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Why Rituals in Your Professional Life Are so Powerful | Rituals are a powerful practice that can help you both conserve energy and achieve your personal and professional objectives. With practice, the actions you take to achieve your goals can become automatic. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz write in their book The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (public library), rituals are an effective tool that can help you get the results you want and mold your life the way you want.
“Positive energy rituals are powerful on three levels. They help us to insure that we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on. They reduce the need to rely on our limited conscious will and discipline to take action. Finally, rituals are a powerful means by which to translate our values and priorities into action — to embody what matters most to us in our everyday behaviors.”
[Photo: Peter Gabas/Unsplash]
We all have daily rituals, which we have intentionally or unintentionally developed along the way to ensure we do the things we need to do. These may include the steps we take to get ready in the morning (e.g., reading the newspaper and mentally preparing for the day) or winding down before going to sleep by reading a book and shutting off all technology. Once the motions we need to achieve our goals become subconscious, the rituals that we have developed help us reduce the energy needed to take that action otherwise.
“Great performers, whether they are athletes or fighter pilots, surgeons or Special Forces soldiers, FBI agents or CEOs, all rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and achieve their goals. “— Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Further rituals can then be developed to help you improve your energy levels while helping you in your every day. Perhaps you want to have more physical energy during the day, or maybe you need to better prepare for challenging and recurrent meetings at your office. Rituals can be a good tool to support you in achieving these goals. You might, for instance, develop a set of actions you use before every meeting, such as reading the agenda, researching the topics, and preparing any documents you will bring along.
The more exacting the challenge, the more rigorous our rituals need to be.
- Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Athletes develop rigid routines and rituals for optimum performance. In the same way, we can build precise support in the form of rituals for the challenges we face. These specific practices will support the results you wish to achieve.
Rituals also help us to create structure in our lives.
- Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Rituals create routines. You may, for instance, write for a few minutes early in the morning. Then, your next ritual might be working out at the gym. Next, you have breakfast with your family. All these rituals have a purpose: you write as a creative outlet or for your work, you work out for your physical health, and you share time with your family to deepen your relationships and enhance your emotional well-being. When these blocks of time become part of your regular schedule, they not only help you achieve your goals, but they also provide a set routine in your life.
To make lasting change, we must build serial rituals, focusing on one significant change at a time.
- Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
Once we discover the power of rituals, it might be tempting to move forward and make all the changes at once. Nevertheless, that impulse may be defeating. Too much too soon may cause failure before you even start. It is much better to select your priorities and then implement the rituals that will help you achieve your objectives one by one.
[Photo: Charles Postiaux/Unsplash]
Start by selecting the areas where you want to implement rituals in your life. Some areas you may wish to consider are:
Health: add a workout routine during your day, include a healthy meal, or take a walk during the day.
Friends and family: call a friend or family member once a week during a commute, add a fun activity with your kids during the weekend, set up a set time to have lunch or dinner with your parents/friends every two weeks.
Productivity: start the day with a long-term project that is important to your career, check all incoming messages at one time during a specific time of the day.
Renewal: take a break at 3 PM every day for 10 minutes to walk or write in your journal, start taking the drumming lessons you have meant to sign up for, meditate for a few minutes in the middle of the day.
Rituals are the way to make the incremental changes we want to see in our lives. The more positive and deliberate rituals we implement to become a part of our routine, the more energy will be freed up. Furthermore, these schedules can support us during the day by allowing spaces for respite. This support combined with the new energy in our schedules will help you achieve more of what you want.
Loehr, Jim and Schwartz, Tony. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. First Edition. Free Press, 2003. E-book. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-rituals-in-your-professional-life-are-so-powerful-ae4047271b7a | ['Pamela Ayuso'] | 2019-07-07 03:01:01.071000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Productivity', 'Professional Growth', 'Business', 'Professional Development'] |
Sex-Positive Parenting: How and Why you Should Talk to Your Kids About Sexuality | Note: This post contains affiliate links for products I recommend. You won’t pay more for products purchased through the links, but I may receive a small commission.
Planned Parenthood says that talking with teens about a wide range of sexual health topics makes it more likely that they will use condoms and birth control when they do become sexually active.
Setting up that sort of open dialogue starts long before the teen years.
Our seventeen-year-old daughter talks with us about her sex life regularly. We know who she’s interested in, who she thinks is attractive, and who she’s gotten physical with. Sometimes this much information makes parents cringe, and, truthfully, sometimes my husband and I have to take a deep breath and calm ourselves after one of these conversations. Even though these topics are sometimes difficult to hear, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Here are some ways we ensure a sex-positive environment and open communication.
Understand how you feel about sex.
Many teens adopt attitudes about sex that are similar to those of their parents. It’s important that if you have lived with unhealthy attitudes about sex and sexuality that you address those rather than passing them on to your children.
If your family believes that an abstinence approach is the only option, you need to be clear about how you pass that along. It’s important to remember that even though you pass your values along to your children, they may choose a different path. it’s important to arm them with the correct information about birth control and barrier methods so that they can make their own informed decisions.
Photo by Blake Barlow on Unsplash
Learn how their peer group thinks about sexuality, and what pressures exist.
As a teenager, my boyfriend told me that women could only get pregnant if they had an orgasm. He heard it from his friends, so it must have been true. My stupid 16-year-old self believed him. Imagine the world of trouble he and I could have gotten in with that line of thinking!
Your goal as a parent is to give your children the correct information they need to make rational, informed decisions about what sexual activity they are ready for.
Knowing the pressures your kids face regarding sex and sexuality among their peers can help you eliminate potential problems before they get too large, and provide your child with resources to avoid peer pressure and incorrect information. If they don’t get the information from you, they will find it somewhere.
When my daughter asked me during her freshman year of high school what a blow job was, the first thing I did was ask what her friends were saying that made her ask that question. Once I understood the misinformation she had, I could correct it and arm her with knowledge.
Our sexuality conversations are deliberately nongendered. We talk about love and sex as something that happens between two people. Our children know that love is love. It is our goal to make our family a safe place for them, even if they aren’t heterosexual.
Find resources to help you out with the more difficult topics.
Amaze has animated videos on a variety of sexual health topics. They cover everything from puberty to issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. These videos can be a way to inform your child about things they are curious about, or as a conversation starter.
There are many books about sexual health. When our then 11-year-old daughter had questions about her body, and the changes she was experiencing we left a copy of It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up Sex, and Sexual Health in our living room. Within a day she had picked it up and snuck it off to her bedroom.
My current favorite book for kids and parents is Drawn to Sex: The Basics. This illustrated guide will give you and your kids a clear understanding of sex and sexuality and will eliminate ambiguity. It is set up as a graphic novel and is engaging for kids who are curious about sexual health.
I love the book Consent: The New Rules of Sex Education: Every Teen’s Guide to Healthy Sexual Relationships for helping both young boys and girls navigate the difficult conversations they will no doubt be having with their sexual partners.
The Sex Education Answer Book is a great resource for parents looking for ways to answer the questions children ask about sex and sexuality. It is organized by age so that you can answer questions about sex whether they come from your three-year-old or your 13-year-old.
Keep the conversations short, low pressure, and ongoing.
I remember talking to my parents about sex as being uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing. Abstinence was expected, and they just pretended that masturbation didn’t exist.
We talk about sexuality as a matter of course in our home. Sometimes it’s just a casual comment thrown out while doing the dinner dishes, and other times it’s a more serious conversation sparked by a question from one of the kids. Sometimes, it’s a bad dad-joke that has our kids rolling their eyes.
My favorite time to talk with the kids about difficult topics is in the car. Removing the need for eye contact and face to face interaction can help kids get over the discomfort of talking with their parents about their sexual development.
My husband and our 20-year-old often listen to the Savage Lovecast and pause to discuss questions that come up during the program. This is entertaining for them both but also provides an opportunity to discuss the intricacies of adult relationships.
Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable with your kids.
Did you struggle with sexuality when you were young? Did you have questions that you didn’t know how to ask? Did you carry around misinformation? Were you afraid of sex and the way your body was changing?
Share those experiences with your children. I only recently told my teenage daughter, who considers herself bisexual and often struggles with that the story of struggling with my bisexuality, and how I often chose to ignore it to be as straight as possible. Life is easier when you are straight.
Our kids know that I was once dumped via a post-it note on my locker and that my husband accidentally lit his first girlfriend’s hair on fire. These stories certainly get some laughs around the dinner table, but that isn’t the point of sharing them. Letting our kids know that we experienced the same awkwardness they do helps to reassure them that it is all a normal part of the process.
We are a resource when our daughter wonders whether it is normal to masturbate every day, and how to get birth control. Our open, sex-positive conversations have helped her to develop a healthy relationship with her own sexuality.
Discuss Consent, often and explicitly.
Consent is a hot-button topic right now, and for good reason. I’ve shared my experiences with sexual assault with our children when they were old enough to understand it.
I didn’t share my experience to scare them, but so that they know the dangers are real. Our daughter knows that she needs to limit alcohol consumption when she’s at a college party, and our son knows that explicit and enthusiastic consent is necessary before any physical contact occurs.
T he best part of all this sex-positive talk? When our daughter ran into a situation on a date that made her uncomfortable, she left. Her boundaries are healthy and strong, and she knows we will back her up.
Talk to your kids, be vulnerable, open, and keep it light. We need to make sure our kids are getting correct information from trusted sources. | https://mariafchapman14.medium.com/sex-positive-parenting-how-and-why-you-should-talk-to-your-kids-about-sexuality-a289c215033e | ['Maria Chapman'] | 2019-11-22 22:16:06.418000+00:00 | ['Family', 'Parenting', 'Sex', 'Sexuality', 'Sex Education'] |
Call or email with a cold list — only on Opposite Day. | Tap into warm connections instead.
Stephen Heitz, Chief Innovation Officer; Tim Trull, Managing Director Account Planning and Strategy
This article is a brief abstract of our exclusive and authoritative study that takes the guesswork out of technology advertising and marketing. Rather than speculating about what will drive B2B technology consumers to action, we’ve asked them.
No one likes to be interrupted. Whether you’re at home whipping up dinner or at work digging into an important report, a visit, phone call, email, text or any other type of unexpected communication from someone you don’t know will get little — if any — of your attention. Perhaps that’s why only 4% of survey respondents overall said they prefer telemarketing or cold calls when considering technology products or services.
Still, telemarketing does have its place. It costs about 80% less, for example, to make phone calls instead of visiting potential clients in person. It also provides a way to reach customers who would not likely make the trip to your place of business. And some of those who do answer the call will be happy to learn why they should adopt your solution for survival in a world of disruptive technology. If just such advice and education are what you’re selling, you could score some major wins. But expecting a prospect to make a final purchasing decision after a single phone call might be, well, a little over optimistic.
The term “cold calling” can also be applied to B2B email marketing or sending message blasts on social media if the list does not key in on prequalified recipients with a reasonable expectation of receiving your message. Compared to a ROI of 4,400% for B2C email marketing efforts using an opt-in list, results for B2B will likely be disappointing — especially with a scraped or cold list.
Business size does matter, but only slightly. Of those surveyed who generate less than $1 million in annual revenue, only 2% responded positively to telemarketing and cold calls, while businesses generating $10 million or more in annual revenue revealed a 6% preference for this marketing tactic.
One possible solution to avoid making calls or sending emails that leave recipients cold is to use intelligent methods to identify warm leads. In doing so, it’s more crucial than ever to work with a business partner capable of gathering and analyzing relevant data. Gartner Blog Network® member Todd Berkowitz predicted the rise in access to intelligent data will lead to more personalized emails to more targeted lists in 2017 and beyond based on technographics, intent and predictive analytics.
This can already be seen with the explosion of big data in 2016 and at least one marketing technology newcomer with a proprietary algorithm to access, analyze and repackage that data at a highly personalized level. Node, a San Francisco-based startup also known as Node.io, uses AI to identify opportunities by diving deep into people-based data for warm connections.
These kinds of services, provided at varying degrees by a variety of providers, make it possible for anyone to take advantage of AI and big data analytics to offer personalization. By 2035, AI could double annual economic growth rates.
However you do it, tap into your connections. If you don’t know how to identify or create them, partner with an organization that does. It’s far better than risking interrupting someone who’s potentially heating up a frozen meal for dinner.
Help is a few keystrokes away. | https://medium.com/lavidge/call-or-email-with-a-cold-list-only-on-opposite-day-37b81ecfa3b9 | ['Points Of View'] | 2017-11-09 17:12:39.353000+00:00 | ['B2b Marketing', 'Technology', 'AI', 'Marketing', 'Cold Calling'] |
How to Get Started in Bitcoin | It’s the start of 2021, and bitcoin has smashed its 2018 all-time high. This will bring a lot of attention and newcomers to Bitcoin. Acquiring bitcoin ten years ago was extremely challenging. Safely holding bitcoin for the past ten years would be even more challenging. However, the Bitcoin space has developed a lot since its inception. A user’s ability to safely acquire and store bitcoin with the highest level of security imaginable is easier now than it ever has been. I have limited technical computer skills; however, I can (do my best to) aggregate and share all the tools that helped me learn. Despite the American meme, most of my content will be Canadian centred. In the future, I will try and update this content for global options. None of my articles are financial advice. I merely share data and my opinions.
The first thing you need to do to get started is to start continuously learning about bitcoin. Do not skip this step. There is a lot to understanding bitcoin, and a holistic understanding is very valuable and obtainable with patience. I hope my articles and suggested content prove useful.
To begin purchasing bitcoin, you actually have a few options in what you purchase. As I mentioned, the Bitcoin space has developed a lot, even in the last couple of years. Below I will discuss the different options you have, however, I will conclude that holding actual bitcoin is the best way to go.
You can buy bitcoin related stocks:
Microstrategy: a software company that holds lots of bitcoin relative to the size of their company — making it a good asset to mirror bitcoin’s price movement.
Square: a payments company that is supposed to ‘help the little guy’ in the world of payments — a useful bitcoin on-ramp, and the company directly holds some bitcoin on their balance sheet
There are other stocks you can get, but you don’t own actual bitcoin. You own stock held for you at a bank or some investment firm. You can track many public and private companies that have publicly disclosed owning bitcoin here
There are also bitcoin related products. These very closely mimic bitcoin price movements and are comparable to owning parts of a bitcoin held at a bank or some investment firm. Here are some of the ones I find to be the most trustworthy (reputation, custody and asset capitalization) in the space.
The Bitcoin Fund — QBTC: The fund acquires bitcoin and safely stores it for a fee, available on the Toronto stock exchange (TSX)
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust — GBTC: The fund acquires bitcoin and safely stores it for a fee
The advantage to these products is that they can typically be held in a tax advantage account, like an RSP or a 401k. A tax advantage account may be useful depending on your situation. However, I believe there is a tremendous value to owning your bitcoin by yourself. To better understand why I highly encourage continuous bitcoin education (links below).
Buy Actual bitcoin. I believe that bitcoin is the best long investment in history and is the best conceivable money — only bitcoin. I think it is best to own bitcoin compared to a bitcoin related stock because bitcoin is the only asset with no liabilities attached. Dollars are liabilities of one’s central bank. Savings accounts are IOUs to a bank; and if everyone tried to withdraw at once, the banking system would crumble. Bitcoin is superior because you can hold the asset yourself without any counterparty risk. No one holds it or has access to it other than you. There are some steps to do this, however, the process is continuously increasing in ease. First you go to a bitcoin exchange, or an on-ramp (cash leaving the traditional financial system and entering the Bitcoin network). Bitcoin refers to the network, and bitcoin refers to the network’s native asset BTC. When it comes to bitcoin exchanges and on-ramps, there are many options. Pick a domestic exchange that is safe, regulated and reputable. The Canadian exchange that I use is VirgoCX (sign up using the link to get $10 CAD). Another good Canadian option I used to use is Coinsquare, however, I find them to be more expensive. I cannot use American options, however, the Cash App is what I would use. Coinbase is arguably the most famous exchange, Gemini is another reputable exchange run by the Winklevoss twins. Kraken and Bitstamp are good for people outside Canada and the USA. Bitstamp is one of the oldest bitcoin exchanges.
Buy a Bitcoin Hardware Wallet. There are a lot of options here as well. Most people seem to agree that a ColdCard is the most secure. People use these to store thousands of bitcoin. I recently pre-ordered Blockstream’s new Jade wallet. I am optimistic about this wallet, but it has not yet stood the test of time like the ColdCard.
Upgrade Your Bitcoin Security. Take all of the security precautions, don’t regret losing a life changing amount of bitcoin due to user error or trusting third parties. Also, a small amount of bitcoin may not seem like a life changing amount of bitcoin at the time, but anyone with a 5+ year old bitcoin transaction (selling bitcoin for something else) ends up regretting it. The best security guide, which is the guide I follow is the bitcoin security guide. Matt O’dell also has some really good video walkthroughs for bitcoin security as well.
Continuously Learn About Bitcoin. I try to write a lot about bitcoin. I also discuss and sometimes share bitcoin chart analysis on Twitter. Definitely read the Bitcoin Standard, it’s the best and fastest way to understand the why of Bitcoin. Youtube and tik tok are not the best resources; the quality of financial education content is terrible — avoid it IMO. There are some most follow Twitter accounts that tweet out great bitcoin educational content. I recommend Dan Held and Anthony Pompliano to start. I highly recommend reading and listening to podcasts as well. Generally, anything Michael Saylor has recorded since the summer of 2020 to be extremely educational. Saylor knew very little about Bitcoin in march of 2020 and has since been buying tens of thousands of bitcoin personally and for his company Microstrategy (mentioned above). Saylor understands that bitcoin has both large upside financial and will change the structure of finance. He understands how early it still is. A good intro podcast is this episode with Saylor on the What Bitcoin Did podcast. Saylor also has a higher level (recommended) podcast with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots justifying his massive bitcoin purchases. Saylor made massive purchases because he realized bitcoin’s value proposition before the rest of wall street. To help understand bitcoin’s long-term value proposition, listen to this episode of Anthony Pompliano’s Podcast, where guest Murad Mahmudov helps explain that bitcoin is extremely undervalued.
Don’t Sell Your bitcoin. Bitcoin is scarce. There is only 21,000,000 bitcoin. You CAN own a fraction of a bitcoin. Each bitcoin is divisible into 100,000,000 subunits called satoshis, and some people refer to 100 satoshis as a bit, where 1,000,000 bits make up one bitcoin. I like the bit terminology. Bitcoin is decentralized, and no single party controls it. This means there is no one in charge of bitcoin to dictate its growing terminology. Decentralization also makes Bitcoin a practically unkillable network, one that is protected through both a highly energy intensive and globally distributed computer system. The amount of energy, physical resources and coordination needed to overrun bitcoin is impractical, if not impossible, to achieve. Thus, bitcoin is unkillable. Through a similar logic, it is also impossible to change bitcoin’s predetermined supply. Bitcoin’s strict supply rules directly affect its value, as Saylor and Mahmudov and many others explain. Given this fact, one often regrets selling bitcoin. This person sold 1.5 bitcoin for some strawberries in 2011. As Sayor said, you don’t sell the most valuable asset in the universe, you hold it forever. It is similar to retaining Manhattan or London real estate for generations, taking loans against the property, and owning the property for generations to come. Don’t be the person who bought at $10, sold at $30 and waited forever for a dip to get back in. Bitcoin is a game of accumulation. If you are hearing on the news that many big wealth managers are accumulating bitcoin, it is because they are starting to understand bitcoin’s scarcity and its value proposition. Keep learning and keep accumulating.
Join Coinmonks Telegram group and learn about crypto trading and investing
Also, Read | https://medium.com/coinmonks/how-to-get-started-in-bitcoin-a6aea1278e3b | ['Konrad Fitzpatrick'] | 2021-02-06 23:26:20.978000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Bitcoin', 'Finance', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Self Improvement'] |
a new york minute. | sheep meadow in all of its glory
Things happen really fast here. The walking, the talking, the glances, the smiles; everyone’s running on their own clock in New York, and that clock is usually 7 minutes ahead of schedule because if you’re early you’re on time, if you’re on time you’re late, and if you’re late don’t bother coming (unless you want to pay for my drinks in reparation). It takes me a quick five to get to my closest subway stop, in which I spare no time being slowed down for anything except the occasional dog spotting.
One fine Tuesday afternoon, a couple approached me extremely timidly, with wide eyes and dad sneakers and a map. They had a map! I hadn’t seen one of those in ages. Even with my headphones in and sunglasses on, I probably still looked the most approachable out of the crowd of old, grouchy Upper East Siders. They spoke to me in broken French, saying, “I am lost” over and over again since it was, well, true. They were supposed to be at Bryant Park and they were instead outside of Bloomingdales. “You’re going to get back on that subway,” I gestured as I removed my headphones and sunglasses so they could see I was a real person, because humanity seemed important in this moment, “and take the F train downtown to 42nd and Bryant Park.” Before I could start blasting The National again they motioned for me to stay. “Wait!” the woman said, then pointing back at the map. “Where can I go to get a gift for my daughter?” I wouldn’t say tourists are any native New Yorkers’ favorite, but something struck a chord in my chest. I spent the next generous five minutes, missing my train, sharing some of the best shops in midtown (read: not many, but some) for them to get their daughter a gift. She was studying to be a doctor at university in France. Eventually we parted ways, the French couple shouting “merci beaucoup” as they descended the subway station, and me shouting back, “de rien” as I decided to walk a bit and window shop before finding another train. In French, “de rien” translates directly to “of nothing,” and maybe that’s what that interaction was.
New York is a lot of things, and this year I finally got to call it home. For what seemed like years of taking the train or bus or Ubers in and out of the city from New Jersey, and even moving coasts for a bit, I could declare citizenship here, with a nice driver’s license to boot without ever having to drive again. I moved into my Upper East Side apartment a full year ago and have been thinking on the grandeur and grime and greatness that is this place that I now feel so at home in.
But of course, there’s that quote: wherever you go, there you are. And I think a lot of places can feel like home. I lived in California for seven years and would be lying to the Internet if I said I never felt home there. But there’s a different, innate sense of peace that someone feels when they are where they’re supposed to be. It’s deep-down, grounding, and natural. A lot of times I sit on my bedroom floor in New York and curl into the tightest ball that I can and stare at my ceiling fan refracting the light shining from my lava lamp my best friend gave me because he knows me way too well. I can sit here for minutes, sometimes almost an hour, feeling small and insignificant in this extremely large island I now call my home. I feel every bit of my body and my soul in a room that I can call my own, something I’ve dreamed about having for a really long time. Sometimes there are happy tears and sad tears and laughter, thinking about what trouble my roommate and I got into the night before, but every time, I sit in silence in my room with the feeling that I am finally so at home in my own body. Each breath feels easier, lighter, than anywhere I’ve ever lived before. Maybe it’s not the physical cities that make us feel at home, but instead, the way they ground our souls to our bodies when we find joy in where we live that makes us feel so connected.
astor place subway at 2:00AM
And there’s millions of people who feel at home here. Or maybe they don’t, and they’re itching in their own skin like it were a wool sweater in the summer to get out of this city and onto the next one. New York is and always has been Hell, but whether you see it as a beautiful one or a terrible one is up to the viewer.
I ride the 6 train a lot to get to SoHo, where I of course shop sample sales and have silly little walks on the cobblestone streets and drink chai lattes from my favorite shop that still sits across from one of my favorite internships with the friendliest staff. And there’s no good way to dress for a New York Summer. Sneakers are of course advised but your feet will feel like they’re catching on fire. Any knit fabric you’ll sweat entirely through. Dresses are nice but then your legs are exposed on public transit. It’s all crap. But you go out anyway because that’s what New Yorkers do; they press on. On this recent subway ride, my hair was plastered to my face as I sat in the train car and I noticed an uptown 5 train running parallel to mine. We were passed by the train in a slow succession of what felt like movie clips. From car to car I saw a different life being lived. A man whose wife had fallen asleep on his shoulder. A family of five toddlers and their parents being wrangled from playing on the poles. Two friends wearing their fraternity shirts and carrying a cooler of what I’d assume to be White Claws heading out for a boys day in Sheep Meadow. A young couple making out in the subway, blissfully nonplussed by a global pandemic and spectators alike. An old woman, alone, reading Cosmopolitan magazine while sipping an iced coffee. A young man in a tank top with beard stubble and an ear piercing who locked eyes with mine, not breaking, probably wondering who I am and what sort of life I lead and who I say goodnight and goodmorning to and what my laugh sounds like and what made me cry most recently. I smiled as the 5 train pulled away and onward.
I’ve been thinking about the in-between recently. How that’s where the magic is in the everyday. Those big, grand moments are never as shiny as you think they’re going to be. The moments that are special are much harder to find.
You can really be anyone you want here, which is incredible for dreamers and a recipe for disaster for people with multiple personality disorder (for the record, I’m the former). Very early into my time here I decided to go on a date, which was big for me, since it’s big for anyone post-pandemic, really. The white negronis at the Murray Hill bar we ended up at were to die for. It’s the only reason I went to Murray Hill, or liked to tell myself. I think the cocktails made time pass exponentially quicker than normal, because three drinks in and all of the sudden we were closing down the bar. Me, closing down a New York City bar on a blind date. Charlotte York who? He smiled and laughed at my jokes and also at things that weren’t jokes but he found cute. He had no idea who I was and I had no idea who he was, and we could make each other out to be whoever we wanted or needed to be. There was magic that night, in how we smiled and winked and really made the bartender think we had been dating for years despite never seeing each other prior to two hours ago. We parted ways, I going uptown and he downtown, and I grinned ear to ear with the promise of a love story. Not with him; we haven’t spoken since that date last autumn. And I think that’s fine with the both of us. The entire night we talked about what we loved about the city, what’s on our post-pandemic New York bucket list, new places to try, parks to run in, and more. This was a first date with New York, and I loved every minute.
fanelli cafe in soho on a mild day
I once was told that, “New Yorkers are not nice, but they’re kind, and Los Angelenos are not kind, but they’re nice.” Having spent time in both cities, there is some truth to that. I’ve seen plenty of people here act like they don’t care about you or anything around them. But then, you’re walking down 2nd Avenue on a hot summer day and you see a young woman drop two full bags of groceries on the street corner. Four people surrounded her, and in collective silence, started to pick up what had dropped from her eco-conscious but not-big-enough-for-her-Gristedes-haul bags. The job was done in record time, and she very politely whispered her thank yous as everyone stood up, nodded, and slammed the crosswalk button impatiently as they wanted to move on with their day. New Yorkers hate being thanked for a good deed more than they hate waiting.
Central Park has been my playground this past year. From day drinks to night walks to free comedy in Sheep Meadow to birdwatching to ice skating, there’s just as much joy there as an adult as I found when I was a child dragging my parents around the zoo to see the sea lions for the 18th time. But most of all, I spend my mornings there jogging and feeling connected to a route that has also formed a sense of home for me. I usually run down my block to the park as opposed to walking there, because I’ve never been the type to not do that, and for a year now I’ve been seeing the same security guard outside of a Temple between Fifth and Madison. At first in the fall, we didn’t acknowledge each other, masked up and protected from interaction from the outside world. By the holidays, we were head-nodding, sometimes even saluting, as I would jog by. Come springtime, he would do the little running man motion when I’d dash by, and I would laugh behind my mask, because it really did make my morning. As summer came and masks were off, I finally got to see his face and he mine, and he started to add clapping and cheering on top of the running man, and I’d be cheesing ear to ear each time from his support.
Finally, after a full year, I stopped at his post. He seemed a little shocked, but happy. I introduced myself and asked for his name. His name is William, and he said that seeing me run everyday brings him joy. I was stunned, not knowing I could have that effect on a complete stranger, and I told him his support gives me the same. He then handed me a travel container of pepper spray and told me to always run straight to the Temple if I’m ever in trouble and he’ll help me out. Tears were welling in my eyes at 7:30AM as I thanked William for his kind words, and said I’d see him soon. I continued home, overwhelmed with gratitude for a stranger’s kindness and care in a city that, on the surface, seemed to be anything but that.
And that’s the thing about this place; there’s more good people in it than you’d think. The news mares the city with danger (and yes Mom and Dad, I do lock my doors and carry an alarm at night and don’t let men I go on dates with see where I live) and the media tells us that only mean, bad, rich people live here. But there are nights where you do sometimes meet a Bad Person and have to turn it into content somehow. I was out on the Lower East Side with my best friend who had just moved to the city. We had a few new friends accompany us for drinks, and one of them turned out to be the grandson of a certain famous dictator and, as you would suspect, acted as such. I’m not sure who started the fighting, but for the greater part of the night I was sharp-tongued sparring, Jersey accent in full force, with a man ten years my senior. He told me and my friend to “look him up on Guest of a Guest” and that “this is the last time he ever hangs out with 26-year-olds” and that “he will blacklist me from every fashion job in New York City.” Imagine this feud outside of Grey Lady on Delancey surrounded by Millennials who are too many drinks in to actually care, but drunk enough to film this because it would be funny on TikTok or their Instagram Story. He eventually then asked for a ride home and my friend and I whisked ourselves away in an Uber never to see the dick-tator again, unless it’s on a Saturday morning grabbing a coffee from Matto uptown, and then, we’d run the other way and pay the extra $2 for Starbucks.
a lower east side day drink
But there are good people too. Sometimes they’re your friends. Well, I’d hope most of the time they are. But it’s you and your friends and you’re riding in the back of a taxi cab at 1:00AM and you love taxi cabs and you stick your hands out the window like you’re 6 and 16 and 26 all at the same time and wind is messing up your tangled, brown hair and the air feels crisp because it’s springtime and the world is waking up after a long year of solitude. You laugh in the face of the night and all of its misfortune, how the guy you wanted to talk to was with another girl and how another won’t text you back and that’s all fine because you have your friends and you have yourself. My friend is saying he met someone he really likes and hopes it works out and I say I hope it does too, because he deserves it. He turned to me and his look was infused earnest compassion and tequila and said, “You deserve a good person too, Joan. There’s some good people in this city.” I looked back at him and stopped humming along to the Fleetwood Mac song I queued on the aux I made the driver give me. “And you’re a good person too,” he said.
Maybe we just need to be reminded of that sometimes. We’re good people who are just trying to exist in this larger-than-life-city that makes us feel like home or far from home or somewhere in-between; most of us sit somewhere in-between. You can’t come to a city, especially one like New York, and just expect it to make you feel at home. But you can live here, spend time here, struggle here, fall in love here, fall out of love here, and sit on the floor of your bedroom here when you’re feeling small, and eventually start to feel more at home with yourself than you’ve ever been in your entire life. We spend years trying to fight who we are and be new people and work for new bodies and change our gut instincts on things to please the masses but at the end of the day, we’re all we have when we’re staring at ceiling fans and lava lamps and sticking our hands out the window of a taxi cab on a ride home past the vastness that is this city and this life. | https://medium.com/@joandaly/a-new-york-minute-8f62b2ee6f21 | ['Joan Daly'] | 2021-07-19 13:15:53.180000+00:00 | ['Friendship', 'Home', 'New York', 'Life', 'NYC'] |
#EndGasFlaringNG: The Unspoken Dangers of Gas Flaring In Nigeria — by @mista_blak | It’s estimated that about 140 billion cubic meters of gas are flared annually across the oil-producing countries of the world (McGreevey & Whitaker, 2020). Gas flaring has been illegal in Nigeria since 1984, yet the country still ranks among the top 10 gas-flare countries with about 7.4 billion cubic meters of gas flared in 2018; and about 425.9 billion standard cubic feet of gas flared in 2019 (Eboh, 2019). Gas flaring is associated with lots of dangers. This essay aims to explain these dangers in details, and also to provide an insight into the efforts made by stakeholders to end gas flaring, identify the missing links between current strategies, and recommend viable solutions to gas flaring in Nigeria.
WHAT IS GAS FLARING?
Gas flaring is the controlled combustion of associated gas generated during various processes including oil and gas recovery, petrochemical process, and landfill gas extraction (Generon.com, 2019).
GAS FLARING IN NIGERIA: A TALE OF NIGHTMARES
The health risks associated with gas flaring are glaring. In the oil-rich Niger Delta, 2 million people live within 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) of gas flare (Schick et al, 2018), which makes them more vulnerable to several health issues including cancer and lung damage, as well as deformities in children, asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, neurological and reproductive problems (CSL Stockbrokers, 2020). Relatively, agricultural productivity (in the oil-producing areas) has been severely hampered by gas flaring. The combustion process raises the soil temperature, with a decline in crop yield and acid rains as its two major ripple effects. The smokes which emanate from the flares also lead to black rainfall and water bodies which affect aquatic and Wildlife.
The economic costs of gas flaring are mind-boggling. Data obtained from the Nigerian Gas Flare Tracker showed that 25.9 billion Standard Cubic Feet of gas, valued at N460.5billion, were flared between January and November 2019. As shown in the figure below, this amount would comfortably finance the capital expenditure of Ministries of Education, Power, Defence and Transport which stood at a combined total of N450 billion.
Also, the volume of gas flared is capable of generating 42,600 megawatts of electricity which would have helped solve the electricity problem of the country.
Climate change is another danger of gas flaring. In 2019, as much as 22.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted into the environment as a result of gas flaring in Nigeria. In fact, the environmental costs of gas flaring in Nigeria amount to N28.8 billion annually (PWC, 2019). There is also the issue of air and noise pollution and a rise in temperature in the oil-producing areas. Issues related to gas flaring also leads to protests and attacks which worsen the fragile security situation of the oil-producing areas.
Meanwhile, several efforts have been aimed at checking gas flaring in Nigeria. Some of these efforts include the Associated Gas Re-injection Act (1979), the Nigeria Gas Master plan (2008), and the Nigeria Gas Flare Commercialization Programme (2017). Nigeria is also part of the Global Gas Flare Reduction Partnership of the World Bank. However, all these efforts couldn’t help the Federal Government of Nigeria achieve its dream of zero gas flaring by 2020. This is a result of several combined factors: the “tax-deductible” charges imposed on gas flaring are too cheap for oil companies; insufficient infrastructure to process and transport gas to end-users; institutional challenges in the gas market which make the cost of processing and transporting gas more expensive than the income from its sale; significant amount of gas in oil-fields which makes greater re-injection impossible; and the country’s heavy dependence on crude oil for revenue.
RECOMMENDATIONS
For the goal of zero routine gas flaring to be truly achieved, the following recommendations should be considered:
The 2018 regulations, which increased the charges on gas flaring, should be adequately enforced.
The Federal Government should pay attention to the development of critical infrastructure such as gas processing technologies and transportation pipelines to enhance the movement of gas from oil fields to end-users.
The Federal Government should address the institutional challenges affecting the gas market in Nigeria. These challenges include underdeveloped local markets and low market prices for gas. Addressing these challenges will incentivize greater investments in gas processing and utilization.
Investments in petrochemical industries should be encouraged. These industries utilize gas to produce polymers, ammonia, hydrogen fuel for cars, etc. We can borrow a leaf from Russia where the petrochemical industry is on the rise, with companies like Sibur leading the way. According to the company’s data, in 2018, through recycling hydrocarbon byproducts of oil and gas extraction (about 22.3 billion cubic meters of gas), it helped reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 71 million metric tons (Frolovskiy, 2019).
There should be increased investment in power generation using gas. This would help reduce the quantity of gas flared and also increase the nation’s electricity capacity.
Oil companies should include gas processing technologies during the development of new oil-fields, and also ensure transparency while reporting to authorities, the quantity of gas flared.
Concrete efforts should be made to diversify the Nigerian economy to reduce dependence on crude oil for national revenue. Reduced dependence on petroleum would increase the government’s tenacity in enforcing measures against gas flaring in the Country. Agriculture, tourism, and processing can provide alternative sources of revenue.
CONCLUSION
Ending routine gas flaring in Nigeria will lead to an increase in revenue generation, infrastructural development, and power supply. It would also support thousands of jobs and businesses, improve health conditions in the oil-producing areas, and reduce the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. With these benefits in mind, tackling gas flaring in Nigeria should be a priority.
REFERENCES
CSL Stockbrokers (2020, February 18). Gas flaring: A never-ending dark tunnel. Retrieved fromhttps://nairametrics.com/2020/02/18/gas-flaring-a-never-ending-dark-tunnel/
Dmitriy Frolovskiy. (2019, December). Gas flaring remains issue for Russia. Retrieved from https://asiatimes.com/2019/12/russias-gas-flare-up-but-less-than-before/
Eboh, M. (2019, December 31). Nigeria: Despite Paucity of Funds, Nigeria Flares N461bn Gas in 2019. Retrieved from https://allafrica.com/stories/201912310199.html
Generon.com (2019, September 24). What is Gas Flaring? — Why is It Done & Viable Alternatives. Retrieved from https://www.generon.com/what-is-gas-flaring-why-is-it-done-alternatives/
McGreevey, C.M. & Whitaker, G. (2020). Zero Routine Flaring by 2030. Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/zero-routine-flaring-by-2030
PWC (2019). Assessing the impacts of gas flaring on the Nigerian economy. Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/assets/pdf/gas-flaring-impact1.pdf
Schick, L., Myles, P., & Okelum, O.E. (2018, November 14). Gas flaring continues scorching Niger Delta. Retrieved from https://www.dw.com/en/gas-flaring-continues-scorching-niger-delta/a-46088235
This article was submitted by Sobechi Evans-Ibe, for the Gas Flaring In Nigeria Essay Competition. | https://medium.com/climatewed/endgasflaringng-the-unspoken-dangers-of-gas-flaring-in-nigeria-by-mista-blak-1b0755452f10 | ['Iccdi Africa'] | 2020-09-20 10:47:34.812000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Gas', 'Climate Change', 'Gas Flare', 'Renewable Energy'] |
Nokia begins selling black and red E71s | Just when you thought the E71 was old news, Nokia decides to bring it back. Nokia introduced two new colors to the E71 line. Starting today, you will be able to get your hands on a black E71 or a white and red E71. This is a nice change from the old grey or white they offered before.
Read | https://medium.com/smartphone-nation/nokia-begins-selling-black-and-red-e71s-63157df58b6 | ['Justin Cauchon'] | 2016-06-18 22:48:41.736000+00:00 | ['E71', 'Symbian', 'Nokia', 'Red E71', 'Black E71'] |
What is Blockchain technology and future world of web 3.0 | Block chain
Blockchain
Today everyone is talking about the blockchain, so First will look at what is Blockchain. Blockchain is one kind of decentralised technology, As you see the above diagram showing rectangular blog, Each blog called as NODE in blockchain technology. Each block will have its own digital signature, contain digital signature of the previous block, and have some data
Blockchain sample structure
Each block doesn’t just contain the hash of the block before it, but its own hash is in part, calculated from the previous hash. If the previous block’s data is changed then the previous block’s hash will change ( since it is calculated in part, by the data) in turn affecting all the hashes of the blocks there after. Calculating and comparing the hashes allow us to see if a blockchain is invalid.
What does this mean ? …Changing any data in this list, will change the signature and break the chain.
So what is hashing?
In simple terms, hashing means taking an input string of any length and giving out an output of a fixed length. In the context of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the transactions are taken as an input and run through a hashing algorithm (Bitcoin uses SHA-256) which gives an output of a fixed length.
Let’s see how the hashing process works. We are going put in certain inputs. For this exercise, we are going to use the SHA-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm 256).
Sample hashing
How Blockchain works
The technology idea behind the Blockchain is similar to that of a database, except the way you interact with the database is different. So, let’s understand the concept how it works:
Someone requests a transaction.
1. The requested transaction is broadcasted to P2P network consisted of computers known as nodes.
2. Validation: The network of nodes validates the transaction and user’s status using known algorithms.
3. A verified transaction can include cryptocurrency, contracts, records or other information.
4. Once verified, the transaction is linked to other transactions to create a new block of data for the ledger.
5. The new block is then appended to the existing Blockchain, in a way that is permanent and unalterable.
6. The transaction is finally complete.
“We can define the blockchain as a system that allows a group of connected computers to maintain a single updated and secure ledger.”
Now the turn to Web3.0
Web2.0 vs Web3.0
The birth of blockchain spawned a movement which is set to disrupt the entire tech industry. Blockchain and crypto enthusiasts are calling it the Web 3.0 and it’s looking to make all traditional business models defunct. This is because, in short, the technology will facilitate the decentralization of the World Wide Web, thereby equalizing control and ownership back from the grasp of profit hungry corporations.
Blockchain decentralizes the control:
In legacy systems, the ‘business logic’ or ‘processing programs’ and ‘data’ is tightly controlled by a central entity like Google, Facebook, Apple. These service providers keep the secret sauce with themselves.
The user of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc generate the data /content but do know anything on how his/her data is being used. He/she has no control to monetise his/her own data. If he/she decides to leave the service, he / she can not get the data back. His/her data is lost forever.
But there is a hope. Freedom is not far off.
Blockchain is the technology that is spearheading the momentum of democracy and decentralization in online world.
Data stored by anyone in Blockchain Database is temper proof. Its immutable. That is why individuals and enterprises have shown trust in Blockchain.
In many scenarios the Blockchain based trust is preferred in modern digital systems than the trust that Banks, Insurance Agents, Property Brokers and middleman provide.
Blockchain has the capability to decouple the ‘business logic / programs’ from ‘data’ using ‘Smart Contract’. Both ‘Smart Contract’ and ‘Data’ are portable. No single organization can make hostage of your data.
Now you can track your data :)
$……………….………… Happy learning…………………………….$ | https://medium.com/coinmonks/what-is-blockchain-technology-and-future-world-of-web-3-0-6ba5cdcd5f87 | ['Bala Venkatesh'] | 2018-08-28 09:44:20.916000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Web', 'Bitcoin', 'Decentralization', 'Blockchain'] |
Four Things I Learned From My Interview with Jamey Rootes, President of the Houston Texans | I recently had the opportunity to interview Jamey Rootes, President of the Houston Texans, for our Murray Resources webinar series. Below I share my top four takeaways.
(You can watch the full interview here)
Jamey has been with the Texans for twenty years, with the most recent fifteen serving as the team’s President. He started his career at IBM and went on to P&G before pursuing his passion and embarking on his sports industry career with the Columbus Crew of the Major League Soccer league.
Under his leadership, the Texans have become one of the most valuable franchises in professional sports, with a loyal fan base that has sold out every game for 18 straight years.
This month Jamey became a Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today best-selling author following the release of The Winning Game Plan, a compelling leadership playbook based on Rootes’ personal and professional experiences.
We packed multiple topics into our discussion (including a little sports talk), but I’m going to focus here on Rootes’ advice for recruiting and developing top talent and creating a strong company culture.
1. When recruiting talent, develop a non-negotiable framework
According to Rootes, he evaluates talent through three non-negotiable lenses.
“When hiring, I figure that the potential employee’s skill set has already been evaluated ten times to Sunday [by the time I interview them],” says Rootes. As such, he focuses his interview on answering three specific questions:
Do they have a great work ethic?
Do they have a winning attitude (i.e. positive, optimistic, team-oriented)?
Do they have a demonstrated commitment to the values of this organization?
If candidates possess those three things, Rootes explains, you can teach them whatever else they need to know.
Your company may focus on a different set of characteristics for new hires, but it’s critical to pre-determine your values and then structure your interviews to evaluate candidates against that framework.
2. Develop your own “Draft Class”
Every year the Texans recruit top graduating seniors to fill 12 intern slots, making up their “Draft Class”.
“These 12 draft class members spend at least nine months with us in varying departments,” Rootes says. “And every couple of months, my leadership team will do a complete review of each draft class member and provide insight into their strengths and their weaknesses.”
According to Rootes, the leadership team also asks the following question about each candidate:
“Would you hire them again if you had the chance?”
If someone shines in the company (and in a typical year about 70% of their interns do), the organization tries to find a full-time job for them.
It’s an approach that allows the Houston Texans to evaluate employees based on actual performance. “You might fake it in an interview, but you can’t fake it for nine months. Who you are is going to come out,” explains Rootes.
The concept came to Rootes by the way of the restaurant, Shake Shack.
“Danny Meyer is the creator of Shake Shake and he does not allow a full-time employee to start until they’ve run a couple of shifts and they’ve gotten a chance to view expertise in action. That’s the draft class,” he says.
There are a number of methods for evaluating talent before making a full-time offer. For some companies it may be an internship, a paid project, a working interview, or a contract-to-hire structure. The more opportunities to evaluate a candidate’s talent, work-ethic, and commitment to a job, the higher the likelihood of a successful hire.
3. Treat 1-on-1’s as development opportunities
Rootes is a big proponent of providing growth opportunities for his team and uses his 1-on-1’s with direct reports to reinforce and realign leadership behaviors.
To develop into a strong leader, Rootes explains. “You must lead well in four directions.” These four directions include:
Leading up. You’re building trust with me (your manager).
You’re building trust with me (your manager). Leading out. You’re becoming a respected voice outside of the building.
You’re becoming a respected voice outside of the building. Leading down. You’re very clear with your employees about what success looks like and are a great manager.
You’re very clear with your employees about what success looks like and are a great manager. Leading across. You’re a great teammate.
For Rootes, leadership development within the organization involves meeting with each of his 12 direct reports for an hour every two weeks. He writes down action items before each meeting to guide the discussion.
The day after each meeting, Rootes’ assistant sends out the action items and notes to the directors. Two weeks later, he and each director meet again to talk through what was accomplished since they last met and add new action items.
Not only does this mentorship approach help leaders learn new skills, but it’s an excellent way to stay plugged in with your team. It also gives your leaders regular access to you.
“Use these meetings to determine what your leaders are missing,” says Rootes. “What can you do to help? What can you send them? Teach them along the way what your expectations are, how they can become great leaders, and how they can become better managers.”
Rootes always emphasizes the importance of guiding leaders and giving them time to come up to speed and sharpen their skill sets.
You shouldn’t be passive, but be patient. If certain leaders aren’t working out, let them know. But put in the effort first and give them every opportunity to be successful.
4. Utilize employee feedback to build a strong culture
Under Rootes’ leadership, the Houston Texans have become a perennial fixture on multiple “Best Places to Work” lists, reflecting their consistently positive company culture.
Their secret weapon? Every two years team employees complete a survey, giving leadership valuable insight into which areas are seen favorably, which are improving, and which need to be addressed. The organization utilizes Gallup’s 12: Elements of Great Managing Survey, which provides a baseline for organizational culture and engagement.
According to Rootes, you have to tap into the human needs you’re satisfying with your employees. “Using the Gallup survey, we enhanced our paternity and maternity plan a couple of years ago, based on direct feedback from our employees that we were out of touch,” he says. “And so we did the research, changed it, and reported back to our employees.”
This brought up another important point for Rootes.
The survey itself is important, but people need to know that you listened and you took action, or you listened and you decided not to take action.
“If you don’t report what you did with the survey information, they don’t know that their suggestions are making a difference,”
Rootes explains. “By telling them how, you show employees that you value their contribution to the organization. The survey and reporting combined, empower employees.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
For more leadership tips and some trivia about Jamey (including his favorite leadership book and his favorite athlete) check out the webinar and my full interview with Jamey Rootes here. You can also learn more about honing your leadership skills by picking up a copy of Rootes’ best-selling book, The Winning Game Plan. | https://medium.com/@executiveresumeservice/four-things-i-learned-from-my-interview-with-jamey-rootes-president-of-the-houston-texans-fe30d0927aec | ['Keith Wolf - Executive Resume Writer'] | 2020-12-22 16:40:23.850000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Leadership Development', 'Human Resources', 'Leadership Coaching', 'Recruiting'] |
Meet Silicon Valley’s own Willy Wonka…and his chocolate-making robot!! | Only in Silicon Valley does a longtime tech startup founder find a second career in a chocolate-making robot.
Nate Saal studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University after graduating from Palo Alto High School in 1990. After returning to Palo Alto, he quickly shifted from science to the internet, founding what he says was the first web-based software updating service in 1996. He went on to start more technology companies and later worked for CNET and Cisco.
The first iteration of CocoTerra’s chocolate-making robot. (Photo by Magali Gauthier)
But these days, he’s immersed in chocolate — specifically, chocolate made by a countertop device that he created called CocoTerra. The sleek white device, which looks like a large, futuristic coffee maker, uses algorithms, hardware and a smartphone app to transform cocoa nibs, milk powder, cocoa powder and sugar into chocolate in about two hours.
