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Lamentations of the Sentimentalists
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https://pin.it/7cskINk
By the end of each day I take a long breath, wipe my forehead and express gratitude on how I prevailed. Life is like a whirlwind to the whimsical kind. Each twist, each turn so melodramatic, so enchanting, so exhausting.
To walk out in the sun is to be done with a skip in the step and a song in the head while you extend your hand out play with the leaves, feel the sunshine absorbing in your pores and a giddy smile making your jaws ache.
Sharing memories is important with the ones you hold dear to your heart and once they speak of times you hadn’t witnessed you listen with a vivid imagination, a younger them, how silly, how fun but beware you must remember to listen as they speak and not let your mind wander too far. Hold their gaze and smile as they do and feel the fluctuations in the sentiments with which they speak of each event. You’d feel so full by the end like you’ve eaten a whole pie just by yourself.
And in the evenings, the uncertain time just after the sunset you would probably sit quietly by yourself. Breathe in all that you saw and breathe out all that you’ve imbibed in. You’re far from being impervious to your surroundings.
At times, quite often perhaps you’d shudder at how cruel and unkind certain sentiments could be or lack thereof. You would want to unfold the mysteries behind them but it would give you chills. It would scare you so. You would run and cry at home by your own. But sometimes you might not find a place to weep so the sunshine would turn gray and you’d shun the idea of intimacy and you’d fold your arms around your chest each time anyone comes near.
If you find yourself at the depths of despair, you would probably eat a whole pie by yourself and find comfort in solitude where you’d look for sympathisers in material things.
If you’ve been bright once, you are allowed to be a wet blanket too. You are allowed to curse at sunshine and turn your face away from the sun. You’re allowed to spend hours at end going over the miseries. You’re allowed to make songs and sing in vain.
And once you’ve dried out you would find yourself laughing in the middle of the tears, dancing around at nothing in particular, finding your voice and your smile and the sparkle in your eyes that never truly left. Just like the Sun.
|
https://medium.com/an-idea/lamentations-of-the-sentimentalists-d9504674366f
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['Uswa S Musings']
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2020-12-13 03:03:18.129000+00:00
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['Sentimentos', 'Self Love', 'Empathy', 'Self Improvement', 'Memoir']
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Why Do Boys Have to Be Taught How To Respect Women?
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Why Do Boys Have to Be Taught How To Respect Women?
I’m glad that my dad modeled it for me
Photo Credit: Robby Virus Flickr via Compfight cc
I am one of the leaders of our church youth ministry. A couple of weeks ago a dad of one of our youth approached me with a concern.
His son was being disrespectful to his mother, i.e the dad’s wife. The son was talking back, delaying obedience if doing it at all, and just being rude. He would hear about it upon coming home from work and has had a few talks with his son.
This has not happened with him. His son is obedient, does what he’s told quickly, and hardly ever talks back.
He wanted to know if I would talk to his son. Maybe coming from someone else he respected it might have more of an impact. He wanted his son to know that his actions were troubling and deeply saddened his mother. This was not how they raised him.
I said I would.
It took me back to when I was growing up and how I treated my mother. There were times when I did talk back and regretted it. Growing up in Africa in the ’70s and ’80s, the backhand or the switch were common disciplinary measures.
I was mostly obedient and civil because I feared my dad. I wasn’t frightened of him. My dad was kind and gentle. But don’t mess with his woman. I feared being the object of his discipline.
I don’t remember having any kind of sit down lesson with my dad on how to respect women. I just watched what he did and knew what to do. I watched what he did at home with my mother, or when their friends came over I watched how he treated other women. I also watched how he acted around women who were strangers, like letting them sit if there weren’t enough chairs. He was courteous and respectful and I wanted to be just like him.
It is natural that boys want to be like their dads or another male person in their life that they respect.
Is it natural that they respect their mothers?
I never asked the concerned dad why he thought his son was being disrespectful. I haven’t had a chance to talk to the 14-year-old yet but having passed by that age 40 years ago I can imagine what he’s feeling.
He’s frustrated. She’s still treating him like a nine-year-old, having him go to bed at a certain time, or not allowing him to stay out later, or go places with his friends. She still checks that his homework is done and doesn’t allow him to play video games until it is.
He just wants to be treated like a man.
That was me. Minus the video games.
Now that’s no excuse for disrespecting his mom.
Just for giving him life does she deserve his respect and gratitude.
She packs a healthy lunch for school.
She makes sure he wears clean underwear.
She kisses his every boo-boo.
She works hard and sacrifices a lot.
They say girls mature faster than boys. It may be true but I also think that girls are allowed to grow up faster than boys. Moms like to coddle their sons a little longer than their daughters. I don’t have any psychological literature on it. Just my own experience.
Thankfully, I had my dad who showed me how to be a man. When I got my traditional rite of passage by being circumcised at 16 years old, I was ready. I’m glad I had him and other men who treated women like queens as my role-models.
Teaching boys to respect women leads to less domestic violence, sexual assault, bullying, etc. This results in fewer suicides, mental disorders, sheltered women and kids, and men in prisons. There’s more information here.
There’s a great article in psychologytoday.com about this that you can read here. It explains three ways men can change the culture of how women are thought of and treated. I will highlight them here:
Learning respect for women starts at home when boys watch how their mothers, sisters, and other women are treated and talked about by men. Parents can address sexism with their middle school and older kids. Kids need to know all the negative consequences of treating people badly due to their sex or gender. The third thing parents can do to raise boys who respect women is to show they believe that men and women are equal.
Websters defines respect as ‘to view or consider with some degree of reverence; to esteem as possessed of real worth.’
What’s more worthy than the Mothers in our lives?
|
https://medium.com/home-sweet-home/why-do-boys-have-to-be-taught-how-to-respect-women-137553cbb46f
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['Vuyo Ngcakani']
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2020-11-18 13:20:06.994000+00:00
|
['Life', 'Respect', 'Father And Son', 'Life Lessons', 'Parenting']
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Engineer Q&A: Alex Milstead, Backend Engineer, San Francisco
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I’m taking part in this Q&A as part of an effort to introduce the world to the Engineering team at Optimizely. If you’re interested in joining, we’re hiring Backend Engineers (and DevOps) in San Francisco and Austin!
Tell us about yourself! What’s your name, what do you do at Optimizely, and how long have you been here? Tell us a bit about your trajectory to get here.
Oh look, a Grand Canyon!
My name is Alex Milstead and I lead Optimizely’s Application Backend Infrastructure team. I’ve been at Optimizely since August 2014 and if I had to put my finger on it, I’d say my work is probably best described as improving the overall application architecture and general infrastructure for Optimizely’s stateless web application services.
When I first started at Optimizely, my role was centered around contributing to our customer billing management code base. After a quarter or so I began to put my hooks into Optimizely’s overall technical direction by driving a re-architecture of our REST API Gateway and working closely with our DevOps team to set internal standards and conventions for how we build and deploy stateless web applications using Amazon EC2.
Before Optimizely, I primarily focused on fixing “boring” application architecture and design problems through modernizing in-house code bases with Open Source and community driven frameworks (think things like server-side template rendering, relational database access, and internationalization). Before that, I studied Computer Science at The Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in Media and Information Networks.
What’s it like to be on the Application Backend Infrastructure team?
It’s a whirlwind — Optimizely has a lot of code! On a given day, you could easily find yourself wading through bespoke eight year old monolith development tools, debugging a recently deployed EC2 docker-based application, or exposing a new proof-of-concept web service to production traffic inside a secure PCI environment.
The Backend Infrastructure team mostly targets opportunities for improving and hardening the application design and/or infrastructural support for a variety of Optimizely’s web application services. In short: you’re a little bit product, a little bit frontend, a little bit backend, a little bit DevOps, a little bit of everything, really. :-)
My role in particular involves identifying areas of improvement for our existing services as well as opportunities for introducing new software (to build or buy?) to fill a gap or enhance the overall stability and resiliency of our systems, then prioritizing that work to align with Optimizely’s general business and product direction.
What are you working on this quarter?
This quarter I am working on improvements to our internal Disaster Recovery service. We use Google App Engine’s built-in Google Cloud Datastore offering and while it has managed export/import APIs, the API in itself doesn’t quite hit the mark for useful managed backups. Our internal service manages automating the Export/Import API usage as well as exposing a way for us to restore partial data collections from a backup in addition to full snapshot restores.
Another project I’m involved with this quarter is planning a data migration effort for a subset of the data in Optimizely’s monolith application. As we continue our path towards a Services Oriented Architecture, we believe it is supremely important to isolate independent services in their entirety (i.e. data is included). This migration project seeks to provide an internal tool for easily migrating data out of our monolith and paves the way for easier full-service migrations and management in the future.
What do you work on here that you are most excited about?
I would have to say that the thing I am most excited about is securing Optimizely’s future as a platform.
A big part of my job is to help figure out the best ways to make Optimizely an invaluable platform for all things experimentation. In particular, our continued investment infrastructure and SOA affords us the opportunity to take all of the amazing software we’ve built internally and turn it back out for new and existing customers.
Experimentation Driven Development is a really powerful way to build software (check out our Fullstack offering!), and being part of a shift in the way we all think about building software is pretty darn exciting to me.
So when you’re not slinging code at Optimizely, what do you enjoy doing outside of work?
Programming Stuff: I recently toyed around with building a kernel (spoiler: it’s complicated), sometimes I force myself to use parts of the Python standard library I’m unfamiliar with (most recently the 2.5+ generator API), I have a hobbyist interest in game development engines and their networking backends, and I’m always eager to try out new tech whenever it pops up across the internets. Currently on my list of things to check out are: OpenCensus, Envoy, and Katran.
Picking flowers at Front Porch Farms in Healdsburg
Non-programming Stuff: I live with my partner in the Mission district in downtown San Francisco. If you haven’t heard, it’s amazing for food, so living there puts us a stone’s throw away from a TON of the best. This is my lame way of saying “I’m a foodie”, so here’s my plug for restaurants I would really urge you to check out: Hoffman’s, Californios, and Rintaro. Besides that, I love escaping to Guerneville or Healdsburg (more great food there) just north of the city, and every now and again my partner and I will resurface on a Monday after a weekend binging Netflix originals or otherwise comically bad TV shows. Also, Alamo Drafthouse always has really fun movies to go see.
What’s unique about engineering at Optimizely?
Transparency and collaboration.
Optimizely’s leadership (eng and non-engineering) goes to great lengths to be transparent about the company’s direction, progress, and problems. They’ve also set the expectation of individual developer empowerment — every engineer’s opinion matters here, and it’s just as valid as all of your co-workers’ opinions. Leadership never misses an opportunity to remind us that they are open to feedback and that our decisions can (and regularly do) drive our business just as directly as product decisions can.
Every engineer I’ve had the opportunity to work with is incredibly talented and an absolute joy to work with. The people are really excited to build software here and that passion brings an energy and excitement to every project that I touch. For better or worse, there is never a dull moment and most of the time this place feels like it’s the most fun you’ve ever had building software.
What advice do you have for people trying to break into your role?
I have two pieces of advice I’d like to give:
First, know that there is a lot more to learn in your role than how to write better code. Building software involves working together with lots of other people and people are complicated! No amount of programming experience will prepare you for things like prioritizing technical debt against ever-shifting product scope and priority; or being able to provide feedback in a code review that doesn’t come off as pedantic or overly opinionated. Your day-to-day involves all kinds of problems that cannot be solved with just a few lines of code.
Second, don’t fret over projects or code feeling unfinished or dirty. It’s going to be there tomorrow when you wake up, and probably a few days after that. If you let these kinds of problems dominate your entire life inside and outside of work hours, you’re going to hit burnout fast. Remember you thought this was fun at some point and try to let it be again.
|
https://medium.com/engineers-optimizely/engineer-q-a-alex-milstead-backend-engineer-san-francisco-5cf1061386bf
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['Alex Milstead']
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2018-07-09 20:11:31.565000+00:00
|
['Software Development']
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Using Medical Marijuana and CBD for PTSD | Leafwell
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Many Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with cookouts, ice cream, red, white, and blue everything, cold beer, swimming, and of course, fireworks. It’s the time of year when people can set aside their differences and celebrate what unites them: the love for their country.
But there’s a sad irony to the holiday as well. For many who fought for the freedoms that are celebrated on Independence Day, the Fourth of July can be a serious source of stress and anxiety. This is because millions of veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
PTSD is a condition where a traumatic, stressful, distressing, or frightening experience is relived. A particular situation, or “trigger,” can remind the PTSD sufferer of their past experience. Nightmares, flashbacks, feelings of isolation, guilt, irritability, anxiety, and depression are common symptoms. PTSD is often — but not always — grouped with anxiety disorders. Therefore, the flashes and bangs of fireworks can understandably be triggering for many veterans.
This Fourth of July, in honor of the veterans who help guarantee US independence, we here at Leafwell are taking a look at post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how medical cannabis and CBD can help those who suffer from it.
How Prevalent is PTSD?
Approximately 8 million adults suffer from PTSD in the United States. It is estimated that approximately 8% of adults, or 1 in 13 people, in the US will develop PTSD during their lifetime. This number sharply increases for those in the military and armed forces. Depending on the war they served in, between 11%-30% of veterans experience PTSD.
PTSD also has a strong genetic factor — from 5%-20%. One analysis “uncovered DNA variants at six loci that were strongly associated with PTSD risk. Three of the six loci were specific to certain ancestral backgrounds — two European and one African — and three were only detected in men. The six loci hint that inflammatory and immune mechanisms may be involved in the disorder, which is consistent with findings from previous studies.”
PTSD is closely linked with anxiety and depression, which can make a vet suffering from it feel isolated. This loneliness could explain why 5%-10% of veterans who develop PTSD experience problems creating lasting relationships. Depression and anxiety also have genetic components, and inflammation also features in both of these mental health issues as well.
With anxiety, depression, and loneliness all being associated with PTSD, it’s understandable then why people who suffer from it are also at an increased risk of suicide and drug abuse. Therefore, finding a solution to help treat PTSD is paramount for saving lives, especially the lives of veterans.
How is PTSD Currently Treated?
How Therapy Can Help Veterans with PTSD
There are several treatments that are effective, including trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Therapy methods include cognitive processing therapy (CPT), prolonged exposure (PE), stress inoculation training (SIT), and present centered therapy (PCT). Other non-medication-based treatments include what might be deemed “the basics”: proper sleep, exercise, and nutrition.
Medications for PTSD
Some PTSD sufferers take medication to help their disorder, including antidepressants like sertraline (Zoloft). Sertraline is also used to treat anxiety-related disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder.
In some instances, sedatives like benzodiazepines may be prescribed on a short-term basis. Examples of popular benzos are Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium. However, benzodiazepines are highly addictive, and in fact, one study found that abuse or misuse accounted for 17% of overall use of benzodiazepines.
Why Does Cannabis Work for PTSD?
There is a multitude of reasons why cannabis may work for PTSD. These include:
Stress and anxiety beating terpenes such as linalool, beta-caryophyllene, and limonene.
CBD may be used to improve regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the brain. This helps by reducing anxiety and increasing the amount of important hormones and nutrients moved through the brain.
May help keep the mind off of reliving traumatic experiences via the endocannabinoid system’s involvement in the retrieval of memories and memory consolidation.
Terpenes like pinene can help prevent hyperventilation, which can occur during an acute anxiety attack associated with PTSD.
Those who have PTSD have been shown to have lower amounts of anandamide available in their bodies. Increasing the amount of anandamide available in the body may help improve mood and reduce fear and anxiety.
May help promote sleep and a night’s rest, with fewer sleep disturbances and nightmares.
Cannabinoids can be used as an alternative to benzodiazepines.
One study suggests that cannabis can reduce the symptoms of PTSD, at least in the short-term.
Based on these findings, medical marijuana for PTSD may be a viable treatment for many veterans. There is no standardized solution for treating PTSD, but CBD and medical cannabis could be a good fit for a vet experiencing anxiety, depression, and/or insomnia as a result of their PTSD.
A common concern among veterans exploring how medical marijuana helps PTSD is the risk of losing their benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). However, the VA states on their website “veteran participation in state marijuana programs does not affect eligibility for VA care and services.”
What Are the Best Products or “Strains” for PTSD?
In general, you should be wary of promises that a specific strain is useful for specific conditions. Instead, focus on the testing of cannabinoids and terpenes for PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Unfortunately, cannabinoids beyond THC and CBD aren’t always tested for, so this can make it difficult to determine a product’s effects.
So, how does a person get an idea of what product to use for PTSD? Essentially, look at the test results. Although cannabinoids beyond THC and CBD are not always tested for, THC and CBD ratios and terpenes usually are. Whilst this is not perfect, it is a good place to start.
THC, CBD, CBG, and CBN may be of particular use for PTSD. THC and CBN can both be used to help get to and stay asleep, so if insomnia or Fourth of July fireworks are causing problems, look for a product that includes either of those. Some CBD can be used to help improve mood and reduce inflammation.
Limonene, bisabolol, myrcene, pinene, beta-caryophyllene, and humulene may be helpful terpenes. These terpenes can help a PTSD sufferer get to sleep and can reduce inflammation, too. Those who suffer from a lack of sleep (insomnia) have higher amounts of inflammatory proteins, known as cytokines, in the body. Reducing the level of cytokines can help reduce inflammation, improve mood, and help get a person to sleep.
However, the above terpene profile may not necessarily be ideal for daytime use. During the day, more CBD may be utilized, so a CBD:THC ratio of 1:1, 2:1, or 3:1, with a mixture of limonene, pinene, and beta-caryophyllene (less of myrcene, linalool, bisabolol, and humulene) for mood-improving effects.
THC, CBN, myrcene, linalool, bisabolol, and humulene may be a better mixture at night — taken 30–60 minutes before bed, to help get to and stay asleep. Most would suggest starting off slow and low — about 2–2.5 mg of THC in tincture form. Some would suggest vaping a small amount of cannabis (which could be one, two, or three puffs) to help reduce anxiety and help get to sleep, combined with a small amount of tincture to help stay asleep. This depends very much on the individual, and some may need higher doses of THC.
Those who suffer from PTSD may be able to tolerate more THC compared to other conditions associated with anxiety. This is because those with PTSD have a lack of anandamide available in the body, and THC can help increase the level of anandamide available in the body via inhibition of the enzyme that breaks down anandamide, fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH).
Overall
PTSD is a serious problem for many people, and especially women and men who serve their country. Although there is a lack of placebo-controlled studies on using cannabis for PTSD, much of the literature so far suggests that cannabinoids could prove to be a very useful treatment for PTSD. The main issue is that there is no magic cure for PTSD. Cannabis, like any other medication, can treat only the symptoms. When it comes to treating mental health conditions, combining cannabinoids with therapy is ideal for efficacy. If you’d like to learn more about how medical marijuana or CBD can help PTSD, our doctors are available to answer any questions you have.
|
https://medium.com/@leafwell/using-medical-marijuana-and-cbd-for-ptsd-leafwell-cb82d04ae0eb
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[]
|
2020-07-01 14:38:07.286000+00:00
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['Medical Marijuana', 'Fourth Of July', 'Post Traumatic Stress', 'Independence Day', 'PTSD']
|
Extracting rich embedding features from COCO pictures using PyTorch and ResNeXt-WSL
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Extracting rich embedding features from COCO pictures using PyTorch and ResNeXt-WSL
Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash
In this tutorial, I will show you how to leverage a powerful pre-trained convolution neural network to extract embedding vectors that can accurately describe any kind of picture in an abstract latent feature space.
I will show some examples of using ResNext-WSL on the COCO dataset using the library PyTorch and other conventional tools from the PyData stack.
Why ResNext-WSL?
ResNeXt is the evolution of the well famous ResNet model that adds an additional dimension on top of it called the “cardinality” dimension. Through this improvement, the authors managed to beat the benchmark of ILSVRC classification task with a 15% improvement. Although better models were developed in the last couple of years, it still stands on the top leaderboard of the ImageNet task, with 85.4% top-1 accuracy.
ResNext block from paperswithcode
The weakly supervised learning (WSL) version was developed by the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group, but it was trained on 3.5 billion public Instagram pictures in order to predict around 8000 hashtags sourced by the users.
This novel approach made ResNeXt-WSL my favorite choice among many other publicly available. I believe that a model trained on a broader variety of pictures can encapsulate many different topics of real-world scenarios while other pre-trained models were mostly optimized solely for their benchmark task.
Below are some facts about the training of this massive model (source):
synchronous stochastic gradient descend on 336 GPUs across 42 machines with mini-batches of 8064 images
153 billion multiply-add FLOPs and 829 million model parameters for the largest capacity model
22 days long training for the smaller capacity model (32x16d)
The model was trained with different capacities in order to reduce its size and inference time.
Different ResNext models and capacities from PyTorch Hub
After training the model on the Instagram hashtag classification task, the last layer was replaced with the ImageNet classes and fine-tuned on that task. Clearly training those models is not something every organization can afford.
Luckily for us, a simplified version was released in the PyTorch hub, trained on “only” 940 million public images and 1.5k hashtags. For this tutorial, we choose the smallest version of ResNext-WSL (32x8d) since it is still accurate enough on the public benchmarks but it is less memory and computationally expensive.
Why COCO dataset?
Common Objects in COntext ( COCO) is a large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset, widely used as a benchmark for many machine learning tasks.
COCO dataset logo from COCO website
For this tutorial, we would focus on the Detection 2017 dataset (validation fold) consisting of 5000 annotated pictures. The dataset satisfies a few desired properties:
Contains pictures from disparate context and kind of objects
The pictures are realistic with different shapes and resolutions
Each picture may contain multiple annotations
The annotations are grouped into two levels hierarchical taxonomy
There are data loaders and libraries for COCO already implemented in Python and PyTorch
The 5000 pictures are annotated with 80 categories grouped in 12 supercategories:
Distribution of categories in COCO 2017 validation set
And below are a sample of random pictures with their annotations:
Examples of annotated pictures from COCO detection 2017
As we can see the pictures in the COCO dataset do represent different real-world scenarios, even though they are skewed with a lot of pictures containing people.
Feature Extraction
The ResNeXt traditional 32x4d architecture is composed by stacking multiple convolutional blocks each composed by multiple layers with 32 groups and a bottleneck width equal to 4. That is the first convolution layer with 64 filters is parallelized in 32 independent convolutions with only 4 filters each.
ResNet versus ResNext architecture comparison from PyTorch Hub
The smallest WSL model in the PyTorch hub uses a 32x8d architecture (bottleneck width = 8) instead. Regardless of those architecture details, what matters for us is the last average pool layer that would concatenate all of those filters into a single dimensional array of size 2048.
The concatenated features are then supposed to be fed to the output softmax layer predicting the 1000 classes of ImageNet. Since we are not interested in the class predictions, we will drop the softmax layer and use the array of the average pool as the embedding features for our pictures.
The embedding-only model will have the following size:
Embedding model size
The first thing to do in order to be usable is to pre-process the input pictures in the format the model would expect. The preprocessing consists of:
Scaling to 256×256
Centering crop to 224×224
Normaliing with mean = [0.485, 0.456, 0.406] and stdev = [0.229, 0.224, 0.225]
I have used a Google Colab environment with GPU runtime to perform the loading, preprocessing, and inference on the 5000 pictures in around 10 minutes.
We now have obtained a matrix of (5000, 2048) float numbers.
Feature exploration
Let’s dive into the feature space and extract some insights.
For example, if we consider a sample picture with a dog:
Sample picture from pytorch github repository
It would be embedded with the following values:
Distribution of embedding values for the sample picture
We can notice that by the design of the neural network we only get non-negative values without any upper bound.
Since not all of the 2048 features will contribute the same way, we can train a random forest classifier on the COCO multi-label annotation task in order to estimate the feature importance.
Let’s now zoom into the most important features extracted from the random forest classifier, whose first 25 are: [ 12, 3, 2011, 1151, 28, 1715, 1004, 583, 479, 1377, 1505, 1690, 1028, 1831, 1704, 466, 634, 1329, 2003, 176, 485, 1066, 1669, 445, 1227].
Correlation matrix between pairs of features
Correlation scatter plots between pairs of features
We can derive a couple of properties:
The feature space is slightly sparse (many feature values are close to 0) The feature values for each dimension follow an exponential distribution on our dataset
The measure the first point we can count what percentage of the dimensions are used by each picture (value > 0.01):
Distribution of the percentage of dimensions activated in each picture
Only 40% of dimensions are used in average by each picture, where we can assume the higher the value the more the topics embedded in the picture.
In order to confirm the exponential distribution hypothesis we can plot the mean of each dimension against its standard deviation across the dataset:
Mean vs standard deviation of the 2048 dimensions on COCO pictures
The proportionality between mean and standard deviation gives us a hint that the dimensions tend to follow an exponential-like distribution on our dataset.
3D visualization
We can apply a few dimensionality reduction techniques to reduce the embedding space into 3 dimensions and use the supercategory to highlight the pictures that belong to the same taxonomy.
We will focus on 3 unsupervised techniques: PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP. For a more exhaustive comparison of their differences, I recommend the following reading: Dimensionality Reduction for Data Visualization: PCA vs TSNE vs UMAP vs LDA.
3D visualization using PCA
3D visualization using TSNE
3D visualization using UMAP
To make the exploration more fun I have deployed a TensorBoard using a sample of pictures in a sprite image:
Sprite image for interactive visualization in TensorBoard
And the TSNE projection looked like this:
TSNE projection animation
The interactive projector of the TensorBoard is a powerful tool for exploring the embedding space and spot correlations and interesting manifolds of points.
Nearest Neighbors
What can we actually do now with this embedding space? A relevant application would be to find similar pictures. Thus, I have selected a few random pictures and plotted the 15 closest ones based on the cosine similarity in the 2048-dimensional embedding space.
The results are astonishing:
“Bikes” neighborhood
“Tennis players” neighborhood
“Living room with sofas” neighborhood
“People skiing” neighborhood
“Cats on a laptop” neighborhood
“Food on a plate” neighborhood
“Large animals exhibition” neighborhood
Not just the embedding space is able to accurately group pictures that do are very similar in terms of objects and context, but it can also correctly discriminate the entropy on each kind of picture based on the cosine distance. For instance, the neighborhoods of “tennis players” and “people skiing” have a much lower distance from the query picture compared to the other more entropic neighborhoods.
Conclusions
In this tutorial, we have seen how easily, and without having to train any model, we can leverage the state-of-the-art to extract rich embedding features from pictures of different natures. We have proven the ability of the embedding space to capture a lot of fine details including both the objects and the surrounding context. The most salient part was showing that the embedding features can accurately find similar pictures. The measure of similarity and the latent manifold structures can enable a lot of downstream applications.
In the next articles, we will see how to discover and define those latent topics represented by the manifolds in the embedding space, to learn how to cluster those pictures, and to learn advanced averaging techniques for document embedding.
Stay tuned!
You can find the code and the notebooks at https://github.com/gm-spacagna/docem.
If you are interested in extracting embedding features from text data, you can check out this other article: Embedding billions of text documents using Tensorflow Universal Sentence Encoder and Spark EMR.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/extracting-rich-embedding-features-from-coco-pictures-using-pytorch-and-resnext-wsl-vademecum-of-6fdbdbe876a8
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['Gianmario Spacagna']
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2021-01-12 14:32:00.639000+00:00
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['Resnext', 'K Neighbors', 'Pytorch', 'Embeddings', 'Computer Vision']
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Gambia’s case on behalf of the Rohingyas underlines shared humanity not just Muslim concerns
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Gambia’s case on behalf of the Rohingyas underlines shared humanity not just Muslim concerns
Gambia’s attempt to hold Myanmar accountable for the Rohingyas’ suffering tells an exhilarating story about multilateralism and international rule of law.
Under the spotlight again. Rohingya refugees watch on a mobile phone a live feed of Myanmar’s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s appearance at the UN’s International Court of Justice in the Hague, December 11. (AFP)
The past few days brought one of the more moving examples of the interconnectedness of our world and the irreducible core of the eternal human quest for justice, Gambia’s case accusing Myanmar of genocide of the Rohingyas has begun at the International Court of Justice. Days later, it ended with the somewhat flat expectation that a ruling on the allegation of genocide could take years.
Even so, the case is significant. When Gambia filed its lawsuit, having received the formal backing of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), there was surprise. Why would a small country in West Africa be taking another, half a world away, to court?
The Rohingyas are mostly Muslim but is that enough to prompt such a profoundly empathetic gesture from another mainly Muslim but relatively poor and unregarded country 11,500km away? What would be gained and by whom?
More to the point, what credibility did Gambia have in pursuing this particular case? It is hardly a template for systemic justice and human rights. Struggling to get to grips with decades of violence under Yahya Jammeh, the dictator who ruled the country for 22 years before fleeing after surprise election defeat to Equatorial Guinea in 2017, Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission began hearings this year into alleged human rights abuses by Jammeh. It’s proving to be a painful and partial process. Reconciliation is a long and hard road; reparation is an aspiration.
In addition, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) typically addresses disputes between signatory states and has no jurisdiction over proceedings in Myanmar, which is not an ICJ member. Some have said that Gambia’s lawsuit at The Hague was an act of frivolous and ostentatious attention-seeking, to no particular end.
That last point was addressed by the fact the ICJ took up the case. Its 15 judges can rule on disputes stemming from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which applies to the killing of “in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Both Gambia and Myanmar are signatories to the pact.
What of the broader issue about the wisdom and purpose of bringing such a case? Gambia’s lawsuit is a stirring story that underlines our shared humanity, the enormous power of the lessons of history and that coincidences sometimes have huge consequences.
First to the coincidences. It was an unlikely coincidence that Gambia’s foreign minister pulled out of the OIC annual conference in Bangladesh last year and sent Justice Minister Aboubacar Tambadou instead. It was a further coincidence that the OIC conference included a tour of Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. The third coincidence was that Tambadou spent more than a decade prosecuting cases from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. When he heard the Rohingya refugees’ stories in Cox’s Bazar, he said he “saw genocide written all over” them.
Another coincidence of a sort was that Tambadou was from a country that suffered from both the violence of the Jammeh years and international indifference to its misery. As Tambadou explained: “Part of the reason we were motivated to be involved in this case was because of our own experiences. Had the international community took up this responsibility at the time and condemned the former president, I don’t think we would have gone through two decades of terrible atrocities.”
Never mind the eventual outcome of Gambia’s lawsuit against Myanmar on behalf of the Rohingyas, a stateless minority that the Myanmar authorities routinely call “terrorists.”
Never mind the reality that no ICJ ruling can change the fact the Rohingyas were stripped of citizenship in 1982 by the country formerly known as Burma on grounds they are not one of its so-called national races. Consider the momentousness of what Gambia achieved in simply filing a lawsuit that stresses justice and a belief in the essential humanity of us all.
The case refocused attention on the plight of the Rohingyas, some 700,000 of whom have been forced by Myanmar’s military to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in the past few years. At the Hague hearing, Gambia asked the ICJ to approve temporary measures to protect the Rohingyas.
These may prove unenforceable but John Packer, Neuberger-Jesin professor of International Conflict Resolution at Ottawa University’s law faculty, said, “Genocide is considered an injury against everybody — a general wrong — which allows any state to take this up. Little Gambia is acting for the whole world.”
In a sense, Gambia’s attempt to hold Myanmar accountable for the Rohingyas’ suffering tells an exhilarating story about multilateralism and international rule of law. Perhaps what it really says is: When the richest, most powerful countries look away from injustice, it falls to small and seemingly inconsequential ones to remind us of the difficulty — and necessity — of being good.
Originally published in The Arab Weekly
|
https://rashmee.medium.com/gambias-case-on-behalf-of-the-rohingyas-underlines-shared-humanity-not-just-muslim-concerns-b4136396133
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['Rashmee Roshan Lall']
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2019-12-18 22:22:18.314000+00:00
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['Myanmar', 'Icj', 'Genocide', 'Rohingya', 'Gambia']
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How To Write A Website Brief
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How To Write A Website Brief
When you hire a digital agency to create a website, they will require a wealth of information about your organisation, that’s where the website brief comes in — it’s purpose is to go to the projects first principles and encapsulate everything about your competitor landscape, your business and customer needs.
Please check out the newest article here
Here is the template that we use at Univers Labs.
This insight can then be shared among your agencies strategists, copywriters, designers, developers, technical director and creatives, arming them with the insight they need to apply their area of expertise to achieve the goals overcome the challenges of your website project.
We recommend the brief is written collaboratively with all project stakeholders, including your chosen agency.
Right, let’s go ahead summerise some of the critical sections of our template and explain how it works.
1. Summary Brief
This is a short intro summary of the project — try to make this short and easy to remember. This should cover the Who, What, Where, When and Why of the project. Be explicit about the deliverables i.e. is this a microsite or is it a full new website? You don’t have to provide a vast amount of background context, we have a separate section for that. You may come back and re-write this section as the act of writing the rest of the segments may surface new requirements and goals.
"Deliver a new website worthy of a Webby, Driving 10% more traffic, with an engaging ever fresh experience, embracing our rebrand, setting *YOUR NAME HERE* apart from their competitors, positioning them as a strategic partner - not a supplier."
2. References, Inspiration and Supporting Materials
In this section, we want to list and give access to supporting documents such as websites you like and why, your branding guidelines or other visual cues such as previous marketing campaigns, anything that gives the project team some idea about the direction you would want this project to go in. Also, include links to supporting documentation you may have such as user personas. Examples of things you could include in this section:
Branding Guidelines:
Previous Campaigns:
User Personas:
Google analytics Report:
Websites you like and why:
Brochures & Marketing Materials:
Presentations:
3. Target Audience & Personas
An essential part of a new website project is to understand who the audience is, who are your customers, who are the people you want to use your website? Depending on your experience you may have a lot of information already — we suggest you create a persona with the following sections.
Name:
Gender split:
Age Range:
Job Title:
Education:
Industry:
Lifestyle in one quote:
Personality Traits:
5 Needs:
Success Factors:
4. Project Goals
Another very important part of the brief is to start thinking about the goals of the website — its a good idea here to think about the quantitive goals such as traffic, leads generated or revenue for example. you may need to talk to your sales department to get some idea of what they are expecting, or take a look at your Google Analytics to see how your current website is performing. Here are some examples of metrics you may want to set targets for:
Traffic Goals:
Leads Generated:
Sign-ups p/m:
Revenue:
Conversion Rate Goal:
Bounce Rate:
Pages viewed:
N.B you may also want to think about some qualitative goals such as impressions you want your users to have when using the website.
5. Competitor / Comparators
There are a fair amount more sections to our brief, but one of the most valuable sections is competitor/comparators. Remember that you are more of an expert than your digital agency will be when it comes to your market, so here is your opportunity to share who your competitors are, what makes them better or worse than you? And also, who do you aspire to be? This could be something entirely unrelated, for example, you could say we want to be like Netflix, “we want our website to be revolutionary in the way we use digital technology to deliver a great experience to our clients”. Use this section to get this juicy insight out of your head and into your digital agencies head. Here at Univers Labs, we use this information to get an idea of your competitor landscape and to analyse where we can use modern web technology and design to speed ahead of your competitors.
Ok, so that’s a short summary of the critical sections of a website brief, remember when done collaboratively the process of writing the brief can surface valuable information that will lead to a market leading web experience!
The brief template alone is not enough to support the design and development of a great new website, but it is a great starting point, as part of our process at Univers Labs we then go into a workshop to discuss the briefs contents and then a strategy and visual concept phase before investing in developing a website.
Here is a Brief Template
Take a look at the brief template here — we will update it as we use and improve it.
Happy website building!
|
https://medium.com/universlabs/how-to-write-a-website-brief-a92404fdedd5
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['Univers Labs']
|
2020-10-09 12:52:05.335000+00:00
|
['Project Management', 'Website Design', 'UX', 'Digital', 'Digital Marketing']
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7 Reasons Why Not To Start Conversations With “How can I help you?”
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Image by Anisa Goshi
What happened to just a normal chat?
Not so long ago I came across a post on LinkedIn promoting that during this pandemic year, we have to look out for each other and that it should become standard to open conversations with “How can I help?”, “What can I do to help?” or a similar formulation.
Those who know me also know there are subjects I am passionate about and then there are some I am extremely passionate about. Identifying and eliminating assumptions, changing perspectives, and reducing the number of questions we ask fall in the latter category.
While I fully agree that we have to support each other and cooperate as best we can, the part about using these questions to open conversations created a reaction in me. When I read about using these lines to make a connection with someone it not only hit a chord of discomfort, but in fact a full-blown philharmonic orchestra started playing. So I knew something had been bothering me these last few months when I read those statements but could not quite place what until recently. During my many years of working in crisis settings and making challenging decisions, I have learned to listen to one thing very carefully and that is my gut feeling. So I decided to explore this.
An increasing number of conversations these days are with people we meet for the first time. On top of it all online, which makes it difficult to read all communication signals. In the weeks following the post above, I observed the opening of many conversations and it was true that an increasing number of them started with questions similar to the ones mentioned in the post.
I also reflected on the conversations I have had throughout the year and while I had many connections with truly amazing, inspiring and creative minds all over the world — one thing I absolutely appreciate from this challenging situation — I also realised that some conversations did not make me feel particularly at ease. And all of them contained this question of help right at the start.
A helper needs someone to help
I am aware that many people who use these opening questions do not have any negative intentions and genuinely try to help and I am sure, in many cases, this is also a fair question and leads to a constructive conversation. However, here are some potential problems I found with posting this question early on in a conversation:
Implicit assumptions.
A:”Hi, good to meet you (digitally). How can I help?” B (pauses thinking): “Eh. Do I look, like I need help?”
A question like that clearly implies that the other person needs help because otherwise, the suggested formulation could be “If there is anything you need support with, let me know”. Also, it assumes that our conversation circles around anything that needs fixing and I am the one who needs help to fix it. This is mildly presumptuous and in the worst-case scenario could be perceived as intrusive and in interference with one’s autonomy.
2. Establishing power-relations.
A helper always needs someone s/he can help otherwise, they cannot fulfil their (sometimes self-assigned) role. Toxic power dynamics are clearly outlined and explained in the renowned helper/perpetrator/victim triangle. And with asking this question at the beginning of a conversation, the person doing the asking puts him-/herself into a power position and potentially creating such an unhealthy dynamic and can make the other person vulnerable.
3. Keeping control over the content.
I also had many conversations throughout the year which were simply labelled “introductions” without an agenda, and I am the first one to admit this is always an uncomfortable feeling. I know from my experience as a facilitator that when we are losing or about to lose control, asking questions is one of the safest things to avoid doing so. And naturally, this is what we do in moments like these; we start off with a question to be in control over where to steer the conversation.
4. Our own demons.
Someone said to me the other day that, seemingly, on LinkedIn there are only people who want to solve problems and nobody who actually needs a problem solved. This is far from the truth; however, it is actually a lot easier to focus on other people’s problems than our own. This year has been challenging for almost everyone both professionally and privately and naturally in crisis we want to keep control over what is ours and hold on to it, even if it is a problem because ultimately it’s mine. Instead, we are keen to show our competencies and share what we can do to help others with their problems.
5. Asking is hardly ever sharing.
I recently ran a workshop about facilitation without questions. Something I am deeply passionate about and have always wanted to do. There I outlined that asking questions is often mistakenly interpreted as encouraging sharing, but in my experience rather the opposite is the case. Asking someone things is an easy way out to not have to share your own story but creates the expectation in the other person to share theirs.
6. Rejection or submission.
When you consider asking this question of ‘how can I help you’, reflect over what choices you present the other person and technically there might just be two: a rejection of your generous offer to help, even if I do not need any, OR a submission into a request that I might not be willing to open up to and share. There are not so many others in between. Adding “you can always say no”, does not lift the burden of such an implicit choice, it might rather increase the likelihood of giving into the request.
7. Rapport and psychological safety.
Asking a question similar to what was suggested in this post does not present a great foundation for what is key to good conversations: psychological safety and establishing rapport. It is a figurative bulldozer that meets a children’s garden playhouse. Don’t be surprised, if the talk is cut short and you might not hear back.
Follow the natural conversation instead
So when recently asked this question at the start of a conversation, I reacted by smiling and saying:
“I could ask you the same question, but you know what, I have not thought of that at all. I would like to just enjoy a conversation and hear what you are up to, get perspectives on what I am up to and see where the conversation leads us. And, if then we find out we can help each other, amazing.”
Not only was the tension of meeting a stranger for the first time digitally gone, the other person’s shoulders visibly went down and there was a smile too, followed by a short “Thank you. I would really like that.”
We then went on to share how much pressure there is in the constant (and partly self-induced) expectation of having to help and do things for others, and how we were both in need of normal conversations that stimulate and are characterised by true sharing of perspectives, experiences and ideas. We simply followed where the conversation led us, and it was stimulating, encouraging and a truly enjoyable chat, which we agreed would definitely not be the last between us. And, most wonderful of all, we actually found something where I need help and it was a natural thing.
So, next time you think of opening by asking the question “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” maybe consider stopping for a moment to reflect if you are in a mandated position to do so, or if it was clearly stated that this is needed by the other person. It might make all the difference to them. And there are better ways to initiate a true conversation anyway. One of them being a genuine, interested and curious: “How are you doing?”
|
https://medium.com/@thomas-89340/7-reasons-to-drop-the-question-how-can-i-help-you-bafde7cc4f82
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['Thomas Lahnthaler']
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2020-12-12 21:44:30.967000+00:00
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['Self Improvement', 'Learning', 'Reflections', 'Communication', 'Questions']
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Where to add subtitles or captions to video in 2021
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Where to add subtitles or captions to video in 2021
Expounds on the best way to include captions or subtitles on video, YouTube captions for Marketing , SEO of your YouTube video channel, it has just begin.
You can likewise check for professional subtitles to video here, They are bit by bit outlines on this viewpoint that can help you better.
However, I will cover the gist of it below.
Go to Video Manager . You can find it when you click on your channel in the right hand corner
Go to Creator Studio > Video Manager > Videos.
Click the drop-down menu next to the Edit button next to the video you want to add captions or subtitles.
Select Subtitles/CC.
Click the Add new subtitles or CC button.
Choose how you want to add or edit subtitles or closed captions to your video:
To create it from scratch:
Choose the language in the drop down box or use search box to search your language.
2. If there is already a draft you are working on, you can select it from ‘My Drafts’.
3. Add the content. Also do mention sounds like applause to make your audience understand what is going on.
4. You can adjust the timing of the captions bydragging the borders around the text under the video.
5. Repeat the process for all texts
6. Click Publish when done.
If you have a file already ready with all the subtitles, you can use upload option to upload it to your video.
On the off chance that you have a record effectively prepared with all the captions, you can utilize transfer alternative to transfer it to your video.
Be that as it may, there are restricted record types upheld by YouTube. In the event that you have a venture of adding caption or open/Closed Captions on your video in any laguages you want. You can get proficient help on this link.
Again you can get expert to add subtitle or caption on video faster for you.
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https://medium.com/@firsttreasure/where-to-add-subtitles-or-captions-to-video-in-2021-a5fc7a9cac4a
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['Ademusere Idowu']
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2020-12-26 03:45:22.353000+00:00
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['Subtitles', 'Videos Subtitle', 'YouTube', 'Closed Captions', 'Add Subtitles To Video']
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Some Questions To Guide Us Into The New Year
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“What are the positive signs of God’s spirit acting among us?” (Photo by Pat Leyko Connelly).
What are the positive signs of God’s spirit acting among us during these difficult times?
That is a question Abbot Gregory Polan recently posed to Benedictine monastic communities across the world.
The abbot is a tall, slender, soft-spoken man and the elected leader of Benedictine monks worldwide. I had the privilege of interviewing him a few years ago for a radio piece after he had completed a new translation from the Hebrew of the Psalms. I’ve since met with him several times in Rome. Every time I’ve felt as though I’m witnessing the Benedictine values of hospitality and humility personified.
When this Chicago-born abbot speaks, it’s the real deal.
For the final #SundayThoughts of this momentous year, I offer not my own remarks, but some wise words from a year-end message Abbot Gregory wrote to monastic communities — words that can resonate with all of us.
Meeting with Abbot Gregory Polan, center, and fellow Benedictine lay associate Rev. Greg Peters, left, in Rome in 2017.
The abbot describes meditating throughout Advent on the Book of Revelation. The author of Revelation writes:
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away … Then I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race … Behold, I make all things new.’
“Behold, I make all things new.”
Something in our psyche irrevocably changed this past year. If the great pandemic of 2020 has made anything abundantly clear it is the fragility of human life. The crisis has shown us how connected we all are.
Abbot Polan rightly points out that the only way forward is to recognize our interdependence. He asks us to consider, “Is God taking this natural disaster and creating something new, good, and even wonderful for us? Will we come to see this new earth that the Scriptures are speaking of?”
The nation was inspired by the courage and compassion of health care workers who cared for deathly ill COVID-19 patients and comforted their family members. (Photo courtesy of ABCNews)
Scripture is full of so-called “happy faults” where an event that at first seems tragic (think of the crucifixion), then takes on new life and meaning by the grace of God. The lessons seem clear. We have an opportunity we cannot miss. We simply cannot go back to “normal” and fail to address the needs that the pandemic has laid bare.
The abbot offers a series of questions that monastic communities might contemplate as this year ends. I’ve paraphrased several of them because they are questions that we all can ponder as we face a new beginning:
What are the positive signs of God’s spirit acting among us during these difficult times?
What are we doing to serve one another?
What are ways in which we have seen compassion shown to others in need that we might emulate?
Have we seen a new potential for vibrancy in our work, whatever our vocation might be?
How can we go deeper into our expression of prayer and communion with God?
What have we learned that we wish to take with us into the future?
This week, may we take time to reflect on these important questions. Perhaps we can choose a different one to reflect on each day.
May these questions, and the answers they uncover, help us to walk confidently and hopefully into the new year.
(Many thanks to Sister Jennifer Halling of Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, KS, the monastery where I am a lay associate, for sharing the abbot’s letter).
|
https://medium.com/@judithvalente/some-questions-to-guide-us-into-the-new-year-c1099a43e1af
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['Judith Valente']
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2020-12-27 16:57:55.674000+00:00
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['Spirituality', 'Contemplation', 'Hope', 'New Year', 'Pandemic']
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How I used pandas and datetime to improve accuracy in a traffic time series problem
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How I used pandas and datetime to improve accuracy in a traffic time series problem Tracyrenee Follow Dec 23, 2020 · 5 min read
During the course of my studies in time series analysis, I have discovered that there are some time series datasets that perform better using the more traditional methods of machine learning because of the way the data is presented. For example, I have seen some datasets that, although time series, were depicted in such a way as to nullify the components of the series itself.
The dataset I am presenting in this post is an example of a data science problem where it is difficult to use models, such as Facebook Prophet, which are designed specifically to predict on time series problems.
I have selected a traffic dataset from Analytics Vidhya and the problem statement and link to the datasets can be found here: McKinsey Analytics Online Hackathon (analyticsvidhya.com)
The problem statement for this traffic problem reads as follows:
“You are working with the government to transform your city into a smart city. The vision is to convert it into a digital and intelligent city to improve the efficiency of services for the citizens. One of the problems faced by the government is traffic. You are a data scientist working to manage the traffic of the city better and to provide input on infrastructure planning for the future.
The government wants to implement a robust traffic system for the city by being prepared for traffic peaks. They want to understand the traffic patterns of the four junctions of the city. Traffic patterns on holidays, as well as on various other occasions during the year, differ from normal working days. This is important to take into account for your forecasting.
To predict traffic patterns in each of these four junctions for the next 4 months.
The sensors on each of these junctions were collecting data at different times, hence you will see traffic data from different time periods. To add to the complexity, some of the junctions have provided limited or sparse data requiring thoughtfulness when creating future projections. Depending upon the historical data of 20 months, the government is looking to you to deliver accurate traffic projections for the coming four months. Your algorithm will become the foundation of a larger transformation to make your city smart and intelligent.”
The program to solve this data science problem has been written as a .ipynb file in Google Colab because it is a free online Jupyter Notebook that can be accessed from computers that have internet access and Google connectivitivity.
The Python libraries are already installed on Google Colab, so I only needed to import the pre-installed libraries.
I then read in the datasets from my personal GitHub account, where I had stored them when I downloaded them from the Analytics Vidhya problem page:
I checked for any null values and in this instance there were none that needed to be imputed:
In the code below I used pandas and datetime to extract the hour, day of the week, week of the year, month, and year to categorise the data so that this information would be better utilised during the training of the model:
I then created the variables, ID_train and ID_test, which are used to store the data from train.ID and test.ID. Once these two variables had been created, I dropped the “ID” column from both train and test because they are not needed during the training process:
I put the time series data on a graph and there it can be seen visually how the time series data is not linear and therefore time series models will not give the best predictive results:
I defined the X, y and X_test variables, which need to be established so the data can be split and used during the modelling process. The target variable, y, contains the data from train.Vehicles, which was then dropped from the train dataset. The independent variables, housed in the train and test datasets, were used to develop the X and X_test variables by additionally dropping the DateTime column.
Once the X dataset had been developed from the train dataset, it was used as input to sklearn’s train_test_split() function to split the data into training and validation datasets.
I then used sklearn’s make_pipeline() function where StandardScaler() and the model were activated. I used BaggingRegressor() because I have had superior results from this ensemble model, achieving 99.11% accuracy:
I used the model to predict on the validation set and achieved 96.88% accuracy on the predictions made on this dataset:
I put the predictions made by the model onto a graph and visually compared the predictions against the validation target:
I then used the model to predict on the test set. I created a dataframe to house the predictions and converted this dataframe to a .csv file:
When I put the predictions on the solution checker I obtained a root mean square error, RMSE, of 9.14, which is a very respectable reading indeed. Because the predictions I obtained were of a high accuracy and low error, I also posted the code on the Analytics Vidhya website:
The code for this post can be found in its entirety in my personal GitHub account, the link being here: Traffic-Forecasting/TS_Traffic_Forecast_Bagging.ipynb at main · TracyRenee61/Traffic-Forecasting (github.com)
|
https://ai.plainenglish.io/how-i-used-pandas-and-datetime-to-improve-accuracy-in-a-traffic-time-series-problem-5fbaad9bb50d
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[]
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2020-12-23 08:43:23.401000+00:00
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['Time Series Analysis', 'Artificial Analysis', 'Datetime', 'Python', 'Pandas']
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How Being a Highly Sensitive Person Improves Relationships
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How Being a Highly Sensitive Person Improves Relationships
It’s time for a new perspective on Highly Sensitive People
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
I’ve always known I was a highly sensitive person, but there were so many idiosyncrasies in my personality-type that were difficult for me to understand. I failed to connect how my compassionate personality affected how I interact with my world. If you research signs of a Highly Sensitive Person, you might see traits like “overreacts,” “can’t take criticism,” “anxious,” and “trouble letting go.” I’ve been called a lot of these words before, and maybe at times, they have been true. People usually perceive these traits as negative. I want to challenge a different perspective, one in which being “sensitive” isn’t bad.
The term Highly Sensitive Person was first developed by Psychologist Elaine Aron in 1991 when she began her research on Highly Sensitive People. The scientific term for the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) trait is called Sensory Processing Sensitivity or SPS. There has been evidence to suggest that the trait occurs in approximately 15–20% of the population. Being Highly Sensitive is not classified as a disorder, and it is often highly misunderstood or perceived negatively. Despite the negative perceptions, there are numerous relational benefits to being an HSP.
A Deep Inner-World
Highly sensitive people aren’t going to hit you with bullshit in a relationship. They aren’t just going to say what you want to hear; they will give you the truth. They overthink a lot, but because they have a deep inner world where they process many emotions. They are aware of their emotions and can communicate them effectively to a partner. Psychologist Elaine Aron’s research about HSP’s in love shows that HSP’s tend to reflect more on positive experiences than non-highly sensitive people. I’m a “wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve” kind of person, and my partner likes that about me. You never have to guess what I’m thinking or feeling.
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Empathy
Highly Sensitive People have been shown through research to demonstrate more empathy. Empathy, or the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, is an asset in relationships. It allows Highly Sensitive People to have an increased understanding of the inner world of other people. This can greatly reduce the frustration of feeling “misunderstood” in relationships. It can be annoying when other people don’t “get it.” Highly Sensitive People try their best to “get it.”
Creativity
Dr. Aron’s studies suggest that there may be a link between HSP’s and creativity due to the higher depth of processing; however, creativity is difficult to define. It’s no surprise that musicians, artists, writers, and other creative types use emotional appeal to reach a wider audience. HSP’s are deeply moved by creative pursuits like art and music and find beauty in nature. They pick up on subtleties in the environment that non-HSP’s might not.
While sometimes, traits of HSP’s are viewed negatively, there are relational benefits to being an HSP. Having many feelings isn’t necessarily “bad,” it just means your way of interacting with the world is different from how other people interact with the world. I love hard and with everything I’ve got, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
If you want more articles like this, check out:
Thanks for reading; I appreciate any feedback below!
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https://medium.com/this-shall-be-our-story/how-being-a-highly-sensitive-person-improves-relationships-93ffca34aaf1
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['Mari Moore']
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2020-12-06 20:25:40.230000+00:00
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['Empathy', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Hsp', 'Sensitivity']
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Privacy Talk with Victoria Lemieux, Associate Professor at British Columbia University“What Does Need Future Democratic Data Society?״
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This interview is talking about blockchain and public transparency at new trend of privacy-driven data economy.
Kohei is having great time discussing with international data protection and blockchain expert Victoria Lemieux.
This interview outline:
What is the future information management?
What is the better analysis for democratic society?
Message to the Listeners
Kohei: Good sounds, and very great and also the privacy concerns is still one of the topics, like to take out enough people to use in our apps because the in Japan is also we have a launch the apps almost six millions people to download it, but the problem is that we need to go active, to be a connected each other to take an assign the signals to send it to the health authority, which is the requirements need to take in enough foreign cities to privacy the utilities to achieve the personal goals so this is a very important.
And the next question is about in the under the COVID-19 to any voluntary or civic activity in Canada, to work for like any engineer team has been associated to walk for the public services the governments that have brought any technology. Is there any good case there in Canada in this situation?
Vicki: Now I I’m aware of a project. There have been projects and at McGill and projects that UofT（University of Toronto) I think.
I think the one at UofT（University of Toronto）was even focusing on a self-sovereign approach. At The University of British Columbia, where I’m based, which is what I know best we had, we have an annual what we call Blockathon for Social Good. So every year we decide, you know, about well how can we contribute to the public good, to the development of blockchain technology. And so this year of course it was natural to focus on COVID-19.
And so, we had a design and hackathon for blockchain technology. And so we focused on Covid-19 use cases so students came up with designs for
supply chain management of PPE, personal protective equipment, and some did payments for people who have lost their jobs or have not been able to find work, you know, because of COVID-19 because they’ve had to stay home from their jobs.
A lot of people have been affected so we have this payment so students came up with a way to issue those payments effectively. And I don’t think anybody did contact tracing but they did do sort of like back to work certificates as well, so the students came up with really great designs. It’s really been up to the students to take those designs forward into products like the COVID Credential Initiative.
or other you know projects and I’m not sure that the students have really decided that they’re going to do that. I think they just maybe decided that they would not necessarily feel like they would want to take it forward.
But I’m sure that if they might see an initiative that they wanted to join and they could contribute their ideas to, they know about CCI and they’ve been encouraged to participate, so I have to leave it up to the students you know because they’re self sovereign so they can decide what they want to do and we are here as faculty to support them if they want to take it further.
There are universities doing lots of different things around this and it’s, you know, my students, particularly are working on the project that we’ve built which is the personal health wallet which could be used.
It could be used for some of the COVID-19 related use cases we haven’t necessarily designed it with that in mind, but it could be used for that and we may involve ourselves in some of these projects that are going on to support those efforts.
We’ll wait and see what happens there, as I said, there’s nothing within the province of British Columbia, there’s no app right now. So, you know, see what the government decides to do there, you know,
・What is the future information management?
Kohei: Sounds very good. Thank you. So let’s move on to the last questions, this part is, it’s a your own expertise. The future information management is a key part of like a governance Yes. So, I think they you know it’s in Toronto has been like suspended the project in the Google which is a very city project.
I think it’s very important to make data transparencies also accountabilities, It’s a kind of the responsible for the users who provides a data subject in the cases so what kind of the information transparency, and also to public service provisions, is a requirement from the opinion in general?
Vicki: Hmm, yeah so it’s an interesting paradox in a way that to have privacy we also need transparency. And this came out in the Covid-19 witness seminar we ran as well.
So, in order for people to be able to trust that their information that they might share through these apps is really, maintaining their privacy, they need transparency about how the apps actually work, where the data is going to be stored and for how long and how it’s going to be used and processed.
You know, all of the protections that will be around the data will need to know that and understand it because without that transparency, they’re not going to trust.
I’m going to trust that they can really share their data without, you know some maybe private information that could endanger them or embarrass them getting out or without the government maybe, creating some great record store that they would use to invade the privacy of their citizens or somehow you know maybe control what their citizens are able to say, or discuss in public.
And that’s always a concern in a democracy we want to maintain our freedoms, our freedom to speak and say, you know, talk about the issues that are important and hold our governments accountable.
