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Learn How a Robust Digital Campaign Drove Exceptional Results for This Fortune 500 Company | Learn How a Robust Digital Campaign Drove Exceptional Results for This Fortune 500 Company Ideometry Follow Nov 3, 2017 · 4 min read
Thomson Reuters is a Fortune 500 company that enables professionals in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, and media markets to make key decisions based on world-class data.
The Project
Thomson Reuters partnered with Elsen to build the first commercially available software on the Elsen nPlatform — Thomson Reuters QA Point powered by Elsen. Upon completion, the new product was ready for launch with a substantial marketing campaign.
To promote the North American launch, the QA Point team planned to host a webinar featuring experts in the field, as well as internal experts from Thomson Reuters and Elsen. The topic of the webinar centered around how the rise of “quantamental” investing is changing the industry and how QA Point can help non-technical investors work like a quant.
To attract webinar registrations, Thomson Reuters would market to their existing leads and customers through email marketing and other owned channels. Ideometry would complement those efforts by developing and executing on a robust paid digital advertising campaign that would generate registrations and, ultimately, high-quality marketing-qualified leads.
The Solution
We started by optimizing the content and design on Thomson Reuters registration page template to drive sign-ups for the webinar. All of our marketing through paid and owned channels would drive users to that page with the goal of getting them to convert.
We started this project by identifying which channels would be likely to get the best results. Because QA Point is for a niche B2B audience, LinkedIn was an obvious choice for a campaign since it makes it easy to segment by specific industries, job titles, seniorities, skills, etc. Our expertise with the platform allowed us to build highly targeted audiences that gave us the best reach without the risk of dilution.
We also used social and display ad platforms to run sponsored stories, SEM ads, display ads, and retargeting ads. For the SEM campaign, we did extensive keyword research to find the best ones to target based on what we knew our target audience would be searching for. The Display campaign targeted specific niche industry websites, and the retargeting campaigned redirected users who visited the landing page back to the page to convert as the timeline moved closer to the start date of the webinar.
Once we had established the platforms we wanted to use, we created multiple creative concepts and copy/visual variations to create multiple Ad Sets across our chosen platforms. Each Ad Set tested creative variations against different target audiences. This would allow us to see which copy/visuals got the best results for each audience on each platform.
A few days after the campaign launched, we had enough data to start making strategic iterations to our strategy. For example, we noticed that particular LinkedIn ad variations were clear winners, while others were not performing as well. We disabled the low performers and forced the platform to put more of the budget behind the stronger performers. We made similar optimizations to the SEM ads as well, ensuring that only the messaging that resonated with our audiences remained.
With these kinds of strategic adjustments across the campaign ecosystem, we were able to ensure that the budget was always being spent on the highest-value ads and audiences. In this case, our LinkedIn ads and retargeting ads were the most effective in driving conversions. Through our efforts, we boosted the webinar’s lead count by over 60% over what Thomson Reuters would have gotten with just their owned channels. Additionally, the cost per lead was significantly lower than it was on previous campaigns for similar products.
The Thomson Reuters team was extremely pleased with the attendance at the webinar — which was one of their first major marketing tactics they used for QA Point — and plan to make webinars a part of their digital marketing strategy for the product moving forward. Thomson Reuters is already leveraging the strategies and creative concepts we developed for webinars targeted for the European and Asian markets. They plan on applying what we learned from this campaign to future digital campaigns for QA Point. | https://medium.com/ideometry/learn-how-a-robust-digital-campaign-drove-exceptional-results-for-this-fortune-500-company-8e1f1827ce67 | [] | 2017-11-03 19:27:40.938000+00:00 | ['Lead Generation', 'Fintech', 'Marketing', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Introducing dockerized | Introducing dockerized
dockerized is a command-line tool that lets you seamlessly execute commands in a container. You can just prepend any command with dockerized exec to have it run inside your container. It’s especially helpful for keeping your build dependencies in a Dockerfile. Think of it as env but for Docker.
It supports caching of the Docker image and even VSCode Remote Containers! Curious? Jump right ahead to the repo!
Quick Glance
In a nutshell, instead of running a command like this (relying on the user to use the correct version of Node.js and Yarn):
yarn install
you just pass it to dockerized:
dockerized exec yarn install
dockerized will run that command in a container with the correct build tools.
Why you should keep your build dependencies in a Dockerfile?
Easy onboarding — when a new team member joins you want them to be able to contribute as fast as possible. You don’t want them to spend hours/days trying to follow an outdated README file, installing build tools, and setting up their machine. Ideally, they should be able to jump in with a minimal amount of preparation.
Consistency — Works on My Machine but breaks on the CI/CD pipeline? Your local development environment cannot be identical to the CI/CD environment, but it should be as close as possible. If both environments use the same Dockerfile to run the build, you minimize the gap between the two.
Conflicting dependencies — one project requires Java 8 and the other Java 10? Does one project require Node 10 and the other Node 12? Python? True, there is JAVA_HOME and nvm and whatever for Python, but try forgetting to set JAVA_HOME when switching a directory only to find fifteen minutes later that you are not crazy, just forgetful. And while avn can automatically switch Node versions when you cd to another directory, it is yet another tool the developer needs to install. Worse, if they don’t — the risk using the wrong Node version without even knowing.
What I’ve seen people usually do (and have done by myself)?
I’ve seen projects that rely on verbal communication and “folk tales” to have a common understanding of what the build-environment is. That should be obvious why it’s bad.
I’ve seen projects that use a README to document what the build-environment is. That usually ends up with an outdated README file that nobody really follows.
I’ve seen projects that have a huge Dockerfile that contains all the build dependencies for all the projects of the team because “they all run in Jenkins eventually”.
I’ve seen projects that have a proper Dockerfile with the build dependencies, but in a different repository. That’s better, but it is hard to coordinate changes between the two repos (albeit, to be fair, these do not often happen).
And I’ve seen projects that have a proper Dockerfile with the build dependencies, in the same repo! However, these usually also require some “wrapper” script to pass all the flags to Docker — the volumes to map, the environment variables, the network mode, the working directory, etc. Why is that bad? For once, you need to re-write this wrapper for every repository. Secondly, these wrapper scripts tend to hide the CLIs of the tools they are running — instead of running mvn -DskipTests package you need to run make package . And when things break, and you need an interactive shell to figure out what went wrong, I usually resorted to docker run — entrypoint /bin/sh …. (or make shell if I was not lazy).
What do you get with dockerized?
With dockerized you can just do dockerized exec mvn -DskipTests package , or dockerized exec COMMAND with whatever COMMAND you need. Need an interactive shell inside the container? Just run dockerized shell . dockerized takes care of building the container when necessary, mapping volumes, setting the working directory, and more. It does not, however, hide the interface of the tool you are trying to run.
Check it out here and share your feedback in the comments! | https://medium.com/@benzaita/introducing-dockerized-8c31dc5a596a | ['Itamar B'] | 2020-12-13 15:04:04.258000+00:00 | ['Build', 'Docker', 'Continuous Integration', 'Development'] |
Why do you need a cleaning service? | What could be more important than having a tidy, well-organized home? With work, family obligations, and other responsibilities, it’s not always easy to find the time to clean up our homes and give them the thorough cleaning they deserve — not to mention that domestic chores may be demanding and rapidly sap your energy.
Fortunately, you and your family don’t have to do everything yourselves! Nowadays, there are a plethora of organizations that specialize in cleaning services for residential properties, no matter where you live. For the most part, they’re professional, efficient, and affordable. In that vein, here’s a handy guide that outlines some persuasive reasons why you should hire a Cleaners services in North Shore.
A home that is guaranteed to be safe and healthy:
A clean home is always favorable to excellent health, wellbeing, and a productive environment, it goes without saying. Cleaning your floors, carpets, curtains, furniture, and décor items on a regular basis cleans the room and removes dust particles and pollutants from the air, which can cause allergies and respiratory difficulties. As a result, hiring a professional housekeeper to come to your home a few times a week should assist keep your interior safe, healthy, and habitable.
Expertise:
While you might think you know everything there is to know about cleaning, sweeping, and sanitizing surfaces, a professional cleaning service follows industry standards. Whether you’ve just had a monthly neighbourhood get-together or are ready to move out of your home, Locals recommend that residents of North Shore consider specialized companies that specialise in domestic clean-up issues and end-of-tenancy cleaning for residential customers. So, whether you live in Sydney or North Shore, you’ll be able to find trustworthy Cleaning services on the North Shore for your home with a little investigation.
Reliability:
A large number of homeowners have had bad experiences with cleaning services. The main reason for this is that they did not go via a licenced organisation first; this, of course, has a variety of concerns, including theft, deterioration, and even unlawful occupancy. Besides, until you hire the cleaners yourself, there is no way to know how skilled she is. When you engage directly with a cleaning business, on the other hand, you can rest assured that you will be getting a qualified and trustworthy worker inside your home.
At the end of the day, the advantages clearly outnumber the disadvantages. Hiring professional home cleaning services in the North Shore will undoubtedly necessitate a different budget, but it is well worth it. Whether you need someone to clean your house once a week or an expert crew to come in and clean after a remodel, you can count on OZ Need Cleaning for professionalism, dependability, and peace of mind. | https://medium.com/@ozneedcleaningau/why-do-you-need-a-cleaning-service-d5a0c40cbf55 | [] | 2021-11-16 08:17:08.950000+00:00 | ['Cleaning', 'Cleaning Services', 'Cleaning Company', 'Cleaning Tips', 'Cleaners'] |
The Problems of India and what we can do about them. | Not to be downright polarising, but India’s problems are immense and too many to count. From casteism, rape, and corruption to the general mindset of the citizens; India is plagued by confusion amongst the people on the pretext of culture and tradition. It’ll take a lifetime of hard work to undo the inter-connected and subliminal acts that have ruined the reputation of our country.
What I’m here to do is to go back to the root of all these problems, education. By giving you context as to why things are the way they are, and what we as students can do about them, it’ll loosen up the frustration and anger I’m sure many of you have thought of as well.
So, where do we begin?
Let’s start with a couple of statistics on the Indian education system.
According to the World Education Services, “With more than 1.5 million schools and about 260 million students in 2015/16, India has the world’s second-largest school system after China.”
India’s literacy rate is 77%, 96% in Kerala is the highest; 66.4% in Andhra Pradesh is the lowest.
According to the CBSE, 88.74% of students that wrote the class 12 board exam have passed in the year 2020.
“Every year on an average 1.5 million students get their degree in engineering. Due to lack of skill required to perform technical jobs less than 20% get employment in their core domain.”
~ bweducation.businessworld.in
India produces the most engineers in the world, more than the US and China combined. It’s a huge priority of Indians to finish their engineering; it attaches a tag and a sort of societal status. You’ve heard me talk about this almost too many times now. What I’m trying to show you is the priorities of the schools and colleges as well. A lot of the schools reflect parents’ wishes to get their child into their school so they can become an engineer or a doctor and go abroad. It has become a business.
The priorities of 20th century school were to create an individual that is capable of doing routine tasks with a rudimentary skillset in a structured and stereotyped environment with no room for inquiry. It isn’t surprising because schools were replicas of factories when they were constructed. They aimed to create workers for factories.
Horace Mann, from Massachusetts, is considered to be the father of Modern Education. He laid down six principles regarding school, according to Science Trends.
Citizens cannot be both free and ignorant
The public needs to pay for, maintain, and control education
Children from all classes should have the same schooling
Education needs to be nonsecular (meaning not religious)
Education needs to use the principles of a free society
The educators and teachers need to be professionally trained
These principles defined education during the 1800s. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much modernisation since then.
Nowadays, this system can’t work due to the digital revolution and the rise of the internet. Careers aren’t jobs that you do for the rest of your life, now, a career can change throughout your life because we aren’t bound to one occupation anymore.
On that thread of occupation, let us segue into the caste system in India. | https://medium.com/@maheeth/the-problems-of-india-and-what-we-can-do-about-them-8b70b57b6301 | [] | 2020-11-05 14:37:30.775000+00:00 | ['Education', 'India', 'Women', 'Caste Systems', 'Corruption'] |
Alton History — Thick as a Brick. For a small city in Illinois, my home… | For a small city in Illinois, my hometown has seen a lot
Thank you, Mrs. Burt.
My 5th grade teacher worked hard to give her students an appreciation of their hometown’s incredible history.
Unfortunately, being children, we didn’t have the perspective to understand.
When I began reading horror novels, I wondered why the small towns in them seemed so thin.
Except Stephen King’s Derry — and I believe Alton influenced Mr. King. The sections of IT that took place when the characters were children, felt real to me. Especially the observation how the kids lived in a world few adults paid any attention to. The Derry of IT has a rich, complex and dark past, some of it touching on the supernatural, as does Alton.
(Mr. King has been to Alton. What I don’t know is how much about Alton’s history he learned while he was there.)
Alton never had a killer clown, however, to the best of my knowledge.
So, while I didn’t appreciate Mrs. Burt while I was in her fifth grade class at McKinley School, I sure do these days.
She was passionate about the history of Alton.
Therefore, in addition to learning about the great explorers of the New World, and math, reading and everything else (which I don’t remember), we learned about our own small city.
Alton is Close to the Largest Native American Metropolis in North America Above the Rio Grande
The story begins hundreds of years ago, just a little south of Alton, in what is now Cahokia.
The former capital of a major North American Native empire.
The largest city north of Tenochtitlan, base of the Aztecs.
Prior to the arrival of Spanish conquistadores and — most importantly, the horses and smallpox viruses they brought with them — most Native Americans north of the Rio Grande lived east of the Mississippi River. Some lived on the Pacific coast.
But the Great Plains in between?
No, though that is counter to our images of traditional Indians.
The glamorous Great Plains Indian cultures — the Sioux, the Cheyenne and all the others we see in movies — required horses, and horses did not exist in the New World until Spanish explorers brought them.
The Great Plains were covered with long prairie grass, except where the herds of buffalo roamed. In the hundreds of thousands.
Try trekking through grass so high you can’t see five feet in front of you. Try killing a buffalo with just a bow and arrow when you have to chase it on foot.
Try escaping when a hundred thousand-head buffalo herd panics and starts to run TOWARD you.
No, prior to the ability to travel on horseback and the death of millions of Native Americans by smallpox, most Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi.
Hundreds of years before Columbus, the largest urban center was in Cahokia.
This is logical. The Mississippi River never dries up. There’s always fresh water. And, therefore, fish and game. It’s a major North American bird migration path.
The Missouri River joins the Mississippi just south of Alton, giving access to the west. (The Lewis and Clark Expedition used it.)
And the Illinois River dead-ends into the Mississippi just north of Alton, leading to Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.
Years ago, archeologists found evidence for Native American agriculture along the Illinois River, close to Campsville (where my grandfather used to take my family to his cabin so we go with him in his boat and collect pecans). They date back 6,000–7,000 years.
Some miles south, the Ohio River ends at the Mississippi, making the Ohio River a gateway to the east.
And, of course, the Mississippi River itself means access to the north up to Minnesota, south to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico.
While I don’t know of any evidence Native Americans had sea-going vessels, it’s likely they could use canoes to travel and trade with people along the gulf, staying close to land.
Somebody did, because shark’s teeth have been found in Indian remains hundreds of miles inland.
These peoples went through a period Robert Silverberg in his book THE MOUND BUILDERS calls the “cult of death.” And they did build mounds, thousands of them.
That included the Great Mound in Cahokia, the largest such structure in the world. Yes, larger than the pyramid of Giza — and it’s made of dirt.
They raised maize and had every attribute of civilization except, unfortunately, a written language.
At some point, due to climate cooling according to one source I read while researching my novel VIRGIN BLOOD, Cahokia fell, and its people devolved into a more primitive hunting and gathering culture. We now call them the Illini.
The Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase President Thomas Jefferson bought from Napoleon in 1804, set out just south of Alton, around Wood River and Hartford.
Thanks to its location near three major rivers and, a little later, near transnational railroads, Alton became a booming town, economically far more important in the early 19th century than it is now.
When Illinois became a state, Alton was in the running to be the capitol. However, Abraham Lincoln used his influence to make Springfield the capitol, presumably because he lived there.
Mrs. Burt never forgave Lincoln for that.
The Tallest Verifiable Man in History
Alton was the birthplace of the tallest man ever documented: Robert Wadlow.
8 foot, 11.1 inches tall. And he weighed 439 pounds upon his death at age 22. He died because a leg brace irritated his ankle, causing a blister and then an infection.
A few more years and a course of penicillin would probably have killed it.
And when he died he was still growing.
Now that I think about it, I find it odd my mother never talked about Robert Wadlow. She must have known who he was. He was four years older than her, though, so they probably didn’t hang out together.
She did tell me that when I was a baby his father used to look in on me when she took me out for a walk in my carriage.
Miles Davis
Alton is also the birthplace of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. I don’t know whether he grew up there or not. Apparently he began his musical career in East St. Louis, which had much more of a nightlife, and live music scene, than Alton.
Alton even looks historical. Forty years ago, a visitor told me that if you looked at a typical street scene downtown, and raised your eyes so you couldn’t see the automobiles, the street looked like it did in the 1930s. There’ve been some changes, but that’s still true for much of the downtown area.
Two old family friends, who long ago moved away to Florida, commented on how Alton buildings looked so old when they visited the area a few years ago.
IMDb lists 41 movies that have been filmed on location in Alton.
It’s also the site of Season 3 of the show Small Business Revolution.
On the Border of North and South
Alton’s location on the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis put it on the front lines of the greatest divide of the Republic.
The Mississippi River made the importation of slaves up from New Orleans easy and economical, and so slavery existed in Missouri, though not to the extent it did below the Mason-Dixon line. Missouri never had lots of cotton plantations or any of that other antebellum southern stuff.
However, Missouri did have lots of agriculture that needed cheap labor. And the established slave states wanted to extend their political strength.
The free states, and especially the abolitionists, wanted to limit the political power of slavery. The two sides fought constant ongoing battles from the Constitutional Convention to the Civil War.
In 1820, they reached what’s called the Missouri Compromise. Missouri continued to have slaves, but it forbade the importation of new ones, and granted all children born as slaves freedom at the age of 25.
Therefore, historically, the border line between Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800's was much more significant than it is now.
It could mean the difference between slavery and freedom.
Alton became part of the Underground Railroad.
Although Dred Scott is not connected to Alton, he filed his court papers in St. Louis, and his grave is in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.
Elijah P. Lovejoy
I don’t want to make it sound as though Alton was an abolitionist paradise, however. Because it attracted runaway slaves, it also attracted runaway slave catchers. And many of its citizens favored slavery despite living on the eastern side of the Mississippi.
In the 1830's Elijah P. Lovejoy moved to the area to promote the abolitionist movement. He worked for, and founded, newspapers in St. Louis.
While he was in St. Louis, proslavery mobs threw his printing presses into the Mississippi River three times. He then moved to Alton, hoping I guess to meet with a kinder reception in a northern, “free” state.
Once he began operating his fourth printing press, however, the resulting mob killed him before throwing that printing press into the Mississippi River, making him a national martyr of the abolitionist movement. Lincoln mentioned him in a speech.
Lovejoy was buried in Alton Cemetery where he’s now honored by a large monument. The Alton Evening Telegraph has kept a portion of his printing press in the front of their building on Broadway.
He’s also still honored at Colby College in Maine, where he went to school. My nephew graduated from Colby a few years ago, but apparently the other students didn’t care that his grandmother lived in the same town that killed the college idol.
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
In 1858, Republican Abraham Lincoln ran for the office of Senator of Illinois against the incumbent, Stephen Douglas of the Democratic Party.
They held a series of debates throughout Illinois, the last one in Alton.
The chief subject of these debates was slavery. Lincoln said the Declaration of Independence applied to African-Americans as well as to whites, and Douglas accused him of being an abolitionist.
Fortunately, Lincoln lost the election. I say fortunately because if in 1860 he’d been a sitting senator, perhaps he would not have run for President. Although he wouldn’t have been the last Illinois Senator to run for, and win, the presidency after serving only two years as a senator for Illinois.
Lincoln published the text of the debates, and they were widely read throughout the country. They helped him become the 1860 Republican presidential candidate.
When I was growing up in Alton, the site of that debate near the riverfront was marked, but lost admidst a sea of parking meters.
As part of the deal to allow the Alton Belle casino riverboat, the Belle owners came up with the money to better mark the debate site.
The Civil War
When the Civil War broke out, Alton, as part of the free state of Illinois, of course fought with the Union.
The state penitentiary in Alton was converted into a prison for captured Confederate soldiers. It rapidly became horribly overcrowded.
Some of the stones of this prison still exist in a back parking lot of a downtown building. When I was growing up, I don’t remember them being marked at all. They looked like just some random, leftover rubble — as though Alton had been rebuilt after World War II.
There was a smallpox epidemic from 1863 to 1864, and many Confederate POWs died there. Because of the diseases and inhumane conditions, many of the men were taken out to Sunflower Island in the middle of the river.
There’s a Confederate Cemetery and Confederate Monument in North Alton on Rozier Street. I’ve heard they are the only such cemetery and monument in “Union” territory.
Up to My Childhood
Through my childhood, I’d characterize general African-American living conditions in Alton as semi-Southern.
It was NOT legally segregated as were the southern states.
However, housing was pretty much segregated by economic status and custom, and elementary school attendance followed from that.
However, that could be changed. My first day of First Grade, I was sent to the local black school, Rufus Easton. After that, I went to McKinley, which was slightly — though not much — farther away. My sister spent at least one full year at Rufus Easton, though she also later attended McKinley.
There were only four junior highs, with attendance again determined by geography, but their areas were large enough that three of the four (East, Central and West) had many African-American students. North didn’t have as many, because it was mainly kids from the suburbs. I’m not sure where the lines were drawn because, come to think of it, at West Junior many of my fellow classmates also came from subdivisions.
There was only one public high school, so everybody went there unless your parents paid to send you to the private Catholic high school or to a private school in St. Louis.
During my high school years, racial tensions ran high, and there was some kind of fight/near riot or something every year in the spring and/or fall. (Winter cooled things down.)
I have vivid memories of standing around on the steps overlooking The Pit (the central parking lot) while crowds of black and white students confronted each other. When fists began flying, the police sirens sounded, the cops were right there, and threw everybody involved into a van and whisked them away.
As Bruce Springsteen sings in My Home Town, “There was nothing you could do.”
The other notable memory of this came one night following a demonstration by African-Americans, some of whom burned down Haskell House, the building holding the Alton School District offices.
Somebody declared some kind of curfew or emergency. My girlfriend lived in Florissant Missouri, which is across the river in St. Louis County, and we did something that night.
When I returned to Alton with friends, we found police cars blocking every intersection along the Beltline leading into Alton proper. I wound up sleeping at a friend’s house in Godfrey, wondering if Alton were burning down.
Nothing did happen. I had other friends who, I later learned, drove around town with no problems, but it was scary that night to be unable to drive home, blocked by police cars.
Wegener’s Robbed
In 1959, my mother told me Wegener’s Grocery Store was robbed the night before.
Wegener’s was a Tom Boy chain store at the corner of 9th Street and Alby. We didn’t shop there because Haymer’s Tom Boy was much closer to our house.
However, the owners’ grandchildren lived right across the street from us. Their father worked at his parents’ store.
Years later, I read in a book how the robber tied up the grandparents of my friends. He fled when Patrolman John Light (who eventually became Chief of Police in Alton) chased him all the way north up Alby Street to the Beltline.
That must have been a terrific car chase, and would make a good movie scene. Alton is very hilly, so Alby Street has a lot of rises and dips.
But Light did catch him. The robber was also convicted of robbing two grocery stores in St. Louis, so he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
In 1967, however, he escaped. Following that, he traveled around a lot, including to Mexico. There, he tried to set himself up as pornography tycoon. When that didn’t work out, he returned to the United States. In Los Angeles, he spent a lot of time volunteering for George Wallace’s presidential campaign.
On April 2, he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee.
On April 4, he shot Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
At least, he confessed to the crime when facing the death penalty, which he could have received if he’d been convicted by a jury.
Later, he claimed he was a dupe and he didn’t pull the trigger.
Like all the 1960's high-profile assassinations, the death of Dr. Martin Luther King generated a lot of controversy and conspiracy theories.
I don’t know. But it is a fact James Earl Ray was born in Alton — in a small frame house on 9th Street hill, just around the corner from Wegener’s.
I don’t recall hearing this myself, but supposedly the principal of West Junior, to avert problems after the news of Dr. King’s death, got on the PA system and told students the assassination had nothing to do with Alton.
West Junior is on State Street, about seven or eight blocks from the house where James Earl Ray was born.
You can join my email list by going here.
Originally published at http://www.richardstooker.com on October 16, 2019. | https://richardstooker.medium.com/alton-history-thick-as-a-brick-8268a961a9fd | ['Richard Stooker'] | 2019-05-19 16:31:01.013000+00:00 | ['History', 'Racial Justice', 'Culture', 'Civil War', 'Politics'] |
china as a society, hangzhou (where i went), also polynesia | rustling papers, clearing throat..
Ok, ok.
Well, Shanghai is over. It passed pretty quickly, like most places do, even though it was actually quick since I was only there a week. It was very hot, so I won’t miss it, except Guangzhou seems hotter so maybe I will.
I was wondering what it was about China that seemed a little “off” to me, not that anywhere is more intrinsically off than any other place, but I had a tickling sensation at the back of my brain nonetheless and wanted to figure out where it came from and I think I finally got it.
Here’s what I’m thinking: everything in China is meant to be Very Big and to appeal to/be utilized by as many people as possible. This is both literal and metaphorical. Even the smallest (new) restaurants are gigantic affairs with maybe 50 tables, and a lot of them have more than one floor. Part of this seems to do with how one is supposed to eat in China, i.e. not alone like a loser who looks like he has no friends, but in me it tends to provoke a sense of agoraphobia (from the Greek agora). This isn’t always the case, and there’s lots of littler family run restaurants it looks like aren’t that big, but I’m not sure that in 21st century China those aren’t the exception rather than the norm.
What this means in praxis is that it’s often hard for me to feel like I’m not being moved through some highly efficient but soulless mechanism. I feel like this in restaurants, in subways, high-speed trains. Kinda everywhere. Everything in China is designed to get people through a pipeline and doing what they need (ostensibly) to be doing as quickly as possible, and the result is a distinct lack of individualism vis a vis the feeling one gets being in public. I would say that this is just a difference in the collectivist versus individualist mindset, but I don’t feel the same way when I’m in Japan. I think the focus there is on individual /communities/, rather than individual individuals. In Tokyo, you can always find some hidden bar where a certain group of locals hang out, or some other hyper-local hyper-nuanced event that you have a chance of just wandering into. The same is true in New York. In China, that’s not the case. I really haven’t accidentally wandered into anything, so efficient is the system. Now, that’s not to say that China doesn’t have anything equivalent to what I experienced in Japan, but I do think the fact that I can’t seem to find it does say something.
Also, apparently Chinese aren’t happy either. I was browsing the World Happiness Index for fun, and according to their findings Chinese people are not happy at all. Not only do they rank behind Russia (which is perpetually miserable), but overall it seems like the people in China are less happy than in LIBYA. That is, the Libya we talk about when we refer to “The Libyan Crisis”, war-torn Libya, controlled by ISIS Libya. That’s kind of crazy, and while I don’t think any study should be taken at face value it’s another indicator of the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Maybe it’s growing pains. China came up fast and it’s still coming. I can’t say I understand it anyway, who’s only been here for less than a year total. But I do find it very interesting.
Mmk.
I went to an exhibit in the Shanghai… Museum, I think it was just the Shanghai Museum, no bells or whistles. The one was about porcelain in one or another specific Chinese dynasties, except the catch was that this was some sort of dark period (warring states?) where up until now they hadn’t been able to pinpoint a lot of information on the specifics, but now they have so it’s a reason to be excited. To be honest, out of all the arts pottery is perhaps the one that’s least exciting to me, so I can’t say I was super stoked, but I understand that this is important to someone, maybe to cultural narrative, almost certainly to cultural narrative. We all want to believe we come from somewhere and are going somewhere. This is just a way to help.
The other exhibit had to do with the crafts of… island nations, Oceania. Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Now this was a good one because it raised a lot of questions, or maybe just made a lot of statements. To me, it was all about bridges. The bridge between land and water, the extension of one’s animus and intention into their environment and physical world, the connection between the life we can see and the life we cannot see. All the clubs looked like animal heads or phalluses. It made me think of power or some invisible force flowing down the arm of the wielder and dispersing out through the club into the world. Here’s a line I really, really loved about manna:
Bonito is the receptable in which supernatural spirits manifest to the living… they contain mana… the spiritual power men seek to make their actions more effective in the world of the living.
A spiritual power to make your actions more effective in the land of the living! How poignant. It’s wonderful. What an ephemeral transfer. Very powerful. How are we bound to the world around us and how do our tools reflect this? That’s what I was thinking of.
I also went to Hangzhou. It feels like I have these incredibly full days that sneak up on me without warning (I don’t think this day will be one since it’s almost 1 pm and I’m still sitting here typing). But I went to Hangzhou at 9, climbed a mountain, climbed down another mountain, visited the big lake, biked through the city to lunch, biked through the city again later, went on a boat to the big lake, ate some crab kebab that wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, napped in a cafe. Honestly I found the city quite beautiful, very green and wide, like Washington D.C. except Washington D.C. sucks and Hangzhou doesn’t. There were lots of /things that happened/ that day, at least, that made me feel as if I’d gotten my time’s worth, which is an illusion I’m content to extend. Then later I went to Haidilao, which is always nice.
Hm, what else…
Well, there’s always something “what else”. | https://medium.com/@schuylerdevos/off-d6b484ec8f5e | ['Schuyler Devos'] | 2019-07-10 04:47:59.907000+00:00 | ['Shanghai', 'Kebab', 'China', 'Hangzhou', 'Sociology'] |
Exploring a Different Kind of Calculus | Exploring a Different Kind of Calculus
Since Leibniz and Newton developed Calculus, the scientific world and all its disciplines have not been the same.
From physics and engineering to biology and mathematics, calculus permeates through the modern sciences as an indispensable tool in the search for truth and inventions.
However, there are different ways of looking at it. From a physical and practical view, it has to do with the concept of rate of change and that leads to applicability in physics through laws written down in the form of differential equations.
From a purely mathematical perspective, we have several ways of looking at it. The act of differentiating a function can be seen as a transformation from one space of functions to another. I won’t go into detail about function spaces and what the word “space” is covering, but it suffices to say that a set of functions displays some of the same properties as a space of vectors with an underlying field e.g. ℝ.
This transformation is a certain kind of mapping d/dx with the following two important properties
These properties together are called linearity.
In analogy, the real function f(x) = kx where k is some real number also satisfies the linearity conditions above in the sense that
It also bears an analogy to linear transformations in the subject of linear algebra where the objects of study are linear transformations between vector spaces e.g. matrices. And matrices satisfy the linearity conditions as well.
The first property is a very important one and what this is intuitively saying is that it preserves the structure of a function space with respect to the operation of addition.
So this is like a dictionary between two worlds. Translating additive structure from one world to the other. This kind of function is called a homomorphism.
What we will do in this article is defining another kind of operator. A transformation between function spaces that instead of resembling the linear function above, resembles the logarithm.
We shall also derive the various rules analogous to the differential operator defined above such as the product rule, chain rule, etc. It turns out that our operator also displays homomorphic behavior but from a multiplicative function space to an additive one.
The operator that I am talking about is called the logarithmic derivative and is defined by the following
Let’s state some of the nice properties that this operator has before using it.
A natural question is what it does to constants. But as is easily shown,
Since it inherits that from the normal differential operator.
The most important property is that it takes products to sums and divisions to subtractions.
Which you can show using the definition and the usual rules of differentiation.
When a constant is multiplied on a function, the constant vanishes when we logarithmically differentiate it.
This also means that we can change the order of subtraction between functions in the operator argument i.e.
Let’s now state the chain rule for this operator.
The derivation of this is quite simple.
It is quite nice how well it resembles the chain rule for the differential operator. We also have the power rule:
In particular, we have the following two useful formulas
At this point, you might be wondering what the eigen functions of this operator are.
Of course, for the normal differential operator, it is the scaled (natural) exponential function in the sense that
but for the logarithmic derivative, it turns out that
for all constants c, making these functions eigen elements in the function space we defined the operator on.
Now that we have some rules of the logarithmic derivative in our toolbox let’s use them.
Let’s first find the logarithmic derivative of the sine function. Using the definition, we quickly obtain
You might remember that the sine function can be written as an infinite product.
Now, using the above rules we can transform the infinite product into a series by taking the logarithmic derivative on both sides.
We get,
We have used several of the rules defined above. The power rule, the product to sum, commuting subtraction, vanishing constant, and the chain rule, respectively.
Technically, we need an argument to be sure that the product to sum rule holds on the infinite product. It turns out that the following is enough.
I will state it first and then explain it after.
The factors inside the product need to be holomorphic (i.e. analytic) on an open subset D of the complex plane
None of the factors is identically zero on D
The product converges locally uniformly to a function f
If these conditions are true, then the corresponding series that we get by taking the logarithmic derivative on both sides converges locally uniformly on the following set
The backslash here means set-difference.
This was a little technical. What does it mean?
First of all, that a complex function is holomorphic means that it is “complex differentiable". That turns out to be a stronger requirement than real differentiation and in fact, if a complex function is differentiable then it is differentiable infinitely many times which means that it is analytic (i.e. it has a power series expansion). This is not true for real functions in general!
That the factors are not identically zero on D simply means that it does not map an open set to zero.
It turns out that for a holomorphic function, if it is zero on any open subset, of an open connected set D ⊆ ℂ on which the function is defined, then it is zero everywhere on D! That is no matter how small the subset of D is. This is not true for real functions.
So informally speaking, a holomorphic function has global information in an arbitrarily small subset of it’s domain.
The Identity Theorem above is extremely important and is used in the proof of the fact that some analytic functions have an analytic continuation.
The locally uniform convergence is a more technical requirement so I will not write it out in full detail but it suffices to say that it is a weaker requirement than uniform convergence but a stronger requirement than pointwise convergence, thus if the product converges uniformly, then it converges locally uniformly.
I’ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader.
If we get back to the resulting series, it would be quite nice if we hadn’t that π lying around in the denominator, but a substitution and a multiplication reveals this identity in a more famous form, namely
Leonhard Euler was the first to find this series. He also used the infinite product representation of the sine function. You can read more about Euler’s beautiful discoveries here.
The logarithmic derivative operator is being used extensively in complex analysis and analytic number theory and is a very important tool in the study of The Riemann Zeta Function. It is also used together with contour integration to calculate the number of zeros and poles of meromorphic functions in closed contours.
Using our rules for this operator, we can find a lot of other series from infinite products.
How about you give it a try? | https://www.cantorsparadise.com/exploring-a-different-kind-of-calculus-23204e02d545 | ['Kasper Müller'] | 2020-12-21 06:00:55.541000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Engineering', 'Physics', 'Mathematics', 'Science'] |
Priming CMSampleBuffer containing AAC-encoded data using Apple’s Core Media API | Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time on a side project that focuses on converting real-time data obtained from AVCaptureSession into H.264 and AAC streams and saving them to an .mp4 file. While AVFoundation offers developers a pretty straightforward way of converting CMSampleBuffer into the desired format by means of AVAssetWriterInput and relevant output settings, I was unable to use that API because my use case required me to have direct access to converted raw bytes before they got appended to the target file.
In my case, I needed to utilize VTCompressionSession and AudioConverter in order to encode the data and then pass the resulting CMSampleBuffers to AVAssetWriter. I’m not going to get into the details of compression here; if you’re interested in learning more about it, you can have a look at the awesome open-source library, HaishinKit, and check out the source code there:
What I’d like to focus on is encoder delay and priming, a mechanism responsible for the correct decoding of audio samples. Here’s a link to Apple documentation describing the mechanism in detail:
Long story short, in order to begin writing CMSampleBuffers containing data encoded as AAC using AVAssetWriter, you need to attach priming information to the first sample buffer(s). This can be done by setting the kCMSampleBufferAttackmentKEy_TrimDurationAtStart attachment with the help of the following Core Media function:
The conventional priming duration for ACC is 2112/44.100 sec, while the duration of one sample I was getting from the AVConverter was 1024/44.100 sec. Based on the tribal knowledge available on StackOverflow and the likes, I was led to conclude that the priming info should be spread across the initial samples so that it did not span longer than the duration information in the PTS (presentation time stamp) of each CMSampleBuffer. So, the first sample buffer was supposed to get 1024/44.100 trim duration, followed by the second buffer with 1024/44.100 and third with 64/44.100 trim or just the second with 1088/44.100 (depending on sources).
It all seemed great until I’ve tried reading the resulting .mp4 file back using AVAssetReader. What turned out was that the first packet of the first sample buffer that had been successfully appended using AVWriterInput, or so it seemed, was missing! At first I thought, it simply did not get appended but then I managed to read it back from the file using ffmpeg on my Mac. I can’t really say how much time I’ve spent trying to debug this issue and what weird ideas and workarounds I’ve come up with when trying to fix it, but I was losing my mind and hope at the same time…
Me, having tried everything imaginable
Eventually, I did find the culprit and it’s kind of dumb in hindsight.
The reason why the first packet of the first buffer was missing when reading the data using AVAssetReader was that the trim duration attached to the first audio buffer was the same length or longer than the first sample and the reader just skipped it completely because it thought it was not supposed to be played back (which makes total sense at the time of writing this post). So instead of spreading the priming duration across multiple buffers, what I had to do was to lengthen the duration of the first buffer by the duration of the priming. I ended up writing the following function:
Once I’ve saved the first buffer primed using this function, everything worked like a charm: I was reading back data as it was written and there was no desynchronization between video and audio playback. Great success!
Borat approves!
My purpose in writing this post is that it’ll save the time and sanity of at least one poor soul that has a similar use case and problem to mine. Hi pal! Hope I helped you, please leave a like.
DISCLAIMER: I’m far from being a certified audio conversion wizard, so please forgive me if I mixed anything up due to my ignorance. Cheers! | https://medium.com/fandom-engineering/priming-cmsamplebuffer-containing-aac-encoded-data-using-apples-core-media-api-c5b2bf0e62a1 | ['Grzegorz Aperliński'] | 2020-06-16 14:53:26.472000+00:00 | ['Avfoundation', 'Core Media', 'Encoding', 'Swift Programming'] |
A new framework for consumer marketplace strategy | Today, many businesses monitor their customers’ Lifetime Value (LTV), or the total revenue expected from an average customer over their lifetime. In an ideal world, we all want a chart like this:
a.k.a. The Cohort Curves VC Dreams Are Made Of
But how?
About two years ago, I sat down to consider this for my business. I was a product manager at consumer peer-to-peer marketplace Rover, which connects pet parents with providers for services like dog walking and boarding.
I searched online for guidance on marketplace LTV optimization and user retention. The Airbnbs and Ubers of the world had been around for much longer and surely had figured this out, right?
The more I dug in, the more I understood that those marketplaces are quite different from Rover. Many user retention best practices were an ill fit, like trying to slam a square-shaped peg into a circular hole. I realized that companies like Upwork and Care.com had more in common with our model, and began to separate consumer marketplaces into two distinct categories. Depending on which category a business fits into, there can be significantly different dynamics for user retention and acquisition.
I couldn’t find this described anywhere, so I’m sharing it now. The great thing about the marketplace ecosystem is there is so much more left to build; so much value still to be captured. Hopefully, a future product manager or business owner scratching their head about how to best serve their customers finds this useful!
The Framework: Short-Term vs Long-Term Relationships (STR vs LTR)
In a short-term relationship (STR) marketplace, transactions occur over a very short time period, and demand/supply don’t build lasting relationships. In long-term relationship (LTR) marketplaces, as you may guess, the opposite happens: demand and supply typically form longer-lasting, ongoing service relationships.
This simple difference overhauls business dynamics.
Differences in how demand and supply find each other. In STR marketplaces, the demand side heavily relies on the marketplace in order to source and choose the supply. In LTR marketplaces, there are many more opportunities for off-platform discovery: through social media, word of mouth, or even in in-person interactions.
When I was planning a Paris vacation a couple of months ago, I started my accommodation search directly on Airbnb. When I need to get across town, I open the Uber app. But many Gumroad and Patreon customers discover products after becoming an avid Twitter or Instagram follower of a creator. Many Rover sitters have a mix of clients sourced from Rover and via personal referrals, friends, or even meeting at a dog park.
Differences in brand association. In STR marketplaces, the customer is more likely to associate the service with the company’s brand than the provider. I’ll say to my friend, “I’m taking a Lyft”, not “John is giving me a ride right now.” In LTR marketplaces, the opposite happens: the customer associates the service with the provider. I’m a Rover sitter, and once I asked an owner how they feel about Rover. “You’re amazing — Yoshi has a great time with you,” they said. They conflated the company’s brand with me, the provider.
Differences in what high-value customers care about. In STR marketplaces, liquidity and diversity of services are key, and high-Lifetime-Value customers are relatively agnostic to service provider identities themselves. In LTR marketplaces, high-LTV customers primarily care about maintaining relationships with their preferred providers.
This is the most critical distinction to understand in order to create a compelling LTV strategy.
STR marketplaces should focus on meeting customer needs in many diverse circumstances. Doordash wants to be able to serve me when I need a quick work lunch in the middle of downtown, as well as a midnight snack out in the suburbs. Amazon wants to be my one-stop-shop not just for a kitchen table today, but also my toothpaste next week.
Meanwhile, LTR marketplaces should focus on creating value for the supply.
In an LTR marketplace, if a supplier wants to take business off-platform, the customer generally follows. Customers may have some brand loyalty to the marketplace, but generally, they care about maintaining a relationship with a supplier.
Once the relationship between demand and supply is established, long-term relationship marketplaces must convince suppliers to keep repeat business on the marketplace, and keep giving a cut of the transaction, rather than preferring Venmo or personal billing.
Put differently:
To optimize user retention (and thus LTV), long-term relationship marketplaces should prioritize features providing value to suppliers.
That makes sense. But how do I do that?
For long-term relationship marketplaces, I believe there are just two simple steps:
Step one: Build a meaningful relationship with your suppliers. User relationship building is key to any business. But it’s especially crucial for LTR marketplaces to build this with their supply base, given their business dynamics.
Make suppliers partners in your company’s success. Airbnb maintains a vast Host community network. Gumroad hosts creator dinners, where the CEO and other team members meet platform superusers and solicit their feedback. Other companies create superuser advisor panels.
One of my favorite online community forums is Spotify’s; they do a great job of collecting feedback, sourcing feature requests, and generally helping their users feel heard and valued. There are so many ways to create ongoing, bidirectional communication channels with users.
Step two: Build tools to help suppliers manage their business. Your marketplace connects demand to supply, which is extremely useful — congrats! It also likely already has a built-in capability to collect and track payments. What else does your platform do to make business management easier?
Now that you’ve set up a feedback mechanism with your users (refer to step #1!), you hopefully have a good idea of what problems bug your suppliers.
Maybe some suppliers use your marketplace less than others, and want more flexibility with fees: customize fee models to fit a more diverse supplier set. Perhaps creators want more engagement avenues with their audience: build interactive tools like creator/audience forums, creator update feeds in-product, or audience → creator feedback mechanisms. Maybe they want more ways to make money: diversify products and services available on your platform.
One example is Upwork’s Work Diary. For hourly projects, the Work Diary allows freelancers to continuously record the work they’re doing, and offers the ability to automatically take screenshots of the work so that the freelancer can, without a doubt, show clients they are hard at work.
Rover offers the ability for providers to track walk routes in real-time, record the number of times a pet peed or pooped, and easily send photos. Gumroad and Patreon offer creators the ability to customize product promotions, and analytics tools that enable simple business performance tracking.
Many marketplaces enable tipping. This is a creative technique because suppliers may be uncomfortable to ask for tips themselves, but are happy for the marketplace to ask on their behalf.
What does your marketplace do for suppliers that they can’t easily do themselves?
How do I know I’m doing the right thing?
Plugging a feature in and then seeing revenue increase over time may seem like a formulaic process, but business stewardship is more an art than a science, and dependent on your organization’s culture.
Apple doesn’t test its features broadly before widespread launch; their product development processes emphasize developing taste and user empathy. Google A/B tests everything, down to the shade of blue for search result hyperlinks. Both companies build great products!
At Gumroad, CEO Sahil Lavingia says, “We keep things simple.” In order to determine if they are building in the right direction, they measure just one thing: how many creators are making how much money?
“Basically we empower creators to earn more money. Everything else we do is second to that. So that’s the big thing we track,” he said.
I’m inclined to skew towards an A/B-testing heavy strategy, and to believe that if something is good for users — even the smallest of features — I should be able to observe a measured change, and ideally, tie it to business revenue. It’s difficult to tie incremental initiatives to a high-level metric like customer LTV — but it’s possible. You can adopt practices like building multi-step, explicit hypotheses; stating fail/success paths prior to development; and tracking lower-level metrics like feature engagement and user sentiment (refer back to “Build a meaningful relationship with your suppliers” above!) to enable quick feedback loops.
Compared to supplier retention initiatives, almost any project will be easier to tie incremental revenue to: conversion rate optimization, expanding services, demand-side UX improvements. Still, just because something is easier to measure doesn’t mean it’s the right choice. For LTR marketplaces, prioritizing supplier retention is critical for long-term success.
Putting it all together
Consumer retention for any company is a tricky beast, and two-sided consumer marketplaces are especially unique. To date, best practices have been discussed broadly, but it’s now clear that business dynamics are distinct depending on whether platforms cultivate short-term supply/demand relationships (STR) vs long-term relationships (LTR).
Understanding which category your marketplace falls into can help you determine whether to focus on liquidity and diversity of services offered (the STR strategy) or to create value for the supply side of your marketplace (the LTR way). Of course, in the lifetime of your business, you’ll probably invest in both! But this may be a helpful framework when stack-ranking various roadmap options.
Building value for suppliers is an iterative two-step process: form a robust relationship with your users; then, build tools to help them manage their business.
There is no one “right” way to measure success. The important thing is your organization has a philosophy that makes sense. Finally, just because an initiative’s impact is easy to measure, doesn’t mean it’s the right initiative to implement. Important things can be hard (but still critical) to measure.
Anything I missed? How do you tackle these problems for your business?
Thanks to Naoko Takeda and Lina Colucci for providing feedback on this post. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-new-framework-for-consumer-marketplace-strategy-5a8bab86e52 | ['Priya Garg'] | 2020-05-30 18:21:30.777000+00:00 | ['Marketplaces', 'Ltv', 'User Experience', 'Product Management', 'User Retention'] |
Variable Validation in Terraform | Introduction:
In this post we will deep dive into custom validation rules for input variables in terraform as well explained in official documentation.
For example, we have declared a variable in variable.tf file as :
variable "ami_id" {
type = string
description = " The id of machine image (AMI) to use for the server."
}
Now we add a validation rule to this variable block:
variable "ami_id" {
type = string
description = " The id of machine image (AMI) to use for the server."
validation {
condition = length(var.ami_id) > 4 && substr(var.ami_id, 0, 4) == "ami-"
error_message = "The ami_id value must be a valid AMI id, starting with \"ami-\"."
}
}
Next, we’ll use can function to validate below:
Boolean variables
variable "boolean_variable" {
type = bool
description = "Example to validate a boolean variable."
validation {
condition = can(regex("^([t][r][u][e]|[f][a][l][s][e])$",var.boolean_variable))
error = "The boolean_variable must be either true or false."
}
}
valid inputs : true || false
invalid inputs: tru, no, 0, 1, yes
IP address
variable "ip_address" {
type = string
description = "Example to validate IP address."
validation {
condition = can(regex("^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)$",var.ip_address))
error_message = "Invalid IP address provided."
}
}
valid inputs : “10.10.60.181”
invalid inputs : “10.0.1.” , “10.40.0.256” , “10.0.10,180”
List of IP addresses
variable "ip_address_list" {
type = string
description = "Example to validate list of IP addresses."
validation {
condition = can([for ip in var.ip_address_list: regex("^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)$", ip)])
error_message = "Incorrect IP."
}
}
valid inputs : [“10.40.0.16”, “10.60.0.17”, “10.50.0.18”]
invalid inputs: [“10.40.0.256”, “10.60.017”, “10.50,0.18”]
Note: Validation error message must be at least one full English sentence starting with an uppercase letter and ending with a period or question mark.
You can validate your regex here .
Thank you! | https://medium.com/@ishusinghkanwar/variable-validation-in-terraform-a9c887d987ff | ['Ishu Singh'] | 2020-12-14 17:33:47.047000+00:00 | ['Regex', 'Cloud Computing', 'AWS', 'Iaac', 'Terraform'] |
An intro to Staking Derivatives I | Staking derivatives by domain
The economic risk associated with staking has a multi-dimensional form. Depending on the particular interaction with the cryptonetwork, the stakeholder could incur different losses.
The following is a list of instruments in relation to each domain:
Security and Operability: instruments protecting from attacks and from losses due to network malfunctioning
instruments protecting from attacks and from losses due to network malfunctioning Economics: instruments preventing pure economic losses
instruments preventing pure economic losses Governance: instruments preventing losses from cryptonetwork mismanagement
instruments preventing losses from cryptonetwork mismanagement Network peculiarities: instrument protecting different kinds of losses, such as the right to perform a work for the network or to vote or participate in any kind of activity, peculiar to a network
Let’s now dive in each segment.
Staking derivatives by domain
Security and Operability
In a PoS cryptonetwork, security is possibly the most important property to achieve in order for the protocol to survive. This segment can be split into:
Liveness: Derivative products protecting token holders from a failure of the network, acting as an insurance for an attack to the blockchain. One could think of them as a life insurance for your tokens.
We refer to liveness as:
Availability
Consistency
Two important points to mention:
The distinction between liveness at network level and at individual node validator level. The latter being relatively insignificant in the context of network performance In terms of network design, there is often a decision on what to prioritize in case of network partition (availability vs consistency). Insurance products would therefore be one-sided as the network pre-determines how it will behave in adversarial situations
Operability: Emergency products issued by foundations to attract new validators when live nodes drop below a predefined threshold.
This would act as an additional stimulus to the dynamic inflation mechanism currently enforced by cryptonetworks like Cosmos or Ethereum 2.0.
These products could be a quicker, more effective tool in comparison to a change in the incentive structure (i.e. inflation). This is especially true since many of those decisions are currently made through elaborate off-chain governance processes.
A suitable and helpful parallel with traditional finance would be a quantitative easing policy.
For example, a government executing quantitative easing would translate into an on-chain crypto derivative issued by a foundation or by an emergency DAO.
This newly issued derivative would be more effective than a structural policy aimed to stimulate the economy from the ground up. In fact, the latter would produce tangible results only after years, if not decades. Alternatively, our instrument would produce immediate effects.
In conclusion, the line between security and operability is extremely thin and blurred. If a cryptonetwork security is threatened, its operability would be indistinguishably compromised.
Let’s revisit the parallels between a cryptonetwork and a city or state. A breach in its high-level security (e.g. a coup d’Etat or an enemy invasion) would also affect its operability (e.g. the public transportation would stop working). But on the other hand there is also a non-zero chance that the subway system in a city stops working without the state being attacked. Back to our PoS derivatives realm, the family of “operability derivatives” would address the single risk of operational failure. Either in a form of insurance (binary options) or in the form of futures or swaps, where the value of the product increases (or decreases) based on the likelihood of the failure occurrence.
The work on frontrunning (manipulating order of transaction on a decentralized exchanges) by Phil Daian is extremely inspirational. Frontrunning is an operability risk that could incur in losses. However, it would be very challenging today to create a product protecting these kinds of risks. Even more challenging would probably be collecting the data and prove that a certain behaviour has actually occurred and caused (you) economic losses.
Plausible example: A derivative product on Polkadot, issued by an emergency-DAO, offering X times higher validation staking returns (for a short, limited period) until the restoration of a minimum set of validators is completed (liveness).
Economics
Similarly to PoW mechanisms, PoS protocols are designed to incentivize miners (validators) to provide valuable resources to the network (such as security, block validation, storage) in exchange of staking rewards coming from newly minted tokens.
Staking rewards are doled out to validators in proportion to the amount of tokens staked in the network. Since PoS leads to some predictability of rewards, the affiliation with a traditional cash flow bearing instrument then becomes extremely intuitive.
Naturally, this is the area where one could foresee the vast majority of staking derivatives flourish.
