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How to Set taking place Your Own Counter Strike Dedicated Server | Counter strike is the most flourishing game in the world. Many of the extra multiplayer, three dimensional, shooting games today are modeled from its success. The game offers a first person game experience. The strong graphics and the variety of maps are the highlights of this game.
Game Play
You can take action as a terrorist or the counter force. The terrorists will tree-plant the bomb at a particular site and the role of the counter force is to defuse the bomb — at a answer get older limit. If the bomb is not defused at the unconditional time, it will explode, and victory is for the terrorist force. upon the supplementary hand, if you acquire to execute them all. next you will win.
The game is quick paced consequently you will infatuation skills to exterminate people upon LAN. Yes, traditionally counter-strike is played through LAN, and it can be run through a console. You can in addition to perform upon your own and make bots as max as 1000. Bots can furthermore be assigned once definite cs and talent levels.
Counter Strike Online
Yes, you can piece of legislation it not only subsequently Local area Network connection, but moreover upon the cloud. You just infatuation to make a counter strike dedicated server for your associates and other people to meet up. Counter strike runs on Steam, suitably there is a dependence to install one. You will after that habit to download the Amxmod metamod plug-in in order to do its stuff the game. You can download it from their website — just search amxmod to locate one.
Here are some of the requirements:
Of course, you will obsession some basic networking stuff to create this work. You will craving a router, and reach harbor warding. Your host computer must have the needed requirements to host the game. You will in addition to need to fiddle with maps and supplementary stuff on your server — for people to enjoy it. But set aside all the small matters, Steam, the plug-in, a router, and a stable internet membership is the backbone of creating a game server upon steam.
How is it vary from Playing LAN?
Yes, you can law upon LAN. However, an online game gives you mobility and your contacts can use their laptops in playing. This is then good later you have an total internet membership at home. Also, it provides opportunities to go head-to-head subsequent to substitute players worldwide. You will as well as acquire to host and recreate your own game, customize maps, and further stuff. | https://medium.com/@bova.vincent/how-to-set-taking-place-your-own-counter-strike-dedicated-server-b73220e7c8e6 | [] | 2016-10-13 07:16:17.719000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Esports'] |
How have Low Traffic Neighbourhoods ignited a culture war on Twitter? | London’s new traffic reduction policies have caused protests, vandalism and furious online arguments. This is the first of three posts analysing the Twitter debate around London’s contentious Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
An LTN in Oval, photo from Lambeth.gov.uk
When the #LTN hashtag appeared in my Twitter feed in July 2020, it caught my eye. It affects the area I live in, but I also noticed it because it was so acrimonious. So far, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) have caused protests across London, a campaign of vandalism, death threats to local politicians, and all the other familiar inhumanity of politics on Twitter. At the same time, there are also Twitter accounts committed to carefully arguing for their sincerely and deeply held views on LTNs. In the hope that the debate could be an interesting model of digital democracy, perhaps even a sandbox for thinking about ways to improve civic discussion on social media, I started collecting data about the LTN debate from the Twitter API.
A protest against LTNs in Ealing
In my previous research, which used the same methods I’ve deployed here, I looked at highly localised Twitter discussions, for example, around a single planning decision. Often, such small scale debates beg questions about how transferable any insights are. On the other hand, national politics on Twitter has so many participants that it is hard to do a proper analysis, because of the volume of data involved, and because of the lack of clear boundaries.
The LTN debate is a middle ground. It has thousands, rather than millions, of participants, but still concerns a substantial issue that we can all understand — LTNs profoundly affect transport and street space for millions of Londoners.
This post: How a handful of Twitter users drive the LTN debate
Second post: How black taxi drivers shape the debate
Third post: Speculative thoughts on tools for better civic participation
What are LTNs?
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) are interventions to reduce private vehicle traffic and encourage pedestrians and cyclists to use the roads. Cycling and walking are intended to substitute for busses and the tube; use of which is discouraged because it is a potential site of covid transmission. LTNs also fit into a wider policy of encouraging walking and cycling.
Modal filter in Powell Road, Hackney. Photo from Dezeen.
LTNs reduce traffic flows by placing a barrier to cars across selected roads — leaving road access from both ends but preventing through traffic. These are called ‘modal filters’. LTNs are funded by Transport for London and make use of Experimental Traffic Orders, legislation which has been modified to assist local government in responding to covid.
How have LTNs been received?
A survey by YouGov, the only methodologically valid poll I’m aware of, shows strong support for the measures overall. However, some citizens forcefully object to LTNs, arguing that they increase traffic jams, reduce air quality by making car journeys longer, are only installed where they benefit wealthy people, and block emergency vehicles. Often, anti-LTN campaigners couch their concerns in terms of their right to drive, or authoritarian threats to their freedom of movement.
Vandalised planter, used to prevent through traffic in Ealing. Photo from David Millican.
The Borough of Wandsworth has removed LTNs as a result of the backlash, while Ealing, Lewisham and Kensington and Chelsea have also modified their schemes in the face of criticism.
The narrow issue of LTNs has become connected to the wider political landscape, with the Anti-LTN campaign casting those in favour LTNs as the ‘metropolitan elite’; likewise, Pro-LTN campaigners have linked the Anti-LTN campaign to regressive nativism, mirroring the rhetoric of the Brexit referendum.
LTNs as class war (I removed identities from Tweets of non-politicians)
LTNs are a short-term response to Covid, but they also respond to longer-term concerns. One is ‘rat-running’ — the practice of using residential roads as shortcuts. In the past, only a few locals or taxi drivers would be aware of these shortcuts. Now, sat-nav route planners algorithmically route large volumes of traffic down rat runs, and the resulting traffic can disrupt residents’ lives.
London Borough of Hackney Cabinet Member for Transport on Sat Nav and traffic
LTNs also serve borough councils’ long term planning ambitions to shift emphasis away from private cars. Critics of LTNs question the legitimacy of using emergency covid legislation to meet the objectives of non-covid transport plans, especially because LTNs have been installed so quickly.
Twitter is not the only place that LTNs have provoked online controversy. Facebook groups have also played a part, although Facebook’s platform makes analysis much harder. Commonplace, a site specifically designed for local planning issues, is another notable platform.
With this background in mind, here is my first finding.
The Twitter debate is highly concentrated
This graph shows the number of Twitter @mentions and retweets by the top 120 accounts using terms related to LTNs, excluding accounts belonging to borough councils or those of borough Mayors. Detailed methodology is given at the end of this article.
The top 20 Twitter users are responsible for half of the total activity. These accounts typically belong to campaigners. Subjectively, comparing Facebook and Twitter LTN discussions, the same individuals are often active on both platforms. This suggests that online debate may be influenced by just a hand full of individuals.
I was surprised by the sheer volume of interactions. Looking through the data, it became apparent that some Twitter users engage in long threads with up to 40 users tagged in, allowing them to generate huge numbers of connections. As a side note, many of the participants must invest huge amounts of time on this topic. On the one hand, much of this effort is poured into unproductive shouting matches; on the other, it does show Twitter’s capacity to drive civic engagement.
Keeping things in perspective
Part of the answer to the question of how LTNs have been so controversial is that a small number of people can make a lot of noise.
It’s obvious that Twitter does not represent the community at large, but it’s also easy to forget that. Loss of perspective is always a danger — especially if you are in the throes of a Twitter spat. When dealing with citizens with trenchant or extreme views, it’s helpful to ask what fraction of the population they represent. Once you are interacting with more Twitter accounts than you can easily memorise, it can feel overwhelming. Our intuitions about group sizes stop working in the virtual world. Data that gives us a better picture the numbers of participants can help, perhaps even tempering Twitter’s capacity to dominate the attention of citizens and politicians alike.
A communication channel
One benefit of analysing the Twitter data is identifying these highly active accounts — applying the term ‘influencer’ seems inappropriate, but it does convey the idea.
This handful of highly active individuals have the power to shape perceptions and disseminate information. While there is no democratic reason to privilege them in decision making, they represent an important channel for communication. They are also an obvious place to start in any interventions intended to guide a conversation towards creative engagement and away from futile hostility.
Perhaps Twitter is too effective at handing power to a few highly vocal individuals and should be sidelined as a forum for civic debate. Or it might be that we need to look deeper in the network to find the more interesting parts of the debate. The second post will do just this, including investigating how taxis have fuelled the ‘culture war’ aspects of the Twitter debate.
Second post: the role of black taxis in the LTN debate →
— — —
Appendix: how data was collected
This appendix describes my method in more detail. This method was used to gather the data for all three posts in this series. My LocalNets software was used to gather all the data, which collects tweets using search terms, or from specified list of Twitter users.
Step 1: Searched for any tweets containing “LTN”, “#LTN”, “LTNs” and “low traffic neighbourhood” within 10 miles of Central London. The search ran from September 12th. This created what I refer to as the search corpus.
Step 2: Looking at the search corpus, I selected the top 130 Twitter accounts with the most @mentions (inbound plus outbound). All tweets from the top 130 accounts were then collected from October 1st — this is the corpus of the account. The top 130 accounts were coded as follows:
Pro-LTN, anti-LTN or ambiguous (2 or more tweets strongly indicating a view either way)
This result in 55 anti-LTN accounts, 54 pro-LTN accounts and 11 ambiguous accounts. There were also 9 taxi drivers, all but 1 anti-LTN.
Step 3: All Twitter users in the accounts corpus each Twitter user was coded as follows (in addition to their already coded LTN views):
Taxi driver — if their bio states they are a taxi driver.
Cyclist — if their bio lists cycling as their only or primary interest.
Cyclists and taxi drivers were also coded as pro or anti-LTN if they had at least two tweets strongly stating a position.
In total, 99 pro-LTN accounts were recorded, and 98 anti-LTN accounts.
There were 49 cyclists, of whom 28 are also pro-LTN, 2 anti-LTN, and 19 coded as not having given an LTN view.
There are 59 black taxi drivers, 30 anti-LTN, 1 pro-LTN and 28 coded as not having a view.
Step 4: Collected the list of accounts each of the 130 top accounts followed. Looking at the whole accounts corpus, those with ‘Brexit’ in their bio were coded as ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ Brexit, if their bio made their position clear.
Step 5: Labeled “Institutional” Twitter accounts: official Twitter accounts of a borough council, borough mayor or mayor of London, or the official TFL account. These accounts are heavily mentioned but rarely reply, so could distort the network. They were excluded from the analysis. | https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/how-have-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-ignited-a-culture-war-on-twitter-676338205084 | ['Jimmy Tidey'] | 2021-01-20 20:16:56.225000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Cycling', 'Design', 'Urban Planning', 'Social Media'] |
HOW TRUMP EXPANDED HIS COALITION | Lessons for Liberals from the 2020 Election
“IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME that everyone has a place in this country . . . that anyone who’s willing to work hard can live here and feel like they belong” — those were the words of Abigail[1], a voter who I had the pleasure of interviewing weekly over the closing months of the 2020 presidential race. A lifelong Republican, Abigail voted for Trump in 2016 but had admitted to me that she felt regret. She managed a business in a wealthy, cosmopolitan suburb outside of Washington D.C.; she admired diversity, professed support for women’s reproductive rights, and as a mother of two, kindness was important to her. As the summer of 2020 unfolded with a bungled pandemic response and intensifying racial tensions, she felt increasing indisposition toward Trump; she always held umbrage with his rhetoric, but now she felt a burgeoning doubt in the president’s competence and ability to lead a divided nation.
Conventional wisdom in the pundit-sphere pegged voters like her — educated white suburban moms — as a critical constituency that would hand the election to President-Elect Joe Biden. That was the logic behind the campaigns, behind the millions poured into The Lincoln Project, even behind Joe Biden as a candidate. A coalition of turned white women, fired up minorities, and a sliver of the president’s own base of non-college educated white males would accomplish the rare feat of removing an American incumbent. The United States’ most illiberal president in modern history would be removed by its most diverse coalition — and then everyone on the bus would clap.[2]
Evidence seemed to support this narrative through the cycle: historically wide and stable polling leads for Biden, levels of civil unrest unseen since closing of the 1960’s, a broad-based social justice movement, a steady trickle of Republican defections and feel-good anecdotes of turned Trump voters. After two months of Abigail expressing persistent indignation at the president’s behavior, at his divisiveness to me on the phone, I had the sense that we were in store for a historic condemnation of the president. The voters had other plans.
On November 3rd, Abigail decided to cast her ballot for Donald John Trump last minute. Along with her, an increased share of Blacks and Hispanics cast ballots for a second Trump term. Now, it’s important to preface any discussion of Trump’s relative successes with the fact that he also experienced a historic loss for a sitting incumbent. Biden bucked historical trends and won the White House with the highest vote count ever recorded. However, we are comparing the results to the background of polling, punditry, takes, forecasting and campaigning that preceded it. Biden didn’t win a landslide electoral victory — with gains in the house and a decisive senate majority — fueled by a clear rebuke of the president. He reliably underperformed the polls; Democrats lost seats in the house and are in a dogfight in Georgia for a narrow senate majority. Biden won critical states with tight margins through gains in the suburbs and a massive swing in white men and senior citizens — not some progressive fantasy uprising of the marginalized.
But this essay is about Trump’s performance, not Biden’s. If exit polls and county level analysis is any indication, it seems that against all conventional wisdom Trump diversified his coalition from 2016. He traded a chunk of his support among white men for modest gains with minorities. While he did not win the largest share of non-white voters for a modern Republican[3] (that honor belongs to George W. Bush in 2004), Trump made vast improvements over both McCain and Romney. Additionally, whereas white women handed Democrats the house in 2018, they seemed to maintain their support for or even slightly warm to Trump in 2020. It is clear that even in loss, Trump managed to expand the Republican coalition.
This wasn’t what anyone expected. Liberals were counting on a stunning rebuke from women and “POCs”. Even Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, before prostrating himself to the Commander in Chief, warned in 2015 that Trump’s brand of race-baiting xenophobia would do long-term damage to the party and diminish their prospects with Hispanics, a demographic that they’ve been courting in vain since the admonitions of Karl Rove. They were wrong. Donald Trump’s brand of politics put his party closer to Sen. Marco Rubio’s professed aim of a “multiethnic working-class coalition” than it has been in fifteen years. Once again Democrats, Republicans, pollsters, forecasters and other paid brainiacs fundamentally misunderstood the electorate. If the discourse following 2016 upset was centered around understanding the stunning “Whitelash,” the conversation following 2020 will be devoted to understanding why the marginalized groups that the intelligentsia pegged as the president’s victims ended up warming up to him.
TRUMP’S PERFORMANCE IN 2020. The nature of 2020 has made exit polling a particularly difficult science this election. In contrast to past years, the exit polls were a combination of in person exit polls taken at polling places and phone polls of voters who voted by mail or early-in person.[4] Considering the partisan divisions on who voted when, and the pollsters efforts to compensate for that, there is likely more “noise” in the results than past years. Nevertheless, there isn’t particular reason to mistrust the direction of the polling shifts; the shifts in support by race seem to comport with precinct analyses[5] and one wouldn’t expect gender to be particularly distorted by when people voted.
Voter Turnout. At over 160 million ballots cast, the 2020 election had the largest vote count in American history and the highest vote turnout in over a century. Because of the remarkable uptick in turnout from 2016, both Trump and Biden were able to expand their gross electorates, and both could increase their shares of the same key demographics by increasing turnout — what mattered is who increased turnout and their respective vote shares more. Biden won this contest, but it is clear that Trump was able to increase his turnout by shoring up support from his party, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters (beating Democrats at their own game), and making inroads with some women and minorities.
Exit Polls. Exit polls show that Trump was able to increase his support among blacks up to approximately 12%, a 4 point increase from 2016 and the highest Republican share of the black vote since 1996. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the president improved his performance with Hispanic (or what the Democrats, probably to their expense, call “Latinx”) voters by around 3 points from 2016 — just under a third of Hispanic voters favored a second Trump term. Additionally, Trump improved 7 points with Asian voters — a constituency the DNC has pinpointed as long-term investment. Finally, as a special affront to pollsters, who forecasted a historic gender gap of up to 31 points,[6] the actual gap sharply reverted to the mean of around 10 points.[7] White women’s support for the president held firm, and Trump made clear gains with women of color.
Precinct Analysis. Again, the racial shifts in the exit polls is largely reflected by the precinct analysis in crucial swing states. Hispanic Miami-Dade county was responsible for around 75% of Trump’s gain in net votes in Florida.[8] In North Carolina, majority black counties warmed to Trump, and Robeson County, home to the Lumbee Tribe, flipped solidly red.[9] Across Florida, George and North Carolina, Trump improved his showing in majority black precincts by 2 points and in majority Hispanic precincts by over 11 points.[10] Trump made similar gains with Hispanics in Texas and Arizona.
I will assert that I personally was not surprised by the racial shifts; I’m intimate enough with people from these backgrounds to know the lamestream media and Democratic establishment was missing a crucial story there. But being familiar with white women, having worked on a 2018 congressional race where they were critical for victory, and having the opportunity to interview one over the course of the race, their stable or slightly increased support for Trump was an extraordinary subversion of my expectations. However, it’s important not to draw the wrong story from the data — this isn’t a “Blexit” or a mass realignment (yet). In total, a vast majority of women and minorities supported the Democratic nominee; Biden got more net votes among these groups than Hillary Clinton, helping him win the presidency. However, the increased turnout — a perennial progressive goal — modestly improved Trump’s vote shares with constituencies that Democrats rely on. Given Trump’s character, and frankly, the project of the Republican Party, this is extremely alarming and reveals dangerous cracks in the Democratic Party’s desired coalition.
WHAT 2020 TAUGHT US. If this election cycle and the past four years have taught us anything, it’s that there’s a fundamental fragility in the liberal vision for this country; many Americans are susceptible to demagoguery and misinformation, and even for those who are not, partisanship can discipline them into dangerous complacency. Liberals cannot rely on them to have an “Aha!” moment. What needs to happen is an aggressive campaign that meets people where they are. To do that, we need to make sure 2020 taught us the right lessons; those lessons also happen to be the reason that Trump was able to expand his electorate. Through data, reporting, and personal anecdote, I hope to illuminate what they are.
Demographics is not destiny. Democrats will not be able to ride the demographic wave to comfortable electoral margins; rather than shift American public opinion, as non-whites grow in their relative share of the population, they will likely simply start falling into existing patterns of partisanship. Given their disproportionate support for Democrats, I expect a long run regression to the mean could only mean increasing relative support for Republicans in the future. We may have just seen the beginnings of this in 2020. As Hispanics become more embedded in the country’s social fabric; through assimilation intermarriage and cultural absorption — they’ll simply stop seeming and feeling so different. As Asians prevail as the highest-income group, I suspect that their posterior — second, third and fourth generation Americans — will trend towards the voting habits of high-income whites. Blacks pose a special case, but it’s very plausible that a combination of dissatisfaction with the status quo, exhaustion with a perceived pandering and condescension, religiosity, and the continued work of high-profile black republican celebrities and influencers (Kanye West, Diamond and Silk) will push more of them into the ranks of the Republican party. If liberals have any hope of demographic shifts handing them majorities into the future, they’re going to have to understand the people who comprise them.
Women aren’t fundamentally different than the electorate at large. I’m frankly a little embarrassed to have believed that women would be “more vulnerable” to campaign dynamics and that some magical maternal instincts would activate in response to Trump’s rhetoric to more than double a historically stable gender gap in favor of Biden. I’ve learned that this sort of wishful (possibly sexist) ideation should be discarded in favor of the reality that women are basically caught in the same patterns of reliable partisanship as the electorate at large. Any professed dismay at a candidate’s character or rhetoric would mostly succumb to the discipline of partisan identity. This is precisely what happened with Abigail. After months of exasperation with the president’s behavior and flirting with the prospect of casting a democratic ballot, she yielded to her more essential instincts: “I just couldn’t get myself to vote for Biden.”
People gave Trump credit for the pre-COVID economy. While Democrats privately rejoiced over the fact that Trump was presiding during the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression, it turns out that assigning accountability for the COVID induced recession was more complicated. Until around late October, issue pollsters found that voters still slightly favored Trump to handle the economy; and even those polled were evenly split on who they trust on jobs.[11] Surprisingly, in the fall, around 56% of voters reported that they were better off than they were four years ago. Right before the pandemic, 61% of respondents said that they were better off than they were in the Obama years.[12] The lesson here is that the idea of the electorate mechanically punishing incumbent parties for economic downturns is dated; the narrative around accountability for the downturn matters. Trump was credibly able to blame a foreign virus and the opposition’s heavy-handed lockdown response. In many instances, this caused sections of the electorate to trust the opposition with the economy less. This was explicitly the case with Abigail, who when probed over why she voted for Trump, told me that “I have people on payroll, and I just can’t trust that Biden won’t do another lockdown.”
On balance, people may have primarily associated Trump with the slightly accelerated economic expansion before the pandemic, no matter the pains Democrats went through to attribute it to Obama. If the Trump campaign had any message discipline, it was in hammering down record low unemployment for blacks, Hispanics, and women. Progressives balked at this reductive characterization of the economic situation, where underemployment, stagnant wages, and high costs of living were harming the prospects of all of these groups — but in the end, the Trump narrative seemed to make a dent in their base. By rejecting the optimistic Trump narrative that Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Shiller suggested had a hand in improving consumer confidence and lengthening the expansion,[13] Democrats looked like “haters and naysayers.”[14] In 2020 and 2016, the narrative was more important than — and even in critical in affecting — the economic fundamentals.
For newer Americans, the politics in their country of origin matters. As an “Asian” American, Trump’s 7 point improvement with the demographic wasn’t surprising. For one thing, most Asian countries represented in the United States have a predominately negative view of China, and I know personally that Trump’s tough rhetoric on “the Communist Party of China” turned many of these voters on to him. Biden’s claims of xenophobia rang as tone deaf and weak. A particularly interesting anecdote is where one of my mother’s coworkers, a Uyghur woman on a green-card who had family members stuck in Xinjiang province, said she loved Trump because he was the only one who would stand up for her people. The fact that he had condoned the concentration camps according to his own national security advisor and that his administration is admitting a record low number of refugees did not register with her. Now she couldn’t vote, but on hearing on this Muslim immigrant woman of color’s love for Trump, I knew that Democrats had a severe messaging problem.
Many Indians also warmed to Trump (exit polling categories doesn’t separate them, but pre-election polling shows a modest shift),[15] as his brand of politics resonated with the nationalist (really, fascist) uprising back home. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a historically powerful and popular prime minister, particularly with the kinds of upper-caste Hindus that immigrate to the United States. His rapport with Trump was well known and well covered in Indian media, this probably turned a good deal of Hindus on to him (astoundingly, my own family members, who were trying to bypass legal immigration procedures with phony asylum claims based on religious persecution, liked Trump!). Segments of America’s model minority are more sympathetic to reactionary politics and authoritarianism than we give them credit for.
Finally, as has been covered ad nauseam, Trump’s charges of socialism against the Democratic party likely had a very real impact on Hispanic voters.[16] Not obvious perhaps is that his comparisons of the party agenda with Venezuela-style socialism was probably effective with some not only because they don’t want to be like Venezuela, but because of many from the neighboring countries aren’t particularly fond of the Venezuelan refugees pouring in to their countries of origin (source: my Peruvian roommate).[17] In the end, Trump was able to shave off some of the Democrat’s minority support because these people aren’t the down-trodden little guys who Democrats want them to be, they’re full-fledged people with their own histories, cultures and even deep-seated bigotries — how very American.
We don’t hear and see the same things. The most important lesson — in fact the macro lesson that encompasses all the others — is that Americans are not hearing and seeing the same things. This may sound like a banal point, anyone paying attention knows how bifurcated our media has become. But the point I’m making is more sophisticated, and more important than this. Yes, media polarization and social media means in some instances we’re seeing different content; what’s more interesting though is how we’re responding so differently to the same things. President Trump isn’t really micro-targeting his messaging; his campaign might do this in the digital realm but if anything, the Democrats have been doing this even better. No, his rallies and his twitter feed go to a mass audience; his voters themselves are segregating his message by projecting their own hopes and anxieties onto his heavily stylized language. His style allows people to pick where he’s being sincere, and where he’s being a blowhard — different people make different selections.
Rather than targeting different images to different people, the president has presented a singular gestalt image — where what you see depends on where you look. Like the famous internet memes “The Dress”[18] or “yanny laurel,” once someone’s seen or heard one version its near impossible to convince them of the alternative perception. Trying to convince a Trump fan to see an incompetent bigot is more like trying to convince someone that “The Dress” is blue when they see gold than a matter of intellectual debate.
This is why my mom’s muslim coworker could see a humanitarian where my family members see kindred spirit to Modi’s anti-muslim Hindu nationalism. Additionally, where white liberals heard attacks on Hispanics, many Hispanics themselves didn’t hear it as an assault on themselves.[19] No, when Trump was attacking drug dealers, criminals and rapists he wasn’t attacking them, he was attacking those townies back home, the bad ones.
The difference between 2016 and 2020 Trump is clear when you compare his Inauguration speech to his 2019 speech. American carnage gave way to unbridled American optimism, a narrow message began to accommodate a larger audience. I would argue that in 2016, the president won because of a disciplined singular narrative: “you’ve been cheated by a corrupt status quo designed to help outsiders, I will fight to help you.” In 2016, it was easy to tell Trump was addressing a white anxiety. Three years into his presidency however, his image splintered — he messaged on broad based inclusive economic growth, had appointed conservative justices, and made very direct appeals to minorities. Trump the nativist multiplied into Trump the jobs creator, Trump the bulwark against socialism, and even Trump the humanitarian. In contrast to Trump the insurgent, Trump the president offered a gestalt image that broadened his appeal.
CONCLUSION. In the days and weeks following the 2020 election, I could tell that many Democrats, particularly on the far left, learned the wrong lessons. Many saw Trump’s expanded appeal as evidence that systemic racism and sexism were even more pervasive than we thought. Hispanic and Black men were attracted to Trump because of an innate machismo, white women were continuing to uphold a racist patriarchy that benefitted them. To these people, what was needed was more education, more activism. I doubt that’s the answer.
I don’t doubt that some voters were motivated by latent racial anxieties or sexism; but for most of these people it’s unconscious, and they don’t want a sensitivity training. Abigail didn’t vote for Trump because of racial anxiety — and I looked for it. She didn’t care about school zoning in our county bussing kids from the Hispanic neighborhoods, or high-density housing being built near her home (“I think that’s good. I want my kids to know not everyone is like them.”) She weirdly liked Kamala Harris. Trump’s racial rhetoric offended her; she voted for him because she didn’t trust Biden. When asked about the president’s corruption, his authoritarian instincts, she retorted “well that’s what checks and balances are for, right?” While many voted for Trump out of anger and racial resent, I suspect that Republicans on the margins voted for him because of a basic faith and optimism that our institutions could withstand the ramblings of a very rude man. They felt it was safe enough to fall back into their partisan identities.
It would be easy to write off the votes of white women as irresponsible complacency towards a racial hierarchy that benefits them if its purported victims — blacks and Hispanics — didn’t also warm to Trump. No, these people didn’t vote for Trump because they thought he would uphold a racial hierarchy.
We know this: Democrats’ attempt to convince more voters that Trump was a racist (or worse, that they were secretly racist, but they just didn’t know it) didn’t really work. To them The Dress is firmly gold, not blue. Trump’s gains among minorities after four years of shouting “racism!” should be a hard lesson for liberals, and likely a source of vindication for Republicans for years to come (“If Trump was a racist then why . . . “). Instead of doubling down on that strategy, as many progressives are inclined to, we have to try something different. Instead of trying in vain to get people to see the flip side of the gestalt image, give them something prettier to look at instead. I believe this is more or less what happened this election. The pundits have pegged the 2020 election as a referendum on character. That’s probably the case, but I don’t think that Biden swung the white vote because he convinced new people that Trump was a racist misogynist, I think that many voters were just ready to change the channel. It’s important that we know what actually worked.
To sum up, Trump’s ability to expand his coalition with the very people who were supposed to rebuke him teaches us that Americans are more complicated, and America more interesting than any modeler can capture. People won’t behave how we want or expect them to, and some probably delight in doing precisely the opposite.[20] There’s a natural resistance to being pegged as a perennial victim; people desire a sense of agency. There is probably a perverse satisfaction in voting for someone you’re not “supposed to” — I would argue that there’s a characteristically American rebellious spirit behind it. Trump earned more support among these groups not because they wanted to ingratiate themselves to a racial hierarchy, but rather because they are becoming ever more American, warts and all.
[1] Alias is used to protect the interviewee’s identity.
[2] This is a reference to an internet meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/and-then-the-whole-bus-clapped
[3] A Republican after the realignment of 1964
[4] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/exit-polls-can-be-misleading-especially-this-year/
[5] Precinct shift maps show shifts to Trump in predominately black and Hispanic counties; most notable is Miami-Dade county which may have solidified Florida as a Republican state.
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/29/daily-202-trump-faces-historic-gender-gap-heading-into-first-debate/
[7] https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-voting-rights-elections-84ef3db79532c0029894ff25a316370b
[8] https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-florida-election-win-hinged-on-big-gains-in-miami-dade-11604518272
[9] https://www.fayobserver.com/story/news/2020/11/12/nc-vote-between-trump-and-biden-shows-gop-dem-shifts-2020-election/6227924002/
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-president.html
[11] https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-10-21/poll-biden-pulls-ahead-of-trump-on-handling-of-economy
[12] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/321650/gallup-election-2020-coverage.aspx
[13] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/20/shiller-recession-likely-years-away-due-to-bullish-trump-effect.html
[14] This is my favorite turn of phrase from Boris Johnson.
[15] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/despite-small-shift-toward-donald-trump-2/3rd-of-indian-americans-back-joe-biden/articleshow/78139899.cms
[16] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/caudillo-or-crusader-against-socialism-florida-s-latinos-debate-trump-n1100036
[17] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/02/peru-rechazo-ilicito-de-personas-venezolanas-que-buscan-proteccion/
[18] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
[19] This is a great Ezra Klein podcast on the issue https://open.spotify.com/episode/4V2GXkWuh0IxsYWvbfDmzV?si=dxNS7MSTR3K3ZhypDt81QQ
[20] See, Kanye West | https://medium.com/@rambocalrissian/how-trump-expanded-his-coalition-b330b3f94abf | ['Rambo Calrissian'] | 2021-01-02 14:52:04.179000+00:00 | ['Patriarchy', 'Race', 'Hispanics', 'Donald Trump', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Dates That Sucked | II. The player
The flat party was busier than I was expecting. There wasn’t a theme or any dress ups this time — my university housemates loved themes — but there was a rugby game on the television and everyone was loud, yelling, laughing, drunk.