But if they have information that they could threaten us with, you know, then that’s obviously would not allow us to have that freedom, civil liberties. So, transparency is necessary for all those reasons so people can trust the app and they’ll use it, and it’s effective, and also so that they know that the way that the data is being handled is still protects their civil liberties and, you know, they can still trust that their rights are protected.
We are very fortunate in Canada to live in a country where we do have our civil liberties we have the ability to speak freely and gather, you know, except for you know when it’s dangerous to do that because we have a lot of freedoms, but by the same token, I don’t think we take those freedoms for granted because you know it’s too easy to look around and see places where people did once have freedoms. And then those freedoms were lost very suddenly.
And so, you’re always aware that, you know, these are you know human rights but in some ways we’re very privileged to have them. And so we want to maintain that and protect them.
So I hope that answers your question there. I mean, in terms of my specific research that I did for the project. The other project that you were referring to is a project that I had looked at analyzing Twitter data.
This is before I got into blockchain technology and I was working on another technology called Visual Analytics. And that is really doing, you know, understanding data and analyzing data in a way that leverages the unique cognitive capabilities of our human visual system. Because we humans are engineered to be able to see visual patterns and data in an amazingly rapid way.
And so visual analytics leverages that cognitive intelligence and is a technology that’s designed to, you know, create a human- machine interface that allows for data analysis. So we harvested Twitter data relating to the 2014 World Cup, might remember that there were a lot of protests in the streets around the World Cup. Brazilian people were really upset about the amount of money that was being spent on the World Cup.
And so the question was really around trust in government, you know, what was it that was causing people to protest in the streets, was it really related to the World Cup, or were there deeper reasons why people were protesting and what were they protesting and who were they really protesting against: were they protesting against politicians, or they were protesting against corruption, or state government. So we created this project which we called “We Feel Fine.”
Working out how do Brazilian people really feel about their government and levels of trust in government. So we found some interesting things through that project. When we analyze the data we built a visual interface to analyze the data.
And we found some interesting things like at the time people were saying the protests were related to the World Cup and they had to do with, you know, transportation and so on. And the money that was being spentWe found that specific things that, you know, politicians like Dilma Rousseff at the time who was president had said that really upset the Brazilian people.
And it was related to fairness, it was more a question of fairness, and people saying, you know, I don’t mind you spending money on this World Cup or, I don’t mind you spending money on really anything you need to run the country, as long as that money is is as long as the benefits of that money are evenly distributed. So it was a question of equality. And we see this all around the world where people don’t, you know, people don’t mind if you know we have to spend money on for example public health and protection from COVID-19, but not if all the benefits of that go to a certain group of people.
It’s only benefiting a small group of people, but where the benefits are evenly spread and we all also suffer equally, you know, we all have to be shut down and it’s not just so where the problems are occurring is where we’ve realized that, you know, maybe some of the shutdown and the economic measures that have been, you know that the economic impact hasn’t been evenly felt like here in Canada.
It’s clear that a lot of the frontline workers, a lot of the people you know in essential services that for example were working in care homes for elderly people, who are new immigrants to the country tend to be, you know, in the lower income bracket.
They might be from ethnic minorities. And so, the economic impact has not affected everyone equally. So, anyway, this research in Brazil we used this analysis of Twitter data to uncover some very similar dynamics in why the protests were happening around the World Cup and I think that the takeaway here is that, you know, people around the world.
Know It shouldn’t really be surprising, you know, people will accept hardship, will accept that we have to make sacrifices, but it should be that it benefits everybody, you know, we don’t make sacrifices and it shouldn’t be just that you know oh you people over here you have to make all the sacrifices and suffer hardship, so that we people over here who are already privileged and in power can continue to enjoy our privilege and power.
That does not make for a happy healthy society and that’s where you see people starting to protest, and people rising up and saying, “Oh, that’s not acceptable; we’re not going to take it.” So making sure that society’s remain inclusive, have equality, that benefits benefit everybody in society, continues to be something that’s very, very important for stable healthy societies. So, that’s the moral of that story.
Kohei: Yeah, that’s very awesome, is it? It was very impressive with me just because the evidence base to like citizen voice is a very important to make a decision processes. When it comes to the, like, new technology like a social media, the social data is new kind of the factors, make it political processing.
So, in Canada is the how government is collecting the data, interacting with the citizens so people? Who worries about the political decisions the political philosophies, or any good activities to interact with the people is that they live in your country?
・What is the better analysis for democratic society?
Vicki: Yeah, well so in Canada, public consultation is part of the way that the government does gather this information about citizen voice like what the citizen wants to say. So, there was a new public consultation announced just recently around opening up society, getting back to normal. So the government is doing public consultations.
Because the project that I worked on was focused on Brazil, I’m not actually sure and I have moved away from analytics and into blockchain. I’m not actually sure if the government is using the advanced analytic techniques that we developed at the time (or they were advanced at the time, they’re more commonplace now).
I’m assuming so, but I don’t know I don’t have any insight into that, really, but I think that there is much to be gained by using those kinds of technologies and techniques, because you can see at scale. Oftentimes we have to go out and we have to do surveys, with people and people respond to the surveys and that’s great.
It’s one source of collecting that data but sometimes surveys will tell you what people are thinking at the time, or what choices they think they’ll make, but the day to day actions are maybe different and analyzing Twitter data gives you a different dimension, you know that it has its limitations for sure which we talk about in the paper that you’re referring to. But you get a different take on things so you get people’s day to day conversation and exchanges. The thing about Twitter is it tends to be the the exchanges tend to be kind of more antagonistic, we know that Twitter is often a place where people just take snipes at each other and so on.
And sentiment analysis which we use for the analysis, t’s come a long way since we used it, but it’s still not very good at picking up on humor. So, when you’re doing the analysis somebody might say something in a joking way.
And the sentiment analysis algorithm would probably interpret it as being serious. So, there’s still a lot of work to do. I have a colleague at the iSchool who actually does work on sentiment analysis and computational linguistics, has done amazing work to extend the capabilities of sentiment analysis.
So I think there’s a lot of room to use that technology,. The government has to be committed to talking to its citizens. Before they, can even start to use a technology, which thankfully the Canadian government is doing.
Kohei: That’s pretty amazing that you’re speaking and throughout this interview still a very impressive with me. So, now, lastly, I want to ask you about a new message to the panel listeners who wants to reach out the looking at details. So could you give me any message to them?
Message to the Listeners
Vicki: I’m always really cautious about, you know, I don’t want to be prescriptive like you should do this or you should do that so no messages about that. Just a message of, you know, as a democratic country like Canada.
Just a message of solidarity with, we are all you know, trying to respond to and figure out how to continue as healthy democratic societies in the face of this enormous health challenge that we face globally. And it affects all people everywhere, all different types of us in all different types of, you know, geopolitical states. And so just a message of solidarity through collaboration.
You know through the kind of collaboration that has been expressed in the the CCI initiative for example, you know, kind of collaboration you showed by participating and coming to talk to my witness webinar, you know, me coming to talk to you and share what I know.
Collectively, through all of the contributions that we can make and the knowledge that we share and the conversations that we have. I have hope that as humanity, we will be able to overcome this pandemic.
And, you know, be able to have a brighter future. But I think at the same time we could learn some important lessons from this, during this time:we know that we’ve seen how it’s affected our mental health.
And our own freedom to move, the environment, like, the sustainability effects have been good. You know the environment has a bit of a break from human pollution.
And we’ve seen in Canada where I live, I’ve seen more wildlife coming out I’ve seen more growth in plants and, and green, so I think we shouldn’t also forget, you know, some of the good things that have happened as a result of COVID-19 and some of the lessons about leading digital lives that we’ve learned.
The word crisis, you know, also conveys opportunity, as well as danger. So, though this has been a dangerous time, and a time of crisis,I hope we can look at it as a time of opportunity as well where we as humans can make choices for ourselves about what kind of future we want. And it’s based on reflections that we’ve done during this time.
Kohei: Thank you for your great message to the audiences, so which is a good time to collaborate with each other to find the best solutions to put forward thinking. So we are thank you for having us this time. Great appreciate that Vicki.
Vicki: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and, yeah, I look forward to staying in touch thanks Kohei.
Kohei: you, too.
Thank you for reading daily Collabogate overview and please contact me if you want to be writer of research blogging.
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https://medium.com/collabogate-research-group-in-tokyo/privacy-talk-with-victoria-lemieux-associate-professor-at-british-columbia-university-what-does-abaf4568371e
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['Blockchain Project Research Study']
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2020-08-05 04:04:08.250000+00:00
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['Privacy', 'Covid 19', 'Blockchain', 'Digital', 'Data']
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Appium Installation Through Terminal
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Pre-Requisites
1. Update MacOS
2. Install XCode from AppStore. Once XCode finishes the install, launch it and let it continue installing all the necessary components.
3. Exit XCode.
Brew Installation
4. Goto https://brew.sh/ and copy the latest installation command
5. Open terminal and run the command to install brew on your system.
6. Run the below command to make sure your system is ready to brew. Follow any recommendation from brew doctor
a. brew doctor
7. Next, add the Homebrew location to your $PATH and source your bash or zsh profile file after adding/saving this:
Open vi .bash_profile and add the below.
a. export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH b. export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH
8. After completion, esc + :wq and then source .bash_profile
a. brew help b. brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
9. Exit the terminal
Java Installation:
10. Run the below commands in a new terminal for latest Java JDK.
a. brew tap caskroom/versions b. brew search java c. brew cask install java
11. Or for specific Java version
a. brew tap adoptopenjdk/openjdk b. brew cask install adoptopenjdk8
12. Existing users of Homebrew may encounter Error: Cask adoptopenjdk8 exists in multiple taps due to prior workarounds with different instructions. This can be solved by fully specifying the location with
a. brew cask install adoptopenjdk/openjdk/adoptopenjdk8. b. java -version c. echo $JAVA_HOME
13. Above command will give empty response. Now let us set up java environment paths by running the below commands
a. vi .bash_profile 14. Copy the updated export in the bash profile a. export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home) or export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_265.jdk/Contents/Home export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
15. Finally, follow the below steps to exit and save successfully.
a. esc + :wq b. source .bash_profile c. echo $JAVA_HOME
16. Successful Java set up will show the below path
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_241.jdk/Contents/Home
17. Exit the terminal
IntelliJ Installation:
18. Run the following commands, remembering to re-run the install in case of any error while installing.
a. brew search intellij b. brew cask install intellij-idea-ce
19. Launch IntelliJ from Launchpad and create maven project
20. Project SDK will auto select’s the Java JDK version or select the desired Java JDK
21. Create a main method
22. Run a print program to make sure Java / IntelliJ installation is successful.
23. Close IntelliJ and Exit the terminal
TestNG Installation:
24. Open pom.xml in the above project.
25. Add below testng maven dependency
<dependencies>
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.testng/testng | TestNG for running testing-->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.testng</groupId>
<artifactId>testng</artifactId>
<version>7.1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
26. Right click on pom.xml and click on Reload project & Generate source to make sure testng is installed.
27. Now create a method and run print program using testng command using @Test notation
Maven Installation:
28. Run the following commands, remembering to re-run the install in case of any error while installing
a. brew search maven b. brew install maven and then run mvn -version c. vi .bash_profile and get the below path from your system d. export M2_HOME =/usr/local/Cellar/maven/3.*.*/libexec export PATH =$Path:$M2_HOME/bin e. or copy the below commands f. export M2_HOME=/Applications/apache-maven-3.6.* export PATH=$PATH:$M2_HOME/bin g. esc + :wq h. source .bash_profile i. mvn -version Apache Maven 3.6.3 (cecedd343002696d0abb50b32b541b8a6ba2883f) Maven home: /usr/local/Cellar/maven/3.6.3_1/libexec Java version: 1.8.0_241, vendor: Oracle Corporation, runtime: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_241.jdk/Contents/Home/jre Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8 OS name: “mac os x”, version: “10.15.7”, arch: “x86_64”, family: “mac” j. echo $M2_HOME /Applications/apache-maven-3.6.3
29. Add steps to validate maven
30. Exit the terminal
Appium Installation
31. Go into the iOS device you plan to use and set the screen to not lock. Locking will cause issues during this process so its key to go into your ios settings app > display and brightness > auto-lock > set to “never”
32. Make sure XCode is install with its necessary components
33. When XCode finally launches go into the XCode preferences, accounts, then add your dev apple account. Once you have signed in, connect an iPhone device (make sure you are on the latest version of iOS) and go into XCode → Window → Device and simulator menu, verify your iPhone is present on the device list and wait for XCode to finish installing all the necessary support onto the iPhone.
34. Once you notice XCode completes its installs, go into your iPhone settings, you will notice a Developer option that you did not see before, click on that and make sure the Enable UI Automation option is selected and green, then close XCode
35. Run the following commands, remembering to approve all requests for the terminal to access your file system.
a. brew install wget b. brew install node c. brew install carthage d. brew install — HEAD libimobiledevice e. brew install –HEAD usbmuxd f. brew install ios-deploy g. npm install wd h. sudo gem install xcpretty i. npm install -g appium-doctor
36. Go to appium.io and download the latest version of Appium
37. Install the dmg file
38. Launch appium via applications folder and verify it launches successfully. If you cannot launch the app right click on it the second time and click open. That should give you another option to open the app.
39. Close Appium
40. Launch XCode
41. Open the following project in XCode
/Applications/Appium.app/Contents/Resources/app/node_modules/appium/node_modules/appium-webdriveragent/WebDriverAgent.XCodeproj
42. Double click on the WebDriverAgent item under the left panel
43. On the center top panel, click on WebDriverAgentLib
44. Click on the signing and capabilities tab up top
45. Enable the automatically manage signing checkbox
46. Set the team drop down to your team (apple id account)
47. The provisioning profile should be set to none required
48. On the center top panel, click on WebDriverAgentRunner
49. Enable the automatically manage signing checkbox
50. Set the team drop down to your team (apple id account)
51. The provisioning profile should be set to XCode managed profile
52. The signing certificate should be set to (your apple id and certificate name this should be auto generated. If the device already has a certificate it may ask you to revoke and recreate. There should not be any errors on this screen)
53. On the center top panel, click on IntegrationApp
54. Enable the automatically manage signing checkbox
55. Set the team drop down to your team (apple id account)
56. The signing certificate should be populated
57. Make sure on the center top panel, click on WebDriverAgentLib_tvOS and make sure “automatically manage signing” is disabled. Repeat for WebDriverAgentRunner_tvOS
58. Click on the webdriveragaint again just above the webdriveragentlib and build the project (play icon on upper left of XCode) This process will install integrationapp onto your ios device and verify the build is successful. You may be prompted to enter your macOS password. Make sure if you are to click always allow after inputting your password.
59. Once you get the build successful notification, stop the build in XCode and exit XCode
60. Go back to your terminal session and perform the following commands
a. sudo XCode-select -s /Applications/XCode.app/Contents/Developer b. cd /Applications/Appium.app/Contents/Resources/app/node_modules/appium/node_modules/appium-webdriveragent/ c. Mkdir -p /Applications/Appium.app/Contents/Resources/app/node_modules/appium/node_modules/appium-webdriveragent/WebDriverAgent.bundle d. bash Scripts/bootstrap.sh -d e. appium-doctor –ios f. Once you run the appium-doctor –ios command, you may be prompted to enter your password. After you do so make sure you only get warnings for optional fixes and there are no necessary fixes needed g. If any errors are listed under necessary fixes, you will need to install and troubleshoot those independently one by one.
61. Exit your terminal session
62. Launch Appium
63. Start the server
64. Click on start inspector session button
65. Set the following capabilities
a. udid = <udid of the device you are using to test> b. bundleId = <bundle id of the app you are testing, I used safari com.apple.mobilesafari> c. automationName = XCUITest d. platformName = iOS e. platformVersion = <current ios version your device is on> f. deviceName = <anything you want> g. Make sure to save these settings
66. Once you have saved, go ahead and start the inspector, the appium logs should start to flow with data and the inspector will launch as well as your app. You may be asked to enter your password multiple times, make sure when you are prompted to click always allow after entering your password (your mac password NOT your icloud password) for each prompt. You will see your app on the left side of the inspector. IF YOU ENCOUNTER A PORT 8100 OCCUPIED ERROR: All you have to do is bounce your machine. Once you restart your machine do not launch anything other than appium and launch the appium app again and load the capabilities again and try to launch the inspector.
67. Add Appium Server dependency to pom.xml
<dependencies>
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.testng/testng | TestNG for running testing-->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.testng</groupId>
<artifactId>testng</artifactId>
<version>7.1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.appium</groupId>
<artifactId>java-client</artifactId>
<version>7.3.0</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Android Studio Installation:
68. Run the following commands, remembering to re-run the install in case of any error while installing
a. brew search Android Studio b. brew cask install android-studio c. vi .bash_profile d. export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools:$PATH export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/emulator:$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$PATH export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/30.0.2:$PATH export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH e. esc + :wq f. source .bash_profile g. echo $ANDROID_HOME
69. Run each below command to make sure installation is successful
a. adb devices [Shows the list of active devices] b. emulator -list-avds [Shows the list of active emulators] c. emulator -avd Pixel_3a_XL_API_30 [Launch an emulator] d. Run appium-doctor e. Once you run the appium-doctor command, you may be prompted to enter your password. After you do so make sure you only get warnings for optional fixes and there are no necessary fixes needed i. If any errors are listed under necessary fixes, you will need to install and troubleshoot those independently one by one.
70. Exit your terminal session
71. Add steps to launch Android system app using Appium and IntelliJ
Charles Proxy Installation:
72. Run the following commands, remembering to re-run the install in case of any error while installing
a. brew search charles b. brew cask install Charles c. vi .bash_profile d. export CHARLES_HOME=/Applications/Charles.app/Contents/MacOS export PATH=$PATH:$CHARLES_HOME e. esc + :wq f. source .bash_profile g. echo $CHARLES_HOME
73. Install the certificate on device / emulator / simulator and test.
Launch Apps Using IntelliJ:
74. Create a Class and run the modified program
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https://rakeshkamaraju.medium.com/appium-installation-through-terminal-6ded35a92d1a
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['Rakesh Kamaraju']
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2020-11-02 22:09:12.125000+00:00
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['Maven', 'Install Appium On Mac', 'Intellij Idea', 'Testng', 'Brew']
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by Martino Pietropoli
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First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow
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https://medium.com/the-fluxus/friday-the-sound-of-silence-6c25904c7532
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['Martino Pietropoli']
|
2016-11-11 01:30:48.717000+00:00
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['Space', 'Friday', 'Humor', 'Cartoon', 'Comics']
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How To Stop Spending Money? 12 Game-Changing Hacks!
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How to stop spending money? Money is a lost cause for all of us. Most people feel that they already have their entire expenses laid out right in front of them, and their salaries are not good enough. That is the main reason we do not believe that we can pay off any debts or have any substantial savings. As much as we agree that none of you are being paid enough for your jobs, savings and payments are not things that can be dismissed based on limited resources.
How to stop spending money?
So today, we have decided to help you break the cycle with essential tips on how not to spend money so much anymore. Here are a few points that will allow you to develop a better understanding of how simple and easy tips can lead to serious saving.
1. Say No To Social Media:
The major problem with our generation is the fact that we live in competition with each other like never before. Every time we put up the take out or hang out the picture, we are all opting for the race and are telling the world that we care about their opinions.
How to stop spending money on food? A simple solution to that is to avoid sharing your life on social media. When you hang out with friends or have taken out or go shopping, skip the picture and cherish what you have all by yourself. You will find that the process will control the need to buy branded clothes and eat gourmet take-outs.
2. Tracking Your Spending:
Have a diary or an expense tracking app, but always track the expenses that you are making every day. That will allow you to see how much money is going on recreational or otherwise leisurely activities and how much of it is going to a substantial need.
People who do not track their spending are far more likely to live above their means than the ones who make an effort. It is hard to spend again on taking out if you wrote down just two days ago, how much you had spent on food take-outs? Having a specific and consistent account of what you are spending your money is an excellent way to reduce mindless spending.
3. Money Tracking Apps:
Many people find it hard to believe that money tracking apps will help them in mindful spending. The truth is that this is like saying, Facebook cannot tell you how to stay connected to your friends. Yes, you knew before social media how to stay connected, but now social media exists, and it is a far better way to connect then emails or phone calls.
How to stop spending money on clothes? Expense tracking apps are a great way to take personal financial management to the next level. They allow you to develop a system of understanding of how everyday spending is developing your big picture. That leads to an understanding of the spending habits you have that stop you from fruitful financial gains. While we all love a good Boba meme, it is time to get realistic about how to spend responsibly.
4. Cutting Out Retail Therapy Or Therapeutic Hang Outs!
Or the SPA treatments or the self care candles, and they are all the same. If you want self-care, then eat healthily, get enough sleep, and take care of your routine. And stop reading fifty-word haikus about self-expression. But seriously, try and find a cheaper way for self-care because your future needs are also self-care. So make sure that you are using your hard-earned money to build a hardcore future for yourself.
5. Avoiding Credit Cards:
Online payments are the worst as they tend to reduce your understanding of how much you have spent. You press a button, and here goes $500 out of your bank account. If you get a payment on delivery option, then you have to take out the same amount from an ATM and pay it by your own hands.
How to stop spending money on unnecessary things? Have a rule to only pay online for things that are important and non-negotiable. For any everyday shopping, always choose cash on delivery option so that you have to pay in real-time.
6. Living Within Your Means:
It means buying things on sale or buying not branded clothes and only saying yes to economical hangouts. It also implies cycling for work and reducing your debt as fast as you can. Living within your means is no magic trick; it is a lifestyle that you will find hard to follow and long lastingly uncomfortable. But our parents and their parents made houses and saved up because they were willing to make these sacrifices. Put, whatever you need to cut out of your luxury, you have to go for it. You will only get results if you are willing to put in the results.
7. Staying Away From Shopping:
Only shop when you have an actual need and make sure that you only buy one item at a time. Delayed gratification is an excellent solution to the everyday financial disasters that we inflict upon ourselves.
8. Either Only Sales Or No Sale:
If you are going to save money, then you have to either shop only at sales and gain an actual benefit or not shop at sales at all. Many people make the mistake of acting like they have to spend twice to avail of the sales.
How to stop spending money? Events like Black Friday and other purchases are significant only if you hold off till they arrive. Only then can these kinds of sale events be used to gain the benefits that we all talk about. So focus on making sure that you only spend your money in the sale season and hold of on buying things unless that season arrives.
9. Killing Off Your Debt:
Work part-time jobs at night or freelance your way to saving but always pay off your debt. If you do not pay off your mortgage, then you will be stuck with a burden, and no amount of savings will ever actually make you financially stable. Give up on Starbucks and drink decafe from home but make sure that you save enough money to pay down your debt until you do not have any debt left.
10. Avoiding Credit:
The massive plague of today’s economy is credit-based shopping. If you do not have the money to buy a new phone, then live within your means. It’s better than having a phone that will lose its shine before you can pay it off. Unless you have the ways to buy things, avoid buying them at all.
11. Stop Spending Money By Living Down
Right residential areas are important but also are housing costs. Try and find a reasonable place to live but also make sure that you live in a neighborhood that you can afford. Share your place with roommates to save and avoid spending all of your money on rent. Saving on rent is the first rule for the successful saving system.
12. How To Stop Spending Money? Upgrade Your Portfolio:
Nothing will bring you financial prosperity like continuously growing your profile and enhancing your capacity for professional growth. Take the next assessment and make sure that you get a new certification every year. All of these will add to your potential as an employee, and you will be able to earn enough to get the financial security you require.
All in all, these are a few ways to ensure that you have the financial future that you need. Always understand that the modern culture of feeling like you are still living hand to mouth is a little bit fabricated.
All of the globes are teeming with taking outs, restaurants, retail brands, and other luxuries. Except that now, none of these entities are considered luxuries but are seen as a regular part of a person’s life.
They are not the essential thing in your life, but your financial future is. How to stop spending money on food? If skipping Starbucks gives you the freedom to sign up for health insurance, then it is not a bad bargain. You need freedom so that one day it will be ok for you to spend money on things that you like.
How To Stop Spending So Much Money?
The concept is too relatable for Millenials, who were pretty well cared for by their parents. And now, as single and independent individuals, they tend to find it hard to have a system of spending that drives their cause. They romanticize labels and think of a branded lifestyle, not as a luxury but a necessity.
These are preconceived and childish notions designed by an industry mooching off young adults who are hardwired to go after the next best thing.
Our advice is for you to focus on making sure that the money you earn is going in the right place. Avoid wasting your hard work on a fantasy that was designed to make someone else productive.
Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section.
|
https://medium.com/@myeasyfiapp/how-to-stop-spending-money-12-game-changing-hacks-afca7b723a3d
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['My Easyfi']
|
2020-05-05 12:25:47.901000+00:00
|
['Money', 'Money Management', 'Saving', 'Personal Finance', 'Saving Money']
|
Creating a Web API with Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB MongoDB API and C#
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Creating a Web API with Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB MongoDB API and C#
In this tutorial, we’ll build a Web API using Azure Functions that stores data in Azure Cosmos DB with MongoDB API in C# Will Velida Follow Feb 28 · 12 min read
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model, NoSQL database service that allows us to build highly available and scalable applications. Cosmos DB supports applications that use Document model data through it’s SQL API and MongoDB API.
I’ve been meaning to produce more content on Cosmos DB’s Mongo API, so in this article, I’m going to be developing a Serverless API in Azure Functions that uses a Cosmos DB MongoDB API account. This article has been loosely based on this fantastic tutorial on creating a Web API with ASP.NET Core and MongoDB.
By the end of this article, you’ll know how to create a Cosmos DB account that uses the MongoDB API. You’ll also know how to create a simple CRUD Web API in C# that interacts with a Mongo DB API account.
If you want to see the whole code before diving into the article, you can check it out on my GitHub:
What you’ll need to follow along with this article:
Visual Studio 2019 with the Azure Development workload.
Azure Subscription.
Postman.
How does Azure Cosmos DB support a MongoDB API?
Azure Cosmos DB implements the wire protocol for MongoDB, allowing us to use client drivers and tools that we’re used to, but allow us to host our data in Azure Cosmos DB.
This is great if we already have applications that use MongoDB. We can change our applications to use Azure Cosmos DB without having to make significant changes to our codebase. We can also gain the benefits of Azure Cosmos DB, such as Turnkey distribution and elastic scalability in both throughput and storage.
Setting up an Account
Let’s set up our Cosmos DB account. Login to Azure and click on Create a resource. Look for Azure Cosmos DB and click ‘New’.
On the ‘Create Azure Cosmos DB Account’ page, provide the following configuration:
Resource Group — Resource groups in Azure are a logical collection of resources. For this tutorial, you can create a new one or add your account to an existing one.
Account Name — This will be the name of your account. It needs to be unique across Azure, so make it a good one :)
API — Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model database, but when we create a Cosmos DB account, we can only pick one API and that will be the API for the lifetime of the account. Since this is a Mongo DB API tutorial, pick the ‘ Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB API ’ option.
’ option. Location — Where we want to provision the account. I’ve chosen Australia East as that’s the datacenter close to me, but pick a datacenter close to you.
Capacity Mode — In a nutshell, this is how throughput will be provisioned in this account. I have written articles on how throughput works in Cosmos DB if you are interested, but for now choose ‘ Serverless ’ (still in preview at time of writing).
’ (still in preview at time of writing). Account Type — Choose production
Version — This is the version of the MongoDB wire protocol that the account will support. Choose 3.6
Availability Zones — Disable this for now.
You configuration should look like the figure below.
Click Review+ Create, then Create to create your Cosmos DB account. Feel free to grab a cup of tea while you wait.
Once our account is set up, we can create our Database and collection we need for this tutorial. In the original blog post, we would create our Database and Collection via the Mongo Shell. But to keep things simple, we can do this in the portal.
In your Cosmos DB account, head into your Data Explorer and click ‘New Collection’. Enter ‘BookstoreDB’ as your database name and Books as your collection name. We are then asked to choose a shard key.
Sharding in Mongo DB is a method for distributing data across multiple machines. If you’ve used the SQL API in Azure Cosmos DB, this is similar to a Partition Key. Essential this shard will help your application scale in terms of both throughput and storage through horizontal scaling.
For this tutorial, I’m going to pick the name as the shard key. Click OK to create your database and collection.
We now have our Database, collection and account all set up. We just need one more thing before setting up, our connection string. Click on Connection String and copy the PRIMARY CONNECTION STRING value. Save this for later.
Creating our Function Application.
Let’s head into Visual Studio and create our Serverless API. Open Visual Studio and click ‘Create a new project’.
Choose ‘Azure Functions’ as our template to create the project. (Make sure C# is the selected language).
Call this project ‘CosmosBooksApi’, store the project in a location of your choice and click create:
Select Azure Functions v3 (.NET Core) as our Runtime and create an empty project with no triggers:
Before we start creating any of our Functions, we need to install the MongoDB.Driver package. To do this, right click your project and select ‘Manage NuGet Packages’. In the Browse section, type in MongoDB.Driver and install the latest stable version.
Once that’s installed, let’s create a Startup.cs file that will instantiate our MongoClient:
Since v2 of Azure Functions, we have support for Dependency Injection. This will help us instantiate our MongoClient as a Singleton, so we can share our MongoClient amongst all of our Functions rather than creating a new instance of our client every time we want to invoke our Functions.
Let’s go through this class. To register our services, we need to add components to a IFunctionsHostBuilder instance, which we pass as a parameter in our Configure method.
In order to use this method, we need to add the FunctionsStartup assembly attribute to the Startup class itself.
We then create a new configuration of type IConfiguration. All this does is pick up configuration for the Function application from a local.settings.json file. We then add the IConfiguration service as a Singleton.
We can then set up our MongoClient. We start off by setting our connection string by passing in our PRIMARY CONNECTION STRING from earlier as a MongoUrl() object. Save this in your local.settings.json file. For reference, this is what my file looks like:
We can then pass the key of the setting (“ConnectionString”) into our MongoUrl object.
We then need to enable SSL by using the Tls12 protocol in the SslSettings for our MongoClientSettings. This is required by Azure Cosmos DB to connect to our MongoDB API account.
Once we’ve set up our MongoClientSettings, we can just pass this into our MongoClient object, which we set up as a Singleton Service.
If you want to learn more about Dependency Injection in Azure Functions, check out the documentation:
Now we need to create a basic class to represent our Book model. Let’s write the following:
In this class, we have properties for the Book’s Id, name, price, category and author. The Id property has been annotated with the BsonId property to indicate that this will be the document’s primary key. We have also annotated the Id property with [BsonRepresentation(BsonType.ObjectId)] to pass our id as type string, rather than ObjectId. Mongo will handle the conversion from string to ObjectId for us.
The rest of our properties have been annotated with [BsonElement()]. This will determine how our properties look within our collection.
Now we’re going to create a service that will that handle the logic that works with our Cosmos DB account. Let’s define an interface called IBookService.cs
This is just a simple CRUD interface that defines the contract that our service should implement. Now let’s implement this interface:
I’ve injected my dependencies to my MongoClient and IConfiguration, then I create my database and collection so I can perform operations against them. Lets explore the different methods one by one.
InsertOneAsync — This will insert a single document into our IMongoCollection asynchronously. Here, we pass in the document we want to persist, this case being the Book object. We could also pass in some custom options (InsertOneOptions) and a CancellationToken. We’re not returning anything here expect the result of the insert operation ‘Task’.
FindAsync — This will find a document that matches our filter asynchronously. Here, we use a lambda expression to find a book with the same id that we have provided in the method. We then use Linq to return the matching book.
DeleteOneAsync — This will delete a single document that matches our expression asynchronously. Again, we use a lambda expression to find the book we wish to delete. We don’t return anything except the result of the operation.
ReplaceOneAsync — This will replace a single document asynchronously.
So we’ve created our MongoClient and have a basic CRUD service that we can use to interact with our Cosmos DB account. We’re now ready to start creating our Functions.
For this tutorial we will create the following functions:
CreateBook
DeleteBook
GetAllBooks
GetBookById
UpdateBook
To create a new Function, we right-click our solution file and select ‘Add New Azure Function’. We should see a pop-up like this. Select Http Trigger and select Anonymous as the Function’s Authorization level.
Let’s start with our CreateBook function. Here is the code:
Here we are injecting our IBookService and our ILogger into the function. We invoke this Function by making a post request to the ‘/Book’ Route. We take the incoming HttpRequest and Deserialize it into a Book object. We then insert the Book into our Books collection. If we’re successful, we get a 201 response (Created). If not, we’ll throw a 500 response.
It’s a bit of a dramatic response code. We would want to throw a different code if there was a bad request of if our Cosmos DB account is unavailable, but for this basic example it will suffice.
Now let’s take a look at the DeleteBook function:
This time, we pass in an id to our Function (‘/Book/id’) to find the Book that we want to delete from our collection. We first look for the book using IBookService method .GetBook(id). If we the book doesn’t exist, the Function will throw a 404 (not found) response.
If we can find the book, we then pass this book into our RemoveBook(book) method to delete the book from our collection in Cosmos DB. If successful, we return a 204 response.
Here is the code for the GetAllBooks function:
In this function, we simply make a GET request to the ‘/Books’ route. This Function will call the .GetBooks() method on our IBookService to retrieve all the books in our collection. If there are no books, we throw 404. If there are books returned to us, the function will return these as an array back to the user.
Our GetBookById function is similar to our GetAllBooks function, but this time we pass the id of the Book that we want to return to us:
We also pass an id to our UpdateBook function. We first make a call to our .GetBook(id) method to find the book we want to update. Once we’ve found the book, we then read the incoming request and deserialize it into a Book object. We then use the deserialized request to update our Book object and then pass this object into out .UpdateBook() method along with the id that we used to invoke the Function.
Testing our Function
Now that we’ve finished coding up our Functions, let’s spin it up and test it! Press F5 to start running our function locally. Give it a second to spin up and you should see the following endpoints for each of our Functions.
As you can see, our functions are running on localhost. We can use Postman to test these endpoints.
Let’s start with our CreateBook Function. Copy and Paste the endpoint for the Function into Postman. Set the request method to POST and click on the body tab. We need to send our request as a JSON payload, so set it to JSON and add the following body
{
"BookName" : "Computer Science: Distilled",
"Price": 11.99,
"Category": "Technology",
"Author": "Wladston Ferreira Filho"
}
Your Postman request should look like this:
Hit Send to send the request. We should get the following response (201).
We can view the document in our Cosmos DB account to make sure that we added the document to our account, which is has:
Insert a couple more books before moving on. We will now try to retrieve all the books in our collection using the GetAllBooks Function. Clear the JSON payload from the Body and change the request method to GET. Hit Send to make the request
We should get a response like this:
Here we have all the books in our collection returned back to us as a JSON array. Now, let’s test our GetBookById Function. In the response of our GetAllBooks function, grab an id and add it as a parameter in your route. Keep the body clear and keep the GET request method. All that has changed here is that we are looking for a specific book by using its Id.
Hit Send to make the request. We should have the book object returned to us like so:
Now let’s remove this book from our Cosmos DB collection. Change your request method to DELETE in Postman and hit Send.
We should get the following response:
Checking our Collection in Azure Cosmos DB, we can see that the book is no longer there:
Finally, let’s try updating a book. Let’s take the following book in our collection:
{
"id": "603ae1b621786dd7fd92d5c0",
"bookName": "The Dark Net",
"price": 18.99,
"category": "Technology",
"author": "Jamie Bartlett"
}
Grab the id and use it as a parameter to our UpdateBook function. Change the method to a PUT request and add the following body to our request
{
"bookName": "The Dark Net v2",
"price": 11.99,
"author": "Jamie Bartlett"
}
We send this body as a JSON payload. Hit Send to update this Book document.
We should get the following response.
We can also verify that the document has updated successfully in our Cosmos DB account.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we built an CRUD Web API using Azure Functions that manages books in a Cosmos DB Mongo API account. While this was a simple tutorial, hopefully you can see that if you’ve already built applications using MongoDB as a datastore, you can easily change to Azure Cosmos DB without making drastic changes to your code base.
If you want to download the full code, check it out on my GitHub (If you notice anything wrong and want to help fix it, please feel free to make a PR!)
If you have any questions, please feel to comment below or reach out to me via Twitter.
|
https://medium.com/geekculture/creating-a-web-api-with-azure-functions-azure-cosmos-db-mongodb-api-and-c-9bd8d528405a
|
['Will Velida']
|
2021-06-26 06:53:58.985000+00:00
|
['Azure', 'Programming', 'API', 'Software Development', 'NoSQL']
|
7 Basic Rules for Button Design
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7 Basic Rules for Button Design
by Nick Babich
Buttons are an essential element of interaction design. They have a primary role in the conversation between a user and the system. In this article, I’ll review seven basic principles you need to know to create effective buttons.
1. Make buttons look like buttons
When it comes to interacting with user interface, users need to know instantly what is ‘clickable’ and what’s not. Every item in a design requires effort by the user to decode. Generally, the more time needed for users to decode the UI the less usable it becomes for them.
But how do users understand whether a certain element is interactive or not? They use previous experience and visual signifiers to clarify the meaning of the UI object. That’s why it so important to use appropriate visual signifiers (such as size, shape, color, shadow, etc.) to make the element look like a button. Visual signifiers hold an essential information value — they help to create affordances in the interface.
Unfortunately, in many interfaces the signifiers of interactivity are weak and require interaction effort; as a result, they effectively reduce discoverability.
If clear affordances of interaction are missing and users struggle with what is “clickable” and what is not, it won’t matter how cool we make the design. If they find it hard to use, they will find it frustrating and ultimately not very usable.
Weak signifiers is an even more significant problem for mobile users. In the attempt to understand whether an individual element is interactive or not, desktop users can move the cursor on the element and check whether the cursor changes its state. Mobile users don’t have such opportunity. To understand whether an element is interactive or not users have to tap on it — there’s no other way to check the interactivity.
Don’t assume that something in your UI is obvious for your users
In many cases, designers intentionally don’t identify buttons as interactive elements because they assume the interactive elements are obvious for users. When designing an interface, you should always keep in mind following rule:
Your ability to interpret clickability signifiers aren’t the same as your users’ because you know what each element in your own design is intended to do.
Use familiar designs for your buttons
Here are a few examples of buttons that are familiar to most users:
Filled button with square borders
Filled button with rounded corners
Filled button with shadows
Ghost button
Among all those examples, the “Filled button with shadows” design is the clearest for users. When users see a dimensionality of an object, they instantly know that it’s something they can press.
Don’t forget about the whitespace
Not only the visual properties of the button itself are important. The amount of whitespace near the button makes it easier (or harder) for users to understand whether it’s an interactive element or not. In the example, below some users might confuse the ghost button with an information box.
As a user, you can’t tell whether it’s a box or a button.
2. Put buttons where users expect to find them
Buttons should be located in places where users can easily find them or expect to see. Don’t make users hunt for buttons. If users can’t find a button, they won’t know that it exists.
Use traditional layouts and standard UI patterns as much as possible
Conventional placement for buttons improves discoverability. With a standard layout, users will easily understand the purpose of each element — even it’s a button without strong signifiers. Combining a standard layout with clean visual design and ample whitespace makes the layout more understandable.
Don’t play hunt-the-button game with your users
Tip: Test your design on discoverability. When users first navigate to a page that contains some actions that you want them to take, it should be easy to spot an appropriate button for the user.
3. Label buttons with what they do
Buttons with generic or misleading labels can be a huge source of frustrations for your users. Write button labels that clearly explain what each button does. Ideally, the button’s label should clearly describe its action.
Users should clearly understand what happens when they click on a button. Let me give you a simple example. Imagine that you accidentally triggered a delete action and now you see the following error message.
The vague label ‘OK’ doesn’t say too much about the action button does.
It’s not clear what does ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ represent in this dialog. Most users will ask themselves “What happens when I click on ‘Cancel’?”
Never designed a dialog box or form that consisted solely of the two buttons ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’.
Instead of using ‘OK’ label it’s better to use ‘Remove.’ This will make it clear what this button does for the user. Also, if ‘Delete’ is a potentially dangerous operation, you can use red color to state this fact.
‘Remove’ makes it clear what button does for users.
A potentially dangerous action ‘Disable card’ is colored in red in this interface. Image: Ramotion
4. Properly size your buttons
Button size should reflect the priority of this element on the screen. Large button means more important action.
Prioritize buttons
Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one. Always try to make the primary action button more prominent. Increase its size (by making a button bigger you make it look more important for users) and use a contrasting color to capture user attention.
Dropbox uses size and color contrast to focus user attention on ‘Try Dropbox Business free’ CTA button.
Make buttons finger-friendly for mobile users
In many mobile apps, buttons are too small. This often leads to the situation when users mistype.
Left: properly-sized button. Right: buttons are too small. Image: Apple
MIT Touch Lab study found that averages for finger pads are between 10–14mm and fingertips are 8–10mm. This makes 10mm x 10mm a good minimum touch target size.
Image Source: uxmag
5. Mind the order
The order for buttons should reflect the nature of a conversation between the user and the system. Ask yourself, what order users expect to have on this screen and design accordingly.
User interface is a conversation with your users
For example, how to order ‘Previous/Next’ buttons in pagination? It’s logical that a button that moves you forward should be on the right, and a button which moves you backward should be on the left.
6. Avoid using too many buttons
This is a common problem for many apps and websites. When you provide too many options, your users end up doing nothing. When designing pages in your app or website, think about the most important actions you want your users to take.
Too many buttons.
7. Provide visual or audio feedback on interaction
When users click or tap on the button, they expect that the user interface will respond with appropriate feedback. Based on the type of operation, this might be either visual or audio feedback. When users don’t have any feedback, they might consider that the system didn’t receive their command and will repeat the action. Such behavior often causes multiple unnecessary operations.
Why is this happening? As humans, we expect some feedback after we interact with an object. It might be visual, audio or tactile feedback — anything that acknowledges the fact that interaction was registered.
User interface provides visual feedback that a press has registered. Image: Vadim Gromov
For some operations, such as downloading, it’s worth not only acknowledging user input but also show a current state of the process.
This button translates into the progress indicator to demonstrate the current state of the operation. Image: Colin Garven
Conclusion
Despite the fact that buttons are an ordinary element of interaction design, it’s worth putting a lot of attention to make this element as good as possible. Button UX design should always be about recognition and clarity.
Thank you!
Follow UX Planet: Twitter | Facebook
Originally published at babich.biz
|
https://uxplanet.org/7-basic-rules-for-button-design-63dcdf5676b4
|
['Nick Babich']
|
2019-06-05 16:58:12.605000+00:00
|
['UX', 'UI Design', 'User Experience', 'UI']
|
What was the Six-Days war?
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What was the six-day war?
In 1967, More than fifty years down the line, war broke out between Israel and its neighboring countries. The historical moment of the six-day war is also quite famously known as various other names such as the June War or Third Arab-Israeli War or Naksah. The brief war began on June 5 and lasted till June 10, 1967. It is considered as the third ward that took place among Arab and Israel countries.
The war event lasted for nearly six-day; however, its after-effects are lingering till the current day. The war broke out majorly between Israel and its neighboring countries, such as the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
Since then, a kind of diplomatic friction and skirmishes has followed among Israel and its neighbors. Israel’s defense forces drove preemptive airstrikes on Egypt’s surface and its allies and maimed their air.
Following the airstrike, Israel then staged a successful offensive terrain. It captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria.
The war ended when the U.N. intervened with a ceasefire. The U.N. intervention did stop the battle; however, it significantly changed the Mideast map and gave ascent to immense geopolitical friction.
Egyptian Air Force Airport following the Israeli Air Force’s launching attack
Why did the six-day war happen?
Eleven years have passed between the Sinai War in 1956 (Suez crisis) and the Six-Day War. Still, as in the period between the War of Independence and the Sinai War, the Arab states have taken advantage of continuing war preparations or war actions on Israel to destroy it.
Some of the measures were carried out over the years, and some were carried out close to the Six-Days war and were the grounds for the outbreak of the war:
In contravention of international law, Syria began work to divert Jordan’s waters that flattened it to prevent water from entering Israel. Establishment of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) terrorist organization whose entire purpose is the indiscriminate murder of Jews within the State of Israel, to lead the country’s demise. Later, the terrorist organization led by the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat will claim that the whole purpose is to establish a Palestinian Arab state in Judea and Samaria. In those days, Judea and Samaria were held by Jordan, and no request or demand was made for the establishment of a state in Judea and Samaria. The reason was simple; the Palestinian Arabs saw Jordan as their state and saw no need to ask for another state. Establish a joint command for the Arab states to strengthen their military force. The entry of Western Saudi and Iraqi military forces into Jordan to increase its military force against Israel. Since Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria and had geographical control all over the center of the country, there was a concern that Jordan was planning to invade the coastal plain, in an area where Israel is no more than 15 kilometers wide, and cut the State of Israel in half. Repeated bombings, from the Golan Heights, by the Syrian army on villages and kibbutzim in northern Israel. Blocking the Straits of Tiran (maritime access to Israel from the south) and imposing a siege on Israel. The same move Nasser made before the Sinai war in 1956. The concentration of large military forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the deportation of UN forces there. Two actions that clearly indicated Egypt’s offensive intentions. This act forced Israel to mobilize many reserve forces, which led to the Israeli economy paralyzing.
An Israeli gunboat passes through the Straits of Tiran near Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
Who started the six-day war?
The last two events (6 and 7) in May 1967 put Israel’s State into a period called the “waiting period.” A military choking ring that is tightening around the State of Israel with a clear desire to eliminate it.
The diplomats’ attempts to open the Straits of Tiran failed. The State of Israel was less than twenty years old, and many of its inhabitants were Holocaust survivors who survived the German inferno.
The Jewish public’s feeling was very harsh, and many feared that the end of the State of Israel was approaching.
On June 5, 1967, with no choice, the Israel Defense Forces initially commenced their focussed operation of coordinating an aerial attack on Egypt to remove the blockade and extermination threats.
Somewhere around 200 aircraft were fled from Israel and swooped in the west direction over the Mediterranean before converging on Egypt from the north. After capturing the Egyptians in astonishment, afterward, they assaulted eighteen several airfields and reduced somewhat 90 percent of Egypt’s air force as it hit rock bottom.
Moreover, once the air force of Egypt was eliminated, then Israel continued to increase the extent of its attack and decimated Jordan’s air force, Syria’s air force, and Iraq’s air force. At last, by the last hour of the day on June 5, Israeli pilots had absolute control over the Middle East’s skies.
Israel announced the victory of securing the air superiority; however, the bloody battle and its horrifying events continued for a few more days. The initial war in the territory of Egypt commenced on June 5. In concord with the airstrikes, Israel’s assets and infantry attacked over the border and into the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
Though the Egyptian forces tried their best to put up an active and strong resistance, however, at last, they fell into disorder and chaos once Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer announced the retreat.
In the next few days, Israeli forces were devotional to pursue the routed Egyptians over the Sinai, striking several casualties. The second round of the six-day war battle began on June 5, when Jordan started shelling Israel’s posted army in Jerusalem after reacting to an Egyptian victory’s fake statement.
Israeli’s gave a response with a horrifying attack on East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. On the last day of this bloody battle, June 7, 1967, The troops of Israel captured the City of Jerusalem, announced their victory, and celebrated by praying at the Western Wall.
The most iconic and famous photo of the Six-Days war
Where did the six-day war take place?
The war took place on three different fronts. On the southern front, Israel fought with Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. On the Eastern Front, Israel fought in Jordan, Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem. On the northern front, Israel fought Syria in the Golan Heights.
Six-day war combatants
Israel — Egypt
The battles of the Six-Day War were divided into air battles and ground battles. As described earlier, the air battles took place on the first day of the war and gave Israel complete air control throughout the war. The ground battles also began on the first day of the war. On Monday morning, the day the war began, three IDF divisions invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Within four days, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip located between Israel and Egypt were captured.
|
https://medium.com/@aboutjewishpeople/what-was-the-six-days-war-266a9210380c
|
['Info Aboutjewishpeople.Com']
|
2020-12-26 05:39:09.149000+00:00
|
['Politics', 'History', 'War', 'Diplomacy', 'Israel']
|
Report: #EarthDay2020 Webinar On “Climate Action & COVID19
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The webinar tagged “Climate Action and COVID-19” focused on Health, Education, Agriculture and Water relating to the COVID19 pandemic and our survival during Post-COVID19. Hosted by Olumide Idowu — the Co-Founder of ICCDI, the event was graced by various professional in all of the selected areas of the thematic concerns.
Speakers #EarthDay2020 Webinar On “Climate Action & COVID19
The speakers were;
Chris Chukwunyere; a public health practitioner with experiences in community and public health development who spoke on “Health and COVID19.”
John Agboola; a farmer, youth advocate, and an agricultural researcher for sustainable development in Africa who spoke on “Agriculture and COVID19”.
Mmanti Umohi; a lead consultant of PurplePatch Consult and educational psychologists who spoke on “Education and COVID19”.
Raquel Kasham Daniel; an educator, entrepreneur and a development practitioner in Nigeria who spoke on “Children and COVID19” and;
Victor Ogunsola; a researcher and development practitioner who spoke on “Water and COVID19”.
Many issues discussed were on the current global pandemic at national, regional and global levels at it relates to our primary means of survival currently treated by growing global health crisis. The challenges and solutions proffer are but not limited to;
Water Challenges:
Over 50 million people in Nigeria have no access to fresh, clean water, particularly in northern Nigeria. The latter heavily depend on rainfall to get access to water to conduct water-related activities.
A finding has shown that 69.7% in monetary value to purchase water since the pandemic has risen and it requires 6 litres of water daily to wash hands. Subsequently, 50% of the rural population spent at least 500 naira daily to buy water to drink and conduct domestic chores.
Solutions:
Water should be a priority for all nations, particularly in Africa; hence, governments have to ensure water provisions for all. If not, the water crisis would be inevitable now and after covid19.
The municipal players in the water resource sectors should be critical agents and partners in championing the cause of providing water.
Agricultural Challenges:
The global health crisis has caused a lower production of food and as strained further, food supply chain compounding the unemployment challenges among farmers who are mostly rural dwellers, and causing more widespread hunger.
Currently, the hunger crisis has increased. According to a United Nations report, over 135 million people are living in hunger.
Solution:
· Massive investment across all sector, particularly in the agricultural industry, should be of priority.
Monetary support, seeds, and fertilizers should be easily accessible to help end markets value addition and the multiplicity of food production.
At this time, innovative ideas by individuals and governmental support will be a holistic approach to rescue the nation from nationwide hunger and starvation post-COVID.
Public Health Challenges:
· Many individuals fail to maintain physical distancing against the rule to do so, increasing the global death rate.
The impact of this on the economy has left 2 million people unemployed and many more to come during post-COVID.
The mental health cases, domestic abuse, and violence have increased rapidly, shutting down marriages and limiting social interaction of people.
The pandemic kills people faster, creating no time for solutions, unlike climate change which is slow and accumulative, yet, it gives us time to act now to be able to mitigate and adapt.
Solutions
The only solution to curb the spread of COVID19 is to stay at home and frequently wash our hands to decrease more casualties.
Poper funding of public health care facilities and health care providers should be of priority. It is crucial to invest in these facilities to help save lives because there will still be pandemics to come but our capacity to handle it depends on our today’s choices.
This period has given us a sense of urgency and proactiveness for the future. It is left for us to use it to save our world.
Educational Challenges:
In our world today, over one billion students are out of school, this will not only affect the teacher-student physical relationship but has interrupted the “social flow” of student greatly
The educational system in Nigeria adopts a face-to-face teaching method. With the stay at home, over 85% of student who lives in rural communities and attends public schools will lack access to information, education, and adequate learning materials.
Many parents have become overwhelmed by this crisis and are not adequately equipped and mentally stable to help educate their children.
The lack of investment in advanced teaching technologies, training materials for teachers as well as the students will create more chaos in teaching students after COVID19
The lack of financial capacity to pay staffs will lead to an override during post-covid19
Solutions:
As a nation and as a people, we need to rethink strategies, restructure and re-evaluate our investments, spendings, channel our energies towards innovations and partnerships.
Complied by Abimbola Abikoye Project Lead ICCDI AFRICA
|
https://medium.com/climatewed/report-earthday2020-webinar-on-climate-action-covid19-ba20d5d464bf
|
['Iccdi Africa']
|
2020-04-25 08:27:55.397000+00:00
|
['Health', 'Covid 19', 'Climate Change', 'Agriculture', 'Wash']
|
Production Unity WebGL — The Basics
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Build once, deploy anywhere are the words on Unity’s site, and for the most part, this is true. However, Web has always felt like it is lagging about 2–3 years behind the other platforms that it supports. Or maybe it’s just that people don’t use the platform that much. Or maybe it’s just a more complicated platform to deploy to. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of the above.
Regardless, the amount of information out there on how to build and deploy a production ready Unity WebGL application is fairly slim. So — I thought I’d start a series of posts in order to ensure that information that we have gained from our various Unity WebGL projects isn’t lost.
Today, we’ll be talking about the basic technical setup that two of our production WebGL projects use: Real Deal Bridge and 22d2.
Basics of the Projects
Both Real Deal Bridge and 22d2 are set up fairly similar in terms of server architecture. They both have a backend server, a RESTful API mainly consisting of data manipulation, with some very basic webpages. They also both have a front-end application which interfaces with this API, built with Unity and deployed to WebGL (among other platforms). These WebGL apps are also hosted on their respective servers.
So, to interact with Real Deal Bridge, a user will head to the website. That will load the WebGL application, which will begin interacting with the backend server, as well as a host of other miscellaneous services in use. That entire web experience is being controlled through Sails JS, a nifty framework that allows us to set up our API, host the WebGL content, and spin up the server easily across our AWS architecture.
Serving Unity’s WebGL
One of the stumbling blocks that we repeatedly hit over the course of our project was to do with serving the WebGL content.
When you build a WebGL Unity application, it automatically creates an index.html for you so you can check out your project. For sails, we needed to convert this .html file to an .ejs — a javascript template that sails uses to represent simple pages. Here’s our landing page.
This is the first part to take note of. In a production environment, we probably want a little bit more control before we go ahead and instantiate the WebGL Module. Our code checks that you are on a supported platform (e.g. not mobile -> there’s an app for that), and that you don’t already have another instance of the application running.
Another thing that seems to have almost no information online is how to configure Sails to serve the headers that you need for people using your application. In Unity, you can configure settings like compression, which may require specific headers.
In sails, this is our block of code which configures those headers. See the full file here.
The key parts to pay attention to are the content-encoding settings. If you’re serving a compressed application, as we are, then you’ll need something like this to ensure your browser knows how to de-encode it again.
What Won’t Work?
Lets touch on some of the Unity functionality that is just missing for WebGL, and what we needed to do to work around this. Bear in mind, most of these are listed on Unity’s website, but don’t offer much help for what you’ll need to do to fix them.
Here’s a quick list of the things that we bumped up against, and a brief summary of how we fixed it.
WebGL doesn’t support the Microphone class, but Frostsweep Games has put together a wonderful WebGL Microphone library.
WebGL doesn’t support native copy/paste, but Kou-Yeung has put together a simple library for copy/paste management.
You can’t easily print files natively on WebGL, so we had to create a simple javascript function to take binary data of an image, convert it to a html image, then print that.
You can’t easily select local files for WebGL, but Frostsweep Games comes to the rescue again with WebGL Native File Browser.
It’s clear that Frostsweep Games has run into a number of problems with available WebGL libraries before, and decided to create and sell their own, and more power to them — they’re great!
Closing Thoughts
This is just the basics of what we had to go through in order to get a WebGL application to be production ready, and there is a lot more to go over. If there’s something you’re curious about, get in touch and I will add it to my list of things to cover in this series.
This article appeared first on the No Moss Studios blog. Head on over there for more quality content like this one.
|
https://medium.com/nomoss/production-unity-webgl-the-basics-b5374e1036fe
|
['Reuben M']
|
2020-12-21 05:32:52.679000+00:00
|
['Unity', 'Games', 'Game Development']
|
The Fact That You Write Is Incredible
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My wrist is currently in a bandage.
That’s an odd way to start an article about writing, I know, but bear with me.
As I write this article, I have just come to the end of a roughly 14 hour day of doing freelance writing jobs in which I have little to no control over what I write. Some of them are underpaid, most of them don't offer me credit, and all of them I took on because I need to earn money to avoid starvation.
Go and be a writer, they said…
The bandage? That’s my hastily thrown together home-remedy for what I think might be an oncoming RSI. It appears that my decision to work with words is now taking its toll on my body as well as my bank account.
Here’s the thing, though.
I love being a writer. And you should too.
Sure, there are some jobs that I hate, be it because of the topic or the workload, and I regularly come across people who think offering $5 for 3000 words is perfectly reasonable, but that still doesn't put me off the trade.
Because I still earn a living by writing.
So many people spend their lives saying that they want to write. They talk about how they would have loved to try journalism or how they’ve always had this idea for a book that they want to publish, but they almost never do anything about it.
We did.
We are writers.
We are the ones that did.
Without descending into a kind of pseudo-Braveheart style speech about the brilliance of writers and writing, I do think that the improbability of our position is something we should try to remember.
You don't have to earn a living as a wordsmith to call yourself a writer. You don't even have to earn any money at all. You just have to write.
