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YC Hacks Fall 2018 — Hello Silicon Valley! | Hackathons are fun. They have always been an awesome experience for me. The thrill of coming up with a problem space and a potential solution when hard pressed on time is something that has always excited me. I’ve been a part of multiple hackathons in India but this one was bound to be special since it was my first one in the Bay Area.
BACKGROUND
I’ve been a student at the UC Berkeley School of Information since August. Things have been moving at a startling pace. Faster than I could initially keep up with. I have been in multiple countries but the infectious energy in Berkeley gets to you pretty quickly. I-School graduates have been consistent performers at hackathons. I wanted to be a part of this culture for the very same reason.
To top that, I hadn’t visited the Bay Area (San Jose, Mountain View etc) because I had no time. This hackathon turned out to be the perfect excuse to get into the heart of the world’s most innovative region, Silicon Valley.
When I got to know about the upcoming hackathon, I immediately applied. A few weeks later, I received a mail confirming that I had been selected. My roommate had been accepted too.
Now, came the hard part and the fun part. Finding a team. Thinking of an idea. My roommate and I discussed plans, problem spaces and ideas were thrown back and forth until we finally got to one.
THE DAY ARRIVES
Between classes and assignments, time passed quickly and sure enough the day came. October 5th. They already had a bus prepared to take us to Mountain View from SF.
Y-Combinator. We had heard the stories, read about the startups and only imagined the culture. Today, we were going to be there. Everybody on the bus looked super excited. I just stared outside the window. I just wanted to absorb the views. I felt like a tourist, just exploring whatever is around him.
After about an hour, we reached our destination. The huge “Y” could be seen. We knew we were there. Me and my teammate both felt that this would be the start of a super exciting journey. This was the reason we had applied to grad school. This was the reason we chose to be at Berkeley. It was finally time to make the most of the location.
Y-COMBINATOR HQ
As I entered the office of the world’s most revered startup accelerator, I could feel a different surge of energy. So many people, so many teams, so many dreams. All wanting to challenge the Status Quo and build something that matters. There was a huge room prepared for the hackathon with chairs and tables. Unlimited food and drinks. YC swag. Free AWS credits. The message was clear.
“Build stuff. We’ll take care of the rest.”
After some initial formalities and meeting a few people, we finally had a team. The hackathon began at 6.30pm. Three of the four people in this team were from my school. The fourth one was a part of the Startup school at YC. We met and shared the idea with her. That is where things began to get interesting. We had a clearly identified problem space, but no clear solution.
As luck would have it, she was a developer turned product manager. Guess what we did next? Whiteboard! It was time to figure things out. We thought of the users, needs, problems and potential solutions. After much discussion, we finally figured out what we would be making for the hackathon. It was 11 p.m. by then. We were left with 18 hours.
LET THE HACKING BEGIN!
After a clearly defined problem space, and a potential solution, we began searching for the tools we would need. After much exploration, we figured the tools we would be using, and started working. Our amazing designer joined us at around 10 am the next day. While we figured out the technology stack and the backend, she worked on making the system usable, and worthy of being demoed.
We had kept a deadline to finish a couple of components around 2, and if not, then abandon them completely. We faced issues with the technology stack we used and had to move to a completely new platform in the crunch of time. Eventually, we ended up creating a scaled-down version of what we had planned to make. But we were happy with the output. It did what we needed it to, and it looked good!
Around 3.30pm, we started working on our pitch deck and were all set to present what we had come up with. All teams were winding up their projects, and we spoke to those around us to know what they had come up with. We met a lot of Cal alums from varying backgrounds.
THE PITCH
Jungo: Create meaningful connections at events
Finally, it was our turn to pitch. We walked into the room ready with our product and presentation. In front of us were the judges who listened to us patiently, and kept smiling reassuringly. We explained how the problem stemmed from our own experiences, and how it is something millions of people needed to cope up with on a daily basis. They were curious about the solution, and asked us a few questions before our time was up. It was exciting to show off something that we had come up with in the space of 24 hours.
After the pitch, we walked out and relaxed. After a sleepless night, we felt that we had earned the right to chill. The only thing left to do was to wait for the results. In the evening, the results were announced. Jungo did not make it to the finals but we spoke to the judges for feedback after the event. They said that they loved the idea, and encouraged us to pursue it further.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the YC Hacks experience was amazing. It made clear to me what silicon valley was all about. Innovation, passion and commitment. The breadth of ideas that people came up with really inspiring.
Before coming to Berkeley, one very senior mentor had told me to not limit myself to the campus, and make use of being in this area. With this hackathon, I understood what he was pointing towards, and I’ll surely be attending lots more. Awesome people, amazing culture and incomparable energy!
The Team: Yezhisai Murugesan, Yunjie Yao , Chintan Vyas, Ankit Bansal(me)
Update: Just yesterday, we got accepted to the Berkeley Lean Launchpad course with the same idea and shall be pursuing it further. Excited to see where this takes us! Maybe back to YC? ;) | https://medium.com/berkeleyischool/yc-hacks-fall-2018-hello-silicon-valley-79c378f52550 | ['Ankit Bansal'] | 2018-10-25 18:40:06.125000+00:00 | ['Hackathons', 'Silicon Valley', 'Berkeleyischool', 'Ycombinator', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
THE ULTIMATE LIFE GLOW UP TRANSFORMATION | Just a disclaimer, what i’m saying in this article is based on my own experiences, what other influencers and motivators say, I’m not a professional or a specialist so take it with a grain of salt. Now let’s begin!
HABIT #1: PODCAST BINGING *instead of Netflix or Music*
Well, who doesn’t love Netflix these days? We have the pandemic to quarantine us in our cozy home. Open our laptop, turn on the Wi-Fi, choosing what to watch on Netflix, BOOM you sit in front of your laptop binging on every Netflix movies you can think of.
There’s nothing wrong with watching movies or Netflix but when you do this too often, it may give you happiness on a short term but it affects your long run. But when you listen to podcasts, you are literally feeding your brain so much positivity, inspiration, motivation, dedication towards your goals which in the long run, it boosts your productivity strongly. I recommend listening to podcasts such as ‘The Nod’
Glowing up is also about mental and brain glow up, not just physical glow up, when you glow up mentally, congratulations! You just levelled up when most people just won’t even bother to consider about all of this.
HABIT #2: BINGE ON MOTIVATIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS *instead of following drama queens*
If you feel like life is just so filled with negativity and it just makes you feel awful, try looking at your instagram following, tiktok following, twitter following and the following of all your social medias. Slowly, you’ll notice that you followed so many useless, negative, unproductive, unmotivating, uninspiring accounts.
They give you so much drama, hate, jealousy, pain, and mental destruction. Start unfollowing these, just click on that unfollow button, it’s free, it even gives you YOUR PEACE. PLUS, when you follow accounts like https://www.instagram.com/imjennim/
https://www.instagram.com/garyvee/
https://www.instagram.com/tonyrobbins/
https://www.instagram.com/stevemaraboli/
https://www.instagram.com/thegoodquote/
then BOOM! Congratulations, you just removed the trash from your life and mind. Your life would instantly be filled with hope, love, laughter, positivity, motivation and these things can increase your happiness, which leads to health, increased productivity, longer lifespan and more
HABIT #3: VISUALIZING YOUR DREAM LIFE DAILY
When I say visualize your dream life, I mean imagine you already have your dream life, believing so strongly that it is already a reality. You might wonder “What for? It’s pointless” , “How does it affect my actual life” , etc.
Let me explain, when you visualize yourself in your dream life (for example, being crazy successful, having your luxurious house, fancy car, financially stable, healthy and fit body, healthy relationships with your family, friends, loved ones, kids, and your goals achieved), it affects how your mind works, when your mind starts believing it already happened, it affects how you work towards your goals.
You start working harder and harder, resulting in you start achieving your goals little by little, it sparks your confidence, you even believe more deeply that you are capable in achieving your goals. Then you tell yourself, WOW, the visualization actually worked so well. And the cycle repeats back again from visualization, it affects your beliefs, it affects your actions, then it affects your results and lastly it affects your beliefs “WOW this actually works”.
Wanna know if it works or not? Try it yourself. No one can do it for you, in the long process you might feel discouraged as well, but never give up. Pick yourself back up, tell yourself “I can do everything I set my mind to”.
HABIT #4: ORGANIZING YOUR THOUGHTS WITH JOURNALLING
Studies actually said that humans think more than 6000 thoughts per day. A surprising amount of thoughts right? Work, school, college, assignments, bills, debts, and something as simple as choosing the right outfit, choosing what to eat today, etc. Just like the Rihanna’s song, work work work work work right? So many new targets to achieve, things to do, errands to run.
When this happens, all you need to do is grab a piece of paper or a book and a pen, just write down all those thoughts that bothers you right now. After writing, the paper carries your burdens, not your mind, now you can plan ahead which tasks you will do first until you tackle all the assignments you have to do. You can also use the journal to write about how you feel during that day, maybe you just met your biggest crush, you had a good shower, good walk in nature and just everything you can think of.
This method does not directly affect your whole life but it affects your mind, it makes you feel more relaxed, organized and you know which things to do first, and when you feel relaxed and not too tense, you will start becoming happier, healthier, less deprived, less stressed, and lastly increase your productivity.
HABIT #5: DECLUTTERING TO CLEAR YOUR MIND
This might feel like a chore, but consider it as a mental therapy, because we work almost all the time, our space tend to get messy, our stuffs, papers, gadgets and other stuff that we use often get dirty or get scattered everywhere. The best way to handle this is to organize all of your stuff, put your stuff in their rightful places, throw the useless things away, clean the dusty stuff and if you have time, deep clean your entire room.
You might be thinking, “i don’t have the time and energy to clean my entire room, i’ve got tons of work to do”. Yes i feel your struggle but trust me, just take your phone, set a timer for 10 minutes, leave the phone and start cleaning your room. When the timer runs out, you’ll be surprised of how much clutter you can clean. It’s not much of a time, but it’s so worth it. And when your space is clean, your mind is clear. You can boost your productivity during work or study session, you feel more relaxed, you feel like you’ve just conquered a hard task which creates happy hormones, and it makes you a responsible and neat person. Another positive effect is your stuff is organized, everything is in the right place, everything is clean, neat which saves you a lot of stress in the future.
HABIT #6: GET OUT OF BED EARLIER
“NOOO I don’t want to leave my cozy and warm bed!” Yes, I feel that almost every day. But you know what? We can’t enjoy the luxury of our bed forever, every morning we have two choices, continue to sleep with our dreams or get up and chase them. The morning hours are therapeutic, you are already awake when the rest of the world is sleeping, you’ve already done your homework and tasks when everybody else is sleeping in.
A method you can use when you’re already half awake and half asleep in the morning is count in your head from 5..4..3..2..1 and get up straight away. This method will distract your brain from talking you into not getting up. This takes lots of discipline and dedication so that’s why you should do this every day, but when you feel like you deserve a break, take some days when you wake up later but not too late. For example when you usually wake up at 10 A.M and now you already have the habit of waking up at 5 A.M, don’t wake up at 10 A.M again when you take the break, wake up at 7 A.M or 6 A.M.
You might feel like you don’t have time, but realize that everyone has the same 24 hours a day, you can’t change that but you can change how you manage your time. This is a skill anyone can learn and master. There’s also a fact about this, when you wake up earlier, it acts as a keystone habit to make you want to exercise more, eat healthier, drink more water and do other good habits. It’s not that waking up early cause you to develop good habits but it affects you mentally and making you more productive, responsible, less lazy and overall just happier.
HABIT #7: SLEEP EARLIER
Waking up earlier starts from sleeping earlier, how to do this? Sleep at least one hour earlier, prepare to sleep two hours earlier. For example when you usually sleep at 12 A.M, prepare to sleep at 10 P.M (brush your teeth, prepare your bed, drink water, go to the toilet, skincare routine, put on a cozy outfit to sleep, make sure you don’t eat anything at this hour, finish all of your work and assignments at least 1 hour before bed (that is 11 P.M), and when the time hits 11 P.M, relax, do some journaling, meditation, put your phone away to avoid distractions, feel yourself getting sleepier in the bed and sleep soundly.
Repeat this process daily, and when you get used to sleep one hour earlier from your usual sleep time, sleep one hour earlier, then sleep one hour earlier until you get the habit of sleeping early. “I regret sleeping early” said no one ever. When you just don’t want to sleep, remember.. in the morning you would not want to wake up so you would want to sleep earlier.
Sometimes at night, our thoughts are running endlessly, notifications are running in our phones, more errands to run and it makes us unable to sleep early so make sure to put away your phone, journal to organize your thoughts, take care of your work. GET YOUR BEAUTY SLEEP GUYS!
HABIT #8: SKINCARE ROUTINE *plus visualization time*
Whatever your skincare routine is, just do your thing, i’m not a skincare specialist but still what i know is when you do this, visualize your skin getting healthier inside out, glowing, your acne and blackheads disappearing, your dead skin cells fading away, welcoming a new, healthy skin.
Just like the third habit, visualize your dream skin already a reality and when it becomes reality, you will tell yourself “wow my skin is rejuvenated”. And just do this daily, or as often as you need. Don’t consider this as a chore or a must but a therapy, your skin deserves love, you deserve love too, skincare is the one of the way to give love to yourself.
HABIT #9: ONLINE CLASSES *instead of Netflix*
I know what you’re thinking, another not so fun habit to do, but still this is your choice. Let’s compare the two of them below:
Netflix: wastes your time and money, gives you happiness, useless habit in the long run. On the other hand, Online classes will waste your time and money (if it’s costly), give you wisdom, knowledge, skills, and insight, it’s a useful habit in the long run
Now do you get it? This pandemic has brought us to this condition where we all have to stay at home, bored? Stressed? Stuck inside these four walls? Open skillshare/coursera/khan academy or any other educational websites to start learning, dig deeper into the things you’ve always wanted to learn or curious about, satisfy your inner child curiosity by doing this, never let the curiosity inside you die. Of course you can reward yourself with netflix for example, after 45 minutes of online class, watch 15 minutes of a movie on netflix. Still balanced, you’re improving your skills but still having fun at the same time.
HABIT #10: TAKE PICTURES *instead of posting on social media*
It’s so easy for all of us to access any information through our phones, we can even view other youtubers, our friends’ status/instastory/instagram posts/any other online post that we can see. Thus making us compare ourselves to them, whether you notice it or not, you can sometimes compare your face/body/financial security, etc. It’s so easy for us to get caught in comparison, e.g “wow it must be nice to be as pretty as her”, to be as successful as her, to be as slim and lean as her, etc.
This only increases your stress levels, wastes your time and energy uselessly, and this is an unproductive habit of course. Sometimes we post something on instagram/facebook/twitter or any other social medias but then we scroll down and see the posts of our friends going out with their date/going on a holiday or doing other fun things and it makes you compare yourself to them, of course this is a toxic habit. So replace them with just taking photos with your camera, no toxicity, no other posts in your camera, nothing else but you, just you. And this is therapeutic, you can take photos of good memories to keep forever, it’s better to not know what your friends are doing, instead of knowing and then comparing yourself to them.
HABIT #11: READ INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES
This is a simple habit, of course with your thumb’s ability to scroll for hours you can do this. You can scroll down the quotes from gymholic, bossbabe, the millionaire mentor, and other inspirational quotes you can find online. This is so empowering, it makes me feel badass, classy and powerful, so instead of scrolling endlessly and wasting time and energy uselessly, try this one. I assure you, you will feel like a newborn person after doing this.
This feeds your mind with positivity, inspiration and you won’t even find drama, negativity, and toxicity by doing this, there’s no negative impact by doing this every chance you get.
HABIT #12: TAKE PERSONALITY QUIZZES
Not only getting to know yourself more, but this is also useful for your career, friendships, relationships, family life and just other aspects of your life. You can find out more about your strengths, weaknesses, career paths and opportunities, how you handle stress, anger, sadness, pressure, what’s your unique traits, what makes you valuable, and just find out as deep as you can about yourself.
Some day you will gain the benefits of doing this habit, i can’t guarantee that you will gain the benefits in one day/one year/one month/ two weeks, etc. Once you find out your strengths and weaknesses you can work on them, and that’s what makes life meaningful, you work on your weaknesses so they become your strengths and your strengths become second nature.
HABIT #13: FLIRT WITH YOURSELF
As humans, sometimes we tend to freely give love and compliments to other people and we forget to do that to ourselves. But you know what? Giving yourself some love isn’t selfish or evil or mean. It’s an act of self love, gratitude and self respect. You also deserve the love you give freely to others, when you give love to yourself, your body and mind will love you back. But when you give love to other people, they may or may not return the same love you give them, so that’s why you need to love yourself first before loving other people.
And the way to do that is flirt with yourself, start giving sincere compliments to yourself, talk to yourself in the mirror and start saying nice things to yourself, at least ten nice compliments every day. “my skin looks glowing”, “i have a great butt”, “i have beautiful body”, “i have a loving heart to love myself and others” and just any other compliments you can think of, throw that compliment to yourself.
HABIT #14: FIND THE INSPIRATION FROM EVERYTHING
When i say everything i mean literally everything, from failure stories, success stories, and just every little thing you can see or hear. For example when you see someone smiling, find an inspiration from it, realize that wow she or he is strong, i don’t even know what they are going through and they are still smiling, or when someone is rich but they still dress as an average person, realize that they are lowkey rich, not trying to look rich.
And below is the last habit to do
HABIT #15: RELAX
Take a deep breath, literally feel the air get inside your nose and lungs, and exhale, feel the air leaving your lungs and nose, practice mindful breathing. Drink water, cuddle your pet, take a walk in nature, take a power nap, eat a small snack or do anything you want to feel relaxed, but don’t forget to do it mindfully, it’s okay to take a step back and slow down, it’s okay to make mistakes and take some rest, just don’t quit.
Overall, good luck in glowing up mentally and feel yourself slowly levelling up and upgrading like never before | https://medium.com/@2minutehustlingoddess/the-ultimate-life-glow-up-transformation-d3c9cbf7f7e0 | ["Minute Hustlin' Goddess"] | 2020-12-26 08:20:58.889000+00:00 | ['Healthy Habits', 'Useful Habits', 'Self Care', 'Glow Up Mentally', 'Mental Transformation'] |
Digital Preservation at Wellcome | Production
The production process varies at Wellcome, depending on whether we are considering digitised or born-digital files. Digitising means creating a digital representation of a physical object: for example, scanning a page or photographing a book. A born-digital file is one that started life as a digital file: maybe a Word document or a web page.
Let’s consider each in turn.
Digitisation
We have a lot of experience at Wellcome with digitisation: we’ve been digitising the collection for over a decade, and we have 40 million images.
How do we choose what to digitise? We have a long-term digitisation schedule, for parts of the collection we want to digitise — often planned years in advance. We also have capacity for ad-hoc digitisation. If a researcher in New Zealand wants to see something from our collections, they can ask for that to be digitised specially, and we can try to accommodate.
So we know what we want to digitise, and we’ve picked it off the shelf — how does the digitisation happen? There are a couple of streams:
We have a contract with the Internet Archive, who scan our bound, printed books. They have specialist book scanners that mean they can scan very quickly.
We send audiovisual material (VHS tapes, audio cassettes, etc.) to R3Store.
TownsWeb work on-site at Euston Road and help to digitise our paper archives.
We’re lucky to have a team of in-house photographers, who handle anything that needs extra care — maybe it’s fragile, bulky, or even radioactive. They work closely with the conservation team.
Now we have a pile of images, and we need to add them to the catalogue. We use a workflow manager called Goobi, made by Intranda. It collates metadata and OCR, adds checksums to the files, and spits out a bundle of images, METS (metadata) and ALTO (OCR data).
A screenshot of Goobi, from Intranda’s website.
Born-digital
Born-digital archiving is something newer for us at Wellcome: it was the new shiny a few years ago, and we brought in lots of material. Now we’re starting to think more carefully about how we want to do born-digital archiving, how we’re going to catalogue it, and so on.
Suppose somebody offers us some files — we start by assessing them. Are these files a good fit for our collection? If they are, we’ll transfer them to Wellcome, and go through them in more detail. This is a more thorough analysis, where we’re looking for files that might need extra work before we can make it available. For example, PDFs of medical research are easier to present than something that’s password-protected.
To prepare the files for ingest, we are about to start using Archivematica, an open-source digital preservation system made by Artefactual. It does a lot of automation for us: virus scanning, generating metadata and checksums, deleting .DS_Store and thumbs.db files that we don’t care about, and it spits out a bundle of files and metadata.
A screenshot of our Archivematica instance.
That gives you a brief overview of our production process, both digitised and born-digital.
At the end of this process, we have a clutch of files and metadata, but nowhere to put them. Where do keep these precious things? Let’s talk about storage. | https://stacks.wellcomecollection.org/digital-preservation-at-wellcome-3f86b423047 | ['Alex Chan'] | 2019-10-22 16:01:51.760000+00:00 | ['Archive', 'Technology', 'Digital Preservation', 'Museums', 'Digitization'] |
Find the Maximum Sum of a Contiguous Subarray | Problem
Maximum sum of a contiguous subarray: InterviewBit
Find the contiguous subarray within an array (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum. For example given the array [-2, 1,-3, 4, -1, 2, 1, -5, 4] , the contiguous subarray [4, -1, 2, 1] has the largest sum = 6. For this problem, return the maximum sum.
Solving Process
Brute Force Solution
If we don’t take enough time to think about the fundamentals of this problem, the first solution we may think of is the brute force one.
The idea would simply be to test a subarray by removing either the first or the last element.
To avoid having to compute each time the sum of a subarray, we could keep a count variable initialized from the initial array and updated throughout the algorithm.
First, we need a function to compute the sum of all elements in an array:
The core algorithm could be implemented both iteratively or recursively. For the sake of this example, let’s implement it using recursion:
At the end of the function, we return the maximum value between:
The current count
The subarray without the first element
The subarray without the last element
Let’s take a look at the time complexity. For each element, we recurse two times. This means the time complexity is O(2^n). Indeed, the time complexity of a recursive function that makes multiple calls is O(b^depth) with b the number of times each recursive call branches. Meanwhile, the space complexity is O(n) due to the recursive implementation.
This complexity may remind us of the basic Fibonacci problem which can be efficiently solved using dynamic programming. Yet, in this case, it is not necessary to implement something that complex.
Let’s take a closer look at the problem and see if we were not missing something.
Kadane’s Algorithm
Let’s take a concrete example with the following input:
4, -1, 6, -100, 5
Here, we can directly say the maximum sum is 9. But what’s the reason to keep -1 but not -100 in the maximum subarray? Obviously, because in this context, keeping -100 would just reduce the maximum possible sum.
The solution is to keep a counter and to increment it with each element. If at some point the counter is negative, there is no need to keep track of the past. We erase the counter and we just move on to the next element. This solution is known as the Kadane’s algorithm.
Let’s see a possible implementation in Java:
As we can see, the solution is very simple but simplicity comes with practice. However, it was absolutely mandatory to understand the fundamentals of the problem to solve it. | https://medium.com/solvingalgo/how-to-solve-algorithmic-problems-maximum-sum-of-a-contiguous-subarray-5568adbfc5b | ['Teiva Harsanyi'] | 2020-12-09 19:30:30.191000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Coding', 'Java', 'Arrays', 'Algorithms'] |
Why A Passive Income Business Should Always Be The Additional Income Source | Everyone seems to be looking for an additional income source these days. Online passive income opportunities are certainly the most potential ventures for someone who’s willing to add some extra cash to his account regularly. However, these passive income sources should only be taken as an additional income source, not the primary one. Here’s why you should never consider a passive income generator as your primary source of income.
Follow Same Process on How i Got $1000 Sent to my Cash App
Why you shouldn’t consider a passive income business as your primary income source?
A passive revenue business is the best way to supple your bank account without hampering your regular job or day-to-day business. However, this should never be taken the primary source or the only source. Else, you might face financial problems and instability. The reasons are explained here:
#1 No Limit (Minimum Or Maximum) Of Income
These passive income generators usually come with no guarantee or limit of income. This means, you cannot set a minimum or maximum threshold of income. So it will not be a realistic idea to use this income source as the primary financial source to manage and maintain your regular expenses. You definitely need to maintain a budget to carry out all those day to day expenses and those should be managed with a regular, definite income source.
#2 Saving Money As Your Retirement Plan
Experts always recommend saving some amount as a part of your retirement plan. The money you will be earning from a passive income generator should be saved as retirement funds. This will ensure your financial security for the future. You should save these extra cash for entertainments, retirement or even investments in future. This can only protect you money-wise and stable your personal finances.
#3 Passive Income Businesses Should Give You Extra Cash
The goal or perspective of a passive revenue opportunity is to make extra cash. This is the basic concept of making passive revenue. If you start depending on this, you might fail to pay your bills, repay your mortgage or maintain your other regular expenses. You should always avoid these situations and concentrate on a passive income generator as an additional monetary resource, nothing else!
#4 Don’t Limit The Endless Potentials
The potentials of these passive income businesses are literally endless. You can make a huge cash with an effective, proven method. But taking this as your primary income source will ruin those potentials as you will be concentrating on a definite amount each month. As you will push hard to make certain amount of cash from the business, it will never uplift the resources to another level. That’s why experts recommend these passive revenue generators to be added as a second income source so that you can make your personal finances even stronger.
There are several other reasons why you should never take a passive revenue opportunity as your bread-earner. Rather, you should move on and establish a business that makes you a definite sum to help you manage the day to day expenses.
Follow Same Process on How i Got $1000 Sent to my Cash App | https://medium.com/@shadetech/why-a-passive-income-business-should-always-be-the-additional-income-source-668eec63682 | ['Adejare Shadrach'] | 2021-12-20 01:06:14.323000+00:00 | ['Make Money From Home', 'Makeup', 'Make Money Online Fast', 'Make Money Online', 'Make Money Blogging'] |
Vibe Check | Lauren logged in to the government’s UBI site, just like she always did right before midnight on the last day of every month. Her university’s tuition increase was literally killing her, despite the trickle of income from her new consulting gig. She waited for seven minutes to log on, but this time it felt even longer than usual. Maybe it was the extra hour she just put in at the firm that made her green eyes feel (and probably look) like worn out sea glass. Maybe it was the 75 pages of reading she had to do for class the next morning that she was only halfway into. Whatever the reason for her sluggishness, she clicked on the government’s message the microsecond she heard the sharp ping of a notification.
She opened the window. Her UBI allotment had been adjusted down from $1500 to $750 for “poor behavior.” “What in the world is going on?” She thought to herself. While she had heard of past administrations using means testing to keep deadbeats and criminals from getting welfare benefits, that hadn’t been policy for a long time. And even if it was, Lauren was neither a deadbeat nor a criminal. Hell, she wasn’t even a NEET. She had the student loan debt and tax returns to prove that.
Furious, Lauren texted her friends, trying to get some semblance of an understanding about what just happened. Apparently, Lauren had been out of the loop for awhile. She was correct that traditional means testing, which involved a litany of drug tests, employment checks, etc. was a thing of the past. Unfortunately for her, there was a new government policy involving welfare payments because UBI’s initial rollout only slightly curbed the loneliness epidemic and the resulting deaths of despair. Apparently, a decent-sized check every few weeks wasn’t enough to stop people from putting guns to their heads and drinking themselves to death.
With this failure in mind, the government made a drastic change to UBI: focusing on happiness in their new initiative. Happiness, cordiality, sociality, etc. was now to be highly rewarded, with payments being raised by as much as 66% from the typical $1,500, meaning that a person could make up to $30,000 a year just for being happy and having friends, which was quite the reward indeed.
To make things even better, the program was to be revenue-neutral. Lauren’s friends assured her that this would all be paid for through additional taxes on the wealthy, but she had other ideas about how the program likely evened out its spending. Lauren was tempted to share those ideas, but then realized it would ruin her friends’ moods, which would hurt them, as well as her, next month.
“Ignorance has finally become bliss,” she thought, rolling her eyes. Instead of shattering her friends’ illusions, Lauren picked up her phone and called up the UBI office herself, hoping to get some of her money back.
The only thing more offensive than the hours-long wait time was having to listen to Katy fucking Perry for that entire period.
Finally, after at least two hours of Katy Perry songs, Lauren got a response. “Hello, my name is Stephanie; how can I help you today?” It was a sing-song voice from the other end. Lauren gripped her phone case so hard she swore she heard it crack. Taking a deep breath, she responded.
“Hello Stephanie, I’m calling about my monthly UBI check. I know the program has changed, but I’m not sure why my payment was cut in half.”
“Well Lauren, as you know, we have a long-term problem with deaths of despair in America. The federal government has tried over and over again to make people happier, but nothing has worked yet, so we decided to incentivize happiness as a way of curing sadness. And you, well, you really haven’t been happy these last few weeks. You constantly complained to your classmates, swore into your computer at work numerous times, and weren’t friendly to people on the street.”
Lauren could tell from Stephanie’s tone that she’d been dealing with these types of phone calls all night.
“I’m sorry, but how do you know these things?” Lauren asked. I thought the facial recognition software on the street cameras was only used to identify criminals, and I go to a private university.” She didn’t even bother to ask about her work computer’s webcam; government surveillance using the workplace had been the norm for decades.
“A private university that receives federal funding. As a citizen, you should know that federal funds come with strings attached and that surveillance is one of them. As for facial recognition only picking up criminals, you would be engaged in fraud if you received your full check with your attitude last month.” The contempt dripping off of Stephanie’s tongue must have formed a puddle around her feet at this point.
“What attitude?” Lauren asked, sounding as if she were from the valley for just a minute.
“That attitude. I see you’re not off to a good start this month either. You just need to chill out. I mean, the energy you’re giving off is, like, really negative. I can feel the bad vibes in my eardrums.”
“My bank account balance will also be negative if you don’t give me my full check. No amount of yoga will give me the $750 to pay off my rent increase after HUD rejected the developer’s plan to add new units!”
“Oh, but it will get you your money back; that’s the point. If you’d like, I can refer you to a government therapist to help you out; their rates are very affordable. It’s estimated that over one-third of our patients will make their money back by the end of the year.”
Lauren slammed her phone on the nightstand. “Fuck that self-righteous bitch,” she muttered to herself before turning her phone off going to bed.
When she woke up a few hours later, Lauren opened her school email, only to find a message that she had been removed from her program for “threatening a government employee.” After that, Lauren didn’t even bother logging on to the UBI site the following month; she knew her check would be for $0.
Freddie Bastiat is a law student whose real name you’ll find out once Andrew Kaczynski doxxes him. He’s a fan of Yoko Taro games, college football, and the restoration of the Byzantine and Achaemenid Empires. You can find him on Twitter @Tht_Fat_Bastiat. | https://bastiatchild.medium.com/vibe-check-6bf938cc5ac8 | ['Freddie Bastiat'] | 2020-08-28 17:03:48.414000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Futurism', 'Fiction', 'Dystopia'] |
Tribhuwan Singh – A Budding Entrepreneur and Event Organizer | Tribhuwan Singh – A Budding Entrepreneur and Event Organizer
Over the past decade, the event management sector has the oretically progressed well. We have seen a big involvement in programmes on particular subjects. People have begun to take an interest in all sorts of activities fairly and actively, whether it is a festival, meeting, business event or marathons. Event Management has certainly become a lucrative career option.
Born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Tribhuwan Singh – a 21-year-old young and inspirational boy has already started his prominent career as an entrepreneur in the field of event organization and has successfully shown his leadership skills by organizing many events. Although Tribhuwan completed his after school studies from Bharati Vidyapeeth Pune in Computer Science, he soon realized his potential as an entrepreneur and took event organizing as a. career option. Since then, there is absolutely no looking back.
His debut event was held on 2nd September 2018 at Hard Rock Cafe and he organized his second event on 16th March 2019 The Westin (The House of Medici) which was a huge success. His third event was held at Hollapalooza Coco (Sushi & Bar) on 17th August 2019.
To talk about his upcoming events, he is all set to manage and organize an event Eve at Blu on 25th December at the Radisson blu. | https://medium.com/@avpromotions/tribhuwan-singh-a-budding-entrepreneur-and-event-organizer-5338a4d00ab8 | ['Artistiv Media'] | 2020-12-22 17:00:42.935000+00:00 | ['Event', 'Tribhuwan Singh', 'Tribhuwan', 'Party', 'India'] |
Becoming…Mum | In this article, I want to express my feelings about motherhood. Perhaps it is going to be quite frankly, but on another hand truthfully. And yes, one more thing, to be more précised I am going to talk not even about motherhood as such, but to say it correctly — about becoming a mother.
Judging by the stories of most women, immediately after they have seen their newborn baby, they immediately felt an all-embracing feeling of love, overwhelming their whole being. I don’t know if this is indeed a truth or if I’m just a pitiful exception … In any case, this was not the case with me. And this is exactly what I want to talk about hereby.
When my baby was born and the nurses put him on my chest, my first thought was: damn, does he already have teeth? Perhaps now it seems ridiculous, but then he so greedily dug into my breast that I almost cried out. And then … looking at his sleepy little face, I thought only about one thing: “Phew, we have managed it. The baby is here, he is with us, and he is healthy.” That’s all that worried me at that time. I do not know whether this is good or bad, and I am not going to judge it. And, actually, what’s for? I just really want to share my discoveries that I have already made on this new path for me. Maybe there is someone for whom this unconditional-love-from-the-first-sight-click didn’t work right away, as it was with me.
Thus, the first few days I still could not believe that this small, peacefully snuffling creature, who is jerking his arms and legs in a funny way while being awake, a couple of days ago, was in my tummy … and now he is here … with me … lies quite a side by side. On these first days, you are still functioning under the action of hormones, and therefore you constantly cry while looking at your baby (how cute and wonderful he is!), but at the same time you feel this wild tiredness: the body hurts, nipples … I was horrified only at one thought of breastfeeding because at the beginning the pain was horrible, nipples were bleeding and every time when my baby wanted to eat, I was almost crying and trying not to scream while he eagerly dug into my breast. Even while standing under the shower, you try to find such position so that water trickles nowise run over your breasts. The body aches a little, it’s uncomfortable to sit, you just can’t get enough sleep, because He literally needs you every two hours. The back is already aching from turning circles around the apartment, rocking the baby and calling out to the skies so that this stupid colic would have already stopped and the baby would finally fall asleep because it is already 2 am in the morning. The idea of going to bed makes the eye twitch nervously, because you know that normal sleep will not work anyway, and how long you can sleep … only your Little one knows it … In general, this is how the first couple of weeks fly by. And you unwittingly ask yourself questions like this:
- Damn, and this is how my whole life is gonna be from now on? I’d rather shoot myself immediately.
- And there are people in the world who go to all kinds of clinics, hoping to get pregnant and voluntarily condemn themselves to such things? Such people … are they all normal?
- And mothers of large families? They are either heroines or … maybe sadomasochists? (sorry, black Russian humor) or everything together?
Then pangs of conscience or something like that begins to torment you a little … Everyone around is so delighted with your baby, and everyone admires how cool and calm he is … and you … you are just tired and dream to sleep … and the thought that this load of insomnia and constant fear for your child you have to carry for the rest of your life…it scares you incredibly and even pressing down with its weight …
But then a couple of months is passing by … The first smile (at first, it would seem, completely random and meaningless), the first independent upheaval from back to tummy, the first real laugh, the first tooth, the first spoon of vegetable puree, His first kiss … the baby himself. Now he can grab various objects with his little hands, and is amused knits the brows, trying hard to taste one. The kid is so happy just because you’re there, and this emotion is so sincerely! And now you can see dancing naughty sparkles in his eyes. From now on you don’t wake up on an alarm clock and you don’t actually need one, because your current alarm clock is a special now — sometimes he slows down the blanket from you, sometimes he starts just telling something, and sometimes he claps you on the cheek with his small palm or actively squeezes your nose, as if it were some kind of soft toy or a ball … And as soon as you open your eyes, you see how two huge blue eyes look at you, full of cheerfulness, curiosity and genuine interest in what this new day will bring.
I don’t know, maybe this is how spring and the sun behind the window act on me, or maybe just awareness and understanding of my new role in this life takes some time … And this is exactly what is happening to me now. As you know, there are two types of people: the first belief in love at first sight, and the second — that love comes gradually, and, as a rule, thanks to this unhurried pace, every day grows stronger. So now I clearly understand that I belong to the second category of people. And again … this is neither good nor bad. This is just my reality. I am extremely happy that I can observe myself and my changes from the side, that I recognize, thanks to my baby, that my heart, my being is getting filled with a tender and warm feeling, to which I don’t want to give a name. And actually, what’s for? One of my favorite writers Antoine Saint-Exupery once said, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye “. I would like to modify this expression a little bit (I hope that Mr. Saint-Exupery will understand and forgive me for that) to something like this: “It is only with the heart that one can see and feel rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye and impossible to describe with the words. “
At the moment, I just enjoy every moment spent with this little miracle and I am already looking forward to a huge amount of new and interesting discoveries that we are going to make together. So, what did I want to say with this?
Becoming a mother is not easy, and sometimes it is even more difficult to realize your new role in this life, but all these fades, when your little boy just smiles at you or trustingly buries his nose in your neck. In such moments you realize that you do not live in vain, that someone needs you and that there is someone else in this world, whom you want to believe, you can make happy. | https://medium.com/@vallettland/becoming-mum-4b20fb1b4f5 | ['Valeria Frisch'] | 2019-07-01 22:31:11.006000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Baby', 'Parenting'] |
Github Actions: Deploying Ionic Angular App to Firebase Hosting | Github Actions is Github’s way of CI/CD
GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories.
CI or Continuous Integration is a mechanism to automate the process of merging new code into an existing code base, — and to test things before doing this merge. This means as a developer you don’t have to worry about — are things still working? Use Continuous Integration to automatically build and test your code as you push it to GitHub, preventing bugs from being deployed to production. That's all about continuous integration here.
What is Continuous Deployment?
CD or Continous Deployment is the process of deploying automatically this code after CI is over — e.g. deploying a website on the server automatically after the relevant code changes are done. Explaining CI/CD or discussing Continuous integration vs. continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment is not the point of this article — so we will move forward with these basic sets of simple definitions. After discussing Github Actions, let us see How to deploy Angular App to Firebase Hosting?
Building with GitHub Actions — Automate software workflows
In this article, we will see — How to use Github Actions for automatically deploying your Angular Web app (Ionic in this case) to Firebase Hosting.
After Github Actions, let us now move on to how to deploy Angular App to Firebase Hosting.
We also assume that you are testing your application via the automated unit tests — So we have added some part related to setting up those tests in the Github environment. However you are free to skip that step — it not at all required.
Preparation 🧑🍳
So let’s start with first knowing the application which we are going to deploy. I have a simple Grocery Dashboard made in the Ionic 5 framework. This app is available on Enappd.com
Grocery Dashboard in Ionic 5(Enappd.com)
Note: We have already set up a firebase hosting environment. To get this setup done you can learn more about How to set up firebase hosting and environment to deploy
Setup Github Actions — Configuring a workflow :
The following are the steps to add a workflow file.
Step 1: Create Directory Structure
Create a directory .github in your root folder and put another directory workflows inside this. In workflows directory, we will make some YAML files. the extension to make a YAML file is .yml
Add .github/workflows directory and create a YAML file
Step 2: Write the Basic Config in Workflow file
Create a YAML file of any name — main.yml (In our case “main.yml” here). This YAML file will often be called the workflow file. As one file contains one workflow. You can create more files in this directory for more workflows.
Workflow file
Let’s understand each part one by one.
There are two main sections of a workflow file ( main.yml )
Trigger: Trigger tells about the action (git related actions — push, merge, etc.) on which GitHub automated workflow will start. For example, it is push in the above example but it can be any other git related action like merge. Also, we have mentioned that this workflow will only be triggered with a push on the branch refactor . This way you can restrict the workflows to only certain branches that are related to deployment branches and not on every push done during the development phase. Jobs: This part contains a list of jobs that will be triggered. In our case, we have given it a name Build and Deploy . name as you can notice appears everywhere in the workflow file— they will be shown while your CI system will run. Every job has some steps — which are like commands to be executed sequentially. Here in the above file, we have many steps and each step is marked with some name and some command in run . As jobs will need a working environment (Operating System) we have put a runs-on part in at the start of the job with a value for the Ubuntu environment — you can change the environment according to your requirements. For most generic requirements Ubuntu seems to be an easy pick.
Step 3: Configuring the steps
Github Marketplace for Actions
Checkout Repo — this is a step to checkout (git checkout) your latest code from the branch you mentioned in the above settings. You can see that there is a uses key which essentially means we are using pre-built GitHub Actions (Scripts). These workflow actions are written by the community and are very helpful to do complex actions. If you don’t know much about shell scripts and automation scripts — these are life saviors for you. You can check the whole list of such actions Install Dependencies — This step is quite simple — Doing an npm install, as we are using an npm based project. Build — In this step we are running npm run build which is used to create a build for our web applications. Run Tests — In this step, we are using the command to test our code. Interesting to note, it will not run tests properly as well as on our local desktop. As in this CI environment, we don’t have the Chrome browser UI to be launched — however, we will make some adjustments to run the code. We will see that part later. Deploy to Firebase — Again we use an external Github Action here named firebase actions . This action will do a lot of complex stuff to make the Firebase CLI available in our CI environment — and we don’t have to install the firebase environment manually on the CI system. If you are confused about what is @ doing after these actions — it is just the version or branch of that action. In the args we will pass the command we use for hosting i.e. firebase deploy --only hosting In this case firebase is not required to be put in this action and you can use the remaining part of the command deploy --only hosting . Finally, to connect your firebase with your account you will need to login to firebase — but you can’t log in simply as this is an automated environment. So how to authenticate?
Step 4: Get Token from Firebase 🔥
You can go to your system and type the command.
firebase login:ci
firebase login: ci command to create firebase login token
Then you can choose the google account from which you are using the firebase account to deploy. In the end, you will be presented with a long token string that you can use for the value of FIREBASE_TOKEN key in the last step. BEWARE: it is not a good practice to put a token available directly and can be a security concern. However, we will use this token right now to test. Later we can use Github Secret Store to hide this secret token from code view.
Let’s Go Live now 🤞
Now we are ready with all the script work. We can push the latest changes on the Github and it should work — at least we hope so
Github Actions Tab: Failed Build
uh oh! 😞
Let us see what might have happened if you see ❌ Build .
We have not tested our code on the localhost — so we are facing some issues here. You should run all these steps beforehand on the local system. Because there is no way CI will magically deploy the code — unless everything is working fine.
After some fixes in our code, we are ready to go again.
This time build works but our tests ( Run Tests ) are stuck for a long time.🐌 🐌
Run Tests Step is Stuck
REASON: We are not having Chrome on this CI Server and we can’t run a UI based browser here, so we need to make a small adjustment to our code
"scripts": {
"ng": "ng",
"start": "ng serve",
"build": "ng build",
"test": "ng test --watch false --browsers ChromeHeadless",
"lint": "ng lint",
"e2e": "ng e2e"
}
We have changed test script to work with ChromeHeadless which is already installed with karma launcher. Also, we made watch false — so that test end after a single run. Otherwise, your tests will be running forever — Caution: Beware of such a mistake on CI as you may lose some free hours of Github Actions.
Now finally let’s run it again by pushing these changes.
Github Action: shows all success
YES !! My code works now. 🕺 💃.
Finally, you can refresh your firebase web app and you will find the new changes.
Github Secret Store 🤫
If you have come this far you can now move your secrets to Github Secret Store, which is under the SETTINGS tab.
Now you can update your YML file and put Token as
FIREBASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.FIREBASE_TOKEN }}
And everything runs fine !! 🏃♀️
Here is the final workflow file. | https://medium.com/enappd/github-actions-deploying-ionic-angular-app-to-firebase-hosting-790df7e9f305 | ['Abhishek Rathore'] | 2020-08-10 09:30:09.532000+00:00 | ['Ionic App', 'Ionic', 'Firebase Hosting Example', 'Ionic App Development', 'Github Actions'] |
How to tell if your database is controlling your application | An ever-growing list of anti-patterns and symptoms, in no particular order.
I think about this mostly from the SELECT-side, so I’m sure there’s a fair amount missing on the INSERT/UPDATE-side, and also from the NoSQL perspective. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-tell-if-your-database-is-controlling-your-application-256d697ce0c1 | ['Jesse Paquette'] | 2020-06-24 15:16:31.218000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Software Development', 'Sql', 'Software Engineering', 'Data Science'] |
HYPE SPIN® Accelerator Taiwan Launches its 3rd Cohort | HYPE Sports Innovation launched the 3rd cycle of the HYPE SPIN® Accelerator Taiwan together with our valued partners IAPS & National Chiao Tung University.
Cheng Ho, the Founder & CEO of the Taiwanese startup, CHOXUE, kicked the day off with some inspiring words. His Startup CHOXUE is disrupting and influencing the educational system in order to encourage more young people to professionally engage in sports during their high school years.
We had the privilege of hosting phenomenal startups from around the world Russia, New Zealand, HongKong, Israel, India, and Taiwan! They all presented their startups in front of an international panel of industry leaders.
13 of them were selected to participate in the cohort.
Congratulations to our latest HYPE SPIN® Accelerator Taiwan cohort.
Fanlytiks |Red Dot Drone | STRYDE App | Komodo Monitr | Uniwill Technology | Gameconomy | Deepunch | Footbot | Freelates | DP Smart Technology |STRIKE | NICESUN Enterprise |Avountes
In addition to the fantastic HYPE SPIN® Accelerator Taiwan Bootcamp, we took part in a truly iconic conference. 2019 APEC Sports City Forum.
Today, economies around the world are using the hosting of sports events to package their cities and generate their own brand. Our CEO Ilan Hadar moderated a panel discussing “how to use technology to improve international sports event”, alongside him were Mr. Mike Yang, Mr. Sam Li, and Mr. Danny Fok.
HYPE CEO, Dr. Ilan Hadar moderating a panel discussing “How to use technology to improve the international sports events”
Later on that day, Our CEO Ilan Hadar and the Administration Director Ministry of Education Sports KAO, CHIN-HSUNG reaffirmed our commitment to each other, signing an MOU for the upcoming year. Our reinforcement of cooperation is a crucial part of advancing sports tech and innovation not only in Taiwan but as a vital step into the Asian Market.
MOU Agreement Exchange between HYPE Sports Innovation and the Administration Director Ministry of Education Sports
We would also like to thank Prof. Hank Huang for his ongoing support and contribution to furthering our partnership and more importantly, innovation in the world of sports! | https://medium.com/@HYPE_SI/hype-spin-accelerator-taiwan-launches-its-3rd-cohort-528879a4359d | ['Hype', 'Sports Innovation'] | 2019-11-14 11:30:44.800000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Startup', 'Sports Tech', 'Accelerator', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Your Kids Will Use Bitcoin Before You Do. Here’s Why. | Your Kids Will Use Bitcoin Before You Do. Here’s Why.
Global adoption will take some time. But don’t doubt it’s coming.
“Oh, it’s another Bitcoin piece. Y’know that magic internet money that’s probably a scam” you think to yourself.
Well, it’s true that Bitcoin is sometimes described as ‘Magic Internet Money,’ a phrase that was initially coined (pun intended) by Andreas Antonopoulos a few years ago in one of his famous ‘Introduction to Bitcoin’ talks. However, trying to get Bitcoin to stand up as a scam under examination is extremely difficult for the best of all reasons.
It isn’t.
However, it’s not my job to convince you on that point, there’s plenty of really good, solid information out there if you want to find it. In the end, your perception of it is not really relevant to where this technology is going and, as we’ll see in a moment, will almost certainly contribute to your kids being earlier adopters than you.
New ideas can be adopted quickly, but new concepts often take longer. Further, the bigger the concept, the more resistance there is and the longer adoption takes.
The internet is a great example of this and often quoted because it’s a revolution that occurred in living memory. We’ve now forgotten the resistance that existed at the time, the negativity, the fears, the doom mongering. Sure, some of those things were — and are — a problem, but would we really undo our dependence on the World Wide Web because of those things now? Of course not.
However, the internet is not the only example. Cars are another good one. When they were first introduced they were seen as no more than a passing fad due to their expense and unreliability and horses were considered a far superior form of transport. The resistance was high, daft laws were passed by governments to limit their use and, for a while, the negativity towards them would seem to indicate they would never see adoption.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I took a car to work this morning. And I didn’t see a single horse on the road.
And of course, there are hundreds of other examples in modern history.
Electricity, television, the telephone and even computers all had resistance to adoption for varying reasons in ways that seem ridiculous now with the benefit of hindsight. But we humans never really learn from the past, and continue to deride and mock the new concepts while they creep in and change the world anyway. It’s normal and it’s probably nothing that a few million years of evolution won’t take care of in due course.
Interesting, money itself has gone through more revolutions over human history than probably anything else. This too, is normal. From barter, to common medium of exchange to gold, to paper notes, to digital bank accounts and global banking, the changes have been enormous.
Each of those changes, however, were difficult to implement at the time and took many years to become the ‘norm’.
Imagine, for example, if you were a merchant in the ninth century and, when you arrived in dock with your ship full of spices or silks to sell to wholesalers, you were asked to accept a piece of paper instead of the usual gold pieces you were expecting.
Accepting this new ‘promissory note’ would be a significant leap of faith. You are told that you can take it to central, state owned repository and exchange it for gold when you’re ready. It saves you carrying the gold itself. However, you only know gold, your father and his father only knew gold, and the people around you are skeptical and urging you not to take it. It could be a scam. Are you really going to hand over your entire cargo for a bit of paper? The early adopters were brave indeed.
I use this example because it really demonstrates how far we’ve come in terms of financial transactions and just how ground breaking this concept was at the time. We’re almost certainly at the same point now with Bitcoin.
However, this time our horizons have broadened. There is instant, global communication and thousand of people working on new systems and solutions every day. And there is another important change — our kids already use and understand internet money better than us adults do.
This is quite the revelation. Traditionally change has been driven by a small group of people, a centralized body or even a single, highly dedicated individual who has the ability to inspire and lead. Whichever it was, they’ve pretty much always been ‘adults’. This time, although the concept was created by adults, true global adoption is more likely to come from the generation that is currently at school even while I’m typing.
There’s two main reasons for this.
First, as adults doing our day to day ‘grown up’ things, we already have bank accounts, property, bonds, savings, equities and pension funds. It’s all in dollars, pounds or whatever currency we use and we understand it.
Well, mostly anyway.
What need do we have for another currency despite the obvious advantages that Bitcoin — and some other cryptocurrencies — offer? Of course, there are many reasons in truth, but this initial obstacle and natural resistance to a new concept is the very point. Why change? Like the merchants with their cargo, why move to promissory notes when we have gold pieces? We tend to stay with what we like and feel safe with don’t we? Especially as we get older.
This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Outdated financial instruments such as cheques are still in use primarily because the oldest generation doesn’t feel confident enough to learn about online banking. Any and all attempts thus far to stop their use completely has resulted in a backlash from that community. It’s not that they are not capable — in most cases they are — they simply lack the desire.
However, the second reason is much bigger and much more powerful. Kids in the western world already use digital currency in vast numbers every single day. Not only that, they use currencies that ONLY exist in digital format and cannot be transferred into physical form.
Those currencies are in-game currencies such as V-Bucks (Fortnite), Robux (Roblox) or simply (virtual) gold in a whole host of multiplayer online games.
These currencies can earned for completing tasks and missions in games or simply purchased in exchange for ‘real world’ (i.e. fiat) dollars. They have no physical presence, but they have perceived value because the community ascribes it based on market forces. This mirrors the real world where any object can be used as money if enough people believe it has value, like cigarettes in prison, or, on a bigger scale, any fiat currency that exists today.
Yes, in case you missed the news bulletins of the last fifty years, our paper money is backed by exactly … nothing. Nothing except the perceived value ascribed to it by the masses.
The fact that these virtual currencies are only good for the worlds they were created in is entirely irrelevant to the user. After all, they have already made the decision to be part of that world, whether or not you or I necessarily understand it, and that currency cannot be drawn, transferred or turned into real world counterparts in most cases.
It can, however, be sent instantly to anyone anywhere in the world without restriction or intervention. It can be traded for virtual goods with the same freedom. The ‘on’ and ‘off’ ramps are simply the fiat-for-virtual currency exchanges that are usually built into the game.
In other words, this is ‘practice Bitcoin.’ True, it’s only being used in a virtual world in this sense, but this sets a precedent for this generation who are faced with growing up a a time when a global financial crisis is now inevitable, whether they’re aware of it or not.
And when this generation grows up and takes charge, they will already understand the concept of instant, border-less, digital money and its advantages over the ‘old’ system as they will inevitably see it. And they will undoubtedly prefer it.
And for the rest of us, we’ll eventually have to come round to their way of thinking. I have no doubt the unfolding and spreading of this new concept of purely digital maths based currencies will, like the internet, be one to tell your grand kids about, probably around the time when you put a few Satoshi aside for their birthday presents.
“I was there before Bitcoin” you’ll say.
“Yeah, yeah, granddad” they’ll reply “and I bet you’ll be telling me next you had to drive your car yourself too.”
You did, actually. And you even bought it with real, paper cash you could hold in your hand.
But on second thoughts they’d probably never believe you on THAT part. | https://medium.com/original-crypto-guy/your-kids-will-use-bitcoin-before-you-do-heres-why-37487d6d7722 | ['Jason Deane'] | 2020-06-09 12:13:13.276000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Economy', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Money', 'Bitcoin'] |
My Favourite Rita Pam Album | Personally, my favourites are Adoration (From her first album, Beautiful), Joy is like the rain is also good, it’s a cover of the original song by Medical Mission Sisters, originally released in 1966.
I also love Anna, Change the tide, In Your Presence, Fire and Away, all from Rita’s second album, Anna.
Coming to Rita’s third album, I can’t even pick a favourite song.
My honest opinion is that Journey is the best, for now. We’ve seen Rita explore different styles, especially Trance, House and Techno. Her EDM songs sound way better.
Do you have a favourite Rita Pam album? And which one is it? | https://medium.com/@ritapam/my-favourite-rita-pam-album-f6382eb149c5 | ['Rita Pam'] | 2020-12-06 20:45:26.343000+00:00 | ['Anna', 'Album', 'Journey', 'Rita Pam', 'Beautiful'] |
Starting my first Medium blog | Hey there,
I’m debating between sharing my blog on Medium or having it on my own website. It’s not my first time blogging however it will be my first time publishing on a major platform. I formerly used to write on github but I want a bigger audience so I can get constructive feedback on my progress or have a source for improving on my ideation process.
That’s all for today :-) | https://medium.com/@marygithumbi/starting-my-first-medium-blog-3a36e3eb6922 | ['Mary Githumbi'] | 2020-12-10 20:38:52.064000+00:00 | ['Beginners Guide', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Analytics'] |
Best Lawyer | It’s a very painstaking profession. You have to dot every “i” and cross every “t” and you may still not get things right.