He caught my eye across the room. I recognized the pull in my gut and smiled. I could tell he thought I was attractive and suddenly he was attractive too. The dark mop of curls, the casual way he dangled his leg over the arm of the couch. I made my way to the chair next to his. But I was too sober to fall for his drunk compliments. “Show me your room,” he slurred. He leaned in and kissed my neck. I was tipsy enough to let him. “Come on. I’ve never met anyone like you.” I shook my head. “Give me your phone number then,” he looked up at me with soft brown, begging eyes. I knew these college guys: the ones who are too smooth, too charming. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Let’s go nightclubbing,” he said. My friends were keen. I gave in. He paid for my drinks, placed his hand on the small of my back, acted like we were on a date instead of a sweaty dance floor. “I have to see you again this week,” he said. “Fine,” I laughed. The ‘date’ ended in a dark street filled with people and a deep thrum of bass from the club. He said goodbye with promises and tender kisses. He pressed his body against mine and held me like he couldn’t stand to let me go. He never called. My housemate discovered later he already had a girlfriend.
III. The socialite
Was it my birthday? It was definitely a special occasion, maybe an anniversary. He picked a fancy restaurant in our town, not the fanciest one but up there. It was attached to a hotel, which thrilled me. Hotel restaurants always make me feel like I’m on vacation or going somewhere exotic. Vintage mirrors on the cream walls reflected other couples: backs of heads, wine glasses in hands, women with more jewelry than me.
We took a seat at one of the tables-for-two in front of the large windows. He browsed the menu, sitting upright, elbows on the table; looking more “business” than usual in an ironed long-sleeved shirt. We ordered — scallops for me, chicken for him — and he spoke with the waiter. He knew him socially. They’d hung out on a beach, played guitar and sung around a fire. Their eyes locked, they mirrored each other’s animated gestures, the conversation buzzed with chemistry. I spun my wedding band. Then the waiter was called away.
He swiveled in his chair, scanning the room for someone else to speak to. Anyone except me. That was our last date.
IV. The “funny” guy
My aunty died, a woman who helped raise me, and I missed the funeral. Too far to go from where I live. There isn’t the time or resources when you’re a solo mum to up and leave whenever you want to. He called for a second date. The first had gone okay and company seemed nice. Having someone to hold, to be held by, seemed nice.
He talked about himself and wanted to watch comedy shows. A distraction he said. He recited poetry: “I Fuck Sluts”, and gave me a look. I laughed and cringed. I looked at him sideways. “What are you telling me with that?” He didn’t answer. He couldn’t stay. I knew dating should be better than this but I didn’t want to be alone. Abandoned. The cut of divorce was fresh and the comfort of a man’s arms around me was cool salve on my still bleeding wounds. My body craved it. “Don’t be clingy,” he said. He screwed up his face, looked pissed off. A light came on in my mind. With it a flood of shame. Did I need a date so badly? I laughed and pushed him away, “I’m joking. Go!” I meant it. Something shifted under my ribs. He wasn’t who I wanted. This wasn’t what I needed.
I waited until he left before I cried. | https://kellyeden.medium.com/dates-that-sucked-46c4b7848f78 | ['Kelly Eden'] | 2020-12-27 23:10:56.461000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Love', 'Dating', 'Nonfiction', 'This Is Us'] |
Yellow Roses, Some Birds, and Happiness in the Gloomy Days | PHOTO-A-DAY CHALLENGE
Yellow Roses, Some Birds, and Happiness in the Gloomy Days
Week fifteen of the photographic documentary of my daily life
I am so excited about the news I just got. Last week’s photo essay has been curated. I don’t get a lot of articles curated. In general. Probably because I don’t use any stock photographs. I have never opened the page of Unsplash or Pixabay. And I refuse to.
I use my photographs. My work means the entire product of an article is created by myself. Including the photographs in it. Even if that means my article won’t get selected for distribution.
I write a lot of travel stories. And a travel story from Namibia with a picture from the Atacama desert is everything else but authentic. It’s my experience I’m talking about. And that is why it will include my pictures as well.
The photo challenge
When Dennett started the photo challenge in July this year and I read her first article on documenting her weekly life in photographs I was blown away. That’s what I want to do. This challenge was made for me.
I joined the publication Snapshots and have published ever since at least one article per week with them. I love photography. It’s a passion of mine. And I love writing. Combining these two is topping it all. It creates a perfect product for me.
Since then I have joined this photo challenge and haven’t missed a single week. I love to work on these photo essays. I’ve learned so much through the process of creating them. Finding every day one photograph describing my day. Writing down a few words for every day in my week.
Three months down the line I feel like I’ve grown. I’ve grown in making better pictures. I’ve grown in finding the right words to describe those photographs. And I’ve grown as a person in finding happiness in the small things in my everyday life.
But it seems like I’ve also gotten better at creating and designing these photo essays. The result of the latest one being selected for distribution made me jump for joy. It shows how much this project means to me.
This challenge wouldn’t be the same without all the other writers who’ve been joining it too. They make it fun. Reading from others about their daily lives, seeing pictures from Iceland, Australia’s beaches and birds from the states is what I love about this challenge.
Erika Burkhalter and Dennett are the ones who have been the most consistent in this photographic documentary but lots of others have joined it too. Anyone is welcome to jump in. Just choose a picture every day for one week and please tag me in it.
“Being creative is not a hobby. It is a way of life.” — Aditya Advik
My week
This week means back to reality. The reality for me is right now lockdown in Germany while spending the last weeks in the country. Soon we will be leaving the continent again. To escape winter.
Or to go get the paperwork done. Deal with visa issues and everything that involves being in a relationship with someone who is not as fortunate as I am by having a German passport. But this is a whole different story.
Let’s focus on the present. It’s autumn in Germany. The last leaves are falling from the trees and the temperatures keep on dropping. We moved into my parents' flat which means we have to find a place to store our belongings until next year’s spring. | https://medium.com/snap-shots/yellow-roses-some-birds-and-happiness-in-the-gloomy-days-365f2212302b | ['Anne Bonfert'] | 2020-11-25 12:31:11.475000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Nature Writing', 'Outdoors', 'Photography', 'Nature'] |
Clearing Up Confusion Over Colds, Flu and Bacterial Infections | Colds and flu have plagued us for as long as we can remember.
The rise in more dangerous strains has made all of us more paranoid about getting sick.
We search the internet, go to our doctors, read up on the latest cures and remedies, but we still don’t have a firm grip on some basic education around colds and flu.
Mainly, we don’t understand what separates a cold from the flu, and we still don’t understand the difference between a bacterial and viral infection.
Many people run to the doctor hoping to get antibiotics for a viral infection, and they don’t need them. Also, people are confused about whether to be tested and treated for the flu.
Lastly, many people are still not sure about how to properly treat colds and flu at home or when they should consult a doctor.
Authors Own Creation for Ask a Nurse
In this “Ask a Nurse” article, I hope to provide some easy to follow tips and education about colds and flu and how to look after yourself and your family.
I’ll use some common questions people have as a way to guide the discussion.
What is the difference between a cold and the flu?
Colds and flu are both caused by viruses, but the strain of virus may be different. Most people have heard about the influenza virus, which causes the “flu,” but many people get similar symptoms from virus strains that are not the same as influenza.
Here are some common symptoms for both colds and flu:
- Runny nose
- Cough
- Congestion
- Fever with chills
- Muscle aches and pains
- Decreased appetite
- Headache
The main difference between a cold and the flu is that the fever is often higher and lasts longer for the flu. Also, symptoms such as headache and muscle pain are often much worse for the flu.
In general, cold viruses are less severe than influenza, but it depends on the person and their health history. A person with a healthy immune system and no other health conditions may only have mild symptoms from a cold.
However, someone with a compromised immune system due to cancer, autoimmune issues, or certain medications may have worse symptoms. Also, heavy smokers and people with asthma, reactive airways, and chronic lung conditions can have severe symptoms from a cold.
Image by skeeze from Pixabay
How do I know if it’s a bacterial or viral infection?
Colds and flu are caused only by viruses. The strains and names are different, but the behavior and trajectory are quite similar.
Let’s repeat that: Colds and flu are ONLY caused by viruses.
The thing that gets confusing is when a viral infection creates circumstances where bacteria can grow. This is called a secondary bacterial infection. The reason people get paranoid, and rightfully so, (especially with children and older people) is because a secondary bacterial infection can be severe.
Let me explain how this works. The main symptoms of a virus are congestion, cough, and runny nose. This happens because the virus causes inflammation of the whole respiratory system.
Sometimes the inflammation stays in the nasal area, and sometimes it travels down into the lungs. Either way, the inflammation causes swelling, mucus, and liquid production.
Within this swollen and mucus-filled area lies a high potential for bacteria to multiply and have a party. This is particularly dangerous for people with immune system issues.
Sometimes even healthy people can get a secondary infection if they are really run-down or the congestion is so severe that there’s no air-flow. Some bacteria love places with limited air flow and lots of mucus to live in. | https://medium.com/ask-a-nurse/clearing-up-confusion-over-colds-flu-and-bacterial-infections-79e19dfbdec3 | ['Gillian May'] | 2019-06-07 19:19:54.764000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Education', 'Learning', 'Life Lessons', 'Health'] |
Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content | Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content
Angular Accessibility Part 2
Accessibility plays a vital role in any Single Page Applications. As Angular growing by leaps and bounds, supporting the accessibility in Angular Application becomes quite complex until we know all accessibility concepts.
Here I am coming with the different guidelines to implement accessibility in Angular Applications.
One of the main concepts to support accessibility is Skip to Main Content. When we are dealing with multiple pages it is better to have one place where we can maintain the whole reusable accessibility feature.
Before starting the implementation techniques, Let’s check common rules to follow while implementing accessibility.
You can also checkout how to create reusable functions to implement accessibility in Angular Application.
Let’s move to our main discussion
One of the main features of accessibility is to skip to the main content. Let’s check out how we can implement Skip to Main Content in Angular.
When keyboard-only users interact with the website they use the tab key to jump from one link to another link. If we have a lot of content in our application and user want to move to the main content available on the page, instead of clicking so many tabs it is better to give them access to reach the main content. Providing the skip to the main content solves this purpose.
Here is a demonstration of what keyboard-only users must do to navigate a page without a skip to the main content link. The below approach worked really well for me to implement skip to main content in Angular Applications.
Step 1. Create header HTML and skip to main content link
Step 2. Add CSS and make that link visible only on focus
Step 3. Create a header component and add reusable methods
Step 4. Create common accessibility service and add common methods
Step 5. We are now ready to use our reusable methods
As we can see we added the ngAfterViewInit life cycle to get the currentValue. Once we get the current value unique to the page we are setting focus to a main-content class of the HTML We can access the accessibility service in HTML and can call sendelementId to update our currentValue. When we redirect to another component we can exactly use the same method on the ngAfterViewInit life cycle of the sample component to subscribe to the current message and focus the ‘Main-Content’ Id which we added in HTML.
We will meet again with one more reusable component to support the accessibility in Angular.
Are you preparing for interviews? Here are frequently asked interview questions in Angular. It covers the Latest interview questions for Angular and Frontend development. Let’s check how many of these questions you can answer? | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/improving-the-accessibility-of-your-angular-app-87ca732b6de3 | [] | 2020-12-23 00:25:50.516000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'Web Development', 'Front End Development', 'Accessibility', 'Angular'] |
Analyzing Starbucks App Data | Udacity Data Science Nanodegree — Capstone Project
Photo: Grand Warszawski / Shutterstock
** All code for this project is included in this Github repository **
Introduction:
Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational chain of coffeehouses and roasting reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. As the world’s largest coffeehouse chain, Starbucks operates more than 30,000 locations worldwide in more than 70 countries. To connect with its customer, Starbucks has a reward mobile application to send advertisements and offers.
Project Overview:
In this project, I will be analyzing data coming out of this app and try to find trends and relations between users information and offer data. Finally, I will build a machine learning model to predict whether a user will respond to an offer or not.
Each user on the application has an account that can include demographic information on the user. A user can make a purchase, receive an offer, view an offer or complete an offer.
There are three types of offers that can be sent: buy-one-get-one (BOGO), discount, and informational.
BOGO: a user needs to spend a certain amount to get a reward equal to that threshold amount. Discount: a user gains a reward equal to a fraction of the amount spent. Informational: mere advertisement for a drink
Datasets:
There are three datasets available:
portfolio.json — containing offer ids and meta data about each offer (duration, type, etc.)
profile.json — demographic data for each customer
transcript.json — records for transactions, offers received, offers viewed, and offers completed
Problem Statement:
The problem that we are trying to answer is how does a customer respond when an offer is sent to them.
The strategy that we will be following is:
Data preprocessing and cleaning: we will look deeper at the data and understand its content. Data will then be cleaned from anomalies, null values, and duplicates. Data analysis and visualization: data will be further analyzed and visualized to answer more detailed questions relating to our problem. Data modelling: we will try to build a machine learning model that will predict whether a user will complete an offer or not. model is evaluated based on f1-score.
Data Preprocessing and Cleaning:
1- portfolio.json (10 x 6):
id (string): offer id.
offer_type (string): type of offer i.e. BOGO, discount, informational.
difficulty (int): minimum required spend to complete an offer.
reward (int): reward is given for completing an offer.
duration (int): time for the offer to be open, in days.
channels (list of strings): channels include mobile, web, email and/or social.
Sample of portfolio dataset
To clean this dataset we did the following:
Expand “channels” into binary columns of all different channels in the dataset (email, web, mobile, social)
Expand “offer_type” into binary columns for all different offer types.
2- profile.json (17000 x 5)
age (int) — age of the customer
became_member_on (int) — date when customer created an app account
gender (str) — gender of the customer (note some entries contain ‘O’ for other rather than M or F)
id (str) — customer id
income (float) — customer’s income
Sample of profile dataset
For this dataset, we did the following:
Remove Nan and invalid values (eg: Age = 118).
2,175 users didn’t input any information and therefore they were removed from the dateset. All users who had Age = 118 were among the 2,175 users with missing information which seems like an auto placeholder for null values.
2,175 users didn’t input any information and therefore they were removed from the dateset. All users who had Age = 118 were among the 2,175 users with missing information which seems like an auto placeholder for null values. format ‘became_member_of’ column to Y-M-D
transcript.json (306534, 4)
event (str) — record description (ie transaction, offer received, offer viewed, etc.)
person (str) — customer id
time (int) — time in hours since start of test. The data begins at time t=0
value — (dict of strings) — either an offer id or transaction amount depending on the record
Sample of transcript dataset
For this dataset, we did the following:
Expand “event” into binary columns of all different events in the dataset
Edit the ‘value’ column and expand it into (offer_id, amount, reward) columns.
Offer_id, reward — for offer events
amount — for transaction events
Offer_id, reward — for offer events amount — for transaction events 374 duplicate entries were removed.
Finally, for simplicity, the hash values of user_id and offer_id were all mapped to integers.
Data analysis and visualization:
In this section, we will answer more detailed questions relating to the problem statement.
Q1) What are the users age and gender distribution in the dataset?
Gender and age distribution
We see that the majority of users are of ages 50–70 and males are 57% of the entire dataset. 1% of users didn't identify themselves as females or males.
Q2) How is the data distributed between different events?
Event distribution
The dataset contains 45% transaction events and 55% offer related events.As expected, not all received offers were viewed and not all received offers were completed. In fact, only 11% of all offers sent were completed by users.
Q3. What are the percentages of each offer type sent?
In order to dive deeper and explore the offers with relation to the users and their types, we will to create a new dataset that includes the 3 datasets.
Percentage of offer types
Almost equal number of BOGO and discount offers were sent. Around 14,000 of all offers sent were just advertisement.
Now let’s look at successfully completed offers and see what are the factors that influence the offer completion.
Successfully completed offers are offers where users received an offer, viewed it, and then completed the offer during the offer period.
In order to find it, we will create a new column called ‘time_expire’ which would identify the time in hours where an offer would expire.
time_expire = time_received + duration* 24
Then we will check the following condition:
time_received ≤ time_viewed
2. time_viewed ≤time_completed
3. time_completed ≤time_expire
Q4. Which offer type had the highest completion rate?
Completed offer per type
Although the total number of discount and BOGO offers sent are equal, it seems that discount offers are more likely to get completed. This is mostly due to the fact that you don’t need to spend a certain amount to get a discount offer, in contrast to BOGO where you are required to meet a certain amount of spending.
Q4. What is the relation between user demographics (age, gender) and offer completion?
It looks like males are slightly more inclined to complete offers especially discount offers.
It also looks like the age had no effect in offer completion as the graph generated is similar to the original age distribution graph in the entire dataset.
Finally, if we look closely at the last graph we see that females are more attracted towards the $10 offer than males.
Q5. What is average amount of spending by age?
To complete the full picture, we will look at the factors that affect the spending, since these users are of higher value for Starbucks.
Average spending by age
As the age of the user increase, the average spending increases.
Data Modelling
Now that we have analyzed the dataset, we will proceed by creating a model that would predict whether a user will respond to an offer or not. There are 4 scenarios that can happen:
A user will view and complete the offer. A user will just view the offer. A user will not view the offer, but will complete it anyway (without prior knowledge of the offer existence) A user will not view the offer and will not complete it.
Metrics
Since Starbucks are targeting users that will view the offer and complete it afterwards, our prediction would be a binary value as such:
1: User will view and complete the offer
0: Otherwise
Three classifier algorithms will be used
LinearSVC
Decision Tree Classifier
k-nearest neighbors
To evaluate a model, we will look into f1-score. The F1 score can be interpreted as a weighted average of the precision and recall which conveys the balance between them.
Looking at Precision value alone would ignore the False Negatives and would make us miss valuable customers that can potentially complete an offer.
Similarity, looking at Recall value alone would ignore False Positives which can make us send offers to everyone and flood users with offers they are not interested in.
For that, F1 score is the best choice in this case as it provides the balance between them.
Model data
In order to proceed with the prediction, we will need to create a new dataframe that will include the targeted features and the prediction column. The features that will be analyzed are:
Age
Income
Gender
Offer_type
Reward
Duration
Difficulty
Channels
A new column will be created “offer_success” to show whether a user will successfully view and complete the offer.
Offer types BOGO and discount have a clear criteria for completion and can be founded by looking at the event column with value “completed offer” and then double check that the timing of completion and viewing and offer expiration are consistent.
However, since informational offers are advertisement offers that don’t have a completion criteria, we will need to define how to consider them successful.
One way would be to look at all transactions and check if a transaction has occurred during an informational offer period. These transactions are considered to be influenced by the offer and thus the informational offer was successful. This is, of course, under the condition that a user has received and viewed the informational offer, then proceed to make a transaction.
After data was prepared, GridSearch was used to tune the parameters of each classifier algorithm.
Results:
Screenshots of the results are taken along with the hyper parameter values that was evaluated for each algorithm and the best values that was found using cross-validation:
LinearSVC
LinearSVC results
DecisionTreeClassifier:
DecisionTreeClassifier results
KNeighborsClassifier:
KNeighborsClassifier results
Evaluation
A summary report of the above results are shown in this table using common test data for all models.
Summary of test result
Looking at the results above, KNeighborsClassifier performed the best with an f1-score of 0.64 for users who will not complete offer and 0.77 for users who complete an offer. The average accuracy is 0.71.
KNeighborsClassifier achieved this result using the following best parameters:
Best parameters for KNeighborsClassifier
Justification
In the above analysis, we looked at Starbucks data and saw how offer features and user demographics affect how a user would respond to a an offer.
After doing dome deeper analysis and visualization we saw that some features such as gender affected a user response to an offer. Males were more likely to complete an offer and especially discount offers whereas women preferred high reward offers ($10).On the other hand, we saw that the age of the user has no effect in that matter.
We discovered some trends on user spending and we saw that users who are older (in their 50’s or 60’s) are more likely to spend more.
we also looked at how the data is spread and we saw that only 11% of the offers sent were actually completed and 19% was viewed. The remaining offers were not touched.
To wrap things up, we built a classification model to predict whether a user would complete an offer or not. We saw that KNeighborsClassifier had the best results. The model was able to classify completed offers better and it had an average accuracy of 71% which is good given the limited dataset and the small number of effective features. [5,10,30] neighbors were tested with gridsearch to give the above result.
We had missing information for so many users in the dataset and therefore their data was dismissed. The experiment was also run for a short period of time, which doesn’t give enough input into how users react to the offers.
One improvement for the model was made after normalizing the income feature as it had very large values compared to the rest of the data.
Reflection
In conclusion, we went through several steps with the analysis to answer our problem statement.
The steps can be summarized as follows:
Understand the dataset and all its features. Clean and modify the data to prepare it for visualization and modelling.
* Null and duplicate values were removed
* For categorical values such as offer_type and event, separate columns were generated to replace them.
* Invalid data such as missing user information was handled. Visualize and explore data.
* Data distribution of age, gender, event, and offer types were looked at.
* Relation between user demographics and response to offers. Identify successfully completed offers from unsuccessful offers and represent them properly. Predict user response to offers using ML classification models. Evaluate results and choose the most appropriate model.
In this project, I learned so many things and explored different areas of data science.
My favorite step was step 3 of visualizing data. My most challenging step was step 4 as it was difficult dealing with the fact that users can complete an offer without viewing it or that an offer can be sent to user multiple times.
Improvement
One thing that can be done is to increase the duration of the experiment. A period of one month is short and would not be sufficient to describe user behavior as users spending can be different every month. A period of 3 or 6 months is more suitable.
We can also create an A/B experiment to split users and check how well our prediction model work. | https://medium.com/@shahedmashni/analyzing-starbucks-app-data-9f9c3cce06ca | ['Shahed Mashni'] | 2020-11-10 09:57:52.377000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Starbucks', 'Analysis', 'Classification'] |
Stop Pretending “Woman” is Synonymous with “Female” | Photo by Juan Marin on Unsplash
For most of my life, I have often heard women be described as “females.”
People think that this language is formal. When I was in grade school, my teachers and classmates would sometimes use the word “female” to describe a woman in more technical terms. Generally, it’s viewed as a more sophisticated word; one more scientific than colloquial.
But this has always bothered me.
For a long time, I couldn’t put my finger on why. Was it because it made us women sound like robots? Like just another species to be gendered? Was it because the word “female” was linked to most parts of reproductive science? Was it because the word “female” felt too weak to describe the strength that the word “woman” conveyed? Was it because I felt like it was too boring?
The truth is, although those things do tend to bother me, the word “female” is problematic for a different reason: the word exists only to express a binary distinction between two types of people. And in doing this, it’s invalidating and disrespectful to people who are not part of the binary.
The word “female” is there to describe someone. When I was younger, I thought female was just another word for woman. But the truth is, it’s so much more than that. It is proof of a culture rooted in exclusivity and the idea that sex is always equal to gender. And the truth is, there are people in the world who fit that mold. There are plenty of women out there with vaginas and uteruses who express themselves as women and identify as women. But there’s also another truth: there are plenty of women out there who don’t. And there’s plenty of people who have vaginas and uteruses and don’t feel comfortable identifying as a woman.
Gender isn’t a Venn diagram with two mutually-exclusive circles; it’s a spectrum, an umbrella. It is not about parts. It’s about what’s inside. It’s about expression, comfort; it’s about being who you are regardless of the organs inside of you. And by using the technical word “female” when we actually mean “woman,” we’re discounting the people in the world who don’t fall into mutually-exclusive circles. We’re creating a world where these people do not have a place to be themselves and be celebrated for that.
Sex and gender are two different things, as many of us are aware. And by putting them into the same category, we’re excluding a lot of people who find themselves struggling to fit that suffocating box. There is no legitimate reason for us to lump them into the same category, even; because what is the benefit of equating gender with sex? If we did, it would complicate healthcare (as it already does). It would invalidate the many transgender and non-binary people who deserve the same space to be themselves as cisgender people do. It would create unnecessary pain and unrest. There is no benefit to this.
And on top of that, this trend doesn’t seem to be as popular with men — I rarely see them being called “male” as a substitute for the word “man.” So it’s a sexism issue, too: the word “man” is so popular and so standard, with a connotation of strength and power, that no one seems to want to reduce a man to a male. The legitimacy of the word “man” is rarely questioned; there is seldom a reason to substitute it. So why can we not accept that the word “woman” is empowering, too?
Transgender women are women. People who are non-binary but choose to use she/her pronouns (whether in addition to or in the absence of they/them pronouns) and identify with the term “woman” are women, too. People who are gender-fluid and feel comfortable and empowered by the term “woman,” no matter when or how often, are women, too. And for those who are not comfortable with the word “woman” but who have a vagina, we need to respect their pronouns, too. We can’t just label them as “women” because of our assumptions. Their parts may be traditionally female (notice the word “traditionally,” as sex is now arguably irrelevant except in situations of health), but that does not at all mean that they identify as such. Even people who choose to express themselves in a way that some people might describe as being “female” — those people might not prefer that label. They might not even prefer “woman.” Maybe they prefer “femme.” Maybe they prefer their pronouns and no such descriptions at all. Maybe they feel that their gender expression is not important to who they are on the inside. That’s where this gets so problematic.
If we are going to grow as a society, we need to learn to be inclusive to everyone — and that means every single person that falls under the umbrella of gender. Regardless of expression, identity, or pronouns, a female isn’t always a woman and vice versa. And additionally, we need to learn that “female” is a weak and outdated term. The word “woman” is much more empowering — and so is “person,” for that matter, because woman isn’t the label for everyone. Why don’t we hold cisgender men to this same standard? Why don’t we question them? Why don’t we use the supposed synonym of “male” to describe them?
The answer lies within misogyny. We rarely question their worth or their strength. We rarely find it acceptable as a society to trivialize someone else’s version of masculinity or their identity as a man. So why should women, non-binary people, gender-nonconforming people, and anyone else settle for less? It’s less than anyone deserves.
This problem is rooted in more than just the stark but vital difference between “female” and “woman.” It is so much more than etymology. It’s in misogyny and transphobia. It’s in the societal implications of this dilemma. It’s in the rights of people who are so often overlooked, when they have as much to offer the world as anyone else despite not fitting into the rigid binary box. It’s in the difference in connotation between “man” and “woman.” It’s in the idea that we even need words beside “person” to describe someone who doesn’t prefer having a gender label. It’s so much more than a word. It’s the injustice behind it.
When a gender identity or a pronoun or a gender expression makes someone feel set free, they have every right to choose to embrace that. But that’s just it: it should be 100% their choice. It shouldn’t be up to the judgment of bystanders. It shouldn’t be based on someone else’s unfair or limited expectations. It’s not that any of this terminology is inherently bad; it’s that there are too many voices that are left unheard.
We are all human. And we must listen to the voices of our fellow humans. Everyone deserves to have an existence that allows them to feel empowered and excited about who they are. And it’s not our job to rob each other of that.
So, of course, to some of us, maybe it’s “just a word.”
But to someone else, it is so much more. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/stop-pretending-woman-is-synonymous-with-female-8515eea442e | ['Brooklyn Reece'] | 2020-06-11 18:47:54.939000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Culture', 'Gender', 'Life', 'Self'] |
3 Easy Beginner Instruments | Some people appear naturally gifted with instruments. While that can be true, to some extent, the less musically talented can still make beautiful music.
Obviously, even those who have a natural talent for music still have to practice and learn, and that takes some time. With that in mind, here are my top 3 picks for the best instruments to learn as a beginner.
This is a Cajon, the first instrument on the list.
This is a Cajon, the first instrument on the list. Also known as a box-drum, the Cajon is a rhythmic instrument usually used to accompany other instruments in a band. As a standalone instrument, it is a top pick of mine to just jam out on.
The Cajon is a box with snare beads inside. Tapping on the top of the front panel produces a snare-like sound. Tapping down in the middle of the front panel produces a deep, kick drum-like sound.
In my experience, the Cajon is one of the easiest percussion instruments to learn. I had to play it for a gig one time, and after watching 1 YouTube video I was confident I could play that night. The player sits on top, straddling the box with their legs. They then tap and rap and hit the front face to produce two sounds.
The first sound, as mentioned earlier, is the snare-like sound, and the second is a kick drum-like sound. Using these two tones, and a combination of different patterns, the Cajon can fill in the entire rhythm section of a song. Practice with a metronome, or if you have a good internal sense of beat, just start tapping along with any song you hear on the radio. Soon you’ll be a Cajon expert!
the Harmonica, a melodic instrument.
Next is the Harmonica, a melodic instrument. The harmonica is perhaps one of the simplest instruments to learn. There are a variety of online sources for harmonica music, and it’s deep, soulful sound can’t be replicated with anything else.
Simply pick a hole and start blowing, and you’ll instantly have a nice sound. But there is a little more to it than that.
A typical diatonic harmonica has 10 holes, with each hole capable of providing 2 notes. Inhale, or exhale, to make two different sounds from the same hole. Harmonica music is quite simple to read as well. Most harmonica notes can be read by hole-number. For example,
-10 -8 -7 -4 is a rough example of inhaling on holes 10, 8, 7, 4. Arrows or hyphens indicate which breath is required for each note, and the player simply has to count holes till they find the right one.
Simple Harmonica music for the song “you are my sunshine”
Although often mistaken for toys, harmonica require very little air to make a good sound, and with easy music, it can be picked up by a beginner and learned in no time.
The ukulele, my favorite, and the final entry on this list.
Lastly, the ukulele, my favorite, and the final entry on this list.
The ukulele is perhaps the most versatile beginner instrument available. Similar to a guitar, but much less complicated, the Ukulele is a fantastic instrument.
With four strings, the ukulele is typically played with a strumming pattern. Chords usually consist of 1–3 fingers, and the strings are much softer than the guitar. Softer strings mean less sore fingers and less buzzing noises on the strings.
Part of what makes the Ukulele a great option is the catalog of learning options on the internet. There are no shortage of videos on YouTube for every topic to do with ukulele, as well as sites such as Uketabs.com which provide free sheet music for ukulele players.
An example of sheet music on Uketabs.com
This is some ukulele sheet music. Don’t worry, this is one of the more complicated songs you could play, “Isle of Flightless Birds” by twenty one pilots. Notices at the top, there are chord diagrams. The reader simply has to place their fingers matching with the dots.
The numbers in the middle section are plucking patterns or fingerstyle. each number matches with a fret on the ukulele neck, and reading left to right, the player simply puts a finger on each fret and plucks the string.
Part of what makes the ukulele so versitile, in my opinion, is the ability to play a melody in fingerstyle, or the ability to strum along to a song with chords. Strumming is a rythmic style, so the ukulele can play an entire song, providing melody, and rythm.
Now I’ve shared with you three of my favorite beginner instruments, if you haven’t ever tried learning an instrument, now is a perfect time! With Christmas in less than a week, perhaps it would be a good time to learn a Christmas carol to share with family (stay safe out there) | https://medium.com/@josiahbdecker/3-easy-beginner-instruments-e9bce8aef939 | ['Josiah Decker'] | 2020-12-19 18:25:21.133000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Beginner Guide', 'Beginner', 'Learning', 'Instruments'] |
Boost the flexibility of your Microservice architecture with Spring Cloud | Inevitably when your application configuration is written directly into the code, every time you need to apply a change, the application must be recompiled or/and redeployed, for the client’s well-being or even for the folk that does that work, avoid it. Most engineers separate the configuration information from the original application source due to the lack of efficiency and flexibility.
Five usual solutions to this problem take place. In this article, I propose one of those solutions, mainly the most straightforward, Spring Cloud Configuration Server.
What is Spring Cloud Configuration Server
Looking at the official Spring.io documentation:
Spring Cloud Config provides server-side and client-side support for externalized configuration in a distributed system. With the Config Server, you have a central place to manage external properties for applications across all environments.