One of the reasons freelance writers get hired is to do the work that other people can't or won’t do. That might seem obvious, but it’s key.
In general, people don't like writing. They’ll tolerate the odd email and they’ll text their friends and loved ones, but actual writing? Like essays and articles?
‘No thanks’
Even those people who say they wish they had tried, those wannabe journalists and authors from before, clearly didn't want it enough.
With that in mind, the fact that you write at all, let alone writing for money or a living, sets you apart from almost everyone else. It makes you special. (Cliched, I know, but still true.)
|
https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/the-fact-that-you-write-is-incredible-8f7c29751ce3
|
['Sean Bennett']
|
2020-12-07 17:02:47.005000+00:00
|
['Freelancing', 'Motivation', 'Inspiration', 'Self Confidence', 'Writing']
|
Let’s Start Decorating
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POETRY
Let’s Start Decorating
It’s time to celebrate the present and carve a beautiful future
Photo by Jovan Vasiljević on Unsplash
Let’s decorate
Our soul and heart
With gestures of goodness
Moulded in various forms
In this blessed present held so dear
Let’s try to reform
With lessons learnt from the past
Cruising peacefully into our future
Let’s carve a wonderful New Year!
©Neha Sandhir. All Rights Reserved.
|
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/lets-start-decorating-9a383b7a3030
|
['Neha Sandhir S']
|
2020-12-28 11:54:38.675000+00:00
|
['Poetry', 'Holidays', 'New Year', 'Energy', 'Happiness']
|
5 Signs You Are Dealing With a Narcissist
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5 Signs You Are Dealing With a Narcissist
Dealing with a narcissistic personality is hard work, here are the signs.
Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash
If you are like me, you may have found yourself being taken advantage of more than a few times in your life, this may have left you feeling stupid, sad, and lost. Why is it that you continue to find yourself in these situations? It’s like there is a beacon calling out to all of the narcissists, “here I am, I am kind and I will not realize what you are doing until it is too late.”
I’m here to tell you that it’s not you, it’s them.
Narcissistic personalities intentionally seek out people who are soft and vulnerable, often they seek out those of us with previous traumatic experiences that they can use to their advantage. If you are particularly open about your experiences and you confide in your narcissist about your trauma, you can bet your bottom dollar that inevitably they will use your trauma to control you.
There are the tell-tale signs of a narcissistic personality, signs such as entitlement, superiority, perfectionism, a need for attention and constant validation, and fear of rejection or criticism. However, I want to talk about the signs that you only begin to see whilst you are dealing with a narcissist — the signs that at the end you think, “Wow, how did I not see this before,” because these are the signs you need to be looking out for from the get-go.
I will also be touching on the aftermath and subsequent trauma of dealing with a narcissist, and how to begin the healing process. Believe me, you are not alone in this.
#1: They need to be in control of every situation.
My most recent experience began when I wanted to take a trip with four friends and we were talking about lodging. The trip happened to be around the same time as both my friend's anniversary (the narcissist) and my own anniversary with my husband. However, it happened to land on the exact same day as mine and my husband’s anniversary. I preferred to get a hotel room for added privacy, however, she wanted to rent a very large, and very expensive home.
I had explained that I need to be saving money and that I don’t really have the money for this home, but she guilt-tripped me and told me that everybody else on the trip wanted to rent this home and everybody else could afford it. Thus, I felt horrible so I agreed, and when I saw the home I stated that I would love to have the room with the bathtub because this trip lands on my 2nd wedding anniversary.
I had not expected the backlash or the argument that took place about a damn bathtub. I felt insane because it’s a bathtub who really cares, but also because of the way in which this person argued and made her case. In the end, I gave in and she would have gotten the room; luckily, the pandemic happened and I never had to go on this trip because the aftermath of our “friendship” came to a crashing halt after we entered into a business relationship.
This may seem like a silly and futile example, but I’m telling you because it is a prime example of the overwhelming control a narcissistic personality needs to have over every situation, even situations that don’t really matter in the long run; like a trip with some friends and a room with a bathtub. Any normal person would think, “Oh, it’s your wedding anniversary, of course, you can have the bathtub room,” or would compromise and at least say, “Well, maybe we can switch off, I get that room one night and you get it the next,” but not somebody who needs complete control and here’s why:
A narcissistic personality needs you to know that in every situation, they are on top, and if you are combative with them, or if you even try to stick up for yourself, they will come down on you like you can’t even imagine.
This was the first sign of many that I did not see, I just thought that she was a little demanding or in charge, and that was okay, but the events that came after were not what I expected.
#2: They blame or deflect onto others and never take responsibility for themselves or their own actions.
“Lack of responsibility is a glaring sign of a narcissist. Although narcissists want to be in control, they never want to be responsible for the results — unless, of course, everything goes exactly their way and their desired result occurs. When things don’t go according to their plan or they feel criticized or less than perfect, the narcissist places all the blame and responsibility on you. It has to be someone else’s fault,” — Margalis Fjelstad, Ph.D., LMFT
I have been in two business relationships with narcissistic women, one in which I wrote an article about here. My first relationship with a narcissist was actually the reason why I recognized the signs in my most recent relationship, and why I had been able to end this relationship before it got out of control. However, as you can imagine, despite my being kind and catering to this person’s needs, it still got out of control; because a narcissist must blame you when things don’t go according to their plan.
It is so important to recognize that this is not your fault. A narcissistic personality cannot take responsibility for their actions unless they reach the absolute perfect result that they were looking for, so if things go wrong, they have to blame you because blaming themselves would mean that they weren’t perfect.
For example, in both of my business relationships, I went above and beyond what the average person would have done. However, when I saw the red flags and decided to step away I ended both relationships in extremely kind ways. Unsurprisingly, despite me being non-combative, things got ugly; I was made out to be the bad guy, and they were completely in the right. Luckily, other people saw red flags too and immediately came to my side.
That is the thing about narcissism: people begin to see it whether you want them to or not.
#3: They completely lack empathy.
One of the most tell-tale signs of a narcissistic personality is their complete lack of empathy. Narcissists are known to be selfish and self-involved, they are also unable to understand what other people are feeling. Thus, when confronted with your emotions, a narcissist may deflect or seem unfeeling, this is because they are. They have little ability to understand the emotions of other people.
Some narcissistic personalities may also not understand their own emotions, according to Margalis Fjelstad, Ph.D., LMFT, “They don’t understand how their feelings occur. They think their feelings are caused by someone or something outside of themselves. They don’t realize that their feelings are caused by their own biochemistry, thoughts, and interpretations. In a nutshell, narcissists always think you cause their feelings — especially the negative ones. They conclude that because you didn’t follow their plan or because you made them feel vulnerable, you are to blame.”
This lack of empathy may have you feeling upset or like you are being undervalued or unheard, this is because making a connection with a narcissist is extremely difficult: they do not understand what you are feeling.
#4: You feel like you are always walking on eggshells.
At one point, in confronting my former “friend” and colleague, I had off hand mentioned that she used a lot of fonts in her ads. I did it in a funny, laughing manner, and the response was not what I expected: she got very upset, shut down, and “had to leave”. Moving forward if I would confront her or constructively criticize her, she would “feel too sensitive to talk about this”, turn off her phone, or simply deflect or blame issues on myself or other colleagues.
This kind of behavior made me unable to talk to her about necessary business issues for fear of backlash. The same thing happened with my former business partner, I began to feel like I was always walking on eggshells. A narcissistic personality needs you to always be on their side no matter what and if you are not on their side you are their enemy.
If you are feeling unheard, undervalued, or like you are getting serious backlash for small issues, this is a huge sign that you are being taken advantage of and that you are dealing with a narcissist. You have to remember that your feelings are valid, they are not to be hidden, if somebody cares about you or values you, they will listen to you with an open mind and an understanding ear.
#5: Emotional reasoning does not work.
You’ve probably made the mistake of trying to reason with a narcissist by explaining how you are feeling, and the painful impact that this person has had on you. However, as I mentioned above, you are met with resistance, backlash, and deflection. You think that if you explain your emotions, they will understand how much they have hurt you, but this thought process does not work with a narcissist, as they are unable to understand your feelings.
A narcissistic personality is only aware of his/her own feelings, and if they say they understand yours they are lying or attempting to gain control by seeming empathetic. Thus, when attempting to explain your emotional reaction to a narcissist, you will be met with anger or another unreasonable response.
You may also feel like you cannot talk about feelings or emotions with this person, which is a huge sign that they do not care about you. A narcissist only cares about themselves, which will make the fall out much worse when it inevitably happens.
Photo by Jonatán Becerra on Unsplash
Understanding and coping with the aftermath.
The aftermath and subsequent trauma of dealing with a narcissist can leave you feeling hurt, angry, and exposed. Watching them continue to move on with their lives, watching people support them, and realizing that they continue to get away with their behavior is extremely difficult. One of the things I have consistently found more frustrating than anything is watching people support somebody who is emotionally abusive operating under the guise of being “woke”.
When your abuser continues to profit off of the work and efforts of other people, it can feel almost just as terrible as when the abuse was happening to you. One way to quell this feeling is to understand that this is not about you. Your abuser did not abuse you for any specific reason, they did it because they could, and they will probably continue to do the same thing to other people.
In the end, you can bet that people will begin to realize their behavior and advocate against how they are treating other people. The best thing that you can do is to rid your life of this person and start wading through your trauma, as time goes by you will begin to see and understand how truly miserable narcissistic personalities are, which is why they abuse others.
Though it may seem that they are living happy, fulfilling lives, you have been privy to who they really are, and by understanding their personalities and their abusive patterns you can begin to understand that those who abuse others are truly unhappy with themselves.
Moving on, being happy, and living your own life is the best revenge because giving your abuser any amount of time is frankly a waste.
Final thoughts:
Dealing with any kind of abuse and trauma will leave you overwhelmed and exhausted, and moving on is a very difficult task. Accepting that being abused has far more to do with your abuser than with you is one way to begin to repair. Narcissistic personalities are unable to feel “normal” human emotions, and thus emotionally reasoning with them is impossible. Instead, begin to emotionally reason with yourself to begin to patch up the holes that your abuser has caused.
I can only hope that writing about my own lived experiences and abuse helps you to rebuild and repair, but everybody’s experiences with abuse and trauma are different. Remember to look for the red flags, don’t ignore them and move past them, sit with them, and allow yourself to truly see who you are dealing with.
Narcissists love to prey on those who they deem vulnerable, it is not about you, it is only about their need for control. Don’t let them dim the light within you.
|
https://medium.com/invisible-illness/5-signs-you-are-dealing-with-a-narcissist-cc6ab7464279
|
['Alexandra Tsuneta']
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2020-05-30 21:50:35.767000+00:00
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['Narcissistic Personality', 'Abuse', 'Advice', 'Trauma', 'Narcissism']
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Optimizing Customer Satisfaction With Machine Learning
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Optimizing Customer Satisfaction With Machine Learning
Analyzing an airline satisfaction dataset.
Photo by Chris Brignola on Unsplash
Flying can be a hassle. Long lines, uncomfortable seats, bad food… the list goes on. Now, mandates on mask-wearing, physical distancing, PCR tests, temperature checks, health forms, and more make the whole process a dizzying ordeal.
This is bad news for airlines. Airline revenue is already way down, and traffic isn’t expected to fully recover until 2024. Flying is more stressful than ever. Given this, airlines need to optimize customer satisfaction to recover faster, and emerge successfully out of this downturn.
I analyzed an airline passenger satisfaction dataset using the predictive insights tool Apteo to find what factors impact flyer satisfaction the most.
Inflight Wi-Fi is King
|
https://medium.com/dataseries/optimizing-customer-satisfaction-with-machine-learning-4735956befdd
|
['Frederik Bussler']
|
2020-09-30 10:20:43.041000+00:00
|
['Data Analysis', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Customer Experience', 'Machine Learning']
|
The Power of Being Against Emptiness
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The Power of Being Against Emptiness
Why taking a stand against the void is so vital for us all
Outside writing for Medium, I happen to do a lot of research in the book stacks of some fairly major libraries. I’m often intrigued by the names of the obscure and arcane volumes I come across. But recently I stumbled on a title that absolutely stopped me in my tracks.
Against Emptiness is cataloged as a 68-page book of poems published by Harper & Row back in 1971. From what I can tell, just a handful of public libraries in all of North America still hold a copy.
I wasn’t able to physically access the book, but as a writer in the self-improvement and personal growth space, those two deceptively simple words — against emptiness — fascinated me for days.
Since coming across the boolean listing, I’ve thought hard about against emptiness as an idea that can make huge ripples in the way we think about life.
|
https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/the-power-of-being-against-emptiness-93a3d7dfb277
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['Christopher Mackinnon']
|
2019-09-26 04:15:56.217000+00:00
|
['Personal Growth', 'Books', 'Creativity', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement']
|
The Lost Poem
|
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/genius-in-a-bottle/the-lost-poem-5a980369309
|
['Priyanka Srivastava']
|
2020-12-24 15:47:56.353000+00:00
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['Writing Life', 'Writers On Writing', 'Muse', 'Writing', 'Poetry']
|
How to Earn Money From Wishing Site Without Google AdSense — Smartest Blogger
|
How to Earn Money From Wishing Site Without Google AdSense — Smartest Blogger
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How to Earn Money From Wishing Site Without Google AdSense — Step 1 -
Step number one is to download the script code which I have linked below and save it to your PC. I have a password and you have to enter the password Two times t……
For Continuous Reading Visit —
https://www.smartestblogger.com/2020/12/How-to-Earn-Money-From-Wishing-Site-Without-Google-AdSense-Smartest-Blogger.html
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https://medium.com/@smartestblogger/smartest-blogger-d92fbff5f4eb
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['Smartest Blogger']
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2020-12-27 14:40:40.375000+00:00
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['Blogging', 'Blogging Tips', 'Admob', 'Google Adsense', 'Blogger']
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Vinea Frizzante: Vášeň pro hrozny jako brand identita
|
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/heelsmakedeals/vinea-frizzante-v%C3%A1%C5%A1e%C5%88-pro-hrozny-jako-brand-identita-e154661a799a
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['Milenka Morongová']
|
2020-12-15 13:17:52.021000+00:00
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['Branding', 'Identity', 'Design', 'Creative Process', 'Shooting']
|
Experts offer five principles to guide Congressional response to COVID-19
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March 12, 2020
Dear [Members]:
As you work to respond to the coronavirus threat on Capitol Hill, we urge you to consider the following:
Prioritize the health and safety of the public, staff, press, and lawmakers: We recognize that there are contradictory pressures to project calm while also modeling appropriate responses, such as the “social distancing” recommended by the Centers for Disease Control. In this vein, we encourage Congress to adopt a “putting on your own mask before assisting others” approach, to take rational steps to limit exposure on the Capitol Campus and within district offices. By temporarily postponing school tours, industry fly-ins, and in-person advocacy meetings, Congress will wisely decrease the risk of contagion to the public and staff.
Take steps to ensure the continued operation of the legislative branch, with modified emergency procedures: While we understand the need for Congress to limit exposure and chances for community spread of the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, we strongly urge Congress to remain capable of conducting business. The first branch of government must continue to legislate, appropriate, and conduct oversight even as the coronavirus makes in-person convening inadvisable; therefore we recommend allowing for the use of commercial technologies to conduct proceedings remotely during the emergency.
Adopt a “digital first” approach and use modern technology to maintain continuity of operations and transparency during emergency response: As both chambers admirably begin to implement steps toward telework for select staff, we encourage Congress to immediately begin working on ways that oversight and legislative work could be conducted online through existing commercial software and teleconference tools. While some functions that remain paper-based may need to continue to be conducted in person by minimal staff, the House and Senate should explore and adopt temporary rule changes that would allow lawmakers’ debate and votes in committee and on the Floor to occur remotely, while still being viewable to members, staff, the press, and public. These changes should be adopted with a “digital first” approach, ensuring that “if it can be done remotely, it should be done remotely” during the emergency response.
Continue to conduct business openly, allow access to the public and media, and provide trusted sources of factual information for constituents: As Congress considers increasingly virtual activity during the emergency period, it should maintain the ability for the public and the media to view proceedings. In addition, even as Capitol access is limited for visitors, members of the Capitol Hill press corps should continue to enjoy unfettered access.
Time-limit emergency provisions: To avoid unintended consequences of emergency-based changes in practice and procedure, they should be enacted as temporary changes, limited in time (we suggest one month) that expire if not renewed. This will allow Congress flexibility during a critical time, but also allows deliberation and debate on changes that could fundamentally alter how Congress conducts its business.
We appreciate the considerable efforts underway to respond to this unprecedented situation and stand ready to assist in any way. If you have any questions about our recommendations, please contact Marci Harris, POPVOX CEO, at [email protected], or Daniel Schuman, Demand Progress policy director, at [email protected].
Sincerely,
Kel McClanahan, Executive Director, National Security Counselors
Soren Dayton, Policy Advocate, Direct Democracy
Kevin M. Esterling, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, University of California, Riverside
Bob Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, OODA, LLC and Former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency
Marci Harris, CEO and Co-Founder, POPVOX
lorelei kelly, Fellow and Director of Congressional Modernization, Beeck Center, Georgetown University
Deborah Kobza, CGEIT, JIEM, President, International Association of Certified ISAOs (IACI)
David M.J. Lazer, Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Northeastern University
Patrice McDermott, Director, Government Information Watch
Michael A. Neblo, Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University
Daniel Schuman, Policy Director, Demand Progress Education Fund
Joshua Sewell, Senior Policy Analyst, Taxpayers for Common Sense
Joshua Tauberer, President, Civic Impulse, LLC
|
https://medium.com/g21c/experts-offer-five-principles-to-guide-congressional-response-to-covid-19-7e15ad1281a4
|
['Marci Harris']
|
2020-03-12 15:46:56.342000+00:00
|
['Congress', 'G21c Articles', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19']
|
Food For Felons: The Orange Card
|
I didn’t wake up in a cell, for the first time in years. The first feeling I felt was -
Hunger.
The previous day I had traveled by bus from Federal Correction Institute Petersburg Virginia to a Halfway House in Baltimore, MD. I was given a bus fare and one set of clothes. I also received the few dollars on my commissary account as cash and had a grey mesh back filled with books and plans for my future.
I wasn’t technically released from prison yet, but I was transporting myself on public transit. The last time I was on a bus I was shackled at the hands and feet and guarded by armed men. Now I was unshackled and unsupervised. As the hunger built throughout the day I ignored it. Still being state property I intended on eating state sponsored meals.
But by the time I arrived and checked into the converted motel which sat across the street from the Coca Cola factory, the food was gone. And as soon as I walked through the waist high chain link gate I was locked down and forbidden from leaving my new home for any reason for the next seven days.
It wasn’t a punishment, I didn’t arrive late or break any rules. It was simply the policy.
The old wrinkled black man who explained the rules made it clear that after the lockdown was over I still didn’t get freedom of movement. Before leaving I would need to request a pass in advance from my counselor, and have it approved. Leaving without permission for any reason (or coming back late) meant being sent back to real prison. Passes were not given for things like “eating” or “grocery shopping”, as these were not essential activities.
There is a saying we have about the Halfway house. It is “halfway in” not “halfway out”.
After my intake I went to my assigned room. There were four metal beds covered with familiar thin plastic mattresses, but the lockers that they were placed next to were much bigger than I was used to. This made the small motel room, with one bathroom, very cramped. Two of the beds had sheets and were clearly occupied, so I chose an empty one, put my bag in the locker and went to sleep directly on the plastic mattress. I kept all my clothes on to avoid sticking to the mattress, a trick I had learned from experience. You don’t want to lay your skin directly on that plastic for a minute, much less 8 hours.
Naturally I woke up hungry. So the first order of the day was breakfast before searching for sheets and other ways to make my situation just a little bit better.
Going down to the chow hall I found a surprisingly short line. When I reached the counter I was handed a small plastic tray with a thin slice of some unrecognizable meat, a tiny scoop of oatmeal and what looked like half a biscuit square.
There was also a small box of milk. The kind that hadn’t been satisfying in grade school and certainly wouldn’t do much for me as a 200 lb grown man. But at least the water fountain worked.
I sat down, ate it all and waited for a good opportunity to try for some more. When I thought the time was right I tried, and was denied.
Feeling frustrated I returned to my room, brushed my hair 1000 times (250 front, 250 back and 250 each side), put on my durag and went out to find a place to work out. I found a deserted workout room with some rusty free weights and a few old broken machines.
I smiled for the first time since checking in, got a workout in and then proceeded to pace the parking lot, watching and learning, until it was time for lunch.
There I received my second small portion of the day, again without seconds.
-
It didn’t take me long to notice something odd about the food situation. Few people ate at the chow hall at all. The standard way of eating seemed to be returning from a pass with copious amounts of store bought food.
I knew from the rules that we were allowed to bring back food when returning. But as a bunch of criminals soon to be released from federal custody money was tight, and while there were certainly some people with good outside support, there was clearly something going on.
The big red flag was the lack of complaints. Inmates complain often and loudly. It rarely makes a difference but there is little to lose by trying. I knew that here people would be on better behavior because of the fear of being sent back behind bars, but someone should have been complaining.
It didn’t take me long to learn how the game was being played here. The word was that the staff was stealing the food out the back, and therefore the less they served the better. A big change from prison where the inmates were the ones stealing the food, so it was circulating among us.
The man who broke it down to me then informed me it didn’t matter. The state was still taking care of us. That’s when he pulled out his wallet and from inside it what appeared to be an orange credit card and said:
“Food Stamps, Nigga. That’s how you eat”
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as “food stamps.” You could get an Orange Card with $300 worth of credit a month — that you could use at almost any grocery store.
Every single grocery store in the part of town where we were living.
Naturally it was against the rules to get one, as the state was already providing us with “adequate nutrition”. But as my clothes were quickly getting looser a supplement to my current nutrition seemed like it was worth a risk. A credit card is a small easy piece of contraband to hide from the frisking and searches.
He also gave me the system for success. There was an office out on the north side of the city. All you had to do is find a bogus reason to leave on a pass, and jet up there. It needed to be an all day reason because the lines are long. Once at that office all you needed to do was fill out an application and wait in line. When you were called they would give you a quick interview and then an Orange Card.
Since you can’t really make money in prison (the highest paid jobs got you a dollar an hour), and we weren’t filing taxes, the computer system would have you as eligible. Of course there was a catch.
You can’t tell them you have a criminal record. Because if you answer yes to that question then you also have to pass a drug test. The test wasn’t the problem, (at least for most of us), but the logistics of getting one were. The testing location was across town and there wasn’t enough time. You aren’t pulling off a bogus pass two days in a row. A gap would close the file, forcing you to restart the process.
This wasn’t really a problem though, because it was known that the computer system at this office didn’t talk to the criminal record systems. So the solution was to say “No” and the great tax paying citizens of the country would foot your grocery bill.
All I had to say when I heard this was:
“Bet. Good look homeboy.”
-
The most common and useful bogus pass that we had at our disposal was “Healthcare for the Homeless”. Which is where we went to get our medical care. But since it was large, overcrowded and disorganized there was no way for the Halfway House staff to make sure that you were there. You could show up in the morning, sign in, get someone to sign your paper and disappear for the day.
And since healthcare is essential it had to be really clear that you were cheating the system to have it denied.
Most of us found a reason to go about once every two weeks. I have pretty bad allergies which used to occasionally develop into sinus headaches. During this time of my life “serious symptoms” of these developed about once every two weeks, and every so often I actually stayed to get prescriptions of claritin and sudafed filled — another way to save a few dollars.
Most of my fellow inmates used these trips to go home or visit friends. Especially of the female variety. I would use most of mine visiting Barnes and Noble in Powerplant by the Inner Harbor. I could hide in a corner in a comfortable chair and read in peace, without worrying about shit poppin off.
Healthcare for the Homeless was a 2.8 miles (4.5 km) walk down Monument street. We were supposed to be able to get bus tokens for our passes out, but much like the food they were really available.
Word was that you could buy the tokens meant for us at Lexington market. On the West Side of Town.
Eventually I would figure out how to stock up on free tokens in the Halfway house, but that came after my Orange Card. So I walked or when time was short, I ran. I knew all those laps around the track in prison would pay off one day. I was conditioning for the war I expected on the outside.
The day I planned to get my Orange Card I was filled with nervous energy.
Good. It helped me move fast.
I ran to Healthcare for the Homeless, waited in line and got my paper signed. Then I ran over to the office I was told about. I arrived sweaty and smelly but I was certainly not the only one there with a stench.
After a few hours it was finally my turn and I went into the office for my interview.
Which went well until I was asked the question…
“Have you ever been convicted of a crime”
The voice in my head said “No” sticking to the plan, but the word that came out of my mouth was
“Yes.”
Then the voice in my head exploded at me.
“You fucking idiot, you fucked up your life and you fucked this up too.”
But my face remained calm, cool and collected.
The lady interviewing me told me that I need to pass a drug test. She says “don’t worry about getting back today, you can come back tomorrow”.
The voice in my head continued to berate me.
After she wrote down the address and directions I simply told her “I will see you later today.” l then casually walk out of the room, and exit the office. Once outside I broke into a sprint, shot down the staircase and started running towards the location of the drug test.
Like a cheetah chasing his prey I know my options are success or going to sleep hungry.
I got a little lost at one point but still made good time. Upon my arrival at the second office there was another line. I impatiently waited my turn staring at the clock. Eventually I was called to take the test and my results came back as negative.
On the way back to the Food Stamp office I don’t get lost. I am sweatier and smellier than I was earlier but successfully get my Orange Card.
My thoughts now turned to getting back to the Halfway House on time. I look at the clock and realize that I have plenty of time. I smile as I realize that I can stop at the grocery store and get some grub.
I jogged until I made it to the grocery story I was familiar with the area near the Halfway House. When I walked in the door I immediately had an anxiety attack. Too bright, too many people, too many options. I stuck my hands in my pocket, looked at the floor and started shuffling around the store trying to calm down.
When I got myself together I decided that what I need is protein and carbs. I got a rotisserie chicken and an enormous bag of kettle cooked potato chips.
But as I approached the counter I could feel my heartbeat rising again. Scenarios of this victory being taken from me began running through my head.
What if the card doesn’t work for some reason.
But when my turn finally came it worked just fine.
I even got a smile from the cashier. It was as if she didn’t know that I was a felon fresh out of the feds. I left the store clutching the unfamiliar plastic bag filled with food. I sped walked the rest of the way to the Halfway House.
Before I rounded the last cored I stashed the card in my underwear. We were often searched upon returning and my new Orange Card was a valuable possession. When I walked inside the worker lazily wanded me with a metal detector and let me inside.
When I reached my room I ate until I got sick..
But my upset stomach had no effect on the smile I had on my face as I lay in bed and thought about the next steps of my plan.
_
I wear a scarlet letter that can never be washed off. You might believe that we live in a society where once you have paid the debt for a mistake that you made, you are allowed to resume “life”. But it is simply not true. There are unwritten punishments for felons such as “life without opportunity” and “life without justice” that help stop most of us from ever becoming productive members of society.
People often ask me what makes me so different from the majority of men who after being released from prison end up back in prison.
When I made the decision to change and make a positive impact on the world, I didn’t expect the world to help. In fact I expected the world to do everything it could to make that task impossible.
I expected the world to do everything it could to bring me back down into the pit, whether that pit was behind bars or under the ground.
Change is hard. It is impossible if you go in with the expectation that because you made a decision that the universe is going to help you. You need to expect obstacles that will make it tough, and it will always be easier to give up.
Reality is not fair. Cliches like “work hard” or “do the right thing” sound great, but are not useful in really tough situations.
I was not willing to play fair and follow the obtuse and often arbitrary rules while being taken advantage of due to my early mistakes. There was no recourse, but there was remedy.
Finding a remedy doesn’t mean taking the shortcut or easy way out though. Because of what I had done I accepted that I would need to work harder to achieve my goals.
Having to pass a drug test to receive nutritional assistance when you have a criminal record is not an unreasonable demand. I complied, even though I don’t believe that drug users should be denied state assistance, with or without a criminal history. Drug abuse is a mental health problem, the criminalizing of certain drug users is the root cause of many of the larger problems in American society today.
But that did not make it ok to lie just to avoid an inconvenient extra step. I don’t have to think that something is “right” to agree that it is reasonable. And the fact that I was being mistreated in the Halfway House also did not justify lying.
Life is not fair. You can choose to complain about the injustices of the world or you can start working to create a better one.
|
https://medium.com/@realdbenmoshe/food-for-felons-the-orange-card-6f0e69a871d0
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['David Ben Moshe']
|
2021-03-09 08:29:19.499000+00:00
|
['Criminal Justice', 'Crime', 'Prison', 'Prison Reform', 'Social Justice']
|
How Ethereum Works (featuring Spongebob GIFs)
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One of the main selling-points of using blockchain technology is security. Many people rave about it, but how exactly does this often confusing technology ensure transactions are authentic? Let’s find out.
First off, every Ethereum transaction features 3 main properties: From, To and Value. Makes sense, right? In its simplest form, a transaction is an amount (value) of anything (MONEY, Chocolate!, Krabby Patties, etc.) going from one person to another. If that was enough to know that a transaction was valid, I wouldn’t be writing this. Every transaction also contains a signature, stored in two fields, r and s, which is what the blockchain will use to verify a transaction as authentic.
Let’s dig deeper into how that transaction signature works.
When you perform a transaction, you’re likely using a wallet. When it comes to Ethereum, a widely-used wallet is Meta Mask. When you create a Meta Mask account, you’re also assigned a Private Key. This key is stored by Meta Mask and used to sign every transaction you’ll ever perform. A Private Key is a combination of 32 random bytes (64 hex characters). As the name implies, it’s value should be kept private, or you run the risk of losing every last dime (Ether) you own. This is like that one dark secret you wrote down in your journal (ew, who still has journals?) and locked away for no one to see.
Your Private Key is passed through an ECDSA (Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), which creates your Public Key. This pretty much takes your private key and makes it into something longer (nominee for over-simplification of the year?).
Your Public Key is 64 bytes long (because why not) and, as the name suggests, is public. You don’t really care about people knowing this one. If the Private Key is like your credit card number, then the Public Key is like your Middle Name. It may be embarrassing, but who cares?
Finally (well, almost finally), your Public Key is hashed using Keccak/SHA-3 (a super-awesome algorithm that does super-awesome algorithmic things) and the last 20 bytes of that value becomes your “Ethereum Account”. Phew!
What’s so special about this? What’s special is that someone may be able to reverse-engineer your Ethereum Account and obtain your Public Key, which is…public…but they can’t use your Public Key to determine your Private Key. This is thanks to the irreversible nature of the ECDSA.
When a transaction is signed, it’s done so using the Private Key. This Private Key populates the r and s fields, which become the signature. The r and s are used in transaction verification. Both fields are passed into a special ECRECOVER function, which outputs the Public Key and Ethereum Account. The blockchain does this, and verifies that the Ethereum Account in the transaction’s From field is the same account that is derived from the ECRECOVER function when you use the transaction signature.
This method of transaction verification works because if someone changes the signature of the transaction, it won’t correspond with the Account From, vice-versa. Additionally, if a transaction is modified in any way while being sent, it must be signed again, therefore if the person modifying it does not have access to the initial sender’s Private Key, the verification step would reject this transaction.
I hope you came out of this one knowing a little more about Ethereum and how blockchain ensures transaction authenticity. Otherwise, hey, at least there were Spongebob GIFs. Who doesn’t like those? Until next time…
|
https://medium.com/@davidmcintosh/how-ethereum-works-featuring-spongebob-gifs-d7916e043325
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['David Mcintosh']
|
2020-12-08 03:39:16.363000+00:00
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['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum Blockchain', 'Blockchain Development', 'Ethereum']
|
On the crest of Waves / Monthly digest / February 2021
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Hi Waves community,
We are excited to introduce the February issue of our monthly digest, from which you’ll learn about the Waves ecosystem’s major news and updates.
In this issue, we’ll pay special attention to DeFi. Five years ago, when Waves was created, it was hard to predict in what directions the blockchain industry would go. Decentralized finance (DeFi), as we know it today, was still in formative stages, and many DeFi tools were not yet even invented, let alone widely used.
However, Wave’s approach towards developing its blockchain has always been focused on high throughput and low fees. And now, as DeFi apps are super-hot, these advantages of the Waves protocol have come in extremely handy.
Based on the Waves blockchain with its low fees and high transaction speed, the ecosystem’s DeFi products and projects are enjoying an inflow of new users, while other chains, including Ethereum, are hitting a road bump due to enormous fees and throughput issues. Due to its gateways to Ethereum and BSC, Waves is offering a scalable solution for users of other blockchains, as well!
In addition, the Waves blockchain offers a very high security level: so far, not a single DeFi application in the Waves ecosystem has been hacked.
Below, you’ll read about recent successes of the Neutrino stablecoin protocol and Swop.fi, one of the youngest projects in the Waves ecosystem, which, however, is quickly gaining traction in the DeFi space.
At Waves Tech, we truly believe that DeFi apps are set to boost mass adoption of blockchain solutions and we are doing everything possible to make open finance attractive for regular users on a day-to-day basis.
And now — to the latest news and updates!
Pushing the boundaries
Staying true to its mission of building innovative blockchain solutions for mass users, Waves Tech is working hard on updating and developing its blockchain protocol. That, coupled with growing interest in the ecosystem’s various projects and products, has resulted in a steady increase in the value of our native token, WAVES.
In late February, we reached another major milestone, as WAVES’ market capitalization for the first time hit the $1 billion mark on CointMarketCap.
Meanwhile, as part of our integration with Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network that provides reliable, tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain, WAVES performance metrics are now available on Chainlink Market.
Set to conquer the world
The Neutrino stablecoin protocol has lately been expanding operations on a global scale.
In a bid to attract users to Neutrino and its tokens, several top international crypto exchanges recently announced airdrops of Neutrino Token (NSBT), the protocol’s governance token, to their users.
A total of 5,000 NSBT will be allocated for distribution and available to be claimed by OKEx users. The same amount of NSBT will be available to be claimed by Bithumb Korea users. Meanwhile, users of Huobi Global have already collected 5,000 ERC-20-standard NSBT.
As users across the globe are learning about the advantages of NSBT, which, by the way, has considerably grown in value over the last few weeks, a USDN/WETH pair has been launched on the popular service SushiSwap.
Meanwhile, Crypto.com, one of the world’s fastest growing crypto exchanges, recently added a USDC/WAVES trading pair.
New staking options have arrived on Waves.Exchange, enabling users to stake their BTC, ETH, UCDC and USDT, earning an APY of up to 48%.
At this point, it is quite clear that the future of the DeFi segment is in interoperability. As soon as DeFi apps can be operable on any chain, as opposed to those on which they were built, the DeFi space’s attractiveness to regular users will grow, as they will be able to avoid exorbitant fees and other issues that some blockchains are currently facing.
In the Waves ecosystem, the Gravity protocol is in charge of interoperability solutions. Recently, it announced plans for the first half of 2021.
The main highlights are:
Integration with the Avalanche Blockchain
The integration process of Gravity and Avalanche, an open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, will involve several stages. At the initial stage, a wrapped version of AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, will be released on Waves and, subsequently, Avalanche-based versions of WAVES, USDN and NSBT will be launched.
ERC-20 gateways in the Waves blockchain
Based on research data and the existing codebase of Binance Smart Chain, full-fledged mainnet ERC-20 SuSy gateways to Ethereum will be launched.
Integration between Gravity and Polkadot
The primary aim of integration with Polkadot, an open-source sharding multichain protocol that facilitates data and asset cross-chain transfer, is to develop and deploy gateways between Polkadot and Ethereum into Waves/Ethereum for DOT as wrapped tokens.
Other plans include an NSBT ERC-20 gateway that will be able to stake locked NSBT and accrue rewards in WAVES and USDN tokens and a delegation gateway that enables signing transactions in Waves from an Ethereum account, as well as possible integration with Fantom and Optimistic Rollups.
In focus: Swop.fi
Launched just a few months ago, Swop.fi, an automatic market maker (AMM), is one of the most recent additions to the Waves ecosystem. However, the project has already emerged as a major player in the global DeFi space.
Swop.fi operates on the Waves protocol, which, thanks to its high throughput, offers low fees of 0.005 WAVES (roughly $0.05). The average speed of a transaction’s adding to the Waves blockchain is just 3–5 seconds. Low fees and high speed are the major components of user experience on Swop.fi, making the service more attractive than the competitors. For instance, sending a transaction on Ethereum could cost $30 and up and take a few minutes.
In early February, Swop.fi launched its governance token, SWOP, which is distributed as rewards to liquidity providers and, going forward, will allow users to vote on key protocol parameters.
1 million SWOP tokens has been reserved to be gradually released to early-bird liquidity providers on Swop.fi, while another 1 million will be distributed during the first year of operation as a farming reward.
SWOP is quickly attracting attention, as it has been listed by Coinranking, and Tidex added the USDN-SWOP pair.
One of Swop.fi’s main features are its lucrative liquidity pools. Most recently, several new pools were launched:
Swop.fi liquidity pools offer an annual percentage yield (APY) of up to 100% and sometimes more. Why is that possible? A detailed answer to this question can be found in this article. But, to explain it quickly, the income of a user who provides liquidity to one of Swop.fi pools consists of several elements, such as:
Farming rewards in SWOP tokens
LP rewards made up by 60% of accumulated swap fees, which stay in the pool to be distributed among liquidity providers, based on pool weights and users’ share in a specific pool.
Staking rewards for Neutrino assets, as most of USDN, EURN and other stablecoins issued on the Neturino protocol, are automatically staked, offering Swop.fi liquidity providers extra earnings.
The combination of the above rewards results in an attractive APY.
Swop.fi is already gaining universal appreciation, as Dapp Radar recently put the service on its list of the best DeFi apps outside the Ethereum ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Swop.fi is a totally global service, and its team is working hard on spreading the word about it across the world. In February, 10 AMM sessions on Swop.fi were held in various countries, explaining how the project operates, why it is lucrative and how to make the most of it. Answers to the most interesting and insightful questions are gathered here.
Moving forward, Swop.fi has ambitious plans for the coming months and throughout 2021.
One is custom pools, or an opportunity to launch your own pools. This will be the easiest way to make a market for your token, as there will be no hassle of creating orders on the exchange, and no special skills will be required. With just a couple of clicks, you will be able to add, for instance, pools of your token in a pair with popular cryptocurrencies, such as WAVES, USDN or BTC. All you need is to have tokens to deposit. Once created, the pools will work by themselves.
Another major goal is the Swop.fi API. Once the basic Swop.fi functionality is ready, an API will be deployed, providing data for our markets, such as liquidity, volumes, prices, etc. This data can be used in various ways, including the representation of our project on DappRadar, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.
Arguably, the highest point of Swop.fi’s plan for 2021 is offering users access to inter-chain liquidity. They’ll be able to add and remove liquidity directly from accounts on other blockchains. Interaction between a user’s account and the Swop.fi smart contract will be done via gateways based on the Gravity inter-chain communication protocol. This feature will turn Swop.fi into a full-fledged global service with mainstream appeal.
Spreading the word across the globe
We keep paying special attention to informing and educating users about DeFi opportunities in the Waves ecosystem.
Since yield farming is a very hot topic these days, introducing many new users to DeFi and offering more earning options, we devoted a livestream to it. We discussed all aspects of yield framing and the best ways to earn using this lucrative DeFi tool.
In addition, we compiled a comparative table for yield farming apps offered by most popular DeFi services — Curve, Swop.fi, Sushi and Pancake. Based on data from the table, users could decide for themselves, which yield farming app better suits their needs.
As Swop.fi constantly expands its operations, adding new liquidity pools, several explanatory videos have been published, guiding users through the new USDT/USDN and USDC/USDN pools.
Since the popularity of the WAVES tokens of the Ethereum network’s standard, ERC-20, is growing thanks to its attractive staking opportunities, we published a step-by-step guide on ERC-20 WAVES staking.
Further spreading the word about the advantages of the Waves ecosystem’s products and services, our speakers were recently featured on Cointelegraph and Cointelegraph China.
Still, regardless of how hard we are working, we never forget about fun stuff! Check out the best gifs from our St Valentine’s Day contest.
That’s it for now. We’ll be back with more Waves ecosystem news and updates next month. Stay tuned!
|
https://medium.com/wavesprotocol/on-the-crest-of-waves-monthly-digest-february-2021-71d7df4e43e0
|
['Waves Tech']
|
2021-03-10 10:02:37.900000+00:00
|
['Digest', 'Neutrino Protocol', 'Wavesplatform', 'February', 'Swopfi']
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Beginner to Advance — Web Scraping Guide in Python: Deploy a Python Web App using Flask and Postgres on Heroku.
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Beginner to Advance — Web Scraping Guide in Python: Deploy a Python Web App using Flask and Postgres on Heroku. Kaus Pathak Follow Jun 23, 2020 · 4 min read
In Previous Tutorials , we learned about:
Asyncio Programming
Rotating Requests with a pool of Headers and Proxies.
Web Scraping
RESTful API for lyrics using Flask and Postgresql.
But in this final tutorial we will deploy the App using Heroku and test our API.
About Heroku
Heroku is one of the first cloud platform as a service (PaaS) and supports several languages — Ruby, Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go.
The first thing we need to do is define which libraries our application uses. That way, Heroku knows which ones to provide for us, similar to how we install them locally when developing the app.
Setup Heroku
Go to Heroku Signup and create a free Account by verifying your Gmail Account.
Log in to your Account
System Setup
Firstly you need to install Git for your Os. Git allows and encourages you to have multiple local branches that can be entirely independent of each other. Go to this page and install the Heroku CLI for your OS. For Installing Heroku CLI on Ubuntu you can follow these Steps. If installed correctly , You will be able to run command in Terminal:
git --version && heroku --version
Gunicorn
The Gunicorn “Green Unicorn” is a Python Web Server Gateway Interface HTTP server. It is a pre-fork worker model, ported from Ruby’s Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with a number of web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources and fairly fast.
To install Gunicorn using pip , run the Command in Terminal
pip install gunicorn
Login Heroku
To login Heroku CLI , you first need to run login command in terminal which will take you to login page in browser:
heroku login
Create App
To create app and PostgreSql on Heroku you need to run following commands.
heroku create <appname>
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev --app <appname>
Get URI
To get URI details of your Postgresql on heroku
heroku config --app appname
# Add details to your app production file
Config Files
You need to add 3 files to you base directory which will help Heroku to deploy your App:
Procfile — Procfile tells Heroku what commands should be run ( without any extension ) requirements.txt — Libraries to install with their supported Versions. runtime.txt — Python Version to use .
Create Procfile
touch Procfile
# Add this
web: gunicorn app:app
Create requirements.txt
pip freeze > requirements.txt
Create runtime.txt
touch runtime.txt
# Add this
python-<your python Version>
Deploy with Git
git init
git add . && git commit -m 'Deploy'
heroku git:remote -a <appname>
git push heroku master
Upload The Database
Congrats……!!!!!!!
You have successfully created your first flask app with Postgre but you still need to upload you Data which you uploaded on local Postgre to Heroku.
Create Backup of Dataset
Fill the Desired Name.sql with format as “Plain”
In Advanced Settings , under the Queries ,set “Use Insert Command” as True.
Once you successfully Exported the Database as SQL format you can Import this data to Heroku PostgreSQL.
Once executed it start Inserting Rows to your app(Heroku Limit- 10,000 rows)
heroku pg:psql --app APP_NAME < SQL_FILE_NAME.sql
To run the Website , you can either check the website or run the command:
heroku open --app APP_NAME
You have Successfully Scraped the Lyrics , Build the App and deployed it on Heroku. Well Done …!!!
Previous Tutorials.
Tutorial 1 — Introduction
In Previous Tutorials , we Understood Basic Concept of Web Scraping and Created Simple function to Extract lyrics from page using requests and BeautifulSoup.
Tutorial 2 — Rotating Requests with Pool of Header and Proxies in Python.
To Create a Bigger Project which can scrap thousands of Pages from the Internet You need more Clear Work Environment by using the concepts of OOP and Inheritance. You also need to have more Detailed Knowledge of Header Pooling and Proxy Pooling to remain Anonymous from the Server which we Already covered in the Second part of This Tutorial.
Tutorial 3 — Work Environment and Asynchronous I/O Programming
We will do Asynchronous I/O Programming to Increase your Scrapping speed Which will be covered in Third part of this Tutorial.
Tutorial 4 — Automated Site Scraping
With all the concepts studied in previous Tutorial , we will create actual Automated Scraper to download and save lyrics from web page in Forth part of this Tutorial.
Tutorial 5 — API Access
To easily access the Lyrics from the internet , We will Create Flask API and front end to access our Scrapped Lyrics in Fifth Part of this Tutorial.
Tutorial 6 — Host our Flask server on Heroku
To provide Easy Access of Lyrics we will host our Flask Server over Heroku.
Final Words
Thanks for reading this post, we would love to hear your feedback. Feel free to Comment on any Issues.
Give us a clap if you enjoyed it:) . Follow us to get our Latest Articles.
|
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/beginner-to-advance-web-scraping-guide-in-python-deploy-a-python-web-app-using-flask-and-a0e3cc8ce9f6
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['Kaus Pathak']
|
2020-06-24 15:38:00.678000+00:00
|
['Postgresql', 'Development', 'Python', 'Flask', 'Heroku']
|
TOP 10 PLACES TO VISIT IN EGYPT. As the only survivors of the ancient…
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1. PYRAMIDS OF GIZA
As the only survivors of the ancient Greek-listed Seven Wonders of the World, the incredible Pyramids at Giza are the world’s oldest attraction. Known as Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus, the pyramids were already more than 2,000 years old when Herodotus the Greek historian visited them (5th century BC). A highly skilled corps of mathematicians, masons, surveyors and stonecutters did the job of building the Pyramids. 100,000 slaves were used to carry out the backbreaking task of moving and laying the stones of the largest pyramid, Cheops. Even to this day experts cannot agree how this incredible feat of architecture was achieved, given the prehistoric tools available to the Egyptians.
To date 138 pyramids have been discovered in Egypt. Most were built as tombs for the country’s Pharaohs and their consorts during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. All Egyptian pyramids were built on the west bank of the Nile, which as the site of the setting sun was associated with the realm of the dead in Egyptian mythology. The Pyramids contain a maze of confusing passages, which were designed to protect the great Pharaohs in the afterlife, along with their hordes of treasure.
2. ABU SIMBEL TEMPLES
Possibly the most awe-inspiring temple of all ancient Egypt with its gargantuan rock-cut façade, the great Sun Temple of King Ramses II at Abu Simbel was created in honour of the mighty King Ramses II. Guarding the entrance to the temple and hewn into the side of a mountain are four colossal statues of the pharaoh himself. In a fit of precision and architectural egotism, Ramses II had the entire temple carefully angled and oriented in order that the sun’s rays would align twice a year on his date of his ascension to the throne (21 February) and on his birthday (21 October) and illuminate the inner sanctum of the temple. This incredible natural phenomenon provides for a most spectacular sight, which has come to be referred to as the Sun Festival of King Ramses II. Arriving to the temple before sunrise sunrise, you’ll witness the shafts of light slowly creeping through the rock hewn inner Hypostyle Hall (replete with further statues of the king) and through to the Sanctuary. Significantly, the sun illuminates statues of Amun-Re, Re-Herakhte and Ramses the god, whilst the statute of Ptah — the god of darkness — remains in the shadows.
Over the centuries, the desert sands imperceptibly shifted until the temple was all but lost to humanity. It was rediscovered by chance in 1813 by a Swiss explorer, John Lewis Burkhardt who saw just the smallest tip of a pharaoh’s head peeking above the desert sands. It was not until the British happened upon Abu Simbel and started excavating, that the full glory of the temple of Abu Simbel was revealed to the modern world. Famously, the temple was re-located in a multi-million dollar operation in 1972, further up from the shoreline of Lake Nasser, which had threatened to erode the foundations of this monolithic temple complex. For this reason, the sun now strikes a day later than Ramses had originally planned, though the event itself is no less stunning.
3. VALLEY OF THE KINGS
Located in 4,000-year-old Luxor, the Valley of the Kings is studded with often highly decorated tombs, constructed to house the regal sarcophagi enclosed mummies of the mighty pharaohs awaiting their passage into the after-life. Some of the best-known tombs are those of Ramses II, Seti I, Amenhotep II and of course, the tomb of King Tutankhamun. In all, more than 60 opulent and lavish tombs have been excavated. There are at least 75 tombs in Biban al-Harim, the Valley of the Queens, around 4 of which are open. Deir al- Bahri, otherwise known as the famous Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, rises out of the desert plain in a series of terraces. Partly rock-cut, partly freestanding, it is one of Egypt’s finest and most photographed monuments.
4. KARNAK & LUXOR TEMPLES
Second in popularity only to the iconic pyramids, the temples of Karnak and Luxor are some of the most striking relics of ancient history in the world. Karnak is known as one of the largest temple complexes in the world, and was added to over hundreds of years by one pharaoh followed by the next. The Karnak complex is made up of four distinct sections, of which only the Amun-Re precinct is open to the public. The Amun-Re part of the complex consists of numerous, intricate temples, columns and an obelisk. The Luxor temples, which were built around 1,400 BC are equally, if not more, magnificent and overall form an exceptionally significant part of Egypt’s history as they were the site where many of the country’s kings were crowned. The site contains a plethora of sandstone structures, ranging from statues of gods and pharaohs to impressive murals and friezes. It goes without saying that no trip to Egypt is complete without exploring the ancient grounds on which these temples sit.
5. HURGHADA
Founded in the early 20th century, the Red Sea resort of Hurghada took on a growth explosion thanks to tourism in the 1980s. The Hurghada of today comprises three main centres and numerous self-contained tourist villages. To the north, lies Ed-Dahar, which hosts more than half of the total local population, and some of Hurghada’s more expensive hotels, restaurants and the tourist bazaar. A couple of kilometres south lies Sigala, perhaps less popular than Ed-Dahar. Still further south is New Hurghada where there are a concentration of up market hotels and restaurants. All of this development has made Hurghada one of Egypt’s most popular resort towns on the Red Sea coast. Hotels and expanded infrastructure provide holidaymakers with excellent aquatic facilities for sail boarding, yachting, deep-sea fishing, SCUBA diving and snorkeling.
Hurghada’s central location provides a gateway to prime offshore reefs, which are some of the finest in the world. Hurghada is also known for its lively nightlife. For retail therapy, the town has plenty of shops selling knock-off bags and tees, snorkelling gear and suchlike. Just outside Hurghada is an ancient Roman quarry called Mons Porphyritis and Port Safarga — a famously windy place and an excellent place for windsurfing.
6. KING TUT EXHIBIT, EGYPTIAN MUSEUM
Discovered intact in 1922 by Howard Carter, the Tomb of Tutankhamun is possibly one of the most dazzling archaeological finds ever. Tutankhamun lived over 3,300 years ago during the New Kingdom period. For two centuries, Egypt had ruled as a world superpower, while its royal family lived an opulent lifestyle. The powerful priesthood of the god Amun had controlled vast temples and estates. Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) -Tutankhamun’s father renounced the multitude of gods worshipped by the Egyptians, abolished the priesthood and established a new order to worship the sun god Aten and changed his own name to Akhenaten, meaning ‘servant of the Aten.’
Upon the death of Akhenaten, Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun) became king at the age of 9yrs. He ruled for a very short time and died in 1325 BC of somewhat mysterious causes. After 70 days, King Tut’s mortuary tomb was sealed and remained untouched until Carter’s astonishing find. King Tutankhamun’s solid gold funerary mask and his priceless cache of treasures entombed with him for his journey to the afterlife, are now on display at the world famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo and a visit is highly recommended.
7. ASWAN & PHILAE TEMPLE
The picturesque town of Aswan is set on the River Nile and serves as the starting point for both the felucca journey downstream to Kom Ombo and optional Abu Simbel excursions. Elephantine and Kitchener Island are worth exploring and sampling the restaurants along the corniche is a good bet. Head out by boat to Agelika Island to explore the Temple of Philae belonging to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The largest monument of the island is the temple of Isis — occupying about one quarter of the island. The walls are covered with scenes of Ptolemic kings and Roman emperors performing daily and ritualistic ceremonies. Later, when this temple became a church, Christians added their crosses to the stones. The laid-back Nubian town itself is also a highlight for visitors as it is overflowing with colourful markets, spicy aromas, Pharaonic and roman ruins and antiquity from the ancient land of Nubia.
8. ALEXANDRIA
Brimming with history, Alexandria was founded by the legendary Alexander the Great and is a fascinating city sitting on Egypt’s north coast, lapped at by the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. While it has come a long way since being founded around 2,300 years ago, its former glory still shines through and is mixed with elements of modernity, creating a unique ambiance that has to be experienced to be fully understood. Although it collapsed long ago, the fact that Alexandria was once home to the Pharos, a lighthouse that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, is a huge draw for travellers. You might not be able to witness this epic structure nowadays but the city is still imbued with its significance and a trip to the Alexandria National Museum will certainly help you on your way to getting to grips with Alexandria’s cultural heritage and intriguing past.
9. ABYDOS
Situated in northern Upper Egypt, Abydos is one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt and by far the most important as far as archaeology is concerned. In ancient years it snowballed in popularity as the place for pharaohs to be buried, a fact which led to it becoming a cult centre for the god Osiris. The focal point of the site is the impressive Temple of Seti, which contains a list of the majority of Egypt’s pharaohs from Menes right up until Ramesses I. Every glance and turn you take within this mysterious complex reveals something incredible, whether it’s the immense courtyards or the intriguing wall art. One part of the Abydos site that has been baffling historians and travellers alike for years is a curious set of hieroglyphics that appears to depict helicopters, submarines and planes. Take a look for yourself and see what you think.
10. EL ALAMEIN
Best known as the site of some of the most brutal battles of the Second World War, El Alamein has become a site of pilgrimage for people wishing to pay their respects to those lost during the fight. When Germany set its eyes on the Suez Canal, the Allies knew they had to defeat their troops or risk a serious blow to their ability to acquire supplies. After the death of 80,000 soldiers, the battle came to an end and the Allies reigned victorious, making the event one of the most decisive moments of the war as a whole. Over 70 years down the line, the rows of graves in the various war cemeteries are a permanent reminder of the tragic loss that each country involved sustained. Yet, El Alamein is not just a sombre relic of the past with its glorious beaches, lapped by sparkling water, that are the perfect place to appreciate life and its moments of pleasure.
Author: The Travel DMC
Also Read: Top 3 Ways To Explore Everest Himalaya And Reach The Base Camp
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https://medium.com/@dmcthetravel/1-pyramids-of-giza-5441f4f17a97
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['The Travel Dmc']
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2020-03-07 13:21:04.840000+00:00
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['Travel Writing', 'Travel', 'Tours And Travels', 'Egypt', 'Travel Tips']
|
Hazard and operability study: HAZOP decision making process — PHA Technique
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HAZOP is one of the methodologies to perform the Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) which is a comprehensive systematic review of a process to identify , analyze the significant hazards, evaluate the adequacy of safeguards and provide appropriate solution to mitigate them when justified.
[Read More]
It is not a method of reviewing the quality or operation of the design, be carried out before your meeting so that everyone has already accepted the functionality of the design.
In 1984, a Methyl isocyanate, a toxic gas was released at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India that killed more than 2,500 people and hospitalized more than 125,000. The Bhopal India incident was the worst industrial accident in history, as a result, American Society of Chemical Engineers helping to develop OSHA 29CFR 1910.119 , this is known as Process Safety Management ( ). adopted Process Safety Management in 1992 for any process that could catastrophically release flammable or explosive reactive toxic chemicals or stores more than 10,000 pounds of flammable liquids.
[Read More]
These are the building blocks of Process Safety Management for emergency shutdown, safety and alarm systems, process controls, and logic and procedures.
An adequate PHA assessment will collectively focus design and safety operational teams to review risks, incorporate input and perspectives, and develop stronger safeguards and procedures to prevent accidents. Most of the time organizations prefer techniques like ‘What if’ or ‘HAZOP’.
[Read More]
Hazard Identification (HAZID) is a technique used to identify hazards based on standard checklists prepared with reference to best industry practices, standards, rules and regulations, experience and best engineering practices. Provides input to the primary risk assessment for credible events or scenarios.
HAZID can be performed at any stage of the installation, i.e. at initial stage of the new installation, in modification of existing project, expansion, operational project, regular, etc.
[Read More]
Risk is the product of probability and consequence. The term probability is something that expresses uncertainty about future events, while the consequences are the result, extent, or severity of the event.
The first section of the control philosophy describes the general process in words. The control philosophy also includes shutdown and alarm setpoints, function and type of PLC. It Includes control loop tables that describe each loop function, loop variable, and parameters. A safety integrity level (SIL) describes the various layers of safety protection to prevent accidents.
[Read More]
1. For any stage in the life of a process that has reasonably high levels of danger and complexity of the process
2. For flow type processes. It is not used very effectively for the mechanical or electrical type of risk analysis of industrial processes or facilities.
3. In general, hazard analysis in the process industries, especially in change management (MOC).
4. For the expansion of existing projects, new or new facilities of process industries.
Before starting HAZOP, the company must have theHAZOP procedure and the risk matrix.
