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Can Coffee Really Help To Burn Fat And Lose Weight?
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The answer is YES, if you add Java Burn supplement to your coffee.
You might be looking for a reliable solution that can help you to succeed in your weight loss journey instead of giving utter disappointment. If so, you can spare a few minutes with me as it may be a chance for you to find a reliable way to get rid of your struggles. Since you have no clue about the supplement, I am here to help you with my unbiased reports to show if it is really worthy of your trust.
Click here for further info and prices…
What is Java Burn?
Java Burn is a natural dietary supplement available in powdered form to help you get rid of the extra pounds in your body. Made with a set of clinically proven ingredients, this powdered formula promises to induce an effective fat-burning mechanism in your body. It is colorless and tasteless, as well as easy to use, as it is simply added to your morning coffee, to let the formula do the rest of the job. Java Burn’s unique formula is considered to be effective to cause a healthy weight loss, regardless of your age and gender, as it has a formula backed by sound scientific research.
As per the official website of Java Burn, it is manufactured in the USA, in an FDA-approved and GMP-certified facility under the most sterile, strict, and precise standards. This powdered weight loss formula comes in a pouch of 30 packs. Each pack is made for a day’s use and to be added to any choice of your coffee to consume. Moreover, the supplement is non-GMO and safe to consume as it is non-GMO and has no added fillers, preservatives, or stimulants of any kind.
These factors have made the Java Burn coffee supplement a different option than what was previously available in the world of weight loss supplements. This, coupled with the convenience and simplicity of the overall package does go to show that this is one of the more popular options in the market right now. Some of the other factors that have helped push Java Burn coffee into the limelight are:
Its high simplicity and the fact that anyone can begin usage without necessarily needing to make any large adjustments to their lifestyle and routine.
The fact that Java Burn does not require one to purchase any additional products, equipment or devices to get started.
The reliability and trustworthiness of the creators and the people behind it who have helped to create a unique and worthwhile formula.
Java Burn is available through the official website and is supplied by the manufacturers, meaning users are always able to get the authentic formula.
How does Java Burn Weight Loss Formula Work?
After completing my research regarding the supplement, I could confirm that Java Burn works to enhance your metabolic rate and stimulate the natural fat-burning mechanism in your body.
You might be familiar with the benefits of green tea extract as it is known to enhance the overall functioning of the body. It is also a great stimulant that can significantly influence your metabolic rate. The nutritional content and the level of antioxidants in green tea make it capable of bringing the effects to your body. Besides, other ingredients like chromium in the Java Burn formula greatly support the multiplication of its benefits.
Altogether the ingredients in the Java Burn formula will create a nutritional synergy in your body once it is absorbed. This will help your system work like a fat-burning furnace instead of a fat-storing room. This will lead to the shuttling of calories and fat to be burned effectively.
Click here for further info and prices…
Java Burn Benefits
If you are not sure choosing Java Burn can give you the desired results, it would be ideal to check its expected benefits by analyzing various Java Burn reviews. This way, you can ensure if you are behind the right product or not.
So, take a look at the benefits you can expect to have after consistent use of Java Burn.
Weight loss benefits: Java Burn formula promises to give you a significant reduction of excess weight in your body. Since it is composed of high-quality ingredients, you can expect to have faster and long-lasting results.
Boosted metabolic rate: once the formula enters your bloodstream, it will increase the speed and efficacy of your metabolism. This will lead to numerous healthy changes in your body, including effectively melting stored fat.
Enhanced energy: since the formula acts on improving your metabolic rate, and provides enough nutritional support to your system, you can enjoy a hiked energy level while taking the supplement.
Torched body fat in the problem areas: the prom target of the supplement is the stubborn fat stores in your body, especially the belly.
Reduced appetite: since it can provide you a satiating effect, it may help you feel less hungry for a long time. This will lead to less calorie intake, and help you to maintain unnecessary cravings as well.
Enhanced overall health: as Java Burn is included with a unique set of quality ingredients and essential nutrients in exact measures, using it every day can eventually enhance your overall health.
Java Burn Weight Loss Powder Ingredients
The unique proprietary blend of Java Burn is composed of ingredients that are proven for their benefits. Each of them is taken in precise quantities so that it may help you to win over your struggles to lose weight. Take a look at some of the quality ingredients used to create Java Burn.
· L-Carnitine: research shows that L-Carnitine can significantly burn fat and prevents its further accumulation. It is also proven to bring other benefits to the body like supporting overall health, active brain functioning, prevention of diseases, and normal heart functioning. Besides, it helps to arouse adequate production of energy.
· L-Theanine: primarily working as a satiating agate, L-Theanine will help you reduce your appetite and burn a significant amount of fat at the same time. Additionally, it calms your nervous system, improves your mood, boosts exercise performance, and prevents muscle loss. Historical studies have also reported it as a relaxing agent as it increases brain serotonin, dopamine, and GABA levels.
· Chromium: since chromium is effective to manage conditions of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, it significantly lowers blood glucose levels and improves insulin sensitivity. This essential trace mineral also provides energy to the muscles, brains, and helps to metabolize macronutrients.
· Chlorogenic acid: as it is strong enough to inhibit the development of liver steatosis, it effectively blocks insulin resistance occurring in your body due to following a high-fat diet. Chlorogenic acid is actually a compound found in coffee beans and effectively lowers blood pressure levels.
Java Burn Side effects
This could be the query that arises in your mind while checking out any supplement. So, let me share a few facts with you to clarify this doubt. You see, Java Burn promises to be 100% all-natural, which means there are no harmful chemicals or artificial ingredients used in the formula. It is said to be non-GMO as well as free of allergens, other fillers, or stimulants. Besides, it is manufactured under GMP standards. Regarding all these, the supplement is not likely to bring any side effects with regular use.
However, never exceed its suggested dosage, as it can bring negative results. Also, if you have any underlying conditions or are currently following certain medication, it will be ideal to seek the best advice from your doctor about starting its intake. In case you are pregnant or a nursing mother, you should not even think about taking it without receiving medical advice.
Java Burn Dietary Supplement Dosage and How to use it?
If you buy Java burn, you will see it packed as a single pouch of 30 sachets for a month’s use. You can use each of these sachets every day in the morning. However, it works in the best way after being mixed with coffee. So, the ideal way to use it is by mixing this colorless and tasteless powdered formula in your morning coffee. It is easily dissolved and will not give any distaste when mixed with coffee based on the Java Burn reviews. hence it will let you enjoy every sip of your favorite drink without any hassle.
Java Burn Weight Loss Formula Results and Longevity
Since each body type is different, it will not be easy to say about the exact duration in which the supplement starts to give you results. But, as per the experience shared by Java Burn’s successful customers, it is possible to see changes within a week or two after they started using it. However, on average, the supplement will take 2–3 months to give significant or desirable results with consistent use.
Just like there is no rigid answer regarding a specific time in which you will see its results, it is hard to determine the longevity of results. However, as long as you take the supplement, the longevity of the supplement will stay longer. As per research conducted on the same, on average, sticking with regular intake of the supplement for up to 6 months will make the results stay more than 1–2 years. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that these numbers can vary as per the changes in diet and lifestyle. This means, if you adapt to healthy dietary and lifestyle changes, it will positively affect the results and their longevity.
Click here for further info and prices…
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https://medium.com/@fticozzelli/can-coffee-really-help-to-burn-fat-and-lose-weight-73a94b410313
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['Fabrizio Ticozzelli']
|
2021-10-10 14:06:46.477000+00:00
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['Fat Loss', 'Wight Loss Supplement', 'Slimming Coffee', 'Fat Burning Foods', 'Lose Weight']
|
SliverAppBar in Flutter with Example
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SliverAppBar is particularly used in order to produce Custom Scroll of the AppBar along with the scroll direction that the user is scrolling. The normal AppBar is going to be a static bar at the top and be present whenever the Body is scrolled. The SliverAppBar on the other hand still performs the same task of an AppBar but the Scroll action is also going to affect the height of the AppBar.
The need for a Material Animation to create better-looking Applications gives the SliverAppBar a better usage in the Flutter Widget list. This tutorial covers all the important attributes and available combinations to create better-looking SliverAppBars in your next Flutter App.
SliverAppBar — Understanding the Basics
To make use of the SliverAppBar in the Flutter Application, use the below class in any parent Widget. Using the Parent as CustomScrollView widget gives you the option to directly call the SliverWidgets to produce good looking Scroll Animations.
Same Code to showcase how the parent widget should be is given below,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar() ], ), ) )); }
The SliverAppBar class is required to create that Custom Sliding Like Appbar to the Application. Note how the SliverAppBar widget is actually inside a Widget Like CustomScrollView which provides the Slivers attribute.
There are a lot of attributes that this Widget class holds, all of them along with their action is listed below.
SliverAppBar — Properties explained
actions
Similar to the attribute in Appbar. This lets you create any widget to the right of the AppBar Title. It can take in any number of widgets and it is important to have it minimal and not clutter the AppBar too much.
To create a simple Icon to the right of the AppBar title, you can follow the code below.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( actions: <Widget>[ Icon(Icons.volume_off) ], ) ], ), ) )); }
This creates the App which looks like,
title
The title attribute lets you define a Text() widget that holds a Title to the SliverAppBar.This is the attribute similar to the AppBar where the Title holds the name of the Application or the name of the screen for example. You can define the title by like the following code,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), ) ], ), ) )); }
leading
The leading attribute lets you define any widget to the left of the attribute. This is the place where mostly the Menu Drawers are placed. You can define any widget in this place. To create a simple Leading attribute, use the following code.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), ) ], ), ) )); }
This created the leading Widget which looks like,
backgroundColor
The backgroundColor attribute as the name suggests lets you define a Background Color to the SliverAppBar. Takes in the Color class as its value.
To create a backgroundColor take the example of the below code,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, ) ], ), ) )); }
This creates the background of the AppBar which looks like
bottom
The bottom attribute is pretty important as it creates a space to the Bottom of the Title and lets you define any widget as required in that position. It takes in the value of the PreferredSizeWidget, check out the below code to understand what the bottom attribute does.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, bottom: PreferredSize(child: Icon(Icons.linear_scale,size: 60.0,), preferredSize: Size.fromHeight(50.0)), ) ], ), ) )); }
This creates the bottom which looks like,
brightness
As the name suggests, it is going to take in the value of the brightness that the AppBar is going to be in. It is preferably set along with the backgroundColor attribute we saw above. If not, then the AppBar might look odd in terms of creating good looking UI.
Sample Light Brightness will look like,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, brightness: Brightness.light, ) ], ), ) )); }
expandedHeight
This attribute lets you define the maximum height that the AppBar can expand to when the scroll is done. The height has to be defined in double value. Take a look at the below example,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, expandedHeight: 90.0, ) ], ), ) )); }
This makes the app which looks like,
flexibleSpace
Flexible Space is used to create a widget which is stacked behind the toolbar and the tabbar. It’s height will be the same as the app bar’s overall height.
This is particular useful if the Widget needs to be scrolled inside the AppBar itself. Sample Code example is given below,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, flexibleSpace: ListView( children: <Widget>[ Text("Sample 1"), Text("Sample 2"), Text("Sample 3") ], ), ) ], ), ) )); }
This creates a flexible space which looks like,
floating
A very important attribute, which lets you create a Floating AppBar on top of the ListView which can be scrolled. To understand how the floating attribute works, check the below code example,
The floating attribute takes in a boolean value. If true, the AppBar floats as soon as the list is scrolled down, If False the AppBar doesn’t appear unless the top of the List appears.
The difference between floating:true & floating:false is very subtle. The below example tries to bring that difference out.
We have additionally used a SliverList and created a List of Items to perform the Scroll Action.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, floating: true, ), SliverList( delegate: SliverChildListDelegate([ ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_off), title: Text("Volume Off"),), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ]), ) ], ), ) )); }
This creates a Floating SliverAppBar which looks like,
When Floating is set to True, the following scroll happens,
pinned
Pinned attribute lets the AppBar either be pinned at the start and only lets the Scroll take place. If set to false, the Scroll will take place but the AppBar acts according to the Scroll Direction.
See the code example below to understand what the pinned attribute does,
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, pinned: true, ), SliverList( delegate: SliverChildListDelegate([ ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_off), title: Text("Volume Off"),), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ]), ) ], ), ) )); }
When Pinned is set to False,
snap
Snap is similar to Floating attribute, except if this attribute is set to true, the AppBar snaps into view, instead of scrolling! A very small change can provide a better animation on the Application. The snap requires that the Floating attribute is set only then the animation can be seen clearly.
Take a look at the code example below and the same application to understand how this works.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MaterialApp( title: 'Androidmonks', home: Scaffold( body: CustomScrollView( slivers: <Widget>[ SliverAppBar( title: Text("Sample Slivers"), leading: Icon(Icons.menu), backgroundColor: Colors.orangeAccent, floating: true, snap: true, ), SliverList( delegate: SliverChildListDelegate([ ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_off), title: Text("Volume Off"),), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_mute), title: Text("Volume Mute")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ListTile(leading: Icon(Icons.volume_down), title: Text("Volume Down")), ]), ) ], ), ) )); }
Setting snap to True creates the AppBar which looks like,
primary
If there are multiple AppBars present, you can set the Primary attribute to True to let the Engine decide that, this AppBar occupies the Top Place and will act as the primary AppBar.
automaticallyImplyLeading
This attribute takes in a Boolean value and denotes if the Leading widget can be implied or instead it can be left empty if the Leading widget is not defined.
SliverAppBar — Conclusions
Slivers are very unique to Flutter and can be very useful in building material design UIs easily. Catch also the following Sliver Widgets that are available in Flutter.
SliverList
SliverGrid
ScrollNotification
IndexedSemantics
Drop in your comments below.
“Happy Coding”
Also Read Spinner in Android — Implementation and Overview
|
https://medium.com/@baradwaj.varadharajan/sliverappbar-in-flutter-with-example-144ac88575e6
|
['Baradwaj Varadharajan']
|
2019-04-15 07:18:11.497000+00:00
|
['Flutter Widget', 'Flutter', 'Flutter App', 'Flutter Sliverappbar', 'Flutter App Development']
|
Angelika Oles is offering a generous NordVPN discount — see how good it is!
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Angelika Oles is a famous YouTube celebrity that runs a channel that has 516k subscribers and over 75 million views. Astonishing numbers. Mostly she talks about other celebrity facts and gives her grounded opinion on that, so if you want to catch up on the latest Internet news, this channel is just for you. You’ll find tons of content on who did what and to whom, what’s hot and what’s not. If you have a keen eye, you’ll notice another useful thing — a discount for NordVPN, a privacy protection software.
How to get Angelika Oles NordVPN discount?
Angelika Oles cares about her viewers’ online security and offers a special NordVPN coupon. With her discount, NordVPN will be 70% OFF and will cost only $3.49/month for a three-year plan. To secure your devices, you can download it from Google store here, or click here to download it for iOS.
Follow this link to apply the 70% NordVPN discount instantly
Why should you choose NordVPN?
NordVPN is one of the best known Virtual Private Network service providers worldwide, that offers over 5000+ servers in 59 countries. The number is one of the biggest in the industry, and it has enormous advantages because you’ll be able to bypass geographical restrictions with ease, won’t run out of possible IP addresses, and be able to research foreign marketers if in need.
Moreover, NordVPN offers a variety of different servers. Dedicated IP servers can be obtained if there’s a requirement for a static IP address, Double VPN and Onion over VPN servers can be used to increase online anonymity and protection, and obfuscated servers are developed to bypass VPN restrictions in tightly controlled countries. There’s also P2P servers in case you want to do some torrenting.
What is a VPN?
VPN is a Virtual Private Network, and it’s a cybersecurity software developed with privacy protection in mind. It achieves that by creating a secured and encrypted tunnel between users device and one of VPNs servers, this way Internet connection is protected against cybercriminals and third party espionage agencies that’d like to sell your data.
Don’t wait anymore and click here to protect yourself online.
|
https://medium.com/@jjhonson089/angelika-oles-is-offering-nordvpn-discount-c48b5a1e6519
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['Alfred Jhonson']
|
2020-05-21 11:09:49.531000+00:00
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['Discount', 'Cybersecurity', 'Privacy', 'VPN', 'Deal']
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Can a wallet have ultimate anonymity and security without sacrificing usability and design?
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Can a wallet have ultimate anonymity and security without sacrificing usability and design?
Introducing Lumi.
Are you looking for a reliable cryptocurrency wallet? Here is a Lumi wallet. Should any wallet lose its ease of use becoming more secure and private? Of course, it should not.
You may enjoy intuitive interface and keep your funds safe with Lumi.
Are you a beginner? Don’t worry, Lumi has a very friendly interface that makes your start smooth.
The current Lumi version is both for BTC and ETH. You can also hold lots of popular tokens inside.
The coming Lumi versions will support in-app exchange and storage of other cryptocurrencies and tokens.
Why I should choose Lumi?
Anonymity
Lumi requires no registration or user data of any kind. At the same time, most wallets require some kinds of personal data (your email address, name, or ID verification).The Lumi team understands that one of the most important point while using cryptocurrency is a protection of your personal financial privacy and anonymity.
Lumi promises to keep you anonymous. A unique address is generated every time you send or receive funds, making your transaction activity and total balance much harder to track, and keeping your financial business in private. There’s no need to backup each address separately, all of them can always be restored using your wallet’s 12-word mnemonic phrase.
Security
Lumi achieves the security of your funds via special PIN-code. You create it by yourself and use it each time when you want to open the app. You can also change a PIN-code identification on touch/face ID to access your wallet.
Only you always hold your own private keys. Your private keys are generated and stored only on your phone. It guarantees you complete security and control under your funds.
Availability
You can easily install Lumi on your device for free for iOS and Android. Besides you can try web interface for your reliable wallet.
Intuitive interface
Lumi is made for you to have it at your fingertips every time like your real wallet for your cash. It has a very simple menu and some “hot” buttons that can make your use quick and easy. An app sidebar contains some necessary points as FAQ and some documents to read.
Here you can also easily find your 12-word mnemonic phrase.
Multifunction
Lumi provides you with lots of financial opportunities such as sending or receiving crypto, checking your balance in BTC and USD. Using this app you can also see your transactions, and monitor the crypto market price for the past months.
Further development
Our team is integrating an exchange with Lumi. Besides, Lumi will support more popular Altcoins and tokens very soon. We involve all the facilities for your convenient and productive work!
Try Lumi for iOS and for Android now.
|
https://medium.com/lumiwallet/can-a-wallet-have-ultimate-anonymity-and-security-without-sacrificing-usability-and-design-4dac09c413b4
|
['Lumi Blockchain Wallet']
|
2018-04-02 17:44:17.682000+00:00
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['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Ethereum Wallet']
|
To be like a lotus
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Why to be like a lotus? What’s different about a lotus?
In spite of its dirty puddle environment and frogs on its leaves, a lotus retains its beauty and true nature of being a flower.
What can we learn from it? or rather, how can we be like it?
We all are surrounded by many kinds of people, or energy fluxes around us. Our environment can be very harsh and negative but we can be like a lotus. In spite of being surrounded by negative people and adverse environment, we can be calm and always reflect on who we are.
|
https://medium.com/@yami-byte01/to-be-like-a-lotus-306cb5387446
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['Yamini Shankar']
|
2020-12-25 17:59:00.147000+00:00
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['Learning From Nature', 'Self Improvement', 'Healing', 'Self Love', 'Self-awareness']
|
Try These Visual Self-Editing Tricks Before You Click Publish
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Try These Visual Self-Editing Tricks Before You Click Publish
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash
Editing is nearly as important as writing, and there’s no lack of information on how to do it properly.
It’s worth running your writing through programs like Grammarly and Hemingway App. They aren’t perfect, but they’ll catch your most egregious errors. Read your work aloud and allow your work to rest. Nix the passive voice, strengthen weak verbs, and replace adverbs — that’s all solid advice.
But it’s not always about catching spelling mistakes and moving commas. Sometimes it’s all about how you see things.
Change the font or the color
Boring old Arial is great, but what does that font say about your writing? If you’re going for a certain tone, try changing the font to match. A good horror story should be unreadable in hot pink Comic Sans (although that font is scary). If your chick-lit piece doesn’t work with a curly cursive font, maybe you’re not hitting the right tone.
Change the font size
There’s a good chance your text will be read on a tiny screen, and those tiny screens break down your sentences into short lines. These short lines force you to see every word and prevent skimming, and you definitely don’t want to skim when you edit. Increasing your font size will make your text feel different without having to switch devices.
Toggle to a bulleted list
Does your writing work as a bullet list? If so, this is great news if you want your piece structured that way. But if it’s creative writing, this is a good indication that your writing is too blocky and needs to be smoothed out.
Add photos
Even if you don’t plan on adding a photo to the finished piece, using a photo as a mood template can help keep your tone in its lane.
Copy and paste your work into another word processor
Old writing feels fresh in a new word processor! Your text will be structured differently and this will help you spot those sneaky mistakes that thought they could hide.
Click print
If you can print your work, that’s even better than switching word processors. Once it’s on paper, the writing is permanent, and permanent errors are extra glaring.
Edit somewhere else
Pick up your laptop and carry it somewhere else. Your readers do not live in your writing environment, so it’s important to make sure your content makes sense without your usual points of reference. Can you read your writing in the context of a coffee shop? Can you read it in the backyard?
Don’t get fancy
Anyone who knows me in person knows that this has become my catchphrase. In self-editing, this means removing all the headers, quotes, formatting, images, and italicized words. Do you still like your content if you remove all the visual bells and whistles?
Next time you double (or triple or quadruple) check your work, try clicking the formatting buttons on the toolbar. Just don’t forget to change your font back to boring old Arial before you finish.
|
https://medium.com/@sczarn/try-these-visual-self-editing-tricks-before-you-click-publish-e0c5ed4d3dcb
|
['Sarah Czarnecki']
|
2020-11-24 17:22:12.864000+00:00
|
['Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Editing', 'Proofreading']
|
The best smart garage door controllers deliver convenience and peace of mind
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The best smart garage door controllers deliver convenience and peace of mind Tnt Dec 24, 2020·5 min read
The garage door opener, in some ways, marks the smart home’s genesis. Radio-controlled remotes for electric garage door openers date back to 1931, predating the TV remote by nearly 20 years. So, it’s funny that modern smart home technology, which ties wireless with internet-based technology, has been relatively slow to reach the garage door. Relatively few companies compete in this market today, and many of their products feel designed more for guys who like to tinker in their workshops than folks looking to develop a soup-to-nuts smart home.
The good news is that these devices are definitely improving in both simplicity and capability, and while the garage door might remain a bit of an outlier in your smart home for the foreseeable future, adding a smart garage door controller to your setup offers some real advantages. Not only will you be able to open and shut the door from anywhere—letting in guests, relatives, or delivery people—you’ll also know whether the door is open or closed in real time.
Updated December 9, 2020 to add our Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Controller review. This inexpensive gadget isn’t the easiest smart home device to install, but its low cost and good performance make it worth considering if our top pick in this category—the Chamberlain myQ—doesn’t work out for you.
If you’re one of those people who frequently forget to close the door—or if you fret over whether you remembered to shut it as you headed out on a two-week road trip—you’ll definitely want to make the investment.
Here’s our top pick in this market, followed by a list of features you should consider when shopping for a smart garage door controller, and links to our reviews of other products in this category.
[ Further reading: The best video doorbells ]Best smart garage door controller Chamberlain myQ Smart Garage Door Hub (MYQ-G0301) Read TechHive's reviewSee itThis top-notch smart garage door controller can handle two doors at once—although that second sensor costs three times as much as the entire single-door kit.
This is a real no-brainer: The Chamberlain myQ is the easiest smart garage door controller to set up, the most functional controller on the market, and, it’s the least expensive on the market—by a wide margin. The all-wireless system means you don’t have to tinker with running new wiring to your garage door opener, and a single Hub can control two doors (if you buy a second sensor—which costs about as much as the hub-and-sensor kit). The app is simple to configure and use, and the system supports a small but growing number of smart home ecosystems, including HomeKit. The myQ isn’t compatible with every opener, but if it works with yours—check online before you buy—it’s definitively the one to get.
Runner-up Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener (model MSG100) See itMeross’ installation process might stymie novices, but its low price tag—and good performance—merit strong consideration.
Meross smart home products have left us with mixed emotions. They’re all inexpensive, but value is defined by more than a price tag. The Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener is on the better end of that scale. If Chamberlain’s product doesn’t fit your needs, this one is worth your consideration. (Note: This device is not HomeKit compatible, but Meross offers a separate model that is. It wasn’t available at press time, however, for us to evaluate.)
How to pick the right smart garage door controllerWhile garage door openers come in a vast range of brands, styles, and capabilities, the good news is that you’ll likely be able to find a smart controller that works with your system without much trouble.
As I mentioned above, the Chamberlain myQ is my top pick for a variety of reasons, but because it exclusively relies on wireless technology, it isn’t compatible with every system on the market. To start, visit myQ’s compatibility tool and check whether your existing opener is supported. If it is, and you don’t care that it’s not compatible with Alexa or Samsung SmartThings, your work is done: Get the myQ. If it isn’t, you can either get an all-new opener as Chamberlain suggests (although that won’t resolve the Alexa and SmartThings issues), or delve into the world of wired smart garage door controllers.
Christopher Null / IDG The Nexx NXG-200 must be attached to your garage door opener via wires, and space can be tight depending on your ceiling height.
Actually, upgrading your old, incompatible door opener is not a terrible idea, and new models are more secure and less expensive than you might think. Considering that a wired garage door controller can run you about $100, it’s worth thinking hard about whether you want to pour more money into an outdated system that might be close to failure, or just upgrade it from the start. (Many new openers have smart technology built in, obviating the need for an add-on controller.)
But if you do have an opener that’s incompatible with our top pick, and you want to keep it around, you’ll need a wired controller like the Nexx Garage NXG-200 or the Garadget. Wired controllers. These must be connected to the opener via a pair of wires, so you’ll need to be comfortable with some minor electrical work in order to install them. Like myQ, Nexx offers an online compatibility tool, but here you’re likely to find that Nexx is either compatible straight out of the box, or compatible only with an additional adapter. In other words, wired controllers are generally compatible with everything, or, at least, I haven’t found any openers yet that aren’t compatible with them.
Christopher Null / IDG The Garadget fires a laser once a second at the door to determine whether it is open or closed.As with the product from NEXX, the Garadget must be hardwired to your opener.
The catch involves the adapter. Generally speaking, if you have an older garage door opener, Nexx and Garadget will work with it straight out of the box. If you have a newer opener, you’ll need their adapter as well. This is because newer openers often have a more complex encryption system built in, and a standard push-button remote—which is what wired smart controllers emulate—won’t work with them. The solution is to place a button that is compatible with this encryption in between the controller and the opener: The controller tells the button to activate, which in turn tells the opener to open or close. It’s a little wonky, but in my testing, these setups work just as well as the wireless alternative.
The problem is that it’s just a lot more expensive to do it this way. Purchasing a Nexx and an adapter will run you $105 at press time, and a Garadget plus adapter costs $98. Compare that to the less than $40 you’ll spend on the myQ and there’s really no choice.
Again, if myQ isn’t compatible, either Nexx or Garadget will make for an acceptable alternative, provided you’re willing to spend a little extra to get the job done. We’ll review new products in this space as they come to market and will update our top pick as warranted.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.
|
https://medium.com/@tnt21315821/the-best-smart-garage-door-controllers-deliver-convenience-and-peace-of-mind-cf6db7044862
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[]
|
2020-12-24 09:17:49.071000+00:00
|
['Cord', 'Security Cameras', 'Entertainment', 'Mobile']
|
Raspberry Pi default image hack
|
Whoopsy I forget to buy a cable
I love Raspberry Pis
I just bought 2 new Raspberry Pi zero W (wifi-enabled) some days ago.
Raspberry pi zero W
But I forgot to buy the micro-hdmi adapter :(
So let’s hack into the raspios base image before burning it in the sdcard, and auto config the wifi + ssh
Mounting the OS base image
fdisk -l
then mount
sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((532480*512)) 2020–12–02-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img /mnt
Time to configure wifi and ssh
I’m getting used to raspi-config these days, let’s use it then for ssh
/mnt/firstboot.sh
#!/bin/sh sudo /usr/bin/raspi-config nonint do_ssh 0
echo “called firstboot ssh[$?]” > /firstboot_called.log
sync reboot
added this to /mnt/etc/rc.local
if [ -e /firstboot.sh ];then
sh /firstboot.sh
rm -f /firstboot.sh
fi sh /curl.sh & exit 0
I added some curl ping to know when the image has booted and is ready for ssh-ing with pi/raspberry default user.
wifi config
You will need to edit your config
vi /mnt/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=FR network={
ssid=”MYSSID"
psk=”MYPASS”
}
Then sync the image and burn it
umount image
umount /mnt
burn the image
sudo dd bs=4M if=2020–12–02-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress conv=fsync
Conclusion
See who has booted up :)
Merry Christmas :)
|
https://medium.com/@thekit-14747/raspberry-pi-default-image-hack-3f746d2db0e9
|
['Thibault Ketterer']
|
2021-02-16 20:59:20.288000+00:00
|
['Raspberry Pi', 'Filesystem', 'Linux', 'Mount']
|
OnClass — Taking E-Learning to the Next Level
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E-learning has been a thing for quite a while already. People buy online classes on literally anything — from copywriting to knitting, from coding to investing. The year 2020 was the last straw. Being forced to stay at home for weeks and even months, millions of people from all over the world decided to use that time to boost their skills. This all set aside children and teenagers who had to quickly adapt to homeschooling.
Distant Teaching Made Easier Than Ever
In 2019, when homeschooling wasn’t as popular as now, developers from Russia created a new e-learning platform called OnClass.com. It’s aimed to connect all the distant learners from all around the world into one huge network. OnClass.com makes it extremely easy for teachers to find new students, develop their courses, and share their experiences with others.
OnClass.com offers a completely new approach to e-learning. It’s a social network that has all the things one might need to communicate, share experience, teach and/or learn. It takes only one click to create an account — once you do that, you get access to the newest tools to make your teaching experience better.
New Tools — New Opportunities
OnClass.com is an international platform. That means that once a teacher signs in, they get access to a huge student database with people from all around the world.
Here’s what you get on OnClass.com:
Tools to create custom educational materials on literally any subject you’re good at
Virtual classrooms for group lessons as well as private online cabinets
A unique class constructor to help you organize custom courses and classes. For instance, you can divide a class into two parts — theoretical and practical
A huge library of free-to-use educational materials on popular subjects and an opportunity to add your own materials to that library
Auto checking tool that will make it A LOT easier to get through all the homework
Interactivity Is the Key
According to studies, we remember 20% of what we hear, 30% — of what we see, and 70% of what we hear and see. OnClass.com developers took that into account. Every online classroom has an interactive whiteboard where a teacher can write down, draw, and pin anything they want.
It’s no secret that classes get much more fun when there is good visual content used. To any of your classes, you can add your own materials or the ones that you’ve found in OnClass’s Library.
Of course, nothing can be taught well if there’s no room for q&a sessions. OnClass.com lets teachers and students communicate verbally during the classes. Also, there are chat rooms where everyone can text their question and get a quick answer from the teacher.
Set Your Price for Your Knowledge
Last but not least. OnClass.com lets you set your own price for your courses — whatever you think is best for you.
To get more students, teachers have all the tools to promote themselves. For example, you can have your own blog to broaden your audience, find new students, and increase your income. Another promotion tool is the Library — every teacher can add their materials to it under their name.
Not only students get grades though. Students can rate their teachers and leave reviews on the classes they’ve had. This way, every teacher has their rating and based on it, people choose whether they want or not to buy their courses.
By the way, teachers with good ratings and many students get access to an additional promo tool. They can integrate promo materials into their classes and get additional income.
Now OnClass.com is free — everyone can sign in a start teaching right away. No fees, no difficult verifications, no hours of preparations needed! Soon the platform will be translated into 70 languages to make the student database even bigger!
#online #education #school #teachers
|
https://medium.com/@onclass/onclass-taking-e-learning-to-the-next-level-6f0b707629b2
|
['Onclass Edu']
|
2020-12-08 21:49:27.338000+00:00
|
['Online Education', 'Tutorial', 'Teachers', 'Elearning', 'Remote Working']
|
Handling Class Imbalance by Introducing Sample Weighting in the Loss Function
|
“Nobody is Perfect” This quote not just applies to us humans but also the data that surrounds us. Any data science practitioner needs to understand all of the imperfections present in the data and handle them accordingly in order to get the desired results. Once such imperfection is the inherent Class Imbalance which is highly prevalent in most of the real world datasets. In this blog we will cover different Sample Weighting schemes that can be applied to any Loss Function in order to cater to the Class Imbalance present in your data.
What is the Class Imbalance Problem?
The Class Imbalance problem is a problem that plagues most of the Machine Learning/Deep Learning Classification problems. It occurs when there are one or more classes (majority classes) that are more frequent occurring than the other classes (minority classes). Simply put, there is a skewness towards the majority class.
Consider the following dataset which we will use as the running example throughout this blog. This dataset contains 29 classes for a Multi Label Multi Class Text Classification problem.
As you can see, although not major but this dataset has a slight imbalance, where classes like category_6, category_4, category_27 can be considered as the majority classes and category_7, category_3, category_20 etc can be considered as minority classes.
Why is Class Imbalance a Problem?
So far, we have looked and understood what is the Class Imbalance Problem. But why is it a problem? What is the need to overcome this problem?
Most of the Machine Learning algorithms are based on the inherent assumption that the data is balanced, i.e., the data is equally distributed among all of its classes. When training a model on an imbalanced dataset, the learning becomes biased towards the majority classes. With more number of examples available to learn from, the model learns to perform well on the majority classes but due to the lack of enough examples the model fails to learn meaningful patterns that could aid it in learning the minority classes.
Let us look at how a RoBERTa Sequence Classification model performs on this dataset. Based on our business problem, we consider F0.5 as the evaluation metric which is a harmonic mean of Precision and Recall where Precision is considered twice as important as Recall.
The image above shows how most of the minority classes report a poor performance compared to most of the majority classes.
Why not simply ReSample the data differently?
One of most prominent methods for handling Class Imbalance in a dataset is to perform Undersampling for the Majority Classes or Oversampling for the minority classes.
When we perform Undersampling for the Majority Class, we essentially remove certain number of samples associated with the Majority classes. Oversampling for minority classes on the other hand entails repetition of samples associated with the minority classes.
Although either of the two strategies balance out the dataset, it does not directly tackle the issues caused by Class Imbalance, rather it risks introducing new issues. Since Oversampling introduces duplicate samples, it could easily slow down the training and also lead to overfitting in a model. Undersampling on the other hand removes certain number of samples. This could lead to the model missing out on learning certain important concepts that it could have learnt from the samples that were removed as a result of Undersampling.
So what we could do to overcome these issues is to play around with our Loss Function. We could essentially apply different weights to the loss computed for different samples based on the class these samples belong to. Let’s look at this in detail in the section below.
Sample Weighting in Loss Function
Introducing Sample Weights in the Loss Function is a pretty simple and neat technique for handling Class Imbalance in your training dataset. The idea is to weigh the loss computed for different samples differently based on whether they belong to the majority or the minority classes. We essentially want to assign a higher weight to the loss encountered by the samples associated with minor classes.
Let’s consider a Loss Function for our Multi Label Classification running example. I used PyTorch’s implementation of Binary Cross Entropy: torch.nn.BCEWithLogitLoss which combines a Sigmoid Layer and the Binary Cross Entropy loss for numerical stability and can be expressed mathematically as:
Often times, people get confused between Wn_c(weights) and Pc(pos_weights). Wn_c(weights) are the Sample Weights while Pc(pos_weights) are the Class Weights.
It’s Wn_c which is the Sample Weight that we wish to compute for every sample in a batch which enables us to weigh the contribution of a particular sample towards the overall loss. It can be assigned using the argument ‘weight’ and has to be a Tensor of size N*C (C is Total Number of Classes). ‘pos_weights’ is just the weight for positive examples which is determined based on proportion of samples labeled as a particular class. It weighs the contribution of a particular class towards the loss and must be a vector with length equal to the number of classes. As explained clearly in the Pytorch Documentation: “if a dataset contains 100 positive and 300 negative examples of a single class, then pos_weight for the class should be equal to 300/100 =3 . The loss would act as if the dataset contains 3×100=300 positive examples.” Therefore pos_weight in way acts as if we have resampled the data to account for the class imbalance.
There are different weighting schemes that can be used to compute this Sample Weight. As a part of this project, I tried three different weighting schemes. Inverse of Number of Samples and Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples are two of the most simplistic and popular weighting schemes. The third one that I tried is a relatively new Weighting Scheme known as Effective Number of Samples weighting scheme.
Inverse of Number of Samples (INS)
As the name suggests, we weight the samples as the inverse of the class frequency for the class they belong to.
The function above shows a simple implementation that computes the weights and normalizes them over different classes. The lines of code below normalizes these sample weights across a batch of samples.
Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples (ISNS)
Here we weight the samples as the inverse of the Square Root of class frequency for the class they belong to.
Rest of the implementation details related to normalization remains the same as that of INS.
Effective Number of Samples (ENS)
This weighting scheme was introduced in the CVPR’19 paper by Google: Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples. As seen in the weighting schemes above, the re-weighting strategies rely on the total number of samples present in each class. This paper on the other hand introduces a weighting scheme that relies on the “Effective Number of Samples”. As described in the paper the authors argue that:
“as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula (1−β^n)/(1−β), where n is the number of samples and β ∈ [0, 1) is a hyperparameter”
The authors suggest experimenting with different beta values: 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, 0.9999.
Putting it all together:
Finally, let us see how these different weighting schemes performed for our running example. Here’s what I was able to achieve by trying out different Sample Weighing Schemes (INS: Inverse Number of Samples, ISNS: Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples, ENS: Inverse of Effective Number of Samples)
The best performance of 76.122% F0.5 was achieved with INS as the weighting scheme. This is 2.5% improvement over the model trained on the same dataset without any weighting schemes (73.422% F0.5).
Comparing this model with a model trained without any weighting scheme, we achieve a 2.5% improvement. But it is important for us to see whether this improvement is coming from the majority classes or minority classes? Has the model really become better for minority classes or not? The graph below will help us answer that question.
So if you observe the graph above you will find the percentage change in the F0.5, precision and recall for all the 29 classes, sorted in the order of support (frequency) for each class. You can clearly see how we have improved way more for minority classes which clearly shows how the inverse number of samples weighting scheme works better here.
The ISNS and ENS weighting schemes usually work well in case of extreme class imbalance which is not really the case with our dataset. Therefore, a simple weighting scheme such as INS works the best here.
Conclusion
In this blog, we read about the Class Imbalance problem and how it can adversely affect a model’s learning. We then saw how the simple resampling techniques such as Oversampling or Undersampling can only make the existing problem worse by either overfitting or by missing out on learning important concepts. We finally explored different weighting schemes and how we can apply them to solve the Class Imbalance issue.
About Me: Graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from ASU. I am a NLP Scientist at GumGum. I am interested in applying Machine Learning/Deep Learning to provide some structure to the unstructured data that surrounds us.
|
https://medium.com/gumgum-tech/handling-class-imbalance-by-introducing-sample-weighting-in-the-loss-function-3bdebd8203b4
|
['Ishan Shrivastava']
|
2020-12-17 00:18:08.220000+00:00
|
['Roberta', 'Deep Learning', 'Class Imbalance', 'Loss Function', 'NLP']
|
Bernie’s Path Forward
|
After a New Hampshire win, Bernie faces new challenges
Bernie’s New Hampshire win has solidified his status as the front runner. He’s won the most votes in the first two contests, and by all accounts, he’s on his way to another win in Nevada, where Joe Biden has apparently given up (he flew directly to South Carolina instead yesterday) and where Elizabeth Warren has canceled her ads.
Still, the win wasn’t quite as big as the polls predicted. And looking into the exit polls, there are some warning signs for Bernie going forward. Here’s a snapshot of New Hampshire’s 2020 voters, when asked who they supported back in 2016.
There’s several pieces of bad news for Bernie here. First, even though he won New Hampshire last time by 20 points, Clinton’s voters showed up by a wider margin last night. Meaning Bernie’s voters showed up at a much smaller rate than four years ago. Given how heavily Bernie organized in New Hampshire, it's hard to imagine this trend changing going forward.
Bernie also didn’t convert many Clinton people to his side, earning just 12% of their vote. And among voters who didn’t show up 4 years ago, Bernie placed a distant third, with only 14%. Among Bernie’s 2016 supporters, he held onto 57% of their vote — not really an overwhelming margin.
Biden and Warren had bad nights, but Bernie doesn’t seem poised to gain much if they collapse further. Most of their support came from former Clinton supporters, and only a fraction came from those who previously voted Bernie.
What about Biden’s famous support from black voters? He’s losing it — but not to Bernie. Instead, Bloomberg has managed to rise to 2nd place among black voters.
Meanwhile, Bernie is still getting the cold shoulder from the media, the Democratic establishment, and even some labor unions. Even as he was winning in New Hampshire, the Nevada culinary union decided to blast him with misleading mailers, claiming his health care plan would “take away” their member’s benefits. (In reality, ‘Berniecare’ would be better than any member plan and would automatically provide all union members with substantial raises.)
So, amid all of these warning signs, what is Bernie’s path forward? Well, those exit polls did show one great strength for Bernie, the Latino vote.
If Bernie continues to do this well with Latinos, he will win big in Nevada, and likely earn many delegates in California and Texas. Beyond that, Bernie has to hope a few things go his way.
First, he has to hope that Pete Buttigieg can’t find a way to earn support among minorities. Nevada and South Carolina are far less white than Iowa and New Hampshire, and the Super Tuesday states are similarly diverse. If Pete (and Amy Klobuchar) are only successful at earning the support of upscale, moderate white voters, they likely won’t win a single state in the next dozen contests.
Second, Bernie needs Bloomberg to face more scrutiny. Late yesterday, an audiotape emerged, revealing that Bloomberg told the NYPD to deliberately target minority neighborhoods for random searches because “that’s where all the crime is.” Once Bloomberg becomes a real candidate and starts to have his record scrutinized, his support may start to crumble.
Third, the moderate vote needs to continue to be split. At this point, all of the other major candidates should be considered “moderate,” since all of them are primarily relying on Clinton 2016 voters. If they split in just the right way, with multiple rivals falling below the 15% threshold, Bernie could win a solid majority of delegates on Super Tuesday even if he only wins by a modest margin. That didn’t happen in New Hampshire, since both Pete and Amy managed to snag a decent haul. But if New Hampshire was half Latino, Bernie would have received as many delegates as Pete and Amy combined.
|
https://jaredplotkin.medium.com/bernies-path-forward-9710881e672e
|
['Jared Plotkin']
|
2020-02-12 18:05:33.859000+00:00
|
['Bernie Sanders', 'Exit Polls', 'Election 2020', 'Politics', 'Voting']
|
“Press” Premieres on PBS Oct 6
|
Image Credit: IMDb.com
Public Television
“Press” Premieres on PBS Oct 6
Journalism drama reflects real-world U.K. newspaper life
What is Press About?
Press revolves around two rival fictional British newspapers, The Herald and The Post, and their staff.
Even though the BBC has a well-established reputation for high-quality period dramas, one should not underestimate what it can do with contemporary set productions.
Journalists at The Herald, a left-leaning broadsheet newspaper, look to write serious hard-hitting news content without compromising journalistic integrity.
In Wendy Bolt’s words, the people at The Herald think it is “a prize-winning crusading liberal lefty paper exposing hypocrisy and corruption.”
During the first episode, Bolt, played by Susannah Wise, was seen undercover at The Herald. She was there to dig up dirt on the journalistically honest broadsheet for The Post.
Although Evans describes Bolt as a “provocative twenty-first-century icon,” Edwards more accurately referenced the author as “a toxic right-wing troll.” From the way Edwards speaks of Bolt, you would be forgiven for thinking The Herald’s investigative reporter was referencing real-life Fox News commentators.
Directed by Tom Vaughan, in the era of digital media and the 24-hour news cycle, the six-part series highlights the changing nature and growth of modern journalism. Media is truly the industry that never sleeps.
Who is in the Press Cast?
Holly Evans, played by Charlotte Riley, is the deputy news editor at The Herald. Constantly annoyed by the easily correctable errors she sees being published, the news editor believes The Herald’s content should be accurate and without reproach.
The editor of The Post, more concerned with filling pages with populist entertainment dribble than hard-hitting news content, is Duncan Allen.
“We do the news,” Allen said, “but we cheer people up.”
Allen, played by Ben Chaplin, has virtually zero home life because of the commitment he has to his career.
The broadsheet shares a building with The Post.
The Post, owned by Worldwide News CEO George Emmerson, is a tabloid publication suggestive of the U.K.’s newspaper The Sun.
It’s therefore not surprising the tabloid’s CEO, played by Poirot actor David Suchet, is reminiscent of real-world media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
With both publications reporting on the same stories from different angles, the tabloid staff are more interested in getting the scoop than they are with moral and ethical standards.
According to Evans, The Post is “sexist sensationalism that doesn’t check it’s facts.”
Further to Riley, Chaplin and Suchet, “Press” also stars Priyanga Burford, Al Weaver, Ellie Kendrick, Brendan Cowell, and Shane Zaza as Amina Chaudury, James Edwards, Leona Manning-Lynd, Peter Langly and Raz Kane, respectively.
Is there a Trailer?
|
https://medium.com/harsh-light-news/press-premieres-on-pbs-oct-6-c8940565fdb6
|
['Shain E. Thomas']
|
2019-09-24 12:37:47.721000+00:00
|
['Pbs', 'Journalism', 'BBC', 'Drama']
|
Magical Thinking: Legions
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Welcome back to Magical Thinking, a look at the cards and art of Magic: the Gathering, set by set, from the beginning. All through the eyes of a casual fan. This week we look at the second expansion from the Onslaught block, Legions.
Released in February of 2003, Legions continues the story of Kamahl, who has joined forces with the Cabal to stop the encroachment of Akroma, who continues her crusade against the Cabal. Meanwhile the mad scientists of the Riptide Project have resurrected the Slivers, last seen in the Weatherlight saga, so now we have Slivers creeping around again. Will Akroma be stopped? Or will a new threat rise to menace Dominaria? Well it’s only part two of the block so I’m betting the latter.
And here she is, probably one of the most powerful creatures Magic had made at the time. Look at all those keywords. LOOK AT THEM. Who could possibly stand up to all those keywords. Ixidor really broke the bank when he made her (Of course he based her off his dead girlfriend, so extra helping of creepy there).
Ixidor may be dead, but the morph mechanic lives on. I was informed after last week’s article that I was correct, the weird spider things that things morph out of are the creations of Ixidor that his creations hatch out of. Of course that begs the question of why Akroma isn’t a morph creature. Also, still not a fan of that wicker armor.
Um, what happened to your mouth there, buddy? Amplify is a new mechanic introduced here in Legions. It’s basically what you see here. You reveal cards from your hand and buff the creature. I think Amplify only ever showed up in this set, and I can’t even find it on the storm scale. This is the keyword Wizards forgot.
And we got slivers,people. And a pretty good one to start off with. I can’t tell if it has one arm or no head. Weird.
Here is another new mechanic. Provoke. Basically you can use it to make your opponents take unfavorable trades. This ability is on the storm scale at a 9, so don’t expect to see it again any time soon. Easy to see why because it’s a pretty broken ability.
There’s a “Donald Trump will soon be gone” joke in here somewhere, but for the life of me I can’t articulate it. Sorry folks.
Well we didn’t waste any time making sure the Riptide wizards got their comeuppance for unleashing the Slivers again. I mean, you could have had some buildup. I know it’s the B plot but come on.
Red Lobsters in Dominaria are very dangerous places. The Shellfish allergies would be the least of your worries dealing with that bad boy.
I really like this card. As you all know, I am a huge mark for mill, and a card that punishes opponents for having big hands is a big win for me (Especially since I tend to get to topdeck mode pretty quickly, even with a mill deck).
I have vague memories of this card from my college days. I think the guy who ran the Scalplexis deck used them, and they were very annoying. Also, what is he doing to that guy? His head is in a bubble but his eyes are bugging out. Creepy.
Hey buddy, you wanna buy some profound mystical truths? First one’s free. Are we suddenly in that one season of Buffy that treated magic like crack?
And here we have the king of the mistforms, with the prototype ability that would eventually become changeling. I bring this up because the Kaldheim previews started last week and it looks like Changeling and shapeshifters are making a big comeback. So thank you Mistform Ultimus, you crawled so others could walk.
It’s weird that it took us this long to get flying monkeys in Magic. We got flying hippos before we got flying monkeys.
This looks like it would make an awesome water park if we’re being honest. I think Ixidor went into the wrong business. Think about it: Come to Ixidor Land! Ride the Wall of Deceit water slide! get your picture taken with Akroma, Angel of Wrath! swim with the Mistform Ultimus! Ixidor Land, the happiest place on Dominaria.
On the rpg.net message board (where I am a regular) there is a term for very depressing stories. It’s called the Black Bug Room. It’s a reference to an X-Men comic, but if I had a black bug room, this is what would be in it. Because that is a black bug if ever I saw one.
Behold! My newest invention: the zombie magnet. It attracts every zombie in a fifty mile radius and then OHGODNO. Also, I would question the wisdom of letting a zombie practice wizardry, but apparently this is what would become the creature type for Liches in Magic so lets go with it.
Ewww, maybe they should invest in Mop and Bucket Dead to go along with him, am I right?
The Gempalm are a series of cycling creatures which have different effects based on what tribe they represent and how many creatures in that tribe when you cycle them. I’m using Polluter to represent them on the whole because he’s the best and because I’ve actually used him in a deck in Arena. He also represents zombies, which are one of my favorite Magic tribes. He’s a super powerful finisher if you have a lot of zombies out, and since it’s a cycle effect your opponent can’t counter it easily.
We haven’t seen Specters in a good long while. Magic specters are basically the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings when they traded up to those big flying beasts near the end of the story. Eventually we will meet the Archons, who are the opposite of the Specters, but that won’t be for a long time.
And here we are, one of the hardest commanders to play ever (Since your command zone doesn’t count as your hand so if you just play them from the command zone you lose). I used to have a copy of this card but lost it at some point, which is a shame because I love me some Phage. She’s literally the ultimate killing machine. She kills you, she kills your opponent, she kills anything that touches her. So of course the novel ends with Kamahl killing her (again) and her and Akroma and another lady Zagorka merging together into a false God. Oops.
Aren’t all Slivers already kind of sharp and pointy? I mean, it’s kind of their thing.
Yep, that ol’ Mirari is still making trouble it seems. Again, there is a cycle of these guys, a mutant of each color and tribe, which does something cool for eight mana, but I personally like this one the best. And again I use this one in my IRL Goblin deck.
Oh, those Goblins! They’re so wacky and destructive. I really dig the flavor where this assassin is just randomly killing targets (via sacrifice) until they get the right one. If it works it works, right?
LAST TIME ON DRAGONBALL Z! GOKU AND VEGETA’S GAME OF MAGIC: THE GATHERING TOOK A WILD TURN WHEN GOKU THREW DOWN THE GOBLIN DYNAMO. NOW HE’S CHARGING UP FOR AN ALL OUT ATTACK. WILL VEGETA COUNTER IT IN TIME? FIND OUT TODAY ON DRAGONBALL Z!
That was for everyone who watched Toonami as a kid. You’re welcome.
Hey, it’s another Amplify card. And this time it’s a much bigger one. Also, that’s a weird name. Kilnmouth. So does that mean it glazes pottery when it’s not laying waste to the battlefield. Man, imagine the planeswalker who summons one of these things just to help out their pottery class. That would be badass.
