 | ['화상회의', 'Release N Updates', 'WebRTC', '유프리즘아이오', '유프리즘'] |
Writing Is a Journey to Enjoy | Writing Is a Journey to Enjoy
Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash
It’s a way to express what you feel. Expressing relaxes you. It empowers you. It can urge you to move further.
Many people don’t have the expressing ability and they can’t communicate properly.
You can develop this skill if you think you don’t have it.
It’s the powerful weapon that makes you feel you can convert your thoughts and ideas into reality.
When you write, you write what you know. You write in your style. You write what you want to let others know.
There is no end to this journey. You can always write something and can become better and better. The more you write, the more ideas will come to your mind on what to write next.
Your writing stops when you die but what you have written already, remains in the space, and people can read that.
Never think that you are not capable of any other thing. Writing is expressing your thoughts and it’s a great ability.
Responsibility comes with writing. So whenever you write something sensitive, be careful about your words and concepts you are going to share with the world.
Initially, I used to think a lot regarding what should I write and how to write and will other people read my words, and will they appreciate it or not.
But now, I write whatever I want to. It’s because I am writing to make myself satisfied as I am doing something my self is urging me to do for years.
So, I just write drafts on whatever topic or theme I know or have an interest in. Then I edit those pieces to prepare a final draft to be published. | https://medium.com/lifesode/writing-is-a-journey-to-enjoy-52ac7763f5c5 | ['Fasiha Imran'] | 2020-12-07 18:21:34.205000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Experience', 'Journey', 'Writing Life', 'Life'] |
Douglas Adams This theory makes a lot of sense. | in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | https://medium.com/@danyihns/there-is-a-theory-which-states-that-if-ever-anyone-discovers-exactly-what-the-universe-is-for-and-bef72b2bcc18 | ['Daniele Ihns'] | 2020-12-11 12:37:37.386000+00:00 | ['Universe', 'Future', 'Theory'] |
Understanding your Blood Pressure | Which Number is more important?
Typically, more attention is given to systolic blood pressure (the first number) as a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease for people over 50. In most people, systolic blood pressure rises steadily with age due to the increasing stiffness of large arteries, long-term buildup of plaque and an increased incidence of cardiac and vascular disease.
However, either an elevated systolic or an elevated diastolic blood pressure reading may be used to make a diagnosis of high blood pressure. According to recent studies, the risk of death from ischemic heart disease and stroke doubles with every 20 mm Hg systolic or 10 mm Hg diastolic increase among people from age 40 to 89.
What readings are considered normal?
If your blood pressure falls within the following ranges then it’s considered normal, From 90–120/60–80 mm Hg. These numbers can also be adjusted for age. This chart will help you better understand the numbers
Image courtesy of Texas Heart Institute
Your Heart Beat (Pulse Rate) and Blood Pressure
While your blood pressure is the force of your blood moving through your blood vessels, your heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute.
They are two separate measurements and indicators of health.
For people with high blood pressure (HBP or hypertension), there’s no substitute for measuring blood pressure.
A rising heart rate does not cause your blood pressure to increase at the same rate. Even though your heart is beating more times a minute, healthy blood vessels dilate (get larger) to allow more blood to flow through more easily.
When you exercise, your heart speeds up so more blood can reach your muscles. It may be possible for your heart rate to double safely, while your blood pressure may respond by only increasing a modest amount.
Can other factors affect my Blood Pressure?
Yes. Each patient needs to be monitored and carefully assessed on an individual basis There are factors that can lead to a temporary elevation of your Blood pressure. You doctor will consider these factors if your blood pressure is unusually high and you can mention these to your Healthcare Provider.
1. White Coat Hypertension
Some people experience white coat hypertension, when blood pressure is elevated in the doctor’s office but not in other settings. These patients need to monitor their blood pressure at home or wear an ambulatory blood pressure monitor that takes your blood pressure every 30 minutes for 24 hours.
While white coat hypertension was formerly considered simple nervousness, recent research suggests otherwise.
A study published in the journal Hypertension found that people with white coat hypertension are at a significantly greater risk for developing sustained high blood pressure than people who have normal blood pressure. One possible explanation is that people with white coat hypertension have a harder time managing stress and anxiety.
2. Stress
Emotional stress and anxiety can temporarily increase blood pressure. Over time, excess stress can take a toll on your cardiovascular system and might lead to permanent blood pressure problems.
3. Medication
Both over-the-counter and prescription medications can impact your blood pressure. Some medications, like diuretics and blood pressure pills, are designed to lower your blood pressure numbers. Others, like cold and allergy medications, can increase your blood pressure. Be sure to discuss any medication you may be taking with your doctor if you’re assessed with high blood pressure.
4. Activity
Exercise, talking, laughter, and even sex can cause blood pressure fluctuations. These increases are generally small and short lived. If you’ve been running to get your doctors appointment, resting a few minutes before you have your blood pressure taken will negate the effects and allow for a “normal” reading.
5. Food and Drink
What you eat or drink might impact your blood pressure reading. Foods high in tyramine, a substance found in aged foods, can increase blood pressure. This includes foods that are:
fermented
pickled
brined
cured
Drinks with caffeine can boost blood pressure numbers temporarily, too.
6. Adrenal Issues
Your adrenal system is responsible for hormone production. Adrenal fatigue occurs when your hormone production is low. Your blood pressure may fall as a result. An overactive adrenal system can cause sudden spikes in blood pressure and hypertension.
7. Pheochromocytoma
This rare tumor develops in the adrenal glands and impacts hormone production. It can cause sudden bursts of irregular blood pressure readings with normal spans in between.
Additional Risk Factors
These factors may put you at greater risk for experiencing fluctuating blood pressure:
high levels of stress
anxiety
taking blood pressure pills that aren’t effective or don’t last until your next dose
tobacco use
excessive alcohol consumption
night-shift work
Certain conditions can also increase your risk for developing an abnormal blood pressure. These include:
diabetes
pregnancy
dehydration
cardiovascular disease
obstructive sleep apnea
kidney disease
thyroid problems
nervous system problems
Further Resources | https://medium.com/beingwell/understanding-your-blood-pressure-6c251cd7a82c | ['Robert Turner'] | 2020-05-30 10:18:08.506000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Hypertension', 'Patient Care', 'Healthcare', 'Blood Pressure'] |
The Power of Thinking in a Rhythm | This is my third letter since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic. I anticipated life would somehow return to something more consistent in three, maybe four, months. Life would be different, but we could start doing again.
In June, concerts were still advertising events and galas were still being planned. I was thinking, of course, experts could foretell the end of this pandemic inconvenience. And now, seven months later, we still don’t have a guesstimate of when this will end. All the while we’re still doing — going forward and backward, to the left and then a pivot to the right. I hear unfamiliar music playing in my head, it feels like a new line dance.
Adding to the confusion of COVID-19, we are knee deep in the final stages of our national elections. As great as our nation is, this is our way of vomiting up our elected leaders. More planning, more doing.
The new complexities within our world have now collided with the typical heightened sensitivity we see every four years. People are more aware of individual rights. Everyone’s issue is the most important issue, and their issue should be the most important issue to you as well. This election process reflects the best and worst of us. A cesspool of hatred, aspiration, those having too much and those not having enough, those that are informed and those that are uninformed. With all the life and world elements to consider, our only course of action is to react. More doing.
To date, COVID-19, and by extension any world event happening during the pandemic, has been closely tied to doing. With every new statistic, with every update from the Governor, with every news report, with every CDC update, with every contradiction from the President, it’s doing.
It’s like playing on a spinning wheel and then rushed to walk a straight line. With every pronouncement and every national event, the spinning wheel gets faster. Maybe we believe that doing is value. Thinking seems too wasteful, a luxury that could not help solve any problem. Well maybe. What if we pull back for a second and ask the question, what actually is the problem or what are we trying to solve?
In all the doing, maybe thinking is the better option. Even with all the speed of the spinning wheel there is a solution to the dizziness, and it’s finding a spotting point. Finding a spotting point reduces anxiety because there’s an element of predictability. The spotting point helps put the spinning in a context. Maintaining the spotting point requires focus and intentionality, two of the main qualities needed as a leader and the activity of thinking.
I would not wish this pandemic on anybody; however, I’ve valued the time to think. Personally, my thinking is not a type of meditation (highly recommend) or daydreaming. I’m also intentional about not allowing my mind to become highjacked by social media, friends or family, or any outside influence. Thinking is ME directed. It is the most selfish, and important, of activities.
Ultimately, the idea is to be intentional about thinking and create habits related to your core values and beliefs. Thinking colors the world and becomes the basis of plans, manifesting itself into physical action (e.g. hiring, policies, coaching, and even friendships).
Intentional thoughts focus on the things that matter — your “why.” Consider the people you are responsible for, what your organization should stand for, how to show-up better at home. Does humanity really matter or is it just business? Do ideas that stem from individuals with unique experiences matter? Does treating people equally matter? How does that even look? Am I treating people as unique opportunities to learn or tools for my objective?
Thinking allows us to reframe and challenge our assumptions. Thinking allows us to realize the mind-shift resulting from the influences floating around. Thinking allows us to reassess the mindlessness of doing. Thinking promotes organizational clarity, which helps in the organization decision making process. And above all, there is an intentionality to what you and your organization want to become.
My point is that thinking has tremendous value in creating the spotting points that contextualize all the stuff we do. Maybe I’ll never master the line dance, but I do know that I hear the music more clearly, and understand the rhythm a little better when I think before my next step. | https://medium.com/@aaroncopeland/the-power-of-thinking-in-a-rhythm-357bec599ebb | ['Aaron Copeland'] | 2020-12-16 17:37:41.091000+00:00 | ['Thinking', 'Mindfulness At Work', 'Thoughtful', 'Leadership', 'Reflections'] |
Bring Back Democratic Capitalism | Sometimes it seems as if “compromise” has become a dirty word. It’s worth remembering that it was a compromise, Democratic Capitalism, that made the United States the country it is.
Democratic Capitalism is capitalism moderated by the power of democracy to ensure we all have a chance to participate in our economy, share in its benefits and that everyone plays by the same set of financial and legal rules.
Politics isn’t a history lesson, but the history is important. In the 1930’s there was a global conflict between two different economic systems, capitalism and socialism. Socialists believed that the government’s scientific management of the economy would generate greater wealth, which the government would share with everyone. Supporters of capitalism believed it would create greater wealth, and because that wealth was in the hands of citizens instead of the government, better support individual freedom.
Under President Roosevelt’s guidance our country essentially reached a compromise. We stayed with capitalism, with the free market instead of government control, but we used democracy to make sure capitalism worked to everyone’s benefit. Capitalists got to continue owning the means of production, the factories and mines and railroads and stores, but we used government to make them share the rewards with the people that worked in the factories and mines and railroads and stores. We applied government to the task of ensuring that every person would have the skills and opportunity to participate in our economy and that everybody played by the same set of rules.
This compromise, we stick with capitalism but use democracy to make sure everyone gets in the game and everyone plays by the same set of rules, supports the most fundamental promise of America, the promise of equality of opportunity. We have never believed in a guarantee of equality of outcome, but we have always believed that a basic purpose of government is to extend individual freedom — to make sure that every individual has the opportunity and ability to choose the course of his or her life. To make sure that everyone had a chance to get in the game.
By no means has the United States achieved equality of opportunity for all segments of our population. It took years of change in societal thinking and legislation to start to level the playing field. Even today racial minorities and women face barriers that constrain their ability to participate in our economy. But this idea has been the beacon that guided our country and our policies.
This compromise — we stick with capitalism, but everyone gets in the game and everyone plays by the same set of rules — helped create the post-WWII economic expansion that grew our economy to be the largest in the world. Because capitalism actually works better if there is one set of rules for everybody. If there’s one set of rules, free market competition decides the winners, not the government. Our economy is more efficient and produces more wealth.
Capitalism also works better if it can draw from the talent of the whole of our population. Talent doesn’t respect economic or racial boundaries. There are talented, motivated kids of all colors and creeds, with parents in all different economic circumstances. Our country wants those kids, regardless of their background, to be able to get in the game, to be able to participate in our economy. Talented kids become driven adults pursuing their dreams and growing our economy. Making sure that everyone had a chance to get into the game tapped into the potential in every part of our society and helped the United States become the economic powerhouse that it is.
We don’t think about it, but our government makes sure we have a chance to participate in capitalism — get in the game — in ways large and small. Making sure there are good public roads we can drive on to get to work. Making sure that every person, regardless of their parents’ situation, has access to an education. Making sure the meat you buy doesn’t poison you. Using 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage laws and support for unionization to increase wages, to make sure capitalists shared the benefits of capitalism with their workers.
It seems obvious, but to have consumer capitalism you need consumers. Making sure everyone got in the game gave our workers the money to participate in our economy. Clever entrepreneurs responded by creating things for people to buy, vacuum cleaners and radios and vacation packages. A virtuous circle was created — more money in the hands of workers created markets for more consumer goods, which led to demand for more workers to build the consumer goods. This compromise, we stick with capitalism but use democracy to make sure everyone gets in the game and everyone plays by the same set of rules, is what made the United States the country that it is.
For many decades our country was making progress towards the goal of equality of opportunity. But somehow we seem to have slipped away from a commitment to the compromise. We have allowed our roads and bridges to fall into disrepair and backed away from our commitment to public education. We stepped away from our commitment to one set of financial rules for everyone. And all of this has taken a toll on our country. All of this has put our future in question.
We as a nation need to return to the compromise. We need to again work to ensure all citizens have the ability and the opportunity to participate in our economic system. We need to again make sure that there is one set of financial, investing and insurance rules. We need to get back to Democratic Capitalism. | https://medium.com/@blake-ashby/bring-back-democratic-capitalism-6de0342a7ae8 | ['Blake Ashby'] | 2020-12-11 14:41:11.776000+00:00 | ['Democratic Party', 'Democracy', 'Capitalism', 'Republican Party', 'Social Democracy'] |
300 Hour Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh | Yoga has increased a lot of prevalence as recently when compared with the prior years when two or three individuals accustomed to replicate it. The amount of those who should master Yoga is expanding each day, the necessity of Yoga instructors has in addition expanded. If you want to select a livelihood that can enable one to lead a wholesome alive and having a promising livelihood, then Kunwar Yoga, Rishikesh is the very best base for you personally. We provide diverse Yoga courses in a perfect manner for helping applicants right to learn Yoga.
We offer 100 Hour Yoga teacher Training in Rishikesh, including everything that’s required to learn by the people who want to take Yoga for a career. Alongside this training course, you’ll find numerous Yoga Training classes we give, determined by the time that you can put resources into learning Yoga, also will select the ideal course so. Our Yoga courses are planned at a manner which we may help individuals to acquire proficient in Yoga.
Yoga aids with establishing a sound way of life and will prompt an extraordinary trade choice. We’ve got the very best Yoga educators working with us who’re experts and are specialists in educating it.
Our group of specialists can certainly aid you with learning Yoga and guarantees that we provide convenient prep as well as alongside this we in addition provide theoretical details on Yoga because this encourages people to turn out to be better pros. This course is the very best for anyone students, who need to admit Yoga by choosing 100-hour Yoga Instructor Preparing at Rishikesh.
In addition, we provide 200 Hour Yoga teacher Training in Rishikesh, this training includes everything that is required to know by the individuals who want to take Yoga as a career. Along with this specific course, you can find lots of Yoga training courses that we provide, depending on the time that you can spend money on learning Yoga, you can choose the ideal course as per that. All our Yoga courses are designed in a way that we’re able to help people to become professional in Yoga in order they can teach it all further.
If you are interested in living a healthy way of life or you love to accomplish Yoga then this career choice will surely be the best for you personally. 100-hour Yoga Teacher Training Course in Rishikesh alongside the 300 Hour Yoga teacher Training in Rishikesh, we also provide a number of different courses as well that can help you to start a promising career in Yoga.
There are a number of of the best Yoga instructors who are employed in our profession, these are the professionals that not only have the good understanding of Yoga but they’re also proficient in teaching it.
Our staff of experts can easily allow one to master Yoga in a sense it will help you to teach it. We make sure that we not only offer practical training but along with this we also offer theoretical understanding about Meditation since this helps visitors to become better professionals. As with our Yoga Institute is located in Rishikesh at the middle of nature, there is a serene environment you can feel at our Yoga centre. We have ensur to provide all of the facilities that are required from aspirants to own a good stay while staying at our Yoga centre. We supply certification for all the courses that are offered by our Yoga Institute.
If you want to start your Yoga practice so that you can become a specialist Yoga teacher you then may get in touch with us now. We offer all the classes that are associated with Yoga teacher training plus we can make sure you offer the best services.
Kunwar योगा offers different Yoga Courses for its applicants that have to start out a promising vocation in Yoga. With immense long periods of participation in Yoga preparing, the organization has helped numerous individuals to advance toward becoming yoga instructors. The 100 hours Yoga Teacher Coaching will be right for the individuals who must wind-up proficient Yoga Trainers. This class is planned with the accomplished specialists that are functioning with Kunwar योगा and it centers across the useful only as the hypothetical part of Yoga.
This will be the path that’s the very best for students who must accept Yoga as a calling could choose the 100-hour Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh as that really is something that may show them with the specialty of Yoga such that they can without much of a stretch begin their expert vocation directly after the prep. | https://medium.com/@200houryogattcdehradun/300-hour-yoga-teacher-training-in-rishikesh-d0ecf432f0c6 | ['Hour Yoga Teacher Training'] | 2020-12-24 16:14:16.052000+00:00 | ['Yoga Teacher Training', 'Yoga', 'Yoga Benefits'] |
On Giving | Years from now, we are unlikely to remember the gifts we received today. But we will remember the feeling of being seen by a person who was generous enough to give something — kind words, time, a note, a donation, food, an item. And that feeling is priceless; it does not require money to create and lasts a lifetime when done right. | https://medium.com/@john-gonzalez/on-giving-b2bd2f1c84b5 | ['John Gonzalez'] | 2020-12-26 03:12:00.521000+00:00 | ['On Giving', 'Give', 'Christmas', 'Giving', 'Gifts'] |
WebAssembly and Rust: There and Back Again | I’m convinced WebAssembly is the next big thing, and it stretches beyond the Web. Here’s my experience learning the basics with the help of Rust.
Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash
“If you want to understand something, write about it”. So I decided to follow the famous advice and tell a short story about my foray into the WebAssembly land.
What is WebAssembly?
WebAssembly (a.k.a. Wasm) is an open standard that includes specifications for bytecode, its text representation and a secure host environment that would execute the code. The initial aim was to run C code on the web, but eventually, a range of compilers and runtimes was developed. So now we can run WebAssembly without a web browser or JavaScript.
It’s not the first attempt to create a cross-platform runtime. How is WebAssembly different from the previous “write once, run anywhere” technologies?
It’s light and simple: no heavy virtual machines, no platforms with complex APIs
It’s an open standard: nothing is proprietary, nothing is for sale
There’s no single “primary” language as it is the case with Java or dotNet
No specialisation: as WebAssembly isn’t a platform, it can be used for anything
Now that I wrote this it looks strange that it is the four “have nots” rather than “haves”. I think it’s an important thing about WebAssembly: it’s not Java. It’s so simple, open and universal that it can run anywhere.
I can’t count how many times I saw the phrase that WebAssembly isn’t designed to replace JavaScript, but rather to complement it. Well, let’s be honest: I did my time as a web developer and I’m not a fan of JS. When I’m looking at WebAssembly, what I actually think is “Can it replace JavaScript?”. Many people focus on performance, and it is important, but what if I just don’t want to write JavaScript anymore? When will its unnatural monopoly come to an end?
WebAssembly may be the answer to that question.
What is Rust?
I wanted to start from a relatively low level — no complex frameworks, no tooling. I like to know how things work before I use a high-level framework. At the same time, I wasn’t determined enough to write WebAssembly by hand. And didn’t want to write any C code either.
Fortunately, we have Rust programming language. Rust is characterized by two main things: it doesn’t let you mismanage the memory (by applying its novel ownership system), and it doesn’t use garbage collection — which means there’s almost no runtime. These traits make it an ideal language to be compiled to bytecode and run on a light virtual machine.
Such as WebAssembly.
Prerequisites
For our little experiment we’ll need to install a few bits and pieces:
Install Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
Install wasm-gc optimiser: cargo install wasm-gc
optimiser: Wasm-pack bundler: cargo install wasm-pack
Miniserve , a simple web server: cargo install miniserve
, a simple web server: Wasmer, the runtime that will let us run WebAssembly outside the browser: https://wasmer.io/
First Rust project
First, let’s write some Rust code. We’ll create a simple project using Cargo, the awesome Rust CLI:
cargo init --lib
We’re creating a dynamic library, so will need a correct crate-type in Cargo.toml — the project’s main metadata file:
Now, let’s add two small functions: one that calculates a Fibonacci number, and another that quite simply returns a string:
I assume this code should be obvious to anyone, even if you don’t have any experience with Rust. Two things to note: the first is the #[no_mangle] tags — we need them to make the functions available in a dynamically linked module, and the second is that the first function has a return type String . String is a dynamic type, a heap-allocated sequence of UTF-8 characters — this will require special attention when we get to bundling WebAssembly.
We can build it to native code using cargo build, but our goal is WebAssembly, so we need to install the compilation target:
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
Now we can do:
cargo build --target wasm32-unknown-unknown --release
After the compilation is done, the WebAssembly file can be found in target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/wasm_example.wasm . This file we can already load on a web page or run on any Wasm runtime.
But if you look at its size, it’s quite big — for web especially, we would like a smaller file. No problem, let’s use wasm-gc to optimise it:
wasm-gc ./target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/wasm_example.wasm ./wasm_example_rust.wasm
The optimised file is just 17Kb (down from 1.4M).
Running with Wasmer
What can we do with this file now? A good start would be to test it locally. We can use Wasmer to call functions from the wasm file:
wasmer wasm_example_rust.wasm -i fibonacci 10
89
Works! What about the function that returns a string?
wasmer wasm_example_rust.wasm -i will_return_string
error: failed to run `wasm_example_rust.wasm` ╰─> 1: Function expected 1 arguments, but received 0: “”
Wait, our function doesn’t require any parameters! What does this mean? Let’s build some suspense — we’ll get to that later.
Running on the Web
By definition, the WebAssembly code can be executed in any supporting web browser — meaning almost every browser these days. Unfortunately, the file still needs to be loaded by JavaScript. The code is straightforward though.
We simply fetch the file, instantiate the object and then run both functions. To serve it, we can use miniserve or any other web server.
miniserve . --index index.html
Let’s open a browser, navigate to localhost:8080 and take a look in the console:
Hmm, this again — fibonacci works as expected, but we still can’t return a string.
A look inside
Wasm file is the bytecode in its binary format. But WebAssembly also provides a text representation called WAT. We can restore it from our binary, using either wasm2wat console tool or its online demo: https://webassembly.github.io/wabt/demo/wasm2wat/. There’s also a nice VSCode extension.
Once uploaded, our file turns into a surprisingly large bulk of code, somewhat akin to Lisp — but, with some effort, it is understandable. For example, we can find the definition of the fibonacci function:
(func $fibonacci (export “fibonacci”) (type $t5) (param $p0 i32) (result i32)
It’s clear that it accepts an integer parameter and returns also an integer. What about our other function, that is acting weirdly?
(func $will_return_string (export “will_return_string”) (type $t4) (param $p0 i32)
As you can see, it’s been rewritten to accept a parameter while it now returns nothing. Why is that? Digging deeper, I found that $p0 is effectively a memory address — a pointer — where the function can place the result. Apparently, this is the only way we can return a dynamic entity like a String in WebAssebly.
The reason for that is that WebAssemby operates a very limited number of primitive types (remember the four “have nots”?) — the concept of strings simply doesn’t exist in this dimension.
Curiously, if we leave out the will_return_string function from our Rust code, compile to wasm and convert to WAT, the result becomes short and clear:
We can conclude that the rest was just boilerplate for moving the memory around.
Photo by Mariana B. on Unsplash
The glue
To overcome these difficulties, we must come back again and start anew. This time around we’re going to use a wrapper, a tool that will take care of all the boilerplate, both on the Rust and the JavaScript side. The Rust code doesn’t change, just the scaffolding.
First, we add a dependency to Cargo.toml . The wasm-opt part is a workaround I had to add because of a bug in this release of wasm-bindgen (don’t ask).
Then, slightly modify the code:
Here we inform Rust that we want to use wasm-bindgen and replace #[no_mangle] tags with #[wasm_bindgen] tags.
Now, as the result will be a javascript package, we must use wasm-pack to build it:
wasm-pack build --target web
This time we skip wasm-gc , wasm-pack does the size optimisation for us.
Unlike the artefacts that Cargo produces, the result is generated in the pkg directory. It is a proper npm package with all the javascript boilerplate. For simplicity though, we’ll just create another small HTML file to run it:
Here everything is taken care for us by wasm-pack. Basically, the only thing we need to do is to import the JS module — it loads our WebAssembly code underneath and publishes both functions in its namespace.
So what will we see if we serve this to Web? Let’s find out.
Both functions work now! Even the one that returns a string.
In conclusion
WebAssembly is limited but that’s a good thing, its power is in its simplicity.
Rust isn’t so simple, but a powerful language that at the same time remains relatively low-level.
One can’t just simply walking into WebAssembly from Rust, but one most certainly can with a little help from these tools:
wasm-bindgen , that provides the glue between Rust and Javascript. It works both ways: we can use JS API from Rust and Rust code from JS.
, that provides the glue between Rust and Javascript. It works both ways: we can use JS API from Rust and Rust code from JS. wasm-pack , the bundler that packs our code so it can be executed in a web browser.
What about Rust coupled with WebAssembly replacing Javascript? Well, this remains a dream for now. Some day, I believe we move on from HTML and the browser will simply execute Wasm applications. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet.
Still, WebAssembly is a powerful technology and it’s becoming increasingly popular. As it makes way to production in big corporations, I’m sure a bright future awaits WebAssembly.
Stay tuned for more WebAssembly articles — Go and Python are next in line!
Links | https://codeburst.io/webassembly-and-rust-there-and-back-again-9ad76f61d616 | ['Mikhail Medvedev'] | 2021-01-18 11:50:29.768000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Rust', 'Webassembly', 'Wasmer', 'Software Development'] |
Are digital tools helping us as much as we claim they are, though? | Just a quick anecdote to open: a few months ago, I had someone Facebook Messenger me to go on Slack. When I got on Slack, he sent me something from Google Docs to work on. That’s three platforms in the span of about 47 seconds. Theoretically a Google link can be shared in Facebook Messenger, so we could have potentially eliminated one step there.
47 seconds and three steps doesn’t sound like a big deal, no. But over the course of a day, a week, a month, etc… I’d legitimately have to wonder how much time is wasted in offices by people bouncing around between various platforms. I’d assume it’s going to add up.
The №1 reason this happens, of course, is that both individuals and silos (departments) become comfortable with specific workflows and tools. They don’t want to break away from those tools. But sometimes they must do projects with other teams, and those teams prefer different tools. This is usually a 27 car pile-up. At my last full-time job, the tech stack guys/girls used one thing (probably Asana), and the marketing “gals” (referred to as such) used another thing (I think OneNote). Do these programs speak to each other? Sure. But bring human context into it (“Why are we using this, Jim?”) and it gets messy.
If you don’t believe me on people clinging to the tools they know, look at some stats around adoption of tech.
The №2 reason, I’d guess, is that people view themselves as insanely busy. Most of work is about “getting this thing done.” We claim it’s strategic but it’s not often really that. So if you’re super slammed and need to get something done, maybe you’ll message someone across three-four platforms just because it seems relatively natural within how busy you are.
This is the reason group chat apps are not as productive as we think, though.
It seems like this all is pointing in two directions.
Direction 1: Digital got to scale too quickly
There weren’t a lot of “set rules,” and it was impacting different ages at the same time. Easiest conceptualization: your grandmother on Facebook. Another one: how most people use LinkedIn (a complete mess featuring number puzzles and bikini shots and updates about your kid’s soccer game).
Digital getting to scale so quickly and everyone kinda using it in their own way created what we call “digital noise.”
Direction 2: Digital is now officially “more shit to manage”
Think of how many new platforms aiming to “fix a pain point” come out monthly. In each industry, it’s gotta be hundreds if not more.
The real reason is because spinning out a platform isn’t super expensive. If you have the skills and can bring people together on it, you can spin it out, get some clients, and maybe get bought. CHA-CHING. You just set up your life for 20 years because you conned a few people into thinking your software will make their teams more productive. Congrats.
But in an era where work stress is supposedly higher than ever and managers are stretched thinner than male jeans in Portland, aren’t all these platforms becoming more shit to manage? Isn’t that eventually going to counter-set the productivity?
“Well the notes are in Asana and the docs are in Google and we’re updating on Slack but we also have a management board with Trello and we use FB for Work during the day as well as a private LinkedIn group and some mindfulness tools and a few productivity boosters. All software, of course.”
That sounds ridiculous, but I’ve worked at 4–5 places where it’s completely true. To get everything done, you need to check 11 things per day. And people put stuff that relates to other stuff in different places, so it’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle to just do your fucking job.
What’s the solution?
I guess the easiest answer here is “focus on simplicity,” but that’s very hard in business. Each silo has their own leaders, check-writers, and personalities. They will buy the stuff that seems to work for them. It becomes a cacophony of competing platforms and confusion, but no one cares — they want to look good and “smart as a buyer” to their bosses.
Mary Barra, who runs GM, once talked about situations where “the simplest task at work becomes impossible.” I think we’re there in a lot of companies, and it’s largely because of the proliferation of digital.
One other answer here would be “have clear priorities and indicate a desire for reduced communication channels to make sure info flows smoothly,” but I mean… LOL that most companies could ever achieve that. Work isn’t about info flowing smoothly. It’s about protecting your perch.
If you read this, though, I’m curious to know: do you see work as a competing mix of platforms? Do you see digital as now just “more shit I need to manage?” | https://tedbauer2003.medium.com/are-digital-tools-helping-us-as-much-as-we-claim-they-are-though-50376ecff639 | ['Ted Bauer'] | 2018-10-07 12:30:05.090000+00:00 | ['New Digital Tools', 'Future Of Work', 'Productivity Apps', 'Productivity', 'Management'] |
Spring boot : Mapstruct & Lombok. The Strike Team | Introduction
The aim of this article, is to get familiar with the use of Lombok & Mapstruct, they are two dependencies that you will import into your project, and they will save you valuable time.