[Read More]
The team leader guides the team to make rational, high-quality decisions by applying a simple decision process that should be sufficient for all team members to understand but must be comprehensive enough to address risk.
List of nodes with design intent
Break down the process installation design into a number of simpler sections in P&ID and PFD. These sections are called ‘nodes’ which are then individually reviewed. Prepare a list of nodes along with the design intent to analyze each node in the design.
[Read More]
You must select a section or node to review, you can highlight each node in the P&ID in colour, for each node you must continue with the start of the process and then clearly discuss and understand the function or design. Spend enough time to thoroughly analyze design intent and goals.
Please note that this is not an opportunity to change the design, but it is to ensure the suitability, reliability and effectiveness of the safeguards. Gather relevant up-to-date documents for chemicals, materials, and equipment data.
[Read More]
Here are the steps to perform HAZOP;
This is the first step where the team documents the node description and design intent when referring to the control philosophy. The process parameters can be pressure, temperature, flow, composition, etc.
For a better understanding, let’s take the example of the first node, there is a liquid-gas separator container that receives the saturated liquid mixture from the bottom and then passes the gas to the compressor and the liquid to the tank. The main parameters are pressure and flow. But, for example, here we are selecting pressure as a parameter to evaluate first.
[Read More]
To identify the deviation, guidewords for each parameter are applied to each node in the process. The guide words should be selected according to the parameters and the study. Here are the ideas for selecting guides.
* MORE or HIGH: indicates that the value increased more than the design intention
* LESS or LOW: Indicates that the value decreases than the design intention
* NO or NO: Indicates complete stop or failure of design intent.
* REVERSE: Opposed to design, logical or directional intention.
* AS WELL: Modification of the value towards the upper side or increase
* PART OF: Modification of the value towards the lower side or decrease
* INSTEAD OR OTHER THAN: Indicate substitute
* EARLY: Indicate the time before the design intention
* LATE: Indicates the delay of the design intention
* BEFORE: Indicates the sequence or before the order
AFTER: Indicates the sequence or later to order
[Read More]
There are several guidewords, but here for our examples, we select the guideword as “high”. So, the parameter is “pressure” and the guide word is “high”. Let’s look at the deviation in the next step
[Read More]
Here we discuss the process deviations from its design intent. We can add various core deviations to each node, including changes in flow, temperature, pressure, level, leaks, concentrations, among other problems. Each deviation will be reviewed by the team. The team must analyze the consequence of each deviation without any design safeguards, then analyze the protection included in the current design.
[Read More]
Brainstorm the possible causes within the node that could cause the deviation, don’t analyze or criticize these causes, you just need to capture the score and record all of them, i.e. make a list.
The risk identification process must be systematic, selecting specific deviations from the process; otherwise, if we only try to identify the risk by asking what can cause a hazardous event, then we cannot conclude since the process can have thousands of causes of hazards.
[Read More]
We can consider the process deviation as high temperature, high pressure, low level, misdirected flow, no or low flow, etc. which are relevant to the identified process. Then the team should focus on a specific deviation simply by asking the question, what can cause high pressure in the process.
For example, there is a separator vessel that separates the liquid from the gas once it is received. This vessel is provided with a pressure control circuit and a level control circuit and a maximum allowable working pressure is slightly above the set point of the pressure relief valve.
[Read More]
Now apply the first guide word, ie “high pressure”, deviation from normal operation. Then find out the cause of the deviation, and if the pressure control valve fails to closed position.
This step is to confirm that the cause is valid and then analyze it, otherwise remove it. When considering the consequences, imagine that we are operating without safeguards, the operator is not paying attention, the control valve is manual, position alarms and safe interlocks are not working, and no one is following the procedures. It is vital to develop and document the consequences fully and chronologically. You should look at the worst possible reasonable scenarios. You must record all consequences.
[Read More]
Identify the worst credible consequences without safeguards and assign a level of severity. What will be the consequences if overpressure of the vessel leads to rupture due to involuntary closure of the pressure control valve? What is the level of exposure of operators or other personnel at the facility and what will be the impact? Can it kill someone? Can it cause a public relations disaster, a major loss of property? Will it cost huge financing to repair or replace equipment, etc. Some of the significant consequences may be considerable and important for the company to manage risk based on the decision of the HAZOP team. Suppose here that the team agreed that rupture of vessel can lead to fatality.
[Read More]
In our example, here we must evaluate the probability of failure of the pressure control valve without safety safeguards. The causes of failure of the control valve may be due to the logic controller or the sensor outlet air.
Then based on data within the company, past experience, or different operational and engineering experience, we have to determine the probability of failure. It can be 5% or 10% or 20% or 90% probability in a year.
[Read More]
Once we have decided the probability and the consequences, we must assess the risk without any safeguards. In our example of the separator vessel rupture scenario, the probability of failure of the control valve is high, and the severity is also high due to a possible fatality.
Consider that in our organization’s standard risk matrix, when there is high probability and high consequences, the risk is considered high. According to the risk matrix, high risk is not acceptable at all. Then we must decide on some control measures to reduce the risk and bring it to an acceptable level.
[Read More]
Now here at this stage, our main focus is to reduce risk and bring it to an acceptable level by ensuring some safeguards. We can reduce risk by reducing probability and / or consequences. In an earlier stage we evaluated the risk without considering the safeguard, but in this stage we have to evaluate the risk with the available safeguards.
So just check if there is an alarm with operator intervention, if there is any pressure relief valve or PSV available in the vessel, if there is any trip interlock, if there is any automatic bypass system, if there is any automatic shutdown system high pressure alarm trigger etc.
[Read More]
You must add safeguards that are included in the P&ID and control philosophy. It first assesses global safeguards and challenges their effectiveness, then we visualize the sequence of the accident, consider the time, effects, and possible impact of stress and urgency in reaction time. Safeguards are listed in priority.
First, it lists the elements that eliminate the causes, then we list the elements that mitigate the consequences, and finally, it documents human intervention, such as the emergency response.
[Read More]
If you check the layer of protection, the first layer is the processed design, which is the most reliable. As you work from the centre, you add alarms, safety instrumented systems (SIS), emergency relief systems, and lastly, emergency response.
Each of these is an additional layer of protection that can collectively prevent accidents. Safeguards include instrumented protection such as control loops and alarms, non-instrumented operator surveillance and mechanical design features, and others such as training and preventive maintenance.
[Read More]
Now, for our examples, suppose there is PSV available to deal with failure of pressure control valve, it will reduce pressure. This protection can prevent the rupture of the vessel, that is, it will reduce the probability of rupture of the vessel.
But based on industry experience and data, it has been observed that the PSV can also fail, so we cannot consider it as the most reliable or full proof system as it will not completely eliminate the risk to an acceptable level.
[Read More]
This is the stage in which we have to conclude that the risk is acceptable, or we have to think of some other more reliable safeguard, that is. recommendation to further reduce risk by reducing probability. You should follow your organization’s risk matrix to decide the acceptability of risk, as it is the only document that will help you make a decision on risk acceptance criteria. Based on the risk decision, you should recommend safeguards when the risk is not acceptable.
[Read More]
Team must rank i.e. classify cause and consequence. Team has first assigned a numerical level of severity without safeguards, then assign a numerical probability of occurrence with safeguards and finally assign a numerical risk ranking or rating from the risk matrix.
[Read More]
The team must prioritize ideas that prevent the cause from occurring. If the cause cannot be avoided, the team will suggest ideas to mitigate the consequences, the team should not attempt to design solutions at this point.
1. It is more suitable to study the complex process or a complicated procedure.
2. It helps to study and analyze large processes in detail.
3. It is the most appropriate process to analyze both safety and operability problems.
4. It is the most logical and gives a constructive result to decide the control measures or safeguards.
1. It is a complicated and time-consuming process
2. Study sessions can be intensive and exhausting, as it takes time to provide a full analysis.
3. In general, do not observe chronic or occupational hazards.
4. People may spend time discussing operational issues rather than safety.
Here are the sample of HAZOP sheet as we studied above for the gas-liquid separator system
[Read More]
Examples No-2: Cooling water chlorination system
[Read More]
The HAZOP team should be competent and aware of the PHA technique led by the facilitator to facilitate the decision-making process. A record must be kept for the fullHAZOP study and roles and responsibilities assigned for each recommendation before the study is closed.
[Read More]
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https://medium.com/@safeworldhsef/hazard-and-operability-study-hazop-decision-making-process-pha-technique-907b448c4f92
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[]
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2020-06-10 14:33:01.282000+00:00
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['Safety', 'Process', 'Hazop Study', 'Hazard', 'Risk Management']
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For Those Who Try
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For those who try to write something meaningful, something which will resonate with the reader, take heart. Prepare yourself. It’s another day, possibly one of frustration and sadness, because you just looked at your stats and realize you have fewer reads than the day before.
Perhaps you’re sitting in front of your computer at the moment, staring at white space, wondering why you can’t think of anything to write. Maybe you’re telling yourself it doesn’t matter because no one’s going to read what you write anyway.
For those of you experiencing this right now, it’s not over yet. Now is not the time to quit. Now is a momentary splash of worry and difficulty which will pass. Maybe it will come back tomorrow, perhaps not, but it shouldn’t be your focus. For those of you who try, now is the time to do just that.
Try again.
What we do is challenging. We all know it because we live it every day as we try to make our way forward, as we attempt to claw our way to the top. We struggle with set back after set back. And for all our hard work, we often achieve lackluster results. It’s just so damned frustrating most days, isn’t it? Up to this point, you’ve probably thought about moving on, searching for something else to nurture your creative spark what, at least a thousand times?
We all have.
But the dream still lives inside of us. It lives in you, doesn’t it? We all have that burning desire that won’t go away, the constant urge which prompts us to sit down and write something.
Even if we know the chance of what we do going viral is maddeningly slim, we have to write. For those who try, it’s never been a conscious decision, a purposeful choice to become a writer. It’s not a choice. It’s a dream, a firm resolve, and an understanding of what and who we are. If you’ve not thought of yourself in this light before, remember this, hold on to this.
You’re a writer.
And you may be thinking based on the poor results you’re currently experiencing, you probably aren’t a good one, but that’s okay. We all start the same way; we all share the same pains, the same frustrations, the same heartbreaks. It’s how you deal with them that makes the difference. Remember, it’s not over yet.
Unless you decide it is.
For those who try, the difficulties and challenges experienced will never go away, and if we do it long enough, we eventually figure it out. We learn that we’re only as good as, or as bad as, the last thing we wrote. Even if the last thing we wrote was yesterday. And when we sit in front of that white space, we often remember all those dreams which prompted us to begin this writing journey in the first place. We remember and compare them to our current progress.
Most times, it saddens us. Sometimes it infuriates us; it makes us so angry we want to just check out and quit. But we don’t stop. Instead, we try again. Somehow an idea manages to bubble up from where we neither know nor care.
All we know is that it’s something we want to say. It’s something compelling us to speak, and so we say it. We tell the story the best way we can. We forget all the challenges which have knocked us about all these days, and we write.
Another day, another story, and without us realizing it, another life lesson learned.
For those who try, it’s essential to remember while the yield of our harvest may be poor most days, we must continue to plow the fields. We must continue to sow these fields with our writing. Though not backbreaking work, I’m sure to all those who try, it seems that way most days.
At the very least, it’s mind-numbing, isn’t it? Most days, it seems as if it’s mind-numbing, grueling tedium as we lay down word, after word, after word. Somedays it all becomes an endless stream, a blur of things written and things yet to be written. And yet, we continue to plow those fields, don’t we? So, if you take away nothing else from this piece, remember this.
It’s not over yet.
There’s still time for you to write something, time for you to tell us another story, give us another opportunity to think differently about something, provide a perspective only you can provide.
For those who try, it’s what we do.
Thank you so much for reading. You didn’t have to, but I’m certainly glad you did.
Let’s keep in touch: [email protected]
© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.
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https://medium.com/the-top-shelf/for-those-who-try-153f1acff8f9
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['P.G. Barnett']
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2020-09-09 13:51:53.507000+00:00
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['Self-awareness', 'Self', 'Writers On Medium', 'Awareness', 'Writing']
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What’s happening in the vegan world?
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Photo by Jess @ Harper Sunday on Unsplash
A lot has happened in the vegan food world recently. KFC released a vegan food item (we talked about it here). But also, singer Miley Cyrus, one of the loudest celebrity voices for the veganism movement, announced that she went off the vegan diet.
Search trends over the past week reveal the great curiosity and consternation this caused. In the United States, ‘Miley Cyrus vegan’, ‘Miley Cyrus not vegan’, and ‘Miley Cyrus no longer vegan’ promptly shot up to the top of Google’s breakout search terms.
Strange Times.
Bizarrely, ‘was Jesus vegan’ made it to the top too, but let’s not go into that.
On Twitter, the vegan community has been divided, with some parts supportive of Cyrus’ choice and some parts critical, pointing out that there were plenty of vegan options available for Omega-3 (what Cyrus claimed motivated the shift to pescetarianism).
The sheer amount of conversation surrounding what is essentially one person’s personal choice invites comment on the staunchness of the vegan community. Sure, Cyrus has been vocal in her support of Veganism and animal rights over the years, whether that entailed wearing vegan garments from Stella McCartney, getting a tattoo indicating her veganism, or talking about veganism on Instagram. Hence, shock at this sudden change would be fair.
But the criticism and policing that came with it indicates how choosing Veganism meant opting out of the meat-eating norm, an opt-out that comes with expectation of permanence in choice.
Cyrus’ move back into non-Veganism was an opting back into a mainstream norm, and this backlash and shock suggests struggle in accepting a fellow community member’s choice for more flexibility.
This also suggests the absoluteness of a Vegan identity — despite greater conversation about flexitarianism and intuitive eating recently, it seems Veganism remains very much a all-in or all-out identity, and being 90% plant-based would not qualify one for claiming a vegan badge of identity.
From a branding standpoint, it would be interesting to see how this absoluteness of vegan identity might inform brand communications within the plant-based FMCG brand world.
Scoping out the 2020 Vegan Beauty Market
In the world of beauty, Vegan Makeup is in vogue. Selena Gomez has most recently released her Rare Beauty line, a cruelty-free, vegan make-up range, joining the list of celebrities who have released vegan makeup lines (Lady Gaga and Kesha recently released vegan ranges too).
Delving deeper into the vegan makeup world, what do we know about consumer interest in this sector?
Studying over 1 million searches across 500+ search terms, we classified them into several broad categories in order to understand the different types of searches for vegan beauty.
We see that for the US, the three most common types of searches related to vegan beauty products were Product Specific (36.7% of total searches related to vegan beauty), followed by Generic searches (30.2%), and searches for Cruelty Free vegan products (19.6%).
In the vegan beauty world, we see a few key customer personas:
The Idea Gatherers:
Generic searches were probably coming from people who were still dipping their toe into the vegan pool, gathering ideas, new to this realm. Searches were along the lines of “vegan makeup brands” or “popular vegan makeup”. These people were seeking out more knowledge about what products were out there and what brands were available for choosing from in the vegan market.
Within this category, we also see searches for the best products out there — consumers keen on optimising their purchase were looking for the most popular and well-loved brands to start with, to head straight for the best product out there in the market.
The Somewhat Aware Bunch:
Product searches were searches with a more focused search intent, related to a specific makeup product, such as “vegan mascara to buy”, “vegan body lotion”, “vegan concealer” or “vegan eyeshadow palette”, suggesting a more informed consumer profile who knew the type of product they wanted to try out.
The Discerning:
The sizable portion of searches for cruelty free vegan products suggested to us that there’s a significant portion of consumers who were pretty discerning about the vegan beauty market, knowing that not all cruelty free products were vegan, and not all vegan products were cruelty free.
Consumer searches for particular brand-specific vegan products such as It Cosmetics and Bare Minerals and searches for Organic vegan products also suggest a discerning consumer, already aware of what they want to purchase.
How has the COVID19 impacted the US Vegan Beauty Market?
Comparing search interest related to vegan beauty and skincare with a pre-covid (October 2019 to February 2020) and post-covid (March 2020 to August 2020) lens revealed that since Covid, consumers have become more interested in going for affordable vegan products, more so than the other features, such as cruelty-free or organic, or brand names.
In fact, we observe an overall decrease in searches for various niches (luxury, organic, cruelty free) and vague, generic searches on vegan products. Desire to head straight for the best product also increased, suggesting less desire to spend money exploring the vegan brand world, rather cutting straight to the chase.
Communicating The Sensible Vegan Brand
These shifts appear to be driven by key instincts of pragmatism and frugality.
For brands playing in this space, perhaps the story search data is telling might nudge one to reimagine one’s brand narratives.
Presently, a semiotic analysis of vegan beauty brands reveal key themes of clean beauty, simple, uncluttered, good-for-you, and easy on the earth.
But now, we see the rising priority of functional benefit over symbolic. Consumers still want to do good, consume ethically and emulate this earth-consciousness. They just want it done all within tightened purse strings and budget-friendly boundaries.
More than this idea of uncomplicated goodness, brands would now need to convey products’ alignment with sensible, wallet-friendly decision making, perhaps steering ever so slightly away from vegan beauty’s perceived hipsterism and more towards mainstream drugstore grounded-ness?
Textually and visually, what are the various ways in which one can pivot messaging to highlight prudence and value-for-money?
For more insights, get in touch with [email protected]
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https://medium.com/quilt-ai/whats-happening-in-the-vegan-world-3be9062f9e08
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[]
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2020-09-18 07:06:34.571000+00:00
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['Vegan', 'Lifestyle', 'Beauty', 'Culture', 'Style']
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10 Unbelievable Unsolved Iowa Murders
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Ten Iowa murders that reveal the darkness which lurks in the heartland of evil.
When you think of Iowa you probably see images of endless fields of corn and soybeans and the simple farm folk who tend to them. Maybe you even see the rather dour, stoic couple from the famous Grant Wood painting American Gothic. Yet underneath all of that simplicity and stoicism, Iowa contains a darkness every bit as horrifying as the legendary darkness of New York or Los Angeles. Perhaps even more so. None other than gothic rock icon Glenn Danzig once quipped that Iowa is the “heartland of evil.”
That evil can be found in a long history of strange and macabre murders that defy our own understanding as Iowans about what we are as a state and as human beings. Has the transformation of our landscape into farmland invited some kind of supernatural curse? Have we ploughed up our black Iowa dirt and released its darkness that it might make its way into the hearts of our people? Or are we just regular people, with the intrinsic tendency for truth to sometimes get stranger than fiction? After reading these ten cases I will let you decide.
10. The Villisca Axe House Murders
While there had already been fifty years of dark and deadly colonial history in the state of Iowa, it had never seen anything like the horrors visited on the Moore family and their two guests on Sunday June 9th of 1912. On this night an unidentified assailant entered the Moore home in Villisca, Iowa and killed all six members of the Moore family, as well as the two young Stillinger sisters who were staying the night with them, using an axe. It was a gruesome scene that tore the town apart, creating a rift between residents who lined up in two camps to blame or support the two biggest suspects, forever damaging community relations.
Recently a book was released by famous baseball writer Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James that claims to have solved the case. After doing years of extensive research on this murder, as well as other murders committed around the country at the same time, the two pieced together a tale of coast to coast serial murder by a man they believe to be Paul Mueller. While they have made a solid case against him, there is no way to ever verify it. The thing about reconstructing the past is that even our best answers will always contain a question mark.
Meanwhile the house in which the crime occurred remains open to visitors, and has been restored to appear as though it might have in 1912. There are both daytime tours and an overnight package in which you get to stay the night in the house where these horrible crimes took place, and which is allegedly haunted by the victims. I once did the tour and overnight stay with an ex-girlfriend and some of her friends, and although I did not see any ghosts, I did see some pretty entertaining human behavior and was genuinely creeped out by the place. Knowing what had happened, how could you not be?
9. Jackie Leigh Douthart
On May 22, 2001 the young single mother was reported missing when she did not return to her home in Mount Pleasant, Iowa after a night out with friends. The last person she was seen with, Benjamin Biggs, became the number one suspect in the case. However Biggs, who claimed to have dropped Jackie off at her home that night, committed suicide during a police chase on June 29th, and so his guilt has remained inconclusive even though police and family members believe him to have been the killer. Further complicating matters, it was almost a year before Jackie’s body was located, which happened like something straight out of a macabre coming-of-age story by Stephen King.
Two children were riding their bikes along a highway on March 17, 2012 when they stumbled across a human skull, which was later determined to be that of the missing woman. As she had decomposed to a skeletal state, nuclear dna testing was needed to confirm the identity, while a cause of death was unable to be determined. With no evidence or motive available, there is little hope of resolution in Jackie’s tragic tale.
8. Matthew John Owen
If anyone ever tells you that you a ninety year old white guy from Iowa can’t live the pimp life, you can give them the Batman backhand and tell them about Matthew John Owen. After 52 years of marriage to his third wife, Matthew became a widower, but not before securing all of their shared assets under his name to fund his pimp future. After having broken the yolk of matrimony through attrition and death, Matthews left behind small town living for the relatively cosmopolitan Cedar Rapids, Iowa and bought a quarter million dollar home in close proximity to his favorite strip club.
As he became a regular of Woody’s Show Club, and other local strip clubs, he met lots of young women whom he became a sugar daddy to. In exchange for cleaning and other household services, as well as their company both platonically and sexually, Owen was subsidizing the lives of several dancers and their entourage. His behaviors were both charitable and creepy, and his lavish lifestyle drew more and more in. He was known to brag about his wealth and made great displays of it, which likely led to his demise.
On the morning of January 18, 2013 Cedar Rapids police visited the home of Matthew. They had visited more than half a dozen times since he had moved in regarding burglary, theft, suspicious persons and welfare checks, which is what they were doing when they found his body that cold morning. There was a uHaul in the driveway, the front door was open, and large amounts of jewelry, cash and property were determined to be missing. Although police are certain he either knew, or was somehow connected to his killer, they have come no closer to fingering whoever plucked the ripe pimp from his geriatric garden of glittery gals. What a way to go out, though, and I would wager Matthew would have thought it was worth it.
7. Julie Benning
The death of this 18 year old woman from Waverly, Iowa left her family, friends and community with far more questions than answers. After graduating high school, the bright and compassionate young woman took a job working the door at a strip club, as her family was unable to send her to college. On November 28, 1975 she vanished, leaving only conflicting accounts. Her employers claimed she never arrived at work, but this was later brought into doubt as the accounts of others present at the club say she not only showed up, but worked for some time before going missing. Other conflicting reports also helped to obfuscate what had happened to the idealistic but somewhat reserved Julie, including an investigating officer who made an odd claim that he knew her to be a regular hitchhiker, which family and friends contest.
To make matters worse, the similar deaths of two other young women, one four years prior and the other a year later, suggest that there was perhaps a serial killer at work in the area. Six months after her disappearance Julie’s body was found naked in a ditch on a quiet country road, robbed of her dignity, future and, ultimately, justice.
While her family has never given up hope in finding her killer, they have gone over forty years without much to work with. A few years back a man stepped forward with information he claimed would point to her killer, but police have yet been able to find any conclusive evidence to draw any conclusions in the case, and after so many years the chances of ever knowing exactly who snuffed out her bright young life are not getting any better.
6. Elizabeth Collins & Lyric Cook
Every loss of human life to violence is a terrible thing, but most people would agree that the loss of a child is even more horrible. The loss of two children to a single act of predation is so vile that it is almost beyond our comprehension, but that is exactly what happened in Evansdale, Iowa in the middle of the hot, humid July of 2012. The eight year old Elizabeth and her ten year old cousin Lyric were riding their bicycles at Meyers Lake when they were abducted by a person who continues to elude identification.
At four o’clock on the day they went missing their bikes were found, but it was not until December 5th of that year that their bodies were discovered by hunters in a wildlife area twenty five miles from where they had disappeared. Because one of the girls came from a troubled home with a father who had abused her mother and had a long criminal history mostly involving methamphetamine, authorities focused on family ties to the girls’ disappearance. However neither any family member or other suspects considered have ever been directly linked to the crime, and the killer remains free.
There is a certain implication in the deaths of two young females as to the motives of their killer, and it makes one shudder to think of how their final moments might have been spent, satisfying the depravities of someone who considered them disposable. This has haunted their community, which has rallied to remember their loss and continue to search for the murderer responsible, yet whoever did that terrible thing is likely still walking among us here in the endless, quiet expanses of agriculture.
5. Agnes McFedries Kennedy
Sometimes a person who meets a tragic end leaves behind a strangely prophetic clue for us before their death. Agnes was a beautiful, generous and loving woman for whom circumstance, opportunity and fortune had not been kind. With children to care for, and in the wake of a bad divorce, she felt forced to leave her highly successful career as a special needs teacher to become a sex worker at a ‘massage parlor’ to make ends meet while raising her children simultaneously. Just two years before her death she spoke anonymously to the local paper about her situation and about the danger she faced as a sex worker by being forced to do it illegally and without protection from sexually frustrated and potentially violent clients.
Agnes went to work as usual on December 22, 2007 but never returned home, and her body was discovered that night in an alley, later determined to have been strangled to death. The first person of interest in the case was a man known for his penchant for physically abusing female sex workers whose alibi was that he had been at home watching tv with different sex workers when it happened, but he is no longer considered a suspect. There was also an attempt to extort her family in exchange for information, which includes Agne’s son Drew McFedries, a UFC fighter. A man who was convicted of two similar murders in the Davenport, Iowa area following the slaying of Agnes is now being considered as a prime suspect.
4. Martavious Johnson
Every description you will find of this young man from Waterloo, Iowa, whose life was so tragically and senselessly robbed from him, is a glowing review of a human being with great character, compassion and a sense of purpose guided by self-discipline and dedication. Six years after his death his family and friends still cannot understand how his promising life could have been taken for nothing but having made a joke.
On January 5th of 2012 Martavious, often referred to as Tay Tay, was involved in a verbal confrontation with some gang members. Even though Tay Tay was not himself involved in gangs, as he was too busy with athletics and being a dedicated employee of a local dry cleaner (whose attitude and work ethic they admired so much they even paid his funeral expenses), a wisecrack he made to them prompted one member to fire a lethal shot at him. It is scary to consider that an ego that cannot deflect against witty quips would fire back with bullets to the tune of such terrifying finality. Even in Iowa there exists enough poverty and inequality to drive young people into what was once thought to be exclusively a big city issue — gangs.
3. Cari Lea Farver
Technically the murder of this young woman by a romantic competitor has been solved, with the killer convicted in August 2017 for the crime, despite the lack of a body, in a Nebraska court. However the details are so strange that it would be a crime of its own not to mention it.
Cari was dating an Omaha man who had also recently been involved with another Iowa woman, Shanna Golyar. While Shanna had become aware of Cari, the opposite was not true, as the boyfriend had believed that relationship to be over. However Shanna became enraged with jealousy and a short time into the relationship Cari went missing after leaving the boyfriends home to go to work, and has never been seen again. And yet the bizarre aftermath left a trail of evidence tying Shanna to Cari’s murder. After disappearing, strange social media posts began to show up on Cari’s personal profile, and even odder text messages were sent from her phone to several people. The boyfriend was puzzled that his short term girlfriend had not only disappeared after, but had sent him numerous off the wall messages and emails in an attempt to make it appear as a rejection and break up. For this reason he did not suspect anything beyond having dated a crazy person, even though the intensity of the correspondence seemed to greatly exceed their short lived relationship.
Golyar also went so far as to shoot herself and then attempted to blame her deceased victim, and engaged in numerous real world and online activities intended to throw investigators off. She even posed as others online and then claimed responsibility for Farver’s death. Yet over time key pieces of evidence like dna and fingerprints connected the two women, as well as the mountains of insane electronic evidence, that prosecutors were enough to make a confident conviction in the killing of Farver. Goylar maintains her innocence and has not yet given authorities a location of her victim’s body.
2. Melisa Gregory and Stephen Fisher
The history of this case has intertwined with my own life. The woman believed to be the only possible killer by police, although they were unable to convict her due to a lack of physical evidence, was a peer and acquaintance of my parents, as well as my coworker at a pizza place in my late teens. I knew her and her children well, and even partied with them at their home with other coworkers and friends on several occasions. I considered her a friend, if not a bossy and domineering woman with a short temper. But she also had an earlier and darker connection to me.
My own father had died when I was eight years old, and the cause of his death was a mystery to myself, my brothers and even my mother. There were rumors and suggestions of foul play and drug deals gone awry. Fueling these rumors was none other than Terri Supino, the woman who most likely killed her ex-boyfriend (and father of her children) Stephen Fisher, along with his new girlfriend in a grisly, violent manner. As Terri had been trying to deflect guilt from herself in the years since the murder, long before she stood trial a few years ago, she had concocted a story of grand conspiracies and a local mafia who had killed not just Stephen and Melisa, but allegedly also my father and others. She contacted my mother on a few occasions to “provide new evidence”, and spoke to me during the time I knew her about it, but as the years went by and I gained distance it sort of faded into a dead end mystery. When Terri was arrested in 2014 after thirty years to stand trial, my mother and I visited the sheriff who was investigating to see if we could help provide some clues, or finally get some answers about what happened to my dad. As it turned out, his death and those of Stephen and Melisa could not possibly have been connected in any way, and the tales told by Terri had all been machinations with much more sinister undertones than helping us to find any answers.
On March 3, 1983 Gregory and Fisher were found bludgeoned to death in trailer on a property outside of Newton, Iowa. The injuries were so egregious that investigators initially believed guns must have been involved, but evidence later revealed the two had been beaten repeatedly with a hammer or other blunt object. Due to the volatile nature of Stephen and Terri’s relationship, and the increased hostility since their separation, she was immediately a suspect. Other factors that made her suspicious were the passionate nature of the crimes, and the killers ability to swing a hammer so hard in such a small space, which would make more sense with a person of Terri’s slight stature. Despite this, and the fact the pretty much everybody believes that she did it, there has never been enough evidence to convict and the case against her is closed forever.
1. Adam & Gary Lack
The deaths of this father and son have some very Iowa circumstances about them, and suggest corruption, conspiracy and ultimately two murders. It is a twisted tale with so many strange turns and believable but insane accusations that it is hard to form a complete picture of what happened, who was involved, as well as how and why.
The Lack family farm in Mitchell County, Iowa, as well as others nearby, had become inundated with waste runoff from the larger surrounding farms. The land become unsuitable for farming and the groundwater which fed their homes was polluted beyond use. Adam Lack was not just going to take this on the chin, and so through legal and technological means he plotted to expose the destructive activities of the local agricultural industry. As a result of his efforts he faced harassment, and ultimately, torture and murder. Yet corrupt local officials allegedly helped cover up his death, even though there was overwhelming evidence of the actual murder and murderers.
A few years later his father Gary was fighting a battle against cancer, which had almost undoubtedly been the result of the pollution in his environment. After a visit to the Mayo Clinic, Gary was assigned temporary hospice care, due to his upcoming participation in a promising experimental treatment. A few days later a hospice nurse injected Gary with a lethal dose of highly questionable medication, which had been ‘stolen’ from a pharmacy ran by the county attorney’s wife. The nurse was found guilty of several wrongdoings by a state nursing association, but charges were never brought against her in his death. She also took it upon herself, outside medical protocol, to declare Gary legally dead, at which point his body was taken away and cremated without permission and with no autopsy performed.
So while you might think of Iowa as just a quiet land of simple folks quietly dotting the rolling farmland, not only do we have pimps and gangsters, but corporate conspiracies and corrupt officials spinning games of deadly intrigue. Hey, we can’t all be Iowa Nice!
MORE UNBELIEVABLE UNSOLVED MURDERS BY STATE:
Colorado — Iowa — New Mexico — Oklahoma — Wyoming
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https://dungherder.medium.com/10-unbelievable-unsolved-iowa-murders-be2bcc91bf3b
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['Joshua Scott Hotchkin']
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2020-11-26 04:38:24.061000+00:00
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['Mystery', 'Crime', 'Cold Case', 'Murder', 'Iowa']
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Select and Upload images to Firebase Storage Flutter
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Introduction
Cloud Storage is designed to help you quickly and easily store and serve user-generated content, such as photos and videos.
Firebase storage dependency. Add the dependency to your pubspec.yaml file. Check the latest version here.
Introduction
Cloud Storage is designed to help you quickly and easily store and serve user-generated content, such as photos and videos.
Firebase storage dependency. Add the dependency to your pubspec.yaml file. Check the latest version here.
Introduction
Cloud Storage is designed to help you quickly and easily store and serve user-generated content, such as photos and videos.
Firebase storage dependency. Add the dependency to your pubspec.yaml file. Check the latest version here.
Introduction
Cloud Storage is designed to help you quickly and easily store and serve user-generated content, such as photos and videos.
Firebase storage dependency. Add the dependency to your pubspec.yaml file. Check the latest version here.
dependencies:
flutter:
sdk: flutter
firebase_core: "^1.5.0"
firebase_storage: "^10.0.2"
Before we start using Storage we must first ensure we have initialized FlutterFire. This is usually done before any Firebase service is used. This step is asynchronous meaning flutterfire usage is prevented until initialization is complete.
await Firebase.initializeApp();
The initializeApp() method is asynchronous and returns a future. Update your main flutter function.
N.B You can change the rules on your storage to allow a user who is not signed in to upload files.
Now let’s create a new dart file to upload our files to storage
Step 1: import cloud storage package to our project.
import 'package:firebase_storage/firebase_storage.dart' as firebase_storage;
Step 2:Create a storage instance by calling the instance getter on Firebase Storage.
firebase_storage.FirebaseStorage storage =
firebase_storage.FirebaseStorage.instance;
Step 3: To select image from gallery or camera, add path and image picker dependency to your application.
path: ^1.8.0
image_picker: ^0.8.4
reference:https://fabcoding.com/2020/06/08/adding-an-image-picker-in-a-flutter-app-pick-images-using-camera-and-gallery-photos/
Happy Coding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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https://medium.com/@mercyjemosop/select-and-upload-images-to-firebase-storage-flutter-6fac855970a9
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['Mercy Jemosop']
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2021-09-02 12:14:50.317000+00:00
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['Cloud Storage', 'Flutter', 'Firebase', 'Dart', 'Technology']
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How To Make Scalable APIs Using Flask and FaunaDB
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What does Serverless have to do with this tutorial?
The main reason serverless is being mentioned here is because FaunaDB is a NoSQL database that is made for serverless in mind. The pricing on this database is request based, precisely what serverless apps need.
Using a service like FaunaDB can help cut costs so much that the hosting capabilities of the app would be virtually free. Excluding the development costs of course. Thus, using a monthly billed database for serverless apps kind of kills the point.
A free stack example would be a combination of Netlify, Netlify Functions, and FaunaDB. Though it would only be ‘free’ for a certain amount of requests. Unless you are making an app that gets thousands of users on day zero of deployment I don’t think it would be much of a problem.
In my opinion, using a monthly billed database for serverless apps kind of kills the point
Flask on the other hand is a microframework written in Python. It is a minimalistic framework with no database abstraction layers, form validation, or any other particular functions provided by other frameworks.
Flask is by large serverless compatible. You can make a serverless Flask app using AWS Lambda. Here is an official guide to Flask serverless from serverless.com.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-make-scalable-apis-using-flask-and-faunadb-f6005d4a8065
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['Agustinus Theodorus']
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2020-10-27 23:50:13.217000+00:00
|
['Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Microservices', 'Serverless']
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EDIFY SPORTS: THE BEST CORPORATE SPORTS EVENT MANAGEMENT AGENCY
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Edify Sports is a main sports activities occasion control business enterprise in India which organizes and manages carrying occasions throughout the region. With a eager attention on experiential advertising answers, we provide a extensive variety of carrying sports for all.
We as a sports activities occasion control business enterprise were within side the enterprise for over 12 years. With the chaos of setting up an occasion, we provide offerings to organize it with worry-free.
What We Do As Corporate Sports Event Organizer Agency?
We as one of the excellent company sports activities occasions organizer business enterprise sell brands & offerings and create connections among participants. The foremost carrying occasions which normally take area on this context are Race, cycling, marathons, swimming opposition and these kind of occasions offer an excellent advertising platform for brands, as humans collaborating in those occasions might be much more likely to recollect the emblem after they see it once more of their everyday life. We additionally offer help within side the planning, execution, design, and advertising of occasions.
Being a Corporate sports activities occasions organizer business enterprise we’re profound with expert setting up skills, an intensive know-how of nearby venues and aggressive pricing for each occasion. This consists of the coordination of financing, occasion personnel, volunteer assist, and key suppliers. Services might also additionally encompass sourcing venues for meetings or exchange fairs, registering attendees on the venue with badges or wristbands that offer get right of entry to to centers or exhibitions areas.
As a company sports activities occasions organizer business enterprise, we ensure that the occasion is a success for each the organizers and the participants. We provide a numerous variety of offerings that consists of setting up sponsorship, venue booking, ticketing, marketing and marketing and lots greater.
What We Offer
On-site hospitality, logistics and full-carrier occasion control
Corporate hospitality programmes: design, implementation and control
Athlete and celeb look coordination
Ticket control
Leisure pastime and excursion coordination
Our programmers are tailor-made to satisfy character needs, and may be customized with emblem pix to in addition enhance the integration of the client’s product with the occasion.
Let The Pioneers Help You Out
Ever growing sports activities enterprise now needs pace and accuracy to satisfy all its technology. We as sports activities occasion control business enterprise have imbibed the equal requirement in our ardor and feature all arms running toward the betterment for any sports activities occasion.
Edify sports activities nowadays proudly time period itself as one forestall answer to satisfy all of your sports activities occasion requirements.
Owing to the studies and information that has passed through within side the current beyond that we’ve advanced a robust tech assist device equipped to rival pinnacle leaders with inside the enterprise.
Where Results be counted we accumulate the performance.
Edify Sports is the excellent company sports activities occasion, talent, venue and race control business enterprise supporting you discover the excellent sports activities answers consistent with your needs.
|
https://medium.com/@edifysports80/edify-sports-the-best-corporate-sports-event-management-agency-3b75efc5fd92
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['Edify Sports']
|
2021-12-31 11:38:20.355000+00:00
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['Battle Ground Engagement', 'Sports Branding', 'Cycling', 'Athlete Management', 'Sports Events']
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Bridge Mutual Token Generation Event and Listing Announcement
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Today, we at Bridge Mutual are excited to announce our upcoming $BMI Token Generation Event (TGE), which is the day that $BMI gets minted into existence.
Nearly one month ago, as Bridge was just coming out of stealth mode, our modest $1.6 million private sale was met with an overwhelming amount of demand (more than $9 million in allocation requests in 48 hours). We are genuinely grateful for the community that we have fostered, which has been eagerly awaiting more details regarding when and how TGE will occur.
We hope the following article answers all of your questions.
General Information
The $BMI TGE is scheduled for January 30, 2021 . The exact time of listing will remain confidential to protect our community from scammers.
. The exact time of listing will remain confidential to protect our community from scammers. The token contract address will be published via official Bridge Mutual social media channels only. The links to our official social media channels are at the bottom of this article. There are multiple scams out there already, please double check who you are following.
We will mute the official Telegram group a few hours prior to the event so that important information does not get buried by other messages.
Bridge team members will never DM you first, this will remain true during the time that the Telegram channel is muted.
Platforms
Bridge Mutual has decided to host the Token Generation Event on popular platforms and trusted platforms:
We believe that these platforms will provide the best experience possible for all those who are interested in participating in the TGE while maintaining the highest level of fairness and efficiency.
The Significance of the $BMI TGE
For every project, the TGE is an important milestone. But for Bridge, it also symbolizes the beginning of a revolutionary way for people all over the world to provide and purchase protection against hacks, exploits, and rug pulls. At launch, in addition to smart contracts, Bridge will be the first platform in existence to provide this protection to stablecoins ($22B+ TVL), centralized exchanges, and specific service providers.
Our token holders will not just be the owners of an asset that is revolutionary in its class, but they will also be able to control the direction of the Bridge platform through participation in Bridge’s DAO governance system after it launches later in 2021.
It’s the beginning of a new age of on-chain decentralized insurance, and it all starts with this TGE. We are excited to release more information about our partners and backers over the month of January leading into our launch.
What makes Bridge different
For those of you just finding out about Bridge, here is a quick synopsis of what makes us different from other insurance projects.
Stablecoin and centralized exchange insurance is an industry-first, and is needed now more than ever: https://bit.ly/3hKyPH0 No minting, no burning, and no static equations that manipulate our price — a steady supply of 160,000,000 tokens. Migrating to Polkadot for low gas fees; voting on claims requires multiple rounds of voting, which means multiple transactions. Cross-chain insurance for assets and platforms on any network. Totally permission-less network that lets anyone add brand new assets by their contract ID within minutes (kind of like Uniswap); no more centralized gate-keeping. Innovative new use-cases for NFTs on our platform (more on this in a later announcement). World-class team, advisors, and partner projects from multiple industries (more being announced through January). More advanced than binary yes/no results on insurance claims, our platform’s voting system allows the community to determine the exact amount that a claimant should be rewarded. No centralized “Advisory Board” or “Council” layer that can overturn votes and change outcomes, as this is not truly decentralized. Very advanced reputation system that makes it lucrative to be an honest and active voter on the platform. Partnering with multiple top-tier auditing firms as an integral part of the platform’s business model — not just for clout, but because Bridge will be paying auditors to provide 3rd party independent audits to popular projects.
Moving Forward
With less than a month left until the event, we will participate in a large number of AMAs to answer any questions that you may have. Don’t forget to join our Telegram Channel!
We thank you for your support, and we look forward to welcoming you on this journey.
— — — — — — -
Official Social Media Channels
References
|
https://medium.com/@bridgemutual/bridge-mutual-token-generation-event-and-listing-announcement-c9842be1a5c2
|
['Bridge Mutual']
|
2021-01-05 08:28:01.909000+00:00
|
['Bridge Mutual', 'Tge', 'Insurance', 'Defi', 'Insurtech']
|
2020 ‧ Comedy/Drama ‧ 1h 36m (Review)
|
Half Brothers
PG-13 | 2020 ‧ Comedy/Drama ‧ 1h 36m
(Review)
“Half Brothers” is half amazing
So, I just finished this film last night and I loved the message it was trying to send, half Brothers is a road trip\Bromance movie that sends two brothers on a road trip tracing the path their father took as an immigrant from Mexico to learn about his story and hardships in a new country.
When the Economy crashes Flavio (Juan Pablo Espinosa), flees to America and never returns, leaving his son to grow up without a father. The now grown-up Renato (Luis Gerardo Méndez) gets a call from his dying father’s new wife and it brings his rage to the surface, and when he goes to America to say his goodbyes, he instead learns he has a half brother, Asher (Connor Del Rio), and now has to solve his father’s riddle to find out the truth behind his life’s story.
While the message of the film is beautiful, unfortunately, that message is tarnished by the unbalanced story, while the film is funny, even hilarious at times, it takes away from the main message this film is trying to send. I wish we could have just seen Flavio’s (Juan Pablo Espinosa) story I feel like the Two brothers going on a road trip was a creative but worse way of telling their father’s story, but even with all of that said I would still recommend this movie to my family and friends who like comedy and Drama. Even though this film does not fully come across as a Drama there are still moments that tug the heartstrings!
⭐️⭐️⭐️➕
|
https://medium.com/@towe.blake01/half-brothers-pg-13-2020-comedy-drama-1h-36m-review-94c944ca40fe
|
["Blake'S Movie Reviews"]
|
2020-12-26 20:46:56.124000+00:00
|
['Review', 'Film', 'Movie Review', 'Movies', 'Halfbrothers']
|
Introduction to Elasticsearch Using Node.js—Part 1
|
What the Heck Is Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is an open-source, broadly distributable, and quite scalable search engine. Queries are significantly faster in Elasticsearch, which helps us search text across a huge volume of data. A key reason to use Elasticsearch is that it abstracts all the complexity of searching and indexing mechanisms from the developer while giving the developer enough tools to customize anything if needed.
Conventional SQL database management systems aren’t really designed for full-text searches. Therefore, one of the primary reasons people use Elasticsearch is to search text in a few milliseconds.
But that’s not all you can do with Elasticsearch. Following are some of the common things people use Elasticsearch for:
1. Auto completion and instant search
2. Fuzzy searching
3. Analytics and visualization using Kibana
4. Aggregating distributed log data
5. Application performance management (APM)
In this course, we will not go in depth into Elasticsearch, as we will focus more on the integration part. But we will cover some basics of Elasticsearch so that we understand how to use it.
This will also mean that the article will be long and filled with boring text.
I can’t really help it :(. That is why I decided to divide the article into two parts. One with only theory and the other one with fireworks :)
But I promise that you will have a clear idea about ElasticSearch once you go through this article.
I recommend going through the tutorials Elastisearch Reference and Elastisearch Answers to have a complete understanding of ES (Elasticsearch. Henceforth, I will refer Elasticsearch as ES.).
First, let’s see how ES stores data and what the key components are:
|
https://medium.com/better-programming/introduction-to-elasticsearch-using-node-js-part-1-164311327557
|
['Pankaj Panigrahi']
|
2019-08-26 18:44:15.401000+00:00
|
['Nodejs', 'Elasticsearch', 'JavaScript', 'Autocomplete', 'Search']
|
Automated testing will set your engineering team free
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Automated testing will set your engineering team free
“Automation frees engineers to focus on the things that matter and unleash their creativity”
Azimo’s mobile apps are used to move hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances to more than 190 countries every year. Around 10,000 variables affect our testing process, including localisation in eight languages.
Despite this size and complexity, our team of just six engineers releases iOS and Android apps to production every week, with 99.5% of users enjoying an uninterrupted, crash-free experience. To achieve this, we had to think very hard about how to test our code and our user experience.
Our goal is to keep more than 99.5% crash-free users all the time
When we opened our internship program, we received almost 100 applications and talked to dozens of candidates. We were surprised to learn that very few had much experience testing code as part of their education or training. As any experienced software engineer knows, testing is your bread and butter.
Why do we test our code?
Many small teams and young companies cut corners on testing. When senior management sees a working product, it’s often difficult to explain the importance of testing coverage when you could be running off to build the next cool feature.
The reality is that as you build more features, your product becomes more complex. As your product becomes more complex, it becomes harder to test. As your product becomes harder to test, crashes become more frequent. You can see the problem.
That’s why at Azimo we created a rule: key implementations are only tested manually once. If a feature is important for our product, it must be tested automatically. Apart from ensuring that no product value is lost over time, we invested in automated testing for the following reasons:
Testing can become boring . When you’ve just built a new feature, tapping every button or field can be a pleasure — but it’s unlikely to be a pleasure after the 100th or 1000th time. We use automation to reduce repetition and keep our team fresh and motivated
. When you’ve just built a new feature, tapping every button or field can be a pleasure — but it’s unlikely to be a pleasure after the 100th or 1000th time. We use automation to reduce repetition and keep our team fresh and motivated We build tests to save our time. It’s easy to launch a new instance of the app to test the login screen. But how would you test a popup that is presented to a user only under complex conditions that must be recreated manually?
It’s easy to launch a new instance of the app to test the login screen. But how would you test a popup that is presented to a user only under complex conditions that must be recreated manually? We build tests so that we can focus on things that matter. At Azimo, 80% of our testing time is devoted to automation. The remaining time is devoted to testing the hardest cases manually, so that we don’t repeat Elon’s over-automation issues. 🙂
At Azimo, 80% of our testing time is devoted to automation. The remaining time is devoted to testing the hardest cases manually, so that we don’t repeat Elon’s over-automation issues. 🙂 We build tests to make our code clean. Building automated tests requires a modularised, loosely-coupled project structure. You need to write code that makes any dependency easy to replace and any data easy to mock. This makes your code easy to test and maintain by multiple engineers working in parallel.
How to test
There are many different ways to test a big project. At Azimo we use a variety of approaches, depending on the situation:
Unit testing
The most basic method of testing your code. Unit tests are most helpful in parts of the code that affect business logic. They verify that algorithms work correctly, identify edge cases and ensure graceful failure.
We use a basic toolset to build unit tests: JUnit (default testing framework), Mockito (passing fake objects into tested classes), Jacoco (test coverage report). Our code is written in MVP (Model-View-Presenter) architecture, and uses Dependency Injection pattern (Dagger 2).
Sometimes we use Robolectric to test code that interacts with Android classes. However, we don’t test the Android SDK itself. Instead, we prefer to build proper abstraction separating any kind of logic from activities, services and any third party libraries.
Integration tests
While unit tests focus mostly on plain Java code, we often need to test a whole component like an application screen or background service.
In this situation we don’t build detailed, Robolectric-powered unit tests that check every single behaviour (is this button disabled under given condition? Is the text set correctly?). Instead, QA and software engineers build a controlled environment for the tested component and then validate whether it behaves in the way we expect.
Our transaction status screen, for example, has many different UI states. Instead of preparing dozens of tests, we prepare API or Database mocks for every state and provide them via DaggerMock to screen dependencies. Then Android Instrumentation tests, together with Espresso, do assertions on every single screen state.
How do you test an app screen with dozens of different states?
End-to-end testing
End-to-end testing is the final stage of our QA process. When we finish working on a new feature or app release, we perform end-to-end testing to simulate the experience of a real user.
We use similar tools for integration and end-to-end testing (DaggerMock, Android Instrumentation Tests, Espresso), but this time there is no hermetic environment for every app component. Instead, we assume that each place in the app has to be reached in the same way that a user would do it — by clicking on the interface.
The price for end-to-end testing is time — the most complex scenarios can take up to a couple of minutes to test. But in return we cover real use cases (features, navigation flows, third party libraries and more), connect to the real API and work on real data.
The process
Over the years we’ve learned to manage a relatively small team and maintain very high standards despite a complex product. Here are some of the basic rules and processes that we’ve found helpful as we’ve grown into a global business:
Unit tests
Written by software engineers as an integral part of a code
Code coverage of up to 60% and no lower than 50%. It’s better to deliver code to QA and build integration/end-to-end tests than to reach 80 or 90% coverage with time-consuming unit tests that must be maintained in future
While running all unit tests takes about 1 minute (more than 2000 tests), all tests for a single class must be launchable in seconds
100% of tests must pass before the code is released to the QA process
Integration tests
Written by QA engineers, supported by software engineers. While QA decides on testing scenarios and the codebase, the developer must expose modules or single dependencies to make mocking easy and effective
We prefer to measure how many features are covered by tests rather than how many lines of code
Use a hermetic environment (usually up to 3 screens tested at once), with mocked data (usually hardcoded JSON instead of API calls or hardcoded database model). While mocking gives us full control of the recent state of a screen, it also removes all latencies like API calls
End-to-end tests
All tests should take no more than three hours. This limit gives us enough time to test and release in a single day. We also have enough time to do final fixes, rerun failing tests or do manual checks for them
Cover all product features. Our time limit means we have to prioritise what should be tested first and most thoroughly:
- Priority 1: Auth , because you can’t do much without logging in
- Priority 2: Recipient , because you need someone to send money to
- Priority 3: Transaction , because this is our primary business metric
- Priority 1: , because you can’t do much without logging in - Priority 2: , because you need someone to send money to - Priority 3: , because this is our primary business metric 95% of tests must pass before the code is released to production. With such a large product (happy and sad paths, countless customers configurations) and hiccups like outages, illnesses etc., it is not possible to guarantee 100%. That’s why the remaining 5% of failing tests are retested automatically and/or checked manually by QA engineers
These are just some of the rules and processes we use for mobile app testing at Azimo. In a future post we’ll talk about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery environments, proper code, project structure and more. The Azimo Labs team also contributes to open source by sharing our internal projects like AutomationTestSupervisor (a framework for running and analysing Android tests) and our fastlane plugin for AVD management (see how other companies use it).
It’s worth remembering, however, that we didn’t start out like this. Our early days were as frantic and chaotic as any startup and our first tests were created after we built the MVP of the Azimo app. We learned the hard way how to do things properly, which is why we try to apply rigour and discipline to everything we do today. We’re sharing out knowledge here to remind everyone that it is never too late to start testing code. Today we’re a happier, smarter team that is focused on delivering value to our customers, not just fighting fires. 🔥🔥🔥🚒
|
https://medium.com/azimolabs/automated-testing-will-set-your-engineering-team-free-a89467c40731
|
['Mirek Stanek']
|
2018-07-04 11:49:35.545000+00:00
|
['Android App Development', 'Quality Assurance', 'Android', 'Software Testing', 'Fintech']
|
Connecting Kafka to Oracle Data Catalog
|
Today, I going to show how to connect Kafka to Oracle Data Catalog. Kafka is running on Oracle Big Data Service.
What is Oracle Data Catalog?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Catalog is a metadata management service that helps data professionals discover data and support data governance.
To connect to Data Catalog, I’m using the public IPs of Big Data Cluster. To configure these IPs you need to create it manually. Check the documentation in case you haven’t created.
Configuring Kafka
Go to your Cloudera Manager and click on Kafka:
Go to instances and you will have two or more Kafka brokers. You need to add this configuration to each broker instance:
|
https://medium.com/@eloi-lopes29/connecting-kafka-to-oracle-data-catalog-e027c3b79534
|
['Eloi Lopes']
|
2020-12-09 08:28:19.705000+00:00
|
['Oracle Cloud', 'Kafka', 'Data Catalog', 'Oracle', 'Big Data']
|
G2’s woes continue—what’s next for France’s best?
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G2’s woes continue—what’s next for France’s best?
A loss to OpTic Gaming in the Northern Arena Montreal grand finals adds another layer of disappointment to G2 Esports. Sam Nordmark Nov 14, 2016·2 min read
Photo via Fragbite
For the second time in two weeks, a North American team has successfully won an international LAN event featuring top-rated competition.
This time it was OpTic Gaming who lifted the trophy after a brutal last half on Dust2 where the Canadian/American roster only dropped a single round to their opponents G2 Esports.
G2 may very well have over-performed during its short reign starting in June.
But while OpTic’s victory gave the squad its first LAN and series victory against a European team, what does this mean for G2 Esports? The strongest French team of the year had been soaring far above most of the established teams in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
A cursory glimpse of the performances of the team’s star players Richard “shox” Papillon, Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom and Cédric “RpK” Guipouy over the past three months shows a significant dip in their overall stats. While stats don’t account for things such as team cohesion or out-of-game struggles, you can’t ignore that G2 may very well have over-performed during its short reign starting in June.
Make no mistake, these performances from the G2 trio made up some of their best in, sometimes, years. At the time of ESL ESEA Pro League and the ECS Season 1 finals, shox and ScreaM in particular looked like the most explosive duo in the game. And while still retaining solid ratings all across the board, that X-factor which allowed G2 to simply turn any situation into a favorable one has gone missing.
You also can’t ignore ignore the fact that rivals and countrymen EnVyUs are looking at an upward trajectory after spending the majority of 2016 in its worst slump as a team. And even though G2 successfully eliminated EnVyUs in the Northern Arena semifinals, one has to imagine that G2 are casting a waking eye at their rival’s recent strides back into the top of CS:GO.
This means that the final group of the ongoing season of ELEAGUE, which forces teams to lock their rosters for the duration of the season, may be more significant than initially thought. In case EnVyUs fails to advance from Group D, which also features Fnatic, Team Dignitas and OpTic Gaming, then the French teams may indeed be looking to change their rosters prior to the major.
Whether this means a stronger G2 or EnVyUs, however, is uncertain.
|
https://medium.com/@S_Nordmark/the-woes-of-g2-esports-continue-ef5b9d0dd53c
|
['Sam Nordmark']
|
2016-11-14 15:50:29.083000+00:00
|
['Esports', 'Gaming', 'Counter Strike']
|
The Parable of the Wedding Banquet
|
This parable told by Jesus is recorded in the book of Matthew, chapter 22 verses 2 to 14:
(2)“The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. (3)He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. (4)“Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’ (5)“But they paid no attention and went off — one to his field, another to his business. (6)The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. (7)The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
(8)“Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. (9)So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ (10)So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. (11)“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. (12)He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. (13)“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (14)“For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
The main character in this parable is the king. This king has a beloved son, who is mentioned only one time in the entire story. Although the background occasion of the parable is the wedding banquet of the prince, the protagonist in it is the king.
The king organises a wedding banquet for his son. He spares no expense to make it a grand celebration. He has an invite list, and has sent the invitation to these invited guests. No one may come who is not invited. What an honour and privilege it must be to be invited by the king to his son’s wedding banquet.
But the invitees did not want to come! Not just some, but all of them, refused to come. They have all received the invitation, and none did an RSVP. Despite this insult, the king sends his servants to tell the invited guests to please come when the wedding banquet was at hand. The servants return to inform the king that the guests refused to come.
The king loves his son too much to have no guests turn up at the wedding banquet. So he sends more servants to the invited guests — they go knocking on the doors of the invitees, beseeching them to please come. The king is so desirous that they come, that he even teaches his servants what to say — the servants are to tell them of the wonderful feast the king has prepared in his son’s honour, and in the guests’ honour. All is ready, only guests are awaited.
One would think the invitees will oblige to show up for the banquet. After all, the king is the highest authority in the land, and they ought to render unto him some respect. But they don’t. They pay no attention to the king’s servants, and ostensibly turn to tend to other matters (seemingly of greater importance than the king’s invitation) even as the king’s servants are still talking to them.