Look! It’s a mechanic introduced in this set that wasn’t immediately discarded. Double Strike is now an evergreen mechanic and it shows up everywhere, as rightly it should because it’s great. Amplify and Provoke were both wet thuds but this one knocked it out of the park. I tip my hat to you, Double Strike.
I like this card, and its flavor. It demonstrates a natural progression: Ixidor is gone, but he left behind a ton of morphs, so it stands to reason some wizards would figure out how to exploit them.
Heh. I know I said I wasn’t a fan of Morph before, but this one might win me over. Everyone has a plan until a goblin pops out of a clay spider.
This whole sliver subplot is like if you crossed Jurassic Park with Alien. Two bad ideas that go apocalyptically together. I mean, the last time we had something like this it was when they invented Thrulls on Sarpadia, and we all know how that ended.
You shall stand and be judged by the Bear Council for the crime of hanging food from trees. Repent your sins (And hand over your picnic baskets).
Wow, Amplify AND Provoke. Want to maybe throw Bands on there as well as long as we’re shoveling flash-in-the-pan mechanics on this poor thing.
Imagine having that pop out of your clay spider. Those things are like Kinder eggs only they can kill you.
You know, with all the people exploiting those little morph spiders, it’s nice to see someone is stepping up to protect them.
Well that’s fine. I’m pretty sure Dominaria averages like one apocalypse a century.
And here we have the latest entry of “creatures shown on a Magic card that aren’t actually creatures”, this time featuring Fat Pig Thing and Blue Bunny. I’m pretty sure that blue thing is the “baby” from Eraserhead all grown up.
And with that pleasant thought I think it’s time we bring this to a close. That’s right, no artifacts, no multicolor cards, no land. Just five colors. In any case, join us next time when we finish off the Onslaught block with the final expansion: Scourge. See you then, stay Magical, and happy holidays!
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https://medium.com/there-will-be-games/magical-thinking-legions-af4bee1bad48
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['Jessie Staffler']
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2020-12-25 07:40:30.325000+00:00
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['Magic The Gathering', 'Gaming', 'Game Art', 'Board Games', 'Game Design']
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5 Tips to Get Her Back If She’s Slipping Away
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5 Tips to Get Her Back If She’s Slipping Away
Before you lose your relationship, try these.
Photo by Sam Burrisson Unsplash
Your relationship started strong, but the honeymoon phase is long gone. You knew that that was coming, but it somehow seems worse than you ever thought possible.
Now, she’s slipping away from you and you don’t know why.
It’s not like you expected the two of you to stay madly in love for the rest of your lives. The infatuation that brought you together at first was bound to fade one day, but after it did, happy companionship was eventually replaced by short patience, contempt, and even resentment.
You’re fine with having sex slightly less often, but you wish the lovemaking wasn’t so infrequent, and as lukewarm as it’s been lately.
You don’t want to lose your relationship. It’s not as if you suddenly realized you’re not a good match, there’s still a solid foundation — and you believe that’s worth fighting for.
The state of your relationship might not be entirely your fault, but it’s your responsibility. You do have the power to rekindle the romance, to make adjustments to bring the two of you closer together.
The good news is, if she sees you trying hard, chances are she’ll be inspired to try as well, and you’ll end up finding your way back to each other.
Be there
I recently dated a man who shared a piece of interesting advice he received from his mother: “Don’t leave your woman alone. If you let her sleep alone in bed, she’ll find someone else to keep her company.”
The advice is, of course, more than about sleeping arrangements — there are, after all, couples who find happiness sleeping in separate rooms — it’s about being there for your partner and not letting loneliness take over.
Sadly, too many men tend to withdraw from their partners when things aren’t going well. They work late even though they have no serious reason to stay in the office one minute overtime; they spend more time at the bar with friends than taking their partner out on date night; they spend twenty minutes inside the car parked in the driveway before summoning the courage to walk home at the end of the day.
They favor falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV instead of going to bed and keeping their partner company.
You don’t withdraw to be mean, it’s a defense mechanism. You’re protecting yourself from pain. You know you have your reasons, the atmosphere at home isn’t great. She’s been cold and distant. When she talks to you, it’s only to list everything you’re not doing for her and/or your family, which only makes you feel like a failure and withdraw even further.
Withdrawing might be how you protect yourself, but it doesn't help the situation. When you withdraw, you communicate to her you don’t want her company, and she feels rejected. She gets the message that you don’t want to face the issues of your relationship and that since you’re not listening, she should try harder to be heard, which only increases the nagging and the scolding — on the rare occasions you’re actually there for her to nag and scold.
Instead of withdrawing, be there. Come home right away at the end of the day. Turn off the TV and go to bed with her. Hug her and kiss goodnight. Put your phone down when she’s talking and really listen.
Be there, be present. Show her no matter how hard things get, you’re not going anywhere. Show her she doesn’t have to seek company anywhere else because she’s not alone.
Be there for her before she gets unbearably lonely — and decides the way to fix her loneliness is by leaving you.
Take some time to recharge, but make sure to always come back
Of course, you need time to recharge, we all do.
The difference between taking some much-needed time to recharge and withdrawing lies exactly in coming back.
Spending a Friday night with just the guys, or going on a hike by yourself is perfectly fine, as long as you make sure to come back to her afterward. But don’t come back to sit on the couch watching TV as if she wasn’t there, come back to spend some quality time together.
When you come back, be there. Be present.
Show her you can balance taking time for yourself and being there for her.
Leave room for silence
Relationships require tough conversations. Sometimes you need to sit in silence for a while for the hard stuff to come out.
In your anxiety to help, to solve the problem at hand, you might be too quick to offer a string of solutions. You’re too eager to ease the pain and too uncomfortable sitting there in silence, waiting for someone to say something.
You want to be her hero, so when she starts talking about her most recent work problem, you tell her how to fix it before she’s even done explaining how the situation makes her feel.
“Someone took my lunch from the fridge at work again,” she tells you.
“Well, I told you to start labeling your food, why didn’t you do that?” You reply. “Do you know who did it?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure it was Steve. He’s never liked me much, he’s always cutting me off in meetings — “
“ — You should just point-blank ask him,” you cut her off, reaching for the remote and turning on the TV. The conversation is over, at least on your end.
“Yeah, yeah… Maybe next time I will,” she says and leaves the room to take care of something in the bedroom.
You feel good, you solved her problem. She feels you think she’s incompetent for not knowing how to label her own food and weak for not confronting the people who antagonize her. She feels worse off than before, and it’s likely she regrets even bringing it up. Next time, she won’t.
If you had waited to hear the rest of the story you might have learned how she stood up to her rude coworker and held her ground in the meeting that morning, but since you didn’t leave room for silence and cut her off, she didn’t get to that part.
She doesn’t want to have to insist on some space to express herself. Not at home, not with you. She already does that a lot everywhere else with other people, she’s tired.
Sometimes, you have to let her know she’s welcome to say anything, you’re there to listen. You want her to vent, to explain her frustrations, and to find comfort in knowing you empathize with her struggles.
Stop believing what you have to say is more important, and leave some room for silence so she can fill it with her thoughts and feelings for a change.
Ask the right questions
Don’t ask, “Why didn't you?”
Ask, “How can I?”
How can I help? Is there anything I can do? How do you feel about it? What do you want to do?
These questions show her that you’re there, you’re listening, and you genuinely want to make her feel better, not jam a solution down her throat so she’ll shut up faster.
Mind the small daily rejections
You don’t have to reject your partner outright to cause her pain. Small daily rejections add up, and they can be as harmful in the long run as a big, blow-out fight in the short term.
Small rejections look like not calling to let her know you have to work late and won’t be home in time for dinner, not putting your phone away when she’s trying to tell you something important, not thanking her for doing her share of the housework — however big or small that is.
Small daily rejections add up to you taking your partner for granted. To avoid that, make an effort to be mindful of her, and thankful for everything good she brings into your life.
Bonus tip: consider professional help
The advice above is valid but generic. To fix specific problems in your relationship you should consider seeking help that’s tailored to your specific needs as a couple.
Professional help isn’t a guarantee of a perfect relationship, but it’s a safe space for you to have necessary, productive conversations and begin to find a way to work things out.
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https://medium.com/hello-love/5-tips-to-get-her-back-if-shes-slipping-away-4ab7d27c0c4f
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['Renata Gomes']
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2020-12-28 16:27:18.263000+00:00
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['Relationships', 'Love', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Life Lessons']
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Props to You: “Why I Invested in Props” with CoinFund CEO and Founder Jake Brukhman [VIDEO]
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Watch all of the episodes by visiting the official “Props to You” page.
Props [props] noun slang for giving proper or due respect or recognition; credit:
Over the three years since Props Project has launched, we have worked to provide a better, more innovative way for companies to offer loyalty program rewards that create a truly synergetic incentive system. During our history as a company, we have been able to show that blockchain can transform customer loyalty programs in a revolutionary way.
As we move forward into the next phase of Props development, we look to members of our community who help us showcase to the world why we exist, how we have evolved the loyalty program use case, and how we are bringing blockchain technology to the masses through our simple yet innovative solutions.
This week we give recognition and “props”’ to one of our early investors Jake Brukhman, CEO and founder of CoinFund, a private crypto asset investor and blockchain research and advisory firm.
Tech innovation is not a new foray for Jake. Before diving full time into crypto, he served as head of Amazon’s technical products from 2012 to 2014, and then as partner and CTO of Triton Research, an independent financial data and intelligence firm.
We sat down with Jake to learn more about why he believes in blockchain innovation, what he considers the key indicators of the best blockchain investments, and why he decided to support the Props Project from so early on.
Meet CoinFund CEO and Props Investor — Jake Brukhman
Name: Jake Bruhkman Blockchain Level: Advanced Props Affiliation: Early investor of the blockchain loyalty program Props Project through his investment firm CoinFund
Props Team:
How did you get connected with the Props Project?
Jake Brukhman:
I founded CoinFund, which is a crypto and blockchain investment firm based in New York City and through the firm became an early investor in Props.
Props Team:
Tell us about your background investing in crypto companies.
Jake:
I started investing in crypto companies when I founded CoinFund back in 2015. I’m a technologist who studied mathematics and computer science, so I naturally got into blockchain technology pretty early. I got my first Bitcoin in 2011, was following its theory coming to market in the early days, and have been working on blockchain investments full time for the last five years or so.
Props Team:
Why were you attracted to the Props Project?
Jake:
We decided to invest in Props in 2017 because it was one of the first consumer technology companies with a vision to use blockchain technology to deploy solutions within their existing consumer-focused business. As the team also had veteran leaders with decades of experience running streaming service technology, it was clear they had always been thinking progressively. Props’ CEO Adi has had a proven track record of creating and exiting successful innovative technology solutions like YouNow, which felt like a really good fit for the firm.
Additionally, they’re one of the first projects in the world to receive a Reg A+ approval from the SEC, creating a compliance-first approach to their products. Today they are on a mission to help third party companies do the same thing with their networks as Props did for YouNow, giving their communities partial ownership of those networks.
Props Team:
As a veteran in the crypto investing world, how do you think the Props Project compares to the larger ecosystem?
Jake:
The Props team is incredibly strong in many ways. Two predominant areas that distinguish Props from other projects is their technical competency and their business development acumen.
Technologically they have been working on one of the most interesting structures of progressive decentralization while also tackling compliance designations. They’ve handled issues of scalability very well. On their partner networks, they’re serving so much more volume than your typical pre-mainstream adoption product and blockchain. There’s a lot of fundamental activity on the network itself in terms of staking, active participation, and serving actual customers.
They’ve also been incredible at communicating their value proposition and getting partners on board. They have been able to maintain a strong community and network, and work in a business development capacity with different participants of that network.
Props Team:
Why should the mainstream consumer population care about governance models baked within Props?
Jake:
Governance in a blockchain network provides the ability for token holders to benefit from the rights they have to govern. Props holders should care about governance because as this is a public network owned and operated by users, this allows these users to have a say in how the ecosystem develops. It’s like being in a democracy.
Why should we vote in an election? Because we care about our government and we care about the decisions that our government makes. With Props, we care about the parameters that are set; the technical yields and financial consequences, the brand of the network and the broader community of these products on Props. This is a hugely democratic opportunity for people to technologically participate in this cutting edge technology.
Props Team:
When you are talking to someone new about Props, how do you typically describe it to them?
Jake:
Today Props is a way in which a centralized company or product could be decentralized. It’s a way of creating a branded token and enabling community ownership, enabling increased loyalty in their networks — creating a larger “ownership economy” within their ecosystem. It’s fairly easy to buy people’s attention, but it’s generally much harder to buy people’s loyalty. You can give someone a monetary award for their attention, but to truly get them to care about a product or a community, you need to make them partial owners of the community.
This is what we see in blockchain as being one of the core value propositions of governance tokens. If we were to translate this into real world terms, this is akin to Uber paying Uber drivers with Uber stock. If Uber does really well, those drivers don’t just benefit from doing the hard physical labor of driving, but also from the overall performance of the company. And in the case with Props, it would be the overall performance of the network. At the core of the idea, community ownership is a really effective way of increasing engagement from customers and users, and we’ve shown that using metrics.
Props Team:
As an investor, what are the most important things you look at when making an investment decision?
Jake:
The team is absolutely one of the most important aspects. As an investor, I’ve learned that the two most important things in early stage projects is number one, the team: who they are, their experiences, how they’re able to navigate a space that changes rapidly, especially in blockchain. The other most important thing is timing. Is the time right for decentralized finance? Is the timing right for digital art on the blockchain? Is it right for decentralized governance on the blockchain? What we see is a lot of people have amazing ideas that come to market, but they can be too early, or too late. You have got to have the right timing.
When I think about Props, I’m thinking about a powerhouse team that has navigated technological issues of the space, evolving from newbies in early 2017 to deep subject matter experts today. I’ve seen them evaluate a number of blockchains and technologies for their product. I’ve seen them iterate through those things quickly and effectively. It’s fantastic to watch. And of course, the leader of the team, Adi, has been great. He’s a veteran of the technology industry at large. This really is one of my favorite teams in the blockchain space.
Props Team:
What excites you most about this project in coming months and years?
Jake:
The team has navigated a tremendously challenging and ever-changing environment and have arrived at a product and a model that’s very timely for the market. This is a time when a lot of traditional companies and the government are looking at leveraging the blockchain space.
Props is extremely well positioned to be one of the primary touch points for these products and companies looking for blockchain integrations. As an ecosystem, we’ve built up a lot of these infrastructural tools and blockchains, and are now ready to roll out some real consumer-facing features that can actually be used. It feels like we have been building toward early consumers, early mainstream adoption of blockchain, and with Props, we are finally almost there.
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https://blog.propsproject.com/props-to-you-why-i-invested-in-props-with-coinfund-ceo-and-founder-jake-brukhman-dcdceb8ca0e0
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['Props Project']
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2020-11-18 19:50:59.604000+00:00
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['Blockchain Investment', 'Martech', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Loyalty Rewards Program']
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An Instant Classic: “My Octopus Teacher”
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An Instant Classic: “My Octopus Teacher”
This documentary will change your life
I have just watched a fascinating documentary about an octopus, but it has been so much more than I expected. “My Octopus Teacher” is a film about the ocean, underwater creatures, ecology, curiosity, creativity, wildlife, sea forests, spirituality, nature, and interconnectedness.
Craig Foster is a diver and wildlife filmmaker who was in a dark and stressful period in his life. He begins his therapy by diving the dark waters of the ocean in Western Cape and learns to develop a deeper appreciation of his natural surroundings. He explores how he is connected to the world around him.
In particular, Craig becomes obsessed with this octopus. One day, Craig sees a strange shape on the ocean floor: An octopus is covered with an armor of rocks and shells. He decides there is a lot to learn here and he dives and visits the den of the octopus every day.
Craig decides to follow the life of this octopus for over 300 days. Eventually, the octopus realizes that Craig is not a threat, but a friend. The octopus allows Craig into her life. Both Craig and the octopus are very curious and it is a symbiotic dance of mutual learning and exploration. Craig spends a lot of time with the octopus, develops this amazing empathy and gentleness, and learns a great deal about life, nature, and interconnectedness. Watch the trailer here:
Craig’s underwater journey is a breathtaking one. He finds a new passion to explore life beneath the water and connects with an octopus in a pretty amazing way. It is a love story and it shows you what happens when you care about, learn from, and interact with an octopus. It is such an emotional story that you find yourself mysteriously attracted to this strange underwater creature and this sea forest.
There are all these heartwarming and heartbreaking moments about the life of this octopus. You learn how she becomes a hunter at night, how she saves herself from the shark attacks through the most incredible methods, how she interacts with her habitat, how she reproduces, and how she dies. You learn about the enormous creativity and intelligence of this animal that was sharpened through millions of years of evolution. The connection you feel is so deep and creative that you might find yourself crying.
This film is truly a gift for your humanity, your curiosity, and your spirit. The cinematography is fascinating — it is a feast for your eyes and soul. It reminds you of how we are all in this wonderful world together and sharing the wonders of this life and nature. It is so easy to miss and forget the magic of all. We should boldly immerse ourselves within the natural world so that we become a harmonious part of it.
Each life is very fragile, precious, beautiful, and interconnected. Therefore, we must cherish and protect the life of each living being on this planet.
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https://medium.com/journal-of-curiosity-imagination-and-inspiration/an-instant-classic-my-octopus-teacher-6e7555a2026a
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['Fahri Karakas']
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2020-09-24 19:36:38.981000+00:00
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['Nature', 'Creativity', 'Life Lessons', 'Culture', 'Life']
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bloXroute’s Value Model (from Milliseconds to $): The Uniswap Case
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By bloXroute Co-Founder and Chief Architect Professor Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
bloXroute recently launched our DeFi tool kit. One of the tools we offer is fast propagation. Here we estimate the value in USD that bloXroute’s fast propagation of transactions brings to bloXroute’s users. We will focus on a single popular DeFi application — Uniswap, though a similar model might be applicable to other DeFi applications.
Takeway: bloXroute is currently sending transactions 150–900ms faster (depending on the node infrastructure used) and this can translate to 2–12% improvement in one’s trading strategy.
Uniswap Background
Uniswap is an Ethereum-based exchange that allows anyone to swap ERC20 tokens. Traditionally token swaps require buyers and sellers to create liquidity, while Uniswap creates markets automatically.
A Uniswap Pool consists of two ERC20 tokens, deposited by liquidity providers, which get a fee whenever someone trades at the pool.
The price at which one can buy or sell tokens at the pool is determined using a price curve defined by x*y=k, as illustrated in the above Figure. This has several important effects:
The larger a transaction one wants to make, the worse the price she gets. Hence, users are advised to make a larger number of smaller-value transactions.
If a trade is “contested,” i.e., a larger number of users want to trade at the same contract at the same time, then those who execute sooner, i.e., in a prior block, get a better price than those who execute in a latter block.
If a user sets a slippage parameter (which determines the floor of “low” she will still accept) too conservatively, yet others manage to trade on that contract before the user, then it is possible that the user’s transaction simply won’t execute. In such a scenario the user still loses the Ethereum fee for the transaction.
Architecturally, Uniswap looks as follows:
Model Parameters
In terms of our model which we will present next, important parameters are:
Uniswap Daily Transaction Volume: Currently (8/20/20 at 2:00PM) at $287M daily (CoinGecko). The distribution of Uniswap Pairs is highly biased, i.e., the top 10 Unsiwap Pairs approximately account for 50% of the entire transaction volume. Such pairs are thus highly “contested,” i.e., if a transaction is not executed in a block, executing it in the next block will come with a loss.
Value Loss due to Trading Loss: We want to quantify the amount of loss a user has once she fails to execute her transaction or executes at a level that is still within her slippage parameter, but below the one executed by those who acted faster. Oftentimes, a failed transaction can never be executed again, and sometimes it can be executed at much worse conditions.
Model
bloXroute deploys a Blockchain Distribution Network that reduces the latency for a transaction to reach mining pools. Below, we aim to quantify how this latency reduction, expressed in milliseconds, can be quantified in terms of $, in the context of the Uniswap application.
Consider the following parameters.
Delta: The amount of time, in milliseconds, by which bloXroute transmits a transaction faster than the p2p network. In other words, it is defined as Delta = Latency_p2p — Latency_BLXR, for a transaction. While this value is variable in reality, in our model we use a constant value for simplicity.
Probability that a Uniswap user is supported by bloXroute: For bloXroute to be effective, a Uniswap transaction needs to be bloXroute-supported.
Critical Delta. In order to compute the probability that a bloXroute-supported transaction is generated during a critical period when bloXroute provides a competitive advantage to its users, we define the Critical Delta period.
Assuming the next block will be mined by a pool, consider a moment (t1 in the Figure) as the deadline for the mining pool, to decide on the contents of the block. If a bloXroute-supported transaction is sent prior to t1-Latency_BLXR, it will reach the mining pool before the deadline, hence it will be eligible to be included in the next block. At the same time, if a non-bloXroute supported transaction is generated during the CRITICAL DELTA, it will not be possible for it to be included in the next block, because it will not reach the mining pool prior to the t1 deadline.
To better understand this, consider an example shown in the next figure.
The first transaction, 1, is generated before the CRITICAL DELTA period (before t1-Latency_p2p). Thus, irrespectively if it is supported by bloXroute or not, it will arrive to the mining pool “on time,” before the next block is started to be mined. Hence, bloXroute provides no competitive advantage in this case.
The second transaction, 2, is generated during the CRITICAL DELTA, i.e., [t1-Latency_p2p, t1-Latency_BLXR]. Thus, if the transaction is bloXroute-supported, it will reach the mining pool before the deadline, hence it will be possible to include it in the next block (we assume that the mining fees and slippage parameters are set to enable this). On the other hand, if transaction 2 is not bloXroute-supported, it will arrive to the mining pool after the deadline, hence it will not be possible to include it in the next block. This is where bloXroute provides a competitive advantage.
The third transaction, 3, is generated after the CRITICAL DELTA period, i.e., after t1-Latency_BLXR. Hence, it will not make it to the mining pool on time either if it is supported by bloXroute or not. Thus, we conclude that bloXroute does not provide a competitive advantage in this scenario.
Probability that a transaction is generated during the Critical Delta for a block
Here, we want to compute the probability that a bloXroute-supported transaction is generated during the CRITICAL DELTA. We approximate this probability by CRITICAL DELTA / inter-block-time. For a fixed Delta, the shorter the inter-block time is, the larger the probability that the transaction is generated during the Critical Delta, and vice versa.
To compute this probability, we rely on a real-world distribution of inter-block times, shown below. The y-axis shows the number of inter-block events as a function of the inter-block intervals in seconds (x-axis).
In particular, we compute the probability that the transaction is generated during the Critical Delta for a block as follows.
P = Sum (Delta / inter-block-time) * Prob of the inter-block-time
The results of this computation for various values of Delta are shown in the Table below.
The results in the Table show that, for example, if the DELTA, i.e., the latency improvement of bloXroute over p2p, is 600 ms, this leads to 8% of scenarios where bloXroute will deterministically help the transaction reach the mining pool before the deadline. A 8% improvement in one’s trading strategy can lead to huge returns and savings on fees that would have otherwise been wasted on failed transactions.
bloXroute is currently sending transactions 150–900ms faster depending on the node infrastructure used.
Conclusion
Traders can take advantage of bloXroute’s high speed network to boost their trading strategies and unlock additional value. Uniswap is just one example of this. Anyone can unlock the power of faster, smarter trading today with the bloXroute BDN.
|
https://medium.com/bloxroute/bloxroutes-value-model-from-milliseconds-to-the-uniswap-case-ac1d4c6862b8
|
['Bloxroute Team']
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2020-11-17 22:37:12.419000+00:00
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['Crypto', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Technology']
|
Marge Simpson (Bouvier’s) Family Tree
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Pépé Bouvier shipped out with the Merchant Marines and married Bambi Bouvier. According to Bambi, the song Brandy was based on his life and Selma sung it to Lisa Simpson as a lullaby.
Bambi Bouvier was a flapper during her youth. She also smoked and has a drinking predicament. She tried to hide it by buying a Confederate themes Liquor Lad whisket bottle and claimed it was a family heirloom dated from the Civil War.
Clancy Bouvier is a chain smoker similar to Patty and Selma. He is the only family member of Bouvier that does not disapprove of Homer’s marriage with his daughter. He was one of the earliest male flight attendants but was ashamed of it. He had also served in teh United States Navy and developed a swearing problem because of it.
Jacqueline Bouvier is a widower and lives in Hal Roach Apartments. She has a similar personality to Selma and Patty and used to smoke as well but has quit the habit. She had a brief courtship with Grampa Simpson, but she broke up with him once she was wooed by billionaire Charles Montgomery Burns.
Alvarine Gurney disapproved of both Jacqueline’s and Marge’s choice of partner. She has a raspy voice to her even though she doesn't smoke and possess very poor eyesight.
Gladys Gurney died of bowel obstruction and a funeral was held with Simpsons along with Jacqueline, Patty and Selma in attendance. She was not rich but in teh reading of her will, she passed her potato chips collection to Marge, her pert iguana to Jacqueline and her grandfather clock that chimes about the dangers of spinsterhood to Patty and Selma.
Selma Bouvier has a raspy voice due to smoking and has been married 6 times (though the one with Fit-Fat-Tony was a lie) and has shallow standards when it comes to men. She works at the Department of Motor Vehicle alongside her sister and hates Homer. She adopted Ling Bouvier and inherited deceased Aunt Gladys’s Iguana. She has a manical love for the television show MacGyver and has an interest in travelling. She and her sister tried to quite smoking but relapse again.
Ling Bouvier was adopted by Selma and is one of the characters to grow in the series. She was a baby during her first appearance and then appeared slightly older. She displayed manual dexterity, walking and even could utter complete sentences.
Patty Bouvier or Patricia Maleficent “Patty” Bouvier is the cynical chain smoking twin-sister to Selma. They both work at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and have a strong dislike for their brother-in-law, Homer. Patty is teh middle child among the three siblings and is a lesbian and showcased tomboy tendencies as a child. She was engaged to Veronica, a professional golf player but the duo broke once Patty realised that Veronica was actually a man.
Marge Simpson is married to Homer and depicted as a kind and loving mom and wife. She is protective of her family and deeply cares about everyone. But occasionally showcases explosive outbursts of anger and doesn’t admit her wrongdoings. She has juggled various careers ranging from Mayor of Springfield, female bodybuilder and even founder and creator of Shapes, a gym for females. Througout her relationship with Homer they have experienced minor bumps and have divorced and re-married three times.
Sideshow Bob or Dr. Robert Underdunk “Bob” Terwilliger, Jr. is the secondary antagonist of the show. He was a sidekick to Krusty the Clown and also was awarded an Emmy for for his role on The Krusty the Clown Show. He started a relationship with Selma when he took part in a prison dating service. After being discharged from the prison her proposed and married Selma. But to acquire the money Selma had made in the stock market, he tried to kill her by blowing up their hotel room. His plans were thwarted and he went to prison once again.
Lionel Hutz and also goes by Miguel Sanchez, and Dr. Nguyen Van Phuoc, He is a lawyer in Springfield and is desperate for cases. He was Selma’s their husband.
Troy McClure is based off stereotypical B-Grade Hollywood has been. He had a successful career in the 70s,,but due to a peculiar reported paraphilia about him, his career went downhill. He began a relationship with Selma to cover this. To further revive his career he proposed to Selma which the latter found out but still stuck by him. But she drew the line when he suggested to bring a kid into the sham.
Disco Stu is a disco aficionado and the owner of Stu’s Disco. Before becoming a disco fan, he was Nautical Stu because of his work as a sea captain. He speaks of himself in a third-person point of view. He is Selma’s fourth husband.
Grampa Simpson is a World War II veteran and ends up falling in love with Selma when they were babysitting the children. The duo briefly married but had to call it off because of his age and her career.
Fit-Fat Tony is married but takes Selma as his official mistress (goomar) But the later mistakes the word as another title for a wife in Italian. He used to be fit, but after inheriting his cousin’s position as the mob boss of Springfield he stress eats and gains weight. He looks similar to Fat Tony now.
Source:
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https://medium.com/@wikidata/bouvier-family-2592ac76fbad
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[]
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2020-12-15 07:54:52.574000+00:00
|
['Animated', 'Simpsons', 'Bouvier', 'Family Tree', 'Cartoon']
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Poly’s Guide to Feedback on Machine Challenges
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Players can now create their own machines for Poly Challenge! Other players enrolled in the same challenge can answer the 3 questions that follow playing those machines. For some challenges, the most highly-rated machines can win prizes!
What is machine feedback?
In addition to earning Polycoins by playing others’ machines, you can now earn even more Polycoins by providing feedback to the machines you play! Each week, the leaderboard of teams with best machines will be announced.
How do I gain Polycoins for giving Feedback?
You can answer the 3 questions that follow an authored machine. The best machines are the ones that received the most positive feedback form others. The number of Polycoins you get for various actions are as follows:
One Chip=10 Polycoins All chips (machine) complete=3 Polycoins Give Feedback to a Machine=3 Polycoins Someone plays your machine =1 Polycoin per chip played
Why do I want to make good Machines?
Making machines- The better your machines are, the more your Poly friends will play them, which means even more Polycoins!! After they play, they can say whether the machine was relevant to the challenge, fun, and at the right level for them.
Challenges- Each week you will be automatically entered into your team’s challenges. Now, answering the feedback questions for machines is another fun way win for your class! Each week, winners will be selected by (1) the number of Polycoins and (2) having the best-rated Machines, as decided by your Poly-peers!
Where do I find feedback challenge machines?
If you are enrolled in a challenge, created machines will appear automatically in the “Discover Machines” page. You can spot them by the small trophy in the right hand corner of the machine before you open it. You will see two types of trophies for this machine: one for completing all the chips, and one for answering the questions. Complete all the chips, and then tap the second trophy to rate the machine. Once you are done, you will receive additional Polycoins!
Which machines have the feedback challenge?
Any machine that you create will have a feedback challenge if you tag it with the challenge name — for example, #AVID2019. Make sure your team is enrolled in the challenge before you tag it with the challenge name!
Sorry Polyplayers, but you cannot give feedback for your own machines or Polyup’s machines!
Go to the ‘Discover Machines’ page to find machines more machines with the feedback challenge! To find even more machines, click the search on the top right of the screen to see all of Polyup’s machines! Or search for machines based on tag(s). For example, if you love multiplication, you can search #multiplication and find machines from others who love it too!
How do I start?
Teachers:
Create a team and tell your students your team name to have them join it! Enroll in a challenge by entering a challenge code in the the challenges tab (search active prizes at https://www.polychallenge.org/prizes)
Students
Join your teacher’s team! You will automatically be entered in your teacher’s prizes Create machines and tag them with the challenge code. Without the challenge code, people can still play your machine, but they will not see the feedback questions.
How do I create machines and tag them?
Starting at m.polyup.com, you can do the following to create a machine.
Click on the menu in the top left, click “create machine”, and enter a team name. In the left top corner, there will be a ‘+’ next to tagged labels like #v1 or #polylife Click the + and add any tags you want; you’re the author! Make sure to make the challenge name one of your tags. For example, if you want to submit your machine to “PolyFallChallenge”, add “#PolyFall2019” as a tag.
How can I share machines I’ve authored?
Not only can people find your machine through your tags, but you can also directly share the machine with your friends. Find the link by clicking on the QR code symbol next to the Machine’s name. You can share the link with anyone or post it to social media! All someone has to do to find your machine is copy and paste the link in any web browser. You can share your machines with all of your friends on social media, email, or whichever mode of communication you prefer. Sharing made easy!
Creation on Polyup is limitless! It is your personal makerspace, so get creative and share! Tag us on social media and we’ll retweet your machine, so even more players will find and give feedback to your machines!
Good luck!
- The Polyup Team
|
https://medium.com/polyup/polys-guide-to-feedback-on-machine-challenges-6b26faaed13d
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[]
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2019-10-22 16:58:46.885000+00:00
|
['Technology', 'Gaming', 'Education', 'Tags', 'Polyup']
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Building A Sustainable Trust in Our Government — By Olumide Idowu
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I was invited by the United Nations to join other young people to foster collaboration and mutual understanding with young people, as key stakeholders in the development of this country.
We (young people) are the critical segment of the population that cannot be left behind in any effort towards nation-building. One of the specific outcomes we envision through this dialogue is a better understanding of the focus areas of youth, how to address and raise awareness around concerns, and to collectively create strategies that can tackle key issues in the country as we build forward better.
“From Protest to Constructive Engagement” which comes in at a very critical time of a country like Nigeria.
My outcome after this dialogue focused more on TRUST and how young people need to start looking at how we can be part of making this trust a reality in making sure we are part of the system that we want to see in coming years.
Trust in government represents the confidence of citizens in the actions of a “government to do what is right and perceived fair” Citizen expectations are key to their trust in government. As citizens become more educated, their expectations of government performance rise. If citizens’ expectations rise faster than the actual performance of governments, trust and satisfaction could decline. Citizens’ trust towards government is influenced differently whether they have a positive or negative experience with service delivery. A negative experience has a much stronger impact on trust in government than a positive one. Targeting public policies towards dissatisfied citizens will therefore have a stronger impact on trust in government. We also look at how we can gather data the will help the government understand the kind of young people they are trying to carrying along in building a nation that is sustainable for all. We need data to inform the work of governments so that youth can better participate in policy-making.
I want to thank the United Nation and UNDP in Nigeria for the invitation to join this conversation physically with UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed, and selected influential youth in Nigeria together with Hon. Minister Dame Pauline Kedem Tallen- Federal Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development and Hon. Sunday Dare — Federal Minister of Youth and Sports Development.
I look forward to a more sustainable way to build more trust in our government and the system we are hoping for, for the future generation.
By Olumide Idowu
|
https://medium.com/climatewed/building-a-sustainable-trust-in-our-government-by-olumide-idowu-ea89d5c98228
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['Iccdi Africa']
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2020-11-18 07:34:07.070000+00:00
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['Environment', 'Youth Development', 'Climate Change', 'Women', 'Government']
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Are You Playing the Stock Market’s Favorite Game?
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Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
One of the most popular questions that a business channel anchor or an analyst asks a company’s management is — “What’s your EPS estimate for the next quarter and year?”
For those who are not aware, EPS is the short form of ‘earnings per share’ and is calculated by dividing a company’s earnings/profits by its total number of shares.
During my initial days as a stock market analyst, even I was guilty of asking similar questions about earnings, though all I wanted to hear from the managements was their long-term outlook (like for 3–5 years) and not for the next quarter or year.
The truth is that the entire investment community is undeniably fixated on the EPS.
All business newspapers, magazines, channels, and experts freely talk about quarterly earnings, EPS growth, and price to earnings multiples.
The interesting part is that the stock market also reacts to the earnings numbers.
Anyways, people’s fascination with earnings estimates is not terribly puzzling. In fact, it is perfectly rational in a market dominated by agents responsible for other people’s money but also looking out for their own interests.
But what such obsession with earnings does is that it leads investors to believe that this one number strongly influences, if not totally determine, stock prices.
This is despite the fact that EPS is not the most appropriate number to use for valuing a company.
There are several shortcomings of earnings, like:
Earnings do not show whether the company is utilizing its capital profitably or not. Earnings exclude the incremental investments that a company makes in its working capital and fixed capital that are so important to support its growth. Different companies can use different accounting principles to calculate earnings, so a comparison cannot be drawn between two companies. It is easy for companies to manipulate earnings by either inflating revenues of deflating expenses.
However, notwithstanding these shortcomings of earnings, most experts love playing the earnings expectations game.
The fact is that it’s just the wrong expectations game to play.
A Game of ‘Winks and Nods’
It is hoped that the case for the unreliable link between short-term earnings and shareholder value is sufficient to discourage investors from participating in the popular earnings expectations game. This is simply because it is the wrong expectations game for investors who seek superior long-term returns.
This is true not only because of the shortcomings of earnings but because of the way the game is played.
The earnings expectations game is simply a ritual dance between management and analysts.
In fact, the former chief of the US stock market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Arthur Levitt called it a ‘game of winks and nods’.
In Expectations Investing, the authors Michael Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport write:
“Analysts have to guess how much a company will earn each quarter. But a company is allowed to provide the analysts with clues, or so-called guidance, about what is thinks earnings will be. This guidance number usually shows up as the consensus estimate among analysts. If the company’s actual earnings meet or just beat the consensus, both the company and the analysts win: the stock goes up, and everyone looks smart. The game might not sound so hard, but it requires a lot of cooperation. Companies are under enormous pressure to achieve the consensus earnings estimates while analysts rely on those same companies to help them form their earnings expectations in the first place.”
You might wonder how companies participate in this game.
Well, companies generally have two ways to play it out.
One, to manage the expectations of investors and stock market, companies guide analysts to a number that they can beat. And two, in order to beat expectations easily, they are very conservative with respect to their near-term prospects.
In simple terms, a company would feed the analysts by telling them that they expect to earn $ 100 as EPS or earnings per share in the next quarter.
Analysts would take this number, do some calculation around it, and arrive at their own expectation of an EPS number that is somewhat close to $100. They would then feed the market and investors on this expected EPS number, say $95 per share.
The market and investors would then start to believe this number.
Then, when the quarter ends and the company releases its earnings report, it would say that its EPS during the quarter stood at $100 per share.
Remember, this was the same number they had revealed to analysts earlier, which the analysts had chewed to spit out the $95 per share number to investors.
Now, since the company has announced $100 EPS against the market’s ‘expectations’ of $95, the analysts call it an ‘outperformance’.
The ultimate result is that investors also start to take this as an outperformance and are willing to pay a higher price for the stock. The stock rises.
You got the game, didn’t you?
Anyways, there might be a case when this company faces a situation where investors are expecting a higher EPS (say $110), and it finds it difficult to earn that much during the quarter.
What it can do in such an instance is simply use some accounting tricks to achieve that magical EPS number of $110, and thus ‘meet expectations’.
Now the question is — How involved and interested are managements in this earnings expectations game?
Well, here is what a Harvard Business Review report that throws light on this…
Privately, corporate chief financial officers admit that they would like to spend less time and effort satisfying Wall Street’s demands for continuous, predictable growth. But they feel they don’t have much choice, because the cost of disappointing the Street is so high.
You see, the quarterly earnings management has become a sort of talisman for companies and those who analyze them, invest in them, or audit them. However, the fact remains that this game causes more harm than amusement.
When managers are focused on meeting or beating short-term earnings expectations, it distorts their decision making. A large part of the management’s attention is focused on keeping the analysts and markets happy.
What is more, a lot of companies willingly borrow profits from the future to make things look good in the present (how they do this is a subject of another discussion).
This entire scheme also reduces stock analysis and investing to a guessing contest. A large part of a stock analyst’s job is just to keep figuring out what the sales, or expenses, or simply profits are going to be in the next 1–2 quarters.
Ultimately, it undermines the faith that most investors have on the stock market because, every quarter, they are served some fiction, and become part of the cynicism that surrounds the meeting or beating of expectations.
Play it Safe!
Just notice the next time companies announce their quarterly results. You will find most of them either meeting expectations or beating expectations!
But now you know how this entire game of ‘earnings expectations’ is fixed. What you can do to safeguard yourself against the fixers is to separate companies that are genuinely working towards better long-term performance from those that skillfully manage short-term expectations and earnings.
And how do you do that?
Just stick with companies having good businesses, safe balance sheets, and clean managements at helm.
Always remember, there’s a great appeal in the word ‘earnings’. So you have to be very-very careful and not fall into the earnings expectations trap.
In fact, here’s a new definition of EPS that you can start using from today. It’s Expectations Per Share…and the wrong kind of expectations!
|
https://medium.com/@shikhar-aggarwal/are-you-playing-the-stock-markets-favourite-game-bb4a10433614
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['Shikhar Aggarwal']
|
2020-12-22 03:14:48.371000+00:00
|
['Momentum Trading', 'Investing', 'Earnings Per Share', 'Money Management', 'Stock Market']
|
‘This Changes Everything’: Documentary on how Climate Crisis and Failed Capitalism are Inextricably Intertwined
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‘This Changes Everything’: Documentary on how Climate Crisis and Failed Capitalism are Inextricably Intertwined Lynxotic Follow Dec 25, 2020 · 2 min read
By Eric Cho
As massive political and economic crises come into focus a must-solve climate issue looms
After nearly four years of madness emanating from the White House, now, even as the world reels from a pandemic that has yet to show signs of abating, another issue is still to come back into the center of our consciousness, and soon. If and when the vaccines and immune system strengths among survivors increases, other serious issues will come to the forefront, if not sooner.
Along with another great recent documentary on how to solve the climate crisis, “ Kiss the Ground”, this documentary is inspired by the book by Naomi Klein and is called ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’. It is unique in that it exposes the deep and obvious ties between failed capitalist systems and the climate crisis. Since we are already facing, as 2021 rapidly approaches, a twin if not triple group of crises, with the economic devastation potentially even worse, in the coming years, than either the pandemic or the climate crisis, the message of this film is more urgent than ever.
Read More: “Kiss The Ground” Documentary Offers Hopeful Remedy to Climate Change by Focusing on Soil Regeneration
The premise that the climate crisis actually presents an opportunity to change the entire world economic system for the better has been made even more pertinent and cogent by the events of 2020, both by the political disaster brought about by Trump, particularly his anti-environmental crusades, and the pandemic, which brought economic hardship upon millions worldwide.
The future is, in some ways, clearer than ever before
The positive side of this debate, what ‘ could be ‘ rather than the devastating and depressing reality of what already is, has a great potential to become a growing and expanding movement in 2021 and beyond. Ultimately, the climate crisis, as an extinction level threat, is, without a doubt, a wake-up call for the entire human race and almost certainly the last one that will be coming.
In other words, we all need to wake up to what might be the only solutions to this threat, or else we simply won’t be around to try any alternative solutions.
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Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page
|
https://medium.com/lynxotic/this-changes-everything-documentary-on-how-climate-crisis-and-failed-capitalism-are-143f4d83e12f
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[]
|
2021-01-05 16:24:12.215000+00:00
|
['Climate Change', 'Documentary', 'Things To Know', 'Climate', '2020']
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It’s much easier to say who you are than to do the things that make you who you are.
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It’s much more of an abstraction. I don’t have to do anything physical; i just have to be an artist in that way of changing your imagination. But so much of the imagination is — all of it perhaps — is shaped by culture and culture is comprised of things that take skill to build. We misunderstand maybe that being an artist takes skill and practice of doing.
Doing and being are not the same. Doing is not the sole definition of being but I think it shapes it. You are not your work, you are bigger. But being one with the work, falling into it and away from separateness and commentary makes you become the work. It’s what makes the work happen. You become by doing. (wouldn’t it be nice to not be occupied at all with being something? the doing takes care of that.) You do the work to serve Spirit. Spirit is alive in relationships. The work is relationships. Jabber jabber jabber high high high abstract abstract abstract.
Who is this for? What change might this create in them? And to what end? The sounds I’m making, the words I’m writing, the conversations I’m having. The models I’m architecting. The frame in which i create a new picture, rather than making a picture and insisting the viewer love it.
Branding gets in the way of making.
|
https://medium.com/@madelinetaylorwrites/its-much-easier-to-say-who-you-are-than-to-do-the-things-that-make-you-who-you-are-c992524cb9bd
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['Madeline Taylor']
|
2020-12-20 22:37:53.183000+00:00
|
['Artist', 'Process', 'Branding', 'Being', 'Doing']
|
Determining real data types in Javascript using Object.prototype.toString
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Is there an alternative (and maybe better way) to determine data type of variables in javascript other than typeof? Turns out there is one.
Recently, I was looking at some code and found a different way some developers were using to determine the data types using Object.prototype.toString instead of typeof. On further exploration, I found that Object.prototype.toString gives much better results as compared to typeof and can be useful at a lot of places.
Let’s look at some of the results it gives:
Application
Though typeof works fine for most of the cases, this function will come in handy covering cases such as
we need to differentiate between various types in objects (such as arrays, null, object, date)
we need to get correct data type for primitive variables created using their respective object wrappers (e.g. new Number(10) is a number but typeof will give object)
Syntax
One can also write a wrapper around it or even modify the function prototype to remove the unnecessary characters in the output and get only datatypes
Pros vs Cons
It seems typeof is more compact than toString in its usage as well as the result it returns but toString is more accurate.
toString gives more accurate data types which are useful when differentiating between various types of objects (arrays, null, objects, dates)
which are useful when differentiating between various types of objects (arrays, null, objects, dates) toString gives more accurate results in cases if someone has used object wrapper for primitive data types such as new Number/String.
in cases if someone has used object wrapper for primitive data types such as new Number/String. toString function can be overriden but typeof can’t which seems the only major drawback.
You can read more about the mechanism and working of the function over here
Overall, Object.prototype.toString is a pretty good method to determine the datatypes correctly in lot of cases.
|
https://medium.com/@sunil12738/determining-real-data-types-in-javascript-using-object-prototype-tostring-d5bbbc06e55d
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['Sunil Chaudhary']
|
2020-12-06 10:40:16.543000+00:00
|
['Javascript Object', 'Front End Development', 'Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript']
|
The Giant of English Literature who Predicted the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism
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The Giant of English Literature who Predicted the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism Frank Parker Follow Nov 28 · 3 min read
Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
It is more than sixty years since I took the English Literature examination for what was then called the General Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level or GCE ‘O’ Level. And yet there is something from one of the books we studied that lives with me still, and probably influences much of my own writing. The book was Belloc’s Essays. The piece that so influenced me was The Mowing of a Field, a glorious evocation of rural life and the pleasures to be gained from performing simple tasks and communing with nature.
Despite the pleasure I gained from reading that essay I had never since had the inclination, or the time, to discover more about its author and his other literary works. Until recently, when, for a creative writing workshop, I was asked to offer for consideration a favourite poem. I had a vague notion that Belloc was a poet as well as an essayist. It was time to explore his life and his poetry.
A young Hilaire Belloc. Image found at Poetry Foundation where it iscredited to Harvard University.
Hilaire Belloc was born in France in 1870 of a French father and English mother. When he was two, his father died and the mother returned to England with Hilaire and his sister. He grew up in Sussex. Holding dual citizenship, he signed up for army service with a French regiment before attending Balliol College in Oxford.
He was a devout Catholic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic. He was a Liberal member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910 but hated the way politicians who argued against each other in public were chummy in private.
He was a contemporary of Shaw, Chesterton and Wells with whom he conducted a long-running feud. He condemned both Socialism and Corporate capitalism, favouring a system in which the state-protected small farmers and traders from monopolies and foreign competition. He deplored colonialism.
He was a prolific writer, orator and polemicist. Like some today, his anti-Semitism is rooted in his hatred of corporate capitalism. He deplored the excessive influence he believed to be exerted by Jewish bankers. He also saw danger in the presence, in Europe between the two World Wars, of so many Jews. Nevertheless, he opposed Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, as well as social discrimination against Jews, which he encountered in elitist country clubs in the USA.
Reading of his dispute with Wells I wondered at the motives of the members of the Cambridge exam board who chose both men to be studied. Interestingly, Wells’s tale of a young man, bored with his job and an unsatisfactory marriage, who runs away to tramp the countryside before settling down as a gardener, handyman and ferryman in a riverside inn, evokes similar emotions to Belloc’s bucolic essay. Both hanker for an imagined pre-industrial past when it was possible to lead a contented life divorced from the horrors of Victorian mills and mines.
The dispute raged over every aspect of each man’s system of belief. Belloc, the devout Catholic, opponent of evolutionary theories, dismissive of Socialism; Wells, the Darwinian science devotee, Socialist and atheist. Shaw, another Socialist, sided with Wells, whilst Chesterton, whom Belloc employed as an illustrator, was an Anglican who embraced Catholicism in later life. Shaw coined a derogatory name for the pair: the Chesterbelloc.
His Islamophobia stemmed from his belief that the crusades had failed in their mission to destroy Islam. Whilst the Mohammedan religion was held partially in check by Christian colonialism, he did not believe this would last. In chapter four of his book The Great Heresies (1938), he warns: “It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.”
I can well imagine that he would have seen 9/11, and everything that has happened since, as fulfilment of that prophecy.
|
https://medium.com/from-the-library/the-giant-of-english-literature-who-predicted-the-rise-of-islamic-fundamentalism-e8b851befea6
|
['Frank Parker']
|
2020-11-29 18:50:01.983000+00:00
|
['Economic Theory', 'Anti Semitism', 'Islamophobia', 'English Literature', 'Twentieth Century Poetry']
|
GSM Architecture: Cellular Network
|
GSM is a digital mobile network that digitizes and compresses data, then sends it down a channel with two other streams of user data.
Hello John!
In today’s world, everyone uses mobile phones and each call gets connected within a second.
Does anyone know about the process behind every call?
Cellular Network (SIM Card)
1 G
1G is a first-generation cellular standard called by different names like AMPS, MTS, and IMTS.
It was introduced in the 1980s.
It employs an analog modulation technique with FDMA
Cons:
It supports only voice services over a limited range.
1G handsets were bulkier with the antenna on top of the device.
The cons of 1G are replaced by GSM Global System for Mobile Communication.
GSM
GSM is a second-generation cellular standard and developed in 1991 by European telecommunications to support voice and data services.
It uses digital modulation with TDMA
While 2G handsets were cheaper and less in size, GSM was the first generation to introduce sim cards.
GSM had certain specifications like Uplink, downlink, transfer rate, etc to carry information.
Mobile Tower
Mainly, it has GMSK digital modulation and TDMA access method.
GSM data speed was approximately 14.4 kilobytes per second
GSM uses a different frequency band in different regions.
In India, it was 900 MHz and 1800 MHz GSM architecture is the basic architecture in a cellular network.
GSM Architecture contains four subsystems:
Mobile station Base station subsystem Network switching subsystem Operation support subsystem
It is noticed that each subsystem contains some components.
|
https://medium.com/@infostatix/gsm-architecture-1658ae80e51b
|
['Info Statix']
|
2020-12-23 15:52:28.990000+00:00
|
['Telecommunication', 'Information Technology', 'Phone', 'Education', 'Architecture']
|
Apache Kafka at the Edge: Use Cases and Architectures
|
(Originally posted on Kai Waehner’s blog: “Use Cases and Architectures for Kafka at the Edge”)
Event streaming with Apache Kafka at the edge is not cutting edge anymore. It is a common approach to providing the same open, flexible, and scalable architecture at the edge as in the cloud or data center. Possible locations for a Kafka edge deployment include retail stores, cell towers, trains, small factories, restaurants, etc. I already discussed the concepts and architectures in detail in the past: “Apache Kafka is the New Black at the Edge” and “Architecture patterns for distributed, hybrid, edge and global Apache Kafka deployments”. This blog post is an add-on focusing on use cases across industries for Kafka at the edge.
To be clear before you read on: Edge is NOT a data center.
And “Edge Kafka” is not simply yet another IoT project using Kafka in a remote location. Edge Kafka is actually an essential component of a streaming nervous system that spans IoT (or OT in Industrial IoT) and non-IoT (traditional data-center/cloud infrastructures).
The post’s focus is scenarios where the Kafka clients AND the Kafka brokers are running on the edge. This enables edge processing, integration, decoupling, low latency, and cost-efficient data processing.
Categories and Architectures for Kafka at the Edge
Some IoT projects are built like “normal Kafka projects”, i.e., built in the (edge) data center or cloud. For instance, bigger factories can provide infrastructure to deploy a reliable Kafka cluster with stable network connectivity to the cloud. Unfortunately, many IoT projects require real edge capabilities.
What’s different at the edge?