A non-comprehensive list of those instruments includes:
Reward linked products: this is possibly the most popular. Those instruments would track exposures to staking rewards rate, fees, commission rates and validators uptime. We are not far away from having products hedging against a validator’s commission rate change in Cosmos, for example. A comprehensive list of risk/reward factors in the Cosmos network can be found here.
this is possibly the most popular. Those instruments would track exposures to staking rewards rate, fees, commission rates and validators uptime. We are not far away from having products hedging against a validator’s commission rate change in Cosmos, for example. A comprehensive list of risk/reward factors in the Cosmos network can be found here. Risk linked products: those instruments would offer insurance against economic losses resulting from slashing, unbonding or downtime. Taking Cosmos again as an example, one can imagine a derivative product providing protection against a validator being “jailed” or against a revision of its “minimum self-delegation”. However, during early conversations some doubts arose: this kind of protection could result in a net negative for network security. Validators could insure themselves against slashing and therefore be less incentivized to spend additional resources on securing themselves.
those instruments would offer insurance against economic losses resulting from slashing, unbonding or downtime. Taking Cosmos again as an example, one can imagine a derivative product providing protection against a validator being “jailed” or against a revision of its “minimum self-delegation”. However, during early conversations some doubts arose: this kind of protection could result in a net negative for network security. Validators could insure themselves against slashing and therefore be less incentivized to spend additional resources on securing themselves. Liquidity linked products: those instruments would facilitate liquidity for token holders who are obligated by the protocol to lock their tokens for a certain amount of time. In Cosmos, for example, the maximum threshold for slashing is currently set at 5%. That means that 95% of the tokens can not incur in any kind of slashing. One can envision a proliferation of derivatives products representing rights over a portion of locked, but secure, tokens. They would be basically used as collateral. In addition, for Layer 2, there is a whole uncovered field about renting liquidity to L2 hubs, like a lightning network or state channels network. The whole locking mechanism makes funds unusable, yet a hub earns some fees. One could consider this as a hub providing both liquidity and L2 payments routing. Akin to delegation in PoS networks, one could provide liquidity to an L2 hub in exchange for shared earnings. While in the PoS realm one casually sees yield, in lightning the rate of return is called Lightning Network Reference Rate. Consequently, one could wrap this into a derivative.
those instruments would facilitate liquidity for token holders who are obligated by the protocol to lock their tokens for a certain amount of time. In Cosmos, for example, the maximum threshold for slashing is currently set at 5%. That means that 95% of the tokens can not incur in any kind of slashing. One can envision a proliferation of derivatives products representing rights over a portion of locked, but secure, tokens. They would be basically used as collateral. In addition, for Layer 2, there is a whole uncovered field about renting liquidity to L2 hubs, like a lightning network or state channels network. The whole locking mechanism makes funds unusable, yet a hub earns some fees. One could consider this as a hub providing both liquidity and L2 payments routing. Akin to delegation in PoS networks, one could provide liquidity to an L2 hub in exchange for shared earnings. While in the PoS realm one casually sees yield, in lightning the rate of return is called Lightning Network Reference Rate. Consequently, one could wrap this into a derivative. DeFi linked products: This range of products, ideally swaps, would provide the holder a protection (exposure) to one or more “competition” protocols for the deployment of the same, locked asset. Taking ETH now as an example, imagine an asset representing a portion of your locked ETH in validation. Let’s call this new asset DETH. 1 DETH = 1/X ETH, with X dynamically set between 1,05 and 10 depending on risk parameters. A staking derivative product would algorithmically pick the most profitable decentralized protocol to autonomously deploy DETH (i.e. Maker vs Dharma vs Compound). The above example would only work if Maker, Dharma and Compound would accept DETH as a collateral asset.
Plausible examples:
Put option on Tezos staking rewards (Reward linked)
A Cosmos on-chain insurance-DAO derivative covering downtime slashing (Risk linked)
A staking provider or CEX backed liquidity certificate on locked ATOMs (Liquidity linked)
Off-chain interest rate swap on ETH locked in Compound vs Maker (DeFi linked)
Governance
This is possibly the most “futuristic” and exciting domain to explore. Governance, or a lack of it, has tremendous implications in a cryptonetwork, whether on or off-chain. However, the specs of the debate go far beyond the scope of this article.
What we are really interested in are the economic impacts of those implications. They will be more or less measurable and more or less “hedgeable”.
To this day, it is practically inconceivable to be able to measure the impact that a governance outcome would have on its primitive asset price. The ecosystem developing around decentralized predictions markets though, is evidence of this trend.
A “cryptogovernance” derivative sounds very far from the state-of-the-art blockchain ecosystem. Its abstractivity could feel overwhelming. However, Jesse Walden had previously compared cryptonetworks to cities while Joel Monegro associated governance to capital. The gap is narrowing and this trend will not likely stop.
Cryptonetworks like Tezos and Polkadot are creating mechanisms for a fair and open governance to insure a sound evolution of the cryptonetwork. The more decisions that are made on-chain, the more rational actors will have the opportunity to evaluate outcomes and assess risks. Governance processes will make decisions on fees, rates, upgrades and much more. As I stated before, risks bring uncertainty which leads to seeking protection.
Plausible example: Digital option on rental fees triggered by the positive or negative outcome of a Polkadot governance decision relative to an upgrade of validator’s dilution-fee.
Network peculiarities, hybrids and miscellaneous
In this segment I will include risks initiated by peculiar actions implemented within a cryptonetwork.
The above-mentioned risks do not necessarily need to incur in economic losses. On the contrary, they could relate more qualitatively to risk. A non-exhaustive list includes:
Right to operate: this range of products was inspired by the talk of Gavin Wood from Polkadot about its parachain auction mechanism. Polkadot will have a certain initially pre-defined number of slots available for its parachains. I found the model extremely interesting and I am confident this kind of mechanism will be a source of inspiration for designing staking derivatives.
Polkadot Parachain deployment — https://slides.com/paritytech/validating-in-polkadot#/15
Polkadot Parachain auction schedule — https://slides.com/paritytech/validating-in-polkadot#/20
One could see derivatives hedging the risk of losing the right to carry out work for the network.
Inter-protocol products: One can envision a multitude of specialized actors creating products and providing liquidity for them in a fully decentralized fashion. They would create new “markets” exploring opportunities across cryptonetworks. Teams are already creating infrastructures facilitating this. I also envision those products being collateralized by different cryptoassets. Consequently they will demand different requirements based on the collateralized asset volatility and liquidity parameters. However, they would be extremely hard to implement in a completely decentralized way. Therefore, centralized inter-protocol products will be much easier to create.
One can envision a multitude of specialized actors creating products and providing liquidity for them in a fully decentralized fashion. They would create new “markets” exploring opportunities across cryptonetworks. Teams are already creating infrastructures facilitating this. I also envision those products being collateralized by different cryptoassets. Consequently they will demand different requirements based on the collateralized asset volatility and liquidity parameters. However, they would be extremely hard to implement in a completely decentralized way. Therefore, centralized inter-protocol products will be much easier to create. Structured products (offering combination of payoffs)
(offering combination of payoffs) Regulatory insurance
Plausible examples:
An interest rate swap on Cosmos vs Polkadot validation (Inter-protocol product)
On-chain structure product long ETH staking rewards + a basket of call options on staking rewards for interoperability protocols (Structured product)
Off-chain OTC futures on a Polkadot parachain slot.
Many of those products could belong to two or more categories at the same time. A product tackling downtime, for example, could be seen with multiple lenses: purely economic, operational or for security.
The chart below summarizes interconnections across products and domains. | https://medium.com/@nicola.santoni/an-intro-to-staking-derivatives-i-a43054efd51c | ['Nicola Santoni'] | 2020-11-05 11:23:42.822000+00:00 | ['Derivatives', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Staking', 'Blockchain'] |
How Young Nigerian Professionals Leverage the Power of Grit and Resilience | How Young Nigerian Professionals Leverage the Power of Grit and Resilience
Photo by Анна Рыжкова from Pexels
I’m a firm believer in what Nigeria has to offer the world in terms of human capital. After all, the nation’s universities and polytechnics produce over 500,000 fresh graduates annually. A lot of these graduates would go on to build solid professional careers both at home and elsewhere.
Nigeria is a country living below its potential as a nation. Even under the prevailing circumstances, the people are extremely resilient, and routinely make something out of nothing.
The reason only negative news about Nigeria grabs all the airtime is that we don’t do so well in telling our own stories.
We need to tell these stories because nobody will do it for us.
While a college graduate elsewhere is spoilt for choice, a typical Nigerian graduate must put up a fistfight against all kinds of obstacles to be established professionally.
I will share a few stories to give you an idea of what an ordinary Nigerian who wishes to rise must overcome. Note that I said, “ordinary Nigerian”. A former president used that phrase anytime he referred to those who have no political connections or rich parents.
If you were not born rich, you need to go the extra mile to earn a place at the table. You need to confront the obstacles radically and aggressively. You need to tenaciously pursue goals without regard for any inherent limitations.
Between a dream and a home
Doxy is a highly sought-after finance professional with a series of international certifications after his name. But it was not always so.
When he arrived in Lagos a few years ago, he had the dream of pursuing a professional certification in accounting. His meager wages as an audit trainee could barely pay for the examinations, training, and his upkeep. He could not afford rent.
He could have abandoned his dream in exchange for a small apartment. But he opted to forgo renting so that all the money could go into the dream.
But there was a problem — where does he sleep at night?
When he got tired of sleeping on benches in classrooms, he found a place inside a local market. A market stall became a 5-star accommodation. The lodging conditions were strict — check-in by 9 pm and check-out by 5 am before the market opens for business.
Miracles still happen. A homeless young man became a chartered accountant and went on to build a great career.
The senior colleague
Ohi moved to Lagos after graduating from a university in Northern Nigeria. He had an uncle in Lagos, so he didn’t expect accommodation to be a problem.
Wrong — the uncle’s wife did not appreciate the inconvenience.
By this time, Ohi had enrolled in an accounting certification training program that ran during the weekends. He was jobless and homeless, but his future depended on becoming a chartered accountant — as quickly as possible.
He struck a deal with the management of the training facility which also hosted a public secondary school. He would keep his few personal belongings in one of the classrooms and use the classroom to study when the kids go home.
It worked! The kids knew they had a senior colleague. His stuff was safe in the classroom.
Ohi passed the professional examinations in record time and won multiple awards in the process. These days, he works as a senior financial analyst and owns a home of his own.
When your goal is 1200 km away
Sunny was lucky to get a job with the bank he worked for during his national youth service year. That means he was spared from experiencing the harsh job market as a fresh graduate. Not a bad start for a young man in Nigeria. But Sunny knew he had to do something to move his career forward. He wanted to become a chartered accountant.
Some of the best training programs for the professional accounting examinations were in Lagos. But he was based in a commercial city in South-Eastern Nigeria, over 600 km from Lagos.
Sunny would board the night bus to Lagos every Friday evening to join the Saturday morning training session. He would make the return trip on Saturday night arriving at his base on Sunday morning.
This went on for as long as it took him to pass the examinations. Sunny received recognition from his employer and promotion for all his troubles.
Sunny knew what he wanted. He knew it would not come by going for a picnic every weekend. He made those 1200 km round trips every weekend over and over until he achieved his goal.
Double glory for double effort
With a degree in Engineering, Bolu knew that his banking career needed a boost. Bolu set out to obtain the Institute of Banking certification while at the same time studying for a major international IT Security certification. The cost of both undertakings was beyond his means, so he took a loan from his employer. The loan raised the stakes for him. How do you fail an examination paid for by Human Resources on loan?
He clearly needed more than 24 hours in a day to pull it off. The strategy was to get to the office by 6 am and read until normal people showed up for work at 8 am. Sometimes, after the close of business, he would bid everyone farewell and continue studying overnight. To support this radical lifestyle, Bolu’s car served as a mobile home complete with clothes, shoes, and books.
The sacrifice paid off — big time. When the result slips rolled in, Bolu got a letter from the CEO for smashing two major professional certification exams at the same time. Bolu is now a top talent in IT Security working for a market-leading firm in Europe.
Loan syndication for examination fees
Yaya had his eyes on an international professional certification before graduating from the university. To motivate himself, he assigned an ambitious timeline to his goal. He wanted to get it done before the end of the national service year.
The only challenge was that his income could not cover the cost of training and examination fees. To solve that problem, he “syndicated” a loan from two colleagues with a commitment to pay up before the end of the national service year. He paid up the final installment of the loan a few days before the end of the service year.
Yaya went home broke after paying up the loans. But he had taken a major step towards achieving his career ambitions.
Stand by for an emergency
Cally and Buki were already employed when they started pursuing international certifications in IT. The lectures for those examinations held every Saturday. The only problem was that they had to be available on Saturdays to handle operational emergencies at work.
Cally was frequently called upon to attend to emergencies. His lecture location was 125 km away from his workplace in another city. He would rush out to attend to the emergency and then go back to the lectures. Sometimes, a call would have ruined the day’s lectures completely.
“I think I was just crazy”, Cally said, reflecting on the experience of rushing from one city to go attend to a work emergency in another city.
Buki on the other hand had to attend the office twice on Saturdays in the morning and later in the evening. She also had to attend lectures on the other side of the city. Buki didn’t have a car which made it more challenging to shuttle from one part of the city to the other. Driving a car may not have been of much help anyway considering Lagos traffic gridlock. She could forget about the lectures because of the inconveniences. But that would have been the end of her dream of becoming a skilled IT professional.
There must be a way out! Buki had to make a dangerous 25 km motorbike ride across the city twice a day every Saturday to perform her role and still attend the lectures.
The risk paid off. That certification gave Buki an opportunity to build the IT career she had always desired.
Keke was not so successful in juggling weekend work with a master’s degree program and a professional IT certification examination. He finally resorted to self-study after excusing himself from the lectures. “My car became a mobile library as I studied before and after work”, Keke said. Keke completed both programs as planned and is now an audit professional working for a large financial services group in Nigeria.
These people were required to stand by (or perhaps stand still), but they found ways to break free from the limitations imposed by their circumstances. It might have been crazy — but it worked.
No exam leave, no problem
Demy was just one of the guys in branch audit of a banking conglomerate. But he desired more for his career. So, he signed up and started studying for a new international certification. His employers did not understand or appreciate the value of this new skill he was trying to acquire. As a result, his request for exam leave was turned down.
Demy took a chance. He flew into Lagos on Friday evening, took the exam on Saturday morning, and showed up at the headquarter office on Monday morning.
Something clicked that Monday morning. Somebody finally listened to his story and bought into the vision. Management asked him to start a new function using the skills he had been learning.
Demy became a pioneer of a new knowledge frontier in the organization and the industry.
It got worse to get better
Rob was preparing for a professional examination under challenging conditions. With no decent accommodation where he could retire after work to study, he resorted to carrying his textbooks and lecture notes with him everywhere he went. He read while riding the then notoriously inconvenient Lagos public bus (molue). He always looked forward to getting stuck in Lagos traffic while on official duties so that he could have more time to read before getting back to the office.
Even with all of that, he wasn’t confident he was prepared for the examinations. So, he applied for two months' leave which was turned down. The small audit firm he was working for could not afford to let an employee go away for two months.
He quit his job so that he could focus on passing the examination. Two years later he ran into his former boss. The man had a few words for him, “you are a strong man”, he said.
Indeed, Rob is having a rewarding career holding forth like a strong man in the audit department of one of the largest banks in the country. It all started with the courage to walk away from his job to focus on preparing for his professional examinations.
Final thoughts
Nigerian professionals smash local and international professional examinations every year under incredibly challenging conditions. But the world does not get to hear these inspiring stories of grit and determination.
The stories we have shared here are not isolated cases. There are probably more grueling tales out there. Stories of people who camp out in the so-called study centers every weekend and still show up at work on Monday morning. People lose vital relationships because of spending a crazy amount of time pursuing this dream that requires so much sacrifice of time and money.
There are people who sacrificed their entire youth trying to achieve their dreams. I know many who were already chartered accountants before they graduated from university. Such folks may have missed hours of football games, soap operas, and quality time with friends.
The common theme in all these stories is discipline and determination. It’s that “crazy” drive to overcome obstacles. It’s the tenacity to stick to a grueling process until the goal is achieved. It’s the mental strength to take on challenges and break new grounds.
Also, it’s important to add that most of these people were aiming to achieve feats that probably nobody in their families had ever attained. There had no shoulder to stand on. Most of them had no mentor to model or look up to — they were self-motivated groundbreakers.
Such sterling qualities don’t disappear after acquiring the certifications. The individual takes them into the workplace and their employers get double value for their money.
For more stories like this, please follow this publication page and subscribe to the newsletter. | https://medium.com/arise-africa/how-grit-and-resilience-power-personal-development-in-nigeria-9c5a0a9383dd | ['Joseph Anwana'] | 2020-12-20 13:20:29.747000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Productivity', 'Nigeria', 'Inspiration', 'Careers'] |
Conquering My Quarter-Life Crisis | There are days (read weeks, sometimes months) when I feel unaccomplished and confused. Questions like where is my life headed, am I making the best use of my time, how badly will eating this box of Oreo affect my health, plague me in those days of doubt.
However, after indulging in my vanity for far too long, I get back up on the saddle and life seems to be moving again. As of writing this, I am in a good headspace despite all the good and bad happening around me at the moment.
I know I am not alone in my struggle and am often reminded of this when people come to me (imagine that happening!) for help with their own quarter-life crisis.
Recently, a friend of mind sent me this text —
I offered to call her and share with her some of the wisdom which I am using to float my own boat. Her response to me was —
“Sure, go ahead, you also try helping me!”
Ouch! Seems like it is a bigger problem than what I had first anticipated. Since I know that the quarter-life crisis is hitting me and my friends hard, I wanted to do something about it.
I am an avid reader and as a result I am part of a group of readers from around the world. We share book recommendations and often discuss books that we are reading.
I have been part of this group for a few months now and have noticed that not only the people in the group are full of life and wisdom but they also cover a wide age demographic. There are high school students and 80-year old book lovers sharing their stories and joy of reading with each other.
I told the group about my agony and that of my friend who recently found out that her best friend is having a baby while she is still unmarried and indecisive about her career. The group responded in ways I could only imagine in my wildest dreams. Hundreds of people responded, from many different professions, continents and age groups and shared their advice for the 25-something adult today.
To say it has changed me may be an overstatement but I do feel so at peace and am loving my life and journey. Here is a compilation of the advice and stories with some book recommendations given by the members, because for me books help me in ways few things do-
“It’s totally normal to still be getting it together at 25. I was married and divorced before 25, and now I’m married, happily, again. Life accomplishments are not linear.”
Life accomplishments are not linear.” “The 20s are for figuring stuff out. You aren’t supposed to have it all together. You’re still young. Enjoy your time and don’t rush things. Be patient with yourself. ”
” “I don’t think that people really know themselves and have an understanding of life until they are in their 30s. You’ve got time. There is no deadline saying you have to do this or that by a certain age. Just because it’s a good choice for a friend doesn’t mean it is for you. ”
” “You have to make wrong choices to learn to make right choices in life. Don’t be afraid to live. 😊”
😊” A happily married mother in her 40’s : “I was 27 when I went to Australia. So even a bit older than you. I split up with my boyfriend when I was 26 and thought “well, just in case you never find anyone you like enough to have kids with you’d better do something really good with your life just for you.””
You have to make wrong choices to learn to make right choices in life. Don’t be afraid to live.😊
“Had my last child at 40. Breastfeeding till 42. You have time. ”
” “I finally figured out what I want to be when I grew up at 46. Don’t worry about other people’s timelines. Concentrate on your own. Life isn’t a race. ”
” “Just focus on the day and if you are very ambitious, tomorrow.”
and if you are very ambitious, tomorrow.” “Always believe you have something to offer the world , because I promise you do. Of that I am absolutely sure. I wish you courage and love and joy in each breath you take and each step forward you make.”
, because I promise you do. Of that I am absolutely sure. in each breath you take and each step forward you make.” “No one is a failure. No one. We are all a work in progress. Read biographies of some famous people and you will discover they all failed.”
and you will discover they all failed.” “Without a doubt, the 20s was the hardest decade of my life (currently 58). Seems like a cliche but truly the best thing you can do is throw out the goals and just be present. You won’t stagnate but you will be able to open your heart to the possibilities before you. And if that doesn’t work you can laugh at the absurdity of it all. This pretty much sums up the 20s for me:
“Gees, girl...I was 35 and had the above stated on the list of things not sorted. Relax and live… life is not any list of things to check out .”
.” “ Save as much of your paycheck as you can, but don’t wait until later to live .”
as much of your paycheck as you can, but .” “I remember sitting at my desk at my banking job thinking “I’m about to turn 30 and people are going to think I know what I’m talking about — I hope they don’t realize I don’t” .”
.” ”…unaccomplished and confused…” in your 20’s par for the course, no matter what your peers look like. I wasn’t completely comfortable in my skin/career/relationships/world until my 50's ….which was the best decade of my life ….so far… ;-) Be kind to yourself and enjoy the ride! ”
….which was the ….so far… ;-) ” “It hit for me in the 50’s…when I stopped caring what other people thought…when I became truly content. I am now in my 60’s and looking forward to more exciting adventures and continued growth”
…unaccomplished and confused…” in your 20’s par for the course
“ A tree and a flower thrive on different timelines , and they’re equally valid. Your 20s are for exploring — for some that means kids, for some travel, for some just enjoying today. Take the trails that look good to you !”
, and they’re equally valid. Your 20s are for exploring — for some that means kids, for some travel, for some just enjoying today. !” “If I’d married the guy I was with in my early 20s it would have been a disaster — and I hadn’t even realized I was sapphic at that point ! You have time.”
! You have time.” “ Go traveling and see the world for an year ! You can get working visas for many countries.”
! You can get working visas for many countries.” “I freaked at 24, depressed and unable to figure out how to get out of it. Mine would have read: my friend just posted her masters degree ceremony-career not sorted-self worth floundering-send therapist soon . Being human seems to be a constant state of comparison and self evolution, the sooner you can stop the comparison , the more fruitful the self evaluation will become.”
. Being human seems to be a constant state of comparison and self evolution, the sooner you can , the more fruitful the self evaluation will become.” “You don’t need to be ‘sorted’. Just because society expects certain things of you does not mean you should follow some ‘life-map’.”
“I had a total crisis at 25. Then at 26 I got married! To the total wrong person. I got out, and have been divorced for eleven years, and have the best kids, the best cats, the best family, the best friends. Getting panicked about that dumb age (25 — I was a baby!). Even if you screw up horribly, you can always fix it. Your family and friends are everything, so pour your energy and love into them.”
Mine would have read: my friend just posted her masters degree ceremony-career not sorted-self worth floundering-send therapist soon.
“ I am 64. I am so very grateful for the journey I have been on. I had very traumatic experiences…and ones with incredible joy…but in the end… everyday I try to LIVE my very best self …being kind and loving. I feel so lucky to be alive. ”
I am so very grateful for the journey I have been on. I had very traumatic experiences…and ones with incredible joy…but in the end… …being kind and loving. ” “Hi. I remember being 25. But I blinked, and now I’m 70! I’ve had lots of highs and lows in all these years. What I’ve learned is that nothing stays the same. No matter how low, things can change and there will be some grand times! Each decade brings different challenges, but keep reading, keep loving life, and remember to stay curious — there’s so much to learn! ”
I’ve had lots of highs and lows in all these years. What I’ve learned is that nothing stays the same. No matter how low, things can change and there will be some grand times! ” “Stop defining what your life should be like based on someone else’s life. There are many versions of success, and someone is likely looking at your life with the same self-judgmental thoughts .”
.” “Life is what you make of it day by day….long-term goals are vastly overrated. Best wishes!”
I remember being 25. But I blinked, and now I’m 70!
“You’re still young, and you have so much time. (This is also what I tell myself, and I’m almost a decade older than you. )”
)” “ Get over yourself. Do not measure your life with someone’s else’s ruler. You will have a much happier life if you do.”
Do not measure your life with someone’s else’s ruler. You will have a much happier life if you do.” “I just started a new career at 60 and am going back to school at 61. Kids are kinda grown and out of the house. Who said there’s an order or a schedule or deadlines to life?! ”
and am going back to school at 61. Kids are kinda grown and out of the house. ” “ I wish I had read it in my 20s : Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown.”
: Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown.” “ When the time is right for big moves like marriage and kids, you will know .”
for big moves like marriage and kids, .” “I had one “quarter life crisis” at 25 and another at 35. It’s totally normal to go through phases of uncertainty and even cycle back around a few more times. I’ve also learned that the periods of unrest and insecurity usually lead to my biggest moments of clarity and growth soon after. ❤️”
Who said there’s an order or a schedule or deadlines to life?!
“With every life decision I have, I ask myself what am I most likely to regret later? For me, I know I would rather fail than wonder what could have been , so knowing that usually resolves the question.”
, so knowing that usually resolves the question.” “ You could not pay me to go back to my twenties! Its the toughest. ”
” “Just enjoy the ride. You can’t get the years back , so enjoy them. 😊😊😊”
, so enjoy them. 😊😊😊” “ I’m 80 and all I can tell you is..enjoy the journey. ”
” “Don’t rush through milestones, love yourself first, live your best life and things will fall into place as the are meant to.”
You could not pay me to go back to my twenties! Its the toughest.
“You do you, and do what feels right for you. Enjoy those 20’s, they are your wild and free years. Hell, if it’s your personality (like mine) all your years can be wild and free :) ”
Hell, if it’s your personality (like mine) ” “If I could go back and give my twentysomething self advice, it would be to worry less about the future . For years I felt like every decision, no matter how minor in the long run, was THE decision that would determine the course of the rest of my life . When I got to my thirties, I finally let that go and it’s given me the freedom to really grow, because I have learned that reinvention is always a possibility . If one thing doesn’t work out, it’s an opportunity for a new path or adventure, not a failure.”
. For years . When I got to my thirties, I finally let that go and it’s given me the freedom to really grow, because I have learned that . If one thing doesn’t work out, it’s an opportunity for a new path or adventure, not a failure.” “I’m 60 and not sure I have my life sorted :) Seriously, though, there is so much pressure on your generation to achieve things on a certain time-line (thanks social media) that was not there for past generations. Everyone has their own path in life and there is no way to predict what the future will bring. Sometimes the late starters are the ones who are doing better when they get to be my age.”
If one thing doesn’t work out, it’s an opportunity for a new path or adventure, not a failure.
“Many of the people who look like they have their lives pulled together don’t feel any more together than you do . As for relationships, as my Grandma used to say, “ Better to be alone than in bad company .” Take your time, breathe, and don’t worry about what other people are doing or what they think.”
. As for relationships, as my Grandma used to say, “ .” Take your time, breathe, and don’t worry about what other people are doing or what they think.” “Lol. I’m 46. Who said you need to have your shit together at 25? Or 30? Or 40? Or any age. It’s not about life partners and babies or having to do any one thing. It’s about enjoying where you are at any moment in life .”
Or any age. It’s not about life partners and babies or having to do any one thing. It’s about .” “ You never know what’s around the corner , you just have to be willing to take a chance on yourself! Look for the dvd series by Marcus Buckingham called Trombone Player Wanted … it could help set your direction.”
, you just have to be willing to take a chance on yourself! Look for the … it could help set your direction.” “Don’t worry about pleasing other people or living up to anyone else’s expectations.”
Who said you need to have your shit together at 25? Or 30? Or 40?
“ Congratulations , your brain has finished growing at 25. As much as it hurts to hear it, you are still a child until age 25 .”
, your brain has finished growing at 25. As much as it hurts to hear it, .” “You are always free to reinvent yourself. Don’t gossip . If someone says, “I’m really worried about the way Adam is acting” your immediate response should be “I’m sure Adam would appreciate your concern. You need to take that up with him.” You don’t report to Adam that Eve is concerned. You don’t gossip. It’ll save you headaches and heartaches .”
. If someone says, “I’m really worried about the way Adam is acting” your immediate response should be “I’m sure Adam would appreciate your concern. You need to take that up with him.” You don’t report to Adam that Eve is concerned. You don’t gossip. .” “ This isn’t a crisis as much as an opportunity to become who you were really meant to be. Find your Great Work (look up Thomas Berry or Brian Swimme for the concept) and never miss the opportunity to see a concert or play that excites you even if spending the money for it feels foolish in the moment. Otherwise, live beneath your means and work to keep your debt low.”
to become who you were really meant to be. Find your and never miss the opportunity to even if spending the money for it feels foolish in the moment. Otherwise, and work to keep your debt low.” “So…I’ll be a little more specific and tell you what I wish people would have told me when I was 25. Focus on one thing…literally anything. Likely it will pivot you into what interests you naturally. Do things you enjoy, you’ll meet people that way. Things happen naturally. I met my husband at your age in a king fu class 😁 We already had something in common.”
Never miss the opportunity to see a concert or play that excites you even if spending the money for it feels foolish in the moment. Otherwise, live beneath your means and work to keep your debt low.
“We worry about what’s the right thing to do too much I think. And WAY too much about what other people think , not about what is important to us. Definitely stop caring so much what other people think, even your own family (maybe especially) . You are the expert on you . But cherish them also, they won’t be around forever.”
, not about what is important to us. Definitely stop caring so much what other people think, . . But cherish them also, they won’t be around forever.” “Don’t define your life by what others say you need to be a success. There’s a big world out there and you have just reached the second quarter of a century, when all sorts of possibilities unfold before you. (P.S. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, and I’m 73.). Wherever you are, create yourself a family of friends you can laugh with and who will be there when you need support.”
Book Recommendations
I haven’t read most of these but they are on my reading list now. I also realized through this exercise that having a group of like minded people around me that can inspire me is really amazing. Yes, I have my friends and family, but it has rewarded me well to go beyond and find myself a group like this that can pull me out of my head and sometimes my own self imposed misery.
Happy Reading. | https://byrslf.co/i-asked-100s-of-people-for-help-with-my-quarter-life-crisis-heres-what-i-learnt-bdc21beae088 | ['Saloni Goyal'] | 2019-12-06 09:27:43.331000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Books', 'Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'Beyourself'] |
On the Road with Kathy — Planes, Trains (and Automobiles) | The touring lifestyle appears glamorous at first glance: new places, changing the scenery, the excitement around every corner. Not the same tired old routine each day, but something different and fun. Yes, certainly it can be fun — but also difficult in ways one would not initially expect.
Take, for example, airplanes. The days of luxury travel, accommodating service, and a variety of choice are gone. There are hardly any upgrades, comfortable seating, or room for carry-ons. Not to mention making a change to a set itinerary can be a bigger headache than just canceling that flight altogether and eating the cost. When changes happen — and they do, often — there is a penalty and the price of tickets skyrockets. Because of this, flying can be a stressful and expensive process for musicians. What was once a convenient and quick way to cross long distances has become one of the most difficult ways a gigging musician can travel.
Most musicians will choose to carry their instruments directly on a flight rather than risk having it loaded with checked luggage. Not only are instruments expensive — some ranging in the tens of thousands of dollars — but many are irreplaceable, customized to suit the musician’s personal needs. Unfortunately, most airlines do not train their employees on how to handle instruments. When a musician shows up at the gate with their livelihood in a case, many times they are informed that there is no carry-on that size allowed and that they must pay hundreds of dollars extra to take it aboard. In some instances, instruments have been dumped haphazardly on the ground during luggage checks, which could incur hundreds of more dollars in expense to repair the damage.
What can you do when you are on the road with a last-minute scheduling change? There are many issues: pre-booked hotels and airlines that will not refund your money; communication with the bandleader and other members of the group as necessary; scrambling to make any necessary changes so that any subsequent gigs are not missed; even finding food to eat that is fairly healthy so musicians aren’t forced to eat greasy fast food every night. Any of these problems can make or break a tour. All a manager can do is take a deep breath, hunker down, and find solutions in order to move the group forward to the next gig.
Not long ago, in the middle of a four-gig tour, the inevitable happened: an engagement was canceled. Keep in mind that when traveling with a small select group there is no one designated to handle changes for you. The musicians are preparing for the gig. Plans have already been made to fly to the next location and then take a train from there. In most cases, the band leader has all of the pressure and must take the heat and come up with solutions. But when the group is part of a jazz agency like Night is Alive, the responsibility falls on the Managing Director’s shoulders.
Attempts to call the airline did not get the group anywhere, as they were unsympathetic to the predicament. To top it all off, a canceled gig meant a day of lost income for everyone on tour. Thankfully, in these situations, most band members are very understanding, knowing that cancellations can happen at any time at no fault of anyone in the group. But they must still find a resting place for the evening off. In this case, the group was close to home and they were able to spend the night in their own beds. Luck like that is not common, however, and often the group will find themselves out not only the cost of the flight but also the price of last-minute hotel accommodations that evening.
In contrast to airplanes, trains can be an enjoyable and forgiving way to travel. Credit can be used for an unexpected change with no extra charge. Carry-ons are also free, as well as luggage itself, so food and water bottles and instruments can travel safely with no additional worry. The flexibility of being able to change your seats, have access to a club car, and use free Wi-fi is invaluable. Additionally, most train stations are refurbished, updated, and accommodating. Traveling by train is unfortunately very limited, but when the option is available there is no questioning whether it is the correct choice.
Though touring itself can be interesting and fun, the novelty can wear off very quickly if you find yourself in a situation where travel needs to be changed due to last-minute cancellations. If you are a bandleader trying to take care of all the details yourself, it can taint the whole touring experience. But with a Managing Director on your side, the responsibility is greatly reduced and you can rely on someone to handle everything and keep the tour running smoothly. The music business is a great industry to work in, but to be a manager requires determination which is driven by a passion for music. Despite turmoil on the road, the manager must focus on giving the artist the highest probability of success and put them in the right environment to thrive. Respectable management is what defines Night is Alive and makes touring fun and rewarding for the musicians involved.
For more information about Managing Director Kathy Moses Salem and the musicians with Night is Alive, please visit our web page ( http://nightisalive.com/) or contact directly via phone.
Article by Kathy Salem, Managing Director, Night is Alive
Revised and Transcribed by Elizabeth Carney, Content Editor, Night is Alive | https://medium.com/@kathymosessalem/on-the-road-with-kathy-planes-trains-and-automobiles-7b431e957f49 | ['Kathy Moses Salem'] | 2019-07-11 13:03:15.393000+00:00 | ['Music Business', 'Travel', 'Jazz Music', 'Music', 'Travel Tips'] |
Presence | a one line poem
Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash
I am here.
I am waiting.
I inhale.
I exhale.
We are here.
We are waiting.
We inhale.
We exhale.
Someday, hopefully,
we will know
who the
next president is…
~~Rhonda Marrone 11/2020
Thanks to this One Line Prompt: | https://medium.com/chalkboard/presence-34cffd969c9 | ['Rhonda Marrone'] | 2020-11-06 02:05:46.045000+00:00 | ['One Line', 'Chalkboard', 'Presence', 'Elections'] |
4 Steps Of How Empathy Creates Sports’ Winners | 4 Steps Of How Empathy Creates Sports’ Winners
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
There’s a link between competitive sports and a lack of deeper empathy and the funny thing is it makes teams lose!
I`ve asked myself the question for many years now:
Can empathy make you win more?
On the surface, it first seems that this is false. After all, being empathetic is about having the deep recognition, understanding, and sharing of another’s thoughts and feelings. Without much thought, it seems that being that touchy and feely with another means you have to be soft, kind, timid, and considerate of the other person’s thoughts and feelings.
On the other hand, being a competitor seems very different. Competition is all simply about being able to dominate an opponent to prove that you reach a certain goal and in so doing, they fail to achieve the same level of success.
But, empathy can aid success and make competitors into winners.
Here’s how:
Empathy creates connections between people, Connections build trust, Trust creates teamwork, Teamwork solidifies a united motivation to compete and win for one another.
1. Empathy creates connections between people,
Empathy is about putting yourself in the shoes of another person. In doing so people often think that this means changing from the place of advantage that you are in so that you can see things from a more difficult viewpoint. Although this can be part of how empathy works, it is not entirely the only way it can be utilized.
Rather than looking at empathy from a sympathetic viewpoint you can also aid yourself by being empathetic. By actively trying to ‘put yourself in the shoes’ of another person it means that you can learn from that other person. In learning, you can bring that new knowledge into your life in the future.
People often get caught up and bogged down on how and what you give up in the time and through the energy that you spend being empathetic. They feel that it robs them of their ability to get ahead, stay on track, or compete in their lives throughout the same timeline when instead, the opposite is true.
Showing empathy will aid your journey to victory.
2. Connections build trust:
We trust people for many different reasons. Simply put, you may choose to trust someone because you recognize them or know that they have authority in your given field. For example, if you were to bump into your favorite movie star on the street you’d probably be more willing to talk to them than the average stranger. The same can be true of a person that presents themselves as your new boss at work. You`ll probably do as they request, simply because you feel trust is a given in that situation.
Neurologically though trust can be built from the brain chemical oxytocin. Oxytocin can be released into the brain when stress is at bay. For example, if a young woman sees a small baby she may feel good and want to interact with the baby. Of course, logically, in this example, most babies are harmless and exude joy. For the young woman, this is far from being stressful and the baby’s joy creates an upbeat feeling within her.
The same can be true in sport. For a coach or manager who witnesses a play performed to the tactical satisfaction that they wished for, they can then begin to admire their players for their successful attempts during practice. This builds the feeling of satisfaction within the coach or manager and this can reverberate back to the team in the form of the positive team talk. In turn, this instills confidence within the players that they are trusted by their leader.
Photo by Coasteering on Unsplash
3. Trust creates teamwork:
Companies’ CEOs and presidents can often be wary of trust. As trust can mean that employees need to understand the boss better, this level of exposure can be beyond the leader’s level of comfort. In so doing, this is limiting the creation and development of teamwork.
The same is true for sporting coaches and managers. Unlike companies, coaches, and managers cannot actively go out and physically compete for their organization or club. Rather they have to stand on the sideline or sit in the stands and watch as their teams’ performance unfolds. By the time the game or match has begun, the work must have been done if they are to compete to win. This is why teamwork is so important and why it is a thread of trust.
4. Teamwork solidifies a united motivation to compete and victor for one another:
When individual athletes and players feel they are truly part of a team that watches out for one another they buy into that team morale. Teamwork builds a united motivation to win. Often, even the most different personalities on teams have the most complex of relationships and this can dilute the existence of true teamwork within a locker room. However, even though personalities can be different these players can work together for a united front under the umbrella of trusting teamwork that exists.
If you were to step back into time with the same teammates under different team management or even jump forward in the future the same two characters may not get on as people. They may even despise one another. Yet, in the timeframe, that trust exists, teamwork can glue those two players together along with the harmony of the other teammates in their group.
From this standpoint, deeper human connections can promote a shared trust that enables tighter teamwork and a competitive united culture.
By competing most strongly, empathy will make you win. | https://medium.com/@drconorhogan/4-steps-of-how-empathy-creates-sports-winners-db6552e8fbf1 | ['Dr. Conor Hogan Ph.D.'] | 2020-12-22 13:24:11.168000+00:00 | ['Youth Sports', 'Sports Coaching', 'Empathy', 'Empathy In Sport', 'Professional Sports'] |
Switching Estate Agents | Posted on 17th December 2021
If you are thinking about switching estate agents, this article will answer any and all questions. It will help you decide what to do next. There may be many reasons you want to change to a new estate agent; the most common ones are,
poor communication
Little or no viewings
Your agents are not advertising in the right places
Your property has been valued too high, and your current estate agent is pushing for a price reduction
You can switch to a new estate agent, it may not be easy, but it is possible! However, before you make such a big decision, make sure to think about all the pros and cons like estate agent fees, contract agreement and then choose based on what is best for you.
If your house has been on the market for a long time with your current agent, it can be frustrating. So this is an excellent time to think about whether you should switch estate agents.
You need to think about the contract that you have with your original agent. You might not be able to switch because of exclusivity agreements/contracts that say you will pay for their services for a certain amount of time.
CAN YOU CHANGE ESTATE AGENT?
Is changing estate agents after listing your home the right move? It may be legally allowed, but you might subject yourself to a minimum tie-in period.
You might worry that you are switching agents as it could affect your property sale and selling process.
But don’t worry! We have everything covered. We know about the legalities and practical steps, too. If there is anything left unknown, I’m happy to help you figure it out!
There are other agreements, contracts, notice periods and key clauses you can sign with an estate agent. It would be best to do your research before signing any contracts, or it could cost you money.
When deciding if changing estate agents are the best solution, a few factors to consider.
When deciding if you should switch from your current estate agent, think about whether it is time for a change. Ask yourself if getting the best service and support from your present estate agent is good enough.
If you answer “yes,” it means that you will probably change from your existing agent. If you answer “no,” it means that you are less likely to change estate agents.
Estate agents often work for fixed fees. You may pay a double commission if you want to change estate agents or work with two estate agents. But there are benefits to a multi-agency agreement,
Reach more prospective buyers
Multiple viewings
Double your chance of selling your property
Increase the chance of a quick sale
Achieve asking price
The Question Is, What Contract Does Your Agent Have You On?
There are no guarantees for success. Sometimes, even agents who want to help you might not be successful.
People usually change agents when they are looking to buy. Therefore, people must answer questions before changing their agents. It will help you not to make the same mistake as people have.
When you switch, you will be under a sole agency agreement for at least one month or three, depending on the area. Most estate agents will permit the other agent to switch if you give them notice in 30 days.
You should also review documents related to real estate transactions and seek advice where needed.
If you are unsure about your rights or responsibilities as a seller, you can get advice from a professional solicitor.
WHY DO YOU WANT TO SWITCH?
When you are looking for a new home or want to sell your property, it can be hard to find the motivation. When your current estate agent is not selling your old house, you should list why you switch agents. In addition, you will want to list any positives about the new agent if you decide to stay with them for now. Being balanced will help.
My agent doesn’t communicate: If your estate agent does not respond to emails or keep you informed, they are not doing their job, you will want to switch estate agents. They need to do this to provide excellent customer service.
I’ve had no house viewings: Think about why no one has shown interest in your home, and it’s not selling. Is it because your estate agent has not done an excellent marketing job? Or is it because you have not thought about some problems with the house?
I can’t find my property online: If your agent is not listing your property on Zoopla or Rightmove, they are not doing their job. It would help if you considered changing estate agents to an agent that will do this.
My agent is working to lower the price: Some agents pressure you to reduce your cost. They might say they are doing it to make the home sell faster, but this isn’t true. Be sure to get at least three property valuations for your property before deciding.
I am sure you have wondered why your property isn’t selling. Now is an excellent time to find out what is going on. First, talk to new estate agents and ask them what they would do if they were in your position.
HOW TO CHANGE ESTATE AGENTS
When you are looking for a new estate agent, think about the following before just randomly picking one,
1, Examine the time frame in which your company is tied: There might be a tie-in period in a contract, especially if you are on a sole agency agreement. For example, it means that you will have to keep your agent for 1–3 months during your house sale.
2, Give your estate agent written notice: If you are going to be away for a few days or weeks, tell your agent before you leave. They might need two weeks’ notice, one month’s notice, or two months’ notice.
3, Create a shortlist of estate agents: Examine the best areas in your town and see what they have. Then, make a list of the top five.
4, Interview local estate agents: Look at the price and service that other offices in your area have to offer. They might know why your home has not been sold yet.
5, Choose a new estate agent: You decide who the best agent will be for you. Then, you negotiate with them on how long they will work to sell your house, what commission they will get, and if you can back out of the deal if it doesn’t happen.
6, Sign your new contract: When you are happy with all of the parts of your agreement, then sign it. Then finish your contract.
When It Comes Time To Switch Estate Agent, You Should Remember A Few Things.
Read the contract your landlord gives you. You want to make sure that it is fair and legal. Pay attention to the length of the agreement, so you don’t lose any money when you leave early or pay a fee when necessary.
It is essential to think about what you are giving up if you want to leave your contract early or pay someone else. Think about how much money you agreed on the deal. Will it still be worth it?
Give the required notice period.
If you want to sell your house, tell the people who will be selling it that they need to give you a lot of time. But, they do not have enough time; they will take your house off sale and cancel appointments. Some agents don’t wait this long before taking your home off sale–they do it at two weeks.
Before you start negotiating with other agents, make sure you are ready. Tell them about any contracts already in place so they know what they can and cannot do.
Obtain a copy of the old agent’s information.
When you want to stop working with estate agent’s, make sure they have your contact information. The old agent will tell people about the house and show it. Then, if they are interested, the new agent will inspect the property before giving back all checks.
Some people want to buy your house before they make a new one. They might not be ready to buy right now, but you can still get their information. It is good to keep in touch with these people because they may believe it soon!
If you switch companies, it is hard to be a good agent. You have an easier time if the company is good and has done well in the past. GetAgent also provides free services for people who are switching agencies.
IS IT TRUE, THAT IF I SWITCH ESTATE AGENTS IT WILL COST ME MORE MONEY?
Unless you have an agreement with your agent, the new one might charge you money. It is essential to know how much they will set before you switch. The new agent could do good work even if they work for a different company.
If you do not spend all the money on your fixed-priced agreement, then it does not matter. But if you want to sign over complete control of your home before your time is up, then this will.
FRENQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is It Possible To Get Out Of An Estate Agent Agreement?
If you don’t want to work with an agent anymore, there is a way to get out of the contract. You can do this if they have not been doing their job. If they break the agreement’s rules, that’s a breach, and you can ask them to leave. If this happens, then talk to someone else.
Is It Legal To Have Two Estate Agents?
You can list your home with two agents. But it depends on the contract.
Some contracts say that one agent will be your only agent. You cannot record with another agent if this is true for both agents you want to use.
If someone asks an agent about a home not listed with them, they will pass on this inquiry to the agent listing that house.
How Do I Give Notice To An Estate Agent?
It would help if you told your agent that you are switching to another agency at least a week before you make the switch.
1, Read your contract to see how much time you have to give notice.
2, To be legally binding, you need to send a letter or email.
3, Ask them to take down their signs.
Can I Cancel My Estate Agent Contract Within 14 Days?
Many U.K. contracts have a 14-day cooling-off period, which means that if you want to cancel your contract with an estate agent, you can do this within 14 days after the agreement is signed.
If I switch estate agents, will I have to pay commission to my old one?
If you sign a contract with an agent to sell your home, they might charge you even if you don’t use them. So ensure that the terms say “No Commission” before signing the contract.
We hope you have found our blog post about switching estate agents useful! If you have any questions, we are always here to offer free advice. | https://medium.com/@bigginmatthew44/switching-estate-agents-5853f56f1673 | ['Matthew Biggin'] | 2021-12-17 11:58:35.772000+00:00 | ['Estate Agents', 'Property Management', 'Property', 'Property For Sale'] |
Learn Mercurial revision-control basics in 10 minutes | If you are using git as a version control tool, you can learn the basics of Mercurial as easy as pie. I was wondering if their motto(Work Easier Work Faster) is true or not and I determined to do basic version control actions using mercurial just by using --help and it worked like a charm!
Installation
Doesn't need any explanation: sudo apt install hg .
If you are using other operating systems this link may help you.
If everything goes well you can see the version using hg --version
Config mercurial
After the installation, we need to add a user (just like Git) using this command:
hg config --edit
And in the config file just fill username and you can start using Mercurial:
Initialize a repository
Use this command: hg init .
Now you are on the default branch which is similar to master in git.
If you want to be sure use this command: hg branch and this will show you: default
Create a file and commit that file
You can create your file inside the folder or with using this command in Linux or Mac OS: touch myFirstFile.js .
Now, this file is untracked. We can use the Add command to make mercurial track this file: hg add ./myFirstFile.js .
Create another file but don’t add that file. For example touch secondFile.js
similar to git status we can use hg status here and the result will be like this:
Result of hg status
Our first file which is added is showing with capital A(Which I assume it means Added!) and the second file(Which we created but didn’t add) is showing by a question mark.
To commit that file we must use: hg commit --message "my first commit message" . Now if you use: hg status again you can see that file is gone.
Question: How can I see my previous commits?
Answer: Exactly like what you do on Git
hg log will give you a brief history of your commits.
hg log result
changeset is something similar to a Git commit hash.
Create a branch and merge that to default
First check that you are in default branch: hg branch the result should be default .
Create a branch: hg branch branchName .
In Git you needed a -b option to create and checkout to that branch branch -b branchName but here you don’t need an option and after creating a branch your current branch is what you just created. Now the result of hg branch should be your branch name.
Switch branches:
Simply by using this command: hg update branchName .
Let’s create a file in this branch and commit that file.
touch thirdFile.js
hg add thirdFile.js
hg commit thirdFile.js
Now we want to merge our branch to default branch. First, we need to change our current branch: hg update default . Second, we need to merge our branch: hg merge -r myBranchName . Why -r ? -r means revision.
After the merge Mercurial shows a message:
Mercurial merge message
My branch name is dev . I had a file in my branch named thirdFile.js and after the merge command, it has a capital M at the beginning when I use hg status to see my working directory files (I assume that means Merge?!).
And the message says clearly that I have to commit this merge:
hg commit --message "merge branch"
Now the default branch is updated and it contains our thirdFile.js .
Clone a remote repository
Mercurial has a test repository and you can easily clone it by using this command:
Push and pull are mostly the same as git and I’m going to write a separate article about them.
And there you have it! Now you will hopefully feel more confident about using Mercurial! :) | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/learn-mercurial-revision-control-basics-in-10-minutes-if-you-know-git-4466bd9d1fa9 | ['Poorshad Shaddel'] | 2020-09-25 07:46:29.342000+00:00 | ['Git', 'Mercurial', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Version Control'] |
Head-Mounted AR/VR For Human Realistic 3-D Data Visualization | If you have done some data visualizations, chances are that you’ve heard the status quo about 3-D charts — they are bad and they should be avoided. There are numerous papers and books, arguing and demonstrating that 3-D charts are visually splendid but they can be mischievous about data, hence we should strive to present almost everything by 2-D plots.
To a large extent I agree with this argument. But with one very important clarification:
All these papers implicitly assume data visualization on 2-D displays, like monitors, projectors and TV screens.
On 2-D displays, the third dimension is artificially projected through a transformation matrix that distorts proportions. In other words, the sense of depth comes at the price of skewed and distorted images.
Up until the last 3–4 years, 2-D displays have been (with few exceptions) the only channel to present information. But that no longer is the case.
In this story I will share a different perspective on 3-D data visualization in Augmented and Virtual Reality through stereoscopic displays.
Before further reading, let’s watch a video that explains what we, at Progress Telerik, are after: | https://medium.com/telerik-ar-vr/head-mounted-ar-vr-for-human-realistic-3-d-data-visualization-40f570a8a363 | ['Georgi Atanasov'] | 2018-12-07 15:23:47.228000+00:00 | ['Augmented Reality', 'VR', 'Virtual Reality', 'AR', 'Data Visualization'] |
Mr. President, At Least Tell Us How You’re Going To Protect People With Pre-existing Conditions | Mr. President, At Least Tell Us How You’re Going To Protect People With Pre-existing Conditions
Actually, in a recent Executive Order he kind of does, and it’s not good.
Trump’s long-awaited health plan doesn’t seem likely before Election Day, but we could at least expect some clarity on that one pledge, right?
This newsletter has existed just about as long as Trump’s Presidency, and the earliest reference we could find to Trump saying his health care plan is ready-to-go took us back to a Washington Post story about a phone call with the President on January 14, 2017. In which the President referred to “nearing completion of a plan”, to replace Obamacare, he said then. On January 15, 2017!
So when the President signs and then touts an Executive Order last month saying that people with pre-existing conditions will be protected, we don’t think it’s too much to expect an answer to the question: How?
Let’s look at the Executive Order itself. Signed by the President on September 24 of this year. Surely there’s something in there. Starts out saying he’s all about:
“[B]ringing great healthcare to the American people and putting patients first.”
Which of course is just a bunch of words, because who wouldn’t want that?
After a few pages, it comes to pre-existing conditions, where the President pledges a:
“[S}teadfast commitment to always protecting individuals with pre-existing conditions and ensuring they have access to the high-quality healthcare they deserve.”
That sounds nice too.
But then there’s a big red flag. The President’s Executive Order refers to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and argues that it already mandated coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, years before Obamacare. So Obamacare doesn’t really deserve any credit for that.
That law is more commonly known as HIPAA. And most people know it because of its protections of patient privacy. But it was also meant to protect workers who lose group health insurance because they lose their jobs. To that end, it mandates any insurance company that sells individual plans must offer health insurance to them, even if they have pre-existing conditions. However, it does not require companies charge the same for everybody under those individual plans, as Obamacare does. And in almost all cases, premiums were far higher than in the worker’s previous group plan. As well as much more expensive in most cases than equivalent plans when Obamacare came along.
Extend that context further and one might infer that Trump considers those HIPAA protections enough to say he’s sticking to his promise of protecting people with pre-existing conditions, if he ever does come up with a plan of his own. Or even a justification for why he’d still be covering people with pre-existing conditions with that alone, even if Obamacare is overturned and he replaces it with nothing.