The king’s servants persevere in the assignment to ask the invitees to please come to the banquet. This costs them their lives. The story tells us that the invitees seize the servants, mistreat them and kill them. This is a clear show of defiance against the king, and not merely that, it is an act of aggression against the king and his kingdom.
What does the king do? When news returns to him that his servants have been tortured and killed by the people he is inviting to his son’s wedding banquet, he is super angry. The king sends his army to destroy the murderers and burn their city. When the king decides to act by use of force, it is a fearsome thing for those who would face the brunt of it.
This punishment ought not to have been a surprise to anyone who dares to defy the king and to kill his messengers. Perhaps the people had thought that there was not going to be any adverse consequences to them to disregard the king and his servants, and to do as they pleased and as they were capable of to the servants. Perhaps the king had all along been gracious to them, and they took this to be sign of the king’s weakness. Perhaps they felt that a strong king would simply command instead of ‘invite’.
With the rebels wiped out, the king tells his servants that those he had invited did not deserve to come. The king is not going to cancel or delay his beloved son’s wedding banquet. He does not want the banquet to be without guests, and so he tells his servants to go out to the street corners and invite anyone they can find — the king’s invitation to his son’s wedding banquet is now open to everyone!
And so, the servants go out to bring in anyone they can find, without finding fault with anyone — the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ alike are invited. If you and I were there, we would be invited!
With this, the wedding hall is filled with guests. It must be quite a surreal experience, to suddenly find themselves in such an august celebration. Here they are, even if they might think themselves unworthy of the king’s invitation. (There really was no need for them to be too concerned, for those whom the king originally invited were not worthy anyway!) Anyway, the choicest food they might ever taste is here at the banquet, and what a privilege it is to be able to partake of it.
The king arrives to meet the guests. He notices that there is a man there who is not in ‘wedding clothes’. Curious, the king speaks to him and asks how he got in without having on wedding clothes. The king’s question seems to have been asked in a friendly tone, for he addressed the man as ‘friend’. When the king asks a question, an answer is expected. But the man speaks nothing.
We are not told in the story who this man is. Is he the only one in the entire banquet who did not don ‘wedding clothes’? As the guests had been invited in from the streets and were not likely to have had much time to prepare themselves before the appointed time, the guests likely were supplied wedding clothes to wear to attend the banquet. This could be why everyone is, and is expected to be, wearing wedding clothes.
The king is surprised at this man who does not have on wedding clothes. And so he asks him about it. The man could have said he was not given wedding clothes to wear. The man could have said he wasn’t aware that there was a dress code. The man could have said the wedding clothes did not fit him but he still desired to join in the celebration of the prince’s wedding. The man could have been apologetic. But the story says he does not say a word — he is speechless.
He is probably aware of the dress code — after all, every other guest has on wedding clothes. He was probably given wedding clothes to wear but chose not to wear them. He probably isn’t all that interested in the celebration itself. He might have been one of the original invitees who had thumbed his nose at the invitation and had gone off to attend to his field or his business (he had not murdered the king’s servants, and hence he was not killed by the king). Whatever the case is, he does not reply the king.
The king then orders his attendants to bind the man hand and foot and throw him out. He is not invited out — he is shackled and manhandled. Unlike the wedding hall where celebration happens, the place where the man is cast is ‘darkness’ and is filled with weeping and gnashing of teeth. The description of this place is cryptic, but it is most certainly a place of regret.
The king then says, “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
This is the point of the parable. Jesus tells the story as an illustration of the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like this. The king in the story represents God. He invites people to a celebration dear to his heart. The people invited need to decide whether to accept or to decline the invitation. Choosing to decline is most certainly the wrong response. There are people who might prefer to not receive an invitation, to be passed over by the king, or God.
Those who have chosen to attend the wedding are to put on wedding clothes. These clothes are supplied by the king. The wedding clothes represent the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The Bible says: This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood — to be received by faith. (Romans 3:22–25). Only guests clothed with the righteousness of Christ are welcome at the banquet.
Where do you find yourself in the story?
Are you among those who might not have been invited? Would you like to be invited? Note that the second round of invitation by the king had gone out to folk at street corners, and people who turn up at the banquet hall need not have their names on a guest list. Having heard the good news of the king’s invitation to all, you can just turn up.
Are you among those who turned their back on the invitation, and who went off in other directions? You could still come to the banquet — the king has not rescinded the invitation or his grace.
Are you attending the banquet without having put on wedding clothes? You may be in the company of a church or a fellowship of Christians, but have not put on the righteousness of Christ which is received by faith. If this describes you, the best decision you can make now is to believe in Jesus Christ as your Saviour and Lord, and you can be assured that you are welcome here in God’s kingdom.
Many are invited but few are chosen. We would want to make sure we are invited to the kingdom of heaven, and then to make sure that we are indeed chosen to be there. By accepting the invitation conveyed by God’s messengers, and by making the conscious decision to believe in Jesus Christ, we can be absolutely sure that we are accepted in the kingdom of heaven.
|
https://medium.com/@yaptatyeen/the-parable-of-the-wedding-banquet-86d2e15e1bf0
|
['Yap Tat Yeen']
|
2021-04-25 15:11:59.419000+00:00
|
['Righteousness', 'Parable', 'Weddings', 'Darkness', 'Clothes']
|
You’re a “Natural”
|
Photo by Hayley Kim Design on Unsplash
And other lies that people press upon us
One of the fastest ways you and I can make asses out of ourselves, so goes the old joke, is when you and I ass-ume things about other folks. Truth is, we have no clue about their lives, their battles, their issues or what comes naturally. The most basic of psychology training teaches that you and I project our traits- good, bad, ugly- onto others. That would explain, at least in part, why folks say what they say to us.
For example, in response to a Medium.com article I wrote about undermining ideas about aging vibrantly, fellow writer Arthur Holmes-Brown shared a classic conversation which underscores my point:
Recent conversation:
WORK COLLEAGUE: “So are you still doing the running?”
ME: “Yeah 8km most lunchtimes… unless I’ve run from home to work, 3km in which case the 6km total is fine”
WORK COLLEAGUE: “You must be a ‘natural’”
ME: “Well…when I started I could barely make it around my block. I was doing so much wrong and had to learn to……
WORK COLLEAGUE: [cuts me off] …”You must be a natural.”
Arthur, like most folks I know, had to start somewhere. That somewhere is usually rookie status. We fail, we flop, we fuck up. We flounder. That is the process by which you and I reach any kind of competence. Beyond competence, if we’re dedicated, we may reach a level of mastery.
That’s for anything.
In Arthur’s case, and I am going to just point out the essence of his conversational partner’s points as I understand them, is that the other person apparently cannot conceive that Arthur’s ability to grind out 8km regularly during his lunch break didn’t “just happen overnight.”
If Arthur can do this, and his coworker likely cannot, then such endurance running comes easily. As in, no effort whatsoever.
That’s despite Arthur’s attempt to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true.
This kind of fantasy thinking has nothing to do with Arthur, or anyone else who has put in the slogging time and dime to build a skill worth something. While it’s fair to say that you and I might possess a skill for math, or languages, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of effort involved with developing that skill.
Photo by KOBU Agency / Unsplash
Sabrina Paterski, one of the best minds in the world, doesn’t know physics just because she’s brilliant. She didn’t build an airplane just because the blueprints appeared in her brain at 13. She still had to study. Physics may come naturally to her but that doesn’t absolve her of the work, study, time and hard labor to learn how to apply those abilities.
By the same token, a natural athlete doesn’t instantly know all the NFL plays on the team, by magic. It’s hard work to memorize them, then put them into play on the field with large trucks otherwise known as linebackers coming after yore punkin haid, as we said in the South.
RGIII was such a “natural.” Yet, despite his considerable natural talents he squandered his career within barely two short years.
The implication is that by being a natural, everything is easy. Nope.
In the same way, none of us shows up ready to rumble the New York Marathon without copious training.
Okay, well, some do, just like idiots with too much money and not enough sense god gave a goose try to climb Everest without proper gear and training.
Arthur’s comment scrapes off my epidermis in the same way that so many people tell me that the body I inhabit, which is tall and slim and muscled, comes to me so easily. That I clearly don’t have to work at it. Naturally fast metabolism.
I have no idea who the hell they’re talking to, but that’s not me. I battled obesity and eating disoders and put in tens of thousands of gym hours, running, hiking, kayaking, biking, yoga, you name it, to have this body. Not a goddamned thing natural or easy about it. And, the older I get the more work I have to put in to keep what I do have, because my metabolism is just that slow.
Still, I guess it satisfies some kind of jealousy gene to accuse others of being a natural, or having it easy. Since the advent of social media’s comparison culture, this has exploded utterly out of any kind of sanity.
Photo by Jonathan Hoxmark / Unsplas
It’s perfectly understandable to want to put our best foot forward into the world. Long before the Internet, many if not most of us would fudge the facts a bit while dating or job hunting.
That very human desire to be or at least appear to be more than what we are has been enabled to the nth degree by social media. You and I can appear to be anything we want. We can manipulate our images, not only fudge but completely fabricate “facts” about ourselves. Ask anyone who dates online; 81% of people lie about something important on dating sites. Not just that: 85% lie on our resumes.
It’s so widespread that these days, those of us who date and those of us who have to review resumes do so knowing that the likelihood of having the Real Thing show up is small indeed.
Yet even knowing this, people look at our feeds, our Facebook falsehoods, our curated ‘gram shots and assume, wrongly, that everyone else is living a perfect life. Everyone but themselves. No wonder folks are angry. However, that anger is based on fantasy thinking.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash
The pressure for perfection, which is part of what drives this insanity, is part of why we envy and attack those whom we perceive to have a better life than ours. It’s also why some take perverse pleasure when those people- whom we’ve labeled perfect- take a tumble.
I found the same kind of thing among women. I wasn’t acceptable to many females until they found out that I’d been obese, and therefore imperfect.
Arthur’s work friend appears to be making excuses, as do we all, for our own laziness or lack of motivation by utterly dismissing Arthur’s hard work and dedication, and stating that he’s a natural.
Here’s one cost of being a “natural:” my big brother was a natural and gifted artist, athlete, writer, composer. Things came easily to him, as did seduction and dishonesty. He gamed his way through life and work and women, until, finally facing down the lies of his lack of effort, his lack of integrity and his utter unwillingness to do the true hard work of the soul, he took his life eight years ago this past October.
Having things come easily to us does not make for an easy life. Not at all. While my brother isn’t necessarily indicative of all such naturally gifted people, I simply find it both ignorant and rude of people who default to such labels and excuses without hearing the story behind what makes things look so damned easy for others.
Photo by Steve Halama / Unsplash
Chances are, as with Arthur, we might discover years of tears and travail and plenty of trepidation, mixed results, giving up and ghosts of our failures following us around in the wee hours.
We face them down. We do it enough, you and I, it looks easy to others.
Natural. Of course it does.
Every person I have ever met, read about or researched who made some aspect of life look effortless put years of effort into making what they do look effortless.
The price of a rather effortless life cost my brother his.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I prefer to do the work. So does Arthur.
And so do the rest of us so-called “naturals,” who don’t need to lie on our resumes, Linked In profiles or Facebook feeds. If you ask us, we’ll tell you how we got to the point where it looked so easy.
But not if you cut us off in the middle of the conversation.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana / Unsplash
With thanks to Arthur for permission to use his story.
|
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/youre-a-natural-75b79f47341a
|
['Julia E Hubbel']
|
2020-11-26 09:45:59.456000+00:00
|
['Mastery', 'Fitness', 'Inspiration', 'Courage', 'Success']
|
Eat Protein, Fat, And Vegetables To Loss Weight!!
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One way to lose weight quickly is to reduce sugar, starch, or carbs. This can be done by using a low carb diet plan or by reducing refined carbs and replacing them with whole grains. Doing this will reduce the feeling of hunger and generally eat less calories
(1TrustedSource). The Low Carb Diet Program uses the burning of stored fat for energy instead of carbohydrates. If you choose to consume more complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains that are deficient in calories, you will benefit from more fiber and slow digestion. This will make them more satisfying to keep you hoppy. A 2021 study found that a very low-carbohydrate diet was beneficial for weight loss in the elderly
(2TrustedSource). According to a study, a low-carb diet can reduce appetite, resulting in less calories burned without thinking or feeling hungry
Take My Free PDF With My Top 10Tips On How To Loss Weight Easier.
(3TrustedSource). Note that research is still underway on the long-term effects of low-carb diets. Also, continuing a low carb diet can be difficult. This can lead to a yo-yo diet and you may not be successful in maintaining a healthy weight. The low carb diet has potential drawbacks that can lead to another approach. A calorie-reducing diet can also lead to weight loss, making it easier to maintain for extended periods of time. If you’re choosing a diet that focuses on whole grains rather than refined carbohydrates, a 2019 study associated high whole grains with a low body mass index (BMI).
(4TrustedSource). Talk to your doctor about recommendations to find the best way to lose weight.
Take My Free PDF With My Top 10Tips On How To Loss Weight Easier.
Move Your Body To Loss Weight.
Photos of Jenny and Michael her Father
You don’t need exercise to lose weight, but it can help you lose weight faster. Weightlifting has a particularly good advantage. Weightlifting burns a lot of calories and prevents slowing down metabolism. This is a common side effect of losing weight (13Trusted Source, 14Trusted Source, 15Trusted Source). Try going to the gym 3–4 times a week to lift the weights. If this is your first time using the gym, ask your trainer for advice. Make sure your doctor also knows about your new exercise plan. If you can’t lift the weights, aerobic exercises such as walking, jogging, running, cycling and swimming can be very helpful in weight loss and overall health. You can lose weight with both aerobic exercise and weightlifting.
Take My Free PDF With My Top 10Tips On How To Loss Weight Easier.
Summary Weight training like weightlifting is a great way to lose weight. If that isn’t possible, aerobic exercise can also help. Choose the one that is sustainable for you.
Take My Free PDF With My Top 10Tips On How To Loss Weight Easier.
|
https://medium.com/@gracegofwen-37786/eat-protein-fat-and-vegetables-to-loss-weight-6a9d2c56e410
|
['Sike Wureka Sati']
|
2021-12-18 13:21:40.271000+00:00
|
['Weight Loss', 'Loss Weight In 30 Days', 'Fitness', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Weight Loss Tips']
|
Custom-Shaped Switch in iOS Apps
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Once I got a rather simple-looking task from a regular client of mine: he needed to make a screen for an iOS app with several switches. The switch was long and thin. It was different from both the UISwitch, which has size 51x31 points, and the Material switch, which is more flexible in size, but the thumb is bigger than the track.
Switches from client’s design
I found many solutions on GitHub, but they were either modifications of existing UISwitch, or variations of Material switch. Other options didn’t look like switches at all.
I’ll give some references, in case you’re looking for something different:
AIFlatSwitch — the switch looks more like an animated checkbox.
MJMaterialSwitch —an iOS implementation of the Android Material Switch.
LabelSwitch — the closest switch to what I was looking for. Longer than the standard one, with text on top. Unfortunately, it didn’t work when I tested it.
TTSwitch — a very old switch, circular or rectangular.
PWSwitch — an animated flat switch with a rather interesting design.
Paper Switch —a standard iOS switch, but with an interesting effect on its superview.
TKSwitcherCollection — a whole collection of different switch components.
SwiftySwitch — a switch component with custom geometry, but written in an old version of Swift.
PVSwitch — another Material-looking switch.
None of them completely fulfilled my requirements. Just to be clear, I needed:
A switch component, looking similar to the standard UISwitch.
A library which can be compiled in a Swift5-based project.
View can be places and set up right in a Storyboard.
The closest to what I needed was SwiftySwitch. There were several issues I needed to fix on the go.
One of the biggest advantages of SwiftySwitch is that it requires only one file. It supports CocoaPods, but obviously, this way of integration wasn’t an option for me. So I just dragged the swift file into my project.
The standard way of old control integration into iOS projects includes three steps:
Upgrading old Swift syntax to a modern one. Apple changes some function names, deprecates some functions, introduces new ones. Usually, Xcode offers some automatic code replacements. Fixing bugs. The same functions may work differently, UIKit views may look different than they used to. After a syntax update, custom control needs testing and bug fixing. Adjusting for project needs. You find the closest control to your needs, but it rarely matches completely. You may need to add or remove some features, or change the behavior of the view.
Here’s the original file:
To update Swift to a modern version, you can use the integrated Xcode function. To use it, click on the Edit menu and select Convert, then To Current Swift Syntax:
Conversion to current Swift syntax
If you project is already using the latest Swift version, it won’t offer you to convert only one file. This problem can be solved by either creating a separate project and running the conversion there, or reviewing the file manually. If you try to build the project, Xcode will show you errors in the file (if it doesn’t, it means that your file is already good to go).
Fixing errors
When your project builds, test it and check if it has any bugs. In my case I only found a couple of issues with speed and geometry, but fortunately, all these parameters could be configured in Storyboard Editor. If you’re going to use it in many places, you can change the default values:
Default values
And that’s how it looks in the app:
Switches in the app after modifications
Final source code:
I hope it was helpful for you.
See you next time and happy coding!
|
https://medium.com/swlh/custom-shaped-switch-in-ios-apps-41de6b5873e6
|
['Alex Nekrasov']
|
2020-11-19 17:36:18.853000+00:00
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['Mobile App Development', 'Swift', 'iOS App Development']
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How To Construct Your Own NFT Real Estate Marketplace?
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The NFT domain is evolving, as a result, it’s paved the way for several sorts of NFT marketplace for Real Estate and crypto protocols. Development platforms like the NFT Real Estate marketplace may be a new entrant into the evolving NFT ecosystem.
We at Brugu dedicate ourselves to developing a top-tier virtual NFT Real Estate marketplace for our customers.
What Is Virtual NFT Real Estate?
The concept of NFT is extremely simple, non-fungible tokens are digital assets that are traded on a decentralized exchange platform, since they’re built on blockchain technology, they will verify the ownership of the digital asset for the customer, and secure transaction details.
NFTs have the potential to represent physical assets as digital assets, like video clips, audio clips, trading cards, and even Real Estate assets. The evolution of non-fungible tokens has unlocked many exciting opportunities and features for business models who have an interest in elevating their businesses to subsequent levels. The important estate domain is that the new addition to the NFT field. The important estate assets are often also represented as NFTs.
Brugu may be a world-renowned NFT marketplace development company. Within the past, we’ve developed numerous marketplaces for our clients and therefore the key benefits of availing of our NFT Real Estate marketplace development services are,
|
https://medium.com/@ssam.gaipp/how-to-construct-your-own-nft-real-estate-marketplace-8f39a789c790
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['Ssam Gaipp']
|
2021-12-29 12:45:49.209000+00:00
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['Nft', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Blockchain', 'Business']
|
Apply for these opportunities for October and November
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Apply for these opportunities for October and November
Here is a list of fellowship, grants, funds, competitions and other opportunities that have been made available beginning in October.
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
The Jacobs Foundation Scholarship was introduced in 2018 and is open to candidates with a strong interest in the field of youth and child development and/or education, or in agricultural development in Africa. Jacobs Foundation scholars have an entrepreneurial vision, are dedicated to social issues, and usually have a minimum of three years’ work experience. The Jacobs Foundation Scholars will also be committed to the goals of the Jacobs Foundation.
| Deadline: 30 October 2020
As cloud and AI technologies are shaping all industries globally and driving numerous innovations, Alibaba Cloud has launched the Machine Learning Platform for AI (PAI) service to empower AI developers and innovators by lowering technical barriers and development costs. The Alibaba Cloud Global AI Innovation Challenge is an open competition for global AI developers, researchers, startups and solution providers to make and/or enhance their products or projects based on machine learning using PAI.
| Deadline: 1 November 2020
UN-Habitat’s Global Public Space Programme is launching a call for proposals (CFP) to seek partnership in the implementation of innovative public space projects in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Nepal, Palestine, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, Syria, Tanzania and Vietnam.
| Deadline: 2 November 2020
The Deji Alli ARM Young Talent Award (DAAYTA) is an ARM initiative in partnership with TechnoVision’s TVC Labs that aims at providing young Nigerians with an opportunity to develop innovative start-up ventures that add economic value to Nigeria. The DAAYTA 2021 initiative is in line with ARM’s commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with the aim of building a generation of change leaders, working together to build a better future. It seeks to support business ideas that intentionally create positive societal impact while generating a financial return.
| Deadline: 2 November 2020
The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) invite proposals from independent policy research organizations from across the African continent that are committed to using research to inform and influence national-level artificial intelligence (AI) policies and research ecosystems. This funding opportunity will provide funding to two (2) AI policy research organizations representing distinct linguistic regions (anglophone and francophone).
| Deadline: 4 November 2020
The call for application is now open! In order to promote international cooperation, particularly with Developing Countries, the University of Pavia and EDiSU (Institute of the Right to University Studies) provide 5 scholarships to visiting scholars for the year 2021 for a period of stay of 4 to 12 weeks at the University of Pavia.
| Deadline: 15 November 2020
The Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellowship in Journalism Innovation* brings individuals to Harvard University to work on a specific course of research or a specific project relating to journalism innovation. The fellowship is a collaboration between the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Both organizations share a set of common interests around journalism, innovation, and the evolution of the digital space, and both have longstanding fellowship programs that offer a year of learning and collaboration with others in the Harvard community.
| Deadline: 1 December 2020
During the contest period, you can submit an application using the official submission form. Automated submissions are not permitted. Incomplete submission/entries are void. StartupXs is not responsible for lost, late, or submissions not received regardless of the cause. In the event of a dispute, entries will be deemed to have been submitted by the authorized account holder of the e-mail address used for registration.
| Deadline: 31 December 2020
The Innovative Teachers Fellowship is a 6-week intensive program designed for teachers in Nigeria. This Fellowship is in partnership with the Uk/NG Tech Hub and graduating teachers will be issued certificates from the Tai Solarin University of Education.
| Deadline: rolling
|
https://medium.com/civictech/apply-for-these-opportunities-for-october-and-november-5be5f4aec0e7
|
['Mmabatho Montse']
|
2020-10-19 13:57:24.396000+00:00
|
['News', 'Opportunities', 'Events']
|
Identity — From lies to truth.. The last few months have been nothing…
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Identity — From lies to truth.
The last few months have been nothing short of busy. Trying to balance the work+home load while mixing in social time on the weekends led to extreme burnout. I usually pride myself on self-care. It was my absolute favorite counseling topic in grad school, & if I’m being honest, I truly thought I had the whole thing figured out.
The truth is, though, is that self-care is a largely tangible topic. The world defines it as engaging in things that produce instant gratification — shopping, favorite foods, relaxing hobbies, social time, etc. The question that nobody asked me in grad school, & the question that I want you to ask yourself today is: When the tangible things of this world no longer satisfy your burnout, what then sustains you?
There are two options here. 1) Continue on the self-destructive path of worldly consumption — idolizing materials, status, relationships, & your career in an effort to establish self-worth. Or, option 2) Give in to the notion that you are not your own saving grace, & that you are in fact a messy, sinful human who is in desperate need of relinquishing control to the One who strong+wise enough to carry your burdens. & if we all strip away our own pride & become vulnerable with our inwards selves, I think we’d all admit that option 2 is the most appealing/least heavy/most rest-evoking choice.
In the spirit of being vulnerable, I’ll admit that today is the first day in weeks that I’ve truly had my (what was once an every morning occurrence) quiet time. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last several weeks carrying the lie that I am not a good school counselor, that I’m not a good wife, that I’m not a good daughter, & that I’m not a good friend. The self-inflicted guilt of these negative statements about myself has consumed me from the inside out. We all have our reasons for why we avoid the Father. Our reasons might be similar or vastly different, but our heartaches & burnout are the same. The solution that we all need is the same. Whatever your reason is, I hope you’ll muster up the courage to speak these truths over yourself this morning.
We look the way we look & are the way we are because God wanted to use our uniqueness for His glory.
“For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully & wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” ~ Psalm 139:13–14
“You will be a crown of splendor in the Lord’s hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” ~ Isaiah 62:3
Quit challenging what God’s word says about us. & finally, here’s a prayer I jotted to Jesus this morning. Allow yourself to speak it to Him on your own behalf:
|
https://medium.com/@jottingtojesus/identity-from-lies-to-truth-9c68002f00e0
|
['Caitlyn Grigg']
|
2021-06-01 13:51:24.098000+00:00
|
['Prayer', 'Journaling', 'Bible', 'Spirituality', 'Identity']
|
Hacking Longevity: How to Live Longer
|
At the end of last year, the CDC announced the life expectancy in the United States had continued to decline once again, a shocking fact in an age when we should seemingly be living forever. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, this decline is most likely due to sharp increases in suicides and drug overdose deaths. In 2017, the CDC announced that opioid use had reached epidemic levels, and the opioid crisis is far from being solved. Over-prescription of opioid medications, lack of access to treatment, and lack of access to mental health services are just a few of the underlying causes of the decline in life expectancy. But what if we could fight the decline in life expectancy by learning how to live to 100 and beyond?
Soon there will be more centenarians than ever before. In 2015, there were fewer than 500,000 centenarians living worldwide, but by many estimates that number will balloon to nearly 3.8 million by 2050. We have the medical technology to detect more diseases earlier and to treat them more efficiently and effectively than ever before. But even with all this medical technology at our fingertips, there’s still more we can be doing to live longer, healthier lives.
We are just starting to really understand the rise of the obesity epidemic and what can be done about it. Until very recently blame was placed on obese people for their own obesity, but the latest research is showing that is not likely to paint the full picture. According to the U.S. News Combating Childhood Obesity Summit, the prevalence of processed foods is coupling with genetics to create a perfect storm in the form of a growing prevalence of children growing into the cycle of obesity. Studies have shown that people who ate minimally processed foods with ingredients that were known and easily identifiable tended to eat less and to lose weight without trying, even with the same caloric intake and nutrient densities.
There are places in the world known as ‘blue zones’ where people routinely live longer than average, and one of the things they have in common is healthier diets. In the Nicoya region of Costa Rica, diets largely consist of corn, beans, and squash, and there is very little meat, eggs, and dairy in the daily diet. Similarly, in Loma Linda, California, residents follow a Biblical diet which also consists of very little meat, fish, and poultry and consists mainly of vegetables, fruits, seeds, and nuts. In Sardinia, Italy, residents eat a low protein, plant-based diet, while in Ikaria, Greece, inhabitants eat a Mediterranean diet that is very low in animal products, and in Okinawa, Japan the predominant diet is plant based.
What do all these places have in common other than very similar plant-based diets? The inhabitants routinely live longer than average, many to 100 years and beyond. Diet and exercise are shown from these regions of the world to have the biggest impact on overall health, while each of these regions also places an emphasis on mental health that is thought to be the secret sauce of the overall longevity. Each of these societies has its own emphasis on work, volunteerism, and having a sense of purpose and community in life.
If we all started to apply these lessons to our daily lives, what good might come of it? The worst that can happen is that we all live a little longer, so why not give it a try?
|
https://medium.com/hackernoon/hacking-longevity-how-to-live-longer-c9448fa13896
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['Brian Wallace']
|
2019-06-09 18:11:00.726000+00:00
|
['Hacking Longevity', 'Lifehacks', 'Health', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Life Hacking']
|
Cash Against Gold in Delhi, Noida
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For selling adornments, you should realize what are the best administrations you can get from us. We at money for gold over moment instalment with any high measure of money conceivable. Additionally, we likewise offer another favoured medium as could reasonably be expected.
We are an approved seller of valuable gems, so just give real help choices. Presently, we have been set up in all the Cash for Gold Laxmi Nagar, expressing from Noida, Delhi and furthermore offer a similar help through our retail place just as on the web. In the event that you are searching for the best assistance in all the locale of, at that point it is none other than us.
We have our online entrance which is been perceived and furthermore gives a similar variation of administrations than at our retail store. To think about our variation administrations, visit us at Cash for Gold in Noida and furthermore read our tributes by our significant clients to comprehend the strategy we apply to our administration. Aside from this, we don’t leave any opportunity to disappoint our important clients. We Endeavour to offer our best work to them to get them the most noteworthy market cost.
|
https://medium.com/@goldbuyerstore0/cash-against-gold-in-delhi-noida-e3455bf7499b
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['Gold Buyer Store']
|
2019-10-17 05:55:36.721000+00:00
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['Gold', 'Cash', 'Cashforgoldinnoida']
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Outrider and our push into autonomy
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By: Bill Pescatello, Managing Partner at Evolv Ventures
Our focus on autonomy
At Evolv Ventures, we spend a great deal of time looking at the changing landscape for CPG companies and emerging technologies that can have the greatest impact on our industry. In that search, when it comes to logistics, there are few technologies we discuss more or that are as high profile as autonomous trucking. Its size and impact on global logistics and the CPG industry will be nothing short of revolutionary.
The global trucking industry is one of the largest markets in the world that touch all of our lives and has been estimated to be as large as $4T. In the United States, truck driving is the primary occupation in more than half of all US states. There are about 1 million truck drivers in the US, and even that is not enough. Worker shortages and driver costs continue to rise and are one of the biggest issues facing the trucking industry today. With rising costs and driver shortages, greater automation is in high demand and will continue to be a high priority throughout this ever-growing industry.
In terms of the importance of this market to the CPG industry, it is estimated that two-thirds of our nation’s consumable products are trucked to the market. It is one of the CPG industry’s greatest costs in bringing products to the market and innovations in trucking autonomy has the potential to save CPG companies hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars down the line.
In fact, it is estimated by McKinsey that shipping costs could decline by as much as 45% with full autonomy. These savings are game-changing and would have a profound effect on logistics costs and potentially improved margins for large CPG companies.
While the promise of full autonomy is impressive, we also have to be realistic about the timing and hurdles to reaching full autonomy. Most experts believe we are 10+ years away from seeing anything assembling full autonomy (some estimating decades) and the advances will need to come in incremental steps.
Safety considerations, technical impediments, local and national regulations, and building the infrastructure needed will take time. We will get there eventually, but there is a lot of work to do to get there. As we move to a world with fuller autonomy, very large companies will be built but countless emerging startups in the space will not survive this long adoption curve.
As investors, it will be critical to find the right opportunities in this space and the industry-changing companies that will likely come out the other side.
So where to invest?
At Evolv Ventures, we will continue to look at long haul autonomous trucking companies but have a specific investment focus today, due to the long adoption curve. Rather than investing in companies that may be a decade(s) away from being operational, we are focused on companies that can start to be successful now and will lead this evolution to full autonomy.
In particular, we are working and investing in autonomous technologies that can operate in smaller and more controlled environments. Companies that address automation within and around our plants, warehouses, and yards at Kraft Heinz. While this may initially represent a smaller market than long haul trucking, opportunities in these spaces still represent a significant market and are in high demand.
Of all the Fortune 500 companies we talk to regularly, we have yet to find one that was not actively looking for partners to more effectively automate their warehouse yard operations. Warehouse yards are notoriously inefficient and often neglected by partners. These operations have a significant impact on logistics costs and can greatly affect your speed to market.
While yard operations may not be a $100B+ market today, warehouse and shuttle operations represent what we estimate to be a $26B market, and will be one of the most important hubs in bringing about full autonomy for large shippers in the future.
|
https://medium.com/@evolv-vc/outrider-and-our-push-into-autonomy-f21ddc8a891e
|
['Evolv Ventures']
|
2020-12-16 19:35:17.853000+00:00
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['Warehouse', 'Automation', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Warehouse Automation', 'Venture Capital']
|
Queen of the rumination
|
One piece of advice that I do like from the self-help world is this: when you find yourself rejected and heartbroken focus not on what went wrong (everything), what you did wrong (absolutely nothing), what you were rejected for (%#*?!), but on your strengths.
Usually in this situation we are instructed to focus on what we love about ourselves, as if the things we love about ourselves are not feeling really really butt-hurt right now…
But, strength! Strength is something else. Take love out of the equation and we get to think simply about what we are GOOD at. Doesn’t matter how useful it is. Doesn’t matter whether or not it makes us more or less lovable. Doesn’t matter if we love it about ourselves. What. A. Relief.
You know what I am good at? You know what MY strength is?
Rumination.
I can ruminate all day long. I can ruminate with one hand tied behind my back. With both eyes closed. I am so good at ruminating I don’t even have to try. I am SO good at it that I can do it even when I don’t want to. No self-discipline required, for me it is a natural talent — it’s innate.
I eat, sleep, and breath rumination. Put me in a room with Woody Allen or Charlie Kaufman — I guarantee you I’ll ruminate them under the table. They’ve got nothing on me.
Some people might (I mean they have many times) accuse me of overthinking things.
Well, I say to that: No, sir! You’re under thinking! (No, seriously, you are.)
Get on board! The Rumin Nation is the place to be!
And here I am the QUEEN.
The Rumin Nation is where memories and imagination collide — where fantasy and mystery embark on great adventure — where all the people of my past live, my subjects — to serve me, and pleasure me, to take their punishments accordingly when they disobey.
I sit on my throne — in my pajamas, effortlessly anxiety ridden, twirling my hair, or picking at my cuticles (also great strengths of mine)— of hours, while I watch the subjects of my Rumin Nation go about their lives.
And here I get to have the last word whenever I want to. Have whatever conversation I want over and over and over again. Here I can punch the boss who fired me, or refuse the love of my life groveling at my feet to win me back. I can flip out dramatically, I can break stuff, I can yell, I can have the sassiest and most clever clap back you’ve ever heard — that never came in time in real life (where instead of saying anything at all I just ran to the bathroom crying).
Or, if I feel like it — I can cry. I can relive all the humiliation, all the times I failed to stand up for myself, or the times I didn’t get what I want, and I can do it over and over and over again. I can pick it all apart until it’s an unrecognizable mess, and then, because I can do whatever I want in the land of Rumin Nation, I can start all over because there’s an endless supply of horrible experiences to decimate.
Now, many people (including actual mental health professionals) will say that rumination is exactly what one should STOP doing in order to get well after a bad breakup or any traumatic experience. “Don’t get stuck there,” they say. “It will keep you from moving on.”
They are right. I don’t think that I’ve moved on from a goddamn thing in my goddamn life. How could I when everything (and everyone) is alive and well in the Rumin Nation?
I do try and leave my Queendom from time to time. Which is really quite a feat because my other strengths include: Procrastination, being afraid of failure, not doing the dishes or cleaning the house, getting stuck in bed, watching too much TV, putting off writing, and generally not knowing what to do with myself. And when I do leave I usually have a grand old time enjoying laughter with friends, love with lovers, productivity and creativity with jobs — and lucky me, provides such a great bounty of new things to overthink about when I return to the Rumin Nation.
Maybe rumination is fucking terrible. Maybe it’s completely unhealthy. But, really, fuck it. It’s what I’m good at. It’s my strength, and if you’re like me, and your strength is often what you are shamed for, or is not highly valued, or valued at all in society — well then fuck it. Honor your strengths, no matter what they are. That’s all I’m really saying. Just because they’ll never make an Olympic sport out of it, just because it makes you intolerable to other people doesn’t mean shit. Your strengths might be fucking annoying sometimes, but they also might just save your life.
|
https://medium.com/@recentexgirlfriend/queen-of-the-rumination-6ecb312d0db1
|
['Recent Ex-Girlfriend']
|
2020-12-17 18:34:31.815000+00:00
|
['Breakups', 'Self Improvement', 'Humor', 'Mental Health', 'Relationships']
|
Closures in JavaScript
|
In previous articles I’ve written the topics have included the idea of JavaScript closures before (although I never explicitly said that), and I thought that I would take this opportunity to break down closures a little bit and explain some more about them.
What is a closure?
According to MDN, “A closure is the combination of a function bundled together (enclosed) with references to its surrounding state (the lexical environment). In other words, a closure gives you access to an outer function’s scope from an inner function. In JavaScript, closures are created every time a function is created, at function creation time.”
To simplify this, basically, a closure is a set of nested functions where the inner function has access to variables from the outer function, even after the outer function has been executed. Let’s take a look at an example, to help visualize things…
function outerFunction() {
let count = 0;
function innerFunction() {
count++;
return count;
}
return innerFunction;
} let runCounter = outerFunction(); runCounter(); // Outputs 1
runCounter(); // Outputs 2
Here we set up our outerFunction() with a variable of count that is set to 0 , next we have our innerFunction() nested inside outerFunction() , innerFunction() has access to the variable count inside of outerFunction() , and this is what makes up our closure. The upshot of all of this is that we have access to our count variable outside of the scope of our outerFunction() , this allows us to “capture” the count variable so that even after outerFunction() has done it’s thing we can still access what our count is.
Closure example
One example of closures comes into play when we talk about currying (which I wrote about here). Currying basically takes a function and transforms from sum(a, b, c) to sum(1)(2)(3) …
function sum(a) {
return function(b) {
return function(c) {
return a + b + c;
}
}
} sum(1)(2)(3); // Outputs 6
Conclusion
So that’s a quick rundown of closures, the big takeaway being that a closure is created by using nested functions in which the inner function has access to variables in the outer function scope.
I hope that this has been useful and thanks for reading!
|
https://medium.com/swlh/closures-in-javascript-74bf3803fc22
|
['Chris Hosler']
|
2020-12-23 22:47:04.570000+00:00
|
['Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript Tips']
|
AirTV Anywhere review: A better version of a middling DVR
|
The AirTV Anywhere is by no means the best over-the-air DVR for cord cutters, but it’s an okay option for Sling TV subscribers.
Like previous AirTV DVRs, the AirTV Anywhere streams video from an antenna directly into the Sling TV app, providing over-the-air and cable TV channels all in one place. But while earlier AirTV tuners required an external hard drive to record those over-the-air broadcasts, the AirTV Anywhere has 1TB drive built in. It also doubles the number of onboard tuners compared to the previous model, so you can watch or record up to four broadcast channels at a time instead of two.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best over-the-air DVRs for cord-cutters, 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. Mentioned in this article Amazon Fire TV Recast (75-hour model) Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $229.99See it Still, the new hardware doesn’t fix any major faults from earlier AirTV models, such as middling video quality and bare-bones DVR features. At $200 with no additional subscription fees, it’s a fine way to add the local channels that Sling TV otherwise lacks, but those who don’t subscribe to Sling will find more compelling over-the-air DVR options elsewhere.
From your antenna to the Sling appAs with other networked TV tuners, such as Nuvyyo’s Tablo and Amazon’s Fire TV Recast, the AirTV Anywhere does not plug directly into your television. Instead, you plug an antenna into the AirTV, then set it up wherever you get the best over-the-air signal. The AirTV then connects to your home network over ethernet or Wi-Fi and streams local channels into the Sling TV app on other devices.
Jared Newman / IDG Here’s a rough sketch of how the AirTV Anywhere DVR works.
The main advantage of a networked tuner is that you don’t need separate antennas or DVRs for each TV. Just a single AirTV device can serve multiple televisions throughout the home.
But you’ll still need streaming devices hooked up to each TV, and AirTV’s device compatibility list is shorter than that of Sling itself. AirTV can stream video to the Sling app on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, iOS, or Android mobile devices. Other devices that Sling supports (such as web browsers, Xbox consoles, and smart TVs from Samsung and LG) are incompatible.
Corporate synergiesSling TV and AirTV are both subsidiaries of Dish Network, which explains why they play so nicely together. In most markets, a Sling TV subscription won’t get you any local channels—a handful of big cities carry NBC and Fox stations, but that’s it—so AirTV helps fill the gaps.
Jared Newman / IDG AirTV brings over-the-air channels into the Sling TV app.
For the most part, this act of synergy works pretty well. Local stations appear in Sling’s grid guide just like any other channel, and you can add local channels to your favorites list for quick access. Your DVR list will include recordings from both local and Sling channels as well. All this beats having to switch to another app or input just to watch broadcast TV.
Jared Newman / IDG Your favorites list can include both local channels from AirTV and cable channels from Sling.
But there are some areas where the integration falls short. Local programming doesn’t show up in Sling’s search results or in its Sports menu, so it’s hard to track down specific shows to record, and if the same show is available on both cable and over-the-air channels, Sling lists their recordings separately. Sling has never seemed fully committed to marrying these two worlds, and that hasn’t changed with the AirTV Anywhere.
Jared Newman / IDG Local channels are available from Sling’s mini guide as well.
Live TV and DVR downsidesIt’s worth noting that you don’t have to be a Sling TV subscriber to use AirTV Anywhere. But without that slick integration, AirTV’s weaknesses as a DVR become even clearer.
Mentioned in this article Nuvyyo Tablo Quad DVR Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $199.99See it Video quality is still an issue on AirTV, with interlaced channels (that is, those broadcasting at 480i or 1080i) topping out at 30 frames per second on all devices. Only channels that broadcast at 720p resolution provide 60-frames-per-second video, which makes sports, news, and talk shows look smooth. As with previous AirTV models, the AirTV Anywhere doesn’t support surround sound, either.
Jared Newman / IDG Recording options are still quite limited on the AirTV Anywhere.
DVR capabilities remains a letdown as well. When setting up a recording, the Sling app only provides three options: All episodes, new episodes, or a single episode. You can’t add padding time to recordings, schedule manual recordings, or automatically discard older episodes of a show. And while the Sling app provides a one-time alert if you schedule more than four recordings at a time, there’s no schedule view or priority list to help avoid future conflicts.
Jared Newman / IDG The Sling app provides a pop-up when you create a scheduling conflict, but no other menus to prioritize recordindgs.
The playback experience is even worse. The Sling app doesn’t let you pause or rewind live TV channels, and it doesn’t show a visual preview when you’re fast forwarding or rewinding through recordings. All this makes avoiding commercial breaks a hassle.
Other options aboundGiven that DVR isn’t a strong suit, there’s still a solid case for getting the AirTV 2 instead of the newer AirTV Anywhere. It only has two tuners instead of four, and doesn’t have a built-in hard drive, but it’s also cheaper at $99. And if you do decide to add DVR functionality, you can add a larger USB drive for less. (The AirTV Anywhere doesn’t support external drives despite the USB port on the back.)
Jared Newman / IDG The AirTV Anywhere has built-in storage, but its USB port doesn’t recognize external drives.
But if you care about a great over-the-air DVR experience, other solutions do a much better job.
Tablo DVR has more recording options, thumbnail previews, and broader device support. It’s more expensive at $240 for a comparable quad-tuner model with built-in storage, and most DVR features require a subscription, but it’s worth the added expense. Can’t stomach a subscription? Amazon’s Fire TV Recast ($280 for the quad-tuner model) offers a great recording and playback experience on Fire TV devices, and you can even view Sling and over-the-air channels together in Amazon’s live channel guide. Power users can also look to Channels or Plex for powerful over-the-air DVRs with excellent video quality and ad skipping.
The AirTV Anywhere is a slightly better DVR than its predecessors, if only because its built-in hard drive and extra tuners introduce fewer potential nuisances, but new hardware can only accomplish so much. AirTV’s issues are more fundamental, and sadly, still unfixed.
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/@donna58400273/airtv-anywhere-review-a-better-version-of-a-middling-dvr-61c4f2a7fd52
|
[]
|
2020-12-13 14:53:52.309000+00:00
|
['Tvs', 'Audio', 'Chargers', 'Surveillance']
|
兩警急救李偲嫣須隔離檢測
|
A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics.
|
https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E5%85%A9%E8%AD%A6%E6%80%A5%E6%95%91%E6%9D%8E%E5%81%B2%E5%AB%A3%E9%A0%88%E9%9A%94%E9%9B%A2%E6%AA%A2%E6%B8%AC-fbde0fa4730b
|
['C Y S']
|
2020-12-16 12:01:11.533000+00:00
|
['Government', 'Politics', 'Hong Kong', 'China']
|
If I Had Known; A Startup Founder Reflection
|
Ever since I started my own company, I’ve read every blog post I can get my hands on about failure. I thought if I read enough about how things went wrong for others, I’d have the ability to avoid disappointment myself.
I’d like to begin by saying that my company is still alive, but pivoting largely from the “big vision” I (and those who have invested blood, sweat and tears) hoped to achieve. The dream was to create a color-focused home planning and search tool.
I had the idea for Vishion, the only color search engine for home, the summer of 2017. We launched our mobile app July 2019. We let our users know that we were shutting it down and pivoting to a B2B model yesterday.
No, Vishion is not dead. But this shift from the original mission, and putting my startup back as a side hustle, does feel like a huge failure.
At this moment, instead of telling my story over-and-over again to those I come across individually, I want to tell you the whole tale now. I want to tell you where I think it went wrong (outside of the gut-punch that is COVID). It would be easiest to simply blame COVID for everything, but when I am being extremely self-reflective, I do have to admit there are a few things I would have done differently.
This is what I wish I had known from the beginning and where it went wrong.
Our (paraphrased) Journey
It’s impossible to capture the ups and downs of starting a business. There is a reason companies like to hire former entrepreneurs; we know how to take a punch and get back up.
Vishion won the Early-Stage Startup of the Year in January 2020.
I’ve pitched hundreds of investors, won and lost a few pitch competitions, and even participated in an accelerator (after being accepted and rejected from a handful). I found and lost cofounders, hired a team, and navigated the complexities that come with managing a team during COVID. I’ve had investors who really believed in what we could accomplish and those who would string us along just to “change their minds” at the finish line. My story isn’t unique — you hear versions of the same tale from almost any startup founder.
I want to fast-forward to where we were the last week of February 2020, before things began to go bad for the world. We had won Early-Stage Startup of the Year in Charlotte and I had just travelled the country with the Brandery Accelerator, pitching dozens of investors in multiple cities. We had launched Vishion social (the ability to search and share designs by color)in NYC and won the SoGal Global Pitch Competition in San Francisco. I remember sitting at a bar in NYC, seeing our first major coverage from Architectural Digest, and crying tears of relief; it was finally happening.
I know exactly where I was when I told my husband (after two years of effort) that I finally saw a path to closing our $750,000 seed round. My dream was all falling into place; my team’s hard work was finally paying off.
Hell Month: March 2020
After winning the pitch competition in San Francisco, I had about two weeks and three cities worth of traveling left as I tried to stack a few more investors into my first round. I was flying home when I saw SXSW was cancelled because of COVID. Although I was aware of the virus, that was the first moment it seemed like something we should be concerned about. A few days later, we got an email from SoGal saying someone at the pitch event had tested positive for COVID. All of my travel plans and meetings immediately came to a halt as I went into my first quarantine.
At first, I was merely managing the change from physical meetings to virtual. Many conversations circled around how everyones reaction to COVID was a bit overblown, but better to be safe than sorry.
The week of my 31st birthday, March 14, is now what I like to call “Hell Week”. It was the beginning of the calls from many of the investors (who had committed just a few weeks earlier) to pull their investments. Only one or two fully pulled out of their commitments — most asked for time to reevaluate. All of the calls had the same tone; they needed to figure out what was happening with their existing investments before moving forward. They needed to see how we would weather the next few months.
I spent my birthday mostly by myself, shell-shocked. There were a lot of tears, deep breathing, and making any excuse to be alone. It goes without saying that there was a lot of wine too. It took me about three months to be able to talk about that week without crying. We had $300K in the bank up until that point and had to scrap all of the plans we had put in place for the $750K round.
There isn’t a playbook for surviving a pandemic. We had spent two years researching and testing, just to throw all of that data in the trash. We focused on interior designers and high-end home brands as our ideal customers, both of which were small business owners dealing with a similar panic as myself. Right away we hosted a Virtual Market with industry experts to help our target audience and to get a sense of how the industry was dealing with COVID in real-time. The event was well attended, but the tone was very bleak if you weren’t an established designer or a brand with a strong supply chain, sales funnel, and digital presence.
It was also clear that the market we hoped to expand to, homeowners and DIYers, were having a field day sprucing up their homes during the pandemic. If we had raised the full round of capital, we may have had the financing to seize the day. Unfortunately, to survive, we had to cut costs anywhere we could.
I’ll give my team all of the credit in the world; they rallied. We decided to put our effort into putting our IOS app on the web, as well as expand our target market to DIYers. We were hoping we could make slight pivots, appealing to a more virtual enviroment. Unfortunately, even with the home improvement market booming, investors still weren’t biting.
When to say When
In April, I had a conversation with my team about what it would take to survive and “when to say when”. I told my team that if I didn’t see a path forward, we would need to have a candid conversation of where we go from there.
By June, we put our color search on the web and had refined a new pitch strategy to address COVID survival. Unfortunately, conversations with investors weren’t getting easier. We had to start thinking further outside the box — which meant large partnerships (that could limit our reach in the future) or an acquisition.
Over the summer and early fall, were secured conversations with two large media organizations focused on home. One conversation went to due diligence, and after a handful of meetings, felt like it was going to actually work. It would not only fill our round and give us the runway to build the company we envisioned, but was also a partnership that could help us acquire users on a massive scale. I remember saying to multiple people, “maybe all of those ‘maybe laters’ from other investors happened so we could get to this moment.”
But, as had happened more than a dozen times before, an investor who said they wouldn’t “lead us on” … led us on. Again, not a unique story for founders. Without much of a reason, other than someone on their team was hesitant because we were so early, the tide had changed in their decision making process. For me, it was the final blow.
I always wondered if I would know in my gut “when is when”. I had never thrown in the towel in my life. After three years without a salary and living through the emotional pain of a pandemic, I finally felt what it meant to be burned out. One of my favorite expressions is “get knocked down nine times stand up ten.” This time, I found it almost impossible to stand up.
I wish I could fully describe to you what it feels like, every minute of every day, to see the window closing. Every “yes” that turned to a “not yet”, where pre-COVID “maybe laters” are already a dime a dozen. If a “no” before March 2020 felt like a pinch, a “no” after Hell Month felt like a knock-your-wind-out punch. You try to keep in mind that everything in startup life is a numbers game; the more people we could reach, the more likely we were to get to a “yes”. It just seemed like the virtual “nos” came a lot quicker after March … which, in the grand scheme of things, you prefer.
Were there investors that would have said yes if I kept going until there was no runway left? Maybe. Does it bother me that if I had the will to keep going, I could be writing a different story? Yes.
My greatest fear is, and will always be, letting the people around me down. My team, my investors, and my family have put so much into Vishion, it felt unbearable to get to a point where there were no options left. Not to mention the fact that my entire identity is intertwined with my company. Who am I without Vishion?
With a pivot, we at least live to fight another day.
Reinventing Vishion
In the first few months of Vishion, we had many conversations around how we could help people search by color. Would it be best to go direct to consumers, helping shoppers search across brands? Or should we help brands with color search on their own websites?
We obviously went with the former, believing it was a larger long-term opportunity. To be honest, the idea to reach everyday shoppers felt way more exciting to me, which in hindsight is probably not the best decision making method. As we built Vishion, we had brands ask for help organizing their products feeds with detailed color identifiers. One fabric brand told me early on that 90% of their web visitors began their product search with color.
When we heard our final “not yet”, I had to prepare to tell our team and existing investors that I could no longer see a path forward with our IOS and web platform. With limited runway, I had to have the conversation you never want to have. I called everyone on my team first, because they deserved to hear from me that I had let us down.
It was a member of my team who asked if we wanted to try one more thing; We could use the technology we built and our existing runway to provide a color search plugin for home and fashion brands. Back to the original drawing board, but at least with a strong foundation. And with this, a light started flickering again at the end of the tunnel.
Our story isn’t over. I have to move Vishion to a side-hustle so I can start making a salary again, but our technology can still make us money. It’s disappointing that we won’t be able to see our big vision come to fruition, but knowing there is a “need” for our tech and that we have a chance to make our investors money back is the only thing I care about at this point.
What I wish I had known
Why did I feel the need to tell you this?
I have been very transparent during my founder journey. In part, this is because we only hear stories about these moments from successful founders … you know as you read the painstaking stories of their journey, they will eventually get to a shiny conclusion we all envy.
If I am being honest, it’s mostly because I am tired of saying “it is what it is” when I am asked how I am doing. I gloss over the bad parts, because who really wants to hear (or tell) this story over and over again. But I do want people to know I gave it everything. I do want them to know how hard we fought.
Whats the lesson for others? How can you avoid a similar fate?
Although COVID undoubtedly changed our trajectory, there are a few things I would love to go back in time and tell myself. Hopefully, the lessons I’ve learned can help other founders in their decision making process.
Let’s start with the question I get the most often: Why was it so hard for you to raise money Pre-COVID?
It took me a long time, almost two years, to get to the point where I was “about” to fill my round. My fundraising challenges can be broken into 4 parts:
location (network)
business model
focus
having a female-centric product
When I started fundraising, I took a trip to San Francisco and went door-to-door asking for opportunities to pitch. Of 12 firms, it got me 3 meetings (but 0 investors).
— Location: I wanted to create something huge; but the idea of Pinterest in its earliest form would not have sold in the South (founded in 2010, they didn’t start making money until 2013). You need investors who love high-risk, high-reward opportunities, which is not the southern way. While my network in in the Southeast is literally as good as it gets, there weren’t enough investors in this pool of people to make a dent on my cap table. I tried everything to break into other networks, but aside from living full-time in San Francisco or New York, it seemed even a warm intro wasn’t sufficient to get the attention of the investors we needed.
— Business Model: if I were to start over, the number one thing I would have said to my pastself was to create a business model that didn’t rely on investors until it was time to scale. Be as self-sufficient as possible, because you don’t have the network to make your business model happen. I needed marketing dollars to really scale (which I am very sure my marketing team would tell you without hesitation). The winners in the South are the companies that can show consistent MRR pre-investment. Aside from that, I would have loved to make a salary during all of this. The personal strain it puts on you and your loved ones is immeasurable. Instead, any money that came into the company went to my team and the business.
— Focus: Every time we got a check in, I got distracted from fundraising. It wasn’t that I fully stopped; I would just get so excited about the business, that fundraising would stop being my full-time focus. If you plan on fundraising, know that you no longer get to be hands-on with your dream (at least not as much as you’d like). You literally spend all of your time convincing others why they should believe in your dream rather than building it.
— Female-Centric Product: You can’t seriously measure bias. Unless I could transform to a fly on the wall, I could never say with certainty that any investors I pitched had bias leading to their “not now” (they all say not now by the way, as to not miss out if the round becomes interesting). I do know for a fact that many of the investors, if they were not turned off by the business model, could not wrap their minds around the problem.
During a pitch competition in San Francisco, I had a judge (who was a lawyer) say his wife was perfectly fine buying couches from Amazon and would not care about the color or where it came from. (I’m pretty sure I lost that pitch competition when I told him he needed to have a conversation with his wife.) I had countless others who said, “My wife handles all of that. I’ll check with her and get back to you.” If the investor doesn’t feel the pain, they won’t think you’re important enough to invest in. Plain and simple.
As for COVID investment pitches, if we were deemed risky before, they saw us as incredibly risky now. It was clear, and honestly even more defeating, that I couldn’t overcome the negative mindset that came with COVID.
Where I went right
Hands down, I have the best investors, the best team, the best advisors, and the best partners. These people keep me going. Their strength, knowledge, and ability to inspire me is one of the main reasons I am still here today, continuing to push. I honestly could spend 10,000 more words on the impact each individual had on Vishion — which they wholeheartedly deserve — but I will only leave them with this sentence of sincere gratitude and unapologetic admiration.
My husband, by my side, when we won startup of the year. I must also mention the amazing Vita, our marketing guru, to my right!
I very quickly must mention the best decision I ever made: picking my life partner. My husband was there through every punch. He never waivered. He never asked me to give up. He was ready with a glass of wine with every “no” and a bottle of champagne with every “yes”. He never made me feel bad when we couldn’t take amazing vacations or buy things we desperately wanted. He is my therapist, sounding-board, advisor and confidant. He is the partner every woman deserves.
What’s next
Stay tuned for announcements about Vishion launching in the B2B space, as well as personal updates from me on my next big thing.
As many people in Charlotte know, a big goal of mine over the past few years is to bring more women into the startup ecosystem. I created Collective Hustle, a group that brings underestimated founders and investors to the forefront, when I noticed a lack of a women at startup events. I did this all while working on my own company, so I am excited to keep it going with a new lens. As we start to get back to normal, or life post-COVID, I hope to reinvigorate Collective Hustle’s mission in the South. It’s especially important now, considering the fact women have taken a huge hit with COVID.
If you’re a founder in need of a sounding board, please feel free to shoot me an email ([email protected]). The first person I went to when I hit rock bottom was another founder I knew would understand what I was going through. She instantly made me feel better, just by having a truly understanding ear.
I’m always happy to help, whether it’s a connection to help you raise your own round or just someone to vent to. Together, we’ll get through this.
Stay safe, wear a mask, and keep it colorful.
|
https://medium.com/swlh/if-i-had-known-a-startup-founder-reflection-50213f27810c
|
['Samantha Smith']
|
2020-12-11 13:46:20.057000+00:00
|
['Failure', 'Founders', 'Startup']
|
How To Block / Blacklist a Number on Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa)
|
There are easy ways to block, blacklist number or sms on Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa). This tutorial covers how to reject calls, block unwanted call and sms, how to blacklist a number via ussd code, apk apps. so by using our tutorial you can block both calls and text messages.
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About Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa)
Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) mobile phone was launched on February, 2016. The smartphone is powered by a Quad-core (2x2.15 GHz Kryo & 2x1.6 GHz Kryo) processor with Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 (14 nm) chipset, as for graphics it possesses Adreno 530 GPU. The phone comes in 32GB 4GB RAM internal memory. The Cellphone runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), upgradable to Android 8.0 (Oreo), TouchWiz UI operating system and is powered by a 3000mAh of Li-Ion battery.