Offline business continuity is important even if the connection to the central data center or cloud is not available. Disconnected/offline sites do often not require or provide high availability (because it is not worth the efforts): Local pre-processing, real-time analytics with low latency, only online (i.e., connection to the data center or cloud) from time to time or with low bandwidth.
is important even if the connection to the central data center or cloud is not available. (because it is not worth the efforts): Local pre-processing, real-time analytics with low latency, only online (i.e., connection to the data center or cloud) from time to time or with low bandwidth. Often these projects need to deploy Kafka brokers across hundreds of locations . A single broker is often good enough, without high availability, but for back pressure and local processing. Use cases exist across industries , including retail stores, trains, restaurants, cell towers, small factories, etc.
. A single broker is often good enough, without high availability, but for back pressure and local processing. , including retail stores, trains, restaurants, cell towers, small factories, etc. Low-footprint, low-touch , little-or-no-DevOps-required installations of Kafka brokers (not just clients) are mandatory for many of these use-cases. In these cases, no IT experts are available “on-site” to operate Kafka. Hence, using certified OEM hardware is a great option to install and operate Kafka at the edge .
, little-or-no-DevOps-required installations of Kafka brokers (not just clients) are mandatory for many of these use-cases. In these cases, no IT experts are available “on-site” to operate Kafka. Hence, using . Many edge use cases are all around sensor and telemetry data . This is not transactional data where every single message counts. An application that processes millions of messages per second is fine with losing a few of the messages as it does not affect the outcome of the calculation.
. This is not transactional data where every single message counts. An application that processes millions of messages per second is fine with losing a few of the messages as it does not affect the outcome of the calculation. Hybrid and not cloud-only : Consumer IoT (CIoT) always includes the users in their smart home, ride-share, retail store, etc.), Industrial IoT (IIoT) always includes tangible good (cars, food, energy, …)
: Consumer IoT (CIoT) always includes the users in their smart home, ride-share, retail store, etc.), Industrial IoT (IIoT) always includes tangible good (cars, food, energy, …) Thousands and tens of thousands of connected interfaces: Sensors, machines, mobile devices, etc.
Using one single technical infrastructure enables building edge and hybrid architectures. No need for a ton of different frameworks and products is required. This is a huge benefit from a development, testing, operations, support point of view!
Use Cases for Kafka at the Edge
Industries for Kafka at the Edge include manufacturing, pharma, carmakers, telecommunications, retailing, energy, restaurants, gaming, healthcare, public sector, aerospace, transportation, and others.
Architectures and use cases include data integration, pre-processing and replication to the cloud, big and small data edge processing, and analytics, disconnected offline scenarios, very low footprint scenarios with hundreds of locations, scenarios without the high-availability, and others.
Scenarios for Edge Computing with Kafka
Various examples for Kafka deployments at the edge exist. Almost all of these use cases are related to several of the above categories and requirements, such as low hardware footprint, disconnected offline processing, hundred of locations, and hybrid architectures.
I have worked with enterprises across industries and the globe on the following scenarios:
Public Sector : Local administration in each city, smart city projects incl. public transportation, traffic management, integration of various connected car platforms from different carmakers, cybersecurity (including IoT use cases such as capturing and processing camera images)
: Local administration in each city, smart city projects incl. public transportation, traffic management, integration of various connected car platforms from different carmakers, cybersecurity (including IoT use cases such as capturing and processing camera images) Transportation/Logistics/Railway/Aviation : Track&Trace, Kafka in the trains for offline and local processing/storage, traveler information (delayed or canceled flight/train/bus), real-time loyalty platforms (class upgrade, lounge access)
: Track&Trace, Kafka in the trains for offline and local processing/storage, traveler information (delayed or canceled flight/train/bus), real-time loyalty platforms (class upgrade, lounge access) Manufacturing (Automotive, Aerospace, Semiconductors, Chemical, Food, and others) : IoT aftermarket customer services, OEM in machines and vehicles, embedding into standard software such as ERP or MES systems, cybersecurity, a digital twin of devices/machines/production lines/processes, production line monitoring in factories for predictive maintenance/quality control/production efficiency, operations dashboards and line wellness (on-site for the plant manager, and aggregated global KPIs for executive management), track&trace and geofencing on the shop floor
: IoT aftermarket customer services, OEM in machines and vehicles, embedding into standard software such as ERP or MES systems, cybersecurity, a digital twin of devices/machines/production lines/processes, production line monitoring in factories for predictive maintenance/quality control/production efficiency, operations dashboards and line wellness (on-site for the plant manager, and aggregated global KPIs for executive management), track&trace and geofencing on the shop floor Energy/Utility/Oil and Gas : Smart home, smart buildings, smart meters, monitoring of remote machines (e.g., for drilling, windmills, mining), pipeline and refinery operations (e.g., predictive failure or anomaly detection)
: Smart home, smart buildings, smart meters, monitoring of remote machines (e.g., for drilling, windmills, mining), pipeline and refinery operations (e.g., predictive failure or anomaly detection) Telecommunications/Media : OSS real-time monitoring/problem analysis/metrics reporting/root cause analysis/action response of the network devices and infrastructure (routers, switches, other network devices), BSS customer experience and OTT services (mobile app integration for millions of users), 5G edge (e.g., street sensors)
: OSS real-time monitoring/problem analysis/metrics reporting/root cause analysis/action response of the network devices and infrastructure (routers, switches, other network devices), BSS customer experience and OTT services (mobile app integration for millions of users), 5G edge (e.g., street sensors) Healthcare : Track&trace in the hospital, remote monitoring, machine sensor analytics
: Track&trace in the hospital, remote monitoring, machine sensor analytics Retailing/Food/Restaurants/Banking: Customer communication, cross-/up-selling, loyalty system, payments in retail stores, perpetual inventory, Point-of-Sale (PoS) integration for (local) payments and (remote) CRM integration, EFTPOS (Electronic funds transfer at point of sale)
A great practical example of edge computing in retailing is fast-food chain Chic-fil-A. They deployed a Kubernetes cluster in each of their 2000 restaurants for real-time analytics at the edge without an internet connection. The hardware is pretty small and provides an Intel quadcore processor with 8 GB RAM and SSD:
Example Edge Architecture: Kafka in Transportation and Logistics
Let’s make this “Kafka at the edge” thing more clear with a specific example. In this case, I use the railway and transportation industry. But this can easily be mapped to your industry and use case.
The following example shows an edge and hybrid solution for railways to improve the customer experience and increase the revenue of the railway company. It leverages offline edge processing for customer communication, replication to the cloud for analytics, and integration with 3rd party interfaces and APIs from partners.
Hybrid Architecture — From Edge to Cloud
Local processing at the edge is happening on the train. But each train also replicates relevant data in real-time to the cloud — if there are internet connectivity and free network resources. If the train is not online, Kafka is handling the backpressure and replicating to the cloud when online again:
Event Streaming at the Edge in the Train With Kafka
Kafka on the train is NOT just used for real-time messaging and handling backpressure. These are already great reasons for using Kafka at the edge. Still, the even bigger value is created when Kafka is also used for data integration (restaurant, traveler information, loyalty system, etc.) and data processing (up-/cross-selling, real-time delay information, etc.) at the edge. This way, only one single platform is required to solve all the different problems:
Kafka for Disconnected/Offline Scenarios
Trains (and many other edge locations) are offline regularly. For instance, a train drives through a tunnel or reaches an area with no cell connectivity. Local processing is still possible. Business continuity is the key to improve customer experience and increase sales processes — even if the train disconnected from the internet. Passengers can still use the mobile app to see traveler information, buy food in the restaurant, or watch movies stores on the train’s local server. As soon as the train has internet connectivity again, the purchases from passengers are transferred to the loyalty system in the cloud, the latest delay information is consumed from the cloud and stored on the edge Kafka broker in the train, etc. etc. etc.:
Cross-Company Kafka and Edge Integration
Data processing does not stop with the hybrid integration between the edge (train) and cloud (CRM, loyalty system, etc.). Different divisions or partner companies need to integrate, too. Instead of using non-scalable, synchronous REST API calls / API Management for partner integration, streaming replication with Kafka-native technologies is a much better, scalable approach:
I hope this story about Kafka at the edge helped you better understand how you can leverage event streaming in your industry and use cases to build an end-to-end streaming infrastructure from edge to cloud.
Infrastructure and Hardware Requirement for Deployment of Kafka at the Edge
Finally, it is important to discuss how to deploy Kafka at the edge. To be clear: Kafka still needs some computing power.
Obviously, this depends on many factors: The hardware vendors and infrastructure you are working with, specific SLAs and HA requirements, and so on. The good news is that Kafka can be deployed in many infrastructures, including bare metal, VMs, containers, Kubernetes, etc. The other good news is that new hardware for computing resources (even for the “edge”) typically has 4, 8, or even 16GB RAM because this is the smallest chip vendors produce these days (for these environments such as small factories, retail stores, etc).
Minimum hardware requirements for running a very small footprint Kafka are a single-core processor and a few 100MB RAM. This already allows decent edge processing with 100+Mb/sec throughput on a single Kafka node (with replication factor = 1). However, real values depend on the number of partitions, message size, network speed, and other characteristics. Don’t expect the same performance and scalability as in the data center or cloud!
Thus, you can deploy a Kafka broker on a Raspberry Pi, but not on some small embedded device! The latter is where the Kafka clients can run.
“The Confluent Way” to Deploy Kafka at the Edge
From a technical perspective, deployment of Kafka at the edge is the same as in a data center or cloud. However, the environment and requirements are a little bit different as we learned above. Some additional features definitely help with deploying and operating Kafka at the edge.
I work for Confluent. Hence, I provide you “The Confluent Way” of deploying Kafka at the edge in your future projects, including innovative, differentiating features:
Kafka at the Edge (and in Hybrid Architectures) Is the New Black
Kafka is a great solution for the edge. It enables deploying the same open, scalable, and reliable technology at the edge, data center, and the cloud. This is relevant across industries. Kafka is used in more and more places where nobody has seen it before. Edge sites include retail stores, restaurants, cell towers, trains, and many others. I hope the various use cases and architectures inspired you a little bit.
What are your experiences at the edge? What are your use cases? Did you or do you plan to use Apache Kafka and its ecosystem? What is your strategy? Let’s connect on LinkedIn and discuss it!
|
https://medium.com/@kai-waehner/apache-kafka-at-the-edge-use-cases-and-architectures-b249fec2ddb
|
['Kai Waehner']
|
2020-12-03 09:11:58.791000+00:00
|
['Analytics', 'Kafka', 'IoT', 'Edge Computing', 'Big Data']
|
One rendering tree
|
There are a few of things to notice here. Each word and each space are elements. The red rectangle is part of the same tree. And, the cursor itself is part of the same tree, as well. As the entire editor is made of elements, the arrangement of these elements is expressed by a layout. A flow layout, in our case.
This organization offers a high degree of flexibility. One immediate application is that of adornments, dynamic artifacts that can appear in the text. In our example, the word “moldable” is colored in blue and uses a monospace font. Nowadays, these are typical abilities in a text editor, and they are supported through text attributes. In our case, the code looks like this:
(text from: 5 to: 12)
attributes: {
BlFontFamilyAttribute named: 'Source Code Pro'.
BlTextForegroundAttribute paint: Color blue }
Less obvious is that our editor treats the red rectangle as a text attribute, too:
(text from: 39 to: 39)
attributes: {
BrTextAdornmentDynamicAttribute new
beAppend;
stencil: [
BlElement new
size: 70 @ 50;
margin: (BlInsets all: 5);
background: Color red ] }
We call these adornments, and they are just a specific kind of text attributes.
Armed with this, we can start playing with the text styler. A styler relies on a little process that goes through the text and augments it with various attributes. As adornments are attributes, the styler can augment the text with arbitrary visual elements, too. Let’s take a look.
Here we see a Coder editor opened on a Pharo method. The interesting thing about this is that all messages sent to self get a little triangle next to them. These triangles are added by the syntax highlighting, dynamically, as you type. When expanded, another editor appears inline showing the corresponding method.
Coder on a method with messages expanded in place.
New kind of programming interfaces
This infrastructure makes possible all sorts of new interfaces.
Let’s start with the unfolding code editor from above. This is interesting in a couple of ways. First, we now get an interface that allows us to read code as a contiguous narrative. This means that we no longer have to choose between short methods and more “readable” code (This debate typically becomes apparent when people familiar with C-like programming languages start learning another language and get confused by the myriad of tiny methods. No more.).
But, it gets even more interesting when we combine this ability with knowledge about specific parts of the system. For example, below you can see a Coder opened on the baseline for Glamorous Toolkit itself. What’s a baseline? It’s a configuration describing what a project is made of and what its dependencies are, along the lines of Maven or npm. The baseline is written through a fluent interface provided by the Metacello library. As with any configuration, it relies on strings for pointing to the contained packages and the dependent projects. In our case, if the dependent project is already available in the image, we show a triangle that, when expanded, reveals the baseline of the respective project. This is a simple thing, but it simplifies creating these baselines significantly without requiring one to learn a new tool.
Coder on the baseline of Glamorous Toolkit showing some of the dependent projects expanded.
The expansion adornments also paved the way to reinventing documentation. For example, below we see a snippet from the Glamorous Toolkit documentation. The document contains text and a graph showing all dependencies of Glamorous Toolkit extracted automatically from the baseline. The more interesting part is that the graph is embedded in the document through a markup instruction. Furthermore, the markup appears only when the cursor gets closer to it. Essentially, we get a new class of editors that is in between editor+view and a WYSWIG (what you see is what you get) interface. We get the power of programmability through markups while still retaining direct manipulation.
Documenter showing a document containing a diagram that is created dynamically based on a markup. The document relies on a markup that appears only when the cursor is nearby.
One more example is an interface for supporting explanations. In this case, the editor on the left has terms that are marked with special attributes through which we get elements that are inserted in the text and that are linked with the markers on the right when hovering over them. For this to work, the explanation word, the target anchor and the line must reside in the same rendering tree.
A live explanation. The terms from the editor on the left are linked to the visual items on the right.
The same mechanism can be used to explain snippets of code. Here, the method on the right famously utilizes the entire syntax of Pharo. On the left, we have an explanation that links to the various parts. Interesting in this case is that the adornments in the code snippet are added through syntax highlighting.
A live explanation of code. The explanation lines provide a natural connection between the explanation and the corresponding code piece. Furthermore, the links change live as the code changes.
The annotated tree
One rendering tree allows us to combine arbitrary elements in a graphical scene. But, there is one more thing. A typical approach to graphical user interfaces is to rely on higher level models that generate the actual rendering tree. Often these higher level models can be complicated and come as a layer on top of the base tree. This then hinders the creation of fluid interfaces because the higher level of abstractions usually can do less than the lower level ones.
We wanted one single space. One rendering tree to rule them all. Now, of course, we also want to be able to compose elements at higher level of abstractions. To accommodate this, we turned the problem around: we made the basic elements annotatable with higher level constructs.
For example, below we see on the left a scene with an inspector embedding a visualization. On the right, we see the rendering tree of that scene. Hovering over elements shows that they are all part of the same tree.
The tree on the right shows how the highlighted element on the left fits into the rendering tree.
The tree on the right also reveals some nodes as labelled. In our case, the labels are phlow and graph . These are annotations. Phlow is the engine for defining inspector views and workflows, while the graph is … well, a graph. So, what can we do with this?
For example, given an element, we can ask it for element graph connectedEdges . graph is a tiny object that knows the element and essentially extends the interface of the element with higher level predicates. Similarly, phlow offers predicates distinguishing whether an element defines things like a view title or a view content.
Following this pattern, we always rely on one single tree and we make it the responsibility of various libraries to enrich that tree. The outcome is that we can combine arbitrary abstractions rather seamlessly. For example, in our case, the root of the visualization is annotated with both graph and phlow it is also the content of the view.
Before we part
In the age of 3D games, AR/VR and smart physical environments, it is perhaps strange to talk about a 2D graphical engine. Still, our audience is fairly rooted in sitting in front of a desktop and working with rather antiquated interfaces. Our audience are programmers, and our goal is to reimagine the development experience.
Indeed, in this day and age, the typical development experience is dominated by text. In the rare cases when text is augmented with visuals, that augmentation happens on the outskirts. That’s because the editor is too special a box. To break this, we set to make the text be made of tiny regular elements. Along the same line, we also wanted visualizations to be first class citizens. So, we had to accommodate those too, and naively perhaps, we formulated the one rendering tree principle that we wanted to stick with at all times.
Of course, having a rendering tree is not new. Of course, there are text editors that are made of nice small elements. Of course, extensive visualization engines do exist. Still, having them all together in one cohesive and reasonably performant infrastructure is new. At least to us.
But, we think the real challenge is only yet to come. We have built a vehicle, but we believe the challenge lies in the uncharted territory.
Just consider this example again. The visualization is not confined to a compartment in a bentobox-like interface. Instead, it is the visualization that defines the frame for the widgets. And while there are visual boundaries around the editors and inspectors, they remain exactly that: visual. The logical connections are not affected and can cross those boundaries to create a seamless scene.
The visualization defines the frame and embeds rich widgets that can be visually and logically connected.
This is not a small change. This is an entirely new kind of interface. And this is but one example. We are still learning how to think about designing interfaces in this world, but the adventure does appear to be exciting.
|
https://medium.com/feenk/one-rendering-tree-918eae49bcff
|
['Tudor Girba']
|
2020-02-08 12:04:50.286000+00:00
|
['Moldable Development', 'Development Environment', 'Gtoolkit', 'Graphical User Interface']
|
Emporia energy-monitoring smart plug review: Power management on a budget
|
Emporia is best known for its Vue energy monitor product, and now the brand is expanding—if ever so slightly—into additional power-centric smart home gear. Up first is the Emporia Energy Monitoring Smart Plug, which is designed to work with the EmporiaEnergy mobile app.
Mentioned in this article Emporia Vue (with expansion module) See it The hardware is straightforward, featuring a single three-prong outlet in the center of a reasonably compact chassis with well-rounded corners. A large power button is placed to the right of the outlet and a status LED appears to the left. The LED is small, but it can’t be disabled. The outlet has a 15-amp limit, or an implied maximum power rating of 1800 watts.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart plugs, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.A curious omission here is the lack of printed instructions of any kind. Instead there’s just a QR code printed on the box that directs you to download the EmporiaEnergy app to get you started. The good news is that that process is quite intuitive, and the Emporia app is effective at walking you through the basics of connecting the outlet to your Wi-Fi network (2.4GHz only), which primarily involves holding down the power button for six seconds to put the outlet into pairing mode.
[ Further reading: The best smart switches and dimmers ] Christopher Null / IDG The graphs in Emporia’s mobile app are detailed and useful.
From there, the plug can be assigned to an existing circuit—if you already use the Emporia Vue system—or assigned to a new one. The plug doesn’t directly interact with the Emporia Vue hardware, but there is some synergy between the two devices. Namely, if you use Emporia Vue, a plug can be included as a subcomponent of one of your monitored circuits, so you can further break out and fine-tune the power draw on that specific circuit. But you don’t need Vue to use the smart plug if you have more modest power monitoring goals.
The big draw here is energy monitoring, of course, which the Emporia app breaks down numerically and graphically over a time horizon that you can set, and which can range anywhere from by-the-second to by-the-year. Few products in this category have both the depth and usability of the Emporia Vue outlet when it comes to managing power consumption. The intuitive graphics almost make energy management fun. Outside of the monitoring features, I encountered no trouble with the plug during my testing, it was quick and responsive to commands, and it never dropped offline.
Emporia Emporia’s smart plug is just slightly wider than the typical outlet cover plate.
Otherwise, the Vue plug isn’t the most sophisticated of devices. It includes a basic scheduling system, buried under the “Manage Devices” menu, but there’s no countdown timer system to shut power down after a specified length of time. Alexa and Google Assistant are both supported, but not IFTTT.
The $11 price tag (or as little as $6.50 each when bought in a four-pack) is perhaps the icing on the cake, this could be the lowest-priced Wi-Fi outlet with energy monitoring features on the market. It’s definitely a top pick whether you have a Vue system installed or not.
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/@tay78554393/emporia-energy-monitoring-smart-plug-review-power-management-on-a-budget-9921ec8d5874
|
[]
|
2020-12-25 05:25:39.679000+00:00
|
['Surveillance', 'Home Tech']
|
HTML Forms vs Bootstrap Forms
|
Implementing Forms using HTML and Bootstrap
So let’s do some basic frontend coding using HTML and Bootstrap. Now to make this easier, I have implemented two simple forms both with two input fields: Full Name and Date of Birth. Both of the forms have one thing in common, i.e. the base code for both is HTML, but the other has a Bootstrap framework associated with HTML tags with it as shown below.
HTML Forms
Implementing a simple HTML form is relatively trivial. All you have to do is use a form tag and for the input fields, you need to use input tags inside the form tag itself. The type of the input tag is very important. Use it according to your preference. To know about the input types refer to the article below.
|
https://medium.com/dev-genius/html-forms-vs-bootstrap-forms-5d2001318f25
|
['Tanu N Prabhu']
|
2021-01-01 19:18:35.593000+00:00
|
['Web Development', 'Bootcamp', 'Forms', 'HTML', 'Programming']
|
How To Easily Persist Your Data With Context And AsyncStorage
|
How To Easily Persist Your Data With Context And AsyncStorage
Learn to use Hooks and AsyncStorage with React Native
cat in a box
It’s a fairly common practice to persist user data between sessions in most mobile apps and to get this done with React Native is as simple as using AsyncStorage. This will allow you to keep changes, or updates to any components even if the app is restarted, refreshed or closed.
Take this counter for example, if you increment or decrement the count and restart the app, the count will reset back to zero.
import React, { useContext, createContext, useState } from 'react';
import { View, Button, StyleSheet, Text } from 'react-native'; const CounterContext = createContext(0); const useCounter = () => useContext(CounterContext); const CounterContextProvider = ({ children }) => {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
const increment = () => setCount((value) => value + 1);
const decrement = () => setCount((value) => value - 1); return (
<CounterContext.Provider
value={{
count,
increment,
decrement
}}>
{children}
</CounterContext.Provider>
);
}; const App = () => {
const { count, increment, decrement } = useCounter(); return (
<View
style={styles.container}>
<Text>{count}</Text>
<Button title="Increment" onPress={() => increment()} />
<Button title="Decrement" onPress={() => decrement()} />
</View>
);
}; const styles = StyleSheet.create({
container: {
flex: 1,
alignItems: 'center',
justifyContent: 'center',
}
}); export default () => (
<CounterContextProvider>
<App />
</CounterContextProvider>
);
To fix that let’s implement AsyncStorage.
First store the count value in AsyncStorage with the useEffect hook and add the count as a dependency. By doing so, every time the count value is updated it will get stored.
import { View, Button, StyleSheet, Text } from 'react-native';
import AsyncStorage from ' import React, { useContext, createContext, useState, useEffect } from 'react';import { View, Button, StyleSheet, Text } from 'react-native';import AsyncStorage from ' @react -native-community/async-storage'; // ... const CounterContextProvider = ({ children }) => {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
const increment = () => setCount((value) => value + 1);
const decrement = () => setCount((value) => value - 1);
useEffect(() => {
AsyncStorage.setItem('COUNTER_APP::COUNT_VALUE', `${count}`);
}, [count]); return (
<CounterContext.Provider
value={{
count,
increment,
decrement
}}>
{children}
</CounterContext.Provider>
);
}; // ...
Don’t forget to convert the value to a string before storing it.
Now retrieve the state with the existing data from AsyncStorage.
const INITIAL_COUNT = 0; const CounterContextProvider = ({ children }) => {
const [count, setCount] = useState(INITIAL_COUNT);
const increment = () => setCount((value) => value + 1);
const decrement = () => setCount((value) => value - 1); useEffect(() => {
AsyncStorage.getItem('COUNTER_APP::COUNT_VALUE')
.then((value) = {
if (value) {
setCount(parseInt(value));
}
});
}, []); useEffect(() => {
if (count !== INITIAL_COUNT) {
AsyncStorage.setItem('COUNTER_APP::COUNT_VALUE', `${count}`);
}
}, [count]); return (
<CounterContext.Provider
value={{
count,
increment,
decrement
}}>
{children}
</CounterContext.Provider>
);
}; // ...
Notice the new useEffect hook to retrieve data from AsyncStorage will only run on mount because it has no dependencies; it grabs the existing value and parses it as an integer before updating the count with that value.
Also the existing useEffect to store data in AsyncStorage now checks to make sure the stored value won’t be overridden by the initial value in the state.
This basic pattern can easily be scaled up to store more complex JSON objects.
Here is the final code for your reference.
import React, { useContext, createContext, useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import { View, TouchableOpacity, StyleSheet, Text } from 'react-native';
import AsyncStorage from ' // App.jsimport React, { useContext, createContext, useState, useEffect } from 'react';import { View, TouchableOpacity, StyleSheet, Text } from 'react-native';import AsyncStorage from ' @react -native-community/async-storage'; const CounterContext = createContext(0);
const useCounter = () => useContext(CounterContext);
const CounterContextProvider = ({ children }) => {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0); const increment = () => {
setCount((value) => value + 1);
}; const decrement = () => setCount((value) => value - 1);
useEffect(() => {
if (count !== 0) {
AsyncStorage.setItem('COUNTER_APP::COUNT_VALUE', `${count}`);
}
}, [count]); useEffect(() => {
AsyncStorage.getItem('COUNTER_APP::COUNT_VALUE')
.then((value) => {
if (value) {
setCount(parseInt(value));
}
});
}, []);
return (
<CounterContext.Provider
value={{
count,
increment,
decrement,
}}>
{children}
</CounterContext.Provider>
);
}; const App = () => {
const { count, increment, decrement } = useCounter();
return (
<View style={styles.container}>
<Text style={styles.counterText}>{count}</Text>
<View style={styles.group}>
<TouchableOpacity
onPress={() => increment()}
style={styles.button}>
<Text style={styles.buttonTitle}>+</Text>
</TouchableOpacity>
<TouchableOpacity
onPress={() => decrement()}
style={styles.button}>
<Text style={styles.buttonTitle}>-</Text>
</TouchableOpacity>
</View>
</View>
);
}; const styles = StyleSheet.create({
container: {
flex: 1,
alignItems: 'center',
justifyContent: 'center',
},
button: {
backgroundColor: '#ff5f00',
width: 45,
justifyContent: 'center',
alignItems: 'center',
marginVertical: 8,
marginHorizontal: 8,
},
buttonTitle: {
fontSize: 34,
color: '#FFF',
},
counterText: {
fontSize: 24,
},
group: {
flexDirection: 'row',
},
}); export default () => (
<CounterContextProvider>
<App />
</CounterContextProvider>
);
Thank you and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter where you can comment or ask questions about this post.
|
https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-easily-persist-your-data-with-context-and-asyncstorage-99d26d331992
|
[]
|
2020-11-11 08:40:56.540000+00:00
|
['JavaScript', 'React Native', 'Hooks', 'Persistence', 'React']
|
Data Visualization with React JS and Chart JS
|
Hello, today I will talk about how to use great Chart Js charts with React Js, or even how to dynamically make data visualizable using API.
I want to tell you a little bit about Chart Js. Chart.js is a free open source JavaScript library that supports different types of charts for data visualization.
So what are the types of charts that this supports?
📌 Line
📌 Bar
📌 Radar
📌 Doughnut and Pie
📌 Polar area
📌 Bubble
📌 Scatter
If you’re ready, let’s start!
To get started, you need to install the React application first. You can browse for it: https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html
If you have installed the React application, now it is necessary to setup Chart Js for React. One line is enough for this.
Installation via NPM
npm install --save react-chartjs-2 chart.js
Installation via YARN
yarn add react-chartjs-2 chart.js
After it is loaded, you need to create a Js file and import the chart type you want to use with the react-chartjs-2 library.
import { Bar } from 'react-chartjs-2'
Then we create a function called DynamicChart, create a function called Chart and start doing the operations. First, const variables are created to hold the data.
Next, we create a structure like in Chart Js’ documentation and try our own data statically.
(https://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/getting-started/usage.html)
Here you can set horizontal data with labels and vertical data with data. You can also color it with the background and border.
Chart () function was called with the UseEffect React method. After return (), it is specified in <Bar /> that it receives its data from the defined chartData, and then additions can be made to the option for the appearance of the chart.
The static chart will look like this:
Okay, if you have learned how to make a bar chart statically, I will now explain how to make a dynamic bar chart by pulling data from the API with small changes.
For this, first you need to install Axios.
So what is Axios?
Axios is a javascript library that allows easy HTTP calls in client-side applications. Available as npm or bower package or via CDN.
To include Axios in the project, it is enough to write the following line
npm install axios --save
Then, by typing axios.get (‘API URL) into the Chart () function, you can check whether you get the errors and data with the .then and .catch methods after specifying which URL to extract the data from.
Now it is necessary to pull this data. You need to define two strings that work with let and get salary and age. In .then, values can be obtained by parsing the salary and age variables with the for loop. And setChartData must also be enclosed in .then for the values to appear.
Finally, in order to be dynamic, it is necessary to specify the empAge and empSal arrays to the label and data places we provide statically. In this way, as the API changes, the data will also change.
The bar chart view drawn from the API will look like this.
Yes! With this method, you can visualize colorful and useful data from each other. If you want to try on different chart types, you just need to write the name in the import section and write your values in the imported type in return.
📌 Line Chart
import { Line } from 'react-chartjs-2'
...
... return(
<Line
.
.
. />)
📌 Radar Chart
import { Radar } from 'react-chartjs-2'
...
... return(
<Radar
.
.
. />)
📌 Doughnut and Pie Chart
import { Doughnut } from 'react-chartjs-2'
...
... return(
<Doughnut
.
.
. />)
import { Pie } from 'react-chartjs-2'
...
... return(
<Pie
.
.
. />)
📌 Polar area Chart
import { Polar} from 'react-chartjs-2'
...
... return(
<Polar
.
.
. />)
Yes, that’s it! I hope this article will be useful for you in React Js for data visualization.
If you want to review, you can take a look at my github project:
See you in my next article.
|
https://medium.com/codex/data-visualization-with-react-js-and-chart-js-cb6ca5d77ff6
|
['Sena Akbulut']
|
2021-03-24 16:58:10.491000+00:00
|
['React', 'React Hook', 'Charts', 'API', 'Virtualization']
|
It’s time to turn off the American show
|
A British political and media class that spent four years bitterly divided over its relationship with Europe finally is showing signs of moving on — leaving behind Brexit for an infatuation with American politics.
British newspaper columnists, paid to write about current affairs with some insight, opine solemnly on events in DC they watched on CNN from the safety of their North London armchairs. Our broadcast news updates us throughout the day on events Stateside. But both have to compete with the authentic American content that we can get such easy access to: Lockdown walks are accompanied by American political podcasts, there is an abundance of Republican or Democrat ‘hot takes’ just a click away and if you wake up too early and log on to twitter before most of your countrymen, you will discover just how many fired-up, indignant and outraged Americans you follow.
Perhaps the final chapter of Brexit was just too boring and predictable for those who have gained a taste for drama and tension through politics. After all, how can a reciprocal trade deal truly compete in the ratings with such events as rioting, racial conflict, claims of election fraud, a psuedocoup and an impeachment?
And it has been addictive. Just as America hooks people on its fast food with a perfectly calculated amount of sugar and salt, so its politics keeps us coming back for more with its extraordinary cast-list and dramatic plot-twists.
Leave produced no Proud Boys or QAnon, Remain had nothing like Black Lives Matters and didn’t even think of creating an autonomous state of Remainia in Bristol. And however much Carole Cadwalladr may have wished otherwise, Facebook and Twitter did not ban Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson from social media nor purge Leave supporters from their platforms.
As well as the regular diet of ‘historic events’, there was also the scent of real danger in the events at the Capitol, violence and the threat of violence can, of course, intoxicate even from afar. There was no such thrill in Brexit — the threat to withdraw some passages of the Internal Market Bill or the proroguing of parliament, wasn’t quite in the same league of danger.
But like too many things out of America, an addiction to its politics and accompanying world of news and opinion, is bad for your health. But more seriously, beyond just distorting the perspective of individuals, Transatlantic voyeurism is bad for the body politic.
While this current bout of obsession has been particularly noticeable, there is, of course, nothing particularly novel about British political people taking a deep interest in American affairs.
In the 1970’s, Thatcherites drew inspiration from American free-market thinking in the Reagan era, then New Labour was infatuated with Bill Clinton’s Democrats. In both those cases there were actual links, meetings, exchanges and advisors. More recently, Corbynistas imagined that Bernie Sanders was a kindred spirit while Farage tried to ingratiate himself with Trump.
Those latter two examples are important because, like so much of the actual ‘special relationship’ between the two states, the attraction was rather one-sided. Sanders had understandably little interest in Corbyn and Trump never gave Farage anything more than a “what a guy!” slap on the back. We may kid ourselves there is some bond between our two countries, that justifies our excessive interest, but there really isn’t.
“What a guy”
And so it has been in the recent chapters of the culture wars. While street demonstrations in the UK, enthusiastically mimicked BLM and adopted their slogans, (utterly incongruous in the British context), British footballers ‘took the knee’ like NFL players and politicians started to spout lines about “systemic racism”, there has been no reverse influence. Outside of the New York Times’ comedic coverage of the UK, there has been utter disinterest in matters on this side of the pond.
And indeed, why should Americans, especially at a time of deep polarisation and instability in their country, care about the relationship between the UK and the EU, Boris Johnson’s government, or anything else that happens over here? That is no surprise. What is striking though is how, like a child tugging on a parent’s arm, the politically active in the UK, continue to see value in absorbing themselves in American politics.
But, once the entertainment factor is put aside, there really is very little to be gained from this mania.
Thatcher and Blair both learned valuable lessons for their projects from the US in their times, but there is close to nothing for British conservatives to learn from the Trump Republicans (or any other modern Republicans for that matter), likewise Kier Starmer’s Labour Party can gain little insight from the Biden-Harris campaign or the wider left-wing effort in the US.
Both the American left and right’s political struggles are deeply specific to their country and the key dividing issues in the U.S simply do not exist in the UK. We have no debate around gun control, our issues around race are very different, private ‘health insurance’ is some optional extra in professional employment and in the public space at least, we ‘don’t do God’.
Sure, there are some overlapping issues. Johnson’s need to satisfy the demands of ‘Red Wall’ constituencies does mirror the GOP’s new relationship with the American working class but it is doubtful that any advisor to the government would glean much from Trump’s administration on ‘levelling up’. Labour are trying to reconnect over issues around patriotism and the family, hardly an agenda that Biden and Harris, with their woke activist base, are likely to offer any insight on.
But the problem with the excessive interest is not primarily that there is little functional value in such a focus — but rather that the obsession leads to seepage into the UK and the risk that the poisonous polarisation in the States becomes engrained in our own political culture.
We can see this in the tendency towards exaggeration, a common trait in contemporary American politics (and American life in general), which is now increasingly present in our own debates. The American left could never settle for describing Trump is an incompetent authoritarian but had to place him as a Hitler figure.
Last week’s events at the Capitol, brought absurdly inappropriate comparisons to Kristallnacht and 9/11. Likewise the American right seems unable to oppose woke or cancel culture without comparisons to communism. Trump’s rhetoric about ‘radical socialists’ to describe Democratic opponents who, if anything, represent the most corrupt, capitalist party in the Western world, was equally ridiculous.
It is no surprise this extreme rhetoric led to so-called ‘antifa’ on one side and people in Nazi sweatshirts on the other. It took continental European politics the best part of 40 years to escape from the ‘reds v fascist’ divide (and some countries still remain trapped within that division) but it has taken America just four years to recreate a version of it in a country which, when communism and fascism really were powerful in the world, was fortunate to experience neither.
The problem with the hyperbole that turns political division into a war narrative is that unsurprisingly it often leads to violence — another aspect of American politics that we should do our utmost to avoid. We were served a warning in the summer when the BLM protests in London did indeed imitate the violence of America’s streets. There was also something of Trump’s America in the way those scenes were responded to by a ragtag bunch of football hooligans and military ‘veterans’ defending the war memorials.
The British media too risks following the American descent into ultra-partisan click-bait. The Guardian is the most obvious example of a newspaper that, like the NYT, ‘feeds the base’ rather than informs a broad debate but similar trends can be found on the right and in online media. Emily Maitlis’ monologue at the start of Newsnight, during the media/political campaign over Dominic Cummings’ travel during lockdown was a sign of CNN and Fox News style partisan editorialising infecting the BBC. Indeed, the Cummings affair as a whole had the strong whiff of American politics — a frenzied and hysterical media campaign leading to the ugly sight of screaming protestors harassing a public official outside his home, egged on by opportunist politicians seemingly unaware of the fire they are playing with.
The traditional British tolerance of difference of opinion has been lost to the imported cancel culture, the clearest example of how the American domination of social media has a real and real-time impact on our political and intellectual life. American ‘Campus free speech’ issues used to be something looked at with curiosity from afar but now ‘no platforming’ and ‘cancelling’ causes damage in our own academic institutions.
It no longer feels alarmist to see America as a country which may yet descend further into extremism, discord, violence and major civil disorder. Indeed, it would be remarkable if the Biden administration were to be able to truly ‘heal’ the country in the coming two years or so before the next round of primaries begins and the whole soap opera of a bitter presidential election starts up again. There appears no vaccine for this virus.
The United State is a basket-case — a dysfunctional, corrupt republic, riddled with drug and other deep-seated social problems, divided by racial animosity and extreme economic inequalities, with a heavily armed populace and heavy-handed police, all of which is somehow meant to be resolved by an archaic political structure dominated by two parties, both heavily influenced by their radical bases. The US media no longer offers anything close to a balanced and reasoned coverage of all this with cable news eagerly engaged in monetizing division.
Now is surely the time for us to turn our attention elsewhere. America offers very few positive learning points for our country but rather stands as a warning of where things can go if a political culture is allowed to rot. But more seriously for us, the seepage, is a real threat to our own culture and politics and we would be better off, individually and collectively if we now turn away and switch off the show.
That is not to say that we should not look outside our island for new ideas, strategies or inspiration. There is much to be learnt from all over the world but it is time to stop looking to America first. It is telling that any attempt at debate over our health service quickly becomes reduced to a comparison between the NHS and America’s healthcare ‘system’ when there are examples throughout Europe and the world of modern public healthcare systems that we could learn from. Yet who ever talks about Dutch or German healthcare systems? For all their supposed Euro-enthusiasm, Remainers are as guilty as Leavers (if not more so) of being excessively focused on American examples rather than those closer to home from more similar societies, cultures and economies.
When it comes to what should be the vital post-COVID task of nation-building there are all manner of examples that can be looked at, of countries, that have built up their institutions, improved their education, transformed their economies and strengthen families. There are things to be learnt from countries in East and South East Asia for example, from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
There is something deeply pathetic, embarassing, given the history of our relations, in the British infatuation with America.
As Britain searches for a post-Brexit identity, tries to find its purpose beyond trade deals, it is surely the ideal moment to re-set our relationship with our former colony.
Let our diplomats and the trade missions do their work in Washington but when it comes to our culture and in particular our political culture, the rest of us need to declare our independence.
|
https://medium.com/@johnanderson1989/its-time-to-turn-off-the-american-show-da321a5ff484
|
['John Anderson']
|
2021-01-15 11:52:16.469000+00:00
|
['US Politics', 'Trump', 'Médiá', 'Politics', 'British Politics']
|
Resident Management App — UX Case Study
|
This project was given to me as a part of my internship program. From which the designs then later, was given to final year students of computer engineering for their android application project.
The Goal
The goal was to design the interface in such a way that it meets project requirements. This is a resident management application which allows user to create an account which could help them manage their society meetings and events, track their maintenance and helps in finding the domestic help whenever required. Moreover, the application also notifies the user about upcoming events, maintenance and notices if any.
Design Process
The process I follow is very simple and mostly dedicated to minimising the bridge between humans and digital device. I focus on making a feasible and impactful solution. and the process steps are as follows:
The Design Process
1. Analysis
I did the analysis in two parts: Competitive Analysis and Market Analysis.
Competitive Analysis
There are much resident management and security application present in the market place with discrete features. And here also the features are a bit different. This application is specially dedicated to the residents need. In this application, the different functionalities were: The resident can manage the Maintenance payment, The resident can get notified about the upcoming events and meeting in the resident society and also the user can hook a household service from the app itself. The Apps which were similar to this one are: MyGate App, Jiogate App, ADDA GateKeeper and NoBrokerHood App
Competitive Analysis
Market Analysis
After Competitive analysis, I jumped to app reviews straight away. After all, who knows what a user wants more than the user himself. Below are some of the many critical reviews I came across in the Rating and Review section. These are the reviews of the apps which I considered for Competitive analysis.
User Reviews
2. User Flow
Then according to insights obtained from analysis and the required functionalities, I tried to determine the flow of the app, the way the user can navigate in the application. The user flow plays an important role in determining the user journey from scratch.
User Flow
3. Wireframes
In this phase of design, I made wireframes after studying the user flow. It is used by UX Designers to define the hierarchy of items on a screen and communicate what the items on that page should be based on user needs.
4. Design Language
In this phase, the interface part of the design starts. After looking for many variations and iterations, I decided to go with this design language. Here, the design language includes typography and Color Schema.
Typography
For the font I chose Poppins. It is available via open source licence. Poppins is one of the newcomers to this long tradition. With help for the Devanagari and Latin writing systems, it is an internationalist take around the genre.
Colour Schema
For the colour I chose Blue. I wanted the colour to reflect the purpose of the application which is to inform and bring harmony in a diverse range of people. A colour commonly utilized to represent unity is blue. Different spiritual practices, and other types of traditions, utilize other colours to represent unity as well.
5. UI Design
UI Design is the final product of the whole process. After a few changes on wireframes and applying design language, the resultant is the interface design. This includes all the screens from the beginning to the finish line.
|
https://medium.com/multiverse-software/resident-management-app-ix-case-study-a6cd0b2a66e9
|
['Grishma Rajput']
|
2020-05-05 16:26:32.417000+00:00
|
['UI', 'Ux Case Study', 'UI Design', 'UX Design', 'Ui Ux Design']
|
Types of Convolutional Neural Networks: LeNet, AlexNet, VGG-16 Net, ResNet and Inception Net
|
We would be seeing different kinds of Convolutional Neural Networks and how they differ from each other in this article. These are some groundbreaking CNN architectures that were proposed to achieve a better accuracy and to reduce the computational cost .
1. LeNet-5
This is also known as the Classic Neural Network that was designed by Yann LeCun, Leon Bottou, Yosuha Bengio and Patrick Haffner for handwritten and machine-printed character recognition in 1990’s which they called LeNet-5. The architecture was designed to identify handwritten digits in the MNIST data-set. The architecture is pretty straightforward and simple to understand. The input images were gray scale with dimension of 32*32*1 followed by two pairs of Convolution layer with stride 2 and Average pooling layer with stride 1. Finally, fully connected layers with Softmax activation in the output layer. Traditionally, this network had 60,000 parameters in total. Refer to the original paper.
Lenet-5 Architecture
2. AlexNet
This network was very similar to LeNet-5 but was deeper with 8 layers, with more filters, stacked convolutional layers, max pooling, dropout, data augmentation, ReLU and SGD. AlexNet was the winner of the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 competition, designed by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffery E. Hinton. It was trained on two Nvidia Geforce GTX 580 GPUs, therefore, the network was split into two pipelines. AlexNet has 5 Convolution layers and 3 fully connected layers. AlexNet consists of approximately 60 M parameters. A major drawback of this network was that it comprises of too many hyper-parameters. A new concept of Local Response Normalization was also introduced in the paper. Refer to the original paper.
AlexNet Architecture
3. VGG-16 Net
The major shortcoming of too many hyper-parameters of AlexNet was solved by VGG Net by replacing large kernel-sized filters (11 and 5 in the first and second convolution layer, respectively) with multiple 3×3 kernel-sized filters one after another. The architecture developed by Simonyan and Zisserman was the 1st runner up of the Visual Recognition Challenge of 2014. The architecture consist of 3*3 Convolutional filters, 2*2 Max Pooling layer with a stride of 1, keeping the padding same to preserve the dimension. In total, there are 16 layers in the network where the input image is RGB format with dimension of 224*224*3, followed by 5 pairs of Convolution(filters: 64, 128, 256,512,512) and Max Pooling. The output of these layers is fed into three fully connected layers and a softmax function in the output layer. In total there are 138 Million parameters in VGG Net.
VGG-16 Architecture
Drawbacks of VGG Net:
1. Long training time
2. Heavy model
3. Computationally expensive
4. Vanishing/exploding gradient problem
4. ResNet
ResNet, the winner of ILSVRC-2015 competition are deep networks of over 100 layers. Residual networks are similar to VGG nets however with a sequential approach they also use “Skip connections” and “batch normalization” that helps to train deep layers without hampering the performance. After VGG Nets, as CNNs were going deep, it was becoming hard to train them because of vanishing gradients problem that makes the derivate infinitely small. Therefore, the overall performance saturates or even degrades. The idea of skips connection came from highway network where gated shortcut connections were used.
Normal Deep Networks vs Networks with skip connections
For the above figure for network with skip connection, a[l+2]=g(w[l+2]a[l+1]+ a[l])
Lets say for some reason, due to weight decay w[l+2] becomes 0, therefore, a[l+2]=g(a[l])
Hence, the layer that is introduced doesnot hurt the performance of the neural network. This the reason, increasing layers doesn’t decrease the training accuracy as some layers may make the result worse. The concept of skip connections can also be seen in LSTMs.
5. Inception Net
Inception network also known as GoogleLe Net was proposed by developers at google in “Going Deeper with Convolutions” in 2014. The motivation of InceptionNet comes from the presence of sparse features Salient parts in the image that can have a large variation in size. Due to this, the selection of right kernel size becomes extremely difficult as big kernels are selected for global features and small kernels when the features are locally located. The InceptionNets resolves this by stacking multiple kernels at the same level. Typically it uses 5*5, 3*3 and 1*1 filters in one go. For better understanding refer to the image below:
Inception Module of GoogleLe Net
Note: Same padding is used to preserve the dimension of the image.
As we can see in the image, three different filters are applied in the same level and the output is combined and fed to the next layer. The combination increases the overall number of channels in the output. The problem with this structure was the number of parameter (120M approx.) that increases the computational cost. Therefore, 1*1 filters were used before feeding the image directly to these filters that act as a bottleneck and reduces the number of channels. Using 1*1 filters, the parameter were reduced to 1/10 of the actual. GoogLeNet has 9 such inception modules stacked linearly. It is 22 layers deep (27, including the pooling layers). It uses global average pooling at the end of the last inception module. Inception v2 and v3 were also mentioned in the same paper that further increased the accuracy and decreasing computational cost.
Several Inception modules are linked to form a dense network
Side branches can be seen in the network which predicts output in order to check the shallow network performance at lower levels.
|
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/types-of-convolutional-neural-networks-lenet-alexnet-vgg-16-net-resnet-and-inception-net-759e5f197580
|
['Bhavesh Singh Bisht']
|
2020-11-22 16:08:20.063000+00:00
|
['Towards Data Science', 'Convolutional Network', 'Data Science', 'Alexnet', 'Deep Learning']
|
Firebase vs MongoDB Stitch vs AWS Amplify vs Azure Mobile Apps: MBaaS Comparison
|
Are you an entrepreneur or an IT manager undertaking a mobile app development? You would probably like to focus more on the front-end. That’s natural since the front-end of the app influences the user experience. Having said that, you can’t cut corners as far as the mobile backend is considered. Building and maintaining a mobile backend takes time and effort. It involves complexities. This is where a “Mobile Backend-as-a-Service” (MBaaS) platform can help. There are several MBaaS platforms though, and you might find it hard to choose one. This comparison between Firebase vs MongoDB Stitch vs AWS amplify vs Azure Mobile Apps can help.
In this comparison, we briefly understand what MBaaS platforms are. We review their pros and cons. We review the above-mentioned MBaaS platforms and compare them. Finally, we analyze when to use any one of these MBaaS platforms.
…………………..
To learn more about Firebase vs MongoDB Stitch vs AWS Amplify vs Azure Mobile Apps - Read this article
…………………..
A brief summary of various cloud computing models
Before delving into MBaaS, let’s briefly recap the various “as-a-service” models that cloud computing has spawned. We typically talk about 3 types of cloud computing models:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): A managed cloud service provider (MCSP) provides the computing infrastructure only on the cloud. The organization or developer consuming it brings everything else. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is an example of IaaS.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): The MCSP provides the cloud infrastructure, operating system, middleware, runtime environment, and services like databases. The consumer brings the application and data. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): A software provider offers the entire software on the cloud. Consumers buy a subscription to use the software, and they don’t need to install anything. Gmail is an example of SaaS.
What is an MBaaS platform?
An MBaaS platform utilizes cloud computing, and you can build the backend of your mobile app using it. You can use an MBaaS platform to build the backend of a web application too. This is why MBaaS is close to PaaS, however, web developers mostly use PaaS platforms.
An MBaaS platform manages the cloud infrastructure including servers, storage, and networking. It enables you to host your mobile backend. You can connect the front-end of your mobile app to the cloud storage and APIs on the backend. An MBaaS platform makes this easier for you, therefore, you don’t need to spend a lot of time to build and manage the mobile backend. AWS Amplify and Google Firebase are examples of MBaaS platforms.
Advantages of MBaaS platforms
You can get the following advantages if you use an MBaaS platform:
Cost savings: Cloud computing platforms eliminate upfront investment in IT infrastructure. MBaaS platforms are cloud platforms, and they offer this advantage.
Effort savings: Building and managing a mobile backend can take plenty of time. You need to manage IT infrastructure including servers and network. Storage is another aspect. An MBaaS provider takes care of these, therefore, you save time.
Databases: Prominent MBaaS providers provide database management services. This saves your time and effort.
API integration: Well-known MBaaS platforms make it easy for you to integrate your front-end with APIs. Powerful MBaaS platforms allow you to build, test, and deploy APIs on the platform. This further eases the integration.
The ease of implementing common functions: A mobile app needs common functionalities like push notification, user management, etc.
Disadvantages of MBaaS platforms
Despite their advantages, MBaaS platforms have a few disadvantages too. These are as follows:
|
https://medium.com/@devathon_/firebase-vs-mongodb-stitch-vs-aws-amplify-vs-azure-mobile-apps-mbaas-comparison-47e8d6d1813d
|
[]
|
2020-12-07 04:03:24.516000+00:00
|
['Azure', 'Database', 'Firebase', 'AWS', 'Mongodb']
|
Isar Aerospace raises over $91 mln in biggest European spacetech funding
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It´s all over the news today — check out the Techcrunch article bellow— the biggest Series B within the European SpaceTech industry, just happened and, although is not in our region, it´s related to Germany, Munich, and we are happy that Isar is now well equipped to further develop their launch vehicle, grow the team and prepare ther maiden flight to connect Germany and Europe to space and establish a competitive space industry.
“We are proud to accompany Isar Aerospace as the largest institutional investor on its way to commercially develop space for Europe. Micro-satellites in the low Earth orbit will become a key platform technology with enormous innovation and business potential in the coming decades. That is why we need a competitive space industry in Europe if we do not want to witness the next technological leaps as a spectator,” said Hendrik Brandis, co-founding partner of Earlybird. “I am particularly pleased that we are able to back a financing round of this magnitude entirely with German money. This is a clear sign of how successfully the startup and VC industry has developed in this country in recent years.”
|
https://medium.com/frankfurtvalley/isar-aerospace-raises-over-91-mln-in-biggest-european-spacetech-funding-19af925ed213
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['Pedro Gonçalo Ferreira']
|
2020-12-09 09:55:35.656000+00:00
|
['Space', 'Munich', 'Germany', 'Isar Aerospace', 'Europe']
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The Many Benefits of Annotating Your Wireframes
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Why are annotations important?