Saal has high hopes for the machine, which has yet to be released. In the age of automation, where robots are making pizza and ramen and delivering our food, he sees CocoTerra as doing something different: using technology to deepen rather than disrupt people’s connection to how their food is made.
“We’re not trying to slap technology for technology’s sake on top of that to abstract it away, to take creativity away,” he said. “We’re trying to actually create a whole new category of people who can now make chocolate.”
While Saal’s professional career has focused on technology, he has always filled his weekends with homegrown food experiments, like keeping bees and growing grapes and olives to make wine and olive oil from scratch. He’s fascinated by the “deep science” of these activities.
Making chocolate, however, was not in his repertoire. It wasn’t until he took his brother-in-law, who works in the coffee business, to a chocolate tasting several years ago, and a conversation about the similarities between the two industries got him thinking. His brother hypothesized that home coffee machines have allowed more people to understand and appreciate coffee in a way that chocolate hasn’t experienced. People did make chocolate at home, but it was a lengthy process that required having several expensive appliances, he found. | https://thesixfifty.com/meet-silicon-valleys-own-willy-wonka-and-his-chocolate-making-robot-8b033c77b80c | ['Elena Kadvany'] | 2020-01-03 23:14:39.144000+00:00 | ['Bay Area', 'Inventions', 'Silicon Valley', 'Technews', 'Chocolate'] |
How to use open source satellite data for your investigative reporting | Undoubtedly a vast goldmine of information — perhaps too vast — many journalists still shy away from working with satellite data extensively. Since the emergence of high-resolution data provided from firms like DigitalGlobe and Planet Labs, the supply of satellite stories has mushroomed. But open source data — a valid and timely source for stories, nonetheless, despite lower resolution— remains under-leveraged. With an untouched mountain of data at hand, many either fear to miss the forest — or story in this case — for the trees or to misinterpret. Both valid concerns. Today, we will try to tackle some of the reservations that you might share with your colleagues and teach some basics in accessing, understanding and handling open source satellite data.
Recent technical commentary on the execution of remote sensing exercises within and outside newsrooms attempted to demystify how to take advantage of open source satellite data platforms. Some attempted to explain how to streamline the process of gathering data. Few drawn viable connections between feasible stories and technical capabilities. This tutorial attempts to challenge this notion. We will walk you through some basic examples — from a beginner to a more advanced technical level.
Understanding how satellite imagery works:
Different satellites send different images to earth. Distinction includes resolution (how crisp the images are), the number and types of bands they produce and how frequently they are updated.
Resolution matters
Finding the balance between resolution, capabilities of bands and availability: Credit: Mark Corcoran, Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford
How frequently available?
Credit: Mark Corcoran, Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford
What are spectral bands?
Not a new musical genre: Spectral bands determine what type of analysis you can do with the data; Credit: Mark Corcoran, Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford
Sentinel 2 satellite image data, for instance, comes in the form of thirteen difference spectral bands, ranging from visible and near infrared to the shortwave infrared, featuring four spectral bands at 10 meters, six bands at 20 meters and three bands at 60 meters spatial resolution.
Consider these bands as a form of binoculars that allow you to spot things that otherwise would remain hidden in the data. The right mix of these bands is key. Various scripts — different band combos if you will — can be run on the data (either on your local machine or on Sentinel hub).
If you are reporting on a broad basis, you want to make yourself familiar with those different combinations and what they achieve for you, as it might come in handy at times when other outlets miss the beat.
Tutorial: What do you need from here?
Python 3.6
An adequate Tif reader (if you want to download raster files)
Jupyter notebook and various python packages
A free account for Sentinel hub (find a description in the python tutorial)
2. Searching for a story using the Sentinel Hub browser tool:
If you are an affectionate technologist, you might be slightly turned off by the idea of using a browser application. But do hear me out. For exploring and investigating, the EO Browser is a decent option (if you want to step back even further, ‘Sentinel Playground’ features fewer satellites but offers a slightly easier way to explore).
Predecessor and other open source satellite platforms may offer limited options in using python in the workflow. Sentinel Hub runs some useful options in this regard. Also, there is no need to download the whole raster tiles in order to do something interesting (arguably, it’s rare that investigations require all the tile data at the same time). Instead, it allows to zoom in on specific areas.
Here is a list of data the EO Browser provides and a rationale to use them:
Description of EO Browser data
Let’s get going and indulge in a satellite frenzy.
1. Beginner
Tracking wildfires:
Detection and reporting of the sudden proliferation and destruction of wildfires that spiraled last year when record flames raged across the U.S. state of California. It might not be the last time. Such fires are feasible to re-emerge in the near future, experts claim. Freely available go-to sources constitute Landsat 8 data — kindly provided with the help of U.S. Geological Survey — as well as Sentinel-2 data.
Sentinel-2 — offering higher resolution imagery than its open source colleagues in the visible and infrared part of the spectrum — is well up to the task to monitor vegetation, soil and water cover, inland waterways and coastal areas.
Challenge
Go to EO Browser — sign up and login (it's free)
Select Sentinel-2
Narrow down the data collection by limiting cloud coverage to 30%.
Spot Wildfires in the U.S. state of California, that climaxed between July and August of 2018 (they are so comprehensively pronounced state-wide, you should not have problems to spot plumes of clouds)
Possible examples of 2018 fires:
Natchez Fire (July 20, 2018): 41.956°N 123.551°W
Carr Fire (July 28, 2018): 40.6543°N 122.6236°W
Mendocino Complex Fire (July 29, 2018): 39.243283°N 123.103367°W
Ferguson Fire (July 14, 2018): 37.652°N 119.881°W
Next, we want to render a specific band combination to see more clearly where the action on the ground is happening.
copy ‘Wildfire script’:
The Wildfire script was kindly provided by Pierre Markuse. Insert it into the ‘Custom’ section (under the Visualisation tab) where the ‘</>’ is exhibited (next to the hand button).
Locating California wildfires (August 2018)
Interesting angle: How successful are firefighters to contain/isolate fires
Example by Pierre Markuse: Fire retardant caused by firefighting planes https://flic.kr/p/Wt8Vzo
If you successfully found a wildfire in the specified time range, you should spot yellow-red ish blotches. Importantly: do not interpret these as flames. Despite showing it, you should tell your audience that what can be seen are not actual fires but a mere IR overlay — that, to some degree, lines up with the active fires and hot spots.
Challenge
New wildfires recently sprawled around Mount Kenya (long, lat: -0.152739, 37.309095) burning nearly a week at the time of writing.
If you have time, discover those fires, apply the script as before and investigate.
MSI
Other band combination can be used to illustrate potential areas at risk of wildfires. Dryness of vegetation is one of such indicators. Moisture stress index — or MSI - can reveal such dry areas — and aid in something called ‘a fire hazard condition analysis’.
The index is inverted relative to other water vegetation indices. The higher the value, the greater the water stress level (and the less water content there is). Give it a try and follow the same procedure with a different band script and see what you can retrieve.
MSI script:
Now let's work with Python:
In order to use Sentinel Hub services, you need a Sentinel Hub account (sign up for free here https://www.sentinel-hub.com/, if you haven’t done already).
Login to Sentinel Hub Configurator. A configuration with an instance ID (alpha-numeric code of length 36) will already exist. For this tutorial, it is recommended that you create a new configuration (via “Add new configuration”) and set the configuration to be based on ‘Python scripts template’.
Write down your configuration’s instance ID and paste it into the INSTANCE_ID variable declaration:
All requests require a bounding box to be given as an instance of sentinelhub.geometry.BBox with corresponding Coordinate Reference System (sentinelhub.geometry.CRS). We will use WGS84 and we can use the predefined WGS84 coordinate reference system from sentinelhub.geometry.CRS.
Now we simply provide a URL address of a JS evalscript (a number of other clever scripts are available on this dedicated page).
Let’s select the fire script again and provide its URL as a value of parameter CustomUrlParam.EVALSCRIPTURL.
Python output: Downloaded Sentinel-2 image with the provided wildfire JS evalscript
NBR
Another custom script, to specifically detect blight from fires is NBR — short for normalized burn ratio — (link to the script here). If you report on the post-mortem status of a large fire, this could aid your analysis and coverage.
Further explanation of NBR here
Challenge
Locate burned vegetation with the NBR script.
Python output: Downloaded Sentinel-2 image with the provided NBR JS evalscript
2. Intermediate — becoming more investigative
Relying on the fire script to locate brigadier General Suheil al-Hassan’s hideout — ‘one of Syria’s most notorious warlords’ (post by The Atlantic)
The general with the frightening nickname ‘The Tiger’ is the helmsman of Qawat Al-Nimr a.k.a Tiger Forces, a Russian backed campaign and an elite formation of the Syrian Arab Army which functions primarily as an offensive unit in the Syrian Civil War.
In Syria to retake eastern Ghouta, a recent operation executed by the Tiger Forces killed, according to the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), at least 600 civilians — of whom at least 100 were children.
To find out where Suheil al-Hassan was hiding back in 2016, we perform a typical act of intelligence work and start by taking a look at the following video:
We can spot whiffs of smoke wafted towards the left. On another sequence, we see the hideout the General operated out of.
The Hideout (left) of Brigadier General Suheil al-Hassan, a.k.a the Tiger — “If you’re not with God then you’re with the devil. Be on the side of God so that God will be with you,” should Hassan reportedly have said at a more recent campaign on the edge of eastern Ghouta
Smoke clouds from nearby Aleppo thermal plant
From the video, we learn that it was shot for ‘Palmyra Battle Against ISIS’. This could be the Aleppo Thermal Plant.
Confirmation: Google earth pics for the power plant show the extent of destruction after the fire raged (burned out circles on the right)
A simple web search provides us with a level of clarification:
Search on Google for ‘ Aleppo thermal plant ’. The Wikipedia link supplies us with long/lat of the Thermal Power Plant.
’. The Wikipedia link supplies us with long/lat of the Thermal Power Plant. Next, go to Google Earth or Google Maps and enter the coordinates you found: ‘36°10′30″N 37°26′22″E’. What you will see is a set of burned out towers to the right of the plant.
On EO Brower, turn on roads and enter the longitude and latitude (36.175000, 37.439444) from the Google maps result (into the search window of the EO Browser). In our case, we are interested in February 16 of 2016 (2016–02–16), for which we witness wondrous smoke plumes.
Smoke plums move to the left
Next, we proceed as before and apply the fire-script to visualize fires in Sentinel-2 imagery (Challenge: if you feel confident, do it in your Python environment, alternatively analog, within your EO Browser window).
Now that we have a better understanding, we can infer the location of the Tiger’s hideout at the time of the fire.
Al-Hassan hideout (left) and Aleppo thermal plant (right) on google maps
To confirm our suspicion, we can check Google maps satellite images and learn that the hideout has since been bombed.
Benjamin Strick, an open source expert for conflict, security, arms, and digital forensics (who also suggested this example) explains that it does help to show which of the towers were on fire at the time. Later imagery of Al-Hassan in the plant would have confirmed: those four towers were on fire that day.
Spotting specific details in places from space has its merits. One, in fact, within the field of human rights. A recent investigation showed that satellite images can help reveal slavery from space. Doreen Boyd, director of the data program at the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom estimates, that one-third of all slavery would be visible from space — whether in the form of scars of kilns or illegal mines or the outlines of transient fish processing camps (arguably, high-resolution commercial images may be better suited for this kind of investigation).
3. Advanced — running an algorithm
Water level extraction
Let us assume you are reporting on distressed water levels, maybe covering a conflict that resulted from such (tension and fighting resulting from scarce water situations are becoming increasingly likely, according to recent research and covered by an Economist special report).
A Jupyter notebook* was composed to detect levels of water bodies, using Sentinel-2 multi-spectral and multi-temporal imagery.
We will run a water detection algorithm in python and extract surface water level for a single reservoir in a given time interval.
Here is what you will do:
Defining geometries of a few waterbodies Preparing and executing the full workflow for water detection: Downloading Sentinel-2 data (true color and NDWI index) using SentinelHub services and cloud detection using the s2cloudless cloud detector, and finally detect water Visualizing water bodies and the water level over a period of time Filtering out cloudy scenes to improve the results
What do you need?
Basic terminal/file setup:
As in the previous example: earlier, in order to run it, you will also need a Sentinel Hub account. You can create a free trial account at Sentinel Hub webpage. Once you have the account set up, login to Sentinel Hub Configurator. By default, you will already have the default configuration with an instance ID (alpha-numeric code of length 36). For this tutorial, we recommend that you create a new configuration ( "Add new configuration" ) and set the configuration to be based on Python scripts template. Such configuration will already contain all layers used in these examples. Otherwise, you will have to define the layers for your configuration yourself. After you have prepared a configuration please put configuration’s instance ID into sentinelhub package's configuration file following the configuration instructions.
Set your Python working environment by loading the following Python Libraries. Make sure you run the Python virtual environment as instructed above.
Obtaining geometries for waterbodies
Let’s use the Theewaterskloof Dam, in South Africa as an example — a substantial water reserve supplying the precious resource to a large chunk of the 4 million dwellers in Cape Town. It is the largest dam in the Western Cape Water Supply System and can run low during droughts. There are signs of increased consciousness for water shortages. How to cover such a topic shows this example.
In the case of Theewaterskloof Dam — or any other large waterbody across the planet — you can easily obtain geometries via the BlueDot Water Observatory API.
By searching for a specific waterbody, you can copy the ID number in the URL in order to access the nominal geometry of the corresponding waterbody (i.e. number 38538 in url https://water.blue-dot-observatory.com/38538/2019-02-05 )
Python code to download geometries:
Now we need a bounding box for this geometry, in order to download Sentinel-2 data. We define a bounding box and inflate it a little bit in order to construct a BBox object which is used with Sentinel Hub services. The BBox class also accepts the coordinate system (CRS), where we use the same one as in the case of the geometry (which is WGS84).
Plotting the BBox and the geometry
Preparing/executing the full workflow for water detection
Sentinel Hub services are installed with eo-learn . It is an open-source earth observation processing framework for machine learning in Python, which provides seamless access and abilities to process spatiotemporal image sequences acquired by any satellite fleet.
eo-learn works as a workflow — where a workflow consists of one or multiple tasks. Each tasks achieves a specific job (downloading data, calculating band combinations, etc.) on a small patch of an area, called EOPatch. EOPatch is a container for EO and non-EO data.
Let’s define a workflow to download and obtain the necessary data for water detection. We will download the RGB bands in order to actually visualize the true-color image of the waterbody. Additionally, we will download the NDWI band combination (Normalized Difference Water Index), which we will use for water detection. It is defined as
Formula for Normalized Difference Water Index
where B3 and B8 are the green and near-infrared Sentinel-2 bands, respectively.
Next: Definitions of some custom tasks that will be used in the workflow
Initializations of EOTasks:
Output: Finished loading model, total used 170 iterations
Output: CPU times: user 3min 9s, sys: 14.7 s, total: 3min 24s
Wall time: 3min 23s
Structure of the `EOPatch`
Check structure by typing
Input: eopatch
Let’s now visualize the first few true-color images of the selected waterbody in the given time series. We see below that some images contain clouds, which causes problems in proper water level detection.
Plot the NDWI to see how the water detector traces the waterbody outline:
Plotting of Normalized Difference Water Index
Plot true-color images with the detected water outlines:
Clear as day: comparing true water levels with Theewaterskloof Dam dam’s outline
Plotting the detected water levels
You should see a lot of fluctuations in the data due to cloud interference (in grey, cloud coverage is plotted. It shares the same dates as the water level outliers).
Let us now set a threshold for the maximum cloud coverage of 2 % and filter out the dates which correspond to cloudy scenes. This is done by filtering out the dates which have a value of eopatch.scalar['COVERAGE'] larger than 0.02.
A lot less vacillating
Voilà, there you have it. Water-levels hit a historic three-year low in mid-2018 but convalesced since.
Conclusion:
Still hungry for more satellite image analysis? I covered some basic techniques related to economic nightlight analysis here(which served as a proxy for economic growth). 99 other ideas for application were pooled by Gisgeography.com and listed below. Knock yourself out. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-use-open-source-satellite-data-for-your-investigative-reporting-d662cb1f9f90 | [] | 2020-06-12 16:59:42.639000+00:00 | ['Data Journalism', 'Satellite Technology', 'Data Science', 'Journalism', 'Data Visualization'] |
Permutation hypothesis test in R. Exploring a powerful simulation… | Permutation hypothesis test in R
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
Introduction
To compare outcomes in experiments, we often use Student’s t-test. It assumes that data are randomly selected from the population, arrived in large samples (>30), or normally distributed with equal variances between groups.
If we do not happen to meet these assumptions, we may use one of the simulation tests. In this article, we will introduce the Permutation Test.
Rather than assuming underlying distribution, the permutation test builds its distribution, breaking up the associations between or among groups. Often we are interested in the difference of means or medians between the groups, and the null hypothesis is that there is no difference there. We may ask the question: from all the possible permutations, how extreme our data would look like? All possible permutations would represent a theoretical distribution. In practice, there is no need to perform ALL permutations to build the theoretical distribution, but run a reasonable number of simulations to take a sample from that distribution. Usually, there are 10k or 100k simulations.
Example
Suppose we have a chain of 12 retail stores, and we want to test a new sales technique. We may assign or just pick, for instance, 5 stores and try it there. Then compare average sales after a certain period with sales in the rest 7 stores.
The data are not randomly collected, presumably not normally distributed; and the sample itself has fewer than 30 observations.
In our dataset, we have two columns: treatment — a binary variable indicating whether the store implemented the new approach; outcome — a numeric variable recoding a sales amount at the end of a period.
From the boxplot representation, we may see that the groups are fairly different and the variance is approximately equal.
The histogram of outcome does not appear normally distributed; however, the Shapiro-Wilk normality test returns a not significant p-value = 0.3654
To find the difference in means between groups, we use build-in commands and save it to a variable original:
original <- diff(tapply(outcome, treatment, mean))
The difference is ~37.8 points. Now we ask the question: if we shuffle the data ten thousand times, how often we would observe this or more extreme difference?
We run a simulation drawing 10k shaffles without replacement, and record the difference in means for each permutation. Then we perform a two-sided test computing the number of records the absolute value of whose exceeded absolute values of original difference.
The function returns the simulated distribution and the p-value.
If we plot the distribution, we may observe that our original difference is not particularly extreme, with an exact p-value of 0.1822818
In many research projects, this would indicate that there is no statistically significant difference between groups: however, in this business case, I would pick the option that there is some evidence that the sales approach affects the outcome.
Comparison with other tests
If we run the Welch t-test, we would get a similar p-value of 0.1815.
The Shapiro-Wilk normality test indicated that the data were presumably obtained from the Normal Distribution, but it is not a general case.
R also has several libraries to run permutation tests. One of them is library(coin), which performs an independence test. It also returns a similar p-value of 0.1858.
Conclusion
The Permutation test is a powerful tool in measuring effects in experiments. It is easy to implement, and it does not rely on many assumptions as other tests do. It has not been widely popular until the simulation on computers became routinely implemented.
It is closely related to the other simulation test: the bootstrapping hypothesis test, where the samples are drawn with replacement. | https://towardsdatascience.com/permutation-test-in-r-77d551a9f891 | ['Serafim Petrov'] | 2021-04-26 15:05:43.479000+00:00 | ['R', 'Simulation', 'Statistical Analysis', 'Permutation Test'] |
The Simple Document That Kept Me Alive | TW: Suicide, self-harm, no-suicide contract
The middle of the night is the hardest. When the world is dark and most healthy people are safely sleeping, then the monsters that are mental illness come out in full force to torment you.
The constant noise and lack of sleep leave you willing to do anything to stop the madness. Sadly, for many people, that willingness can include suicide ideation.
Believe me, I get it. Thoughts of suicide have been part of my daily life since some time in fourth or fifth grade. These beasts have been my companions for nearly forty years.
Life is worth living, though. It may not always feel like it, but it is always the truth.
What follows is my story of how a piece of paper helped me through some of my darkest hours. | https://medium.com/speaking-bipolar/the-simple-document-that-kept-me-alive-25f6c7ba3265 | ['Scott Ninneman'] | 2019-11-16 19:40:48.730000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Bipolar', 'Suicide Prevention'] |
4 Best Investment Tips | In this fast-paced world, we are running to perform two different actions, one is earning and another one is spending. We never think about the vital process for money accumulation which is called investment. When it comes to a job, you work for money. But whereas in investment it is contrary, the money will work for you. It is the place where all the compounding and recurring of money will take place.
It is always advisable to invest half of your earnings as an investment (whatever the investment it can be). This will yield you a good amount as a return in the future when you really need it. Before we get into the investment tips, if you have never been to this investment area, this will be Greek and Latin to you.
For those people, let us have a quick sum-up of what investment is and its types. And for others, this will be a jog for your memory.
What is Investment?
Investment is an act of investing your money into an asset of a certain value. The value of a certain asset will be increased over a period of time. The investment aims to appreciate the value of an asset by yielding an enormous amount of money.
Every investment is assessed based on the time (tenure), money(invested amount), return(rate of interest). Most people do investments to create or multiply their wealth which will be used in the future.
Let us see about its types…
Investment
Types of Investment
Investments are available in different types. I would like to mention some of the common investments that are done everywhere.
Gold and Sovereign bonds Share Market and Mutual funds Cash Certificates Commodities Fixed Deposit(FD) Recurring Deposit(RD) Real estate Cryptocurrency Market
You can choose your right investment based on your investment money and risk appetite. When we talk about risk appetite, every investment has different risks. Understand the types of investments that are with different risk levels before investing. It will surely help you out in choosing the best investment for you. Now let us proceed with the tips that will help you with investing.
Investment Tips
Before stepping into investing, I would like to brief you with some tips that will surely help you in handling your investment in a hassle-free way. These tips are not subject to handling one particular investment; these will apply to all the investments out there. Okay, let us quickly move to tip one…
#1 Have a thorough knowledge
You must have thorough knowledge about the investment that you are about to invest in. You must look for the interest rates from different investments and compare that with another investment or different investment firm.
Let us have an example: if you are investing an amount of 1000 as a fixed deposit (you can assume whatever investments you like). You are approaching a firm called ABC, they offer you 5.68% for 1 year. You should not stop with that. You must look for other investment firms and also about their interest rates. When you constantly enquire in different firms about the same investment, you will get to know different variations. Let us keep another example: In another firm called XYZ offer 7% for 1 year for the same investment, which one will you choose to go?. When you constantly search for other options, you may get to know with new plans.
You can do this approach for all the investments, this will widen up your view and you will come up with so many options in hand.
#2 Plan Before Invest
I always advise you to plan your finances. You must have a thorough understanding of how money flows in your home. It doesn’t matter how much you earn, financial planning is the most important thing that you should do. You should manage and calculate all your transactions every week. By doing that you can figure out the ways where your money is getting spent lavishly.
It is always important how much you are about to invest. There is a famous rule called 50–30–20. Where 50% of your money can be spent on your needs. 30% of your money can be spent on recreation which will be your wants whereas, your 20% of earnings must be saved or invested.
#3 Never rely on one
There is a popular quote on this attitude, it goes this way “Don’t put all eggs in one basket”. With that, investing all your money in one investment will put you in a high-risk zone. The reason is, I will explain to you with a small example.
If you are investing your money of 1000 in a share. You have bought some shares for the whole investment amount. You thought the share will give a good amount despite some little price falls.
Unfortunately, if the share faces a huge fall that you haven’t imagined, the whole invested amount will be at loss. This is the prime reason that you should not invest your whole amount in one investment.
#4 Never be Greedy
Never go for an investment that has a high-risk appetite that will attract you with a high-interest return. But, that will lead you to a heavy loss. If you get a good amount of profit, with a meager amount as an investment.
That doesn’t mean you must invest more. It is more like a temptation that it creates. Never invest more than what you are capable of. That will lead you to a heavy loss that you have imagined.
These are all then organic tips for carrying your investments in the right direction. I have jotted all these out of my personal experience. Hope these tips will help you to gain more profit without any losses. For more such amazing articles never forget to follow. | https://medium.com/@iampraveenhere/best-investment-tips-for-beginners-84189cdfed39 | [] | 2021-02-23 07:46:04.810000+00:00 | ['Investment Tips', 'Money Management', 'Personal Finance', 'Financial Planning', 'Investment'] |
My top 10 favorite disability/ accessibility articles of the year | My top 10 favorite disability/ accessibility articles of the year
After I was named the UX Collective Medium author of 2020, I was asked on LinkedIn to post a list of my top 10 favorite stories for 2020 for folx who haven’t been previously following me. Of course, I decided it was easier to just write an article :-)
FYI, these are NOT my most popular articles. That honor goes to Accessibility is not an Add-on Service, something I wrote largely through voice dictation in a car (my husband was driving) while I was super annoyed about getting 7 messages in one morning from completely inept organizations trying to win my business as an accessibility contractor.
These are the articles that I think can have the most impact on people, that could potentially push them over the tipping point from
Accessibility? Yeah, we really should do that
to
Accessibility? Here is our roadmap and testing schedule and oh by the way all hiring managers need to take this class on how to interview candidates with disabilities and our next Disability ERG meeting is ….
The latter is my definition of success, and when I can convince others to take that leap, the success is that much more impactful.
Without further ado, my ten favorite articles of the year
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? Lack of perfection should not stop people from trying to be accessible. People get credit for trying in this field. They also are a whole lot less likely to get sued, because they are a harder target. Once people accept that their initial effort will be terrible, it’s easier to get past the “I hope people don’t hate it” barrier that frequently keeps people from taking the first step in many areas.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? My need to use a wheelchair is congenital, so I’ve spent not quite half of my life (including K through my first college degree) with a mobility disability prior to the ADA being passed, and slightly more than half my life where I gained two more college degrees, three new autoimmune conditions, glaucoma, and most of my corporate experience. All of Gen Z and about 1/3 of millennials know no other life than one with the ADA — the second half of my life. It is important to understand the history of the ADA as a civil rights movement, and also where it is failing to do what it promised three decades ago.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? Claiming that an organization’s inability to find people with disabilities, women, or people of color for tech jobs is a) completely wrong and b) a total “it wasn’t our fault” cop-out. I like that for this article, “the pipeline” applies to all people intersectionally; it isn’t 100 % focused just on disability.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? Accessibility widgets/plugins/overlays are a plague. They are a terrible solution that actually doesn’t solve huge swaths of accessibility problems, yet tricks organizations into thinking they DO solve the problem, and thus the organization need seek no further than installing the magical single line of code. If it sounds too good to be true it is.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? I like the headline. Short phrases that carry emotion are powerful. But more importantly, this is the first article where I addressed what I personally think the root cause of the lack of accessibility-aware professionals — colleges and universities aren’t teaching it.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? This was a “challenge” article — someone whom I didn’t know on LinkedIn saw one of my posts shredding some organization’s accessibility and said “It’s easy to pick on people who do a crappy job at accessibility. Why don’t you write an article on how to get people good at accessibility to up their game?” It was fun to write because many of the seven items are obvious to expert practitioners, but maybe not so obvious to new entrants to accessibility.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? The first time I tried to explain accessibility several years ago to my mother-in-law, I fumbled miserably. In business, if you can’t connect with people in 45 seconds, you will lose them. Constructing an accessibility elevator pitch that is authentic to who you are, is the first step of building your accessibility brand.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? Regardless of whether you have a public accessibility presence, all successful accessibility managers have an accessibility brand, whether they know it or not. Having an internal accessibility brand is essential to get all parts of the product experience on the “accessibility train” heading to the same destination.
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? People who don’t have a strong legal background get hung up on “following the law” — that is, doing what the law says directly. They don’t always look at what the law implies with 100 % certainty, even though it may never be stated directly in the regulation. Magnification, which uses the same design breakpoints as responsive, is one of these “implied requirements.”
Use this link if you don’t have a Medium subscription, or if you use assistive technology that Medium doesn’t support.
Why on the list of my favorite articles? It’s super difficult to make accessibility engaging to people who don’t have a personal connection to the disability universe. Also, I put a bit of insight into my personality and my sense of humor in this one. Every time I go back and look at it, it makes me laugh. It’s a tab I keep open for the tough days. | https://uxdesign.cc/my-top-10-favorite-disability-accessibility-articles-of-the-year-4a4441e6bf0 | ['Sheri Byrne-Haber'] | 2020-12-10 16:17:41.718000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Design', 'Blog', 'Accessibility', 'Disability'] |
After the crisis: let’s fix procurement. | How do you solve a problem like procurement?
So, if we were to redesign procurement for the 21st century, to try to imagine a system that is faster, cheaper, more effective, more competitive, more open, gets better public value and provides better protection against corruption, what might that look like?
Well, I don’t know. But if you’ve read this far, you’re probably interested enough in this problem that you might have some ideas. These are mine:
Digital platforms
The first and most obvious move is to use the web to solve the bandwidth problem. It’s what the web does best. Government can learn from the effectiveness of platforms like Amazon, Ebay, AirBnB, Alibaba and the App store; all made possible by standardised template agreements, simple protocols and well-designed digital interfaces that aim to get the transaction costs as close as possible to zero. The Digital Marketplace and GCloud framework are a first step towards this. The objective should be to create truly open markets – that is, markets where any new entrant can join and quickly prove themselves capable of delivering. As far as possible, these could shift from filling in long application documents, towards a more ‘ratings’ like approach, where a supplier can easily get a small first order and prove themselves. The real proof is always in the pudding, and even the smallest portion tells you more than whole books of recipes. Right now, a busy, stressed, NHS care trust executive should be able to get online, and order 200 face shields each from 10 companies, in less than 10 minutes.
However, what makes web platforms effective is not just the frictionless digital infrastructure, that lets buyers connect with sellers and vice versa. Their success lies in the power of the platform owner to shape the market: to set standards and enforce rules of engagement. Uber do it. What if government did too?
2. Rules-based procurement
This ability to aggregate the public sector’s combined purchasing power to set the rules of the market is the single most powerful tool that government is not using.
Let’s return to the example I mentioned earlier, of IT contracts. A year or so ago, in collaboration with Connected Places Catapult, Tech UK and with contributions from a range of experts and suppliers, we drafted a checklist of 15 simple but robust basic checks for any local government IT contract. It included things like a customer’s right to extract their own data at any time, and a ban on any contract longer than 2 years. We realised that if government were to make all public sector IT contracts conditional on meeting those 15 rules, government could prevent most, if not all, of the kinds of market failure we see across public sector IT every day, where government ends up paying millions for rubbish, outdated software. In other words, there is no such thing as ‘The Market’. There are many possible markets, and government has more power than it thinks it has to shape markets where it is almost impossible for them to go too far wrong. I would argue that not only does government have an opportunity to use its platform power more effectively, it in fact has a moral obligation to do so.
Of course, there were some (not as many as you might think, I should add) murmurs from the old suppliers who said ‘if you make the rules of the game too stringent, we won’t play’. But that’s the whole point of competition. If the old companies aren’t willing to play, they leave the market open to younger , smaller, hungrier, more innovative companies who will. And believe me, they will. I’ve written about this before under the concept of ‘Democracy as a Platform’.
(Additional note: In other domains, this could go further. For example, in cases where a contract will inevitably create a temporary monopoly, or where there is a particular urgency to move fast in a crisis, bids could be limited to non-profit companies (no profits to shareholders) with wage ceilings.)
3. Open, modular contracting
Another approach we’ve been exploring, particularly in relation to procurement of buildings, is to shift away from the practice of bundling everything together (R&D, finance, delivery, risk etc) into a massive contractural black box, and instead doing the exact opposite: breaking everything you want to buy into small, separate, predictable, transparent modules, each of which is documented for all to see, and can be procured from any (or several) of a range of suppliers at any time.
Let me give an example from our work on WikiHouse. In recent years, if a council wanted to build social housing on a site, they might go to a single contractor to do the whole thing. Of course, there are a limited number of construction firms capable of taking on a task and risk of this scale, so the bids come in high. All the design IP, costings, task data etc is black-boxed, kept by each contractor whose costs are largely based on guesswork. So when the next project comes along, nothing gets much better, cheaper or more predictable. Councils are stuck in groundhog day, re-tendering to the same group of construction firms, and starting every project from scratch.
Digital manufacturing allows us to change this, because it allows construction to be broken into clear, predictable tasks, that almost anyone can do.
So what if, instead of going out to tender, the council were to start by paying an R&D team to develop a customisable house type design, with an IP agreement that allows them to use that design as many times as they please (this might be a open source, or a commercial licence). Every component, every task is predictable and separately documented, all recorded in spreadsheets and assembly manuals that everyone can see. Prospective suppliers (who might be small shop-fitting companies down the road) then provide rules of thumb for the costing of each task (eg ‘£200 per day’ or ‘£21 per sheet of plywood’). These rules of thumb are their ‘bid’ that can be used to cost a task. If the customer offers them the job, they don’t get to change their bid, they only get to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. If they do accept, they are obliged to measure as they go and feed–back into the design and documentation, so the predictability of cost and timescales gets better and better over time, for everyone to see. This also means that instead of being stuck with the same old large suppliers, the council can grow an open network of SMEs capable of delivering the same product or service, and switch between them at any time. Continuous competition, continuous collaboration and continuous agile innovation.
This approach has the additional benefit that, by taking on additional risk (and then using feedback to reduce it) the customer also regains control over design quality. The contractors’ incentive to drive-down quality has been politely removed from the equation.
This approach may not work for everything, but I suspect it could be applied to a huge variety of procurement tasks. It could certainly be used in the case of the COVID-19 PPE.
(Update: After I posted this, Richard Pope shared with me this post on pioneering work done by 18F on Modular Contracting. It’s very much worth a read.)
5. Flat pricing
The final idea — which certainly won’t apply to every situation, but might apply to some — involves flipping the game of bidding itself upside-down.
The traditional contracting mindset is that you invite bids on price from different suppliers in order to ‘let the market find the price point’. You then pick one (often the second-to-lowest bidder). The trouble with this, as we have already explored, is that it creates a strong incentive for suppliers to bid low to win the job, then immediately engage in a race-to-the-bottom on quality or resilience. In the end, the money saved by getting suppliers to bid-low often turns out to be a false saving.
But in many situations it may increasingly become possible to use shared data to predict roughly what the price point should be, or what the customer can viably afford for it to be. So what if, instead of getting suppliers to bid on price, we were to fix the price across all potential suppliers, but then invite them to outbid each other on quality or performance. In effect, to trigger a race to the top on quality and other social or economic outcomes. It’s a way of extending an open invitation to all possible suppliers, including new entrants, and saying ‘here’s the money that’s on offer, what could you do with it’?
Of course, if no suppliers step forward, then the price would have to be raised until several companies offer their services. | https://alastairparvin.medium.com/after-the-crisis-lets-fix-procurement-428c598fb558 | ['Alastair Parvin'] | 2020-05-12 09:53:34.728000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Politics', 'Covid-19', 'Design', 'Systems Thinking'] |
Fixed Requirements — An Oxymoron? | One issue with the software industry is the belief we know exactly what to build. It is wrong to assume that we’ve all these cool technologies with us and anything that we develop will be perfect.
I’ve reminded this many times to myself, the team including the non-software/engineering people I interact with: we will never know what the users want. Sometimes we have a feel or an intuition for it. And it can be right depending on your proximity to the users. And the way to confirm it is through conversations with the users and keeping a close watch on how they use our software.
A simple migration tool
A few years back, I was working with a customer to deliver a product to migrate documents from one system to another. Our customer has a workflow management system targeting specific domains. They needed a tool to migrate documents from different systems [like Sharepoint, Documentum etc.]. The migration makes their onboarding process much faster.
The tool description is simple — copy documents from one system to another. The document also has metadata such as who created it, multiple versions, when and who created those versions, etc. The tool needs to save these metadata too by mapping them appropriately.
We built a prototype to help the sales team to demo the idea to their customers. And it worked. The customers got the idea quickly enough.
However, to make the tool ready for deployment, we needed more testing and polish, such as:
Making sure the tool is intuitive enough to understand which documents had synced successfully and which ones had failed — along with the reasons for failures
Handling customisations of these document management systems in a smooth manner
Handling varying numbers of documents
Handling varying document sizes
Handling intermittent internet connectivity
We didn’t follow a good enough system to convert the prototype to a “useable” software. We also failed to convey to the stakeholders why the conversion involves effort. The rest of the post is a retrospective of the same and what could have done differently.
Three Cs
User stories, as per Extreme Programming, have three critical elements, called the three Cs:
Card — A 1 or 2 lines line “definition” of what needs to be implemented
— A 1 or 2 lines line “definition” of what needs to be implemented Conversation — The conversation among the stakeholders and the team around what to build in a way that both parties share their opinions, thoughts and feelings. The stronger the collaboration and communication, the better the quality of the product.
— The conversation among the stakeholders and the team around what to build in a way that both parties share their opinions, thoughts and feelings. The stronger the collaboration and communication, the better the quality of the product. Confirmation — Arrive at an agreement among the stakeholders and the team about what needs to build.
We didn’t follow a disciplined way for all the three Cs. Even though we had stories, i.e. the “card”, our conversations and confirmation were not good enough. That resulted in a less than optimal quality of the final product.
It happened because of various reasons such as the lack of spending enough time with the end users. The stakeholders followed different processes for building software. We weren’t persistent enough to influence them.
Domain Knowledge
Related to above, the conversations should help us in arriving at Ubiquitous Language and also for gaining domain knowledge because interactions with the expert users help to improve the understanding of the space.
Respecting the logs
As Dan North mentioned in his talk Ops and Operability, A log is an append-only, read-only, user interface. It should allow one to answer the below:
What happened?
Who is impacted?
How do we fix it?
We learned this the hard way :)
Exceptions need to be exceptions
Somewhat related to logging, we need to respect exceptions too. The exceptions should be handled whenever appropriate without losing any relevant information. Many know how much it pains when you have a block like this:
We didn’t have the above one. But there were cases which needed to be considered as exceptions but were not. E.g., handling non-2XX response code when making API calls.
What worked well
In spite of the above issues, certain things we did, worked in our favour.
TDD
We had enough coverage for the tool which helped us in multiple ways:
Better extensibility. We could add integrations with other document management systems without too much difficulty
We had to refactor the code numerous times. One time we had to move from one persistence layer to another. And we could do that because of the abstraction layer and decent test coverage.
Hardly any regression issues. We were confident when the tests passed.
Continuous Delivery
We never waited for fixed length iterations to deliver what we accomplished. It meant we were slicing features in small chunks.
We deployed the tool in-house. We were given a test instance, simulating the production setup. Continuously delivering to this environment helped actual users to test it against actual data.
Communication with actual users
We have been conversing with the end users. We could see them using the product, struggling with it and watch their emotions. That is when we realised that we need to improve our domain knowledge. Ideally, we should have had two levels of communication:
One during the development to understand and confirm what should be built by communicating through quick prototypes for different scenarios
Then feedback session with the working software to confirm that what we envisioned with the prototype is “usable” enough
We took baby steps to implement the above changes and improve. We had our constraints which made it difficult to bring in the changes. These constraints were mainly due to the contracts and working agreement among different parties. That is a candidate for another post :)
Finally!!!
Over a period, we brought in some rhythm and discipline to improve the situation. Finally, we delivered it decently, and the users were happy. The users got the value. Even though it took a lot longer for us to reach that stage, we felt good that we delivered something that is useful.
Of course, we could have reached there a lot earlier, if we had the right focus and persistence.
The fundamental reason for failure was the lack of knowledge about users and to accept that the requirement evolves over a period. Rarely we build the same software multiple times. There will be similarities in, but it will have differences too.
And this is what differentiates software industry from any other engineering streams like construction. I recommend you to watch Deliberate Discovery by Dan North which explains how to design this discovery process.
It is the responsibility of every software professionals to understand the feelings of our users and everything that we do should be to optimise for delivering value for them. Any time the focus shifts to something else, the quality of the product dips.
Those who have watched how users use the software you built, agree that there is no better learning experience than the same. Others who haven’t experienced it, I highly recommend setting apart time, even though it can be embarrassing. | https://medium.com/continuousdelivery/fixed-requirements-an-oxymoron-c2a9ebf7b272 | [] | 2019-03-18 04:31:00.709000+00:00 | ['Customer Collaboration', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Agile', 'Lean Software Development'] |
Dataset deduplication using spark’s MLlib | A deduplication process is always important for companies with a huge amount of data. From one thing, deduplication minimizes the amount of space required to store business data and will bring a lower infrastructure cost and better performance for our pipelines. From another thing, reducing the number of duplicates will reduce the pipelines complexity and will increase the time to business via continuing integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Sometimes a deduplication process consists of a simple text to text matching and you can simply choose either a CRC32-Checksum or an MD5 matching. However, there are some situations where the dataset rows differ only for some small text discrepancies on some of the columns, even though they represent the same entity. Thus, this article shows an entities recognition and linking process using two different spark approaches over a specific dataset of products collected by scrapping e-commerce websites will be used.
The entire code and process describe following could be found here:
The general process could be found on this trait (… Yes, I use scala for data science !!!):
package com.sample.utils
import org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame
trait OperationsHelper {
def ds: DataFrame
def preparedDataSet()(df: DataFrame): DataFrame
def deduplicateDataSet()(df: DataFrame): DataFrame
def resultsDataFrame()(df: DataFrame): DataFrame
}
As you will see the idea behind this helper will be having a functional pipe from where easily chain dataframe transforms could be called.
Preprocessing Products Data
Techniques to reduce dimensionality are widely used by the data science community to get a smaller set of features to analyze and obtain better performance while training and evaluating models. The PCA method allows dimensionality reduction while keeping those features that describe a large amount of the information. Consequently, this pre-processing stage follows these steps:
Data Cleaning: Cleaning the data to have a common scale. For the case of the products, dataset consists of a simple text cleaning for cases, white spaces, encoding, and symbols.
Cleaning the data to have a common scale. For the case of the products, dataset consists of a simple text cleaning for cases, white spaces, encoding, and symbols. Features Selection: Using the PCA technic a set of features are selected.(“titleChunk”, “contentChunk”, “color”, “ productType”)
The content found on the features above contains most of the discrepancies for candidate duplicate products.
1 — Approach A: Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH)
Locality-sensitive hashing is a technic used for entity resolution, then records that represent the same entity will be found. The spark MLlib has a custom LSH implementation used here to find duplicates as follow:
First, hashes are generated using a concatenation of selected features (PC above). For a real-world example hashes for each feature could be generated. However, for this example and in order to get results faster a simple concatenated column is used.
Then, this column is used for generating LSH vectors as follow:
— A tokenizer generates the list of words for a record using a words stopper.
— A CountVectorizerModel creates the vectors with hashes and buckets (similar hashes) for the LSH algorithm.
val pccTokenizer = new Tokenizer()
.setInputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ConcatComments)
.setOutputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnWordsArray)
val wordsArrayDF = pccTokenizer.transform(df)
val remover = new StopWordsRemover()
.setCaseSensitive(false)
.setStopWords(OperationsHelperLSH.stopWords)
.setInputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnWordsArray)
.setOutputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFilteredWordsArray)
val wordsFiltered = remover.transform(wordsArrayDF)
val validateEmptyVector = udf({ v: Vector => v.numNonzeros > 0 }, DataTypes.BooleanType) val vectorModeler: CountVectorizerModel = new CountVectorizer()
.setInputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFilteredWordsArray)
.setOutputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFeaturesArray)
.setVocabSize(VocabularySHLSize)
.setMinDF(10)
.fit(wordsFiltered)
val vectorizedProductsDF = vectorModeler.transform(wordsFiltered)
.filter(validateEmptyVector(col(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFeaturesArray)))
.select(col(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ConcatComments),
col(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnUniqueId),
col(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFilteredWordsArray),
col(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFeaturesArray))
(vectorizedProductsDF, vectorModeler)
Class: com.sample.products.OperationsHelperLSH.scala
In order to finish the training step, a MinHashLSHModel is used to train the products data, generating the final buckets of similar products.
Finally, using KNN similar hashes for a category could be found.
/**
* Uses the dataset to train the model.
*
*/
def deduplicateDataSet(df: DataFrame): (DataFrame, MinHashLSHModel) = {
val minLshConfig = new MinHashLSH().setNumHashTables(hashesNumber)
.setInputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.ColumnFeaturesArray)
.setOutputCol(OperationsHelperLSH.hashValuesColumn)
val lshModel = minLshConfig.fit(df)
(lshModel.transform(df), lshModel)
}
/**
* Applies KNN to find similar records.
*
*/
def filterResults(df: DataFrame,
vectorModeler: CountVectorizerModel,
lshModel: MinHashLSHModel,
categoryQuery: (String, String)
): DataFrame = {
val key = Vectors.sparse(VocabularySHLSize,
Seq((vectorModeler.vocabulary.indexOf(categoryQuery._1), 1.0),
(vectorModeler.vocabulary.indexOf(categoryQuery._2), 1.0)))
lshModel.approxNearestNeighbors(df, key, nearNeighboursNumber).toDF() }
To run an example: Go to the test com.sample.processor.products.ProcessorProductsLshTest and you will see a complete flow running.
Input Params:
category → color = ‘negro’ and productType = ‘tdi’.
nearNeighboursNumber → 4
hashesNumber → 3 (More hashes more precision but more computing cost).
3 products with almost the same text for selected features.
Results Analysis:
Pros:
Accurate: If a complete set of fields (representing the string) is used, the correct value for hashes and neighbors could detect almost all the repeated values.
Faster: compared with other ML strategies as Term-frequency-inverse, etc.
Cons :
A cluster with good resources is needed.
Needs a process for data cleaning.
2 — Approach B: Fuzzy Matching with Levenshtein + Spark Windows:
Levenshtein is an algorithm used for strings fuzzy matching. Basically, this method measures the difference between two strings. Furthermore, the spark windows functions allow dataset analytics function in a concise way, avoiding multiple groupBy and Join operations. Thus, this method defines a 2-level window to group similar data and then applies Levenshtein to values in the same windows to discover duplicates. The process is described here:
First of all, a set of records described as non-fuzzy is selected. The list contains columns that represent categories and are were free of errors most of the times in the PCA process: (“productType”, “city”, “country”, “region”, “year”).
This window represents the general windows hash for the analysis.
Secondly, a second window to discover quite similar records is applied. This list represents records that are neither part from the fuzzy list (PCA) nor from the non-fuzzy list: (“doors”, “fuel”, “make”, “mileage”, “model”, “color”, “price”)
Note: the “date” field helps to order and get only the most recent.
Then, For each group applies levenshtein (string difference only in the second window) over the concatenated most fuzzy fields from PCA results: (“titleChunk”, “contentChunk”).
As you can see an MD5 representation of the columns is used instead of each String to have better performance:
keyhash: MD5 for the category column set. The picture below shows many products within the same category.
hashDiff: MD5 hash that represents the non-fuzzy set. The picture below shows products within the same category but with a different description (> levenshteinThreshold) and also those with a small levenshtein (< levenshteinThreshold) difference having the same hashDiff.
Finally, the values with the same hashes (both) and rank only change the row_num. Filtering row_num == 1 is possible to get the deduplicate Data set.
/**
* Applies windows functions and Levenshtein to group similar categories.
*
*/
override def deduplicateDataSet()(df: DataFrame): DataFrame = {
df
.withColumn(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ColumnRank, dense_rank().over(windowProductKeyHash))
.withColumn(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ColumnHashWithDiff,
concat(col(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ColumnCategoryFieldsHash),
when(levenshtein(
first(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ConcatComments).over(windowProductsCategoryRank),
col(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ConcatComments)) >= levenshteinThreshold, lit("1"))
.otherwise(lit(""))))
.withColumn(OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.ColumnRowNum, row_number().over(windowProductsCategoryRank))
}
Class: com.sample.products.OperationsHelperWindowStrategy.scala
To run an example: Go to the test com.sample.processor.products.ProcessorProductsWindowsTest and you will see a complete flow running.
Input Params: levenshteinThreshold → 6
Results:
2 groups example with almost exact values.
The results are deduplicated after filtering rn == 1. This removes > 1/3 of the data in the sample dataset.
Results Analysis:
Pros:
More control in the spark partitioner and functions.
Cons :
Could have much more false positives.