My legal assistant, who worked for me for 20 years and was very skilled, used to say, succinctly, “Everything is hard.” You can’t cut corners.
You have to remember a lot of things: substantive law, procedural law, the rules of evidence, your ethical limitations, be appealing to your clients and prospective clients.
You have to know what papers to file, how to file them, the rules on time limitations, how Judge A runs her court versus how Judge B runs his court, how to pull a court file in an old case from the court archives, who is the best and cheapest process server, who runs the best stenographer business, what temp service provides the most qualified workers, and so on. No one teaches that stuff, you just learn from experience. It takes a long time.
For many lawyers, assistants, secretaries, and paralegals come and go, so you have to be on top of what they’re doing and be able to train new workers quickly. If you fail at that, watch out for a malpractice suit or an ethical grievance.
If you’re in private practice, you have to know how to manage your part of the business.
You have to possess a fair degree of cleverness and ability to think on your feet, to change tracks in mid-course when a new and unanticipated twist comes up.
If you’re not careful in your early years, you can easily become an insufferable person. For most people, experience distills that out of you, but it can take time and be a lonely passage.
The kind of people who are drawn to law as a profession tend to be people who like to test boundaries, are competitive, who enjoy arguing, but in a contradictory sort of way are also bookish. They like to be right, preferably more right than you. I once had a friend who said that “the kind of people who become lawyers are the people who once were 10-year-olds who had memorized all the rules of Monopoly and who made you want to strangle them every time you played the game with them.” Point taken.
Image source Google
Thanks for Reading | https://medium.com/@ravikant-negi617/best-lawyer-48f3745266c3 | ['Ravikant Negi'] | 2020-12-24 11:10:45.069000+00:00 | ['Law', 'SEO', 'Digital Marketing', 'NBA', 'Trending'] |
StakingDerivative for ETH2.0 is live on Testnet, join rETH bug bounty and win FIS reward | StakingDerivative for ETH2.0 is live on Testnet, join rETH bug bounty and win FIS reward Stafi_Protocol Follow Dec 17, 2020 · 5 min read
Overview
After pulling many all-nighters, the StaFi team has finally developed rETH, a solution to the liquidity of ETH2.0 staking, with the help of community contributors. Once accessible, Stakers will be able to Stake freely in the ETH2.0 ecosystem. More importantly, the minimum Staking amount will be lowered to 0.01 ETH instead of the 32 ETH required by ETH. The rETH a user obtains after Staking can circulate, and he or she can virtually enjoy the real decentralized Liquidity Staking.
On the other hand, any validator can deposit 8ETH in the StaFi rETH contract in order to run a node in the ETH 1.0 Deposit contract. This is because a validator’s deposit will be combined with another 24ETH from StaFi users’ funds. The above validator will virtually become an Original Validator of rETH, enjoying staking rewards that are much higher than that of self-operating nodes.
StaFi hereby announces with excitement that the rETH Open Beta is officially live to the community from today: https://test-rtoken.stafi.io. We welcome any Staker or Validator participating in the testing of the rETH product, and for that, we have prepared incentives as well as considerable bounty rewards for any Staker and Validator who finds bugs and vulnerabilities.
For a detailed introduction to the rETH solution, please check: https://medium.com/stafi/official-release-of-stafi-staking-liquidity-solution-for-ethereum-2-0-8f1557763cfd
Image: https://uploader.shimo.im/f/OZR5xMGHRhN71pkk.png
Security Audit
The contract of rETH contract will be formally submitted to a third-party auditing agency this week. At the same time, the Open Beta of Bug Bounty will be accessible by the StaFi community. Submission of any Bug you find during the experience will be eligible to win up to $25,000 as reward. When all tests and the audit phase are over, we will officially release rETH.
Function test stimulus
1. Period
Start from: December 18, 2020, 21:00 (UTC+8)
End at: January 7, 2021, 21:00 (UTC+8)
2. Related document:
https://docs.stafi.io/rproduct/reth-solution/reth-testing-guide
3. User testing task and incentives
Task: Stake 5 times, 10 ETH each time.
Incentives:The first 200 participants who complete the task will win 10 FIS (ERC20 FIS). Be sure to memorize the test address which will be used to receive the reward.
When you complete the task, please：
1）Forward the related Tweet from StaFi official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/StaFi_Protocol/status/1339561422808739840) with the screenshot of your Staking operations, Staking ETH address (the same as the address in the screenshot).
2）At the same time, please @ three of your friends in the crypto community.
4. Validator task and incentives
Task: Run the validator node through rEth and obtain more than 0.02 ETH on the Eth 2.0 testnet.
Incentives: The top 100 validators who complete the above task will win 200 FIS (ERC20 FIS). Be sure to memorize the test address which will be used to receive the reward.
Before starting the task, you need to join the StaFi validator test group: .
https://t.me/stafi_reth.
When the test is completed, Please:
1) Send the deposit ETH address, the pubkey(as shown in the figure below) in the deposit_data*.json file, and @Telegram ID@ sara8721 in the telegram group.
2) Forward the related Tweet from StaFi official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/StaFi_Protocol/status/1339561422808739840) with the screenshot of your staking dashboard, deposit ETH address, the pubkey (as shown in the figure below) in the deposit_data*.json file;
3) At the same time, please @ three of your friends in the crypto community.
For any bug, vulnerability, or details that might need optimization, you are welcome to report through the same channel as that of bug submission. (see below article).
Code vulnerability testing incentives
1. Test content
https://github.com/stafiprotocol/stafi-node
2.Criteria
Critical: Abnormal function, ineffective function, or security breach, etc.;
Moderate: Defects that do not affect the function, non-security issues, such as the room for optimization, performance improvement, etc.;
Low: Unimportant issues, some minor issues that can be modified during updates, such as modifying text or notes.
Outside the scope of the bounty program
Repeated reports on security issues, including security issues that have been confirmed by the StaFi team;
Theoretical security issues without pragmatic application scenarios, or issues that require complex user-interactions.
3.Rules
1 It must be a newly discovered bug(s) that has/have not been reported before
2 The bug(s) found must be related to security issues in StaFi GitHub page code, but not other third-party code;
3 Have not written any codes of StaFi around the bug(s), and have not participated in any process that generated the bug(s) of StaFi in other ways;
4 Public disclosure will make you lose your bounty;
5 The StaFi team reserves the right to make the final decision on eligibility for the event and all rewards.
4.Bounty rules
The bounty will be issued in the form of FIS, and the amount will depend on the severity of the bugs found.
In addition to severity, the bounty amount will be determined (but not limited to) by other factors including:
The accuracy and details of the bug description;
The quality of reproducibility, such as test code, scripts, and detailed instructions.
5.Submission Method
When you find bug(s), please send a report to: [email protected]. Please attach your name, email, company name (optional), description of the bug(s), your opinion on what is the potential impact of that bug on StaFi rBridge, and how you discovered that bug.
6. FAQ
1. What should I do if I submit a bug but do not hear a reply?
Before publicly publishing the bug(s) you found, we need some time to review and confirm them, and will reply to you as soon as possible. If you haven’t received a reply two weeks after submission, you can send an email to us at: [email protected]
2. In what form is the bounty issued?
The bounty is issued in the form of FIS.
If you have more questions, please send an email to us: [email protected].
About StaFi Protocol
StaFi is the first DeFi protocol unlocking liquidity of staked assets. Users can stake PoS tokens through StaFi and receive rTokens in return, which are available for trading, while still earning staking rewards. FIS is the native token on StaFi Chain. FIS is required to provide security to the network by staking, pay for transaction fees on the StaFi chain, and mint & redeem rTokens.
Website: www.stafi.io
Twitter:@Stafi_Protocol
Telegram Chat: https://t.me/stafi_protocol
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/stafi_ann
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/jB77etn
Forum：https://commonwealth.im/stafi | https://medium.com/stafi/stakingderivative-for-eth2-0-is-live-on-testnet-join-reth-bug-bounty-and-win-fis-reward-4bbb14500bff | [] | 2020-12-18 01:31:28.395000+00:00 | ['Airdrop', 'Stafi', 'Stakingderivative', 'Defi', 'Proof Of Stake'] |
Deploy flask app with Nginx using Gunicorn less than a minute | Deploy flask app with Nginx using Gunicorn less than a minute Behrad Kazemi ·Nov 14, 2020
Many thanks to Rahul Nayak and Tasnuva Zaman for publishing an awesome article about deploying a flask app using Nginx and Gunicorn.
But we need to do lots of works for deploying each time we commit into our git repository and our time is gold!
so we need to automate the job with bunch of scripts to do all the stuffs for us.
E asy way…
I just automated all the command into couple of bashes:
https://github.com/behrad-kzm/EasyDeployer
All you have to do is copy the Runner folder and paste it into your project directory.
Project structure:
Your project must have these files: | https://medium.com/@behradkazemi/deploy-flask-app-with-nginx-using-gunicorn-less-than-a-minute-8db6bc0dbb8b | ['Behrad Kazemi'] | 2020-11-14 13:26:47.007000+00:00 | ['Deploy', 'Bash', 'Nginx', 'Gunicorn', 'Flask'] |
The Boy From Nowhere | Theo Marchand was no ordinary boy, and Mrs. Lewis, the orphanage’s director knew it from the beginning.
In fact it was her who found the baby boy, when she was just a temporary staff at the orphanage. She found the baby, who was bundled in a thick winter blanket, placed in a box at the footstep of the orphanage’s front doors many years ago.
Coming in for her shift, she arrived at the orphanage freezing from the cold. There was a box by the front doors. Thinking that it was filled with donations, as they usually do during the winter holidays, she grabbed the box and carried it inside to the kitchens.
She opened the box and lo and behold, there was a baby boy. She was thrown aback, not expecting the incredulity of the situation, and accidentally placed her left hand by the open flames of the kitchen stove, burning her . Her right hand went to cover the screams of pain.
Kitchen staffers and even some of the grown up children flocked to her to help. They bandaged her hand after putting on burn creams on the wound. It was a messy sight. The director then, Mrs. Wallace, got the baby boy off the box. She had been there for many decades and the incredulity that Mrs. Lewis found, was for her, normal.
When staffers of the orphanage receive a baby, they tend to name it immediately, as they needed identification prior to filing the police report. After the mandatory paper pushing, tedious administrative processes and its accompanying accoutrements, the baby boy was finally named Theo Marchand.
Growing up, Theo had been a happy, normal baby. Cheeky during his toddler years, inquisitive when he was a child, and now that he is slowly developing his personality, it shows that he is going to be great. Mrs. Lewis knew this secret a long time ago.
When Theo was a baby, he placed his soft tiny hands over Mrs. Lewis’ bandaged hands. She felt warmth and heard the sound of flesh healing. She put Theo back in his crib, and removed the bandage from the burnt hand. It was good as new — no pain, no scars, no history.
Amazed by what she witnessed, she kept her mouth shut and told nobody — out of fear of being called crazy. She needed this job badly. So she learned how to shut her mouth.
When Theo was about 7 or 8 years old, the orphanage hit an almost end — the finances were low and the supplies in the kitchen were running out. With winter coming, mouths to be fed, a house to run, Mrs. Lewis was in despair. She was in her office thinking how to get support. Theo walked in and gave her a “present” so she wouldn’t have to worry. Some of her kids give her trinkets, bits and bobs they find around the house, or craft they did in the local public school. Some kids just give her incessant headaches. Theo, held her hand and placed a shiny crystal on her palm. A gift he said.
That turned out to be a diamond. A real one. She pawned it and with that gift, continued to pay for the finances of the orphanage, until donations and funding came in. She never told anyone that story.
She had many more stories about Theo — all great ones, all unexplainable ones, all that leaves her continuously in awe. In a way, she is protecting Theo from being outcasted or bullied by the other kids. But again, Theo got along really well with the kids, even with the staff.
It was a normal, ordinary day. When out of the blue, two men in suits, all impeccably polished and dressed smartly knocked on to the orphanage’s door.
They were looking for a boy named Theo Marchand.
Mrs. Lewis, who do not judge people by their appearances, let them in her office to discuss the situation over some tea. The men introduced themselves as government agents and were demanding to see Theo.
Of course, Mrs. Lewis was weary, and treated everyone who came to the orphanage as visitors with caution. She had to know why one of her kids had captured the interest of these people. After all, Theo was her favorite.
The agents looked at each other and nodded. From the breast pocket of the other man, he pulled an envelope and gave it to Mrs. Lewis.
The paper had big red CLASSIFIED in the top, with TOP SECRET stamped across the entire page, with a formal looking seal she did not recognized from where. Although the summary was long, few phrases caught her attention:
Blood test at school
Curious findings
Technician posted results online
Government took over the remaining blood samples
Subject not human
The last phrase reverberated in her brain for a long time.
“Subject not human”. | https://medium.com/@rikuadler/the-boy-from-nowhere-109d79eb9011 | ['Riku Adler'] | 2020-12-13 17:41:09.427000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Thriller', 'Writing Prompts'] |
Unsupervised approaches for NMT | Translation is one of those tasks in language where the arrival of deep learning systems, and in particular sequence-to-sequence, has been something like a boon. In less than 4 years since the first paper on Neural Machine Translation, software giants such as Google and Microsoft have already announced that their translation systems have almost completely shifted from statistical to neural. Gone are the days when researchers mulled over complex word and phrase alignment techniques, and yet fell short on several language combinations. With the latest framework, all you need are a million parallel sentences, and your system can then translate between this pair sufficiently well.
A million parallel sentences — that’s a little constraining, though! It is often difficult and sometimes even impossible to obtain a bilingual parallel corpus for many pairs of languages. In such cases, using a pivot language for triangulation has been found to be helpful. However, even in such supervised systems, the performance is still constrained by the size of the training corpus.
Monolingual data, on the other hand, is available in abundance, and a number of semi-supervised systems do use these, but mostly for the language modeling part of translation. For example, a naive system may perform word-by-word substitution and use a language model trained on the target language to obtain the most probable word order.
Recently, there have been 2 very similar papers (both currently under review at ICLR ’18) which propose to perform completely unsupervised machine translation. In this article, I will discuss both of these papers. A similar blog is available here, but I didn’t know of its existence until I was already halfway through this post. | https://medium.com/explorations-in-language-and-learning/unsupervised-approaches-for-nmt-f0b18b12d4d5 | ['Desh Raj'] | 2018-02-26 14:52:02.107000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Machine Translation', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Unsupervised Learning'] |
Make Sourdough Biscuits from Scratch | Recipe
Make Sourdough Biscuits from Scratch
You’ll love the way they taste!
My sourdough biscuits are ready to rise—photo by author.
Since the pandemic started, I have been cooking with a sourdough starter and looking for ways to use the discard that I just can’t throw away. My niece recently posted a recipe for caramel apple bombs using canned biscuit dough and store-bought apple pie filling. They looked delicious, but I thought I could add more flavor by using sourdough biscuits.
I began looking at all the biscuit recipes I could find in my cookbooks and online. They all were basically the same. I wanted to use the sourdough starter to leaven the biscuits instead of the baking powder and baking soda used in traditional recipes and even most sourdough biscuit recipes I found.
I came across one recipe that didn’t use those items and used it to guide my own version. I wanted my biscuits to be light and tangy. I wanted them to be easy to make and not require special ingredients. I came up with three versions that anyone can make easily.
Ingredients — My Favorite Version
2 Cups (284 grams) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon (24 grams) granulated sugar
¾ teaspoon (4 grams) Kosher salt
8 (170 grams) tablespoons very cold unsalted butter
¼ cup (60 grams) very cold milk
¼ cup (60 grams) sour cream
1 cup (227 grams) sourdough starter, recently fed
Mix the dry ingredients together
First, in a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt. Using a fork, cut in the cold unsalted butter. I usually use the fork to mash the butter into small pieces and then use my hand to gently mix it into the dry ingredients, breaking up large chunks with my fingers.
You want the butter to be cold so that it will take some elbow grease. You want to have small pea-sized pieces of butter in the mixture when you are finished. It should not be smooth but somewhat chunky. I like to put the bowl in the refrigerator while I mix together the wet ingredients, just to keep it chilled.
Mix the liquid ingredients together
In a separate, smaller bowl, mix your recently fed starter, sour cream, and milk. Stir together until the mixture is smooth. I usually mix this up several hours before making the biscuits and putting it into the refrigerator to get it as cold as possible.
Your starter should be cold before combining these ingredients. I will take my starter out of the refrigerator, feed it, and let it rest on the counter for an hour. Then, I will put it in the refrigerator to get it very cold before mixing it into my recipe.
Combine the wet and dry mixtures
Once you have let your mixtures chill for a few minutes, pour the wet mixture into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Gently fold the dry ingredients over the wet until it is just combined. The dough will be a little shaggy and slightly sticky.
Dust your counter with 1–2 tablespoons of flour and dump the dough out onto it. Gently fold the dough over and mash it flat 3–4 times. If the dough becomes too sticky, sprinkle a little more flour on the counter.
Let the dough rest in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes if it has become too loose and hard to handle. Once it has firmed up, roll the dough into a single layer that is ¾" thick. Using a 2 ½" cutter, cut out 6 biscuits. Place them into a greased 9" round pie dish or cake pan. You can also use a cast-iron skillet.
Reroll the scraps and cut more biscuits. You will get between 8–10 biscuits cut. Melt a tablespoon of butter and brush the tops of each biscuit.
Proof your biscuits
Unlike traditional biscuits, you need to give the sourdough time to leaven these. It will take between 3 and 4 hours to complete the rise. This is called proofing.
I have a proofing drawer in my oven, but I usually opt for a simpler way to proof bread. I put a pan of boiling water in the bottom of my regular oven and turn on the oven light. This raises the temperature in the oven to the perfect level for helping bread to rise. The hot water prevents the bread from drying out before it can rise.
Bake your biscuits
After your biscuits have risen, remove them from your oven. Also, remove the pan of water from the bottom. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. After it is preheated, brush melted butter on the top of each biscuit, if you wish, and bake them for 20–25 minutes.
Test for doneness by sticking a toothpick into one of the biscuits. If it comes out clean, they are done. If you have a kitchen thermometer, the biscuits will be done when they reach 200 degrees.
Several variations you can try
There are several variations that I experimented with that are almost as good as this recipe. The first variation simply uses ½ cup of milk instead of ¼ cup of milk and ¼ cup of sour cream. If you don’t like the tanginess of sourdough, this would be a good option for you.
The second variation substitutes ½ cup of buttermilk for the ¼ cup of milk and ¼ cup of sour cream. I think this version is slightly tangier than my favorite version. If you love that tangy sourdough taste, this version may be for you.
Finally, if you just don’t have that sourdough made or don’t have time for all that waiting, you can simply use a non-sourdough version. Instead of the sourdough starter, milk and sour cream used in the original recipe, use 1 cup of buttermilk, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, and ¾ teaspoon of baking soda. In this version, you will bake them immediately, without needing to proof them.
Yummy, good
These biscuits do take some time to make, mostly waiting time, but they are so worth it. They make delicious Apple Bombs, which I make using my own apple pie filling recipe. The original recipe includes using a square of caramel, but since we have diabetics in our family, I leave out the extra sugar.
You could drizzle them with a combination of caramel sauce and sugar icing, if you liked, or just leave them plain and add a scoop of ice cream.
I am planning to try using this recipe to make cinnamon rolls. Instead of cutting out biscuits, I will roll the dough out, spread melted butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon over the surface and roll it into a log. Then I will cut 1" slices and place them in my pie plate and let them rise before baking them.
However you make these, they will be a hit!
Bon Appetit! | https://medium.com/the-cookbook-for-all/make-sourdough-biscuits-from-scratch-d0b7be327f1d | ['Patricia Davis'] | 2020-11-07 11:49:53.805000+00:00 | ['Recipe', 'Cooking', 'Lifestyle', 'Food', 'Baking'] |
Thanks for the article —for years I was in a similar state with multiple remotes and byzantine… | Thanks for the article —for years I was in a similar state with multiple remotes and byzantine operational modes.
The latest generation of the Apple TV (streaming box) comes close so solving all this. Using the remote, one click turns on the device, the TV and and the home theater system (via the HTMI 1.4 connection) and then all the streaming services are available from a straight forward interface, including purchased movies from iTunes and Amazon Prime. The different streaming apps all have their own user interfaces though, so pause and fast-forward is a little different on each. Navigating YouTube is tricky, especially when you want to “like” or subscribe a particular video.
Of course when I want to play a Blu-ray disc I have to use the player’s remote, which has it’s own navigation menu and player controls. But I’m purchasing more movies on iTunes these days, so eventually disc playing will go away.
The tiny Apple remote could be a lot better, although the audio search works surprisingly well. And every once in a while the connected TV and home theater device don’t turn on and I have to dig for the remotes. | https://medium.com/@designgauge/thanks-for-the-article-for-years-i-was-in-a-similar-state-with-multiple-remotes-and-byzantine-53f0cf1c529f | ['Kevin Perera'] | 2020-01-15 19:09:01.853000+00:00 | ['Home Theater', 'Apple TV'] |
Burny Finance WhitePaper | Introduction
As the crypto market has been on a massive bull run since the beginning of the year, so has there been a rise in new DEFI projects. Blockchain is taking over the world rampantly as we are in an evolutionary phase — the new internet is here, and it’s here to stay.
Source: Payments Journal
With an influx of coins and tokens hitting various blockchains, there have been a diverse amount of projects that are positively impacting the space. There are also other projects that have been developed that delegitimize the progress of cryptocurrencies, limiting potential for mass adoption.
Getting in on the ground floor of any project is difficult and it’s much more difficult to prevent these early adopters from dumping early investments, which often yield a solid ROI in the beginning. With these thoughts in mind, we developed a cryptocurrency that aims to discourage dumping and encourage hodling for the long-term.
Burny Finance is a philanthropic, deflationary token for the people. As a long-time U.S. Politician, Senator Sanders has often been criticized for his progressive ideals. We decided to incorporate some in our smart contract.The contract includes taxes contributing to transactional burns and a re-distribution to a charity wallet, solely used for philanthropic endeavors. So while you are purchasing a deflationary token, you’re also contributing to a charitable cause.
We launched on the Ethereum Network, with Uniswap as our DEX of choice. While gas fees can be troublesome, there has been an increased fear of rug pulls on the Binance Smart Chain network, thus why we elected to launch on Ethereum.
Source: Wikipedia
Tokenomics
Burny Finance launched on April 7, 2021 with 1 trillion BURNY tokens minted at genesis.
5% of supply was issued to support marketing endeavors
of supply was issued to support marketing endeavors 32% to initial Liquidity Providers, the rest was added to a liquidity pool on Uniswap, locked on Unicrypt.
to initial Liquidity Providers, the rest was added to a liquidity pool on Uniswap, locked on Unicrypt. 5% of each transaction is redirected to the charity wallet, and 15% of each transaction is burned.
of each transaction is redirected to the charity wallet, and 15% of each transaction is burned. Burns will occur until 80% of the initial supply is burned (200 Billion Tokens remaining).
Note: Due to the burn that occur on your transaction, this offsets the charitable distribution with a rise in price floor. As supply decreases, price increases.
Example of a 1,000,000 buy OR sell (you should HODL though….)
Transaction Amount: 1,000,000
Burned Tokens: Transaction Amount * 0.15 = 150,000
Charity Donation: Transaction Amount * 0.05 = 50,000
Tokens Received or Returned to Supply: 800,000
Roadmap — Going Forward (As of 4/10/2021)
As of April 10th, 2021, we conducted our first charity event. We will post those details soon. In the future we will announce more details on future endeavors.
Redesign Website and grow Social Media platforms
Community Growth/Marketing/Contests
Planning Future Charity Events
NFTs
Launch Reddit Board
Launch Youtube Channel (Completed)
Launch Twitter (Completed)
Launch Instagram (Completed)
CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, and CoinPaprika listing applications (Completed)
Concluding Statements
Thank you for taking the time to read this whitepaper. We welcome you to our wonderful community. If you’d like to contribute to our mission, join us on telegram and contact an admin.
Talk soon!
Burny Finance
Join our Telegram for Discussion — https://t.me/burnyfinancetoken
Follow us:
Twitter — BurnyFinance
Instagram — BurnyFinance
Subscribe to our YouTube Page
Audit — https://solidity.finance/audits/Burny/
Swap Link — app.uniswap.org/#/swap?outputCurrency=0xFEF62A8586480f794b7E6a869a9937F97f88205A | https://medium.com/@burnyfinanceofficial/burny-finance-whitepaper-c660c770ce5e | ['Burny Finance'] | 2021-04-10 18:28:06.597000+00:00 | ['Bernie Sanders', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Art', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Philanthropy'] |
Understanding Cryptocurrency Mining Through Byzantine Fault Tolerance Algorithm | Image by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay
What’s the Byzantine Generals problem?
The Byzantine Generals problem was first introduced in a computer science paper published in 1982. The problem discussed in the paper is that reliable computer systems must be able to function effectively in the presence of faulty components that may send conflicting information to different parts of the system. This issue is even more acute when we talk about decentralized computer networks.
Imagine the following thought experiment: The Byzantine army has surrounded an enemy city. The army is organized into several units. Each unit is commanded by a general and they all need to come up with a coordinated plan of action. However, they are located away from each other and the only means to communicate among themselves is via messages. To make things more complicated, one or more of the generals are possibly traitors. The presence of disloyal generals means that misleading messages could be sent aiming to disrupt any coordinated plan of action, be it attack or retreat. To find a successful solution to this conundrum, the Byzantine army needs to find its path to coordinated action, one way or another. To achieve this, the Byzantine army needs an algorithm that works effectively towards a coordinated outcome where the loyal generals follow it and the traitors don’t.
What’s the Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm?
Now that you are familiar with the problem, let’s see its solution. It is called the Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm. Over the years, there have been several proposed theoretical solutions involving game theory and math.
The first practical implementation of Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm came with the Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. In this case the “generals” are nodes on the Bitcoin network, also known as “miners”. A network node is a connection point that can receive, create, store and send data across a network. In other words, nodes are the connected dots that make up a network. To simplify, think of it in the following way. In the image we traditionally use to depict a blockchain, every single computer is a separate node. They are all connected and can receive, create, store, and send data to each other.
In the context of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm, the important concept to grasp is that these mining nodes start from the assumption that nobody else on the network can be trusted. Proof-of-work secures network consensus even in the presence of non-compliant nodes. That is, even if there are some Byzantine generals who are not acting in the army’s best interest, coordinated action can still be achieved.
How does the mechanism work in cryptocurrency?
Let’s see how this mechanism works in Bitcoin. As we all know by now, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network where all activities are done by its users through appropriate software and hardware. These activities include making transactions, receiving transactions, and verifying and transmitting transactions.
Now, this is where we need to introduce the concept of “mining”, which many of you have probably heard. Mining is an activity, carried out by network participants, which involves proof-of-work and results in generating new coins as a reward for the miner who successfully did this proof-of-work first for each new block. Proof-of-work requires a hefty number of calculations done by a computer aimed at solving cryptographic hash puzzles. These are the same puzzles described earlier, enabling the network to function and to continue exchanging transaction messages with other network participants.
Let’s dig into the nuts and bolts of this mechanism to figure out how it works. First, let’s see how miners create new blocks. Mining nodes collect and aggregate new transaction data. Upon receiving such data, each node independently verifies each and every transaction against a long list of criteria including: tracking the source of the digital money being spent; checking for double spending of the same money; checking if the total transaction volume is within the allowed range of 0 to 21 million bitcoins (as 21 million is the maximum total supply of bitcoin allowed by the system); and the list goes on.
The Bitcoin software installed on the node performs a number of other checks and balances. Verified transactions are aggregated into transaction pools, also called memory pools or mempools where they wait until they are included into a block. As miners compete with each other to be the first to come up with a new valid block, they need to make sure the transactions in their mempools have not already been included in previous blocks. After collecting and arranging verified transactions in a candidate block, the miner needs to construct the block header, which includes a few important components: a summary of all the transaction data in the candidate block; a link to the previous block in the chain also known as a parent block; a timestamp showing the time of creation of the block; and a valid proof-of-work.
The summaries of what’s included in a given block are done through hash functions, which process data in a way that results in a standardized unique identification code. This identification code is also referred to as digital fingerprint. In this way the system has a unique identifier for each block of transactions. | https://medium.com/what-is-bitcoin/understanding-cryptocurrency-mining-through-byzantine-fault-tolerance-algorithm-64b815865030 | ['Sana Uqaili'] | 2020-05-19 21:17:29.651000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency Mining', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin Mining'] |
Career Changes: Holiday Distractions | Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash
As 2020 winds down, I fluctuate between feeling relief that the year is coming to an end and being afraid of what 2021 holds. It kinda feels like the end of a horror movie when the hero finally kills the monster but doesn’t believe it’s truly dead and has to shoot a few extra times just to make sure.
Especially with the vaccine being still so far off from reaching the masses, I’m worried about a second outbreak. I’m concerned about the economic fallout of being shut down for the better part of the year. I’m worried about my elderly relatives who are vulnerable to being infected.
The pandemic is like nothing I, or anyone, has ever seen before. So I’m having trouble being optimistic about 2021.
However, I’m oddly confident that things couldn’t possibly get any worse than this. Like what could happen that’s worse than what we’ve already been through? A zombie apocalypse? I don’t believe in Zombies. Aliens invade the earth? The nearest planet is millions of miles away. We’d see them coming (I think).
Famine and pestilence? If there was going to be a food shortage, I think we’d already see the signs. Also, what are the chances of a second outbreak of disease in my lifetime? Pretty low, judging from history.
While I’m worried about the future, I’m cautiously hopeful about the future.
The Saga Continues: Holiday Studying
Trying to study during the holidays is becoming more and more difficult as the year advances.
It’s not like I’m bouncing from party to party. I’m not (social distancing and all). This week my distractions came in the form of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
I knew companies were going to be having unbelievable sales. Boy, was I not disappointed. CXL offered an additional 30% off of their training programs on Cyber Monday. I squeezed out the funds for an annual subscription. Yay!
Their prices were already low, so I was surprised that they were offering further discounts. But I moved to quickly snatch it up. Now I have access to all their mini degrees. I can’t wait to finish up the Conversion Optimization mini degree and move on to the next one on my list, Technical Content Marketing.
One thing that I’ve learned in 2020 is the importance of having skills that you can use to make money, with or without a job. For me, being dependent on a single job is a recipe for disaster. So I continue in my quest to be the best Conversion Copywriter that I can be.
User Research
Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash
This week I started the User Research course. User Research focuses on understanding people’s goals, needs, and wants.
The goal of User Research is to understand who your users are, what they do, what they believe, and how you can use that understanding to create better experiences and deliver greater business value.
While I 100% percent agree that User Research must be done in order to deliver better value to customers, I do wonder if the course delves too much into the product development side of things. I was left wondering where I’m supposed to draw the line between research for a landing page, for example, and research for improving the user experience for product usage. As a conversion copywriter am I supposed to even be involved in that?
Why Everyone Should Be Doing More User Research
This module started off by explaining what User Research is (understanding our users so we can build better experiences for them) and what it is not (Market research).
It highlighted the benefits of User Research, which has shown to help:
increase user productivity
increase user satisfaction
increase retention
improve the quantity and quality of customer referrals
increase sales
decrease development costs
reduce user errors
lower training and support costs
lower the amount of time to meaningful user activation
I learned that User Research allows you to uncover insights and behaviors about your users that you wouldn’t have understood or gotten from any other method.
How Different Research Techniques will Help You Answer Different Questions
In this module, I learned that research is not valuable unless it helps your organization achieve its goals. You may find out a piece of information that is interesting, but if it doesn’t lead your company closer to achieving its goals. Therefore, it’s useless.
I like how everything in research ties back to meeting organizational goals. So when developing research questions you must start with goals, as they help define the questions.
After that, we moved on to the different types of questions to ask. Different questions require different tools to gain insight, such as:
Behavioral Research Methods
Attitudinal Research Methods
Finally, we looked at different methods and the different times to apply them. Essentially, you do research at whatever stage you are at and the earlier you research, the better.
Listening to What People Say
We looked at how and when to use interviews and surveys as research methods. Interviews are really good at helping you uncover things you didn’t know before. While surveys take existing insights or beliefs about people’s demographics or attitudes and try to generalize them across a population.
We looked at the 3 step plan for conducting a useful interview, which are:
Define your goals for your interview Create a data collection template based on these goals Conduct the interview. Let the conversation flow. Ask “why” a lot.
We also looked at sources of errors in surveys, such as:
Coverage error — occurs when you are not able to survey a representative sample of the population you are studying. Sampling error — Arise from the fact that you are not measuring everyone in the target population; you are only surveying a portion of them. Measurement error — occurs when the way you choose to measure something leads to inaccurate data Non-response error — occurs when some groups within your survey complete the survey less than other groups.
Watching What People Do
This is where I feel the course delves a bit into the product development side. Here we’re looking at building useful, actionable tests to make sure we’re building a product that delivers a great experience.
In conversion copywriting I’m used to hearing about understanding customers’ pain points, wants, and desires in a bid to refect it on a landing page, for example. But this course is looking at user research with the goal of improving the product. I feel this will take me off course and increase the scope of a project exponentially.
With that being said, I find this aspect of product development very intriguing. Researching your users before product development, during product development, and after product development would probably reduce the amount of time and money, a company stands to lose in the long run. | https://medium.com/@mckaylawrites/career-changes-holiday-distractions-6dc145dd16a8 | ['Mckayla Afolayan'] | 2020-12-06 22:27:36.863000+00:00 | ['Career Change', 'Cxl Minidegree', 'Conversion Optimization', 'Career Development', 'Career Paths'] |
A Theory of Social Groups: Evolutionary Social Exchange Theory | Hadzabe Bushmen near Lake Eyasi (Richard Mortel); Chelyabinsk Bus-people [?] in southern Russia (Source)
(This article presents personal research, a review of relevant literature, and my own hypotheses. It includes links to all sources used, but it has not been “peer-reviewed” itself. I am posting it to provoke thought and further research.)
Back in July 2012, I posted elsewhere an essay titled “Evolution, Pragmatism and Progressivism” [copy here]. In it I offered what I saw as a political philosophy for Progressivism. It was based on ideas which had been steeping in my mind for decades, after I received my M.A. in Sociology and left academia. In today’s essay I’ll present what I see as the social science behind that diary.
As I indicated at the outset of “Evolution, Pragmatism and Progressivism,” this theory is grounded in Evolutionary Psychology and Social Exchange Theory. The fundamental assumption is that the human brain is an organ which has evolved over millennia to calculate, on both conscious and older sub-conscious levels, the potential risks, costs and rewards of various behaviors. Association with other people has been a successful survival adaptation, but nature and social life continue to present problems, so we continue to calculate, consciously and subconsciously, the potential risks, costs and rewards of various social behaviors.
I would summarize the major premises of Social Exchange Theory as follows:
1. Social interaction of any kind involves a conscious or unconscious calculation of benefits and costs, or expected benefits and costs;
2. The benefits and costs being calculated include the material, such as money and imprisonment, and the non-material, such as honor and dishonor; and
3. The objective of this conscious or unconscious calculation is to manage benefits and costs so that benefits outweigh costs to the greatest extent possible.
I believe these principles apply all the way from the smallest social groups, such as families, to the largest, such as nation-states and multi-national organizations. I’m not saying that everyone behaves rationally, nor that every behavior is purely rational. There are crazy people out there, and sometimes our emotions overpower our reasoning. But it’s my observation that most people, most of the time, behave in ways which reflect such calculations. Differences in calculations can be due to differences in what we find rewarding or costly, or differences in how much weight we give to potential rewards and costs — our “value priorities.”
So the major premise is that people act in groups on the basis of benefit/cost calculations. But what factors determine the complexity, evolution and duration of social groups? All kinds of answers have been proposed. Here are the factors which appear to me to be best-supported, along with the authors who proposed them.
FACTOR #1: USABLE RESOURCES
This is the factor most emphasized by Jared Diamond, in both Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. It’s also a factor identified by Gerhard Lenski in his book, Ecological-Evolutionary Theory. Both Diamond and Lenski were considering fairly large social groups, so their attention was drawn to resources such as drinkable water, arable soil, climate, and available food sources. Diamond, in particular, demonstrates how a difference in the availability of such resources allowed Polynesians on one island to continue an agrarian lifestyle, while their former relatives on another island, with fewer resources, were compelled to resume hunting and gathering.
But I believe this factor can and should be generalized to include other resources potentially available to social groups, such as capital. There are many social groups, especially modern social groups, which do not directly engage in food production. But they still need resources — such as capital — in order to survive as a group.
The bottom line is this: if more usable resources are available to the social group, then more benefits can be available to the social group. In historical terms, a social group which lived in an area with drinkable water, good soil, a temperate climate, and edible grains and animals was able to obtain more food than a social group which did not. In modern terms, a social group which has more capital can support itself better than a social group which has less. With more resources at hand, the group can grow larger, and eventually develop more complexity.
But the amount of usable resources — natural or capital — can change over time. The climate can change drastically. Or you might use up a resource until you have no more. So, it is a factor which is both critical and variable. It bears watching. Perhaps a measure of “Gross Domestic Resources” is worth creating.
FACTOR #2: KNOWLEDGE
This is a factor upon which Lenski places particular emphasis. Well, he refers to it as “technology,” and then defines “technology” as “information about the ways in which the resources of the environment may be used to satisfy human needs and desires.” It’s a critical factor, because the more practical information a social group acquires, the more benefits that social group can generate, economic and/or social. The group might learn how to grow more food, how to defend itself better, how to heal its sick, or how to create various arts. This is true whether we’re talking about families or empires. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz reports that he has found “consistently positive and significant effects of educational attainment on economic growth” (p.294).
But the amount of knowledge acquired can differ from group to group, and it can also decline, as it did in Europe during its “Dark Ages.”
What’s the appropriate measure for this? My suggestion would be aggregate measures of educational attainment by group members.
FACTOR #3: POPULATION
Another critical factor identified by Lenski and Diamond is the number of people in the social group — its population. With more members, the social group can increase its ability to acquire the resources and knowledge necessary to increase economic and social benefits for its members, which in turn permits the group to evolve more complex and specialized social exchanges. Exchanges between members of a small group are wholly personal; exchanges between members of a large group become less personal and more a function of position, class or caste. Of course, the size of a social group can also decline, due to things like disease, war, famine, or emigration — or separation and divorce, in the case of families. In any case, a decline in the population will decrease the amount of social and/or economic benefits the group can generate.
Appropriate data is already collected by most countries in the form of a periodic census.
FACTOR #4: BENEFIT EXPECTATIONS
Lenski identifies “ideology,” or belief system, as critical to a social group’s development, because he associates the social group’s “ideology” with how its members will calculate costs and benefits. Since these calculations involve uncertainties, I think it would be more accurate to say that a social group’s “ideology,” or belief system, is a factor which determines the cost and benefit expectations of its members.
The Amish give us a perfect example of this: based on their religious beliefs, members of this social group are expected to lead simple, humble lives, so they vastly restrict their purchase and use of modern amenities, such as cars, TVs and telephones. As a group, they don’t have high benefit expectations. They are satisfied with the amount of benefits they can obtain by their traditional means. Their non-Amish neighbors, however, have higher benefit expectations. The non-Amish do expect to be able to enjoy the benefits of such amenities, even if they could technically survive without them. So, I would predict that the non-Amish would be likelier to increase their amount of practical knowledge, increase their usable resources, and increase their population. It’s not because the Amish are less intelligent; it’s because the Amish are satisfied with less.
Nevertheless, I prefer not to tie benefit expectations exclusively to a social group’s ideology. First, some of the expected benefits of human association are universal. Everyone, regardless of ideology, needs food, drinkable water, and some form of shelter. These are basic “economic” needs. Furthermore, the vast majority of us find it necessary, for psychological and emotional reasons, to be around other people. We are generally social animals with certain basic social needs. Some social groups are based exclusively on such exchanges. Consequently, people who participate in groups will have certain basic benefit expectations in common, whether social or economic (or both), regardless of the group’s ideology.
Additionally, it can be the case that people who share the same social group — even the same family — don’t share the same ideology, possibly due to having different political orientations. The existence of different ideologies [and different political orientations!]can result in some different benefit expectations among its members. That can be a source of friction within the group, which forces the group eventually either to evolve or to rupture.
My first hypothesis regarding this factor is that the more benefits the members of a social group expect, the more benefits they will try to obtain. Sociologist Peter M. Blau adds that the amount of benefits which group members are able to obtain then becomes the standard for the amount of benefits which they expect to obtain (p.143–4). When members don’t get the kind or quantity of benefits they expect, they will definitely make their disappointment known! Frustration of expectations leads to aggression. I’ve written more about that in “Origins of Political Conflict: an Evo-Exchange View” and “Political Movements: the Role of Political Orientations.”
I’m guessing that data on benefit expectations will have to be gathered from periodic surveys of group members.
FACTOR #5: AVAILABLE BENEFITS, SOCIAL AND/OR ECONOMIC
The four previous factors enable a social group and its members to secure a quantity of economic and/or social benefits. The group’s survival depends, first, on whether the quantity of economic and/or social benefits is enough to meet the basic expectations of its members. If it isn’t, the group will collapse, partially or wholly.
But the group may be in a situation where its usable resources, knowledge, population and benefit expectations combine to yield more than enough to meet its members’ basic needs. If that is the case, the group will be able to grow in population, acquire more knowledge, and develop more usable resources. Benefit expectations will likely increase, as well, creating a “feedback loop.”
Of course, a group which has enjoyed a surplus can later experience an event which causes the group to lose resources, population and benefits. Wars, epidemics and droughts can have that effect. In this case, if member benefit expectations are not met, the group will collapse, partially or wholly.
Measures of a group’s pool of economic benefits might include data concerning total assets held, or GDPs for nation-states.
Measures of a group’s pool of social benefits might include rates of member interaction and voluntary participation in group activities.
FACTOR #6: EFFECTIVENESS OF THE POLITICAL ARRANGEMENT AT SECURING SOCIAL AND/OR ECONOMIC BENEFITS FOR GROUP MEMBERS
In small groups, political roles are informal. There is no need for formal administration, since everyone has a personal relationship with everyone else, and there may not be enough of an economic surplus to permit any members to assume formal, full-time administrative roles.
However, as groups increase in size, and in their capacity to exceed basic expectations, they do become able to support formal, full-time administrative roles. At that point, formal political arrangements — governments — arise and assume responsibility for effectively ensuring that the expected economic and/or social benefits are secured for group members. The size and complexity of the political arrangement increases and evolves along with the group.
Of course, a group may grow in population, have specialized roles, develop a political arrangement, and then experience an event which causes the group to lose resources, population and benefits.
My contention is that, to be effective, the leaders in the political arrangement need to:
(1) pay attention to increases and decreases of the four primary factors, as well as increases and decreases in the benefits being received by members of the group; and
(2) undertake pragmatic actions calculated to ensure that group members receive the benefits they currently expect.
As I see it, the fate of the political arrangement, and possibly the group’s survival, depends on the degree to which the group meets the benefit expectations of its members. If member expectations are NOT met, then members will be frustrated and either fight the political arrangement or flee. The degree to which they fight or flee will depend in part on the degree to which their benefit expectations are not met, and in part on their numbers within the population. I’m sure there are other variables, as well, and I hope to address some of them in a future diary.
Typical measures of the political arrangement’s effectiveness have included things like wealth surpluses, credit ratings and membership figures. I think measures of ineffectiveness would include the quantity, size and forcefulness of member protests directed against the political arrangement, as well as emigration.
THE TEMPLE OF ESET
As I developed a mental picture of the interaction of these factors, the facade of a greco-roman temple came to mind. It’s a temple with four pillars: “Usable Resources;” “Knowledge;” “Population,” and “Benefit Expectations.” The four pillars work in combination to support the lintel, i.e., “Benefits, Social and/or Economic .” And resting upon the lintel is the crown, i.e., the “Political Arrangement for Securing Expected Benefits.”
If the pillars of resources, knowledge, or population increase, then the lintel of benefits also increases, and so does the crown, the political arrangement. If the pillars of resources, knowledge, or population weaken, the lintel of benefits also weakens, and so does the political arrangement.
Here’s another way to picture the factors and their interactions:
But social groups are also affected by beneficial or detrimental changes in their natural and social environments. Taking that into account, a more complete interaction diagram would look like this:
Perhaps some day an algorithm can be designed to help with predicting social change and reaction. Something like meteorology does today with weather events. | https://medium.com/@rosayted/a-theory-of-social-groups-evolutionary-social-exchange-theory-3412a9155f85 | ['Alex Budarin'] | 2019-11-10 17:18:47.739000+00:00 | ['Gerhard Lenski', 'Exchange Theory', 'Psychology', 'Jared Diamond', 'Sociology'] |
We’re Thankful for YOU | While on our public lands, you stayed safe. You followed guidelines, kept your distance, and looked out for the wildlife around you. When we couldn’t connect with you through events and demonstrations, you made connections with one another. Take North Attleboro National Fish Hatchery, for example, where an open gate and a stocked pond attracted the local fly fishing club. The members met many visitors and offered their expertise on fly-fishing techniques, all while maintaining a safe distance.
Wildlife Biologist Kris Vagos releases a monarch during the virtual Mingle with Monarchs event at Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge in Connecticut. USFWS
When you couldn’t make it physically, you tuned in virtually. Many of our refuges and hatcheries hosted online events to inspire and educate:
Mingle with Monarchs virtual walk at Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge
Ask a Biologist and Nature Tots video series with John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum
Wildlife Trivia with Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge
Art contests and Behind the Scenes tours with Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge
You continued to learn all you could about our natural resources from the safety of your homes. You actively engaged with our staff members and reminded us that, though we may not be with you all outdoors, we can still educate from afar.
Staff and volunteers sell Federal Duck Stamps and entrance passes at Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. USFWS
You helped raise funds by purchasing Federal Duck Stamps and hunting licenses. With 98 percent of Duck Stamp proceeds going directly to the purchase of millions of acres of refuge lands, you made your money count. Because of programs like this, we are able to protect many of our nation’s natural spaces.
Smith College engineering students working with Kevin Mulligan (U.S. Geological Survey) and Julianne Rosset (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) at Silvio. O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Laboratory in Massachusetts. Brett Towler/USFWS
You volunteered your knowledge and your time. Early this year, a team of Smith College students worked countless hours alongside staff from the Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to develop a model for a vertical-slot fish passage design. This project will help fish migrate past dams and improve aquatic connectivity in years to come. | https://medium.com/usfishandwildlifeservicenortheast/were-thankful-for-you-5ff573aaa915 | ['Sydney Giuliano'] | 2020-12-03 15:51:04.272000+00:00 | ['Wildlife', 'Virtual', 'Thank You', 'Usfws', 'Volunteer'] |
I’m sorry you lost your friends. | I’m sorry you lost your friends.
Years ago I decided that I would not lend anything I was not willing to say goodbye to. Books, money, clothing, whatever; in my mind it is theirs as soon as it leaves my hands. This way there are no hard feelings.
There are exceptions: if I let you look after my house or I lend you my car, I’ll fight to get them back. And if I trust you enough to let you look after my children, please remember that your life is on the line. | https://medium.com/@miscellaneplans/im-sorry-you-lost-your-friends-922574b98b57 | ['Ellane W'] | 2020-12-11 19:09:44.781000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Parenting', 'Relationships', 'Family', 'Trust'] |
Orange High School Student Equity Team | #EQUITYWARRIORS
According to Student Equity Team facilitator Kelly Arnold at Orange High School, “The students have the ideas, and they are the ones doing the work… They put the heart into it, and we (the adults) serve them.”
Orange High School Student Equity Team — PLEASE NOTE this photo was taken pre-COVID.
Equity and access are collectively one of the most important issues in public education right now and the members of the Orange High School Student Equity Team agree. With about 50 students on the mailing list, and 10–15 highly active members, this student-led organization has made it possible for the first ever African American Studies course to be taught at OHS beginning second semester!
In addition, they are working with school leaders to implement a Latinx Studies Course (plans are in progress), and one day, an Indigenous Studies Course.
“The kids know better than the adults what the needs are in their school,” said Arnold.
The students have also spearheaded the creation of a common language of equity among students and staff committed to equity in OHS. That way, everyone can be on the same page, using the same terminology if an issue or concern must be addressed. The students are training the faculty on this language, which also keeps an open dialogue.
The students on the team also know that access to AP and Honors courses can be the ticket to college for students, so they work to recruit talented students of color to take a chance on the higher-level courses. At the same time, they emphasize to staff the importance of making students of color feel capable and welcome in both these courses and the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program, which targets first generation college kids.
Students also lead virtual roundtable discussions, periodically, to have courageous conversations and identify areas how staff can better create a safe, inclusive, and welcoming school culture. Topics include why staff should SPEAK UP to address microaggressions, even though it may FEEL uncomfortable. Other conversations have tackled issues such as the achievement gap, the challenges English Language Learner (ELL) students and parents/guardians face, and the lack of representation of teachers and staff of color.
One student member, Sofia (Sally) Salamanca, said that “Most times when students go through unfair situations, they don’t speak up because they don’t feel like teachers are going to listen, or they don’t feel motivated to say something about what makes them uncomfortable because they think no one is going to listen.
“I think is important to have a Student Equity Team so that we can provide that safe space for kids to open up about what bothers them and to help teachers create a safer environment for future students.”
Salamanca was one of the OHS Student Equity Team members who spoke to the Board of Education, most recently back in October along with Estrella Rocha De La Cruz, about the need to do more to promote Hispanic Heritage Month.
Estrella said, “It is essential to have a Student Equity Team at OHS so that the voices of minority students are heard. Yes, there are some teachers at our school trying to help minority students, but if the students don’t speak out, the teachers will not know what needs to be done,” and she emphasized that the Student Equity Team at OHS wants to have the Latinx course available by the next school year.
“I want the world to know that we, the Equity Team at OHS, are very passionate and committed to addressing the racial issues in our community,” she added.
Another Team member, Samantha George, helped to organize an event back in October where people could gather (within COVID-19 safety guidelines) and talk about various social injustices against African American people.
Additional key members of the OHS Student Equity Team, identified by Arnold, are Savannah Clay and Lydia Runyambo.
Savannah had this to say, “The Student Equity Team at OHS is persistent!”
“It may take weeks, months, or years before we can see changes or classes we are fighting for, but we never give up or lose sight of the end goal…
“In unity, our team provides a platform and safe space for students of color and students from other marginalized groups to voice their concerns. We listen, collaborate, and uplift one another, before addressing the changes we desire to see head on.”
Lydia Runyambo had this to say about the Student Equity Team: “Most institutions claim that they strive to build a just and inclusive community, one that is tolerant of all cultures, and different identities. They make mission statements, yet put little to no effort in upholding these principles.
“Having a Student Equity Team at Orange High challenges and addresses the ignorance that takes place at our school and curriculum. It has students, of all backgrounds, fighting for equality by representing those that might not have the courage to do it themselves.
The Equity Team overall gives students the opportunity to create safe spaces for every affinity group. My peers and I recognized that the lack of diversity in our curriculum and staff has manifested a deep-rooted lack of self-worth in students of color at our school.
Having that class (African American Studies), I believe, is the catalyst for change in OHS’s curriculum and its overall atmosphere.
We want to continue giving the Orange County School Board feedback. For our staff, we are still advocating for them to take part in mandatory equity training. The OHS Equity Team is open to new ideas, and we hope to get more people involved.
Hope is never dead, and change has the power to enhance any situation. Every student deserves the chance to feel comfortable, safe, and motivated despite their differences.” Lydia Runyambo
#EquityWarrior
Do you know a staff member, student, community member, school, etc. that is working to advance equity in the district? If so, we want to hear from you! Please email Dr. Dena Keeling, Chief Equity Officer with the subject line: EQUITY WARRIOR! Equity Warriors will be featured each month by the OCS Equity and Communications Departments. | https://medium.com/@orangecountyschools/orange-high-school-student-equity-team-4f3970197a2b | ['Orange County Schools'] | 2020-12-15 01:31:12.356000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'K12'] |
訂飲料2.0版 - 簡述使用SheetDB來讀取/上傳資料. 使用SheetDB做Read功能 | 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/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%E6%BD%98%E7%9A%84-swift-ios-app-%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BC%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4/%E8%A8%82%E9%A3%B2%E6%96%992-0-%E4%BD%BF%E7%94%A8sheetdb-97b9dd84f17e | ['Andy Lin'] | 2020-12-25 09:11:00.321000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Swift', 'Xcode'] |
A deep dive into Linear Regression | Actions have consequences!!!
Linear Regression is the most popular regression algorithm
Regression analysis is a statistical technique which studies the cause effect relationship between the independent variable (explanatory/predictors) and the dependent (outcome/response) variables.
Cause Effect → An event (cause) that leads to happening of other event(effect).
The underlying objective of regression is to identify the nature of cause-effect relationship between the variables. Based on the kind of relationship, the regression technique is chosen.
Linear Regression
Lets breakdown first, what is meant by linear regression?
Linear regression is one of the oldest, simplest, and most popular regression technique. Linear regression is based on assumption of linear relationship between predictor and outcome variable. In other words, the relationship can be expressed with first order equation. Linear regression is originally statistical technique which is also borrowed by machine learning under supervised learning algorithm. Linear regression works on the ordinary least square (OLS) principle, which is a technique to estimate the noise parameter of linear regression function and try to minimise the Mean squared error.
The equation of line:
𝐲=𝐦𝐱+𝐛
m=slope of the line;
b=y intercept.
In linear regression, the outcome variable is a function of bias, predictor/s, and error/noise/unknown term. The noise terms takes account of the part that can not be explained by the model. To make the precise prediction, the aim is to minimize this noise as much as possible.
Simple Linear Regression: Simple linear regression is technique when we are interested in relationship of 1 predictor and outcome variable.
Simple Linear Regression Equation:
y=βₒ+β₁x+ε
y= Outcome variable
x= Predictor variable
βₒ= y intercept (minimum value of the outcome variable when predictor variable is zero)/ Bias
β₁= is the slope coefficient of the line (which show the ratio of change in y value with the change in x value.)
ε= error term
How it works? Let’s find out!
There are two important parameters in linear regression Bias(βₒ) and slope (β₁). The parameter estimation is done by least square method which means that error term in equation (y=βₒ+β₁x+ε) should be minimised.
To calculate error:
Error or noise in the regression line
Sum of squared errors
Step 1: We start of by calculating the slope (β₁).
alternate method
Step 2: To calculate the bias, plug in the least square estimates of β₁ in the equation.
When we have value of β₁ and βₒ we can plug in the values to obtain the equation
Step 3: Making predictions by plugging in the values of x.
Step 4: To know how good the model is in predicting, we need to find how close the predicted values and recorded values are. This is done by calculating error metrics such as RMSE. RMSE in simple way tell us on an average how wrong/far recorded values are from the predicted values.
This still looks like lot of calculation. Thankfully sklearn library makes implementing the model like a piece of cake!
Get the data (predictor and outcome variable) in arrays and reshape if necessary. Split the dataset into train and test set. Define the model Fit the data
The complete code can be found on my Github.