I can’t be objective about using them or not, because I can no longer live without them (Okay, that was exaggerated).
The shield : The strike team
The strike team is going to be : You, your IDE, Mapstruct and Lombok.
The project
Requirements to get your project up and running :
A favorite text editor or IDE : I do use IntelliJ IDEA, come on judge me.
JDK 1.8 or later
Maven 3.2+
A keyboard
No mouse 😁
For this project, we are going to skip the use of a database, the model is going to be just POJO with no link to any database whatsoever. | https://medium.com/@fahd-boudali/spring-boot-mapstruct-lombok-e219bef471ab | ['Fahd Boudali'] | 2020-11-25 10:04:29.717000+00:00 | ['Lombok', 'Spring Boot', 'Mapping', 'Spring', 'Java'] |
Transforming Healthcare | To date, healthcare has proven one of the toughest industries for startups to crack. Following on from a similar roundtable a year ago, we gathered together a group of representatives from HealthTech startups and investors for a frank and honest discussion on what, if any, progress has been made in the last year.
At last year’s roundtable, the key takeaway were the difficulties of dealing with the NHS. With a virtual monopoly on healthcare in the UK, it is virtually impossible for any HealthTech startup to achieve a unicorn valuation without interacting with it. It is, however, a highly complex and bureaucratic organisation, and difficult to break into.
But progress has not been impossible: Babylon Health’s achievements, notably a trial of its service to power the 111 service, marked for many a breakthrough moment. Understanding the different touch points within the NHS and understanding the right people to talk to was vital in achieving this; many hope that these successes will pave the way for others.
An alternative approach that other startups have taken is to build services privately, and gaining traction before selling into the NHS. This allows HealthTechs to bypass NHS bureaucracy in the difficult early stages, and when their priority does turn to selling into the NHS, they can force the conversation with concrete results.
Meanwhile, the other pot of money eyed by investors looking at an exit is the pharmaceutical companies. Whilst they have been slow to address innovation thus far, these giants are now starting to wake up to disruption. In particular, there is a huge opportunity for selling services alongside the drugs manufactured by the pharma companies.
Companies in attendance include: AstraZeneca, Babylon Health, Doctify, DrEd, Echo, Lumeon, Medopad, Medvivo, Patient, Push Doctor, Skin Analytics, Thriva, Vida Care, Vitalfootprint, and Vitality. | https://medium.com/the-up-group/cracking-the-virtual-monopoly-on-healthcare-cbe4374f7728 | ['The Up Group'] | 2017-07-24 08:27:45.940000+00:00 | ['Roundtables', 'Digital Transformation', 'Healthtech', 'Nhs', 'Healthcare'] |
King: We’re Hack Again! | By James Glass, Xavier Gibert & Zuzanna Kruszczynska
On each Hack Day at King, we round-up tech gurus from far and wide with a creative range of ideas on how to improve the technologies and internal tools that we use.
Our recent Barcelona Hack Day event gave King employees a chance to take a break from daily work to collaborate and connect with new Kingsters.
It’s also where new product ideas can come to life!
From hacks designed around improving ticket features on JIRA, to increasing our time-efficiency using software tools. Some projects were just meant to bring Kingsters together from different disciplines while learning about other subjects such as Clojure.
The Winner! — Improving Filtro with KSQL
By Xavier — “Super Cool” Java Developer
This Hack Day project highlighted how Filtro could be improved if its backend was replaced with KSQL.
What’s Filtro?
Filtro is a logging tool to view and filter tracking events at King in development, QA, and live environments. However, when the user needs to transform/aggregate events, programming knowledge is required to create a Java/Groovy script. This along with the fact that tech incidents can and will occur were central reasons for building this project, as it would allow quicker response-times for solutions to the issues when they occur.
“… it supports a varied range of streaming operations, including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, windowing, and sessionisation.”
Xavier proudly holding his trophy!
W hat is KSQL?
This is an open source streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka. It offers a simple and complete interactive SQL interface for stream processing on Kafka. KSQL is scalable, elastic and fault-tolerant, supporting a varied range of streaming operations that are essential at King including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, windowing, and sessionisation.
Normally to find any errors or anomalies, as a dev, you would need to write an RBEA script. The benefits of using KSQL for this hack project included: No coding, no additional analytics cluster, streams and tables as first-class constructs along with access to the rich Apache Kafka interconnected system.
The outcome — The project is in developmental stages; however, it works in terms of functionality and would need access to a properly configured environment in QA for example. A local test environment was used at the hack demo to illustrate how it could be applied to detect anomalies in the data.
The challenges — Working on a project that didn’t use Kafta and wasn’t prepared to process events was challenging along with trying to find something that was not only useful for developers but also useful for other users such as Data Scientists.
The future — Getting access to a UI on top of an API would further help this project move forward which could potentially help King detect incidents as they occur much quicker. The project still has a long way to go, however, the initial results have been shared with the product owner of Filtro at King so let’s see!
King — Hack Day Barcelona Video Snippet | https://medium.com/techking/king-were-hack-again-d1ec2f55f55a | ['Tech At King'] | 2018-12-11 08:16:38.558000+00:00 | ['Hacks', 'Technology', 'Gaming', 'Tech', 'Hackathons'] |
A Letter to the Goddess of Sleep | A Letter to the Goddess of Sleep
Photo by Karina Tess on Unsplash
Ah, Sleep. You crafty, elusive goddess. We crave your embrace. We desperately chase the fleeting satin of your gossamer gown, but we recognize that you only give yourself to us when we cease our pursuit.
We find the release that only you can give when we relinquish the chase of the one thing we desire.
We shower you with our desperate entreaties for your magical touch, we toss and thrash about our beds, begging for you to bestow on us your intoxicating elixir of slumber. Coyly, you smile and wag your finger. “Not until you stop trying, my love.”
Obediently, we try to stop trying. We wrestle with ourselves, with our breath, with our bodies, with our minds. We repeatedly claw our way to the brink, excitedly becoming aware of our proximity to our desired destination, and then, when we realize that we have almost reached the peak, we suddenly, tragically tumble backward into our spinning, ravenous minds.
Eventually, her patient caresses lull us, in spite of ourselves, into a rhythm. Her rhythm. Our breathing deepens, we slowly let go, shifting from our brains to bodies. We embody the most primal of our ancestors, we release logic, reasoning, and self-awareness.
As she sings the final notes of her siren’s song, we unfasten the remaining lock that keeps us in the cages of our intellect. We start to fall into her enduring bosom. She is always there to catch us.
But silence is our only reward for our efforts. We are whisked away from our climax before we reach an awareness of our achievement. Our reward for wrestling in our beds is only the absence of thought. Utopia consistently barely eludes us. We can find no joy in our long-awaited conclusion.
The siren has delivered us to our boat, but she has pushed us out to sea as she sits majestically still on the sand.
When our nighttime journey has run its course, when we have journeyed incoherently through the abyss, we awaken thinking on the primitive battle of the previous night. We know that we will crave her again. We know that ever how pernicious she may be in the withholding of our pleasure, we require her release.
We will come back for more. | https://medium.com/the-virago/a-letter-to-the-goddess-of-sleep-211993323e77 | ['Michelle Loucadoux'] | 2020-12-27 22:41:29.845000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Sex', 'Women', 'Life', 'Self-awareness'] |
還在聽Podcast | 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/%E8%A6%96%E8%81%BD%E9%9F%B3%E6%83%B3/%E9%82%84%E5%9C%A8%E8%81%BDpodcast-a10965721776 | ['Oliver Hsu'] | 2020-12-25 23:13:51.566000+00:00 | ['華語音樂', 'Podcast', '播客', '還在聽', 'Thoughts'] |
Why Going from Director to Intern can be Healthy | Why Going from Director to Intern can be Healthy
How being the lowest rung on the ladder can teach you more about being at the top of it
When you’re faced with multiple decisions a day, that can be tiring. In the same way when you have multiple small tasks to complete, that can also be tiring. The mental taxation from these activities is what differentiates the type of tiredness that you experience.
With that being said, there are different levels of mental taxation when it comes to being in a lower vs. higher ranking position within a company. People too often get caught up in titles rather than the knowledge that they can gain in their position. Regardless of a title, there is always something to learn in any given position. Though the impact of your position may be different depending on the totem pole of your organization, it is always in your best interest to learn from those above and below you.
Photo by Arif Riyanto on Unsplash
Here’s what this is referring to:
In one of my positions as a Director at the McMillon Innovation Studio I make decisions daily to best support my team. I am one of the leaders in that organization. Being in a position of leadership naturally puts you in a place of having to make choices — keeping in mind these choices will affect other people.
In another position I’ve recently held at Seaboard Corporation, I am just another intern. How many decisions do I make?
About negative 2.
Do I make decisions daily?
Yes, I get to choose what I want to eat for lunch! Being an intern is not a bad thing or a negative experience, you just aren’t the decision maker for… well anything really. The hard part for me is I went from making constant decisions to making no decisions in a matter of weeks. That was a big adjustment, and it got even harder as time went on because the transition was so quick.
Both of these positions require different kinds of thinking, amounts of brainpower, etc. that make them mentally taxing in their own unique ways. The internship was candidly less mentally taxing because less people relied on me personally.
If so far it sounds like this internship was a negative experience or worse than being a director/leader, that’s not true. Though some internships can leave a bad taste in a young person’s mouth, I got to directly absorb unique experiences that will allow me to become a better decision maker.
How is that possible without making any decisions myself?
I got to analyze how decision-makers who are better and more experienced than me at leading make major decisions. Now that is what I call invaluable experience.
Outside of that I learned a lot more about several business industries including real estate, food processing, energy generation, and many more that the Seaboard Corp umbrella covers. That experience is fantastic for me because it is part of my mission to have an extremely diverse skill set and knowledge of many different business industries.
However, that experience does not provide as much value to me as witnessing Fortune 500 leadership make legitimately Earth-shattering decisions in the same room as me. This piece adds to another part of my mission to gain experience in leadership positions, but in this case I was not in the position. I was around other leaders who I took notes from.
Do I sound too excited yet?
Good.
Here is the difference between the decisions I make vs. the decisions that the Seaboard leadership makes which causes the shattering of Earth:
When I make a decision within the studio as a Director, here are the effects-
About 60 people will somehow feel it
A few hundred people will potentially see it or know about it
It will shift the environment of the overall studio
There may or may not be positive/negative consequences from it
When the Seaboard leadership team makes a decision, here are some of the effects-
About 12,000+ people will somehow feel it
A “few” hundred-thousand will see it or know about it
It will shift the environment of major areas including entire countries
There may or may not be positive/negative consequences from it
There is an incredible amount to learn from watching those types of decisions be made. Though my decisions don’t affect nearly as many people, applying what I learned as just the intern to my director role is key to becoming a better leader.
When I implement what I learned in my internship into what I do as a director I will instantly enable myself to make better decisions. I know this because I got a front-row seat to some of the best leadership in town, and get to filter in or out what I think is applicable to my organization and leadership style. That doesn’t mean I will always make the right decision and it doesn’t mean that leaders of huge companies always do either.
Learning from other’s mistakes is one of the best ways to sharpen your leadership skills, and it is healthy to observe other leaders that are multiple positions ahead of you (especially when you are currently a leader in some capacity). Does that mean you have to be the intern at some point to become the leader? Absolutely not, but it is invaluable experience to learn from those who are better than you at whatever you are trying to become.
Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash
All leadership positions hold importance (not just positions in giant companies) and I am not trying to say ever leader is the best to learn from. There are certainly terrible leaders out there who lead with things like fear, dollar amounts, etc. I am encouraging you to keep learning from leaders that positively impact your life. One day you will become or already are a leader, and will appreciate the knowledge that you absorbed. Once you have been the leader of something for a long time and you get comfortable, it can be easy to just stay where you are. Sitting back and letting the people under you be the only ones growing is the fastest way to no longer be the leader. Even in the classic game of follow the leader the person in front has to keep moving forward or else someone in line that keeps moving will inevitably pass them.
I think that it’s obvious which is the better position to be in, but what’s not obvious is the fact that you can learn just as much (or maybe even more in some cases) from being “just the intern” in an organization than being at the top of the ladder. Climbing ladders is never fun, but each position presents a unique situation, so be sure to keep learning in every position that you hold. You truly never know what knowledge those around you may be able to give unless you’re open to looking for it. | https://medium.com/business-growth-network/why-going-from-director-to-intern-can-be-healthy-23b09e3e16d9 | ['The Equation'] | 2020-07-21 06:43:52.905000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Leadership', 'Youngadult', 'Internships', 'Business'] |
Writing Technical User Stories | Writing Technical User Stories
Building the right thing, and building the thing right
By Sue-Mun Huang
With technical products, deciding what needs to be done is just the first step. Figuring out how to actually define that “what” is a difficult and ongoing challenge for product managers. Fortunately, like the development cycle, feature specification itself is an iterative process, and it’s owned by the entire team.
If you’re building an API, middleware, or any kind of backend product, you’ll likely face these (additional) challenges when defining requirements:
Features are often tightly coupled and co-dependent
Features touch multiple parts of the system (or systems)
Small changes can have far-reaching impact — lots of nuances to consider
Hard to keep end-user value top of mind or explain value to stakeholders
Unfamiliar jargon: highly technical or vendor-specific terms
As such, building a more technical product requires substantial preparation and a lot of communication. But what does that look like, exactly?
User Stories vs. Use Cases
First, you need to decide how you’re going to define what your product does.
User stories are widely regarded as the best way to capture feature requirements in agile development. They were first introduced by the Extreme Programming (XP) framework in 1998, which stated that project scope is defined “with user stories, which are like use cases”. User stories begin as a simple sentence which can fit on a card, describing an action/goal and its benefit to the user. These stories are designed to invoke conversations between team members, where details are added as the functionality is built.
Use cases, on the other hand, provide a more detailed description of the interaction between a user (role) and the system from the beginning. These are more popular in technical projects as they capture the preconditions, triggers, and responses of the system to all the possible paths (successful and unsuccessful) that could occur when the user performs an action — which can make engineers’ lives a lot easier.
The debate on using user stories vs. use cases continues today: some even argue that the two converge as they move from conversation to confirmation. As long as it works for you and your team, it shouldn’t matter what you use. Personally, I really like to use a hybrid approach: leveraging use case thinking to help discover what stories need to be written.
What makes a Good Story?
Stories can make or break a project, especially a highly technical one. Good stories are:
Independent (can be built separately to other stories)
Negotiable (requirements can be adapted)
Valuable (provides benefit to the end-user)
Estimable (to reasonable accuracy)
Small (can be built within one iteration)
Testable (can be verified by QA)
So how do we get from high-level product feature ideas to these INVEST-worthy stories?
First, Establish a Hierarchy
Projects can quickly become overwhelmingly complex and it can be difficult to find and keep track of tasks — creating a human-readable organization layer helps keep the relevant information easily accessible at all times.
I like to use epics to describe large chunks of system functionality, which are comprised of features that describe some kind of job to be done, which are in turn comprised of the user stories required to achieve that job. For example:
Epic: Ability to access on-demand content
Ability to access on-demand content Feature(s): Ability to find a podcast to listen to, and ability to subscribe to a podcast
Ability to find a podcast to listen to, and ability to subscribe to a podcast Stories: Get list of podcasts, search for podcast, and filter for podcast by market or category
Others may prefer to do this differently. If your team prefers using labels, then do that.
Feature Slicing
Features should be sliced vertically, not horizontally, to break them into stories. That is, you should focus on end-to-end user value, and not by frontend tasks vs. backend tasks. A story should reflect the end-user’s action e.g., “be able to add a podcast to their favorites”, which could then comprise of frontend and backend elements contained within that story, like “add a favorites button to the UI” and “save the podcast id to the user’s account”. This applies to all types of projects, technical or not.
If your product is an API, then your stories will still reflect this vertical slicing — except the “frontend” action might instead be with reference to hitting an endpoint like `POST/favorites/podcasts`, instead of clicking a button that looks like x.
Stories get Smaller Over Time
As you work with your engineers and QA to better understand what should be done, stories can be broken into smaller and smaller chunks as the details and dependencies become apparent.
You should consider breaking down a story if:
There are multiple unrelated acceptance criteria
Some elements are considered ‘nice to haves’
Team is struggling to estimate development effort
Story does not fit within a single iteration
But how Small is too Small?
For example, to provide an end-user with the ability to search for a resource by typing in search terms, the acceptance criteria should cover these scenarios:
Single search term
Multiple search terms
Search + other query parameters
No matches found
The end-user doesn’t differentiate between “searching for one term” vs. “searching with multiple words”. To them, it’s just “searching”, so they can be combined in the same story. Separating these may lead to confusion during implementation, especially if different people are working on the stories.
However, different functions, like sorting vs. searching, should be broken out into separate stories.
Happy and Unhappy Paths
Use case-thinking is really helpful to ensure your stories cover all the possible paths, conditions, triggers, and outcomes, e.g., “the user performs a successful ‘create’ action”. As a big fan of the Checklist Manifesto, I always use this quick list as a reminder to consider the different types of paths which can be taken by the user (obviously, this can vary from product to product):
CRUD actions (a classic):
Create
Read
Update
Delete
WEESLD states (pronounced “weaseled”):
Waiting
Empty
Error ← THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT
Success
Limits
Default Values
Configuration options (FSSPI? Open to suggestions here!):
Filtering (single parameter, multiple parameter)
Sorting (single parameter, multiple parameter)
Searching (single term, multiple term)
Pagination (page size, page number)
Include (what related information can also be returned in the response?)
At the most detailed level, I usually find you need at least one story per action-state-configuration permutation to completely define a feature e.g., “unsuccessful create” or “successful read with filtering applied”.
This approach can lead to needing multiple stories to properly define a feature: in addition to labelling, prefixes and consistent naming conventions can be used to find these more easily. Also, emojis are a fun way to quickly differentiate between happy path and unhappy path stories!
The Story Itself: Bringing It All Together
If an API is the product, then the routes, method, request, and response definitions are the business requirements. I’ve found writing stories in the Gherkin format (given, when, then) to be helpful since this accounts for pre-conditions, and offers an elegant means to describe different outcome paths:
Summary: As a {end user}, I should be able to {action}, so that I can {benefit}
Acceptance Criteria:
GIVEN: A {end user} is {doing the action} in the {app}
WHEN: The app hits the {endpoint route} endpoint with a valid request, containing {required request parameters}
THEN: The app should receive a status {code}
AND: In the response, the following information should be returned: {required response parameters}
Sample Request/Sample Response
Dev Notes/Resources: {any supporting notes here}
Testing Notes: {notes for QA, with examples if applicable}
As tempting as it may be: stories are not implementation instructions. Technical stories are supposed to describe what happens, not how it should be built — let the engineers find the best solution for this, and let them document this. Remember, no one likes to be told how to do their job.
Supporting Materials
To help ensure the right functionality is built and tested, stories should be supported by:
User workflow diagrams
Wireframes, design prototypes, high fidelity mocks
Customer feedback
Architecture diagrams, schema definitions, and technical documentation
Response matrices
Explanation of jargon (I always create and maintain a glossary)
Error Handling
Error handling is especially important for backend-heavy products where there is no UI available to prevent a user from going down an unsuccessful path. Responses should ideally contain at least the following information:
Error id (to help trace the specific instance of the error)
Transaction id (to help trace the workflow a user was performing, especially if there are multiple steps)
Status code (e.g., 400)
User-friendly message (e.g., “Please log in and try again.”)
Error key (more technical information for debugging purposes e.g., FACEBOOK_ACCESS_EXPIRED)
Using a response matrix is a quick and easy way to specify these requirements (for happy and unhappy paths), and should be referenced in the story itself. For example: | https://medium.com/tribalscale/writing-technical-user-stories-434bf96f1dd5 | ['Tribalscale Inc.'] | 2018-12-20 14:47:48.784000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Agile', 'User Stories', 'Product Management'] |
Installation process, Setup, and How to use Vue.js? | Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash
Vue js is easier to install and setup on your machine. The installation process is more easier than other popular front end frameworks like react and angular.
Vue.js have 4 type of installation
1. As an external <script> import or locally setup
Simply download Vue and include a script tag on your HTML file. Vue will be registered as a global variable.
vue have two type of versions:
Development Version — click here for download
Production Version — click here for download
<html>
<head>
<script src="vue.js">
<head> <body>
</body> <script>
const vue_app = new Vue()
</script>
</html>
Script import must be above the Vue object declaration, the best way/practice is to include the script in the head tag and declare Vue object bellow body tag with<script></script> tag.
Don’t use the minified version during development. You will miss out on all the nice warnings for common mistakes!
2. CDN
For prototyping or learning purposes, you can use the latest version with:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vue/dist/vue.js"></script>
For production, we recommend linking to a specific version number and build to avoid unexpected breakage from newer versions:
If you are using native ES Modules, there is also an ES Modules compatible build:
<script type="module"> import Vue from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/vue.esm.browser.js' </script>
Vue is also available on unpkg and cdnjs (cdnjs takes some time to sync so the latest release may not be available yet).
CDN script acts like a similar with locally imported script, the best way/practice is to include the CDN in the head tag and declare Vue object bellow body tag with<script></script> tag.
for more about CDN visit here
3. NPM
NPM (Node Package Manager) is used to install packages. You can use it to install Vue within either a new or existing project.
You will need to ensure you have node.js installed on your machine along with access to NPM, to download and install node.js for Windows/Linux/Mac click here
To check availability those two open up your console and type:
node -v
npm -v
Both of these commands should provide you with version numbers.if any problem or error occur then intall node.js properly and try again
In order to save our project dependencies based on what we install with NPM, we need to create a package.json file.
npm init -y
Next, we will use npm to install Vue:
npm install vue --save
A folder will be created named node_modules in the directory where you run this npm init -y command
At this point, you could create an HTML file with the same exact contents as the locally setup example above, except change the <script src to node_modules/vue/dist/vue.js, and it will work just the same.
<script src="node_modules/vue/dist/vue.js">
4. Vue with the Vue CLI
after a successful install of node.js, you can access npm to install vue-cli.
npm install -g @vue/cli
After installation, you will have access to the vue binary in your command line. You can verify that it is properly installed by simply running vue, which should present you with a help message listing all available commands.
You can check you have the right version with this command:
vue --version
then you have to go to the project directory and run this command:
vue init webpack-simple vue-cli
here webpack-simple is the name of the template that is provided by vue official and vue-cli is the name of the project folder, you can choose your folder name on your own.
Here is the link for official available template or you can use the command to find out the official template list, to find out just run:
vue list
then some information should be needed like project name/ description etc, you can use default or you have an option to modify these things.
Then execute some command to run you Vue project:
Enter the vue-cli folder or your own chosen name folder then install npm to pull down all the dependencies for development and then start a development server for use and it will keep running, so keep this process running and will automatically recompile everything and reload our server automatically whenever we change a file.
cd vue-cli
npm install
npm run dev
Thank you! | https://medium.com/@juwelariful1/installation-process-setup-and-how-to-use-vue-js-aa78972b9c38 | ['Ariful Islam Juwel'] | 2020-06-24 07:43:38.300000+00:00 | ['Vuejs', 'Getting Started', 'Installation'] |
Automated Dispensing Machines Market Demand, Sales and Growth Opportunities | Automated dispensing machines market is expected to generate a revenue of $2.3 billion by 2024, advancing at a CAGR of 7.8% during the forecast period, according to P&S Intelligence.
Automated dispensing machines
Rising incidence of medication errors, technological innovations and advancements, growing geriatric population, rising prevalence of chronic diseases, government initiatives to integrate automated dispensing machines in healthcare settings, and growing number of patent approvals for automated dispensing machines are some of the major factors driving the growth of the market.
Geographically, North America holds the largest share in the automated dispensing machines market, with an estimated contribution of 40.8% to the market in 2018, and is projected to generate $919.5 million revenue by 2024. This can be mainly attributed to the improved healthcare infrastructure, presence of established players, and surging geriatric population in the region.
During the forecast period, the automated dispensing machines market is expected to witness the fastest growth in APAC, with 9.3% CAGR, mainly on account of the improving healthcare infrastructure in the region and the increasing focus of market players on developing countries, such as China and India, for business expansion.
Request to Get the Sample Pages at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/automated-dispensing-machines-market/report-sample
Initiatives implemented by government organizations to install automated dispensing systems in healthcare settings have increased the demand for such systems in APAC. For instance, the Central Medical Services Society (CMSS) of India is encouraging installation of automated dispensing systems in rural parts of the country. With the support of CMSS, automated medication systems are installed in several states of the country. These systems dispense free of cost general prescribed medicines.
Besides, growing economies and increasing healthcare expenditure are allowing countries of the region to install automated dispensing machines in healthcare settings. According to the World Bank data, the gross domestic product (GDP) of Malaysia was increased from $193.5 billion in 2007 to $314.7 billion in 2017. Similarly, in Vietnam, its GDP was increased from $77.4 billion in 2007 to $223.7 billion in 2017. A similar scenario was observed in India and Sri Lanka, where the GDPs were $1.2 trillion and $32.3 billion, respectively in 2007, which were reached to $2.6 trillion and $87.3 billion, respectively in 2017. Since the GDP growth is on the rise, the adoption of technological advanced products in the APAC region is expected to increase, which in turn, will boost the market growth.
Make Enquiry Before Buying the Report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/send-enquiry?enquiry-url=automated-dispensing-machines-market
Acquisitions and collaborations among prominent players have dominated the automated dispensing machines market in the recent times. For instance, in July 2018, NYU Langone Health Hospital extended its strategic partnership with Omnicell Inc. for the installation of Omnicell XT automated medication dispensing cabinets, anesthesia workstation, and controlled substance manager in the hospital.
Besides, showcasing novel technological advancements at various public platforms is also aiding the growth of the automated dispensing machines market. For instance, in February 2019, Omnicell Inc. showcased its comprehensive and customizable platform for medication management at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 Global Conference and Exhibition held in Florida, U.S.
Major key players operating in the global automated dispensing machines market are Becton, Dickinson and Company; Omnicell Inc.; ScriptPro LLC; Pearson Medical Technologies LLC; Capsa Healthcare; Talyst LLC; McKesson Corporation; Newlcon Oy; TouchPoint Medical Inc.; and ARxIUM. | https://medium.com/@pramodkumr/automated-dispensing-machines-market-demand-sales-and-growth-opportunities-83586bbc4ff9 | ['Pramod Kumar'] | 2019-07-19 07:09:53.838000+00:00 | ['Marketplaces', 'Healthcare', 'Medical', 'Automated', 'Market Research Reports'] |
Brand Asset Management vs. Digital Asset Management | What is the difference between BAM and DAM and how can one strengthen the other?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Brand Asset Management (BAM) are very similar, but there are some key differences. Find out more about the distinction and how one can be used to improve the other.
Brand Asset Management (BAM) consists of the organization, storage and retrieval of important branding information in order to communicate according to the brand guidelines and standards, therefore protecting the brand’s identity.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the organization, storage and retrieval of corporate digital media and marketing collateral along with their associated usage guidelines.
Sounds quite similar, doesn’t it? Although these management forms are often referred to as the same term, there is a distinction between the two.
A company’s brand is its most valuable asset. Brand value or customer based brand equity is built by continuous and consistent branding.
“Customer-based Brand Equity is defined as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand” — Keller
What are assets?
Digital or brand assets are valuable property of a company. They consist of, well, what else: digital files, digital media, images, logos, documents, videos, presentations, et cetera. The distinction between an asset and a regular file is — and there is that keyword again — value.
Digital files can be considered digital assets, but not all digital files are necessarily an asset to the company.
The assets of a brand, which are more or less tangible, play an important role for marketers who manage, control and maintain the corporate identity.
Digital Asset Management is a management form that carries the tools marketers need for consistent branding. DAM software contains the brand guidelines, a media library containing all the brand’s assets and a workflow module where all marketing publications can be monitored before they are published.
Digital Asset Management → Brand Asset Management → Brand Equity
In short: Digital Asset Management software contains, amongst others, brand assets. Therefore, Digital Asset Management complements and strengthens the Brand Asset Management. BAM adds value to a brand, which leads to high brand equity.
BAM or DAM software?
Luckily, you don’t have to choose between the two. Brand Asset Management is an integrated part of Digital Asset Management software. The main goal with DAM is the centralization and consistent use of assets, which includes brand assets.
DAM software is the librarian of your marketing department that never sleeps and never gets tired of your requests. Find out how your company can increase brand equity with Digital Asset Management:
Supercharge your marketing performance
Download the white paper and learn the impact of a DAM solution on your business.
DOWNLOAD | https://medium.com/marketing-and-branding/brand-asset-management-vs-digital-asset-management-30d27a860b8e | ['Raul Tiru'] | 2020-12-18 12:05:08.417000+00:00 | ['Brand Management', 'Digital Asset', 'Digital Asset Management', 'Branding', 'Brand Strategy'] |
Twin Flame at the River Styx (1) | Twin Flame: A Narrative of Queen Penelope of Ithaca
Episode 1: Twin Flame at the River Styx
(image credit: Penelope. Dante Gabriel Rosetti, 1828–1882)
©copyright registered Twin Flame: A Narrative of Queen Penelope of Ithaca
Editorial Note: I want to say that I am intentionally breaking boundaries with punctuation and dialogue with Penelope. I say I am “breaking the container” because the container can stifle creativity. Sometimes it can enhance creativity too — but mostly not. So at first the reading can be challenging but that’s also intentional as it demands reader participation. These are some of the theories I developed and worked out in my career as a writing teacher. It is fun to see them come to new fruition now. Let’s begin!
This is a narrative of Penelope and Odysseus, Twin Flame lovers of Ithaca. Follow episodically as in the olden days of yore. We begin with episode one. It proceeds thusly: Fair Penelope has welcomed her soulful lover home from his fateful journeying and King Odysseus is tired. He is in need of succor and Penelope’s warm embrace. For years he has conquered countless foe and met his many challenges. Homer tells the tale for all time. We listen still.
Now Odysseus has been away a decade following his valiant struggles in the Trojan War. His travel home was met with many obstacles and he was lost for dead. The people of Ithaca clamored for a new king. Queen Penelope resisted, such was her love for her Odysseus and his for her too unsullied by this time and this travail. So reader our lovers meet this very night to rewed! They remarry and rejoice in the passion that is a Godly gift to them and all of Ithaca too. Let us listen in as Penelope speaks at last to her dear lover.