With this server, whenever you apply a simple configuration change, the microservice instances will automatically update themselves, with the new properties settled. Some of its features:
It supports multiple backends for storing configuration data (Etcd, Eureka, Consul, ZooKeeper, and the one we are currently explaining);
Can be integrated with GIT source control;
With simple annotations, you can have the configuration server up and running;
Multiple profiles environments for each microservice (usually dev/QA/Prod);
How microservices interact with this central repository
Every time one service instance starts, it will fetch all the properties data from the configuration server, through a service endpoint exposed by the repository. When some changes occur, the services are notified to refresh their copy of the application data.
Conceptual Architecture
Creating our Spring Cloud Configuration Server
Create a new spring project,(You can easily do it through the Spring Initializer). Make sure the following dependencies are added:
spring-cloud-starter-config
spring-cloud-config-server
Spring Cloud is a massive collection of independent projects, many third-party libraries and dependencies are used, you need to specify the version number of the current spring cloud project you are currently depending on, in this case, Hoxton.SR8. All this code is pushed into a GIT repository, you can easily go there and check if all dependencies match with the ones inserted on your pom.xml or gradle.build.
3. Edit the application.yml, this file will tell your Spring cloud configuration service what port to listen to and where to locate the backend that will serve up the configuration data. To maintain the easy setup and understanding of the concepts/steps, I decided to store these configurations properties in the filesystem, however as you probably know, in a distributed environment, this may become a bit overwhelming and make the architecture unnecessarily complex, you should probably consider storing this data in a database.
Configuration Server (application.yml)
The search-locations property will have the location of your service configuration files (dev/QA/Prod), just by inserting the minus after the service name and then the file context, like:
client1.yml -> default
client1-dev.yml
client1-qa.yml
client1-prod.yml
Spring Cloud can easily map the services to each environment automatically if they follow this name convention.
4. About the service configuration itself, it’s pretty much the same content as you would insert on the original application.yml of the service, in this case, we set up an in-memory database like:
Client1 (client1.yml)
5. The only step missing is inserting the configuration annotation at the main application class, @EnableConfigServer, we place it so Spring can know which context should be running:
Configuration Server Main Class
6. Now the only thing missing is to build the project and start it:
mvn clean install
java -jar <project-path>target/configuration-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
Configuration Server Startup logs
And Boom, you got yourself a spring cloud configuration server, you can test it just by requesting the following endpoint: | https://rafael-as-martins.medium.com/boost-the-flexibility-of-your-microservice-architecture-with-spring-cloud-729ded91e221 | ['Rafael Martins'] | 2020-11-02 11:42:28.954000+00:00 | ['Code', 'Spring Boot', 'Programming', 'Java', 'Spring'] |
The Un-Sprint | Can we have a sprint for refactoring? This sprint we are only going to do bug fixes. Let’s take a sprint to tackle some technical debt!
We’ve heard it before. Maybe we were even the ones asking for it. We just need a block of time to clean up the mess we’ve made. Then everything will be better! Some teams will do this a few times a year. Others may need to do it more often. I was on a team that had a “bug-fix” sprint every fourth week. Yes, a quarter of our time was spent on fixing and stabilizing.
At the end of a sprint, we should be delivering something valuable to the customer. But these un-sprints don’t really do that. Often, there is very little to show. Sure, bugs are fixed, but fixing bugs is rework. Those bugs shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Some bugs are unavoidable. Having enough bugs to fill an entire sprint is a failure in the development process.
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
Fixing bugs, refactoring, and paying down technical debt should be part of the daily activity of a development team. Putting those activities off costs more. Having regular un-sprints incentivizes developers to kick that can down the road. They can develop “faster” by ignoring these concerns until then. The result is more bugs and more technical debt.
Teams that have frequent un-sprints should invest in improving code quality earlier in the process. This investment pays dividends as fewer defects reach production, fewer un-sprints are needed, and more work is done to build valuable features. | https://medium.com/ready-for-dev/the-un-sprint-542d926935a3 | ['Chris Bojarski'] | 2020-12-04 17:52:15.955000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Teamwork', 'Agile', 'Scrum', 'Team'] |
Adam and Steve | Adam Steele thought he had seen it all. He thought that he had known all the depravity that the decadence of modern society could sink too. But what he has just seen he knew he could never be unseen. And it was there, unmistakable, incontrovertible evidence. Something in the water somewhere was causing frogs to turn against nature and MALE FROGS WERE HAVING SEX WITH MALE FROGS. Humans do such a thing, sick lifestyle choices, but frogs? They have only instinct. Something was put in the water to make the frogs act this way. He turned off Infowars and wondered where is this happening, could it be happening in MY community? And if so, is it part of a plan to make a bio-weapon to use against normal (And totally not gay) people.
Steele had long fought the continued encroachment of the Homosexual agenda. He campaigned tirelessly against drag queen story hours, fairness ordinances, for the rights of cake bakers and thrice divorced county clerks. He also knew that in order to understand the enemy better he had to research how they thought, which is why he spent countless hours searching for nearby men on Grindr to meet and have discussions with at the park bathroom. He of course would never enjoy the blowjobs, he was just wanting to see what motivated the enemies of THE LORD. His wife had some questions for him once about why he had so many gay porn sites in his internet history. “It’s for research of course! Stop asking questions!” he snapped back. He knew he needed to use incognito mode after that. There were some of these local deviants who he had encountered when rallying against the homosexual club that just opened, perhaps some of them were involved.
He knew though, that he needed to do more research. He got on Youtube and started searching for information about gay frogs. It turned out there was indeed a Pentagon project to create a gayness weapon. Supposedly it had been discontinued….or had it. Countless videos showed evidence of the decline of moral fiber, strange behavior of animals and other things. But the evidence was not enough. He needed to get out there and see what was happening in the nearby streams. He sort of remembered some stuff from science class, but didn’t really pay much attention because he played football and knew that learning things wasn’t what REAL MEN did.
He went and got a net that he used sometimes when he needed to move the koi that he had in the pond at his house and headed off to the local park. He knew one end had a lake with a lot of frogs in the cattails. As he made it there he could hear the ribbiting and croaking of various frogs and he set to work trying to catch some. He figured that if he caught some he could see if they were male and female and tried to breed. If they didn’t he’d know that they had turned….homosexual. He finally caught two. One was smaller and had a lighter color and a spotted pattern like a little leopard. The other was pretty big and green and had made deep sounds like “jug-o-rum” before he caught it. Obviously the smaller, more graceful spotted one was the female and the bigger one was the male. It made sense. There’s just one kind of frog right. He put them in jars and headed back to his house and set them in a fish tank. Since they are animals he knew they were going to do what animals do. To his shock and surprise the larger one opened its mouth, reached out and grabbed and ate the other! This can’t be right, the male wouldn’t mate with the female. It must only be interested in males! What is going on in this town?
Back at his cozy suburban McMansion, he got back on Facebook and shared his findings with his group “Real Men Against the Queermosexual Agenda.” Leftists, and the Globalists they serve had tried time and time again to shut their group down, but every time even the notorious Venezuelan Socialistic Facebook had said that their page that openly discussed committing hate crimes all the time “Did not violate community standards.”
“I think its happening here,” he typed. “The evidence from my research can’t be refuted.” Everyone in the comments agreed. Something had to be done. “You need to find the source of this Gaymosexual infestation,” his buddy Steve Rawlings replied. Briefly a thought crossed his mind of them together. “No homo! Just bros being bros,” they said to each other. He put it out of his mind, back to business.
“Yeah I’m going to try to infiltrate the den of iniquity that is the campus and find the lab, destroy the bomb,” he wrote to Steve. “I think it’ll be easier to get in, so I’m gonna go it alone. If I’m not back by tonight, they got me.”
It was a bright morning and Adam was “On his way to class.” He had exchanged his freshly pressed khaki pants for some jeans and his Lacoste polo for a Biden 2020 shirt which would surely allow him to blend in as a leftist deviant, He made sure to sensibly pack his Desert Eagle in his backpack in case he ran into any trouble with A.N.T.I.F.A. Despite its modest size, reliability and ease of handling-he was having difficulty attempting to conceal it in his pants and realized the backpack would be the best choice. Hopefully the fact it was in multicam and was covered in MOLLE webbing and tactical pouches wouldn’t stick out. He decided to wear a buff, that way he could appear to be ‘wearing a mask’ but also concealing himself and giving himself enough oxygen to resist George Soros’s mind control subliminal broadcasts. As he walked down past the buildings with effeminate signs like “Department of Sciences” and “Department of Humanities” he wondered what hope America had left if they were taken over by these Socialistic Communist traitors and the Christian West went up in smoke. He kept getting lost among the teeming masses of pink and green haired millennials that he knew would kill him, if they found out who was. “Where is the lab, I’m on my way to the Young Communists meeting?” he finally asked one. “Which lab?” they replied.
“Shit, they’re onto me!” Steele thought as he darted away and into the nearby building. He had to find somewhere to hide until the heat died down as he wondered the halls. He finally found a small closet and took refuge in there.
After what seemed like hours, Steele realized that he needed to come out of the closet and get to work. It seemed like late afternoon, and the campus looked deserted. “They must be done with indoctrination and off to having orgies or whatever they do in their dorms,” he thought, basing his guess off of detailed searches he conducted by typing in “College Dorm” on Google and turning off safe search to get around leftist censorship. As he came to the end of the hallway and was about to head out the door, he chanced to look at the wall on the left. A map!
Surely these crazed leftists wouldn’t be so careless as to just leave a map of the campus just on the way for patriots like him to find. As he looked he realized, there were actually multiple labs on the campus. But which one was the gay bomb being made at? The biotechnology lab seemed promising-it was isolated from the rest of campus and that word is the sort of thing that people making a gay bomb would use. It was a long walk-he’d be caught if he had drove here in his Chevy Silverado with its lift kit. He knew its was gonna be dark before he got there-Steve would think he hadn’t gotten back-but it couldn’t be helped.
He finally caught sight of the lab as he made is way around the football stadium (Or at least it was a stadium, before Communist activists took it over and the university made it the Antifa/BLM/LGBTQ Pride social center). Unlike the rest of the campus the lab looked like hive of activity. He darted behind some bushes before a group of people came around the corner. It was a close call as he peered out and saw who they were. It was a column of what looked like Venezuelan soldiers! Green uniforms, ski masks and carrying AK-103 rifles, they marched in a small column up to and into the main entrance of the lab. As he looked over at the flagpole on the building he was disgusted to not see the red white and blue, but some foreign flag-the colors were bands of light blue pink and white. He didn’t know what country it was but he remembered seeing that flag before-being flown by the most hardened and militant of the enemies of THE LORD. He knew he’d never just be able to walk in the front door, so he’d have to find another way in. He darted into the stadium, hoping to either find a way onto the roof of the lab or maybe a sky walk connecting the two buildings. Walking around this stadium was shocking. Gone were the posters of All-American sports heroes of old-replaced with liberal socialist propaganda. Pictures of Black Panthers, workers striking because they were to lazy to work, smiling happy people dancing on burning cop cars. Looming largest of all, a banner with antifa supersoldiers standing behind The Squad as those four evil women trample Ben Shapiro underfoot. Ilhan Omar is pointing to a rising sun, the rising sun replaced by a circle A. “Lord Jesus Christ Trump help me in this den of iniquity,” Adam prayed, asking THE LORD for protection.
Adam was suddenly startled by a click-the sound of a Kalashnikov safety being disengaged. As he turned around and began fumbling in his backpack to remove is outlandishly large handgun he realized he was surrounded. “Drop your weapon chud!” a commanding voice barked.
“You’ll never take me alive!” Adam bellowed in response as he finally pulled out his Desert Eagle and leveled it at one of the shapes in the gloom. But suddenly he felt a sharp thump on the side of his head. Everything went dark.
His head throbbed in intense pain when he came to. He tried to get up, and realized he was restrained, shacked to a hard metal chair. An intense light beamed down on him. He decided to look around the room. To his left he saw what looked like a balcony and windows. To his right were several Antifa guards, their Vityaz 9mm submachine guns pointed at him.
“Don’t try to entertain any foolish ideas of trying to skip out on your trial, enemy of the people,” came a voice from in front. He finally looked to face his captors. Directly in front of him stood a blonde woman. She was wearing a clean, crisp olive green gymnastyorka. Her olive pants had a red stripe down the side and were neatly tucked into impeccably polished sapogi, Her ushanka appeared custom made. He realized that he was facing Chelsea Manning the most ruthless of the Anti-fa commissars.
Behind her was a long table with four figures sitting behind it. On the wall behind them were four flags, the flag of A.N.T.I.F.A., the rainbow flag, the flag of Venezuela and that flag with the pink, blue and white stripes again. His heart sank when he realized who those four figures were-The Squad in the flesh.
Ayanna Pressley stood up and read a statement:
“Adam Steele, you stand accused of counterrevolutionary activity against the people’s army, espionage, sabotage and bourgeois decadence against the glorious liberal socialist revolution on this the 4th day of the month of Pelosi on Year Zero of the New Order. Do you confess to your crimes?”
“Eat shit godless leftist!” Adam screamed as he spat at them.
“Wrong answer,” Ilhan Omar said, coldly. “Comrade Commander Commissar Manning, let this chud know that these are serious accusations and that this People’s tribunal is not to be taken….lightly.”
“Yes Comrade Leader Omar,” Chelsea replied. She undid the flap of her leather holster and drew out a worn, but well-maintained Zastava M70A pistol. With a swift flick she smacked the butt of the pistol across Steele’s face.
Steele spat out blood. “You commie bastards think your gay bomb is going to turn us all into queermogaymosexual commie libs, but you’re wrong our god will prevail and you’ll go down in flames,” he said.
The squad and Manning broke out laughing. “Gay Bomb, you think that’s what we’re doing here, mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cackled. “You think so little of our capabilities. Perhaps you need a demonstration of our power. Commissar Chelsea, lead him to the balcony.”
The squad got up as Manning unshackled Steele and let him at gunpoint to the balcony. Below them were assembled thousands of Anti-fa supersoldiers, as well as a large body of battle-hardened Venezuela’s Special Action Forces. Behind them, about 40 Tatra trucks, each armed with a ballistic missile.
“We were at one point working on adapting the pentagon tested gay bomb,” Manning explained. “But were never able to properly develop a dispersal mechanism and turned to other weapons. Aside from using this facility to engineer and grow the supersoldiers you see were we were finally able to perfect our superweapon. Each of these missiles contains an air dispersed form of the MMR vaccine, as well as the newest version of the Covid vaccine-a far more potent weapon than any ‘gay bomb’ could ever be. Hwa! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“You bastards! Your plan is almost perfect too.” Steele said.
“Indeed, and it was stupid to think you ever had a chance of stopping us.” AOC replied. “And now as we prepare to deploy each of these weapons against American suburbs-using our supersoldiers to clean up the rest-you will have an appointment with the guillotine. But first, watch the end of your tradition.”
“You wanna hit this Manning?” Omar asked. “Sure thing,” Manning replied as shackled Steele to a chair again.
AOC produced a large bible and began tearing out pages. She then got out some of the Dankberry Ku$h 69 she had been saving and rolled a big ass joint for all of them. Adam Steele recoiled in horror as the moral guide of the Christian west went up in cloud of dank chronic.
“And now comrades, we shall read from the Book of Dankberry Kush Verse #69,” Manning said. “You want to hit any of this Adam?” Adam thrashed in the chair, powerless to stop these wicked blasphemers as they got high as fuck from the Devil’s weed and said terrible things about Jesus Trump Christ. Even the Antifa guards joined in on the fun.
As Adam Steele was led down the corridor to the guillotine, he looked out the window to watch the missiles lifting off. He knew each of them would be spreading their lethal payload over the suburbs in minutes. He shuddered to think about what was going to happen to his megachurch, the members of his Facebook group. If only he could have warned him. As the door was flung open and he was led up to the guillotine he took a look at the executioner.
The executioner removed his mask. Adam gasped. It was Steve Rawlings!
“I was on assignment to infiltrate and destroy your org and knew all about how you liked getting your dick sucked at the park while you encouraged hate crimes against the people you hooked up with the rest of the time. Now you will finally feel the hand of revolutionary justice.” Steve said.
Steele cried, begging for mercy as he was strapped down to the board and the blade was ready to be dropped.
“You know what they’re gonna say about this moment, Steele?” Rawlings asked.
“What’s that?” Steele asked.
“This day didn’t feature Adam and Eve, it featured Adam and Steve,” Rawlings answered, laughing.
The blade fell. | https://medium.com/@civilwardispatches/adam-and-steve-c0811b1c9784 | ['Dispatches Civil War'] | 2020-12-19 03:49:59.686000+00:00 | ['Civil War', 'Socialism', 'Christianity', 'Satire', 'Homophobia'] |
Data Structure and Algorithm Common Interview Questions (Part 1) | Reverse string, Palindromes, Reverse Integer and Return Max character into a string.
When I first start programming, I did know anything about Data Structure and algorithm, and even after completing a Coding Bootcamp, I was completely blank in the topic. I found out later that these are important topics to discuss, especially, for interviews. I decide to study those topics which I was trying to avoid until that moment because I was scared of the challenge I could face.
The good news was that after starting to study these topics I found them really funny and helpful in improving my problem resolution skills. Another good news is that the concepts are always the same, and has been like this for the last 30 years, so once you got this basic and more advance concept you are done, that’s it, you can solve many algorithms and data structure problem always using the same pattern.
In this series of blogs, I will post every week the more classic interview questions that cover all the different concept of Data Structure and Algorithm. I’ll start from the easiest one and go into the more advance. The structure of this blog is done in a way to help you understand the next and more advance one, so I will suggest that you read each blog to be able to improve your skills and knowledge to solve the more advance concepts later.
Reverse String
The reverse string is one of the most class questions and is really simple to understand. You are giving a function which takes a string for example “apple” you require to reversed “elppa”.
Solution 1
This solution uses a pre-build function “reverse()”. This method works on the array, so the steps to do here to solve this problem are:
Turn the string into an array, and split each character inside reverse the array join the array back into a string return the string
To turn the array into a string we going to use the “split(‘’)” method, we then going to call the “reverse()” one on the array and in the end we are going to use “join(‘’)” to join back the array into a string.
Using the concatenation, we can return everything on the same line.
This way to solve the reverse string is easy, but the problem is that during an interview does not show your skills or problem-solving thinking, and there isn’t much to discuss with the interviewer. This is why I will show you a better approach to show your skills in the interview.
Solution 2
Septs to solve the revered string:
create an empty string, and we are going to call it “reversed.” use a for loop to loop into the string we passed inside the method for each character into the string, we are going to add it to our empty string return the reversed string
So let’s examine how this works, in the first round of loop we have an empty array and assuming we have the string “apple” to reverse. We are going to take the first character “a” and combined with the string which is empty so the reversed string will become “a”. In the second round, we have the letter “p”, so the same we are taking “p” and add it to the reversed array that this time is not empty but has the “a” inside from the previous loop, so as follow:
p + a = pa
p + pa = ppa
l + ppa = lppa
e + lppa = elppa
By explaining this simple concept during the interview, you will show better skills in solving a problem than a simple call to a “reverse” method. Ther are other methods to solve the reverse string but you don’t need to know all of them, but I will list for you an additional one:
str.split('').reduce((a,b) => b + a)
This method transforms the string into an array and calls the reduce method on it which combine the letter in the order you ask to do it, in this case, “a” and “b” represent each letter if you call a + b will rejoin the string as before, but by reversing the b + a will do the opposite. This method is also perfect for doing calculation inside the array.
Palindromes
This method is really similar to the above one, and I will go over it really quickly, and the question is:
Given a string, return true if the string is a palindrome or false if it is not. Palindromes are strings that form the same word if it is reversed. *Do* include spaces and punctuation in determining if the string is a palindrome.
— — Examples:
1. palindrome(“abba”) === true
2. palindrome(“abcdefg”) === false
As you can see there is a clear pattern here and the solution is simple you can use the above method to reverse the string and compared to the original one and if are not similar return false otherwise return true:
As you can see, the above solution is really similar to the reverse string, but before to return the value we check if there are equal or not. In the second one, we check first if the first letter is equal to the last one, and in that case, we do not even run the function and return false directly.
Reversing an Integer
This problem may seem similar to the above two we did but is actually a bit more tricky, the problem is:
Given an integer, return an integer that is the reverse ordering of numbers.
— — Examples
reverseInt(15) === 51
reverseInt(981) === 189
reverseInt(500) === 5
reverseInt(-15) === -51
reverseInt(-90) === -9
const reverseInt = (int) => {}
I suggest you to give a shot to this one before to go ahead and see the solution.
Solution 1
As I said, this one is a bit more tricky for the simple fact that having a negative number we need to return instead to -15 -51.
The first solution has the following steps:
Transform the int into a string Use the split, reverse and join method to get the reversed result. Convert back the string into and Int Check if the original number was negative, n< 0. In case is negative multiple the new reversed result for -1, and return the result.
In the return statement, we are asking if n<0, if true we multiple that reveserdNumber * -1 and this will give us a negative result.
Explain: if we had an original argument of -15 after transforming and reversing the value we are going to have a string of “51-”. by re-transforming the value into an integer, we would lose the minus “-” sign. At this point, once we check if the original value was negative, we multiple this new value for -1 and we will get a negative -51.
Return Max character
This algorithm is a little bit more complex to code than to think about the solution:
Given a string, return the character that is most commonly used in the string.
— — Examples
maxChar(“abcccccccd”) === “c”
maxChar(“apple 1231111”) === “1”
Give it a shot before to check the below solution.
Solution 1
Step to take for solving this quiz:
Create an empty object Loop into the string and for each character into the string add it to the object as a key, if the key does not exist the first time you create it need to give a value of 1, but if in the next loop the key exists you increase by one the value. Check for each key into the object which one has the max value.
In the return statement, I am using Object.keys() which gave me an array of all the keys into the object. I then call the reduce method on each key and check if the obj[key] is bigger then the next one or not. In this case, reduce will check each key-value pair and return in case a or b. to better understand this method, check the documentation on the reducer() and the Object that keys.
Solution 2
create empty object create max variable with a value of zero 0 create a letter variable with a value of the empty string “ “ Loop into the string and for each character into the string add it to the object as a key, if the key does not exist the first time you create it need to give a value of 1, but if in the next loop the key exists you increase by one the value. Loop into the obj and check if the value of the current key is greater, then max will get the value of the current value of the key and letter will become the current key, in the case is not both max, and letter variable will remain the same. Return the letter variable
I hope this first blog on Algorithms and Data structure was helpful and clear, in case follow me to see more solution. | https://medium.com/swlh/data-structure-and-algorithm-common-interview-question-part-1-991df06b23bf | [] | 2020-11-08 23:46:56.249000+00:00 | ['Data Structures', 'JavaScript', 'Palindrome', 'Algorithms', 'Reverse String'] |
Geospatial adventures. Step 1: Shapely. | Image generated using KeplerGL
Geospatial adventures. Step 1: Shapely.
A quick look at the basics of working with geometrical objects in Python using Shapely library.
This is a first in a series of posts summarising some of the key outtakes from working with geospatial data with a PropTech twist over the last couple of years. These are going to have a bit of everything — geospatial datasets, geometric shapes, raster files, maps, visualisations. Starting from the very basics and building up towards more interesting and challenging things in the later posts...
Let’s kick things off with introducing Shapely. Without a doubt one of my favourite libraries in Python — very central and absolutely essential to any geometry/geography related work you will end up doing.
The library allows you to work with three main types of geometric objects: Point, LineString and Polygons+ geometry collections if you want to combine them. There’s a bunch of others — linear rings, multi-points, multi-polygons, etc., but for now these will do, the methodologies are very much transferable.
Installation
Pretty standard installation, using pip. If, like me, you are using jupyter — you can just run
!pip install shapely
Note that GeoPandas is using Shapely under the hood, so if you have installed GeoPandas— you probably have a recent version of Shapely already. You can perform some of the Shapely operations after importing Geopandas without a separate import, however, if you want to work directly with Point and Polygon objects — you would still need to load them in first. Enough about Geopandas however, we are going to look at it in more detail in the next post.
Once installed, import it into your notebook and load the main geometry types:
import shapely
from shapely.geometry import Point, Polygon, LineString, GeometryCollection
import numpy as np
I am also importing numpy because I like it so much. Seriously though, I very often find myself jumping back and forth between shapely objects and equivalent numpy arrays of coordinates as numpy allows you to do some of the operations in explicit vectorised form a lot quicker, so it’s a good idea to look at the connection between the two right from the start.
Point objects
As the name suggests, this is just a point on a two-dimensional plane, characterised by a pair of coordinates.
One of the super convenient features of Shapely is — it allows you to view all the geometric objects without having to resort to any graphical package. Note that regardless of the coordinate system positioning of the object, it always centres on the object for you when you want to view it.
pt = Point(10, 10)
pt1 = Point(100, 101)
You can also display the string representation of the object, by just wrapping str() around it, or convert it to a numpy array of its coordinates. As I mentioned, I find the latter particularly useful as I often find myself working with large arrays of geometric objects (for example over 6mln building polygons from OSM) and if I want to do calculations in vectorised format, numpy is absolutely irreplaceable.
There is also a method to load this string representation back into geometric format, which will come really handy when you have to load the data stored in a non-geometric format, for example from a csv file.
If you want to quickly look at several objects and see how they scale vs. each other all you have to do is turn them into a geometry collection:
A few other handy methods — distance, coordinates collection.
In[8]:
pt.distance(pt1)
Out[8]:
127.98828071350908
In[9]:
pt.x, pt.y, pt.xy
Out[9]:
(10.0, 10.0, (array('d', [10.0]), array('d', [10.0])))
One final thing before moving on to lines. All shapely objects have a .name attribute. This can be useful, for example, when you are transforming each of your polygons from a large collection stored in a GeoPandas or Pandas DataFrame into an array of smaller polygons, like a grid and want to have an easy way of relating them back to the original polygons.
In[10]:
pt.name = 'My Point'
pt.name
Out[10]:
'My Point'
LineStrings
LineStrings are initiated in a very similar way, only this time we have a list of tuples, rather than a single one. They can cross themselves and pass through the same points multiple times, however, the latter is not recommended as it adversely impacts performance and you are better off splitting them into individual components. Note that the order of points is important as it determines the order in which you pass through them (same applies to polygons as you’ll see below).
ln = LineString([(0, 1), (20, 100), (100, 3), (120, 102), (200, 5)])
As with points, you can convert LineString object to an array of point coordinates. Order is preserved here, so this can be used to quickly get the coordinates of the first and last point — handy for constructing tree objects representing road networks for example.
In[13]:
np.array(ln)
Out[13]:
array([[ 0., 1.],
[ 20., 100.],
[100., 3.],
[120., 102.],
[200., 5.]])
Or if you want the same list of tuples representation used to create your LineString in the first place:
In[14]:
list(ln.coords)
Out[14]:
[(0.0, 1.0), (20.0, 100.0), (100.0, 3.0), (120.0, 102.0), (200.0, 5.0)]
You can also split out only X coordinates or only Y coordinates (of course, you can do that using numpy as well):
In[15]:
list(ln.xy[0]), list(ln.xy[-1])
Out[15]:
([0.0, 20.0, 100.0, 120.0, 200.0], [1.0, 100.0, 3.0, 102.0, 5.0])
A quick look at the graphical representation together with the points we created earlier:
Calculating a point to line distance, point projection on the line (distance from start along the line) and the length of the line is as trivial as:
In[17]:
pt.distance(ln)
Out[17]:
8.01980198019802
In[18]:
ln.project(pt), ln.length
Out[18]:
(10.801980198019802, 453.46769176178475)
In[19]:
list(ln.interpolate(ln.project(Point(1, 1))).coords)
Out[20]:
[(0.039211841976276834, 1.1940986177825703)]
Note that if the projection of the point onto the line happens to be outside of the defined area — the distance will be calculated to the nearest end of line. If you are after the actual projection — you would need to do a bit of extra geometry. The easiest thing would be to extend the first and last segments of the line and still use the same projection method.
Line intersections are pretty straightforward too, even when you end up with multiple intersections.
The result is a MultiPoint object, which you can iterate through, just as if this was a regular list, with Point objects as iterables:
In[21]:
str(ln.intersection(LineString([(0, 0), (200, 100)])))
Out[22]:
'MULTIPOINT (72.55474452554745 36.27737226277372, 110.561797752809 55.28089887640449, 144.5255474452555 72.26277372262774)'
In[22]:
[np.array(a) for a in ln.intersection(
LineString([
(0, 0),
(200, 100)
])
)]
Out[22]:
[array([72.55474453, 36.27737226]),
array([110.56179775, 55.28089888]),
array([144.52554745, 72.26277372])]
Polygons
Not surprisingly, creating one is very similar to creating a LineString and, as in LineStrings , the order in which points are listed matters.
Polygons can have holes inside and the way these are defined follows a simple rule: Polygon([list of polygon coordinates],[list of holes]), where each hole is itself a polygon. Note that polygons representing holes have to be either fully inside your original polygon or can touch it in no more than one place.
Note that polygons can not be directly converted to a collection of points like we did with LineStrings and Points. Instead, we have to deal with their exterior and interior outlines (which are LinerRings themselves, i.e. a lineString, which loops on itself). For interior boundaries we get back an iterator:
In[25]:
np.array(poly.exterior)
Out[25]:
array([[0., 0.],
[0., 1.],
[1., 1.],
[1., 0.],
[0., 0.]])
In[26]:
[np.array(a) for a in poly.interiors]
Out[26]: | https://towardsdatascience.com/geospatial-adventures-step-1-shapely-e911e4f86361 | ['Dmitry Selemir'] | 2020-06-15 16:49:42.090000+00:00 | ['Geospatial', 'Shapely', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Geometry'] |
Jacques Roubaud on Math and the Art of Literary Invention | Jacques Roubaud on Math and the Art of Literary Invention
Adventurous heroines, abstract algebra, a poetics of grief, OULIPO, and the ongoing memoir of a grand project
Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash
If you’ve never heard the name “Jacques Roubaud,” just use any of these substitutions:
“Emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre”
“Composer of the innovative, recombinatory poetry collection ∈”
“Author of a fantasy about talking animals and abstract algebra”
And that’s only a start. Since publishing his first volume of poetry in 1967, Roubaud has produced a stream of innovative literary works in almost every form — including a trilogy of comic novels about the postmodern heroine Hortense, and a series of intricately interwoven memoirs that explore not only his personal experience but the mysteries of memory and the structures that organize our individual realities. His work in every form is suffused with mathematics, whether explicitly or subtly.
Roubaud has been a leading member of the experimental writing collective known as Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature“). Oulipo writers often employ “constraints” like leaving one letter of the alphabet out of a novel, or making word substitutions according to a predetermined algorithm. And they frequently organize their works according to numerical patterns, as exemplified in two of Roubaud’s poetry collections: ∈ follows a scheme derived from the ancient Japanese game of Go, and Trente et un au cube [31 cubed] contains thirty-one poems of thirty-one verses of thirty-one syllables.