In fact, those individual policies were notoriously expensive. Particularly hard to keep up with when you just lost your job. So easy to slip through the cracks. Also, in order to qualify, you had to have recently had and lost a job.
There were also a lot of other hoops to jump through to qualify: you must first have enrolled in the Federal COBRA plan, which allows somebody to extend the group health coverage they had at the job they just lost. The aim being to tide them over until they find another job, without having to switch to an individual policy with sky high costs.
Oh, and one more thing: to qualify for any of that, a worker had to have active health insurance at their job for a period of at least 18 months, without a gap of more than 63 days.
Obamacare doesn’t really have those kinds of restrictions.
So in short, anybody who lost a job before Obamacare kicked in, knows how difficult and expensive it was to maintain health insurance. And if the President is pointing to what was happening in those pre-Obamacare days as a benchmark for protecting pre-existing conditions vs. Obamacare — which he is — then we likely got a real problem.
Or maybe not. Maybe there are people out there, maybe even lots of people who believe the President does have a “beautiful” health care plan up his sleeve, which he has just never revealed for some reason, with far better coverage and far lower premiums.
And if you do believe that and happen to be reading this, please do us just one little favor and ask yourself one simple question: if the President actually had such a plan, wouldn’t he be showing it off? Whether you support Trump or don’t, we can all agree the President is nothing if not a show off, can’t we?
So for that reason alone, we don’t even believe Trump supporters believe he has a plan, yet he’s banking on their willingness to believe he’ll protect them whatever his plan turns out to be. Even if it turns out to be nothing. Because he’d be re-elected by the time he’s really compelled to deliver on it. That is, if the Supreme Court overturns Obamacare in the latest Republican run at it, including doing away with protection of people with pre-existing conditions, which Trump is simultaneously fully supporting. And at that point he wouldn’t be running for anything anymore, so it really wouldn’t matter.
And we really don’t like to speculate on outcomes, especially on proposals that are kind of phantoms at this point. But based on past performance, we can probably narrow down what the President’s up to, to 1 of 3 possibilities:
Trump’s lying. The loophole. Again, whether you support Trump or not, you’ve got to agree he’s the King of the loophole. So let’s use as reference for how this might work the 3 Obamacare replacement plans Congress failed to pass during the 1st year of Trump’s presidency, even though Republicans had full control. In those plans, pre-existing conditions would’ve been protected at the federal level. But states would’ve been allowed to apply for waivers where they wouldn’t have to stick with the federal plan. Actually, they can do so now, but only if they still meet all mandated federal requirements, which includes coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Those new plans would’ve allowed states to separate those people out into “high risk pools” without specifying how they could ever adequately be funded. And it left open the possibility states could decide to allow insurance companies to charge higher risk people more. One of the bills allowed insurance companies to offer basically any kind of coverage they wanted, as long as they also offered at least one single plan that would cover pre-existing conditions. And presumably would be a lot more expensive. Would that meet Trump’s criteria? Probably, because back in 2017, he was ready to sign it. Finally, Trump has also favored making cheaper plans available that do not meet federal standards, but people could opt into to save money on premiums. Once you’re in that plan, in many cases you’ve opted out of coverage if in the future you have something that’s considered a pre-existing condition. But since it was your “choice” to give up that protection, Trump wouldn’t exactly be lying now would be? The technicality. Insurance companies have never been forbidden from covering people with pre-existing conditions, they just didn’t because it was too expensive for them. And technically, pre-Obamacare, someone with a pre-existing condition could’ve still gotten health care coverage, it was just exorbitantly expensive in most cases. So if things just went back to the way they were, the President could still technically say people with pre-existing conditions are covered, because he wouldn’t be doing anything to deny coverage to them. Whether they could afford it or not is their business.
So the President saying that he’s going to do something means very little when what he might do could mean so many different things. | https://ericjscholl.medium.com/mr-president-at-least-tell-us-how-youre-going-to-protect-people-with-pre-existing-conditions-866a7037a2e0 | ['Eric J Scholl'] | 2020-10-27 12:55:21.311000+00:00 | ['Insurance', 'Healthcare', 'Politics', 'Health', 'Donald Trump'] |
Private HBCUs Should Be Receiving the Majority of Large Private Gifts | Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash
Before I get into my explanation, I should let it be known that I am a proud Fort Valley State University alumni and a staunch public HBCU advocate.
There has been a lot of buzz and spotlight on HBCUs this year as racial tensions have yet again erupted in America. This has led to substantial donations by private benefactors to a select few HBCUs. Patty Quillin and Reed Hastings donated $120 million, Mackenzie Scott donated upwards of $200 million, and the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis(CFGM) gave a $40 million endowment. Up until this week when Ms. Scott announced a new round of donations to HBCUs, bringing her total contributions to $560 million, each of the HBCUs that had been beneficiaries of these transformational donations was private HBCUs, and besides the donation by the CFGM, each institution was ranked in the U.S News Top 10 HBCUs. It is no coincidence that the institutions receiving funding were private and it has everything to do with how HBCUs receive funding. However, these donations, especially by Ms. Scott and Mrs./Mr. Quillen/Hastings has seen a general response by the HBCU community along the lines of “This is great but there are 100 more institutions who could also use the money.”
I have written extensively on the fact that the donations should be spread out to more institutions, but the fact they are predominately going to private HBCUs first is the right move.
To frame my argument, I am going to draw from a few of my previous articles. I have already explained the differences between public and private HBCUs. In short, private HBCUs since their inception have always had a large portion of their financial support provided by black church groups and/or white philanthropists. Take Spelman College, for example, if you examined their history you would find that white philanthropy has been a significant part of their institution’s development. Spelman is named after John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller. In examining the history of other private HBCUs you will see that many have similarly been supported and propelled by (white) philanthropy.
Pulling the financial data from the present-day you will see that Private HBCUs still rely heavily on private gifts/grants and subsequent investment returns, in the same manner, that public HBCUs rely on State Government support. Since private HBCUs see substantially less federal and state aid, private gifts and investments are essentially their state aid.
(Data from the National Center for Educational Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_313.30.asp )
When the landmark Brown vs Board decision came down and declared segregation of schools to be unconstitutional, both public and private HBCUs were hurt by the decision. It is well-documented that the integration of schools has caused HBCU enrollment to decline it is often not discussed that the decision also caused a sharp decline in outside support for HBCUs. Many white philanthropists concluded that since blacks could now attend integrated universities, HBCUs were no longer necessary. Questioning the value of HBCUs is an issue all HBCUs still face and we often catch ourselves having to explain their value to those who have not attended our institutions. For private HBCUs, the loss of support meant that the funding they had been receiving since their inception was pulled from under them. This is a reason why I believe private HBCUs are the institutions that have had to shut their doors in recent years as they struggle to garner outside support and compete in a competitive higher education landscape. This is also in part why I labeled the CFGM endowment to LeMoyne-Owen as the most transformational HBCU gift.
The fact that there has been a surge in private benefactors and philanthropy to HBCUs is a welcome sight and I hope it means that private HBCUs will be able to get back an essential funding source they have been missing for half a century. My biggest worry is the private HBCUs that have been affected most by the abandonment of private philanthropy, the LeMoyne-Owen’s, the Bennett College’s, will continue to be excluded and continue to face extinction.
To reiterate, I am not opposed to Public HBCUs receiving sizable private donations as it is the task of Unversity/Institutional Advancement departments to forge those relationships, I do think the fact that Public HBCUs have an extra substantial funding source should be taken into account by private benefactors. Of the 24 HBCUs that have received sizeable donations from these benefactors, 10 HBCUs have been public, but it is critical to note Ms. Scott’s contributions make up all the public HBCU donations. (10(43%) of her HBCUs have been public). The state of public HBCU funding is largely caused in part by the continued negligence of our Federal and State governments since these institutions' inception. In the same manner, there has been a surge in private philanthropy, there should be a similar surge in governmental aid to HBCUs, that would overwhelmingly benefit public HBCUs. The passing of the FUTURES Act is a step in the right direction but public HBCUs are owed so much more. Additionally, one area of philanthropy I believe to be fair game to both public and private HBCUs is corporate philanthropy. A good example of corporate philanthropy benefitting both institution types is the recent $35 million donation by Dominion Energy that was split by 11 HBCUs(a mix of public and private institutions).
All in all, while I agree there has not been enough due diligence done in sourcing the institutions to receive these benefactors' large donations, the fact that the donations have gone predominately to private HBCUs is the right move. Private philanthropy has been in the blood of private HBCUs since their inception. We, as public HBCU alumni and supporters, should continue to solicit donations from benefactors but more importantly force our lawmakers to hold our government accountable for over a century of negligence to our institutions. As it relates to the surge in private donations, we should continue to root for benefactors to spread the wealth amongst the deserving HBCUs, even if the donations end up predominately going to private HBCUs. All HBCUs are facing an uphill battle, let us continue to uplift all aspects of our community. | https://medium.com/wearehbcus/private-hbcus-should-be-receiving-the-majority-of-large-private-gifts-b08dce1cdb94 | ['Filmore Thomas'] | 2020-12-19 20:32:33.721000+00:00 | ['Hbcu', 'Race', 'Philanthropy', 'Wearehbcus', 'Education'] |
Latest 2021 Google Ads Updates | It has been a busy year for Google with all the updates and improvements, which means it has been a busier year for digital marketers. It is important for both Google Ads and digital marketers to keep up with new trends and updates. Digital marketers have to wrap their heads around the adjustments in order to get the best results possible, whereas Google Ads has to update its algorithm to ensure that it is providing the most accurate, reliable, and secure pages for its users.
Let’s get into some of the newest updates Google Ads has given us.
1- Updated Features to Keep Up with Demands on The Go.
When you run a business, and campaigns are included, you know how important it is to keep an eye on them 24/7. Whether to stay on top of the customer demands, or to see how your campaigns are performing, Google Ads has made it easier for you to understand what is going on. Now with a mobile app, keeping connected with your campaigns is only a click away.
What can you do with these new features?
Monitor not only your campaigns, but also get insights about how they are performing. Now, with the newest update, you can get performance insights, real time notifications, explanations and even recommendations for solving issues. Now with the new modifications, you will be able to see what worked positively in your performance. This way, you will be able to know what to replicate and what to ignore!
Using search trends to understand real time customer demands.
To understand this better, let’s imagine a scenario. You have a clothing business and need to know how and what to do in order to reach more customers. With search trends you can learn what the rising trends are, let’s say hoodies. This way, you will be able to provide your customers exactly what they want without them knowing. On top of that, you can tap into the search trend and get more detailed searches associated with that trend; for example, “Pastel-colored hoodies”.
Google Ads didn’t stop there! You can also create alerts when new searches start trending and are relevant to your business.
2- From “YouTube Video Discovery Ads” To “In-feed Video Ads”
What does YouTube Video discovery ads do? Well, they place your brand alongside your YouTube content or people who seem interested. This is a very smart move since the people viewing your content are already potential customers, which improves the chance of sales.
How does the In-feed video ads work? These ads consist of a thumbnail image from the video you created with some relevant text next to it. Depending where the ad is appearing, the size of the ad changes, however no matter how small, it has a great chance of inviting people to click on the video. After the click, the viewer will be directed to a YouTube watch page or a channel homepage where your video will start playing.
Where do these ads appear in the first place? To start with, these videos are programmed to appear places of discovery; that is, to your target audience. Some of the places you can find these ads are:
Next to a related YouTube video.
As a result of a YouTube search.
Simply, on your YouTube mobile homepage.
What’s great about this feature is that the only time you will be charged is when a viewer clicks on your thumbnail and chooses to watch the video!
It’s your time to bring your videos to life.
3- Take Advantage of the Customer Match
If you value reaching your customers, then you will thank Google Ads for this. Just as the name suggests, customer match helps you reach your customers by using both online and offline data. Whether on the search console, their shopping tab, the videos they watch on YouTube or their Gmail list, customer match helps you target ads to customers who are guaranteed to be interested.
Let’s talk about some of the benefits you can enjoy while using customer match:
Increasing brand awareness.
Build deep connections with your customers
Optimize your campaigns.
Discover and reach potential customers.
Increase the conversion rate of your website.
Getting interested and want to know more details about the process? You’re in the right place because we will talk about how exactly customer match works.
– First, you start by creating and uploading a customer list with information, which you got from your own customers.
– Second, you create a campaign that is targeted to those customers.
–Thirdly and finally, whenever they use the search network, YouTube or Gmail, your ads will be right there waiting for the clicks.
As simple as that!
4- Your Products Hand In Hand With Video Campaigns
YouTube has changed our lives ever since 2005 Valentine’s Day; the day it was launched and is continuing to change it for the better. Whether you use YouTube for business or pleasure, there’s no denying that it is extremely beneficial.
YouTube isn’t just a place where people rush to be entertained and connect with their favorite creators, they also come to shop. Which is why Google Ads has come up with a new feature where you can display product feeds links to your awareness and consideration Video campaigns, making your videos shoppable too!
Did you know that 70% YouTube viewers buy a product because of seeing it on YouTube? 70%!
What does this mean? Now, with Google Ads’s newest update, you can display browsable images of your products right below your video ads. This will not only inspire the viewers to make a purchase, but also will increase the conversion rate and drive more clicks.
On average, the advertisers that choose to add product feeds below their video ads campaign achieve 60% more conversions, wait for it, at a lower cost!
To end our blog in an interesting way, let us look at some of the mind-blowing, jaw-dropping, super interesting statistics, and facts about google. | https://medium.com/@brainspace-sa/latest-2021-google-ads-updates-dbebaf343e4e | ['Brainspace Digital Solutions Agency'] | 2021-12-25 14:31:27.401000+00:00 | ['SEM', 'Ppc Agency', 'Search Engine Marketing', 'Adwords Management', 'PPC Marketing'] |
matt webb’s 15 rules for blogging | Matt Webb, who has been blogging for a long time, has been blogging a lot more recently, and I’m here for it. He recently shared his 15 rules for blogging, which he uses to “bump [him] out of certain mental traps.” I loved #8 in particular.
8. Give up on trying to be interesting. Readers will come to my site for what’s interesting to me, or not, it’s fine, just say what I think about whatever I’m thinking about.
CF long-time blogger Ev Williams’ post on relational media. | https://sippey.medium.com/matt-webbs-15-rules-for-blogging-b872bdcf868f | ['Michael Sippey'] | 2020-10-20 21:44:01.877000+00:00 | ['Blogging'] |
UX Case Study: 10cBooks — How We Improved our Internal System for Borrowing Books | UX Case Study: 10cBooks — How We Improved our Internal System for Borrowing Books
An internal library in our office is one of the best ideas we’ve ever had, but how to make sure that it comes with an equally good online service for borrowing books? (UX case study)
10cBooks is an internal system for borrowing books in 10Clouds. Thanks to it, employees can develop their interests in the area of IT, design, management and many others. Everything is completely free! We created 10cBooks with the idea that everyone could easily access unlimited sources of knowledge. What’s more, if an interesting book is not in the collection, employees can add a book to the waiting list, which is subject to vote. If the book gets enough votes — it is ordered.
Even the best product can be improved, which is why I wanted to determine — what is the level of satisfaction of using 10cBooks, what are the main pain points and how we can get rid of them. This article describes how the process looked like step by step.
Research Goals & Stages
I wanted to check what experience the use of the system generates and identify areas that need improvement. For this purpose, I prepared a questionnaire (thanks, Google Forms!) and sent it out through the company. The next stage was to create a map of empathy based on open answers and the definition of the main pain points. Then, using the HMW method and brainstorming technics, me and UI Designer Agnieszka Ciurysek identified a number of solutions that respond to the user’s problems. By creating two primary use cases, I was able to input the actual solutions within the user flows. After that, wireframes where quickly created and then, actual UI.
Discovery Phase
Questionnaire
The first step was to indicate who uses the service and what are the feelings associated with using it. Users are all these people from 10Clouds who borrowed a book at least once. The questionnaire was sent to all of them, so we were able to check the satisfaction level and also all comments, pains, likes and feelings about the service.
From 120 people 35 filled in a questionnaire. This is not a bad result, assuming that only 62 people actively use the internal system to borrow books.
I asked 16 different questions:
7 of them where multiple choice questions such as: “how often do you borrow books” and “how often you give back the book after the deadline?”
4 of them where scale questions such as: “how would you rate your level of satisfaction when using 10cBooks” and “how would you rate the system of reminding about the return of the book?”
5 of them were open questions: “describe three things which you don’t like about 10cBooks”, “describe your feelings regarding 10cBooks in one sentence” etc.
What were the major findings? In general, the service was rated as good, very good or excellent by 89,7% of respondents, but only 5,9% rated it as excellent, so there was a room for improvement. From all functions, experience related to returning books got the worst score. 36,8% of respondents rated the process of returning a book as bad or terrible, so we knew that this area should be deeply analyzed. The answers from open questions gave us the most hints and deeply tackled the interesting aspects of using the service. Based on that answers it was possible to create the empathy map.
Empathy Map
An empathy map allowed to understand the user. Thanks to this it was possible to determine what the user thinks, feels, sees and hears, and based on his fears and needs we have identified a wide range of possible pain points.
Pain Points
Pain points were then combined into groups using affinity mapping. We have indicated areas which are the most common problems for users. The process of returning books generated the most pain points — as expected from the rating questions. This is a complex problem because it occurs for people who have a borrowed book and must return it, but also has an impact on those who wait for the book.
“Returning the book” — Users paid a lot of attention to the process of returning books. One of the respondents noticed that there is no information on for how long you can borrow a book. There is no commitment that you have to borrow the book for a certain period. The other problems are annoying notifications, which are silenced only when the book is returned. Users who have missed the deadline are worried that they are holding a book that someone is waiting for — they have no information if this book is needed or not. “I do not know what to borrow”- There are a lot of comments pointing out that there is a need for additional information about the book, so then it will be easier to decide which book to take. It is also necessary to publish covers so that users could easily find the book on the shelf. “Rating” — A few people pointed out that the rating system is not very clear. You can not evaluate a book that you have not borrowed. The possibility to look how others voted for specific books might be beneficial.
How might we?
Using the “How might we?” method and brainstorm techniques we developed a number of ideas that seem to solve the problems described above.
Adding information on how many days you have left to keep the book so that the user would be aware of when he should return the book
Adding a profile in which we show information about both the history of borrowings and recommendations based on borrowed books, and notifications related to information about the availability of the book or about new books.
Adding book details — the ability to rate a book that was not borrowed through 10cBooks, the ability to preview the cover and check the ratings given by other users. Thanks to this user can write to the person and exchange opinions about the book
Adding a screen informing about the maximum time of borrowing the book — thanks to this the user will be more aware of his choice. In addition, every time you enter the list where you see the book you read, it also has information about the number of days left to return.
CTA “I am still reading” — By adding this option, users will not receive annoying notifications about the return of the book at the moment when they exceeded the deadline. They simply click on the button “I am still reading” and they have to declare how much time they still need. In addition, the information will be displayed on the list of books — thanks to this, those interested in the book can see how much time it will be out of order.
In addition: adding filters and advanced search to help find a particular book
Design Phase
User Flows
After identifying areas that respond to users’ pain points, the next step was to consider transferring ideas to specific functionalities. In that case, I wrote out two use cases: “I want to borrow a book” and “I’m still reading”.
Wireframes
In order to improve the process, I sketched the solutions on the sheet of paper. The design phase based on close cooperation with the talented UI designer Agnieszka Ciurysek. We exchanged our views and opinions, as there is never a single solution to a particular problem.
The visual and functional solutions focused on fixing the pain points determined at the discovery stage. We have made sure that changes are introduced evolutionarily, without the need to redesign the entire product.
What did we design?
User profile — a place where the user has the whole history of borrowings, as well as recommendations related to his interests. Also, there is a section with notifications from people who are waiting for the book, which user has borrowed. From a psychological point of view, we believe that social responsibility will make the user feel responsible for returning book as fast as it’s possible.
Book’s detail page — a place where the user can see the cover and a description of a particular item. There are also similar books available so that user can quickly browse items on similar topics. There is also a place where the user can see who else has read that book, how and by whom a book is rated. Thanks to this user know with whom he could exchange opinions about the book, which is helpful to make decisions.
Remaining time: smart reminders — when borrowing the book, the user gets notified about the borrowing time. Already at this stage, he becomes aware that borrowing time is not endless. When the user exceeds the deadline — he can extend the time in three options — 1 week, 2 weeks and a month. During this time, he will not receive annoying notifications about returning the book, but he will still see notifications from people who are interested in it. That option is available from the main list as well as information about time left.
UI Design
As the previous design was rated very high we didn’t change it so much. (91% of the users said that they want to keep the existing colour scheme) Design is available on Dribbble or Behance, and I definitely recommended to go there to have a full picture.
Next Steps
We are now in a phase where the project is waiting for development — we would like to send a survey to 10cBooks users one month after launch to see if the satisfaction of using the website has increased and, above all, whether the process of returning books will have better ratings than before the changes.
I hope that those actions will improve the quality and satisfaction, but only evaluation and test will give me the real answer. Fingers crossed :)
I also believe that this case study will inspire you to always look for improvements and remember how valuable the feedback from your users is. Even if an app that you are working on seems to be fine, it is worth to check if it really fulfils the needs of its users. | https://medium.com/beautiful-code-smart-design-by-10clouds/ux-case-study-10cbooks-how-we-improved-our-internal-system-for-borrowing-books-39c04502234b | ['Natalia Jach'] | 2019-07-05 11:47:14.369000+00:00 | ['Ux Case Study', 'UI', 'UX', 'Product Design'] |
Why Átlátszó tried to forecast, and not just visualise, COVID-19 cases in Hungary | Átlátszó operated in a difficult environment during COVID-19 as hospital staff were expressly banned from speaking to the press. This meant the team received anonymous leaks about topics including the shortage of masks and the unreliability of the rapid COVID-19 tests imported from China. Most recently they published an anonymous diary from a healthcare worker explaining what it was like to work in a hospital during the height of Hungary’s pandemic. To ensure safety, the team maintains a strict policy of not using a mobile phone and of communicating solely via secure email. It also advises sources to use Gmail or Protonmail as well as other encrypted chat and voice applications like Signal, Viber or WhatsApp.
Átlátszó Facebook post
Átlátszó’s website saw unique visitors more than doubled from 600,000 in February to 1.4 million in March. Traffic rose when the team published COVID-19 stories that the mainstream media weren’t reporting on. For example, its most popular piece during COVID-19 was about a relative of a politician from Fidesz, Viktor Orban’s right-wing party, profiteering on the shortage of medical supplies. The Hungarian version of the article reached 72,000 shares on Facebook. The team believes that publishing stories the Hungarian mainstream media weren’t covering — such as the reorganisation of hospitals — made the site a destination for concerned citizens. Traffic in April dropped to about 1.3 million unique visitors and then just over a million visitors in May (see chart below).
The organisation saw a handful of people cancelling their microdonations out of over 3000. This is likely due to the economic uncertainty as people may continue to fear being laid off. Átlátszó doesn’t yet know how donations have been impacted by the pandemic’s economic blowback as the government only releases information about the 1% tax donations in September.
How has COVID-19 changed the future of Átlátszó?
When Átlátszó started crowdfunding in 2011, no other Hungarian media was asking their readers for donations. Today, all independent media in Hungary does crowdfunding, making the market much more competitive and harder for Atlaszo to raise funds from readers. Pressure on international donors to help out independent Hungarian media has increased in recent years. This means Átlátszó expects more competition for crowdfunding and international donors as well.
Átlátszó will continue to work with the data journalism team. The success of the ‘koronamonitor’ has demonstrated the power of data journalism to stand on its own. While there are no extra resources to invest in the team, they want to find more data-led stories that can add to the depth of their coverage.
Átlátszó’s mission remains the same. It will continue to publish stories on COVID-19 and hold the government to account. The new fake news law in Hungary means the team has to continue to report very carefully and to focus on fact-checking. They continue to work with lawyers and fight attempts to silence their work.
What have they learned?
“Investigative reporting on Covid-19 was in high demand since most of the Hungarian press did not cover the pressing issues during the lockdown. We have learned if you have enough courage to report on problems during a crisis your audience will reward you. The ‘koronamonitor’ was by far the most successful data journalism feature we ever did. This made us realise that data journalism can be very important to our work. Prior to this, we saw data journalism as a ‘nice to have’ add-on feature but not a necessity. This was the first case where data journalists played a central role in Átlátszó and were the most important element of our coronavirus content. This means we will look for news topics that can be visualised and explained in a similar way.”
Tamas Bodoky, executive director, Átlátszó | https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/why-%C3%A1tl%C3%A1tsz%C3%B3-made-an-effort-to-forecast-hungarys-handling-of-covid-19-9af6da2197e0 | ['Tara Kelly'] | 2020-09-07 09:45:05.255000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Journalism', 'Press Freedom', 'Data Journalism', 'Media'] |
Data-at-Rest encryption in MySQL | Setup:
The data-at-rest encryption feature relies on a keyring plugin for master encryption key management.
We will be using docker approach to achieve data at rest encryption in MySQL, so that you can save some time for snacks! 😜
Step 1:
Clone the repository:
*We are using MySQL version 8.0, yes we always use latest ones 😉
Step 2:
Setup a keyring plugin:
Move to conf/my.cnf
Add the following lines to my.cnf to setup keyring plugin:
early-plugin-load=keyring_file.so keyring_file_data=/var/lib/mysql/keyring-data/keyring innodb_file_per_table=ON
Step 3:
Build and run customized docker image to repository
Navigate to root folder
Build the docker image:
sudo docker build -t <IMAGE_NAME>:<VERSION_ID> .
Run the docker image:
sudo docker run -d — name mysql <IMAGE_NAME>:<VERSION_ID>
Step 4:
Execute the running docker container:
sudo docker exec -it mysql bash
Step 5:
After moving inside the container, check for /etc/mysql/my.cnf contains same configuration as we had set.
sudo vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Step 6:
Login to mysql instance:
mysql -uroot -p
*Default password is no password
Step 7:
Create database and tables:
mysql> CREATE DATABASE databasename; mysql> CREATE TABLE table_name ( column1 datatype, column2 datatype, column3 datatype, …. );
Step 8:
Insert some data:
mysql> INSERT INTO table_name (column1, column2, column3, …) VALUES (value1, value2, value3, …);
Step 9:
We have data in place, now we will move to encrypting this data at rest 😇
Check for the keyring plugin is in place:
If you didn’t get required output, please follow step:
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN keyring_file SONAME ‘keyring_file.so’;
Step 10:
The default_table_encryption variable can be set for an individual client connection or globally using SET syntax.
The following statement enables default schema and tablespace encryption globally:
mysql> SET GLOBAL default_table_encryption=ON;
Step 11:
To encrypt particular table at-rest, first select the database:
mysql> use databasename;
Step 12:
To alter the encryption of an existing general tablespace, an ENCRYPTION clause must be specified:
mysql> ALTER TABLE table_name ENCRYPTION = ‘Y’;
Step 13:
Validate the encryption:
Our output should look like below:
Voilaa!!🥳 this is how we encrypted data at-rest in MySQL 😎 | https://medium.com/@shubhamkhairnar/data-at-rest-encryption-in-mysql-a8abd3a864de | ['Shubham Khairnar'] | 2020-12-08 07:26:09.120000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'Encryption', 'Data At Rest', 'Docker', 'Data'] |
Evropská unie zase dohnala a předehnala! | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/shifthappens/evropsk%C3%A1-unie-zase-dohnala-a-p%C5%99edehnala-dddb0801be30 | ['Martin Pánek'] | 2017-12-31 12:11:03.262000+00:00 | ['Eusoc', 'Politika', 'Notes'] |
Converting a Jupyter Notebook to Pdf | Originally published at http://www.ds4n6.io.
jupyter nbconvert my_notebook.ipynb --to pdf
If you want to change the font size, for instance, you can do it through overriding templates ( docs, base templates), but it can get complex. So the easiest way is to convert to LaTeX first, do some simple replacements, and then convert the resulting LaTeX to pdf via the pdflatex utility:
$ jupyter nbconvert --to latex my_notebook.ipynb
$ sed -r -i 's/documentclass\[11pt\]\{article\}/documentclass[8pt]{extarticle}/' my_notebook.tex # <---- This modifies the font size from 11pt to 8pt
$ sed -r -i 's/geometry\{verbose,tmargin=1in,bmargin=1in,lmargin=1in,rmargin=1in}/geometry{verbose,tmargin=0.5in,bmargin=0.5in,lmargin=0.2in,rmargin=0.2in}/' my_notebook.tex # <---- This sets the margins
$ pdflatex my_notebook
$ rm my_notebook.tex; rm my_notebook.out; rm my_notebook.aux; rm Requirements:
Requirements:
texlive-xetex must be installed in the system (Ubuntu installation: apt-get install texlive-xetex texlive-generic-extra)
Refs: | https://medium.com/ds4n6-tips-and-tricks/converting-a-jupyter-notebook-to-pdf-c7f591b9f827 | [] | 2020-11-16 12:06:15.059000+00:00 | ['Ds4n6', 'Data Science', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Forensics'] |
Does Social Opinion really matter? | When I told my mom that I want to marry a girl outside my caste, I could see crinkles growing fast on her head, like a stream of water flowing in to fill the gaps. I asked her, why are you so worried? She replied, “Char log kya kahenge?” (What will people say about it?).
It’s beyond my logical thinking that I take such life-changing decisions based on what people think about it. Contrary to that, almost everyday I count on the opinions of my friends, and even random people at times, before I take decisions. Decisions like, which phone to buy? which movie to watch? where to travel? which book to read? Marijuana: good or bad?..(OK, may be not this one!) and so on.. are majorly driven by people’s opinion. It is actually the reason why reviews and ratings are the heart of so many tech companies ( IMDB, Tripadvisor etc).
The thought has been stuck in my mind for a while — Does social opinion really matter?. Being in my late 20’s, it’s about my age that I should take a stand on such “philosophies” of life. Rewinding back, I recall a whole bunch of my childhood memories revolving around “Char log kya kahenge?” which somehow faded as I aged. The wise man grew in me, who could take his own stand on bigger choices of life, yet running around asking for opinions on rather smaller things.
The mystery here lies in the line you draw between your personal space and social space. That boundary is already defined when your emotions overtake the mind. And when that happens, the opinion is rather a judgement of the society. However, when it comes to this consumeristic world, you seek for a “social validation” before you make a choice. It is rare to go against the masses, when choosing a product (or service). More I think about it, more I realise the importance of social opinion, and it’s quiet presence in my life.
Isn’t it in the power of social opinion to make or break governments, companies, religions, markets…? I wish to see a world where society itself can drive its future, a world where every individual is visible, counted and considered. In the era of smartphones and social media platforms like facebook, I see us heading in the right direction. It’s just a matter of time that our society will start listening it’s own voice! | https://medium.com/sociale-blog/does-social-opinion-really-matter-41aabf91a03f | ['Akhilesh Lahoti'] | 2015-12-24 14:26:08.488000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Philosophy Of Life', 'Opinion'] |
Farmsim Forensics: Real World Terrains (a.k.a. DEMs) | It looks like we got lucky again. Our entire desired map area is covered by a single DEM tile. Go ahead and download that tile using the ‘Download TIF’ button. If you picked a location that needs two or more tiles, download all of them. If a one meter DEM is not available for your location, download the next best one (1/9 arc second is about 3.5 meter per pixel, 1/3 is about 10 meter pixel). If you try to open the files to view them, they will appear all white. Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong, the data is stored in a way that doesn’t translate well into visible colors. Think about these TIF files as large spreadsheets, where every pixel stores a lot of information about a little piece of the world.
Processing the DEM tiles
To recap, we picked a location, grabbed its coordinates, and downloaded one or more DEM tiles that cover our area. The last step is to crop these to the bouding box of our area, and convert them into the format that GIANTS expects. For all this, we use a single command line tool, called gdal . It’s an industry standard tool for working with geospatial data.
On Windows, the easiest way to get it installed properly is using Anaconda: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/gdal. The website provides installation instructions. Either way, make sure to have it installed before continuing.
Stitching tiles together (optionally)
If you had to download more than one tile in the previous step, we will need to stitch these together first. From the Anaconda command prompt, in the folder where you downloaded the tiles, run:
> gdalwarp tile1.tif tile2.tif merged.tif
Cropping the tile
Next up, we are going to crop our tile (or merged tiles) to the area we need:
> gdal_translate -projwin -108.334368 39.126934 -108.311245 39.108917 -projwin_srs CRS:84 USGS_one_meter_x73y434_CO_MesaCo_QL2_UTM12_2016.tif cropped.tif
This command tells gdal to take a window with the coordinates that we specify (top left, bottom right) and put them in a new file. Because different sources use different coordinate systems and projections, we also explicitly specify that these coordinates are CRS:84 coordinates.
Elevation levels
Next up, we need to figure out what the minimum and maximum elevation is in the tile. We need this information, because we need to tell GE what the heightScale of our DEM is (in order words, how many meters of elevation does going from completely black to completely white in our heightmap represent). For this, we use gdalinfo :
> gdalinfo -mm cropped.tif Driver: GTiff/GeoTIFF
Files: cropped.tif
Size is 2058, 1941
Coordinate System is:
PROJCS["NAD83 / UTM zone 12N",
GEOGCS["NAD83",
DATUM["North_American_Datum_1983",
SPHEROID["GRS 1980",6378137,298.257222101,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","7019"]],
TOWGS84[0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
AUTHORITY["EPSG","6269"]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],
UNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],
AUTHORITY["EPSG","4269"]],
PROJECTION["Transverse_Mercator"],
PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],
PARAMETER["central_meridian",-111],
PARAMETER["scale_factor",0.9996],
PARAMETER["false_easting",500000],
PARAMETER["false_northing",0],
UNIT["metre",1,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","9001"]],
AXIS["Easting",EAST],
AXIS["Northing",NORTH],
AUTHORITY["EPSG","26912"]]
Origin = (730425.000000000000000,4334247.000000000000000)
Pixel Size = (1.000000000000000,-1.000000000000000)
Metadata:
AREA_OR_POINT=Area
Image Structure Metadata:
INTERLEAVE=BAND
Corner Coordinates:
Upper Left ( 730425.000, 4334247.000) (108d20' 3.76"W, 39d 7'36.98"N)
Lower Left ( 730425.000, 4332306.000) (108d20' 6.13"W, 39d 6'34.08"N)
Upper Right ( 732483.000, 4334247.000) (108d18'38.14"W, 39d 7'35.01"N)
Lower Right ( 732483.000, 4332306.000) (108d18'40.53"W, 39d 6'32.11"N)
Center ( 731454.000, 4333276.500) (108d19'22.14"W, 39d 7' 4.55"N)
Band 1 Block=2058x1 Type=Float32, ColorInterp=Gray
Description = Layer_1
Computed Min/Max=1430.570,1687.457
NoData Value=-3.4028234663852886e+38
Metadata:
LAYER_TYPE=athematic
This command outputs a lot of information, but the bits we’re interested in are highlighted above, the minimum and maximum elevation values.
Creating the heightmap
The final command that we will use will create the actual PNG image
> gdal_translate -of PNG -ot UInt16 -scale 1400 1700 0 65535 -a_srs CRS:84 -outsize 2049 2049 cropped.tif DEM.png
We’re telling gdal that we need a PNG image, with 16-bit depth. We are also specifying that we would like an elevation range of 1400 to 1700 meters to take up the entire range from black (0) to white (65535). We also specify the projection, and the resolution of the file (2049x2049).
And there you have it, the heightmap for our terrain. You can clearly spot the low (dark) river, and the higher (lighter) mountains on the left and right of it. Let’s load it up in GE and see what it looks like. Don’t forget to set the heightScale to whatever range you picked (in our case: 300), and unitPerPixel to match the resolution of your image. | https://medium.com/farmsim-forensics/farmsim-forensics-real-world-terrains-a-k-a-dems-934c267a60e5 | ['Kim Brandwijk'] | 2021-01-07 03:17:51.192000+00:00 | ['Terrain', 'Dem', 'Mapping', 'Fs19', 'Farming Simulator'] |
The gospel of Elektra Abundance | The gospel of Elektra Abundance
Transgender actress Dominique Jackson of “Pose” was always a believer.
“My grandmother’s proud of me, my family’s proud because here I am, I’m closer to God now.” In a 2015 interview, she thinks back on the Anglican altar boy in Trinidad, and being raped by the priest. I’m catching up with Dominique Jackson, the star of FX’s Pose, struck by how the imperious Elektra Abundance is, in reality, a spiritual seeker.
She started out life in hell.
“We live in this realm,” she sighs, “where things exist but we pretend they don’t exist, so that makes them, you know, nonexistent.”
It led to a long investigation into what ‘exists’ . . . finding God, and herself.
As in the Protestant Reformation, she had to figure out what a priest meant to her. Did he handle “God” for you?
That remained true for her family and community, even after they learned of the abuse, so she was left without a spiritual narrative, except dying. “I felt that it would be better for me to save my family’s name by dying than to come forward as myself or live as myself and bring them shame and disrespect.”
She laughs. “And then I woke the hell up.” | https://medium.com/belover/dominique-jacksons-spiritual-journey-1b7ffd13e969 | ['Jonathan Poletti'] | 2020-05-02 06:07:38.256000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Religion', 'LGBTQ', 'Life', 'TV Series'] |
GE Lighting announces three new smart home products and a new brand | GE Lighting announces three new smart home products and a new brand Tasha Jan 27·3 min read
GE Lighting is moving beyond smart lighting products for the first time, announcing an indoor home security camera, a ceiling fan controller, and an outdoor smart plug ahead of CES. These are the company’s first new products since being acquired by Savant Systems acquired in May, 2020.
Savant is also launching a new brand identity—Cync—to replace the awkward C by GE branding the company has used to date (it will retain the familiar GE logo, which is used under license from General Electric). A new Cync app will be released in March, but it will be backward compatible with all the C by GE products, so old and new products can coexist.
GE says the new app will be based on Savant’s software platform, which was developed for professional installations, and will include the parent company’s TrueImage feature that allows users to preview lighting changes—in color and/or brightness—using a photo of their room in the app.
[ Further reading: The best smart switches and dimmers ]The first new hardware product, expected to ship in March, will be an outdoor smart plug with two independently controllable outlets. The weather-resistant Cync Outdoor Smart Plug will feature Bluetooth for local control and an onboard Wi-Fi adapter to connect to the cloud. A Wi-Fi connection will also enable users to control the outlets with voice commands via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
GE Lighting The two outlets on the Cync Outdoor Smart Plug can be independently controlled via the app or with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant voice commands.
The Cync Indoor Camera, expected to arrive in May, emphasizes privacy with a mechanical shutter that can be moved over the lens when you’re home and want to ensure video isn’t being recorded. Moving the shutter electronically turns off both the camera and the onboard microphone that allows two-way conversations. It will stream video in 1080p resolution using a 2-megapixel image sensor with HDR and color night vision capabilities. The camera will also be capable of motion and sound tracking, and it has a pan/tilt feature.
Insert a microSD card in the camera and video will be recorded to that local storage, versus being uploaded to the cloud. GE Lighting plans to offer a cloud storage subscription option, but pricing for that service has not been announced.
GE Lighting Sliding the physical shutter over the Cync Indoor Smart Camera’s lens electronically disables the camera’s lens and its onboard microphone to ensure privacy.
The Cync Fan Speed Smart Switch connects to your Wi-Fi network and allows you to select four speeds for a connected ceiling fan. A row of LEDs will light up to indicate the currently selected fan speed. Users will also be able to schedule the fan to turn on and off on a schedule, and they’ll be able to group the fan with other GE Lighting smart home products. The fan controller will be offered in four- and three-wire versions, the latter for installations where a neutral wire isn’t present in the electrical box. It’s expected to ship in June.
GE Lighting GE Lighting’s Cync Fan Speed Smart Switch features a similar industrial design to its smart lighting controls and lets users select four speeds for a connected ceiling fan.
GE Lighting says it also intends to ship a smart thermostat this year, but it has not released any details about that product. The company also has not yet announced pricing for any of its new Cync products.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@tasha40211881/ge-lighting-announces-three-new-smart-home-products-and-a-new-brand-f369ddab5997 | [] | 2021-01-27 11:27:03.929000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Surveillance', 'Security Cameras'] |
As a software engineer, do you have a mentor at work? | As I am an IT professional, I choose my mentor by his or her knowledge and all the protégé information with the experience they can share with me. In many cases, I got my coach while I am in my profession. But the best mentor I got only from SkillPal. It is the Indo-Russian platform by which novice mentees can feel confident. SkillPal will help those who want a career switch or wants to start something new.
Your mentor would have experienced many failures while walking his path, and so he would have found creative solutions for such shortcomings. With their guidance, you can take shortcuts evading these failures. Moreover, they can help you get a better picture of your end goals. The best way to get a successful mentor is SkillPal. It is the Indo-Russian platform where qualified mentors come to give personalized mentorship.
Just like knowing your shortcomings, knowing your strengths is also a key part of your career. You know best what you’re good at and what comes easily to you. And again, a SkillPal mentor may be able to point out some assets you may not fully realize. But strengths are only strengths as long as they continue to grow and develop. And often developing those strengths isn’t something you can do on your own.
Here are 10 qualities to look for in a mentor:
Investment in education and growth Willingness to connect and network Availability to devote time Active listening skills Feedback capabilities Honesty and integrity Positive outlook Confidence and ability to motivate Industry knowledge Resilience and adaptability
The knowledge, advice, and resources a SkillPal mentor shares depend on the format and goals of a specific mentoring relationship. A mentor may share with a mentee (or protege) information about his or her own career path, as well as provide guidance, motivation, emotional support, and role modelling. A mentor may help with exploring careers, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources. The mentor role may change as the needs of the mentee change.
The best website for linking mentors with mentees is SkillPal. According to Skillpal, they onboarded industry expert mentors who passed many toughest phases and here to talk with mentees. Mentors from various fields came here to discuss with young and inexperienced people. You can get an IT expert, business expert, startup mentors and even martial art expert here too.
A mentor is defined in the dictionary as “an experienced and trusted adviser.” A mentor is someone with which you can develop a long-term relationship that is centred around building the mentee’s growth and development. A SkillPal mentor does not work on a day-to-day basis to help a mentee make decisions, but they are there to serve as someone who can offer support, wisdom, and teaching over time.
SkillPal Mentors share their knowledge and experience with you so that you can learn from their experience. You can then apply these lessons to your life as a student and in personal and professional settings. It’s often easier for someone outside of yourself to notice where you need improvement. A mentor gets to know your strengths and weaknesses over time and can play a critical role in helping you become the best version of yourself. | https://medium.com/@chatterjeesayantan62/as-a-software-engineer-do-you-have-a-mentor-at-work-c8684dfe006e | ['Sayantan Chatterjee'] | 2021-06-08 06:26:59.073000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Personalized Mentorship', 'Skillpal', 'It', 'Growth'] |
4 Most popular Logo Design Types | Best Logo for your Brand | A logo is defined as any product’s pictorial identifier. The customers should identify your business just by having a look at its Logo. The logo should be designed very carefully by the makers as the design can surely evaluate the name of their brand which not only makes them visually better but creates trust and value for their product.
Logo price is equally considered important by the makers. Logo design with Logo prices can vary, for instance, the value of a logo design be subject to the quality and who made that. The price of making a logo design varies generally from $0 to even tens of thousands of dollars, but if you possess a small business or even startup looking for the best quality design, the best logo design should cost between $300-$1300.
Now that we know what a logo is specifically for and its main purpose, then let’s have a look at some well-known logo designs and the kind of logo design.
1. Wordmark/Logotype Logo Design
A wordmark is usually a font-based type of logo that primarily focuses on the ‘brand’s name alone. GOOGLE logo has a succinct and distinct name and this is the reason that it works very well. When the name of the brand is combined with the strong typography, it does create strong brand recognition.
A wordmark logo is a virtuous decision if you are a new business and require to get your name out there, just ensure that name is brief enough to take benefit of the design.
2. Monograms Logo
Monogram logo which is also known as lettermarks, usually consists of letters and brand initials. Many of the brands have used their initialism rather than a lengthy name for brand-identification ideas. By employing just a few letters, lettermark logos are efficient, as it is easy to remember NASA instead of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
3. Pictorial marks
A pictorial logo or logo symbol is generally an icon which is also known as a graphics-based logo. A true brand mark is just a picture, and due to this, it can be a quite tricky logotype for brand-new companies, or even for those brands without strong brand recognition. The most important thing is to select an appropriate image while creating any pictorial logo.
4. Mascots Logo
This is another type of logo that always involves an illustrated character. Those characters are usually in the form of colorful cartoonish which is the perfect way to create your customized brand spokesperson. Mascot logos are great for corporations that want to generate a wholesome atmosphere by tempting children and families. | https://medium.com/@weetechsolutionblog/4-most-popular-logo-design-types-best-logo-for-your-brand-b8872b3b31ce | ['Jenny Smith'] | 2021-12-20 12:20:59.422000+00:00 | ['Logo', 'Logo Design', 'Website'] |
How to lose baby weight fast after birth. | Hello there. Welcome to Ultrasoundfeminsider. This post is going to be about” Workout, while and after pregnancy” all you need to know to go back in shape as soon as possible but in a safe way, I hope you’re having an amazing day, so let’s begin…
Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com
Pregnancy is a precious stage for all women, unfortunately gaining weight is inevitable and losing those extra pounds can be difficult for some of us.
It is scientifically proven that the exercise is very important in all stages of human being. Pregnancy and postpartum is not the exception. Keeping your body active during and after the pregnancy can be crucial to lose those extra pounds after. Always remember during the Pregnancy and after the delivery check with your doctor if there is no contraindication for you to exercise.
First lets review some Medical reasons why you might not be able to exercise while pregnant.
Pregnancy already puts women in a vulnerable physical state. And some medical conditions can threaten a pregnancy. Conditions such as vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure or pre-eclampsia, and preterm labor contractions can warrant the cessation of all work activities. If you are having twins or multiples, your pregnancy is naturally high-risk. So the doctor may take more precautions with your activities. If you are diagnosed with an incompetent cervix or there are complications with the placenta, the doctor will likely insist on complete bedrest, as these two conditions can have fatal consequences for your unborn child.
A previous history of stillbirths, miscarriages or preterm births can put your pregnancy at a higher risk than if your medical history were clean. If you are older than 35, and drink or use drugs during pregnancy, then your pregnancy may fall into the high-risk category as well. Your pregnancy may even start normally but turn high-risk at a later stage. Any of these high-risk conditions could cause your doctor to order bedrest.
Sharing is caring!
But if there is no medical reason for you to rest, then keeping yourself active is a great way to go back in shape after you have the baby.
Now Let’s head into Workout, while and after pregnancy
What Exercises are Safe During Pregnancy?
Most exercises are safe to perform during pregnancy. As long as you exercise with caution and do not overdo it.
The safest and most productive activities are swimming, walking, indoor stationary cycling, step or elliptical machines, and low-impact aerobics (taught by a certified aerobics instructor). These activities carry little risk of injury, benefit your entire body, and are beneficial for giving birth as well.
SO LET’S START WITH THE POSTPARTUM WORKOUT, SHALL WE!
After you have your baby you want to go back in shape as soon as possible. Well, I have bad news for you!!! that is not possible. As you gain weight gradually that’s exactly what’s going to happen now. But a good nutrition and workout routine is going to take you where you wanna be sooner.
How soon after delivery can I start exercising?
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says it’s okay to gradually resume exercising as soon as you get the go ahead from your doctor, and as long as you feel up to it. Your provider may want you to wait until your six-week postpartum checkup to see how you’re doing first.
Generally, if you exercised throughout your pregnancy and had a normal vaginal delivery, you can safely do light exercise like walking, modified push-ups, and stretching within days of giving birth as long as you’re not in any pain.
How do I get started, and which workouts are best for new moms?
Start slowly with a low-impact aerobic activity, such as walking. As you regain strength, you can increase the length or number of walks.
If you had a C-section, check with your provider first and expect to wait until you recover from your operation before beginning an exercise program.
A C-section incision takes at least several weeks to heal, and it may be some time after that before you feel like working out. However, walking at an easy pace is encouraged because it promotes healing and helps prevent blood clots and other complications.
Keep in mind that many women develop a gap between their abdominal muscles as their belly expands during pregnancy and labor, a condition called diastasis recti.
The gap may or may not fully close after delivery, but in most cases it doesn’t cause any short or long term problems.
Take it easy on your abdominal muscles and don’t do any traditional sit-ups or crunches for the first several months after delivery, these put too much stress on those muscles and aren’t effective for rebuilding abdominal strength.
Instead, ask your fitness instructor with expertise in prenatal exercise to show you gentler exercises for strengthening your abs. Good postpartum abdominal exercises should minimize stress on your lower back and midline.
What are some ways to start exercising?
When you are ready to start exercising, walking is a great way to get back in shape. Walking outside has an added bonus because you can push your baby in a stroller. There are special strollers made for this kind of activity, but using a regular stroller is fine.
What are some guidelines I can follow when I begin exercising after pregnancy?
Aim to stay active for 20–30 minutes a day. When you first start exercising after childbirth, try simple postpartum exercises that help strengthen major muscle groups, including abdominal and back muscles. Gradually add moderate-intensity exercise. Remember, even 10 minutes of exercise benefits your body. If you exercised vigorously before pregnancy or you are a competitive athlete, you can work up to vigorous-intensity activity. Stop exercising if you feel pain.
How should I prepare for my workout?
As you get ready for your workout, follow these steps:
*Wear loose-fitting clothing that will help keep you cool.
*If you are breastfeeding, feed your baby or express your milk before your workout to avoid any discomfort that may come from engorged breasts.
*Wear a bra that fits well and gives plenty of support to protect your breasts.
*Have a bottle of water handy and take several sips during your workout.
Take a look on this routine:
Read related posts:
All about IUD or Intrauterine device.
Caring tips for your postpartum body. Heal painlessly.
Self-care routine for busy moms, the routine that saved my life.
Ok guys, this is the end of this post I hope you learn something new today, do not forget to check the other categories on my blog for Mom/women Health and week by week pregnancy ultrasounds, as always thanks for visiting and I hope to see you next time. | https://medium.com/@ultrasoundfeminsider/how-to-lose-baby-weight-fast-after-birth-a87d47b8b699 | ['Zadi Silveira'] | 2020-02-21 21:42:25.118000+00:00 | ['Workout'] |
Bye-bye Python. Hello Julia! | Don’t get me wrong. Python’s popularity is still backed by a rock-solid community of computer scientists, data scientists and AI specialists.
But if you’ve ever been at a dinner table with these people, you also know how much they rant about the weaknesses of Python. From being slow to requiring excessive testing, to producing runtime errors despite prior testing — there’s enough to be pissed off about.
Which is why more and more programmers are adopting other languages — the top players being Julia, Go, and Rust. Julia is great for mathematical and technical tasks, while Go is awesome for modular programs, and Rust is the top choice for systems programming.
Since data scientists and AI specialists deal with lots of mathematical problems, Julia is the winner for them. And even upon critical scrutiny, Julia has upsides that Python can’t beat.
The Zen of Python versus the Greed of Julia
When people create a new programming language, they do so because they want to keep the good features of old languages and fix the bad ones.
In this sense, Guido van Rossum created Python in the late 1980s to improve ABC. The latter was too perfect for a programming language — while its rigidity made it easy to teach, it was hard to use in real life.
In contrast, Python is quite pragmatic. You can see this in the Zen of Python, which reflects the intention that the creators have:
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
[...]
Python still kept the good features of ABC: Readability, simplicity, and beginner-friendliness for example. But Python is far more robust and adapted to real life than ABC ever was.
ABC paved the way for Python, which is paving the way for Julia. Photo by David Ballew on Unsplash
In the same sense, the creators of Julia want to keep the good parts of other languages and ditch the bad ones. But Julia is a lot more ambitious: instead of replacing one language, it wants to beat them all.
This is how Julia’s creators say it:
We are greedy: we want more. We want a language that's open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that's homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn, yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it interactive and we want it compiled.
Julia wants to blend all upsides that currently exist, and not trade them off for the downsides in other languages. And even though Julia is a young language, it has already achieved a lot of the goals that the creators set.
What Julia developers are loving
Versatility
Julia can be used for everything from simple machine learning applications to enormous supercomputer simulations. To some extent, Python can do this, too — but Python somehow grew into the job.
In contrast, Julia was built precisely for this stuff. From the bottom up.
Speed
Julia’s creators wanted to make a language that is as fast as C — but what they created is even faster. Even though Python has become easier to speed up in recent years, its performance is still a far cry from what Julia can do.
In 2017, Julia even joined the Petaflop Club — the small club of languages who can exceed speeds of one petaflop per second at peak performance. Apart from Julia, only C, C++ and Fortran are in the club right now.