Come home with me Odysseus Penelope says. We will consort tonight in the bed you crafted by your own artistic hand at our nubile bliss. It has lain empty without you for I took up other chambers in my despair. I could not lie there without you. Penelope forsooth the bed still lays planted firm? How the supple olive tree limbs support our weight and sing our passion. Odysseus chuckles. I have heard that music in my dreams oh love. Say it is not chopped asunder and carted off for prize money. It is not Odysseus. It is perfectly well preserved and we shall see our maiden bed soon and hear its song. Here I have prepared a tonic for you. We will drink together. This will soothe your soul and mine and we will discharge the foul memory of this distance and time. We will rejoice in our body communion soon. God’s Grace is surely upon us now love.
I have watched and waited through your many adventures. Eons of them my love and now at last Nirvana approaches. Athena comes and Portia sometimes too to whisper in the astral hours of your undaunted courage and bravery I swoon. And now this is our own twilight, our red-gold sunset, our purple eventide, our majestic orange glow morning. We celebrate. It is here at last. I lost you for dead and now Athena brings you as a mortal man disguised like a beggar. I feigned. I knew you at once. The bedpost story notwithstanding. You named the olive branch you did I knew you would. I stood aloof and silent but I knew you. O my Odysseus how could I ever not know you? Now we are about to rejoin our twin souls in sensual union. I delight. Praise the Gods on Mount Olympus for bringing you home to me. I died many times Odysseus now I am born anew. Come and bathe with me in this golden Godly light.
Penelope knits a funeral shroud.
Penelope. Persephone.
I am the Queen of Death. Persephone.
The Queen of the Underworld. Persephone.
I am the Flower Maiden. Persephone.
Queen Penelope and Persephone are the self same soul.
My King let us condole together now. Before we wed tonight I must know more of your struggles. You come to the castle in your beggar’s disguise. With Athena’s help you take me unawares and surprise me so. The shroud nears completion. I was to choose a husband at the new moon. And now here you are before me and I can do nothing more than weep in your presence my love. Take me in your arms now and hold me until I calm. Odysseus obeys her edict and says my love I am shaking with pent desire and longing for you. Let me take you now and then we talk.
Odysseus no my love I cannot. Leave me be now and let us sit apart. You are led by a prideful pain of unknown origin. I sense in you a deep wound and caustic too. Something within you burns and troubles you. I have no way of ascertaining the origins of this raw and troubling pain. Is it possible for you to describe it for me now for the future rests upon its announcement and its resolution. We can take not one step further until you open this pain to me my love.
Alas I cannot open this pain my Penelope. In vain I have struggled against it. Forsooth I have struggled with a mighty fierceness. My struggle has led me to the desperate shores of despair and I have sought the comfort of the lotus blossom. The lotus blossom quieted the call and demand of my petulant soul, dear lady, and I am wont to continue in its deep and dark embrace. Nay verily though I passed through this shadow once before and saved my men from the lotus embrace. They struggled mightily against me and I against them. I wrest them back to the ship but many men were lost to me and now I am lost again to myself my dear Penelope. I cannot say what troubles me. Penelope exclaims Odysseus my love forsooth. Take this tale away from my ears. Come enjoy the honeyed wine with me. You are in great need of my succor. Only with me will you rest but I must know this account.
Now will Odysseus lie with his Penelope in their castle at Ithaca following his return from sea? We shall see. We shall see.
Penelope pursues her passion. Tell me Odysseus. I deserve your reply. What is the painful point now my King? There is nothing you cannot tell your Penelope. We are we. Only with you I lie in truth. I love only you. Penelope says my brave King I longed for you when you were away at sea. Ten long years I knit and rend for you. I have been made barren in your absence. I long for your child Odysseus. Odysseus I must have your child what can we do? Alas and woe. Penelope weeps, cast down, then raises her tear stained face to her lover. Yet still Odysseus my body responds to you now like a young girl just altared. What do you make of it my King?
Penelope. Odysseus rushes forth for embrace. He buries his face at the bend of her neck. Penelope. Penelope my love your body enchants me still. You enchant me. The smell of you calls me home. I will take you now with renewed vigor and passion. I will. Have me Penelope. Your long waitfulness has not been in vain and we will surely conceive a child. I ask the Gods now for a purification to settle our account. Here it is. I beg you. Here it is. Now listen and take me at my word. O Penelope here it is. Penelope sounds alarm. She says what King what!
On my voyage I was besieged by demon harpies who stole my seed from me my love. They yanked it loose from whence it grew cold and stale in wait for Penelope, the honored cherished wife of King Odysseus. I cried begone you demon harpies. You are not my love Penelope who is chaste and pure of heart, mind, body and deed. You are temptresses all. Go. You will not bind me to the masthead to have your way with me. No. I toss off the shackles of your vain deceit and your hostile miasma. Yet my true pure and chaste Penelope. I fell then. I did. I became weakened by their malicious and aggressive succubine energy. I fell indeed. More than once. Woe. But in this dishonored falling I remembered my true and committed love to dear Penelope and I exclaimed No Harpies No! I have but one true command and she owns my heart, my body, evermore. Faithful, waitful, prayerful Penelope. She who is mine above all others. I struck out successfully against them then and I made it home to you at last Penelope.
Odysseus, Penelope exclaims, this report strikes hard in my heart. What are you saying to me? Demon harpies? Calypso’s cave no doubt I heard tell of it and banished the teller. I had him killed Odysseus such was the torment of his beseechment. Now I have just told you that my womb is barren and I long for our child and you taunt me with this tale of consort with unclean women. Women. Odysseus. How many women? How am I now to discharge this and allow you entry into my body, my soul? O I long for a child Odysseus. I am sickened. Is it not too late for us? How will we ever recover from this woeful absence? This traitorous thievery? I am bereft. My heart is wrenched asunder. How could you do this to me Odysseus? Weeping weeping.
Penelope wife I commanded a league of men in the battle of the Trojans. My military skill is now legendary. You know this Penelope. It is a success and a cunning that comes with great price my love. I am known across the land for my manly prowess and skill. Women ensnare me with their trickery and guile. They say ‘Lo Odysseus come hither and they flash their hips at me and say I am a tasty treat for you. I attempt to fend them off Penelope but you are not a man. You are not able to reconnoiter the weakness of a man in lust after the supple body of a woman. It is a torture known not to the fairer sex and By Jove thunderously good thing Penelope. You know this to be true. Where would we be as a people if a woman fell prey to the same beguilement as a man? No! It is a masculine weakness only Penelope. Now I must beseech you to honor me with your perfect understanding. You are my wife. Come take my hand. Lead me to your bed. We will resolve to speak of this no more. Pray my love you are the sun and moon and stars to me. Heaven above adores you. You are the air I breathe and I receive sustenance only from your body, brain, and breath of life.
O no Odysseus you woo me greatly with your clever tongue and silver oratory. But what of Helen the fair one who you courted so aggressively and lost to that foul miscreant Paris? If not for Paris’ trickery it would be Helen you bed and not poor Penelope. I am the one discarded. I am not a maiden for my womb is barren. Truly Odysseus you love me not. Let me weep now into my pillow. Call to the servant and away. I can speak no more of this tonight. I can take no more from you Odysseus. My heart aches from ten thousand little deaths and now this Odysseus I cannot. I cannot. I will not recover. Away. Away. Servant! | https://medium.com/@parkgables63/twin-flame-at-the-river-styx-585d5bb31341 | ['Patricia Anne'] | 2021-09-08 21:43:18.866000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'Odyssey', 'Soulmates', 'Twin Flame', 'Mythology'] |
Mary’s Writing Wisdom and Medium Mastery Moments | Humble advice from someone just a few steps ahead of you on how to grow as a writer on Medium.
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
There is so much excellent advice on how to succeed as a writer and specifically how to do it on Medium. What do I have to add? I’m someone who has been writing on this platform just long enough to have figured some things out but also came here recently enough that I remember what it was like to be new, confused, and overwhelmed. Join me on the journey. | https://medium.com/@marydj03/marys-writing-wisdom-and-medium-mastery-moments-f9fc923ef41 | ['Mary Devries'] | 2021-03-03 17:31:53.387000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Advice', 'Productivity', 'Ｍedium', 'Writing'] |
Launch a Hadoop Cluster in 90 Seconds or Less in Google Cloud Dataproc! | “I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one-hundred percent!” — Dr. Seuss
Hadoop, our favourite elephant, is an open-source framework that allows you to store and analyse big data across clusters of computers. This is achieved by using Google’s MapReduce programming model which you can learn more about here.
Now launching an on-premise Hadoop cluster is not an easy job. I have been fortunate enough to be involved in the process and know the effort it takes to build one. For reference, it generally takes a day and a half per node to launch a working cluster (e.g. a 10-node cluster usually takes around 15 working days). Who has 15 days to build a 10-node cluster?
Lately in South Africa, there have been a lot of interest in Hadoop among corporates and big data startups. That is why I thought it was a good time to write an article which shows how easy it is to launch a Hadoop cluster (step-by-step) using Google Cloud Dataproc. Cloud Dataproc is Google’s fully-managed Hadoop, Spark, and Flink services that allows you to deploy clusters in a simpler, more cost-efficient way. Let me show you how.
What you need
A Google Cloud project with billing enabled which you can learn how do do it here.
Write down your public IP address by typing “What is my IP” in Google.
1. Network Setup
Step 1
Go to your project dashboard that you have created on console.cloud.google.com | https://medium.com/google-cloud/launch-a-hadoop-cluster-in-90-seconds-or-less-in-google-cloud-dataproc-b3acc1c02598 | ['Kimoon Kim'] | 2017-11-27 16:50:18.930000+00:00 | ['Hadoop Cluster', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Big Data', 'Hadoop'] |
Data Science: Data Cleansing And Visualization For Beginners Using Python | In this article, I am discussing an educational project work in the fascinating field of Data Science while trying to learn the ropes of Data Science. This write-up intends to share the project journey with the larger world and the outcome.
Data science is a discipline that is both artistic and scientific simultaneously. A typical project journey in Data Science involves extracting and gathering insightful knowledge from data that can either be structured or unstructured. The entire tour commences with data gathering and ends with exploring the data entirely for deriving business value. The cleansing of the data, selecting the right algorithm to use on the data, and finally devising a machine learning function is the objective in this journey. The machine learning function derived is the outcome of this art that would solve the business problems creatively.
I will be focussing exclusively on the Data cleansing, imputation, exploration, and visualization of the data. I presume the reader has a basic knowledge of Python or even any equivalent language such as Java or C or Cplusplus to follow the code snippets. The coding was done in Python and executed using Jupyter notebook. I will describe the steps we undertook in this project journey, forming this write-up’s crux.
Import Libraries
We began by importing the libraries that are needed to preprocess, impute, and render the data. The Python libraries that we used are Numpy, random, re, Mat- plotlib, Seaborn, and Pandas. Numpy for everything mathematical, random for random numbers, re for regular expression, Pandas for importing and managing the datasets, Matplotlib.pyplot, and Seaborn for drawing figures. Import the libraries with a shortcut alias as below.
Loading the data set
The dataset provided was e-commerce data to explore. The data set was loaded using Pandas.
The ‘info’ method gets a summary of the dataset object.
The shape of the dataset was determined to be 10000 rows and 14 columns. The describe specifies the basic statistics of the dataset.
The ‘nunique’ method gives the number of unique elements in the dataset.
Initial exploration of the data set
This step involved exploring the various facets of the loaded data. This step helps in understanding the data set columns and also the contents.
Interpreting and transforming the data set
In a real-world scenario, the data information that one starts with could be either raw or unsuitable for Machine Learning purposes. We will need to transform the incoming data suitably.
We wanted to drop any duplicate rows in the data set using the ‘duplicate’ method. However, as you would note below, the data set we received did not contain any duplicates.
Impute the data
While looking for invalid values in the data set, we determined that the data set was clean. The question placed on us in the project was to introduce errors at the rate of 10% overall if the data set supplied was clean. So given this ask, we decided to introduced errors into a data set column forcibly. We consciously choose to submit the errors in the
‘Purchase Price’ column as this has the maximum impact on the dataset outcome. Thus, about 10% of the ‘Purchase Price’ data randomly set with ‘numpy — NaN.’
We could have used the Imputer class from the scikit-learn library to fill in missing values with the data (mean, median, most frequent). However, to keep experimenting with hand made code; instead, I wrote a re-usable data frame impute class named ‘DataFrameWithImputor’ that has the following capabilities.
Be instantiated with a data frame as a parameter in the constructor. Introduce errors to any numeric column of a data frame at a specified error rate. Introduce errors across the dataframe in any cell of the dataframe at a specified error rate. Impute error values in a column of the data set. Find empty strings in rows of the data set. Get the’ nan’ count in the data set. Possess an ability to describe the entire data set in the imputed object. Have an ability to express any column of the dataset in the impute object. Perform forward fill on the entire data set. Perform backward fill on the entire data set.
Shown below is the impute class.
The un-imputed data set was checked for any Nan or missing strings for one final time before introducing errors.
A helper function ‘do_impute’ was defined to introduce errors in a column of the data set and impute the data set column afterwords. This function would take a condition parameter to perform imputation.
To introduce error, random cells in the ‘Purchase Price’ column is set to ‘NaN.’ Once set, there are several ways to fill up missing values or ‘NaN’:
We can remove the missing value rows itself from the data set. However, in this case, the error percentage is low at just 10%, so this method was not needed. Fill in the null cell in the data set column with a constant value. Filling the invalid section with mean and median values Fill the nulls with a random value. Filling null using data frame backfill and forward fill
The above mentioned are some common strategies applied to impute the data set. However, there are no limits to designing a radically different approach to the data set imputation itself.
Each of the imputed outcomes was studied separately — the fill (backfill and forward fill) and constant value imputations outcome shown below.
The median and random value imputations are in the code below.
Then the mean imputed outcome is visually compared with an un-imputed or clean data column as below.
From the above techniques, mean imputation was found closer to the un- imputed clean data, thus preferred. Other choices such as fill(forward and backward) also seemed to produce data set column qualitatively very close to clean data from the study above. However, the mean imputation was preferred as it gives a consistent result and a more widespread impute technique.
The data frame adopted for further visualization was the mean imputed data set.
Exploring and Analysing the data
A cleaned up and structured data is suitable for analyzing and finding exemplars using visualization.
Find relationship between Job designation and purchase amount?
2. How does purchase value depend on the Internet Browser used and Job (Profession) of the purchaser?
3. What are the patterns, if any, on the purchases based on Location (State) and time of purchase (AM or PM)?
4. How does purchase depend on ‘CC’ provider and time of purchase ‘AM or PM’?
5. What are top 5 Location(State) for purchases?
We plotted a sub-plot as below.
We can similarly repeat this subplot to view the top 5 credit cards, the top 5 email providers, and the top 5 languages involved in purchases. There are many other visualizations techniques beyond what I have described in this article, with each one capable of giving unique insights into the dataset.
Acknowledgment
I acknowledge my fellow project collaborators below, without whose contribution this project would not have been so exciting.
The Team
Rajesh Ramachander: linkedin.com/in/rramachander/ Ranjith Gnana Suthakar Alphonse Raj: linkedin.com/in/ranjith-alphonseraj-21666323/ Yashaswi Gurumurthy: linkedin.com/mwlite/in/yashaswi-gurumurthy-020521113 Praveen Manohar G: linkedin.com/in/praveen-manohar-g-9006a232 Rahul A linkedin.com/in/rahulayyappan
Closing Words
The Github link to the codebase is https://github.com/RajeshRamachander/ecom/blob/master/ecom_eda.ipynb.
We had fun and many learnings while doing some of these fundamental steps required to work through a large data set, clean, impute, and visualize the data for further work. We finished the project here, and of course, the real journey does not end here as it will progress into modeling, training, and testing phases. For us, this is only the beginning of a long trip. Every data science project that has a better and cleaner data will generate awe-inspiring results! | https://medium.com/the-innovation/data-science-data-cleansing-and-visualization-for-beginners-using-python-3f55323768f1 | ['Rajesh Ramachander'] | 2020-09-11 20:14:08.271000+00:00 | ['Data Imputation', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Pandas', 'Data Exploration'] |
8 Things I Wish You Would Stop Doing to Black Womxn | 8 Things I Wish You Would Stop Doing to Black Womxn
Daily as a Black woman, I wake up incredibly grateful for all that comes with being one and I wake up equally exhausted
Watching Meg Thee Stallion’s performance on Saturday Night Live recently and her usage of Malcolm X’s words sticks with me daily:
“ The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman.
The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.
The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
Daily as a Black woman, I wake up incredibly grateful for all that comes with being one. And daily, I wake up equally exhausted for all that comes with being one. Sharing 8 things I wish everyone around me would stop doing, to myself and fellow Black womxn. This is not an exhaustive list but honestly, these days I’m too exhausted to share more:
1. Stop policing our tone, language, and opinions.
Saying things like: “ Well, if you just said it like this…” or “ It feels like your tone is too aggressive and will push people away..”, it’s tone policing and it needs to stop.
2. Stop asking us to do free labor.
We don’t need free publicity, access to your email list, or a tagged IG post in exchange for the labor and burden we take on when we do work. When you show up to do work, you expect to get paid, right? It should be the same for us.
3. Stop treating us as a monolith.
We are not all the same. We do not speak for every other Black womxn. We do not all have the same story. We do not all have the same ancestors. We are not all the same.
4. Stop not taking our word the first time we say it.
We do not need to prove to you that racism exists. I don’t need to give you a PowerPoint presentation with supporting evidence, 3 references, and video evidence to prove that my words are real, that my experience is real How would you feel if you took the time to share your very raw, personal story and the only thing you received in return are questions on if it’s credible?
5. Stop recommending white women who can “educate” us on our own stories.
I’ll keep this one brief: Where do you think they get the stories that they then turn around and educate others about in the first place?
6. Stop creating space for us that actually doesn’t center us.
Giving us a place at the table, a promotion, a position, an “opportunity” to lead DEI or Anti-Racism work (yes, or because there is a difference) and then telling us how to show up in the space, how to lead the space, or taking up space with your own narratives and objectives leads to space you “ created for us” not being for us.
7. Stop telling us how to do self-care and protect our own space.
t always baffles me when I hear from others telling me exactly how I should take care of myself, protect my time, and my space. Ironically enough, many of the same folks who are so prescriptive are also guilty of then turning around and asking for my time and space. Be mindful of telling people exactly what they need. Social media gives you a 1% view of my space.
8. Stop positioning us against one another.
It is really messy and unfortunate to see comments that try to cause division amongst Black womxn. Even if I disagree, I’m not going to engage in messy. public slandering that puts us against one another. Please stop trying to bait us into doing so.
Could many of these same 8 apply to all womxn? Yes, absolutely. But as a Black woman, the disproportionate amount of times I am fighting for these 8 daily is exponentially higher and normal in an unacceptable way. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/8-things-i-wish-you-would-stop-doing-to-black-womxn-1ff0634477f4 | ['Dynasti Hunt'] | 2020-10-08 10:00:24.339000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Womens Rights', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Black Women'] |
Eustress is the key to personal and professional growth. | Did you know that we can actually also create eustress , which is actually “good” or beneficial stress? It can help to motivate and energize us, and give u… | https://medium.com/@tpseager/eustress-is-the-key-to-personal-and-professional-growth-a38b427331d | ['Thomas P Seager'] | 2020-12-07 14:22:45.505000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Stress Management', 'Stress And Anxiety', 'Stress Relief', 'Stress'] |
How to identify the right employer | Interview tips to find your employer of choice
My parents spent their entire career of over 35 years working for the government. My uncle, on the other hand, worked for a private organisation for more than 3 decades. They used to crib about work not going well but continued to work for the same organisation throughout.
I, on the other hand, have worked for 3 different organisations in my 16 years of work experience. Some of my mates have jumped as many if not more. When I sit back and think why I did this, I realised that I have missed checking on organisation culture every time before joining.
Though there are quite a few reasons why people jump jobs, one of the primary reasons is organisational culture. Yet, there aren’t many things we do to assess the culture of the organisation before we join them.
So how do you then find out if an employer has the right culture that will fit you? If you are looking to make a career out of a job, then you need to put in more effort before you can pick your employer of choice.
It starts with you. You need to have a clear picture of what you need and want. This could change depending on what stage of life you are in.
If money is your only driving factor; just go for it and grab the first one you find? But if you are looking for more, read on.
One of the critical things that you need to do if you are caught in a toxic culture is to start looking out immediately. It could take you at least 2–3 months to land a job depending on the market and your experience. If you want to be picky, you will need more time
Get started before it’s too late. Don’t get desperate to land a job. Desperation could only lead to a poor decision.
Here is what you need to do:
The astrologers are bribed (Employer review sites).
Some websites can help you with employee feedback about the organisation. However, I have my own doubts about the credibility of the information available. In some markets, I have heard stories of movie ticket coupons given to employees for providing positive feedback to increase the organisations’ rating.
So use it as a guideline rather than for decision making.
Walk the talk (The employer and talent brand)
These days there is so much emphasis on brand building that organisations have started investing heavily on marketing their employer and talent brand. You need to look for those success stories that resonate with you.
There are two challenges here. One, not all good employers have a significant online presence. Two, the ones drumming might not walk the talk.
So, again, use this as a guide rather than for decision making.
The insider information (Recruiter connects)
Your recruiter could be your best friend if you are lucky enough to get a good one. Try and gather as much information as possible from them.
Ask about employee development programs.
What is the emphasis on learning? Are there any learning platforms that they use? Do they set development goals?
You can ask about the values of the organisation. You can go one step ahead and ask them about situations where these values were demonstrated.
How is the culture within the team you would get into? Flexibility and autonomy. How is the manager seen by the team and the leadership above?
What is the organisation’s turnover rate? What steps are being taken to address them?
The real story (Job descriptions)
Good employers spend time writing great job descriptions, they realise the importance of it. A well-written job description shows the planning that has gone behind the position. It provides excellent clarity for the new hire and lays the foundation for success.
Does the job description talk about the purpose of the role? Does it call out the behaviours or competencies that are required to be successful in the position? or does it just call out only the years of experience and a long list of skills?
Having behaviours as part of the job description is one but being interviewed is another. Behaviour is a significant driver of culture. If you are being assessed for the right behaviours or culture fit/add, then it’s a good sign.
A great conversation (The interview)
The conversation with the hiring manager and/or the hiring team is your gold mine. This is your opportunity to gather as much information as possible. You need to be prepared for this moment.
Great leaders are great relationship builders. They always carry a smile and convey a story. Assess how the conversation flows, is it a monologue? are they forthcoming and giving you more information about the team?
Post your meeting, do a retrospect. Did you like the conversation?
Check their social presence? Search other functional or skill-specific forums like a Github or a Behance or see if they have written any articles in LinkedIn. These will speak volumes about the person you are going to report to. Finding a thought leader in your space is like finding a needle in a haystack.
If Managers are the reason why people leave, why not ask them a few questions during the interview?
So, here are a few things that you need to learn about
Purpose (why does the role exist?)
For all its importance, there isn’t enough focus on the “Purpose” of a role. You will not find any employee engagement survey without at least one question on “Purpose”. Yet, many job descriptions seldom have a purpose written.
A purpose statement is usually a 3–4 line statement that connects the role to the larger purpose or the vision and strategy of the organisation, telling us why the position exists. This applies to every single role within the organisation.
Your prospective hiring manager not being able to articulate this well, is a clear indication of the disconnect the manager has with the organisation.
Product/Service
Learn more about the product you are getting into; how important is the product for the organisation? Is it a cash cow or a star? This question can, in fact, helps you assess a bit more about the culture. The culture in an organisation whose product and/or service is fighting for margins will be very different from the one that gives excellent returns.
The question you could ask is
Tell me how is the product/service doing now? How does it compare to the other products/services within the organisation and from your competitor?
What is the market penetration and where you do you see the product/service in the next 3–4 years.
Team structure and scope of the role
A flat hierarchy could mean promotions are far and few. If the scope is broad, then it could mean a more entrepreneurial role. When an organisation is more entrepreneurial, you will find a more open-minded culture, one that accepts failures and has an emphasis on learning.
You should be able to assess the scope from the job description if not, then here is your opportunity
How big is the team and how many are in the same role?
How many stakeholders do I have to manage internally?
Tell me more about the organisation structure.
Leadership
Culture cascades from the leadership team. However, getting to know about the top leadership team could be difficult. A leadership team that is focused on creating the right behaviours and hiring candidates with the right behaviours tend to perform better in the long run.
Assess the leadership qualities of the manager, too; there is absolutely nothing wrong in being safe than sorry.
I wouldn’t prefer asking about values but would focus on Corporate Sustainability. An organisation that focuses on Sustainability takes all its stakeholders into account, which includes its employees. If you are new to this topic, take a look at UN Sustainable Development Goals for a start. Corporate Sustainability is not CSR.
Here are a couple of questions.
How did the senior leadership team approach the COVID situation? What steps did they take to ensure and how? Why did they do what they did (like a layoff or pay cut)
What leadership style do you follow, and why?
Are there any steps/measures taken to align the organisation towards UN SGD?
Network
Organisations do exit interviews to do culture checks. You could do the same. Leverage your LinkedIn network to find alumni and gather information about the culture. This could be a good source of information as you could gather a bit more thorny information like politics and power centres.
Workspace
A workspace can speak a thousand words about the culture of an organisation. Seeing a lot of cabins indicate a more hierarchical culture. A cramped space could mean an organisation fighting for margins. An organisation that focuses on collaboration will have more open spaces.
This is a question you need to ask yourself. Would I feel comfortable working in that space for a long time?
Conclusion
Though these could help you understand the culture to an extent, there are other factors that a lot harder to decipher. We can only hope that such things are minimal and not toxic.
Thank you so much for your time. I hope you find this article useful. I will come back to you with more that will help you find a job that is right for you.
Until then, Ciao!
For more articles like this, you can also visit my blog site: www.talentexperience.net | https://medium.com/@talentexperience/how-to-identify-the-right-employer-d8d1e5185807 | ['Deepak Tm'] | 2020-10-13 08:15:34.433000+00:00 | ['Job Interview', 'Interview Preparation', 'Organisational Culture', 'Find A Job', 'Interview Tips'] |
GraphQL in Play Framework | Many different programming languages supports GraphQL. Java programming language also support for building GraphQL APIs. The basic understanding of GraphQL and play framework are the prerequisite requirement to understand the below explanation and an example can be found over on the github project which is a Java implementation of GraphQL API with Play framework.
Installation
Add the GraphQL dependency to your pom.xml or build.sbt if you’re using sbt build tool instead of Maven.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.graphql-java</groupId>
<artifactId>graphql-java</artifactId>
<version>15.0</version>
</dependency>
SBT:
libraryDependencies ++= Seq("com.graphql-java" % "graphql-java" % "15.0")
Define a GraphQL Schema(SDL):
type Query {productById(id: String!): Product}
type Product {
id: ID!
categoryName: String
description: String!
details: [ProductDetail!]
image: String!
instances: [ProductInstance!]
name: String!
related: [Product!]
}
type ProductDetail {
id: ID!
description: String
display: String
image: String
link: String
linkCaption: String
name: String!
type: String!
provisionAllowed: Boolean!
}
type ProductInstance {
id: ID
name: String
note: String
status: String
subscribedDate: String
}
Define a http request route:
The following line maps a POST request for the GraphQL URL /graphql to the postHandler action in GraphQLController : GET / controllers.GraphQLController.postHandler() Now modify the postHandler action method to execute the graphQL query. This method responsible to read the client query and prepare the GraphQL Executable input using the GraphQLRequest. Here is the sample snippet:
JsonNode body = request().body().asJson();
GraphQLRequest graphQLRequest = MAPPER.readValue(body.traverse(), GraphQLRequest.class);
Map<String,Object> variables = graphQLRequest.getVariables();
if (variables == null) {
variables = new HashMap<>();
}
ExecutionInput executionInput = ExecutionInput.newExecutionInput()
.query(graphQLRequest.getQuery())
.operationName(graphQLRequest.getOperationName())
.variables(variables)
.build();
First we have to prepare the graphql schema. The graphql schema depends on type definition registry and runtime wiring. Here type definition registry is created by parsing the “schema.graphqls” file and runtime wiring do the mapping with data fetcher and field definitions of SDL. here is the snippet of type definition registry:
ClassLoader classLoader = getClass().getClassLoader();
String path = URLDecoder.decode(classLoader.getResource("schema.graphqls").getFile(), "UTF-8");
TypeDefinitionRegistry typeRegistry = new graphql.schema.idl.SchemaParser().parse(new File(path));
This is how the runtime wiring defined which maps the Query type to the “productById” resolver and the “details”, “instance” and “related” field definition types are wired with the respective resolves in the “Product”.
RuntimeWiring.newRuntimeWiring()
.type(TypeRuntimeWiring.newTypeWiring("Query")
.dataFetcher("productById", productDataFetcher.productById()))
.type(TypeRuntimeWiring.newTypeWiring("Product")
.dataFetcher("details", productDataFetcher.productDetail())
.dataFetcher("instance", productDataFetcher.productInstance())
.dataFetcher("related", productDataFetcher.relatedOfferings()))
.build();
Now the GraphQL schema use the above defined type definition and runtime wiring and creates the GraphQLSchema:
GraphQLSchema schema = schemaGenerator.makeExecutableSchema(typeRegistry, runtimeWiring);
Now execute the input using the GraphQL schema and executableInput defined(above) using below snippet:
final CompletableFuture<ExecutionResult> executionResult = GraphQL.newGraphQL(schema).build().executeAsync(executionInput);
Let’s run this sample web application using the sbt build tool by running the “sbt run” command in terminal. Once this application become up successful, we can try GraphQL playground and run some queries.
Conclusion
This is just tip of the GraphQL iceberg. If you are interested in the more advanced features, feel free to take a look at the official GraphQL documentation.
Have fun! | https://medium.com/swlh/graphql-in-play-framework-3fa5e6759990 | [] | 2020-07-11 11:03:03.430000+00:00 | ['GraphQL', 'Java', 'Play Framework', 'Graphql Playground'] |
5 Things I’ve Learned From Building a Company That Cares | Grow with your clients, not off the back of them
In May 2019, I lost a £100k pitch. Like most agencies, my last role was all about winning more clients and more money. I found myself completely isolated.
