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Write Better Commits With Semantic Commits | Write Better Commits With Semantic Commits
Writing clear, concise commit messages enable you to work well with any team and get your best work out there.
Good commits can make the difference between a well-maintained product, and a terrible product. Well-written commits following a standardized format will enable viewers of your codebase to easily understand the type of change, what modules it affected, and why it occurred. Below, I will outline my format for commits, based on the Semantic Commits style popularized by the AngularJS team.
Most people don’t start thinking about their commits when they first start development (I get it, there’s a lot going on and a lot to learn)
But commits become especially important when you’re a part of a team.
When you enter a new repository, you want to be able to see how the project has developed over time. If you were to see commits like this:
Fix the thing Update styles Add the thing
(Note, these are actually not the worst examples—I’m sure you’ve seen worse)
You likely won’t be able to understand what happened, without reading the code changes in a commit itself.
However, contrast those with these commits:
fix(blog): Imported posts formatted correctly with new styles feat(blog): Update styles to reflect new design feat(blog): Add blog feed to site.
Looks great, so how do we do it?
The semantic commit contains 4 parts:
The type of commit
The Scope of the commit (optional, but often nice to have)
The actual content of the commit
An optional body, for more description. Good for larger commits.
Here’s how it works:
So in our first example above, we might create:
feat(blog): Add blog feed to site Add the markdown plugin, generate pages, and create blog template.
The type
You can use your own types, but here are the defaults:
feat : a new feature, or change to existing feature.
: a new feature, or change to existing feature. fix : Fixing a bug or known issue in code.
: Fixing a bug or known issue in code. test : Adding additional tests for existing features.
: Adding additional tests for existing features. chore : Updating build tools, like webpack, gulp, ascripts, etc.
: Updating build tools, like webpack, gulp, ascripts, etc. docs: Update to documentation like README
The scope
Your scope can be as granular as you’d like and will likely change based on the complexity of the project. If you’re just starting off a project, you could omit the scope, but I highly recommend you consider it because it forces you to think very clearly about what you’re changing.
The description
You want to summarize your commit with a single line. If you can’t, then you probably want to consider breaking the commit down into smaller pieces to make the work logical and self-contained.
The (optional) body
A single line is good for the summary, but sometimes you want to add additional detail so that readers can see more about what you changed now that they know why you changed it.
Writing better commits will help you write better code. Simple practices like this force you into a mindset of craftsmanship and self-documenting projects.
Want to take it further?
Consider reading the original source The Karma Commit Message Format or this newer resource The Conventional Commits.
Once you’re going with semantic commits, you might want to enforce it as a standard on your projects! For something like this, you can use Commitizen(for validation) and Husky (for pre-commit hooks).
I will be following up with a guide on using pre-commit hooks to do linting, testing, and more in a future article.
Till then, happy coding.
May your code be functional, readable, and well-used. | https://medium.com/swlh/write-better-commits-with-semantic-commits-3316c68763f6 | ['Matthew Weeks'] | 2020-10-23 23:43:58.517000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Web Development', 'Git', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
Bad Go: not sizing slices | This is the 4th in a series of posts about Bad Go — a clickbaity title for posts about Go code that I’ve found frustrating because it could just be that little bit better. Better in my mind means more performant with less impact on GC, without being more complex or harder to read.
In this post we’ll look at a very common issue — not setting the size of a slice when you know how big it needs to be. I’m talking about code like the following.
func numbersToStringsBad(numbers []int) []string {
vals := []string{}
for _, n := range numbers {
vals = append(vals, strconv.Itoa(n))
}
return vals
}
Why is this bad? Well, you know that the slice of strings needs to have the same capacity as the slice of ints, so why not save everyone some guesswork and make the slice have the right capacity? Here’s a better version. We don’t have to do anything particularly different, just set the capacity of the slice to the length of the slice of numbers.
func numbersToStringsBetter(numbers []int) []string {
vals := make([]string, 0, len(numbers))
for _, n := range numbers {
vals = append(vals, strconv.Itoa(n))
}
return vals
}
Let’s do a quick benchmark and see how bad failing to set the capacity is, and how much we can gain with a little extra care. I’ve used b.Run to group these two benchmarks together this time.
func BenchmarkSliceConversion(b *testing.B) {
numbers := make([]int, 100)
for i := range numbers {
numbers[i] = i
} b.Run("bad", func(b *testing.B) {
b.ReportAllocs()
for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
numbersToStringsBad(numbers)
}
}) b.Run("better", func(b *testing.B) {
b.ReportAllocs()
for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
numbersToStringsBetter(numbers)
}
})
}
I ran the benchmarks 8 times each and fed the results to benchstat. Here’s the results.
name time/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 2.12µs ± 5%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.02µs ± 4% name alloc/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 4.08kB ± 0%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.79kB ± 0% name allocs/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 8.00 ± 0%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.00 ± 0%
You’ll see the better version takes half as much time and does only 1 allocation versus the 8 allocations done by the bad version. Why does this happen? It is all to do with growing the slice to fit the data.
I think we can see what’s happening by modifying numbersToStringsBad to show how the capacity of the slice grows as we append more items to it. This modified code prints the capacity of the slice whenever it changes.
func numbersToStringsBadInstrumented(numbers []int) []string {
vals := []string{}
oldCapacity := cap(vals)
for _, n := range numbers {
vals = append(vals, strconv.Itoa(n))
if capacity := cap(vals); capacity != oldCapacity {
fmt.Printf("len(vals)=%d, cap(vals)=%d (was %d)
", len(vals), capacity, oldCapacity)
oldCapacity = capacity
}
}
return vals
} func main() {
numbers := make([]int, 100)
for i := range numbers {
numbers[i] = i
} numbersToStringsBadInstrumented(numbers)
}
Here’s the output. We can see that append doubles the capacity of the slice each time it fills up.
len(vals)=1, cap(vals)=1 (was 0)
len(vals)=2, cap(vals)=2 (was 1)
len(vals)=3, cap(vals)=4 (was 2)
len(vals)=5, cap(vals)=8 (was 4)
len(vals)=9, cap(vals)=16 (was 8)
len(vals)=17, cap(vals)=32 (was 16)
len(vals)=33, cap(vals)=64 (was 32)
len(vals)=65, cap(vals)=128 (was 64)
How does the capacity of the slice increase? append increases the slice by allocating a new slice that’s twice as big and copying the data over. So as well as the overhead of extra allocations we suffer the overhead of copying the data. And all the intermediate versions of the slice that are discarded will need to be garbage collected too.
Now you know the consequences, you’ll size your slices whenever you can won’t you? But if you don’t know what the final size will be, don’t worry. Although the “bad” version is slower, it really isn’t that bad.
Since you’ve read this far, as a bonus let’s see if we can do a little bit better if we set the length of the slice as well as the capacity, and set each slice entry directly rather than appending.
func numbersToStringsBest(numbers []int) []string {
vals := make([]string, len(numbers))
for i, n := range numbers {
vals[i] = strconv.Itoa(n)
}
return vals
}
benchstat gives us the following. Our final version is faster by about 10%
name time/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 2.07µs ± 2%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.00µs ± 2%
SliceConversion/best-8 900ns ± 2% name alloc/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 4.08kB ± 0%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.79kB ± 0%
SliceConversion/best-8 1.79kB ± 0% name allocs/op
SliceConversion/bad-8 8.00 ± 0%
SliceConversion/better-8 1.00 ± 0%
SliceConversion/best-8 1.00 ± 0%
If you’ve enjoyed this you might enjoy the previous posts in the series. The first two posts are about slices of pointers and pointer returns from functions. The third is about frivolous use of fmt.Sprintf.
This post is also here, where the code formatting is a little better. | https://medium.com/swlh/bad-go-not-sizing-slices-aed1b01cff83 | ['Phil Pearl'] | 2019-09-06 12:37:33.886000+00:00 | ['Golang', 'Benchmarking', 'Programming'] |
The Gold Price War Debate HARRY DENT vs JAMES RICKARDS — Summary | The Gold Price War Debate HARRY DENT vs JAMES RICKARDS — Summary Jiagu Apr 25·4 min read
Dent’s points are signified by ‘D’, whereas Rickards by ‘R’. The ‘1s’ are introductory statements, whereas others include both counterarguments, as well as responses to questions given by the presenter. This summary has been made so that the questions are omitted.
Note that I have mentioned only what I thought essential.
R1 Drivers of the price of Gold:
Until 1971 (when Nixon broke the last link between gold and paper currency) gold was a form of money, and we have had 3 bull markets since then (currently in the 3rd, it began in 2015). According to the average by how much gold has risen in the previous bull markets, it would put it at $14.5k/o.z. in 2025. The possibility of a gold standard due to the collapse of the paper currencies (possibly starting with the USD). Considering the global M1 supply of the major economies, and a backing (historically gold standard worked well with 20%) of 40%, gives us ~$13k. The debt-to-GDP ratio is about 130%. Empirical data is suggesting that for a ratio of above 90%, the Keynesian multiplier drops below 1, which means it can’t borrow its way out of the debt crisis. To reduce the ratio, you either inflate or increase the GDP. A 75% devaluation of the USD would put the ratio at 30%, so something similar would put gold at $8k/o.z. Since 2010 central banks became net buyers of gold Mining output is flat High dependency ratio (1 grandchild/4 grandparents in China) due to demographics (can’t be automated) — labor shortage, low productivity, low growth = higher wages (inflation and an increase in the price of gold)
D1 He argues using numerous charts that we are in a deflationary season, and with each year we are getting further into it. Because of this, more QE is required to achieve the same effects, and there’s not much correlation between it and inflation. The current constant increase in debt and financial assets is unsustainable, and deflation is needed to return them to a normal level. Gold rallies in anticipation of QE, but since QE doesn’t cause inflation, gold eventually crashes. An example of the crash would be the halving of the financial assets (e.g. from 6x of GDP to 3x). He then says that gold often runs in 9-Year Cycles, due to its correlation with inflation (as opposed to BTC which is a bad hedge), and based on that it cannot go further than $2200, to eventually crash to ~$1000. According to a megaphone pattern on the S&P 500, every time you make a higher high, you make a lower low, which would be a -47%. The best thing to be in case of a deflation scenario are 30-year T Bonds/Zero Coupon 30-year. Although blockchain is the future (digitization of financial assets), BTC should go suffer a 95% crash (since it’s a bubble). He believes that Asia is going to be the dominant part of the world in the next several decades (India being the biggest growth story of the next 30–50 years), and since they love gold, it makes sense to buy gold after it crashes. If you want to cover all the bases: 40% SQQQ, 30% gold, 30% -bonds, though he himself would take only SQQQ and 30-year T-bonds.
R2 He explains that recessions are 2 consecutive quarters of declining GDP, whereas depressions are when growth is consecutively below trend (meaning you can have growth in a depression). He believes that gold is at an inflexion point where it tips from a deflationary environment into accelerating inflation (2022), and so you can’t extrapolate deflation like Harry does, but instead watch the tipping points.
D2 Depression is the deleveraging of debt and financial assets bubbles. Demographics predict that slowing deflationary workforce growth and its inflationary rise. The central banks will not want deflation to happen, but it will happen anyway as they have no choice in the matter. The rich will lose the most, not the poor.
R3 Money printing doesn’t cause inflation due to velocity — Friedman was wrong, instead of being constant it’s highly volatile. It’s currently low because central banks signal that they are afraid of deflation. The declining labor force isn’t deflationary, it’s inflationary. The only way you can deflate the debt is through defaulting (not possible) or by inflating the currency. 85% of global reserves are dominated in USD and EUR, which means that it’s the only cross rate that matters. To measure the USD, you have to look at gold (opposite price relationship). Gold going down in the immediate aftermath of Lehman, has nothing to do with gold, but the fact that leveraged investors get margin calls, and so they have to sell gold.
D3 You can’t possibly inflate the currency. He says that the data regarding labor growth since 1989 proves him correct (e.g. Japan has the lowest inflation, and has to print at a much higher rate to keep the deflation at bay). What deflates isn’t government debt, but private debt, making default possible.
R4 Central banks can’t themselves inflate the currency, but velocity (which is psychological, and not controlled by central banks) can.
D4 Long-term, yes, but not in a crisis (in which we are now).
R5 Vaccine doesn’t really matter, since the psychological effects will be with us for 30 years (e.g. many restaurants will never re-open, and their equipment will be for sale at fire-sale prices, moreover people won’t suddenly leave their houses the first chance they get). Tether’s printing is behind the BTC rise. BTC’s supply cap prevents its actual usage (no reason to borrow a deflationary currency).
D5 BTC is going to collapse (it isn’t an inflation hedge), but the blockchain will stay (and it makes sense to invest in them as new tech companies). | https://medium.com/@summaries/the-gold-price-war-debate-harry-dent-vs-james-rickards-summary-e8abbbcf1c1b | [] | 2021-04-25 16:48:10.422000+00:00 | ['Dent', 'Gold', 'Inflation', 'Deflation', 'Jim Rickards'] |
Setup pgbouncer-rr for PostgreSQL on AWS EC2 | This Blog has been moved from Medium to blogs.tensult.com. All the latest content will be available there. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated.
Have you ever wanted to split your database load across multiple servers or clusters without impacting the configuration or code of your client applications? Or perhaps you have wished for a way to intercept and modify application queries so that you can make them use optimized tables add security filters, or hide changes you have made in the schema?
The Pgbouncer rr project is based on a pgbouncer, an open-source, PostgreSQL connection pooler. It just adds two new features:
Routing: Intelligently send queries to different database servers from one client connection; use it to partition or load balance across multiple servers or clusters.
Rewrite: Intercept and programmatically change client queries before they are sent to the server; use it to optimize or otherwise alter queries without modifying your application.
Pgbouncer-rr works the same way as pgbouncer. Any target application can be connected to pgbouncer-rr as if it were an Amazon Redshift or PostgreSQL server, and pgbouncer-rr creates a connection to the actual server or reuses an existing connection.
Setting up the EC2 Instance
Here I just created a VPC with 3 subnets: 1 public and 2 private subnets. I attached EC2 instance to the public and the RDS attached to the private subnet. The AMI I’m using here is CentOS 7. In the security group, I opened up the following port numbers 5432 for PgSQL and 5439 for pgbouncer.
Getting Started with Configuration
Install
Download pgbouncer-rr by running the following commands (Amazon Linux/RHEL/CentOS):
# install required packages
sudo yum install libevent-devel openssl-devel python-devel libtool git patch make -y
# download the latest pgbouncer distribution
git clone https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer.git
# download pgbouncer-rr extensions
git clone https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch.git
# merge pgbouncer-rr extensions into pgbouncer code
cd pgbouncer-rr-patch
./install-pgbouncer-rr-patch.sh ../pgbouncer
# build and install
cd ../pgbouncer
git submodule init
git submodule update
./autogen.sh
./configure …
make
sudo make install
Configure
Create a configuration file, using ./pgbouncer-example.ini as a starting point, adding your own database connections and python routing rules / rewrite query functions.
When checking the configuration file you can see the following parameters: listen_port
It’s a command to set the listen port, listen_aadr- its command to set the listen to that particular address.
authtype=
auth_type
How to authenticate users.
pam
PAM is used to authenticate users. This method is not compatible with databases using the auth_user option. Service name reported to PAM is “pgbouncer”. Also, pam is still not supported in the HBA configuration file.
HBA
Actual auth type is loaded from auth_hba_file. This allows different authentication methods from different access paths. Example: connection over Unix socket use peer auth method, connection over TCP must use TLS. Supported from version 1.7 onwards.
cert
A client must connect over TLS connection with valid client cert. Username is then taken from CommonName field from a certificate.
md5
Use the MD5-based password check. auth_file may contain both MD5-encrypted or plain-text passwords. This is the default authentication method.
plain
Clear-text password is sent over the wire. Deprecated.
trust
No authentication is done. Username must still exist in auth_file.
any
Like the trust method, but the username given is ignored. Requires that all databases are configured to log in as a specific user. Additionally, the console database allows any user to log in as admin.
pool_mode
Specifies when a server connection can be reused by other clients.
Session
The server is released back to pool after client disconnects. Default.
Transaction
The server is released back to pool after transaction finishes.
Statement
The server is released back to pool after query finishes. Long transactions spanning multiple statements are disallowed in this mode.
pgbouncer rr currently works as a daemon in the Linux Operating System so we are required to manually start the daemon using the following command pgbouncer -d “configuration filename”. Like a normal process, we cannot restart the pgbouncer daemon using the command systemctl restart “service name”. As of now, to review the changes we need to manually kill the pgbouncer process and need to restart the pgbouncer daemon.
Let’s discuss the EC2 instance setup:
Launch Pgbouncer rr
Run pgbouncer-rr as a daemon using the command line pgbouncer <config_file> -d . We need to start pgbouncer as a daemon in Linux machine. To do that we need to use the following command -d to start as a daemon,
pgbouncer -d config.ini -v. -d
to start as a daemon and -v is for verbose. Check whether pg bouncer is working.
Note: When you get some errors on starting pgbouncer you need to kill the pgbouncer daemon from PID. You can use the command
sudo lsof -i : port number
to identify the pid. Use the command sudo kill -9 PID.
Connect to RDS
To connect to the RDS use the following command
psql -h *Host address -U pguser -d pgbouncerDB1 -p 5439
As you can see in the above screenshot, you are now connected to the RDS and start working. | https://medium.com/tensult/introducing-pgbouncer-rr-for-postgresql-198a3596ac2e | ['Nidhin Manjaly'] | 2019-12-09 13:00:42.377000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Postgresql', 'Pgbouncer', 'Proxy', 'AWS'] |
Therapists Face Different Challenges with Telehealth | Therapists Face Different Challenges with Telehealth
”In a moment, saving a bird”
Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash
The pandemic has forced medical professionals including mental health professionals to rethink how they do their jobs.
I called my client promptly at 10 am for an appointment we had scheduled. No answer. I called a few more times. About 10:10, I got this text. ”In a minute, saving a bird.” Ok, then. I like birds. I wonder what kind of bird? I pictured her putting it back in a nest or in a box in a warm place, or? I waited til about 10:30 then got another text “do you have time later today? Well of course I have time but….
Isn’t it my time? Already designated for relaxing with my husband. Or taking a walk or starting dinner? Or just being quiet and alone?
Boundaries get blurred
The pandemic has forced medical professionals including mental health professionals to rethink how they do their jobs. Since early March, after a scare with a client who had been exposed to the virus, I have been doing therapy from home. Of course, this is safer for me and my family.
I am in my 70s and live with a man in his 70s who has several risk factors as well. The thought of sitting in a small room across from people who may not be as careful as I am, talking and gesturing and laughing and crying, (and how do you do therapy with a mask, for Pete’s sake?) sounded like a set up for catching and spreading the virus. I was freaked out in March.
I went home, set up an office there, and began using the telephone and internet to connect with my clients. My main goal was to keep talking with my people, to console, encourage, and steady them as we all went through this pandemic for a few months.
The few months turned into six with no end in sight. I didn’t want to keep paying rent and utilities for an unused office so decided to give it up. Now I work from home permanently. I set up some office hours but it’s hard to stick to them, because of birds. And other things.
So I tell my client, yes, we could talk at 2:30 this afternoon. That’s within my stated office hours. Even though I had hoped to be finished before then, I can deal with it. That’s what I’m here for.
Some time before 2:30 she calls to cancel, saying she’s too tired and can we talk tomorrow morning. Tomorrow is Friday, my day off. No, I’m not doing that.
My usual policy with people who miss appointments for non-emergency reasons is to have a talk about the value of my time and the need to prioritize their treatment. If this were a client with private insurance I could charge my standard $75 missed appointment fee. This is not possible in this case. So I take the loss of income, because of a bird. But I like birds.
Creative excuses
When I worked at the mental health practice of the local hospital system, the staff kept a running list of creative excuses clients gave for missing their appointments. Here is a sampling:
I missed my appointment because:
My dog just had puppies
I’m stuck on the rotary and can’t get off
I’m expecting my period
I might be getting depressed
I’m too anxious (the only reasonable one)
My kids won’t stop whining
To which I could add
I’m saving a bird
While clients don’t have to drive to see me now, invalidating all the excuses involving flat tires, keys locked in the car, money for gas, and the danger of driving in ice and snow in winter, instead, there are different excuses like this one: I need to get my husband/child breakfast, the internet just went down and Joey has to go online for school, my wife can’t find the car keys, etc.
And there are many more interruptions than in my pleasant, private office. I listen to children fighting and ruining their parent’s train of thought; I tolerate cats swishing grandly past the screen, tails high (and close-ups of cat butts). There are the occasional tantrums of younger children, endless arguments with older ones, requests for help from unknowing, and sometimes undressed, spouses.
On top of that, there are situations like the long-awaited plumber arriving just as we are about to start. Or a virtual meeting with a doctor rearranged for our appointment time. Of course, if my clients were organized and assertive with good time management skills and clear priorities, meeting with me might be unnecessary. But I know they need help with these things.
This is a new age for all of us and most of us are trying our best to stay afloat, help our fellows and figure out creative ways to solve problems.
It is harder to keep my own boundaries
Another problem is that, mixed in with my clients personal lives, now a part of each session, is my own life. And it’s harder to keep them separate..
I have an office but it’s upstairs. Sometimes I inadvertently answer a call from an unknown number, thinking it might be a repairman I’ve called, and there I am in the middle of frying okra trying to sound professional to a potential client. My private life would be interrupted constantly if I didn’t at least try to screen calls. Even so, I am often caught apologizing to someone I’ve never met for my frustrated or too-familiar tone, and attempting to explain. I am not quite the same person as I was in the office. Maybe this is a good thing, I’m not sure yet.
I find myself talking to people during their commute to work and wanting to send them a summary of our session so they remember the important points. This is probably a useful change. I am sending links to relevant online articles to clients instead of giving them handouts, saving a lot of paper, I guess. If people don’t use the internet, not always a ’given’ with my clients, I snail mail things to them. That’s ok, in fact, I think we have all been exercising unused brain cells to solve some of the new problems we face.
I’ve noticed that I tend to think about clients more often during the day, sending them useful links to things I read or pictures I’ve taken. I occasionally call them at odd hours to check on them if they were having a hard time. When I was a therapist in an office I rarely thought of clients when I went home. I know my work is wheedling it’s way into the very core of my personal life. Is this a “boundary issue” or just how it is in a pandemic. Who knows?
To sum up
I am not quite the same person at home as I was in the office
My clients and I know more about each other’s private lives than we did before
It is harder to keep my personal life separate from work
During sessions, it is harder to avoid distractions on both sides
The pandemic has become a routine part of our check-in, sometimes part of our goals
I feel kinder, softened toward my clients facing the same pandemic restrictions and challenges as I do. I break “the rules” more often.
I would like to hear how doctors and nurses and other caregivers perceive the difference created by the pandemic in their relationships to patients or clients. Though these people may not be working from home, there must be changes in how they perceive and accomplish their work.
I know one thing. This is a new age for all of us and most of us are trying our best to stay afloat, help our fellows and figure out creative ways to solve problems. | https://medium.com/curious/therapists-face-different-challenges-with-telehealth-1f2062b247c1 | ['Jean Anne Feldeisen'] | 2020-09-20 09:21:00.906000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Work From Home', 'Work Life Balance', 'Boundaries', 'Mental Health'] |
Dockerize your SpringBoot + MySQL Application | In this article, I will discuss how to dockerize your Spring Boot application and MySQL database in separate containers. The Spring Boot application I have used in this article can be found here. It is a simple CRUD application of employee management system which enables to view, add, update and delete employees.
The first step is to create a MySQL container.
docker pull mysql:[version]
You can simply do that using an official image available at docker hub. You can pull images with different versions. ( [version] = latest / 8.0 / 5.7 / 5.6 etc ).
Then we can create a container using that image with different environment variable values.
docker run --name mysql-standalone -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -e MYSQL_DATABASE=test -e MYSQL_USER=sa -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=password -d mysql:[version]
The name given for the MySQL container is “mysql-standalone”. The root password is set to “password”. And the database name is set to “test”. Another user is created with the username of “sa” and the password is “password”. The image we are using to build the container is mysql:[version].
After creating the container we can list the containers using,
docker container ls
Then it will show that “mysql-standalone” container is running. You can see the container ID, image and other data related to the container.
The next step is to dockerize the spring boot application. For that first go to the application.properties and add the data source related data.
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://mysql-standalone:3306/test
spring.datasource.username=sa
spring.datasource.password=password
To name the jar created at the build phase, go to the pom.xml and make relevant changes.
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<finalName>demo-application</finalName>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
The build the project with skipping tests, execute
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
It will create a jar in the target directory with the name of “demo-application.jar”.
To package this as a docker image, create a Dockerfile in the project’s directory and add the required configuration.
FROM openjdk:8
ADD target/demo-application.jar demo-application.jar
EXPOSE 8086
ENTRYPOINT [“java”, “-jar”, “demo-application.jar”]
Since spring boot requires jdk , I have packaged it inside the container. Then ADD the jar using the existing location and rename it to demo-application.jar. Then EXPOSE the port number 8086 of the container to communicate with the host. The last one is the ENTRYPOINT which is the command to run. To build the docker image, go to the projects directory and run,
docker build . -t demo-application
The image will have a tag demo-application. If you run “docker images” in the console, then you will be able to see the image with “demo-application”. To run the application in the docker container,
docker run -p 8086:8086 --name demo-application --link mysql-standalone:mysql -d demo-application
“-p” is used to match the port numbers of the host with the containers. So here the first 8086 is the host port which is mapped with the containers port of 8086. The container is named as demo-application and linked with the mysql-standalone container. The image used to create the container is the “demo-application”. Then running the command of,
docker container ls
will show you both containers.
To view the logs,
docker logs [container-name]
Then go to your browser and type “localhost:8086/” will let you access the application.
References | https://medium.com/@praboddunuwila/dockerize-your-springboot-mysql-application-969deef5c60 | ['Prabod Dunuwila'] | 2020-11-24 10:44:32.444000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'Spring Boot', 'Containers', 'Dockerize', 'Docker'] |
Kali Linux & Metasploit: Getting Started with Pen Testing | Metasploit Framework
The Metasploit Framework is an open source penetration testing and development platform that provides exploits for a variety of applications, operating systems and platforms. Metasploit is one of the most commonly used penetration testing tools and comes built-in to Kali Linux.
The main components of the Metasploit Framework are called modules. Modules are standalone pieces of code or software that provide functionality to Metasploit. There are six total modules: exploits, payloads, auxiliary, nops, posts, and encoders. We will just focus on exploits and payloads.
Exploit
An exploit takes advantage of a system’s vulnerability and installs a payload.
Payload
The payload gives access to the system by a variety of methods (reverse shell, meterpreter etc.)
We will us both of these to gain access to the victim machine in the exercise detailed later.
Environment Setup
Virtualbox is an operating system emulation software that gives us the ability to run additional systems from our local machine.
Kali Linux will be our local machine where we can run our attacks from. Since we will need both Kali and the Metasploitable vulnerable machine running we will use Virtualbox to emulate both environments. To login to Kali: username is root & password is toor.
Metasploitable 2 is designed to be vulnerable in order to work as a sandbox to learn security. This will provide us with a system to attack legally. Most of the vulnerabilities on Metasploitable are known so there are tons of resources available to help learn various attack types.
Metasploit is a framework within Kali to run attacks on other systems. Metasploitable is a vulnerable system that can be used as a target for attacks and security testing.
Metasploitable Installation
The pictures below show the settings to setup a new virtual machine for Metasploitable.
Metasploitable shouldn’t need more than 256MB of ram but you can add more if your system can handle it.
Instead of creating a new hard disk the Metasploitable machine we downloaded will act as our existing virtual hard disk.
We do not want the Metasploitable machine on our actual network, so configure the settings for that machine as below. Make sure the Kali machine is also on the Host-Only Adapter. (Settings or tabs not shown in the pictures below were left as default)
Main settings page for Metasploitable
Make sure to change the network settings to Host-only
Make sure to change the network settings for Metasploitable to host-only adapter
Once we are done changing the settings we can start Metasploitable. The login and password are both: msfadmin. After logging in we can leave it running and start up Kali Linux. From there we can work with the Metasploit framework on Kali Linux.
Note: When entering password it won’t show on the screen
Exploiting VSFTPD v2.3.4 Backdoor Command Execution
Now that everything is setup we can focus on how we can break into the Metasploitable 2 machine from our Kali Linux VM.
With Metasploitable 2 most if not all the vulnerabilities are known. But that is not usually the case. For systems in the wild there is many more steps to get into a unknown system or network. To get comfortable with the Metasploit Framework we can look up vulnerabilities online to get comfortable with the workflow.
For this walk-through we will focus on VSFTPD v2.3.4. This vulnerability will provide root shell using Backdoor Command Execution. This means we will have full access to Metasploitable 2’s command line.
Step 1: Start the Metasploit Console
Open the command terminal inside Kali and type | https://medium.com/cyberdefendersprogram/kali-linux-metasploit-getting-started-with-pen-testing-89d28944097b | ['Nicholas Handy'] | 2018-08-10 15:39:31.484000+00:00 | ['Metasploit', 'Kali Linux', 'Linux', 'Cybersecurity', 'Penetration Testing'] |
Revolutionising Journalism Education in International News Reporting Via Zoom | We faced a crisis in cracking teaching online. Two-hour straight lectures were not going to work, particularly staring straight down the tube.
But first a flashback. Two main problems need solving to capture this extraordinary event in the photo above. How do I convey what this experience is like and how do I preserve it? I’m near the Syrian border teaching a group of young Syrian journalists Cinema Journalism.
It’s a style of news making that makes use of cultural, social and literary forms in storytelling pulled from different cultures, which more often fictional cinema makers deploy.
I interview the storytellers after my training session and then organise them into a photo-shoot. Below is the completed product which drapes across video.
When I begin this story, I have attendants attempt a mental image of the scene by describing a cinematic narrative.
Imagine this I say: | https://medium.com/@viewmagazine/revolutionising-journalism-education-in-international-news-reporting-via-zoom-60c9c4a556c8 | ['Dr. David Dunkley Gyimah'] | 2021-01-03 17:11:43.758000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Journalism', 'Academia', 'Storytelling', 'Zoom Meetings'] |
Sacrifice. | Sacrifice.
How much more must I sacrifice until you are satisfied. What more can I do to survivor all of this pain inside. What haven’t I yet done that you are trying to teach me. Why am I always being tested day in and day out. When’s my turn. When do I get something to jump up and shout out with pride and scream from the roof tops that I’ve finally made it to some sort of pinnacle or checkpoint in life that makes me feel somewhat successful and not completely destroyed.
I’m constantly looking at the man in the mirror and asking why. Asking what I’ve learned from this past mistake and how I can change and when I change I find a newer harder challenge that you’ve placed in my way. I have to chip away at it slowly until I overcome it just to see on the other side a little ways down the road of life you’ve placed another one. Bigger and much tougher again then the last.
Father, school, bullies, Air Force, drinking, heartbreak, college, failure, marriage, death, cheating, fatherhood, anger, and now you’ve done the one thing I never thought possible you’ve finally broken me with tearing the one person I love with all my heart away. The one person that makes me smile every time I see her little face. The one person that I can hold and and hug and do whatever I want with and she just looks at me with love and trust in her eyes. The one person I’m suppose to protect from harm. The one person I’m suppose to be there for every day of her life to make sure she succeeds and learns and grows to become someone better then me. To become the best she can be. To teach her from my mistakes and let her learn from her own and when she makes those mistakes she can walk up to me and ask me for help through her rough times and I give her the best advice for that moment and give her a great big hug and tell her everything will be ok. You decide to take that person from me.
It kinda scares me right now cause if you’re willing to make my life harder and harder every time I over come one of your challenges what are you willing to do to me next? Cause as shitty as I feel right now for what you’ve done I don’t know how I’m going to overcome anything harder then this.
I mean yea, I’m gonna face uphill battles with her. But nothing I haven’t dealt with or nothing I can’t help her through cause I’ve learned along the way. But that’s just repeating the cycle and taking the challenges you made me face to make me stronger and help her become stronger…ooooh Is that why? Have I reached a check point. Am I at the top of the curve? Is this it? Is this the lesson you’ve always wanted me to learn? Are there greener pastures on the other side of this hill you’ve placed in front of me? Cause honestly I need a win right now. And I’m gonna have to fight and sacrifice days or weeks away from her in order to have her in my life forever and not let anyone else including you take her from my arms ever again. And if they try I’m going to confuse to fight like hell and get more protection stronger armor sharper swords and learn the best damn war cry you’ll ever hear to make sure she’s not going anywhere.
I’m tired I’m drained, I’m beaten but I am not defeated. So bring it on, whoever YOU may be cause I’ve come ready for war and I’m not gonna back down for anyone anymore. I am willing to do what I’ve always done to over come any of your challenges. I am going to sacrifice everything.
Bring it on,
-Joseph Serio 11/23/2020 | https://medium.com/@josephserio/sacrifice-3d9ebb029a0d | ['Joseph Serio'] | 2020-12-22 11:53:41.170000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Challenge', 'Loss', 'Poetry', 'Faith'] |
Why The Next Big Revolution Is In Your Hands | Why The Next Big Revolution Is In Your Hands
How COVID-19 can affect how you eat for the rest of your life.
Many Thanks To Jen Theodore, on Unsplash
Food for thought
People may not know it, but the biggest improvement for Earth is within reach. To change the world for the better means we must change our relationship to our planet. Unselfish sustainability is not only possible, but it is the best outcome to cope with our new reality of pandemic, climate, and biodiversity crisis.
No longer able to support billions who are out to exploit every opportunity, Earth has been very clear that we have four primary areas that are unsustainable: Inequality, unfair capitalism, universal healthcare, and what you eat for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner.
In these four areas, you are not powerless, even if it may feel that way. But, surely, it is the last one: what we eat, over which we have the most power.
Food insecurity
In glaring light, COVID-19 has exposed all of the excess of the first three areas. Let’s look at food in relation to each of the first three unsustainable factors. If people are unequal, they suffer from unhealthy food, food deserts, non-nutritious food, heart disease and obesity, and/or possible food shortages. Whether inequality is due to gender imbalance, or racism, it prevents people from getting healthy food systems that work worldwide.
Capitalism, too, has had obvious flaws exposed. With non-balanced, or rapacious capitalism, inequality persists. Food is obtained by those who can afford it, then hoarded. It is also farmed, harvested, packaged, and distributed by people with less who are in service, to those with more. This is our present system, and no one can argue that it protects public safety. Therefore, it makes a huge impact on the third societal problem, in adequate healthcare systems that cannot meet the needs of people in lockdown, or afterward, efficiently.
Despite denial of it, the COVID-19 disaster is directly linked to people eating wildlife, such as bats and pangolins. Other epidemics, such as swine flu, bird flu, and more — are linked to domesticated animals. If we continue to eat them as we do, we cannot sustain a comfortable life for many billions.
Add to the healthcare needs that food insecurity, especially in impoverished world pockets, presents. It creates crowding, other disease vectors, civil unrest, and predictable refugee movements. Where and when people combine commerce with food, there is time and place for disease to emerge. Obviously, we can’t ignore food as a human need, so then, we must address shortcomings in these areas.
The other great issue with unfair capitalism, is that it consistently rewards, at public costs, things like cattle ranching, logging, soil destruction, and mining. Each of these degrades food security in the long run. Arable land is finite, and, therefore infinite growth in dollars is impossible. Poverty itself does not call for a redistribution of wealth, but for more equal opportunity. This can only arise with public demand for diversity-based solutions.
The UN goals for sustainability
Unknown to most people, the United Nations, UN, sets Sustainable Development Goals, (SDG). If these goals were realized, it would be not just a healthier world, but an abundant one that provides generously.
These are goals which economists and other scientists research deeply in order to discover what people must change in order for industry, healthcare and education, local and global economies, to fight climate change challenges and inequality.
COVID 19 may not have made SDG a household word, but the effect of the pandemic has been to open the eyes of almost everyone to the very real threat of unsustainable living.
Food is one universal marker that every one who eats can relate to, and notice.
Food under threat
Our food networks, are now clearly seen as vulnerable, even to privileged people. The news reports how our wasteful system has endangered slaughterhouse workers, put unhealthy dietary habits on full view, and revealed how shortages and hoarding affects availability. Then, there is the very real, and terrifying fact that most of our pandemics come directly from our indifferent relationships to animals.
A tiny virus in the food supply, absolutely assured to resurface again, changes our relationship to food, and one another, forever. We must choose how.
What food relationships can you affect, personally? For one thing, buying locally, and staying informed about your food will help. Knowing the source of your food, how deeply it impacts exploitative systems, whether it is without excessive additives and contaminants is something we can put under our own control. Eating less CO2 generating, food decreases your carbon footprint as well as ensuring your food supply is close at hand.
If we choose to keep addicted to junk food, and prepackaged food, we are not developing healthy habits for the next pandemic by way of approaching it with healthier bodies. Obesity, but also, hunger are real threats. Diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, are problematic, but so are respiratory diseases exacerbated by our over-use of CO2.
Food culture and habits
Remaining dependent upon unsustainable networks of powerless workers, and degraded lands and exploited animals, keeps each of us insecure. Taking power to tweak your food intake, even just a tiny bit, affects the entire planet.
Some ways to eat a healthier diet include eating less meat. Veganism may not be your thing, but just eating a bit less meat, supports a healthier populace. Rather than get into the destructive name-calling game that such food fights have fostered for decades, it’s time to admit we must insist on a healthier food supply for personhood and planet.
There are a myriad of ways to approach the meat problem, not just one answer for all.
Growing your own vegetables, on site, or in a community garden, is an easy way to eat more real food. This method also provides critical social interaction and promotes mental and emotional health. Sharing food, too, has the same effect.
To promote cultural inclusion, making efforts to connect to foodways of diverse peoples is also helpful. Many indigenous, and inter-sectional cultures have great wisdom we may put to use in everything from crop sustainability, to recipes, and festivals.
Food should be something to celebrate, think of soul food, italian pastas, sustainable North England seafood, Tex mex, or apple festivals in the Pacific Northwest.
Instead, we now eat primarily monocultural bland foods. We need to reconnect to local, even as we stay aware of the threat to orangutans, (avoid palm oil) the biodiversity of the Amazon, (protest illegal logging, ranching) and support for immigrant and exploited food workers, (avoid xenophobia) are just a few examples of how your eating habits affect the world for better or worse.
New food in new environments
No one knows just yet how cafes, restaurants, food workers, distributors, will look in the future. We don’t know whether downtown streets will be closed off to traffic to create wider walkways for physical distancing. We don’t know if food workers will have work, or be dependent upon industry changing tactics.
The optimists out there who understand the critical inter-dependency of food networks are planning for huge upheavals. The revolution in how we eat, is at hand.
The pandemic has revealed inadequate food systems around the world. Innovation and technology are also being presented as part of the solution. High tech agriculture, if engineered in sustainable ways can produce higher yields, better nutrition, and more efficient circular-economy driven elimination of waste and pollution. In the months since lock-down, technology that produces plant-based meat alternatives has found growing popularity. People are looking not just for more secure food, but for more creative meals. Clean meat, lab meat, and more are not yet at a scale that makes them affordable, but images of animals being culled as a result of lay offs and loss, is driving interest in cruelty-free, REAL meat.
Imagine no lost limbs in meat packing industries, no exploitation of BIPOC and animals, and/or no contagion due to working in cramped quarters. It is likely that the origin of the meal on your plate will be very different.
Innovation and investment in all of these areas of our food network are no longer meat-pie in the sky aspirations, but very real goals every person who eats food should consider.
Food for the human spirit
What you eat for breakfast matters. A new collective, communal spirit for the public good has been unleashed right along with our greatest fears, and uncertain pathways. This provides food for the human spirit.
Unselfish people may continue to share. Selfish people may continue to hoard.
But people of every kind, with cultural pride, imagination, drive, determination, and collaboration, are going to change how, and what, is on the menu.
Eat as a community, as one family on one planet, and you will be okay. | https://medium.com/greener-together/why-the-biggest-revolution-is-in-your-hands-f4cdda35dcda | ['Christyl Rivers'] | 2020-07-18 16:56:00.949000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Culture', 'Health', 'Equality', 'Environment'] |
All is fair in faith and war… | All is fair in faith and war…
Imagine someone threatening to take your most prized possession away, something that you hold dear, something that defines you, or something apart of your own identity. Now imagine this item being your faith or belief practice. Would you not try your best to protect this privilege? Joël Edouard Follow Dec 1, 2019 · 4 min read
During World War II, propaganda posters were designed to encourage American citizens to contribute to the war effort. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were no emails, text messages, chat rooms, Instagrams, or Twitters. Therefore, the American government had used basic media to creatively reach the everyday people who may not have been able to serve in the military to contribute to the war effort. The American government commissioned artists to influence public support with posters that spoke to specific topics such as food rationing, war bonds, freedom, and religion.
The topic of religion was seen and used by the government in two ways. One way was by raising concern that the people’s freedom to practice religion was threatened. Another way was to use faith as a means to justify war.
This is the Enemy. 28"x20" Created by Barbara Marks. 1943. http://digitalmemory.stjohns.edu/digital/collection/WWIIposters/id/70
We see the first method used in the lithograph poster designed by Barbara Marks titled This is the Enemy. While there is little information found about the designer who created the illustration, we do know that the poster was created for the Office of War Information or OWI. The purpose of the OWI was to share wartime information with the public. This office thus implemented propaganda campaigns using not only posters but any and all media available (film, radio, press, etc). This is the Enemy contains an illustration of a Nazi soldier’s hand holding a knife that is piercing a bible. What catches the eye initially is the aggressive bright orange-red color of the background. The color supports the striking image of a knife going through a bible in that it is intense draws much attention to the illustration. The subject matter is emphasized by the use of dramatic light and dark colors seen in the hand and bible. This application of lights and darks creates dark ominous shadows. Beyond the subject matter, the colors used in the design have a strong contrasting relationship. For example, the artist used the red for the Nazi symbol and green for the phrase This is the Enemy. The dimensions of the poster are measured to be 28” by 20”, larger than most posters we see today. The content of this design is justified by Hitler’s hatred for Christianity.
An article in the Washington Post says, “in Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves.” And continues, “Its teaching, he (Hitler) declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle of the fittest.” Information in the St. John’s Digital Archive Collection suggests that this poster was most likely mailed to St. John’s University during the war and displayed around the campus. Such a strong image would have impacted the students to develop a strong animosity to the “enemy” Nazi, especially because St. John’s is a catholic university. It must have been a very deliberate decision to share this specific poster with the university community. Mark’s poster can be seen as an example of how faith was used to shape public opinion and also justify war. This idea goes back to the question originally posed. If someone threatened to take away something that is a part of your identity, would you not try your best to protect that? Seeing the threat shown in This is the Enemy would provoke viewers to support the war effort, which was the mission of the OWI’s propaganda.
This use of faith for the purpose of propaganda is important to examine especially during a time when information wasn’t as readily accessible as it is today. Using an important part of one’s identity for these posters in some ways personalizes war for the everyday person who was not on the front lines, who may not have been fully informed, or who might have lacked a sense of “nationalism” or “patriotism”. If someone’s core beliefs are attacked and that is communicated to them directly they are more likely to be moved to support the war effort and oppose the “enemy”. The piece by Barbara Marks personified an actual issue during an important period in our history and communicated directly to a specific group of people. Thus, through art, faith became a means to connect people to war.
In the St. John’s Digital Archive Collection you can find this work and more posters that touch on not only religion but on many other topics.
WORKS CITED
“Office of War Information.” Office of War Information, www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3959.html
“Poster, This Is the Enemy, 1943.” Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18622269/.
Rosenwald, Michael. “Hitler Hated Judaism. But He Loathed Christianity, Too.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 23 Apr. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/20/hitler-hated-judaism-he-loathed-christianity-too/.
“This Is The Enemy.” CONTENTdm, digitalmemory.stjohns.edu/digital/collection/WWIIposters/id/70. | https://medium.com/make-it-red/all-is-fair-in-faith-and-war-93e20609962d | ['Joël Edouard'] | 2019-12-02 00:39:51.218000+00:00 | ['Propaganda'] |
The People You Meet in Another Land | I remember it as if it were yesterday instead of ten years ago when the tuk-tuk pulled to a stop in front of a house with an iron gate that was to be our home for the next three weeks. They came piling out, just as eager to meet us as we were to meet them.
First, there was Bong Thom*. Bong is a term that they use to address older males. He became like the stereotypical big, annoying, older brother I’d read about in books. He would always tease us, make jokes at our expense, scare us, play tricks on us.
But he was also just as protective and went out of his way to make sure we were adjusting comfortably, and that we understood the cultural norms and customs of Cambodia. He was the one who made sure we remembered to remove our shoes before entering a house, as custom dictated. If we needed a ride on a motorcycle to go somewhere, he would take us.
“What you’re wearing is scary,” he told my friend one day when she came our of the house wearing mini shorts and leggings. Through him, we learned that Cambodia is still quite conservative. The less skin, the better. The women often wear baggy pants and big, long shirts to hide their curves.
Bong Arun came next. He was like Bong Thom if you removed the mischief and added a lot of kindness. He was always asking us if we were fine. “Are you all right? You’re not yet kapuy?” he would often ask, using a word from my home country that means “tired”.
It was Bong Thom who bought spiders and crickets for us to try on our first day, declaring that we could not so much as step out of the house if we didn’t try them. Nevertheless, it was Bong Arun who taught us how to eat and enjoy them.
When Bong Arun took us to his home town, we stayed over at his house, a beautiful wooden one raised on long stilts. He and his mother prepared meals for us, and while the food was still cooking, he got us some green mangoes from the tree in their front yard.
He took us on a tour around the village after lunch, showing us where they cultured their crickets, grew their vegetables, and tended to their livestock. When dusk fell, he took us all back home and served dinner. There was no electricity that night, so while we were washing up, he lit lanterns and candles and waited until we had all done to go to bed before settling in for the night.
Temple in Angkor Wat Cambodia | © Alyssa Chua
Pheakdei was my special partner in crime. I think that was because we instantly bonded on the first night, with him as my motorcycle driver and me as the scared girl who had never ridden a motorcycle before, clutching his shirt and praying we wouldn’t crash.
It’s not that Pheakdei was a bad driver. It’s just that I had never seen so many motorcycles in my entire life. It did not help that they would cut into each other’s paths recklessly, daringly. It was Pheakdei who sat and listened while I taught the English classes.
There were two classes, the high schoolers, a mixed group of boys and girls, and the college-goers, mostly boys. Cambodia, we learned, is a patriarchal country. Men are given a lot more importance than women, and they are the ones who usually pursue studies beyond high school.
On one of the first few nights, Pheakdei came up to me after I had just finished teaching a class and was getting a drink of water in the kitchen. “They say teacher saat,” he told me.
“What? Me? I’m not sad!” I protested, misunderstanding. “No, not sad, saat,” he said. “You know what saat means?” I shook my head. “Saat is pretty. The students are saying the teacher is saat. You are saat.”
I could never be sure, but my companions told me that Pheakdei had also been the subject of much ribbing from his friends where I was concerned. “Pheakdei thinks you are saat,” one of them called out to me one day as I was leaving the house to go to the market.
Overgrown tree in Angkor Wat | © Alyssa Chua
Bona was one who taught us all about daling. “It’s not a really good word,” he said. “It means ‘nightlife’ and you know that means bars and parties, and getting drunk.” We agreed. “But we can have our own meaning,” he went on. “It can mean that we’re just going out at night.” After that, every time we’d go out, we’d say, “Let’s go daling!”
He was mischievous and playful, this Bona. I wouldn’t label it with the flimsy word “fling” that they use when you have a brief summer romance going on, but it was obvious that he was attracted to my friend and she felt the same way. Their brief summer romance would pretty much dictate their moods whenever they were with us.
If he teased her too much, she would become angry and refuse to speak to him. He, in turn, would become sullen and refuse to participate. They couldn’t see eye-to-eye most of the time. Their hurts were too deep, their pasts too raw, their cultures too different. Maybe they were both too young and too stubborn. Maybe she was just coming from heartbreak and he had also just recently broken up with his girl.
Maybe immersing ourselves into another culture for a summer meant we were supposed to see life and the world from their perspective, but not necessarily fall in love.
Steps in Angkor Wat | © Alyssa Chua
Chanvatey was my fellow singer, my co-duet. Prior to going to Cambodia, our host was telling us, “Alyssa needs to meet Chanvatey. They are both musicians and play the guitar.” It didn’t take long to realize that Chanvatey was the more skilled one.
Once he held a guitar in his arms, his hands would never stay still. His fingers would deftly coax out scales and complex tunes. Chanvatey didn’t know how to read music, but he could copy and play a song just by listening to it over and over again. And he sang beautifully too.
At night, just before everyone would go to bed, I would ask him to play some songs and he would. Throughout the three weeks, I was there, our favorites would become Plaine White T’s Hey There Delilah, Owl City’s Vanilla Twilight, and Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat’s Lucky.
Chanvatey’s fingers were not just skilled in playing the guitar, he was a wizard at origami and other paper art too. During our last night in Cambodia, we had a gathering for our English students and the people we met during our stay there. It was some sort of a farewell party. Chanvatey made each of us paper roses as a good-bye gift. I still have mine tucked in a drawer full of other memories.
Chaya was one of the few girls I got to meet during our stay. There was also Soboen, but I couldn’t bring myself to warm up to her. Soboen was too distant, too aloof, which was strange since we lived in the same house, and so we saw her a lot more than we saw Chaya. And yet, it was Chaya who was the outgoing one, the one who asked lots of questions. “Teach me English,” she would beg me.
And I did. In the afternoons when we had not much to do, we would sit by the desk. Sometimes, we would open up her workbook to do the lessons, more often than not, we would talk. She would tell me about her life in Cambodia, her family, her boyfriend. She would ask me questions, too. What it was like where I came from. How had I learned to speak English? What was my college course and why had I chosen to pursue it.
Sunrise in Phnom Penh, Cambodia | © Alyssa Chua
As the time of our visit and cross-cultural exchange program drew to a close, our hearts became heavier, sadder. How does one part with the wonderful people they have met from the first country outside that they have ever been to?
There were others we met, their faces fading and blending with the coming dusk.
There was Sovann, one of the youngest and everyone’s favorite because he was so sweet and kind and would help us do the dishes. There was Khean, the studious one, who was always quiet but very observant. There was Bong Sonith, who stayed close to us when we toured Angkor Wat and took all our group pictures. There was Bong Narith who gave us a whole gallon of a jelly ace as some sort of a welcome gift.
That was ten years ago. | https://medium.com/world-travelers-blog/the-people-you-meet-in-another-land-5c036b0f7529 | ['Alyssa Chua'] | 2020-12-27 08:47:16.852000+00:00 | ['People', 'Travel', 'Life', 'Cambodia', 'Stories'] |
Speaking Computer: The Binary Words of Technology | I’m going to make a guess about you. Yes, YOU. I don’t know you, but I know one very important thing, you’re reading this page. I’ll go one step further with my guess, you’re reading this page on a computer, perhaps a phone, tablet, or laptop, but some kind of computer. Now, you’re reading this page in English, I suppose I just made another guess about you. And this page is composed of select letters within the 26 letter alphabet. Those 26 letters are mixed together by predetermined rules to form more complex words.
Now, like I said, you’re reading these English letters on a computer. Your computer is a complex machine developed by many smart people over a few years. Certainly, 26 letters wouldn’t be an issue for such an innovation? Well, it is.
Computer language is very much different than our own, because, while we use 26 letters, computers use just 2 numbers. That’s right, computers communicate only using 0 and 1.
Read this sentence in English.
Simple right? This is how your computer sees that same sentence:
01010010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01000101 01101110 01100111 01101100 01101001 01110011 01101000 00101110.
That five word sentence easily becomes nearly impossible to read, every 8-number section of the above sentence (01010010) is a new letter.
How can computers communicate, work, calculate, and function with such gibberish?
Well, to tell that story, we’ll need to visit the 17th century.
A German mathematician by the name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed a 2-base number system in 1679 (“Binary system.”). He published his findings in 1703 in his article titled, Explanation of binary arithmetic, which uses only characters 0 & 1; with remarks about its utility and the meaning it gives to the ancient Chinese figures of Fuxi (Garfinkel and Grunspan 32). (Try saying THAT title 10 times fast).
Our standard numbering system is base-10, meaning we use 10 numbers (0–9). These numbers form the base of every other number. But Gottfried developed an entirely new numbering system, his was base-2, meaning he used two numbers (0–1). With these two numbers, all other numbers were created and represented. With his new system, Gottfried avoided nearly all multiplication tables (see they aren’t THAT important) and created simple rules for calculation (Garfinkel and Grunspan 32). His numbering system was called binary, because it used two numbers.
Let’s review a few simple problems and discover how the numbering system works.
Each number is represented by a combination of 0s and 1s. Of course 0 is represented by 0 and 1 is represented by 1.
For larger numbers, we run into some complications, but let’s review how base-2 works.
Base-2 starts at 0, then doubles every number after that, therefore it could be written in this way:
0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.
Or written another way:
2(^0), 2(^1), 2(^2), 2(^3), 2(^4), 2(^5), 2(^6), 2(^7)
As you can see, the base remains 2, and the power that each 2 is raised increases by 1, doubling each number. This forms the foundation of the binary numbering system. Now let’s explore how to represent a number in binary. Whenever I convert base-10, or decimal numbers, to binary I like to start with a quick table (this makes the process easy and quick on paper). Write out a table as follows:
Now let’s convert the number 55, into binary. We will start by finding the largest number that can be subtracted from 55 in the table. That number is 32. So we’ll place a 1, in the box under 32.
55–32 = 23. Now we do the process again. 23–16 = 7. We’ll place a 1 underneath 16.
8 doesn’t fit into 7, so we’ll enter a 0 under the 8.
7–4 = 3. We’ll place a 1 under 4.
3–2 = 1, Place a 1 under the 2.
And since 1–1 = 0. We’ll place a 1 under the 1 and 0’s everywhere else, and we’re done!
Our binary number is 00110111 which is equal to 55. To convert the number back to 55, simply reverse the process. Fill the table in with the binary number and add all the places where there is a 1. Therefore, 1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + 32 = 55.
Now, let’s consider a simple math problem using binary. Math with binary numbers is even easier than decimal (or base-10 numbers). Let’s add 55 to 10. 10 is 00001010 and 55 is 00110111. Our problem is 00110111 + 00001010. It’s the same as regular addition, but remember, you only get to use 0s and 1s.
Now let’s add. Start from the right. 1 + 0 = 1.
We’ve hit a snag. I encountered 1 + 1, which is 2 in decimal, but we can’t use 2, but we can use 2 in binary which is 10. So add and carry (write 0 underneath and carry the 1.). We’ll continue that same process and solve the problem.