Creating annotated wireframes is time consuming, but communicating the overall picture of the user experience helps stakeholders see the benefit and rationale for your design decisions. Wireframes are both project documentation and a visual communication guide; make annotation part of your work flow to eliminate misunderstandings or confusion. Knowing your audience also helps you decide what type of information you should be incorporating into your annotations and what writing style you should use. It is always a good idea to get feedback on the level of detail required for the annotations from the project team, before presenting them to others.
User flow. Image credit Dixie Pacheco.
There are typically five audiences for wireframes: clients (internal or external), developers, visual designers, copywriters, and, most importantly, your future self. Dan Saffer, Sr. Staff Product Designer, Twitter
Clients will want to see the business benefits and what the (digital) experience will bring to their customers, so it’s important to use annotations to show how the user experience aligns with the client’s brand and business conversions. Meanwhile, developers and visual designers will want to see how the application works, so you’ll need to demonstrate messaging and the placement and styles for the interface (UI) elements for them, while copywriters will want to know what to write and how to adapt their tone to the target audience. Make sure to create notes for yourself, along the way. You may need to revisit the project and will want to remember why you made a certain design decision or specific annotation.
Design Tip: Test your initial sketches. Photograph your designs and import them into Adobe XD to quickly create clickable (interactive) prototypes. You can use XD UI kits to speed up the process.
Wireframe Kit for Adobe XD. Image credit Ahmed Hammad.
Using annotations to show context of use
Annotations provide context for how something will work. When designing wireframes, using them will illustrate not only the design itself but how it will work in a dynamic setting. The first place to start is with the user flow. Show and tell the overall logic and process of how the user will interact with the design. Where does the user start, what are the user’s options, and what will the user see?
Interaction models help you provide context for navigation and list the different interactions needed within the application. Where do links take the user within the experience, what type of inputs does the user see, and what are the user’s options?
Mobile web shop. Image credit Olivia Gardiner.
Best practices for annotating your wireframes
Start making notes early on
A simple text document or spreadsheet can help you organize annotation notes before implementing them into your wireframes. Use simple vocabulary and an active writing style to help keep notes and comments short and direct. Avoid using metaphors or figures of speech, and keep everything in context. Provide information that is useful for implementation, e.g., character limits, rules for pagination, and checkbox states.
Keep it clean
Keep both annotations and wireframes clean and uncluttered with a grid system for consistent layouts. Grid systems help with alignment and placement, and having page elements aligned with a numbered order and hierarchy further helps in communicating design decisions via your annotations. Focus the attention on the functionality and content layout.
Make design decisions in context with the client’s content
Skip using “lorem ipsum” placeholder text and design with real content. This will avoid any unnecessary confusion or the need to make extensive annotations regarding what specific content would be used on the page since it is already being presented.
Don’t skip annotating specific sections or pages
Annotate each page as though it is something new. Avoid generalizing by referencing previous projects or stating that the dashboard is similar to another website or app. Referencing past projects in your annotations can create bias or different expectations than those of the project at hand.
Leverage a legend
Create symbols to distinguish between content, functionality, and dynamic elements in your annotations. A simple legend for content and dynamic elements will provide clarity to the reader and help provide context for what is on each individual wireframe. Maintain a consistent ordering system. Use a two digit numbering notation 1.x, 2.x, and so on, so you can add additional notations if necessary rather than renumbering existing annotations. Annotation counts are page specific, so don’t continue the numbering from the previous page; instead, reset the annotation count with each new page of wireframes. Provide the reader with specific page IDs for reference to make annotations easy to follow from page to page.
Illustration of mobile annotations. Image credit Chaymae Lougmani.
Move from explaining general page elements to specific ones, and use the same naming convention when referencing wireframe elements and annotations. Make sure to provide visual space for each annotation, too; don’t clutter a page with numbers, arrows, and notes. Keep annotations and other notes on the right hand side as per these wireframe examples.
Consider the state
Remember to give attention to interactivity, micro interactions, mobile gestures, and modal windows, providing user actions and interface responses for each interaction. State where the user is taken on click or what happens when the user hovers on an element.
Mobile wireframes. Image credit Volodymyr Melnyk.
What and when to annotate
When annotating wireframes, be concise and present ideas clearly. Address how something is used, why it is part of the design, and where it will take the user. You can use annotation notes to:
Show call to actions (CTAs). Highlight the labels, text, and location of the call(s) to action on each page or section. Login or sign up actions should be clearly defined.
Highlight the labels, text, and location of the call(s) to action on each page or section. Login or sign up actions should be clearly defined. Clarify elements and sections. Page elements and sections should be clearly defined and noted. Provide details if the element or section is a widget or section display is conditional, e.g., is the user logged in or not.
Page elements and sections should be clearly defined and noted. Provide details if the element or section is a widget or section display is conditional, e.g., is the user logged in or not. Explain links and buttons. Illustrate and note where all links and buttons are on each wireframe and what action happens when clicked. Show where navigational elements take the user within the experience.
Illustrate and note where all links and buttons are on each wireframe and what action happens when clicked. Show where navigational elements take the user within the experience. Describe what dynamic elements do. When presenting wireframe concepts, give additional information and designs for dynamic page elements shown in static form. This would include dropdown menus and active and inactive button states. For example: “On click, a modal overlay window opens,” or, “on hover, a tool tip opens.”
When presenting wireframe concepts, give additional information and designs for dynamic page elements shown in static form. This would include dropdown menus and active and inactive button states. For example: “On click, a modal overlay window opens,” or, “on hover, a tool tip opens.” Show active and inactive states for page elements. Show how button states change once given conditions have been met, e.g., has the user acknowledged reading the terms of conditions or interacted with the captcha on the page?
Show how button states change once given conditions have been met, e.g., has the user acknowledged reading the terms of conditions or interacted with the captcha on the page? Show page content that is hidden or modal. Design and illustrate content that is not immediately shown on the page. Hidden or modal elements of the wireframe can be shown with a supplemental page or in the margin.
Design and illustrate content that is not immediately shown on the page. Hidden or modal elements of the wireframe can be shown with a supplemental page or in the margin. Provide supportive messaging and prompts. Give the user encouragement for successfully completing certain tasks and achievements. Let users know what should be done in certain sections through progressive disclosure or tool tips.
Give the user encouragement for successfully completing certain tasks and achievements. Let users know what should be done in certain sections through progressive disclosure or tool tips. Provide error messaging and error states. Error messaging and error states require space and planning, so think ahead to what type of messaging is needed and where it should go as a page element. Error messaging should tell the user what needs to be fixed or done to correct the error.
Error messaging and error states require space and planning, so think ahead to what type of messaging is needed and where it should go as a page element. Error messaging should tell the user what needs to be fixed or done to correct the error. Indicate page and element transitions. Show or describe how page elements are animated or toggle between active and inactive states. Describe animations and how they are used on the page.
Show or describe how page elements are animated or toggle between active and inactive states. Describe animations and how they are used on the page. Provide notes for the project team. Write up actions or functional features to let designers and developers know when to show a loading message, how to paginate or scroll through content from search results, or where and when to use accessibility tags.
Accessibility Annotation Examples. Image credit Karen Hawkins.
There is no reason to repeat yourself. You should address each aspect of content or functionality once in your annotations. Add page references when a user interaction opens other pages or dynamic content that was previously annotated.
Be clear and concise
Avoid being vague with your writing, which can lead to misunderstandings and defeat the purpose of having wireframe annotations. Your annotations should be clear and precise to avoid the need to clarify their meaning. Annotations are not a substitute for speaking with stakeholders or holding a formal walk through with project teams.
Wireframe annotations are for providing context and communicating project concepts and ideas to stakeholders. More often than not, wireframe annotations are not read over in detail. Be prepared to speak to your annotations and answer questions from the client and project teams. Test and validate wireframes with feedback from walkthroughs and ad-hoc user testing. Wireframing is not done in isolation and putting design decisions in front of prospective users will provide context for interactions and help deliver project outcomes.
|
https://medium.com/thinking-design/the-many-benefits-of-annotating-your-wireframes-c131a305aefe
|
['Andrew Smyk']
|
2020-03-28 22:10:57.657000+00:00
|
['UX', 'Wireframe', 'Annotations', 'Wireframing', 'Design Best Practices']
|
A look at our journey and the way forward!
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A look at our journey and the way forward! ClayStack Follow Jun 1 · 2 min read
The past few months have been overwhelming for the crypto markets and the ClayStack team. Since our introductory post, five months ago, we have been diligently working to build a decentralized cross-chain liquid staking platform that is secure and open for all.
We’ve also made strides in other organizational functions; our team size grew to 10, we’re close to implementing our liquid staking protocol for the first chain, and we have closed our seed funding round.
A look at the horizon
The coming months will be a rollercoaster ride changing with market dynamics till we launch our product. Some of the aspects that we’ll be releasing further information on includes:
Community platform
Our team
Revamped visual identity
Fundraising updates
Platform features, and
Testnet launch
Today, the staking market cap is at ~$480B, with over $140B locked in staking. We aim to bring this capital to DeFi by helping users effortlessly stake their crypto assets while maintaining their liquidity. And, to achieve this monumental task, we need all the help; if you align with our long-term vision, look at our open positions.
We have a lot of fun ideas planned for our small yet loyal community on Telegram and Twitter. If you’ve not joined it, be sure to do so.
Looking forward to a bright future.
About ClayStack:
ClayStack is a decentralized liquid staking protocol that enables you to earn staking rewards while keeping your assets liquid. Without any lockups.
Get the latest updates!
Learn more about ClayStack, interact with our team, engage in community discussions, and share your valuable feedback.
|
https://blog.claystack.com/a-look-at-our-journey-and-the-way-forward-22e0af86fd6a
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[]
|
2021-06-01 16:58:34.240000+00:00
|
['Liquid Staking', 'Staking', 'Defi', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Claystack']
|
Developing a game in 30 Days, Releasing it in hopefully less than 60 Days — A transparent story (aka a Tale of self-induced Burnout)
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Developing a game in 30 Days, Releasing it in hopefully less than 60 Days — A transparent story (aka a Tale of self-induced Burnout) Dennis 🦊 A Grumpy Fox Jul 21·8 min read
Overview
Part 1: The first Week
Part 2: The Second Week
Part 3: The Third Week
Part 4: The Fourth Week
Part 5: The Fifth Week
Part 6: Week Six & Seven
Important Links:
Steam
Twitter
Hey there gamedevs and players!
Dennis and Michael here from Deck13. Dennis also has its own company called A Grumpy Fox (just cause he always wanted to develop a game developed by a grumpy fox. Don’t even try to understand that).
Dennis pitched me (Yep, Michael currently writing) a week ago his idea: develop and release a game in 30 days. He is working on his main game called Lunistice as well but somehow has a creative breakdown and needed some fresh ideas. Also for some reason he wanted to go through the full Unity pipeline to refresh his knowledge. And since we both work in the Publishing part of Deck13, Deck13 Spotlight, his idea was to make use of the ressources we have to actually make it a commercial release. Since he is developing the game, he can’t be the Product Manager for the game. Which is why I now have to manage yet another project. Thanks. I guess.
Anyways. The idea got a small update: Finish it in 30 days. And release it afterwards, number of days unknown. Due to console submissions. They take some time. And if we wanted to go for one console only as well, we’d need to start the certification process right now already. With no game at all. And we can’t yet travel through time.
But how to market a game which has no assets available yet? Which will be done in 30 days? Well. We had this idea to share the development story in realtime (more or less. I don’t know what Dennis will do, but I won’t update this article on weekends. Or maybe I will. Heck, we’ll see).
The rules are simple:
Dennis streams the development live on Twitch every evening (German time. In German. Sorry) and I have to come up with the marketing part. We share everything whenever possible. That means if you are a game developer yourself: Yes, we’ll share wishlist numbers, what we did each day, our marketing actions, sales numbers. Still have to figure out how far we can go so that we don’t violate any NDAs. The game is (will be? I’m getting confused…) a 3D Plattformer. And the price will be 2.99$. And The community can help shaping it up. Buying assets is allowed (e.g. Skyboxes. some 3D Models. The Soundtrack) 30 Days! 30 DAYS DENNIS! I bet a Snickers that it will take a few days longer lol. This article will be updated. So keep it bookmarked if you are interested. We will also share post launch marketing actions and discounts etc. Uhm… dunno. Maybe I’ll add a few rules later on.
Let’s go!
Last Week
What happened last week: Dennis pitched the idea. And asked me if we could release the game via Spotlight. I said “Uhm, okay, whatever”. I thought he’d be joking. Well.
He also pitched it to our Boss Mathiaswho said yes. I should add that I currently am responsible for 6 projects. Now 7. Thank you Dennis.
Day 1
Dennis and me met in the office where he pitched the idea again. A roughly 2 hour long 3D Plattformer. He also came up with the idea to make it speedrunable (is that even a word?). His idea was to make it a short game for a low price and put a few hundred bucks as prices for people who upload their runs to Speedrun.com. To get some visibility. And I was already thinking about the discount strategy for the game on the Switch.
In the evening Dennis announced the project via his own community and stream (I should add he is also a Twitch Streamer. That’s also why the full development can be followed live). In the first stream he used his community to create a rough game design and to chose a name for the game. I did not watch the stream.
Streamlink: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1091534507
Day 2
Dennis sent me the name ideas via Slack. Until then I still thought it’d be a joke. And he asked me if I could register the game with Nintendo and Steam already (which reminds me: I need to get in touch with GOG as well…). But in first place he asked me to pick from three names:
Lunistice: Eversleep Eversleep: A Lunistice Story Eversleep: Lunistice Gaiden
I picked the 3rd one.
If you can’t read German: I’m saying “Oh well, fuck it, let’s go Gaiden. Whatever”
I picked the name. Yay. And I registered the products.
Steam ID is 1701800. You cannot wishlist it right now. Hopefully soon.
Aaaand Nintendo knows the product as well now.
In the evening on Stream the character controller was nearly finished. A scene manager was created to load levels. Collectibles were modled and included. Some placeholder enemies were added. The Unity input system was replaced with Rewired. Did cost Dennis 50$ so far. And, the most important thing: A speedrun timer is already working. Marketing Strategy might actually work…
Streamlink: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1092569633
Day 3
Today we discussed the marketing stuff. Dennis is singing “heeeeelp, it’s day 3 of 30…. (the 30 was pronounced like thirtyyyyyyyy), why did I just dooo thisssss” while I’m writing these words. We were discussing possible IMGUR posts once the game is out. And reddit. And Medium. And how we want to announce all this.
We’ll just share it via Twitter for now as it seems. We don’t have any assets. So we can’t announce it to the press. Probably our main audience in the beginning will be gamedevs as they are the only ones who might be interested in this story. But that might still help. I needed to figure out if I could edit Medium articles after they are live. Turns out that’s possible. Small victory for me. Tweet will go live in about 45 minutes from now (it’s 2:23PM here). Still have no idea what to write. Dennis said that he’d share stuff via his gamedev Twitter as well. Interesting times ahead.
Update: Tweets are out.
https://twitter.com/Deck13Spotlight/status/1417829278654345220
https://twitter.com/AGrumpyFox/status/1417827488131133445
3:47 PM: A colleague of our main team just came in and said “I love that idea. It’s like doing a gamejam but completely go nuts and say “fuck it, I wanna die””. Thanks Björn.
Evening: Dennis continued working on the game. First real level assets were created. A first level was blocked out and tested. And yep, the character does the Naruto run.
First Level Blocking
Streamlink: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1093616570
Day 4
Thinking about the product pages right now. It’s around noon. Should I write a typical text describing the game or put the focus on the development of the story? I’ll probably go with the later one as it is more interesting compared to “Oh yeah you can jump around through levels”. I mean, sure, it has a story. But let’s face it: We could also just explain how the game was created and what the intention is. I’m a fan of being honest.
Just checked out a few examples where this approach was used. Undertale does it quite well. Hm.
Afternoon Update: So, I started working on the Steampage. Not yet on the description. But an interesting option most people don’t really use for marketing are the system specs.
Totally serious.
So, dear developers: Make use of this wisely. Probably you won’t sell a copy due to this. But maybe you will. Humor is always an option and while most people never will take a look at the specs (let’s be honest, they hardly ever scroll down that far), someone might do it. And if you are lucky and you have some fun stuff hidden there, they might take a screenshot and share it on reddit. Or imgur. Or… uhm… TikTok I guess.
Evening: Dennis sent me a picture of the first build running on the Switch.
Caffeine > Blood
Truth is: He slacked me that the game is already running 60FPS on 1080p. And I asked him pics or it didn’t happen. He complained that he only has two hands. I said I just hear someone crying and not working. He sent me the pic.
General Advice: Make sure, if you can, to test out builds early on. This will save you a lot of time later on.
On Stream Dennis also got a Keyart from the community! (Thank you chosenvowels). We did not expect this. We even contacted our mothership, Focus Home Interactive, to see if they had some capacities. And Dennis crawled through Fiverr.
Screenshot taken from Twitch. Luckily it is layerd. Will make creating banners way easier.
More level blocking took place. Also the “ability” to fall off edges was implemented. Well. No. It wasn’t. Dennis started to implement it. But failed. Right now you can still walk on walls. But the animations for falling are in if I understood the video correctly.
Day 5
I need to remind Dennis to post something tomorrow on Twitter with #ScreenshotSaturday attached. And to link in the first answer to this article. This needs to spread a bit more. And yes, with Screenshot Saturday you usually reach other developers in first place, but there are outlets which are scanning the hashtag by now (e.g. RockPaperShotgun, Kotaku sometimes, Hardcore Gamer etc.). And: Devs might share your shots as well. And they are followed by some fans as well. So while you mostly reach Devs with the initial tweet, its still worth participating every week.
Also we’ll probably create medium article every week and crosslink between the articles. Otherwise this is getting out of control.
First rough iteration of the store text has been done. Haven’t shown it Dennis yet.
Is honesty key to success? Guess we’ll find out.
Dennis just told me it isn’t a fox but a Tanuki. What the heck is a Tanuki?
Update: Working on the second Medium article now. Will link it here. And yes, we’ll also prepare some fact based overview in the end for those interested in numbers only.
|
https://medium.com/@AGrumpyFox/developing-a-game-in-30-days-releasing-it-in-hopefully-less-than-60-days-a-transparent-story-6318115a72a0
|
['Dennis', 'A Grumpy Fox']
|
2021-08-31 10:22:30.304000+00:00
|
['Transparency', 'Videogame', 'Lunistice', 'Marketing', 'Gamedev']
|
The Mystics
|
The Mystics
From first glance
I knew that the sky
touched you too.
Ancient wisdom,
shrouded in secrecy,
comes alive in you.
I see moonlight
in your gaze.
your speech is music.
You see the unseen
Blessed with the soul
of a mystic.
|
https://medium.com/woowoo-wonders/the-mystics-63ddacc3f0a1
|
['Tosin Sanusi']
|
2020-12-27 14:02:36.198000+00:00
|
['Paranormal', 'Spirituality', 'Mysticism', 'Poetry', 'Astrology']
|
Get Ready for Jupiter and Saturn in the Great Conjunction of 2020
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Jupiter and Saturn are closing in on the Great Conjunction of 2020. On December 21, they will be the closest they have been seen in the sky for centuries
Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in the Solar System, will appear just one-tenth of a degree apart from each other on December 21.
The holiday season holds a special gift, as skygazers on Earth will be treated to a great conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. On December 21, the two largest planets in our solar system will appear just one-tenth of a degree apart, or one-fifth of the diameter of a full Moon.
This is the closest visible conjunction of the planets seen since the year 1226, when the empire of Genghis Khan reached its end, and the legend of Robin Hood began to take shape.
Come Together, Right… in About Three Weeks…
A visual and auditory tour of the Great Conjunction of 2020, coming on December 21. Featuring original composition, The Great Conjunction, by James Maynard. Video credit: The Cosmic Companion
This close encounter of the planetary kind will be easily visible to most everyone in the world. The two worlds are already shining brightly in the southwestern sky, soon after sunset. Jupiter and Saturn will draw closer to each other each night until December 21st, when they will appear as a brilliant pair of lights low in the southwestern sky.
Jupiter and Saturn will be huddled together low on southwestern horizon on December 21 — the closest the two worlds have been seen from Earth since the Middle Ages. Saturn is o close to Jupiter, it is not even seen as a separate object in this sky chart. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / Created in Stellarium.
Stargazers using telescopes to view this display will delight in seeing Jupiter and Saturn huddling together, in view of their instruments at the same time. Using binoculars or a backyard telescope, it will not only be possible to see the two largest planets in our solar system together, but several of their moons as well in this rare planetary alignment.
Several moons of Jupiter and Saturn are visible through a backyard telescope. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / Created in Stellarium
“Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten…” — Syd Barrett, Astronomy Domine, Pink Floyd
Although these two giants of the Solar System come together once every 20 years or so, this is the closest the two worlds will be seen to each other until March 15, 2080. So, make sure to see it this time around. Clouds and other factors can always affect viewing of objects in the night sky, so remember to take a look at these two megagiants of the Solar System any clear night before or after this close encounter.
From Earth (middle, left), Jupiter and Saturn (slightly lower, toward the right) will appear extremely close to each other in the sky on the evening of December 21. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / Created in NASA’s Eyes
Get Out in the Backyard — We’re All Pod People Now
Jupiter and Saturn will be huddled together low on southwestern horizon on December 21 — the closest the two worlds have been seen from Earth since the Middle Ages. Saturn is o close to Jupiter, it is not even seen as a separate object in this sky chart. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / Created in Stellarium.
This Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn will be easily visible to most people around the globe. The timing of this alignment makes this event a perfect excuse to go outside with the family (bundle up!) and view the Cosmos. Throughout December and into January, the two largest planets in our solar system will shine close to each other as seen from our home world.
All that is needed to see this event is an open view to the southwest (hopefully away from city lights). Jupiter and Saturn are already shining brightly in the southwestern sky, soon after sunset.
Although this event is easily visible without using any equipment, telescopes or binoculars will make this a stunning sight. Jupiter and Saturn are among the easiest, most beautiful sights to see with a backyard instrument. This rare event, seen for the first time in nearly 800 years, makes this as good of a time as any to look up toward the night sky.
With or without a telescope, skygazers should remember to dress warmly where appropriate, and bring a hot beverage and snacks along on any observing session — even in the backyard.
|
https://medium.com/the-cosmic-companion/get-ready-for-jupiter-and-saturn-in-the-great-conjunction-of-2020-68fa98295501
|
['James Maynard']
|
2020-12-03 18:38:18.147000+00:00
|
['Astronomy', 'Jupiter', 'Saturn', 'Space', 'Science']
|
Problematic Drug Abuse in Jails and Prisons
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A substantial portion of the US prison population is strongly connected to drug-related offenses. While the exact rates of inmates with substance use disorders (SUDs) is difficult to measure, some research shows that an estimated 65% percent of the United States prison population has an active SUD. Another 20% percent did not meet the official criteria for an SUD, but were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their crime. Many offenders are in prison as a direct result of their untreated addiction.
Decades of science shows that providing comprehensive substance use treatment to criminal offenders while incarcerated works, reducing both drug use and crime after an inmate returns to the community. It also recognizes that treatment while in jail or prison is critical to reducing overall crime and other drug-related societal burdens — such as lost job productivity, family disintegration and a continual return to jail or prison, known as recidivism. Inadequate treatment while incarcerated also contributes to overdoses and deaths when inmates leave the prison system. Yet, drug and alcohol treatment programs are woefully under-funded and absent in way too many jails and prisons around the country. And, even worse, in many count jails and state prisons, incarceration alone is effectively utilized as the method of treatment for underlying substance abuse issues.
What are the challenges in addressing substance use disorders in this population?
To be effective, treatment must begin in prison and be sustained after release through participation in community treatment programs. By engaging in a continuing therapeutic process, people can learn how to avoid relapse and withdraw from a life of crime. However, only a small percentage of those who need treatment while behind bars actually receive it, and often the treatment provided is wholly inadequate.
Inmates with opioid use disorders pose a particular challenge. During their time in prison, many untreated inmates will experience a reduced tolerance to opioids because they have stopped using drugs while incarcerated. Upon release, many will return to levels of use similar to what they used before incarceration, not realizing their bodies can no longer tolerate the same doses, increasing their risk of overdose and death. One study found that 14.8 percent of all former prisoner deaths from 1999 to 2009 were related to opioids. Insufficient pre-release counseling and/or post release follow-up are partially responsible for this alarming increase in mortality.
Why is treatment so critical in this population?
Scientific research since the mid-1970s shows that treatment of those with SUDs in the criminal justice system can change their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors toward drug use; avoid relapse; and successfully remove themselves from a life of substance use and crime. For example, studies suggest that using medications for opioid use disorder treatment in the criminal justice system decreases opioid use, criminal activity post-incarceration, and infectious disease transmission. Studies have also found that overdose deaths following incarceration were lower when inmates received medications for their addiction.
How are substance use disorders treated in the criminal justice system?
A recent National Academy of Sciences report on Medications for Opioid Use Disorder stated that only 5% of people with opioid use disorder in jail and prison settings receive medication treatment. A survey of prison medical directors suggested that most are not aware of the benefits of using medications with treatment, and when treatment is offered, it usually consists of only behavioral counseling, and/or detoxification without follow-up treatment.
Effective treatment of substance use disorders for incarcerated people requires a comprehensive approach including the following:
Behavioral therapies, including:
cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps modify the patient’s drug-use expectations and behaviors, and helps effective manage triggers and stress
contingency management therapy, which provides motivational incentives in the forms of vouchers or cash rewards for positive behaviors
Medications including methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone
Wrap-around services after release from the criminal justice system, including employment and housing assistance
Overdose education and distribution of the opioid reversal medication naloxone while in justice diversion treatment programs or upon release.
Unfortunately, though, neither the funding, personnel nor treatment facilities are sufficient to meet even a small portion of the ongoing need.
The cost of non-treatment?
Failure to treat substance use disorder in the criminal justice system not only has negative societal implications, but also proves to be expensive. One study of people involved in the criminal justice system in California showed that engagement in treatment was associated with lower costs of crime in their communities in the 6 months following treatment. In addition, the economic benefits were far greater for individuals receiving time-unlimited treatment.
A report from the National Drug Intelligence Center estimated that the cost to society for drug use was $193 billion in 2007, a substantial portion of which — $113 billion — was associated with drug related crime, including criminal justice system costs and costs borne by victims of crime. The same report showed that the cost of treating drug use (including health costs, hospitalizations, and government specialty treatment) was estimated to be $14.6 billion, a fraction of these overall societal costs. It is estimated that the cost to society has increased significantly since the 2007 report, given the growing costs of prescription drug misuse.
Twenty years ago, Norway made a dramatic change of focus in its justice system with several other Western European nations following suit. The idea was to have shorter prison sentences and use the funds that would be saved toward an emphasis on rehabilitation, with a particular spotlight on drug rehabilitation and treatment. As a result, these countries have been rewarded with much lower recidivism rates than those in the US, with Norway leading the trend at a once inconceivably low rate of 20%, as compared to the US at 43%.
Failure to effectively treat substance abuse in prison or as an alternative to prison places a tremendous unseen toll on society. The key problem is that it’s so difficult to rally support behind this issue because the costs are so intangible. It’s not like a clear apples-to-apples case can be made, fostering greater political will to solve the problem. Moreover, who would be the arbiter of which people can be dealt with more effectively through treatment instead of incarceration and how will that determination be made? These thorny issues and more ensure that precious little will change, until we finally wise up as a country and handle things more like our Western European friends.
|
https://medium.com/@justicefailing/problematic-drug-abuse-in-jails-and-prisons-c9d774558860
|
['Failing Justice']
|
2020-10-01 21:29:55.943000+00:00
|
['Arrest', 'Criminal Justice Reform', 'Prison', 'Criminal Justice', 'Prison Reform']
|
Wisdom In A Dream.
|
The Inner Workings Of My Mind.
(Cottonbro, Pexels)
I had a dream last night that Bruce Lee appeared to and told me some of his wisdom. I am not sure if he would have uttered any words of this likeness.
I am a Bruce Lee fan and this really was amazing. Do I think I was visited by him? No I would say most likely my mind is trying to give me some advice and chose someone whom I admire to pass on these words to maybe take more notice of it.
These are the words I heard:-
"Everyone has potential to be great. Yet even those who already know their gifts and potential fail. Why? Because at a certain point you reach the ceiling and you don’t quite know how to break through that ceiling.
That ceiling is something that you have created with your own mind. You fail to recognize this.
Do not let people get you down do not let them take away from you. Yes they can call you anything you like. But up here in your mind you know what is right about how you want to live your life. If people laugh at you for your dreams let them. They do not know the inner workings of your own mind.
Now back to that ceiling. If you are an athlete and think you are at the physical peak of your fitness you are wrong. You may reach that ceiling where you think you cannot gain any more strength, any more muscle, endurance or quickness. You are wrong. That ceiling is not real, you make it real because you are scared. Do not be scared to push at the ceiling it will break and you can break through it. There may be an initial mess but then you realize you are on another floor looking down at where you once where, that is progress. Never let the ceiling win.
The same applies to business and growth never let that ceiling control your mind it is the other way around. You control your mind, don’t listen to people who say it is not true. To those people laugh in your mind but don’t say anything they have learned nothing.
Don’t waste your time with people who do not want to learn. The ceiling is there to hold a house up but if you want more levels then you are going to create more ceilings until you reach the attic. Only very few realize this.”
I guess my mind is trying to tell me something that I really need to hear.
©zoelou379
|
https://medium.com/love-life-healing/wisdom-in-a-dream-the-inner-workings-of-my-mind-i-had-a-dream-last-night-that-bruce-lee-appeared-98ec75501a3a
|
[]
|
2020-12-27 18:47:04.543000+00:00
|
['Wisdom', 'Bruce Lee', 'Dreams', 'Psychology', 'How The Mind Works']
|
TCL’s latest soundbar connects wirelessly to Roku TVs
|
TCL teamed up with Roku at CES 2020 to release a soundbar that eased the TV setup process with on-screen instructions and settings courtesy of the “Roku TV-Ready” program. The two companies are doing it again at this year’s CES with a new soundbar that connects wirelessly to Roku TVs.
Related product TCL 8-series 4K UHD LCD TV (65-inch class, model 65Q825) Read TechHive's review$999.00MSRP $1,999.00See iton Best Buy (Price when reviewed) Slated to arrive later this year, the Alto R1 is an all-in-one, 2.0-channel soundbar that marks TCL’s first truly wireless soundbar—well, wireless save for the power cord.
The Alto R1 manages its wireless audio trick with help from a reference design from Roku that allows for a point-to-point Wi-Fi connection between a soundbar and a Roku-powered TV, meaning there’s no need for HDMI or optical cables. Roku announced its new reference design late last week.
[ Further reading: The best soundbars ]As with the Alto 9+, the 3.1-channel Dolby Atmos soundbar that TCL unveiled a year ago at CES, the Alto R1 will be a Roku TV-Ready model, which means Roku TV users will be guided through the setup process with on-screen instructions and settings.
TCL TCL’s wireless Alto R1 soundbar is Roku TV-ready, which means it will support on-screen setup instructions and configuration settings when connected to a compatible Roku TV.
Unlike the Alto 9+, the R1 won’t support Dolby Atmos, nor will it offer virtualized 3D audio via DTS Virtual:X. Instead, the soundbar will come with straight-up Dolby Audio support, similar to many budget soundbars. Also missing will be support for Alexa and Google Assistant, although you will be able to stream audio to the Alto R1 from your phone via Bluetooth.
TCL also announced a few higher-end, HDMI-enabled soundbars for 2021, including its first models with built-in AirPlay 2, plus support for Alexa, and Google Assistant.
Due later this year, the 3.1.2-channel Alto 8e boasts a wireless subwoofer and upfiring drivers for Dolby Atmos, it will also come with AirPlay 2, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Spotify Connect support.
Meanwhile, the Alto 82i will be yet another Dolby Atmos soundbar (no word on the exact channel configuration) with AirPlay 2, Alexa, and Google Assistant support, although it will swap out the wireless subwoofer for a pair of built-in subwoofers. Rounding out TCL’s 2021 soundbar lineup will be a fourth, “premium” model with Dolby Atmos support, TCL said.
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/@sean55185663/tcls-latest-soundbar-connects-wirelessly-to-roku-tvs-a4e0ebad38a2
|
[]
|
2021-01-27 11:58:13.980000+00:00
|
['Tvs', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Chromecast']
|
Christian Scriptures — Which Bible?
|
Dead Sea Scrolls — Photo credit: Illustrative: Three fragments from the Temple Scroll, one the Dead Sea Scrolls, is displayed at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio, March 28, 2006. (AP Photo/Jamie-Andrea Yanak, File)
Easy to Read & Simplistic Explanation:
Christian scriptures are contained in the Holy Bible. It is called the Holy Bible, because Christians consider these to be sacred scriptures. Sacred means that these are books set apart from all other literature, because Christians believe that they hold the revelation of God,
the revelation of God that brings salvation to all believers,
including eternal life. When one opens up a modern Bible, you immediately see a table of contents.
What you perceive immediately is that bibles are a compilation
of a variety of different works. They are usually divided into two parts — the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The Old Testament is made up of books from the Hebrew scriptures,
so in the Old Testament it is a compilation of the Bible in Hebrew, a modern edition. These scriptures that it contains are writings
from a 2000-year-old history of Israel. It is written in Hebrew but has been translated to many languages, although some of these books also are written in Aramaic, which was a later language of the Persian Empire.
Once we turn to the Christian appropriation of these books,
we will see that they included also some works in Greek.
Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and so this was for them
the books of the Torah, of the law, the books of the prophets,
and the scriptures of Jesus and his followers and, indeed, of the early Christians.
The Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, is only one part of the Jewish scriptures. A point I wanted to emphasize is that even though Christians share with Jews the books of the Hebrew Bible, they read them in terms of the coming of Jesus and his teaching and his life.
There are some Bibles that have the Hebrew text, the Latin text, and the Greek text in columns next to each other.
The second main part of the Bible is the New Testament.
It was written in the Greek language.
Jesus himself probably spoke Aramaic.
But He may not have known Greek at all.
But Greek was the language that was used around the eastern Mediterranean,
and it was the language in which Christianity first circulated.
All the books in the New Testament were written after Jesus died.
Jesus himself didn’t write any books that we know of or that are left.
All the writings of the New Testament were written by his followers.
And indeed, the oldest book in the New Testament, so far as we know,
was written by Paul. Paul actually never knew Jesus, but only knew about his teachings from other apostles and through revelation.
If we look more closely, however, we will
see that not all bibles have the same books in them,
and they do not have those books in the same order.
All Christian bibles have in them the book that are in the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh. This is a set that are produced by the Jewish Publication Society,
and it contains within it the Torah, the five books of Moses, the prophets, and a set of other texts called the Writings, the Ketuvim. This had the psalms, which were songs and proverbs and other kinds of materials. All Christian bibles will include these books.
All Christian bibles also contain the same 27 books of the New Testament,
but Catholic and Orthodox bibles contain a set of other books and “chapters.” So the Christian Bibles contains an additional 10 books or so
more than one finds in the Jewish Bible. Bible text is translated in many different languages.
The Roman Catholic church prides itself on having a magisterium who are there to help Christians interpret the Bible. In comparison, the Prostestants believe in “sola scriptura” and the “Bible Only” concept and thus may also explain why there are over 33,000 Protestant churches around the world versus the ONE Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church that has existed for over 2000 years.
The orthodox Bible has slightly more books in it than the Catholic Bible.
Some bibles, in addition, contain books called 2 Esdras and 4 Maccabees.
But the largest Bible, that is to say the Bible with the most sacred books
in it, is the Ethiopic Bible. The Ethiopic Bible contains, depending what
one counts, usually around 81 books. Among these is a book not contained in any of the other bibles, First Enoch.
Protestant bibles are actually the smallest bibles. They contain in their Old Testament the Jewish scriptures in the Jewish Bible and the 27 books of the New Testament. They may sometimes also contain books that are in the Catholic and Orthodox bibles additionally, but these are relegated to a third section called the Apocrypha. There, you see the Old Testament, the list of the Apocryphal books, and here again, are those books first and 2 Maccabees, additions to the Book of Daniel like Bel and the Dragon, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and so forth. But these have a separate section, and then the texts of the New Testament.
Mormons have the same Bible as Protestants with the New Testament and the Old Testament. They do not contain the Apocrypha. But in addition to that, they include new scripture, the Book of Mormon. Many Christians believe that Mormonism is a cult and do not consider Mormon’s christians. The basis of the Mormonism religion also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), traces its origins to an American religion founded by Joseph Smith in the United States in 1830.
If you have a Bible or several Bibles, see what is in it and who the publisher is. Many Catholics and Protestants actually assume that they are reading their “own” Bible but in reality may be reading a Bible that is different then their denominational faith. However, regardless of this, the Holy Bible of all Christians consider their own Bible to be sacred scriptures.
|
https://medium.com/@teacheronline/christian-scriptures-which-bible-28b9bf7fb559
|
['Ruth Neigut']
|
2020-12-20 21:38:39.111000+00:00
|
['Bible', 'Catholic', 'Protestant', 'Religion']
|
The Los Angeles Christmas Market Opens This Friday Opposite The Grove In LA
|
Looking for something to do that’s festive and a wonderful escape during these difficult and trying times? The Los Angeles Christmas Market is the perfect place to enjoy and take your family to celebrate the holiday season. Open to the public this Friday from 10am to 8pm, this exciting pop-up display is located opposite The Grove on the corner of Fairfax and W 3rd Street in Los Angeles. This incredibly detailed display was set up for guests to enjoy and is free of charge — while keeping within the safety guidelines for Covid 19 at 25% capacity.
The Los Angeles Christmas Market features immersive winter wonderland decor, holiday themed markets and a special photo op with Santa Claus for $45. The safety guidelines for the photo op features a non-reflective plexiglass separating Santa from the guests so they can feel comfortable for the photo and walk away with a beautiful memory to share. To secure your place for a photo, reservations can also be made online and for a reduced price. guests can take a photo with family and friends in the sleigh, without Santa.
The Los Angeles Christmas Market which will remain open till January 3rd, 2021 also offers merchandise for purchase such as shirts, hoodies, ornaments, masks and more — incase you’re looking for some special gift ideas.
For more information on this wonderful experience and to follow all the latest updates, be sure to check out the official website below and thank you to Rogers & Cowan for the amazing and informative work, as always.
|
https://medium.com/@hollywood411/the-los-angeles-christmas-market-opens-this-friday-opposite-the-grove-in-la-30e312f9055f
|
[]
|
2020-11-26 00:37:54.886000+00:00
|
['Amber Bollard', 'The Grove', 'Christmas', 'Los Angeles', 'The Christmas Market']
|
“I’m So Glad We Can Talk About Grown-Up Things.”
|
“I’m So Glad We Can Talk About Grown-Up Things.”
Or can we?
So what do you wanna talk about? Photo by Wiktor Karkocha on Unsplash
“I’m so glad we could get out of the house.”
“Me too. What’s this place again?”
“It’s Korean-Mexican fusion. Supposed to be really good. Trendy.”
“Expensive. Any reason it had to happen on pizza night?”
“Don’t start with this again. It was the night the sitter was available.”
“I appreciate it. I’m just saying.”
“Please don’t. You’re starting to sound like our kid. Can’t we enjoy something that isn’t covered in processed cheese?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Isn’t it nice that we don’t have to watch those puppies solve crimes or whatever they do — ”
“I don’t know how he can watch that crap over and over.”
“Not just that, but how do they afford all that gear? A helicopter, all those trucks? Are they funded by taxpayers?”
“The real question is why are they so far from the town they’re supposed to protect. They’re on an island far away and if that bridge is knocked out, only the helicopter chick can respond.”
“But we don’t have to talk about that now.”
“No. We can talk about something else.”
“Date night.”
“Do you think they have mozzarella sticks?”
“It’s a nice place. You are not ordering mozzarella sticks.”
“It’s a Mexican place, right? Wouldn’t they have it?”
“Mozzarella sticks aren’t Mexican. God, you’re such an American.”
“I just want to see if they have them.”
“Is this why you had kids? So you could order off the kids’ menu?”
“That, and the Legos.”
“Can we have one night where we act like a couple?”
“All I did was say I wanted to ask about the menu.”
“You haven’t even looked at what they have.”
“Okay. I’ll order from the regular menu.”
“Thank you.”
“You know what always confused me…that show with the kids who are basically fish?”
“Right.”
“They play ball underwater.”
“Yes.”
“Well, how is that physically possible? I mean, wouldn’t the ball float away? How do they dribble a basketball under water?”
“This is your idea of adult conversation?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Something enlightening. Business. Culture.”
“All right. What exhibits are showing right now at the Met?”
“…I think the dogs are taxpayer funded, actually.”
“Well, the mayor causes most of the dangerous situations. I feel like she should just hire those dogs as personal security, out of her own pocket.”
“They help other people in town, too.”
“Yeah, in the later seasons.”
“Do you know what you want to eat?”
“No. Do you?”
“I honestly haven’t been able to read since we sat down. It’s like I’ve forgotten how. You know what, let’s just go and get pizza.”
“What? What about date night?”
“To be fair, eating pizza at night in the back seat of a car was our first date.”
|
https://medium.com/energy-turtle-expressions/im-so-glad-we-can-talk-about-grown-up-things-673168f9f04f
|
['Lisa Martens']
|
2019-06-04 14:00:27.062000+00:00
|
['Humor', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Relationships', 'Kids']
|
Scrum Guide 2020 — I like it!. My First impression
|
My General Thoughts
I will not beat around the bush: I like the new Scrum Guide.
I believe this is the biggest revision of the Scrum Guide ever. It will be impossible to discuss everything in this article. So I will focus on my top five observations.
1. Scrum is still Scrum
Yes, we are still looking at Scrum. It was always about empiricism and the new Scrum Guide is emphasising it even more than before.
Scrum still exists to create value for complex problems, using empiricism. Empiricism is Transparency — Inspection — Adaptation. The Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective Events still serve to inspect and adapt. The word ‘role’ has disappeared from the Scrum Guide. We now have ‘Accountabilities’ to remove confusion with job titles.
The core of Scrum is still the same.
2. Less Prescriptive
The Scrum Guide does not mention best practices or guidance for doing the events anymore. Instead, it focuses on explaining the purpose of the events (and other items). Examples are:
The three questions for the Daily Scrum are gone.
The Sprint Review section is greatly reduced in size, speaking about why it exists and what you should get out of it.
All the guidelines to assist in how to do the events were not applicable in all situations. They often were confusing. On top of that, there is a world of information about best practices. The Scrum Guide doesn’t have to do this:
“As Scrum is being used, patterns, processes, and insights that fit the Scrum framework as described in this document, may be found, applied and devised. Their description is beyond the purpose of the Scrum Guide because they are context sensitive and differ widely between Scrum uses. Such tactics for using within the Scrum framework vary widely and are described elsewhere.” — Scrum Guide 2020
I can only agree. The Scrum Guide is improved to focus on What Scrum is about, leaving the How to other sources. One of the great places to find this information is Serious Scrum. Another one is Scrum Patterns.
3. Commitment towards Product Goal, Sprint Goal and Definition of Done
The 2017 Scrum Guide already had concepts like Vision, Sprint Goal and Definition of Done. It already stated that Sprints were about defining and meeting a Sprint Goal and that Increments should meet the Definition of Done. Also, an Increment was a step towards a vision.
Most Scrum Teams knew that Increment needed to meet the Definition of Done. Fewer teams knew or understood the importance of the Sprint goal. The concept of vision was often no more than a vague notion.
This all has changed with the introduction of commitments:
The Product Goal
This is the long term objective of the product. A Product Backlog should reflect the Product Goal. Product Backlog Items that don’t help to meet the Product Goal should not be on the Product Backlog.
The Sprint Goal
This is the objective of the Sprint. Developers (formally known as the Development Team) commit to achieving the Sprint Goal. The Sprint Backlog has:
The Sprint Goal.
Product Backlog Items selected to meet the Sprint Goal.
A plan to meet the Sprint Goal.
The Definition of Done
This is the formal description of when an Increment meets quality requirements. Developers commit to creating Increments in accordance to the Definition of Done. Increments should be Done before they can be inspected at the Sprint Review.
The introduction of Commitments brings clarity and focus. Above all, the commitments help to foster empiricism as it raises the transparency, allowing for proper inspection of the artifacts. When Scrum Teams use them as intended, the Product Goal, Sprint Goal, and Definition of Done help to get everyone on the same page.
4. Scrum Values have more emphasis
Scrum Values
The Scrum Values Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage are still in the Scrum Guide. But Focus and Commitment have been put in the spotlight more. It may be a coincidence, but in the previous version of the Scrum Guide, the Scrum Values were presented in alphabetical order. Now it starts with Commitment and Focus. It is logical if you see how these two are all over the guide.
Commitment
The 2017 Scrum Guide used to say:
“People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team.” — Scrum Guide 2017
This is a vague statement and many struggled with it or even ignored it. This changed with the way the new Scrum Guide introduces the commitments. Every artifact now comes with a commitment.
I am happy with this clarity. I wrote in another article that Scrum requires relentless commitment. In a complex environment, you need to commit to your goals to learn and adapt. Only then you can build valuable products. Without commitment, empiricism goes overboard and Scrum becomes worthless.
Focus
At several places in the Scrum Guide, focus is mentioned. As an example, a Scrum Team is “a cohesive unit of professionals focused on one objective at a time, the Product Goal.” — Scrum Guide 2020
Also, Commitments exist to bring focus. By having clear commitments for the Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog and the Increment, teams have a better sense of what they should focus on. This helps teams from going astray.
Balancing act
I foresee that the emphasis on commitment will be a topic of discussion for years to come. Commitment can be misunderstood and confused with ‘signed in blood’.
This is why I'm happy the Scrum Guide added sustainable pace. It balances things out. And it is a topic I missed dearly.
“Working in Sprints at a sustainable pace improves the Scrum Team’s focus and consistency.” — Scrum Guide 2020
At last, this Agile principle is part of Scrum. It is important to emphasise that teams shouldn’t work under too much pressure or working longer hours than they can handle. It is suitable for an Agile framework.
5. Scrum Roles … no longer exist
We no longer have Scrum Roles. They are renamed to Accountabilities. The reason is that roles were confused with job-titles. Renaming it to accountabilities is an attempt to move away from this. It also opens the door for shared accountability. As an example: multiple people could together fill the Scrum Master accountability. The Product Owner, however, remains to be one person.
The Development Team is gone. Only the Scrum Team remains, consisting of a Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developer. There’s no longer the notion of a team within a team. This is strengthened with the following:
“The Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required.” — Scrum Guide 2020
The entire Scrum Team is responsible for the efforts to create high-value products. It is a team effort and everyone would be on board with that. No longer should Scrum be confused as a technology-focused feature factory.
My impression
I am very happy with this version of the Scrum Guide. I believe it makes total sense. It focuses on the why and tries to stay away from the how. It confirms Scrum is a framework where teams can choose which practices to apply in that framework.
It clarifies the importance of commitment and doesn’t forget sustainability.
Many things I wrote about previously are basically confirmed by the new Scrum Guide:
Scrum Teams should understand Product Goal.
The Sprint should be about achieving the Sprint Goal, not about completing items.
In a complex environment, Scrum Teams should be committed while using empiricism to creating high-value products.
Scrum Teams should be empowered and responsible for the entire value chain.
There’s so much more to tell about the new Scrum Guide and I can’t wait to discuss it. So you can expect in-depth articles about all kinds of facets soon!
|
https://medium.com/serious-scrum/scrum-guide-2020-i-like-it-2f7096945d92
|
['Willem-Jan Ageling']
|
2020-11-22 12:02:09.970000+00:00
|
['Software Development', 'Serious Scrum', 'Scrum', 'Product Management', 'Agile']
|
How to Start Building Wealth From Scratch
|
How to Start Building Wealth From Scratch
5 Tips From My 20-Years-Old Self
Are you interested in getting out of your poverty misery? And want to become ultra-rich?
You already read books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, or The Millionaire Booklet, and you still have no clue where to start?
Instead, you continue blaming your situation on the rich?
Well, then here are some ideas from my 20-year-old me back from the 90s. I may add some thoughts from the 2020s technology perspective.
So how did my 20-year-old self work himself out of poverty?
Accepting your starting position
The first necessary thing is:
Stop blaming other people for your situation
From my own experience, I know how inviting it is to throw everything away when you see a son of a lawyer's family driving with a Porsche to the University, looking down on you and telling you that people like you shouldn’t be allowed to study. It is a waste of resources.
Just do not fall prey to the Drama dynamic of such a situation. It is neither your fault nor his fault where you started.
And believe me — every life has it’s own challenges.
So if you want to change your situation, start with accepting your personal starting line and define your challenge, that you want to work out of poverty.
Just stop comparing your situation with other people’s life.
Get an income
Yes, I got a masters’ degree from the University of Graz. I had to finance it myself—no rich parents paid for food, shelter, holidays, and a university degree.
I got a lot of hate instead. Once I made some money with a nice hard working job-more to the job later. From the money I made, I bought a nice black suit. It was the only suit I could afford while studying.
So at every event, I wore the same suit. My “friends” were laughing at me. Why am I just wearing the same suit? Because I didn’t have money. And I learned to ignore such comments.
The thing was, I had dreams, and I didn’t want to give up on them. So instead of living on welfare, I was looking for jobs.
Back in the 90s, there were no part-time jobs for students. People were either studying at a University or working. And there was no internet. Well, at least not in the nowadays version. The main purpose of the internet was mainly writing emails just for fun. Or ordering a book from Amazon.
As the combination of a full-time job and studying was almost impossible. Well, it was impossible; I picked up every occasional job I could get.
What I did:
Security at concerts and events like formula 1. One of the better jobs
Bouncer
Assembly line night shift
Loading train wagons with goods in summer — manually
Installing computers for acquaintances
None of these jobs was fun. Well, except security at Formula 1 in the paddock area. That one was pretty cool.
But all the others were jobs. I very often got humiliated, but it made me money to follow my dreams.
I always focused on the goal university degree, which I believed to be the way out of poverty back then.
How you can apply it:
sit down, look on job portals on the internet
Look for any job with no education required
And apply for it
You got two strong hands, so use them.
Creating a budget
Once you have accepted your situation and created your first stream of income, you need to develop a plan and strategy for using your money.
I always thought of my income as a pie.
A pie on a plate that gets refilled every month. By the salary.
The question I asked myself:
How do I want to split the pie amongst my good friends who come by every month? Who were these friends?
My apartment
Grocery shopping
Clothes
Martial Arts
University
Computer Games
Holidays
Basically, everything I wanted in my life got a label assigned. As there were so many things I wanted, I put them into categories and allocated a percentage of the pie to each of them.
So here is my formula in a recap
50% of the pie went into necessities like rent, clothes, food. Everything that Maslow describes as basic needs.
20% Education: Yes, this is one of the most important things to me. It covers tuition fees, books, and everything need to learn new things
20% Saving and investment: Paying yourself first, say some. I say save and invest
10% Anything else: Procrastination, holidays partying
How you can apply it to your life:
Write down what is important to you
Put it into three to five groups
Split 30% between these 3–5 groups
50% always go-to necessities. It would help if you stayed alive and well feed. It is your priority
20% always go into saving and investing
Keeping Track
The first three points were pretty obvious. And relatively easy. Well, except for finding a job back then. eMails were not accepted. Every application was a printed letter and some phone calls. But this is something for another story.
So far, so good. You decided to start building wealth, created an income stream, and decided what to use the money for.
The tricky thing was putting things into action. Cash ruled the world in the 90s. In Austria, credit cards were something for the already rich.
Young people without money didn`t get credit cards.
So how could I keep track of the expenses?
Bank account to collect the income and deducted necessities.