Final Conclusion
A deduplication process depends always on the company needs and the amount of data to analyze. This article describes two different strategies. As a result, Levenshtein with windows functions is good enough for small dimensionality problems; otherwise, LSH is always the best option | https://towardsdatascience.com/deduplication-using-sparks-mllib-4a08f65e5ab9 | ['Ronald Ángel'] | 2019-08-09 06:45:46.976000+00:00 | ['Scala', 'Spark', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Deduplication'] |
How do you improve your self control and develop good habits? | A life lived in normality will always lead to peace of mind, happiness in heart and harmony in society. Self-control is not something that you need to exercise in every little aspect of your life, for this will only irritate your mind.
It is certainly advisable to strictly maintain self-control in areas where crossing the limits could eventually harm you and / or those who you greatly love in life. If self-control is not exercised in such areas, going ahead you could develop strong bad habits which may become hard to change then. And these habits throw us backwards in life, they make us feel so low and demoralised and we experience such confusion and despondency, that we begin to lose the will and confidence to ever get back to a normal life.
However, it is never too late to exercise self-control and develop good habits in life!
Practicing good, moral and noble habits has a great impact of a positive influence on our life as well as others’ lives too. Therefore, it is very important that we always remain in favour of exercising good self-control and developing good habits in life.
How do we do that?
· Start off by assessing in which areas do you really and desperately ought to improve. These are the areas that matter the most in life and where you would like to take a great leap towards the positive.
· Good habits stem from your strong inner intent. Therefore, once you have determined the area(s), maintain a strong positive inner intent to improve your self-control in these areas and develop the corresponding good habits that you yearn for. A positive mind-set can change anything for the better.
· There may be times when your mind tells you ‘It is no good, it will never happen in my case’, but you remain firm. However, know that your inner intent is an extremely powerful tool that will take you through. If your inner intent is virtuous, it will yield good results for sure; just that you ought to remain sincere and hold onto your intent, come what may.
· The days you fumble or stumble, acknowledge what caused it and decide to be more careful and aware the next time.
· Learn from your mistakes, forgive yourself, reset where-ever you have lost control and march ahead. There is no need to punish or beat yourself up over it. Never let yourself get wrapped up in guilt, anger or frustration, because these emotions will only drag you down and further impede your progress.
· Be persistent and committed to your purpose. Importantly, never give up nor lose hope.
· Get inspired, draw strength and rejoice whenever you have exercised self-discipline and succeeded in it.
Thus, you will slowly begin to improve your self-control and start developing good habits.
And if you still have difficulty in figuring out where to begin this practice from, try out the following:
· Have a pure and deep inner intent to not hurt any living being to the slightest extent through your mind, speech and body. This is one of the best habits that you could develop in life and it will go a long, long way in returning good dividends to you. The value of not hurting any living being is a fundamental teaching given by the enlightened beings. Every morning, as you wake up, atleast five times ask for strength in order to go by your intent.
· Be charitable and help those who are less fortunate. Your help doesn’t necessarily have to be in monetary terms, it could be in the form of donating food to the hungry or even supplying medicines to the sick. Physically supporting those who are very ill or giving time and a patient hearing to the old and weary in your neighbourhood are noble habits that one must cherish.
· Live your life morally, honestly and with integrity. This in itself is a great service to society.
· Have a higher purpose in life. This will make you progress religiously and spiritually and soar to greater heights. | https://medium.com/@dadabhagwan/how-do-you-improve-your-self-control-and-develop-good-habits-356d5168151a | ['Dada Bhagwan'] | 2020-12-01 05:32:31.168000+00:00 | ['Goal Setting', 'Self Improvement', 'Habits', 'Life Lessons', 'Self-awareness'] |
Ideation Methods: SCAMPER | Lets explore step by step
Substitute
You should think about substituting part(s) of your product or process for something else. Guiding questions:
What can I substitute so as to make an improvement?
How can I substitute the place, time, materials or people?
Can I substitute one part for another or change any parts?
Can I replace someone involved?
Can I change the rules?
Should I change the name?
Can I use other ingredients or materials?
Can I use other processes or procedures?
Can I change its shape, colour, roughness, sound or smell?
Can I use this idea for other projects?
Can I change my feelings or attitude towards it?
Combine
The overall question to think about here is: How can I combine two or more parts of my product, problem, or process so as to achieve a different product, problem, or process to enhance synergy? Guiding questions:
What ideas, materials, features, processes, people, products, or components can I combine?
Can I combine or merge this or that with other objects?
What can I combine so as to maximize the number of uses?
What can I combine in order to lower the costs of production?
Which materials could I combine?
Where can I build synergy?
Which are the best elements I can bring together so as to achieve a particular result?
Adapt
Think about which parts of the product or process you could adapt so as to solve your problem. Guiding questions:
Which part of the product could I change?
Could I change the characteristics of a component?
Can I seek inspiration in other products or processes, but in a different context?
Does history offer any solutions?
Which ideas could I adapt, copy, or borrow from other people’s products?
What processes should I adapt?
Can I adapt the context or target group?
What can I adapt in this or that way in order to make this result?
Modify (Also Magnify and Minify)
Overall, the question you need to focus on is this: What can I modify or put more or less emphasis on in my product, problem, or process? Can I change the item in some way? Can I change meaning, colour, motion, sound, smell, form, or shape? Alternatively, distort the product in an unusual way. Guiding questions:
What can I magnify or make larger?
What can I tone down or delete?
Could I exaggerate or overstate buttons, colours, size…?
Could I grow the target group?
What can be made higher, bigger, or stronger?
Can I increase its speed or frequency?
Can I add extra features?
How can I add extra value?
What can you remove or make smaller, condensed, lower, shorter or lighter — or streamline, split up or understate?
What can I change in this way or that way so as to achieve such and such a result?
Put to Another Use
The overall question to consider here is this: How can I put the thing to other uses? What are new ways to use the product or service? Can I reach out to other users if I modify the product? Is there another market for the product? It’s time to work out how you may be able to put your current product or idea to other uses and purposes. Guiding questions:
What else can it be used for?
How would a child use it? — an older person?
How would people with different disabilities use it?
Which other target group could benefit from this product?
What other kind of user would need or want my product?
Who or what else may be able to use it?
Can it be used by people other than those it was originally intended for?
Are there new ways to use it in its current shape or form?
Would there be other possible uses if I were to modify the product?
How can I reuse something in a certain way by doing what to it?
Eliminate
Your overall question to consider here is: What can I eliminate or simplify in my product, design, or service? Guiding questions:
What can I remove without altering its function?
Can I reduce time or components?
What would happen if I removed a component or part of it?
Can I reduce effort?
Can I cut costs?
How can I simplify it?
What’s non-essential or unnecessary?
Can I eliminate the rules?
Can I make it smaller?
Can I split my product into different parts?
I can eliminate what by doing what?
Rearrange
Overall, you have to ask yourself this question: How can I change, reorder, or reverse the product or problem? What would I do if I had to do this process in reverse? Guiding questions: | https://medium.com/@specialsaket/ideation-methods-scamper-42dac67d8a45 | ['Saket Chandra Prasad'] | 2019-10-17 17:57:05.248000+00:00 | ['UX Research', 'Scamper', 'Process', 'Brainstorm', 'Ideation'] |
An anti-climactic rock ’n’ roll adventure. | Now Playing: “Have You Forgotten?” by Red House Painters
In the summer of 1997, I was 17 years old, coming off a tumultuous Junior year of high school. I’d always been strange, with a dark side, but I plummeted that year for a hundred reasons. I can’t say it was any one single thing that derailed me, just a series of unfortunate events. Kind of like the Titanic. Ok, that’s an exaggeration. But my spirit had sunk.
Music always comforted me, and I was listening to a lot of it. Because of the new friend I’d made the summer before — The Internet — I’d been exposed to a ton of stuff that year and my (musical) horizons had expanded wildly. One of the bands I learned about through a mix-tape acquired via The Internet was Red House Painters. “Medicine Bottle” was the first song of theirs I’d known, but the first album I acquired for myself was Songs for a Blue Guitar. I loved several of those blue songs, and the gentle nostalgia of “Have You Forgotten?” haunts me to this day.
That July, I visited San Francisco on a “family” trip, i.e. me, my mom and one of her best friends. We stayed at the Grovesnor House in Nob Hill, just across from the Fairmont and close to Grace Cathedral. We did all of the tourist stuff — Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39 and Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley.
It was Thursday, July 10, that we were in Berkeley. I already had an extensive music collection — cassettes, CD’s and records — and couldn’t wait to unearth more elusive gems at Amoeba Music. I’m pretty sure my mom and her friend left me there while they walked around and did other things on Telegraph. I couldn’t tell you what records I purchased that day, but one thing I did notice on the way out was a flyer for a Red House Painters show happening the very next night in the city. Oh my gosh. This was perfect! What better way to remember a trip to such an artistically and culturally exciting place like SF than going to a live show and getting to see a favorite band that would never play in my hometown?! All I had to do was convince my mom to let me go. In that strange city. By myself. At the tender age of 17.
It was happening at The (world famous) Fillmore on Friday, July 11. I had heard about The Fillmore. A lot of the stand up comedy specials I watched at the time on HBO were filmed there. The Sunshine Club and Tarnation were opening. It didn’t take too much persuasion to talk my mom into it — she agreed to drop me off right in front at the curb and pick me up in the same spot at 12:30am sharp. That sounded reasonable. It said on the flyer that the show started at 9pm. Even with two opening acts, by my calculation they would probably be on by 11pm. (I didn’t understand how shows in San Francisco actually worked, especially on Friday nights.)
When the night came, I was thrilled and terrified. At 17, I definitely felt ready to be out in the world. In fact, the thought of being completely on my own in an unfamiliar city, anonymous in the middle of a crowd was everything to me. A dream. I could be whoever I wanted for a night. I donned my favorite grey, second-hand blazer, which always felt so sophisticated. To me a blazer said, “I’m not your average teenager. I think about things. I’m an old soul.”
I got there at 9pm, just as the flyer said. Upon entering The Fillmore and ascending the stairs, a charming female usher asked if I would be consuming any alcoholic beverages, that she would need to see my ID. Wow. I know she was just doing her job, but that made me feel pretty fucking cool. Instead of revealing that I was only 17, I just said, “Not tonight, thank you!”
I don’t think I’d ever even been to a show by myself at home. Walking into the main floor of The Fillmore alone was surreal. It seemed pitch black when I stepped in but my eyes quickly adjusted. I noticed that it was set up more like a lounge, with tables and chairs around the perimeter. Apparently I was early. Now I know better. At the time, I took everything at face value and assumed that 9pm is exactly when everything would start. But there really wasn’t anyone there yet, and I easily found a seat at a table.
That is where I remained, planted like a lump of concrete for the next three and a half hours. I was scared stiff as the place started to fill up, self-conscious because it was all so strange and just awkward. I had become quite the loner already at 17, but once the main floor swelled with chatty friend-groups, smoking cigarettes and laughing, I felt out of place all by myself. But I was there for the music, so I stayed the course, trying to look deep and mysterious as I people watched and sipped Shirley Temples (there was a two-drink minimum at the tables).
10pm: The first band finally takes the stage. The Sunshine Club. Eh.
11pm: The second band takes the stage. Tarnation. I remember them (and Paula Frazer) distinctly.
It was getting close to midnight, and the main act hadn’t come on yet. I was anxious, to say the least. My mom would be out on the curb at exactly 12:30am, and we didn’t have cell phones yet. Even if we had, there was no way she was going to wait up for me and let me be out until 2am under these circumstances. I knew I was absolutely going to have to leave, and I was going to miss my band.
About 15 minutes after midnight Mark Kozelek appeared on stage. According to a setlist archive, the first song was “Uncle Joe”. I didn’t know that one. By the second song, that was it. I had to go. I descended the stairs with my head down, trying to hold back the tears. I was so disappointed but could do nothing about it. At least I’d tried and caught a glimpse. I’d always have the souvenir ticket stub. My mom felt bad, of course, but definitely was not going to let me stay. We were on vacation and still had plans the next day.
They didn’t play “Have You Forgotten?” that night according to the setlist, but I did miss two of my other favorites — “Song for a Blue Guitar” and “Medicine Bottle”.
I can’t deny that, as frustrated as I was, there was a great sense of relief as I got back inside the familiar car and saw my mom. I couldn’t help but be grateful that she had let me loose at all in a strange city, all by myself at only 17.
Within ten years, I would be living in the Bay, deeply immersed in the music scene. I’ve since been to several shows at The Fillmore, both by myself and with companions. Friends of mine have played there, in fact, and I’ve met and interviewed some of my favorite artists backstage (including Dean Wareham).
Every time I walk in, I remember the first time. | https://medium.com/now-playing-by-betty-blue/have-you-forgotten-26bd272d19d1 | ['Betty Blue'] | 2021-01-13 07:40:46.015000+00:00 | ['San Francisco', 'Music Memoir', 'Memoir', 'Coming Of Age'] |
Executing in console mode with Katalon Studio | One of the advantages of Katalon Studio is that you can execute automation test without launching Katalon Studio IDE by using command line mode execution. Users use this function to run execution batch files or planning jobs in CI Tools. This easy-to-follow guide will walk you through steps on how to execute test cases using the command prompt.
Read more helpful tutorials about Katalon Studio Test Execution
Execute Katalon in CMD
1. Open the command prompt and navigate to the Katalon Studio folder that contains katalon.exe file. For example:
2. Enter the following syntax to execute automation test:
katalon {option1} {option2} ... {optionN}
This command includes:
For example:
C:
cd C:\Katalon\4.7
katalon -runMode=console -projectPath="C:\Project\Sample Project.prj" -reportFolder="Reports" -reportFileName="report" -retry=0 -testSuitePath="Test Suites/TS_RegressionTest" -browserType="Chrome"
3. Press Enter to start execution.
Katalon Command Line options
Here’s the list of options supported in the “katalon” command:
Command Builder
Instead of typing directly in the command prompt, you can quickly generate commands to execute test suites by following the steps below:
1. Click on Build CMD from the main toolbar.
2. The Generate Command for Console Mode dialog is displayed as below. Configure your options as needed.
This dialog has the following options:
3. Click on Generate Command after you complete the configuration. The command is generated and shown in a dialog as below
4. You can Copy to Clipboard and paste it into the command prompt for execution.
Use console.properties file
Instead of specifying command settings for each execution, you can place all settings in the console.properties and use this file in the command prompt. This file can be generated using the same Command Builder as above.
1. Generate console.properties file using Command Builder
2. The console.properties file will be generated to your preferred location. You can open and update the parameters manually as needed. For example:
3. Run the console.properties file in the console mode using the following syntax:
katalon -propertiesFile="<absolute path to console.properties file>" -runMode=console
For example:
katalon -propertiesFile="D:\Katalon\Demo_Project\console.properties" -runMode=console
4. You can add extra Katalon command options to this command. Any option already defined in the console.properties file will be overwritten by the one declared on the command line. katalon -propertiesFile="<absolute path to console.properties file" -runMode=console -browserType=IE
This command runs the test on IE instead of Chrome as browserType is set to IE.
Read more helpful tutorials about Katalon Studio Test Execution
For further reference, visit Top 10 Automation Testing Tools Review.
Source: Executing in console mode | https://medium.com/katalon-studio/executing-in-console-mode-with-katalon-studio-7603dd49f81e | ['Katalon Studio'] | 2020-07-01 08:41:26.737000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Continuous Integration', 'Software Development', 'Web Development', 'Testing'] |
The Five Latest Trends In Legal Tech | For a long time, the word “legal tech” seemed an oxymoron. 20 years ago, if you asked a lawyer “how do you organize your documents”, the answer was mostly likely “folders”, if they didn’t mean literal paper folders . However, the world has transformed. As technology starts to creep into the legal world, we have seen hundreds of startups mushrooming in legal tech, many of whom raised tens or hundreds of millions. According to this article, in 2019 alone, $1.9B was invested in legal tech. What are the trends in legal tech?
The front runners are e-discovery related tools. Smart lawyers or engineers (or lawyer turned engineers) quickly found the previous discovery model where you have paralegals or young lawyers read and tag documents and emails are antiquated. By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, the e-discovery space is the first to innovate and transform and where AI and ML are the most prominent. Second to follow suit are contract review and legal research tools. Although the law is complex, they are, after all, words that follow certain patterns. Using AL and ML, instead of having lawyers reading through each provision, now you can easily research, gather and tag relevant contract languages and relevant legal documents using SaaS. As a matter of fact, our friend at Appinventiv cited e-discovery and contract review as the most used applications in legal tech. CLM and practice management tools are on the rise. The most modern law firms and the in-house departments of modern technologies companies also discovered there are better ways to work. You can store your contracts, tag them into different categories and even negotiate contracts with other parties using online tools. You can take in clients, start marketing campaigns, manage the bills and track lawyer’s billable hours using more sophisticated software. Smart people have found niche areas to innovate. Not long ago, I received a parking ticket and decided to try DoNotPay. It worked like a charm. Granted, I paid them $30 for a year of service, but that’s better than paying the $75 ticket. More importantly, I didn’t lift a finger, other than uploading the few pictures I took at the time. I didn’t have to fill out a paper form, find a stamp and mail in my contest. There are apps that can help you notorize online. You can draft your wills and fight your delayed flight claims online. As the millennials continue to live a digital life on phones and computers, there are legal related tasks where now you can just text, chat and get resolutions. The legal marketplace still needs disruption. While there are a few forward thinking websites where you can post your legal questions or try to find lawyers online, the space remains to be confusing, complicated and daunting. Why pick out a lawyer from a 100+drop down menu or write up a lengthy summary? Worse yet, you still need to wait to hear back, and have to talk on the phone! Who wants that? Why not just chat online and get connected to the right lawyers online, immediately! The legal marketplace still needs to innovate with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data. This is where we come in. We are the unique combination of legal tech and AI.
Leveraging CBinsight, we created this map of the most funded legal tech companies. Although we are still a very early stage startup, we are hoping to be the center stage of legal tech, soon!
Disclaimer: the below is our categorization and understanding of the legal tech landscape. This is our personal, subjective opinion. This is not a representation of any warranty or claim for scientific research methodology. | https://medium.com/@sleegal/the-five-latest-trends-in-legal-tech-cea012c760ea | ['Sleegal Ai'] | 2020-10-25 01:45:27.622000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Legal', 'Tech', 'Legaltech'] |
Every day need to be Earth Day! | Earth has been into existence much before we humans devised days or calendar. Had Earth had the option , it would have declated the day humans arrived on it as “Human Day” and similarly a day for the each specie whenever it arrived on earth, It kind of sounds funny that we late-comers on Earth have dedicated just 1 day from our annual calendar for mother Earth.
This Earth Day, the least we can all do is URL (Unlearn, Relearn & Learn) that Earth is not land or soil only but it stands for the whole planet. It is we who occupy minuscule space & came here on Earth for minuscule time, when compared to the timescale of Earth.
What we need to be understand is that Earth comprises of 5 elements (Air, Water, Fire, Space & Earth) and that too in a very harmonious rhythm. Any imbalance in the composition/ratio of these 5 elements causes havoc on Earth directly or indirectly. All creatures on this earth are also made up of these 5 elements only and thus each creature has to work towards maintaining balance of these 5 elements within their own body as well as in their surroundings. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried via various programs like UNEP or Paris climate deal or UNSDG, the balance of these 5 elements is completely out-of-sync on the whole planet and so in our bodies. As a consequence world is struggling to find clean water for all, struggling to have enough fertile land to grow food for all, struggling to find solutions ro defer the global warming, struggling to find means to pull-back excess carbon from atmosphere, struggling to clean-up the mess in space etc! The current pandemic as well as all other climate-change related issues are for sure an outcome of this imbalance only.
If we have learnt something from ongoing pandemic then we can atleast make two commitments/promise to ourselves i.e.
I would do whatever it takes to: Being AirWise, Being WaterWise, Being FireWise, Being SpaceWise & Being SoilWise I will celebrate Earth Day everyday
They sound so simple & maybe too less also but as such its no easy feat. The solution for all the mess Earth is in, doesn’t lie with one single nation or one international body. Every creature on Earth is abiding by the rules of the game, except humans. Now is the time, we humans also proclaim that each and every human on Earth would not do any foul play and will abide by all rules of the nature! Happy Earth Day! | https://medium.com/@sunil.pachar/every-day-need-to-be-earth-day-a97364775426 | ['Sunil Pachar'] | 2020-04-23 13:50:25.173000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Earth Day', 'Esg', 'Earth', 'Climate Action'] |
What goes into an MSCI ESG rating? | June 25th, 2020
This week I want to give a brief overview of what goes into an MSCI ESG rating. All of this comes from public material from MSCI (you can see more detail here).
MSCI is one of the many companies currently offering ESG ratings for public companies. According to MSCI, “MSCI ESG Ratings aim to measure a company’s resilience to long-term, financially relevant ESG risks.” They rate companies on an AAA to CCC scale depending on what exposure they have to ESG risks and how they manage them (AAA and AA are considered leaders; A, BBB, and BB are considered average performers; B and CCC are considered laggards). The expectation is that a company that has significant exposure to a given risk will match that level of exposure with the right management approach.
MSCI as of June 2020 rates 8,500 companies globally, and more than 680,000 securities (both equities and fixed income). On the equity side, MSCI primarily rates issuers included in their MSCI indices. On the fixed income side, the starting point is the Barclays Global Aggregates Indices. It’s important to note MSCI doesn’t conduct solicited ratings.
As for data and processing, they use both artificial intelligence (including AI natural language processing) on public information, as well as ESG analysts to process all data. In sum, they rate and analyze 37 key ESG issues selected annually for each industry. They go through company reports, media reports, and specialized datasets to feed their models.
As of today, the 37 Key ESG Issues they are measuring, include:
Environment: Carbon Emissions, Product Carbon Footprint, Financing Environmental Impact, Climate Change Vulnerability, Water Stress, Biodiversity & Land Use, Raw Material Sourcing, Toxic Emissions & Waste Packaging, Material & Waste, Electronic Waste, Opportunities in Clean Tech, Opportunities in Green Building, Opp’s in Renewable Energy.
Social: Labor Management, Health & Safety, Human Capital Development, Supply Chain Labor Standards, Product Safety & Quality, Chemical Safety, Financial Product Safety, Privacy & Data Security, Responsible Investment, Health & Demographic Risk, Controversial Sourcing, Access to Communications, Access to Finance, Access to Health Care, Opp’s in Nutrition & Health.
Governance Board, Pay, Ownership, Accounting, Business Ethics, Anti-Competitive Practices, Tax Transparency, Corruption & Instability, Financial System Instability.
Depending on the industry, the weights given to each one of these factors will change (as exposure to these factors varies from industry to industry). So, scores are given to individual items, then weighted for pillar scores (one for E, one for S, one for G), and then weighted for the final score. That score is normalized by industry, and then a rating is provided.
The ratings we could find for Mexican corporates on MSCI’s website are:
· America Movil — B rating, laggard in the telecommunication services industry
· ASUR — BBB rating, average in the transportation infrastructure industry.
· Banorte — A rating, average in the banks industry
· Becle — B rating, laggard in the beverages industry
· FUNO — B rating, laggard in the real estate management & services industry
· GAP — B rating, laggard in the transportation infrastructure industry
· Gruma — BB rating, average in the food products industry
· Grupo Mexico — CCC rating, laggard in the metals and mining — non-precious metals industry.
· IENOVA — AA rating, leader in the utilities industry
· Inbursa — BB rating, average in the banks industry
· Kimber — BBB rating, average in the household & personal products industry
· KOF — A rating, average in the beverages industry
· Megacable — CCC rating, laggard in the media & entertainment industry
· Orbia — CCC rating, laggard in the commodity chemicals industry
· Peñoles — BB rating, average in the metals & mining — precious metals industry
· PINFRA — B rating, laggard in the transportation infrastructure industry
· Walmex — A rating, average in the retail — food & staples industry
There is much more analysis into what an MSCI ESG rating entails, and as we’ve said in the past, we recommend really knowing what goes into any rating before using it for an ESG integration process. However, MSCI ESG Research has become one of the most widespread rating agencies in the ESG world, and we believe it is worth knowing at least the basics about it.
Marimar
Partner, Miranda ESG | https://medium.com/@marimartorreblanca/what-goes-into-an-msci-esg-rating-31e373817cf3 | ['Marimar Torreblanca'] | 2020-12-04 15:08:48.410000+00:00 | ['Msci', 'Consulting', 'Esg Investing', 'Esg', 'Finance'] |
What an AI-Driven Tax Policy Would Look Like? | What an AI-Driven Tax Policy Would Look Like?
Discover what Reinforcement Learning can bring to Tax Policy Design
Inequality is one of the greatest social and economic concerns of our time. It has dramatically increased over the last decades and has become deeply entrenched in our societies.
Today, the figures are alarming: according to the OECD, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about 9x that of the poorest 10% across the OECD. This is 7x higher than 25 years ago! The situation is even more worrying in the United State where the richest 1 percent concentrate more on national wealth and income than in any country.
Faced with this situation, what actions should countries be taking to ensure a fair redistribution of wealth?
As Amitabh Behar, the CEO of Oxfam India, puts it:
“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies”.
Therefore, despite the critics, tax policy is an indispensable tool for governments. It enables them to redistribute wealth through the services and the benefits they provide and thus reduce inequality.
And yet, finding the optimal tax policy can be very challenging. Why?
The main reason is that it has found a comprise of two opposing objectives: equality and productivity. In order words, tax policies must improve equality without undermining people's willingness to work, which would lead to lower productivity.
Even with these two objectives in mind, it is still hard to determine the most effective tax policy, as it is difficult to carry out real-life experiments. Therefore, it is common to rely on economic theory. But the latter often makes simplifying assumptions that are hard to validate.
So, how can Artificial Intelligence be used for tax policy design?
AI and more precisely the field of Reinforcement Learning provides tools to simulate an artificial economy and observe and explore quantitatively the consequences of different policy scenarios.
It consists of modeling multiple agents. These agents are immersed in a certain environment, which is here a simulated economy with a specific tax policy. For every action they choose to take, they receive rewards or penalties. After many iterations, they eventually learn the optimal decision-making strategy that will allow them to maximize the rewards accumulated over time.
By observing the behaviors of these agents, it is possible to quantitative measure the efficiency of the tax policy both in terms of agents’ productivity and overall equality.
How can it be implemented in practice?
This is exactly what you will discover in my article.
To go beyond the conceptual framework, I have simulated a simple world in which economic actors interact with each other according to the fiscal constraints set by a social planner. Both the economic actors and the government learn and adapt progressively. They do not use any economic modeling and rely only on observational data.
In this article, I will describe the methodology I used, and I will share with you my key findings.
You will learn:
How to build an economic environment where multiple agents interact under market competitive pressures and dynamics?
where multiple agents interact under market competitive pressures and dynamics? How to measure the effectiveness of a tax policy ?
? What an AI-driven tax policy looks like and what improvement does it bring over common tax systems?
This work is inspired by the research paper The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies written by S. Zheng & al. in April 2020[1].
Environment Description
From the Agents’ Perspective
The environment consists of a 2-dimensional grid word where agents are free to move, collect resources (stone or wood), and build houses at each step of an episode. They can also trade the resources they gather for a pre-defined price. | https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-driven-tax-policy-what-it-would-look-like-6d73bfee313 | ['Lina Faik'] | 2020-12-28 09:53:12.793000+00:00 | ['Reinforcement Learning', 'Data Science', 'Taxes', 'Economics', 'Editors Pick'] |
The Importance of Data Privacy | Data privacy is a frontline issue for consumers and businesses alike these days. For the consumer, data privacy means protecting their personal information and financial health. One bad decision with a simple online purchase can lead to disastrous results for an individual or family, sometimes resulting in damaged credit or even worse — bankruptcy. The stakes are just as high for businesses when it comes to securing information. Customer expectations are shifting around data privacy, for one. Year over year, more and more consumers are stating that they must fully trust a company with their personally identifiable information (PII) before doing business with them. As such, organizations are stepping up to ensure data protection and privacy for their customer base in efforts to drive conversions, increase revenue, and maintain the integrity of their brand. Data privacy involves an additional, crucial layer- compliance. Compliance is especially important in highly regulated industries.
Staying in Compliance
Companies in regulated sectors not only need to consider data privacy from the consumer’s perspective but also need to address compliance demands required by their industries. Companies working in Finance or Healthcare, for example, are held to a much higher bar when it comes to data security and privacy and must undergo intense audits to ensure that they are in compliance.
In the financial space, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act governs the protection of any personal data in the hands of a bank or financial institution, even defining who within an organization can access customer data and when. In the Healthcare industry, the HIPAA regulation defines parameters for how organizations handle data related to a patient’s health status or how a patient provisions or pays for their healthcare services. HIPAA contains both the security and privacy layers, defining how data should be secured and how it is collected and disclosed, respectively.
Spotlight on Data Privacy for Consumers
Given the increasing relevance of data security, what are some ways in which businesses in any space can ensure data privacy and compliance? As more businesses continue the transition into cloud technology, the right solution or service can help mitigate the risk of current and future industry compliance requirements. The CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) is a recently enacted piece of legislation that allows consumers to increase control of how their personal information is being accessed, used — and misused. Other states are following this lead, such as Washington, Virginia, Florida, and a few others. This legislation is very similar to the EU’s GDPR, in that it includes the right to be forgotten.
This limits companies from storing personal consumer information beyond necessity. In a right to be forgotten scenario, companies must be able to locate a specific piece of information across multiple repositories in files that are often enormous in size, and securely delete that segment without affecting the integrity of surrounding content. Research has shown in the past few years since it was enacted that the most difficult GDPR obligation for companies is the fulfillment of the right to be forgotten. This area is something to carefully consider for businesses still reliant on legacy ECM systems that were not designed with the capability to address these risks.
In today’s world of business, data privacy has to remain at the top of the list when it comes to a business’s priorities. What experiences have you had with data privacy at your company? Let us know in the comments below.
Systemware Content Cloud’s capabilities to simplify data protection management include several features to combat security risks, such as static and dynamic data masking and securing content with data encryption and role-based permissions for access control. Read about these capabilities and more ways Systemware can help your organization securely manage information in your free download of:
Systemware Content Cloud is an innovative content services platform that can be seamlessly deployed in external cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, and more. Content Cloud delivers optimized performance in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments, as well as a fully hosted SaaS offering. Systemware is committed to ensuring organizations meet information governance requirements in a manner that optimizes cost and complexity while providing a tailored experience for users. To learn more about Systemware Content Cloud, call to speak directly with a content services expert at 866.533.1514 or visit us on the web at Systemware.com. Explore our Case Studies to see how we have helped organizations in their digital transformation journey, and how we can also help you.
About Systemware: Systemware is a pioneer in enterprise content management, helping organizations for over forty years efficiently capture content from a variety of business systems, find it wherever it is stored, and deliver it in the exact context needed for each business line. Our content services platform, Content Cloud, helps organizations modernize their content management, connect with a range of repositories and systems, automate their processes, personalize their experience, and enable their content for business intelligence. Follow us on Social Media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter) to keep up with all the latest news and product offerings. | https://medium.com/@systemware-inc/the-importance-of-data-privacy-5cef8f106792 | ['Systemware'] | 2021-08-31 19:58:27.728000+00:00 | ['Compliance', 'Content Services Platform', 'Information Governance', 'Ecm', 'Data Privacy'] |
What’s The Secret Essence Behind All Life? | What’s The Secret Essence Behind All Life?
Photo by Manyu Varma on Unsplash
Religions allude to it; spiritual teachers point their finger at the moon. What is the mystery behind life?
The ever-present essence that life springs from, the progressive energy that pushes all things forward, the space of possibility contains the seeds of life.
As you can see in the picture, many rituals play with the elemental. Dancing around the sparks of creation. Embers swirling in the air; a mask calling the spirit into the human form. Specific energy that drives us forward, push us into courage, transcend our pains.
The mystery of life is an exploration into surrender and embrace of the unknown.
“Let’s keep our minds open and explore these diverse experiences and perspectives. No matter whether we’ve already travelled in the unknown or this is our first time, let’s learn from the inhabitants of this place — the “poets and inventors of fables,” ~ Steven D’Souza & Diana Renner ~ Not Knowing — The art of turning uncertainty into opportunity ~
Not knowing is counter-intuitive to the modern western narrative, we’re so obsessed with knowing; rational, logical, numbers, goals.
Not knowing is assumed to be the opposite of rational control; ignorance and foolishness. These things aren’t desirable; it’s no wonder that we live in a materialistic market-driven society where consumerism is idolized as a ‘patriotic’ act.
“I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong. I asked wisdom and God gave me problems to learn to solve. I asked for prosperity and God gave me a brain and brawn to work. I asked for courage And God gave me dangers to overcome. I asked for love and God gave me people to help. I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities. I received nothing I wanted. I received everything I needed.” ~ Hazrat Inaayat Khan ~
Not knowing can be a beautiful and connecting experience. It is surrendering to the present moment, connecting to the spirits in us that want to express. Desire is an unmet need, exploring that and choosing to respond in the right way will evolve you. Without this exploration into our inner world, we remain shackled to the subconscious need to play any and every desire out on situations and people.
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.” ~ Eckhart Tolle ~
By partnering with your desires, you can become a part of the universe; unfolding in the way that it must. You are progressing over time; achieving harmony and balance with the natural order.
It’s no surprise that people crave connection. It’s wired into us, our body-mind works in that way. You can pretend that you don’t need anyone, don’t need anything. All you are doing is using the suppress function of your nature. Those needs will come back into your life, and they’ll come back in a mutated unhealthier version of the original; run through all the shit that is programmed into your shame and suppression circuits.
The shadow will come out of you if you do this.
The inner world matches the outer world.
Our inner thoughts and beliefs create the environment and reality that we exist in because it’s our drives and actions that define our physical world.
Lynne Twist, in ‘The Soul Of Money’, talks about the three beliefs that underlie western capitalism:
There’s not enough More is better That’s just the way it is
These thoughts define every aspect of who we are because they are the underlying beliefs that permeate and colour all our other thoughts and actions.
Starting the reshape these underlying beliefs gives you the knowledge that you are enough, that quality over quantity brings fulfilment, that things can be different if we are the change that we want to see in our lives.
Gay Hendricks talks about the upper limit in his book ‘The Big Leap’, this is a ceiling in our body-mind where we don’t feel comfortable transcending.
The brain is wired for comfort, not change. It’s wired to repeat the familiar because that’s what allowed us to survive when we were foraging in the wild. It allowed us to avoid dangerous spots with predators or other tribes who might kill us. Interacting with people outside of our tribes was uncommon. We are wired to be suspicious of people we don’t understand. Hence racism, and national borders.
“We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.” ~ Pema Chödrön ~
Luckily, in the modern times, we have learned how to harness our heart’s ability to connect and communicate love; the brain’s ability to regulate our system so it can function efficiently, and our gut’s intuitive knowing.
It is possible to make almost anything familiar. You have to get intimate with uncertainty, mystery, courage, surrender and embracing life’s magic.
You see, expanding your paradigm needs to be an active process. It can’t happen in the comfort zone.
I joined a reiki circle last night. It was for the younger members of the reiki community; that’s generally considered around the age of thirty. Reiki encourages sitting in the mystery because you call in universal energy for the highest possible good; you don’t have to know what that means, you have to trust that it will be.
We talked about the concept in the reiki precepts ‘just for today’. We talked about the difference between ‘now’ and ‘today’. How today seems to denote the passing of a complete cycle. Today includes the passing of the darkness and the light. Yinyang. A complete and harmonious passing.
We also talked about how the day encourages us not to shame the feelings that we feel, because each feeling is natural and human. Yet, thinking about the day, we set our sights on not holding onto those emotions.
So you can see the precepts encourage you to align to a big picture that is connected and spiritual, living in kindness, gratitude and love. Do your work honestly.
Align with the idea of connecting to something bigger, a vital part of the mystery of life. All religions have this aspect, what is described as healthy shame in Healing the Shame that Binds You.
Knowing we are but a part of a bigger wheel seems to promote the cultivating, nurturing and nourishing aspects of our nature. All our neuroses fall away, our problems don’t feel as big and overarching.
Rituals seem to be connecting to this through a process; dissolving into elementals; dancing loose the egoic strongholds; convening with the divine and infinite energy; feeling timeless; feeling eternal, becoming a divine presence within your body, connecting more fully to your body, learning its expression and harnessing its gifts.
“ When we utilize these techniques of relinquishing the negative and surrendering resistance to the positive, sooner or later, we come into a sudden, comprehensive awareness of our true dimension. Once this has been experienced, it will never be forgotten. The world will never intimidate us again as it once did.” ~ David R. Hawkins ~ Letting Go ~
When you surrender to life, you tend to find that answers are waiting for you beneath the anxiety and scarcity that you exist in. There is universal wisdom; people who have lived the same situation that you have differently; possibilities to evolve your practice and thrive.
Giving your fears to burn in the fire and our spirit to be reborn in the embers. Understanding the nature of water and how that resonates with the feeling states. Understanding the eternal nature of our connectedness to the earth. The decisiveness of metal, and how it cuts through pain, how nutrients in those metals, found deep within the earth. Nourish our bodies, the fluidity of air.
Our relationship with the divine tells us that we need others; we need something bigger than ourselves.
How do you connect to the mystery of life? | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/whats-the-secret-essence-behind-all-life-9af829ce99a2 | ['Peter Middleton'] | 2020-12-27 15:20:37.650000+00:00 | ['Mystery', 'Self Improvement', 'Growth', 'Self', 'Spirituality'] |
İyi Yazmak Üzerine - Part I | Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.
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Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/t%C3%BCrkiye/i%CC%87yi-yazmak-%C3%BCzerine-part-i-c039af8c2750 | ['Safa Kutlu'] | 2017-10-21 13:57:39.973000+00:00 | ['Türkçe Yayın', 'Yazmak', 'Edebiyat', 'Türkçe', 'William Zinsser'] |
Not So Random Software #25 — Powerful questions | Hello there and welcome back to Not So Random Software!
This week I am thinking about how to deliver powerful questions to others and yourself. Questions might feel intimidating or pointless, I get it; at the end of the day we are trying to get things done, and challenging every single decision can be detrimental to our productivity. On the other hand, many breakthroughs started by asking incredibly simple, but fundamental questions. Isaac Newton noticed an apple fall and simply asked himself: “If the apple falls, does the moon also fall?”. This question put Newton on the road to all his future accomplishments. So here is my reminder for keeping up with the exercise, even when you are experiencing temporary diminishing returns.
I hope you enjoy this selection of links!
A random article or paper
Discovering first principles by using Socratic questioning
Socrates believed that the disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables the scholar/student to examine ideas and be able to determine the validity of those ideas. The link above puts such practice in the context of discovering first principles, i.e. irreducible truths you can use to explain reality. Here is what Socrates used to ask:
Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)
Challenging assumptions (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?)
Looking for evidence (How can I back this up? What are the sources?)
Considering alternative perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)
Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?)
Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)
A random video or podcast
InfoQ presentation on Wardley Maps: Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones
Maps are a simple and effective tool to question reality. By positioning elements into a few dimensions you can challenge your model of reality and ask powerful questions about how the territory looks like and what practical decision you can do. In this presentation Simon Wardley presents his famous maps to analyse the technology and business territory.
A random book
What if: Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions
If you are following this newsletter you probably appreciate the value of randomness a bit. Jumping into something completely random every now and then is a very engaging way to build excitement. The same goes for questions! Asking random questions like the ones in this book might lead to unexpected (and certainly funny) insights.
A random tool
Stimulus Reflex — Alternative to Phoenix live view to create realtime, reactive apps in Rails with no Javascript.
You have TODO web app and you want to mark an item as done without refreshing the page. Let’s think this through; this involves hooking a javascript handler to the element, make an AJAX request, update the database, and finally update the DOM accordingly on success.
But why we landed into this solution? Using a map analogy, we might have had a mental map of the browser technology territory that lead us to design such a solution. But when was the last time you challenged your assumptions?
Stimulus Reflex does exactly that; by using the well-known Stimulus model together with web sockets, you can create reactive apps in Rails with almost zero custom Javascript.
A random line of code
class AddIndexToAsksActive < ActiveRecord::Migration
disable_ddl_transaction! def change
add_index :asks, :active, algorithm: :concurrently
end
end
If you need to add an index to a big scary Postgres table, you don’t need to be! By default, Postgres locks writes (but not reads) to a table while creating an index on it, which means your index creation might take hours. By using the CONCURRENTLY option for CREATE INDEX you can try your luck and build one hoping it’s not going to be invalidated by a write.
A random quote | https://medium.com/@motta.lrd/not-so-random-software-25-powerful-questions-ce2f2ef5da54 | ['Alfredo Motta'] | 2020-05-05 07:50:35.033000+00:00 | ['Retrospective', 'Questions', 'Stimulusjs', 'Actioncable', 'Maps'] |
UN75: Multilateralism is the essence of intercultural dialogue | By Olga Algayerova. Published 21 November 2020 on GS News.
Dvořák’s expression would make a generous tribute to our diplomatic system: so many parts, each with its own role.
We stand at a critical moment. More than ever, the great challenges we face — like Covid-19, the climate crisis, unsustainable resource use, and inequalities — cannot be faced by one country alone.
The 75th anniversary of the United Nations is the time to reflect on how we can best work together to address them. Because the challenges we face are complex, our collective response must be multifaceted. For this reason, political cooperation, scientific and technical work must be fostered alongside cultural exchange.
Indeed, this recognition is imprinted in the very DNA of our modern multilateral system. Signed in 1945 among the still smouldering ashes of the Second World War, Article I of the UN Charter — whose entry into force 75 years ago we celebrate in 2020 — states the objective “to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character”.
In fact, the “intellectual and moral solidarity” of humankind was deemed so essential to build lasting peace that in the very same year, the signature of the UNESCO Constitution established a dedicated organisation within the fledgling United Nations system, its purpose being “to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science and culture”.
And in turn, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948, affirmed that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community” and “to enjoy the arts”.
Over the decades, much has changed, but the intergovernmental apparatus set up back then has weathered the storms, thanks also to the mutually reinforcing foundations of political cooperation and intercultural understanding.
Indeed, three-quarters of a century of the United Nations project has taught us a great deal about common endeavour. Today, at a time of rising nationalism and tensions, we may look to lessons from history.
The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) was established in 1947 to promote pan-European economic integration. After the horrors of the Second World War, this was deemed “essential to the maintenance of peace”. This mandate is as relevant today as ever.
Since then, we have provided a platform for countries to come together to address common challenges. Our experience shows that difference does not exclude dialogue. For instance, at the height of the Cold War, countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain negotiated and adopted a unique regional treaty to tackle air pollution. Forty years on, our Air Convention continues to save lives across the region, avoiding some 600,000 premature deaths each year in Europe alone.
With this, I wish to stress that multilateralism itself is the essence of intercultural dialogue. In fact, the diversity of cultural identity is a vital resource for our intergovernmental work. It permeates and enriches even the most technical discussions. It also profoundly shapes the physical environment in which we operate.
The crux of our work at UNECE is to forge common standards, legal and regulatory tools, that, for instance, make vehicles safer, and make cross-border trade cheaper and more efficient. In recent years, we have had the privilege to work with artists, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, and creators to promote sustainability in the fashion industry. We are now working on developing traceability tools for the sector.
For over 70 years, these processes have been inseparable from our setting: the historic Palais des Nations in Geneva — a city shaped by the greatest concentration of multilateral engagement anywhere on earth.
Over the decades, cultural diplomacy has become a fundamental feature of this unique global hub for human rights, humanitarian affairs, environmental protection and development. It is increasingly used by member states not only as a vehicle for soft power, but also to promote United Nations values of dialogue, democracy, solidarity, human rights, and freedom of expression.
Over 40 exhibitions are organized each year, along with dozens of concerts, performances, film screenings and other cultural events, showcasing traditions and contemporary creativity from all around the world. Paintings, sculptures and traditional crafts offered by governments to the international community are as much a feature of this unique setting as the conference rooms and translation booths.
In 2005 the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations initiative was introduced with the mission of addressing persistent cross-cultural tensions and divides. In 1998 the UN established the Messenger of Peace programme, mobilising prominent artists from around the world.
In this context, I had the honour of opening a Silk Road concert a few years ago, organised by the UN Alliance of Civilizations. That concert beautifully brought to life the tapestry of cultures woven over centuries across the Eurasian continent. And just last month, I joined the ambassador of the Republic of Moldova to inaugurate an exhibition of exquisite traditional textile craftsmanship, celebrating — quite literally — the intertwined fibres of our region’s rich cultural heritage.
Fostering exchange, understanding and connectivity between nations offers great potential to drive progress across the sustainable development goals — our global roadmap to build the future we want for 2030. In our ever more connected world, we need creativity, fresh ideas and broad engagement in multilateral dialogue. At UNECE we are acting on this conviction: our first Forum of Mayors held in October was an important step in this direction, where leading architect Lord Foster shared an inspiring vision for green and resilient cities after the Covid-19 crisis.
An inclusive approach to regional and global cooperation is the vital energy we require — to inform our collective efforts now, and to tackle the great challenges ahead. This has been at the heart of the UN75 dialogue, a unique global conversation to shape our shared future.
Now we must put this message into action. To all governments across Europe, North America, the Caucasus and Central Asia, to all stakeholders, and to all citizens of our region: let us build on the foundations of mutual understanding, cooperation and intercultural exchange to carry our United Nations forward. We need your engagement more than ever.
Olga Algayerova is the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). Before her appointment in 2017, she served as permanent representative of Slovakia to the International Organizations in Vienna, Austria, for five years. She also held previous roles as president of the Slovak Millennium Development Goals and state secretary at the Slovakian ministry of foreign affairs. | https://medium.com/geneva-solutions/un75-multilateralism-is-the-essence-of-intercultural-dialogue-dec004860a1 | ['Gs News'] | 2020-12-01 12:03:58.673000+00:00 | ['International Relations', 'International Geneva', 'United Nations', 'Culture', 'Multilateralism'] |
The Gaping Hole in Our Family Bucket List | As a family of world travelers, we’re constantly seeking out “firsts” of all types.
First time eating a fresh baguette from our village bakery in France. ✅
First time standing feet away from mountain gorillas in Uganda. ✅
First time lighting water candles and watching them float off into the night in Vietnam ✅
Along the way, it’s easy to forget that these “firsts” are pretty ridiculous when compared to the world around us.
An afternoon at the beach (photo by the author)
Case in point, take the image above. To the casual observer, this photo could be any Vietnamese family enjoying a lunch at the beach with their American friends.
If you could zoom in, you might even see a series of interesting firsts in our diet, including sea snails sea urchin, and a fish head.
What you won’t see is how humbled we felt at the end of our meal, when our good friend Minh came over to thank us for the day’s outing.
“This is my parents’ first time ever to the beach or a restaurant,” he told us. “Before now they always eat at home.”
“Before now” is 73 years for Minh’s parents, known to us simply as Ma and Ba (Mom and Dad). Ma is the beautiful person you can see clearly in this photo:
73 years of toiling day in and out in the rice fields in hopes of making a few dollars a day for your family. ✅
73 years of always eating in because eating out would never make sense. ✅
73 years of no paid beach vacations, or unpaid beach vacations even if you do live within 20 minutes of the coast ✅
It was a stunning reminder that in a world of haves and have-nots, we that have can’t even fathom what it would be like on the opposite threshold.
That’s not an unfortunate life lesson. It’s an unnatural and unnecessary reality.
To those of us that have more, we can do more.
To those of us that seek after firsts, let’s reset our sights.
Instead of chasing bucket lists, let’s look at filling a few buckets besides our own.
If everyone that “has” could do that, we’d all enjoy more “firsts” together.
Here’s my free guide to having a traveler’s mindset even when you’re at home | https://medium.com/mindtrip/the-gaping-hole-in-our-family-bucket-list-18049c1d5100 | ['Dave Smurthwaite'] | 2020-07-03 11:00:41.805000+00:00 | ['Asia', 'Travel', 'Family', 'Poverty', 'World'] |
What it's like to be a 'digital nomad' | By Rachel Hosie
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of digital nomads in the world is on the rise.