To ascertain the model reliability, the underlying assumption of linear regression should be checked. In case of finding a violation, corrective measures can be taken.
Assumptions examining ascertains that a sword is not used in place of needle!
Linear regression model assumptions:
Continuous variables: The measured variable should be on continuous scale.
startup dataframe
Linearity: Linear regression is based on the assumption of linear relationship between the independent and dependent variable.
Test: Scatter plot between dependent variable and independent variable.
Solution: Choose non-linear model / non linear data transformation techniques such as Logarithmic, Exponential,Quadratic, Inverse.
Traps: Selection of technique is conditional and should be tested by applying on the data. Residual plots and correlation coefficients should be observed to find improvement in the linearity.
Scatter plot
Independent observations / absence of multicollinearity: The independent variables should not be highly correlated to each other.
Test: Correlation matrix, Tolerance (T < 0.1 there might be multicollinearity in the data and with T < 0.01 there certainly),Variance Inflation Factor
Solution: Remove the independent variable, feature engineering, centring data.
Note: Try and see, which method yields better results.
Correlation matrix | https://medium.com/@chauhan-nisha/a-deep-dive-into-linear-regression-319c1bac6bf | ['Nisha Chauhan'] | 2020-11-12 15:16:04.927000+00:00 | ['Regression Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Linear Regression', 'Machine Learning', 'Statistics'] |
Governance Isn’t Sexy But It’s Essential to Higher Ed Success | In How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators and Policymakers, Dr. Joey King and I make a case that colleges must begin to reimagine themselves by rethinking their operating models.
Colleges Must Reduce Dependence on Tuition Revenue
It no longer makes sense to depend so heavily on tuition as the principal source of revenue, especially if most colleges and universities face considerable consumer and political backlash when annual tuition increases rise much more than the rate of inflation.
Higher Ed Governance Model Hinders Creative Solutions
But higher education faces more than a financial problem. We also assert that the governance model is a principal driver behind the inability of colleges to manage their future.
Governance — an unusual mix of trustees, faculty, and administration by most business standards — is generally weak and inefficient.
Trustees are typically the least effective of the three stakeholder groups, with an unclear mandate, a poor understanding of how colleges work, and a scale too large to make nimble contributions on strategy and direction.
Sanctity of “Process” Limits Colleges and Universities
These concerns must be placed within the context of the campus climate. Any understanding of how colleges work begins with an inescapable fact: colleges and universities govern by process.
It’s sometimes how well the process plays out politically on campus that determines whether or not even the best ideas go forward. If the protocols are weak or not in place, it’s a recipe for disaster.
As we work with institutions across the country, one of the biggest concerns expressed, regardless of their size, is that colleges and universities are often a victim of their own internal design.
Governed by process, these institutions are places of campus cultural inertia where the process matters as much as the outcome.
At the weakest campuses, the codification and execution of strategy — a key to the institution’s future — can be a long committee-based effort, governed by an academic calendar that precludes the agility and nimbleness that colleges require to become sustainable in a fiercely competitive market.
Please don’t misinterpret these comments. They are not intended as an attack on process, clarity, or transparency. In fact, the protocol and timeliness must be clear, broadly and regularly communicated, and presented to all affected campus constituencies for their input.
Where Does Process End and Decision-making Begin?
Further, the right group within governance must assume the responsibility for any actions taken on a particular issue. But the process must also permit a timely “call of the question,” so that the policy can be shaped or shifted to shape the direction of the institution.
In an environment where the goal posts are not clearly identified or shift constantly with each new administration or board chair, the effect can be a kind of perpetual chaos exacerbated by a permeating cynicism on campus.
On these campuses, it’s better to take a conservative “wait-and-see” approach to major policy adjustments of people, programs and facilities than to lead the campus charge. In these circumstances, process protects against excesses or bad ideas that might take hold.
In this respect, the macro view is different from the “boots on the ground” reality. This is a point, for example, where the faculty make their best and most original contributions.
Only Faculty Can Lead Educational Enterprise
The faculty is the incubator of ideas, whether in teaching or research. Boards can empower faculty. Administrations can facilitate dialogue, identify funding, and mandate assessment. Presidents must shape the institutional agenda to permit these good ideas to go forward. But only the faculty can lead the educational enterprise effectively.
That’s why it’s so important to work through any deficiencies in governance.
Each governing group — faculty, trustees, administration — must understand its role clearly and be willing to accept its interrelated responsibility in shared campus governance.
The relationship can and should periodically exhibit a healthy skepticism. But skepticism is different from cynicism. That’s where the process by which policy decisions are made is critical.
Good policy typically occurs when the loudest voices don’t prevail.
The best policy comes from an understanding of its need, a transparent and timely discussion with clear deadlines, and a willingness of a campus to accept change broadly supported.
The colleges and universities best positioned to survive in the 21st century will be those that have a collective “clear head” about the marketplace and challenges they face.
They won’t necessarily be the oldest or best endowed institutions. Some of these will atrophy while others will merge or be acquired.
But the way to a sustainable future is to call the question on why colleges should continue to operate in a way that will not work for them going forward.
Those that prosper best will seek a campus community solution. | https://medium.com/academic-innovators/good-college-governance-essential-66b00d22220a | ['Brian C. Mitchell'] | 2018-10-30 12:22:45.037000+00:00 | ['Higher Education', 'Governance', 'Leadership'] |
Weekly Blockchain Industry Report-19th Issue: Blockchain media were banned in China | (August 18th –August 24th, 2018)
OK blockchain capital is committed to exploring the cutting-edge technology of blockchain, setting benchmarks for high-quality analysis, guiding the sound development of the industry. Follow us to get more high-quality articles.
Market Overview
This week, the daily average global cryptocurrency’s market capitalization was $211.715 billion, representing a 0.88% increase from last week. Among them, the Top 5 cryptocurrencies’ market cap increased by 1.93%;The daily average transaction volume was $12.45 billion, representing a 5.23% decrease. Among them, the Top 5 cryptocurrencies’ transaction volume decreased by 19.28%. All of them had a continued bear performance, EOS experienced a maximum decrease of 18.15% and ETH had a maximum decrease of 17.3% .
Among the top 10 cryptocurrency gainers this week, most of the projects were in the cryptocurrency and payment field. PKG token, a token in game industry, experienced the greatest increase in price by 233.96%.
Analysis of Top 200 Market Cap Projects
Until 12:00 p.m. of the releasing date, the market capitalization of the top 200 projects decreased by 0.18% compared with last week. Based on our classification of 4 categories: cryptocurrency and payment, basic chain and protocol, vertical chain and protocol, and vertical industrial application, the projects of the vertical chain and protocol sector decreased the most.
Through further classification of the vertical chain and protocol and the vertical industrial application sectors, it was found that company service sector experienced market cap increase of 21.59%, AI field’s market cap increased 11.93%. But the education projects took a hit, got a 13.48% market cap decrease.
Analysis of Newly Listed Projects
According to latest announcements from more than 30 exchanges including OKEx, Binance, Huobi, Bitfinex, Bithumb, ZB.com, Upbit, HitBTC, Bittrex, Poloniex, there are 6 newly listed cryptocurrencies. These projects are distributed in different industries including company service, tourism, E-commerce, AI, finance and health. What’s more, these newly listed cryptocurrencies concentrated on Bitfinex crypto exchange. BCEX’s price increased by 92.86%.
Analysis of Closed Public Offering Projects
There have been 42 closed public-offering projects this past week, with the soft cap totaling nearly 291 million USD. Among these projects, HYT has the largest soft cap, exceeding 100 million USD.
Important News on Global Governmental Policies this Past Week
Below is a list of some of the most important global news on governmental policies on blockchain and cryptocurrency. The picture below is for reference to how strict/loose some countries are with their regulations.
The US: US Republican congressman Warren Davidson recently invited 32 digital currency industry representatives and institutions to Capitol Hill to discuss ICO regulation. The meeting’s purpose is to prepare for the submission of a formal ICO regulatory proposal to Congress. It is reported that the discussion will be held on September 25. Participating digital currency leaders and institutions include A16Z, Ripple, NASDAQ, CME, Kraken Exchange, and Intercontinental Exchange.
Mongolia: Zanden Shartle, Director of the Cabinet Office of the Government of Mongolia, said that 87% of public services in Mongolia will be digitized in the future, and he presented the idea of Blockchain — New Economy — New Mongolia. Mongolia will launch a series of preferential subsidy policies to attract capital. The recently launched Mongolia National Blockchain Digital Assets Exchange will support national blockchain projects, offering technical and other support for national projects.
Russia: Russia’s non-profit independent election monitoring agency, National Public Monitoring (NOM), announced at a press conference in Moscow that it is preparing to pilot a blockchain-based electronic voting system. It is reported that the first Russian public observer conference, the Russian Fund for Free Elections and Association of Lawyers of the Russian Federation, was held at the initiative of NOM.
Nigeria: The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said it is currently actively studying the encryption market so that it can develop a regulatory framework to protect each market participant. At the same time, CBN warned that financial institutions should not enter the encryption market until the regulations are introduced.
South Africa: The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is working to track digital currency transactions to determine whether people engaged in digital currency trading are evading tax. A commissioner of SARS said the key point was to identify traders. Since most traders use credit cards to purchase digital assets, SARS can investigate cases once they have correctly identified non-compliant traders.
South Korea: The South Korean government classified the digital currency exchange industry as a form of gambling, and prohibited venture capital companies from investing. Some analysts pointed out that this may indicate that the government believes that digital currency exchanges will have a greater negative impact on society than promoting the development of blockchain markets.
Keeping Up with the Blockchain Giants
August 18th
IBM submitted a patent application to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its project titled “Description of node features in blockchain.” The new system will allow distributed ledgers to have a set of nodes characterized by different functions. Nodes used to encrypt currency feature anti-money laundering (AML) functions. The information is automatically synchronized to the log, and can be checked by regulatory agencies connected to the node.
August 19th
Japan’s tech giant Softbank has signed a strategic partnership with the blockchain gaming company Ludos in Japan. The two parties aim to provide several channels for cooperation, including state-of-the-art game resources, product exchanges, and game redesign, bringing Ludos to a new stage.
August 20th
58 Group launched its blockchain service platform 58BaaS, which provides a complete set of blockchain deployment, application development, real-time monitoring, and flexible scalability solutions. It will also provide better technical support for recruitment, used cars, real estate and other services. Yao Jinbo, president and CEO of 58 company, also confirmed the news in his WeChat moments and said that “trust can create a better society”.
August 21th
A white paper entitled Datong Trusted Consortium Blockchain Technology, written by a team of experts from Shenzhen Datong Industrial Co., Ltd. (000038), and advised by network information security and blockchain experts from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and technical service experts from Blockchain Tech (Beijing) Co., Ltd, was officially released.
August 22th
The Bank of Thailand (BOT), the country’s central bank, has announced that the first phase of its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiative will be used for interbank funds transfer. Under Project Inthanon Phase 1, the BOT and the eight participating banks will collaboratively design, develop and test a proof-of-concept (PoC) prototype for wholesale funds transfer by issuing wholesale CBDC. The eight participating banks are Bangkok Bank, Krungthai Bank, Bank of Ayudhya, Kasikornbank, Siam Commercial Bank, Thanachart Bank, Standard Chartered Bank Thai and HSBC.
August 23th
Ant Financial said that Alipay will be used as a vector to explore how mobile payment security and blockchain technologies might be more widely used in Chongqing municipal governance, public travel and spending, and various businesses in the future.
August 24th
According to the official website of the Bank of China, it recently completed US dollar international remittance between customers in Xiong’an, Hebei Province, and Seoul, through its cross-border blockchain payment system. This is the first international remittance business completed by a domestic commercial bank using its own blockchain payment system.
Hot topic of this week: A large number of Blockchain media were banned. Chinese government is getting serious to crackdown domestic ICOs
On the evening of August 21, a large number of crypto-related WeChat official accounts were shut down. As of press time, media that have been confirmed to be banned include Jinse(AKA Cointime), Huobi News, Huobi Blockchain, BiShiJie, DeepChain, Bitcoin.Wu, DPRating, TokenClub, CoinLab and Coin Daily. The Tencent WeChat team responded that some official accounts were suspected of publishing information on ICOs and virtual currency trading hype, violating the Interim Provisions on the Development and Management of Instant Messaging Tools for Public Information Services. All content on these accounts has been blocked, and they have been permanently banned.
The severe ICO rectification in China began on September 4, 2017, when the People’s Bank of China and other 6 ministry departments issued a joint statement titled Notice on Preventing Financial Risks from Token Issuance, where they reiterated that ICOs are illegal fundraising mechanism, and they are suspected of illegally selling tokens, illegally issuing securities, illegal fundraising, financial fraud, pyramid schemes, and other illegal activities. The statement said authorities are banning all organizations and individuals from raising funds through ICOs. The central bank added that individuals and organizations that have completed ICO fundraising should make arrangements to return the funds. The statement specifies that token financing trading platforms may not exchange fiat currency with tokens or virtual currencies, may not act as a central counterparty in the purchase, sale, or trade of tokens or virtual currencies, and may not provide pricing service or information intermediary for tokens or virtual currencies.
The statement notes clearly that the specific rectification targets of this round are projects financing with token issuance, and exchanges that provide fund or information for such these projects. However, the government quickly expanded the scope to include all virtual currency trading activities, including virtual currencies without ICOs such as Bitcoin. In October 2017, major virtual currency trading platforms announced that they had terminated service and quit the Chinese market. Since then, virtual currency transaction in China has officially lost the RMB channel.
CN Stock reported on July 6 that Zhang Yifeng, Dean of the China Banknote Blockchain Technology Research Institute, revealed the progress and effectiveness of the virtual currency clean-up and rectification in an interview. He said that 88 domestic virtual currency trading platforms and 85 ICO trading platforms targeted by local governments have essentially achieved risk-free exit. Less than 1% of the world’s total BTC trade is in RMB, as opposed to more than 90% earlier. Zhang also pointed out that based on the preliminary results, the People’s Bank of China and relevant departments adopted a series of targeted clean-up measures in response to new types and situations of illegal financial activities to prevent possible financial risks and moral hazard. The specific measures have included blocking oversea’s virtual currency trading platforms, and strengthening the clean-up and rectification, starting from payment and settlement. This media ban can be understood as regulators’ re-statement of zero tolerance for ICOs.
In the past year, thanks to effective suppression of virtual currency speculation, the Chinese blockchain industry achieved sounder and more orderly development. Internet giants like “BAT” and financial institutions such as major banks have further increased investment in R&D and application of blockchain technology. Major universities have also established blockchain research centers and related courses. At the same time, the number of blockchain security service providers is growing quickly, marking the beginning of industry self-discipline. The next serious issues for the industry will include further eliminating the negative impact of speculative bubbles, fully promoting the development of blockchain technology, and tapping into greater commercial value.
Appendix: Upcoming Crowdfunding Projects（8.25–8.31)
Please follow our twitter @ https://twitter.com/OKCapital_ to stay updated with our reports!
*Credits go to Quqi Deng for his superb research! | https://medium.com/ok-blockchain-capital/weekly-blockchain-industry-report-19th-issue-blockchain-media-were-banned-in-china-94b5c3f9360 | ['Quqi Deng'] | 2018-08-28 07:56:09.007000+00:00 | ['Exchange', 'Crypto', 'ICO', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
GANA BITCOIN | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/bivo/gana-bitcoin-980bb35efb2d | [] | 2018-08-31 04:20:12.998000+00:00 | ['Criptomonedas', 'Tecnologia', 'Peru', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
Three Deadly Eating Disorders | Three Deadly Eating Disorders
Healthy eating is very important for our everyday lives, but unfortunately, many people develop problems with body image to prevent them from this healthy eating lifestyle. Eating disorders vary greatly from person to person, but one thing remains constant — they are very detrimental to a person’s health. If you or someone you know suffers from an eating disorder, it is important to seek help as soon as possible.
The first kind of eating disorder that a person may develop is anorexia. Anorexia occurs when someone is overly concerned with weight and simply refuses to eat. Someone suffering from this disease usually tries to hide it by discarding the food without anyone knowing, cutting the food into small pieces to make it look smaller, or lying about skipping entire meals. Anorexia is dangerous because it does not allow a person to lose weight in a healthy way. Cutting fat out of a diet is fine, but not getting enough proteins, vitamins, minerals, water, and other nutrients can make your body lose muscle weight and weaken.
Another major type of eating disorder is bulimia. While you may notice an anorexic person losing lots of weight in a hurry, someone who has bulimia may or may not be losing weight. If a person has bulimia, he or she does not have the will power to give up foods but instead vomits or uses laxatives after meals to rid the body of these foods. Like anorexia, this can rob the body of key nutrients, and it can also lead to problems in the digestive system, throat, and mouth, which are not made for regular induced vomiting.
The third main type of eating disorder is binge eating. This is a combination of anorexia and bulimia in most cases. A binge eater will, like a bulimic, not deprive his- or herself of food. In fact, someone who is a binge eater will eat enormous amounts of food in a single sitting, and often these foods are not high in nutritional value. Instead of vomiting, a binge eater will then refuse to eat at all and exercise rigorously for a day or two but then slip into a binge once again. This leads to major problems with weight.
Eating disorders can affect bother males and females, as well as people of any race, ethnicity, or age. Most commonly, victims of eating disorders are teen and young adult girls. Many people die every year due to complications with eating disorders, but if you or someone you know suffers from this problem, help is available. So make sure you see, talk, and listen to what your doctor says for you to do!! | https://medium.com/@barwest/eating-naturally-78ce118feb27 | ['Barbara West'] | 2020-11-23 01:59:31.595000+00:00 | ['Eating Disorder Recovery', 'Eat Clean', 'Eating Habits', 'Eating Disorders'] |
how to write an application for not attending online class | how to write an application for not attending online class Technical Nayak ·Dec 27, 2020
Overview:-
How to write an application letter for not attending online class.
The letter or application for not attending online class:-
Online Class
Subject:-A letter of apology for not attend
Respected sir,
With due to respect, I’d like to inform you that due to my family issue/health issue/network problem,I’could not attend the online classes regularly.Therefore I request you to from the bottom of my heart to take my apology….Read More | https://medium.com/@gunjannayak2k20/how-to-write-an-application-for-not-attending-online-class-278c0a6a0054 | ['Technical Nayak'] | 2020-12-27 15:24:05.108000+00:00 | ['Leave Letter', 'Online Classes', 'Online', 'Letters', 'Application Letter'] |
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: ELIMINATES or FUELS DISCRIMINATION? | image from depositphotos.com
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: ELIMINATES or FUELS DISCRIMINATION?
The phrase “affirmative action”, since its emergence in the 1960s to end discrimination against people of color, particularly against nonwhite ethnicities and women within the workplace, has been in the center of the most intense debates. Among the fiercest controversies is the question whether this act ensures equality and diversity or reversely fuels biases based on race and gender. In other words, since President Kennedy introduced it to American life, affirmative action has been contested in terms of its focus on and accomplishment of creating and improving opportunities for already discriminated, disadvantaged or excluded groups. In order to discuss the questions and arguments about affirmative action, we should take a look initially at the roots of the problem.
To be more precise, we should first ask why certain groups are considered as disadvantaged or why the administrative bodies would need such an act for equal recruitment or admission. Are not the companies, corporations, universities and such institutions and organizations already accessible to all people regardless of their sex, gender, race, religion and class? If not, then the next question would be what are the challenges and barriers for those particular groups to be recruited to a job or admitted to a university? Let me ask more explicitly. What are the odds for a black girl from a low-income family living a fully black community where the schools have mostly black students to be able to get accepted to an Ivy League university? Is it really achievable for a Muslim immigrant man to be appointed as a high level director in a prominent corporation? Could a Latinx LGBTQ individual easily have a tenure position in a prestigious university? I will play the advocate of the devil and answer all these questions by saying “No”! More precisely, even if they ultimately reach their dreams/goals, that would not be easy and quick.
In light of the ideas above, I would like to discuss most controversial pro and con arguments about affirmative action more closely. A great deal of the debate about affirmative action goes round the paradigm of meritocracy. Opponents argue that affirmative action, specifically race-based, undermines the fairness aspect of admissions or recruitments which could only be maintained through the idea of meritocracy. Advocates of affirmative action respond to this critic by stressing out the fact that race (or gender) is not the only determinant for decisions. It is rather among the many other influential factors that impact the selection proceedings for those who are already equally highly qualified. Another controversial issue about affirmative action is the dilemma whether it creates stereotypes regarding the interpretation of underrepresentation. Supporters of the affirmative action challenge this dispute through the proposition that not all disadvantaged people in terms of interlocking systems of race, sex, gender and class undergo the same kind of inequalities and discrimination. On the contrary, just as the discriminatory factors, their experiences are also intersectional with reference to the variety of socioeconomic issues. Thus, it is claimed by the advocates that an argument of creating further stereotypes would be void.
Coming back to my original discussion about affirmative action, I will repeat the aforesaid suggestion that it is a very complicated issue so that claiming it to be conflict itself or solution of the conflict is almost impossible. Some support the idea of affirmative action by arguing that it eliminates discrimination based on the above said dynamics and reassures diversity in educational institutions and the workplace. On the other hand, critics claim that the affirmative action creates reverse discrimination by rejecting the idea of meritocracy. This approach of the critics brings another controversial paradigm front which implicitly suggests that discriminated people are not qualified for the position or the admission. Another significant issue related to this point is the alleged idea that discriminated people who are addressed by the affirmative action unfairly take the positions of dominant group. Such an approach again targets women, people of color and disadvantaged individuals as non-merit people and actors of reverse discrimination.
To conclude, I would argue that affirmative action paves the path which are full of obstacles, barriers and challenges for discriminated people who are already as qualified as other dominant peers to be able to equally access to resources. Yet, along with affirmative steps, further improvements in terms of policies and regulations must be developed to eliminate the discriminatory conditions in all parts and institutions of the society. Moreover, discriminatory discourses and acts based on sex, gender, race, religion and so on should be eradicated through education and laws. | https://medium.com/@hafza-girdap/affirmative-action-eliminates-or-fuels-discrimination-cdd309da9730 | ['Hafza Girdap'] | 2020-12-11 17:11:03.862000+00:00 | ['Affirmative Action', 'Discrimination', 'Gender', 'Equality', 'Race'] |
The Who, What, How & Why of a Brand | Infamous advertising guru David Ogilvy originally defined a brand as “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.” Ogilvy always had a way with words and found clarity in simplicity. While his definition is clear, logical, and succinct, it only scratches the surface. Brands, like people, aren’t easily defined. Both are complex and just plain messy. It is so complicated that Heidi Cohen pulled together 30 branding definitions to help brand owners. That being said, I have broken this topic into Who, How, What and Why to help explain what is a brand.
The Who — The Product
The brand story always begins with a product. Without a product there is no brand. Authors and define a product as “anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need, including physical goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.” For the moment, let’s suspend the concept of services and talk about something that is made from physical materials.
So much time and thinking must go into designing, building, testing, refining, and producing a product. Decisions must be made on how and where it will be manufactured? What ingredients and basic materials will be used? How, where, and when will it be marketed? Who will be the best customer? How will the product feel? What will it look like? Smell like? What colour is it? All of these physical product attributes must be replicated perfectly each and every time. The logistics and distribution, the support, the partnership, the price, the competition and the consumer must be analysis and selected. Then you need to assemble a team of employees to execute the production schedules, logistics, marketing and sales plans. All of these tasks are daunting.
The last thing you are thinking about is its brand identity, brand personality, brand value, brand purpose, and brand vision. Without a product there isn’t a brand or a who.
The How — Product Attributes
How the product works in making a consumer’s life better is the start to a wonderful relationship. Product attributes are the unique physical and abstract aspects of how the product works such as speed, size, weight, material, finishing, durability, functionality, flexibly, and features. The brand experience begins the day the customer positively interacts with the product features and attributes. The interaction can be instantly gratifying or build over time through repeated usage or elaborate steps of anticipation. In some of these situations, the brand is completely orchestrated to minute details; in others, the brand experience is wholly defined by the consumer. The consumer’s interpretation of how the product makes their life better is when the brand relationship begins.
The What — Visual & Audio
The what is all of the visual and audio manifestation that moves a product beyond the who and how into transforming it with human characteristic with physical and emotive features. Unlike a human, a brand can build its brand identity from the ground up. This brand identity begins with a name, colour palette, design, logotype, symbol, and, where possible, stimulating consumer’s senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Every interaction with the brand directly or indirectly through visual or audio content must support and build the brand experience. This means every branding channel used must feel like it coming from the brand’s ethos.
The challenge is expressing what people think about your brand. This is ultimately where your brand lives in the consumer’s mind, based on feelings and emotion. Some branding experts describe it as the brand promise or the emotional bond. I like Ze Frank’s definition as an “emotional aftertaste”. A great brand should taste like a wonderful 2000 vintage Bordeaux wine, preferably from the left-bank.
The Why — Action
Action is louder than any brand identity. This is where the brand walks the talk. The brand’s guiding principals must be solid and based on its purpose of why it exists. The best time to watch a brand shine is when things go wrong — especially terribly wrong. What a brand does when it fails to deliver on its promise is a true moment of truth.
In essence, a brand is all the positive physical and emotional brand attributes combined into a consistent, memorable experience with a product or service. Please note, that the interactions don’t need to be direct. Advertising and storytelling play a big role. We all love a great story. Great brands tell great stories that inspire a passion for life and illustrate the why and how behind the product.
What is Branding
Branding is the act of showcasing your brand purpose, promise and/or personality. Its the articulation of why your brand exists. Consumers don’t care about the how and what. Consumers care why brands do what they do; it gives customers a reason to embrace a product. Successful brands always start with the brand’s why. Consumers want to understand why they should care about your brand. As Cheryl Burgess CEO of Blue Focus Marketing says, “a brand is a reason to choose.”
Branding is actively showing how your brand’s personality is desirable, relevant, unique, and cool. Never underestimate the cool factor. To have any value, your brand must always be relatable, reliable, consistent, but also change with the times and with consumer’s needs. Jeffrey Harmon founder of Harmon Brothers explains that “branding is the experience marketers create to win that attention.” All branding elements must be defined by what the brand represents, including in advertising and social media.
Branding is Big Business
Clutch.co, who evaluates marketing agencies, list over 28,121 branding companies in the US and Canada. Branding agencies come in all sizes from a one-person shop to hundreds or a company with thousands of employees in offices around the world. The cost of hiring a branding consultant or agency is extremely variable. The scope of work determines the cost. A consultant could be simply developing the visual elements or completing a complex task like developing the brand position and communication elements that support the brand strategy and business plan. The cost could range from thousands of dollars to over a million.
If a brand is cultivated with meaningful existential reference points that the consumer can embrace, the brand can have enormous monetary value. According to Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand, the world’s most valuable brand in 2019 was Amazon at $315.5 billion, followed by Apple at $309.5 billion.
Brand is a Concept
Humans are creatures of meaning not transactions. Successful brands live in consumers’ minds. Defining the emotional connection is the most difficult but the most essential step. This is where the branding agency is worth their weight in gold. The deeper the connection, the stronger the relationship. The stronger the relationship to the brand, the more valuable the brand becomes. The trick is giving the consumer the power to own the brand but ensuring that the brand is still actively steering the relationship with positive brand activities and associations. Lester Wunderman, author of says “Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship.”
Brand Personality
People are attracted to people (and furry friends). The quickest way a brand can relate to people is through an authentic and distinct personality. This personality is made by how the brand and its employees act and speak. A brand’s personality can’t be manufactured but it can be built with the right tools. Recruiting the right people to represent the brand is a good start. Shaping the brand’s values will set the stage for the brand ‘s personality.
You must decide what characteristic is paramount. Define what the brand will not compromise on such as: quality, safety, transparency, sustainability, trust and/or customer service. You can also define what the brand will not be. These values will drive the brand’s tone of voice. Being witty and funny might not suit certain brands but being caring, empathetic, and lovable might. Once determined, all of the brand’s messaging and marketing must reflect its determined personality traits.
A brand evolves over time as do its customers. An EmotiveBrand blog post on the topic says: “Brands mean different things to different people at different times.” Amy Daggett, owner of Dagget Design, says a brand “is an associative memory in the brain of the consumer, who connects-or associate-the brand with a set of brand attributes, benefits, impressions or emotions. It’s everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering-both factual, and emotional.”
Brand Elements
Brands are complex and always evolving. A great emotional advertising campaign that connects with customers can make a brand famous. But if the product doesn’t live up to expectations, it’s dead in the water. Every product offering, every service, every message, advertisement, and digital manifestation, every internal policy, email, and business decision must be congruent with what the brand stands for. Each brand element and touchpoint must be strategically and creatively aligned to have maximum impact. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-who-what-how-why-of-a-brand-2d56fafab14 | ['Rozdeba Brand'] | 2020-03-21 19:42:11.868000+00:00 | ['Brand Strategy', 'Branding', 'Branding Strategy', 'Brands'] |
What Of Zimbabwe’s Story — What Of Zimbabwe’s Future? | Revolutions in Zimbabwe — from the times of capitalistic slavery into the war of liberation (Chimurenga, the fight, the struggle) and further still into the post independence era — have wreaked havoc on the body.
Many people across races, tribes, political divide and ages were maimed — they lost their hands, limbs, eyes, ears, and to a certain extent their very lives — and that resulted in disability, in myriad inabilities. It affected the souls of the bereaved; depression creeped, mental health cases bloomed in the wake of the Zimbabwean political revolutions.
The democratic dispensation — roughly beginning in 1999 on the edge of the Millennium and sprawling for 8 years — was marked by labour and student movements, teachers and young people in cities, rising and defying the all-powerful Mugabe regime. They made a clarion call for democracy, free and fair elections, and as well as sea change of political organization in a country death-gripped by autocracy and a two-decade era of tyranny.
As Tafi Mhaka of Aljazeera writes:
“The SADC (Southern African Development Community) should not have to wait for Western nations to point out glaringly obvious constitutional transgressions or human rights abuses. Besides, a still-murderous ‘new dispensation’ cannot be persuaded to freely adopt democracy without establishing measures that proactively punish repressive deeds.”
Each and every election or political season has been marked with
violence in Zimbabwe. The 1980s killings of Zapu cadres led by
“Father of the Nation” Joshua as they were labelled “political
dissidents” in most Matebeleland region ,was followed by even more
ruthless slaughterings in June 2008, hardening the nation into a state
of despair and depression..
Every generation carries the scars of their kindreds in their hearts. They never forgave or forgot and remain raring for revenge.
Zimbabwe revolutions — both past and present — are marked with
political expediency and the rampant abuse and rape of economically
impoverished women; subsequently many women lost any taste for sexual
enjoyment or healthy partnerships. In the end, most of them have
failed to have stable relationships or marital arrangements because of
abuse by war criminals; the struggle to survive has hardened them.
There was little space for proper romantic and dignified marital choices.
Many women became sexual wanderers — their approach to relationships grew calcified, predicated on gain, on the possibility of safety. Many died of sexually transmitted diseases. Sexual favor buys space and favor from political gurus — but disease does not spare the brilliant — and we lost promising minds that might have helped develop our nation.
It could be elaborated upon, & tied to the overall theme of politics & their toll on the body.
As of today my village is torn between jaws of biting poverty and claws of political despair. The revolutionary euphoria is now extinct and in its wake we find mass polarization. The heavy scent of freedom has vanished from their teargas-hardened nostrils. Peasants’ faces are broken mirrors of torn campaign manifestos and squashed ballot boxes. They suffer from an election hangover and the November coup det’at of 2017, led by President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s former security chief — Emmerson Dambudzo Munangagwa — which dethroned the black cockerel from the echelons of power.
Munangangwa is struggling to climb out of the three-decade trap of the Mugabeist legacy. The economy is suffering and the masses are angry; corruption is endemic and trade embargoes and sanctions are stripping the last flesh from the bleached bones of a paralyzed economy.
You can see hems of weather beaten flags flapping silently in the hot air from a distance; you can hear school walls echoing with hesitating tenors of the national anthem coming out from beneath a decade of famished toddler bellies.
I was born and bred alongside the morning baritones of baboons and hesitant laughter of hyenas. Red hills strutted in white gowns of mist at dawns and hide under the black veil of shadows and dark silhouettes at nights.
A few nights ago, the rumor of another military junta takeover wafted like the mist of an exotic perfume and the foul scent of that gossip is still hanging over our drought-baked red earth like a cloud of dense fog.
Sometime in the ’80s, our immediate ancestors jived for the birth of a new republic even inside their red clay dagga and grass thatched rondavels packed together on the hems of red hills. The birth of our republic was welcomed by a spirited trances of mega phonic euphorias and cacophonic festivals in rural climes and urban metropolis.
“Modern Zimbabwe wasn’t supposed to be a police state,” writes Karan Mahajan in the New Republic. “In fact, when Mugabe came to power in 1980, following a 15-year liberation struggle against Rhodesia’s white supremacist rule, he was seen as an antidote to the colonialists’ repressive policies.”
The freedom mantra was echoed from every mouth, even tender ones struggled to utter the word Freeeedom. The sweet smell of liberation circulated in every crack and crevice of Zimbabwe. War collaborators and guerilla combatants danced to their Leninist wartime tunes until their backs cracked.
Vana Mayi bikai Sadza Vana Venyu Tadzoka Vana Mayi bikai Sadza Vana Venyu Tadzoka Vana Mayi bikai Sadza Vana Venyu Tadzoka Youwiii Vana Mayi bikai Sadza.
(This is a chant of defiance and excitement, of freedom from colonial rule. It was chanted by the youthful veterans of the struggle in 1980, the eve of Zimbabwean Independence. They sang with the hope of a new country.)
The zeal was extreme and nerve-wrecking.
Laughter and spirited excitement reverberated from mountain caves to hills into village homes. Peasant mothers chanted sopranos of new dawn at water holes. Rivers responded with the tenor of their flowing songs. The usual train whistles rekindled our hearts, and edified the joy of the everyday festival mood. Our earth dangled with dance and hope. Peasants and their youth sipped from jugs of juicy promises all the way to the dregs. They ululated to red carpets they never stepped on. They saluted to the adrenalin-shredding motorcade bells.
They sang to the new flag and the anthem with great anticipation of a great Canaan. They were excited about the coming of the new country, freedom from colonial rule and they expected much from the new black-led government, the Mugabe Regime.
Their spirits glowed with the Vaseline glint of victory. My father and other village elders were staunch evangelists of the new black regime and its Oxford English-gifted, spiked-tongue lashing, Leninist-Marxist protégé, the master of paradox Gabriel Black Cockerel, the revolutionary angel, who villagers felt had bravely exorcised demons of the colonial pharaoh from their land and led them into the Canaan of liberation.
Our evening dinners were prologued and epilogued by praise tales of the all-powerful Uncle Gabriel, a refined orator, ex-guerilla leader and a student of Mao Zedong principles.
My mother’s regalia was emblazoned with black cockerel graphics. Village women donned the same regalia.
They sang for Gabriel and danced to his rhetoric. Wartime hymns floated in their DNA like white blood cells. Marxist propaganda lingua franca was the lotion that waxed their war-tired, but hopeful minds.
Nyika yedu yeZimbabwe, Ndimo matakazvarirwa Vana mayi nana baba ndimo mavari, Tinoda Zimbabweee nevukuru hwayo hwose Simuka …aa Zimbabwe ee
(This song expresses the zeal the Zimbabweans had for their new country. Their profound disappointment in Mugabe would come later.)
These tunes oiled their hope for the new republic and kindled the fire of their Canaan of honey and milk. Castro style, bush-green denims with other ex-guerrilla costume paraphernalia decorated the walls of our parents’ inner rooms, my father’s souvenirs bleached and faded due to their constant exposure to time, smoke and weather.
Uncle Gabriel’s portrait hovered over our fireplace. It boggled my psyche, how a brave man like my father could willingly deposit his entire manhood into another man’s portrait. It was the same with all villagers. Our elders had lost their mind. Insanity! They walked, dressed and talked like Uncle Gabriel.
My father and the headman had their black and white striped suits and Uncle Gabriel’s thick brown goggles. We enjoyed the free stand up parody acts every day of our lives. School teachers were the most interesting cast. They loved Uncle Gabriel to their marrow.
But time is the healer and like sunlight, it exposes the rot of darkness; a decade elapsed between 1982 to 1992, revealing the devil and his antics.
The revolution turned Armageddon and revolutionaries turned into black mambas drinking eggs of freedom under shadows of hypocrisy and political witchcraft.
We lost many of our learned teachers and brothers to Uncle Gabriel’s spy web as it was extremely lucrative. All those who refused to become informants were targeted. Teeth gnashed and many disappeared forever. Army-drilled securocrats — the military complicit in Mugabe’s most egregious abuses — and secret intelligentsia snuck into village gatherings and rural bars, our shebeens, under the guise of teaching recruits and visitors.
Uncle Gabriel’s real name and his wrong-doings were a taboo to be mentioned in public or to the wrong people. But we didn’t know who the wrong or right people were. We were young. The only bad people we knew were whites. Our parents sternly warned us to barricade our mouths and not to mention anything about Uncle Gabriel. We were supposed to see or say no evil about him at school, church, crèche or pastures.
We were warned. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Those who bad mouthed Uncle Gabriel disappeared, maimed or were banished from villages.
The Spy web was sophisticated and well-greased. It was the anopheles — disease-spreading mosquitoes — that haunted us year in and year out. Fear gripped the land. Anxiety stripped our confidence. Headmen got recruited as local informants into the cruel network. Our elders had no other option than joining the bandwagon to protect us as they faked to sing along baritones and sopranos of liberation.
I trust that they understood some things better than us, but the truth is with them in their graves — perhaps hidden in the thick clouds of long gone smoke that emanated from their pole and dagga rondavels. Perhaps the truth was carried away by train whistles.
God knows the truth.
Despite infiltration, suspicions, and other Judas Iscariot tendencies, the republic was fast recovering from colonial hangover and our elders were busy imbibing Leninist:Communist propaganda crank and mothers enjoyed the Marxist- Socialist slogan booze as if they were blind.
Elders who were fed Mugabe lies passed the propaganda to some young people where it caused divisions and violence to a greater extent; factionalism and polarization took to centerstage.
They vomited that booze into our mouths.
We sang Uncle Gabriel’s name at elementary schools’ assembly points. Most of our teachers were ex-guerrilla fighters and ex-detainees of the struggle for liberation in the late ’70s. We smoked Mao and Lenin’s wisdom rolled in book petals. We drank Samora’s Aluta Continua and Kwame Nkrumah’s African Unity. We danced to Kambarage Nyerere’s Ujamaa and Jomo Kenyatta’s Uhuru lyrical vibes.
We worshipped the flag and supplicated to African Gods through the Ishe kombera Africa anthem. The political rhythm and the ideological revolutionary stew was still juicy though slowly losing its flavor. Elders died and with them went their struggle songs, their revolutionary jive and their black cockerel regalia.
Time stewed years into more and more decades. Uncle Gabriel’s hangover still clutched the red hills. Sons and daughters crossed oceans and returned back home clutching degrees in modern politics.They were fed with some fresh ideological pizza of democratic change and free speech from Harvard and Oxford canteens, gulped mugs of the renewed political brew fermented in super power Westminster labs, smoked wisdom rolled in global governance journals and international law textbooks.
Alas, they were not welcomed by the old system. Things were falling part in the land of their birth. The country was already infected by the moral decadence fungi, dying from economic cancer and coughing from virulent political malaise. Young ones had digested communist theories, regurgitated African nationalism and vomited pseudo Leninist-Marxist snort.
There grew a rising of opposition forces from those who had received education from western elite schools; they came up with new ideas of better Zimbabwe. They began fomenting the basis of opposition politics, joining forces with local university students , town dwellers, trade unions and others to form a truly democratic movements that aiming to combat the old system.
They chanted down black African totalitarian regimes.
More town dwellers sipped from jugs of the new revolutionary refreshment with renewed hope. College students, urban youth and city workers danced along, imbibing the new revolutionary refreshment with determined passion. University corridors and city bars were now beehives of change rhetoric, the mantra was democratic change.
Cities became breeding troughs of the new struggle.
An earthquake of political marches and mass demonstrations shook the roots of the seasoned, but old regime. Each among the defiant fighters carried in their hearts the required zeal and a character of bravery. The new refreshment had seized their passions, ambitions and minds.
They were tired of the unrepentant dictatorship that was amassing the vast mineral wealth and looted tracks of fertile land. The paradoxical gap between the rich and the poor, the political zealots, the poverty-riddled laborers and the hunger ravaged villagers was countrywide.
The irony that this was a communist–socialist revolutionary system was lost on no one.
Uncle Gabriel had for long time sacrificed us on the altar of pseudo revolutionary gospel and crucified us on the Golgotha of corruption. Idi Amin Dada style, “The Butcher of Uganda.” The wind of the new revolution for change stoked a raging inferno; songs of resistance echoed in the mountains, red hills, the beer gatherings and across our plains.
Uncle Gabriel was now a wounded buffalo, but young revolutionaries were killed and many were maimed. They sacrificed their lives for regime change and political liberation from the chains of dictatorship and cuffs of revolutionary hypocrisy.
Change was the song and democracy was the slogan.
Uncle Gabriel’s regalia was burnt to cinders, his portraits smashed and sealed in unmarked shallow graves on the edges of our lands. Our Red hills stood still in defiance against the earth-baking sun and ravaging droughts. We remained resilient, eking out survival off our red clay earth.
We defied our mothers and sneaked to Cde. General Change’s rallies. Morgan Tsvangirayi was a bright beacon on which we rested fledgling hope; he was the first leader to openly and successfully challenge Mugabe and his regime.
Some of us were banished from our homes. Elders said the white men bewitched us children with the democratic crank and newspaper rolled nonsense to wet the mats of liberation and urinate on the tombs of war cadres. They said the Gods were angry and Ancestors of the struggle for liberation were turning in their grave.
Abomination! They bellowed.
They vowed to fight us until the end. Uncle Gabriel had castrated our elder’s consciences with Pan Africanist rhetoric and the Marxist slogan. They had fought their own war.
But the times had changed and we were fighting our own war of our own liberation. The drama was succeeded by another year of locusts, more hunger — and a little joy.
The joy that our leader Cde General Change was released from the dungeon of hell, they call prison. His prison ordeal was a hell on earth. Our Man of the People and Man of the Movement. We sang for his bravery. We were his trusted commissars.
Halo Genarari Change Halo Genarari Halo YuYu YuYu YuYu YuYu Famba Genarari Famba Genarari Famba Famba Genarari , Famba Genarari Famba Yuwi Genarari Change Yuwi Genarari Yuwi Yuwi Yuwi Yuwi Yuwi , Yuwi Genarari Yuwi Famba Genarari Save Famba Genarari Save Genarari Save , Famba Genarari Famba Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Yuuu Famba Genarari Famba Genarari Famba Titore nyika famba famba famba Yu yu yu Yuuuuu, Youuuu ,Youuuuuu Halo Genarari Genarari Halo Genarari Change Famba Famba Genararu Change , Genarari Change Yu yu yu Yuuuuu, Youuuu, Youuuuuu.
( Part of the songs young people sang for the rising leaders of change against the old system.)
Celebrations roared and traversed throughout the whole country, in villages, cities and across oceans.
Even the dead danced with us in spirit. I believe their spirits were livened and calmed. Memories of the struggle were evoked again and encouraged us to be more resilient, we braved on.
Locusts persisted, but Genarari Change (Morgan Tsvangirayi ) was defiant like his foot soldiers; tables were rapidly turning upside down. The sun was setting every minute for the old system.
We got crazily elated, we danced again for yet another liberation.
But nothing has changed with the so-called new dawn. The mist is dense still and the fog is thick in the hills. Genarari Change died a painful death of cancer just weeks before our elections, and we wept until sorrows swept away all our hope.
The laughter has faded — even the baboons and hyenas in the red hills are hesitant to bark.
Now the great Uncle Gabriel is watching the political soap opera from the terraces of a heavenly or hellish Castle — nobody knows which. Meanwhile, books, memoirs, and obituaries of the man unfold every day, telling his story. But what of Zimbabwe’s story — what of Zimbabwe’s future? | https://medium.com/pulpmag/what-of-zimbabwes-story-what-of-zimbabwe-s-future-a7fbc316d843 | ['Mbizo Chirasha'] | 2020-03-11 15:12:35.811000+00:00 | ['Revolution', 'Democracy', 'Zimbabwe', 'Politics', 'Mugabe'] |
Uncorrupted Stand | to take an uncorrupted stand is
to not say —
I can do this
I must do this
I must face this
I should do this
I will do this
and more importantly
to not say I can stand
to take an uncorrupted stand is also
to not say —
I can’t do this
I will mess up
I am not capable
this is not for me
I cannot face it
to take an uncorrupted stand
is perhaps to simply see
what is it in reality when you aren’t
continuously corrupting your intelligence
with neither positive nor negative thoughts
to take an uncorrupted stand is also
to not give in to what you believe about yourself
be it strong or weak;
but to simply see
what is it for real when you aren’t
busy corrupting your experience
to take an uncorrupted stand is also
and perhaps for the first time
to take a break from
slipping into habitual reflexes
in a totally unconscious way;
but to begin to see it
what is driving it
what might come up
what you might see
— ugly or beautiful,
calm or panic —
you aren’t concerned
standing unforced and uncorrupted
to take an uncorrupted stand is
perhaps to see with fresh eyes
for the first time.
Consider reading similar poems:
Thank You ❤
Pretheesh Presannan | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/uncorrupted-stand-e494e674b532 | ['Pretheesh Presannan'] | 2020-09-20 16:18:30.106000+00:00 | ['Spiritual Secrets', 'Beginning', 'Anxiety', 'Fresh Start', 'Beginners Mind'] |
Divide and Conquer Algorithms | View the updated (and frankly, much better) article here:
We divide the problem up to solve many smaller problems. It is just like recursion. We need to know when to stop.
Let’s say we have 8 numbers:
4 6 3 2 8 7 5 1
And we want to add them all together. We divide the problem into 8 parts, which are all the numbers seperately (as seen in the example above). We then begin to add 2 numbers at a time, then 4 numbers into 8 numbers which is our resultant.
So when we get 8 individual numbers we get:
4 6 3 2 8 7 5 1
And then break it down into 4 parts we get:
4+6 3+2 8+7 5+1
And so on.
Why do we break it down to 8 individual numbers and not stop at pairs of numbers since we only go back to that step anyway?
Well, what if we have an input of 1? Or an odd amount of numbers? We have to break it down to singualr numbers to deal with these cases.
A divide and conquer algorithm tries to break a problem down into as many little chunks as possible since it is easier to solve with little chunks. It typically does this with recursion.
Examples of divide and conquer include merge sort, fibonacci number calculations. This is the psuedocode for the Fibonacci number calculations:
algorithm f(n)
if n == 0 or n == 1 then
return 1
else f(n-1) + f(n+1)
Merge Sort
Merge sort is a sorting algorithm. The algorithm roughly works as follows:
Divide the sequence of n numbers into 2 halves
Recursively sort the two halves
Merge the two sorted halves into a single sorted sequence
In this image we break down the 8 numbers into seperate digits.
Once we do this we can start the sorting process.
We compare 51 and 13 and place the smallest on the left and largest on the right. We do this for 10 and 64, 34 and 5, 32 and 21.
We do that for the next level as well until eventually we get a fully merged sorted list at the top.
In the second level from the top where we have 2 boxes of 4 numbers we create 2 pointers. Pointer #1 is pointing at 10 and pointer #2 is pointing at 5.
It compares 10 and 5 and since 5 is smaller than 10, it puts 5 in the list as the smallest item.
It then compares 10 and 21, 10 is smaller than 21 and we know that 10 is the smallest item in the first list (due to our sorting and merger process) so 10 is placed in the list. It does this for all the numbers until we get a fully sorted list.
It’s important to note that we are not comparing 2 lists of unsorted numbers. We are comparing 2 lists of sorted numbers. We know that 10 is the smallest in the list on the left. We know that 13 is second smallest in the list on the left.
Algorithm Merge_Sort(list)
if n > 1
copy A[1...n/2] to B[1...n/2]
copy A[(n/2 + 1)...n] to C[1...n/2]
merge_sort(b)
merge_sort(c)
merge(b, c, a)
end
Our basecase here is n. If n is strictly larger than 1 then we want to divide the problem up and solve. If n is 1, if there is 1 item in the array, then the array is already sorted.
Have a look at this trace table. We have 2 lists which contain 4 items each. These lists are sorted. We want to merge them. i is the pointer in the first list, B. j is the pointer in the second list, C. K is the kth element of the new merged list.
Notice how we compare them like we did earlier.
Each node takes O(p) time when there are p integers in the list.
Each level takes O(n) time because the total number of integers at any given level is n.
There are O(log n) levels.
Therefore overall there is O(n log n) time.
Towers of Hanoi
The Towers of Hanoi is a mathematical problem which consists of 3 pegs and 3 and a number of discs. In this instance, 3 discs.
Each disc is a different size. We want to move all discs to peg C so that the largest is on the bottom, second largest on bottom — 1 etc.
We can only move 1 disc at a time.
A disc cannot be placed on top of other discs that are smaller than it.
We want to use the smallest number of moves possible.
If we have 1 disc, we only need to move it once.
If we have 2 discs, we need to move it 3 times.
We need to store the smallest disc in a buffer peg (1 move), move the largest disc to peg c (2 moves) and move the buffer disc to peg c (3 moves).
When we have 4 discs we need to make 15 moves. 5 discs is 31.
These move numbers are powers of 2 minus 1.
To find out how many moves a Tower of Hanoi solution takes you calculate (2^n)-1 where n is how many discs there are.
Notice how we need to have a buffer to store the discs.
We can generalise this problem.
If we have n discs: move n-1 from A to B recursively, move largest from A to C, move n-1 from B to C recursively.
If there is an even number of pieces the first move is always into the middle. If there are an odd number of pieces the first move is always to the other end.
ToH(numDisc, source, destination, spare)
if (numDisc > 1)
ToH(numDisc-1, source, spare, destination) Move a disc from source to destination if (numDisc > 1)
ToH(numDisc-1, spare, destination, source)
This is what the execution tree looks like for the above algorithm with ToH(3, A, C, B).
Once we call that we 2 calls to:
ToH(2, A, B, C)
ToH(2, B, C, A)
Since 2 is more than 1, we move it down one more level again.
Fibonacci Numbers
The Fibonacci numbers can be found in nature. They start at 1 and the next number is the current number + the previous number. Here it’s 1 + 1 = 2. Then 2 + 1 = 3. 3 + 2 = 5 and so on.
This is the formal definition of the fibonacci numbers. If n = 0 or n = 1, output 1. Else sum the previous numbers.
Execution table for F(n)
Algorithm F(n) if n == 0 or n == 1 then
return 1
else
return F(n-1)+F(n-2)
N here is 6. N is more than 0 or 1, so we ignore that part.
We then calculate F(5) + F(4).
F(5) becomes F(4) + F(2).
Eventually when we get down to the base cases (when F is 0 or 1) we end up with the number 1. We return the previous number to the upper level.
So F(1) + F(0) = 2 and then we get F2 + F1 = 2 + 1 = 3. | https://medium.com/brandons-computer-science-notes/divide-and-conquer-algorithms-4e83d9999ffa | ['Brandon Skerritt'] | 2019-03-31 14:36:45.613000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Education', 'Computer Science', 'Algorithms'] |
Big Tech Finally Attempts to Curb QAnon’s Spread | Image Credit: Mike MacKenzie
This week Twitter and TikTok each announced significant action against proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The New York Times reports that Facebook plans to “take similar steps to limit the reach of QAnon content on its platform” soon as well. The Times also reports that Facebook has been coordinating with Twitter and other social media platforms on QAnon.
Twitter banned 7,000 associated accounts, limited the reach of 150,000 additional accounts and “ban QAnon-related terms from appearing in trending topics and the platform’s search feature, ban known QAnon-related URLs and prohibit “swarming” of people who are baselessly targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns pushed by QAnon followers” The classification of QAnon content and activity as “coordinated harmful activity” is new and a reaction to the growing harm and harassment associated with QAnon. Meanwhile, TikTok has disabled two prominent QAnon related hashtags. Videos that use the hashtags are still up but users are unable to search for QAnon content using those hashtags.
As a reminder, QAnon is a mega far-right conspiracy that claims Donald Trump is waging war against an international Satanist sex-trafficking pedophile ring including multiple public figures and celebrities including everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks to Chrissy Teigen. Born on 4chan and 8chan in October 2017, QAnon devotees devour frequent posts, called QDrops, from a supposed Trump Administration staffer who goes by the handle ‘Q.’
If you live in the reality-based community QAnon sounds absolutely ridiculous but unfortunately, in the three years it’s existed, QAnon’s reach has exploded. Here’s what you need to know:
QAnon’s growth has accelerated during the pandemic. It now dominates other extremist and conspiracy conversations. Research on misinformation spread during the pandemic from Graphika finds that “over the course of the pandemic, the QAnon community has not only grown in size, but the QAnon content and concepts have taken hold in other communities. Further, our results show that this fringe ideology has spread to broader, more mainstream groups.” Mother Jones also reports that starting in mid-March, “online activity around QAnon and related topics rapidly climbed to all-time highs. Interest in the search terms has yet to return to pre-COVID levels.” Finally, The Global Network on Extremism and Technology has produced research showing that “three formerly distinct online ecosystems — lifestyle/wellness, violent extremism and conspiracy promoting groups — have become intertwined through shared #QAnon related hashtags and conspiracy narratives on vaccines, 5G and the evils of the ‘Deep State’ during this pandemic.”
QAnon supporters are running for office and winning primaries. There are 67 former and current QAnon supporters running for Congress this cycle and Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan reports that “fourteen candidates have secured a spot on the ballot in November by competing in primary elections.” QAnon believer Jo Rae Perkins is the Republican nominee for Senate in Oregon though she’s unlikely to win in November. But we’re likely to see at least two QAnon believers in the House next year: Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th district and Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd district, which Cook Political Report ranks as Likely Republican, who primaried a Republican incumbent and won.
QAnon inspires violent crimes and terrorism. The FBI has named QAnon a domestic terrorism threat, and with good reason. A QAnon believer in Arizona has pled guilty to a terrorism charge after blocking the Hoover Dam bridge with an armored truck. A QAnon believer is accused of murdering a Gambino family mob boss. The accused believed the victim was part of the deep state and that killing him would help Donald Trump. Recently a mother and QAnon believer was charged with kidnapping her own children and claiming she was a “sovereign citizen” and therefore the police had no authority over her. Finally, a QAnon believer is accused of starting a wildfire in Southern California.
Trump and MAGA continue to play footsie with QAnon. As I’ve written previously, while President Trump has yet to directly endorse QAnon and is unlikely to do so, he frequently retweets QAnon influencers and accounts on Twitter. Business Insider’s Tom Porter writes that the Trump campaign relies heavily on QAnon to spread conspiracy theories as a “deeply-embedded part of how the Trump campaign operates online.” And The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant reports that QAnon is merging with mainstream conservatism.