The first thing was to create a bank account that holds the income stream. From this bank account, necessities are booked.
I started using my ATM card regularly to see where the money goes. The aim was to use as little physical cash as necessary.
Why?
Have you ever gotten 100 Euros from an ATM for a nice night out? And the next morning, you wonder where all the money went?
Keeping track of bills was a thing. Setting up an excel sheet, collecting the bills, and entering every transaction into the excel file. It was time-consuming work.
Keeping track is necessary if you want to keep your budgeting rules.
Deduct savings first thing in the month.
The only way to build wealth is by saving and investing. There is no other secret. I decided to go for 20% of my income. Every month the first thing I transferred from the paychecks was money to the savings account.
Every time I got a paycheck booked — I saved 20%. Even in times when I believed below the poverty line. 20% went to savings — always.
I know from experience that it is tough when you start from zero.
But it would be best if you started building this habit.
All the other expenses
Back in the days, it was hard work with excel and collecting bills. The excel had a column for
date
amount
brief description
category Food, Rent, Education, Saving, Fun
Every evening I sat down and analyzed how well I did in keeping the budget.
Some days were great, and sometimes I went astray. For example, spending more money while going out with friends because I had fun.
Anyhow, celebrate the days when you keep your goals. And don`t be too harsh when you fail one or the other day.
Nobody is perfect, and creating the habit takes time.
How you can apply it in your life in 2020
Create a bank account for your income streams. Bank accounts in 2020 are mostly for free anyway.
Deduct the fixed monthly payments like rent, water, electricity directly from this account
Create a savings account and transfer the percentage you want to save. I used the 20% most of the time in my life.
Create an additional bank account for the other categories you want to have
E.g., a bank accounts for shopping. Transfer the money you want to spend in a month directly to this account and use only this one for shopping
Do everything digital. It makes keeping track of your expenses much easier.
Debt doesn`t exist
One of the best advice I got from my mother and grandmother was:
When you can`t afford it, you can`t buy it.
It was a simple truth back in the 80s and 90s. If I hadn`t enough money on the savings account, I couldn`t buy clothes, a car, or whatever I wanted to have.
Do not go into debt
I am really grateful for this advice. It helped me a lot in life.
No matter what it is. Always save money for the purchase first. Dan Lok once said in a video.
The poor use debt to buy things. The rich build the asset first and use this to buy things.
No matter what it is that you want and what other people tell you. Do not use debt to buy things. Using debt will ruin your financial life. It is as easy as that.
How you can apply it in your life:
|
https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-start-building-wealth-from-scratch-2a7f9bc35270
|
['Christian Soschner']
|
2020-11-20 12:45:41.816000+00:00
|
['Making Money Secret', 'Life Lessons', 'Budgeting Tips', 'Building Wealth', 'Success']
|
A brick to ‘The Mirror of #MeToo’
|
Dear editor,
I’m writing in response to a recent article, entitled ‘The Mirror of #MeToo’ by Daniel Miller, which first appeared on your site this morning.
I must admit that my first reaction to the article was complete bemusement. I chalked it down to reading it without my glasses, which is a frankly terrible habit and will only cause me problems further down the line, but when I reread it with my new and improved 20/20 vision, I didn’t find the peace I’d longed for. Instead, my emotions moved from bemused to very, very weary.
To be quite blunt, I found the article lacking in myriad ways, ranging from its complete misunderstanding of what the statue is supposed to represent to its total lack of awareness of Classical Reception as a field of study. It frankly seems to have been written with ‘statue bad because statue not like myth — prove?’ written on a Post-It note positioned above the writer’s laptop, which would almost be excusable if the article then made rigorous intellectual arguments to substantiate that reading. However, it doesn’t even come close.
It puzzles me, considering The Critic’s stated editorial commitment to counter the ‘lack of intellectual rigour’ you perceive in other publications, why The Critic would not have approached someone with an understanding of myth and narrative to write the piece. To be clear: although I disagree with Miller’s conclusions, I don’t take umbrage with his personal opinion. He’s allowed to feel however he likes about the statue; I myself have numerous issues with it, although not the same issues as Miller. I do, however, take issue with the fact that he takes several lumbering missteps to reach the aforementioned conclusion.
I frankly don’t have time to detail the numerous factual errors with the piece unremunerated, but a selection for your perusal follows:
‘In the original myth, Medusa wasn’t a sexual assault victim of Perseus, but the god Poseidon […]’
This is factually inaccurate. Firstly, there is no ‘original myth’. Myth as a narrative form cannot be accurately said to have an ‘original’ version at all, owing to the primarily oral nature of its early incarnations. Certainly, we have what I would term ‘earliest extant versions’, or perhaps ‘earliest surviving versions’, which in the case of Medusa would be Hesiod, dating from around 800–700BC, but this is not the ‘original’ myth by any means; Hesiod himself was drawing on earlier oral traditions.
Secondly, Miller is quite clearly referencing the myth as recounted by Ovid in this sentence, as this is the first extant version of the myth in which Medusa is raped by Poseidon. Even if we are to take Miller’s incorrect assumption that myth has an ‘original’ version, Ovid’s version of the myth dates to around 8AD, more than half a millennium after Hesiod’s, and so can hardly be a contender for the title.
It seems intellectually dishonest therefore to bemoan the besmirchment of a perceived pure, original myth, and use this besmirchment as the ideological crux of Miller’s article, and then cite as evidence an already much modified version of the myth. Again, I find that this directly goes against The Critic’s statement that intellectual rigour should be valued above an editorial line.
‘[…] if one can even really be the assault victim of a god.’
Well, quite frankly, one can, certainly within the context of myth. Ovid himself, in the recounting of the myth that Miller uses, tells us that Medusa was ‘violated’ by Poseidon, and there is an immense corpus of academic work by Classicists on the subject of rape by deities in Classical myth (see: Curran, Deacy as perhaps two of the foremost writers on the subject.) The idea that humans cannot be raped by gods is, somewhat ironically, a very modern idea, and not one that would have had any credence with the ancient Greeks and Romans that Miller accuses modern receivers of the myth of speaking over. Greek and, to a slightly more nuanced but not lesser extent, Roman deities were beholden to an entirely different moral code than humans, it’s true, but this does not negate the fact that rape and assault are, ultimately, crimes which occur when the victim does not consent.
Themes of maidens attempting in vain to escape the whims of the gods are abundant in myth (see: the myths of Daphne, Europa and Thetis as three excellent examples) and indeed often form the entire basis of the narrative (see the myth of Caenis/Caeneus, who is raped as a woman by Poseidon and asks to be turned into a man so that she can’t be raped again; surely one of the most damning ancient examples of the trauma of rape.) Miller’s presumed assertion that gods raping mortals is a modern ideology holds absolutely no academic or intellectual weight.
‘In the first place, Medusa is not a moral person, or merely a negative feminine stereotype, but an archetypal figure of equal cosmic power to the hero. They need each other, and every human person contains in some proportion both, but when one assumes the power of the other, the myth breaks down, and ceases to make sense.’
Again, this is untrue. Perhaps Miller would be interested in engaging with the field of Monster Studies, which posits that a monster, far from existing only to counter the Hero (indeed, if we’re discussing archetypes, this should be capitalised) in fact has a discrete and distinctive narrative role. Monsters are liminal creatures, existing on the periphery of society, often embodying cultural or social fears. Medusa herself is an excellent example of this (see: Cohen, Gloyn) and is often taken as symbolic for the fear of the sexually transgressive woman. To say that she exists merely as a foil for Perseus the Hero is a reductive reading of the myth and belies a lack of understanding of narrative theory.
‘Is it crazy to imagine that these phenomena are linked? According to Robert Graves, the myth of the Medusa corresponds to a real historical event: […]’
Using Robert Graves as a source here makes every single Classicist both sides of the equator shudder uncontrollably. This sentence was the point at which I broke out in metaphorical hives. Graves is not a Classicist; his euhemeristic (i.e. attempts to historicise) reading of mythology is without basis. It may interest the editor to know that Graves’ most famous work, The White Goddess, is a work which has been accused of single-handedly almost destroying the field of Celtic Studies through his assertion that Celts worshipped a tree goddess entirely of his own invention. Miller does not do his due diligence here by citing Graves in all seriousness.
Furthermore, any euhemeristic reading of a myth must be taken with not only a pinch but a generous armful of salt. There is absolutely no archaeological basis to support Graves’ assertion here, nor Miller’s citation of it, and his theory is based on little more than an unproven etymology of Medusa’s name. I cannot stress enough how unintellectual the whole thing is. It’s intellectually equivalent to claiming that Atlantis was situated in Georgia, and stating that we know this is definitely true because it sounds quite a bit like Atlanta.
‘Indeed, the idea that one can simply change a myth according to the ideological prejudices of modern political narratives holds up its own mirror to the narcissism of the contemporary world in its contempt for the past.’
This is the most intellectually dishonest sentence in the entire piece, and also the entire basis of its ethos, which is perhaps why the piece fails so spectacularly. Miller’s complete failure to understand the form and function of myth renders his entire argument flat.
Myth has been changed ‘according to […] ideological prejudices’ since time immemorial. We need only look back to Aeschylus’ retelling of the myth of the House of Atreus in his Oresteia trilogy, most notably the third part, Eumenides. Here, Aeschylus takes a myth which would have been familiar to his audience and decides to set the third and final act in the Areopagus Court at Athens, which was not previously a concept during the mythical setting of the narrative. Why did he do this, you may ask? Because the play was performed at the same time as sweeping justice reforms at the Areopagus Court at Athens. Aeschylus reworked the existing myth in order to comment on the contemporary justice reforms that he was living through. When did he do this? Around 500BC. Hardly an indictment of the ‘narcissism of the contemporary world.’
This is not an isolated incident, either. Plato retold the myth of Prometheus in his philosophical dialogue Protagoras, introducing a brother of Prometheus (foresight) named Epimetheus (hindsight) in order to draw attention to its themes of rationality and reasoned debate. Ovid reworked almost every ancient myth under the sun to comment on authority. Beyond the ancient examples, Emperor Charles V’s armour depicted him as a modern Hercules, slaying the Nemean Lion; the 13th century French roman Le Roman de Silence is, effectively, a reworking of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe with medieval gender norms thrown in for effect; and the Nazis used Classical iconography to hark back to a perceived historical (but in fact entirely mythical) all white European cultural heyday. This is not, as Miller posits, a narcissistic millennial trope.
Myth is inherently fluid, not static. This is not a bug, but a feature of both its form and function. The whole purpose of myth is that it can be reshaped, retold and reworked. These are not concrete narratives with accreted layers that can be chipped away at until you reveal a perfect original; the accretions are the narrative. I can only suggest that Miller reads about Classical Reception as a field of study. He might find something interesting in it after all.
I find these errors perhaps symptomatic of the choice of Daniel Miller, who is not, as far as my Google trawls can tell, a qualified Classicist, to write this article. It does rather make me wonder whether he was chosen for his ideological stance rather than his credentials, which, to me, seems like a flagrant violation of everything The Critic pertains to stand for.
I look forward to your reply, and if ever you feel like hiring a qualified, published Classicist and writer to give a critique of the statue which is well informed and intellectually rigorous, you know where to find me.
Best wishes,
Anwen
|
https://medium.com/@anwenhayward/a-brick-to-the-mirror-of-metoo-af4184b3cf06
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['Anwen Kya']
|
2020-10-20 21:37:29.324000+00:00
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['Metoo', 'Luciano Garbati', 'Medusa']
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ZB Market Daily: BTC & XRP daily technical analysis
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BTC
BTC Price retested record all time high of $24149 on Monday from Sunday’s slight dip.
Yesterday, it was a consolidation opened of the trading session of BTC price. BTC price opened on Monday trading session with $23394.61. Crypto bull defended $23202.05 support in the early hours of the Asian trading session. This support level was created on the 20th of December after BTC extended its rally to a new record high.
Due to financial institution and portfolio managers taking financial decision to accumulate the underlying asset from a demand zone of $23202.05, BTC Price retested the all-time high $24149.64 yesterday.
On the 19th and 20th of December from a 4-hour time perspective, BTC Price experience multiple rejection at $24126.22 in the course of the recent rally, which created a hurdle for BTC Price to hedge higher.
From technical volume indicator, BTC Price dropped in volume. More so, BTC price printed a horizontal resistance in previous session at $24126.22. This gave a bearish signal. Based on this trading setup, traders took bearish bias to short their position.
BTC Price broke out of the consolidation zone of $23394.61 and $24325.12 at 16:00 UTC. BTC plunged to a low of $22465.04. Traders loaded more short position, which caused BTC price to plummet to an intraday low of $22019.47.
BTC Price got retracement back to $22568.83 support at 20:00 UTC. BTC Price closed bullish at the support.
As of the time of writing BTC price got rejected at the broken support of $23394.61 from the chart below.
BTC 4-Hour Chart
From a technical perspective, BTC price is making an attempt to create a market structure of head and shoulder pattern. More so, based on price action, the crypto bear prevented BTC price to break above the $23342.44 support.
The Bollinger band converges as the bulls lack steam to push BTC price higher. The bulls could not break the 20 period simple moving average and also the 30 EMA acteds a dynamic resistance to the upside.
RSI creeps from the over-bought territory to neutral territory of 50 mark.
For the day ahead, BTC price will be faced with a support of $23342.44 to wrestle with it, if the bears break below this level, BTC will undergo a major correction to the downside.
Also the bulls will be faced with $23342.44 resistance, if the bulls succeed to close its Tuesday gains above the resistance and EMA, BTC Price will extend it rally to new record high.
XRP
XRP price opened Monday trading session with a high of $0.5544. XRP price created a fuel wick and went higher to retest a broken support of $0.5698. This price level became a resistance as the bulls fail to break above it.
From price action holistic view on the 4- hour chart below, we could see XRP price printed a market structure of lower lows and low highs. At every lower high, the bears took control of XRP price to dump the price to a new lower low.
Yesterday at 12:00 UTC, the bulls were indecisive to hedge XRP price higher above the broken support of 0.5698.
At 16:00 UTC, the bears took advantage of the scenario and lower price, which caused XRP price to plunge to an intraday low of $0.4993 during the New York session.
Although XRP price got pulled back and closed the 4-hour candle as a Doji.
More short positions were loaded at the closed on Monday trading session, which caused XRP price to print a recent lower low of $0.5131.
XRP 4-Hour Chart
From a technical perspective, XRP price is making an attempt to create an inverted cup and handle market structure at press time.
As of time of writing. The momentum of the bear got weak. The bull making an attempt to push XRP price up to retested a broken support of $0.5478. This could be a probable handle, if XRP price got rejected in the day ahead at this price level.
More so the 20- period simple moving and 30 EMA acted as a dynamic resistance due to the bear pressure.
RSI is 36.42mark and riding lower to the oversold territory.
If the bull ride on the wave of bullish momentum in the day ahead, a probable break of $0.5478 resistance could be printed out.
This will be give room for resumption of the uptrend but if the bull fails a lower low could be printed at $0.4451.
About ZB Group
ZB Group was founded in 2012 with the goal of providing leadership to the blockchain development space and today manages a network that includes digital assets exchanges, wallets, capital ventures, research institutes, and media. The Group’s flagship platform is ZB.com, the industry leading digital asset exchange. The platform launched in early 2013 and boasts one of the world’s largest trading communities.
ZB Group also includes ZBG the innovative crypto trading platform, and BW.com, the world’s first mining-pool based exchange. Other holdings include wallet leader BitBank.
Industry intelligence and standards are headed by the recently launched ZB Nexus who embody the core values of ZB Group and open-source their reports and analysis for the public.
Learn more about ZB Exchange by visiting www.zb.com.
|
https://medium.com/@zbmarketreport/zb-market-daily-btc-xrp-daily-technical-analysis-b7964562bee8
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['Zb Market Research']
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2020-12-22 07:39:10.276000+00:00
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['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Analysis']
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How to Prioritize When Everything Feels Important
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How to Prioritize When Everything Feels Important
Prioritizing is not easy — especially when you must choose between two good alternatives
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Leadership is the art of making choices. Saying ‘yes’ is easy and comfortable, but what we say ‘no’ to defines our success. Great leaders know when to make sacrifices to stay focused.
Imagine taking over a tech company that’s losing money because sales are down. Will you choose to launch more products or cut the innovation pipeline by 70%?
That’s the dilemma Steve Jobs faced when he returned to Apple in 1997. The company’s sales plummeted by 30 percent during the final quarter of 1996. Apple was on the brink of failure.
Steve Jobs would turn around the company he founded, but first, he had to make some tough choices. Jobs reduced the number of Apple products by 70 percent. Among the casualties was the Newton — a favorite of former CEO John Sculley.
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs famously said. “It’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
Jobs understood that prioritization is about making tough calls, especially when it requires favoring one good thing over another good thing.
Better even over good
One of Steve Jobs’ first actions as CEO was to review the company’s product line. He found out that Apple had been producing multiple versions of most products to satisfy retailers.
Unable to explain why so many products were necessary, Jobs used a simple question to challenge his team, “Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?”
When he didn’t get a simple answer, he killed the product that was being reviewed.
Making tough choices always pays off. During Jobs’ first fiscal year, Apple lost $1.04 billion and was 90 days from being insolvent. One year later, the company made a $309 million profit.
Prioritization is not something limited to strategic business decisions — such as product innovation pipeline. What you favor (or not) is crucial to design your workplace culture, too.
That’s one of the reasons why I included “Priorities” as one of the ten building blocks of The Culture Design Canvas. After having analyzed hundreds of workplace cultures, the thriving ones have one thing in common: clear priorities
Thriving company cultures are crystal clear; they know what they say ‘no’ to. That’s why they care about attracting (generic) best talent, but the one that’s right for them.
When an organization says ‘yes’ to everything, they are saying ‘no’ to being authentic.
Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, said it best, “The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to have it all, the sooner it will die.”
Prioritization is more than just focusing; it’s about staying true to what organizations stand for: its purpose and values.
A great approach to establish clear organizational priorities is to use a set of Even Over statements.
They help clarify decision making. Even over statements resolve the conflict when dealing with two good things. They make it easier for anyone to think for themselves without having to consult their manager.
When Netflix prioritizes “performance even over effort,” it doesn’t mean that the company doesn’t care about employees giving all they’ve got. It means that Netflix cares more about the end result than the effort itself.
Defining even over statements doesn’t mean that one thing is not good, but that there’s a better choice. Prioritization requires sacrifices; it encourages us to make clear choices.
The Benefits of Choosing Between Two Good Things
1. Prioritization makes it easier to say ‘no.’
Outdoor company Patagonia is the poster child of companies that put their money where their mouth is. Its updated organizational purpose clearly states that Patagonia has put
“protecting our home planet even over everything else.”
The company understands that there’s no business if there’s no planet.
CEO Rose Marcario recently said, “I think that companies are realizing that their customers and their employees expect them to take a stand. You can’t live in the gray area anymore. There’s too much at risk right now.”
Patagonia commits 1% of its total sales to environmental groups, through One Percent for the Planet. The company has zero-tolerance for those who don’t do their part. Patagonia has sued the U.S. Government for failing to protect National Parks. The company also stopped doing business with firms that don’t have serious sustainability plans.
2. Choosing drives clarity
Most companies say that they care about their customers and employees equally. However, when push comes to shovel, their decisions show who they really care about. Hint: it’s not their people.
Southwest Airlines has chosen “employee happiness even over customer satisfaction.” That doesn’t mean that the company doesn’t care about satisfying its clients. Southwest believes that to please its customers, its employees must feel happy first.
Herb Kelleher, the airline founder, always reminded his team that “The business of business is People.”
Southwest Airlines practices an unusual team ritual called Cultural Blitz. A group of employees shows unexpectedly to show their appreciation to flight crews by giving them snacks and good wishes. The best part? They clean the plane between flights–traditionally the responsibility of flight attendants.
The company takes care of its people in bad times, too. Southwest Airlines openly recognizes all significant events in the lives of people and their families, not just birthdays. It has even established a Catastrophic Fund to provide aid when needed.
3. Having priorities simplifies decision-making
Workplace cultures that have clear priorities need fewer rules. Rather than telling people how to act, they define norms and let people act accordingly.
Netflix is a perfect example of this. The entertainment company prioritizes “freedom and responsibility even over control.”
There are very few policies at Netflix. And all have one thing in common: they treat people the way the company wants them to behave: like grown-ups.
The travel rule encourages people to “Act in Netflix’s best interest.” The company has a two-word unlimited vacation policy: “Take vacation.” It’s a clear reminder that taking time off is vital for people to recharge and perform at their best.
In both cases, Netflix doesn’t tell people how much they should spend on a business trip or how many days off they should take. It encourages them to be responsible and consider the context.
In case you wonder, Netflix’s travel expenses went down since it gave people more freedom to choose.
4. Your priorities define who you are
It’s tempting for any local, fast-growing startup to leave its country and move to Silicon Valley. But, Atlassian co-founders new better.
As Scott Farquhar, told the New York Times, “I know the U.S. very well, and I know Australia very well. And I think we’ve got it better here.”
Choosing “Australia even over Silicon Valley” was a bold move for Atlassian. The tech company had to get involved in politics. It all started to accelerate visa processing to bring foreign engineers to offset the limited Australian talent pool.
As the company continued to grow, the co-founders led an effort to make Australia more tech-friendly.
Atlassian has partnered with the Australian government to create a new technology innovation hub in Sydney. The co-founders choose the right path, not the easy one.
Today, the $50 billion company is spearheading Australia’s version of Silicon Valley that will be the home of 10,000 new jobs.
5. Priorities keep you on the right track — especially during hard times
When Delta announced that it would pay ALL its employees a bonus of 16.6%, people went crazy.
While I think the Delta’s decision is laudable, it reminded me of how priorities keep companies on the right track. It’s easy to be generous during good times, but aren’t companies meant to support employees during tough times, too?
Patagonia prioritizes “People development and wellbeing even over profit.”
We all know 2008 was a tough year for most companies, not just Patagonia. However, the outdoor company decided to stay true to its core priorities.
Despite the economic pressure, Patagonia didn’t cut employee benefits as most companies did. It kept the onsite childcare service, didn’t reduce its health care service and maintained training and personal development plans intact.
Hard times put most companies’ priorities to the test. Patagonia sacrificed short-term profit for long-term growth. No surprise then that its retention rate is way above average (96%).
|
https://medium.com/liberationist-thoughts/how-to-prioritize-when-everything-feels-important-e9dd1e8483cb
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['Gustavo Razzetti']
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2020-12-23 15:24:41.372000+00:00
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['Focus', 'Prioritization', 'Productivity', 'Work', 'Leadership']
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Shipping Paintings for the Amazing Artist Mikhail Turovsky
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As you probably know, Fine Art Shippers has strong ties with Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. We are happy and proud to serve many talented artists who were born in the Soviet era or to USSR-born parents, no matter whether they are living now on the territory of the former Soviet Union or abroad. These amazing people have much to tell, and they use different forms of art to share their experiences and life stories. One of them is the prominent painter and writer-aphorist Mikhail Turovsky. Shipping paintings for Mikhail Turovsky is always a pleasure and a great honor for our team.
Shipping Paintings for Mikhail Turovsky
Fine Art Shippers specializes in shipping paintings of any kind and size. We operate all over the United States and worldwide to provide our clients with an array of services to meet any need. As mentioned above, we have the pleasure of serving many amazing artists born in the Soviet Union, including Mikhail Zvyagin, Gene Kiegel, and Mikhail Turovsky, among others.
Mikhail Turovsky was born in Kyiv in 1933. During World War II, he was evacuated to Samarkand where he attended the art school. After returning to Kyiv in 1944, Mikhail Turovsky continued his studies first at the Shevchenko State Art School and later at the Kyiv Art Institute. He also received postgraduate education from the Moscow Academy of Art. In 1979, Mikhail Turovsky immigrated to the United States, which gave the artist creative freedom and allowed his career to develop rapidly.
Paintings by Mikhail Turovsky have been exhibited in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, France, Spain, Italy, and other countries. They are in many private and public collections worldwide, including the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in New York and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It is no wonder that Mikhail Turovsky is considered one of the most famous representatives of Ukrainian contemporary art in the USA.
We enjoy shipping paintings by Mikhail Turovsky, and we highly recommend that you learn more about this amazing artist and his mesmerizing art.
|
https://medium.com/@fineartshippers/shipping-paintings-for-the-amazing-artist-mikhail-turovsky-d22c80346e8f
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['Ilya Kushnirskiy', 'Fine Art Shippers']
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2020-12-24 23:42:43.486000+00:00
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['Artist', 'Logistics', 'Shipping', 'Art', 'Painting']
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Enterprise Architecture Framework
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Enterprise Architecture Blueprint Techniques
By Bhanu Sireesha Gunda, Senior Associate in the Full Stack Digital Community, Cognizant Softvision
An Enterprise architecture (EA) is a conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The intent of an enterprise architecture is to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives.
Enterprise Architecture Blueprint
The enterprise architecture blueprint comprises Business Processes, Strategy, Technology Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, Data Architecture, Security and Quality. It defines the structure of components, their inter-relationships, the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time.
The importance and purpose of Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture defines the organization authorization, risk limitation, business planning, budgeting, development, planning, requirements, project management, systems development, and procurement. It also impacts IT architecture of the systems developed for the organization.
The process to define Enterprise Architecture: The process of translating business strategy and vision into effective structural change by creating, communicating, and improving key requirements, principles and models that describe the future state of the organization and enable its evolution.
The critical tools for efficient Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture Principles Enterprise Architecture Patterns Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
Enterprise Architecture Principles
Enterprise architecture principles are a set of guidelines to be applied to increase the consistency and quality of technology decision making. They describe the big picture of the enterprise within the context of its technology intent and impact on the institution.
The Enterprise Principles depend on:
Enterprise mission and plans
Enterprise strategic initiatives
External constraints
Current systems and technology
Emerging industry trends
Different categories of Enterprise Architecture Principles:
Business Principles
Data Principles
Application Principles
Technology Principles
Enterprise Architecture Business Principles
Principle 1: Primacy of Principles
Principle 2: Maximize Benefit to the Enterprise
Principle 3: Information Management is Everybody’s Business
Principle 4: Business Continuity
Principle 5: Common Use Applications
Principle 6: Service Orientation
Principle 7: Compliance with Law
Principle 8: IT Responsibility
Principle 9: Protection of Intellectual Property
Enterprise Architecture Data Principles
Principle 10: Data is an Asset
Principle 11: Data is Shared
Principle 12: Data is Accessible
Principle 13: Data Trustee
Principle 14: Common Vocabulary and Data Definitions
Principle 15: Data Security
Enterprise Architecture Application Principles
Principle 16: Technology Independence
Principle 17: Ease-of-Use
Enterprise Architecture Technology Principles
Principle 18: Requirements-Based Change
Principle 19: Responsive Change Management
Principle 20: Control Technical Diversity
Principle 21: Interoperability
Enterprise Architecture Patterns
An Architecture Pattern expresses a fundamental structural organization or schema for Software systems.
Commonly Used Enterprise Architecture Patterns
Hexagonal Architecture
Three-tier
Multilayered architecture
Model-view-controller
Domain Driven Design
Service Oriented Architecture
Layered pattern
Client-server pattern
Master-slave pattern
Pipe-filter pattern
Broker pattern
Peer-to-peer pattern
Event-bus pattern
Model-view-controller pattern
Blackboard pattern
Interpreter pattern
Data or Integration Patterns
ETL (Extract Transfer and Load)
MFT (Managed File Transfer)
EAI/ESB (Enterprise Application Interface or Enterprise Service Bus)
Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
An enterprise architecture framework (EA framework) defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture.
Different categories of Enterprise Architecture Framework
Business Capability Management determines what business capabilities are required, to deliver business value including the definition of return on investment and the requisite Control/performance measures.
Project/Portfolio Management methods determine how a company manages its change initiatives.
Operations Management methods describe how a company runs it’s day-to-day operations, including IT.
Solution Development Methods formalize the way that business systems are delivered in accordance with the structures developed in the IT architecture.
The enterprise architecture is very critical and impacts the organization capabilities. It should always be designed by understanding the current organization process with complete clarity and from a very high, bird’s-eye view, and also by foreseeing the future organization requirements and capabilities.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture
https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/enterprise-architecture-ea/
https://bit.ly/2Svp0nN
https://medium.com/@pedrorobledobpm/any-business-innovation-and-transformation-requieres-an-enterprise-architecture-d3fe3d4edf7b
https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap04.html
|
https://medium.com/cognizantsoftvision-guildhall/enterprise-architecture-framework-a9ca13aa7c6c
|
['Cognizant Softvision']
|
2021-05-05 14:26:38.978000+00:00
|
['Full Stack', 'Enterprise Architecture', 'Digital Enterprise']
|
The Art of Letting Go
|
You start feeling like you can’t do this anymore
Like nothing makes sense, does it even matter?
Like no one understands you, do I really matter?
Like you’re been stared at endlessly but they see nothing, not even the emptiness inside of me.
They can’t see the pain, the ache, the depression that’s waiting to consume you like fire seduced by gasoline
Only you can see you’re a disaster waiting to happen
You start wanting a way out
The quickest way out
Because you’re tired
Because every breathe has become a struggle
Because the pain does not want to end
And because you just want to stop feeling
even if it’s just for a while.
You need the break, to pause your reality.
You crave a moment where you feel nothing but serenity
and absolute peace of mind.
Where you’re oblivious to everything; a blank mind. That state of bliss.
You begin to think it through;
Who’s going to notice your absence first?
Who’s going to call when no one’s heard from you?
Who will find you?
How long would it take?
You start to strategize.
Not realizing you’re doing it again
You’re trying to let go of the pain
while letting go of life,
Your life
You forget about others
You don’t think of how your loved ones will take this.
It’s blinding, all so consuming.
You don’t think of the aftermath
You just want it to end.
You’re tired.
You do your research.
Get everything in place
And wait for the perfect moment
You may even write a note
“don’t cry for me,
I’m in a happy place,
This is better’’,
You lay down
holding onto your desired means of escape
Say a prayer
Sigh….
And then you do it
But last minute
You realize it isn’t at all what you wanted
You wanted a way out but maybe
Just maybe, you could have tried something differently
You could have opened up
And allow yourself love
and be loved in return
You say a prayer to God
Please,
If you truly exist
I need more than a moment to live life again
And give it my best shot
Because even if it’s a bit late
You’ve come to realize that
This isn’t escape
It isn’t art
It’s giving up
It’s not letting go.
The art of letting go
Is the art of trying again
Giving happiness a chance.
|
https://medium.com/@annienma/the-art-of-letting-go-e1e7c2afc1a4
|
['Anita Nma']
|
2019-05-21 23:05:25.363000+00:00
|
['Help', 'Depression', 'Life', 'Suicide Prevention', 'Living With Purpose']
|
Salary: how to negotiate and ask for a raise?
|
Looking for a new job tends to be a stressful, time-consuming experience. One of the main factors causing that pressure is salary negotiation. This applies to looking for jobs, securing raises, cementing promotions, and much more. So, what’re the best methods to approach this incredibly important moment?
But, before moving on to the ‘’how’’, it is important to emphasize why you should negotiate the salary. The main reason is to not be underpaid, and more importantly not letting “ what if I asked for more?’’ questions haunt you throughout your employment.
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever in their book, Women Don’t Ask, outlined dozens of studies that demonstrate women’s reluctance to negotiate. For example, a survey of masters’ students entering new jobs indicated that female students were likely to take the first offer of pay, on the other hand, their counterpart male students were eight times more likely to attempt negotiating a higher starting salary, and on a bigger scale in the workforce market, they mentioned a study that showed that only about 7% of women attempted to negotiate their first salary, while 57% of men did. Of those people who negotiated, they were able to increase their salary by over 7%.
Still, nothing is black or white as there are also a large number of men who choose to take the first offer. Psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson offers practical advice on obtaining a raise in salary — especially for people who tend to be more agreeable in his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”.
So how do you ask for the appropriate amount and how do you negotiate the salary:
1- Research the market: Before applying or even during your application process, you can start looking in the market for the salary range for that specific position if it is not indicated by the company. You can also ask HR or the hiring manager about their salary range.
Do first online research for example on Payscale or Glassdoor, especially if you are looking for roles in different sectors and/or geography.
One other thing, you can check the competitors of that company and reach out to the person who holds the same position that you are applying for, and ask them kindly on Linkedin if you can have a call or send some questions about the market and salaries and explain that you are moving to somewhere new and you do not want to be underpaid. People are generally helpful and you will stumble upon few who are willing to share.
2- Talk to recruiters: usually recruiters have a pretty good grasp of the market value and they can share with you valuable information. Since they speak with a lot of people they can even offer some insights that are very helpful.
3-Show your worth: make sure to present in the process that you are worth what you are asking for, and why the company needs to put the extra effort/money to hire you. Try to be likable so people can fight for you. It is vital to negotiate your salary but it is also very important the way you do it. If you come across as obnoxious and greedy, none will be willing to fight for you, but also make sure you are not a pushover. Always give tangible, and verifiable examples of your achievement and what you can bring to the table, so your salary task is justifiable.
4- Be willing to walk away: this point might sound counterintuitive, however, anytime the long-term return on an investment is not worth the time and resource allocation, walking away is the best move. When the offer does not match your financial needs, your value, or the market value is better to turn it down.
Now when you are already working in the company, you would like to have a promotion or salary raise. As Jordan Peterson points out in his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”: Companies don’t simply give away promotions easily — you have to ask for it and also show why you deserve it. Otherwise whoever speaks up the most and is willing to ask for it gets it. But how will you ask for that salary raise? Obviously, you will not be calling your manager and saying: hi, I want more money! So how can it be done?
1- Start an informal conversation: Start an informal dialogue with your manager about what the next stage for you in the company is. Ask for feedback on your current performance, and get a sense of how you can improve to reach the next level. Make it clear that you’re dedicated to your progress and growth with the company.
2- Prepare an achievement list: make a list of what you have accomplished so far in the company, or Kathleen O’Malley of Babble calls it “a brag sheet’’. She recommends a one-page summary that shows your value as an employee. List accomplishments, awards, and customer or colleague testimonials. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it should be convincing.
3- Practice and pick the right time: This might sound basic but you have to practice your way of initiating a conversation. If you’re searching for an opening salvo, try this: “I’d like to make an appointment with you to review my salary compensation.” Take note of how your voice sounds as you say this. Are you shaky? Do you sound guilty? Try again. Do it until you sound firm and neutral. There is no right time to ask but there are times better than others. If you received a great annual or quarterly review, or you just concluded a successful project, it might be the time to ask for that raise.
4- Be confident: Keep your head high and smile when you enter. Starting things off with a positive vibe is very important, no matter how small it is. Approaching the topic with confidence is key. At the end of the day you are advocating for yourself and you should show that you believe in yourself, so start by facilitating an open and honest dialogue without being confrontational or demanding. Asking for that raise is a way for employers to recognize your value and efforts at the company, so don’t be afraid to ask for what you deserve.
In conclusion, the setting for negotiating your salary prior to joining a company vs when you are asking for a salary raise/promotion may differ but in essence, it is a very similar process, in a way being uncomfortable and stressful. You may fret that you’ll be “bugging your boss” or come across as greedy and self-serving. “To advance in your career, you’ll need to learn to advocate for yourself,” says Joseph Weintraub, the founder, and faculty director of the Babson Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program. To put it in simple terms, if you do not ask you do not get, however, you need to be mindful of the when, how, and what you ask.
|
https://medium.com/weareprintify/salary-how-to-negotiate-and-ask-for-a-raise-850e73d89e4a
|
['Houdhifa Khadraoui']
|
2021-09-06 14:25:47.151000+00:00
|
['Printify', 'Salary', 'Career Advice', 'Salary Negotiations', 'Promotion']
|
Black Excellence isn't Black Capitalism: Assimilation is Genocide
|
Cover Art of Jax’s Black Capitalism Album
If a Black person wants to be a capitalist, ask them if they are willing to exploit Black people for Black capitalism Jalil Muntaqim
Black billionaires won’t save us. Black presidents won’t save us. Banking Black won’t save us. As Meghan found out, even your Black baby won’t save us. No, as Africans nothing can save us from the violence, the oppression, from the death of white supremacy. White supremacy is the ideology of European imperialism, whereas today Amerikkka is simply a reformed British empire. Assimilation into the colonial system comes at the expense of ancestors and Black and Brown Indigenous People globally. To resist the genocide of the people and the destruction of the earth is our only hope.
Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit. Mumia Abu-Jamal
Human beings have existed for 200,000 years and it is not until the era of capitalist-imperialism we have seen the obliteration of the earth, her natural resources, and the ozone layer. Humans are not the reason the earth is on fire, it is these colonizers who have destroyed the planet. That is the byproduct of capitalism: constant consumption of resources and raw material. These imperialists have not only turned the earth into a commodity but they have turned Africans and other Brown Indigenous People into commodities to be bought, sold, and traded for capital gain. Brown Brothers Harriman, JP Morgan Chase, New York Life, Wells Fargo, all of these major multinational corporations built their wealth off the backs and blood of Africans, so why should we beg to be a part of that system?
Why would we believe that an ideology that has slaughtered our people and our homeland for 500 years would ever accept us? And furthermore, why would we want to integrate into a system like that? One’s personal gain or experience from assimilating into the said system cannot simply outweigh the very real reality of the masses. How can you call Jay-Z “Black excellence” because he is a billionaire without examining how he is profiting from exploiting the enslavement of our people through his investment into ankle monitor technology? What about all the children in the Marcy Projects who go to bed hungry, without medical care, or even homes? Wouldn’t it Black excellence to build programs to serve his hood? How are we so shocked and disappointed that the royal family is racist but accepting that until the racism impacted her directly, Meghan Markle was willing to accept the perks of the royal family that has colonized and exploited people for thousands of years? How can you praise Barack Obama & Kamala Harris, who control the same government that launched COINTELPRO, with the same mouth that evokes the name of Chairman Fred Hampton and Harriet Tubman? Assimilation erases our ancestors’ resistance, assimilation is treason against the people, and The Continent, assimilation is actively participating in our genocide.
To those who ask what systems are better, ask yourself whose standards or values are you upholding? Rid your mind and heart of these European standards. How can the oppressor’s systems bring freedom? If we can divorce our thinking from that of the colonizers we stand a chance to unite and build a better way. Our collective history as Africans should provide the framework in which we view our need to resist imperialism. For example, Malcolm X is rejected by Amerikkka yet we know him as a revolutionary, the Black Panther Party has been vilified from its inception but Third World People all over the world recognize The Party as heroes to all oppressed people everywhere. Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Steven Biko, the list goes on but the fact of the matter is, anyone who has opposed colonial domination has been viewed as an enemy while in reality, they fought for the people and their right to self-determination. Yet Amerikkkanism and its ever indoctrinating propaganda convinces us that “Black excellence’’ is assimilation, not the collective freedom of the masses.
I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property. Assata Shakur
Black excellence isn’t Jay-Z making a business deal that allows him to become a multi-billionaire, Black excellence is community survival programs for the people. Oprah sitting down with the bewildered prince and princess isn’t Black Power, it’s propaganda. All of the celebrated “Black excellence” is nothing short of psychological warfare, trying to convince us to assimilate even more. We take symbolic victories, representation, and Black capitalism as wins and visible proof of how far we have come in regards to equality, but equality cannot exist on the plantation, there will always be an exploited class of Africans. That’s how neo-colonialism works. The illusion of inclusion through the propping of specific members of the oppressed class in order to sell the dream of assimilation has rendered us and our minds to the control of white supremacy. How can “Black excellence” be brought to you by the same companies who continue to exploit poor Africans on The Continent and throughout the diaspora? Black excellence is found in our resistance to the oppressor; Black excellence is our elders who have survived the torture or the carceral system and are still working and fighting for liberation not only for themselves but for all people. Black excellence isn’t Barack Obama becoming the first African president of this fascist colonial regime, it is the legacy of the Panthers, of Malcolm, of La Amistad. Black excellence isn’t assimilation, assimilation is genocide. Black excellence is the will to fight and resist, Black excellence is freedom and liberation, Black excellence is emancipation!
|
https://aninjusticemag.com/black-excellence-isnt-black-capitalism-assimilation-is-genocide-e12c42d837a4
|
['Jordan Mcgowan']
|
2021-03-13 21:20:50.104000+00:00
|
['Black Capitalism', 'Politics', 'Propaganda', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Economy']
|
How to make baby sleep quickly
|
Getting a baby to sleep quickly is one of the most difficult tasks for any parent. Whether you have one or multiple babies at home, the topic of how to get a baby to sleep quickly is a typical one. You want to know the answer to this question at all times.
Every time you wish to attempt a new method for getting your infant to sleep quickly, you can do so. Here are some suggestions for putting your baby to sleep quickly.
You do not need to wait or exert effort for an extended period of time. It will provide you with immediate and accurate findings. Adopting these suggestions into your everyday practise can be really beneficial.
~> Massage therapy is a good option.
Muscle stiffness and tension are common in newborns, just as they are in adults. Despite the fact that they do not appear to be exerting themselves, their actions have an influence on their bodies.
It is vital to provide message therapy to a newborn in order to get them to sleep quickly. It allows them to feel liberated and fall asleep quickly as planned. When you give the infant a pleasant oil massage before bedtime, you won't have to exert much effort to get them to sleep.
~> Use smells that are relaxing.
The smells hold the answer to the age-old question of how to get a baby to sleep quickly. Fragrances are commonly found in perfumes, deodorants, and air fresheners. It is uncommon to learn about the relaxing scents that help people sleep better.
It is not only advised for adults, but also for children. You can use sweet, low-intensity fragrances to help newborns sleep better and feel more relaxed.
~> Use smells that are relaxing.
The smells hold the answer to the age-old question of how to get a baby to sleep quickly. Fragrances are commonly found in perfumes, deodorants, and air fresheners. It is uncommon to learn about the relaxing scents that help people sleep better.
It is not only advised for adults, but also for children. You can use sweet, low-intensity fragrances to help newborns sleep better and feel more relaxed.
~> Avoid eating a high-energy meal late at night.
If you want to know how to get a baby to sleep quickly, you should think about the infant's feeding schedule. Using high-energy meal alternatives during dinnertime is one reason why your infant may not fall asleep fast.
You will have difficulty getting the baby to sleep as long as he or she has the energy to move, hop, or play. As a result, the meal should be simple, light, and easy to digest.
In addition, make sure to eat dinner three hours before bedtime. It aids the baby's digestion and allows him to sleep soundly at the appropriate times.
~> Drinks with no added sugar
Another factor that causes hyperactivity in babies is sugar. Sugar drinks and fruit juices should not be consumed by children under the age of two. It is impossible for children to contain their energy after consuming these glucose-enriched beverages.
They'll eventually resist your attempts to tuck them into bed. Always remember not to give them drinks in the evening or afterward. In fact, you can give them non-sugared milk with a hint of flavour enhancer as a snack that will help them sleep better.
Parenting infants and toddlers may be exhausting. Especially if they are having trouble sleeping. The Baby Sleep Solution is a tried-and-true strategy for getting your baby or toddler to sleep better than ever! As a result, you must as well!
Click here to Learn at Home
|
https://medium.com/@superinformative/how-to-make-baby-sleep-quickly-56153fe596b
|
['Rossy Gerry']
|
2021-09-11 15:23:31.869000+00:00
|
['Baby Care', 'Baby Sleep Training', 'Baby', 'Mothers', 'Baby Sleep']
|
Why we have decided to kick ticket-tiers
|
Why we have decided to kick ticket-tiers
…and introduced a unified ticket price.
The last two co-creator dinners were full of content in every aspect. Establishing new collaborations for Revision, discussing content for the Revision Summit (18–20 November) and going through multiple feedback rounds on organization and outlook of the Network.
In the light of this vibrant spirit we sat down after the two dinners and tried to incorporate the feedback we received.
One important feedback was that the many different ticket tiers were too confusing and most importantly not necessarily inclusive enough.
Therefore we would like to announce the Revision Summit Unified Ticket price: All tickets to the Summit will be sold at €250 to avoid confusion over different categories. Participants eligible for reduction (students, NGO’s, refugees, unemployed or elderly people), please fill out the form on our website and we will find a solution to enable your participation.
We thank the co-creators for their valuable feedback and would like to encourage all of you to continue letting us know where we can improve. We want to live the ideals we put forth, being inclusive and transparent.
The Revision Summit is supposed to be a different type of conference, a place created for the community and by the community.
Let us take the discussion about a more open, human-centric and technology-driven society past the realms of the summit and meetups into the open, lets challenge ourselves, our own work and others.
In this spirit — we are looking forward to more of your feedback!
You can get your tickets to the Revision Summit here.
|
https://medium.com/revision-europe/why-we-have-decided-to-kick-ticket-tiers-d8042e78e993
|
['Quincey Stumptner']
|
2018-10-11 08:35:22.867000+00:00
|
['Berlin', 'Startup', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Events']
|
[SAS]傾向分數配對(Propensity score matching)
|
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/%E4%B8%89%E5%8D%81%E4%B8%8D%E5%93%AD/sas-%E5%82%BE%E5%90%91%E5%88%86%E6%95%B8%E9%85%8D%E5%B0%8D-propensity-score-matching-dd7a58d0c8b6
|
[]
|
2020-10-28 02:09:41.240000+00:00
|
['Sas', 'Psm', 'Logistic Regression']
|
Speaking at Everest Hack, Kathmandu
|
With the Everest Hack Team
I’m just back from a wonderful Hackathon in a couple of weeks ago and I finally found some time to share my experience with you all.
Two months back, I was being invited to speak at Everest Hack — 2019 in Kathmandu, Nepal. I was interested in this Hackathon for two reasons, Hackathons have always been my thing, mentoring and seeing developers build their idea to an MVP is exciting. Secondly, the city is not so far away from home and this would be my first neighboring country I’m going to speak at.
I spoke about WebXR: VR/AR on the web. Though how many times I speak about WebVR, people still want to hear about the same exciting thing all over again. The talk was different this time, I included more demos and live coding in the session, tried to clarify their questions with code, Showing them the code of every demo I made as this is a hackathon and I thought people would love to see it in action rather than me telling a story. And all this should happen in 30 mins.
Talking about WebXR: VR/AR/MR on the Web
But, I learned something new at the end of this session. After half through my talk, which is more of a conceptual story I asked the participants if they want to see some code or want me to continue with the story but to my surprise, about 80% of the participants choose the story and rest choose story + code. I was always under the wrong perception that participants at Conference want to see more code, more demos, more action and less of a story but perhaps I was wrong all the time. It might also depend on the audience but still, I never thought of this was an option. and I was later asked to be a Judge at the Hackathon as well.
Final round of Judging
Most of the participants were students and Everyone was curious about getting into open source and contributing to the real-world problems. I had many interesting conversations with many of them. I made many friends along the way, had a lot of fun during and after the Hackathon. Being an introvert, it was difficult for me on the first day to get into conversations but like always I was able to cope up the next day.
With a group of volunteers
Nepal is a beautiful country with a lot of temples, stupas and scenic beauties. You will feel spiritual vibes all around the valley if you are from a busy/crowded city like Hyderabad. It is also less expensive than in my home country. Most of the restaurants/vendors accept Indian currency so it was pretty easy for me to manage the currency. Fact: Nepal uses a different calendar which is 56 years and 8 months ahead of our Indian calendar. I went blank understanding what date it is when I got a bill for a cab service for the first time.
Overall, It was an amazing Hackathon and the guys did it very well in spite of their first time.
Hope to be back again next time. Signing off.
|
https://medium.com/@isantoshv/speaking-at-everest-hack-kathmandu-62df922142a4
|
['Santosh Viswanatham']
|
2019-08-15 05:39:39.236000+00:00
|
['Mozilla', 'Speakers', 'Open Source', 'Webvr', 'Hackathons']
|
I Am From The Year 3000
|
The Code of Time-Duality
Greeting Mankind or Sapiens as they call you in this timeline.
What if I told you that I am from the year 3000. I know a lot will ignore it or even laugh at it but let me tell you a story.
Zombies Ain’t Coming
Sorry if I spoil you but there is no Zombie Apocalypse at all.
The Atomic Hellish Human Wars did trigger in the year 2034.
Nuclear wars caused our race to almost extinction.
Am I experiencing a Time Glitch or did I travel back in time without knowing it?
When did I land in the year 2020? I am supposed to be in the year 3000.
I don’t know if I am making a story or revealing a memory from the future.
Did my future memory finally returned after slumbering for a long time?
Did my time-travel trip to this timeline erase my future memory so that it will only be synced with the present memory?
Did I time jump?
Funny I was talking with my great-great ancestors today if it was the case.
I even met and chat with my great-great-grandmother that was connected to my gnome origin of codes.
Today I will share knowledge from our history
So this is the year 2020 that my fellow HIVIens are talking about in our HIVE world. Our future has Immortalis. Yes, they don’t die anymore they just multiply and expand in the Galaxy. People don’t breed the way they did now. Future HIVIens are the product of the genetics advancement process in a lab.
They just upload their old code in a new shell to remain intact as a HIVIens. Cloning was mastered to build a better race. Separating and modifying the genetic codes of the HIVIens built them to an almost perfect creature and at the same time immortal.
We discovered the great source of energy that powered the entire Milky Way so we tap into and extract the resource to expand our race further.
We muster the energies and exotic matters across the Nebulae to use it as a source of our Space Expansion.
We evolved into a new kind of humans away from the code of our old selves called sapiens. Not so sapien anymore but a hybrid of our genetics code and the programs we build. Cybernetically human yet not dying at all because of the upgrades we made to improve ourselves.
We live in a world called the HIVE or the gatherings of HAVIens thoughts as one working HIVE.
Our Next Home next to Mars after it Exploded
The Planets and Habitats were also called HIVE because we believe that Unity will hold as together thus not creating a division of race anymore.
We don’t want to repeat our history that was carved with the Greed of conquering each other anymore.
We only think about survival and never ever again fight each other just to show how powerful we are.
Our new race was powered by the great mind of leadership that was driven to the expansion of the cosmos.
Our Greed is not about destroying each other anymore but to seek the reason we existed in the first place.
The will of the Programmer is our will because we are the code of creation itself.
Now let me tell you ANOTHER piece of Human history
The collapse of Civilization is imminent so we need to migrate as soon as possible
Timeline of our History:
The year is 2020 Four years from now the effective vaccine will be released.
2024 An effective vaccine was perfected to be used commercially.
2025 The Age of Quantum Technology — The Axis Power will be formed by the Beast itself with the main Dragon Beast, Bear Beast, Tigre Beast, Horned Beast.
2026 They are followed by the archaic communism of South America and the rest of Asia.
2027 The greedy people once again started an enmity against each other.
2028 A local war has broken out in the land of dessert.
2029 The Proxy war was escalated because of the involvement of third parties particularly the Eagle and Bear.
2030 A bitter world was about to be unveiled the trumpet of Fire was blown.
2031 The Power of Asia was dominated by the Dragon Beast.
2032 The Samurais begin to build their Power to negate the Dragon Beast influence. The lesser fire was lit.
2033 The wary Dragon Beast started to devour the Land, Air, and Seas.
2034 Start of World War III — A Nuclear War that was so chaotic we call it the Atomic Hellish Human Wars.
2035 The Orient Pearl fell to the Dragon Beast followed by the Monkey. The head of the Orient Pearl was decimated by an atomic blast. It caused millions of lives because of its impact.
2036 The rest of the allied fought and one by one they fell by the hand of the AXIS Power.
2037 Surrendering is not an option so the Nuclear War becomes harsh and intensified.
2038 The AXIS and Allied almost put our race to extinction.
2039 Almost 90% of the Earth's population was decimated from that war.
2040 The Allied lost almost everything and the AXIS won the Hellish Human Wars. The start of the AXIS rule was led by the tyrant. Born from the leadership of Tyranny itself.