While some Oulipo texts are merely curiosities, Roubaud’s novels, plays, and poems are really very good. And fortunately — in case your French isn’t as good as your math — his best works have been translated into English.
Perhaps the most delightfully original — and the most mathematical — of Roubaud’s works is La princesse Hoppy, ou le conte du Labrador (1990; The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador, 1993). This inventive fantasy cleverly integrates talking animals (whose languages include Posterior Duck, which is silently conveyed by the motion of duck feet, and Anterior Duck, which is vocalized), with abstract algebra, encoded autobiographical references, and intertextual allusions that range from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Chrétien de Troyes’ medieval romance, the Conte du Graal.
Fortunately again, Elvira Laskowski-Caujolle’s “Jacques Roubaud: Literature, Mathematics, and the Quest for Truth” outlines many of the math elements in The Princess Hoppy — and Jstor.org offers free access to the article.
Here’s a sample:
“To read Roubaud’s novel means not only to interpret and to analyze, but [also] to decipher the given puzzles and riddles. Like a mathematician who reads a mathematical text with pen and paper to verify theorems or to do the inevitable exercises at the end of a chapter, the reader of La Princesse Hoppy has to answer 79 questions to verify whether or not s/he has properly ‘understood’ the tale.”
In addition, complex mathematical and logical problems are woven through the whole narrative, as the princess tries to unravel a conspiracy in which three of her uncles are plotting against a fourth. She doesn’t know which uncle is the target of the plot — and every time any two of the uncles meet, they conspire in secret, creating a very large array of conspiratorial configurations. One key to the solution derives from a mathematical interpretation of a medieval monastic precept: the Rule of St. Benedict.
Laskowski-Caujolle’s commentary on the princess’s problem offers a glimpse of the complexity Roubaud has built into the story:
“If we translate the literary text into algebraic formulas, we will get the axioms for a mathematical group of order 4, when we consider a set of four kings [the uncles]. There exist only two groups of order 4, the cyclic group C4 and the so called Klein group KA, represented by the following multiplication tables (in general the elements are given by a, b, c, e; the element e is called the unity element):
So: “If we can determine the unity element for the set of the four kings and the type of group, we will be able to answer the princess’s question concerning the royal conspiracy.”
There’s much more of course, with clues and puzzles scattered throughout the text. As Roubaud explains elsewhere, everything in his work — down to each letter of the alphabet — has more than one meaning.
The Princess Hoppy represents one side of Roubaud’s writing: the playful, intellectually entertaining, and eccentric side. An opposite, complementary aspect is deeply personal, balancing emotional intensity with mathematical abstraction. In Quelque chose noir (1986; Some Thing Black, 1991), Roubaud organizes the experience of grief into nine groups of nine poems— beginning with the starkly physical account of finding a body, and ending with one last poetic expression of grief: “Nothing.”
By now I hope you’d like to know more about this unusual writer, so here’s a quick get-acquainted guide.
Born in 1932, Roubaud was a literary prodigy, who began publishing poetry at the age of twelve. But he disliked the competitive system of French education, and dropped in and out of school, studying English, linguistics, and other subjects at various points. Then, in 1954, he happened into contact with the innovative mathematical collective known as Bourbaki, and became interested in set theory. Although twenty-two is a very late age to begin the serious study of mathematics, Roubaud made rapid progress, and by the early 1960s had obtained a teaching position and completed his doctorate.
The decision to immerse himself in math was the first turning point in Roubaud’s life — but he couldn’t abandon literature altogether. During a dream on his birthday in 1961, he envisioned a vast web of works that would contain both literary and mathematical texts. He planned to provide a map of its thematic structure in the form of a novel, to be called Le grand incendie de Londres [The Great Fire of London].
Roubaud embarked on this “grand project” with a disciplined plan of writing, and extensive research into a traditional poetic form, the sonnet —a fourteen-line poem with ten syllables in each line and a thematic turn that usually divides the poem into an eight-line octet and a six-line sestet. Since there are several possible rhyme schemes, and several different ways of organizing the sonnet’s internal elements, the basic form has many variations.
Combining his sonnet research with a mathematical structure based on the game of Go, Rubaud produced his first major work, the 1967 collection titled simply ∈ (the symbol for an element belonging to a set). The poems and their internal components can be rearranged by the reader in a variety of configurations — and if that sounds intriguing, you can explore an English translation of the collection online, for free.
During the 1970s, Roubaud continued teaching mathematics and writing mathematically inspired poetry. He also collaborated on a play cycle and published Graal Fiction, a text that combines the retelling of several medieval stories about the Grail quest with interconnected theoretical commentaries.
By now, however, Roubaud had realized that his original vision of the “grand project” was impossibly ambitious — and at the end of 1978, he tore up the outline and threw it away.
The following year he met and married 28-year-old photographer Alix Cléo, with whom he formed a deep emotional and creative bond. Her sudden death from a pulmonary embolism, just three years later, became the second major turning point in Roubaud’s life, and for many years, his work reflected — often very subtly — a slow, complex process of grief and recovery.
The first expression of that process was Some Thing Black, a somber, often wrenching, volume of poems published in 1986. But in a characteristic alternation of emphasis, Roubaud surrounded the publication of Some Thing Black with two comic, carnivalesque novels: La belle Hortense: roman (1985; Our Beautiful Heroine, 1987) and L’enlèvement d’Hortense: roman (1987; Hortense Is Abducted, 1989). Three years later he concluded the trilogy with L’exil d’Hortense: roman (1990; Hortense in Exile, 1992).
A cross between off-kilter fairy tale and crazy-quilt detective story, the Hortense novels are not just irresistibly entertaining but also intellectually mischievous, as Roubaud parodies accepted ideas about the literary novel, and lampoons some exaggerated aspects of literary theory.
In 1989, Roubaud returned to his “grand project,” but from a radically different perspective. The prose work he published as Le grand incendie de Londres was both a description of his original vision and an account of why and how he abandoned it.
You can get a good idea of the book in English translation from the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon. And in case you’d like to read about the work before/during/after exploring the work itself, Dalkey Archive has kindly provided the text of several commentaries for free download.
Le grand incendie de Londres began a series of works that Roubaud calls the “minimal project” — exploring the dimensions of memory and the fragmented remains of what he had once imagined. A second volume, La Boucle, travels back to Roubaud’s memories of family and childhood. It was published in 1993 and translated as The Loop in 2002. The third volume, Mathematique: recit (1997; Mathematics, 2012), focuses on the period of his life during which Roubaud committed to the serious study of math.
A fourth (not yet translated) volume traces Roubaud’s early explorations in the practice of poetry — and taken together, Mathematique and Poesie form a “branch” of the minimal project, reflecting Roubaud’s practice of linking various texts in a tree-like structure.
The minimal project, which has grown to seven volumes, comprises a complete cycle of autobiographical reflection, but does not present a linear narrative. And in each text, memories are recounted in the order they came back into recollection, not in the order that events actually took place.
The elementary unit of these works is the “prose moment,” Roubaud’s term for the amount of writing that happens between the time he habitually begins (in the early morning darkness) and the time he stops (when sunlight reaches his desk). In constructing the memoir cycle, his practice was to write every day, but never re-read or revise what he had already written, preserving the spontaneity of his recollections.
In Mathematics, Roubaud offered this observation:
“I sought out arithmetic to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from ‘literature.’”
Yet he went on to discover that the two realms — “arithmetic” and “literature” — could not be completely separated, at least in his own work. The result has been a lifetime of writing that not only breaks new ground intellectually, but also reaches into the deepest recesses of the human heart.
Which seems quite remarkable. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/poetry-prose-math-and-jacques-roubaud-998fa18071f9 | ['Cynthia Giles'] | 2020-05-15 20:16:04.093000+00:00 | ['Literature', 'Philosophy', 'Mathematics', 'Essay', 'Writing'] |
Bangalore to Bhilai — On a one-way ticket! | As most of my friends (who temporarily shifted base to their respective hometowns due to COVID-19) travel back to the metros, I am busy packing my bags and shift to Bhilai for good by end of this month! While COVID-19 surely accelerated the move the seeds were sown in late 2016!
It was a day before Diwali of 2016 and I had visited my parents for Diwali (after missing several Diwalis in a row because of the actuarial exams I was writing for several years). My dad fell because of low blood pressure. The fall resulted in bleeding the brain and he was in ICU for several days. While the organization I worked with was considerate to give me leaves, the thought of event happening again in absence still sends chills down the spine. While he was in the ICU, I had decided to shift my base to Bhilai.
So why it took 4 years?
While I was clear that I would move to Bhilai eventually, the decision to move immediately would have been a knee-jerk reaction driven by emotions. Clearly, there would have been challenges around the job (both mine and my wife’s) and with limited money in the bank account, the transition couldn’t have been sustainable and would have possibly added to the problem for everyone. In the hindsight, the decision to delay surely feels right.
In the 4 years, a few things happened and now I am more confident of the transition. I qualified as an actuary in the beginning of 2017 and I quit the job soon to start on my own in October 2017. I have been consulting clients across the globe and my physical location didn’t play any part in winning and delivering the assignments I took. And of course, ProtectMeWell started as a remote-only company last year. The acid test happened during last Diwali when I temporarily shifted to Bhilai and worked from there for over 100 days!
Now I have enough reasons to believe that location has a limited role to play in my professional role. Thanks to COVID-19 the world has also realized the one can work from anywhere. And yes, I would travel like I used to pre-COVID whenever and wherever my physical presence is required.
Essentially, nothing changes for the clients I have been consulting and stakeholders of ProtectMeWell
How would personal life change?
It would change a lot and I can see only positives here.
My daughter is now 3. Since I worked from home all these years, I was lucky to have spent a lot of my time with her but I think I need to spend a lot more. Not because I intend to “teach” her but because I want to help her discover the world and herself.
I strongly believe it is the responsibility of the parents to set the right foundation for the kids and can’t be outsourced to schools!
Apart from the intent, this would require both time and money. Thanks to the transition (implying reduced expenses) and financial assets accumulated all these years, my expenses would be funded by interests and dividends. Financial Independence of sorts! Achieving similar status while in Bangalore could have taken a few more years!
If my parents could quit their comfortable life and shift from Kanker (in Bastar) to Bhilai for us to get the right environment for education, I can surely move from Bangalore to Bhilai (and add to the quality of my life!)
Both parents and parents-in-law are super-excited about the move as they both in Bhilai and can’t wait to spend more time with their granddaughter. Yes, the focus of parents has shited to the daughter but both the wife and I want to live closer to parents and spend quality time with them.
Once parents age, the role reversal “should” happen!
My wife was on a career break after the daughter was born. She has been acquiring new skills and is getting ready for her Career 2.0. The fact that both parents and parents-in-law would be around to take care of the daughter (apart from me, of course) is only going to help when she does take the plunge again. Like mine, her second innings of the professional life would be location agnostic
Why Bhilai?
It couldn’t have been any other place. Both my wife and I grew up in Bhilai and love the town. The parents and parents-in-law live in Bhilai. And most importantly it is a cosmopolitan town in every sense of the word. The education scene until recently was top-notch but has lost the charm in recent years. But I have the plan to more than compensate for it.
Bhilai also ticks the box when it comes to high-speed internet and access to the airport — the two key facilities that you need for work. The distance between Bhilai and Raipur airport is the same as the Bangalore airport from my home in Bangalore (which, by the way, is pretty central!)
The town also boasts of excellent infrastructure (like 6-lane roads in the heart of town), decent gymkhanas, no traffic jams, parks, green trees and is in proximity to several getaways!
Am I slowing down?
This is the question I was asked by several people who are privy to the transition decision. The answer is, “Certainly not!” I am at the prime of my health and career and the groundwork done over the last 3–4 years has created a solid foundation. I also have intentions to dip into the new talent pool being created in the area because of IIT Bhilai and IIM Raipur which became operational a few years ago. Who knows my move could trigger the start-up movement in Bhilai! So for me, it is an onwards and upwards journey from here on. Both on the personal and professional front! | https://medium.com/@sumit-79708/bangalore-to-bhilai-on-a-one-way-ticket-2dfa75246be6 | ['Sumit Ramani'] | 2021-03-09 18:56:22.705000+00:00 | ['Financial Independence', 'Bhilai', 'Transitions', 'Actuary', 'Bangalore'] |
Sonder: A Series To Change Your Perspective On Success | I just learned the word ‘sonder.’ It’s a sudden, deep shift in perspective:
The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.
In German, ‘Sonder-’ is a prefix for everything that’s special. You’re special. But so is everyone else. Realizing that is a special experience. A feeling. Sonder. John Koenig invented the word. It’s made up. But now it’s real.
Thousands of people know the word ‘sonder.’ They can point to it when they have that feeling. They can grab it in conversation. Pass it on. John didn’t invent the experience. Just the label. He changed his perspective and, in doing so, solved a problem. A problem others wanted to solve. Sonder is success.
Sonder is Einstein’s secret. That’s why he said stuff like this:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
And this:
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Einstein may have had superb thinking skills, the right environment, and impeccable timing. But he also had sonder. He was relentlessly open-minded. That’s why he always talked about imagination, about reading children fairy tales, about treating presidents and janitors the same. It’s change, not brains.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
How often do we experience sonder? Once? Annually? Never? Einstein felt it twice a day. When your problems keep changing, keep changing your perspective. It’s a radical approach, but we live in radical times. How willing are you to forget what you learned yesterday? This is the future of education.
It’s also the solution to your problems. The path to success, however you define that destination. Sonder. The faster you flip through different angles from which to tackle an obstacle, the faster you’ll find one that works. But each shift requires another mode of thinking — and that takes an open mind.
So let’s not waste our year-end reflections, but use them to actually improve. To consider abandoning not just what we know, but that we know. To look at success with a new pair of eyes. That’s what this series is for. Sonder.
Each week in December, I will publish a piece about our conventional, Western idea of success. We will question some notions, validate others, and consider opposing sides at the same time. We’ll change our perspective.
You’ll find all pieces here, along with short introductions. To read everything, I suggest you become a Medium Member. It’s a no-brainer, really.
1. The Simplest Way To Improve Your Life
Bruce Lee once said that: “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.” Learning means abandoning labels. Unless we’re willing to change our perspective, we won’t grasp a thing. It’s not a matter of doing but of being. The reason the wise man can learn from even the most foolish question is that he never considers it foolish in the first place.
This piece is about opening your mind and, hopefully, keeping it this way.
2. What Are The Habits Of Successful People?
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best-selling books of all time. It’s good, but the title has embedded four big problems into our culture. The notion that an ideal combination of habits causes success, let alone that said set is finite, timeless, and universally applies, is false. So let’s debunk it.
This piece creates a new context for you to consider habits and success in.
3. How To Really Develop Self-Awareness
Today, successful people are thinkers armed with leverage. But first, you have to think yourself into that position. Warren Buffett is a great example of what it takes: a life-long practice of discovering yourself. This discovery happens on three levels and besides taking on the task, we must give it time to compound.
This piece argues self-awareness as non-binary and shows you how to find it.
4. Self-Awareness Is Not A Character Trait
It’s one thing to know what a successful journey of self-discovery looks like, but another to begin and lead that journey yourself. One huge misconception we have around self-awareness is that it’s a feature, like being tall or thin. It’s not. It’s one of many cognitive states you can learn to be in at any time.
This piece helps you see self-awareness as a measurable habit of thought.
5. Habit-Building Self-Awareness Exercises to Keep Yourself Accountable
Learning to be more and more in the cognitive state that is self-awareness takes time. But by repeating several exercises over time, you can work towards making it your default. Here are the 11 I like the most and how to do them.
This piece gives you 11 specific self-awareness exercises to cultivate it with.
6. Don’t Imitate Successful People, Learn From Your Mistakes
The more self-awareness fills the backdrop of your life’s canvas, the less bound by dogma you become. Once you’re free to run your own experiments, however, it’s tempting to turn back. To tune in to advice culture. Don’t. Failure hurts, but it leads to the right data. Don’t remove yourself from the source.
This piece is about fully dedicating yourself to independent inquiry.
7. Everything I Know To Be True
Underneath it all, the human experience is very similar for most of us. We might all learn the same lessons, but we do so in different ways. Once you filter everything you see and experience through your own, unique perspective, you’ll come up with new ways of expressing old wisdom.
This piece is a collection of all the lessons I’ve learned on my own.
8. Do You Believe In Ethical Wealth?
One of the biggest preventers of success I’ve identified in myself is the subtle, but deep-seated belief that being rich is wrong. Historically, society has always branded wealth as a selfish endeavor, but that’s not necessarily true.
This piece shows you 10 anti-wealth behaviors and how to avoid them.
9. What Habits Does Your Best Self Not Have?
At some point, you realize success and self-improvement are two different games. The number of win-win moves is small. Once you’ve made them, the tradeoff gets harder. But I found there are some things that get in the way of both. So I’m trying to let them go.
This piece identifies 8 behaviors that serve neither your self nor your career.
10. How To Unlock Your Confident Self
When you have a stack of behaviors you’re proud of and continue to learn more about yourself and the world through mistakes, all that’s left is to push past the barrier where you believe you can fly. It’s impossible to explain and I’ve only begun to feel it myself, but I hope these stories will help you find it.
This piece tells a few stories of people who’ve learned to live life to the fullest. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/sonder-a-series-to-change-your-perspective-on-success-b9333774a3b8 | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2019-01-22 20:51:49.757000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Life', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Success'] |
6 Practical Ideas of Shopping Online With Safety and Security | Online shopping — two words that many people get excited about, and sometimes even cancel other plans for, especially around *this* time of the year.
The holidays bring with them a load of offers, discounts, and special deals for shopaholics all over the world.
And how can the fun loving people of the world miss out on them? 🙂
Check out this quick fun fact:
Research indicates that “shopping has a direct effect on the brain’s pleasure centers. It can flood the brain with dopamine, similar to the way a drug addict experiences a fix.”
Shopping is almost like a ritual for some people. And I’m not just talking about the regular brick and mortar stores.
When I say shopping, in this digital era, I also mean online shopping. We are living in the age of digital buying.
As a matter of fact, according to the Mintel Online Shopping US 215 Report, almost 70% of adults in the US shop online at least once in a month. Another one-third of them shop online once in a week.
eMarketer estimates, “In 2016, total retail e-commerce sales across the globe will reach $22.049 trillion. Sales will top $27 trillion in 2020, even as annual growth rates slow over the next few years,” as explored in a new eMarketer report, “Worldwide Retail E-commerce Sales: The eMarketer Forecast for 2016″.
(Image Credit: eMarketer)
So you can see how intense the love for shopping seems to be in the US and how it is continually growing.
Convenience is one of the biggest factors that have contributed to this rapid growth of online shopping.
People are increasingly getting super comfortable with the idea of snuggling up on their couches or beds and having the best of the world’s options to choose from and purchase with their fingertips.
While online shopping is increasingly becoming one of the most preferred means of purchasing products, it also has its fair share of skeptics.
As we all know, the Internet can be one of the most dangerous things in the world, and when a new piece of technology is developed almost every day, there’s more risk and more chances for cyber criminals to gain access to your information and steal your money.
There are a number of people who shy away from online shopping, fearing the risk of cyber attacks.
But you don’t want some cyber criminals to spoil the spirit of the holiday season, do you?
Here are some practical tips that will help you stay safe while shopping online.
1. Never give away your Social Security Number or sensitive details
It’s understandable that a shopping site needs some of your personal information such as your name, contact number, email address, and billing information.
Beyond payment options, these companies use this information to send you future deals and offers.
But any site that asks you for anything more than that, like your Social Security Number, is not a legitimate one.
Some things always need to be kept to yourself. This is true for physical stores as well.
Many of these sites will make you feel that it’s the part of their normal registration process. But it’s not. Make sure you don’t end up giving out details that aren’t necessary.
2. Prefer an “HTTPS” in the URL of the site over an “HTTP”
You need to look for sites that have an added “S” in the URL to ensure security. This is where the importance of a Secured Sockets Layer (SSL) comes into play.
So, what is SSL?
Here’s a word about SSL from SSL2BUY:
SSL is basically what protects your personal and sensitive information as it travels from one network to another across the world. It keeps the information encrypted so that only the person it is sent to can read it.
Websites that use SSL certificates either have a closed lock or an unbroken key at the bottom.
Sites that are protected with an EV SSL certificate (or an Extended Validation) have a padlock and a green address bar when opened on most browsers.
(Image Credit: Shopify)
Now you know what to look for in a good shopping site.
If you are using the Chrome browser, you can use the HTTPS Everywhere addon to enforce secure connections with every site you browse.
If you want to take your browser security to the next level, you can use this newly launched browser called Brave.
This one has an inbuilt option to enforce HTTPS, ad-blocking, and blocking tracking scripts.
3. Use credit cards more than debit cards
As rightly said by the popular financial blog NerdWallet, “With a credit card, the card issuer must fight to get his money back. With a debit card, you must fight to get your money back.”
When you use a debit card, instead of a credit card, you give out information which allows a possible cyber criminal direct access to your bank account. When you use a credit card, you are using the card issuer’s money. It’s easier to take protective measures and get a new card issued in the case of fraudulent activity on your credit card.
If you are paranoid about your security & shopping from an unreliable or new site, you can use PayPal, PayTM, or any other such payment method which doesn’t require you to give out your credit card details. The only downside is you might end up paying an extra 1–2%.
4. Use a separate email address for shopping
When you shop online, you need to provide your email address.
My advice is to maintain a separate account just for online shopping. This gives you two advantages:
If that site ever gets hacked or is compromised in some way, none of your important personal information (which is present in your regular email) is at risk. All the promotional and marketing emails go into that account, which lets you save a lot of email space.
Speaking of email, beware of fraud emails trying to steal your info.
Here’s an example of a phishing fraud email:
5. Use different passwords for all of your accounts
This is more of a cliché thing to say, but it’s important that you maintain different passwords for various accounts.
Otherwise, when one of your accounts gets hacked by a criminal, it will become a walkover for the rest of your accounts to be compromised. So make sure you have at least 2 or 3 different passwords. You can go ahead and write them down somewhere, as long as they are in a safe and secure place.
If you are a power Internet user, make sure you use a password manager. Dashlane is one that I can recommend which works on all browsers & smartphones. Here is a screenshot of the Dashlane password audit dashboard (it’s downloadable software for desktops with an iOS/Android app for smartphones).
Apart from saving passwords, this popular password manager will also suggest strong passwords when you are registering a new account online. In 2017 & beyond, having a password manager is a must.
6. Use several layers of security
When you see two and three-step authentication processes for shopping sites, do not skip them.
They add an extra layer of security to your account, and it makes it harder for hackers to get access.
You need to do this even if it means going through an extra step while you are hurriedly trying to purchase something. You will not want to have a hacker steal your information because you didn’t want to spend an extra 30 seconds ensuring your security.
According to Allen Grayson, an Internet security expert at Symantec:
One of the best ways to keep your business safe from cyber criminals is layering your security. Start with firewalls, an essential aspect in stopping attackers before they can breach your network and gain access to your critical information. Add extra layers of security to the website and applications such as contact forms, login boxes, and search queries.
Staying Safe When Shopping Online
Above all of these, trust your instincts. Just like you wouldn’t go into a store or any place that seems “odd” to you, do not continue shopping on a site that appears to be illegitimate.
If the site has a weird URL, or if it’s designed in a weird way, or if there are too many pop-ups, then you should probably leave. It’s always better to be safe when there’s so much at stake.
Be sure to follow these tips while shopping online. But don’t let fear kill your spirit!
Call To Action
I’m creating an eBook: “Email Now: A Human Guide to Learn the Art of Email Marketing.” Do you want early access of it? Get on VIP List Here. | https://medium.com/the-mission/6-practical-ideas-of-shopping-online-with-safety-and-security-6e2576bf6400 | ['Pawan Kumar'] | 2018-07-19 16:00:24.060000+00:00 | ['Shopping', 'Email Marketing', 'Business', 'Digital Marketing', 'Ecommerce'] |
4 Cute Clothing Pieces That Are Too Cool For The Heat | By Yap Jin Wen from THREAD PH
Living near the equator means it’s compulsory to accustom ourselves to the heat, huh? Well, no need to pull a sour face. Aside from turning on the air-conditioner, opting for the right apparel can prevent you from sweating buckets. When shopping, look out for materials like linen, cotton, chambray, and technical fabrics. They are light, thin textiles that effectively wick moisture away from the skin. While this sounds like we’re down with limited fashion choices, fret not. We’ve compiled a list of cute clothing items to help you stay stylish when beating the heat.
MIX & MATCH
Does staring into your wardrobe feel like gazing into a black hole of eternity? You’re not alone. Pairing the ultimate outfit for any occasion requires hard work. But with effortless matching outfit sets trending, you can finally cut down on prep time. Wear this set of striking magenta that is versatile enough to be both loungewear and workwear. When you’re bored with this combo, feel free to match the top or bottom with other wardrobe staples.
GO WITH THE FLOW
The last thing we ever want in this sweltering heat is a heavy fabric that will weigh us down. So, something light and flowy such as this midi polka-dress is heaven-sent. The slightly longer hemline perfectly offsets against a deep V plunge, avoiding the impression of a “suffocating” look. We love the ruffle sleeves and the extra cinch at the waist as they give the whole ensemble a graceful, elegant vibe.
DOLL UP
We’ve seen Sophie Turner wearing an awfully lot of baby doll dresses throughout summer. Irrefutably, baby doll dresses must be in season right now. If you wish, hop onto the bandwagon with this delicate lilac sartorial piece. Its A-line shape gives room to hide any “homegrown” potbelly (you know, #WFH after effects) while the puffy sleeves draw attention to the upper body. Ideally, the kind of dress you’d want to wear to hotel buffets. Other than that, can we also appreciate how the dress is produced with linen? Hands down the best material to wear in sultry weather.
POWER PUFF GIRLS
Puffy sleeves are dramatic, though no better element can eloquently translate the current pandemic situation than this. Hence, don’t be afraid to wear your heart on your sleeve by sporting this poofy white top with a wide square neckline. The impressive design cleverly elongates any short neck and narrow shoulders. If you’re unsure what to pair it with, team white on white for a polished look that’s suitable for a casual day in or a snazzy night out. | https://thread.zalora.sg/4-cute-clothing-pieces-that-are-too-cool-for-the-heat-3dedeb0bebda | [] | 2020-12-27 16:27:22.049000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Singapore', 'Trends', 'Lifestyle', 'Style'] |
The 5 things that great financial industry salespeople do everyday | Great salespeople produce strong, long-term client relationships when they are in the right sales role.
Great financial industry salespeople know the feel of success in selling. This feeling starts with the genuine desire to help a customer. It comes when you’re listening more than you’re talking, and when your conversations revolve around a customer’s needs, feelings, and fears.
The feel of success in selling is not something that people are born with. It is not something that some salespeople have, and some just don’t. It is a set of habits and behaviors that show up in each client conversation, and in repeated rituals and methods that a salesperson does every day.
What are the habits, behaviors, rituals and methods that we see in the best bank and credit union salespeople? Here are the top ten.
Break down their goals into a daily action plan. Salespeople who have goals consistently outperform those who don’t. Goals concentrate our efforts in ways that help us achieve greater results in less time. When you’re focused, you do first what’s most important to your success, and you become more aware of the opportunities and the people who can contribute to your success. Every salesperson needs a beginning point, an action plan that will translate his/her goals into the sales activities that will be necessary to achieve those goals. Sell using the customer’s viewpoint. Selling persuasively requires tailoring your selling proposition to each customer’s viewpoint. Whether you’re selling a product or an idea, the one question you always have to answer for a customer is, “WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?” The greatest secret in selling is that customers do things for THEIR reasons, not ours, and high performing salespeople know this. Listen actively and empathetically. Great salespeople listen proactively to accurately hear what people tell you about their needs. These high performers have the habit of fending off distractions, repeating without judgment, and reflecting the customer’s emotions in their conversations. They know how to encourage a person to talk, and fight off the desire to talk more than they listen. Ask the right questions. Clarifying a customer’s concerns assures you that you’ll answer the right concern. Your questions may identify the misinformation a customer has about the features or value of our product, or about what our competitors offer. Listening and then asking questions will help your customer make an apple to apple comparison among our products and those of our competitors. About one-third of the valid concerns you’ll encounter can be answered simply by clearing up misinformation or by helping a customer make a more informed competitive comparison. Think optimistically. Instead of thinking of a “no,” as a personal rejection, great salespeople revel in getting negative feedback from customers. Why? When a customer says no and explains why, that customer is sharing exactly what he or she wants or what he or she doesn’t understand. Many times a “no,” is just an opportunity to develop a relationship and find a solution that is a better fit for a customer.
Great salespeople produce great sales relationships when they are in the right sales role. To make sure every hire is a good hire, use a powerful assessment tool like the Optimum Performance Profile before you hire. | https://medium.com/@schneidersalesmgmt/the-5-things-that-great-financial-industry-salespeople-do-everyday-3e52108e4870 | ['Schneider Sales'] | 2019-02-01 00:14:49.591000+00:00 | ['Sales Management', 'Sales', 'Sales Training', 'Sales Development', 'Salesforce'] |
Effective Java! Avoid Creating Unnecessary Objects! | Today we are onto our sixth item from Effective Java. This one’s title particularly makes me smile. Avoid creating unnecessary objects. What’s more uncontroversial than saying, “Don’t do things you don’t need to do.” We are all looking for shortcuts of how to get a job done more quickly so this one we automatically get for free right? Well not quite, there is actually a little bit more to be said here than, “Be lazy.” So let’s get started.
So why would someone do something that they don’t need to do? Well we will go over some of the ways this can happen throughout this post but I would sum up most of these cases simply as the following, ignorance and lack of attention. This is understandable. Sometimes we just don’t realize the damage we may be doing or we do know to avoid something but may not realize we are doing that thing.
Let’s start off with the first example from the book:
String title = new String("Effective Java");
So what does this do? Well it does exactly what it looks like it will do, it creates a new String for each time it is called. But that’s not what we actually want to do. This simply creates more objects for the garbage collector to clean up without any benefit. Compare that to the more efficient way to accomplish this which also turns out to be cleaner:
String title = "Effective Java";
In this case no extra objects will be created no matter how many times this line is run. Also because of String interning if this same static string shows up multiple times in the JVM it will only be allocated once which is a fun memory saving tip.
So why would someone do the first example? Good question. My guess would be simply not knowing that it has a negative effect.
So what are some ways that we can help avoid creating unnecessary objects. Well it’s no wonder that the book starts with talking about static factory methods as it comes up as a solution again. As mentioned in that article, by using a static factory method we can make the determination if we want to create a new object or not whereas with a constructor we are forced to create a new object every time. An example of this can be seen with the Boolean object:
Boolean trueBoolean = new Boolean("true");
// vs
Boolean falseBoolean = Boolean.parseValue("false");
Let’s look at another example of a place where developers sometimes get themselves into issues with creating unnecessary objects. This time it’s boxed types. Let’s look at the example from the book:
private static long sum() {
Long sum = 0L;
for (int i = 0; i< Integer.MAX_VALUE; i++) {
sum += i;
}
return sum;
}
The one capital L makes this code much less efficient where we are boxing and unboxing values over and over, creating more and more objects for not reason. Those that I work with know that I'm not a huge fan of boxed types. I see people accidentally using them for no good reason and they can have subtle effects that people don't realize.