Before the pandemic, an estimated 3.4% of US employees worked remotely. That figure has now risen to 42%, according to Stanford University.
And some remote workers are taking advantage of their new lack of physical office ties to travel the world with their laptops. Countries from Barbados to Georgia are capitalizing on this new trend by launching special visas designed for digital nomads, while also ensuring they manage the spread of the coronavirus.
The Barbados Welcome Stamp Visa, for example, requires applicants to fill out an online form, upload their birth certificate, confirm their salary (which must be over $50,000), and pay a $2,000 fee, and they can then come to the island for a year.
In October, I went to Barbados for three weeks (following the necessary safety protocol and quarantining upon arrival) to meet some of the island’s digital nomads and experience the lifestyle. It’s made me want to become a digital nomad myself — here’s why.
Digital nomads told Insider that they feel so lucky to travel that it makes them work harder
Many of the digital nomads I spoke to in Barbados told me they were working harder than they did at home but were happy to do so.
They said that working in a location as desirable as Barbados, there’s a certain need to prove that they’re not just lying around on the beach all day. Many of them also had jobs where they could be somewhat flexible with their hours so many chose to start work early, break later in the day to go to the beach, swim with turtles, or go surfing, then go back to their laptops later on.
“I feel so blessed that I know I need to protect my lifestyle by working hard,” digital nomad in Barbados Cris Torres, 35, from Barcelona, told Insider.
After living the digital nomad life for three weeks, I agreed that it made me work harder. Watching turtles swimming through the turquoise ocean from my makeshift desk in my Airbnb also did wonders for my anxiety and inspired me to write.
It’s a great way to travel without taking all your vacation time
Batt’s Rock Beach, Barbados. Rachel Hosie/Insider
For a lot of people around the world, traveling to Barbados for the weekend isn’t possible. But if you’re already living there, you can be a tourist on Saturdays and Sundays, and do all the things you might pack into a two-week vacation over the course of months.
Of course, this will look different during the coronavirus pandemic. Official government guidance in Barbados currently states that bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues must have hand sanitizer at the entrance, take customers’ temperatures upon arrival, and ensure face masks are worn when walking around.
Some tourist attractions in Barbados had special measures in place when I visited in October due to the pandemic, such as requiring pre-booking or having limited opening hours, but it was still possible to explore and maintain social distancing measures.
You meet like-minded people from around the world
While some digital nomads arrive in their temporary home with a friend or in a small group, it’s very common to travel solo because it gives you the ultimate freedom.
However, Barbados locals told me that despite the influx of remote workers, the island is still a lot quieter than usual due to the lack of tourists during the pandemic.
But I found that people who were there on the Welcome Stamp seemed to be making the most of life in Barbados, experiencing the culture, giving back to the community, and welcoming newcomers into the group.
It’s not all easy — adapting to working across different time-zones can be tricky
Cris Torres has been a digital nomad for years. Cris Torres
For workers in Europe or America, Barbados’ time-zone is very manageable. Some digital nomads I met shifted their workdays earlier or later to tie in with colleagues at home, others were able to work largely 9–5 as long as they got their work done.
If you do have to work the same hours as your colleagues, however, not every location in the world would be viable — unless you’re really dedicated to the lifestyle.
When Torres first started her digital nomad journey in Bali, for example, she ended up having to work from midnight to 6 a.m. some days, but, she told Insider “it was absolutely worth it.”
The coronavirus pandemic has also made the lifestyle more complicated
While in many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has facilitated more workers to become digital nomads, it also means that travel has never been more difficult or dangerous.
Take my trip to Barbados as an example. Arriving on the island was difficult, especially if you’re coming from a high-risk country like the UK or US, which I discovered when I went through the process of taking my two COVID-19 tests, quarantining, and taking my temperature twice a day for two weeks.
Although coronavirus rates in Barbados are low — there have been 305 cases on the island and seven deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins data — and the Minister of Health and Wellness said in November there was no evidence of community spread on the island, the risk certainly isn’t non-existent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently warns that “travel increases your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19.”
Your experience will also look different during this time. For example in Barbados, some restaurants and tourist attractions in the country are only open on certain days of the week, so the current digital nomads there aren’t able to have the same experience they would have done pre-pandemic.
Despite these challenges, chances are that the digital nomad lifestyle will likely remain an option for many when travel restrictions relax in the future.
For more great stories, visit Insider’s homepage. | https://medium.com/insider/i-worked-remotely-in-barbados-for-3-weeks-and-now-i-want-to-become-a-digital-nomad-5984ba19c065 | [] | 2020-12-24 19:02:08.425000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Digital Nomad Lifestyle', 'Barbados', 'Travel', 'Remote Work'] |
You must unlearn what you have learned | In 2015 I was honored to attend the Agile Bootcamp from the Agile Coaching Institute taught by Lyssa Adkins, Michael Spayd, and Michael Hamman. When I returned to the newly formed user experience team I was working with I asked a fatal question of the team:
Do you mind if I sorta take on the mantle of being the Agile Coach for the team?
The rest of the team seemed to think it would be a good idea.
Later I was discussing Tuckman’s stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing) with one of the customers who was on the team. She was fascinated by this concept and could see how it had manifested in her own life. She became even more fascinated when I said:
“I think it’s actually possible to skip the storming bit for the most part. If you facilitate a group discussion with the goal of coming up with the norms. Essentially creating the base culture in which we want to operate.”
“That would be awesome!”
“I would love to facilitate that for us.”
“Let’s make it happen.”
I ran off and started working on my facilitation guide.
Now, if you know me, then you know I don’t plan things. The more I plan, the more the universe seems to like saying, “Really? Let’s see how easily you can adjust.” But, there I was, planning a roughly three hour event (I would probably prefer having it be all day, but I understood where the client was at)…then I got an email from the customer:
“So, how long do you think you’ll need for this?”
“Three hours.”
“How about an hour and a half.”
I thought about it. I had never actually done something like this before, which translated to me thinking I could handle anything. Probably still a bit euphoric from the bootcamp and making progress on an added adventure in my life. So, of course, I replied, “Not preferred, but I think I can make it work. Might need to be a couple of events though.”
The agenda was pretty simple:
< 30 minutes for ice-breakers.
< 30 minutes for what are your passions, dislikes, and hates…as a prioritization game and seeing how we’re similar.
Remaining time focused on actually coming up with the rest of the norms, a constitution for the team…whatever you want to call it.
There would only be about 4 or 5 people in the room; so, chances are we wouldn’t run into communication overload. We agreed on a noon start time to take advantage of lunch. We also agreed to go somewhere we wouldn’t be interrupted…most likely.
I showed up an hour early to set the room up…there were people having a meeting. I had just been shoved a bit.
No matter, I was prepared.
Brought dry erase markers in case the room didn’t have any that worked (totally happens in that building). When I checked to see if the room was empty I scoped out the layout and started thinking how I would adjust the furniture for the activities.
Then I got an email from the customer:
“Hey, just checking in. I invited K to join the party, she’s not technically on our team, but I told her what we were doing and she wanted to join in. I also ordered pizza.”
I replied with a simple, “Okay. Thanks for the heads up.” But inside I was starting to feel very confused and slightly frustrated. This wasn’t a party, per se. It was getting serious work done to help us become a team. The “off-site” was turning into one of those off-sites. (Tuckman might identify this as storming.)
Noon hit and no one was there. The room emptied and I went in. I made space for the pizza on a counter under the presentation monitor. I moved all the chairs on the side of the table nearest the whiteboard so people (mainly me) could easily walk in front of the whiteboard unencumbered.
It started approaching 1230. I emailed the customer:
“Where is everyone? Really eating into our time-box here.”
She replied, “Pizza still hasn’t arrived — I need to be able to pick it up at security. Stuck in a meeting. Can we make the time-box 2 hours? I would like to talk about this other thing.”
I sighed deeply before replying to the email, “Sure.”
My frustration was coming to a head when I decided to close my eyes and take a serious deep breath. If I think the Agile Software Development values and principles are almost universally applicable, then what would that look like?
Back to basics. A Scrum analogy would be most appropriate. | https://medium.com/8fold-pub/you-must-unlearn-what-you-have-learned-6e902384050a | ['Josh Bruce'] | 2017-11-23 13:13:06.580000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Software Development', 'Agile'] |
The Elastos Wallet | For First Time Users:
Wallet Creation:
Create your first wallet according to this guide, using the passphrase for backup.
1. Navigate to the wallet application, click ‘Get Started,’ ‘Next,’ ‘Create ELA Wallet’.
2. Enter your email and click ‘Continue’. Once reviewed, click ‘Confirm’.
3. Click ‘Backup Wallet’, then review the security statement before clicking ‘Next’.
4. Write down the passphrase.
5. Verify the passphrase on the following screen. Click ‘Confirm’ once finished.
6. Review and agree to the Terms of Use.
7. Enter a ‘Spending Password’. This cannot be recovered. Click ‘OK’ when ready.
8. Navigate to the ‘Home’ tab, then follow the steps according to the ‘New Wallet Creation’ guide below.
Generate and View Your address:
1. Click the ‘Receive’ tab. You have now generated a new receive address for your Elastos wallet. You can also generate additional receiving addresses as needed. Click the address to copy it to the clipboard.
2. Click the ‘Me’ tab.
3. Click ‘Personal Wallet’.
4. Click ‘More Options’.
5. Click ‘Wallet Addresses’ to see all wallet addresses including both those that have been used and those that have not.
New Wallet Creation and Wallet Backup
Create a New Wallet:
1. Click the ‘Home’ tab.
2. Click the ‘+’ button on the upper-right corner of the wallet to enter the ‘Add Wallet’ page.
3. Click ‘New Personal Wallet,’ and fill in the wallet name.
4. Click ‘Create New Wallet’.
Backup a Wallet:
Method 1: Backup using a passphrase
1. Click ‘Me’ tab.
2. Click the wallet name you created.
3. Click ‘Backup’ to begin the backup process.
4. Write down the passphrase when prompted.
5. Verify the passphrase has been backed up on the following screen.
Method 2: Backup using an exported wallet file
1. Click ‘Me’ tab.
2. Click the wallet name you created.
3. Click ‘More Options’.
4. Click ‘Export the Wallet’.
5. Set the wallet file password, and click ‘Download’.
Restore a Backup Wallet:
1. Navigate to the ‘Home’ tab.
2. Click the ‘+’ button on the upper-right corner of the wallet to enter the ‘Add Wallet’ page.
3. Click ‘Import the Wallet.’
Method 1: Use your passphrase to import the wallet.
Fill in your recovery phrase.
Make sure you add spaces between the words.
Click ‘Import’ to import the wallet.
Method 2: Use your backup wallet file to import the wallet
Click on ‘File/Text’, located on the right side of the page.
Select the backup wallet file.
Input your password.
Click ‘Import’ to import the wallet.
Delete the Wallet:
1. Click ‘Me’ tab.
2. Click the wallet name you created.
3. Click ‘More Options’.
**Please confirm that the wallet file has been safely backed up before continuing.**
4. Click ‘Delete the Wallet’ to delete the wallet.
Receive and Send Funds from the Wallet
Single Signature Wallet Payments
Send Funds:
1. Navigate to the ‘Send’ tab.
2. Write the recipient’s wallet address in the ‘Recipient’ field.
3. Fill in the transfer amount, and click the send button ‘ → ’.
4. Navigate to the ‘Home’ tab.
5. View the ‘Recent Transaction’ column to see that a transfer has been sent. At this moment, the UTXO is frozen.
6. Wait for the transaction to be packed.
7. Click the wallet name to see the most recent transaction record.
Receive Funds:
1. Click the ‘Receive’ tab.
2. If you own more than one wallet, please confirm the wallet shown at the bottom is the one that you want to use to receive money.
3. If you need to use another wallet to receive the money, please click the wallet column, then select the one that you want to use to receive the money.
4. Click your generated address to copy it to the clipboard.
5. Send the address to the recipient.
**You can click “Generate Address” to generate new addresses for different recipients.**
6. Confirm that the sender has completed the transfer.
7. Navigate to the ‘Home’ tab.
8. Check the unpacked payment information in the recent transaction column.
9. Wait for the transaction to be packed.
10. Click the wallet name to see the most recent transaction record.
Transfer Funds to Another Wallet:
1. Click the ‘Send’ tab.
2. Select a target wallet in the ‘Transfer to Wallet’ column.
3. Fill in the transfer amount, and click the pay button ‘ → ’.
4. Wait for transaction to be packed.
5. Navigate to the ‘Home’ tab.
6. Click the wallet name to see the most recent transaction record.
Check Transaction Status
1. Navigate to http://blockchain.elastos.org.
2. Use the recipient’s address to check the transaction status.
IMPORTANT: Please make sure to write down the security passphrase to access your wallet, in case you lose your private key. This is the only address where you will receive ELA tokens. Please refer to “Wallet FAQ” for any additionalvquestions. Please follow each step carefully to ensure the security of your wallet.
Elastos Wallet FAQ
For more information on Elastos:
Join the conversation: Elastos Telegram Community
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elastos_org
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/elastos
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elastosorg | https://medium.com/elastos/the-elastos-wallet-68797064d8dd | ['Elastos Community'] | 2018-03-14 02:12:48.928000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Blockchain Development', 'Blockchain', 'Tutorial', 'Elastos'] |
Top 5 Common Mistakes Students Make While Preparing for Exams | Year after year, the world of the internet stays awash with mistakes that students make while preparing for exams. Several of them are hilarious, and most of them are one-of-a-kind. The majority of them are concerning misinterpretations of certain terms and phrases. Examination blunders, on the other hand, are quite common. These errors may be prevented by taking a few easy measures at the right moment or ahead of time. Learning from mistakes is an unavoidable aspect of learning. However, if you continue to make the same mistake twice, it may be quite discouraging. There are certain frequent mistakes students get into while undertaking examinations.
Following are some of the most common mistakes that students make while preparing for exams:
Not Knowing Your Desired Grades:
How would a student realize which examinations are by far the most crucial to prepare for if they don’t know exactly which grade they require on every one of their final examinations to acquire the marks they desire in their classes? Indeed, in a perfect world, students could study for each and every topic of each subject and receive perfect scores on every one of their tests. However, even though they only have a small window of time to research, it makes perfect sense to allocate more attention to the courses wherein their standardized test rating seems to be more important. It can help a lot since it counts for a higher percentage of their final rating or since they need a decent test score to raise their estimate to their desired rating.
The study from one source:
Most students believe that if they attend the class, visit the professors’ examination review sessions, as well as read the learning material supplied by the instructors, they will become well equipped for the examination. The resources an instructor offers give them a good idea of what they believe is crucial to know for the test because they’re a fine place to begin.
However, simply attending study sessions as well as reading the study material will not be enough to ensure that a pupil will perform well enough on the examination. One must take measures to ensure that they actually comprehend the topic if they really would like to succeed in any examination of any sort.
Start Panicking:
It’s natural to become anxious and panicked when confronted with a qualifying examination, particularly if your immediate instinct is that you won’t be able to address any of the important questions. Breathe deeply and gently count to 10. This will assist you in de-stressing. It may seem self-evident, yet it is critical to calm yourself and answer the exam questions, even if they are super tough.
Even if you’re having trouble, you should really be ready to come up with at least one topic that you could always explain and at least confidently seek to answer. Begin there, and after you’ve completed that particular question, repeat the process. Don’t abandon the examination since you literally cannot think there’s anything more to write about. That won’t get you any points.
Delay Things:
Numerous students have an excessive amount of time to think and laze around. They want to plan and prepare after a while, however, as a consequence of their laziness, distraction quickly sets in. As a consequence, they decided to postpone it even more. They delay things for the following day, the next day, the day after tomorrow, and so on.
Examinations show up unexpectedly. The pressure mounts, the stress mounts, and the adrenaline levels soar. As a consequence, there occurs a great deal of uproar. As a result, never trust the idea of “early the next morning.” Begin now! You would be able to alleviate a lot of stress throughout the days leading up to your tests if you do it this way. In comparison to how it was previously, your efficiency would increase dramatically.
Fail to Prioritize Subjects:
Sitting down and going over all of the documents and notes during a lecture in a type of sequential order is a frequent method to study for tests. In particular, with respect to being such a silent strategic approach of studying, it puts students at danger of having to run out of the time they have to evaluate the latest content and information they discovered, which is almost always emphasized more strongly on the qualifying examination and it can also be perhaps one of the most complicated subjects to comprehend, particularly in courses like calculations, math as well as language groups that significantly raise the difficulties involved all through the academic session. Students are required to learn in terms of priority rather than sequential sequence, focusing the bulk of their energy on the material that would be most useful to them in the future.
Lack of Action Plan:
Evaluate the set of questions as well as the duration of time you get before you begin to write for any test or examination. It will give you an idea of how much time you have for every question. Try to limit yourself to that amount of time for each topic. You may always seem to go around if you already have time to spare up, although it is preferable to tackle each question being asked.
Have you decided what’s more essential and what is really less significant? What should have been the first question to attempt, or what should be the final thing to do? Do you know that how much amount of think you’ll really have to devote to every particular subject and question? These would be the considerations and priorities that must be made prior to starting the process of studying for any exam.
A Final Thing
If you are preparing for any engineering exam and are facing the above-mentioned issues, try to look for the best way out. | https://medium.com/@tehreemalfoy/top-5-common-mistakes-students-make-while-preparing-for-exams-b285b83957b9 | ['Tehreem Fazal'] | 2021-12-10 10:42:45.819000+00:00 | ['Studying', 'Study Abroad', 'Study', 'Photography', 'Apple'] |
My pitch got ripped apart. Here’s what I did next. | We recently got the amazing opportunity to pitch on ThePitch.fm. They’re a podcast that provides entrepreneurs the friendly opportunity to be evaluated by investors after pitching them their company. It has a very strong following and many influential entrepreneurs have participated and listen to their podcast.
I appreciated the candid feedback they gave me on their show and it’s pretty amazing how clearly ThePitch hosts articulated their position without getting overly emotional.
Overall I’m happy with how I pitched Shotput but here are a few mistakes I made that you should avoid:
Pitch lacked cohesion
I pitched Shotput as BOTH an advanced warehouse which means physical infrastructure + basic software & as a producer of advanced logistics algorithms.
Currently, we’re providing warehouse services like pick & pack fulfillment and storing products which puts us in the position to substantially reduce the cost of supply chains long-term.
Our goal is to reduce the cost of direct-to-consumer supply chains — what we call “Production Floor to Customer’s Door” — by 90% in 5 years through the use of advanced software and robotics.
Though from any investor’s (and even your customer’s) perspective, they want to hear the simplest and clearest story i.e. where the company is going, NOT all of the messy details involved in current day-to-day operations.
Emphasize momentum
Ignore your distractions, focus on your strengths, and use that momentum.
Again, we got lost in the weeds with our business and should have spent more time discussing recent momentum. I spent time discussing how we opened a warehouse to manage physical services for our early customers.
Having a warehouse, however, is an important step to learning more and building the correct experience for our customer. The distraction of eventually becoming a strong software business is unrelated to the existing business and needs to be framed contextually.
Additionally, since Shotput had a 6 month set back after my other founders left I should have focused on clarifying the time frame we’ve had to execute.
Building a strong service offering that will evolve as we gain more traction and reducing the costs further will continue improving our growth trajectory.
Real Pitch
Here’s what I should have said instead: Shotput’s main goal is to reduce the cost of direct-to-consumer supply chains by 90% in 5 years. To achieve that goal, we have a warehouse with software which helps our customers precisely understand their cost and control their fulfillment experience.
With larger volume customers, we’re focused on using advanced algorithms to provide richer intelligence such as how to optimize their distribution network and how to lower their overall shipping costs & time.
Over the long term, we expect to develop more software and continue to reduce the costs of fulfillment which will increase our ability to service more customers.
With more volume, we have the opportunity to outsource fulfillment to other providers, but to maximize the customer experience today we need to maintain the warehouses. | https://medium.com/the-chain/mistakes-made-while-pitching-509d356607dc | ['Praful Mathur'] | 2016-07-11 18:03:00.799000+00:00 | ['Pitching', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Investors', 'Tech'] |
Practical Rails Plugins | Hey wow, author copies of my book just showed up yesterday. That’s pretty cool. My side of things has been finished for a few months now, but it’s nice to finally see it in print!
The book, Practical Rails Plugins (Apress 2008), is aimed at the beginning to intermediate Rails developer, featuring a number of recipes for using popular third party plugins in Rails projects. So it’s sort of a recipes book but with a focus on leveraging plugins to accelerate feature development, and on standalone mini-projects rather than code snippets, which I think is much more illustrative for developers who are new to the framework. Topics include video transcoding and asynchronous processing, state machine modeling, payment processing, geocoding, full text search, testing and a whole lot more.
I wrote about 50% of the content, David Berube (author of Practical Ruby Gems and Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails) is responsible for the rest. If you want to pick up a copy, you can order it via Amazon. We also put up a companion site for the book last week, if you wanna check it out. | https://medium.com/zerosum-dot-org/practical-rails-plugins-c8b126c9cc2d | ['Nick Plante'] | 2017-12-03 22:52:31.993000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Publishing', 'Software Development', 'Ruby on Rails'] |
Journal — my life from Print to UX/UI | What is the comfort zone?
Really! I’m afraid to forget how it is in this place.
I’m 39, living in a foreign country for less than three years, learning a new language, adapting to a new culture, making new friends (this include undoing some of them that were made by mistake), trying new kind of food, building a new family just with my husband, no relatives around.
I’m a graphic designer who always loved my work. Not so glad about the direction of my career was going, but still enjoying my work.
When we decided to move, I didn’t think about my career itself; I just wanted to live in a country where the community was more important than “self.” About work, house, the family I agreed with myself to think after. The change became urgent somehow. It took us three years to prepare the move and here we are.
I had had never studied or worked different subjects before but design. The first two years was all about these new approaches (I made a post-graduation in Business Marketing and worked in immigration consultant officer). And I will confess, I have never missed myself so much. How I LOVE graphic design and everything around it. Jezzz. I was dreaming even about listening to the client say: put my logo bigger. (inside joke)
So, I decided to stop everything and started again, again. My husband always supports my ideas, and I don’t know how to thank him enough, otherwise, cooking his favourite foods.
So, after months looking for a job and receiving no answers, even with my resume filled with more than then years with substantial experience in print design. I realized that I was doing everything wrong. The way to get a job in a country is different as their culture. So I started to talk with people to fit myself in “my new world.” Coaches taught me how to write down my resume and behave in interviews. I got my first job but was temporary, and it finished two months later. They called me for more 3 or 4 jobs, but they didn’t have the position available. I spent six months there in the total between comings and goings.
Besides that experience, I understood that to succeed in the city that I have chosen to live; I would need to learn a new skill. One of the people I talked told me to learn UX. I heard about UX before, but I had never get deep in the subject. So, I started to study it. I bought online programs and read everything which pops on my screen. I just finished my first case study, and I have to say: I want more!
To get off just a little bit more from my comfort zone, I decided to write this journal in the language that I’m learning and not comfortable yet, to improve and force myself to think in English while I’m learning and developing my new career.
Next step: find a problem. | https://medium.com/@manuelacamisasca/journal-my-life-from-print-to-ux-ui-b700e461ac72 | ['Manuela Camisasca'] | 2019-01-11 00:13:58.759000+00:00 | ['Journal', 'Case Study', 'Immigration', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Life'] |
Create a web app for your data science project in under an hour | Create a web app for your data science project in under an hour
Photo by Ga on Unsplash
Prefer to watch this? Check out my Streamlit tutorial on YouTube.
Having a portfolio is crucial to land the data science job of your dreams. And as long as you get your hands dirty working with data working with interesting use cases, you will impress your future employer. But you can always go the next mile when it comes to presenting… and make an interactive web app out of the project you built.
Until very recently this required one to learn web development and start complex React or Angular projects but no more!
Streamlit is an amazing tool that makes it extremely easy to build an interactive front-end. It is specially made with data science projects in mind and thus has a lot of useful functionality to show off your projects.
Let’s walk through how to set up a very simple yet very impressive front-end that you can use to show off your project.
If you’re thinking, “But Mısra, I don’t have a project I can build a web app on yet!”, fear not. I have just the thing for you. My Hands-on Data Science course is specifically designed to help you get your first data science project out. In the course, we get hands-on immediately and learn by doing. Go check it out. I promise you will be impressed by how fast you can progress when you put your practical skills to the test and experience working on a real-life project first hand. And then, you can build and be proud of your web app.
Download and install Streamlit
Make sure you have pip installed on your computer. Pip is the package installer for python. Once you have pip, you can go ahead and install streamlit using:
pip install streamlit
You can check that it is installed with:
streamlit hello
Now, create a folder where you will have everything for your front-end in. Inside that folder, create another folder named data, that’s where you will have the data you worked with and a python file called main.py
This is what your folder should look like. Image by Author
Decide on a design
Before we go any further and start creating the front-end I think it’s a good idea to sketch out what you want it to look like. At this point it might be good to know what Streamlit is capable of in terms of layout. Basically by default Streamlit displays things linearly. So everything you want to show goes below the previous thing. And as an addition, you can also have a sidebar. On this sidebar, you can have field to collect input from the suser like sliders, text fields, drop down selections etc.
But with a recent update Streamlit now also lets you divide your content into containers and columns. Containers divide the page into horizontal sections and columns let you divide it into vertical sections. Columns go inside containers but you don’t have to have columns at all. You can just have one column in the middle.
So in the light of this information, here is what I sketched for my app. I am not using the sidebar because I want to be able to use the whole width of the screen and also show 2 column comfortably.
Quick design on paper. Image by Author
Set up main structure of the page
Now it’s time to code! Open your main.py file and import streamlit. And right away create all the horizontal sections I want.
import streamlit as st siteHeader = st.beta_container()
dataExploration = st.beta_container()
newFeatures = st.beta_container()
modelTraining = st.beta_container()
Let’s add some of the text we want. Here is how you write text:
st.text('Hello, welcome to my app!')
Very simple right? And there are a couple of options when it comes to writing headings and titles.
st.title() # corresponds to H1 heading
st.header() # corresponds to H2 heading
st.subheader() # corresponds to H3 heading
This is what my code looks like after I add some text. Note that the ‘with’ divider helps me write code that belong to a certain container inside its limits.
import streamlit as st siteHeader = st.beta_container()
dataExploration = st.beta_container()
newFeatures = st.beta_container()
modelTraining = st.beta_container() with siteHeader:
st.title('Welcome to the Awesome project!')
st.text('In this project I look into ... And I try ... I worked with the dataset from ...') with dataExploration:
st.header('Dataset: Iris flower dataset')
st.text('I found this dataset at... I decided to work with it because ...') with newFeatures:
st.header('New features I came up with')
st.text('Let\'s take a look into the features I generated.') with modelTraining:
st.header('Model training')
st.text('In this section you can select the hyperparameters!')
At this point I want to see what my app looks like. So I open a terminal window and make sure to navigate to the folder where I have my main.py file. Then I run:
streamlit run main.py
#or whatever the name of your python file is (instead of main.py)
The browser window automatically pops up and here is what I see:
Image by Author
That’s a great start! And actually, most of what we’re going to do next is normal Python code. Next up is actually using the data to build the first section. I get my data and put it into the data folder I created inside the folder for this streamlit application.
By the way, when you make changes to your application, you do not need to run streamlit run main.py again. If you have not closed the browser window, you will see the rerun options on the top right of your screen.
Bring in your data
I want to create a visualization for my dataset. And here is simply how to do this.
import pandas as pd. #1 taxi_data = pd.read_csv('data/taxi_data.csv') #2 distribution_pickup = pd.DataFrame(taxi_data['PULocationID'].value_counts()) #3 st.bar_chart(distribution_pickup) #4
#1 import pandas library but put this at the beginning of the file
#2 read the data file
#3 calculate the amount of time each pick-up location ID occurs in the data
#4 display the values in a bar chart
In the next section, you might want to talk about some of the features you came up with. One useful way to show them is to use a list. Streamlit lets use have markdown text. That way you can decide how you want your text to look like. Here is a simple guide on how to edit markdown. https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/
In the new features container, I add the explanations:
st.markdown('* **first feature:** this is the explanation')
st.markdown('* **second feature:** another explanation')
Here is how my app looks now:
Image by Author
Collect user input
In the last section, I want to get some input from the user. I want to show you three different ways to do this:
You can create a slider simply with the function st.slider(). You need to determine the minimum value the slider can take, maximum value the slider can take, the default value the app should start with and the step meaning how much at a time should the slider move. I use it to determine the max_Depth I should use at my machine learning algorithm. And the way to get the input from the user is simply to write a variable equals to the slider function.
max_depth = st.slider ('What should be the max_depth of the model?', min_value=10, max_value=100, value=20, step=10)
Similarly we can have a drop down menu. In streamlit it goes by the name of select box. You need to give it the options to be displayed as a list and the index of the option to be showed by default.
As you can see you can have numerical and non-numerical values in the same list so it’s possible to have options like “All”, “No limit”. We read the selection by the user with the same technique.
number_of_trees = st.selectbox ('How many trees should there be?', options=[100,200,300,'No limit'], index=0)
Lastly, you can also get text input from the user. You need to give the text_inpur function the prompt to show the user. You can choose to include a default value too. I also included a way to show the user their options before they give an input.
st.text('Here is a list of features: ')
st.write(taxi_data.columns)
input_feature = st.text_input ('Which feature would you like to input to the model?', 'PULocationID')
In my original design, I wanted to have 2 columns in the last section. In order to do that, inside the container section I will define two columns.
selection_col, display_col = st.beta_columns(2)
# 2 because I want to create 2 columns.
# You can create more if you want to.
But even though I create the columns, the input prompts still take up the whole width.
Image by Author
In order to put them in one column, we need to assign them to columns. To do this, I change the streamlit identifier “st” with the name of the column I want to assign the component to.
So my code for the last section looks like this:
with modelTraining:
st.header('Model training')
st.text('In this section you can select the hyperparameters!') selection_col, display_col = st.beta_columns(2) max_depth = selection_col.slider('What should be the max_depth of the model?', min_value=10, max_value=100, value=20, step=10) number_of_trees = selection_col.selectbox('How many trees should there be?', options=[100,200,300,'No limit'], index=0) selection_col.text('Here is a list of features: ')
selection_col.write(taxi_data.columns) input_feature = selection_col.text_input('Which feature would you like to input to the model?', 'PULocationID')
And the section looks like this:
Image by Author
Lastly, I want to report the performance of the model trained with the choices of the user. It is just like any other time you train a machine learning model, only the hyper parameters are determined by the user.
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor
from sklearn.metrics import mean_absolute_error regr = RandomForestRegressor(max_depth=max_depth, n_estimators=number_of_trees) #1 X = taxi_data[[input_feature]] #2
y = taxi_data[['trip_distance']] #3 regr.fit(X, y) #4 prediction = regr.predict(y) #5 display_col.subheader('Mean absolute error:') #6 display_col.write(mean_absolute_error(y, prediction)) #7
#1 set up the model with the selected inputs
#2 set the input features again selected by the user
#3 set the output feature
#4 and #5 Fitting the model to the data, getting the predictions. (Ps. I didn’t separate the data into train and test for the ask of keeping the code simple.)
#6 Display an explanation for the metric
#7 Display the calculated metric for the performance of this certain settings
Optimize your app’s run time
One other very nice feature of streamlit is caching. You might not be aware of it when working with small application built on small amounts of data but every time the user changes an input, the whole application runs from the beginning. If your application includes a lot of calculations, works with big amounts of data or does calls to a database to retrieve data, your application will quickly become too slow to interact with.
As a solution, the streamlit team developed “caching”. It is very simple to set up and when you assign a certain piece of code to be cached, the application saves the result of that piece of code and does not re-run it unless the input given directly to that piece of code has changed.
We can do this for reading the data in our case because once it is read, we do not make any changes on the data and we do not need it to be re-read from its source.
All we have to do is to turn the data reading code into a function and decorate it with the cache decorator.
@st.cache
def get_data():
taxi_data = pd.read_csv('data/taxi_data.csv')
return taxi_data
Then we can call this function to load the data to the application.
taxi_data = get_data()
Personalize
Streamlit is designed to put interactive front-ends out there quickly. So that’s why there is not much flexibility when it comes to how the application looks. But there is still something we can do to personalize the application a little bit. All you need to do is to add this little section to your code.
st.markdown( """ """, unsafe_allow_html=True )
And by populating the gap between the quotes with css code, you can personalize your application. What I would recommend especially if you’re going to use multiple columns is to definitely make sure you set the width to be wider, so the application takes up more of the screen and is not crammed to the center of the webpage.
One example is changing the background color:
<style>
.main {
background-color: #FA6B6D;
}
</style>
And that’s it.
This is a very simple app yet it is interactive, looks nice and is ready for sharing with the world. The nicest thing about Streamllit, apart from it being a very easy-to-use tool is that the built-in design is very nice looking. The colors and the layout of the page are well designed. So there is little to no need for spending time on tweaking the design.
Let’s wrap this up here. I will prepare a separate guide on how to deploy and share your Streamlit apps with the world. Stay tuned. | https://towardsdatascience.com/create-a-web-app-for-your-data-science-project-in-under-an-hour-552553236ded | ['Mısra Turp'] | 2021-02-27 19:49:41.921000+00:00 | ['Portfolio', 'Data Science'] |
At My Best: Practices for Optimal Function | When I listen to interviews or read memoirs of people who’ve accomplished their intention, I look for the practices that they believe allowed them to be at their best. In the spirit of reflection, I’ve collected my personal practices, which are actionable steps I can take to be present with life and exemplify my purpose. When I’m feeling tired, down, confused, anxious, frustrated, or helpless, it’s been at least one of these actions that have pulled me back to optimal functioning. When I’ve observed that I’m at my best and feeling focused, grateful, and present, I’ve realized that I’ve been unconsciously doing one or more of these practices as well. They are largely anecdotal, and they are what works for me, but perhaps they can help you too.
In no particular order, here they are:
Journaling About Peaks and Valleys
When scared, anxious, frustrated, or any number of negative emotions, I write down my thoughts. It grants me some distance to see that there’s actually a choice in the emotion (reaction) that I chose to associate with any event in life. I put my thoughts down on paper exactly as I would in a conversation with a friend. “I’m worried about ___________ because ____________.” Also, while feeling elated, victorious, jubilant, or other strong positive emotions, I journal to reflect on why I’m feeling on top of the world. My journal prompt begins with: “I’m feeling victorious because ________________.”
With both the positive and the negative emotions, they’re likely due to the emotions I experience due to my perception of perceived success, failure, or external circumstance. I try to reflect on the fact that it was an internal state (which I can control) that produced the condition that I feel.
Reading Real Life Fiction and Reflection
Although it’s not exclusive to the genre, real-life fiction has the ability to stir up emotion in the strongest ways. A quote from The Shadow of The Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, reads “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” I recently read I Know This Much is True, and it stirred up a lot of frustration with the main character due to his decision making. Upon reflection, I realized I shared many of his thoughts, and perhaps my frustration was with decisions I have made in the past myself.
Food and Nutrition
Recovery
Consistently water, and add some lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, and Celtic or Himalayan salt. I’ve found these combinations to keep me free of headaches and that ultra-drained feeling I sometimes get after very intensive workouts.
Iodine
Eating kombu and wakame seaweed as potent sources of iodine helps me maintain energy.
Potassium
White/yellow/sweet potatoes are actually very high and potassium and do a great job in maintaining a proper electrolyte balance. For me, this means I avoid muscle aches, headaches after working out, and I feel properly hydrated. A lot of people remember to get significant sodium, but potassium intake equally as important. Check out this lists of the top sources of potassium: https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/food-sources-of-potassium.php
Breathing
Wim Hof breathing
I’ve found that taking 10–15 mins to follow Wim Hof’s breathing exercises gives me peaceful energy.
Walking, Breathing Meditation
My version of walking meditation is a great way to get sun and wake up my body in the morning without being too strenuous. My routine is to inhale for eight steps and then exhale for eight steps. Some mornings I struggle with eight steps, and I will drop it down to six or even four if needed. I walk for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes in this manner at a comfortable pace. I expect that it will feel a little less comfortable as the walk goes on, but I do my best to be at ease with it.
Daily Agenda
Every morning (or even at night ideally), I write down the list of things I want to accomplish. I may not accomplish every item on my list that day, but I have a much higher chance if it’s on that list. It gives my brain peace of mind. With nearly 100% observance, I’ve found that even if an item isn’t completed by the end of the first day, it will be completed with 3 at most, so I have patience with myself over uncompleted items.
Community:
I call up an old friend I haven’t spoken to since HS or college. I do my best to ask questions about their life rather than making it a rundown of my own life. I aim to truly listen to what they have to say.
Exercise
I favor consistency over intensity. I put in solid work, but recognize that this isn’t the workout to end all workouts. It’s not the one to get me the six-pack or the body fat percentage that I’m looking for. It’s a part of the process, and probably a smaller put than you put emphasis on. I don’t have to struggle to put effort into a tough workout: I do struggle to put down the phone or video games and hit my bedtime consistently, and the payoff is larger.
Avoid “I Will Be Happy When”
Whenever I can fill in the blank of the statement “I will be happy when ____________”, I know that I’m in trouble. This means that I’ve chosen to desire the perceived circumstances of the future over what I’m experiencing right now. In reality, choosing actions that will bring happiness in the present moment will lead me to my goal in a faster and more effortless manner.
Decision Making
Jump in, go with the thing that scares me, and everything will likely turn out alright. | https://medium.com/@jamil-lawrence/at-my-best-practices-for-optimal-function-8a03102dd733 | ['Jamil Lawrence'] | 2020-12-22 23:40:31.925000+00:00 | ['Optimal Function', 'Best', 'Habits', 'Best Practices', 'Optimization'] |
Is it possible to watch/cast video using Google ChromeCast via iPhone/iPad ?(CnX player) | Yes ! CnX Player comes with an exciting feature through which you can easily enjoy your favorite videos in your iPhone/iPad on a bigger screen like a TV by using Google ChromeCast casting.
Make sure you have subscribed for the Video casting feature from Navigation menu → Upgrade feature.
Please note, the subscription fund supports the cost of our amazing development team and keeps us motivated. We thank you for your support.
Follow the below steps to make video work on big screen using ChromeCast device:
Make sure you have switch on the ChromeCast device and made it connect to your TV.
You will notice ChromeCast icon on top right side of player screen. Tap on that icon and select the device on to which you want to cast video.
As soon as application gets connected to ChromeCast device, splash screen will appear on application and the video will get cast on to your TV.
You can control the playback from the application.
Please check the link below to see all the video codecs supported by Google Chromecast device :
https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media
Facing trouble in casting videos to TV via Chromecast ? | https://medium.com/@cnxplayerapp/is-it-possible-to-watch-cast-video-using-google-chromecast-via-iphone-ipad-cnx-player-1601cbf72a20 | [] | 2019-06-21 12:25:52.132000+00:00 | ['iPad', 'Chromecast', 'Cast', 'iPhone', 'Casting'] |
How to Deflate Your Time Series. We’ll look at what inflation adjustment… | How to Deflate Your Time Series
We’ll look at what inflation adjustment is and why you should deflate your time series. Along the way we’ll get to know the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and how it is calculated.
Inflation adjustment or deflation is the process of removing the effect of price inflation from data. It makes sense to adjust only data that is currency denominated in this way. Examples of such data are weekly wages, the interest rate on your deposits, or the price of a 5 lb bag of Red Delicious apples in Seattle. If you are dealing with a currency denominated time series, deflating it will extinguish the fraction of the up-down movement in it that was a consequence of general inflationary pressure.
Before we get into the ‘How’ of inflation adjustment, let’s look at the effect that inflation adjustment can have.
The time series below represents the average yearly salary of all wage and salary earners in the United States from 1997 to 2017. The data shows a modest average year-to-year growth of roughly 3%.
Source: Wages and salaries by Occupation: Total wage and salary earners (series id: CXU900000LB1203M). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Image by Author)
When you adjust this data for inflation, the graph turns decidedly choppy:
Wages after adjusting for inflation (Image by Author)
What did we do to get this second graph? What we did was to take the Consumer Price Index, specifically the CPI-Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers: All Items 1982=100 published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and we divided the yearly salary data with the CPI value for that year and multiplied the result by 100. For example for 1997, we divided the wage $43615 by the CPI for 1997 which was 157.6 and multiplied the result by 100, to get the inflation adjusted wage (in 1982 Dollars) of 43617/157.6*100 = $27674. This calculation was then repeated for each year to get the second plot shown above.
Here is another plot that illustrates the effects of inflation adjustment.
(Image by Author)
The blue line in the plot shows the percentage change in wages from year to year before deflation, the orange line shows the percentage change in ‘real wages’ after deflation, and the gray line shows the inflation for each year.
For the most part, the changes in the inflation-adjusted wages have tracked the changes in the non-adjusted wages. But in years with low inflation as compared to previous years (e.g. 2009 & 2015), the inflation adjusted wages have risen sharply, while in years where inflation has risen a lot as compared to the previous year (e.g. 2000 , 2008 and 2011), the inflation adjusted wages have taken a nose dive.
Now that we have seen a couple of examples of how inflation adjusted data looks like, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of how inflation adjustment works.
The formula for inflation adjustment
As we have seen, you can adjust for inflation by dividing the data by an appropriate Consumer Price Index and multiplying the result by 100.
Inflation Adjusted Value (Image by Author)
This is an important formula. Let’s tag it as Equation I. We’ll need to use it again soon.
There are two things you should know while using this formula: 1) in the denominator of this formula, it is important to use the correct index — there are usually several indexes that you can choose from, and 2) It is important to know how to interpret the inflation adjusted value. How you interpret this value depends on what data you have and which index you have used to deflate it.
Let’s inspect each one of these points in detail.
Using the correct index
There are usually several kinds of CPI available and you should use the right kind for your category of data. For example the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a large number of price indexes. Following is a sample set:
Data source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Image by Author)
Which index you use depends on what data you wish to deflate and what property of your data you wish to measure. Let me illustrate this point with two examples:
Example 1: Suppose you have a time series for the average yearly apple prices found across all urban areas of United States. If you wish to bring out the core-growth in the price of apples experienced by urban consumers in the US, as compared to the overall inflation experienced by urban consumers, you should use the CPI-All Urban Consumers: U.S. All items, 1982–84=100 or the CPI-All Urban Consumers: U.S. All items, 1967=100 to deflate your apple price data. If you make the mistake of using the very popular CPI-Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers index you will get incorrect results because this index measures the price inflation experienced by only urban wage & salary earners, not by all urban consumers.
Example 2: Say you wish to bring out the core growth in apple prices after cancelling out the effect of only urban food inflation, you should use the index CPI-All Urban Consumers: Food and beverages in U.S. city average, all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted to deflate your data. This will give you a measure of how much dearer or cheaper apples became w.r.t. to other food items only for urban consumers. I’ll describe this particular use of CPI in more detail later.
Now that we have understood the importance of using the correct index and how to use it to get the adjusted values, let’s drill a bit deeper into what the adjusted value is telling us. For this we’ll first need to understand the concept of CPI.
Interpreting the inflation adjusted values
To know how to interpret the deflated values, one must first understand what CPI is and how it is calculated. The technical definition of CPI sounds boring but here it is anyway:
The Consumer Price Index measures the change in the price of a market basket of goods and services consumed by a household.
To really understand what CPI is one must know how to calculate it, and this calculation is best illustrated by an example. So, let’s launch a mini-project to create a shiny new index. We’ll call it CPI Fictitious in Gotham City — All Items, not seasonally adjusted.
Our first task will be to calculate the yearly expenses of a fictional household in, well Gotham City of course!
Image credit: Pexels from Pixabay
We’ll also make a rather daring assumption: we’ll assume that our fictitious household’s consumption perfectly represents the consumption of all households in Gotham City. Armed with this assumption, let’s get down to the task of computing the household’s expenses.
The following table contains the breakup of the household’s yearly expenses among 8 categories measured for two consecutive years:
The market basket of our fictional household (Image by Author)
In this example, the market basket is the collection of goods and services that our fictional household consumes every year. For the fictional household in Gotham, the price of the market basket was $42000 in 2018 and it was $43260 in 2019, an increase of 3% over 2018 which we will attribute to inflation.
Notice that the market basket has been spread across eight categories. These are also some of the categories that the BLS uses while calculating the various kinds of CPIs in the United States.
Now let’s recollect that we want to arrive at is an index and not the absolute dollar cost of the market basket. An index needs a base with which all future values can be easily compared. So we will arbitrarily assume that 2018 is our base year and we’ll set the value of the index in 2018 to 100 points. Let’s bring this out in the name of our index by renaming it to CPI Fictitious in Gotham City— All Items, not seasonally adjusted, 2018=100.
We can now calculate the value of CPI Fictitious in 2019 as follows:
(Image by Author)
Thus, value of index in 2019 = $43260/$42000 * 100 = 103.
What the CPI value of 103 is telling us is that the market basket became 103/100 = 1.03 times more expensive in 2019 for all households in Gotham.
In general:
A simplified version of the formula for calculating the value of the index (Image by Author)
In this article, by time period (or simply period), we normally mean a specific day, week, month, quarter or year.
For instance, if the price of the market basket that our fictional family consumes was found to be $44400 in 2020, $46200 in 2021, $43800 in 2022, and $45240 in 2023, the index takes on the following values in those years:
In 2020, index value = $44400/$42000 * 100 = 105.7143
In 2021, index value = $46200/$42000 * 100 = 110
In 2022, index value = $43800/$42000 * 100 = 104.2857
In 2023, index value = $45240/$42000 * 100 = 107.7143
Following is the resulting table of values:
CPI Fictitious in Gotham City — All Items, not seasonally adjusted, 2018=100 (Image by Author)
Once you have the CPI data, calculating year-to-year inflation is very easy. Here is the formula:
Formula for rate of inflation (Image by Author)
Using this formula, we can see that Gotham City households experienced the following inflation from 2019 to 2023.
Percentage Inflation Year over Year in Gotham City (Image by Author)
Now let’s look at the effect of inflation on just one of the items in the market basket — say a bowl of mulligatawny soup .
During the time frame 2018–2023, suppose mulligatawny soup showed the following price trend:
Price of soup in Gotham from 2018 through 2023 (Image by Author)
Clearly some of the inflation in the price of soup was because of the general inflationary pressure in Gotham’s economy during those years. We saw that Gotham experienced an overall inflation of 3% in 2019. We’ll assume that the cost of mulligatawny soup must have also increased by at least that much in 2019.
Let $X be the cost of soup in 2018. If after 3% inflation the cost became $3.26 in 2019, then $X * 103/100 = $3.26. So the cost of soup in 2018 ought to have been:
$3.26*100/103 = $3.17
So $3.17 is the cost that soup ought to have had in 2018 for it to have cost $3.26 in 2019 after a 3% price rise. Another way of interpreting the value of $3.17 is to say that this is how much soup cost in 2019, but in 2018 dollars.
We know from the table that $3.08 is how much soup cost in 2018 in 2018 dollars. So now we can do an apples-to-apples comparison of two costs: $3.08 and $3.17 because both of them are expressed in 2018 dollars.
We can now calculate the intrinsic inflation in the cost of soup in Gotham in 2019 as follows:
(Image by Author)
Similarly, the price of soup in 2020 can be adjusted to 2018 dollars by dividing it by the amount of inflation that Gotham experienced from 2018 to 2020.
To calculate this inflation amount, recollect equation (III): the formula for inflation. We’ll reproduce it below:
(Image by Author)
We can re-purpose this formula to find the inflation rate in the current time period as compared to the base year (2018). Let’s work through the math:
Calculating the cost of soup in 2018 dollars (Image by Author)
Remember we said we’ll revisit Equation (I)? Here it is again:
(Image by Author)
We can express Equation (IV) in terms of (I) by expressing the denominator of Equation (IV) as follows:
(Image by Author)
Now referring back to Equation I, CPI for 2020 is the index value and CPI for 2018 is always 100 since its the base year. Therefore,
(Image by Author)
Which is the same as what we got before using a different but equivalent formula.