So, our answer is 01000001. We can check our answer by plugging in into our table:
Now, we add the columns which have 1s. So, 64 + 1 = 65. We know that 55 + 10 = 65. So our answer is correct! Subtraction is carried out in the same way, just reverse. Division and multiplication are done in the same way as regular numbers as well.
So that’s binary in a nutshell.
But why is it so important and why is binary the only language of computers?
Well, at their core computers control electricity. When you send an email, the computer is only sending pulses of electricity. Really, computers are simply switches that control electricity. We’ll explore this concept more in future blogs (so be sure to follow me here on Medium).
Now think about a light switch. When you turn the switch to “ON” electricity flows to the bulb and the light comes on. When you switch it to “OFF,” electricity stops flowing and the bulb turns off. That’s how a computer works. But a computer is made of billions of tiny, microscopic transistors. Each transistor is a switch.
When you turn on your light, there are two options, ON and OFF.
There is nothing in the middle or onish or offish positions. It’s ON or OFF.
The same is true for transistors. They are either on or off, nothing in between. In binary, 1 represents ON and 0 represents OFF. So, when we see the binary number, 00110111, the computer turns transistors off, off, on, on, off, on, on, on. Now, this may seem confusing, you can’t turn a switch off, that’s already off. But computers work in cycles, so each cycle could be ON or OFF. When we see, off, off, the transistor is off for two cycles (sending no pulse of electricity), then on for two cycles (send one pulse for each cycle), etc.
Computers use the ON and OFF nature of transistors represented through binary for everything.
Every number, letter, shape, and even color on your screen has a binary translation. This is simple to understand with numbers, but how does binary represent this vast collection of information, including letters? During the early days of modern computing (less than one hundred years ago) when researchers wanted to build computers for more than calculation, computer scientists discovered this issue. They developed a system of codes to represent all information in the form of binary numbers.
One such method that isn’t as popular today, is ASCII, which stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” The ASCII table lists letters, uppercase and lowercase, numbers, and some symbols, with number codes that can be converted into binary. For example, capital letter A is ASCII code 65 which converts to 01000001 in binary. Each letter is 8 digits long. Let’s look at a quick example of the word HELLO.
H is 72 in the ASCII table or 01001000 in binary. E is 69 or 01000101. L is 76 or 01001100. O is 79 or 01001111.
So, the word HELLO is 01001000 01000101 01001100 01001100 01001111 in binary.
Of course, we humans don’t use binary. That’s where the computer’s operating systems (such as Windows) and programming languages (such as Java) are used. The computer converts the information into binary by itself in a process called compiling.
In binary we call each digit a bit (binary digit). And each grouping of 8 bits is called a byte. These bits and bytes are the primary measurements for the storage systems of a computer. I’m sure you’ve heard of a gigabyte when using a USB stick or maybe an external hard drive or when you bought a laptop. 1 gigabyte is about 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) bytes and about 8,000,000,000 (8 billion) bits.
In 1703, when Gottfried Leibnix published his article on binary arithmetic, he could never have dreamed of its use.
But binary has become the language of our world, even if none of us ever use it, see it, or speak it. Binary’s 0s and 1s power many of our homes, our TVs, smart watches, phones, computers, cars, and much, much more. Binary arithmetic is the ninth major milestone in the history of computing.
More on the Importance of Math:
More on the History of Computers: | https://medium.com/tech-is-a-tool/speaking-computer-the-binary-words-of-technology-6069d42c14e1 | ['Benjamin Rhodes'] | 2020-07-30 12:57:28.229000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Math', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Digital Life'] |
Turkey attempts to capture Iran’s territory by inciting Iranian Azeri separatists | H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Chairman of the Education and Human Resources Council (EHRC) presided over the virtual council meeting held via video conferencing. During the meeting, Sheikh Abdullah lauded the nursing cadres and their role played during the Covid-19 pandemic. He highlighted their selfless services, sacrifices and devotion to the country, being a key frontline worker. H.H. noted that their continuous efforts deserves appreciation and support.
“Nursing cadres are an integral part of the UAE’s health system, and we have a duty to provide them with a supportive environment, development opportunities and plans aimed at reinforcing their efficiency, as well as to highlight their contributions to drafting health plans, achieving national priorities and ensuring an ideal and flexible response to health crises and emergencies,” Sheikh Abdullah said.
Abdulrahman bin Mohamed Al Owais, Minister of Health and Prevention, presented the “National Strategy for Nursing and Midwifery Professions-Roadmap for 2025”. It showcases country’s readiness to adopt the most relevant and leading regional and global practices to bolster the healthcare system.
The country’s brand new strategy encourages more citizens to pursue the nursing and midwifery profession, promote related academic programmes, and raise the quality of these services across the country through five strategic pillars. These pillars are: governance and effective legislation, a comprehensive labour administration system for the nursing and midwifery profession, high-quality health and nursing services, improving the quality and innovation in education and professional development, and scientific research and evidence-based practice.
Hussain Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Minister of Education, presented the latest developments in education system amid the Covid-19 pandemic. He also highlighted the procedures and controls in place for governing attendance of students, teachers and administrative staff at public and private schools, nurseries, and universities.
Shamma Al Mazrui, Minister of State for Youth Affairs, suggested that a new criteria must be adopted for the requirements of accepting scholarships programmes, according to the best international standards.
The council also discussed the significance of broadening the room for scholarship destinations, fields, specialisations and languages, to help expand the knowledge gained by Emirati students.
The meeting was attended by Abdul Rahman bin Mohammad bin Nasser Al Owais, Minister of Health and Prevention, Hussain bin Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Minister of Education, Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, Minister of Culture and Youth, Jameela Al Muheiri, Minister of State for Public Education, Nasser bin Thani Al Hamli, Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation, Hessa Essa Buhumaid, Minister of Community Development, Abdullah bin Touq Al Marri, Minister of Economy, Dr. Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of State for Entrepreneurship and SMEs, Zaki Nusseibeh, Minister of State, and United Arab Emirates University Chancellor, Shamma bint Suhail Faris Al Mazrui, Minister of State for Youth Affairs, and Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, Secretary General of the Council.
Other attendees of the meeting were: Sara Awad Issa Musallam, Chairperson of the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge, Dr Abdulla Al Karam, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Director General of the Knowledge and Human Development Authority — Dubai, Dr. Muhadditha Yahya Al Hashimi, Chairperson of Sharjah Private Education Authority, and Muhamed Khalifa Al Nuaimi, Director of Education Affairs Office at the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court. | https://medium.com/@ajayvaseegaran/turkey-attempts-to-capture-irans-territory-by-inciting-iranian-azeri-separatists-9de51ef2294b | ['Ajay Vaseegaran'] | 2020-12-17 10:15:57.615000+00:00 | ['Iran', 'Opinion', 'Turkey'] |
Ketch — The Back Story. Every start-up has a back story. So… | Every start-up has a back story. So does Ketch. And this one is personal.
To understand why, we’ll need to rewind back to early 2017. Salesforce’s acquisition of Krux had closed a few months earlier and the “integration” process was kicking into 3rd gear. Having lived through various incarnations of ePrivacy, Safe Harbor, Model Clauses, etc., I was intimately familiar with how to build data management systems where user level data moved back and forth across the Atlantic, at least in a digital sense. But then came GDPR. And my entire world-view on how to store, process, and manage data shifted radically.
A few months into my tenure at Salesforce, I found myself leading the Engineering team for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and with May 25th 2018 fast approaching, GDPR compliance became the top product priority for me. Every product within Marketing Cloud had its own tech stack and while I was overseeing the development of all products, I was — as expected — deeply involved with the solution design for GDPR compliance in the Krux platform.
In GDPR parlance, Krux operated as a Data Processor with our customers being Data Controllers — the latter being a fancy legal term for businesses that have a direct relationship with end-users (or data subjects) and the former being companies that provide (software) services that manage and process user data on behalf of the Controllers.
Consent Management
GDPR requires businesses to operate with a “consent, opt-in” mindset — meaning that any end-user data that is used by a business can only be collected and used if the end-user has given the requisite consent. GDPR also requires businesses to explicitly declare the purpose(s) for which they are collecting user data and allow users to control if their data is used (or not used) for a given purpose.
Therefore, the first challenge for Krux was the collection of consent. Krux didn’t have a direct relationship with consumers so we had to provide a way for our customers to pass on the consent signals that they were collecting from their users. Consent Management Platforms had not cropped up yet so we ended up building a Consent Management API that was exposed to customers via our JavaScript tag, Mobile SDKs, and an HTTP(s) end-point. Some customers were not ready to use the Consent Management API in any form so we also provided the ability to upload consent signals using files uploaded to S3.
Once the consent signals had been collected, we had to put them to use. Before we could do that though, we had to figure out the most recent consent signature (think of the consent signature like a bitmap — a sequence of 0s or 1s with 1 place, or bit, for every data processing purpose in the Krux platform) for every user. The most-recent consent signature logs were rolling in nature — in other words, we had to retain the consent signature for every user regardless of when that user generated any activity for a given customer. Writing the map-reduce job to do this wasn’t hard, but the fact that we had to run it every day, for every customer made a material impact on our AWS costs.
Next, we had to assign a data processing purpose to each and every data processing job and then update the job to respect the consent choice made by the user.
As an example, consider the following query for the purpose of Analytics, which counts the total number of users generating at least 1 page view broken down by “site” for a given customer (each customer got a unique organization_id in the Krux platform):
SELECT event_site, COUNT(DISTINCT krux_user_id)
FROM user_events
WHERE
organization_id = '0xDEADC0DE' AND
event_type = 'PAGE_VIEW' AND
DATE_DIFF(now(), event_day) <= 30
GROUP BY event_site
To comply with GDPR, the above query had to be rewritten like so:
SELECT ue.event_site, COUNT(DISTINCT ue.krux_user_id)
FROM user_events ue, user_consent uc
WHERE
ue.organization_id = '0xDEADC0DE' AND
ue.event_type = 'PAGE_VIEW' AND
DATE_DIFF(now(), ue.event_day) <= 30 AND
ue.organization_id = uc.organization_id AND
ue.krux_user_id = uc.krux_user_id AND
uc.consent_purpose = 'analytics' AND
uc.consent_value = True
GROUP BY event_site
That looks straightforward enough. And for simple use-cases like that, it was. But Krux had a large number of fairly complex data processing jobs that were implemented using Hadoop and/or Spark which were not so straightforward to modify. The brute force approach worked in some cases, but in most cases, because performance could not degrade too much (or at all), we had to figure out clever ways of implementing that “join” in a cost-effective, efficient manner.
Rights Management
Under GDPR, a data subject (legal term for a consumer or user) can exercise multiple rights. The two that were most relevant for us were: RTBF (Right to be Forgotten) and Portability — or, in plain English, delete my data and give me all my data, respectively.
On the surface, this seems simple — just issue the following queries:
For RTBF:
DELETE FROM user_data_table
WHERE
customer_id = '0xDEADC0DE' AND
email_hash = sha256(‘[email protected]’)
or, for the Soft Delete and/or Data Obfuscation peanut gallery:
UPDATE user_data_table SET
email_hash = sha256('gobbledygook'),
gender = 'other',
age_range = 'other',
household_income = 'other',
customer_status = 'other',
is_deleted = True
WHERE
customer_id = '0xDEADC0DE' AND
email_hash = sha256(‘[email protected]’)
And, for Portability:
SELECT gender, age_range, household_income, customer_status
FROM user_data_table
WHERE
customer_id = '0xDEADC0DE' AND
email_hash = sha256(‘[email protected]’)
If only it were that simple. If you have a modern data technology stack like we did at Krux (most companies fall into this category now), user data was spread across multiple types of data management systems:
Raw Log files in Blob Stores (S3)
Processed, semi-structured data sets in Blob Stores (S3)
NewSQL Data Warehouses (Redshift)
NoSQL Key-value Stores (DynamoDb)
Our data technology stack had grown and scaled organically and while we weren’t moving fast and breaking things, we were definitely moving fast. Which is to say that we didn’t have all of the metadata about our various data assets stored in a centralized Data Catalog that we could easily query to figure out which S3 locations, Redshift tables, and DynamoDb tables we had to process in order to retrieve or delete all the data for a given user.
The process of discovering all the data assets that we had to query to delete or retrieve user data was painful. A significant amount of time went into that. Not to mention all the extra AWS data processing costs we incurred to do the discovery.
All in all, the GDPR compliance project consumed 6 of our top-notch engineers for just over 6 months. While that cost was significant, it paled in comparison to the 30 % increase in our AWS costs.
And now, Ketch
Which brings us to Ketch, where we are building a Data Control Platform that provides
A Policy Center that allows our customers to maintain a centralized repository of privacy compliance and data governance policies
that allows our customers to maintain a centralized repository of privacy compliance and data governance policies A true Consent Management Service that allows our customers to configure their privacy posture via the Ketch Policy Center, present a Privacy Experience to capture consent consistent with that posture
that allows our customers to configure their privacy posture via the Ketch Policy Center, present a Privacy Experience to capture consent consistent with that posture An Orchestration Engine that allows our customers to define workflows that manage the flow of data subject rights (DSR) requests and propagation of consent signals to internal and external systems that manage and process user data on their behalf
that allows our customers to define workflows that manage the flow of data subject rights (DSR) requests propagation of consent signals to internal and external systems that manage and process user data on their behalf A Data Asset Manager that discovers and builds a searchable Data Catalog of data assets across all the data management systems — SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, Blob, Structured, Semi-structured — used by a customer
that discovers and builds a searchable Data Catalog of data assets across all the data management systems — SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, Blob, Structured, Semi-structured — used by a customer A Data Classification Service that detects and classifies private and sensitive data, and identifies all the tables, files, partitions, etc. that store personal user data
that detects and classifies private and sensitive data, and identifies all the tables, files, partitions, etc. that store personal user data A Data Fortification Engine that enforces data governance policies defined in the Policy Center across all the data management systems used by the customer
Remember that 6 devs/6 months with a 30% increase in AWS costs — those numbers would have been halved across the board if I had access to Ketch’s Data Control Platform, specifically, the Policy Center, the Consent Management Service, and the Data Asset Manager.
So, yeah. This one is personal. I am building Ketch for my former self. Ketch is the platform I wish I had access to back in 2017.
P.S. To keep this post somewhat readable, I have glossed over many of the details of our generalized GDPR design and implementation. If you are curious to learn more or want to discuss this further, please give me a shout! | https://medium.com/@vsvaidya/ketch-the-back-story-6c4ef44f7f86 | ['Vivek Vaidya'] | 2021-03-26 05:00:40.949000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Startups', 'Data Governance', 'Ketch', 'Gdpr'] |
Variables, hoisting, and the temporal dead zone in JavaScript | Photo by Christopher Robin Ebbinghaus on Unsplash
Introduction:
Variable hoisting is one of the simplest but still misunderstood concepts in JavaScript. There are still a few of us who feel that in Javascript variable declaration is physically moved to the top of the function block. Although conceptually it is much simpler to visualize and understand the variable being physically moved to the top, that is not how it happens.
Let's understand this with an example, consider the code below
function test() {
console.log(myVar);
var myVar = 10;
console.log(myVar);
}
test(); // Output
> undefined
> 10
Understanding the output
The simple way: The variable declarations are hoisted, and that essentially means the above code gets interpreted as
function test() {
var myVar;
console.log(myVar);
myVar = 10;
console.log(myVar);
}
test();
The detailed way: Javascript executes code in two phases, the creation phase, and the execution phase.
The creation phase: Whenever the function call happens, the JS engine creates a function scope and in that stores all the variable declarations and initializes them to undefined.
The execution phase: Here, when we try to access the variable myVar for the first time, the engine can see the variable name in the memory (stored in the creation phase) with the value undefined. Thus we can see undefined printed in the console. And once the value is assigned to myVar, 10 is printed.
But what happens with let and const? Do they not get hoisted? Do they not get created in memory during the creation phase?
Let’s try the same code with let:
function test() {
console.log(myVar);
let myVar = 10;
console.log(myVar);
}
test(); // Output
> VM94:2 Uncaught ReferenceError: Cannot access 'myVar' before initialization
at test (<anonymous>:2:14)
at <anonymous>:6:1
We got a reference error.
This happens because the variable myVar is not reachable until it is declared. Such a state, where the variable is present in the scope but is unreachable, is called Temporal Dead Zone.
So, does this mean that when we use let and const, the variable is not created in the memory during the creation phase?
Actually, it does get created in the memory during the creation phase, the only difference between let and var is that the variable is not initialized with anything if it is let, while var is initialized with undefined.
To confirm this, let's look at the code below:
function test() {
console.log(typeof myUndefinedVariable);
console.log(typeof myVar);
let myVar = 10;
}
test(); // Output
> undefined
> VM114:3 Uncaught ReferenceError: Cannot access 'myVar' before initialization
at test (<anonymous>:3:10)
at <anonymous>:6:1
The above output proves that the JS engine knows that myVar is present in the scope, but it is just not accessible.
There is not a single scenario where we need to access a variable before it is declared, and if there is, it must be incorrect.
So, to catch errors at an early stage and prevent the nuisance that might occur because of the variables declared after their use, the concept of the temporal dead zone was introduced in ES6.
“Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.” –Vera Nazarian
References: | https://medium.com/@gauravawale/variables-hoisting-and-the-temporal-dead-zone-in-javascript-bd5bf3b6af21 | ['Gaurav Awale'] | 2021-06-17 15:54:00.974000+00:00 | ['Advanced Javascript', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript', 'Hoisting', 'ES6'] |
New Examination Vendor for PMI Certification from July 2019 | PMI is moving Exam vendor from Promteric to Pearson VUE to provide better exam experience worldwide (except in China).
Pearson VUE will provide the following
Availability of more test locations — Life becomes easier when there is an option to choose a test site that is much more convenient. With Pearson VUE, candidates have additional test location to select.
Online proctoring for PMI-ACP and CAPM — from now on the candidates can be tested online through Pearson VUE. This is an awesome thing for the candidates, as they can stay at home or office only to finish their tests.
Flexibility to US Service members — Pearson VUE will provide a global U.S Federal and military on base test canter network in the marketplace, thereby helping the US service and the government to test where assist.
It is important to review the following steps to determine whether online proctored is appropriate for you.
Online proctored exams have specific technical, system, environment, and testing protocol requirements which must be met to successfully take an exam.
Have to review them before you register for your exam to make sure your system is ready when the actual exam time comes.
Now candidates can check the test from their home or office for increased convenience. No other certifications are scheduled for online proctoring at this time.
What should do now?
Without any change, you can pursue candidates through the application process.
Candidates will lead to test vendor, based on the timeframe, they plan to test.
If provide details about your schedule or testing in the process, have to update them.
Transition Timeline
There will be periods of planning and testing with both Prometric and Pearson VUE. Most candidates already selected will not be affected by this change.
Important Dates
1st March 2019: PMI-ACP scheduling available at Pearson VUE.
1st April 2019: PMI-ACP testing begins at Pearson VUE centers and online proctoring
1st April 2019: Scheduling available at Pearson VUE for PMP, PgMP, PfMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-SP and PMI-RMP exams
30th June 2019: Last date for testing at Prometric centers
1st July 2019: Testing begins at Pearson VUE centers for PMP, PgMP, PfMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-SP and PMI-RMP exams
Candidates, Who Already Scheduled through Prometric
Candidates who have already scheduled a test with Prometric on or before 30 June 2019 can keep that appointment and test as planned for certification exam.
Candidates scheduled with Prometric on or after 1st July 2019, we will work with Prometric and Pearson VUE to have their test appointment moved to Pearson VUE.
Candidates Who Have Not Scheduled with Prometric
Candidates who want to test before 30th June 2019 will need to schedule their exam at a Prometric test center location before 19th April 2019.
Candidates, who want to test after 30th June 2019, will not be able to schedule their exams until 19 April 2019. Candidates will receive Pearson VUE exam information on 19th April 2019, so they can schedule their exam for any date on or after 1st July 2019.
For Paper-based Testing (PBT)
Pearson VUE to transition any candidates that are scheduled for a PBT exam on or after 1st July 2019 to Pearso VUE test center location. | https://medium.com/@infocareerpmi/new-examination-vendor-for-pmi-certification-from-july-2019-9860154bbe27 | ['Pmi Infocareer'] | 2019-04-12 11:06:37.997000+00:00 | ['Certification'] |
What Is Artificial Neural Network And How Is It Useful ? | An artificial neural network (ANN) is the piece of a computing system designed to simulate the way the human brain analyzes and processes information. It is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and solves problems that would prove impossible or difficult by human or statistical standards. ANNs have self-learning capabilities that enable them to produce better results as more data becomes available.
Human brains interpret the context of real-world situations in a way that computers can’t. Neural networks were first developed in the 1950s to address this issue. An artificial neural network is an attempt to simulate the network of neurons that make up a human brain so that the computer will be able to learn things and make decisions in a humanlike manner. ANNs are created by programming regular computers to behave as though they are interconnected brain cells.
Artificial Neural Networks are the computational models that are inspired by the human brain. Many of the recent advancements have been made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, including Voice Recognition, Image Recognition, Robotics using Artificial Neural Networks.
These biological methods of computing are considered to be the next major advancement in the Computing Industry.
Artificial Neural Networks can be best described as the biologically inspired simulations that are performed on the computer to do a certain specific set of tasks like clustering, classification, pattern recognition etc. In general, Artificial Neural Networks is a biologically inspired network of neurons (which are artificial in nature) configured to perform a specific set of tasks.
Understanding Artificial Neural Network
Artificial neural networks are built like the human brain, with neuron nodes interconnected like a web. The human brain has hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. Each neuron is made up of a cell body that is responsible for processing information by carrying information towards (inputs) and away (outputs) from the brain.
An ANN has hundreds or thousands of artificial neurons called processing units, which are interconnected by nodes. These processing units are made up of input and output units. The input units receive various forms and structures of information based on an internal weighting system, and the neural network attempts to learn about the information presented to produce one output report. Just like humans need rules and guidelines to come up with a result or output, ANNs also use a set of learning rules called back propagation, an abbreviation for backward propagation of error, to perfect their output results.
An ANN initially goes through a training phase where it learns to recognize patterns in data, whether visually, aurally, or textually. During this supervised phase, the network compares its actual output produced with what it was meant to produce the desired output. The difference between both outcomes is adjusted using back propagation. This means that the network works backward, going from the output unit to the input units to adjust the weight of its connections between the units until the difference between the actual and desired outcome produces the lowest possible error.
Architecture of an Artificial Neural Network
To understand the architecture of an artificial neural network, we need to understand what a typical neural network contains. In order to describe a typical neural network, it contains a large number of artificial neurons (of course, yes, that is why it is called an artificial neural network) which are termed units arranged in a series of layers. Let us take a look at the different kinds of layers available in an artificial neural network
1) Input Layer : The output layers contain units that respond to the information that is fed into the system and also whether it learned any task or not. It contains those units (Artificial Neurons) which receive input from the outside world on which the network will learn, recognize about or otherwise process
2) Hidden Layer : The hidden layers are mentioned hidden in between input layers and the output layers. The only job of a hidden layer is to transform the input into something meaningful that the output layer/unit can use in some way.
Most of the artificial neural networks are all interconnected, which means that each of the hidden layers is individually connected to the neurons in its input layer and also to its output layer leaving nothing to hang in the air. This makes it possible for a complete learning process and also learning occurs to the maximum when the weights inside the artificial neural network get updated after each iteration.
3) Output Layer : The output layers contain units that respond to the information that is fed into the system and also whether it learned any task or not. It contains units that respond to the information about how it’s learned any task.
Most Neural Networks are fully connected which means to say each hidden neuron is fully linked to every neuron in its previous layer(input) and to the next layer (output) layer.
How does Artificial Neural Network work ?
Artificial neural networks use different layers of mathematical processing to make sense of the information it’s fed. Typically, an artificial neural network has anywhere from dozens to millions of artificial neurons-called units-arranged in a series of layers. The input layer receives various forms of information from the outside world. This is the data that the network aims to process or learn about. From the input unit, the data goes through one or more hidden units. The hidden unit’s job is to transform the input into something the output unit can use.
The majority of neural networks are fully connected from one layer to another. These connections are weighted; the higher the number the greater influence one unit has on another, similar to a human brain. As the data goes through each unit the network is learning more about the data. On the other side of the network is the output units, and this is where the network responds to the data that it was given and processed.
In order for ANNs to learn, they need to have a tremendous amount of information thrown at them called a training set. When you are trying to teach an ANN how to differentiate a cat from dog, the training set would provide thousands of images tagged as a dog so the network would begin to learn. Once it has been trained with the significant amount of data, it will try to classify future data based on what it thinks it’s seeing (or hearing, depending on the data set) throughout the different units. During the training period, the machine’s output is compared to the human- provided description of what should be observed. If they are the same, the machine is validated. If it’s incorrect, it uses back propagation to adjust its learning-going back through the layers to tweak the mathematical equation. Known as deep learning, this is what makes a network intelligent.
Application of Artificial Neural Network
Artificial neural networks are paving the way for life-changing applications to be developed for use in all sectors of the economy. Artificial intelligence platforms that are built on ANNs are disrupting the traditional ways of doing things. From translating web pages into other languages to having a virtual assistant order groceries online to conversing with chatbots to solve problems, AI platforms are simplifying transactions and making services accessible to all at negligible costs.
There are several waysANNs can be deployed including to classify information, predict outcomes and cluster data. As the networks process and learn from data they can classify a given data set into a predefined class, it can be trained to predict outputs that are expected from a given input and can identify a special feature of data to then classify the data by that special feature. Google uses alayered neural network to power Google photos as well as to power its “watch next” recommendations for YouTube videos. Facebook uses artificial neural networks for itsDeep Face Algorithm, which can recognize specific faces with 97% accuracy. It’s also an ANN that powers Skype’s ability to do translations in real-time.
Here are some important uses :
1) Face Recognition: Face recognition entails comparing an image with a database of saved faces to identify the person in that input picture. Face detection mechanism involves dividing images into two parts; one containing targets (faces) and one providing the background .The associated assignment of face detection has direct relevance to the fact that images need to be analyzed and faces identified, earlier than they can be recognized.
2) Named Entity Recognition: The main task of named entity recognition (NER) is to classify named entities, such as Ram, Google, India etc., into predefined categories like persons, organizations, locations, time, dates, and so on. Many NER systems were already created, and the best of them use neural networks.
3) Speech recognition: has many applications, such as home automation, mobile telephony, virtual assistance, hands-free computing, video games, and so on. Neutral networks are widely used in this area.
4) Signature Verification : Signature verification technique is a non-vision based technique. For this application, the first approach is to extract the feature or rather the geometrical feature set representing the signature. With these feature sets, we have to train the neural networks using an efficient neural network algorithm. This trained neural network will classify the signature as being genuine or forged under the verification stage.
5) Paraphrase Detection: Paraphrase detection determines whether two sentences have the same meaning. This task is especially important for question answering systems since there are many ways to ask the same question. | https://medium.com/@geekygrid/what-is-artificial-neural-network-and-how-is-it-useful-666d52faca87 | ['Ram Ratan M'] | 2020-12-27 07:44:39.730000+00:00 | ['Artificial Neural Network', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Computer Science', 'Tech', 'Blogger'] |
Modified Scene | Modified Scene
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
Sometimes, when I put on my sunglasses, the words disappear; then I know it is night, and when it is night everything must be licked to show its message.
Inserted into a kind of panicked oblivion, I become enamoured of the opposite situation; I mean, I become other to myself, I am the fluid and the vessel that holds it.
The sense of where the stage ends up is never written down; there will be, I know, empty seats at some point, and perhaps many points.
After new cinnamon buns and a carafe or two of coffee, the whole scene slid into the garbage, reinvented itself, and carried on with its dance.
I groaned at the mountain of edits before me. Yes, I spiraled into a kind of red-inked reverie but didn’t play the right music for it: I miss Nine Inch Nails sometimes.
I couldn’t be completely given over to dismay; I tossed the sunglasses and picked up the paper. Everything I looked at was modified by now. | https://medium.com/artrock-sexual-manifestations-queer-madness/modified-scene-6063d4d74869 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-10 14:44:08.480000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Madness', 'Image', 'Poetry', 'Editing'] |
Ways of working (in progress) | This is an attempt to write down the approach we are starting to formalise around our ‘squads’ — it is a work in progress but is starting to make sense. It is inspired by working practices I witnessed or experienced at Defra, mySociety, ONS and elsewhere →
We work in the open by default — if something needs to be dealt with in private we deal with that be exception.
What open looks like for us:
Github
A new squad gets a new repository on the Notbinary Github.
This repository is used for:
Online Kanban board (Github Projects)
Issues are used for tracking ongoing tasks
All code and prototypes
Github Pages site to document outcomes and decisions
Weeknotes should be published at the end of each week summarising activity and link circulated to the team and client(s)
At the end of an engagement we want to be able to provide a single Github repo that represents everything we did with a Github Pages site that provides all the relevant context — the expectation isn’t that the code is reusable in the open source sense but that all our learning is available and we show our workings (through the code!). Also our ambition is that when we do Service Assessments or similar we don’t need a slidedeck — we just step through the repo using the Github Pages site as the guide (as such we have created a GOV.UKesque Pages template — as well as an upcoming Notbinary one.)
Agile
We are agile not Agile™. We do daily updates via Slack rather than traditional stand-ups, we do regular retrospectives (using FunRetro and Slack calls), for Alphas we work with a loosely one week sprint cadence but a Kanban-esque backlog. We are #noestimates during Alpha.
For Beta we take a more rigorous approach but still relatively lightweight by default. Two week sprints are more likely. Some high level estimating is likely to creep in. We will also be much more driven by TDD and as such the ‘stories’ will be much more precisely articulated that during Alpha.
In both cases we maintain public roadmaps as well.
Slack
Each squad has a private channel on the Notbinary Slack.
Slack is the default team communication channel.
This channel includes
A user-group so all members can be contacted at once
Invited members from the client-side (one channel guests in Slack parlance)
‘The Standup Alice’ chatbot to handle daily updates via Slack
Email
When email communication is required with the client(s) the team email should be BCC’d in to all communications to ensure nothing is lost in team members inboxes if they are unavailable (the archive can be searched via Notbinary’s Google Groups account).
Meetings
We have ’Show and Tells’ per sprint. These are facilitated by the Delivery Lead. They should also act as the primary stakeholder meeting for broader conversations.
Otherwise seek to minimise large group meetings. Where possible one-to-one or small target conversations with subject matter experts are our preference.
Makers
We firmly believe in what David Kelly of IDEO said;
“A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”
The goal of our squads is software not slideware. | https://medium.com/notbinary/ways-of-working-in-progress-5db4656bb753 | [] | 2019-02-01 20:14:14.416000+00:00 | ['Agile'] |
Is Impact Investing Impactful? | Source: Philanthropic Foundations Canada
Impact investing is just like regular investing, but in addition to generating a financial return, impact investors also aim to create tangible, positive social or environmental impact. Impact investing allows investors who have specific social values to address their values by providing capital to companies that have the ability to carry out change towards them.
The history of impact investing
“Impact investing” is a relatively new term, being coined in 2007 by The Rockefeller Foundation. However, its roots from socially responsible investing date as far back to Biblical times, when Jewish law mandated ethical investing.
Socially responsible investing began in the U.S. during the 18th century, when the Methodists avoided investments in gambling, liquor, tobacco, and the slave trade. Modern socially responsible investing in the U.S. picked up as the investment management industry grew during the latter half of the 20th century. Values related to social issues like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and climate change were all reflected in the industry.
It is important to note the subtle difference between impact investing and socially responsible investing. While the two share many principles, they differ in approach. Socially responsible investing focuses on the process, aiming to do no harm. Evolving from socially responsible investing, impact investing emphasizes the outcome, trying to actively do good. For example, a socially responsible investment might be a company that meets the majority of their energy needs with renewable energy, while an impact investment might be a company that develops a more accessible and efficient source of renewable energy.
Nowadays, impact investing is becoming mainstream. Some of the world’s largest investment firms — like Blackrock, which manages over $6 trillion — have committed to serving a “social purpose” as part of their missions. And as the industry has continuously grown over the past decades, the size of the industry is now (as of June 2020) estimated by the Global Impact Investing Network to be $715 billion.
Does impact investing have an impact?
Critics of impacting investing argue that impacting investing is not effective at actually making an impact. A report by Let’s Fund, a social impact crowdfunding organization, argues that donating will usually be more effective than investing at creating social impact.
Their report finds that truly impactful companies are hard to find. Because companies trying to make an impact have the difficult problem of balancing social impact and financial return, it is hard to identify whether or not social initiatives will be successful. Let’s Fund’s research suggests that impact investors do not carry out rigorous enough analyses on impact. As a Vox article about the same report says, “Articles about the marvels of social impact investment tend to emphasize the inspiring stories of the founders or the employees, not the expected benefits from the business.”
The report also argues that it’s difficult to provide “additionality” in companies, which cause them “to be more successful than [they] would otherwise have been.” If an impact investor merely displaces another a socially neutral investor’s investment in a company, then they are not providing any additionality to that company. This causes the need for financial sacrifice. In a big, public market, a company with the best-expected financial return will usually attract the most investors. Therefore, in order to provide additionality, impact investors usually have to sacrifice financial return to provide companies capital that they would not otherwise receive.
It’s not impossible to outperform the market with impact investing, though. According to a 2017 study by the Global Impact Investing Network, a group of 71 impact funds had an average annual return of 5.8%. While this is lackluster compared to the S&P 500’s approximately 10%, the top 5% of impact funds had a return equal to or greater than 22.1%. This shows that, just like conventional investing, stock picking/fund manager selection is very important.
The Let’s Fund report finds that philanthropic donations are “likely upwards of 10x more impactful” than impact investing. However, impact investing is not totally fruitless — the report identifies a few circumstances in which impact investing is a good approach. They are when an investor can accept a financial sacrifice, work on a problem neglected by other investors, invest in private companies to more easily provide additionality, or have an informational advantage to reliably identify impact opportunities.
Moreover, Let’s Fund acknowledges that money in impact or socially responsible investments will almost always be more beneficial to society than money otherwise not responsibly invested or donated. So, unless there is a day when investors would rather donate their money instead of investing it, impact investing will continue to serve a purpose by allowing investors to address their social conscience while also making a profit. | https://medium.com/junior-economist/is-impact-investing-impactful-dca355391ab | ['Kyle Tang'] | 2020-11-12 02:17:44.161000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Finance', 'Money', 'Investing', 'Social Impact'] |
How Data Visualization Helps Us See the Effects of Climate Change | How Data Visualization Helps Us See the Effects of Climate Change
Mapping techniques highlight how quickly the glacier margins in Glacier National Park are receding
The importance of maps
I’ve always considered maps to be powerful visuals because of how universal they are. They’re a pretty standardized encoding system, as we learn about maps and what the legends mean all the way back in school, and then we keep seeing them throughout our lives, everywhere from the weather channel to planning our commutes.
When using maps for data visualization, we build on all those lessons taught about maps throughout the years. If we choose to visualize a metric by country on a world map, we can introduce characteristics that that can capture the interest for a wider audience. Let’s take life expectancy as an example. This may not be something you’ve considered in the past, but if you were shown a map of average life expectancy, I’m fairly certain you’d look to see how your country compared to others.
(Romania, where I was born, averages 74 years, and I’m pretty confident you also checked your home country.)
Methods for visualizing data on maps have become more advanced to meet the needs of our global landscape. The Tableau-Mapbox integration has made exploring map data increasingly easy, leading to some interesting visuals such as how Africa would look like without forests or what the military presence looks like in Syria.
Maps and climate change
Inspired by the many compelling visuals, I set out to explore the effects of climate change using maps. Climate change is a complex topic that first came under the name of “global warming.” That term caused people to associate climate change with weather, which is the shorter-term manifestation of overall climate trends. This, in turn, led to questions like “How can the Earth be getting warmer if we just had a really cold winter?”
Climate is a longer-term trend than seasons and can be harder to understand intuitively, because singular weather events can skew perception of what the overall climate trend looks like. This is where visualizing data can help us look past our own experience of the weather and instead focus on long-term patterns and trends that exist on a scale we otherwise would have trouble noticing. A good proxy to understand climate change is to look at geographical units that would otherwise be stable and see how they evolved over the years. The most straightforward example for this is glaciers.
Why is the melting of glaciers always mentioned in climate change debates?
The most commonly known consequence of melting glaciers is rising sea levels, but it’s just one of many. According to the WWF, the melting process increases coastal erosion, creates more frequent coastal storms and affects the habitat of wildlife such as walruses and polar bears. Through continual melt, glaciers are a source of water throughout the year for many animals, and help regulate the stream temperatures for animals that need cold water to survive. When a glacier shrinks, that cyclical source of water disappears.
It’s difficult to remember what a glacier looked like 10 years ago compared to now. While pictures of glacier valleys before and after melting can provide an interesting visual, they can be seen as anecdotal, and lack a certain quantitative element to them. We know glaciers are melting, but how fast and by how much? What do the glaciers look like now, and what are the implications? I decided to see if I could use Tableau and map data to visualize how the glaciers are shrinking over time, to see if I could help answer some of those questions.
Choosing Glacier National Park
2.9% of the Earth is covered with glaciers, so representing all the glaciers in the world in one visualization is tricky. Not only that, but there is no universal, consistent dataset of all glacier margins that is detailed enough to derive meaningful visualizations from. As a result, I chose to narrow down my analysis to Glacier National Park, a forest preserve that spans over 1 million acres (4,000 square kilometers) between Canada and the US state of Montana. It’s home to more than 1,000 different species of plants and animals. Currently, it’s home to 37 named glaciers that have been evolving over time.
The USGS (US Geological Survey) has collected a time series spanning 49 years of the 37 named glaciers and their margins based on aerial imagery. The dataset consists of shape files that can be overlayed to produce a comparison of what the park looked like 50 years ago versus now.
Full visualization can be found here.
Looking at some of the glaciers with the most recession (as percentage of their initial span in square meters), we can compare the 1966 margins (dark blue) with the 2015 margins (very light blue).
These comparisons tell a story that is less than ideal. Taking Herbst Glacier and Two Ocean Glacier as examples, we can see that over 80% of the main glacier body area has disappeared. Summing up the losses, we find that over 7.6 million square meters of glacier area has receded. That’s over 1,000 football fields lost just out of this one national park in Montana. Below are sevenof the glaciers visualized:
What can we do next?
There is a wealth of resources that address how to slow down the effects of climate change, so access to information is clearly not the problem. From a data perspective, what we can do is help understand it better by providing the information in an accessible way. One of my favorite Tableau vizzes presents the topic of ocean plastic in a way that made me look at it closely, even after scrolling past multiple articles with the same theme throughout the years. The method in which data in presented has a great impact on whether the information is consumed.
So I invite you to dig into the data, visualize it yourself, find key insights, and share with others. In doing so, we have the ability to make others see the issues more clearly and in turn, work to address those issues. | https://medium.com/nightingale/how-data-visualization-helps-us-see-the-effects-of-climate-change-8b937ab7a71f | ['Maria Ilie'] | 2019-12-27 13:01:01.135000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Climate Change', 'Data Science', 'Mapping', 'Data Visualization'] |
Physical Intimidation | Then there is that one charismatic person who goes entirely against this stereotype. They enter a room and their quiet presence demands attention, respect and authority.
I don’t know how some people pull this off. But I’ve seen it in movies and real life alike. It’s not their clothes or hair or a stern, determined look on their face that creates this aura. It’s something else, something deeper at the core of who they are.
You know when someone walks in and you just know they’ve been through a lot and won’t back down, especially not because of a silly reason of someone being bigger than them.
Maybe when you fall in love, this deeper core is what attracts you. Its probably the reason why so many people end up marrying people they’d never expect to get spend their whole lives with.
Physical confrontation shouldn’t stop you from being you and holding up whatever you stand for. At the end of the day, the worst case scenario is that you’ll get beaten up. Which probably won’t happen as most of these really heated arguments that are worth arguing for, take place in work environments.
So next time just say what you have to and deal with whatever follows later.
LV | https://medium.com/@lvthinks/physical-intimidation-27a0e1cd508 | ['Lavan Vickneswaran'] | 2019-07-13 13:50:49.872000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Development'] |
Sheep in the wolf’s skin. Yea yea, what?? | Yea yea, what??!
We all heard about wolf in the sheep’s skin.
But have you seen sheep in the wolve’s skin? I mean literally look around you.
You may see a lot of toughness, lot of stories, a lot of a lot of stuff. We walk daily around things we have no clue that’s totally something else. Once we find out there was something else going on, we call it getting “WOKE”. You literally can’t look at things the same way after it.
Literally speaking, we mainly know and focus on the first ones ”wolf in the sheep’s skin” a lot more, because we hate how fraudulent people are, due to our bad experiences with them.
Can we say this the same way about people that inflict others with something good? Like they portray something bad(or neutral), but kind of people can feel something else from them all the way?
One example of this would be: sheep that will look like a wolf and kill each wolf one by one because wolves were killing the flock of the sheep.
Literally when you look around with the “naive” eyes, you can’t tell a difference between sheep in the wolve’s skin, wolf in the sheep’s skin and just the regular sheep and wolf. Mainly when they’re in the group together.
If you are a legend, you don’t freaking see the outer layer as the one defining what’s inside. You must be in 21st century if you do. Check your heart. | https://medium.com/@matdbrava/sheep-in-the-wolf-skin-ac324c0a2b7b | ['Matúš Dúbrava'] | 2020-12-26 04:23:16.547000+00:00 | ['Humanity', 'Everyday Life', 'Sheep', 'Wolves', 'Mindset'] |
Remote Year Month #6 in Review: Prague | And with that, my first 6 months of Remote Year have wrapped up. It is hard to believe that it has been 6 months since I was last working in Toronto. Now spending a few days at home in Winnipeg, it feels both strange and familiar to be home. I love seeing friends and family but also miss my Tramily (never really thought I would use that word). The Remote Year group really becomes part of everything you do and it feels a little strange to be removed.
Prague was the only city on my Remote Year itinerary that wasn’t new for me. I loved getting to see it from a more local side, learning about the nuances that make the city so unique. Below is my month in review. | https://medium.com/go-remote/remote-year-month-6-in-review-prague-f1a1230fa16c | ['Vanesa Cotlar'] | 2018-08-03 02:38:47.820000+00:00 | ['Remote Year', 'Digital Nomads', 'Lifestyle', 'Travel', 'Experience'] |
Down the Middle | Spiralbound
Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman. | https://medium.com/spiralbound/down-the-middle-8a570a2dcfe0 | ['Grant Reynolds'] | 2019-04-19 11:01:00.846000+00:00 | ['Pain', 'Memoir', 'Health', 'Comics', 'Emergency Room'] |
Adobe Xd Gradients | Gradients are very useful for Designing Something attractive inside a UI Design. Therefore for all Adobe XD users, We have created this sweet short article in which we will give you a simple guide and list down some useful UI Kits, Website resources for a better selection of gradients for your UI design..
How to Create Better Gradients
You can watch the above video to find out how you can create beautiful UI Design with Gradients..
Some Quick Instructions for Creating Better Gradients are:
Select the element Go to the Color Panel Select the Gradient option Choose gradients to shape you want to use.. linear or round gradient And customise according to your need..
Some Adobe Xd Gradients UI Kits
There are various UI Kit available for better Gradients Work.. these are the UI kit popular for their gradients collection.. some have big and some have a small collection of gradients
And most importantly all of them are Free.. so, without any delay let’s look at them
1. Gradient Collection
By Vishal Ganage
This is one of the famous gradients collection kits for Adobe Xd. This kit has 60 Pre-made gradients that help you in better selection of gradients for perfect designing..
2. Gradient Collection
By Hannah Milan
This UI kit is also very helpful for choosing simple gradients for your UI Design some people love that because they hate adjusting the gradients again and again for perfection therefore they prefer using gradients.
Some Gradients Resources Website
These are some of the very useful websites for gradients you can go and check their amazing collection of gradients..
1. Web Gradients
This website is my favourite gradients website as it has many useful gradients collection.. these websites have every type of gradients shades.. so go check them out
Website Link: https://webgradients.com/
2. UI Gradients
Another website that many designers use because of its big collection of gradients.. it has some of the very common gradients and some very unique and you can use them for free..
3. CSS Gradients
This website is one of the great websites for designers who love gradients as it has many websites links that contains a collection of gradients.. so go the website
So these are some of the best resources for Xd gradients if you like the resources then clap 👏👏 for this article.. and also subscribe our account for better articles thanks. | https://medium.com/uiblogger/adobe-xd-gradients-19c77a96f127 | ['Ui Blogger'] | 2020-12-25 08:06:10.005000+00:00 | ['UI Design', 'Gradient', 'Designer', 'UI', 'Adobe Xd'] |
How the Soviets Used Child Labour to Produce Weapons | How the Soviets Used Child Labour to Produce Weapons
PPD-40 submachine guns being assembled by young girls 1944
In 1944 the tide of the Second World War(WWII) had changed in the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union had to dedicate all of its assets and delegate all of its human resources in order to commit to the biggest offensive attack of WWII. It was time to push back the Axis and bring the fight to their doorstep, but for this to happen the Soviet Union would require an enormous armament for all of its ten million soldiers. All of the men capable to fight were sent on the front. It is imperative to mention that the Soviet Union was the only nation that allowed women to fight in the Second World War (direct combat).
This meant that the only human resources which could contribute to the war production of the Soviet Union were children. How old you may asl? Old enough for them to screw a bolt, from the research done by some Soviet historians from the Cold War era the average age for a child working in a weapon factory during the Second World War was around ten years of age. You may also ask if these children were forced into child labor and to that, I say that it is the predicament that was forcing them rather than any specific person. If they worked, they got food, if they didn’t then they would have starved to death.
The Red Army in 1944
After the battle of Stalingrad where the tide of the war had changed, many had volunteered to join the Red Army in order to stop the fascists once and for all. In fact, so many people volunteered that the Soviet Union simply did not have enough weapons to supply to all the soldiers. Until late 1944, many battles led to a soldier being offered a rifle and a second soldier being offered bullets for the rifle. The orders were simple, follow the soldier with the rifle until he dies, upon his death take his rifle and continue fighting.
Red Army marching out of Stalingrad in 1944 (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
Some historians refer to the Red Army from 1944 as the “unarmed army” for the lack of weapon supplies. With so many volunteers for the Red Army, the weapon production had slowed down and there were not many viable solutions rather than having all the children work to produce and assemble weapons. Most of the weapons of the Soviet Union such as the Mosin Nagant rifle and the PPD-40 submachine gun were easy to assemble, some may say as easy as a child’s play.
Production of weapons and ammunition
A big majority of the child labor in war production was occupied with the assembly of weapons and the production of ammunition (mainly packaging the ammunition). They were treated just like any other factory worker at the time. They would enter their first day, be offered an induction on how to work on a certain point from the production line, and from there it was just intensive labor. War had taken away everything for some of these children, their homes, families, and even parents, therefore, this was the only way that they could fight against the fascists.
Old worker checking the weapons produced by children in Leningrad factory 1944 (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
Child labor in the war industry had begun in 1943, due to the lack of personal it became mainstream in 1944. Surprisingly, these children had become quite efficient at their jobs, so efficient that you can argue that they contributed to the abundance of weapon supplies at the end of the war. The children would not be given a wage but they were offered food and shelter (especially those that had lost their family in the war).
You need to realize that most children in the Soviet Union did not have an easy upbringing because of the poor conditions, therefore, they were in a way built for hard labor. During the famine before the Second World War, these same children were forced to work in the fields for the same reason which is their predicament, it was either work for food or death due to starvation. But for the children doing hard labor in the war industry during the Second World War, it was much more than that.
A soviet child working on mechanic steel drill during WWII (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It was a way for these children to have their revenge for all that they had lost. Indeed, some of them were too young to understand exactly what was going on, still, they weren’t stupid. It is within our human nature to tell friend from foe.
Children of War
These are what we call children of war, this is the true meaning of an unfair life, having everything taken away from you at a young age and forced (by circumstances) to work hard labor when you should be playing. At the same time, these children were well educated in the sense that they would not refuse work but accept it for what it was, they knew that they were contributing towards the Allied victory of the Second World War.
Homeless Children Sleeping (1920) (Source: Russian State Film & Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk)
This was not the first time that the children of the Soviet Union had to suffer from hard labor or other living predicaments. The Great War (WWI) had left some children in a grim life where they had lost everything and the Soviet communist government had no mercy on them. Just take a look at this image of homeless children sleeping on the colds streets with no possessions nor families. All they had was working for a piece of bread that they would praise more than anything in this world.
Little would these children know that when they were older they would have children of their own who would experience a similar fate. A senseless war that is mostly impactful on children. | https://historyofyesterday.com/how-the-soviets-used-child-labour-to-produce-weapons-47348bc6ee7e | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-12-15 21:02:51.957000+00:00 | ['Child Labour', 'History', 'World War II', 'Parenting', 'Children'] |
What is Google Adsense?. Google Adsense is a unique make money… | Google Adsense is a unique make money online program that can produce a lot of revenues over time if you are patient and your site contents quality content. Here is an overview of the basics of Google Adsense and how Adsense works.
The Basics of Google Adsense
Let’s us understand the basics of Google Adsense, you first have to understand what is Google Adwords.
Adwords is a program where people can bid per click to buy advertising space on platforms (such as Adwords partnered websites and apps) Google supports with advertisements. This includes the ads you see on the top and down the right column of results when you search on Google.
The beauty of Google Adsense is it creates a great revenue source for sites. How it works, let’s assume someone bids 60 cents in Adwords for the placement of their ads. A website or blog then shows those ads through the Adsense program. When an ad is clicked by a person on that site, Google charges the advertiser and splits the money with the partnered website/blog.
The Google Adsense program is extremely simple to use. You can sign up for Google through your Gmail account and, once approved, are able to select the format of ads you want to list on the pages of your site.
Google then generates and provides a javascript, which you have to copy and paste into the HTML of your pages where you want to show the ads to your visitors. Remember you should not change or mess around with the code, it will stop displaying ads if there is an error in the code.
Once you have inserted the code and republished your site, it is time to sit back and watch. Google provides stats within your account area. You can see basic click and revenue information as well as monthly totals. Once you reach a total of $100 in revenues, Google will give a check to you. The check is issued at the end of the month when your earnings hit the $100 amount mark.
Note: You will be tempted to click the links on your page. Don’t do it! If Google finds out that then you’ll be banned from the AdSense program.
HOW ADSENSE WORKS
Okay before we go through and understand why Google AdSense is very important for content sites, it’s essential for you to know and have an idea that how AdSense works.
The concept is very simple.
The publisher or the webmaster (owner of the website) needs to inserts a javascript code into his/her webpage(s) where you want to show the ads. Each time the page is accessed, the javascript will pull advertisements from the Google server and will show it to your visitors.
The ads that are targeted should, therefore, be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a website visitor clicks on the displaying ads, the website displaying the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying Google for the click.
Google handles all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive ads without the hassle of soliciting advertisers, collect funds, and monitor the clicks and statistics.
BENEFITS OF GOOGLE ADSENSE
One of the most impressive advantages of AdSense is that Google has a huge database of advertisers who are looking to place their ads on google and it’s partnered websites. Because of this ample base of advertisers, AdSense can provide you with numerous advertisers that can match just about any type of content and keywords that you can think of.
Advertisers are categorized based on the product, service, geography, and business size. This helps to both provide local advertisement opportunities to businesses, as well as provide your site with relevant content.
Another no cost-benefit that AdSense offers is the use of their Google custom search box feature. You can add this feature to your website, which will encourage visitors to stay on your website longer, and it will encourage them to return to your site.
You can even earn money from this feature. When a visitor enters a keyword or keywords the results appear in a box at the top of your web page. You earn money for every ad that they click on that was generated from their search.
In addition to these benefits, you also are able to control what kinds of ads you want to be displayed on your website. You can filter out ads from specific company genres, and you can also filter out companies that compete with what you are trying to sell.
You can also design the look of the ads that are displayed on your website. You can choose their color pallet, layout, and size of the ads that are displayed, and where they appear on your website.
Finally, you can customize your AdSense to perform on only selected posts and pages of your website. Many of these options enable you in which to stay control of how AdSense is exhibited to your visitors.
Adsense is vital for content sites since it has come quite a distance in understanding the needs of web publishers and webmasters which allows full advertising customization.
The various formatting expands the opportunity of more clicks from guests who might not exactly be familiar with what they are simply clicking.
Thus making them take the next phase of simply clicking a relevant advertisement. This way the folks behind Adsense are certain to get their content read, therefore you make money.
Read more: How to start a blog from Scratch. | https://medium.com/upblog/what-is-google-adsense-adsense-benefits-fbff2a8a7c9c | ['Subhasish Adhikary'] | 2020-04-23 08:17:28.072000+00:00 | ['Earn Money Online', 'Make Money Online', 'Advertising', 'Blogger', 'Google'] |
Top 5 4G Best Mobile Phones Under 10000 In India | Realme C15
Realme c15 was launched on 28 July 2020. It has 6.48x2.99x0.39 inches size with 209 grams weight and build by plastic.
It comes with a 6.5 inches IPS HD+ 720x1600 pixels resolutions at 270PPI density and display is protected by coring gorilla glass 3.
The phone runs on Android 10 and realme UI 1.0 OS. It is powered by MediaTek helio g35 12nm architecture, octa-core cortex a53 CPU and PowerVR GE8320 GPU.
The phone arrives with a quad-camera setup on the back. the main camera is 13MP with F/2.2 aperture, the second camera is 8MP with f/2.3 aperture for ultra-wide shots, the third cam is 2MP with f/2.4 aperture for macro shots and the last cam is 2MP with f/2.4 aperture for deep sensing. For selfie, it has an 8MP camera.
Realme C15 has big Li-Po 6000 mAh comes with 18W fast charger and phone is secured by a rear-mounting fingerprint sensor.
Price 4GB/64GB @ ₹9,999.00
Oppo A5s
Oppo A5S comes with 6.14x2.97x0.32 inches size with 270 grams weight and build by plastic. It has a 6.5 inches IPS HD+ 720x1520 pixels resolutions at 271PPI density.
The phone runs on Android 8.1 and colorOS 5.2 OS. It is powered by MediaTek helio p35 12nm architecture, octa-core cortex a53 CPU and PowerVR GE8320 GPU.
The phone arrives with a dual-camera setup on the back. the main camera is 13MP with F/2.2 aperture, the second camera is 2MP with f/2.4 for deep sensing. For selfie, it has an 8MP camera.
Oppo A5S has big Li-Po 4230 mAh comes and the phone is secured by a rear-mounting fingerprint sensor.
Price 2GB/32GB @ ₹7,990.00
Motorola Moto E7 Plus
Motorola Moto E7 Plus was launched on 11 September 2020. It has 6.50x2.98x0.36 inches size with 200 grams weight and build by plastic.
It comes with a 6.5 inches IPS HD+ 720x1600 pixels resolutions at 270PPI density.
The phone runs on stock Android 10. It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 11nm architecture, octa-core kyro240 CPU and Adreno 610 GPU.