So in these previous examples we have seen creating unnecessary small objects. While this should still be avoided it would take looping over this mistake many times before it actually started to affect our performance. What are some other times that we should particularly be concerned about creating unnecessary objects? Well even if we only create a few unnecessary objects if we are creating expensive objects unnecessarily it can make a difference so we need to be particularly careful with these expensive objects. The most common example of this is database connection pools. I won’t personally go into this as I think the logic is simple to follow however I did want to mention it as something to take care of.
So there you have it, don’t create objects for no good reason. This doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons. Later in the book we will discuss defensive copying and keeping the code clear is worth a few extra object creations if it comes to that.
So the core lesson I’m trying to share with this post is to be careful with your allocations. Realize what your code is doing and that should help improve the performance of your application. | https://medium.com/@kylec32/effective-java-avoid-creating-unnecessary-objects-55dfc2f37b5f | ['Kyle Carter'] | 2020-12-26 04:01:22.463000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Optimization', 'Design Patterns'] |
AMA Recap: CRYPTO MINERS X WIZARDIUM | We hosted an AMA session with Wizardium on 29th December at 3:30 PM UTC.
Mr. Ramsy was the host from Crypto Miners and Mr. Arch was the guest. He shared delightful knowledge and unique features of Wizardium.
.
Segment 1️⃣: Introduction
.
Ramsy:
Hello everyone 👋 and welcome to the Crypto Miners AMA session With Wizarduim
To help us learn more about the featured project of this AMA session, we are lucky to be joined By Mr. Arch
Arch:
Hi there!
Ramsy:
Hello 👋
Wolcome here
Thanks for bringing Us Wizarduim❤️
Arch:
Welcome community 🙂
Ramsy:
I'm pretty sure that our AMA participants are very much excited to learn more about Wizarduim 😇
so let's get started if you're ready!!
Arch:
Lets do 🙂
Ramsy:
So here's our first question from this segment...
Q1) Can you give a brief explanation about 'Wizarduim' .What popped up in your mind to create such a platform in this Space?
Arch:
We were inspired by Harry Potter stories and the atmosphere of good magic. We decided to bring this to binance smart chain community and create wizardium as the Metaverse of good magic with play to earn principles, where users will be able to have their own heroes magician animals and farm WIZZY tokens to gain some profit.
Ramsy:
Thanks Arch For This warm start 🤝
Now let's see our second question from this segment...
Q2) So what are your main features and advantages that discern you from other projects?
Arch:
Actually we have started with some well known features to be quickly adopted. You can mint NFT hero by using BNB, BUSD and other currencies and go to exploration of Wizardium lands to gain some gems - WIZZY tokens, next steps for us to implement another DEFI mechanics - staking, where users will be able to stake LP tokens and earn WIZZY or stake WIZZY tokens to earn even more WIZZY tokens.
Ramsy:
Q3) How has the experience and background of your team been effective in the success of your project so far?
Arch:
We have a huge experience in online gambling and crypto. Professional approach in smart contracts development bring the opportunity for us to create a quite interesting game mechanics that may attract lots of users across Binance Smart Chain.
Ramsy:
4) Now Share us about your Native token, What are the some of utlities of $WIZZY Token in Your Ecosystem? And if possible share to us the Tokenomics
Arch:
We are aimed to build the most balanced token system in blockchain Play to Earn gaming. Tokenomics of the $WIZZY Wizardium. The use case of tokens is the most important thing we understand that so we have several important use cases for WIZZY tokens inside the game: The use cases of $WIZZY tokens are: 🪄Exploration cost (when you send NFT hero to farm you need to have some $WIZZY)
🪄Exploration rewards
🪄In-game store purchasing (potions, other stuff in future)
🪄Token Staking and LP staking
🪄Ecosystem partnerships
🪄Trading
Ramsy:
Q5) So how long did it take to develop this project? What plans do you have for the future? And what can we expect from Wizarduim? If possible could you please share road map with us.
Arch:
We have started in the late summer with this idea and spend all the autumn to make it work. We have lots of plans but all of them depend on the adoption of the nearest releases which include NFT Farming and Staking. We have plans to make mini games with our heroes and implement more play to earn mechanics we have worked. But it’s a secret for now! Current roadmap can be seen here: https://about.wizardium.io/start/description/roadmap
Ramsy:
Thanks Arch for this well detailed introduction about Wizarduim:)
And that's the wrap up of our the first part of the AMA session ✅
Let’s now proceed to our Twitter Questions section...
i hope you’re ready for that!!
Arch:
Lets do it 🙂
Segment 2️⃣: Twitter Questions
Ramsy:
1)What are the risk management policies that project uses to safeguard the investments and credits granted by its platform? How do you really ensure that there is a backup base to rely on in the face of any situation or sudden change in the commercial markets?
Here's out first question from twitter
Arch:
We have a great game mechanics to make it stable 🙂
Ramsy:
2)Many of us as blockchain gamers have experienced constant bugs from games hitting rock bottom today. So what steps will Wizardium take to avoid cases like this? Have you tested it on the Wizardium platform?
Arch:
We are testing more than 1 month to be sure that everything will be smooth :) Testing is very important We are good in that
Ramsy:
3)Game NFT Blockchain and P2E are becoming more popular, however most of the existing games that use this concept are too expensive for newbies. Will your games be affordable and accessible to the general public, or have you taken any steps to appeal to a wider audience?
Arch:
We are also expensive in NFT heroes the floor price is 250 usd for minting However users may participate by buying WIZZY tokens and use staking WIZZY token is cheap now only 0.11 usd :) And can be bought here https://pancakeswap.finance/swap?outputCurrency=0x9E327B55D5791bd1b08222F7886d7a82EB11aCEE
Ramsy:
4) I read that Wizardium was designed by the team to give NFT owners the opportunity to earn around $500-1000 per week. In the long run, how do you make these passive returns profitable? What does this benefit depend on? What kind of economic structure do they have?
Arch:
This profit can be riches by using multiple heroes farming and great market conditions :) We can’t assure it will be long term but will do our best to keep it as long as possible
Ramsy:
Let's hear our last question from twitter...
5) Collaborations and partnerships are some of the most important cornerstones to help improve adoption. Can you tell us about your current partners, plans for partnerships and what everybody stands to gain from these partnership??
Arch:
We have partnered with major nft marketplaces, also in the near future we are gonna expand WIZZY use cases :)
Ramsy:
Thanks man for Your Valuable Informations,
And that's the end of our twitter question segment
Now Moving on to our last segment - Live Q&A
Shall we go?
Arch:
Let’s go :)
Ramsy:
Here we go,
Segment 3️⃣: Live QnA
(In this segment group was opened for 60 seconds and Miners sent hundreds of questions. Guest choose some best to answer)
1)How important is the community to Your project? and How can we collaborate or help share token for the development of the project?
Arch:
The community is very important, we have a great community of game lovers. Join https://t.me/wizardium_nft
2) Has our project been audited?
Arch:
Yes we have done audit with solidproof team and it’s 100% secure ✅
3) What are the top priorities of your project in 2021? As we know that we are in the bullish phase of the crypto market now, are there any exciting initiatives that you’re planning in the pipeline that you can share with us?
Arch:
Okay, our mai priority is game development and the next priority is token development to make it a real usable asset with high value 🧙♂️
4) What is the next most important thing to achieve according to your roadmap, do you start working for it?
Arch:
The next important thing is to launch NFT farming where users who have NFT hero will be able to gain some WIZZY tokens ;)
5) IS This Your Project Only For Elite Investors, How About Others With Small Funds, Is It Open To Everyone?
Arch:
Our project is for people, we don’t have a huge investors backing us. We build Wizardium for people :)
*This segment ends here*
Arch:
Play games guys, love crypto Visit Wizardium.io to check us :) Thank you
Ramsy:
Thankyou so much Arch For your valuable answers and information about Wizarduim,
It Was Pleasure Hosting An Ama With You
Time To Conclude Our AMA Section
Best of luck for the future 🚀🚀 | https://medium.com/@cryptominersco/ama-recap-crypto-miners-x-wizardium-b34c02dc9d4 | ['Crypto Miners'] | 2021-12-31 11:37:12.197000+00:00 | ['Ama', 'Metaverse', 'Nft', 'Nft Gaming Platform', 'Decentralization'] |
5 Times You Shouldn’t Be on Your Phone Around Your Kids | You probably have a lot of expectations of your children when it comes to their cell phones, tablets, and other electronic devices — and for good reason. Not only do you pay for these devices, but you’re also keenly aware of the dangers of too much screen time.
In the middle of the endless hurricane that is parenting, it can be easy to forget how easy it is for your personal habits to impact your kids. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not effective as a parenting model — which is why it’s so important to model the behavior you want to see from your kids.
Kids learn by mimicking the behavior they see. If you see your child mirroring your worst phone habits, then it’s time to be more intentional about when and where you use your phone. Keep it, as well as other electronic devices, put away in the following situations:
1. On weekends and holidays
Weekends and holidays are meant to be times spent socializing with others, not buried in screens. Neglecting those around you to scroll through social media, respond to a few emails, or make a quick call can give your kids the wrong idea.
It’s also worth mentioning that kids, and especially younger kids, may have a tough time differentiating phone use for work and phone use for play: They might not understand that you need to monitor your email more frequently than they need to text their friends.
If work must absolutely be done on a weekend or holiday, try to do it when there is a bit of downtime. Even if your colleague sends you a mission-critical email when your family is in the middle of the meal, feel free to ignore it.
Whatever the circumstances, be transparent with your kids. Make the distinction between essential and optional usage, which encourages them to do so as well.
2. When you’re outdoors together
Getting outdoors and unplugging can be extremely beneficial for kids, but it’s just as important for you. Plan outdoor activities and experiences as a family, and make it a point to put your phone away. Whether your idea of a day outdoors is laying by the pool or hiking at a nearby park doesn’t matter; what’s important is that you spend it engaged with each other.
Even the slightest intrusion of screens can ruin the beauty of nature — and give your child implicit permission to whip out their device. Although it’s never a bad idea for someone to have a phone with them while you’re on a wilderness adventure, keep it turned off and put away.
3. When you’re in the car
You’re already well aware of the dangers of being on the phone while driving. But with kids, using your phone in the car at all can give them the wrong impression.
Do your best to disassociate the car and phone use altogether. Checking your phone at stoplights signals to your child that they should do the same once they get their license. You also don’t want your kids to think that it’s socially acceptable as a passenger to ignore the driver. An engaged passenger can help the driver navigate or watch out for other cars — something your child might need in their first few years behind the wheel.
Treat time in the car as an opportunity for a heart-to-heart chat. How was their day? What did they learn at school? Who’s the latest pop music phenomenon you’re not hip enough to know about?
4. During your child’s games or performances
This one might sound obvious, but take a look around you at your kid’s next soccer game or band concert: How many other parents are looking down at their phones?
You may think that it’s no big deal to check your phone during a timeout of your teen’s basketball game. But when there’s no action on the court is one of the few opportunities your child has to look up in the stands to find you. Ask yourself: What kind of message does it send if they see you engrossed in your smartphone?
This kind of behavior teaches your child that it’s OK to prioritize their favorite app over others’ important events. If you really want to support someone at a game, concert, recital, you have to be fully there as a spectator — not splitting your attention with social media.
5. While they’re working on homework
You remember what homework feels like: time-consuming work you have to do while everyone else is having fun. No matter how dedicated or passionate your child is about a subject, it’s tough to stay the course after a long day.
For your kid’s sake, avoid using your phone while they’re doing homework. Not only does it make them think about what they’re missing out on, but some kids may take it to mean you don’t care about their performance in school.
If you must use your phone while your child is doing homework, go to a different room where they won’t be distracted. If it’s at all possible for you to wait, use this homework time as a teaching moment. Prioritize school work, and agree that when their homework is completed you can both indulge in a little screen time.
When 96% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind, your kids are going to see plenty of bad phone etiquette modeled for them. Try not to add to the problem. Always lead by example when it comes to using your phone at the appropriate time and place. Just following these simple guidelines can go a long way in helping your child establish a healthy relationship with their first phone.
Originally published on Gabb Wireless. | https://medium.com/@gabbwireless/5-times-you-shouldnt-be-on-your-phone-around-your-kids-b27f88dae67c | ['Gabb Wireless'] | 2020-12-22 02:03:12.552000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Kids', 'Smartphones'] |
A Recession Is the Worst Time to Pay down Debt | A Recession Is the Worst Time to Pay down Debt
Photo by Jake Young on Unsplash
By their nature, recessions are difficult to predict. We usually don’t know when they are coming, and we never know how severe they will be or how long they will last.
Many people believe that paying off debt during a recession is the safest financial decision they can make. Although it may seem counterintuitive, let me explain why the middle of a recession is the worst time to pay off debt.
Debt is not evil
Despite what many people believe, debt is not inherently evil. Debt is simply a financial tool. The problem is that so many people do not know how to use this financial tool. Put simply; they use debt for all the wrong reasons.
Debt can make you wealthier if you use it wisely to fuel investment, such as buying a house, starting a business, or getting an education.
Debt is terrible when you use it to fund a lifestyle you cannot afford.
If you use debt to buy “things,” including cars, you are placing an anchor around your finances.
Why you don’t want to be in debt during a recession
Here is a simple explanation of how carrying debt heading into a recession can cause a lot of financial pain.
When the economy was strong, you were living a lifestyle you could not afford.
To pay for that lifestyle involved taking on credit card debt or other consumer loans.
That simply added an extra monthly payment on top of a lifestyle you could not afford.
This is what I call the “debt spiral.” If you are using debt to maintain your lifestyle, your monthly payments to service that debt increase over time. If you maintain the standard of living while adding a new monthly payment to service debt, you are likely to take on more debt.
This debt spiral can continue as long as two things are true.
You have a steady income that allows you to make your monthly debt payments. Someone is still willing to lend you money.
During a recession, one or both of those things are unlikely to be true anymore.
A lot of people lose their jobs during a recession. Lenders are much more cautious about who they lend money to.
At this point, the debt spiral draws to a painful conclusion.
The immediate impact is that it forces you to reduce the lifestyle you were accustomed to drastically. If your income is reduced or banks won’t lend you more money, you have no choice but to reduce your standard of living. Sometimes dramatically. Think about having to choose between the power bill and the mortgage payment.
At this point, you might be thinking that this all seems like a very compelling reason to pay down your debt during a recession.
Except, it isn’t.
The time to pay down debt is when the economy is strong, and you have a secure source of income.
Once a recession is upon us, we need to change our approach to managing money completely.
During a recession, cash is a lifeline
When the economy is doing great, and money is easy to come by, our financial priority should be on thriving and building wealth. Which means investing and paying down debt.
When the economy is in recession, our financial priority should be surviving. Which means ensuring we have enough money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.
Everything else is secondary. Especially if you have lost your job or have seen your income decline for any reason.
That means cutting all non-essential spending until such a time that the economy and your income security has recovered.
You should continue making the minimum payments on all of your debts. The last thing you need is to destroy your credit score and have collection agencies chasing you down.
However, making additional payments to pay down the principal on your debt is non-essential, and you need to consider if it still makes sense to continue.
Every dollar you pay against your debt (above what is required), is a dollar you won’t have access to if your savings run dry and you don’t have enough income to pay your bills.
Having cash on hand is the greatest source of security during a recession. The technical term for this is “liquidity.” Companies and households with the most liquidity are the ones that can most easily get through recessions.
Making additional payments against your debt reduces your liquidity.
What to do instead of paying down debt
When money gets tight, the next best thing to having a pile of cash on hand is reducing your monthly expenses.
Here are two options you might consider when it comes to consumer debt like credit cards during a recession.
Make only the minimum payments. If possible, consolidate multiple debts into a single loan payment.
If you’re currently paying more than the minimum required payments on your loans during a recession, you can easily free up cash flow by reducing that payment to the minimum.
If you have a lot of consumer debt, the monthly cost to service that debt is likely a significant expense. This is especially true if your debt is spread over multiple credit cards and loans, which each have their own minimum monthly payment.
This is where a debt consolidation loan can be beneficial.
Debt consolidation is the process of rolling all your high-interest debt such as credit cards, payday loans, and other debt into a single payment with a lower interest rate.
3 Debt consolidation methods to consider
Refinancing your mortgage. Using a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC). Apply for a consolidation loan.
If you own your home and still have sufficient equity in your home, it might be worth a phone call to your mortgage advisor about refinancing.
Essentially you would increase your mortgage by the amount of your consumer debt and use those funds to pay out and close all your other loans. Your mortgage payments will increase, but the net impact on your cash flow will be positive once you pay off your other loans.
It’s important to remember that “secured” debt like mortgages and HELOCs are loans against your home. If you default on these loans, you could potentially lose your home. That is a very important risk to take into consideration.
If you don’t think you’ll be able to make your mortgage payments, it’s best not to refinance at this time.
If you don’t own your home or don’t have enough equity to refinance your mortgage, you can apply for an “unsecured” consolidation loan.
Since the loan is “unsecured” against other assets you have like your home, the interest rate will be higher than your mortgage.
An example of a consolidation loan
Let’s say you have $25,000 in credit card debt spread throughout three different cards.
Card 1 has a $5,000 balance at an 18.9% interest rate and a minimum payment of $130.
Card 2 has a $10,000 balance at 15% interest rate and a minimum payment of $338.
Card 3 has a $10,000 balance at a 20% interest rate and a minimum payment of $267.
That totals $25,000 in debt at an average interest rate of 18% with total minimum monthly payments of $735.
If you were able to refinance your mortgage and pay off the $25,000 in credit card debt, it would increase your mortgage payment by $132 per month. This assumes a 4% mortgage rate and a 25-year amortization period.
If you were able to consolidate all three credit cards onto a single consolidation loan with a 5-year term and an interest rate of 8%, your monthly payment would be $507.
In this example, consolidating your debt accomplishes three things.
You know when you will be debt-free. The interest you pay on your debt has been significantly reduced. You lowered your monthly payments by $603 in the case of a mortgage refinance and $228 per month in the case of the debt consolidation loan.
Point number three is what matters most. The lower you can get your monthly costs, the better your chances of riding out the recession.
The longer the amortization period on loan, the lower the monthly payment
Here is an important point to remember if you are considering a debt consolidation loan. The longer the term of the loan, the lower the monthly payment.
Let’s say instead of a 5-year term; you had a 10-year term on your debt consolidation loan.
That would cut your monthly payment to $303 per month. Saving you an additional $204 per month compared to a 5-year term and $432 per month compared to having three credit cards.
Yes, you will pay more interest if you take more time to pay off a loan. In normal economic conditions, we want to pay our debts as quickly as we can.
In a recession, our priorities change, and the name of the game is holding onto as much cash as possible until the economy recovers.
Everything has an opportunity cost. Increasing cash flow today by making only minimum payments or extending the term of a loan comes at the expense of paying more interest over the lifetime of a loan.
Make every penny count
If you are carrying a lot of consumer debt in a recession, it can be tempting to want to pay that debt down.
Remember, if you lose your job or fear you may lose your job, you have one priority during a recession; hang on to as much cash as you can.
Every dollar you put against your debt beyond the minimum payments is a dollar you don’t have to pay the mortgage or groceries. Ensuring you’re not paying more than the minimum payments on your loans is a simple change you can make immediately.
If you can refinance your mortgage and pay off your consumer debt, that would free up the most cash every month. But be aware; Mortgages and HELOCs are secured against your home. If you don’t make your payments, you could lose your home. It’s critical to take that risk into account if that is an option you are considering.
If you don’t own a home, can’t refinance, or decide you don’t want to, you might consider a consolidation loan. Remember that the longer the term of the loan, the lower the monthly payment.
Consolidation loans can be hard to qualify for and is a “bottom of the barrel” option.
By consolidating your debt, you’ll pay more interest in the long run, but remember the golden rule during a recession; hold on to as much cash as possible.
If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t consolidate your debt in any way or if the numbers don’t make sense, the best option would be to continue making the minimum payments on your loans.
Now is not the time to pay anything above the minimum required payment. | https://themakingofamillionaire.com/a-recession-is-the-worst-time-to-pay-down-debt-610134f2b1cd | ['Ben Le Fort'] | 2021-12-24 17:57:30.509000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Debt', 'Money', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Finance'] |
Tell Don’t Ask: Principios de POO en PHP | Senior Software Engineer | I love coding, software architectures and all new technologies. I’ll try to share, in an easy way, all the bits of my head.
Follow | https://medium.com/francisco-ugalde/tell-dont-ask-principios-de-poo-en-php-271e6ef131f2 | ['Francisco Ugalde'] | 2020-06-10 18:50:37.961000+00:00 | ['PHP', 'Tell Dont Ask', 'Software Development', 'Oop Concepts', 'Clean Architecture'] |
Imagine being a queer tourist at the Vatican, heart of the beast of homophobia and transphobia. | Imagine being a queer tourist at the Vatican, heart of the beast of homophobia and transphobia. Imagine walking through gilded halls filled with glorious art, knowing you are physically safe but that you stand at the epicenter of worldwide hatred of LGBTQ people, at the origin of countless hate crimes committed against people like you and those you love.
Now imagine in the distance, walking toward you with pride and confidence, you spy two men holding hands.
What do you think? How do you feel?
Let Sean Bennett take you there. It happened to him. | https://medium.com/james-finn/imagine-being-a-queer-tourist-at-the-vatican-heart-of-the-beast-of-homophobia-and-transphobia-128e0be7dab7 | ['James Finn'] | 2020-12-16 19:30:10.535000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Art', 'Religion', 'LGBTQ', 'Catholic'] |
Представляем вам Сообщество Визуализации Данных | Sign up for The 'Gale
By Nightingale
Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look | https://medium.com/nightingale/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D1%8F%D0%B5%D0%BC-%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BC-%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%89%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE-%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D1%83%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8-%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85-55c9100441b1 | ['Natalia Kiseleva'] | 2019-03-30 18:00:09.699000+00:00 | ['Дизайн', 'Dvsintl', 'Визуализация Данных', 'Data Visualization', 'Dvsintro'] |
Amazon Fresh Opens First Alexa-powered Grocery Store, Debuts Dash Carts to Automate Checkout | Amazon’s smart devices and voice assistants are omnipresent in the store, which will give the shoppers a very pleasant experience. Moreover, echo shows in booths will help the shoppers find out where items are located or suggest what to make for a meal.
Dash Cart
In order to shop, you will have to log in to Amazon’s Dash carts using the amazon app. The dash carts are equipped with sensors and cameras, which help identify the items you drop in. Besides, it has been augmented with other smart technologies, which make it compatible with reading QR codes and connecting to the shoppers’ Alexa Shopping list, thus displaying it on the embedded screen. There is a specific lane for the Dash Carts when the customer has to check out, which will scan what the cart says is in the basket and proceed to payment via the card linked to their Amazon account. Notably, Amazon mentioned that the Dash cart is not part of the same brand as the now-retired dash wand or dash button though they are identical in name and almost similar in functioning.
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Albeit this is the first time, an Amazon Fresh will open for in-person shopping, it interesting to note that the need for human interaction is limited. During this pandemic, it is necessary to limit social interactions even if all the precautions are taken, and Amazon has taken some severe measures. Amazon makes sure to check the temperature of the employees every day. Besides, everyone inside must wear a mask, and customers are provided with disposable ones. Also, Amazon has decided that the store will operate at half capacity during the pandemic. Moreover, pickup and delivery options are available for those who don’t want to go inside.
Amazon said that it would continue to give online shopping services to its customers in addition to in-person shopping. Also, Amazon Prime members will enjoy free same-day delivery and in-store pickup services for online shopping. Though the Dash Cart is unique to Amazon Fresh stores at the moment, the company has plans to sell or give them on lease to other grocery stores in the near future.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 ! | https://chatbotslife.com/amazon-fresh-opens-first-alexa-powered-grocery-store-debuts-dash-carts-to-automate-checkout-8a95e4fe45bf | ['Tapaan Chauhan'] | 2020-12-05 14:50:02.165000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Automation', 'Amazon', 'Bots', 'Alexa'] |
2020 examining the role of modernity today | image from knowyourmeme.com
Introduction
If a Time traveler approached you on New Years Eve of December 2019 and told you that in the year 2020, Climate change in Australia would become a matter of life or death. There would be protests; riots and petitions worldwide calling for the defunding of the police and that tensions between the already unstable relationship of Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un would escalate. As well as the fact that a virus would emerge from Wuhan in Central China that would not only force people to remain in their homes for three months but drastically force us to reevaluate our basic societal etiquette on the basis of communal gatherings. Would you believe them? Consequently, as a direct result of this I think we can all agree that 2020 has been nothing short of a real life Science fiction novel and as such in this analysis I will be discussing the role of Modernity in today’s global epoch and my beliefs on whether we are better off as a collective species because of it or not.
image from imagepop.com
What is Modernity?
Modernity or being ‘modern’ is a phrase used to define the present day generation’s advancements in the realm of science and technology, corporal governance within present day nations as well as the use of socioeconomics and basic communal values. Furthermore, as an ongoing process modernity can be closely examined through an analysis of cultural disparity amongst post-modern and pre modern civilizations. In addition to this veracity, although modernization has brought many undisputable benefits to the human race in the form of a lower mortality rate, reduction in deaths evoked by sickness or starvation in addition to threats of climate change in our everyday life nevertheless, it did not come without it’s challenges. Although modernity is characterized through the advancement of a postmodern societies ethical ,social and political facilitations, suffering and inequality are still plaguing the world today. Comparatively, one may even argue that the vulnerability and anguish being experienced by populations across the globe in todays epoch is not only unprecedented but taking place at an alarming rate. Consequently, baring this in mind; would you say our present day generation are amicable in the use of modernity as an ongoing process.
image from blogsofancientfaith.com
What is Globalization?
Globalization is a term often used to describe the ever growing not only interdependence of nations but interconnectedness of the world’s economies, cultures, social facilitations, political analytics in addition to populations. This phrase did on the other hand, only gain recognition once it was coined following the end of the Cold War in the late1900’s in an attempt to articulate the current state of the world.
Challenges to Modernity
image from knowyourmeme.com
Nonetheless, regardless of this actuality perhaps the greatest challenge to modernity today rotates around the loss of belief in religion, faith and the higher powers of Mother Nature. This can be noted through the change in societal ethical beliefs and values regarding not only longstanding human conduct but the earth’s resources from pre-modern societies in comparison to todays. As a direct result of this veracity we are forced to argue the affectivity of our modernization today as the threat of climate change could not be greater, poverty and inequality have never been more prevalent as well as the fact that conflict and violence on the basis of prejudice has never been more prevalent .Nevertheless, pre-modern societies lived in close proximity to nature and as such they venerated the earth and their living environment as one would an ancient deity and as such the earth’s atmospheric conditions and weathering were far superior and conducive than today’s. Comparatively , one may even argue that in today’s global epoch we live in a modern society that ultimately practices these opposite ideals on the basis of greed and overindulgence. This veracity can however be noted as excessive pollution still exists, many animal species are on the border of extinction and that deforestation continues at such a significant rate that certain ecosystems are being exposed to the dimensions of vulnerability.
What’s more, another challenge set on by the process of modernization through globalization rotates around the loss of tradition, heritage and noble values amongst developing nation-states. This veracity can be noted as in certain ‘Third World’ countries modernization through science and technological development have introduced a new set of socialistic goals on the basis of materialism, individualism and hedonic beliefs. In addition to this actuality, as a direct result of the perpetual nature of modernization through globalization, an over emphasis was placed on some these nations to become ‘developed’ and as such in an attempt to achieve this goal in a timely manner many of these nations would place an insufficient investment in national institutional structure in the form of education in addition to personal development. This did however consequently, result in a weak level of literacy skills nationwide in addition to a fragile set of moral values easily swayed by temptation.
Image from knowyourmeme.com
Furthermore, as a direct result of the systematic framework imposed by globalization through modernization our society has become engulfed by the constant clash of varying eroded values that many considered noble in the past. The reality of this quandary can however be noted as, in many countries today the rich legacy of freedom, equality and social justice bequeathed by earlier generations has become overloaded due to the institutional frameworks inability to conduct interstate reconciliation in addition to living life on the premise of ‘just keep life going! ’Consequently, as a result of the states inability to address and tackle these social issues too their entirety many states today baring this title exist in a realm of crisis. The dimensions of this actuality can however be noted through the protests that took place in honor of George Floyd world wide.
Hence Fourth, in conclusion it is my belief that the practice of local wisdom must be integrated amongst the global community in order to counteract the negative effects of modernization through globalization inflicted upon present day societies. Moreover, I also believe in order to escape the dimensions imposed by this quandary as a collective human society we will have to make social awareness and empathy a priority amongst our youth. Furthermore a new form of simplicity and mental fortitude must be not only taught and planned to learners but the wider community as a whole .It is my belief that if we practice these ideals we may be able to negate the unwanted consequences of modernization today.
Image from Redpeper.com
References
Fogu, C. (2008). Modernity is Crowd. Modernism/Modernity, 15(4), 813–817. doi: 10.1353/mod.0.0029
Harvey, P. (1999). Landscape, Modernity and Exclusion in Dubrovnik. Anthropology Today, 15(6), 21. doi: 10.2307/2678359
Modernity | culture. (2020). Retrieved 22 December 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity
Mulyono, M. (2017). The Problems of Modernity and Identity in Globalization Era. Journal Of Maritime Studies And National Integration, 1(2), 106–111. doi: 10.14710/jmsni.v1i2.1819
The Challenges of Modernity -. (2020). Retrieved 22 December 2020, from https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-challenges-of-modernity/
Thomas, J. (2004). Archaeology’s Place in Modernity. Modernism/Modernity, 11(1), 17–34. doi: 10.1353/mod.2004.0028 | https://medium.com/@ntsikayezwefakude/2020-the-year-that-keeps-giving-examining-the-role-of-modernity-today-1d5631a8b19a | ['Ntsikayezwe Yahya Fakude'] | 2021-01-25 13:11:31.285000+00:00 | ['Ethics', '2020', 'Modernity', 'Social Justice', 'Analysis'] |
The WannaCry virus was just the beginning | On May 12, 2017, a computer virus known as WannaCry swept around the globe in what may have been the most extensive cyber attack in history. The ransomware, which gets its name from how it held a user’s data hostage, affected at least 200 000 computers in more than 150 countries, disrupting the operations of FedEx, Renault-Nissan, Russia’s interior ministry, Chinese universities, and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). 98% of the infected computers were running the Windows 7 operating system, for which Microsoft no longer offers free security updates as standard. On June 27, 2017, another major cyber attack hit Ukraine before spreading to tens of thousands of computers worldwide.
The damage done by WannaCry was made possible by hacking tools named EternalBlue and DoublePulsar. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the software code of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which allows computers running Windows operating systems to share files with one another over a network. Those vulnerabilities, called Zero-Day Exploits, are flaws in a software program’s original code that were overlooked when it was first written. ‘Zerodays’ are known as such because they present an opening for cyber attacks the moment they are discovered, leaving the authors of the software zero days to fix the error. The developer is then suddenly pitted against potential hackers in a race to patch the code’s weakness before it can be exploited. This type of vulnerability is common because, as The Economist magazine explains, even a rate of 0.5 errors per 1000 lines of code still results in numerous holes for hackers to discover, particularly if a program’s code is several million lines long.