In that moment, I vowed I would never let other people feel the way I did. Launching my new agency, I’ve been learning that long-term, sustainable revenue comes from real relationships.
How do you measure relationships? It’s the difference between focusing on your client’s retainer and caring about them as people. It’s knowing their kids names, their birthdays and making a continual effort.
Nowadays, we have less clients but our relationships are stronger and, financially, we’re winning more repeat work than ever before. We’re growing with our clients, not off the back of them.
Making your team feel valued looks like listening, HARD
Research shows that 1/3 people feel they don’t belong at work.
What if your company didn’t have to be that way? What if you could create a space for people to say what’s on their mind — not just in a 1:1, but always? As leaders, it’s our job to create space for people to show up and be themselves. It starts by us being more ourselves.
We need to get to know each other better so we can support each other better. When you make people feel safe and supported, their work becomes fundamentally better too.
Show more care in what you share
I used to feel pressure to share something on LinkedIn every day. I felt bad because, in my mind, I’m taking away people’s time and attention. This particularly matters to me as the co-founder of a branding and advertising agency.
It got me thinking: What if we all considered the time and attention of others before sharing something? What if we asked ourselves: does this piece of content deserve to take up space in someone’s newsfeed?
How we think about the stuff we share shows how much we care.
Care needs to be measured in quantifiable action
We need more accountability around care.
For me, care is all about taking real, quantifiable action.
At Make Us Care, we’re proud to be supporting GenieShares, an initiative that sees founders pledge 1% of their 2021 profits to an individual who really deserves it.
We’re donating our 1% to an NHS nurse at West Suffolk Hospital, where my nana was when she had both her falls during the UK’s first lockdown.
The cure for burnout is all of us caring for each other
Covid has set the perfect backdrop for burnout. As a founder, I’ve been focusing on moving from self care to collective care. It shouldn’t be up to one person to look after themselves. Fundamentally, we’re all here to care for each other.
Burnout is our collective responsibility. As Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout say, “Self care requires a bubble of protection of other people that value your well-being as highly as you do.” | https://medium.com/@amandabuildsbrands/5-things-ive-learned-from-building-a-company-that-cares-2b2e293a4be0 | ['Amanda Baker'] | 2021-01-27 12:06:16.082000+00:00 | ['Company Culture', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Startup Lessons', 'Leadership'] |
Monster Roll | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/joshhallman/monster-roll-27be1f4bfbdd | ['Josh Hallman'] | 2016-06-12 03:03:29.722000+00:00 | ['Sushi', 'Monster Roll', 'Video'] |
How to Create a Revolut-Esque Cards Collection View on iOS | How to Create a Revolut-Esque Cards Collection View on iOS
Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash.
This article is to help you understand how you can customize a UICollectionView layout by subclassing a UICollectionViewFlowLayout .
We’ll get into insets and line spacing to customize the spacing around the cells and use the UIScrollView protocols to add a snapping behavior to each cell when a user scrolls. We’ll also add in a scaling animation to the cells when the user is swiping over them to give it a bouncy feel.
We’ll be creating an In-App Wallet that is similar to what Revolut has (i.e a collection of credit cards that the user can swipe through, centering the selected card and displaying a small part of other cards):
This is what you will achieve by the end of this article.
Let’s break down the problem into three parts:
Add spacing between cards such that a part of the previous and the next card is visible (centered pagination).
Add a snap-on-scroll behavior so that only one card is in the center of the screen.
Scale down the selected card when the user starts scrolling and scale up the new card on scroll end.
So let’s get started. 🥳 | https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-create-a-revolut-esque-cards-collection-view-on-ios-c42e649f17a9 | ['Burhan Shakir'] | 2020-12-21 16:36:57.385000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Xcode', 'Mobile', 'Programming', 'Swift'] |
First sunlight | Six Years of poetry-only publishing, PoetsUnlimited was a diverse, engaging and authentic poetry magazine. For most of that time a daily publication, it was always diverse and original, and free-to-read by all.
Follow | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/first-sunlight-40f0f51f0c3b | ['Robert Mann'] | 2019-06-18 13:29:00.825000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Poetry', 'Haiku', 'Verse'] |
Preliminary | 2020 was a difficult year and was also a turning point year in accelerating world change towards accelerating new technologies. Where many things have changed as has been said in these articles:
So in 2021–2022 is the year of adjustment of human life to the accelerated process of world change with the acceleration of technology. One of the things that are felt is the changing patterns of technology use in human life, one of which is financial technology, investment, shopping, payments, and conducting online meetings.
This may still be a bit difficult and uncomfortable in the middle of 2020, especially when things that are not considered disrespectful are normal and even become the main requirement for everyone. This makes people increasingly accelerate the race to keep up with the acceleration and adapt to changing world with existing technology.
One of the issues for some countries and even people today is how to create a technology that can help everyone and can be used comprehensively in all sectors of life and energy that make it work. If we look at the existing technology, several existing technologies are capable of doing this.
One of the things we hear most often is the word “Green Energy” which is a new and renewable energy that has extraordinary and unlimited energy. And if we look at this, several ways can be used with existing technology, one of which is by using or utilizing solar cells, water treatment, plant ecology, gas pipes, and so on.
But often it is plagued by various problems because there is no automatic supervision and control that can do this. So in the acceleration of technology that is happening at this time, the “Techno Home” must be created by utilizing the “Green Energy” that exists today.
Green Energy
“Green Energy” is one of the new ecosystems in this modern world order where all energy is created from all things that can be renewed again and will not be lost, even into infinity.
In today’s world, an energy that leads to infinite energy is indeed being developed. one of the ongoing uses is biofuel using CPO / palm oil which is widely grown in developing countries and some existing equipment as green energy, namely the “solar cell” which is used for solar power generation and “kinetic energy” which is used for wind and water power plants
But this still cannot cover the main role of coal and fossil oil which are very popular and very easy to use because they have been used for centuries. On the other hand, coal and oil commodities have an important role in stabilizing the existing economy. This is very difficult to get rid of or make it non-existent.
the role of “Green Energy” today is how to embrace all the energy that has been available to date and save that energy with materials or things that can be converted into electric or kinetic engines. Where the conversion we often call Hybrid combines 2 ways of entering energy (Green Energy and fossil energy). into a machine or vehicle so that it can move and run according to the function and purpose of the tool.
If we look at a growing sector as it is today, housing should be the first pilot project for green energy. Why? Because from the housing you can feel how the function and role of this green energy for daily needs. And housing is a land of “green energy” that is the most extensive and can coexist with humans.
This is evidenced by the small scale where the upper-class people especially use solar cells for hot water and the use of electricity for daily use. With proof on a small scale, it should be able to be made also for a large scale. Where is housing with the concept of Green energy?
But the next problem is the maintenance and maintenance of these tools, if you look at the existing problems, one of them is human negligence in the use of electronic goods that are closely related to green energy. but this can be minimized periodically with the existence of “Techno Home” which can guide, remind and carry out maintenance and periodically upgrade several functions of green energy equipment with the help of artificial intelligence.
Techno Home
Techno Home is a term used by some people to describe or describe a future house (future house) that has many smart electronic circuits and can help humans carry out all activities.
Usually, almost all rooms in Techno Home are based on a cloud system because the life in it is combined with smart features that can be connected to various devices based on artificial intelligence / smart electronics using the IoT system.
This is well proven by how all the care in the house can be carried out automatically and if it is controlled, it can use the smartphone in the owner’s hand. This also becomes the basis for how a Techno Home can develop and collaborate on green energy.
This is indeed a bit hard to imagine, let’s look at it as an example. For example, you can see from inside a normal house that there is a stationary bicycle for sports only. Meanwhile, in Techno Home, static bicycles have various functions which should be an initial detection of the body’s condition, electricity generators, physical data and sports activities, and so on. But if planned with green energy, then the stationary bike can turn into a small generator to produce green energy.
Not to mention talking about the flow of air which is seen as a means of refreshing / in the house for example a small waterfall in a fish pond can be a small power plant that helps create green energy and a place for air circulation for plants and the ecosystem as a whole.
Can we imagine if the statistical bicycle is only a manual static bicycle, will it be given that it is big enough? If the small waterfall in the pool is only for air circulation, does it have a big impact?
So nowadays this IoT system has a role that is very much needed by humans. And if there is no small system, this will be detrimental because everything has to be done manually by humans. So that in the calculation of current investment and technological advances, it is very disadvantageous which will take time, effort, space, and costs without the energy produced.
IoT System
With the IoT system, it is very helpful to collect information, carry out maintenance, notify if there is damage, and save power like a personal assistant. Where the IoT system is designed to help all human activities make it easier and can do all work from a considerable distance.
Techno Home with a little more complex mechanical system will produce purity of green energy which is very sustainable and has the potential to create unlimited energy. Where unlimited energy will come out of human behavior that is always moving, which is captured and converted into energy, especially electrical energy.
Advantage
If we talk about the advantages of using green energy, then we will talk about the energy that will not run out and the energy that is the main force in carrying out activities that 80% already use or depend on electrical energy. even with green energy and techno home, it will make electricity cheaper and have a polluting impact on the environment.
this affects not only one sector, but all life will change. Even if coupled with the game psychology program in IoT, it will bring impacts and a new ecosystem that is good for the environment and allows it to become a new, more modern work of life.
With Techno Home, all human routines will be read and assisted by technology to find statistical movements that will have an impact on the development of the energy source itself. And humans will help the technology to realize the intended device so that energy can be obtained, for example, solar cells, wind chargers, kinetic electricity, and the like.
Weakness
If there is an advantage, there must also be a drawback. where the Green energy and Techno Home sectors are still experiencing obstacles in terms of procurement of goods/investment. From the calculation of the procurement of goods carried out independently, it is found that a simple house costs money that can only be purchased by upper-class citizens. This is triggered by the high price of solar panels, quite expensive kinetic assembly prices, and many more
And if you look at the prices that have been stated, it is very difficult for green energy and techno home to materialize. so it needs the role and support of all parties for extraordinary development in the field of materials and the field of application of existing systems.
Solution
From the things described, we can see the tremendous potential of this project, and indeed the obstacles that exist to date are the investment costs that existed at the beginning of the construction and initial installation. This resulted in the project failing many times and no one even glanced at this solution. Only a few people use this stuff for very small purposes. Even when there is someone who makes this solar garden, it doesn’t respond well enough
So on this occasion, we are eager to make green energy and techno home based on clusters, where all 85% of the houses use green energy materials based on kinetic and solar cells. This indeed requires a lot of support from several companies as well as investors who are able and willing to try this basic thing.
Because after being proven by theory and calculation, it was initially a very large investment, but with the capabilities and things that Techno Home can do, everything will pay off and become even more profitable. This is because 65% of the electricity used comes from routine human work and all the electricity income earned will reduce the electricity load used.
It even occurred to us that we would create 2 Techno Home start-up rooms based on the Custer itself and booking a fitness lounge connected to several ID-based IoTs could help residents to enthusiastically generate extraordinary green energy for the region and themselves.
Financing
If we think about where will the funding for this project come from and if it is used as a cluster, who will buy the cluster? In our opinion, to finance this project, we will collaborate with several large vendors and developers who care about green energy for a better world. One of the vendors that are needed is a developer, network company, technology equipment company, health company, and many more.
And if based on our calculations, making Green Energy and Tecno home requires a lot of tools and a lot of investment costs, including:
Solar Panel
with a land area of 1 hectare, it is possible to make as many as 60- 65 houses of type 40 m². With the need for 12 panels to get a capacity of 3 kWp. The area of each panel is 1.7 square meters, so you need a roof of 12x1.7 = 20.4 square meters that is not blocked by shadows of trees or buildings throughout the day from sunrise to sunset. So that it requires 1 hectare of land to produce approximately 4000 watts per day.
The cost that must be incurred is 780 panels (an estimate of 65 houses and one house requires 12 panels) and the price of one panel is estimated at 9 million — 13 million rupiah. So the initial investment in the house is about 11 billion outside the home and excluding other expenses.
And if from PLN the price is Rp.1,467 (compass data, 2018), then the value of 11 billion can be BEP by itself in the range of 6 years with an estimate outside the use of other electricity. But with the age of a solar cell that is over 10 years old, the vendor’s investment will indirectly be profitable.
Wind Catcher
Given the area of land and buildings above, the next step is to make a wind catcher that functions as modified kinetic propulsion and will capture very small wind movements so that it can move to catch the wind that is outside the house or that will enter the house. With the estimated type taken 100A x 24V = 2400W / hour
Costs incurred for the price range in 5 million rupiahs, with an estimate of one house requiring a capacity of 3 pieces, so the price of 1 house is estimated at 15 million rupiahs, so the initial investment that must be spent is around 1 billion apart from other costs.
And if from PLN the price is IDR 1,467 (compass data, 2018), then the value of 1 billion can be BEP by itself in the range of 1 year with an estimate outside the use of other electricity. But with the age of the windcatcher above 5–6 years, the vendor’s investment will indirectly benefit.
GYM Kinetic
When we talk about green energy, then we don’t forget that we will talk about health which is very useful and has other benefits. Where actually from sports equipment used by humans, it can produce kinetic energy that produces the electrical energy that can be reused by humans.
But often people do not realize and don’t like to do this, but with the addition of a little game/loyalty, psychology can make people live healthily and generate electrical energy from what they do. However, for this program, it is necessary to consider several experts and to consider the conditions of each person in using supporting tools.
After we discuss the main technology of Green energy, we must also pay attention to the Techno home which is based on the IoT System which we often call a virtual assistant. Where the function of this virtual assistant has an important role to keep every process carried out by all major technologies can be properly recorded, perform simple maintenance and notify engineers or interested people if a problem occurs in the main technological process.
With the IoT system, it will indirectly change people’s lifestyles to switch to a more secure security system based on virtual assistants. Where all smart system-based devices will be connected to a smartphone that can be known about the condition of the device and controlled remotely.
Even for the cost, for now, it is very relative depending on the usability and how functional the virtual assistant is. But the development of this virtual assistant is very necessary and important for its continuity so that the financing of this will continue to grow and will adjust everything.
Conclusion
Of all the things that we have discussed above, it is a small part of the business plan of a series of business plans that should make a country have extraordinary unlimited power based on green energy. And if this is applied to a larger scope and the more multinational companies that join even from abroad, it will make this program more concise with very excessive benefits.
Even if it is seen from the amount of investment it looks very large, the existence of cooperation between several companies and mutual collaboration between one another will make things even easier. This can also be realized with a more thorough and developed repair detail,
The calculation is still very raw because it is very far from land prices, location, and other factors that greatly affect the calculation of a place. But indeed if this proposal is going to be implemented, we can start with a discussion about it in depth. Of course, in the calculation, there must be data on the value of utilization and the value of the assembly and maintenance of the existing tools. To get maximum results and implementation and have a higher value than the general function.
Hope
We hope that we can help to realize it in a company/institution under one of the vendors so that it can continue to be developed even more and can be run as a whole. To produce maximum results for the use of the wider community.
We hope that we can work together to do this big thing because, with cheap and reliable electricity, indirectly more and more data on the need for electricity usage will be directly proportional to energy income from green energy and techno home.
Papers as a Business Program Proposal in the PLN ICE (Innovation & Competition in Electric) By Samuel Liputra
CC from https://newsevengenerationsiklan1.blogspot.com/2021/06/idea-4u-development-of-green-energy.html | https://medium.com/@samuelliputra/preliminary-fdcc59d885af | ['Samuel Liputra'] | 2021-06-08 03:07:18.086000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Future', 'Technology', 'Green Energy', 'Samuel Liputra'] |
The Best Emails Ideas For Today’s Marketers | Many companies look for ideas when looking for email marketing solutions. Email marketing is becoming very popular because it helps a company get new customers, drive sales and grow its customer base.
Business owners spend a lot of time thinking about the content, they will send out. They have to be able to create a unique content that is appealing to people. A good way of doing this is through email ideas and concepts.
Email ideas are ideas that you can use as a starting point to find new ways to reach more people and make your business grow.
Email ideas can come in many different forms. Some ideas are very specific, such as how you should write your emails, or what to include in the body of the email.
Other ideas are general ideas that can apply to many types of businesses. These include general tips on what to put into an email, how to create different graphics and images and how to get the most from your text.
When you use email ideas, remember that there are many ways to deliver your message. If you want people to open your email then you will need to give them a reason to open your email.
This can be through the type of information you want to share with them, a new product or service, or a new promotion your company has implemented.
Marketing is a very important part of running a business. Email marketing is one way of reaching potential customers. There are some great ways of finding ideas and concepts for email marketing. Look online, in magazines and books, and watch movies.
Email marketing is a big help to a business. It allows a business to market itself, gain new customers and keep existing customers happy. It can be a lot of work, but when done properly it can generate a lot of profit.
If you use the correct email’s ideas and concepts, you will create a great marketing campaign and grow your business in no time.
Marketing is an important part of running a business. You need to have a well designed website in order to reach new customers and keep existing customers happy. You also need to have an email campaign in place to inform customers of new products and services that your company provides.
Email ideas are great because they give you an opportunity to communicate with your customers in a unique way.
Email is a very effective way of communicating with your customers. It gives you an opportunity to reach a lot of potential customers at once. Using email ideas will also allow you to reach a lot of people with the same information, so it will save you time and money.
Email marketing is a great way of reaching out to your target audience and finding new customers. You will get an email address for each customer and have them on your mailing list.
This is a great way to expand your customer base and grow your business. Email marketing is an effective and inexpensive way of increasing your revenue.
The Best Emails Ideas For Today’s Marketers
If you are looking for email ideas for the day, you may be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information available online. There is so much information that it can be overwhelming and you need to know how to filter it.
It is easy to get distracted when you have a lot of information in your daily life. When there is so much information around, you have no time to absorb it all. This can lead to you not being able to make sense out what is important and what is not.
You want to make sure that you only have the information that really matters to you. When you only have important information to work with, you can focus on what you need to do to get your job done.
This way, you are making progress in the right direction. Instead of just working on your work at home business and spending the time on unimportant things, you have time to spend on your important stuff. You will have time to get the rest of the stuff that you need to accomplish.
To help you create your own schedule, you need to start by deciding where you want to work. You should decide what type of job you want to take.
There are many different jobs that you can choose from, but you may want to choose a more flexible job. The reason for this is that you want to have some flexibility and you may want to change jobs every once in a while.
Many internet marketers will recommend that you hire an employer-sponsored network marketing company. This way, you will have access to a good list of leads. You can also find leads to your business that will allow you to advertise your business.
Remember that the best emails ideas for the day will come from you. You need to write your own emails. If you can write them well, you can have them printed and send them to a large number of people.
By doing this, you can get a lot of emails, but you will have to be honest with yourself about how many people you will actually reach.
If you want to get the most sales from your business, you should always be thinking of new ways to attract new leads. There is nothing wrong with keeping an old list up to date. The problem is that this method will not bring new visitors to your website.
You need to use the internet to find people that have email addresses. These people are not going to be interested in what you have to offer if they do not have a computer with internet access. Use the email that your prospect has left and then sell it to another person.
Resource: https://emailsideas.com | https://medium.com/@tipslife/the-best-emails-ideas-for-todays-marketers-4959b47bfb00 | [] | 2020-12-04 01:47:12.667000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Emails Ideas', 'Email'] |
Diamante Blockchain enters the non-fungible token (NFT) market to mainstream the auction of the world’s finest and rarest diamonds. | Diamante Blockchain enters the non-fungible token (NFT) market to mainstream the auction of the world’s finest and rarest diamonds. PayCircle_io Jun 8·2 min read
NEW YORK, June 2, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Diamante Blockchain, a global fintech company, announces the first-ever non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based rare and the most unique diamonds auction platform. The platform will be powered by the Diamante Net, the proprietary blockchain network of Diamante Blockchain.
Diamante’s auction house will consist of the rarest and unique diamonds from across the world that are validated and certified. The buyers can bid for the precious diamonds on the Diamante auction house with a non-fungible token or NFT, which has a unique digital signature linked to the physical diamonds. It acts as a digital certificate of ownership, authenticity, and provenance. The sellers have to deposit their diamonds in the safe and secure deposit vault owned by a Swiss partner. The transportation and the storage of the diamonds throughout the auction lifecycle will be traceable on the blockchain network with 100 percent insurance.
Diamante’s NFT-based online auction platform will create the first market for real and unique diamonds to go digital. Also, the platform offers buyers to gain the rights to the NFT with guaranteed control and blockchain proof of ownership over the real diamonds.
Dinesh Patel, CEO, and co-founder of the company said, “Our NFT-based diamond auction house provides instant, safe, and secure access to the world’s rarest diamonds. The buyers and sellers are all validated and authenticated. They will have to deal with a minimal operational fee associated with the bidding of the diamonds on the Diamante ecosystem.”
Chirag Jetani, COO and co-founder, added, “We are working to make the rarest diamonds more attainable. Our platform will allow users to buy NFTs and diamonds using our digital asset, DIAM. A few years from now, this could just be how people trade rare diamonds.”
The NFT diamond auction platform will be secured and traceable. The company’s progress is fascinating as there are already a few global diamond traders lined up to collaborate with the Diamante.
About Diamante Blockchain:
Diamante Blockchain is a global, decentralized finance platform successfully implementing and developing a competitive blockchain-enabled ecosystem for trade, payments, and financing.
The Diamante ecosystem consists
(i) Proprietary blockchain network — Diamante Net
(ii) Consortium of luxury goods and service industry stakeholders — Diamante Consortium
(iii) DeFi payments application — PayCircle
Related links:
Website: https://www.diamanteblockchain.com/
To stay up to date on the company’s latest announcements, join their social hubs.
Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Telegram
Source: Yahoo Finance | https://medium.com/@paycircle/diamante-blockchain-enters-the-non-fungible-token-nft-market-to-mainstream-the-auction-of-the-d951f93db524 | [] | 2021-06-08 17:35:30.367000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Press Release', 'Diamonds', 'Blockchain', 'Decentralization'] |
Learning From Your Mistakes: What Works For Leadership Developer & LMFT Rebecca Ching | The Nitty-Gritty:
How Potentia Therapy founder Rebecca Ching learned from key mistakes she made bringing her vision to life
What she does differently today when she’s finding the right people for her team
Why learning to lead has made her less lonely as a business owner
The process of self-reflection that allowed her to stop debating her own worthiness despite her setbacks
If there’s one constant in business and entrepreneurship, it’s that stuff happens.
Things go wrong.
We make bad choices.
The market shifts.
An employee leaves.
The big client gives notice that they’re terminating your contract.
We can’t always prepare for what’s going to go wrong — but we can work on becoming more resilient when bad things do inevitably happen.
This month, we’ve been sharing conversations all around the topic of resilience.
We’ve looked at why we don’t push through to our goals and finish the projects we start. We’ve explored the natural and not-so-natural pivots that happen over time. We’ve examined how expectations can get out of hand and what it looks like to coach yourself through 2 decades of business ownership.
Today, as we close things out, we’re going to take a good, long look at actually learning from our mistakes.
I spoke with one of my oldest business friends, Rebecca Ching, about some of the mistakes she made when she took a huge leap forward in her therapy business and opened a multidisciplinary brick & mortar practice. Today, Rebecca is both the founder of Potentia Therapy and an Integrated Leadership Coach helping entrepreneurs and leaders navigate the complexities of leadership today.
Rebecca shares both the errors in her execution and the errors in her thinking that led to some difficult years.
She also gets into some deep reflection around her personal identity and sense of worthiness that really resonated with me. For many of us self-described “achievers,” making a mistake or failing at a venture isn’t just a setback — it rocks us to our core.
If that’s you too, I think you’ll especially appreciate this conversation.
And if you’ve appreciated this deep dive we’ve spent on resilience this month, I’d love for you to leave What Works a rating & review on Apple Podcasts. Your kind words mean the world to me.
Now, let’s find out what works for Rebecca Ching! | https://medium.com/help-yourself/learning-from-your-mistakes-what-works-for-leadership-developer-lmft-rebecca-ching-d270a218b250 | ['Tara Mcmullin'] | 2019-10-29 14:22:48.385000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Resilience', 'Podcast', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business'] |
The SAAM smoke detector serves as an air quality monitor when it’s not warning you of fire danger | The SAAM smoke detector serves as an air quality monitor when it’s not warning you of fire danger Lisa Jan 27·3 min read
Smoke detectors have been fixtures in homes since the 1970s—and they haven’t evolved all that much since. SAAM is the latest company to step up with what it says is a better idea. Its detectors can detect smoke and fire four times faster than the competition, according to SAAM, and they also function as high-end air quality monitors that can detect dangerous gases.
SAAM says its S-series smoke detectors use a spectroscopy-based detection method. Spectroscopy is essentially the study of matter using light, and the company says the methodology enables its detectors to determine which elements are present in a fire, such as substances released by smoldering polyurethane, a material commonly found in upholstery.
[ Further reading:The best smart smoke detectors ]SAAM says this also makes its detectors both quicker to detect smoke and fire—they can react in a matter of seconds—and less inclined to trigger false alarms because they can recognize and ignore airborne elements that trigger false alarms in conventional detectors. Machine learning and artificial intelligence enable the S-series to improve its detection algorithms so that they become even more accurate over time.
SAAM The SAAM SC4 smart smoke detector can to be mounted on the ceiling or on a wall.
As an added benefit, spectroscopy allows SAAM’s S-series to evaluate your home’s indoor air quality, presenting real-time data on particulate matter and more than 13 other airborne elements. The detectors can also warn you when levels of dangerous gasses, including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, become too high. Finally, they can detect levels of volatile organic compounds (VoCs) in the air. Installing an S-series detector could eliminate the need for a dedicated air quality monitor (you’ll find a number of our reviews of air quality monitors here).
The S-series will have both Wi-Fi and Zigbee radios onboard, so they can connect to the cloud and be integrated into smart home systems. For consumers with smart home systems that include professional monitoring services, the detectors will be able to summon the local fire department in the event of an emergency. Smart home integration could give the S-series the ability to activate your smart HVAC system, increasing ventilation if harmful gases or high levels of VoCs are detected, or shutting it down if smoke is detected to prevent it from being circulated throughout the house. Alerts are sent to SAAM’s mobile app and via text message.
There will be two models in the S-series: The SC4 is a hardwired model designed for ceiling or wall installation. The SP4 is a battery-powered, tabletop device. They’re slated to cost $250 each. Both are expected to ship by the end of this year, but the company couldn’t give us a precise date. SAAM CEO Rob Qualls says the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed parts availability and testing.
Interested in new smoke detector technology? Be sure to check out our story on a similar new product shown at CES this year: the Owl Wired.
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/@lisa83907487/the-saam-smoke-detector-serves-as-an-air-quality-monitor-when-its-not-warning-you-of-fire-danger-87880c9ca80 | [] | 2021-01-27 18:17:05.084000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Tvs', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Home Theater'] |
I am horrified and saddened that I had to find out about this brilliant light in a dark way. | Thought-provoking articles, opinion pieces, etc. on diverse topics that promote lively, constructive and productive discussion. Who knows? We may even save the world.
Follow | https://medium.com/express-yourself/i-am-horrified-and-saddened-that-i-had-to-find-out-about-this-brilliant-light-in-a-dark-way-bc37f70ce2f5 | ['Treathyl Fox'] | 2020-07-15 17:49:20.448000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneur', 'Crime', 'Obituary', 'Justice', 'Claps On Medium'] |
Never be afraid to tell others what you do | Earlier this year, I managed to catch up with a childhood friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen for years, even though we’d been keeping touch on and off every few months.
We met for coffee and started talking about what we had been up to, the jobs we had, what our lives were like, and the guys we dated. And then she started telling me about this guy she had met at a wedding and how they had hit it off really well.
“He is the PERFECT guy. He’s a doctor, he treats me well, he loves kids, and once in awhile he likes to do pedicures.
So what’s the problem?
“Well…he’s a doctor and from what it seems, he has no idea what blogs or bloggers are. I wasn’t sure what to tell him, so I lied instead and said I was working as an associate for a marketing firm.”
I was shocked. It’s bad that she felt like she had to lie to a potential boyfriend but the worse part was, she had felt unworthy, embarrassed of being a blogger even though it was a job she was passionate about.
You see, there’s never any shame in what you do or what you’re passionate about. If you truly believe what you’re doing is right, and that it’s for the greater good or for yourself, then why lie about what you don’t do? Why lie to yourself? You’d only be crippling your own self image and undermining what you’re truly capable of — and for what? To impress others who probably don’t give a shit anyways?
Just because others don’t understand what it is that you do doesn’t mean your profession is mediocre or unimportant; it’s far from that. They don’t understand because they’re simply not knowledgable about that part of the world. And if they judge you for a profession they don’t understand, they’re not worth knowing in the end.
Remember, job titles aren’t everything. They shouldn’t matter that much. What matters more is your dedication, your persistence, and your passion to do something more.
There are people in the world who work jobs that are nowhere as glamorous as let’s say a doctor or a lawyer, but they still became successful in their own right and have turned their passion into something extraordinary.
Take Joe Ades for example. He’s spent most of his days, sitting on the sidewalk of New York City, selling potato peelers for $5 each. Eventually, as he kept selling one potato peeler at a time, he began making millions. His job title? Potato peeler salesman. If anyone heard that and judged Joe by his title, they would’ve never known about his capabilities and would’ve probably missed the opportunity to connect with someone of his stature as a world class salesman.
Take Brian Scudamore as another example. He invested his savings to purchase a truck and drove door-to-door asking people if they had any trash. He even patrolled the alleyways for junk that the city wouldn’t take. You might think this kind of job, one where glorified garbage trucks drive around to haul broken TVs, bulk trash, smelly sofas, and abandoned gardening tools, doesn’t make much, but the truth was, Brian had made hundreds of millions in revenue year after year.
This just shows us that people with a simple or unimpressive job title can still become something great. They can still be wildly successful in what they do. And even if they’re not, who’s to say they can’t be?
Remember, there’s no such thing as a mediocre job; it’s all about how far you want to take your passion and whether you feel good about what you do. If you’re afraid of telling people about what you do and why you’re doing what you love all for the sake of someone’s else approval, then you’re missing the point. You’re forgetting that you have already achieved more than what others have not — a job of your choice that you’re actually passionate about. Don’t let anyone take that away from you. Ever.