Community
With its more than 30 years of age, Python has an enormous and supportive community. There is hardly a Python-related question that you can’t get answered within one Google search.
In contrast, the Julia community is pretty tiny. While this means that you might need to dig a bit further to find an answer, you might link up with the same people again and again. And this can turn into programmer-relationships that are beyond value.
Code conversion
You don’t even need to know a single Julia-command to code in Julia. Not only can you use Python and C code within Julia. You can even use Julia within Python!
Needless to say, this makes it extremely easy to patch up the weaknesses of your Python code. Or to stay productive while you’re still getting to know Julia.
Libraries are still a strong point of Python. Photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash
Libraries
This is one of the strongest points of Python — its zillion well-maintained libraries. Julia doesn’t have many libraries, and users have complained that they’re not amazingly maintained (yet).
But when you consider that Julia is a very young language with a limited amount of resources, the number of libraries that they already have is pretty impressive. Apart from the fact that Julia’s amount of libraries is growing, it can also interface with libraries from C and Fortran to handle plots, for example.
Dynamic and static types
Python is 100% dynamically typed. This means that the program decides at runtime whether a variable is a float or an integer, for example.
While this is extremely beginner-friendly, it also introduces a whole host of possible bugs. This means that you need to test Python code in all possible scenarios — which is quite a dumb task that takes a lot of time.
Since the Julia-creators also wanted it to be easy to learn, Julia fully supports dynamical typing. But in contrast to Python, you can introduce static types if you like — in the way they are present in C or Fortran, for example.
This can save you a ton of time: Instead of finding excuses for not testing your code, you can specify the type wherever it makes sense.
The data: Invest in things while they’re small | https://towardsdatascience.com/bye-bye-python-hello-julia-9230bff0df62 | ['Rhea Moutafis'] | 2020-05-01 22:50:39.612000+00:00 | ['Towards Data Science', 'Programming', 'Programming Languages', 'Python', 'Data Science'] |
Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall, What’s the Safest Sex of All? | Back in 1994, the Surgeon General of the United States of America was forced to resign over a comment she made while speaking at the United Nations conference on AIDS.
She was asked if it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a way to keep young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity. And she said,
“I think that (masturbation) is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.”
To be clear, Dr. Elders was not suggesting teachers have children practice dropping their drawers and touching their Wee Willies and Wet Wandas in the classrooms. All she said was that masturbation perhaps should be added to the sex ed and wellness curriculum.
Ironically, the president who fired Dr. Elders might have saved a young intern’s reputation had he been more comfortable relieving the pressures of the Oval Office himself. Yes, it was Bill Clinton who first hired then fired the good doctor.
I was 28-years-old when that mess blew up in Elders’ face. I’d been working with an international development organization that had programs around the world, including in Africa and what Dr. Elders said made all the sense in the world to me.
But, if you’d asked me then how I felt about dropping my hands below my waist to spend a little time self-loving, I’d have made my scrunch-face (not attractive), shaken my head, and said,
“It’s great for other people, perfect sex to reduce the transmission of HIV, but mastur — you know, it’s not for me.”
My feelings about self-love have shifted slightly over the last 25 years, but not much. Certainly, not enough to make me happy.
However, over the last several months, I’ve been pushing myself to talk and write about sex and my sexual hang-ups. All this talk — mostly with my husband — has had the benefit of pushing me to try new things, too. Like mutual masturbation. Turns out that’s quite enjoyable.
But I draw a mysterious line with the lube when it comes to masturbating on my own. Why, oh, why? I wanted to break free of this phobia so, on May 20th, I signed up for an online masturbation course that I suspect Dr. Elders would be proud to endorse.
The course was two-thirds finished, but I figured ten days of learning how to self-love would be a good start. The emails landed day-after-day, and I immediately filed them for later… I’ll start tomorrow, I promised myself.
Neither I nor tomorrow ever came.
On Day 30, ashamed that I’d failed so dramatically at overcoming the shame I felt touching myself, I sent the course-creator an email and asked if she planned to make her course evergreen. The next day, she shared a link that allowed me to try-try again, from Day 1. I signed up immediately. That was June 1st.
On June 2nd, I wrote, with naïve optimism, about my plan to do the course right this time in Ladies: Start Your Vibrators! Embracing the power of becoming a self-lust goddess.
And now here we are at the end of August and how many times in the past 57 days have I followed the prompts in Eleanor’s emails? Twice. And even then, I broke her rule about not using a vibrator. If I was being graded, I’d get a solid 0/30 in this course. I imagine Dr. Elders shaking her 86-year-old head in disappointment.
But I really, really want to be an A+ self-love student.
I am neither too old nor too proud to admit that I need help. Having a course at my fingertips is clearly not enough to motivate me to move those fingertips to the places they’re being encouraged to explore.
I need accountability. I need to take this journey into lubricating my libido with another gentleperson’s genitals at my side. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Obviously, it would make the most sense to ask my partner to do this with me, but I know that this won’t work. For one, he’ll want to have sex if we masturbate together. Second, we have wildly different sleep schedules and for the few hours we are together awake, we’re never alone. We would never feel comfortable excusing ourselves to the bedroom every day immediately after dinner. Third, I’ll want to have sex if we masturbate together.
And the point is to learn how to self-love. If mutual masturbation became foreplay, I think that would void the purpose of pleasuring my pleasure points… right?
I considered placing a Craigslist ad.
Sexually repressed dame seeks masturbation buddy
But as soon as I wrote the headline I realized I’d be spending more time reading emails from men about their masturbatory fantasies than authentically loving myself if I used this approach. And, I would run a high risk of being sent a dick pic. <Shudder>.
And that’s when my creative, erotic imagination spoke up. It said, Ask your friends on Medium. All you need is one person to take this challenge with you, to check-in with once-a-day, to ensure that neither of you is ignoring your nethers.
I’m also considering emailing Dr. Elders, to ask if she’d be willing to be the person who holds me accountable. I’m not expecting an “I’d be delighted to” response, but the reply might be amusing. And since laughing is one of the things that turns me on… well, in this case a fail might be a win for my masturbation efforts.
Finally, to make sure failure is not an option, I’ve promised myself an expensive gift at the end of thirty days of successful self-loving — but only if I get that A+. It’s a hands-free vibrator meant for couples that promises to be a thing of orgasmic beauty.
I am so ready to receive the benefits of masturbation — better sleep, higher self-esteem, decreased muscle tension, and increased libido. I’m counting on the whambam combination of accountability and a special reward to help me finally overcome the illogical shame and irrational fears I hold about making my sacral chakra shake.
Postscript — teaching masturbation 25 years later
And the postscript on the status of Dr Elders’ idea of teaching masturbation as a safe sex alternative to penetration: it’s still not widely done.
In fact, masturbation was finally added to the curriculum in one Canadian province three years ago only to be removed again in 2018 with the leader of that province threatening to fire any teacher who used the updated curriculum that spoke of masturbation.
Safest sex or not, talking about masturbation is still a topic that can get some people fired. So let’s give those conservative political leaders the finger by taking courses about how to shamelessly finger ourselves. | https://medium.com/love-and-stuff/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whats-the-safest-sex-of-all-3e1ddf2caadb | ['Danika Bloom'] | 2020-04-29 17:28:59.258000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Health', 'Sex', 'Ideas', 'Sexuality'] |
A Rose Spreads its Fragrance | On the 23rd of December, I went for a wonderful walk with my friend Malashri Lal to the heritage park at Sunder Nagar, New Delhi. When we saw the beautiful roses, she was very keen that I write a sonnet for the Black Prince which is a maroonish black colour of a rose. The colour is quite rare.
She was also keen that I write more poems on roses since we both gushed after seeing such beautiful flowers in the garden.
Whitney Rose also loves roses like me. Her name is also a rose which is so sweet. My appreciation and thanks to her for publishing my poems in her publication Flicker and Flight. | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/a-rose-spreads-its-fragrance-dfaba5c82fd0 | ['Dr. Preeti Singh'] | 2020-12-24 15:13:03.661000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Nature', 'Sonnet', 'Roses', 'Creativity'] |
A Deep Thought: Whose Reality Are You Living In? | What we’ve come to know about ourselves and the world is learned — our perception of it is predicated on where we’re born, our culture and our religion. We are born knowing nothing; it’s only once we are taught what to believe that we start to form ideas about ourselves and others. So essentially, our beliefs originate from someone else’s mind. The intricacies of our culture, from the language we speak, to the food we eat, our values and the clothes we wear is the product of someone else’s thoughts that manifested into something tangible. That in of itself is a miracle, perhaps not as obvious as the miracles of our self-sustaining bodies, or the sun and the sky or the fruit that grows on its own, but nonetheless, it’s proof that we create the world we live in based on our thoughts, emotions and actions. It’s why we all have different experiences and struggles.
My question to you is, whose reality are you living in? Whose scars have you allowed to penetrate into your soul, and whose insecurities have you taken on as your own?
When we come to recognize that most of what we believe about ourselves and others is nothing more than a thought, it should empower us to know that we have the capacity to create the life of our dreams. We are not restricted to past conventions, rather empowered to shed old beliefs, behaviours and dogmas that restrict us from reaching our full potential. We daydream, not to live in fantasy, but to create reality.
Originally published on www.sarahnazim.com | https://medium.com/@sarahnazim/a-deep-thought-whose-reality-are-you-living-in-7b810385f947 | ['Sarah Nazim'] | 2019-02-07 19:28:54.053000+00:00 | ['Self Discovery', 'Self-awareness', 'Emotional Intelligence', 'Awakening', 'Reality'] |
A Skeptical Look at HK’s 8 New Virtual Banks* | The New Entrants
Given this landscape, it was intriguing when HKMA invited applicants for virtual banks with a two pronged goal — “to promote fintech and innovation in Hong Kong to offer a new kind of customer experience” and “to promote financial inclusion to target retail segments and SMEs”. While the former is an obvious area of expertise for FinTech-oriented virtual banks (VBs), the latter seems a bit harder to understand, or breach, in this author’s opinion, given the hold of licensed banks on SMEs and retail banking.
Nonetheless, below are the Fab 8 that will look to challenge the domination of the 22 pre-existing banking behemoths.
Ant SME Services (shareholders: Ant Financial)
Infinium Limited (Tencent, ICBC Asia, Hillhouse Capital and HKEX)
Insight Fintech (AMTD and Xiaomi)
Ping An OneConnect (Ping An Group)
Livi (Bank of China HK, JD Digits, and Jardines)
SC Digital Solutions (Standard Chartered Bank, HKT, PCCW, and Ctrip)
WeLab Digital (WeLab)
Zhong An Virtual Finance (ZhongAn Online and Sinolink)
Many of these are collaborations between financial firms and technology firms, eg, Livi, SC Digital and Infinium, while others firms are going solo (eg, PingAn, Insight, Ant SME and WeLab). Though none of these VBs have announced their business models yet, this author feels a sense of cautious optimism about this whole scenario.
First, the Optimism
1. Let there will be innovation
If you are a customer, it is a time to rejoice. The next few months are likely to see new banks lining up to offer customers easier account opening, cash giveaways to restaurants and supermarkets, probably new credit card deals with other startups or more miles (and cash back), and maybe more favourable credit lines to acquire assets (houses/cars etc.)
In short, happy days!
This innovation might not be restricted to the VBs alone — as incumbent banks will also compete to hold on to their customer base. This will necessitate spending on their digital banking prowess (‘digital transformation’ for those into buzzwords)— to compete with the new entrants. In essence, HK’s 7 million+ bank customers can expect the next 12–24 months to see improvement in customer experience, and hopefully a host of new goodies. And that, is a huge positive.
2. More hiring
Branch-based retail banking has been notoriously constrained by high staff costs, even though banks’ profit margins have outweighed costs (especially for the bigger banks). However, as part of a new norm, one can expect many medium-to-senior level retail bankers will be joining the new VBs — setting up their middle and back-end operations (including KYC / Compliance / AML practices), helping with product expertise and client base.
Some, like WeLab, have publicly announced plans to hire 100 more people in 12 months, while SC Digital (65% owned by Standard Chartered) also plans to hire 40 more bankers. Interestingly, hiring could go the other way as well, as established banks spruce up their digital banking.
This hiring spree will depend a lot on banks’ focus — from product (eg, SME, or retail banking) or technology (eg, FinTech, Digital transformation) to geography (eg, Greater Bay Area).
With a decade of lay-offs behind us, this offers an unexpected bright spot for HK’s financial landscape, and its FinTech-savvy university graduates.
3. The opportunity set
Despite averaging about 2.5 mobile phones per capita, Hong Kong ranks very low in daily mobile banking penetration of 14% vs. 20% for global average. While some of it is due to demographics and mindset (more on that later), other reasons have to do with the poor mobile banking experiences thrust on the customers.
That said, this author has noted a significant improvement in HK banks’ app and mobile user experience over the past two years, especially for HSBC, DBS and Standard Chartered, all of whom have invested heavily to offer on-demand banking solutions to its demanding customer-base.
That said, branchless banking remains quite a challenge in HK. While digital and branchless banking is common in many parts of the world, HK remains a serious laggard due to legacy issues, customer demand for high-touch banking and an over-dependence on paper-based workflow. Even a behemoth like JP Morgan mentioned in their annual investor day report (in February 2019) it has the ability to shut down 75% of its US branches in 5 years or keep them open for decades. But, HK banks have not shown that sort of flexibility.
That is about to change.
With VBs offering a new business model to run operations and service customers, one can expect brick-n-mortar banks to follow suit (albeit in a few years), and hopefully, utilise their advanced digital banking prowess to reduce costs of running a branch, without sacrificing on service quality.
4. Better customer understanding
One of the first questions I used to ask bank CEOs (in my avatar as a banks research analyst) was, “How much do you know your customer?”, and they would often answer in numbers — we have x% product cross-selling rate, or we help y% of businesses in Pearl River Delta, etc . Many of these were top-down data sets, with clear limitations on how much they actually ‘knew’ their customers.
To a mildly tech-enabled banks analyst this seemed like a missed opportunity! Established banks’ analytics arms have so much information they can concur from just one part of their customers’ lives — finances. Think about it, what information can a financial report tell about your life ?
When and where you eat/drink/shop,
How much you spend on travel, clothes, necessities and education,
When do you get your salary and how it track against peers,
What are your recurring expenditures say on school tuition, rents, travel etc.
If brick-n-mortar banks wanted, or were allowed to (by regulators), or had the right technology to do it, they could have harnessed the power of ‘big data’ before the foray of tech firms in the space! Think of all the great products a bank could have created for its customers — differentiated service for differentiated pricing— at the click of a button!
And that is the opportunity that VBs will try to explore, at least the tech-enabled ones, eg, Ant SME and Infinium. These companies know their customers inside-out, from their habits, to their movements and behaviour patterns. That is a massive boon for VBs that can harness knowledge of customers’ lifestyles — from social media, P2P payment patterns and taxi or supermarket spendings — while cross-selling financial products.
In essence, adding a financial engine on top of all this data set is a gold mine of opportunity. And curiously, this opportunity is welcomed by both sides of the market, with consumers happy to bank with tech firms, even though their privacy is usually tossed out of the window. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-skeptical-look-at-hks-8-new-virtual-banks-71bcd999a45d | ['Sukrit Khatri'] | 2019-05-24 05:42:19.646000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Banks', 'Hong Kong', 'Digital Transformation', 'Finance'] |
15 WAYS TO SKYROCKET YOUR BRAND’S AWARENESS. | 15 WAYS TO SKYROCKET YOUR BRAND’S AWARENESS.
You are here to learn about skyrocketing the awareness of your brand?
You have started a brand but did not know how to skyrocket your brand’s awareness?
Then you are at the right platform because today I am going to teach you A-Z on how to skyrocket your brand’s awareness in the audience or market.
So, keep going with us until the end of the article. I hope you will learn a lot about it.
KEY POINTS OF THE ARTICLE:
1. 15 WAYS TO SKYROCKET BRAND’S AWARENESS?
2.CONCLUSIONS.
3. FAQ.
15 WAYS TO SKYROCKET BRAND’S AWARENESS:
Skyrocketing your brand awareness means to boost up and enhance your identity in the market or audience.
To build a successful business you need to skyrocket your brand’s awareness in the audience.
There are different ways to skyrocket your brand’s awareness. Like social media pages, on which you can simply put your post and thus ultimately audience identify your brand.
Other methods are through partnerships, advertisements, offline as well as online campaigns, etc.
These are the super-easy methods that every brand can use in the beginning to skyrocket their brand’s awareness. We will discuss all of them step by step.
1. Go for social media:
You know the power of social media in this modern world very well. You can tell about your brand on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Because nowadays everyone uses social media. You can run your ads on Google which can be the best opportunity to
attract more audience towards yourself and this will be helpful in skyrocketing your brand’s awareness.
2. Make engaging content for your brand:
Another way to raise your brand’s awareness is by writing down the content of your brand’s services and products. This content may be in the form of blogs and articles.
This will enhance your customer’s interactions with your brand. You can share these blogs or content on social media, as it increases the traffic of the customers on your brand.
3. Try LinkedIn publishing:
Do not forget to share your posts on Linkedin. If you want to spread your name on the web and market then you have to publish the posts of your brand daily. If your content will be engaging then it will come to the LinkedIn main page where there are a lot of customers to view posts about brands. This will also be the best way to enhance the brand’s awareness.
4. Run remarketing campaigns:
is a pro strategy for boosting and enhancing good brand awareness. Remarketing involves showing ads to users who visited your site. Remarketing ads are placed all across the web on sites your customers visit. Soon they’ll be seeing your business everywhere — on their favorite blogs, while shopping online, etc. This gives the impression that your brand is unique than it really looks. And this a great way to increase your brand’s awareness rate.
5. Arrange social media contests:
Arranging social media contests is a better way to enhance your brand’s awareness.
Allow your contestants to share the photos and videos with other users voting for their favorites.
Allow them to share the videos and photos of the brand products and services with friends and this will result in raising the awareness of the brand.
6. Explain your expertise:
You have to explain your expertise to your customers. How? customers will not buy the thing which they do not understand. So, give them an understanding of the products and services in an engaging and consistent way. Help your customers in making the right decision by sharing your expertise.
7.Always give quality and on-time service:
Always deliver your services and products on time and of good quality.
Suppose, you have a restaurant and you give your customer quality and on-time food. Then definitely he will be pleased and give you a tip.
Similarly, to earn a good profit quality and on-time service will be needed.
8. Ask for suggestions and improvements to your customers:
Your business is almost nothing without your customers. That is why always ask your customers about their recommendations and point of view related to your products and services.
Always keep loyal customers with you which give the good and bad point of views about your brand.
This will improve your brand weaknesses and hence your brand will get awareness.
9. Build partnerships with others:
Always build partnerships in the market with other brands. Share your strategies, blogs, and services with other brands. If you help them they definitely help you in return.
In this way, more brands know about you and this will bring up the brand’s awareness.
10. Podcasts:
Podcasts are very handy and popular nowadays.This is an easy way to stay on top of things and people listen to them as they commute to work or travel. You can start your own podcast and interview industry experts and develop relationships with others in your field etc.
This strategy is especially effective in an industry or a niche that doesn’t have many podcasts, to begin with, so you can make yourself a famous podcasting star overnight, so to speak.
11. Be a professional storyteller:
If you really want to grow your brand’s awareness then you have to be a good storyteller.
If you are writing a blog about your brand or product then bring a twist by giving an emotional story that takes the attention of the customers in such a way that they become willing to buy that product.
12. Display engaging ads of your brand’s:
Ads are the main component of every brand.
To become a good brand you have to make your ads more engaging and professional.
Ads are the most powerful means of spreading awareness of any brand in the audience or market.
So, make your brand’s advertisements engaging by adding sweet texts, colorful and informative pictures, and a motivated logo.
13. Build strong progress in your brand:
To become famous and a successful brand, strong bases are required. What are the strong bases? The strong base of the brand is its logos, colors, ads, and fonts.
Always keep improving your logos, animations, and fonts of your brand. This helps people remember your brand’s name and entices them to share their material and products with others.
14. Infographics:
Infographics mean to display your marketing data and statistics in a colorful manner. These content powerhouses often get shared far and wide, making them a great tool for brand building and thought leadership.
15. Make your content entertaining:
One of the best and easy way to build a brand’s awareness is to make your content’s wording entertaining.
If your content is very large and boring, no one likes it.
So, make your content entertaining so that the audience takes interest in it and ultimately wants to buy that product.
CONCLUSIONS:
So, this is all about how to skyrocket your brand’s awareness.
If you are also running a brand and did not know how to raise awareness of your brand then this article is for you.
I hope you have learned a lot of things from this article.
Faqs:
1.How do I get more brand awareness?
You can get more brand awareness by making engaging content, by running ads, through podcasts, and the best way is through social media platforms.
2.what is the example of brand awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent to which a consumer can correctly identify your brand based on visual indicators such as logo and colors. For example, if you see the Dunkin Donuts pink and orange letters up ahead, before even making out the words, you’d automatically recognize it as Dunkin Donuts.
3.How can I increase the awareness of a small brand?
There is the same technique for the small brand but the first step you have to take is to go towards social media platforms like Facebook groups and then start making content and blogs and ask for reviews. | https://medium.com/@hamzawsi124/15-ways-to-skyrocket-your-brands-awareness-e24c3ab2e914 | ['Hamza Waseem'] | 2020-12-02 15:02:56.551000+00:00 | ['Skyrocket', 'Brandings', 'Ways To Skyrocket', 'Tips And Tricks', 'Brand Awareness'] |
Why Having a Fitness Mentor is Important? | Everyone no matter what the fitness goal is always has someone they can look up to for guidance. A source of inspiration and wisdom so that they are guided the right way with efficiency. Seeing what it takes to work hard, train smart, and plan correctly to transform yourself is an honor to show that change is happening. We love the notion that improving ourselves with the right people is what gets us growing all the time. They care and look after us no matter the odds. But… there are mentors that will take you to the beach, and then there are mentors that will take you beyond the beach into the oceans to see if you really want it as bad as you say you want something.
These special kinds of mentors do not care how much you say you want it, their way of communication is through how many actions you’re putting yourself into for change. They have standards set to which if you are not willing to reach the heights that they know you can get to then they will hold you accountable. These are the mentors that a lot of people stay away from due to the fact that they will be pushed mentally and spiritually through a rigorous physical regimen. I’ve known people that would try a group session and would never show up again to only see that they either could not manage and went for a softer touch, or they quit trying to reach their goals altogether. No, you should never quit overall when a special mentor is there to push you to the outer galaxies.
You see a lot of people want the fast 30 days route to get a flat stomach and nice legs, and the infamous summer body, but are not willing to have someone that can make them work for it day in and day out to reach these goals. When the right mentor comes and knows what it takes to get there and pushes the individual, they think it’s too much so fast and want to quit. No, you should never quit. The mentor is showing you that there are no shortcuts and no magic potions for physical changes to occur. These are the kind of people you want to take you far in life and it can be a life-changer in terms of your perspective and build a work ethic.
I have mentors that pushed me to the point that I’ve asked myself why am I still doing this program or training. The question is how much do you want to turn an idea and vision you have in your mind into reality. It is more of a mental transmutation, something that alchemist in centuries past practice a lot for turning elements into gold as the legend says. The same principles can apply when it comes to everything else you want to happen including fitness. The fitness mentor shows up and he will ride you out of the norm to get you to where you want to be.
When you have the right person that is experienced and open-minded to pushing his/her body to the next level you stick with that person. They will be very intense when they are helping you out on your fitness journey, and it will be tough and can make you want to quit a lot believe me. But you stick with that person. Why? Because you will be one of the few that will actually accomplish what you want the right way and the majority that don’t like the tough love approach, well they just don’t want it as bad as their thoughts suggested.
Stay Strong, Stay Game! | https://medium.com/@amufits/why-having-a-fitness-mentor-is-important-amufits-5e15432867db | ['Anton Scott'] | 2020-12-11 19:07:10.440000+00:00 | ['Mentorship', 'Health', 'Mental Health', 'Fitness', 'Lifestyle'] |
This Street Artist’s Work Fits Perfectly in Its Environment | This Street Artist’s Work Fits Perfectly in Its Environment
Drawing from pop culture, especially horror, JPS makes art that cleverly interacts with its surroundings
All photos with permission: JPS
Jamie Paul Scanlon (JPS) is a British street artist currently based in Germany who draws inspiration from pop culture (especially horror) and accidents of geography. His wit, and his active imagination, mean that a T-junction sign can become Thor’s hammer, a worksite can become home to a marauding Jason Voorhees, and the Predator could be hiding around the corner in a wooded area near you.
Like all the very best street art, JPS’s works enhance and transcend their surroundings, working with accidents of geography or design to create a three-dimensional effect that enlivens the art with humor, social commentary, or both. In JPS’s capable hands, a cracked pavement, a damaged vehicle, or an ugly building are transformed into something that will surprise and delight passersby, enriching urban environments with a colorful cast of characters. Here are a few of his pieces, and you can find plenty more by following him on Instagram. | https://medium.com/sharks-and-spades/this-street-artists-work-fits-perfectly-in-its-environment-1ad3334bdb4c | ['Jack Shepherd'] | 2020-10-21 21:19:58.664000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Cities', 'Art', 'Photography', 'Design'] |
What are the Options to Fill Gaps in your Teeth? | According to invisalign dentist Fremont ,Many people have gaps in their teeth. Some people choose to deal with having gaps in their teeth, while others prefer having those gaps filled in. While the best course of action may be leaving the gaps alone, you may want to visit your local dentist for a professional opinion. Gaps aren’t like missing teeth but they may bother you enough to visit a dentist who can help. Closing your teeth gaps can help with self-confidence and make one feel more attractive. There are several options for closing teeth gaps.
Gaps in your smile may be due to missing teeth or a result of two adult teeth that aren’t aligned. The most common option and less costly for replacing a missing tooth is a removable partial denture. This type of partial is commonly made from chrome cobalt and acrylic.Flexi partial dentures are gaining popularity due to the comfort of aesthetics. Partials are easy and ideal if you need several teeth that need replacing. The only downfall is trying to get used to wearing metal or plastic in your mouth.
Another option for replacing a missing tooth is referred to as a “fixed denture”. The down side for this procedure is the cost. This method is more expensive and requires a few visits to complete. A drawback is that the healthy teeth on either side of the missing tooth require expansive removal of tooth tissue with a dental drill so a mold can be created. The mold is delivered to a dental lab and a dental bridge is fabricated of porcelain and gold. Most people seem pleased with the results and there’s a lifespan of anywhere from 5–10 years.
Dental implants are another option. A dental implant is made from titanium, in the shape of a root. This is screwed into the bone, where it incorporates into it like a root. Implants can be used to support a crown, a bridge or a denture. Implants may also be used in orthodontic treatment. If a bridge cannot be used, dental implants are a good choice. Dental implants are costly and require many visits to the dentist. The pros: implants feel natural and there’s no preparation time involved.
For a less intrusive bridge, the Maryland Bridge isn’t as costly and there’s less removal of tooth tissue. This means less damage to the surrounding teeth. This procedure is often used for replacing a single tooth. This type of bridge is comprised of a porcelain crown bonded to a metal framework and glued with an adhesive resin to the back of the teeth on either side of the missing tooth. | https://medium.com/@eastbaydental.seo/what-are-the-options-to-fill-gaps-in-your-teeth-491caa0af262 | ['East Bay Dental'] | 2015-12-16 13:18:08.990000+00:00 | ['Dentistry'] |
Crypto Community Spotlight: Alex Saunders! | What is the Huobi Crypto Community Spotlight?
Huobi will provide a quick overview of influencers in the crypto space to help bring a quick recap of who they are and what they are doing in the community. We also want to give thanks to people making crypto what it is today and building it with us!
Find out more about Huobi by visiting: www.huobi.com
Now, our first spotlight is about Alex Saunders from Australia!
Hi Alex, What are your current thoughts about ETH 2.0 and DeFi?
As far as technology goes, many projects now have working products, users, revenue & an exciting roadmap that is starting to increase awareness. But right now many DeFi projects have a similar level of excitement to the ICO boom. We’ve seen 1000%, 5000% or more price appreciation in the past 6–12 months. Whenever that happens it always worries me. So while I’m very bullish on Ethereum & DeFi capturing a market share of traditional finance or CeFi in the coming years, I’m certainly cautious about the price in the short term. We’ve had half a dozen or more 1000% picks from our research for our followers. Recently I told them it’s time to take some profits & look elsewhere…
Can you tell our community about yourself?
I have been immersed in cryptocurrency since discovering Bitcoin in 2012. I have a unique investment style that combines fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and market sentiment as key drivers in decision making. My passion lead me to leave my successful career as a head Pharmacist in 2017, to start Nugget’s News.
I established the brand through a loyal following on my educational YouTube channel and my crypto community discussion group. I started being a trusted voice in the Australian crypto community, conducting many speaking engagements to spread the word of crypto and helped to accelerate blockchain start-ups by applying my years of experience and wisdom.
How would you describe your life outside of crypto?
I am a husband and dad to a 1yo baby boy & a 60kg Bernese mountain dog!
Louie got a bitcoin on the day he was born in 2019. So I coined the term HODLer before toddler.
What is your main passion right now in crypto?
I produce Nugget’s News, a beginner-level cryptocurrency educational content for enthusiasts and investors as well as those interested in financial markets. My content is tailored and distributed to our 100,000-plus followers across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
Where can people connect with you?
Thanks, Alex for everything you do for the crypto space.
As always we want to invite everyone to get more educated in the crypto space. Feel free to give him a follow and us as well at HuobiGlobal .
Clap this medium post and retweet the tweet on Twitter if you want more spotlights on different communities within crypto.
Thanks for reading — see you next time!
Risk Reminder:
1. Trading in digital assets comes with high risks due to huge price fluctuations. Users should be fully aware of the risks associated with digital asset trading and make prudent trading decisions.
2. Huobi Global’s announcements and information do not constitute investment advice, and Huobi will not bear responsibility or provide compensation for direct or indirect losses arising from trading decisions whilst relying on this information. | https://medium.com/huobi-global/crypto-community-spotlight-alex-saunders-3594b272e29e | ['Huobi Global'] | 2020-07-15 23:55:04.214000+00:00 | ['Defi', 'Cefi', 'Alexsaunders', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Improving Toronto -> NYC train travel | A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion about implementing a high speed rail connection between Toronto and New York, and how cost prohibitive it would be to upgrade the rails and trains to allow for faster speeds. It did get me thinking about how long the current trip takes, and I wanted to figure out *why* it’s as long as it is.
Here’s a breakdown of the main modes of transportation between (roughly) Downtown Toronto to Manhattan, New York City:
I’ve based the plane duration on gate-to-gate from Toronto Island airport to Newark, and not Union Station to Penn Station (which would make it much longer than 1.5hrs). I also assume the bus will always take longer than the car since it’s limited to the same highways and makes stops on the way.
But why is it slower to take the train than to drive, when trains typically have much more direct paths and have higher top speeds?
Let’s look at what contributes to the long train travel time.
Here’s the Toronto->NYC route, which is the Amtrak Maple Leaf route operated by both Amtrak in USA and Via Rail in Canada:
Route from Toronto -> NYC (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_Leaf_(train)#/media/File:Amtrak_Maple_Leaf.svg)
There are 22 stops in total (23 including the crew switch):
Toronto, ON — Union Station (TWO)
Oakville, ON (OKL)
Aldershot, ON (AST)
Grimsby, ON (GMS)
St. Catharines, ON (SCA)
Switching train crews (done at its own stop) outside Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls, ON (NFS)
Niagara Falls, NY (NFL) (border security)
Buffalo, NY — Exchange Street (BFX)
Buffalo, NY — Depew Station (BUF)
Rochester, NY — Amtrak Station (ROC)
Syracuse, NY — Regional Transportation Center (SYR)
Rome, NY (ROM)
Utica, NY (UCA)
Amsterdam, NY (AMS)
Schenectady, NY (SDY)
Albany-Rensselaer, NY (ALB)
Hudson, NY (HUD)
Rhinecliff, NY (RHI)
Poughkeepsie, NY (POU)
Croton-Harmon, NY (CRT)
Yonkers, NY (YNY)
New York, NY — Penn Station (NYP)
For the 12 hours 30min train trip duration, let’s break down where that time is spent:
Let’s assume an average dwell time at each station of 3 minutes (to load and unload passengers). That translates to 1 hour 3 min of time spent waiting at stations (for 21 stops, not including Penn Station, Union Station, or the border security).
Let’s also assume roughly 4min of travel time is lost to decelerate and accelerate from each station (compared to the train not stopping and travelling through). This translates to 1 hour 24min of decelerating and accelerating along the whole trip, if we ignore the initial acceleration from Penn Station and decelerating into Union Station.
There is also a 2 hour wait at the border for customs check.
At the Albany station, there is also a locomotive change (to a dual mode diesel / electric engine) that occurs due to emissions restrictions at underground NYC stations. This stop lasts about 20min.
We can assume the rest of the time (7 hours 43min) is the train going at its average speed along the route, which serves as a hard limit for travel time reduction (without infrastructure upgrades to raise the average speed). | https://medium.com/@PeterKruzlics/improving-toronto-nyc-train-travel-928031f2cf5e | ['Peter Kruzlics'] | 2019-05-27 13:25:45.707000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Via Rail', 'Improvement', 'Train', 'Amtrak'] |
God created the human body on the sixth day of Creation Week. | God created the human body on the sixth day of Creation Week. the body is fearfully and wonderfully made according to Psalm 139:14. because we are wonderfully and fearfully made we are under responsibility to keep this temple extremely healthy. The body is so wonderful and so fearfully created that it is our duty to God, our fellow man, and to ourselves, to keep it 100% healthy so we can give our best service to God and cooperate with him in a plan of redemption.
the books of Daniel and Revelation are two in Time Books specifically designed for the final generation. And in the Book of Daniel the first chapter God shows us the necessity of Health reform for those living in the last days.
"And the king appointed them a daily provision of the king's meat, and of the wine which he drank... Now among these were of the children of Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah...But Daniel purposed and his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself... Proved thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink." (Daniel 1:5,8,12)
In the first chapter of Daniel he was tested on nutrition and appetite. King Nebuchadnezzar wanted to change his diet to something that was against the laws given through Moses on nutrition. and Daniel resisted eating the king's meat and drinking his wine cuz he knew that that was violation of the laws of nutrition sent through Moses so we asked for water to drink and pulse to eat.
In Hebrew pulse is vegetable food or a vegetarian diet. Daniel resisted eating meat and drinking wine, but he asked for water and a vegetarian diet. He wanted vegetables to eat instead of flesh food. After the 10 days of eating a vegetarian diet and drinking his water, the Bible says that Daniel and his friends looked it way more healthy and good looking than everybody else that ate the king's flesh food.
"And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king's meat."
(Daniel 1:15)
This was not written for no reason. God was trying to teach us the importance of the eighth law of Health reform nutrition. As well as temperance. This book was for the people in the final generation. Those who live in a final generation cool make it through this thing without seeing death will respect the law of nutrition, which is the eighth law of haealth reform.
Our physical health is maintained or destroyed by the food which we eat. Anything that you put into this body/temple affects every cell, tissue, organ, and systems of the body. It affects it in a way that work promote health or destroy health.
The men of God in the Bible always walked in perfect and strict obedience by faith in the Ten Commandments and the laws of health reform. the reason why the law of nutrition is so seriously important because the body is the only medium through which the mind and the soul is developed for the up building of a perfect character.
At the beginning God gave man fruits, grains, and nuts, as his food. And after sin God added the vegetables because man no longer had access to tree of life. The tree of life perpetuates immortality and when man lost access to it, God added vegetables to his diet because he became mortal. Therefore, because we are mortal we must have vegetables and nutrition in this body or we can die. And the best way to get your vegetables is to eat a nice salad!
"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." (Genesis 1:29)
Right here is the diet chosen for us by the Creator. When God said he has given man every herb bearing seed this mean he has given man every plant that produces seeds.
"Sometimes we eat only the seeds of a plant. Some of these foods include corn, peas, and beans. But they also include nuts like pecans, walnuts and almonds. Other seeds we eat are rice, wheat and oats."
(Counties.agrilife.org)
Do you see the diet God gave us in Genesis 1:29? The plants that we eat produces corn, peas, beans, nuts, etc. according to the above statement and the Bible.
The fruit of a tree yielding seed, means a tree that produces seed or fruit. Just like we don't eat the whole tree that produces apples, before man sinned we didn't eat that herb (plants) that produced seeds. But after sin entered the world, God now had to command man to eat the plants.
"And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field."
(Genesis 3:17-18)
Now God commanded man to eat the plants or vegetables. Before sin He commanded them to eat that which came from the plants, now he must eat the plants/vegetables itself.
Below is a guideline of what we should be aiming for to get our nutrition.
1. 3 servings of fruit every day.
2. 2 tablespoons of seeds everyday. Get a quarter cup of your chia seeds, a quarter cup of pumpkin seeds, a quarter cup of sunflower seeds, a quarter cup of sesame seeds, and mix them all together. Then everyday take 2 tablespoons.
You can eat them in your hand, you can eat them in your cereal, or you can grind them up.
3. Study the seeds individually to see what they are high in. See what minerals are they high in that our body needs.
4. We are to eat a handful/quarter cup of nuts everyday. Take your measuring cup to WinCo, go to the nut section, and take a quarter cup of almonds, cashew, pistachios, walnuts, pecans, hazel nuts, and brazil nuts. Then mix them all together and take them everyday.
5. Fruits, grains, nuts, and vegetables, which includes your seeds and your beans, contains all the food nutrients and elements that we need to create good blood.
6. A simple way to get a lot of veggies is simply to eat a whole lot of salad. Green onions, purple cabbage, shredded carrots, romaine lettuce, spinach.
7. heaviest meals too be eaten at breakfast.
Breakfast
1. Steamed asparagus and broccoli. Asparagus and broccoli are known to kill cancer.
Cooked breakfast - quinoa with collard greens
2. We are to have 4 items max on our plate. Each portion will be 25%.
3. Common breakfast MM style.
We need a minimum of 6 servings of grain a day. You can get two servings of grain from your oatmeal's, and two servings of grain from your bread. This is 4 servings of grain for your breakfast. And then if you eat two servings of rice then you have your equivalent of 6 servings for the day.
One cup of oatmeal and two slices of toast. This is four servings of grain for your breakfast. So all you need is to eat a cup of rice and you got your full 6 servings of grain for the day. Half a cup is a serving.
You need three fruits. If a banana can fit in your whole hand you are to split that in half and that is 2 servings. A small orange is one serving. A large orange could be two servings. A kiwi is one serving. 3 strawberries is about a serving. A handful of grapes is a serving. Switch up your food so you do not get bored.
Grains - You can eat oatmeal, granola, oat waffles, french toast, etc.
Dinner
Vegetables. Tomatoes mixed with greens causes fermentation in the stomach. Fruits and veggies are not to be mixed.
Jobs said that we were made from clay. The very minerals in the foods of the earth that we are required to eat are the very minerals in the clay that the Lord made us from.
God allowed the herb of the field in the diet to replace the minerals that we lose on a daily basis. Therefore we need to eat fruit, grains, nuts, seeds, and veggies every day. Your fruits and vegetables 2 days ago is not sufficient.
Drinking too much juice puts a burden on the kidneys | https://medium.com/@survivaloftherighteous/god-created-the-human-body-on-the-sixth-day-of-creation-week-2779bfee2fcd | ['A.D. Keller'] | 2020-12-26 22:05:18.455000+00:00 | ['Ellen G White', 'Health', 'Healthcare', 'Seventh Day Adventist', 'Vegan'] |
“Reconceiving notions of power”: Making visible Métis women’s practices of wellness | You live in and are helping your community, but you’re also doing research. What sort of benefit does your academic work bring to the community?
This research really privileges local knowledge, and it creates a greater sense of belonging and it shows the importance of making visible the beauty of Métis identity, Métis women’s knowledge and Métis values. So one aspect of the project is interviewing and doing digital storytelling with the Elders in the community. What’s come out of that — in terms of being beneficial to the community — is the preservation of their own stories and preservation of their own knowledge. Now these stories are actually being used inside of the school by one of the local Métis teachers. The students are listening to their Elder, Sophie McDougall, and the teacher shared with me that it’s like she’s become the grandmother to all the students in this classroom.
What about yourself, as an academic — is there a particular strength to this approach that you see for yourself as a researcher?
Yes, for sure. Because I’m already arriving in relationship, I already show up knowing that I have certain ethical responsibilities and obligations to the community. You know, I have five generations of my ancestors that are part of that whole area. The revitalization in the community is my life revitalization also. I’m not separate from anything that I do. I can’t just walk away, I can’t close the door and leave work, because it’s part of me. It lives inside of me. It’s in my blood, it’s in my history, it’s in my everything.
What’s a major learning you’re taking away from this research so far?
The importance of gathering as women. We’ve seen an increase of Métis women and families taking back our lands, the knowledge of our lands, and the teachings of our lands. So gathering in our own spaces, and defining and determining wellness for ourselves — that’s a major theme.
Visiting [keeoukaywin] was the heart of living and being well, and the heart of our educational and learning systems. It’s how we took care of each other: visit ourselves, visit each other, visit our relations, visit the land, visit the river, visit our old knowledge, our Elders’ stories.
What important practices emerge out of gathering and visiting?
There was a Métis Elder at an interview, years ago when I was doing my Master’s, named Rose Fleury from Duck Lake. She said, “women need to gather again, because that’s how things change politically, socially and economically.” And so, we’re kind of testing her teaching and her wisdom, to see what does occur when we visit.
— -
Want to take part in Walking With Our Sisters? This outdoor installation will be open to the public August 15–18, 2019 on the Batoche National Historical Site: East Village. Everyone is welcome. If you wish more information or would like to volunteer, please email [email protected] or visit WWOS Batoche on Facebook for the latest updates. | https://medium.com/@greenuofa/reconceiving-notions-of-power-making-visible-m%C3%A9tis-womens-practices-of-wellness-ad0223bb4118 | ['University Of Alberta'] | 2020-04-23 16:25:14.165000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Indigenous', 'Saskatchewan', 'University', 'Education'] |
The problem is not sexism, it’s patriarchy | The problem is not sexism, it’s patriarchy
Photo by Gabe Pierce
We must realize that gender is an identity which is based on nature, but not in itself natural. But that doesn’t mean we can simply dismiss gender as “not real”: because it’s ideological it’s more real than if it were merely natural.
Sexism is defined as discrimination based on sex. So the first thing wrong with this definition is that we don’t interact with people based on their anatomical sex, we interact with them based on gender. But ok, even if we call it “Genderism” it still misses the point because it doesn’t describe the specific way in which women are oppressed.
So without an analysis of the particular system of oppression women face, feminists are then reduced to simply pointing out differences in gender and saying “this is oppression”, which doesn’t always work. Also, men can easily turn it around and say, hey, men are more likely to die in wars, that’s oppression too, so it kinda evens out.
But arguably the worst result of this abstract definition of sexism is a kind of censorship we impose on ourselves, where we are afraid to even acknowledge gender difference, because doing so already implies a discrimination based on sex. In a hypocritical way, we are only allowed to talk about gender difference when it is at the expense of men, never women. Such hypocrisy and censorship have unfortunately proven to be a breeding ground for privately held patriarchal views.
Just like not being able to criticize Israel can be a breeding ground for antisemitism. Speaking of Jews, imagine if we were to replace the word “antisemitism” with “religion-based discrimination”, or “religionism”. Immediately it’s clear that such a neutral, abstract way of putting it actually diminishes the violence done to the Jewish people. It would dangerously obscure the reason for the particular violence Jews have suffered by lumping it together with other religion-based violence.
The same exact thing goes for the term racism. When talking about Black people in America we should always use the term white supremacy or anti-blackness. Because again, simply using the word racism bypasses the particular history and the particular grievance Black people have with America. You could easily imagine a white liberal saying “end racism!”, but then opposing reparations, because if the government writes a check based on people’s race, isn’t that racist? | https://medium.com/@thefakemaarten/the-problem-is-not-sexism-its-patriarchy-691d6510b380 | ['Maarten Schumacher'] | 2020-12-19 11:41:23.914000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Feminism', 'Patriarchy', 'Racism', 'White Supremacy'] |
Going Sober Again — A Lesson About Ending My Year of Sobriety | If you don’t already know, I went a full year without drinking a single drop of alcohol. I won’t lie and tell you it was easy, there were a lot of sleepless nights and tears. The one thing that kept me going was that I started to see that I was a much better person sober than I was drunk. Learning to live with being restless and bored took almost half of a year but after that, I relished the feeling. Turns out what you do when you’re restless and can’t drink really helps you grow as a person.
There were so many benefits when I quit:
Better sleep ( slept through the night )
Spent more time working on my career
Got a job in the field I wanted ( Automation Engineer )
Got a puppy
Had more meaningful conversations with my partner
Cooked better food
Had more money
Lost weight
etc etc ETC
Then I hit a year and my addict brain started to rationalize with me. If I could handle being sober for a year, then I could handle reintroducing alcohol back into my life, right? New year, new me!
Looking back on this article, I cringe. How self-righteous did I sound?
An entire year, down the drain
Once I hit my year, I celebrated the fact that alcohol no longer had a hold over me and I felt confident. I felt confident that I had beaten my addiction, alcohol meant nothing to me and it felt great. Feels bad to admit, but I even felt pity for those that still felt the need to drink. Can’t they see that someone like me is doing so great without alcohol?
If everything was so great, why did I go back to drinking?
Slipping back into drinking didn’t start with a bender or going back into old habits right away, it was so deceptively slow that I was almost back at a year ago without even realizing. It started with tasting beers or cocktails that my boyfriend was drinking to getting my own beer once a week just “as a treat”. I mean it was only one right? I had stopped drinking before the hard seltzers were popular, especially White Claw so I jumped at the chance to try one when I could.
You all know this story and how it plays out. I would drink one and feel fine, even proud of myself for stopping after a single drink.
Then next week, I would drink two and be proud after stopping. Then three, and most recently a whopping four.
Starting at zero, again
I thought for a while that I was still fine because I didn’t drink beer every night and I stayed away from liquor. My addict brain told me that I couldn’t slip back into old habits if I didn’t pick up vodka again. There was no way I could be having an issue with alcohol again if I wasn’t buying a six pack of beer every night. I wasn’t missing workouts and I made it to work on time every day so there was a lie I kept telling myself- I had a handle on it this time. This time is different. New year, new me…right brain?
But all of the signs were there:
Stopped going to bed early
Woke up several times and would sleep in to catch up
Ate junk food more often and stopped wanting to cook
No motivation to do any of the activities I loved
Gained weight again
My performance at work was steadily declining
Stopped reading
Was getting agitated by everything
Watched the clock until it was an acceptable time to drink
I want to blame Covid-19 and the whole pandemic. Alcohol sales have gone up since Covid-19 and everyone is struggling. Being stuck at home and dealing with isolation has pushed a lot of people into drinking heavily and it really shows on social media especially. I used all of that and the fact that I, a former alcoholic, went a whole year without alcohol to tear down all of the progress that I made and started drinking again. As silly as it sounds, the original reason I tried drinking again was because I started doing happy hours with my friends over Zoom and felt like not drinking was distancing myself. Months had gone by without me seeing another person and I was aching for closeness. But even though I did it to feel close to my friends, I was really using alcohol to push down the loneliness I had been feeling.
I don’t think it’s all negative, though. Even though it had been a full year, I easily slipped back into those old bad habits and it finally proved to me that I can’t have alcohol in my life at all. It’s in my nature to want a distraction and to be terrified of being bored. It was all too familiar to tell myself that I could only feel emotions when I was drinking and I would dwell on negative emotions. My addict brain forgot about an entire year where I tried new hobbies, lost weight, and felt happiness again. It forgot how much more I was reading and how well I would sleep at night. It forgot how much more me I was without alcohol.
So here I am, back at day one. Ready to be my best self and remember that sobriety isn’t linear. There are ups and downs and sometimes the journey has so many pit stops that you start to wonder if you’ll ever make it to your destination. But I have hope that it’s there, on the horizon. | https://medium.com/an-idea/going-sober-again-a-lesson-about-ending-my-year-of-sobriety-8ccd2ee186ce | ['Kelly Tompkins'] | 2020-10-08 01:14:39.548000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Productivity', 'Sobriety', 'Life Lessons', 'Addiction'] |
Foods to Nourish Your Skin and Hair: Understanding Outer Nutrition | Nutrition is all about nourishing the body with the right foods and nutrients. Some people, however, tend to forget that our skin and hair also need nourishment and that they play important roles in our overall health and wellness.
The skin is the body’s largest organ; it serves as the primary barrier against pathogens in the environment. Our skin also serves as protection from a loss of fluid from inside the body, which is why we should keep our skin healthy and protected from ultraviolet light. Similarly, our hair provides heat insulation and cooling and protects us from ultraviolet radiation.
What Is Outer Nutrition and Why Is It Important?
In my role, I have the pleasure of training and educating independent distributors around the world about our company’s holistic approach to health and wellness. We teach our members about the importance of nourishing the body inside and out.
What we call “Outer Nutrition” is simply about achieving and maintaining healthy skin and hair. Just as your heart, brain, and muscles need proper nutrition for long-term health, your skin and hair require the right nourishment to be able to perform their functions: protection, thermoregulation, sensory perception, secretion, and excretion.
This might not come as a surprise, but inner and outer nutrition are deeply connected.
What You Eat Affects the Health of Your Skin and Hair
The condition of your skin and hair is affected by your diet, age, and environmental conditions. You can’t control some of these factors — like aging or climate — but you can manage what you eat, so it supports your skin and hair.
A variety of nutrients, including protein, antioxidants, vitamins, and collagen can help improve the health of your skin and hair. People with good-looking skin and hair tend to have daily healthy habits!
Here are my recommended foods and nutrients for healthy, glowing skin and hair:
Eat Protein-rich Foods to Repair Your Cells.
Every cell needs protein to maintain its life. Protein is also the primary material used to “replace” worn-out or dead cells. Your muscles, hair, nails, skin, and eyes are made of protein. A diet low in protein, over the course of many months, can cause a loss in skin tone, thinning hair, and wrinkles beyond what would be reasonable for chronological age.
Including protein in your diet from sources like chicken, meat, fish, soy or tofu will help you solve that concern. Meal replacement protein shakesare also great options for protein consumption.
Get Your Vitamins A, C, and E.
While protein is essential to achieving healthy skin and hair, vitamins with antioxidant properties — such as vitamin A, C, and E — are also crucial.
Deficiencies in any of these micronutrients can affect the health of your skin. The skin easily shows the effects of oxidative damage, and antioxidants have been shown to be potent in protecting the skin from oxidative damage.
Here’s how vitamin A, C, and E support outer nutrition:
Vitamin A
There are two types of vitamin A: retinoids (preformed vitamin A) and carotenoids (preformed vitamin A). The liver converts both types into retinol, which stimulates the production of new skin cells and prevents hair loss.
Good sources of vitamin A are fruits and vegetables rich in yellow to red pigments, as well as green leafy vegetables.
Vitamin C
Vitamin C is crucial for the body to be able to naturally create its own collagen. When there is a Vitamin C deficiency, unstable collagen is produced, which provides a weak structural framework for tissue repair. Vitamin C is also involved in the formation of certain lipids that help reconstruct the epidermis — the outermost layer of skin — when damaged.
Good sources of vitamin C are citrus fruit, such as oranges and lemons, peppers, strawberries, broccoli, and kale.
Vitamin E
Vitamin E functions as a chain-breaking antioxidant due to its ability to rapidly expel radicals before they can react with other lipids, thereby ending the propagation of oxidative processes in membranes. Additionally, vitamin E helps to strengthen skin barrier function.
Good sources of vitamin E are sunflower seeds, almonds, peanuts, pumpkins, and red bell peppers.
Taking a daily multivitamin is also an excellent way to ensure you are providing your skin with the micronutrients it needs to look healthy.
Try Collagen-rich Foods and Supplements.
During the aging process, which starts in your mid-20s, the skin suffers from a progressive loss of moisture and becomes increasingly dry. When this happens, the dermis becomes thinner; the connective tissue loses its firmness and elasticity, and wrinkles and sagging start to occur.
The human body’s collagen accounts for 25 percent to 30 percent of its total protein, of which about 75 percent is skin collagen. Collagen is located primarily in the connective tissue, and it’s responsible for giving the dermis its firm structure.
Some examples of collagen-rich foods include leafy greens, red and yellow vegetables, berries, citrus fruits, fish, chicken, egg whites, avocados, soy, beans, and white tea.