The WannaCry incident was the most severe in a growing trend of cyber attacks. A 2016 study by IBM Security found that from 2015 to 2016 the number of ransomware emails spiked by 6000%. Symantec’s 2017 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) notes that while the increase slowed in 2016, it could indicate that the ransomware market is now dominated by professional hacking groups rather than amateur cyber criminals.
The emergence of the Internet of Things, about which I have written before, will further exacerbate this threat. Every Wi-Fi-enabled device from household appliances to baby monitors to children’s toys can be hacked, hijacked, and recruited into a botnet used to carry out massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber attacks.
The abundance of threats makes further incidents likely, especially given deficient public cyber literacy. While major software companies work hard to detect and patch weaknesses in their products, accounting for human naiveté is far more difficult. The IBM study discovered also that 40% of spam emails contain ransomware. As University College London discovered first-hand hardly a month after the WannaCry incident, it only takes one person to click on a malicious link in an email for the malware to gain access to an entire computer network. Croatian cyber security expert Miroslav Stampar cautions that “once hackers start breaking in from the inside…countermeasures that corporations have taken mean nothing.” His trepidation is well-founded. Take this quiz on cyber security concepts, and then compare your knowledge level to the results of a survey by Pew Research Center. It concludes that “a majority of internet users can answer fewer than half the questions correctly…”
If you are looking to learn more about cyber security and ethical hacking, you can take tutorials here.
Playing with fire
If the general public is guilty of cyber illiteracy, certain governments lack cyber wisdom. The UK’s NHS, for instance, was stricken by WannaCry because chronic underfunding has prevented its computers’ operating systems from being upgraded to Windows 10. Then there is the issue of culpability, since the vulnerabilities that enabled the ransomware attack had been discovered, hoarded, and weaponized by the National Security Agency (NSA) for the purpose of surveillance, much to Microsoft’s chagrin. When the NSA realized that it had been hacked it advised Microsoft to release a software patch, but it proved to be too little, too late.
To make matters worse, EternalBlue and DoublePulsar are only two of seven hacking tools that the group who released them, known as the Shadow Brokers, stole from the NSA. The other five ― EternalChampion, EternalRomance, EternalSynergy, ArchiTouch, and SMBTouch ― make up a ‘doomsday’ malware called EternalRocks, which may have already infected many computers around the world. At this point it’s impossible to estimate the extent of the contagion because EternalRocks infects computers covertly, and even names itself ‘WannaCry’ in order to deceive analysts. Strictly speaking, EternalRocks is benign on its own because it will infect a computer network but remain dormant once inside, so far. That hardly comforts Miroslav Stampar, though, who warns that it could be weaponized to enable mass phishing or Trojan horseattacks. Furthermore, unlike the early versions of WannaCry, EternalRocks has no ‘kill-switch.’ It could eventually be unleashed to even more devastating effect than its predecessor.
The NSA’s policy of keeping exploits secret from software developers is dangerous because it involves a fundamental trade-off: a backdoor can be used by anyone who discovers it, with bleak implications for cyber security. Such recklessness is emblematic of the difficulty in juggling efforts at counter-terrorism, concerns for privacy, and protection of digital infrastructure. The conundrum is far from being resolved. Even if security agencies really can be trusted to use hacking tools responsibly, the WannaCry episode proves that it’s only a matter of time before those same cyber weapons fall into the wrong hands. | https://bradstollery.medium.com/the-wannacry-virus-was-just-the-beginning-71ff2ebee272 | ['Brad Stollery'] | 2018-08-17 15:01:52.554000+00:00 | ['Wannacry', 'Cybersecurity', 'Cybercrime', 'Cyber Warfare', 'Computer Science'] |
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Wonder Woman entra en conflicto con la Unión Soviética durante la Guerra Fría en la década de 1980 y encuentra un enemigo formidable con el nombre de Cheetah.
Género: Fantasy, Action, Adventure
Estrellas: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig
Personal: Patty Jenkins (story by), Patty Jenkins (Director), Patty Jenkins (screenplay by), Geoff Johns (screenplay by), Dave Callaham (screenplay by), Geoff Johns (story by), William Moulton Marston (based on characters from DC Wonder Woman created by)
Idioma: English
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THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 62, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 2-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 624’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Primal Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 206) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 6, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 6 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 2 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/@ver-ww84-2020-sub-esp-hd/ver-gratis-mujer-maravilla-1984-hd-p-e-l-i-c-u-l-a-completa-2020-8cd9a7932cbf | ['Ver Sub Esp Hd'] | 2020-12-26 02:38:23.718000+00:00 | ['Adventure', 'Fantasy', 'Action', 'Movies'] |
$600? Are You Serious? | On Monday December 22nd just before the end of the worst, and probably most depressing, year ever the United States congress approved a $900 billion economic relief package.
I’m going to spell that number out for emphasis, Nine hundred BILLION dollars. This is more money than those of us reading this article will ever make COMBINED. This was after a two TRILLION-dollar stimulus package that was approved in March. With this new package each United States citizen will be receiving… $600… which, supposedly, will begin to be dispersed next week.
This stimulus package is embarrassing and a clear indicator that our leaders have zero understanding on what it is like to live as an average, working class, American in 2020. Our government basically gave us $1800 this year and said, “good luck.”
You might be thinking that I’m being hyperbolic — I can be guilty of that sometimes — but lets’ talk about some numbers. According to Yardi Matrix, in 2018, the average monthly rent in the United States was $1405. That is more than double the stimulus check we are about to receive from our government. Now, you might counter this with “you should still be working this isn’t unemployment” this is true. However, these stimulus checks are supposed to help with the added costs that the pandemic has created. Many Americans are now struggling with Daycare. Schools are closed, and many parents need to pay someone to watch their children while they work. The average cost of daycare in the united stated is between $5000 and $10,000 a year depending on the state and some families have needed childcare now when they haven’t needed it before. This pandemic also added to a households food cost. Many families rely on free lunch programs that public schools provide, and those kids aren’t going to school anymore.
Let us go back to a different number, $1800. That is how much the United States government gave its citizens to make it through this year. This is how much they gave us when our economy has shut down. Some senators have said that this should be plenty, one being Nancy Pelosi, who called the $600 a “significant amount of money.”
Nanci Pelosi: The United States Speaker of the House
I don’t want to come off as too critical. I am a left leaning man, and I acknowledge that this $600 had to be negotiated (I also believe that many liberal senators such as Pelosi know deep down this package is a failure).
The stimulus package almost didn’t happen at all. Republican lawmakers pushed back heavily to this deal. They are why the stimulus package almost didn’t happen at all. I think we should take this as a sign; A sign that our leaders have lost touch. a senator makes $175,000 a year. They have lost touch on reality so much that they believe the average American can last longer than a few weeks, if even that, on $600.
Let this be a wakeup call to you. Your leaders do not understand what it is like be a minimum wage, working class American. You deserve better treatment from your elected representitives. We deserve better. | https://medium.com/@mbev1994/600-are-you-serious-5cd243313d03 | ['Michael Beverley'] | 2020-12-23 14:03:25.070000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Covid 19', 'Stimulus', 'Economic Relief', 'Stimulus Check'] |
Why the Agoric Team Spent a Week Eating Our Own Dogfood | The whole Agoric team took a week off work. Not because of the pandemic. Not for vacation. Not for a mental-health break. We took off work to take part in a hackathon. Specifically, an internal hackathon. At Agoric we develop tools (called Zoe and ERTP) for building and trading digital assets. We recognized that doing our own internal hackathon where we were the participants, rather than just the sponsors, would be beneficial for various reasons, among them:
We’d learn what our users experience with our software tools — because we’d have to use the tools ourselves. We’d all get better at our tools — because we’d take a break from being individual specialists and for the week be a team of generalists. We’d improve our offering — because everything we learned would be funneled back into what we do, not just into the tools, but the user experience, the documentation, everything.
The Care and Feeding of Software Development
There’s a term in product development where you “eat your own dogfood.” Amazon employees buy products online to understand and improve the user experience. Microsoft employees use beta Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to make sure the suite is truly enterprise-grade. Apple employees use iPad Pros to make sure they can really serve as desktop replacements.
Our internal hackathon was a week-long event where the entire Agoric team, and a few invited friends, participated in a deep dive into building DeFi (decentralized finance) and other solutions that benefit from our smart-contract platform (Zoe and ERTP). Our tools dramatically simplify the development of smart contracts. We help developers write contract constructs in just a few lines of code.
How to Prep for an Internal Hackathon
The concept of an internal hackathon isn’t just applicable to us. Certainly any software company could benefit from it. In addition, though, if you’re in another industry, like publishing, or healthcare, or education, you still might be able to adapt the concept to your own operations.
Set goals: We knew what we wanted out of this. We wanted everyone on the Agoric team, which numbers a little more than a dozen people, to build and demonstrate a new smart contract on our platform, specifically using Zoe and ERTP. There’s an important “rubber meets the road” internal understanding you get when you actually get something working. Our secondary goal was to implement examples that show new possibilities for our system. Plan projects: Most hackathons involve a set of challenges, or projects, that the participants select from and then try to accomplish. Some hackathons are more self-directed than others. We came up with projects that exposed the team to topics we wanted everyone to have familiarity with. We also use the challenges as ways to produce proof-of-concept examples in new areas. We did several rounds of brainstorming, in which various team members contributed. Having criteria was helpful in, for example, filtering out projects that, while interesting and helpful to ongoing engineering, didn’t provide the learning we wanted. Pre-select teams: In our case this involved a mix of internal and external participants. In regular hackathons, the teams are largely self-selecting. We had some self-selection, but also balanced skills so that every team had its share of engineers familiar with the part of the system we wanted to learn, and the non-engineers could learn and get assistance. Don’t bother with competition: There were no prizes for our internal hackathon. The point wasn’t for anyone to get anything done first, or to judge one project versus another. The goal was to play in the sandbox together, and to learn together. Invite outsiders: It can help to have an outsider or two on each team. This brings in fresh ideas, and keeps work colleagues from falling back on familiarity and shorthand when communicating. These were “inside outsiders,” meaning they were already familiar with what Agoric does, and didn’t require time-consuming handholding.
It’s Not a Sprint or a Marathon
There’s a term in software development for a “sprint,” which is a set amount of time (a week, a month) during which a team iteratively and rapidly improves upon something with the goal of finalizing it within the product (i.e., shipping the upgrade). It’s important to understand that an internal hackathon is quite different from a sprint. A sprint is a means to achieve a development milestone expediently: You’re building the product. In an internal hackathon, we weren’t building the product. We were using the product.
What Happens in an Internal Hackathon Doesn’t Stay in an Internal Hackathon
Our internal hackathon ran the week immediately after the Fourth of July holiday break. We explored essential concepts that make Agoric tick, like governance, voting, and lending, among others. After the hackathon was over, we gathered to celebrate what we’d all done together, and then did the all-important post-hackathon work, much as we do after regular hackathons. This involved interviewing select participants to gauge their experience and collecting feedback accumulated during the process. This work helped us to delineate product needs and to prioritize development opportunities, all in the interest of helping our actual users to be more successful and to achieve their own goals more quickly.
. . .
Thanks for reading. You can join the Agoric community on Twitter, Telegram, and LinkedIn, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and catch us at upcoming events. | https://medium.com/agoric/why-the-agoric-team-spent-a-week-eating-our-own-dogfood-3006300a7efc | ['Michael Jablon'] | 2020-07-21 16:27:23.349000+00:00 | ['Hackathons', 'Coding', 'Startup', 'Smart Contracts', 'JavaScript'] |
Escalation in Ukraine — The Gordian Knot | For the new administration in the White House the escalation in Eastern Ukraine is a test and an opportunity to demonstrate its strength and resolve.
The recent escalation is a result of diverging political goals between Ukraine and Russia. As a result a negotiated solution has become less likely in the short term.
The Russian military build-up should be interpreted as demonstrative in accordance with the doctrine of strategic deterrence [strategicheskoe sderzhivanie]. The Russian mobilization of military force aims to prevent an escalation by deterring Ukraine from attempting to solve the situation by military means.
Russian objective is to maintain the status quo in Eastern Ukraine in order to maintain leverage over Ukrainian foreign and security policy.
There exists very unlikely possibilities for a significant military escalation.
The new Biden administration got off on a wrong foot in March 2021 with the other great powers in the world — China and Russia. The first high-level meeting between the officials of the United States and China in Alaska started with a breach of the diplomatic protocol, when the highest foreign policy representative of China went off on a 17 minute tirade significantly exceeding the allotted time for the opening remarks. The key message from the Chinese representative was that the United States can not speak to China ‘from a position of strength’.
Around the same time the Russian ambassador in Washington was called back to Moscow for consultations after president Biden described president Putin as ‘a killer’. The Russian president responded by remarking ‘it takes one to know one’ and challenging president Biden to a live streamed online debate to talk about the countries relations and the state of the world. Behind the proposition was an implication that president Biden could not hold his own in a debate with Putin. Biden’s staff quickly shut down the proposition referring to the president’s busy schedule.
These episodes had a common denominator, which was the explicit or implied lack of respect for the United States and its new administration. One dimension of great power relations is a game of perceptions of power — and the whole world is watching. These two episodes did not signal the strength and resolve of the new Biden administration. It is possible that the United States is looking for a chance to show strength and strengthen its resolve against its main adversaries.
Now on to Ukraine. The escalation in Ukraine has developed over the winter with Ukraine modernizing its Armed forces and Russia escalating its rhetoric regarding the Donbas region. Ukranian defence company formed a joint venture with Turkey to receive 48 Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones which proved to be very effective in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. On the other side of the front on 28th and 29th of January 2021 a conference titled “Russian Donbas” was held Donetsk in which calls for the ‘People’s republics’ integration to Russia were heard. Simultaneously a document was published titled ‘Donbas doctrine’ which calls for strengthening the breakaway republics as Russian national states and their cultural, political and economic integration with Russia.
The most recent escalation in East Ukraine is most likely a result of the Ukrainian president signing an official decree on March 24th 2021 titled “On the Strategy of de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol”. The decree refers to official Ukrainian foreign policy goals of membership in the European Union and NATO and sets as a official goal the ending of occupation in the Crimea peninsula, which was now written explicitly into law. The Crimean federal republic and the city of Sevastopol by Russian law are determined as Russian territory, but the occupation widely considered illegal and the annexation has not gained international recognition.
The Russian military build-up in the recent weeks on the Ukrainian border and the Crimean peninsula should be interpreted in the context of Russian official military doctrine as strategic deterrence [strategicheskoe sderzhivanie]. According to Kristin Ven Bruusgaard the Russian strategic deterrence “…is not entirely defensive: it contains offensive and defensive, nuclear, non-nuclear and non-military deterrent tools. These are to be used in times of peace and war — making the concept resemble, to Western eyes, a combined strategy of containment, deterrence and coercion — using all means available to deter or dominate conflict.”. According to the Russian military doctrine the Russian military policy is aimed at containing and preventing military conflicts, improving military capabilities, increasing readiness in order to ensure the security of the Russian federation and its allies. The Russian military build-up should be interpreted as strategic signalling to deter Ukraine from using military means to resolve the conflict on Ukrainian territory. The Russian objective is to distance itself from the conflict and treat it as an internal matter between Kiev and the ‘People’s republics’. Russian strategic signalling attempts to force Ukraine to accept that they can not resolve the conflict by military force and it will be forced to negotiate with the ‘People’s republics’ and give them concessions to resolve the conflict.
It is unlikely that the conflict would expand into a large scale military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. A large scale military operation by Russian forces is very unlikely, because it would not serve Russian foreign policy and military objectives regarding Ukraine, it would possibly collapse Russia’s international standing and would make Russia a target of increasing economic sanctions. A military escalation between Russia and NATO could not be ruled out in this scenario. A large scale military offensive also opens a possibility for significant losses for the Russian Armed Forces. Possible military defeat or significant losses in Ukraine would damage Russia’s international prestige and reputation. Occupying parts of Ukrainian territory would require significant military resources from Russia and would mean giving up the control over escalation dynamic. An expanded occupation could become a prolonged drain on Russian resources and damage the domestic support for the Russian administration.
Russian objective is to maintain the status quo in Eastern Ukraine and support the separatist regions as a bleeding wound preventing Ukrainian integration with the Western institutions. A country that has an ongoing conflict on its territory will not be accepted as a member of NATO. It is very likely that Russia will not openly intervene militarily in the conflict unless the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics suffer significant military losses or Ukraine gains initial success in an offensive military operation.
However unlikely it is, there exists a possibility that Russia might calculate, that it could be worth the risk to attempt to force the Ukrainian government to resolve the conflict on Russian terms. This could prevent the Ukrainian integration with the Western institutions and leave Ukraine crippled politically and militarily. Russia could achieve this outcome through a large scale military offensive, which would encircle the Ukrainian formations on the front and force their retreat to the west — or their destruction. This would result in a significant blow to the credibility of NATO and the United States, which have supported Ukraine through diplomatic means.
Most likely Ukraine will not attempt to re-take the Donbas region by military means without international support. Ukrainian attempt at reconquest of the Donbas region is not likely to succeed and would probably inflict heavy losses on the Ukrainian armed forces. Russia controls the escalation dynamic and can covertly increase its material and direct military support for the armed formations in the Donbas. Significant military losses as a result from a Ukrainian failed offensive would probably force Ukraine to resolve the conflict on unfavorable terms and damage its aspirations for Western integration.
Ukraine is making a bid to receive increased western support for its aspirations of ending the occupation of parts of its territory and an accelerated path into NATO membership. A statement from the United States promised ‘unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbas and Crimea‘. The European Union and the United Kingdom have pledged their support for Ukraine in the case of a Russian offensive. Should Ukraine receive no explicit international support for offensive operations against the separatist regions, a military escalation is very unlikely.
To evaluate the chance of Ukraine receiving significant military support from the United States, we should recall an interview of president Obama from 2016, in which he stated that:
“Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there… The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
However, outcomes in escalating situations are always uncertain. The United States might calculate, that explicit military support of Ukraine in an offensive against the separatist regions would demonstrate resolve and deter the adversaries of the United States. Inflicting a significant blow on Russia’s international prestige by causing military losses on the armed formations in the Donbas and forcing Russia to intervene in the conflict overtly or recede from Ukraine, could seem like an attractive proposition. This scenario is very unlikely, but if it comes to fruition — all bets are off. | https://medium.com/@virtusriskconsulting/escalation-in-ukraine-the-gordian-knot-427f609d30fe | ['Virtus Risk Consulting'] | 2021-04-09 12:55:01.932000+00:00 | ['Military', 'Russia', 'Ukraine', 'United States', 'International Relations'] |
For a Resilient Retirement, Let Nature be Your Guide | For a Resilient Retirement, Let Nature be Your Guide
Photo by Matthew Bargh on Unsplash
This September makes it five years since I retired. This is fifth autumn that I haven’t had to wake up early in the morning, teach classes and attend interminably long faculty meetings. That means we can stay at the cottage, far away from the city (I know, lucky us!). Now we can watch the changes: the hummingbirds are leaving, mushrooms are popping up, the trees are taking on that undefinable yellow-green tinge and geese are flying overhead: heading south. A small thought comes up: how many more beautiful autumns will I see? The day darkens as I notice a little uneasiness tinged with sadness, like a cloud passing over the face of the sun. Just a slight turn of thought and I move from contentment to sadness.
The transition into retirement isn’t all about our Golden Years, is it? It’s also about loss. What do we lose? Our job, of course, but also our sense of identity. We may notice, or continue to notice, a falling away of those mental and physical abilities we took for granted, like our razor-sharp memory or our ability to eat whatever we like without gaining weight. Society isn’t very kind to the aging process either. We are expected to look young, embrace the newest modes and not mingle too much with people outside our age group. When we get too old, we’re not treated like the wise elders of our communities; we’re hidden away in retirement homes.
What we gain is a bleak view of our future. We may try to distract ourselves from those thoughts, but they persist.
I am suggesting an expansion of our viewpoint, a relaxation of our former way of doing things…
Fear not: there is a way to turn this perspective upside down, although not the way you may think I’m going to recommend. This isn’t about saving your money wisely (a good idea), or exercising (another great idea) or finding your new Dream Job (although that’s getting close to what I’m driving at). I am definitely not going to talk about the Secret to a Happy Retirement. As a matter a fact, let’s leave the happiness expectations at the door for now and I will come back to that. I am suggesting an expansion of our viewpoint, a relaxation of our former way of doing things and embracing a flexibility of mind or spirit.
Here is a suggested approach on how you might cope with and even enjoy retirement and aging; not always, but sometimes. It’s a strategy from our natural environment. There is a concept in ecology called resilience. Psychology uses this term as well, defining resilience as how easily a person can bounce back from difficulties. But this definition has been overused and carries all sorts of negative baggage including the necessity of having grit (tenacity). If you’ve got it, you’re a success but if you don’t, you’re a failure. This judgmental attitude really turns people off.
Let’s look at another way to approach resilience and see if we can make it more tolerable, omitting the grit. The more resilient an ecosystem, the better it can recover from disturbance (change). The most resilient systems have more species and more diversity, which means there are more complex webs of interactions between animals, plants and soils. Okay, that’s the science part, but how does it work? Imagine a field of corn: at its the best, it looks beautiful and robust with the promise of a bountiful harvest. Then a blight hits the field, the corn shrivels and the entire crop is decimated. The problem is, this is an ecosystem with many individual plants but just one species, probably just one strain (this means they’re all pretty much clones of one another). This is a “monoculture” which has less resistance to disease and invasive species because they are all equally susceptible to whatever chooses to attack it.
Natural ecosystems, on the other hand, are better at handling disturbances, because there are so many different species and so many interactions and connections between species. Say a disease attacks only the paper birch of a particular woodland. While the paper birch trees struggle to survive, its cousin, the yellow birch, is unaffected. Birds can build nests in its branches, its seeds provide food for animals and its roots stabilize the soil. So even though one species is in trouble, the natural, resilient ecosystem continues to thrive. Even some individual paper birch in that natural system will probably survive because they’ve dealt with small disturbances before and have better immunity. It can be argued that human societies also thrive where there is more diversity (it’s not just a Leftist, liberal thing). But we’ll focus on the smallest scale: you and me.
The more we allow change into our lives, the more resilient we become.
You and I will adapt to disturbance better and recover faster if we cultivate resilience for ourselves. And how do we do that? We encourage a diversity of strategies for survival, just like an entire ecosystem. We can think of each behavior or activity or personal relationship as one species, so exposing ourselves to more of these makes us more diverse. The more we allow change into our lives, the more resilient we become. Right away, I should tell you that you have to work at it and find your own answers. One size does not fit all. To use another nature metaphor, I can’t tell you what to plant in your garden or how to make things grow. You have to decide what flowers and vegetables will flourish in your particular soil, given your personal climate. And you also have to figure out what you want to grow. Just don’t plant a monoculture.
What does the human version of a monoculture look like? Doing one thing and not changing any comfortable, or even uncomfortable, habits. We tend toward entrenched behaviors that dig us in deeper: we become ever more extreme and resistant to change. Our culture encourages the monoculture: just look at how social media and even online shopping steer us toward listening to the same music, buying the same stuff and talking to people with similar interests.
Monocultural behavior is habitual and familiar. One of the big challenges of the pandemic has been that people’s routines become monocultural as their perceived options shrink. You can try this: contemplate your habits and what is familiar in your life. What do you feel comfortable doing and how would you feel if you lost one of those comforts? Then think about what your natural, diverse, resilient world might look like. I recommend that you think about this over a period of time, no rush. It could be as easy as remembering what you liked doing when you were a kid, before you started working. What pulls at you? What calls to you?
Another suggestion is not to come up with only one new thing you want to do or learn or get involved in. Again, there is value in diversity. Some people planned to travel when they retired, or go to plays and concerts and parties. Obviously, although these plans could’ve worked out great under normal conditions, they weren’t viable options during the pandemic. Learning a new language, planting a garden, playing the guitar, joining an on-line book club may be more suitable activities during this strange time in history.
Resilience is also about pushing the limits of your tolerances by nudging up against what makes you uncomfortable. I am lucky (very lucky) to have a husband who keeps me challenged by putting me in situations that I might otherwise avoid: blearily waking up at dawn to go fishing, stumbling across rope bridges that traverse wild canyons. I would have never experienced those joyful sunrises and the thrill of breath-taking vistas if I hadn’t been forced to test my abilities. But resilience is not just about what is going on outwardly, it’s also about what’s happening inside your head. Can we face our fear of change? Can we recognize and accept our resistance to being disturbed or agitated?
We don’t like change but it doesn’t matter, change is what it’s all about.
Here’s the secret: everything is going to change and you are going to change with it, whether you like it or not. Some changes may be too gradual to notice. Or you will notice the changes because they abruptly invade your life. You’ll make plans for your dream retirement and a pandemic comes along and makes all that moot. You will plan an adventurous biking tour and find you’re not strong enough to achieve what you planned. You may find that you’re a little frightened of the unknown future. By the time you get to retirement, aging and illness are closing in. You’ve avoided thinking about these big changes your entire life. That’s the unspoken secret, and the question is: how resilient do you want to be to meet the unknown? We don’t like change but it doesn’t matter, change is what it’s all about. It’s the one constant in the universe.
My response to retirement has been multilayered, and it hasn’t always been easy. As I pursue my passion for painting, I’m often hyper-critical of my efforts. My intense love of nature and my dream of traveling with my husband have been curtailed to small-scale hikes because of the pandemic. On the other hand, what is always available to me and where I can fully satisfy my curiosity is in the exploration of my inner life: the mind. What is this whole world going on inside of me? How can I learn more about myself? Meditation, contemplation, reading, writing: these are a few tools for transforming and expanding our inner world. Again, my path is different from yours so I can’t supply you with a Google route map. For you, there will be challenges on your journey that will be quite different from mine. The interior landscape is a very diverse ecosystem, full of wonders and distractions and beauty and danger.
Retirement forces us away from our familiar ways of being busy. Retirement insists on some level of resilience. Will I be happy? I don’t know. I do know there is an invitation here. An invitation to re-evaluate old ideas and habits. I can look back on my life before retirement and review what brought me happiness and contentment, but some of those habits and patterns are less useful in this new world. It’s time to push past the old barriers, embrace new ideas and new perspectives. Create my own resilient ecosystem. This could be the most important phase of my life. | https://medium.com/@weisner5/for-a-resilient-retirement-let-nature-be-your-guide-fb5dad0022f6 | ['Wendy Eisner'] | 2021-09-07 22:51:54.670000+00:00 | ['Retirement', 'Change Your Life', 'Resilience', 'Inner Journey', 'Nature'] |
How to run Spark/Scala code in Jupyter Notebook | Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash
Jupyter Notebook is the most widely used tool for putting code and text together in Data Science World. It’s a great tool for practicing data analysis and performing machine learning techniques in Python. This is a must for every Data Analyst and Data Scientist.
Apart from the data analyst and data scientist, this tool can also be useful for a data engineer. If you don’t know about Data Engineering, It’s a way of collecting/transforming data into a common data lake from where Data Analyst and Data Scientist can use this data to perform data analytics.
In the Big Data domain, there are various tools and technologies we use to collect and process the data. Apache Spark is one of the frameworks which allows distributed computing on a large data scale.
Apache Spark is a data processing framework that can quickly perform processing tasks on very large data sets, and can also distribute data processing tasks across multiple computers, either on its own or in tandem with other distributed computing tools.
Apache Spark code can be written in the following 3 languages — Java, Scala, and Python. Scala is the most preferred programming language for Apache Spark as Spark itself is written in Scala.
Hence in this article, I am going to tell you how you can use the same Jupyter notebook to write Spark code in Scala language.
Step 1: Install the package
pip install spylon-kernel
Step 2: Create a kernel (scala)
This will allow us to select scala kernel in the notebook
python -m spylon_kernel install
Step 3: Install and use Jupyter Notebook
pip install jupyter
And in the notebook, we select New -> spylon-kernel. This will start our scala kernel.
However, for this to work, you need to make sure that SPARK_HOME is set.
To set the SPARK_HOME in linux/mac OS, put the below statements in the home .bash_profile file.
export SPARK_HOME=/Users/vishalmishra/spark-3.0.1-bin-hadoop2.7
cd ~ vi .bash_profile | https://vishalmishra2k20.medium.com/how-to-run-spark-code-in-jupyter-notebook-using-scala-as-a-language-3d2cdcbce3de | ['Vishal Mishra'] | 2020-11-10 00:28:15.974000+00:00 | ['Jupyter Notebook', 'Data Engineering', 'Apache Spark', 'Data Science', 'Scala'] |
Virtual Reality (VR) in the Industry of Real Estate! | Virtual reality (VR) indicates a full experience of immersion which cuts out the rest of the real world. VR headsets are a perfect example of virtual reality technology. Using this headset, users can shut out their view of the outside world.
VR helps prospective buyers or landlords to go on a virtual tour of the house, saving both energy and travel expenses. VR system also enables virtual staging. In other words, real estate agents will offer prospective buyers a completely furnished room through virtual reality technology, despite the real-life room is empty.
Such digital tours permit real estate agents to sell properties with very little investment for real estate companies. Virtual reality also helps real estate firms to sell the completed project before its completion. The technology allows agents to view both the inside and outside of unbuilt assets, and also allows buyers to explore a space from sitting at home.
How Virtual reality Benefits Real Estate?
While being in the real estate industry you already know some practical applications of virtual reality, you might still have questions about whether it’s valuable. And of course, it is. But to illustrate the case, take a look at our list of greatest advantages that virtual reality offers real estate agents.
Biggest Time Saver
This is perhaps the greatest advantage-applications for virtual reality that saves time for both consumers and realtors. There’s no need to fly from one property to another thanks to VR and ride in heavy traffic. Customers can easily put their headsets for VR and experience immersive three-dimensional experiences, alternatively.
A lot of people nowadays don’t have their VR gadgets. But a real estate agent can get one in this situation, and hold virtual tours in their office. When virtual reality systems become more popular, most people can take VR property tours before having to leave their homes.
Also, the use of virtual reality in real estate indicates that all of the properties available are accessible 24 hours a day. Homebuyers can visit houses and apartments at any time with the help of VR headsets, without the realtors having to spend their time.
Aims to build Emotional Bonds
Virtual house and apartment tours help visualize each property for your guests. Except for standard visits when everybody is in a rush, prospective buyers can take VR home tours at a suitable time and can concentrate on specific information.
Complete virtual house tours create a positive relationship and engage customers much more effectively than traditional 2D images, which might look quite distinct from what a property looks like in reality.
Allows Global Reach
Real estate agents know well how much help each client needs. Organizing visits, displaying properties, negotiating a deal, and prices — all of these tasks are extremely time-consuming, so it’s no wonder the average realtor works with a relatively limited number of customers.