This post was originally published on misstiffanysun.com. You can find all of my posts, including ones I don’t post on Medium at misstiffanysun.com. | https://medium.com/misstiffanysun/never-be-afraid-to-tell-others-what-you-do-76676bbb249c | ['Tiffany Sun'] | 2018-03-21 10:36:34.263000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Work', 'Self-awareness', 'Careers', 'Career Advice'] |
How I got one of the best background cutouts in history. | What are Cut Out images and Why are they important?
Infinity Console table (cut out) Extending table (not cut out)
Cut out images (also called deep etched) are photos where the object has been cut out from it’s original background onto a clean, white background, as here.
Why are they important?
When you look at the majority of products being featured in magazines and blogs you’ll usually find them as part of a “trends” or “get the look” style feature . To secure yourself a spot in one of these hot topic spreads, it’s important to have professional, individual product shots readily available for journalists. Cut out images on a crisp white background are really popular with journalists because they can bend and fit into nearly all of their articles with ease.
To secure yourself a spot in one of these hot topic spreads, it’s important to have professional, individual product shots readily available for journalists. Cut out images on a crisp white background are really popular with journalists because they can bend and fit into nearly all of their articles with ease. Cut out images also make your product stand out. They’re more appealing to the eye and by having this type of image on your own websites, you are putting your products in the best light and will absolutely help with sales. — It’s important to note that not all products will suit being cut out. Wallpaper and flooring for example often look best in lifestyle shots.
While great lifestyle shots are important to have in everyone’s image collection (which we’ll talk about another time) there are a higher percentage of journalist downloading cut out images on Press Loft. We have found that even product images with a grey background or dark shadows — as professional as they are — don’t seem to get as many downloads because they are not as universal.
1.Nel Lusso Wooden Towers 2. Hero Statue Lamp 3. Pomegranate Iron Lantern 4. Black and White Tumblers 5. Pineapple Glory Platinum Cushion
How do I deep etch (cut out) my image?
You can do it yourself in a photo editing program like Photoshop or Gimp (free). There are plenty of tutorials online.
You can ask your photographer to supply images deep etched onto a white background when you do your next product shoot and they can just incorporate this into their editing process for you.
Or there are companies online who will do it for a small cost of about $1 per image, such as deep etch(see their clipping path service). Just upload your current images with any type of background and they’ll send them back to you cut out professionally.
** We recommend that you have a balance of Lifestyle and Cut Out images to really get the most out of Press Loft. By having both styles you maximize the chances of your products being featured across a variety of publications | https://medium.com/@kuba-badzynski/how-i-got-one-of-the-best-background-cutouts-in-history-98b567f8c7e4 | ['Kuba Badzynski'] | 2020-12-17 15:03:57.942000+00:00 | ['Cut Out Image', 'Graphic Design', 'Background Removal', 'Fiverr', 'Fiverr Gig'] |
5 Foods That Will Make You Dumb.. We’ve have heard about food that can… | 5 Foods That Will Make You Dumb.
We’ve have heard about food that can make you smart, strong and such but have you ever thought about foods that make you dumber?
Researchers at Oxford University, have found that there are certain foods that can actually make you less smart.
High consumption of these foods may affect your memory, mood and nervous system, such as your neuromuscular response time.
So, read the following list of ‘dumb foods’ so that you know which foods to avoid.
1. POPCORNS
Yeap, next time when you are off to movie you might want to cut these fellas out.
This is because popcorns have a large amount of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), the same material which is found in kitchen pots and pans to ensure it doesn’t rust.
Some studies have linked the property of this acid to infertility, weight gain, and impaired learning.
In fact, butter-flavoured popcorns are always laced with diacetyl (DA), a chemical that has been found to break down the layer of cells that protects our brain.
2. SUGAR
When it comes to our health, we all know that excess of sugar isn’t exactly sweet.
New research indicates that more sugar than recommended may take a toll on your brain as well.
High consumption of sugar affects your memory and your ability to learn.
Too much sugar in your blood restricts your brain cells’ use of insulin to break down sugar which aids in processing thoughts and emotions.
This leads to a decrease in brain activity.
3. CHEWING GUM
A recent study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that chewing gum during memorising something impaired participants’ short-term memories.
The researchers believe the act of chewing may get in the way of concentrating on memory tasks.
4. TOFU
Though tofu is generally regarded as a healthy food but consuming a large quantity of it can be harmful.
A research was done and its results show that those who consumed a lot of tofu were more at risk of memory loss.
5.ALCOHOL
Alcohol, in general, is injurious to health but it does more damage to your brain to you knew.
So, say no to alcohol because consumption of alcohol lowers your ability to think clearly and to recall information.
If you can’t recall the names of common items or you are not able to differentiate between your dreams and reality, then you are likely a heavy alcohol user and need to stop it ASAP. | https://medium.com/@kavithakavy/5-foods-that-will-you-dumb-2688ccbb5b9c | ['Kavitha Kavy'] | 2019-02-20 08:17:26.932000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Food', 'Health Foods', 'Healthy Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle'] |
Analyzing data networks | Using the “Clustering” function in the Analysis bar, you can identify organic groups in your network. When you run the clustering process, it applies the Louvain Modularity algorithm and finds the tightly knit groups characterized by a relatively high density of ties.
When clusters are detected, it is important to highlight their significance within the larger network. Therefore, they are automatically labeled based on the most connected node in the cluster. However, we strongly recommend you to rename these communities yourself to highlight what these communities specify in your network.
The “Penal Systems Network” (seen above), is a network map of countries in relation to juridical topics such as such as life imprisonment, parole, indefinite sentence, and amnesty. By displaying if or how these topics are being exercised, it provides a comparison of penalties at scale between countries and legal systems.
When we apply the clustering analysis, it shows the following clusters, which are labelled by the most central node within a given cluster:
Countries where amnesty is granted by president
Countries with life imprisonment
Countries where requesting parole varies by sentence
Amnesty by royal decree
The cluster of death penalty
Countries where requesting parole is below 25 years
The clustering of these countries and penalty systems is inline with the distinction of law traditions. The common law countries (from US to UK and its past colonies), the civil law countries (Europe, Latin America, Asia and beyond), and the mix of religious and civil law countries (partly Middle East and North Africa) stand close to each other in the network diagram.
List important actors and ties
Depending on the type of network, some nodes may have relatively more important positions than others. In some situations, important nodes may be defined as being central to the network when they have many connections, or as having a bridging role between two communities. Bridging nodes can be important because their removal may break the network into parts or they become too powerful as they are the broker of the information flow between the communities. | https://medium.com/graph-commons/analyzing-data-networks-f4480a28fb4b | ['Burak Arikan'] | 2017-10-17 00:25:26.132000+00:00 | ['Social Network', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Big Data', 'Open Data'] |
Tools // Fact 023 | Shaken, not stirred…
A great way to make your whiskey blending more interesting is with a cocktail shaker. It is a device used to mix alcoholic beverages by shaking. When ice is put in the shaker this allows for a quicker cooling of the drink before serving. A shaken cocktail is made by putting the desired ingredients in the cocktail shaker and shaking it vigorously for around 10 to 20 seconds, depending upon the size and temperature of the ice.
A little shake worth every drop. | https://medium.com/konosaur/tools-fact-023-3374168df231 | [] | 2020-12-26 17:33:39.375000+00:00 | ['Tools'] |
Market Basket Analysis — Multiple Support Frequent Item set Mining | Market Basket Analysis — Multiple Support Frequent Item set Mining
An improvement over the default MSApriori algorithm for mining itemsets with multiple supports.
Pic credit: Upgrad
Introduction:
The problem of generating Association Rules from a database of transactions (market baskets) is of interest for many retailers. An association rule is of the form 𝑋 → 𝑌 where X, Y are subsets of I (the universal set of all products (or items) and 𝑋 ∩ 𝑌 = ∅.
One can understand the meaning of above association rule as, if the customer has purchased items in the set X then he is likely to purchase items in the set Y. Some well-known examples of association rules can be {Milk} -> {Bread}, {Milk} -> {Bread, Eggs}, {Bread, Butter} -> {Jam} and the humorous {Diapers} -> {Beer}. Please note that association rules are not commutative, .i.e. 𝑋 → 𝑌 does not equal 𝑌 → 𝑋.
The problem of finding association rules for a given transaction database (market baskets) is defined as follows:
a. Given a transaction database of size Z with N distinct items and an input support and confidence, find all the rules 𝑋 → 𝑌 that satisfy the given support and confidence constraints.
b. A support is a threshold that would determine if the items in X are frequent enough to be considered for association rule generation. More specifically if {X}.count / Z >= support, then X is considered a frequent item set.
c. A confidence is a threshold that would determine the conditional probability of buying Y. More specifically if {𝑋⋃𝑌}.count / {X}.count >= confidence, then 𝑋 → 𝑌 is considered a valid association rule.
Suppose if there are ’N’ distinct items/products sold by the retailer, then a brute force approach of counting and generating association rules has the complexity of O(N!).
Apriori algorithm is an improvement over the brute force method based on the observations that a set of items X is a frequent item set only if all the proper subsets of X are also frequent item sets. This would reduce the no of states/rules need to explore for generating all possible association rules. The Apriori algorithm works by this principle and is executed in two steps
a. Find all the frequent item sets in the transaction database of size 1, 2, 3…k.
b. Generate all valid association rules from the frequent item sets 2, 3, 4…k.
c. Stop if no further frequent item sets of size k + 1 can be generated.
The Apriori algorithm requires at least ‘k’ scans of the transaction database.
MSApriori:
MSApriori, which stands for Multiple Support Apriori, is a more constrained definition of the Apriori algorithm for real life scenarios. The Apriori algorithm considers only one support value for all the items in the transactions, irrespective of whether an item is a frequently selling item (such as groceries) or a less frequently selling item (high priced items such as Home decors). So, to establish a weighing scheme for the frequently/rarely sold items, each item is given an individual support. The problem definition for MSApriori algorithm is modified as follows:
a. Given a transaction database and different minimum input support’s (MIS) for each item and confidence, find all the rules 𝑋 → 𝑌 that satisfy the given support and confidence constraints.
b. A support is a threshold that would determine if the items in X are frequent enough to be considered for association rule generation. Because there are different supports for different items in MSApriori, any item set that satisfies the minimum MIS of items in its set is considered frequent. More specifically if
a. |X| = 1,
{X}.count / n >= MIS(X), then X is considered a frequent item set.
b. |X| >= 1,
{X}.count / n >= MIN (MIS(X1), MIS(X2), MIS(X3) … MIS(Xk)); Xi ∈ X, i=1 to k.
c. To discourage very frequently and less frequently items appearing together in any frequent item set, a support difference constraint Φ is enforced on the candidate item set X
a. |X| >= 1,
MAX(Supp(X1), Supp(X2) … Supp(Xk))–MIN(Supp(X1), Supp(X2) … Supp(Xk)) <= Φ
The task of assigning MIS to items must be done in a meticulous manner. For highly moving items such as daily groceries, a high value of MIS is desired. For not so frequently sold items such as high end electronics, a less value of MIS is desired. One such assignment of MIS can be done using the following approximation.
MIS (item) = δ * Supp (item); δ ∈ [0, 1]
The above assignment is discussed in WebMining by Bing Liu et al. An algorithm for solving MSApriori is also proposed in the above book by Bing Liu, let’s call it the default MSApriori algorithm. The default MSApriori algorithm does a scan of transaction database for each candidate item set Ck; k >=2 to compute the frequent item set Fk.
Considering there are ‘Z’ number of total transactions in the database and ’N’ unique items, the default MSApriori algorithm requires calculation of support for all C2; C2 would have N*(N-1)/2 item sets if the MIS of each item is defined as above equation.
Total time complexity = N*(N-1)/2 * Z ~ O(n3).
Similarly, C3, C4… Ck would have corresponding complexities based on the size of item set multiplied by the number of transactions in the database.
Proposed improvement to MSApriori:
The proposed improvement to the default MSApriori is to use a look forward strategy of computing the supports of each Ck in the first pass of the transaction database scan, storing them in a Hash Table (Hk) and retrieving them when required. In the first pass of the transaction database scan, for each transaction of length ‘L’, each Ck (k <= L) is generated locally and the count of its support increased in Hk. So, for C2, the proposed modification would work as follows,
/* modified MSApriori Algorithm form Bing et al */ Modificaiton-1: init-pass() For each item(i) in Transaction T: a. Compute/increment the support of item(i) b. For each item(j) in Transaction T: // (j>i)
Compute the hashcode of itemset(i,j)
Retrieve the support of itemset(i,j) from the hash table(H2)
Initialize/Increment the support of itemset(i,j). Modificaiton-2: CandidateGen2() //Candidate generation function for 2-itemset For each item(i) in list L/C2:
For each item(j) in list L: // (j>i)
Compute the hashcode of itemset(i,j)
Retrieve the support of itemset(i,j) from the hash table(H2)
If support > MIS(item(i)) // and other constrains like Φ
Return itemset(i,j) into F2.
NOTE: CandidateGen2() directly returns the items into F2, no need for scanning the transaction database again!
In the Modificaiton-1, an extra sub-loop is added for each transaction to compute the support for 2-itemsets, assuming the average length of transaction is ‘L’ then this step would add further processing time of L*(L-1)/2 for each transaction in the database. Assuming, there are ‘Z’ transactions in the database, the time required to complete the init-pass() is
Time complexity (init-pass) = L*(L-1)/2 * Z
~= c * Z ~ O(Z) //for all practical reasons L << Z
In the Modificaiton-2, I am adding an extra step for accessing the hash table (H2) which can be done in constant time (TH) in most library implementations. The time required to complete CandidateGen2() is given as
Time complexity = N*(N-1)/2*TH ~ O(n2).
Combining both modifications, total time complexity = O(Z) + O(n2) < O(n3)! (from the default algorithm).
Verification of the result:
The default MSApirioi algorithm is implemented by Phillipe et al in the open-sourced java data mining library SPMF. I have modified the default MSApriori algorithm in SPMF library with my proposed alteration in the program MSAprori_H.java. The results of the execution of the MSApriori and MSApriori_H is as follows:
Dataset considered: retail1.txt
No of distinct items in the dataset: N = 2603.
No of transactions in the dataset: Z = 541909.
A note on the Hash function requirements for this algorithm. We would ideally require a hash function that would give a unique hash value for a set of integers, irrespective of the order of the integers in the given set. Generating such a hash function is definitely not a simple task, so I have relaxed the hash value to be a Java object in my implementation. I have chosen a BitSet object to implement in MSApriori_H.java. Consider a java BitSet object as a long array of Booleans that can hold ON/OFF values in required positions.
Hash function in MSApriori_H.java: | https://towardsdatascience.com/market-basket-analysis-multiple-support-frequent-item-set-mining-584a311cae66 | ['Srinivas Paturu'] | 2020-02-21 09:33:16.813000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Algorithms', 'Association Rule', 'Apriori'] |
Mais Hatem Visualizes Reddit Data Using AnyChart JS | Leading the data visualization market with the best-in-class solutions, we are always excited to see how not only companies but also individuals from all over the world use them to produce interactive charts in their projects. Here’s one new interesting example we’ve recently learned about. Mais Hatem from Syria, currently an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), created “Cloud a Subreddit,” a web project that generates a beautiful interactive Word Cloud chart out of any given Reddit’s subreddit with the help of the AnyChart JS library.
We had a quick interview with Mais where she told us more about her work and experience using AnyChart. Check it out.
AnyChart: Hey Mais! Let’s introduce you to our community to start with. Could you please say a few words about yourself?
Mais Hatem: Hi, I’m Mais, a college senior studying Computer Science. I am from a small town in Syria and I’m currently residing in Lebanon. In my freetime, I like experimenting with JavaScript and RESTful APIs in general.
A: What role does data visualization play in your life? We’ve seen several works showcased on your personal website — do you create graphics within the framework of studies or, like, out of personal interest?
MH: It’s mainly a hobby. Although I’ve never used data visualization in any coursework, I’m genuinely excited by the act of turning words and numbers into colored charts that are visually appealing, and that’s the main idea behind all those projects you saw.
Generally speaking, there are tons of open APIs out there with plenty of information that’s sitting in a boring JSON or XML format. So, I imagine it would be great if more significant data can be visualized in domains like health or public governance. It’s also definitely easier to talk to people when you have charts to back you up.
A: How did the idea of “Cloud a Subreddit” first come? Why did you decide to develop it?
MH: I was attempting doing the #7days7websites challenge, and I came across a developer who analyzed movie scripts into gender charts. I spent quite some time reading their documentation and making sense of their code. And since I’m a daily user of Reddit, I thought it would be cool to scrape the first couple of pages of each subreddit and make a word cloud out of them.
In addition to being fun, word clouds are a very quick way to give readers a clear insight about what’s going on in texts. In this case, such a colorful bubble of words could provide a snapshot of what is currently most important to the subscribers and visitors of a certain subreddit.
A: So what is “Cloud a Subreddit” now and is it exactly what you wanted to build?
MH: For the user, it’s just as simple as that. You enter a subreddit’s name, without “/r/” or spaces, press the orange button, and there you go: A beautiful interactive word cloud is generated on the same page within a moment, and it allows you to see at a glance what words are the most frequently used in that subreddit’s first-page post titles right now.
That’s exactly the basic functionality I was going to provide.
Of course, there are always more keywords to filter. This project is open source and I remember labeling this as an issue on GitHub, which led the repository to receive useful contributions from HacktoberFest participants. This made me very happy as it was my first repository to have complete strangers work on with me.
A: Looks cool indeed! Do you think of adding or updating something in your tag cloud tool moving forward?
MH: For future improvements, there are many places to start from, including the front-end layout. However, it is mainly tempting to go with NLP processing to automatically tokenize words, instead of filling dictionaries. Another cool thing would be for each word cloud to also show the “general sentiment” of the given subreddit.
So, a lot can be done and I’d like to do much more. Basically, I hope this project serves as a good starter for my knowledge and skills in text mining and that I possess enough time for everything.
A: Please tell us more about the technical side. How do you work with Reddit data? What technology stack does your project use and was the integration of AnyChart into it easy enough?
MH: The fact that I could add .json to any Reddit link made everything easy. To issue GET requests, I used JavaScript’s Fetch API. I then populated a dictionary of word occurrences, after passing them through a filter for unimportant words such as linking words and definitive and indefinite articles. Then comes the fun part of passing my dictionary to my anychart object, in order to make a word cloud. I used Bootstrap to maintain responsiveness.
Integrating AnyChart into my project was indeed seamless as I only included two lines of CDN imports.
A: Why did you choose the AnyChart JS charting library at all? What did you like most about it?
MH: I looked into different libraries and frameworks, but AnyChart was the easiest to start and familiarize with due to its great documentation.
A: When someone asks you for advice on which JavaScript library to use for data visualization, how would you recommend AnyChart in a nutshell?
MH: Easy to personalize graphs, and great documentation.
A: Thank you! | https://anychart.medium.com/mais-hatem-visualizes-reddit-data-using-anychart-js-b11e515c618 | [] | 2020-11-25 17:25:42.873000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Reddit', 'Data Visualization', 'Front End Development', 'Data Science'] |
How we at Ralient successfully tested and signed an agreement for 1,000 autonomous taxis | In October of 2020, we successfully tested our Sol SDS. We at Ralient developing self-driving technology without using lidars.
Our vision of self-driving is similar to the Tesla Autopilot and Intel MobilEye, but there are exceptions. These two companies (Tesla and MobilEye) are different from each other, but ours is different from both. Nevertheless, what common to all three companies is the rejection of lidars as the most important sensor on which an unmanned vehicle should rely.
One of the most important elements of the system is our neural networks, which allow us to determine the distance to other participants on the road by using a single camera. This is shown in the video about Sol and this is the key objective of the test.
Of course, it is impossible to create a self-driving vehicle using only one camera, just because a single-camera does not give a 360 view. We are planning to use 8 cameras, 2 radars, and ultrasonic sensors. It is necessary to ensure high safety and 360 views.
The words that we are doing this using single-camera intended to show the capabilities of Sol. It can do it and accurate enough.
All participants of the test were satisfied with the test results. Of course, a big portion of the development is not shown in the video and will not be released to the public just yet. Now we are planning to conduct the next tests in autumn-summer of the 2021 year in vastly different conditions and with much more complicated objectives. Some modules need to be improved. An autonomous vehicle is a complex project which includes many modules, and each is not trivial in development.
The testing resulted in an agreement with Taxovichkof for the first 1000 licenses for their fleet of unmanned vehicles. And also partnership with StarLine, which will help us in the development of the takeover of the vehicle.
Moreover, we found partners outside Russia, including automotive companies, now we are creating a strategy for entering the British and American markets.
To this day, as far as I know, only 3 companies have been able to show and prove that they can determine the depth of objects with high precision from a single camera, including Tesla (which till recently used radar exclusively to determine distance), MobilEye and our company. Of course, we are behind these companies in many ways, but taking into account the time of these products to enter the market and certification time, and the life of automotive solutions, we have time. | https://medium.com/ralient/how-we-at-ralient-successfully-tested-and-signed-an-agreement-for-1-000-autonomous-taxis-105d4728c3c0 | ['Artem Krivich'] | 2020-11-09 09:15:49.728000+00:00 | ['Autonomous Cars', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Lidar', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Computer Vision'] |
How to Use Journaling as a Form of Meditation | When we hear “meditation,” we think mindfulness, self-care, reflection, personal growth and more. Journaling can be a powerful tool to aid in your meditation routine. Read on to discover our top tips to do so.
1. Do breathing exercises before you write.
Make it a habit to do breathing exercises for 5–10 minutes prior to journaling. You’ll be more relaxed, present, connected and it’ll fuel inspiration.
2. Bring your journal with you in your meditation space.
Your meditation space is a space reserved for your deepest connection with your mind, it’s where you let go of daily stresses, where you get inspired and where you feel your best. Bring your journal with you in your meditation space so that once you are done your session, you can take some time to write your journal entry.
3. Use your thoughts that come up during your meditation session to inspire your next journaling topics.
When we meditate, a lot can come to the surface and this is a great time to both investigate our thoughts further but also write them down so that we can remain conscious of our deepest feelings.
4. Set an intention for your journal entry.
Just like we sometimes set an intention for a meeting with a life coach or with a friend, set one for your journal entry. You can set your intention in your mind or write it down. This can be something as simple as “writing down 5 business goals,” to something more complex like “gaining clarity on where I want to take my business in the next year.” Writing down your journaling intention will allow you to focus on what you want to achieve during your journaling session.
5. Always focus on the positive.
This may seem like a no-brainer but for some, it can be easier said than done. Always focus on the positive when you begin journaling and if you are having difficulty in certain areas, try to look at them as a positive learning opportunity. A positive angle on everything.
Looking for a new journal to get started? Look at our beautiful Zodiac journals here: https://soothi.com/collections/zodiac-journals
Happy Journaling! | https://medium.com/soothi-journals/how-to-use-journaling-as-a-form-of-meditation-2dd513edb16e | [] | 2019-03-03 01:45:28.379000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Writing Tips', 'Journaling', 'Writing', 'Bulletjournal'] |
The true meaning of Unus Annus: Why the channel is being deleted | As we’re writing this piece, the YouTube channel Unus Annus still stands. But come tomorrow, November 14, there will be no record of this channel on YouTube. When YouTubers Markiplier & CrankGameplays created Unus Annus a year ago, they stuck by the meaning of the Latin phrase: one year.
Play
on Apple Music
On November 13, 2019, a mysterious YouTube channel called Unus Annus launched for the first time. The first video ever posted to the channel featured gaming YouTubers Markiplier (Mark) & CrankGameplays (Ethan) standing in black & white suits in front of a swirling background. There, they presented their plan.
The channel Unus Annus was meant to live for only one year. In that year, Mark & Ethan created a smorgasbord of strange & experimental content they would’ve never done on their own channels. The goal of the channel was simple: “What would you do if you only had one year?”
http://templecav.org/cav/video-sinn-v-posp-tensi-fx12.html
http://templecav.org/cav/video-sinn-v-posp-dir-fx12.html
http://templecav.org/cav/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-rt32.html
http://templecav.org/cav/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-la32.html
http://templecav.org/cav/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-v224.html
http://templecav.org/cav/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-vpz24.html
http://templecav.org/cav/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-ama4.html
http://templecav.org/cav/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tvc4.html
http://templecav.org/cav/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tv25.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/video-sinn-v-posp-tensi-fx12.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/video-sinn-v-posp-dir-fx12.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-rt32.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-la32.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-v224.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-vpz24.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-ama4.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tvc4.html
http://naturalmilkcompany.ie/rexx/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tv25.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/video-sinn-v-posp-tensi-fx12.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/video-sinn-v-posp-dir-fx12.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-rt32.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-la32.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/roja-sinn-v-posp-dirett-v224.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-vpz24.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-ama4.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tvc4.html
https://www.iqhair.co.uk/mave/Tenn-sinner-pospisil-finale-tv25.html
In the first video posted to the channel, Mark & Ethan open with a simple question. “What would you do if you knew how much time you had left?” For 365 days, the pair uploaded videos to their channel, living out the true meaning of Unus Annus.
While neither Mark nor Ethan are strictly known for their gaming content, the content posted to Unus Annus was far from their normal brand of entertainment. From painting each other nude to producing unholy water, the content uploaded to Unus Annus varied from day to day.
Of course, COVID-19 ruined some of their plans for more extreme videos, but the duo continued to push content that helped “make beautiful memories” as Ethan described. 4.35 million people joined Mark & Ethan on their journey over the year, subscribing to the channel and enjoying the content the boys made.
Saying goodbye after a year
While many fans are in denial the end is here, the duo made it clear the end of Unus Annus was November 13, 2020. Launching a live stream to celebrate the end of the YouTube channel, both Ethan & Mark will look through fanart, memes, and their favorite videos to celebrate the end of the channel.
At the end of the stream, Mark & Ethan will delete the Unus Annus channel live, fulfilling the meaning of the channel’s name. Following this, all social media accounts for Unus Annus will be taken down, as well as the merch store for the channel.
Honoring the name
The biggest request of Mark & Ethan was for no videos from Unus Annus be reuploaded after the channel’s demise. Once the channel is officially taken off YouTube, honor the name Unus Annus and let the videos die with the channel. The channel will live on in name (and merch) alone, reminding people of what once was.
With numerous fan videos & fan art available online, it’s hard to believe every video reference to Unus Annus will be deleted, but the majority of fans are ready to honor the meaning of Unus Annus and take down their content after the channel is deleted. However, there’s a small minority of fans who believe November 13 isn’t the end.
While Mark & Ethan have made it very clear the channel is set to die on November 13, many fans still believe this is a troll move from the two creators. While the countdown clock will strike zero on November 13, the conspiracy theory among fans is the channel won’t die.
Instead, Unus Annus will somewhat keep the meaning of its name and upload no more content. However, the channel will remain as an archive of the past year. We won’t know for sure what Mark & Ethan will do until their livestream goes live at 12pm PST on November 13. Until then, memento mori. | https://medium.com/@phan.galasy1/the-true-meaning-of-unus-annus-why-the-channel-is-being-deleted-1b9142a1a5d8 | ['Van Thuong Phan'] | 2020-11-14 10:42:49.761000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Covid 19', 'Uganda', 'Coronavirus Covid19'] |
Matt Mcdole talks Skating, Simple Living, and Making Sense of the Times. | In Conversation with Graphic Design Artist Matthew Mcdole
Artist: Matthew Mcdole
Matthew Mcdole is an in-demand graphic artist that is probably skating when not managing his many clients. His work ranges from murals to logos for big breweries. Even with Mcdole’s busy schedule, he remains present, cherrishing sentimental items from family and childhood, items that help him capture the simplistic beauty of life represented in his work. I got a chance to talk with him recently about time, life, and his creative process.
Ai: Hey, Matt, How are you?
Matt: Good, no complaints at all. You seem busy.
Ai: Yeah, but so do you.
Matt: Yeah. Well, it's weird because I do so much stuff for people. Like, I’ll do something for someone, but it’s for two months from now. It almost feels like I’m not [busy] because I’m not putting stuff out. But that's such a strange feeling in the internet era…the idea that you're not doing anything if you're not putting stuff out…which is insane.
Ai: Right. We’ve thought about the same things at Artinformation. I think we’ve concluded that posting online isn’t necessary if it takes away from the attention we want to give to our subject material and the people involved with our research. Like a good meal, quality takes time.
Matt: I think about that all the time. If I haven’t seen someone post, I just imagine they're doing what I'm doing. They're probably working or paying for something that they just don’t feel like sharing.
Ai: Yeah, or they’re going through family stuff. Just living life.
Matt: Right. I’m moving this week. And so, I haven’t skated or made anything since last weekend. And even though I've been insanely productive, I feel like I haven’t been doing as much.
Art and skating are the things that I think about when I go to bed. At the end of the day, those are the things that I think about. It's good to have those things to think about at the end of your day. Moving isn’t like that.
Ai: When you feel like you’re behind. How do you get yourself back in the head-space to work?
Matt: I’m always thinking about what I’m doing to do next. Usually, it starts with a drawing, and depending on what it is, I get it on the computer, mess with it a little, and send it off. The next thing is a shirt for a brewing company.
I already know what i’m more or less doing. It’s like second nature. It’s like if you haven’t swam for a bit, you just need to get back into the pool. Its not hard to get back into it.
Ai: Do you get time to do stuff for yourself?
Matt: Yeah. If I have a thing to do for clients, then I want to do that. I usually work on client work. And I’m making notes in the meantime of stuff I want to do whenever I get the time. If there's something I want to do, then I find the time. If there's something I’m really excited about, then I find the time to do that in the middle.
Ai: Do you find yourself spending more time in the past, present, or future? How would you describe your relationship with time?
Matt: Personally, it’s good to enjoy and live in the moment. Not doing spontaneous and crazy things but just taking the day as it comes. Like plan for the future, but be present before you plan.
Writing things down helps. If you try to keep a mental list of what you have to do, you’ll always be stressed and forgetting things. It’s good to just write it down and come back to it. I have like 5 or 6 projects I have to do but i’m really only thinking about 1 or 2. I will think of those other projects when the time comes.
Ai: Right. Your sanity is most important. Prioritizing projects in time is the real work.
Matt: Yeah, and figuring out how much mental energy to put into things. Sometimes your time is better put into spending time with friends and family.
Ai: What are some of the objects in your life that have had a special impact on you?