Collagen is also available as a nutritional supplement. Hydrolyzed collagen — a type of collagen that can be easily absorbed into the bloodstream when used as a supplement — can increase skin elasticity, skin density, reduce wrinkles, and support a smooth skin.
Finally, Don’t Forget to Stay Hydrated!
Did you know that a significant amount of skin tissue is made up of water? About 25 to 30 percent. For this reason, it’s important to drink lots of fluids to avoid dry and dehydrated skin.
As you can see, nutrition plays a vital role in having healthy skin and hair. It’s the best path to looking and feeling great. When you nourish your body from the inside out, with the proper food and nutrients, your body will thank you with youthful and radiant skin and hair, ultimately promoting better wellness and greater confidence.
For more on Healthy Aging and other related topics, visit Herbalife Nutrition. | https://medium.com/herbalife-nutrition/foods-to-nourish-your-skin-and-hair-understanding-outer-nutrition-d7ac349ab983 | ['Herbalife Nutrition'] | 2021-07-06 15:03:21.475000+00:00 | ['Hair Care', 'Nutrition', 'Skincare', 'Water', 'Vitamin'] |
COVID-19 and Parkinson’s Disease: Is There a Link? | As people continue to live longer, Parkinson’s disease, or PD, becomes more widespread. It is the fastest-growing neurological disorder. By 2040, the number of cases is expected to top 14 million worldwide. Scientists who study PD wonder if COVID-19 will compound the problem.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
It is far too early to speculate about the long-term neurological effects, if there are any, of COVID-19. However, some symptoms of the viral respiratory illness worry researchers. Encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, is one. The loss of taste and smell is another. They indicate that SARS-CoV-2 — the virus strain that causes COVID-19 — might be capable of invading the central nervous system.
Dr. Carla Alessandra Scorza is a professor of neurology at the Federal University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, she recently weighed in on possible links between PD and viruses. She noted that the microanatomy and motor symptoms of PD share traits with several viruses. Examples include HIV, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis B, and H1N1, known as swine flu.
Scorza also pointed to telling studies. Patients with severe COVID-19 were more likely to develop problems that affect the brain’s blood supply. Brain scans of other patients showed evidence of altered brain structure and function. Still, other scans indicated intracerebral hemorrhage, which is bleeding on the brain.
Are these findings evidence of a viral neuro-invasion? Scorza and other scientists concede that only time will tell. However, the possibility has been discussed before.
Encephalitis lethargica, or EL, is a rare and serious inflammation of the brain. It was once known as sleeping sickness.
The deadly Spanish flu pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people through 1918 and 1919. An epidemic of EL followed. Dr. Ava Easton of the Encephalitis Society reports that EL affected up to a million or more people. A remarkable number of patients who survived developed a form of PD. At the time, many scientists blamed the Spanish flu virus, but the cause was never confirmed.
Scorza and others are revisiting that theory. Neurology has advanced by light-years since then, and COVID-19 sparks renewed interest in the role of viruses in PD.
Viruses might directly trigger PD by being physically present in the central nervous system.
COVID-19 patients struggle with shortness of breath and other respiratory issues. Scorza points out that the nuclei responsible for breathing rhythm are in the brain stem. If the virus took hold in the central nervous system, it would directly impact breathing.
Another possibility is that COVID-19 and similar viruses start a lengthy inflammatory process in the brain. PD is an indirect result.
Finally, lab studies show that other human coronaviruses may lie dormant in blood cells. They could potentially cause infections in the central nervous system much later. Coronavirus antibodies have turned up in the brain and spinal fluid of PD patients.
There is a reverse aspect to consider. Are people who already have PD at greater risk for contracting COVID-19? Will the virus affect them differently if they get it? No one knows for sure.
There is no evidence that having PD makes someone more susceptible to COVID-19 infection. Complications of the virus definitely increase for the elderly, diabetics, and people with heart or lung problems. No such data exists for PD patients.
Scientists can only study cases of PD patients who have had other viral respiratory illnesses. Their PD symptoms worsened, but just about any illness exacerbates symptoms. Some patients reported feeling stiffer and slower than usual. Others thought their medications didn’t work as well while they were sick. Recovery was drawn out.
Doctors assume that most PD patients who contract COVID-19 will have similar complaints. Symptoms might be much worse, though, for patients who also have restrictive lung disease. In that condition, the lungs never fully expand with air.
Until more is known, PD patients should do all they can to protect themselves. Safety guidelines vary almost by the community, so doctors advise erring on the side of caution. When in doubt, the experts agree, follow the most stringent guidelines.
Dr. Patrik Brundin is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. He hopes that neurology researchers closely monitor COVID-19 patients who recover. Infections and viral inflammation have already been linked to a higher risk for PD later in life.
Also, studies on animals show that viruses probably raise alpha-synuclein levels. Alpha-synuclein is a protein found in the heart, muscle, and stomach tissue. It is especially abundant in the brain.
Neurologists are not quite sure about all its functions. They do know that it plays a role in the release and regulation of dopamine. That is highly relevant to PD. Dopamine helps control the start and stop of both voluntary and involuntary movements.
Daniella Balduino Victorino was the lead author of the journal article. She remarked that the National Institutes of Health recently threw $6 billion at infectious disease research. Only $300 million went to PD research.
Victorino, Scoza, Brundin, and other scientists hope that PD soon gets its fair share. With well-funded research, the relationship between neurology, viruses, and PD will be much clearer. | https://medium.com/@shivagopalvasishta/covid-19-and-parkinsons-disease-is-there-a-link-643691d60b6a | ['Shiva Gopal Vasishta'] | 2020-05-20 16:41:35.540000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Medical', 'Neurology', 'Covid 19', 'Doctors'] |
A poem about the natural, the beautiful and the often hidden – | A poem about the natural, the beautiful and the often hidden – WritingSophie ·Dec 20, 2020
Beware of the unshaven vagina
‘What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men’ – Naomi Wolf
she pulled the hair out of her skin
a razor each time
weeding out her womanhood
as if femininity herself
walked across rose gardens
and asked them to strip their thorns
as if the very state of being a woman
is only complete with a decoration of softness
s.c | https://medium.com/@sophiecook2710/a-poem-about-the-natural-the-beautiful-and-the-often-hidden-53794e3cc0a2 | [] | 2020-12-20 05:38:28.830000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Feminism', 'Body', 'Image', 'Poetry'] |
Decision Control Statement in Python | Today we are going to familiar with the concept of Decision control statement in Python. Here you will learn about -
What is Decision Control Statement
Types of Decision control Flow?
If
If -Else
If-elif Statement
What is Loop?
Why we need to use a loop?
Types of Loops
What is Decision Control Statement?
Decision Control statement is a statement that determines the control flow of a set of instructions. means D.C.S decides the sequence in which instruction in the program is to be executed.
The three fundamental methods of control flow in a programming language are -
Sequential Control Selection Control iterative Control
Here we will learn about only two methods of control flow.
Sequential Control
-When the program is executed line by line means from the first line to the second line then from the second line to the third line and so on. This method is called Sequential Control.
Selection Control Statement
- When we execute only a selected set of statements then we use the Selection control statement. It usually jumps from one part of the code to another depending on whether a particular condition is satisfied or not.
In Selection Control Statement we learn about -
If statement
If -else statement
If-elif-else statement
If Statement
- The if statement is the simplest form of decision control statement that is frequently used in decision making.
Syntax of If Statement
if (test_expression) : statement1 ………….. statement n statement x # Program to increment a number if it is positive x = 10 # Initialize the value of x if (x>0): # test the value of x x = x+1 # Increment the value of x if it is > 0 print(x) # print the value of
If — else Statement
The use of If — else statement is very simple. When you run your program, The test expression is evaluated and if the result is True, the statement followed by the expression is executed, else if the expression is False, the statement followed by the expression is executed.
Syntax of If — else Statement if ( test expression ) : statement block 1 else : statement block 2 statement x
If — elif — else statement
Python supports if — elif — else statements to test additional conditions apart from the initial test expression. The if- elif — else constructs works in the same way as usual to if-else statement. One more thing to remember that it is not necessary that every if statement should have an else block as python supports simple if statements also.
Syntax of If — elif — else statement
if ( test expression 1): statement block 1 elif ( test expression 2 ): statement block 2 ………………………… elif ( test expression N ): statement block N else: statement block X Statement Y
Introduction of Loop
- A loop is a programming function that repeats a statement or condition according to the specific condition.
The loop repeats a certain statement until the condition given by the programmer is True.
Let’s understand the loop through an example -
Suppose you went to the market to purchase a T-shirt. Now, you will visit each and every single shop until you get your desired T-shirt and when you find it you return to your home.
That’s how loop work, It will also perform the task until the condition will not be met.
Why we need to use a loop?
Now, for understanding the use of loop let’s take also an example -
Here, You need to purchase some fruits from markets. You have the list of fruits in which you have to purchase -
Mango
Guava
Banana
Apple
Water-melon
Now, you have to option to purchase all these fruits -
You told an individual person to purchase an individual fruit from the market. Like — You told you, dad, to buy mango and to Mom, you said to buy banana. And, the other option is, you go to the market and purchase all fruits on your own.
It is not wrong if I said you choose the second option right.
Now, the use of a loop is also like this. Look at the two different programs to solve the same problem.
In both pictures, we are print the Table of a certain number with loop or without loop
On the Very first program, we choose option 1 of our example and called different print functions for doing the same task. But, In our second program, we apply our second option and perform all activity by only one print function.
so, this the use of loop I hope you will understand it.
Types of Loop
In python programming language, loops are usually three types -
For loop While loop Nested loop
What is For Loop?
- Basically ‘ for ‘ is a keyword of the python programming language used for repeat a task until a specific condition becomes True.
Syntax of ‘ for ‘ loop -
for < variable > in sequence:
statement block
An example of ‘ for ‘ loop
In the above example, we take a variable name, ‘ i ‘. which stores the value and with the help of print function it shows us the first 10 natural numbers.
Now, the above example we use a function name range ()
Range() Function
- The range() is a pre-defined function in python programming language used to iterate over a sequence of numbers. The syntax of range() is :
range( beginning, end, [step] )
NOTE:- One important thing about range function is, it prints one less value of its last value. means if you write a program like — range( 1, 10) then, it only prints the number from 1 to 9.
What is While Loop?
The while loop also works the same as for loop. The difference is only their syntax.
Syntax of while Loop
statement x while ( condition ):
statement block statement y
An Example of while loop
In the above example, we print the first 10 natural numbers using a while loop.
At very first we initialize a variable named ‘ i ‘ and store a value 1 in it. After that, we create a while loop and put a condition over there that the loop works continuously until the value of ‘ i ‘ is not greater than 10 and print the all value of ‘ i ‘ until condition is not True.
Nested loop
- Nested loop is nothing but a loop under a loop means you can also execute a loop under another loop.
see this example :
So, in the above example, you can see that how we can use a nested loop.
What is break Statement and continue Statement
The break statement is used to terminating the execution of the loop at a specific point. For example -
So, in the above example, we execute a program in which we give a statement to run until the value of ‘ i ‘ is not equal to 10 but after that, we realized we only need 4 value of ‘ i ‘ then we use break command to terminate the program.
Continue Statement — When we add a continue statement in our loop then the condition written under the ‘ continue ‘ statement will not be shown and execute. For example -
You can see that in the above example the value ‘5’ is not shown in the output. | https://coderadvice.medium.com/decision-control-statement-in-python-25891ebb94d7 | ['Coder Advice'] | 2019-12-19 18:49:10.075000+00:00 | ['Python Programming', 'Python3', 'Python', 'Loop', 'Programming'] |
Gen2’s Big Announcement — The Iris Token Platform | This past week, Gen2 Technologies, a public company trading under the ticker BRKK, announced its revolutionary Iris Token Platform. We are excited about this new market proposition for a number of reasons, especially the following.
The Iris Token. Yes, a catchy name. But also a digital token which we expect will be in demand. An ERC Ethereum design, which will function as a utility token. Buyers will get the opportunity to get unique and unparalleled views of professional sports teams and players in action, along with other people doing things of interest. Sports viewing, reality TV, and user-generated content will never be quite the same.
An Advanced Technological and Media Platform. The Iris Token platform will leverage a distributed network of thousands of miniature body-worn cameras, which can even be woven directly into sports jerseys and clothing. Content will be streamable directly from cameras, on-demand, by holders of the Iris Token. Seamless, unique, and advanced streamable content — this service promises to deliver consumers a step-change improvement in their content consumption possibilities.
To learn more details about why the Iris Token Platform might well be the next big thing in content distribution and enjoyment, click on the link to read the Iris Token whitepaper. | https://medium.com/the-capital/gen2s-big-announcement-the-iris-token-platform-e1bbb1c2f7d6 | ['The Capital'] | 2020-12-21 12:00:10.375000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Eth', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto'] |
Reinforcing personal boundaries in quarantine: how to respond to unsolicited advice, unplanned video-calling, and unwarranted pics from exes | Photo by Mike Palmowski on Unsplash.com
It would be an understatement to say I am not a morning person: several cups of coffee, breathing exercises, and a dance routine are required to aid me to step into an extrovert attire. I work and write mostly during the evenings and nights, and while I greet a wake-up text from a lover with a virtuous smile, my morning elegance is something I keep to my private chambers.
My mornings in quarantine are not very different from the usual ones: I wake up, stretch, power up on caffeine, cook an egg or two, slice some fruit, swallow my vitamins, and read my emails, while scheduling the important calls of the day — work, friends, sometimes family. But my mornings for the past days have had something of a disturbing element, which keeps taking me by surprise: everyone suddenly wants to video call.
Video calls were not all that common until recently, which isn’t to say they weren’t an important part of virtual communication, but they were not the norm. Although I spend numerous hours in a week, sometimes in a day, with a close friend or two in a WhatsApp call, we very rarely (if ever) see each other on video. Such encounters are reserved for my psychotherapist (we live far away, thus we meet online), a lover, and, on occasion, a job recruiter — but even in these cases, with prior consent.
Video calling someone without prior notice is the virtual equivalent of breaking in their bathroom without knocking, while that person is taking a dump - I have come to think recently, as several friends and acquaintances showed up on my phone’s screen each morning, eager to chat, while I was much less prepared for such immersive interactions.
I imagine the person placing such calls without inquiring whether the timing is right feels confident and eager to see and speak to the other. But what if the recipient of that call is naked? What if she or he is crying, as they woke up from a dreadful, stress-induced nightmare painting the end of the world in a shopping-mall sized supermarket? What if they’re having sex or pleasuring themselves? Better yet, what if they’re going about their business in the bathroom? What if, simply, they’re unprepared to be seen?
My pre-quarantine introvert/extrovert personas have been balancing each other out with the switch between indoor/outdoor environments. I love socializing when I go out but immediately retreat in my hermit shell as I rejoice in the comfort and solitude of my apartment. There is something unnatural and relatively surreal about encounters that unfold on a small screen - as opposed to meetings and dialogues in the 3D. When it’s close friends, the setting is obviously more relaxed. But when it comes to more official encounters, a sense of discomfort and anxiety builds up. Faced with virtual work interviews, I study my living ecosystem to determine what type of scenery I ought to create in order to make an effortlessly reliable, yet professional first impression. Not too creative, not too bland. A neutral background, the Business Insider advises. The wall just looks wrong. The light is too dim. A plant needs to be moved. My hair looks brittle on camera. I’m already tired.
It baffles me that a video call can raise such concerns within us. Yet, we are reduced to finding acceptable, and furthermore, meaningful avenues to compensate for our loss of real-life interaction.
As I navigate these new pathways of connection, I am left wondering: do we suddenly need to reframe our boundaries?
Which brings the topic of unsolicited advice.
In the past years, I have kept my online presence to a minimum, limiting my activity to postings about work, my books, and stories I wrote. Then, as I dealt with the grief of my last serious break-up, I limited the exposure of my private life — and thoughts, to a greater degree. Separating my internal workings from my professional ones in front of an audience was not just a trial to keep my privacy unadulterated — but merely an effort to protect my emotional health from unwarranted advice from the people on social media that I didn’t personally know — or barely knew. As an immersive journalist of many years on the topics of relationships and mental health, I inadvertently exposed several layers of my private life in order to curate stories — to a degree, and more often than not I received feedback in the form of more or less blunt psychological advice that implied I could have done differently in life — or better.
But quarantine, and subsequent isolation, brought the extrovert in me back to social networking, one step at a time. As I began writing again on Medium and publishing more quarantine-related stories in my daily work as an editor too, I began to retrace my life on social media, and regain momentum there — surely as means to make up for the time and experiences I otherwise would have acquired in a real-life social setting.
Naturally, I did get acquainted with people from my past too. Some I welcomed, some — not so much. Some of the calls and messages I began receiving as I stepped back on social media revolved around my health and state of mind. Speaking openly about my stress-triggered panic to leave the house for extended periods of time was welcomed with a plethora of advice.
Have you tried yoga?
Are you breathing correctly, though?
Maybe you have, in fact, a panic disorder.
Why don’t you meditate?
Chin up, it will pass.
Why are you feeling so scared, though?
Are you afraid to die, or to get ill?
You should get out of the house more!
Don’t watch the news so much!
Are you taking Vitamin D?
Have you tried yoga, though?
The trouble with unrequested advice or presumptuous opinions is that they keep popping in the back of one’s consciousness like dull hammer knocks, and one soon finds herself or himself entertaining a conversation they didn’t even want to be a part of, to begin with. It is easy to fall prey to frustration as we want to help another out of their perceived struggles, but I cannot help wondering how much we project ourselves on another when we try so hard to tell them what is best for them?
Finally, in the spirit of it’s ok to text your ex now, messages from several former partners, or former friends have found their way into my mailbox. Some were expressing regret for our forlorn relationships or affairs. Some were duly inquiring about my health and state of mind. Some were sending me selfies, which fall — I came to think — just short of dick-pics, when uncalled for.
I pondered over what enables people to do such gestures now (why not before?) While it is our deeply human need for connection that drives us to try to rekindle or think of people in our past in a kinder light right now, how do we keep healthy boundaries when it comes to verbal or visual interaction with them? A selfie from one of my exes made me uncomfortable in a familiar way. It prompted me to revisit the reasons we broke up, and the baggage that dragged the connection further and further away from my sympathies.
The unsolicited advice I received from strangers or acquaintances prompted me to step back, thank them for being caring and thoughtful, and eventually remove myself from the conversations when it had become absolutely necessary.
The common denominator of all such interactions is that they feel as if someone is walking in your apartment without ringing the doorbell. While this was a casualty in the Seinfeld series, it’s understandable that not everyone has the same legerity with their friends and families.
In a sense, the quarantine has a regulatory function on the ways we connect and engage, and more importantly — on whom we choose to engage and entertain.
It’s not commendable that we want, more than ever, to stay in touch — and it shouldn’t be a pain to do so: it’s a dire necessity. Still, it’s sensible that we walk the fine line between genuine care and curious trespassing, and we avoid crossing boundaries that may now call to be redefined. | https://medium.com/moments-of-passion/reinforcing-personal-boundaries-in-quarantine-how-to-respond-to-unsolicited-advice-unplanned-44fec379593b | ['Ioana Cristina Casapu'] | 2020-04-06 17:13:37.394000+00:00 | ['Boundaries', 'Ex', 'Quarantine', 'Coronavirus', 'Relationships'] |
How to Build Your Professional Confidence | Your professional confidence level can seriously affect success in interviews, or even day-to-day workplace settings.
This is a complicated thing considering the best way to grow your confidence is to have many wins, however a lack thereof will restrict you from those wins. If you’ve been realizing that a lack of belief in yourself lately is actually lowering the amount that others believe in you, something must be done.
There is no need for a downward spiral, and with the help of GoFable, we’ll help you pull yourself out of this situation by your bootstraps, turning you into a certified stone cold fox.
The paddling duck analogy
Continuing on the theme of animal references, there is a very important story we once heard here at GoFable. The paddling duck analogy is one that pervades both the East and West coast, without discrimination. And here’s how it goes.
When a duck is swimming on the top on the water, what the average passer-by sees is a calm surface with a smooth wake.There are no ragged surface patterns, just a smooth animal gliding across the water.
Very peaceful, right?
However, the truth of the matter is that this is not the case at all beneath the water. When a duck is dancing peacefully above water, underneath their feet are paddling frantically. You have never seen someone move faster than a duck’s feet beneath the water. But from the top, no one would ever know.
This is the point. Many people do just this — hiding this secret mentality from the rest of us, that let our struggles lie on the surface for others to support us with.
But there is a percentage of people that never let others see them sweat, and these are the people others look at with respect, believing they never fail or struggle, or don’t know what to do. There is no truth in that, except that perhaps this is all anyone needs to have others trust them.
So why not try it?
Get the gear you need to feel cool
While I personally believe the concept of ‘fake it till you make it’ has gone out, that doesn’t mean that making yourself feel more confident with the clothes you wear can’t make you feel better for real. The idea is if perhaps you have a lack of professional confidence when your more experienced peers have the ideal work bag, or great loafers that just scream executive, maybe you should do something about it!
It’s actually very common for people to feel intimidated or affected by their clothing options, especially since it is a direct visual comparison to others. We are after all, simple creatures.
Therefore, make sure you feel equal at least on this level and rest assured, more confidence will follow. Besides, if you are a bit strapped for cash, which is contributing to your scrappy wardrobe, there is absolutely nothing wrong with second hand or discount! Check out warehouse clearance stores and get the exact brands your coworkers are wearing for half the price.
Besides, your coworkers will never know that the same exact brand produced the same exact year is any lesser because it was cheaper, therefore you shouldn’t think it’s any less either. In fact, you should just consider yourself smarter by spending your money in a more educated fashion.
Get some work under your belt
Apart from feeling lesser because of not having that Gucci belt, another common reason there is a lack of professional confidence is not having the same amount of experience as those you look up to, or aspire to be like. However, just remember that everyone starts with zero experience somewhere, and this is something that is easily fixable.
Plus, if you can eliminate the lack of confidence you feel from a weaker wardrobe and weaker resume, then what else is there? This is probably the main contributor, as a lack of confidence generally represents not believing you are as worthy as those around you. It is your mind’s way of expressing you think you are lesser, and if in a professional setting you prove you are professionally equal, then there is nothing to fear.
Apart from the positive appearance you will gain through having more to display on your resume, you will also gain confidence through actually having more experience. The only reason someone feels nervous or uncomfortable in a professional setting is that it is unfamiliar to them, and with some real time put in behind a desk at a workplace, everything won’t seem so daunting. It’s not intimidating — It’s just going to work!
Understand business confidence is all about sales
As the last main point to leave you with, it is important to understand nearly any business role — even if not in the industry of sales — is about sales.
Have you ever seen someone walk into a room with a rolling confidence that you can even see on their shoulders? Think about the type of environment they are entering — are they selling something? Is the room they are walking in to a place that they will need to persuade others?
Then perhaps the reason they walk in like this is because they are considering these things, and know customers and their coworkers, and most importantly their boss will trust them more if they maintain a strong front.Personal confidence is huge for opening doors for yourself.
This is what it’s all about. Even though there are many other contributing factors to professional success, you can rest assured that the associate you are working with, who earns the promotion, does not doubt themselves openly. They may do it in private, but you’d never know that since they have a wonderfully confident and professional appearance as soon as they step out of their home. Think about creating something like this for yourself.
But still be yourself.
Conclusion
Honestly, in every circumstance confidence is just something that is gained over time. Put your time in, and do what you can now to arrive at interviews feeling like the winner you need to feel like so you can secure those opportunities, or even a raise. And very soon it won’t have to be some persona you have to put on like a suit. It will just be how you feel in the work setting.
Connect with us
GoFable Website
Medium Blog
Twitter
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LinkedIn
— — —
Have a personal confidence trick that crushes the competition at work?
Tell us your secret in the comments below!
Credits: Anna Davis, Anastasia, Sophie Bagaeva, Gabe Fearing | https://medium.com/gofable/how-to-build-your-professional-confidence-e6dbf9232cbb | ['Alex Yakovlev'] | 2019-11-03 18:01:01.799000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Leadership', 'Management', 'Self Improvement'] |
BlockShow Americas Recap | BlockShow Americas which recently concluded on August 21st, was the first stop of the LEDU North American Roadshow. The event was held at the Venetian luxury hotel and casino resort in Las Vegas. Over 1500 guests attended the event which also included over 80 speakers. BlockShow provided an opportunity for discussions on decentralization, use cases for blockchain technology and more by some of the top blockchain and cryptocurrency experts in the field.
Education Ecosystem had a booth at the event where we provided information to interested parties about our project and LEDU coins. The conference also afforded us the opportunity to meet with some potential partners and discuss possibilities for working together. Keep up to date with the other events in our roadshow on our website, blog and social media platforms. Below are some photos from the event: | https://medium.com/ledu-tokens/blockshow-americas-recap-fd39c70e0201 | ['Dr. Michael J. Garbade'] | 2019-01-11 19:52:14.437000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Las Vegas', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Challenging Patriarchy Through the Lens of Privacy | Below is the introduction to Privacy International’s 2017 International Women’s Day report, which highlights the recent work of the PI Network on privacy, surveillance, and gender. It was written by PI Team Lead Alexandrine Pirlot de Corbion.
Many of the challenges at the intersection of women’s rights and technology as it relates to privacy and surveillance, come down to control. Such challenges have come sharply into focus as societies trend toward surveillance by default and foster data exploitative ecosystem.
And whilst control, in the context of privacy, should be about one’s control of their data, the limitations that are set, and the boundaries one erects between one’s self and others, unfortunately the dominant narrative has been about something else. The focus has been about the powerful, the State, industry, and dominant males, being given legitimacy within patriarchal societies to exercise their control over people, over women, in the name of security, economic prosperity, and self-empowerment. Feminists argue that surveillance itself is tool of patriarchy which controls and limits the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms online and offline.
Whilst national and legal frameworks uphold equal rights and their enjoyment without discrimination, in practice, the adoption of national legislation, as well as sectoral policies and laws have resulted in the development of a differential treatment of women and girls, and men and boys. While data and technology are presented as being ‘gender-neutral’, the way they are used is not, and so existing inequalities are maintained or in some circumstances heightened.
Changes in policies and the adoption of new practices by the State but also industry, can result in changes in gender roles and power structures for the better through improved empowerment and access to equal opportunities, but also for the worse.
In this special briefing for International Women’s Day 2017, we explore through the work of the Privacy International Network some areas of concern being addressed in relation to privacy, surveillance, women’s rights, and gender. Coding Rights demonstrates the important of generating and disseminating gendered content on issues of surveillance in Latin America as a means of inciting informed action. In Chile, Derechos Digitales explored the booming market of mobile applications related to sexual and reproductive health and with a focus on menstrual apps. Digital Rights Foundation undertook an important process of understanding the perception female journalists have of privacy, and some of the risks they faced in undertaking their work. In the Philippines, the Foundation for Media Alternatives worked in collaboration with the Association for Progressive Communications to map out violence against women online, specifically on social media. Fundación Karisma presents concerns in relation to both of those topics, the work of female journalists and the need for ensuring secure access to the internet for women so it is truly a space that enables the enjoyment of their fundamental rights, and not a tool for abuse. In Kenya, the National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders (NCHRD-K) remains highly concerned by the threats to women human rights defenders in a context of arbitrary surveillance, but also physical abuse.
These cases demonstrate the need to understand the implications of policies and practices that interfere with the right to privacy through the lens of gender, and consider socially constructed gender roles and socio-economic and political structures which rigidly hinder challenging these. In addition, interferences with women’s right to privacy are multifaceted and require a multi-pronged approach targeting various stakeholders. States must move beyond the patriarchal alpha male approach of protecting their citizens with little regard to gender issues and impact their policies have into silencing and marginalising a large percentage of their population, women. We have also seen the role of industry who have tapped into a profit generating market of providing sexual and reproductive support to women, as well as other service providers, and yet who have failed to consider a gendered-approach to their business model that not only respects but promotes the right to privacy of women in their enjoyment of their fundamental right to freedom of expression. And finally, the implications of the patriarchal society we live in which continues to try to silence women and hinder their contributions to our societies through censorship, shaming, and other deplorable tactics.
Women and men need and should enjoy the same opportunities, agency and power, and have access to the same choices to live in dignity, manage their autonomy and establish their identity, both offline and online, as a core principles to exercise their fundamental rights. And the key word here is choice. | https://medium.com/privacy-international/challenging-patriarchy-through-the-lens-of-privacy-efdc7ecb4387 | ['Privacy International'] | 2017-03-08 10:45:59.551000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Privacy', 'Surveillance', 'Human Rights'] |
My 2018: Occupational Therapy and more | For me, 2018 has been a year of highs and lows. Two semesters, two placements (fieldwork as called in the US), and a busy summer accounted for my 365 days. Undoubtedly, this year has been the most challenging year I have had in university. Before 2019 tops that, it is an excellent time to look back at what I learned.
Placements
Two placements have been the highlight of my year. Between April and May, I worked in an inpatient rehabilitation setting for 6-weeks. Despite having to set the alarm for 5 am and a 2-hours long commute on two trains, I enjoyed my first placement. The OT team worked with older adults to assess and providing interventions to maximise independence and reduce risks to health and well-being. My favorite part of this placement was being able to work with a patient through their rehabilitation from start to finish. It was rewarding to see people regaining their skills and strengths. The amount of time dedicated to patients truly helped to develop a productive therapeutic relationship. I was upset that the 6-weeks flew by.
My second placement did not have a happy ending as the first one. When we I was given a placement in an emergency department I knew it was going to be difficult. The fast work environment did not agree with my style of working. Spending time with patients as I did in my previous placement was not possible here, which was frustrating. However, having a supportive practice educator was helpful. Upon reflecting, I can only hold myself accountable for not getting over the line. I made silly mistakes that could have easily been avoided with a touch of self-awareness. But I also understood that some difficulties I faced are unique to the setting and may not be found elsewhere.
University
The most nerve-racking experience of 2018 was the OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). The build-up to it since we started classes in September 2017 was not helpful. We had to pass it to be able to go on placement, so the lot was at stake. My task was to recommend a walking aid to an actual elderly gentleman with a made up condition. There were two lectures in the corner doing the marking and timing. Although I was a bag of nerves during mine, I did enough to pass (lately this has become my motto). The best advice I can give to anybody doing an OSCE is never to do one without timing yourself beforehand.
Throughout the year I wrote several essays which were related to the OT process. Designing assessment strategies and intervention plans for real-life cases was exciting and challenging at the same time. At times it felt like a puzzle with all the edge pieces missing, so you have no idea where to start. This year I was able to get rid of my bad habit of starting an essay right away. I would typically end up going back and forth between reading and writing, killing my productivity. Instead, I read the sources and made a plan of the content before writing making sure it is relevant and checks out the marking criteria. This way, I only had to deal with the mandatory stress that comes with assignments.
Summer
I wanted to gain experience working in a clinical setting over the summer. Therefore, I was excited to hear that I have been accepted for a healthcare assistant job in a community hospital. Thinking of how I enjoyed my first placement in inpatient rehabilitation this was this was the ideal scenario. I worked nearly full time over the summer break and switched to part-time over the term. Although the job does not involve occupational therapy, working with patients is a priceless experience. Also, the money was not bad either.
Instagram
Opening an Instagram account to post about my journey through the course has been an amazing experience. I used to be sceptical about social media, especially Instagram. But listening to Gary Vaynerchuk made me realise that posting selfies is not the only use of Instagram. Through the learningot account, I was able to connect to a large community of like-minded people. It is an incredible platform for sharing knowledge and experience. The OT community on Instagram is incredibly supportive.
Looking at 2019
This year is going to be the most challenging year of my life so far. It will have a dissertation, two placements, and many job applications. However, rewards at the finish line are going to be sweet. I will be entangling myself in the following over the coming 12 months.
1. Working on my dissertation + coursework
2. Improving my performance in placements
3. Getting regular exercise
4. Applying for OT jobs
5. Reading more books
6. Being more active on Instagram and the blog
I am grateful for the growth that has taken place in all aspects of my life in 2018. I look forward to another great year with you all.
Happy New Year!! | https://medium.com/@madukaihalagama/my-2018-occupational-therapy-and-more-489cdc4b6fa3 | ['Maduka Ihalagama'] | 2019-01-02 18:35:32.148000+00:00 | ['Occupational Therapy', 'Blogger', 'Oxford Brookes', '2018', 'Year In Review'] |
The Price of a Lesson Learned | Transcribed from the podcast “Self Improvement Daily”.
Well, I have to break it to you — I’m not perfect. I recently made a few mistakes and paid the price, quite literally, it cost me a lot of money. But in that moment, and reflecting on the situation, I have learned a valuable lesson that will continue to make that money well invested.
So, about two months ago, in the morning I got up and got in the car to go to work, only to find that there was a crack in my windshield. It was disappointing of course, but it was small, so I didn’t think much of it. Then as time passed, the crack continued to creep further and further across my windshield until it got to a point where repairing it was unavoidable. So I booked an appointment to get it fixed at the dealer.
Well let me tell you, that was not the right decision. Not only was it much more expensive than it needed to be, but the dealership doesn’t accept insurance, and I got jerked around by the staff trying to get a ride, making me late for work. It was frustrating and I was getting upset.
But then I decided to be in control, or as I say every day, take ownership of the situation. It was my fault that I let the car get to this point, and I could have managed the crack better before it required a full windshield repair. I could have been more proactive about reaching out to insurance earlier to understand how to best handle the situation, and I didn’t. And also, I have so many knowledgeable friends and family who could have guided me through the process of what I should have done, but I didn’t ask anyone. That’s on me. I realized that my frustration and emotion could have been avoided had I done something differently.
But after taking ownership I was able to take a position of gratitude — how lucky I was to have a car, and for this repair to be the only thing I needed. There is SO much worse out there and I tried to keep that in perspective. And then of course the lessons I learned — Don’t procrastinate when it comes to things you don’t know much about, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
I’ll take those with me for years to come!
Thanks for taking the time to read, and follow to never miss a tip again! Or if you prefer to listen, all tips are available by audio here. They can also be found on every major podcasting site by searching “Self Improvement Daily”. | https://medium.com/@brian.ford/the-price-of-a-lesson-learned-5dd89a1069aa | ['Brian Ford'] | 2019-06-17 16:29:07.259000+00:00 | ['Lessons Learned', 'Gratitude', 'Lessons', 'Ownership', 'Life'] |
The #1 Key to Make More Money in Your Writing Business | Have you ever had an idea for a story that you just couldn’t wait to write? You’re knowledgeable about the subject, and you do a masterful job sharing your enthusiasm with your reader.
But it bombs. Nobody reads it, claps for it, or pays you for it.
Let me tell you what probably happened.
My Personal Failure
Years ago, pursuing a lifelong dream, I started a kennel raising top quality German Shepherd dogs.
I had terrific dogs with bloodlines back to the breed’s foundations — imported from Germany, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. The dogs had the best training, conformation, and health.
I carefully raised each puppy with the most up-to-date, scientific methods, and socialized them to my exacting standards.
On my website, I had their parents’ pedigrees and photos, yet, I was struggling to sell my pups.
I’d invested all my money and I was getting desperate.
Looking for help, I met a talented marketing expert who asked me this question, “Why should your customer care?”
He explained that we all share five core human drives or needs, and these motivate our behavior— including buying a dog.
I remember them as A through E:
A cquire- we all want material needs and power or status.
cquire- we all want material needs and power or status. B elong- humans need to be loved, valued, and understood by others.
elong- humans need to be loved, valued, and understood by others. C uriosity- people are curious and enjoy learning.
uriosity- people are curious and enjoy learning. D efense- we will protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our property.
efense- we will protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our property. Emotion- humans crave experiences that produce pleasure and excitement.
This expert suggested that on my updated website, I should explain why my dogs’ genetics would result in a superior puppy, better than the ordinary German Shepherd.
He told me to detail how my dog training methods produced puppies they would be proud to own — reliable friends and protectors.
I posted copies of their parents’ hip x-rays and explained their diet, carefully formatted diet to prevent health problems.
Many photos illustrated the pups’ daily lives — socializing at the airport, playing with kittens and kids, preparing to join the family.
They were so cute. Who could resist? Especially with my 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Now I had a waiting list of people wanting puppies at three times the price!
Customers could imagine how proud they would be to own one of these fantastic dogs and see it fitting into their family. They could picture how comfortable they would be with a magnificent German Shepherd protecting their home.
I suspect they even imagined how superior they would feel, knowing they had an expensive dog with ties directly to Germany.
It was a lesson I try never to forget. My dogs and their care hadn’t changed. I had just put myself in my customer’s shoes and discovered their needs.
We can forget to ask, “Why should my reader care?”
Talking to other writers, I realized it’s easy to forget this prime directive, and wonder why no one is reading our work.
Each article, essay, or piece we write must fill the reader’s need, not our own.
It’s fine to write for yourself, but that is a journal. And few people are paid for sharing their diary entries.
Educate, Inspire, Entertain
These are the three primary purposes of writing. If a piece does none of these things, it’s unlikely anyone wants to read it.
Our writing can educate the reader by inspiring curiosity when we promise to share a tip on improving a skill. The person imagines they can make more money and buy the things they need, hitting the acquire need.
When we share a story of personal struggle, perhaps as tragic as a partner’s death, and our inspiring journey learning to love again, it matters. Our reader feels a sense of belonging, knowing we all suffer but there’s still hope.
And fiction, humor, and poetry can all entertain and inspire us.
At first, looking at your writing this way feels tough. However, it will soon become natural to you.
If it bleeds, it leads.
You’ve heard that old newspaper saying that means violence and tragedy are always top articles, and perhaps thought, “That is exploitative.”
I will not suggest you capitalize on tragedy but rather understand the truth behind that saying. We are interested in the experiences of other people, whether happy or sad.
Unless you are an academic, technical, or scientific writer, you need to include human stories in what you write. Writing styles change over time. We are in an era that favors creative nonfiction. This modern form combines elements of storytelling with facts, to educate and inform.
Even journalists, who in former times may have been content to answer who, what, when, and where — now delve into the why.
Why should the reader care?
Check out this theory and see if I’m right.
We know we’ve got to hook the reader with an intriguing headline for a relevant topic. Here are some popular stories from today; it’s easy to see how each one resounds with human needs.
I Spent 3 Weeks in School, With Kids, Under Covid-19
The private school where I teach followed CDC guidelines to the letter. Let this be a cautionary tale.
An Obsessive Misogynist Killed a New Jersey Judge’s Son. He’s Long Targeted Feminists, Too.
How many people have to die before we take sexism seriously?
How to Make Your First Twenty-Five Dollars as a Writer
The key is to think small.
Those Are Effective Topics.
The first article appeals to our need to defend or protect ourselves by knowing more about COVID-19.
The second article promises to inform us about an important news story, satisfying curiosity and suggesting the author understands the pain created by sexism.
The third article says it will tell writers how to begin making money, clearly an acquisition.
Of course, each article follows up with clear writing, proper formatting, and meeting the reader’s expectations.
Keep the principles of meeting basic needs in mind and you’ll be an effective and compelling writer—and more successful. | https://medium.com/ninja-writers/the-1-key-to-make-more-money-in-your-writing-business-6bcdf960b3b | ['Cindy Heath'] | 2020-08-02 17:48:21.990000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Success', 'Writing'] |
Lithuania considers EU as a tool to get money and punish opponents | The latest Lithuanian political initiatives could leave to breaking basic policies of the European Union.
As we know, the idea of European unity led to the creation and development of the European Union. The EU was established when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993.
Today, the European Union is a political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services and capital within the internal market; enact legislation in justice and home affairs; and maintain common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries and regional development. Due to its global influence, the European Union is often described as an emerging superpower.
The EU does not focus only on the development of its member states, but on the involving neighbour countries in its sphere of influence. Thus, within the EU the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was developed to promote prosperity, stability and security within the EU’s neighbours and to avoid new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and its neighbours. This Neighbourhood Policy is designed not only to assist neighbour countries but to benefit from cooperation with them.
At present, the EU works with 16 partners: its immediate neighbours by land or sea — Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine.
Lithuania became a full-fledged member of the European Union on 1 May 2004 and still economically is not among the strongest members. By the way, it is one of the largest beneficiary of the EU financial support. It is used to get large sums of money on its development.
It seems as if Lithuania continues to consider the EU as a non-dissecting source of money and as a tool to punish those countries which act contrary to its national interests.
Lithuania and Poland called for EU sanctions for Belarusian companies supporting the Lukashenko regime, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said on Tuesday, November 17. The existing sanctions «have not yet produced the result we expected», the Lithuanian leader said.
Nonetheless, there is a result which Lithuania did not expect and which is not beneficial for the EU as an organization. Vladimir Makei, the Belarus minister of foreign affairs said that “Belarus does not see much point in working fully within the Eastern Partnership initiative. All these measures are only a response to the destructive steps that our European partners have taken towards Belarus.”
So, Lithuania, calling to impose sanction on Belarus, achieved the opposite effect. It is ruining the basic aim of the EU Neighbourhood Policy. | https://medium.com/@kristupasgavelis/lithuania-considers-eu-as-a-tool-to-get-money-and-punish-opponents-bd53f82dbd0b | ['Kristupas Gavelis'] | 2020-11-26 12:04:40.888000+00:00 | ['Belarus', 'Money', 'European Union', 'Lithuania'] |
When You Say “I’m Not Attracted To Trans Women” | When You Say “I’m Not Attracted To Trans Women”
You have full freedom to choose your sexual partners. You also have accountability to be a decent human.
Date who you want to date. Of course each person should be free to pursue their own choices and listen to their own heart. But when you say “I’m not attracted to trans women,” you’re taking about more than 20 million people. There are over one million trans women in the United States alone.
Saying that you wouldn’t be attracted to millions of people give never met sure sounds like prejudice to me.
“Oh but my sexual attraction is tied to a type of genitals,” you might say. Well, many, many trans women have vulvas and vaginas.
Some say that dating someone who “used to be a boy” makes one gay. No. Dating someone who used to be a child doesn’t make you a pedophile. You date the person she is today. Also, trans women didn’t “use to be a boy” — they were born with a body condition which is rectifiable through medical means.
Some might say, “trans women cannot bear children.” This is sadly true. But many women are unable to bear children, and judging the worth of a woman by her childbearing ability is medieval. There’s adoption. There are surrogates. There are solutions.
The reality is that this society is still swimming in a soup of toxic masculinity where men are terrified of having their man card challenged, where their sexuality runs down a weird river of patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, where the need to conform and not be bullied supercedes a man’s free choices of whom to love.
Date who you want to date. But truly give yourself freedom of choice. If the woman you love won’t meet the standards of your buddies at the pub, maybe you need new pals.
Is it transphobic to not date trans women? Who knows. Search your own heart. You know what drives you — and if it’s fear or even disgust, you might want to question that. But hey, it truly IS your choice to make. However, is it transphobic to pronounce publicly “I would never date a trans woman”? Yes, a thousand times yes. Discounting millions of humans before you’ve even met them is prejudice. And making such a pronouncement feeds bigotry.
I was at a pizza place today. I asked for a lemonade, the man reached for a bottle. “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t do plastic.”
Do you see? I didn’t just say, “do you have a glass bottle? I prefer those.” I made a public statement against plastic. Other customers heard. To a smaller or larger degree, I influenced people’s opinion. (I hope.)
Your words matter. Your words sway others.
What would you think of someone who writes “no fatties” in their profile? Or “no men below 5'10”?” What would you think of someone who wrote “No Hispanics”?
Date who you want to date. But don’t prescribe your own preferences — and prejudices — into others. And challenge your prejudices. It’s ok, we all have prejudices. Sadly it’s part of being human. But just understand that prejudices are PRE — before, JUDICE — think… to think before you know.
Get to know people. You might find that, in this world of 7.1 billion people, there are more people you like than you originally thought. | https://medium.com/empowered-trans-woman/when-you-say-im-not-attracted-to-trans-women-a278fd6c985b | ['Cassie Brighter'] | 2019-12-15 02:49:04.618000+00:00 | ['Inclusion', 'Diversity', 'Trans Visibility', 'Dating', 'Transgender'] |
Collaboration at Technology Hits | Collaboration at Technology Hits
image designed by Dr Mehmet Yildiz
The power of collaboration is proven in my other two publications ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated. Both publications are rapidly growing and serving thousands of writers and readers.
To ignite collaboration for Technology Hits I created a new club called TSEE which stands for Technology, Science, Engineering, and Entrepreneurship.
TSEE Club aims to connect writers writing about technology, science, engineering, and entrepreneurship topics. This club is not only about the writers but the actual practitioners of these domains.
We invite professionals and leaders from various domains. The core team are made up of technologists, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. We will extend our invitations to business leaders, digital marketers, economists, finance and accounting professionals.
My purpose is to mix technologists, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to cross-pollinate ideas and initiatives with extended virtual teams.
You can learn more about this club from this link.
https://medium.com/illumination/welcome-to-the-tsee-club-deaf02284081
We created a first reading list and distributed to our readers. Reading lists in digest format are important for our busy readers. These lists make the stories easily accessible in a timely manner.
Here is our first reading list for Technology Hits.
https://medium.com/technology-hits/reading-list-on-technology-hits-ff4e540823b2
Our Editor of Technology Hits also created the first featured list and shared it on ILLUMINATION to give Technology Hits writers a better exposure to a broader audience. Here is the link to the first featured list for Technology Hits on Medium.
https://medium.com/illumination/editorial-picks-from-technology-hits-c8f81c8874cf
Thank you for contributing and supporting Technology Hits.
You are welcome to join our Slack workplace and participate in our clubs.
https://medium.com/illumination/an-introduction-to-illumination-slack-workspace-33e10b9e890c
Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Editor in Chief for Technology Hits on Medium
Digitalmehmet.com | https://medium.com/technology-hits/collaboration-at-technology-hits-edfcce08b583 | ['Dr Mehmet Yildiz'] | 2020-12-15 10:11:45.640000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Design', 'Tech', 'Technews', 'Technology'] |
REAN or RACE: what’s the difference | What’s the difference and how to use them for marketing activities prioritization.
We’re used to associating prioritization with product backlogs. Prioritization is something that a product manager does to find the divine order of features their engineers must build. And the other departments must be working as usual — in turmoil.
And what about marketing? There are many marketing frameworks and funnels to help you plan, strategize, and map goals. Which is essential. But none of them actually suggests how to filter the tasks and in what order you need to approach them.
We’ve been prioritizing our marketing initiatives for more than half a year, which has helped us become more productive and goal-oriented. So we decided to address some of the popular marketing models from a slightly different perspective to help you further-expand those and make the most out of them.
In this article, we want to compare two marketing frameworks, REAN and RACE, find the differences and similarities, and share our method of using them for marketing task prioritization.
REAN Model Definition
REAN is a four-factor framework for mapping and analyzing marketing activities, and goal setting. Stands for Reach, Engagement, Activation, and Nurture.
Originally developed by Xavier Blanc for mapping activities. Popularized by Steve Jackson in the Cult of Analytics as a way to analyze the activities’ effectiveness and develop KPIs.
Reach
Reach focuses on activities needed to raise brand awareness and attract people to the brand.
Answers question: How can we raise attention to the product and how effective are the measures?
Measured by: Impression metrics.
Engagement
Engagement focuses on activities needed to improve audience interaction with the brand.
Answers question: How can we engage the audience we attract and how effective are the measures?
Measured by: Click depth, Time spent on the website.
Activation
Activation focuses on activities needed to increase the number of people taking action.
Answers question: How can we get more people to take action and how effective are the measures?
Measured by: Conversion metrics.
Nurture
Nurture focuses on activities needed to retain and re-engage activated consumers.
Answers question: How can we encourage visitors to return and consume more content, and how effective are the measures?
Measured by: Effectiveness of re-marketing efforts.
RACE Planning Framework Definition
RACE Planning is a five-step framework for mapping and managing engagement activities. Developed by The Smart Insights. RACE stands for Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage. It also includes Plan — the initial phase of digital strategy creation and objective setting.
Reach
Reach focuses on activities that will drive traffic to your website and raise brand awareness.
Cover by: Organic and paid search, social media, PR, etc.
Measure by: Audience volume/quality/value/cost.
Act
Act focuses on persuading site visitors to take action and encouraging interaction with your content.
Cover by: Relevant, useful, and engaging content.
Measure by: Lead conversion rate, time spent on site, number of subscribers/likes/shares.
Convert
Convert focuses on encouraging visitors to take the final step and their conversion into paying customers.
Cover by: Conversion rate optimization, marketing automation, and retargeting.
Measure by: Sales, Revenue/Profit, Conversion and Order Value.
Engage
Engage focuses on developing long-term relationships with customers to drive repeated sales and advocacy.
Cover by: A wide range of online and offline communications, customer loyalty drivers research.
Measure by: Repeat Purchase, Customer satisfaction, advocacy.
What’s Different
If we look closely at the criteria description we can notice some differences:
Engagement vs. Act
While REAN’s Engagement speaks only of the overall customer interaction with the brand and a way of understanding visitors’ interest, RACE’s Act wants you to think and focus on the first desired action as well. Thus the second stage can help you be more goal-oriented and gather more valuable data.
Nurture vs. Engage
REAN’s Nurture speaks of engaging the activated visitors to come back and consume more content. RACE’s Engage wants you to drive repeated sales and build a loyal audience through the re-engagement. Which again makes the RACE’s criterion more goal-oriented.
What’s the Same
If we take a step back and look at both frameworks from afar we’ll notice that generally, they focus on the same marketing efforts and customer lifecycle stages:
Reach / Reach → Traffic acquisition → Awareness Stage.
Engage / Act → Interaction engagement → Consideration Stage.
Activate / Convert → Selling → Purchase Stage.
Nurture / Engage → Retaining customers → Retention & Loyalty Stage.
So basically, there is no huge difference in which abbreviation you choose for yourself. The main point is how you use it for better performance. Both REAN and RACE models will help you map activities, measurements, goals, and channels.
Simply ask questions:
How are we going to acquire/engage/sell/retain? What do we track to understand how effectively we acquire/engage/sell/retain? Will our goals help us acquire/engage/sell/retain? How will each of the channels help us acquire/engage/sell/retain?
Why Prioritize Marketing Tasks
Let’s imagine you’ve already created your marketing roadmap, and decided on goals and measurements. Each step you’re going to take will mostly consist of several options and dozens of tasks your team needs to accomplish. There’s no doubt that you’d want to gain value faster for fewer costs.
Aside from that, you need to equally develop each of the stages, because if your website attracts no visitors, it has no value. If you can’t engage those you reach, you’ll fail to convert them, and so on.
So, when all the plannings and mappings are done, don’t rush your team to randomly complete tasks, write texts, and create designs. Take the time to figure out which of them will influence your objectives more with less work done.
Prioritization shouldn’t take long in the first place. It must save you hours on doing unnecessary work and ensure you don’t jump in with a complex expensive solution when there is a cheaper one. But we won’t focus on how to prioritize fast in this article — we’ve already covered it here.
How to Prioritize with REAN / RACE
The best way to keep balance and highlight quick wins is by using weighted scorecard prioritization. This is when each idea is evaluated by criteria with prior determined significance. Transforming REAN, RACE, or any other marketing funnel into a weighted scorecard is simple. We’re going to use REAN for our examples below not to get confused. Here are the steps:
1. Transform Stages into Criteria.
Think of the stages as your goals. Each task must help you achieve these goals. So you can describe your criteria as such:
Reach → Will this task help us attract more relevant traffic to the website?
Engage → Will this task help us encourage visitors to interact with the website?
Activate → Will this task increase the number of conversions?
Nurture → Will this task help us encourage customers to return to the website?
These are example descriptions of the criteria we have in our free REAN template. You can adjust them to fit your marketing objectives more.
Visit our template library to find out more.
2. Decide on the Score Scale.
Next, you need to decide on scores each task can get. To determine which activity will bring more value, you need to evaluate how strongly it impacts the objective.
First, choose numbers to assign. It might be a sequence like Fibonacci or Exponential. We prefer a range from 0 to 3 for simplicity.
But numbers are just a half of a step. If you leave them as they are, your teammates will perceive them very differently thus making the estimation vague. You need to specify what it means when a task impacts the Reach by 2, 3, or else.
The simplest way is to use the MoSCoW method. We prefer this one when it’s difficult to predict the outcome in numbers. So you can explain the scores like:
0 = Won’t impact.
1 = Could impact.
2 = Should impact.
3 = Must impact.
Alternatively, we can borrow estimations from RICE’s Impact:
0 = Doesn’t impact
1 = Low impact
2 = Medium impact
3 = High impact.
The best way to describe scores for marketing evaluation is to use the exact measurements you expect to track. For example:
Reach → Will this task help us attract more relevant traffic to the website?
0 = no traffic.
1 = less than 100 visits.
2 = 100–500 visits.
3 = 500–1000 or more.