Virtual reality will allow a shift. As most assets can be displayed through virtual tours, realtors can function more efficiently. It does not matter where your customers work, anyway. VR allows you to present properties and to customers on long distances. This means, of course, you can work with more customers and handle more inquiries.
Money-saving
Designing a feature-rich Virtual 3d tours can seem costly but consider investing in conventional real estate marketing. You need to not only stage properties, as well as provide high-quality images and lots of print resources (particularly for new assets).
Virtual reality, using the technology of 360-degree images and computer graphics, lets you save a good amount of money. Having a guided video tour of an estate today requires only a wide-angle lens and simple modeling.
Immediate Sense of Possession
The most difficult job for most real estate agents is to drive clients into making a purchase or signing a lease agreement. And this is where VR home tours prove useful: they allow clients to visit properties virtually whenever they want and for as prolonged as they would like. This provides a feeling of personal identity and possession.
By offering virtual tours including lots of customizable add-ons, like mortgage calculators, details on comparable properties, and neighborhood details, you can improve customer service. This will help your customers get all the details they need about the assets before they approach you and ask for real visits to properties they like.
Potential of VR within the real estate sector
Virtual reality has to revolutionize real estate for its ease, in addition to its cost-saving advantages. Prospective investors will visit an area without having to fly to the estate and explore the room with real estate agents, using Virtual Reality Technology. Specialists in real estate can also advertise properties on a much broader scale, while also allowing prospective buyers to explore the property through an immersive method.
This is particularly useful for residential housing because the flexibility of providing virtual tours would dramatically reduce the amount of time for potential tenants to make a rental commitment. VR technology also supports employees during the construction period, as well as helping the pre-lease process. As described above, VR technology can improve operational performance, simulate on-site work experience, and increase the accuracy of construction workers through a continuous visual picture of the ultimate project plan.
VR technology’s principal point of concern is perception. Due to problems of accessing VR headsets, awareness has not expanded on a mass basis. Augmented reality, which uses a computer like an iPad to view renderings of a room, is, therefore, a favorite for changing the real estate market.
As VR technology progresses to be more cost-effective and the services become more user-friendly, the entire real estate industry expects more acceptance. Up to then, AR technology has been a personal favorite among real estate players to gain interest. | https://medium.com/@tretechmedia/virtual-reality-vr-in-the-industry-of-real-estate-c67e55ca639e | [] | 2020-12-18 11:18:42.045000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'VR', 'Technology', 'Real Estate', 'Digital Transformation'] |
The Mysteries Of The Abyssal Zone | The Mysteries Of The Abyssal Zone
And The Wonders it Contains
It is natural for humans to be curious and wanting a sense of exploration. The biggest companies and richest people have often spent millions of dollars to explore uncharted land, resources, and even space in conquest for discovering new things.
Photo by Karan Karnik on Unsplash
However, these missions often end in coming home with millions of dollars wasted, or a minor discovery not even worth mentioning. But what if there was something else we could explore? Well, we do have a literal sandbox left to explore and it’s called the Abyssal Zone!
Just How Big is the Abyssal Zone?
Humans have only explored 5% of the ocean and in the ocean, there are 4 zones which are the sunlight zone, the twilight zone, the midnight zone, and the abyssal zone. The abyssal zone is the least explored zone because of its dangerous environment. The pressure is immense too, reaching around 600 times the pressure we feel on the surface.
It is also considered the biggest zone as it covers 60% of the global surface and 83% of the oceans. Because of this, our exploration of the abyssal zone has been limited greatly, meaning so much of this particular zone has been undiscovered and ready to be explored.
A Mysterious Creature in the Depths of the Abyssal Zone
Life in the Abyssal Zone
Solitary life other than ecosystems exists here too, such as large fish (Anglerfish, Fangtooth fish, etc.), crustaceans (Spidercrab, Squat Lobsters, etc.) and many more creatures. These marine animals survive on a few unique adaptations exclusive to the abyssal zone. | https://cuyleryu.medium.com/the-mysteries-of-the-abyssal-zone-cf9bfc9f77dc | ['Cuyler Yu'] | 2020-10-14 23:50:40.460000+00:00 | ['Oceans', 'Ecosystem', 'Deep Sea', 'Natural Phenomena', 'Marine Biology'] |
How I Made $700 in My First Month Selling Digital Products | Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
I’ve always believed that passive income was largely a myth.
The concept of starting a business that makes money on autopilot seemed unlikely at best.
To be honest, I still think that truly passive income- where no ongoing effort is required- is not a realistic goal.
The good news is that there is a happy medium between not working at all and 20-hour workdays.
I invested a few hours of my time into starting a digital product business, and after 30 days, I made over $700.
I made $737 in revenue in my first 30 days.
I had no email list, no social media following, and no experience.
With that in mind, it also wasn’t a complete accident- I did a lot of research before I started, and all in all, my first month wasn’t too shabby.
I won’t say that I did nothing in those 30 days, but it was astonishing how little work was required to keep things moving.
Here’s how I did it.
I found an underserved niche
First and foremost, you need to pick a niche for your business. When customers find your shop or website, two things should happen:
They need to feel like you are an expert in the area- so that they trust you enough to buy products from you. If they like one of your products, they will probably like several others, too.
If you want to turn a profit quickly, don’t look to a niche that is oversaturated with other sellers. It’s not that success here is impossible; it’s that it will take you longer to stand out in the crowd (the experienced and well-established crowd).
Instead, it’s in your best interest to find a product that other sellers either aren’t selling or aren’t specialized in selling. Maybe they have some of these products, but it’s not their main focus.
You’ll end up competing with fewer people to get in front of your customers.
Keep in mind that there needs to be customers in this niche, too- so people need to be searching for it.
I know what you’re thinking- this sounds great in theory, but how do I actually find the right niche?
Start with what you know- what are you good at? What do you know a lot about?
Now imagine how you could package this up and sell it to others. Some options include ebooks, printable planners, workbooks, online courses, templates- you can even sell spreadsheets or digital planners.
I decided on selling printable planners in my niche.
When you are knowledgeable about a topic, you’ll be able to not only churn out lots of products on it, but there’s a good chance it will be something people actually want to buy.
To test out if your niche idea could work, I recommend using Google Trends (it’s free) or Keywords Everywhere (you do need to pay for this, but it goes into detail on the keywords people are searching for).
If you’re planning to sell your products on Etsy, then I recommend using Marmalead for your niche research.
These tools can show you how many people are searching for these products and the competition for them (how many others are already selling them?).
I also used them to find keywords to use in my listing titles and descriptions (by finding keywords that had little competition and a lot of search volume).
I found an easy platform for creating my products
Since I was selling printable planners, I needed to make PDFs that customers could simply print off at home.
I needed them to look good, too, even though I have no design background whatsoever.
Signing up for a free account on Canva was probably the best decision I made here. It’s super user-friendly, and I could create exactly what I was envisioning in little time.
I found a marketplace to sell my products
If you don’t have a follower base or email list yet, you’ll need to go out looking for your customers.
By far, the easiest way to do this is to open a shop on Etsy. It is the largest online market for digital downloads that I have found, and people are buying lots of these products on Etsy.
Opening an Etsy shop is free, although there are transaction fees on each sale.
Once you are on Etsy, there are a variety of ways that they put you in front of shoppers. Of course, shoppers who search for your item may see it in their search results (although it can take time for your listing to appear in the first page of search results).
As this can take some time, Etsy also shows your items on the home page of interested shoppers. They may even advertise your items on sites like Google, and you can pay for Etsy ads, which places your items higher up in search results.
I spent more time on marketing than on creating products
When I was doing research for my new business, there was a lot of information on how to make digital products. There was also a ton of info on how to choose the right titles, tags, and listing photos on Etsy.
What was missing? Marketing.
If you sit there and wait for customers to find you- you won’t sell a lot of products.
Instead, you need to put yourself in front of your customers as much as possible.
I marketed my products in two ways: Etsy ads and Pinterest.
I also had one Youtuber showcase my products on her videos (and link my shop in all of her videos). I lucked out here (she actually reached out to me), but this has been a fantastic form of free advertising.
I took advantage of as much free marketing as possible
Especially when you’re a new business, it’s critical to market your business for free wherever possible.
Why? It’s not necessarily that your product is trash or that you have a bad idea.
It could be that your price is too high, your product images aren’t flattering, or your product descriptions aren’t convincing people to hit “add to cart.”
It can take some time to iron out all of these details. In the meantime, you’ll be glad you didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on advertising, only to have one or two sales come in.
Start small, even with just $1 a day (that’s what I did). If it starts to work and generate sales, consider increasing it bit by bit.
Pinterest is probably the best free marketing tool I had at my disposal.
This is because Pinterest is more of a search engine than it is a social media platform. Users are on there because they’re searching for something- so I made sure I posted my products there (I used a variety of different pins, which I designed on Canva).
As I mentioned before, I also had someone who wanted to feature my products on her YouTube channel- I sent her some freebies, and she has been featuring them in most of her videos and video descriptions. I have had consistent views on my Etsy shop from this.
If you’re able to reach out to channels who might be interested in showcasing your items to their followers, go for it!
Better yet, if you have the time to start your own YouTube channel that shows people how to use your products- that’s even better. You have complete control over how your products are featured, and you can gain a following here.
Honestly, after I set up my shop and listed my initial products, my ongoing work consisted of posting to Pinterest (which only took minutes) and listing 5–10 new products a week (to increase my exposure on Etsy). | https://themakingofamillionaire.com/how-i-made-700-in-my-first-month-selling-digital-products-e63dd0d7a008 | ['Ashley Jane'] | 2021-01-26 15:05:39.195000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Digital Product', 'Digital Nomads', 'Etsy', 'Making Money Online'] |
Measuring observable influence and impact of scientific research beyond academia 📄 | METHODOLOGY
EDA:
We conducted EDA using Numpy, Pandas and Excel on Genome BC’s dataset which lists the academic papers funded by them. We explored the downstream documentations using web browser, collecting their citation methods such as by presenting PMID, PMCID, DOI or giving pdf files directly.
Data Collection:
Collection of data is the most challenging part of our project. The downstream documents are variable. By EDA, we find that we can use PMID to represent the papers they cited as most of them are medicine field papers. (If we want to extend our work to the other fields, we can use DOI instead.)
The data is collected from 5 downstream documents entries:
bcm
It has a zip file that contains all the information that the website hosts. So we get all the pdf files by downloading the zip file and unzipping it manually.
bcc, cadth and cpic
We use Scrapy to scrape all the pdf files and extract all the DOI, PMCID and PMID references.
pgkb
pgkb is a javascript-generated dynamic website, so we used Scrapy combined with Selenium to scrape the pdf files and extract all the DOI, PMCID and PMID references.
Web scraping using Scrapy combined with Selenium
Extracting references directly from these documents does not solve the problem as we have to dig in deep by going to each link or reference taken from the previous reference. This task is done up-to a threshold due to the limited computing power and internet availability.
Data Cleaning and Integration:
After collecting the data, for DOI, PMID, and PMCID references, we clean it using python libraries -Numpy and Pandas combined with NCBI APIs which fulfill the null values and get rid of the duplicates.
For the pdf files, at first sight, extracting references from pdf files seems hard. But in fact, as Chenet mentioned [2], reference information is, in fact, structured information. Using regular expression alone can achieve a satisfying result [5].
Still, this problem is not easy, as each website contains many different structures for PDFs and parsing them requires different approaches. We firstly parse pdf files using PDF2XML to get structured data. The lxml library is used to get to reference using XPATH. The implementation of this part becomes more tedious as the type of pdf files increasing.
Then we extract reference paper titles using regular expression combined with NCBI APIs. We set the regular expression rule like this: every title is between two periods, and the number of words in the title should greater than 4. Then we verify this title by querying NCBI API. If we can find a paper the title of whom has an edit distance less than 4 to the title, then we can be sure that the title is indeed a valid paper title. In the meantime, we get the corresponding PMID of this paper.
We use edit distance to determine whether the two papers are the same one based on this fact: each paper’s title is unique. The similarity method, such as Jaccard Similarity, will fail because papers focused on one specific topic will always have similar titles.
Below is our pdf parsing result, we extract 1246 reference paper titles from 4379 pdf files:
Analysis:
We measure the impact of a Genome BC funded paper in real life by counting how many times they are cited in the downstream documentations both directly and indirectly.
We get all the direct and indirect cited papers for every downstream documentation and represent it as a tree.
Accelerate the generation of the reference graph
At first glance, it seems a trivial task — just perform BFS to get the reference tree by query NCBI database. But as 1000 downstream entities will refer to around 40 million papers given a depth constraint of 6, plus that the NCBI API only allows querying 10 times every second, this becomes an impossible mission. We come up with an accelerated solution: as we only concern about the depth but not the actual structure, we can merge nodes at the same depth.
As NCBI API allows a 100 id list query every time, we merge the nodes into a package of 100 nodes and do the query. This method decreases the number of nodes from 40 million to around 400 thousand and reduces the running time to 25 hours given a depth constraint of 6.
After the query, we merge all the nodes of the same depth into one node, which further reduce the running time for later analysis.
Finally, we will go and measure the real-life impact of Genome BC funded papers. It is somehow straightforward: go through the reference map using Breadth-First-Search (BFS) to do the counting for our Genome BC funded papers.
Finally, we find the actual impact of research papers in the real world.
Visualization:
In order to show the relation between downstream documentations and the Genome BC funded papers, we use igraph to construct a map with coordinates associated with every paper and downstream documentation entity. Then, we plot the map using plotly. Plotting this helps both the researchers and the company to move into the right direction. It provides motivation to researchers and at the same time increases revenue for the company. These figures give a better picture to the company and are understandable to a greater audience. | https://medium.com/sfu-cspmp/measuring-observable-influence-and-impact-of-scientific-research-beyond-academia-c00372c96a76 | ['Chhavi Verma'] | 2019-04-17 20:22:09.172000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'NLP', 'Web Scraping', 'Healthcare', 'Big Data'] |
The Top 6 UI and UX Trends for 2020 | Three Big UI Trends for 2020
1. Mindful design
Whether you make your own pictures of your business and clients or make your own illustrations (comics, designs, and such), this next year will gravitate around authenticity. Such services as stock photos and templates will take a step back and will not help businesses convert as much.
2. Complex illustrations and motion effects
In 2019, due to responsive designs and the limitations of 4G, using complex illustrations and motion effects was an actual problem as it hurt your website rankings and didn’t load at all for some users. With the arrival of 5G, we should forget that as everyone will be free to customize their website or app without encountering any of the previous issues.
3. Dark themes on the rise
Mojave started it, and this year we saw the dark-themed Instagram taking the market by storm as many apps decided to follow that wave. In 2020, this trend will only reinforce itself as many big companies have announced the release of dark-themed updates. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/ui-ux-trends-for-2020-f254e0313124 | ['Allegue Wessim'] | 2019-12-21 17:21:37.771000+00:00 | ['Augmented Reality', 'Ui Ux Design', 'UI', 'Virtual Reality', 'UX'] |
5 Unbelievably Easy Ways to Boost Your Web Traffic With Blogging | 5 Unbelievably Easy Ways to Boost Your Web Traffic With Blogging Zoek Marketing Aug 23·7 min read
Check out the original blog post, here.
With organic reach being limited more and more in favor of paid advertising, small businesses are feeling like they have to work twice as hard just to reach their target audience. Don’t worry though, that’s not always the case!
The easiest way to reach your ideal customer at low to no cost is simple — Blog Marketing. The benefits of blogging are vast, but when it specifically comes to driving traffic, here are 5 reasons why you should start today…
What is Blog Marketing?
First, let’s focus on why blogging is important for your business.
Like we discussed earlier, platforms like Google and Facebook have been limiting the reach of organic traffic for quite some time. According to a study done by Ahrefs in 2020, “90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google.”
So how exactly is your website supposed to be found by your target audience if they can’t even see you? That’s where Blog Marketing comes in.
Blog Marketing is the act of catching your audience’s attention through blogging in hopes of directing that traffic to your website.
While there are many reasons blogging is the ideal type of content for businesses, the ultimate reason is simple — it can be accessed and searched for at any time. Even if your blog post is a few years old, as long as it’s still relevant, it can still bring traffic to your business.
Here are the easy ways that Blog Marketing can bring direct, quality leads to your website…
1. Build Credibility
Building credibility may seem like an obvious thing to add to this list, but it’s more important and more serious than you might think. If your audience doesn’t see you as a credible source, they’re never going to visit your website.
When writing your content, the number one rule of blog writing is always to remember that you’re writing your blog for your audience — not for you.
What do they want to see?
What information are they looking for?
What do they need help with?
Instead of focusing on putting out as many blogs as possible to gain readers and viewers, think about posting a steady flow of quality content that is designed to be shared.
You can do this by backing your content up with research and examples, having strong, professional branding, and by building up your backlinks.
2. Backlinks for Blogs
You might be asking yourself, “what are backlinks” and that’s ok! Backlinks can be one of the hardest parts of Web Traffic and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to understand.
Backlinks, otherwise known as inbound or incoming links, are simply links that go from one page to another. The easiest way to understand this is by thinking of Pinterest.
Pinterest is an entire platform dedicated to backlinks! Each “pin” takes you to someone’s blog, website, or platform. The more times your content is repinned, the more backlinks you create.
But why are backlinks so important? Backlinko says it best…
Not only that, but Google themselves even confirmed that Backlinks are still one of their three most important search engine ranking factors.
It’s more than just dropping your link in random platforms though, there’s a real science behind backlinks. So let’s teach you a few simple ways on how to build them!
First and foremost, you want to create content that is high quality. Research your topic thoroughly, have a strategy, and remember…you’re writing for your AUDIENCE, not yourself. Team up with professionals in your industry or even your competition, and use their voice in a guest post. Interview them for your blog and ask them to share it on their social platforms as well. As stated previously in this article, use sites like Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Tumblr to share your content. Comment on other relevant blog posts and drop your link! Remember to be authentic and professional, though; don’t randomly drop your link on every blog you see. Create original artwork or illustrations that are designed to be shared. Infographics are one of the best and easiest ways to build backlinks!
3. SEO for Blog Posts
When it comes to improving the quality of your content, regardless of the platform you choose, SEO is a reliable way to bring traffic to your website. While it is recommended to hire a professional to optimize your site to ensure online visibility (see our SEO Bundle Pricing here!), it is also very much possible to optimize your blog by yourself.
When users search for a keyword or topic, an algorithm works to determine which results are considered the “best” for that particular inquiry.
Blog SEO works by optimizing your content for the search engine that you want to rank for; this includes websites like Google, Bing, YouTube, or Amazon.
While there are many reasons blogging is the ideal type of content for businesses, the ultimate reason is simple — it can be accessed and searched for at any time. Even if your blog post is a few years old, as long as it’s still relevant, it can still bring traffic to your business.
The trick to ranking high on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) is through posting quality content filled with specific keywords that your audience is actually searching for. As WiX SEO Experts, we’ve compiled a list of 5 ways to optimize your blog…
4. Google’s Featured Snippets
One of the best blogging benefits is Google’s Featured Snippets. When users ask a question into Google, the result that is read back to them at the top of the page is called a snippet.
These snippets usually come in the form of a list, paragraph, sentence, table, or video, and are a way to answer the inquirer’s question quickly and clearly easily.
Featured Snippets matter because it puts your website at the top of SERPs and makes it much more clickable. Not only that, but blogs featured on Google Snippets often have a high CTR (click-through-rate) and higher Brand Authority, meaning Google considers you an expert in that particular subject.
It’s also perfectly optimized for Voice Search. According to Rocks Digital Marketing, 76% of smart speaker users perform local voice searches at least weekly, with 46% of users performing it daily as an easy way to get the information they need fast.
With Voice Search quickly becoming the next hot marketing trend, optimizing your blogs to be featured as a Google Snippet is almost necessary.
For example, let’s say you google ‘why do cat’s purr’ into your search bar. That first result that appears at the top of your page in bold is called a Google Featured Snippet.
As you can see from the example above, the answer pulled from Wired.com’s blog is from 2015 — that was over five years ago! Google still considers this source one of the most accurate and keyword-inclusive blogs for this particular search.
To be featured on Google’s Featured Snippets, your blog needs to establish credibility and rank within the top 10 searches on Google. Producing quality content that Google will love in a format that is easy to understand is key.
We recommend these four tips when optimizing for Featured Snippets…
Use platforms like Answer The Public to determine potential content ideas. Answer the keyword question in 52 characters or less. Add a “How To” or “FAQ” section to your blog. Use high-quality images and videos.
5. Build an Email List
Email marketing might be one of the most important strategies to add to your marketing plan out of everything on this list since it continues to have a higher ROI than any other marketing channel.
It is still considered one of the best ways to interact and engage with your audience, especially since those who subscribe to your email list are already supporters, customers, or interested in your product or service.
When you share your blog with your email list, and they enjoy it, they are more likely to share it with other sources. Sharing your blog or website creates backlinks, which boosts your SEO, which creates more visibility and credibility for your website, which may get you featured on Google’s Featured Snippets!
As you can see — it’s all related.
Updating your email list when you write a new blog not only shares that content immediately with a targeted audience but also ensures it’s reaching an audience who already considers you a credible and trustworthy source of information.
The Bottom Line Is…
The benefits of blogging are vast; it’s hands down one of the best and most effective ways to bring targeted traffic to your website. According to bloggingwizard.com, an estimated 3.4 billion people read blogs!
With those kinds of numbers, it’s almost a necessity to include blogging into your digital marketing strategy. The ability to grab your target audience’s attention through a type of content that can be shared on almost any social media platform is unmatched, and its backlink and SEO potential are staggering.
If you’ve included blogging into your business strategy, how has it worked out for you? And if not, what has been holding you back?
A consistent blog strategy is essential for Web Traffic, which is why we release new blog posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Make sure you subscribe to our blog to get all the information, news, and advice you need by visiting www.gozoek.com. | https://medium.com/@zoek-marketing/5-unbelievably-easy-ways-to-boost-your-web-traffic-with-blogging-6c04d9961c30 | ['Zoek Marketing'] | 2021-08-23 16:04:43.014000+00:00 | ['Seo Tips', 'Blogging Tips', 'Blogging For Business', 'Organic Traffic', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
How does sustainable investing actually create change? | Financial Incentives
The first and maybe most obvious impact to companies is financial. Investing in companies has an impact on demand for their stocks and bonds, and therefore makes it easier for them to raise money to fund their growth. Conversely, divesting from other companies makes it harder and more expensive for them to raise money, hurting their growth prospects.
Shareholder Voting
The second and lesser known source of impact from sustainable investing is shareholder voting. Casual investors are often unaware that a number of significant issues can be voted on or influenced by shareholders. Individual investors rarely have the capacity to sway voting on a particular issue, but funds, made up of many investors, often can. If more people invest in funds that have an environmental and/or social objective, this pooled voice can influence companies through their voting power and change companies’ policies from within!
Media Attention
The last and potentially most impactful agent of change from sustainable investing is media attention. Every article about the growth of sustainable investing, every video, and every tweet showing the rise of consumers demanding more from their investments permeates and influences companies’ decision-making. Knowing that investors are holding companies accountable for more than just shareholder returns has an impact. Companies also see an opportunity to have a positive mark on our society and gain positive publicity by making sustainable business choices. | https://medium.com/vestive/how-does-sustainable-investing-actually-create-change-183c85767c15 | ['Vestive Staff'] | 2019-04-12 19:40:59.275000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Investing', 'Personal Finance', 'Investing', 'Impact Investing', 'Esg Investing'] |
The Worst Interview Of All Time | As a Graduate Software Engineer with two years experience I felt so ready to go to a new company that has different challenges, in hope that it would be something new and exciting.
The Phone Interview
I remember sitting in my car having the first phone interview with the Head of Engineering. We got on really well, he loved my attitude towards best practises, I was already writing technical blogs back then as well ( just on a different platform). I asked about the culture and the team sizes. It was a small team of around seven male developers. Neither of those things threw me off, small team sizes were my bread and butter coming from an SME company. And the tech industry is male dominated, I had spent two years as the only woman in the Engineering team, it makes absolutely no difference to me, you just get used to it.
The Code Test
I was very quickly rushed onto the next stage, which was the code test. Without sounding too confident, I knew I did well. I met all the requirements and had time to add unit tests in. It met my standards which is saying something, I’m always really hard on myself about the quality of my code.
I had nailed it! They asked me to come in and meet their team lead and one of their team members for a final interview in their office in London.
The Big Day
It took me about an hour and a half to get there, it was a mixture of trains and tubes. I was slightly uncomfortable because I’m quite claustrophobic, but It was the chance to work in London, It was exciting, I would have done anything to live that life. Anyway, I digress…
I arrived early, It was a really nice office and I just walked into the lobby and waited there. I was greeted by the team lead and he seemed out of his comfort zone trying to make small talk. This is something else that I just got accustomed too, so I just started asking him about his day and made couple of jokes; it relaxed the whole situation.
Needless to say the interview was going really well, we were talking about strengths and weaknesses, agile practises and problems I had faced in development.
Then he wanted to walk through the code test, line by line, I was looking forward to what his feedback was.
Before we did that, he told me it was the best one they’d ever seen. In my head I was already rejoicing, I had nailed every stage, new life here I come!
When I was walking him through my code, I don’t know why, he just seemed really anal about having something explained to him in a specific way, like he was looking for a specific word. But while he was doing he was ignoring what I was explaining to him, we were saying the same things, he just didn’t like how I was explaining it. I didn’t quite get why he was doing that, the code was commented and I had documentation.
In that moment something felt really odd, like he wanted to see me mess up, making me feel rather uncomfortable. I advocate pair programming and I’m well aware people need to have things explained slightly differently for them to understand, but no matter how I said it he wasn’t happy. But It was my code, I know what it does, I wrote it. I was trying to stay really calm, I’d never experienced this, it was really frustrating. Until it all made sense, because then he said …
I don’t think you wrote this.
He pointed at three lines of less efficient code that he didn’t approve of and said…
I think you wrote this and someone else wrote the rest
Those words haunted me, I was in shock. Normally, I’m quite a quick-witted person but all I could say in that minute was ‘oh’. I literally didn’t know what to feel, he’d seemingly brought me in for interview after already casting his judgements about me from the code test, to tell me what ? That I cheated ? It didn’t make sense.
I don’t think I have to tell you, that I messed up the rest of the interview, and travelled an hour and a half home. For a long time after this experience I was haunted, not from what he said but from being made to feel like a school girl who had cheated on a test.
Here is what I learnt…
They didn’t deserve me, it was their loss! I think it’s all too often that we think, when you go into an interview, the interviewee is the only one that has to be impressive. In reality it’s a two way street. Had I relived that moment again, I would have walked out. There’s not a company in the world who should be able to make people feel like that. And that is for sure not a company who is worth your time. I was a really good at my job. It wasn’t until I went home and told this story to my boyfriend, did I realise this. My boyfriend thought it was the most messed up complement that the hiring manager had paid me. He started with ‘it’s the best they’d ever seen’. Even though it turned out that he thought it was too good to have been written by me. That still meant after all the candidates they had been interviewing in the last five months of that vacancy being open, I was the best. Talk to people. When something like this happens, look to your support network and reach out. I stayed quiet, I really wanted the whole experience to go away and forget that it ever happened. However I think that’s why it stuck with me for a lot longer than it should have. I’m a mentor for a lot of people now, and I can only hope that if they experienced something like this, they would feel like they could come to me. Also, provide feedback to the recruiter, so hopefully they would never do that to someone again.
I hope you never have to experience something like this, but if you do, I hope reading this has helped you. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/my-worst-interview-ever-5fc56acfd83a | [] | 2020-06-16 15:49:42.248000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Software Development', 'Women In Tech', 'Interview', 'This Happened To Me'] |
Thinking Outside the Social Media Echo Chamber | POLITICS
Thinking Outside the Social Media Echo Chamber
Time to expand your bubble
Social media algorithms serve us up with what we like to see because the more we scroll, the more data they can harvest, and selling that data is their business model. Lately, it’s been popular to refer to the increasingly narrow worldview that we receive this way as an “echo chamber.” Commentators have been warning that both ignorance and polarization are the result, and that we need to take deliberate steps to avoid being boxed in and judgmental. Agreed.
One suggested remedy I saw recently is to keep people with “completely opposite political views” on your newsfeed, in part because this will remind you that people who believe those things are human too. That’s fine as far it goes, but let’s go further. I propose that the key word is not “opposite” but “outside.”
Breaking down issues into sets of opposite views is itself a product of the colonial/Western worldview, and that’s a larger “echo chamber” that we inhabit. Its intellectual tradition, which proudly roots itself in ancient Greece, is hobbled by duality, which is neither inherent to the world nor helpful for modeling political topics.
Rather than picturing ourselves along a spectrum — defined by only two dimensions — we can envision ourselves in bubbles, which extend into all directions. Our knowledge and experience is demarcated by how big our bubble is.
This admits to being in a bubble, which is honest.
First, because here in the “developed” West, we are insulated from many aspects of reality that are commonplace elsewhere, such as bombed cities, mass starvation, and child slavery. That all of these terrible crimes are connected to our material wealth here is even less known. These things are outside our collective bubble.
Second, our individual bubble is a product of our upbringing, experience and constitution, most of which is not in our control. That is, each of us was handed something to work with that we didn’t choose. We can decide what we’ll do with it, though, as circumstances allow. We can push the walls of the bubble out to include more. We widen our perspective.
This process might include keeping people in your social media newsfeed who have “completely opposite political views” but that would only be one element. If we are talking about the very limited world of social media, I would suggest adding people to your feed who offer points of view that are defined less than how they relate to yours in a polar way and more by how “outside” they are of your bubble. Because batting the same ball back and forth between two sides is really only fun if it’s with a racket or a paddle or whatever. When it comes to your knowledge and understanding of life, that approach won’t get you far. It’s reductive and flattens the bubble.
Life is not two-dimensional. Living it that way will not lead to satisfaction or growth. Look back over the centuries of tragedy that led us to this moment: so much brutality and bloodshed, all the way back to Mesopotamia, when this “good vs. evil” slop started getting dished out. Have any of our civilizations worked during that period? As in, accumulated wealth without imposing suffering on humans and nature? Some, like the pre-Patriarchal Crete that Riane Eisler speaks of, were certainly better than others. But we here in the US are among the worst.
We owe it to this planet to widen our field of vision. Rather than viewing life as a series of us vs. them battles, we must step back and look around.
Personally, I don’t see the point of ensuring that my social media feed has at least one virulently homophobic jerk on it who can remind me on a daily basis that people who “hate f@gs” are human too. Or who will spew the racist shit I heard regularly during my red state childhood. Or who is going to denigrate all my sisters because it’s the only way they know to feel like a man. Conversely, as a white US American, I find it totally valuable for my feed to include Native Americans, Blacks and other people of color, as well as a generous amount people who live in other countries. Additionally, non-political interest groups, such as plant, bird and insect identification forums, offer a much needed reminder that it’s not all about humans. (And of course, cat videos are essential, and cut across all sociopolitical lines.)