Matt: There are so many things that I’ve had for many years that I continue to keep. I have so many records; I have some books, I have a couple of bins of keepsake clothes: old band shirts, old skate shirts, shirts I made for people. I keep a lot of stuff. Any knick-knacks that I’ve gotten from certain people, I’ll keep to remember that person.
My dad has cancer, we just found out at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s not something that's going to totally get better. He’s going through chemo right now, and he’s not really worried about it as much as I am. He’s like, “I’ll be fine” or “This won't kill me”…now, the things related to him I’m more likely to keep.
In my studio, I have all these random things. So some stuff my dad had when he was a kid. Or old photos of me with old friends. It’s all very sentimental.
Ai: What about the rest of 2020? It seems like you’ve had a lot going on. How do you deal with all the new changes?
Matt: Masks and everything like that. When it first started, it felt insane. But I’m not the most social person. I usually just do the things I need to do, skate and make art. Those things haven’t been affected. Obviously, I can’t have an art show…. But I felt more affected by the George Floyd situation. Around that time, I felt like sharing stuff. “Does this matter?” you know? Are there not more important things to share or say? — [or] “Maybe this isn’t the best time to promote yourself.”
Ai: Was that hard to get used to since the platforms online are kind of built for promotion?
Matt: Yeah, and I slowly got back into it, but I thought much more about helping other people, and I took some time off to do stuff for other people. Giving people discounts on my work and encouraging people to donate to charities. A friend and I made a big skate fundraising campaign. We took all that money and donated it. We got everyone together, and we skated down to Breonna Square as apart of the campaign. Bringing posters for everyone.
Ai: What are you looking forward to in the future?
Matt: I enjoy now. Now is pretty cool. It's really easy to look back on time and think, “Oh, those were the good times.” “I should have appreciated that while it lasted.” I think from a young age, I caught onto that, so I’ve always been really good at appreciating things while it happens. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the future or what I want. I just think, “This is really cool right now,” my girlfriend and I are more or less just focusing on our art. This is a sweet time right now. If you’re always looking at the future…you’ll never be happy. | https://medium.com/artinformation/matt-mcdole-talks-skating-simple-living-and-making-sense-of-the-times-d0cf980f36f7 | [] | 2020-12-13 14:52:33.453000+00:00 | ['Artist', 'Graphic Design', 'Interviews', 'Images', 'Matt Mcdole'] |
Extreme Learning Machines | Extreme Learning Machines III
Part III: Is it better?
Well, it depends.
Like said, it has the main advantage of the smallest training time and error and better generalization performance. ELM has the simplest algorithm as we do not have to decide the number of hidden layers, learning rate, and other hyperparameters. Even being simpler, ELM outperforms any other algorithm in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall.
But ELM architectures mostly end up with more number of hidden nodes for the first layer which affects the test time. If the application of the model does not demand lower training time but requires faster results as its priority, then ELM should not be your first choice. For example, ELM hasn’t turned out good in real-time image classification.
Comparison from source [3]
Comparison with LSTM and HTM
OR-ELM used here is a type of ELM algorithm for online recurrent time-series data. This experiment was done on predicting faults in a cloud environment.
The parameter used here is NRMSE, which is Normalized Root Mean Squared Error. In fig.1.(a), we can see that the ELM algorithm has overall better performance has it has lower NRMSE.
Fig.1 (a) Prediction error for the 40 days from source[1]
Fig.1 (b) Prediction error when rapid changes of inputs occurred from source[1]
Time comparison: Time taken by the ELM algorithm is around less than 10% of its comparison, along with having an overall lesser error.
Fig.2 Comparison with (I)NRMSE, (II)MAPE, (III)Computational Time (in sec) from source[1]
Comparison with Support Vector Machine and Random Forest
Dataset is randomized and divided into three parts: full samples, half samples, and 1/4th samples. The full dataset consists of 65,535 samples, the half dataset includes 32,767 samples, and the 1/4th dataset consists of 18,383 samples. Accuracy, precision, and recall are used as evaluation metrics.
Dataset is then split into 80% training and 20% testing.
ELM performs better compared with SVM (Linear), SVM (RBF), and RF on full data samples, whereas SVM (RBF) indicates improved accuracy over RF and ELM on half data samples. SVM (Linear) outperforms other techniques on 1/4 data samples.
Fig. 3 (a) Accuracy of SVM, RF and ELM
The precision of ELM is better than all on the full data samples. On half data samples, the precision of SVM (Linear) is higher than that of SVM (RBF), ELM, and RF. While SVM has shown better performance than ELM and RF in the 1/4 dataset.
Fig. 3 (b)
The recall of ELM is better than all other algorithms for full samples and reduces as the sample size is reduced. This indicates that SVM performs better on a small dataset, while EML outperforms other approaches on large datasets.
Fig. 3 (c )
Conclusion
We can conclude that ELM has better performance than any other algorithm given a large amount of data and shortens the training time from days (spent by deep learning) to several minutes (by ELM) in MNIST OCR dataset, traffic sign recognition and 3D graphic application, etc.
Along with that ELM even performs better when there are rapid changes in input data as seen in fig.1.
The only drawback from using the ELM algorithm will be a little bit of larger testing time in some cases and the dataset should be large enough. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/extreme-learning-machines-ef3b229d63c5 | ['Prasad Kumkar'] | 2020-08-04 18:40:16.805000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Research', 'Extreme Learning Machine'] |
What do Tesla, Nvidia, Alphabet, and General Motors, All Have In Common? | All are attacking an $8 trillion market future.
This future market is a reason I own all of these stocks!
Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash
Let’s be clear. My ownership of the stocks of these companies is no inherent reason for others to invest. However, my research about why I purchased these stocks provide a guide about each company’s future leadership potential in a massive new market opportunity. Before discussing these details, you should know I believe in investing versus trading. For me, investing is a long term endeavor versus trying to time a company’s stock price by making frequent entry or exit decisions. I think of investing like being an owner of the company. I put a lot of emphasis on the quality of management (mostly the CEO), along with the decisions management makes around capital allocation.
Also, I like companies that have cash cows (significant profits from long-term products or services sold today) that can fund investments into new products, services or industries. In the case of GM, Nvidia and Alphabet, they also have cash cow businesses and products that allow for the massive allocation of capital targeted at a gigantic future market known as transportation-as-a-service (TaaS), thought to be an $8 trillion market opportunity. Tesla, however, has almost unlimited access to capital markets allowing it to continue investing in the technology required to continue to drive toward building its TaaS future.
Photo by Dario on Unsplash
Follow the leader, Tesla
The leader in the autonomous driving space is Tesla. Unlike others, Tesla collects data from a global fleet of customer vehicles already equipped with self-driving data collecting sensors (all of those Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y vehicles on the road around the globe). This was highlighted in a Medium article I wrote earlier this year about Tesla’s engineering advantages. Other companies rely on test fleets and simulations for data generation. Tesla has amassed 3 billion miles of real-world, Autopilot data according to Electrek. That’s a massive amount of data that far exceeds others. It’s this large and growing data that feeds the neural networks which drives the artificial intelligence required for developing full-self-driving capability. Tesla’s goal is to leverage the self-driving capability of its customer’s cars into an autonomous taxi fleet allowing other people to hail the car when owners are not using it. It’s an audacious goal for sure. However, what once seemed audacious in the electric vehicle space for Tesla, is now capability still unmatched by any other company. So when Elon Musk states audacious goals, I now choose not to discount his statements. As the TaaS space unfolds over the years, I fully expect Tesla to be a major player (if not the leader) on the global TaaS stage.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
Follow the technology, Nvidia
Nvidia is a multinational technology company popularly known for its graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming. The company also produces supercomputers for cloud systems as well as. But Nvidia is more than a gaming GPU company. In addition to its data centers, the company has made substantial investments in the automotive sector as well as in artificial intelligence capabilities designed to enable self-driving vehicles.
Nvidia’s automotive clients include not only automakers, but also automotive suppliers. A recent CleanTechnica article by Zachary Shahan describes how Nvidia’s automotive partnerships have moved beyond just supplying GPUs and SoCs (systems-on-a-chip) to the automotive industry. The company is now working with automakers to develop cars centered around artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputers. Until recently, even the self-driving computer used by Tesla came from Nvidia. The company is developing self-driving vehicle systems in partnership with Volvo, Continental, Xpeng Motors, Toyota and Mercedes. Last year in a post on the TaaSMaster site about the autonomous vehicle ecosystem, it seemed clear that Nvidia was the one company that has the most TaaS business relationships with other entities in the space. And today, it seems these partnerships have only grown giving Nvidia a substantial leg-up on other companies providing the technology to the TaaS industry.
Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash
Follow the deep pockets, Google
Very few companies have the balance sheet of Alphabet to take on the financial burden of developing autonomous vehicle TaaS solutions. And no other company has been working on this longer than the parent company formally known as Google. Back in 2008, Google assembled a team of experts to tackle the challenges of autonomous driving in a project that internally became known as Chauffeur according to Larry Burns in his book, Autonomy. Today, Chauffeur is an Alphabet subsidiary called Waymo.
According to UBS, Waymo could generate $114 billion in revenue by 2030. And like the “follow the money” overview for GM’s Cruise division, Waymo recently raised $2.25 billion from entities such as Silver Lake, Magna, Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation. Waymo’s parent, Google, also enjoys massive profits from their advertising business that allow the company to continue to fund the development of its TaaS business. Like Nvidia’s partnership strategy, Waymo has linked-up with multiple automakers to help create an autonomous, TaaS future. Waymo has partnerships with Volvo, Fiat-Chrysler, Jaguar, and Renault-Nissan. Waymo already operates an autonomous ride-hailing service called Waymo One in the Phoenix area. In my opinion, the company is well-positioned to be a major player in a global TaaS future.
Photo by Elishia Jayye on Unsplash
Follow the money, General Motors
Dan Ammann, CEO of GM’s Cruise autonomous vehicle subsidiary, recently described to CNBC how TaaS will become an $8 trillion market opportunity. It’s this business future that drove GM to acquire Cruise Automation in 2016 estimated to be between a $580 million and $1 billion acquisition. Cruise is helping GM develop autonomous vehicle technology. Autonomous vehicle capability is a major capability required to succeed in this future $8 trillion market. It’s because of Cruise’s technology that Softbank’s Vision Fund invested $2.25 billion into the company in May 2018. Also in 2018, Honda announced that it would invest $750 million into Cruise followed by an additional $2 billion investment over the next 12 years. These are giant bets on GM’s future capability in a new TaaS world.
Get over what you think you know about GM
I realize GM gets less Wall Street love than the others. Investors do not like traditional automakers. In fact, GM’s share price today hovers around its post-bankruptcy, 2010 IPO price of of $33. GM’s very good, recent financial performance (even during the industry slowdown caused by coronavirus) can’t get the stock pricing moving forward. However, believing yesterday’s General Motors will be tomorrow’s GM is a mistake.
“History is littered with big companies that ignored innovation”
The quote above is attributed to GM’s former CEO, Dan Akerson, when he formed an internal skunk-works team in 2013 to keep tabs on Tesla and its burgeoning electric vehicle technology. Akerson believed then that Tesla could be a disruptor. We now know that Akerson was correct. GM’s current CEO, Mary Barra, is steering the company today to an electric, autonomous, and mobility future. The company calls it Zero Zero Zero (Zero crashes, Zero emissions, Zero congestion). Each “zero” requires the development of autonomous driving, mobility solutions and electric vehicles. Of the major global automakers (except for Tesla), GM has been driving toward this future the longest and will have more to show for their efforts faster than many others.
I also like that profits from key aspects of GM’s business (trucks and truck-based SUVs primarily) which help fund the massive investments required for a TaaS future as highlighted in this Medium article. Other than Tesla, GM seems to possess the best EV technology along with an overlooked, but required, capability to produce electric vehicles at scale. Similar to Tesla’s strategy, GM is building a dedicated EV battery factory with their EV battery partner, LG Chem. The company also is converting an entire vehicle assembly plant in Michigan dedicated to producing electric vehicles only. GM even recently revealed a production-ready electric, autonomous vehicle clearly designed for a TaaS world. It’s called Origin. It has no steering wheel or pedals. Its interior has seats that face each other. Origin, together with Cruise and GM’s massive electric vehicle investments are examples of smart capital allocation that will pay tremendous dividends toward a future TaaS world.
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
And then there’s China, where GM sold 3.1 million vehicles in the country in 2019 (second for international automakers other than Volkswagen). GM’s Chinese business contributes almost a fifth of the companies profit. And the Chinese market (including Chinese government mandates) is a primary impetus driving General Motors to accelerate its push to a Zero Zero Zero future.
TESLA. Follow the leader! NVIDIA. Follow the technology! GOOGLE. Follow the deep pockets! Generals Motor. Follow the money!
I’m sure other companies also will prosper and benefit from the disruption occurring in transportation. However, General Motors, Nvidia, Google and Tesla each have a head start and a great opportunity to write the future, not just participate in a new Taas world. | https://medium.com/@rmcadory/what-do-general-motors-nvidia-alphabet-and-tesla-all-have-in-common-c126f5603b4c | ['Randall Mcadory'] | 2020-08-19 23:19:25.701000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Business Strategy', 'Automotive', 'Self Driving Cars'] |
Getting started with Ruby on Rails: A blog app (Part 2) | Add authentication with devise
add devise gem to your gemfile
gem 'devise'
run bundle install to install devise into your app, and complete the installation using the following command. you can learn more about the devise gem here.
rails generate devise:install
now lets add users into our app, as for me I will call them authors
rails generate devise author
and well now migrate our database
rails db:migrate
in our app, we only want authors(users) who have logged into our app to post articles, so we need to add some restrictions. at the very top of our app/controllers/articles_controller.rb, add this line.
before_action :authenticate_author!, except: [:show, :index]
Its important for it to be at the top of the file as rails follows top to bottom order when it comes to executing controller restrictions. here we are restricting every other action except showing list of articles or reading an article.
2. Add associations
here we going to link our authors with articles. typically, authors can post multiple articles, but an article can only have one author. so we have a one-to-many relationship in our case.
in app/models/Article.rb
class Article < ApplicationRecord belongs_to :author end
in app/models/Author.rb
class Author < ApplicationRecord has_many :articles end
create a new migration from your terminal to add author_id to article.
here will will add author id, which will be an integer
rails g migration add_author_id_to_articles
now in root folder/db/migrate, you will see the migration file. mine looks like this
class AddAuthorIdToArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration[6.0] def change add_column :articles, :author_id, :integer end end
Don’t forget to run the database migrations with rake db:migrate
now in our articles controller, edit the create action, and add this line.
# POST /articles.json def create @article = Article.new(article_params) @article.author = current_author #add this line respond_to do |format| if @article.save format.html { redirect_to @article, notice: 'Article was successfully created.' } format.json { render :show, status: :created, location: @article } else format.html { render :new } format.json { render json: @article.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity } end end end
here we are associating a new article with the current logged in user. with this, you can call author.articles, and it will return a list of all articles by the user.
i wont go into design, but i have attached my final app screenshots. you can also find this code on GitHub. | https://medium.com/devceldoret/getting-started-with-ruby-on-rails-a-blog-app-part-2-9bb0b2c0bdc | ['Brian Ngeywo'] | 2020-12-11 11:50:28.447000+00:00 | ['Beginner Rails', 'Rubygems', 'Devceld Backend', 'Ruby on Rails'] |
Virendra Sehwag very happy birthday, Sehwag personal life with Arti | Virendra Sehwag very happy birthday, Sehwag personal life with Arti
Virender Sehwag, who turned 43 on October 20, has made a mark both on and off the field. On the field, he was a batsman who displayed aggression and dominance and struck fear in the hearts of the bowlers.
In a career spanning over 13 years, Sehwag has played 104 Tests, 251 ODIs, 19 T20s, and 104 IPL matches. Sehwag was respected in Test cricket for scoring 8,586 runs with 23 centuries and six double centuries. Bringing the same form of energy to One Day Internationals (ODIs), Sehwag amassed 8273 runs, including 15 hundred and a double century.
Read more: DEK vs KSA Dream11 Prediction Today with Playing XI, Pitch Report & Player Stats
Sehwag is still on the playing field of ‘social media, the playing field. Known for his wit and humor since his playing days, Sehwag continues the legacy of entertaining his fellow cricketers and fans thoroughly.
Read more: Shakib- The team felt relieved by the victory
Virender Sehwag And Wife Aarti-
Virender Sehwag met Aarti Ahlawat when he was only 7 and Aarti was 5. Viru’s cousin was getting married to Aarti’s aunt, which is what brought them together as children. Immediately, they formed a strong bond and remained in touch as friends. Over the years, this bond seem to grow and their affection towards each other began to develop into something more serious.
Read more: Anushka Sharma: My whole heart in one frame
When Sehwag turned 21, he realized that enough was enough and he went to Aarti and proposed his love for her. She reciprocated those feelings for him but her family did not seem too keen on this union at the start since the couple was distantly related. However, with time, they realized that the two would not give up and decided to give them their blessings.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQGPYIqnts2/
The pair were united in matrimony in 2004 after 3 years of dating and when Sehwag was 23, gave birth to their first son Aryavir in 2007. In 2010, Virender Sehwag’s wife Aarti Ahlawat gave birth to their second son Vedant. | https://medium.com/@babacric/virendra-sehwag-very-happy-birthday-sehwag-personal-life-with-arti-d559ceace1e4 | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-10-20 07:20:11.550000+00:00 | ['Cricket'] |
A practical guide To living (and working) 8667 km away from the office. | There are a tons of articles about living as a so-called digital nomad. When I look back at the over 5 months of my stay in Taipei, Taiwan I can honestly say that even though some of them might help you make a decision whether or not it something for you, they don’t really prepare you for the challenges you will be facing. With this article I’ll try to give you some practical advice on what to take care of before you leave your country and start a wonderful (or not) journey that you will someday tell your grandchildren about.
Right here I want to clearly state that this text refers to Asia and Taiwan, but from what I know, apart from a few small exceptions, most of the common go-to locations follow similar rules.
But why?
First and foremost you should really, and by really I mean like REALLY, seriously think about the place you are going to live in, and why is it this particular place. For me it was following the love of my life (she might read it hehe) on her one-year scholarship in Taipei. I kinda knew what I could expect the place to be, HOWEVER when I talk to people who kept their online job and just moved here because they thought it was cool, the majority of them say that after the honeymoon there comes real life and with every single day you start to see more and more drawbacks of living and working so far away. Do thorough research and make sure It is really the right place for you and your job.
Let’s do it!
So, to start off, you should book an appointment with all of the people you would normally contact at work in case of emergency: your leader, senior, Project manager, whatever. Tell them the risks that come with your trip, which are:
You have an accident, you go to a hospital and have no possibility to contact anybody from your company for a day or two.
Your company equipment that you work on is destroyed or stolen and you have no gear to work on.
You get sick and suddenly you need to take few days off.
You will most likely live in an area that has a 5h+ time difference and that affects your flexibility when it comes to working hours.
You will most likely be unable to attend on-site workshops or projects that require your physical presence and that will affect your scheduling and work assignments.
If you go to any country that has a limited time tourist visa-free stay, you will need to go for a short trip outside this country every now and then to renew the visa.
With so much to see around and stuff you need to take care of, the normal yearly vacation allowance might not be enough and you will most likely have to ask for unpaid vacation.
If they are cool and supportive with all that, then congratulations! You can buy a ticket to a tropical paradise or wherever you want to spend your nearest piece of life in!
Photo: Michał Smolec
What’s next?
Now what I suggest you to do is to call an embassy of your destination country and simply tell them what you are trying to do and ask them to tell you anything you need to know and what might be the problems to watch out for. 99% of the time you will connect with a friendly and helpful person that will guide you through the policy of you staying there and what you can do to make it a pleasant experience.
Things you need to have worked out:
Finance — transferring funds and converting them to a usable currency can be pretty expensive in fees and commissions. I use Revolut app which solves this problem, but not all countries will have this possibility.
Health insurance — find a plan that includes an on-site specialist that will arrange anything for you in a short time. Make sure it is valid through your whole stay.
Backup plan — You should secure some money for an emergency comeback or unexpected expenses if something goes wrong. Two months’ worth of anticipated expenses is a good start. That also includes laptop or phone failures.
Unexpected legal stuff — if there is anything you will need to take care of at your tax office or bank, there is a big chance someone can do it for you, but for that there is a need for a disposition.
Connectivity — In some countries unlimited access to high speed internet is ridiculously expensive or simply unavailable. Make sure you won’t be surprised by that.
Of course there are many more things to cover, but the problem is that they vary depending on the country you are going to visit.
What you should prepare for and how to do it:
Language — The thing you instantly get to know that, apart from the Philippines, people outside the big cities don’t speak English, and i don’t mean good English — I mean like no English at all. Even google translate won’t help you. For me it is not a huge issue because my girlfriend studies Chinese, but I can honestly say that if I came here on my own and tried to deal with everything without help for this long I would be screwed.
My advice here is look for a Facebook group of people from your country living in your destination. Talk to them and try to make some friends who could help you in case of a problem. Also, if possible, try to learn at least the very basics of the language you might need.
Adjusting your workflow — The thing you may not be willing to think about is that, overall, you are making your employer take a major risk, so you should be prepared to go the extra mile at work to reciprocate.
I suggest to try working from home for a bit to see if you even qualify for the task. It all sounds cool when you hear about travelling and so on, BUT when something goes wrong you have onsite support, you have high quality equipment like monitors and various devices that might be more crucial to your work than you realize, even a coffee machine to wake you up after a longer than expected game night with your friends. Living on the other side of the world you are on your own, so consider what you use on a regular basis and whether you can live without it, does it impact you performance?
Material stuff — If you work in a somewhat professional company, there is a great chance you use your company laptop or other devices, which obviously might break. So what if they do?
Unfortunately, it is your problem and a risk you must be willing to take. The solution here might be international electronics insurance plans that will allow you to service your device in any country on the list — just make sure yours happen to be on the list. I don’t recommend saving on these, because if you need to randomly get yourself a new Macbook Pro after you drop it or spit some Litchi flavoured jasmine bubble milk tea, you are going to have a bad day.
Getting to know the new place — Try to get as much as possible done BEFORE leaving your home. By that I mean finding an apartment to look at when you land. In this case the friend that you made and talked to about your dream place can be a lot of help. Get to know the area as fast as possible, maybe start your time in the new place with some vacation to get the most out of it so you have a head start and make it a little less intimidating. | https://medium.com/netguru/a-practical-guide-to-living-and-working-8667-km-away-from-the-office-d62312021bea | ['Michał Smolec'] | 2019-04-01 11:21:03.199000+00:00 | ['Digital Nomads', 'Travel', 'Remote Working', 'Designer', 'Netguru'] |
Dataflows vs Dashboards — What to use and when? | Why are we talking about this?
Dataflows/Recipes/Data Prep 3.0 (Let’s call this whole gamut as Dataflows for this post) and Dashboards are an integral part of our work with Tableau CRM (TCRM). A question and challenge we always come across and ask ourselves or experts is should we approach the solution to the problem statement using Dataflows or Dashboards or do we need a combination of both? Let’s break this apart today and understand what to use and when.
Common Questions asked
Can we perform the calculation in the widget/lens/dashboard (for simplicity, we will call this dashboard) or should this be done in the dataflow? Should we join ALL our datasets that we intend to use in the dashboard/widget to form a comprehensive dataset in the dataflow and then work with it or should we join these datasets in the dashboard? Are we proficient enough to do this in the dataflow, if that is the preferred route for this issue? Are we proficient enough to do this in the dashboard where SAQL and Interactions (fka Bindings) maybe required?
Let’s Crack the Code!
It is not always a matter of which we know better or we think is easier for us to solve. And we will come across scenarios where we try doing something in the dataflow and then realize, it doesn’t work the way we want. A good example is one-to-many join. If you perform a one-to-many join in the dataflow and then try grouping it, you will see that the data is all over the place. That one has really joined to many and some of those should never ever have joined! Example, one weather station that contains weather data but services multiple store locations for a retail chain in a city! But, this works like a charm if your only purpose is to filter!
Another example of such a challenge would be aggregating the data in the dashboard. Of course, you can aggregate the data in Recipes/Data Prep 3.0, but then you will need to join it back to the original dataflow either to not create a separate dataset for this or for multi value row level security. An example for this would be Avg Amount by Account and Year. Now imagine the Account has a few other fields like Type of Product. If we average the amount in Data Prep 3.0, you may need to add it back to one of the dataflows for reasons mentioned above.
Now that we have the why out of the way, let’s see when to use what.
Dataflows
When we need to compare data to previous rows and doing that using windowing function would not help.
When we need to repeat the task, say a formula, to be used in multiple dashboards like currency conversions.
Date fields — It is easier to create date fields strings (Year, Quarter, Month, Like4Like etc.) from date fields in the dataflow for filtering in dashboards.
Aggregate in Data Prep 3.0 and add it back to the dataflow when it might be a cumbersome calculation in dashboard.
Join multiple objects/datasets when that forms part of a logical chain. Say, child to parent to grandparent. Caveat: If the grandparent then has another branch that creates child and grandchild, create a different dataflow.
All the joins will be left joins then use dataflows! Right/Outer/Inner joins don’t work in dataflows yet. But they are part of Data Prep 3.0 and can be used there.
Dashboards
Simple aggregation of datasets.
Easy calculations and even a few complex ones where the data should update based on row level and upper level filtering.
Joining multiple datasets in a widget when it will maybe used in 2–3 dashboards and creating a dataflow for that would take more time than creating a dataflow.
With all joins available in dashboards, it is easier to join datasets there now. But we can join only 4 datasets from the UI. And the more datasets we join in the UI, the more heavy the dashboard becomes.
SOQL: Any dashboard that needs real-time (Live) data should use SOQL and it is available only at the dashboard level.
Dataflows and Dashboards
There will be cases where we will have to rely both on our dataflow and dashboard skills to meet our requirement. An example for this would be a field, say days/months between two dates which can be done in Salesforce but, can as easily be done in dataflow! This can then be used to filter dashboards where we are looking for a specific period of time like orders where the number of days been order and shipping is more than 7 days.
A combination of dataflow and dashboard when used the right way can shorten the time we spent on creating dashboards and make our lives easier!
Parting Thoughts!
The above is in no way a comprehensive list of all that can be done and cannot be done in a dataflow or dashboard. Every company has a different use case and as TCRM grows and more people work on it, the more the use cases. This is meant to give us a feel of what to do and what not to do. Ultimately, we will have to find what works best in our case and find the right solution! | https://medium.com/tableau-crm/dataflows-vs-dashboards-what-to-use-and-when-331c0956119d | ['Sayantani Mitra'] | 2020-12-21 01:07:04.459000+00:00 | ['Dashboards', 'Einstein Analytics', 'Tableau Crm', 'Dataflow'] |
Are we doing it wrong? | Do you ever feel like we were supposed to sleep at Sunlight (what we call day time) and be awake at Moonlight (what we call night time) ? yeah me too.
We were supposed to be working at the night? Then why do we work at daytime? Because our ancestor started working at day time and took rest at night time and we forced to follow the same and it became a super habit and human body has started to adjust accordingly. we started to follow as a member of society what society decided at the time.
Everything is a social construct, the words and letters? A construct.
Here is why i think day was meant from sleeping and night for waking up.
The ultraviolet (UV) radiation is harmful to us, especially for the skin. Excessive exposure to the sun is known to be associated with increased risks of various skin cancers, cataracts and other eye diseases, as well as accelerated skin ageing. It may also adversely affect people’s ability to resist infectious diseases, and compromise the effectiveness of vaccination programmes.
We feel more calm at night time, night is peaceful, sky looks beautiful, our soul feels safe, we feel more productive. Let’s go back in the time and learn more about the moon. https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/does-the-moon-affect-humans-health-mood By the 16th century, tracking the Moon’s position had become an “essential part of medicine” according to Louise Devoy, curator of Royal Observatory Greenwich. In ancient Greece and Rome by contrast, girls were given crescent-shaped amulets on their birthday to protect them from evil spirits. Women also wore them to improve fertility and for protection during childbirth. Moon even has correlation with mental Health and moods. In an article on “ Does moon affect sleep” it is said that “The idea that a Full Moon may result in poor sleep is a consistent theme, but the scientific evidence remains inconsistent.”
Ummm…. Probably because we were supposed to be awake?
Maybe ancestors used to work by the moon and sleep by the sun but due to the advancement of the technology and change it people’s thinking brought a change to this, like the way people are losing the connection with the nature. We might have had night vision but we lost it due to the rays of sun, think about it this way ; our eyes burn while looking at a ball of burning fire (the sun) 92,900,000 miles away because we were not supposed to be looking at it, insted we should have been sleeping and be awake at the night.
Here is a little poem about the sun and moon by Nadia:
https://pin.it/20AdYtO
Everything around us can be questioned !! *don’t let it make you go insane though*
Think for a while, if our ancestors had started sleeping during sunlight and waking at moonlight. What would be our habit.
Do you want me to write about more conspiracy theories? Clap the story if you liked it !
I post almost every week follow to never miss a story ! | https://medium.com/@binrainbow11/are-we-doing-it-wrong-ac88c2e4440e | ['Kritika Neupane'] | 2020-12-22 15:29:56.738000+00:00 | ['Day And Night', 'Habits', 'Moon', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Sun'] |
Boston and Kyoto Celebrate 60th Anniversary as Sister Cities | Mayor Kadokawa welcomed at Japan Society of Boston’s annual gala dinner.
Boston welcomed the Mayor of Kyoto, Daisaku Kadokawa in late April with an annual gala dinner hosted by the Japan Society of Boston. The Society also invited Nobel Laureate and Kyoto University Distinguished Professor, Tasuku Honjo, to attend the event.
Sister cities differ from other bilateral community relationships in that they are recognized with an official signed agreement. Because of the formal structure of this relationship, the two cities are able to successfully foster deeper cultural, educational, and business ties. The sister relationship between Boston and Kyoto began when Mayor Takayama visited Boston in the early 1950s and he was impressed with the similarities between the two cultural and educational centers. Mayor Takayama suggested the partnership for official cultural exchange, and Mayor John Hynes accepted on June 24, 1959.