Activate → Will this task increase the number of conversions?
0 = no conversions.
1 = few conversions.
2 = about a dozen conversions.
3 = more than a dozen conversions.
In Ducalis you can explain criteria and their scores in the language of your team, and won’t need to memorize them or constantly peep into the notes in a separate doc — everything you write in the description will appear in a pop-up each time you need to assess the criterion.
Make criteria description always visible during evaluation.
3. Decide on Weights
Most of the time, you need all four stages to develop equally, as we’ve already stated. So for the beginning, you may set the same weights to all the criteria, like +1.
But there will definitely be times when you’ll need to focus more on one of the four as it may show worse performance or require a boost. To increase the priority of the tasks that impact that stage more, add to the criterion weight making it more significant.
In Ducalis, you can change weights at any point in time. If the scores have already been assigned, varying weights will rearrange the task ranking on the Top Priorities screen. Increase Activation weight to +2, and activities impacting your conversion rate will skyrocket to the top.
Example scores of a task evaluated with REAN.
4. Decide on Efforts
Prioritization makes no sense if you don’t take into account how much the activity will cost you. You want to work on the most valuable and cheapest solutions first. Thus you must calculate the expected expenses.
As we estimate Development Complexity for our product features, we evaluate Time and Price for the marketing.
Time → How long will it take for the team to complete?
0 = 0–2 hours.
1 = 3–6 hours.
2 = 7–10 hours.
3 = more than 10 hours.
Price→ How much will cost the promotion?
0 = for free.
1 = less than 100$/month.
2 = 100–500$/month.
3 = more than 500$/month.
These are our example criteria and scores descriptions. Create your custom efforts criteria and set them with negative weight. We set up -2 to both Time and Price, as there are more positive criteria than negative, and we want to find the cheapest opportunities.
5. Evaluate
Gather all your marketing tasks in a single place and evaluate them by the whole team. Collaborative prioritization has a whole load of advantages:
You use the power of crowd wisdom. You collect all the diverse opinions and gather all the perspectives. Even if you know less, you add value as long as what you know is different. Thus, by averaging, you get the most accurate estimation you will ever be able to get.
You break silos because everybody knows what the others are doing and what to expect in the nearest future.
You avoid the HiPPO effect. Your product promotion won’t go wrong because of some emotional decisions.
You motivate people because you empower them with decision making. You let them see their goals clearly and choose how they achieve them.
Create a marketing board in Ducalis and send invitations to all the teammates to collaborate. You can divide people into evaluation groups and give them team-specific criteria only they can estimate. But we highly recommend you make all the criteria common and evaluate them together even if it’s out of the person’s purview.
REAN criteria divided among the team members.
6. Find Gaps in Shared Understanding
Another valuable advantage of collaborative evaluation is the possibility to see where the team has disagreements and misunderstandings. Check your teammates’ scores scatter and discuss the most divergent. You may find that somebody doesn’t understand the task or a specific criterion, or vice versa has a unique point of view the whole team has missed out.
Team disagreements in scores highlighted on the Alignment page in Ducalis.
Key Take-Aways | https://medium.com/ducalis-blog/rean-or-race-whats-the-difference-2ad26773fc1d | [] | 2021-02-22 07:19:47.851000+00:00 | ['Framework', 'Marketing Priorities', 'Marketing Framework'] |
Exploring Hyperledger Indy through indy-dev Example | Overview
In the digital world, we cannot live without identity. The way to prove my identity (I am who I claim to be) is mainly implemented as simple username and password, and sometimes we use advanced mechanism like multi-factor authentication or biometrics. This does not change the reality that we have too many siloed identity, and situation is only getting worse. Federated identity service, in which some identity provider serves as a single point for accessing multiple services helps a lot from user perspective. However our access to multiple services becomes too centralized to one or two big companies. They hold my identity, and too many identities also make them a good target of attack.
Sovrin Foundation brings up the idea of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). I don’t think I can describe better than the material created by Sovrin. But in short, we are not relying on any single identity provider. Instead, actors in SSI this identity network will communicate in peer-to-peer fashion. The authentication is composed of credential (provided by one party) and proof verification (done in another party). When an identity verifier is to verify whether someone is who he claims to be or of any attributes, he is presenting the credentials obtained by trust parties. And the verifier accepts those credentials as proof. Individual now only discloses what is needed for authentication, and in many cases we can use proof on a condition item rather than disclosing the actual value or fact. Think of the classic example that “I only need to prove I am over 21 without disclosing my actual birthday”.
Each actor in this identity network is given decentralized identifiers (DIDs). It is “decentralized” as DID is recorded in a decentralized environment (for example, a blockchain network). Also for privacy purpose, each entity can have multiple DIDs, which can be used in various contexts. This largely reduces the chance of entity correlation, as different parties only hold some information about the entity.
The code base is open sourced and then contributed as the initial code for Hyperledger Indy, a blockchain project now under Linux Foundation. We will mainly refer it as Hyperledger Indy in this article.
Hyperledger Indy comes with a good example (indy-dev), simulating a real life case. There is a good and in-depth getting start guide (Indy Walkthrough), and it contains very comprehensive codes on how things work. Here I would like to explore the example in an illustrative way, and help audience to grasp the idea behind.
Storyline
We first take a look on the storyline of this example.
There are five actors in this example: Government, Faber College, Acme Corp, Thrift Bank and Alice. The first four are organizations, while Alice is interacting with them as an individual during the story.
Government is responsible of setting the “standard” of schemas. This makes sense as it is preferable to have standards of various types of schemas such that all organizations can follow. Two schemas are created in this example: Transcript Schema, and Job-Certificate Schema. We will see how they are used later.
Alice is applying for a job in Acme Corp. Acme Corp requires a proof of education level as one requirement in the job application. As a graduate from Faber College, Alice is first applying transcript from Faber College, which is a credential Alice keeps. Faber College adopts Government’s Transcript Schema. When applying for that job in Acme Corp, she presents this credential to Acme Corp. Acme Corp accepts the credential as proof of her education level from Faber College.
In this case,
Alice : prover and credential holder
: prover and credential holder Faber College : credential issuer
: credential issuer Acme Corp: credential verifier
Alice is lucky enough to get the job, and she is now an employee in Acme Corp.
Alice is applying for a car loan from Thrift Bank. Thrift Bank requires her proof of both employment status and identity, something known as Know Your Customer (KYC) process. Alice now applies a job certification from Acme Corp, which is again a credential issued by Acme Corp following Government’s Job-Certificate Schema. Now Alice has two credentials: one from Faber College which contains the identity, and one from Acme Corp for the employment status. She submits these credentials in car loan application.
In this case,
Alice : prover and credential holder
: prover and credential holder Faber College and Acme Bank : credential issuers
and : credential issuers Thrift Bank: credential verifier
This is the whole storyline of this example.
Run The Example
Before we go into detail how the storyline is implemented, we will give some highlights on the files of this repository and how to run this example.
Docker runtime is required to run this example. We will build the docker images and then run the containers. Here I use local host in this article.
Clone Repository
First git clone the indy-dev example.
$ cd indy-dev $ git clone https://github.com/sovrin-foundation/indy-dev.git $ cd indy-dev
Makefile
The Makefile helps us to run scripts defined inside the scripts directory. The one we are using is build and start.
Build Docker Images
We issue make build command to build docker images.
$ sudo make build
If we take a look on scripts/build.sh, we see that this command will build two docker images, corresponding to the two dockerfiles: indy-pool.dockerfile and indy-dev.dockerfile.
With the indy-pool.dockerfile, a docker image indy_dev_pool is built. When running, this container is a pool of four Indy nodes, which are where ledger is kept. With the indy-dev.dockerfile, a docker image indy_dev is built. When running, this container is where we implement the whole story, and records are written on the ledger.
Start the Dev Environment
We issue make start command to run the example.
$ sudo make start
If we take a look on scripts/start.sh, docker containers are instantiated. Effectively both the indy_dev_pool container and indy_dev container are brought up. We are also in the shell of indy_dev, where we can run the python code for the story.
After make start we will be in a shell of indy-dev
And if we take a look on the running docker containers, we will see the two containers running (on another terminal).
Two docker containers are running after make start
Run getting_started.py
Inside the shell of indy_dev we can run the python code to simulate the whole storyline.
$ cd python
$ python3 getting_started.py
When executing this python code getting_started.py, the whole process is running automatically, with good logging information. From the log we an understand the sequence of tasks different actors perform. If we wish to see more detail, we can take a look on the getting_started.py file, which is also detailed the steps.
After executing the python code, we see detail log of the story (truncated)
We will detail the implementation in the next session.
During the code is running, we observe some wallets files are created (in .indy_client/wallet directory). But before code execution is complete, all these wallets are removed. It is done purposely in the python code for cleanup. See the last few lines of logs.
Last several lines when the python code is completely executed
Also after we exit the shell, we also see the two docker containers are killed.
Exit the shell
Implementation: Setup
The storyline above is something happening in real life. Let’s see how it is implemented in Hyperledger Indy.
Indy Nodes: Source of Trust
First, we need a source of trust, which holds the necessary information that helps to build trust in the whole network. Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchain) is a good source of trust, given that data stored is secured against tampering and with good traceability. Hyperledger Indy comes with a permissioned blockchain in order to provide the trust required for the whole system. The blockchain is Indy Plenum.
In the indy-dev example, the network is implemented in four nodes. All these nodes have the shared ledger. The example does not go into detail on how the four nodes work. Let’s assume they are working well and things written in the ledger provides the source of trust for the whole network.
Steward
In this example the first actor is called the Steward. Steward can onboard new actors in the system and assigns role to them. All the organizations mentioned in the storyline are “created” by Steward with the role Trust Anchor before they can perform all activities.
In real life, for a well established Hyperledger Indy network, Stewards (and Trustees) are important members of a governing body, who holds the ultimate responsibility in maintaining the level of trust and credibility of the whole network. Governing body will define the necessary rules and regulation in choosing the right Stewards. Again, in this example, Steward is simply just “created” in the code.
Steward Creates All Actors
Once created, Steward is responsible of creating other actors (Government, Faber College, Acme Corp and Thrift Bank). Two steps are needed before an actor can perform the tasks in the storyline.
Onboarding Actor
Onboarding involves creating a pairwise-unique identity (DID) between two parties. Pairwise-unique identity is a pair of DIDs, each owned by one party. This pair of DID is unique in a sense that it is only used for communication between these two parties. Each DID is created with a signing key, a verifying key (verkey), and a DID. Signing key is the private key, kept as secret and stored in wallet. Both the verkey and DID are public information and are recorded to the ledger for public access.
The pairwise-unique DID is not used for interacting with the ledger. They need another DID (called Verinym) that can identify themselves in the ledger and a role of Trust Anchor.
Granting Actor a Verinym and a Trust Anchor Role
Take Government as an example. After Steward onboards Government, Government will create another new DID (again a signing key, a verkey and a DID). As now Steward has a communication to Government (through that pairwise-unique DID), Government passes this new set of DID and verkey to Steward. Steward will record the DID and verkey to the ledger, and set the role Trust Anchor.
From now on, Government is fully functioning. Government now has a DID representing her own, and this DID has a Trust Anchor role.
Steward keeps doing the same “onboarding actor” and “giving a Verinym” to each actor: Government, Faber College, Acme Corp and Thrift Bank. Now these actors have the same capability to act on the ledger.
We will not see Steward any more in the example. And all actors are ready and we can continue the storyline.
Steward creates the actors with Trust Anchor Role
Storyline Implementation
Step 1: Government creating schemas
Government issues the Transcript Schema and Job-Certificate Schema, and records them onto the ledger. The schemas are accessible by everyone.
Government creates schemas
Step 2: Faber College and Acme Corp create their own credential definitions
The schemas defined in Step 1 is useful for any colleges and any companies if they adopt these schemas. In our example, Faber College and Acme Corp creates their own credential definitions based on the schemas issued by Government.
The credential definition contains the schema it is using, plus the necessary information about the issuer of credential definition.
Faber College issues “Faber Transcription Credential Definition”, which is based on “Transcript Schema”, and records it onto the ledger. Similarly, Acme Corp issues “Acme Job-Certificate Credential Definition”, based on “Job-Certificate Schema”, and records it onto the ledger.
Since both of them are now recorded in the ledger, everyone can access these credential definitions later.
Faber College and Acme Corp create credential definition based on schemas issued by Government
Relation between Schemas and Credential Definitions
In the first case, Alice is getting the transcript (credential) from Faber College, and later provides the credential to Acme Corp as proof of education qualification, when she applies for a job.
Step 3: Alice obtains a Credential from Faber College regarding the transcript
Here are the detail steps:
Build a connection between Faber College and Alice (onboarding process). Faber College creates and sends a Credential Offer to Alice. Alice retrieves the “Faber Transcript Credential Definition” from the ledger, and creates a Credential Request and sends it to Faber College. Faber College creates the Credential for Alice. Inside the Credential it contains the values of items listed in the “Faber Transcript Credential Definition” (and Transcript Schema), plus the required proof that Alice can use later when requested by Acme. Alice now receives the Credential and stores it in her wallet.
Alice gets credential from Faber College
Step 4: Acme Corp requests proof of education level from Alice
Here are the detail steps:
Build a connection between Acme Corp and Alice (onboarding process) Acme Corp creates a Proof Request, which lists the items and the condition required. In this case Acme requires proof of degree, status and ssn from Faber College, and the average is over 4. Alice receives this Proof Request, and creates a Proof based on the credential she obtains from Faber College. The Proof contains information such that the requirement of Acme’s Proof Request can be satisfied. Acme Corp receives the Proof from Alice. Inside the Proof, Acme Corp sees the information and condition required, and verifies that they are coming from Faber College. Acme Corp accepts this Proof.
Alice creates proof with the credential to Acme Corp
In the second case, Alice is getting the job-certificate (credential) from Acme, and provides the credential to Thrift Bank as proof of employment, when she applies for a car loan. Also a KYC (Know Your Customer) process requires her name as well. Alice uses the credential issued by Faber College to fulfil this process.
Step 5: Alice obtains a Credential from Acme Corp regarding the employment status
Here are the detail steps:
Acme Corp creates and sends a Credential Offer to Alice. Alice retrieves the “Acme Job-Certificate Credential Definition” from the ledger, and creates and sends a Credential Request to Acme Corp. Acme Corp creates the Credential for Alice. Inside the Credential it contains the values of items listed in the “Acme Job-Certificate Credential Definition” (and Job-Certificate Schema), plus the required proof that Alice can use later when requested by the bank. Alice now receives the Credential and stores it in her wallet. Now she has two credentials in the wallet.
Alice gets credential from Acme Corp
Step 6: Thrift Bank requests proof of employment status and KYC from Alice
Here are the detail steps:
Build a connection between Thrift Bank and Alice (onboarding process). Thrift Bank creates two Proof Requests, which list the items and condition required. In this case Thrift Bank requires proof of employment status as Permanent, salary is over 2,000 and experience of more than 1 year. Also as KYC process she is asked for name and SSN. Alice receives both Proof Requests, and creates Proofs based on the credentials she obtains from Faber College and Acme Corp. The Proof contains information such that the requirement of Thrift Bank Proof Requests can be satisfied. Thrift Bank receives the Proofs from Alice. Inside the Proofs, Thrift Bank sees the information and condition required, and verifies that they are coming from both Faber College and Acme Corp. Thrift Bank accepts this Proof.
Alice creates proof with the credentials to Thrift Bank
Some Observation
What is in the Ledger?
If we walk through the whole example, items recorded in the ledger are
All Decentralized Identifier (DID), verinym and pairwise-unique DID, and corresponding verifying key (verkey)
Schemas, which defines the structure of items referred by both credential definitions and credentials
Credential Definition, which is built on top of a schema, plus the issuer’s information for proof creation
All these items are publicly accessible, and therefore is NOT secret at all to any organizations or individuals.
These items in the ledger serve as a good source of trust when constructing any proof later. We keep seeing these items are queried during the whole process.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Not in the Ledger
Then where is the PII? Over the story, we see some PII for Alice, such as her name, employment status, salary, year of graduation, etc. However this information is never exposed in the ledger, and therefore not readily accessible by anyone. This information is communicated via peer connections, such as Alice-to-Faber, Alice-to-Acme, and Alice-to-Thrift. And these connection is secured, through authenticated encryption, and information shared between is only known to the two parties. Therefore no PII is disclosed to the public, while the information in public (in ledger) provides the strong trust on the proof.
Alice’s Identity
So how is Alice identified in this network? We first do not see a single party containing all Alice’s information. In fact Alice has different DID when she is communicating to other organizations.
A secure connection is first established between Alice and an organization. This secure connection is made by pairwise-unique DID, and that DID is only used for that connection.
If we open Alice’s wallet and see how many DID she has after going through the example, we see there are THREE, one for each organization she communicates before (Faber College, Acme Corp and Thrift Bank). As mentioned above, they are different DIDs, and all these three DIDs are recorded in the ledger with the corresponding verkey. Nothing else about Alice is seen in the ledger.
Alice’s attributes are only disclosed and kept on those organizations requiring proof on a necessity base. If the overall network is well designed, organizations do not keep more excessive information than needed, and by leveraging proof of conditional items information stored in organizations is further reduced. For example, Acme Corp knows Alice’s average is over 4, while they do not know the actual figure. And hence Acme does not store the actual average figure (which is 5 in the example) of Alice.
Closing
SSI is a very interesting topic. I hope this article provides a first step to understand what SSI is through indy-dev a real life example. For those who are interested, you can go to the indy repository, or begin with some good videos from SSI Meetup. | https://kctheservant.medium.com/exploring-hyperledger-indy-through-indy-dev-example-10075d2547ae | ['Kc Tam'] | 2019-05-16 23:53:05.426000+00:00 | ['Hyperledger Indy', 'Self Sovereign Identity', 'Identity', 'Blockchain', 'Sovrin'] |
The joy of climbing and the fear of falling: How becoming a climber made me better at my job | Five years ago I discovered rock climbing. To be precise, I discovered ‘indoor climbing’ with a group of work colleagues. It was one of those team building events where we were taken to do challenging things in the hope that we would become a ‘high performance team’.
Whether we became ‘high performance’ is still questionable, but I fell in love with climbing immediately. As a kid growing up in the Sussex countryside I was rarely not climbing something — trees, hay bales, grain stacks, combine harvesters — but never rocks. While the Sussex coast has it’s share of rock, it’s primarily chalk; a rock that spends most of its time sloughing insouciantly into the sea; a murderous trait which doesn’t lend itself to relaxed climbing.
Our company day out took us to The Foundry in Sheffield, one of the UK’s oldest indoor climbing walls. While the experience of the actual climbing was memorable, my white-hot recollection wasn’t my own attempts to scale a wall but rather the other people enjoying the facilities.
Next to our group of mostly male, mostly middle-aged, desk-bound executives were a pair of older climbers. Watching them, I guessed that they were a husband and wife couple and placed them in their mid-seventies. As our group grunted and strained at the easiest climbs on the wall, this couple took turns to float, serenely and without seeming effort, up the routes next to us. The grace and effortlessness of their technique wall was compelling to watch.
One other thing stood out. When you climb indoors with a rope, the most common approach is for one person to climb and another to ‘belay’ — providing the protection which makes falling safe and easy. Our group was learning to climb and belay simultaneously, and it was belaying which was the more nerve-wracking; feeling the responsibility for protecting the life of your climbing partner in the event that they fell from the wall. The older couple next to us were completely dependent and responsible for each other, a deep connection that necessarily transcends minor squabbles and frustrations.
Leaving the wall, I didn’t just want to climb; I wanted to honour the inspiration of that nameless couple. That evening, after the long drive home from Sheffield, I began my insistent sales pitch to my wife…
Five years later, I’m an enthusiastic but resolutely intermediate climber, and I’m okay with that. As luck would have it, I’m better at my day job than I am at climbing.
My unrealistic ambitions of hard grades put aside, I use climbing as both exercise and therapy; an opportunity to shut off my conscious mind’s hyperactive, always-on chatter. The act of climbing, unlike running, cycling or swimming, is the only time that I find everything non-essential fades away. No phones, no email, no distractions, just the tunnel-visioned focus that climbing hard demands. This peace, a kernel of meditative calm among the fear and effort of the actual activity, is why I love climbing.
Despite the significant improvement that climbing can offer to overall fitness, it’s the less obvious benefits that I want to focus on. It often surprises non-climbers and beginners when I explain that climbing isn’t really about physicality (at least, not until the hard grades). Just as important to being a ‘complete’ climber are the technical and mental aspects of the sport.
Over the last few years, this seemingly physical activity has taught me pervasive and powerful lessons about myself, and my approach to work, that directly translate to me being better at my job.
For those interested in real climbing advice, this guide was inspired by an article written by Neil Gresham which you can read here.
So, here goes — the biggest things that climbing has taught me about going to work:
Easy is best
Acquiring new skills at work invariably means learning something new. In my role this is typically a new technology, but is equally apparent if you’re changing jobs or companies. Unfamiliar processes and new surroundings can be challenging, and progress can feel uncomfortably slow and stunted.
“Beginners should emphasize easy climbing in the early stages, as it is impossible to learn new skills when the difficulty is too high” — Neil Gresham
For beginner climbers, there’s a similar challenge. We want to try hard and ‘push the grade’, seeking routes that are harder than those we’ve climbed before. Trying to rush to harder grades can, counter-intuitively, hold us back as we remove the opportunity to hone our technique on more measured challenges. Climbing relatively simple routes is an opportunity for us to focus on our technique without the mental and physical stress of exertion.
At work we should aim to make good technique habitual when things aren’t frenzied. One example I can offer from experience is preparing for managing ‘incidents’ (in tech speak, this is when your website stops working, or the CEO’s email is hacked); having a well drilled response to exceptional issues is the best way to maintain calm and execute efficiently.
We need to drill our techniques until they’re second nature while things are under control, and let the accumulated muscle memory take the strain when they go to hell.
Technique first, speed later
Invariably I work with companies who want to go faster; the business equivalent of climbing hard routes. More people, more features, more customers, more revenue, as fast as possible.
For nearly every one of these companies, the last thing on their mind is perfecting their technique. The belief is that worrying about process will make you slower, more bureaucratic, less dynamic.
“Style and efficiency are intrinsically related. It’s all about what goes on in your head while you climb, so on your warm-up climbs, focus on placing your feet quietly, accurately, and without re-adjustment. Breathe deeply, [and] try to move fluidly.” — Neil Gresham
Process improvement is something I’m passionate about. At work, the refinement of process makes us more efficient, more effective and capable of delivering more quickly with less resource. Technique is what inspired me to take up climbing in the first place. The couple, gliding up the wall next to our group, demonstrated technique instead of strength.
I often hear the excuse that young businesses just need to focus on getting the work done, and that the processes can follow. Invariably, they don’t follow; by the time the company has stopped to think about putting in good recruitment process, or security controls, or staff perks, it’s too late.
The truth is that refining technique — the process of releasing product features, of honing the sales process, of onboarding new employees, even of getting your bills paid — will slow you down at first…. and then it will speed you up, repaying your initial investment with interest. Even if you feel like you can power through it, don’t.
Get the technique right first, or as Neil puts it, “Use skill before force”.
Learn from others
Climbers are unusually supportive as a tribe. I suspect that it lies in the rather unique demands of the sport; you’re alone on the wall, but usually climbing with other people. Climbing is a sport that mitigates high risks by default, putting safety ahead of any other concern, yet is still considered ‘extreme’. It’s rarely directly competitive, and climbers celebrate other people trying hard, regardless of the route they’re climbing.
Climbers are diverse; there is a diaspora at every climbing wall, with encouragement shouted in many languages and accents. The gender split is even, with men and women climbing equivalently well up to the highest levels, while the ages at an indoor wall will regularly range from seven to seventy.
This generally inclusive, supportive, diverse environment makes for a fertile ground for improvement. Climbing improvement does not happen in isolation, and taking feedback from others is the fastest way to improve your ability. This can be as simple as watching other people attempt the same climb that you’re working on, sitting together to plan a route, or debriefing after a climb at the pub.
While the value of feedback from peers is high, the benefit of professional coaching is even better. A coach is experienced in structuring and prioritising feedback and, from my own experience, capable of motivating you to perform significantly better than trying to improve on your own.
At work, we should look for these same opportunities for support. Encouraging feedback and discussing our challenges with our peer group is powerful, but seeking advice and coaching from a professional is better still. While our direct managers may sometimes be well placed to do this, it can be more effective to seek mentors and coaches outside our immediate organisation; either in specific technical disciplines, or in the wider context of our careers.
Analyze your mistakes
If working in a tech company could teach climbers anything, it should be our well-documented commitment to failure.
While it would be far-fetched to say that tech firms and startups invented ‘test and learn’ approaches, we definitely popularised them. Agile software development, Scrum, the Lean Startup; all approaches which encourage us to try, probably fail, and then analyse what happened.
Climbing is a sport defined by iterative failure which, hopefully, culminates in hard-won success; if you succeed in climbing every route you attempt you’re not trying hard enough. When we climb a difficult section of a route, it’s extremely useful to review our performance; either taking feedback from a climbing partner or, even better, to watch a video of how we performed. We can then attempt to internalise the feedback, plan our improvements and apply them on the next attempt.
Although I suggested that climbers should be able to learn from tech businesses, it’s rare that I find a culture that is truly committed to this type of disciplined improvement. However, we have the tools available already — retrospectives, reviews, planning sessions. Ask yourself whether you, or your organisation, is really making enough of an effort to analyse and improve on past performance.
Balance variety and intensity
Climbing has a variety of high level challenges; in fitness, attitude and technique. At a more detailed level, even climbs of the same grade can vary significantly in the detail and the approach required to succeed.
Outdoors, on real rock, this difference is more pronounced than indoors, on plastic holds. Non-climbers and beginners are often bewildered by experienced climbers fixating on their foot placements rather than finger strength. Getting fit for climbing is not as simple as busting out a huge set of pull-ups. Instead, the best climbers don’t focus on just one particular exercise or style to improve, but rather maximise their exposure to as many different styles as possible.
“It’s easy to get trapped into only practicing the things you’re good at. Work your weaknesses” — Neil Gresham
It’s easy to fall into this trap as a climber. We begin to develop a style of climbing that suits our unique talents; maybe powerful and dynamic, or precise and technical. As our competence in that one style increases, the risk is that we unintentionally start to favour it at the expense of our weaknesses. Over time our training sessions start to eschew the areas that we’re weaker at because, psychologically, they don’t show us performing at our best.
This is something that I’ve experienced in my climbing practice, but also just as keenly at work. As we progress in our careers we lose our ‘beginner’s mind’, and start to grow attached to our reputation of competence. We, more than those around us, start to believe that we always need to display mastery and so restrict the activities that we try our hand at. There’s an unwillingness to demonstrate any incompetence that grows with rank. But that sting? That’s just pride.
The night of the fight, you might feel a sting.
This is an unfortunate and preventable problem. Wherever possible you should seek opportunities to broaden the diversity of your experiences at work, and practice the habit of exposing yourself to failure and the potential for appearing embarrassingly incompetent. As long as this is carried out with control and forethought, the opportunities for personal growth far outweigh the reputational risk.
However, this doesn’t mean giving up your expertise and focusing on being awful at your job. Dave McCleod, an elite climbing coach, suggests a 3:1 ratio in our climbing practice; identifying a weakness in our technique and working on that weakness with three times more intensity than those you are already an expert in. To defend this, McCleod points out that it generally requires much less effort to maintain a capability than to improve it.
In my own experience, adding bouldering (a type of short, powerful climbing) to my climbing styles saw the greatest improvements of my ability in a short period. Trying outdoor and ‘trad’ climbing, an even more specialised style that requires that you carry and place your own protection, opened my eyes to an entirely new world of possibility, while offering an experience that is uniquely close to nature.
In my career, this has been a powerful lesson — I’ve turned away permanent roles in favour of a ‘portfolio’ career, with the expressed intention to learn as much as I possibly can in the shortest period of time. Immersing myself in different companies and entirely new sectors has had the same effect on my professional life as adding new climbing styles has to my climbing training.
Just turning up isn’t good enough
If you want to become a professional climber, get ready to put the hours in. Even for those of us content to be adequate amateurs, it’s difficult to improve beyond a certain level as a climber if you can only manage to climb 2–3 times a week.
“Don’t expect to be a good climber if you are not prepared to put the time in” — Neil Gresham
Turning up and watching other people climb for two hours won’t boost your grade. Making the most of every opportunity to practice is critical; and that practice needs to be mindful and disciplined. The challenge is not to simply accumulate hours, but to ensure that training is effective and focused.
A case study in the discipline and focus required to climb at world class levels
Having a goal in mind and developing an effective training plan are important tools for improvement, both in climbing and at work. Instead of ‘putting the hours in’ and ‘trying hard’, it is a valuable skill to be able to determine whether the things that you spend your time doing are effective and lead to your long term success, whether that’s as an individual or as a team.
Again, this is an area where business is well placed to help athletes. Earlier this year, having spent some time with a large company to implement their ‘Objectives and Key Results’ (or OKRs), I turned my attention to my own, personal OKRs. Surprisingly, the application of this goal setting process to my non-work goals was surprisingly effective. The nature of OKRs to set ‘stretchy’ goals which form the basis for analysis and improvement makes them well suited to improvements in a sport like climbing.
Learn how to to rest
You hear a lot of macho bullshit about how success at work is measured by the hour. The legendary executives delivering 120 hour work weeks on four hours of sleep are martyrs at the altar of capitalist nonsense.
Not only is the myth unhelpful, but it’s also demonstrably bad for the business and the individual. Even if we optimistically assume that these people are filling their days with valuable work, their capacity would be severely restricted by lack of sleep.
Even excusing these highly driven individuals from their exceptional regimes, we see other dysfunctions in the normal work population. The very obvious example are colleagues who turn up for their first meeting on time, spend all day completing Cambridge Analytica surveys and then heading for the door as soon as the clock strikes tea-time.
Less obvious is the impact of those who feel culturally pressured to deliver for long periods at maximum capacity. These are those people who you leave at the office in the evening, heads deep in spreadsheets, only to find them still at their desks on Monday morning.
There’s no question that sometimes we have a ‘crunch’ project. Whether it’s a new product release, a TV advertising campaign, or a new client to support, sometimes we just have to make sacrifices to deliver. But, by having teams or individuals driven to maximum performance for any length of time, our organisational ability to respond to periods of escalated demand is diminished.
Simply put; if you’re always at 100%, you have nothing left for the hard stuff.
In climbing, we have a name for the hard stuff; ‘the crux’. The crux move is the hardest move on the wall; the sine qua non of the route, on which you’re definitely going to fall.
While it’s important to work large rests into your training regime, just as you should be ensuring you take vacations from work, there’s another climbing trick that I’d like to introduce you to: active rests.
When you climb a wall as a beginner, everything feels difficult. Every move is strenuous until the top. Your arms burn with the intensity of suns, until you get back on the ground.
As climbers develop, so does their ability to ‘read the route’, to determine the hard moves in advance, and critically, to identify rests.
Watching a great climber will appear almost balletic. While the overall speed is fast, the speed of individual moves can appear graceful and precise. If you watch the very best climbers, you’ll notice that they take great care to find rest positions, and even take rests where there are none.
To demonstrate this, have a quick look at this video of Jain Kim, a top South Korean climber (from 1h 52m).
Jain Kim is undoubtedly at the top of her game, and the entire sport of climbing, in this video. But if you do take a moment to watch this video, notice that every time she drops an arm down below her, or reaches into the chalk bag on her back, she is, effectively taking an active rest.
“In climbing Biographie, Margo spent nearly twice as much time resting as she did climbing!” — Eric Horst
Margo Hayes, a US climber, recently climbed one of the hardest climbs in the world, Biographie (5.15a/9a+/very very hard indeed). Eric Horst, a top US coach analysed her ascent and found that while the entire climb took around 16 minutes, just less than 6 minutes were actually spent climbing. Margo recruited every tool at her disposal to climb with optimal technique and speed. Resting is crucial to this.
At work, the analogy by now should be obvious: it’s not how many hours at work you spend, but how you spend them while you’re there.
Don’t be an 11pm emailer, showing your dedication through sheer volume of hours. Don’t burn yourself out by attempting to take on all the responsibility for keeping the ship afloat at nights and weekends. Don’t just turn up for your allotted eight hours and claim a pay cheque.
Instead, be focused on delivering your best from the smallest responsible amount of time. Focus yourself in single-minded bursts of activity, avoiding pointless meetings and resource-sapping multitasking. Plan your day to make the most effective use of time, using your mental energy when it’s most needed and on the most valuable tasks.
I have learned to use a few of these active resting tricks at work; I like to arrive at work early, but twice a week I make sure that I leave early to enjoy the evening. I grab a few minutes in silent meditation once or twice a day, especially on days packed with chaos and energy. I make sure that meetings aren’t relentlessly structured back to back, allowing thoughtful, ‘heads down’ work to fall into chunks where I can commit 2–3 hours at a time.
Whatever tricks you use to take active tests at work; rest when can, and save yourself for the crux.
The best climber is the one having the most fun.
Alex Lowe was a climber before my time. One of the greatest alpinists of his generation, he died in an avalanche in Tibet in 1999.
Alex is responsible for the quote that I find most meaningful in climbing; “The best climber is the one having the most fun”.
If I can implore you to take anything from this article, it is this. We spend the vast majority of our lives at work. Just as climbing brings us closer to our humanity and teaches us about ourselves, work should be the single greatest endeavour of our lives.
Before becoming a climber I would occasionally go for a run, and perhaps visit the gym. I ate poorly and wasn’t in great shape. I had little desire or need to change.
Since becoming a climber, going to the gym is an opportunity to train to go climbing. Eating healthily has a purpose that directly improves my ability to climb better. Embracing yoga, an activity I’d long held ridiculous male suspicions of, improves my flexibility for climbing. Having a passion for climbing has brought these other activities a sense of greater purpose.
In the same way, you can bring this focus to your work and career. Try to understand the work that you want to be still doing when you’re 70, and how you can do it with grace and efficiency.
Never forget why you climb. Never forget why you go to work. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-joy-of-climbing-and-the-fear-of-falling-c20ecc53bcac | ['Mark Ridley'] | 2019-08-13 13:11:21.223000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Climbing', 'Training', 'Life Lessons', 'Work'] |
Clean Drinking Water and the Fight to Save It | If there is one thing every American tends to take for granted, it’s a clean glass of drinking water drawn from a household tap. However, the availability of clean water is under assault across the country due to lax government regulation and outdated methods of handling sewage and toxic chemicals.
A case in point is Teton County in Wyoming. The drinking water for the residents of that community is derived from a single source: the Snake River Aquifer. While this underground water resource has been providing clean drinking water for centuries, it averages a depth of just five feet below the ground surface. That has made the Snake River Aquifer vulnerable to pollution coming from thousands of home septic tanks that have grown old, damaged, or leaky. Raw sewage is increasingly finding its way into the underground aquifer — that water then gets pumped up for in-home use.
Even though water delivered to cities and towns is treated by municipal water plant treatment centers, the end result continues to be more pollutant agents finding their way inside the homes of Wyoming residents. Luckily, the residents of Teton County are not taking this sitting down. Civic action groups have formed, including Protect Our Water Jackson Hole (POWJH). This group has teamed up with the Wyoming Outdoor Council to put pressure on public officials to remedy problems with septic tank leakage.
The Wyoming case demonstrates that maintaining clean drinking water is a matter of good government management combined with mustering the political will to take action. Failing clean water infrastructures, such as the famous example of the lead-tainted water of Flint, Michigan, is the result of government oversight that goes lax. Some of it is caused by misguided efforts to save money on expensive municipal projects in an effort to cut budgets so that politicians can brag about “keeping tax rates low.”
However, when it comes to clean water, there is no substitute for spending what needs to be spent in order to upgrade failing systems and maintain existing water treatment facilities. Getting government leaders to act requires organization. That means citizens taking action to create pressure on government regulators to do the right thing, find the money needed, and put in place sound water delivery and treatment systems. | https://medium.com/@barrynerhus/clean-drinking-water-and-the-fight-to-save-it-b0709803dad9 | ['Barry Nerhus'] | 2020-12-23 21:13:21.711000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Barry Nerhus', 'Water'] |
How to Enable a Global Hybrid Workforce Transformation | www.GeoActiveGroup.com
CEOs agree, enabling ‘remote working’ options for their highly skilled talent is now essential to their digital growth goals. For many CHROs, supporting remote work is routine. HR leaders must cater to parts of their workforce that drive key growth initiatives, and deliver new human resource policies that are most beneficial.
A survey of HR leaders has revealed that 90 percent of respondents plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time, even after the COVID-19 pandemic vaccine is widely adopted.
Furthermore, 65 percent of respondents reported that their organization will continue to offer employees flexibility on when and where they choose to work. That’s a ‘talent retention’ imperative for 2021.
Hybrid Work Infrastructure Market Development
As the global distribution of various COVID-19 vaccine begins, HR leaders who responded to a recent Gartner survey predict that about 50 percent of their workforce may want to return to the workplace — at least part-time — once a vaccine is made widely available and proven effective.
“With a COVID-19 vaccine rollout approaching, HR leaders are now faced with an onslaught of questions, including if they can or should require employees to be vaccinated, what the employer’s responsibility is in helping employees and their families get vaccinated, and how the release of vaccines impacts their return-to-the-workplace strategy,” said Elisabeth Joyce, vice president at Gartner.
Sixty-two percent of HR leaders surveyed reported that they’re planning to continue all safety measures put in place once a COVID-19 vaccine is available. Nearly one-third of respondents noted they would no longer require masks in the workplace, nor enforce social distancing in high-traffic areas.
“Right now, organizations are considering different policies for employees who receive the vaccine and those who do not,” said Ms. Joyce. “What is most critical is that HR leaders are making these decisions with the expectation that they may need to course-correct as we learn more.”
Several geographic regions around the globe are currently experiencing a COVID-19 pandemic resurgence, requiring employers to take action to maintain the health and safety of their workforce.
Among HR leaders surveyed, 46 percent said their organization has already, or will, shut down offices that had previously been reopened — also, 37 percent reported extending new benefits to employees, such as childcare assistance and more sick leave.
When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available in their area, 60 percent of HR leaders surveyed said they will encourage employees to get vaccinated, but it won’t be required as a condition of employment.
Sixty percent of respondents reported they will provide resources to employees on where and how to get vaccinated, and 44 percent said they plan to cover or subsidize the costs of the vaccine for employees.
“While there are concerns around the COVID-19 vaccine, including privacy and data security, ultimately, there are many factors involved in making decisions around an organization’s vaccination strategy, including local government regulations,” said Ms. Joyce. “Therefore, it is critical that HR leaders work closely with their legal and compliance partners.”
Outlook for Flexible Hybrid Working Innovation
I believe the singular emphasis on in-office safety policies will diminish over time, as more employers acknowledge that many of their most skilled employees have no desire to return to any open office. Moreover, the widely recognized ‘digital business skills gap’ has created an environment where CHROs can’t risk alienating their most essential employees with blanket ‘return-to-office’ mandates.
That said, I anticipate that remote working demand will remain steady, and job requirements will evolve rapidly as more organizations compete for the shallow pool of talent that’s proven to deliver digital growth. One-size-fits-all HR policies are no longer viable in the highly competitive Global Networked Economy. CHROs must find creative ways to customize HR policies to address this big challenge.
Besides, enterprise IT organizations must provision and maintain ‘secure network access’ for current work-from-home (WFH) employees, and any new hire that may also need to reach software applications within the corporate on-premises data center and/or numerous SaaS providers in the cloud. | https://medium.com/technology-media-telecom/how-to-enable-a-global-hybrid-workforce-transformation-605b5e1f3b2a | ['David H. Deans'] | 2020-12-25 13:39:23.545000+00:00 | ['Digital Transformation', 'Talent', 'Remote Working', 'Human Resources', 'Hybrid Workforce'] |
Real-Time Ingestion in Google Cloud Platform | fig. Real-Time-Ingestion-Pipeline
Introduction
In this post, we will look at how we can handle stream data in GCP. There are many ways to achieve this, we will look at one. We will be implementing our approach as we go forward. Assuming you are aware of GCP components. If you are not, please go through the below links to get an idea about pubsub, cloud function, storage.
Pubsub — https://medium.com/@anwarshaikh078/google-cloud-pub-sub-ba0cda2a1fbc
Cloud Function — https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-functions-python-overview-and-data-processing-example-b36ebde5f4fd
As you can see in the above image, our first step will be to publish a message to the pubsub topic. There are many options to do this, suppose you have to capture data from a mobile phone. You can just write a few lines of code that will capture and send data using the pubsub_v1 library. For our implementation, we will write a python script to publish a message to the pubsub topic. We will run that script in the cloud shell.
Once the topic gets a message, it forwards that message to its consumer. In our case, it will be a cloud function. The cloud function will be the one to process the data that we have received and write it to the Bigquery Table. We will also write it to the storage, for persisting incoming messages and handling errors that occur. Now you have data in your table, you can analyze and use it for reporting or any other task that you want to achieve.
This is a very simple architecture to handle stream data. Let's get started with the implementation part of it.
Setup
There are a few things we need to do, to start creating this pipeline.
Set up a free Google Cloud Account. Create project. Enable Pub\Sub API for your project. Enable Cloud Function and Cloud Build APIs for your project.
A word about Input Data
We will be using the JSON format for data. Since there is a Biquery Streaming API that can write a JSON file directly to Biquery Table. We can also use XML or CSV data. JSON data is used most of the time to make API requests. Publishing a message is like calling a pubsub_v1 library function with data and parameters. That function internally makes an HTTP post request to the topic. As mostly use datasets, we will use employee data.
Publishing message to Pub\Sub topic
First, we need to create a pubsub topic. Once you have enabled pubsub API, creating a topic requires only 2 steps.
Go to the pubsub homepage. Click on create PUB\SUB topic. Give a name to your topic. Encryption — Google Managed Key. Click on create a topic.
It’s done, we can now publish messages to pubsub topic.
Pic. Publisher.py code
Partition Table in Bigquery
The partition table in bigquery is a special table that is divided into segments called partitions, that make it easier to manage and query data. By dividing a large table into smaller partitions, you can improve query performance, and you can control costs by reducing the number of bytes read by a query.
You can partition BigQuery tables by:
Ingestion Time— Tables are partitioned based on the data’s ingestion (load) time or arrival time.
Date/Timestamp/Datetime — Tables are partitioned based on a TIMESTAMP , DATE , or DATETIME column.
, , or column. Integer Range — Tables are partitioned based on an integer column.
We will use Ingestion Time partition for our case.
Processing Data using Cloud Function
The cloud function is a component of GCP and an excellent example of function as a service. Cloud Functions are a lightweight managed service that you can use to increase agility while using the cloud. They are serverless, so you can code without having to worry about managing or scaling servers. Cloud Functions integrate easily with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services and you pay for resources only when your code runs. They are invoked by triggers that you specify and they standby waiting for specific events or HTTP endpoint calls.
Steps to create a cloud function.
Go to Cloud Function Homepage. Click on Create Cloud Function. Function Name — Whatever you want to give, depends on you. Trigger — Select the trigger type as pubsub and select the pubsub topic you created earlier. This will create a subscription from the topic to function. In the Advanced tab, you will see Memory allocation set it to 128Mib and Timeout to 60 seconds. Timeout specifies the number of seconds your cloud function will be up. Maximum it can be up to 9mins. Next is the environment variables tab, we provide variables at runtime to the cloud function so that, we don't need to hardcode stuff such as project name, dataset, etc. Next is the Connections tab, select allow all traffic. Click on NEXT, now you will be asked to add your code. Here you can write code and give library requirements for it. Select Python 3.6 from the language tab. In the requirements tab, add google bigquery and google storage.
google-cloud-storage>=1.23.0
google-cloud-bigquery>=1.22.0
11. Use the below cloud function code, make sure you have given proper environment variables.
Pic. Runtime Variables
Once done click on create. It will take a few minutes to deploy the cloud function.
Testing the Pipeline
Now, its time to run what we created. Our publisher script is ready, the topic is done, the cloud function is done, bigquery table is in place.
Let's run the script on the cloud shell.
Go to the cloud shell editor, paste the above publisher script. The script needs you to have a pubsub_v1 library installed or else it will give an error.
gcloud config set project [PROJECT_ID]
pip install google-cloud-pubsub
Run python publisher.py on cloud shell, you will get the below result.
Pic. The result after running publisher.
Messages have been published to the topic.
Now you check the cloud function logs.
Pic. Cloud function logs
Excellent, now check Biquery Table and Storage.
Pic. BQ Table
As you can see in the BQ table we have entries for 101,102,103. These are the user_id we had published. Also, we have persisted data in google cloud storage. Check below,
Thus, we conclude that the pipeline got succeeded. You can optimize it for the production run. | https://medium.com/swlh/real-time-ingestion-in-google-cloud-platform-df27276aa668 | ['Anwar Shaikh'] | 2020-09-27 21:04:20.702000+00:00 | ['Google Cloud Platform', 'Google Cloud Functions', 'Google Cloud Storage', 'Google Cloud', 'Bigquery'] |
Detroit’s Diaspora | By 1950, the population of Detroit peaked at 1.85 million, making it the fifth largest city in the country. Additionally, Detroit was the wealthiest city in the US on a per capita income basis. With new freeways being built at a frenzied pace to ferry workers back and forth from rapid suburbanization, black neighborhoods were literally cut in half. Many families were forced into public housing projects. The focus on the freeways signaled the end of the heavily used electric streetcar system, further hindering the black community.
Thousands of homes were foreclosed on and left for nature to take over. The city is slowly demolishing such structures, making way for the development of urban gardens and parklands. Photo: Daniel Tuttle, Unsplash.
Continued housing scarcity (due in part to blacks’ inability to receive bank loans) restricted their ability to improve their standard of living. The practice of redlining encouraged whites to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. Blacks were in essence, trapped.
Immigration from the South continued, with 2.4 million more blacks moving north in the 1960s and early 1970s. And then it stopped.
Recession, inflation, high oil prices, and the oil embargo stopped automobile manufacturing in its tracks. On top of an already low tax base, the automakers began to lay off thousands of workers and shutter plants. White, middle class flight to the suburbs continued en masse. By 1970, the city’s population had fallen to 1.51 million, down nearly 20% from the peak in 1950.
What was once known as the Manufacturing Belt became The Rust Belt. In addition to the above, high interest rates forced many manufacturers overseas. Numerous other forces such as automation began to transform the economy, leaving many in its wake. What was once a bustling economy (though not without its problems), became riddled with a host of issues: population loss and it’s resultant declining tax base, an uneducated workforce, high unemployment and crime, drugs, welfare rolls and deficit spending.
Abandoned factories litter many areas of Detroit. Photo: Hieu Vu Minh, Unsplash
Is “reverse diversity” a thing? According to the 2010 census, 83% of the citizens were black, with 11% being white. Detroit remains as one of the most segregated cities in the country.
The most significant population loss occurred from 1980 to the present count of 670,000, or a loss of about 55%. Once the fifth largest city in the United States, it now sits at number 24. But it gets better. | https://medium.com/@artsma57/detroits-diaspora-806e8eb50ad4 | ['Arthur Keith'] | 2020-12-17 01:15:14.896000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Motown', 'The Great Migration', 'Detroit', 'American History'] |
QUANTITATIVE GOAL-BASED FINANCIAL ADVICE | Goal-based financial advice is usually based on investor’s risk averseness and the current market condition (hypothesized by fundamental and market parameters). The asset allocation models use these parameters to switch between equity and other asset classes. This approach misses the time-horizon element of the goal. An investor, although risk-friendly, can’t fulfill his short-term financial goal by taking a risk exposure to equity markets. As per the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), an investor shall earn a risk-premium in the long-run for the risk-exposure (beta) she has taken now, hence the idea of time-horizon is important.
This article holistically approaches the goal-based advisory problem by including the time horizon element into the models. These advisory models are based on horizon-dependent return’s distribution and it gives more weightage to downside risk to cater to capital protection.
Further, the article lays a foundation for portfolio management specific to the equity asset class. It introduces a framework for managing portfolios pertaining to asset-allocation.
Introduction
If you have ever asked someone to advise you on your wealth and financial planning, you must have likely encountered a standard ‘risk-assessment’ questionnaire. This questionnaire is usually used to define broader allocation limits on various assets (debt & equity in most cases). These limits are further refined with a ‘dynamic allocation’ framework, which usually captures the relative valuation of asset classes.
The problems with this framework are as follows:
1. The risk-assessment questionnaire only focuses on investor’s risk-taking ability but ignores the investor’s goal timeline. An investor might be a risk-taker by behavior but would not fulfill a near-term goal by buying more risky assets. In other words, the probability of losing money is more in near-term, hence no matter how risk-taking an investor is, if her goal is a near-term goal, she would fail to achieve her goal if we ignore the time-horizon element in our asset allocation models
2. Asset allocation models have two broad levels — strategic asset allocation (broadly defines the limits) and dynamic asset allocation (broadly caters to the current market situation). A common practice in the industry is to use valuation ratios, typically price-to-book, price-to-earnings, etc., of a broad market index, to assess the cheapness or expensiveness of equity asset class. Basis of this assessment, the dynamic allocation models allocate capital to various asset classes. The fundamental issue in this approach is that in case of tail events (financial crisis, epidemics, etc.) every asset class shall under-perform despite having a low/high valuation for that period
3. One important consideration in all asset allocation models is that they don’t account for withdrawal patterns. The investor’s withdrawal pattern is a function of goal type and investor behavior. A goal like buying a house (where all the money shall be withdrawn in a lump sum) is completely different from a goal like planning for retirement.
4. Lastly, many asset allocation models ignore the risk element while modeling. They assume that the world revolves around averages, but they ignore the ‘spread’ around the average
Typically, asset allocation advice should be backed with a solid base of underlying assets. Imagine that, for a client, you come up with 60/40 equity/debt asset allocation for a goal. And in equity allocation, you come up with a list of mutual funds for diversification. This is fundamentally a correct approach, but since the very structure of a long-only mutual fund (or any equity product for that matter) is opaque, you would not have too much control over the risk and return of a particular asset class.
This becomes important because most of the advice in the industry is based on Nobel Prize-winning Markowitz’s mean-variance framework. The important consideration in Markowitz’s framework is to forecast the risk and return of different asset classes. The mean-variance optimization technique is very sensitive to inputs, hence accurate forecast is required, which is difficult for products like mutual funds. Also, rebalancing using mutual fund products will be costly.
Given the above issues, the investor should have such underlying assets on which she has control. In this article, we shall discuss the strategic asset allocation part which broadly sets asset allocation limits as per investor’s goals.
In the later series of articles, we shall discuss other elements of goal-based advisory like portfolio management for each asset class. Figure 1 describes the entire flow chart. For any goal, we shall start with a broad allocation limit (giving more weightage to downside risk) and then refine it further by considering each investment model.
Figure 1: Horizon based allocation glide frontier: Allocation glide path (HAGF) takes the investor’s goal to come up with an optimal risk-based allocation. Metamodels allocate capital between different Investment Models (IM)
Financial goals and investment horizon
First, let’s understand how investors assess their financial needs:
Investors have goals
2. Goals can be short-term (like a vacation) or long-term (like planning for retirement)
3. Goals should be independent (vacation goal should not have any impact on retirement goal)
4. Investors hate it if their goals are not achieved
5. Sometimes investors are clueless about their goals
6. Each goal has a final liquidation assumption
7. Investors can have their risk preferences
8. Investors have few sources of income hence they prioritize the goals with different horizons (like they can choose to buy a car over going for a vacation)
As an investment advisor, we should understand the investor’s goal and see how they can achieve it without risking their capital. Once we have goals in place, we should look at the investment horizon and withdrawal pattern for each goal and build an allocation glide path for each goal. Each goal is independent and serves a different purpose (although statistically, they can have a high correlation). Hence, each goal should be viewed differently. Figure 2 explains this process.
Figure 2: Financial goals are independent: Each goal is different and independent. Each goal will have a different allocation glide path. The capital allocated to each goal shall depend on the investor’s goal prioritization order. The capital allocated can increase or decrease over time, ideally should be at a fixed rate.
A goal like buying a house would require sudden withdrawal at the end of the period, while a goal like income for retirement will have a staggered withdrawal pattern. Table 2 summarizes some of the investment goals mapped with their horizon and withdrawal patterns.
Time horizon and withdrawal pattern depends on the investor’s financial need
With the information on time-horizon and withdrawal patterns, we can determine the optimal level of risk for a given time horizon based on different possible outcomes. The process of defining risk levels is explained in the next section.