***
I’m glad that the tech companies are taking more action to curb the spread of QAnon. Anything that makes it harder for new people to discover QAnon and become radicalized is a positive development. But for those already lost in conspiracy-land, it’s too little too late. QAnon communities exist on every platform and have an extensive infrastructure of private digital spaces as well. Devotees are adept at getting around bans and finding workarounds. QAnon was born from pro-Trump online conversations but has long since eclipsed MAGA and will remain online long after Trump is gone. America will be reckoning with this homegrown conspiracy cult for years to come. | https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/big-tech-finally-attempts-to-curb-qanons-spread-7b95e3359695 | ['Melissa Ryan'] | 2020-07-27 17:39:36.738000+00:00 | ['Tik Tok', 'Disinformation', 'Twitter', 'Elections', 'Conspiracy Theories'] |
How Can I Improve On My Writing? | ‘Creating A Masterpiece’
How can I improve on my writing? Which is the best format, style and technique to use? Where can I get the ideas to write about?
These are just some of the questions I have asked myself as I embark upon my curious writing adventure.
I realize that perhaps I should have created this particular piece first, ahead of the previous two articles I recently produced, asked some of the above questions before jumping in and writing whatever was on my mind at the time. But I didn’t, so….
Where It Began
My interest in writing has only recently been triggered again, I do not know why and I do not know what it was that ignited that smoldering ember, but I’m here now, intrigued as to what will come of this recurring interest.
Writing first became of interest to myself in my school days, as I imagine was the case for the majority of people.
A rebel without a cause, the class clown, slouched in my seat at the front of the class (so as the teacher could see what I was up to), shirt hanging out, top button undone and tie in a loose knot all accompanied by a far away glaze in my eyes that signaled to the educator, ‘I am just not that interested in retaining the information that is being forced upon me.’
In my naive ‘know it all’ teenage brain, all teachers had nothing useful to say and they were saying it all too loud!
This was my opinion in each of my classes bar one, English.
Perhaps it was the 6’3, square shouldered, balding giant of a teacher who conduced the class that compelled me to straighten up, smarten up and pay attention. That and he was also the vice principle of the school.
Working our way through the various case studies of the school curriculum was when writing first engaged my curiosity.
A Quick Fix?
Jump forward a few years, 10 (and a bit) roughly, which brings us to present day, 2018. Besides the bare minimum at work or a social media post while under the influence, when we all become a deep and spiritual individual with the answers to all of life’s big questions, I have done next to nothing when it comes to writing, until now.
I have decided to write as often as I can or whenever there is a moment of silence at home, which isn’t a common occurrence with a boisterous 1-year-old running amok and a prepubescent 10-year-old moping around like a lost soul.
As a result of this decision, I have been eager to answer the questions previously mentioned and most commonly asked it seems: ‘How can I improve my writing?’ ‘Which is the best format, style and technique to use?’ ‘Where can I get the ideas to write about?’ to name a few.
It then occurred to me, everyone already knows the answers to these questions deep down, the real question that is being asked is: ‘I need a quick fix to becoming a successful writer, where can I find it?’
As I am a complete newbie to writing I am not going to say for certain that I know this answer, but I would hazard a guess and say, ‘There is no quick fix’
Solutions?
Through researching and on the quest to increase my knowledge on writing, I have come up with a few personal opinions on how to improve on my writing.
1. Practice — The only way to improve at anything, whether it be writing, sports, driving, you name it, is to practice. Repetition is the key. You will never master a task if you never perform the task, so get writing as often as possible, emails, social media posts, blogs will all contribute to increasing your writing capabilities. 2. Reading — Lately I have been paying closer attention to how pieces are written and formatted. By reading books, articles, blog posts, advertisements in magazines and newspapers, bill boards, anything were the creator/author of the content is trying to evoke an emotion I have not only been reading, but also thinking about why this has been put together in this particular style, what is the author trying to achieve, what can I learn from this etc. 3. Listening — This is the digital era and there is no shortage of podcasts, videos and audiobooks, to name a few, on almost any subject you could possibly think of. I have been listening to podcasts and interviews from professional writers on my daily commute, whilst I work and even as I drift of to sleep. The beauty of listening is it can be done on the move and be done whilst multitasking with the option to playback any thing you may have missed. 4. Online Courses — I haven’t looked to deeply into any of the online courses that are on offer as I believe there is more than enough free content to learn from for someone at my stage of their writing journey. 5. Where to get ideas — I have set up a Google Docs folder on my phone that I use to note ideas that I hear in my daily life. Perhaps I hear a certain subject mentioned on the radio that triggers an idea I could write about, I jot it down right there and then so as not to forget. There are ideas surrounding you every day, you just have to listen. Maybe you don’t wear your ear buds the next time you use the bus or train for example and just listen to what’s going around you, anything can set off a thought pattern in your mind and next thing you know you have 5 or 6 ideas to write about, give it a go.
The points listed above include some of the steps which I use when I wish to learn or improve at anything in life and I believe the same methods will be just as rewarding as I seek to improve on my own writing skills.
I would love to hear of any other methods you use to help increase your knowledge and skills when it comes to writing or anything that you have tried in the past that has been of immense value and help in moving you forward toward your writing goals. | https://weejusty.medium.com/how-can-i-improve-on-my-writing-37544ae10f89 | ['Ryan Justin'] | 2019-05-03 01:35:57.289000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Practice', 'Writing', 'Reading', 'Productivity'] |
Chronos — Episode 7. The End? | The End?
Welcome to the final episode of Chronos! I hope you have enjoyed it thus far. I am going, to be honest, I know this is the ending but I’m not 100% sure how I’m going to end it yet. I have had several people contact me with their thoughts on the story, so if you have any other thoughts please let me know! I plan on editing the story with those thoughts and publishing the whole thing as a continuous story…so stay tuned for that in the new year! Without further ado, here is the link to the last episode and a quick summary of what happened. If you are all caught up then just jump into the final episode below!
Previously on Chronos: Jerry and Samantha are not dead after all. We see them wake up again on the same day. Not sure what is happening, Jerry has all his memories of the previous night. Memories of being stabbed and bleeding to death. Quickly, Jerry and Samantha put together a plan. Jerry had recognized the woman killed on the park bench. He had recognized Jess. They track Jess down and try their best to explain what is happening (if they themselves even know). Jess is on board to help them and asks what she needs to do. We were left with their ominous reply, “Jess. We need you…to die.”
Episode 7 — The End?
October 30th
1:30pm
“Die!? You want me to die!? Is this some kind of joke!!?”
“Well…let me explain..”
Furious, she interrupted again, “Die!?”
“Just…look…you are NOT going to die! Not…really.”
Mocking him, “What is that supposed to mean, Time Wizard?”
Brushing the insult off, “If my theory is correct, and they have been so far, then if our plan succeeds we will wake this morning safe and sound.” The two others looked at him in utter confusion.
“Just…trust me. The timing of it is weird. And as strange as it sounds, time is of the essence. We need to lay out our plan.”
Jess looked him in the eyes and saw nothing but confidence. She responded, “Ok, Jerry. I trust you. Let’s see the play.”
5:30pm
The train came to a screeching halt. Jess, heart beating out of her chest, took a deep breath. “This is it.” She whispered to herself. She took what confidence she could muster and exited the train. She looked around the terminal. No one was in sight. Where there usually sat a man with a paper and coffee, was now an empty bench.
She walked to the park. Every step her heartbeat quickened. She sat down at the bench, hands trembling, not even aware of her surroundings. In the bushes nearby lay Jerry, ready to trap the monster once and for all.
5:47pm
“POOF!” As if out of thin air, he appeared. A man with a scarred face and a red feather in his top hat. Knife in hand, he did it. He slit her throat. Jess looked over at Jerry with her eyes wide open. Speaking with her soul, “This better work.”
“POOF! There he was again. Teleported in the same second to where Rob stood. But where was he? Rob was missing. Gerald stood there stabbing thin air! Gerald looked around for a split second. For the first time in a long time, he was afraid. Then a splitting pain in the side of his neck. Blood pouring down his sides as darkness surrounded him.
2:30pm
While Jess and Jerry went over their part of the plan, Samantha left to do her role.
She left the breakroom and walked up to Rob’s desk. “Hello, excuse me, are you Rob Shar?”
“Umm…yes, yes I am.”
“Could you come with me, we have a few questions to ask you.”
“Can I ask what this is about?”
“No. You cannot. Either come quietly or we can arrest you loudly. It’s your choice.”
Rob was terrified. He thought to himself, “Arrest? What did I do? They can’t possibly know about…” He looked in the breakroom and noticed the strange man talking to Jess. “Maybe they do know…”
“Sir, this way please.”
Rob got up and followed Samantha out of the building. She took him all the way back to Jerry’s apartment.
3:15pm
Samantha brought Rob into the apartment and had him sit across from her at the kitchen table. Pouring herself a cup of coffee, she offered him some too. Rob accepted the offer. She went on to speak, “Rob, Rob, Rob. You know stalking people is illegal.”
“Stalking? I..”
She cut him off, “Just stop it. We know you stalk Jess every day. Lucky for you, we caught you before she did. Lucky for you, there are bigger problems at hand than you.”
“What do you mean? Am I under arrest?”
“Rob, we are not the police. Look around. This is an apartment, not a police station.”
“Are you going to kill me?” He asked, looking around for a possible escape.
“Rob…calm down. We are doing just the opposite. We are trying to save you, and possibly Jess.” Rob was puzzled and afraid. “Look, we don’t have time to explain everything right now. And to be honest, you would ‘t believe us anyway. So, for now, we just need you to rest.”
“POP!” A tranquilizer dart impaled Rob right in the thigh. He didn’t see she was holding the gun under the table the entire time. He collapsed on the table. His coffee spilling all over the ground. But this time that’s all that spilled.
Talking on the phone, “Alright, Jerry, we are all set. The mission is a go.”
4:00pm
When Samantha left the office with Rob, Jerry went out to use his quantum tracking devices in the streets to try and locate Gerald.
“He’s been a busy man. I don’t know how long he’s been at it, but this day has more entanglement than all the other days in history…combined. I don’t know his full plan, but I know it has to be more than just killing you two.”
“This is just surreal. I don’t understand.”
“I know, Jess. But listen. It will be over soon. As for now, you know your side of the plan. Just go about your day as normal and I promise you will wake up tomorrow. Or…today…well…you just won’t die, ok?”
Jess, afraid, left him and tried to entertain any other thought than the fact she was going to have her throat slit in a couple of hours.
4:15pm
Creaking, Jerry pushed the door opened. It was an old abandoned theater. His quantum tracker was off the charts here. This must be the place. Jerry walked into the main auditorium and saw him sitting on the stage. Practically waiting for him.
Speaking in his ominous slow tone, “Well hello, Jerry. I thought I killed you yesterday, hahaha.”
“Hello, Mr…?”
“Just call me Gerald. I thought I told you to drop all this ‘detective nonsense.’ I simply cannot be stopped. I have seen this day more times than the number of seconds you’ve been alive. In fact, I’ve had this very conversation with you more times than you know.”
Jerry called his bluff, “No. I don’t think that’s true, Gerald. I think this has never happened in all your attempts. I don’t think we’ve ever met. In fact, I think you’re actually afraid of me.”
“POOF!” Gerald disappeared from the stage. He was now right in front of Jerry with a knife to his throat. Staring at him with those red eyes, “hahaha! Afraid? Of you? I haven’t been afraid in years.”
Jerry held it together. “Listen, Gerald, it’s not too late to take it all back. You don’t have to do what you’re going to. Imagine all the good you can do with this power!”
“Good? Why would I do that? What person deserves that? Haha! No, no, no. I plan to rid the earth of you petty creatures. The despicable, deplorable, routine-loving, selfish creatures we call humans!”
“And then what? When we are all gone, then what, Gerald?”
“Well, I guess I’d die after that. But at least I’d be happy.”
Jerry stood there staring into the deep malice in Gerald’s eyes. “Well…Gerald. I’m afraid you’re not the only one who knows about time.”
“What do you mean?”
“POOF!” This time Jerry disappeared. Gerald’s eyes were huge. The fear started to trickle in. “No, no, this cannot be! That arrogant scientist thinks he can trick me! I am Gerald! I am the greatest killer who ever lived! I will prove it to him.”
5:00pm
Jerry couldn’t believe it. His teleporter actually worked. It only took him 15 years to build. And this was the first successful test run. No body-parts removed, no one died, it was a true success.
He gathered his things and made his way to the park for the final showdown.
5:47pm
As the blood poured out of Gerald’s neck, Jerry whispered in his ear, “Do you have the time?” Gerald glanced over at him, that big Christmas grin on his face again. Then…suddenly…darkness. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/chronos-episode-7-48e3a79450b8 | ['David J. Meyer'] | 2019-12-18 23:30:52.650000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Suspense', 'Thriller'] |
The Essay | Did you go to the party? I
Heard Brian was there. Mr. Marx is
Collecting the essays he assigned last
Week. Everyone
Was there. Even Sarah?
I’m so glad it’s almost break. Are you ready
For the game on Friday? The
Cheer team has to
Wear leg covers since it’s getting
So cold now. Mr. Marx is a joke.
Did you see the video? She’s
Actually showing her face. I
Just bought these sneakers.
Oh my God, look at her face! I
Didn’t know someone
Could drink that much. Dude,
I’m not ready for this Anatomy exam.
Gross!
Did you see the way she’s
Looking at
Him?
What a great night! That’s what
Brian said, too.
Hey Sarah, looking good.
I forgot about the Essay. | https://medium.com/@beyondliterary/the-essay-aa5a1b7e3cda | ['Beyond Literary'] | 2020-12-07 17:02:57.304000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Writing', 'Creative', 'Conversations', 'Poetry'] |
A New Year’s Eve | An introverted non-drinker, Dan didn’t attend many company New Year’s Eve parties. But this year, he got peer-pressured into it.
Dan saw an attractive woman who appeared sober.
“Hi, I’m Dan. Have we met?”
“I don’t think so. I rarely attend company parties.”
“Me either.”
“Hi, I’m Eve.” | https://medium.com/centina-pentina/a-new-years-eve-e5ae9d5b393a | ['Mark Starlin'] | 2020-12-30 02:06:38.354000+00:00 | ['Introvert', 'Romance', 'Pentina', 'Microfiction', 'New Year'] |
WHY ARE CRIMES COMMITTED?. ( CRIMINOLOGY ) | Study Basic Criminology NOW
Criminology can be defined in many different ways. It is the scientific study of crime, of criminals and of penal institutions. It is a branch of Sociology and it deals with the causes of crime and the ways in which crime could be prevented. Just like any other social science, Criminology also has different approaches and perspectives. Following are few approaches and views in which we can understand and deal with the different types of crimes.
1.) Biological Approaches
Biological theories of criminality claim that criminal behavior is caused because of some problem or change in the biological makeup of a person. This change may be inherited with heredity, or it could be the result of any abnormality in the brain or it could also be because of a blow/hit/trauma to the brain. There are several biological theories out of which the following are essential and well known.
Genetics and Criminality (Caesar Lombroso)
Lombroso was an Italian psychiatrist who was a physician in the army. He was considered to be the “father of Modern Criminology”. Based on his observations, he published a book titled “The Criminal Man” in which he claimed that criminals were physically inferior in growth and that they were less sensitive to pain due to which they have little regard for the sufferings of others. He believed that criminals could be distinguished from innocent people on the basis of anatomical oddities such as small diameter of the skull, big ears and abnormal secondary sex characters. Lombroso also had the belief that women were less inclined towards crimes as it deviated from their basic nature. Although these studies gained a lot of popularity, Lombroso later realized that these theories were pointless. Another study of genetics claimed that the prisoners and criminals had an extra Y chromosome. A Y chromosome contributes to maleness so an extra Y chromosome constituted super-male which meant more aggressive and hence potentially criminal. However these findings were also proved to be wrong in a later study.
Constitutional (Body Type) Determinants
William H. Sheldon, a professor in the University of Colombia tried to establish a relationship between body structure and behavior. The structure and built of a person can be divided into three groups; endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph.
The person high in endomorph is soft, fat and bulky. He has short limbs and small bones, soft skin and usually a mild temperature and is a comfortable person.
Mesomorphs have a hard and muscular physique. Thus they have a hairy appearance and large wrists and hands. These people have a serious temperament and can behave aggressively.
Ectomorphs have a flat chest, a long thin body and a little in the way of muscular development. These people are constitutionally lean and fragile with delicate body, small face, sharp nose and fine hair. They are sensitive by temperament and avoid crowds.
Sheldon claimed that these physical structures were directly related to the temperament of the person who committed crime. Thus, according to him, endomorphs are moody and accommodative by nature while mesomorphs had a rigid and somewhat serious temperament. The ectomorphs are often indecisive and are short tempered. Experimentally Sheldon concluded that the mesomorph physique was more likely to manifest criminal behavior.
Constitutional Interactionist View
The two Harvard social scientists, Wilson and Herrnstein, believed that gender, intelligence and body type did play a role in determining criminals. It is well known that more men are repeated law offenders than women. If we look at intelligence, extreme research leads to the conclusion that criminals have an average IQ of 92 i.e. 8 points below the mean IQ of a common man. Low IQ means the criminals cannot understand society’s rules or the consequences of their actions. Most criminals are also impulsive. Their criminal act show little planning and they are less able to delay pleasure than most people. Body type also is responsible to criminal behavior just like the study of Sheldon tells.
2.) Psychological Approaches
According to Nietzel (1979), these theories all share the same beliefs that crime is the result of some personality attribute uniquely possessed by the potential criminal. From the psychological perspective, the cause of criminal behavior could be a result of the failure of psychological development, learned behaviors of aggression and violence, mental illness or a personality disorder, or by heredity.
Yochelson and Samenow, psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC propose that criminals possess a different way of thinking. These psychiatrists claim that criminals are criminals. People become criminals as a series of choices they start making at an early age. It is the patterns that result in criminality. Crime is like alcoholism. Once a criminal, always a criminal.
Personality disorder, also known as Psychopathy, generally refers to persons who have frequently and repetitive criminal activity. Such criminals have an unsocial character. They are unable to learn from experiences or feel guilt. They lack loyalty to family, friends, groups and society’s values. As Nietzel observes, they are grossly selfish, callous and irresponsible and tend to blame others for their behavior. According to a research, about 80% of psychopaths are men. Such people are easy to identify but difficult to rehabilitate. Fortunately, psychopaths are accountable for a very small number of law offences. However, they commit a large number of violent crimes. They seem to have an unusual characteristic pattern of brain organization.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis suggested that criminality may result to either an over active conscience or too weak conscience. He noticed that those who were suffering from unbearable guilt committed crimes in order to be apprehended and punished. Once they had been punished, their feelings of guilt were relieved. Freud proposed a new conception, in 1920. It contained three systems; id, ego and superego. These systems are concepts or ways of looking at the personality of an individual. ‘Id’ is the personality that is present from birth. It is inherited and is unconscious. It is the life instinct, which is sexual and biological urges like hunger and thirst, and the death instinct, which accounts for our aggression and destructive impulses. The ‘Id’ operates according to the pleasure principle i.e. to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. The ‘id’ cannot act on its own. It can wish, imagine, fantasize and demand. The ‘ego’ is the logical and rational and part of the personality which makes the mind consider about the real world. The ego draws energy from ‘id’. One of the functions of ego is to satisfy the id’s urges. It is mostly conscious and acts according to the ‘reality principle’. It must consider the limitations and restrictions of the real world in determining the appropriate times, places and objects of gratification of the id’s wishes and because of that sometimes compromises must be made e.g. a chicken sandwich instead of a fish curry. When the child is 5 or 6 years of age, the super ego — the moral component of the personality — is formed. It has two parts; the ‘conscience’, which consists of all behaviors for which we have been punished and about which we feel guilty, and the ‘ego ideal’, which contains the behavior for which we have been rewarded and about which we feel pride and satisfaction. At first, the superego reflects only the parent’s expectations of what is good and bad, but it expands over time to incorporate teaching from the broader social world. The psychoanalytic theory of criminality attributes delinquent and criminal behavior to be a conscience so overbearing that it arouses feelings of guilt or so weak that it cannot control the individual’s impulses of immediate gratification. The principles appear to the psychologists who study criminality are:
1.) The actions and behaviors of an adult are understood in terms of childhood development
2.) Behavior and unconscious motives are connected and their interaction must be untangled if we are to understand criminality.
3.) Criminality is essentially a representation of psychological conflict.
3.) Sociological Approaches
Social approaches towards criminal behavior can be summed up into three theories; structural explanations, sub-cultural explanations and the multiple factor approach.
Structural Explanations maintain that criminality is the result of structural defects in the society or family i.e. the inequality in the structure of the society. There are different types of people in a society. Some realize that the means to achieve their goals are restricted and act according to it and work for their goals. Some people just fix their goal but reject the accepted and legitimate means to achieve them. Some follow the institutionalized means such as hard work and thrift but lose sight of their goal or reject them. Some reject both the means and their goals which drops them out from the society and such people tend towards behaviors such as alcoholism, drug addiction and homelessness. The others become rebels and view accepted goals as unattainable or undesirable and socially approved means of reaching them as demanding or unworkable. So when success is blocked by unavailability of means, individuals experience strain and either adjust their aspirations downwards or devise alternative routes to achieve their goals.
Subcultures are the cultures within a culture. Examples of which may be emos, hippies, LGBT etc. Subcultures exist within a society, not apart from it. Deviant behavior is supported by subcultures. A subculture of criminals has its own norms which stand over against the norms of the larger group. The deviance doesn’t seem unusual or abnormal from their point of view.
Despite multiple efforts of criminologists to compile a singular theoretical explanation of criminal behavior, no hypothesis could answer the issue satisfactorily. Eventually, the sociologists made use of the ‘multiple factor approach’ to explain the causation of crime. The supporters of this view believe that crime is a product of combination of a variety of factors which cannot be narrated in terms of general prepositions.
1) Mobility
The rapid gain of industrialization has led to the easy means of communication and travel. Hence it has become easy to commit crime as the criminal can commit the crime in a place where he cannot be recognized and can run away and hide. The criminal can also commit cybercrimes by the comfort of his home by using different methods on the internet.
2) Cultural Conflicts
As our society is changing rapidly, social change is caused. This may sometimes lead to cultural conflicts between different sections of the society. The differences may be between old and new values, local and imported values, and the traditional and government imposed values. An example of this may be the tribal areas of Pakistan who have a completely different culture from the dominant society. The transfer of population due to migration or immigration quite often affects the crime rate of a given place. The culture conflicts between inhabitants and immigrants results in deviant behavior.
3) Family background
As children spend most of their time with their parents and relatives, family background plays a vital role in criminality. Children adapt criminal tendencies if they find their parents or members of their family behaving in a similar manner. Some parents embrace criminality such as burglary, pickpocketing and prostitution as a way of life and teach their children the same. Some parents may not be themselves associated with the crime but may not prevent their children from doing so. But children can turn out to be criminal even if this isn’t the case. Poverty, quarrels between the parents, frequent births, step motherly treatment may lead to the neglect of the child and can cause him to turn towards criminality
4) Political Ideologies
With the changing ideologies and laws, the concept of criminality changes. What was unlawful and illegal yesterday may become lawful and legal today and vice versa. The liberation of abortion laws, homosexuality, and protection of women against violence including harmful traditional practices like ‘suti’ are some examples. Political offences like the excessive interference of politicians in executive functions of the government weaken the morale of the administrators as well as the police due to which there is a spontaneous growth in crime.
5) Religion and Crime
The bond of religion keeps people within their limits and helps them to keep away from sinful and criminal acts. The growth of liberalization in modern times has tended to leave people free to do as they like without any restrictions or fear. On the other hand, although all religions speak of peace and harmony, most wars on Earth are fought in the name of religion like that between Iran and Iraq, Catholics and Protestants, and the terrorist activities in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.
6) Economic Conditions
Nowadays money is a paramount consideration to assess the social status of a person in society. Economic Growth and Urbanization are major factors behind it. Everyone can not catch up with urbanization due to which social disorganization is caused. Some people become poor while the others get richer. Everyone runs after money and do go to different extents to gain a high social status. This leads to employment of women and their outdoor activities which also enhances the opportunities for sex crimes.
7) Ecology of Crime
The region, weather and climate of a place also affect the crime rate. It Is well known that violation of customs, excise and drug laws is more common in border areas and coastal regions than in plains. Illegal felling of trees is an everyday activity in forest regions. In pilgrim places, cheating, stealing and exploiting are common activities. Also, in cold areas, the people have low temperament and are less attracted to crimes whereas in warmer areas, the temperament of people is comparatively higher and hence they tend more towards crime.
8) Influence of Media
Experience has showed that television and films have the maximum impact on the viewer’s due to combined audio-visual impact. Most of the serials and films shown on television or cinema halls depict scenes of violence which adversely affects the viewers, particularly young boys and girls who often tend to imitate the same in their real life situations. The rising incidence of juvenile delinquency is essentially the result of the evil effect of violence and vulgarism and undesirable sex exposures depicted in movies on television. Likewise pornography has an unwholesome influence on the impressionable minds of the young which generates criminality amongst them. Nevertheless, it is seen that the media has the powerful effect on public perceptions of the dangers posed by particular events, actions or behaviors. At times, crime may also be distortedly reported to suppress reality and sometimes it may be hidden.
THE END | https://medium.com/@saadsalman-3536/approaches-to-criminal-behaviour-edad33914d70 | ['Saad Salman'] | 2020-09-02 06:29:10.400000+00:00 | ['Criminal', 'Crime', 'Psychology', 'Criminology', 'Sociology'] |
Did Satoshi Steal My Blog Post? | I’m JP Richardson, co-founder of Exodus bitcoin/ethereum wallet and active JavaScript/Bitcoin developer (github). I, like a lot of you, got caught up into reading about Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.
I started poking around Craig Wright’s site and stumbled upon this gem: http://www.drcraigwright.net/generating-bitcoin-address/ (if link is dead/removed: PDF copy)
I thought it looked very similar to an old post I wrote in 2013: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-with-javascript using an ancient version of bitcoinjs-lib circa 2013.
Google for “Random number generation”+”is the basis of most cryptography”. Top two hits? My post is first, Craig Wright’s is second.
Here’s a screenshot:
Look at the code snippets. The variable names. The old bitcoinjs version. The ordering of the languages.
Coincidence? Could be.
Did Craig Wright steal my post? Or just maybe, I am Satoshi Nakamoto.
Thanks to Fluffy Pony for reviewing both posts. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/did-satoshi-steal-my-blog-post-76a68cdda4f3 | ['Jp Richardson'] | 2019-03-26 03:13:33.291000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Tech', 'Ethereum'] |
How to create a 3D time-series map using Python and Kepler.gl | Visualizing time-series data using Kepler.gl
In the wake of protests rippling throughout the U.S., I wanted to better understand just how often interactions between police and victims lead to death. This presented a great opportunity to test out Uber’s Kepler.gl toolbox and create an interactive 3D map of police interactions that have resulted in death.
In this post I’ll talk about the map, what it does, and how we can interact with the data. I’ll also talk about the creation process and how you can easily make interactive geospatial visualizations (for those that are interested in the technical aspects of this project).
About the map
When you open the map you’ll notice a time series slider with a play/pause button. You can click the play button to animate the data and see how the number of deaths change over time (ranging from January 2013 to December of 2019).
Time series functionality in-action. (Image by author)
If you click on the > button (in the top left corner of the page), you can interact with the data to change what you see on the map. For example you can: hide layers, add new ones, filter the data by variables (such as race, gender, etc). I added a hidden layer that visualizes aggregated data based on geospatial radius. When the layer is visible, you’ll see calculated clusters:
Time series with cluster mapping layer enabled. (Image by author)
I won’t talk in-depth about everything you can do within the map interface. Feel free to check out a live version of the map here and play around with the map’s features / explore the data.
How the map was made
Let’s walk through the process of creating this map. To do this we leverage open-access datasets and Kepler.gl, Uber’s open-source geospatial analysis tool. Uber recently released a great article talking about Kepler.gl. It was built using React & Redux, Deck.gl, and WebGL.
If you’ve worked with Deck.gl, using Kepler.gl is even easier. Deck.gl already makes it easy to create WebGL-based visualization of large datasets. Kepler.gl further simplifies the process by providing an on-screen interface where you can quickly configure your data visualization. Map configurations can be saved for archiving or edited directly (if you want to make changes to your configuration script manually).
Your dataset will need to include three variables:
a ‘datetime’ variable (to enable time series functionality) a latitude variable (from the polygon centroid for each county) a longitude variable (from the polygon centroid for each county)
If you have a date variable already, you’ll want to modify the variable to include at least hours and minutes (i.e. convert the date to a date time format). Currently, Kepler.gl can only process date time stamps and not dates only (see Kepler.gl Github Issue #78).
A quick way to do this (if your date column is formatted as mm/dd/yy):
kepler_mvp_df[‘datetime’] = kepler_mvp_df[‘datetime’].astype(str) + ‘ 0:00’
We’ll want to include longitude and latitude information for Kepler time series maps because rather than assigning a geojson shape to each time stamp, we’ll use the centroid of each polygon as the central longitude and latitude of each distinct area/region.
The police interaction dataset I used (see dataset source/validity section) includes the street address, city, state, zip code, and county information. We’ll map the data by state counties because we can use the National Weather Service’s GIS shape files to extract each county’s central longitude and latitude using the centroid of each county’s respective geospatial shape.
I recommend using geopandas to extract the shapefile data:
shapefile_data = gpd.read_file("c_03mr20.shp")
print(shapefile_data) shapfile_raw = pd.DataFrame()
shapfile_raw = shapfile_raw.append(shapefile_data) shapfile_raw
Once you’ve extracted the longitude and latitudes, we simply merge the coordinate dictionary with the dataset using state and county variables (which should be present in both datasets). In this case, we’ll merge the data using State abbreviations and County names:
kepler_mvp_df = pd.merge(MVP_raw,merged_dict_df, on=[‘STATE’,’County’])
Now we’re ready to load our data into Kepler.gl and begin creating our visualization!
Setting up Kepler.gl for Jupyter Notebook:
There are many ways to use Kepler.gl. For this map, I used the Kepler.gl Jupyter widget. This method is useful because Kepler.gl loads within a cell in Jupyter Notebook, allowing you to manipulate your data and load it directly into Kepler without having to toggle between environments or transfer your dataset.
If you don’t have Jupyter Notebook, I highly recommend this tutorial. The easiest way to install Kepler is using pip:
pip install keplergl
I recommend pushing your data to a DataFrame using pandas. In this case our dataset was prepared within Jupyter Notebook, so we just directly import the dataset into the Kepler Jupyter widget:
from keplergl import KeplerGl kepler_map = KeplerGl(height = 800, data={‘data_name_here’: dataset_df}) kepler_map
In the above snippet, we’re importing the Kepler widget, specifying a window height, and defining/importing our dataset into the widget.
Once the data is loaded you can configure the map visuals to your liking using the Kepler.gl built-in interface.
(Image by author)
For this map, a heat map was overlaid along the x- and z-axis, where the heat density ranges from dark red to yellow as the density of deaths increase. 3D rendering of the map allows us to take advantage of the y-axis, using yellow lines to show the intensity of the heatmap density color (seeing a yellow dot in the center of a heat spot doesn’t tell you about its intensity relative to other yellow-colored hot spots, so the hexbin lines help us better visualize hotspot density by utilizing the y-axis).
Your configuration script will looking something like this:
new_config = {'version': 'v1',
'config': {'visState': {'filters': [{'dataId': ['police action that resulted in death'],
'id': 'o7g4tr5v',
'name': ['datetime'],
'type': 'timeRange',
'value': [1357006005000, 1374938411000],
'enlarged': True,
'plotType': 'histogram',
'yAxis': None},
{'dataId': ['police action that resulted in death'],
'id': 'p34jx073r',
'name': ["Victim's race"],
'type': 'multiSelect',
'value': [],
'enlarged': False,
'plotType': 'histogram',
'yAxis': None}],
'layers': [{'id': 'e136xu9',
'type': 'heatmap',
'config': {'dataId': 'police action that resulted in death',
'label': 'Heat',
'color': [231, 159, 213],
'columns': {'lat': 'LAT', 'lng': 'LON'},
'isVisible': True,
'visConfig': {'opacity': 0.5,
'colorRange': {'name': 'Global Warming',
'type': 'sequential',
'category': 'Uber',
'colors': ['#5A1846',
'#900C3F',
'#C70039',
'#E3611C',
'#F1920E',
'#FFC300']},
'radius': 40},
'hidden': False,
'textLabel': [{'field': None,
'color': [255, 255, 255],
'size': 18,
'offset': [0, 0],
'anchor': 'start',
'alignment': 'center'}]},
'visualChannels': {'weightField': None, 'weightScale': 'linear'}},
{'id': 'm9ia9z',
'type': 'hexagon',
'config': {'dataId': 'police action that resulted in death',
'label': 'Hex',
'color': [221, 178, 124],
'columns': {'lat': 'LAT', 'lng': 'LON'},
'isVisible': True,
'visConfig': {'opacity': 0.4,
'worldUnitSize': 8,
'resolution': 8,
'colorRange': {'name': 'Global Warming',
'type': 'sequential',
'category': 'Uber',
'colors': ['#5A1846',
'#900C3F',
'#C70039',
'#E3611C',
'#F1920E',
'#FFC300']},
'coverage': 1,
'sizeRange': [0, 500],
'percentile': [0, 100],
'elevationPercentile': [0, 100],
'elevationScale': 40,
'colorAggregation': 'count',
'sizeAggregation': 'count',
'enable3d': True},
'hidden': False,
'textLabel': [{'field': None,
'color': [255, 255, 255],
'size': 18,
'offset': [0, 0],
'anchor': 'start',
'alignment': 'center'}]},
'visualChannels': {'colorField': None,
'colorScale': 'quantile',
'sizeField': None,
'sizeScale': 'linear'}},
{'id': 'l2vlgiq',
'type': 'cluster',
'config': {'dataId': 'police action that resulted in death',
'label': 'Cluster',
'color': [23, 184, 190],
'columns': {'lat': 'LAT', 'lng': 'LON'},
'isVisible': True,
'visConfig': {'opacity': 0.05,
'clusterRadius': 110,
'colorRange': {'name': 'Uber Viz Diverging 1.5',
'type': 'diverging',
'category': 'Uber',
'colors': ['#00939C',
'#5DBABF',
'#BAE1E2',
'#F8C0AA',
'#DD7755',
'#C22E00']},
'radiusRange': [1, 40],
'colorAggregation': 'count'},
'hidden': False,
'textLabel': [{'field': None,
'color': [255, 255, 255],
'size': 18,
'offset': [0, 0],
'anchor': 'start',
'alignment': 'center'}]},
'visualChannels': {'colorField': None, 'colorScale': 'quantize'}},
{'id': 'ci0b6l',
'type': 'point',
'config': {'dataId': 'police action that resulted in death',
'label': "Victim's Name",
'color': [28, 27, 27],
'columns': {'lat': 'LAT', 'lng': 'LON', 'altitude': None},
'isVisible': False,
'visConfig': {'radius': 0,
'fixedRadius': False,
'opacity': 0.8,
'outline': False,
'thickness': 0.5,
'strokeColor': None,
'colorRange': {'name': 'Global Warming',
'type': 'sequential',
'category': 'Uber',
'colors': ['#5A1846',
'#900C3F',
'#C70039',
'#E3611C',
'#F1920E',
'#FFC300']},
'strokeColorRange': {'name': 'Global Warming',
'type': 'sequential',
'category': 'Uber',
'colors': ['#5A1846',
'#900C3F',
'#C70039',
'#E3611C',
'#F1920E',
'#FFC300']},
'radiusRange': [0, 50],
'filled': False},
'hidden': False,
'textLabel': [{'field': {'name': "Victim's name", 'type': 'string'},
'color': [255, 255, 255],
'size': 3,
'offset': [0, 0],
'anchor': 'start',
'alignment': 'center'}]},
'visualChannels': {'colorField': None,
'colorScale': 'quantile',
'strokeColorField': None,
'strokeColorScale': 'quantile',
'sizeField': None,
'sizeScale': 'linear'}}],
'interactionConfig': {'tooltip': {'fieldsToShow': {'police action that resulted in death': ["Victim's name",
"Victim's age",
"Victim's gender",
"Victim's race",
'URL of image of victim']},
'enabled': True},
'brush': {'size': 0.5, 'enabled': False},
'geocoder': {'enabled': False},
'coordinate': {'enabled': False}},
'layerBlending': 'additive',
'splitMaps': [],
'animationConfig': {'currentTime': None, 'speed': 0.5}},
'mapState': {'bearing': 12.35033335232777,
'dragRotate': True,
'latitude': 33.612636906131925,
'longitude': -98.63889376921583,
'pitch': 55.12552722162369,
'zoom': 3.5734484899775754,
'isSplit': False},
'mapStyle': {'styleType': 'dark',
'topLayerGroups': {},
'visibleLayerGroups': {'label': True,
'road': True,
'border': True,
'building': False,
'water': True,
'land': True,
'3d building': False},
'threeDBuildingColor': [9.665468314072013,
17.18305478057247,
31.1442867897876],
'mapStyles': {}}}}
Be sure to save your configuration script for future reference (or if you want to make changes manually to your config script):
current_config = kepler_map.config current_config
You can also export the map as an interactive html map:
kepler_map.save_to_html(file_name=”kepler_map.html”)
Always be sure to keep a copy of the final configuration files. You can use the config files to re-load map visuals in the Kepler Jupyter widget:
kepler_map = KeplerGl(height=800, data={‘data_name_here’: dataset_df}, config=current_config) kepler_map
OR you can also use saved config files to re-create interactive html maps quickly:
kepler_map.save_to_html(data={‘data_name_here’: dataset_df}, config=config, file_name=”kepler_map.html”)
And that’s it! Creating an interactive 3D map doesn’t get much easier than that.
Dataset source / validity:
The dataset I used came from mappingpoliceviolence.org, which was created by Samuel Sinyangwe and DeRay McKesson. I can’t attest to the accuracy nor validity of the dataset, but the dataset does contain deep detail about each individual data point listed in the set (such as demographic information, geographic information, and relevant links). | https://towardsdatascience.com/an-interactive-3d-map-of-police-action-s-that-have-resulted-in-death-b9d7fbf81822 | ['Erik Yan'] | 2020-09-26 19:47:28.149000+00:00 | ['Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Visualization', 'Data'] |
How 15 Mundane Miracles Saved 15 Lives From an Explosion | How 15 Mundane Miracles Saved 15 Lives From an Explosion
The miraculous case of the Beatrice, Nebraska choir members
Adaptation of Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash
On March 1, 1950, choir practice was scheduled, as usual, for 7:20 PM at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska. Choir members would usually all gather by 7:15 PM.
At 7:25 PM a gas leak caused an explosion. The blast demolished the church, destroyed the windows of nearby buildings, and took a nearby radio station off the air.
None of the 15 choir members scheduled to practice died. They were not there. Every single one had been delayed by a completely different and random reason.
What saved them?
The minister, Reverend Walter Klempel, his wife, and his daughter, Marilyn Ruth, were all set to leave on time. They were almost out the door when Marilyn Ruth noticed her dress had a stain. Her mother took out another dress and started ironing it.
When the church exploded, they were still at home. | https://medium.com/the-mystery-box/how-15-mundane-miracles-saved-15-lives-from-an-explosion-4e111669f3a6 | ['Martina Petkova'] | 2020-09-12 18:30:51.276000+00:00 | ['Mystery', 'Miracles', 'Unsolved Mysteries', 'Coincidence', 'Bizarre'] |
Engaging Patient Will Improve the Quality of Healthcare | The job of sharing patient stories should be spread across the organization, not assigned to a few staff.
As patients, we have long recognized and known the importance of including our voices to transform healthcare. And now the Canadian Medical Association Journal CMJA (October 1, 2018 article) is also acknowledging the important role patients can play.
There are many examples of hospitals and healthcare providers across Canada, and the world, including patient voices in a meaningful way. In a recent blog post, Dr. Brian Goldman shares how staff at Kingston General Hospital increased hand washing rates by implementing suggestions made by patients. The patients had recommended putting signs up indicating hand washing rates by healthcare professionals. This simple change, brought about by patient input, resulted in hand washing rates going up.
As a patient advocate, I have also seen how patient voices make a difference. This includes (with a lot of work) getting healthcare professionals to speak in plain language versus acronyms when holding meetings with patient volunteers present. Even though these are committee meetings made up primarily of medical staff, it is important to speak in a language that includes patient volunteers versus excludes them in the conversation. The hope being this change of language will continue outside of the committee meetings into their work with patients.
While some of these changes may appear small, over time, the small changes create larger changes. And these are the changes that are needed to truly create patient and family centred healthcare that respects and includes the needs of patients, their families and healthcare professionals.
More work ahead
While I was excited to read the CMAJ article, and Dr. Brian Goldman’s thoughts on patient engagement, I know we have a long way to go. While many healthcare authorities and hospitals now acknowledge the need to engage patients, it is often assigned to one department or a few staff instead of being an organization-wide priority.
Sadly, many patient engagement offices become the patient complaint office, so most of their time is spent responding to negative issues or putting out fires. While there is a place for this, as those voices need to be heard, this is not patient engagement.
Rather, true patient engagement is involving healthcare professionals from ALL levels of the organization.
This starts with training doctors, nurses, managers, patient volunteers, students, residents, and board members, on understanding how to include patient voices in a meaningful way. It’s helping them understand the role everyone plays in sharing patient stories — formally (by the patient) or informally (third-person telling of patient story).
It’s also about making this training, and acting upon the learnings, a priority in terms of time and funding for healthcare staff. And, with all do respect to patient engagement staff, this training needs to be offered from a patient advocate who is living the patient experience and can provide insights and advice from the patient perspective.
My hope is patient engagement and advocacy goes from being on the sidelines and assigned to a few staff, to being part of the culture and vocabulary of all healthcare professionals. This shouldn’t be in conflict or seen as a burden on top of their already high workloads, but rather as a way to decrease conflict, identify efficiencies and truly provide patient and family centred care that includes patient voices in a meaningful way.
If you like what you’ve read, visit learnpatientadvocacy.com to learn more about my patient advocacy work. | https://cynthialockrey.medium.com/engaging-patient-will-improve-the-quality-of-healthcare-274eb5724a7d | ['Cynthia Lockrey'] | 2018-10-02 19:08:56.898000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Patient Engagement', 'Transformation', 'Healthcare', 'Advocacy'] |
Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney | The way Dr Lyons talked about the brief was fascinating. While he may have had a concern for aesthetics — he would hardly have been talking to Boyd if he hadn’t — he essentially left all that to Boyd, offering no preference at all. What he was more interested in, he said, was the way the building would perform. The functional element to the architecture. “As a machine”, he said.
It’s slightly ironic to hear the “machine” quote, given how associated that is with Le Corbusier and its typical interpretation in a certain kind of modernism. Ironic given how intimate, warm and organic this house feels, at least from within. Interesting too, in terms of our contemporary focus on behaviour and performance in design.
Backtracking slightly, it’s worth pausing to tell the story of how he ended up with Boyd. Dr Lyons recalls advice he was given at the time: ‘In Sydney it’s Harry Seidler. In Melbourne you talk to Robin Boyd.’ Being in Sydney, and of a clearly pragmatic nature, he decided to speak to the former first, and regales us with a great tale revealing Seidler’s character. Invited to the great architect’s office in downtown Sydney, Dr Lyons enters the vast office that Seidler had to himself, a giant space, largely empty save for a desk at the far end, with Seidler sitting behind it. Lyons pads towards the architect, which seems to take an eternity, and settles down to listen. Seidler quickly lays things on the line, stating that he doesn’t want to see or hear from the client at all, after the initial commission — the architecture itself would be entirely up to him. (Oh Harry.) Those who have seen Mad Men recently may be able to visualise the office and the attitude all too well. | https://medium.com/iamacamera/lyons-house-robin-boyd-sydney-5a194c6ac9cb | ['Dan Hill'] | 2016-09-11 00:14:03.379000+00:00 | ['Sydney', 'Australia', 'Architecture', 'Modernism', 'Housing'] |
Interview Programming Questions and Answers in C — Part 3 | Interview Programming Questions and Answers in C — Part 3
Interview Programming Questions and Answers in C
Q. W.A.P to find the maximum/largest element without using an array concept.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int size, element, largest = 0;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Integers ::
", size);
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &element);
if(element > largest)
{
largest = element;
}
}
printf("Largest number is %d
", largest);
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to find the maximum/largest element in an array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], size, i, maximum, location = 1;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Integers ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
maximum = array[0];
for(i = 1; i < size; i++)
{
if(array[i] > maximum)
{
maximum = array[i];
location = i+1;
}
}
printf("Maximum Element is Present At Location %d and It's Value is %d
", location, maximum); return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to find the minimum/smallest element in an array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], size, i, minimum, location = 1;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Integers ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
minimum = array[0];
for(i = 1; i < size; i++)
{
if(array[i] < minimum)
{
minimum = array[i];
location = i+1;
}
}
printf("Minimum Element is Present At Location %d and It's Value is %d
", location, minimum); return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to insert an element in an array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], size, position, value, i;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Elements ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
printf("Enter the Location to Insert :: ");
scanf("%d", &position);
printf("Enter the Value to Insert :: ");
scanf("%d", &value);
for(i = size-1; i >= position-1; i--)
{
array[i+1] = array[i];
}
array[position-1] = value;
printf("Resultant Array is ::
");
for(i = 0; i <= size; i++)
{
printf("%d
", array[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to delete an element from an array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], size, position, i;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Elements ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
printf("Enter the Location to Delete :: ");
scanf("%d", &position);
if(position > size)
{
printf("Deletion Not Possible.
");
}
else
{
for(i = position - 1; i < size - 1; i++)
{
array[i] = array[i+1];
}
printf("Resultant Array is ::
");
for(i = 0 ; i < size - 1 ; i++)
{
printf("%d
", array[i]);
}
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to remove duplicate elements from an array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> void main()
{
int a[20], i, j, k, n; printf("Enter array size :: ");
scanf("%d", &n); printf("Enter %d array element ::
", n);
for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &a[i]);
} printf("Original array is ::
");
for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
printf("%d
", a[i]);
} for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
for(j = i+1; j < n;)
{
if(a[j] == a[i])
{
for(k = j; k < n; k++)
{
a[k] = a[k+1];
}
n--;
}
else
{
j++;
}
}
} printf("New array is ::
");
for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
printf("%d
", a[i]);
}
}
Q. W.A.P to merge two sorted arrays.
A. It is assumed that the user will enter arrays in ascending order.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int a[8] = {10,15,18,20,25,30,35,40};
int b[9] = {1,6,19,22,28,45,50,51,53};
int c[20];
int i, j, k, n1, n2;
i = j = k = 0;
n1 = 8;
n2 = 9;
while(i < n1 && j < n2)
{
if(a[i] < b[j])
{
c[k++] = a[i++];
}
else
{
c[k++] = b[j++];
}
} if(i < n1)
{
while(i < n1)
{
c[k++] = a[i++];
}
} if(j < n2)
{
while(j < n2)
{
c[k++] = b[j++];
}
}
printf("Sorted Array is ::
"); for(i = 0; i < k; i++)
{
printf("%d
", c[i]);
}
}
Q. W.A.P to merge two unsorted arrays.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int m, n, i = 0, j = 0, temp;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in First Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &m);
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Second Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &n);
int c[m+n];
printf("Enter %d Integers For First Array
", m);
for(i = 0; i < m; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &c[i]);
}
printf("Enter %d Integers For Second Array
", n);
for(i = i; i < m+n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &c[i]);
}
printf("Start Sorting
");
for(i = 0; i < m+n; i++)
{
for(j = i+1; j < m+n; j++)
{
if(c[i] > c[j])
{
temp = c[i];
c[i] = c[j];
c[j] = temp;
}
}
}
printf("Elements of Array After Merging and Sorting ::
");
for(i = 0; i < m+n; i++)
{
printf("%d
", c[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to merge elements of two arrays alternatively without using the third array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int a[10] = {10,20,30,40,50};
int b[5] = {15,25,35,45,55};
int i, j, k, n1, n2;
k = 1;
n1 = 5;
n2 = 5;
for(j = 0; j < n2; j++)
{
for(i = n1-1; i >= k; i--)
{
a[i+1] = a[i];
}
a[k] = b[j];
k = k + 2;
n1 = n1 + 1;
} printf("Final Array is ::
");
for(i = 0; i < n1; i++)
{
printf("%d
", a[i]);
}
}
Q. W.A.P to print the largest and the second largest element of the array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> void main()
{
int arr[100], i, n, largest1, largest2; printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &n); printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
"); for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
} largest1 = arr[0];
largest2 = arr[1]; for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
if(arr[i] > largest1)
{
largest2 = largest1;
largest1 = arr[i];
}
else if (arr[i] > largest2 && arr[i] != largest1)
{
largest2 = arr[i];
}
} printf("largest = %d, second largest = %d", largest1, largest2);
}
Q. W.A.P to print the first largest, second largest, and third largest element of the array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> void main()
{
int arr[100], i, n, largest1, largest2, largest3; printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &n); printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
"); for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
} largest1 = arr[0];
largest2 = arr[1];
largest3 = arr[2]; for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
if(arr[i] > largest1)
{
largest3 = largest2;
largest2 = largest1;
largest1 = arr[i];
}
else if (arr[i] > largest3 && arr[i] != largest1 && arr[i] != largest2)
{
largest3 = arr[i];
}
else if (arr[i] > largest2 && arr[i] != largest1 && arr[i] != largest3)
{
largest2 = arr[i];
}
}
printf("First Largest = %d, Second Largest = %d, Third Largest = %d", largest1, largest2, largest3); }
Q. W.A.P to reverse an array without using the second array.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], n, i, temp, end;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &n); printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
end = n - 1;
for (i = 0; i < n/2; i++)
{
temp = array[i];
array[i] = array[end];
array[end] = temp;
end--;
}
printf("Reversed array elements are ::
");
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
printf("%d
", array[i]);
}
return 0;
}
or
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int a[100], n, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &n); printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &a[i]);
}
i = 0;
j = n - 1;
while (i < j)
{
temp = a[i];
a[i] = a[j];
a[j] = temp;
i++;
j--;
}
printf("Reversed array elements are ::
");
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
printf("%d
", a[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to arrange even and odd numbers in the random array.
A. Segregate even and odd numbers in the array such that all the even numbers should be present first, and then the odd numbers.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int a[100], size, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &a[i]);
}
i = 0;
j = size - 1;
while (i < j)
{
while (a[i] % 2 == 0 && i < j)
{
i++;
}
while (a[j] % 2 != 0 && i < j)
{
j--;
}
if(i < j)
{
temp = a[i];
a[i] = a[j];
a[j] = temp;
i++;
j--;
}
}
printf("Final array elements are ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d
", a[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to sort elements of an array through Bubble Sort.
A.
Algorithm:
Step 1: Compare the first and the second element of the array and swap them if they are in the wrong order.
Step 2: Compare the second and the third element of the array and swap them if they are in the wrong order.
Step 3: Proceed until the last element of the array in a similar fashion.
Step 4: Repeat all of the above steps until the array is sorted.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int arr[100], size, i, j, temp, flag;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
}
printf("
Sorting array using bubble sort technique...
"); for(i = 0; i < (size-1); i++)
{
flag = 0;
for(j = 0; j < (size-1-i); j++)
{
if(arr[j] > arr[j+1])
{
temp = arr[j];
arr[j] = arr[j+1];
arr[j+1] = temp;
flag = 1;
}
}
if(flag == 0)
{
break;
}
}
printf("All Array elements sorted successfully!
");
printf("Array elements in ascending order:
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d ", arr[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to sort elements of an array through Selection Sort.
A.
Algorithm:
Step 1: Set min to the first location.
Step 2: Search the minimum element in the array.
Step 3: Swap the first location with the minimum value in the array.
Step 4: Assign the second element as min.
Step 5: Repeat the process until we get a sorted array.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int arr[100], size, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
}
printf("
Sorting array using selection sort technique...
"); for(i = 0; i < size-1; i++)
{
int min = i;
for(j = i+1; j < size; j++)
{
if(arr[j] < arr[min])
{
min = j;
}
}
if(min != i)
{
temp = arr[i];
arr[i] = arr[min];
arr[min] = temp;
}
}
printf("All Array elements sorted successfully!
");
printf("Array elements in ascending order:
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d ", arr[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to sort elements of an array through Insertion Sort.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int arr[100], size, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
}
printf("
Sorting array using insertion sort technique...
"); for(i = 1; i < size; i++)
{
temp = arr[i];
j = i-1;
while(j >= 0 && arr[j] > temp)
{
arr[j+1] = arr[j];
j--;
}
arr[j+1] = temp;
}
printf("All Array elements sorted successfully!
");
printf("Array elements in ascending order:
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d ", arr[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to sort elements of an array through Quick Sort.
A. Quicksort is based on the ‘Divide & Conquer’ algorithm. In this sorting technique, an element is picked as a pivot and the array is partitioned around the pivot element. The target of each partition is, to put all smaller elements before pivot & put all greater elements after the pivot.
Now, what is ‘Divide & Conquer’?
In the Divide & Conquer algorithm design paradigm, we divide the problems into sub-problems recursively then solve the sub-problems, & at last combine the solutions to find the final result.
One thing to keep in mind while dividing the problems into sub-problems is that the structure of sub-problems should not change as of the original problem.
Divide & Conquer algorithm has 3 steps:
1. Divide: Breaking the problem into subproblems
2. Conquer: Recursively solving the subproblems
3. Combine: Combining the solutions to get the final result
Now first, we look into the pseudocode for recursive QuickSort function :
/* low --> Starting index, high --> Ending index */
QuickSort(arr[], low, high)
{
if (low < high)
{
/* pi is partitioning index, arr[pi] is now
at right place */
int pi = partition(arr, low, high);
QuickSort(arr, low, pi - 1); // Before pi
QuickSort(arr, pi + 1, high); // After pi
}
} -------------------------------------------------------------------- /* This function takes last element as pivot, places
the pivot element at its correct position in sorted
array, and places all smaller (smaller than pivot)
to left of pivot and all greater elements to right
of pivot */ partition (arr[], low, high)
{
pivot = arr[low];
start = low;
end = high;
while(start < end)
{
while(arr[start] <= pivot)
{
start++;
}
while(arr[end] > pivot)
{
end--;
}
if(start < end)
{
swap(arr[start], arr[end])
}
}
swap(arr[low], arr[end])
return end; }
A program for the above Pseudocode is given below.
#include <stdio.h> void quickSort(int arr[], int low, int high);
int partition(int arr[], int low, int high);
void swap(int *a, int *b); int main()
{
int arr[100], size, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
}
printf("
Sorting array using quick sort technique...