These ties are best shown via university study programs between Kyoto and Boston. Boston falls into Massachusetts 7th and 8th Congressional Districts and in total, the two districts have seven universities with Japanese studies programs. Overall, there are over 480 international students from Japan who contribute around $2.3 million to the local economy. For Kyoto, the Ritsumeikan-Showa Boston University Culture and Society Research Program offers a four week experience that focuses on Boston’s societal and cultural elements. Furthermore, there are four bilateral study abroad exchanges between Kyoto and Boston. Boston University has two partnerships with institutions in Kyoto: the Kyoto Consortium and the Kyoto Tachibana University. Other bilateral exchanges include the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Ryukoku University, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston) and the Kyoto University of Art & Design.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the friendship, many special events are being held in Boston.Japan Festival Boston was held on April 27 to 28 with food booths, workshops, stage performances, etc. It aims to introduce authentic Japanese culture and pass on traditions to the next generation.CIC ArtWeek: Global Arts, Eats & Beats was held on May 3 to introduce the roots of Japanese cultural traditions through art, food, and music.
Japan gave a Japanese-style house to the Boston Children’s Museum for its 20th anniversary. Before that Boston received two cherry blossoms, in addition to four Japanese gardens. These ties and current efforts signal a bright future between Boston and Kyoto.
Caitlin Huynh is a participant of the Young Professionals Program at the East-West Center in Washington. She graduated from Virginia Tech with Bachelors of Arts in International Studies and French.
Seol Hong is an ASAN Academy Fellow and a participant in the East-West Center in Washington’s Young Professionals Program. She is a graduate of Korea National University of Arts concentrating in Musicology and minoring in Arts Management. | https://medium.com/asia-matters-for-america/boston-and-kyoto-celebrate-60th-anniversary-as-sister-cities-e0e6051e14ac | ['East-West Center In Washington'] | 2019-06-18 14:05:44.301000+00:00 | ['Diplomacy', 'Asia', 'Japan', 'Boston', 'Sister Cities'] |
Getting started with Development in Quantum Computing | When Classical computers were just some registers on boards and scientists were performing basic functionality on them, that is the current state of Quantum computers right now.
So Quantum Researchers are working on developing new Circuits (these are Quantum Circuits made using gates that execute a particular operation) and Algorithms to find new use cases & applications for Quantum Computers.
Following companies are researching and developing Quantum computers:
So we are focusing on IBM here, as they have plugged their Quantum Computer worth millions to the cloud and provided access to the whole world for free.
So in order to work on Quantum Computer, you don’t need to be a Quantum Physicist.
You just need to understand the basics of Maths, other things you can pick up as you move forward.
IBM provides jupyter notebook-based environment on their website to code and test on their quantum computers or simulators. But it’s always better to work directly so from our system so let’s set up the working environment on our systems.
First Step, Download & Install Anaconda Python (make sure you download Python 3.7 version or more)
Second Step, Install Qiskit library using (terminal on Linux and Mac & Anaconda prompt on Windows) and following command,
pip install qiskit
Third Step, After qiskit installation type the following command in the same terminal.
jupyter notebook
So now you can start coding in python3 for IBM Quantum Computers from here.
So Jupyter Notebook makes it really easy to use Python 3 environment and for continuous development and the main feature I feel is that you can just write a line of code and press shift enter and see the output of that code immediately or you can shift between lines of code or fix bugs and rerun a particular block of code basically it just makes it really easy to develop and debug applications.
So, let’s create a Quantum Circuit,
Line wise explanation,
Import everything from qiskit. Get 2 quantum registers i.e. Qbits. Get 2 classical registers to measure the values in the quantum registers. Create a quantum circuit using registers. Matplotlib inline directive for graphics Draw the circuit which looks like following,
I know it looks confusing let draw it like we are not in '90s.
mpl stands for matplotlib
Now let’s add some gates. First up is H gate is also known as Hadamard Gate (https://www.quantum-inspire.com/kbase/hadamard/). In short, it sets the state of a single qubit in Superposition.
In superposition a quantum bit can be 0 and 1 at the same time.
So we added H gate on the first qbit. Moving ahead we will add a Controlled Not (CX) gate from qbit 0 to qbit 1.
So basically whenever qbit-0 is 1 then it will flip the value of qbit-1
if qbit-0 == 1 qbit-1 =Flip(qbit-1)
if qbit-0 = 1 & qbit-1 = 0 then CX will set qbit-1 to 1
if qbit-0 = 1 & qbit-1 = 1 then CX will set qbit-1 to 0
Now as we have a very basic circuit ready let’s add some measurements to this.
Here what we are doing is measuring all the qbits in qr and saving the values in all the classical bits cr.
Basically qbit-0 -> cbit-0 & qbit-1 -> cbit-1.
Now let’s run this code on a qasm_simulator, provided in qiskit.
So here we got the simulator from Aer which is a part of qiskit. Then we passed the circuit and simulator to execute the function again comes with qiskit.
Then in order to visualize the results we are using plot_histogram.
So you can see that we got almost 50/50 result for 00 && 11, and if you remember the way we designed the circuit, the H gate will make the output of q0 as 0 and 1, after that the CX gate will set the output of q1 as 1 when q0 is 1 or 0. So the output we got is right.
So guys this is it for now, in the next post I will introduce you to some new algorithms to use with quantum circuits and we will execute our quantum circuit on IBM quantum computers.
Thanks!! ✌️ | https://blog.tarkalabs.com/getting-started-with-development-in-quantum-computing-3eed007dcee0 | ['Utkarsh Mehta'] | 2021-04-18 13:13:49.568000+00:00 | ['Ibm Q', 'Qbits', 'Quantum Computing', 'Qiskit'] |
Zoom Burnout Is Real | It is a time of great uncertainty.
Many of us are asking life-or-death questions, like: “Will I die if I open a window?” (Answer: No. Please open your windows.) But there are also little ones, like: “How do I tell my friend to stop inviting me to five video-call happy hours every week?”
“Zoom gives me crazy anxiety and the same social pressure I would feel being invited to a party,” says Dani, a marketing manager based in Cleveland, who requested that only her first name be used to protect her workplace privacy. “I have to do Zoom calls all day for work. I cannot socialize that way right now.”
Dani’s anxiety mirrors that of countless others currently battling an onslaught of Zoom calls, digital events, and online happy hours. “I’m in 3 different Slacks, 4 different Discords, in countless Zoom Happy Hours, and even more virtual events. I can’t wait until this pandemic is over so I can disconnect,” a community manager based in Ohio tweeted. “1) people assume u can do more meetings than u did before 2) u don’t move btwn them,” tweeted a psychiatrist based in Missouri, in response to a journalist’s assertion that “Zoom burnout is real.”
Zoom burnout and Zoom FOMO are only a couple of the issues people face as they shift their social lives from meeting over martinis at the neighborhood bar to meeting over oversize glasses of wine on a video call. From the awkwardness and anxiety of staring at the supposed flaws in your own face, to not knowing when to cut a call short when you don’t technically have anywhere else to be, our new social lives are lawless, with few guidelines to let us know how to navigate difficult situations for which we have no prior blueprints.
Social contact right now is more important than ever, but it’s okay to feel stressed out and want to avoid what seems like little more than new venues for anxiety. While you should make an occasional effort to get some kind of social interaction with friends and family, you shouldn’t feel like you need to be accepting every invitation that comes your way. Here’s how to wiggle out of unwanted invites, battle Zoom FOMO, and overcome other small anxieties — because if we’re going to be spending a foreseeable future of Friday nights via video-call cocktail hours, we need to figure out the proper etiquette.
I’m really popular, and it’s stressing me out. How can I politely decline some of my many Zoom invitations?
First of all: condolences.
Seriously, though, if I had to Zoom more than once or twice a week I would absolutely burn out, so I feel your pain. There’s also the simple issue that video calls can be more emotionally exhausting than a regular hangout, according to multiple psychologists I talked to for this piece.
“With Zoom or FaceTime, you can’t rely on body language for communication,” says Jamie Aten, a psychologist and an associate professor of humanitarian disaster leadership at Wheaton College in Illinois. “For those with social anxiety, Zoom or FaceTime makes it harder to draw boundaries. People get to see into your environmental context, it becomes unclear when ‘socializing’ should end, and certain social cues that are easily read in real life can be harder to read virtually.”
When we’re already forced to conduct our work life via the same means, it’s perfectly reasonable to become overwhelmed when suddenly your entire social circle thinks you’re 100% available all the time to hop on Zoom or Houseparty.
“With no delineation of work and home, most people I know are on calls all day,” says Reema Mitra, a brand strategist based in New York. “On the weekends, I am exhausted from all the calls, so I don’t want to use more screens to see friends, and overall that makes me sad.”
This can be difficult to explain to friends with different social burnout thresholds, especially since we’re all locked up inside and don’t exactly have dinners, concerts, and parties to attend that we can use as excuses. Mitra tells me that she connects with most of her friends one-on-one via phone calls, so that by the time Friday rolls around and it’s time for a virtual happy hour, she’s a little less burnt out by video.
Victoria Turk, the author of the book Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, From Social Media to Work to Love, says the occasional white lie about your schedule is fine. “I’ve noticed a few people declining on the basis they have a ‘Zoom clash’ — which may be real or not, but it’s a good excuse if you don’t want to just straight up say you’re not interested,” she says. “A little white lie here or there to save someone’s feelings is fine etiquette by me.” Still, with friends, she recommends a more honest approach. “With close friends, of course, you should be able to simply say you’re tired or have other plans (that sourdough starter won’t feed itself!), without it being a big deal.”
Steven Petrow, an etiquette expert who has written four books about civility and manners, agrees that in many cases, honesty is the best policy. “What are the lessons of all this? One of them, I think, is to be more authentic, to be more real,” he says. “It’s perfectly fine to say if you don’t want to join in a Zoom cocktail party, that you’re not feeling up for today.”
Scheduling yourself non-negotiable “Zoom time” can also ensure you’re not getting wrangled into video calls you don’t have the energy for. Blocking out a couple of hours a week — say, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Saturdays — can help keep your calendar from getting overloaded, and can also provide you with a good out if you’re not in the mood. “I’d love to chat, but to avoid excess screen time, I’ve been limiting my video call time to a few hours a week. Are you around on Tuesday evening?” Not exactly easy-peasy — saying no rarely is — but it provides a little structure and certainty to a calendar that can look depressingly empty and, as a result, make it appear like you’re available at any time for any reason.
“With no delineation of work and home, most people I know are on calls all day.”
Are video calls really even worth it?
Few if any studies have investigated how well video calls and other forms of online socializing act as a proxy for real-life social contact during times of quarantine, though the impact of isolation on one’s mental health has been relatively well documented.
The best comparison might be to seniors living in nursing homes, who tragically are often hungry for social connection, and have too little contact with the outside world. A small 2020 study in the medical journal BMC Geriatrics found that nursing home residents experienced less loneliness, more vitality, and even less sensitivity to pain after connecting with family members once a week for six months via video call. A larger study, from 2011, had nursing home residents in Taiwan engage in at least one five-minute video call a week for three months. The experiment had a positive long-term effect on the residents’ depression symptoms and loneliness, even a year later.
Other studies have shown the negative health effects; one 2015 meta-analytic review found that social isolation is comparable to other risk factors for mortality. Right now, though, our options to overcome isolation are severely limited. For the next month, maybe two, our closest physical companions might be our sourdough starters, which makes it all the more important that we maintain some form of contact with our friends and family.
Can’t I just call people on the phone instead?
You definitely can — any contact is better than none. Video calls are a particularly demanding form of connection, and if you just can’t do it as often as people wish you could, it’s okay. “In real life, when we’re hanging out with friends, we don’t feel the same pressure to ‘perform socially’ as we do on Zoom or FaceTime,” says Suzanne Degges-White, a professor of counseling at Northern Illinois University. “As one colleague puts it, ‘Wearing that “happy girl” mask wears me out during unit meetings!’”
Still, research shows that seeing someone’s face has more of an impact on your sense of isolation than just hearing their voice. So if you can push yourself to participate in a Zoom call every once in a while, you should. “Give this new type of communication a chance, especially if you’re feeling isolated or lonely,” says Susan Biali Haas, a medical doctor who has written about the importance of video calls, even for introverts. “You might be surprised by how much you enjoy this kind of connecting, once you get used to it.”
I’m one of the most introverted people I know — I need very little social interaction, and often go weeks with very few social plans, even when not under quarantine. Even so, I push myself to engage in at least the occasional call with family, friends, and my therapist to keep my social skills intact and stave off any loneliness that might begin to creep up.
For some people, though, the anxiety presented by a video call eclipses the relief they might get from the face-to-face conversation.
“I am extremely self-conscious about my physicality, and seeing a constantly moving picture of myself all the time is really jarring and I hate it,” says Ed Zitron, the CEO of EZPR, a media relations company. “Seeing my face at a really bad angle is not a great feeling.”
Unlike real-life conversations, video calls often force you to stare at your own face for the duration of the call, and if you’re insecure about your appearance or merely find your floating head distracting, it can make participating in video calls unpleasant.
There’s not necessarily any need to keep your camera on the entire time, says Biali Haas.
“Turn on your camera when you join a meeting so others can see you and ‘know’ you’re there. Turn it off after that,” she suggests. “A lot of people will turn their camera off when they’re not speaking, but turn it back on when they are.” This is a great recommendation for work-related calls, and it has the added bonus of easing the strain on your internet if your connection isn’t the best.
Shveta Kumaria, a therapist and associate researcher at Northwestern University’s the Family Institute, says fun video effects could take the pressure off if you’re anxious about staring at your own face. “Use any of the backgrounds that Zoom offers, which distort some aspects of the image making it easier and fun to look at,” she says. You could also make your image into a Memoji or Animoji — I’m personally a huge fan of this option — so that you and your friends are talking to an alligator or unicorn. Memoji have no unflattering angles, and they’re either obscenely cute or funny, so they’re a great option to take away the stress and inject a sense of humor into a video call during a pandemic.
Our lives were already increasingly online; this pandemic took that trend and transformed it into a new, enforced way of life. It’s one many of us will be living with for months yet. With no established guidelines and no experience dealing with anything like this before, it’s normal if you feel like your social life is totally out of whack. But by setting boundaries, being honest, and occasionally pushing yourself to socialize even if you’re feeling a bit low-energy and depressed, we’ll all hopefully get through it okay — and for some of us, we’ll emerge with a newfound ability to better manage an active social life. | https://onezero.medium.com/zoom-burnout-is-real-27e6938d0e1f | ['Angela Lashbrook'] | 2020-04-14 05:31:01.024000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Microprocessing', 'Remote Work', 'Digital Life', 'Burnout'] |
Designing effective onboarding for apps | What?
Do you still remember your first day of college, where during induction you’re introduced to your faculties, your classroom layout, where the cafeteria is, etc.?
That same process of introducing someone to an unfamiliar environment for the first time is onboarding.
By Minh Pham
In more technical words, Onboarding is the process of introducing a product, service or feature to its first-time users to increase familiarity and understanding without confusing them.
Why?
Now you’d ask, why is onboarding important in apps?
In today’s day and age, where users have access to millions of apps in their devices, onboarding makes a lot of difference in their activation as engaged users.
Value Proposition
A well-designed onboarding explains the value proposition of the app to the users.
Handholding
In some cases, it can also let the users know how to achieve a specific task in the app.
Simplify
In some cases, it can also be used to simplify the user journey, leading the user to the core functionality of the app.
So depending on the use case, onboarding can be very helpful to engage the users in the long term.
How?
Now let’s talk about the “how” of onboarding.
Depending on the stage, you want to implement the onboarding in the user journey; there are three types of onboarding models; keeping the core app flow as a yardstick, i.e. Pre, Post and During.
Depending on the use case, their effectiveness might vary.
Pre
This type of onboarding activates right after the user opens the app before reaching to the core app flow.
This model works very well for showcasing the value proposition of the app or how a specific in-app feature works.
Most commonly, users see a couple of screens explaining which is presented as a carousel that can be swiped through.
By Nitin Bhatnagar
The ease of implementation makes it the most commonly used onboarding model, which you would have seen in a lot of apps. But the same can’t be said for their effectiveness as they are mostly perishable and once the user navigates away from these screens, there are on their own.
Post
This type of onboarding activates post the user has reached the core app flow.
This model works very well for highlighting specific options in the app with a given context; i.e. activating such overlays on particular user actions guiding them through what to do next.
This model is also relatively easy to implement. But due consideration is needed to map out their activation contextually, and a better way of implementation would be highlighting only one option at a time.
During
This type of onboarding uses progressive disclosure to introduce must required features of the app and handhold the user through the core app flow. Here user learns via doing.
This model works very well with a sophisticated core app flow, which needs a lot of user input.
This model is quite challenging to implement as it needs a separate user journey altogether, and it acts like a mini-app within the app. But when designed and appropriately executed, it’s the most rewarding. | https://medium.com/cricplay/designing-effective-onboarding-for-apps-474f27e064a4 | ['Rohit K Jangir'] | 2020-02-20 11:43:36.150000+00:00 | ['Cricplay', 'UI', 'Design', 'Onboarding', 'UX'] |
Experiences of a newbie to Computer Science | For the majority of teenagers in India, especially when you are from a science background in class 12, their real-life journey starts from JEE coaching centres. The most common advice that an average student gets is “Join these coaching centers, crack JEE, you will be successful.”
I am sure most of them might have had a similar experience. I had to join these coaching centers after working hard for two years, but unfortunately, I didn’t have a result as expected and luckily got admission at CUSAT for B.Tech Computer Science Engineering. After taking admission I had so much confidence and motivation that I will be able to learn so many things from college and hoped I might be able to learn a lot of industry-required expertise from classes. But later on, I realised that participation in various events helped us leverage our skills more.
In the initial days I was worried about how I would start learning to program. Most of my classmates had a CS background, and they were able to understand it very quickly and answer the questions asked by the faculty. I started feeling nervous and less confident. This insecurity in me in turn made me explore and learn new things. Initially I was confused on where I should start from. To find the answer I started googling and tried out anything I found interesting. I talked to my friends and classmates, and they also helped me a lot.
GDG Cochin Devfest-18
One day one of my friends told me about an event happening at Infopark Cochin, conducted by GDG Cochin. It was a great experience and I met students from different colleges. From there I started networking. Later on they added me to a Whatsapp group and we started our discussions over there. What I noticed about them was the fact they were always ready to help. Even if they didn’t know something they had an insatiable curiosity in them to learn about it, which I found really admirable. With the help of these people I got to know about different events happening around the city. For some programs I even got referrals and free tickets!
By attending more events I gained a lot more contacts and friends in this field. This helped me improve my knowledge about different tech domains and I started learning new things. From being an attendee, I went on to volunteer for different events. One of my first volunteering experiences was for DebUtsav, conducted by the Student Developer Society. From there I met some amazing people supporting the ideology of free and open-source software. After the event I was really motivated and started reading about different gnu/Linux distros and tried installing some of them and helped my friends with the same. After attending some events and interacting with people, my confidence built up. I started taking some sessions after the class or during weekends, and my friends were surprised that I had improved a lot and kept guiding me with more suggestions. For conducting events we got support from CITTIC (Centre for Innovation, Technology Transfer & Industry Collaboration) — The startup incubator at CUSAT, and they provided us space and resources for conducting different programs.
DebUtsav
Usually, every weekend I used to be busy with events. From my contact circle, I got to know about TinkerHub Foundation and attended their programs. TinkerHub Foundation is a non-profit organization created to promote tech-talents. From Tinkerhub I met some people who were highly passionate about helping others. These people encouraged me to explore different domains and even helped me get started with it.
My seniors were also of great help to me. The Association of Computer Science Engineering Students (ACES), in our college, organized ‘Session@4’ programmes — a series of classes that helped us learn about different aspects of technology. It helped me learn the basics of computer programming. During our tech fest Dhishna, I was so excited about contributing but I didn’t know where I could contribute. After talking to my seniors I learnt about different teams like the tech team, media team, sponsorship team, and so on. I attended the meetings of a few teams and gathered some ideas on their working. I liked the media team so I talked to the head of the media team and told him that I was interested, but didn’t have enough experience in designing. He was quite chill and asked me to do a sample poster for a competition to be held soon.
I referred to some event posters and started working on it. The next day, I showed him what I did. I knew it was a bad design and thought he might tell me off, but instead, he looked at it and suggested on how to improve on it, showing me a lot of websites. He also taught me some basic techniques and asked me to work on sample posters. I did as he said and received more suggestions from him. He even came all the way to my hostel, to help me out. By simply volunteering for an event, I was able to learn some poster designing, that helped me design posters for other events.
By this time I started contributing back to some communities and got an opportunity to conduct a program called py-lad, which was meant to help students learn python remotely by providing resources and mentorship. For that, I had to make a site, so I used google sites in the beginning and later shifted to a WordPress site. We then released the registration forms, arranged mentors and presented this event during its launch. Initially, it had so many registrations and I had to email them about this event and the related information. I had to explore a bit and found different ways to automate the emails and scheduled emailing at different times, collecting feedback, and learnt the difficulties faced in conducting an event. Even though the program wasn’t as successful as expected, it gave me opportunities to explore, learn and talk to different people.
Innovators’ summit
In our second year, we again had our tech fest for that academic year and this time I got the opportunity to contribute to the tech team. We sat in a room for a few months and started working on the web sites. We had other events to be held before Dhishna (our tech fest). These included a 24 hour hackathon — ‘Make-a-ton’ and a gathering of tech-enthusiasts and experts in the technical field — ‘Innovators’ Summit’. These events not only improved my technical skills but also helped me learn how to organize an event and helped expand my network of friends.
After exploring and talking to people, I understood that learning should be continuous and enjoyable. And the fastest way to learn something is to actually work on implementing it or by practically solving a problem! | https://medium.com/writeabyte/experience-of-a-newbie-to-computer-science-3c58790656fe | ['Kiran Pk'] | 2020-08-18 11:10:30.138000+00:00 | ['Btech', 'Technology', 'Computer Science', 'Skills Development', 'Writeabyte'] |
Learning how to ride a bike at 12 years old | Photo by Razvan Mirel on Unsplash
Marie was sitting on a sidewalk wondering how she had reached this point. It was a sunny summer day that was just slightly on the wrong side of scorching heat, too hot for other kids to come out and play. She was sitting there while her mom was packing the boxes in the house.
They were moving, again.
The idea of moving made Marie look at her sketch. She ripped it violently from her notebook, leaving a bunch of frilly ends in the spiral. Then she spitefully crumpled it into a ball. Holding the ball in her hand, she stared at the trashcan at the end of their driveway. It was five feet to her right, she mentally calculated, and lined up for the shot. Then she missed. There were four other crumpled balls near the trash and two inside the can.
She heaved a sigh. Each of those papers had a rough sketch of her mom and dad.
It was because of her mom’s desire to get away from her dad that they were moving. Her mom was walking around the house stuffing things in boxes and muttering about men who were ‘fudging everywhere!’ and ‘couldn’t be bothered to get his own friends’. Marie felt uncomfortable after listening to her mom and just left the room.
Marie refused to help her mom drag her away from her friends and school, so that’s why she was sitting on the sidewalk to the right of her driveway.
Marie was told by her mom to empty out the trash from their garage, but knew that her mom just wanted her out of the way. Marie had made her displeasure known by rebelling in small ways. A small stack of misplaced papers, piles of junk being moved around the house, and mislabeled boxes eventually convinced Marie’s mom that she wasn’t going to be much help. Marie was conflicted; she wanted to help, but she also had an urge to go to the nearest box and empty it onto the floor.
Sighing again, Marie got up and stuffed her notebook into her backpack and walked to the garage. There were boxes lining up the garage walls filled with various decoration for holidays and other junk. Next to an old fish tank in the corner, lay a bike. It was technically her bike that her uncle had bought for her birthday…when she turned three. She is honestly convinced that her uncle had no clue what she liked because he always got the worst gifts. The bike had sat in the garage for years but her parents never got rid of it. Marie didn’t even know how to ride a bike.
A thought came to Marie, anything is better than helping her mom uproot her life.
Learning how to ride a bike at the age 12 is, in one word: embarrassing. However, Marie supposes the idea that applies is ‘better late than ever’. Marie sighed, just another kid with classic divorced parents, neither having much time to bother with a kid. Neither of them bothering to teach her how to ride a a bike, and both assuming that the other had taught her. Newsflash! Neither of them didn’t teach her and neither bothered to notice her never riding a bike.
Marie remembers when her classmates had found out that she didn’t know how to ride a bike. She didn’t tell anyone, too embarrassed, but her friends noticed that she didn’t know after a birthday party. It was her friend, Josh, who was celebrating his birthday. He like to ride his bike off ramps and do mini stunts. Many of her friends were giving it a shot and then it was her turn. She refused but they kept badgering her, thinking that she was just nervous. However, when Marie told them that she didn’t even know how to ride a bike…it just got awkward. None of them wanted to point out her parent’s divorce since at the time it was too fresh. Her parents hadn’t paid attention to her in awhile and not teaching her to ride a bike was just one more thing.
Marie grabbed the bike and looked for a helmet. Maybe if she learned how to ride a bike, she could explore their new neighborhood after they moved. She shifted around a few more boxes then shrugged, guess they didn’t have a helmet. Well, that’s stupid.
She walked out of the garage and paused. Well getting comfortable on a bike and getting used to balancing is probably a good place to start. She sat on the seat, it was uncomfortable.
Marie moved her feet to the front tire and with her hands tightly gripping the handlebars, she pushed off down the driveway. It was a ten second trip but Marie felt wobbly while balancing. When she reached the bottom of the driveway, she used her feet to stop, got off, and then walked the bike to the top of the driveway. She did this for about 30 minutes.
Sit. Coast. Stop. Walk back. Repeat.
Again and again, Marie then started to gain confidence. She could do this. She grabbed her bike and this time didn’t walk back to the top of the driveway. She looked at her street and had a thought.
The hill. It looked like it could be fun to go down, it was much longer than her driveway.
The street that Marie lived on was a hill. She lived at the bottom of the hill and the top of the hill started about five houses up. She thought it was perfect, long enough to get comfortable but not long enough to go really fast.
Marie walked up the hill with the bike. She had no helmet, but she wasn’t bothered. She sat down and grabbed the handlebars.
Lifting her feet off the ground, she started to move down the hill. This time, instead of putting her feet in front of her, she placed her feet on the pedals. She was coasting when she decided that she wanted to go faster. She pedaled one and then twice.
Continuing to pedal, Marie grinned widely. Then she laughed to herself, riding a bike was so much fun! Marie passed two houses, when another thought occurred to her.
Should she have practiced braking or steering?
The bike started to pick up speed at a higher rate than before.
Faster and faster.
Marie was officially worried. How could she have forgotten to practice braking and steering? That was like one of the most important parts of actually riding a bike!
It was as she passed the third house that she realized the true problem. The moving-truck was blocking the entire street! She felt a pressure squeeze her throat and panicked. Jerking her hand to the right, the bike moved suddenly and Marie lost her balance.
Wham!
Marie fell to the ground, her knee scraping the sidewalk and the pedal scraped the back of her calf. She kicked the bike away from her and lay on her bike. Wow, that was definitely one interesting first try.
Checking her injury, Marie sat up a bit. She looked down at her knee and there was a huge four inch long scrape. It has asphalt stuck in her skin and it stung.
Marie was wearing shorts because of the hot weather and so her skin had absolutely no protection from the harsh asphalt.
She stood up and limped up the driveway, leaving her bike behind. She walked into the house. Her mom turned around, “Hey? Do you know what the noise was? I just heard-”.
Her mom turned around mid-sentence and stopped.
Sighing, “Well, I didn’t know that cleaning the garage was that dangerous.” | https://medium.com/@leticia-beltran/learning-how-to-ride-a-bike-at-12-years-old-d52698c2d5a4 | ['Leticia Beltran'] | 2020-12-17 11:02:41.316000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Short Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Storytelling', 'Fiction'] |
Stupid Christians and Abortion Politics | Donald Trump
The Christian obsession with abortion is bad for our country.
All of the really bad policy decisions in the United States since at least 1981 have come from Republicans. Ronald Reagan started the era of enormous budget deficits with his dumb “supply side” tax cut, which stirred some economic growth, but in old fashioned, Keynesian ways, no matter what his “conservative” sheep say.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget with a small tax increase before Republicans gained control of Congress in his first midterm election. He signed the Republicans’ “welfare reform” law and their repeal of the Glass — Steagall Act, a New Deal banking law, both of which were bad ideas that he might have resisted more strongly, but they were characteristically Republican ideas.
Then George W. Bush let the September 11 attacks happen and used the outpouring of support he enjoyed during a (real) emergency to conceal his malfeasance with the invasion of Afghanistan. He then lied to the public to gin up support for the invasion of Iraq, which some have called the biggest mistake in U.S. history. He also pushed two tax cuts and reversed the budget surpluses that Clinton had achieved, returning us to the deficits Reagan created.
Most of us are not incapable of learning. There is in the United States, however, a powerful rump of people who refuse to learn anything and so keep voting for Republicans even though Republican policies are bad for the country. The keys to this stupidity are that the rump is mostly Christian and obsessed with abortion.
The Democrats are honest about believing that women should be able to terminate a pregnancy if they choose. This honesty allows Republicans to win Christian votes just by pandering on abortion alone. So it is that Trump voters supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a good Catholic who has taken the position of opponents of abortion rights with respect to contraceptives (but has only two children of his own).
Republicans, of courses, are greedy and mean spirited. Opponents of abortion rights often gush about their supposed concern for “the unborn,” but their actions routinely betray the reality that they really just want to control everyone else’s sex life (everyone except their own leaders, whom they leave free to molest children pretty much at will). So Kavanaugh repeated uncritically the absurd claim of a Catholic group that contraceptives induce abortions, which is consistent with the official Catholic Church position that all contraceptive use is immoral.
As one would expect, making contraceptives widely available is by far the most effective way to reduce abortion, so anyone who rationally wants to minimize abortion would also advocate distribution of contraceptives.
The Christian position of opposing both abortion rights and distribution of contraceptives is irrational. Reliably taking an irrational position on a policy question allows elected officials to win votes by advocating all manner of irrational policies, as Republicans routinely do. They continue to bruit this fantasy that tax cuts pay for themselves despite overwhelming historical evidence that they do not. They support “abstinence only” sex education, even though all of the evidence shows that it does not work.
The sole rationality behind everything the Republican Party does is to protect the wealth and privilege of the wealthy and privileged. A lot of good Christians are poor, mostly because Christianity is the default option in the United States, so poor people are Christian, but they do not help themselves when they give money to their churches so that their pastors can buy huge houses and airplanes.