The phone arrives with a dual-camera setup on the back. the main camera is 48MP with F/1.7 aperture, the second camera is 2MP with f/2.4 aperture deep sensing. For selfie, it has an 8MP camera.
Motorola Moto E7 Plus has big Li-Po 5000 mAh comes with 10W fast charger and phone is secured by a rear-mounting fingerprint sensor.
In my opinion Moto E7 Plus is best Mobile Phone Under 10000 rupees.
Price 4GB/64GB @ ₹9,499.00
Tecno Camon 15
Tecno Camon 15 was launched on 21 February 2020. It has 6.46x3.01x0.35 inches size with 196 grams weight and build by plastic.
It comes with a 6.6 inches IPS HD+ 720x1600 pixels resolutions at 266PPI density.
The phone runs on Android 10 and HIOS 6.6. It is powered by MediaTek helio P22, 12nm architecture, 2.0Ghz octa-core cortex a53 CPU and PowerVR GE8320 GPU.
The phone arrives with a quad-camera setup on the back. the main camera is 48MP, the second camera is 2MP for depth shots, the third cam is 2MP for macro shots and the last cam is QVGA for low light. For selfie, it has a 16MP camera.
Tecno Camon 15 has big Li-Po 5000 mAh and the phone is secured by a rear-mounting fingerprint sensor.
Price 4GB/64GB @ ₹9,999.00
Tecno Spark 5 Pro
Tecno Spark 5 Pro was launched on 13 July 2020. It has 6.48x3.0x0.35 inches size and builds by plastic.
It comes with a 6.6 inches IPS HD+ 720x1600 pixels resolutions at 266PPI density.
The phone runs on Android 10 and HIOS. It is powered by MediaTek helio P25 12nm architecture, octa-core cortex a53 CPU and PowerVR GE8320 GPU.
The phone arrives with a quad-camera setup on the back. the main camera is 16MP, the second camera is 2MP macro shots, the third cam is 2MP for deep sensing and the last is QVGA for low light sensing. For selfie, it has an 8MP camera.
Tecno Spark 5 Pro has big Li-Po 6000 mAh comes with 18W fast charger and phone is secured by a rear-mounting fingerprint sensor.
Price 4GB/64GB @ ₹9,959.00
Also Read: Top 10 4G Best Mobile Phones Under 10000 | https://medium.com/@newspermit/top-5-4g-best-mobile-phones-under-10000-in-india-63f16b9c5ced | [] | 2020-12-28 04:30:30.109000+00:00 | ['Mobile Phones Under 10000', 'Mobile', 'Smartphone Under 10000', 'Mobile Phone', 'Smartphones'] |
ThunderCore’s Customized Node Opens an Age of Smart Management for Taipei | ThunderCore’s Customized Node Opens an Age of Smart Management for Taipei ThunderCore Follow Dec 10 · 3 min read
With the development of blockchain technology, Taipei City Government hopes to improve the transparency, convenience and security of its municipal public service with the help of the transparency, non-tampering and traceability of blockchain, so as to better carry out its concept of “using science and technology to solve the life problems of citizens”. At the same time, in order to promote the construction of a smart city, the Department of Information Technology (DOIT), Taipei City Government continuously interacts with new blockchain entrepreneurs through Taipei Smart City Project Management Office (TPMO).
At present, the ThunderCore node at DOIT has been basically completed. After the exclusive node is successfully deployed, DOIT can utilize the high throughput, fast network confirmation, safe operation, low gas cost and other advantages of ThunderCore to upload, backup and retrieve data. Chaining of data can improve the processing speed of complex data and the scientific management level of big data in various departments. Later, relevant departments can import various convenience measures (such as put voting and draw data on chain) into this node, and build an efficient and trusted government-people communication platform, so that Taipei’s government administration level is further improved.
A release by Department of Information Technology, Taipei City Government: Taipei’s exclusive blockchain node is launched online to optimize the digital governance efficiency
In fact, many service scenarios can be combined with blockchain to make existing municipal services more fair, just and trustworthy to the people. Where public resources are distributed through drawing lots, the public are often concerned about unfair distribution of quotas, manipulation and other problems. The draw system developed on ThunderCore is exactly an effective solution to such problems. The parking lot stall draw system and the public kindergarten admission draw system, for example, are supported by a blockchain smart contract + verifiable random number mechanism, so that citizens can autonomously verify the draw process from announcement of rules to announcement of results through public contract address, chaining time and Hash Value.
The running node of DOIT allows relevant authorities to deploy diverse DApps. The on-chain and off-chain services customized by ThunderCore for it can quickly meet their demand. DOIT expects to introduce blockchain into the government and construct a highly transparent and credible environment. The government services combined with blockchain can be closer to the life of the public. The possibility of developing convenient DApps by authorities in the future will advance Taipei towards a smart city.
ThunderCore, a public chain, is the infrastructure of the blockchain world. Its goal of “connecting with the real world and serving social life and production of mankind” is consistent with the objective of DOIT for serving Taipei. We are working together to promote the value application of blockchain technology in more fields for the convenience of the people. For example, the non-tampering of blockchain is used to enhance the objectivity and traceability of data; smart contracts are ingeniously used to help standardize parking lot management systems; the future implantation of digital assets into certain systems allows people to interact with new financial derivatives and pay fees more easily.
The stability and security of DApps developed on ThunderCore have been verified in many fields, such as digital finance, game entertainment and so on. Taking the chance of deploying the exclusive node for DOIT, we are looking forward to helping Taipei achieve more intelligent and efficient management service in transportation, government affairs, finance, supermarkets, enterprise management, tourism, medical care and other fields.
[ Website] Thundercore.com
[ Telegram ]
T.me/thundercore_china
T.me/thunder_official
[ Medium ] Medium.com/thundercore
[ Twitter ] Twitter.com/ThunderProtocol | https://medium.com/thundercore/thundercores-customized-node-opens-an-age-of-smart-management-for-taipei-c1b7e91125f4 | [] | 2020-12-10 13:15:09.219000+00:00 | ['Node', 'Blockchain', 'Defi', 'Thundercore'] |
Job Market Insights for 2020–2021 | Job market condition changes for 2019 and 2020 that have stayed consistent.
Job market insights for 2021
Data and Insights
Young generations and job market changes:
Millennial and Gen-Z job seekers are still “on the move” with roughly 58% of employees ages 21–28 change jobs within one to three years of employment.
Benefits programs are continuing to evolve. With more than 42% of Millennial and Gen-Z job seekers idealizing job flexibility, vacation pay, remote working, and other job flexibility benefits as more important than traditional 401k and retirement plans.
Cost of living, wages, and living conditions:
On average, more than 40% of adults in large metropolitan areas are living in “doubled-up” households. A strong indicator of lack of wage growth in accordance with true or “real” cost of living index (as indicated by Glassdoor).
While wages are growing, the “real wage index” calculation by Glassdoor in contrast with changes of wages from 2018 to 2019 would indicate that in 2020 we could expect the cost of living to outpace average wages by about 1.8% per year in metropolitan areas.
How job seekers are finding their positions:
Less than 11% of new hires are being made through online job applications or online job board listings. Down from 14.9% in 2017. 11% is the conservative figure as a result of the business polling.
On average less than 10% of hiring managers are using resumes and cover letters as an indicator of a job applicant’s strength. Instead, they are seeking referrals and public previous work history as part of their measurement for a high-profile candidate.
About the Author
Patrick Algrim is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW), NCDA Certified Career Counselor (CCC), and general career expert. Patrick has completed the NACE Coaching Certification Program (CCP). And has been published as a career expert on Forbes, Glassdoor, American Express, Reader’s Digest, LiveCareer, Zety, Yahoo, Recruiter.com, SparkHire, SHRM.org, Process.st, FairyGodBoss, HRCI.org, St. Edwards University, NC State University, IBTimes.com, Thrive Global, TMCnet.com, Work It Daily, Workology, Career Guide, MyPerfectResume, College Career Life, The HR Digest, WorkWise, Career Cast, Elite Staffing, Women in HR, All About Careers, Upstart HR, The Ladders, Introvert Whisperer, and many more. Find him on LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/@hellyeahdude/job-market-insights-for-2020-192c1629b136 | ['Patrick Algrim'] | 2020-12-11 16:25:34.843000+00:00 | ['Human Resources', 'Careers', 'Job Market', 'Jobs'] |
“Anı” Biriktirmek mi, “An”ı Yaşamak mı? | AgEcon | no social media | simple life | mind mapping | loves IT only for productivity | NGO volunteer | [email protected] | https://medium.com/@aykutgul/an%C4%B1-biriktirmek-mi-an-%C4%B1-ya%C5%9Famak-m%C4%B1-ab6ddf343548 | ['Aykut Gül'] | 2020-12-15 15:47:44.670000+00:00 | ['Minimalism', 'Anı', 'Mindfulness', 'Zaman Yönetimi', 'Türkçe'] |
The Magic Behind Zynga Poker’s Hand Strength Meter | How It Works
The way this feature currently works is relatively straightforward:
1. Using the player’s 2 hole cards and visible community cards, the best possible 5 card (or less, if the community cards are not yet visible) hand the user could make is found on our game server.
2. That hand is classified as one of the following
High Card
One Pair With A Kicker
Two Pair
Three-Of-A-Kind With A Kicker
Straight
Flush
Full House
Four-Of-A-Kind
Straight Flush
3. That hand will win in a showdown on the river a certain percentage of the time. For example, the full house “Three-of-a-kind twos and a pair of Jacks” has historically won, let’s say, seventy percent of the time when shown down on the river. Note that this excludes all the times where someone holding that hand won because all their opponents folded. This percentage is already stored in one of our databases. It is retrieved whenever a new card is dealt and sent down to our client.
4. This percentage is translated on our client into the visual filling of a meter displayed to a user. For example, a winning percentage of fifty percent would be translated into a meter filled halfway.
Zynga Poker’s Hand Strength Meter
Tradeoffs of This Design
The Good
Because the winning percentages have already been pre-calculated and stored in Part 3 of “How It Works” rather than calculated on-the-fly, the process of looking up the winning percentage for a hand is very fast. This allows us to show the same information to all of our users while allowing them a reasonable time with which to take their turn.
The Bad
The percentage calculated in Part 3 of “How It Works” is usually fairly accurate, but in some cases (particularly degenerate ones) this percentage can be far from accurate.
As one of the most extreme examples, let’s suppose we have
Our Hole Cards
and the current community cards are
Community Cards
For simplification, let’s assume that we need at least a straight or a flush to win the hand. In that case, any of the following cards would give us the winning hand:
Outs
Both the turn and the river would have to not be one of these cards for us to lose the hand, a likelihood of
100 * (34/47 * 34/46) = 53.47%
This in turn means that we have a 46.53% chance of winning the hand.
However, the percentage found in Part 3 from “How It Works” only takes into account our current hand, Jack high, not our potential for improving our hand. Since our hand has a high potential for improving, we’re missing key information in our estimate.
Why We Chose This Tradeoff
The degenerate case above raises the question, “Why did you do this approximation instead of actually calculating the exact percentage? How much time could that really take to calculate?” Let’s find out, for the most extreme case, just how long this takes.
For this specific example, we’ll assume there are eight opponents, all still in the hand, with all 5 community cards yet to come. To find our exact chance of winning, we need to:
1. Enumerate the total possible ways the yet unknown cards could be revealed.
2. For each of these possibilities, find
a. The best hand we could make
b. The best hand each of our opponents could make
c. Whether our hand is better than all of our opponents’ hands.
3. Take the number of possibilities that would have resulted in us having a winning hand, divide it by the total number of possibilities, and multiply it by 100 to give us our percentage chance of winning.
We have 8 opponents, each with two unrevealed cards, and 5 unrevealed community cards. This means that there are
(50 choose 2) * (48 choose 2) * (46 choose 2) * (44 choose 2) * (42 choose 2) * (40 choose 2) * (38 choose 2) * (36 choose 2) * (34 choose 5)
=
50!/(2 * 48!) * 48!/(2 * 46!) * 46!/(2 * 44!) * 44!/(2 * 42!) * 42!/(2 * 40!) * 40!/(2 * 38!) * 38!/(2 * 36!) * 36!/(2 * 34!) * 34!/(5! * 29!)
=
50!/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/(5! * 29!)
=
50!/(256 * (5! * 29!))
=
50!/(30720 * 29!)
=
(50*49*48…*30)/30720
=
111,973,393,664,173,216,721,145,600,000
possible outcomes.
All of these would need to be checked to see if you would have the winning hand. For the sake of argument, let’s say we can make that check (step 2 from above) for a given outcome in one millisecond. This means you would complete step (2) from above in 3,548,222,731,265,153,773 years. According to scientists who hypothesize an eventual collapse of the universe (The Big Crunch), you wouldn’t be done until ~ 35 quadrillion years after the universe collapsed on itself!
Knowing that it’s physically impossible to find an exact percentage chance that we will win a given hand in this situation, our current method of providing a “best guess” is a decent alternative despite the existence of degenerate cases.
Future Hand Strength Meter Design
In order to consistently present our users with a much closer approximation to their exact chance of winning a hand, we devised an adaptation of Monte Carlo simulation. Rather than search through all possible eventual outcomes of a hand for the ones in which you would win, we instead randomly generate a subset of those outcomes and see how many of that subset you would win.
There are key tradeoffs regarding the size of this sample subset. A smaller sample size will result in faster completion of the simulation such that a solution is presented to the user with more time with which they can act. However, that smaller sample size will lead to a potentially less accurate approximation. Conversely, a larger sample size will require more time to complete while providing a more accurate approximation.
One way to allow for the benefits of both these approaches while lessening their respective downfalls is for us to show to users the current value of the approximation as the algorithm progresses. That is, on your turn we can show you the current approximation that you will win the hand at showdown. That number will be constantly changing, becoming ever more precise until you either take an action or run out of time. This allows us to show the user as accurate an answer as possible while also allowing them as much time as possible with which to act.
Why Our New Hand Strength Meter Hasn’t Been Released
In a word: fairness. We aim to make our game equally fair to all players. A user with a 5-year-old phone would be at a distinct disadvantage to a user with a brand new, state of the art phone should this feature be released today. We support such a wide range of devices in our game that the number of simulations one device can perform in a given time can be drastically different than the number of simulations that another device can perform in that same time. More simulations means higher accuracy in this approximation, and higher accuracy leads to a competitive advantage.
There is hope, however. After a certain number of iterations, the discrepancy between the current approximation and the approximation after further iteration diminishes to the point of inconsequence. As our minimum supported devices continue to improve and allow for faster iterations, we get closer to being able to provide this amazing feature to all our players without introducing any unfairness.
Conclusion
Calculating the exact chance of winning a poker hand at the beginning of a hand of 9 players is currently unsolvable. In order to solve this problem, we are currently approximating that chance and presenting it to our users. This solution has its own downfall of inaccuracy, though. We’ve created a feature that goes a long way in solving this problem, but we are currently waiting for the right time to present it to our users while allowing for complete fairness. We have a U.S. Patent No. 9,940,783 (issued Apr. 10, 2018) regarding this design if you are interested in learning more about it.
Thank you for the read! If you found this post interesting or helpful, give it a share. If the ramifications of insurmountable combinatorics in our game is of interest to you, I encourage you to read our previous post regarding random number generation. If you have any input you’d like to give us, reach out to us at [email protected] or shoot me an email at [email protected].
References:
https://www.iflscience.com/physics/big-crunch-back-possible-end-universe/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method | https://medium.com/zynga-engineering/the-magic-behind-zynga-pokers-hand-strength-meter-90b63cff17ba | ['Zynga Poker Engineering'] | 2018-10-22 15:15:46.191000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Poker', 'Video Game Development', 'Mathematics', 'Zynga'] |
Working from home: Around Family Events and Festivities | (for Indian IT employees)
I took off from work last week to take care of a few family things and events in my hometown, which is about 700 km from Bangalore. I had a busy but great time with family and friends. What prompted me to write this little story is an (impromptu) presentation/demo that I had to give during my vacation time and my experience/thoughts on how to balance.
As I was preparing material for the presentation and demo, a few enthusiastic relatives got interested and started watching over my shoulder as I was typing some random words(for them)on my black terminal, they were hoping that some magic will happen but soon got disappointed and retreated after they got bored with a bunch of repeated kubectl commands ;-). Finally, when I was happy with the dry-runs of the demo, I was late for lunch and almost every one of the extended family gave that look… but they let me alone for the day, somewhat unwillingly.
This along with a few requests for unplanned day-offs in our team recently made me think, how remote colleagues can balance their work, life, festivals, participation in family events and have a true balance and not continuous struggle to balance. Here are my thoughts:
At a broad level, we have the following remote working environments:
In/around physical workspaces: These are generally in large cities and employees usually have fewer distractions except an occasional delivery person or handyman. Work-life balance is manageable in these scenarios and people take off for travel/vacation etc. Apart from regular engagement with the team, and taking care of any young children at home, they can balance it well and typically take a week or so off for travel to their hometown or a vacation place. So, there is by and large clear demarcation between work and rest of the life.
Remote Tier-2/3 towns and villages: Life here couldn’t be more different from big cities. The group of people here typically live with parents, extended family, and distractions can get quite high at times. With the pandemic running for so long (and so is remote working), by now, they most likely figured out a space that works for them in their homes most of the time. But occasionally (or somewhat frequently, depending on festive season and events), the distractions can be very high, following are the tips for individuals and managers in those situations:
Individuals:
When any such events or festivals are there at home, inform your manager and take a day off, believe me, you will enjoy it more and will come back energized If you know these ahead of time, inform your manager as soon as you can and apply for a day off, block calendar etc. Based on your condition, inform your manager about your reachability in case of any work-related emergency Don’t try to balance with a couple of hours away kind of agreement, as we know these rarely finish within that time and create that unnecessary struggle in the mind, and you can’t make justice to either
Managers:
Encourage your teammates to take some time off, enjoy the festivities and events. In most cases, work can wait for a day or two Don’t bother them unless absolutely required and no one else can cover for them When they return, ask about how was the break, learn a bit about the event/festival, India is such a diverse country, we can learn new things by asking and can help in establishing the bonding along the way
One Team, One Work, Many Environments… Interesting times!!! | https://medium.com/@gautham.nimmagadda/working-from-home-around-family-events-and-festivities-27c03222d0b9 | ['Gautham Nimmagadda'] | 2021-11-22 03:51:27.900000+00:00 | ['India', 'Work Life Balance', 'Festivals', 'Diversity', 'Working From Home'] |
Tracy Lawrence LIVE at Billy Bobs Fort Worth | Tracy Lawrence LIVE at Billy Bobs Fort Worth Diegospider ·Dec 25, 2020
LIVE STREAMING >> https://web.facebook.com/events/421941088988056
Additional details :
Date: December 31, 2020 [10:00pm]
Venue: Fort Worth, TX
Don’t Miss Out!!!
Save this event to your plans and we’ll remind you when it’s coming up!
ATTENTION : For easy registration,please register now to keep from network busy or access full,before the performance begins | https://medium.com/@diegospider/tracy-lawrence-live-at-billy-bobs-fort-worth-a00a6a7a4552 | [] | 2020-12-25 21:05:50.736000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Country', 'Streaming', 'Online', 'Live'] |
Introduction to Email Threats & Defense | There’s a constant threat to your organization. Email is one of the most common ways hackers attempt to breach your organization’s security. Over half of the messages received are spam, phishing campaigns, and malicious. Staying up-to-date with the latest email related threats isn’t an easy task. It’s virtually every company uses third-party email hosting with built-in spam protection or opts for third-party spam protection in front of on-premise servers. Like its competitors, Office 365 comes with built-in protection for your environment, Microsoft’s Information Protection team is staying up-to-date and evolving the email security of Office 365 to protect Microsoft customers from threats. The default configuration isn’t always enough to keep your organization secure and compliant.
Why is Spam Still a Problem?
Despite years of combating spam, the campaigns are still relentless. To understand why there’s so much spam we have to ask, How successful is a spam campaign? Since spammers typically work in the shadows it’s a difficult question to answer. Fortunately, the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) performed an interesting and surprising study. The ICSI hijacked an existing botnet to determine how successful these campaigns truly are. By redirecting the botnet to a fake pharmacy website and throwing an error instead of completing a purchase the ICSI was able to provide insight into the spam plague that has troubled us for so long.
By emailing 200 million email addresses the fake pharmacy site led to over 10,000 people visiting the site with 28 purchases. This would have led to almost $9500 a day in sales.
What’s Phishing?
“Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted by email by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as credit card details and passwords. The information is then used to access important accounts and can result in identity theft and financial loss.” — phishing.org
30% of phishing messages get opened by targeted users and 12% of those users click on the malicious attachment or link. — verizon.com
How a Phishing Attack Affected U.S. Elections
In September of 2015, the FBI contacted the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to inform them that at least one of their computers has been compromised and sending information to Russian based computers. Six months later a campaign chairman receives a phishing email masked as a fake alert stating another user attempted to breach his account and he needs to change his password. The DNC chairman clicks the link that directs his browser to a fake website where he types in his password giving Russian hackers access to his account.
The average cost of a phishing attack for a mid-sized company is $1.6 million.
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posts emails that were stolen through the phishing attack. For weeks, the emails consumed the media. No one can say for certain how much the phishing attack affected the election but the damage was done.
What is Malware?
Malware is any form of malicious code that is often distributed via email. It can be distributed using a direct attachment, stored in a Word or PDF document, or can be downloaded once a person clicks a link in an email.
The 1st Email Virus
In January 1999, a new threat emerged. Codenamed Happy99, it was one of the first known viruses spread through email. The malicious code would attach itself as an email attachment and send an email with fireworks saying Happy New Year. Unknown to the user, the code would install itself on the computer and begin spreading again.
Unlike today, the Happy99 virus wouldn’t do anything other than send itself to the next computer. Today, malicious code is used to steal identities, financial information, and other private corporate information.
How is Spam Detected in Office 365?
Office 365 uses a multi-layered spam protection system. Every email is scanned using a number of different algorithms to detect and block unwanted messages.
Content Filters
Content filters are used to detect words and phrases that are known to be related to spam. It’s a constant struggle because content continues to change. Microsoft handles the content filtering behind the scenes but you can create a transport rule in EOP to add words and phrases your company would like to block.
See the section “Custom Content Filtering in Office 365” below to customize your tenant.
Connection Filters
Screenshot of EAC Connection FIltering Customizations
Connection filters block emails from known bad IP addresses. Spammers will typically use botnets and hijack legitimate companies to send spam. Microsoft will detect an IP address that has an infected device and immediately blocks the bad email from your organization. Once the issue is resolved by the sender, Microsoft will remove the IP address from the block lists and allow email to reach the destination. Additionally, your organization can add IP addresses to a block list or allow list from the EAC.
See the section “Custom Connection Filtering” below to customize your tenant.
Domain Filtering
A domain is the second part of your email address, everything after the @ symbol. For example, the domain of [email protected] is gitbit.org.
Domain filtering is a broad term used to determine the authenticity of the email senders. If a particular domain continues to send unwanted or malicious emails, the entire domain may be blocked. Microsoft uses a number of complex algorithms to determine the validity of a domain.
For example, many spammers will create a new domain and immediately start sending spam and malicious code. Since most organizations are established and have had an email system for years, Office 365 is more likely to block an email from a new domain.
At the same time, using ‘fuzzy-match’ technology Microsoft will review the sender’s domain for suspicious activity. If someone sends an email from micros0ft.com (a zero replaces the O) it will be blocked.
See the section “How to Whitelist and Blacklist Senders as Spam” below to customize your tenant.
SPF / Spoofing Protection
Technically, SPF filtering could be part of the domain or connection filtering based on how it works. In short, a hacker can send an email from their computer and set the from address to another. While the email will appear legitimate it can be sent from another location.
To put this in real-world terms, imagine receiving a letter with your mom’s name and address in the return address field. You would immediately assume the letter originated from your mom but in reality, anyone could have sent the letter.
An organization can and should configure an SPF record from each domain they own. For example, if I send email from the IP address 1.1.1.1 using my gitbit.org domain I should create a TXT record to inform the world that 1.1.1.1 is the only IP address that is allowed to send gitbit.org email.
// Example SPF record
v=spf1 ip4:1.1.1.1/32
Office 365 automatically reviews SPF records of anyone that sends you an email to keep your organization safe. You’ll need to configure the SPF record for your organization when migrating to Office 365 to help protect your outbound email as well. Microsoft will verify your SPF record after you add it to the Office 365 tenant.
I haven’t added a section on how to set up your SPF record. Microsoft provides some assistance to their customers but I recommend asking a professional if you haven’t managed SPF records before.
Reputation Filtering
Bulk emails are a bit different than spam. A bulk email is typically a newsletter or an offer from organizations that you know. They usually appear in your inbox after signing up for a new website. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/introduction-to-email-threats-defense-9735ba4b193e | ['John Gruber'] | 2019-06-10 11:26:00.925000+00:00 | ['Email Threats', 'Email', 'Information Security', 'Technology', 'Phishing'] |
About our Features | This is our place for longer-form, more involved essays. Here you will find pieces not just about the Classics per se, but about culture in general, with a classical slant. We’re always looking for thoughtful, in-depth pieces: send pitches to [email protected]. | https://medium.com/in-medias-res/about-our-features-bc0c64663f72 | ['John Byron Kuhner'] | 2018-01-19 17:55:39.202000+00:00 | ['Essays', 'Long Form', 'Features', 'Classics'] |
Trans Rights Are Not Up For Debate | Trans Rights Are Not Up For Debate
You can’t debate someone else’s existence. That’s just genocidal
Venus Xtravaganza (1965–1988). Feel sad even seeing this image.
I was watching Paris Is Burning, about ballroom subculture in 1980s New York. It’s a documentary, but moreso a fairy tale. It’s a Cinderella story about young people that just want to be beautiful for a night, while the world wants them to sleep in the ashes.
The people in Paris Is Burning are so beautiful and so damned. They are so alive and yet died so young. On screen they are Cinderella, but in life they were literally called ‘faggots’. Yet at the ball they were Queens.
Of the many legendary characters in the film, Venus Xtravaganza stands out. She is a beautiful, achingly delicate young girl with such fragile young dreams. Then she was strangled to death in a hotel room.
It was heartbreaking.
Whenever I think of the ‘debate’ about trans people I think of this. Trans people are so regularly raped and killed. When we debate their existence, this is what we debate. There is so much violence behind our idle words. We are not debating something academic. We are debating whether we should stand by, while Venus Xtravaganza dies.
Life in the ashes
The gay men and trans women in Paris Is Burning, most of them Black, live a marginal existence. Often rejected by their families or living on the street, they make their own families. They hold balls — grand competitions, an entire subculture reflecting the ‘straight’ culture with as many facets as a diamond.
Like Cinderella, for that one night, they dance. They are who they want to be. They can dress as Marilyn Monroe, or pose like a supermodel. They can dress like a girl next door, or a CEO. All worlds that would be closed to them during the day, open for that night (with the help of a fairy Godmother). But when the night ends, everything turns to pumpkins and rats.
The clothes are often shoplifted, money is often dangerous sex work. Their families often reject them, and society is uniformly hostile. Voguing and ball culture takes the everyday life of pretending as a gay or trans person and makes it an art form. In the light of day, it’s just survival.
It’s heartbreaking because these people, these young people, they just want to be beautiful. And we crush them for this. We murder them. We break their hearts. At the sharp end are the johns who throw them out of moving cars. Or the cops who ignore or rape them. Or the serial killers and rapists who hunt them as prey. Or the simple fact that, by society at large, they won’t be missed.
That’s the sharp end of the knife. The handle, the part that turns it, that’s us. At a far distant remove, academic even, we are the structure of violence. We put the existence of trans people up for debate. They have to prove themselves to us, biologically, socially, legally. We hold no one else to these standards.
Do you check anyone’s genitals before you call them he or she? Or do we just treat each other with respect and get on with it? Even the fact that I — a straight cis man — am writing this is obscene. What does my opinion have to do with their rights? And yet trans rights are up for debate, so I write. To say that the whole debate is obscene.
I will not engage in this as a ‘debate’ because I think it is frankly genocidal. We do not debate the right of people to live. I will not legitimize a debate that is, in itself, structural violence. I will not glorify the handle that twists the knife. Trans rights are right and denying them is wrong.
The fact that — to this day — rich and powerful people use their platforms to pick on the weakest among us is galling. It’s appalling that they whinge about being cancelled while trans people are regularly strangled to death. Free speech? These people are highly paid to speak. Their greatest loss would be some marginal royalties, whereas marginalized people lose their lives. Rich and powerful people are punching down on the homeless and poor. It’s disgusting.
The objections are all hypotheticals. What if ‘men’ end up in ‘safe’ female spaces. Bitch, what safe space? Men are already everywhere. You can’t oppress an entire people because of hypotheticals. Deal with problems as they come up, and focus on the real problem, which is cis men. Leave the vulnerable people alone. More to the point, help them.
It is the height of genocidal thought to take a deeply oppressed minority and make them the danger. We are not in danger from trans people. We are the ones killing them. Not just the violent people that do it. The ambivalent people who make their existence up for debate. How do you think an existential debate is settled? It’s with hands around their neck.
I am part of this violence. I grew up in it. I laughed.
As a 12-year old I sat in a theatre and laughed at Ace Ventura until I cried. Do you know what the final punchline was? Transphobia. A woman actually had a penis. Ha ha ha. People on screen threw up. The whole audience laughed. I laughed. How fucking horrible.
No I think back, in horror. What if I had been a trans person in that audience, how would I feel with everyone laughing at me? I though the movie was about a pet detective. I would go home worried that my parents wouldn’t love me. I’d go to bed fearing I would never be loved. I would fear for my life. And I would be right.
What if I had been a young violent man, sitting there laughing with my friends? What if I was making out with a girl and she turned out to have a penis. What if I got so angry that I choked her? No one would care, we laugh at freaks like this. And I would be right.
It’s not right.
Paris Is Burning
There is no debate about trans rights. You cannot debate other people’s existence. Transphobia is hate speech, and trans people deserve nothing but love. These are the most vulnerable people on Earth, rejected by a society with frankly colonial norms that wants to obliterate the great diversity of human life that has always existed. You can see it in Paris Is Burning. They are so creative, out of their rejection by an entire culture, they create a vibrant subculture of their own. Which has now fed back to us.
Trans people have so much to give and frankly, they don’t owe us shit. Like anybody else they’re allowed to name themselves, to use the bathroom, and just exist. Trans rights are human rights. I’m so sorry that it’s even up for debate. It shouldn’t be.
Venus Xtravaganza, Rest In Peace. | https://indica.medium.com/there-is-no-debate-about-trans-rights-cefe721767b5 | ['Indi Samarajiva'] | 2020-11-17 12:43:00.412000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Equality', 'Life', 'Human Rights', 'Transgender'] |
She Traveled the World, Faced Every Danger and Hardship. Now, She is Home and at Peace. | She Traveled the World, Faced Every Danger and Hardship. Now, She is Home and at Peace.
For two decades the story of a young American, female photojournalist, etched in film, remained stored in my file cabinet. It was time for these images to see the light of day and to tell the story of Yola Monahkov.
Yola Monakhov was 26 years old when she caught a bullet while working in Israel. She would have died if not for the fast actions of her Associated Press colleagues, who rushed her to the Haddassah hospital where the doctors there put her back together. She was fortunate to have had a network of friends, fellow journalists, like Ed Gargan, Matthew McAllester, photojournalists Alan Chin, Thomas Dworzak, Katy Daigle (a college friend), and especially AP staff photographer Lefteris Pitarakis.
Yola’s dream of being a foreign correspondent, a photojournalist, and her great curiosity about the world is what put her in harm’s way on November 11, 2000, the day she almost died.
She was working as a stringer, a dedicated freelancer, for the AP in Bethlehem on that day. She was shot by an Israeli soldier at a common, barely newsworthy event; in Israel, it was small group of Palestinian kids throwing stones. She walked past the soldier who shot her only a few moments before and greeted them. The soldier’s bullet struck her in the pelvis, shattered it and tore up her stomach. Even in those days before instantaneous global communications, the shocking news ricocheted around the photojournalist community. It could have been any one of us. This news, even for those who didn’t know Yola, was personal. | https://yunghi.medium.com/she-traveled-the-world-faced-every-danger-and-hardship-now-she-is-home-and-at-peace-d5ca4340e31c | ['Yunghi Kim'] | 2020-10-21 23:20:49.032000+00:00 | ['Photojournalism', 'War Photographer', 'Phot', 'Women Photographers'] |
Enabling Human Values in Foreign Policy: The Transformation of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy | 2019 年 04月 15日/ Journal of Human Values
Author: Alan Hao Yang and Jeremy Huai-Che Chiang
Abstract
How foreign policy embodies human values is an issue worth studying. Such a value not only refers to the interests of social and political elites but to the prevailing welfare of people. In 2016, the Taiwan government launched the New Southbound Policy (NSP), considering it as the flagship foreign policy of President Tsai Ing-wen. It is also Taiwan’s regional strategy for Asia, envisaging a people-centred agenda of Taiwan’s national development and Asia’s regional growth. The NSP demonstrates Taiwan’s concern for national development; in addition, it expresses Taiwan’s emphasis on the human value of Asian development. This article highlights how the NSP responds to prevailing human values by developing social connectivity between Taiwan and its neighbours in Southeast Asia.
Keywords New Southbound policy, foreign policy, people-centred agenda, the value of development, Taiwan, Southeast Asia
Introduction
Can foreign policy embody human values? Or does it only reflect the values and interests of political and social elites? These questions are not only the focus of academic debates (Baglione, 2008; Bayram, 2016; Gaskarth, 2013; Pratt, 2001), but public concerns across the world (Schoen, 2007; Souva, 2005). In the past, foreign policy was seen as the exclusive territory of diplomatic elites, designed to uphold state interests and enhance the international influence of a specific country (Headley & Reitzig, 2012; Murray, Cowden, & Russett, 1999; Roberts, 2009). In recent years, however, domestic factors are increasingly being incorporated and highlighted as key elements in foreign policymaking.
In some cases, foreign policymaking seems to fulfil domestic appeals, either from within or from the society of the targeted countries. The major powers, in particular, often claim that their foreign policies are based on prevailing values for the purpose of legitimizing their influence by avoiding accusations of hegemony (Chandler, 2007).
The USA, for example, instils its foreign policy with the specific features of democracy and human rights, thereby strengthening the link between American interests and universal values. As the State Department reiterates its rationale of diplomacy in action, ‘promoting freedom and democracy and protecting human rights around the world are central to U.S. foreign policy’ (U.S. Department of the State, 2019).
Another example is Japan’s ‘heart-to-heart’ diplomacy which developed in the late 1970s. The then Fukuda Doctrine was aimed at reversing Japan’s international image of militarism and reinventing closer ties with Southeast Asian countries by providing development assistance and facilitating regional growth (Lam, 2007).
A recent case is China’s ‘good neighbour’ diplomacy. As China’s economic and political power continues to develop, Beijing has also begun to expand its influence, starting from its immediate neighbouring countries (The State Council, The People’s Republic of China, 2015). It offers abundant economic resources and incentives through the Belt and Road Initiative, highlighting China’s development model and its governance experience and forming another kind of ideological value, that of proactive growth (Swaine, 2015).
Foreign policy centred on human values is not the prerogative of the major powers, nor is it a normative proposition endorsed by the United Nations and other international organizations. This article argues that there are at least two connotations of human values. In terms of normative definitions, human values embody universal values such as equal economic rights, social welfare and political rights that ensure the sustainability of human survival. Each country should be responsible for ensuring equality, openness and freedom for its people. In operational terms, governments of all countries should prioritize policy instruments and arrangements which uphold and practise human values while safeguarding their national interests.
Foreign policy featured with human values plays an even more important role for small countries in terms of protecting their strategic interests and ensuring state survival. For example, global climate change is threatening the very existence of the Pacific island states (Howes, Birchenough, & Lincoln, 2018). By all means, the Pacific island states prioritize the importance of collective action and collaboration in their foreign policies, in tackling climate risks and hazards, to defend sustainable development and environmental security. The purpose of this, of course, is to ensure the state survival and the welfare of the people in the name of safeguarding human values that are threatened by environmental degradation. Similar to its Pacific counterparts, Taiwan is an island country vulnerable to natural disasters and external political inference. It is worthwhile to explore how Taiwan utilizes its new foreign policy undertakings and efforts to secure its survival while contributing to the regional community.
In 2016, Taiwan unfolded the New Southbound Policy (NSP) envisaged by President Ing-wen Tsai as its ‘regional strategy for Asia’ (Office of the President, 2017). The NSP is featured with a people-centred agenda deeply imbued with human values for domestic development and regional growth. This article highlights how the NSP responds to prevailing human values by developing social connectivity between Taiwan and its neighbours in Southeast Asia. It begins with the introduction of the NSP in securing the state survival of Taiwan. Then, it addresses the people-centred agenda of the NSP and highlights its blueprint for transcending the political constraints set on Taiwan and facilitating human values upheld there and throughout the region.
The New Southbound Policy and Taiwan’s State Survival
The strategic rationale underlying the NSP is linking Taiwan with the ASEAN-led regional integration process and a broader context of Indo-Pacific communities (Yang, 2016). The implementation of the NSP highlights Taiwan’s strategic importance and contribution in facilitating development and growth in Asia.
Compared with previous efforts made by the Taiwan government since the 1990s, the NSP’s strategic thrust emphasizes people-to-people exchanges and a people-centred agenda for regional and national development in Southeast Asia, South Asian countries, Australia and New Zealand. It is a geo-strategic move, echoing the regional community-building process initiated by the ASEAN and embraced by its dialogue partners in accordance with the prevailing values of the United Nations (Wu, 2018). Moreover, the NSP is implemented in line with Taiwan’s own national growth and social transformation projects.
There are three reasons to address how the NSP would facilitate Taiwan’s state survival.
First, Taiwan is facing imminent economic and social transformation within the region. In terms of ensuring economic growth, it is imperative that Taiwan’s domestic industries strengthen their ties with regional production networks. The NSP is aimed at securing economic interests and the welfare of Taiwanese people in the region by setting up and upgrading institutional arrangements in trade, investment and related fields. Moreover, institutional connectivity between Taiwan and Southeast Asia needs to move beyond economic issues towards technology, education, public health and agriculture. And in terms of social development, the number of immigrants and foreign workers in Taiwan has been increasing since the 1990s, most of whom come from Southeast Asia (Shaw, 2017). Currently, they account for 3 per cent of Taiwan’s population, with over 600,000 people from Southeast Asia, increasingly transforming how Taiwanese perceive themselves and their relationship with the region (Chiang & Yang, 2018). The need for taking good care of their rights and welfare is in great demand. By safeguarding human rights and labour rights of migrant workers and ensuring fair access to education and social welfare for ‘new immigrants’ living in Taiwan, the government would be demonstrating its determination to address human values in relation to the value of development in Asia.
Second, the NSP can be seen as Taiwan’s concrete initiative to support the ASEAN-led regional community-building masterplan. As ASEAN has been developing a people-centred regional community for more than five decades, its governments and societies are prioritizing human values in regional development upon its three pillars: the ASEAN Political Security Community (APSC) the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASSC) (Mahbubani & Sng, 2017; Natalegawa, 2018). In the past two decades, Taiwan was devoted to promoting political democratization, accelerating economic prosperity and facilitating social stability by highlighting the dignity of its people, improving quality of life and fostering a vibrant civil society. The NSP is a crucial bridge in the development of regional prosperity among Taiwan and like-minded stakeholders.
Finally, Taiwan needs to tackle with the diplomatic constraints imposed by China through new pragmatic partnerships with its Asian neighbours. This challenge will not be easily resolved anytime soon in the near future, as China still firmly maintains its aggressive claims on Taiwan. This antagonism towards Taiwan is also being increasingly enhanced by the upsurge and state support of reckless nationalism among its citizens. For a long time, Beijing has tried to frame the Cross-Strait relations in an arbitrary manner, treating the values of Taiwanese people with disdain and restricting this island country from being normally integrated as a part of the international society. One recent example of this is China’s intervention to exclude Taiwan from the World Health Assembly (WHA), which has deprived Taiwanese people from sharing valuable experience in public health with the world, disrupting the Asian and global epidemic prevention network, for example, the regional fight against the African swine flu since 2018 (Horton, 2017; Kyodo News, 2018; Kyodo News, 2018). China’s opposition to Taiwan’s constructive role in the region is a loss for every stakeholder but itself. If Taiwan is prevented from defending its people’s rights or from participating in international organizations, the human values of its people and those of citizens in other countries will be endangered.
These factors demonstrate how Taiwan needs to prioritize human values in its foreign policy to secure state survival. In this regard, the NSP can develop common interests and values and strive for more regional links and international ties. This also makes the NSP more relevant to the people both in Taiwan and in Asia.
The New Southbound Policy: A People-centred Foreign Policy
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as the ruling party in Taiwan since 2016 prioritized the NSP as its flagship foreign policy stance along with its people-centred agenda. The NSP-related initiatives envisaged an ever-closer relationship between Taiwan and Southeast Asia and South Asia through heightened awareness of regional communities. Its purpose is to reinforce Taiwan’s ‘warm power’, contributing to economic integration and social stability of Asia (Public Television Service Foundation, 2018).
As its diplomatic allies have severed their ties with Taipei under political pressure and economic inducement from China, Taiwan only has 17 diplomatic allies out of more than 200 countries in the world, none of which are in Asia. In addition to defending its relationship with allies, this island country’s foreign policy needs to actively engage in different fronts. The people-centred rationale of the NSP reflects the changing mentality of Taiwan’s foreign policymaking. It is Taiwan’s continuous effort that relocates itself in Asia by upholding human values in regional development agendas.
For Taiwan, emphasizing the people-centred development agenda can highlight its experiences and resources in promoting sustainable development and inclusive growth manifesting as human values shared by Taiwan and its Asian neighbours. Since 2016, Taiwan has been reinvigorating these experiences and resources into substantial content of the NSP from four policy dimensions (economic collaboration, people-to-people exchanges, resource sharing and regional links) to five flagship programmes, that is, industrial innovation and cooperation; industrial talent development; medical and public health cooperation; regional agricultural development; and setting up regional and national platforms and forums, such as the ‘Yushan Forum: Asian Dialogue for Innovation and Progress’.
The flagship programme industrial innovation and cooperation is designed to strengthen regional ties on industrial innovation between Taiwan and its Asian counterparts in the field of green energy and technology, industrial networks and smart machinery. The focus of cooperation is not only on facilitating the commodity trade of technological collaboration but also on consolidating institutional linkages with regional counterparts. For example, as the NSP emphasizes the importance of India and South Asia, the Indian Cabinet approved the signing of a bilateral investment agreement between India and Taiwan in October 2018, which will increase investment flows between both sides and facilitate a better environment for investment in both countries (Press Information Bureau, 2018).
In terms of industrial talent development, Taiwan plans to establish institutional platforms for bi-directional exchanges and then strengthen its multi-faceted engagement in Asia. In addition, the Taiwan government and its civil society are paying extensive attention to Southeast Asian and South Asian residents in localities with its empowerment and capacity-building projects. They can together become important linkages and stakeholders for Taiwan and Asia for progress. Since 2016, increasing numbers of students from Southeast Asia and South Asia have been migrating to Taiwan to study in universities and colleges. In 2019, Taiwan aims to receive and train 58,000 young talents in higher education from the region (Focus Taiwan News Channel, 2018).
With regard to medical and public health cooperation, Taiwan is implementing the ‘One County One Center’ (1C1C) project, linking up the national hubs of hospital collaboration in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India with Taiwan’s counterpart hospitals for the purpose of upgrading collaboration in public health, medical services and in establishing transnational disease prevention networks. Moreover, facilitated by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the New Southbound Market Healthcare Union will prioritize its ties with local medical centres and medical service networks in Southeast Asia (Taiwan News, 2018).
In regional agriculture, the NSP focuses on common interests in the agricultural industry, sustainable development and local empowerment in rural areas. One successful example of the ‘Agricultural Demonstration Farm (ADF)’ is set in Karawang in Indonesia with a specific focus on facilitating irrigation, rice cultivation, horticulture, smart agriculture and farmer training, while also procuring food security through bilateral and regional undertakings (Chairunnisa, 2018). Not only in Indonesia, the Philippines is also partnering with Taiwan through joint venture agreement in setting up the ADF at localities to produce high-value crops (Hou & Yeh, 2018).
Finally, Taiwan has pledged to organize new regional dialogues to share ideas and practices of regional development. The Yushan Forum, initiated by Taiwan and held annually, is one of the key mechanisms to promote warm power diplomacy and seek for more participation from regional stakeholders. In 2018, this Taiwan-initiated regional platform hosted by the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation (TAEF) attracted more than 1,000 participants from Taiwan and neighbouring countries. There were 51 representatives from 17 countries, including international leaders such as Nobel Peace Prize laureates Frederik Willem de Klerk and Kailash Satyarthi, to address human values and people-centred development agendas for regional prosperity (Yang & Chiang, 2018).
In Taiwan, the people-centred agenda and practice of the NSP enjoy solid support from within. It is encouraging that, according to public opinion surveys conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in 2016 and 2017, the NSP enjoyed support from the majority of Taiwanese people. In 2016, 71 per cent of respondents said they were ‘satisfied’ with the policy, while 80 per cent said they were ‘supportive’ of it in 2017 (Taiwan Today Agencies, 2017).
Highlighting People-centred Regional and Global Values
Taiwan’s President Ing-wen Tsai emphasizes strengthening ‘values-based diplomacy’ with ‘like-minded’ international partners as a way to secure its survival niche (Tiezzi, 2018). The NSP is her flagship foreign policy initiative to promote its values-based diplomacy in Asia and with like-minded partners.
The NSP is to promote regional identity and human values shared by the Taiwanese people and the region, rather than merely exporting a so-called ‘Taiwan model’ to neighbouring countries. Its ‘soft branding’ looks at reinforcing solid partnerships between Taiwan and regional stakeholders in tackling with development challenges. In other words, Taiwan is seeking to develop regional recognition that will eventually lead to more regional collaboration. The prevailing regional and global values are also the values that are being promoted by Taiwan. To this end, Taiwan can contribute to the modalities of good governance and share its practice on how these challenges can be addressed and common interests can be shaped. The process of sharing and cultivating partnerships facilitates linkages between human and regional values.
At a regional level, since ASEAN began its community-building process in the late 1990s, it has sought to promote a people-centred agenda by underlining the importance of human values in regional integration (Morada, 2008). For instance, the AEC plans to accelerate regional economic growth by creating a single production base and an integrated market. The economic benefits of this undertaking will be shared with the people of ASEAN. The APSC is aimed at creating a stable environment for political development that will protect the rights and interests of its people. The ASCC is being developed in response to the new transnational challenges, regional connectivity and economic integration. Its purpose is to encourage social transformation and foster multicultural values.
Taiwan is aware of the community-building process in ASEAN for the past two decades. It is therefore keen to utilize the NSP to catch up and be included in the process of ongoing regionalization. Now that ASEAN members are embracing the idea of ASEAN connectivity, with the purpose of establishing transnational connections among institutions, infrastructures and people, Taiwan is eager to share its experience in developing soft infrastructure and good governance as well as participating in physical infrastructure projects.
With regard to the APSC, Taiwan is firmly in favour of securing regional peace and stability and hopes to promote this with values of good governance. Taiwan’s responses to the AEC and the ASCC are embodied in the NSP’s five flagship programmes as well as in potential policy areas such as e-commerce, infrastructure and tourism.
At a global level, these efforts also show that Taiwan’s NSP is moving towards the practice of value diplomacy corresponding to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) upheld by the United Nations (refer to Table 1). The flagship programme industrial innovation and cooperation, for example, addresses six SDGs out of 17 goals, such as ‘affordable and clean energy’, ‘decent work and economic growth’, ‘industry innovation and infrastructure’, ‘reduced inequalities’, ‘responsible consumption and production’, ‘climate action’ and ‘partnership for the goals’. In effect, 13 out of 17 SDGs are addressed by the NSP’s flagship programmes as well as its potential policy engagement areas. In this regard, the NSP not only ensures Taiwan’s national interests but more importantly, implements the vision of regional and global co-prosperity with human values through bilateral and multilateral engagement.
In defence of regional and global human values, Taiwan’s NSP has at least three significant features: material sharing, capacity upgrading and identity making.
First, at the material level, the promotion of the NSP represents Taiwan’s provision of material resources and support towards its neighbours and cooperation with their local communities in building production bases or securing common development needs. Taiwan does not aim to act alone but instead seeks to work in tandem with local efforts. In countries or localities with insufficient development opportunities in Asia, Taiwan’s NGOs, for example, Taiwan Alliance in International Development (Taiwan AID), is working together with local partners to provide equal educational opportunities for people, building facilities such as water-pumping stations and developing specific local assistance programmes. Resources sharing by Taiwan can contribute in freeing people from the threat of hunger and provide them the opportunity to access sufficient food and clothing.
Second, in other Asian countries or societies that have already attained foundations for further development, Taiwan’s NSP focuses more on promoting or enhancing the development capabilities of its partners. This is the idea and practice of social progress. Through the sharing of resources and experiences of development, the NSP would facilitate the government and people of partner countries in adopting a sustainable and balanced inclusive growth model, translating the results of bilateral cooperation into a reference for the government’s and people’s self-improvement.
From the perspective of education and talent cultivation cooperation, this is not just about providing school hardware but introducing the supplementary concepts of education and empowerment, so that more talent may be developed for local needs. A good example is the Taiwan-Indonesia joint project in ADF in Karawang mentioned earlier. This is not a trailblazing mission to open new farmlands but instead aims to upgrade agricultural practices and irrigation systems and promotes the development of ‘Smart Agriculture’. This project is embodied in the spirit that people should not be left in hunger and destitution but should have a better, more sustainable livelihood in which adequate food and clothing should not be a distant dream.
Table 1. Sustainable Development Goals and Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy
Table 1. Sustainable Development Goals and Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy
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Third, in addition to the advancement of material and capabilities, the NSP strives to enable the establishment of a regional community identity, which will be embedded within and supported through deeper mutual understanding and interaction between people in the region. These people-to-people exchanges are not limited to political and social elites or to only businessmen and young leaders. By intimate interaction and dialogue, and by sharing similar concerns, embracing common interests and executing joint endeavours, social actors from different backgrounds and nationalities in the region become part of other living world experiences. Through intensive cooperation, Taiwan and the people of neighbouring countries can jointly advance the goal of co-prosperity. This is not only a value upheld by Taiwan and neighbouring countries but also is commonly shared by the world.
Linking Societies and People as a Regional Community
The NSP is not a short-term policy initiative; rather, it is a long-term self-reformation policy of Taiwan. It proceeds with a specific blueprint of ‘inward-looking’ regional engagement in promoting human values through public and private partnership. Its sustainability requires the engagement of various stakeholders and partnerships through new synergies. For Taiwan, the particularity of the NSP is related to the nature of Taiwan’s immigrant society. While developing its ‘regional strategy for Asia’, Taiwan needs to prioritize the welfare and rights of Southeast Asian and South Asian communities in Taiwan. It would be an encouraging model of enabling human values in foreign policy for all countries in Asia.
We believe that there are at least two modalities of domestic efforts to localize the people-centred NSP in the Taiwan society: one is the efforts made by Taiwan’s public sector and the other is capacity-building projects and social engagements initiated by civil society. The former has mostly ensured the basic rights of migrant communities of Southeast Asia in Taiwan, while the later focuses on the enhancement of their welfare and consolidates mutual understanding among people in Taiwan and the region.
It is true that public sectors in Taiwan have been devoted to ensuring the basic rights and interests of immigrants in Taiwan. Some further steps are taken by the Taiwan government through the implementation of the NSP. In 2018, there are approximately 696,000 migrant workers in Taiwan, of which 260,000 are from Indonesia, 210,000 from Vietnam and 150,000 from the Philippines. The Taiwan government has been committed to providing basic protections for migrant workers, as well as ensuring labour rights and adopting equal standards of minimum wage for both domestic and migrant workers.
Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency (NIA) has increased its capacity in protecting labour rights and securing the interests of migrant workers from guaranteeing basic minimum wages and promoting the Respite Care Service for special domestic caregivers. For years, there have been a number of migrant workers in Taiwan whom have fled out of factories for different reasons, called by governments in the past as ‘runaway migrant workers’. The NIA has recently changed the term ‘runaway migrant workers’ to ‘foreign workers lost in contact’ in 2018. It not only shows the changing mentality of bureaucrats, but also Taiwan’s respect for basic human rights and human values of its economic partners.
In the seaports of Taiwan, due to the population shift to urban cities and insufficient labour resources, migrant workers are in great demand in the fishing industry. The labour rights of fishermen have not been properly taken care of, especially in cases of overseas employment; this has become a concern for the Taiwan government and civil society. In Yilan, Yilan Migrant Fisherman Union (YMFU) was set up in 2013 with specific focus on protecting and ensuring labour rights and the basic rights of Indonesian and Pilipino migrant fishermen. The YMFU has long been committed to the care of fishermen and provides training courses. Its Secretary-General, Allison Lee, with her contribution, was awarded ‘Hero Acting to End Modern Slavery Award’ from the US State Department in 2017 (Everington, 2017).
For decades, many migrant fishermen from Indonesia have been working for the local village of Donggang Township, a famous port in southern Taiwan. They raised a total of NTD 7 million to set up a Donggang Mosque which is now a religious centre for Indonesian migrant fishermen there, valued and respected by local people. Taiwan’s NIA also assists in recruiting resources for the Mosque to provide facilities or computer classrooms to facilitate capacity-building programmes for migrant workers. (Interview with an Official of National Immigration Agency, 23 October 2018, Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, Taipei).
In addition to upgradation and capacity-building programmes, more efforts are being made by Taiwan’s social enterprises. One-Forty, one of the leading NGOs working on capacity-building programme for migrant workers in Taiwan, has pledged to establish ‘Business School for Migrant Workers’ with free courses, including classes on Chinese, savings, business and photography on the weekend. The trainees during their stay in Taiwan, initially only 10 students, now have increased to 400, and are increasing every year, and they have successfully operated businesses after returning to their home countries.
Moreover, One-Forty offers online courses for more than 22,000 subscribers. Labour workers are helped by newly acquired talents and subsequently become civilian ambassadors of Taiwan when they return to Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The exchanges and understanding between Taiwan and Asian neighbours should not be limited to the areas of economic, commerce, investment or migration issues. In particular, bilateral exchanges on cultures and arts would be meaningful in contributing to the deeper social understanding of Taiwan and Asian societies. For example, Vietnam National Institute of Culture and Arts Studies (VICAS) under Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sport, and Tourism worked with TAEF and National Culture and Art Foundation (NCAF) in developing cultural leaders and artists’ exchanges in late 2018. A delegation of contemporary artists, as the first group of VICAS for bilateral exchange, was invited to Taiwan for in-depth visits and dialogues with local counterparts. They not only learnt that the development of contemporary art in Taiwan has been deeply influenced by its historical legacy, political development, economic and social transformation, but also believed that display of arts is the best projection of Taiwan’s civil society and human values. Through the exchange of arts and cultures, it can better overcome the obstacles of languages and foster a genuine community for Taiwan and Vietnam.