Balancing risk with time
Let’s consider you have Rs 1,00,000 to invest for a goal with sudden withdrawal at the end of the period. The investment can have a different possible outcome for different time horizons. The figure below plots different levels of outcomes (I will discuss how I calculate different levels of outcomes in a while)
Figure 3A: Equity investment value for different percentile levels: BSE Sensex Index is used as a proxy for equity investment. Period of analysis: Jan 2, 1980, to May 7th, 2020
The 3-year expected value for 100% equity portfolio is Rs 1,38,676 (50th percentile) but the range of possible outcomes varies from Rs 3,18,927 (95th percentile, 47% CAGR) to Rs 87,075 (5th percentile, -5% CAGR). This is a great example to explain how stocks can have a huge potential for upside but at the same time carry some risk element.
If we plot this till 10 years, it’s less likely to get negative returns. For 10 years, even the 5th percentile will yield a portfolio value of Rs 1,33,113 (3% CAGR).
Figure 3B: Equity investment value for different percentile levels: BSE Sensex Index is used as a proxy for equity investment. Period of analysis: Jan 2, 1980, to May 7th, 2020
All these observations are in-line with various asset pricing models like the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). In the long-run, investors earn a risk premium for the risk exposure they have taken in the short-term.
Figure 4: Equity investment value for different percentile levels from 5th to 50th percentile: BSE Sensex Index is used as a proxy for equity investment.
How outcome levels are derived?
The outcome levels are derived from a distribution of expected returns of the underlying portfolios. For a proxy of expected returns, we can use an index that truly represents the underlying portfolios. For this article, I have taken S&P BSE Sensex (I will refer it as Sensex in the remaining part of this article) and CRISIL Composite Bond Fund Index as my proxies and have studied their distribution of returns over time to calculate outcome levels. In reality, the distribution should reflect the risk and return parameters of the underlying portfolios.
Coming back to my proxies, the stock market price data is very heterogeneous. The parameters of the distribution of returns changes with the horizon. Figure 5 gives you a comparison of returns distribution for different periods. One observation that we can draw from it is that the short-period distribution has higher volatility (has a wider distribution) as compared to long-period distribution. Also, long-period distribution is smoother and close to a normal distribution (see figure 6). This explains well how risk and time interact with each other.
Figure 5: Returns distribution for different periods: Period of analysis: Jan 2, 1980, to May 7th, 2020
Figure 6A: Q-Q plots for 1-year returns
Figure 6: Q-Q plots for 10-year returns
Comparing it with the fixed income counterpart, the distribution for Sensex is much wider for any period. This explains that equity investments are risky, and investors earn risk-premium for taking that risk.
Figure 7: 10-year returns distribution for debt and equity
Constructing Horizon based Allocation Glide Frontier (HAGF)
In the previous section, we have defined the relationship between return, risk, and time. Now we know how different time horizons have a different distribution. We can use these distributions to make an appropriate recommendation for stock and bond allocation.
We will take all possible stocks allocation (from 0% to 100%) for a given equity percentile level.
To explain this concept, consider an example below:
Here we see the 20th percentile outcome for every stock allocation over a 20-year investment horizon. We will consider the 20th percentile outcome as the “bad case”. With a shorter horizon, you can see that the model shows 100% debt allocation. While for longer horizon 100% equity allocation is the best choice.
Now let’s see the best allocation in each period. It’s nothing but the top part of this graph. I’ll call this as a percentile glide path. You can see that after 7years, at the 20th percentile outcome, 100% equity allocation is advisable (since it’s the best option available). Similarly, below 7years 100% debt allocation is advisable.
Figure 8: Percentile glide path for the 20th percentile equity and 50th percentile debt
Another way to view this percentile glide path is to change the value of the y-axis from absolute values to stock allocation %. This graph will tell you how the allocation must have performed best for a given period in a ‘bad’ scenario (we consider the 20th percentile as the ‘bad’ scenario).
Figure 9: Percentile glide path for the 20th percentile equity and 50th percentile debt in terms of equity allocation percentage
This is the case when we have taken the 20th percentile for equity outcome and 50th percentile for debt allocation. We can be more conservative and vary the percentiles for debt outcomes (from 5th percentile to 50th percentile) for each equity percentile as well. If we do so, we will have 46 different percentile glide paths. We can then take their average to come up with a final percentile glide path for a percentile of equity outcome. This is shown in figure 10
Figure 10: Percentile glide path for the 20th percentile equity and 5th — 50th percentile debt in terms of equity allocation percentage
Now, we can use the same concept to make percentile glide path for all the percentiles, from the 5th percentile (close to the worst case) to the 50th percentile (expected outcome). Remember that any percentile glide path over the 50th percentile will show 100% equity allocation in all periods. Our aim here is to provide our investor with a seamless experience of meeting her goal. Hence, we should give more importance to downside risk as compared to the upside potential. To do that, we will take an average (we can change this as well for a different level of risk tolerance) of all percentile glide paths from the 5th percentile to the 50th percentile. We call this as ‘HAGF’ (pronounced as “hough”, short form for Horizon-based Allocation Glide Frontier).
Figure 11: Horizon-based Allocation Glide Frontier — Balanced investor
You can see that if your goal is a long-term goal, 100% equity allocation is advisable. As you approach your goal date, HAGF will reduce your equity allocation and increase your debt allocation.
Figure 12: Horizon-based Allocation Glide Frontier — Balanced investor
Including investor’s risk preference
In the previous section, we have taken an average of various percentile glide path to come up with a HAGH. We can also take a weighted average of percentile glide path depending on the investor’s risk tolerance.
Figure 13A: Weights — Aggressive investor
Figure 13B: Weights — Balanced investor
Figure 13C: Weights — Conservative investor
Figure 14 shows weights given to different percentile glide paths for different risk preferences.
Figure 14: Weights — Horizon-based Allocation Glide Frontier for different investors
One thing to note here is that the risk preference also depends on the goal’s type. For example, for major purchase goals, the recommended HAGH takes a more conservative path than a recommended HAGH for a retirement goal. This is because we expect the investor will fully liquidate her investment at the intended date and will need the full balance. Retirement, on the other hand, would have a staggered liquidity preference.
We can use this framework to decide a reasonable range of deviation for different risk preferences.
Closing thoughts
An allocation cannot be optimal if the investor is not comfortable committing to it in both good markets and bad ones. Including the time-horizon element into the models lists out the risk of an investment. Remember that 100% equity allocation is only advisable if the investors have a long-term view. To ensure that investors understand and feel comfortable with the short term risk in their portfolios, we should look at both extremely good and extremely poor return scenarios | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/quantitative-goal-based-financial-advice-9dffa633e9d9 | ['Anupreet Choudhary'] | 2020-07-11 15:46:46.664000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Stock Market', 'Financial Planning', 'Finance', 'Financial Advisor'] |
A Guide to O3 Wallet (Desktop) | First, head over to the O3 official website to download the app (I’m using Windows to demonstrate, but it should look similar on macOS and Linux).
How to import an existing wallet
1.1 After the download completes, click ‘Import Existing Wallet’ in the welcome page.
1.2 You’ll be prompted to choose which chain you want to view your wallet on.
1.3 Now you should be directed to the interface below. Enter your Private Kay or Encrypted Key with password to import your wallet.
1.4. Enter your wallet’s name and passphrase to access it.
1.5 When the steps above are done, you can start using your wallet.
1.6 Alternatively, you can open the drop down menu in an existing wallet, and click ‘Import’.
2. How to import a Ledger wallet
2.1. Click ‘Import Ledger Wallet’ in the welcome page.
2.2. Connet to your Ledger and select the wallet address you want to import. You can check the checkbox ‘Ontology only addresses’ to view Ontology only addresses.
3. How to create a new wallet
3.1 In the welcome page, click ‘Create New Wallet’. You’ll be prompted to select chain and enter the wallet name/passphrase.
3.2 Alternatively, you can open the drop-down menu in an existing wallet, and click ‘Create’.
3.3 There’s even a third way. In the app’s Settings tab, you can click ‘Create New Wallet’ and start the process. You can also import existing wallet and ledger wallet in this tab.
4. How to manage a wallet (This includes funtions like backup public address/keys and remove wallet from the app)
4.1. Click ‘Manage Wallet’ in the app’s Settings tab or directly from your wallet’s home page.
4.2. You’ll be directed to a page with your wallet’s address and keys shown. At the top of the page there are buttons for performing actions like ‘Edit name’, ‘Print wallet’, and ‘Remove wallet’. Below the Encrpted key you can change the wallet’s password.
4.3 In the app’s Settings tab, you can perform other actions as shown below.
4.4 You can also switch chains in the drop-down menu. | https://medium.com/o3-labs-o3-wallet/a-guide-to-o3-wallet-desktop-fe2368d5b968 | ['Caroline'] | 2021-04-12 11:00:48.572000+00:00 | ['Desktop', 'O3', 'Wallet', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Unresolved trauma and its complications | Unresolved trauma and its complications
Trauma is a neurological response that lives on in our nervous system when untreated. In combination with the human brain and bodily functions it can even evolve to a fatal state. This is an urgent matter in society today due to the fact that trauma responses often go untreated due to the misconceptions related to the very similar symptoms listed of different kind of diseases that even occur in humans with untreated trauma.
Our nervous system is very complex. Our brain is very good at handling and communicating with it. If life goes by without any traumatizing events a human being thrives in life. This is easy seen in various indigos tribes and in ancient knowledge. The modern human being faces many challenges in society which leads to different kinds of events in life. Fear based events in life are very harmful to human basic functions but that doesn’t mean an event has to be of a disastrous form, it can also be many small experiences of fear that lead to a sensory overload of many different kinds. This leads to different kinds of behavior in human beings. When understod they tend to go away and the behavior goes back to a normal state.
A human being with this kind of behavior change related to trauma goes untreated or treated as having a disease, in some cases medicated, the behavior or bodily sickness tends to get worse. This could be because the brain and the nervous system doesn’t understand what’s going on with it witch only leads to more fear. Its also probably due to a fact in our memory system that blocks out fear based life situations in the past. And instead the mind creates subconscious blocks that lead to even more behavioral change without the individual consciously knowing about it.
In the year of 2000 there was a scientifically breakthrough. The discovery of brains synapses handling memories did have a short window of time where the brain itself could repair and undo blocks created in the subconscious mind. A psychologist Colette Streicher has implemented this in her treatment of patients with trauma and the results are amazing. Her studies show that the human brain can repair and heal itself in a matter of minutes.
Traumatic events, in either a big or small form, leads to a stress response in a human. In this state of stress a human tend to imprint feelings of that situation in to the nervous system. These stress responses stays in our nervous system and creates even more feelings related to that event. Feelings that a human later on don’t know consciously the origin of. Our hearts counsioussness also carries on these feelings and when a subconscious block in our memory is triggered, it can lead to a complex post traumatic stress reaction. This is a very confusing experience for a human being. To explain it plainly a human can have this reaction leading to great anxiety in very safe surroundings, triggered by a blocked memory in the subconscious mind. It only takes a similar surrounding that the human system relates to an event in the past witch triggers the feelings from that event to reappear. ”The alarm clock” of fear, threat goes off.
Furthermore this triggering effect can occur when a human being is close enough to an another human being feeling similar feelings that the human system recognizes and relates to a triggering subconscious block. The human capacity of recognizing feelings in other forms of life tend to not be triggering at all more so relaxing and creating a feeling of love. Similar to the fact of two human beings being in love where they tend to feel each others feelings.
A case study of a female
Known trauma in the past:
The loss of a child of age 2 while being pregnant. Another baby in a very ill condition, life-threatening, and the fetus stopped showing signs of life at the same time.
All of the above happened at the same time. Her husband handled it by collapsing. He couldn’t handle it so he laid in bed covered up.
Later in life another baby is born. Adored by the father and neglected by the mother.
This woman tried to seek help for trauma but has been medicated and labelled by the psychiatric care but never diagnosed. Now 40 years later she shows signs of an extreme form of complex post traumatic stress reaktion where this stress response makes her believe she is in different times of her life including a change of bodily pain, disease related to that time of her life.
This occurs situation based. Hard enough blocked subconscious memories that are untreated tends to throw her back in time to a better place to be. Until its safe to come back to reality.
The similarities to dementia are easy to see but also the difference.
A case study of a male
Known trauma in the past same as above
This man evolved to be mean to the surviving children of the trauma event but not to the last born. That child was treated as a little princess. The man got separated from his family due to his behavior. He never got any trauma treatment, he was put in jail and later on labelled on as having paranoia, schicofrenia and he has all his life waited for the return of his youngest child.
When looking at these case studies from a trauma point of view it clearly states out that leaving trauma untreated affects the life of the whole family. And further studies of the children, their partners and grandchildren in this case study confirms that theory.
Furthermore this case study shows evidence of that the different kinds of responses that today are being labelled as a human being being narcissistic, empathic, autistic, depressive, without impulse control, oversensivity all can relate back to untreated trauma. I believe that further studies can show a relation between more human conditions and unresolved trauma issues.
The extended study involving the children also shows signs of how humans with untreated trauma responses subconsciously trigger other human beings suffering with unresolved trauma issues which leads to more suffering due to the differences in trauma responses. It also shows that if one human resolves the subconscious blocks related to trauma this circle of harmful subconscious behavior stops from spreading any further. Knowledge of the condition is the key.
Science and knowledge in this article is based on the knowledge of:
Dr Joe Dispenza - well known scientist - the human body, mind and soul
Colette Streicher - map coaching institute psychiatric care, coaching and neuroscience - memory synapses.
Richard Grannon - cptsd (cptsr) expertis in the different kinds of brain functions psychologically/fysically and the behavior patterns that follow.
Dr Les Carter - Narcissism
Gregg Braden - well known scientist, human dna research, ancient knowledge research, neuroscience
Dr Ramani - expertis in narcissism and c-ptsd
Maryon Meyer - pharmacy
Jeanette Nord - Trauma treatment and self care
Dr Andrew Kaufman
By taking in expertis from the above listed (and more related to my extended studie) and relating it to my case studies, including treatment based on understanding trauma in a broad spectrum I myself consider myself as a very healthy person. My case studies can absolutely be studied again. Probably not with the same timeframe and recognition though. I have lived it, survived it, so I do know it. I am the youngest child in the case study above. Anyone interested in following up my work in this area are welcome to continue my research by studying me and the ripple effect that occur just by understanding and sharing this knowledge.
My background in medical care as a assistant nurse also gives me an insight in how the the lack of understanding trauma based reactions further traumatize human beings suffering from different variations of trauma. I therefore come to the conclusion that information about these conditions should go out worldwide in a broad spectrum as soon as possible. Especially now due to the fact that international reports show that the implementations of restrictions that was necessary in preventing the corona disease to spread also can cause trauma, trigger already traumatized humans into new responses of/and other trauma related diseases.
Written By Sonja from the family tree of Rantila
Nowadays a happily married woman in the Ullman family.
Adress:
Klockarvägen 61
15164 Södertälje
Sweden
Phone
+46764178788
Email
[email protected]
Youtube | https://medium.com/@onlinesonja/unresolved-trauma-and-its-complications-3133cc8cac97 | ['Sonja Ullman'] | 2020-11-26 10:16:41.499000+00:00 | ['Empathy', 'Trauma', 'Narcissism', 'Cptsd', 'PTSD'] |
my friend is sad and that makes me sad | Chosen family is special. Chosen family can mean more than blood family sometimes because nobody told you to love them. You just do. Those people who your kids will one day explain to their friends that “oh that’s my mom’s best friend, I call her auntie” or “we aren’t related but they’re still family, Karen…” and so on. They become those people who everyone associates with you. The ones who are a given when you make family vacation plans, or holiday plans, or taco Tuesday plans. Everyone has those people in their life. I’ve known my mom’s best friend since I was born. She comes to every family party we have and then some. I spent every New Year’s Day with her family. I have a friend like that too, the kind of friend who’s come over my house for Sunday lunch ever since we were in second grade, and who still goes and visits my mom now that I’ve moved away. My dad’s best friend was also present almost every weekend of my childhood. We all knew when he arrived from his signature knock on our kitchen door. He brought me to buy my first car. Helped my dad build my childhood bedroom. I have a friend who I only met three years ago, and we started off on a very different path than the friendship we’ve embarked on since, but somehow there they are. One of my favorite people. Sometimes you meet your people early in life, sometimes later. It doesn’t matter how you meet them. What matters is that you meet them.
I want to remind you that you’re that person to someone. The one whose knock on their front door makes them grin because “it’s Ed!” and the one whose kids are excited about seeing on New Year’s. The one your dog loves the most. The one your cat crawls out of their napping spot to greet. The one you call when you crashed your car, or chopped off part of your finger, or got engaged, or got unengaged, or because you’re driving and want to feel like someone is in the car with you, or whatever it is. This year has really drilled in that people are important. People matter. Without each other, what’s the point? I used to struggle to find the meaning of life or whatever, and I’ve stopped searching because I don’t think I’ll ever truly know why any of us are here or where we came from or where we’ll go. All I know is that while we are here, we live for each other. Whether or not you believe that, I think it’s the truth. And it shows up in our lives in different, nuanced ways for everyone. And sometimes your chosen family includes your blood family, because believe it or not, as adults we get to choose who we keep around. Family doesn’t have to look one specific way to be valid. Love is valid, period. So if you’re reading this, we love you. Your chosen family, me, the universe. We love you. We are glad you’re here. We are glad to know you. And we’ve gotcha.
Here’s to you. And to us. And to platonically choosing people for life. We love that. Happy holidays from your neighborhood coffee addict. Raising a mug to y’all in solidarity on this annoyingly warm December day in Miami. Take care of yourselves ❤
-Nen | https://medium.com/@smanzi/my-friend-is-sad-and-that-makes-me-sad-7a6b3b93c0e | ['Serena Manzi'] | 2020-12-20 18:44:23.776000+00:00 | ['Chosen Family', 'Empathy', 'Love', '2020', 'Holidays'] |
Writing Satire Is Making Me Take Myself Less Seriously | I’m usually a very serious writer. I take a very analytical and emotional approach to the topics I write about, and readers can usually count on me for an effort to give nuance, research, as well as personal experience to heavy topics like race, religion, politics, the economy, TV, sports, and a lot of topics in between.
Recently, however, I’ve been writing a lot of satire. I wrote a satire making fun of how liberals can be blind to their own racism, a satire on the exploitation of many self-help authors, and a satire on bad writing advice. There are a lot of topics I didn’t make fun of, which I thought in the past would have just been bad taste, but recently, I’ve been making fun of a lot of things.
Sometimes, satire and humor are the best modes of communication.
I wrote an essay on how white liberals could be so blind to their own racism, too, but for a lot of us, humor conveys a message better. And, for a lot of us, sometimes, humor is the best way to express emotions.
A 2010 Harvard Medical School report states that laughter stimulates endorphins and serotonin, down-regulates stress hormones, and bonds people through the up-regulation of serotonin. A lot of us will not unite in our beliefs, but a lot of us can unite through humor and witty statements and satire. One of my friends, who is very conservative, loves Saturday Night Live, which is a symbol of liberal political resistance to Trump these days.
Writing satire has helped me take myself and my writing a lot less seriously, and that’s a very good thing. It takes a lot of emotional effort that can be draining when writing long, thoughtful pieces on a heavy topic, but a satire keeps things light and engages us on a subject.
To be clear, I don’t think a discussion with satire is the only way to have a discussion. But it’s sometimes the best place to start. Humor is inherently a coping tool that allows us to take a break from a heavy topic.
For those of us who suffer from depression, according to Robert W. Griggs, the best break is something that makes us laugh. Griggs found that he first found humor as an effective coping mechanism in his therapist’s office. He looked at all the book titles and found that the titles forebode an overwhelming sense of doom. Griggs thought to himself this:
“Okay, I know I’m sick, but I can’t have all this stuff wrong with me.”
For him to be able to laugh when he felt so ashamed and apprehensive going into the therapist’s office gave him hope that the therapy was going to be okay. Griggs tells us that finding humor in a situation allows us to take a step back and see things more clearly and bring everything back to earth. He reminisces to when he was in the psych unit with other patients, and he laughed at the funniest scenes of movies.
“Locked in that place with no control over what happened next, we could laugh, which meant we had some control after all.”
Of course, it’s important to proceed with caution when mixing humor and mental health. Biting and bitter sarcasm can cause a lot of pain when it’s used to express deeply-rooted anger at someone. Humor is not the end all be all and should be used with discretion, but it’s a tool for all of us to take ourselves a little less seriously and ground ourselves.
Like all of us can’t be laughing all the time and grounded all the time, I acknowledge that I can’t either. I’ve been writing a lot more satire in expense of serious articles and wrote satire all of yesterday, trying to come up with headlines about Mother’s Day that were funny. It was a nice break from my usual essay-writing, but it couldn’t replace it.
Satire was a way for me to take myself less seriously. I didn’t need to be the expert on everything, which I know but don’t necessarily accept. I don’t need to be perfect, whether it means fulfilling my productivity goals, exercising every day, or trying to be the best online teacher. When I write satire, I laugh. If it isn’t funny to me, I know it’s probably not that funny to my audience — so I have a laughing fit every time I write satire so my readers can feel some semblance of the same emotion.
Inherently, we as humans want to feel like we’re in control. But the best humor and satire often strike us by surprise and make us realize that, well, it’s OK not to be in control. Who does feel in control when we have a pandemic like the Coronavirus upending our lives?
“Jokes work because they defy expectations,” the Harvard Medical School report writes. The report makes sure to differentiate laughter and humor: laughter is a social signal that’s like a punctuation mark, and humor is an evoked response to shifting expectations. Our frontal lobes work to seek pattern recognition, and when those expectations are broken, are brains shift away from informational processing and into an emotional response in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure reward system.
A perfect joke is provocative enough to grab someone’s attention, but not so provocative that it’s outright offensive or bigoted. I’m still learning to navigate these lines but some editors, including Susan Brearly, have helped me immensely in a non-judgmental manner.
I used to think that I just wasn’t funny. Well, in real life, I can be a funny person, but I thought that as a writer, humor and satire just weren’t my place. My place was as an essay writer that persuaded or someone who told compelling personal stories, or someone who documented his profound experiences with faith.
To write satire? That just seemed like it was for someone else.
And then I started writing satire more and more. I sampled some Onion articles and wrote fake news-style satirical stories, and then pivoted to just general satire where I made fun of something I knew.
And the person we know best? Ourselves. The best of my satire now is when I make fun of myself. I’ve written my fair share of self-help advice and articles. I wrote those pieces because there are habits and techniques that work well for me — and yet I recognize a lot of readers’ frustration with seeing way too many self-help pieces, so I made fun of the conniving and ambitious thought process of writing a self-help article.
In effect, making fun of myself is possibly the best form of comedy. I can be provocative, funny, and have attention-grabbing punchlines, and yet I won’t go too far because I know my own limits and boundaries. If you’re in the place where you feel you can make fun of yourself without being too self-critical, I would suggest going for it, because making fun of myself in satire has made me less self-critical in real-time. When you’re someone who can take being made fun of, you don’t take criticism as personally, nor you open yourself up to self-acceptance as well as being more vulnerable with others.
Writing satire has made me take myself less seriously, and it doesn’t matter how serious a topic is or how depressed I feel — humor helps us heal. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/writing-satire-is-making-me-take-myself-less-seriously-9514504a7042 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-05-11 17:16:23.676000+00:00 | ['Satire', 'Health', 'Humor', 'Mental Health', 'Writing'] |
I asked my mother to hold my hand | Trigger Warning: Suicide
Credits — Unsplash
I spoke to God when I was three for the first time
and my mother watched a man push me into the deep end of the pool,
She told me to swim, swim, swim so I wouldn’t drown.
It would be years before I saw her face again but I’m patient.
Sixteen and floating in a rose painted bathtub,
I raise my hands up towards her
and she says wait for me,
i’m not finished with you yet.
It’s been a long day but I think one more can’t hurt
I speak to her again when my sister’s gone-
it could have been me, it should have been me-
my head’s in a porcelain sink and I see her watching me.
She says she’s not ready yet but I’m sick of waiting.
No one reads poetry to me anymore.
It’s been a few years and I’m watching
Pennsylvania’s sun melt into my wounds.
She stands beside me but I can’t meet her eyes.
Do you know where I go?
She asks me, like she wants me to pry
the words out of her cold, dead mouth
but i don’t, i can’t care anymore
I can’t look at fans,
I can’t swim in foreign pools.
I tell her,
wherever you go, take me with you
and this time she holds out her hand. | https://medium.com/thecontextmag/i-asked-my-mother-to-hold-my-hand-442a4c42406b | ['Srishti Das'] | 2020-12-06 15:41:38.600000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Poetry', 'Fiction Writing', 'Fiction', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
Common Mistakes When Choosing Autoresponders | Practical Business
Common Mistakes When Choosing Autoresponders
In the last article, I addressed all the various technologies and tools you needed to make your autoresponder process work. Today we will talk about what to consider when you specifically selecting your autoresponder software. Trust me, this is important. I may or may not have mentioned that I have used several.
Your email autoresponder is one of the most critical pieces of technology you will invest in if you are trying to build a list of subscribers, with the one exception probably being your website. You can earn a reasonably high ROI via email marketing and so I would be neglectful in my information sharing if I underestimated the importance of this one system for your business. Some entrepreneurs earn between $38 — $42 dollars on every dollar they invest in email marketing. So, let’s help you avoid the common mistakes that will leave money on the table.
Mistake #1 — Not Knowing Your Email Marketing Goals
This seems pretty rudimentary, I know. However, how many investments have you made in your business with the goal of making money? That is a fine goal, but it is not specific enough to select the right tools. Wanting to build your list isn’t specific enough either.
Why do you want to build your list? Why do you want these individuals on the list? Do you want to build a long-term relationship? Do you want to sell low-content / low-relationship offers? Do you want to build awareness or inform? Most likely, if you are reading this, you want to build a long-term relationship with the individuals on your list to help them choose to buy your products and services. If so, that is much different than just sending out daily affiliate offers or quotes. Be sure you know what you want from the list and create content accordingly.
Mistake #2 — Focusing Too Much on Price
I get it. When you are first starting out or maybe when you are starting to create a side gig, you don’t have a ton of disposable income to invest. Yet, if you focus only on the freemium or low-priced products and you don’t look at the features you need to meet your goal (see mistake #1), you will miss out on getting the right technology for the job.
There will be some very expensive tools, like the Actionestics add-on for ClickFunnels, that may be well above your ability to pay right now, but there is going to be something more reasonable that works for you near-term and mid-term goals. Remember, what is your goal. Then, what is the functionality you need to meet that goal? Then you can narrow it down further to what you can afford.
Mistake #3 — Not Caring About the Company Reputation
Look, I like the underdog just as much as the other guys. Yet, the services you choose need to have a good reputation. I am not saying they have to be the captain of the football team type popular, I am saying they need to do what they say they will do when they say they will do it.
For example, I started out with the “popular” web hosting company, even though my knowledgeable friends and colleges said they had terrible customer support. I figured it would be unlikely that I would need much of that support until I did. It cost me a lot of time and a lot of money. The point is it doesn’t take much to ruin the trust you have worked too hard to build with your audience. If you choose a company that has a reputation similar to the one you want to have, either way, it will rub off on you someday. Protect your rep!
Mistake #4 — Not Reading the Terms of Service (Fine Print)
Ugh. Can I say how much I hate this one? Each service has its own terms of service (TOS) or service level agreement (SLA). These are rules that you must pay attention to and the ones that they pay attention to. You don’t own this service or have much influence over them other than what they are legally obligated to do.
If you mess up, they can easily cut you off and don’t even have to give you much of an explanation. For example, there was a requirement to not sell supplement products with one provider I used. Turns out they considered essential oils (includes digital download information) as a nutritional supplement and they shut off my entire site and my service, but happily continued to charge me.
Therefore, pick the right choice that allows you to do what you need to do with the software. See Mistake #1. You need to be clear what your goal is with the product and that you are allowed to use it in service to that goal. For example, if you want to do a lot of affiliate marketing, don’t pick one that makes that hard. So yes, read the fine print … with a cup of coffee … or two cups of coffee.
Mistake #5 — Not Concerning Yourself with Deliverability
I will assume that the only reason that you don’t concern yourself with it is that you didn’t know to consider it. I mean why would you take the time to craft long nurture sequences or lead sequences only to have the emails not get delivered. Seems silly right?
Some services have better records of their deliverability than others. Active Campaign has one I really like and find helpful. Read the fine print to find out. (Yes, more reading of legal crud, but it matters.). Test out the service when you use their free version to find out if they are accurate in their deliverability claims. Ask others who use the software is they have had any issues in the past. Find out if that email service provider is often used by your audience or your industry. Clearly, I like and use Active Campaign. Maybe you have a college that loved Mailchimp. Just do a little homework so you are not left with a lot of effort wasted.
Mistake #6– Not Testing the User Interface
Should I admit my arrogance here? Yes, yes, I should. I guess I figured since I spent 20+ years in technology — often as a software developer — that all these things should be easy, and I would be fine. Ummmm…. Maybe not so much. No matter has fantastic the service is, if you can’t figure it out, it’s not amazeballs — umkay? Choose a service you can figure out or that is easy to teach a virtual assistant.
I will admit, these things are more complicated than I gave them credit for. I thought I know how to email, right. Well, there are sequences and tags and conditions and lions and tigers and bears — oh my. So, really. Use the trial person. Follow their tutorials. Do the work. Otherwise, you will have three or four of these things all half-working … or maybe I am projecting a bit?
Mistake #7– Ignoring the Availability of Important Analytics
Your autoresponder platform will have analytics. Some systems offer more than others. Ensure the choice you pick has the information available that you need or a way to integrate with another software to get those analytics. Be careful here though. If you read the last article on all the various technologies and tools you needed to make your autoresponder process work you will know that you can quickly end up with three to ten systems just to run things. If you don’t have to add another integration software — don’t. If you do, consider something like Zapier that is used often and there are others that can support it if you can’t figure things out.
Mistake #8– Not Understanding and Knowing the Terminology
There is a lot of new stuff to learn when you start using autoresponders and email marketing. If you understand the terms you will feel much less lost. Again, I was a 20+ year technologist … and well … you know what happens when you assume, right? HubSpot has an excellent glossary of important email marketing terms to get to know so you don’t end up looking like the right side of assume — you feel me?
When you choose your autoresponder and system that you want to use to build your email list so that you can get your first 1000 subscribers, you are finally ready to get started, so don’t dottle!
Remember that you need to create a business email to use your autoresponder as well as an address that will be included automatically on each email. It’s the law. You can get a virtual business address and phone number via sites like Rovva.com or Regus.com, and others. If you use self-hosted WordPress, you can create as many unique email addresses as you need via your website host. Mine is www.jackieschwabe.com and my email is [email protected]. You can also get a google voice phone number if you don’t want folks calling your cell phone directly … but those are topics for a different article.
Did you miss the first few articles in this series? Now worries … I pasted the links of a few below for you. | https://medium.com/practical-business/common-mistakes-when-choosing-autoresponders-ae9765bb5500 | ['Jackie Schwabe', 'Mba'] | 2020-12-09 21:35:04.863000+00:00 | ['Startup Lessons', 'Email Marketing', 'Small Business Marketing', 'Entrepreneur', 'Email Marketing Tips'] |
Building a Smart Central Heating System with a Raspberry Pi, and Python | Building a Smart Central Heating System with a Raspberry Pi, and Python
My parents recently had a ‘smart thermostat’ installed. It got me to thinking: how hard could it really be to make one myself?
Even as a young child I can remember craving technology: miniature portable technology in particular. From the mini TVs and games systems of the early 90s, through the Palm Pilots and Nokia Communicators of the late 90s, to the handheld heaven that emerged at the turn of the millennium, I’ve consistently coveted other people’s gadgets! I used to think miniature electronic devices and things like ‘home automation’ were pursuits of the wealthy: the Bruce Waynes and Tony Starks of this world. That was until yesterday when I received this:
Raspbery Pi Zero W
Tiny, isn’t it!? That’s a single board computer: as in, a whole computer on a single (tiny) board, a.k.a. the Raspberry Pi Zero W… And it only cost 7quid*! Now, of course, I’m being melodramatic for the purposes of the introduction ( skip to the end if you’re itching to get to the code ); I, of course, already knew of the existence of SBCs and, in fact, have owned a Pi 3B for a number of years now and used it for various things: games console emulator, media center, file server, web server, kali linux experiments, etc etc.. and let’s be honest, they do all of these things adequately, but not especially brilliantly — a Raspberry Pi 3 media center certainly leaves a lot to be desired!
However, I didn’t start to realise the real potential of such a device until recently. It turns out the real super power of a Raspberry Pi is in its GPIO pins (General Purpose Input/Output). I’d actually seen a whole load of YouTube videos, including those of a long-time personal favourite channel of mine, Christopher Barnatt’s Explaining Computers, which describe in detail various projects and experiments which make use of these pins, but, as is often the case, by all accounts, with YouTube-addicted-hacker-maker-wannabes like myself, I had no worthy project of my own in mind to stimulate me, and therefore had not yet bothered experimenting myself.
GPIO Pins on a Raspberry Pi SBC (from here)
Other things that stopped me:
worry that I would blow up my one and only Pi
cost of buying peripherals such as jumper cables/modules/breadboard etc.
general laziness
In answer to the first two, I can now say that 1: with minimal research you come to realise how simple the layout of the pins is and that the majority of the pins are more-or-less exactly the same — just waiting for you to define them — and 2: the cost is extremely low, especially with adequate prior planning: more affordable third-party parts might take longer to arrive/source. Additionally, in spite of all that, for my initial tests I was able to sacrifice a few cables from elsewhere and mash them haphazardly onto the GPIO pins without issue (and in so doing, offer further reassurance to worry number 1!). In addition, as one of the aforementioned hacker-maker-wannabes, I have already amassed such bare essentials as solding irons and tiny screwdrivers, as I’m sure is the case for many people reading, and I never needed a breadboard after all.
Number 3 is just life unfortunately, and we all deal with our laziness in our own ways, but it definitely stems back to the point about having a worthy project and coming up with a plan.
*quid: British money
A worthy project…
I moved into a new house a year ago, and this winter the central heating system has really demonstrated its limitations. We have a separate downstairs/ upstairs loop, each with its own programmer. The programmer is of a type that you set the temperature at 4 times during the day, on either a week-day or a week-end. So, you could, for example, set it to warm up to 20°C at 6am, then down to 5° at 8am (if nobody’s at home) and up to 20° again at 6pm, and then down to 5° again at bedtime, and different on Saturday and Sunday if need be. It’s a combined system; most I’ve had in the past have had separate thermostat and timer units, and I have to say, I think combining the two, while saving wall space, actually restricts the functionality; especially since, in the case of the model on our wall, there is no advance (+1hr) button. The only thing you can do, if you want some non-standard heat-time, is laboriously notch up the temperature on the digital display until it goes above the threshold, and then it will stay like that until the next change unless you remember to (laboriously) notch it back down, which is seldom desirable. This annoyance, along with my parents’ having installed a ‘smart thermostat’ with an app, and my own growing desire to be able to warm up the house from afar, got me to thinking: how hard could it really be to make one myself?
Setting up a mains relay with Raspberry Pi GPIO pins.
Pulling the programmer off the wall, I saw that behind it was a simple single-channel relay. We’re lucky in the UK not to need air conditioning and/or fans; if it’s ever unbearably hot, it’s usually only for 2 or 3 days at a time, so we don’t bother… lucky because it makes hacking my house a whole lot more straightforward (…not so lucky about the weather!).
Simple relay, bottom left, in normally open (N/O) position.
This was what I was expecting to be honest: temperature goes below threshold, click (unmistakeable sound of a relay), boiler fires up; temperature goes back above, click, boiler chills out; so I checked online for the cheapest possible relay that would interface with my Pi. I was extremely excited for, but still mildly apprehensive towards my first GPIO project.
The model I settled on was the Adafruit Power Relay Featherwing. This 5A 250V relay could apparently handle UK mains voltage and be triggered effectively by the Pi’s 3volt pin. (Other cheaper examples came with warnings from reviewers about non-ideal results when trying to work with the Raspberry Pi’s 5v pin.) When it arrived, I saw that it had almost as many holes for GPIO pins as the Pi! This confused me slightly at first, but again, at the end of the day, it was down to me to choose my own location for the signal pin (one of the three needed; the others being 3-volt power and GND [ground]). The 3V and GND were easy enough to locate on the Pi, and the signal, as it turned out, could also be connected to any one of the standard GPIO pins on the Pi. I connected the pins to the Pi like so:
3V connected to pin 1, GND connected to pin 9 and Signal connected to pin 13 (GPIO 27)
When the relay arrived, I could move on to the next stage of the project: writing some code…. finally! I used a test script based on one I’d seen on Explaining Computers.
Testing the relay for the first time.
In the code example above, after importing the RPi.GPIO libary, I set the board numbering mode to sequential, and then set my chosen signal pin, pin 13, as an output pin. Then I initiate a while loop that clicks the relay on and off with a second’s delay. The try/finally block removes the settings before exiting the program. It worked first time (thanks Chris!) and it was incredibly satisfying to hear the click and watch my script interacting with a physical object!
There were a whole load of pins spare, which is good because I also needed to attach a temperature module. Again after some research I settled on the cheapest option without any negative reviews, the BMP280 (originally manufactured by Bosch):
And after a quick search found this helpful diagram and tutorial for how to wire it up to the Pi:
In this case the pins you use are important as pins 3 and 5 (GPIO 2(SDA) & 3(SCL)) are intended for I²C usage.
Using the configuration above, I would probably have to move the relay’s 3V cable to the Pi’s 3V pin at position 17 but otherwise, the temperature sensor shouldn’t interfere with the relay. I wired it up without issue:
The temperature module hanging from salvaged cables (later replaced)
Obviously I first wrote some simple scripts to test the relay and sensor module and while the former was incredibly easy to get going, the latter was a little tricky due to the data transfer aspect relying on the Pi’s I2C pins. There are various permissions issues when using these pins, especially when not running the Raspian OS (I’m running Ubuntu 20.04), but nothing that couldn’t be solved with a few searches of Google/StackOverflow. The main issue came down to my old friend, PermissionError, when trying to run the script not as root (not ideal when you want it to run autonomously on a webserver). In the end I found a fantastic package called pigpio which when the pigpiod daemon is running on your system, bypasses these permissions. It can be used instead of RPi.GPIO and it is considerably easier to configure. On Ubuntu (and Raspian) you can install it with the following command:
sudo apt install pigpiod
and then install the Python module with:
pip3 install pigpio
There are various other dependencies; I also needed to install smbus2 and pimoroni-bme280 with:
pip3 install smbus2 pimoroni-bme280
Troubleshooting
Another helpful thing to install is i2c-tools which helped me debug an issue that came down to bad soldering.
sudo apt install i2c-tools
This allows you to use i2cdetect to see the I2C addresses that are currently in use. If nothing is connected, the output will look like this:
If you’ve installed all the dependencies and you’re still not picking anything up, it’s time to check your wiring, and in my case, I wasn’t really too happy with the soldering job I’d done, so I started there. When soldering the tiny GPIO pins to the Pi Zero W, I hadn’t made sure that every blob of solder had melted right into the hole, as it’s supposed to do, so I went back over it and sorted this out, and was extremely relieved when the module immediately got detected by i2cdetect:
As you can see, something has been detected at address 76 (exciting!).
(This was the closest I came to giving worry number 1 from earlier any validation. I was mainly concerned that I would solder all of the tiny pins together by accident and short the board. However, I escaped with my Pi in tact, albiet with some laughably inconsistant blobs of solder across the bottom!)
The code
Hardware debugging completed, it was time to write some proper code (finally!).
I decided to contruct a class for the heating system that would take care of all the different things that needed to be done. In this way, it can be easily imported into another project, such as a Flask application.
So, it’s quite long! I included various checks that would be needed by the Flask application/front-end; the start_time() method for example, is to create a variable which is passed to the html template to allow for a consistent JavaScript countdown timer, regardless of whether the page is refreshed, or a different device is used.
A Thermostat API
As you might have noticed, the script above doesn’t actually contain the functions for checking the temperature module itself, and that was because I found it more convenient to leave my Pi 3B that I had been testing on set up with the relay, and to have a more portable Pi Zero W which could then serve up the data from the sensor module via an API. The code for that very simple Flask API with the BME280 methods is as follows:
The single endpoint returns a JSON response with the sensor data at that moment in time.
The new sattelite thermostat API system. Source of soldering issues mentioned above.
Reverse engineering my central heating system.
The nice thing about electronics is that the majority of components are nicely labeled and documented. When it comes to electrics, this is rarely the case! When I took the cover off the junction box in my airing cupboard, there were a number of different wires serving the two actuator valves that deal with the two heating loops: an indistinguishable mess of wires coming in through a hole in the wall, and 4 going out to each actuator, for a total of 8.
I searched around and found the official documentation for the actuator valves and was able to work out what the 4 different wires were and which one was the crucial ‘live’ that was being broken by the relay in the programmer-unit on the wall. (This took a lot longer to work out than I’m making it sound — not helped by the fact that all of the wires coming in from the rest of the house seemed to be brown! I watched a huge number of YouTube videos on “how to wire a central heating system UK” in an effort to understand it.)
Then, it was just a case of closing the relays on the wall and breaking the circuit inside the airing cupboard with my relay, powering both the actuators at the same time. I also decided to add a plug socket to the cupboard while I was there to give the Pi some power, enabling me to give my router a new out-of-the-way home (my wife is extremely pleased as she hates wires) — the signal has barely suffered from it’s being inside a cupboard which is surprising!
In the process of re-routing the router. Relay can be seen hanging from the wall, and Pi in black box.
Essentially, there was one circuit leading away from the actuators towards the pump that was to be left alone, and two circuits going to the programmers on the walls, upstairs and downstairs. As I said, I closed one relay and used that circuit for the plug socket extender you see there. I’ll make a more permanent solution at some point. For now this is fine.
The Front End (GUI)
I actually built out the front-end routes and templates in the early stages since it went hand in hand with testing the system. (I also had to wait several days for the temperature module, so had a half-baked version that was purely timer based that I wanted to start using.) Again, the Flask app is pretty simple. I just needed routes/views for ‘/’ ‘/on’ ‘/off’ ‘/advance’ and ‘/settings’ . I also played with adding a music feature, but I won’t go into it here. I have left in my rudimentary authentication system, which relies on a simple codeword stored in plain text. I could encode this fairly easily, but again, I’ll leave that for now. It’s another long piece of code, but there are some nice images of the UI and the ‘finished’ product at the end. (I won’t bore you with the html and custom css, but will make a public repository at some point on my Github)
I wonder if in the responses anyone can find the obvious security flaw that I’ve left in?!
Again there are various extra things, like the fetch_temp() view/api, which was included purely for styling purposes. The view responds to an asynchronous request from a javascript function to allow updating the temperature display in real time and changing its colour to red when the relay is switched on:
The temperature module (a slightly different version to the one pictured above, without the two extra pins.)
Salvaged cables replaced with colour coded jumper cables.
Discretely place behing the TV, although this later turned out to be too cool an area to be effective.
So, that’s pretty much it. There’s plenty to keep tinkering with and smartening up, and I look forward to it! The whole thing’s cost me about £30 (quid) give or take so far, but I’m sure I’ll sink a bit more into it with said tinkering! (I also already had the Pi 3B.) Thanks for reading, and I hope I’ve shown you, as I’ve shown myself, that all this stuff really isn’t that hard. | https://python.plainenglish.io/building-a-smart-central-heating-system-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-python-403c6ea0fd7e | ['Michael Jarvis'] | 2021-04-26 16:23:17.614000+00:00 | ['Home Automation', 'Raspberry Pi', 'Flask', 'Smart Home', 'Python'] |
Making your own Menorah is no longer a Pipe Dream! | With the Jewish Diwali aka Hanukkah well nigh upon us, I was looking to provide my 7 year old son Uriel with a maker angle on the central artifact of the holiday, the Menorah. The Maccabees had hastily hacked together their Menorah by using hollow iron spearheads and I also wanted to capture this improvisational aspect of making the Menorah. Inspired by Joe Grand’s Pipe Menorah we set off to the nearest hardware store to make one of our own. The guys at the store were kind enough to let us putter around gathering the parts we needed and try them out together.
Very quickly, we had used 1/2 inch steel pipes and connectors to make a Menorah that was able to stand up without tipping over by it’s own weight (we had to replace the round base we used initially as it was too unstable). We then assembled a tripod base which proved to be quite solid. Interestingly, the base for the original Menorah in the Jerusalem temple might have also been a tripod.
Brass connectors for the candletops and cheap Chinese toy finger LEDs as the “candles” completed the build. Uriel was so proud of his handiwork!
At home I took everything apart and let Uriel build up the pipe Menorah again by himself while oiling and tightening up the parts.
We then had an evening photo shoot with Uriel’s sister Rachela who proved herself quite the DJ!
Have fun making your own version — this craziness is sure to make your local hardware store VERY happy☺
Wishing you a happy festival of lights! | https://medium.com/learning-for-life/making-your-own-menorah-is-no-longer-a-pipe-dream-ad8cda89a0fe | ['Avi Solomon'] | 2017-12-12 20:19:11.274000+00:00 | ['Fun', 'DIY', 'Hanukkah', 'Judaism'] |
What is Content Writing? | What is Content Writing?
Content Writing comes with different things. Now days many companies use content writing in marketing, creating different articles, blogs for promoting their business. Content writing is a way to express your thoughts about anything. Here I will give my consumers unique content especially related to technical stuff. There are many companies who wants to engage their products on digital platforms. There are many internet services which are also part of content writing. Many tech companies who provide online services apart from content writing, provides many other services like website development, SEO, Security Services, ecommerce and other marketing services.
I will provide some unique content with detailed information. I will write technical articles related to any tutorials, online service articles which can help in increasing business or grabbing more consumers.
How Content Writing can grab more traffic to any website?
SEO is very basic requirement for any website to increase more traffic. SEO uses very common methodology for grabbing traffic. SEO uses most relevant keywords in their website. Same way content writing uses most searched keywords on the internet. If any person will try to search down any query, that particular website will come in search results. With content writing, it is important to express your thoughts with images, infographics and video-related content which helps to gather more audience.
There are many things can be added in article to express your thoughts. Gif or small videos to tell about the product are also used. Connect with me and give me a chance to showcase my skills. | https://medium.com/@add-rbansal/what-is-content-writing-4fcbf3774df3 | ['Raghav Bansal'] | 2020-12-10 18:31:27.509000+00:00 | ['Content Developers', 'Content Development', 'Content Development Pros', 'Content Creation', 'Content Writing'] |
99.99% | Our goal at Synapse is to provide a highly scalable infrastructure layer to our customers.
To ensure we have strong business incentives to deliver on these goals, we have added some interesting non-standard provisions in our legal agreements over time. They are:
90 day money back guarantee
Up until 90 days after you sign the agreement, you can terminate at any time for any or no reason. We will refund to you the SaaS fees paid. No questions asked.
No suck clause
You can terminate the agreement at any time if you are not satisfied with our services. We ask for a 15-day period to improve ourselves based on your feedback before termination.
Support and uptime SLAs on all products
We provide SLAs to you with no cap on credits that you may receive each quarter. | https://medium.com/synapsefi/99-99-bd2a5d311465 | ['Sankaet Pathak'] | 2019-07-16 04:08:20.644000+00:00 | ['Banking', 'API', 'Financial Services', 'Payments'] |
Advocacy and Action | Written by Emily Atkinson.
Marie-Anne Michel, has been in Galway for 18 years working for various charities and more recently for Cope Galway. Marie-Ann has most recently been appointed Trocaire’s volunteer and outreach officer for the West.
Trocaire is 45 years old and has centres in, Dublin, Cork, Derry and Belfast but this is the first time they have an employee in Galway. Trocaire also has a new woman CEO, Caoimhe De Barra so it’s an exciting time for Trocaire.
There are many things people can do to make a difference says Marie-Ann, “Getting informed and taking action on our campaigns. So at the moment, we have a business and human rights campaign, and we are asking people to sign petitions online. Sharing things on social media as well, sharing global issues with their friends, for student’s it’s very easy, they can do everything online if they want to. Just letting as many people know what’s going. Advocacy is very important. We did a lot with our Climate Change campaign, we worked with pushing the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill and we were successful, on the 12th of July this was signed in. But this was a result of years of advocacy, people pushing their local TD’s to push the Bill. We are now trying to push for the Occupied Territories Bill, and we are pushing our local TDs again. So students could send emails, make phone calls, send letters, getting in contact with politician’s telling them that they want them to vote yes for the Bill.”
Volunteers can help in a number of ways, “We are looking for volunteers to do what it is they are interesting in themselves. They could be helping with the school outreach programmes, they could help with our online campaigns, being active and organising events, maybe NUIG volunteers could so a film screening or discussion and try and push the agenda of a certain campaign. We also have events as well that we need help with. There’s loads that can be done! We are trying to keep the momentum in Galway, so if anyone has any ideas that they would like to do they are welcome to contact me.” Trocaire is currently recruiting volunteers, and there will be an induction in November, “We are hoping that volunteers would like to commit long-term and because we have the different centres around Ireland, they can link up with different centres if they move away from Galway. It can be as much time as they want it to be.”
Marie-Anne has a strong sense of justice which pushed her to start working for charities. On her new role, she says “Volunteer and outreach is everything I love doing. Trocaire is such a great organisation as well, and I feel very strongly about development and about what’s going on in the world. I love the idea of being a voice for an organisation, and doing my bit of work within Ireland that’s going to have a huge impact on people’s lives overseas.”
The role of volunteer and outreach officer involves recruiting volunteers, “We’re focusing on Galway for now, and then all the West of Ireland. We want to recruit volunteers to raise awareness on global issues and the impact that your actions may have, even in Ireland on the rest of the world. So it’s all about raising awareness in the community and letting everyone know what’s going on in the world, and to encourage people to become more active citizens, to know what’s going on and to know that they have a voice. A lot of the work would involve schools, to let children know about the world and how lucky they are they are living in Ireland, and that things are not the same everywhere in the world.”
The highlights of Marie-Anne’s work has been meeting with young people, “I was recently at the Ploughing Championships and I loved the interaction with the young children and was amazed at how some of them are so aware. They really know what’s going on in the world and they really understand it.”
Trocaire is known for their humanitarian work but hey also do a lot of work on women’s empowerment, “In Somalia there’s a big problem with malnutrition in young children, so there’s a lot of work being done to help these children like building hospitals to give them proper care and start making them feel better. In Sierra Leone, Trocaire has helped women in political campaigns, to try and win elections so they can become the chief of their communities. There’s a lot of work being done to empower women and give them a voice.”
For information on becoming a Trocaire volunteer, and to find out about volunteer opportunities with Trócaire in the west of Ireland, please call Marie-Anne on 091 781 231 or email [email protected] or visit www.trocaire.org/volunteer or email [email protected]. | https://medium.com/the-galway-eye/advocacy-and-action-2a81c87aec9b | ['Emmy Atkinson'] | 2018-10-29 18:23:58.265000+00:00 | ['Action', 'Volunteering', 'Empowerment', 'Advocacy', 'Climate Change'] |
On Reading | On Reading
Young Man Reading, by Octavian Smigelschi (1892)
When I start reading something, I look for its second line first.
That is important to me. The first line is always evocative. It helps you enter the story, but the thing is- you always read the first line. If you don’t, you can’t say that you even tried your eyes at the story. The second line, though, is more important. As for the question, “Did you read the second line?” If you were able to read it, and move onto the third, it means that the story might keep you with it for long. But that’s not enough. And that’s where the second step of reading comes.
I read the first two lines again. Often aloud, with my tongue and lips, and most importantly my head- the image it creates. And if I feel like continuing, I read the first para on the trot; expecting to miss something, except for a gist, about what the story is about.
And that does the deal. Often.
If I feel like jumping to the second para, I will read the first para again, and often finish the whole story, even though I may not like it in the end.
If I like it in the end, I will encore. And congratulate myself for being worthy of the story. | https://medium.com/literary-impulse/on-reading-34467b1a4a64 | ['Literary Impulse', 'Shabd Aaweg'] | 2020-11-24 22:57:29.019000+00:00 | ['Literary Impulse', 'Editions Li', 'Writing Tips', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'Reading'] |
AccessViolation in ObjectNative::IsLockHeld (part 1 of 2) | Symptoms
To monitor the stability of the Datadog .NET tracer, we have a reliability environment where we continuously run mainstream applications such as Orchard. This story starts when, while preparing a release, we discovered that the latest version of our tracer was crashing the app with the message:
Application: w3wp.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an internal error in the .NET Runtime at IP 00007FFB62CB0A8D (00007FFB625B0000) with exit code 80131506.