");
quickSort(arr, 0, size-1);
printf("All Array elements sorted successfully!
");
printf("Array elements in ascending order ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d ", arr[i]);
}
return 0;
} void quickSort(int arr[], int low, int high)
{
if (low < high)
{
int pi = partition(arr, low, high);
quickSort(arr, low, pi - 1);
quickSort(arr, pi + 1, high);
}
} int partition(int arr[], int low, int high)
{
int pivot = arr[low];
int start = low;
int end = high;
while(start < end)
{
while(arr[start] <= pivot)
{
start++;
}
while(arr[end] > pivot)
{
end--;
}
if(start < end)
{
swap(&arr[start], &arr[end]);
}
}
swap(&arr[low], &arr[end]);
return end;
} void swap(int *a, int *b)
{
int t = *a;
*a = *b;
*b = t;
}
Q. W.A.P to sort elements of an array through Merge Sort.
A. Mergesort is also based on the ‘Divide & Conquer’ algorithm. In Merge sort, we divide the array recursively in two halves, until each sub-array contains a single element, and then we merge the sub-array in a way that it results in a sorted array.
Merge sort is one of the efficient & fastest sorting algorithms with the following time complexity:
Worst Case Time Complexity: O(n*log n)
Best Case Time Complexity: O(n*log n)
Average Time Complexity: O(n*log n)
#include <stdio.h> void mergeSort(int arr[], int low, int high);
void merge(int arr[], int low, int mid, int high); int main()
{
int arr[100], size, i, j, temp;
printf("Enter the size of the array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter the elements of the array ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &arr[i]);
}
printf("
Sorting array using merge sort technique...
");
mergeSort(arr, 0, size-1);
printf("All Array elements sorted successfully!
");
printf("Array elements in ascending order ::
");
for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
printf("%d ", arr[i]);
}
return 0;
} void mergeSort(int arr[], int low, int high)
{
if (low < high)
{
int mid = (low + high)/2; mergeSort(arr, low, mid);
mergeSort(arr, mid + 1, high);
merge(arr, low, mid, high);
}
} void merge(int arr[], int low, int mid, int high)
{
int i = low; // Initial index of first subarray
int j = mid + 1; // Initial index of second subarray
int k = low; // Initial index of merged subarray
int arrNew[100];
while(i <= mid && j <= high)
{
if(arr[i] <= arr[j])
{
arrNew[k] = arr[i];
i++;
}
else
{
arrNew[k] = arr[j];
j++;
}
k++;
}
if(i > mid)
{
while(j <= high)
{
arrNew[k] = arr[j];
j++;
k++;
}
}
else
{
while(i <= mid)
{
arrNew[k] = arr[i];
i++;
k++;
}
}
//Transfer elements from arrNew[] back to arr[]
for(i = 0; i <= high; i++)
{
arr[i] = arrNew[i];
}
}
Q. W.A.P to find an element from an array through Linear/Sequential Search.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int main()
{
int array[100], size, number, i;
int found = 0;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Integers ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
printf("Enter a number to search :: ");
scanf("%d", &number);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
if(array[i] == number)
{
printf("Number is Present At Location %d.", i+1);
found = 1;
break;
}
}
if(found == 0)
{
printf("Number not found.");
}
return 0;
}
Q. W.A.P to find an element from a sorted array through Binary Search.
A.
#include <stdio.h> int binarySearch(int arr[], int low, int high, int num);
int binarySearchRecursive(int arr[], int low, int high, int num) int main()
{
int array[100], size, number, i;
printf("Enter The Number of Elements in Array :: ");
scanf("%d", &size);
printf("Enter %d Integers ::
", size);
for(i = 0; i < size; i++)
{
scanf("%d", &array[i]);
}
printf("Enter a number to search :: ");
scanf("%d", &number);
int result = binarySearch(array, 0, size - 1, number);
if(result == -1)
{
printf("Number not found.");
}
else
{
printf("Number is Present At Location %d.", result+1);
}
return 0;
} int binarySearch(int arr[], int low, int high, int num)
{
while(low < high)
{
int mid = (low + high)/2;
if(num == arr[mid])
{
return mid;
}
else if(num < arr[mid])
{
high = mid - 1;
}
else if(num > arr[mid])
{
low = mid + 1;
}
}
// We reach here when element is not
// present in array
return -1;
} int binarySearchRecursive(int arr[], int low, int high, int num)
{
if (high >= low)
{
int mid = (low + high) / 2;
if (arr[mid] == num)
{
return mid;
}
// If element is smaller than mid, then
// it can only be present in left subarray
if (arr[mid] > num)
{
return binarySearch(arr, low, mid - 1, num);
}
// Else the element can only be present
// in right subarray
return binarySearch(arr, mid + 1, high, num);
}
// We reach here when element is not
// present in array
return -1;
}
. | https://medium.com/@imnaveensharma/interview-programming-questions-and-answers-in-c-part-3-68c38df0047c | ['Naveen Sharma'] | 2020-08-08 11:39:37.011000+00:00 | ['C', 'C Programming Language', 'C Program', 'Arrays', 'C Programming'] |
Do You Want One Of the Pharmacist Jobs? | Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash PharmacistDo You Want One Of the Pharmacist Jobs?
Title:
Do You Want One Of the Pharmacist Jobs?
Summary:
There are more pharmacist jobs going round than pharmacists, an excellent scenario for job seekers. So how do you tap into this job market?
Article Body:
There are more pharmacist jobs going round than pharmacists, an excellent scenario for job seekers. So how do you tap into this job market?
Different Kinds of Pharmacist Jobs
Pharmacists are needed wherever medicines are prepared or dispensed. Even storage of medicines should be under their supervision. The pharmacist is trained to dispense the correct dosages of medicines meeting the correct standards of purity. Non-pharmacists can make incorrect decisions on these matters, leading to serious health consequences, including danger to life.
So who stores, prepares and dispenses medicines?
Retail Chemists selling prescription and over the counter drugs to the public
Hospitals and Clinics dispensing medicines to their patients
Healthcare and infusion facilities providing medication services at home or nursing homes
Government and community centers offering healthcare and medication
Armed services that have their own medical departments and services</li>
All the above establishments will thus need the services of qualified pharmacists.
Pharmacists are also needed to research and develop drugs for pharmaceutical companies, and in their sales and marketing departments. Thus the pharmaceutical manufacturers are a major employer of pharmacists.
Pharmacists work as retail pharmacists, clinical pharmacists, IV pharmacists, pharmacy managers, drug research scientists and so on. When dealing with the public, they have to be more than just medicine dispensers. They have to provide advice on the correct usage of the medicines. They might also be called upon to consult with healthcare professionals. Pharmacists thus need an ethical attitude and good communications skills in addition to technical know-how.
<b>How Do You Become a Pharmacist?</b>
It requires years of training to become a licensed pharmacist.
You start with about two years of study at college level in chemistry, biology, physics and other science subjects. Even after this study, you might be required to take a Pharmacy Colleges Admissions Test before you are accepted into a college of pharmacy.
Pharmacy colleges typically offer 6 year and 5 year curriculum equipping the pharmacist in formulating, preparing and dispensing medicines, as well as in other areas such as professional ethics, communicating with patients and healthcare professionals and managing a pharmacy practice.
Before obtaining the license to practice, the pharmacist will also have to undergo internship under a licensed pharmacist, and pass a state examination.
Becoming a pharmacist is thus a painstaking process, and it is no wonder that there are more pharmacist jobs going round than pharmacists seeking jobs!
The pharmacist jobs also require you to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Illnesses requiring medication do not go home after “duty hours” (much as we might wish them to do)!
<b>The Pharmacist</b>
Pharmacists are trusted persons whom patients and healthcare professionals consult. They have access to confidential information about patients. Naturally, they need to be persons who can be trusted to behave ethically and considerately.
If you meet the bill, pharmacist jobs will come looking for you!
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
Title:
Don’t Forget to Say, “Thank You”
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Summary:
For two candidates of equal strength and competency, the thank you note may be the tiebreaker people of hiring authority will use when selecting the winning candidate.
Keywords:
Thank You Note, Career Counseling, Job Market, Employment Opportunities, Work, Career, Job
Article Body:
One of the biggest mistake for job seeks is to not follow up an important interview with a thank you note to the people who interviewed them. Human Resources experts note that as few as 10% of interviewees take the time to say, “thank you.” Let’s take a look as why writing a thank you is the right thing to do and list some tips on how to write one.
If you are a candidate for a particular position you need every edge possible to land a job. Writing a thank you note is important because:
1. It reinforces your interest in the position.
2. A note shows your professionalism and suggests that you are organized, reliable, and efficient. It also underscores that you know how to deliver a personal touch. If your job is in customer service, companies will see the note as especially advantageous.
3. It proves that you understand proper business protocol.
For two candidates of equal strength and competency, the thank you note may be the tiebreaker people of hiring authority will use when selecting the winning candidate.
Content of Your Thank You Note
Your thank you note should mention the following:
1. Reiterate your interest in the position.
2. Reiterate one key point of the interview. For example, if you learned that the company is launching a new product line the following year and you will have an important part in its launch, you could state how you will further the goals of the company in helping to roll out the new product line.
3. Stress that you are looking forward to a follow up meeting. Optional: Tell the person you are writing to that you will contact them within a certain time to follow up.
You can either type or print your note. If you type, use standard business paper and a matching envelope. If you write, a thank you note card or a generic card are acceptable. Be careful not to get anything too flashy unless your field is flashy {e.g., the fashion industry}. Email isn’t wrong, but you have no guarantee that the person will receive your note unless you request a return receipt. Approximately eighty percent of all email is spam; why risk having your thank you note lost in a junk mail folder?
In this age of strict competition for plum positions, you cannot afford to not say thank you in writing. Give yourself every edge possible and use the thank you note as your opportunity to show potential employers why they should hire you. | https://medium.com/career-realted-article/do-you-want-one-of-the-pharmacist-jobs-51ab26011f26 | ['Mohit Chawla'] | 2020-12-27 14:23:03.586000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Careerr', 'Money Management', 'Mohit Chawla', 'Money'] |
The Gay Wedding Toast That Brought Straight Men to Tears | “There was hardly a dry eye in the room when my husband finished speaking.”
My husband, Mike, and I were married at noon on May 31, 2014, on the green roof of a Washington DC office building.
The reception took place inside the adjacent, all-glass penthouse conference center. It was a beautiful warm spring day, sunny, 81 degrees, with puffy clouds floating gently in the sky.
There were about a hundred guests for a decidedly-Italian catered luncheon that included an enormous pot of Italian wedding soup that my Mom and I had made together the night before.
Although the wedding was only six years ago, sometimes it feels more like a film I saw twenty years ago.
For months leading up to the wedding, I had been so caught up in the planning that when the day finally came, it flew by.
I’m not saying I was a gay Bridezilla, but if it weren’t for all the wedding photos, I’m sure I couldn’t tell you exactly who was there.
One part I will never forget, however, is how my husband’s speech at the reception brought many of the men (as well as many of the women) in the room to tears.
Honestly, at the time, I didn’t realize how deeply moved people were, but in the years since, I’ve gotten messages from them and their wives, remembering the toast. Like this text message from my cousin after the death of their family dog:
Speaking of their heartbreaking loss she wrote, “It was the only the second time I saw Bill [her husband] cry in 35 years. The first time was at your wedding.”
Her text reminded me that when Mike had given his toast, I looked up and saw my straight personal trainer crying.
At that moment, I realized that whatever I planned to say, however funny or profound, it was not the time. I stood up and mumbled a few words, thanking everyone for coming.
Intuitively, I realized that although nearly every single detail of the wedding had my name on it, this was Mike’s turn to shine. I had no choice but to take a step back and give him the stage.
Collage by author.
All Men Have Daddy Issues
Let’s face it; American culture doesn’t promote the expression of affection between fathers and sons. As a result, many men, straight and gay, grow up longing for more nurturing relationships with their dads and a little less sports and weather talk.
How many men have you heard say, my father never told me he loved me? It’s kinda sad.
I remember blubbering like a baby when I saw Field of Dreams. Never mind that I hate baseball and never had any use for Kevin Costner. My point is, in one way or another, all men have father issues.
Just remember Oedipus.
In my own case, my husband is older than me. Once when we were buying a mattress together, the clueless salesman asked him, “Is the mattress for you or your son?” I nearly died laughing because he’s only 16 years older than I am.
Anyway, in 2014 Mike was 64, making him nearly as old as or older than many of the guests. Mike is also an ex-Marine. There is nothing effeminate about him. Unless told, few people, even other gays, would ever think he’s gay. His voice is low, without a trace of that beautiful lilt that belies many gay men.
Lastly, my husband is a diehard Bob Dylan fan so it was no surprise to me when he quoted him in his toast. The lyrics he quoted were from the song, Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.
For many of the guests, especially the straight men who knew the song, hearing the word’s that Bob Dylan had no doubt written for a woman, said to another man, triggered both nostalgia and a deep-rooted longing for male affection.
After thanking everyone for coming and saying how much it meant to us, he said he wanted to read a quote from Bob Dylan. He noted the fact he had to write it down, which showed how nervous he was.
Pulling a piece of paper from his breast pocket, somehow looking directly at me, he read the first verse:
Is it really any wonder The love that a stranger might receive You cast your spell and I went under I find it so difficult to leave
Then came the second verse, which landed like a knockout punch:
Throw my ticket out the window Throw my suitcase out there, too Throw my troubles out the door I don’t need them anymore ’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you
Those who know me know can testify that I am seldom struck speechless. That day I was. Furthermore, I rarely pass up a chance to be the center of attention. That day, I did.
Collage by author.
Marriage is a Promise
Mike and I were together for almost twelve years before gay marriage was made legal in the District of Columbia.
The irony of this story is that I was ambivalent about tying the knot when he first proposed to me. Not because I didn’t love him, but because in my eyes we were already married.
Since I was very young, I’d always known I was different. And I also knew there was nothing wrong with me.
So, for decades I had stopped seeking the approval of society, the government, or even my family, for that matter. When they belatedly got around to bestowing it, I didn’t want to give any of them any credence.
Our marriage, I said, “is built on a promise we made to one another, to love and care for each other, come what may.” We don’t need a court, the Church, our families, or even to have children together to ratify that promise.
Aside from living together, we were not legally bound together in any way.
Even though we don’t always get along perfectly, and sometimes we fight, our marriage has endured because of that promise.
Today I woke up feeling very emotional but also especially grateful for that.
Lately, I’ve been feeling emotional for several reasons, the biggest one being my career. Earlier this year,, I left the security of a job and a paycheck and decided to strike out on my own.
Now, I am preparing to launch a digital content masterclass series that I’ve been working on for months. As the moment of truth approaches, many of my fears and insecurities are in full bloom. To say the least.
At the same time, according to my therapist, the definition of mental health is the ability to have two seemingly contradictory emotions simultaneously, without needing to allow one to invalidate the other.
For me, that means being okay with the anxiety and excitement I feel because I know I am loved. As I am. And for that, I am forever grateful. | https://medium.com/@v2b-iconoclast/the-gay-wedding-toast-that-brought-straight-men-to-tears-fdf94daf02dd | ['Sean Smith'] | 2020-12-15 02:30:02.456000+00:00 | ['Life', 'LGBTQ', 'Family', 'Fatherhood', 'Love'] |
2021 Brexit Guide for UK VAT (for EU, US, and worldwide Sellers) | This article was originally published on the Quaderno blog. Click here to see the original one and access bonus content with it.
Brexit is bringing changes to the world of VAT as of 1 January 2021. UK VAT after Brexit could affect your business if you’re based in Europe, the US, or anywhere around the world.
Now that the UK is leaving the European Union, you need to make some adjustments in your VAT registration for both regions.
Selling digital products after Brexit
This section will tell you how to:
Wrap up 2020 with your current VAT MOSS
Register for UK VAT as a foreign business
Comply with UK VAT moving forward
For non-EU businesses, how to re-register with a new VAT MOSS
Finish the 2020 fiscal year with your current EU VAT MOSS
This is the last time you’ll include UK sales in your EU VAT return.
The final return period for this year’s VAT MOSS system will be the period ending 31 December 2020. You should only include UK sales made before 1 January 2021 in your final return.
File the return, as you usually would, by 20 January 2021.
Register for UK VAT as a foreign business
If you’re selling digital products or services to British customers, you need to register for UK VAT as of 1 January, full stop. You are not allow to sell digital products to UK consumers (aka private individuals) if you’re not registered for UK VAT. There is no tax registration threshold for your business.
The one exception to UK VAT registration requirements is for B2B remote sellers. Remote sellers don’t need to register for UK VAT if they sell digital products only to businesses and/or professionals (100% B2B). If you think you fall in this category, we recommend you confirm your particular case with the HMRC or a professional tax advisor.
The good news is you can likely register online, and it’s not necessary to get an agent or representative to do it for you.
1. Go to the VAT registration page and, under the section “How to Register”, click “register online”. On the sign in page, you can start the registration process by clicking “create sign in details”. This creates for you a VAT online account (sometimes known as a ‘Government Gateway account’). You need this to submit your VAT returns to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK’s tax collections agency.
2. Provide details like your turnover, business activity and bank details.
3. Submit the registration application!
Hopefully within 30 days (though it can take longer), you’ll be sent a VAT registration certificate, which will arrive in your online account. This certificate confirms:
Your UK VAT number*
Your ‘effective date of registration’
When to submit your first VAT Return and payment
*Something tricky: You can’t start displaying or charging VAT on UK sales until you get your VAT number, but you’ll still owe that tax to HMRC. So here’s what they advise you to do while you’re waiting to receive your VAT number:
“You should increase your prices to allow for this and tell your customers why. Once you’ve got your VAT number you can then reissue the invoices showing the VAT.”
Comply with UK VAT moving forward
From your effective date of registration, you must:
Charge the right amount of VAT on each UK sale. The standard rate is 20% .
. Show all VAT information on your invoice
Pay any VAT due to HMRC
Submit VAT Returns
Keep VAT records and a VAT account
Note: Most VAT registered businesses that earn over £85,000 must also follow the rules for ‘Making Tax Digital for VAT’. Here’s our own guide on how to follow Britain’s Making Tax Digital guidelines.
As a non-EU business, register for a new VAT MOSS
There’s one extra step for non-EU businesses. If you had your EU VAT MOSS registration based in the UK, you probably need to pick a new “home country” and re-register in the non-Union scheme.
Before you re-register for EU VAT, you should know it’s not required across the board. Here’s the breakdown:
If you only sell digital products in B2B transactions, then you do not need to register for EU VAT.
sell digital products in transactions, then you do not need to register for EU VAT. If you ever sell digital products B2C in Europe, even just once, then you need to register and get your business a VAT number!
So, if you’ve decided you do need to register, let’s carry on…
As of 1 January 2021, you should register with a new EU VAT MOSS in the non-union scheme. Like we said above, you can choose which of the 27 member states you’d like to serve as your “homebase” in the European Union.
Tip: If your native language is English, you might want to choose Ireland. Unless you like a challenge!
1. Choose your country and find its EU VAT MOSS online portal. (For links and specific information, you can check out our tax guides per country.)
2. Add your company information and bank account details.
3. Then enter your personal contact information.
4. From there, you’ll be asked about your company’s VAT history.
5. After this, the portal will send you to a summary page where you can review all the information you entered. Make sure it’s all correct!
6. Submit. And that’s it!
That’s the whole registration process. You’ll receive your new EU VAT number either electronically or by mail.
For more in-depth information, check out this guide about how to register for EU VAT if you aren’t based in the EU.
*If you don’t want to use VAT MOSS after Brexit, then you have to register for VAT in each EU member state where you sell your digital products. (Every. One.) And then you must follow the different local rules and timelines for tax returns, which is an extra hassle. Basically, MOSS is the way to go.
Selling physical products to the UK after Brexit
Well, the UK’s tax registration threshold for foreign businesses selling physical goods into the country is £0.00. That means you must register for UK VAT as of 1 January if you plan on making any sales within the United Kingdom.
Register for UK VAT
Unfortunately there’s no online option for you! You must register by post using forms VAT1 and VAT1A.
Hopefully within 30 days (though it can take longer), you’ll be sent a VAT registration certificate, which will arrive in your online account. This certificate confirms:
Your UK VAT number*
Your ‘effective date of registration’
When to submit your first VAT Return and payment
*Something tricky: You can’t start displaying or charging VAT on UK sales until you get your VAT number, but you’ll still owe that tax to HMRC. So here’s what they advise you to do while you’re waiting to receive your VAT number:
“You should increase your prices to allow for this and tell your customers why. Once you’ve got your VAT number you can then reissue the invoices showing the VAT.”
Comply with UK VAT moving forward
From 1 January 2021, if the product is shipped into the UK, it’s an import. And so import VAT must be declared and paid! It depends on who handles this step.
And these rules are still a bit in flux, but here’s what we understand right now.
B2C transactions:
Packages worth less than £135 are subject to 20% VAT at the point of sale. You should put all the VAT information on the receipt and keep it in your records.
are subject to 20% VAT at the point of sale. You should put all the VAT information on the receipt and keep it in your records. Packages worth over £135 are subject to import VAT rules. This means you, the seller, may pay the import VAT (and duties) on clearance, and reclaim them with your UK VAT number. OR your customer may pay at customs or to the delivery service… but they probably won’t be too happy about that surprise fee!
Other general compliance points:
Submit VAT Returns
Keep VAT records and a VAT account
Note: Most VAT registered businesses that earn over £85,000 must also follow the rules for ‘Making Tax Digital for VAT’. Here’s our own guide on how to follow Britain’s Making Tax Digital guidelines.
What can help you handle VAT after Brexit
The best way to simplify this VAT craziness is to use a cloud-based accounting tool that automates the entire process — from charging the correct VAT rate to collecting payment to issuing the proper invoice. All of your records are kept safely online for you, even if your computer crashes.
Quaderno handles all of this tax compliance for you, so that you can spend your time focusing on bettering your product, getting to know your customers, taking care of your employees, or whatever else matters more than fretting over tax technicalities.
In fact, Quaderno can do all of the following:
Calculate the right amount of tax to charge each customer, right on your checkout page.
Automatically verify the VAT numbers you receive from customers.
Collect and store the customer location evidence that you need to get from every sale.
Create and send invoices in multiple languages and currencies.
Send VAT invoices automatically.
Ensure you never overpay on your VAT returns.
Notify you when any tax policies or tax rates change, so that you’re always in the loop.
And that’s only how Quaderno can help with VAT. When it comes to other sales taxes around the world — or simply everyday billing and accounting — Quaderno jumps through the hoops for you and presents your business data in a way that’s easy to understand. Sign up for a free 7-day trial and see how Quaderno can do the dirty work for you.
* At Quaderno we love providing helpful information and best practices about taxes, but we are not certified tax advisors. For further help, or if you are ever in doubt, please consult a professional tax advisor or accountant. | https://medium.com/@quaderno/2021-brexit-guide-for-uk-vat-for-eu-us-and-worldwide-sellers-78300457d809 | [] | 2020-12-10 12:10:10.424000+00:00 | ['Brexit', 'Ecommerce', 'Uk Vat', 'SaaS', 'Vat Scheme'] |
Jealous Lover | I used to breathe in your skin
like it was my favourite perfume — Obsession,
but only somewhere between dusk and dawn
you would linger on my wrists and neck like the sweetest scent of taboo
a hint of the love story between the Ocean and the Moon,
the jealous lover hovering over a wild thing
as distant as Neptune circling the Sun,
part time lovers
lonely together under a blanket of stars and the night covers
that became dirty laundry for the tide to wash away,
now — I sleep alone on the shore like a wild thing
with the Sun rolling down my back and the Ocean dripping from my feet | https://dabboh76.medium.com/jealous-lover-46eead1ad764 | ['D Abboh'] | 2019-10-25 09:39:18.956000+00:00 | ['Lovestory', 'Relationships', 'Poetry', 'Storytelling', 'Life'] |
Why Does Industry 4.0 Depend on Data? | Data is the raw material from which we make decisions. With the proper context, data becomes information, and when faced with a problem, we use this information to make the best decision we can to solve it. As we adopted more computer- and PLC-based controls for Industry 3.0, there was a movement to automate the collection of data to make it faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than what manual collection methods could support. For Industry 3.0, data has been used for control systems, production reporting, and compliance records. As we move to Industry 4.0, our dependence on data increases exponentially to maximize the efficiency of existing production systems and solve manufacturing challenges that were thought to be impossible.
Industry 4.0 describes how manufacturing is evolving to leverage modern and future advances in computer power and connectivity, and data is the lens through which these computer systems interpret the physical world and communicate with each other. Any Industry 4.0 technology is directly reliant on data. An augmented reality application might combine data from cameras, maintenance records, and real-time and historic machine performance data to guide a technician to solve a problem. The digital twin is a fit-for-purpose virtual representation of a physical product or process achieved by synchronizing real-time data in the physical world with its digital model in the virtual world. Advanced analytics and machine learning can automatically identify and contextualize trends in machine data to predict failures for major equipment. Each of these Industry 4.0 applications relies on verbose and accurate data to deliver its value.
Industry 4.0 needs data the same way the brain needs its senses: it is how they connect intelligence with the outside world.
What Does Industry 4.0’s Insatiable Appetite for Data Mean for You and Your Manufacturing Business?
It means you are going to collect and keep more data than ever before. It will also lead to the integration of more disparate data sets from new sources and systems, including product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), warehouse management (WMS), and computerized maintenance management (CMMS). As we see more data being used in more applications, the accuracy and integrity of that data becomes critically important; decisions and actions that are based on poor data can be catastrophic.
While the effort needed to collect, coordinate, and contextualize the data required of Industry 4.0 may be significant, the returns can optimize and transform a business. From optimizing supply chains and minimizing disruptions, to reducing new product introduction times, to connecting directly with customers and delivering personalized products, Industry 4.0 can give you a competitive edge today-but it will be an expectation and a requirement tomorrow.
Industry 4.0 is changing the way we manufacture products. It enables us to be more efficient, more sustainable, and more responsive to changing market conditions. Realizing that vision and value requires us to connect intelligent computing and processing systems to the real world, data is the interface that allows the virtual world to connect and communicate to the physical one, and the most fundamental building block that enables Industry 4.0.
This article is a product of the International Society of Automation (ISA) . If you are an ISA member who is interested in joining this division, please log in to your account and Smart Manufacturing & IIoT Divisionvisit this page.
About the Author
Sam Russem is the director of the smart manufacturing practice at Grantek Systems Integration and serves as the leader of the ISA SMIIoT Division’s Digital Twin and Simulation committee. Sam has been working in automation and smart manufacturing for over a decade. He focuses on the strategic and practical application of Industry 4.0 technologies for manufacturers. | https://medium.com/@isaautomation/why-does-industry-4-0-depend-on-data-468e7fbc12fc | ['International Society Of Automation - Isa Official'] | 2020-12-21 14:23:05.866000+00:00 | ['Industry', 'Industry 4 0', 'Tech', 'Engineering', 'Data'] |
Are we heading towards a dystopian society? | Supermarket queues stretching down the street, deserted city centres, endless video calls, and a constantly rising death toll; humans are pessimistic by nature, and this year has given the doomsayers a lot of ammunition. ‘It’s like we’re living in a dystopia’, is a phrase I myself have used; one I’ve heard thrown around increasingly casually. In the words of Amy Atchnison, writing in her article ‘are we living in a dystopia’, the term dystopia has become, through overuse, ‘a synonym for a bad time’, however its true meaning is much deeper, and to evaluate whether our society is falling, or could fall, into the realms of dystopian fiction, we must first understand the meaning of the word dystopian.
As pointed out by Gregory Claeys in ‘Malice in Wonderland: The Origins of Dystopia from Wells to Orwell’ The first fictional ‘dystopian turn’ appeared in the form of satires, such as Swift and Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society (1756) mocking the enlightenment ideals of the age. Indeed, the word dystopia itself, is derived from the word ‘dys’, meaning bad, and the word ‘utopia’, so is in its very essence, a ‘bad utopia’, the disastrous outcome of a ‘perfect’ world. Utopian fiction itself literally means ‘not place’, a perfect world that doesn’t exist, humanities pipe dreams of perfection.
If utopian literature is humanity dreaming of perfection, then dystopian literature is humanity exercising its cynic, our morbid curiosity in the possibility of disaster. It is, at its most primal, simply negative predictions of the future.
In most cases however, it is a lot more than that. M Keith Booker, in his essay ‘The dystopian impulse in Modern Literature: Fictions as social Criticism’, described dystopian fiction as ‘inherently recognising the mutual involvement of literature and society’, it is, in other words, social commentary on our world and what it could become. In that sense it is also a warning, a guide of ‘what not to do’.
Dystopian fiction is humanity, for whatever reason, imagining the worst position humanity could be in. So I guess the next question is this, what is a dystopian society; what does humanity’s worst nightmare look like?
Dystopian societies, as seen in literature, can be sorted roughly into four main categories; biological dystopias, feminist dystopias, technological dystopias, and governmental dystopias. (Note that some dystopias have occasionally been termed ‘environmental’ but I have chosen to leave this out; environmental occurrences are often the trigger of dystopian societies but not often the defining feature.)
Lars Schmeinks book, Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, opens with the words of famed genetics professor JBS Haldane, writing in 1923. ‘The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention… which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion…indecent and unnatural’. This speech claims what our fascination with biological dystopias proves; humans are scared of science, of its advancement, of it turning us into something not quite human. This fear has birthed many fictional biological dystopias, like Jurassic world, Dawn and Brave New World, media that explores the consequences of playing with nature. Brave New World paints a lab coat clad stark image of the future, where humans are ‘mass-produced’, created in ‘yellow barrels’ and ‘labelled test tubes’. Humanity is split into a biological class system with ‘alphas’ and ‘betas’ being the elites, allowed to be individuals, and the ‘gammas, deltas and epsilons’ being created from split embryos, ‘Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before.’, making, essentially, a slave race. In the book this technology is presented as positive, ‘progress’, ‘major instruments of social stability!’. This uniformity is a predominant feature of other biological, and non biological dystopias, and shows our very human fear of losing what is both an asset to our species and to individuals freedoms; our individual uniqueness.
That fear is still very much present in our collective psyche. When biology makes the headlines, they are littered with predictions of Huxley’s Brave New World coming true; ‘Cry round the brave new world’, and ‘The brave new world of three-parent IVF’ are headlines written almost 30 years apart, and show that the scar Brave New World left on our world is still very predominant. In reality though, we are very far from vats of test-tube babies. In the article ‘Designer babies: an ethical horror waiting to happen?’, Phillip Ball explains that currently, the closest we have got to ‘editing’ babies is the gene editing technology ‘Crispr-Cas9, which uses natural enzymes to target and snip genes with pinpoint accuracy’. Crispr-Cas9 has only been used to modify non-viable human embryos, but already gene editing in reproduction doesn’t seem to have a market, ‘there seems little need for gene editing in reproduction as its expensive, difficult and uncertain way to achieve what can mostly be achieve already in other ways’. This is somewhat reassuring, but the ‘other ways’ are eerily reminiscent of Huxley’s world; ‘embryo selection’. However despite the fact it is possible, embryo selection, PGD, is neither popular nor easy, and it will take decades to develop to a point where ‘designing babies’ could be possible. Even if ‘designer babies’ were ever a real possibility I hope humanity’s general distrust of biological engineering would discourage scientists; I personally believe we are a long way off from rejecting our morals and playing god.
As we are scared of to progress of biology we are scared too of technology; as technology has advanced, so with it has advanced bleak prophecies of a technological world; in the media you don’t need to look far to find movies about rampant technology, the matrix, the minority report, even in children’s films, like Wall-e, can humanities fear of technology be seen. The first technological dystopian novel dates back from 1928, E.M Forster’s immortal short story The Machine Stops. Since then literature has been riddled with dystopian tales of rogue robots and dependent humans; but they all seem to have shadows of Forster’s first world in them. In The Machine Stops humanity has regressed into an infantile, dependant state; one of the main characters, Vashti, is described as ‘a swaddled lump of flesh’ and she, along with the rest of humanity live alone in underground rooms ike ‘the cells in a bee-hive’, communicating only through speaking tubes and depending on ‘the Machine’ for everything; food, clothes, entertainment, communication. In the book Vashi see’s the machine as a god-like being, he son Kuno reprimands her in the first few pages, ‘You talk as if a god had made the machine…men made it, and do not forget that’. As the story progresses most of humanity starts to see the machine as a god, to worship it, to pray to it. This role reversal, humanity becoming dependent on, and then worshiping, the technology it created, can be seen in many technological dystopias like the recent YA novel Scythe, where humanity is governed by the all knowing ‘thunderhead’.
In my house we have six google homes that connect to the TV, the lights, and the heating. I can stand in any room and shout a command that will be obeyed. I can turn off the heating or the lights or change the TV channel without lifting a finger. This all seems eerily dystopian, and if Forster was to see the world we live in now he may very well think we are well on the way to those bee-hive cells in the ground, yet I feel like the way we view technology is still primally un-dystopian; We still see ourselves as the creators, the masters of these creations; they are at our service, not the other way round; we don’t hold them with mindless reverence like technological dystopian societies are apt to do; we still remember that men made these machines, and it doesn’t look like we will forget that anytime soon.
Feminist dystopias are intresting, because they are not concerned with advancment, but with a dramatic, warped return to the past. Feminist dystopias imagine the polar opposite of the progressive, equal world, most of us strive for; they paint a dark future where society has returned to belittling and abusing women, often now with the addition of torturous technology, biological control, or constant surveillance. The most famous feminist dystopian novel is Margret Attwoods, The Handmaidens Tale, and its recent sequal the testaments. The Handmaidens Tale has become a blueprint for femnist dystopian literature, a genre that has risen in popularity in recent years. In Atwood’s The Handmaidens Tale, an unspecified disaster has led to a society where only some women are fertile, and these women become ‘handmaidens’, slaves of the state, stripped of names and rights and forced to bear the children of whatever man they are assigned to. These women have no names, referred to as the names of their current masters, ‘Offred…Offglen’ and their real names are ‘forbidden’. In fact women are forbidden from having any personal freedoms, walking alone, reading, talking, doing anything they’re not ordered to do. Dissenters are executed.
Sarah Gilbert, writing in an article for The Atlantic, says she believes that feminist dystopias are becoming increasingly resonant with women today because to them ‘the world feels like it’s running backward’; that progress is being undone, that a feminist dystopia, though not reconisable, does feel possible. The article describes how in recent years there are ‘moments when life seemed to be doing its utmost to imitate Atwood’. She is referring of course to Trumps presidency, and events such as the rise in anti-abortion bills, (11 states passing anti-abortion bills in 2019), and discarded rape cases, (this year rape convction have fallen to a record low in the UK). These are awful statistics and it does seem like there are some in positions of power who are trying to undo everything we have worked towards. The continued denial too, by many in power, that there is anything wrong with the way we are heading is concerning. Despite these worrying signs I still feel as if we are far away from the nightmare world of gilead; the scales doesn’t seem to have yet tipped dangerously towards the direction of worlds described by Atwood and others. Women are still speaking out, being listened to, supporting each other, playing an active part in our world; it is when people stop speaking, and when no one is listening, when a nightmarish dystopian world could emerge. For now all we can do is make sure we keep shouting and listening, and take the influx of feminist dystopian literature as a warning of what we must avoid.
Governmental dystopias are the most common and arguably the most affecting dystopias, because they are the most human. In governmental dystopias, like 1984 or the YA novel Breathe by Sarah Crosson, it is not science, or technology, hurting humanity, though those may be factors, but humanity hurting itself. In 1984 we are introduced to a world eerily similar to our own, the warped familiarity of fallen london. In the novel the main character, Winston, lives in a world where the government controls everything, including what their people believe to be true. There is constant surveillance from ‘tele-screens’ and those who think dissenting thoughts are kidnapped by the ‘thought police’ and tortured, as Winston eventually is. The world of 1984 is haunting in the way everything is desensitised and presented as normal, and the slave population are unaware of their slavery.
It is this unawareness that frightens us, makes us question our own world. Could we be, unwittingly, slaves to the government? Of course, in a very less drastic way, we are slaves to our government, working to pay taxes to support our country, and obeying laws, but this, as pointed out in ‘are we living in a dystopia?’, can be termed as ‘legitimate coercion’, control to keep us all safe in the long run. The British government, and others, also have ‘a strong core of democratic values’ and ‘constitutional and judicial measures to check the power of the majority’, which are attributes of what the article calls ‘good governments’.
Literary dystopian societies, as we’ve seen, have overlapping themes that help us define dystopian society, and, in turn, our own society.
One overarching similarity seems to me, to be this; humanity falls when it tries to stop being human, in other words, humanity falls when we try to be perfect, try to achieve utopia. Indeed a ‘utopia’ was never meant to be achievable, the word itself means both ‘good place’ and ‘no place’; a good place that cannot exist. It seems that many literary dystopian societies emerge when humanity tries to reach the unreachable ‘heaven on earth’. In every type of dystopia humanity seems to strive for some perfection, ultimate comfort, immortality, complete control… every dystopian society seems to have been formed by humanity playing at gods, and creating hell. That thought comforts me somewhat, as I look at our world. We all wish for change, and exact change sometimes, but in small, human, ways. Humanity as a whole still accepts our flaws, accepts our imperfections as something that can be dealt with, but not destroyed. We have no desire as a species to play god; we still have our own gods.
Another main characteristic that has cropped up in every literary world I’ve explored is that element of control. The control of humanity as a species, the control of humans as individuals, the control of a population. Dystopian fiction revolves around the idea of being controlled, and breaking out of that control. Our world is a patchwork of different governments, but arguably in the democratic world, everyday citizens have control over their lives and some control over the fate of the country. However I also feel that our world may be slipping into a more subtle, more terrifying type of control. Control by the society in which we are born in and in some ways trapped in. In our society there are a number of accepted paths, and those who stray are ostracized. This in a way is a type of control, the limit of our negative freedoms, the shaping of our lives into a shape society has a use for. This seems dystopian, and the fact that we are unaware makes it seem even more dystopian. Despite this, I think, for now, we are fairly content in our society, and if it does control us it is probably passive control, for non malicious reasons; not many people are willing to break out of the safety of society.
The natural partner of control is the third theme that seems prevalent in every dystopia. The control and constraint, if not the death of, the individual. Outwardly the western world seems far from the dystopian nightmare of uniformity; America is built on the idea of the individual, social media celebrates the individual, university and job applications encourage individuality. Yet at the same time there is something uniform about individuality in our world. There are a set of characters that are socially acceptable. Anyone who is not individualistic in the right way is shunned. So while our society baulks at the death of individuality, which is comforting, it also doesn’t fully embrace it, and one day we may reject it entirely.
Humanity is like that, not fully embracing something but not rejecting it either. This simple fact answers the question for us, are we heading towards a dystopian society? I believe, no, not at the moment. But we haven’t fully rejected those ideas that could push us over the edge. So there is still a chance, and will always be a chance, that humanity tumbles into the abyss of a dystopian society.
Unless, of course, we are already there. After all, a feature of dystopian society is that its inhabitants are mostly blissfully unaware of their predicament. | https://medium.com/@rosiejonz/are-we-heading-towards-a-dystopian-society-667897376c0b | ['Rosie Jones'] | 2020-12-22 18:39:10.096000+00:00 | ['Humanity', 'Literature', 'Future', 'Dystopia', 'Essay'] |
Year in Review & Covesting Module Status Update | Investment and Withdrawal Scheduling Microservice
At the time of the fund creation and activation, an investment and withdrawal schedule is created by the scheduling microservice, consisting of two distinct parts: an open rollover, set by the fund manager manually, and the withdrawal threshold. During this period of one hour before the open rollover begins, pending requests for withdrawals can no longer be canceled, nor can new withdrawal requests be made for the coming rollover period.
Any withdrawal request made during the withdrawal threshold will be scheduled for the next consecutive open rollover period.
Offer Management Microservice
At this point, the offer management microservice will assign the fund a specific offer. At first, there will only be a single, default offer, but in the future, Covesting may enable additional offers for fund managers. This means that every individual fund manager will be able to customize and adjust conditions, the same way as hedge fund managers can adjust entry / exit conditions, as well as success fees in traditional finance.
Once the offer is assigned, the trading account is unlocked, and trading can begin!
Investment Creation and Close Service
Investments are made into funds, and therefore require a separate service to create and close investments, as well as check that all minimum requirements are met.
This service verifies that the minimum investment amount of 0.00000001 BTC has been met and that any invested amounts are put on reserve, resulting in a decrease in the investor’s wallet balance by the reserved amount until a withdrawal is made.
The investment will then enter an activation queue until rollover, then is applied to the fund. Information related to the investment is then displayed in the investor’s portfolio.
At close, the service will calculate the percentage of profit the investor will receive and award it to the investor’s account balance.
Rollover Service
ROLLOVER SCHEME
Each rollover phase includes a variety of complex calculations that occur behind the scenes. At each rollover, the unit price is recalculated and may change depending on the trades made by the fund manager.
This is also when any pending new investments awaiting in the queue are activated. This involves withdrawing the reserved funds from investor’s wallets, calculating these new investments while closing and distributing any investments requested to be withdrawn, and changing the balance of the account.
If the fund manager’s account is lacking the equity necessary to close out any investments requested for withdrawal, the service will begin closing out the fund manager’s trading positions based on the ascending order of open positions’ PnL.
Managers can use the threshold time for the position closures based on their trading strategies.
The investment profit distribution algorithm will review PnL, and if there is no ROI, all proceeds go to the investor, with the broker and fund manager receiving nothing. If the fund manager invested into their own fund, then the broker’s interest is removed from any profit, with the remaining profit going back to the investor.
Statistics Service
One of the most compelling and exciting aspects of the Covesting Module is the global leaderboards, ranking each fund by PnL, age of the account, and various other factors.
The statistics service is necessary to build and populate a growing table, ranking each active fund for all investors to see. These rankings are based on total profitability, daily profitability, number of investors, along with the current fund account equity.
FUND LEADERBOARD STATS
All rating information is made available to the public so investors can make informed decisions on which funds to invest in. In the beta version of the Covesting Module, the metrics themselves will be available, but star ratings won’t be applied until more information is aggregated over time.
Transfer Service
As we mentioned, the transfer service was among the biggest challenges we faced. The transfer system ensures data consistency across each platform, as well as ensuring the guaranteed delivery of funds from one service to another without the risk or disruption, duplication, or loss of investor’s funds.
Fund Liquidation Service
The fund liquidation service ensures that there are enough available funds in a fund manager’s account to cover collateral on all positions. If the fund’s account equity falls below the margin requirements, the service will initiate the liquidation of open positions.
Liquidation of the fund will first close all open positions, reallocate any remaining funds, credit the wallets of investors with the remaining funds, and restore the fund account to a normal, trading account.
Monitoring Service
To ensure all the above services are running properly, are interconnected with one another, and that there is data consistent throughout, an intricate monitoring system has been put into place. The monitoring system is designed to not only prevent any issues from occurring, but also to generate a warning to our developers of any possible errors so that they can be dealt with promptly by our teams.
Technical Difficulties We Faced Throughout Development
The main developmental difficulty we faced arose in the process of successfully integrating the Covesting Module into PrimeXBT’s infrastructure, as both platforms are built upon a microservice architecture.
Because of this, we had to verify both transactionality and data consistency, in an effort to ensure the delivery of all funds from one service to another without the risk of them being duplicated or lost.
In order to provide these necessary safeguards, we integrated the system detailed below:
Providing Distributed Transactions in the Microservice Architecture
At their core, microservices are simply a set of distributed systems that work together to provide interoperability between multiple services and systems. When large applications lack interoperability or are difficult to modify or maintain, they can be broken down into smaller components that can be recomposed to work more cohesively with other systems.
Applications that are built upon microservice architecture are thus composed of multiple small parts that work together, whereas more traditional monolithic applications are simply developed as one singular fixed piece.
The microservice architecture provides numerous benefits to an application or platform, as the modular constituent components are easier to test, maintain, and upgrade. It also allows for greater scalability, as the small components can be scaled to fit the specific needs of the platform.
In these distributed systems, transactions span across multiple computers or physical systems within a network, with transactions moving sequentially through multiple services in order to fully complete transactions.
In monolithic systems, processes are guaranteed something called “ACID” (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), which helps ensure that all failed transactions can be rolled back.
Distributed microservice databases lack the ACID nature of monolithic systems, which poses multiple challenges for ensuring that transactions are atomic — meaning that either all the steps are successfully completed or none of them are — and that concurrent microservices requests can be successfully processed.
There are multiple ways we successfully confronted the issues seen while building and integrating microservices.
The first way is by integrating a two-phase commit system, where each transaction has a preparation phase and a commit phase. In this system, a transaction coordinator orchestrates every commit or rollback command. This ensures that transactions are atomic, and also ensures that changes on transacting objects are not implemented until the transaction coordinator confirms the changes.
The second way to confront the lack of ACID within distributed systems is to implement eventual consistency and compensation. In essence, each service in this system publishes a visible event whenever it uploads data. Subsequently, other services subscribe to these events, updating their data each time a new event is received.
This process creates an “event bus” where multiple microservices are able to communicate with one another via asynchronous local transactions that fulfill distributed transactions. All event-based communication is arranged by a separate system and takes place through the event bus.
Enterprise Service Bus
Implementing an enterprise service bus (ESB) was another way in which we solved the problems that were posed by implementing the Covesting Module into PrimeXBT’s infrastructure, as ESBs allow for cohesive communication between the two systems in a service-oriented architecture.
At their core, ESBs represent a distributed computing architecture that allows for flexibility and promptness in high-level protocol communications between separate applications within a distributed system.
Enterprise service busses allow for the separate services within the network to run independently within a distributed system and helps translate and direct client requests to the proper services.
The primary focus of ESBs is to act as a moderator for the routing of communications between multiple services, while also resolving disputes and contentions between any communicating components. Enterprise service busses can also monitor redundant services and process event handling, like data transformation, data mapping, event queuing, security, and more.
By employing enterprise service busses into our network, we ensure that the service network has proper communication, is decentralised, and is scalable.
Our focus on ensuring distributed transactions within our microservice architecture whilst confronting the lack of ACID, while also employing an ESB to ensure decentralized and efficient transactions between the service network, allowed us to successfully implement the Covesting Module into PrimeXBT’s infrastructure safely and efficiently.
Current Development Status
To summarize the full release notes and the current development programs, here are status updates on each key service.
Back End Development:
Fund Activation Service (Complete)
Fund Creation Microservice (Complete)
Investment and Withdrawal Scheduling Microservice (Complete)
Offer Management Microservice (Complete)
Fund Creation Microservice (Complete) Investment and Withdrawal Scheduling Microservice (Complete) Offer Management Microservice (Complete) Investment Creation and Close Service (Complete)
Rollover Service (Complete)
Transfer Service (Complete)
Fund Liquidation Service (Complete)
Monitoring Service (In Progress, 70%)
Statistics Service (Complete)
Global Rankings System (Complete)
Front End Development:
Rating Interface (In Progress, 70%)
Create Fund Interface (In Progress, 90%)
Manage Fund Interface (In Progress, 60%)
Portfolio Interface (In Progress, 70%)
What To Look Forward To From Covesting in 2020
We are proud to reveal that despite the many challenges we have faced in developing a microservice architecture that serves all of the functionality the Covesting Module requires for security and fluidity, we are approaching the final stages of development, and will soon announce the official launch date of the Covesting Module Beta on PrimeXBT.
Meanwhile, PrimeXBT is rapidly growing its customer base each and every day. This is particularly exciting for Covesting, as the more active traders using the PrimeXBT platform, the more users will be able to access the Covesting Module Beta at launch.
Our goal is never to launch as fast as possible, but instead to release a product designed for the future of the new digital economy and serve as the benchmark and standard in peer-to-peer asset management moving forward. We are confident that working hard to ensure a successful launch of the Covesting Module in partnership with PrimeXBT will open up new B2B opportunities for us in the future with new partners to integrate Covesting white label solution.
Stay tuned for exact beta launch timing, and additional updates from the Covesting team. Have a happy and safe New Year!
Yours,
Covesting team | https://medium.com/covesting/year-in-review-covesting-module-status-update-f8557becb0aa | [] | 2019-12-24 15:04:12.175000+00:00 | ['Covesting', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Trading', 'Btc', 'Crypto'] |
Writing your first “Hello World” program in TypeScript with ease | Hello World Program
A simple Hello World program in JavaScript would be to print Hello World! message to the console. In TypeScript, just like in JavaScript, it would be using the console.log function call with a "Hello World!" string literal.
Let’s create a simple project with the directory name hello-world and place a hello.ts file inside it. The .ts extension will help us and the TypeScript compiler understand that it is a TypeScript file.
/hello-world
└── hello.ts
The hello.ts program looks like above. It’s plain and simple JavaScript, nothing TypeScript specific at the moment. To run this program inside a browser (by importing it using a <script> tab) or in Node.js, we need to convert it to the .js file. So let’s use the tsc command and provide the hello.ts as a source file.
The TypeScript compiler accepted the hello.ts file and created a hello.js file right beside the source file. Now we can import this hello.js file in the browser or run directly inside Node as shown above.
Adding Type Support
Let’s modify the previous example and let’s try to mimic a little modular project structure. Let’s also focus on making the program safe by adding TypeScript features such as type annotations.
/hello-world
└── src/
├── lib/
| └── utils.ts
└── program.ts
In the modified project structure, the src directory contains all the source ( .ts ) files. The utils.ts contains a sayHello function that the program.ts imports and executes. These program files look like below.
The :number part of result variable declaration is called the Type Annotation. The type annotation declares the ultimate data type of an entity such as a variable, an argument of the function, or the return value of a function. This type annotation syntax placed just behind the name of the entity in the entity declaration statement.
The number here in the type annotation is the built-in data type provided by the TypeScript that represents all the numbers. You can also create your custom types that may represent complex values such as an object of a specific shape or a function of a specific signature.
Once an entity is annotated with a type, its type can’t be modified. That means an entity can represent only a set of values once it is declared. Therefore the result variable in the above program can only contain number values during the lifetime of this program. You will see in a minute why the above program fails to compile simply because of this reason.
When we compile these program files using the tsc command, we could provide file paths of both the files or just the program.ts since it imports utils.ts therefore it is auto included in the compilation process. Focus on the type annotations in the program. The sayHello function accepts an argument of type string and returns a value of type string .
💡 We will learn more about type annotation, basic and abstract types and the type system in general in the upcoming lessons. We have used import statement in the program above. We are also going to discuss these in upcoming lessons.
This type information will be used by program.ts and we can already see a problem here. The result variable assignment statement shows an error. If you hover on it, you will be able to see the problem. But let’s try to compile the program and see what TypeScript compiler says about it.
Oops, looks like we made a mistake. The sayHello function returns a value of type string but the result variable is a type of number . We can save a number value as a string value. So we need to either change the type of result to string , to change the return type of sayHello function.
Now if we compile the program, TypeScript won’t complain about anything and we also do not see any errors in the IDE. When the TypeScript compiler generated the compiler .js output files, it places them right beside the source files, since it likes to maintain the original file paths.
/hello-world
└── src/
├── lib/
| ├── utils.js
| └── utils.ts
├── program.js
└── program.ts
Generally, we do not like to pollute our working directory. This is obviously bad and we need to fix it. What we can do is to provide an output directory where these files should be emitted. We can do that by invoking the tsc command with the --outDir command-line flag with the directory path.
Now the output files are placed inside dist directory but the TypeScript held on to the original file structure of the source file which is a good thing. Let’s see how compiled JavaScript looks like and what I said it’s a good thing.
By default, TypeScript converts ES6 import statement into CommonJS require() calls by default so that the output code can be run inside Node. This however doesn’t work inside a browser since the browser doesn’t support the CommonJS module system. But you can change it using --module flag.
You can also see that the TypeScript compiler performed some operations on the source code. It converted ES6 template string (inside sayHello function) into normal string concatenation using the + operator.
This process is called downlevelling since it down-compiles the code from a higher language version to a lower language version. This is done by the TypeScript compiler since the default target is set to ES3 (JavaScript version) which do not support template strings. You can change the target to ES6 or above to bypass this process using --target flag.
💡 You can learn more about these flags from the Compiler Flags lesson.
If we want to run this project using Node, we just need to invoke the node command and provide the dist/program.js file since it already imports the ./lib/utils.js file (relative to itself) using the require() call. Now you can see why keeping the original file structure in the output was a good thing. Had the output file structure different, Node would not have been able to find the ./lib/utils.js file relative to the program.js file.
Using tsconfig.json configuration file
So far we talked about --target and --module command-line flags and used the --outDir flag to change the output directory. These flags configure the compilation settings of the TypeScript compiler.
Similarly, we provided the source files to the TypeScript command from the tsc command itself. When the compiler-options get larger, so does the tsc command and it could be overwhelming to handle such a big command.
To solve this issue, TypeScript provides specifying these options through a JSON configuration file mainly named tsconfig.json . This file should be placed in the root directory of the project. When we invoke the tsc command from this root directory, the TypeScript compiler uses this file to extract the compilation settings just like values from the command-line options/flags.
So let’s create the tsconfig.json in the hello-world project directory.
In the above tsconfig.json , we have specified the source files to include in the compilation using the files field. The uitls.ts file is redundant since it is already imported inside program.ts . The compilerOptions field contains the actual compilation settings.
You can provide a custom file path of this configuration file using the tsconfig.json using the --project or -p flag such as tsc --project tsconfig.prod.json . You can also override compilerOptions of the imported tsconfig.json file by using the command-line flags.
In the above example, even though the tsconfig.json says the output directory is dist but we have overridden it using the --outDir flag. This could be useful while performing automated tasks.
Working with ts-node
So far we have learned that in order to run a TypeScript program, you first need to compile it and then run the output JavaScript ( .js ) files. But sometimes you really do not care about the output .js files, you just need to run the program using Node. So having this extra compilation step kinda seems unnecessary, though it is mandatory.
To solve this issue, some brilliant people came together and made ts-node . It is an open-source command-line utility to run .ts directly on Node without having to manually compile these source files to .js file since ts-node does that internally with added optimizations. You can just run ts-node program.ts command and the process we went through manually in the above example is taken care of by the ts-node under the hood.
To install this tool, follow this official documentation on the GitHub. I would recommend you to install this tool globally so that you can access it using the command ts-node from anywhere on your system. Once the installation is done, let’s move to our project and execute the ts-node command.
As you can see from the above example, we just executed the ts-node command and provided the src/program.ts file. The ts-node tool uses the TypeScript compiler to first compile the program and then run the output .js file using the node command. So in a nutshell ts-node is just a combination of tsc and node command but with added improvements.
If you want to provide custom compiler-options to ts-node , then you should put the tsconfig.json file in the directory where the ts-node command is being invoked, perhaps in the root directory of the project.