Conclusion
Human values are the positive driving forces for the advancement of national and regional development. Taiwan seeks to defend and ensure human values in partnership with regional stakeholders with the same goals that regional governments and civil societies aspire to. Human values should not be represented as negative quantitative indicators or a social credibility waiting to be deducted (Hatton, 2015), nor should they be mere slogans used by the government to sustain the regime. They should be people oriented, not people targeted.
It is not easy for any country to enable human values in its foreign policy. As some major powers utilize ‘sharp power’ (Walker & Ludwig, 2017) to impose their ideology on others, what they are promoting is pursuing hegemony over other countries, rather than promoting human values for all. When it is practised by small states, diplomacy with human values is more likely to be ignored or brought into question because these small powers have insufficient resources or lack commitment. But this is not the case with Taiwan.
Taiwan is a small state that has endured decades of political constraints imposed on it by China. These constraints have limited the island’s ability to contribute to the international community. However, Taiwan has also undergone a long period of economic transition and social transformation. Based on Taiwan’s story of good governance, people-centred political development and foreign policy transformation, the NSP is able to contribute to the promotion of human values and the realization of the regional community in Asia. While President Tsai’s predecessor focused too much on Taiwan’s relations with China, the current administration worked vigorously to relocate Taiwan in the ongoing dynamism in Asia. This new value-based NSP bases itself on humanistic aspirations that are shared by most Taiwanese politicians from both sides of the aisle. While as a democratic country Taiwan inevitably experiences electoral power transitions, its people and leaders should be aware that Taiwan’s human values and progressive achievements, not only its military and economic capacities, are key to its own state survival. It should strive to share its resources and experiences for the betterment of its surrounding neighbours.
Taiwan’s practice of the NSP is not without its own set of challenges. While China’s aggression is a constant background factor, the hesitance of other regional countries to expand relations with Taiwan due to their fear of upsetting China may also limit the success of the NSP. In light of that, Taiwan should not proceed with unilateral actions but instead treat carefully the cautious feelings of its neighbours and strive to carve out innovative collaboration linkages that may contribute to stability and development in the region. Taiwan must always maintain an active role while avoiding being too high profile, so as to avoid causing uneasiness among its partners.
And, on the other hand, the Taiwanese government needs to communicate its policy objectives to its people with more clarity, to inform the public not only the necessity of trade and investment but also the necessity of comprehensive engagement with neighbouring countries. While economic cooperation is important and one of the key concerns of the Taiwanese public, people-to-people relations must also be prioritized so that the NSP may continue to progress organically into the future after the policy’s implementation, not only in the public sector but also among civil societies within the region.
The execution of the NSP may be challenging, but it is the right path to take if one envisions a region embedded in human values, with Taiwan playing an active role in this evolution. Taiwan’s NSP embodies a people-centred and people-oriented agenda for regional development, one which utilizes its economic and social resources to develop new regional economic networks and social partnerships. Only by emphasizing on human values and the prosperity of the entire regional community can Taiwan persuade its international partners to actively support Taiwan’s existence and contribution, thus ensuring Taiwan’s role as a key link in global development.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This article is a part of the authors’ research project (MOST 106–2420-H-004–002-MY2) financed by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
References
Baglione, L. A. (2008). Emphasizing principles for a moral foreign policy. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(9), 1303–1321.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | https://medium.com/@jeremychiang/enabling-human-values-in-foreign-policy-the-transformation-of-taiwans-new-southbound-policy-df0cf5aedef6 | ['Jeremy Huai-Che Chiang'] | 2019-04-27 12:07:05.094000+00:00 | ['Taiwan', 'China'] |
The Challenges Every Startup Faces and How Our Team Coped with Them | The path of any startup is not paved with flowers. Our history is no exception. We have been working on creating JOI — a diary of emotions that will help users improve their mental health. We’d like to share the problems we faced and the solutions we took. Perhaps our path will help someone get rid of the fear of screwing up — it happens with everyone sometimes, the most important is to learn how to cope with it :)
Even at the stage of developing the idea, my team and I encountered difficulties. In short:
insufficiently experienced developers and designers were our biggest problem: changes were implemented very slowly, we had a huge backlog of tasks that no one had time to do. It turned out that finding a specialist in these areas is not easy at all, despite the seemingly high competition on the market.
by the way, speaking about competition — there is a lot of apps related to mental health, so we had to come up with a unique selling proposition and work on the quality of the product to be competitive;
and again about the work of developers and designers: not all of them understood the concept of the future app. We aimed to build the work of algorithms based on the popular ABC method — one of the most famous techniques of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, used to analyze thoughts, behavior, and emotions. It seemed to them that it was enough to create an ordinary basic tracker to mark your mood quickly and that’s it.
The solution was:
not to be afraid to change the team. We had to go through many candidates before we’ve found specialists who understood our goals and shared our values. We managed to convey to the team the importance of diaries, mood tracking, and emotional intelligence for human health and successful social interaction.
communication with users is the key to success! We talked a lot with those who used our app and it helped us understand what they wanted, what problems they had, and how we could improve their experience, evoke positive emotions and support them in difficult times. We’ve managed to develop a useful journaling habit in people to prevent mental health problems.
And then everything suddenly became great, and money fell from the sky!
That was a joke, obviously. When JOI was released, the problems did not diminish — they just transformed, and became even deeper and more global :)
there are many startups, and only a few successful ones. And the problem is often the inability to promote yourself and your product. It was the time when we’ve faced the first difficulties — none of the team had any idea how important the proper advertising was for the success of our application. We didn’t realize that we needed to improve visibility, didn’t imagine how ASO works, and, to be honest, at first we behaved like blind kittens. Through trial and error, we’ve developed a promotion strategy, which, although not immediately, but began to bring results. If you want, I can share it in the following articles.
surely, we found bugs in our app and tried to fix them in time. This helped us grow and develop, albeit with difficulty, because initially we knew little about this area and were just a group of enthusiasts who wanted to create an interesting and useful product.
We got a pretty good reaction from users — nowadays the topic of working with your mental health is one of the most necessary and popular. Many people like the simplicity of our app, someone noticed the pleasant design. It turned out that some users even kept a diary on behalf of their children to track how certain triggers, people in the environment, and even games affected the child’s mood. In this regard, we are lucky — users understand the value of the app and we do not have to persuade them, trying to deceive or sniff out frank sh*t.
The app was almost immediately featured in Britain and then in other European countries, so users here have already tried it. Producthunt.com also featured our app under the Product of the Day category. We are very pleased that there are so many people sharing our idea to change the world, fight inequality, and create useful products to improve the quality of life.
Our team continues creating products for health and creativity, and we will tell you about them in the following publications. Now we are engaged in attracting investments for explosive growth and diversification of our projects. | https://medium.com/@aleksandr-lanin/the-challenges-every-startup-faces-and-how-our-team-coped-with-them-1090d922eff3 | ['Aleksandr Lanin'] | 2020-12-18 11:48:37.281000+00:00 | ['Startup Life', 'Startup', 'App Development', 'Business', 'Startup Lessons'] |
Serverless ETL using Lambda and SQS | AWS recently introduced a new feature that allows you to automatically pull messages from a SQS queue and have them processed by a Lambda function. I recently started experimenting with this feature to do ETL (“Extract, Transform, Load”) on a S3 bucket. I was curious to see how fast, and at what cost I could process the data in my bucket. Let’s see how it went!
Note: all the code necessary to follow along can be found at https://github.com/PokaInc/lambda-sqs-etl
The goal
Our objective here is to load JSON data from a S3 bucket (the “source” bucket), flatten the JSON and store it in another bucket (the “destination” bucket). “Flattening” (sometimes called “relationalizing”) will transform the following JSON object:
{
"a": 1,
"b": {
"c": 2,
"d": 3,
"e": {
"f": 4
}
}
}
into
{
"a": 1,
"b.c": 2,
"b.d": 3,
"b.e.f": 4
}
Flattening JSON objects like this makes it easier, for example, to store the resulting data in Redshift or rewrite the JSON files to CSV format.
Now, here’s a look at the source bucket and the data we have to flatten.
Getting to know the data
Every file in the source bucket is a collection of un-flattened JSON objects: | https://medium.com/poka-techblog/serverless-etl-using-lambda-and-sqs-d8b4de1d1c43 | ['Simon-Pierre Gingras'] | 2018-08-13 11:51:01.250000+00:00 | ['Python', 'S3', 'AWS', 'AWS Lambda', 'Serverless'] |
Community Update — July 13th, 2018 | Good day everyone and welcome to this community update.
Exchanges
We are working closely with the Quoine and Qryptos team as they are working diligently to fulfil their regulatory requirements in Japan and Singapore. Given the recent scrutiny of the Asian regulators on exchanges and token issuers, we felt the need to undertake clearer regulatory and legal analysis on the cryptocurrency landscape in Singapore and in relation to our LND token. This analysis will be completed in the next few weeks at which point we will be able to give a clearer indication of our listing date on Qryptos.
Business Development
In the last two weeks, Linda and Steve have been travelling to meet clients and potential partners in New York, Chicago, Seoul and Hong Kong.
New York & Chicago
We met with a number of our partners including banks, exchanges and hedge funds while in New York. We also met a few trading desks in Chicago and attended networking drinks on the rooftops of one of our partner firms. During these meetings we saw the scale in which traditional financial institutions are embracing the cryptocurrency space in a massive way and are paving the infrastructure and tools through which they can be accessed.
However many of the institutional players are still waiting and strategizing for the right step to approach the market, given the regulatory uncertainty. Through this process, we have been able to establish ourselves as a go-to industry partner to cement our relationship with these institutional players as they approach entering this market.
Seoul
We attended a Blockchain event called Chainers in Seoul where we met with interesting Asian based projects, exchanges and emerging institutional players. We also met with different exchanges and funds which we previously had relationships with.
We quickly navigated a depressed attitude in the South Korean market which is attributed to the strict regulatory oversight by the financial regulators. This has meant that it’s been very difficult for exchanges to offer the same services to retail clients in 2018 that they have been able to do last year. This meant that exchange volumes for the top Korean exchanges have decreased by almost 60–90% of their 2017 volumes. In addition, their strategy towards the market is also changing and have all now professed a more institutional outlook for their go-to-market strategy. Yet, this is still challenged by the fact that the regulators currently do not allow deposits to exchanges to be made through corporate accounts and are restricting mainstream financial services players from offering cryptocurrency products to their existing retail or corporate clients. In practical terms, this means that any ambitions Korean institutions have for entering the crypto market is now funnelled out of their domestic markets and into the Hong Kong or Singaporean markets instead. Across the conversations we had in Korea, this attitude from locals have helped us re-evaluate Korea as a key market for Lendingblock so we will focus our attention closer on Hong Kong and Singapore as key access points into the Asian markets.
Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, we had a more positive experience with regards to meeting many traditional new crypto financial institutions who are young in their digital asset experience yet are ambitious to grow and have recruited heavy weight teams supplemented by the wealth of experience and local financial industry talent in Hong Kong. Here we met our partners Octagon Strategy, as well as a few other hedge funds, both traditional and crypto focused. Discussions here mirrored our experience
The trip quickly reinforced our relationships with both new and existing partners and helped us navigate the Asian markets for developing future relationships in the region.
Regulatory Update
Feedback from our Gibraltar lawyers on the DLT License application suggests the GFSC are becoming increasingly demanding on firms in the application process and several firms have been asked for significant additional information, extending the timeframes of the application process. We are on track to submit our full application at the end of July and intend to provide a comprehensive set of documentation in order to minimise the level of additional questions and document requests. We have undertaken a review, with our legal advisers, of the US regulatory landscape as it relates to the Lendingblock business model and have drawn up a plan for obtaining US regulatory approval. This is likely to be a lengthy process and very few firms have so far obtained approval to operate on a fully authorised basis in the US. Whilst it may be possible to operate for a short time with non-US entities of US clients, we believe that obtaining full regulatory authorisation in the US will provide important commercial advantage for the long-term operation of the platform, including the potential for bringing tokenised securities into the product set. With the General Counsel having started two weeks ago and the new Head of Compliance and Risk due to start next week we now have almost the full team needed to pursue the various regulatory approvals that we need to obtain across the globe. Next step will be to begin a review of the regulatory environment and all of the key territories which Lendingblock clients operate.
Tech Update
The tech team are continuing with the build of the platform and service infrastructure. Sprint 7 was closed last week, and included the following work:
Adding user settings, KYC, notification end points to the API
Build out API docs and user guides for key functionality on the website
Further work on devops
Complete loan smart contract development
Build out mobile version of the website
Login/registration build and UI completion
Sprint 8 is now mid-way through and looks to provide the following deliverables:
Institutional settings and KYC UI and build
Execution panel UI and build (the component which will allow users to execute orders)
Further API development
Creation of price engines
Creation and storage of loan wallet
Further devops work
Team
We have had a number of new joiners start in the past few weeks including Ehsan, Sebastian and Ben, our General Counsel and Business Analysts respectively. In the next two weeks, we will have a new backend developer, Head of Marketing and Head of Compliance starting as well.
We are glad to report that despite the growth we’ve had in the recent weeks at Lendingblock, the new joiners have been able to adapt to our culture very quickly and are getting on fantastically with the rest of the team.
Community Update
For the past two weeks we have been focusing on the Ambassador Program and co-ordinating to publish the Ambassador produced content towards the end of the month. It is paramount to generate and distribute articles/blog posts/videos that are well written, correct and most importantly, feel organic, thus we have been concentrating on these traits.
As a reminder, you can apply to be a Lendingblock Ambassador here.
Given our increased focus on Hong Kong and Singapore, we are putting together a plan to grow and engage with Chinese speaking community there, which will be implemented towards the end of the month.
We are also planning to host a Lendingblock meetup in London at the start of August — more details next week.
In case you didn’t get a chance to attend the Tax & Cryptocurrencies event earlier this month, we will be posting the recorded talks on our YouTube channel in the near future.
Pathfounders Event
On June 22, 2018, Linda spoke on the Instituionalisation of cryptocurrencies and the financial infrastructure that Lendingblock is building to facilitate the market dynamics. https://fintech-blockchain.thepathfounder.com/agenda
Women in Silicon roundabout
Our product manager, Tara, spoke at the Women in Silicon Roundabout event on 27th of June, speaking on “How Lending and Borrowing Provide New Opportunities for the Cryptoasset Market”.
https://www.women-in-technology.com/entrepreneurs-and-female-founders
The Europas
Charlie Beach gave an interesting discussion on the process of an ICO, by using our own ICO process as an example.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/31/more-speakers-panels-at-the-europas-and-how-to-get-your-ticket-free/
Links
Website: https://lendingblock.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lendingblock
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lendingblock/
Telegram: https://t.me/Lendingblock | https://medium.com/lendingblock/community-update-july-13th-2018-31bc744cc44e | [] | 2018-07-13 14:27:27.899000+00:00 | ['P2p Lending', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Fintech'] |
How to Engage People with Ideation and Challenge-based Learning | 1st Training of the Be-novative Partner Hub
The Be-novative Partner Ecosystem is a Hub of people and resources whose main goal is envisioning, accelerating, and scaling the success rate of both organizational and product-development, creating impactful projects and meaningful solutions locally or globally. We share knowledge, inspire people and actively co-create new methods. We contribute to a better, more creative Earth.
Learning and sharing knowledge in the Be-novative Partner Ecosystem
After the high energy and high attendance kick-off of the Be-novative Partner Hub on the 24th November 2020, we have gathered again online on the 10th of December for our second session. It was great to see new people joining us and see many returning. The event was hosted again by Priszcilla Varnagy, Founder of Be-novative, and Elvira Kalmár, Founder of Go Beyond Project, facilitator of the Learning Community.
How to engage and motivate people to be open in sharing their ideas and solve challenges your organisation is facing? Be it evolving the employee experience, a product or service development, or creating value for your customers, the way you organise yourself around the work matters — this is what we focused our training on.
We believe in challenge-based, experiential learning. So we designed the training to be immersive: we invited our partners for a challenge about a meaningful topic: Co-creating the ideal goals and action plan for 2021. We went through a challenge including ideation, evaluation, adding suggestions, and reviewing results on a collaborative action planning topic on the Be-novative platform: “What would make you feel content and proud to learn or achieve by the end of 2021 as part of the Be-novative Partner Hub?”
With our efficient ideation and decision-making process we could remotely arrive at the conclusions in less than an hour — that would need a day of a F2F workshop with highly skilled facilitators. Besides a great many ideas created, participants’ feedback on each idea created a shortlist of best concepts. These priority concepts can be further elaborated on the platform.
We are keeping the challenge open until our next session, so more ideas can be captured and participants, also people who couldn’t attend this session due to end-of-year engagements, can re-visit our session.
How To Engage With Ideation & Challenge-based Learning
Priszcilla Varnagy shared with us the Be-novative team’s learnings from projects and interviews conducted with challenge participants in the past 5 years. We all could see from the outcomes with more than 150 interviewees and more than 500 online participants that encouragement is more important for people than reward when it comes to a successful ideation or innovation process.
Pris shared tips and tricks on how to set up a challenge and how to communicate about it to make sure we get the right people on the platform. What motivates people to take part in challenges:
The topic itself (not the ideation process)
People want to take part in an ideation session on a topic that is relevant for their expertise and the outcomes are important. It should also be medium-wide (not too generic, neither too specific) and involving so that it contains “We” in both the question and description.
Involvement & communication of C-level management
Encouragement and feedback from valued people (mentors, jury) are one of the most important motivational factors for participants.
Implementation of the idea
If we are talking about reward, the opportunity to implement their idea with provided resources (time and budget) works best for the participants we mostly want to engage with.
Connections with new team members
We are social creatures and we like to be connected with like-minded people. The ability to connect with possible team members who see the same vision and solutions leaves us with a positive feeling and excitement about our jobs.
Training & Learning experience
People like to participate more in those challenges, where as a new experience, they also learn new skills. So we advise taking the teams with the best ideas forward in training where every team showcases their work-in-progress and they get feedback from each other and learn new methods to go forward with concept mapping, prototyping, or validation.
T he usecase of GE Healthcare showed the difference of traditional idea collection (idea box type) and using the Be-novative platform. The first year, when GE used a simple application process for their innovation week, their process resulted in 1 patentable solution, but next year using Be-novative, not just slightly more people were engaged to participate but they surfaced multiple times more ideas and narrowed them down to only the most impactful and feasible ones to develop into tangible prototypes. This process resulted in 23 patentable solutions which is insanely great.
Results & Outcome Driven Projects
We will group similar and complementary ideas together and conclude the best concepts for our 2021 Strategy and Action Plan for our Learning Community. On our next training on the 14th January on ‘RESULTS & OUTCOME DRIVEN PROJECTS’ we will work together on how to ensure the best outcomes for immersive and collaborative ideation sessions and select the highest impact solutions to implement. We will discuss another case study from IQBusiness, South Africa.
In the meantime, if you are interested in trying the platform with your team before you use it in client work, why not invite your colleagues and maybe even your trusted clients, partners and ideate together in the virtual space about your goals and best hopes for 2021 in your business? Get in touch with us, so we can assist you tailor the challenge.
If you are interested in joining our Partner Hub, we are looking forward to getting to know you. Apply to become a Be-novative partner by contacting us. | https://medium.com/@benovative/how-to-engage-people-with-ideation-and-challenge-based-learning-da025ce9c265 | [] | 2020-12-15 19:18:06.830000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Challenge', 'Planning', 'Innovation', 'Ideation'] |
Deploy Machine Learning Models On AWS Lambda | 2 — AWS Lambdas :
Before we start digging into using this service, let us first define it:
AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.
So what does this mean?
In simple words, it means whenever you have a ready-to-deploy machine learning model, AWS lambda will act as the server where your model will be deployed, all what you have to do is, give it the code + the dependencies, and that’s it, it is like pushing your code to a repo.
So let me show you how to do that:
First, you are going to need the serverless framework — an MIT open-source project — which will be our tools to build our App, so let us start:
The steps we will follow are these :
Install the serverless framework
Create a bucket in AWS
Push our trained model to the created bucket
Build main.py, the python file that will call our model and do predictions
Build the serverless.yml file, in which we will tell the serverless framwork what to do (create the lambda function)
Test what we have built locally (generating prediction with our model using the serverless framework)
Deploy to AWS.
Test the deployed app.
These will be the steps we are going to follow in this tutorial in order to deploy our trained model in AWS lambda.
So let us start:
Important Remark:
For the rest of the tutorial, make sure you are always in the directory where the files are, the requirements.txt, the main.py and the saved_adult_model.txt, and since I mentioned it, this is our requirements.txt:
lightgbm==2.2.3
numpy==1.17.0
scipy==1.3.0
scikit-learn==0.21.3
2.1 — Install The Serverless Framework :
To Install the serverless framwork in ubuntu, first you have to install npm. In order to do that, you can run the following commands in your terminal:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install nodejs
The above commands will install nodejs and also npm.
Next you can check that everything was installed correctly by running :
$ node -v
Which will return the version of nodejs
npm -v
Which will return the version of npm.
Now that we have installed npm, let us install serverless by running the following command:
npm install -g serverless
You can check that everything is installed successfully by running :
serverless
If you reached this point with no errors, then congrats, you have serverless installed and you are all set.
Let’s us move on to the next step.
2.2— Create A Bucket In AWS :
Our next step is to push the model we have trained to an AWS bucket, and for that we need first to create a bucket, so let us do that:
Creating a bucket on AWS can be done from the command line using the following code :
aws s3api create-bucket --acl private --bucket deploy-lgbm --create-bucket-configuration LocationConstraint=eu-west-1
The above command will create a bucket called deploy-lgbm in a private mode in eu-west-1 location.
2.3 — Push Our Trained Model To The Created Bucket :
So, now that our bucket is ready, let us push our trained model to it by running the following command :
aws s3 cp saved_adult_model.txt s3://deploy-lgbm/model/saved_model.txt
Perfect, now let us move on to the next step, building our main.py python file which we will use to call our model and make predictions.
2.3 — Build The Main.py File:
When it comes to deploying in AWS lambdas, the main function of your code is a function called lambda_handler (or any other name we choose to give it, although the standard one is lambda_handler).
Now, why this function is the important one?
That function is the one AWS lambdas will execute each time you invoke it (interact with it).Thus, that function is the one will receive your input, make the prediction, and return the output.
If you have ever worked with AWS lambdas from cloud9, you will notice that when you create a new lambda function and import it, the standard definition of the lambda_function is this :
def lambda_handler(event,context):
return {'StatusCode':200,
'body':'Hello there, this is Lambda'}
As you can see, the lambda function expects 2 inputs — an event, and a context:
The event will contains the information that we will send to the lambda, which will be in this case the samples we want to predict. (they will be in a json format)
As for the context, it usually contains information about the invocation, function, and execution environment. for this tutorial we won’t be using it.
So let us summarize what we are gonna do in this section :
First we need to get our trained model from the bucket, initialize our lightgbm and return it, so we will build a function for that.
Then we are going to make predictions with our model, so we are going to build a function for that too.
And finally, inside our lambda_handler function we will put all these things together, which mean, receive the event, extract the data from the event, get the model, make predictions, and then return the predictions.
So simple right?
Now let us build our file:
First we will build the get_model() function, which will download the trained lightgbm, and then initialize our model and return it :
Download the saved model.
As you can see, first we created an access to our bucket deploy-lgbm, using boto3, and then we used the method download_file to download our saved_model.txt and save it in /tmp/test_model.txt (recall that we saved the model in the bucket using the key : model/saved_model.txt).
All clear right? Let us move on then.
Now we will build the predict function, the function which will get the model, a data sample, do a prediction and then return it :
predict function
Let me explain what the above function does:
The function gets the event, extracts our data from the event, and gives the extracted data to the model to make prediction.
So simple right?
Important remarks :
For best practice, always use json formats to pass your data in the event.
In our case, things are sample, we extract the data and pass it to the model directly, in most other cases, there will be some processing on the data before you pass it to the model, so you will need another function for that, you will call before passing the data to the model.
Always split your process into multiple functions, we could have put everything in the lambda function, however our code won’t be that beautiful anymore. So always use a function when you can.
Now the last step is to define our lambda handler function, so let us do that :
lambda handler
As you can see, it is a very basic function, and it will grow more complex in a real world project.
What it does is clear, get the event and send it to the predict function to get the predictions, and then return the output in the standard format (you should always use that format): a dict with a Statuscode, and the results in a body.
So, this is the end of this section, let us move on to the next on : building the serverless.yml file.
2.4 — Build The Serverless.yml File :
As we have mentioned in the start of this article, the Serverless framework will be our tool to communicate with AWS and create a lambda function which will act as the server that will host our trained model. For that we need to tell serverless all the information that it needs:
Who is the provider? For example, is it AWS or google,
What is the language used?
What we want to create?
What roles it should have ?…etc.
All of these instructions, we will pass them in the serverless.yml file, so let us start building it:
First, we will give our service a name, let us say: test-deploy
service : test-deploy
Next section in our file will be about our provider, for this case it is AWS, the instructions in the yml file will look like this:
So, what did we do in the above lines of commands? Let me explain:
We set the name of our provider, which is aws,
The language used (python3.6),
the region where our lambda is going to be deployed,
the deployment bucket that serverless will use to put the package.
the iamRoleStatements, which mean this :
Our lambda function is going to download the trained model from a bucket in aws, and by default, it does not have the permission to do that. So we need to give it that permission, and this is why we created a role, so we can give to our lambda the permissions it needs (for this case just the access to a bucket. In other cases could be more, you can consult aws documentation for a detailed explanation on the matter).
And to give more example about roles, let us say that you need to invoke another lambda from this lambda, in this case this lambda needs permission for that, so you have to add them in the iamRoleStatements.
Important remarks:
The bucket where we put our model, and the bucket used by lambda should be in the same region (for this tutorial we used eu-west-1), if they are not in the same region it won’t work.
The next section in our serverless.yml file, will be about the function we are going to create :
As you can see,
First we define some very basic things, like the name and description.
We define our handler :
Recall what we said about lambda_function, we mentioned that this function will be the one doing all the work. Now this is the point where you tell serverless who is your lambda_handler function; for this case we have defined it with the name lambda_handler in our main.py file, so we put handler : main.lambda_handler. As we said earlier, we can give it what ever name we want, like for example, we can name that function hello, but then we have to put in the handler : main.hello.
Recall what we said about lambda_function, we mentioned that this function will be the one doing all the work. Now this is the point where you tell serverless who is your lambda_handler function; for this case we have defined it with the name lambda_handler in our main.py file, so we put handler : main.lambda_handler. As we said earlier, we can give it what ever name we want, like for example, we can name that function hello, but then we have to put in the handler : main.hello. We define our event :
How are we going to communicate with our lambda function, or in other words, how are we going to trigger (invoke) our lambda function. For this tutorial we are going to use http events, which means, invoke the lambda function by the call of a url, which will be a POST and the resource will be /predictadult.
Next Section is about Plugins:
What does that mean? Let me explain :
So far we instructed the serverless about who is our provider, and what is our function. Now for our code to work, we need the packages to be installed, and we have already put them in a requirements.txt file, so, we need to tell serverless to install those requirements, and for that we will use a Plugin called serverless-python-requirements.
We will add it to our serverless.yml file like this :
plugins:
- serverless-python-requirements
The last thing we are going to add in our file is an optimization thing, but why we need optimizations? Let me explain :
Lambda function has some limitations for the maximum size of the package to be uploaded, and the maximum unzipped file allowed is of size 250 MB. Sometimes we exceed this amount, and to reduce it we can remove some garbage that exists in our packages which will save us some Megabytes. To do this, we instruct serverless by adding the following command in our serverless.yml file :
custom:
pythonRequirements:
slim : true
And that is it, the full serverless.yml file will look like this :
service : test-deploy
plugins:
- serverless-python-requirements
provider:
name: aws
runtime: python3.6
region : eu-west-1
deploymentBucket:
name : deploy-tenserflow
iamRoleStatements:
- Effect : Allow
Action:
- s3.GetObject
Resource:
- "arn:aws:s3:::deply-tenserflow/*"
custom:
pythonRequirements:
slim : true
functions:
lgbm-lambda:
name: lgbm-lambda-function
description : deploy trained lightgbm on aws lambda using serverless
handler : main.lambda_handler
events :
- http : POST /predictadult
Cool, now let us move to the next chapter: Testing what we have built locally.
2.5 — Test What We Have Built Locally :
So it is testing time:
First, your local directory should be like this :
Now that our model is ready, also as our serverless.yml file, let us invoke our serverless locally and test if everything is working by running this in command line:
serverless invoke local -f lgbm-lambda -d '{"body":[[3.900e+01, 7.000e+00, 1.300e+01, 4.000e+00, 1.000e+00, 0.000e+00,4.000e+00, 1.000e+00, 2.174e+03, 0.000e+00, 4.000e+01, 3.900e+01]]}'
If you followed the steps correctly you should get an output out of this command. In this case the output is:
{
“StatusCode”: 200,
“body”: 0.0687186340046925
}
As you can see, we choose the option invoke local, which mean we are using our computer, not the cloud, we also passed only 1 sample through the ‘body’ field (those values are the features values, not very elegant why right ?)
So, it seems everything is working locally, now let us deploy our lambda.
2.6 — Deploy To AWS:
So, it is deployment time:
Once everything is set and working, deploying a lambda is as easy as running this line of command :
serverless deploy
And that’s it, you will start seeing some log messages about the package getting pushed, you will also see the size of your zipped package.
2.7 — Test The Deployed Model :
Once the deploy command is executed with no errors, and your lambda is deployed, you will get your end point (the url) which we will use to make predictions. This url will be something like this https://xxx/predictadult :
And to test our prediction we will run this command:
And that’s it, Congrats, you have deployed your model in a AWS lambdas function and now can serve you.
If you faced any error while re-running the above tutorial, you can reach out to me, my contact info are below, Iwill be very happy to help.
I hope you found this tutorial very insightful and practical, and I hope you are feeling now a better Data scientist after reading all these words.
Until next time, meanwhile if you have any questions for me, or you have a suggestion for a future tutorial my contact info are below.
About Me
I am the Principal Data Scientist @ Clever Ecommerce Inc, we help businesses to Create and manage there Google Ads campaigns with a powerful technology based on Artificial Intelligence.
You can reach out to me on Linked In or by gmail: [email protected]. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/deploy-machine-learning-models-on-aws-lambda-5969b11616bf | ['Oussama Errabia'] | 2020-03-11 10:46:41.379000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'AWS'] |
DEVS FOR HEALTH: a Hackathon for Good — Codemotion Magazine | Hackathons have had a long history of bringing people together to develop technological solutions in response to specific problems and challenges. Hackathons can be in-house, focused on a particular technology, a social issue, or policy challenge.
Over the last year, we’ve seen a shift from in-person events as COVID-19 has required extensive efforts to reduce the risk of exposure. While virtual events may lack the in-person experience, they present the opportunity to develop tremendous value and rapid innovation development.
Over merely days, teams can help deep dive on a specific problem and develop, test, and launch prototypes, which if successful, can lead to full-scale commercial services and initiatives.
This year Codemotion recently partnered with Gilead Sciences to create the hackathon DEVS FOR HEALTH in response to the challenges of living with HIV. This document provides an in-depth analysis of the event: the logistics, the challenges, the stakeholders, and the benefits to all parties.
It’s particularly relevant to organisations that may be considering hosting, partnering, sponsoring, or contributing to a hackathon but are not sure where to start or how their company can reap the benefits.
Why the DEVS FOR HEALTH hackathon?
While the treatment of HIV may have progressed significantly over the last few decades, the challenges of detection and treatment still persist. The disease now manifests as a chronic condition for most people in Europe. However, the realities of complex health needs and stigma mean that living with HIV still has a significant impact on a person’s wellbeing.
It is estimated that 120,000 people with HIV live in Italy, of which about 18,000 are unaware of the infection. HIV may not show symptoms for a long time and can be diagnosed even after years (on average 4.5 to 5 years after infection. The delay in diagnosis can result in a faster course of infection, less efficacy of therapy and a greater risk of increased transmission of the virus.
The COVID-19 epidemic has further made it difficult if not impossible, to offer the test for the diagnosis of HIV and assistance health care of people with HIV.
According to Cristina Le Grazie, Executive Director Medical Affairs of Gilead Italy:
“ DEVS FOR HEALTH is the new initiative that Gilead Italy has developed at the service of those living with HIV. Innovation for us does not only mean developing medicines that are increasingly responsive to the management of different types of patients, but also putting technology at the service of the community and of those living with the HIV virus. Hence the two themes selected for this initiative: the emergence of undiagnosed cases and the quality of life of patients. The participation of doctors and patients focuses on the needs of the two actors in the fight against this disease to ensure that the technological solutions that will be developed fully meet their needs “.
The DEVS FOR HEALTH hackathon challenge
“ Intuition and imagination on the one hand, digital skills on the other. An explosive mix to contribute to the definition and implementation of innovative technological solutions in the fight against HIV infection “.
Cristina Le Grazie, Executive Director Medical Affairs of Gilead Italy
Hackathon participants were invited to develop a specific product or service in respect to particular challenge across a number of issues experienced by people with HIV/AIDS, specifically a mobile app, web app or another service not categorized as a medical device with the choice of two broad umbrella categories of problems to solve with a deeper niche within:
The challenge of the undiagnosed and access to HIV care
In short, participants were tasked to create an innovative solution on the issues of:
Knowledge of infection and testing
Finding and integrating information on the state of the infection in Italy
Facilitating access to the test
Simplifying the procedure for initiating and maintaining therapy
This could specifically focus on:
Health education / Health promotion: promote awareness of risky behaviours among the general population and the so-called key populations (MSM; male, female, trans prostitution; prisoners; drug addicts, young people, etc.) and the importance of timely testing in the event of such behaviour.
Access to HIV testing: Solutions that facilitate access to the test:
Where to perform it
Which test to do
Speed of execution
Obtaining the result
The expansion of places where testing can be performed
Cultural and operational barriers in the population and in health workers
Data integration
Italy lacks a University accessible central site of AIDS epidemiology.
Participants were tasked to design solutions based on the following categories that promote the integration of information for a better and rapid knowledge of the state of the infection in Italy and for better management of information on individual patients.
Devise solutions that promote the removal of obstacles that prevent or slow down the initiation and maintenance of therapeutic treatment, both from a bureaucratic organizational point of view and that linked to other factors.
Quality of life
This category sought innovative solutions to improve the quality of life of HIV-positive patients, who face personal and social challenges as well as those related to the management of the now chronic infection and obstacles to therapy.
Stigma: Devise solutions that can alleviate the isolation of the person with HIV and/or the stigma still associated with the person and the infection in general. Management of chronic condition: Devise solutions that assist doctor/patient involvement and awareness in infection management specifically:
Continuity of the doctor-patient relationship in the periods between one visit and another aimed at managing the infection and concomitant diseases of HIV and consequent to ageing (e.g. diabetes, hypertension)
Optimization of control exams for monitoring the state of seropositivity and for concomitant pathologies to avoid excessive medicalization
Protection of the privacy of seropositivity with the increase of checks due to the chronicity of the infection and concomitant diseases
Health discrimination
Access to drug withdrawal
Devise solutions that can facilitate the withdrawal of drugs for HIV therapy.
The prize
Each member of the two winning teams won Amazon vouchers worth € 3,000, in addition to being invited to the DEVS FOR HEALTH boot camps, five days of technical and training support to transform the idea into a concrete digital solution in the fight against HIV.
The DEVS FOR HEALTH hackathon timeline
June 4: Registrations opened (This included the early stages of forming groups and initial mentoring delivered through a dedicated Discord channel
June 15 — June 30: formalise the composition of teams and dedicate focus to their proposal
June 30 — July 12: Period of intensive work including compulsory mentor check-ins to monitor the progress and completion of tasks
July 12: The deadline for sending the project proposals. Afterwards, the projects were sent to the Technical Jury, which evaluates them and pre-selects the best ones.
July 20: Announcement of the four preselected teams who will compete for the prizes and participate in the final event The Teams preselected by the Technical Jury compete for the awarding of prizes and will participate in the final event.
September 10 Online final winners announcement event. This event included:
Welcome and institutional greetings
Video-pitch of the four finalist projects and Q&A session
Inspirational pitches and project evaluation
Winners announcement
September 19: Beginning of 5 day Bootcamp
Day 1: Business canvas, early adopters identification, business idea validation with industry experts, user stories
Business canvas, early adopters identification, business idea validation with industry experts, user stories Day 2: Functional and graphic mockup, possible rethinking, mockup validation with industry experts
Functional and graphic mockup, possible rethinking, mockup validation with industry experts Day 3: MVP
MVP Day 4 and 5: Delivery and prototype demo
The value of a 5-day DEVS FOR HEALTH bootcamp
Unlike many hackathons, things didn’t end with the awarding of the winners. Winning teams were invited to attend a five-day bootcamp where they received the technical support necessary to transform ideas into prototypes and then into functioning services.
This gives teams the ability to continue to work to enhance their respective projects and take advantage of the mentorship of experts, including clinicians and people living with HIV who provide valuable support and insight.
The need to understand the problems the hackathon is trying to solve
“ We thought it useful to support the participants with information, content and materials previous to the hackathon, that could help them to address better the topics of the challenges — videos and online resources “.
Silvia Rossi, project manager, Gilead Hackathon for Codemotion.
It’s critical that any tech is created with the end-user in mind — even more so in the healthcare when part of the challenge is to get people to engage in the first place. A more technical audience may not possess the necessary lived knowledge of HIV or health science as a discourse.
In response, DEVS FOR HEALTH made a concerted effort to provide critical resources to aid hackathon participants to have data-driven and patient-centric knowledge. This included:
Documentation about the science and challenges of HIV
Interviews with leading experts in HIV specific to the challenges including Franco Maggiolo , Head of US HIV-Related Pathologies and Experimental Therapies, ASST Papa Giovanni XXIII, Bergamo and Daniele Calzavara, Coordinator Milan CheckPoint Coordinator and living with AIDS
, Head of US HIV-Related Pathologies and Experimental Therapies, ASST Papa Giovanni XXIII, Bergamo and Daniele Calzavara, Coordinator Milan CheckPoint Coordinator and living with AIDS An analysis of existing data tools created around HIV. — This is particularly valuable in avoiding the temptation by teams to ‘reinvent the wheel’.
The winning proposals of DEVS FOR HEALTH
The challenge of the undiagnosed and access to care: fHIVe
fHIVe aims to create a mobile App that provides practical answers to the needs of the population aged 18–35 on the subject of HIV. The dissemination and use of the App will increase awareness and early diagnosis of HIV in a young population in which prevention and early treatment significantly improve the quality of life.
Quality of life challenge: UNLOCK 4/90
Unlock 4/90 is a smart locker service that facilitates the withdrawal process of antiretroviral therapies. Unlock enables HIV-positive patients to programme, via a mobile app, the day and time of the withdrawal of drugs in a hospital of their choice and carry it out in total privacy. The hospital pharmacist can receive the withdrawal request and place the drugs in one of the drawers of a computerized locker located near the hospital pharmacy itself.
Special mention: PGP Medical Card
PGP Medical Card involves the creation of a system for the exchange of sensitive medical information in a confidential and protected manner between the person and the health system. The data is encrypted using a general key belonging to the health service and can only be accessed through a system of 2 QR codes.
Why join a hackathon?
There are many great, tangible reasons for joining a virtual hackathon:
Increase your experience working in groups
Meet and collaborate, solve problems, share skills and help build better products
Make friends and connections — you might find your new colleagues or housemate
Gain confidence in explaining your ideas to new people
Gain mastery of virtual tools and working online with a group of people
Learn new skills and hacks
“ In some fields, and in particular in Italy, there are few opportunities to implement a real open innovation project: this hackathon has been the first step of a collaboration between a promoter involved in scientific research on one side, and the innovation brought by developers on the other. The opportunity offered by boot camps (i.e., the second important part of this project) will be a further step towards the development of the ideas towards prototypes “.
Silvia Rossi, project manager, Gilead Hackathon for Codemotion.
Hackathons are for everyone
One thing that is often overlooked is that hackathons are just not for developers. You might need writers who can translate tech concepts into practices, designers who can share charts and graphics, and financial folks who can set a potential budget of costs in case you win the funds to finance your idea.
Anyone who might be an end-user of whatever you are planning to build will have valuable insights and a perspective you may not have considered.
“ We are always working to improve and offer a better experience to our users. It has been challenging to succeed in making this opportunity accessible to our target users: we have been working with all the project’s stakeholders to define the goals and make them clear and reachable in terms of their expected outcome. To do that, we had to work on both sides: with the promoter to find out and define the challenges, with the developers to support them at our best with our mentorship and resources “.
Silvia Rossi, project manager, Gilead Hackathon for Codemotion.
According to Silvia Rossi, project manager of the Gilead Hackathon, there are many benefits for a company to get involved in a hackathon including:
Collect new ideas that can be useful to address an issue or stimulate the development of new business models
Discover and get to know new professionals for future collaborations
Launch (or re-launch) promote, enhance or boost the brand
Promote a brand new kind of event for marketing purposes
An opportunity for the company to test a specific technology or promote the use of a particular tech product
Gilead Sciences told about their experience with this hackathon:
“Our commitment to fight against HIV has always been strong on all fronts, from prevention to therapy, to offer a good quality of life of those living with HIV. Our goal is to find the cure through innovation. That’s why we have launched DEVS FOR HEALTH, a truly innovative project whose wide scope embraces many sensitive areas, from raising awareness among the global population to improving the quality of life of the patients. We have chosen Codemotion as our partner for DEVS FOR HEALTH as we were convinced it was the best technological partner to engage the digital professional we needed. AWe hope that the 3 projects will continue to develop with Codemotion’s digital support and may soon become ready-to-use solutions having a positive impact on how we manage this infection”. ll 3 winning solutions have met very high standard confirming the fact that we have made a good choice.
How Codemotion can help your hackathon
Codemotion consists of an enthusiastic team of professionals experienced with running events both in-person and virtual. As a result, we can help manage your hackathon to ensure the process and winning teams meet with your expectations. Specifically, we can assist with:
Establish a cross-company organising team, including corporate, academic, and community representatives.
Assistance with developing the themes and specifics of your hackathon
Create and host a central platform to upload all the information relating to the hackathon, including timelines, guidelines and other resources.
Community outreach and access to participants through our extensive community of developers, data scientists, designers, technical writers, CXOs and other technologists
Assistance with corporate outreach and enlisting mentors
Resourcing and supporting mentors throughout the hackathon to support their teams
Live event coordination
Media outreach
Post-participant survey and additional communication such as establishing groups, newsletters or other channels as appropriate
Post-event analysis
Creation of a contacts database of stakeholder, participant and event attendees for future marketing opportunities
If you have any queries about our hackathons, please contact us.
About Gilead
Gilead Sciences was founded in 1987 in California by the will of a group of researchers to bet on scientific research to develop drugs capable of changing the course of very serious diseases that still afflict humanity. Among these, in particular, HIV / AIDS.
Focusing on research since the beginning has allowed the development of over 24 innovative drugs, in addition to the 32 molecules in various stages of clinical development in 5 different therapeutic areas: HIV / AIDS, Hepatitis C, respiratory and inflammatory diseases, hematology and oncology.
Gilead is now present in over 35 countries around the world. Thanks to the work of over 11,000 employees and collaborators, it continues to be at the forefront of innovation: cell therapy in oncohematology.
Commitment to the fight against HIV
In Italy since 2000, Gilead has its operational headquarters in Milan and counts on the value and professionalism of over 200 employees. Since its founding, Gilead has never stopped considering HIV infection as one of the global health emergencies on which to focus its scientific and social commitment.
Gilead’s scientific research has led to increasingly effective therapies that have transformed HIV from a debilitating and deadly infection to a chronic and manageable disease today. Through close collaboration with physicians, patient associations and public institutions, Gilead has carried out important initiatives for the prevention and early diagnosis of HIV.
In addition, it promotes and supports programs to improve the quality of life and therapeutic assistance of those affected. Devs for Health is another piece of the company’s commitment to fighting the virus. | https://medium.com/@catelawrence/devs-for-health-a-hackathon-for-good-codemotion-magazine-65926953e7c4 | ['Cate Lawrence'] | 2021-01-11 11:52:07.167000+00:00 | ['HIV', 'Tech For Good', 'Hackathons', 'AIDS', 'Technology'] |
5 global news consumption trends in charts | For anyone interested in understanding the attitudes and habits of news audiences, the annual Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University is a must-read.
This year’s study, of course, plays out against the backdrop of the coronavirus crisis, a development that the report says is “almost certain to be a catalyst for more cost-cutting, consolidation, and even faster changes in business models.”
Nonetheless, despite the uncertainty that COVID-19 has produced, many of the trends shared in the report pre-date the pandemic. And their repercussions will continue to be felt when we come out on the other side, too. As a result, these trends are too big for journalists and news outlets to ignore.
Here are five essential trends — based on a survey of more than 80,000 digital news consumers in 40 markets — that you need to know.
(1) Norway is the global leader for digital news payments
Data captured in January 2020 shows that more people are paying for online news, and Norway is the poster-child. More than four out of every 10 (42%) respondents in the country paid for online news at some point in the past year. Other markets, including parts of Europe, Latin America, Asia and the United States have also seen an increase in this space.
At the same time, as the report authors remind us, “It is important to note that across all countries most people are still not paying for online news, even if some publishers have since reported a ‘coronavirus bump.’”
Q7a. Have you paid for ONLINE news content, or accessed a paid for ONLINE news service in the last year? Base: Total sample in each market = 2000.
(2) Trust in the news media is lowest in France and South Korea
“As the coronavirus hit, we observed overall levels of trust in the news at their lowest point since we started to track these data,” says the report.
Globally, fewer than four in 10 (38%) news consumers said they trust “most news [providers] most of the time.”
The figure is slightly higher when asking about specific news channels that consumers themselves use- rather than the wider news ecosystem. Nevertheless, less than half (46%) of digital news consumers said they trust the news they use themselves.
Although trust in search (32%) and social media (22%) is even lower, this conclusion should give journalists and news producers pause for thought.
Only six countries — Finland (56%), Portugal (56%), Turkey (55), Netherlands (52%), Brazil (51%) and Kenya (50%) — enjoy trust levels above 50%. Trust levels are lowest in Taiwan (24%), France (23%) and South Korea (21%).
(3) Social media is the leading source of concern for misinformation
Even though trust levels in news media are low (especially given the fact that survey respondents are news consumers, rather than the general public), the study found users are much more concerned about social networks being sources of misinformation than they are about news outlets.
Across the sample, 40% expressed concern about false or misleading information being found on social media, versus 20% expressing concern for news sites and apps.
Reflecting different news media habits around the world, across all countries Facebook (29%), followed by YouTube (6%) and Twitter (5%), were the leading sources of concern for false or misleading information.
However, in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Malaysia and Singapore, where the adoption of WhatsApp tends to be higher, the messaging service led the way in levels of concern.
As the study reminds us, “This is a particular worry because false information tends to be less visible and can be harder to counter in these private and encrypted networks.”
Which of the following, if any, are you most concerned about online? Please select one. False or misleading information from…Base: Total sample in each market = 2000; Taiwan = 1027.
(4) YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram are the fastest growing social news sources
Across the more than 80,000 sample of digital news consumers across the globe, Facebook (63%) and YouTube (61%) remain the most used social networks on a weekly basis, with WhatsApp (33%) in third place. Twitter (23%) ranks sixth, behind Facebook Messenger (28%) and Instagram (36%). The data is a useful reminder that journalists’ social media habits do not necessarily mirror those of the wider population.
This sentiment is even more applicable when examining how consumers use social networks for news.
Across 12 major markets, Facebook takes the lead (36%) but YouTube (21%) is in second place, five percentage points ahead of WhatsApp. This suggests, perhaps, that some news organizations need to make the video channel a greater priority in the distribution of their work.
The “Stories” format may be a further driver for the use of social networks like Instagram for news. In Brazil, Instagram is already considerably more popular (30%) for news than Twitter (17%). Chile (28%) also has a high adoption of Instagram for news.
Q: Which, if any, of the following have you used for any purpose in the last week? Please select all that apply. Base: ‘Main’ 12 market average: UK, USA, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Brazil & Japan (10 market average for 2014 exl Australia & Ireland)
(5) Few consumers come to a news brand directly
News brands, and the journalists who work for them, need to continue to deploy a range of tactics to get their content in front of audiences. This is particularly true for younger audiences.
Reuters’ sample revealed that just 16% of Gen Z news consumers said going directly to a news brand was their primary way of accessing online news. Instead, other channels such as social media and search were more popular.
Collectively, push notifications, mobile alerts, aggregators and email also accounted for how more than one in five (21%) young consumers find the news.
With 72% of all news consumers saying they discover news via means other than a specific news website or app, this reiterates the importance of distributing your content across a variety of different channels, as audiences increasingly become brand agnostic.
The 2020 Digital News Report comes at a precipitous time for journalists and the news industry. We know that COVID-19 is having a huge impact on business models, the practice of journalism, and our wider media habits.
However, if anything, the coronavirus makes it even more important that changing news habits — including “changes in how people access news, low trust, and rising concern[s] about misinformation” — are addressed.
Understanding audience behaviors and habits, on a market-by-market basis, is more important than ever. Click here to find out more. | https://medium.com/damian-radcliffe/5-global-news-consumption-trends-in-charts-1800a96920b9 | ['Damian Radcliffe'] | 2020-12-28 07:16:00.173000+00:00 | ['Trends', 'Journalism', 'Digital News Report', 'Digital Transformation', 'Media Criticism'] |
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This Is How Generation Z Will Drastically Improve the Workplace | Between morning meetings at the kitchen table and preparing financial reports in pajamas, you wouldn’t think we were in the midst of a workplace revolution, but we are.
The old system was broken.
The endless commute, sucking precious time from your day and with your family, is over.
The culture of working through lunch and on the weekends is done.
The days of meeting your manager once a year for a 15-minute performance review and living in the same sterile office for 30 years are gone.
Somewhere between a pandemic and the entry of a new generation into the workforce, things were bound to change drastically.
Born between 1997–2015, the oldest of Generation Z are just entering the workforce. This generation’s workplace values are drastically different from their predecessors, and they will change the working world for the better.
Technologically savvy, entrepreneurial, and fiercely independent, here’s how Gen Z will shake things up and how you can attract the best of this generation in the years to come. | https://bettermarketing.pub/this-is-how-generation-z-will-drastically-improve-the-workplace-c3e86b0cc994 | ['Ruth Matthews'] | 2020-12-18 15:13:02.679000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Work', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Gen Z', 'Business'] |
Linear Regression. Predict Insurance Charges using… | Linear Regression
Predict Insurance Charges using different Linear Regression Models and compare results.
Predict Insurance Charges
Here I will discuss how Linear Regression works and how can we implement it in different ways to achieve best accuracy.
Data set overview:
I have taken health insurance data set for analysis. It contains 1338 samples and 7 features.
Here we want to predict insurance charges using given features like age, sex, bmi, children, smoker and region.
You will be able to download data from here.
Data set overview
Table of content:
Data visualization, interpretation of visuals and feature selection Simple Linear Regression Multiple Linear Regression Polynomial Regression Discussion Conclusion
1. Data visualization, interpretation of visuals and feature selection:
Check relationships between features and target variable and select most relevant features.
Here we can see that age, bmi and smoker all three features are correlated with target variable charges. Charges increases with age and bmi. Smoker variable clearly divides data set into two parts.
Here we can see that sex variable is not able to differentiate data set in anyway.
Same way region is also not able to differentiate data set.
Conclusion: age, bmi and smoker are important features to predict charges. Where sex and region do not show any prominent pattern in data set.
Data set after converting categorical variables to numeric:
Data set after converting categorical variables to numeric
2. Simple Linear Regression:
In simple linear regression there is only one input variable and one output variable.
Equation: y = ax+b
a = slope
b = intercept
x = input
y = output
Let’s use age as an input variable and charges as an output.
x=df[[‘age’]]
y=df[[‘charges’]]
lr = linear_model.LinearRegression()
lr_model = lr.fit(x, y) print (‘Slope: ‘, lr_model.coef_)
print (‘Intercept: ‘,lr_model.intercept_)
Slope: [[257.72261867]]
Intercept: [3165.88500606]
Note:
Based on above result, equation to predict output variable using age as an input would be like,
y = (257.72261867 * x) + 3165.88500606
If sample data with actual output value 8240.5896 having,
having, age = 46, bmi = 33.44, smoker_yes = 0
Let’s put value of age in place of x in above equation,
(257.72261867 * 46) + 3165.88500606 = 15021.12546488
So, considering age as only input, 46 years old person will have to pay 15021.12546488 insurance charge if we will use Simple Linear Regression model.
as only input, old person will have to pay insurance charge if we will use model. Here we can see that predicted value is almost double than actual. So we can say that Simple Linear Regression model is not performing well.
Let’s visualize output of Simple Linear Regression Model:
Output of Simple Linear Regression Model
3. Multiple Linear Regression
In multiple linear regression there can be multiple inputs and single output.
Equation: y = a1x1 + a2x2 +….. + b
a1,a2 = slope
b = intercept
x1,x2 = input
y = output
Let’s use age, bmi and smoker_yes as input variables and charges as output.
x=df[[‘age’,’bmi’,’smoker_yes’]]
y=df[[‘charges’]]
lr = linear_model.LinearRegression()
lr_model = lr.fit(x, y) print (‘Slope: ‘, lr_model.coef_)
print (‘Intercept: ‘,lr_model.intercept_)
Slope: [[ 259.54749155 322.61513282 23823.68449531]]
Intercept: [-11676.83042519]
Note:
Based on above result, equation to predict output variable using age, bmi and smoker_yes as input would be like,
y = (259.54749155 * x1) + (322.61513282 * x2) + (23823.68449531 * x3) — 11676.83042519
If sample data with actual output value 8240.5896 having,
having, age = 46, bmi = 33.44, smoker_yes = 0
If we will put value of age in place of x1, bmi inplace of x2 and smoker_yes inplace of x3 in above equation then,
(259.54749155 * 46) + (322.61513282 * 33.44) + (23823.68449531 * 0) — 11676.83042519 = 11050.6042276108
So, considering age, bmi and smoker_yes as input variables, 46 years old person will have to pay 11050.6042276108 insurance charge if we will use Multiple Linear Regression model.
and as input variables, old person will have to pay insurance charge if we will use model. Here we can see that predicted value is somewhat near to actual value. So we can say that Multiple Linear Regression model is performing better than Simple Linear Regression.