Either way, we now have the cost of soup for both 2019 and 2020 adjusted to the same base i.e. 2018 dollars. Therefore like we did before, let’s compare the real percentage change in the price of soup from 2019 to 2020 after discounting the effect of overall price inflation. This ‘core’ change in price is:
(Image by Author)
We can now state the general formula for calculating the real (intrinsic) change in the price of an item with respect to a CPI of interest:
Formula for intrinsic inflation in an item (Image by Author)
The following table shows the inflation in soup price in Gotham in the years 2019 through 2023 before and after adjusting for overall inflation.
(Image by Author)
That was a healthy dose of math. Let’s take a break and enjoy some soup before ploughing ahead.
Image credit: GeoTrinity CC BY-SA 3.0
Our fictitious CPI example has served us well. So far it showed us how to calculate the index, how to calculate inflation in the index, how to interpret inflation adjusted values and how to calculate the intrinsic growth of an item’s price w.r.t. an appropriate index.
But now, at the risk of deflating the interest (and egos) of all us Batman fans, we must return to reality.
A quick dose of reality
Each year the BLS in the US, (or the corresponding government agency in other countries) interviews thousands of households across different financial strata (low, middle, high income), and different professions, in order to gather data about their spending habits. The result of this exercise is the calculation of dozens of smaller, more focused indexes. These indexes are then aggregated to form several top-level CPIs using a system of weights. The exact calculations can get complicated, but the concept is simple. You want to find out how much money the ‘average’ household spends on goods and services and then index that amount to some arbitrary base year. Then repeat this calculation each month, quarter and year to get a sense for how much more expensive (or cheap) the cost of living has become as compared to the previous time period.
If you are training a model on currency denominated data…
If you are training a model, your training will not fail if you do not deflate your currency denominated data. At the same time, you should consider deflating it because doing so will remove the portion of the ‘signal’ from your data that is due to general inflationary pressure. Along with deflation, you should also consider one or more of other transformations such as the log transformation (which makes the trend linear), seasonal adjustment, and differencing. All these operations will remove the corresponding portions of the signal from your data. What will remain is the residual trend that your training algorithm can now focus on. Plus of course there will be the noise —which, your algorithm will have to learn to ignore!
Happy deflating! | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-what-and-why-of-inflation-adjustment-5eedb496e080 | ['Sachin Date'] | 2020-11-21 15:43:45.971000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Statistics', 'Inflation', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Consumer Price Index'] |
The Key Difference Between Regular Jobs & Entrepreneurship | The Key Difference Between Regular Jobs & Entrepreneurship
Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash
What is the difference between regular jobs and entrepreneurship? This is a question that you will hear frequently. This question will always sound the same, but the answer to it will differ each time. There are hundreds of minor differences between regular jobs and entrepreneurial work that you’ll see people pointing out but today we’re going to talk about the one key difference which sets these two apart from each other: Scaling Of Income.
Have you ever heard about it before? Scaling of income? Let me explain this entire process.
Putting In The Hard Work In Regular Jobs
If you have ever worked a regular job, you know that there are times when employees feel motivated to achieve more and therefore, they start putting in more efforts into their work. This happens to each and every working individual at some point. And this is a good thing, right? Well, in case of regular jobs, I would say that it isn’t good because of “income scaling”.
You see, in regular jobs, the income is fixed. If your employer pays you $100 per day for the purpose of checking emails of the organization, it doesn’t matter whether you check 5 emails or 500 emails per day; you will only be paid the fixed $100!
Here’s what this means:
Your income does not scale with your efforts. Doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’ll be paid the same.
People working regular jobs often talk about how they feel stressed out when they put in lots of efforts in their work but don’t see any benefits. This is because in regular jobs, the income does not scale. It is fixed. So, in financial regard, it doesn’t matter if you’re putting in 110% instead of 100% in your work; your income/salary will remain the same.
Of course, I am not considering the bonuses that people receive for their good efforts, but generally, these bonuses are not so frequent and the overall income of course, remains the same.
Working Hard In Entrepreneurship
Now on the other hand, in entrepreneurship, the income scales! Entrepreneurship differs from regular jobs in one main aspect and it is that in entrepreneurship, the harder you work, the more you earn. Income scaling exists in entrepreneurship. The more work and efforts you put in, the larger your income is going to scale.
Your income is directly related to your efforts and hard work in entrepreneurship. When you work more, you’ll earn more.
In entrepreneurship, the income is not limited, which is the greatest benefit of it that makes it so desirable as a path to choose over regular jobs. This is the key difference between regular jobs and entrepreneurial work.
The Only Difference That Matters
So, forget about all the other minor differences between entrepreneurship and regular jobs. The only difference that matters is the scaling of income. Once, you know this, you’ll be able to look at the two with a completely new and different viewpoint.
If you want to earn more, you just need to focus on the scaling of income instead of other useless factors. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/the-key-difference-between-regular-jobs-entrepreneurship-9b5946546885 | ['Zeeshan Wasim'] | 2020-12-27 16:02:17.977000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Freelancing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Work'] |
Why you shouldn’t do that Coding Bootcamp and what you should do instead | In the summer of 2017 I attended a coding bootcamp in San Diego. Having done some programming in college I’d thought this was a good advancement for my career, being one year in the workforce post-degree. I’ve given it a few years to reflect on what this point of my career meant to me and the benefits and repercussions of my decision. My experience may be biased, and you should take this with a grain of salt, however I’ll try to be pragmatic with my reasoning.
There are a ton of free (or very cheap) resources out there.
Everybody knows bootcamps aren’t cheap. They average around $10,000 and if you need to factor in living expenses can climb up to $20,000. I paid ~ $16,000 for mine. The thing is, there are a ton of free, or cheap, resources out there that you’ll gain more knowledge from. Code Academy, Udemy, and FreeCodeCamp then I did in my bootcamp for less than 1% of the price. The trade-off here is that you lack the other “benefits” you get from a coding bootcamp (I’ll delve into that further down).
Don’t believe everything you read in their intro packets.
No, everyone graduating is not making $90,000, and arguably if that’s the only thing you’re looking for then you probably aren’t going to make it as a software engineer. No, you probably aren’t going to get hired right after the bootcamp and yes you will have to put in extensive hours if you plan on it. No you won’t be a full stack developer when you’re done, as a matter of fact you’ll barely be able to hang (I’ll get to this later on as well). I think something bootcamps do poorly is set your expectations wrong. One of the worst offenders is your skill level — you aren’t a 9/10 in Javascript. Side note, what even is a 9/10? You aren’t proficient in Javascript, Node, ReactJS, etc. You are barely educated.
You’re going to need to fucking hustle.
There’s no way around that. You’re going to need to put in 18 hours a day for a long time. I’m still going a year and a half later and I’m now pursuing my M.S. in Computer Science. Assuming you join a good company you’re going to need to catch up. You’ll need to learn design patterns, why things are happening and less of “just get it to work”. You’ll need to understand concepts like clean code, refactoring and architecture. These things aren’t taught in bootcamps because you simply don’t have enough time. Post-graduation you’ll have to hustle to keep up. If you expect a 12 week course and then be paid 100k and put in 40 hour weeks, this isn’t for you.
You should probably learn another way — college?
For the price, bootcamps are getting up there. My Masters degree at SDSU will be a little cheaper than my bootcamp and there’s a plethora of reasons why it’s better but the mains ones being
It’s an actual, physical, accredited degree.
Since it’s accredited, it’s tax deductible.
You’ll learn more, you have significantly more time.
Now there are some drawbacks to this approach. The first being time. The Masters I am in is 30 credits so that part time for a year and a half. Second is price, many schools aren’t subsidized like Southern California schools are. This means that they very well could be $40,000 M.S. programs and/or undergrad programs.
When you should do a bootcamp
Now my opinion is biased and I realize that. BUT there are a few spots where I think that a coding bootcamp does make sense. First being you are unemployed or desperately need to change jobs for whatever reasons. Secondly, if you know you won’t put in the work without someone sitting there and pushing you through it. Lastly if you are in a time crunch and can find a bootcamp that places you in internships and/or is a paid per your salary structure, then this may be a good option for you.
My suggestion.
Find a mentor, teach yourself every possible thing you can find on the internet that pertains to Computer Science and learn it diligently. Never be satisfied with where you are in your learning. Find a good internship or associate position job and soak in everything, ask questions and understand. Lastly, if you feel like you’re still missing gaps or feel that need for an accredited piece of paper do a Masters.
Closing notes.
Everyone has a different opinion on bootcamps. Others could have had a great time. Most people I’ve talked to wouldn’t do it over. It’s too short, too expensive and not enough value. That said, talk with the bootcamp counselors, find graduates of the programs and followup via social media. Final note is to set your expectations realistically. You will come out making 40–55k in most scenarios. It’ll be an arduous ladder to climb and if you don’t love software engineering/web development or whatever your niche is you will fail. | https://medium.com/@garretthughes3/why-you-shouldnt-do-that-coding-bootcamp-and-what-you-should-do-instead-cd893d02dc9e | ['Garrett Hughes'] | 2021-06-06 22:48:22.750000+00:00 | ['Codingbootcamp', 'Bootcamp', 'Programming', 'Learning To Code', 'Mindset'] |
Why ESG Matters in Emerging Markets | The January 2019 collapse of a Brazilian mine tailings dam-which released 11.7 million cubic meters of toxic mud, killed at least 150 people, and led to a corruption probe-underscores the critical but underappreciated value of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in emerging markets. In this four-part series, I examine the growing materiality of ESG factors to emerging market investing, exploring both risks and opportunities.
ESG: More Important in Emerging Markets?
The majority of ESG-aware asset managers surveyed by Citi Research in October 2018 expressed the view that ESG factors are more important in emerging markets than developed markets, particularly from a corporate governance risk perspective. ¹
Generally, weaker corporate governance practices in emerging markets relative to developed markets have played a role in shaping this opinion. More seasoned, quality-focused investors have long appreciated the need to be sharp on governance considerations when investing in frontier countries such as Kenya and Argentina, as well as the more mainstream countries such as China, India, and Brazil.
We’ve seen a variety of environmental and social issues become increasingly relevant to investors.
Emerging markets have more state-owned enterprises, necessitating a higher level of scrutiny of governance practices by prospective investors. While varying across different countries, there is generally a greater prevalence of family founders with majority stakes within emerging markets. Lower rates of board director independence and weaker corporate transparency are other realities contributing to the elevated governance risk profile.
Beyond these more obvious considerations related to governance and business culture, we’ve seen a variety of environmental and social issues become increasingly relevant to investors. From an environmental perspective, combating air, soil, and water pollution is becoming a more significant focus of government policy in China and India. And from a social perspective, investors are increasingly scrutinizing how companies are managing broader stakeholder relationships that can materially impact financial performance.
Back to the Brazilian Dam Disaster
The latter point takes us back to the Brazilian dam disaster.
The resource-intensive energy and materials sectors continue to play an important role in the socioeconomic welfare of many emerging and frontier economies, with concomitant ESG risk factors that can have severe consequences beyond share price performance.
For example, mining companies that operate in environmentally sensitive areas where indigenous populations live have to be thoughtful about how they develop resources. They must also ensure the safety of their employees through ongoing capital investments and training.
Brazil’s Vale SA, which owns the dam that collapsed in Brumadinho, knows that all too well. The company has since announced that it will close all 10 of its dams in the country with a similar design.
Ratings Reflect Greater Risks, but also Opportunities
These risks can be seen in the ESG ratings distributions of emerging versus developed markets. Conventional ratings distributions, such as the one shown below from MSCI, reflect a negative skew in emerging markets relative to developed markets. (Applying MSCI’s ratings methodology, CCC is the lowest ESG rating assigned to companies on an industry-relative basis and AAA is the best.)
This negative skew in ESG ratings reflects some of the risks I discussed above, with a consistent overhang being weaker governance structures for companies across different sectors within emerging markets. Companies lacking a majority independent board, for example, are systematically penalized. The existence of a combined chairman and CEO or dual share classes with unequal voting rights are also detrimental to the rating.
Over time, we expect ESG ratings for emerging market companies to broadly improve as more capital flows into ESG-focused equity and fixed-income strategies, and as more asset managers integrate ESG considerations in traditional strategies.
Emerging market ESG funds now account for nearly 10% of global emerging markets funds, up from just 2% a decade ago, as illustrated below.
Growth of ESG Assets in Emerging Markets
We’ve already seen tremendous growth in ESG-focused emerging markets fund assets, from less than $1 billion in 2008 to $20 billion in 2018, as measured by EPFR and Citi Research. Emerging market ESG funds now account for nearly 10% of global emerging markets funds, up from just 2% a decade ago, as illustrated below.
Asia ex-Japan represents a significant percentage of ESG-focused assets in emerging markets based on data collected by the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), with the largest markets for sustainable investing being Malaysia (30% of total professionally managed assets), Hong Kong (26%), South Korea (14%), and China (14%). ²
Malaysia’s prominence may come as a surprise considering the high-profile scandal involving its state-owned investment fund, 1MDB. Similarly, China’s inclusion on the list of prominent ESG markets contradicts the conventional perception of weaker governance given the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and environmental mismanagement (ambient air pollution kills hundreds of thousands of citizens every year, according to the Chinese Ministry of Health).
But, perhaps surprisingly, according to a recent biannual review of corporate governance practices in Asia by research firm CLSA, Malaysia was the “biggest mover in 2018,” climbing to 4th place in Asia’s corporate governance market ranking.
And China was the fastest-growing market for sustainable investing from 2014 to 2016, according to the GSIA. Sustainable assets there were up 105%, followed closely by India (up 104%).
Much of that growth was driven by investment opportunities arising from public policy initiatives to clean up the environment, including China’s efforts to improve air quality by working to transition away from coal toward natural gas and renewables. That’s a compelling story that I’ll explore further in my upcoming post in this series.
Blog Series: Why ESG Matters in Emerging Markets
Part 2: China’s ESG Transformation
Part 3: Improving Emerging Market Disclosures Drive Results
Part 4: ESG: Link to Financial Performance
1 “Sustainability in CEEMEA,” Citi Research, as of 10/29/18.
2 Source: GSIA as of 2016. Measures ESG-focused strategies as a percentage of total professionally managed assets in each country. | https://medium.com/william-blair-investment-management/why-esg-matters-in-emerging-markets-497bb2c04751 | ['William Blair Investment Management'] | 2019-06-10 15:04:39.899000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Investment Management', 'Esg', 'Investment'] |
Midlife Crisis? Or Just Bottoming Out on the U-Curve of Happiness | Midlife Crisis? Or Just Bottoming Out on the U-Curve of Happiness
Photo credit: iStock
By Michael Allwright
The myth of the midlife crisis as an inevitable right of passage may be mortally wounded by recent research. But there’s ample evidence of a midlife dip that’s more than just a pothole in the road of life.
In a recent article, I explored the origin myth of the midlife crisis. Research suggests that a midlife crisis may be far less likely to occur than originally thought. In fact, only about 10 percent of men actually experience a full-blown midlife crisis. The midlife crisis may be on the mat, but research has also confirmed a slump in well-being at midlife.
A (nearly) Universal U-shaped Curve of Happiness
A growing body of research over the past decade has confirmed that our sense of well-being through life forms a U-shaped curve. As men in our 20s and early 30s, we focus on external achievement and goals (that successful career, the perfect family, the castle on the hill). In our 30s and 40s, we start to get tangled up in the stresses and trials of the real world and the challenges of achieving the goals we set early in life. Perhaps because of this or other factors, our happiness quotient in the first half of life trends downward, bottoming out in our mid-40s. But then in our mid-50s, we begin a slow ascent, and happiness (or our sense of well-being) increase again … thankfully!
This general finding is so striking because it has been consistently found across many countries and cultures (and even in other primates!). While definitely not found in all countries and generations, in a recent study of 46 countries, 44 had a clearly defined U-shape when well-being was compared across age.
The lowest point of the curve varied across countries but was generally between 40 and 60 years. The low-point for folks in the U.S. was found at about 46 years of age. A 2010 study found similar results, with U.S. male’s sense of well-being bottoming out in their early 50s.
So midlife is, statistically speaking, the rock-bottom of our happiness in life? Now that’s something to celebrate … no wonder I’m so depressed. …
Reframing the midlife story
This midlife dip may be what’s been generalized through the myth of the midlife crisis and could explain how the midlife myth has such a stronghold in our culture. Most of us can expect a midlife dip, but few of us will have a full-blown crisis.
This reframing of the midlife experience provides some measure of comfort that:
we’re not alone
midlife doesn’t have to be cataclysmic
there’s the hopefulness of an upswing somewhere in our 50s.
Right, how lovely that we have a new la-ti-da story, but I want resolution! Just give me answers would you, or at least a pill to help ease the pain!
Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet here. There are also potential challenges in medicating our way through midlife. Unfortunately, there’s still no clear explanation of why our sense of well-being bottoms out in midlife and then rises throughout the rest of late adulthood. But where there’s a will, there’s away, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to look to the survivors.
Following in the footsteps of the survivors — the climb up from midlife
At this point, being the curious and intelligent man that you are, you may be asking yourself, “What do folks in their 60s and 70s have that those in the trough of midlife might be lacking?”
Gerontologists who study midlife survivors are trying to answer just that question. While nothing conclusive can be drawn at this point, there are definitely areas to look at. Well-being later in life may result from the qualities and actions associated with midlife survivors, such as:
Creating a life of meaning (building and sustaining a sense of fulfillment or purpose)
Knowing ourselves and becoming what we are (understanding our deeply held values and living them)
Greater emotional intelligence (creating connection and communication by employing loyalty strategies vs. exit strategies)
Reduction in perceived severity of stressors (drama management)
Increased capacity to self-regulate emotions (less likely to resort to anger or respond to anger with anger)
Ability to see situations positively (less likely to see other’s responses as negative or remember them as negative)
The perspective of time (that heals everything, right?!)
Reduced regret response (not mulling over or focusing on what’s beyond our control)
Increased wisdom (or more specifically the traits that come with it like compassion, empathy, respect for and tolerance of divergent beliefs, acceptance of ambiguity, ability to make decisions based on the good of the whole, levelheadedness)
Imagine what might it be like if those of us in the throes of midlife begin to emulate the survivors. How might creating a life of meaning, knowing ourselves better, developing our emotional intelligence, and practicing altruism support an earlier bounce off the bottom of the U-curve of happiness?
Are you successfully managing midlife? Which of the above strategies do you use to navigate midlife challenges? Share it out in the comments below!
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This story was previously published on The Good Men Project.
About Michael Allwright
Michael is a certified life coach working with men in midlife to create a vision that’s aligned with their values, is purpose-driven, and creates lasting and meaningful connections. You can join him at the corner of Midlife and Thriving and on his website.
You can follow him on Facebook. | https://medium.com/modernidentities/midlife-crisis-or-just-bottoming-out-on-the-u-curve-of-happiness-86cc919beade | ['Agents Of Change'] | 2020-12-20 11:33:42.881000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Burnout', 'Happiness'] |
The Use of Blockchain in Agriculture | The global distributed ledger technology, the blockchain in agriculture sector and food industry target size is estimated at USD133 million in 2020; it is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 18.5% to reach USD9 485 million by 2020. This technology will enable a secured transfer of credits in real time, reducing the cost and time of trade in the agricultural sector and making trade easier between parties. In order to gain from this, agricultural companies need to develop an information system that will track and manage their assets. This will allow them to make informed decisions regarding investment and marketing strategies.
In the distributed ledger technology, the digital recording of financial transactions in the food industry is combined with the manual recording of product sales and inventory. The ledger is generated by computers connecting directly to the payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard. The transactions are then recorded digitally on a secure computer network and sent to the payment networks where they are converted into credits. The digital recording is done by the manufacturers of crops, making it easier for them to process payments.
The main advantage of the blockchain in agriculture is the greater degree of transparency and accountability it offers. Traditional methods involve physical counts of tons or sacks of grain traded each year. The results are often inaccurate and sometimes unreliable, since not all traders use the same systems. But with the implementation of the protocol, it has made for a more transparent and reliable exchange of commodities.
For stakeholders in the food supply chain, this means improved security for the food supply. They can monitor and trace shipments of their commodities and can trace where they are headed. The value chain is also simplified since there is less duplication of tasks and the risk of duplication is minimized. For example, if a shipment is not delivered on time, the company does not have to pay additional charges for the re-delivery. In addition, there are fewer losses due to delays and breakdowns as the protocol enables rapid data transfers.
There are also several incentives for companies and other stakeholders to adopt the use of the Blockchain in agriculture. The improved quality control and traceability can allow companies to provide better services. They can adopt the best practices from other industries such as finance and banking, to apply the same principles in the food chain.
Companies involved in the agricultural industry should be aware that a streamlined supply chain system plays a crucial role in delivering sustainable growth. If companies do not take the time to improve the quality of their goods and services and adopt the best practices in the agricultural sector, they will find their efforts going in vain. It is important to note that the use of the technology will not make farmers immune from crime or corruption. However, it will make the business more transparent and therefore improve its reputation and credibility both at home and abroad. | https://medium.com/@excelvisor/the-use-of-blockchain-in-agriculture-8f45d401f49f | ['Upskill Iq'] | 2020-12-19 20:17:26.800000+00:00 | ['Agriculture', 'Blockchain'] |
Anxiety Disorder: What do you think it’s easy to deal with it? | The sunlight of misty winters says something about the difficulty of living. Here I am indicating the situation of depression. Hence, these are not just words because Anxiety is real, and people who’re experiencing it becoming critical. In that way Yellow Xanax bars is the medication of anxiety.
When I was 12, my mother once told me that “Your happiness is not dependent, so never expect anything from anyone.” — She was right. But, I take those words lightly. Now am at the stage of facing multiple situations. My Amygdala wasn’t right due to overthinking.
Anxiety Disorder: It’s a feeling of living with fear and continuously remembering past experiences. Overthinking it and having a sense of guilt all the time. All these emotional impacts in the single brain.
Do you think medications work?
I observed various real-life experiences. In that way, medications only improve the condition but not cure it. Many neurologists suggest Xanax 0.5 mg in the situation of chronic depression. Hence, medications work according to various brain transmitters.
Feeling and symptoms of Anxiety
We feel numb during symptoms and tense situations. Our thinking ability makes us. So, overthinking is the first thing that makes that generates loads of negative thoughts. In that way, anti-depressant like yellow Xanax bars works to reduce the sensation of stress.
Symptoms:
Negative thoughts
Overthinking at night
Insomnia
Lack of concentration and focus
Trouble in sleep
Restlessness
Headache
Extreme suffocation
Sadness or crying continuously
Feeling nostalgic
Is it normal to think differently during Anxiety?
According to the researches, we think deeply during overthinking. That makes us anxious, but the thing is that we can also think creatively. And only we have the power of transforming the unconscious mind into creative thinking. It’s quite familiar that we think differently during the stage of depression. It generates more logical ideas. But, converting it according to your ideological power is challenging.
Is it possible to deal with it?
Yes! It’s easy. Then why it seems so difficult to deal with it? It all depends on your psychological stability. We attract what we think. I understand it looks like a vast, challenging rock, and it takes a lot of time and courage rather than expecting it.
That’s the only reason medication helps you to deal with the situation. But there is another thing that you should try.
When you’re not able to face the situation- Run! As much you can, as far you can because sometimes we’re not in the situation to heart our self-esteem again and again.
Travel because it makes you feel mentally independent. Because your happiness is independent. Even being emotionally independent is also a game-changing situation.
A neurological medication or having a session with psychologists makes you feel lighter. In that way, Blue Xanax bars are one of the best medicational solutions.
Why it seems complicated to deal with the situations?
Thus, we humans make situations critical.
In fact, they’re not that tougher, but we think deeply. You know what, these are just illustrations. Your decision makes you. So, tie yourself with the right decision and follow it well. You’ll be alright soon. | https://medium.com/@alphamansi01/anxiety-disorder-what-do-you-think-its-easy-to-deal-with-it-a326601ad9b2 | [] | 2020-11-23 11:03:55.532000+00:00 | ['Anxiety And Depression', 'Depression Counselling', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'Mental Toughness'] |
Cool gadgets on amazon india under 1000 — Gamofly | Introduction:-
This blog is about Top 5 gadgets on Amazon under 1000, Best Gadgets under 1000 in Amazon, Cool Gadgets on Amazon India under 1000, Gadgets on Amazon under 1000, Best Gadgets to buy under 1000, Best Gadgets on Amazon under 1000 which will help you to choose the best gadget helpful or entertaining gadgets for you under the budget of 1000 rupees.
Topics covered in this blog:-
▪️ Top 5 Gadgets on Amazon under 1000
▪️ Best Gadgets under 1000 in Amazon
▪️ Cool Gadgets on Amazon India under 1000
▪️ Gadgets on Amazon under 1000
▪️ Best Gadgets to buy under 1000
▪️ Best Gadgets on Amazon under 1000
Good for giving gifts to kids, this game console has 400 in-built games for a child including Mario, and many more.
Some of the main features of this game console is that it is rechargeable, portable, colourful LCD Screen, Small and Compact, had 400 in-built games for a child.
This classic retro video gaming player from Amisha is one of the best budget friendly gadgets you can buy from Amazon under 1000 rupees.
This gadget is extremely helpful and made only for gamers which strengthens your grip and gives you a good gaming experience. This can be useful for gamers who play any kind of Battle Royale games like Pubg, COD Mobile, Free Fire and Racing games.
The main features of product is that it is compatible with Android, or ios devices and they are Conductive. You can use it for shooting, vision, movement or anything you want in games. The clamps are made of alloy which are capable of capacitive conduction, instant trigger, ergonomic design, charging while long hours of gaming are some more features of this gaming grip.
This Coffee Cup Heating Stand is a good gadget to remove your workload from the evening time while you have to make coffee everyday or heat it many times. This is electrically powered and it gives a constant temperature of 55°C . For warming coffee or tea you just have to place the cup on the heating stand and it will start to warm your coffee or tea and it will automatically on/off once the task is started/completed.
Conclusion:- | https://medium.com/@gamofly/top-5-gadgets-on-amazon-under-1000-cool-gadgets-on-amazon-india-under-1000-gamofly-172657b6fc80 | [] | 2021-01-25 05:07:10.562000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Gadgets On Amazon', 'Really Useful Products', 'Amazon', 'Technology'] |
What is ReactJS? | What is ReactJS?
A walkthrough to ReactJS
Photo by Ferenc Almasi on Unsplash
React is a front end library developed by Facebook for creating reusable UI components. It is used to handle the view layer for web and mobile apps. Before working with React you should have a solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Features
It is using JSX(JavaScript Syntax extension) which is similar to HTML. React is all about Components and we have to think about everything as a component. Unidirectional data flow makes it easy to make the app and Flux is a pattern that helps to keep the data unidirectional.
Advantages
Uses virtual DOM that helps apps performance. It can be used on the client and server-side. Component and data patterns improve readability.
Disadvantages
Covers only the view layer of the app. Uses inline templating.
Setup the Environment
First of all, we have to install the runtime environment to react. We can use nodeJS as the environment.
Install nodeJS from https://nodejs.org/en/download/
Then install Visual Studio Code. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/
and downloaded the latest version.
It is recommended to install Git on your computer.
Then you can check the version of npm by typing, npm --version in the terminal.
Create an app
Create a root folder as React or any name you prefer, as below.
C:\Users\User\Documents\VS Code>mkdir React C:\Users\User\Documents\VS Code>cd React
Then you can create your first React app by typing the following command. I named my app as ‘test’ and you can give any name as you prefer
C:\Users\User\Documents\VS Code\React> npx create-react-app test C:\Users\User\Documents\VS Code\React> cd test C:\Users\User\Documents\VS Code\React> npm start
Screenshot by Author — to test react app
After that, you can see your first react app is running on the browser in port:3000. Let’s learn further. Then you can delete unnecessary files as shown in the below image.
Screenshot by Author — keep only the necessary files
The ReactDom.render() the function is inside the index.js file as well as we can edit the app.js file as we prefer. Inside the public folder, we can see the index.html file and the purpose of the function is to display the specified code in the HTML element.
We can change the index.js file to display some text as below. | https://medium.com/linkit-intecs/what-is-reactjs-3581dc68573 | ['Pulsara Sandeepa'] | 2020-07-16 17:00:42.899000+00:00 | ['Reactjs', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Front End Development', 'Web Development'] |
Asshole or Not, Weak Ties Will Decide | Produced for a Virtual Communities/Social Media Course (Sociology)(2019)
Whether it's politics, the environment, guns, or sexuality people are going to disagree. With around 7.7 billion people on the planet, it makes sense that we have a variety of opinions. But regardless of the topic, we try to reach a consensus anyway for the sake of efficiency, safety, and even in the pursuit of truth. In pursuing truth, philosophers have spent hundreds of years chasing the concept of a capital T truth. With no objective truth, we instead arrive upon a collective moral code through which we base our decisions. We work out the nuances of what is good and bad behavior through debate, and this has been a constant iterative process practiced through laws and conversations. With the internet, however, we are now able to communicate instantaneously on a global scale and many of these conversations have moved to online forums. The subreddit Am I the Asshole (AITA) is one such forum for discussion where individuals can go to ask the question when a decision is difficult to make. I argue that the format, rules, and structure of the subreddit AITA reinforce an impartial forum where weak ties are well utilized to provide an answer to the question, “Am I the Asshole?”, while incentivizing long-term investment into the community through a combination of the flair system and upvotes which are clearly visible metrics of social capital on Reddit.
My experience with the AITA subreddit began years ago when I first came across a front-page topic that caught my eye. The actual question is lost to me now but the subreddit has stuck with me through the years. With a membership of over 1.5 million Redditors, AITA is a great place for moral deliberation regarding the questions “Am I the Asshole” or “Would I Be the Asshole” in regards to events that have transpired or have yet to transpire. I spent the last six weeks analyzing the subreddit's posts, comments, rules, and flair system to better understand how the multitude of topics was dealt with in such a civil and constructive manner. In particular, I paid attention to the rules of the subreddit and how the community members and mods worked together to reinforce the norms of the subreddit. I also looked at the flair structure with regards to social capital and how the subreddit managed to provide a badge of accomplishment for contributors that submitted the best answer to the posted situation.
In this section, I will outline how the AITA subreddit takes advantage of weak ties to arrive at a collective consensus while encouraging long-term engagement by collecting social capital through the flair system. First I will examine the subreddit’s rules with regards to Baym’s seven key concepts and illustrate how they encourage hyperpersonal communication as outlined in Tufekci’s piece (Baym 2010: 6–12)(Tufecki 2010). Then I will illustrate how the aggregation of opinions regarding the post (the post flair) is an accumulation of various weak ties outlined by Granovetter which explains why this collective answer is satisfactory (Granovetter 1973). Finally, I will argue that repeated interaction is encouraged in a novel manner through the unique user flair system that serves as an actual tally of Steinfeld’s bridging social capital, outside Reddit’s own upvote system (Steinfeld 2008).
When first accessing the AITA subreddit, one is greeted with the standard subreddit format. A pinned post on top with other popular posts underneath, with the metrics and rules to the right. There are 13 rules in the subreddit each with its own expanded explanation. Of these, I will touch on the rules Be Civil, Voting Rules, and Comments and Post Flairs and how these create a forum for debate that encourages hyperpersonal communication.
The first rule for the subreddit is Be Civil, and this rule sets the tone for all discussion on AITA, “The title of this subreddit is not an invitation for you to be cruel. The purpose of this space is to determine whether or not someone is in the wrong, not to tear them a new one. Be civil. Be kind. Treat others with respect, no matter how big of an asshole they may be.” (ATIA 2019). Of Baym’s seven key concepts for comparing media, this touches on the aspect of social cues (Baym 2010: 6–12). As opposed to the full range of cues available in rich media, the cues are significantly more limited in the text-based communications that happen in AITA. With fewer social cues, miscommunication can happen much more easily, and to preempt any conversation derailing the first rule clearly outlines expectations for how community members should interact with each other. Tufecki outlines the advantages of internet communication as “allowing for more honest, truer communication” (Tufecki 2010: 5) thanks to fewer social cues. This civility and anonymity encourage hyperpersonal communication as anecdotes are often utilized in providing context for both posts and comments.
Since community members are now aware of how they should interact in their text communications, the next rule outlines how the built-in vote mechanics of Reddit should be utilized. Instead of downvoting posts and comments that one disagrees with, community members are encouraged to instead upvote assholes and comment on why they are assholes or to reply with civil disagreement. This is important as downvotes kill visibility and encouraging comments inspires greater debate and engagement. By encouraging the upvote mechanic and comments, the AITA subreddit increases its reach through increased interactivity. This is important as AITA posts often reach the front page of Reddit allowing the post to take advantage of the enhanced reach to get as many opinions and votes as possible.
Finally, the comments and post flairs rule outlines the five possible deliberations suggested by the subreddit: You’re the Asshole (YTA), You’re Not the Asshole (NTA), Everyone Sucks Here (ESH), No A-holes Here (NAH), and Not Enough Info (INFO). These labels help define the overall decision the community has come to arrive at after the 18-hour deliberation period. This is decided by the comment with the highest number of upvotes, and the appropriate post flair (a separate tag that accompanies the post title) is added to the post. What would normally be just storage of the post is now enhanced by this categorization as the notation allows for enhanced readability of all the opinions both during and after the 18-hour period. This enhances the mobility of this data since the enhanced readability also promotes mobile reading. This aggregation of opinions takes full advantage of the multitude of weak ties that result from the public deliberation that occurs in the comments of each post.
Granovetter outlines the strength of weak ties as their ability to bridge groups, enhancing their knowledge sharing and encouraging the transmission of information between groups that would otherwise not have had the opportunity to interact (Granovetter 1973, 1362). This phenomenon is epitomized on AITA as the global nature of the internet allows for interactions between people of all backgrounds and cultures. With no other identifiers than a username and what they’ve written, community members are able to deliberate without being a part of any group, making each interaction a weak tie. Frequent visitors aside, many interactions are between strangers. As I read through the various posts and comments, I could see that posts with similar conclusions would receive vastly different numbers of upvotes and comments. This would sometimes be due to when the comment was posted, but it was also due to the reasoning as to why the commenter arrived at their conclusion.
Fig 1 Screenshot from subreddit r/AmITheAsshole
Take the thread “AITA for wanting to go to the funeral of a girl that I helped get addicted to drugs?” posted 3 months ago. This thread received over 30,600 upvotes and resulted in the “asshole” tag being awarded. The top comment received 28,400 upvotes and was by a user who had 128 user flair(Fig 1). The second most upvoted comment received 10,300 upvotes and was by a user who had 123 user flair (Fig 2).
Fig 2 Screenshot from subreddit r/AmITheAsshole
The top voted comment had well over 150 comments with tens of conversation threads debating and discussing the topic at hand. The top comment stated that they are not the asshole for wanting to attend, but would be if they did attend. This is different from the second top comment that states that the poster is the asshole since the family’s mourning is more important than the feelings of the original post (OP). Had the post format been just a poll with the five possible deliberations, we may not have arrived at what is possibly a more complete answer. Both state that ultimately, the OP is the asshole, but the first acknowledges the OP’s feelings of guilt then lets them know that the perception would be that of an asshole. This line of thought is echoed throughout the comments below and in other similar answers. Even in the second top answer, after the OP clarifies a piece of information, the commenter replies with more or less the same answer given by the top comment (Fig 3).
Fig 3 Screenshot from subreddit r/AmITheAsshole
By encouraging a space that judges while avoiding attacks, people are incentivized to divulge their true opinions and reasons. This opens up a meaningful debate that allows the subreddit to converge on a group consensus regarding an issue. With strict rules regarding post and comment content, the AITA subreddit circumvents the need for strong tie formation and highlights instead what I see as a ticker of bridging social capital, the user flair.
Granovetter measures the strength of ties through the amount of time invested, the emotional intensity, level of intimacy, and reciprocal services (Granovetter 1973: 1361). Strong ties tend to reinforce norms and information we already know, while weak ties work to bridge networks of people and serve as bridges of information. The cumulative opinion, which is a sum of the weak ties and their opinions, regarding the posted question is condensed into a post flair after an 18-hour deliberation period. The comment with the most upvotes is also the comment that has the most ties. With over 1.5 million subscribers and with monthly Reddit visits averaging around 1.5 billion, it stands to reason that many of the interactions on AITA are between individuals that have no strong ties. Even in a situation where two users know each other in the real world, unless one or both parties are aware of the other’s username, they would interact as strangers and therefore would act as weak ties. When one considers the usage of alternate and throwaway accounts, this is further strengthened as the chances of knowing a random user gets smaller and smaller. This is particularly important because this would then mean that the user flair, which tracks the number of top comments a user has written, would be a tally of how many times the user was able to form a value decision that resonated with a very diverse group of people. This is, of course, limited by the subset of the world population that uses Reddit, but weak ties would still dominate the discussion nonetheless.
Steinfeld brings up two main forms of social capital, bonding social capital which occurs between family and friends and bridging social capital that is comprised of weak ties that are great for sharing information but lacking in emotional support (Steinfeld 2008: 436). As outlined prior, the interactions between users on AITA tend to be weak ties, and this results in a more holistic answer comprised of the opinions of many different groups and individuals. When a user’s comment is selected as the top comment by the community, it carries the approval of many weak ties. This user flair is, therefore, a measure of how many times an individual was able to provide an answer that was approved by a massive group of weak ties. Thus, user flair is an indicator of how much bridging social capital has been accumulated by an individual.
This user flair does not afford any extra allowances or status and the response is what elicits an upvote or debate, not the user that is posting the comment. Just as there are many posts where individuals with high user flair counts claim the top comment, there are just as many where users with 0 or low flair that have the top comment (Fig 4).
Fig 4 Screenshot from subreddit r/AmITheAsshole
This is important because it allows individuals to feel good about the contributions they are making while also preventing them from exercising undue influence over the debates. Outside of accumulating Reddit karma for providing good answers, the users that exemplify the norms of the subreddit are able to show off the fruits of their labor within the community as well (Fig 5).
Fig 5 Screenshot from subreddit r/AmITheAsshole
Moralistic judgments are difficult to make due to the complexities of every situation. However, the AITA subreddit takes advantage of the reach afforded by the internet to gather as many different people’s opinions as possible to try and arrive at some sort of moralistic judgment. Regardless of whether this is the “right” answer or not, the final judgment is arrived upon through a public debate between many weak ties. By preventing personal attacks, the AITA subreddit is able to maintain an on-topic discussion and encourage greater reach at the same time through their rules reinforcing the virality mechanisms of Reddit’s algorithms. This impartial forum for debate is also a place for users to show off their knowledge and decision making through the Reddit karma system which tracks their total karma based on upvotes (+1) and downvotes (-1) and the AITA user flair system which tracks the number of times users had the highest voted answer. The format of AITA actively promotes healthy discussion while encouraging repeat interaction through the karma and flair systems. The format for discussion and the rules surrounding civility could be used in other contentious areas to help frame debates in a constructive manner. This could work well in politics if moderators were able to keep politicians on topic and engaged with the material while preventing ad hominem attacks.
Works Cited
Baym, Nancy K. 2010. “Personal Connections in the Digital Age.” Polity 1–49
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78(6):1360–1380.
Steinfield, C., Ellison, N. B, and Lampe, C. (2008). Social Capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: a longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29: 434–445.
Tufekci, Zeynep (2010). Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why? “Rich Get Richer” versus “Seek and Ye Shall Find.” In Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM, 2010). AAAI Press. Forthcoming. | https://medium.com/@cliffahn/asshole-or-not-weak-ties-will-decide-22af3bf9e4e8 | ['Cliff Ahn'] | 2021-01-16 01:40:40.419000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Reddit', 'Sociology'] |
The Future of Energi Masternodes and What It Means for You | The Future of Energi Masternodes and What It Means for You Energi Cryptocurrency Follow Feb 29 · 3 min read
One of the biggest opportunities of Gen 3 is its potential to empower our community. As the project grows, we want to give everyone the chance to have a say in the direction the project takes. That’s why with Gen 3 we’re making it easier for more people to own an Energi masternode than ever before.
Let’s start with some background.
Why Masternodes
Masternodes are the pillars of the Energi ecosystem. Their primary role is to serve network stability by validating transactions across the network. Their secondary role is governance, which means helping our decentralized project to make decisions about treasury fund allocation and innovations to the protocol. As with a building, the more pillars it has, the stronger it is — and Energi is no different.
Masternode holders are Energi’s foundation and have been a fundamental part of our success so far. However, we know that the cost to own a masternode has been prohibitive for many who would otherwise want to help secure and strengthen our network. That’s why we’re asking the current masternode network to vote on a change for Energi Gen 3 to reduce the masternode collateral to only require 1,000 NRG — not the 10,000 NRG needed currently.
For the Community
This change will benefit the community immensely. Because it’s now cheaper to own a masternode, it’s more accessible to more people than ever before. Community members who could only dream of running their own masternode can now do it for real…
This will also benefit our existing masternode holders. Not only will they benefit from a stronger network, but they’ll also be able to increase the number of masternodes they own more quickly. In Gen 2, it would take approximately two years to gain another masternode. With Gen 3, operators will be able to gain an additional node in about one-tenth of the time (under three months) because only 1,000 NRG will be needed.
For the Network
This new structure also provides crucial benefits for the wider ecosystem. With a stronger masternode network, Gen 3 will be more decentralized than ever before, which ultimately lets us increase the security and scalability of the entire ecosystem. That’s a win for everyone.
And we’re improving the way masternodes are managed. With Gen 3, masternodes will be able to be run with any amount from 1,000 NRG to 100,000 NRG (in increments of 1,000). This will lead to a better experience for masternode operators by enabling masternode rewards to be accumulated more efficiently. All in all, it will let them do their jobs better — as well as improving the security and quality of the entire network.
One Last Thing
Thank you for taking the time to stay up-to-date on everything that’s happening with Gen 3. This is another important step in opening up the Energi project to more supporters. We hope you’re as excited about the future of the Energi project as we are!
If you would like to find out more about getting your own masternode, check out our awesome guide. 👇
Until next time!
The Energi Team | https://medium.com/energi/the-future-of-energi-masternodes-and-what-it-means-for-you-9c458f81639c | ['Energi Cryptocurrency'] | 2020-02-29 21:09:42.886000+00:00 | ['Energi', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Masternodes', 'Announcements'] |
Korean Beef Curry | Want a taste of heaven? Then try this Korean beef curry.
This isn’t just a regular Korean curry- It has a smooth, silky creaminess and a spicy flavor all in one bite. Okay, so it sounds like regular Korean curry. But I also add in a secret ingredient that takes this curry to the stratospheres. Read on if you want to learn more.
My version of Korean beef curry is chock full of savory flavors that’ll make your heart beat fast every time you head over to your fridge and find leftovers (assuming that it’s still there and your family didn’t sneak some during the middle of the night).
There’s nothing better than a hot bowl of delicious Korean beef curry.
What makes this curry different is the ingredients. There are the usual earthy ingredients like carrots, sure, and potatoes, sure. But the secret ingredient in my recipe is red wine. Yup, good ol’ red wine helps pull out all the flavors from the beef, carrot, and potato. There’s a subtle smoky flavor in the finished Korean beef curry that makes it unexplainably delicious. You just have to try it to believe.
Now’s your chance to make this divine curry. It’s everything and so much more:
easy to make
nutritious and healthy
great for breakfast, lunch, or dinner
the ultimate comfort food
Store-bought Korean curry
There’s no need to reinvent the wheels for this curry recipe. Store-bought Korean curry powder works just fine. Visit your local grocery market or Amazon, and you’ll see Korean curry powder sold with different labels. I suggest the Ottogi brand; they’re the oldest and most reliable in terms of taste and quality.
Ottogi sells curry powder for different spice levels, from mild to really spicy. Depending on your spice tolerance, go with what you’re comfortable with. We’re using the mildly spicy curry packet for this recipe (affiliate link).
Let’s fill your tummy with some delicious Korean beef curry.
Korean Beef Curry Recipe
Ingredients
3 cups of water
1 cup water for curry sauce
1 package Ottogi Curry Powder
1 tbsp red wine Cabernets works best
1 instant white rice or any rice of your liking
1/2 onion cut into slices
1 potato peeled and cubed
1 carrot peeled and cubed
2 tbsp butter
2 pounds thin beef tenderloin
Directions
1. Add 2 tablespoons of butter in a pot over high heat. Cook until the butter melts. Add 2 pounds of thin beef tenderloin and stir.
2. Use a ladle to take out excess liquid from the pot (this will happen once the beef starts to cook).
3. Once the beef turns brown, add the cubed carrots, potatoes, and onion and stir.
4. Add 1 tbsp of red wine.
5. Add 3 cups of water and let it simmer over medium-low heat for 10 minutes until the carrot and potato softens.
6. Curry sauce: Add the curry powder in a small bowl. Add 1 cup of water and mix until the powder dissolves.
7. Add the curry sauce to the pot and mix well.
8. Let it simmer over low heat for another 7 minutes.
9. Serve over a bed of hot rice. Enjoy!
Find the original recipe at https://harueats.com/korean-beef-curry/. | https://medium.com/the-cookbook-for-all/korean-beef-curry-d973aaa59e89 | ['John Lim'] | 2020-12-23 03:23:42.856000+00:00 | ['Curry', 'Korean', 'Korean Food', 'Korean Beef Curry', 'Asian'] |
Lovers to be | Lovers to be
Love is peaceful and chaotic like the raging sea
Confusing and calming, will it cease to be?
We walk through storm, thunder, and rain
Hand in hand walking in happiness and pain.
Your heart is so pure and your is love is sweet
My heart is selfish, it needs you in every beat.
When asleep or when I’m awake
You occupy my mind with each breath I take.
Without you, I wouldn’t know what love meant
I would never smile, I could never be content.
Your smile makes me smile and brightens the day
I would bask in its tenderness if only I had it my way.
It’s still fresh in my memory, the day we met
The love we shared and emotions that were left unsaid
Nothing in this world can even compare
The joy you bring and the love we share
If I’d never met you, I don’t know what I’d do
I’d be so lost and incomplete without you.
Today is the day you fly high and bright
Amidst all the happiness, it’ll be my favorite sight.
To every wound that bled
And to every tear, I shed
Sing me a happy song of victory and glee
Let’s bathe in love as the world calls us lovers to be. | https://medium.com/thenewnorth/lovers-to-be-9e3d3686c447 | ['Neha Ravindra'] | 2020-11-10 05:55:50.040000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Dating', 'Poem', 'Love'] |
Startup Culture — What is it? Why do you need one? | Culture is everything
Working at a Silicon Valley startup is an exhilarating roller coaster ride to say the least. Many people focus on product, technology and vision as the key elements for startup success, which obviously are extremely important. But I want to highlight another “X factor” that is equally vital: culture. Here are my thoughts on how the right culture impacts startup success, and what you can do to create an excellent one.
What is company culture?
Early in my career, I did not have a real understanding of what company culture meant. When people talked about culture in the context of the workplace, I had no solid basis of reference. I went to work for a large company that was reported to have very good culture for the employees. I knew people wanted to work at the company, but I could never put a finger on how to actually define what that meant.
After being part of a Silicon Valley startup from the ground up, I finally know what company culture means:
“The culture of the company is how employees carry themselves when no one else is watching”.
The culture of the company is exemplified by the way employees treat each other, and each customer, partner, and vendor. Beginning at the top, the culture is established by the way leadership carries themselves in their actions — not just in their words. The culture of the company is how employees address situations, good bad or indifferent.
Why is a company culture so important in a startup?
A startup is a daily series of setting precedents. Many times each working day, employees will be asking and answering the question “How will we do it in our company?” That goes for everything from sales process to marketing to engineering. A big factor that often gets overlooked — the type of culture that we will develop for our teams, and the interactions they have with other employees, customers, and vendors.
Make no mistake, if not directly addressed, a culture will develop anyway — but it might not be positive. A negative culture can generate itself quite as easily as a positive one, and have a major impact on the success of the company. It is vitally important, as part of the planning of your startup from day one, that a commitment to culture is established.
The company culture at Mist
When Mist began as a startup, the fabric that wove us together was our culture. I finally saw how to define the culture of a company, as well as how to live it, and how to know when employees are not living it. As an old saying goes “you cannot expect what you don’t inspect.” It just doesn’t work to expect a strong positive culture, when you can’t hold yourself and your employees accountable to uphold your values in the company setting.