Just like the tsc command, the ts-node command looks for the tsconfig.json file but only to extract compilerOptions . The files field is ignored (also the include and exclude fields) so that we can provide the executable source file path from the command-line itself. | https://medium.com/jspoint/typescript-hello-world-program-b0826ee3d87d | ['Uday Hiwarale'] | 2020-09-01 06:38:45.104000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'Nodejs', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development'] |
Drawing: Mr. Lynch | Artist’s Note №1
This drawing will earn no money (Medium recently all-but-demonetized poetry, cartoons, flash fiction and other short articles). Please consider buying me a coffee. More coffee=more drawings for you to enjoy.
Artist’s Note №2
This drawing is brought to you by the letter “D.” “D” is for Dr. Franklin’s Staticy Cat and Other Outrageous Tales, my collection of humorous stories and drawings for children.
Artist’s Note №3
My new one-man Medium magazine is called — Rolli. Subscribe today.
Artist’s Note №4
From now on, I’m letting my readers determine how often I post new material. When this post reaches 1000 claps — but not before — I’ll post something new.
Artist’s Note №5
You might like these drawings, too. | https://medium.com/pillowmint/drawing-mr-lynch-ca8d27a7e655 | ['Rolli', 'Https', 'Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites'] | 2020-01-27 19:18:51.352000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Culture', 'Comics', 'Drawing', 'Film'] |
Five Time-Saving Hacks to Use Plagiarism Checker X! | Five amazing tips and hacks to use Plagiarism Checker X
Let’s admit we all have tons of pending work, poking at the back of our minds. Yet we keep procrastinating and delay it till the 11th hour!
Why not try some cool tips and tricks to analyze your documents faster with Plagiarism Checker X. Interested huh? Let’s dive straight into it….
1 — Use Plagiarism Checker X in your Native Language
Native Language? Yes, you got it right.
According to several researches published in the native language reading studies from 2000 till date, it is clearly shown that you read and work faster in your native language. Why? Because it is built-in your brain since you were born. In fact, you started to recognize it sooner with your mother’s voice.
So, taking edge of this natural ability, it is possible to use PCX software in your native language. Plagiarism Checker X is available in 20+ languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. Even more languages are coming soon. No more language barriers for all users around the globe.
2 — Easy Reading with Color Coded Text
Easy on the Eyes : Color-Coded Reports
According to several studies on effect of reading color coded words and its effects on fluency and decoding ability, it is perceived that a color-coded text segment is easier to read due to several factors; main being the cognitive patter of our brain to process text and visuals.
Online Plagiarism Report is visually appealing and easy-to-understand. It’s COLOR-CODED layout makes it easier to pick duplicacy sources in just a glance. The copied content is given a particular color, depending on the percentage of the duplication. At last, you can export the report into standard word, pdf or html file formats. In current version, we provide built-in Word and PDF Support. So, you can use this feature even if you do not have Microsoft Word installed on your system.
3 — Use Dashboard to quickly access files
No need to remember manual file path.
Now, you can use the Main Dashboard Layout to access files directly. Isn’t it great. Quick and faster access to all files, and selecting from recent files makes the usage even more seamless.
Dedicated dashboard layout gives users more control while organizing plagiarism report content. It provides useful insights about cumulative plagiarism checking. Also, it makes it easy to navigate around the features.
4 — Scan past content to avoid self-plagiarism
Scan with your own previous documents
Well, to err is human. It is a complete possibility that due to lack of time, focus or in a rush, you could accidentally copy or misquote even your own work. This could happen when you unknowingly write similar ideas from your previous work. Or maybe there are sections in your text where you should mention what you did in the past.
When done with your draft, try to scan your current work with your referenced past documents. In order to avoid the hassle in future. You can easily fix it using BULK COMPARISON in Plagiarism Checker X. If you want to know more how can you use this feature, feel free to read more about it here.
5- Use Lunch Breaks to save scanning time
Analyse your text during a break.
When meeting the deadline, every minute counts. So do not waste a single moment. It is always a good idea to use passive time effectively like showers, lunch/tea breaks or even a small nap. Before your leave your desk for any such reason, simply load your file for similarity check. And get complete results on your return, to start with the next tasks of report writing.
We all know how important it is to get done faster with that long-pending deadlines. So, even though you will be away from your desk, but practically you will be utilizing this break-time effectively.
Hey, Let’s catch up on PCX Instagram to know your hacks.
Hey, you know what, our Plagiarism Checker X family is growing. PCX is now on Instagram too. We are excited to reach more people who believe in power of original content. Let’s catch up on insta @plagcheckerx and share your stories of quality content.
Stay connect for all updates www.lagiarismcheckerx.com |ww.plagx.com | https://medium.com/@plagiarismcheckerx/five-time-saving-hacks-to-use-plagiarism-checker-x-8a6dd1df2abe | [] | 2020-12-09 10:05:27.396000+00:00 | ['Plagiarism Checker Tool', 'Tips And Tricks', 'Original Content', 'Similarity Score', 'Hacks'] |
The Morality of the Influencer Community on YouTube. | Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
One Saturday morning I was watching one of my favourite YouTubers. I have followed this lady for about three years, watching her channel grow and her content improve. I was super happy for her when she finally reached the 100,000 subscribers milestone on the platform. However, she posted a video about how YouTube would not give her the play button that creators usually receive when they reach this milestone.
This particular creator transitioned from being a blogger to a YouTuber and once worked as a nude model (art nude). Early on in her YouTube days, she received a strike on her account for showing a minor amount of nudity (I think she showed a little boob or bum), something that is against YouTube policy. Her audience, I would say, are mostly men and women over 30, with a lot of comments on her videos coming from an older audience. She does not promote products, nor does she get paid to influence her audience. If anything, she promotes being a strong and independent woman.
I agree that it is an important requirement for YouTube to have strict guidelines over what is allowed on their platform, and understandably, certain nudity should not be allowed. However, from my research, there are far worse things that children can see on YouTube than a little bit of a ladies bum.
Whilst scouring the platform for female influencers. I came across two creators, both in their early 20s, each with over 7 million subscribers. Looking at their viewer demographics, I found that the majority of their audience is minors, the remainder is teenagers and girls in their early 20s. Despite their audience demographics, these influencers are allowed to post content on the platform that encourages binge drinking and making drinking games look like fun. Yet, they have all their play buttons and no strikes against their accounts.
I then looked at the videos made by another female influencer. Again, she is in her early 20s. Her channel came up as a recommendation because I had viewed the other two channels. Her vlogs contained information about sex, contraception, drinking and weight loss. Again, her demographic was young and impressional girls. Despite being an attractive young lady, her content was about her own negative view of her body and how she needed to lose weight, have her teeth straightened and, on yeah, she had body dysmorphia, I had no idea what that even was. At this point, I was getting quite annoyed. How can this be acceptable content for an adolescence audience, I thought? Moreover, why is it OK for one creator to speak negatively about the female body, yet, another creator, that celebrates positively the natural beauty of it gets penalised?
From my viewpoint, it appears that YouTube likes to keep the larger channels happy, regardless of their content. After all, they are how YouTube makes its money. Perhaps if I were a teenager or in my early 20s, I would think differently. However, as a 30 something female, I have already lived through times when I never felt skinny enough, hated my spotty skin and was body-conscious. I thought that all the creams and pills promoted in magazines would improve my life and make me feel better about myself. None of them ever did. Influences are only doing the same thing that magazines did ten years ago. However, YouTube is available to a much wider audience. Back in my youth, you needed money to buy magazines, today, the internet can be accessed for free, just go and sit outside Starbucks.
Moreover, perhaps it is unbeknown to younger audiences that the majority of their favourite YouTubers are paid to make them want to buy the stuff that they promote. These influences are millionaires, pay for personal trainers, dieticians and dermatologists to make them look the way they do. It is not the £5 cream they are trying to influence their viewers to buy that makes them look the way they do.
But what can be done? At the moment, not much. We sadly are living in a world where, even the government use social media influencers to promote common sense across the masses because, for some reason, the public will listen to them over a doctor! Hopefully, in the future things will change and this is just a phase in our culture. However, in the meantime, I do think YouTube needs to tighten their reigns on some of the larger creators and more closely monitor their content. | https://medium.com/carre4/the-morality-of-the-influencer-community-on-youtube-3a31e8d49cbd | ['Obscure Travels'] | 2020-09-19 17:32:26.736000+00:00 | ['YouTube', 'Social Media', 'Feminism', 'Female Role Models', 'Influencer Marketing'] |
Christmas 2020: How is it Special for You? | 2020 will be the year to remember for some of us. And for others, it will be the year to forget as fast as possible.
We didn’t ask for a deadly pandemic to infect our planet, our lives, our bodies when the year dawned, young and ripe. We didn’t ask for a second pandemic of racial violence. However, many of us welcomed the wide-spread outcry and public conversations of what’s hard to talk about.
We didn’t ask for a skyrocketing death toll or safety precautions becoming controversial.
And yet, here we are, celebrating Christmas, Chanukah, and/or Winter Solstice in the midst of all this — as we say in Yiddish — mishigas (craziness).
Yes, there are a lot of restrictions. But they vary. Some areas are on fairly strict sheltering-in-place. Others are more open.
Either way, we’re being asking, warned, or guided to stay close to home, keep our bubbles small, Christmasing on Zoom.
Can you hear the new carol — I’ve been dreaming of a Zoom Christmas…Unlike the ones I use to know…Where the boxes glisten, and children listen to hear, “UNMUTE YOURSELF ALREADY!
Some of us batten down willingly and may not have had places to go or people to see anyway.
Others are sad or angry at not being able to hold the new grandbaby, play Santa in person, or hug loved ones up close.
Like my sister’s family, still, others decided to take the risks, travel anyway, quarantine on arrival, thrilled to be together for a little while.
New conditions bring out new qualities.
For some, it brings out our worst ones. We’re taking Scrooge’s bah humbug to new levels. For some, the SAD Seasonal Affective Disorder depression’s on steroids. We’d like to hibernate. Wake me when Christmas is over. Or better yet, January 20th.
Others of us try to figure out how to make Christmas feel like Christmas as best we can. That’s our question for this week’s Middle-Pause Pump-Priming Prompt.
What memories are you making? What goodies are you baking? How are you doing it differently this year?
There’s a lot we can still do.
We can still play and sing Christmas songs. I love A Charlie Brown Christmas, the soundtrack from the Peanuts special by jazz great Vince Guaraldi and his trio. Any song on that track is an instant cheer up.
Thanks to Pandora.com, I have several (commercial free!) Christmas music stations. One is smooth jazz Christmas. Another is the Anonymous 4, featuring medieval chant and church music sung acapella. And last but not least, a Chanticeer Christmas featuring luscious choral arrangements.
Music makes a huge difference in my mood and ability to cope. Singing lifts my spirits up and over the petty obstacles that I seem to have less tolerance for when my nerves are shot.
And right after my biopsy, my nerves were shot. I didn’t expect that. Or that I’d have a few tearful meltdowns best described as hormonal. But I did.
We can still decorate trees, put up lights, bake cookies to share, filling the house with great smells. The party may have to be on Zoom, but we can still show off how we’ve brightened our homes.
Or we can put up a virtual background and not worry about decorating or even making the place presentable. That’s my option! I found a lovely photo of soft candlelight. What you see is what you get.
We can still brighten others’ lives.
We can still purge our closets and pantries to give away clothes, toiletries, and non-perishable food items to those who need them. Like Katie wrote about in her story. I’ll Be Alone for Christmas but Not Lonely, helping others lift our spirits, not just theirs.
I plan to give away items to Goodwill, Out of the Closet, and a local women’s shelter that is deeply appreciative of those hotel sample toiletries that I collect for just this purpose.
I will also donate to the Alameda County Food Bank. With COVID, the usual demand has increased dramatically above Christmas pasts. We can help feed hungry folks.
We can give gifts, homemade or store-bought. I’ve enjoyed shopping locally, supporting family-based businesses. My sister and family are getting three goody baskets from The Turquoise Museum Bakery Cafe.
They’ll get to try out a new white chocolate cranberry cookie recipe. A Christmas floral arrangement for their table comes on Wednesday with the last delivery. Shhh. Don’t tell. It’s a surprise!
Have Zoom, will “travel.”
We have a call planned for tomorrow morning. It will be fun seeing both nieces, my grandniece, Moira, my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew-in-law. We sing with the baby and act silly. But it’s not the same as being there in person.
If I were, we’d be playing Bananagrams, watching movies, looking at lights. My sister, nieces, and I would work on art journals and scrapbooks as well as attend church.
We’d go out for lattes and treats at our favorite Flying Star Cafe. They will all go up the mountain to see the Luminaria. At best, I will join via face-time. (But I’ll stay toasty warm while they traipse in the snow).
What helps me is staying positive. Humor does that. And knowing, like everything else, this too shall pass. We’ll have a chance to catch up and do it all up right next year, hopefully, or the year after.
In the meantime, have a merry Christmas, and happy holiday however it needs to be. Oh, and be sure and get out in the early night sky to enjoy the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that shine bright as the Christmas Star.
Whatever you’ve got planned, please share it with us here on Middle-Pause. How are you doing it differently this year?
We look forward to hearing from you! | https://medium.com/middle-pause/christmas-2020-how-is-it-special-for-you-482a61b427f9 | ['Marilyn Flower'] | 2020-12-22 16:33:08.381000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Covid 19', 'Wisdom', 'Family', 'Writing Prompts'] |
How I Start A SwiftUI Project | Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
In WWDC 2020 Apple announced “SwiftUI now supports building entire apps!”, which I personally find awesome. No more UIKit needed.
Additionally, also during WWDC 2020, a major update to their logging API has also been introduced.
Adding the above two results in the below gist, which is my “template” for new and ongoing SwiftUI projects. | https://medium.com/@twissmueller/how-i-start-a-swiftui-project-28767bb73df9 | ['Tobias Wissmueller'] | 2020-12-11 14:01:54.944000+00:00 | ['Swift', 'Swiftui', 'Macos Development', 'Apple Development', 'Ios Development'] |
Practice POST-VITAM to remember 2020 positively | Do the POST-VITAM exercise to end 2020 positively.
After a crisis, individuals and organizations do POST-MORTEM to identify the root cause of what went *wrong* so we avoid a similar crisis in future. Sadly, rather than enable introspection & growth, Post-Mortem leads to Victimization and Blame.
Instead, I suggest you practice POST-VITAM.
Identify what you did *right* in 2020 that made you come ALIVE during Covid-19 crisis and reflect on how you can *amplify* these factors in 2021.
I did my own Post-Vitam and learned a lot about myself. In Q1, all my speaking engagements got cancelled, and my income plummeted. I was scared. But being an Enneagram Type 2 (The Helper), I am wired to help others. So I did dozens of free webinars throughout 2020 to inspire/motivate others.
In doing so, I felt more ALIVE in 2020 than ever in my adult life.
The life lesson I learned in 2020 is: “As long as I am aligned with my Swadharma (my true Higher Nature), the Universe will take care of me.”
Positive psychology (and trauma studies) shows that “You Create Your Past in the Present.” Post-Vitam will help you store your 2020 memories — however traumatic — with “positive charge” in your brain (and nervous system) so every time you recall 2020 in the future its memories won’t “trigger” a big negative charge | https://medium.com/@naviradjou/practice-post-vitam-to-remember-2020-positively-f539a2bed2f5 | ['Navi Radjou'] | 2020-12-22 17:09:16.434000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Trauma', 'Healing', 'Personal Development', '2020'] |
How to find the population-weighted centre of local administrative units | Why is this a problem?
In the case outlined by Andrea Borruso in the post linked above, the problem is that the visuals are unconvincing to local residents if they do not reflect the actual human geography that they are familiar with.
In the case of my colleague Ornaldo, defining where a given town actually is has an impact on the data themselves. You can find more details about his work at this link, but here is his problem in brief. One of the datasets distributed by Copernicus provides detailed data on temperature for the whole period 1961–2018, with data available for a grid covering all of Europe with a precision of 5.5 km. These data are continuous and know no borders, but change of temperature differs considerably even in contiguous grid cells, in particular in mountain or seaside areas: readers familiar with the geography of Italy, for example, will surely understand that a large number of municipalities falls into one of these two categories.
In order to make these data available to the wider public, Ornaldo created an interactive interface enabling readers to find data about their own town (currently available for Italy, forthcoming for the rest of Europe). Here is the problem: when talking about the temperature of Aosta, people will have in mind the city of Aosta. For example, when they look at the weather forecast, they see the expected temperature of downtown Aosta, not the one on the neighbouring mountaintop, which would be very different and not really helpful in understanding if they need a coat or not to go out. As a consequence, when reporting temperature change of Aosta, if we want to be fair to the reader, we should give the temperature change in the city of Aosta, not on some mountain in its proximity. This is true also for small municipalities in the mountains, especially if we publish these data with a local audience in mind.
Ultimately, this is relevant also for national audiences, considering that such mountain locations are often outliers and as such are more likely to make headlines: to the extent that it is possible, such headline should make sense, and not simply record whatever municipality happens to have more mountain pastures and peaks within its administrative boundaries.
The solution: towns are where people are
Ultimately, towns are where people are. So the best way to find the centre of a municipality could well be to find the population-weighted centre. Given that Eurostat distributes a population grid with data on the number of residents in each square kilometer of the continent, it should be possible to consistently apply this approach for all municipalities in the European Union.
How does this look in practice? Let’s start from an easy case: a relatively big town with large non-inhabited areas within its municipal border. If the town centre is where people are, and through the population grid we know where people live, we can just make a weighted average of the coordinates of the centroids of each cell of the population grid. Et voilà, we have a point that can reasonably be understood as a central location of the town. | https://medium.com/european-data-journalism-network/how-to-find-the-population-weighted-centre-of-local-administrative-units-a0d198fc91f7 | ['Obc Transeuropa'] | 2020-03-27 09:15:51.642000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Geography', 'Mapping', 'Explainer', 'Data Journalism'] |
Building Tiny Docker Images Containing Go Microservices | This tutorial shows you how to make small Docker images when building Go programs.
Sample Go program
I wrote two tutorials recently demonstrating Docker Compose and Traefik. They both used a small Docker image containing a simple Go REST API that returns a JSON string with the message Hello World.
Let’s take a look at the code:
As you can see, the code doesn’t do much, it listens on a port specified by the APP_PORT environment variable and returns a JSON response when GET requests are made to /.
The code for this post can be downloaded from this GitHub repository.
Even the small amount of code above can create large Docker images depending on how you build them. Let’s make the smallest image possible in the next step.
Create Dockerfile
Create a Dockerfile and add the following contents to it.
FROM golang:1.15.5-buster AS builder
ARG VERSION=dev
WORKDIR /build
COPY main.go .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 \
go build -o demoservice \
-ldflags="-w -X=main.version=${VERSION}" main.go FROM scratch
COPY --from=builder /build/demoservice /demoservice
ENTRYPOINT [ "/demoservice" ]
This Dockerfile uses a multi-stage build process. The first five lines are used to build the Go program and the last three copy the built program into a small scratch image.
In order for this to work correctly, we are statically compiling the Go program by specifying CGO_ENABLED=0 . You can read more about statically compiling Go programs here: https://www.arp242.net/static-go.html
We’ve also used -w with -ldflags to strip out debug info. This can make the image a little smaller but if you need debug info, remove this flag.
Build Docker image
Run the following to build the image:
docker build -t demoservice:1.0.0 . --build-arg VERSION=1.0.0
Note: specifying --build-arg VERSION=1.0.0 assigns 1.0.0 to the variable named version in main.go. This is done at build time using the -ldflags option.
Check its size
We can check it’s size by running:
docker images
As you can see from the screenshot above. The size of this image is only 5.08 MB. If we had used a Debian slim image instead of scratch, it would have been 74.3 MB.
We’ve saved a lot of space but does the program still work?
Let’s test it
Run the following command:
docker run --rm -e APP_PORT=8080 -p 8080:8080 demoservice:1.0.0
From another Terminal process run:
Yay, the Go program still works.
Conclusion
By using a statically compiled binary and copying it to a scratch image, we managed to save almost 70 MB of disk space creating a Docker image. This can speed up deployment times and save disk space. | https://medium.com/@tonyuk/building-tiny-docker-images-containing-go-microservices-766e7f5b316 | ['Tony Mackay'] | 2020-12-08 13:15:00.277000+00:00 | ['Docker', 'Microservices', 'Go', 'Golang'] |
Instructive insights on launching Slack apps you need to know — Part 2 | Instructive insights on launching Slack apps you need to know — Part 2
Motivation
In the first part of our Slack miniseries, we’ve introduced our app Facehunter and explained the basics of Slack API for developers. In this part we’ll go through the application itself, i.e. we’ll explain in more detail how exactly it works.
The app is open-source and thus available online at ROI Hunter repo. Feel free to go through the code or even develop new functionality for it — that would be much appreciated.
While the code should largely be self-explanatory, we are going to explain it more, particularly in relation to Slack.
Development
Now that you know your way around Slack API, it’s time to jump into our development process. We’ll go through it step by step.
DevOps part
Application deploy setup is usually done by DevOps — you need to set up the domain, prepare the app deploy, etc. For us, it was super easy, as our DevOps team has prepared a process for us called Simple Deploy. The name says it all — it’s simple and it handles deploy for you.
All we needed to do was copy-paste three files: Dockerfile, cloudbuild.yaml, and all.yaml. Now I just had to configure a Cloud Build trigger to get the deploy fully working. The most time-consuming part of this process is waiting for your new domain to get propagated.
Here we should also mention the secrets. When you go to the code, you can notice that the app sometimes reads secrets from environmental variables. This is another DevOps magic done via all.yaml file — in the envFrom property we define which secrets we want to read from our Vault and it automatically handles everything for us. Yes, we do use Vault for secret management.
Flows
The application code itself is self-explanatory. We structured the code by layers (this is not always ideal, but we believe it to be the better choice for such a small microservice as Face Hunter).
Pretty much all application logic is kept in Flow classes. Essentially the app works in the way that a Controller gets an outside input and initiates a Flow that processes the input. In a few rare cases, the Controller handles the input by itself. Let us explain the individual flows to you.
ExchangeVerificationCodeFlow
This is the first working flow, as it handles oauth so that we can connect other Slack workspaces to the app. It handles step 3 in Slack’s oauth flow.
Note that we store workspace’s access token, which seems unnecessary at first because we use a bot for everything. However, as you may remember from the Slack API part of this article, there is one particular method where using bot’s token is a bad idea — message.postEphemeral.
Secrets used in this flow are extracted from the Vault via the cool DevOps mechanics described above.
NewGuessFlow
Let’s move to the core flow. The point here is to get one random user photo and four false names to prepare a guess from.
First, we start by reading workspace’s bot token from the database. After that, the most time-consuming part of the flow arises retrieval of all employees from the given Slack workspace. We have yet to test this method with workspaces bigger than 200 users, but at least for us, it’s working pretty fast and usually is done faster than 1 second. Still, we are running this flow in a new thread (using Kotlin’s coroutines) just to be sure.
When we have downloaded the list of users, we filter it for the ones that are actually usable. Only human users that are active and have a custom image are eligible for guessing.
Here we discovered one strange issue in the past: Slack downloads gravatar images for those who use them but doesn’t consider them to be a custom image. Thereby some users won’t show up, even though they seemingly should.
Then we shuffle the filtered list. It is an easy and elegant way to randomize the choice.
After that, we take first person in the shuffled list (correct guess) and four more (wrong guesses). We build blocks from the selected data and finally, we post the guess to Slack.
Note the special logic for setting up buttons’ value param. It is so that every button carries all the information needed when it gets clicked on, i.e. we don’t have to do any third-party API calls on button evaluation. Thereby each button’s value includes info on whether the guess was correct, who the person really was and what was the person’s position in the company.
EvaluateGuessFlow
When a guess is made, it must be also evaluated. After a button gets clicked on Slack, it sends a POST to our InteractiveController, which initiates this flow. Part of the logic is in the controller, as it splits the value of the clicked button and only sends the data to the flow.
The logic in the flow is very simple. If the guess was correct, it reveals the person’s position and offers the next guess. If the guess was wrong, the correct name of the person is revealed and the next guess is offered.
The next guess option is done via a button, as that is far easier than having to type /facehunt again. Button for support/feedback initiates another flow.
SendHelpInfoFlow
This minor flow does only one thing: sends support/feedback information to the user. It also has to include the Next question button, because users tend to get slightly confused without it.
SendEphemeralReplyFlow
Ephemeral replies have been discussed quite a lot above and in Face Hunter, they have a special flow just for them. Note that we’re using workspace’s access token instead of bot token.
Other interesting parts
Database
Face Hunter uses a database for a singular purpose: to store workspace info. In the future, it would be theoretically possible to use it to store usage info, but we decided against that for now.
Logs
Face Hunter is open-source and available to be installed by anybody on Slack. That is why we were not quite sure how to handle logging in there, as we would be working with information about pretty much anybody. Ultimately we decided to go without logging in order to be safe on the privacy and personal data side. This is a decision we may change in the future.
The only logs we have now are the ones in our Kubernetes when an exception is thrown. As a matter of fact, that’s all the logs we need at this moment, so fingers crossed.
Obstacles
During the development process, we encountered a few obstacles and believe some of them are worth mentioning here.
Different OS
In my first implementation, after the user correctly picked the name, they got this icon in response: :heavy_check_mark: On wrong answer, this came: :negative_squared_cross_mark: Here is what they look like on Linux desktop Slack:
Green for right, red for wrong, exactly as everyone would expect. That is why I was surprised when my colleague who uses Mac wrote to me that the icons were wrong and I should be using a green one for the correct choice and red for the wrong one. Puzzled, I sent him the icons and got the following screen from him:
I.e. almost the exact opposite of what we actually needed. We discovered that many of the default Slack icons appear completely different on different operating systems. Finally, we settled on these two icons for the right and wrong answer: :tada: :x:
Now we can just pray the some Slack version doesn’t show the big red X as green.
Who is that guy?
When testing the app, I had this photo shown to me:
Weird thing is, there were five name options and none of them matched the photo. I even went to manually check them all to see their profiles and all were very different from this photo.
I had even searched our user list for this photo and didn’t find it. At this moment I thought there either is an insane bug on Slack or that we have a ghost in our company. Funny thing is, the guy in the picture looks very similar to the father of one of our colleagues, so I even asked the guy how his father could get to our Slack.
Only a few hours later did I find the truth: one girl in our company likes to put funny pictures to her photo and this was one of them. She had already changed the photo when I looked at her, so that’s why I didn’t realize the connection. Also, it means Slack is somehow caching employee photos for a short time.
Conclusion
We would like you to take one message from this article: developing apps for Slack is pretty easy and quite a lot of fun. If you would like to create new pull requests for Face Hunter, feel free to do so, we’ll be more than happy to take a look at them. Enjoy Face Hunter & have fun!
Thanks for reading!
➡ Find out our other articles on tech{hunters}.
➡ We are ROI Hunter, if you enjoyed this article, have a look at our job offers.
⬇ Be sure to 👏 below if you like what you read. ⬇ | https://medium.com/tech-hunters/instructive-insights-on-launching-slack-apps-you-need-to-know-part-2-9b62cbd93600 | ['Josef Hertl'] | 2020-02-13 10:21:32.592000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Slackbot', 'Slack', 'DevOps', 'Kubernetes'] |
Lifechanging Things I Learned From Being In Cryptospace For 2 Years | My first startup, the early day's phase
The main thing I learned while working for the first startup for a year, is something that is the most difficult thing for many working in this fascinating industry.
Let me first tell you how I got there
It started with a dream. I got invited to a huge catamaran yacht in Ibiza where I live and I met the owner, a very successful computer tech visionary millionaire. We had a good click and next thing I know I was floating on the Nile in Egypt on one of his other 4 boats. He had invited about 45 people, presented his vision, and boom.. a startup was born.
A rare mix of investors, people coming from companies like IBM and other computer giants, and a bunch of spiritual hippies with some cool skills. I fit in the latter category.
The mission; disrupting the complete Internet as it is today by building a new decentralized internet, bringing innovation at the edge with a cheaper, much greener distributed network of mini data centres all around the globe.
My task: Storyteller.
W.T.F?
Let me explain
In order for the movement of decentralization to work, many people on this planet need to become more responsible and embrace different, higher values than greed and power alone. Just to mention the two that are kind of the fundamentals of the pyramid system we try to get rid of today.
For this to happen, a new story needs to be told. We need to imagine this future first, to frog leap into a world where technology will really serve humanity in its evolution. To avoid a world where AI runs us.
I am part of that army of storytellers that sparks that very important revolution not with bits and bytes, but with words.
Next thing that happened, we were meeting in the owners’ penthouse in Dubai on the 71st floor, to further forge the digital swords, make a strategy, and get to know each other better.
This was the pure excitement phase.
We were going to change the world, and we all felt privileged to be part of a team that was going to create a new internet, from the people, for the people. We contacted the former inventor of the WWW, Berners-Lee, and asked whether he would like to invest.
We were high on blockchain.
I assume many of you in this space must have felt this too. The Everything-is-possible mentality since blockchain will change this world forever and our plan is the best and we will all be heroes soon.
It lasted from around 2017 till the end of 2018. | https://medium.com/spirit-of-crypto/from-exctacy-to-disappointment-the-short-lifecycle-for-many-in-the-crypto-industry-3d06767fd710 | ['Lucien Lecarme'] | 2020-02-25 04:24:20.557000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain', 'Life Lessons', 'Inspiration'] |
FireFest by 3Musafir | As we sat around a bonfire surrounded by strangers, in a strange city, humming to an unfamiliar language, it hit us; a vision. The youngsters of our land are deprived of such opportunities, the only place people make friends at are institutions and even then there isn’t fun enough stuff to do in your city. So we thought to ourselves, how do we bring about a community in Pakistan to unite our youth, to introduce a platform for a new social culture and this is what we came up with: Teen Musafir.
Firefest happens to be one of the four flagship events we host yearly. It was also our very first official event for Teen Musafir, the execution however wasn’t all fun and games initially. It took hours and hours of planning and designing, thinking, and rethinking our model, our motto, and what was the best possible way to lay it all down. One of our top priorities while executing what was only an idea in our head was to create a safe space. We knew what we had to do; exclusivity. Regardless of its financial drawbacks, we always chose quality over quantity. The response we received post-Firefest was overwhelming, reassuring us that our vision was understood and appreciated. From there onwards, Firefest became a custom. As the next year rolled up, we knew it was time for Firefest 2.0, except it had to bigger and better this time around.
When you’re tired of the city and you need a break from all the hustle-bustle, camping is the way to go. Sharan forest, in KPK, is the perfect place for such a getaway. It’s like a little piece of heaven on earth that traps in itself blissful tranquillity. Since we believe in experience-based traveling, our aim was to come up with the most fun, eventful itinerary, where you get to connect with nature while also having a blast. Our extensive pre-trip arrangements began early on, sorting out accommodation, travel details, and many more specifics. Finally, on the day of the trip, we loaded our buses from Islamabad and Lahore and got on the road. The best part about our trips is meeting our adventurous, hyped-up musafirs, who’re always just as excited as us. The bus rides are an essential part of road trips, it’s where you take turns to play music, where you play games and become friends with strangers. The craziness starts as soon as you step foot on the bus. We stopped at Balakot, by a beautiful stream, to quickly have breakfast before reaching our final destination. Since Sharan forest is really far up a mountain, we had to fill up in mountain jeeps for the last part of our journey. The jeep dropped us off at the forest, after a bumpy ride. We instantly felt the change in temperature and how much fresher the air felt up here. The location had pods and camps lined up in a field, it was like having one big sleepover.
After assigning everyone to their camps, it was time to freshen up before starting off with our planned event for the night. As night fell upon us, the sky overflowed with stars. Being up there felt like being so close to the sky, so we wrapped up in blankets and stargazed, even wished upon a few fallen ones. From there we gathered around a bonfire, played the guitar, and started singing to our favorite songs, and this time we could sing along, it was happening. Our vision had come alive. The night went on singing and dancing around the bonfire. Once our specified DJ took over, the once wholesome gathering cracked into a full bonfire rave. Under the starry sky, thousands of feet up the ground, us dancing out of our minds like there isn’t going to be any tomorrow. Fortunately for us, there was a tomorrow.
7 am, Maroon 5 playing on loudspeaker across the fields, the musafirs were up and as energetic as last night. A little yoga session to soak in some sun took place before we moved on to morning chai. The agenda for the day included a 4-hour hike to Manshi top. We put on our sunblock, tied our shoes, and started moving upwards. Up, up, up we go, the musafirs singing and chanting, as athletic as ever. Let’s just say the climb wasn’t the easiest one but we made it to the top and oh boy was the view worth it. Acres and acres of lush green fields with ponds that horses drank from, kids running around, and a little hut in the corner serving chai pakoras, it was surreal. We sat at the top, looking down at the miniature world, thinking of the infinite possibilities life had to offer. A guest appearance was made by the rain which added to the serenity of the place but however cut our trip short. We hiked back to our campsite, some of us rested and the others read books to a divine view, either way, we paced down. After dinner, we had in store a final surprise for our musafirs; A horror movie night midst the woods, spooky? We know right! We rolled up in our blankets, alongside campfire, screaming and laughing, making memories that’ll last a lifetime. We weren’t sure when the sun took the moon's place and it was time to say goodbye to this stunning place until next time.
Firefest was over but we were left with so much warmth in our hearts. The people we met on the trip continue to be our closest friends to this day and that’s the beauty of what we do, you constantly meet new people, different people with their own variety of beliefs and visions, you evolve, you learn. You recognize the beauty which lies in being young and alive, to value what you’re blessed with every day. Here’s a little something from an inspiring author “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete”. | https://medium.com/@3musafiir/firefest-ed1a965f62c1 | ['Teen Musafir'] | 2021-06-02 20:46:31.864000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Wanderlust', 'Forest', 'Pakistan', 'Experience'] |
What is Devops? | The complete guide to DevOps (With Examples) | What do companies like Amazon, Target, Esty, Netflix, Google and Walmart all have in common? Apart from the fact that they are wildly successful companies, they all use a method known as DevOps in their day to day processes to increase efficiency and improve delivery time. In this DevOps guide we will try to explain what is DevOps and how it can be a boon for your business.
What is DevOps and Why is It So Widely Used?
So what exactly is DevOps? Let’s take a small hypothetical example to illustrate. Let’s say there is a small startup that builds AI-enabled cleaning robots. There are 3 developers (let’s be lazy and just call them Team D) who write and execute the code to create the robots and two operations people (Team O of course) who maintain the robot infrastructure in the real world environment and provide support for the robot users.
Team D has just spent 8 months creating the latest robot. It can recognize people, take commands from Alexa devices and of course clean like a boss. Team D has spent time creating this robot in their controlled dev environment and everything seems to be working smoothly. They couldn’t be prouder.
They hand over their creation to Team O which promptly takes it out into the real world. That’s when the problems start. It turns out that the perfect cleaning robot is not so perfect after all. It doesn’t recognize everyone, it’s capacity to follow Alexa commands breaks down when they are given by different people and it can’t reach and vacuum tricky shelves.
Team O is angry and frustrated. They have been waiting for this robot for so long and they can’t believe it’s an unmitigated disaster. Team D, on the other hand, is now on the defensive. They believe that everything was working perfectly during controlled testing conditions and the royal mess now must be because of Team O’s poor execution.
In conclusion, there is a sub-optimal product in the market, it seems like corrections and improvements will now take almost as long as product roll-out did, and two very competent teams now hate each other and their jobs.
That, in a nutshell, is why DevOps was created and why more than 70% of SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) were adopting DevOps Services in their companies in 2016. A lot of heartache, frustration and inefficiency could have been avoided had Team D and Team O worked with each other right from conception and execution to delivery and support. Instead, they worked in silos with an imaginary wall between them.
Team O had no involvement when the code was being written and the robot was actually being built while Team D was completely out of the picture when the robot went out into the real world and cleaned many different houses. The result was a robot that was not ready for the market and a dev team that still doesn’t quite know how to resolve things.
As you can imagine, a lot of time will go by before the robot is finally market-ready. There will be a number of iterations as Team D makes some changes and Team O sends the robot out into the real world. And not just during product development, this same issue will continue when the robot needs maintenance and upgrades. As a result, even a small startup ends up becoming inefficient and slow and there’s a good chance that it loses out to other companies that get superior products to market faster.
This was the problem that companies started seeing especially as technology became more advanced. Keeping their operations and development teams isolated from each other was resulting in slower delivery and less efficient products and services. Moreover, many processes in the company operations that could have been easily automated to increase efficiency were not being automated because the developers were simply unaware of them.
That’s when the concept of DevOps came to the fore and began being adopted widely. DevOps is nothing but a set of philosophies, practices, and tools that help an organisation to deliver better products faster by facilitating an integration of the development and operations functions. This enables companies like the one in our example to serve their customers and markets in a better way and have a competitive edge.
This starts from the design to the entire development process right up to production support.
How Has DevOps Evolved?
DevOps is now in its 10th year. DevOps, like most philosophies and tools that have practical application, has had a journey from being just a bunch of ideas and principles thrown together into a full-fledged discipline with its own processes and tools.
Back in 2007, a project manager named Patrick Debois was working with the Belgian government to help with data centre migrations. He found the whole process extremely frustrating because of the wall between the developers and the operations team which made his job much harder and delivery much slower.
Debois was a big believer in the agile methodology which promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the development lifecycle which helps dev teams ship better products faster. He believed that similar principles should apply to the development and operations teams working together in sync.
In 2008, Andrew Schafer (who later became known as a DevOps evangeliser), and Debois got together at a conference to discuss initial ideas and principles around what they then referred to as “agile systems administration”. They also formed an agile administrator group on google which is where the real beginnings of DevOps lie.
Another landmark event in the history of DevOps’ evolution was the now famous presentation by Flickr employees John Allspaw(then VP of technical operations) and Paul Hammond(then Director of Engineering) at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in 2009. With a hilarious yet hard-hitting role-play, Hammond and Allspaw brought home the fact that there was major business loss due to the wall between development and operations and the only way out was a seamless integration between the two.
This presentation came to be known as “the defining moment” for DevOps as the tech world quickly woke up to the need of such integration. The presentation inspired Debois to organize a DevOps conference called Devopsdays in Belgium, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Another important moment in the evolution of DevOps was the first DevOps conference in the United States. It was held in 2010 at Mountain View, California, the Mecca of technology. This was the definitive signal that DevOps had arrived and was here to stay. In 2018 in fact, there were more than 30 DevOps conferences across the world.
How Does Using DevOps Benefit an Organisation?
The reason DevOps saw such rapid adoption is that it truly makes a massive difference to how a tech company operates at a very fundamental level. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that accrue when a company adopts the DevOps approach.
Accelerated Innovation
This is the major reason that DevOps came into existence. Using DevOps allows companies to develop and deploy products much faster. As we saw in our earlier example, cycle times become significantly longer when there is a wall between development and operations. When the two are integrated, on the other hand, changesets are smaller and problems to be solved each time are less complex. Moreover, team members can make software changes easily since they only need to look at the latest code added and not at all of it. Things like microservices and continuous delivery allow teams to take complete ownership of projects and deliver them faster.
Collaboration
As our example has shown, a wall between development and operations often results in an environment where the two teams don’t trust each other and each is walking around a little blindly. This has long-term repercussions on the morale of the team and how motivated they are to work towards their goals. A DevOps approach results in a collaboration between the two teams where they work with a shared passion to achieve common goals. This creates a much more positive work environment where outcomes can be reached much faster and more efficiently. This also has other positive outcomes like enhanced job satisfaction and lower attrition.
Reliability
Before DevOps updating an application to meet changing user needs was a nightmare. There was always a chance that updating the application would compromise the quality required by the user.
With DevOps tools like continuous integration and delivery, it is now easy to test the functionality of the software and keep security and quality in mind. Other processes like monitoring and logging help keep track of real-time performance metrics which help maintain the reliability of the software.
Security
Without DevOps, you have to often make a tradeoff between speed and security which results in delivery time becoming a lot more. With DevOps, you can use automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques to maintain speed without compromising on security.
Scalability
DevOps started growing in prominence as companies like Google, Amazon and Youtube started finding it harder to manage their technology at scale with a wall separating development and operations. The automation and consistency that comes with DevOps allows you to manage and change complex systems more efficiently.
What are Some of the Best Practices for Effective DevOps
While DevOps still means different things to different people, there has emerged a core of best practices that should be incorporated by companies looking at adopting DevOps.
Active Stakeholder Participation
This is the fundamental guiding principle of DevOps. DevOps can succeed only if both the developers and the operations and support staff are truly committed to collaborating and using an integrated approach to achieve goals.
Automated Testing
Automated regression testing is something agile teams adopt very often as it helps to fix problems right away and ship higher quality code. This works well in DevOps too as a dire need of operations staff is that the code shipped should meet a certain quality standard.
Integrated Configuration Management
In a DevOps environment, configuration management applies not only to the current solution being worked on but also on the configuration issues between the solution and the rest of the organisation infrastructure. Integrated Configuration management helps operations teams see the potential impact of a new release more clearly which helps in making better decisions regarding when the release should be made.
Integrated Change Management
With integrated change management, operations and development teams work together to understand how using different technologies will impact the organisation as a whole and then work toward managing that.
Continuous Integration
With continuous integration, the code is tested and analysed whenever updated code is checked into the version control system. This provides immediate feedback on code defects which allows developers to build a high-quality solution with little risk.
Integrated Deployment Planning
A DevOps approach means operations engineers will be closely involved with the developers when it comes to planning the deployment of products as per an organisational deployment schedule.
Continuous Deployment
With continuous deployment, when integration is successful in one sandbox it is automatically promoted to the next sandbox and integration begins there. This continues until it reaches the point where it requires human verification. This usually occurs at the point of transition from dev to operations.
Production Support
With DevOps, not only do developers work on new releases, but they also work on addressing critical problems with a solution that is already in production. Although they are the third and last team to get involved in solving production issues, it is a fairly common occurrence and gives them insights on production problems that help them design better solutions in the first place.
Application Monitoring
This refers to the practice of monitoring and logging solutions real-time once they are in production. This gives us performance metrics that improve the reliability of the solution and prevent failures.
Automated Dashboards
DevOps allows us to create automated dashboards for several key metrics. All metrics cannot be automated of course, but several key metrics can be seen real-time using automated dashboards and they provide critical business intelligence.
What are the DevOps Tools?
In order to implement DevOps best practices described above, certain tools have been developed to automate and facilitate different DevOps processes. While the right tools play a key role in effective DevOps implementation, simply using the tools does not mean DevOps adoption. Tools are only relevant when they are used as the last stage- after the organisation has already adopted the philosophy of DevOps and there is a commitment to execute its best practices.
Although DevOps was not supposed to be about tools, with its evolution in the last few years, a number of technologies that were not part of the original concept have now become an integral part of DevOps. According to research firm Gartner, a linked toolchain of technologies has now become critical if DevOps is to bring about the change it’s meant to. In recent years there has been an explosion of DevOps tools for different DevOps practices. Here are just a few examples.
Release Tools
Jenkins
Travis
TeamCity
Bamboo
Configuration Management Tools
Puppet
Chef
Ansible
Cfengine
Saltstack
Orchestration Tools
Zookeeper
Noah
Mesos
Monitoring, Virtualization and Containerization Tools
AWS
OpenStack
Vagrant
Docker
New Relic
Sensu
Spunk
Nagios
Coding Tools
Jira
Git
Eclipse
Testing Tools
JUnit
Zephyr
Selenium
Vagrant
SoapUI
The Key to Effective Adoption of DevOps
Adoption of organisation wide DevOps is a slippery slope because it requires a philosophical and cultural change combined with a more practical implementation of tools and best practices. If an organisation simply aspires to the philosophy of collaboration and efficiency behind DevOps without doing the hard work of actually executing it on the ground, DevOps will remain a philosophy and nothing more.
At the same time, simply adopting DevOps practices and tools without the philosophy and DevOps culture permeating across the organisation is also futile. The starting point of a successful adoption of DevOps within your organisation should be getting your development and operations teams fully committed to the cause. It is only after they are fully onboard that the best practices and DevOps tools should come into the picture.
Source: Cuelogic Blog | https://medium.com/cuelogic-technologies/what-is-devops-the-complete-guide-to-devops-with-examples-13db789dd1c | ['Harsh Binani'] | 2019-01-08 09:59:29.079000+00:00 | ['Devops Practice', 'Devops Tutorial', 'Devops Guide', 'DevOps', 'Devops Solutions'] |
A Curious Fate of the Printed Coupon | Did you know that the concept of “Coupons” has been around for a VERY long time!?
Dating back to some of the very first encounter, our history in America has allowed consumers to have the option to celebrate their shopping with an added element of winning something extra.
The very first coupon was created in 1887 from the mind of Atlanta businessman Asa Candler. Candler used this new invention to push forward the company he had founded, Coca-Cola.
As history progresses, coupons were more widely distributed in newspapers, including the famous “Sunday Inserts” known as Red Plum, and before then in the 1960’s, Valupak that now distributes to individuals by the billions each year.
Shows like TLC’s “Extreme Couponing” that aired to make the everyday couponer look like a supermarket superhero by shaving off hundreds- even thousands- of dollars from their lengthy list of bulk-items that were carted off in truckloads!
Nowadays, many aspects of the couponing process have switched over to the digital landscape because of how important convenience is to the modern consumer.
Old, traditional coupons are now starting to become more inconvenient due to the slow process of obtaining them, distribution, and redemption. Not to mention, most restaurants who have reopened during the global pandemic have switched to completely contactless ordering & payment using QR codes for menus and even paying the bill!
Not to mention, out of the 2 billion coupons redeemed, 271 billion were distributed by print, creating an increased waste in recycling bins & landfills all across America.
The question stands today: with the increase of consumers using technology in their day to day activities: What is the way of the future for coupons? | https://medium.com/instabids/how-coupons-started-and-the-journey-of-coupons-5ed12dd0b5ed | [] | 2020-08-15 04:07:39.675000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Coupon', 'Printedcoupon', 'Coupon Marketing', 'Qr Code'] |
3 best wireless headphones under 4000 in India | NOTE :- if you want to buy best headphones please check-out my honest review. Then buy your best online products. thanks you…
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. Ultra soft ear cushions | https://medium.com/@studykaro24/3-best-wireless-headphones-under-4000-in-india-3611b1352faa | ['Vicky Singh'] | 2020-12-19 15:51:55.406000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Headphones', 'Review', 'Earphones', 'Headphones Online'] |
An overview of predictive analytics in industrial production | Image by Pixabay
Overview
The growing use of social networks, smartphones that collect and continuously generate data, the growing use of the Internet, the presence of sensors that measure and monitor everything, causes the volume of the produced data is growing exponentially, providing valuable information for society and for companies.
All this is Big Data, defined as a large collection of data volume and variety can not be managed with traditional database management tools, but require the use of new technologies and adequate data management systems for storing and analysis, are able to extract their value quickly.[1]
Image by https://www.stockvault.net/
With Big Data are experiencing a new revolution, the large amount of data and information available to us, are considered “black gold” of the new millennium.
They are fundamental to the predictive analysis and extrapolation of information (Data Mining) developed by research institutes and companies in support of their decision-making strategies.
In business intelligence is changing the way to manage information for decision support, they are developing new tools, and down the costs of data collection systems, storage and processing.
As mentioned Big Data are having great success in the analysis Predictive (Predictive Analytics), which is a variety of techniques that predict future results based on the analysis of historical and current data [2].
This type of analysis, using predictive techniques on machine learning models, is taking place in different sectors; for example in industrial production, marketing, in finance and in the energy sector.
An approach to Big Data in industrial production
The great potential offered by Big Data and Predictive Analytics, make it possible to resolve some issues by large corporations that ultimately are investing capital and resources in this direction, hiring data scientists, funding research projects and enhancing their data infrastructure, to predict failures and anomalies in the operation of certain machines based on the flow of data recorded by the sensors and optimize production.
With the Internet of Things (IoT) and technologies for the analysis and management of Big Data, such as Hadoop and Spark, companies can capture and process an amount of data increasing and this implies the need to identify models for predictive maintenance can improve decision support strategies.[3].
This implies the development and improvement of machine learning algorithms used in Predictive Analytics, such as the supervised algorithms, which develop of classification rules for training using a set of data known (labeled data) or unsupervised algorithms that try to locate the information contained within the data not previously known.
Image by Wikimedia.org
The main type of supervised techniques include neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian classifier or Support Vector Machine (SVM) but also linear and nonlinear regression algorithms. While unsupervised learning is based on cluster analysis using techniques such as K-Means clustering.
To process daily huge data moles it is necessary that the chosen models are very precise, and you have to create prediction models tailored to the type of manufacturing process to be controlled, to promote the reliability and performance. In the next image are shown stages of Predictive Analytics.
Image by Forrest Research
Many multinational or major companies are investing in these technologies bringing great profits, or provide services to maximize the potential of Big Data and predictive analysis.
For example, Amazon offers services to use machine learning technology and by AWS provides cloud computing services that help create, protect and distribute applications for Big Data and using these technologies, by recommendation systems, can understand the interests of customers obtaining huge profits.
In the transport sector Trenitalia has announced that it has invested in collaboration with SAP in an innovative project, the Internet of Things and the application of Predictive Analysis software on Big Data, called “Dynamic Maintenance Management”.
The system is based on hundreds of micro-sensors placed inside the trains, which provide information about board components by capturing a large volume of data, which is then reworked with machine learning models applied to maintenance.
With this investment will provide a significant improvement in service and reduce maintenance costs of traditional [4].
Future Perspectives
Doing predictive maintenance with Big Data, help avoid breakdowns and production blocks which could cause major economic losses for businesses but also to program the various production stages, making them less expensive and more efficient.
Furthermore, a big advantage that you could get, would reduce, if not eliminate, the time and cost of testing processes, having provided via the Predictive Analytics, the quality of the products during the production process [3].
The advent of Big Data and Machine Learning techniques is the technological evolution that will change in the coming years, the methods and strategies of the classical industrial production systems.
The versatility of these technologies enables applications in various fields such as in medicine, which is already used for diagnosing and predicting the spread of epidemics, or in the management of energy consumption within the Smart Grid, they are already popular in the marketing and in advertising with recommendation systems able to profile customer preferences, as well in sports, especially team sports through the analysis of historical information, the play action manage to extract valuable information and improve team strategies.
Bibliography and sources of inspiration for this work | https://medium.com/@antoniocastiglione-9550/an-overview-of-predictive-analytics-in-industrial-production-f1bd456ade68 | ['Antonio Castiglione'] | 2020-12-12 10:31:29.561000+00:00 | ['IoT', 'Data Science', 'Industry', 'Big Data Analytics', 'Overview'] |
The Epitome of Gusto | The Epitome of Gusto
“Today is life — the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today.” — Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie wasn’t the first to say this; Shah Rukh Khan sang it in Kal Ho Na Ho, millennials have been hashtagging YOLO, and the Romans said Carpe Diem. What all of these proverbs (perhaps intentionally) exclude, however, is what it means to make the most of life, to live it to the fullest.
But Carnegie also has another quote: “Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.” Here, he expands upon what makes one feel like they’re truly living: it’s when their entire existence is beating for something, allowing their energy to flow so that they feel alive.
Though the authors of such quotes always leave the question of what one’s ultimate goal is (I suppose that’s what all great philosophers have sought to answer), we may be able to reach into Jain philosophy for clarity here.
At face value, it seems like gusto is antithetical to Jainism. After all, gusto suggests that one must be enthusiastic about something. And when we are enthusiastic, we are attached, which lead to the four “passions,” or kashayas: the root to our unhappiness. For any action I take with gusto, I may lash out in anger when things go awry, tread a deceitful path to fulfill a goal, inflate my sense of pride upon accomplishment, and even continue to yearn for more even once I’ve reached my initial goal. (Read this issue’s education corner to learn more about the four kashayas.)
However, people with gusto can also teach us a lot: how to be robust in the face of adversity, empower those around them, and be strong leaders and followers. When I first thought about arranging this issue, I searched for stories of people who cared deeply about a particular cause. Initially inspired by the enthusiasm in our community in spite of the pandemic, with pathshalas going virtual and a canceled convention taking the shape of YJA Day, I sought to share that gusto; it’s contagious. As you read the featured stories and experiences in this issue, and I hope you’re inspired to flow with their energy and direct it where you see fit.
Yet after reading and reflecting on the stories in this issue, I realize I had slightly misconstrued the definition of gusto — it doesn’t defy Jain principles. In its purest form, it doesn’t need a subject — you don’t have to be enthusiastic about something. In other words, it doesn’t necessitate attachment: moh or parigraha. So if one can detach themselves from the outcome of the event, yet participate with full gusto, that’s when they’ll truly be making the most of life, of the moment.
This feeling isn’t exactly foreign, either; you’ve likely caught a glimpse of it while doing something you truly enjoyed. The experience is often marked with a complete loss of sense of time — I first recognized this state of flow while playing violin in middle school. If we can be autotelic, sourcing purpose and drive from within ourselves, we’ll naturally exhibit gusto in all we do while feeling internal contentment.
Here’s to another year filled with gusto: the kind that allows us to grow from setbacks, as you’ll see throughout the issue. I hope to bring the best of our community to you all through Young Minds this year — and for that, I’ll need your support. Your readership guides our future decisions: what kind of content we publish, how much, and how often. If you’d like to share any feedback or have a story for a future issue, please let us know at [email protected].
With #yjalove,
Vishwa Shah
Director of Publications
2020–2021 | https://youngminds.yja.org/the-epitome-of-gusto-c8ae067d4a8b | ['Young Jains Of America', 'Yja'] | 2020-12-15 19:47:47.074000+00:00 | ['Yja', 'Perspectives', 'Ymq4'] |
In This House, We Believe | Out running with my wife before the election, we passed some of the “We Believe” signs posted in yards in our town.
The signs, with some variations, run so:
In This House, We Believe:
Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
No Human Is Illegal
Science Is Real
Love Is Love
Kindness Is Everything
Half-jokingly (and, yes, somewhat snarkily) I wondered aloud what the signs of Trump supporters might say, were they to address the same themes in their yards.
Now, being a social liberal/progressive, and having been raised a Christian with the original Jesus (the vastly better eye-of-the-needle one), I happen to agree with all those things on the sign. (And, so, I really don’t wish to be unkind.)
Oh, the ones that also include “Water Is Life” just make me thirsty.
Yard signs of Trump supporters tend to say things like America First/Keep America Great/Trump: No More Bullshit!/Support the Police/We’re Pro-Life, and so on. But I’m interested in what the explicit counter — the anti-text — to the signs’ addressing basic affirmations of women and science and love and kindness would be. Can it be that our tribes even disagree on what love and kindness mean?
Well, yes, clearly we do; that’s why the sign exists.
So, what would the counter signs say? Let us imagine, fairly:
In This House, We Believe:
All Lives Matter (We Support Our Police!)