Let’s visualize output of Multiple Linear Regression Model:
Output of Multiple Linear Regression Model
4. Polynomial Regression:
Sometimes, the trend of data is not really linear, and looks curvy. In this case we can use Polynomial Regression methods.
methods. The relationship between the input variable x and the output variable y is modeled as an nth degree polynomial in x.
4.1 Find Optimum Value for degree of polynomial:
x=df[[‘age’,’bmi’,’smoker_yes’]]
y=df[[‘charges’]]
lr = linear_model.LinearRegression() scores = []
degree = list(range(2,15))
for n in degree:
pr = PolynomialFeatures(degree=n)
x_pr = pr.fit_transform(x)
lr.fit(x_pr, y)
scores.append(lr.score(x_pr, y))
degree_score_df = pd.DataFrame(list(zip(degree, scores)),columns = [‘Degree’, ‘R2-score’])
degree_score_df.set_index(‘Degree’,inplace=True) degree_score_df.plot()
plt.xlabel(‘Degree’)
plt.ylabel(‘R2-score’)
plt.title(‘Degree Vs. R2-score’)
Degree Vs. R2-score
Here we can see that R2-score is highest i.e 0.86 when degree=13.
4.2 Use value of degree as 13 and train model:
x=df[[‘age’,’bmi’,’smoker_yes’]]
y=df[[‘charges’]] poly = PolynomialFeatures(degree=13)
x_poly = poly.fit_transform(x) lr = linear_model.LinearRegression()
lr_model = lr.fit(x_poly, y)
Let’s visualize output of Polynomial Regression Model:
Output of Polynomial Regression Model
4.3 Normalize input data and then train model:
x=df[[‘age’,’bmi’,’smoker_yes’]]
y=df[[‘charges’]] normalized_x= preprocessing.StandardScaler().fit(x).transform(x) poly = PolynomialFeatures(degree=13)
x_poly = poly.fit_transform(normalized_x) lr = linear_model.LinearRegression()
lr_model = lr.fit(x_poly, y)
Let’s visualize output of Polynomial Regression Model using Normalized-X:
Output of Polynomial Regression Model using Normalized-X
5. Discussion:
Compare results of all 4 models:
Here,
MAE = Mean Absolute Error
Used to check how wrong our model is
Mean value of absolute difference between actual and predicted values.
Higher the MAE, worst the model
Goal is to minimize this value.
MSE = Mean Squared Error
Used to check how wrong our model is
Mean value of squared difference between actual and predicted values.
Higher the MSE, worst the model
Goal is to minimize this value
R2-score = Accuracy Metric
Used to check how accurate our model is
Higher the R2-score, best the model.
Goal is to maximize this value. Best value can be 1. Worst can be 0.
Comparison Of Results
Visualize Comparison:
Scatter plots of Actual Vs. Predicted values using all 4 models
Dist plots of Actual Vs. Predicted values using all 4 models
Scatter plots of error generated by all 4 models
6. Conclusion:
Comparing above models, we conclude that Polynomial Regression With Normalized-X is the best model which is giving 87% accuracy.
If we look at error plots then, | https://medium.com/swlh/linear-regression-models-dc81a955bd39 | ['Priyanka Dave'] | 2020-10-30 19:33:21.957000+00:00 | ['Linear Regression Python', 'Feature Selection', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Normalization', 'Polynomial Regression'] |
Dear Republicans, Stop Denying the Southern Strategy | Dear Republicans, Stop Denying the Southern Strategy
Barry Goldwater. Image taken from WikiCommons
With the recent eruption of Black Lives Matter protesters, many Americans are being forced to come to terms with the racist history of the United States and how that racist history affects us today. From Biden’s involvement with the 1984 crime bill, to Reagan’s racist commentary with then-President Richard Nixon, America is facing a moment of introspection that will affect America for generations to come. It is this deep, profound moment of reflection that makes or breaks a country. Unfortunately, there are some who would deny such an event, and it appears that this is part of a broader effort by the Right.
Just this week, the Telegraph Herald, a local newspaper in my town, published a Letter to the Editor by Mr. Laverne Domeyer. The piece sought to compare the Democratic party of the 19th century to the party of today while also arguing for the reelection of the current administration. Among some of the more blatant party attacks, Mr. Domeyer argues that, “It was the Democrat South who imported the slaves to pick their cotton and other menial tasks. It was the Democratic Ku Klux Klan that continued their regime of terror by hanging Blacks for any perceived grievance.” While it is true that the Democrats were the party of slavery during the civil war and reconstruction, some serious leaps of logic have to be made to consider that to be representative of the modern Democratic party. In order for the 19th century Democrats to be comparable to their modern counter parts, one must suppose that the parties never switched. Such a position flies in the face of reality. It serves to obscure the truth, and serves only to reaffirm the prejudices of the Republican’s conservative, White base.
Mr. Domeyer is far from alone in his anachronistic view of the parties, PragerU has also promoted this narrative that the parties never flipped. Candace Owens has also made that claim repeatedly. in defiance of all historical evidence and facts. Among some of the arguments promoted by this video are as follows:
1. Republicans were competitive with the Democrats in the South since 1928 and therefore, there was no need to appeal to White racists.
2. Republicans lost the deep south in 1968, 1976, 1992 and 1996. How effective was the Southern Strategy?
3. Republicans were the party of Civil Rights
This framework is constructed by splitting points in history and ignoring others. In particular, Dr. Carol Swain, the narrator of the video, makes no mention of Barry Goldwater despite the fact that he is the one who helped start the realignment in the South.
Goldwater was firmly against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguing that it was unconstitutional. In fact, Barry Goldwater was such a threat to Civil Rights legislation that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned him in a sermon at Antioch Baptist Church on October 11th, 1964. Due to his extensive opposition to Civil Rights Act of 1964, Goldwater won Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona. To put this in perspective, Mississippi and South Carolina hadn’t been Republican since Reconstruction.
Screenshot taken from 270towin.com
Indeed, seven congressional districts that had been firmly Democratic since Reconstruction went to the Republicans during that time period. In Alabama, five Republican candidates for Congress won and dumped three incumbent Democratic Congressmen. Among the Democrats who had been representing Alabama in Congress, only Armistead Selden remained in office. Mind you, Selden was a signatory to the “Southern Manifesto,” which opposed to the integration of schools, so it isn’t surprising that he survived. In Georgia, Republican Howard Calloway beat Democratic incumbent Garland Byrd and in Mississippi, Prentiss Walker beat Democratic incumbent Arthur Winstead, who had served since 1942. Although Goldwater lost, his approach to Civil Rights ended Democratic control of the South and began the long, extensive process of a party switch and ensured that the Deep South would no longer be a stronghold for the Democratic party.
You may have noted that I referred to it as a long, extensive switch. Because at its core, that is it was. The party switch was not immediate as Dr. Swain or others would like to argue, but was a decades-long process that took time and experimentation to perfect. Republicans would begin to see how potent racial prejudice could be when the infamous former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran as an independent in 1968, winning the Deep South.
In 1972, Nixon would win not just the Deep South, but all of the South.
There was but one example of a true Democratic resurgence in the South and it took place in 1976. Jimmy Carter, a Southern Democrat, won the South in an overwhelming show of force.
It would be the last time that Democrats could come close to such a display and it was primarily due to his Southern connections. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan won all the Southern states save for Georgia, which he would take in 1984.
The last chance for the Democrats in the South came in 1992 and 1996, but Republican efforts were hampered in both elections by the Reform Party candidate, Ross Perot. Even with these advantages, Democrats failed to take the Carolinas, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Alabama in 1992. In 1996, Republicans would begin to make inroads into the South even with Ross Perot running yet again. Never again would the Democrats win a state in the Deep South.
Though some may remain unconvinced about the Southern strategy, and may argue that this may be just coincidence. If you are such a person, then allow me to put that bed to rest. Lee Atwater, a strategist for both Nixon and Reagan, spilled the beans for us in 1981 with his interview with reporter Alexander Lamis, saying:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n***r” — that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.” -Lee Atwater to Alexander Lamis, 1981.
It is self-evident that the Republicans and their advisors knew what they were doing. They said so to interviewers, and in the case of current Republican senator, Lamar Alexander, they wrote memos about it and actively confirmed they had done it. Reagan, the godlike figure for many Republicans, went to the murder scene of several SNCC activists who were killed for the Civil Rights work in Mississippi and, in a speech to the people of Mississippi, said, “I believe in States Rights,” a phrase consistently used by White Southerners to cover for their racism. The symbolism was obvious.
I am not suggesting that Democrats are angels or that the Democrats don’t have a lot to answer for, they do. Biden’s “You aren’t Black,” comment is just an example of the pernicious and continuous problems that the Democrats have to face. However, where the Republicans promote groups like PragerU who deny the Republicans racist past, the Democrats are actively trying to acknowledge their past sins rather than pretending they have none. Senator Bernie Sanders, who voted for the 1994 Crime Bill, has been open and honest about his past vote. Biden, the current nominee for the Democrats, although less inclined to admit his mistakes than Sanders, has still acknowledged the damage done by his involvement in the 1994 Crime Act. Trump can’t even be bothered to apologize for his death penalty ads directed at the Central Park Five.
If I have to chose between the party that is trying to cleanse itself of its sin and the party that claims it has none, I will go with the one that is putting in the work. | https://medium.com/the-polis/dear-republicans-stop-denying-the-southern-strategy-2aa66f4e6ed3 | ['Conor Kelly'] | 2020-11-05 01:29:35.004000+00:00 | ['History', 'Politics', 'Recognition', 'Southern Strategy', 'Civil Rights'] |
the frost within. | Captured by Esther Diehl (Gurushots)
There’s something about these wintery months that usher in a coldness that settles deep within your bones. The kind that demands your surrender. I imagine it to be like slowly, expanding icicles.
I’m enveloped in warm blankets, resting against my headboard with a book in hand, seemingly oblivious to the gradual changes happening in the air around me. I’m completely unprepared for the first inkling of frost to find a home in my usually warm room. My gaze remains fastened on the words before me as long, crystalline tendrils of ice make their way closer to me. I don’t flinch when the first needle-like arms attach themselves to the far corners of my duvet. I read on, ignoring the world I’m in for the one I’ve created in my mind. Time passes but I couldn’t say how much. It could have been seconds or days. I expel a sigh of contentment. I watch my breath in a dissociated state as it manifests as a cloud of billowy, white smoke. I try to muster up a little alarm, but I’m too far gone. Where I was once swathed in warmth and lightness, I am now cocooned in harsh, bleak coldness.
To resist its slow spread through my veins is futile. It leaves no part of me untouched as it occupies every space within me. The once vivid colours around me have lost their lustre. The foods I once craved, now seem like putrefied mounds on a plate. The sun has turned into the moon. To say everything in me has gone cold is wrong. The one thing the ice left well alone are the droplets in my eyes. Maybe it saw a kindred spirit in my tears and knew that they were cut from the same cloth. Two sides of the same coin. The tears that escape burn my numbing skin on their way down. I don’t know if I will them to fall faster and more incessantly because they’re my sole source of heat, or if it’s because they’re the only tether to life. The only reminder that I am alive and there is a heart beating inside, albeit hidden under layers of dullness.
I go outside, my movements stiff and lackadaisical, to see the outside world completely unperturbed by the coldness. People walking briskly, enjoying food that radiates heat, smiling from ear to ear. I look at my frozen hands and caress my torpefied face in mild confusion. It is at that moment I realise, the bewitching icicles with their ornate carved fingers, have touched me and me alone. | https://medium.com/@thelemondiaries/the-frost-within-12e41abbb9bd | ['The Lemon Diaries'] | 2020-12-22 16:15:22.533000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Seasonal Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Winter'] |
Masterclass Recap: The Meal with Benefits! | Last month, we brought in Amy Sonnenberg, Registered Holistic Nutritionist to the SupperWorks kitchen to discuss The Meal with Benefits — Making time for Breakfast. Amy says the first meal of the day is important, whether you are an early eater, or would prefer a slower start to the day. Eating a balanced, first meal of the day matters for your mood, your concentration and yes, even your waistline.
First, let’s dispel some Breakfast Myths!
“Eating Breakfast Will Help Me Lose Weight.”
Research is divided on this one. The simple act of eating something first thing in the morning is not enough to help you lose weight. One must consider what it is that you are eating. A croissant with jam is not the same as an egg with tomato and avocado slices. Additionally, many times the people who make a point of eating breakfast are the same people who value routine and are likely to implement other healthy habits such as habitual exercise, eating at regular intervals, etc.
“Not Eating Breakfast Will Help Me Lose Weight.”
While it has been a long-held belief that skipping breakfast will help save on calories, it is a short-sighted strategy. Skipping breakfast, especially if you are feeling hungry often leads to overeating later in the day as well as increased cravings for simple carbs. It can also contribute to food obsessions and a pattern of ignoring innate signals that our body uses to communicate hunger and satiety.
“Intermittent Fasting is the Best Way to Maintain My Weight.”
Taking a break from eating makes good sense. This allows your body to fully work through the process of digestion without constantly having to start over every time something goes in your mouth. The challenge is to listen to your body and be open to change. Sometimes you’ll be fine to eat your evening meal and last until breakfast, while at other times, you’ll get hungry in the evening. A good guideline is to try and finish your evening snack at least an hour and a half before going to bed. The type of snack is also important. Aim for healthier snacks like raw nuts, fruit, vegetables, plain yogurt, cottage cheese, etc.
“Coffee is my breakfast.”
Coffee does have its health benefits such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, liver cancer and more.
The caveat is that it should not be treated as a meal replacement and that its benefits become less so with increased consumption and the addition of sugar & cream. Coffee is a stimulant that can disrupt sleep, can increase anxiety as well as impair blood sugar regulation. It can also be very hard on the digestive system. It can be a major contributor to upset or sour stomach, heartburn, and impaired digestion. Source
Strategies for Building a Better Breakfast
plan ahead — M,W,F & T,Th
keep it simple
prep food in advance
take advantage of frozen fruit
think outside the (cereal) box
balance your meal
While a croissant with jam might be delicious, it is not a balanced breakfast. Having a breakfast like this will make it harder for you to regulate your blood sugar levels for the rest of the day, which often leads to poor concentration and mood swings. This breakfast also fails to provide you with the nutrients your body needs to thrive day in and day out.
Your body requires complex carbohydrates, lean protein, and healthy fats to function at its best.
Complex Carbohydrates — fruit, vegetables, whole grains (whole wheat, oats, brown rice)
Lean Protein — lentils, beans, chickpeas (hummus), nut and seeds & their ‘butters,’ plain yogurt, cottage cheese, eggs
Healthy Fats — nuts & seeds, avocado, olives, olive oil, salmon
Life can get complicated, eating healthy shouldn’t be. Amy has experienced firsthand the benefits of personalized nutrition and loves to share it with others. She shares common-sense tips and tricks to help you create sustainable strategies for healthier habits without a lot of fuss. Check out Amy and her services here. | https://medium.com/@timeforsupperkw/masterclass-recap-the-meal-with-benefits-e560a8078b03 | ['Candace Wagner'] | 2020-03-06 13:50:41.489000+00:00 | ['Foodies', 'Masterclass', 'Breakfast', 'Nutrition'] |
오픈소스 일기 2: Apache Zeppelin 이란 무엇인가? | All things Apache Zeppelin written or created by the Apache Zeppelin community — blogs, videos, manuals, etc. Let us know if you would like to be added as a writer to this publication.
Follow | https://medium.com/apache-zeppelin-stories/%EC%98%A4%ED%94%88%EC%86%8C%EC%8A%A4-%EC%9D%BC%EA%B8%B0-2-apache-zeppelin-%EC%9D%B4%EB%9E%80-%EB%AC%B4%EC%97%87%EC%9D%B8%EA%B0%80-f3a520297938 | ['Jesang Yoon'] | 2017-06-12 02:16:40.021000+00:00 | ['Opensource', 'Apache Spark', 'Apache Zeppelin'] |
Why You Need a List? | Many people overestimate the power of a simple list, but it really helps with relieving your stress, managing your time, and coping with packed schedules in life. In today’s article, we are going to share with you about how a list works magically as the best productivity tool.
Types of Lists
Making a list is effortless. You simply write down the things you’d like to complete/achieve, but this small action can bring big changes and results to your life. Different types of lists serve for different purposes, and let’s see some common list types.
People have limited time and brain energy to process many things we need to do in daily lives. Writing down today’s tasks onto a to-do list (in priority) in early morning costs less than two minutes but helps manage your time efficiently in a day. With this list in hand, you can complete and check things in order without being anxious about what to do next and what’s left unfinished.
One-time life needs a bucket list — a list of the best things to do before you die! What kind of person do you want to become? What life do you want to live? What would you like to achieve? Think about your life’s bucket list and never regret not doing something.
You need a happy list whenever feel anxious and depressed. A list of things that make you happy may lift you from a depressing swamp and encourage you to continue strongly living your life.
As mentioned before in the previous How to Spend Money Wisely blog, we introduced the wish list — a list of items wanted before actual purchasing. It will help to hold off your impulsive spending desires and cut down many unnecessary spending.
A checklist is the key to preparation. Whatever you’re preparing for, packing travel items or an online interview, a checklist is great for checking every detail and making sure you’re fully prepared. You will also feel the joy whenever finishing and checking an item/list off your list!
Tips for List-Making
SMART Principle
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This principle is one of the most used tools to help people plan and achieve goals, and it serves as a guide to list-making as well, especially for lists with specified goals such as to-do lists and checklists.
PDCA Cycle
The Plan-do-check-act cycle (PDCA) is another great management and planning tool for delivering changes. There is no end to this cycle, so PDCA needs to be repeated again and again for continuous improvement, which is key for us to constantly grow and achieve higher goals through lists.
Thank you for reading, and we hope that you become familiar with varied types of lists and master the power of simple lists through this article to better manage time and brings productivity to your life. Make lists with XMind, starting today! Take care, and until next time… | https://medium.com/xmindofficial/why-you-need-a-list-cb2fa108804c | [] | 2020-12-10 03:04:12.607000+00:00 | ['Xmind', 'Time Management', 'Schedule', 'Lists', 'Stress Management'] |
Aflux-Ecom Journey Part 1… | What’s up guys? Hope you all are doing fine. Today I am blogging about my project that I build for my Portfolio and ELEVATE LABs.
I am going to tell you about my journey on building this project and the challenges I faced. My Site is live now you can visit https://aflux-ecom.netlify.app/ to play with it.
This Project is built with MERN Stack which stands for MongoDB, Express, React and Nodejs.
I built this project with focus on the front end. But on this first part of the blog I will tell you about the Back end codes that I wrote.
Its an E-commerce right? so first I need to write codes to post products before that I needed to prepare my nodejs server.
I started with ‘npm init’ command on by git bash terminal on the server folder.
This initializes a file package.json and prepares nodejs environment .
I just filled the relevant fields that were needed and pressed enter.
After preparing the nodejs environment, it was time to install some packages namely “express, body-parser, jsonwebtoken , cors , dotenv, mongoose”.
I ran command “npm i express body-parser jsonwebtoken cors dotenv mongoose” and installed all the necessary packages that I would need for the backend server.
Then I created an index.js file where I wrote the following codes.
I used models and routes folder to separate the codes and keep it manageable.
now it was time to build a mongoose schema. Schema is basically like a format through which mongoose saves database to mongodb.
I build two schemas which are above. One is for Product and one is for User. Then I started writing codes in routes for uploading products.
I wrote the above code to start uploading the products. After uploading the products. I wrote get products code which is as below:
now to test the api I used POSTMAN which is a famous tool that developers use for checking routes requests.
As all was working fine I switched my concern into handling user sign up signin.
Here I used all the npm packages which I installed earlier. I use bcrypt to hash passwords. Hashing passwords help to save guard the user authentication details. I used jsonwebtoken which we will use later to save login state later in the react app. This pretty much the backend a very simple one.
Note: I did not build entire backend-api in one-go. The whole app has been built with coding front-end and backend simultaneously. Its for easier understanding of the back end codes that only Backend codes are being shown in the first part of the blog.
Thats it for the backend codes and now Lets move to the front end on the next blog :) | https://medium.com/@rahuldas35748/aflux-ecom-journey-part-1-93f65d481bf7 | ['Rahul Das'] | 2020-11-23 11:24:38.596000+00:00 | ['Backend Development', 'Expressjs', 'Ecommerce', 'Nodejs', 'Mongodb'] |
How To Survive Your First Traveling Experience | Don’t do what I did.
Going traveling for the first time can be a nervous and adrenaline rush fueled experience. At least it was for me in 2016 when I started my journey in Bangkok. It all happens so fast when you touch down at the airport, flag for the taxi and then hope that the driver is friendly and the traffic isn’t to bad (the traffic was awful and the driver was a maniac). And then you get to your hostel/hotel and hope that everything goes smoothly (it rarely does).
Your life changing journey has begun.
But things never go as planned and they certainly did not for me. I jumped in head first, went to a busy hostel, partied with the first people I met and drunk far too much alcohol. I was trying to do everything at once and I wanted to be friendly with everyone, not making time for myself.
I remember, coming back to mainland Thailand after a quick couple days on an island called Ko Samet being hungover, burnt to a crisp and completely drained of all life. I felt like my traveling dream had been crushed and all I wanted to do was run home!
Why did I feel like this?
I had rushed into this experience way to fast because I was both excited and nervous and did not want to waste a single moment. This is a common mistake among travelers who are just starting out.
Learn to take it slow
It may feel like, because the world is at your fingertips, you have to go at a million miles per hour. But you really don’t. In fact, your probably missing out and letting things pass you by because you are not aware.
Taking it slow allows you too:
Engage with locals Learn the culture Discover new friends Discover yourself
If you are feeling anxious, stop and take a breath. Take a look around and remember that you are in another culture experiencing things that most people only dream of. Sit back relax and soak in the atmosphere. Don’t be afraid to chill out with a coffee and let time pass you by for a moment.
Don’t move on too quick
If you find a place you love then stay there. Don’t move on too quick. Sometimes plans have to be changed to accommodate taking it slow, because that is how you will most enjoy a place. You won’t regret staying too long but you may regret moving on too quick.
But still, definitely go traveling!
If you have that deep lying passion to go traveling then get out there and do it. It has changed my life and radically opened my mind to new ideas and possibilities in this world. Don’t waste any more time not preparing for your trip. Time can be wasted when you are at your destination, drinking your coconut on the beach. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/how-to-survive-your-first-traveling-experience-1f3172b00139 | ['Reece Barclay'] | 2018-08-22 12:22:05.490000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Travel', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Life'] |
Serenity.Exchange Development Report | Dear friends!
We strive to be as open as possible, so every two weeks we will present a progress report on the development of our Exchange.
During the period from August 27th to September 10th, we have improved a number of features, thereby increasing the security and usability of the Exchange:
Passwords are now more secure!
The risk of your account being hacked is minimized thanks to the improved password generator: not only alphanumeric characters can now be used in passwords. This makes any hacking attempts much more difficult.
2. Select your citizenship from the full list of countries.
We have expanded the list of countries, now all users can choose their country to specify citizenship.
3. Minimum transaction limits are set for each instrument.
The limits will be displayed in the currency of a quote, so our users can immediately access information about the limitations of trading a certain instrument.
4. User’s order list bug fixed.
Our users are reporting a problem: when one of the placed orders is canceled, others get canceled too. We already fixed the bug — try it now!
5. TradingView vulnerability eliminated.
TradingView, a web service providing online charts for exchanges, reported vulnerabilities in its software. Serenity Exchange team promptly updated TradingView libraries, thereby protecting the exchange and users from possible attacks.
6. Automatic verification of scans and photos of documents.
To pass the KYC procedure, you must provide photos of your documents with a .JPG or .PNG extension. Now Serenity automatically checks documents before upload and rejects images with wrong resolution. This eliminates the risk of downloading malicious files and increases Serenity Exchange’s resistance to external threats.
7. “Unnecessary” notification about loss of chat connection removed.
The notification was groundless and confusing to users. Bug fixed.
8. Favicon added for the web version of the Exchange.
Minor aesthetic upgrade: Serenity.Exchange icon added in the site loading bar.
We will continue to keep you informed about our development process. Your awareness, safety, and comfort are of the utmost importance to us. Like this post if you think that these Serenity.Exchange updates are useful. Leave a comment to report a bug, propose an improvement idea for the exchange, ask a question, or share your opinion. | https://medium.com/serenity-project/serenity-exchange-development-report-29d66fee92b9 | ['Serenity Financial'] | 2019-09-11 08:25:43.486000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Exchange', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Relationship with music Though music has always played a large part in the lives of those who make… | Relationship with music Though music has always played a large part in the lives of those who make it, scientists today are discovering just how important it is to society as a whole. Obvious to many are the emotional responses we get when we hear music: it stimulates old memories, causes us to calm down or feel other emotions, and can even inspire us for the future. Now, studies are showing that it actually builds new pathways in the brain, strengthens old ones, and contributes a completely unique type of neurological stimulation.
This only reaffirms that our job as musicians is extremely important. Not only does music help us live fulfilling lives, but it also helps society like nothing else can.
This is something to be extremely proud of. There are cases everywhere of people who were injured or traumatized and were able to come out of their hopeless state and heal through music. Here are five such cases that will make you feel very proud to be a musician.
By viel april | https://medium.com/@vielapril_25438/relationship-with-music-though-music-has-always-played-a-large-part-in-the-lives-of-those-who-make-f136a6fc5092 | ['Viel April'] | 2020-12-14 09:15:36.278000+00:00 | ['Musicians', 'Songwriting', 'Singapore', 'Musicianship', 'Singer Songwriter'] |
UNDERSTANDING THE LAW OF ATTRACTION (Why most people aren’t able to manifest their desires) | UNDERSTANDING THE LAW OF ATTRACTION (Why most people aren’t able to manifest their desires) Terna Chianson Sep 3·4 min read
“THE LAW OF ATTRACTION IS A SECONDARY LAW, WHICH IS BASED ON A PRIMARY LAW..” Bob Proctor
This simple statement above is the reason a lot of people after watching the movie “The Secret” went out, tried to apply the law of attraction failed, and concluded that the Law of Attraction doesn’t work, and the movie “The Secret” was a ripoff.
You see the Law of Attraction is based on a primary law which is the Law of Vibration, which states “Everything is in a state of motion, nothing rests”. Not understanding this law is the reason a lot of people who tried practicing the Law of Attraction failed.
The theory behind the Law of Attraction is the belief that energy attracts like energy in the vast expanse of space and time that comprises our universe. Each person’s being is constantly radiating energy out into space; the type of energy being radiated is determined by the emotional state of the individual in question and may differ from day to day-sometimes even hour to hour!
This emotional energy is what is commonly known as a “vibe” and is referred to as vibration by scientists studying the law of attraction. Chances are that you’re familiar with the term. Have you ever been with someone so happy they seem to be radiating a “glow which inspires happiness in all those around them?
By the same token, have you ever spent time with someone so critical and unhappy that they consistently gave off a “negative vibe” that seemed to suck the life and happiness out of all those around them?
You don’t have to possess psychic powers to be able to feel the vibes that people emit; this energy is very real on a psychological plane and will affect anyone, anywhere at any time.
Our vibrations are usually an unconscious response to some form of environmental stimulus; something has happened which has caused us to feel happy, or sad, or scared, or confused, or stressed, etc., and our subconscious response to this (because vibes are generated and projected from the subconscious rather than the conscious) is something that is beyond our control.
The ability to control your vibrations at any given time is the key to manifesting your desires, this is “The Secret” in the movie “The Secret”.
You see everything is just an expression of the same thing, they are just at varying frequencies, when you “match” the frequency of another thing, you become like it like you were taught like attracts like, hence the “Law of Attraction”. This simple principle is the reason a lot of people who practice the Law of Attraction fail to get their desires, they instead get the opposite and the simple reason is that they aren’t putting out the right frequency to match their desire, rather they are putting out the frequency of what they don’t desire, so they attract what they don’t want again and again.
You see what a lot of people don’t know about the law of attraction is that “people don’t really attract their desires, they attract who they are”. Take for example someone who is poor and wants to manifest prosperity or abundance, then the person begins to use the law of attraction. What happens is that he/she will continue getting the opposite of their desire because they already have a poverty mindset that constantly puts them in a poverty vibration, and as long as they are in that poverty vibration they will continue to attract poverty and lack, and this will now lead to frustration.
So for this person to be able to attract abundance, he/she must, first of all, replace that poverty and lack mindset with prosperity and abundance mindset, and how to do this is by “Affirmations”.
Many people do not know the correct use of affirmations, they go and copy any affirmation they see and start confessing it, and most times they don’t see results and conclude that affirmations are fake. The main use of affirmations is to implant a new thought or idea or image by repetition.
The correct use of affirmations is to bombard a mental block you have recognized in your subconscious with the intent to change it, everyone has different mental blocks, my mental blocks will be different from yours so my affirmations will be different from yours. You first of all need to find the block, then you craft a suitable affirmation to bombard that block and change it to the image you want. This is the correct use of affirmations.
You use affirmations to create a prosperity and abundance mindset first, which then puts you in the prosperity or abundance “vibration”, then you will begin to attract circumstances and events that will bring the abundance you seek.
Time will fail me to talk about how to recognize the very frequency you are emitting at a particular time, and how to know whether it’s in harmony with your desires or not. Or the various emotions that lead to either positive or negative “vibes” and how to change any negative emotion to a positive one, but I can show you how.
So the big question is…
Are you ready to learn how to work the Law of Attraction and attract any and every one of your desires?
Have you tried practicing the Law of Attraction and your heart desires never manifested?
Have you watched videos, read books, and attended seminars on this subject and didn’t seem to get a handle on it?
Have you given up on the Law of Attraction?
Have you given up on your dreams?
Your time is now, the Universe has orchestrated that you come across this article, the missing piece to the puzzle of manifesting your desires is here, right before you. All you need to do is click here. | https://medium.com/@moseschianson/understanding-the-law-of-attraction-why-most-people-arent-able-to-manifest-their-desires-491c43c650d7 | ['Terna Chianson'] | 2021-09-11 11:17:58.366000+00:00 | ['Vibration', 'The Secret', 'Law Of Attraction', 'Manifestation', 'Life'] |
What is a unit? | During our careers, most of us learned about the different types of test. We learned that we should have many unit tests (because they are super fast to run) and fewer integration tests (very slow to run). When we think about unit tests, most of us have the same understanding of what the unit stands for: the smallest possible unit. We all learned it, its the smallest possible unit: a class, a method and we would isolate it during the test-run from all other units.
What if I tell you that we got it all wrong?
Writing your tests like this will make them brittle and flaky. As unit tests are the foundation of our testing pyramid, we would create nothing but a lot of tech debt.
Like many of you, I believed in the definition of unit tests I stated above. I would also use a lot of mocks to make sure all my tests are independent.
I would create tests for every method.
I even had that phase where I would test my getters and setters.
But something was wrong.
Whenever I had to do a larger refactoring, I would spend days “fixing” my tests, often resulting in throwing away a lot of those. But we learned that tests are the ones allowing us to refactor! Something was wrong!
It was not before I dug more into test-driven development (TDD) when I understood my mistake.
For years I was testing implementation details!
You might think: wait, as long as we don’t test private methods or internal states, this is not true. As we test public interfaces of our APIs right?
Nope, wrong!
The classes we were testing were the implementation details to the problems we tried to solve. What we hardly ever tested was the actual purpose of what we were supposed to write.
And seeing it like this, I could understand why many Android developers prefer writing integration tests instead of unit tests. For them, they feel more useful. But this kind of thinking leads to an inverted testing pyramid:
The ice cream cone https://blog.reactiveconf.com/tdd-waste-of-time-7bf5a84ce9b6
The better way
When you do TDD you start by writing tests for the actual things you are trying to build. The code you write would change over time as you continuously refactor.
The tests though are still the same as you wrote them initially. Although we would extract new classes, evolve our architecture, we would not change the tests! Why? There is no need to!
Let me show you an example.
We used the MVVM architecture in one of our apps. From ViewModel onwards, everything was heavily tested. As it was developed with TDD, those tests would cover multiple layers up to a stubbed/mocked API.
Example MVVM implementation
At some point, one colleague noticed that certain ViewModels grew too large (250 lines). He decided to add some Redux type of architecture. This way he could get all the state management out of the ViewModel.
With such an architectural change you might think that lof of tests needed to be rewritten.
But actually, they all kept working!
The ViewModel still exposed the same things as before. Its purpose didn’t change! It just had far less code and talked to some new intermediate actors,
MVVM with some Redux
Our tests gave us the confidence that we didn’t break anything during that refactoring. Applying Redux was an implementation detail.
Now imagine we would write tests the classical way afterwards. We would write tests for all the components of Redux: the Reducer, the Store. Probably would write them all by mocking the other elements.
The 1:1 way of testing Redux components
And in the end, we would have written much more test code than production code. Something many of us just accepted as given.
But many of those might just become worthless next time the architecture changes. In our example, the moment I’d remove or replace Redux those tests would become useless. Because they didn’t test anything relevant to what we built the app for.
But but…
Now you might think: But aren’t these integration tests?
We are so focused on the definition of unit tests that it’s hard to see through it. Yes, I have larger units than you might be used to. But my tests are fast, I don’t do actual network requests or similar. I see them as unit tests.
Interestingly Kent Beck in his famous TDD book doesn’t even use the word unit tests, he just speaks of tests or developer tests.
Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin mentions a similar thing all the time:
And once you’ve started you will find many reasons to rethink “unit”:
Test what you deploy… not a function rather a Microservice or a React component
Tech has evolved, we can now run whole component tests very quickly (e.g. CI has dynamic workers, test harness are great in parallelizing things)
When starting a new module, the given artefact is a requirements document. It makes sense to start with tests at the same level. This is also recommended by classic TDD books.
In my experience: a good developer is a pragmatic developer. Let’s try to be more pragmatic! | https://medium.com/pleasework/what-is-a-unit-b833bc4f99e5 | ['Danny Preussler'] | 2019-08-14 08:25:54.083000+00:00 | ['Testing', 'Tdd', 'Test Driven Development', 'Philosophy', 'Unittest'] |
HOW TO MANIFEST: Manifest anything you want (Wealth, Health, Love, Relationship, etc.) | How to manifest? Is this the question which derive you here, then reading the whole article will shatter all your doubts about manifestation. What is manifestation? How to manifest? What to manifest? What is the correct way of manifestation?
Is there something coming in between you and your desire? Do you want to start a business but you don’t have money or the right idea? Do you want to earn more money but you are getting stuck in debts? Do you want love in your relationships? Manifestation can help you in achieving them all. Manifestation seems like a theory when you first see this concept but people who have felt its effects, they know the power of manifestation and affirmations.
Manifesting works for many people, but you feel as though you’re missing something to make it work for you. Do you find it hard to manifest the things you want into your life? Learning how to manifest what you want is much easier than you think. In order to succeed in your manifestations, you need to truly trust the process. The most probable reason most people get stuck while manifesting is they don’t know every actual step to manifest.
(* Note — this article may contain Affiliate Links. If you purchase anything after clicking an affiliate link, I may receive some compensation)
What is manifestation?
What does it mean to make something manifest in your life?
The word manifest means to display, exhibit, or appear. It’s a verb — a word of action and consequence. Manifestation is ‘something that is put into your physical reality through thought, feelings, and beliefs’. We can also say that, to manifest something is to make it appear. Seemingly out of thin air.
Manifestation is a complete process includes several steps and each step is an inherent part of the process which makes the process complete. You can focus and manifest through meditation, belief, visualization or just via your conscious or subconscious. Whatever you are focusing on is what you are bringing into your reality.
Is this even possible? For example, if you want to start a successful business and you focused on exactly what you wanted and when you wanted it, your thoughts and feelings would be strong surrounding environment for this. Whenever you meditate or visualize about this with your 100% intention to make this happen and keep on working for it and this can help to manifest it into your reality.
Well, with the Law of Attraction, it most certainly possible. You just need to understand how the law works to wield it in your favor.
Now you say. “I’m ready! How do I make this happen, as quickly as in next 24 hours?”
Manifestation doesn’t work only with your thoughts, there has to be a form of action on your part. The sooner you take action on the first physical step, the sooner things will begin to manifest. Trying to visualize your thoughts and feelings about your goals; this will then help you to feel more positive and motivated to make these changes a reality. This will then push you to take some action and, ultimately, manifest your goals into your life. Manifesting is simple. You just have to start. | https://medium.com/@salim1321aff/how-to-manifest-manifest-anything-you-want-wealth-health-love-relationship-etc-ef7f0109aa5f | ['Muhammad Salim'] | 2019-09-30 11:39:29.040000+00:00 | ['Affirmations', 'Success', 'Manifestation', 'Trusting God', 'Self Improvement'] |
Who Is The Hero Of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”? | Photo by Rebecca Campbell on Unsplash
Who Is The Hero Of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”?
The tale of How The Grinch Stole Christmas has been woven into the fabric of western culture to such a degree, that I need not bore you with the plot of Mr. Grinch’s yuletide heist. We know that the Grinch is our antagonist in this tale but, there is a character who plays a pivotal role in the narrative and is the catalyst for the garlic souled Grinch’s eleventh-hour epiphany.
Who is the hero of this classic tale? Who is it that the Whos owe a debt of gratitude for saving Christmas? Is it Cindy-Lou Who?
No, it is not Cindy-Lou, it is Max the dog that is our hero in this iconic Suess tale.
Room for Redemption
The simple fact that a rotter like the Grinch lives with a dog foreshadows the good that lies within that heart that was two sizes too small. I don’t think that there is any debate about whether or not dogs bring out the best in their owners. For someone with the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile to feed and care for an animal demonstrates, that like our favorite Sith Lord Darth Vader, there is good inside that evil exterior.
Max acts as the Grinch’s conscience and although he is largely ignored and neglected he is still there as a tiny voice of reason and virtue who serves as a persistent reminder of what good is.
He knows that the Grinch can be saved, and to continue with my Star Wars analogy, Max is much like Luke Skywalker who will stop at nothing to see the Grinch turn back to the light.
Loyal to the End
In both the 1966 and 2018 animated versions of the story, Max genuinely appears to have all the characteristic loyalty that we come to expect from our canine companions.
There is more to this loyalty than meets the eye though.
Max knows the Grinch’s views on Christmas and how the Whos down in Whoville celebrate the season. We can make a safe assumption that Max has seen this day coming for years and probably knows how the events of the evening are going to play out. It is clear that Max the dog is a big fan of the Christmas season, so why is it that he would stick around with someone who is the antithesis of what he loves?
The loyalty Max shows is not blind, he has an agenda and that agenda is the redemption of the Grinch, not just in the eyes of the reader, but also in the eyes of the Whos and the Grinch himself.
Max is well aware that if it is not he who rides with the green menace, then there is a risk that no one would be there to put an end to the plot. Worse yet would be the Grinch locating an accomplice that shares his dim view on Christmas and the Whos.
Courage and Grit
While we do not know how many years he has been in exile with stink, stank, and stunk, we must make the assumption that those years have been challenging to say the least. Max endures hardship because he understands something that others do not.
Max understands that the Grinch can be saved and that he is the only one who can save him.
Max lacks the vocal ability to give the Grinch the proper dressing down he deserves so he resorts to the only medium he has to influence others.
Puppy eyes, which are the ultimate canine weapons of mass destruction. Since Max is a skilled tactician, (well I’m assuming that he is, based on my anthropomorphizing human levels of badassery on to this fictitious animated dog) he knows that he must be there by our antagonist's side throughout the Christmas caper to time his surgical strike into that heart full of unwashed socks.
Max has the true warrior spirit in where he is going to put the mission before himself and face great peril to redeem the goblin that the world has cast off. Max is charged with pulling the imposter’s sleigh not only down to the Whoville but back up to the top of the mountain. On the way, he is run over, crushed repeatedly by heavy bags of ill-gotten loot, and in the 1966 version, he finds himself on the business end of a whip.
Not to mention that during the construction of the Grinch’s sleigh I doubt that Max was offered the proper PPE and it is unclear whether or not the Grinch followed proper safe work procedures. That isolated cave is the very definition of an unsafe workplace and Max is lucky to have gotten out of there with all his limbs intact.
Max has faced untold peril to skillfully execute the greatest last-minute redemption since that time on the second Death Star.
Operation Three-Decker Sauerkraut and Toadstool Sandwich with Arsenic Sauce
Max carefully calculates his strike. The whittling down of the Grinch’s resolve is phase one of our courageous canine’s plan. He carefully and strategically influences the Grinch, much like the frog in a pot having the heat gradually turned up, our king of sinful sots is unaware that his resolve to destroy Christmas is being weakened.
Max knows that once the Grinch begins the looting of Whoville there is no stopping him, but Max also knows what the true spirit and meaning of Christmas is and that the populous of Whoville will wake to find their stuff gone but will band together and outflank the Grinch at the pivotal moment.
It is a perfectly timed coordinated assault on the crooked dirty jockey and his crooked hoss. The moment of revelation for the Grinch comes as he stops to listen to the reaction of the Whos, an action he undertakes to bask in the glorious conclusion of his plot, alongside his trusty accomplice. He hears the sweet Whosong and looks over to Max to see the atomic puppy eyes nuking his soul and supercharging it with good.
Puppy eyes from one direction and the sweet songs from Whoville from the other inflamed that charming eel’s heart three sizes. Even from 39 and a half feet away the Grinch is helpless to resist the vaporizing of his evilness.
Max is obviously a student of military philosophy made obvious through this quote from Sun Tzu.
To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. — Sun Tzu
Final Thoughts
While it can be argued that without Max the plot could never have been undertaken, I think it is clear that the Grinch would have found a way to steal Christmas from the Whos regardless. If anything, Max had probably delayed the onset of the Grinch’s wrath for many years by merely being there as a beacon of goodness.
The fact of the matter is simple, Max the dog is the only hero in ‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas’ and Cindy Lou Who’s only role was to buy into the weak-ass fibbery of a nasty-wasty skunk. I mean seriously, why in the hell would Santa bring a tree back to the North Pole to change a lightbulb? He would replace it with one off the back of the tree like the rest of us would. | https://medium.com/@michaelmajor604/who-is-the-hero-of-how-the-grinch-stole-christmas-1966752ece0e | ['Michael Major'] | 2020-12-24 06:01:54.007000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Dr Suess', 'Dogs', 'Heroism', 'The Grinch'] |
The Fire at Bahria Town Karachi | A vandalism event that took years to culminate
Bahria Town and Malik Riaz’s names are one of the most curious ones in Pakistan. They are curious because no one take these names publicly unless it is to praise them. The incident on June 6 2021, where a sit-in protest was taking place in front of Bahria Town Gate by various groups, resulted in vandalism that included burning of the iconic gate, torching of commercial avenues, vehicles, offices, and one or more buildings. The criminal silence of media on the entire saga was clearly felt by everyone, as distorted stories came through different social media pipelines.
The day started as Sundays do … slow and sleepy. With the difference that thousands of people were gathering in front of Bahria Town gate from all over Sindh province for protest. Within a 3km stretch, people were packed with a strong squad of police between the protestors and the gate. Additional blockades were placed to keep people from entering the premises. The protest leaders, many of them from Sindhi nationalist parties, had assured police they only want to protest and not enter the premises or cause any violence.
Suddenly, when speeches began, a group of protestors managed to break through the blockade and enter Bahria Town, initiating vandalism. Scattered videos emerge within one hour of the incident, recorded by people involved in vandalism, how they were destroying property.
For me, these were horrible sights. As a Sindhi myself, and familiar with some of the history of nationalist parties and their followers, I felt angry at them for resorting to violence despite assurance nothing of this sort would be done.
It wasn’t until I saw this protest video that I felt something was not right.
Protest in Bahria Town Karachi gone wrong — YouTube
Looking at the recent Israel and Palestinian conflict via social media, I discovered first hand that the videos made by third parties are first to reach and propagate to masses than from those actually involved. An incident in Canada where Palestinian protesting group was seen beating an old man and allegedly sexually assaulting a Jewish girl (as claimed by a Twitter handle). Later another video emerged of that incident where the Palestinians were seen to be getting surrounded by baton wielding group of men (of all ages) and provoking the unarmed Palestinians. The fight that followed saw the Palestinian youth fighting with their buckles against sticks and batons. The same old man that was seen beaten in the first video, not only had a baton that he lost during the fight but apparently had pulled a knife before fleeing. With the emergence of the incident video up close, the twitter handle claiming sexual assault went private to hide all its tweets.
With this fresh in mind, when I saw this protest video on Facebook, it made no sense. Apart from scattered bricks, there was no damage to the structure. The protestors are beating a metallic flap repeatedly and throwing bricks on the roof half-heartedly. No one is hitting Bahria Town symbols that are all around. No bricks appear dislodged from walkway. No ceramic damage on the walls. The protestors were clearly seen carrying hammering tools with which they broke offices, then why weren’t they used here?
These weren’t protestors … they were just there enjoying themselves.
Then videos began to emerge of nationalist parties where they said they don’t know who the people were that entered the premises, the protestors have nothing to do with them, and those who are entering the premises should be stopped.
https://twitter.com/MushkIllahi/status/1401962801388830727?s=19
In the above video, main organizer of Sindh Action Committee is clearly announcing the people entering the premises and getting involved in vandalism has nothing to do with the protestors or the organizers of the protest.
This is another video where the same question is being repeated, that how these unknown people that no one had any affiliation with, easily entered and started vandalism despite heavy police contingent blocking the gate and Bahria’s own security on standby.
When no one has affiliation with these people, the organizers kept saying please stop these people they are not from us, the refusal of police to get involved to stop vandalism is perplexing.
https://twitter.com/SajjadA79300086/status/1401544540087930886?s=19
Here, one participant is pointing out that miscreants came from huts nearby on motorbikes, set things on fire and went back without any action taken by law enforcements in the area, while all organizers were on the other side of the this area.
https://twitter.com/Sangrisaeed/status/1401534738486157316?s=19
Videos like these are available online, mostly in native Sindhi, where participants are pointing out those engaged in vandalism.
The vandalizing group, numbering to 100 or so from the looks of it, torched vehicles, offices, broke property, and senselessly strolled the underpass beating metal flaps and throwing bricks with no visible target. They were allowed to do that without any problem.
What changed was fire on the gate.
Bahria Town Karachi gate on fire (picture taken from Twitter)
This is very odd fire. This is a metallic structure with fiber sheet. There is no way a group of protestors can torch it without significant quantity of chemicals to start and maintain the fire. What is even more confusing is how the fire is traveling vertically rather than horizontally, as if it is being guided. How did a group of protestors carried such a chemical through police blockade is completely unknown. There is no video of them actually torching the structure, and no footage released by Bahria Town (if there were any CCTV cameras installed at the gate) of how the fire was set. It was this fire that finally brought police to action …
But it took action against the people that were sitting in front of the gate. Tear Gas was shelled, protestors were baton charged … while those vandalizing in BTK remained untouched and unconcerned.
Interestingly enough, all the property that was destroyed (vehicles, commercial shops/eateries, office furniture) pretty much falls into insured category. If any of the destroyed stuff was not insured by the owner, that’s a different story, but this was a curious pattern that mostly those items were being destroyed where damages could be claimed via insurance (if they were insured).
All of this, and the fact that these property damages videos emerged and spread within an hour of it happening, with no clear source of origin, set off red flags. It is highly irregular that someone who is breaking and entering an office in Bahria Town Karachi, hammering away, plundering, torching and completely destroying it, would immediately viral the video. Facebook Groups like Halaat Updates had several members post these videos, leading to racial slurs against the protestors (several members twisted this into Muhajir vs Sindhi narrative that is completely untrue and total bullcrap). But none of those posted videos have origin, rather they were shared by those members by uploading it themselves.
How did they get their hands on these videos when there is no original uploader on Facebook or Twitter? What is the source of the spread? This appears to be completely unknown (without any forensic investigation to trace the origin of these videos) and even surprisingly, the on-ground video is first to spread and go viral instead of third party videos that are usually recording from afar.
At no point do I support this vandalism, and at no point I am accusing any entity of fraud or deception. All I am doing is pointing out patterns based on information from existing sources. Bahria Town has a dark past, whether one likes to acknowledge it or not, that’s a different story. Due to influence on media, Bahria Town’s antics are largely hidden from the masses, but social media is a different beast. Here is a small preview of the time when this Bahria Town Karachi project was announced (Hint: It was announced and millions were collected even before Bahria Town had a location)
Following is a short read of the some of the disturbing scams Bahria Town has been involved in. The above image is taken from the same source.
Greed Unlimited: Bahria Town Karachi — Hot takes, Served cold (substack.com)
Following is Dawn’s coverage of Bahria Town’s greed.
Bahria Town Karachi: Greed unlimited — Pakistan — DAWN.COM
Following is the recent incident that eventually led to this protest.
‘They fired at everyone’: peril of Pakistani villagers protesting giant luxury estate | Global development | The Guardian
Here is an analysis of Bahria Town’s control over media and how/why media remained silent on the protests (including this incident).
Even though Malik Riaz cannot influence social media the way it does mainstream media, but there is always a way to influence it through paid people. We kept seeing that on Facebook and Twitter where ‘outraged’ individuals spoke about how some people were ‘anti-development’ and how the ‘terrorists’ ended up ‘terrorizing’ folks in the name of peaceful protests (one look at their profile and it was confirmed that they were either trolls, ideologues, or just those who get paid by taking part in campaigns). There were paid Twitter campaigns going on as well.
Received from WhatsApp (source and veracity unknown)
I will not be covering the ethnic slurs and angles that many people spun for anti-Sindhi and pro-Matruka Sindh narrative. I find them despicable to spread such blatantly toxic narrative when people protesting for their right to live are being silenced.
To conclude, what was announced as peaceful sit-in has been turned controversial with vandalism incident (which is not only highly irregular in nature, but its virality and publicity is extremely unusual). If Bahria Town’s history is any indicative, pretty soon there were be something like ‘Bahria Defense Force’ to save the settlement against those who wish to destroy it … the indigenous people whose land was illegally encroached upon and continued to be encroached despite Supreme Court’s orders. | https://medium.com/@wasioabbasi/the-fire-at-bahria-town-karachi-ea98af4db42e | ['Wasio Ali Khan Abbasi'] | 2021-06-08 13:23:47.388000+00:00 | ['Sindhi Nationalist', 'Pakistan', 'Bahria Town', 'Fire', 'Protest'] |
We Are the Enemy | by Martin Gurri
Consider the view from the highest positions in the world’s greatest democracy. If you are a cabinet-level appointee or a civil service supergrade, you imagine yourself to be a data-driven manager, almost a scientist, playing vast impersonal forces like a keyboard in the service of the public. Then you gaze out the window of your office in the top floor of an ornate Federal edifice, and you feel surrounded by hordes of volatile barbarians — Muslim extremists, Occupiers, Tea Partiers, militiamen, fundamentalists of the biblical or ecological kind, plus angry lunatics innocent of any coherent ideals. Those are the public, and you are aware, dimly, that they blame you for every failing of their non-data-driven lives.
What’s a wise Platonic guardian to do?
The answer is obvious to anyone who has attempted to enter a Federal building or catch a flight at an airport. We, the public, have been declared the enemy.
I have lived and worked near Washington most of my life. It used to be a welcoming city — at least, once you got past the inscrutably rational street design imposed by Pierre L’Enfant. I can remember when you could saunter into the C Street entrance of the State Department building straight through to the inner courtyard, no questions asked. I’m not saying you could catch the elevator to the seventh floor and shake hands with the Secretary of State — but I’m not saying you couldn’t, either.
Today State Department looks like it has been taken over by a hostile force — and my point is that it has. C Street has been closed to traffic by concrete barriers so removed from any sense of design as to make L’Enfant groan in his grave. Guards with guns patrol the perimeter of the building, eyeing nervous tourists closely, in case they go rogue. A hundred feet from the entrance, you will be stopped and asked to explain yourself. Inside, you must endure yet another ordeal before being allowed into the inner sanctum — more armed guards, sullen gatekeepers, metal-detecting devices, X-ray machines, anxious people herded into slow-moving queues.
Most of us have endured similar rites of passage. It’s what transpires in American airports. Recently I stood in a long, slow-moving queue at Dulles Airport, while the public address calmly announced a set of demands so eccentric and arbitrary they reminded me of the revolutionist in Woody Allen’s Bananas: “Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.” I feel reasonably certain that every interaction with TSA would have come under the “mandatory duel” etiquette of our sturdy ancestors. The most fight I have shown, alas, has been to remark to a particularly enthusiastic body searcher, “I think we have to get married now.” He was not amused.
Government grandees insist they have no quarrel with the public, only with potential terrorists. For the rest of us that is a distinction without a difference. There are many ways to fight terror: assuming every member of the public is a terrorist until proven innocent is only one of them. Someone could try closely coordinated police and intelligence work, for example — that would at least get points for originality.
Or they could ask for the help of those who dwell on the far side of their office windows. I am not the first to note that, on 9/11, while staffers ran screaming from the White House and the government stood helpless and blind, the only successful interception of a terror attack was conducted by ordinary people trapped inside United Airlines Flight 93.
It won’t happen. Terrorism has been too good for Federal executives, and they have no incentive to share. It’s proved an absolute boon to the Federal limo fleet, which now allows over 400 public servants to transcend our world-famous rush hour. Washington is a city where the movers and shakers never just get into their cars: instead, they “board the motorcade,” and so maintain the proper degree of separation even while shuttling between their barricaded offices. It’s our version of the red carpet, only in reverse — the better shielded you are from cameras and public, the more important you are considered to be. No doubt watching burly Washington cops or even burlier Secret Service types bark orders at the snarled masses of traffic adds to the experience a sense that all is right with the world.
I believe the people who run the government are sincerely afraid of us, however. It isn’t a self-interested dodge. For evidence I would point to the amazing proliferation of SWAT teams funded by Federal agencies. I mean, the Fish and Wildlife Service keeps its own SWAT team. So does NASA. Even the Department of Education has a SWAT team, setting up all kinds of alternative endings to Ferris Buehler’s next day off. There’s only one plausible explanation for these investments. The recurring nightmare of agency heads is that, like slow but persistent zombies, we will one day catch them out in the open, away from their limos and Jersey barriers. They want lethal force to rescue them before they become infected and turn into one of us.
Representative democracy requires industrial quantities of trust, but it’s easy to lose that trusting feeling when being told to take off your belt and shoes so you can be groped for self-detonating devices. In a spirit of good citizenship, therefore, I have developed a plan that should restore the bond of trust between rulers and ruled in America.