So, what is our culture at Mist? Why is it so remarkable, and how does it permeate to every new employee? Our culture began by having strong company values, and is kept alive by reinforcing them constantly. At our company, we live these values in every scenario with employees, customers and partners. In the hiring process, we ensure that every new hire fit in to our value system and culture.
The culture starts with having clearly defined company values. Each startup will have to decide which core values you choose to implement. For our company there are four:
· Family First
· Relentlessness (24hr rule if you are stuck)
· Transparency
· Team before self
Family first. When a colleague has a family member to take care of — from a pickup at school to something more serious — they are encouraged to handle this task above all else. We consistently re-enforce this value — from the CEO down. A startup is a marathon undertaking, and it won’t succeed without a group effort. Trying to start a new company is especially painful if you don’t have a supportive family. Family first is a fundamental supportive pillar for the extended Mist family, and we live that out in every scenario.
For example, we had a critical large customer RFP presentation. One of our best Sales Engineers had a family commitment. We started the meeting by explaining why he wasn’t there, and why this aligns with our company values. Even though the client was very important to us, family first took precedence over this presentation. The customer actually appreciated that we stood by our values so strongly. We live out our company culture, every day.
Relentlessness. (We call it the 24hr rule). Our CEO, Sujai Hajela is relentless at a legendary level. He drives this sense of urgency in everything we do, everything we inspect, everything we deliver, and how well we provide everything that our customers need. How do you measure this? By evaluating every interaction you have with employees, customers, partners and with vendors. How fast do we respond to a customer email? How fast do we respond to a support ticket? How fast do we get on a call with the customer for a critical issue? How fast do we send the presentation to the customer after the meeting?
At Mist, if any employee is “stuck” for over 24 hours, they are expected and encouraged to escalate to senior staff to get the roadblock moved. This helps to drive relentlessness with every team across every function. This value was key, not just when we were small but especially when we were accelerating — maintaining this relentlessness made the momentum snowball for us. We had some tough customer situations. However, our customers stood by us, because ultimately they knew we would do everything in our power to make them succeed. Relentlessness is a must have core value for startups.
Transparency. We are extremely open with all aspects of the business to all Mist employees — from customer wins, to engineering bugs, to help desk escalations, to the amount of funding in the bank. (This last one has obviously become less of a focus now that Juniper has announced its intent to acquire Mist). We don’t want our employees distracted by wondering if the company is doing well, and whether their job is at any risk. While we want to have everyone share in the joys of every win, they also have a right to hear about the chalenges so they can help to overcome them. Transparency brings a feeling of belonging and care.
Team before self. As our co-founder and CTO Bob Friday says, startups are a team sport. Ultimately, company culture is carried forward by the people we hire. In every new employee interview, we look for a culture fit. We pay close attention to the little things people do, say, or have demonstrated during their career, that shows who they really are.
A key filter for me is that we don’t want any prima donnas, who want the spotlight all to themselves, and can’t be a team player. We look for people with high skill, who don’t have a sense of entitlement. We want people who put team first, and will do anything for the team. At Mist, this was a major factor for a developing a very low stress environment. Startups are inherently a stressful endeavor, but if you have a team that has fun and low ego, the work becomes far more enjoyable!
These four core values have become the foundation of our company culture. We didn’t just put them on a poster in the break room and consider that good enough. We internalized and lived them. We start every company meeting by reinforcing our company values. We want to remind the employees about our values, and reinforce how we deeply we are committed to those values.
If you are starting a new company, set the tone for the culture from the very beginning. It will determine what your company becomes, and how customers and partners perceive you and treat you. It will be how employees evaluate you.
Develop a company culture with three simple steps:
· Define a value system.
· Live by it every day, in everything you do.
· Hire people that fit in with that value system.
You will keep your company culture powerful and dynamic for a long time! | https://medium.com/@sudheermatta/startup-culture-what-is-it-why-do-you-need-one-a29eaf2fe547 | [] | 2019-03-18 04:41:31.320000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Mist', 'Silicon Valley', 'Culture'] |
Blackout Queen to Teenage Dream. | The more voids I felt, the more my mind disappeared.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Maybe that was what my blackouts were about. The more voids I had, the more my mind disappeared. I’m not sure of the science but I know that there was a correlation.
In 2006 I tried out for the Winthrop Cheerleading team and broke my arm during the tryout. There are parts of this story I reflect on fondly. Like, I didn’t go to the hospital until AFTER the try out was over because I wasn’t a weak ass. We had to stunt during the tryout, and I did so with one hand because I was a beast. The most important part of this entire memory, according to my ego, was that the squad that I coached beat the team that the coach of the Winthrop cheerleading team also coached. I remember him and his spiky hair being more arrogant than I cared for, and so my defeating him made me feel superior. Talk about an ego.
Back to the story.
After I made the squad, (obviously I did), I went to the hospital and got my first cast. I wasn’t foreign to pain, but I was foreign to the concept of prescription drugs on my own. Around this time I’d just started taking Ritalin and my pain medication seemed to be an excellent addition.
Do you know what was also a fine edition? Tequila.
And what else? Desperation.
There was a boy that I liked who very much did not want me beyond sex. Naturally, I thought that if I had more sex with him he would eventually come around. He did not. He came around to one of my friends instead.
And so, tequila and pain medication became the healers of my broken cheer heart.
They also were the recipe for my first blackout. Naturally, I have no idea what happened. What I was told was that I was throwing shoes and screaming at someone’s house. The next day, I went to take a final exam, left the exam midway to vomit, and passed with a B.
Now, this seems like a pretty typical American College tale. Heartbreak. Alcohol and drug abuse. Blackout. What is also typical is not the part that we talk about as much. We pretend like those experiences stay at University or stay in our youth. They don’t.
My first blackout experience was the catalyst for years of blacking out. There was a 5 or 6 year period that it didn’t matter how much I had to drink, and I was going to blackout. One beer. Two bottles of wine. One shot. Whatever the liquid, my brain was shutting off as soon as it touched my tongue. I didn’t know it wasn’t okay. I did know that I was the only one experiencing it. Or I thought I was the only one experiencing it. I’ve never really been one for discretion, but this I kept to myself the best I could.
I can’t tell you all the things I did in a blackout state. Obviously, because I can’t remember, but also because sometimes I was blacked out with people I don’t know. Your friends will tell you what you did. People you don’t know, won’t.
I do have some awful memories of being a twenty-something wasteland and I still wonder why my brain couldn’t have chosen to blackout during those moments. I can see myself vividly being taken home by a bartender when I first moved to Atlanta. He was a toxic piece of shit, and I wanted everything to do with him.
The first time I met him I thought he looked like the type of asshole I’d want to treat me poorly for the rest of my life.
I found him one Sunday afternoon off of work drinking at a bar and well… you can imagine. Or maybe you can’t. Me, three sheets two the wind, rubbed up on him like a cat in heat. Well, I tried. I couldn’t really stand. Or talk. But I did my best to make sure he knew I was ready if he was ready. Now, I don’t know why at this point in the story I can still remember anything. Is my memory accurate? Probably not. I’m sure my thinking I rubbed on him was perhaps, in all reality, my falling on the floor next to him.
But I still remember him taking me home.
I still remember throwing up in his bathtub.
I still remember taking a shower and shaving my legs and my pubic hair with his razor so that I could appear to be sexy.
I still remember leaving the residual hair and vomit in the bathtub.
I still remember vomiting again.
What happened next?
I passed out.
To find out the rest of this story & how I changed my life click here | https://medium.com/recovery-international/blackout-queen-to-teenage-dream-12dbf4abd60a | [] | 2020-07-12 09:17:57.064000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Personal Growth', 'Sobriety', 'Change Your Life', 'Life Lessons'] |
Brockhampton: The Best Years of Our Lives | The Saturation Era began with the group’s first release in the trilogy with SATURATION being released on June 9th, 2017.
In the lead-up to the album’s release Brockhampton released four singles; HEAT, FACE, STAR, and GOLD. All four of these songs would go onto become signature tracks from the group, and easily the most popular songs on the album itself. SATURATION clocks in at just under and hour and features a very diverse 17 tracks (3 of which are skits, a staple on all 3 of the SATURATION albums).
HEAT opens the album and right away thrusts listeners into the vast and vibrant world that the group has created with their unique and sometimes polarizing sound. Aggressive and in-your-face are probably the best ways to describe songs like HEAT and BUMP, easily two of the band’s most “hard” songs to date. STAR, another standout single, packs a powerful punch filled to the brim with pop culture references, with each line hitting harder than the last and leaving an impact on the listener.
Music Video for STAR
Music Video for FACE
On the other end of the spectrum, songs like FACE, MILK, and SWIM are some of the softest sounding Brockhampton songs, but are each equally as impactful as those mentioned above, with FACE even being used in the second season of the hit Netflix Original show Dear White People.
Along with unique and vastly different songs from any other band or group out there, Brockhampton has also achieved something special with their music videos. Each video has a distinct look and feel, with all videos from the Saturation Era being shot in the same aspect ratio. These releases were all connected through their openings, which feature the band’s web designer, Roberto, introducing the video in Spanish. | https://notveryprofoundfilm.medium.com/brockhampton-the-best-years-of-our-lives-449dc978112c | ['Patrick Coyle - Simmons'] | 2018-10-01 00:44:40.454000+00:00 | ['Hip Hop', 'Rap', 'Music', 'Discovery', 'Brockhampton'] |
Framed | I wrote this poem three years ago, 13 years after the loss of my son:
I love to look at pictures.
When I visit people’s homes,
More than small talk I enjoy wandering,
Looking at the pictures, in their pretty frames.
You can tell so much from peoples’ pictures.
Perfectly posed? Nothing but smiles?
Hiding something.
Two people, heads together, smiling, while their bodies push apart?
This will not last.
Nothing but old black and whites,
Romantic memories of bygone eras?
Avoiding something.
I like to listen while I look,
to hear the story that’s being told by the pictures in their frames.
What story do my pictures tell?
I hope they tell a story of moments.
The moment when
my daughter met her new baby brother for the first time.
The moment when
my toddler son basked in the belief of my perfection.
I’ve tried to frame these moments,
display them for all to share.
But there’s one moment I’ve framed, but never shared.
The moment when
My 23-week old son was born, but never took a breath.
Thirteen years ago today
After laboring the better part of a day
I saw my little boy for the first and last time.
This moment has been framed in my mind for years.
Framed with grief and anger.
How many things were visibly wrong
How his outward deformities symbolized my inner ones.
This year, I notice the frame is changing.
Now, when I look at this moment, I see other things too.
Yes, I see the deformities, but today
I also see a little soul, pure and beautiful.
Yes, I see sorrow, but today
I also see joy, joy for the boy and man he would have become.
The frame, which was one-dimensional and black
Now shows some facets and sparkle,
Like a diamond in the rough.
Today I know the frame isn’t finished
And I’m curious about what it will become.
I’ve always thought the black-framed moment
was never meant to be shared.
But today’s multi-dimensional, sparkly frame
Demanded to be shared.
And so it is | https://medium.com/@lmondale/framed-560a11380814 | ['Lucy M'] | 2019-02-16 01:10:29.392000+00:00 | ['Loss', 'Perinatal', 'Love', 'Perinatal Loss', 'Grief And Loss'] |
SEGRON, beyond end-to-end test automation | SEGRON has secured €3M Series A Financing from Credo and OTB. We talk with Thomas Groissenberger, its CEO.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe Segron in a single tweet?
Thomas Groissenberger: SEGRON provides future proof Beyond End2End test automation solutions for communication networks.
PC: How did it all start and why?
TG: Working as a Consultant for big Telecom players, 25 years ago, I met Michael. We developed several projects together. After many years, we realised that it was a common need for our clients which was not fully covered by any solution available in the market. Then we decided to establish together Segron initially under the business model of the consulting firm, specialised in the field of network design, deployment and testing for the Telecom industry. Years later, Jari joined the company bringing a big contribution to the development of what is today our main product, SEGRON ATF (Automated Testing Framework) and Petri joined to the company already more than 3 years ago strengthening the entire Segron financial area.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
TG: Certainly, the biggest achievement and asset so far is our wonderful and committed team. Engineers and experts coming from the Telecom industry with invaluable know-how in the sector. Today, we are an international group of 50 people coming from more than 8 different countries. Each of us makes an invaluable contribution of culture, skill-sets, abilities and personalities that make us unique in the market.
In terms of product development, SEGRON ATF, our main product has evolved enormously. Unlike competing solutions, the SEGRON ATF can orchestrate testing with real Out-of-the-Box end-user devices (phones, tablets, laptops, IoT devices, etc.) while providing full access to the systems under test, enabling real-time Signal Trace and system log analysis.
After the introduction of SEGRON ATF and during its continued development, major telecommunications carriers and service operators have selected ATF to meet their current testing requirements. After several years of hard work, we have established a solid footprint across the DACH region. Our product has a presence now in more than 6 countries across Europe.
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
TG: The funding is undoubtedly a great vote of confidence, already allocated to scale-up our team, innovate our R&D department, increase our communications and marketing efforts and reach more customers in Europe.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?
TG: Our main goals for the upcoming years are: | https://medium.com/petacrunch/segron-beyond-end-to-end-test-automation-2d11bbb75fbc | ['Kevin Hart'] | 2019-09-03 20:17:59.818000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Automation', 'Test Automation', 'Software Testing', 'Testing'] |
Kid Cudi Is Back With ‘MOTMIII’ | Photo Credit: Complex News
Over 10 years later, rapper Kid Cudi drops his most anticipated album, Man on the Moon III: The Chosen. This album release is a monumental moment for Cudi’s career and fans.
I first discovered Cudi in high school, and he became someone I predominately listened to, even through college. He has this unique beat, lyrical flow, and infamous hum that no other artist can mimic. I can still envision myself listening to his music in high school parking lots and my college apartment. Times were a lot simpler then. Now years later, I’m listening to his new music with a more mature mindset. He spoke to me then, and he still does to this day. His music is universal and timeless.
Cudi still raps about sadness, overthinking, and depression but in a different light. He shares how he’s overcome the darkness before and now he’s fighting the pain once again. Cudi’s been making people not feel alone since he hit the scene, and that’s why he remains one of my favorite artists. He’s been open about mental health and has helped a generation of kids.
I watched Cudi’s new music video, “She Knows This,” before I had a listening party of one. Because social distancing, duh. The beginning of the video opens up with Will Smith’s infamous The Pursuit of Happyness speech when he’s lecturing his son about not letting anyone tell him he can’t do something. The speech has a slight twist as Will Smith starts talking to Cudi. Then Cudi yells, “It is my destiny, Will Smith!” And the music drops. The video is iconic, so I knew this album would be great.
I felt like I was back in 2009 when I played the first song on his album. “Beautiful Trip,” just 37 seconds long, takes listeners into an alternate universe. With that intro, you know you’re in for a ride. Why do the shortest songs on the album always end up the greatest and leave you wanting more? Every piece flows seamlessly to the next as Cudi tells his story through the songs. I’ve listened to the tracks from start to finish five times already. Just like his previous MOTM records, I didn’t skip a song. I just let it play until the end. His MOTM trilogies deliver a unique message and different vibe, yet all connect with one another. His timing is impeccable with this album release. It feels like a holiday present to me, and I’m sure other fans. And the art cover is the chef’s kiss to this project. I think Cudi has more in store for fans as he ends his album with his daughter whispering, “To be continued.” Does this mean we’ll get another MOTM in the future? Guess we’ll have to wait and see. Till then, I’ll be listening to this album on repeat. I have no doubt the MOTM trilogy will go down in history as the greatest.
See Cudi talk about what he’s been up to and the making of MOTMIII in his interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe here. Hear his familiar melody fans love on all streaming platforms now! If you’re not a fan, this album will convert you to one.
“I told myself I cannot grow without loving me.” — Scott Mescudi, aka Kid Cudi. | https://medium.com/@misshernandezwrites/kid-cudi-is-back-with-motmiii-6a91242f1a0 | ['Ash Hernandez'] | 2020-12-13 05:10:30.876000+00:00 | ['Apple Music', 'Spotify', 'Artist Spotlight', 'New Music', 'Kid Cudi'] |
E2E Testing React Native with Detox + Screenshots | Note: This tutorial uses create-react-native-app and Expo, but the approach will work on any react-native app.
Wouldn’t it be nice to run your app through its paces without having to manually tap through all the screens? After creating a new feature or fixing a bug, we usually install the app on our device and test it out manually. But this process can get out of hand when we want to verify all our features, new and old, before tagging a release.
This is the dream that Detox provides, a Selenium like interface for testing React Native apps. With Detox’s focus on synchronization (we’ll see an example of this later), it lets you write cleaner and less flaky specs. Other tools that rely on naive solutions like adding sleep(2000) to wait for a request to the backend to finish often break on slower CI machines or networks. But with Detox, along with stuff that Google developed (EarlGrey for iOS and Espresso for Android) under the hood, it automatically waits not only for requests to finish, but also animations, timers, and more.
Sample app with Detox
So let’s see how writing Detox specs looks like with a sample app. This sample app is nothing more than a create-react-native-app that has a button and pressing that button five times will show a cool fact about cats. Also, we’ll add testID props to any component we’d like to interact with our tests.
App.js
And here are the specs. Aside from the normal setup from the Detox docs, we can use detox-expo-helpers to have Detox play nicely with this CRNA app.
The first test checks the initial state of the app and makes sure that a component with testId="button-tap" is visible.
The second one tests that the number of taps will be shown on the first and third tap.
And the third one tests that a cat fact shows up on the fifth tap. Note that the cat fact comes from the internet and we’re not waiting for the request to finish here. We simply expect that the element is visible and Detox will wait for the request and the resulting render to finish before making the expectation.
So let’s pull the sample repo and see it in action.
cd detox-sample git clone [email protected] :cjcaj/detox-sample.gitcd detox-sample # Install our dependencies
npm install
npm install -g detox-cli
brew update
brew tap wix/brew
brew install --HEAD applesimutils
# Run the packager and get a build for detox to use
npm run ios
# In a new window, copy over the build when you see the app running
cp -R ~/.expo/ios-simulator-app-cache/Exponent-2.3.0.app e2e/
# Run the tests
detox test | https://medium.com/async-la/e2e-testing-react-native-with-detox-screenshots-595146073863 | [] | 2018-08-01 15:46:27.262000+00:00 | ['Detox', 'React Native', 'Expo', 'Testing', 'Screenshots'] |
Honor Your Gifts | I went through a period a few days ago where I was just being down on myself. Unlike some of my friends who either have a husband who works which allows them to be able to work from home and work on their creative business, or who have savings that allow the same thing, I must work a full-time day job.
While scrolling through Facebook and seeing all the lovely new book releases from these same friends, and myself who hasn’t released a brand new book since 2019, well it really made me feel bad. And then to top it off I got mad, why the hell can’t I be in the position to work from home and write too?! Needless to say I started beating myself up for not having as many new releases, not writing as many articles, and not having the same amount of time to be “creative.”
And oh the jealousy! Yes, I was positively becoming that green-eyed monster. The more I scrolled, the more jealous and angry I got. Talk about a vicious cycle.
The fact is we all get a bit jealous at times, or angry that others can do things that we wish we could do, it’s normal and it’s important to honor your feelings and allow yourself to feel them. That being said, mine were quickly getting out of control and I knew I needed to do something fast or I was going to be in a downward spiral for who knew how long.
Then something wonderful happened. While I was working to speak kindly to myself and release those negative emotions once I had allowed myself to feel them, these words came to into my head. “Honor your gifts.” Suddenly I’m thinking about all my gifts and how I use them. These are things that others either don’t necessarily know how to do or don’t want to. They make me unique. I remembered that while I may not have released a new novel this year, I did reformat, and create new covers for nearly all my books and then re-uploaded them to Amazon. And I created this publication and have been pretty regularly writing articles for it and and and…
Suddenly I was able to release those negative emotions and get back to the business of appreciating not just my own gifts but those of my friends who are blessed to be able to do what they love from home. While I still don’t have that option, I’m okay with it, because I have my own gifts and I get to use them everyday on my day job. Maybe I don’t have as much time to write and publish books and articles as I’d like, but I still do write and publish. I also paint, draw, and create Native American beaded jewelry when I can make time.
Comparing yourself with others is just a street to nowhere because while you’re busy doing all that comparing, and telling yourself you want this person or that person’s life, it is easy to forget that you have your own gifts and your own contributions. And if you had that other person’s life then you wouldn’t be who you are and your offerings would not be there. When you remember to honor the gifts you have and to use them (this is key, remember to use them) then you don’t need to compare yourself to others. Remember that you are unique and you have your own gifts to give to the world. Remember to honor your own gifts when you find yourself comparing yourself to others. You will not only feel better, but you will be giving something wonderful to the world. | https://medium.com/the-rainbow-unicorn/honor-your-gifts-92ac874b495e | ['Regina Paul'] | 2020-12-08 19:55:16.813000+00:00 | ['Talent', 'Journey', 'Journey Of Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Life'] |
Why does your gym need an app? | The health and fitness industry is currently booming as people have started taking their health a lot more seriously these days. With the world falling prey to technology and apps, the fitness world is no exception. A fitness centre or a gym needs an app to function better and become more versatile. Apps have now become a lifeline for most businesses and to pace up with the world, Here are the reasons why does your gym needs an App.
Like every other thing nowadays, even a person’s fitness quest now starts online. A large part of the world first starts all the research about health and fitness online and then makes a plan to go ahead with their fitness journeys. That is the kind of influence the digital world has on small businesses belonging to any and every field. The first idea that pops up in a fitness trainer’s mind would be of making a website for his platform which is not exactly a bad idea. A better one indeed is to make an app.
Why does your gym need an app?
If you own a gym or you are a personal trainer, an app can help you reach out to your audience better and in a more professional manner. There is absolutely no fitness business that is too small for an app. Whether you are a solo trainer training couple of clients or an owner of a gym cain, everyone needs an app. If you look around in your gym, you will see most of the people peeping into their phones for a workout plan, music or anything at all. That’s the reach you want to have access to and that’s the power of having an app.
Continued to read this article till here, we are sure you are someone who has got to do something with this. The good news is, this guide will help you through knowing and exploring exactly why you would need an app to grow. Here is why your gym needs an app: –
Reach
Technology has made it possible for every business to operate even beyond the four walls of their office space. This has a massive influence on the number of people a business can reach. Likewise, for gyms, fitness apps are a way where they can attract a massive number of customers and let them know that they exist. Apps for gyms can also cut down on the barrier of physical distance and help trainers to stream online classes for their customers who are far away. Trainers can do a lot of creative things to entice their customers via an app. They reach is far and wide, giving the trainers and gyms more opportunities to increase their revenue and grow bigger.
People make their choices of gyms and fitness centres only by taking into consideration, which gym is closest to them. The “near me” aspect of searches can bring in gyms and fitness centres with apps a lot of local customers and make them popular in the locality. This widens the reach, potential and popularity of gyms and fitness centres.
Distinction from Competition
Not many fitness centres/ gyms yet know the power of social media and therefore are not using it. With an app, you can organize your customers better and give them a wonderful customer experience while the other gym owners are manually having to organise their customers which has room for mistakes. With an app for your gym services, people will be well aware of who you are and what you do since they will have your gym’s logo on their phone screens constantly if they have downloaded your app. They will constantly be reminded that if they ever need gym services, they need to head to you. This will give you more customers than your competitors.
Establish a Fitness Community
An app will help you establish an entire fitness community. Let’s look at it this way. All your customers come to your gym for the same purpose that is to have a good body, a fresh mind and to better their lives as a whole. This is where your app steps in. You can use your app to connect likeminded people. You can allow your members to share photos and videos of their fitness journeys and keep everybody in the community motivated. Other than that, your fitness community will be able to track their workouts and diets to attain the body they desire to have. This will make people more interested in being a part of your community and using your app.
Your apps can help upsell and bring more revenue
You can send massive discounts and offers to your customers via an app and help attract a larger group of customers. You can add some advanced features like paid advances classes for your customers which will make them want to pay a little to get more benefits out of their fitness regimes. You can have other paid features like a personal diet plan for your customers and help them get better at fitness. | https://medium.com/@onairmobileappdevlopment/why-does-your-gym-need-an-app-8598ee4050cc | ['On Air Mobile App Builder'] | 2020-12-22 12:41:02.504000+00:00 | ['App Development', 'Onairappbuilder', 'App Development Company'] |
Coronavirus: WFP ready to rise to the challenge | Coronavirus: WFP ready to rise to the challenge
Agency puts expertise and infrastructure at the service of pandemic response and appeals for US$ 350 million as part of consolidated UN funding call Simona Beltrami Follow Mar 18, 2020 · 4 min read
True to its nature as an agency that is always on the frontline of the toughest emergencies, WFP is already providing support in the response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and adapting its planning to ensure operations can carry on in a highly volatile environment. Whether it is a crisis caused by conflict, disaster, or a health emergency, such as the Ebola outbreaks in recent years, WFP always stands prepared to help.
As part of a global appeal to raise a USS$ 2 billion for COVID-19 response, launched by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on 25 March, WFP is calling for US$ 350 million to support vital aviation, shipping, storage and transport, and engineering services in areas affected by the pandemic.
WFP is working to mimimize the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of millions of already vulnerable people. Photo: WFP/Gabriela Vivacqua
“The survival of millions of people depends on us,” WFP Executive Director, David Beasley, said in the week when the COVID-19 pandemic gripped global attention. “We must rise up to the occasion and be there for them.”
Immediate response
Among a number of immediate actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, WFP has provided support to the Chinese government’s efforts to curb the spread of the virus by delivering lifesaving medical equipment to hospitals in Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak.
In Iran, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus, a generous donation by Japan is enabling WFP to provide a two-month supply of personal protection equipment — masks, gloves and coverall gowns — for more than 2,000 staff and volunteers from the Iranian Red Crescent Society. The items will be airlifted into Iran from the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot in Dubai within coming weeks.
WFP will also continue to provide food and cash to 31,000 Afghan and Iraqi refugees living in settlements across the country to ensure that their food needs are maintained at an acceptable level during the pandemic.
Refugees and people displaced by conflict or disasters are among the world’s most vulnerable. In the picture: a food distribution in northwestern Syria. Photo: WFP/Fadi Halabi
Elsewhere, WFP is providing support to governments’ preparedness and response efforts — one such case is El Salvador, where the organization has provided the Government with technical and financial support for setting up warehouses, and for storing and delivering items donated for people in quarantine. Also, WFP has provided immediate food assistance to people in isolation and is working closely with partners to ensure these people have access to nutritious foods.
Getting ready for what’s to come
Amid mounting concerns about the spread of the virus and the consequences that this — and the protective measures taken to contain it — might have on food systems, WFP is using its long-standing expertise to monitor markets, supply chains and prices.
Analysis is also extended to identifying areas of vulnerability, both in terms of locations and programmes, with school feeding being particularly affected by school closures in dozens of countries. As schools close across the world, many millions of children will lose the nutritious daily meals and snacks that they normally received in their place of learning.
School closures mean millions of children will not receive daily nutritious school meals and snacks. Photo: WFP/Charlie Musoka
Data collected on possible supply chain breaks, food shortages or price spikes will help WFP to ensure that the 86 million people it aims to serve this year will continue to receive the food assistance they need, when they need it.
Having food in place — and the flexibility to switch from in-kind assistance to cash or vice versa — is key to this. WFP is currently aiming to pre-position stocks of food to be easily accessible and readily available, even in case of trade or movement restrictions, or other disruptions that may occur due to social unrest.
Vital partnerships
At a time like this, it is critical that substantial, fully flexible funding is made available to enable contingency planning that will allow operations to continue running smoothly. WFP is in regular dialogue with donor governments to update them on the evolving situation and ensure that the right decisions are made on funding priorities to provide a guaranteed flow of vital food assistance to vulnerable populations.
UNHRD Panama is preparing to dispatch personal protective equipment (PPE) items for the World Health Organization (WHO) to support healthcare workers in 13 countries in South America. Photo: WFP/Photolibrary
As the lead agency of the Logistics and Emergency Telecommunications Clusters, WFP is also ready to lend the expertise and infrastructure other UN and humanitarian agencies might need as they join the response to the virus. In previous global emergencies this has been a valuable asset alongside the use of the strategically positioned UN Humanitarian Response Depots that WFP has placed as staging areas to load and deliver vital supplies across the world.
Please help WFP at this time of global crisis. Donate now. | https://medium.com/world-food-programme-insight/coronavirus-wfp-ready-to-rise-to-the-challenge-8178a4d0aeac | ['Simona Beltrami'] | 2020-03-25 18:05:44.657000+00:00 | ['Humanitarian', 'Coronavirus', 'World', 'Emergency'] |
When Venezuela Accused Me of Being a Terrorist | When Venezuela Accused Me of Being a Terrorist
Detained and extorted by Venezuelan Intelligence on the border
“Venezuelan Death Squad” Composite image (Joshua Collins)
“Do you know it’s a 10-year minimum sentence for espionage and another 10 for terrorism?” said the officer from SEBIN, the political police charged with persecuting and torturing those considered threats to the Venezuelan regime.
I had heard a lot of stories about SEBIN during my time reporting on Venezuela — none of them good.
He paused, staring at me. His manner was poised- his posture perfect. He adjusted his wire-frame glasses.
“Of course, we will have to charge your friend with sedition, treason and perhaps espionage as well. It will be more difficult for him than for you.”
He made the threat as if he were commenting on the weather- his manner detached and terrifyingly polite.
He began fiddling with my phone, scrolling through my text messages. “What kind of information does your friend pass to you?” he asked.
An hour before, I was detained on the Venezuelan border while working as a journalist.
Now I was being accused of being a spy and a terrorist.
All of the stories of torture and violence in Venezuelan prisons I had heard in the last two years swirled around in my head.
Maintaining a calm exterior was becoming increasingly difficult.
Maicao
Twenty-four hours before that charming conversation, I arrived in Maicao, Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, to work on a story about gasoline smuggling.
I was travelling with a Venezuelan named “Jose Rafael”, a journalist from Caracas. I was glad to have company. Maicao isn’t the sort of place in which one wants to be alone.
It is a blisteringly hot trade-town on a lawless frontier. Venezuelans come from the western part of the country, where ongoing shortages are the most severe, to buy goods. The region is also a smuggling hub for gasoline, food and cocaine.
During the day, the entire city is an open-air marketplace for every good imaginable- from clothes to cheap electronics to bulk food to diapers to anything else one can imagine.
There is little police presence and after dusk the streets empty as Maicao transforms from bustling market town into a silent city of phantoms.
After sunset we stayed in our cheap hotel room killing roaches, writing and waiting for the sun to rise.
The open air marketplace in Maicao, Colombia (composite image: Joshua Collins)
Detained
In the morning we went to La Raya, the neighborhood on the frontier.
As Jose and I walked towards the unmarked border, we spied a Venezuelan checkpoint about 100 meters in the distance. A large billboard featuring Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, with his arm draped around Hugo Chavez bid us welcome.
“I want to go have a look.” Jose told me. I had no desire to go anywhere near the checkpoint. I told him I would wait there, presumably in Colombia. I took a seat on the curb, well away from the officials checking documents.
I waited as he wandered off. A few passersby tried to sell me rides to Maracaibo in Venezuela, but mostly people just smiled at me. I chatted for a few minutes with a curious fruit vendor about life in New York City.
Then I noticed a Venezuelan National Guardsman approaching me. Alarmed, I stood up and slowly backpedaled.
“Please stop moving, sir.” he shouted, with his right hand on his holstered pistol.
“Hello. I’m just waiting for a friend.” I replied, continuing to slowly back up. Why was he following me? I thought maybe if I could keep mobile, I could attract the attention of one of the few immigration officials from the Colombian side.
“I told you to STOP MOVING!” he yelled. He un-holstered his pistol and shifted into a combat stance- feet separated, elbows raised with both hands on his weapon, which he kept pointed downward.
I stopped moving and raised my hands to shoulder level.
“Uh, is there a problem here?” I asked.
He didn’t respond, but kept advancing. When he reached me, he holstered his pistol, but kept his right hand on the weapon. “Identification.” he stated bluntly.
“Sure, officer.” I said, slowly taking out my wallet with my right hand while keeping my left hand raised. “Here is my Cedula”, (Colombian identification card). I knew my appearance and accent had already given me away as American but I thought maybe I could buy some time. Venezuelan officials would not react well to a reporter from the Evil Empire, the name Chavez gave the United States.
I looked towards the Colombian immigration office. There were no officials in sight. He pocketed my identification.
“Come with me.” he said, placing his left hand on my shoulder, his pistol hand still on the weapons’ grip.
“Listen. I think there is a misunderstanding here. I’m not doing anything. I’m just..”
“Shut your mouth.” he told me. “Come with me now.”
“Surely we can work this out.” I said, removing some Colombian money from my wallet.
“I told you to shut your mouth.”
I did. He gripped my arm and pushed me along roughly towards the checkpoint in the distance..
“I’m no thief.” he told me as we approached a small, two-story dilapidated concrete building near the military checkpoint.
It seemed like a strange comment to make.
It turned out later he and I have very different definitions of the word.
Jose Rafael was chatting with an immigration guard in the distance. He spotted me being escorted away and bee-lined towards us.
“Hey! Wait a second!” he shouted.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked as he approached. The guard he had been chatting with followed behind.
“You’re with him?” said the guard detaining me.
“Yeah, he is my friend.” Jose replied. “I just went to get…”
“Come with me,” said the guardsman who wasn’t a thief, cutting him off. The soldier that had been following behind placed his hand on Jose’s shoulder.
They ignored our protests as they escorted us into the building, dumping us in a concrete cell that contained a desk, three chairs and a barely functioning fan.
“What are you doing in Venezuela?” the guard asked after patting me down.
“You brought me here. I was waiting in Colombia.”
“No. You entered Venezuela without permission. Are you a spy?” he said as he opened my backpack.
I laughed. The idea seemed ridiculous. I had been sitting in plain sight on a curb in the middle of the street chatting with passersby. If I were a spy, I would be the worst secret agent in the history of espionage.
“What are these?” He held my cameras up before me, frowning.
“Journalists.” said the other guard, smiling.
My heart sank.
“Please wait here.” said the guard who wasn’t a thief, as if we had a choice. He left the room with the cameras and our phones.
Jose paced with his hands on his face.
“Brother, I don’t think you realize how bad this is. They disappear people like me.” He pulled on his hair as he circled the room.
He stopped, looking me. “How much money can you get a hold of? Right now.”
“Not much. Maybe if I made some phone calls and emptied my account I could come up with a few thousand dollars.”
“It’s not enough.” said Jose. He sighed. “Look. If we can’t get some money together you’re going to be on a bus to a prison in Caracas. They’re not going to kill a gringo. If I’m really lucky I will be there beside you.” He resumed pacing.
“But it’s more likely I will be buried outside in a ditch.”
Venezuelan Intelligence
An hour or so later, the official from SEBIN arrived. He was average height, lanky, perhaps about 45 years old with a neatly ironed uniform, wire-rimmed spectacles and a grim expression.
“Gentlemen, this is a very delicate situation you are in. You have material against Venezuela on your cameras. You snuck into the country, and you are here to commit espionage and terrorism.”
He waved off our attempts to respond. “Please be quiet while I am speaking.”
He arranged his papers in front of him. “In short, you are a spy.” he said looking at me. “And perhaps a terrorist.” He then looked at Jose, “And you are a traitor, a collaborator with a hostile foreign power and perhaps a terrorist as well.”
“But you are lucky. I would rather avoid any international problems. I believe that I can hush this incident up and all can move on if you can transfer ten-thousands dollars to a bank account here in Venezuela. I will provide you with the account number.”
He stood up, still holding his papers. “Now Jose Rafael, you will accompany me, please.” he said, gesturing towards the door. Jose followed him out of the room.
I didn’t know it at the time but he was taken to another cell with a metal chair in the center of the room. Next to the chair was a table on which rested a car battery, rusty terminal clamps, a knife and a pair of pliers. They sat him in the chair and began to explain in minute detail the precarious position we were in.
Jose eyed the torture implements nervously as they spoke.
The torture Room (modified photo from twitter account of Amnesty International)
Bad Cop
Another agent from SEBIN entered my cell as they left. His demeanor and appearance the opposite of the first; younger, perhaps 30, muscular and nonchalant. He carried himself with the easy swagger of a gangster- all slouches and threatening smiles- insultingly informal and dangerous. If the first official was terrifyingly polite, he was street-thug intimidation.
He turned the chair around and flopped down before me, uncomfortably close.
He leaned in, his face inches away. He wore way too much cologne. It made my eyes water. “You know what we do to gringos in the prisons here?” he asked me.
He was here to scare me, to underscore and exaggerate all the worst possibilities, and intimidate me physically and with threats.
It worked. He scared me, though he seemed like a cartoon cutout- the “bad cop” as it were. I felt like he had been watching terrible police-dramas to practice for this.
It made me laugh a little inside to think of him as an overly dramatic actor.
I needed the laugh because he was describing beatings, open-air prisons where the inmates would be just as dangerous as the guards, cells shared with a dozen other occupants and serial torture at the hands of officials seeking information.
The scary part wasn’t his demeanor, rather it was the fact that he wasn’t lying. I’ve talked to people who have been in those prisons. It was all true.
He threatened me for 15 minutes then left me to think.
I did not think happy thoughts.
Jose Rafael Escapes
After awhile, “Good-cop” returned with Jose. Jose had convinced the Venezuelan officials that he could obtain a few-thousand dollars. I told them I could do the same.
But one of us would have to go back to Colombia to do it. Jose Rafael volunteered and the agents from SEBIN agreed. They would keep me as collateral. It was the best outcome we could hope for. As Jose said, they weren’t going to kill a gringo- especially a journalist.
As he was leaving, Jose grabbed my phone. He said he would need my contacts in order to raise money.
Jose and I shook hands. “I will see you in a few hours, brother,” he said, looking me in the eyes.
I had serious doubts that he would. Would he just run off?
I couldn’t blame him if he did, there was no way he was going to be able to enter Venezuela again after this ordeal-he was lucky to be escaping with his life.
They threw me back in the oppressively hot, concrete cell and left me alone. I don’t know how much time passed. I sat in the chair, staring at the electric fan. My heart raced. My thoughts dwelt on prisons in Caracas.
I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing, trying to calm myself. A panic attack wasn’t going to improve my situation. The rising terror was preventing me from thinking clearly.
That’s when the power went out.
I sat in the darkness, sweating, waiting, trying not to scream. | https://medium.com/muros-invisibles/when-venezuela-accused-me-of-being-a-terrorist-b403de1f66a8 | ['Joshua Collins'] | 2019-10-21 06:15:50.696000+00:00 | ['Sebin', 'Venezuela', 'Crime', 'Journalism', 'Human Rights'] |
4 Steps to Go From Rags to Riches by Using Your Rags | Identify your current assets and put them to work building wealth
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
We all love a good rags to riches story. It gives us hope. If that person started from nothing and made it big maybe I can too.
The more compelling the initial poverty story, the more impressed we are by the rise. We feel tricked if halfway through the story we realize the writer leveraged some assets that we don’t have to bring about their rapid success.
The truth is no one gets rich without taking what they already have and turning it into something more. Let’s be honest, it is a lot easier to get rich if you have a lot of assets to begin with.
I graduated from college with a ton of debt. I married someone with even more debt. Then we both went to grad school racking up additional loans. Neither of us went on to lucrative careers. There were a couple of penny-pinching decades there. But we are now putting three kids through college debt-free, traveling the world, and technically are millionaires.
Rags to riches, right? Sure, and there are many crucial steps we took that got us to where we are today. But we also had a lot of luck and help along the way.
Do you want to be a millionaire? Take whatever rags life has given you and upcycle them into riches.
Step one: examine your rags
One person’s rags are another person’s riches. I was born into a loving family with two educated parents. Money was very tight, but I never went hungry and I always had a roof over my head. I’m white, cisgender, and heterosexual. I have no major physical or mental disabilities. Getting good grades took effort but was well within my skill set.
I was already rich in so many ways even when I was living on rice and beans and racking up crippling educational loans.
Some people have parents who gave them every financial advantage but left them emotionally bankrupt. Others don’t have loving or rich parents. Maybe you have loving and well off parents but they want you to make your own way to success so they aren’t giving you a dime. Or your parents are struggling so much it is your job to support them as well as yourself.
Get out a piece of paper and start jotting down the key elements in your life. Don’t stop to consider whether they are positive or negative just list them. Use the following categories to get you started but add everything you can think of.
family: parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, others
friends: close and distant
education: formal and informal
race, ethnicity, skin tone
gender and sexuality
socio-economic status as a child and now
money: current balances of debt and/or savings
social networking connections
faith: religious connections from childhood and now
physical and mental abilities and disablities
trama: past and present
employment
physical items: car, laptop, steam cleaner, whatever
residence: where you live geographically as well as dwelling type and condition
Wherever you start your journey from, be realistic about your assets, good and bad. For better or worse this is what you have to work with.
Step two: recognize and cherish the good
What do you have going for you? Healthy body? Sound mind? Great friends?College degree? Trust Fund? Okay, probably not that last one or you wouldn’t be reading this article. Still, everyone has some assets material or immaterial. What are yours?
Go back to the list you made in the last step. Read through and put a check by everything that is an unquestionable positive. For example, if you are healthy physically put a check there. Try to do this first run quickly without getting too bogged down in evaluation.
Now read through your list again. Are there aspects of some of the items that are both positive and negative? For example, maybe you listed your car. It’s an asset but also a deficit because it needs repairs, the payments and insurance are killing you, and finding a parking spot every day drains your energy. Go ahead and put a checkmark but keep the negatives in mind for step three.
As you do your second run through your list adding checkmarks to assets, you will need to separate out and clarify out aspects of your list. Loving parents? A clear asset. Loving parents but they need your financial support due to disability? Separate this out into two items, adding a check to the positive.
If you find it helpful, put multiple checks by positive assets you consider most valuable so they stand out from the assets you perceive as less valuable.
Many of us don’t think of ourselves as having assets because we continually compare ourselves to others who have more. Put other people out of your mind as much as you can. What do you have that is of value?
Step three: reframe and flip the bad
Now it’s time to look at the negatives in your life. What’s holding you back? Debt? Fear? No money? Disability? A power structure stacked against you? These are real liabilities and it’s okay to feel the pain of having a longer road ahead of you than the person who started on third base.
Take a moment to acknowledge that the world is most decidedly unfair and people who deserve it way less than you have so much more. Wallow in that thought for a moment. The flip side, however, is that your success will feel so much sweeter when you acknowledge the deficits you had to fight through to reach it. Rags to riches is a popular genre for a reason.
Now remind yourself that many people more deserving than you have much less. One of the ways I am privileged is that I spent my childhood in the Philippines. My dad worked with people who lived in the garbage heaps and made their living picking through the trash. Seeing real poverty up close puts things into perspective fast.
Go back to your list and look at the negative items, those without a single checkmark. Are there ways to turn any of your negatives into positives?
One way to reframe is to use your deficits as motivation for change. Needing to pay child support might be a literal deficit but wanting to provide a good life in the future for your child is a strong motivator.
Maybe your negative life experiences have given you skills you can put to use or connections you can leverage. For example, if you are a recovered addict who has gone through a 12 step program this entire exercise has been easier for you because you already have practice in self-analysis.
Your trama might become the basis for a novel you write. The people you meet in a support group get added to your connections list and may lead to a job or other opportunity someday.
Student loan debt may be crippling you, but the cost-cutting skills you hone as you struggle to pay it down will give you the ability to invest a large portion of your income once your loans are paid off.
Reframe and add as many of your obstacles to your assets column as you possibly can. Training your brain to look for positives even in the shitty things life throws your way is an incredibly valuable life skill. If you are already good at this add it to your assets. If not, practice.
Step four: start putting your assets to work
Now you are coming from a growth mindset. You have acknowledged that you are already rich in some way and you are ready to get richer.
Think creatively about how you can leverage your assets. | https://medium.com/@marydj03/4-steps-to-go-from-rags-to-riches-by-using-your-rags-fec39f3d531a | ['Mary Devries'] | 2020-12-23 17:47:53.942000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Life', 'Money', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Self Improvement'] |
Congratulations on the milestone, oh soul sister of mine. | Congratulations on the milestone, oh soul sister of mine. It has been a privilege to know of you early on and read most of the 109. 💜 | https://medium.com/@kimmckinney719/congratulations-on-the-milestone-oh-soul-sister-of-mine-120c842159fb | ['Kim Mckinney'] | 2020-12-13 14:04:18.621000+00:00 | ['Writers On Medium', 'Writing', 'Relationships'] |
Renewable Energy Solar Power — No Longer Use the Non-Renewable Resources | Photo by MICHAEL WILSON on Unsplash
Renewable energy solar power is a great way to start saving the planet or saving your pocket book from having to shell out a ton of money each month in your electric bill. However, what might deter many people about using the renewable energy solar power is that the systems can be costly and might even scare away some people that do not realize that the outlay that they will have now will end up saving them even more in the long run because they will not have an electric bill anymore. Not only will you be eliminating your own electric bill each month you will also be saving the planet because your home will no longer be drawing power from the grid which means that less non-renewable resources will be needed at the power plant.
So you are probably thinking well if it doesn’t cost that much how come everyone doesn’t have a renewable energy solar system on there home, but that is because they have yet to discover the instructions that can lead to them having this freedom from the non-renewable energy resources. Just imagine though that if you are able to have your own power system then you will have one less bill each month that you need to worry about paying. Which with these tough economic times can be one of the biggest reliefs that we can have is the comfort of one less bill that can put a challenge on our checkbook. Not only that if you install the system yourself you will save even more money each month because you do not have to worry about paying down the cost of having the system installed.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2772780 | https://medium.com/@chirag5676/renewable-energy-solar-power-no-longer-use-the-non-renewable-resources-ae2c9a34664a | ['Chirag Chauhan'] | 2020-12-13 11:32:19.631000+00:00 | ['Solar Panels', 'Renewable Energy', 'Solar Energy', 'Solar Energy System', 'Solar Power'] |
Housing data investigation and linear regression modeling | Project: As Flatiron’s online data science boot camp students we were given our module 2 project which was to find price predictors and create a linear regression model capable of predicting potential prices for new homes in the King County region of Seattle.
Data we worked with: kc_house_data.csv which can be also found here
-> https://github.com/learn-co-students/dsc-mod-2-project-v2-1-onl01-dtsc-ft-030220/blob/master/kc_house_data.csv
Here is a general outline of the data set
-> https://github.com/learn-co-students/dsc-mod-2-project-v2-1-onl01-dtsc-ft-030220/blob/master/column_names.md
Exploratory Data Analysis: We had various EDA’s in this project but we chose to interpret a few which will be explained below.
As we can see, there does appear to be a linear relationship with higher house grades and higher sale price. Here grades represent the construction quality of the houses and go from 1 to 13. The description of the grades can be found here : https://info.kingcounty.gov/assessor/esales/Glossary.aspx?type=r . Also here we see that the quality of houses started improving constantly from the year 1943.
We then looked into the affects of renovation and if more recent renovations had a stronger effect on the sale price of the house.
While not a strong relationship with our data, it was interesting to see that there did appear to be a slight trend with more recently renovated homes tending to have a slightly higher possible selling price than those that were renovated longer ago.
Due to the lack of information of waterfront properties, we were curious if the houses proximity to water would have an effect on the sale price as well as the houses distance from downtown Seattle.
There did indeed appear to be a correlation between the price of a house and its distance from Seattle, with houses that were closer to the city tending to have higher price possibilities.
Model: We first checked for multicollinearity using a heat map as shown below.
We then went on to create our OLS model using the function below:
def make_ols_sm(df, cols, add_constant=False, target=’price_o’):
x = df[cols]
if add_constant:
x = sm.add_constant(x)
ols = sm.OLS(df[target], x)
res = ols.fit()
print(res.summary())
return res cols = ['time_since_renovated', 'condition_grade_sq', 'Renovated', 'basement', 'view'] res = make_ols_sm(df, cols)
The features we used to predict the price are :
Time since renovation Condition and Grade Has the house been renovated Does it have a basement View count
Here we got a R² score of 0.89.