Christian irrationality is bad for the country. | https://medium.com/@wbtphdjd/stupid-christians-and-abortion-politics-51955afc4ff3 | ['William B. Turner'] | 2019-02-25 01:18:19.209000+00:00 | ['Abortion', 'Christians', '2016 Election', 'Donald Trump'] |
Social Lessons From Dan Kaminsky (Who Has Now Left Us) | Social lessons I took from being friends with Dan Kaminsky, in four stories. I hope these will be helpful to you as much as they have been to me.
I miss Dan, we just started talking more thanks to Facebook, and I am devastated by his passing. While sad, remembering these stories, and hearing of his shenanigans from others, has mind-bogglingly made yesterday a happy day, right alongside the sadness. I hope you will find these helpful.
Always make people feel their worth. All it takes is the passion you already feel.
It was defcon 13, 2005, in the Alexis Park. Dan introduced me to some folks.
“This guy,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I love this guy!” Then he told the world why. “If not for Gadi eCommerce would not have been able to exist, as the Internet wouldn’t be here.”
Obviously, he exaggerated — a lot. But he made me feel appreciated for my work. There was magic in how he spoke to, and of, people.
He then introduced someone else.
“This guy?” He smiled. “I love his work. What he does is nothing less than genius.” Dan then turned to this new person. “I want to work with you. It would be amazing.. Let’s find out how we can do that.”
Gadi of 2005 felt a bit confused, as if Dan does this for everybody, it must not be as real. Today’s Gadi can appreciate it all the more for how Dan found something special, and real, in everyone he met.
Always pull people up. It’s just 15 bucks.
It was defcon 14, 2006, in the Alexis Park.
Dan and I walked lazily by the pool area. We met a young woman (we were young back then, too) who sold t-shirts she made. Dan immediately showed excitement and bought one. I said that the shirt is too small for me, also privately worried over if I could afford to spend the cash. The young woman was upset over my words, disgust came over her face as her lips and nose pulled up, “2X is pretty damn big.”
Dan made her happy with 15 bucks and a good word. I made her upset. Yes, her response was unwarranted, and yes, she fat-shamed me, but that’s beside the point of the story. I learned from Dan that day. I should have bought that t-shirt.
Just ask the question. Many people won’t, or can’t.
23C3, Berlin 2006.
I was speaking about fuzzing, and as usual Dan would come into my talks, and then I’d hand the speaking over to him for the last 5 minutes.
At some point early in the presentation I asked the audience if everybody knows some random technical term, before moving on to the next slide. Dan raised his hand from the back of the room. I was like “seriously? You don’t know what X is?” Then I explained it.
When I asked him about it, he said “many people here may not know it, and won’t raise their hands.” I learned from Dan that day, about speaking, and about raising my hand for others. I also cringe in talks whenever I hear a speaker asking that question.
Objectification isn’t always obvious. I wish guys received training.
2008 in Toronto.
We try to be good people, but sometimes we find we don’t even know we aren’t. I was about to ask the bartender out. I mentioned something about what I want to say to Dan, and he said “don’t be that guy,” sounding sad. I learned that day about objectification in daily language and that it is more subtle than I thought.
Gadi Evron.
(@gadievron on Twitter) | https://medium.com/@gevron/social-lessons-from-dan-kaminsky-in-memoriam-914bc8fa884a | ['Gadi Evron'] | 2021-04-25 14:36:31.370000+00:00 | ['In Memoriam', 'Hacker', 'Dan Kaminsky', 'Interpersonal Skills', 'Social'] |
#meetthementor — Heidrun Twesten. Mentor Interview and Top Tip | Mentor Interview and Top Tip
What does it take to make an accelerator unique?
What does it take to make its portfolio thrive? One essential pillar is a broad network of mentors, who dedicate their spare time in order to support the startups in their field of expertise. In our format #meetthementor we are introducing the faces who help our startups scale their businesses. First off is Heidrun Twesten — with her concept of STORYDISTILLING. But read for yourselves in the interview…
1.) Please introduce yourself — who are you and since when do you mentor at NMA?
I am a Storydistiller, Corporate & Startup Advisor and Founder & Managing Partner of Impacct GmbH. We focus on developing equity stories that drive company value. Since 1996, I have developed numerous (equity) stories for IPOs, private and public companies as well as startups and personalities. Back in 2015, I startet mentoring at NMA with their first batch.
2.) You got more than two decades of experience in the startup orbit — let us know, what does it take to become a founder?
Mainly, it takes guts to become a founder. The strong will to actively drive change — and take the personal risk to do so. Research came up with only one characteristic that’s more prominent/frequent in entrepreneurs than in employees: resilience. My personal experience shows that successful founders listen particularly well, accept advice and criticism constructively and implement what they have learned quickly. Last not least, it helps a lot to be a likeable person who loves selling.
3.) You met many startups so far. Did you see changes or a development into a certain direction over the past 5 years?
Professionalism of teams has increased over the last years — as has the support of a growing ecosystem. And I am very happy to see some more female founders and higher diversity (age, nationality) in tech startups here recently.
4.) Sourcing stories can be one of the hardest parts of storytelling — what is your approach? How do you tell a story right?
The key is to first distill and clearly define the core story — and use it as the content base of all communication. If this is done well it isn’t at all hard to source stories as they arise nearly automatically from an authentic foundation. A well told story engages its audience — so it’s key to know who exactly you want to listen and what they need.
5.)Your field of expertise is story development — in a nutshell — what is the number one thing every startup should know about it and why? What is the most important advice you have when it comes to storytelling?
Everyone and every organisation has a story. My most important advice is to take the time and effort to dig deep to find it and then work hard to tell it compellingly. Good startup stories are always rooted in the personal WHY of their founders — which fits well with the fact that investors’ main reason to invest is the quality of the team. | https://medium.com/next-media-accelerator/meetthementor-heidrun-twesten-5fe10cc76183 | ['Next Media Accelerator'] | 2019-11-18 10:48:08.096000+00:00 | ['Meet The Mentor', 'Startups', 'Storytelling', 'Next Media Acclerator', 'Heidrun Twesten'] |
Why Should You Develop a “Procrastination Habit”? | It seems odd to say that at first. But, developing a procrastinating habit is better than being captive in a procrastinating bubble. Let me explain.
The more you try to limit your urges to procrastinate, the more productive you become — this is obvious. Well, you can limit your procrastination, but don’t try to eliminate it. We all are human beings. The more we put limits on ourselves, the more we feel locked down. By developing a habit of doing whatever you want to do and limiting it with time constrain, you will have more time doing what you enjoy and more guilt-free to achieve your work.
There are certain rules you should follow to develop your own procrastinating habit:
#1 Time it
We all agree that procrastination and bad and a waste of time — at least, it is what productivity gurus believe to my knowledge. But, no, procrastination can be a productivity hack that, if applied correctly, can help to increase your productivity and work. The first step is important, and it is the building block for the next 4 points.
Time is the key here; you have to set a time for your procrastination. Don’t ever leave it open otherwise; you will look down on your time and see that you wasted 2 hours browsing random Instagram posts, looking at a cat rapping, for instance. What I think will make your day go wrong after the wake-up of your — un-planned for — procrastinating session is the guilt that will get to you — regardless of it was a time spent scrolling through your Twitter timeline or looking at a random educational video on Youtube.
Set a time where you believe that you are less productive during that time. For me, it's the afternoon time — usually between 2:00 and 5:00 pm — and choose one thing that you want to do for the next hour — Don’t overdo it; point #2 will explain why.
#2 Limit it
After setting the time for your “time-wasting activity,” set a time limit. You should apply a time block for this activity; otherwise, it will get out of hand. In the previous point, I urged you not to overdo it. The reason behind this is that you don’t want to turn this into an unbreakable habit. The more time you spend doing it, the more you will get attached to at — that you are setting a time block especially for the activity.
Our brains work backward when we want to waste time. So we tend to say this “it's 7:00 am; I’ll just take 10 minutes to break before writing.” Wrong! Without limiting your “break” you can not guaranty that you will not get drowned in your “break,” and your 10 minutes is now 50 minutes.
Use a timer on your phone, or maybe use an activity/habit tracker — to make it fancy. You can use Forest, which is an app I wrote about in my post: Productivity tools every writer should try
#3 Enjoy it
If you are forcing yourself to get a break, then forget about it. If you are a productivity god and don’t believe in taking time out of your 24 hours day to do what you — as a human being — enjoy doing, then don’t. This is a tactic for those who want to enjoy the small things they eliminated from their lives to have time to work. Believe it or not, many highly productive people still have time to practice their Rubik’s cube, play the piano, and go golfing or fishing. Time is an asset, and wise people manage it to enjoy their lives fully. Working all day and trying to be productive all day won’t do you good. Having mini-breaks now and then is healthy not only for your productivity but also for your physiological and mental wellbeing.
#4 Stop it
After the time’s up, please stop it. I don’t care if you are in the middle of a handstand world record. Please stop it. The more you are disciplined to your time and respect your decision to make time for the little things, the more you are enforcing your time management skills and, therefore, increasing your productivity.
#5 Measure it (optional)
This is an optional part, but it is useful to measure your habit. Use a simple habit tracking app to add the habit times and write down how you feel, and this is worth your time or not. You can also use journaling and write about it to review at the end of the week. The tracking and measuring part is useful to get a hint on what you are getting out of your 1 hour per day extra habit — in other words, procrastination. | https://medium.com/@alounpro/why-should-you-develop-a-procrastination-habit-9b7ad73b96de | ['Ahmad Aloun'] | 2021-06-26 07:52:37.751000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Habits', 'Time Management', 'Life Hacking', 'Procrastination'] |
Warnock’s Israel Stance Remains an Issue | With less than a month until the Jan. 5 runoffs for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, the degree of Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock’s support for Israel remains an issue in his race against interim Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. As Warnock asserts a pro-Israel stance, Loeffler argues that statements he made before becoming a candidate prove that he is anti-Israel.
On a Dec. 8 video conference call organized by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, Warnock said, “I am a staunch ally and supporter of Israel and I echo without reservation Dr. King’s perspective that Israel’s right to exist as a state and in security is incontestable.” Warnock is senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also served.
The videoconference with Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the Democrat challenging incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue, drew an audience of 2,000 and was moderated from Israel by Daniel Shapiro, the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017.
Get The AJT Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
The next day, the Republican Jewish Coalition issued a statement to the AJT that called the Democratic event “an attack on the truth, and an affront to all Jewish voters in Georgia.”
Note: The RJC held a video-conference Dec. 2 with Loeffler and Perdue, but would not permit on-the-record coverage and turned down an AJT request for a recording afterward.
On the Democrats’ videoconference, Warnock said, “My opponents are trying to use Israel as yet another wedge issue in this campaign and I think that’s quite unfortunate. I wish I were surprised. I’m not. They are worried and they should be.”
Polls released in December have ranged from Warnock leading Loeffler by 5 percentage points, to Loeffler leading Warnock by 7 points. The same surveys have shown Ossoff and Perdue holding 2-point leads over each other. Republicans must win one of the races to maintain control of the Senate. Democratic victories in both would create a 50–50 division, with the vice president, projected to be Democrat Kamala Harris, holding the tie-breaking vote.
Much of Warnock’s time on the Dec. 8 videoconference was spent discussing Israel.
“I am a supporter and an advocate for the two-state solution. I see that as the viable way to a democratic Jewish state and I’m committed to that work and I think it deserves attention and focus and engagement,” Warnock said. “I come out of the Kingian tradition of nonviolent resistance and so I will always affirm the right of people to protest nonviolently, but at the same time I condemn BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement], its refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and I support President [Barack] Obama’s memorandum of understanding.” That 2016 agreement provides Israel with $38 billion in U.S. military aid over a 10-year period. “Israel is an important ally for us, the most important ally for us in that part of the world. … Our aid and support of Israel is something that I would advance as a member of the Senate,” Warnock said.
Warnock has been targeted by Loeffler and her Jewish supporters for a letter that he signed following a February 2019 trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a delegation of African American and South African ministers organized by the National Council of Churches. The clergy said that they observed “the heavy militarization of the West Bank, reminiscent of the military occupation of Namibia by apartheid South Africa.”
On the Dec. 8 video call, Warnock said, “I do not believe Israel is an apartheid state, as some have suggested.”
In its response, the RJC stated, “Perhaps the most insulting exchange for the Jewish community came when Rev. Warnock claimed to not believe that Israel is an apartheid state, despite the fact that he signed a letter just last year stating the complete opposite.”
Warnock also addressed the May 2018 sermon in which he discussed a week that included dedication of the U.S. Embassy location in Jerusalem and clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians. In that sermon he said, “We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey. And I don’t care who does it, it is wrong. It is wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all. And it’s no more anti-Semitic for me to say that than it is anti-white for me to say that Black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.”
Warnock told listeners on the call, “I was speaking to the issue of activists and human rights and the ability of people to be heard. At the same time, I have an increasing recognition of Hamas and the danger that they pose to the Israeli people.”
Warnock said that he would engage with the “complicated situation” as “a principled and honest broker who affirms human rights and at the same time is trying to get us to a place where Israel can exist alongside its neighbors in peace.”
Loeffler released a television ad on Oct. 10 titled “Birds of Prey.” In an accompanying statement, she said, “Raphael Warnock is the most anti-Israel candidate anywhere in the country who supports cutting all military aid to our country’s strongest ally. This unfortunately follows a pattern in which he has called Israelis ‘birds of prey,’ compared Israel to an apartheid state, and celebrated notorious anti-Semite Jeremiah Wright. Unlike my opponent, I will always fight for Israel’s sovereignty and I will always stand fully behind America’s strongest friend and ally.”
Note: In 2008 and later, Warnock defended and sought to explain the April 2003 Palm Sunday sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago during which Rev. Wright used the words, “God damn America.” When a tape of Wright’s sermon emerged during the 2008 presidential campaign, the ensuing controversy prompted Barack and Michelle Obama to resign from the church.
In his remarks, Ossoff mentioned a digital advertisement, posted and withdrawn in July by the Perdue campaign, in which Ossoff’s nose appeared to have been lengthened. “Did David Perdue run an anti-Semitic attack ad in which he lengthened my nose? Yes, he did. Was it disgusting? Yes, it was. Has he apologized for it? No, he hasn’t,” Ossoff said. [Perdue’s campaign blamed the advertisement on a subcontractor subsequently fired.]
“So, he may be an anti-Semite but, worse, he’s corrupt,” Ossoff said. He repeated allegations that Perdue profited from stock transactions while playing down the COVID-19 pandemic. A Perdue television ad restates his campaign’s position that the Republican incumbent has been “exonerated totally” of any wrongdoing.
In its statement, the RJC said, “Recently, to everyone’s amazement, no one stood up to Ossoff or Warnock for campaigning with Rep. Hank Johnson, Ossoff’s former boss, who has called Israelis termites, or for Warnock’s previous defenses of anti-Semitic sermons from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The entire event was a huge disservice to the entire Jewish community and Georgia’s Jewish voters can see through the untruthful campaign rhetoric of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.”
Note: Ossoff left Johnson’s Capitol Hill staff in 2012. In 2016, Johnson compared West Bank housing construction to “a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself.” His office later said that Johnson “did not intend to insult or speak derogatorily of Israelis or the Jewish people.” | https://medium.com/@daveschechter/warnocks-israel-stance-remains-an-issue-e68a6d3a1e8e | ['Dave Schechter'] | 2020-12-12 17:06:04.312000+00:00 | ['Georgia', 'Election 2020', 'Politics', 'Israel', 'Jewish'] |
What to post on OnlyFans. So you signed up to this super trendy… | So you signed up to this super trendy thing called OnlyFans that everyone and their dog is jumping on but what do you even post? Making an account is easy but most models forget the business aspect of it all. You have to sell something that the customer wants, you have to find the customers and then be able to keep them around. And in order to do that you have to first understand your customer.
Having coached and managed hundreds of girls over the past few years, I will share what I have learned about people who buy porn and what they want to see you doing in order to buy your content.
Who even subscribes to OnlyFans
Before we dive deeper, let’s try to build a quick profile of someone who buys content. When I started in the cam business, the majority of people who paid tokens to models were lonely guys; older gentlemen, divorcees, guys in boring marriages or younger people with social anxiety. Rarely, we got people who deeply enjoyed the specific niche of porn the model was selling in. Buying porn was considered shameful like everything else related to it so most ‘normal’ guys stayed away.
In the recent years however, things have changed for the better. Porn and everything related to it is now considered just plain ole’ entertainment; buying, selling and producing it is no different than it would be for any other type of content. As a result, we now see a lot of average guys who are open to spending a few bucks to check out some premium content for models they follow on social media. Your subscribers are nothing but average people who want to support and interact with you; that girl who they don’t get to meet in real life but have always fantasized about. They are regular guys who want entertainment. You provide it. They will pay to support you, just like they pay to support their favorite YouTuber.
That being said, getting people to part with money always requires some work and in order to have them go from your social media to buying your content on OnlyFans requires you to offer some value.
Take a pause and ponder over this for a second. What value do you really offer? Porn is freely available on tube sites and they can probably already see your teasers so why even subscribe?
In my experience coaching models, I always get different answers for this question. And that is OK! Everyone does have unique selling points. The key is to just approach whatever you offer with the following mental framework:
Keep it interactive Keep it exclusive
Everyone will approach this differently, but as long as you keep these two things in mind you will make money! Let’s dive deeper and help you develop some ideas to achieve these things.
Keeping it Interactive
Reply to DMs on social media and make yourself available
If you seriously want to make money with an OnlyFans, making yourself open to conversation is the first step. Having your DMs open tells guys that there is a real person behind it all and also gives you the opportunity to hustle your fans into a paid subscription. This is specially important in the beginning when you don’t have the volume to automatically attract paid followers.
That being said, be cautious of the amount of time you budget for this. You will get a lot of messages and you need to be able to recognize guys who pay. Most models develop a good sense for this over time. I generally teach models to mention their OnlyFans within 5 messages. If you get a lead, great. Otherwise on to the next one.
Post Free Content and Get Chummy with Fans
A lot of models hate when I ask them to post for free this but hear me out. Usually it comes from a place of guarding their oh-so-precious content which is what they think guys are paying to watch. But this is nothing but a missed opportunity.
Your content has no value. They can jerk off to unlimited content for free. What has value is your personality; that cool sexually open girl who loves to flaunt.
Posting fun freebies gets a lot of eyes and gives them a preview of what you offer. It lets them experience your world and makes it easy to convert them into paid customers. I encourage models to explore being interactive with their free followers as much as possible. Follow them back, like their posts, reply to their messages and encourage flirty discussions through captions, polls and wish lists.
Show Face
I know some models want to do it anonymously but hiding your face makes it impersonal. It tells guys that you are not serious about making content. If you are someone who does porn, just own it. Having your face hidden does not do a good job at preventing your being found out but at the same time prevents you from making any good money. If you’re in it for the long hall and want to make serious money, just say fuck it and reveal!
Post Regularly
Posting regularly is one of the most important things to do to run a successful social media account. When you post regularly, it breeds a sense of familiarity, shows you are someone who makes content and encourages guys to interact with you. Familiarity makes it easy to have guys pay for your content. Would you rather not spend a few dollars on a friend’s enterprise?
Also social media companies design algorithms that give you more visibility if you post more often. Posting regularly, makes sure your profiles are presented to more people organically and we all know the math: more views ⇒ more money
Keep it exclusive
Creating content tiers is one of the most important things you can do to make money on OnlyFans and as a business owner one of the most important challenges is to create that perfect balance; give away enough to attract interest from people but hidden enough so that they convert to paid customers.
Generally here are a few different tiers I use to create exclusivity for my models.
Before everything, come up with a strong persona
This is your brand, and it’s important to say the least. Brands themselves have exclusivity built-in. A Honda Civic does not offer the same class of a Mercedes Benz and the same concept applies to content. You have to set yourself apart from everyone else. Think about a genre you’re passionate about and see how you can add your own personal touch to it.
If you need to discuss this with someone, we offer a free one on one coaching service for models!
Social Media Tier
Social media is super important and at the same time super super competitive, especially with everyone and their mom now jumping into selling content. The trick here is to instantly get attention from people as they browse their feeds.
For more conservative platforms, focus on posting good quality pictures; good lighting, good poses and good clothing goes a long way. For open platforms like Twitter and Reddit the best way is to post juicy tidbits from your best content.
I did an experiment with a few models clips involving the climatic parts of content i.e orgasms, squirting etc get the best engagement. Giving out the best parts seems counterintuitive but you still keep exclusivity by limiting the viewing time; keep clips super short and cover some things with creative sticker overlays if you have the editing capacity.
Generally you want to keep your social media as fresh as you possibly can by posting regularly. This keeps you staying blessed with the algorithms and gets your content recommended to new people.
Freemium Tier
Some fans simply don’t want to part with their cash right away and I use this tier to just have them step into the door. This creates an excellent opportunity to upsell.
I mostly use two tools for this; a second free OnlyFans and a clip site like ManyVids.
For free OnlyFans, the open content does not look that different from social media. I like to bring the content a notch down here because fans know they can unlock it all with a few dollars so hiding the good bits a bit more leads to sales.
Keep your profile set up as best as you can and make liberal use of bulk private messages. You can advertise and offer some or all of these services:
Private Clips On on one video sessions Cock ratings Tangibles such as used panties, replica pussy etc
You can sell very similar things on ManyVids except it’s more of a public store so things sell automatically. Again, keep your profiles updated as best as you can and keep uploading content. I like to simply repost old clips of my models here.
Camsites like Chaturbate also fall in this category. If you can, definitely consider joining one because it can elevate your presence as a content creator significantly. Camming can be complicated and require discussion on its own so if you need to talk to someone about it book a free session with us here!
Premium Tier
These are your tops fans…and they need to be cherished. They are in the door, you know they like you and you know they can pay. They should be treated with love and respect and given VIP treatment. Talk to any sex worker and they will tell you that they make money from just a few people. Talk to a sales manager and they will tell you how important existing customers are. You already spent energy acquiring them and you have a relationship; they are ready to be sold. I love them and like to call them the phat cats.
They should just get the best of all your content. Don’t try to hide anything from them and offer them discounts on the things you upsell in your Freemium tier. Keep your DMs open and talk to them if they initiate.
One thing you can do to offer even more exclusivity here is something like a girlfriend experience; offer long term packages, one on one texting, video sessions and anything to get things more personal with you (within reason and with safety in mind! No meetups ever!)
One quick note on exclusivity; make sure you keep content from your best fans private as posting can sometimes drive them away as you’re sharing something that they think that they paid for with everyone for free. They should get to own it unless they ask you to post.
Get FREE Help
Navigating the cam world can be daunting specially if you’re new! Book a free coaching session at jojosgirls.com and get all the help you need with everything from navigating platforms to mental health.
Need toys, lingerie or absolutely anything you need start making content? Drop us a message on Twitter @xxjojosgirlsxx and we can arrange a few goodies through our partners! | https://medium.com/@jojosgirls/what-fans-want-from-your-onlyfans-and-what-you-should-post-on-it-3f223154d190 | ['Jojo S Girls'] | 2021-02-05 03:15:53.525000+00:00 | ['Porn', 'Sex Work', 'Sex Work Is Real Work', 'Onlyfans', 'Pornography'] |
Air Force Drone Crews Got So Demoralized That They Booed Their Commander | Air Force Drone Crews Got So Demoralized That They Booed Their Commander
The U.S. military learned the hard way to take care of its robot controllers
by DAVID AXE
For the first decade after its invention, the General Atomics Predator drone was a special weapon. The CIA and the U.S. Air Force possessed just a handful of the 27-foot-long unmanned aerial vehicles, which can fly for 12 hours or more, scanning with cameras—and even firing at targets with lightweight Hellfire missiles.
By 2011, the drone fleet had expanded more than tenfold—and so had the community of pilots, sensor operators, analysts and maintainers that fix and fly the robots and disseminate the resulting video imagery.
The drone air force grew fast—but not fast enough. As demand outstripped supply, the Air Force yanked pilots from the cockpits of their supersonic F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and forced them to sit in trailers in Nevada, from where they steered flimsy robots via satellite.
These involuntary robot operators didn’t get many days off. And they had little chance of ever returning to their beloved fighters. Drone crews became so unhappy that, in one chilling moment in late 2005 or early 2006, a group of Predator operators actually booed their commander.
“They were just so bitter and so angry,” the commander said, according to a redacted U.S. Air Force official history that War Is Boring obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars fueled the seemingly limitless need for what had been a niche robotic system. The twin U.S.-led invasions sparked violent and popular insurgencies. American troops struggled to separate enemy fighters from innocent civilians in Iraq’s teeming cities and Afghanistan’s lush farming valleys.
Not to mention, the CIA and military also deployed the propeller-driven UAVs over Somalia, Yemen, The Philippines and other conflict zones. The military needed drones. Lots of drones.
Demand for Predators skyrocketed starting around 2004. Soon the Pentagon ordered the Air Force to keep 65 Predators or larger Reapers on station at any given time.
The flying branch refers to each on-station drone as a “Combat Air Patrol,” or CAP. Normally, a CAP includes four drones. One is in the air over the target area. Another is en route to replace it when its fuel runs out. The other two machines are in maintenance.
To meet the 65-CAP requirement, the Air Force began acquiring hundreds of drones, which can cost between $5 million and $17 million per copy. “We’re going to tell General Atomics to build every Predator they can possibly build,” Air Force Gen. John Jumper, then the flying branch’s top officer, said in 2007. | https://medium.com/war-is-boring/air-force-drone-crews-got-so-demoralized-that-they-booed-their-commander-cfd455fea40f | ['War Is Boring'] | 2017-03-12 04:14:18.441000+00:00 | ['Drones', 'Wib Air'] |
Explaining UX writing. How I learned over five months that my… | Explaining UX writing
How I learned that my writing skills are in high demand for digital content.
UX Writing is more than just card sorting
What is UX Writing?
If I had a dollar for every time someone said, “What?” when I told them I was taking a course in UX writing and they gave me that look, well, I’d have a good chunk of change by now.
For the past five months, I have been participating in the UX Writing Hub’s online course founded by tech entrepreneur Yuval Keshtcher. This course teaches the fine art of micro-copy for apps and websites and shows by example and through practical exercises what the industry will eventually come to call UX writing.
This job is still called many other things like “content designer” or “technical writer,” or more recently “content strategist,” but generally the task itself can be called UX writing. The final word is not yet out on whether the title “UX Writer” will prevail, but for the sake of this article and the fact that I just finished a course on UX writing, I’ll keep using the phrase.
Once I began learning myself and then explaining to my confused friends and family what I was up to, they got it. In fact, as users of digital products, they — and most everyone alive today — already know good and bad UX writing when they see it. We recognize cute and helpful text and appreciate it, like this e-commerce communications page:
Examples of microcopy
Breaking up is hard to do. Or not, with Grovemade
Or these extensive pop-up blue tooltips for Patreon’s convoluted new benefits, tax, and payments system:
Patreon…you need a special certification just to collect donations as an impoverished artist.
Not just like copywriting
But there’s more than just genuine, clear and even clever writing involved. You know when you keep clicking on a button or text box in an app or on a website thinking you are supposed to do something and only to discover that the words on the button don’t match the action in the flow of the task?
This is a common bad user experience. It’s not a given that how a developer or designer creates a product that will match how end users will actually use it. It turns out there’s a lot of work that goes into creating all that good writing and those great user experiences. User research, design, style and tone guide, and testing. Writing is just one part of the larger job description of a UX writer.
Don’t assume your user is just like you!
My 73-year-old mother uses Mailchimp and was quite familiar with their famous style guide (also featured in the course as best-practices). What she didn’t know how to use well was her outdated Android phone, and as I showed her how to click around in the settings, I felt just as clueless. As a long-time iOS user, functions I assumed would be located in one section were in another altogether, and it took a while to ‘unthink’ my way from iOS into an Android mindset.
This is another example of what one designer or product creator might think of as given, is not self-evident at all for the end-user.
My mother doesn’t have a lifetime of “click” or “swipe” experiences to draw on. In many digital products, sometimes there might only be a tiny shaded area indicating that swiping left or right might reveals new content, but if you’re not thinking of that as an option — like my mom — then you’re left wondering why it just “doesn’t work.”
Why your business should care about UX writing in your product
The above types of frustrating experiences lead to high abandonment rates. If people are annoyed by your product, they won’t waste time with it or give it a second chance these days. I know myself how many times I’ve downloaded an app, only to delete it without even getting through the on-boarding process because of some overly complicated, cumbersome, or even patronizing wording or process.
Or maybe I begin the process of buying something online and just as I get to the checkout the many steps push me over my patience threshold, either the price changes due to added costs, or the payment doesn’t go smoothly—and I quit.
UX writing as part of UI
So, it’s not just the way a site flows, and how the user journey moves from one step to the next where UX writers can apply their skills, but also which words guide the user through the flow. The tone and implications of even one word can have a high impact on the success of a business. To find out which words are best, UX writers can conduct user research, and A/B testing on copy to see whether certain words lead to improved performance and a better user experience. This is especially obvious in error pages.
Error Pages
Sometimes pages don’t work. That’s just part of digital life. But what does the user experience when they get to an error page? In the screenshot below, Metlife apologizes in a self-deprecating way and gives us immediate steps to continue on our journey. This makes us feel relieved. It’s not our fault! And we can give them a break because they are admitting their error and vulnerability. And we are empowered to stay engaged in the process by trying again.
Metlife’s Error Page
Writing still matters in the digital era
There are countless ways where UX writing can affect the success of a digital product. About as many ways as there are digital products—which by this point is about 5 million apps and 1.5 billion (yes, billion!) websites. There will be work for UX writers for the next thousand years at this rate. Assuming the robots haven’t taken over by then.
Microcopy text can appear in so many places, from the basic landing page to the entire checkout process or internal user flows for B2B or B2C SaaS products. Writers have a role to play, and thankfully, the industry is waking up to the importance of the role of UX writer.
Resources:
If you are looking to get into UX Writing, I recommend checking out the UX Writing Hub and the Facebook group also run by Yuval for Microcopy, and the UX Collective, the community of writers, designers, and many other related roles is an inspiring and fun community of people. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/explaining-the-need-for-ux-writing-88adcd164ed4 | ['Bettina Hindes'] | 2020-10-25 17:38:36.279000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Writing', 'Ux Writing', 'UX', 'Resources'] |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.