I propose that we, the public, find the nearest person in authority and surrender. We should turn ourselves in, then request to be sent to Guantanamo Bay. I can reassure everyone that we’ll be treated humanely, and allowed to keep tokens of our cultural identity — 24/7 access to Oprah reruns, with miniature golf on Saturdays. This is certain to save our democracy. As for us, I’m betting we won’t be worse off than before — and we’ll sport much nicer tans. | https://theumlaut.com/we-are-the-enemy-ab404ed38d82 | ['The Ümlaut'] | 2016-12-16 09:08:24.357000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Hillary Clinton'] |
Derivative the Gradient Descent of Linear and Logistic Regression | Linear Regression and Logistic Regression are most useful models in Machine Learning field. We need to fit these models to predicting, forecasting, classification or reducing error. This why it is very essential to calculate gradient descent, cost function. I am don’t writing this blog to elaborate on the Linear and Logistic Regression. I will explain the derivate of the cost function for gradient descent. Let’s start,
We know,
Linear equation:
Let’s derivate gradient descent of the logistic regression.
Finally, we got our simplified formula to doing derivation.
Linear equation: | https://medium.com/@jacknayeem/derivative-the-gradient-descent-of-linear-and-logistic-regression-6162685cb333 | ['Abu Nayem'] | 2020-08-18 17:17:31.379000+00:00 | ['Cost Function', 'Logistic Regression', 'Derivatives', 'Linear Regression', 'Gradient Descent'] |
It’s Only a Paper Moon | It’s only a paper moon,
it holds my dreams and more.
It’s only a paper moon,
It is a wish made from floor.
It isn’t as bright as the moon,
it’s paper after all.
It’s a fake moon on my wall,
but still I make my wish.
Moonlight, moon bright,
first paper moon I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
have this mighty wish tonight.
Grant me peace upon my bed,
when I lay down my sleepy head.
Hold me in your sweet night light,
that I may wake and be bright.
May you guide me through this night,
may you always hold me close,
gather up my thoughts,my prayers &
keep bad dreams at bay.
It’s only a paper moon,
It preserves my secrets tight,
It illuminates my life,
It contains my heart’s delight. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/its-only-a-paper-moon-939da02d2166 | ['Debbie Aruta'] | 2019-05-31 17:44:34.145000+00:00 | ['Moon', 'Writing', 'Poem', 'Writer', 'Poetry'] |
TikTok Is Putting Children at Risk | TikTok Is Putting Children at Risk
With 18 million users under the age of 14, age restrictions need to be raised immediately.
Photo by Aaron Weiss on Unsplash
By the end of 2021, TikTok expects to surpass 50 million users in the United States alone. While the popular platform reigns supreme among the American youth, nearly 30% of users are under the age of 18, despite TikTok’s meager attempts to set an age limit. Without any effort on the platform’s behalf to verify the ages of its creators, many young and impressionable children find themselves amongst an abundance of video content, most of which is geared towards an older audience.
Though TikTok’s Community Guidelines clearly state that no inappropriate material, such as sexual language or scenarios will be tolerated, one only has to spend a matter of time on the app before sexually suggestive content reveals itself. The worst part? Not only is this content completely accessible to minors, but some of it is also even created by minors themselves. If TikTok doesn’t instill stronger guidelines to protect minors and quickly, there’s no telling how detrimental the results may be.
The Ever-Growing Presence of Youth on Social Media
The user base for social media is getting younger and younger each year. According to an article published on BBC, around 50% of all children aged ten own or have access to a personal smartphone. As many social media platforms only require a birthdate in order to sign up, accessing content under the age of thirteen couldn’t be easier.
In order to combat inappropriate usage by minors, TikTok released parental controls that allow grownups to filter content and monitor their children’s accounts. These controls include both a screentime limit and a restricted mode, which supposedly blocks mature content. However, TikTok has proven to be busier blocking content that follows community guidelines as opposed to removing inappropriate material, making their so-called “restricted mode” virtually useless.
Additionally, the majority of inappropriate content on TikTok isn’t obvious to the technology’s filters. This often manifests in dancing trends not appropriate for minors or vulgar and sexual lyrics to popular sounds. Therefore, even when monitoring your child’s usage of the platform, it’s still very likely that they will be exposed to content geared towards older audiences.
The Problem With Influencers
Each and every social media platform comes with its own influencers — popular creators that have significant followings and often end up creating a career out of their social media presence. The most striking example is that of YouTubers, who once reigned supreme in the world of internet content.
While YouTube creators were typically in their early twenties to thirties, TikTok influencers are earning their fame at as young as 13. Most notably, Charli D’Amelio recently skyrocketed to just under 100 million followers at the age of 15. Other young creators include Addison Rae, Loren Gray, and Zoe Laverne, all of whom are under the age of twenty.
As social media influencers get younger, so do their fanbases. A 28-year old fashion vlogger typically attracts a different crowd than a 15-year old dancer on TikTok. However, there is a clear difference in maturity levels between these two. While the 28-year old influencer may have a better idea as to how to present herself as a role model, the 15-year old is still a child herself and cannot be expected to set a good example for her fans.
The problem with influencers is a topic in and of itself, yet the danger to minors on TikTok goes hand-in-hand with the rise of younger stars. TikTok stars have typically risen the ranks by participating in dance trends, often created by older users. Many of these dance trends are sexually suggestive and performed to explicit songs, such as “WAP” by Cardi B and “3 Musketeers” by ppcocaine.
While these dance trends could be considered harmless fun, performing them for an impressionable following of young users poses two problems: the sexualization of the minor performing the dance, and the audience’s desire to participate in the trend itself. Although not every dance on TikTok is inherently sexual, there are many involving suggestive gestures that should not be recreated by children.
Pedophilia on TikTok
Not only is TikTok exposing minors to inappropriate content, but it’s also a hotbed for pedophiles due to the massive amount of younger users. TikTok does have privacy settings; users can set their accounts to private and manually approve followers. However, with the rise of young TikTok influencers like D’Amelio, many users want to give themselves the best possible chance to be discovered.
A public account may attract a bigger audience, but this isn’t always desirable. In fact, there is no real security keeping convicted sex offenders and pedophiles off the platform. With the ever-growing presence of children on the app, more and more opportunities arise for these offenders to get their hands on inappropriate content concerning minors.
This argument is not new to the conversation surrounding TikTok. Plenty of articles have been posted calling out the app’s allowance of minors and pedophiles, but no real action has been taken on the side of the company. Instead, the responsibility of protecting the minor is left up to the parent, who in many situations has no knowledge of their child’s usage of the app.
The Solution
Age restriction on social media platforms is difficult to enforce, but it is incredibly important to have. Due to the nature of the content posted on TikTok, the app should consider raising its age limit from 13 to 16. Though younger minors could technically still get around this restriction, it may stop young influencers from finding success and therefore discourage children from using the app in the first place.
Secondly, parents should be spending more time monitoring their children’s social media presence. The conversation surrounding the type of content posted on TikTok needs to be louder, as many parents are unfamiliar with the app and therefore don’t see a problem in allowing their children to use it without supervision. This very lack of conversation could be putting our children in danger, without us realizing it.
Social media, while highly regarded as a way to stay connected, is one of the most dangerous places for children to be. TikTok is no exception. Otherwise, we may find ourselves creating an online world that will ultimately be our downfall. | https://medium.com/swlh/tiktok-is-putting-children-at-risk-dc624a4a3ecd | ['Natalie Vinh'] | 2020-12-06 22:40:11.894000+00:00 | ['Influencers', 'Children', 'Technology', 'Tiktok App', 'Social Media'] |
A User Experience Guide to Clubhouse | What is Clubhouse?
The most talked about startup of early 2020 is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you.
A single, black and white image of a human face, sets the tone for Clubhouse, giving it a unique vibe not found elsewhere on the App Store.
An iOS and mostly AirPods exclusive experience, Clubhouse brings a combination of live-streaming and podcasting to a select group of already-popular influencers, mostly in the startup and tech community.
Clubhouse centers around individuals, most of whom have done something remarkable or noteworthy. They represent existing cults of personality (at least, in a more humble, silicon valley form), typically with tens of thousands of Twitter followers, and a pre-built audience.
You notice this when you sign in to the app, and view a list of rooms, centered not around topics, but individual influencers. A Room is defined by who is currently speaking. So, you may receive a notification to join a room where Sahil, Drew, and Tyler are speaking. No profile pages, or lengthy explanations as to who’s here. Either you’re in the know, or you aren’t.
Novel User Interaction, or just Phone Calls?
From a bare-bones user interaction point-of-view, Clubhouse shouldn’t be unique. It’s a group call. iOS supports this natively. As does WhatsApp, FaceTime, Discord, and a countless number of community chat platforms.
But what makes a phone call toxic in 2020, and Clubhouse refreshing?
This boils down to community, curation, and interaction.
Why Voice Works
Video Calls have glued us to our seats. Mobile apps may exist for Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet — but the culture that developed around using these apps in an office setting is preventing us from using them casually.
Moving from our MacBooks to our phones and AirPods, gives us mobility. Removing video reduces friction, and removes the need to “prep for a call”, giving us more flexibility to decide how to hang out with others.
Simply put, adding video introduces more friction to the call experience than it’s worth. Clubhouse introduces a new mode of interaction that can be more spontaneous, casual, and frequent than a Zoom call. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-user-experience-guide-to-clubhouse-and-the-emergence-of-audio-as-a-platform-8a425a7a6661 | ['James Futhey'] | 2020-10-06 10:16:52.453000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Startup', 'Podcast', 'Apple', 'UX'] |
Product-Led Strategy: 10 Growth Cases for SaaS | Hey everybody 👋 This is Paul.
FlowMapp team is working on product development (as, I’m sure, many of you here).
Every day we take care of our users and cope with daily hurdles related to startup growth (this is fun, anyway).
We’ve gathered an exciting experience along the way and decided to share with you the practices of Product Led Growth (PLG), the primary driver of our customer acquisition, conversion, and adoption. And delivery value to end-users, of course.
Since the first product release, we have been working according to this exact strategy but learned its name a lot later (great thanks to OpenView).
This article is based on the speech I gave at the PLG Conference. Here I’ll cover the practical parts of Product Led Growth and explain its main concepts using 10 FlowMapp’s cases.
Update: This is the 1 part in a two-part series. Please read the second one also: Product Growth is hard
Let’s go 🏄
The Product
We are a bootstrapped SaaS startup (productivity tools, online collaboration, UX/UI design). Still, I like the definition of «small team of enthusiasts who are obsessed with inventing collaborative design tools for passionate makers all over the world.»
Our audience consists of 180,000+ users from 150 countries, and among our clients, there are such companies as IBM, Intel, Salesforce, Invision, Accenture, Unicef, Hyperloop TT, Pega, and Kontrapunkt.
This motivates us to go further 🙌 | https://medium.com/flowmapp-plg/product-led-strategy-the-startups-guide-to-growth-in-10-cases-f601df5c4e38 | ['Paul Mit'] | 2021-01-14 13:05:06.355000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'SaaS', 'Product', 'Product Led Growth', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Stop your plants from dying - Part 2: Slack Integration | In the first part of this series, I described how a LilyGo TTGO board could be used to measure, interpret and send data to TTN with an external soil moisture sensor. My goal though was to send that data directly to my smartphone, so I would never forget to water my plants. See how I managed to gather and upload the humidity data into our company Slack channel.
Also, make sure to check out part 1 here and feel free to take a look at the source code.
Introduction
Checking the TTN console every few days was no option for me. However, Slack offers a nice API enabling bot users to share any data they would want to. All you need is an application registered on Slack as well as something deciding when and what data to share. I thought a NodeJS Express server should do the trick.
If you would like to send the status to any other messaging app, you might want to try Discord or Threema. They both offer similar solutions, where bots can post into channels (Discord) or directly to any other user (Threema). But let’s first take a look at how we can schedule, receive and process downlink messages from TTN.
Scheduling Downlinks
After creating my application in TTN I added the webhook integration. That integration allows me to send JSON data to any web address based on events in the TTN application. I chose to forward all the incoming uplink messages from my sensor to make sure I’ll receive every humidity value.
At first, I played around with RequestBin, a quick and easy way to dump requests, to find out what data will be sent in a downlink. I shortened the whole JSON data I received due to simplicity (and privacy, since I do not want to share my EUI’s), but roughly that’s what I received.
If you take a look at the above payload, you’ll quickly see that the decoded humidity also mentioned in the first blog post is contained there. Also in there is the sensor’s name assigned via the TTN console. So basically that is all I need to be sure which plant has which humidity. So let’s build a Node.js server with Express added.
Slack API Prerequisites
So after taking a look at Slack’s API, I figured out that I need a Slack app that can act as a bot user for my automated requests and is able to send messages. Even though Slack offers to send messages acting as regular users I decided to use a bot. Slack provides detailed documentation on the requirements for automated messaging here and provides information on how to create such an app here.
After creating the app I started looking at Slack’s post message API method. Three things are needed to place a call there. First, an authorization token received from the Slack app settings in the OAuth & Permissions section. Secondly, the channel ID can be gathered from the channel’s info in Slack directly. And finally the required permissions within the Slack channel you want to send it to. Since those might change, take a look at what is needed in the API doc linked above and then apply them.
Build the Express server
Now all requirements are met to start sending messages from the bot user. Since creating a basic Node.js Express server is already covered on their website, I won’t go into too many details about the creation process itself. Also on there is a hello world application for express and that’s where I started to build my application on top.
Slightly modified version of the Hello World example on expressjs.com
To test, if Slack will accept my messages I first tried to just send a basic Hello Slack before dealing with TTN’s downlink messages. So I included Axios in my project to send HTTP requests and set up a post request to Slack’s post message URL. I also decided to deal with post requests on a separate URL /ttn, but that’s completely optional.
The Express server can be run with node <path-to-your-index.js> and will then listen for incoming requests on localhost:8080 . Since the request is not considered in the above code, I could just send an empty POST request to that URL with cURL.
curl --header "Content-Type: application.json" --request POST --data '{}' http://localhost:8080/ttn
And well the Express server does his job and places the message in a Slack channel I set up for testing.
Dealing with a TTN downlink
Sending messages to Slack works. Let’s now take care of the incoming downlink messages from TTN. As mentioned before the downlink is in JSON format and can therefore be easily dealt with in JavaScript. However, I needed to add Express’ built-in JSON converter (see line 15) to be able to decode the data correctly.
I first read out the device ID and the humidity attached to the payload and slightly adjusted the text object in my request to Slack to feature the device ID and humidity. I used the below request to send data to the Express server.
curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data '{"end_device_ids": { "device_id": "ttgo-sensor-02" }, "correlation_ids": [ ], "received_at": "2021-08-18T10:55:40.850879628Z", "uplink_message": { "session_key_id": "AXtY5vJ/Cc851E1ah8SFHQ==", "f_port": 1, "frm_payload": "RHJ5AAAAAABwH/s=", "decoded_payload": { "humidity": "Dry" }, "rx_metadata": [ { } ], "settings": { }, "received_at": "2021-08-18T10:55:40.647503177Z", "consumed_airtime": "0.061696s", "network_ids": { } } }' http://localhost:8080/ttn
And that resulted in the following message in Slack.
Even though the basic principle is already working, I didn’t want Slack to send a message every two minutes with hardly any effects. Therefore I implemented a key, value map to deal with multiple sensors and their values.
With that out of the way, there’s one thing still bothering me. The message looks very basic and if you know Slack you probably have already seen fancy bot messages which look more like a canvas than an actual text message. I do not fancy a canvas, but I wanted to try applying some styling to the message.
Styling the Slack message
Slack’s messaging API supports markdown, which enables basic text styling. The API also supports preformatted blocks featuring headers, images, etc. I’ll add a header as well as a dynamic image for each plant sensor, so each plant has its own visually supported style.
To get a header I used the built-in header block, which just makes the font a little bigger and bold. To also feature an image in the message I defined a separate function returning the image URL. To prototype this I used some images from Unsplash, though you could also put in any other pictures. The adapted code sample looks like this now.
To test the final stylized version I used the same cURL command mentioned above. And this is how it looks in Slack:
Conclusion
I explained in this blog post how I connected TTN to Slack via a self-developed Express server. In the end, I also showed how you can style Slack messages to display different images for different plants. What I also did, was deploying the application via a docker container on our server. Though, I won’t explicitly cover this here due to brevity and many other sources covering a docker deployment already. However, I feel that there’s still one major flaw about the whole project — Battery consumption. Right now it is not possible to power the sensor’s with a battery for longer than 4 days. Hence stay tuned for the third part.
Before you leave: take a look at the full source code here and also make sure to check out the first part of this series, if you haven’t done already. Please also feel free to share your thoughts down below. | https://blog.classycode.com/stop-your-plants-from-dying-part-2-slack-integration-20f9a7e0f814 | [] | 2021-09-06 11:38:44.100000+00:00 | ['Slack', 'Ttn', 'Slackbot', 'Expressjs'] |
Age Comes, But So Does Wisdom | Age Comes, But So Does Wisdom
Learning to love yourself can be a painful process, but worth it
Image by author
I don’t want to admit it, but this year has aged me.
At the same time, miraculously, I feel younger inside. But my DNA ain’t havin’ it. Wrinkles have set up camp. Skin finally got gravity’s memo, sent long ago. Belly fat thinks it’s going to move in for the long haul (sorry, belly fat — you’re not).
I’ve got to be honest, aside from any life challenges that have come up in the last few years, the 40s have been the best decade so far.
I never imagined I’d feel so comfortable in my own skin. Pride in myself has become my new way, my new normal. Whereas before, I thought fairly little of who I was and what I was capable of. Now I know I can accomplish anything…
It has been a methodical 20 years; full of imagining my better self, striving for better, finding new ways to achieve my goals, and learning how to believe in myself. Lots and lots of self-talk…
I’ve gotten here, to this place of pride and self-love, not by walking the comfortable path, but through effort, sweat, cuts, and bruises. Through many phases where I just had to break down and learn how to get up newer and better than before.
This sort of growth makes you stronger. No matter how many times you must break, each breakage brings a more valuable solution, a deeper knowing of self, a more possible YOU.
Don’t lie to yourself and say that becoming your dream-self will be easy. Tell the truth: sometimes you have to come to the brink of your understanding to know there is a field out beyond your imagination…one you want to go to. One where you can create anything you desire. One where you can become someone you love, someone you’re proud of, beyond reckoning.
I’ve seen that field of possibility many times. I’ve walked it. I’m walking it, even now, on both good days and bad. I believe we can all get here. I believe that no matter how much we fail, we will still get up, in the end. I believe that even as time ravages us, the embers within grow hotter and more capable of making things.
You are the future you hope for.
You are the light you’ve been praying for.
You are the strongest self you never thought you’d be.
Now, beautiful, capable human…get up from the floor. Get up and shake off those old excuses and become the fire. Become the person you know, somewhere within you, that you can be.
I believe in you.
Melissa Raise is the owner of Raise the Bar Wellness. She is a Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach, and Licensed Massage Therapist with 18 years of experience helping people become more comfortable and successful. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/age-comes-but-so-does-wisdom-d46e0ffff134 | ['Melissa Raise'] | 2020-12-01 10:02:44.217000+00:00 | ['Illumination Curated', 'Self Love', 'Midlife', 'Life'] |
Home Restaurant Platforms: Connecting Home Cooks and Consumers Who Want Delicious Food | Humans have been cooking food and sharing it with their friends and neighbors for generations. In contrast to other food sharing trends that have morphed into food technology platforms, like food delivery, home restaurant marketplaces have been unable to take off due to regulatory barriers. In California alone, there are thousands of people selling food out of their homes illegally. That lack of food sharing innovation and the absence of an all-in-one technology solution to combat regulatory barriers changed when Josephine was founded in 2014. This startup worked with home cooks to sell their meals locally by providing them with liability insurance, business assistance, a marketplace with the different vendors, and food safety training. Ultimately, they were unable to continue because local health officials were not aligned with their mission. They subsequently closed in 2018.
Still, these types of marketplaces are beneficial to both sides because customers get truly local food from their neighbors and chefs get to test out their restaurant concepts for less money compared with building out a brick and mortar restaurant. For example, Cooks Alliance, a home restaurant advocacy group, has estimated that the cost to launch a home restaurant is less than $1,000, compared with $400,000 to start a brick and mortar and $50,000 to start a food truck. Home restaurants also help many underserved populations, like single parents and recent immigrants, supplement their income. According to the Cooks Alliance, existing informal food economy participants, are 84% women, 48% black or Latino, and 30% first-generation immigrants.
Later in 2018, California passed AB626, which enabled Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations (MHEKHO), which are restaurants that operate in one’s private residence. The food produced in these kitchens is able to be consumed on the premises or via delivery, but cannot be sold to other businesses, like catering or grocery stores, or use third-party delivery services. This law expanded on the existing Cottage Food Laws by allowing the local county’s health department to oversee these MHEKHOs. The individual restaurants are on the smaller side because they can only have up to $50,000 in yearly sales, but the potential in serving these customers is the growing number of these types of restaurants. The services that offer backend logistics support to these restaurants are in high demand. Unfortunately, the local health departments took time to enable these types of restaurants, but in January 2020, Riverside County began permitting these restaurants with others soon to follow, like San Bernardino and Alameda Counties.
While regulations are shifting to permit food innovation, it is important to understand US consumer's dining habits as well. In 2018, there were about 660,755 restaurants for consumers to dine at or get takeout from. Americans had a slight preference for dining out compared to ordering delivery, pre-pandemic. Data from Restaurant Dive shows that 56% of Americans dine out at least once or twice a week, while only 47% order delivery once or twice a week. However, this same report found that off-premise sales (takeout and delivery) now make up 60% of sales across the industry, and that number has jumped up due to the pandemic. According to survey data from the National Restaurant Association, the number of adults who ordered takeout or delivery jumped up 8% between February and November 2020. Similarly, meal kit adoption is up 7% since the start of the pandemic after being down in 2019. While these trends may not continue on the same growth trajectory once people can go to dine out more frequently, the convenience and habits of delivery or takeout are here to stay. These types of products needed broader market penetration, which they have been able to achieve due to the increase in home cooking and a decrease in eating out. Restaurants will need to adapt their food to cater more towards delivery, which can be hard. However, for home restaurants, which can more rapidly test new dishes and interact with consumers more personally, they can rapidly apply insights from customer interactions to ensure that their food is optimized for delivery.
I personally became interested in the industry when going down a personal rabbit hole about starting a cottage food bagel business. Despite that idea not going very far, my fascination with the ability to share the products of one’s kitchen with others continued to interest me. I still think these startups don’t fully do that (I don’t know if what I am asking for will ever be legally possible), but it is good progress towards that.
Market Map:
Market Map of Existing Home Restaurant Platforms
Startup Overviews:
· Shef — Shef is a home restaurant platform that offers food just via delivery to its customers. Customers must order through the website and ahead of time, unlike other applications that offer a website and freedom to order whenever. The meals start at $7 and they have sold over 300,000 meals. Shef also has partnered with companies to allow them to set up a program for their employees to order. In order to circumvent regulations that don’t allow home cooks, they work with the cooks to give them access to commercial kitchens. Shef is available in the Bay Area and NYC. They have raised around $9M to fuel their growth.
· Josephine — Worked with over 3,000 home cooks to help sell their home cooked meals. The Josephine platform creates “clubs” that helped these home cooks sell to their friends and neighbors. The price per plate ranged from $7-$13, with Josephine taking a 10% cut. Every chef had to pass a test by the Josephine team and receive a food handler’s license. Ultimately, they had to shut down in 2018 due to cease and desist orders from local health departments.
· FoodNome — A web platform that matches customers searching for food and home cooks trying to sell their meals. They take a 15% fee from all reservation transactions, so the customer is covering the cost. In order to onboard a chef to their platform, it costs the chef about $1,000 and they must pass the food safety test, but they receive tools to help them maximize profitability and have efficient operations. FoodNome also lists all the restaurants on the platform, so customers can browse through the many options. The typical meal is between $10 and $20. The chefs are a mix of part-time and full-time employees. They have raised a $1.1M seed.
· DishDivvy — Not only do they support home restaurants in California, but they also have expanded to Utah to support home food producers there. Compared with the other companies in California, they are the first to expand outside California. Diners in each location have their order fulfilled by the home cook and then can either pick it up or have it delivered by DoorDash, who DishDivvy has a partnership with. Most of the customers are people in their community, while the cooks are typically highly skilled with previous cooking experience. DishDivvy charges a 15% commission fee that comes out of the home cook’s revenue. They haven’t raised any VC funding yet.
· Appetivo — This startup also enables home cooks to sell their food to people nearby. It had a head start over the other startups, as it tested the concept in Mexico City before it was legal in California. Once it became legal, it immediately rolled out in Los Angeles. It has raised some angel funding, but hasn’t raised any VC money yet, which makes it an outlier in this list. Appetivo charges a 10–15% commission fee to the customer. Their strategy to onboard chefs involves having them try listing one dish on the platform and then slowly expand their menu on the platform. Sit down restaurants can also list their products on Appetivo. Order management is done through a proprietary dashboard, and notifications are sent on SMS and email.
· WoodSpoon — This startup is on demand home food marketplace that provides customers with food from local chefs. The chefs on the platform are a mix of professional cooks and local cooks utilizing a mix of professional and home kitchens. The chefs are located across Manhattan’s east and west village, but they have plans to expand outside NYC. NYC’s evolving regulations on home chefs will play a big role. WoodSpoon makes their money from three different fees: delivery fees, service fees (15% of total order), and small order fees. They have not raised any funding yet but have $46,000 in revenue since their launch in mid-September.
Market Trends:
Government regulation — California typically leads the rest of the United States on legislative innovation and with MHEKHOs that leadership is similar as well. Typically, the MHEKHO legalization process goes from allowing limited cottage foods, to expanding Cottage Food Laws, to enacting food freedom or MHEKHO laws. Already, three states have enacted food freedom laws, which let residents sell almost any homemade food, but not in a sit-down restaurant setting. In 2019, 17 Cottage Food or Food Freedom Laws were enacted, which illustrates states are trending in the direction of allowing home restaurants.
Restaurant Layoffs due to COVID-19 — Restaurants have been harmed by restrictions on capacity due to COVID-19 and decreased consumer interest in eating at a restaurant, leading to layoffs across the industry. According to National Restaurant Association data from September, there are 2.5 million fewer restaurant workers than before the pandemic. These workers need employment, and a cheap, easy alternative to utilizing their skills is home restaurants. Plus, consumers may be more inclined to order from local restaurants because they are cheaper, their purchase supports a micro-local business, and they don’t have to travel as far to get the food.
Workers Demand Flexibility — A 2018 survey found 62% of respondents “desire to choose when to work” and 49% “desire to be (their) own boss,” which is provided by having a home restaurant. Given these types of restaurants can only do $50,000 a year in revenue, these restaurants provide a side-hustle opportunity to meet people’s desire to have more work flexibility. Additionally, the startups that are supporting home restaurants can offer other products to help the top entrepreneurs expand their businesses to a food truck, ghost kitchen, or even a brick and mortar location.
CA County Permits — At the county level in California, MHEKHO policy innovation has been driven by Cooks Alliance, an advocacy and organizing group created by the founders of Josephine. They are focusing on getting MHEKHOs allowed in every county in CA. As the country watches to see how California’s home restaurant pilots go, the Cooks Alliance will be instrumental in expanding these programs. The chart below summarizes the progress of implementing AB626 at the county level in California’s 58 counties based on Cook Alliance’s efforts. The number above the bars illustrate the number of people in the category.
Calfornia residents grouped by AB626 implementation status (Cook Alliance)
Conclusions:
Whichever startup can figure out the best way to partner with local health departments quickly and make sure food quality is consistent will be able to grow the quickest. However, I do not think the Uber model of act now, ask for forgiveness later will work this time because local governments are more attune to that strategy now and most consumers don’t want to buy food from an uncertified kitchen. Despite the change in the presidential administration and this type of policy being in line with his policies, I do not see federal action happening because this is reliant on individual health departments. Instead, I think states will be more inclined to pass home restaurant legislation due to the restaurant industry being decimated. In addition, restaurateurs will be wanting to start over for as cheap as possible. With regard to quality control, it will originate in the vetting and training of the chefs. Chefs with previous kitchen experience and a built-up social media following will be crucial. Finally, one strategy I have enjoyed is how Wood Spoon created a video of one of their chefs telling his backstory and background. While this may not be scalable, I think it will go a long way to getting consumers to trust home chefs in the initial phases. | https://medium.com/@noah-sobelpressman/home-restaurant-platforms-connecting-home-cooks-and-consumers-who-want-delicious-food-894daf11058d | ['Noah Sobel-Pressman'] | 2021-01-06 20:19:52.198000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Foodtech', 'Investment Thesis', 'VC', 'Food Tech Startups'] |
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Till date, the Ketogenic Diet has maintained its status of effectiveness and of course gaining wider attention among people looking to lose weight faster. The Ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that causes weight loss and provides health benefits. It involves significantly reducing carbohydrate intake while increasing protein to the levels necessary to maintain muscle mass with the calorie ratios approximating 70 percent fat, 25 percent protein and 5 low-glycemic carbohydrates.
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Till date, the Ketogenic Diet has maintained its status of effectiveness and of course gaining wider attention among people looking to lose weight faster. The Ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that causes weight loss and provides health benefits. It involves significantly reducing carbohydrate intake while increasing protein to the levels necessary to maintain muscle mass with the calorie ratios approximating 70 percent fat, 25 percent protein and 5 low-glycemic carbohydrates. | https://medium.com/@rayhanprodhan57/28-day-keto-diet-plan-recipe-book-755f9fcd9dd | [] | 2021-12-19 10:24:08.045000+00:00 | ['Keto Recipes', 'Low Carb', 'Keto Lifestyle', 'Keto', 'Keto Diet'] |
Dad’s Dog, Dwalin | Tom Daly makes comics about what is on his mind; getting thrown out of a store when he was a little kid, creepy neighbors, or hugging his kids. TomDalyArt.com
Follow | https://medium.com/spiralbound/dads-dog-dwalin-66f9e3cc8365 | ['Tom Daly'] | 2019-04-02 11:01:01.049000+00:00 | ['Illustrated Memoir', 'Dogs', 'Life', 'Family', 'Comics'] |
Top 10 Software Development Outsourcing Companies in Eastern Europe | Top 10 software development outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe
Deloitte reports that 59% of businesses hiring software outsourcing services are looking to reduce overhead cost.
Now, while IT outsourcing companies help you save money and increase your project’s backlog flexibility, your business still needs results. This need is why you can’t hire any outsourcing development team you find.
Software development team
I’ve picked out a list of 10 software outsourcing companies. Regardless, you will likely need just one team. So how do you go about it?
Here’s a brief guide to help you make the best decision towards a productive implementation of your product development.
Take Your Pick, Wisely — Hiring a Software Development Outsourcing Company
These factors have to do with your needs over the software outsourcing company you are looking to hire. So, consider these points before you hire developers that will meet your business needs as outlined or exceed expectations.
Minimal supervision: Outsourcing companies allow businesses to focus on their primary objectives indirectly. Since you don’t have your hands full trying to develop your software, you get to see to other tasks on your business backlog.
But you may not get this opportunity if you constantly have to tell your outsourcing team what to do or what not to do. So, you need to hire developers who can work with minimal supervision and still produce great results.
Trust: While you will need an outsourcing development team that you don’t always need to supervise, this comes with trust.
If you can’t trust the developers, you will ALWAYS want to supervise so everything is in order. So hire developers you can trust, and minimal supervision is assured.
Technology and resources available: Technology advances every day. Before you forge ahead with any software development company, check if they have the latest technology and resources available to see to your project.
ROI: Yes, BPO Outsourcing helps you cut costs but does this add to your overall Return on Investment (ROI)? Suppose your outsourcing need is an in-house project or for a client, does the product’s development come with the potential for good returns?
Again, yes, outsourcing helps you reduce cost, but how much impact will that cost reduction have? Think about this.
Business fit: Software outsourcing companies have their strengths. We have companies very good with custom software development as opposed to IoT development. You have to look out for a company with the highest success rate for the project you want to work on.
Most importantly, hire developers that have extensive work experience in your business industry. This way, they know what you need even if you don’t know this.
Nearshore or onshore company: What if you need to have a physical collaboration? A meeting? Or does the project you need to get sorted demand a consistent collaboration with the outsourcing development team? In-house developers and outsourced developers? Then you will need a nearshore or onshore company to work with.
Combine these factors to get the perfect fit for your software development project using this list of Eastern Europe’s top 10 software outsourcing companies I will share with you now.
Best Software Development Outsourcing Companies in Eastern Europe
I curated this review from Clutch’s — a trusted website that helps businesses find partners — list of the top software development companies to ensure that we got the best from the best. So let’s get right into it!
1. Altoros
Altoros — #1 software development company in Belarus in 2021 according to Clutch.co
An IT outsourcing company that is hugely focused on R&D activities, Altoros is situated in California with development centers spread across Europe and Latin America. With more than 20 years of experience in the software development industry and more than 350 dedicated professional developers, Altoros can cater to diverse software needs. And they have over 750 clients to show for it. This success is down to their client-centered approach.
They have built a structure over years of experience that businesses can rely on. Their partnerships with renowned brands show their efforts.
Their services include:
Custom software development
Staff augmentation
Cloud-native transformation
Big data and data engineering
Legacy software modernization and more
However, suppose you need a customized product or software solution expertly tailored to your business idea and are in need of cloud computing, in that case, you should check them out.
Portfolio: Samsung, Toyota, Huawei, Siemens, Pfizer, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Solutions and Cloud Computing.
Industries specialization: Healthcare, FinTech, Logistics & Transportation, Banking, Supply Chain, Retail, and Manufacturing.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Website: https://altoroslabs.com
2. STX Next
STX Next — Europe’s largest Python software development company
STX Next is based in Poland, one of the leading countries in the software development industry. Their expertise goes beyond the fintech industry to the banking and the gaming industry.
With over 16 years of experience and on average a 3-year partnership with brands, STX Next has served 200 clients on 400 different software development projects. Their services include:
Team extension
End-to-end product development
Consulting
Portfolio: Vyze, NOTA, Unity, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and Web Development.
Industry specialization: Financial services, Advertising and Marketing, Real estate, Banking, Gaming, and Biotechnology.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland.
Website: https://www.stxnext.com
3. MentorMate
MentorMate — software development outsourcing provider with development center in Bulgaria
MentorMate is headquartered in Minneapolis. However, this product development team started in 2001 in Bulgaria playing a part in the country’s technological growth. So far, they have expanded into other regions like Sweden.
Their services range from:
Software design and development
Cloud and DevOps
Their approach to every project is what puts them on the list. MentorMate builds software with an extra human touch to it and prioritizes a secured delivery.
Portfolio: AstraZeneca, Royal Bank of Canada, among others.
Strongest expertise: Web Development and Custom Software Development.
Industry specialization: Healthcare, Education, Finance, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Commerce, and Lifestyle.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria.
Website: https://mentormate.com/
4. The Software House
The Software House — #1 software development company in Poland in 2020 according to Clutch.co
Based in Poland, Software House is considered one of the highly recommended software outsourcing companies in the country. Compared to other firms on this list, the Software House started in 2012.
Regardless, they have so far built a clientele who largely refer to them for their services. These include:
Web development
Software architecture
Cloud & DevOps
Mobile development
Product design
Portfolio: eSky.com, Vaana, Smartum, Synerise, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and Web Development.
Industry specialization: Financial services, information technology, and real estate.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland.
Website: https://tsh.io
5. DCSL GuideSmiths
DCSL GuideSmiths — IT outsourcing company with 27 years of experience
With a team of 250+ software experts, DCSL GuideSmiths provide software-related services for startups and SMEs. This IT outsourcing company started back in 1994, making them one of the oldest firms on this list. Their services are categorized into three:
Core software development, i.e., web development and bespoke databases
Specialist software, i.e., UX design and software consultancy
Complementary software, i.e., hosting and data migration
Although they are headquartered in Hampshire, they have development centers scattered across Madrid and Bucharest.
Portfolio: NHS, Berkshire Hathaway, Mitsubishi, Pearson, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and Web Development
Industry specialization: IT & Technology, Insurance, Retail & E-commerce, Hospitality, Healthcare, Financial & Business Services.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: România.
Website: https://www.dcsl.com
6. Merix Studio
Merix Studio — web application development agency based in Poland
This software outsourcing team boasts more than 200 experts who have worked with close to 300 clients worldwide.
With offices spread across the US and Europe, Merix Studio comes into this list not only because of their expertise but their speed of development.
Their services include:
Web and mobile app development
Product design
Software development consulting
Team augmentation and outsourcing
Machine learning & AI
Software modernization
Portfolio: Volkswagen, Toshiba, Tesco, Deutsche Post, among others.
Strongest expertise: Web Application Development.
Industry specialization: Financial Services, Education, Gambling, and Business Services.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland.
Website: https://www.merixstudio.com/
7. Door3
Door3 — software development and UI/UX design agency
Founded in 2002, Door3 is on this list due to its project approach that upholds flexibility, secured delivery, and reliability. With over 80 professional software developers, Door3 has served more than 500 clients worldwide.
Their services include:
Technology consulting, i.e., digital strategy and project management
Software development, i.e., portal development and operations software
User experience design, i.e., UX Audit and design system
Door3 embodies professionalism and a client-oriented focus.
Portfolio: WWE, Wells Fargo, HP, News Balance, AIG, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and UI/UX design.
Industry specialization: Financial services, Insurance, Legal, Construction, Non-Profit & Education, and Consumer & Retail.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Ukraine.
Website: https://www.door3.com
8. SoftwareMill
SoftwareMill — custom software development provider
SoftwareMill is another BPO outsourcing team based in Poland. Founded in 2009, SoftwareMill has built a clientele from diverse industries highlighting their expertise. Besides Poland, they have centers in the UK depicting their growth despite their relatively early emergence in the software outsourcing industry.
Their services include:
Big data engineering
Machine learning services
Backend and frontend development
Blockchain development
Internet of Things (IoT)
You get a pretty good idea of how your collaboration with SoftwareMill will turn out due to their transparency. From creating a backlog of your idea to shipping your delivery, every process is laid out even before your business commits to the project.
Portfolio: Intelli Messaging, Flexys, Kafka, Tipser, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development, BI & Big Data Consulting & SI.
Industry specialization: Business, Telecommunications, E-Commerce, Consulting, FinTech, and Blockchain.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland.
Website: https://softwaremill.com
9. Intetics
Intetics — software development company with 26 years of experience
Founded in 1995, Intetic operates in 6 different countries in both Europe and the United States. The company is both security and quality certified. With a hub of global talents, Intetics have a diversified portfolio encompassing almost every industry you can think of.
Their services include:
Data management
Process automation
Product prototype and MVP development
Advance websystem development, and more.
Portfolio: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Burda Digital, Spreadshirt, Symantec, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and Mobile App Development.
Industry specialization: Agriculture, Communications & Networks, Life Science, Retail & ECommerce, Logistics, Insurance, Healthcare, Energy, Education, and Media.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Russia.
Website: https://intetics.com
10. Future Processing
Future Processing — software outsourcing company based in Poland
While Artificial Intelligence (A.I) in the future, A.I with a human touch is actually what businesses need. With Future Processing, you can get this. Founded in 2000, this software outsourcing company based in Poland has more than 20 years of experience to show for quality.
Future Processing started with just two developers. Fast-forward to two decades later, they boost a team of 800 software specialists and have worked on 600 projects with 200 clients worldwide.
Their services include:
Discovery and strategy, i.e., design sprints and software audits
Software development services, i.e., software development and product design
Digital innovation, i.e., business intelligence and cloud services
Portfolio: Allocate, Valeo, UK Power, Thomas Miller, Flowbird, among others.
Strongest expertise: Custom Software Development and Web Development.
Industry specialization: Healthcare, Finance, Media, Logistics, Entertainment, Automotive, Construction, Entertainment.
Software development centers in Eastern Europe: Poland and Ukraine.
Website: https://www.future-processing.com
Bottom line
Here’s the thing: it comes down to what your business needs at the end of the day. So first, you will need a clear and detailed outline of what you want to achieve through your idea or what you want to help your clients achieve.
This will help you define the ideal solution that your business needs. For example, is it a web or a mobile app development service? Next up is merging the factors to consider before hiring IT developers.
Combined, you will have a clear picture of the kind of team you would want to outsource your project to. Now, why don’t you get started with that? | https://medium.com/@kanstantsin.lastouski/top-10-software-development-outsourcing-companies-in-eastern-europe-780593ea55ae | ['Kanstantsin Lastouski'] | 2021-09-14 20:06:59.199000+00:00 | ['Information Technology', 'Business', 'Outsourcing', 'Software Development', 'Top 10'] |
The World’s Most Poisonous Tree: The Manchineel Tree | The World’s Most Poisonous Tree: The Manchineel Tree
The Little Apple of Death
A warning sign near Manchineel trees (-JvL- from Netherlands / CC BY 2.0)
Across the coast and wetlands of the Americas, the Manchineel tree has come to be known as the world’s most deadly tree.
The tree is so poisonous that simply touching its bark can cause serve rashes. Getting rainwater that’s touched the tree in your eyes can lead to temporary blindness, as can the smoke from burning the wood of the tree. The sap will also cause serve rashes, but it’s the fruits that have become infamous the world over. Eating one of the small apples from the Manchineel tree will cause tremendous pain and swelling in the throat, and for some unlucky individuals this can lead to death by asphyxiation.
However, resourceful humans have found a use for this deadly tree, both to hurt and to heal.
History of the Manchineel Tree
The tree was likely known to the native peoples of the Americas for centuries, but with practically no records from these peoples, it’s impossible to confirm for what length of time, and how, they made use of it. The first time the tree enters the historical record for our purposes is in the late 15th and early 16th centuries with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
It’s not known who exactly named the tree, but it’s thought to come from both the Spanish ‘manzanillia’ and the French ‘manchinille’ both of which refers to a type of apple. The Spanish would give the fruit a more appropriate epithet, however, calling it ‘manazanita de la murete’ or ‘little apple of death’.
It’s also from the Spanish conquistadors that get our first glimpse into one of the trees’ primary uses at this time — warfare. The Carib Indians of South America (from whom the English word ‘cannibal’ is derived, as well as the word ‘Caribbean’) are said to have dipped their arrows in the sap of the Manchineel tree, while also using it to poison water supplies in an attempt to hamper the Spanish advance. Early conquistadors learned to avoid eating the fruits of the trees, yet still suffered its poisonous effect in clashes with the Carib Indians.
The Poisons
The Little Apples of Death
What exactly makes the Manchineel so poisonous is not fully understood. A great many plants evolve toxicity to deter predators, but the Manchineel is an outlier in just how extremely toxic it is.
Aside from humans, the tree is also toxic to most animals and birds, with rare exceptions. The striped iguana of Central and South America is known to eat its fruits, and even live in the trees on occasion. Again, why they can tolerate the toxicity isn’t fully understood.
Its proximity to the oceans has been put forward as one reason for its toxicity, since it can disperse seeds via the ocean, it has little need of the birds or animals to ensure its survival. This is just one theory, however, and the debate continues to rage. Scientists aren’t even sure which chemicals make the tree so toxic. Hippomanin A and B have been identified, but many others remain a mystery.
Uses for the Manchineel
It may come as no surprise, given the seemingly unending toxicity of the Manchineel tree, that numerous culling’s over the decades have seen this tree slowly move into the category of ‘endangered’.
While it may sound like a good thing to rid the Americas of this deadly scourge, nothing is ever that simple. Typically growing in dense thickets in coastal and swampy regions, the tree provides an important bulwark in soil and beach erosion. Each year, in the United States alone, the nation’s beaches recede between 25ft (7.6m) and 50ft (15.2m). Coastal erosion costs around $500 million annually in coastal property loss, with an additional $150 million being spent on combating coastal erosion each year. In addition to all this, 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands are lost each year to erosion.
In both of these situations, however, the Manchineel tree can help. It’s deep roots and denseness make it well suited to lessening the effects of erosion, while also providing a natural, low maintenance windbreaker. And that’s to say nothing of the small, safe ecosystems they create for the few animals that can live in them.
Beyond ecological benefits, the Manchineel tree has long been used for furniture wood in the Caribbean. While it may seem a strange choice to make furniture of a toxic tree, they can grow to be almost 50ft (15.2m) and can provide ample wood in places where such resources are scarce. However, the wood does need to be dried for days in the sun to render the sap harmless, before it can be used in furniture construction.
Valuable wood from the Manchineel tree (Skimel / CC BY-SA 4.0)
In native traditions, such as those of the Carib Indians, gum from the tree was also used as a diuretic and an oedema remedy, proving yet again that our capacity to turn the same substance into something to heal or hurt with is by no means a modern one.
Today, Manchineel trees are emblazoned with warnings against disturbing them but could be vital in the defence against a changing climate. However, further weakening to environmental protection laws within the US is putting these already endangered trees under a new threat.
While it may seem strange for us to focus our efforts on saving something so aggressively poisonous just touching it can cause problems, it’s important to remember that each plant or animal is vital to its ecosystem, whether we like it or not. Though we often forget it, humans, like Manchineel trees are simply one part of a wider world. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-worlds-most-poisonous-tree-the-manchineel-tree-c162b8667940 | ['Danny Kane'] | 2020-08-21 12:14:16.043000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Agriculture', 'Health', 'Climate Change', 'Environment'] |
Community Proposal: Implement a Creator token fee to create an OSS ETF | David Teniers the Younger depicting part of the famous collection formed by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria while he was Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647 to 1656.
Community Proposal
Implement a 5% fee for Creator tokens upon minting
Where to vote?
Go to the Dev Protocol Discord channel #🗳️governance-vote to cast your vote.
Summary
Dev Protocol’s mission is to deliver economic sustainability to Open source software through tokenization and inflationary funding. Open Source Projects can leverage their native token to create powerful microeconomics to scale their project and incentivize their stakeholders. Examples of this are governance or utility capabilities and commit farming. Dev Protocol wants to ensure that the ecosystem takes part in this growth. This is why we’re proposing a Creator token fee of 5%. Additionally, since Creator token holders receive the proportional amount of Creator rewards the Dev Protocol treasury will receive 5% of Creator rewards. The OSS token and DEV tokens received will be held in the Dev Protocol treasury which will eventually be governed by the community.
Benefits
Value Capture
Dev Protocol Treasury holds 5% of all minted Creator tokens and DEV minted for Creator rewards. The Creator fee forms a linear relationship between OSS projects’ value and Dev Protocol’s treasury value. In retrospect, Dev Protocol has minted 152,000 DEV or $763,000 in Creator rewards at the price of writing ($5). A 5% Creator token fee would have put 7,632 DEV or $38,000 in the Dev Protocol Treasury.
OSS ETF
The Creator token fee will transform Dev Protocol, and the DEV token, into an OSS ETF since it holds an underlying basket of Creator tokens. The DEV tokens’ value should form a linear relationship with the valuations of the Creator tokens held in the Dev Protocol treasury. The DEV token can provide exposure to the OSS market on Dev Protocol and solve fragmentation.
Meta-Governance & Utility
Today, Github users tokenize their OSS projects to participate in receiving Dev Protocol’s inflationary funding. We expect soon that OSS projects will build governance and utility capabilities for their Creator token. Since Dev Protocol would have an underlying portfolio of creator tokens we could extend voting power and utility to DEV token holders. That allows OSS dependent projects or foundations to simply buy DEV tokens to have voting power in a basket of OSS projects.
Project Maintainer of Last Resort
Open source software is the technological infrastructure of today’s world. OSS projects that are underdeveloped or funded can become a security risk to its dependents. The Dev Protocol community could bootstrap growth by starting commit farming or liquidity mining programs.
Technical Requirements
New variable in a Policy Contract. Controls the percentage of the fee. New function in the Policy Factory Contract. Allows force update Policy by admins. New behavior in a Property Contract(Creator Token). Allows transferring part of the Property Contract to a treasury contract. Treasury Contract. This contract is just a wallet contract and should be implemented in the util-contracts.
Voting format
There will be an off-chain community vote held on Dev Protocol’s Discord in the #🗳️governance-vote channel. The voting format will be Yes or No with each community member receiving one vote. The Dev Protocol team will begin to implement the option with the most votes at 5:00 AM UTC on Thursday, December 3, 2020.
If you have any questions regarding the community vote then please feel free to ask on our Discord or Telegram channel.
Disclaimer | https://medium.com/devprtcl/community-proposal-implement-a-creator-token-fee-to-create-an-oss-etf-d74386909339 | ['Scott', 'Dev Protocol'] | 2020-11-30 05:02:36.543000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Defi', 'Open Source Software'] |
How To Pick Technology That Drives Shipper Success | Making your operations digital opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you as a logistics provider or freight broker. When you digitize your operations and reduce manual activities such as check calls, you do more than make your business more efficient and lower your operating costs. Digitization also provides tangible benefits to your current customers and helps you become an attractive potential partner to prospective shippers.
In this blog, we discuss the top three broker/3PL technologies that drive shipper success — and why you should make them a top priority heading into 2021.
Digital freight matching uses machine learning technology and powerful algorithms to automatically match your open loads with trucks from your network of preferred carriers. Designed to replace and improve upon load board technology, this software-based matching process happens instantaneously. With digital freight matching, you don’t have to post your loads to load boards, send bulk emails to carriers to inquire about capacity or phone dispatchers to find out what trucks are available. You can cover a load in seconds and move onto the next load.
The speed with which digital freight matching helps you find qualified capacity directly benefits shippers. The quicker you can provide your shippers with rate quotes and finalize capacity, the happier they will be. Digital freight matching augments your shipper service capabilities in another way, too. In addition to letting you find capacity quickly, Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching system lets drivers and carriers view and book your available loads 24 hours/day, seven days/week directly. All they need is an internet connection and our free driver app (or free carrier dispatcher platform). Fewer phone calls, emails and load boards help increase carriers’ profits and reduce downtime. The efficiency and convenience offered by Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching encourages carriers and drivers to keep running your loads. You can use carrier-friendly digital freight matching to build a robust carrier network, which ultimately benefits your shippers.
To say that real-time, digital visibility is important to shippers would be an understatement. In the last year, in particular, real-time load tracking has become a must-have for shippers. When shippers have access to real-time, digital visibility data, they can better manage their resources and identify inefficiencies in their operations — both of which help them be more profitable. Visibility has become so important that some shippers have minimum load tracking benchmarks that you must meet to move their loads. If you’re tracking loads with check calls, that may immediately disqualify you from working with some shippers.
Solutions like Trucker Tools’ real-time load tracking platform reduce or even eliminate check calls, while providing you with real-time location updates every five minutes. To find out where a load is, simply open our load tracking software or view the location of the truck in your TMS. With Trucker Tools’ real-time visibility platform, you instantly know if a truck has stopped or if the trucker has gone to the wrong dock. This instant access to real-time location data means you can update shippers on load status immediately, providing them with outstanding service. Trucker Tools’ real-time visibility platform also can be integrated with MacroPoint, Project44, 10/4 and FourKites shipper visibility platforms. That integration capability lets you automatically share visibility data with shippers in real-time.
When capacity is tight, providing a positive experience for carriers becomes supremely important. If you can provide a better, more efficient experience for carriers and drivers, they are more likely to want to work with you over your competitors. Increasing your carrier utilization instead of contracting with a new carrier or driver every time you want to move a load ultimately helps your shippers. When you have a loyal, capable carrier network, it’s that much easier for you to cover your shippers’ loads and to do so quickly.
One of the best ways to improve your relationships with carriers is to reduce the number of technologies they need to work with you. When you use the free Trucker Tools driver app with your carriers, you give them a single, unified technology platform that meets your needs — and one that helps them reduce their downtime. Carriers can use the load tracking and digital load matching features included in Trucker Tools’ all-in-one driver app with multiple brokers. The driver app also provides drivers with real-time info on parking, rest areas, truck stops, fuel prices, routing, weigh scales, CDL legal protection, load insurance, Wal-Mart locations and more. Carriers can use the Trucker Tools driver app again and again and they never have to download a single-use load tracking app just to move one of your loads.
To find out what makes Trucker Tools different from other tech vendors, read Trucker Tools’ Frequently Asked Questions for Brokers. Schedule a free demo of Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching and real-time visibility platforms. | https://medium.com/trucker-tools/how-to-pick-technology-that-drives-shipper-success-dd73d54a5de7 | ['Tracy Neill'] | 2021-02-03 18:57:03.865000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Shipping', 'Logistics', 'Transportation', 'Freight Shipping'] |
Sudbury: Social Concerns Downtown, the city’s Fiscal Imperative, and the Economic Opportunity | At the time of writing, the view of this essay is to highlight and describe opportunities and possibilities impartial to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, based on issues that were pre-existing that are presented herein. The conclusion highlights new developments up to the most recent point prior to publishing.
Since amalgamation took place in Sudbury under the Harris Administration, much of the benefits — both economically and socially — are yet to be seen, notably in the downtown core and in the residential areas where the majority of citizens live. This has been brought up many times since amalgamation took place on January 1, 2001 with requests and appeals from citizens for change largely falling on deaf ears. Taxpayers across Sudbury view their property taxes as implicitly paying for services, benefits, and other expenditures that they may not be taking advantage of — either they do not qualify for them, they do not need to take advantage of them, or do not use the service or benefit in question — and rightfully so.
Downtown Sudbury used to be a bustling core: department stores, notable historical buildings housing financial institutions, municipal and federal government outlets and offices, small businesses of various sorts, with minimal, or at the very least, controlled, social concerns. The streets would be filled with people shopping at local businesses regularly, visiting their favorite department store, or taking in delicious grub at one of the many restaurants. The businesses prospered and firms were able to survive a quiet period because they knew that it would rebound in the warmer months or when a recession let up. Certainly, a number of start-ups never took off, but the entrepreneurial spirit was there, and they chose downtown to locate for their headquarters or where they’d sell their goods. The citizens at that time — regardless of where they lived — knew where their tax dollars were being spent, and knew it was going into services that benefitted them as the resident. Not to mention amalgamation was not in place, though, their local economy looked different from what it is today.
The downtown core has faced a serious decline in quality and value since those pre-amalgamation days; not adapting to the times, poor political mistakes, unfocused city planning on downtown instead on the outskirts closer to where people lived, and undisciplined fiscal management. It’s not a matter of public finance, but simply assessing the fiscal responsibility regardless of your shape — a firm or municipality, the focus being the latter — is absolutely paramount when adapting to the current state while listening to your citizens who have good ideas, social requirements that are of the city’s responsibility, and focusing on greater economic prosperity.
A case in point is the issue downtown with people who have substance abuse issues, be it alcohol, non-medical use of prescription opioids and illicit drug use, and mental health needs. These may be people who need help but can’t find it or the help isn’t offered, and the reduced economic opportunities in an area of the city such as the downtown core. At the same time, the crime concerns are a deterrent to people to visiting downtown. Rightfully so, consumers won’t want to visit their favorite restaurant or shop with their family or friends if there’s even the slightest apprehension that they could be injured by someone with a weapon or pestered on the street with a homeless individual seeking proceeds. In the latter case, a lot of times it’s used to buy alcohol, illicit drugs, and other times it’s just because they need to eat, proceeds which would go back into the downtown core because they don’t have the means to travel beyond this area.