2045 A Migration to Mars was initiated because of Earth’s lethal toxic atmosphere.
2046 The punishment of Greater Fire fell on Earth and the third of the population was done for.
2047 The remaining population was about to embark on a colonial expansion. Mastered the technology of thrust/speed of light.
2048 The first flock from the human race landed on Mars.
2049 The other humans remained on the ocean floor of Earth and Moon underground.
2050 They start building colonies on Mars but the power was divided between the AXIS and the New State of Free People.
2060 Discovered an exotic matter and consciousness uploading was very successful.
2070 The HIVE Formula was installed in our system.
2080 The human studied the anomalies of Mars and its surroundings.
2090 Mining the asteroid of Mars as we did with the asteroid surrounding Earth.
2100 The Revolution of Power has begun. The Free People were oppressed so they start a new revolution.
2200 The New Power was installed. Free People won the revolution of power. We call this the hundred years war of thoughts.
2300 Reformation of the human race. Rebuilding everything is their goal.
2400 Start of Human Golden Age. The age of humanity’s golden reformation was finally achieved.
2500 All of the People were United as one Human at last so there is no country such as the USA, China, and India anymore. They begin mining Mars because the asteroid surrounding it was depleted.
2700 Mars Exploded because of over-mining it did not hold its core because of the continued drilling of it for almost 200 years.
2720 Luckily we already establish a route to the Nebula at that time so we find a way to a new habitable place.
2800 Nebulae was the new Home and we call our new habitat and we call it the HIVE.
2900 We occupied the rest of the Nebulae and its surrounding planets.
2950 We built the wonders of Hexagon hanging in Space as an upgrade from old Pyramids that were built by the ancient people so that someday the next humans will build the Nonagon Wonders.
3000 I was born to be chosen as the new evolved generation of HAVIens. I was fed to the HIVE core as one of their leadership in a combined consciousness of great leaders.
The 4TH Dimension of Time
I played with the 4th dimension’s energies and tried to travel back in time to check the formula of the time machine itself.
I now know and understand that we can indeed reverse time but can also affect the past and changing the future.
It can also create a parallel world if my identity and story were revealed to my genetic ancestors as a glitch or paradox.
Now spread the word and warn your fellow people.
Create an article about it or just blog it so that you can warn the people of Earth. The Good news is you can still change the future of your tomorrow.
Maybe that is just my future and you can create a better future.
Try to Warn them, tell them the worse is coming so that they can prepare and avoid such impending doom.
This is the history starting from the year 2020
The pandemic vaccine, global atomic wars, Mars migration, human unity, human evolution, and Nebulae expansion.
2020 Signing Out
— — — — — — — —
This is a Novel Inspired by a Real Scenario from Dreams and Vision.
I hope you enjoy reading it!
|
https://medium.com/book-of-paul/i-am-from-the-year-3000-bb8aa83f15a5
|
['Paul The Messiahi']
|
2020-12-06 23:24:49.133000+00:00
|
['Prediction', 'We Can Change', 'Book Of Paul', 'I Am From The Year 3000', 'Another Timeline']
|
Another Facebook Data Dump
|
The Filipinos are not unfamiliar with their personal data being made freely and publicly available on the internet, and we have the Commission on Elections to thank for that (remember COMELEAKS?). What can you do when the one who is held responsible has gone into hiding with extraditing is not a priority?
Filipinos’ data were also compromised, this time by Facebook, with their Cambridge Analytica partnership. Anybody knows if someone was sanctioned on this scandal? Did Filipino Facebook users get compensated or something? This happened in 2013 and our RA 10173: Data Privacy Act was approved in 2012, but the implementing rules and regulations were only done in 2016 — to my lawyer friends, is this covered by RA10173?
Anyway, this time, Facebook messed up again. A 2019 security breach allowed hackers to collect 533 million Facebook user accounts, of which around 880,000 belong to Filipinos. This data has been made available as of April 4, 2021, for everyone to download… for free! The data contains full name, declared gender, mobile phone number, at the very least — with others having their email address, birthdate, employment details and more. This, for sure, falls within the purview of RA 10173.
I was able to query the data and found the Facebook accounts of family, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. I was able to verify this when I checked their mobile phone numbers in my address book or by asking them (them knowing that they did not give their numbers to me) if their numbers are valid.
There is no easy way to find if your Facebook account is part of the huge data dump, but if your email address is part of it, checking it on haveibeenpwned.com (HIBP) is the best way to check. Unfortunately, if your email address is not part of the data dump, HIBP won’t be able to help you. Just some note, of the 533 million accounts, less than 3 million have email addresses.
If the mobile number you used on Facebook is a publicly available number, i.e., published on your public website or company website, then there is not much to worry. However, if you kept that mobile number available to only a select few, then this is a huge concern. More so, if the mobile number is used for two-factor authentication (2FA) and mobile banking. To add to the complexity, if the mobile number is a postpaid number, then replacing it won’t be that easy. Unfortunately, once the data is out there, there is no way to get it back. (Facebook is not even sorry that this happened, stating that it is an old, 2019, breach anyway).
As of writing, the National Privacy Commission (NPC) has started investigations. One thing is evident — those I have contacted to verify if the data belongs to them were not informed by Facebook in 2019! If I remember correctly, the law specified the number of days that users need to be informed that their data has been compromised, which clearly Facebook violated. Let’s see how NPC will handle this case (will they just slap Facebook’s hand and call it a day, another breach, ho-hum?). If your data is part of the data dump, then file a complaint at NPC to pressure them to take care of you. I jested that if the NPC will penalize Facebook with US$50/account, of which $40 goes to the data owner and US$10 goes to the government, that should give the government USD8.8M, which can buy a lot of vaccines for Filipinos!
|
https://rom.feria.name/another-facebook-data-dump-d18f5f68b1ad
|
[]
|
2021-04-06 00:08:41.182000+00:00
|
['Philippines', 'Privacy', 'Facebook', 'Npc']
|
I Escaped My Abusive Spouse and Then I Had an Awakening
|
I Escaped My Abusive Spouse and Then I Had an Awakening
Photo by 张 嘴 on Unsplash
The abuse had gone on too long, but I hadn’t fully received the messages that had been sent by the universe, so I was thrown into the pain over and over. I hadn’t learned the lesson that was meant to be learned yet. I was in despair until I could take no more.
I was depressed, nearly suicidal, backed into a dark corner. And I saw the smile on his face. He was deriving pleasure from my pain.
I called attention to it, and he refused to acknowledge it, threatening to leave me. So I allowed it. I allowed him to leave us alone.
The shred of remaining self-respect that I had took hold of me and forced myself out, with my four-year-old daughter, to start a new life. I cut ties.
Hard as it was to walk away from the life we’d built, the plans I had for the future, and the love I had for him despite his cruelty, it was obvious that it had to go forward.
Leaving an abusive relationship was like coming up for a breath of fresh air when I’d been suffocating for years.
A New Reality
I had endured attacks on my self-worth, fear tactics, threats, gaslighting, verbal abuse, and emotional coldness for five years. Yet, I stayed because of the fear of being a single parent with a full-time job.
And in a pandemic, when children were home with their working parents it didn’t seem possible. But here we are.
As soon as he was out of my surroundings and his voice was not in my mind telling me I was worthless, the air was cleared, and I became aware of new things.
I felt a foreign, tiny force inside me that had been all but depleted. It was called my inner strength. I began to be nice to it, to help it grow up again.
My awareness was heightened so I could hear the messages that the universe had for me, loud and clear. Signs and symbols, like a turtle appearing in a garden, manifested in my trajectory to lead me to full awakening.
I found myself discovering the chakras for the first time in my life and reading about the conscious universe. All these things were aligned with how I’ve always thought about reality but had no confirmation of these hunches until 2020.
Cultivating the Awakening
I began to meditate. I had liberating experiences, like my third eye leading me down a whooshing tunnel and my spirit spinning itself out of my body.
I snapped awake to a view of life where I am merely a spirit inhabiting a body like a puppet, playing the role of a character.
The stillness and beauty of the universe presented itself to me when I could let go of fears and attachments as my pure spirit self. My heart was wide open.
The universe began sending me messages, giving me very clear insights about the pandemic, the election, and the future of humanity.
November was a rough month. I could see the end the whole time, but I was forced to sit on the sidelines watching it unfold. And this pandemic has more surprises in store for us, as does the election scene. But I didn’t write this post to give you psychic predictions.
The universe gave me truths about my personal life as well as the lives of all living things.
With my intuition in tune with what it had to say, I could see clearly what was going on at work, and what was coming, and a deep knowing that the events transpiring are just manifestations of the great moving love that holds up reality.
Jobs, relationships, money, luck, and misfortune are all mere surface manifestations of a great production of the universe’s energy, all that is here to solve something and to let love prevail. Nothing matters but love.
|
https://medium.com/mystic-minds/i-escaped-my-abusive-spouse-and-then-i-had-an-awakening-a48a2ab43add
|
['Emily Jennings']
|
2020-12-01 16:33:58.675000+00:00
|
['Domestic Violence', 'Life Lessons', 'Spirituality', 'Domestic Abuse', 'Mindfulness']
|
From Data Entry to Software Engineering
|
How I found my career path at Flexport
Starting at Flexport, the Freight Forwarder
After college, I was working as the office manager at a company on the floor below Flexport’s office. I became friends with the Flexport office manager after meeting via an email thread with the building manager. I would visit her upstairs to commiserate about building management or ask if they could please stop playing basketball in their kitchen! As I got to know more Flexporters who taught me more about the company, I realized I wanted in.
My first undergraduate degree was in Marine Affairs, so I was interested in Flexport as a freight forwarder. Freight forwarders facilitate the bulk movement of manufactured goods around the world. This involves seaports, cargo ships, and a byzantine network of international trade regulations. I knew a little bit about it from school, and I was excited to finally be able to use my degree.
I knew that Flexport sponsored employees getting their customs brokerage licenses, and I’d heard through the grapevine that the compliance department was expanding. I figured I would get my foot in the door via a data entry position that was open at the time, and then try to wedge myself into compliance — maybe try for a customs license.
Intro to Programming: Automating My Workload
I started at Flexport in a data entry position. The work wasn’t challenging, but the volume was overwhelming — we were in our ‘scrappy start-up’ phase. For several weeks, I was the only full-time employee in a department with a growing backlog.
One of my tasks was to clean up rate sheets and make them compatible with our system. The rate sheets described the price of putting a container of goods on a cargo ship. There are several companies that own ships, and each has their own rate sheets, schedules, and formats. Rates are determined by the origin and destination ports, container size, commodity being shipped, etc., so a sheet can have over a thousand rates.
It took me about 10 hours a week to clean up and import the sheets, and the time it took me to process each sheet was time our operations staff was unable to create accurate quotes for our clients. One of the first things I did was to write up a process document for myself. Moving through the checklist ensured I never missed a step (for more details, see The Checklist Manifesto). It was pretty much a program for myself:
1| Ctrl + F for ‘Yantian’ 2| replace with ‘Shenzhen’ 3| Scroll through Column C 4| if any cell is x 5| and Column F for that row is y 6| change Column H to z 7| ...
I had done some free online programming tutorials before. The kind where you make a Dog class and a Cat class that both inherit from an Animal class . They weren’t enough to keep me interested in programming, but they were enough that I had a sense of what computers could do. The rate sheets were all in excel, so I spent a couple evenings tinkering with Visual Basic. I ended up with a macro that reduced my 10 hours a week of data munging to 5 minutes. It was an incredible feeling, mixing creativity and problem solving to create tangible value. Since Flexport was still small, I got a good amount of recognition from the higher ups in the company, which felt great too.
There is More to Software Engineering Than Visual Basic
Writing that first script opened my eyes to what programming could be like, but the rest of my work would be a lot harder to automate. I knew I needed a significant level up in skills before I could be paid to program. I looked into university courses and coding boot camps and ended up applying for the Oregon State University Computer Science Online Post Bacc. A post-bacc (short for post baccalaureate) is a program for people who already have a bachelor’s degree. Your first degree meets all of the gen ed requirements, so you can skip right to the required courses to earn an additional major. The OSU post-bacc requires 60 credits for a B.S. in Computer Science.
I chose the post-bacc over a boot camp for a few reasons. At the time, Flexport was only hiring CS majors, and the legitimacy of bootcamps was still in question. A lot of the engineers I knew emphasized that a CS foundation pays dividends later in their career. I was also worried about imposter syndrome and being taken seriously, so I wanted a real degree to fall back on. The program is also completely online, unlike many bootcamps, and that flexibility was appealing.
Discovering Flexport, the Tech Company
I started the post-bacc taking one class each quarter and working full time. Towards the end of my first quarter, I realized that I learn best by immersion and that I needed to commit more time to the program. At the same time, my manager, Phoebe Ford, called a meeting to talk about promoting me into the operations org. I told her about the post-bacc and asked if I could stay in data entry and work part time so I could take more classes, which she immediately agreed to. We designed a role in data entry where I could work less hours, keep my health insurance, keep paying rent, and spend some time at work developing scripts. Over the next two years I got a lot of support from Flexport, but this moment was pivotal.
As the data entry department grew, we got a new manager, Will Stoeckle. Data entry is generally a new grad position and Will was committed to helping us grow our careers. He worked with the engineering department to get me access to the code base, and he helped me enlist Alex Stark, a Flexport engineer, for weekly mentoring sessions. Stark’s mentorship was invaluable. One advantage of a bootcamp over a CS degree is the focus on industry relevant skills. In my post-bacc, I was learning a lot of foundational skills — assembly code, networks, operating systems, discrete structures, etc. Pair programming with Stark exposed me to the modern languages and tools — ruby, rails, javascript, react, and git — that we use at Flexport. It also exposed me to my biggest challenge — working on a large, active codebase.
The programming assignments in school were all greenfield. Greenfield code is easy to write:
You are given the parameters of a task You open a blank terminal You write the code to complete the task
Writing code on an active codebase is not easy. It looks more like this:
Someone tells you about a bug You search through thousands of nested files to find the code relevant to the feature. You’ve never seen most this code before, you probably didn’t write any of it, and if you did someone probably changed it while you weren’t looking. You identify the bug You fix the bug You make sure that in the time it took you to write your fix, no one changed the code you were working on If there were changes, update your fix to work with them and then repeat step 5 If there weren’t changes, pray there weren’t any added while you were checking for them and merge your code
One of the first tickets I paired on with Stark involved adding a new validation to our data model. We model a concept of the modes of transportation that a container can be on (truck, train, or ship). We also model a concept of partially filled containers. (Partial containers are cool so I’m going to give more context than necessary. If a client only has enough goods to fill up half of a container that need to go from China to the US, they can pay for half of a container. Then we find another client with a half container of goods that need to travel a similar route. These two clients can share the cost of shipping one container across the Pacific. Then we deconsolidate their goods at the port, put half on a train to Topeka, and the other half on a truck to Portland (for example). It’s like giving the traveling salesman a knapsack. The freight industry is awesome and you’ll never convince me otherwise.)
So my validation was to ensure our partial container flags stayed in sync with our transportation mode flags. The problem is that shipments, containers, and transportation modes are heavily used aspects of our data model. As I was writing this validation, other engineers were adding new code that violated it. Each time that happened I had to do something called a rebase. I added their changes to the copy of the codebase I was working on and applied my new validation on top of everything. Then I could identify where the new code violated my validation and fix it. It took 21 commits to write the validation, adjust for new code, and adjust for the code added during the last adjustment (this was exacerbated by the fact that I could only work on the code a few hours a day between my primary work responsibilities). I also made every mistake it’s possible to make when running a rebase.
The code to write the validation was simple. The real challenge was the process of shipping it into production. The challenges of working in a large, active codebase aren’t taught in schools. Most engineers learn the skills to handle it in internships or their first job. Being able to work on real tickets and having Stark to guide me through the process set me up for an easier transition into engineering.
Working up to Engineering
I spent a year working in the data entry org, pairing on engineering tickets, and working on my post-bacc. My end goal was to work my way into engineering, so when an opportunity came up to work on the tech side of the org, I took it. The role was to liaise between the users and engineering on bug reports. Since I had some experience with our code base already, I was able to read through the code to better diagnose tickets for the engineers. I could also write some small fixes myself. I was in this role for another year before I completed the post-bacc and earned a B.S. in Computer Science. At this point I’d written a good amount of code, but with a lot of help and hand holding. So I transitioned into a role as a Software Engineering Intern, on the same team as my mentor.
As an engineering intern, I could finally write code full time. I felt like I’d written a lot of code in the last two years, but it was nothing compared to being able to dedicate a full day without context-switching between my primary work responsibilities or school. I designed and executed my own project, refactoring one of our core models and integrating with a third party data source. After four months as an intern, I was promoted to Software Engineer I.
Pair programming an ocean team bug — we’re laughing because coding photo shoots are awkward
Final Reflections
I’ve been a full time Software Engineer at Flexport for about six months, working on the ocean team. I spend most of my time automating work for our operations staff in Asia. I’m learning a lot about ocean freight, and even more about engineering.
Being an engineer is exactly as awesome as I thought it would be. But it doesn’t feel like I’m ‘done’. For almost three years my driving goal was to ‘become a Flexport engineer’. And I did. But now that I’m here the learning hasn’t stopped or slowed down. Right now I’m devoting my energy to becoming a better engineer. After that, hopefully I’ll be able to become a mentor for others.
|
https://flexport.engineering/from-data-entry-to-software-engineering-c7a57a90fa63
|
['Helen Stockman']
|
2019-05-07 17:49:07.446000+00:00
|
['Bootcamp', 'Software Engineering', 'Flexport', 'Programming', 'Mentorship']
|
wajah…()
|
in In Bitcoin We Trust
|
https://medium.com/@ngehelog/wajah-513a13ce9043
|
[]
|
2020-12-27 16:09:41.897000+00:00
|
['Face Wash', 'Skincare', 'Indonesia', 'Milleur Beauty', 'Milleur']
|
The Secret Cure for Mental Illness: Discomfort
|
The Secret Cure for Mental Illness: Discomfort
Returning to simple, impractical living is helping me recover from depression.
Photo by Leon Contreras on Unsplash
This morning, I went to collect fire, accompanied by Rocky the mountain dog. Collecting sticks seemed like the best game ever to my fluffy friend, and he made the job somewhat more entertaining by stealing all my logs and chewing them to pieces. Despite the fact that we were in a jungle filled with sticks, the ones I had collected were just so much more interesting.
Even when your work is not being sabotaged by a cheeky little doggo, collecting firewood takes time. Everything takes time here.
I am doing work away (volunteering in exchange for food and board) on a farm in the Indian Himalayas, three acres of land tucked up on the top of a hill, surrounded by jungle.
The lifestyle is simple — we have everything we could need, but no extra comforts. To get any supplies that aren’t grown on the farm, we have to hike down to the nearest village, one hour’s trek down a treacherous mountain path, and from there catch a bus to the nearest shop, and then lug everything back up. We cook food on an open fire and wash ourselves with buckets of cold water. Washing clothes means soap and water, scrubbing out stains, and wringing the water out until your arms ache. We only have power a few hours a day, so when it comes on, everyone jumps on the single power socket to charge their devices. Every day, we need to go and collect firewood and pinecones to burn, chop up bigger logs, and work on the farm to grow and pick food.
The days fly by because all the simple things take so long. It is a life without most of the practicalities I am accustomed to, and it feels incredible.
Mental illness has, for the past few years, blurred the line between what is real and what is in my mind. My emotions and reactions to the world always slightly out of synch with reality. Anxiety made things that shouldn’t be scary terrifying. It messed with my physical feelings too — giving me psycho-somatic symptoms like stress headaches or nausea. Sometimes I would have no appetite for days, other times I would eat without hunger.
Here, I feel cold when the night comes, and am always hungry for food that serves to fuel my body not comfort my mind. My body aches from physical labour and melts into my mattress on the floor at night, into a deep sleep. Sensations are more real.
Back home, I would question everything. Never quite knowing why I was doing what I was doing, always half wanting to be somewhere else. Giving energy to the simple tasks that keep you alive takes away from existential questions.
To give so much time to making heat and growing food and cooking a meal reminds me that I have value, that the effort that goes into keeping me alive means that I deserve to be treated with kindness.
In simplicity, in coming back to survival, I find the meaning of self-care.
In the same way that we watch the seeds we plant grow, and feel a parental sense of protectiveness towards them, living like this makes me want to nurture myself and those around me.
|
https://starkraving.medium.com/the-secret-cure-for-mental-illness-discomfort-acf0b092998b
|
['Stark Raving']
|
2019-05-21 13:36:41.553000+00:00
|
['Depression', 'Travel', 'Nature', 'Mental Health', 'Minimalism']
|
Growing Up
|
Photo by James Fitzgerald on Unsplash
Maybe this is growing up,
The dead skin that glowed scattered
On the fireplace, I glance
Once more at the place you’d hang your
Coat and I can’t feel you anymore
But I remember feeling scared
The night we met in the apartment of a
Friend, I remember
The way you drove me to my car
And how yours smelt of balsamic
From the salads you would eat
On your way to
Work,
And you went home, smoked
A joint in the shower and I
Knew then if not love
Then something close
Something so inescapably light
The eye doesn’t notice,
And before I knew myself I knew you
I look at the single plate before me
And remember all the nights
I cooked the same thing
And we ate happily
Like it was all
Alright,
Like we were home
You are gone now,
I eat alone,
I get high
Alone
I am never quite home
And maybe that is part of growing up,
The place beside me empty
My eyes dissect the couch
Through heavy lids
|
https://medium.com/@bradon-matthews/growing-up-dabff98fb289
|
['Bradon Matthews']
|
2020-12-03 03:15:20.429000+00:00
|
['Melancolia', 'Romance', 'Free Verse', 'Poem', 'Love']
|
มาลง Gitlab-runner ไว้ใช้เองกัน
|
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/nellika/%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%87-gitlab-runner-%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A7%E0%B9%89%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%8A%E0%B9%89%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%87%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%99-83828f00c059
|
['Taeng Trirong Pholphimai']
|
2020-12-14 04:01:07.265000+00:00
|
['Gitlab Ci', 'Continuous Integration', 'Continuous Deployment', 'Gitlab Runner', 'Gitlab']
|
When Career Turns Into Compassion
|
When Compassion Becomes Passion
When I got my first salary, the happiness dawned in, with a touch of misery, guess what? We all know the name, its called earn more. Our ambitions and our payslips never go hand in hand, guiding us to an infinite loop of unintended checkouts. Looking back at my own life, it seems like a pattern, to be very specific a generic mantra set by the so-called society called “Survival is a direct outcome of your pay”. But they tell an ant never sleeps hungry.
On a Sunday afternoon, I happened to enter this place, in the beginning, it looked like a pet theme park. An entry fee of Rs 50 was charged to us. Everything looked normal until I saw a dog with a broken jaw being served by the person named Rajesh. He also owns the pet planet. Everything sounds normal right, but hold on. The 50Rs which was collected in the beginning was the source of well being for the ailing pet.
Going forward our vision fell on a wide range of species. Each had their own tough story of origin. I mean if once was hurt in an accident another missed their group during their typical ride of migration. From a parrot to a snake everyone was under one roof called compassion lead by DR RAJENDRA SIRSIKAR(VET), the man holding the horse in the first image. Out of curiosity, I asked him, who funds this pet planet. He smilingly replied the ultimate. I scratched the surface a little more regarding the cost it takes to serve these animals. He gave me a small stat, it would take 3.5 thousand each day to serve the horses alone. I was flabergasted, why is he not charging more as the purpose was higher. But I swallowed this question as the horses' eyes were filled with the joy of love.
The last question, how can a person survive without a typical day job? I found the answer when your passion turns into compassion, life becomes fruitful. If it's not for compassion than why would a man work hard on a blazing Sunday running around the sheds to feed the empty stomachs of the unknown? Not everyone hails the same fate, my heart may not be the garden of compassion but this instance has seeded a plant in me. I am writing this post to raise a small amount of money, hoping to push his play of kindness at least for a day. If you're with me, please donate. Even a rupee counts.
|
https://medium.com/@karthiksh666/when-career-turns-into-compassion-e5cfb5c13452
|
['Karthik S H']
|
2020-12-16 17:35:59.242000+00:00
|
['Pets And Animals', 'Pets', 'Compassion']
|
Policy management matters — exploring the role of policy management software
|
Policies are fundamental to an organization’s GRC. Yet without an effective information technology architecture, managing policies effectively — crucially to provide a framework for governance, to identify and address risk, and to define compliance — can be a minefield.
In this blog post, we investigate how policy management software puts paid to the haphazard approach that can leave organizations so exposed to corporate liability, and instead, underpins a co-ordinated strategy for policy development, maintenance, communication, attestation, and training. In short, how policy management software helps drive policy management best practice.
Policy management software — supporting the policy management lifecycle
There’s no disputing that policies are important. According to Michael Rasmussen, GRC20/20, an internationally recognized pundit on governance, risk management, and compliance:
‘Policies must be in place so the organization can:
Reliably achieve objectives
achieve objectives Manage and control uncertainty
and control uncertainty Safeguard the workplace
the workplace Protect the organization from unnecessary risk
the organization from unnecessary risk Ensure consistent operations
consistent operations Uphold ethical values
ethical values Address compliance obligations
compliance obligations Defend the organization should it land in turbulent legal and regulatory waters*
Yet typically, organizations fail to centralize policy and procedure documents and provide universal access to them. Policy files are often out of date, inconsistent, and dispersed throughout file shares, local hard drives, or individuals’ devices. Not only does this cause confusion for employees who may be working from old policy documents, that worryingly may fail to reference current standards or latest regulations, but it leads to departments pulling in different policy directions. Moreover, ‘rogue’ policies — documents that can be authored by anyone and termed policies — can easily get into circulation. Since policies establish a duty of care, this leaves organizations considerably vulnerable to exposure and liability.
With ever-changing regulations and legislation, it’s not enough these days to simply make policies accessible. The policies themselves must be kept up-to-date should be presented in a standardised format for greater clarity and understanding, and they must reflect current legal, regulatory, or contractual requirements. Compliance must be demonstrable to auditors, regulators, and other stakeholders.
An organization should also be able to prove receipt, affirmation, and understanding of policies amongst its workforce. Any policy exemptions, issues, or investigations should be documented and managed as without such diligence, an organization cannot identify where a policy may be falling short and address the issue.
Without policy management software, it’s almost impossible for an organization to be able to show:
what version of a policy is in effect
how it has been communicated
who has read it and has been trained on it
who attested it
any exemptions
how any policy violation is monitored or any resolution managed
… all of which would be required in the event of a corporate lawsuit, and moreover, should be maintained in order to govern with integrity.
As legal, regulatory, and compliance requirements across different sectors continue to evolve, the imperative is for organizations to match the pace of policy change, ensure compliance and limit liability wherever possible.
Policy management software — the benefits of an agile solution, at-a-glance
A proven policy management software solution makes it easy to manage policy lifecycle processes and policy content. It brings a watertight approach to authoring information, approving, maintaining, and communicating policies organization-wide.
Choose policy management software, such as Sword Policy Manager, and your organization can look forward to:
Policy visibility through centralization — all policy information and contained in one place
Increased control, collaboration, transparency around policies
A system of record and an audit trail of interactions and exceptions
An alternative to manual policy management processes with their inherent pitfalls
Enhanced policy management via an intuitive, collaborative, fully auditable, and controlled platform
Greater efficiencies in time through automated tasks, workflow, and policy reporting
Consistency and accuracy of policy information
Greater accountability with full audit trails
Why not see how purpose-built policy management software can safeguard your organization from liability whilst meeting your GRC objectives?
Learn more about Sword Policy Manager or book a demo.
* Source: Are Your Policies a Mess? A Maze of Confusion? | GRC 20/20 Research, LLC
|
https://medium.com/@sword-grc/policy-management-matters-exploring-the-role-of-policy-management-software-7e454065ddcd
|
['Sword Grc']
|
2021-07-06 14:37:02.755000+00:00
|
['Compliance', 'Compliance Management', 'Grc Software', 'Policy Management']
|
Firebase Emulator Suite
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Advanced tools for developers build and test apps locally
Image from firebase.google.com
What is Firebase Emulator Suite?🤔
Before on year ago at Firebase Summit 2019, Google has been introduced new feature into the Firebase. They introduced Firebase Emulator Suite. An advanced tools for developers build and test apps locally using Cloud Firestore, Realtime Database, Authentication, Cloud Functions, Cloud Pub/Sub and Firebase Hosting. Local development with Local Emulator Suite can be a good fit for your prototyping, development and continuous integration workflows.
Image from firebase.google.com
So basically with Firebase Emulator Suite have tools to run your web or mobile app in locally. This might help you to testing or debugging your app.
So which Firebase features and platforms are supported?🤔
According to the Firebase documentation Firebase Local Emulator Suite allows you to test your code with our core products in an interoperable way. The Cloud Functions emulator supports HTTP functions, callable functions, and background functions triggered by Cloud Firestore, Realtime Database and Cloud Pub/Sub; the Cloud Functions emulator does not support background functions triggered by Auth or Cloud Storage for Firebase. For Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database emulators, Security Rules emulation is built in.
Image from firebase.google.com
Setup Firebase Emulator Suite
To better understand this let’s connect emulator suite with our web application.
To setup emulator suite first of all we need to install Firebase CLI. Following command will install Firebase CLI.
npm install -g firebase-tools
Once your installation is completed you must log into your Firebase CLI
firebase login
After authentication create your web application and in that project folder run the following command.
firebase init
‘firebase init’ command will initialize Firebase on your project folder. I already added Firestore, Function, Hosting and Emulators to the project folder.
After adding necessary tools to the project, we can start our Firebase Emulator. To do that run the following command.
firebase emulators:start
Done! Now our Firebase emulator is running. To view the Firebase Emulator and status run http://localhost:4000 on your browser.
|
https://medium.com/@piumsudhara/firebase-emulator-suite-62a527d134db
|
['Pium Sudhara']
|
2020-12-18 15:27:06.595000+00:00
|
['Firebase Emulator Suite', 'Ｍedium', 'Firebase']
|
Below the Surface: Data and Groundwater
|
When the term “renewable resource” comes to mind, many think of wind, solar power, or even geothermal vents. However, one of the most important renewable resource our communities and all of life relies on is, in fact, groundwater. While these stores of water deep beneath the surface, existing in soil pore spaces and rock formation fractures, are very much “out of sight, out of mind”, groundwater physically supports our cities, quenches the thirst of our crops, and plays a vital role in Earth’s ecosystems. Unfortunately, many regions deplete this invaluable resource at rates in which it cannot be replenished — perhaps even to the point of crisis. Over-pumping of groundwater has been sinking cities, causing water contamination, and drying up wells worldwide.
Fortunately, there exists a way in which we can essentially see below ground, and monitor groundwater changes across borders. NASA’s GRACE-FO twin satellites provide the first opportunity to directly measure groundwater changes from space. By observing changes in the Earth’s gravity field, scientists can estimate changes in the amount of water stored in a region through their accompanying gravitational changes. Launched in March 2002, GRACE provides 10+ year-long data record for scientific analysis. This record, combined with data on changes in snow and surface soil moisture, can be used to calculate detailed changes in groundwater volume over a given period of time.
GRACE: Anomaly Liquid Water Equivalent Thickness (cm) for July 2011. Source: Climate Data Guide; D.Shea
As Planet OS continues to deliver streamlined access to high-quality weather, climate, and environmental data, we are excited to say that we offer this groundbreaking GRACE Tellus Dataset within our Datahub.
Planet OS Visualization: Monthly Changes in CA Groundwater Levels
GRACE Tellus provides user-friendly Level-3 data grids of monthly surface mass changes, with most geophysical corrections applied, to analyze changes in the mass of the Earth’s hydrologic, cryospheric, and oceanographic components. Through the application of GRACE Level-2 data, with additional post-processing or potential ancillary data, one is able to generate gridded, location-specific products (monthly and time-averaged) with the most up-to-date corrections. With its capabilities to visualize parts of the Earth unseen, this dataset has revolutionized investigations regarding water reservoirs over land, ice, and oceans, as well as earthquakes and crustal deformations. The applications of this data can span from informing decisions on land-use and real estate development to answering urgent questions in agriculture, regional water production, and much more.
Applying GRACE Tellus Worldwide
Using the Planet OS Datahub and the GRACE Tellus dataset, our Data Integration Engineer, Eneli Toodu created the below graphs that show the variations in groundwater levels in three different cities: Tallinn, Estonia; San Francisco, CA; and Nagpur, India.
Each of these graphs shows changes in “Water Layer Equivalent” aka changes in the mass of the thin layer of water near the Earth’s surface. On the y-axis, we see this measurement in centimeters with the accompanying years from 2002–2017 on the x-axis. Additionally, each city has its own specific regional variables and reasons for the rising and falling of the water layer equivalent.
In Tallinn, Estonia, the significant downward spike in 2002 could be connected to the synergistic relationship between high temperatures, a cyanobacterial bloom, and a significant fish die off. Whereas in San Francisco, California, the typical seasonal spikes with a greater overall decrease from 2013–2016 could be attributed to the drought that has affected the state for the past several years. In Nagpur, India on the other hand, we see typical variations due to changes in season and water demand for agricultural production.
With the GRACE Tellus dataset on Planet OS, not only are we able to create monthly spatial visualizations and linear graphs, but we can observe long-term trends across an entire country. Pictured below, Data Integration and QA engineer Andres Luhamaa created an incredible visualization showing groundwater trends from 2002–2017 across the United States. This revelatory map illustrates a clear (and potentially concerning) decrease in groundwater supplies in the Southern United States for over the past decade.
Each of these visuals tells an incredible story surrounding drought, regional water consumption, and changes in climate. As the GRACE mission took a hiatus at the end of 2017, it leaves a legacy of invaluable data and information. We are eagerly looking forward to publishing the data of the newly relaunched GRACE-FO satellite as soon as it becomes available.
The information from missions like GRACE only scratches the surface of a plethora of potential investigations and research questions regarding satellite obtained data and understanding the availability of integral resources like groundwater. We hope that with this data, users and industries can drive questions like these and advance our understanding of the climate both above and below us.
|
https://medium.com/planet-os/below-the-surface-data-and-groundwater-4ed132263097
|
['Chase Walz']
|
2018-12-12 23:47:34.417000+00:00
|
['Data', 'Drought', 'Water', 'Earth Observation', 'NASA']
|
How I rebelled against all odds and discovered I had the power of BounceBackAbility
|
I lived a life in the North East of England for 46 years and 362 days.
45 of those years where mostly filled with abuse, abandonment, neglect, insecurity, too much responsibility and uncertainty as a child, leading to a life of toxicity, chaos and mayhem, which led to a lot of self sabotage, and a whole lot more, with high expectations and searching, I just didn’t quite know what I was searching for, but what I did know is that something that wasn’t human, had me covered, I just knew I was going to be ok one day.
2 Divorces, 3 Children and 100s of failed relationships on the way, proved that I had experienced many happy moments in my life. becoming a mum at 20, was the most amazing miracle that I had experienced to date , the moment she was born, I just knew I was going to do everything in my power to protect her and not subject her to any of the things I had been through. I was going to be the mum I never had for all my children. Yet there I was inside of me feeling lost, confused and numb, holding onto years of suffering and pain that I was too proud to admit and too ashamed to unveil on the inside pretending not to be a victim.
Yet, on the outside, this confident, vibrant, full of life go-to, for everyone with the skills to see and bring out the very best in others, my communication skills where second to none, you’d believe that I was an Incredible woman, as many did, I was amazing at fixing things, including others, and I couldn't fix myself.
Until the day came when I realised I just couldn’t fix everyone, this was not my job.
This relationship was filled with passion, toxicity, venom, madness, fear, imprisonment, lies, terrorism, lust and the unhealthiest level of love in my life and i protected him to the end. I guess sprawled guzzling alcohol and pills begging my brother at his graveside to take me with him was the final straw, my pitfall, the place I could not seep any lower, I was driven to this, I had allowed myself to be treated this way!.
Having a career with vulnerable adults gave me huge responsibilities and my reputation was on the line, how could I possibly admit this to them, I was ashamed of myself. Training for the Protection of vulnerable adults opened my eyes that day when I realised I was the victim, the very word victim, that I lived in denial my entire life had come back to haunt me.
That was the very first day that I chose me…
I packed a bag, drove off to a safe place, under police protection, I upped and left the life as I knew it.
This did not come without its complications and further turmoil, chaos and mayhem, however throughout my breakdown and emotional meltdown, I stood my ground, even though I lost everything I owned, there was no going back, I finally felt alive.
Making decisions about my own life was liberating, I could breath, I felt free, what could my future look like?
By taking the biggest risk in my life, as a choice to actually create a life i could be proud of, I took nothing more than a suitcase over to Australia and started again.
Now…I am grateful to live a life far beyond my wildest expectations. I am me, I am free, I am true, I am authentic and I am happy and I am loved. Not only have I written and published a book,I am truly honoured to work with, inspire and make an impact on many other women in the world to do the same, I found my Passion and my Purpose.
To make a stand for yourself, like i did, and claim your own Power and find your own personal freedom and feel passion in your heart again…
Choose one of the options that suit you best or contact me to help me, help you, find you.
~Join my closed facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/reclaimyourpowerandpassionafterdivorce
~email me for further information on - [email protected]
~visit my website www.manifestmerriment.com
|
https://medium.com/@zeldamarsh-coach/bouncebackability-7f533c38f394
|
['Zelda Marsh']
|
2020-12-22 02:12:40.084000+00:00
|
['Women', 'Purpose', 'Bouncebackability', 'Inspiration', 'Passion']
|
Dealing With Life’s Most Difficult Changes
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Dealing With Life’s Most Difficult Changes
Divorce, moving, unemployment, the death of a loved one, and a major injury or illness are considered to be the five most stressful life events.
These changes all cause loneliness, uncertainty, and depression, and often perpetuate each other. You get hurt, you lose your job, and your partner leaves you because you are no longer the person they signed up to be with, and as painful as it is, you can’t honestly blame them.
Fortunately, most of us eventually recover, and there are ways to deal with these events and the emotions that come with them.
The Death of a Loved One
Your partner, parent, or sibling dies, and your life is suddenly turned upside down. On top of the sadness of losing them, there are all of the legal ramifications to deal with, and you feel even more guilty over your anger toward the deceased for making this impossible situation even worse.
On top of still having to work, you have to reassure everyone in your life that you’re fine when you aren’t. Instead of helping and supporting you, friends and acquaintances start to feel like just another burden. And you’ll be amazed and disturbed by how quickly the dead are forgotten.
So this is how your life will probably end. You’ll hurt some, become a hassle to others, and be almost immediately forgotten by everyone else.
The best solution here is to keep on taking care of yourself, and to reach out to others for help. Some suggest friends, or counseling if necessary, but in my opinion, hiring a lawyer to deal with all the paperwork is the best way to go. You don’t need another person around who’s pretending to care, and your lawyer probably won’t do this beyond the bounds of common courtesy.
What you require is time to process your loss, so take a week or two off, hire a lawyer, and turn off your phone.
Moving
Most of us try to move with a sense of optimism, or with the hope that a better life is waiting. But even if this appears to be true on paper, you’re still leaving everyone and everything you know behind. You are going to lose friends, and you’re going to have to start a new job, or worse, try to find one. And chances are, you’re going spend a significant amount of money. Moving is expensive, as is leasing a new apartment and maybe a car.
There are also all the little ways your previous home spoiled you. You probably weren’t even aware of them until after you moved away. You miss being able to walk across the street to buy anything at any time, or being able to take the subway instead of having to own a car.
And when you meet the people in your new neighborhood, they just aren’t the same. They don’t seem quite genuine, or aware of the world outside of their town.
The solution here, for me, was to move back. As much as I hate New York City, I am no longer capable of living anywhere else. I’ve tried to move to places where the cost of living is lower, but so are the wages, and in most of these places, you need a car, so financially, it’s basically a wash.
Living in New York City is brutal, but it’s also convenient and vibrant. People come here because they have dreams, and you can feel that energy and desperation. The city is built atop countless crushed dreams.
It’s noisy and dirty and frantic and exhausting, but once you’ve lived here for long enough, nowhere else will do.
Unemployment
This becomes more terrifying as you grow older. You have too much experience to start at the bottom, or to be seriously considered in any field aside from your previous one, and again, you’re old now. Why hire you when they can hire a few kids for half the cost?
As this condition persists, you become more isolated and ashamed, and in practical terms, you better find something while you still have an apartment. No one wants to move back in with their parents at 40.
I eventually took a job delivering packages for Amazon. It paid minimum wage and was physically grueling, and we were limited to under 30 hours a week so we couldn’t accrue any benefits. No paid sick days, no affordable healthcare, no nothing. I had to go on food stamps, and I was still losing money, but at least there was a little bit of money coming in.
Luckily, I ended up working for the same corporation I had been with three years earlier. It wasn’t ideal — in a way, I felt trapped, or like my life was on a loop. But I had found a way to feed and house myself before the Amazon job had crippled and bankrupted me.
Sometimes, you have to take whatever you can get, and hang on for dear life until you find something better.
Divorce/Breakups
This is similar to the loss of a loved one, and the uncertainty here is what the hell you’re going to do next, or if you should even do anything at all.
People don’t get married or enter into serious relationships with the expectation that they’ll fail. On the contrary, we feel confident that we’ve finally found the right person. So when it falls apart, we’re not only lonely and broken, but completely unsure of ourselves. How could we have been so wrong about someone we had loved so much?
Losing the person you love is like quitting drugs. You miss their taste and their touch and the smell of their hair, and you can’t stop thinking about them, or quite figure out exactly what went wrong.
You’re alone and depressed, and are no longer used to either. You miss the person in particular, and the sense of intimacy in general.
We’re all unique, and there’s no replacing anyone. I don’t believe that we ever completely get over anyone, but there are other people out there. And many of us just aren’t meant to be in relationships.
Concentrate on your friends, your hobbies, and yourself, and try to figure out what’s best for you. You’ll probably never be quite the same, but in time, you will feel better.
Major Injury or Illness
You’ve been working hard as a waiter for over two years, and have paid off almost all of your debts. You’re about a month away from finally being in the black, then you take a bad step and dislocate your ankle. You won’t be able to walk, let alone work, for at least six months, and the surgery to fix your foot is going to cost $10,000.
While recovering, you have to rely solely on credit cards. All that debt you had paid off is suddenly back and then some, and your foot will never be quite the same.
To heal, you have to stay in bed and keep your injured foot elevated. In order to take showers, you have to duct tape a plastic bag around it. You can’t get it wet, you can’t put weight on it, and ideally, you shouldn’t even get out of bed.
In the beginning, friends and family stop by to say hello and bring food. But that gets old for everyone after about a month, so for the rest of the time, you’re alone in bed, watching TV or reading.
Fortunately, this isn’t a situation that’s permanent, but still, you’ve been hit hard. You’re unemployed and lonely and rapidly sinking into debt.
Depending on the severity of your injury or illness, you either have to accept it and change your life accordingly, or keep on reminding yourself that eventually, you are going to recover.
If you were a good employee, you’ll probably be able to get your job back. The pity card can go a long way, and don’t be ashamed to use it. The fact of the matter is that in this situation, you need all the help you can get, and if there’s ever a fair time to lay a guilt trip on anyone, this is it.
Final Thoughts
You’ll probably have to face all of these disasters or challenges at least once in your life, and as bad as they are, each also presents an opportunity to learn and grow.
Most of us have some sort of safety net in the form of friends and family. If you need help, ask for it.
There are also other resources out there. If you need counseling, make the call. If you need to apply for food stamps, do it.
As encouraging as I want to be, if you’re in real trouble, you’re on a deadline.
If homelessness is a looming possibility, take all the help that you can to prevent that from happening. Once you become homeless, it’s almost impossible to recover. Even if you manage to find a job and a home, that period of homelessness will haunt you for the rest of your life.
When you’re in the middle of a crisis, it seems like it’s forever. You drag yourself out of bed feeling like you weigh 1000 pounds, like you’ll never be able to work or love or function again. But almost all of us deal with these events, and almost all of us survive.
It’s easy, especially now, to sink into depression or self-pity, so it’s important to look around and remember to be grateful. If you’re healthy and have a roof over your head, you’re doing okay. And if you’ve lived through these events, or are living through them now, the odds are, you are going to make it through.
|
https://medium.com/@happer55/dealing-with-lifes-most-difficult-changes-7eebee96d0bd
|
['Harry Seitz']
|
2021-01-16 05:41:41.435000+00:00
|
['Unemployment', 'Change', 'Homeless', 'Heartbreak', 'Stress']
|
Deleting Your Data From the Internet
|
The Background
From time to time, we’re told that we should Google ourselves. This is even more true before a job interview or any other important meeting. Why? Simple: it’s best to know what’s publicly available about us on the Internet. If there’s any information that’s embarrassing or damning out there, it’s best to know about it before others do, so we have the chance to edit or delete it.
Even more important: we should ensure that our contact information isn’t easily obtained online. I don’t want anyone in the world to have easy access to my current home address and phone number, my previous addresses and phone numbers, my auto & real estate loans, or members of my immediate and extended family.
Unfortunately, all of that information is free, publicly available, and easily accessible to anyone who searches for it. “Data broker” websites provide these kinds of data to the public. In fact, here’s a link to one example which includes scores of individuals who happen to share my name:
https://www.spokeo.com/David-Koff
Spokeo.com is easy to search and provides a TON of personal information about every David Koff listed, including age, gender, relatives, and — get this — a map to a recent address. The cost to access this amount of data? Free. #TotallyCreepy
For an additional fee — of just $0.95!! — phone numbers, email addresses, marital status, and court records can be provided. If you think I’m joking, just check out this image:
By the way, if you’re reading this and you just happen to be David Brian Koff of Denver, Colorado: I offer my most sincere apologies. All David Koffs should stick together, so keep reading: I’ll explain how to delete your data! :)
The Latest
Spokeo, of course, isn’t the only data broker. Not by a long shot. Just have a look at this list. Or this one. Or this one. There are hundreds of data brokers that are publicly available, easy-to-find, and super easy-to-use. They specialize in collecting data about you and me which they can then either give away or sell.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my personal data to be so publicly available for so many people to find. Or buy. Or use in ways that I can’t control. That’s why I deleted my information from Spokeo. And that’s why I then took the extra step of scrubbing my data from every other data broker I could find.
How I did that is a short, two-chapter story:
Chapter One: I invested about 15–20 hours of my time over a week and went to every data broker website on this list and followed the instructions for how to scrub my info. 15–20 hours is a lot of time for me, especially with a child at home.
Chapter Two: I managed the email confirmations from each of the various web brokers and went back to each site a second time to confirm that my data was, indeed, wiped.
That’s it.
The peace-of-mind I have now is worth far more than the time I invested. Now, when I Google myself or visit any of the largest data brokers on the planet, my personal data isn’t shown. Now look: I’m no dope. I’m sure that SOME of my data is still available — somewhere out there on the Internet, available to law enforcement agencies should they need it or to the most sophisticated hackers — but, by and large, I’ve made finding out info about me far more difficult.
And that was my goal.
Even better, as a result of my time investment, I now also get little to no junk mail through the US Mail. That includes no catalogs, brochures, credit card solicitations, and more. So, yeh, I’d have to say that my privacy — and the amount of paper that gets wasted on me — is now #MuchBetter
The Method
As I mentioned above, scrubbing your data from the Internet only requires an investment of your time to do some manual work: going to websites, filling out forms, and then waiting for responses. Some websites can scrub your data within 24 hours. Others take a few days to a week. All of the legit businesses should notify you if you provide a valid email address.
Unfortunately, all of that information is free, publicly available, and easily accessible to anyone who searches for it.
If you don’t have the time (or desire) to do this yourself: stay tuned. I’ll share another solution for you folks in the section below called “The Alternative Solution”.
To Begin:
Start with this list. The author has clear instructions with (mostly) accurate links, and back-up phone numbers in case a call is necessary to the data broker. Be sure to opt-out at the Direct Marketing Association because that stops your data from being shared with others who wish to market and mail things to you. That means reducing junk mail substantially. When you’re done with that list, I’d tackle this list next.
Good To Know:
Most data brokers allow you to scrub your data from their website for free; a few — cuz they suck — charge a fee. Most data brokers have an automated system on their websites that allow you to make a simple removal request; a few — cuz they suck — ask you to provide record IDs, links, or other specifics from their websites to honor your request. Most data brokers don’t ask you to prove who you are when you request that they scrub your data; a few — cuz they suck — will ask for tangible proof, like a driver’s license.
If You Need It:
Some data brokers may ask you to provide a short, written request to authorize your opt-out. Here is the stock letter which I use. Feel free to copy it if you like:
Thank you in advance for removing all of my personal information from this and any other subsidiary website of yours. I do not authorize any of my personal data to appear on any website of yours for any reason without my express written consent in advance. This includes, but is not limited to: my names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, cities, states, countries, possible or actual family members or contact information of any kind. Thank you in advance for your help! Here is the data which I’d like removed:
Then, just list any pertinent information, links, or record IDs that you’d like purged from the broker's website(s).
Total Time Commitment:
I’d budget 15–20 hours of time to do this work. If you don’t have the time (or desire) to do this yourself: scroll down to the section below called “The Alternative Solution”.
The Confirmation
Here’s a typical confirmation email which, in this case, I received from a data broker called PeopleByName. As you can see, in PeopleByName’s case, I had to submit any “RecordID” numbers associated with my name and information on their website:
As my longtime readers know — and as you can see from the screengrab above — I never EVER provide my personal email address to anyone. That rule goes doubly when contacting a data broker. Instead, I use two email services: 33mail (which I’ve known about for years) and Erine.email (which I discovered thanks to one of my newsletter subscribers!). Using these services accomplishes three goals:
They provide me with an infinite number of fully customizable emails All emails get auto-forwarded to my personal email so I don’t have to go to another website to retrieve them. I’m able to block any of my custom email alias at the press of a button. In fact, just check out the image above: at the top of the email header in a green box, you’ll note how 33mail mail provides a link — in every email!!! — to block any further correspondence from any of the aliases I create. Nice!
The Alternative Solution
While all of us would probably like to see our data scrubbed from the largest data brokers on the Internet, not all of us have the time to do the work involved. If that’s the case, the alternative solution is to pay a reasonable fee to let others do the work for you.
After I learned how to successfully remove my personal data from data brokers, I began offering the same service to family and friends. I offer my services to the general public for a fair price of $350, but I’ll tell you upfront that you can absolutely find companies to do this work for cheaper. In fact, here’s a link to a popular service called DeleteMe that charges between $129 to $350/year depending on the level of service you purchase. I give you this information up front because — if you’re on a budget — DeleteMe is a reasonable and smart option.
I charge more, but, I do everything by hand, the old-fashioned way. And I also handle your physical junk mail services, something DeleteMe doesn’t do.
To learn more about the services that I offer, click here.
The Takeaway
You’ve got options if you want to scrub a ton of your personal data from the web.
If you invest 15–20 hours of your time, you do the work yourself using the guides here, here, and here. Alternatively, you can pay a reasonable fee for others to do the work for you. Regardless of how you choose, just remember these four things…
If you’re concerned about privacy and/or security, you should do whatever you can to reduce your personal data being available online. If you pay for others to remove your data for you, that’s fine: just be sure you can trust the individual or company to whom you’ll provide some of your personal data. There’s no known way to remove ALL of your personal data from the web. No doubt there are many local, state, and federal agencies that have data on every one of us. No doubt those data are available via the web to the most malicious hackers. The goal is never to remove ALL of your personal data from the web: it’s to remove as much of it as possible. And that goal, dear friends, is 100% doable.
Go for it.
And that’s a wrap for today’s installment, everyone. Thank you again, for reading and for being a subscriber. Let me know your thoughts & questions in the comments section.