This means the predictive model is able to explain a good amount of variance in the data and can be taken into consideration for testing and accuracy calculation on Test Data.
R2 < 0.5 means tending towards Underfitting of the model.
R2 > 0.9 means tending towards Overfitting of the model.
While not all models were saved, numerous attempts were made with various adjustments that all seemed to provide similar or diminishing results.
Tried using recursive feature elimination method here but high amounts of multicollinearity seemed unavoidable with this method as in the data set we were provided, almost all the features had a correlation.
At first glance, it looked like we had finally made a great model for our provided data.
However, further investigation showed that our test results weren’t matching up with each other. Essentially we had forgotten to include a constant in our model as a house will never sell for $0. After including the constant we got a much different result that confirmed what our initial test results were trying to tell us, which you will see in the cross validation section below.
Calculating VIF scores to check for multicollinearity:
from statsmodels.stats.outliers_influence import variance_inflation_factor X = df[cols]
vif = [variance_inflation_factor(X.values, i) for i in range(X.shape[1])]
list(zip(cols, vif)) VIF SCORES
____________________________________________________________________ [('time_since_renovated', 2.8410498876413746),
('condition_grade_sq', 3.1143028769918084),
('Renovated', 1.0503986065798132),
('basement', 1.7405733555157932),
('view', 1.1190630106116475)]
The VIF scores are great, indicating no multicollinearity.
Cross Validation:
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression cv_scores = cross_val_score(LinearRegression(), X, df[‘price_o’], scoring=’neg_mean_squared_error’, cv=5, n_jobs=-1)
cv_scores
Using above cv_scores on a sample taken from the data frame.
x_sample = df.sample(n=1)
x_sample.head()
Conclusion:
Well this may explain why our residuals looked like they did and also why our predictions seemed to vary so much. While we may have solved for multicollinearity, it appears the predictive power of our model still leaves much to be desired. Ideally, I’d like to re-evaluate some of our feature selection to see if it’s possible to improve the model without increasing the likelihood of multicollinear relationships. The entire notebook can be found here : https://github.com/saifzkb/dsc-mod-2-project-v2-1-onl01-dtsc-ft-041320 | https://medium.com/@saifkasmani84/housing-data-investigation-and-linear-regression-modeling-6a809d1a1f72 | ['Saif Kasmani'] | 2020-06-15 07:28:55.486000+00:00 | ['Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Linear Regression'] |
“Canon” is something we made up | “Canon” is something we made up
Whether we’re talking Star Wars or Twilight, Star Trek or Batman, there is no real difference between“canon” and “fan fiction”.
The entire argument has already been made in the headline and subheadline. The rest of this article will simply be a footnote on this point, which I believe to be more or less irrefutable.
Given this, you should recognize that this article is basically fluff, and consider that your next six minutes or so might be better spent doing something else.
Oh? You’re on your break at work and need something to pass the time? You’re in the restroom and need something to read? Or, you’re merely finding something else to occupy the agonizing, seemingly neverending hours of a sustained lockdown while counting down the days until you finally die of boredom? — or maybe of stress, while you watch the world descend into a politically-polarized, social media-driven collective hysteria?
Well, fine then. Here are my bogus opinions on a bogus argument I’ve seen play out on internet forums over and over again, because we all have strong opinions on irrelevant nonsense. Maybe this new angle can help you avoid some stress during your perusal of internet comments sections — even if the odds of such a thing approach pretty damn close to zero, since people who peruse internet comments sections aren’t exactly looking for peace of mind.
The argument is rather simple. I’m going to take a Socratic approach, where I pose questions, and then assume what your answers will be. This may seem unfair to you. But I object to this accusation of yours, because what I’m doing is no different than what Plato did. Only, I will actually say what it is I’m doing, rather than putting words in the mouth of someone who disagrees with my ideas. This makes me a more decent person than Plato, and thus you can trust me to present a fair and down-to-earth assessment of what you think, and how you’d respond. Fair? Fair. (See how that works?)
What are the characters in a fictional universe? Where do they exist? How do they exist?
Of course you have no troubling answering these questions. The characters, settings and events in a fictional universe are imaginary. They exist in our minds. They’re created by our imagination.
Let’s discuss what it really means to relegate something to the imagination. We might consider the Nominalists (yes, we have to include some substance or the article will be boring, just go with me here). John Stuart Mill explains here who they are:
In the later middle ages there grew up… a school of metaphysicians, termed Nominalists, who, repudiating Universal Substances, held that there is nothing general except names.
Nominalism is the viewpoint that universals, and general categories, don’t really “exist”. This is opposed to philosophers like Plato. Plato was a realist, who believed that the Forms constituted a sort of “universal” category, and that things in a given category therefore possessed a sort of “essence”. In Plato’s view, things are beautiful to the extent that they approach the universal “form of beauty”. What is “good” exists not simply in the minds of men, but in objective reality itself. The names we give things, then, would not be simply arbitrary, but actually designating some general, abstract category that actually exists.
Nominalists, on the other hand, say that these general categories don’t exist. They’re just abstractions. While the Platonic realist holds that an abstraction can have some degree of reality to it, the Nominalist denies this. Basically, it’s a negative position.
I assert that people who concern themselves over issues of “canon” in a fictional universe are acting like Platonic Realists, and those who reject such concerns are acting like Nominalists. I support the Nominalist position.
This is because a fictional character — like an abstraction, a form or a general category — exists solely within the mind. Granted, he or she can exist in a lot of minds. But even unlike issues of morality or religion, there is no real controversy as to whether James Bond really exists or whether Star Wars really did happen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We all agree that these thing don’t exist.
So, what is “canon”?
Well, obviously, you say: The stories told concerning a certain set of fictional characters and settings that are owned by the person, or people, who first made up the fictional character and setting.
But many of the people who made up these characters and settings are long dead. One could even say that most iconic cultural masterpieces on our society were made by people who are now dead or not involved with their production in an endless barrage of sequels and remakes. There’s been far more Star Trek made after Gene Roddenberry died than when he was alive.
Well, sure, you would naturally say. But Rick Berman and Majel Barrett and Michael Okuda and all these other people managed the franchise over the decades after Gene’s death. And they brought in new people and those people became just as important to the canon.
But isn’t this a Ship of Theseus in that example?
Of course, you would reply that you do know of the Ship of Theseus, and that it is a thought experiment about a ship whose boards and parts rotted over the years and had to be replaced, until after a time the entire ship had been replaced in this fashion and none of the original parts remain. (You can thank me for giving you so much credit.)
So we are likening the ownership over a given “canon” to the Ship of Theseus. But wouldn’t this mean that, at best, one can gain ownership of a canon by inheritance? That it can be passed down? How far shall we take this notion?
What if there’s a completely new set of people making new content under the same brand name? What if none of the original people are involved with the show anymore? And what of George Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney? Someone who created something can sell the rights to make “canon”?
Enough. Listen. This is all made up. The only hard realities we can identify in all of this are money, and intellectual property. The extent to which any of this is real is only the extent to which someone’s ownership of something is backed up by law. That means a lot in material terms. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing in artistic terms.
And if we’re going to say that it does, all we’ll be doing is allowing market forces to determine what we’re allowed to imagine.
Stop thinking like such a Platonic Realist, and come over to the Nominalist camp. Someone reboots a beloved franchise and makes new content under the same brand, and it’s absolute garbage? Fine. It’s not real, it didn’t “really happen”, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the creative vision of the people who originally made it. Whether a firm worth billions of dollars acquired the rights to reproduce certain characters or imagery from another firm worth billions really should have no bearing on whether that reproduction is taken seriously.
Put another way — no, you don’t have to accept that Star Trek: Picard is “canon”, or that The Rise of Skywalker is “canon”, or whatever else.
But wait, you say. We have a term for this. It’s called “headcanon”.
No. No, no, no, no, no. You’re still being a shameless Platonic Realist, still trying to draw a division between different ways we perceive the characters and stories that exist nowhere else other than in our imagination. The division between “canon” and “fan fiction” isn’t real. Therefore, anyone who spends any amount of time arguing as to what is canon or isn’t, or telling people they have to accept something as canon because some studio owns a bit of intellectual property, or shitting on people who like something that doesn’t fit in with your viewpoint of a given fictional property — is a damn pitiful rube. (I’m obviously exempt from this principle because of my own self-awareness of it, or something).
The concept of “canon” is as made up as the fictional universes we apply it to, for just the reason that it is an attempt at creating general category among things that aren’t real. That means that if you’re both a Nominalist in regard to fictional franchises, and a philosophical Nominalist, the idea of “canon” is like, doubly untrue, dude. Not a good look, bro.
That’s it. That’s all the distraction I can currently muster. You’ll have to scroll over to something else now.
But maybe you’ll now look at the creative and intellectual productions of our culture as something we all share. The art of our cultures exists in all of us, and cannot be “owned” by some company. It is yours. It’s all yours — to do with as you please, in your own mental kingdom. | https://medium.com/the-shadow/canon-is-something-we-made-up-be67a792deec | ['K. J. L. Kjeldsen'] | 2020-12-09 21:06:07.262000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Fiction', 'Ideas', 'Culture', 'Writing'] |
Football & Friends: The Picks (NFL Week 16) | NFL Week 16
Welcome once again to Football & Friends: The Picks. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all. I hope this holiday season finds you happy, healthy, and in great spirits. My gift to you all is some fun-filled picks for Week 16 of the NFL season. We are down to the last two weeks of the season. The playoff picture is starting to shape up as well as who will get the top pick in the draft. That’s a pretty big deal too for those that won’t make the postseason. At least you have something to look forward to.
No Thursday game this week. I believe Raiders vs Chargers was the last Thursday game of the year. We do have a game on Christmas Day and another set of Saturday games. Let’s get into those picks.
Christmas Day: Vikings vs Saints
Santa
Kirk Cousins and Drew Brees
We start the week off with a Christmas Day matchup between the Vikings and Saints. Both teams are coming off losses last week. Drew Brees returned. He did throw three touchdown passes but it wasn’t enough. I can see both teams winning here. Kirk did beat the Saints in a playoff game last year. Even coming off an injury, I gotta take Brees and company to pull out the win this week.
My Pick: Saints
Drew Brees
Now let’s get to the Saturday games. We have three this week.
Saturday games Week 16
Saturday Games: Tampa Bay vs Lions
Matthew Stafford vs Tom Brady. I like the sound of that. Tampa beat the Vikings last week. The lions are coming off a loss to the Titans. Tampa has more to play for obviously. Stafford will keep the Lions in the game but I gotta go Brady and the Bucs here.
My Pick: Tampa Bay
Mike Evans
Arizona vs 49ers
49ers vs Arizona
A battle of AFC West teams here. It’s been a tough year for the 49ers. From going to the Super Bowl last year to missing the playoffs altogether this year. You just never know in the NFL. One minute you are a contender and the next you are not. I gotta go Cardinals here. They are a team on the rise and have a lot going for them right now. Arizona wins.
My Pick: Arizona
Larry Fitzgerald
Miami vs Las Vegas
Raiders vs Miami
This should be a good match up. Derrek Carr went down last game and Marcus Mariota took over. He looked really good and almost beat the Chargers. I don’t know if Carr will be able to play or not but with Mariota the Raiders still have a shot. I’m liking what I see in Miami too. They are a team to keep an eye on in the coming years. This one may be closer than you think. I’m a take Miami to pull out a close win here.
My Pick: Miami
Tua
Now let’s get into the games for Sunday.
Carolina vs Washington
WFT vs Panthers
I’ll get into the Dwayne Haskins situation at another time. Ron Rivera faces his former team with a division title on the line. It doesn’t get much better than that. You already know who I’m going with here lol. Hail to the Football Team.
My Pick: Washington
Coach Ron Rivera
Colts vs Pittsburgh
Steelers vs Colts
The Steelers have not been the same since my team beat them. I’m taking the Colts here. The Steelers better get it together.
My Pick: Colts
Phillp Rivers
Atlanta vs Kansas City
KC vs ATL
This could be a high scoring game. You have two teams with good offenses. Atlanta is no KC tho. My money is always on Mahomes. Chiefs win.
My Pick: Chiefs
Patrick Mahomes
Bears vs Jacksonville
Jaguars vs Bears
With the Jets win last week, Jacksonville is now in the number one spot for next years draft. Tanking for Trevor Lawrence lol Bears win.
My Pick: Bears
Mitch Trubisky
Bengals vs Houston
Bengals vs Houston
The Bengals actually won last week against Pittsburgh. Like I always say, division games can go either way. Can the Bengals make it two in a row? Never say never but I doubt it. I’m going with Watson and the Texans.
My Pick: Houston
Dashaun Waton
Giants vs Baltimore
Ravens vs NYG
A rematch of Super Bowl XXXV. I need the Giants to lose so Washington can take the NFC East. Go Ravens.
My Pick: Ravens
Lamar Jackson
Browns vs Jets
Jets vs Browns.
Hell must of frozen over. Pigs must be flying. The Jets won a game lol. Against a good Rams team too. With that win they are out of the spot for the top draft pick. Things can change but that’s crazy. The Browns have been rolling. Baker Mayfield has stepped his game up in recent weeks. I gotta go Browns here. No way the Jets win two in a row and mess up their draft odds even more.
My Pick: Browns
Baker Mayfield
Broncos vs Chargers
Denver vs Chargers
Another division game here. This one’s a toss up. The Chargers have the better QB in Justin Hurbert. Plus he was on my fantasy team. I’m a go Chargers to get the win here.
Justin Hurbert vs Drew Lock
My Pick: Chargers
Justin Hurbert
Eagles vs Dallas
Eagles vs Cowboys
Jalen Hurts has brought some much needed energy to the Eagles team. Even though they lost both his starts, you can see how much better the offense looks without Carson Wentz. Dallas has won two in a row. They won their last game without Ezekiel Elliot. This is another game that could go either way. Hurts is due for his first win. What better way to get that win then by beating Dallas lol.
My Pick: Eagles
Jalen Hurts
Rams vs Seattle
NFC West battle here. Seattle is coming off a win against Washington. The Rams are coming off that embarrassing loss to the Jets. I can’t trust a team that losses to the Jets. Seattle wins here.
My Pick: Seattle
DK Metcalf
Sunday Night Football: Titans vs Green Bay
Waiting all day for Sunday Night
Green Bay vs Titans
We have an excellent match up for Sunday Night with the Packers vs Titans. Aaron Rodgers has some real competition this week. The Titas are no joke, Especially with King Henry leading the way. I was one touchdown off on my Henry predictions last week. I say he has another big game of over 100 yards and at least one score. In the end, I gotta go with that bad man in Green Bay to pull out the win for his team. Go Pack Go! If the Titans win it would’n’t shock me. I’m still sticking with the Pack.
My Pick: Packers
Aaron Rodgers
Monday Night Football: Bills vs Patriots
Are you ready for some football?
Bills vs Patriots
We end the week with a division game between the Patriots and Bills. How the mighty have fallen. For the first time since 2008, the Patriots will miss the postseason. On the other hand, the Bills are building on what they did last year and takings things to the next level. They are solid on both sides of the ball. The Bills will win here. Josh Allen continues to get better each game. He is a future league MVP for sure.
Cam Newton vs Josh Allen
My Pick: Bills
Josh Allen
That’s it for the picks. I can’t believe we are down to the last two games of the year. One more week of regular season picks and then the playoffs start. I plan to bring guest back soon to help pick games. Be on the look out for that as well. As always I’ll leave my patreon page at the end of this post if you’d like to subscribe to my exclusive content.
My online shop is posted as well. A lot of awesome custom gear including the official Football & Friends gear. I take request too so if you have any ideas or need something for your team let me know. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. Happy Holidays. Have fun, stay safe, and I’ll see you next time for the final week of the season. Week 17. Enjoy the picks. | https://medium.com/@BrokenMoneyMaker/football-friends-the-picks-nfl-week-16-7c46db09fca0 | ['Chris Durham'] | 2020-12-25 06:45:53.430000+00:00 | ['Nfl Week 16 Picks', 'NFL', 'Football', 'Blogging', 'Weekly Picks'] |
Vite Bi-weekly Report | Project Updates
Vite App
We received a lot of feedbacks since Vite iOS APP v3.8.0 was released last month. Most are positive, but also having a few issues. For example, scanning QR code may cause the App to crash, and some pages load slowly. All these issues will be fixed in the next release.
In addition, we found the text description in some pages may cause confusion. One example is the label associated with the “Enable Automatic Staking” checkbox. This will be improved too.
At last, the “Discovery” page will add the logo of the airdrop project to increase brand exposure.
ViteX Exchange
In the next milestone, we plan to upgrade the ViteX smart contract for a better deposit/withdrawal experience. By the time users can directly deposit/withdraw assets to/from the exchange without going through the wallet first.
In the meantime, ViteX will start to support Market Order, a key function for both users and trading bots.
The development work to integrate ViteX into Hummingbot has been completed. ViteX users can conveniently run their high-frequency trading bots to perform market making, cross-exchange market making, and arbitrage. In the follow-up, we will keep improving the user experience, documents/tutorials, and finally, submit a Pull Request to the project.
At present, the source code can be found at a forked branch (hummingbot: feat/vitex-connector ). We humbly invite the community to download and have a trial use.
Recent Milestones
BAN Airdrop with trading on ViteX
On September 30, we started the BAN airdrop campaign. Traders that have used on ViteX between Aug 8 and Oct 8 are allowed to claim from a pool of 2 million BAN.
All rewards have been distributed as of Oct 15.
Referral Campaign for VX Mining One-Year Anniversary
On September 9, in celebration of the mining anniversary, we launched the campaign for free referral as mining on ViteX. From Sep 9 to Oct 9, users may claim referral codes (worth 1000 VITE) and invite others to trade on ViteX. Referrers will on a permanent basis receive 5% of the transaction fees and 2.5% of the liquidity mining rewards from the referred traders.
On Oct 15, the VIte team has officially published all qualifying addresses for this campaign.
ViteX Exchange
On October 13, AR/USDT trading pair becomes eligible for trading mining and market-making as mining (“liquidity mining”). In particular, market-making as mining for AR/USDT receives a 3x multiplier for reward distribution.
ViteX has listed Privacy coin (PRV)
On October 14, the Vite Labs gateway has listed Privacy Coin (PRV), and PRV/USDT trading pair began trading.
The associated project Incognito builds technology to allow coins on other chains to transact privately. PRV is Incognito protocol’s native coin and is used for paying for transactions on the Incognito chain.
ViteX Data
Activities
Our COO Richard ran a new AMA for the international community, where he covered topics such as exploration of automated market makers on ViteX, improving Vite discussions on social media platforms like Reddit, and withdrawal fees on ViteX.
You may read the transcript of the AMA here: https://forum.vite.net/topic/4236/vite-labs-leadership-ama-oct-13-2020-review
Our COO Richard has been invited to moderate a debate between Mina (blockchain with small footprint) and Solana (performant blockchain without sharding) on the Futurist Conference. The content will become an episode of The Blockchain Debate Podcast. All past episodes are available here: https://blockdebate.buzzsprout.com
You are welcome to follow Richard’s twitter accounts: Twitter.com/gentso09 / Twitter.com/blockdebate | https://medium.com/vitelabs/vite-bi-weekly-report-3cc63f828a83 | ['Allen Liu'] | 2020-10-17 07:22:52.103000+00:00 | ['Project Updates', 'Vite', 'Blockchain', 'Crypto Exchange'] |
Calvin Ayre Bitcoin — Review. “Bitcoin Trader Calvin Ayre” Click Here… | “Bitcoin Trader Calvin Ayre” Click Here To Join!
Check out my analysis to see how we compare to other auto-traders in the crypto industry.
Here’s my brief review of my Bitcoin Dealer.
I got together with Bitcoin Trader to keep it quick, and I added $250 to my account because it’s the sum recommended to maximize your earnings ultimately. Today is my sixth day using the software, and I was able to hit $11,000+, but I’m still trying to reach my $21,000 target by the end of the week.
My Honest Analysis of Bitcoin Auto Trader:
Bitcoin Dealer has a super-speed program that exchanges a large number of trades every day. The framework uses the existing business establishment and rapid AI, which gives this program a favorable position over the other systems.
This item has an unfortunate speed of just .07 percent after more than six years of automatic trade. This means you’d have a very low chance of losing your cash, like less than 1% of the probability of misfortune. Take the divider lane!
The machine signal carries out transactions with 163 exchanges in 35 countries, and the amount of trades it is getting to is disconcerting-4 million!
After looking at the association behind this signing scheme, I found that it was on favorable terms. In 2018, this Trading Application earned $723 million in benefits, which was 11 percent more than the Merchant of 2019. A beautiful return.
This year, regardless of how the market sectors are in a state of unrest, this bitcoin merchant has determined that he will start picking up $650 million in benefits amid immense misfortunes on world securities exchanges.
I’ve been wildly looking for some real technique to pick up money online from home for as long as two years. I was looking for a dream that I couldn’t get my all-day pound by working my hours and making shrewd speculations. So when I caught the breeze of the broker robot on my Facebook channel, the thought provoked my curiosity.
How does it work?
You start by opening a record to use Bitcoin Dealer. At the hour of my registration, they provided a record master to walk you through the cycle and “hold your hand” for your first projects. For the calculation to make trades, it needs assets to work with, so I just stacked the base to start with $250. In any case, writing this out of what’s to come, I’m thinking about how much better my earnings would have been if I had started higher. When I stacked the assets, Bitcoin Broker dominated and started to do business for me!
Having used Bitcoin Merchant for a couple of days, I’m very excited about the performance. Bitcoin Broker can consistently trade when the conditions are acceptable, but it is inactive as a general rule. However, I’ve found out on the off chance that you’re only keeping your PC running with the intention that it can do business at whatever point it needs to, you have the best results. So I just let it go and let it get me some cash while I’m resting!
My Score of Bitcoin Trader: 4.75 /5
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“Bitcoin Trader Calvin Ayre” | https://medium.com/@rruss522/calvin-ayre-bitcoin-review-346326c4dc32 | ['Ray Russ'] | 2021-06-22 11:40:40.777000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Bitcoin News', 'Bitcoincash', 'Bitcoin'] |
How a Dumb Mistake Helped Me Become a Faster Snowboarder | I always struggled with speed in the past. On my previous years snowboarding, maintaining balance over the board when going over 45km/h, 50km/h was unthinkable. I never had the guts or the control to keep the board moving when going over these speeds for more than just quick short bursts. It looked way too scary. And that had a really bad effect on my riding: I usually got stuck on flat areas for not getting enough speed on the downhill sections, having to unstrap my back feet and do the “skate of shame” through the planes while everyone whizzed by. Of all of my friends, I was undoubtedly the slowest one on the snow, which left them quite annoyed most of the time for having to wait for me to arrive while we were riding together.
Last season, when I moved to live in the middle of the resort of Åre, one of my main goals was to improve my speed. I was determined to, for once and for all, not be the slowest one in the pack anymore. So, with the slopes on my backyard and all the season ahead of me, I started practicing… and failing miserably. Well, first of all: how do you even overcome the fear of high speed riding, specially when getting to know a new resort?
This is how a regular riding day used to look like.
My first attempts to start learning how to ride faster was to watch other snowboarders riding and check the paths they took across the slopes. This was quite a tricky task because most of the people snowboarding like to go through paths that leads them to hit features and perform tricks, but at least it was a start. I could start improving daily, little by little, getting a bit more comfortable at speeds that before were too much for me to handle.
The end of the year came, and with that, my friends came for a winter trip up here at my place. The training I did prior to these days showed some results. I was finally able to follow my friends closely, which in turn pushed my friends to ride faster because they didn’t have to wait for me for so long anymore. And this created a side-effect of this pursuit for speed riding: competition!
Oh yeah! My friends were not having this thing about the slowest guy in the pack being as fast as them, so it all began to look like a contest to check “who could ride the fastest”. At this point I was somewhat comfortably reaching speeds of 50km/h and my friends were not too far ahead. The days went by and the speed records went higher and higher. 55km/h… 58km/h… 59.5km/h… can I break the 60km/h barrier? Yes! 64.4km/h! That was my fastest speed of all time! I was finally able to match my friends kind of speed records on the mountains. But this didn’t last long, because soon one of my friends reached a new record for our group: a peak of 71.9km/h. That was super ultra fast in my mind. But now it was time for my friends to leave, and they soon would return for another trip in a few weeks time.
Without my friends around to keep the competition pace going, it was hard for me to keep the speed levels increasing. I had no one to follow to match so I had to find other ways to practice my high-speed riding. Following the other snowboarders on their tracks wasn’t cutting it anymore since I was already almost as fast as I could go while avoiding hitting the features. That’s when, one day, while riding down the slopes near my home here in Duved, I got passed by a group of skiers going down pretty fast, as every skier usually does. And that gave me the idea: why don’t I follow these guys? And, like that, I decided to point my board in their direction and started trying to follow their pace. 66km/h… 67km/h… 68.9km/h… 69.7km/h… can I break past 70km/h? Yes! 72.3km/h! That was a number I was impressed about for quite a long time! Finally I was the fastest of all of my friends. But that just heated things up, and there would be “revenge” when they come back up here so I wouldn’t hold that title of “fastest of us all” for too long. Specially not without practicing. And, during the time they were away, that’s what I did every single day. I used my lunch breaks from work to get to the slopes near my home and try to improve my speed riding, which is quite a good time of the day to do this sort of thing since most of the people are having lunch and the slopes are basically empty. Every day getting more and more comfortable in high speeds, and also trying to beat my own speed record in vain.
The weeks passed by and my friends returned for another visit. And, as soon as they came, I definitely didn’t hold that record for any time at all. My friend who previously held the fastest speed record managed to set a new one of 82km/h on day ONE and that shattered my score! Man… 82km/h??? That’s another 10km/h higher than my previously successful attempt! That was tough! In the back of my head, I couldn’t stop thinking that I should be a little bit better than this. Ok, my friends have been on the snow since childhood and I’ve been doing this for just five years but, come on, these days my friends ride it just for a few weeks per winter and I’m literally living in the resort. I should be able to beat this speed record with enough practice. And that’s what I set my mind to do now. It was time to break this barrier once again.
Each run, I was getting faster and faster… 72.5km/h… 74.8km/h… 74.9km/h… can I break the 75km/h? It took quite a while and a lot of effort, but, yes! A beautiful and round 75km/h score. But, I still wasn’t fast enough. So I kept pushing. 77km/h… 78.4km/h… Come on, let me break the 80km/h barrier! 79.8km/h… Come on!! 80.8km/h! YES! Let’s keep pushing, I’m almost there… but, before I could even beat 82km/h, my friend pushed the number forward once again: 84.5km/h!
My legs were dead at home when he showed me this result. To me it felt that, the harder I pushed, the further the barrier moved. After all, maybe we were all pushing each other harder. But, 84.5km/h? How? Where? I was flying past all of them that day. When did that happen? I had to ask him:
— Man… 84.5! F**king hell! Which slope was that?
— Hummm… Good question. I think it was at the end of that one we took when we were coming back from Björnen.
— Oh wow! Can we see it in the app?
— Nah… I need a premium pass on the Slopes app to see the full day stats. With the free version I can only see the daily bests.
— Ah, I can give you one of my Premium Daily passes that I have on my account so we can check it out!
— Cool! I’m curious too. Let’s do it!
As we added the Premium Daily pass to his account, we pressed the button that shows “which part of which slope was the place where the top speed has been reached” and the results of this investigation were… well… You see, during these days with my friends here, we tried to take advantage of the whole day of snowboarding the most we could, so we would ride until the lifts are closed and then, from the top of the mountain, ride down and rush to the bus station almost on the last minute to take the ski bus home. While my friends are packing their snowboards and skis at the back of the bus, I’m closing my snowboard tracking activities in the app. My friend, on the other hand, always left it to be done while sitting on the bus, relaxing after a tiring day. The issue is that, sometimes he took a bit too long to close the activity tracking and THE BEGINNING OF THE SKI-BUS ROUTE WAS BEING TRACKED AS A RUN! 🤦♂️
Well, now with the Premium Pass it was possible to edit the days and delete runs that are invalid (like, the ones taken inside a bus or driving or whatever other issue you had during the day). We deleted the 84.5km/h and his new speed record went back to be the 82km/h one. Just out of curiosity, we decided to check where that one was achieved as well.
And, guess what? SKI-BUS! 🤦♀️
The previous one from the end of the last trip: 71.9km/h? SKI-BUS! 🤦♂️🤦♀️
After we deleted all of the Ski-Bus related “speed records”, his top speed record fell all the way down to around 65km/h. This means that, for the past month, I’ve been trying to ride faster than a diesel engine powered bus running on a highway that takes us to and from the lifts in Åre! I was in total disbelief. So much focus and intense training for this sort of revelation. Oh well… 😅
During the next days, while we were snowboarding, his speed records were still on the middle to high 60s while I kept riding comfortably on the upper 70s. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach my numbers anymore. So when they left this second time, I still was the leader on the top speed category of our group. There was no more contest to have at this moment. But, well, since I was already hitting in the 80km/h range, why to stop there now? So, I kept pushing during my next days here in the mountain… 82.3km/h… 85.1km/h… 92.1km/h… 95km/h… until:
100km/h!
Now THAT was a number to be proud of! At that point, any quick run from point A to point B could reach around 80km/h with little effort. A casual ride from a lift to another on an empty day was averaging 70km/h easily. This Ski-Bus situation increased my levels of confidence quite a lot! I’m definitely a way better snowboarder than I was before thanks to this ludicrous contest. I’m not much into bombing down the mountain every day because I don’t want to become a hazard to other people trying to have fun in the resort but I’m happy that, if needed, I can ride as fast as a rocket with full board control. And I usually use this here and there to pump up the blood before practicing other stuff like hitting jumps and performing tricks.
Oh yeah!!!
About my friend? Ah, he came again for a third trip but now I was the one setting the pace and pushing the group forward. His speed record? At the moment of writing this article, 78.2km/h, with no buses involved this time, I hope! 😅
Do you have any weird story like that? A story about an event that made you push your limits harder and harder by accident? Share your thoughts below.
And, by the way, if you haven’t yet, go to https://getslopes.com and get your copy of the Slopes App today! It is available for both iPhone and Android devices and it is honestly one of my favourite apps. And, best of all: it is free!
Cheers and have a good ride! | https://medium.com/riding-diaries/how-a-dumb-mistake-helped-me-become-a-faster-snowboarder-2b0c7ba0e8d2 | ['João R.G. Sampaio'] | 2021-09-06 15:32:45.658000+00:00 | ['Winter Sports', 'Snowboarding', 'Speed', 'Snowboard', 'Snow'] |
HSV Herpes Eraser Review PDF eBook Book Free Download|NOOK Book | HSV Herpes Eraser Review PDF eBook Book Free Download|NOOK Book Jossmartin ·Dec 17, 2020
HSV Eraser PDF Download -
https://www.ereviewbay.com/HSVEraser.pdf
HSV eraser is probably one of the most straightforward guides that are actually made available to remove the HSV virus from the body. All it takes is 21 days to get rid of the nasty Herpes virus from your body entirely by following a diet plan that is very simple.
HSV Eraser Review PDF eBook Book Free Download | https://medium.com/@joss12martin/hsv-herpes-eraser-review-pdf-ebook-book-free-download-nook-book-be351e7aae35 | [] | 2020-12-17 12:02:00.603000+00:00 | ['Chadwick Boseman', 'Trump News', 'Cdc', 'Green Bay Packers', 'Joe Biden'] |
Ledger Hardware Wallet Review 2021 — Pros, Cons & More | What is Ledger wallet?
Ledger wallet is a hardware cryptocurrency wallet that allows you to safely store, send, and receive hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Ledger wallet offers the best level of protection as your private keys remain protected in a certified secure chip. Ledger crypto wallet safeguards crypto assets for ordinary users, hedge funds, high net worth individuals, and crypto banks. The Ledger hardware wallet has two models; the Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano X.
Ledger Nano X
The Ledger Nano X is the next level Ledger hardware wallet with which you can exchange, buy, sell, lend (using the DeFi functionality), stake and manage 27 coins from your smartphone or computer.
The Ledger Nano X allows you to manage your crypto assets from your smartphone by linking the device to the Ledger Live app via Bluetooth. You can also connect the device to a cable on your computer or smartphone. Depending on their sizes, you can install up to 100 apps on the Ledger Nano X.
Ledger Nano S
The Ledger Nano S is the original hardware wallet in the Ledger series. It lets you manage 27 assets and ERC-20 tokens via the Ledger app from your smartphone (Android) or desktop. You can also install 3 to 20 apps on your Ledger device depending on the app size.
Ledger Hardware Wallet Pricing
Compared to most other cryptocurrency wallets, Ledger offers the best value for your money. The Ledger Nano S is the entry-level cryptocurrency wallet offered by Ledger, and it has all of the same security features as its flagship model, the Ledger Nano X. Ledger wallets, bundles and accessories are priced as follows:
Ledger Nano S: $59
Ledger Nano X: $119
Ledger Family Pack S: $139
Crypto Starter Pack: $69.00
Ledger OTG Kit: $17.99
Ledger Wallet Pros And Cons
Pros
Easy to set up and use
Supports more than 1,500 different digital assets
Tamper proof
Portable
Long-lasting battery
Bluetooth connectivity features
Cons
Can be quite pricey
Ledger’s Hardware and Design
Ledger wallets have a simple and easy-to-use interface. Both wallets have display screens (the Nano X screen is larger)used to confirm transactions and two navigation buttons used to access the menu, select apps, and enter your PIN code and input backup passphrases. Ledger wallets have a durable stainless-steel cover surrounding the device. Nano wallets also come with a micro-USB cable used to plug into a computer.
Supported Coins
Both of Ledger’s wallets, the Nano X and Nano S are known to support the widest range of cryptocurrencies among all crypto hardware wallets. Ledger prides itself as a multi-currency feature, and stays true to its word it can support thousands of cryptocurrencies. This composition includes the most obvious suspects like:
Bitcoin (BTC)
Ethereum (ETH)
Ripple (XRP)
Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Polkadot (DOT)
Litecoin (LTC)
Binance coin (BNB)
Stellar (XLM)
Monero (XMR)
Ledger’s multi-currency feature lets you manage multiple assets with the same hardware wallet.
Security and Hacking Protection
Ledger employs the highest security standards to ensure the wallet is hackproof. For starters, both of Ledger’s hardware wallets integrate a certified chip that’s designed to withstand the most sophisticated attacks and securely host cryptographic data like private keys.
Ledger goes a step further to create a custom operating system (BOLOS) for its wallets to ensure your hardware device isn’t susceptible to malicious attacks. The custom OS also ensures that your applications are isolated from each other. Ledger also steps up security measures using its genuine check, a Ledger-developed authentication that ensures your wallets have not been compromised or tampered by a 3rd party.
Any hacking attempt on your wallet would be thwarted since a hacker would need your personal PIN, which only you can have. After 3 incorrect PIN attempts, Ledger goes into a timed lockout, from which you’ll need to enter your backup passphrase to access your wallet.
Ledger Customer Support
Ledger offers its customers a wide range of support resources, the main avenue of support being the Ledger’s website. You will find almost everything you need to know concerning the Ledger wallets on the FAQs section. Alternatively, there is the Ledger Academy which can help beginners learn the crypto basics. For quick questions, you can reach the support team through Ledger’s live chat feature or submit a ticket through the online contact form.
DISCLAIMER: Some of the links in this blog post are affiliate referral links. If you find value in this article; and make a purchase via these links, I will receive a small commission. And it won’t come at any extra cost to you. Thank you! | https://medium.com/@dojiihorani7/ledger-hardware-wallet-review-2021-pros-cons-more-6c2895ca5326 | [] | 2021-09-16 05:38:38.730000+00:00 | ['Hardware Wallet', 'Ledger Review', 'Ledgerwallet', 'Bitcoin Wallet'] |
10 Must-Follow Men’s Style Bloggers in 2021 | Here at Worldzfeed, we like to stay ahead of the curve in order to bring our customers the very latest in men’s fashion trends and style inspiration in 2021. Taking key styling tips and advice from the most influential names across the menswear scene, these fashion bloggers and influencers are setting their own trends, whilst social media platforms allow them to gain popularity.
Making successful careers on social media platforms such as Instagram, their own personal blogs, and a growing handful of influencers, keep up to date with the latest in emerging menswear trends by checking out our list of men’s fashion blogs to follow in 2021 here at Worldzfeed. | https://medium.com/@worldzfeed/10-must-follow-mens-style-bloggers-in-2021-9255b220f4e1 | [] | 2020-12-25 06:29:42.903000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Men', 'Trends', 'Menstyle', 'Mens Fashion'] |
Non-fungible Tokens Coverage Series #25 | Here are some of the latest and most relevant articles that you should hear about on the topic of Non-Fungible Tokens.
This article was originally published on the Auctionity Blog. If you want to keep up to date with the latest news of the NFT world, head to https://www.auctionity.com/non-fungible-tokens-coverage-series-25/ | https://medium.com/auctionity/non-fungible-tokens-coverage-series-25-ea61c030ff66 | ['Domraider Team'] | 2019-05-15 09:31:38.949000+00:00 | ['Crypto Collectibles', 'Blockchain', 'Crypto Gaming', 'Nft'] |
Linux Pentesting: From Recon to Exploit Research | Start with Linux basics
The Linux Operating System forms the basis of a huge number of the applications that we use every day on the Internet. Linux servers are configured for uses as varied as high-performance computing, storage, network routing, and web servers. This flexibility has meant that the management of a Linux server is a complex subject with plenty of room for error. A large number of deployments and configurations has also led to new vulnerabilities being discovered almost every day. To protect a deployment on Linux, a system administrator must ensure that the Linux servers are always up to date with the latest security patches. A single vulnerable service or a minor mistake in configuration could leave the server, and the data residing on it, vulnerable to attack.
As a pentester, it is important to know how to scout for vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited. But first, one has to know how Linux works. In our labs, you’ll be using a Kali/Ubuntu Attacker machine to attack other Linux-based target machines.
Our learning path thus starts with Linux Basics, where you will learn concepts, commands and tools required to interact with various Linux services and applications. Specifically, the path covers:
Understanding the Linux filesystem and users
Understanding the system and user crontabs
Learning the important Linux commands and tools
Fingerprinting web applications and network services such as FTP and SSH
Creating bi-directional connections with socat
Once you’re comfortable with Linux, we’ll move on to Linux pentesting and the five phases of hacking:
The 5 phases of hacking is a well-known methodology amongst security professionals, where attacks start with a reconnaissance phase and end with covering tracks. In our learning path, we expand on this methodology and show you how to perform additional phases such as Pivoting and Exploit Research.
Let’s dive right in!
Reconnaissance
Before attacking any application or service, it is important to gather as much information as possible. The more information an attacker has, the easier it will be to identify any misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. The objective of the reconnaissance section is to familiarize the student with the approach to follow for enumerating web applications and various network services, such as DNS, web servers, databases, caching systems, etc. Using the information, the attack vector and entry points can be identified and then used in the exploitation phase.
In our reconnaissance section, you’ll learn:
Identifying open ports on the machine
Identifying services running on the machine
Interacting with network services
Fingerprinting different types of services
Understanding service-specific misconfigurations
Enumerating files/directories on web applications
Scanning web application using popular scanners and identifying the entry points
Exploitation
The objective of the exploitation phase is to establish access to a system or resource by leveraging a vulnerability or bypassing a security restriction. In this section, the student will learn how to search for exploits based on the information acquired in the reconnaissance phase and use them to compromise the application or service. Once the attacker has compromised a machine, it is possible to attack other machines on the same network which may not be exposed to the Internet.
This section covers:
Performing dictionary attacks on various network services
Searching for exploit based on the results found in the reconnaissance phase
Exploiting vulnerable services and application using Metasploit
Performing manual exploitation on vulnerable web applications
Post-exploitation
A compromised system may contain sensitive information, such as user data, access keys, credentials etc. It may then be possible to use this information to compromise other machines on the same network. The attacker can also turn the machine into a zombie computer and use it to perform attacks on other machines in a planned attack on a future date. The objective of this section is to teach students how to look for sensitive information on a machine, crack password protected files and perform the lateral movement on the network.
For post-exploitation, we cover:
Using Metasploit modules to retrieve sensitive information from a compromised system
Extracting valuable information from browser preferences data
Compromising other machines on the same network
Privilege Escalation
On Linux systems, services may be running as a non-root user. For examples, by default, Apache and Nginx run as the user www-data. Therefore, even if a web application or the service itself is compromised, the attacker will only get access as the www-data user, which has limited privileges. To gain full control of a system, it is important to escalate privileges from a user with low privileges to the root user (vertical escalation).
It might not be always possible to escalate from the current user to the root user. In such cases, other users on the machine must be compromised (horizontal escalation), and then used to try to attain root privileges. The objective of this section is to teach the student the various techniques of privilege escalation in the Linux environment. You’ll learn:
Leveraging misconfigured Cron jobs for escalating privileges.
Leveraging SUID binaries for escalating privileges.
Performing Shared Library injection and escalate privileges.
Breaking out of restricted environments such as rbash and chroot.
Exploiting vulnerable services to escalate privileges.
Pivoting
In a corporate environment, most of the machines are behind a firewall, which makes it impossible to attack them directly. However, if there is a vulnerable machine exposed to the internet which is also connected to the internal network. It might be possible to pivot through the compromised machine and attack the machines on the internal network. The objective of this section is to teach the various pivoting techniques that can be used to attack machines behind a network, such as:
Pivoting through a machine by using ssh tunnels
Using the Meterpreter autoroute script to route traffic through a compromised machine
Using the Metasploit socks proxy module to proxy traffic through a machine
Pivoting through a machine by using reGorg
Maintaining Access
The aim of an attacker is not only to compromise the target machine but also to maintain access to it so that the machine can be used later in a planned attack. Maintaining access to the machine is not a trivial task since the attack vectors might trigger alarms and cause the system administrators to block the vulnerability. This section covers various techniques that can be used to maintain access to a compromised machine, specifically:
Maintaining access to database services such as PostgreSQL
Leveraging ssh keys for maintaining access
Leveraging cron jobs for maintaining access
Using tools such as netcat, socat and python for maintaining access
MITRE ATT&CK
Mitre ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge) is a framework developed by Mitre corporation. It consists of threat tactics and techniques based on observations made from real-world attacks. With the Mitre ATT&CK framework, real-world attacks can be broken down into various categories and compared with other attacks. This section familiarizes students with the various techniques from the Mitre ATT&CK Matrix for Linux. Our syllabus covers:
Familiarity with Mitre ATT&CK Framework
Classification of various attack vectors and techniques used in APTs
Exploit Research
Based on the information found during the reconnaissance phase or in the post-exploitation phase, a public exploit might not exist for compromising the machine. In such cases, the attacker will have to analyze the files or output and write their own exploit code. In this section, the students will be taught how to debug a process and how to write code to exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability in a program. You’ll learn: | https://blog.pentesteracademy.com/linux-pentesting-from-recon-to-exploit-research-5b8381d13cb2 | ['Pentester Academy'] | 2021-01-19 09:20:38.872000+00:00 | ['Cybersecurity', 'Linux', 'Edtech', 'Hacking', 'Security'] |
The Gist of Big-O Notation Explained via Bubble Sort | Regardless of where you are in your software career, or what role you fill, you’ve surely heard of the idea of Big-O notation and its relation to algorithmic performance. Many of the analytics behind Big-O can appear quite daunting, and the high-level idea which applies can be lost. Having a solid grasp on Big-O can be a game-changer if you need to answer technical interview questions, grow a keener eye for the implementations in your codebase, or design new products while cognizant of performance characteristics. While you may never find yourself at a whiteboard showing off your analyses, you will surely find yourself asking “do I really need to nest that many loops together?” the next time you churn out a snippet if you come to understand the asymptotic analysis behind Big-O.
The Gist of Big-O
Big-O notation is simply a framework for performing asymptotic analysis. It comes with a simple vocabulary and serves as a sweet-spot for high-level reasoning about algorithms. It is also coarse enough to suppress any dependencies related to the architecture, language, compiler, and other system elements. Additionally, it is sharp enough to make useful comparisons between different algorithms on very large inputs. This enables it to be a useful tool for quickly making decisions and conclusions about a whole universe of algorithms.
Motivating Example (Bubble Sort):
We’re going to see how we can apply asymptotic analysis to Bubble Sort —a simple (but also inefficient) sorting algorithm. The way it works is by simply reading an array of integers in steps, and comparing the current value to the next value to determine which is greater (or less) than the other. The final output yields a sorted list in either ascending or descending order — depending on how you implement it.
Let’s say we’ve got an array of integers [1, 4, 2, 5, 8, 6, 3, 9, 7] . This array of integers contains n = 9 elements (note that n is simply the number of elements in this array — and is typically the defining variable which denotes the count of elements in an input for virtually all problems in algorithm analysis).
To sort our array you would implement the following algorithm (we won’t go into the details of implementation since the scope of this article is the asymptotic analysis):
isSwapped = true
while isSwapped
isSwapped = false
for j from 0 to N - 1
if a[j] > a[j + 1]
swap(a[j], a[j+1])
swapped = true
This algorithm requires n iterations to perform the sort. In each iteration we perform a comparison, and additionally a swap if required. Given an array of size n (or 9 in our example), we need to perform (n — 1) = 8 comparisons on the first iteration. On the second iteration we will need to perform (n — 2) = 7 comparisons. The third iteration will require (n — 3) = 6 , and so on… until you exhaust all of the inputs. This yields a formula as follows:
If you are wondering why we have simplified the time complexity of the bubble sort to O(n^2) it is simply because the constant factors and lower order terms have little impact on the conclusions we can draw about its running time performance as the input size of the array increases. Note in the chart below, bubble sort aligns with the quadratic running time in the “Horrible” category. As we increase the number of elements in our input array, Bubble Sort will simply perform worse and worse as n grows in size. The motivation to take from this example, is that we should constantly question if we can achieve better performance as input sizes grow.
Formal Definition
Big-O defines the running-time performance of any algorithm in general terms with a concern for increasing input size (i.e. can the algorithm still perform favorably if we go from 9 integers up to 1,000,000 integers?).
Put quite plainly, Big-O is concerned with functions that are defined on all positive integers n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, .... (we won’t ever have an input with a negative count of values … ).
Additionally, the running time of an algorithm will always aid in denoting the worst case running time of an algorithm.
The definition provided relates well to the chart below (which signifies that no matter what constant factors are applied, we can always apply a bound above the running time of our function). Therefore, we can always ignore constant factors and lower-order terms (in the case of algorithms with polynomial complexity) to infer a succinct running time complexity. The takeaway should always be that the running time of an algorithm increases according to Big-O as input sizes grow large. The magnitude or severity of this increase comes down to the unique algorithm in question.
T(n) upper bounded by f(n) with arbitrary constant c
When To Care About Constant Factors and Lower Order Terms
Generally speaking, writing loops and snippets which operate on collections or data structures in your codebase won’t require profound analysis. You can get away with the general Big-O running time characteristics for your use case.
However, its entirely possible that you’re in a startup, or in a highly specialized environment where your domain knowledge can come in handy. In very specific scenarios, where your product or service relies on an algorithm you or your team have implemented, it can behoove you to uncover your constants and lower order terms so that you can further optimize your algorithm — especially if its not feasible for you to vastly modify your design to conform to a totally different implementation.
Typically, constant factors and lower order terms are generated as a result of basic setting operations, and other primitive operations (like initializing a variable). The cost with such operations is very low, hence its ignored by Big-O mostly. But, you can take the reigns and utilize Big-O while retaining these factors and terms, and develop ways to reduce those costs to maximally optimize your algorithm (perhaps you can lower the number of variables, and reduce the times you reference addresses in your memory). The little gains made in this area could allow your product to hit the market stronger than your competition — even if marginally.
What To Take Away
Consider what input you have, and what you need to output
Come up with an algorithm, by brute force, or via domain knowledge (use best practices when possible)
Analyze your implementation, uncover how many times you are operating on your input (is it quadratic, cubic, linear, etc.?)
Ask if your implementation can be better — can you reduce your operations on the input from, say, quadratic to cubic, by using one less loop?