Beyond the downtown, though, there has been tremendous development of commercial opportunities, opportunities in which people are incredibly satisfied with, and long for more. As we move into the next pieces of what can be an opportunity grasped by small- and medium-sized enterprises, multinational firms, and regional establishments, Sudbury has the opportunity to do some important fiscal & economic growth liberties that could be difficult to attain in the future if we don’t set up the right course, now.
Modern Downtown Social Fundamentals
The downtown core has been argued by many as being “dead,” “there isn’t enough parking,” “there’s too much crime,” and “people don’t want to go down there.” All of these are valid arguments, and there is no doubt many more, but for brevity these are listed. Indeed, people won’t want to visit a downtown that has two stabbings in a week, as we witnessed in December 2020, used needles strewed on the ground and near a seniors’ center, the act of seeing someone “lifeless” when the drugs hit them: a greater focus on a safe, supervised site for use of non-prescription medical drugs. If people can’t park downtown, there is no way that people will be able to shop or dine downtown. While the public transportation argument is presented as a way to bring people downtown, the local bus terminal is where a large portion of the crime that takes place because individuals congregate near easy-to-access transportation.
There is a considerable concern that people could lay victim to any incident, whether the perpetrator knows them or not, and the way we need to solve this is through not merely affirmative action but referring these turbulent individuals to professional help. Despite the fact that a downtown for small cities is relevant, Sudbury is not what it was — a small city, measured by geography and population — and we can shift the dialogue to solving the social problems existing downtown, from finding ways to make it more vibrant that are the end result to the former.
Social Candor
In Bias et. al (2015), major institutions such as quality universities and local schools, and major companies also serve as “anchors” for downtowns. The spillover from these firms would benefit the downtown businesses, as seen with the placement of the McEwen School of Architecture. At the same time, federal and provincial government employees located in downtown Sudbury also spillover to businesses and restaurants; evidently noticed during the summer months when everyone is on lunch break. In this case, you see less of the homelessness likely because of all the foot traffic notwithstanding those few who still beg. The OECD (2020) discussed three different factors driving homelessness:
Structural factors. Some of the factors here would include a shrinking social safety net, labor market changes, and a reduction in housing allowances.
Institutional and systemic failures. This is referring to people who are coming out institutional settings (the criminal justice system, or hospitals and mental health facilities).
Individual circumstances. Job loss, eviction from a rental or subsidized housing, health issues or even child poverty, are all examples of the individual circumstances.
These structural factors all apply to Sudbury in some way or another. Even though institutions send the patient on their way back into society, we cannot put the blame solely on these benefitting institutions. Some of the homeless and drug users likely could have been born into it because of family circumstances, mental health issues, and the like, circumstances beyond many of our realms. In a lot of cases, these people want the help but can’t find it and therefore, end up back on the street after being in a mental health institution or a hospital setting. Indeed, Sudbury’s Off the Street Shelter, Homeless Network Day Centre, and the YMCA Overnight Warming Centre are valid options for temporary shelter, but don’t serve a permanent solution to the problem because those using the facility end up back on the street during the day or remain on the street if these facilities are at capacity. This discourages consumers from visiting the downtown and engaging in economic activity that is desperately needed to restore growth downtown; the homeless population are not a vexation but an opportunity to help those who need it most by fostering a re-entry into supporting municipal economic growth through employment and temporary housing.
Impacting our youth, the Sudbury Action Centre for Youth is an important facility to support our youth who more than ever are experiencing greater inequalities that we cannot allow them to grow into. With just four beds and seating for ten, available for ages 16 to 24, this won’t be enough to offer a solution that is adequate for a period of time longer than what is currently offered. The services that are available to them contain benefits: offering a place to stay during familial hardships and abuse can be or is the most comforting solution to their life at that point in time. The youth in our city need to be encouraged that we have solutions available and are ready for those youth to take advantage of them. Cultivating our youth so they do not end up in the same position as those older than them on the streets, is critical for our community to not reach future social obstacles that will be more difficult to diminish, and more costly, a situation our city is not prepared for.
One important community that has its own considerations is Sudbury’s First Nations people who are homeless downtown. In Sudbury alone, almost 43 percent who identified as Indigenous are homeless, compared with just over 9 percent of the general population who identify as Indigenous, according to 2018 homeless hub data. These numbers should be a wakeup call to policymakers that there is more than the Caucasian population who need affordable housing. It is true that Indigenous peoples arguably have more resources available to them including on-reserve housing, plus better access to community care through groups such as N’Swakamok Native Friendship Centre.
However, this does not detract from the importance of serving this part of the population with housing that would accommodate their culture while solving the homelessness situation. An example of this comes from Seattle, where a new building is being completed for the Native American community with 80 studios on seven floors for households at/below 30 percent of Area Median Income, with 60 units designated for homeless households and 10 units for veterans (Chief Seattle Club, 2020). There will also be a primary care clinic run by the Seattle Indian Health Board. In Sudbury, providing this same option by having that immediate access to primary care will help in two ways: 1. Solve some of the less serious health problems, and 2. Reduce the capacity of the emergency department at the local hospital, thus lowering costs to the taxpayer on a provincial tax basis. The $33.55 million project’s budget is funded with investor equity, grants, and loans from LIHTC, Capital Campaign, City of Seattle, and the Seattle Equitable Development Fund, to name a few (Beacon Development Group, 2020). This project was designed to reduce the homelessness among Native Americans in the City of Seattle: the native community in King County, which includes Seattle, makes up 1 percent of the population but 15 percent of the homeless population (Golden, 2020).
Further, as our country advances on the global scale with resounding social policies that citizens may or may not agree with, the existing social concerns facing downtown are an obvious issue that need to be addressed, but so does the non-medical use of prescription drugs. In many instances, these individuals are the same ones that are homeless, but this does not deter from those who are facing addiction issues but are not also homeless. In the study Canadian Substance Use Costs and Harms 2015–2017, it showed that the use of opioids cost the healthcare system $439 million (3.4 percent) despite the costs related to alcohol ($5.4 billion, 41.6 percent) and tobacco ($6.1 billion, 47.1 percent). On a per-person healthcare-cost basis, substance use of alcohol and tobacco were the highest at $149 and $168, in 2017, respectively. The healthcare cost related to opioids, per-person was $12. Related, the lost productivity cost of opioids use was $116 per-person in 2017, increasing 34.1 percent, and is the largest increase in per-person lost productivity cost, relatively speaking. In the same report, alcohol and tobacco lost, per-person, productivity costs of $184 and $161, respectively.
The focus here is not alcohol and tobacco because although it is ambitious to reduce the use of these two drugs (and they are drugs), the access is too great, therefore, unreasonable to assume that much can be done. Controlling opioids on the other hand, will have a much greater impact, not only because the cost to the healthcare system is less, but also because the cause of these deaths is more visible, and through smart regulation, can be solved.
As the previous issue is resolved, now there is focus on the future for the individual. Granted, homeless individuals will have greater difficulties in being employed, but the opportunity for firms to hire motivated candidates if help can be taken advantage of, and if the services can be offered for those seeking or mandated to pursue assistance, will give a bright spot in the dim lit area of economic prosperity. Kelly et. al (2005) compared a one- and five-year substance use and criminal recidivism outcomes among participants in each group and adjusted for a range of sociodemographic and dependence-related variables. In short, they found that the mandated group had a significantly lower-risk clinical profile compared with the comparison groups at baseline. Notably, after one year, participants mandated by the justice system for treatment had the highest reported level of abstinence from illicit drugs (61 percent) compared to those who were either voluntarily enrolled in treatment with justice system involvement (48.1 percent) or no involvement in the justice system yet still enrolled (43.8 percent).
This being said, using the justice system as a way to mandate rehabilitation may not be the most appropriate way, socially, to solve the opioid crisis and by implication the homeless problem downtown, but could possibly be used as an option for the most serious and most-reliant users of non-medical use of prescription drugs as a way to put them on a path to recovery.
Our Social Solution
Ultimately, the response to homelessness has to be structured, organized, and in coordination with all agencies, administrations, and the municipal government and to an extent, the provincial government. With respect to the entirety of teams for these agencies being involved, it does not require every single member or team to be part of it to make the change; having one or two representatives, agents, delegates, or deputies with the authority to make decisions & changes as needed to move initiatives forward is sufficient. Policy decisions need to be placed with those making the daily decisions specific to the project or initiative. It should be expressed clearly that these representatives from agencies, organizations, and other groups, are not by any means bypassing any sort of financial requirements that the municipality would like to participate in.
As we have seen with traditional government initiatives, they become bogged down with bureaucracy and inefficiency thereby limiting the impact they have on the community. While including these individuals as directed by their respective agency or otherwise as being part of the project, there’s a need to include young people in the project too because ultimately when administrators become involved, groupthink and haggling will drag down the process. By including a handful of young people, they can offer valuable insights based on their education or constructive ideas, which will foster the most important growth aspects of a project being undertaken. Not only this, but they are also the future of the community who are better able to relate to the issues at hand. Putting politics aside, forming a group of individuals who are not “community practitioners” or administrators, will encourage new ideas and give credibility to an issue that is greatly impacting the downtown core.
Thus far, community planning has focused substantially on New Sudbury and the South End, where a good portion of residents live. Indeed, we need to provide services and commercial opportunities to serve residents in these areas. Major chain stores are anchors for major strip malls and retail divisions of communities, as both of these areas of the city clearly demonstrate. Through encouragement of new business or entrepreneurs from across the province and country to show that Sudbury is a favorable, business-friendly city to establish, we can encourage employment of the homeless and create new opportunities for economic growth in the downtown core. One example of this is Barrie, Ontario’s creation of the Connected Core initiative, a collection of programs designed to support marginalized people downtown. This project is co-funded by the city, the Barrie police, and the local hospital. It includes initiatives such as naloxone training, and a bank of casual employment opportunities, primarily for downtown businesses.
Much like the spill-over effects described previously from key anchors and other institutions, businesses employing the homeless and with support groups to get these individuals into employment opportunities is a key component to reducing homelessness. Certainly, requirements have to be met by the individual to make them suitable for employment but if the resources are made available, the expectation should be taken that they will pursue the requirements accordingly. Establishing a new group that focuses on bringing new businesses downtown — not existing businesses in the city — will encourage opportunities to be created, drive economic growth, and reduce homelessness. This group should be composed of individuals not only trained in social issues such as homelessness and drug use, but also focuses on finance, economics, and education because the ultimate goal is to rebound downtown economic growth while encouraging new investment.
If we turn for a moment to the non-prescription drug use issue that troubled the downtown core, it’s important to note that this may not be the driving component of the homeless individuals. Particularly, a site for a safe injection clinic is an important measure in containing the illicit drug use downtown. The public health unit should move quickly with private investors for a safe injection site that would not be in harm’s way of other downtown patrons. As we have seen, used needles that have been strewn about on streets is no way to be encouraging downtown economic activity. Having a safe injection site is indeed one way to reduce the number of overdose deaths, at the same time, reducing visibility on the streets of the drug use. Increased police presence has somewhat helped but the police officers don’t have anywhere to direct these users to. By introducing a safe injection site, law enforcement will direct them to the site and provide better safety to the community, the focus of law enforcement.
Meanwhile, it will allow medical providers to refer substance users to treatment, counselling services, and medical guidance to getting sober. Whether or not this is to be mandatory should be decided collectively among site employees, the public health unit, and healthcare professionals; the public should not be involved in that discussion because the situation of the user is different, and that trust — between the counsellor/supervisor/medical professional and user — needs to be built without the influence of what the public has to say. Structurally, institutions in the city need to work with the site for promoting it as a safe location for users where they are not intimidated by their drug usage, rather, through supervision, and can put them on a path to recovery. As agreements become formal, the local hospitals and clinics will have to work together to promote the common goal of reducing non-medical use of prescription drugs. This is not a cost to the taxpayer — the service itself — but a policy issue that is agreed between two healthcare facilities.
The idea of a First Nations housing project to reduce homeless presents many viable benefits including targeting a group that has long been discriminated against, and puts the city — and as a whole, the country — on track to promote social inclusion of an ethnic group that has not always had a solid footing. This housing project should focus on accommodating only First Nations homeless individuals because by directing the attention that is needed, promotion of their well-being will give credibility to the project, show other homeless Indigenous individuals that they can have a place to stay, all the while creating a sense of community that is most desperately needed. Sources of funding could be through grants and loans provided by the federal government, the respective First Nation community itself who wishes to sponsor the project, and debt financing through financial institutions. First, by financing it through the city of Sudbury, there would be a lot of pushback from residents that will quash the project almost from the start even though the social mandate is present. Second, it allows the First Nation community or agency that surrounds Sudbury, whichever community or agency it may be, with the ability to promote Indigenous values. Third, it can give the downtown core the economic boost it requires through promotion of new business now that demand exists. Fourth, the project could allow a clinic to be developed right in the building with street access that has practitioners of the Indigenous beliefs to promote health and healing, as was done with the Chief Seattle Club “Home” plan. As well, a small retail business such as a café could serve as an employment opportunity for the residents, providing them with a jumpstart to their vitality and employment search. Similar to the Connected Core group, providing those with wrap-around support services that are necessary to find permanent housing, employment, and long-term stability for the community is vital.
A core group made up with select one or two individuals from agencies, groups (non-Business Improvement Area), and the municipal government, in addition to young professionals who will serve as part of the innovative task to tackle some of the crucial decisions will be important to supporting economic growth downtown. They will be the ones tasked with making the decisions that will serve the purpose of acting quickly to make economic and low-level fiscal decisions, decisions that do not require funds from the municipality. The current development corporation in the city needs a makeover and this is the way to do it. With this group in place, they’ll be tasked to work with public agencies and authorities, and private investors to focus on developing quality housing efforts to reduce the homelessness issue. This option can still be offered downtown on the edge of the core because it would alleviate traffic, focus on allowing residents from the suburbs of the city to be enticed to visit downtown, thus removing some of the social stigma attached to the homelessness and drug problem facing the downtown society.
Building affordable housing that exists in the downtown core but is on the perimeter will still allow these residents to access public transportation, other government services, and financial services that many rely on. A key benefit to be noted here is that we can stimulate economic growth because the issue of having homelessness and drug users on the main streets where consumers and pedestrians are frequent has been modified, thus boosting confidence in safety and consumer spending. Private investment with incentives such as property tax rebates and subsidizing the housing through provincial and federal — not municipal — government efforts, should be pursued. Removing the bureaucratic interest from the process will be important to the solution because it will not only promote Sudbury as a place for social impact investment, but also foster better social policies for the community.
As we have seen with the proposed real estate project for at-risk youth — a 38-unit apartment building — being given strong support from municipal government, Habitat for Humanity, the CMHA, and others, this will be one of the premier projects for reducing youth homelessness and giving our youth an important place to stay. Beyond the neighborhood where it will reside, it’s a symbol for our city’s youth by showing “we support our youth, and we are here to help.” Notably, the way the project is structured should be a blueprint for future housing initiatives and impact investing because from this project alone, $100,000 in property taxes and more than $400,000 in development charges will fuel further fiscal sustainability of the city of Greater Sudbury. Offering rent at 80 percent of market value has its merits, and while market rents are high, we also need to bear mind that these youth are the future of our city and supporting their financial well-being by possibly lower rents will help them enormously notwithstanding the prospect that the current plan offers. Private investment such as this undertaking is a foundational approach towards full-market-rent housing and giving our youth the positive promotion of making a living for themselves in Sudbury, with future revenue streams for current real estate developers and property managers in Sudbury.
Private investment to simply build the project is not necessarily the same as who manages it. While the city could be the prime candidate for collecting rent, it must ultimately be up to a third party to manage the property and maintenance through a bidding process. Furthermore, any red tape that stands in the way of a developer — regardless of where the firm is based — from pursuing a greenfield or brownfield project, needs to be minimized to a simple submission of a plan that covers economic impact, project budget, stringent safety plan, the project’s impact on the city, and how it will benefit social policies. Another option to solve the homelessness issue is to empower the Greater Sudbury Housing Corporation with the ability to issue debt for projects. Transferring the revenue raising and spending ability of this entity will give credibility to the project instead of the municipality itself because public support will adapt to when the ultimate overseer of the project can modify and make decisions without having to go through the bureaucracy that will bog down its mission. Similarly, transferring the revenue raising and spending ability of a private investor is a wise decision. The firm tasked with the social housing project — greenfield or brownfield — will be more fiscally apt to onboarding industry practitioners to complete the endeavor. As mentioned about a brownfield project, the point here is to use an existing facility currently owned by the municipality and can be reasonably converted to affordable housing.
The opportunity for sustainable and affordable housing has been in Sudbury for some time, but the changing social and financial landscape has required that the city pursue new opportunities that make it fiscally worthwhile for projects to be lifted off the ground. Coupled with the deteriorated economic rout of the downtown core, this has compounded the homelessness and use of non-prescription drugs that has clouded the city’s core for some time. By creating a group focused solely on the creation of affordable housing, who are empowered to make decisions with the absence of bureaucracy, and focusing on creating better social awareness of the dynamic that has yielded unfavorable dialogue, the downtown core will be better able to sustain a more dramatic fallout of social consequences. Pursuing affordable housing that accommodates the First Nations homeless, it will foster a community that is essential to the Indigenous way of life while maintaining their traditional values in healing, medicine, and health practices.
While the short-term housing (shelter) options are still valid, not enough transitional housing has been presented, although, new projects on the horizon are a leading response to this challenge. In addition to First Nations affordable housing, allowing private investment for social impact on general affordable housing projects will alleviate much of the stigma that taxpayers will be entirely on the hook for the cost of it; pursuing a partnership that makes better fiscal sense for the city will shift the social awareness in the right direction for projects to be deemed credible and worthwhile.
The Fiscal Imperative
Historically, the city of Sudbury has faced various financial situations that do not necessarily benefit the residents of Sudbury. However, the cost is surely felt by those same residents. Much of the spending that has taken place does not directly benefit the taxpayers, but it has almost, every single time, cost the taxpayers by this way: an increase on their property taxes. Indeed, Sudbury has a smaller taxable assessment (the denominator) that means the number by which the budget (the numerator) consistently falls short continues to rise, hence the amount increasing each year by taxpayers to pay in their annual property taxes. While zero-based budgeting will solve part of the problem, there needs to be fundamental check on the spending taking place.
With the increasing use of technology to perform transactions and tasks, traditional office space becomes a way of the past because of work-from-home (WFH), and workers increasingly engaging in “gig economy” jobs, these will have an impact on the municipal finance situation. Beyond the transfers received from the federal and provincial government, the only other revenue sources include residential and non-resident property taxes, development charges (the fees charged for new development to help pay for infrastructure required to service new growth), and user fees.
Consistently, infrastructure, namely roads and transit, have been a focus for some time that residents feel as though the construction related to these items are never ending. The short season for optimal construction with tight regulation supports this motive. With increased focus on jumpstarting the economy through infrastructure projects, this is a reason to focus on new opportunities for job creation and changing what needed to be done long ago but neglect and other focuses — not priorities — has meant deterioration leading to full revitalization. Public-private partnerships are the key to solving fiscal responsibility while creating a prosperous Sudbury. Additionally, the fiscal situation has long been a point of contention but as the financial results show, there is reason to believe that the city has solid financial footing to absorb further fiscal outlays.
How it’s Described to Alter
In a report from KPMG (2020), there were some important facts that should be seriously considered for the city to gain optimal performance in its delivery of core services to citizens and focus on reducing spending in areas that do not conform to the municipality’s fiscal situation. In fact, some of these opportunities have been pursued, either in early stages of implementation, process, or completed.
Facilities rationalization . This was discussed back in 2016 to reduce the overall footprint, establish best use of surplus space, and consider functional efficiency opportunities (City of Greater Sudbury, 2016). The report noted disposing of the resulting excess capacity across facilities and office buildings. The savings: $1 million. This is a tremendous amount of money that will benefit the city long-term by fully realizing key assets that have traffic to support their sustainability. Furthermore, from the same city report in 2016, it presented that opportunities exist to centralize administrative space and rationalize some operations. By doing so, we can reduce costs and find efficiencies in the structure. Furthermore, a lot of the assets described in the 2016 presentation were old and underutilized; underutilized assets should be offloaded as part of a larger restructuring to bring back in-line further fiscal capacity. The proceeds from the sale of these assets can be used towards expediting debt repayment or putting it towards facilities projects that are revenue generating, or as previously mentioned, converting it to an affordable housing projection.
. This was discussed back in 2016 to reduce the overall footprint, establish best use of surplus space, and consider functional efficiency opportunities (City of Greater Sudbury, 2016). The report noted disposing of the resulting excess capacity across facilities and office buildings. The savings: $1 million. This is a tremendous amount of money that will benefit the city long-term by fully realizing key assets that have traffic to support their sustainability. Furthermore, from the same city report in 2016, it presented that opportunities exist to centralize administrative space and rationalize some operations. By doing so, we can reduce costs and find efficiencies in the structure. Furthermore, a lot of the assets described in the 2016 presentation were old and underutilized; underutilized assets should be offloaded as part of a larger restructuring to bring back in-line further fiscal capacity. The proceeds from the sale of these assets can be used towards expediting debt repayment or putting it towards facilities projects that are revenue generating, or as previously mentioned, converting it to an affordable housing projection. Digitalization. For the city to move forward with several initiatives and remain competitive with other municipalities, digitalizing citizen, business, and corporate processes will support growth. Similar to the facilities rationalization recommendation, municipal services are offered across the city instead of one location. While the municipality has moved forward with placing Tom Davies Square as a “one-stop shop,” more needs to be done. Restructuring the municipality to have a full digital platform of everything from filing building and business permits to infrastructure updates to emergencies and security to economic development and community engagement, will serve the residents of the City of Greater Sudbury well and provide efficiency in public administration. The savings: $600,000, and it could be more.
As a matter of citizen engagement, residents want to know what’s happening in their city because it’s their tax dollars paying for the initiatives in the city and they should know as fast as the policymakers what’s happening in the city. Creating a digital platform can free local businesses from red tape that will contribute to an efficient local economy and stimulate entrepreneurial endeavors. Plus, a firm from anywhere in Ontario will be able to see clearly there are other cities welcoming new investment and see Northern Ontario through a new lens. Through a properly crafted and deployable marketing plan with targeted financial resources behind it, exceptional professional talent, and a structured plan that has clear goals, we can invigorate new growth that will ultimately yield increased investment. Focusing on creating jobs for developers (tech) and actively recruiting from the local university and college to put in place this infrastructure will help with job growth and create a holistic approach to encouraging innovation in Sudbury notwithstanding the increase in wages and benefits.
Furthermore, digitalization will encourage our municipal government to be more transparent by making minutes and council meetings — finance, planning, recreation — widely available the moment the meeting is done; it shows that the city has the capacity to provide information without delay to residents. At the same time, we can foster a community that moves beyond single-sector ideas and lays the groundwork for future economic opportunities, namely in tech. For example, in a 2018 McKinsey Global Institute report, they found that municipal digitalization will encourage local business growth and building skills that make people more employable. Similar to the social instances above, creating a digital environment to help the homeless in developing their skills for permanent employment will draw a new talent pool for businesses, SMEs and large corporates.
User Fees & Cost Recovery. Currently, fitness centers, other recreation interests, and youth centers are deemed at standard service level. However, these are directly competing with private entities, and the city should have zero involvement in these types of businesses. This is not the city’s expertise, these are businesses at the very heart of their existence, and is not the mandate of a municipality. Indeed, offering a low-cost option as a way to bring citizens to the facility with the same offerings is the imperative of supply and demand, although, it’s a drag on the fiscal capabilities of the municipal budget not to mention the municipality has no expertise in this area. To promote healthy community living, the resources directed to these facilities should be redirected to green spaces or sidewalk infrastructure in residential neighborhoods for a few reasons: it will help the city meet climate goals; it will create a space for families and pets to spend time outdoors in natural landscapes; and encourage residents to get outside for exercise in their neighborhood. If these costs aren’t adjusted, the facilities will fall behind in their maintenance and eventually larger cost outlays to update them will result in higher tax levy that residents will not support. Building on the discussion of competing with private, the trailer parks are competing directly with private, and resources would be more sensibly spent in aspects of key projects. This sector is still private and should remain that way, meaning the city should privatize these entities.
Beyond the KPMG report, there is a notable item that should be discussed here in brevity as it is consistently brought up by residents: wages and benefits. The important thing to note here — per the financial statements for the City of Greater Sudbury (2019) — is that about $30 million of the $268 million (11 percent) is from general government, but 32 percent is from protection services ($87 million) and almost 25 percent is from health and social services (~$65.5 million), which also includes Pioneer Manor. Reducing the latter two services would likely result in a few issues: increased violence downtown and across the city, reduced mental health services, lowered service of ambulance, and lower health services that are attributable to almost all City of Greater Sudbury residents such as the Health Unit. On a dollar basis, protection services increased $8.3 million compared to wages and salaries that increased by a little more than half ($4.6 million). If cuts were to be made, start digging into what protection services is and if it’s more than just policing services. Although zero-based budgeting is time consuming, you could implement it for this division to find savings despite the presumed difficulty that would take place to find these savings.
Building on privatizing the areas that directly compete with private, recreation and cultural services accounted for roughly $44 million or 7 percent of budget revenues with expenditures reaching 8 percent of total budget expenses (net loss of almost $3 million). This division of City of Greater Sudbury revenues has not turned a profit since FY2015, the last year the division it turned a profit of nearly $4 million (FY2020 has not been released but it can be assumed that there is no difference from the last 3 fiscal years). With that being said, refocusing on pools and libraries, where the city does not compete, should be its main focus and not on recreation centers and the like.
In assessing the debt capacity of the city, a lot of the judgements made are overstated. For example, when we look at long-term liabilities, the bulk of it is debentures. For a city, this is normal because even though they aren’t backed by collateral, it’s difficult and extremely unlikely for a municipality — in Canada or Ontario, anyhow — to declare bankruptcy since municipalities are agents of the province; in Sudbury’s case, the province of Ontario, and borrowing is approved by the province, and not freely decided by a municipality to declare to issue millions in debt.
In addition, suppose Sudbury pursued borrowing long-term. They can do so only for capital investments, but the annual repayment limit (ARL, also known as debt service) is 25 percent of annual “own source” revenue (property taxes, user fees, investment income) less annual long-term debt servicing costs and annual payments for other long-term financial obligations (Ontario, 2020). Of course, revenue will be unlikely to disappear because the majority of it is made up of property taxes, and unless every single household upped and left, it won’t go away. Sudbury’s outstanding debentures at 31 December 2019 was under $45 million, and issued no new debt in FY19.
On the whole, net debt was a little over $210.7 million, positioning the municipality quite well compared to other municipalities such as Barrie whose net debt is roughly $154 million (The Corporation of Barrie, 2019). In addition, reserves were bolstered in FY19 with more than $55 million set aside compared to Barrie with less than $24 million set aside for the same fiscal year. In assessing the debt service coverage, Sudbury’s is just over 2 percent of taxation, the main “own source” of revenue, noting this would be far less as a percent of total revenues; Barrie’s debt service was over 17 percent. This would put Sudbury in a much better position to meet short term debt obligations especially with new capital projects on the horizon despite some of the ignorance surrounding Sudbury’s financial capacity. One other important operating measure that is especially attributable to Sudbury is their ability to pay operating costs. At FY19, Sudbury reported 17.4 percent of cash and cash equivalents available to pay operating costs, if it were needed. Barrie on the other hand reported almost 27 percent noting $25 million is from an available line of credit, although, it’s not encouraged by the Ontario government to borrow for operating costs. Most residents assume that because their taxes are going up it’s because of the debt, and that’s not the case. Largely, it’s to maintain service levels but also because the city is mandated by provincial law to balance the budget.
Modifying the Fiscal Future
Public-private partnerships (PPP) are probably the most important ways for Sudbury to maintain its fiscal responsibility while leaving key aspects of the project to the private sector. Although the focus of this paper is not on the PPP model, it’s to highlight some of the benefits that can be realized from pursuing this type of arrangement for projects not yet taken off the ground and if necessary, to revisit the project structure. In particular, the library planned for The Junction project would be deemed a social infrastructure project, and the Kingsway Entertainment District, which has two distinct components: the infrastructure (transportation, energy, water & waste), and the facility (economic/social). Private involvement in the project should be left to strictly the private sector without any municipal involvement, other than the city focused on approving any permits quickly with deregulating the process to allow for less bureaucracy and focus on bringing the project online quickly.
For example, noted in Gatti (2018), through a build, operate, transfer (BOT) contract, the private sector would build the facility (arena, conference center, performing arts center, library, etc.) that meets some standards requirements with the municipality; manages for a period of time then transfers to the municipality at the end of the concession period (ownership remains with the municipality), with the project repaying the investment throughout the concession period (roughly 10 to 15 years, perhaps longer). With a build, own, operate, transfer (BOOT) contract — the main suggestion — the private sector builds/designs/operates/maintains the facility (see above examples of facilities/outlets) with financing provided by the private sector and retains the revenues during the concession period. Naturally, this period has to be long enough for the private sector to attain an adequate ROI and pay back the investment; facility ownership is transferred to the public sector at the end.
Through a PPP, government budget restraints are lifted and should ultimately prove to generate public support given taxation would be minimized if at all present. Ultimately, the project needs to have a strong IRR in order for it to be deemed reasonable and undertaken. The NPV should also be favorable but especially for infrastructure, it’s usually not above percent, rarely near 15 percent, and equity IRR at some 10 percent or more would be highly attractive for the private sector involvement. Since much of the budget — $107 million in FY19 — being attributable to roads infrastructure, pursuing PPP agreements will support the reduction in cost for these projects and putting into the agreement the quality standards to be in place, an essential component in any PPP. This would alleviate much of the financial strain on the budget that could be otherwise directed to capital projects or revenue generating opportunities, beyond city owned enterprises per above.
Let’s see some of the capital projects that are key and a lightning rod.
The Junction Project/Greater Sudbury Convention and Performance Center. Capital investment: $65.5 million, annual net loss of $272,000 by year 5; municipal taxes of $830,000. Total revenue of ~$4.1 million by 2023 (CBRE, 2018). Since the majority of the revenues will be derived from the events space, you could balance financially via either of these two avenues:
1. Charge less in the early years to support demand with a focus on service that could supporting breaking-even on the costs, with the expectation in future years 10 percent to 20 percent in additional revenues will come from the existing parties that booked historically with the center, thus you’ll make up some sort of shortfall.
2. Raise the price charged to space users to cover the expenses so the project payback period is shortened, and payoff is largely through years 1 to 3. The funding sources are from federal and provincial sources but also private.
The city should be involved as little as possible when it comes to the financing piece, and largely allow federal and provincial grants to do the work or the private sector, as described above. For example, focus can be towards the Ontario Arts Council for partial funding related to infrastructure noting their budget is only roughly $70 million; the Northern Ontario Development Program for the technical services/studies/plans; the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation for its ability to fund projects related to economic growth and job creation, which perfectly aligns with this capital project; and the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, for a vast portion of government funding (provincial and federal combined).
Beyond public sources of funding, attention should be drawn to private sources through private investment. Using a PPP to create this project will not only be a benefit for the city to transfer the design, build, finance, operate, and maintain aspects of the project to private, it’ll help make the project more sustainable long-term given the financial backing of the “private sector partner” to make sure the resources are well spent. Municipal involvement on the financing piece would create disparities in deployment of funds that would delay the project, given it would have to be approved by municipal council. An example of PPP usage for an entertainment site is the Shenkman Arts Centre in Ottawa. The Orléans Town Centre Partnership secured a nearly $28 million loan at a preferred interest rate, and it followed the design, build, finance, operate, and maintain PPP method (City of Ottawa, 2020). The same can be applied to The Junction project. All of this being said, if the NPV of the project is negative or a low positive, it shouldn’t be pursued even with its community benefits. Suppose this project receives the funding it needs, and the project looks good for a few years and is on track to reduce its debt load by 80 percent by year three (hypothetically speaking). Now, there’s a federal and or provincial government change and spending cuts take place including the grants that the library and performing arts center need to operate. The project no longer becomes viable and likely the city would bail it out, which is not what the taxpayer should be on the hook for nor should the city borrow to finance the operations of this initiative. If the funding model in place doesn’t work, it needs to be transferred to private for them to manage and operate. Simply start out using the method above, and the project demand risks are transferred to the private entity.
Kingsway Entertainment District . A lot has been said about this project since its inception in 2018 at municipal council that will be briefly discussed here because it is a key capital project, if not the only one that has been sought-after by residents. The city being involved while may have seemed ideal at the time because it’s a project that residents supported, it should’ve been left to private from the start and here’s why: the project has faced setbacks leading the discussion to the overall cost of the taxpayer, and a revived discussion (throughout the whole process) of keeping it downtown. Since the private sector would have been the only participant in a BOOT framework (the proposed idea here), the project could have started and possibly near completion when it was approved back in 2018. As well, the capital from the municipality for this project could have gone to others that are revenue generating that required little time to complete, that directly benefit the residents. While a cost sharing agreement in principle has its benefits, it places the municipality in a position to never stop funding an events center because it’s owned by the municipality. Through private ownership, not only would service levels and operating optimization materialize, but the private sector would be better able to attract major concert performances, large scale events, and massive entertainment productions that would likely be stalled by municipal involvement. Instead, private has an incentive to pursue these avenues because their goal is to make a profit and generate ROI; the city is focused on the well-being and policymaking of the municipality, and not seeking profit motives because the city is not a for-profit entity, and neither should it take ownership of one.
. A lot has been said about this project since its inception in 2018 at municipal council that will be briefly discussed here because it is a key capital project, if not the only one that has been sought-after by residents. The city being involved while may have seemed ideal at the time because it’s a project that residents supported, it should’ve been left to private from the start and here’s why: the project has faced setbacks leading the discussion to the overall cost of the taxpayer, and a revived discussion (throughout the whole process) of keeping it downtown. Since the private sector would have been the only participant in a BOOT framework (the proposed idea here), the project could have started and possibly near completion when it was approved back in 2018. As well, the capital from the municipality for this project could have gone to others that are revenue generating that required little time to complete, that directly benefit the residents. While a cost sharing agreement in principle has its benefits, it places the municipality in a position to never stop funding an events center because it’s owned by the municipality. Through private ownership, not only would service levels and operating optimization materialize, but the private sector would be better able to attract major concert performances, large scale events, and massive entertainment productions that would likely be stalled by municipal involvement. Instead, private has an incentive to pursue these avenues because their goal is to make a profit and generate ROI; the city is focused on the well-being and policymaking of the municipality, and not seeking profit motives because the city is not a for-profit entity, and neither should it take ownership of one. Elgin Street Greenway. The idea of this project has always been interesting, and it would offer a terrific area of the downtown core a place to bring consumers and pedestrians to enjoy. While the project’s vision is attractive, some aspects of it contain financing that could be better utilized elsewhere. For example, focusing on the “rock star element,” focus should be solely on making it green, and moving that “element” to the project previously mentioned. Placing trees, shrubs, and additional greenery will go a long way to harnessing the city’s focus on being climate friendly and reinforcing the natural landscape that the city has long been a foundation for and will be a lot more attractive and fully realize the project’s viability. In addition, the Nelson Street bridge component should likely be done separately given it is a key piece of infrastructure, that is, a bridge that connects area residents and serves as a mode of transportation. It was reported in September 2020 that it would cost the municipality $1 million for a refurbishing or painting (CBC, 2020). If it’s a matter of painting, something is seriously wrong with the estimates, and should be reconsidered. The “work needed for the bridge isn’t quite at the point yet” tells residents that municipal administrators are waiting for something seriously wrong to happen before the bridge is repaired. Taking the proactive approach and pursuing a PPP will alleviate some of the financial pressures that the city clearly is concerned about. Moreover, once the bridge collapses, it’ll end up on the CP Rail tracks, and the city would expose itself to negligent behavior.
Altogether, some of the fiscal concerns raised by residents are indeed valid and some are with merit. It should be emphasized, however, that the municipal taxes charged through property taxes, user fees, and development charges are important tools in sustaining future capital projects that the municipality directly sustains, and the fiscal state of the municipality is not as bad as it seems compared to the next closest city of comparable size by population. Sudbury’s fiscal measures are by and large quite good.
At the same time, the opportunity to focus on public-private partnerships for new infrastructure, events center, and entertainment/recreation is immense and must be considered; the cost-sharing arrangement currently in place has its benefits but allowing the private sector to bear the financial cost would make the project more feasible to sell to the residents. Furthermore, we’ve seen that the residents desperately want these capital projects to occur, as they should because they benefit the overall economic activity and social support throughout the city. As the infrastructure of the city continues to be a major part of the budget, pursuing a PPP for transportation infrastructure will alleviate much of the resources taken on by the municipal budget and allow the private sector to retain these risks while achieving improved infrastructure. There are many key capital projects on the horizon for the municipality that will benefit the overall community and are economic or social based. The projects will not only support future economic growth but are an economic opportunity for the city of Greater Sudbury.
The Heart of the Economy
The City of Greater Sudbury has been a pioneer in mining and mining services for a very long time. In fact, you could easily state the city has been like this since the city’s founding. With the discussion on climate change taking a front seat that is a serious concern for Sudbury and Canada as a whole, we can find ways to improve our economic opportunity by directing our focus on new sectors or promoting sectors that would help meet this challenge. Moreover, focusing on economic diversity in the city will stimulate new economic growth that will challenge our current standing but improve on our foundation. One example is clean energy, the process of using renewable and non-emitting sources to create energy that is now clean. Furthermore, we have an opportunity to attract non-durable goods industries to do their manufacturing in Northern Ontario, in city boundaries, that will support diversity in our economy.
In addition to mining, our economy is made up of education and healthcare that has meaningful employment, whether it’s administrative or in some other professional manner (professor, researcher, scientist, doctor, etc.) According to the Canada 2016 census, 15 percent and 9 percent were employed in healthcare and education, respectively, and nearly 14 percent were employed in retail. It’s safe to assume that in each of these three industries, the number of people employed has grown. By finding new sectors for the municipal economy to grow, we can offset job losses related to changing dynamics in the national economy to new sectors that will help reduce unemployment and attract new talent to Northern Ontario.
The Economic Opportunity
Financial services have always played a key role in growing the Canadian economy for employment. According to The Conference Board of Canada (2020), they found that the financial services sector is the largest private sector in Ontario and the third largest in Canada. Financial services exports reached $14 billion in 2018, and according to the WEF, Canada’s banking system has been the most sound in the G7 since 2007.
At the local level, there are a few impressive programs that offer grants & incentives to encourage development, redevelopment, and promotion of job creation and economic growth in the region. First, the Community Economic Development Fund is geared towards not-for-profit entities within the City of Greater Sudbury whose project has an economic benefit to the community and must align with the Economic Development Strategic Plan (Invest Sudbury, 2020). One of the key aspects of the strategic direction is “to create 10,000 jobs by 2025, Greater Sudbury must also become…a community that embraces diversity, innovation and entrepreneurship as key values that will create new economic opportunity” (City of Greater Sudbury Community Development Corporation, 2015). By promoting new businesses from those that are locally sourced or from across Ontario, we need to take a more advanced approach to creating these new opportunities. Through this fund, stimulating locals who have an idea that will benefit Sudbury, then we can deploy capital to assist them in this mandate, which will contribute to the strategy to create 10,000 new jobs.
Another fund that is compelling is the Sudbury Catalyst Fund. As of now, there are more than $5 million in VC funds to help entrepreneurs scale-up their business. Investing at the pre-seed stage or seed stage, we can promote innovation in the areas of technology and other products that will contribute to good economic growth while creating local jobs and strengthen the local entrepreneurial ecosystem (Invest Sudbury, 2020). This should encourage new grads or current students to be creative in how they apply their studies or solutions to the current trends of technological advancements. Indeed, the Sudbury Catalyst Fund is compelling because it also targets advanced manufacturing (NORCAT, 2020), and Sudbury and the surrounding area is probably not in short supply of workers to support this sector. Creating a new product that will suffice new manufacturing capacity, we’ll not only stimulate employment growth, but also diversify our economy with new entrants in venture capital and manufacturing.
In addition, by attracting new VC firms to Sudbury, stimulation for new ventures will likely increase resulting in fresh innovation and economic growth. This should be part of the mandate of key local organizations to attract these firms to Sudbury. Beyond financial services, services as a whole are a great way for Sudbury’s economy to grow because we have fresh grads looking for employment, and this offers a platform in growing their career. By promoting Sudbury as a place for firms to locate both front- and back-office operations it will help the youth employment situation and could be a way for introducing our homeless back into the labor market.
If we turn to the capital projects that are being discussed or planned to take shape in the next years, we see that there are sound benefits. The Kingsway Entertainment District would have some $75 million in total GDP impacts in Sudbury, and could reach direct employment impacts of 495, and up to 850 (PwC, 2017). For Sudbury, these numbers are important because the total GDP impacts in Ontario would reach nearly $4 million with almost $3 million in employment income impacts in Ontario. The increase in income would then support discretionary spending for small businesses and other retailers, restaurants, and leisure goods, to name a few beneficiaries. Furthermore, the Greater Sudbury Convention and Performance Center has some important economic factors. The total GDP impact from this project is estimated to be $29.7 million and more than $21 million in employment income and roughly 265 jobs (CBRE, 2018). Although the municipal taxes would be roughly $830,000, this number could obviously change if a formal agreement and new vision takes shape for the capital project. When assessing the operations aspect of the project per the CBRE report, the employment income would be almost $3.3 million, which will in turn stimulate economic growth through consumer spending on goods mentioned above.
These two projects are revenue generating not only for the city but for the private sector. To cap off the three main projects in focus, the Elgin Greenway has been on the horizon for some time. This project is not revenue generating but helps achieve social impact goals such as making the city climate friendly and furthering the green expansion the city has been a foundation for; beautifying the downtown core; and improving the well-being of residents. The project would have $934,000 in federal and provincial grants with annual operating budget impacts of $67,500, which is 0.01 percent of the $630 million annual operating budget for the City of Greater Sudbury. Part of the Elgin Greenway is the improvement of the Nelson Street bridge with $750,000 requested, and has an amount attached to it of $1.6 million made up of third party, 2022 outlook funding & donations of $1.4 million; infrastructure for the project was approved for $194,000 (City of Greater Sudbury, 2018). Even though this project is not revenue generating, the spending effects will go towards local businesses for the purchasing of materials such as the stonework, trees, plants, and shrubs along with the hiring of local businesses for installation of the project. Those spending effects while they may be small, it increases employment and supports job growth and gives people experience that can help their career and employment search, if they were to find another job.
In sum, the economic prosperity in Sudbury has good foundations and strong support for major projects approved in the last two years and social goals that can support economic opportunity. With government spending in capital projects that will achieve employment growth, consumer spending, and business investment, the economy has the potential to contribute positively to provincial economic growth, the province that is the economic engine of Canada. Focus on mining & mining supply services has its roots in Sudbury and continues to be a recruiter for local job seekers while continued business investment in manufacturing and new technologies are ways for the economy to diversify. Services of all sorts including financial services, will be courses of business investment to support local graduates and grow their operations concurrently. The large-scale capital projects that are poised to improve the well-being of residents and deliver economic prosperity are projects that residents should anticipate in the form they were first approved. For policymakers, even though some doubts have been raised over the course of the last few years, the tenacity of these projects held by residents has seen support that has not been seen in a very long time, and would be momentous to pursue them as such.
The New Prospect
As Canada and Sudbury has grown, we find ourselves at an important point in history: working for the people to solve our current social, fiscal, and economic effectiveness that provides a future of godsend and well-being. The City of Greater Sudbury has seen pushback on issues that are now out of question and form our present opportunity. City planning aspects have not entirely been balanced, but have shaped how we can form our city for the future that will provide our residents with the new prospect. Much inaction has beleaguered our city to perform meaningful growth socially and, on the whole, fiscally, where corrections can help our municipal direction. Forming robust committees that are empowered to make decisions where crucially necessary to advance the social divide that exists in our downtown core, will be fundamental in policy making for future hope. Beyond the decisions that might make use of municipal resources, approving projects and initiatives that are meaningful — both in terms of impact and thoroughness — will serve an important statement to creating a cohesive mandate that can serve as a platform for other municipalities across Ontario and the country, similar to what has already been introduced. Including the private sector in meeting housing requirements for those most at need will not only support social union, but also fiscal and economic importances.
With our fiscal situation intact, we have the capabilities to deliver for the residents of Sudbury the ability on meeting our capital projects. Compared to other municipalities across Ontario, we have a strong financial foundation that will allow the municipality to expand on its current platform of improving the welfare of its residents while creating new opportunities for economic growth. Leading the city with a solid plan to attract new private investment and firms will allow our economy to diversify that will support our youth employment and our educated professionals. Promoting the City of Greater Sudbury as a place to invest with a well-crafted, structured, and measured plan, we can shape new opportunities that will function as a platform for new economic growth. The planned projects in the municipality are an image of what will be sustainable and focus on targeted ways to meet the wants and needs of residents in their current approved form. Working with the private sector, the municipality has the capabilities to reform and improve the bureaucracy that has bogged down project development. The City of Greater Sudbury can make its mark on provincial and national mandates as it has for so many years, now we only have to get down to work and make the effort count.
New Developments
As of late, we have seen that site for the Kingsway Entertainment District been under — by many accounts — hypothetical revisions. At the time of the project’s inception, it would be located where the project bears its name: the Kingsway. As described, this capital project has been fought for it to be placed in the downtown core, and the same two themes keep coming up: lack of parking and unpleasant conditions in the downtown core as a whole, and now there is a consideration on the table for reviewing all options for the site of the event and sports center. Obviously, there are some very serious issues that need to be addressed first, and have been noted in sections one and two of this essay. For every project that has been talked about lately is the parking. It’s a trivial issue but a novel solution is this: build a parking garage. If you can’t go “out” go “up.” It seems as though this has been forgotten. The cost is the cost, but noted with a PPP model, or allowing private entirely to develop it with reasonable fees for parking, this concern can be alleviated. I don’t think we’re in the position of having to charge $25 per hour for parking; demand will suffice for the site’s intended purpose and ample parking spots will support payback from the investment.
Focusing long-term will transition our way of looking at what the current dynamic is now to what will be two to three years in the future. Keep in mind: no capital projects — with exception to the Place des Arts project — have begun; no shovels in the ground have taken place. I didn’t mention the Place des Arts project in the essay because it’s near completion at the time of this writing. I hope the project is self-sustaining and improves the lives of those who take advantage of its proposed benefits, and improves the overall arts and culture segment. By beginning the construction of these prominent capital projects as they were initially approved, it will diminish the apathy of residents towards elected officials, and demonstrate that placing the entertainment zone on its intended site, and the same for The Junction project, will focus long-term growth for the City of Greater Sudbury. Returning to the first section, the task force created seems to have been created for the sake of optics but doesn’t have practical significance. In addition to the proposals above, changing the focus for most of these groups, committees, and the task forces to have more significance, a clear plan, plain direction, set obligations, and targeted & measurable goals, we can a better response to the social, fiscal, and economic uncertainties facing us today.
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Austin Martin is a Master in Corporate Finance graduate from SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy, and previously earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree specialized in Finance with Honors from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada.
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Golden, Hallie. “As Homelessness Rises in Seattle, So Does a Native American Housing Solution.” Bloomberg CityLab, 17 Dec. 2020, www.bloomberg.com/tosv2.html?vid=&uuid=a61df840-5bf1-11eb-97ac-9b2c0d57aca3&url=L25ld3MvYXJ0aWNsZXMvMjAyMC0xMi0xNy9hLWJvbGQtZml4LWZvci1uYXRpdmUtYW1lcmljYW4taG9tZWxlc3NuZXNzP3NyZWY9SWhYRDZyRG0=.
“Grants and Incentives.” Invest Sudbury, 15 Dec. 2020, investsudbury.ca/incentives-and-programs/grants-and-incentives/#Community-Improvement-Plans.
Hindle, Thomas. The Impact of Toronto’s Financial Sector. Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada, 2020.
Hohol, Fran, and Rebecca Godfrey. CBRE, 2018, pp. 1–139, Business Plan for Greater Sudbury Convention and Performance Center.
Juric, Sam. “Updating Sudbury’s Aging Nelson Street Bridge Part of Stalled Elgin Street Greenway Project, City Says.” CBC, 2 Sept. 2020, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/sudbury-nelson-street-bridge-elgin-street-greenway-project-1.5708070.
Kelly, John F., et al. “Substance Use Disorder Patients Who Are Mandated to Treatment: Characteristics, Treatment Process, and 1- and 5-Year Outcomes.” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, vol. 28, no. 3, 2005, pp. 213–23. Crossref, doi:10.1016/j.jsat.2004.10.014.
McLean, Jacinda, et al. City of Greater Sudbury Community Development Corporation, 2015, pp. 1–70, A Community Economic Development Strategic Plan: From The Ground Up 2015–2025.
OECD (2020), “Better data and policies to fight homelessness in the OECD”, Police Brief on Affordable Housing, OECD, Paris, http://oe.cd/homelessness-2020. Print. 13 January 2021.
PwC, 2017, pp. 1–98, Proposed Sports and Entertainment C Entre Feasibility and Business Case Assessment.
Rolfe, Kelsey. “How One Ontario City Is Tackling Homelessness and the Opioid Crisis.” TVO.Org, 1 Oct. 2020, www.tvo.org/article/how-one-ontario-city-is-tackling-homelessness-and-the-opioid-crisis.
Rolfe, Nick, et al. KPMG, 2020, pp. 2–192, The City of Greater Sudbury Core Services Review.
“Sudbury Catalyst Fund.” Sudbury Catalyst Fund | NORCAT Innovation, www.norcat.org/innovation/Sudbury-Catalyst-Fund.html.
Statistics Canada. “Census Profile, 2016 Census Sudbury [Population Centre], Ontario and Ontario [Province].” Census Profile, 2016 Census — Sudbury [Population Centre], Ontario and Ontario [Province], Government of Canada, 9 Aug. 2019, www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=POPC&Code1=0904&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&SearchText=Sudbury&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=Labour&TABID=1&type=0
“Understanding Municipal Debt.” Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, www.ontario.ca/document/tools-municipal-budgeting-and-long-term-financial-planning/understanding-municipal-debt.
Woetzel, Jonathan, et al. McKinsey & Company, 2018, pp. 3–144, SMART CITIES: DIGITAL SOLUTIONS FOR A MORE LIVABLE FUTURE. | https://medium.com/@austinmartinwriting/sudbury-social-concerns-downtown-the-citys-fiscal-imperative-and-the-economic-opportunity-743479b6c6da | ['Austin Martin'] | 2021-01-24 16:21:51.059000+00:00 | ['Canadian Economy', 'Policy', 'Homelessness', 'Fiscal', 'Social Change'] |
St Dominic de Silos | St Dominic de Silos
It’s not the founder of the Dominicans we honor today, but there’s a poignant story that connects both Dominics.
Our saint today, Dominic of Silos, was born in Spain around the year 1000 into a peasant family. As a young boy he spent time in the fields, where he welcomed the solitude. He became a Benedictine priest and served in numerous leadership positions.
Following a dispute with the king over property, Dominic and two other monks were exiled. They established a new monastery in what at first seemed an unpromising location. Under Dominic’s leadership, however, it became one of the most famous houses in Spain. Many healings were reported there.
About 100 years after Dominic’s death, a young woman who experienced difficult pregnancies made a pilgrimage to his tomb. There Dominic of Silos appeared to her and assured her that she would bear another son. The woman was Joan of Aza, and the son she bore grew up to be the “other” Dominic — Dominic Guzman, the one who founded the Dominicans.
For hundreds of years thereafter, the staff used by Saint Dominic of Silos was brought to the royal palace whenever a queen of Spain was in labor. That practice ended in 1931.
Reflection
Saint Dominic of Silos’ connection with the Saint Dominic who founded the Dominican Order brings to mind the film Six Degrees of Separation: We are all connected it seems. God’s providential care can bring people together in mysterious ways, but it all points to his love for each of us. | https://medium.com/ave-maria/st-dominic-de-silos-824b0a42c6af | ['Vic Alcuaz'] | 2020-12-20 10:32:27.362000+00:00 | ['Church Leadership', 'Saints Angels', 'Inspiration', 'Catholic'] |
Machine Learning Basics with the K-Nearest Neighbors Algorithm | The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm is a simple, easy-to-implement supervised machine learning algorithm that can be used to solve both classification and regression problems. Pause! Let us unpack that.
ABC. We are keeping it super simple!
Breaking it down
A supervised machine learning algorithm (as opposed to an unsupervised machine learning algorithm) is one that relies on labeled input data to learn a function that produces an appropriate output when given new unlabeled data.
Imagine a computer is a child, we are its supervisor (e.g. parent, guardian, or teacher), and we want the child (computer) to learn what a pig looks like. We will show the child several different pictures, some of which are pigs and the rest could be pictures of anything (cats, dogs, etc).
When we see a pig, we shout “pig!” When it’s not a pig, we shout “no, not pig!” After doing this several times with the child, we show them a picture and ask “pig?” and they will correctly (most of the time) say “pig!” or “no, not pig!” depending on what the picture is. That is supervised machine learning.
“Pig!”
Supervised machine learning algorithms are used to solve classification or regression problems.
A classification problem has a discrete value as its output. For example, “likes pineapple on pizza” and “does not like pineapple on pizza” are discrete. There is no middle ground. The analogy above of teaching a child to identify a pig is another example of a classification problem.
Image showing randomly generated data
This image shows a basic example of what classification data might look like. We have a predictor (or set of predictors) and a label. In the image, we might be trying to predict whether someone likes pineapple (1) on their pizza or not (0) based on their age (the predictor).
It is standard practice to represent the output (label) of a classification algorithm as an integer number such as 1, -1, or 0. In this instance, these numbers are purely representational. Mathematical operations should not be performed on them because doing so would be meaningless. Think for a moment. What is “likes pineapple” + “does not like pineapple”? Exactly. We cannot add them, so we should not add their numeric representations.
A regression problem has a real number (a number with a decimal point) as its output. For example, we could use the data in the table below to estimate someone’s weight given their height.
Image showing a portion of the SOCR height and weights data set
Data used in a regression analysis will look similar to the data shown in the image above. We have an independent variable (or set of independent variables) and a dependent variable (the thing we are trying to guess given our independent variables). For instance, we could say height is the independent variable and weight is the dependent variable.
Also, each row is typically called an example, observation, or data point, while each column (not including the label/dependent variable) is often called a predictor, dimension, independent variable, or feature.
An unsupervised machine learning algorithm makes use of input data without any labels —in other words, no teacher (label) telling the child (computer) when it is right or when it has made a mistake so that it can self-correct.
Unlike supervised learning that tries to learn a function that will allow us to make predictions given some new unlabeled data, unsupervised learning tries to learn the basic structure of the data to give us more insight into the data.
K-Nearest Neighbors
The KNN algorithm assumes that similar things exist in close proximity. In other words, similar things are near to each other.