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The phone comes with a 5.1" desplay size, Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1440x2560 pixels. It has a display aspect ratio of 16:09 and ~72.3% of screen ratio with 16M of display colors.
The Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) camera on the back side packs single Lens of 12 MP. The rear camera setup has LED flash, auto-HDR, panorama features.
The front camera sports single Lens of 5 MP for selfies, with Dual video call, Auto-HDR features
The smartphone runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), upgradable to Android 8.0 (Oreo), TouchWiz UI operating system and packs 32GB 4GB RAM of inbuilt storage that can be expanded via microSDXC (dedicated slot). The Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) is a Nano-SIM. The smartphone measures 142.4 x 69.6 x 7.9 mm (5.61 x 2.74 x 0.31 in) (height x width x thickness) and weighs 152g (5.36 oz). It was launched in Black Onyx, Silver Titanium, Gold Platinum colors.
So lets move to how to blacklist, block or even unblock numbers call or sms on Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa)
Block a number on your Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) with Android 4.4 KitKat right from the call log:
- Click the phone app on your smartphone
— Head over to the three dots on the right up side of the screen
— Click Call Reject
— Press Reject calls from
— Tap Private numbers
— You can add numbers from here
You May Like: How To Block / Blacklist a Number on Samsung Phones
Through the setting menu of your Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa)
- Click on settings and click on Call
— click on Call Reject
— click on Reject calls from
— click on private numbers if you would like or simply add a number coming from your contact list
— Look for the contact you choose to block
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Block a number on your Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) Using Third-Party Apps
You can easily make use of a third party apps that accomplish the task for yourself. All the apps in this article are free of charge and virus free!
Setup one of the following cell phone number blocker apps within your Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) by using the url following and enjoy the silence as before!
- Download
— Mr. Number — Caller ID & Spam Protection
— Developer: Hiya
— Price: Free+
- Download
— Call Blocker — Blacklist
— Developer: cxzh.ltd
— Price: Free+
- Download
— Calls Blacklist — Call Blocker
— Developer: Vlad Lee
— Price: Free+
How to Block Number / Call on Samsung Galaxy S7 (Usa) Using USSD Codes
You can use ussd code to block unwanted calls on your smartphone
You May Like: Download blue Whatsapp apk for Samsung
How to bar all outgoing calls
*333*(enter password)# — To Activate
#333*(enter password)# — To Cancel
*#333# — Check Status
Block incoming calls
*353*(enter password)# — To Activate
#353*(enter password)# — To Cancel
*#353# — Check Status
|
https://medium.com/@TecMobs/how-to-block-blacklist-a-number-on-samsung-galaxy-s7-usa-702639f70ad1
|
['Tecno Mobiles']
|
2021-12-31 14:12:25.652000+00:00
|
['Samsung']
|
5 Things to Help React Native Beginners
|
1. React Native CLI vs Expo CLI
When setting up your mobile app there are two ways to get your app up and running, Expo CLI and React Native CLI. See React Native docs for setting up the development environment page.
Expo CLI is more beginner-friendly and only takes minutes to get your app up and running. However, React Native CLI is better for experienced mobile developers and has more options to customize native features as opposed to Expo CLI. Here is a great video outlining the advantages and disadvantages of both!
2. Core Components
Since there is no DOM on mobile we do not use any HTML elements like <div> tags for example. Instead, React Native uses built-in components. The basic ones to know off the bat are…
<View> pretty much acts as a <div>
<Text> equivalent to a <p> . It can display text.
<Image> like a <img>
<TextInput> similar to <input type = "text"> , this lets the user enter text
<ScrollView> like the view tag but is scrollable
Here is the full list of Native components. Don’t worry if these seem foreign, once you start using them they will seem like second nature!
3. Screens/ Navigating Between them
Mobile apps are made up of screens. React Navigation is the official library that allows navigation across screens. The library contains three types of navigators
StackNavigator - Used to transition between screens where each new screen is placed on top of a stack
Stack Navigation
TabNavigator (most common) - Tabs on the bottom of the screen or on the top below the header
Tab Navigation
DrawerNavigator - Panel of options on the left edge of the screen that is usually hidden until the user swipes to the right
Drawer Navigation
4. Styling
React Native does not use CSS, instead, you use Javascript to style your application. All core components accept a prop named style . The style names and values usually match how CSS works except the names are written in camel case ( ex. backgroundColor ).
It is best practice to use StyleSheet.create to define several styles as in the below code.
I personally find styled-components cleaner and easier to use. Styled-components is a CSS-in-JS library where you write CSS per component. Follow below for a short example.
Something also important to note about styling in React Native is Flexbox . FlexDirection defaults to column instead of row. Flex is a little bit more tricky.
Flex defines how your items will be filled in the space available. Space is divided based on each item’s flex property and only supports a single number. Read the official documentation here to get a better sense.
5. Helpful Resources
Lastly, I would not have been able to do half the things I did on my app if it was not for the resource below! I hope these help you as much as they did me.
React Native Docs - This is an obvious one, but I cannot stress enough to read the docs first 🤓
- This is an obvious one, but I cannot stress enough to read the docs first 🤓 Expo CLI Docs - I used Expo to run my app and am thankful I did! Their documentations are easy to follow and great for beginners. I also used Expo-Camera which was straight-forward to install and use. This article also helped me with setting up my camera.
- I used Expo to run my app and am thankful I did! Their documentations are easy to follow and great for beginners. I also used Expo-Camera which was straight-forward to install and use. This article also helped me with setting up my camera. React Native Beginner Tutorial - A Youtube tutorial by Mosh that I highly recommend. It is a great first look on React Native that was shared by my cohort friend Matt Ericksen. It was the first thing I did after reading the documentation.
- A Youtube tutorial by Mosh that I highly recommend. It is a great first look on React Native that was shared by my cohort friend Matt Ericksen. It was the first thing I did after reading the documentation. Running Your App on a Device with Local Backend - This is more specific but this one threw me for a loop and took me some time to figure out. This article gives a great step by step way to run your app on your mobile device.
- This is more specific but this one threw me for a loop and took me some time to figure out. This article gives a great step by step way to run your app on your mobile device. Form Template - Forms are a little different compared to React due to React Native’s built-in components. This is a great template for a sign-in form or any form you want to make!
I hope this article helped clear any hesitation for anyone thinking about learning React Native. If you are interested here is my code from my capstone project. Please reach out to me if you want to discuss more, I am still learning and always am looking to bounce my thoughts/ideas off of someone!
|
https://samantha-lurio.medium.com/5-things-to-help-react-native-beginners-9b692e12df4d
|
['Samantha Lurio']
|
2020-12-09 19:07:08.460000+00:00
|
['Software Development', 'Bootcamp', 'Beginner', 'Coding', 'React Native']
|
Dart: Different types of functions in Dart To Help You Write Your Flutter app.
|
Dart: Different types of functions in Dart To Help You Write Your Flutter app. Tiya Chows Follow Sep 18 · 2 min read
A quick low down on the different types Dart functions you might come across.
Types of functions:
void functions e.g
void greeting() {
print(‘hello’);
}
2. functions with a return type e.g
String greeting() {
return ‘Hello’;
}
3. functions that take parameters
i. mandatory parameters e.g
void greeting(@required String greeting){
print(greeting);
}
ii. optional parameters
optional positional parameter e.g
void details([int telephone]) {...}
optional named parameter e.g
void details({String firstName, String lastName}) {...}
optional parameter with default values e.g
void details({int age: 30}) {...}
a function with all possible types of parameters:
void details (int id, [int telephone],{String firstName, String lastName}, {int age: 30}) {...}
and you could call it with:
details(1001) details(1001, 078787878787, firstName: John, lastName: Ham, age: 50)
4. Getters and Setters
Special methods that provide read and write access to an object’s properties.
class Car {
String make; Car({this.make}); String get make => make; void set make(String name) => make = name; }
to call:
Car myCar = Car(‘Porsche’); print(myCar.make);
Different Function declarations:
Regular function e.g
void greeting {
print(‘hello’);
}
2. Lambda function/arrow function is a short form of a regular function that can only return one expression. (Arrows instead of curly brackets). e.g
|
https://medium.com/the-innovation/flutter-different-types-of-functions-e92461371660
|
['Tiya Chows']
|
2020-09-25 02:27:29.736000+00:00
|
['Flutter App Development', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Flutter']
|
What is happening with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
|
The most influential cryptocurrency in the world, is experiencing again heavy losses, many will wonder how is it that a cryptocurrency that in 2017 went from 1,000 to 20,000 $ per unit in 2018 its descent has led to having it again at an average of $ 4,000 for the day that this article is written?
There is no doubt that 2018 has been a difficult year for Bitcoin, and that as a chain effect (one phenomenon after another) has led to the world’s strongest cryptocurrency to the downside.
In a previous article that we called “NOOOO why the crypts fall?”, We explained that the regulatory decisions of two governments gave a strong blow to Bitcoin, these governments represent great markets for the asset: China and South Korea.
This would be the first blow, since the meaning of the word “prohibition” in China or South Korea does nothing but ignite the alarms in the inhabitants, this effect is so serious domino that you would think that the problem should affect only to the Chinese or the South Koreans, but it is not like that, being such influential markets when the Chinese and South Koreans sell their Bitcoin the numbers fall in red all over the world.
Result, users panic and start selling the asset in all parts of the world, something completely counterproductive to the Bitcoin market and other cryptocurrencies.
After this attack by the Chinese and South Korean governments, which in itself helped to reduce confidence and credibility of cryptocurrencies, during 2018 Bitcoin and the altcoins have had a downward trend, the other hypotheses that are added are the following:
According to analyst Jorge Bejarano, consultant to the OAS (Organization of American States) in Digital Security, he assures that the reasons for the collapse are due to the fact that in recent months “interest has fallen or from where the most important negotiations are taking place of exchange of assets and expectations of making deals based on cryptocurrencies have declined “.
“There had been talk of establishing a cryptocurrency negotiation table and that generated an expectation of having a more serious negotiation space. However, the issue did not prosper and what it does is generate a little more distrust in relation to stability. “
The regulatory scrutiny that the digital currency has faced is the other major cause of the collapse of recent months. “The fact that these cryptoactives do not have a central authority and do not have a bank that supports them, ends up generating distrust in relation to the support that can be given,” he says.
In addition, Bejarano adds that despite the fact that Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies have made enormous progress in terms of purchase-sale compatibility on a global scale, there is still a long way to go, “for example, in Colombia you can not buy an apartment with Bitcoin because the transactions are not authorized, elements such as these generate instability “, these elements being precisely able to support a market.
To what has been commented above is the fact that a major change in the infrastructure of the digital currency itself is coming, a change in its base code that has many Bitcoin investors accumulating cash for when the change occurs and buying coins right after . A phenomenon very similar to when the sea contracts and then return perhaps more strongly.
Another cause, according to experts, could be due to the first two fines imposed by the Regulator of the US markets against two cryptocurrency companies, Airfox and Paragon Coin, each of which will have to pay $ 250,000. This would have caused users to fear more fines, and therefore would be selling their portfolios in cryptocurrencies before the value fell further. Actually, the Bitcoin was already falling before these two events occurred, although since its fall has increased in recent days, could have influenced the decline.
On the other hand, Kevin Murcko, CEO of crypto exchange CoinMetro, told Euronews that Bitcoin’s peak price was always set to go down.
“All crypts are incipient assets, speculation, rather than the utility of technology or the underlying asset, is what has driven the movement of prices since its inception.”
“Driven by the hubbub of the media and the public’s belief that cryptography was a way to get rich quick, the asset class skyrocketed from almost nothing to over $ 800 billion at its peak. obviously, it was unsustainable, “he said.
The psychology of the market is also a factor: “Fear is a tremendous motivator, and this is what we see reflected in prices, fear of the market is cumulative, selling encourages us to sell more, nobody wants their BTC to be left to a dollar”.
To reverse the downturn, Murcko explains that we need to see a new value, that is: more real-world use cases of companies and people that actually use the underlying asset.
“This will bring new buyers, new eyes and generate a renewed demand, so that a recovery occurs after the initial bubble burst, it is necessary to show a correlation between the price of the asset and its practical value,” he said.
In every crisis there is an opportunity
From our organization we are pleased to share with you the vision of Fritz Wagner CEO of Bitdharma regarding the current bearish situation, he made the following analysis:
“Our Stop Loss in Bitcoin shows bullish and bearish BTC signals, although the overall picture was clearly bearish we can conclude that after 2 big declines; it is not surprising that a bounce occurs, we note that the next strong support will be between $ 3100 — $ 3200 (Bitstamp prices) where the convergence of points between MA200 (weekly chart) and the support area could offer a good defense “ Analysis done on 11/26/2018.
Likewise, Wagner stressed to always keep calm and sanity, you should never panic and sell, this attitude is harmful not only for people, it is also for the market, instead the CEO specialist in cryptocurrencies and Blockchain recommends have a broad and positive view under any scenario: “if it is a rebound we advise taking advantage of the maximum projection, if it is a setback this could be the ideal opportunity to invest at really economic prices with a projection towards a substantial future”.
By: Journalist Marcelo Durán.
|
https://medium.com/bitdharma-newsletter/what-is-happening-with-bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies-7393db2249eb
|
['Fritz Wagner']
|
2018-12-03 13:27:05.450000+00:00
|
['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Btc']
|
WiFi Hacking
|
Hey Guys, In this article I’ll teach you how to Hack nearby WiFi routers using Kali Linux.
In the first part of WiFi hacking we will use two tools
airmon-ng
airodump-ng
Stack utilities of aircrack tool.
In this we’ll use 2 tools which are used under Wireless Hacking. For this I’m using AWUS036NHA Alpha Wifi Adapter. If you want to see the configuration process then click here.
Part 1 is finding nearby Devices.
Here is the process:
Step 1: Open your terminal and type the following command
sudo airmon-ng start wlan0
Explaination: The above command will change the mode from managed to monitor mode. Monitor mode is basically to catch all the nearby frequencies. It will shutdown wlan0 and will switch on wlan0mon. It means it shutdowned managed mode and switched on monitor mode.
Step 2(optional): then Type the following commands in terminal:
ifconfig
iwconfig
Explanation: ifconfig is a optional to check if its started or not. And iwconfig to see that monitor mode is on and power mode is off)
Step 3: Now type the following command to search nearby list of routers in your range.
sudo airodump-ng wlan0mon
where,
BSSID: Mac Address of router PWR: How near is the frequency Beacons: Record all beacons in the dump file. #Data: How much data is passed out. CH: On which channel it is running ENC: What encryption does router have mostly have WPA2 CIPHER: Encryption format AUTH: PSK(Pre Shared Key) ESSID: Name of WiFi router.
NOW IN THIS SEGMENT WE’LL USE TWO MORE TOOLS:
1. aireplay-ng
2. aircrack-ng
Now that we know how to see nearby devices Next thing will be to choose the target for executing our hacking skills on them.
Step 5: Ctrl +C to stop the process of finding and searching and Choose your target mine is with ESSID E12.
Step 6: sudo airodump-ng — bssid <bssid> — channel <ch> wlan0mon
This will show the devices connected to a particular bssid.
As you can see three devices are connected
Step 7: Next write the following command:
aireplay-ng — deauth 0 -a <bssid> wlan0mon
Explanation: aireplay-ng is basically a utility under aircrack. The primary function is to generate traffic for the later use in aircrack-ng for cracking the WEP and WPA-PSK keys. There are different attacks which can cause deauthentications for the purpose of capturing WPA handshake data,fake authentications, Interactive packet replay and ARP-request reinjections.
— deauth: deauth means deauthentication. It means we will disconnect all the devices or particular device from the target router.
0: 0 means it will run infinite number of times. And also till you don’t stop the process no devices under that router will be able to recoonect.
-a : -a here means to enter target bssid.
Once disconnected & then try to connect it will leave the password. Here the Attack start for WiFi hacking.
Note: But in this case we will never run infinite times we’ll run for limited number of times say 10,20 etc. Because we want handshake after they disconnect and try to reconnect.
Step 8: type this command:
sudo aireplay-ng — deauth 25 -a <bssid> wlan0mon
This will send 25 deauth packets and after disconnecting when he will try to connect this will catch the password.
This is to disconnect all the devices. If you want to particularly disconnect 1,2 then you can use -c <station or client id> after -a in above command.
Note: Prefer disconnecting all just because sometimes it get in problem with WPA handshake. That’s why we hackers prefer disconnecting all
It’ll send exactly 25 packets.
Step 9: sudo airodump-ng — bssid <bssid> — channel <ch> — write <anyname> wlan0mon
Explanation: This command will write with the data of traffic capturing. The password will be stored in the .cap file But problem will be that it cannot be human readable. It can only be cracked using password attacks.
This is how files will be stored.
Result when you try to open the .cap file.
Note: Try store this files in a folder so that it will look nice and also easy because you know where you saved it.
Now after this WPA Handshake should be written on top. If this is not showing you cannot connect or attack the wifi.
Because I’m working with adapter it will show me PKID found in place of “interface wlan0mon down”. It is showing me because I stopped the process and shutdowned the wlan0mon
If you’re not using adapter then in your case it will show WPA handshake.
Now the packet is been captured we’ll now bruteforce it.
Step 10: sudo aircrack-ng -w <password list file path> <.cap file>
Explanation: aircrack-ng is a network software suite consisting of a detector, packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and anaylsis tool for 802.11 wireless LANs
-w: is used for the wordlist/password list file path.
.cap file: means .capture file in which password is stored.
Note: If you will get the password it will show PASSWORD FOUND !! just above the master Key.
If you want to shutdown wlan0mon then just type
sudo airmon-ng stop wlan0mon
Congratulations you have learned how to hack WiFi. Thanks and GOOD BYE !!!! hackers.
|
https://medium.com/@overide/wifi-hacking-part-1-704a79d24610
|
['Ayush Bagde']
|
2020-12-30 09:37:44.740000+00:00
|
['Wifi', 'Hacking Training', 'Wifihacking', 'Hacking For Defense', 'Hacking']
|
5 Action Steps for the Department of Energy to Lead National Mobilization to Defeat the Climate Crisis
|
President-elect Biden has a mandate to revitalize American industries and deliver good union jobs through an ambitious clean energy economic recovery, and his Energy Secretary nominee has experience doing just that. Former Gov. Jennifer Granholm led Michigan through the worst of the Great Recession and worked with then-VP Biden to put clean energy policy at the heart of the Rust Belt’s recovery. Now, as Energy Secretary, Granholm will need to mobilize the full DOE to enact President-elect Biden’s bold agenda to defeat the climate crisis and build a just and thriving clean energy economy.
The DOE must utilize its financing authorities and technology program offices, important regulatory powers, and the unparalleled research capabilities of the National Labs to rapidly shift us to a clean energy economy.
Jennifer Granholm’s leadership was pivotal to rebuilding the auto industry and putting it on a fast track to decarbonization. She also pushed incentives for renewable energy infrastructure and implemented a renewable energy standard for utilities. Her background shows clear commitment to climate issues.
In order to realize Biden’s climate mandate, every federal agency must become a climate agency. The Department of Energy under former Gov. Granholm will be critical in this effort. As President-elect Biden begins an all-out government mobilization to defeat the climate crisis, today, Evergreen Action is releasing 5 concrete actions for how the next Department of Energy must act:
1. Mobilize Billions in Public and Private Capital for Clean Energy Projects
The new Energy Secretary should move urgently to leverage its loan and grant programs to boost the development and deployment of clean energy technologies. To support the execution of clean energy projects, DOE’s Loan Programs Office should aggressively deploy its more than $40 billion in loans and loan guarantees, including $17 billion to support the manufacture of advanced-technology vehicles, over $4 billion for innovative renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, and $2 billion to support Tribal energy development. And with these financing authorities, and with new investments to be pursued in Congress DOE should play a leading role leading a large-scale investment in an American clean energy economic recovery. Further, to ensure federal leadership in the clean power expansion, the Federal Energy Management Program should more aggressively pursue energy performance savings contracts advancing efficiency and electrification improvements for partner agencies.
2. Partner with States and Local Governments in Clean Energy Deployment
The next Secretary should prioritize funding and technical assistance to states and local governments transitioning to clean energy sources. DOE operates several programs providing intergovernmental support through the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), and the Secretary should ensure that every available resource is deployed to subnational governments. DOE can expand the reach of the State Energy Program, which has supported projects ranging from industrial sector efficiency to cost-saving retrofits in rural communities, and the Weatherization Assistance Program, which employs more than 8,500 workers improving energy efficiency in low-income households. At the same time, it should bolster the Cities-LEAP project to provide cities with access to energy data and analysis enabling them to take initiative on clean energy innovation. DOE’s Office of Electricity can also work with state energy agencies to fund and deploy smart grid technologies, advancing a national transition to more resilient, efficient, and renewables-friendly power transmission systems. Through these and other financing and technical assistance programs, the next Secretary must fully utilize DOE’s capacity for intergovernmental support.
3. Raise the Climate Ambition in Clean Appliance, Building, and Industrial Standards
The next Secretary should raise standards for energy efficiency from appliances, buildings, and industry. DOE’s Appliance and Equipment Standards program is its most important regulatory mitigation tool; the program enforces efficiency standards for dozens of categories of appliances and equipment, saving consumers $1 trillion since 1975 and reducing energy site consumption by an average of 13%. The Secretary should first work to undo the Trump administration’s rollbacks by coming up to speed on delayed standards reviews and complying with the law to update standards for 25 of the 60 appliance categories DOE oversees, ranging from freezers to clothes dryers. Moving forward, the DOE should then set a multi-year calendar for appliance standards to motivate progress, and factor carbon pollution and grid improvements to accelerate decarbonization, promote electrification, and ensure predictability for manufacturers. The next Secretary should also push for the development of a national Zero-Carbon Building Standard for all zero-carbon new buildings across the U.S. by 2030, and partner with states and cities to integrate this standard into new and stronger state and local building codes. And to bolster advances toward industrial efficiency, DOE should increase its grantmaking to support new manufacturing technologies through the Advanced Manufacturing Office, expand its energy audit programs with Industrial Assessment Centers, and revitalize its Industrial Technologies Program to actively deploy innovative energy-saving technology to American industry.
4. Focus DOE Innovation Agenda on the Next Generation of Climate Technology Challenges
DOE should fully leverage its preeminent energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) programs and capabilities for climate action. The agency’s SunShot initiative, which cut the cost of solar power by 75% three years ahead of schedule, exemplifies the possibilities of an invigorated RDD&D program poised to tackle everything from energy storage and building electrification to biofuels and carbon capture. To that end, the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy must be reoriented to support a full transition to clean energy sources. The Office’s RDD&D agenda should move past failed technologies to focus on more promising climate solutions within its brief, including carbon sequestration for hard-to-abate industry and innovative processes to use sequestered carbon in manufacturing.
5. Use DOE’s Unique Analytical Capacities and National Labs to Advance an All-of-Government Climate Mobilization
Collectively, the DOE’s staff and lab experts have the broadest, most robust energy-related technical expertise, analytical capability, and modeling tools in the federal government. The next Secretary should direct the analysts at DOE’s Office of Science to center climate change and the clean economy transition in their work. The agency’s 17 laboratories should devote significant resources to determining resource efficiency targets and modeling policy outcomes to bolster other agencies’ regulatory proposals. The next Secretary should also immediately revive and fund the DOE Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis (EPSA). EPSA has released multiple reports on the U.S. power sector’s vulnerability and resilience to climate impacts, but the Trump administration killed the office. A reinvigorated EPSA can reconvene the U.S. Partnership for Energy Sector Climate Resilience to further study power sector resiliency and work with industry partners to harden American energy infrastructure against escalating climate disasters.
|
https://medium.com/@evergreenaction/five-to-mobilize-department-of-energy-92e247b8479
|
['Evergreen Action']
|
2020-12-22 20:46:13.346000+00:00
|
['Biden', 'Renewable Energy', 'Energy', 'Department Of Energy', 'Joe Biden']
|
WORD EMBEDDINGS-NLP
|
Photo by Hunter Harritt on Unsplash
WORD EMBEDDINGS-NLP
What are Word Embeddings?
Word Embeddings are the texts converted into numbers and there may be different numerical representations of the same text.
” Word Embeddings are Word converted into numbers ”
A dictionary may be the list of all unique words in the sentence. So, a dictionary may look like — [‘Word’,’Embeddings’,’are’,’Converted’,’into’,’numbers’]
A vector representation of a word may be a one-hot encoded vector where 1 stands for the position where the word exists and 0 everywhere else. The vector representation of “numbers” in this format according to the above dictionary is [0,0,0,0,0,1] and of converted is[0,0,0,1,0,0].
This is just a very simple method to represent a word in the vector form
Different types of Word Embeddings
The different types of word embeddings can be broadly classified into two categories-
Frequency based Embedding Prediction based Embedding
Frequency based Embedding
There are generally three types of vectors that we encounter under this category.
Count Vector TF-IDF Vector Co-Occurrence Vector
Count Vector
Consider a Corpus C of D documents {d1,d2…..dD} and N unique tokens extracted out of the corpus C. The N tokens will form our dictionary and the size of the Count Vector matrix M will be given by D X N. Each row in the matrix M contains the frequency of tokens in document D(i)
Now there may be quite a few variations while preparing the above matrix M. The variations will be generally in-
The way dictionary is prepared.
Why? Because in real world applications we might have a corpus which contains millions of documents. And with millions of document, we can extract hundreds of millions of unique words. So basically, the matrix that will be prepared like above will be a very sparse one and inefficient for any computation. So an alternative to using every unique word as a dictionary element would be to pick say top 10,000 words based on frequency and then prepare a dictionary. The way count is taken for each word.
We may either take the frequency (number of times a word has appeared in the document) or the presence(has the word appeared in the document?) to be the entry in the count matrix M. But generally, frequency method is preferred over the latter.
TF-IDF vectorization
This is another method which is based on the frequency method but it is different to the count vectorization in the sense that it takes into account not just the occurrence of a word in a single document but in the entire corpus
Common words like ‘is’, ‘the’, ‘a’ etc. tend to appear quite frequently in comparison to the words which are important to a document. For example, a document A on Lionel Messi is going to contain more occurences of the word “Messi” in comparison to other documents. But common words like “the” etc. are also going to be present in higher frequency in almost every document
Ideally, what we would want is to down weight the common words occurring in almost all documents and give more importance to words that appear in a subset of documents
TF-IDF works by penalising these common words by assigning them lower weights while giving importance to words like Messi in a particular document.
TF = (Number of times term t appears in a document)/(Number of terms in the document)
IDF = log(N/n), where, N is the number of documents and n is the number of documents a term t has appeared in.
So, how do we explain the reasoning behind IDF? Ideally, if a word has appeared in all the document, then probably that word is not relevant to a particular document. But if it has appeared in a subset of documents then probably the word is of some relevance to the documents it is present in.
Co-Occurrence Matrix with a fixed context window
The big idea — Similar words tend to occur together and will have similar context for example — Apple is a fruit. Mango is a fruit.
Apple and mango tend to have a similar context i.e fruit.
Co-occurrence — For a given corpus, the co-occurrence of a pair of words say w1 and w2 is the number of times they have appeared together in a Context Window
Context window is specified by a number and the direction
Variations of Co-occurrence Matrix
Let’s say there are V unique words in the corpus. So Vocabulary size = V. The columns of the Co-occurrence matrix form the context words. The different variations of Co-Occurrence Matrix are-
A co-occurrence matrix of size V X V. Now, for even a decent corpus V gets very large xand difficult to handle. So generally, this architecture is never preferred in practice. A co-occurrence matrix of size V X N where N is a subset of V and can be obtained by removing irrelevant words like stopwords etc. for example. This is still very large and presents computational difficulties.
But, remember this co-occurrence matrix is not the word vector representation that is generally used. Instead, this Co-occurrence matrix is decomposed using techniques like PCA, SVD etc. into factors and combination of these factors forms the word vector representation.
And, a single word, instead of being represented in V dimensions will be represented in k dimensions while still capturing almost the same semantic meaning. k is generally of the order of hundreds.
So, what SVD does at the back is decompose Co-Occurrence matrix into three matrices, U,S and V where U and V are both orthogonal matrices. What is of importance is that dot product of U and S gives the word vector representation and V gives the word context representation.
Advantages of Co-occurrence Matrix
It preserves the semantic relationship between words. i.e man and woman tend to be closer than man and apple. It uses SVD at its core, which produces more accurate word vector representations than existing methods. It uses factorization which is a well-defined problem and can be efficiently solved. It has to be computed once and can be used anytime once computed. In this sense, it is faster in comparison to others.
Disadvantages of Co-Occurrence Matrix
It requires huge memory to store the co-occurrence matrix.
But, this problem can be circumvented by factorizing the matrix out of the system for example in Hadoop clusters etc. and can be saved
Prediction based Vector
So far, we have seen deterministic methods to determine word vectors
These methods were prediction based in the sense that they provided probabilities to the words and proved to be state of the art for tasks like word analogies and word similarities.
Word2vec is not a single algorithm but a combination of two techniques — CBOW(Continuous bag of words) and Skip-gram model. Both of these are shallow neural networks which map word(s) to the target variable which is also a word(s). Both of these techniques learn weights which act as word vector representations.
CBOW (Continuous Bag of words):
The way CBOW work is that it tends to predict the probability of a word given a context. A context may be a single word or a group of words
Suppose, we have a corpus C = “Hey, this is sample corpus using only one context word.” and we have defined a context window of 1.
This corpus may be converted into a training set for a CBOW model as follow.
This matrix shown above is sent into a shallow neural network with three layers: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. The output layer is a softmax layer which is used to sum the probabilities obtained in the output layer to 1.
The flow is as follows:
The input layer and the target, both are one- hot encoded of size [1 X V]. Here V=10 in the above example. There are two sets of weights. one is between the input and the hidden layer and second between hidden and output layer.
Input-Hidden layer matrix size =[V X N] , hidden-Output layer matrix size =[N X V] : Where N is the number of dimensions we choose to represent our word in. It is arbitary and a hyper-parameter for a Neural Network. Also, N is the number of neurons in the hidden layer. Here, N=4. There is a no activation function between any layers.( More specifically, I am referring to linear activation) The input is multiplied by the input-hidden weights and called hidden activation. It is simply the corresponding row in the input-hidden matrix copied. The hidden input gets multiplied by hidden- output weights and output is calculated. Error between output and target is calculated and propagated back to re-adjust the weights. The weight between the hidden layer and the output layer is taken as the word vector representation of the word.
We saw the above steps for a single context word. Now, what about if we have multiple context words? The image below describes the architecture for multiple context words.
The image above takes 3 context words and predicts the probability of a target word. The input can be assumed as taking three one-hot encoded vectors in the input layer as shown above in red, blue and green.
So, the input layer will have 3 [1 X V] Vectors in the input as shown above and 1 [1 X V] in the output layer. Rest of the architecture is same as for a 1-context CBOW.
The steps remain the same, only the calculation of hidden activation changes. Instead of just copying the corresponding rows of the input-hidden weight matrix to the hidden layer, an average is taken over all the corresponding rows of the matrix
So, if we have three context words for a single target word, we will have three initial hidden activations which are then averaged element-wise to obtain the final activation
1.) We initialize weights and biases with random values (This is one time initiation. In the next iteration, we will use updated weights, and biases). Let us define:
wh as weight matrix to the hidden layer
bh as bias matrix to the hidden layer
wout as weight matrix to the output layer
bout as bias matrix to the output layer
Step 0: Read input and output
Step 1: Initialize weights and biases with random values (There are methods to initialize weights and biases but for now initialize with random values)
Step 2: Calculate hidden layer input:
hidden_layer_input= matrix_dot_product(X,wh) + bh
Step 3: Perform non-linear transformation on hidden linear input
IN CASE OF CBOW MODEL WE DO NOT PERFORM ANY SUCH NON LINEAR TRANSFORMATION.
hiddenlayer_activations = sigmoid(hidden_layer_input)
Step 4: Perform linear and non-linear transformation of hidden layer activation at output layer
output_layer_input = matrix_dot_product (hiddenlayer_activations * wout ) + bout
output = sigmoid(output_layer_input)
Step 5: Calculate gradient of Error(E) at output layer
E = y-output
Step 6: Compute slope at output and hidden layer
Slope_output_layer= derivatives_sigmoid(output)
Slope_hidden_layer = derivatives_sigmoid(hiddenlayer_activations)
Step 7: Compute delta at output layer
d_output = E * slope_output_layer*lr
Step 8: Calculate Error at hidden layer
Error_at_hidden_layer = matrix_dot_product(d_output, wout.Transpose)
Step 9: Compute delta at hidden layer
d_hiddenlayer = Error_at_hidden_layer * slope_hidden_layer
Step 10: Update weight at both output and hidden layer
wout = wout + matrix_dot_product(hiddenlayer_activations.Transpose, d_output)*learning_rate
wh = wh+ matrix_dot_product(X.Transpose,d_hiddenlayer)*learning_rate
Step 11: Update biases at both output and hidden layer
bh = bh + sum(d_hiddenlayer, axis=0) * learning_rate
bout = bout + sum(d_output, axis=0)*learning_rate
Advantages of CBOW:
Being probabilistic is nature, it is supposed to perform superior to deterministic methods(generally). It is low on memory. It does not need to have huge RAM requirements like that of co-occurrence matrix where it needs to store three huge matrices.
Disadvantages of CBOW:
CBOW takes the average of the context of a word (as seen above in calculation of hidden activation). For example, Apple can be both a fruit and a company but CBOW takes an average of both the contexts and places it in between a cluster for fruits and companies. Training a CBOW from scratch can take forever if not properly optimized.
Skip — Gram model
Skip — gram follows the same topology as of CBOW. It just flips CBOW’s architecture on its head. The aim of skip-gram is to predict the context given a word
C=”Hey, this is sample corpus using only one context word.”
The input vector for skip-gram is going to be similar to a 1-context CBOW model. Also, the calculations up to hidden layer activations are going to be the same. The difference will be in the target variable. Since we have defined a context window of 1 on both the sides, there will be “two” one hot encoded target variables and “two” corresponding outputs
Two separate errors are calculated with respect to the two target variables and the two error vectors obtained are added element-wise to obtain a final error vector which is propagated back to update the weights.
The weights between the input and the hidden layer are taken as the word vector representation after training.
Input layer size — [1 X V], Input hidden weight matrix size — [V X N], Number of neurons in hidden layer — N, Hidden-Output weight matrix size — [N X V], Output layer size — C [1 X V]
In the above example, C is the number of context words=2, V= 10, N=4
The row in red is the hidden activation corresponding to the input one-hot encoded vector. It is basically the corresponding row of input-hidden matrix copied. The yellow matrix is the weight between the hidden layer and the output layer. The blue matrix is obtained by the matrix multiplication of hidden activation and the hidden output weights. There will be two rows calculated for two target(context) words. Each row of the blue matrix is converted into its softmax probabilities individually as shown in the green box. The grey matrix contains the one hot encoded vectors of the two context words(target). Error is calculated by substracting the first row of the grey matrix(target) from the first row of the green matrix(output) element-wise. This is repeated for the next row. Therefore, for n target context words, we will have n error vectors. Element-wise sum is taken over all the error vectors to obtain a final error vector. This error vector is propagated back to update the weights
Advantages of Skip-Gram Model
Skip-gram model can capture two semantics for a single word. i.e it will have two vector representations of Apple. One for the company and other for the fruit. Skip-gram with negative sub-sampling outperforms every other method generally.
Doc2Vec:
Doc2vec model is based on Word2Vec, with only adding another vector (paragraph ID) to the input. The architecture of Doc2Vec model is shown below:
The above diagram is based on the CBOW model, but instead of using just nearby words to predict the word, we also added another feature vector, which is document-unique. So when training the word vectors W, the document vector D is trained as well, and in the end of training, it holds a numeric representation of the document.
The inputs consist of word vectors and document Id vectors. The word vector is a one-hot vector with a dimension 1xV. The document Id vector has a dimension of 1xC, where C is the number of total documents. The dimension of the weight matrix W of the hidden layer is VxN. The dimension of the weight matrix D of the hidden layer is CxN.
The above model is called distributed Memory version of Paragraph Vector (PV-DM). Another Doc2Vec algorithm which is based on Skip-Gram is called Distributed Bag of Words version of Paragraph Vector (PV-DBOW).
FastText:
Their key insight was to use the internal structure of a word to improve vector representations obtained from the skip-gram method.
One major draw-back for word-embedding techniques like word2vec and glove was its inability to deal with out of corpus words. These embedding techniques treat word as the minimal entity and try to learn their respective embedding vector. Hence in case there is a word that does not appear in the corpus word2vec or glove fails to get their vectorized representation. However fasttext follows the same skipgram and cbow model like word2vec.
It treats each word as composed of n-grams. That is let us say value of n is 3 for the word ‘India’ we have ‘<in’, ‘ind’, ‘ndi’, ‘di>’ as the n-gram representation. And for the word ‘India’ we can infer the whole vector as sum of the vector representation all the character n-grams.(Here it is assumed that the hyperparameter [minn] and [maxn] value is 3,where ‘minn’ and ‘maxn’ are the smallest and largest ngram respectively). The symbols ‘<’ and ‘>’ are special symbols and are appended to show the start and end of the token.(P.S <her> and ‘her’ are not the same.)
ONE CAN TAKE ANY WORD AND APPEND UN OR LY AT END AND A WORD THAT IS NOT IN THE TRAINING SET CAN BE FORMED.
Fasttext can generate embedding for the words that does not appear in the training corpus. This can be done by adding the character n-gram of all the n-gram representations. For example,let’s say there is a word ‘commonly’ in the testing dataset,but doesn’t have any representation in the training set. But training set has vector representation of all its n-grams. So we can just average the vectorized representation of all its constituent n-grams.word. On the otherhand for a random word ‘fgghoio’ we can get the representation of by average all ngram characters(i.e ‘f’+ ‘g’ + ‘g’ + ‘h’ + ‘o’ + ‘i’ + ‘o’ here we have to keep the hyperparameter minn as 1).
DrawBack:
One of the major drawback of this model is high memory requirement. Since this model creates word-embedding from its characters and not from words. We can control the number of character embeddings by using the maximum and minimum ngrams. It has been seen that for a corpus size of 50 million unique words the requires ram size can be as much as 256 GB RAM. Hence in order to get rid off this problem we can make use of a hyper-parameter called min word count, which can be increased to ignore words below a certain threshold.
Fasttext can be used both for classification and word-embedding creation.
SOME USEFUL LINKS:
https://www.quora.com/How-is-GloVe-different-from-word2vec
https://medium.com/@jonathan_hui/nlp-word-embedding-glove-5e7f523999f6
https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs224n/cs224n.1194/slides/cs224n-2019-lecture02-wordvecs2.pdf
https://shuzhanfan.github.io/2018/08/understanding-word2vec-and-doc2vec/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASn7ExxLZws
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERibwqs9p38
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01759.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.04606.pdf
https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/unsupervised-tutorial.html
https://stackabuse.com/python-for-nlp-working-with-facebook-fasttext-library/
|
https://medium.com/@mrinalyadav7/word-embeddings-nlp-7d1e4d483f05
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['Mrinal Yadav']
|
2020-12-27 07:45:23.759000+00:00
|
['Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Word Embeddings', 'Vectorization', 'Deep Learning', 'Machine Learning']
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How To Host a Hit Virtual Party They’ll Never Forget
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Listen. We know what we need to do. Be responsible, safe and healthy. Stay away from big gatherings and don’t spread the Covid around with our holiday cheer.
It’s a downer for everyone. You feel like you’re flushing all the holiday traditions and missing out on something sacred. No big family get-together. No one cooking a feast in the kitchen while we socialize and spend time catching up.
Grandma isn’t going to see her grandchildren. Auntie Vi won’t be able to hand out life advice.
We don’t get to see Uncle Carl pass out after supper while we play cards.
We can’t see people’s faces as they open that special gift we picked out for them. There’s no chance to play board games or have a few drinks with our loved ones as we close out this year.
Okay. So let’s move on and see what we can do. Christmas is still going to happen.
“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.” — Garrison Keillor
Have you considered a virtual party? Let’s look at how this can work out for you so you can still have that get-together.
|
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-to-host-a-virtual-party-theyll-be-talking-about-for-years-39a5942f7a6
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['Tim Ebl']
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2020-12-23 13:31:57.623000+00:00
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['Life Hacking', 'Covid 19', 'Party', 'Family', 'Travel']
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Did Nikola Tesla’s Mental Health Issues Help Him Succeed as an Inventor?
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Did Nikola Tesla’s Mental Health Issues Help Him Succeed as an Inventor?
A man of few words but many great inventions
Nikola Tesla in the 19th century (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Contemporary inventors and geniuses have always been quite introverted, and in rare cases, ended up suffering some sort of mental health issue, in many of these instances due to spending too much time by themselves. However, to become a renowned inventor or for someone to be remembered for their craft, you need to spend a lot of time alone understanding your thoughts and your visions.
From that perspective, I consider Tesla as being the biggest visionary ever, as he was imagining inventions and devices that we are struggling to invent today with two centuries worth of technological advancements. Many historians see him as a man who was born in the wrong century, as his mind was way ahead of the 19th century. This wasn't something that Tesla was initially born with, but something that he gathered from hours of research and the mindset that allowed him to put two and two together.
Mental health issues
The father of modern electrical engineering who brought to us the electric motor, the radar, the radio, x-rays, and other devices that we use to this day was suffering from obsessive-compulsiveness or better known as OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) which refers to the forced need a person feels to repeat a certain action or thinking of the same thought over and over again.
Some historians say that this mental disorder actually helped him reach his maximum potential as it made him focus on the same thing over and over again until he managed to achieve his thoughts or brings his visions to reality. At the same time, this may explain why he preferred to spend so much time alone as a complication that can be developed from OCD is anxiety. As Tesla lived mostly by himself, we don’t have much information about his personal life, however, there are some records describing the “obscure” personal preferences he had.
This disorder, as well as other health issues, might have been caused because of his very bad sleep schedule, it is said that Tesla was only sleeping for two hours a day. Author W. Bernard Carlson who wrote Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age mentioned in his book that tesla loved sitting alone in his hotel room in New York with his white pigeon who apparently communicated with him on a daily basis. In my opinion that isn’t strange, but it still isn’t a very healthy habit for someone who was suffering from a mental disorder.
The hand of Nikola Tesla taken by his wonderful artificial daylight. This is the first photo made by the light of the future. (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
Carlson also mentions that Tesla hated touching other people's hair and also jewelry, especially the earrings worn by women. The author does not mention a reason for hating these things, but we can guess that being introverted and probably also suffering from anxiety, he liked to keep to himself. We also need to acknowledge that anxiety wasn’t known of back then, so many people could not understand why he was so introverted. Still, most people assumed that he spent all of his time inventing, meaning that he needed to concentrate.
We are also told that Tesla had an obsession with the number three, doing things in three actions such as three steps or just using the number three. This explained why every hotel room that he stayed in started (or at least contained) three in its number. He would take a small break every three hours of work to refocus his thoughts. The room in which he was found dead in a New York hotel by the name Wyndham was 3327, located on the 33rd floor. The author also mentioned that most of these problems became more predominant in his senior years.
Nikola Tesla in his New York office, 1916. (Source: Vintage)
From all of this, we can see that he was a man that followed quite specific routines, and this can be seen from the diet he followed, eating twice a day — meaning breakfast and dinner — as well as exercising for three hours a day. This information was found in an interview from 1933 when Tesla was seventy-seven years of age. He said that in order to live an energetic life you need to avoid all foods that may contain toxins and that exercise is key to good health, as with no exercise the body produces certain toxins that can be harmful in a long term.
Where did he get his dedication from?
This is a rare person who had dedicated his whole life to make his visions a reality, but what drove him to keep going?
Surely, just like any other person, he must have had times in life where he doubted himself, especially when he did not have much support from anyone as he was mostly by himself. We can presume that his genius was above the whole population at the time as he knew that no one had his vision for the world. Therefore, no one could understand him and it would be pointless to explain to someone why he lived in the way he did, why he was so introverted, and why he dedicated his whole life towards evolving this world.
A glow of nitrogen fills the atmosphere with Tesla sitting in front of his generator (1899). (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
It is imperative to understand that psychiatry was still in its early, primitive stages at the end of the 19th century, hence even if he tried to express himself he would have been seen more like a weird person rather than someone actually suffering from mental health issues. The only thing that made people believe in him was the functionality and efficiency of his evolutionary inventions that, at the time, seemed out of this world.
In the interview taken in 1933, he said that by the age of seventy-seven he lived mostly by himself and isolation helped him concentrate on his work. From the records gathered by W. Bernard Carlson, even until the age of eighty-six, when he passed away, he was still alone.
So, the only thing that does remain to be taken into consideration is his mental health issues, which he seemed to take on as sort of an advantage rather than letting them get to him. Yet again, we do not know how severe his case of OCD was or of other mental health issues he might have suffered from, but he very well managed to combat these mental issues or at least to portray himself in such a manner that it seemed as if his mental issues didn’t affect him, but actually, in a weird way, enhanced him as a person.
|
https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/did-nikola-teslas-mental-health-issues-help-him-succeed-as-an-inventor-96f8ed67bfa4
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['Andrei Tapalaga']
|
2020-11-16 22:16:33.914000+00:00
|
['Health', 'Ocd', 'Success', 'History', 'Mental Health']
|
A Simpler Way to Test Your React Application
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“The more your tests resemble the way your software is used, the more confidence they can give you” — Kent C. Dodds, creator of the react-testing-library.
Writing tests is like eating your veggies: it is something everyone knows that they should do, but not everyone does. Spearmint provides a simple way to write tests that give you confidence your React application will work in the way your users interact with it.
Using spearmint, developers can easily generate React tests by using our user-friendly GUI. It dynamically converts user inputs into executable Jest test code by using DOM query selectors provided by the react-testing-library. We chose react-testing-library over Enzyme because it guides developers to focus on testing user behavior rather than testing implementation details. By leveraging react-testing-library, our application provides our users with more stable tests that do not break when refactoring or gives false positives due to shallow-rendering.
Fun fact: The origin of the word “debugging” comes from Grace Hopper removing a moth that was causing the Mark II Aiken Relay computer to malfunction. Did you know that moths are repelled by spearmint?
How it works
On the initial screen, enter the URL of your project and load your React application to start creating tests.
2. Utilize our auto-complete, drop-down options, and tooltips features to easily create arrangement, action, and assertion test statements.
3. Refer to the browser view of your app that is displayed on the right to quickly identify values for your selectors and use the file directory to open up a code editor view to easily refer to your codebase for props information.
4. Spearmint will then convert user input to dynamically generate a test file that will be saved inside a __tests__ folder, which you can use to run ‘npm test’ on.
Thanks for Reading!
Our team pledges 5 hours of development for every 100 Github stars we get on spearmint! Star us to speed up development for an easy way to test your React applications. We would greatly appreciate any feedback — bug reports, feature requests, positive support, constructive criticism etc! Please email [email protected] if you are interested in contributing.
|
https://medium.com/@jylglim/a-simpler-way-to-test-your-react-application-61fd2e02e8ab
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['Johnny Lim']
|
2019-06-17 21:16:16.219000+00:00
|
['Bdd', 'JavaScript', 'Testing', 'React', 'Tdd']
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The Smoothie Diet Review
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The Smoothie Diet is a definitive program for getting the correct smoothies into your day to start changing your life, wellbeing, and body. It’s a 21-day online program that gives you all the plans, drink plans, good dieting aides and more to take your smoothies to the following level. Be that as it may, don’t be mixed up — what you realize in this program isn’t a squeezing or smoothie prevailing fashion diet. Smoothies should never be utilized as substitutions for the three dinners of the day. This is something you normally observe in different projects and in spite of the fact that smoothies do assist you with burning-through the every day suggested measure of leafy foods required for ideal wellbeing, they shouldn’t supplant the entirety of your morning meals, bites, snacks and suppers. All things considered, this program is tied in with accomplishing ideal wellbeing and weight reduction with smoothies by getting nutritious and flavorful beverages into your day to commend the nourishments you’re eating. This is key on the grounds that to lose maintainable weight and to change your wellbeing, you need something you can proceed with; drinking smoothies for the remainder of your life simply doesn’t appear to be ideal. In this way, in case you’re prepared to fire mixing up some nutritious beverages at the best occasions for the duration of the day to arrive at your objectives, this is what you can anticipate from The Smoothie Diet.
There is no mystery to getting more fit. There is no sorcery mixture, pill, or smoothie all things considered. All things considered, it’s tied in with adjusting to a system that you can proceed with pushing ahead to keep the outcomes coming. Tragically, most eating regimens make it inconceivably hard to stay with. That, however many are undesirable to do on a drawn out premise. Thus, you experience weight reduction while doing the program yet when you stop, the weight returns on.
The Smoothie Diet is a brilliant alternative that shows you how to add the correct smoothies into your day to praise the nourishments you’re eating and the exercises you’re doing. It’s anything but a smoothie diet yet rather, a manual for utilizing smoothies to accomplish the objectives you need. It’s an on the web, 21-day program that furnishes you with all you require to think about squeezing and drinking smoothies to carry you closer to your wellbeing and weight reduction. Be that as it may, it isn’t only a smoothie formula book.
The Smoothie Diet is a thorough guide that shows you what smoothies to drink, when to drink them for ideal outcomes, the best smoothies for various exercises and considerably more. I’ll dunk into the subtleties in one minute however for the present, here’s a brief glance at what you get:
As should be obvious, that is significantly something other than smoothies. This program has you covered with plans, plans, pre-made shopping for food records, formula cards, exercise plans, good dieting aides and the sky is the limit from there. There are plans for each taste and inclination you can envision and the program even accompanies kid-accommodating and sans gluten alternatives.
You can begin immediately just as the program is computerized, which means you get quick access and can download the substance right onto your PC, cell phone, tablet, or PC. This makes it significantly simpler to follow, as all you require — from the shopping for food records to the plans, are readily available at whatever point and any place you go. It sure beats dragging around a gigantic formula book.
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https://medium.com/@tusharpujhari79/the-smoothie-diet-review-76fdb11da22
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['Tushar Pujhari']
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2020-12-26 14:57:50.639000+00:00
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['Health', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Healthcare', 'Health Foods']
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Press Release 22/12/2020— Severe Mental Health Consequences after Forced Moves and Evictions in Katsikas’ Refugee Camp
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Riot police enter Katsikas camp on the morning of 14 December 2020
On Monday, 14 December 2020, several residents of the refugee camp of Katsikas were subjected to forceful evictions, some from their containers (into a different container) and others from the camp entirely. According to eye-witnesses, the police enacting said evictions used aggressive measures including teargas and sound bombs; the resistance of individual camp residents culminated in the arrest of at least four persons. This report is based on the statements of camp residents who witnessed the events of Monday, 14 December, and Tuesday, 15 December.
On the morning of 14 December, riot police surrounded the refugee camp of Katsikas. Eye-witnesses confirmed that the riot police had been present from approximately 6 AM without clear reason, as there had been no incident which would have required their presence.
Around 10 AM, the police began moving through the camp, informing specific families and individuals of the fact that they had to move to other containers. Some others were told that additional people would be moved in with them and yet again others were informed that they had to leave the camp altogether. According to several residents, 8 families/individuals were evicted from the camp that day. In cases in which residents were not found in their containers, the police forced entry, dragged personal items outside and changed the locks.
Resistance by individual residents of the camp was met with the use of teargas, violence (including batons) and sound bombs from the side of the police. At least four people were arrested. One of them was a family father of four children who refused to have an additional 3 people move into the container in which the family of 6 lives. A man who states to hold a medical note attesting to his severe mental health condition was arrested because he refused to move into a container with 7 others. After having been arrested and released, having lost the only shelter he had and not receiving any information from the camp management on the following day either, he stabbed himself, causing injuries that required his immediate hospitalisation. He is one of two persons who had to be hospitalised due to self-harm after the police intervention on Monday. These reactions are illustrative of the emotional and mental toll this situation has — it can be regarded as a consequence of the fatigue brought on by this indefinite situation, of the police intervention as well as of the despair and anxiety created by the question of where to go in the middle of winter, in the middle of a nationwide lockdown and a global pandemic without understanding the local language and without sufficient financial resources
Two persons had to be hospitalised with severe injuries due to self-harm as a consequence of the forced moves and evictions. These reactions are illustrative of the emotional and mental toll this situation has.
Several current residents of the camp are facing pressure to leave the accommodation structure by the end of 2020, including more than 40 families. Those being asked to leave have been pointed to the HELIOS program, which is supposedly assisting people in finding their own accommodation. But there have definitely not been enough efforts made on integrating people and on orienting them on how to navigate within the Greek system and society.
At the same time as people are being forced to share the limited space in a container with even more people or being moved out of the camp altogether, other asylum seekers are being moved into the camp. Several residents stated they heard about 150 new people who were going to be transferred into the camp. A first group of new residents arrived already the next day — 15 December. For the time being, before spaces are made available in the containers, the new arrivals are being put up in a large tent, which is exposed to steadily dropping temperatures and heavy rains.
Background: What led to this incident?
A substantial proportion of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece is forced to live in isolated refugee camps in often dire conditions. In Katsikas camp, as in many other camps, the residents stay in containers which they share, sometimes with up to 8 other persons — these being family members or complete strangers. This solution for accommodation is, as such, highly questionable in a country in which empty buildings are available in abundance, let alone on a continent that can be considered one of the most powerful and wealthy regions in the world today.
Within the current asylum system, people usually have to wait for one or two years in these conditions before a decision about their asylum claim is made. Once they receive a positive decision, they are given a grace period of only four weeks to leave their spaces in the containers and find their own accommodation (more about the change of the grace period from 6 months to four weeks ). In practice, this confronts people with the impossible task of having to act like integrated members of the host society, while in reality no integration pathways have been made available to them. The language barrier and the financial situation are obstacles that most cannot easily overcome; these barriers are exacerbated in the current situation of being in a nationwide lockdown brought on in response to a global pandemic. The authorities had put previous processes around the evictions on hold due to the ongoing pandemic. Now however, new people are being brought to the camp of Katsikas and current residents are being evicted, even though the conditions that brought this process to a halt remain unchanged: The pandemic continues unabated and the national lockdown was recently extended into 2021. Meanwhile, temperatures are steadily dropping and will reach their lowest point in January-February. It is difficult to find the logic behind revamping the evictions under the present conditions. While space is needed for new arrivals to the camp who lack adequate accommodation, the solution cannot be to force people into overcrowded containers or to leave others homeless. Instead of forcing people into tents or onto the streets, the authorities — and all of us — need to question the approach of hosting tens of thousands of people in these isolated ghettos and unacceptable conditions in the first place.
We urge the European government to support Greece in providing dignified, sustainable solutions instead of using Greece as a barrier that shields them from the need to assume responsibility.
We urge the Greek authorities to stop evicting people from the only accommodation available to them under the current situation. We urge the Greek authorities to make accommodations available to asylum seekers that are not overcrowded, that are a risk for their mental health and that remove dignity from their lives. We urge the European governments to support Greece in providing dignified, sustainable solutions for people who come to Europe in search of freedom and safety, instead of using Greece as a barrier that shields them from the need to assume responsibility.
Written by Mimi Hapig
|
https://medium.com/context-updates/press-release-22-12-2020-severe-mental-health-consequences-after-forced-moves-and-evictions-in-e5ef74ab7533
|
['Soup']
|
2021-01-08 14:03:26.960000+00:00
|
['Refugees', 'Migration', 'Greece', 'Mental Health', 'Asylum Seekers']
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How To Stay Motivated When Working From Home
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Set up a designated work space
This one is probably the most important for switching your brain into work mode, which is why it’s first on my list.
When I first started writing from home, I would work on my laptop, usually from a comfy seat on the couch (and sometimes even from bed when I was feeling particularly lazy).
Sure, it sounds amazing to be able to earn money while you sit on the sofa in pajamas all day, but I struggled to get more than a few hours of work done without feeling tired or getting sucked into some strange social media hole.
Once I realized that lounging around with my laptop was doing nothing for my self-motivation, I decided to set up a designated workspace. I bought a new desktop computer and an over-priced office chair, and I don’t allow myself to do anything other than work when I’m sitting at my desk.
Not only is it nice to have a specific space set aside for work, but it does wonders for tricking my brain into knowing the difference between when it’s time to knuckle down and when it’s okay to browse social media or watch weird videos on YouTube.
You’re going to need a schedule
I learned very quickly that working from home does not mean you can wake up and go to sleep whenever you feel like it.
Sleeping in until late morning and staying up past midnight was a particularly demotivating self-schedule. Within two weeks of working remotely I had realized the utmost importance of setting myself a routine that made me more productive during the day.
Everyone’s self-schedule will look different, but it’s important to find some sort of routine that works for you.
As humans, we crave some sort of structure in our everyday lives. Working a 9–5 where you have to show up at the office each day sort of creates that routine for you. But when you work from home, it can be easy to just do whatever you want, whenever you feel like doing it, and that’s not going to bode well for you in the longrun.