Consult a Big-O chart when performing analysis, decide if your implementation is critical to your system
chart when performing analysis, decide if your implementation is critical to your system Look up a Big-O chart and uncover the general running times of an array of algorithm types and primitive operations — you don’t need to whiteboard everything on the job
What Else To Learn | https://medium.com/swlh/big-o-notation-explained-like-im-5-1828183ffcac | ['Andre Unsal'] | 2020-12-15 02:04:17.165000+00:00 | ['Algorithms', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Data Structures', 'Big O'] |
How to Deploy a Django Project to a Server in China? | What is Django?
Django’s Official Website
Django is an open source web application framework developed based on Python. The Django framework not only provides a complete code directory structure, but also uses the structure model, view, and template. This makes the code easy to standardize during the development process. Among them, Django Admin provides an out-of-the-box back-end management system and is the “Go-To” by many Python developers and startups.
21YunBox provides a very simple Django deployment method. You can deploy on the 21YunBox in the Python environment.
Register as a 21YunBox member Create a PostgreSQL database Fork Django example Create a Cloud Service on the 21YunBox, and allow the 21YunBox to access your code base Configure the following settings
Environment
PYTHON 3.7
Build command:
./build.sh
Start command:
gunicorn hello.wsgi:application
Click Advanced Configuration to configure environment variables:
For more Django-related configurations, please refer to Official Document. In this example, DJANGO_DEBUG=True is a demonstration and example only. You can set DJANGO_DEBUG to False in the environment variable when it goes live.
Once the build is complete, use the remote connection of the 21YunBox to create a Django administrator account
It’s that easy! When the build is completed, your application will be accessible in the subdomain of 21YunBox.
If the description of the above text is not clear, you can refer to the following actual example video: How to Deploy Django Application to Server
Why Choose 21YunBox?
21YunBox is a Cloud Service platform based out of Beijing. Our services enable your team to be more effective in leveraging the growing opportunity within China by hosting your sites at blazing speeds with an operational and maintenance free solution. We offer an easy and budget friendly, end-to-end web platform deployment service for all applications from small teams to large enterprises using a low-code solution. We also offer full support in obtaining your ICP license. This allows you to do legally do business inside of Mainland China.
To learn about the differences between 21YunBox and these foreign (outside of China) cloud service platforms? You can refer to: | https://medium.com/@21yunbox/how-to-deploy-a-django-project-to-a-server-e016e1a6c530 | [] | 2021-02-19 05:34:20.249000+00:00 | ['Django Admin', 'Django Framework', 'Django', 'China', '21yunbox'] |
Work Out Loud on Yammer | International Working Out Loud Week is here! On November 7 through November 13, teams all over are sharing their work to connect their work. If your team or organization doesn’t already have a strategy for working out loud, get this infographic, and learn how Yammer can help! | https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/work-out-loud-on-yammer-7-day-challenge-c6be5056714f | ['Cartier Gwin'] | 2016-11-08 17:27:11.917000+00:00 | ['Future Of Work', 'Work', 'Leadership', 'Yammer', 'Challenge'] |
Shift your Linux Dev Environment to Windows using WSL 2 | An overview of WSL
Following an official excerpt from Microsoft:
The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment — including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications — directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine.
With WSL, you can:
Run your favorite Linux distro on Windows among Ubuntu , Fedora , OpenSUSE , Alpine etc.
, , , etc. Have a bash / zsh shell accessible to you at all times in Windows.
/ shell accessible to you at all times in Windows. Install your favorite Linux software using the package managers among apt , yum , snap etc.
What’s new in WSL 2?
WSL 2 is a new version of the architecture in WSL that changes how Linux distributions interact with Windows.
The primary goals of WSL 2 are:
Increase in File System Performance Providing Full System Call Compatibility
WSL 2 was announced in May 2019, introducing important changes such as a real Linux kernel, through a subset of Hyper-V features.
However, it was available under Windows Insider program until the Windows May 2020 update.
With the Windows May 2020 update, WSL 2 is being rolled out to users outside of the Insider program and now everyone can access it.
For a complete list of differences between WSL 1 and WSL 2, see this official comparison guide by Microsoft. | https://medium.com/@shivamarora/shift-your-linux-dev-environment-to-windows-using-wsl-2-b621ef938af9 | ['Shivam Arora'] | 2020-06-14 05:16:52.819000+00:00 | ['Windows 10', 'Wsl 2', 'Wsl', 'Productivity', 'Ubuntu'] |
練習製作下雪動畫：聖誕節快樂 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%E6%BD%98%E7%9A%84-swift-ios-app-%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BC%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4/%E7%B7%B4%E7%BF%92%E8%A3%BD%E4%BD%9C%E4%B8%8B%E9%9B%AA%E5%8B%95%E7%95%AB-%E8%81%96%E8%AA%95%E7%AF%80%E5%BF%AB%E6%A8%82-da46eb735b6d | [] | 2020-12-12 16:36:11.834000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Swift', 'Xcode'] |
STARBUCKS SUPER PROMO | B. portfolio.json — Promotions information:
portfolio Data Frame
This is a straight forward data set, which has information about the Starbucks’s promotions sent to its clients. There are 10 offers classified in 3 types: bogo , informational and discount and there are no Nan values. I want to highlight the importance of the duration column, it could help us to relate the promotion with a transaction.
C. transcript.json — Timeline / Events:
transcript Data Frame
This is the more interesting dataset, it contains a timeline with the events of all the offers for each client and the amount of the transactions. If a transaction and a promo were completed in the same moment (time column), we can consider that the value in the transaction is the amount the customer has paid to complete the promotion. Here is a list of the events:
events
There are 4 possible sequences for a promotion:
table sequence promotion
It’s also important to note that in the ‘value’ column there is a dictionary containing the offers id, the amount of the transaction and the reward when an offer is completed.
3. defining the model
Before modifying the data, it’s important to define the type of model and the evaluation metrics based on the problem we are addressing: How much a customer is willing to pay based on the type of promotion and demographics.
Since we are going to predict continuous values (“how much a customer is willing to pay”) a good first approach is to use a regression model. My first attempt was a simple Linear regression model, but as you will see in the following sections, there were many outliers that affected the prediction. For this reason Support Vector Regression (SVR) seems a better fit for the job, since it finds a function representing the data within a margin of error (epsilon), where most of the points can be found inside this margin, making SVR a stronger model to treat outliers than other regression models. You can find more information about SVR in this blogpost by Tom Sharp
image taken from here
To evaluate the model we can do a simple cross validation technique taking a part of the training data to get predictions from the trained model and compare it with the actual values(y_test)
To measure how well the model fits we can measure R2 score and the Adjusted R-Squared (same as explained_variance_score in Scikit-learn). The first one is the Coefficient of Determination, which is a good measure to determine how well the model fits the dependent variables.
However, R2 score does not take into consideration overfitting, for these reason we can also calculate the Adjusted R-Squared, wish is similar to the R2 score but it takes into account the Mean of Error, that reflects the tendency of the estimator (how biased is the model). Basically If R2 score is equal to Adjusted R-Squared the mean of error is 0.00. If R2 Square is roughly the same as the Adjusted R-Squared we can conclude that the model is quite robust in this matter. The following formula was taken from this post.
R2 score = 1 — [(Sum of Squared Residuals / n) / Variancey_actual] Adjusted R-Squared = 1 — [{(Sum of Squared Residuals-Mean Error) / n} / Variancey_actual]
4. data pre-processing (cleaning and transforming data)
conceptual dataframe
To create a dataset that fits into a SVD model, all features must have numeric values. To explain the modifications made to the dataset I divided these sections in three parts, each of them explains one part of the ‘conceptual dataset’ shown above.
a . Demographics:
As we saw in data exploration, we can find the demographic information in the profile Data Frame, where have the following features:
‘id’ will help us merge the information with the other datasets.
‘age’ and ‘income’ are numerical values that don’t need to be change, for the moment.
‘became_member_on’ doesn’t give us demographics information about the user, thus we can drop this column.
‘gender’ . We have to convert these features into numerical values. To do this, we can do One Hot Encoding this feature to create three columns for each value (F , M , O).
b . Amount of the transaction (y):
To obtain the value a user paid to complete a promotion, we can extract this value from the transactions that were made. As we can see in the table below (red squares), when a promotion is completed there is a transaction at the same time that has the value that the user paid to complete this offer, thus the first step could be to merge this rows to have the amount with each completed offer.
But there is a tricky part (green square), there are some offers that are classified as ‘informational’ that does not have an ‘offer completed’ event, thus we can’t link the Informational offer with a transaction ( first time I try to create the data frame, all the transaction values were $0.0 in the informational offers type).
To get the transaction values for this type of promotion we have to check if there is a transaction during the duration of the promotion ( in the portfolio dataFrame). We can assume that the transaction made by the user after he or she sees the promotion was influenced by this offer, if it’s still active. In the example below we can see this client saw the informational offer in the hour 216, and made a transaction 6 hours after. Because this offer has a duration of 72 hours we can relate the amount of this transaction with this promotion. | https://medium.com/@arturo.gonfo/starbucks-super-promo-48c95b40c413 | ['Arturo Gonzalez'] | 2020-10-20 02:51:38.566000+00:00 | ['Capstone', 'Machine Learning', 'Starbucks', 'Udacity', 'Scikit Learn'] |
This year, give the gift of code. | This year, give the gift of code. We’ve put together some gift ideas for all the girls in your life who are changing the world through tech.
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Buy Now | https://medium.com/@girlswhocode/this-year-give-the-gift-of-code-da06debdadf7 | ['Girls Who Code'] | 2019-12-12 15:27:29.715000+00:00 | ['Giving', 'Women In Tech', 'Holidays', 'Gift Guide', 'Gift Ideas'] |
What Do You Do Again? with a Customer Success Manager | What is your job title?
Commercial Customer Success Manager.
What’s that mean?
I’m responsible for everything that happens with a customer, post-initial sale. Customers can be (in order of company size) small / medium businesses, mid-market companies, or enterprise customers.
What is your day to day?
It’s a balance that depends on time of year.
The beginning of the year is focused on onboarding, because we are grounding customers that signed during the fourth quarter of the previous year. We focus on implementation calls, setting best practices from the first day, and crafting account plans for long-term success.
Once onboarding is complete, we spend more time on adoption, themed calls, and in-person meetings. The goal after onboarding is to be strategic, versus just tactical. Tactical is focusing on details (project management, technical setup, delegation of users, tasks). Strategic is quantifying the impact of all of those things on the business you’re serving, to know whether or not your tactics are actually moving the needle.
There’s a constant flow of internal meetings as well. In my 1:1s, I’m diving deeper with my manager using dashboards and account notes to manage my book of business. In team meetings, I’m learning from my team’s customer relationships and personal expertise. In cross-functional meetings, I’m hearing what other departments (Sales, Marketing, Product) are working on.
Right now, a perfect work day for me would be spent on account planning, because it allows me to look at each customer holistically and set proactive goals for their customized success. Having downtime to be creative and thoughtful is critical, to me.
What did you study in college?
Writing major with a Philosophy Minor at Loyola Marymount University.
I actually didn’t mean to be a Philosophy minor, but I took so many philosophy classes as electives that I ended up with a minor at graduation!
Businesses used to tell consumers what to think or what to buy; now, that power dynamic has shifted, and consumers hold that power.
Do you think that helped?
Yes. Writing taught me to be more aware of my surroundings, to observe how people act and move, not just what they say. It taught me to write with meaning, and mindful communication is something the world needs, deeply. Writing also opened a lot of doors for creative problem-solving; when you’re creating a poem or a story or blog article, you have so much power in the world you create and the problems you address. Creative problem-solving is something you need as a CSM; the role is all about resilience and execution.
Philosophy helped me harness my creative energy by connecting the dots between different ideas. That honed my analytical skills, which I’m constantly using at work, as I dig deeper for subtext on what customers are trying to achieve, compared to the bigger concepts they’re sharing with me. Going one layer deeper is something CSMs do constantly, to understand the impact (and not just the tasks) that customers want to catalyze.
My academic work also tied in nicely with the way the business landscape started to change in 2010, when I graduated. Businesses used to tell consumers what to think or what to buy; now, that power dynamic has shifted, and consumers hold that power. They tell business what they want, and businesses have to make it happen, to attain or retain them. With that shift, there’s a bigger emphasis on relationships and achievement. It’s not just about a feature or discount — people want to be part of a bigger story. They want to trust the person managing them.
This really resonates with me on a personal level too, growing up in a culture that is very entrepreneurial, tight-knit, and expressive [Jenn is a first-generation Lebanese woman!]. I was raised to value authentic connections in life and in business. Having bonds with customers is rewarding, but it also holds me accountable for how I communicate, and help them reach their goals.
What crossroads of majors would you job fall under?
Philosophy / Psychology / Business / Marketing / Sociology / Accounting / Communication
Is there something else you could have studied to get here?
I know it’s cliche, but study what you’re passionate about. Customer Success is an open-ended industry for people with different backgrounds. Whatever your passion or superpower is, that will be the value you bring to the team.
For example, if you’re passionate about marketing, you’ll be the CSM that partners with the marketing team around customer communications, shaping the marketing calendar on behalf of CS. If you’re interested in computer science, you’ll be the technical CSM, piecing together how different systems work. Pick a major you love, because you’ll be spending a lot of time, energy, and money on it. Make sure it’s something meaningful that you’ll look back on and be proud of.
What courses really prepared you for what you do now?
“Dialogue for Scene Writing” — We crafted scenes with multiple characters who had specific motivations, and we could only express their motivations through dialogue and environmental descriptors. I started thinking a lot more about the different layers of communication, subtext, and body language. Nurturing that writer’s eye for detail helped me become more observant and aware in all my interactions.
Philosophy / Research Papers — Writing any analytical paper with a thesis is an invaluable practice. At work, I constantly use the metaphor of establishing a thesis (your business goal), and having everything — every meeting, call, and project — correspond to that thesis (goal). Start with what you’re trying to accomplish, then work backwards and lay out all the details that support that end goal.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a writer, short fiction and poetry. To me, good writing shouldn’t be esoteric or overly-intellectualized; it should move anyone who picks it up, regardless of background.
That passion for creative universality keeps me aligned with the creative side of business, like professional communication or using data for deeper storytelling. I try to use writing as a bridge, so I’m in my happy place when I’m working on creative / communications-based projects.
Where do you hope to grow next?
There are a few different paths to take. Typically, CSMs are coached to be the next level of CSM: a senior CSM, enterprise CSM, or an eventual manager.
These would be great opportunities for me, but I’m also intrigued by customer marketing, where teams are now focusing on meaningful communication to existing customers (not just prospects). Existing customers can make up 80% of your company’s revenue over time; as a company, you can drive value on an individual level with Customer Success, but you also need to scale storytelling and adoption through communication with a clear call to action. Scaled storytelling seems like a huge win-win as vendors and customers continue to grow rapidly.
Whatever your passion or superpower is, that will be the value you bring to the team.
Where will Customer Success grow?
I went to a panel recently called How Customer Success will Affect the Future of Business, by two professors in an MBA program. They’ve started incorporating Customer Success topics into their coursework, creating a whole curriculum to drive learning and exposure. That’s so hard, because there are no textbooks and no benchmarks for the Customer Success field. I found it inspiring that they’re thinking about Customer Success academically, preparing students for that in advance. It’s really important to give students something valuable they can take with them into the business world when they graduate, and Customer Success skills are broadly applicable to almost any role.
Professionally, I see Customer Success becoming more consultative, and competitive.
Consultative, because as time goes on, people are reframing this role from being an account manager who comes in at renewal time, to being a meaningful partner who is focused on outcomes AND relationships. As much as you connect with your customers, you also have to deliver on their investment. You have to actively cultivate the insight and influence to do that.
Competitive, because companies are recognizing how important recurring revenue is, which means the expectations of a CSM are higher. It won’t be enough to just check in or have “good” calls; the need for analytical, communicative, and influential CSMs is now heightened. With artificial intelligence in the mix, I anticipate more of the administrative tasks in account management becoming automated, which will just reinforce how much of your value will have to come from the meaning and execution you bring to the table.
What’s an unexpected perk about your role?
We talk a lot about gender disparity in tech, but being in a relationship-driven field means I’ve had the chance to be around a lot of powerful female leaders. When I look back on my career, I owe a lot of my opportunities to amazing women who have taught me confidence, bravery, and vision. I’m so lucky to work in a field and company that prioritizes female leadership, when that’s not always the case in the tech space.
What Do You Do Again?
I drive relationships with results.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. | https://medium.com/what-do-you-do-again/what-do-you-do-again-with-a-customer-success-manager-4c22a19f954c | ['Chelsea Lee'] | 2019-06-21 13:49:28.384000+00:00 | ['Customer Success', 'Careers', 'Tech', 'Business'] |
Alia Bhatt’s traditional saree is perfect for days when you feel like keeping it simple; Check it out | Alia Bhatt’s traditional saree is perfect for days when you feel like keeping it simple; Check it out Atif Hassan Dec 19, 2021·2 min read
Click here to see more photos of Alia Bhatt
Alia Bhatt (born 15 March 1993) is a film actor and British citizenship holder, she works in Bollywood pictures. She entered her early education from Jamnabai Narsee School in Mumbai. Alia Bhatt is one of the most freehandedly compensated actors in India. She has been featured in the Forbes India’s Celebrity 100 rundown and was stressed by Forbes Asia in 2017.
She belongs to the Bhatt family, she’s the son of notorious film patron Mahesh Bhatt and film actress Soni Razdan. Alia made her first debut in the Sangharsh movie featuring Akshay Kumar and Preity Zinta. Latterly, Alia Bhatt’s notable work was in the movie Pupil of the Time (2012) produced by Karan Johar. She progressed to team up with Johar’s plant Dharma Products in a larger part of her forthcoming releases, including the romantic flicks i.e., 2 States (2014), Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014), and Badrinath Ki Dulhania (2017).
Latterly, she did n’t look back and took part in numerous great pictures out of which a drama movie Kapoor and Sons (2016) where she played part beside notorious Pakistani actor Fawad Khan and Indian actor Sidharth Malhotra. In the same time, Alia showed up against notorious Bollywood actor King Khan i.e., Shah Rukh Khan in the movie‘ Dear Zindagi (2016)’.
Click here to see more photos of Alia Bhatt’s
Also, in 2014, Bhatt showed up in a short movie on ladies’ good, entitled Going Home, by administrative Vikas Bahi. She next replied with Bahl to retake the unconcerned comedy Shaandaar. Released in 2015, the film stressed Shahid Kapoor and Bhatt as two restless people who begin to look all starry eyed amid a destination marriage.
Alia Bhatt entered Filmfare Critics Award for Stylish Actress for portraying the extraordinary characters in the road drama Trace (2014).
In the time 2016, the crime film Udta Punjab (2016) won her the Filmfare Award for Stylish Actress
Click here to see more photos of Alia Bhatt | https://medium.com/@atif.cool1986/alia-bhatts-traditional-saree-is-perfect-for-days-when-you-feel-like-keeping-it-simple-check-it-3eaeafc401bd | ['Atif Hassan'] | 2021-12-19 07:15:21.487000+00:00 | ['Bollywood', 'India', 'Celebrity', 'Ranbir Kapoor', 'Alia Bhatt'] |
Cadence, Choo Choo!! | Over the last four years the mobile team at Strava has shipped more than fifty releases across Android and iOS. Our release cycle has varied from over three months for huge monolithic features to less than a week for hotfixes of issues discovered shortly after releasing. Historically app updates and new feature releases have been tightly coupled. As demands on each release escalated we saw release dates slip and quality jump around due to making concessions trying to push a release out the door. After going through a particularly ambitious release in early Spring 2015 we needed to reassess how and when we release.
“The Lumens Express” by Nick Fisher is under CC BY-ND 2.0
At the end of Summer 2015 we shipped a landmark update. The difference between this release and the scores of prior releases was not a groundbreaking feature or an important bug fix, the difference was that this release went out on its own schedule: it was not dictated by the need to release a certain feature and it was not a response to an emergency. It marks a move to a constant four-week long release cycle and an important shift in how mobile engineering and product development is done at Strava. We call it Cadence.
As Strava grew the number of projects we tackled simultaneously and the number of stakeholders in those projects grew as well. A few difficult releases illustrated how hard it is to align goals and deadlines across a growing number of teams. With enough stakeholders feature-based releases inevitably slip. As the deadline for a release approaches everyone lobbies to jam in their feature. Scope gets cut, bugs are introduced, unplanned hotfixes have to happen, and it all snowballs into a large, complex, stressful and often indeterminate release cycle.
Over the past few months we’ve adopted and defined a set of practices to help development and product releases stay agile. By decoupling feature releases from app updates we have intentionally attempted to reduce the stress of having to have a feature completed on a hard date, and eliminated the anxiety and ill-effects that happen when such deadlines are inevitably missed. We’ve also found that we’ve developed a rhythm for prioritizing and fixing bugs as well as releasing an app of continually increasing quality. Strava has always been quality focused and we’ve undertaken an effort to ensure that focus is built into the testing and release process itself.
We’re currently on our sixth iteration of the Cadence release cycle and instead of having one large team stressing out about working on one large feature we have a few more nimble teams, concurrently working on several features, and most of the stress has dissolved.
How it Works
Cadence is based on a four-week release cycle and a set of practices that determine what goes into each release. We’ve adopted some of the metaphors graciously loaned to us by friends at other companies. At the start of each four-week release cycle, or train, a train branch is cut from our main development branch, master. We work on the assumption that master is stable and always in a shippable state. To do this we ensure that all features that are currently in development get hidden by feature switches which can be controlled easily in code or remotely from a server driven API.
There are two types of work that get released: bug fixes and new features. Work on bugs can be targeted at a given train branch and will go out to the public when that train leaves the station after four weeks. This process is how we prioritize bug fixes. A bug gets fixed on the current train by targeting the train and then gets cherry-picked back into master. Opportunistic work on future bugs can always go in master, but we try to encourage developers to fix bugs on the current train and we continually go through a triage process to ensure that we’re addressing bugs in a timely and efficient manner.
Work on features continues on master in parallel. Features can span multiple train releases because they are introduced with their feature switch off by default. This allows developers and internal testers to evaluate the feature along the way. Once a feature is completed we turn the feature switch on for everyone. When the next train branch is cut the new feature will be available to the public at the end of the release cycle
Throughout a train release cycle we send out betas based on the train branch to the entire company and a curated set of external beta testers. We also build internal nightlies off of master for developers, designers, and product managers who are working directly on a feature in development. This means that bug fixes that go into the train branch are tested for up to a month before they ship and that features are tested for at least a month, if not longer, before they go out to the public.
Cadence is led by train conductors, one for each mobile platform (Android and iPhone). The conductors change each release. They have a handbook that defines a set of practices and responsibilities including ensuring consistency between the train branch and master and ensuring that beta and nightly builds are going smoothly. A conductor will remind (nag) engineers about bugs and work left to do on their branch, as well as coordinate with team leads to ensure work is on track. Attention to bugs can be a challenge as engineers have often moved on to new feature work in master. A conductor will work closely with QA to triage, assign, prioritize and punt issues. Finally, one of their most important duties is to drive the process itself — they own the release. We’ve learned something new each train and with that has come gains in documentation, tooling, and a shared appreciation for what it takes to make a release go smoothly.
What’s Been Working For Us
Before we adopted Cadence we were gradually losing our agility and our product development process was becoming more “waterfall”. We spent too much time planning a release up front which was eating into actual development time. A poorly defined feedback cycle, where feedback came late in a release, led to more planning and development which wasn’t captured in our initial estimates. We’d often encounter a rush at the end of a release to finish or cut scope. We’d file bugs to make up for work that didn’t happen but new feature work took priority over defects in following releases. This led to a snowball of a issues that would only get looked at toward the end of a release. The available time to work on bugs would conflict with the need to slip-in forgotten features, instrumentation and analytics, the ever popular “just one more thing”.
Since adopting Cadence the stress about meeting a specific date and the associated ill-effects of rushing toward that date have largely disappeared. Features ship when they are ready. We’ve refocused on craftsmanship, not just for the product itself but for our working habits, processes and testing practices.
Getting Started
One of the hardest things we encountered with Cadence was simply getting started. It’s all too easy to play the engineering, design, product, marketing finger pointing game in any start-up: marketing relies on engineering to ship marketable updates but pressure from marketing can lead to risks when shipping. We were a little nervous about being in a good place to start because the initial release required a one release cycle delay and we had features in development hoping to ship as soon as possible. But finally we dove in. And that is what I would like to encourage. Set a firm deadline to start, don’t let any outside stakeholders try to slip one last thing or release in before your first train arrives in the station. Just get started, reassure product and marketing that things will get moving, because once the trains start running you will quickly see the gains in quality and agility.
Summary
Mobile engineering at Strava has undergone a pretty drastic shift in team structure and release process. We’re no longer a monolithic team on each mobile platform all working on the same feature with a deadline looming over us. Instead we’re half a dozen tactical smaller teams working on different features but all working together under Cadence to improve Strava and keep shipping an amazing app.
There have been challenges along the way as we’ve adopted this new process. Ensuring that work is continually accepted and that our velocity is appropriate was difficult at first. As was simply ensuring that everyone had enough to do or knew what they should be working on. Prioritizing and ensuring that bugs got worked on was also an initial challenge. However as each train progresses and after each one ships we’ve taken a look back to see what we could improve. In each train we’ve addressed at least one problem we encountered on the previous train, such as ensuring there was a product manager or a team lead on top of making acceptance meetings happen, or adding new practices and tooling to ensure that bugs get fixed. We’re still working out the kinks, such as having to deal with review times in the Apple App Store causing one train to bleed into the other, only being able to have one release out to beta testers at a time (a limitation of TestFlight), and ensuring consistency between localizations in master and our train branches. The beauty of the process is that it is quick and encourages iterative improvements.
One thing that hasn’t changed is our desire to create an awesome product and always improve ourselves. That’s what Cadence has brought us.
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank friend of Strava, Jim Puls, for his early guidance when we considered this drastic change to our software development process. His advice and time were invaluable, thanks Jim! | https://medium.com/strava-engineering/cadence-choo-choo-fbce4770ade7 | ['Strava Engineering'] | 2017-05-09 17:40:57.320000+00:00 | ['Process', 'Team', 'Mobile'] |
Hellion | Image from Pixabay
Spellbound hellion
Nuisance of the hen house
Hellhound yelling on
Good news since the Zen drought
What is it boy? What do you want?
Sniffing at traces, your face looking gaunt
What is it girl? What do you see?
I’m shushing the bushes,
you’re showing your teeth
I should take note
from the fur and the fangs
Stop dwelling on death,
the birth of Big Bangs
It’s riddled with mystery
Armed to the eyes
I muster the lust to combust in my mind
But
I haven’t the time
Instinct and innocence
Pull it into the pulpit
Suffocated by raving droolers
Drowning in conspiracy spit
Another sacrifice for the Lord of the Horde
It’s hit or miss
Some make it out with a bite and a scratch
Others, unlucky
Forever detached
It’s warm in the swarm
but it comes with a catch
No longer natural
primal and free
When you vacate your headspace
for hellion seeds
Overgrown tangles
your feet in the weeds
How you’ll ever shake loose
A mystery to me | https://medium.com/literally-literary/hellion-cb9af56b2f4f | ['Scott Leonardi'] | 2020-12-25 05:32:27.163000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Writing', 'Abstract', 'Poetry', 'Creative Writing'] |
Victory a Long Time Coming: In Historic Court Win Louisiana Civil Rights Groups Bring to Light Overwhelming Medical Disparities at Angola | I write this today in celebration. This has been a long time coming. Finally that voice crying out in the wilderness got heard.
For those who don’t know the background of this historic case, let me fill you in. In 2015 civil rights lawyers in Louisiana filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the more than 6,000 people imprisoned at Angola. Lewis v. Cain argued that patients at Angola had undergone inexcusable and abhorrent treatment, often resulting in continued suffering in place of treatment, refusing to test for ailments despite symptoms, being afflicted with preventable illnesses, over-medication, and untimely death. This win, six years later, is a tremendous moment and a monumental turning point, in DOC accountability.
Mercedes Montagnes, Executive Director of the Promise of Justice Initiative and co-lead counsel for the Plaintiffs, hit the nail on the head when she said:
“This ruling today affirms what we have been saying for years, the men incarcerated at Angola have been subjected to completely inadequate medical care and discrimination based on their disabilities. Going forward, prison officials will have to start fulfilling their constitutional obligation to provide adequate medical care and disability accommodations to everyone incarcerated there, no matter how young or old, healthy or sick.”
When I was incarcerated at Angola, I saw firsthand what the guys went through. For example, you see guys today who are in wheelchairs? They were in wheelchairs back in prison too. This was back before the ADA. We had to pick them up out of their chair to get on the yard. We didn’t have a bunch of those things, the ramps, everything you see talked about in this litigation. This took a lot of trial and struggle. When the prison officials first realized they had to do something, it was due to bad weather. Sometime in the ’90s there was a storm that came down, and with it there was a real chance that the river would flood, and Angola is right in the middle of a bow in the Mississippi. That’s when they realized they had to get these folks in wheelchairs out of there because we didn’t have the structures to keep them safe.
It should not take so much effort, so much tragedy, to force people to do the right thing.
We were the experimentation piece. I remember how they used to give us these blister packs of medication, when your back hurt or whatever, and you didn’t even know what you were taking. Then, years later, it would come out that something they were giving us caused cancer. We were the guinea pigs. A friend of mine, Finny, got out and I took him to the Formerly Incarcerated Transition (FIT) clinic, something we had gotten up and running because the medical treatment he received in prison is the sort that people had to sue the prison over. Finny was on, I kid you not, probably 20–25 different medications coming out of Angola. After his appointment at the FIT clinic, that went down to one.
This win, this litigation, and legislation on similar subjects, is why I do what I do. This is a long time coming, and I am really praising the judge for being courageous enough to do it. — Norris Henderson, founder and Executive Director VOTE | https://medium.com/@voiceoftheexperienced/victory-a-long-time-coming-in-historic-court-win-louisiana-civil-rights-groups-bring-to-light-ad69a9b0596e | ['Vote', 'Voice Of The Experienced'] | 2021-04-02 18:03:59.019000+00:00 | ['Prison Reform', 'Politics', 'Prison', 'Louisiana'] |
What is Tidy Data? | Data Cleaning & Tidying
What is Tidy Data?
Photo by Hunter Harritt on Unsplash
Introduction
There’s a popular saying in Data Science that goes like this — “Data Scientists spend up to 80% of the time on data cleaning and 20 percent of their time on actual data analysis”. The origin of this quote goes back to 2003, in Dasu and Johnson’s book, Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning, and it still true to this day.
In a typical Data Science project, from importing your data to communicating your results, tidying your data is a crucial aspect in making your workflow more productive and efficient.
The process of tidying data would thus create what’s known as tidy data, which is an ideal first formulated by Hadley Wickham in his paper. So my article will be largely a summarization or extracting the essence of the paper if you will.
What is Tidy Data?
From the paper, the definition given is:
Tidy datasets provide a standardized way to link the structure of a dataset (its physical layout) with its semantics (its meaning)
To break down this definition, you have to first understand what structure and semantics means.
> Structure is the form and shape of your data. In statistics, most datasets are rectangular data tables(data frames) and are made up of rows and columns.
> Semantics is the meaning for the dataset. Datasets are a collection of values, either quantitative or qualitative. These values are organized in 2 ways — variable & observation.
Variables — all values that measure the same underlying attribute across units
Observations — all values measured on the same unit across attributes
If you didn’t get any of that, I recommend you reading the paper mentioned as it has examples and tables that illustrate it better.
Nonetheless, the 3 rules of tidy data help simplify the concept and make it more intuitive. | https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-tidy-data-d58bb9ad2458 | ['Benedict Neo'] | 2020-12-13 11:50:49.422000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Tidyverse', 'Machine Learning', 'R', 'Data Science'] |
Why Companies Should Pay Attention to the Trend of Minimalist Consumers | Deconstructing digital devices
These dangers of new technologies can also come from the digital devices themselves. The tools that have become our daily lives, such as smartphones, compact computers and touch-sensitive tablets, have features designed to do everything.
As such, hardware designers, be it Apple, Sony or Samsung, have promoted devices that make us pay attention to several things at the same time. They were based on the idea that increasing the multifunctionality of devices would bring more value to the consumer.
Yet, as neuroscience studies show, the brain is very good at doing only one thing at a time, as neural networks gather information simultaneously and not successively. As a result, these technologies lead to distracting and permanently addictive behavior for activities that require little concentration.
Many consumers have become aware of the need to have devices that only provide one service at a time (for example, by turning off social network or call notifications, or filtering applications). Some others have started to think about creating new kinds of products that address a single need.
The Light Phone, for example, is a phone that meets the basic functionality of a normal phone, like the models before smartphones, i.e. calling and SMS, and nothing else. Some others have conceived computers that would perform only a few cognitive tasks.
These initiatives are in line with what Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown called in their seminal article the revolution of “calm technologies”, i.e. less invasive technologies that are deployed in the peripheries of our senses and make less noise. They started from the conviction that technology must be made to serve the human being, the consumer who needs to minimize the influence of the machine on his work and his life. | https://medium.com/curious/why-companies-should-pay-attention-to-the-trend-of-minimalist-consumers-ec52039ecd37 | ['Jean-Marc Buchert'] | 2020-12-22 15:48:12.307000+00:00 | ['Minimalism', 'Product Design', 'Productivity', 'Consumer Behavior', 'Marketing'] |
Fidelity’s 10X Rule is Ridiculous | Fidelity is a well-known asset manager with trillions of dollars under its umbrella, including mutual funds, retirement services, and even cryptocurrencies.
They promote their own “10X Rule” but I’m here to tell you it’s anything but 10X.
Here it is:
“Aim to save 10X your salary by age 67.” — Fidelity
They go on to give more details, such as…
By age 30 — save 1X your salary
By age 40 — save 3X your salary
By age 50 — save 6X your salary
By age 60 — save 8X your salary
By age 67 — save 10X your salary
Is this the right goal to have?
Andrew Briggs over at Forbes thinks Fidelity’s 10X Rule sets the bar too high. He even says it’s “over the top”.
This begs the question: Does Fidelity’s 10x rule overstate or vastly understate what people need to save for retirement?
Consider a 40-year-guy who earns an annual salary of around $60,000.
Based on Fidelity’s 10X Rule, he should have $180,000 — which is 3x his annual income — already saved for retirement.
Is that really “over the top”?
Seems pretty tiny to me!
As I graduated college from McNeese State University in the 1980s, becoming a millionaire was an almost iconic and unachievable status.
Upon doing some simple math, though, I realized a million dollars wouldn’t go very far, even back then.
Fast forward to today and a million dollars won’t be even enough money to allow a normal person to retire comfortably — despite what Forbes or Fidelity tells you.
Now, before you decide I am just another arrogant, greedy elitist, do some basic math and you will realize what I did.
While consumption items like cars and trips are nice, they are not the main driver for creating wealth — freedom from worry is.
The whole point of building wealth is achieving financial security, a position from which no single setback could plunge you into destitution.
Many people know firsthand how fast an emergency can devastate a household.
Unexpected medical expenses alone can easily wipe out a 6-digit portfolio.
I know the idea that “a million dollars isn’t enough to retire on” is hard to swallow, but your opinion doesn’t change the reality: A million dollars is simply not what it used to be.
Some people are beginning to suggest that $5 million is the new $1 million.
I would suggest you make it $10 million because inflation continues to eat at the value of what money can purchase and your money earns almost nothing at the bank.
I was earning 10 percent at the bank at the age of 33 and my money doubled every seven years.
That’s not going to happen for you with today’s rates.
For those who want to create multi-million dollar wealth, try these simple steps.
#1 Forget Fidelity’s 10X Rule.
Trade in your baby 10X Fidelity target for a net worth target of $10 million. That’s a true 10X goal.
#2 Avoid all showoff purchases.
At least until you hit the $10 million target. That includes homes, fancy cars, watches, etc.
#3 Save 40%
Get your income levels to where you can save 40 percent of your gross income before taxes. Fidelity’s 10X Rule just isn’t enough.
#4 Invest surplus
Invest surplus cash in illiquid assets that produce additional flows of income. Invest for cash flow with the potential of appreciation long term and never invest where you could lose your capital.
With $10 million in net worth, you should be in a situation to weather almost all events.
So, forget Fidelity’s 10X Rule for retirement. GO BIGGER!
— Grant
Grant Cardone is the author of eight business books, thirteen business programs, and is the CEO of seven privately held companies. Forbes calls him one of the top social media business influencers in the world. Cardone founded and manages a real estate investment firm, Cardone Capital, with $1.2 Billion assets under management. He also travels the world consulting Fortune 500 companies, small business owners, startups and governments on business expansion. One of his enterprises recently hosted The 10X Growth Conference at Marlins Park in Miami, Florida with over 34,000 business people and entrepreneurs in attendance from over fifty countries. Mr. Cardone resides in Miami with his wife, Elena Cardone and their two children, Sabrina and Scarlett. | https://medium.com/the-10x-entrepreneur/fidelitys-10x-rule-is-ridiculous-bcefd3883972 | ['Grant Cardone'] | 2019-06-26 20:42:30.489000+00:00 | ['Fidelity', 'Saving Money', 'Retirement', 'The 10x Rule', 'Retirement Planning'] |
American vs. Chinese Steel: The Best Price is Not Always the Best Option | With Chinese steel being somewhat more affordable in some cases, it might seem wise to invest in some when constructing your building — but this opens you up to a world of liability.
Foreign steel markets like China are trending toward valuing price over safety. Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious that the product you’re buying is 100% made in the U.S.A. Numerous companies go out of their way to cover for the fact that they’re outsourcing resources to China.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to such practices out. Many companies use third party steel building brokers who don’t actually make the steel. They’re only interested in the lowest price possible, which often means it’s outsourced.
The best way to determine where your steel is coming from is to simply ask the person you’re doing business with if they’re a broker or not.
At Probuilt Steel Buildings, you’ll never get the wrong answer, with high-quality steel straight from the heartland. We never sacrifice quality over safety, all at affordable prices. | https://medium.com/@mariamartinezofficial1/american-vs-chinese-steel-the-best-price-is-not-always-the-best-option-295396013c40 | ['Maria Martinez'] | 2020-12-24 10:43:46.789000+00:00 | ['Chinese Steel', 'American Steel', 'Steel Building', 'Steel', 'Construction'] |
A New Wood Recycling Solution That Cannot Be Missed | Now in family decoration, many people prefer to use wooden flooring. However, any product has a certain service life, and wood flooring is the same. Many people’s wooden flooring will be replaced after a period of time, and the reasons for replacement are also varied. Some are for the wooden floors at home are broken, some feel it old and ugly, and others simply don’t like it. These wooden floors are expensive when they are purchased. It is a pity to throw them away directly. It is also a waste of resources. After all, the forest resources in our country are not rich at present.
In addition, there are many materials such as wooden pallets, brackets, bamboo plywood and building formwork with nails, which not only waste resources, but also have a certain impact on the environment. These waste wood should be used in a good way.
The existing crushing and processing equipment is specially for the crushing and processing of waste wood materials. After crushing and processing of these waste wood materials by the crusher, we can process the waste wood into wooden flooring again, so that the recycling processing and use can avoid the waste of resources very well. Moreover, the waste wood not only has higher recycling value, but also reduces its pollution to the environment.
The wood pallet making machine and utilization of is promising, but the premise is to choose a good wood pallet making machine. Many molded wood pallet press machines can crush the waste wood, but the fineness, quality and output of the finished materials processed by them are certainly different. The material used in making wooden flooring is required for its thickness and output. Molded wood pallet press machine is a very powerful wood waste processing equipment. In the production process, the output and quality are guaranteed.
Rotecho is devoted to supplying various waste recycling machine. We sincerely invite and welcome people from all around the world to invest and create more values together. | https://medium.com/@graceretecho/a-new-wood-recycling-solution-that-cannot-be-missed-f4249365a6c5 | ['Grace Ray'] | 2019-10-17 09:06:03.069000+00:00 | ['Recycling'] |
Mother Mind Calamity | Females can become mothers.
To be a mother is to surrender your own body to Nature
as it unfolds inside you into a human being
who will walk this Earth beside you
for a time
then break away and become their own person
with their own hopes, dreams, desires, and deeds.
Modern scientific evidence suggests a mother and her children swap DNA such that the child’s DNA (that new combination wrought by the mating between mother and father)
lives in her brain and changes them both into chimeric beings composed of each other.
Women live that way,
surrendering self,
becoming someone else composed of both mother and child.
It makes us vulnerable to men,
our cruel and violent children.
Men never surrender to such intimate goings-on as
sharing breathing, feeding, sleeping with another person,
instead, they take.
They take from women as fetuses take. They insist only they matter, as a fetus matters to the mother in whom it lives and grows toward its own life.
Women have accepted this fetus relationship with strange grown men
because our minds are good at surrender and enfoldment
to help another live.
Because of this, men expect free food and all services necessary to live from women, all those things they got from their own mothers. They expect all women they encounter should just be there for them, no holds barred, no questions asked, like their moms were — and if their moms weren’t,
such men hate and punish other women all their lives.
For our love and trouble, they throw us the bones of lifelong cages and disrespect.
These are the arrangements their societies are built on.
But, men are not fetuses or growing children,
and for their sake, the Earth’s sake, and our sake,
we should all stop pretending they are. | https://medium.com/an-idea/mother-mind-calamity-d67aae547f24 | ['Teresa D Hawkes'] | 2020-12-29 09:53:07.344000+00:00 | ['Chimeras', 'Motherhood', 'Mother Mind'] |
When it comes to terrorism, yes, jump to conclusions | Whenever a vehicle/gun/bomb/knife attack hits a western nation, the left and their media cohorts are quick to drag out their broken record, better known as “the narrative.”
“Wait for the facts.”
“Don’t assume it’s terrorism.”
“Stop jumping to conclusions.”
Let’s put aside the fact that the vast majority of these incidents turn out to be terrorist attacks. Let’s also ignore (for now) the fact that the vast majority of terrorist attacks are perpetrated by radical Islamic terrorists. Even if we take away these facts, there’s still a very valid reason to jump to conclusions first and fix the record later.
It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Tonight’s attacks in London were the latest in a rash of “Ramadan incidents.” It’s not a coincidence that the Islamic State and other organizations have been calling for attacks on western targets during their holy month. It’s also not bigoted to point that out. The terrorists don’t play the politically correct game. They aren’t worried about how the world will view them if they’re associated with Islam. They’re proud that they’re representing what they believe to be the true fulfillment of their religious beliefs.
That’s not to say that Islam is to blame or Muslims are bad, but we have to address the issue with our eyes open.
The media and everyone playing the politically correct game are quick to crank up the rhetoric. They either willfully ignore the facts or are too blind to see that it’s no coincidence the vast majority of terrorist attacks are perpetrated by people claiming the mantle of Islam. If one out of every 10,000 Muslims are potential terrorists, that’s still nearly 200,000 people worldwide. This can’t be brushed away as politically inconvenient to the left’s narrative.
We need to handle every situation like this as if it’s a terrorist attack. There’s a difference between a drunk driver swerving into a group of people and what took place on London Bridge. When it appears that an attack is willful, we need to put our guard up. There’s no harm that comes from doing so if we’re wrong. On the other hand, if we “wait for the facts” before taking on a defensive posture, the results can be deadly.
The left is so worried about hate speech. Such speech should not be condoned whether there’s a terrorist attack or not. However, we cannot let fear of hate speech prevent us from being aware and diligent. The terrorists want to kill or subjugate all of us. Their greatest ally is a weakness propped up by fear. We cannot give them that.
Article originally published on Soshable. | https://medium.com/political-jargon/when-it-comes-to-terrorism-yes-jump-to-conclusions-eacfd9b178b | ['Jd Rucker'] | 2017-06-04 01:43:13.583000+00:00 | ['Islamic State', 'ISIS', 'London Bridge', 'London', 'Terrorism'] |
10 clever interior design ideas | I grew up in a medium to small-sized apartment, which I shared with my parents, my brother and our house cat. With 21 I went on an exchange year to Madrid and ended up living in various shared flats. One of the rooms I rented was just big enough for a bed that folded out of a closet and a table-sized board that was attached to the closet and transformed into a small desk. A foldable chair completed the pieces of furniture in my room. During my year in this room I really learnt how to maximise small spaces and make use of every little bit of room available. This would come in handy years later when I moved into a studio apartment in Amsterdam and even shared it with my boyfriend for a year. Did I mention we are both freelancers working from home?!
I know what you’re thinking now. She must be traumatised from living like a sardine all her life. Well, yes and no. Yes, small rooms, houses and apartments can sometimes feel pretty claustrophobic. But, what I always liked about a compact space was the feeling of cosiness. Anyone else obsessed with tiny houses??
I like to keep my space pretty clean and clutter-free. Be mindful of what you put in your home. A little vase here, a few boxes there will all fill up your small space in no time. On the plus side, it’ll take you no time to clean your entire apartment. I say that’s a huge win!
In addition to keeping up with my less is more attitude, there are a few other tips and tricks you should consider when planning to furnish your small apartment:
1. If you work from home like me you’ll need an office corner, that essentially has everything a normal office has, but in a more practical way. Think foldable everything! A fold-down table you can put down when you’re done working and a folding chair you can put away (e.g. hang it on the wall, then it doubles as wall decoration). Instead of bulky cabinets you can use shelves above your table to keep books and other office documents as storage space.
2. In a small apartment/studio it’s pretty likely that you have an open kitchen/living room area. You probably don’t want to eat your dinner sitting on your sofa (all the time), but there’s also no chance you’ll fit a full-sized dining table in. Instead of cramming a normal table in, consider putting in a bar with stools. This doubles as work area and uses less of your precious space.
3. No meditation room? No problem! If you like to get your zen on before work, you just need a few things to transform one of the corners of your biggest room into your personal sanctuary. Place a nice cushion on the floor, decorate with a candle or some incense and use a folding screen (that you use at night to separate your bed from the living area) to create the right ambience to meditate.
4. If you have a little room for a sofa or a comfortable chair, don’t bother cramming in a bulky coffee table in front of it. Get one or two of those little tables that perfectly fit a cup of coffee and a book, so you can move them around as needed. Or, use cubes/small stools that also double as extra seats when you have friends over.
5. We’re still optimising space in your living area. If you have a TV, don’t put it on a media console, but instead hang it on the wall. This frees up so much floor space and will make your room less cluttered. Plus, it’s wall art!
6. Speaking of wall decoration. When I decorate I tend to think practically. You can hang up that expensive bike you’re keeping in the apartment, beautiful plates, folding chairs, colourful bags and hats. It’s practical and at the same time nice to look at. Speaking of decoration that doubles as art, think of an interesting rug as a focal point in an otherwise minimalistic space.
7. If your bedroom/sleeping area feels too crammed or you live in a studio apartment, you can use a sofa bed instead of a normal-sized bed to gain some extra space during the day. A folding screen or a bookshelf are perfect dividers between your sleeping and living/working area.
8. Create zones with the help of a strategically placed bookshelf, a curtain, a plant, a chair or a screen (as mentioned before). Or, you could paint certain areas in a different colour to create the illusion of a room. Sometimes a dark colour like navy blue or dark green works well in a small space as it creates a perception of depth.
9. Use mirrors. This is the oldest trick in the book but it really works. A mirror will visually transform your space into a larger and lighter area. Glass is also a good idea to make a room seem bigger. A glass door (to your balcony) or a bigger window can really open up a small room/apartment.
10. Be creative with your storage space, especially in weird-shaped areas that don’t fit any furniture. Maybe you can place boxes under your bed or between the tops of your closets/shelves and the ceiling. Often people don’t consider this as a practical storage space, but with help from a little step you can reach this area. Plus, the step doubles as a seat or a place to put a pot plant. This practical trick also makes your room feel higher. | https://medium.com/@alixmcampbell/10-clever-interior-design-ideas-61ec61f344a6 | ['Alix M Campbell'] | 2019-01-11 11:50:15.436000+00:00 | ['Design Inspiration', 'Home', 'Freelancers', 'Interior Design', 'Homedesign'] |
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