A look at the reliability monitor showed that the app was crashing once or twice per day:
Not something you like to see before a release
Unfortunately I couldn’t tell much from the error message. You can’t normally cause this kind of crash from managed code (unless of course you use unsafe ), so I scanned the changes we made to our native libraries and found nothing suspicious. As there wasn’t anything more I could do, I configured the server to capture a memory dump at next crash, and waited.
Thankfully the app crashed again during the night, and I could start my analysis in the morning.
Into the crash dump
Just by opening the dump, WinDbg gives a bit more information about the error:
This dump file has an exception of interest stored in it.
The stored exception information can be accessed via .ecxr.
(13c0.16f0): Access violation - code c0000005 (first/second chance not available)
For analysis of this file, run !analyze -v
clr!ObjectNative::IsLockHeld+0x4d:
00007ffb`62cb0a8d 8b592c mov ebx,dword ptr [rcx+2Ch] ds:00000000`0000002b=????????
The error tells us two thing: the issue occured in clr!ObjectNative::IsLockHeld , and we tried to read the memory at address 0x2B . 0x2B is clearly not a valid address, and it looks like an “actual” value rather than something random. I tried running !clrstack to get the managed stacktrace, but the command was not working. At this point I started suspecting that something overwrote values on the stack, causing the crash.
Getting the native stacktrace worked, but it only gave me addresses for the managed frames:
Fortunately, I could resolve them with the ip2md command:
By checking the Orchard source code, we can confirm that OutputCacheFilter.Dispose indeed calls Monitor.IsEntered :
It sounds reasonable to assume that Monitor.IsEntered is going to call ObjectNative::IsLockHeld , but just for the sake of it we can confirm it.
First, the source code of the BCL on .NET Framework shows that Monitor.IsEntered calls Monitor.IsEnteredNative , which is implemented in the CLR. Unfortunately we don’t have the code of the .NET Framework CLR, but the .NET Core one is usually close enough. And indeed, we can see that Monitor.IsEnteredNative is mapped to ObjectNative::IsLockHeld , as expected:
Looking further at the Orchard code, I could see that the OutputCacheFilter is locking on an interned string. That’s a dangerous pattern, but not necessarily wrong. I suppose they did that as a cheap way of ensuring all instances share the same locks.
Where to look next? I wanted to check the instance of string that was given to Monitor.IsEntered , to see if there was anything suspicious about it, but I couldn’t find it on the stack. So I focused instead on the native code.
The error occurred when executing the instruction mov ebx,dword ptr [rcx+2Ch] , meaning: “read the memory at the address rcx+0x2C , and store it in ebx ”. I used the WinDbg Registers window to check the value of the registers at the time of the error:
The value of rcx was 0xffffffffffffffff (that is, -1). This explained where the 0x2B came from: rcx + 2C = -1 + 2C = 2B . 2C was probably the offset of a field in an object, so it looked like the address of that object was wrong.
I then decided to check where the value in rcx came from. The disassembly window of WinDbg shows the assembly code near the exception:
rcx was written for the last time by the instruction mov rcx, qword ptr [rdx+8] , with rdx having a value of 0x0000029704f50208 . It looked like an address, so I tried to figure out what kind. The value of the stack pointer register, rsp , was 0x000000d967bfdca0 , so definitely not a stack address. The managed heap maybe? The command !eeheap -gc gives the range of all the GC segments, and allowed me to confirm that 0x0000029704f50208 was not on the managed heap either.
At this point, I decided to take a step back. IsLockHeld takes only one parameter: the object used for locking. Therefore, I could think of only 3 possibilities to explain the error:
The address of the parameter was wrong
The sync table was corrupted
The header of the object (with the index to the sync table) was corrupted
Wait, what “sync table”? Let’s introduce the concept for those who are not familiar with it.
The sync table
Whenever you lock on an object, either by using lock (obj) or Monitor.Enter(obj) , the CLR has to keep track of what thread owns the lock in a specific data structure. As much as possible, the CLR tries to stores that information in the object header. Since the header is next to the object itself, it’s almost guaranteed to be present in the CPU cache, which makes the lock really fast. This kind of lock is called a thin lock.
Unfortunately, the object header is only 4 bytes long, so the amount of data it can store is very limited. It’s going to run out of room in two situations:
When the lock is contended (e.g. if multiple threads are trying to acquire it at the same time). In this case, the runtime needs to store the list of threads waiting on the lock, to wake them up when it is released.
When GetHashcode is called on the object.
Let’s elaborate a bit on that last point. Have you ever wondered what happens when you call GetHashCode on an object? The runtime needs to generate a hashcode that satisfies at least two properties:
The probability of another object having the same hashcode must be low
The hashcode of a given object must not change over time
At first I thought using the address of the object would be an elegant solution, but it doesn’t work because the address of an object can actually change (during a garbage collection). So instead the runtime just generates a random value, but since the value needs to be stable it has to be stored somewhere. And that “somewhere” is the object header.
There isn’t enough room in the object header to store both the thin lock and the hashcode. So when the header runs out of room, the information is moved to a structure named a sync block. The address of all the sync blocks is stored in a table, named the sync block table, or sync table. And the index of the sync block in the table is stored in the object header.
You can find a more detailed explanation and an estimation of the performance overhead of a sync block versus a thin lock in this excellent article.
Back to the memory dump
Now that everybody knows what the sync table is, let’s remind my 3 theories:
The address of the parameter was wrong
The sync table was corrupted
The header of the object (with the index to the sync table) was corrupted
In WinDbg, you can use the !syncblk command to dump all the sync blocks that contain a lock currently owned by a thread:
The Failed to request Thread at 0000029704768650 message is very suspicious. Could it be a sign of data corruption? I decided to have a look to the full sync table, using the command !syncblk -all :
It is very suspicious that the output would stop right after the Failed to request Thread error. I don’t know if it means that the table has 226 entries and there was coincidentally an error at the last one, or if the output stopped on the first error.
In any case, the address of the sync blocks, given in the second column, was very interesting. The last entry, 0x0000029703e38fa8 , was quite close to the value I found in the rcx register ( 0x0000029704f50208 ). The “corrupted sync block” theory seemed more and more plausible. But I checked the source code of IsLockHeld and it was only reading memory, not writing anything.
Since the code of the .NET Framework CLR is not available, a good approximation is to look at the very first commit of the dotnet/coreclr repository, before the code diverged too much.
So if some value in the sync block was corrupted, it meant this happened before the IsLockedHeld method was called.
To get further, I needed to understand exactly what was corrupted. In other words, what was the code trying to read when it got the 0xffffffffffffffff value?
Mapping the assembly code to the original C++ was going to take a lot of effort, so I decided to first wait for another occurrence of the crash to confirm that the symptoms were identical. Fortunately, a fresh new crash dump was waiting for me on the server. This will be the subject of the next part! | https://kevingosse.medium.com/accessviolation-in-objectnative-islockheld-part-1-of-2-7fae4b839f9a | ['Kevin Gosse'] | 2020-11-10 13:12:30.543000+00:00 | ['Dotnet', 'Debugging', 'Csharp', 'Software Development', 'Programming'] |
WebGoat Admin password reset Challenge | WebGoat Admin password reset Challenge
This challenge is basically a “suggestion” to make use of source code, when available, to get as much information as possible
First of all send yourself a mail on WebWolf to get the reset link structure, put <username>@<anydomain> and press “Reset Password”
Reset password mail
Check the mail in WebWolf, the reset link is in the mail and it looks like this
/WebGoat/challenge/7/reset-password/<HASH_VALUE>
We have to find the correct <HASH_VALUE> to reset the admin password
You can either
search for WebGoat GitHub
use java decompiler GUI — http://java-decompiler.github.io/ — to check the souce of your webgoat.jar file in your webgoat server install
go to /WebGoat/challenge/7/.git unzip and check the objects in the downloaded git repository
Eventually you will come to check the source code of WebGoat/webgoat-lessons/challenge/src/main/java/org/owasp/webgoat/challenges/SolutionConstants.java or SolutionConstants.class
https://github.com/WebGoat/WebGoat/tree/develop/webgoat-lessons/challenge/src/main/java/org/owasp/webgoat/challenges
Inside you will find the ADMIN_PASSWORD_LINK static value used in WebGoat/webgoat-lessons/challenge/src/main/java/org/owasp/webgoat/challenges/challenge7/Assignment7.java or Assignment7.class
https://github.com/WebGoat/WebGoat/tree/develop/webgoat-lessons/challenge/src/main/java/org/owasp/webgoat/challenges/challenge7
That is the hash we were looking for
Then browse to /WebGoat/challenge/7/reset-password/<ADMIN_PASSWORD_LINK> and you will be given the flag
This concludes WebGoat Admin password reset Challenge
I hope you liked it.
PVXs — https://twitter.com/pivixih | https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/webgoat-admin-password-reset-challenge-36a26dd598ca | [] | 2020-11-17 19:02:20.883000+00:00 | ['Infosec', 'Challenge', 'Ctf Writeup', 'Webgoat', 'Solutions'] |
From AIPAC’s La-la Land to the Bitter Reality in the Holy Land | From AIPAC’s La-la Land to the Bitter Reality in the Holy Land
Gaza children in Beit Lahiya (2015)
Bookshelves are overflowing with books on Palestine and Israel. One might imagine that there are no new angles to write about. However, this man-made historic tragedy is not only historic but continues to this day, thus, books are not going to stop being written anytime soon. This is a godsend, as this book’s author will confirm, for it was his reading of a few books from the other side that was the start of his wake-up call of a lifetime.
Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity
By Richard Forer
Mindstir Media, 2020, 312 pp., paperback $14.99 and digital edition $4.99
($2.99 on Amazon until November 15)
During the past few years, author Richard Forer is the second person who has come my way who is Jewish American, a former member or employee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and educated themselves on the Palestine and Israel that their upbringing consciously hid from them. Both also happen to write and are in a hurry to share with the world their learning journey, not to mention to speak out in the boldest way possible to make the case that they, as Jews, will not allow continuing Israeli war crimes to be done in their names. These two friends of mine are not alone. During these dark days, they provide light at the end of the tunnel, for when the Jewish community around the world wakes up I can see reality on the ground finally changing for the better.
When Richard reached out to ask if I would be willing to read his manuscript and consider writing an endorsement for his new book, I did not hesitate. Since being in touch online with Richard since 2013, I was aware of his profile and his previous book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion — A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. I viewed him as someone thoughtful. Equally exciting to me was my constant desire to understand the journey that members of the Jewish community take to adjust the colossal disservice their community and educational institutions instill in them, the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians.
My endorsement of the book reflects my immediate reaction. It read:
“Wow. Wow. Wow. This is powerful. A brave and bold eleventh-hour clarion call for the world to wake up before it is too late. For those who are blindly loving Israel to death, this meticulously documented journey of enlightenment is meant to open minds and hearts. Invoking words from the horses’ mouths and recounting his visits to the region, the most feebleminded will be shocked; older Palestinian readers will relive open wounds from the past and present; the younger ones will have a new appreciation for how much we have endured. This book rings the bell of our universal humanity if only we are willing to hear it. A word of advice before you start reading, you will not want to put this down.”
Author Richard Forer
Author Richard Forer grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Trenton, NJ, where he attended reform synagogue. His identical twin brother has been a prominent member of an Orthodox Hasidic sect since the early 1970s. Another brother is a former president of one of the largest Reform Synagogues on the East Coast. Other Orthodox members of his family live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Forer is a past member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In 1996, he was certified as a practitioner of the Meir Schneider Self-Healing Method, a unique system of touch, kinesthetic awareness, and mental imagery developed by an Israeli.
The first lines of the book’s preface caught my attention and had me reading through it in one sitting. Richard writes,
“Have you ever noticed how right most of us think we are even when we are wrong? I never thought this phenomenon applied to me until one day in 2006 when what I had taken for the truth of Israel-Palestine was exposed as fiction and what I had taken for fiction exposed as truth. Over many years I had maneuvered myself into this position by rejecting evidence that didn’t conform to my worldview and clinging to evidence that did. Although I didn’t know it, personal prejudice was the instrument that drove my judgments. I had believed only what I wanted to believe.”
With short, razor-focused chapters that are well-researched and extensively footnoted (766 footnotes to be exact), Richard chips away at his journey of being re-educated as an adult on Palestine-Israel. The book intertwines the author’s personal story, with news stories of the time, along with a dose of the history of the issues being discussed, all to shed the light that showed him the truth. This is all done without judging the reader because, not being judged by a critical friend, was the exact way he found his way to the truth.
The book comprises of twenty-nine chapters, all with intriguing titles, such as Willful Blindness is a Crime Against Humanity; We Are All Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims, Christians and Jews; A Mitzvah to Kill; “True” Friends of Israel; The Religion of Zionism; Ego Before God; and Is Dialogue Between the Israeli and Palestinian Sides Effective?, among others.
Each chapter starts with a quote or two, which tell a story in themselves. For example, chapter 28 starts with the quote, “First use force, and if force doesn’t work, use more force. — Popular Israeli Saying.” As someone living on the receiving end of that force in Occupied Palestine, I had to pause at this and wonder how many more personal learning journeys are needed in Israel, so this no longer remains a “Popular Israeli Saying.”
If this topic interests you, read this book for insight. If you are Jewish American, read this book as if the future of your Jewish values depends on it. And if you are Jewish Israeli, read this book as if your future and that of your children depend on it, because they do. | https://medium.com/@sbahour/from-aipacs-la-la-land-to-the-bitter-reality-in-the-holy-land-63b591982518 | ['Sam Bahour'] | 2020-09-23 19:18:46.398000+00:00 | ['World', 'Israel', 'Jewish', 'Palestine', 'Book Review'] |
Covid Catalyst | Covid Catalyst
Saturday, 1/16/20
Having more time to sit around and think, last month I was observing the news about covid and listening to the warnings and pleas for assistance from the Doctors and Nurses at the hospitals around the world.
After days of analyzing, and coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to build make-shift hospitals in every city, town, county for infected patients only. Quarantine the virus to an entirely new system with no crossing over, thereby freeing the hospitals for regular emergencies and reducing the risk for spreading the disease.
Sitting for days, and wondering why this is not being done as it seems like a perfect solution and a radical way to stop spreading, as well, freeing the hospital for incoming patients who are not infected. At least designating empty hospitals for the sole purpose of treating Covid patients would make more sense than chaos which leads to a patient with a broken arm contracting a deadly disease at the ER then spreading it to more people.
This morning in the news, I read that China has built a 1,500.00-bed facility for coronavirus patients that will eventually house 6,500.00 beds. The first of six, five more they intend to build. With 500 a day passing in CA alone, expecting to climb even higher, I hope the US will soon follow suit behind China and begin to isolate the virus.
Imagining, there will be more surges in cases for many months to come, something should be done soon. Knowing it has only been slightly over one year since the spread began and if you calculate the numbers, more than 2 million people have passed and if you add the strange cases of deaths with unknown lung /brain bleeds in the last year it comes to 1% of the population of the United States, taking into consideration that the virus will accelerate with every year, I would imagine in 10 years, there may be 1% of the population left if nothing is done to stop it now.
All traveling out of the country and into the country should be temporarily stopped until the virus is irradiated. There should be no allowance of traveling at all and I think deep down we all know this is true. Someone we know will die from this virus. I personally know five people who have contracted the virus in the last year. They are recovered but are not the same.
Normally we would suggest that it will take a high-ranking individual to lose a loved one before major changes would be taken but we can clearly see, that is not the case, since high-ranking individuals have died and lost loved ones to the virus. What will it take? Ten years from now, I do not really wish to be one of 1% left on earth, that is for certain at the same time, I do not wish to die in vain.
I imagine if every single out-of-work individual volunteered to build hospitals, it could be accomplished, likely not as fast as China (5 days), but we could get it done. The truth is, China has infected dairy products, which leads me to believe, perhaps the virus has spread to livestock much like foot and mouth disease, if this is true, it will be with us indefinitely.
If I were a believer in conspiracists ideas, which I think we all tend to let our minds wander to places they should not, then I would assume, this virus was an attack created in a lab, introduced through the garment district by radical Vegan leaders in the fashion industry and movie industry in an attempt to sell more Vegan products, furniture, clothing, food which was recently introduced to the market, coincidentally, the same time the virus was introduced. With this in mind, let us do calculate the cost of cheap non-leather furniture, clothing, and shoes polluting the planet in the last 12 years…too much to count. Drive down any street USA-there is a cheap faux leather couch waiting for you to repair and usually, it is not worth the time, the best you can do with it, is take a photo of the cheap frame, go home and build your own frame and cover it with whatever you want to cover it with.
Perhaps, they just want to kill anyone who will not convert to a Vegan lifestyle, in an attempt to save the planet and animals from dumb cannibal humans. Radical vegans see themselves as equals to animals and everyone who does not conform to their way of life is BENEATH a cockroach….they envision a Utopian Paradise where no animals or bugs or reptiles are killed, not ever, not even for food or clothing or furniture.
They are forcing the Globe to adapt to a VEGAN diet or die.
I could take it a step even further to suggest there may have been others working behind the scenes, to further the distribution, the way the entire thing was orchestrated and plays out, much like a producer would execute a movie production from beginning to end. The perfect crime that made a lot of people rich and a lot of people poor. I would not put it past the radical vegans, as I have worked with a few who believe it is better to not kill a cockroach and better to kill a human who does kill cockroaches.
That really brings things into perspective to show you what type of psychopaths, we are really dealing with if this were the scenario. To think there are powerful people who would rather protect a cockroach and kill your lovely daughter, who stepped on a cockroach. When you see inside the psychotic mind of a radical vegan, the conspiracy does not seem so far fetched, does it? The cockroach, the most useless, the oldest bug on the planet, spreading more disease than any other bug other than the mosquito.
So if they want to be surrounded by cockroaches instead of humans, the 1% of the population, in the US who are radical vegans, can be relocated to an island where they can have their paradise and the rest of us can get back to stepping on cockroaches without guilt. I wonder how long it would be before the animals and bugs they refuse to kill, devour them all? Less than 10 years.
Assuming the conspiracy is not a conspiracy one would need to prove it to not be a conspiracy but rather a fact. The only way to prove this would be to hire a professional confession extractor. We do have plenty of them in the world, but which one will forgive and look away and which one will hold them accountable for the largest mass murder on earth? The executioner in the hypostasis of this mystery is nanoscopic and the results of that execution were magnificently catastrophic. | https://medium.com/@rettewdawn/covid-catalyst-d44fc556a0af | ['Dawn Rettew'] | 2021-01-16 16:55:41.561000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'Coronavirus'] |
How to build a Computer Vision Game in Python? | I grew up in the (19)90’s. Before the internet, smartphones, next generation game consoles. Hell, before augmented and virtual reality. I Know, I’m old… At least I got to experience the physical world. Snap! (No, we didn’t have Snapchat either…). We would just communicate an approximate location, time for re-entrance and we were ready for takeoff.
That was fun. But you know what else was fun? A Master System II.
Brief history of gaming consoles
A long, long, looooong time ago, gaming consoles looked like this:
Games were cartridges that you had to insert in the console. Well… Not all of them. One game came pre-installed (thank G.od they didn’t open an inquiry for abuse of dominant position). A game that captured hours of my life.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
This game was a master piece. Indeed a true miracle world. You were playing a small character, Alex, on a mission to defeat an illegitimate tyrant (plot). No impeachment, just tons of different levels.
What was particularly amazing in this game, was the diversity of its gameplay. You were jumping around breaking bricks, collecting money, swimming under water trying to avoid the fish and octopus’ tentacles. Why not taking a boat? Well you could buy one. Or a helicopter, a motorbike, a flying cape… Instagram life before Instragram!
Let’s play Rock Paper Scissors…
Alex Kidd was afraid of nothing. Except rock, paper and scissors…
At the end of almost every level, you had to play a game of Rock Paper Scissors. I have never played more intense games of RPS than in Alex Kidd. But that was before.
… on live video…
Technology is amazing. While I reminisce hours of games played on a TV that weighted probably more than me, “nowadays kids” are playing in virtual worlds, without cables. Let’s meet in the middle.
The program I created uses computer vision and deep learning to play a game of rock paper scissors on a live video stream (in this case from a webcam). Sounds impressive… It’s not. In fact, it is really simple!
… using OpenCV and Python
OpenCV is a very complete computer vision library that pretty much lets you do everything you need. Plenty of tutorials are available online to get you started (I can recommend some if needed — hit me up in the comments). That’s what I used to capture and process the images. I used Tensorflow and Keras for the deep learning part.
The workflow
What do you need to play this game? A hand. And that’s it. The program simply needs to recognize the gesture from the hand, compare it against the opponent and output the result (win, loss, draw).
1 — Identifying the hand
You could come up with a hand tracking algorithm, but I like simplicity. So I created a region of interest which is where the user has to put its hand and do the gesture. It is less flexible and “idiot proof”, but it has the merit of simplifying the code.
We have narrowed down where the action is going to take place. But we still need to “capture the action” (meaning identify the hand). For that, there are several different approaches. The first one that I tried was to use a histogram of oriented gradients. If you don’t know what that is, no worries, this is not the approach I ended up with. I just wanted to brag a little.
I used a simple ‘‘background subtraction’’. If you subtract the background of an image you are left with the foreground. And this is what we want here: the hand is (supposed to be) the only thing moving in the region of interest.
2 — Recognizing the gesture
Once we have isolated the hand, we can start thinking of strategies to recognize what gesture it is making. I decided to use deep learning, because it is cool to use deep learning for everything and anything.
And it is also incredibly easy. Count with me: I recorded a few hundred images of each hand gesture (20 seconds), augmented that dataset (20 seconds) and trained the model (5 minutes). Deep learning in under 6 minutes!
NB: data augmentation consists of randomly modifying the images I created to create new ones, a little bit different (rotated by some angle, zoomed in or out by some percentage etc.). You can do that directly when training the model but I like to do it separately so 1/ I can visualize the modification that I’ve generated, 2/ keep track of the pictures (for reproduction) and 3/ memory space was not an issue here.
3 — Output the results
Once the program has recognized what gesture the person is doing, you just need to implement the rules (paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper). I hard-coded the logic because it is much simpler.
Because nobody wanted to play with me, I simulated an opponent. At the end, this is what you get.
Look at how much fun I’m having!!
How does it work?
Let’s break it down:
1 — The program takes the first image coming from the stream and consider it as the background (we hypothesize that only the hand will be moving in the region of interest);
2 — Then takes each frame and subtracts the background (this approach also works for diverse skin tone);
3 — Takes the result of 2/ and feeds it to the deep learning model in order to identify the gesture;
4 — Compares the gesture to the opponent’s according to the rules;
5 — Outputs the image and results information (win, draw, loss).
How can it be improved?
If that game doesn’t get me a job as a developer at Blizzard, I dont know what will! But if I wanted to spend more time and really improve it, I would:
1 — Use a hand tracking system to remove the need of a preset region of interest;
2 — Improve the deep learning model (design, but also the training data — including additional hand gestures);
3 — Improve the opponent (either by creating a reinforcement learning agent or by creating more logic like “if player played two X in a row, play Y” — the best strategy is to play randomly, but it is more exciting to build an opponent that seemingly has a strategy that you try to guess);
4 — Improve the graphics and effects of the play screen (count down for each new game, celebratory confetti when winning etc.);
5 — Other ideas you have!
Have fun!
If you made it until here, congratulations, you defeated all the bosses (Boredominus, NotFuninator and ObviousItIs). As a reward, you can find the code on my github. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, but the code is very simple so I’m sure you’ll be fine!
Ok, here’s your real reward: play Alex Kidd in Miracle World on PC for free.
See you on the other side! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-to-build-a-computer-vision-game-in-python-a6b064ce72be | ['Thomas Taieb'] | 2019-10-12 06:11:30.341000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Gaming', 'Deep Learning', 'Computer Vision'] |
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13 (Super) Easy and Fast Ways to Overcome Your Bad Mood | 1. Listen to the right music. I have, achingly, replaced ‘Cigarettes After Sex’ with Casey Neistat mixtape. Listen to positive, upbeat and energetic music.
2. Smell a pleasant scent. Lavender is the best. Spray it at the back of your hand and smell it for at least a minute.
3. Give some money to a homeless person or to a charity.
4. Do you have a role model? Picture her/him right in front of you. What is she/he saying to you?
5. Stare at the blue, brightly-lit sky, if it’s morning. Stare at the moon and stars, if it’s night. Stare for a few minutes. Breathe in the fresh air.
6. Move your eyes to see different things in the room. Focus on everything that your eyes see. Do this for a couple of minutes.
7. Watch the videos of babies or pets.
8. Smile and laugh. Laugh out loud. For no reason.
9. Clean your room and organize everything.
10. Dance. Jump around. Of course, when no one’s around!
11. Do you have a friend in your life who’s happy, positive, empathetic, and thoughtful? Call her/him and talk for a few minutes.
12. Make weird noises.
13. Go out of the house, or out of wherever you are, and walk. Just walk. | https://medium.com/@thatnameasif/overcome-bad-mood-31ff549f9906 | ['Asif Ali'] | 2019-05-20 17:16:55.703000+00:00 | ['Bad Mood', 'Sad', 'Happiness', 'Negativity', 'Optimism'] |
Two Sparrows on a Bamboo Branch* | Two Sparrows on a Bamboo Branch*
(Fa-ch’ang, 1181–1239 AD)
You see what Buddha is —
The branch does not bend
Under the weight of sleeping lovers.
*******************************
(This poem is dedicated to James Wright)
*The epigram is the name of the Chinese painter, and this poem is a ‘translation’ of this Chinese art; the title of the poem is the name of the painting.
I wrote a series of these poems, in 1968. They were among my first published works.
********************************
Thanks, ILLUMINATION for letting me pitch, via this short-form poem, my longest and best work!
Sheehan. An Epic Poem of Love and Loss | by Terry Trueman ILLUMINATION | Medium | https://medium.com/illumination/two-sparrows-on-a-bamboo-branch-8d78cdee2c0d | ['Terry Trueman'] | 2020-12-26 18:19:21.717000+00:00 | ['Sheehan', 'Love', 'Loss', 'Poetry', 'Art'] |
What if I said that you don’t exist, and there’s no way to really find out? | What if I said that you don’t exist, and there’s no way to really find out?
Since the inception, humanity has battled with the question of their absolute existence; is the answer finally here?
The Tree by Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salah (Source: artsy.net)
“Reality only exists in the human mind and nowhere else.” - George Orwell
Nineteen years and still one of the most epic scenes to be ever filmed in the history of Hollywood belongs to the era changing franchise — The Matrix, but that’s not the only thing that etched this movie in our memories. It was also responsible for popularising an idea that sparked a decade of debates on the topic of simulated reality. The idea that we might all just be living in an illusion, not metaphorically but literally, baffled a lot of people.
Neo’s fight against the matrix (Source: Wikipedia)
It’s hard to accept the fact that there is a considerable chance that we all might be just a figment of someone’s imagination or lines of code in a long-running simulation by beings that are incomprehensible to us. This puzzling concept of reality isn’t that new, to begin with. For millenniums, philosophers and religious thinkers of society have been dealing with similar ideas.
Before we head into the reason behind all the conflicting debates on the topic, we should see where this idea originates from. Many philosophical and religious texts deal with the existence of different versions of reality, which opened up the whole debate on this topic. One of the most prominent thoughts comes from the 3rd-century text, Zhuangzi, where Master Zhuang describes his dream known as “The Butterfly Dream.”
Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.
This story generated many arguments on the authenticity of this reality. Similar ideas can also be found in various texts, like the concept of Maya (Illusion) in Indian philosophy, which was used as the basis in many other religious scriptures. This also became the foundation stone for different religious sects which tried to understand reality with spirituality. This concept of illusion raises in us a deep question that is anything around us real?
The web of Maya (Source: Pinterest)
Keeping that idea in mind, many scholars put on their thinking caps and started describing the universe in mathematical equations, it started with Pythagoras. Now, if the whole universe can be defined in equations, what’s there to stop us from simulating them and creating a different reality, if all we require is a computer big enough to run those simulations? Maybe, Hitchhiker’s guide wasn’t lying, after all, Forty-two might still be the answer to the whole universe.
It would be too bold to assume that we haven’t even given it a shot. In fact, many basic programs were created to put the idea in perspective. One of the best examples was the game invented by John Conway, a British mathematician in 1970. The zero-player game — The Game of Life, was just basic cellular automation, not exactly a game that would be played for fun because the only role one would have is to set the initial parameters and then it would just run itself. It generates the patterns based on initial parameters, and while some of these die after few generations, some keep going on forever.
The game of life (Source: Wikipedia)
If with just a few variables we can create a never-ending simulation of different patterns of dots on the screen, imagine if we scale this up to the size of the universe and instead of dots we consider atoms. This would result in a simulated reality, but it should not be confused with virtual reality. For example, when you are playing ’Call of Duty’ or any other first player game, you are the character in that world, but you are aware of the fact that it isn’t real, the one you are living in is, but in a simulated reality, you can’t distinguish between these two. Even if we find any evidence of us being simulated, that evidence itself might be simulated. There should be some way on how to address this situation when we can’t even trust the thoughts that we think, to be real.
I mean, making simulations of what you’re going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you’ve gone wrong and what you can do about it.
- Christopher Alexander
Before we head on further, we have to understand that human consciousness isn’t something that is outside of physical laws, it’s due to the complex structure of the human brain and isn’t governed by some supernatural forces. Thus, it is possible to generate an artificial consciousness by stimulating the underlying laws and structure.
Simulated world (Source: Fandom)
The first philosopher to give a structure to the whole simulation argument was Nick Bostrom. In his paper published in 2003, he argued that at least one of his propositions is true. He dealt with three possibilities, first of which states that humans would be extinct before they reach the point where they would merge with technology initiating an era of post-human civilisation. The argument for this possibility is the improbability of human civilisation to pass through the Great Filters — Nuclear war, Climate change, Meteorite crash etc. The second possibility is a rather interesting one. It assumes that a post-human civilisation is more likely to be disinterested in running an ancestral simulation in the first place. The reason being ethical prohibition, legal bindings or the unlikelihood of post-human beings having human-like desires and ambitions. Refusion of both these possibilities leaves us with the third hypothesis.
This one says that we will reach a time when we will be able to create a simulated world having simulated beings with consciousness. Keeping in mind that fifty years ago we just had two dots playing on a desktop and now we have 3D games that millions of people play simultaneously, we can claim that with technological advancements we will reach a stage where we simulate different realities. If that is possible, there is a good reason to believe that the nature of our own reality itself is hierarchical. This establishes the postulate even further that we ourselves are residing in a simulated reality at this very instance. If a simulated universe is not terminated at the post-human stage where they don’t have the ability to simulate further then it creates a nested reality and it continues up to an infinite number of realities, which also forms the basis of multiverse theory. The base reality would be an absurd concept in that case.
There is no chance that we humans can ever know with full certainty that are we in simulation or not (Heisenberg was right about many things), but it’s in human nature to try. Elon Musk and many other people in Silicon Valley are trying their best to find some glitches in our reality, which might prove that there exist other beings that are running us on their computer screens.
But, in 2017, two physicists, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi put these ideas to rest to some extent. While working on Quantum Monte Carlo technique, which uses random sampling of the many-body quantum problems by simulating them, they found that the complexity of simulation increases exponentially with the increase in the number of particles, instead of linearly. Thus, they found out that storing the memory of a few couple hundred electrons would require computing power that physically would require more atoms than the whole number of atoms in our entire universe. | https://medium.com/pragyan-blog/what-if-i-said-that-you-didnt-exist-and-there-s-no-way-to-really-find-out-48f223851cf | [] | 2020-03-06 17:29:07.391000+00:00 | ['Simulation Hypothesis', 'Philosophy', 'Science', 'Info', 'Simulation Theory'] |
An Easy Way To Warm Hearts, Open Minds, and Create Connection | An Easy Way To Warm Hearts, Open Minds, and Create Connection
Learn a new one of these to open up new worlds
Photo by author
The elderly Malay lady was quickly packing up the sweet kuihs (desserty-steamed cakes) packet that I wanted to purchase. She wasn’t saying much as I pointed at different items that I wanted.
I pointed towards the kuih lapis, a delicious layered and rainbow-colored steamed dessert. “This one please.” And I’ll have one of these, I pointed and said, “that please”.
The woman vendor was busily picking up the desserts and was packing them up for me. In a moment of realization, I then switched to Malay and asked her in Malay, “how much for all these sweets?”
And within an instant, she flashed a big smile, told me the price, and looked immediately more relaxed. I had simply been in my own world speaking English without realizing that she didn’t speak a word of English.
In these rural parts of Malaysia, most folks speak Malay and are more comfortable in Malay. Simply switching languages immediately created a bond and connection with this food vendor I was buying from.
It’s why I’ve been practicing and re-learning my Malay ever since I got to Malaysia earlier this year. | https://medium.com/be-unique/an-easy-way-to-warm-hearts-open-minds-and-create-connection-acd5a2d6466b | ['Vishnu S Virtues'] | 2020-12-06 03:48:46.338000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Lifestyle', 'Culture', 'Tradition', 'Language'] |
The Brain killers | Our brains use over 20% of the body’s energy but makes up only 2.5% of the body weight. We lose 10,000 neurons (brain cells) everyday. Our diet and lifestyle are key factors in how it recovers or degenerates.
What will decrease your mental performance and brain health the most?
I love reading about how we can improve our brains but it’s important to know what will actually make it worse.
As Charlie Munger says: ‘Always invert’. To focus on what you should do, it is vital to know what you SHOULDN’T do.
Here are 6 ‘brain killers’ to avoid, in order of the most important first.
1. < 6 hours sleep a night
No matter what you do or eat there is very little that can overcome the effects of sleep deprivation. So called ‘Smart drugs’, like modafinil, are dangerously papering over the cracks
Sleep deprivation can impair attention and working memory. It also affects decision-making and ironically judgement, so you lose the ability to tell if you are getting the sleep you need (1)
It reduces your emotional processing, so you are less likely to empathise and can develop a short temper (2)
Recent research shows lack of sleep may increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers. Sleep helps to clear beta amyloid, a protein that builds up during the progression of Alzheimers (3)
Adriana Huffington, of the Huffington Post, has been much more productive since getting more sleep. She has written about our increased arrogance about how little sleep we need is destroying our health AND performance (4)
Tiny habit
Set a ‘go to bed’ alarm to get in a routine
Read more here
2. Low Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12 is vital for brain health and can be found in many animal products eg. meat/eggs. Vegans and vegetarians may need to supplement this.
Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause fatigue, memory impairment, irritability, and depression.
Recent evidence has shown that deficinecy can lead to brain shrinkage (atrophy) as it does not rebuild from neuron loss (6)
If looking for B12 supplements find those with methylcobalamin, not cyanocobalamin. It is more expensive but has a better absorption profile and has better retention in tissues than cyanocobalamin
Tiny habit
Look at your diet, are you getting enough vitamin B12?
3. Excess sugar
Impairs cognitive function and can cause memory defects (7)
Will decrease the amount of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor when consumed with high fat. BDNF is essential for growing new neurons in the brain (9). So avoid those doughnuts they are high in fat, sugar plus are part of #4 below
Tiny habit
Change fizzy sugary drinks for water
4. Deep fried & processed foods
Many packaged foods contain transfats. A recent study shows that they cause a significant reduction in working memory and recall (9)
Deep fried foods also put you at greater risk of congitive decline (10)
5. Alcohol
Drinking 3 alcoholic drinks a day, for men, leads to fast decline in all cognitive areas, especially memory.
However, in women the results are less clear, and in some instances abstinence lead to faster cognitive decline in this study (11)
Tiny habit
Keep alcohol for non work days to improve productivity
6. Use it or lose it
Like a muscle, if you do not use your brain it will deteriorate. Don’t just eat smarter, think smarter.
As Warren Buffet once said ‘ The more you learn, the more you earn’. I like the sound of that!
Tiny habit | https://medium.com/gourmet-focus/the-brain-killers-c93aab097a03 | ['Dr Owen Bain'] | 2018-02-27 09:10:02.940000+00:00 | ['Brain Killer'] |
Founders, determine COVID impact granularly and adapt! | There’s a lot being said and written about the impact of the current COVID-19 induced economic crisis on SaaS businesses, and how founders and management should react. Many teams have already made the first adjustments.
One thing that deserves more attention is that this downturn is very different from prior ones. Its impact varies very significantly along many dimensions and is unique to each business.
Most general advice and sentiment tend to gravitate towards the mean. But when the variance is so high, the mean may not be applicable to many. Granularity is paramount.
The range of impact of the current situation is stark. While there are some sizeable companies looking at prospects of near-zero business for months, there are also those that are seeing acceleration and are scurrying to keep pace with a surge in customer demand. And then there is everything in between.
This downturn is different from prior ones. It is coupled with a massive dislocation. Like prior recessions, many business customers are looking for ways to optimize software costs. However, they are also looking for tools that help adapt to the new reality, ways to continue serving customers in a very different set-up and be more efficient.
As an example, consider the impact of this crisis by industry sector below. These could be industries that you or your customers operate in. Companies in ‘Green’ zone have a very different set of challenges than the ones in the ‘Red’ zone. So any response needs to be very specific to where the business and its customers are along this curve.
Illustrative COVID-19 impact by industry
There are several other dimensions that we are seeing the COVID impact on businesses vary significantly along. Here are a few others:
Whether you can offer a proposition that can help customers get back to business or stay in business. Business customers are currently hyper-focused on ensuring business continuity, safety and productivity of employees, and cost optimization. Longer-term modernization projects may be put on hold as focus shifts to near-term RoI. We are seeing many entrepreneurs quickly adapt their proposition to serve these changing needs
Business customers are currently hyper-focused on ensuring business continuity, safety and productivity of employees, and cost optimization. Longer-term modernization projects may be put on hold as focus shifts to near-term RoI. We are seeing many entrepreneurs quickly adapt their proposition to serve these changing needs Deal sizes. Larger deals are coming under significantly increased scrutiny and businesses are requiring higher levels of approval for large deals. If your natural deal sizes are large, can you find ways to start small, prove value, and grow accounts over time?
Larger deals are coming under significantly increased scrutiny and businesses are requiring higher levels of approval for large deals. If your natural deal sizes are large, can you find ways to start small, prove value, and grow accounts over time? Sales models. Field sales are obviously on pause for a while, as are events and trade shows as sources of leads. Those that already have a well-oiled inside sales machine or self-serve models — or can build those quickly — are better positioned
Field sales are obviously on pause for a while, as are events and trade shows as sources of leads. Those that already have a well-oiled inside sales machine or self-serve models — or can build those quickly — are better positioned Buyer persona. Some departments such as IT or HR may be tied down with a focus on immediate business continuity needs, while others such as Sales and Marketing are dealing with a sudden change in momentum and changes to their team. Products that tie into their current, changing needs are doing better than those that don’t
Some departments such as IT or HR may be tied down with a focus on immediate business continuity needs, while others such as Sales and Marketing are dealing with a sudden change in momentum and changes to their team. Products that tie into their current, changing needs are doing better than those that don’t Channels and lead sources. Events and trade shows as major lead sources are off for a while. But prospects may be more available for phone conversations and video chats. Online ad rates are falling. Those that have adapted their lead-gen playbook quickly are better positioned
Events and trade shows as major lead sources are off for a while. But prospects may be more available for phone conversations and video chats. Online ad rates are falling. Those that have adapted their lead-gen playbook quickly are better positioned Capital efficiency. Those that are — or can be — cash-flow positive based on revenues will experience this downturn very differently than those with high burn rates
Those that are — or can be — cash-flow positive based on revenues will experience this downturn very differently than those with high burn rates Scale/stage. While larger companies have the advantage of more management bandwidth, resources, and execution capacity overall, earlier stage startups have the advantage of being nimble and being able to change direction very quickly. Industry focus, sales motion, lead sources, and burn rates get harder to change with scale.
The good news is that many of the above can be adapted. And the best entrepreneurs are already hard at work doing so.
So carefully determine where you are on the COVID impact curve, and adapt, adapt, adapt.
Anupam Rastogi is a Seed and Early VC based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been associated with over two dozen startups and growth-stage companies from around the globe. Anupam focuses on SaaS, AI and Smart Mobility investments at Emergent Ventures. He can be reached via Linkedin or Twitter | https://medium.com/@anupamr/founders-determine-covid-impact-granularly-and-adapt-f56b19a3e589 | ['Anupam Rastogi'] | 2020-04-28 18:56:27.122000+00:00 | ['Sales', 'Covid 19', 'SaaS', 'VC', 'Startup'] |
Transportation Analytics Can Help Manage the New Hours-of-Service Rules | Transportation Analytics Can Help Manage the New Hours-of-Service Rules
by Michael Watson
New hours-of-service rules went into effect on July 1st. These new rules decrease the amount of time a trucker can drive during a week.
For more information on the impact, The Wall Street Journal wrote a nice article and Dan Gilmore at SupplyChainDigest wrote an interesting article suggesting that the impact may not be as large as forecasted. I also commented on Dan Gilmore’s article in my blog post at SupplyChain Digest.
But, what is true is that these hours-of-service rules will increase rates. If you are a shipper (or 3PL trying to compete), you need to figure out what you will do. This is where transportation analytics comes into play. As rates increase, you need to take a look at your shipments to determine if you can reduce costs by shifting modes, building better routes, or shipping fuller trucks.
If you have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of shipments, you need to be able to quickly analyze these shipments to look for savings. That is, you need to figure out which shipments can be consolidated, what kind of impact will mode shifts have, and how will rate increases drive total cost.
You also need to be able to incorporate what kind of impact a change will have to your inventory. For example, if your shipment quantity increases, how much more inventory will you have in the system and how much will this inventory cost.
Finally, a project like this may require you to analyze your customer requirements. Which customers would be willing to change their shipment frequency? Or, which customers would likely change their delivery windows.
You will likely need a variety of tools to help. But, we’ve found that with a little effort, you can mitigate the impact of a rate increase.
___________________________________________________________________
If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars. | https://medium.com/opex-analytics/transportation-analytics-can-help-manage-the-new-hours-of-service-rules-174f24326653 | ['Opex Analytics'] | 2019-04-25 16:42:00.652000+00:00 | ['Trucking', 'Supply Chain', 'Logistics', 'Optimization', 'Transportation'] |
Why Clones of the Popular Game Among Us always Fall Flat | Why Clones of the Popular Game Among Us always Fall Flat
Lack of originality, game design sensibility, and polish are some of the most common reasons.
“Werewolf Among Us” is a clone of the popular game Among Us, specifically for the Chinese market.
Indie game designers and developers are usually after one thing — notoriety. Not for themselves, but for the experiences they create. Game makers always want more people to play their games. So seeing a game like Among Us amass about 60 million players per day is like watching someone win a billion dollars in the lottery!
It is not every day that we see a low budget indie game reach astronomic heights of popularity and fame. Games like Braid, Undertale, Cave Story, and Stardew Valley are some such games inducted to the Hall of Indie Fame. Among Us is the latest game to reach those coveted levels of fame, and it has not slowed down since its spike in popularity during the summer of 2020. Among Us has shown us that a game’s release does not always predict its success, as it was released back in 2018 to a modest (and comparatively tiny) audience.
Among Us feature artwork, by Innersloth Games
What is Among Us?
For those who are somehow unaware of the premise, Among us is an online multiplayer “whodunit” game of social deduction and deception. You play as a monochromatic crewmate on a space station, where 1 to 3 of your fellow members is out to kill you as “imposters”. Your goal is to either complete all of the ship's maintenance tasks or discover and vote out all of the imposters before they kill you and your teammates.
The popularity and success of Among Us is not unearned. The game is a hit mainly due to its design — when a deceased party member is found, the game opens up to discourse among the players, and the voting process is typically rife with accusations, logical fallacies, and double-crossing.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plays Among Us on Twitch.tv, to speak to youths and raise awareness for political matters.
In a time where we are encouraged to engage in social distancing to reduce the spread of the pandemic, having an excuse to join up with friends and play a social game is all too alluring. That and the low price of the game ($4.99 on PC/Mac and completely free on mobile devices) have been major factors catapulting the game to unanticipated heights.
Here Comes The Imposters
With any game that does well, there are sure to be unimaginative clones of the game that hope to cash in on the game’s success. Many “imposters” of the original Among Us game have nearly identical design, down to the map, phases, and even tasks. These imposter games fall flat because they attempt to recreate every little detail of Among Us. Fans of the original game are not keen to latch onto a clone of a game that already does everything else right. And as a game designer, if your only goal is to mimic someone else’s specifications, your result is bound to be of equal or lower quality than the original.
There’s something about the game named “Pretend” that is particularly ironic. Source, https://youtu.be/mjrx7ZrBQ1k
So it goes without saying that clones of Among Us ultimately fail to capture audiences the same way as the original. But what about games that follow the same genre lines and gameplay beats? Social deduction games are not a brand new concept, and the market is not nearly saturated enough to turn down the idea.
So why have we not seen dozens of new social deduction games?
A Hefty Design Challenge
Creating a successful social deduction game requires a good amount of game design sensibility. The issue of balance is key. Games of this nature are typically considered asymmetrical games, where one minority of players is vastly more expressive and subjectively more powerful than the majority of players, whose main force is their numbers and cooperative strategies.
It can be argued that Among Us does not fully conquer this unbalanced, asymmetric design. Players have been known to enjoy being the “imposter” way more than being one of many defenseless “crewmates”. The game tackles this issue by giving the game’s host the ability to tweak the parameters of the game to create a fair playing environment. In the end, creating a balanced and enjoyable asymmetric game is a difficult task.
Designing a game that is both asymmetrical yet fair and fun for all players is a big challenge for any game designer. Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
Just Other More Interesting Genres
Sure, Among Us is wildly successful today. But its success does not guarantee the success of another social deduction game. Players by this time may have had enough with the genre and are looking for other interesting genres to explore. Consider the case where a game like Town of Salem took off before Among Us. There is no guarantee that Among Us would have been as popular if the game Town of Salem had satiated gamers’ desire for the genre at an earlier point.
Take my advice: don’t make one type of game just because you want to “ride the hype train”. Successful games take months to years to complete. By the time your “Among Us killer” is done, the general public will have moved on to the next big game.
Works In Progress
While there has been very little buzz over upcoming games like Among Us, there are sure to be some works in progress that are hoping to scratch the same itch that Among Us does. We may have not seen a successful competitor to the popular deception game because it is still being developed, and developers are taking their time to craft a truly fun and polished experience!
Conclusion
Among Us is a mainstay game that will continue to be popular for the foreseeable future. With more updates to the game coming in December, it's hard to imagine a clone will be able to top Among Us and take its place.
Are you interested in more game design articles discussing the latest and most popular games? Check out some of my other articles that will give you insight into the most interesting gaming trends of 2020. | https://cjames1.medium.com/why-clones-of-the-popular-game-among-us-always-fall-flat-3f0e5a27f189 | ['C. James'] | 2020-12-06 05:02:46.805000+00:00 | ['Among Us Clones', 'Indie Game', 'Game Design', 'Gaming News', 'Gaming Trends'] |
My Neighbor Alice Land Sale Lottery: A Reference Guide | Frequently Asked Questions
Purchasing a new property can be daunting and confusing with information from different sources. The same goes for digital Land Sale purchases. We’ve compiled the most asked questions from our community to help you better understand the land purchasing & lottery process at My Neighbor Alice Land Sale.
If your question isn’t here, feel free to reach out to us on telegram or email. We will be happy to chat about any questions you may have.
Q: When will I be able to make a deposit?
A: From the 26th of May.
Q: When does the staking begin?
A: From the 28th of May.
Q: For how long do I need to stake my tokens?
A: You need to stake minimum 1 day to get 1 ticket.
Q: Which tokens are eligible to stake?
A: ALICE and CHR.
Q: When is the last day to start staking?
A: 26th of May + 14 days = June 10th (before 10:00 UTC.)
Q: Since you can get several lottery tickets, can one user buy more than one plot?
A: Theoretically, yes.
Q: How can you stake 50 ALICE when you are actually staking LP tokens?
A: User has to send 20 ALICE tokens for plot collateral (which will be held should he win the plot, or can be withdrawn otherwise), We will use the sending address and check how many tokens of that addressare in liquidity pools. We can add locking contracts for people that don’t want to be liquidity providers should we see the need.
Q: You mentioned that we need to send 20 ALICE to register for the sale. Will details on that be announced later?
A: You’ll be able to transfer the 20 ALICE from May 26th when the land sale begins.
Q: Can we get bonus tickets for staking longer than 14 days?
A: No, you can get tickets for 14 days only.
Follow up Q: Is it a concern that liquidity pools will empty after the 14 days? Why not allow users to continue accruing tickets for subsequent sales?
We will continue to encourage people to participate in the liquidity pools and design yield farming programs in the near future. We will keep the land sales event separate from yield farming and for the follow-on land sales, we will inform the rules before the actual sales.
Q: Is this game only for rich people, what about the people who really want to play this game. It’s very expensive to buy land, even after a discount.
A: You don’t have to own land to be able to play and enjoy My Neighbor ALICE. 50% of the land will be reserved for rentals and public facilities. So even if you won’t be able to own a piece of land, you could still have fun in the game.
Land can be shared among friends (atm 10, but we plan to increase this limit). This means a cost per capita of less than 20€.
Q: It seems that after a user transfers the 20 ALICE to qualify for registration, they can use their tickets on said plot and the more tickets they use, the more likely they are to win the registration. Is this correct?
A: The tickets are fungible. The lottery gets one winning ticket per each plot. So the plot assignment will be casual. It is not possible to express preference atm.
Q: In terms of “For CHR”, you could stake the tokens in the official staking contract”, you mean the staking on Chromia´s official website?
A: Yes
Q: If I stake CHR and only hold CHR and win the lottery, will you convert my CHR to 20 ALICE to purchase the land or must I hold ALICE?
A: You need to deposit 20 ALICE in order to be able to participate in the lottery.
Follow up Q: Since you can only send the 20 ALICE on May 26, so just staking would be enough to generate tickets?
Yes, staking will be enough to generate tickets.
Q: Where do I buy the land if I win the lottery?
A: On the My Neighbor Alice marketplace website which will be available from May 26th.
Follow up Q: Will winners be granted access to the marketplace website at the same time and just race to buy the land they want?
A: They win a specific — random — land. In the future we plan other sales mechanisms.
Q: Why are you using this kind of model? Why can’t you offer land sales with a fixed amount for anyone to buy like other games have done.
A: We want to make the game accessible. If we had an auction only rich people would be able to buy the land. If we just have low prices there won’t be enough land available for everybody.
Q: When should they send the 20 ALICE to the address?
A: From 26th of May.
Q: What is the correct Uniswap link to the ALICE-ETH pair?
ALICE-USDT: https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0xde93684627d4e34d6ef96adf5bcabf10bbd8dd81
ALICE- ETH：
https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0x30bc873193466dc59fc08159460c49f26f609795
ALICE — BNB in Pancake Swap:
https://pancakeswap.info/pair/0xe022baa3E5E87658f789c9132B10d7425Fd3a389
Q: In what form would the ticket be?
A: Digital.
Q: What happens when my 50 ALICE in the liquidity pool fluctuates? Does that disqualify me for a ticket?
A: No, we calculate how many ALICE tokens you have at the time of the snapshot in the LP. So you can expect variation from one day to the other but your tokens will be counted.
Q: Do you have a fixed time in UTC on when you take the snapshots?
A: Done. It’s 10:00 AM UTC.
Every 24 hours we check if your tokens are still there for 14 days.
Q: As I am staking CHR for the lottery tickets, and ALICE for the possible land purchase, how do you guys know, I am the same person staking CHR and ALICE? Does it need to be from the same wallet?
A: We will issue tickets for the staking participants, and the receiving address will be the same as the address that participates in the land sales.
Q: If my CHR has just been staked in the site since last year, do I need to restake it on the 26th or do I automatically qualify once I send the 20 ALICE over to signify my intent in joining?
A: You will need to claim the tickets once the land sales are started.
Q: If I win twice in the lottery, do I need to send the 20 ALICE right away? When?
A: You will need to send in the 20 ALICE first before being qualified for the lottery.
Q: What happens to all of the ALICE bought from the land sale? Is it burned?
A: Proportion of the sales revenue from land sales will be contributed to the DAO in the future and that token holders could decide either a buy-back and burn design or to fund community development initiatives.
Q: Can I use LP tokens to farm? Will this affect their ability to get a lottery ticket? Since if LP tokens are in the farming pool, then their balance will not be displayed.
A: Yes
Thank you for your support and good luck in the land sale! | https://medium.com/@myneighboralice/my-neighbor-alice-land-sale-lottery-a-reference-guide-4a3b4f83a7a3 | ['My Neighbor Alice'] | 2021-06-09 14:27:23.327000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Nft Collectibles', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Nft'] |
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