“B irds of a feather flock together.”
Notice in the image above that most of the time, similar data points are close to each other. The KNN algorithm hinges on this assumption being true enough for the algorithm to be useful. KNN captures the idea of similarity (sometimes called distance, proximity, or closeness) with some mathematics we might have learned in our childhood— calculating the distance between points on a graph.
Note: An understanding of how we calculate the distance between points on a graph is necessary before moving on. If you are unfamiliar with or need a refresher on how this calculation is done, thoroughly read “Distance Between 2 Points” in its entirety, and come right back.
There are other ways of calculating distance, and one way might be preferable depending on the problem we are solving. However, the straight-line distance (also called the Euclidean distance) is a popular and familiar choice.
The KNN Algorithm
Load the data Initialize K to your chosen number of neighbors
3. For each example in the data
3.1 Calculate the distance between the query example and the current example from the data.
3.2 Add the distance and the index of the example to an ordered collection
4. Sort the ordered collection of distances and indices from smallest to largest (in ascending order) by the distances
5. Pick the first K entries from the sorted collection
6. Get the labels of the selected K entries
7. If regression, return the mean of the K labels
8. If classification, return the mode of the K labels
The KNN implementation (from scratch)
Choosing the right value for K
To select the K that’s right for your data, we run the KNN algorithm several times with different values of K and choose the K that reduces the number of errors we encounter while maintaining the algorithm’s ability to accurately make predictions when it’s given data it hasn’t seen before.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
As we decrease the value of K to 1, our predictions become less stable. Just think for a minute, imagine K=1 and we have a query point surrounded by several reds and one green (I’m thinking about the top left corner of the colored plot above), but the green is the single nearest neighbor. Reasonably, we would think the query point is most likely red, but because K=1, KNN incorrectly predicts that the query point is green. Inversely, as we increase the value of K, our predictions become more stable due to majority voting / averaging, and thus, more likely to make more accurate predictions (up to a certain point). Eventually, we begin to witness an increasing number of errors. It is at this point we know we have pushed the value of K too far. In cases where we are taking a majority vote (e.g. picking the mode in a classification problem) among labels, we usually make K an odd number to have a tiebreaker.
Advantages
The algorithm is simple and easy to implement. There’s no need to build a model, tune several parameters, or make additional assumptions. The algorithm is versatile. It can be used for classification, regression, and search (as we will see in the next section).
Disadvantages
The algorithm gets significantly slower as the number of examples and/or predictors/independent variables increase.
KNN in practice
KNN’s main disadvantage of becoming significantly slower as the volume of data increases makes it an impractical choice in environments where predictions need to be made rapidly. Moreover, there are faster algorithms that can produce more accurate classification and regression results.
However, provided you have sufficient computing resources to speedily handle the data you are using to make predictions, KNN can still be useful in solving problems that have solutions that depend on identifying similar objects. An example of this is using the KNN algorithm in recommender systems, an application of KNN-search.
Recommender Systems
At scale, this would look like recommending products on Amazon, articles on Medium, movies on Netflix, or videos on YouTube. Although, we can be certain they all use more efficient means of making recommendations due to the enormous volume of data they process.
However, we could replicate one of these recommender systems on a smaller scale using what we have learned here in this article. Let us build the core of a movies recommender system.
What question are we trying to answer?
Given our movies data set, what are the 5 most similar movies to a movie query?
Gather movies data
If we worked at Netflix, Hulu, or IMDb, we could grab the data from their data warehouse. Since we don’t work at any of those companies, we have to get our data through some other means. We could use some movies data from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, IMDb’s data set, or painstakingly create our own.
Explore, clean, and prepare the data
Wherever we obtained our data, there may be some things wrong with it that we need to correct to prepare it for the KNN algorithm. For example, the data may not be in the format that the algorithm expects, or there may be missing values that we should fill or remove from the data before piping it into the algorithm.
Our KNN implementation above relies on structured data. It needs to be in a table format. Additionally, the implementation assumes that all columns contain numerical data and that the last column of our data has labels that we can perform some function on. So, wherever we got our data from, we need to make it conform to these constraints.
The data below is an example of what our cleaned data might resemble. The data contains thirty movies, including data for each movie across seven genres and their IMDB ratings. The labels column has all zeros because we aren’t using this data set for classification or regression.
Self-made movies recommendation data set
Additionally, there are relationships among the movies that will not be accounted for (e.g. actors, directors, and themes) when using the KNN algorithm simply because the data that captures those relationships are missing from the data set. Consequently, when we run the KNN algorithm on our data, similarity will be based solely on the included genres and the IMDB ratings of the movies.
Use the algorithm
Imagine for a moment. We are navigating the MoviesXb website, a fictional IMDb spin-off, and we encounter The Post. We aren’t sure we want to watch it, but its genres intrigue us; we are curious about other similar movies. We scroll down to the “More Like This” section to see what recommendations MoviesXb will make, and the algorithmic gears begin to turn.
The MoviesXb website sends a request to its back-end for the 5 movies that are most similar to The Post. The back-end has a recommendation data set exactly like ours. It begins by creating the row representation (better known as a feature vector) for The Post, then it runs a program similar to the one below to search for the 5 movies that are most similar to The Post, and finally sends the results back to the MoviesXb website.
When we run this program, we see that MoviesXb recommends 12 Years A Slave, Hacksaw Ridge, Queen of Katwe, The Wind Rises, and A Beautiful Mind. Now that we fully understand how the KNN algorithm works, we are able to exactly explain how the KNN algorithm came to make these recommendations. Congratulations!
Summary
The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm is a simple, supervised machine learning algorithm that can be used to solve both classification and regression problems. It’s easy to implement and understand, but has a major drawback of becoming significantly slows as the size of that data in use grows.
KNN works by finding the distances between a query and all the examples in the data, selecting the specified number examples (K) closest to the query, then votes for the most frequent label (in the case of classification) or averages the labels (in the case of regression).
In the case of classification and regression, we saw that choosing the right K for our data is done by trying several Ks and picking the one that works best.
Finally, we looked at an example of how the KNN algorithm could be used in recommender systems, an application of KNN-search. | https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-basics-with-the-k-nearest-neighbors-algorithm-6a6e71d01761 | ['Onel Harrison'] | 2019-07-14 01:10:25.321000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Algorithms', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Data'] |
How I Found Success as a Part-time Entrepreneur | How I Found Success as a Part-time Entrepreneur
Adding scalable income to complement my 9–5
Designed by Naulicreative/Freepik
It used to be the case that you had to choose between being an entrepreneur or an employee working a 9–5 job. With the rise of the digital economy, you no longer have to choose one or the other; you can become a part-time entrepreneur.
Starting a part-time digital business has three benefits. The first is that it is entirely flexible; you choose when you work and what you work on. Second, it provides you scalable income, which is the perfect complement to your fixed-income from your day job. Third, it allows you to see if you are cut out for a full-time entrepreneur.
In this article, I will review why a part-time digital business has been the perfect complement to my 9–5 job and how I plan on using the profits from my business to achieve financial Independence.
The importance of flexibility in a part-time business
If you are working a day job, either full or part-time and have a part-time business, you will need to be efficient and flexible with your time.
I recently polled my readers on this issue, and I asked them what is more important when it comes to side hustles:
Flexibility to work when, where and how they want
Earning the most amount of money per hour worked.
79% of people said that they value flexibility more than money when it comes to taking on a side hustle.
Whether it be selling digital products, blogging, or e-commerce, a digital business provides fantastic flexibility and freedom of choice of when, where, and how you work.
I have a digital business where I can put in work when it fits in my schedule. Whether it be before work, late at night, or on the weekends, I cam pick up right where I left off.
I should note this extreme level of flexibility does not hold true with all digital businesses. If you are a freelancer dealing with clients and deadlines or have a business with a lot of customer service, you will have less flexibility than I do as a writer and course creator.
A digital business offers scalable income
The real beauty in starting a part-time online business is that it provides you a lot of upside to your income that you simply can’t get working an hourly wage or even a salary.
If you run any business, including a digital business, your income is “scalable.”
Here is a simple definition of scalable income: “You aren’t guaranteed to make a cent, but there is also no limit on what you could potentially earn.”
In this video, Ben and Trish discuss what they do with the money from their Scalable Side Hustle.
What I do with the profits from my part-time business
One of the reasons so many people struggle to save money is because they have a tendency to spend based on their paycheck and only save and invest if there is any money left over after the bought everything they wanted.
There are ways people with one paycheck can increase their savings, like automating their savings and then spending what is left.
However, it is much easier for most people from a psychological perspective to save money they earn from a side hustle or second job.
Since the money I earn from my part-time business is independent of the paycheck I receive from my 9–5 job, and since the income I earn from my day job covers all of my living expenses, I reinvest every penny I earn from my part-time business. However, I don’t reinvest it into the business. I reinvest it in myself.
All of the profits my side business generates goes directly into an investment account.
This provides me with both scalable income and scalable wealth.
As I grow my side business, that means I will have more money to invest.
Each year I invest more than I did the year before.
At the same time, the investment gains from previous years begin to compound.
That is how I plan on quickly snowball my wealth and, along with it, strengthen the financial security for myself and my family.
If my business continues so scale at the rate it has in the past 12 months, I have put myself on pace to become financially independent within the next four years.
Financial Independence is the ultimate form of financial freedom. It is the point where I could lose my job, and it would have no material impact on my family’s lifestyle. If you can paint a better picture of financial security, I would love to see it.
The scalability of part-time digital business is what excites me the most because it provides me the fastest route to Financial Independence.
A part-time business allows you to give entrepreneurship a test run
Many of you might be wondering why I haven’t just dove straight into being a full-time entrepreneur?
The simple answer is that one of my greatest fears is not having a reliable income.
It is a well-known fact that the majority of businesses fail. The scalable income that a business provides works both ways;
It can scale up.
It can scale down, potentially to zero.
I am thrilled with where my side-business is as a secondary source of income. However, it is not at the point where it matches my income from my 9–5 job. Even if it was, there is the potential that my income could begin scaling back down.
If my business failed while I have my 9–5 paycheck, I would be disappointed but would be completely fine financially.
If my business failed and was the only source of income I had, I would be pulling my hair out.
Full-time entrepreneurship is a gamble and not one I am willing to take at this moment.
Financial Independence, Retire to entrepreneurship
For the next few years, I am perfectly content growing my business in my spare time and building my wealth snowball. Once my wealth snowball has gotten big enough, I will have reached Financial Independence.
You may have heard of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement. Which, in principle, I am a big fan of.
However, I like to rewrite the “E” in FIRE and phrase it as “Financial Independence, Retire to Entrepreneurship.”
We like to think of entrepreneurs as fearless risk-takers when a lot of the time, they simply come from a wealthy family and have never had to worry about money.
I don’t come from a wealthy family, and I do have to worry about money, so at this moment, the responsible thing for me to do is remain a part-time entrepreneur. I may not be completely fearless, but I am not afraid to put in the work over a long period of time to make these financial dreams become a reality.
So, for now, I will continue to work at scaling up my side-business and continue to embrace the lessons I have learned from becoming a part-time entrepreneur. | https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/how-i-found-success-as-a-part-time-entrepreneur-5788f308318 | ['Ben Le Fort'] | 2020-11-18 17:16:22.371000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Money', 'Business', 'Personal Finance'] |
Mayor Vows to Rush Vaccines to Communities of Color | Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash
Mayor Bill de Blasio promised on Thursday that communities of color, where infection rates are high, would not take a back seat in vaccine distribution for the coronavirus
“We’re not going to allow the vaccine just to go to the highest bidder, but to actually go to who needs it most,” said de Blasio in his daily briefing.
As New York City prepares to receive the first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine, expected to arrive on December 15, followed by the Moderna vaccine on December 22, de Blasio and Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi noted the need to repair the distrust of vaccines in black and brown communities tied to historic cases where they were used as involuntary subjects of medical experiments.
The officials stressed the importance partnering with the trusted messengers such as faith leaders and community-based organizations.
“It’s not just about the message that we deliver, but about the messenger, and sometimes that’s about passing the baton to someone else with respect to delivering the message,” said Chokshi. | https://medium.com/@gloriarcruz/mayor-vows-to-rush-vaccines-to-communities-of-color-6699b065c927 | ['Gloria Cruz'] | 2020-12-12 14:56:45.951000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'New York City', 'People Of Color', 'Vaccines', 'Black'] |
Deconstructing Chatbots: How to integrate Dialogflow with BigQuery | Introduction
In this article we will learn how Dialogflow connects with BigQuery and stores information collected during the conversational experience. We will use the same Agent that we created in previous labs “Appointment Scheduler”. In the Agent’s GCP project we will create a dataset and a table in BigQuery. Then we will edit the original fulfillment with the BigQuery dataset and table IDs. Finally we will test to see if the interactions are getting recorded in BigQuery.
Here is the sequence diagram of the events from user to the fulfillment and BigQuery.
Dialogflow BigQuery integration
What you’ll learn
How to create dataset and table in BigQuery
How to set up BigQuery connection details in Dialogflow fulfillment.
How to test fulfillment
Prerequisites
Basic concepts and constructs of Dialogflow. For introductory Dialogflow tutorial videos that covers basic conversational design check out the Deconstructing chatbot series.
As I mentioned earlier, we will be using the same “Appointment Scheduler” chatbot that we built in this article and add the integration with BigQuery.
Also go through the “Deconstructing Chatbots: Understanding Fulfillment by integrating Dialogflow with Google Calendar” article to get some background on Dialogflow fulfillment.
If you would rather follow a visual for this integration, check this video out
Integrate Dialogflow with BigQuery
Step 1: Create Dataset and Table in BigQuery
Navigate to the Google Cloud Console
In the Cloud console, go to the menu icon ☰ > Big Data > BigQuery
Under Resources on the left pane, click on the project ID, once selected, you will see CREATE DATASET on the right
Click on CREATE DATASET and name it.
Dataset in BigQuery
Once the dataset is created, click on it from the left panel. You will see CREATE TABLE on the right.
Click on CREATE TABLE, provide Table name and click Create table on the bottom of the screen.
Create Table in BigQuery
Once the table is created, click on the table from the left panel. You will see “Edit Schema” button on the right side.
Click on Edit Schema button and click on Add Field button. Add “date” field and repeat the same for “time” and “type”.
Take note of the “DatasetID” and “tableID”
Step 2: Add BigQuery connection details to Dialogflow fulfillment
Open Dialogflow Agent and enable Fulfillment inline editor. Refer to the previous article if you need help with this .
Make sure the “package.json” in the Dialogflow fulfillment inline editor contains BigQuery dependency. “@google-cloud/bigquery”: “0.12.0”. Make sure you use the latest version of BigQuery at the time you are following this article.
In index.js create “addToBigQuery” function to add the date, time and appointment type in the BigQuery table.
Add the projectID, datasetID and tableID in the TODO section of the index.js file to properly connect your BigQuery table and the dataset to your fulfillment.
index.js
Sequence of events:
The intent map calls the “makeAppointment” function to schedule an appointment on Google Calendar
Within the same function a call is made to “addToBigQuery” function to send the data to be logged into BigQuery.
Step 3: Test Your Chatbot and the BigQuery table!
Let’s test our chatbot, you can test it in the simulator or use the web or google home integration we have learnt in previous articles.
User: “Set an appointment for vehicle registration at 2pm tomorrow”
Chatbot response: “Ok, let me see if we can fit you in. August 6, 2 PM is fine!.”
Check the BigQuery table after the response. Use query “SELECT * FROM `projectID.datasetID.tableID`”
Congratulations!
You created a fulfillment using inline editor and integrated it with BigQuery. Think of more integrations like these and try them out!
Next steps | https://medium.com/google-cloud/deconstructing-chatbots-how-to-integrate-dialogflow-with-bigquery-267b68f4e795 | ['Priyanka Vergadia'] | 2019-08-31 07:45:00.104000+00:00 | ['Chatbots', 'Dialogflow', 'Bigquery', 'Conversational UI'] |
Frontend Architectural Patterns: Backends-For-Frontends | Frontend Architectural Patterns: Backends-For-Frontends
Client-Tailored Microservices
What is it?
The backends-for-frontends architectural pattern describes a world in which each client application has its own server-side component— a backend for a particular frontend.
This pattern is highly applicable if you have multiple client interfaces with significantly different needs that all consume the same underlying resources. The most common real-world example is an application that has both a web and a mobile client.
To understand why backends-for-frontends is useful, let’s walk through some evolutions in web architecture.
Multiple clients with a single general-purpose server
Monolithic application with multiple clients (source: author)
Simplicity is great, right? Actually, it is…but only up to a point. If your application is small enough this architecture can absolutely work! However, monoliths tend to break down with scale. You might hear your teams start to say things like…
Our server is so bloated! Client-specific control flow is littered everywhere and we are struggling to add features without introducing side effects.
I can’t commit any changes without merge conflicts. There are N teams changing this exact piece of code; some that we barely talk to!
Builds and tests are taking forever to run and it’s going to take us days to debug that one intermittent test failure.
These types of problems catalyzed the rise of microservices.
Multiple clients with a microservices architecture
Microservices! (source: author)
Microservices, when implemented with proper boundaries, are great for scale and help solve a bunch of problems.
Backend teams are typically responsible for a single service and are no longer tripping over each other.
Individual microservices are lightweight, customizable, decoupled, and readily extensible.
However, there are still boundary issues amongst frontend teams. The responsibility of handling multiple clients is still encoded in one or many services. Frontend engineers are struggling to jam multiple use-cases into a single API layer and the customer experience is beginning to suffer. Tension is growing between the web and mobile teams.
Why can’t we draw both technical and organizational boundaries around disparate clients, the same way we’ve done for microservices?
Multiple clients with dedicated backends and a microservices architecture
BFF! (source: author)
Enter backends-for-frontends! We’re using the fact that our clients have very different needs to draw helpful boundaries. The BFF applications are lightweight translation layers that decouple individual clients from downstream services and serve only a single frontend.
Benefits of BFF | https://medium.com/frontend-at-scale/frontend-architectural-patterns-backend-for-frontend-29679aba886c | ['Bowei Han'] | 2020-09-12 14:30:04.351000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Microservices', 'Architecture'] |
7 Possible reasons no one is reading your blog | I created so many blogs in previous years but the only problem that I faced is How to get traffic.
Because without enough traffic a blog never is your business. So to make your blog a perfect business you have to understand some problems.
I have been blogging from 2 years and I search a lot and then I try some experiments myself.
Then i learn some amazing things that i am going share with you.
Let us first understand a EQUATION.
According to it ” The only way to make money from your blog is traffic and the traffic means visitors”.
AND you have to catch visitors with your own efforts. THINK IT if you just posting blog posts and no one knows about it then how he or she can come to you.
But there are many ways you can do to catch visitors…
#1 Your site is slow
If your site is slow then this is the most important thing due to which you may lose your visitors.
Because no one wants to wait a lot to open your blog after 5 or 10 seconds later. For a good blog, it is important to maintain its speed approx 2 to 3 seconds.
The only factor of slow speed is your hosting service. If your site speed is good then just chill. But if not thencheck Bluehost by clicking here.
Because bluehost is no.1 recommended hosting service by wordpress itself.
#2 You are not using social media platforms
Today, Social media is the best platform to start anything online. Because approx internet users are on social media.
Because media is open to use and it is free too. So you can promote your blog here.
If you are not using social media for your blog then you can’t imagine how much traffic you are loosing.
The best social platforms to promote your blog according to me is
1)Pinterest
2)Facebook
3)Twitter
I put Pinterest on №1 because Pinterest is my №1 traffic generator. According to me pinterest is the easy and quick way to get huge traffic and its all free.
RELATED How to get traffic from Pinterest
#3 You are not solving a problem
Writing a blog to teach something is actually all about to solve the problem of the reader.
If you are just writing your blog to just fill the space in your blog and not giving something useful knowledge to your reader the dear no one will read you after some lines.
And that reader will never come you because he or she will think you are writing valuable for them.
So to keep your visitor to come to you again and again. For this, you have to write something crazy and valuable.
#4 Your headlines are’t exciting
One line that we all listen that ” First impression the last impression” Hee is the same.
When a visitor comes to your blog first time then the first thing that he or she reads is your blog posts headlines.
If your blog headlines are catchy then a visitor will go to read your whole blog post.
Because your headlines are the first impression for your blog. So you have to write catching headlines that will sound good.
#5 Ignoring SEO
If you are just writing, writing and writing only without doing any SEO. Then it is not going be good and no search engine like google will promote you.
And you are will be alone to help yourself.
SEO is the most important thing that you have to do in your whole blog post.
Because the search engine traffic is free and it comes automatically by doing a proper SEO.
If you are not familiar with a proper SEO guide then read this post from Neil Patel
#6 Ignoring niche
Writing on specific niche is the way to make trust on your readers on you.
Let it be supposed that you are writing about good food then people will know that you are a person who knows about good food.
So when they want to read about good food then they will come to you.
But if are writing just many many different topics in the same blog then people why trust you.
#7 You are not promoting
After writing a blog post it is more important to promote it. There many ways you can promote your blog for free by doing some simple things by yourself.
You can guest post on other bloggers to get free traffic to blog and in this way you can more trust.
Because in guest posting you are getting traffic from a very trustable blog so you can also make trust so pleople will to you again and again.
You can also create backlinks for a blog. Read this post from backlinko to read how to get backlinks
Conclusion
If you have a blog and you want to make it your future business then you have to promote your blog.
There are many ways to get traffic free of cost but you have to work for that. It is not so much easy to run but it may possibly in easy steps if you will try seriously. | https://medium.com/@indreshrajgautam/7-possible-reasons-no-one-is-reading-your-blog-22ca3e8570dd | [] | 2019-07-10 05:25:22.164000+00:00 | ['Blogging Tips', 'Blogging', 'Traffic Optimization', 'How To Get Traffic', 'Free Traffic'] |
Part 1: Building a Flask Web Application | Elliott Saslow
We will be building a flask server that we can use to post the work that we create in this class. Check out more about flask here
Lets build a website!!
Goals:
Website with home page and about page Flask server to handle calls AWS EC2 set up so that you can access the website remotely Smart Contract?
Part 1. Building the website:
To begin, we are going to be uing the command line to build out a folder system.
Create a new folder called flask_website: mkdir flask_website Create new folders within flask_website mkdir static mkdir templates Make a server file: touch server.py
Open flask_website folder in your favorite code editor
The Static folder will contain all of our javascript and css files.
The templates will contain all of our html pages | https://medium.com/future-vision/building-a-flask-web-application-a66acafea2d2 | ['Elliott Saslow'] | 2019-06-14 04:26:54.079000+00:00 | ['Flask', 'Web Development', 'Python', 'Developer', 'Servers'] |
Can’t or Can? | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/wordsmith-library/cant-or-can-ae513b77d86a | ['Terry Mansfield'] | 2021-02-18 09:55:29.300000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Words', 'Choices', 'Poetry', 'Humor'] |
One Night Success — Episode 4.. Change is the only constant. If as a… | Most of the startups failed in today’s world, Even the big ones. Why ? I was just trying to find an answer to this question. is it idea, Business plan, Scaling or profitability? To find the answer i have studied so many case studies of the brands which was so successful startup at some point of time and today it just don’t exists.
Today i am going to share with you the best story i have ever read. The story is about small online movie rental company vs big offline movie rental company.The story begins in 1997 where some people feel so bad to pay late fees to that rental company.
Year 1997 — A $40 Late Fee Triggered a Startup
Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, forgot to return a rented VHS tape of the movie “Apollo 13” and was charged a $40 late fee. Hastings and Marc Randolf, who also happened to be co-workers, decided to revolutionize the movie-rental business and founded Netflix. One of the key features of their model was to eliminate late fees.
Year 1998 — Netflix Opened for Business
Netflix officially opened its DVD rental business this year with 30 employees. Remember, this was the time when customers were still used to renting Blockbuster’s VHS tapes, and not many people owned DVD players because they were expensive. However, Netflix founders were willing to take the risk.
It worked. The website received a lot of traffic. Netflix also joined hands with Toshiba, HP, and Sony and offered free DVD rentals to new DVD player buyers.
Year 1999 — Netflix Found an Investor
Netflix received a huge help from Groupe Arnault, a France-based private company owned by Bernard Arnault. A $30 million investment from the company helped Netflix launch its subscription-based service.
Customers loved the idea of renting out as many DVDs as they wanted for $16 a month (given that they only had 4 DVDs in their possession at any given time). There was no late fee for not returning DVDs in a given period.
Year 2000 — Netflix Offered to Surrender to Blockbuster
Despite its growing popularity, Netflix was still earning a measly $5 million in revenue. Meanwhile Blockbuster, Netflix’s biggest competitor, was killing it and making a whopping $4.5 billion.
This is when Netflix knocked on Blockbuster’s door and asked for some help. As I have already mentioned above, Blockbuster kicked them out in a rather discourteous way.
Netflix was yearning for external assistance as it experienced $58 million in losses this year.
Year 2001 — DVD players Became Popular
Reed Hastings managed to keep Netflix afloat while he hoped for DVD players to go mainstream. And it finally happened — DVD players were now cheap and people started buying them.
But DVD players were worthless without the right DVDs. No worries — Netflix was there to fill this gap by offering convenient DVD rentals.
Year 2003 — Netflix’s First Profitable Year
They say good things come to those who wait. After years of hardships and brutal rejections, 2003 turned out to be the first profitable year for Netflix.
The company also crossed the 1 million subscriber mark this year.
Year 2004 — Netflix vs. Blockbuster Began
Blockbuster realized that the old VHS rental model might not be their best bet, and the company began its online DVD-by-mail service, which was similar to Netflix.
The big boy was in direct DVD-rental competition with the little guy, but that didn’t stop Netflix from continuing.
Year 2005 — Netflix’s Revenue Increased, Blockbuster’s Revenue Decreased
Netflix was slowly increasing its profits as well as its popularity. This was the time during which they shipped 1 million DVDs daily.
As compared to 1998, when Netflix first opened, 2005 was a completely new era. Customers were inclined to ordering DVDs online instead of visiting a physical outlet — something that Netflix was used to and Blockbuster was new to.
Blockbuster’s brick-and-mortar film-rental model was becoming obsolete. The company started losing its revenue as well as popularity, gradually.
Year 2007 — Netflix Kept Soaring High and Launched On-Demand Video Streaming Service
Netflix mailed its billionth DVD this year. The company now also started offering an on-demand video streaming service.
But, they hadn’t obtained the copyrights to bestselling movies or TV shows yet, so the videos available on Netflix’s on-demand service were, for the lack of a better word, generic.
During this time, Blockbuster’s profits were declining further and Netflix’s profits were rising.
Year 2008 — Netflix Added More Popular Videos to Its Service
Netflix realized that it needed to provide more popular videos for its on-demand video streaming service to succeed. So the company signed a deal with Starz to bring more than a couple thousand movies and shows onboard.
Blockbuster’s profits declined further.
Year 2010 — Netflix Dominated the Market, Blockbuster Went Bankrupt
By this time, Netflix had signed deals with the entertainment industry giants, such as Disney, Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, and Sony. Netflix became extremely popular in North America and grabbed a 20% share of peak-hour traffic.
Netflix’s profits increased further and Blockbuster, well, they finally accepted their defeat in this 6-year David versus Goliath type of battle and filed for bankruptcy.
Key Takeaways
Customer is the King, Technology is the Queen :
Customer always want something better, something great then you are providing right now. Technology gives always a chance to improve the things and make them better if you just so busy counting the notes someone will use the new technologies to provide better experience of the product or services which you are providing and sooner or latter if you don’t adopt the new ways your sky-fall is fixed.
Keep Flexibility :
Every time any startups grows big often they forgot to be flexible to adopt new technology and new approaches to serve the customers in best possible manner. That’s where a small startup optimize and take the big pie. Flexibility and open to adopt new changes is the key differentiator between success and failure, between rise and fall.
Focus on core :
Both companies were in the business of entertainment industry, both were in the renting DVD business but blockbuster focused on the revenue from late fees and Netflix focused on the improvement of their business which was to rent the DVD not to collect the late fees.
Hope you have learnt something good today. Take care, stay home, keep reading. | https://medium.com/@ankitshah424/one-night-success-episode-4-f97d03770a2d | ['Ankit Shah'] | 2020-04-23 03:13:44.663000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Ideas', 'Innovation', 'Startup', 'Business'] |
Critical race theory: the newest foundational science | In my second year of medical school, I took the grueling, high-stakes test known as the USMLE Step 1. This 7-hour multiple-choice test is designed to assess understanding of the “foundational” sciences, and I spent the first 18 months of medical school in preparation. One day, as I was reviewing genetic diseases in the 790-page reference book First Aid for the USMLE Step 1, I came across an entry for a genetic condition known as hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis. My first thought was, “Yet another disease they didn’t cover in class.” I read on and learned that transthyretin amyloidosis is caused by a mutation in the gene coding for the protein transthyretin. The protein misfolds and builds up inside cells, leading to a variety of symptoms: some patients develop heart failure, others suffer from debilitating nerve damage. Then I saw this sentence: “5% of African Americans are carriers of mutant allele.”
That short sentence raised 3 big red flags for me. Firstly, a cursory internet search revealed that First Aid was incorrect about the genetic mode of inheritance for transthyretin amyloidosis. Secondly, that same internet search also showed that transthyretin amyloidosis is drastically understudied given the number of people affected. The third and most concerning was the use of race — a social construct used to divide people into groups — to imply risk for a genetic disease. Each of these can be examined through the lens of critical race theory, which explores how powerful institutions create and perpetuate racist systems.
Transthyretin amyloidosis is autosomal dominant, meaning that a person needs only one copy of the mutation to develop the disease [1]. First Aid describes people with a transthyretin mutation as “carriers”, a term which is specifically used for autosomal recessive genetic conditions. Implying that the transthyretin amyloidosis mutation is recessive is not a trivial error: if a physician thinks their patient is a carrier, unaffected by the disease, they will not recommend any follow-up care. This misinformation could delay diagnosis and management for years.
Secondly, in my two years of medical school, I have never met a patient with transthyretin amyloidosis. If it were true that almost 1 in 20 African Americans have the mutation for the disease, odds are I would have seen it in clinic, or heard of it from a classmate or instructor. In fact, I do not know where First Aid even got their information on prevalence, because for the specific transthyretin mutation identified in African Americans, reported rates are actually between 3 and 3.4 percent — still a worryingly high number [1–3]. Compare this with Huntington’s disease, an infamous genetic illness with many similarities, including a fatal prognosis. There are currently 85 clinical trials for Huntington’s disease in the United States, but only 13 clinical trials for transthyretin amyloidosis. This is despite the fact that Huntington’s affects a far lower number of patients: 1–2 of every 100,000 people in the United States.
Why is transthyretin amyloidosis understudied? Racism, or systemic discrimination by powerful people and institutions against nonwhites, likely plays a significant role. While transthyretin amyloidosis is traditionally thought to be most prevalent in blacks, Huntington’s occurs at equal rates in blacks and whites [4]. Whites hold leadership positions in medical research at a disproportionately high level, and power players tend to promote causes with a concrete benefit to themselves, even if that benefit is not readily apparent (a phenomenon known as interest convergence). Some argue that transthyretin amyloidosis is a challenging diagnosis to make, with few hallmark features to distinguish it [5–7], which is possibly why I have never seen it in clinic. I would counter that diagnosis can become more accurate if we fund more research and increase awareness. Another argument is that patients often present at late stages of the disease, making it harder to study the course of illness and potential treatments. Here, critical race theory would remind us that black patients have multiple barriers to healthcare that delay their diagnosis and worsen their outcomes.
The third issue in First Aid’s statement on transthyretin amyloidosis is the term “African American”. The use of race in determining disease risk is pervasive in medicine, often without any supporting evidence. A prime example is glomerular filtration rate or GFR, which estimates kidney function and is calculated with a “correction” for African Americans, despite increasing evidence that this is unnecessary and even harmful to black patients [8,9]. Using race as a proxy for genetic disease risk is particularly problematic. Many recent studies have shown that race is not based in genetics and society’s definitions of race rarely reflect where a person’s ancestors came from [10,11]. In other words, the labels of “black” or “African American” may include people that actually have no African ancestry, while missing many people with African ancestry who have not been societally labeled as black or who self-report as two or more races.
Ancestry can be somewhat reliably determined through DNA [12], but as far as I know, medical research centers do not routinely collect DNA ancestry data. It is therefore almost impossible to estimate the true number of people with the transthyretin mutation. One is left asking, “5% of who? Does First Aid actually define who is an African American?” The answer is, they don’t. First Aid doesn’t even define race, or racism for that matter. To be fair, neither did the researchers who performed the original studies identifying the transthyretin mutation. By presenting information this way, without context or explanation, these groups perpetuate the myth that race is determined by genes.
This piece is not really about transthyretin amyloidosis, though I do think more clinicians should know about it. I sought to demonstrate the kinds of questions critical race theory leads us to ask in medical research. After learning that race is determined by society and not genes, I no longer accepted the argument that someone was at risk of a genetic disease because of their race. I wondered why transthyretin amyloidosis, which is (according to First Aid) 20 times more prevalent than Huntington’s, has one eighth the clinical trials and one tenth the research studies. The most troubling part of this exercise, however, was realizing that the premier reference material for medical students has absolutely no information about race. First Aid is not alone: none of my review materials attempted to define race. Why? Because they teach to the test, and the only material the USMLE Step 1 expects students to know in this area is “race/ethnicity health care disparities”, without any historical context of why those might exist.
Step 1 is meant to assess knowledge of the foundational scientific fields that underlie modern medicine. We have to learn biochemistry to understand the collagen in our skin, physics for the flow of blood through our arteries, and biomedical ethics for the complex circumstances in which we provide care. If race is considered an integral part of disease risk, then critical race theory should be an integral part of a physician’s education.
References
1. Jacobson DR, Pastore RD, Yaghoubian R, et al. Variant-Sequence Transthyretin (Isoleucine 122) in Late-Onset Cardiac Amyloidosis in Black Americans. N Engl J Med. 1997;336(7):466–473. doi:10.1056/NEJM199702133360703
2. Buxbaum J, Alexander A, Koziol J, Tagoe C, Fox E, Kitzman D. Significance of the amyloidogenic transthyretin Val 122 Ile allele in African Americans in the Arteriosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) and Cardiovascular Health (CHS) Studies. Am Heart J. 2010;159(5):864–870. doi:10.1016/j.ahj.2010.02.006
3. Jacobson DR, Alexander AA, Tagoe C, Buxbaum JN. Prevalence of the amyloidogenic transthyretin (TTR) V122I allele in 14 333 African–Americans. Amyloid. 2015;22(3):171–174. doi:10.3109/13506129.2015.1051219
4. Bruzelius E, Scarpa J, Zhao Y, Basu S, Faghmous JH, Baum A. Huntington’s disease in the United States: Variation by demographic and socioeconomic factors. Mov Disord. March 2019. doi:10.1002/mds.27653
5. Kapoor P, Thenappan T, Singh E, Kumar S, Greipp PR. Cardiac Amyloidosis: A Practical Approach to Diagnosis and Management. Am J Med. 2011;124(11):1006–1015. doi:10.1016/J.AMJMED.2011.04.013
6. Gertz MA, Benson MD, Dyck PJ, et al. Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Therapy of Transthyretin Amyloidosis. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2015;66(21):2451–2466. doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2015.09.075
7. Hawkins PN, Ando Y, Dispenzeri A, Gonzalez-Duarte A, Adams D, Suhr OB. Evolving landscape in the management of transthyretin amyloidosis. Ann Med. 2015;47(8):625–638. doi:10.3109/07853890.2015.1068949
8. Peralta CA, Lin F, Shlipak MG, et al. Race differences in prevalence of chronic kidney disease among young adults using creatinine-based glomerular filtration rate-estimating equations. Nephrol Dial Transplant. 2010;25(12):3934–3939. doi:10.1093/ndt/gfq299
9. Zanocco JA, Nishida SK, Passos MT, et al. Race adjustment for estimating glomerular filtration rate is not always necessary. Nephron Extra. 2012;2(1):293–302. doi:10.1159/000343899
10. Tishkoff SA, Kidd KK. Implications of biogeography of human populations for “race” and medicine. Nat Genet. 2004;36(11 Suppl):S21–7. doi:10.1038/ng1438
11. Fujimura JH, Rajagopalan R. Different differences: the use of “genetic ancestry” versus race in biomedical human genetic research. Soc Stud Sci. 2011;41(1):5–30. doi:10.1177/0306312710379170
12. Collins FS. What we do and don’t know about “race”, “ethnicity”, genetics and health at the dawn of the genome era. Nat Genet. 2004;36(S11):S13-S15. doi:10.1038/ng1436 | https://medium.com/race-law-a-critical-analysis/critical-race-theory-the-newest-foundational-science-3cae9fb02ded | ['Natasha Edman'] | 2019-06-05 14:54:41.885000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Medical School', 'Genetics', 'Step 1', 'Critical Race Theory'] |
this guard of magnificent Christmas trees | this guard of magnificent Christmas trees
Poem
Image by @maxlarochelle on Unsplash
this path through life
is like a long and magical doodle
bright and sharp with sweeping bends and sometimes,
the pen runs out
and you’ve got to adapt -
and start out again using chalk
or beetroot.
you are not alone on this path
you are carried by the rolling streams
the spiders
and the concern of this guard of magnificent Christmas trees -
who have seen it all
and survived the chop
year after year after year.
basic logic tells us,
that if we keep walking upwards,
and the wind is on our back —
we can make it to the top.
but it is the path —
and everything in it,
on it
and around it —
that is the real story.
it is good sometimes to walk back down the way you came,
with crossed eyes,
and notice the things you missed —
Rambo sorrel with stems like marines
fig rolls
wooden owls,
and that lad that waved at you —
with family and dog,
the one who was pulling from a bottle of Moretti on top of Beacon Fell at 11 O’clock in the morning,
because it was Christmas Day,
and that meant fuck it —
today, tomorrow, as long as I can open my eyes and breathe —
I am here,
and I can do anything. | https://medium.com/scrittura/this-guard-of-magnificent-christmas-trees-f97df62f5815 | ['Mohan Boone'] | 2020-12-27 02:57:13.727000+00:00 | ['Scrittura', 'Self Reliance', 'Poetry'] |
What is Blockchain? A Simple Definition | It is interesting to know that 90% of the bank’s infrastructure cost has been reduced through blockchain technology.
Other interesting statistics about blockchain technology are that by 2024 its occupancy will reach approximately 20 billion.
This increased funding for the data to approximately 76 million.
Financial and technology companies invested $ 1.4 billion in blockchain in 2016.
On average, investments in blockchain projects in 2017 were $ 1 million.
What is Blockchain Technology?
Blockchain technology is very simply defined as a decentralized, distributed ledger that records proof of digital property. Our guide will guide you through what it is, how it was used, and its history.
Blockchain is a system that records information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to modify, hack, or defraud the system.
Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems in the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and each time a new transaction is made on the blockchain, a record of each transaction is added to each participant ledger. A decentralized database maintained by multiple participants is called Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Blockchain is a type of DLT in which transactions are recorded with an invariant cryptographic signature called a hash.
This means that if a block in a chain is changed, it is immediately clear that it is damaged. If hackers want to corrupt the blockchain system, they have to change every block in the chain, in all distributed versions of the chain.
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are constantly and continuously increasing as blocks are added to the chain, which significantly contributes to the security of the ledger.
Why is there so much hype around blockchain technology?
There have been many attempts to create digital money in the past, but they have always failed.
The current problem is trust. If someone creates a new currency called X Dollar, how can we trust that they will not give them a million X Dollars, or steal your X Dollars for themselves?
Bitcoin is designed to solve this problem using a specific type of database called a blockchain. Most common databases, such as the SQL database, have people responsible for changing entries (e.g. giving them $ 1 million). Blockchain is different because no one is responsible; It is run by people who use it. What’s more, bitcoins cannot be counterfeited, hacked, or doubled — so people who have this money can trust that it has some value.
As The blockchains technology is using by many Industries you know many companies are using private blockchains today!! | https://medium.com/@priyankapatilbeast/what-is-blockchain-a-simple-definition-74a5b24510ac | ['Priyanka Patil'] | 2020-11-05 09:01:04.360000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchain Development', 'Mobile App Development'] |
Have You Had *Too Many* Sexual Partners? | What would you think of a fictional female character who had four lovers in one year?
Take a second and think of the label you’d give her. Got it?
In the first manuscript I ever wrote, the female protagonist went on dates with 24 different men over the course of one year and had sex with four of them — but only after having had at least three dates with said men.
The man whom the protagonist was most interested in having a relationship with was someone she’d known for years. And although she never did sleep with him in the story, their relationship was central to the character’s growth arc.
I had an early draft of the manuscript read by a developmental editor — a woman who was quite progressive in her social beliefs — and she was unequivocal in her advice:
She: Do you want to try to sell this as a mainstream book?
Me: Yes.
She: Then reduce the number of men your protagonist dates from 24 to fewer than five and have her sleep with just one man — the one she knows at the beginning of the story and ends up with at The End.
Me: But this is not a romance. Certainly, it doesn’t have to follow the expectations of romance readers.
She: Shaking her head at the naïve writer questioning her good advice. No matter what genre you’re writing you need your readers to like your main character. Nobody will cheer for a promiscuous woman.
Me: Wait, what? Serial monogamy is promiscuous? And what you’re suggesting is an entirely different story to the one I’ve written.
She: Well, if you want to save it, make your protagonist the man. Readers don’t mind a guy who plays the field, looking for Ms. Right. But they’ll put the book down if your female protagonist gets action from more than one man.
And this is where you insert language that would make any raping, pillaging male Viking from a historical romance novel blush.
That conversation took place in 2006. Certainly, things are different in 2019, the ever-hopeful, but apparently, this still naïve writer thought…
Sadly, not at all. And worse, not just in novels, but in flesh-and-blood real life.
What would you think of me if I told you I’ve had ten lovers in my lifetime?
In my research for my current work-in-progress, I read some academic research published in December 2018 titled, The Sexual Double Standard in the Real World: Evaluations of Sexually Active Friends and Acquaintances.
What this study found is that the sexual double standard that readers accept in fiction is alive and well in the real world, too. It’s a world where
men are socially rewarded for engaging in sexual activity and women are socially denigrated for sleeping with the men who are reaping those rewards.
What does “socially denigrated” mean in real terms?
Well, if you were part of this study of 4,455 American men and women between the ages of 18 and 35, it means that if you have a male friend and a female friend who have both had, let’s say, ten sexual partners, you’d give your female friend lower scores for attributes related to her values, likability, success, and intelligence than your male friend.
Even though I was the one who read the study and wrote that line I need to pause and take that fact in. The fact that I’ve slept with ten men (in theory) means that my own friends will think I’m less intelligent than our mutual friend, John, who’s also had ten lovers.
Quoi le phoque?
This double standard has dangerous social implications
Imagine you’re on a jury in a case where a man has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. It comes to light that the woman has had ten sexual partners in the last two years.
But wait! So has the man, so they’re equal in morality, trustworthiness, intelligence, making good decisions and so on, right?
You know the answer. This virtually invisible double standard allows us to judge the woman as less moral, with less a trust-worthy testimony, lower intelligence and more prone to have made a bad decision that landed her in this pickle.
Silly woman shouldn’t have led him on. What did she expect? Blah blah blah.
And this isn’t just opinions of people who self-identify as being conservative or part of the religious right — this is how friends label their own friends based on their sexual activity.
This is depressing and disappointing and generally makes me feel too sad to be as angry as I’d like to be.
In 1969, author E. B. White said,
“Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”
But, how can writers inform and shape a new way of thinking about sexual norms and mores when the majority of readers (being regular people) are, apparently, not willing to cheer on women who challenge these sexual double standards?
Thank the goddess for the exceptions to the rule
This little bubble inside Medium is one of those places where hundreds of writers push the boundaries, sharing first-person stories about sexual activities that are generally not acceptable to engage in, let alone write about.
Photo by VINICIUS COSTA from Pexels
And thank goodness for them — writers like traceybyfire, Emma Austin, Darcy Reeder, Shannon Ashley, Zita Fontaine, James Finn, Joe Duncan and so many others.
These are just some of my Go To writers when I need to know the entire world is not as narrow-minded as mainstream fiction readers and the 4,455 Americans who were part of that depressing study. | https://medium.com/love-and-stuff/have-you-had-too-many-sexual-partners-f9040c704871 | ['Danika Bloom'] | 2020-04-29 17:38:48.621000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Sexuality', 'Culture', 'Feminism', 'Books'] |
Ecommerce Development Company in India | Do You Need To Sell Your Products Online? Our Robust Feature Rich eCommerce Shopping. Cart Website Design Is Key In Your Online Success.
E-commerce is found everywhere in today’s web and remains one of the top ways to enhance consumer interaction. This great feature doesn’t come without problems. Despite the ease of online shopping, e-commerce cart abandonment rates hover around 95–96%.
Sometimes customers simply change their minds (we can’t really do anything about that), but more often than not customers are led around in circles by poorly-designed e-commerce websites that confuse and frustrate them.
Why us?
Most website development firms deliver out of the box business sites that look great as a brochure but lack interactivity and connection with the customer. These dry, uninviting sites lack originality and quickly turn off customers. Sites with cookie cutter templates take very little time to setup. As a result, these sites rarely lead to a successful business because customers leave as soon as they arrive. When they leave, they are left without an impact or lasting impression of your corporate identity. This gives them little reason to return.
Our website development professionals recognize the value of solid information architecture design and integrative branding that engages the customer from the first stop at your site. Engagement with your customer is crucial to tying into their emotional connection to your site and developing loyalty. Behind great design lies website development that contains solid coding and web application design with targeted features that place your business at a competitive advantage.
Oxcytech System’s web application design begins with an assessment of how technically complicated you want your site to be. You can have an eCommerce shop, message boards, subscription services, dynamic frames, and even eLearning solutions. The key to effective web development is consumer interaction, and Sopan Technologies matches you with the right web developers to get a site above and beyond your expectations. | https://medium.com/@oxcytechseo2020/ecommerce-development-company-in-india-136244bde68d | [] | 2020-08-20 06:23:26.043000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Web Development', 'Ecommerce Development', 'Website Development', 'Website Design'] |
3 Ways to Increase Your Concentration at Workplace | 3. Don’t Get Sucked Into Multitasking
There is a myth that multitasking helps us complete many tasks in a short time. But the fact is most of us suck at it.
Switching between tasks distributes our attentional resources of the brain, as a result of which we lose our efficiency to focus on a single task. So, whenever we are involved in a job where we need to use our problem-solving abilities, we must restrict multitasking.
As the Turkish proverb says:
“One arrow does not bring down two birds.”
Likewise, we can’t simultaneously complete different tasks using one brain because we lose our efficiency and productivity.
We can think of it as sunlight. What do you think is more powerful enough to burn a piece of paper?
Scattered sunrays or the ones that are concentrated by a magnifying lens?
We must try to avoid multitasking if we can. Distributing our energy on varied activities is much likely to cause chaos and stress. Besides, the pressure to complete all the tasks kills our creative quotient, and hence our performance compromises.
Having too much to handle than our mental capacity can also weaken our memory. Suppose you are cooking four recipes at one time. There are very high chances that you’ll forget an ingredient or two.
Have you ever felt that while cooking, you can’t figure out if you’ve added the seasonings or not? This scenario is the result of scattered focus and an alarm to stop multitasking.
A research study conducted at Stanford University suggests that multitasking is less productive and fruitful than doing one thing at a time. The researchers also provided evidence that individuals regularly affected by different types of electronic media cannot concentrate, recollect important information or juggle between tasks.
Though we believe that we can multitask with ease, we are subtly killing our attention to detail, creative thinking, and organizational skills.
So, how can we complete all tasks in a shorter time without multitasking?
How you can do it
First of all, get enough rest and sleep well at night, so you don’t rush things the next morning. A calm mind is a secret to 1000x productivity.
If your employer demands you to work like a maniac, learn the art of saying NO. Sometimes, an upfront no is better than doing a lousy job.
If you are overloaded with work, and yet your manager wants you to work on a new project, you can request that you already have plenty on your plate and appreciate it if your colleague could take over the next project.
It would be best to use scheduled planner apps like Todoist, Microsoft, google tasks, etc., to prioritize activities. Listing all the jobs priority wise helps us devote our attention accordingly.
Next, try to respond only high priority emails first. Not all emails need our attention.
Schedule a time for distractions like phone, television, etc. This habit will help you to concentrate on your job better.
Planning your day before it starts gives you room to accommodate any last-minute tasks, or else multitask will suck you in like a black hole. And you’ll come out of it stressed, exhausted, and tired. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/3-ways-to-increase-your-concentration-10a0ddc756c7 | ['Darshak Rana'] | 2020-12-11 02:26:05.612000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons'] |
How Kubernetes is used in industries and how does industries got benefited using Kubernetes…? | What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a tool for automation of Linux container operations. In short we can make cluster of containers and then Kubernetes can manage them together. Kubernetes automates the manual processes involved in deploying, managing and scaling containerized applications.
What is Kubernetes used for?
When there is a need to do same operations in multiple containers together we can used Kubernetes to group them together and it will manage to do all operations together in all containers.
How does Spotify used Kubernetes and got benefited?
Spotify is a audio-streaming platform which was launched in 2008 and now has 200 million monthly users all over the world. Earlier in 2014 they felt need for containerizing microservices and for solving that they used an open-source, homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. But in 2017 they felt need of Kubernetes so that they can focus on features on platform. They started with Kubernetes and found it beneficial as they gained velocity and reduced cost.
“The community has been extremely helpful in getting us to work through all the technology much faster and much easier. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing.” Says DAVE ZOLOTUSKY, SOFTWARE ENGINEER, INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS, SPOTIFY.
When they were migrating from Helios to Kubernetes, the service was running on both until they validated Kubernetes under a variety of load circumstances and stress circumstances. They used Kubernetes APIs and extensibility features of Kubernetes, and found it straightforward and easy.
The service which takes over 10 million requests per second is running on Kubernetes and benefits in auto scaling. Hours of work turned to seconds and minutes.
Spotify team built a tool called Slingshot on Kubernetes, it was one of they success stories of Spotify using Kubernetes.
So this is how Kubernetes is used and how industry uses it to get quicker.
Spotify got benefited using Kubernetes and many more ….
So, get started with Kubernetes✌
Hope you all found my blog informative.
THANK YOU FOR READING | https://medium.com/@ishikamandloi-963/how-kubernetes-is-used-in-industries-and-how-does-industries-get-benefited-using-kubernetes-930417e352fc | ['Ishika Mandloi'] | 2020-12-26 18:12:03.749000+00:00 | ['Kubernetes Cluster', 'Kubernetes', 'Slingshot', 'Spotify'] |
35 Journaling Prompts to Reflect During Lockdown | Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
If you are bored or need something to write about, here are 100 journaling prompts to reflect on. I guarantee these will help you discover more about yourself and grow deeper in mindfulness. Even 5 minutes is enough.
How have your daily routines changed since the pandemic? What is your biggest fear? What was your last dream about and what do you think it represents? What have you learned from being in lockdown? What has made you happy today? Is there a new skill you have learned from being in lockdown, and why have you chosen to learn this skill? Why are you keeping in touch with the people you are communicating with? What is the first thing you will do when the pandemic is over? How are you prioritizing self-care and your mental health right now? How has this experience changed your view on human nature? What is the one thing that brings you the most joy? How has this experience changed your opinion on politics? How has this experience changed your opinion on society and the way it functions? What does your dream life look like? What are ten things you are grateful for? What is one regret you have before lockdown started? What gives you a feeling of comfort? What is one action you can take to prioritize self-care or self-love more? Who is one person you have not contacted during lockdown, and why? What are you in control of at this moment? Describe your ideal morning routine. Who is inspiring you right now, and why? Who can you encourage today? What can you do to declutter yourself emotionally this week? Write a letter to your future self. Write a letter to your past self. What is the easiest part of quarantine? What is the worst part of quarantine? What is one true story you find particularly funny that happened during lockdown? Write a letter to your future spouse/child/pet. What was the last thing you did before quarantine? Who do you know that has been affected by COVID-19? Write about them. How will things change after quarantine? How can you make quarantine more enjoyable or productive? How have you improved yourself over the course of this lockdown period?
Written in March 2020, published on December 23, 2020. | https://medium.com/@emwuuu06/35-journaling-prompts-to-reflect-during-lockdown-31dd5455304d | ['Emily Wu'] | 2021-01-29 14:02:40.489000+00:00 | ['Quarantine Diaries', 'Quarantinelife', 'Journaling', 'Prompt', 'Writing Prompts'] |
What can we learn from successful people? | Photo by Nate Johnston on Unsplash
This is the question we all want to know; after all we all want to be rich and successful don’t we? The self help industry is a multi billion pound enterprise; with a well trodden path for successful people, to amplify their success (and wealth), by explaining to us mortals how they did it.
From an evolutionary point of view it was a winning strategy to watch other people to see what works and replicate it yourself. This may work when cause and effect is clear and obvious; for example, with a farmer learning from their neighbour’s more efficient practice.
This framework is still within us, but does it still serve us and does it explain our worship of all things rich and successful? To be precise, do we have a bias to view wealthy people as leaders who we can all learn from?
As you may tell I have a cynical view of self help and view the market as of little utility to ordinary people.
Does this matter though? Don’t we all want to suspend reality for a few days as we ‘awaken the giant within’ as the title of Tony Robbin’s best selling book proclaims? Maybe. But is this not the argument of the psychic who knows he cannot talk to the dead but argues that it brings comfort to those willing to pay him?
It is hard to argue against this seemingly altruistic stance, and do we want to live in a world without dreams and hope? But who creates the dreams and hope? Those that benefit financially from it. The people in power have always been able to decide whether the end justifies the means. Or as the communist would say ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’.
This is why truth matters. We need to go back to truth, because it is the only thing that unites people. And where there is no agreed upon truth, the striving towards truth should be promoted; with the scientific method as a framework.
The enemies of truth are vested interests of all stripes; this is why democracy matters. But even this is up for sale these days, and public opinion can be bought by the highest bidder.
To come back to the original question, I believe we should be sceptical of successful people: their success is not necessarily the result of virtue or talent, sometimes quite the opposite. And what we can learn from them is debatable, watch their actions not their words; if they write a book about how to be successful, if anything this is what you should do, not following the rules that they rarely follow themselves. And also, many of the tips will only apply to people who are successful, because it is clear success is a messy, individual business, and can’t be achieved by following a set of proscribed rules; each success story is unique, as is your life.
I’ll leave you with this to ponder: there is a reason people become successful and wealthy first and then talk about values and tricks later, and it’s not because they now understand what made them so successful. | https://medium.com/@harveyfw123/what-can-we-learn-from-successful-people-772028ce5b66 | [] | 2020-12-09 11:09:16.095000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Celebrity', 'Philosophy'] |
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