I personally don’t let myself sleep in or stay up too late on weekdays. I get up at 7am Monday through Friday, I set aside time to workout or walk the dogs and time for relaxing or switching off.
Most importantly, I set myself designated work hours, just like I would have if I was showing up to a job everyday.
Take small breaks regularly
Anyone who has worked a job that requires large chunks of time spent stuck in front of a computer screen probably understands the importance of this one.
Trying to stay at your desk for eight plus hours of the day without taking regular breaks is suicide for your mental (and physical) health.
Even if you just take a walk to the kitchen and back for another cup of coffee, stepping away from the computer screen and stretching your legs is vital to keeping yourself happy and motivated throughout the day.
I’ve taken to getting up every hour for five minutes and going outside to my front garden to enjoy some fresh-air and break that stale feeling that comes from being stuck inside all day.
Always get ready for the day
If you have to get up and head into the office each morning then getting ready for the day isn’t even something you need to think twice about. But when your “office” is a desk in the neighboring room where you can work in your pajamas, well, that changes things a bit.
It’s all too easy when you work from home to spend your life in loungewear. Why suffer through putting on a pair of uncomfy jeans if you don’t need to?
Sweatpants are great, but getting ready for the day works wonders as a means of self-motivation. I, personally, feel way more motivated to work when I’m dressed in actual clothes. It also helps not to be too comfortable while you’re working; you want to be thinking “work time” rather than “nap time”.
Allow yourself to take downtime
Sometimes, when I’m particularly into a piece of writing or I get stuck in a creative hole and can’t rip myself away from my computer, I’ll end up working round the clock.
It’s great to have that kind of work ethic when you need to hit a deadline or you want to get something finished, but it can also be easy to overdo it when your work is always with you. Try not to get stuck in the at-home-work-web of answering emails at 11 o’clock at night or eating dinner at your desk.
Never stepping away from work is a one-way road to burning yourself out.
It’s important to value your downtime, and set aside at least a little bit of time each day to switch off entirely from your work and focus only on yourself.
Socialize whenever you can
Now, obviously, be safe when socializing and do so mindfully (given the current state of the world), but do find ways to socialize whenever and however you can.
Maybe it’s just a quick phone call to a friend or a zoom chat with a family member, it really doesn’t matter what you do, just find some way to break up the monotony of being by yourself all day long for multiple days in a row.
This was a BIG issue for me when I first started to work remotely. I went from a very social work environment where I spent my days surrounded by people to working day in and day out all by my lonesome. Not having a single co-worker or companion on any given workday can get lonely, and it can make you a bit stir crazy, particularly if you’re usually a social person.
We wonderful humans are sociable creatures by nature, and many of us aren’t used to experiencing a work environment where there is little to no contact with other people. Chronic loneliness can raise cortisol levels, impede sleep, and augment depression and anxiety.
We get a lot more human interaction through our work life than we may realize, so transitioning to working primarily alone can be hard on your mental health. Make sure to regularly set aside time for some form of inter-personal interaction.
|
https://medium.com/inspired-writer/how-to-stay-motivated-when-working-from-home-e73048c495da
|
['Sophie Binns']
|
2020-08-17 22:16:23.099000+00:00
|
['Writer', 'Remote Working', 'Writing', 'Motivation', 'Writing Tips']
|
Basics of Natural Language Processing for Beginners
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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a part of AI (artificial intelligence) that deals with understanding and processing of human language. In real time, majority of data exists in the unstructured form such us text, videos, images. Mass of data in unstructured category, will be in textual form. To process this textual data's with machine learning algorithms, NLP comes in to play.
NLP use cases are Language translation, Speech recognition, Hiring and Recruitment, Chat Bot, Sentimental analysis and so on.
Examples:
Sentimental analysis
Sentimental analysis predicts whether the review is positive or negative.
Positive Review:
“Love the phone. the phone is sleek and smooth and beautiful I highly recommend the phone you will not regret getting this phone. “
Negative Review:
“The telephone headset is of poor quality , not understood that Dijon you when you call that sounds very bad, not recommending this article. I wanted to return it but it is very difficult and expensive it back from Venezuela , since the dollars in my country are scarce and would consist more than the…”
2. Named entity recognition
It is the task of identifying and categorizing entities from the text.
Input:
Dhoni is one of the famous cricketer in India team.
Output:
Dhoni |Person
India| Country
Terms used in NLP
Corpus refers to the collection of documents or text files. The tweet data from twitter is a corpus.
refers to the collection of documents or text files. The tweet data from twitter is a corpus. A text sample defined as Documents . Each tweet is a document.
. Each tweet is a document. Document comprises of Sentences . Each tweet has one or more sentences.
. Each tweet has one or more sentences. A text get divided in to smaller unit called Tokens. Each tweet sentence has one or more tokens.
NLP Techniques For Text
Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is the leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides pre-defined functions for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging and parsing.
Explore it here https://www.nltk.org/
Tokenization
Tokenization is the process of the splitting the text in to smaller units called tokens. This tokens comprises sentences, words, symbols, numbers etc.,
There are different type of tokenizers such us White Space Tokenizer, Tweet Tokenizer, Regex Tokenizer, Word Tokenizer, Sentence Tokenizer.
White Space Tokenizer is the commonly used one but it depends on the use cases.
Examples for Tokenizer:
Let’s import nltk and different form of tokenizer. sent_tokenizer function apply sentence level tokenization, word_tokenizer function apply tokenization to word level and TweetTokenizer function apply tokenization to twitter data's as shown in below code sample.
The inputs get split as two individual sentence for Sent_tokenizer output. In Word_tokenizer output, the inputs get broken to four words. In TweetTokenizer output the inputs get split in to ten words, symbols etc.,
Normalization
Normalization is the process of removing inflection from the word.
Documents may contain grammars to give meaningful information's but these words does not influence in text processing. In order to remove it, let us use techniques such us Stemming and lemmatization to chop off inflection.
Examples:
Trouble, Troubling, Troubled => Trouble
am, are, is => be
Stemming refers to a process that chops off the ends of words in the hope of achieving this goal correctly most of the time, and often includes the removal of derivational affixes. Lemmatization refers to doing things properly with the use of a vocabulary and morphological analysis of words, normally aiming to remove inflectional endings only and to return the base or dictionary form of a word, which is known as the lemma.
Stemming vs Lemmatization
Both stemming and lemmatization removes inflection from word. However stemming induce words that are not in dictionary because it does not use any part of speech tagging, vocabularies and grammar relationship to words whereas lemmatization use all above mentioned process step by step and produce desired word.
Below code illustrate Stemming vs Lemmatization.
Stop words
Stop words are the common words which doesn’t add much meaning to the text. These words need to be removed in the text pre-processing stage, if not it cause noise while processing text .
Examples :
Conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so
Articles: a, an, the
from nltk.corpus import stopwords allows to import stopwords module. NLTK has pre-defined stop words for English, it can be imported by stopwords.words(‘english’).
Tokenizer used to get tokens from text, with those tokens stop words get removed and placed in text_without_stopwords.
Code Sample:
BOW (Bag Of Words)
As discussed earlier, NLP process textual data’s with machine learning algorithms. Text can’t be given as input to ML algorithms, Text need to convert as vectors. This process also known as feature extraction from text. For this conversion available techniques are BOW(Bag Of Words) and word embeddings.
A bag of words represent the occurrence of words within a document. By implementing Tokenization, ignoring the stop words ,applying normalization and applying further pre-processing steps we trail and collect the words. Here, the model concern, whether the word present in document and has unique collection. This approach is a simple and flexible way of extracting features from documents.
Steps involved to create BOW
Import Necessary Libraries & Load the text.
Text pre-processing & Vocabulary collection.
Implement Vectorizer.
Let us import all the necessary libraries from NLTK to perform the earlier discussed pre-processing techniques such us Tokenization, Normalization, Ignoring Stop words. Additionally, in below code while performing lemmatization the special characters are removed and text case changed to lower in order to perform identical case to all text.
Import Necessary Libraries & Load the text
Text Pre-processing & Vocabulary collection
Vocabulary collection can be done by two ways. Easy way of implementation is with Count vectorizer from Scikit-learn or with following all pre-processing steps & vectorize it.
Vocabulary collection without Count Vectorizer:
Output:
Vocabulary collection with Count Vectorizer:
Next we need to convert the text to vector. The simplest method is to note the presence of words with 1 and 0 for absence of word. For this, we need to implement Count Vectorizer.
Output:
Vectorizer
Without Count Vectorizer:
Check whether word present in document if yes append 1 or else append 0.
With Count Vectorizer:
Output:
Better Understanding:
Let’s consider 1st sentence “I like this car”. Now observe the vector given by count vectorizer, wherever the words of sentence (i.e., ‘I’, ‘like’, ‘this’ ,‘car’) seen it mark as 1 apart from that it marked as 0.
Word Embeddings
Why Word Embedding? If the new sentences contain new words, then our vocabulary size would increase and thereby, the length of the vectors would increase too and the vector representations will have a lot of zeros which are called sparse vectors. These vectors do not have a neighborhood or directional relationship between words
Word embedding techniques are TF-IDF (Term frequency — Inverse Document Frequency), Word2vec, Glove (Global Vectors).
1. TF-IDF
Term frequency is defined as the number of times a word appears in a document divided by the total number of words in the document. Generally, known as Normalization in some sense.
Term Frequency
Inverse data frequency defined as the log of the total number of documents divided by the number of documents that contain the word. In below formulae 1 may or may not included it’s up to your wish. It is just for standardization.
Inverse Document Frequency
TF-IDF defined as below
Example of TF_IDF Calculation:
Let us assume that the word “system” appears 6 times in a document of 10000 words. Calculate TF?
TF= No. of. times word appear/Total number of words
TF= 6/10000=>0.006
TF=0.006
Let us assume that the word “system” appears 60 times in a 10000 document. Calculate IDF?
IDF=log( No. of. total documents/No. of. documents that contain the word)
IDF=log(10000/6)=>3.21
IDF=3.21
TF-IDF=0.006 * 3.21
TF-IDF=0.01926
TfidfVectorizer from Scikit-learn allows to apply TF-IDF word embedding technique.
Code Sample:
Output:
From above output, let us try to impute it manually for 1st sentence ‘I like this car’. Consider the word “car” in the text for TF-IDF calculation.
Calculation:
Total number of words = 11
TF=1/4=>0.25
IDF=log(3+1/1+1)=>1.308
TF-IDF=0.25 * 1.308=>0.327
The Scikit-learn implementation applies normalization on the product between TF and IDF
Normalization of the word “car”= square root(0.327) =>0.57
2. Word2vec
Word2vec invented in 2013. It predicts the vectors only by considering the local co-occurrence of the predictive word. The word prediction is happened by looking the range of window size.
Word2vec incorporated with two architecture such us CBOW and Skip-Gram. In CBOW (Continuous bag of words) we try to predict a word by looping many words whereas in Skip-Gram we try to model the contextual words by given particular word.The below architecture illustrate the same .
In Word2Vec, the similar words are located together in the vector space and arithmetic operations on word vectors can pose semantic relationships.
For instance: “king” — “man” + “woman” => “queen”
Example for skip-gram :
Q: Walt Disney invented Disneyland. In this sentence Let us predict the word Disneyland.
Word2vec is built by neural networks. As known we can’t pass text as input to models so we need to convert the words to vectors by marking predicting word as 1 and others as 0. In order to predict the word “Disneyland” high weightage is given to it. So, the output layer ( soft max ) predict word with high weightage accurately..
Skip-Gram Example Architecture
Example for CBOW
Q: Walt Disney invented Disneyland. In this sentence Let us predict all the words except Disneyland.
Here, we need to pass the vice-versa of skip-gram model and predict the words by inducing high weightage to all words except “Disneyland”
CBOW Example Architecture
Code Sample:
Before look in to with code sample, I would recommend to explore Gensimword2vec
3. GloVe (Global Vectors)
GloVe was invented in 2014. It is a unsupervised learning algorithm for representations words by vectors. It captures word-word co-occurrences in the entire corpus better than the word2vec. In other words, it creates a global co-occurrence matrix by estimating the probability of other words in corpus.
Why Glove is better than Word2vec ? Both models are fundamentally same, they learn vectors from the co-occurrence. However Word2vec is predictive model and GloVe is count based model. This predictive model learnt the vectors in order to improve the prediction accuracy but count based model overall statistics of the co-occurrence. In Glove , it is easier to train more data’s than word2vec.
Example for GloVe:
Let’s Consider text as “I love NLP. I Love to write blog”. First, find all unique words from text including any special characters present. Next find co-occurrence for each words.
For instance, consider the word “I” and find left and right words of “I” (i.e., co-occurrence of word). Mark as 1 for all co-occurrence words and 0 for others.
Summarization of above table.
Glove Vectors Representation
Resources
I would love to hear some feedback . Thank you for your time!
|
https://medium.com/geekculture/basics-of-natural-language-processing-for-beginners-d86351df9d09
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['Keerthana Durai']
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2021-07-07 14:52:17.612000+00:00
|
['Bag Of Words', 'Word Embeddings', 'Beginners Guide', 'Neural Networks', 'Tokenization']
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A Path of Spiritual Learning
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Spiritual Saturdays
Two opposites connecting
Physical reality no longer teaches me, but glows with my love for all who create it. There are some issues to write about, sparked by my desire for teaching. Spiritual reality now holds my attention to learning, and I am like a young child eager to learn more about this higher dimension. It’s as though I jump back and forth in my mind, from physical reality as a teacher, and spiritual reality as a student. When a child and first going to kindergarten I would come home, gather the ones younger than I on my doorsteps, and tell them what I learned for the day. It seems learning and teaching has always been in my nature.
It was through a spiritual awakening in 1975, and TM meditating that I became aware of bits and pieces of spirituality that as yet had no connections to physical reality. It was three decades of trying to balance these two opposites worlds, as Claire Elaine so eloquently expresses. A great deal of that time was spent in both teaching and learning extensively from others in art, literature, technology, and yes, even in politics — and mostly from my students and protégés. When I say learning I do not follow or believe. There always was an inner intuition that guided my own beliefs, even though I accepted others’ beliefs for them.
“The Genesis of Opposites is the Soul of All Matter” (From my book, 1985, “Do You See What I See?”)
The 1980s was a period of discovering my spiritual path, and intense searching to learn from everyone, all books, and some groups that were not cults. I wrote of my experiences in a poetry book, “Do You See What I See?”- As a way of teaching with poetic license, because the larger society did not accept much of this spiritual learning.
Gradually, around the turn of the century and toward my last aging years, I came to give most of my attention to spirituality that has so many synonyms in various spiritual disciplines. I like what Darshak Rana says, “Spirituality is not a religion, and hence it is free from any prejudices.” And therefore it is most wholistic, encompassing so many different ways of learning for each who travels the path.
My mind is like the “Last Rose of Summer” (Photo by author)
Aurora Eliam, CMP, in a poem captures some of my feelings:
“The breezes of dawn have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep! …
People are going back and forth, across the doorsill where the two worlds touch….
There is a greater intensity to know more about spiritual reality, which is the one experienced after death of the body with no physical capabilities. The deep desire is a kind of preparation for that event, so I will glide peacefully and willingly in to it. Upon reading Joe Luca, “Hello, your past is calling “, I thought of all the books and experiences in my past 1980s, and realized I can review them again. I have been rereading Rudolph Steiner’s “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain Them”. He talks of the importance in physical life to develop this knowledge and the faculties for seeing, hearing, and feeling in those higher spiritual worlds. It is here, in physical reality we learn, and our spiritual mind is to study what we have learned here, and prepare for whatever is next for us.
Another book that I recently picked up again is, Ruth Montgomery’s “A World Beyond”. She channelled the famous psychic Arthur Ford in the hereafter, explaining his experience. Some things that especially impressed me:
“It was like coming home … What we make of it here is influenced by what we had expected on your side … Here we communicate, work, grow and thrive only through thought … [we are taught] how to remember, how to forget and what to know without learning. … It seems we create in the spirit world but no one here to admire the creativity. It seems in the afterlife we make our own reality with meeting like-minded souls … Idea of a computer in the physical world was carried there in the minds of men who had operated segments of this system here, and thus they tapped into the unlimited resources of this spirit plane, as Edison and others have done with their so-called inventions.”
There is never an end, but there are many beginnings.
Thank you for reading. Love to you all.
|
https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/a-path-of-spiritual-learning-8c22c82c12e5
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['Shirley Willett']
|
2020-10-17 15:04:25.829000+00:00
|
['Teaching', 'Opposites', 'Learning', 'Love', 'Spiritual Secrets']
|
4 Things That Happen to Your Body When You Live a Sedentary Lifestyle
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4 Things That Happen to Your Body When You Live a Sedentary Lifestyle
You’ve probably heard your grandparents or even your parents’ stories about life in the old days, walking several miles to the school, or getting on all fours to scrub the bathroom. We hardly hear these stories anymore. Technological advancements and growing affluence has eliminated a lot of physical labour that used to be normal in the past.
According to one report, sedentary jobs have increased 83% since 1950 and physically active jobs now make up only about 25% of our workforce, which is 50% less than in 1950. Our average work week is also much longer than it used to be.
We may be delighted that we don’t have to take the stairs if we don’t want to or walk if we can drive. But in the absence of physical activity, something deadly has seized our generation and we don’t realise it, because the effects are so subtle and invisible until it’s too late.
Whether we are willing to make a lifestyle change or not, the lack of exercise and physical activity is wreaking havoc in our bodies. Even though technology has increased the human lifespan through medical breakthroughs, the misuse of technology has shortened it by affecting other areas of our lives.
In today’s article, we have picked out 4 important things that happen to our bodies when we live a sedentary lifestyle. You be the judge, if we should limit the use of modern technology and get moving instead.
The negative effects of sedentary lifestyle on your body
1. You may lose muscle mass
In a study conducted on 162 men and women aged 60 to 86 years, increased television viewing, which represents a sedentary activity, showed an increase in the risk of muscle mass loss. In another study, it was proven that inactivity impacts the lower limbs of the elderly more, compared to younger people.
But why does it matter? How is muscle mass significant to a person’s health? After all, doesn’t muscle loss lead to weight loss which is better for health?
The main function of muscles in our body is to produce mobility and stability. Almost everything we do requires the help of our muscles from walking, writing, climbing the stairs etc. It’s virtually impossible to undertake even the simplest daily activity without a strong, healthy muscular system in the body. A human person has more than 600 named skeletal muscles of varying types, supporting different functions of the body.
What a sedentary lifestyle does is it prevents physical activity that keeps the muscles healthy. When muscles are not active or trained, they waste away. When the muscle mass falls below a normal level, everyday physical activities become more difficult and increase the risk of injury.
As humans however, we naturally lose muscle mass as we age, specifically, after 30. According to Healthline, we continue to lose 3% to 5% of muscle mass every decade, which reduces physical function. The good news is, although we lose muscle mass as we age, exercise and good nutrition will help slow down the process.
2. Your bones may become weaker
It is common for people to lose their bone density by 0.3% to 0.5% after the age of 35. Those with osteoporosis or brittle bone disease just 20 years ago were typically aged 50 and above. In recent years however, there has been an increase in osteoporosis cases among people in their 30s and 40s.
Doctors believe bone mass loss among the younger population is accelerated by a sedentary lifestyle. According to Mayo Clinic, people who spend a lot of time sitting have a higher risk of developing osteoporosis compared to those who are more active.
In adult bone, lack of activity promotes the activity of osteoclasts or cells that resorb bone tissue, which is a natural response to disuse. This is not much different from how muscle loss occurs.
It is helpful to maintain a healthy intake of vitamin D and calcium, but the effects of a sedentary lifestyle might just forfeit their benefits.
Experts say that any weight-bearing exercise and activities that promote balance and good posture are good for the bones. But walking, running, jumping, dancing and weightlifting seem especially helpful.
3. Your immune system may not work properly
According to a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, too much sitting and avoiding exercise can affect our bodies’ ability to fight infection over time.
Our immune system is designed to protect us from danger, infections, toxins and allergens. When it is overactive, it causes inflammatory diseases and if it is not active enough, can leave us vulnerable to diseases.
According to Dr. Leonard Calabrese, an immunology expert, being sedentary will make us vulnerable to infections like colds, flus and more. But exercising moderately, getting 150 minutes of moderate to high physical activity stretched over a week, will reduce the risk.
On the other hand, high exercise training, sports competition and the associated stress are linked with inflammation, muscle damage, and increased illness risk.
So, while moderate exercising is good, it is best to keep competitive sports to a minimum if the activity cannot be supported with a high energy diet, adequate sleep, balanced emotional and mental health and general hygiene.
4. Your metabolism may be affected
Several studies have shown that sedentary behavior over a long period of time can increase the risk of metabolic syndrome. Those who sat less and engaged in more vigorous physical activity had a lower risk of metabolic syndrome.
But what is metabolic syndrome and how does it affect us?
Metabolic syndrome represents a cluster of metabolic disorders such as high fasting glucose level, hypertension, high triglyceride level, low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol level, and high waist circumference. It indicates the metabolic risk factors of cardiovascular disease. If three out of these five factors are detected, the condition is diagnosed as metabolic syndrome.
Without a change in lifestyle, this can lead to a heart attack and early death. The simplest adjustment we can make to avoid metabolic syndrome is avoid prolonged sedentary positions such as sitting, lying down or reclining. Stand up every few minutes and do something else even if your job requires you to sit for prolonged periods of time. Also, avoid sleeping for more than 8 hours a night.
Did you know that these 4 things happen to you when you don’t exercise or engage in physical activity over a long period of time? If you did, did you change your lifestyle?
Remember, it doesn’t take much to live a healthier lifestyle, just a few alterations even if you have a job that requires you to stay seated for a long time. Get up every half an hour and do some easy stretching. Walking daily for a few minutes after work, taking the stairs, walking to the grocery store and weight lifting can all add up to make a difference in your health.
|
https://medium.com/@ndnglobalgroup/4-things-that-happen-to-your-body-when-you-live-a-sedentary-lifestyle-4aa8d20fb990
|
['Ndn Global Group']
|
2020-12-18 02:54:29.337000+00:00
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['Sedentary Lifestyle', 'Lifestyle', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Exercise', 'Active']
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Do You Believe in Holiday Magic?
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Hey there!
Look around you!
Its time for the holidays, for the cheer and spirit it brings to each one of us, in gratitude of a year gone by, and in anticipation of a year to come!
Well, you might look at the year gone by and think there’s not much to be happy about it and perhaps, you’re even thanking god since it’s soon to be in the past.
You might even be so tired from all that was thrown at you during the year, that all you care about now is getting a break!
Anxiety and sadness envelop us when we look at the year past. You may want to be happy for the season, but are at a loss for thoughts and words to find such happiness. After all, health, finances, and relationships, everything we hold dear was under attack.
But, for a moment let’s look at the bright side. You are still here and so are most of your loved ones around you. Yes, perhaps finances have taken a hit, and health is unpredictable; but you’re here at the doorstep of a new year! And, when you have yourself to count on, you can build everything back. Loved ones lost is a fact and the grief is no less, but you can’t let that hold you from a better tomorrow. Know that your lost ones want the same for you.
A holiday, a new year or a new day is only as perfect as you make it. Use the bitterness of yesterday to make tomorrow more sweeter. It’s in your hands, whether to wallow in despair or to take stock of what you have, and go ahead with a new found zeal.
Create your own happiness, find your own peace.
If the memory of those lost saddens you, use this time to honor their memory, together as a family. If traditions seem heavy, create new ones that prioritize what you truly feel and want.
Find new meaning this holiday season.
Volunteer or spend time with another in the same boat so you can comfort them. Step out of your comfort zone and think about serving another. See the difference it can make in your own experience of joy and peace.
Normalcy, as we knew it has gone for a toss. Adapt to the new normal, but make it your own, the one you control. Show denial and depression the door, they have no place in your new normal. Connect with like minded people and build a network that supports one another. Say what you have to say without hesitance and do what you have to do. Don’t judge others and don’t allow others to judge you.
The holiday spirit and cheer are real, so long as you embrace them. Get dazzled by what they can do to you, your mood and inner self.
Don’t feel guilty about experiencing joy because you will, and it’s not wrong. Let the season do its magic on you! Relive your childhood, let the nostalgic feelings of happier times gone by swoosh over you.
Appreciate your today, what you have and feel blessed!
|
https://medium.com/@rajeevmudumba/do-you-believe-in-holiday-magic-cb85f42bc862
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['Rajeev Mudumba']
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2020-12-25 17:36:38.981000+00:00
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['Magic', 'Family', 'Holidays', 'Relationships', 'Gratitude']
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BTC: “Sit and wait while price climbs” game is over?
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BTC: “Sit and wait while price climbs” game is over?
So far this year, bitcoin prices have been buoyant, up 124% for the year to date.
But since 14 April, the world’s number 1 crypto has lost more than 23% – from almost $65,000 per coin to $49,647 (current price at the time of writing this article).
After Bitcoin prices breached a new all-time peak following the exuberance for digital assets after Coinbase Global’s listing on the Nasdaq last week, we saw a huge drop, and still don’t see prospects for a swift recovery.
Does this mean investors should be prepared for a new downtrend and price movement to $40,000, as a lot of experts seem to expect? Not so fast. Let’s analyze the situation.
Why did Bitcoin fall by so much and so quickly? There are 5 key factors likely to have caused the price of crypto assets to drop steeply:
Regulatory pressure is increasing, Mass liquidation, An overheated futures market, Whales selling, Concerns over US President Joe Biden’s tax plans.
The latest news from the cryptocurrency area is mostly pessimistic – to be honest, we haven’t seen any positive news since Coinbase listed on the Nasdaq. Some also blamed COIN’s lackluster performance.
Regulatory pressure on the crypto market is growing in the United States, Turkey and South Korea.
The cryptocurrency market has been sensitive to attempts at regulation. Even if this area doesn’t depend on any central bank directly, human psychology is still the same – when newspapers all over the world are screaming “cryptocurrency is banned” or “taxes will increase”, people start to close their positions in hope of avoiding the potentially approaching danger.
The inflation of fiat currencies and low-interest rates on saving accounts at traditional banks, (especially in the emerging markets) increased the numbers of people who are opting to use cryptocurrencies in an attempt to protect their savings from a sharp decline in the value of the local currencies.
As you know, the key difference between Bitcoin and fiat currencies today is on the supply side. The supply of Bitcoin is fixed, while for many fiat currencies, the central banks control the supply and have been increasing it in recent years via their QE programs. A high supply of fiat currencies combined with low interest rates сould theoretically drive hyper-inflation.
That’s why more and more people are looking to cryptocurrencies as a hedge against inflation, instead of bank deposits. There has even been a trend of BTC being favored over gold! 24% of the reduction in the gold price is attributed to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is having an impact. But nobody likes to lose customers and see them go to the competition, and central banks and governments aren’t an exception.
The Turkish case is particularly interesting. The Turkish lira is facing an inflation spiral (the course of USD/TRY price has risen almost 13% for the year to date). Increasing numbers of Turkish people are opting to use cryptocurrencies in an attempt to protect their savings from a sharp decline in the value of their local currency, the lira.
But the Turkish cryptocurrency market is unregulated. Last week, Turkey said it would ban the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services from 30 April. One of the reasons cited by the central bank was that wallets can be stolen or used unlawfully without authorisation from the holders.
A few days later the cryptocurrency exchange Thodex in Turkey went dark and almost 400,000 users lost access to funds and assets on the site. An estimated $10bln in assets are supposedly tied up in the exchange. Turkish media reports say that Faruk Fatih Ozer, Thodex’s founder, has flown to Albania, taking $2 billion of investors’ funds with him.
Does it mean that the entire crypto area is illegal and criminal? Of course not!
Initially, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were used for illicit purposes (e.g., trafficking, tax evasion, money laundering). However, now it is different as Bitcoin transactions have become a lot harder to hide. In 2019, just over 2% of the activity in the cryptocurrency space was linked to illicit activity; and in 2020 it was down to only 0.3%.
Bitcoin has become a large market and is, therefore, more carefully scrutinized. Law enforcement agencies are using the blockchain to track down suspected criminals and the flows of digital money.
What about the prospects of BTC?
Charts on the short-term frame are showing some signs of being oversold, but the current short-term downtrend is still the main focus.
BTC/USD chart. Source: TradingView
The first target in a potential downside movement is $44,549 – a strong support level.
According to technical analysis, as long as the price of BTC is under $ 51,000, we are in a short-term downtrend that started on 14, April 2021. And the ability of buyers to climb to the level of $51,000 again is significantly important. If the price rises above $51,500, it will be a new signal for a bull market.
NVT BTC Ratio shows potential for the price to fall, but we are approaching the support area.
Bitcoin NVT Ratio
Source: Woobul charts
And as we can see on the chart below, the exchange’s reserves are decreasing so that means accounts are still buying (net demand).
The long-term outlook appears positive for the crypto area. The pre-programmed, finite supply of all bitcoins determines the value of each BTC, that’s why it’s a good candidate for diversification and inflation protection from a long-term perspective.
All investment strategies and investments involve the risk of loss. Nothing contained in this article should be construed as investment advice. Any reference to an investment’s past or potential performance is not, and should not be construed as a recommendation or as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit.
|
https://medium.com/@vrmtrade/btc-sit-and-wait-while-price-climbs-game-is-over-89f0042feb41
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[]
|
2021-05-12 14:15:24.746000+00:00
|
['Vrm', 'Analysis', 'Market', 'Bitcoin']
|
A Sneak Peek at the Remme Protocol System dApps
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As you’ll be aware, Remme is migrating to the EOSIO framework, bringing with it a number of tech tasks that must be completed to give Remme Protocol, and REMChain in turn, its full functionality. We covered the architecture of the new-look Remme tech stack in our recent technical paper on the matter. Now we’d like to zero in on the smart contracts that will power the core services of Remme Protocol.
Smart contracts are an integral component of blockchain-based systems, enabling digital verification and enforcement of rules, which allows for transactions to be completed without the need for third parties. First proposed by Nick Szabo long before Bitcoin was even created, smart contracts have come to play an increasingly vital role in controlling a host of blockchain systems. From automating insurance payouts to facilitating cross-chain asset swaps, smart contracts are the invisible hand guiding much of the cryptoeconomy. In the future, entire industries, from law to credit loans, may be partially automated by smart contracts that eliminate the need for human input, and thus for human error.
In the here and now, though, system smart contracts (operated by Block Producers, regular users are not able to modify the state of a system contract) have a vital role to play in delivering information about the external state, controlling key functions of Remme Protocol and its supportive ecosystem. In this article we’ll examine some of the ways in which smart contracts interact with Remme Protocol components.
A quick primer on Remme Protocol
Our goal in conceiving Remme Protocol was to create a full-cycle identity and access management solution suited to humans and machines alike. In other words, a product that could be purposed for controlling staff access to company networks, but which was equally adept at verifying IoT devices connecting to the edge of the cloud. Remme Protocol provides a basis for establishing self-sovereign and authority-issued identities, with a broad array of use cases spanning multiple verticals, segments and industries.
At the heart of Remme Protocol is a flexible and future-ready solution that provides a robust and secure alternative to traditional PKI systems, which present a single point of failure. Some of the use cases we’ve envisaged for Remme Protocol — a number of which have already been successfully trialed during our pilot program — include user and smart devices authentication, digital key management, domain validation, email signing, and code signing.
Now let’s take a look at some system smart contracts that make all of this possible in Remme Protocol.
Foundational component #1: System contract for managing account attributes
Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is the system used to determine which access rights are granted to certain users. For example, senior management in a company would be expected to have broader access than junior staff. A properly functioning ABAC system will ensure that access policies are enforced properly at all times, so that privileged information is only accessible by those with the authorization to view it.
Attribute-based credentials are cryptographically secured carriers of properties that correspond with a particular user. They are a key component of numerous privacy-preserving solutions and identity management systems. When designing attribute-based credentials, however, there are certain limitations and requirements, aside from privacy and security, that must be taken into account — like usability and efficiency.
Attribute-based identity management has a wide range of tangible real-world use cases, both online and offline. Successfully implementing an ABAC-based solution, however, demands that certain credential design principles are met. Through effectively integrating attribute-based credential systems, useful identity relationships can be established and maintained.
Any account can start and host its independent namespace of attributes. However, there will be a predefined namespace with attributes delivered by the system smart contract rem.attr. Standard attributes will include basic Directory attributes like “Common Name”, “Organization Name”, “Picture”, and etc.
There are also several types of attributes based on the way they can be assigned to an account:
Self-assigned — only the account that receives the attribute can issue it.
Examples: ComonName (UTFString), Picture (URLString or IPFS CID). Public Pointer — any account can assign such attribute to any account.
Examples: FollowedBy (Remme Account Reference). Public Confirmed Pointer — any account can assign such attribute to any account, however, the receiving account has to explicitly confirm it.
Examples: SomeTermsAndConditionsAcccepted (OID, URL, IPFS CID). Private Pointer — attribute-namespace-owner account can assign such attribute to any account.
Examples: Door1234AccessGranted (Boolean). Private Confirmed Pointer — attribute-namespace-owner account can assign such attribute to any account, however, the receiving account has to explicitly confirm it.
Examples: AgentKYCPassed (String:TierLevel).
Attribute naming starts with the account name that manages its namespace and followed by the attribute name, e.g. accountname:attributename.
For instance, the list of standard attributes of some account may return:
$remcli get account attributes rem.attr someaccount rem.attr:commonname = “John Doe” rem.attr:picture = “/ipfs/QmW2WQi7j6c7UgJTarActp7tDNikE4B2qXtFCfLPdsgaTQ/cat.jpg”
For instance, the list of standard attributes related to domain validation may return:
$remcli get account attributes rem.domain someaccount rem.domain:commonname = “verified.domain.com” rem.domain:commonname = “verified.domain2.info”
For instance, the list of assigned attributes of some account that belongs to XYZ Company may return:
$remcli get account attributes xyzcompany someaccount xyzcompany:commonname = “John Smith” xyzcompany:organizationalunit = “Head Office” xyzcompany:picture = “/ipfs/QmW2WQi7j6c7UgJTarActp7tDNikE4B2qXtFCfLPdsgaTQ/cat.jpg”
Assigning any attribute sends a contract action to the receiving account, so the account contract (or a watching node) may react to this event. For example, an exchange may monitor a user account and react to an attribute assignment event by a trusted KYC agent (e.g kycagent:verified = “Tier1”).
Foundational component #2: Verification of the external state by Block Producers
With REMChain being an independent blockchain fueled by the REM token, Remme Protocol utilizes the decentralized consensus algorithm Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). Under this algorithm, those who hold a certain amount of tokens on a blockchain adopting the protocol software may select Block Producers (BPs) through a continuous voting mechanism. Anyone who accumulates a minimum required amount of tokens may choose to participate in block producer election by running for top 21 status or vote for other candidates they trust and feel confident about.
With the elected Block Producers that negotiate and form the deterministic environment for the smart contracts that run on-chain, there is the second foundational component of the Protocol that is present to bring the information about the external world to the blockchain. This component is called External Validation and is a separate and parallel routine performed by the Block Producers. Such routines are implemented as a set of plugins for remme-node (or nodeos in eosio terms) or sometimes as an independent service that uses an independent key connected to the same account of a producer. Standby Block Producers should also participate in External Validation routines, and by doing so, demonstrate to the community their uptime, performance, and engagement to increase their social reputation.
BP verification of the external state works as follows: for each service within the Protocol ecosystem, there will be a requestor (account). With relatively difficult tasks (like Domain Name validation), the request is expected to be paid with REM tokens. The submitted request along with the object (a domain name, for instance) must also describe the expected result that BPs will be called upon to verify.
For example, an account (johndoeaccnt) may claim on-chain ownership of a domain (johndoe.com) following these steps:
Create a file {$chain_id}.json in the root directory. E.g.
http://johndoe.com/aca376f206b8fc25a6ed44dbdc66547c36c6c33e3a119ffbeaef943642f0e906.json
http://johndoe.com/aca376f206b8fc25a6ed44dbdc66547c36c6c33e3a119ffbeaef943642f0e906.json Let the file content specify the on-chain owner account name. E.g.
{ owner: “johndoeaccnt” }
{ owner: “johndoeaccnt” } Execute a transaction that requests external verification.
All BPs (Active BPs mandatory, Standby BPs optional) will process the request, by fetching a URL and verifying ownership by comparing the requestor’s account name and the information returned by the webserver in the json file. Every BP will send a transaction with its resolution and signature. This will include the following data: request ID, the resolution (confirmed or failed), timestamp.
Every transaction with the BP resolution checks whether it’s passed the threshold of the Active BP majority requirement on a particular External Validation request. If yes, the request transition into the final state and there is a callback made to the requestor contract about the consolidated resolution. Depending on the case, an attribute may also be assigned, for example in the domain validation scenario: rem.domain:commonname = “johndoe.com”. The External Validation request is always a timeboxed task so that if there is no consensus among BPs or the majority threshold is not met, the request will resolve with the failed status.
Conclusion
There’s more to cover in regards to the system smart contracts of the Remme Protocol ecosystem, but in this overview we’ve covered its two important components: Attributes management and External State validation routine. For more information on how these interact with Remme protocol, our technical paper has all the details. Understanding the Remme Protocol’s smart contract system is key to grasping the efficiency and security underpinning our full-cycle identity and access management solution.
|
https://medium.com/remme/a-sneak-peek-at-the-remme-protocol-system-dapps-528c3fe2fad8
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[]
|
2019-07-16 15:00:27.098000+00:00
|
['Encryption', 'Decentralization', 'Smart Contracts', 'Remme Tech Update', 'Blockchain']
|
FAST AND FURIOUS HAS WON THE RACE…
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FAST AND FURIOUS HAS WON THE RACE…
Fluff or cultural touchstone — there’s no denying that the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise has left a mark on cinema, and on the world. Many might argue that this mark is really a stain, but what they don’t realize is that ‘Fast and Furious’ is actually pretty revolutionary.
It breaks every law of physics, laughs in the face of logic, and treats gravity like a tiny inconvenience that can be easily overcome. However, its WTF silliness aside, the franchise gets tons right.
Over the last two decades, it has transformed from a “teen summertime car flick” to a box-office breaking phenomenon. It is actually a great representation of the American dream narrative — ordinary guys doing extraordinary things behind the wheel. Cars are displayed as a great equalizer — it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from as long as you drive well. They are vehicles of social mobility with which the heroes better their blue-collar lives.
A common trope in many films is likening fast cars to fast women. Insert the common montage of bikini-clad women sprawled on shiny automobiles. The F&F franchise, however, leaves objectification behind to focus on the power of the wheel. No wonder ‘Fast and Furious’ has impacted modern car culture more than any other franchise. It introduced the idea of car customization and debunked the common misconception that car performance was directly proportional to engine size.
We may even go far enough to compare the F&F world with the Bond universe. The ingredients are the same — shiny cars and cool stunts. But, instead of a white dude going around basically doing what and whoever he wants, the F&F squad consists of Hispanic, black, Asian, and Israeli characters who constantly drive home the importance of relationships and family.
The Fast and Furious franchise is a genre of cinema in itself. Some may call it “Hollywood’s version of Bollywood”, but its iconic car chases have been mirrored by many. The ninth Fast and Furious film is set to release in 2021 — will you watch it or hate-watch it?
|
https://medium.com/@anikettekam/fast-and-furious-has-won-the-race-5d397ce1aea7
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['Aniket Tekam']
|
2020-12-24 14:40:36.260000+00:00
|
['Movies', 'Cars', 'Netflix', 'Fast And Furious', 'Watches']
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When the Gospel isn’t Good News. I don’t remember logistical details. I…
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When the Gospel isn’t Good News
Getting saved can feel like hell.
Unsplash
I don’t remember logistical details. I can’t tell you where I was. I don’t know who I was with or who the speaker was. What I do remember is that I was short, that I was sitting cross-legged in the grass surrounded by other children, and that I was pulling grass up out of the ground through my small fists. I was five. I was being told I was going to hell for my sins.
It was such a strange suggestion: I did bad things and therefore I couldn’t go to heaven unless I believed God’s son died for me.
I knew about Jesus. I’d been in Sunday school since I was a toddler. I liked Jesus. I didn’t realize I had to use him to get to heaven. I just wanted him to be my friend.
But I knew I did bad things sometimes as I was trying to figure out how the world worked. I stole a Reese’s peanut butter cup from the grocery store once when I was 3 -and I think maybe a word search book a little later. I was 3, so my memory is faulty, but from what I can recall, I didn’t understand why we had to go through so much rigmarole at the grocery store. I figured things could be more efficient if I wasn’t constantly asking permission to have things that were just sitting there. I did realize my mistake after the fact. I knew I did things that others would not approve of, so… I guess I was wretched?
I liked adults. I trusted them. They liked to talk about things, and I liked to talk about things. So even though what this adult stranger was telling me didn’t make much sense, I trusted. I prayed the sinner’s prayer. I entered fundamentalist Christianity, hoping folks were steering me in the right direction.
It wasn’t that big of a day. I imagine the adults I informed were relieved. If we’re assuming the truth of what I was told, no one wants their kid to be tortured for eternity. So it’s great when she accepts the possibility of eternal damnation and acts in prudent preparation for the afterlife.
But the underlying message, There’s something wrong with you. Do what I say and it will be okay, and my response to it, I have questions, but this seems like the most risk-free option, provided the foundation for trauma later on.
For their inherent wellbeing, children need to know that they’re safe and loved. Children depend on adults to provide this for them. Demanding that a child protect and love themselves in lieu of parents is inherently traumatizing.
And let’s face it, if a person believes that each individual must be saved from hell by believing in Jesus, we’re living in a world in which parents cannot protect their children from God. The moment a child learns it is up to her alone to think and do the right things in order to not suffer forever, that there’s nothing a parent can do to save them other than encourage them in the right direction, we are setting up a traumatic reality. A child cannot take on an angry God by herself.
But she must.
There are two things going on in this scenario. Emotional abuse and emotional neglect. The abuse starts from the very beginning of the “gospel” story. There’s something wrong with you. Do as I say and you’ll be okay. Emotional abuse, like other forms of abuse, is about control. It includes convincing a person that they cannot trust their own thoughts and feelings. With eternal damnation on the line, I was not about to trust my questions, and my feelings were secondary to imminent danger.
The need to control others in order to save them from hell almost seems loving, but it is not. The longer a person believes there’s something wrong with her, the more sense of self she loses, the easier it becomes to internalize shame, guilt, and toxic self-criticism that takes over her inner monologue later. That toxic inner monologue is a key symptom of C-PTSD.
And that toxic inner monologue is easily supported in the Christian tradition. It is reinforced in the lyrics of our favorite hymns, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” It can be hurled at us regularly from the pulpit — especially in churches where we are constantly being told about our “sin nature.” I can’t count the times I heard testimonies about kids re-asking Jesus into their hearts at summer camp just to be sure. The graceful forgiveness of God cannot stick with a story that starts by informing us of our wretchedness. Shame and hell will win every time.
Then comes emotional neglect. Emotional neglect surfaces when children’s (and adults’) genuine questions and fears about an abusive God are dismissed.
Pete Walker, whose writing has been incredibly helpful for me as I define the nuances of abuse in Christian theology, defines emotional neglect as “when a child does not have a single parent or caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger.” For children who get evangelized into Christianity with fire and brimstone, there is often no parent in the room for them — the parents are taking advantage of free “family-friendly” childcare. Even parents themselves can cause emotional neglect after the fact. Because there are patterns of trauma in the stories we’ve been telling about God for decades (or centuries or millennia), religiously traumatized parents can experience children’s questions and feelings about God as dangerous and therefore dismiss them. With no room for the child’s feelings or thoughts to be validated, the narrative of there’s something wrong with me is reinforced.
Emotional abuse and neglect are not in and of themselves trauma, but they can be traumatic. With foundational beliefs of There’s something wrong with me and There’s a powerful force out there that wants to kill me forever unless I do what I’m told, the groundwork is laid for C-PTSD to develop.
Not all of us will experience trauma from the same things. Trauma is about the bodily reaction to traumatic experiences — not the experiences themselves. Many Christians experience love and hope through Christianity. Some people I grew up with in similar or even the same religious spaces have positive associations with the Christian tradition. That’s great.
But, when we can’t acknowledge the potential trauma within our beloved religious traditions, we run the risk of causing further harm in the name of God. It is imperative for the spiritually wounded and spiritually empowered to have open conversation about traumatic theology and how to heal from it. Otherwise, we isolate ourselves from each other and traumatic cycles continue.
|
https://medium.com/interfaith-now/when-the-gospel-isnt-good-news-how-getting-saved-can-feel-like-hell-65e1f4e377b9
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['Emily Hedrick']
|
2020-07-17 12:07:03.022000+00:00
|
['Christianity', 'Emotional Abuse', 'Spirituality', 'Trauma', 'Religion']
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Cyber security month 2020: the importance of it and why you should be interested
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Cybermonth or cybersecurity awareness month is dedicated to raise awareness on the topic. During this period, companies and national infrastructures usually share information about safer online experiences and potential harms.
Cybermonth is becoming more and more critical to the public, since many companies holding sensitive user data are experiencing various types of hackers attacks. According to Statista statistics, in 2019 alone, 752 business and financial companies experienced data breaches in the US.
At the moment, data breaches targeting big companies are not the most significant problems. Hackers are now targeting people at home. Recently home security camera footage was hacked and shared over 3TB worth of videos online. The content was shared on pornographic sites.
Also, more and more cases occur regarding big companies trespassing and ignoring the basic laws or privacy. H&M was recently fined for breaking GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) over employee surveillance. The company was surveillancing over a few hundred employees and collecting their private data.
Hackers are not the only bad guys anymore considering the current events in cybersecurity. The internet is full of threats that can come from many sources. That’s why cybersecurity hygiene and basic knowledge is crucial.
How can you learn more about cybersecurity?
You can follow news websites, for example, BBC or Business Insider. Usually, the big guys of the press are fast to upload hot news. And do not forget to visit Ycombinator and Hackernoon — these websites have strong communities and aim for top-notch content as well as discussions.
If you use Reddit, try searching for these subreddits r/security, r/privacy, r/technology, etc. These are only a few to mention, and you can find way more if you check out the suggestions section. You will definitely find people and experts talking about various security issues, the future of cybersecurity or even getting down to the basics and discussing the importance of cyber security.
Also, if you are a podcast fan, there are plenty of cyber security podcasts to listen to. Darknet Diaries is a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, cybercrime, etc. The series started to air in 2017 and is still going strong. Risky Biz podcast is hosted by journalist Patrick Gray. This podcast covers the most important news of the week.
You can also check out these podcasts: Cyberwire, Hacking Humans, Unsupervised Learning.
What tools should you use to improve your online security?
By educating yourself and being aware of the potential threats online, you become more immune to them. Sadly this is not enough, and it is crucial to use various strategies to improve cybersecurity. Here are a few cybersecurity tools to start using:
Password manager — a password management tool is essential for safe login information keeping. Using this tool, you will have the ability to create strong passwords, like this one: P3@B*$KpCdsqD, and the best part is — you don’t have to remember it. Also, most of the providers have breach scanners. This feature alerts you when data breaches occur.
If you are doing a lot of e-shopping, a password manager is a must. A lot of websites offer you a convenient way of storing your credit card details. This feature saves time, although it is dangerous if the website gets hacked, and all of your banking info sails into the void of hackers. For this particular reason, better save your credit card details in an encrypted vault and copy-paste them when needed.
There are plenty of providers out there offering different types of services and features, so far NordPass, has it all. Antivirus program — a strong antivirus is one of the critical tools to add. This service will scan your computer for harmful viruses and eliminate them from the system. The basic preinstalled antivirus may seem to do the job. However, it’s not always the case. Hackers are continually improving their skills and finding new ways to crack system vulnerabilities.
A lot of techies swear by EsetNod32 antivirus, although there are a few others worth mentioning: Norton Antivirus, Bitdefender. VPN service — a so-called virtual private network will help you encrypt your traffic. This means your ISP won’t be able to see what you are up to online. Also, a VPN allows you to skip countries. In other words, you can appear to be in Australia, although you are in the US. This tool is essential while using public WIFI because it will encrypt your traffic and protect from hackers using the same network. According to PCMag, the best VPNs in 2020 are NordVPN, ProtonVPN, and Mullvad.
A lot of cyber security companies during this month are offering some significant discounts. So, it’s the best time to start using some tools and not spend a pile of cash. For example, NordPass is offering a 70% discount of a 2 years deal (price $35.76) and 60% off a 1 year plan for $23.88.
Cyber attacks became complete normality these days, and security industry specialists are continually warning about more and more advanced techniques used by hackers or others. That’s why a cybersecurity month is way more important than ever. This month is a window to invite more people to the conversation and show them its importance.
|
https://medium.com/@voncarlde8/cyber-security-month-2020-tools-and-deals-e74e5381cc63
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['Carl Vonde']
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2020-10-28 13:49:44.703000+00:00
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['Cybersecurity Month', 'Cybersecurity', 'Internet Security Toolkit', 'Cybermonth', 'Deal']
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Meet Nadina Galle (2/2)
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Each week, Urban AI presents you one member of its Scientific Committee. We begin this series of interviews with Nadina Galle. Nadina is an Ecological Engineer who coined the concept of “Internet of Nature”. She is the Co-Founder of Green City Watch, Research Fellow at Metabolic and is a former Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab.
You have developed a method using high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor urban nature. Could you tell us more about this idea and technology?
Satellite imagery provides a powerful objective viewpoint on how greenery is doing in different cities. It allows us to measure things that we might not be able to measure in the field, for example, canopy cover of a whole city. If you take any address point within a city, you can analyze whether or not each citizen has access to greenery within 300 metres from their house.These are things that, with the help of AI, are able to be quantified very quickly for cities across the world.
Did you use computer vision to automatically identify and categorise some trees?
When it comes to satellite imagery or aerial imagery analysis, we have used a lot of object-based image analysis, so training the computer to identify certain things, tree crowns, mostly, but you can also use it for buildings, for cars or any kind of urban feature that you want to identify. Treepedia by MIT Senseable City Lab uses a similar computer vision based approach, but with Google Street View imagery. Computer vision is an extremely powerful tool to quantify how much greenery there is in a city.
On the left satellite image, five of the dozens of red maples are highlighted from which she took soil samples to check fungi, CO2 content and other soil properties. On the right, the same trees in the near infrared.
You have also worked on a project called “Diversitree”. Could you tell us more about this project ?
Growing trees in cities is difficult to do because the fight for space underground is really fierce. Tree roots have to compete with cables and other underground infrastructure, and there’s polluted air, there’s salty air, there’s a lot of wind. An urban environment is quite an extreme environment for trees to grow in. Therefore, over the last 50 years of greening our cities, we’ve come up with a list of let’s say five to ten different species that will grow well in urban environments (even though the list of trees that we could theoretically plant in cities is thousands of trees long). That’s not a bad thing because, of course, we want trees to survive. But it shows the need to improve the soil conditions so that more different trees can grow in cities. Why? Because if you only have the same couple of species that are planted in cities, you essentially have a monoculture and when you have a monoculture and you have a species-specific path to a disease that comes by, you wipe out 50% to 70% of your urban forest. Thus, it’s an incredibly precarious situation to be in. And let’s not forget that growing trees in cities takes an incredibly long time. Before you have a mature tree it costs maybe 30, 40, 50, sometimes 70 years, because the growth patterns of trees in cities are so different.
That’s why it’s so important to increase the diversity of trees that are being planted in cities, except we have lacked a methodological approach to be able to map it. That’s what Diversitree is all about. It maps tree diversity on four different parameters and then provides a way to visualise that as well, so that city practitioners can learn from it.
Diversitree by MIT Senseable City Lab
You wrote that “urban trees can be lonely, like some human beings”. Could you explain what you meant when you wrote this ?
We live in a bizarre world where if you live in a rural area, you’re more likely to know who your neighbours are than in a dense city. It’s kind of a strange situation that you can live so close to people and yet not have that connection. And this is a broader trend as well, right. In Western society it’s almost looked down upon to live with your parents or have your grandparents live with you or have your children live with you for a long period of time. This idea of the inter-generational house, which is actually really effective for household management and for health and wellbeing, can actually be really helpful. We’ve kind of moved away from community-based living towards very individual apartments locked away from each other. And in a way, that’s the parallel to how trees are planted in cities as well, in their own individual boxes not able to communicate with one another. That can be disastrous and shorten the life of a tree, but actually loneliness is also one of the biggest silent killers for humans. And no time has that been more prevalent than it is now in this era of COVID-19.
This is where we see that technology is ambivalent. Smart sensors can be used to improve our interactions and the dialogue between trees while some social media amplify that loneliness…
People are so intent on pitting nature and technology, or people and technology as enemies of one another. But technology is never the goal, technology is simply a tool to be able to optimise all these other goals that we have in mind, whether that’s inclusivity or diversity or nature. So, all of these different things that we want, technology is simply a tool to get there. So, in the same way that we might use sensors to step in where trees are not able to communicate with one another, we might use an app like Peerby. Peerby is an app where you can say that you need a power drill. And then another person within a one-kilometre radius will say “I have a power drill, do you have a blender?”. This app facilitates the interaction. You go to your neighbour’s house, you start a conversation, you get to know each other and maybe for the next time you won’t need the app, but the interaction started with the app. It fosters beautiful communication even with the people closest to you.
Peerby app
Last question, Nadina. For you, what is the most promising field of application about urban Artificial Intelligence?
I feel like there is a lot more work to be done on raising awareness of the different technologies that we can use for urban ecosystem management and for piloting those technologies. It’s easy to come up with a concept, but we also need to actually pilot the specific technologies and see which ones work and which ones have a real business case behind it. And I think that’s kind of the step where we’re at now. We know about the different AI technologies, now we’re in the process of bringing a lot of these to market and seeing which ones work.
For example, concerning the sensors, I think the use case and the business case is quite clear. Previously the traditional way of doing it was driving around with a watering truck and seeing where you should water. Well, clearly having a data driven approach to that is going to optimise that situation. The previous way of creating a tree inventory was going by each individual tree and manually surveying the tree by hand or with a table. Obviously, being able to do that via a mobile mapping LiDAR and then using algorithms to filter out the trees and attributes of the trees, is going to be a lot more efficient .
We are going to move from what used to be a very reactive sector to a much more proactive sector. And I think if we can show those applications for the urban ecosystems space that’s really going to be a gamechanger in my opinion. Not for using the technology and showing how cool it is that we can use it, but for the ultimate goal of growing greener and healthier cities.
The 1st part of our interview with Nadina Galle is available on this link : https://medium.com/urban-ai/meet-nadina-galle-1-2-9854dafe588e
This interview is also available on our Blog.
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https://medium.com/urban-ai/meet-nadina-galle-2-2-88249509c56f
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['Urban Ai']
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2021-05-16 22:34:49.798000+00:00
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['Smart Cities', 'Internet of Things', 'Cities', 'Nature', 'Biodiversity']
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Lightning Network is the Future of Bitcoin
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In recent years, Bitcoin and its underlying infrastructure, the Blockchain, have been proven to be safe and reliable technologies. However, despite its continued popularity and high-demand from businesses, Bitcoin still cannot be used as a functional currency to date. Some of the few merchants that had accepted Bitcoin as a payment option, like Valve, removed their support for Bitcoin. Another example is Stripe, a leading payment processing firm for online businesses, ended its Bitcoin support due to lengthy transaction times and growing fees. The fact that out of the leading 500 internet sellers, just three accept Bitcoin indicates that Bitcoin is becoming less popular among merchants and users for use in everyday commerce. Instead, Bitcoin is perceived to be a modern day equivalent to gold as consumers holding it prefer to profit from its price increase rather than spend it on products and goods that could be purchased via fiat currencies. Peter Thiel recently stated that Bitcoin is “like bars of gold in a vault that never move”, adding that it is too cumbersome to be used as a payment system.
I don’t agree. I believe that the success of Bitcoin will be greatly impacted by its tradability and its ability to impact our everyday commerce. However, in order for that to happen, we need to face Bitcoin’s shortcomings which prevent it from being accepted by consumers and merchants as a functional currency:
Payment is not instantaneous. The Blockchain contains blocks, where each block documents several transactions. As soon as a block has been filled with transactions, it needs to be added to the chain before starting to record transactions on the next block. However, before a block can be added to the chain, there is some processing that needs to be done to ensure that everyone agrees with the contents it contains. This process is called mining. With the Blockchain architecture, a payment is accepted once a transaction has been mined into a block. However, on average, it takes between 9 to 10 minutes to mine a block. Lack of scalability. In order to maintain its decentralized nature, the Blockchain limits a block size to 1MB. Because of the block size and the minimum delay between blocks mining, the Blockchain is only able to process 2 to 12 transactions per second. For Bitcoin to play a meaningful role as a payment system, transaction processing power needs to increase by at least 3 orders of magnitude. High cost of transactions fee. Transactions speed limit is causing network congestion, with thousands of transactions waiting to be confirmed and delays reaching several hours. The nature of the Blockchain architecture (in which miners can be incentivize to include a transaction in a block sooner than others) inherently drives an increase in transaction fees, as users are willing to pay higher fees to get their transaction at the front of the queue. Unfortunately, any temporary decrease in transaction fee can be attributed to lower transaction volume, which defeats the purpose…
Lightning Network (LN) lays the foundation in which Bitcoin can be evolved to become a functional currency. Lightning Network offers an off-chain transaction model which addresses the current Blockchain deficiencies. This model enables:
Instant Payments . Lightning-fast Blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by Blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-Blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
. Lightning-fast Blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by Blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-Blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds. Scalability . Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity is better than legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Payments are now possible without custodians.
. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity is better than legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Payments are now possible without custodians. Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-Blockchain, Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which enables instant micropayments.
The innovation behind LN is that not all transactions are required to be recorded on the Blockchain. In cases where two parties transact a few times among themselves, they can bypass the recording of transactions on the Blockchain and carry them off the Blockchain (off-chain). LN’s fundamental technology is a local two party consensus, also known as a payment channel. When two parties are ready to transact, a payment channel is opened and recorded on the Blockchain (an on-chain action). From now on, the parties can transact any number of times through this payment channel and it can stay open for any duration. The only time the parties interact with the Blockchain again will be when they would want to close the channel. Then, the parties record the final status of the transactions that occurred through the channel on the Blockchain. This notion of payment channel enables the creation of a network of payment channels such that it would be only rarely required to transaction on the Blockchain. Meaning, all payment channels can be connected to enable tractions between parties that do not have a direct payment channel between them. In this architecture, because on-chain interactions are reduced to a minimum, transactions are happening at lightning speed.
Lightning Network is a potential breakthrough in transforming Bitcoin to be used as a functional, tradeable currency. LN can help Bitcoin to deliver on its promise, but, in order to do so, most of everyday transactions will need to be processed via LN payment channels, while the Blockchain will only exist as a secure fallback to ensure honest commerce. IMHO, Bitcoin’s success depends on Lighting Network’s ability to flourish as vibrant network, relying on the security infrastructure provided by the Blockchain, but reducing Blockchain transactions to a minimum.
If you found this article helpful, please don’t forget to add claps (long press to add multiple claps) and share it.
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https://medium.com/breez-technology/the-future-of-bitcoin-3187aefe2746
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['Roy Sheinfeld']
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2019-04-08 21:30:15.100000+00:00
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['Blockchain', 'Payments', 'Lightning Network', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency']
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Reprinted from Wilderness House Literary Review
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Reprinted from Wilderness House Literary Review
The Burden of Eating: Misconceptions About Eating Disorders
I knocked on the door and saw a woman who was more fashionably dressed than would have been expected for a trip to the cardiologist’s office. Ronnie* was in a program at a nearby facility dedicated to the treatment of women with eating disorders. The facility sent Ronnie to see me for cardiac evaluation, to ensure she was medically stable to continue with her treatment there. My office was conveniently located. But the staff also included female cardiologists, not common as men greatly outnumber women in the subspecialty. The assumption, or perhaps the hope, was that as a woman I better understood eating disorders. But I did not. My medical training had not included even rudimentary education regarding eating disorders. I had learned mainly from treating patients like Ronnie.
Like the general public, medical professionals have misconceptions about these patients. For many, “eating disorder” is synonymous with anorexia nervosa. Although she had been anorexic in the past, Ronnie was currently bulimic. Although both share an intense fear of gaining weight, bulimia is characterized by periods of overeating followed by purging, often in the form of vomiting or laxative abuse, both of which Ronnie had done from time to time. However, unlike anorexics, Ronnie maintained a normal body weight. All eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia, are classified as psychiatric conditions. Anorexia nervosa was originally labelled a neurosis in 1952 by the American Society of Psychiatry in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the authoritative index of psychiatric diagnoses. The term bulimia nervosa was coined by psychiatrist Gerald F.M. Russell and more recently added in 1987 to the DSM.
Despite entering the medical lexicon, awareness of disordered eating was largely non-existent when Ronnie was growing up. In the United States, eating disorders entered public consciousness in the 1970s with Karen Carpenter, lead singer of the Grammy award winning band, The Carpenters. She was anorexic and as her popularity soared, her weight plummeted. At one point she weighed less than 80 pounds. She died in 1983 with the official cause of death listed as “Emetine Cardiotoxicity due to Anorexia Nervosa,” implying she regularly ingested emetine. It was the active ingredient in ipecac syrup, a substance toxic to the heart. Its official indication was to induce vomiting in cases of accidental poisoning. At a time when eating disorders were unacknowledged, it had not occurred to medical professionals that ipecac would be misused.
Karen Carpenter’s death at the age of thirty-two raised awareness of eating disorders. Since then, others have been more forthcoming about their struggles. Jane Fonda recounted the impact of disordered eating and poor body image on her health. Princess Diana laid all bare in a 1995 BBC interview when discussing her bulimia. She likened the temporary comfort it gave her to “having a pair of arms around you.” Twenty-five years later another icon, Taylor Swift, revealed she sometimes had an unhealthy relationship with food. In her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, she spoke of how a picture of her or a comment about her appearance could trigger her “to just starve a little bit — just stop eating.” Clearly, material success and fame do not ensure a sense of self or safeguard one’s confidence.
Ronnie did not have fame or fortune. She worked a humdrum job, stressed not by popularity but by anonymity. Feeling invisible at work and in life, the eating disorder was her coping mechanism. Like many with disordered eating, she was smart and functional. Yet she struggled with an eating disorder for most of her life, at a time when recognition of and treatment for eating disorders were essentially non-existent. It felt like a secret to her even though National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD) estimates disordered eating will affect approximately 70 million worldwide (approximately 10–15% of those affected are men), and 30 million in the United States during their lifetime. Diagnosis of an eating disorder confers a higher likelihood of depression, substance abuse and death. Of all categories of mental illness, those with eating disorders have the highest likelihood of dying, with up to one-third of deaths in this population attributed to cardiac dysfunction.
This explained Ronnie’s visit to a cardiologist. I started with my usual questions. At one point I asked, “When did your eating disorder start?” She paused. Despite giving her medical history to many others before me, she did not have a ready answer. Perhaps no one had asked this question, or maybe she had tried to forget how it started.
“I can’t remember an exact date, but it started decades ago. School was tough for me in so many ways. I was always concerned about my weight and how I looked. One night I was really upset about something, maybe a boy. I talked to my mother, sobbing, trying to explain what was wrong. She listened and told me not to worry. She told me I could just — — ” And then she pointed her finger into her mouth and motioned she was gagging.
I was confused. “Your mom told you to make yourself vomit?” Other patients have said things that have surprised or upset me, but I found Ronnie’s admission particularly disturbing. A parent intentionally encouraged their child’s self-destructive behavior.
“Yes.” Ronnie said, “She taught me how to purge.” Then Ronnie threw her hands up as if to say, “What can you do?” With a single gesture she simultaneously signaled a fait accompli, transgenerational pathology
and her mother’s denial of the disease. More importantly, her mother had passed on a mindset, one that values the opinions of others over your own. She spoke to a reality, the correlation of body image to self-worth, that women learn early in life even if it does not result in an eating disorder. Ronnie’s mother conveyed this truth to her daughter in a devastating manner. But Ronnie was not upset with her mother. She felt her mother had genuinely tried to help.
“Did your mother purge, Ronnie?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I think she probably did.” She did not elaborate, and I did not probe further.
Patients often realized they had family members with eating disorders. Their own disease made them look back at a relative’s behavior and recognize it for what it was, even when it had no name. Eating disorders are thought to have a genetic predisposition. Research from the Price Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health suggests certain genes may be linked to anorexia and bulimia, increasing a person’s vulnerability to these conditions. Yet genetic predisposition does not fully explain eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex traits thought to result from an intertwining of genetic, psychological, and sociocultural factors, which often collide during adolescence. No single factor has been shown to be necessary or sufficient for causing eating disorders.
Although no clear cause for eating disorders has been identified, the effects of decreased consumption are known. In the 1944 University of Minnesota Starvation Experiment, the caloric intake of thirty-six male participants was reduced in half (semi starvation) for twenty-four weeks. Along with multiple physical changes, prolonged semi starvation induced depression, emotional distress, poor judgment, and decreased concentration-qualities present in those with disordered eating.
Why then would anyone choose not to eat, especially with the associated morbidity and mortality? Perhaps the greatest misconception is that it is a choice. Research from Dr. Walter Kaye, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of California San Diego, indicates there is an underlying biochemical process. Neurobiology studies suggest the brain and appetite systems of patients with anorexia and bulimia function differently, so that eating is stressful, not pleasurable. It is unclear whether eating disorders reflect a primary disturbance of the brain systems that regulate appetite, or whether changes in appetite are caused first by factors such as anxiety or preoccupation with weight gain. This explains the most recent criteria change for defining anorexia. When last updated, the DSM removed the word “refusal” (as in refusal to eat or maintain weight) because it implied intention on the part of the patient. Hopefully, more accurate description of these behaviors will increase the likelihood of timely diagnosis and treatment.
Ronnie had been diagnosed later in life but always knew something was wrong. She was not alone. I thought of the young woman who worked in a fast-food restaurant. She could barely make eye contact, because her eating disorder caused her heart rate and blood pressure to be so low. It was hard to believe she could function, let alone work. There was the Ivy League educated professional who ran marathons in her spare time. Her reticence was not due to lack of energy, but rather a surplus of shame. She went in early to her office to binge and purge, away from the scrutiny of her children. Her colleagues found her unconscious on the bathroom floor. Another patient knew she had a problem as a teenager, but doctors would not formally name her condition until two decades later. She was forced to take medical leave from work after a precipitous decrease in weight. She insisted she ate in abundance, but also exercised for hours on end. Her discipline rivaled that of any professional athlete. Ronnie, like these women, did not control her eating disorder but did her best to manage it.
Despite years of shunning food, Ronnie’s eating disorder had not caused cardiac dysfunction. Others are not as fortunate. Regardless of outcome, these patients all share a certain ambivalence and work to create a world in which they coexist with their omnipresent eating disorder; a world that most, including medical professionals, do not understand. Even for those without a formal diagnosis of an eating disorder, the relationship with food can be complicated. It echoes larger issues such as the perception of beauty, self-acceptance, and control. A better understanding of disordered eating will hopefully lead to less judgement and more treatment options. Moreover, perhaps fewer will feel forced, as Ronnie and her mother had, to make peace with their eating disorder and accept it as the natural state of things.
*Names have been changed to protect patient privacy
https://www.whlreview.com/no-16.2/essay/RitiPatel.pdf
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https://medium.com/@drritipatel/reprinted-from-wilderness-house-literary-review-3f48d98b3f4f
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['Riti Patel Md']
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2021-07-06 19:50:25.157000+00:00
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['Mental Health', 'Self Esteem', 'Transgenerational Trauma', 'Eating Disorders', 'Cardiovascular Disease']
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What to Do? Do I Get the New Hip, or Not? Advice Needed…
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Where’s my cane? I am NOT old enough to need a cane!! [Photo by The Lensemen on Unsplash]
The weird pain in my hip ramped up in 2008 after I’d spent several 12-hour days crawling around under and behind some ancient cedars in front of our house. My father and I had been building a dog run and cutting through the thick tangle of prickly branches, crouching, bending and squatting for hours as we hammered and pounded stakes, wired posts to tree trunks, threaded wire mesh in and through and around awkward corners to make sure everything was secure against escaping canines.
We’d built a ramp and a closing doggie door into the front hallway, all in a rush to meet the deadline of a departing plane I needed to be on. That’s why the date stamp that marks the beginning of the end of my hip is so clear in my mind. When I settled into my seat on the plane I was in agony. My hips complained for the duration of the entire 10-day trip to Europe, where I traveled with my publisher to attend an international publishing conference. We had added a few days to the end of the business trip to visit Florence and see a bit of Tuscany, but the pain did not abate even when I was roaming around places like the ancient hill town of Siena, marveling at how it is possible that Italian pigeons mooching for crumbs in the town square seem so much exotic than those pooping on statues back at home.
My pigeon photos have gone missing… the perils of cloud storage and no filing system. [Nikki Tate]
I thought perhaps I had injured something during all the crawling around in the dirt. But, in both hips? It seemed unlikely. The pain was deep, unrelenting and ominous. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sit without pain. Couldn’t walk my usual, enthusiastic, ground-covering stride. By day 6, I had convinced myself I had bone cancer. I was 45.
It seemed a shame that I was going to die so young — I was barely getting started with my writing career. My daughter had still to be fully launched into adulthood. I had not yet lived long enough to see her future husband.
Photo by Einar Storsul on Unsplash
Weird symptoms and sleep deprivation make for a dark blend in a novelist’s mind.
As soon as I could get an appointment I went to see my doctor. That was the beginning of a series of x-rays, trips to physiotherapists, more x-rays and the bizarre and impossible (to my mind) conclusion that arthritis had come calling. There was no way I was old enough!
“Have you ever injured your left hip?” the doctor asked, noting that it was a lot worse than the right one.
“Well, there was that time I fell off a bridge… with a horse. Like, when I was 21.”
And, yes, at the time the doctor had said — well, he said various things. First, “You are lucky to be alive.” Then, “you could have broken your neck. Or your back. Or both legs. Or your skull.” And then, finally, “… chances are you will develop arthritis in that hip at some point.”
Considering the alternatives, I thought a bit of achiness ‘at some point’ wasn’t really that bad. I hobbled around on crutches for a couple of months while all the bone bruises healed up (I had no idea bones could bruise), and then put the whole incident out of my mind (it’s a good story, the bridge and the horse… I’ll tell it in another blog post).
Fast forward to 2019 — just the other day — when, after years of suffering from increasingly awful pain, I finally went in to see a surgeon. It was busy in the hip and knee clinic and sitting on hard chairs waiting my turn is the worst thing for the hip. It locks up. It whines and complains. As usual, I ignored it.
When my name was called I hobbled over to the surgeon who said, “Where’s your cane? You shouldn’t be walking without a cane.” I wanted to pop her in the nose. I am NOT of cane-bearing age.
“This is you.” She waved her hand at an x-ray. “That hip of yours is shot. No cartilage. That’s bone on bone.” She pointed to the round knob at the top of my leg bone where it sat grinding into the socket in my pelvis. “And, my — look at those bone spurs.”
Not my hip x-ray. I was too stunned to think of snapping a photo. WikiCommons to the rescue… [Hellerhoff [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Extra bits of bone stabbed into the black background of the x-ray. They looked nasty. When my hip locks and refuses to move I imagine those hooks are snagging on something inside my leg rendering me immobile until I find a curb or a step and stand on my good leg, shaking my bad one over thin air until things jiggle loose.
The surgeon shook her head. “This is bad news. Because you are too young for a hip replacement.”
What now? You’ve just said the hip is shot. I’m fit and would love to be more active except, you know, the whole moving thing…
“How bad is it? What do you do for a living?”
She asked a lot of questions, one after the other. I barely answered before she threw the next one at me.
“I’m a writer. I can’t sit for long before it locks up. Then I can’t stand up. It hurts to walk. Hurts to lie down. No — I can’t sleep- I can’t remember the last time I slept soundly through the night.”
“What do you take for pain?”
“I can’t take anything Aspirin-related. I’m allergic.” And, I won’t take opioids — that just seems like a bad idea. I don’t drink enough red wine to be helpful — either from its purported anti-inflammatory properties or its ability to render me unconscious. And, ever since that terrible Tylenol poisoning incident in Paris, I only give in and take one of those when I’m desperate.
All through my description of my ongoing on misery, she kept shaking her head. “I hear you. But if we replace the hip now —you’ll wear it out. And the second round doesn’t usually go so well.” Her eyes widened when she stated this in a look clearly meant to convey she was imparting a dire warning. What the hell did that mean? ….doesn’t usually go so well… Was she asking me to make a decision now about a surgery that I might need 15–20 years from now? When I’m actually old? Will it matter then if my second fake hip is a bit wonky?
Then she began the list of all the things that could go wrong. Infection in the bone (very bad news — hip needs to come back out and I’ve got nothing. Except, a wheelchair). It isn’t a good fit and I wind up not walking any better than I do now (ok… a limp, but would the pain stop?).
“What do you do for sport? Ski? You’d have to stop skiing — new hips don’t break nicely when you fall.”
Apparently, the new implant is too strong. If I were to fall, the new hip part wouldn’t break. Instead, the surrounding bone shatters. In my mind I heard it going, exploding into shards inside my thigh. Yeah, that would be bad. It would be like that moment when I heard both bones in my arm pop out of place when I had a fall (climbing, that time — not another riding incident) and double-dislocated my elbow. The noise was the first indication something nasty had just happened. The wave of mind-melting pain that followed three seconds later confirmed it. The only good thing about that incident was that I didn’t think about my hip for a few days.
The doctor was staring hard at me now, perhaps recognizing I was drifting away into the bleak land of memory and imagination. “I had to give up skiing when I had mine done,” she said. She gestured to one hip, then the other — her own pair of new installations.
“I don’t ski. I’m a climber.”
Climbing is my thing… that’s why I moved back to the mountains. [Photo: Fabio Lacentra]
“You’d have to stop. The risk of dislocation is too high. I know about climbers — how you contort yourselves into weird, twisty positions. And if it pops out once, chances are it will pop out again.”
“I’m not giving up climbing.”
Heading up a climb at Red Rocks in Nevada. [Photo: Fabio Lacentra]
She took a deep breath. “You climbers…”
Which is the point at which tears welled up and my throat closed and all rational thought abandoned me. Give up climbing? I had come to the office thinking I would be told the normal risks of surgery, get put on the list, and then be sent home again to wait my turn. Yes, there would be physio and it would take some time to recover and get back up to speed, but I know people who are climbers and who have new hips and who are my age-ish.
My world here in the mountains only exists because I came here to climb. I am engaged to a climber. I met him while climbing… well, trying to climb. [That’s a topic for another blog post]. The point is, climbing is not something I am going to give up.
“You’ll have to make some difficult decisions,” she said.
“What are my options here?” I asked, thinking maybe there was some angle to this conversation we had missed.
“Cannabis?”
“What?”
“No — not what you think. It’s not the young people who are telling me this stuff works. It’s my old cowboys. They swear by the stuff. You don’t smoke it. It’s an oil you put under your tongue.”
Her lips were moving and words were coming out. I had come in for a new hip and she was offering me marijuana? Wow.
The end result of all this? The surgeon is sending a letter to my family doctor saying I am a candidate for a full hip replacement. All I have to do is let my doctor know what I want to do and then I can be scheduled, knowing that the new hip might pop out, cause the rest of my leg to shatter, become infected so the new hip has to be removed and I have to move into a wheelchair, or that the new equipment will wear out and leave me with a not-great-chance of a successful repeat. I’ll have to assess just what sort of climber I’ll be with the new hip… if I’ll continue to climb at all.
So, that’s where I sit, uncomfortably at my desk, mulling over my options and typing this post (it helps, when I’m sorting options, to put it all down in black and white). I suspect if you’ve read this far you might know someone who has been in my position, wondering whether the pain is bad enough, whether the risks are worth the potential benefits. Maybe you have been there yourself. Maybe you are there now. I’m gathering information and soliciting advice. Do tell… what would you do in my situation? And, if you know someone who has gone down the cannabis road, should I be visiting one of these new shops that have opened in town since Canada legalized marijuana and related products?
I’m in research and info-gathering mode now. Check back for updates…
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https://medium.com/nexus-generation/what-to-do-do-i-get-the-new-hip-or-not-advice-needed-59f000726f14
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['Nikki Tate']
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2019-03-23 18:10:20.463000+00:00
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['Middle Age', 'Climbing', 'Surgery', 'Health', 'Arthritis']
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Something exciting ahead…
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I’m embarking on a journey to fulfil the digital nomad inside me.
I was laying low for the last year without any definitive initiative which would challenge me, excite me. But my recent collaboration with ……. has brought me to think about it seriously.
I have completed some work earlier on this, but now I’m going to do it without any safety net, which leaves space for a VERY BIG Learning Curve for me.
Not expecting PERFECTION as this will be first real effort at spreading the wings, but I will try and make it interesting.
I’ll have to start on 3 frontiers
Subject Matter Expertise (I’m a novice at this domain— Level 0) Latest Advancements in the Tech space (Feels like decades have passed) Personal Peace and Focus (Although I try to keep in touch with myself)
I’ll try to post abstract progress as a reminder of why I started in the first place
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https://medium.com/@saketnalegaonkar/something-exciting-ahead-20782911662a
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['Saket Nalegaonkar']
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2020-12-17 05:27:31.907000+00:00
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['Startup Life']
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Cross the River by Feeling the Stones
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There is a saying in China, 摸着石头过河, that translates to “cross the river by feeling the stones”. It is generally attributed to Deng Xiaoping, who used it as a metaphor to describe China’s approach towards the reform and opening (改革开放）which kicked off at the end of the 1970s. On one side of the river was China’s closed, Marxist, centrally-planned economy. On the other was an open, liberalized, market-driven one. China hadn’t crossed this river before, and so would need to do so slowly, thoughtfully and carefully, by feeling the stones.
Today, just over forty years later, it’s clear the approach has been hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that internet and software entrepreneurs across the world need to employ a similar strategy if they are to cross the river the other way, by successfully navigating the strongest cultural, linguistic, regulatory and technical rapids we’ve seen in recent years. This makes success more tenuous, but rewards perhaps more precious for those who can still find a way to incorporate the modern day Chinese behemoth into their supply chains, their user bases or their cap tables.
To that end, we were humbled to host an event at our Balderton offices recently that tried to shed light on how foreign internet entrepreneurs might best engage with China. We were joined by David Sullivan, Founder of ADG China, one of the top cross-border technology advisory firms focused on China. We were also lucky to have with us Joanna Shan, a Beijing-native and Peking University graduate who works on the Partnership team at Facebook, and Balderton’s own Jodi Yang, Head of Investor Relations, who has extensive experience both operationally on the ground and managing cross-border capital raising processes with China.
Below I’d like to share a few summary takeaways from our wide-ranging conversation.
+ Entering the Chinese market is better done wholeheartedly, with substantial resources and sufficient time allocated to the effort, or not at all. To consider China just another market on the path towards global leadership is to grossly underestimate the scale of the undertaking. Even companies with tremendous resources (see Facebook, Google, Uber) can fail in their efforts.
+ Partnering with provinces and local governments and cutting deals at the regional level can be a more sensible approach. These provinces often have the size and population of large European countries. China has more than twice the population of the 28 countries in the EU divided across 23 provinces (and 11 municipalities and special administrative regions). For example, Anhui province has roughly the same population as Italy, the Beijing and Shanghai municipalities each have more people than the Netherlands, and Guangdong, Henan and Shandong each have populations substantially larger than Germany’s.
+ Allocating 6 months to 2 years from start to finish is sensible in terms of a realistic timeline for getting a deal done with a local partner. It will also mean either regular trips or the establishment of a permanent office in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou or Hong Kong. Too often foreign companies have set up a great schedule of meetings on a first trip and not returned to follow up, and so getting boots on the ground (or hiring them via an organization like ADG) is often a prerequisite to kicking off deals in earnest.
+ In negotiations, remain transparent, firm and pragmatic. Your negotiating partner will expect you to. Also, until the final deal is signed you can expect issues you thought were previously agreed to still be in play, as they might be used to bargain or trade for the outstanding terms.
+ The playing field in China for foreign firms is not level. Foreign companies need to obtain a specific license to be able to sell and deploy cloud software for example.
+ While China has in the last five years started to leapfrog the West in the sophistication of its social media, e-commerce, telecommunications and mobile payments infrastructure, b2b and enterprise software has lagged behind on a relative basis. That is changing, and fast. Expect increased local competition and more headlines proclaiming massive new enterprise software companies born and bred in China.
+ Given the degree of competition and scale of the 800M internet users in China, startups sometimes have to prioritize strategy above product. Particularly when the companies trade in substitutable goods (like ridesharing or delivery services). Making sure you are employing appropriate go-to-market strategies is critical to success
+ Some of the high growth areas where foreign firms can still offer differentiated services in China include outbound travel and world-leading healthcare, both of which the Chinese have an insatiable demand for but have only been accessible to most relatively recently.
It is a charged time, thirty years to the week after Tiananmen Square, forty years after the launch of reform and opening. With trade tensions rising steeply and newspaper articles highlighting how Chinese and American governments are working to keep critical components away from each other’s military supply chains. This is a scary time.
It is times like these that private citizens and businesses can continue to work together to increase mutual understanding, to engage each other with openness and respect.
We hope the above has helped you a little bit with a toolkit to help you do that.
|
https://medium.com/balderton/cross-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones-%E6%91%B8%E7%9D%80%E7%9F%B3%E5%A4%B4%E8%BF%87%E6%B2%B3-73c0b55dea17
|
['Colin Daymond Hanna']
|
2019-06-06 14:08:25.656000+00:00
|
['Trade', 'Internationalization', 'Technology', 'Strategy', 'China']
|
Mackenzie Bezos and the Giving Pledge
|
After a quarter of a century of marriage, founder and CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie have divorced. Currently holding the titles of the richest man and third richest woman in the world, the two have agreed to an amicable split. They plan to continue to not only parent their 4 children together but remain business partners as well, each holding stock in Amazon. While the situation is not one to be taken lightly, Mackenzie has made it her mantra to use her 25% stake worth in Amazon to continue to give back. She has since signed the Giving Pledge — an international agreement signed by over 200 of the world’s richest who have vowed to donate over half of their wealth to philanthropic causes.
An experienced philanthropist, Mackenzie Bezos carries with her a strong resume of charitable work and attributions. In 2013, Bezos started the Bystander Revolution, an anti-bullying website aimed to educate youth on the effects of bullying as well as providing advice and an outlet to learn about ways to diminish the widespread issue. The organization accepts contributions from children all over the country to come up with different bullying scenarios and issues, and the resolutions to them. It also approaches the solutions from a parent or teachers point of view as well. Mackenzie has also devoted much of her time and funding into cancer research, Alzheimer’s Disease, marriage equality, and education for young immigrants.
The Giving Pledge, founded by Bill & Melinda Gates with longtime friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet, was coined to inspire those with the financial means to do so to contribute to making the world a better place to live. The pledge gives philanthropists the freedom to choose the charitable organizations in which they will donate to, at their own discretion. The common goal of the group is to share ideas and organizations that can benefit directly from their contributions. The organization also orchestrates annual learning events in which the signatories can all convene together to discuss their philanthropic ventures.
While the Giving Pledge’s intent is to donate half of an individual or couples wealth, Mackenzie has taken it upon herself to promise to exceed this requirement. She believes that she has come across her wealth by luck, among other reasons, and that it is her duty to share her wealth with those who have not been given such opportunities for success. However, she does intend to take careful consideration into choosing the organizations that she will bestow this wealth to. She fully plans to continue her philanthropic dedication throughout her life until “the safe is empty” as she referenced from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life in her Giving Pledge Letter.
This article was originally published on ChartWestcott.net
|
https://medium.com/@chartwestcott/mackenzie-bezos-and-the-giving-pledge-afdd2b1ac1f8
|
['Chart Westcott']
|
2019-06-11 15:51:55.967000+00:00
|
['Philanthropy', 'Charts', 'Charity', 'Business']
|
100+ Must-Read Books In 2020.
|
From What Is to What If
Rob Hopkins
There are times when the state of the future can look dire, Rob Hopkins shows that with the right application, we can create the future we truly want.
|
https://medium.com/@dolectures/100-must-read-books-of-2020-d61935703a7b
|
['Do Lectures']
|
2020-12-15 10:34:27.292000+00:00
|
['Useful', 'Books', 'Inspiration', 'Lists', 'Must Read']
|
A Practical Introduction to Keras Callbacks in TensorFlow 2
|
1. EarlyStopping
EarlyStopping is a built-in callback designed for early stopping. First, let’s import it and create an early stopping object:
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import EarlyStopping early_stopping = EarlyStopping()
EarlyStopping() has a few options and by default:
monitor='val_loss' : to use validation loss as performance measure to terminate the training.
: to use validation loss as performance measure to terminate the training. patience=0 : is the number of epochs with no improvement. The value 0 means the training is terminated as soon as the performance measure gets worse from one epoch to the next.
Next, we just need to pass the callback object to model.fit() method.
history = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=50,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[early_stopping]
)
You can see that early_stopping get passed in a list to the callbacks argument. It is a list because in practice we might be passing a number of callbacks for performing different tasks, for example, debugging and learning rate schedules.
By executing the statement, you should get an output like below:
Train on 8000 samples, validate on 2000 samples
Epoch 1/50
8000/8000 - 6s - loss: 1.5632 - accuracy: 0.5504 - val_loss: 1.1315 - val_accuracy: 0.6605
......
......
Epoch 10/50
8000/8000 - 2s - loss: 0.5283 - accuracy: 0.8213 - val_loss: 0.5539 - val_accuracy: 0.8170
Epoch 11/50
8000/8000 - 2s - loss: 0.5141 - accuracy: 0.8281 - val_loss: 0.5644 - val_accuracy: 0.7990
The training gets terminated at Epoch 11 due to the increase of val_loss value and that is exactly the conditions monitor='val_loss' and patience=0 .
It’s often more convenient to look at a plot, let’s run plot_metric(history, 'loss') to get a clear picture. In the below graph, validation loss is shown in orange and it’s clear that validation error increases at Epoch 11.
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
Arguments
Apart from the options monitor and patience we mentioned early, the other 2 options min_delta and mode are likely to be used quite often.
EarlyStopping(
monitor='val_loss',
patience=0,
min_delta=0,
mode='auto'
)
monitor='val_loss' : to use validation loss as performance measure to terminate the training.
: to use validation loss as performance measure to terminate the training. patience=0 : is the number of epochs with no improvement. The value 0 means the training is terminated as soon as the performance measure gets worse from one epoch to the next.
: is the number of epochs with no improvement. The value means the training is terminated as soon as the performance measure gets worse from one epoch to the next. min_delta : Minimum change in the monitored quantity to qualify as an improvement, i.e. an absolute change of less than min_delta , will count as no improvement.
: Minimum change in the monitored quantity to qualify as an improvement, i.e. an absolute change of less than , will count as no improvement. mode='auto' : Should be one of auto , min or max . In 'min' mode, training will stop when the quantity monitored has stopped decreasing; in 'max' mode it will stop when the quantity monitored has stopped increasing; in 'auto' mode, the direction is automatically inferred from the name of the monitored quantity.
And here is an example of a customized early stopping:
custom_early_stopping = EarlyStopping(
monitor='val_accuracy',
patience=3,
min_delta=0.001,
mode='max'
)
monitor='val_accuracy' to use validation accuracy as performance measure to terminate the training. patience=3 means the training is terminated as soon as 3 epochs with no improvement. min_delta=0.001 means the validation accuracy has to improve by at least 0.001 for it to count as an improvement. mode='max' means it will stop when the quantity monitored has stopped increasing.
Let’s go ahead, run it with the customized early stopping, and plot the accuracy.
Train on 8000 samples, validate on 2000 samples
Epoch 1/50
......
Epoch 12/50
8000/8000 - 2s - loss: 0.5043 - accuracy: 0.8290 - val_loss: 0.5311 - val_accuracy: 0.8250
Epoch 13/50
8000/8000 - 3s - loss: 0.4936 - accuracy: 0.8332 - val_loss: 0.5310 - val_accuracy: 0.8155
Epoch 14/50
8000/8000 - 2s - loss: 0.4835 - accuracy: 0.8353 - val_loss: 0.5157 - val_accuracy: 0.8245
Epoch 15/50
8000/8000 - 2s - loss: 0.4757 - accuracy: 0.8397 - val_loss: 0.5299 - val_accuracy: 0.8060
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
This time, the training gets terminated at Epoch 15 as there are 3 epochs with no improvement on validation accuracy (It has to be ≥ 0.001 to count as an improvement).
For more about early stopping, please check out this article:
2. CSVLogger
CSVLogger is a callback that streams epoch results to a CSV file. First, let’s import it and create a CSVLogger object:
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import CSVLogger csv_log = CSVLogger("results.csv")
Next, we just need to pass the csv_log object to model.fit() method.
history_csv_logger = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=10,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[csv_log]
)
Once the training is completed, we can view the information in the CSV file
import pandas as pd pd.read_csv("results.csv", index_col='epoch')
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
Arguments
Apart from the compulsory argument filename , the other 2 options separator and append are likely to be used quite often.
CSVLogger(filename, separator=',', append=False)
filename : is the filename of the CSV file.
: is the filename of the CSV file. separator : string used to separate elements in the CSV file.
: string used to separate elements in the CSV file. append : is boolean and default to False , True append if file exists (useful for continuing training). False : overwrite existing file.
3. ModelCheckpoint
ModelCheckpoint is a callback to save the Keras model or model weight during training, so the model or weights can be loaded later to continue the training from the state saved.
First, let’s import it and create a ModelCheckpoint object:
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import ModelCheckpoint checkpoint_path = 'model_checkpoints/' checkpoint = ModelCheckpoint(
filepath=checkpoint_path,
save_freq='epoch',
save_weights_only=True,
verbose=1
)
Next, let’s pass the checkpoint object to model.fit() method for training.
history_checkpoint = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=10,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[checkpoint]
)
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
We should be able to see the above printout during the training.
Once the training is completed, we can get the test accuracy by running:
>>> get_test_accuracy(model, X_test, y_test)
accuracy: 0.779
Loading weights
Let’s create a new model new_model to demonstrate how loading weights work. And by running get_test_accuracy(new_model, X_test, y_test) , we get the test accuracy 0.086 for a model without loading any trained weights.
# Create a new model
>>> new_model = create_model() # Without loading weight
>>> get_test_accuracy(new_model, X_test, y_test)
accuracy: 0.086
Next, let’s load weights with load_weights('model_checkpoints/') and get its test accuracy again. This time, we should be able to see the same accuracy as we trained the model model .
# Load weights
>>> new_model.load_weights('model_checkpoints/')
>>> get_test_accuracy(new_model, X_test, y_test)
accuracy: 0.779
Arguments
Below are the commonly used arguments you should know when using ModelCheckpoint callback
filepath : string or PathLike , the path to save the model file. filepath can contain named formatting options, for example, if filepath is weights.{epoch:02d}-{val_loss:.2f} , then the model checkpoints will be saved with the epoch number and the validation loss in the filename.
: string or , the path to save the model file. can contain named formatting options, for example, if is , then the model checkpoints will be saved with the epoch number and the validation loss in the filename. save_freq : 'epoch' or integer. When using 'epoch' , the callback saves the model after each epoch. When using integer, the callback saves the model at end of this many batches.
: or integer. When using , the callback saves the model after each epoch. When using integer, the callback saves the model at end of this many batches. save_weights_only : if True , then only the model’s weights will be saved ( model.save_weights(filepath) ), else the full model is saved ( model.save(filepath) ).
4. ReduceLROnPlateau
ReduceLROnPlateau is a callback to reduce the learning rate when a metric has stopped improving. This callback monitors a quantity and if no improvement is seen for a patience number of epochs, the learning rate is reduced by factor value ( new_lr = lr * factor ). Let’s see how this works with the help of an example.
First, let’s import it and create a ReduceLROnPlateau object:
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import ReduceLROnPlateau reduce_lr = ReduceLROnPlateau(
monitor='val_loss',
factor=0.2,
patience=2,
min_lr=0.001,
verbose=2
)
monitor='val_loss' to use validation loss as performance measure to reduce the learning rate. patience=2 means the learning rate is reduced as soon as 2 epochs with no improvement. min_delta=0.001 means the validation loss has to improve by at least 0.001 for it to count as an improvement. factor=0.2 means the new learning rate will be reduced as new_lr = lr * factor .
Let’s train the model with the reduce_lr callback
history_reduce_lr = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=50,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[reduce_lr]
)
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
You should get an output like above. In the above output, the ReduceLROnPlateau callback has been triggered at Epoch 30 and 37.
Let’s plot the learning rate and loss to get a clear picture.
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
Arguments
Below are the commonly used arguments you should know when using ReduceLROnPlateau callback
monitor='val_loss' : to use validation loss as performance measure to reduce the learning rate.
: to use validation loss as performance measure to reduce the learning rate. factor : the factor by which the learning rate will be reduced. new_lr = lr * factor .
: the factor by which the learning rate will be reduced. . patience : is the number of epochs with no improvement.
: is the number of epochs with no improvement. min_delta : Minimum change in the monitored quantity to qualify as an improvement, i.e. an absolute change of less than min_delta , will count as no improvement.
: Minimum change in the monitored quantity to qualify as an improvement, i.e. an absolute change of less than , will count as no improvement. mode='auto' : Should be one of auto , min or max . In 'min' mode, the learning rate will be reduced when the quantity monitored has stopped decreasing; in 'max' mode learning rate will be reduced when the quantity monitored has stopped increasing; in 'auto' mode, the direction is automatically inferred from the name of the monitored quantity.
: Should be one of , or . In mode, the learning rate will be reduced when the quantity monitored has stopped decreasing; in mode learning rate will be reduced when the quantity monitored has stopped increasing; in mode, the direction is automatically inferred from the name of the monitored quantity. min_lr : lower bound on the learning rate.
5. LearningRateScheduler
When training a neural network, it is often useful to reduce the learning rate as the training progresses. This can be done by using learning rate schedules or adaptive learning rate. LearningRateScheduler is a built-in callback for learning rate schedules.
For more details about learning rate schedules, please check out the following article:
Let’s see how LearningRateScheduler works with the help of an example.
First, let’s import it and create a schedule function:
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import LearningRateScheduler def lr_decay(epoch, lr):
if epoch != 0 and epoch % 5 == 0:
return lr * 0.2
return lr
lr_decay() takes 2 arguments epoch (current epoch) & lr ( current learning rate), and returns a new learning rate. Our lr_decay() function will reduce the learning rate by a factor of 0.2 in every 5 epochs.
Let’s train the model with the reduce_lr callback
history_lr_schedule = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=20,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[LearningRateScheduler(lr_decay, verbose=1)]
)
You should get an output like above. And below is the plot of the learning rate.
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
6. LambdaCallback
Another useful callback is LambdaCallback . It is similar to Callback and allows us to build custom callbacks on-the-fly.
LambdaCallback is constructed with the following anonymous functions that will be called at the appropriate time.
on_epoch_begin : called at the beginning of every epoch.
: called at the beginning of every epoch. on_epoch_end : called at the end of every epoch.
: called at the end of every epoch. on_batch_begin : called at the beginning of every batch.
: called at the beginning of every batch. on_batch_end : called at the end of every batch.
: called at the end of every batch. on_train_begin : called at the beginning of model training.
: called at the beginning of model training. on_train_end : called at the end of model training.
Note that the callbacks expect positional arguments, as:
on_epoch_begin and on_epoch_end expect two positional arguments: epoch , logs
and expect two positional arguments: , on_batch_begin and on_batch_end expect two positional arguments: batch , logs
and expect two positional arguments: , on_train_begin and on_train_end expect one positional argument: logs
Let’s see how LambdaCallback works with the help of an example.
First, let’s import it and create 3 different LambdaCallback :
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import LambdaCallback epoch_callback = LambdaCallback(
on_epoch_begin=lambda epoch,logs: print('Starting Epoch {}!'.format(epoch+1))
) batch_loss_callback = LambdaCallback(
on_batch_end=lambda batch,logs: print('
After batch {}, the loss is {:7.2f}.'.format(batch, logs['loss']))
) train_finish_callback = LambdaCallback(
on_train_end=lambda logs: print('Training finished!')
)
Let’s train the model with above callbacks
history_lambda_callback = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=2, # change epoch to 2 for demo purpose
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=2000, # change to 2000 for demo purpose
verbose=False,
callbacks=[epoch_callback, batch_loss_callback, train_finish_callback]
)
Image made by author (Please check out notebook)
You should get an output like above. This is very useful
Other callback functions
Along with the above functions, there are other callbacks that you might encounter or want to use in your Deep Learning project:
Callback : this is the base class used to build custom callback. It is similar to LambdaCallback but much powerful. We will have another discussion for it.
: this is the base class used to build custom callback. It is similar to but much powerful. We will have another discussion for it. TensorBoard : a callback writes a log for TensorBoard, which is TensorFlow’s excellent visualization tool.
: a callback writes a log for TensorBoard, which is TensorFlow’s excellent visualization tool. RemoteMonitor : a callback used to stream events to a server.
That’s it
Thanks for reading. This article has covered the most popular Keras Callbacks.
Please check out the notebook for the source code.
Stay tuned if you are interested in the practical aspect of machine learning.
You may be interested in some of my other TensorFlow articles:
More can be found from my Github
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/a-practical-introduction-to-keras-callbacks-in-tensorflow-2-705d0c584966
|
['B. Chen']
|
2020-10-09 23:33:49.391000+00:00
|
['TensorFlow', 'Keras', 'Machine Learning', 'Callback', 'Deep Learning']
|
디프만 8기 파이널 발표
|
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/depromeet/%EB%94%94%ED%94%84%EB%A7%8C-8%EA%B8%B0-%ED%8C%8C%EC%9D%B4%EB%84%90-%EB%B0%9C%ED%91%9C-cec92facf599
|
['Depromeet 디프만']
|
2020-12-17 15:05:30.924000+00:00
|
['Side Project', '디프만 8기', 'Backend', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Front End Development']
|
Unauthenticated Account Takeover Through Forget Password
|
I was hunting a full month on a federal private program and comes up with plenty of account takeovers. I am going to share one of the findings.
The Scope of the target was a wildcard and unauthenticated testing only. So the first thing I did -> Recon.
I fired up sub-finder combined with httpx (https://github.com/projectdiscovery) and I came up with a huge number of sub-domains, one of the domains caught my eyes with 403 forbidden error.
So instead of running ffuf, the first thing I run, a simple google search such as:
site:subdomainhere
It comes up with plenty of results
While this has been hosted with plenty of login pages, I decided to hunt on the very first result, it was an online invoice system. The application asks for some kinda D** Ids and Password for login.
I search about D** Ids in help articles, and I got to know, it's a 9 digit number assigned to all vendors at the time of licensing.
I did google searches but didn’t come up with this particular ID. I ended up looking at google images results in hope that licensing could have done over a paper and can have this id included.
Cool, I was correct, licensing was done over a paper and I got a couple of valid D** ID in the subject Part of letters, such as
Since I have this ID now, the first thing I did was brute-forcing for a password but ended up with nothing.
I started testing forget password flow, it asks for D** ID first for resetting the password. I found that the application is using two requests for resetting the password, one for querying the password for D** ID and another one sending a newly generated password to their email ID inside the request itself
So, this discloses not only their password but emails too. Using the newly generated password, I was able to login into their account.
stay curious.
|
https://infosecwriteups.com/unauthenticated-account-takeover-through-forget-password-c120b4c1141d
|
['Nikhil', 'Niks']
|
2021-04-12 19:07:35.145000+00:00
|
['Authentication', 'Security', 'Pentesting', 'Information Security', 'Bug Bounty']
|
Predatory Men Routinely Sidestep Sexual Consent
|
Obviously, it’s not just men who prey upon women but in terms of society’s treatment of men and women, this is a significant problem. And a man who cares about obtaining true consent can be honest when he only wants to fuck around. But a predator will reject the notion that he’s a fuckboi or just looking to get himself off. He’ll make excuses and explanations instead.
One of the reasons these dudes get away with denying their bad behavior is because our society expects so much more from women than men in terms of relationships. Think about it. When a woman of legal age is used by a predator, the typical response is that she should have known better. That she was stupid, naive, or simply fooling herself. Some folks will even call her a slut.
Maybe they think she “asked for it.”
It’s crazy how the accountability of men in such circumstances is little to none. They may have lied to get laid, or, they may have pretended to be something they are not, yet our society still puts the onus upon women to have better judgment. Folks, this is messed up.
When men choose to lie and chase woman after woman in a way that removes the ability to give informed consent, they should be called out for their bad behavior. But more often than not, what happens is that the women feel bad — they feel foolish or naive for “falling” for the man’s charms. They don’t speak up because they don’t want the ridicule (and who can blame them), or, they face the legitimate concern that they will not be believed.
I’ve seen this happen time and time again. A woman speaks up to say that Mr. Popularity got inappropriately fresh with her. Mr. Popularity’s friends include plenty of feminist women who all rush to his side and tell the accuser that she misread the situation, that is was all a misunderstanding, or that she’s sick and twisted — anything to shut her up and protect their friend.
The lopsided weight of responsibility is so heavy upon women that plenty of feminists fail to see it. If they think for a minute that a woman is trying to attack their supposedly woke man friend, often, the man won’t even need to defend himself. Misinformed feminists will take care of it for him.
Of course, what’s worse is that other women will see this strong response and think the dude must be on the up and up. Surely, if he was a predator, feminist women wouldn’t continue to support him… right?
Except that they do. Virtually any woman who has ever opened up about her sexual assault(s) knows that they do. We’ve seen this now within the #MeToo movement. It’s very easy to speak out against the bad behavior of men whom we feel are more or less morally repugnant anyway. It’s a helluva lot harder to hold our friends accountable. But frankly, it’s something we must do to combat sexism and misogyny at the source.
|
https://medium.com/honestly-yours/theres-a-difference-between-consensual-hookups-and-a-predatory-pattern-42857fac0138
|
['Shannon Ashley']
|
2020-07-18 14:17:31.983000+00:00
|
['Sex', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Dating', 'Relationships']
|
2020 Holiday Gift Guide — Direct to Consumer (DTC) Brands
|
Direct to Consumer Brands Holiday Gift Guide
Holidays can be a stressful time and I recently asked for help on Twitter to find holiday gift ideas from eCommerce and direct to consumer (DTC) brands. Hopefully, this holiday gift guide makes holiday shopping much easier and rewarding for your family and friends.
The outpouring of holiday gift ideas was so great that I decided to share all the replies featuring unique product ideas from the DTC hottest brands on the planet.
Tatcha - Give the gift of beautiful, glowing skin with curated sets and specialty beauty items
Riya Collective — Handmade and sustainable global fashion and home decor
Rumpl — Everyday blankets made with the same materials found in premium sleeping bags and puffy jackets
Shop Small 2020 — Hand curated gift guide featuring Woman Owned, Black Owned, Latina Owned, and Chicago Local. NOTE: the curator is an affiliate
Sook — Browse & buy the best apparel, grooming and home decor from small businesses in your city
HIGHR Collective — Lipstick, redone. Clean | Sustainable | Wearable
Snaxshot — Curator of the coolest CPG brands
Alecs Ice Cream — Organic super premium ice cream delivered to your door
Neve Apparel — Single layer, 4-way stretch, waterproof & windproof cold apparel for guys & girls
Packa Ponch — Graphic, waterproof ponchos and accessories that are produced responsibly from recycled materials
Freshly — Chef cooked, healthy meals delivered to you
Flytographer — Book hand-picked, local photographers in 350+ cities and get travel-inspired gifts
Mallama — Natural vegan skincare products
Favor — Everything from stocking stuffers to the perfect centerpiece
Cancelled Plans — Clean burning, coconut and apricot wax candles
Girls’ Night In — Hand-curated and giftable picks from the GNI team
Coop Collective — Gift guide curated from independent brands
Noowave — Flow State Coffee
Meraki Design House — Handmade artisan footwear for women
Consciously — curated collection of fashion goods with purpose
Thing Testing — 9 brands with products and services designed for gifting
Snux — Active-Thermal ski boot cover engineered to keep your feet warm in alpine winter conditions
Cheekies — Sustainable and 3D-knit using premium recycled fiber masks
Loverboy Spritz — Premium craft cocktail
Store Roulette — Discover random and independent online stores
Kinfield — Discover female- and BIPOC-owned brands for the holiday season
Haus — Apéritifs made with natural ingredients in flavors that will satisfy everyone on your list
Rozae — Hand embroidered pillows for warm and colorful interiors
The Quality Edit — Hand curated top 100+ gifts of 2020
Tecovas — Western goods and products like cowboy boots
Happy shopping and don’t forget to give time and resources to those in need this holiday season!
|
https://medium.com/@rajnijjer/holiday-gift-guide-direct-to-consumer-brands-e900e6a13f71
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['Raj Nijjer']
|
2020-12-07 20:37:29.888000+00:00
|
['Christmas', 'Gifts', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Holidays']
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We Must Have the Courage to Reject Confirmation Bias (Part I)
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We Must Have the Courage to Reject Confirmation Bias (Part I) APU Jan 25·3 min read
By Dr. Gary L. Deel, Ph.D., J.D.
Faculty Director, School of Business, American Public University
This article is the first part of a two-part series on confirmation bias and how it affects human reasoning.
Confirmation bias is a well-understood psychological phenomenon, and it is something to which we, as humans, are all susceptible. Essentially, confirmation bias is predicated on the reality that questioning what we think — especially in the presence of others — can be painful and embarrassing. As a result, we have a natural inclination toward seeking out information that supports our preconceived beliefs and ignoring information which conflicts with those beliefs.
What Drives Confirmation Bias?
Confirmation bias is driven by two primary motivators. One is a personal desire for a belief to be true. For example, imagine that you really like Coca-Cola and you believe that it is a healthy beverage. If Coca-Cola wasn’t healthy, it would be harder for you to drink it without a sense of guilt. So you might understandably be resistant to information or evidence that Coca-Cola is not in fact healthy, because you want it to be healthy for your own sake.
The other motivator is a desire to maintain respect from our peers when we commit to a claim or an idea. Suppose that you and a friend are arguing about how many Super Bowls quarterback Tom Brady has won. You think that the answer is seven, so you stake your claim and defend it vehemently.
Personally, you don’t really care whether the answer is seven or any other number, but you’ve now committed to your answer with your confident assertion. Here, you might resist any evidence that suggests Tom Brady has in fact only won six Super Bowls. That’s not because you want Brady to have won seven games, but because you’d rather not endure the embarrassment of having to admit to your friend that you were wrong.
Idolatry and Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias becomes particularly pronounced when you’re dealing with idolatry, especially concerning public figures. Imagine, for example, that it’s the year 2000 and you are a huge Bill Cosby fan. After all, Cosby was at that time “America’s Dad,” and he was beloved by millions of fans. So imagine you’re one of them, and you regularly talk up Cosby’s virtues with your friends and family. Everyone who knows you knows that Bill Cosby is your hero.
But then, in 2005, everything changes. Cosby is accused of sexual assault by the first of what would eventually be many women, and the house of cards that you’ve built to support your idol collapses.
You don’t want to believe that Cosby is capable of this behavior, because you’ve invested far too much emotional currency in your support for him. Also, you’ve made your support very public with friends and family, so Cosby’s scandal comes with a high cost to your own credibility in the eyes of others.
So ask yourself: Under such circumstances, do you think you’d be more inclined to embrace information which shows Cosby is guilty, at the expense of your confidence in your own judgment and the respect that you’ve earned from others up to now? Or do you think you might be eager to look for information which suggests that Cosby is innocent, which would then preserve your dignity and your reputation with everyone you know? The argument for Cosby’s innocence — no matter how far-fetched and delusional — becomes a necessity for both your mental stability and your social integrity.
In the second part of this series, we’ll turn to the 2020 election and look at how confirmation bias played out among many supporters of President Donald Trump.
About the Author
Dr. Gary Deel is a Faculty Director with the School of Business at American Public University. He holds a J.D. in Law and a Ph.D. in Hospitality/Business Management. Gary teaches human resources and employment law classes for American Public University, the University of Central Florida, Colorado State University and others.
|
https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/we-must-have-the-courage-to-reject-confirmation-bias-part-i-3fb2e8fdcb59
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[]
|
2021-01-25 15:30:41.410000+00:00
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['Confirmation Bias', 'Human Behavior', 'Donald Trump', 'Reasoning']
|
The Good Fight “2021”| Series 5 Episode 1 (Full) Episode
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⭐A Target Package is short for Target Package of Information. It is a more specialized case of Intel Package of Information or Intel Package.
✌ THE STORY ✌
Its and Jeremy Camp (K.J. Apa) is a and aspiring musician who like only to honor his God through the energy of music. Leaving his Indiana home for the warmer climate of California and a college or university education, Jeremy soon comes Bookmark this site across one Melissa Heing
(Britt Robertson), a fellow university student that he takes notices in the audience at an area concert. Bookmark this site Falling for cupid’s arrow immediately, he introduces himself to her and quickly discovers that she is drawn to him too. However, Melissa holds back from forming a budding relationship as she fears it`ll create an awkward situation between Jeremy and their mutual friend, Jean-Luc (Nathan Parson), a fellow musician and who also has feeling for Melissa. Still, Jeremy is relentless in his quest for her until they eventually end up in a loving dating relationship. However, their youthful courtship Bookmark this sitewith the other person comes to a halt when life-threating news of Melissa having cancer takes center stage. The diagnosis does nothing to deter Jeremey’s love on her behalf and the couple eventually marries shortly thereafter. Howsoever, they soon find themselves walking an excellent line between a life together and suffering by her Bookmark this siteillness; with Jeremy questioning his faith in music, himself, and with God himself.
✌ STREAMING MEDIA ✌
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the procedure of delivering or obtaining media this way.[clarification needed] Streaming identifies the delivery approach to the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies especially to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio tracks CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the web. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of this content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, an activity in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user may use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as for example live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
This brings me around to discussing us, a film release of the Christian religio us faith-based . As almost customary, Hollywood usually generates two (maybe three) films of this variety movies within their yearly theatrical release lineup, with the releases usually being around spring us and / or fall respectfully. I didn’t hear much when this movie was initially aounced (probably got buried underneath all of the popular movies news on the newsfeed). My first actual glimpse of the movie was when the film’s movie trailer premiered, which looked somewhat interesting if you ask me. Yes, it looked the movie was goa be the typical “faith-based” vibe, but it was going to be directed by the Erwin Brothers, who directed I COULD Only Imagine (a film that I did so like). Plus, the trailer for I Still Believe premiered for quite some us, so I continued seeing it most of us when I visited my local cinema. You can sort of say that it was a bit “engrained in my brain”. Thus, I was a lttle bit keen on seeing it. Fortunately, I was able to see it before the COVID-9 outbreak closed the movie theaters down (saw it during its opening night), but, because of work scheduling, I haven’t had the us to do my review for it…. as yet. And what did I think of it? Well, it was pretty “meh”. While its heart is certainly in the proper place and quite sincere, us is a little too preachy and unbalanced within its narrative execution and character developments. The religious message is plainly there, but takes way too many detours and not focusing on certain aspects that weigh the feature’s presentation.
✌ TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY ✌
A tv set show (often simply Television show) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. Tv shows are most often scheduled well ahead of The War with Grandpa and appearance on electronic guides or other TV listings.
A television show may also be called a tv set program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies is The War with Grandpaually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and so are The War with Grandpaually split into seasons (The War with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new episodes. A show with a restricted number of episodes could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The War with Grandpa show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television set rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video.
Television shows may very well be Bookmark this sitehey are broadcast in real The War with Grandpa (live), be recorded on home video or an electronic video recorder for later viewing, or be looked at on demand via a set-top box or streameBookmark this sited on the internet.
The first television set shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within an extremely short range from the broadcast tower starting in the. Televised events such as the 2020 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 2020 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famoThe War with Grandpa introduction at the 9 New York World’s Fair in the The War with Grandpa spurreBookmark this sited a rise in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 2020 World Movies inspired many Americans to buy their first tv set and in 2020, the favorite radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a well balanced, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The firsBookmBookmark this siteark this sitet national live tv broadcast in the The War with Grandpa took place on September 5, 2020 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in SAN FRAThe Good Fight CO BAY AREA was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets.
✌ FINAL THOUGHTS ✌
The power of faith, love, and affinity for take center stage in Jeremy Camp’s life story in the movie I Still Believe. Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin (the Erwin Brothers) examine the life span and The War with Grandpas of Jeremy Camp’s life story; pin-pointing his early life along with his relationship Melissa Heing because they battle hardships and their enduring love for one another through difficult. While the movie’s intent and thematic message of a person’s faith through troublen is indeed palpable plus the likeable mThe War with Grandpaical performances, the film certainly strules to look for a cinematic footing in its execution, including a sluish pace, fragmented pieces, predicable plot beats, too preachy / cheesy dialogue moments, over utilized religion overtones, and mismanagement of many of its secondary /supporting characters. If you ask me, this movie was somewhere between okay and “meh”. It had been definitely a Christian faith-based movie endeavor Bookmark this web site (from begin to finish) and definitely had its moments, nonetheless it failed to resonate with me; struling to locate a proper balance in its undertaking. Personally, regardless of the story, it could’ve been better. My recommendation for this movie is an “iffy choice” at best as some should (nothing wrong with that), while others will not and dismiss it altogether. Whatever your stance on religion faith-based flicks, stands as more of a cautionary tale of sorts; demonstrating how a poignant and heartfelt story of real-life drama could be problematic when translating it to a cinematic endeavor. For me personally, I believe in Jeremy Camp’s story / message, but not so much the feature.
FIND US:
✔️ https://cutt.ly/En7VYtV
✔️ Instagram: https://instagram.com
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|
https://medium.com/@the-good-fight-s05e01-ep-1/the-good-fight-2021-series-5-episode-1-full-episode-d4e0a90bc7c7
|
['The Good Fight', 'Previously On']
|
2021-06-24 07:31:37.877000+00:00
|
['Politics', 'Technology', 'Covid 19']
|
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