Women’s Rights Are Not Originalist
No Human From a Northern European Country Is Illegal
Science Is a Plot (and a Hoax)
Love Is What We Say It Is
Kindness to Us Is Everything (No Matter How Badly We Behave)
Too harsh? Unfair? The slogans involve more words, which is never a good sign (yes, sorry, intended) when it comes to truth and beauty.
Am I wrong? Let’s take a look at the words, policies, and actions of Republican politicians and judges and tens of millions of voters to check accuracy on these assertions of belief I’m ascribing to others.
All Lives Matter (We Support Our Police!)
It took the corrective “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Matter” to mostly shut down the “All Lives Matter” willful bit of misunderstanding/trolling from the right. I’ve coupled it with a parenthetic assertion of “We Support Our Police!” because one does regularly see those yard signs (or “Back the Blue” or “The Blue Thin Line”), and while not a lot of thought likely goes into planting one out in the front yard, what it clearly implies is that “We Support Our Police — No Matter What.” I say that because everyone supports the work that the police are hired and trained to do. Everyone. It is a difficult job — long periods of routine work and observation that may suddenly turn to confrontation and great personal danger, a job in which you are asked to perform in ways (marriage counselor, mental health expert) you are simply not trained, or paid enough, to do. Everyone knows that. Again, everyone supports the police.
And, yes, the left’s “Defund the Police” is one of the worst phrases ever conceived to convey a concept that actually supports police by limiting what we ask them to do for society.
It is worth remarking here that the president who broke all norms about honesty and dignity in office and was impeached and had the most members of his administration in history to be charged with crimes, with many being found guilty, ran on the “law-and-order ticket.” By definition, authoritarians like standing (in this case “bigly” and “strongly”) for their perverse fantasies of “law and order,” which means militarized police cracking heads and indiscriminately shooting rubber bullets and lobbing tear gas canisters in the streets. As for the rule of law that a democracy depends upon? Not so much — in fact, we now know a grifting authoritarian sociopath will do everything in his power to undermine and subvert the rule of law.
Women’s Rights Are Not Originalist
At the founding of the United States, women had few rights — and they knew it. Many people know something of the “Remember the Ladies” letter Abigail Adams wrote her husband in the spring of 1776, while he was at the Continental Convention, in which she pleaded with him to consider the rights of women in any laws created for the new country. In his reply, John Adams scoffed at the idea, writing: Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.
Heck, women didn’t even get the vote until 1920. The Equal Rights Amendment still languishes.
Amy Coney Barrett, the well-connected under-qualified Supreme Court judge rushed into a lifetime appointment by Trump and Mitch McConnell, is a strict constitutional originalist in the way she views the law. She herself belongs to a secretive charismatic religious group, People of Praise, that puts men at the head of the family. Since she has been “a leader” (a “handmaiden”) in this strongly paternalistic group (the teachings of which she says she will ignore in her rulings), and she is looking back to John Adams and the other founders for guidance, her presence on the court obviously does not bode well for any women’s rights issues that come before the court.
What is the likelihood that the founders, most highly educated men, if transported through time to our society would, after about a day, still hold to their original views?
And let’s not forget that the man who nominated her, Donald John Trump, has been accused at least 25 times of sexual assault (including rape), sexual harassment, and sexual misconduct since the 1970s. Once he leaves office, Trump faces two defamation lawsuits because he called accusers E. Jean Carroll and Summer Zervos liars. When it comes to being a misogynistic pig, one could say that Trump is himself truly an originalist. Many of his supporters love him for it, and millions of other voters — in fact, exit polls suggest possibly more white women than in 2016 — again found it not to be disqualifying behavior.
No Human From a Northern European Country Is Illegal
Trump kicked off his 2016 campaign for president by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and promised a “big, beautiful” wall along the southern border. But he had no problem with other kinds of immigrants, say, from Northern European countries, like Norway. Just not Muslims or brown and Black people from countries he called a term I won’t use here. He specifically mentioned Norway, but one thinks he likely was thinking of Sweden, as in Swedish models. In any case, he was definitely saying “white” and “wealthy.”
Led by uber-creepy Stephen Miller, Trump’s revolving-door administration kept its focus on racist and xenophobic anti-immigration measures as much as with anything it did. Perhaps not equal to how members of the administration worked, as if by daily checklist, to obfuscate the truth, deride the press, promote conspiracy theories, destroy documents, push unqualified conservative judges to federal benches, and obstruct justice — but, really, there is no denying that they put their backs into this one.
In an illuminating interview in Salon by Chauncy Devega with author Jean Guerrero, who has written the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda about how Miller became the person he is, she notes that Miller tightened the focus of the Department of Homeland Security to immigration issues:
“Stephen Miller wanted DHS narrowly focused on immigration issues because that was where the country’s demographics could be re-engineered. This allowed him to shape policy to attack refugees and asylum-seekers. Miller would eliminate people from their positions if they disagreed with him.…The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to be protecting the American people from things like a public health crisis, but is so narrowly focused on Miller’s racist obsessions that it has failed to protect the American people from much greater and real threats.”
Trump and Miller pushed to keep naturalized immigrants from ever having the chance to become citizens if they had ever taken any form of public assistance, including making use of the Affordable Care Act. They carried on a terror campaign by repeatedly threatening to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct raids in cities and deport immigrants. And they purposely separated children from their parents, and put them in cages, to teach everyone a lesson. Under their “zero tolerance” policy that began in 2017, and an earlier pilot program, the Trump administration reportedly separated some 5,500 migrant children from their parents — and then deported their parents. Because records were spotty at best, more than 545 children still have not been reunited with their parents — and many may never be.
None of this kept some 74 million from carefully inking in the Trump-Pence tick-box on their ballot.
Science Is a Plot (and a Hoax)
The endless anti-science rhetoric we hear from Trump, and Republican politicians in general, is an essential tool in the kit of the authoritarian, who must constantly re-define reality to maintain control.
Trump is anti-science, unless he can somehow claim credit. This is the man who proclaimed, “Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”
You know, Donald Trump, who was called “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had” by one of his professors at Wharton. (Perhaps Trump should have paid his alleged SAT taker to also attend his classes.)
Trump may be, as Fran Lebowitz noted, “a poor man’s idea of a rich man” but, as my wife pointed out, he is also the anti-intellectual’s idea of a smart guy. (Except she didn’t put it so politely.)
But that, apparently, is the idea. Many people seem to want leaders who are around their own mental ability. Folks felt so comfortable with George W. Bush’s plain talk they imagined he would enjoy having a beer with them. (A light beer, no doubt. Trump reportedly speaks at a fourth-grade level and doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages, so maybe you dream of having a Bosco with him?)
Okay, no one likes an intellectual bully, but nowadays just having a basic grip on reality and being somewhat curious about the world renders you an egghead. Maybe even a dangerous leftist radical.
Trump ceaselessly proves he knows nothing about the value of science, that he will not listen to scientists or allow experts of any kind to inform the nation without hovering over them. He either ignores the pandemic now or actively misinforms his followers about the coronavirus. Both he and Pence do an odd dance of downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic while trying to take credit for the crucial vaccines.
As recently reported, nurses and other health care workers have to deal with patients arguing with them (and worse) about the reality of COVID-19, as they are being treated for it — and even dying of it.
You want us to treat you with respect and compassion? Wear a mask. Not everything is a test of your loyalty. Be loyal to your own life and to the lives of those around you, not to a two-bit pretend mob boss who, by the way, actually despises you.
Love Is Mostly What We Say It Is
I suppose that is unfair; maybe it would be more accurate as Love Is What Our Religious Belief Allows. But if your “religious freedom” includes not baking a wedding cake for a gay couple even though you are clearly a baker with a business in town, maybe you need to be a baker for hire. (Maybe a baker/masseuse to maximize the time at people’s houses?) Maybe we need private bakers. (Wasn’t “Private Baker” a minor hit in the ‘80s?)
Recently, Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito gave a keynote address at the conservative Federalist Society — that group that seems to manufacture conservative judges like widgets — in which he complained that if he were to say that marriage was strictly something between a man and a woman he might be thought a bigot:
Alito also criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to recognize the right of Americans to same sex marriages in Obergefell v. Hodges because, according to Alito, “you can’t say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman” because it might be labelled “bigotry.”
And the Supreme Court just ruled that churches could not be told to limit attendance during the pandemic, somehow comparing church gatherings, with the speaking and the singing in an enclosed space (for what always felt to me a tad too much time), with going into and out of stores.
Religious freedom is, of course, about observing your own religious faith and not being hampered or thwarted by the government. It is not about laying your beliefs on the rest of us by discriminating against certain customers in your business or by putting other citizens more at risk during a pandemic.
For God’s sake, bake the cake. Does it hamper you in your beliefs (or somehow degrade your own marriage) if people legally pledge themselves to whomever they love or temporarily pray at home or in groups outdoors during a pandemic? No one is persecuting you; they are asking you to not discriminate against certain customers if you own a business and and to be a responsible citizen during a health crisis.
The Trump years have been an outright assault on LGBTQ+ rights. And since the Republicans have stacked the federal courts with more than 200 conservative judges, the effect will likely be long lasting.
It might be noted that Trump and his main man Rudy Guiliani understand the value of love and marriage — each has been married three times and each has been unfaithful to the institution. (Rudy’s last imploded dramatically in the fall of 2019.)
Kindness To People Like Us Is Everything
There has always been a great deal of psychological projection from the right, and the old “snowflake” as a withering putdown of people on the left is one of them. What do we hear every day from much of the right?
So. Much. Whining.
Over a number of decades, the GOP went from the official party of the intellectually lazy, but ambitious, frat boy to the party of the toddler who didn’t get all the attention and presents he felt he deserved on his birthday. Trump is the logical nadir of the GOP’s vertiginous descent from the semi-serious political party of William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review to Ronald Reagan’s open appeals to racism to Newt Gingrich’s “no civility” approach to the Democrats to this Trumpist cult ready to dispense with democracy right now, after losing an election.
Meanwhile, as noted by Heather Digby Parton in an op-ed piece in Salon, some Republicans are already pivoting to talking of maintaining norms and being the “adults in the room”:
We are seeing a return to the smarmy, sanctimonious, “adults in the room” pretense of Republicans who will wring their hands over Democrats’ alleged incivility and partisanship — toward Donald Trump, the crudest, most insulting brute in American politics since Joseph McCarthy. Hypocrisy doesn’t even come close to describing this. It is shamelessness on a level that is downright psychopathic.
Immediately after the election during which a bunch of yahoos in Texas trapped a Biden-Harris campaign bus and the president praised them and claimed he couldn’t lose unless there was cheating, Democrats were told that they should be nicer and not celebrate the Democrats’ victory.
We should be kind, yes, if at all possible. But he and a shocking number of his enablers are trying to steal an election right now. Give it a moment, okay? | https://medium.com/@kirkswearingen/in-this-house-we-believe-5ea8f05addb9 | ['Kirk Swearingen'] | 2020-12-12 14:12:48.914000+00:00 | ['Kindness', 'Politics', 'Jesus', '2020', 'Republican Party'] |
My experience of being a Remote Research Assistant in XR (AR/VR) | Background
In January 2020, I came across a post on LinkedIn regarding a Research Assistant Role at IIIT Hyderabad that involved some work in VR. I shared my updated resume and portfolio link with the author of the post i.e Shivang Shekhar. I got shortlisted and was given a small assignment in order to get selected for the internship.
My assignment was reviewed by the peers at IIIT Hyderabad on the basis of several internal parameters(details were withdrawn). A week or so later I was informed that my work had successfully passed all the parameters and I can immediately join as a Research Assistant from the first week of March.
Yes, I was happy and excited, but all that got drained out when my parents asked me, “What about the Corona Pandemic, son?”. (Damn, why didn’t I think of that?).
Their concern was valid because at that point in time there were already 2 Corona cases reported in Hyderabad. So it was a risk to travel at that moment. There was a big chance that I might have to forego this opportunity. So I explained this to the faculties at IIIT Hyderabad and they said that I can work remotely.
As much as I wanted to go to the campus, interact with the professors personally, and experiment around with a VR Headset myself, I had no other option but to work remotely.
Why research in AR/VR?
I don’t really have a background in research, but I always loved reading Research Papers, especially the ones falling under the AR/VR category.
I like to keep up with all the latest news and tech updates related to this field as well as noting down ideas on what are some of the products or tools that can be developed using this technology that can lay the foundations for the future. Here is a thought that always kinda bothered me — that if we are living in a 3D space with 3D objects, materials, lighting then why are we developing the apps in a 2D space with all those “cool” animations, colors, and UI design?
Extending those same design principles in 3D can be revolutionary and with the comfort of having powerful gadgets in our hands, this does not seem very far fetched. Shouldn’t these gadgets serve as a natural extension for a human? Shouldn’t they be as intuitive as they are being shown in movies?
Luckily there is a whole range of AR glasses, and developing applications for AR Glasses might be the next big thing in the near future. I decided that I should have a good understanding of how we can develop AR/VR Experiences and prototypes that can open the path towards a solid foundation for the future. This Research Assistant job can improve me furthermore as the job was aligned towards my goals.
Development and Testing
I have worked on several projects(ranging from android app development to basic web development) remotely in the past 3 years as an undergraduate, but this research project was something that involved experimenting with hardware and I didn’t have a VR Headset.
Imagine developing an Android application and not having an Android Smartphone with you(sucks, right?).
Surprisingly, things went pretty good because I contributed majorly towards the software side and the testing was done by my senior i.e Shivang who had an Oculus Go device with him, at his home. We sat together(virtually, of course 🤷🏻♂️) on a day, communicated via Microsoft Teams, solved some development issues, implemented features from scratch, and then tested the application on the Oculus Go. After several hours of back and forth-bug fixing in Unity, communicating and testing — when the feature worked exactly as per the requirements, it felt great — not only because we implemented a feature from scratch and solved issues live in a day, but the fact that we did it remotely and while we were in a global pandemic, where everyone around you is in panic mode.
Working in Unity was just one piece of the cake. The next thing was ensuring code quality through code analysis. Things like code refactoring, reducing the code smells, bug fixes, decreasing vulnerabilities, and then writing Unit Tests for code coverage were new for me.
Neat right?
Frontend and Backend stuff
I generally stay away from web development because I am not very good at it. Since I was asked to design and develop just a one-page website using basic HTML and CSS, I took this opportunity to improve this skill furthermore by practicing on FreeCodeCamp(got certified!).
I am not a Python expert but I have worked with it in some past projects. So I just created an endpoint using the Flask framework and then deployed the whole thing on PythonAnywhere. The communication between the Unity client application and the Flask backend was working fine.
All it did was spit out some data coming from Unity on a web page. It was just basic networking and JSON parsing that I had learned during my Android Development Nanodegree from Udacity. The only difference — Android Development was in Java and this project was in C#.
So different classes and packages. That’s all.
Cyclone
I couldn’t work a lot during the month of May because there was a cyclone in my city and the internet connection became very unstable. The situation was already bad due to the pandemic and it actually got worse due to the cyclone.
I just worked offline with a limited internet connection. Most of the communication was being done over phone calls because video calls were not possible.
The one thing that I could do was work on some side projects offline. Therefore, I thought of developing a one-page portfolio page as a side project. So I designed a website, developed it, and deployed it here.
I also wrote a report and designed a few assets as a part of the Research Process.
Conclusion
I loved every bit of this internship. I never thought that I will enjoy Research, but that is exactly what I have been doing since my 4 years as an undergraduate without actually realizing it.
Developing something, experimenting with the latest tools out there, breaking things, and waking up the next morning to fix those. It’s exciting.
Our(team of 4 researchers) paper has been accepted for the EuroXR conference 2020, which is in November 2020. It’s my first paper🎉
I am writing another article where I will be highlighting what are the things that I actually did and what you can also do as a Research Assistant(I didn’t want to make this article too long.)
I am done with the article. You can read it here.
Acknowledging
I honestly don’t think any senior will cooperate as much as Shivang did. The level of guidance that I have received in this internship was truly valuable. A big thanks to him for mentoring, guiding, and above all, cooperating.
While few Researchers dislike Developers and few Developers dislike Researchers, I see an intersection and a dependency.
Without Researchers, there won’t be developers and without developers their wont be Researchers.
Both of them are equally creative and both their jobs are equally important for the sustainability of the whole tech industry.
Happy Researching!
Next Article> | https://medium.com/xrpractices/what-was-it-like-to-work-as-a-remote-research-assistant-ar-vr-at-iiit-hyderabad-during-a-pandemic-f3993d5c50e7 | ['Rajat Kumar Gupta'] | 2020-10-12 04:37:10.773000+00:00 | ['Internship Experience', 'Research', 'VR', 'General', 'AR'] |
Marching Forward | POETRY
Marching Forward
will stop at the end
picture was taken by the author
Inside the concrete jungle of an urban utopia
I capture the snap of a clock,
tick-tock, tick-tock
indicating the marching forward of time.
Then, I recalled a theory
debatable, controversial, and a fearful one
once the last atop of the universe will be ripped apart,
when the universe will converge into darkness,
and when no elements collide or merge or mingle
to form anything new
only remains will be the empty, dark, cold space
the momentum of time will halt forever,
no marching forward, whatsoever.
Although in the symmetric reality, it can move backward too. | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/marching-forward-efc2b52f16b4 | ['Suntonu Bhadra'] | 2020-10-14 00:08:55.355000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Poetry', 'Time', 'Science', 'Theory'] |
What Does It Mean to be Spiritual? A Rational Answer. | The year 1745 wasn’t the best to be David Hume. This man, who many now consider to be the greatest philosopher to write in the English language, had over the years made enemies in the wrong places. In an epoch dominated by dogmatism, Hume was an outlier, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. And so, when he sought the chair of Ethics and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, people were outraged.
How can we possibly let a man who has undermined the will of God and religion in his writing teach about ethics, they wondered; a man who went out of his way to preach the wonders of extreme skepticism and cold atheism. As per their interpretation, this was a man who clearly sought to crush the foundation of morality on which they had built their society.
Now, these charges, of course, lacked merit, and Hume saw it to himself to correct them in an essay he wrote to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh titled A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh. He noted each charge and then wrote a rebuttal comparing it to his real position. Unfortunately, however, this didn’t help. The clergy was overwhelming against his appointment, which he eventually withdrew. He continued to be chastised for the rest of his life due to the content of his work.
As someone reading this in the 21st century, someone who is familiar with Hume’s work, I find this particularly interesting. Hume was a famous skeptic, no doubt, and he certainly did deliver some devastating critiques in regards to the existence of God and the religions built in his name, but the people’s core charges, it seems, suggest that he was a man entirely devoid of any kind of faith, that he was advocating some kind of nihilism — claims that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, as I see it, Hume’s later work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is perhaps the most spiritual work of philosophy written in the Western world.
Today, the term spirituality has one of two connotations: the first is a classic religious one; the second is inspired by New Age culture. Both of them seem to diverge away from a world where science and reason dominate. Broadly speaking, I think it’s correct to suggest that both categories embody spirituality better than cold, hard reason and that they are right in doing so. Many smart and thoughtful religious people, for example, have a relationship with truth that most scientifically-minded people should be envious of. But at the same time, some of the most religious and New Age-oriented people I have ever encountered are also among the least spiritual people around. Why? Because spirituality goes beyond dogma—something Hume showed perhaps better than anybody.
Anyone who has spent enough time reading and thinking and living will come to the same conclusion that Hume did when he exercised his famous skepticism: In a world where we have complete information about everything, reason can give us certain answers; in the real world, however, where we are not even close to having all the answers — a world where words are fallible, where perception is fallible, where imagination is fallible, reason is more of a guide than it is a hallmark of truth. An example: Those who confidently claim that life is meaningless in the name of reason defeat themselves by doing so, because that claim can’t be made logically in a world we don’t fully understand — it’s an example of the intellect dumbing itself down with language when our experience so obviously tells us otherwise.
Now, by doubting everything from his opponents’ arguments and the promises of religion and even the principle of causality (an especially devastating critique that some philosophers believe we might never recover from) to even his own positions, Hume showed that we all mostly operate on faith and habit in ways that aren’t obvious. The point was never to illustrate that we can’t know anything, but more so, it was to humbly suggest that there are limitations to what the human mind can comprehend and understand, and we have to learn to operate in this complex world in spite of that fact without getting tangled away in our minds.
Maybe one-day scientific instruments will remove the limitations that hold us back, and that’s possible, but the chances are that the mysteries of both the Universe and our conscious experience are simply too complex to be confined to words and formulas. The confidence that many science-minded people (who often ironically don’t understand how science works, mistaking it for the dogma of scientism) have in science’s ability to comprehend and disprove what lies beyond the laws of physics are just as lacking in concrete evidence as the certainty of the narratives that some religious-minded people are intent on imposing on others.
In this vein, true spirituality is defined by skepticism — of both self and of authority, of both today’s religions and of today’s science. It’s individualistic, and thus, it’s the opposite of dogmatism. As soon as you use a phrase or a story to reduce away the complexity of life without acknowledgement, you are closing a gap left by reality with something that hides the uncertainty that is inherent in everything from our knowledge to our perception. True rationality is open-ended, and it’s skeptical about itself even as it does its best, knowing that an undiscovered mystery still lies ahead.
The hallmark of any dogma, whether religious or scientific, is the attempt to use today’s information to do away with the unknown unknowns of a future without accepting that this future could very well prove us wrong, just as the past has been proven wrong, again and again, whenever we have entered a new paradigm. Today’s truths do indeed allow us to project the patterns we can expect to see tomorrow to a healthy degree, but this truth is always probabilistic, and even a high probability truth can be wrong in unanticipated ways due to our own fallibility.
Right now, the knowledge we use to assert the laws of physics is based on only 5 percent of the Universe, with the remaining 95 percent being clouded away by dark matter and dark energy — entities that we don’t have good assumptions about. Somehow, complex systems produce sums of wholes that are greater than their parts in ways that we don’t understand. We call this emergence, which makes it sound like we know something we definitely don’t, and it can be observed everywhere in nature. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems suggest that, due to the self-reference problem, logical systems will always be incomplete. And of course, again, Hume’s critique of causality gives us a reason to doubt the very foundation that we use to build all of our scientific knowledge on, and if not that (as the great Karl Popper almost convincingly argued), then it at least tells us that there might be knowledge out there that science can’t uncover in its current form.
When it comes to metaphysics, traditionally, philosophy has leaned towards either theism or materialism. The former reasons the existence of God and has usually monopolized spirituality, and the latter is concerned with the sub-atomic particles that it assumes makes up everything. This materialism is also the implicit assumption that guides most scientists and thus conditions people living in the modern era, which is mostly fine, except for one thing: Given where we are right now, materialism is just as much of a dogma as most materialists assume theism is. In fact, I’d argue that these categories are both wrong and that a rational skeptic practices science or religion as they do, in the relevant domain, but doesn’t make any confident claims about the future, thus embracing what I define as spirituality by default.
The question then, of course, is: What does this spirituality represent beyond skepticism? The answer is: A healthy respect for an uncertain reality; a mysterious future looked upon without assumptions and with only awe; a search for truth with open-ended rationality and a mind willing to entertain the absurd without pretending that the mask of language can define the unknown without the corroborating knowledge. Spirituality, in this sense, doesn’t rule out what reasonable people think of as God or the supernatural, nor does it ignore what science currently tells us; it lets you be you and me be me, as we both honor the uncertainty that reminds us that there is something bigger than us to be discovered.
Whenever I reflect on this spirituality in my own life, I am brought back to late-summer nights spent with people I love at an old German-style cottage in the country. Even driving away from the city, it would feel like we were being compelled by a force of nature to move away from the sounds, the lights, the people, to something more honest, more pure in its expression. We would drive until the highways were replaced by broken roads, the high-rise apartments by enveloping trees, the web of pressures and expectations in our lives by the openness of freedom and potentiality.
On these nights, as we settled in, as time began to dance to a different beat, we would sneak out of the back door and walk down to the dock and sit ourselves right where its wooden structure met the water. It would be quiet. The lake would be still. The moonlight would radiate. At first, the conversations that began inside would carry on outside, but eventually, our silence would match the silence of nature.
In this silence, we would stare. We would stare at the ripples in the lake, and we would stare at the movement of the forest beside us, but mostly, we stare up. We would stare at the unpolluted sky, at a million little dots of brightness, with each one of them representing a different center of reality, with each constellation telling a different story. And in these moments, I would be reminded of something I am otherwise quick to forget: I may be infinite in the complexity of my experience, but I am finite in the Universe. And with that, I would only smile — lightly, humbly, knowing that there’s more, knowing that this isn’t it. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-does-it-mean-to-be-spiritual-a-rational-answer-857380fda855 | ['Zat Rana'] | 2020-05-11 07:09:05.595000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Philosophy', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Spirituality'] |
USA Sandbox… | USA Sandbox…
It’s appalling. The USA resembles a children’s sandbox. Our nation is at war with its inhabitants-both politicians and civilians behaving like brats.
How pathetic we look in the eyes of other nations. Not wanting to take “it personally”-the embarrassing actions of our nation’s people cannot go unnoticed.
I love our country-but for the first time in my life, what is happening here in this beautiful nation has saddened my soul. The games being played in Washington, DC and individual states are reducing the character, backbone and integrity of this nation and the Constitution. | https://medium.com/@patricesimon/usa-sandbox-494d2b783925 | ['Patrice M Simon'] | 2020-11-16 19:13:34.955000+00:00 | ['Politics And Protest', 'American Politics', 'Global', 'Freedom Of Speech', 'Civil Rights'] |
Journaling gotten out of hand? If so here’s the 5 minute journal | The 5 minute journal
I’m a writer (sort of), I like to throw in a bit of sass, personality, and flavour into journals. What can I say I like telling stories? Interestingly even to myself… I find it cathartic to write out sequences of events as they happened so I find mysef writing 6, 8, or even 10 page long journals! Like it’s literally war and peace stuff, it’s a mission. I mean come on, did you see the size of this post? I swore to myself this was gonna be 500 words, whoops!
I started writing journals for the first time seriously when I started the “Understanding Counselling” course, our teacher told us that each week we will be writing journals to document how we feel as the course is an intensive mental and emotionally transformative process. I had never really given journals much thought other than writing down how I felt in times of desperation as directed by my therapist. She told us that we were writing down our observations about how we felt and things we noticed about ourselves, easy right?
After completing a journal I would find myself feeling a massive weight off my shoulders after sharing with myself the deepest troubles and truths. I’d also feel a sense of vulnerability that made me absolutely despise journaling, it made my sore spots exposed and that was tough. I’m a guy that got himself into £5000 worth of debt because I struggled talking about vulnerability and being accountable for things in my life so it was always going to be a difficult task, I just didn’t like calling myself out on my own bullshit I guess? Something I did well though was to romanticise the process of journaling, it was like a ritual. Every Wednesday after college I’d go to some pub where I knew it was going to be quiet and I wouldn’t know anyone so I could scribble away in peace. My hand would hurt because I’d write that much, I’d have my headphones in jotting away, I mean the people behind the bar probably figured I had cracked special relativity. I had messy hair, smudged glasses, a backpack, and a scruffy notebook. A poor man’s Harry Potter?
This process continued after I finished college, I would take myself out on these dates. I’d go for food and write a journal. Drive to a service station and write a journal. I’d head to the city for the morning and write a journal. It evolved and blossomed into something beautiful, I actually liked myself, I had given myself time and space to reflect on life and as a result developed self-worth. After some time I found myself writing journals less and less until it was more of a monthly task instead of a weekly pleasure to write down my thoughts and feelings. I would only write a journal if I was desperate, and even then it was kind of like being invited to a pity party where the room sad, empty, and the only company was a wet fart when you slumped onto the sofa. Part of it was me, you know making mountains out of mole hills, and it’s cool. Sometimes you have stuff to say and sometimes you don’t, I think I went from romanticising the process to fucking marrying myself to it. I’d fallen out of love.
Things happen in three’s sometimes, my favourite number is exactly 3 because I saw an advert when I was a kid that said the number was magic and even had the song “3 is a magic number” by Schoolhouse Rock so I was convinced. That’s literally all it took. So my therapist stared at me for a while when I told her that I hadn’t journaled for a little while and said “You’re putting too much pressure on yourself to write a lot in your journals, it can just be sentence or a word if you want it to be”. Naturally I ignored her advice, and it wasn’t until I had heard the same advice from two other people that it sank in and I gave it a try.
So I sat down with a notepad one night and crafted a quick template for a journal when I got inspired. So grab yourself a piece of paper and a pen and I’m going to show you how to do this :) In the top left hand corner of the page draw yourself a battery, it doesn’t have to be massive, just a small icon. Now what you are going to do is fill in the battery with how you are feeling in yourself. So for example today I feel a little run down and tired so my battery would be at 50%, it’s also a measure of how irritable, angry, content, or happy I might be. You can make yours mean whatever is most authentic to you, but ideally you would use it as a quick visual update on how you are feeling.
Title the page “The 5 minute journal” with today’s date, and then below that write “How I am feeling today”. This bit is where you write a couple of honest sentences about how your day was, so if it was bad I want you to write that it was bad and how it made you feel, if it was good I want you to write that it was good and how that made you feel. Then I ant you to write a heading “Today’s achievements”, here your aim is to write 3 bullet points about things that went well, it could be getting up on time for work, making someone smile, and even throwing a paperball across the office which gracefully flew into a the bin. Next write another heading underneath the bullet points you have just done which reads “Improvement points”, notice how we’re not focusing on negativity? This is about accepting shit happens and figuring out what we can do to make things better for next time, so you might write not judging yourself so harshly, learning when to take a break, or even something like tomorrow is another day to get at it again.
That’s literally it. Yup. That simple, do this every day. I tend to do mine before bed because it helps me dump a few thoughts out of my head and relax. You will recognise patterns about yourself, gain self-awareness, and this may even lead onto you loving journaling and doing more long-form journaling like I do once a month too.
Thanks for reading it has been an absolute pleasure having you! If you enjoyed this blog post check out my podcast Know Yourself on anchor.fm/knowyourself for more helpful tips and advice on Mental Health.
Instagram — dudale92
Twitter — knowyourselfpod
Dan Udale | https://medium.com/@danieljamesudaleforrester/journaling-gotten-out-of-hand-if-so-heres-the-5-minute-journal-eb5b7afd5bf3 | ['Daniel James Udale-Forrester'] | 2019-03-18 20:58:18.440000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Journaling', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health'] |
Do Not Be Afraid of Taking Your Design from UX to UI | Do Not Be Afraid of Taking Your Design from UX to UI
For the past one and a half years, I’ve worked as a UX/UI Designer, and in that time, I have worked on a variety of projects. These included redesigning an investment app and my company’s website, also creating a UX wireframe kit from scratch.
And, I have no background in graphic design at all.
How was I capable of doing all of those design projects? I’m not going to lie; it was very challenging. Specifically, I did not know how to set up logical UX wireframes that reflected useful insights we obtained from user research, and then take them rapidly into finessed UI design.
However, I thought the struggle was worth it in the end, and I would love to share what I did to overcome it. Here are my top 4 tips for UX/UI design beginners and how to progress your designs from logical UX wireframes to UI designs.
1. Start with purpose and research insights
While you build your UX wireframes and feel stuck in your design, there are a few questions you can ask yourself:
What are the objectives/purpose of these components/layout you are designing now?
of these components/layout you are designing now? How does it solve your users’ problem ? — or even, DOES IT?
your ? — or even, DOES IT? Does your design reflect what you’ve learned from your research?
+ If so, add annotations as you design, including your logic as to why you think these design elements are necessary and relevant research findings (see the attached example)
+ If not, you can revisit the idea
Example of adding annotation on your design
These series of exercises will help you remarkably when explaining your design decision to clients or your team, BUT mostly for you to better understand your design.
2. Trust your gut feeling
This tip can apply more generally.
Having spent my first project being mostly introverted and passive because I was nervous to avoid making mistakes, I had my first performance review with my boss and a senior designer where I asked them about what would help me to step up and grow in a team.
They showed me a lot of support and gave me great tips on how to improve my confidence, but there is one piece of advice that I remind myself of constantly.
“Trust your gut feeling — if things don’t seem right, they probably aren’t, so speak up, so we have a chance to question ourselves and create better solutions”.
This advice particularly helps me when I feel that something on my UX wireframes doesn’t make sense. I then bring the issue up to my team and discuss my concerns with them. I found that this is the best way to avoid going around in circles with your design.
3. Ask for rapid feedback — Learn, build, measure and repeat
One thing you shouldn’t be worried about during design phases of UX/UI projects is trying to impress your team right away. So, be confident enough to ask for feedback even if it’s only rough wireframes.
By doing so, you can:
Build rapport with your team members
Learn & grow faster
Save everyone’s time
Show your work ethic & enthusiasm
Raise an opportunity to ideate the best design solution within the team
If you start questioning your design, trust your gut feeling, ask for rapid feedback, learn something, build again, ask for feedback, and repeat.
4. Design references: Imitating vs. Getting inspiration
After the UX wireframes get approved, the next step is UI design. These often include aligning with brand guidelines or creating a brand design system which contains colour palette, typography, iconography, and basic components such as buttons styles. Then you apply the “design rule” to your wireframe to maximise engagement with users.
However, it can all sound overwhelming, especially if you don’t have any graphic design background like me.
First of all, don’t feel pressure to create something creative that will blow people’s mind, but try the steps below while being mindful of keeping the balance between imitating vs. getting inspiration.
1) If available, view the brand/style guide or determine your own brand/style guide using:
Colour palette
Typography
Accessibility
Iconography
Basic components such as button style
2) Visit design inspiration sites such as:
Dribble (https://dribbble.com/)
Behance (https://www.behance.net/)
Muzli (https://muz.li/)
Google search
3) Use keywords to search for specific design patterns — E.g. ‘Dashboard’, ‘Dashboard UI’ or ‘Dashboard app designs’
4) Find design elements that are suitable for your design solution and review these alongside your UX wireframes to determine suitability
5) Modify it to align with your brand design system
6) Congratulations, you have designed something
Take away
Four tips for UX/UI design beginners with no graphic design background and how to progress from UX to UI design:
Start with purpose and research insights
Trust your gut feeling
Ask for rapid feedback — Learn, build, measure and repeat
Get UI inspiration from design references sites
I believe those will be a good starting point when progressing from UX to UI. Remember, we all start from somewhere, and the key is asking questions and grow from there. Best of luck!
Nura Lim, Dec 2020 | https://medium.com/@nuralimtheuxer/do-not-be-afraid-of-taking-your-design-from-ux-to-ui-12ac540e710b | ['Nura Lim'] | 2020-12-17 13:14:15.573000+00:00 | ['Design Process', 'UI Design', 'UX Design', 'Feedback', 'Wireframe'] |
5 Things I learned About Propaganda | In this paper, I explain the many takeaways I had from my COM 416 course at URI, from political ads to conspiracy theories. I feel as though this is a good read because it summarizes many of the things I found most important when learning about the media form we learn the least about in elementary through high school. I urge people to read this specifically for that reason, because without me persuing a higher education, I never would’ve learned about how the government, as well as any other company, tries to get on your side through advertisement.
It was genuinely frightening to see how many ways propaganda affects us in our daily lives, and how many people are out to manipulate the general public for money, power, and anything in between. The five main points I talk about are propaganda for good, political propaganda, memes, how propaganda is made, and conspiracy theories. My favorite two topics are the last two. Creating propaganda really got me into the mindset of trying to convince someone else to make immediate, drastic lifestyle changes for the greater good (according to me).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-fyAR-KXJIOuU_9K07JlA0SsKcVi8hH5U6pVhJkwH8/edithttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-fyAR-KXJIOuU_9K07JlA0SsKcVi8hH5U6pVhJkwH8/edit | https://medium.com/mindovermedia/5-things-i-learned-about-propaganda-112899ad34f8 | ['Alex Gomes'] | 2020-12-14 17:19:59.573000+00:00 | ['Leap 3', 'Social Media', 'Media Criticism', 'Propaganda', 'Technology'] |
Clustering: What Is It and When To use it? | K-Means
Introduction to K-means
K-means come from a family of unsupervised learning algorithms, where the input is unlabeled unlike that in supervised learning algorithms.
The end goal of K-means is clustering, let’s dive deep into clustering.
Sometimes we just want to organize the data, and that’s where clustering comes into play. It can be used for both labeled as well as unlabeled data.
Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash
Everybody has heard about Netflix and its never-ending content compilation.
The content is well organized in different genres such as comedy, drama, thriller, etc.
Now suppose one day you log in to Netflix and archive is cluttered and vague. How cumbersome that would be.
This is the concept of Clustering, grouping all the collateral data point into a cluster for a better and cataloged experience.
This is exactly how K-means works.
Clustering is often found in realms of data analysis, customer segmentation, recommendation systems, search engines, semi-supervised learning, dimensionality reduction, and more.
K-means algorithm is a part of hard clustering, that corresponds that every point belongs only to one cluster.
How K-means work?
The “K” in K-Means denotes the number of clusters. This algorithm is bound to converge to a solution after some iterations.
Goal: Partition data among some “K” number of clusters.
Initialize K-points. Categorize each item to its closest mean. Update coordinates of mean that is average of items categorized in mean so far. Repeat the above steps until our algorithm converges.
The cost function is :
where m = all points K = all clusters wik=1 for data point if ith belongs to cluster k; otherwise, wik=0.
To minimize the loss, we implement coordinate descent. The loss encountered in K-means isn’t convex function therefore there can be multiple local minima.
It’s a minimization problem of two parts:
We first minimize J w.r.t. wik and treat μk fixed. Then we minimize J w.r.t. μk and treat wik fixed.
E-step: We differentiate J w.r.t. wik first and update cluster assignments (E-step).
We are assigning the data point xi to the nearest cluster assessed by its Euclidean distance from the cluster’s centroid.
2. M-step: Then we differentiate J w.r.t. μk and re-compute the centroids after the cluster assignments from the previous step.
In the nutshell, first, we’ll get wik using E-step and it will classify the point as either 0 or 1. If wik =1 then we will shift to M-step and using μk we get mean of all points to get updated cluster center.
Sci-kit implementation of K-means
To specify the number of clusters, there are two methods:
Direct method: Just plot the data points and see if it gives you a hint. Value of inertia: The idea behind good clustering is having a small value of inertia, and a small number of clusters.
The value of inertia is inversely proportional to the number of clusters. So, its a trade-off here. Rule of thumb: The elbow point in the inertia graph is an optimal choice because after that the change in the value of inertia isn’t relevant.
Pros and Cons of K-means
Pros:
Easy to implement. Scalable for large data Assure convergence.
Cons: | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/clustering-what-it-is-when-to-use-it-a612bbe95881 | ['Daksh Trehan'] | 2020-07-05 13:43:28.372000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Clustering', 'Data Science'] |
Incredible Skincare Tools For Women Worth Your Money | Skincare is mandatory as the skin is the most delicate and sensitive part of our body. Give a soothing effect to your skin by treating it with reliable tools and products. Be kind when treating your skin, and don’t go with low-quality products.
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We have summed up a list of incredible beauty tools for women worth your money because we value your hard-earned cash.
Have a look at these essentials and pick what you need the most.
Natural Jade Facial Roller Facial Massage Roller
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Dr. Pen Derma Roller 6 in 1 Micro-needling Kit
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Facial Steamer
The facial steamers work wonders on the skin. It helps to cleanse the skin and rejuvenate your skin deeply. When you treat your skin with a facial steamer, it boosts the absorption of the nutrients in your skin and penetrates the healthy nutrients particles into your skin. It keeps your skin moist and hydrated and makes it crystal clear. This steamer is so handy and easy to operate with a one-touch button and has a large water tank in it. You can grab this nano iconic face steamer at an affordable price of $69.95.
HoMedics Marbleous Mini handheld Massager
Release all your tensions and stress by using this mini handheld massager. You can use it all over your body, and it has a proper hand grip for convenient usage. This rechargeable massager is so handy that you can carry it with you anywhere at any time. Grab your massager at just $10, and before purchasing anything from anywhere, make sure to read reviews as it makes your buying decision more accurate. Read the Catch reviews for a better shopping experience.
Remington Smooth & Silky Effortless Glide Epilator
The silk epilator has been designed to glide over the contours of your skin and gives a finishing feel. It has lift and grip featured tweezers that grasp short, fine hair and pluck out. It comes with a cleaning brush and an angled cap. Grab your product at $47 and save $12 and enjoy shopping. | https://medium.com/revountsau/incredible-skincare-tools-for-women-worth-your-money-cb3d274e71f6 | ['Angela Jones'] | 2021-06-03 11:24:00.843000+00:00 | ['Coupon', 'Women', 'Skincare', 'Beauty', 'Skin Care Products'] |
Changes That’ll Make a Big Difference With Your Learning Programming For Kids : Any Kid Can Code | Here, we are going to use library named turtle and how:
import turtle
Then, type magical keywords and give suitable name to your turtle, I choose “jumper”.
jumper = turtle.pen() or see in case you have to use turtle.Pen() [CAPITAL P]
And suddenly we have the new window open or so called our own techie playground
Our Play area to make innovative figures
We have our own turtle
Most of you want to see turtle, lets give this arrow shape of turtle. Refer above image.
jumper.shape(“turtle”) or turtle.shape(“turtle”)
Now you are ready to move with turtle. Where you will move there will be line drawn. Thus you can create different images.
For basic understanding of the screen, we should know the X,Y axis. X axis is horizontal line and Y axis is vertical line. Coordinates (0,0) where X is 0 and Y is 0, is the position where our turtle is now. Try to Grasp it. If not, don’t worry we have commands to move turtle in playground.
2 dimensioal chart
Basic commands to play with Turtle
forward: to move forward in the direction of its mouth
left: to change the direction. Bit tricky, you have to have knowledge of angles.
up: When you move, it wont make any line, till you bring it down.
down: To bring it down, otherwise your turtle is flying turtle
shape, width, goto, color are the other commands to play with.
If you want to go more deeper, please go to the below link and take a lead:
https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/turtle.html
Lets make use of the above commands and make quadrilateral (square or rectangle)
I ran below commands in sequence and here we go, we have our first magic figure ready:
jumper.forward(100)
jumper.left(90)
jumper.forward(100)
jumper.left(90)
jumper.forward(100)
jumper.left(90)
jumper.forward(100)
our first creation: Square
jumper.left(90), will change the direction of your turtle in left upto 90 degrees. And, if you want to be creative, change this from 90 to some other number and see the magic. You will have magical figures turning up.
Just one important thing to mention, when you type command, try to use up arrow key. It will bring the previous commands and you need not to type and give pain to your fingers.
Magic to master this is to practice and practice. So, try to make 5–10 different figures. And, challenge yourself by putting the color inside those figures. It is pretty simple. I will be coming up with next blogs to that where we will learn new things in programming like conditions, loop and their types, variables and their usage etc.
Name your turtle and move as you want. Code and don’t forget to have fun! Included Links below for further Learnings! | https://medium.com/swlh/simplistically-easy-any-kid-can-code-2294919a34e | ['Laxman Singh'] | 2020-12-22 09:44:36.454000+00:00 | ['Kids Programming', 'Python', 'Kids', 'Technology', 'Kids And Tech'] |
Everyone waiting for Uber IPO? | Here some headlines I read today I found really interesting.
All three Booster Rockets land for first time
SpaceX has launched its Falcon Heavy rocket and was able to land all three boosters for the first time. That is so amazing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/livestream-watch-spacex-falcon-heavy-rocket-launch-and-landing.html
Is everybody waiting for Uber IPO?
After two weeks public Lyft hasn’t done that well and is down by over 20 percent (April 12). Seems like all the world is waiting for its much bigger competitor Uber to launch on the market which likely will have five times bigger market capitalisation. Uber — even though I can’t really use in Germany at this time — is I think one of the biggest success story’s for the last couple of years. It’s so simple to use. So obvious. So convenient.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/lyft-stock-plunges-as-investors-get-a-first-look-into-ubers-finances.html
Amazon raises Japan Prime prices for first time in 11 years
11 years Amazon Prime in Japan without increasing the price. This is impressive. Event when it’s getting more expensive the value have increased over the last years too.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/amazon-japan-raises-prime-membership-for-first-time-in-11-years
Have a nice weekend!
Jona | https://medium.com/@jonahw/everyone-waiting-for-uber-ipo-c3719f937583 | ['Jonah Williams'] | 2019-04-12 21:15:25.715000+00:00 | ['Spacex'] |
Combining Strengths to Unlock Business Potential in the Anthropocene | Even before the current crisis, many experts on business development agreed that the next ten years are shaping up to be extremely volatile across a range of different sectors and industries. Some have suggested that as many as 40% of the current Fortune 500 companies will no longer be here by 2030.
Without any doubt, what is happening now, in combination with the massive sustainability transformation underway, will mean the end for many companies. But there will also be winners among those who realize that the Anthropocene is here to stay and consequently transform their business model to one that is relevant in this new context while at the same time managing to build their capacity to navigate future change.
At Prosperous Planet, we help companies who are about to embark on this journey of exploration and innovation towards a planet-positive future where being part of the solution is what makes a company successful.
The people who work at Prosperous Planet are quite an unusual mix — scientists specialized in sustainable development in the Anthropocene working together with management consultants turned entrepreneurs on the start-up scene and with experts in facilitation, group dynamics, and developmental leadership.
Professionals in these fields have rarely shared their turf in the past — for several reasons. Sustainability scientists, in general, like to think things over, reluctant to set things in motion before they are sure that they properly understand the complexity of it all (shouldn’t we gather a bit more data first…?). Creativity is valued over efficiency, precision over speed, and facts over feelings (although the latter could, of course, be studied and factored in).
The management consultants turned entrepreneurs (a quite unusual combination in itself, actually), in contrast, are efficient, quick to spot the opportunities, decide, prototype, and move on, adding success to success (because failed experiments are also a form of success as everyone in the startup world knows) in their relentless strife towards “The Goal”. While the differences are obvious, these groups at least share a certain belief in numbers.
This brings us to our experts on group dynamics and leadership. Not that they renounce numbers altogether, it is just that they often see them as quite pointless if you don’t understand the people who have produced the numbers or the ones who will use them in the end. Spending their time trying to understand what it is that makes us human beings “tick” and figuring out smart ways of making us “tick” better together, this group of professionals are all about the journey and what really matters deep down.
So, what do we want to say with all this (besides giving you a glimpse of what can be really interesting coffee break discussions at Prosperous Planet)? The point is that, although the areas of sustainability science, innovation management, and organizational development rarely have been considered simultaneously in the past, their combination is actually the key to successful business development in the Anthropocene.
Why? Well, it is actually quite simple: although sustainability is a prerequisite for success in the Anthropocene, sustainability work that is not forward-looking and focused on continuous innovation will not be able to bring enough competitive advantage to serve as an engine for business development. And while continuous innovation is essential for companies in a rapidly changing world, business innovation that is not firmly anchored in the Anthropocene context, targeting the real needs of humanity today, risks becoming irrelevant. And, finally, changing a company’s business model and trajectory of development (regardless of the direction for this change) requires that you successfully deal with and further develop all that is “social” in an organization.
So, the conclusion is that you need a bit of everything: the science to properly understand the complex sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene, an ambitious innovation focus to turn these into opportunities for growth and development, and a deep understanding of the human side at an individual as well as a collective level to unleash creativity and maintain a commitment to change processes over time.
The team at Prosperous Planet is composed of people who possess these different skills and qualities, and while we, admittedly, are a somewhat odd bunch, we also truly enjoy this interaction across professional disciplines and seeing how combining our strengths can help companies unlock their own Anthropocene potential. If you recognize the need for your organization to transform in the Anthropocene, what are you waiting for? Let’s get to work — together. | https://medium.com/@prosperousplanet/combining-strengths-to-unlock-business-potential-in-the-anthropocene-d25882f302ae | ['Prosperous Planet'] | 2021-09-10 09:33:06.719000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Sustainable Development', 'Sustainable Business', 'Sustainable Innovation', 'Anthropocene'] |
Movie Recommendation System Using Spark MLlib | Spark MLlib Tutorial — Edureka
Spark MLlib is Apache Spark’s Machine Learning component. One of the major attractions of Spark is the ability to scale computation massively, and that is exactly what you need for machine learning algorithms. But the limitation is that all machine learning algorithms cannot be effectively parallelized. Each algorithm has its own challenges for parallelization, whether it is task parallelism or data parallelism.
Having said that, Spark is becoming the de-facto platform for building machine learning algorithms and applications. The developers working on the Spark MLlib are implementing more and more machine algorithms in a scalable and concise manner in the Spark framework. Through this blog, we will learn the concepts of Machine Learning, Spark MLlib, its utilities, algorithms, and a complete use case of Movie Recommendation System.
The following topics will be covered in this blog:
What is Machine Learning? Spark MLlib Overview Spark MLlib Tools MLlib Algorithms Use Case — Movie Recommendation System
What is Machine Learning?
Evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence, machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data — such algorithms overcome following strictly static program instructions by making data-driven predictions or decisions, through building a model from sample inputs.
Machine learning is closely related to computational statistics, which also focuses on prediction-making through the use of computers. It has strong ties to mathematical optimization, which delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field. Within the field of data analytics, machine learning is a method used to devise complex models and algorithms that lend themselves to a prediction which in commercial use is known as predictive analytics.
There are three categories of Machine learning tasks:
Supervised Learning: Supervised learning is where you have input variables (x) and an output variable (Y) and you use an algorithm to learn the mapping function from the input to the output. Unsupervised Learning: Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning algorithm used to draw inferences from data sets consisting of input data without labeled responses. Reinforcement Learning: A computer program interacts with a dynamic environment in which it must perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle or playing a game against an opponent). The program is provided with feedback in terms of rewards and punishments as it navigates its problem space. This concept is called reinforcement learning.
Spark MLlib Overview
Spark MLlib is used to perform machine learning in Apache Spark. MLlib consists of popular algorithms and utilities.
MLlib Overview:
spark.mllib contains the original API built on top of RDDs. It is currently in maintenance mode.
spark.ml provides higher level API built on top of DataFrames for constructing ML pipelines. spark.ml is the primary Machine Learning API for Spark at the moment.
Spark MLlib Tools
Spark MLlib provides the following tools:
ML Algorithms: ML Algorithms form the core of MLlib. These include common learning algorithms such as classification, regression, clustering, and collaborative filtering. Featurization: Featurization includes feature extraction, transformation, dimensionality reduction, and selection. Pipelines: Pipelines provide tools for constructing, evaluating and tuning ML Pipelines. Persistence: Persistence helps in saving and loading algorithms, models and Pipelines. Utilities: Utilities for linear algebra, statistics and data handling.
MLlib Algorithms
The popular algorithms and utilities in Spark MLlib are:
Basic Statistics Regression Classification Recommendation System Clustering Dimensionality Reduction Feature Extraction Optimization
Let us look at some of these in detail.
Basic Statistics
Basic Statistics includes the most basic of machine learning techniques. These include:
Summary Statistics: Examples include mean, variance, count, max, min, and numNonZeros. Correlations: Spearman and Pearson are some ways to find correlation. Stratified Sampling: These include sampleBykey and sampleByKeyExact. Hypothesis Testing: Pearson’s chi-squared test is an example of hypothesis testing. Random Data Generation: RandomRDDs, Normal and Poisson are used to generate random data.
Regression
Regression analysis is a statistical process for estimating the relationships among variables. It includes many techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables when the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. More specifically, regression analysis helps one understand how the typical value of the dependent variable changes when any one of the independent variables is varied, while the other independent variables are held fixed.
Regression analysis is widely used for prediction and forecasting, where its use has substantial overlap with the field of machine learning. Regression analysis is also used to understand which among the independent variables are related to the dependent variable, and to explore the forms of these relationships. In restricted circumstances, regression analysis can be used to infer causal relationships between the independent and dependent variables.
Classification
Classification is the problem of identifying to which of a set of categories (sub-populations) a new observation belongs, on the basis of a training set of data containing observations (or instances) whose category membership is known. It is an example of pattern recognition.
Here, an example would be assigning a given email into “spam” or “non-spam” classes or assigning a diagnosis to a given patient as described by observed characteristics of the patient (gender, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.).
Recommendation System
A recommendation system is a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the “rating” or “preference” that a user would give to an item. Recommender systems have become increasingly popular in recent years, and are utilized in a variety of areas including movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general.
Recommender systems typically produce a list of recommendations in one of two ways — through collaborative and content-based filtering or the personality-based approach.
Collaborative Filtering approaches building a model from a user’s past behavior (items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users. This model is then used to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in. Content-Based Filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties.
Further, these approaches are often combined as Hybrid Recommender Systems.
Clustering
Clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). So, it is the main task of exploratory data mining, and a common technique for statistical data analysis, used in many fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, and computer graphics.
Dimensionality Reduction
Dimensionality Reduction is the process of reducing the number of random variables under consideration, via obtaining a set of principal variables. It can be divided into feature selection and feature extraction.
Feature Selection: Feature selection finds a subset of the original variables (also called features or attributes). Feature Extraction: This transforms the data in the high-dimensional space to a space of fewer dimensions. The data transformation may be linear, as in Principal Component Analysis(PCA), but many nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques also exist.
Feature Extraction
Feature Extraction starts from an initial set of measured data and builds derived values (features) intended to be informative and non-redundant, facilitating the subsequent learning and generalization steps, and in some cases leading to better human interpretations. This is related to dimensionality reduction.
Optimization
Optimization is the selection of the best element (with regard to some criterion) from some set of available alternatives.
In the simplest case, an optimization problem consists of maximizing or minimizing a real function by systematically choosing input values from within an allowed set and computing the value of the function. The generalization of optimization theory and techniques to other formulations comprises a large area of applied mathematics. More generally, optimization includes finding “best available” values of some objective function given a defined domain (or input), including a variety of different types of objective functions and different types of domains.
Use Case — Movie Recommendation System
Problem Statement:
To build a Movie Recommendation System which recommends movies based on a user’s preferences using Apache Spark.
Our Requirements:
So, let us assess the requirements to build our movie recommendation system:
Process huge amount of data Input from multiple sources Easy to use Fast processing
As we can assess our requirements, we need the best Big Data tool to process large data in a short time. Therefore, Apache Spark is the perfect tool to implement our Movie Recommendation System.
Let us now look at the Flow Diagram for our system.
As we can see, the following uses Streaming from Spark Streaming. We can stream in real-time or read data from Hadoop HDFS.
Getting Dataset:
For our Movie Recommendation System, we can get user ratings from many popular websites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Times Movie Ratings. This dataset is available in many formats such as CSV files, text files, and databases. We can either stream the data live from the websites or download and store them in our local file system or HDFS.
Dataset:
The below figure shows how we can collect dataset from popular websites.
Once we stream the data into Spark, it looks somewhat like this.
Machine Learning:
The whole recommendation system is based on Machine Learning algorithm Alternating Least Squares. Here, ALS is a type of regression analysis where regression is used to draw a line amidst the data points in such a way so that the sum of the squares of the distance from each data point is minimized. Thus, this line is then used to predict the values of the function where it meets the value of the independent variable.