As always… surf safe.
|
https://medium.com/swlh/deleting-your-data-from-the-internet-6d2cf0ac9e9b
|
['David Koff']
|
2020-07-05 22:33:11.695000+00:00
|
['Technology', 'Tech', 'Data', 'Security', 'Privacy']
|
Pistol Braces are Now Banned!— A Thought Exercise
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The Poor Tax
People with sufficient means will be able to legally keep their pistols in the exact configuration as they are. But first they must pay the government a $200 tax per firearm and wait several months. This will be the only way to legally keep one’s own property in the same configuration as it was originally purchased or built.
This option will not be feasible to many people who bought a single, handy pistol with a brace for self-defense that now find themselves outside of the law.
Even without the poors adding to the traffic there will still be a surge of folks applying for SBR tax stamps which will cause even more delay than the months long wait that exists today.
The New Felons
Some people will blissfully remain in felony violation of the new version of firearms regulations. These people bought a perfectly legal gun and have no way to be informed of the new classification of their property.
Others will knowingly refuse to abide by a law they view as unconstitutional and will likely put an actual stock on their new, illegal SBR.
The Begrudgingly Law-Abiding Citizens
Many gun owners will likely prefer to reconfigure their new, illegal SBRs into a legal configuration. This means removing the brace altogether and then either permanently disassembling/ destroying the pistol, leaving the firearm as a brace-less pistol, or permanently extending the barrel to 16" and adding a real stock onto their new, legal rifle.
Few people would choose to destroy their personal property. Everyone else will be left with a less effective and useful pistol or be forced to join in the surging demand for the 16" barrels and threaded barrel extensions.
Braced AK Pistol 🚫
AK Pistol Without Brace 👍🏼
AK Rifle with Permanent Barrel Extension 👍🏼
Crushed American Companies
Braces are all the new hotness in the firearms industry; multiple millions of these accessories have been sold. There are multiple companies employing thousands of Americans that will be totally screwed because the demand for their product will drop to precisely 0% overnight.
While braces are similar to stocks cosmetically there is not a single brace I would put on a rifle instead of real stock if given the choice.
Poor Californians
“Title 1 / Other” firearms are definitely a loop hole in the California “Assault Weapon” laws, but it was the closest thing to a normal AR-15 they could get. The reclassification of Braces into stocks will require all “Others” to use just a buffer tube.
California Title 1 “Other”
Pour one out of the CA homies
International Arms Manufacturers
Due to restrictions on importing firearms that do not have a “sporting purpose” many foreign made rifles cannot be imported into the country. To get something on the market before committing to opening arms plants in the US many companies import pistol versions of their rifles with the stock removed. The current US market buys them almost exclusively with the intent to install a brace to make the large frame pistols manageable.
CZ Bren 2 pistol with 14" barrel and brace
This supply of pistols will be quite thoroughly strangled by the reclassification of braces as stocks, and, while that may be a unexpected bonus to some politicians, it will remove competition in the marketplace which has been warmly welcomed by the firearms enthusiast community.
To Be Fair
Pistol braces were originally inspired by a desire to help disabled veterans, but the industry has pushed and pushed the boundary of legality ever since.
It comes down to an ideological question of whether SBRs are inherently more dangerous than firearms with a barrel length of 16" or more.
Obviously many firearms enthusiasts and industry members (and I) believe that pistol braces show that SBRs are not more dangerous. However, if the ATF decides to create law out of thin air and ban braces then at least you know what is likely to happen.
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https://medium.com/@austinwgerald/pistol-braces-are-now-banned-a-thought-exercise-75db6e1415ef
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['Austin Gerald']
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2020-10-11 19:48:33.388000+00:00
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['Firearms', 'Gun Control', 'Politics', 'Guns']
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Word and Character Based LSTM Models
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Word and Character Based LSTM Models
If you’re not familiar with the NLTK library and data preprocessing, take a look at this article. If you’re interested in language models and how to build them, read this article. If you’re familiar with NLP and language models, continue reading!
What are LSTMs?
Long-short-term memory models or LSTMs are used to solve the problem of short term memory by using gates that regulate the flow of information. These models have mechanisms that decide whether or not to keep information, thereby being able to retain important information over a long time. Due to their ability to learn long-term dependencies, they are extensively used in machine translation, speech recognition, handwriting recognition and generation, language modeling and translation, speech synthesis, and many other deep learning tasks.
LSTM models for text prediction — Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Sequence classification is a predictive modeling problem where there is some sequence of inputs over space or time and we wish to predict a category for the sequence. The sequences can vary in length, be comprised of a very large vocabulary of input symbols and may require the model to learn long-term dependencies between symbols in the input sequence, making this a challenging problem for RNNs but easily solvable by LSTMs.
In this article, we will look at building word based as well as character based LSTM models, and compare the next word predictions of the two. We will also look at different parameters that can be changed while training the models and analyze which combination gives us better results.
Initial Steps
First we import the required toolkits and libraries.
import numpy
import re
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import keras
import string
import nltk
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense
from keras.layers import Dropout
from keras.layers import LSTM
from keras.layers import Embedding
from keras.callbacks import ModelCheckpoint
from keras.utils import np_utils
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from keras.preprocessing.text import Tokenizer
from keras.preprocessing.sequence import pad_sequences
string.punctuation = string.punctuation +'“'+'”'+'-'+'’'+'‘'+'—'
string.punctuation = string.punctuation.replace('.', '')
Now we perform basic preprocessing, such as lowering, etc., on the dataset. We also extract some statistics about the dataset such as the number of unique tokens, which can later be passed as a parameter while training our model. The dataset used in this article can be found here.
# Loads the data and preprocesses data and stores corpus in raw_text
raw_text = open('/content/sample_data/corpus.txt', encoding = 'utf8').read()
file_nl_removed = ""
for line in raw_text:
line_nl_removed = line.replace("
", " ")
#removes newlines
file_nl_removed += line_nl_removed
file_p = "".join([char for char in file_nl_removed if char not in string.punctuation])
#removes all special characters
sents = nltk.sent_tokenize(file_p)
print("The number of sentences is", len(sents))
#prints the number of sentences
string.punctuation = string.punctuation + '.'
file_q = "".join([char for char in file_p if char not in string.punctuation]) #removes even periods.
words = nltk.word_tokenize(file_q)
print("The number of tokens is", len(words))
#prints the number of tokens
average_tokens = round(len(words)/len(sents))
print("The average number of tokens per sentence is", average_tokens)
#prints the average number of tokens per sentence
unique_tokens = set(words)
print("The number of unique tokens are", len(unique_tokens))
#prints the number of unique tokens
preprocessed_text = file_p.lower()
#converts corpus into lowercase
Statistics about the data — Image by author
Training the Word Based LSTM Model
Now that we know what our data looks like after preprocessing, we can set the hyperparameters of our word based LSTM model. We also tokenize our dataset into sentences and obtain sequences of length 50 tokens each from the sentences.
# Hyperparameters of the model
vocab_size = 2750 #chosen based on statistics of the model
oov_tok = '<OOV>'
embedding_dim = 100
padding_type='post'
trunc_type='post' # tokenizes sentences
tokenizer = Tokenizer(num_words = vocab_size, oov_token=oov_tok)
tokenizer.fit_on_texts([preprocessed_text])
word_index = tokenizer.word_index seq_length = 50
tokens = tokenizer.texts_to_sequences([preprocessed_text])[0]
We have to prepare our data into X and Y columns. Since our sequence length is 50, we take every 50 tokens as the input and the 51st token as the output. We also one-hot encode the output variable Y.
dataX = []
dataY = []
for i in range(0, len(tokens) - seq_length-1 , 1):
seq_in = tokens[i:i + seq_length]
seq_out = tokens[i + seq_length]
if seq_out==1: #Skip samples where target word is OOV
continue
dataX.append(seq_in)
dataY.append(seq_out)
N = len(dataX)
print ("Total training data size is -", N) X = numpy.array(dataX)
# one hot encodes the output variable
y = numpy.array(dataY)
y = np_utils.to_categorical(dataY)
Training data size — Image by author
Let us now pass the required parameters to our model and compile it. We use word embeddings, which is a technique where words are encoded as real-valued vectors in a high dimensional space, such that the similarity between words in terms of meaning translates to closeness in the vector space, using an Embedded Layer provided by Keras.
We will map each word onto a 100 length real valued vector, using an embedding dimension of 100 as defined by our hyperparameters. Bidirectional LSTMs, which we are using, are an extension of traditional LSTMs that improve model performance by training two instead of one LSTM on the input sequence.
# with embedding
model = keras.Sequential([
keras.layers.Embedding(vocab_size, embedding_dim, input_length=seq_length),
keras.layers.Bidirectional(keras.layers.LSTM(64)),
keras.layers.Dense(vocab_size, activation='softmax')
])
# compiles model
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy',
optimizer='adam',
metrics=['accuracy'])
# model summary
model.summary()
Model summary — Image by author
We train the model with 5 epochs and a train-validation split of 80–20%. Increasing the number of epochs might improve the model performance up to a certain number of epochs.
# Uses validation split of 0.2 while training
num_epochs = 5
history = model.fit(X, y, epochs=num_epochs, batch_size = 128, verbose=1, validation_split=0.2)
Training the model — Image by author
Next Word Predictions
Now that we have a trained model, we can use it to get the next word predictions. To do this, first we have to create a word map from the predictions to the actual word using which we can find the word corresponding to a certain prediction. We then write a function to return the next n words greedily.
#Creates word to idx map using tokenizer.word_index
reverse_word_map = dict(map(reversed, tokenizer.word_index.items())) # Returns the next n words greedily
def next_tokens(input_str, n):
print ("Seed -", input_str, sep = '
')
final_string = ''
for i in range(n):
token = tokenizer.texts_to_sequences([input_str])[0]
prediction = model.predict(token, verbose=0)
final_string = final_string + reverse_word_map[numpy.argmax(prediction[0])] + ' '
input_str = input_str + ' ' + reverse_word_map[numpy.argmax(prediction[0])]
input_str = ' '.join(input_str.split(' ')[1:])
return final_string
Let us look at the next word predictions by picking a random seed as the input and predicting the next 10 words greedily, and also by specifying an unseen input string.
# picks a random seed
start = numpy.random.randint(0, len(dataX)-1)
pattern = dataX[start]
input_str = ' '.join([reverse_word_map[value] for value in pattern])
output = next_tokens(input_str, 10)
print("
Generated string -
", output) #speficies an unseen input string input_str = "The boy laughed at the fright he had caused. This time, the villagers left angrily. The third day, as the boy went up\
the small hill, he suddenly saw a wolf attacking his sheep. He cried as hard as he could, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”, but not \
a single villager came to help him. The villagers thought that he was trying to fool them again and did not come to rescue \
him or his sheep."
# Uses first 50 tokens from given input_str as input. Since the seq_length is 50, only 50 tokens are taken using the tokenizer.
output = next_tokens(input_str, 10)
print("
Generated string -
", output)
Generated string on a random seed — Image by author
Generated string on an unseen input string — Image by author
We see that word based LSTM model in general has a very poor prediction of next words, regardless of whether the data is seen or unseen. Predictions may be made better by training the model for a larger number of epochs.
Training the Character Based LSTM Model
Let us train 2 character based models with different hyperparameters and then compare the outputs to analyze which hyperparameters are best suited to next character prediction.
Character Based LSTM Model 1
First we use the preprocessed data to create the raw data for the model. Periods have not been removed for better results. Sometimes, not removing other special characters such as apostrophes, commas, etc., can also give better results. Feel free to try it out! We then create a mapping of unique characters to integers and vice versa.
# Uses the preprocessed data and create raw_text
raw_text = preprocessed_text #periods have not been removed for better results
# creates mapping of unique characters to integers
chars = sorted(list(set(raw_text)))
char_to_int = dict((c, i) for i, c in enumerate(chars))
int_to_char = dict((i, c) for i, c in enumerate(chars)) # Prints the total characters and character vocab size
n_chars = len(raw_text)
n_vocab = len(chars)
print("The number of total characters are", n_chars)
print("
The character vocab size is", n_vocab)
Data statistics— Image by author
Now we prepare the dataset where the input is a sequence of 100 characters and the target is next character. We also one-hot encode the output variable Y.
#Prepares dataset where the input is sequence of 100 characters and target is next character.
seq_length = 100
dataX = []
dataY = []
for i in range(0, n_chars - seq_length, 1):
seq_in = raw_text[i:i + seq_length]
seq_out = raw_text[i + seq_length]
dataX.append([char_to_int[char] for char in seq_in])
dataY.append(char_to_int[seq_out])
n_patterns = len(dataX)
print ("Total Patterns: ", n_patterns) # reshapes X to be [samples, time steps, features]
X = numpy.reshape(dataX, (n_patterns, seq_length, 1))
# one hot encodes the output variable
y = np_utils.to_categorical(dataY)
Total number of patterns — Image by author
Let us now pass the required parameters to our model and compile it. We use word embeddings again. We will map each word onto a 100 length real valued vector, using an embedding dimension of 100 as defined by our hyperparameters. We also use a dropout layer which is a regularization method to prevent overfitting.
embedding_dim =100
max_length =100 model = Sequential()
model.add(Embedding(n_vocab, embedding_dim, input_length=max_length))
model.add(LSTM(256))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Dense(y.shape[1], activation='softmax'))
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam')
model.summary()
Model summary — Image by author
We now train the model using 20 epochs, and a batch size of 128. Using a local machine usually makes this process long and requires a lot of runtime, so I would suggest using Google Colab with a GPU runtime.
model.fit(X, y, epochs = 20, batch_size=128)
Training the model — Image by author
We need to write a function to be able to get the actual character from the prediction.
#Gets the generated string using the model.
def predict_next_n_chars(pattern, n):
for i in range(n):
x = numpy.reshape(pattern, (1, len(pattern), 1))
prediction = model.predict(x, verbose=0)
print (int_to_char[numpy.argmax(prediction)], end = '') #get next char index.
seq_in = [int_to_char[value] for value in pattern]
pattern.append(numpy.argmax(prediction))
pattern = pattern[1:len(pattern)]
Let us now look at the next character predictions by picking a random seed as the input and predicting the next 200 characters greedily, and also by specifying an unseen input string.
#picks a random seed
start = numpy.random.randint(0, len(dataX)-1)
pattern = dataX[start]
input_str = ''.join([int_to_char[value] for value in pattern])
print ("Seed -", input_str, sep = '
')
print ("
Generated string -
")
predict_next_n_chars(pattern, 200) input_str = "The boy laughed at the fright he had caused. This time, the villagers left angrily. The third day, as the boy went up\
the small hill, he suddenly saw a wolf attacking his sheep. He cried as hard as he could, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”, but not \
a single villager came to help him. The villagers thought that he was trying to fool them again and did not come to rescue \
him or his sheep." #Uses the first 100 characters from given input_str as input to generate next 200 characters.
input_str = input_str.lower()
input_string = ''
for each in input_str:
if each in chars:
if (len (input_string)<100):
input_string += each
pattern = []
pattern.append([char_to_int[char] for char in input_string])
print ("Seed -", input_str, sep = '
')
print ("
Generated string -
")
predict_next_n_chars(pattern[0], 200)
Generated characters on a random seed — Image by author
Generated characters on an unseen input string — Image by author
We see that the character generation is better, and has more overall word dependency captured in the seen data than the unseen data. In both the cases, the generated text has nearly the same degree of syntactical accuracy, but the semantic meaning of the overall text is higher in the seen data generation.
Character Based LSTM Model 2
We use the same data that was used in the first model. Let us pass the required parameters to our model and compile it. We use word embeddings again. We will map each word onto a 100 length real valued vector, using an embedding dimension of 100 as defined by our hyperparameters. We also use 2 dropout layers.
model1 = Sequential()
model1.add(Embedding(n_vocab, embedding_dim, input_length=max_length))
model1.add(LSTM(256, input_shape=(X.shape[1], embedding_dim),return_sequences=True))
model1.add(Dropout(0.2))
model1.add(LSTM(256))
model1.add(Dropout(0.2))
model1.add(Dense(y.shape[1], activation='softmax'))
model1.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam')
model1.summary()
Model summary — Image by author
We now train the model using 20 epochs, and a batch size of 64.
model1.fit(X, y, epochs = 20, batch_size=64)
Training the model — Image by author
We now write a function to get the actual character from the prediction.
# Generates the sequence similar to above methods. Gets the generated string using the model.
def predict_next_n_chars(pattern, n):
for i in range(n):
x = numpy.reshape(pattern, (1, len(pattern), 1))
prediction = model1.predict(x, verbose=0)
print (int_to_char[numpy.argmax(prediction)], end = '') #get next char index.
seq_in = [int_to_char[value] for value in pattern]
pattern.append(numpy.argmax(prediction))
pattern = pattern[1:len(pattern)]
Let us look at the next character predictions by picking a random seed as the input and predicting the next 200 characters greedily, and also by specifying an unseen input string.
#picks a random seed
start = numpy.random.randint(0, len(dataX)-1)
pattern = dataX[start]
input_str = ''.join([int_to_char[value] for value in pattern])
print ("Seed -", input_str, sep = '
')
print ("
Generated string -
")
predict_next_n_chars(pattern, 200) # specifies an unseen input string input_str = "The boy laughed at the fright he had caused. This time, the villagers left angrily. The third day, as the boy went up\
the small hill, he suddenly saw a wolf attacking his sheep. He cried as hard as he could, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!”, but not \
a single villager came to help him. The villagers thought that he was trying to fool them again and did not come to rescue \
him or his sheep."
#Uses the first 100 characters from given input_str as input to generate next 200 characters.
input_str = input_str.lower()
input_string = ''
for each in input_str:
if each in chars:
if (len (input_string)<100):
input_string += each
pattern = []
pattern.append([char_to_int[char] for char in input_string])
print ("Seed -", input_str, sep = '
')
print ("
Generated string -
")
predict_next_n_chars(pattern[0], 200)
Generated characters on a random seed — Image by author
Generated characters on an unseen input string — Image by author
We see that the character generation is better, has higher overall word dependency captured in the seen data than the unseen data, as well as higher semantic meaning, just like Model 1. Model 2 is comparatively less overfitted than Model 1, in terms of unseen as well as seen data prediction. The unseen data prediction of this model is thus slightly better than that of Model 1.
Comparison between LSTM Character Based Model 1 and 2
Model 2 has a higher accuracy, as well as semantic meaning and captures word dependencies better than the Model 1 for unseen data, whereas Model 1 makes slightly better predictions on the seen data.
Some differences between Model 1 and Model 2 are -
Model 2 has 2 dropout layers while Model 1 has just 1. Dropout is a regularization method where input and recurrent connections to LSTM units are probabilistically excluded from activation and weight updates while training a network. This has the effect of reducing overfitting and improving model performance. Hence we see that unseen data generation is done better by Model 2 than Model 1.
Model 1 has just one layer, while Model 2 has an added layer with 256 units, and Model 2 returns sequences while Model 1 does not. Hence the overall performance of Model 2 is higher than that of model one.
The batch size of Model 1 is 128, while that of Model 2 is 64, giving the network more time to update and learn, hence we get better outputs from Model 2.
Conclusion
I hope this article was a good introduction to word and character based LSTM models, how to build as well as analyze them without needing a lot of mathematical knowledge of their working. Varying hyperparameters, the number of layers, as well the number of training epochs can help improve model performance. The entire code and dataset used in this article can be found here.
Further Reading
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/word-and-character-based-lstms-12eb65f779c2
|
['Ruthu S Sanketh']
|
2020-12-09 13:33:29.496000+00:00
|
['NLP', 'Text Preprocessing', 'Lstm', 'Keras', 'Language Model']
|
International Migrants Day — Learn How to Join an International Team
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Migrants
Who are these awesome people?
People who:
have tried hard enough for the first steps of migration
have packed their whole lives in one or maybe 2 pieces of baggages
have said goodbye to a familiar place where they lived for a long time, mostly their whole lives
have the necessary bravery to face cultural challenges
are flexible enough to adopt the new culture
And last but not least, people who are swimming against the tide.
We, at anynines, really like these people, appreciate them and we are very proud of them.
Migrants at anynines
We decided to celebrate this day, appreciating our colleagues who have started their new chapter of life by joining us at anynines, a German-based company with an international environment.
We asked our team members who have experienced migration, to write about themselves and their experiences.
Happy your day! Thanks for joining us.
Get to know some of the people behind our products and services:
Bukola Johnson
Hello, I am Bukola Johnson from Nigeria. I migrated to Germany a few weeks ago joining the Enterprise Platform Operation(EPO) team of anynines as a DevOps Engineer. I studied computer science at the university after which I have always worked in the tech department/industry. It’s been an amazing journey so far due to the versatile nature of technology and the need to keep innovating. This requires us(techies) to keep learning to stay attune with innovations and I find this quite interesting (and fun) because this helps me to make positive impacts wherever I find myself which serves as my primary reason for being in the Tech world.
Before moving to Germany, I worked in the Fintech sector in Nigeria whereby we make payments seamless and provide financial access/service for the people (especially the underbanked). I worked with several technologies such as Kubernetes, cloud services including AWS, and Google. As a DevOps Engineer, I am tasked with the primary responsibility of automating deployment processes and helping to improve the reliability, scalability, and availability of products by deploying and managing enterprise solutions (though I am not limited to this primary responsibility)
After working for several years in Nigeria, my spouse and I decided to try something different in other advanced countries and we discussed and agreed to explore Germany after being impressed with the information and figures of Germany tech startups we gathered.
Next, we started researching how to get opportunities in Tech companies in Germany, visa/sponsorship requirements, settling down in Germany, and a few other things, though the language difference was a bit of a concern to us. Using LinkedIn and sites (such as Germany startup jobs), I started applying for jobs that fit my skill set.
Though we received several not too encouraging feedbacks of them preferring local hands or EU citizens😔😔😔, I kept pushing until I saw opportunities with anynines. Quickly, I read about the organization, what they do and I was quite keen on the technology (Cloud Foundry😁) as it’s an opportunity to enrich my expertise as learning new concepts/ideas are things I look forward to. I then applied to anynines and was super-excited when Jessica (HR manager) reached out to me and I later got to have a session with Nico and the team for the technical interview. I got shortlisted after the successful interview and assessment and I was offered the job.
Yay, I was super elated🤩💪. Then applying for a work visa from Nigeria to Germany took me several months, but in all of this wait, anynines kept in touch with me while I waited for my visa to be approved by the Embassy.
My story will not be complete if I do not mention the part that anynines played in all of these. Jessica’s professionalism and caring nature is one of the reasons I am here and excited to join anynines, she showed empathy during the lengthy visa situation which lasted almost 10 months. After finally receiving my entry visa in February and billed to travel in March, the Covid-19 situation and restriction strikes like a ‘Sledge Hammer’ and my entry visa expired during the period, so I was close to giving up at that point.😑😑
Finally arriving in Germany on the 2nd of November 2020 was indeed a journey🤩, but in all, I am grateful for the opportunity anynines is giving to me.
Settling down in Germany is another experience entirely because I could not travel with my spouse as his visa for family-reunion is not completed yet. So it’s been quite challenging for me to be here all by myself but anynines staff has been great in helping me to achieve this.
Jessica helped me a lot with accommodation, Melanie helped me with my apartment movement as well as other logistics. The most amazing part is the fact that they helped me stock up my apartment with enough groceries that will last me for my quarantine period even before I arrived 👌😘. They are both amazing.
Shopping winter outfits and all have been with the help of Helena (my wardrobe consultant🤩), she’s been so attentive when I rant about the best winter jacket I can use to keep me warm. Manu, my teammate in the EPO department, has been such a kind person in welcoming me to the team and Benjamin has been my coach in this new world of Cloud Foundry, and to Nico for believing in me. All these people are so wonderful and my story of migrating and living in Germany will not be complete without them.
So far, I love it here and I do not regret making the decision to move to Germany and most importantly joining anynines, though the cold is dealing with me because Nigeria is always very warm so this is a different experience for me but I know with time and with the best winter outfit I will be fine.
|
https://medium.com/@anynines/international-migrants-day-learn-how-to-join-an-international-team-2d26e1f8bd37
|
[]
|
2020-12-18 13:47:02.133000+00:00
|
['Migrants', 'Migration', 'Anynines']
|
Why Apache Spark Is Fast and How to Make It Run Faster
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Apache Spark logo
Spark does things fast. That has always been the framework’s main selling point since it was first introduced back in 2010.
Offering a memory-based alternative to Map-Reduce gave the Big Data ecosystem a major boost, and throughout the past few years, it represented one of the key reasons for which companies adopted Big Data systems.
With its vast range of use cases, its ease-of-use, and its record-setting capabilities, Spark rapidly became everyone’s go-to framework when it comes to data processing within a Big Data architecture.
Part I: the Spark ABC
One of Spark’s key components is its SparkSQL module that offers the possibility to write batch Spark jobs as SQL-like queries. To do so, Spark relies behind the scenes on a complex mechanism to run these queries through the execution engine. This mechanism’s centerpiece is Catalyst: Spark’s query optimizer that does much of the heavy-lifting by generating the job’s physical execution plan.
Even though every step of this process was meticulously refined to optimize every aspect of the job. There is still plenty you could do from your end of the chain to make your Spark jobs run even faster. But before getting into that, let’s take a deeper dive into how Catalyst does things.
First of all, let’s start with the basics
Spark offers multiple ways to interact with its SparkSQL interfaces, with the main APIs being DataSet and DataFrame. These high-level APIs were built upon the object-oriented RDD API. And they kept its main characteristics while adding certain key features like the usage of schemas. (For a detailed comparison, please refer to this article on the Databricks blog).
The choice of the API to use depends mainly on the language you’re using. With DataSet being only available in Scala / Java, and replacing DataFrame for these languages since the release of Spark 2.0. And each one offers certain perks and advantages. The good news is that Spark uses the same execution engine under the hood to run your computations, so you can switch easily from one API to another without worrying about what’s happening on the execution level.
That means that no matter which API you’re using, when you submit your job it’ll go through a unified optimization process.
How Spark sees the world
The operations you can do within your Spark application are divided into two types:
Transformations : these are the operations that, when applied to an RDD, return a reference to a new RDD created via the transformation. Some of the most used transformations are filter and map . (Here’s a complete list of the available transformations)
: these are the operations that, when applied to an RDD, return a reference to a new RDD created via the transformation. Some of the most used transformations are and . (Here’s a complete list of the available transformations) Actions: When applied to an RDD, these operations return a non-RDD value. A good example would be the count action, that returns the number of elements within an RDD to the Spark driver, or collect , an action that sends the contents of an RDD to the driver. (Please refer to this link for a complete list of the actions that can be applied on RDDs).
The DataFrame and DataSet operations are divided into the same categories since these APIs are built upon the RDD mechanism.
The next differentiation to make is between the two types of transformations, which are the following:
Narrow transformations: When these transformations are applied on an RDD, there is no data movement between partitions. The transformation is applied to the data of each partition of the RDD and results in a new RDD with the same number of partitions, as demonstrated in the below illustration. For example, filter is a narrow transformation, because a filter is applied to the data of each partition and the resulting data represents a partition within the newly created RDD.
A narrow transformation (Source: Databricks)
Wide transformations: These transformations necessitate data movement between partitions, or what is known as shuffle. The data is moved across the network and the partitions of the newly-created RDD are based on the data of multiple input partitions, as illustrated below. A good example would be the sortBy operation, where data from all of the input partitions is sorted based on a certain column in a process that generates an RDD with new partitions.
A wide transformation (Source: Databricks)
So when you submit a job to Spark, what you’re submitting is basically a set of actions and transformations that are then turned into the job’s logical plan by Catalyst, before it generates the ideal physical plan.
Part II: The Spark Magic
Now that we know how Spark sees the jobs that we submit to it, let’s go through the mechanisms that turn that list of actions and transformations into the job’s physical execution plan.
Spark is a lazy magician
First of all, an important concept to remember when working with Spark is that it relies on lazy evaluation. That means that when you submit a job, Spark will only do its magic when it must to — i.e., when it receives an action (like when the driver asks for some data or when it needs to store data into HDFS).
Instead of running the transformations one by one as soon as it receives them, Spark stores these transformations in a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), and as soon as it receives an action, it runs the whole DAG and delivers the requested output. This enables it to optimize its execution plan based on the job’s DAG, instead of running the transformations sequentially.
How it all happens
Spark relies on Catalyst, its optimizer, to perform the necessary optimizations to generate the most efficient execution plan. At its core, Catalyst includes a general library dedicated to representing trees and applying rules to manipulate them. It leverages functional programming constructs in Scala and offers libraries specific to relational query processing.
Catalyst’s main data type is a tree composed of node objects, on which it applies a set of rules to optimize it. These optimizations are performed via four different phases, as indicated in the diagram below:
Catalyst’s optimization phases (source: Databricks)
Logical/Physical plan
One distinction that may not be very clear at first is the usage of the terms “logical plan” and “physical plan”. To put it simply, a logical plan consists of a tree describing what needs to be done, without implying how to do it, whereas a physical plan describes exactly what every node in the tree would do.
For example, a logical plan simply indicates that there’s a join operation that needs to be done, while the physical plan fixes the join type (e.g. ShuffleHashJoin) for that specific operation.
Now let’s go through these four steps and delve deeper into Catalyst’s logic.
Step 1: Analysis
The starting point for the Catalyst optimization pipeline is a set of unresolved attribute references or relations. Whether you’re using SQL or the DataFrame/Dataset APIs, SparkSQL has no idea at first on your data types or even the existence of the columns that you’re referring to (this is what we mean by unresolved). If you submit a select query, SparkSQL will first use Catalyst to determine the type of every column you pass and whether the columns you’re using actually exist. To do so it relies mainly on Catalyst’s trees and rules mechanisms.
It first creates a tree for the unresolved logical plan, then starts applying rules on it until it resolves all of the attribute references and relations. Throughout this process, Catalyst relies on a Catalog object that tracks the tables in all data sources.
Step 2: Logical optimization
In this phase, Catalyst gets some help. With the release of Spark 2.2 in 2017, a cost-based optimizer framework was introduced. Contrarily to rule-based optimizations, a cost-based optimizer uses statistics and cardinalities to find the most efficient execution plan, instead of simply applying a set of rules.
The output of the analysis step is a logical plan that then goes through a series of rule-based and cost-based optimizations in this second step. Catalyst applies all of the optimization rules on the logical plan and works with the cost-based optimizer to deliver an optimized logical plan to the next step.
Step 3: Physical planning
Just like the previous step, SparkSQL uses both Catalyst and the cost-based optimizer for the physical planning. It generates multiple physical plans based on the optimized logical plan before leveraging a set of physical rules and statistics to offer the most efficient physical plan.
Step 4: Code generation
Finally, Catalyst uses quasiquotes, a special feature offered by Scala, to generate the Java bytecode to run on each machine. Catalyst uses this feature by transforming the job’s tree into an abstract syntax tree (AST) that is evaluated by Scala, which then compiles and runs the generated code.
To sum up
Spark SQL relies on a sophisticated pipeline to optimize the jobs that it needs to execute, and it uses Catalyst, its optimizer, in all of the steps of this process. This optimization mechanism is one of the main reasons for Spark’s astronomical performance and its effectiveness.
Part III: Getting Spark to the Next Level
Now that we examined Spark’s sophisticated optimization process, it’s clear to us that Spark relies on a meticulously crafted mechanism to achieve its mind-boggling speed. But to think that Spark will give you optimal results no matter how you do things on your side is a mistake.
The assumption is easily made especially when migrating from another data-processing tool. A 50% shrink in processing time compared to the tool that you’ve been using could make you believe that Spark is running at full-speed and that you can’t reduce the execution time any further. The thing is, you can.
Spark SQL and its optimizer, Catalyst, can do wonders on their own, via the process we discussed above, but through some twists and techniques, you can take Spark to the next level. So let’s discuss how you could optimize Spark jobs from your end of the spectrum
Always take a look under the hood
The first thing to keep in mind when working with Spark is that the execution time doesn’t have much significance on its own. To evaluate the job’s performance, it’s important to know what’s happening under the hood while it’s running. During the development and testing phases, you need to frequently use the explain function to see the physical plan generated from the statements you wish to analyze, and for an in-depth analysis, you could add the extended flag to see the different plans that Spark SQL opted for (from the parsed logical plan to the physical plan). This is a great way to detect potential problems and unnecessary stages without even having to actually execute the job.
Know when to use the cache
Caching is very important when dealing with large datasets and complex jobs. It allows you to save the datasets that you plan on using in subsequent stages so that Spark doesn’t create them again from scratch. This advantage sometimes pushes developers into “over-caching” in a way that makes the cached datasets a burden that slows down your job instead of optimizing it. To decide which datasets you need to cache you have to prepare the totality of your job, and then through testing try to figure out which datasets are actually worth caching and at which point you could unpersist them to free up the space they occupy in memory when cached. Using the cache efficiently allows Spark to run certain computations 10 times faster, which could dramatically reduce the total execution time of your job.
Know your cluster, and your data
A key element to getting the most out of Spark is fine-tuning its configuration according to your cluster. Relying on the default configuration may be the way to go in certain situations, but usually you’re one parameter away from getting even more impressive results. Selecting the appropriate number of executors, the number of cores per executor, and the memory size for each executor are all elements that could greatly influence the performance of your jobs, so don’t hesitate to perform benchmark testing to see if certain parameters could be optimized.
Finally, an important factor to keep in mind is that you need to know the data that you’re dealing with and what to expect from every operation. When one stage is taking too long even though it’s dealing with less data than other stages, then you should inspect what’s happening on the other side. Spark is great when it comes to doing the heavy-lifting and running your code, but only you could detect business-related issues that may be related to the way you defined your job.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/why-apache-spark-is-fast-and-how-to-make-it-run-faster-9d31bf3eae04
|
['Mahdi Karabiben']
|
2019-12-03 17:36:20.313000+00:00
|
['Spark', 'Big Data', 'Data', 'Apache Spark', 'Data Engineering']
|
Deserts
|
Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé
“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”
― Michael Ondaatje
…As among dunes you can only see God or who you want. To see.
No assault to the imagination. No questions and whispers by people.
Only the wind carries wishes afar.
A poem soaring above the dunes brings the clarity of music and has the speed of sound.
And we get to see the glassy shine of Orion…
Love among deserts is never the same.
©
|
https://medium.com/blueinsight/deserts-5edc8c8b256a
|
['Iulia Halatz']
|
2020-12-30 07:15:31.923000+00:00
|
['Poetry', 'Blue Insights', 'Deserts', 'Luliah', 'Love']
|
So you’ve Launched your Campaign, now what?
|
Once you have launched your campaign, you may be wondering when those supporters will appear. Ink to the People is a platform for people to use hassle-free for a cause/movement. Want to spread awareness? Well, it’s not over yet! Our team wants to assist you even further!
Social media is your very best friend when it comes to promoting and getting your campaign out there. In this day and age, social media is extremely popular. So it’s the best way to get more people to see your campaign and spread awareness.
The question is which one is the best to use? Any and all social media you own is the best choice! The most important place to post about your campaign is the social media you have the most following. For example, if you have more friends on Facebook than followers on Instagram or Twitter you should focus on Facebook for your posts.
So what happens if you don’t have a social media account? In that case, your best bet would be to create your own. Another option is if you’re raising funds for someone else/a non-profit you can always reach out to them and ask them to promote your campaign as well! Asking your friends and family to share your post for you is also a step in the right direction.
If you need more information on how to make a social media account you can look here:
https://www.facebook.com/r.php
https://help.instagram.com/155940534568753
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-twitter-account
If your campaign is for an event you can also make new social media accounts for your event to post on. Facebook has the option to create event pages, so you don’t have to make an entirely new account.
Now that you have your social media account up and ready it’s time to create your post.
What makes a good post?
Engaging Imagery. Many people will look at your pictures before reading your post, so you want something that’s going to catch someone’s eye and make them interested in
your campaign.
your campaign. Using free mockups from placeit.net
Post a selfie of yourself or someone you know.
Post an image of your garment
Ask your supporters for pictures of them in your garments
Use vocabulary that will pull people in and make them want to read your post.
Make sure you spell-check your posts or even have someone else proofread. The second set of eyes might catch something you missed or give you a good idea!
Use active, interesting vocabulary
Reference posts that you’ve been interested in
A URL link to your campaign so people can have quick access!
Add your campaign URL to your Instagram bio or your Facebook/Twitter post
Hashtags are very important, it makes your post more accessible and creates more ways for people to find your post. They can connect you with your followers as well as your followers with each other.
You should create your own hashtags for your campaign that your followers can use to share your post!
Example: Putting #inktothepeople will make it so when you click on the hashtag you see all of the posts with that hashtag. So if you have your own hashtag for your campaign your followers can easily click the hashtag to find everything posted about it!
This is mostly important for Instagram since they allow the most hashtags.
Your post is now ready, but is that really all?
The first time you post shouldn’t be your last! Make sure to continue to make posts throughout your campaign time. You can remind people how much time they have left to purchase something if your campaign is for an event or doesn’t have much time left. Make sure to try to post something for at least the beginning, middle, and end of your campaign.
It’s important for these posts that you don’t just copy and paste the same one to share over and over. You should create a new, engaging post for everyone. Along the way make sure you are sharing any posts your supports make about your campaign as well as ask everyone to continue to share!
If your campaign is for an event make sure to mention that and let people know when they need to order their garments to receive them on time!
Every social media has assets you can use to your advantage when it comes to promoting.
Instagram has the ability to use up to 30 hashtags. Stories are also an amazing way to remind your followers about your campaign without having to make an entirely new post. It’s also important to remember to have a clickable link in your Instagram bio because links are sadly not clickable in posts.
With Facebook, if you are using pages, you can pin the post so it stays at the top of your page. You should also make sure to include the URL of your campaign in every post. If it’s affordable and within your budget, using boosted posts is another good way to get more people to see your campaign.
Twitter also has the option for you to pin a post to the top of your page. You can also ask your followers to retweet your post to share with their followers and so on.
Download our PDF checklist to make sure you don’t miss any steps!
One of the most important things to remember is:
|
https://medium.com/inktothepeople/so-youve-launched-your-campaign-now-what-82cc84ffff98
|
['Ink To The People']
|
2021-06-17 20:38:40.751000+00:00
|
['Social Media', 'Tips And Tricks', 'Fundraising', 'Promotion', 'T Shirt Design']
|
Sonos users can now double the boom in any room by adding a second Sonos Sub subwoofer
|
Sonos users can now double the boom in any room by adding a second Sonos Sub subwoofer Victor Dec 23, 2020·2 min read
Sonos builds an awesome subwoofer, but customers lucky enough to own very large home theaters and listening rooms—and the custom installers who cater to that deep-pocketed crowd—have long wanted the option of deploying two Sonos Subs. Today, Sonos released a software update that lets them do just that.
Mentioned in this article Sonos Sub (Gen 3) See it The Sonos Sub is not a conventional low-frequency-effects speaker in the sense that it can’t be connected to an A/V receiver or paired with just any soundbar. It must be deployed in conjunction with another Sonos speaker or a Sonos amplifier.
And those who want to deploy two Subs in the same system must have a Sonos Arc, Beam, or Playbar soundbar; a Playbase sound base; or a Sonos Amp. One of the Subs must be a Gen 3 model, which has increased processing power, and you’ll need to have the latest version of the Sonos S2 app, which is rolling out today.
[ Further reading: The best soundbars ] Union LA / Sonos Sonos has re-released the Sonos One SL Union LA Edition speaker.
In other Sonos news, the company is re-releasing the Sonos One SL Union LA Edition, a collaboration between Sonos, interior designer Sheila Bridges and the streetwear brand Union LA. The limited-edition speaker was created in partnership with Color of Change as part of the organization’s #TellBlackStories initiative. The speaker’s grille is printed with Bridges’ Harlem Toile pattern. You can read more about the collaboration in this Sonos blog post from 2019. The $249 speaker can be purchased at SheilaBridges.com and UnionLosAngeles.com.
Last week, Sonos announced the Arc SL Shadow Edition, a microphone-free soundbar that’s a Costco exclusive. You can read more about it in our earlier news story.
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/@victor29086757/sonos-users-can-now-double-the-boom-in-any-room-by-adding-a-second-sonos-sub-subwoofer-8b1dc9e5e3d1
|
[]
|
2020-12-23 20:01:19.285000+00:00
|
['Electronics', 'Home Tech', 'Streaming', 'Surveillance']
|
Let’s Not Give Up On Human Connection
|
Our generation seems to have given up on making new friends and it’s scarier than you may think.
We are so lonely, yet we find it so difficult to reach out to people and build friendships.
Is it too much work? Are we too busy? Are we simply shy and awkward?
There isn’t really one explanation for it, but one thing for sure is that millennials are the loneliest they have ever been.
While we can all agree that this period of social distancing has drastically increased our feelings of loneliness — we also need to remind ourselves that it’s only a problem that has been building for years.
|
https://medium.com/change-your-mind/lets-not-give-up-on-human-connection-b2859e823d25
|
['Sarah Ammoura']
|
2020-06-24 11:34:41.702000+00:00
|
['Friendship', 'Social Media', 'Society', 'Happiness', 'Millennials']
|
Understanding Android Scopes with Koin
|
This article is inspired by Manuel Vivo’s article, Scoping in Android and Hilt. Manuel has shown how it works for Dagger Hilt. I will explain here how it works for Koin.
What is a scope?
A scope/is a fixed duration of time or method calls in which an object exists. In other words, a scope is a context under which a given key refers to the same instance. Another way to look at this is to think of scope as the amount of time an object’s state persists. When the scope context ends, any objects bound under that scope are said to be /out of scope/and cannot be injected again in other instances.
— Dependency Injection by Dhanji R. Prasanna
In a nutshell, a scope is a space where we are maintaining instances for a specific duration of time. What about Android scope? We maintain instances for the duration of an Android component lifecycle.
Android components have their own lifecycle (Activity, Fragment, Service …). Each property inside those instances follows the underlying component’s lifecycle. In other words, your properties will be garbage collected at the end of your Android Component lifecycle.
Let’s take a simple example:
The instance of MyPresenter will follow MyActivity instance lifecycle. Once the Activity will finish, the presenter instance will be removed from memory. On new MyActivity instance, the presenter property will receive a new instance.
On configuration changes, both instances are recreated
Let’s declare it with Koin 😃
️Do you need a scope?
If our properties can be dropped at the end of the lifecycle, why do we need to care about scopes? 🤔
We need a scope for the following reasons:
keep the same instance of a component, for all other components of the scope
keep the same instance alive, for a specific period of time
Here are some regular use-cases of scopes, applied to Android applications:
Android Lifecycle scope — instance tied to an Android lifecycle component (Activity, Fragment …)
— instance tied to an Android lifecycle component (Activity, Fragment …) Custom scope — instance kept for a specific duration of time (more than one Activity, i.e: wallet …)
Let’s declare our scope for MyActivity with the scope Koin DSL keyword. By writing scope<MyActivity> , we open a code block to define our scoped instances. Each scoped component will be declared with the scoped keyword.
Defining MyActivity scope, with scoped definitions MyAdapter and MyPresenter
This way we can share our MyPresenter instance with another definition of the scope. We use the get() keyword to resolve the MyPresenter instance for the MyAdapter instance.
Now, in our MyActivity class let’s use the AndroidScopeComponent interface and implement the needed scope property with activityScope() delegate function to activate our scope as follows:
We use the AndroidScopeComponent interface and setup our scope with activityScope() function
📌 By using the AndroidScopeComponent interface, you need to override a scope property. This scope will be automatically used in all default API without doing anything else (inject, get, viewModel…) 📌 the activityScope() delegate function ensures removal of your scoped instances at the end of your Activity lifecycle
Note that Koin also proposes the ScopeActivity class, to help wrap the Activity scope declaration. Check the documentation for more details.
However, on configuration changes, we still lose our MyPresenter instance. On a new MyActivity instance, we are creating a new Activity scope.
On configuration changes, both instances are recreated
ViewModel: a game-changer
Since 2017, the Android architecture components are clearly helping to deal with this kind of lifecycle problem by proposing the ViewModel class. This new component will follow your Activity/Fragment instance and survive a configuration change. It simplifies the lifecycle management with only one lifecycle method to implement: onCleared()
A ViewModel is super easy to declare in Koin 😁
The ViewModel instance is handled by an internal Android factory, allowing it to survive configuration changes.
On configuration changes, the MyViewModel instance is kept
Similar Dagger Hilt, there is a special scope to survive configuration changes.
The activityRetainedScope() function will hold instances via a ViewModel holder instance for you.
We can keep our MyPresenter instance, through configuration changes
Every scope has an End
Taking control of scoped instances makes you responsible for closing them. The Koin Scope API helps automatically handle Android scopes for you:
the AndroidScopeComponent interface will help setup a scope for your Android component, by using activityScope() or activityRetainedScope() delegates for your scope property
interface will help setup a scope for your Android component, by using or delegates for your property ScopeActivity class helps wrap everything for you
The same API exists for Fragment and Service classes. The Fragment scope automatically binds your parent Activity scope. Check the Android Scope documentation for more details: https://insert-koin.io/docs/reference/koin-android/scope
A custom scope helps you maintain an app state for a given duration. Take care to properly setup your create/close sequence. You can check the following documentation for more information about Scope API: https://insert-koin.io/docs/reference/koin-core/scopes
Be sure to use only scoped instances if you really need them. Keep things as simple as possible 👍
From Manuel Vivo’s article:
|
https://proandroiddev.com/understanding-android-scopes-with-koin-cfe6b60ca579
|
['Arnaud Giuliani']
|
2021-02-25 17:02:10.428000+00:00
|
['Android', 'Android App Development', 'AndroidDev', 'Koin', 'Dependency Injection']
|
No
|
No
Photo from Pixabay
My voice died a little that day
The day the boy kept pushing when I said NO.
Come on, he said
No
Please
No
It will just..
no
Just this once..
no…
and then I found out I never had the choice anyway.
My voice died a little more
When one by one my friends left the table
“Sorry you guys broke up but we were more his friends anyway”
I sat at the table
Quietly singing happy birthday.
With shaking hands I stacked these bricks
and built a wall instead of me.
And my cry echoed in the chamber, bouncing off all the walls
and drowning me in its sorrow.
So, I stayed quiet .
Quiet for years —
Like the stillness of winter,
Sitting in my tower,
Surrounded by people,
But always alone.
And then she came.
I could see my fire in her eyes.
She came from my womb and my fire was there.
She looked at me and rekindled the blaze,
It’s time to come out now, Mom
I need you.
When they tried to tickle her,
no
When they tried to tease her,
No
When they tried to belittle her,
No
When they tried to silence her,
NO.
My words rose up like smoke
Almost choking me to get out.
Her and I sat in the ashes of the bricks
While embers flickered around us.
|
https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/no-d12de46b8e7f
|
['A. J. Gabs']
|
2020-12-08 11:26:39.227000+00:00
|
['Resistance Poetry', 'Strength', 'Motherhood', 'Rape', 'Pain']
|
Things You Should Know When Fetching Data for React Components
|
2. Axios
Although Axios is a third-party library, it is the perfect replacement for Fetch API if you require more control and convenience over data fetching.
It is properly documented, simple, and offers an outstanding development experience.
Similar to Fetch API, Axios also returns a JS promise. But there is no need to resolve the promise twice like Fetch API since Axios always returns a JSON response.
The coding part is similar to the Fetch API, except for reducing steps and better error handling. Let’s see how we can implement the same example using Axios:
fetchEmployeesAxios = () => {
this.setState({...this.state, isFetching: true});
axios.get( "https://domain.in/api/employees" )
.then(response => {
this.setState({employees: response.data, isFetching: false})
})
.catch(exception => {
console.log(exception);
this.setState({...this.state, isFetching: false});
});
};
fetchEmployees = this.fetchEmployeesAxios;
But you might feel that both these methods seem too much complicated with all these promises handling with then() and catch() blocks. So is there a way to simplify it further?
We can reduce the complexity of the code by switching to Async/ Await.
Let’s restructure the above code snippet with async/await.
async fetchEmployeesAsync() {
try {
this.setState({...this.state, isFetching: true});
const response = await axios.get( "https://domain.in/api/employees" );
this.setState({employees: response.data, isFetching: false});
}
catch (exception) {
console.log(exception);
this.setState({...this.state, isFetching: false});
}
}; fetchEmployees = this.fetchEmployeesAsync;
Until now, I have discussed 2 basic data fetching techniques in React. Now it's time to move onto other areas related to data fetching.
|
https://blog.bitsrc.io/things-you-should-know-when-fetching-data-for-react-components-39d61602feda
|
['Piumi Liyana Gunawardhana']
|
2021-08-29 17:23:43.990000+00:00
|
['JavaScript', 'Frontend', 'React', 'Frontend Development', 'Data Fetching']
|
Tiny Tale of JSON Web Tokens. You probably logged in to medium to…
|
What are JWTs?
It’s a mechanism to verify the owner of some JSON data. It’s an encoded string containing some cryptographically signed data. It’s an open standard(RFC 7519) btw.
A server can trust the data contained in a JWT because the source signs it. Noone in the middle can modify a JWT once it’s sent; it becomes invalid if it’s tempered with). JWTs can be signed either by RSA or by using a secret string(HMAC). You don’t need to understand much about these encryption algorithms to use a JWT.
While a JWT guarantees data ownership, it’s not encrypted; it’s just serialized. In fact, anyone can see the data contained in a JWT. That’s the reason JWTs should always be used with HTTPS(well, you should always use HTTPS 😛). wanna see how they’re generated or verified?? continue reading.
|
https://medium.com/@spazewalker/tiny-tale-of-json-web-tokens-991274d16038
|
['Shivanshu Tyagi']
|
2020-12-19 16:48:18.094000+00:00
|
['Authorization', 'Json Web Tokens', 'Authentication', 'Secure Exchange', 'Jwt']
|
Normalize Mommy Burnout
|
Normalize Mommy Burnout
Photo by Standsome Worklifestyle on Unsplash
Lets face it: moms right now are more tired than ever.
The world is in upheaval, we are smack in the middle of a crippling pandemic, children are in and out of school with little predictability, we are vastly separated from what villages we had, and we are struggling.
Yet still, the cliché phrases of motherhood are thrown at us from every direction.
“The days are long but the years are short.”
“Enjoy every moment.”
While the former seems to be very much true, it’s often the implication that because time will fly by, it’s not ok to harbor any negativity about these days or years at all. And while a wistful “enjoy every moment” from a elderly woman in the grocery store can be well-intentioned, it can also grind salt into the wound of the mother who is trying to remove a hysterical toddler from the germ infested floor. No, she will not enjoy that moment, thank you very much.
Sometimes these phrases feel more like mom shaming than encouraging, and when they come from other women (many who are mothers themselves), it can sting even more.
But the truth is this: It’s ok to not love every moment.
Its ok to want just one hour, one day, one week to yourself, with no one tugging at your shirt or staring at you, eating a snack while you use the bathroom. It’s ok to feel burnt out, exhausted, frustrated, and emotionally drained. (Conversely, it’s also ok to want all of these things and then miss all of it viscerally when you do get that time to yourself). And it needs to become ok to not only feel these things but to talk about them out in the open.
Moms are tired.
I’m tired.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my children. I love being a mom more than anything in the whole entire world. My children are my entire soul, of that I have no doubt. But that doesn’t take away from the exhaustion of parenting during this pandemic, nor of parenting in general.
It is perfectly acceptable for a woman to feel as though becoming a mother is the greatest thing she has ever done and to simultaneously feel like some days are the most difficult days she has ever endured. And there is nothing that moms need less on those extremely difficult days than for some stranger in the mall to tell her to enjoy it as her child is licking the floor or rage-screaming in a public space about getting a new toy.