The blue line in the diagram is the best-fit regression line. For this line, the value of the dimension D is minimum. All other red lines will always be farther from the dataset as a whole.
Spark MLlib Implementation:
We will use Collaborative Filtering(CF) to predict the ratings for users for particular movies based on their ratings for other movies. We then collaborate this with other users’ rating for that particular movie. To get the following results from our Machine Learning, we need to use Spark SQL’s DataFrame, Dataset and SQL Service.
Here is the pseudo code for our program:
import org.apache.spark.mllib.recommendation.ALS
import org.apache.spark.mllib.recommendation.Rating
import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
//Import other necessary packages
object Movie {
def main(args: Array[String]) {
val conf = new SparkConf().setAppName("Movie").setMaster("local[2]")
val sc = new SparkContext(conf)
val rawData = sc.textFile(" *Read Data from Movie CSV file* ")
//rawData.first()
val rawRatings = rawData.map( *Split rawData on tab delimiter* )
val ratings = rawRatings.map { *Map case array of User, Movie and Rating* }
//Training the data
val model = ALS.train(ratings, 50, 5, 0.01)
model.userFeatures
model.userFeatures.count
model.productFeatures.count
val predictedRating = *Predict for User 789 for movie 123*
val userId = *User 789*
val K = 10
val topKRecs = model.recommendProducts( *Recommend for User for the particular value of K* )
println(topKRecs.mkString("
"))
val movies = sc.textFile(" *Read Movie List Data* ")
val titles = movies.map(line => line.split("\\|").take(2)).map(array => (array(0).toInt,array(1))).collectAsMap()
val titlesRDD = movies.map(line => line.split("\\|").take(2)).map(array => (array(0).toInt,array(1))).cache()
titles(123)
val moviesForUser = ratings.*Search for User 789*
val sqlContext= *Create SQL Context*
val moviesRecommended = sqlContext.*Make a DataFrame of recommended movies*
moviesRecommended.registerTempTable("moviesRecommendedTable")
sqlContext.sql("Select count(*) from moviesRecommendedTable").foreach(println)
moviesForUser. *Sort the ratings for User 789* .map( *Map the rating to movie title* ). *Print the rating*
val results = moviesForUser.sortBy(-_.rating).take(30).map(rating => (titles(rating.product), rating.rating))
}
Once we generate predictions, we can use Spark SQL to store the results into an RDBMS system. Further, this can be displayed on a web application.
Results:
Hurray! We have thus successfully created a Movie Recommendation System using Apache Spark. With this, we have covered just one of the many popular algorithms Spark MLlib has to offer.
So this is it! I hope this blog was informative and added value to your knowledge. If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Spark. | https://medium.com/edureka/spark-mllib-e87546ac268 | ['Shubham Sinha'] | 2020-09-10 10:21:50.423000+00:00 | ['Spark', 'Sparkml', 'Spark Mllib', 'Apache Spark', 'Machine Learning'] |
ResNet Implementation with PyTorch from Scratch | Network Implementation
left: VGG19, middle: a plain network with 34 parameter layers, right: a residual network with skip connections.
Translation of tabular representation to code
representation of residual networks with 18, 34, 50, 101, and 152 layers.
conv1
The first layer is a convolution layer with 64 kernels of size (7 x 7), and stride 2. the input image size is (224 x 224) and in order to keep the same dimension after convolution operation, the padding has to be set to 3 according to the following equation:
n_out = ((n_in + 2p - k) / s) + 1
n_out - output dimension
n_in - -input dimension
p - padding
s - stride
maxpool1
The second layer is a max-pooling layer with kernel size (3x3) and stride 2. In order to get the size (56 x 56) at the output, the padding has to be set to 1
Convolutional Blocks
all the architectures consist of 4 convolutional groups of blocks. In the case of ResNet18, there are [2, 2, 2, 2] convolutional blocks of 2 layers, and the number of kernels in the first layers is equal to the number of layers in the second layer. Similarly, in the case of ResNet34, there are [3, 4, 6, 3] blocks of 2 layers and the numbers of kernels of the first and second layers are the same.
In the case of ResNet50, ResNet101, and ResNet152, there are 4 convolutional groups of blocks and every block consists of 3 layers. Conversely to the shallower variants, in this case, the number of kernels of the third layer is three times the number of kernels in the first layer.
The convolutional block is defined as the following class:
class Block(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, num_layers, in_channels, out_channels, identity_downsample=None, stride=1):
assert num_layers in [18, 34, 50, 101, 152], "should be a a valid architecture"
super(Block, self).__init__()
self.num_layers = num_layers
if self.num_layers > 34:
self.expansion = 4
else:
self.expansion = 1
# ResNet50, 101, and 152 include additional layer of 1x1 kernels
self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(in_channels, out_channels, kernel_size=1, stride=1, padding=0)
self.bn1 = nn.BatchNorm2d(out_channels)
if self.num_layers > 34:
self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(out_channels, out_channels, kernel_size=3, stride=stride, padding=1)
else:
# for ResNet18 and 34, connect input directly to (3x3) kernel (skip first (1x1))
self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(in_channels, out_channels, kernel_size=3, stride=stride, padding=1)
self.bn2 = nn.BatchNorm2d(out_channels)
self.conv3 = nn.Conv2d(out_channels, out_channels * self.expansion, kernel_size=1, stride=1, padding=0)
self.bn3 = nn.BatchNorm2d(out_channels * self.expansion)
self.relu = nn.ReLU()
self.identity_downsample = identity_downsample
def forward(self, x):
identity = x
if self.num_layers > 34:
x = self.conv1(x)
x = self.bn1(x)
x = self.relu(x)
x = self.conv2(x)
x = self.bn2(x)
x = self.relu(x)
x = self.conv3(x)
x = self.bn3(x)
if self.identity_downsample is not None:
identity = self.identity_downsample(identity)
x += identity
x = self.relu(x)
return x
Putting all together
the whole network is defined as the following class:
class ResNet(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, num_layers, block, image_channels, num_classes):
assert num_layers in [18, 34, 50, 101, 152], f'ResNet{num_layers}: Unknown architecture! Number of layers has ' \
f'to be 18, 34, 50, 101, or 152 '
super(ResNet, self).__init__()
if num_layers < 50:
self.expansion = 1
else:
self.expansion = 4
if num_layers == 18:
layers = [2, 2, 2, 2]
elif num_layers == 34 or num_layers == 50:
layers = [3, 4, 6, 3]
elif num_layers == 101:
layers = [3, 4, 23, 3]
else:
layers = [3, 8, 36, 3]
self.in_channels = 64
self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(image_channels, 64, kernel_size=7, stride=2, padding=3)
self.bn1 = nn.BatchNorm2d(64)
self.relu = nn.ReLU()
self.maxpool = nn.MaxPool2d(kernel_size=3, stride=2, padding=1)
# ResNetLayers
self.layer1 = self.make_layers(num_layers, block, layers[0], intermediate_channels=64, stride=1)
self.layer2 = self.make_layers(num_layers, block, layers[1], intermediate_channels=128, stride=2)
self.layer3 = self.make_layers(num_layers, block, layers[2], intermediate_channels=256, stride=2)
self.layer4 = self.make_layers(num_layers, block, layers[3], intermediate_channels=512, stride=2)
self.avgpool = nn.AdaptiveAvgPool2d((1, 1))
self.fc = nn.Linear(512 * self.expansion, num_classes)
def forward(self, x):
x = self.conv1(x)
x = self.bn1(x)
x = self.relu(x)
x = self.maxpool(x)
x = self.layer1(x)
x = self.layer2(x)
x = self.layer3(x)
x = self.layer4(x)
x = self.avgpool(x)
x = x.reshape(x.shape[0], -1)
x = self.fc(x)
return x
def make_layers(self, num_layers, block, num_residual_blocks, intermediate_channels, stride):
layers = []
identity_downsample = nn.Sequential(nn.Conv2d(self.in_channels, intermediate_channels*self.expansion, kernel_size=1, stride=stride),
nn.BatchNorm2d(intermediate_channels*self.expansion))
layers.append(block(num_layers, self.in_channels, intermediate_channels, identity_downsample, stride))
self.in_channels = intermediate_channels * self.expansion # 256
for i in range(num_residual_blocks - 1):
layers.append(block(num_layers, self.in_channels, intermediate_channels)) # 256 -> 64, 64*4 (256) again
return nn.Sequential(*layers)
jupyter notebook is available here | https://medium.com/@niko-gamulin/resnet-implementation-with-pytorch-from-scratch-23cf3047cb93 | ['Niko Gamulin'] | 2020-11-01 17:22:56.382000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Convolutional Network', 'Machine Learning', 'Pytorch', 'Resnet'] |
Keisha’s Kyra | After Keisha (our nearly 5 year old pug) decided to hit the Angel Zone, we weren’t quite the same. My family and I busied ourselves in the busyness of life. I grieved ‘constructively’ by volunteering for the Rainbows Bridge, an online portal for families of deceased pets and service animals. 10 years ago, I would have failed to fully appreciate the need for such a service. 10 days in as a volunteer and it felt as if someone had granted me the belated right to consent that my fur-child had returned to Nature.
Keisha
I began to begin my mornings as a ‘condolence writer’ for the Rainbows Bridge message center. My inbox received roughly three requests each day for condolence letters for a family who had lost a pet. The memorial page for each request shared a brief description of the family, the pet and his or her favourite things. It was a simple portal without the complexities of a personal profile or user stats or even a Facebook account linked to it. I imagine it would be easier to create an FB or Instagram memorial page for ones pet with no costs involved and a far more savvy interface. However, Rainbows Bridge seemed to be built on the foundation of an old fashioned need for a community sharing the same loss.
Every article or resource had been contributed as an act of service from one grieving parent to another. These were regular-people-turned-content-writers, as if on an errand to retrieve new meaning with each post. Perhaps, a little like Harry Potter’s character in the first book when he realized he was only one of two students who saw the white phantoms pulling his Hogwarts carriage. Death has a way of re-arranging meaning even after meeting it time and over in its many shapes and forms.
A screen shot from a post on Rainbows Bridge.
One family wrote of their loss of a 44 year old bird (8 years my senior) who had brought the pet-parent couple together. Another wrote of their deceased service dog in a family with special needs children. A third wrote of a cat who restored a woman’s faith in her God after a losing a child.
“Transition has a way leaving wisdom in its wake,” I wrote in one letter, feeling a little bit like a hypocrite and hating the feeling. I wasn’t feeling particularly wise myself, especially on that day. I signed the letter with Keisha’s name, as if writing on her behalf and from a second person perspective. I described death as liberating and beautiful, based on accounts of near-death experiences I’d read about as a medical student. I also went so far and typed “it’s important to live well and fully in his honour” to an anguished Brazilian couple. It was a paraphrase from the work of Bert Hellinger, a therapeutic idea I’d read of a few years ago after the passing of a close friend.
As I typed, I wondered how another friend had recovered from the loss of a child, but not from her 2-year-old Labrador who developed a failure in both kidneys. It seemed bizarre and yet made all the sense in the world.
…
In the meanwhile, Keisha’s friend Patch (also a pug) had delivered a litter of 7 healthy pups. We visited them with Keisha to lift her spirit and ours. Patch’s partner, a French bulldog was possibly feeling ‘fatherful’ at the time and contributed to two litters in the same month (yes, he has an appointment to be neutered next week and no, we’re not feeling bad for him at all).
Keisha seemed to take to one pup in particular and we decided to adopt a second fur-baby in the happy possibility that Keisha would pull through her illness, win over cancer and we would all live happily ever after amid dog treats and puppy poop.
However, Keisha seemed to have her heart set on sprouting angel wings. Even after her heart stopped beating and her lungs had given way, she looked peaceful and happy as she lay there, her eye-lids not completely closed over her opaque corneas, with a little light glistening in them as if they were twinkling. Peace and sadness sometimes take over the human heart at the same time, as if Nature had set aside different compartments for them until they consent to merge into a film of gratitude.
…
3 weeks and several phone calls later, Keisha’s successor whooshed into our home. “Whoosh” is the only word that quite describes Kyra’s movements. She is the ‘chosen one’ to carry forward the mischief and quite frankly, at the age of 7 weeks she is taking the role very very seriously. She has the stubbornness of a French bulldog and the resilience of her mother Patch. She also has the spunk of her predecessor Keisha which translates into near-zero sleep for us on any given day.
The 4:00 am mornings have kicked in once more, this time to the soundtrack of a whining and then wailing sound of the Bandit-Queen-Kyra. The nick-name came to us naturally while she bit (not nibbled) happily into our earlobes while we watched, half-nodded-off and then found ourselves jostled into wakefulness (or at least our earlobes were) in the middle of a favourite TV show.
Kyra thinks Keisha is still in the home and sniffs imaginary trails to find the source of this other doggy. Her search stops inside her little pooch bed, smelling mildly of detergent and of Keisha. She snuggles in, giving up her search for the moment.
The truth is that our home will always belong to Keisha; for home really is where the heart is. | https://medium.com/@shradhdhashah/keishas-kyra-859c19a87b93 | ['Shradhdha Shah'] | 2020-11-24 13:13:52.434000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Pets', 'Adoption', 'Letters', 'Condolence'] |
That First Ticket | Life in any new job can mean a lot of on-the-spot learning, questions, and stumbling. As a former educator transitioning into tech, life as a brand new Software Engineer felt all the more foreign.
Some of my very first questions to myself:
Sweet! I now have a laptop and an external monitor — oh boy, where exactly did my cursor go!?
Why can’t I stop thinking of boats whenever I hear the word Docker?
Is this the part where everyone finds out I don’t really know what I’m doing?!
Truth be told, my first few days of virtual onboarding and meeting my new team (my new team!) were a treat. New beginnings can be absolutely beautiful.
But what I really, really, really wanted to know was the answer to the very question I asked everyone else when I was job hunting:
What’s a day in the life like?
A Day In The Life
It all starts with a ticket.
Bugs and features. In my short experience thus far, I’ve learned that there are generally two types of tickets: bugs and features. You’re either fixing or building. For my first ticket, I was fixing. I needed to prevent text from spilling outside of a button.
In my short experience thus far, I’ve learned that there are generally two types of tickets: bugs and features. You’re either fixing or building. For my first ticket, I was fixing. I needed to prevent text from spilling outside of a button. A sea of code. Being brand new at your job means that each task is so much more than solving a problem. That sea of code — that’s what I was swimming in. For the first few hours, I was trying to orient myself. Look at the portal (app) in the browser, inspect some elements, find said elements in the code repo. Well, try.
Being brand new at your job means that each task is so much more than solving a problem. That sea of code — that’s what I was swimming in. For the first few hours, I was trying to orient myself. Look at the portal (app) in the browser, inspect some elements, find said elements in the code repo. Well, try. Replicate. Back to the task at hand, after orienting myself a wee bit, I knew I needed to first replicate the issue. Find the button, see the text overflow, and figure out when it happens and why. Might I say, this part was a hoot!
Back to the task at hand, after orienting myself a wee bit, I knew I needed to first replicate the issue. Find the button, see the text overflow, and figure out when it happens and why. Might I say, this part was a hoot! Find the code. Once replicated, I knew I needed to find the code for that element in the repo. Figuring out what to search for was initially a roadblock, but trial and error proved effective.
Once replicated, I knew I needed to find the code for that element in the repo. Figuring out what to search for was initially a roadblock, but trial and error proved effective. Blank stare. I jest, but this was the moment I’d been waiting for. Me, Software Engineer Anna, at bat. After a bit of panic breathing, I thought back to the task at hand. Text, in a button, was overflowing. Overflow. Overflow properties. CSS.
I jest, but this was the moment I’d been waiting for. Me, Software Engineer Anna, at bat. After a bit of panic breathing, I thought back to the task at hand. Text, in a button, was overflowing. Overflow. Overflow properties. CSS. Google. Yes, folks! Yes! Now that I knew what I needed to do, I searched for CSS properties and ways to keep text inside a button and prevent overflow.
Yes, folks! Yes! Now that I knew what I needed to do, I searched for CSS properties and ways to keep text inside a button and prevent overflow. Educated trial and error. I knew a few properties that might do the trick, but now I had to compare the standards and styles of the code base at hand.
I knew a few properties that might do the trick, but now I had to compare the standards and styles of the code base at hand. The other bits. Throughout that process, there were plenty of other tidbits that I picked up. When to start Docker and why it’s important, how to track progress in Jira, which version of Bootstrap we use.
Throughout that process, there were plenty of other tidbits that I picked up. When to start Docker and why it’s important, how to track progress in Jira, which version of Bootstrap we use. Run the tests. There are tests to be run, to ensure that what I’ve built didn’t break existing code. There will be a time and place to get into the details (the details are great!) but for now I’ll say, testing really, really, really, really, REALLY matters and is a lot to get used to.
There are tests to be run, to ensure that what I’ve built didn’t break existing code. There will be a time and place to get into the details (the details are great!) but for now I’ll say, testing really, really, really, really, REALLY matters and is a lot to get used to. That first PR. Once tests are passing and the commits are made and pushed, it’s time to make the pull request. That gorgeous signal that you’re ready for your changes to be reviewed by another team member.
The next steps vary, but here’s what else happens once a PR is submitted. Someone else on the team will review it and leave comments for next steps. But don’t wait for that review — keep going. Either work on a new ticket, work on any other open tickets or pair up with a teammate to review what they’re working on.
And then rinse and repeat. Tickets, pairing up, testing, fixing, building — it’s a beautiful process to improve what exists.
Now that I’m in it and have experienced the day-to-day life of a software engineer, it doesn’t feel all that foreign to me. But while still at Flatiron or even while job hunting, it was THE thing I was most anxious to figure out.
If you’re out there and want to know more about the ins and outs of a day on the job, leave a comment below! Always happy to share.
Cheers, and thanks so much for reading.
Author: Anna Wejitunga, Associate Software Engineer | https://medium.com/@aware3/that-first-ticket-c9f7ca10e647 | [] | 2020-10-13 15:07:50.398000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Code Newbie', 'Careers'] |
How to Buy Things Better | My friend and I have been chewing on this problem for a long time: How can we decide what is worth buying?
I came upon this problem for a variety of reasons. The first is my crippling perfectionism. I can’t just buy a thing. I need to buy the perfect thing perfectly.
I remember once I tried to buy a diffuser at my favorite local store. As I reached for the diffuser, the cheapest one, my mind flashed forward 24 hours. I was huddled under a bridge, shoeless and now homeless. In my insane mind, buying the diffuser was the first step in a spending spree that would end with me homeless and penniless.
I ended up buying that diffuser and enjoying the hell of it. Rather unsurprisingly, my purchase did not lead to an uncontrollable spending spree.
But, my irrational fear does illustrate a potent fact: buying the right things is hard.
Buying anything can be a guilt ridden process and it’s made worse by the fact that our fallible minds sometimes lead us astray.
How can we decide what’s best to buy?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately and I think I finally have some clarity.
My friend and I developed the first question I ask when considering a purchase, while Mr. Money Mustache gave me the second question in an interview with Tim Ferriss.
Questions
How often do you think about buying it?
I acknowledge this is not a perfect predictor of the viability of a purchase. It is a proxy and an imperfect one. But I’d argue it’s good enough. If you struggle daily to untangle cords, that $5 cord holder will come to mind often. And I’d bet that it’s a great purchase. Why? I think the reason this question is great because it is an awesome proxy for the next question. The more often you have a problem, the more you think about a solution and the more valuable that solution will be to you.
2. What problem does the purchase solve?
Mr. Money Mustache has a fascinating philosophy that underpins the value of this question: More happiness comes from removing a negative than adding a positive. As Dr. Mike Bechtle quotes in his blog:
“The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.” | https://medium.com/jimmys-ten-cents/how-to-buy-things-better-b76a15452b3a | ['Jimmy Cerone'] | 2020-12-08 13:57:55.858000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Heuristics', 'Questions', 'Ideas', 'Mr Money Mustache'] |
This book is about power — who has it, and how it’s used | This is an excerpt from the Introduction of Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good By Giving Up Control. You can learn more about the book at lettinggobook.org.
This book is about power — who has it, and how it’s used.
The two of us work in a field that could be broadly defined as the “social sector”: the foundations, impact investment funds and aid organizations that collectively go about funding solutions to the world’s thorniest problems, from economic inequality to climate change.
This kind of work can be very appealing, especially to a certain kind of young person trying to figure out how to use their privilege for good. Activist Courtney Martin has called it the “reductive seduction of other people’s problems,” writing that “if you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable.” She notes that “There is a whole ‘industry’ set up to nurture these desires and delusions… encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase ‘save the world.’”
But over the past few years, we, like many of our pedigreed peers, have become more critical of this industry, its power dynamics, and our own role in it.
The social sector, like many global institutions, is at a moment of reckoning.
Books like Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth and Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All have punctured the air of righteousness around the architects of social change. Twenty years into philanthropy’s so-called golden age, the unchecked rise of global inequality raises questions about just how effectively those trillions of dollars have been put to work.
For us, and for many of our peers, this reckoning boils down to a reckoning with our own egos. When you’re watching a movie (particularly a bad one), you end up relying on a “suspension of disbelief” to get you through the plot. Some scenarios might seem like a stretch, but you’re willing to hold back judgment in service of the larger story. Similarly, when you work in the social sector long enough, you learn to suspend disbelief about the power of your own judgment. If a problem is out there, it must be solvable. If it’s solvable, then it must be within the reach of your own logic, reason and intellect. It’s a perfect philosophy for a generation raised on the can-do idealism of “The West Wing” and the clean logic of Freakonomics.
For most of our careers, we’ve leaned into that suspension of disbelief. Between the two of us, we’ve developed what is sometimes incredibly shallow expertise on an incredibly wide variety of topics, from voting rights to vertical farming. We’ve frequently been positioned as experts on topics that six months prior we knew next to nothing about.
The idea to write Letting Go came out of a conversation we had at a conference in 2019.
The conference was about impact investing, which had grown from a niche topic into a field representing half a trillion dollars’ worth of capital. It was held in an immense former stock exchange; the main hall was filled with investors from around the world who had paid upward of $1,500 to mingle and learn about the field.
The investors saw suffering in the world, and they nobly aimed to heal it. The ideas they were discussing — greenhouse gas reduction, microfinance, sustainable infrastructure — were all important. Still, the people in the room were mostly white, mostly male and almost entirely from the United States and wealthy European cities. Several times during the conference, investors (and, to their credit, the conference organizers) pointed out the lack of voices in the room from marginalized communities.
The investors were talking mostly to each other, about solutions to problems that many of them had never experienced. The setting of the stock exchange, with its cavernous ceilings that caused sound to bounce back, completed the picture of an echo chamber of privilege.
To change this dynamic, we need to change who has power. We need to challenge our assumptions about authority and expertise and rethink who has a voice in making decisions about our collective future. In short, we need an entirely different approach to the problem of problem-solving.
This book is about an approach to problem-solving that we call participatory funding.
To steal a phrase, it’s the biography of an idea. The idea is both simple and powerful: What if we shifted decision-making power away from expert grantmakers and investors? What if we gave that power to people with lived experience of the problems at hand?
You might be familiar with the idea of participatory funding in the context of local government. City budgets are essentially moral documents — setting the priorities for how tax dollars are spent. In the past few decades, cities from New York to Barcelona have experimented with handing over direct control of segments of city budgets to citizens, a process called participatory budgeting. In December 2020, the Seattle City Council voted to cut the police budget and simultaneously create a $30 million fund for social services that will be distributed by popular vote — a plan to defund the police that is more substance than slogan.
The operating philosophy behind participatory budgeting is that the best way to solve a problem is to follow the lead of the people who know it best. It narrows the distance that inevitably exists in any form of representative democracy: between mayor and citizen, federal and local, those who govern and those who are governed.
Can this approach be applied to the social sector? As you might have guessed, grantmaking and impact investing as practiced today are far from participatory. Both fields are shaped and dominated by a homogenous group of decision-makers: mostly white, mostly male and mostly from the West. And both fields are distinctly undemocratic. Decisions are made from the top down, behind closed doors, in a secretive and opaque way.
But that’s starting to change. Over the past decade, dozens of foundations have begun to experiment with participatory funding, which involves shifting power over funding decisions to community members who will be most affected by the outcomes. In this book we’ll tell several stories of participatory funders, including:
How Village Capital’s peer-selected investment process evolved into a viable alternative to traditional venture capital, and a check against the danger of digital recolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa.
How a group of racial justice activists in Boston created a new model for community-controlled economic development, the Boston Ujima Fund.
Why experimental foundations like the Disability Rights Fund and Young Feminist Fund are driving a growth in the popularity of “participatory grantmaking”.
Letting Go
In 2011, Kristi Kimball and Malka Kopell, two grantmakers experienced in participatory funding, wrote an essay in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about philanthropy’s control complex.
“We would probably be better off as a society,” they wrote, if the decision-makers in the nation’s large private foundations took up surfing:
“Why? Because surfing is about letting go….Surfing is incredibly humbling, an encounter with the enormous power, beauty, and unpredictability of the ocean. No surfer would attempt to change the shape of the waves or the schedule of the tides, because these forces are far beyond any one person’s control. Just as men cannot control oceans, individual foundations cannot control social systems….Such an approach underestimates the vast power and complexity of the systems in which foundations are attempting to intervene.”
Letting Go is a call to action for the social sector. We are asking grantmakers and investors to embrace previously unthinkable levels of intellectual humility. It will be hard, but it’s necessary in an increasingly complex world. In the Foreword, Edgar Villanueva envisions a world where at least fifty percent of the people who make decisions about funding have direct lived experience. We explore what that could actually look like, and how we might get there.
This book is not about any single cause, but rather about the entire spectrum of progressive causes. If you care about the success of the environmental justice movement, Black Lives Matter activism, or LGBT rights, it’s important to understand how the money moves behind the scenes at the world’s largest foundations. If you’re passionate about impact-driven tech startups, or the success of minority-owned small businesses in your neighborhood, then it helps to learn about the flow of funding in the opaque world of finance.
There are plenty of books about how to bring a strategic approach to grantmaking, or how to go about investing for good. What we’re suggesting is something entirely different: that the best way to step up for social change is to step back — and that the best way for powerful people to make an impact is to simply let go. | https://medium.com/letting-go-book/this-book-is-about-power-who-has-it-and-how-its-used-ff9701487243 | ['Letting Go'] | 2021-07-18 19:42:07.013000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Participatory Grantmaking', 'Power', 'Philanthropy'] |
To smarter emails & efficient service, presenting the AI case | I am sure you’ve all been hearing about artificial intelligence. You see it on new devices, the cool Alexa that you can speak with, a phone support system that’s instantly capable of listening & responding to your voice, and of course the media and investment community has been crazy looking for the next big thing. Us being us, we thought we’d try and make some sense of it in the marketing and sales function.
I went about looking for the latest innovations in some of the most established tacts of digital marketing and here’s what I found:
· Email marketing
Email marketing has been an ongoing topic for a while, but we haven’t seen the true value it can provide until the rise of AI in the email marketing analytics space. A notable service we found was Nova. By utilising AI to scrape through a person’s online identity, it generates a personalised paragraph that sales representatives can add to their sales proposition. How does it work? Dump a batch of email addresses in, as well as the text of your pitch. Nova then screens the contacts and pulls information from sources published publically online and on social media accounts to create a personalised pitch. That’s great right?
· Customer service
Now, when you think of customer service, do you picture a bot serving you? Or the real question these days is, do you prefer it? A study of 5,000 consumers worldwide, conducted by LivePerson, showed that more than 50% of consumers preferred a human representative, and found only 38% of those surveyed had positive perceptions of this technology. They also found that some factors such as country and industry, had an effect on the receptiveness of consumers to these technologies.
Additionally, the nature of customer conversations for industries are inherently different. The fast food industry only really need to engage in simple conversations with their customers. Dominos for example, implemented a chatbot feature, “DRU” for their customers to easily choose their pizza base, toppings, dressing and sides, then order it. This was objectively efficient, and even impressive. Was it a success? YES. Chief executive Don Meij even stated, after realising the benefits of AI, that they are beginning to shift the philosophy of the company from “mobile first” to “AI first”. New initiatives are expected to come out such as drone deliveries, a Facebook chat that helps consumers find vouchers and coupons, and soon enough- DRU manager which helps Domino store owners automate rosters and order stock.
However, chatbots won’t be so easily implemented for customers asking about, say, life insurance. Again, the nature of the questions and conversations are important. In saying this, it’s also important to ensure that the tone and intonation of the chatbot is reflective of the brand. Amazon’s Alexa is a good example of this. She was friendly the majority of times, but there were few times the chatbot was perceived as judgemental. Another tribute to DRU’s success was that it conveyed the Domino brand well, and built a closer connection with the customer than the point-and-click interface.
As I continue on my journey to explore the applications of Artificial intelligence and how it can help make a real difference, I will be coming back soon with more interesting technologies we’ve tested and enjoyed. | https://medium.com/drizzlin/to-smarter-emails-efficient-service-presenting-the-ai-case-b4810cc4fe0 | ['Andrea Virrey'] | 2017-12-15 12:24:37.842000+00:00 | ['Customer Service', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Chatbots', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Montreal’s Night of Terror | Montreal’s Night of Terror
A dark glimpse into a world without law enforcement
On the morning of October 7th, 1969, both the police department and fire departments in Montreal, Canada, went on strike. The first responders were upset by their recent working conditions. Unknown to most people today, in the 1960s, Quebec was struggling with a violent separatist group known as the Front de libération du Québec. The police officers at the time decided to strike for higher wages in the face of the increased danger.
On that brisk autumn day in 1969, over 3,700 members of the police in Montreal walked off the job. They were tired of disarming bombs, being harassed on the streets, and having to deal with frequent riots and unrest caused by the separatist split in the province, especially since there were rumors that officers in much calmer Toronto were getting paid substantially more money.
Instead of entering a new utopia in which a metropolis governs itself peacefully without the aid of law enforcement, the city rapidly descended into chaos. The strike was only to last one day, but one day was all it took for disaster to strike.
The Early Hours
The strike officially started at 8:00 AM local time, and the police slowly emptied out of their normal stations and posts to go and conduct “a day of study.” A witness to the events, Steven Plinker, said that it only took a couple of hours for things to start to go south. By his information, the first bank was robbed at 11:00 AM.
By 12:00 PM, noon, many of the shops in the city center had boarded up to prevent looting. Jewelers took their valuables out of the window, and many business owners called it quits for the day.
That afternoon saw a steady uptick in crime, including an abnormal amount of bank robbery attempts throughout the city, but no widespread unrest had been reported.
The city was uneasy, but there were those who were planning on capitalizing on the absence of the police.
Nightfall
Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash
Around 6:00 PM, a group of angry taxi drivers converged on city hall to protest what they saw as an unfair contract that the city had given to a rival company. Montreal had contracted the Murray-Hill limousine company to have exclusive rights to airport picks ups. In an age before Uber and Lyft, this was a serious source of revenue for average taxi drivers, and being forcibly shut out of the market had enraged a large portion of the city’s average driver.
The crowd migrated from town hall to the main garage of the Murray-Hill limousine service with the intent of burning down their rival’s place of business. Seeing the large group of men with arson in their hearts, surrounding business owners, including the owners of Murray-Hill, began to arm themselves in preparation to defend their business.
What came next was utter chaos.
The Riots Begin
Photo by Flavio Gasperini on Unsplash
As the mob began to approach the Murray-Hill garage, someone opened fire on the crowd. The security personnel defending Murray-Hill were armed primarily with shotguns, but there were snipers on the roof of the garage as well. Once the gunfire started, the mob got out of control.
As reported by the CBC:
Gunfire erupted between armed protesters and security guards, and four buses were set on fire. As seen in this clip, one of those flaming buses ploughed through a garage door.
The two groups exchanged fire as the angry taxi drivers attempted to destroy the garage and overpower the armed security that was protecting the place. In the melee, a Quebec man, Robert Dumas, was shot and killed by a sniper on the roof. He turned out to be an off duty police corporal.
In light of the gunfire, the mob spread out and began to move down the streets in downtown ransacking and looting storefronts, restaurants, and hotels along their route. Without any opposition from government officials or police, more disgruntled people poured into the streets to join in the destruction.
Seeing the disorder erupting in Montreal, the Canadian National Assembly met in the middle of the night and passed a bill compelling the police to return to work. When that did not get the police back on the streets, they opted to send in the army instead.
Around midnight, the Canadian army rolled into Montreal to secure the streets from the rioters and looters. Once the army was deployed, order slowly returned to the city after hours of absolute chaos.
It took less than twenty four hours for the lack of police presence in Montreal to reap devastating effects.
Aftermath
Photo by ev on Unsplash
The situation ended with 108 people arrested, 30 people injured by gunfire, and one dead. There were millions of dollars in damages to local businesses.
The police in Montreal ended up getting their raise, and in a few short years, they were being paid substantially more than they had been in 1969. The Murry-Hill limousine company lost its exclusive rights to airport pickups in Montreal.
A reporter who was on the ground at the time would later recall:
“The bunch of us had thrown in our lot with something called the Mouvement de libération de taxi, a group dedicated to ridding the airport of its Murray Hill limousine monopoly… It seems that all it took back then to organize a full-scale riot in Montreal was a suggestion and lots of beer.”
You can watch the original broadcast by the CBC from the night of October 8th, 1969, here. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/montreals-night-of-terror-1e9bd632cdb | ['Grant Piper'] | 2020-06-14 11:56:00.728000+00:00 | ['Montreal', 'Canada', 'History', 'Law Enforcement', 'Police'] |
Trauma Healing is Messy!! | Trauma Healing is Messy!!
There are as many ways to work with trauma as there are ways to be traumatized. Everyone is different and will need to follow their own path. My own journey continues to be an evolving path of the most excruciatingly difficult lows as well as profoundly healing and connecting experiences.
The more I travel down my healing path, the more I see how insidious trauma really is, especially childhood abuse. As I am unraveling this tangled ball of beliefs, ideas, feelings, sensations, and memories, I am realizing that nothing is as it appears to be. The gaps in my memories painted an incomplete picture of the childhood I thought I had. The beliefs I had about myself being unloveable, damaged, alone, all trace back to seeds that were planted when I was too young to understand anything else. These seeds grew into noxious weeds that I have spent the better part of 3 decades trying to eliminate. From the early attempts at CBT and changing my “distorted thoughts” to learning how to treat myself with self-compassion. My path recently has taken me into my body; literally. I am gaining a profound understanding of how much of my trauma my body still holds. The modalities that have been most helpful in this area has been integrative breathwork therapy, somatic approaches as well as various other alternative therapies.
I used to covet my rational thoughts and relish in logically understanding my experiences. I used to think about feelings instead of feeling them. I used to think about my trauma vs. feeling into the edges and the depths of the sensations. The thoughts are only a fraction of the story. What I realize is that I was bypassing the feelings, sensations, and emotions and jumping to the narrative and the meaning of my experiences. I was missing so much, but now I see that I can’t out-think my trauma. I can’t out-run my emotions or those sensations that are trapped in my body. The only way I can transcend my past is to feel the depths of what I have experienced and move through the healing stages. Is it fun? NO! Would I rather do ANYTHING else? YES!!! But let me assure you, the relief that I feel- the expansive and energetic shift in my body after somatically processing or after I come through a breathwork session is glorious. It’s what keeps me coming back for more. Despite the challenges of moving through the process. It is worth it! The freedom I feel afterward reinforces the courage that it takes to stick with the hard shit.
I don’t know what lies ahead, but I do know that I have the tools and resources to help me continue moving forward to help process the things that were done to me years ago. It doesn’t change the grief I feel about what happened to me, but it does help me feel more empowered to decide how I move forward and ways I can leave these experiences in my past; digested and processed and not centre stage in my life. It allows me to move towards a life full of connection, energy, play, and fun. That sounds like a good path forward from where I stand!!! | https://medium.com/@sharonmslate/trauma-healing-is-messy-afc22ca5f48b | ['Sharon M. Slate'] | 2020-12-14 22:05:09.420000+00:00 | ['Therapy', 'Sexual Abuse Survivors', 'Healing Journey', 'Healing From Trauma'] |
Life and Leadership Lessons I Learned In The Military: “I simply can’t imagine anyone saying that… | As a part of my series about “Life and Leadership Lessons Learned In The Military”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Kapitulik. Eric was born and raised in Thompson, CT and attended Pomfret Preparatory School where he was a three-sport varsity athlete. Upon graduating, he attended the United States Naval Academy. While there, he was a 4-year varsity letter winner and played on three NCAA Division I Lacrosse Tournament teams. During his junior year, Eric received the Lt. JG Frank McKeone Award, given to the Navy player who most demonstrated spirit and sportsmanship and who served as the unsung hero. Eric was also named Navy’s Most Outstanding Defenseman and received North-South All Star honors his senior year at the Academy. He graduated in 1995 and went on to serve as both an Infantry Officer and Special Operations Officer with 1st Force Reconnaissance Company, 1st Marine Division. As a Force Reconnaissance Platoon Commander, Eric led 20 covert operations specialists in Special Forces related missions including long range reconnaissance patrols, hostage rescue, high altitude jump exercises, ship takeovers and gas-oil platform takedowns. He left active duty after eight years of service and graduated from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 2005.
Eric has been extensively involved with the Force Reconnaissance Scholarship Fund, which he established for the children of six Marines who died in a helicopter crash while serving under his command. Since 1999, he has been helping to raise funds through public speaking engagements covering “Leadership and Attacking Adversity” and through participation in Iron Man Triathlons and other ultra-endurance races around the world. In addition to finishing 8 Iron Man triathlons, Eric has competed in numerous marathons, the Canadian Death Race Ultra Marathon, the Eco Challenge, the American Birkebeiner Ski Marathon and was a competitor on The Outdoor Life Network’s “Global Extremes Challenge”.
Eric is also an avid high-altitude mountaineer. He has summated five of the Seven Summits (the highest peaks on the seven continents); Mt. Kilimanjaro, Mt. McKinley, Mt. Aconcagua, Mt. Elbrus, and, most recently, Mt. Everest.
Eric sits on the board of directors for the Massachusetts Soldier’s Legacy Fund and is the Founder and President of The Program LLC, a team building and leadership development company for high school and collegiate student athletes and corporate teams.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a bit about your childhood “backstory”?
I was born and raised in a small town in northeastern, Connecticut called North Grosvenordale. I grew up on a 100- acre farm. My dad was a Connecticut State Policeman and my mom was a high school French teacher. As I wrote in our new book, children don’t get the opportunity to choose their parents, but if I could have, I would have chosen mine. A big part of who I am is because of my upbringing. Specifically, as my Mom often says, “you don’t let children grow up, you raise them.” I am so fortunate that they raised me to be the man I am today by always challenging me to get outside my comfort zone, instilling great values in me, and, most importantly, for their love through it all.
And what are you doing today? Can you share a story that exemplifies the unique work that you are doing?
After the Marine Corps, I attended and graduated from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I went into Finance and worked at Goldman Sachs. I worked with exceptional people, but the job just wasn’t the right fit and I wanted to start my own company. I wasn’t 100% sure what that company would do specifically, but based on my work coaching a local high school lacrosse team and while working in corporate America, I thought there was a need for true leadership development and team- building training for college and professional athletic teams and in Corporate America. I also believed that I had the experience and expertise to address and fill that need. My answer to it was my company, The Program (www.TheProgram.org), and we now work with 160 collegiate and professional athletic teams and corporations throughout North America annually. We provide a number of different services, but our experiential training services are what we are best known for and, I believe, we are the best in the world at providing.
Can you tell us a bit about your military background?
My military career started at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland which I feel very fortunate to have decided to attend. Like most teenagers, we make our decision on where to go to college with really very little knowledge. Most of us make that decision based on feel. That feeling ended up being one that I have been so happy with every day of my life. Further, although joining the Marine Corps is the best decision I have ever made in my life (outside of the decision to marry my wife and to become a father), I would never have had the opportunity to become a Marine if I hadn’t chosen to first attend the Naval Academy. I made the decision to attend the Naval Academy because it was just different. It was going to be a challenge. I didn’t know if I could do it. It made me a little nervous (read “a lot nervous”). As I look back on my life, that thought process of constantly seeking out that which makes me a little bit nervous, that which I don’t know I can accomplish, is why I have done almost everything in my life, and it has, for the most part, never proven false; Naval Academy, Marine Corps Special Operations, The Ironman, Mt. Everest, Husband, Dad etc.
Can you share the most interesting story that you experienced during your military career? What “take away” did you learn from that story?
This is such a difficult question to answer because we are all a “sum of our experiences,” and my entire military career was an experience that has had a HUGE impact on me. Obviously, the helicopter crash that my Force Recon Marines and I were involved in that killed 6 of the 10 of us on board, has had a huge impact on my life. However, I would instead like to highlight two stories, one related to the helicopter crash and one that occurred right at the end of my Marine Corps career.
First, after the helicopter crash, my Force Recon platoon still had to do another very similar training mission on a ship prior to our deployment. My leg was in a cast and I couldn’t physically participate. The Commanding Officer told me that I could ride in his helicopter and watch the mission “from above.” I readily agreed, but at the very last moment prior to the mission commencing, I left his helicopter and went on board the same helicopter that all my men were in, the same type of helicopter that I (and they) had just barely survived swimming out of one month prior after it struck the side of a ship that we were practicing taking over and flipped over into the Pacific Ocean, killing, as I mentioned earlier, 6 of the 10 of us on board. I was scared. Really, terribly scared.
However, as I walked on to that helicopter, every single Marine in my platoon knew that they could trust me because I was proving to them that I would never ask them to do anything that I wasn’t willing to do myself. I proved it to them! And, just as importantly, I proved it to myself! As we discuss at length in our new book, leaders must never ask their teammates or their team to do something that they aren’t willing to do themselves. Unfortunately, many do.
Second, right before I left active duty, I was asked to fill the role of a Casualty Assistance Officer. As such, I was tasked with going to tell a Marine’s family that their son had just been killed in Iraq and then help them through that unbelievably difficult, and hard time. It is one of my life’s great privileges to have had the honor of doing so for that Marine (Corporal Jason Mileo) and his family, but walking to the door, and waiting for them to answer it so that I could tell them that their son had just died, is a moment in my life that I will never, ever forget. It is one of only two things in my life that I have ever done that I consider hard (burying my best friend, Major Douglas Zembiec, was the other). It made me realize that everything else that I/we do in our day-to-day lives is simply challenging. NEVER EVER forget it!
I’m interested in fleshing out what a hero is. Did you experience or hear about a story of heroism, during your military experience? Can you share that story with us? Feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.
A “hero,” I believe, is a matter of perspective. A hero might be someone who runs up a hill and single handedly destroys a machine gun position. In doing so, he or she saves the lives of the rest of their platoon. It is a heroic act to the rest of that unit, but not to someone who disavows violence in any form. Currently, in our own nation, some people consider Colin Kaepernick a hero. Others completely disagree. It is a matter of perspective. Because of this idea of perspective, I try not to use the word, “heroic.” Instead, I prefer, “courageous.” As a member of our armed forces and now having the opportunity to serve with so many combat veterans, I have witnessed thousands of incredibly courageous acts.
Based on that story, how would you define what a “hero” is? Can you explain?
A courageous person is someone who, despite their fear of the possible, negative consequences of what their actions may be, still perform those actions that they believe to be morally “right”. It doesn’t only occur in the military or in life or death situations either. Every time a “cool” high school student- athlete sits with the “geek” freshman at lunch, he or she is showing incredible courage. Every time a leader or teammate has a tough conversation with a teammate about their poor behavior in an effort to make them (and the team) better, they are showing great courage.
I don’t ever talk to my son or daughter about being a hero. Being a “hero,” is like your reputation, it is what other people think of you based on their perspective. Instead, I challenge him (my daughter is 2 years old) to be courageous. Courage is not about his reputation; it is about his character. Character is not about what other people think of you, it is about who you truly are. Too many are concerned about their reputation (see the explosion of social media) when, in fact, we should be much more concerned with our character.
Based on your military experience, can you share with our readers 5 Leadership or Life Lessons that you learned from your experience”? (Please share a story or example for each.)
See stories above (most interesting story from my military career?) for 1) “Never ask your team to do something that you aren’t willing to do yourself,” and 2) Dealing with the death or sickness of a loved one is hard. The things we do in our day-to-day life are challenging- start to think about them as such. Our thoughts become our words and our words manifest themselves in our actions. By human nature, we want to get through things that are hard, but we ATTACK challenges! Further, this mindset helps promote a positive attitude in each of us. We have to deal with hard things, but we get to attack a challenge. As an example, when you have had the experience of having to tell a mother that her son has died in Iraq, you know that climbing Mt. Everest is just challenging. “Everyone is a hero when it is seventy degrees and sunny.” Unfortunately, that isn’t when you need them. We need great teammates and great team leaders when it’s not! There are countless examples of individuals and teams who are good when things are going well… and really bad when things start to go bad. When things are good, a dog can lead. Leaders must be prepared to show their leadership, their influence, when all heck is breaking loose (or even better, the moment before it does). In those times, despite the adversity, the leader must keep the team focused on mission accomplishment. How? Most often, by effectively communicating and then over- communicating the team’s mission, the plan to accomplish it (if possible, this plan has been created with the help of the team), roles and responsibilities, and then his or her expectations from each member of the team. Stop blaming the “Kids These Days!” Goals are performance based. They reinforce what we want to achieve. Standards are behavior based. They reinforce how we are expected to behave while accomplishing those goals. Failure to reach a goal- reattack it tomorrow. Failure to achieve a standard carries a consequence. Let me say this again, failure to achieve a standard carries a consequence. It isn’t our kids’ fault that they grow up in homes, attend schools, play for coaches, and work for companies that have no true standards (i.e. ones that carry consequences). Every team has goals. World-Class teams have goals and standards. The kids these days are no different than the “kids these days” from every other generation. We, their parents, coaches, teachers and business leaders, are different. Not the kids! And how are we different? We give our kids hundreds of goals and rarely any standards (positive or negative). We make a huge positive deal when our kid scores a goal, but never when they didn’t score a goal, but were incredibly tough instead. That toughness will serve them much better throughout their lives than their scoring a goal, but we don’t reinforce it. We make a bigger deal about scoring a goal than about their toughness or sportsmanship, etc. We all perform best with and within a structure. Not military left foot, right foot structure, but structure; knowing what we are expected to achieve and how we are expected to behave while doing so. It is our jobs as parents, teachers, coaches, and business leaders to provide it! We provide that structure with having goals and standards. Yes, I learned it in the military, but the battlefield doesn’t matter. Individuals can “win games,” but great teams compete for championships- on any battlefield. Great teams are comprised of great team leaders and great teammates. Further, to be great team leaders and great teammates on all the teams of which we are privileged to be a part requires an incredible amount of energy. Exercise produces that energy! That isn’t what The Program believes. That is what science teaches us! Therefore, our more fit self is a better leader and teammate than our less fit version. Thankfully, we control our fitness. Unfortunately, many people choose not to… Let your passion be mission driven and not emotion driven. What is the difference? One deep breath. We have many passions in life and if we are passionate about something, it will produce an emotional response (happy, sad, angry etc.). Those are natural human emotions. We don’t control them. However, how we respond to them we do control, or, at the very least, we should (we appreciate at The Program that some people do suffer from personality and behavioral disorders but are describing the average person here). How do we control them? By taking one deep breath. And during that deep breath, we must think (that is the key word) about how we should respond to this natural human emotion that will best help our team accomplish its mission. The best leaders and teammates do. Others simply respond to that emotion- a CEO is upset at revenue numbers and starts screaming and yelling. A team gives up an easy score and a coach reacts the same. No deep breath. No thought. Just yelling. Be better than this- human emotions are natural, but we don’t yell because we are angry. We are angry and we yell. We aren’t mission driven. We are emotion driven. We could just as easily speak calmly and intelligently when angry… if we are mission driven… if we take one deep breath.
Do you think your experience in the military helped prepare you for business? Can you explain?
I simply can’t imagine anyone saying that the military didn’t help prepare them for anything they did after it! Depending on what you do in the military, you are almost constantly outside of your comfort zone. We only grow as individuals and as a team when we are. Unfortunately, we live in such an affluent society that most of us can go through our life with never getting outside of our comfort zone. Because we are talented, we can still do well while staying safely ensconced in our comfort zone. Many people choose to do so. I just have no interest in doing well. I want to do and, more importantly, be great. And “great,” to me means being the best version of myself- the best husband, the best father, the best leader, the best teammate, the best youth coach- the best man that I can be. To do so, we must be committed to constant self and team improvement. We show that commitment by always operating on the fringes of what we are comfortable doing. The military taught me that and then provided me with an environment to prove my commitment for constant self and team improvement. It instilled that habit in me at a very young age and it has been a constant with me ever since. You don’t need the military to do so, though. You can just commit to being uncomfortable on whatever your chosen battlefield may be. Instead of focusing on winning and losing, stay focused on getting better! There is no true thing in life as “just maintaining.” We are getting better or we are getting worst. Commit to the former.
As you know, some people are scarred for life by their experience in the military. Did you struggle after your deployment was over? What have you done to adjust and thrive in civilian life that others may want to emulate?
I have had the opportunity to speak about my military experiences, specifically the helicopter crash that killed 6 of my teammates, to 40- 50 corporations each year for the past 10 years while delivering a keynote address on “Leadership and Attacking Adversity.” I believe that constantly talking about those experiences has helped me immeasurably. Some veterans (and first responders) have seen much worse than I ever have though and their scars (physical and mental) are much worse than my own. However, although discussing those “scars” can help, I am certainly not a health care professional who is qualified to deal with these issues that some of our veterans are afflicted. I don’t even begin to suggest that just talking about it will cure or address their scars. I just hope they know that my family and I can’t begin to express our thanks for them and their families.
I think that one thing I have always done, but also did help me adjust to civilian life, is that once I make a decision, I commit to making it the right decision. I think a lot of people make a decision and then, when adversity strikes or they experience a setback, they start to think and question if it was the right decision. I don’t have that mindset. I believe that most of the decisions we make in life are neither right nor wrong, they just must be made and then it is up to us to make them “right.”
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We are so excited about our new book, The Program- Lessons from Elite Military Units for Creating and Sustaining High Performance Leaders and Teams. My co-author (and Program Lead Instructor), Jake MacDonald and I have taken all of the lessons we (and the rest of The Program’s Leadership Instructors) have learned as college athletes, military veterans, high- altitude mountaineers, and while working with more than 160 collegiate and professional athletic teams and major corporations annually and presented them to our audience in 7 section book that provides a road map to help any individual or team create and sustain a world-class team in our family, our athletic team, our classroom, or our business.
What advice would you give to other leaders to help their team to thrive?
First, yes, reward great performance, but, more importantly, always remember to reward great behavior even more. High performance ensures short-term success. Great behavior ensures it in the long-term. We need both. Second, stay focused on constant improvement rather than winning or losing. That isn’t to say don’t celebrate big victories or address the defeats, but rather stay focused on (and reward) constant improvement.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
So many people have helped me get to where I am. Starting with my parents, coaches, teachers, Marines, and, most importantly, my wife and kids. However, from a strictly business perspective, Rob Hale, the Founder of Granite Telecommunications, was instrumental in my/our success. He gave me my start with office space and IT support for free and, more importantly, business (and life) advice that has been instrumental to my/our success.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
The greatest business-related compliment I get is when a client calls or emails me/us and tells us that their work with The Program “changed their life.” Through my work, I get to bring goodness to the world. It is just one of the reasons why I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
“The Program” is that movement! The Program, as outlined in our book by the same name is a way of life. It is a commitment to becoming the best teammate and best team leader that we can be, on and for every team that we are privileged to be a part.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
That is so tough for me to do because I love inspirational quotes! Although not my favorite quote, but the one that I believe has been most relevant (along with Teddy Roosevelt’s, “It’s Not The Critic Who Counts,”) would be, “Never make short term financial decisions at the expense of long-term wealth creation. ‘Be long-term greedy’” — Goldman Sachs
At Goldman Sachs, a firm that I worked at shortly after business school and that I still have a very high regard for, long term greedy defines a Goldman Sachs employee’s relationship with clients; always make decisions for the client with the idea of creating long term wealth for them (and in turn for yourself) rather than get-rich-quick practices.
This mindset is powerful for all of us in life and one that I have subscribed to throughout my own. Much has been written about the difference between pleasure and happiness. Author Matthieu Ricard (Huffington Post article entitled “Why Happiness is Not Pleasure”) said that happiness “is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things…pleasure is externally motivated and fleeting, while happiness is internally generated and constant.”
Many people make decisions based on what will give them more pleasure in the moment, they fail to be long-term greedy. I have too, and those decisions are the worst decisions I have ever made and almost destroyed the relationship that I care most about- the one with my wife.
Conversely, the great majority of the decisions I have made, and continue to make, are based on being happy. To be truly happy, to have the “inner fulfillment” that Matthieu Ricard discusses, I must be long-term greedy. As discussed earlier, as one example, exercising is one of the long-term greedy decisions I make. Running a company, being a husband, a father, coaching my kid’s athletic teams, living on a farm and taking care of the animals, a house, landscaping etc. all requires an incredible amount of energy. If I don’t exercise regularly, then after a night when the kids were sick and/or didn’t sleep, an early morning, a full day running The Program followed by coaching a child’s athletic team, I will not have the energy to play with my kids or give to my most important teammate and the Co-Captain of my most important team (my family), my wife. Quality time spent with her (so too, with my children), makes me happy.
Be long-term greedy.
Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Absolutely! That person is called my son (or daughter). Our children don’t choose us as their parents. They just end up with us. And yet, there is no one who we can have a greater, positive impact on than them. I want to try to do so.
Thank you so much for these amazing insights. This was truly uplifting. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/life-and-leadership-lessons-i-learned-in-the-military-i-simply-cant-imagine-anyone-saying-that-bdee76b9247d | ['Authority Magazine'] | 2020-01-08 01:29:33.773000+00:00 | ['Veterans', 'Military'] |
Zero Emission Investing + COVID | Zero Emission Investing + COVID
This is an adapted transcript of a talk from the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Tech Series. A recording can be found here.
We’ve got half an hour together and a lot of ground to cover.
Back in January, I gave a presentation on the arc of climate investing. It was a look back on the pace, the hard lessons learned, and the road ahead.
Things felt really great in at the start of 2020.
In January, EDF got a hundred of us together — investors, company builders, researchers, policymakers, and advocates — focused on how we advance climate investing, especially on early stage technologies.
At the same time, if you turned on the news, you saw that Davos became a climate change conference. With the largest banks and companies of the world trying to out climate each other on the air.
Then, COVID happened. And the world’s attention rightfully shifted. So what has happened since then? What was COVID’s impact on emissions? What was COVID’s impact on clean technology investing? At the earliest stage? At the latest stage?
We’ll dig into that right now. | https://medium.com/@rypan/zero-emission-investing-covid-39022823d374 | ['Ryan Panchadsaram'] | 2020-12-03 16:07:52.789000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Climate', 'Business', 'Investing', 'Venture Capital'] |
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