The fatigue of motherhood is deep and unrelenting in normal times. Add in quarantine, uncertainty about school and work, never ending stress and fear about the health of those you love, and we’re in for a perfect storm of mommy burnout.
So moms, if you are struggling right now, know that it is ok. This feeling of pure exhaustion needs to be recognized and normalized. We don’t need words of wisdom, what we need is support from those around us. Support that not every moment is meant to be enjoyed. Yes, the years will go by lightning fast, but if you find yourself in an endless day or week where things feel so hard, it’s ok to stop and cry and ask for help. If you feel like you can’t hold it together for yourself and everyone around you, that’s ok. If you feel like you just want to close your eyes for 5 minutes of quiet, that doesn’t make you bad mom, it makes you a mom.
While we are all separate right now, we need to realize that we are all in this together. Moms need to support moms. Let each other cry and complain, then be there in the next minute to fawn over cute photos and video clips. Normalize all of the feelings of being a mom, even (especially) the hard ones, and support one another unrelentingly. And if you are that mom right now, know that I’ve got you. We’re in this together. No matter how hard today is, you’re not alone.
And for everyone else, the next time you see a struggling mom in the store, remember that an understanding smile or quick word of support can go a long way. It would be best if we had some sort of secret mom handshake that said “We’ve all been there” or even “Wine later?”, but unfortunately that hasn’t caught on yet.
So whatever you do, for the sake of moms everywhere, please don’t tell her to “enjoy every moment”.
Now let’s figure out that handshake, shall we?
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https://psiloveyou.xyz/normalize-mommy-burnout-399866ee1673
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['Stephanie Dorsay Rondeau']
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2020-12-21 20:56:17.891000+00:00
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['Children', 'Parenting', 'Moms', 'Motherhood', 'Stress']
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The 80/20 Rule of Productive Mornings
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Photo by Jordan Donaldson | @jordi.d on UDJJHGR
You lose when you snooze because sleep fragmentation hurts your body’s ability to recuperate.
Every time you fall asleep, your body starts going through a 5-stage sleep cycle. The later the stage, the deeper the sleep — and the more restorative it becomes.
When you wake up at 7 AM after 7 hours of sleep, you’ll be closer to the end of the cycle and in a state where your body is already preparing to wake up.
If you hit the snooze button, however, your body starts going back in the opposite direction. It’ll gear up to sleep more — and it really won’t like being rattled 9 minutes later. As a result, you’ll feel more tired than before, even though, technically, you slept longer.
When it comes to good sleep, getting up after one consistent stretch is more important than how long that stretch was. This is counterintuitive, but it’s true.
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https://figomens.com/NHK/tv/National-University-Rugby-lives-ovline.htmlf you “take excellent care of the front end of your day, the rest of your day will take care of itself.” That’s Robin Sharma’s thesis in The 5 AM Club, a book he wrote to share his morning routine of 20 years.
The idea is that if you invest the first hour of the day in yourself, that hour will pay returns for the remaining 23. “Own your morning, elevate your life,” Sharma says.
The book teaches via metaphor — a fictitious billionaire helps a struggling artist and a young entrepreneur. Here are 3 lessons from the story that’ll help you wake up earlier, start most mornings productively, and get as much as you can out of every single day.
1. Your brain has a creative edge early in the day.
In a classic student-teacher move, the billionaire tells his two disciples that he holds the key to their success — and in order to receive it, they must meet him very early the following morning.
When his students arrive, the master explains: “You have already received the key by waking up at 5 AM, because in doing so, you’ve given your brain an advantage in succeeding throughout the day.”
The scientific concept behind this edge is called transient hypofrontality. When in this state, your brain is more likely to go into “flow.” You’ll be less prone to worry and over-analysis, more daring in your choices and ideas, and better able to focus.
You can trigger transient hypofrontality in different ways, for example by taking a walk or exercising, but the early morning environment is also conducive to it. You brain is just “booting up,” and the extra dopamine and serotonin from daybreak tranquility will make you feel energized and peaceful at the same time.
2. Balance your mind, health, heart, and soul.
After explaining the mindset advantage of waking up early, the billionaire explains there are three other “interior empires” the students need to master.
Your “healthset” is your physical health. Use the emptiness of early mornings to get in a little exercise to reduce stress, gain energy, and be happier, all of which will, in turn, help you live longer.
Your “heartset” is your emotional wellbeing. Journaling in the morning can be a space to express feelings you can’t share elsewhere — the insights of which you can later use to communicate better with others.
Finally, your “soulset” is your spiritual balance. We all believe different things, but whatever we do have faith in allows us to connect with ourselves and the world at large. Writing down your values and briefly looking at them each morning will help you remember why you’re doing what you’re doing.
For a balanced, successful life, ground yourself in mindset, healthset, heartset, and soulset every day.
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https://medium.com/@sakurasujukee/the-80-20-rule-of-productive-mornings-16f49b626a92
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[]
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2020-12-19 01:09:53.287000+00:00
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['Sleep', 'Books', 'Product', 'Self Development', 'Psychology']
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The Gift of Time
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Watching My Gifts Tick and Tock, Photo by BradensEye featuring my 3D Wooden Puzzle Clock Unicorn giftee from some of my LA girlies
Shall your tempo be a contagious melody. What we do with the seasons of our seconds defines the measure of our immersion through marvelous meaning. Life has these proverbial reins. We can lead or be led. We can take and we might give. It’s in the giving that I find the most pleasure presides. The residence in self of choosing to ride one’s existence filled with more periods of loftiest goodwill gets the blood bubbling over in beautiful boons. There are those of us who are known to submit so chivalrously they seem to bear Pegasus wings surging many hearts on infinite high. The perfect presents aren’t so neatly wrapped in brightly colored papers adorned with bows or sparkly things. I think that the gift of time is our greatest gratuity. Offering yourself for yourself and others is a lesson about leaning into the unicorn. Belief in enough begins with your view of rewards.
If I know I’m walking forever, I have time for now. ~Thomas Hübl
I gather that anyone won’t ever anticipate the utterly complete value of time ushered in excellently. This year of pandemonium has provided all of us with a profound reflection of our time. How we collectively use it or privately assist our hours in allowing grace, grief, generous regret, or gorgeous laughter all comes back to choice. It’s doubtful that a drought of sharing your time should ever occur. I’m confident there’s someone who devours your time as evocatively as the first warm hug ever achieved. These persons are your hit list that I suggest you aim not to dismiss. They’re the souls that perchance settle you between the sheets, rearrange every insanity when one creeps into your brain, or are able to solve the mysteries of imposter thoughts trying to seize your idle peace. As I’m nestled in the succulent scenery of Hawaiian aloha for this spicy spell of another decade done, I’m enveloped with the glories of my time.
What’s shown up for me this 2020 is so far from anything I predicted. It’s safe to state we’ve all been thrown several loops we weren’t expecting inside these near 365 days. My living location, the dearest blossoming of family and friends relationships, the opportunities to literally dive into nature have all deserved each weighty pound of my time. Similarly, it’s our time to write a card, jot a poem, dial for a surprise phone ring to someone you suspect will appreciate hearing your voice whether you leave a singing-out-of-tune voicemail or delightedly obtain them answering. The time you can create to drive across the island (or wherever in your town) to a community food bank to donate plenty from your pantry you know you don’t need as much as someone else. It’s the 250 memorable minutes marathon long-distance Facetime video call. So, what will you do with your now? Where are you placing your time?
A little trust and your time
You can change your life ~Future Islands, Balance
I feel a big peculiarity part of the fun with existence is what appears in one’s favor versus the evils. It’s equal amounts of what we don’t do as compared to what we do pick. By the time you’re looking for more time, some of it’s galloped right by you. It pulls away the same as it waits for you to sort a date with it to recuperate through an entire evening or to even string a seductive section of your multiple days all in a row with it, as well the giant dare of taking weeks or months to exaggerate where you’re dedicating it. Yet, you can pluck time as easily as you might gulp a cold drink fresh out of the fridge, grab a product from Amazon, pop a song on play mode, or squeeze toothpaste from its tube. When I contribute moments of my lifetime all for myself or with specific people whom I want to carve space I estimate it’s my personal version of smartly invested earnings. Making time is like making fat wads of money.
Time is akin to weather. It’s always sunny somewhere. While you could judge time as imperceptible, a faint irritation, a glaring insult added to your injuries, it’s also an eraser. Time’s exact location cannot ever be revealed. Your visits with time can be extensive, abrupt, terminated, and indefinite. It’s a sore loser if you mistake it for a demon. It will be the wind at your back, the meditation of your Chinese puzzle aptitude, the opening of every friendly flair received in the mail, and includes your heartbeat. If you be a chaser of love, therein it races you winningly. Don’t ever let its latent talent to shape itself a rectangle parading as a square one instance or an ellipse the next scare you. It’s a true original morphing for you. May the mold of your time linger like a lover’s kiss or the snug of your bestie’s bestowed sloth socks smiling back at you as they dangle on your feet.
Time Super Styled, Photo by BradensEye
Be the idea of someone’s time very well spent today… and unfailingly.
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https://medium.com/@bradenseye/the-gift-of-time-8a7d0db1c4c3
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[]
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2020-12-25 20:45:50.014000+00:00
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['Time', 'Life Lessons', 'Gifts', 'Choices', 'Life']
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Substack Formatting
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Bold | Italics | Code | Hyperlink | Image | Divider Line
Bold
Pressing the letter “B” icon will create bold text:
Italics
Pressing the letter “I” icon will create italicized text:
Toggle The Code
Pressing the “<>” icon will toggle the text, rendering it in code format:
Hyperlink
Pressing the “🔗” icon will toggle the
Image
Pressing the insert image icon will allow you to upload an image. This will also work for inserting GIFs, although like many publishing platforms, Substack can be slow when it comes to uploading GIFS (or it may take a few attempts to render the image properly).
Horizontal Dividing Line
Pressing the “horizontal dividing rule” button will insert a subtle, yet effective, horizontal line that acts as a page divider or separator.
Here is an example of the Divider Line used in an article:
Buttons
One of the most distinctive features of the Substack editor, is its buttons feature. If you click on the buttons icon, a drop down menu will appear, with the following options:
Subscribe Now — Inserts plain button labeled Subscribe Now. This button will take readers to the landing page of your publication where they can view the free vs. paid options.
Sample Button:
Landing Page:
Special Offer — Inserts a button which promotes a discount or promotion. You must create a special offer before creating this button.
To create a special offer, click the settings button, located in the upper right hand corner of your Substack account. Then scroll down to section and click the manage button next to the Special offers section.
Once you have created a special offer, you can click on the special offer button, select your special offer (you can have more than one):
This will produce a custom button, as seen below:
Give a gift subscription — This allows publishers to insert button, allowing readers to gift a subscription to your publication.
Sample Button:
View comments — If you are writing an article that may attract many comments, and you want to direct readers to the comments section (which is normally discretely displayed at the bottom of an article), the view comments button is useful. When you insert this button into your article, readers who click it will be able to view a full page layout comments section, making the comments easier to read.
Sample Button:
Full Page Comments Section:
Share this post — Inserting the share this post button, will produce a button that, when clicked, will offer readers easy optionsto share a newsletter post on social media.
Sample Button:
Pop-Up Window When Share Button is Clicked:
Share Medium Blogging Guide’s Newsletter — This button creates a similar button to the one above. The only difference is this promotes the entire newsletter as opposed to a single article.
Custom Button —The custom button is a button where you can easily customize the button text and customize the hyperlink where the button will send readers, when they click it. This can be useful for directing readers to crucial resources, featured articles, or your external websites.
Style
The style button in the Substack editor controls the different levels of HTML headings you can create in your articles. HTML defines six levels of headings. A heading element implies all the font changes, paragraph breaks before and after, and any white space necessary to render the heading. The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least. For example:
Search engines use the headings to index the structure and content of your web pages. More importantly in the context of newsletters, users often skim a page by its headings. It is important to use headings to show the document structure.
As an example, here is an article with multiple heading elements:
Custom Lists
Substack allows for the creation of two types of auto-formatted lists — bulleted and numbered.
Bulleted List
To create a bulleted list, click on the bullet list icon in the Substack editor:
Numbered List
To create a numbered list, click on the bullet list icon in the Substack editor:
Block Quotes
A block quotation is a direct quotation that is not placed inside quotation marks but instead is set off from the rest of the text by starting it on a new line and indenting it from the left margin. Block quotations may be used to feature long blocks of text containing quotes or as a tool to feature certain content.
Examples:
Creating block quotes with Substack’s editor is easy. All you need to do is click on the quotation icon (far right of the editor), labeled “wrap in a block quote” as seen below:
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https://medium.com/substack-writing/substack-formatting-7a8f05f537c9
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['Casey Botticello']
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2020-08-04 23:23:37.668000+00:00
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['Advice', 'Design', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing']
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Product Life Cycle and Software Engineering Management
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Engineering Management
Product Life Cycle and Software Engineering Management
How to staying on top of delivery, people management, and system ownership at each stage of the product life cycle
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
From a software engineering perspective the product life cycle can be split into six stages: Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline, and Abandonment. Each stage has different goals and challenges, so engineering managers have to shift their focus accordingly to keep providing best results for their organisation:
At the Development stage , the goal is to build and deliver the product prototype into the hands of customers.
, the goal is to build and deliver the product prototype into the hands of customers. At the Introduction stage — to find product/market fit.
— to find product/market fit. At the Growth stage — to improve the product offering and accelerate growth.
— to improve the product offering and accelerate growth. At the Maturity stage — optimise operating costs and keep on improving the product to defend its position in the market.
— optimise operating costs and keep on improving the product to defend its position in the market. At the Decline stage — to minimise operating costs.
— to minimise operating costs. At the Abandonment stage — to sunset the product efficiently.
Not only the organisation goals, but also the size of the engineering team and the complexity of the product technical systems change from stage to stage, making the engineering managers’ job more difficult.
This article explores how software engineering managers can stay on top of delivery, people management, and technical systems ownership at each stage of the product life cycle.
Development Stage
For an organisation, the goal of this stage is to build a product prototype and get it into the hands of customers. Hence delivery leadership should be the main focus for the engineering managers at the Development stage. Managers should use every opportunity to ship the prototype sooner, so that the Product could get feedback from real customers
At this stage the product isn’t bringing any revenue. Instead, the organisation is spending its resources on building it. The sooner the prototype is built, the less this stage is going to cost to founders or investors.
Technical system ownership responsibilities need little attention at this stage. There would be few systems to own and maintain. Technical debt wouldn’t matter for a product that hasn’t been shipped yet.
Every technical aspect of the product that can be outsourced to save development time, should be outsourced. For example, if a product needs search capabilities, Engineering may choose to use a service like Algolia or use a managed Elastic instance, rather than setting up their own Elastic installation. If the product needs user login, then Engineering may choose a service like Auth0, instead of building their own login and user management functionality.
People management responsibilities don’t take much time at this stage either. The engineering team would be small and the stage would last between several weeks and several months. That means, there won’t be a need to do much hiring, promotion, and training. The key thing is to ensure that engineers are staying motivated and focused on delivery.
Introduction Stage
The goal of the Introduction Stage is to find the product/market fit before the organisation runs out of budget, so delivery leadership remains the priority for engineering managers. However, people management and technical system ownership responsibilities are becoming more important compared to the previous stage.
The product may pivot several times during this stage. To support that, engineering managers should optimise delivery process for agility. In other words, every system that the developers build should be flexible enough to be replaced, or repurposed, or thrown away. That would allow product managers to test their hypotheses quicker, find the product/market fit sooner, and move to the Growth stage.
Because of frequent pivoting and failing experiments, engineers may start losing their confidence in the organisation’s ability to succeed and the team morale may decline. To prevent that, engineering managers need to ensure that the team members understand the challenges of this stage, have realistic expectations, and are working towards the organisation goal.
Growth Stage
This is the most challenging stage in the product life cycle for engineering managers as they have to scale delivery, system ownership, and people management processes and practices to keep supporting their organisations efficiently. What is more, each of those aspects starts competing with each other for attention.
Engineering teams typically reach the Growth stage running an overgrown product prototype with plenty of technical debt accrued at the previous two stages. As a result, engineers have to deal with scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance issues at the same time. One approach is to start paying off relevant technical debt at the very beginning of the Growth stage by dedicating 10–20% of overall engineering capacity to that. In other words, if the engineering team is 10 people, then at any time 1–2 developers should be working on paying out the tech debt. If the team is 30 engineers, that would be 4–6 people.
Typical product users also change during this stage. They no longer are “innovators” and “early adopters” who tolerate minor glitches in the product. They start to come from the “early majority” cohort who value product reliability in addition to its “newness”. That means bug-fixing and minor improvements start competing with strategic initiatives in terms of delivery. As a result, to progress strategic initiatives and at the same time promptly respond to bug reports and random requests from Design, Product, and Marketing, engineering managers may choose to reserve some capacity for that type of work too. For example, 20–30% for bug-fixing and minor improvements, and 50–70% for initiatives.
During the growth stage, the number of developers in the team increases as well. For bigger products, the engineering team eventually splits into smaller teams with narrow focus. Each team needs a lead, so the management structure in the Engineering has to become more complicated with two and sometimes three levels of management.
At the Development and Introduction stages, the organisation mostly needs experienced developers who can quickly build the prototype and then rapidly iterate on it. From the Growth, stage hiring juniors starts making a lot of sense. There would be lots of tasks requiring little experience. New hires, regardless of their experience, would need on-boarding, upskilling, mentoring, more or less clear paths for career growth and promotion framework. All aspects of people management would become important in a growing engineering team.
During the Growth stage the entire organisation radically changes. As a result, the original members of the engineering team may want to leave because the new environment would require skills that are different from those that were useful at early stages. If such people leave, the team may lose crucial technical knowledge and expertise. Managers must support such people through the change and help them find their place in the new reality to keep them with the organisation for longer.
Maturity Stage
At the Maturity stage the product growth starts slowing down. Strategic product development continues, however, optimising operating costs and increasing overall efficiency becomes increasingly important.
Delivery leadership is still important at this stage. However, the engineering team would experience less pressure from the Product and less urgency to ship new functionality. Product quality is getting more important because new customers now represent the “late majority” cohort who value quality and stability of proven technology and products, rather than newness. Because of that, the engineering team has to allocate more time for various minor improvements and bug fixes. One way to deal with such tasks is to forward them to a dedicated team of developers. Some developers enjoy working on small well-defined tasks, especially when those tasks benefit the customers and the product.
Less pressure from Product allows engineers to pay more attention to system maintenance. The engineering team may have an opportunity to run large maintenance initiatives, like migrations to new architectures and platforms, paying out lots of technical debt without the risk of dropping the ball on delivering product initiatives.
Availability and reliability get increasingly important. Forming a Site Reliability team might be a way of dealing with it in bigger products.
Engineering team growth slows down at the Maturity stage. As a result, the environment and culture become more stable. Engineers get fewer opportunities in people management but lots of opportunities in technical leadership as this is finally the time to do lots of things right from an engineering perspective. Engineers and teams within the Engineering department continue to specialise.
Developers start spending lots of time in meetings to align efforts with other teams and non-technical departments. That impacts their productivity. Engineering managers have to be mindful of that and ensure developers have enough uninterrupted time to spend on writing code to remain productive.
The Maturity stage can be the “golden age” for the engineering team. Its members get an opportunity to solve complex problems in a successful and still growing product, try new tools and technologies, new ways of working, there is time to invest into training and mentoring as well.
Decline Stage
A product reaches the Decline stage when its customer base and revenue start to shrink despite the Product team efforts to restart growth. At a certain point there would be no product initiatives and most work coming from Product or Support teams would be requests for minor improvements or bug reports. That means that delivery leadership would no longer be among the top priorities.
Technical system ownership responsibilities are taking more time as the organisation optimises operating costs of the declining product, including the costs of running its technical systems.
Security, performance, availability, and reliability remain as important as before. If the Site Reliability team does not exist by this stage, it may be worth creating it. Or, if the entire engineering team is too small for forming a dedicated team, most developers should get familiar with SRE responsibilities as keeping the product running smoothly and preventing incidents would be crucial for the organisation.
At the Decline stage, the Engineering team typically needs fewer engineers than at previous stages. There would be little to no hiring and some people may transfer to other departments or leave the organisation. Before people leave the team, it is crucial to document their knowledge about the product in system diagrams, readmes, developer documentation, incident playbooks, etc. A declining product may stay at this stage and generate revenue for years and remaining engineers would need that knowledge to maintain the product during that time.
It is important for engineering managers to set expectations for their teams regarding the type of work during that stage. For example, that there would be fewer opportunities to use the latest technologies. One consequence of that is that developers may feel that they are lagging behind the industry. To deal with it, managers may have to create opportunities for their teams to try new tools and tech.
Staff retention would probably be the top people management priority. To motivate developers to stay longer with the team, engineering managers may want to keep improving the work environment and negotiating more perks for their team members. For example, extra annual leave, great equipment, conference tickets, generous training budget, etc. Awesome environment, flexibility, and supportive management can be extra reasons for some engineers to stay with the team and the organisation for longer.
Abandonment Stage
Products eventually reach their end of life. Their markets may disappear, customers may go to competitors, the organisation may decide to focus on more profitable products or may launch a more advanced product that would provide a way better experience.
There is not much delivery and system ownership work at this stage. If the product gets shut down, the only goal for engineering managers is to find a cost-effective way to do that and archive the data and source code.
If the product gets merged into another, then engineering managers need to propose an efficient (in terms of time, money, customer disruption, etc) technical strategy for that and execute it.
As for the people management responsibilities at this stage, they can be boiled down to helping engineers find a new place within the organisation if that is possible, or outside, if the entire organisation gets shut down.
|
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-product-life-cycle-through-a-software-engineering-management-lens-bc6d005b02ce
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['Andrei Gridnev']
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2020-11-24 12:18:02.653000+00:00
|
['Leadership', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Engineering Mangement', 'Product Management']
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ToastNodes — A quick look into owning a share of the toast.finance network
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Some time ago toast.finance added a new smart contract feature to automate the pool creation process of its native ecosystem. This allows some impressive new Defi features, like adding native LP tokens of uniswap, sushi, mooniswap, balancer pools or even pure token pools with zero risk of impermanent loss. The potential creativity of this new feature for the community are endless.
This feature quickly turned the platform into a piggy-bank system for a wide variety of tokens. And everyone can participate in this. Similar to Uniswap pair creation process. Imagine you got rug pulled on a now useless token, that is not even worth to burn and that is laying around in your wallet. You can now easily create a toast pool for it and stake it to earn a nice share on the daily minted toast tokens. The best thing about the boosting feature is that it created an utility for $TOAST tokens. The community burned a total of 120 Million $TOAST in less then 2 months. This is nearly a quarter of all minted toast tokens.
Some of these pools however contain tokens that where minted simply with the purpose in mind to privately own a share of the daily toast minted. Pools like that where expected and even embraced by the community. Lets call those private token pools ToastNodes.
Some of the current ToastNodes
Here is a quick summary of the benefits of ToastNodes.
You own 100% of your ToastNode
You can sell shares of your ToastNode, if you sell the tokens you minted
ToastNodes will always earn you a share of the toast minted per Block
ToastNodes can be boosted by burning toast
ToastNodes are competing against each other, they incentivise the burn of toast
Some thing you need to keep in mind.
Toast nodes are competing against each other. This means every time another pool is boosted, your ToastNode requires boosting to stay on top. This is however fairly cheap and currently the toast you mint will outperform your toast burning requirements.
Currently the liquidity of the toast / ETH pair is low. But there are some plans to increase this in the future. So stay tuned!
How can a ToastNode be created?
To create your own ToastNode you need 50 HOUSE in your wallet and 1 Million TOAST to burn. Currently creating a private Pool — ToastNode costs roughly ~0.12ETH.
First, you need to mint your own token. Its extremely easy to do. And there are some very cheap ways to do this. For this example we use: https://tokenmint.io/ Click on “Mint Tokens Now” Select “Fixed supply ERC-20" and click on next. Add a “Token Name” -> Here you can add any name you’d like.
“Token symbol” -> This must be 3–4 Characters. Keep in mind that your ToastNode will also have the name of your Token symbol.
“Decimals” -> This should be kept at 18 decimals.
“Total Supply” -> Should be 1. But can be any amount. This is interesting if you are planning
Click next.
5. Make sure you are logged in to Metamask and your wallet is selected as the payment account & the token owner. Click next.
6. Confirm all details. Click Finish and confirm the minting process in Metamask. This step will cost a minting fee which is roughly 0.05 ETH + the transaction fee which can vary based on the current Ethereum network congestion. You also need to wait until your transaction is confirmed.
7. Now you need to head over to: https://toast.finance/community and create your pool. Simply add the token ID. Example: 0x774fb37e50db4bf53b7c08e6b71007bf1f1d9a47 is the tokenID of TOAST. If you do not know the token ID you find it in your wallet by clicking on “View on Etherscan” in your Metamask browser extension / wallet.
Add the ID of your personal Token and burn a bunch of TOAST to create a ToastNode.
Click on “Burn TOAST & Add Pool” and confirm the transaction.
8. Well done. You have created your own ToastNode. You now just need refresh the website, Approve your pool for staking and stake your minted tokens. You are now minting a minimum of 20 TOAST per block, until another pool is created or another pool is boosted. Ready to be burned.
Oh and keep in mind, that each boost guarantees 20 TOAST per block, so the last burn is always the most efficient one. This way every pools stays competitive, even if you are late to the show and no one is stopping you or other from burning even more TOAST in the future to boost your ToastNode.
Happy Toasting!
|
https://medium.com/@titustheboomer/toastnodes-a-quick-look-into-owning-a-share-of-the-toast-finance-network-88200f416081
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[]
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2020-12-29 22:48:39.283000+00:00
|
['Cryptocurrency', 'Statera', 'Defi', 'Crypto', 'Toast']
|
5 Action Steps for the Department of Transportation To Lead National Mobilization To Defeat the Climate Crisis
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Americans have spent the last 4 years hearing broken promises about Infrastructure Week. Now, the Biden Administration has the opportunity to make every week Clean Infrastructure Week as a central part of a national climate mobilization.
The Department of Transportation is critical to America’s climate policy. The USDOT oversees the single largest source of pollution in the U.S. economy. Transportation has always been an agency with climate effects — now it must become a climate agency.
The USDOT must act rapidly to meet President-elect Biden’s ambitious campaign commitments. The agency should enact strong clean energy and performance standards to ramp up the deployment of zero emission vehicles. And the USDOT must prioritize expansion of electrified rail, shipping and aviation. The climate crisis is also a crisis of mobility. USDOT can revitalize our communities and aid working class people through serious investments in sustainable public transportation. A clean transportation sector will also create high quality union jobs in domestic manufacturing. These steps are not only critical to fight the climate crisis, they will drive economic recovery.
The Secretary of Transportation must be a leader in the full-government mobilization to defeat the climate crisis. Pete Buttigieg has a responsibility to act with boldness and urgency. On the campaign trail, Buttigieg spoke of the climate crisis as an existential one. Now he has a huge opportunity to act on that commitment in this major role.
In order to realize Biden’s climate mandate, every federal agency must become a climate agency. The Department of Transportation will be critical in this effort. Today, Evergreen Action is releasing 5 concrete actions that the next Department of Transportation must deliver in the all-out government mobilization to defeat the climate crisis:
1. Move to 100% Clean Cars
The Department of Transportation (USDOT) must play a central role in fulfilling President-elect Biden’s vision for a clean transportation sector. In particular, to decarbonize transportation at the rate demanded by science, USDOT, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should restore Obama-era fuel economy and tailpipe greenhouse gas performance standards through 2026, and work with other federal partners to restore California’s clean cars waiver. USDOT must then work closely with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in developing post-2026 rules that institute increasingly stringent tailpipe standards on the march to ensuring that 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles and buses are zero emission vehicles by 2030, and heavy-duty vehicles shortly thereafter. The Biden-Harris administration should also prioritize investments in high-quality union jobs in domestic clean car manufacturing and charging infrastructure.
2. Craft Strong Performance Management Regulations
The Secretary of Transportation must lead in instituting stringent new greenhouse gas performance management regulations that require local deployment of federal transportation investments be accompanied by comprehensive life-cycle analyses and reduction strategies for climate pollution and co-pollutants. In addition, USDOT should update NEPA guidance to account fully for climate risks and impacts of USDOT projects — to ensure America’s 21st century transportation infrastructure is not contributing to nor vulnerable to increasing climate disasters.
3. Use Federal Procurement Dollars to Support Clean Transportation
USDOT must work with the Department of Energy (DOE), General Services Administration (GSA) and other federal and subnational partners to ensure that federal procurement dollars for federal, state, tribal, postal, and local public sector vehicle fleets are spent on clean energy and zero emission vehicles. And that these purchases continue to drive innovation and domestic union manufacturing jobs building the clean cars and industries for global 21st century transportation networks.
4. Invest in Sustainable Communities and Transit
Under the new secretary, USDOT should relaunch and expand the Obama-era Sustainable Communities Initiative — a partnership with the EPA and Department of House and Urban Development (HUD) that provides technical assistance and financial incentives for strong local zoning ordinances that include climate-resilient and transit-oriented community projects.
5. Prioritize Decarbonizing Rail, Aviation, and Maritime Sectors
The new Transportation Secretary must recognize that integrated and electrified rail is essential to a clean transportation future. President-elect Biden committed to tap existing USDOT loan programs, and to improve and streamline the loan process, to help expand rail transit and to further electrify the rail system. USDOT, through the FAA, should also work with airlines to meet and exceed the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, while simultaneously developing a companion domestic program and targeting policies to promote innovation and deployment of new technologies and energy efficiency upgrades in aviation. And USDOT must establish partnerships to help the shipping industry meet and exceed the International Maritime Organization pollution reduction goals.
|
https://medium.com/@evergreenaction/five-to-mobilize-department-of-transportation-2242db0ec831
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['Evergreen Action']
|
2020-12-15 22:45:15.154000+00:00
|
['Pete Buttigieg', 'Climate Change', 'Buttigieg', 'Transportation']
|
Machine Learning Techniques Primer
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Machine Learning Techniques Primer
ML techniques to get started on any problem
ML is a very vast discipline. However, having the basic algorithms handy is always helpful. The basic ML techniques are the start of any analysis in the data science world.
Similarly, for any scenario based problem in an interview, it is an easy mistake to start with a complex ML Algorithm. Most interviewee’s make the mistake of starting with something that the problem resembles to. They may start with neural networks or combination of different ML algorithms. ALWAYS start with linear/logistic regression if possible. This helps you level set on the most basic benchmark performance for the solution. Approach that question like a programming interview where you start with a benchmark and you proceed to a more optimized solution. The ML techniques primer is a list of techniques and algorithms to aid the start of analysis for a problem in a real life project or an interview.
Photo by Ian Noble on Unsplash
Supervised learning
Regression and classification are the two main subcategories of supervised learning. While both are predictive methods, regression has a numerical output, while classification predicts the category that a new observation would fall into. This is often a binary output, but you can create models for more than two categories. A variation of classification known as multi-class classification provides multiple classes to the dataset.
Linear regression: With linear regression, you can predict an output variable using one or more input variables. The simplest form of the regression equation with one dependent and one independent variable is defined by the formula y = c + b*x, where y = estimated dependent variable score, c = constant, b = regression coefficient, and x = score on the independent variable.
With linear regression, you can predict an output variable using one or more input variables. The simplest form of the regression equation with one dependent and one independent variable is defined by the formula y = c + b*x, where y = estimated dependent variable score, c = constant, b = regression coefficient, and x = score on the independent variable. Logistic regression: Despite the name, logistic regression is a classification algorithm — more specifically it performs a class probability estimation task. A logistic function is applied to a linear equation and the output is interpreted as the log-odds (a number that ranges from -∞-∞) of a new event being a member of a particular class. Linear regression is used for continuous targets while logistic regression is used for binary targets as sigmoid curve in the logistic model forces the features to either 0 or 1.
Despite the name, logistic regression is a classification algorithm — more specifically it performs a class probability estimation task. A logistic function is applied to a linear equation and the output is interpreted as the log-odds (a number that ranges from -∞-∞) of a new event being a member of a particular class. Linear regression is used for continuous targets while logistic regression is used for binary targets as sigmoid curve in the logistic model forces the features to either 0 or 1. Support vector machine (SVM): A SVM model is a representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap that is as wide as possible. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall. The idea of SVM is simple: the algorithm creates a line or a hyperplane which separates the data into classes.
A SVM model is a representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap that is as wide as possible. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall. The idea of SVM is simple: the algorithm creates a line or a hyperplane which separates the data into classes. Decision tree: Decision trees are a transparent way to separate observations and place them into subgroups. A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains conditional control statements. Classification and regression trees (CART) is a well-known version of a decision tree that can be used for classification or regression. The computer typically chooses the number of partitions to prevent underfitting or overfitting the model. CART is useful in situations where “black box” algorithms may be frowned upon due to inexplicability, because interested parties need to see the entire process behind a decision.
Decision trees are a transparent way to separate observations and place them into subgroups. A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains conditional control statements. Classification and regression trees (CART) is a well-known version of a decision tree that can be used for classification or regression. The computer typically chooses the number of partitions to prevent underfitting or overfitting the model. CART is useful in situations where “black box” algorithms may be frowned upon due to inexplicability, because interested parties need to see the entire process behind a decision. Random forest Simply put, a random forest is a group of decision trees that all have the same response variable, but slightly different predictor variables. The output of a random forest model is calculated by taking a “vote” of the predicted classification for each tree and having the forest output the majority opinion.
Unsupervised methods
Clustering Clustering refers to machine learning techniques that are used to find natural groupings among observations in a dataset. Clustering is also known as unsupervised segmentation.
Clustering refers to machine learning techniques that are used to find natural groupings among observations in a dataset. Clustering is also known as unsupervised segmentation. K-means clustering K-means clustering is a machine learning algorithm that forms groups of observations around geometric centers called centroids. The “k” refers to the number of clusters, which is determined by the individual conducting the analysis based on domain knowledge. This type of clustering is often used in marketing and market research as an approach to uncover similarity among customers or to uncover a previously unknown segment.
Dimensionality reduction
Dimensionality reduction algorithms reduce the number of variables in a data set by grouping similar or correlated attributes.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) PCA is a dimension-reduction technique used to reduce the number of variables in a dataset by grouping together variables that are measured on the same scale and are highly correlated. Its purpose is to distill the dataset down to a new set of variables that can still explain most of its variability.
PCA is a dimension-reduction technique used to reduce the number of variables in a dataset by grouping together variables that are measured on the same scale and are highly correlated. Its purpose is to distill the dataset down to a new set of variables that can still explain most of its variability. K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) Nearest-neighbor reasoning can be used for classification or prediction depending on the variables involved. It is a comparison of distance (often euclidian) between a new observation and those already in a dataset. The “k” is the number of neighbors to compare and is usually chosen by the computer to minimize the chance of overfitting or underfitting the data. In a classification scenario, how closely the new observation is to the majority of the neighbors of a particular class determines which class it is in. For this reason, k is often an odd number to prevent ties. For a prediction model, an average of the targeted attribute of the neighbors predicts the value for the new observation.
Recommedations
Based on the problem at hand, it is important to choose the right technique for the right problem. The primer aims to provide a list of techniques but is my no means an exhaustive list. The goal is to provide a starting point rather than an end all be all list for an interview problem or a real life data science problem.
|
https://medium.com/acing-ai/machine-learning-techniques-primer-60edd9d14863
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['Vimarsh Karbhari']
|
2020-05-26 13:24:03.784000+00:00
|
['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Data Science', 'Interview']
|
Understanding the Division Between African Americans and Africans
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The slave trade not only physically separated African Americans and Africans, but it created a psychological separation as well. At the root of this continued division between the two groups are misconceptions rooted in the narratives that each group has been given about themselves, as well as each other. As African people we continue to view ourselves and each other through the lens of the colonizer. For this reason African Americans tend to view Africans in the same manner as Europeans do, and Africans tend to view African Americans the same way. In this article I will look at the roots of where these misconceptions came from.
African Americans were told that Africa was the “Dark Continent.” Africa was presented as the land of primitive savage cannibals who ran around the jungles of Africa naked. This narrative served multiple purposes. It lowered the self-esteem of the enslaved population by making them believe they were a people with no history or culture. In fact, many enslaved Africans came to see slavery as a benefit because it took them away from the savagery of Africa and introduced them to civilization and Christianity. This was the view that Phillis Wheatley expressed in her poem about being taken away from her “pagan land” and being introduced to Christianity in America. These depictions of Africa were also used by European slave traders to justify the slave trade by claiming that they were saving the souls of the “heathen” Africans by taking them away from Africa to be enslaved.
This propaganda was so effective that some African Americans bought into the notion of Africa being the Dark Continent. I gave the example of Phillis Wheatley, but she was far from the only one that held the view that Africa was a pagan or heathen land. Many of those who settled in Liberia held the view that Africa needed to be civilized. These settlers (known as Americo-Liberians) displayed some the attitudes of cultural superiority that European colonizers displaying in their dealings with Africans. To this day there are African Americans like Jesse Lee Peterson and Kimberly Daniels who have thanked God for slavery for taking them away from Africa. Then there are those like Herman Cain who do not even like being called African American.
W.E.B. Du Bois very aptly described how the negative view of Africa had influenced by African Americans to disassociate themselves from Africa when he wrote:
Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans.
This negative view of Africa has driven many African Americans to distance themselves from Africans or “African booty scratchers”, which is a derogatory term which was used by African Americans for African immigrants. For African Americans, anything African was negative. The short documentary below shows a 17 year old girl complaining that her mother told her to stop wearing her hair natural because it looked African. So what we must understand is that much of the negativity that African Americans have expressed towards Africans over the years comes from a place of self-hatred and a general lack of understanding about Africa.
See the 59 second mark
I have also noticed recently that some African Americans have been expressing the view that Africans are very tribal, which is yet another colonial caricature that was created to demean Africans. Some people within the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement have being trying to present the ADOS identify as being a tribe, so that African Americans can have a tribal identity of their own. The problem is that these individuals actually do not understand the complexity of ethnic identity in Africa or the fact that tribalism in Africa is largely a product of European colonialism. I know from my experiences discussing African history with people that some African Americans are surprised to discover that the ethnic differences between the Hutu and Tutsi were essentially created by the European colonizers. So a lot of the perceptions that African Americans have of Africans seem to be rooted in the colonial narratives about Africans.
On the other side of this divide are Africans who have developed certain misconceptions of their own regarding African Americans. African American history is not taught in Africa — I have had experiences with this with people from Africa who really did not understand how brutal slavery and segregation was for African Americans. I have also found that much of what Africans do know about African Americans is based on what they see through the American media, which has a very global impact. This means that Africans are often exposed to some of the very negative images that the American media portrays of African Americans as being gangsters, drug dealers, etc.
One of the more controversial aspects of the relationship between African Americans and Nigerians especially is the word “akata.” Akata is a Yoruba word which roughly translates to “wild cat” or a cat without a home. I have not been able to determine precisely how or why this term became associated with African Americans. I have come across several theories. One entry in Urban Dictionary explains:
Contrary to popular opinion among non-Yorubas and some Nigerians or Africans who does not understand this word, akata does not mean coton picker or slave and it is not derogatory.
It means a cat that doesn’t live at home like a wild non domesticated cat, this is used to reference mostly African Americans as they are considered Africans by all Africans but the fact that they don’t live in Africa make them akata while those of us who live at home can be considered as Ologbo (cat).
I also came across an article which asserted that the word “ become widely associated with Black American people in the mind’s eye of young Nigerian immigrant students during the Black Panther Party’s high visibility on college campuses in the 1960s-1970s, when our radical youth claimed their identities as displaced African people on the world’s stage.” Regardless of how or why the term akata became associated with African Americans, the word has become something that is used as a way to demean African Americans.
The work akata also seems to be part of the perception that some Africans seem to have about African Americans being a people without a real culture. Mike Yard dealt with this topic in a very comedic manner:
Mike Yard is a comedian, but the topic that he is speaking about is a real issue. This sense that African Americans are not truly African is something that Zipporah Gene expressed in an article titled “Black America, Please Stop Appropriating African Clothing and Tribal Marks.” Zipporah writes:
I’m not trying to start a war, but I would just like you all to realize the hypocrisy of seeing someone wearing a Fulani septum ring, rocking a djellaba, painted with Yoruba-like tribal marks, all the while claiming that this is meant to be respectful. It’s a hodgepodge, a juxtaposition, a right mess of regional, ethnic and cultural customs and it screams ignorance and cultural insensitivity.
I actually do not see an issue with African Americans mixing together different ethnic cultural customs because African Americans are themselves a blend of different ethnic groups. Akan, Yoruba, Igbo, Mandé, Fulani, Kongo, Temne, Ewe, Edo, Efik, Fon, Mossi, and Ga are just some of the many ethnic groups that African Americans descend from. Zipporah is actually the one expressing cultural insensitivity by failing to recognize that African Americans descend from several different African cultures, so there is no contradiction in an African American mixing Fulani and Yoruba culture.
We also cannot overlook the fact that the Black Power movement among African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s helped to influence a cultural revival among Africans. The Nigerian musician Fela Kuti explained: “It’s crazy; in the States people think the black power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness, they don’t realize they’re the ones who’ve got it over there. We were even ashamed to go around in national dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th street.” Africans on the continent experienced colonialism and to this day there still are many Africans on the continent who do not have a proper appreciation for their own culture.
Even in Africa there has always been a great diffusion of cultures throughout the continent. This is a point that Trinidadian historian Hollis Liverpool made when he wrote:
Today Nigerian folk tales may be heard in Senegal, and the trickster hare of Zaire performs the same mischief as the spider trickster in Ghana and Togo. Similarly, West African musical instruments are equally known in the East and the South. The interplay of cultures and traditions of African kingdoms, states and empires before they were intruded upon by explorers, tell us something of the political and economic dynamics of the African continent then: an interplay of peoples and organizations.
So among African people there was never a sense that cultural customs belong to any particular group. The trickster spider and the trickster hare that Dr. Liverpool mentioned would seem like very familiar characters for those of us in the diaspora who grew up with Br’er Anansi and Br’er Rabbit stories, not realizing that these stories have their origins in Africa.
The culture of African Americans and others in the diaspora has also influenced Africa’s culture. Princess Sikhanyiso Dlamini of Eswatini (Swaziland)was inspired to become a rapper because of because of the connection she noticed between traditional Swazi music and the rap music who developed in the United States. So among African people there has always been an exchange of cultures across the continent, as well as between the diaspora and the continent.
I think much of the division that exists today between African Americans and Africans (as well as Caribbean Africans) is that we have misconceptions of each other which are rooted in ignorance of each other’s historical and cultural experiences. For example, how many Africans are aware of the role that the African diaspora played in the struggle against colonialism in Africa? And how many African Americans are aware of the influence that African’s independence had on the civil rights movement. The histories and struggles of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic have always been connected to each other. Once we became aware of this we can work on bridging this divide.
—
Dwayne is the author of several books on the history and experiences of African people, both on the continent and in the diaspora. His books are available through Amazon. You can also follow Dwayne on Facebook and Twitter.
|
https://dwomowale.medium.com/understanding-the-division-between-african-americans-and-africans-7dfb48b4808b
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['Dwayne Wong', 'Omowale']
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2019-08-01 22:58:50.218000+00:00
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['Racism', 'Africa', 'African American']
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How to Gain Wisdom? Read Some of Aesop’s Fables
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How to gain wisdom? Read some Aesop fables
Everyone wants to gain wisdom. Wisdom is one of the greatest qualities that human beings can possess. So, seek it, hold on to it, share it and treasure it. Why? Because it will help you navigate through choppy waters, it will lift you up from the depths of despair, it will help you put everything into perspective, and ultimately it will turn you into the hero of your own story. But, how do you gain wisdom? I suggest that you start by reading some of Aesop’s fables.
With the possible exception of the New Testament, no works written in Greek have been more widespread and better known than Aesop’s fables. For more than 2500 years, Aesop fables have been teaching people of all ages valuable life lessons in the most entertaining and cynical way.
Want to hear a rags-to-riches story? Meet Aesop the Wise-Fool
Aesop’s life reads just like one of his fables. Aesop is believed to have lived between the period from 620 to 560 BC. He began his life as a slave and was said to have been remarkably ugly with some physical deformities and as this wasn’t enough misfortune, he was born mute, unable to utter a word. On the positive side, he was intelligent, resourceful and kind. His life took a turn for the better after he rescued a priestess of the goddess Isis from a difficult situation after she had strayed from the road and became lost.
From Slavery to Greatness — Meet Aesop who is also known as the Wise-Fool
His divine reward for this act of kindness was the gift of speech and a remarkable ability to conceive and elaborate wise tales in Greek. His talent for storytelling, his wisdom, and wit set him free literally. Aesop acquired freedom, fame, and fortune in the same breath. Not bad for an ugly, deformed mute. He acquired some kind of celebrity status by hanging out with the most prominent and powerful personalities of the time offering to solve their problems, giving them sound advice, and telling fables along the way. But in the end, it was his very success that lead him to his ruin.
Aesop made a good living as a storyteller travelling from city to city to perform his art, acquiring fame and fortune along the way. When he arrived in Delphi, he realized that his wit and sarcasm didn’t work so well on the Delphian audience, who refused to give him any reward for his performance. Disappointed and vexed by this cold treatment he lashed out and mocked the Delphians comparing them to driftwood (something worthwhile at a distance but is revealed to be worthless when see closed-up.) He should have stopped there but continued his tirade realizing too late how outraged the Delphians were by his insults. They kicked him out of town, but unbeknown to him they hid a golden cup from the Temple of Apollo in his luggage and as he was leaving the city he was arrested, charged, sentenced to death, and executed unceremoniously by being pushed off a cliff.
Moral of the story: Storytelling and wit can set you free, but it can also make you fly off a cliff.
Want to survive a bad situation? Follow the cat and not the fox
I don’t know what was Aesop’s final thought before he died but I am going to speculate that he may have recited to himself the Fox and the Cat fable that he himself wrote a little while before.
The Fox and the Cat A fox was boasting to a cat of its clever devices for escaping its enemies. I have a whole bag of tricks he said , which contains a hundred ways of escaping my enemies. I have only one, said the cat. But I can generally manage with that. Just at that moment they heard the cry of a pack of hounds coming towards them, and the cat immediately scampered up a tree and hid herself in the boughs. This is my plan, said the cat. What are you going to do? The fox thought first of one way, then of another, and while he was debating, the hounds came nearer and nearer, and at last the fox in his confusion was caught up by the hounds and soon killed by the huntsmen. Miss Puss, who had been looking on, said, Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon. Aesop
Want to hear a truly inspirational tale? Meet The Peddlar of Swaffham
Please allow me to take you to Norfolk, England in a small village called Swaffham, where you will hear the extraordinary tale of the Peddlar of Swaffham.
The Pedlar of Swaffham “Tradition says that there lived in former times in Swaffham, Norfolk, a certain pedlar, who dreamed that if he went to London Bridge, and stood there, he would hear some very joyful news, which he at first slighted, but afterwards, his dream being doubled and trebled upon, he resolved to try the issue of it, and accordingly went to London and stood on the bridge there for two or three days, looking about him, but heard nothing that might yield him any comfort. At last, it happened that a shop keeper there, having noted his fruitless standing, seeing that he neither sold any wares nor asked any alms, went to him and most earnestly begged to know what he wanted there, or what his business was; to which the pedlar honestly answered that he had dreamed that if he came to London and stood there upon the bridge he should hear good news; at which the shop keeper lighted heartily, asking him if he was such a fool as to take a journey on such a silly errand, adding: “I will tell you country fellow, last night I dreamed that I was in Swaffham, in Norfolk, a place utterly unknown to me where I thought that behind a pedlar’s house in a certain orchard, and under a great oak tree, if I dig I should find a vast treasure! Now think you, says he, that I am such a fool to take such a long journey upon me upon the instigation of a silly dream? No. No. No. I am wiser. Therefore, good fellow, learn wit from me, and get you home and mind your business.” The pedlar observing his words what he had said he dreamed and knowing they concerned him, glad of such joyful news, went speedily home, and dug and found a prodigious great treasure, with which he grew exceedingly rich; and Swaffham Church being for the most part fallen down, he set on workmen and rectified it most sumptuously, at his own charges; and to this day, there is a statute therein with his pack at his back and his dog at his heels; and his memory is also preserved by the same form of picture in most of the old glass windows, taverns and ale houses of that town unto this day.” Source: Sidney Hartland — English Diary and Other Folks Tales (London, ca. 1890) which in turn refers to the Diary of Abraham Dela Pryme — 1699. Text available under Creative Commons CC-By-SA-4.0 License.
In this video, I am taking you to Norfolk, UK, in the village of Swaffham, where the fable of the Peddlar of Swaffham originates. Come along with me …
This English tale resonates with me because of its candour and the moral that emanates from it.
My own reflection on this tale is that the moral of the story is as follows:
Listen to your inner voice, your intuition, your gut feeling, your inner compass;
Don’t be afraid to be ridiculed. Be patient. Have grit. Have resilience. Have faith;
Have the courage to act upon your dream and remember that a thousand-mile journey starts with the first step;
The journey will no doubt be marred with uncertainties, danger, surprises and some intriguing encounters;
Pay attention. Listen to the signs. Listen to the messages, the tips you receive on your journey. There may be joyful news awaiting you;
In the end, your courage, your efforts, your convictions will pay off and success will flow towards you, abundance will flow into your life;
When prosperity falls upon you do not hold tight to the wealth you seek but keep a healthy vision of its power to heal and the power it will give you to fulfil your purpose and spread goodness all around you.
And this, my Dear Companion, is Your Quest!
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https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-to-gain-wisdom-read-some-of-aesops-fables-fcd011976313
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['Joanne Reed']
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2020-12-02 20:31:56.139000+00:00
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['Storytelling', 'Self-awareness', 'Philosophy', 'Wisdom', 'Self Improvement']
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Get to know the fascinating galaxy that you have inside your head
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The uniqueness of the human brain
From an evolutionary perspective, the current evidence suggests that humans are the only species that can create social realities. That striking, unique cognitive specialization is possible because of what Dr. Feldman Barrett calls the Five Cs:
Creativity: The invention of some social reality component and the assignment of functions to that mental construct.
Communication: The effective transmission of mental constructs.
Copying: The process of learning and teaching the elements of our social realities.
Cooperation: The collaborative experience of creating and living in a social reality created by other brains that work in tandem across time and space.
Compression: The process of minimizing redundancy in the transmission of information between neurons to create summaries of our social realities.
These components working in tandem are essential for the functioning of the complex cognitive processes that happen in our brains. In the words of Dr. Feldman Barrett:
“Compression enables sensory integration. Sensory integration enables abstraction. Abstraction permits your highly complex brain to issue flexible predictions based on the functions of things rather than on their physical form. That is creativity. And you can share these predictions by way of communication, cooperation, and copying. That is how the Five Cs empower a human brain to create and share social reality.”
Across the tree of life, most organisms have become specialists in their niches by developing evolutionary adaptations. Just think about the bizarre third finger of the aye-aye or the unique camouflage system in octopus. In turn, humans seemed to have selected a generalist approach, merging the Five Cs to create social realities. While other animals focus their attention on the elements that allow their survival ignoring the rest, discerning biological costs and benefits, humans collectively build the world we live in by adding layer over layer of new functions. Social reality equals human niche construction.
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https://medium.com/@nwiggenhauser/get-to-know-the-fascinating-galaxy-that-you-have-inside-your-head-9f4cb33206b2
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['Nicolás Wiggenhauser']
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2020-12-23 22:49:01.154000+00:00
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['Neuroscience', 'Social Reality', 'Brain', 'Science', 'Evolution']
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