The internet and social media gives us an opportunity to expose ourselves to all sort of different cultures and ideas; the fact that most US Americans don’t seem to use it that way reminds me of how I have often found myself to be the only white person in an Asian, Middle Eastern or Latinx grocery store. I mean, if the US has been good for anything, it’s been as a place where you can choose from a dizzying array of foods from around the world, probably unprecedented in history. Yet many people just stick with the same set of narrow, habituated choices.
Which might be getting more to the heart of things; in general, US Americans have never been interested in other cultures, and are not only satisfied with living in an echo chamber in real life, but seek to keep it that way. In that sense, social media algorithms are merely reflective of how we have always behaved anyway. A few people are curious, but most aren’t.
Personally, I greatly appreciate people who are smarter, wiser or clearer-seeing than I am in whatever way — whether the topic is politics, food propagation or car repair — and I am happy that this is a pool of people so large that I can draw from it for the rest of my life. As I am exposed to the words and ideas of people like that, my understanding of life expands. Instead of merely seeing that people are human in spite of their shortcomings, I can enjoy that people are inspiring in spite of their suffering. I’d rather seek hands to hold in the darkness, than fists to fend off. | https://medium.com/swlh/thinking-outside-the-social-media-echo-chamber-a72b3eb2f891 | ['Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume'] | 2020-08-16 08:07:41.599000+00:00 | ['Social Media'] |
How to Cope Up With Stress At Work | All of us have some sort of work or job in offices and somewhere else. We always try to live a luxurious life and try hard to earn more money to fulfill our basic needs. We need money for our children and family. For this, we take stress at work. We have the stress of compiling our work for the happy boss. Although we don’t love to do this, we have to do it.
Unfortunately, many people can’t handle this stress and go under depression and stress. This affects their focus on work. These people must need strategies or some type of management of stress. The whole world is stressed in fact.
Do You Need A Stress at Work? Why Have A Stress at Work? Are You Embarrassed by Your Stress at Work Skills? Here’s What to Do
Common reasons for stress at work
Low Salaries
The burden of excessive work
Lack of financial support
Family pressure
Low status in society
Have no control over employee
Effects of uncontrollable stress
Slight stress may be controlled but it causes minor symptoms on both physical and mental health. It causes headaches, stomach problems, Intestinal disorders, and many more common difficulties. This may affect your mental health. Instead, if stress is long-term, it may cause serious issues like depression, obesity, or diabetes.
Now we will focus on the strategies on how to cope with stress at work
Things To Do Immediately About Stress At Work
Track your stress factors
When you are stressed due to work, please don’t go for alcohol, or spills, or some kind of immediate activity to release stress. You need to track those causes to factors that are disturbing you mentally. Are you sure it is no threat of losing a job or work? Did you think it was just your illusions? Track these factors and evaluate them. This will help you to cope with stress from the root.
“More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.”
Build boundaries in life
Focus on your current life and make your depict destination with definite goals. Instead of making too many expectations from making small goals, fulfill them. Making small targets will help you a lot. It will make you clear in your doings, and you will be at ease in every situation.
Live easy life
Many of us consider our life the toughest phenomenon. But If we set our targets when we are at east, we feel comfortable. It makes us focused on our target. Be easy and relax come on! Life is something that you expect. | https://medium.com/@musiccreation/how-to-cope-up-with-stress-at-work-ef51858a0795 | ['Music Creation'] | 2020-12-15 11:11:01.352000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Stress Management', 'Health', 'Work Life Balance', 'Stress'] |
Data Science Training In Mumbai | Looking for a head start in your career? Not sure which way to pursue? Well, here is a golden opportunity to have a shining career in the world of data science with the Training Centers Mumbai. With hundreds of established students all over the country, the training centers like Hadoop and many more centers offer you a kick start as a data scientist in the best possible way.
What is Data Science?
With conventional employment lines becoming too overcrowded, aspirants are constantly in search of out-of-the-box careers where they can succeed with a little less competition. In this era of technology, being a certified data scientist is a much sought after a career with both national and international organizations requiring professionals who could handle the large volumes of data in their systems.
Data science consists of a multi-disciplinary field of work that includes extracting information and knowledge from huge volumes of structured and unstructured data using scientific methods and approaches. Data scientists are required to work with various systems, algorithms and mathematical operations that give shape to huge volumes of data.
With the current market largely based on computerized documentation, data scientists are in great demand in various sectors of the corporate as well as the business world.
Aiming to provide freshers and experienced individuals a bright start to their careers, the training centers offer hands-on training to help its students get a clear idea of the intricacies of data science and also a taste of the professional world. The experienced faculty ensures that students learn the basics of the field as well as are trained to handle and solve any sort of problem that may pop up in the professional front.
The training centers provide you with in-depth knowledge of data analysis using tools like-
· YARN
· Hive
· MapReduce
· HDFS
· Spark
· Oozie
· Pig
· Flume
· Sqoop
· HBase
You are taught to handle real-time problems under expert guidance. Students are provided with industrial training where they face actual problems of the industry and are assessed on their ability to solve them. They ensure that you are job-ready and can take up any challenge that comes your way.
About the course
Data science courses are tailor-made for both freshers as well as experienced individuals looking for a career in this field. Data science training in Mumbai is now easy to get and also inexpensive. Any person with a science, mathematics, statistics or related background can enroll themselves in this course. The course is divided into two phases-
· The first phase includes theoretical and hands-on training to the basic coursework. This is imparted by the trained experts who help you to get familiar with the world of data science and analysis.
· The second phase consists of industrial training. Students are sent to various partner industries where they work to solve real-life issues regarding data analysis. This gives them an insight into the actual job problems and thus trains them adequately.
All course details are available on the respective websites. The class timings, course breakup, the structure of fees and messages from the successful alumni over the years can all be accessed from the website.
So wait no more and get a head start in the world of data analysis! | https://medium.com/@besttraining/data-science-training-in-mumbai-cddd28499fa2 | [] | 2020-02-22 15:54:04.662000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Data Scientist', 'Data Science Mumbai', 'Data Science Training'] |
The Social Media Experiment is Failing | The Social Media Experiment is Failing
The amount of ignorant posts on social media is appalling.
Social media at its finest. Photo by Tim Bennett on Unsplash
I told a friend at the end of March that the only way I saw the pandemic executive orders ending was if there was a violent revolt.
The difference between myself and everybody else is that I would never post that on social media.
Why? First, simply because it is my personal opinion not even based on any facts, just a feeling. Second, I use social media to post pictures of my latest running adventure, to let people know I love my beautiful wife and to see pictures of places I would love to visit someday.
I just don’t believe social media is the place to be sharing your latest conspiracy theory, damning people you disagree with or airing your grievances.
That is what social media has become and it is destroying the way we agree and disagree with people. It is far too easy to hide behind a keyboard and share your kooky theories than ever before and it is doing great harm to the psychology of how we function as a society.
We will not begin to heal as a nation or a world until we see social media as the tools they were meant to be and stop using them as just another means to divide as societies.
My opinions are simply that, an opinion. A firmly held belief based on strong assumptions of what I see in the facts. My opinions are neither right nor wrong. They are simply an opinion.
Therefore, I restrict my opinions to what I can say personally to another human being who can hear the emotion in my voice, see the sarcasm or disbelief on my face and make correct assumptions based on the humanness of my expressions and voice inflections.
Social media is too jaunted to share personal opinions on, where words are in black and white, where your mood upon reading words determines whether you agree or disagree.
The social media experiment is failing.
Of course, that is simply my opinion and since these are mere words, you will have to decide whether I am being serious or sarcastic. | https://medium.com/afwp/the-social-media-experiment-is-failing-e9c35e934133 | ['Michael Horner'] | 2020-06-04 15:31:01.437000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Debate', 'Lifestyle', 'Social Media', 'Self'] |
Why You Should Take Site Speed More Seriously | Why You Should Take Site Speed More Seriously
Designing a compelling website involves many elements, from fonts and images to interactive features and calls-to-action. Yet many marketers neglect one important detail: site speed.
Written by Michael Del Gigante
Speedy loading times are essential to great customer experience, and they can even impact your SEO. Why does loading time matter, and how can you get your site up to speed? The web experts at MDG Advertising have answered those questions and more below.
Why Do Loading Times Matter?
Developers have long taken loading times into consideration as they create websites. However, as consumers rapidly switch to a mobile-only environment, site speed is no longer just a consideration. Customers expect pages to load quickly on mobile, and 46% say that slow site speed is a nuisance when browsing online on their devices.
Sluggish load times present two major issues for marketers: first, they lead to decreased engagement and discourage the visitor from taking action — including making a purchase. Pages that load slowly tend to generate less revenue than their speedier counterparts. Plus, slow load times can cause a higher bounce rate: a load time of one second that increases to three seconds can increase the bounce rate by 32%. If loading times take 10 seconds, the bounce rate skyrockets to 123%.
How Can Loading Times Impact SEO?
There’s no doubt that search engines value quick loading times. Google and other search engines work to provide the most valuable information possible, which usually means that a fast-loading page is featured first. Google, in particular, has been transparent about this fact; last year, it reported that it would look at loading times for mobile sites, in addition to desktop sites. The search engine giant stated that users want fast, relevant information, whether on mobile or desktop.
Google focuses on a variety of factors when analyzing site speed. Start to render (when a page begins to materialize), visual complete time (when a user first views the page, even if it hasn’t completed loading), as well as time to the first byte are all characteristics Google will consider when assigning rankings.
With such a nuanced approach, marketers may wonder just how fast a site must be to catch Google’s attention. While an exact standard can’t be pinpointed, site speed’s importance cannot be understated. A study from Backlinko found that, ultimately, slow-loading pages fall much lower in rankings than fast-loading sites.
How Fast Should a Website Load?
Most marketers know that site speed can have an impact on search rankings and conversions, but just how quickly should a website load? It depends on a variety of factors, including the site type and the connection speed. Customers expect speedy loading times over, say, a company Internet connection, but may be more patient over 3G. Additionally, customers could expect a financial website to load faster than a media site.
Regardless of the site, however, speed still rules. Only 27% of users will wait three seconds for a website to materialize on mobile. Thirty-two percent will wait up to six seconds, but only 24% will wait for a full six seconds or more.
It’s clear that customers demand quick loading times, yet many brands aren’t optimizing their pages. Across multiple industries, websites can be found that take five seconds, or even six, to fully load.
How Can Brands Increase Site Speed?
When developing a website, several factors can affect loading times, including code handling, media compression, and caching. Fortunately, developers have several speed-boosting tools at their disposal, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool allows you to flag potential problems, benchmark pages, and view recommendations for improving performance.
If you publish a large amount of content, Google’s AMP tool or Facebook’s Instant Articles may help. These platforms help to increase loading times by hosting a portion of the content for you.
Remember that building a speedy site can take time. However, even small adjustments can make an impact on the consumer experience. In fact, Google’s research revealed that users begin to see a difference in lag time between 100 and 300 milliseconds. These incremental changes add up, meaning that if you wish to improve site performance, now’s the time to start.
About Michael Del Gigante, CEO of MDG Advertising
In 1999, CEO Michael Del Gigante founded MDG Advertising, a full-service advertising agency with offices in Boca Raton, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York. With his unique insight and decades of industry experience, he turned what was once a traditional ad agency into an integrated branding firm based on an innovative 360-degree marketing philosophy that provides a full spectrum of traditional and digital advertising services. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-you-should-take-site-speed-more-seriously-78238ba4cebc | ['Steven Hansen'] | 2019-05-19 08:30:41.548000+00:00 | ['Site Speed', 'Website Development', 'Web Design', 'Loading Time', 'SEO'] |
How Dirty Hands automated their custom reporting in Pipedrive with pickSaaS | How Dirty Hands automated their custom reporting in Pipedrive with pickSaaS Aneta Szotek Follow Jul 1 · 6 min read
Choosing the right CRM is not the only problem our clients reach out to us to get some help with. We support our clients in general CRM implementations as well as in more advanced cases. One of the stories that can illustrate that is the one about custom reporting for Dirty Hands.
Having an efficient CRM in place is a great first step that can transform the way you work. However, when you explore all its functionalities you may find that the default configuration doesn’t always match your exact workflow. Customizations in reporting are one of the most influential adjustments you can apply to improve your CRM performance.
Every company has a specific set of needs when it comes to making informed decisions based on data. That’s why generating precise reports is crucial to optimize your business operations.
With pickSaaS consultants, you can not only implement and choose the right CRM, but you can seek help with more advanced issues that are too complicated to solve on your own.
“We need more detailed reports”
Dirty Hands is a family-owned company that helps grocery stores with retail execution, sales, data, and reporting. They live by the “of service” mentality and that’s how they build great relationships with their customers.
The Dirty Hands team has already used Pipedrive for some time when they got in touch with us. They had a reporting issue that they tried to solve on their own but the task seemed too advanced and time-consuming.
To make the best decisions, many businesses need specific reports and summaries. Sometimes, the options available in the CRM system by default are not detailed enough. That was the problem the Dirty Hands team was facing.
They needed efficient automation that would allow them to track specific product’s value on every stage of the sales funnel. In other words, they wanted to know the worth of all products (potentially) sold on every stage of the funnel. Dirty Hands needed a solution that would be reliable and cost-efficient.
By default, Pipedrive shows you the sum of all deals’ value on a specific stage of the funnel, It’s not possible to have a breakdown for each product separately. And that’s exactly what Dirty Hands needed to manage their business more effectively. The team also wanted to see this “product value per deal stage” report in Pipedrive Insights.
Let’s explore how we approached this configuration.
Custom reporting setup
As in Pipedrive it’s not possible to generate a report based on the product value itself, we needed to approach this task in a different way.
The main idea was to use Pipedrive’s custom fields. These new fields mirrored the value of the products attached to a deal.
This means that for every product, you’ll have an additional field that shows the exact same value. If “Product 1” costs $500, the custom field will also show $500.
It’s important to note that you can only use numerical custom fields for this purpose. Otherwise, you won’t be able to generate the report.
Having applied this solution, you can sum all custom fields up and generate the report in Pipedrive Insights.
But that was only the first stage of the project. The real challenge was to automate the process of updating the custom fields. Managing these fields manually wasn’t an option as the reporting process needs to be efficient and accurate. With manual updates, there are simply too many possibilities for human errors and inconsistencies.
Let’s automate the process
The real challenge was to automate the process of updating manual fields so that the user would be served with up-to-date, reliable data in Pipedrive.
We created an automation flow using 3 technologies:
Pipedrive’s webhooks
Zapier
Google Sheets
The goal was to create an automation that would update the custom field value anytime the deal is changed. We needed to:
identify if the deal was changed see if the changes affected the products if so, apply the changes in Pipedrive
The automation flow looked like this:
First, we used the deal.updated webhook in Pipedrive to get the deal’s ID into a Google Sheet.
This webhook caused the code embedded in a Google Sheet to run. This piece of App Script code had a goal to get a specific set of data from Pipedrive. Once the process was over, we had the timestamp and the deal ID listed in the spreadsheet.
The Google Sheet is deployed as a web application. It makes it possible for the Pipedrive webhook to trigger the code upon the deal update. Then, the script fills in the deal ID in the Google spreadsheet.
Once the deal ID is already in the spreadsheet, Zapier is being launched. In Zapier, we have a Python code set up that downloads the relevant field values from the deal. We connect with the client’s Pipedrive database to get all the info we need.
This code also compares the entries and identifies if the product value field was updated.
The next part of the automation funnel only runs if the product value has changed. The last “PUT” stage uses a Pipedrive-Zapier trigger called “deal updated” to finally update the custom field with the correct values and make the automated reporting possible.
We also created a separate automation funnel to make sure that this sequence would also work for new deals that are created in Pipedrive.
When a deal is created, its custom fields are empty by default. This zap updates all custom fields with the “0” value upon the deal creation. Thanks to this additional funnel, the entire process can run smoothly and without any manual work on the team’s end.
It was crucial to make sure to optimize the process and make it cost-effective for the client. The automation uses only 3 zaps in the first funnel and 1 zap in the second one.
To ensure the highest quality of the automation, we used unit-testing to check if the data is flowing smoothly at every stage of the process.
All reports available in Pipedrive
Thanks to this automation, the Dirty Hands team can always access real-time product value reports in Pipedrive Insights. They can easily see what is the value of a particular product on every stage of the funnel. They can also identify which products in their offer perform best.
The automation allowed them to see more detailed product information that otherwise wouldn’t be available in Pipedrive.
Even though the Dirty Hands team is quite advanced at using Pipedrive as a reporting tool, they chose to cooperate with the CRM experts. It let them speed up the automation process and save the team members’ time.
At pickSaaS, we specialize in solving difficult CRM cases and we really creating custom solutions for our clients. An atypical request always creates an interesting challenge for us that we’re ready to take up. | https://medium.com/softwaresupp/how-dirty-hands-automated-their-custom-reporting-in-pipedrive-7b30c177fca9 | ['Aneta Szotek'] | 2020-08-11 15:44:09.804000+00:00 | ['CRM', 'Zapier', 'Customers', 'Sales', 'Automation'] |
Sometimes, all we can do is wait for a good story to come. | Sometimes, all we can do is wait for a good story to come.
Just like that. Good stories love to play hide-and-seek in our minds, and they love to play that game for days.
Meanwhile, I’m living my life. Studying, reading, and relaxing — and that part is helping me a lot, because when our world slows down our thoughts get clearer, like mud at the bottom of a pond, they settle when the water stops moving.
There’s a lot of noise in our lives, and like physical noise, we don’t notice it until it’s gone.
Isn’t that beautiful? | https://medium.com/short-shots-city/sometimes-all-we-can-do-is-wait-for-a-good-story-to-come-d3cd129e6904 | ['Jm Miana'] | 2020-12-22 16:01:12.572000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Creativity', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Short Form'] |
何栢良稱應考慮停飛往來英國航班 | A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics. | https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E4%BD%95%E6%A0%A2%E8%89%AF%E7%A8%B1%E6%87%89%E8%80%83%E6%85%AE%E5%81%9C%E9%A3%9B%E5%BE%80%E4%BE%86%E8%8B%B1%E5%9C%8B%E8%88%AA%E7%8F%AD-387454901938 | ['C Y S'] | 2020-12-21 02:16:13.549000+00:00 | ['Government', 'China', 'UK'] |
History Kyiv Medical University | UAFM Kyiv Medical University or UAFM Kiev Medical University is a Ukrainian university. Established in 1992, the university has trained over 10,000 healthcare workers, primarily general practitioners, dentists and pharmacists. As of August 2014, approximately 1000 foreign students are studying in SMEs.
University Education is Bright Future Abroad University Study Agency
As the highest accredited university of Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, all degrees awarded to foreign students are validated and notarized by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Kyiv Medical University (KMU) is recognized and listed in all relevant international directories of medical universities, such as the International Directory of Medical Education (IMED). This means that graduates are eligible for medical licensure exams in the United States and graduates’ eligibility for certification and licensure from the Education Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) and Medical Council of Canada (MCC) in the United States. Therefore residency and postgraduate courses will be conducted in these countries.
The university is also listed in the Avicenna Directory, maintained by the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the World Association for Medical Education (WFME), which means that The WHO and all governments fully participate in recognize SMEs. Is.
Kyiv Medical University (KMU) is accredited by the Ghana Medical and Dental Council, the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, the European Medical Council, the Indian Medical Council, and the General Medical Council. Some names. It has joint research and partnership relations with several scientific institutions in the former USSR and worldwide, such as a practical conference with international partnerships and one with Nuro Hospital lsk, Poland, on the organization of medical practice for fourth and fourth-year students Contract. 5th grade. Medical Faculty of SMEs.
Click to know more about study MBBS Abroad, visit our website Orbit Guide. | https://medium.com/@orbitguideofficial/history-kyiv-medical-university-5b9c2c9eeb51 | ['Orbit Guide'] | 2021-12-22 18:11:45.188000+00:00 | ['Mbbs Abroad Consultants', 'Mbbs', 'Study Abroad', 'Study Mbbs Abroad', 'Study Mbbs In Ukraine'] |
“Better Than Excellent!” Rob Thomas LIVE! at BergenPAC | By Spotlight Central. Photos by Love Imagery
Crowds are lined up on this Wednesday, July 16, 2019 evening at BergenPAC in Englewood, NJ for a live concert appearance by singer/songwriter Rob Thomas. Best known as the singer of Matchbox Twenty, Thomas is also a leading solo artist who won three Grammy Awards for writing and singing on Santana’s 1999 smash, “Smooth.”
In the lobby, we chat with a family of four Rob Thomas fans from Little Falls.
Says Mom Adriana, “We first saw Rob Thomas perform with Matchbox Twenty. I love him and his music! I’ve never really been a hard rock fan, but his music with Matchbox Twenty is a little edgy which I really enjoy, and I love his solo work, too.”
Continuing, “He has a great voice — and he’s cute,” Adriana recounts, “I play his music all the time at home and in the car, so my girls know it. They’re real concertgoers. We see a lot of different kinds of music, and we really love coming to this theater.”
Dad Harold agrees adding, “I’m actually a metalhead, but I like Rob Thomas,” noting, “As a family, we see a lot of live music, and we especially like coming to BergenPAC — we’ve always been able to get good seats to shows here.”
Whereas daughter Emilia, 16, tells us she likes all different Rob Thomas songs, Gabriella, 8, says she prefers his “slower songs,” acknowledging her hope that Thomas performs Matchbox Twenty’s hit, “Unwell,” tonight.
Inside the beautiful BergenPAC auditorium we chat with two friends, here tonight to share an evening of Rob Thomas’ music.
Declares Alison from Paramus, “I’m Rob Thomas’ #1 fan! I like him because he’s a down-to-earth person. I’ve seen all of his videos, and tonight will be my first time seeing him in person.”
Continuing, “I’ve been listening to him for nearly 25 years now — since Matchbox Twenty formed in the early ’90s, when I was a teenager in high school,” Alison recalls, “Initially, I was attracted to his music because I liked his lyrics — he writes really great songs,” before exclaiming, “and he’s good looking, too!” | https://medium.com/spotlight-central/better-than-excellent-rob-thomas-live-at-bergenpac-49dde703a415 | ['Spotlight Central'] | 2019-08-01 13:45:21.283000+00:00 | ['New Jersey', 'Concerts', 'Concert Review', 'Music', 'Rock'] |
Artis Affiliate Reward Program | Artis Affiliate Rewards Program
Artis Turba is excited to announce the ARTIS Affiliate Rewards Program (AARP). The AARP grants holders of ARTIS the right to share in the Artis Turba revenue stream generated by operating its trading platform. Each ARTIS holder will receive an even distribution of 50% of the revenue generated from the trading platform, allocated according to ARTIS holdings. Artis Turba hereby aims to create a sustainable revenue stream for ARTIS holders by way of the AARP and ensure growth in the value of ARTIS as trading increase.
Transaction costs are levied on each trade and in the respective currency of each pair, the transaction cost are split 50% to Artis Turba for operational cost and 50% to ARTIS holders as reward. The rewards due to ARTIS holders are credited to their Artis Turba wallets for each respective currency.
Forward together!
Example
“For example if i will hold 5000 artis how much i will get artis or dollars?”
“It will depend on 2 factors; trade volume on ARTIS TURBA exchange (ex fees are 0.25% per trade) and the prices of all the cryptos listed. The payouts are distributed in BTC, ETH, DASH, LTC, XRP, XMR, ARTIS according to each Cryptocurrency’s underlying volume traded.
So for simplicity let us assume that the sum of all Cryptocurrency volumes equals $10 million per day:
Ex fees = $10 million x 0.25% = $25,000
Share 50% = $12,500
$12,500 is then split among all ARTIS holders via smart contracts (the equivalent in BTC, DASH, XRP, XMR, LTC, ETH and ARTIS).
There is 350 million ARTIS so
1 ARTIS gets $12,500/350,000,000 ARTIS = $0.00003571 per day
Thus 5000 ARTIS gets $0.00003571 per day x 5000 ARTIS = $0.17 per day | https://medium.com/artisturba/artis-affiliate-reward-program-df940cd36a61 | ['Artis Turba'] | 2018-04-06 07:30:01.603000+00:00 | ['Altcoins', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Ethereum Wallet', 'Bitcoin'] |
The steep walk of creativity | I have always loved the touch of color people place in the normal and cycle heavy life. Adding a bit of spice like watching your favorite movie or hanging out with your friends. These are some of the spices someone can add to a bland recipe. Why am I saying this? You see this is also creativity
Creativity isn’t a linear walk in the park. It is also not a bland cycle. It is a colorful and labor-intensive activity someone can undergo. It takes up your brain juices, your physical work, and your mental will to continue with the project.
Let me share how I create my makeup looks and my photos.
When it comes to my makeup and clothing looks. I tend to not plan them. I love the excitement I get when I notice that the look I did was absolutely the bomb. I like to mimic how I would usually go my day. Just pick out an outfit I have in my closet and just pick at random. For makeup, I would just go for my usual. This is a singular eyeshadow on my eyes and some lip tint to look fresh. | https://medium.com/@ruizjamesfelip/the-steep-walk-of-creativity-8d5d0628d51e | ['James Felip Ruiz'] | 2020-12-14 13:36:41.521000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Creative Process', 'Makeup'] |
Increasing Nutritional & Psychological Quotients of Children Appearing for Board Examinations | “A mental marathon like Board examination needs a calm mind, healthy body, correct nutrition and psychological grooming without any stress to sail successfully.”
With board exams round the corner, what matters the most to the parents and students are ‘grades’ though we all configure that grades do not qualify much; but the truth is that everyone wants quantified results of the board examinations and even the environment endorses it as admissions to good colleges and schools are more or less based and biased on the number and percentage game. If you are a parent to a would-be-appearing board exam student or a student experiencing examination blues, you might be trying hard to cope-up with the living realities and stress associated with it.
As rightly told, board exams are like a mental marathon and students need to keep their energy levels up, brains at the sharpest and their bodies free of diseases. During times of such intense exam pressure, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and a nutritional diet is very important for the students to keep their stress levels to minimum to help them getting through all of their papers with flying colours, as they work hard for it and they deserve good results.
Wrong dietary choices can make students feel anxious and slow down their comprehensive thinking process. So, there is an univocal requirement of addressing the nutritional aspect co-opted with psychological grooming for bright young children to ace the board exams in a better manner.
Firstly, lets uncover the reasons and the effects of the Examinations with the coordinated Pandemic on Mind & Body of students appearing for the Board Examinations. Reasons for pressure during such time may be due to peer, parents, environmental and above all the students’ expectations from themselves. These have compounded more because of less interactions forced by the pandemic like restricted outdoor movements, online classes, on screen presence more than desired and the fear of unknown in their unconscious minds.
The effect of such pressure as per nutritional & psychological research and studies can be situations like indulgence in stress eating pattern, developing unhealthy eating habits, weight gain and laziness, sleep pattern disturbance, lack of concentration and focus, memory at reduced level, weak Immunity and above all an anxious behavior.
Apropos, what is desired?
To cope up with situations precisely not under control, we have certain corrective measures, which eventually would help students to ace the board exams well as planned; if followed.
Balancing diet with Study Time — When faced with repetitive revisions, nutritional requirement often slides way down on the priority list. But, this is the time when the brain requires the best nutrition fuel.
Students should eat a healthy & balanced diet which is rich with fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains and protein-rich foods. Consuming food rich in complex carbohydrate & protein provides brain with adequate nourishment to aid in memory retention and keep energising the brain tissues.
Hence must try…..to have servings of whole grains, pulses, fruits, vegetable, milk, curd, nuts & eggs daily in your diet. Avoid junk, refined and processed foods, eat natural and healthy energy boosters like brown rice, fruits like Banana, Apple, Guava, Oranges, Strawberries, Fatty fishes, sweet Potato, Eggs, curd, flax seeds etc., Eat more protein rich foods like Eggs, legumes (pulses), chicken, dry fruits or nuts, milk, Salmon, paneer, soya products etc. Healthy carbs from sweet potatoes can also help stay energised for longer duration.
Give stress on Food that relieves stress — The stress aspect is there with everyone but how we handle it; can make all the difference. Stress management can be a powerful tool for wellness, since too much stress is bad, there are many strategies, but most important is to understand, what you eat. Food can help tame stress in several ways. Comfort foods, like a bowl of warm Dalia or oatmeal boosts level of serotonin, a calming brain chemical. Other food can cut levels of cortisol and adrenaline; stress hormones that take a toll on the body over time. A healthy diet can help counter the impact of stress by shoring up the immune system and lowering blood pressure.
Here are some stress buster super foods; a must during preparing for the exams…
Eggs — contain choline, a nutrient that is needed for the production of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that impacts the portion of the brain responsible for regulating mood and reducing stress.
Whole Grains — All carbs prompt the brain to make more serotonin. For a steady supply of this feel-good chemical, it’s best to eat complex carbs, which take longer to digest. Good choices include whole-grain cereals like Wheat, Oat, Ragi, Jowar, Bajra etc. Complex carbs can also help feel balanced by stabilizing blood sugar levels. Dietitians usually recommend steering clear of simple carbs, which include sweets and soda. But in a pinch, these foods can hit the spot. They’re digested quickly, leading to a spike in serotonin. Still, it doesn’t last long and simple carbs can also spike blood sugar, There are better options. So don’t make these a stress-relieving habit; you should limit them.
Oranges — Oranges are one of the best source of vitamin ‘C’. Studies suggest this vitamin can curb levels of stress hormones and also strengthen the immune system.
Raw Vegetables — Crunchy raw vegetables can also help ease stress in a purely mechanical way. Munching celery or carrot sticks helps release a clenched jaw, and that can ward off tension too.
Dark Leafy vegetables — Too little magnesium may trigger headaches and fatigue, compounding the effects of stress. One cup of spinach soup or vegetable helps you stock back up on magnesium. Don’t like spinach?…Other green, leafy vegetables too are good magnesium sources.
Flax seeds — It provides omega-3 fatty acids, which is known to be mood lifting and possibly help in combating depression.
Fatty fishes — To keep stress in check, make choices with naturally fatty fish. Omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish such as salmon and tuna, can prevent surges in stress hormones. For a healthy supply of feel-good omega-3s, aim to eat at least 100 gms of fatty fish at least twice a week.
Almonds — Almonds are chock-full of helpful vitamins; vitamin E to bolster the immune system, plus B vitamins, which may make you more resilient during bouts of stress or depression. To get the benefits, snack on a quarter of a cup every day.
Warm Milk — Research shows that calcium eases anxiety and mood. Dietitians typically recommend skim or low-fat lukewarm milk daily.
Overall one has to re-evaluate his/her dietary approach towards exam preparation to beat stress
Strengthening Immune System — Students should avoid having digestive issues and getting cold, mild flue or other unwelcome sicknesses during preparation period. Hence try Probiotic Foods, avoid large meal in one go and take small amount of frequent meals. To ensure a steady stream of energy, better digestion and a calming effect on the brain, eat intermittently.
Control the caffeine intake (though it soothes your routine) Caffeine leaves you dehydrated and more stressed and restless. This generates insomnia, headache, rapid or abnormal heart rhythm, anxiety and dependency on such hot beverages. Instead sip on green tea or any caffeine-free herbal tea.
Don’t wait for the hunger pangs to arrive as hunger pangs make things worse &may generate gas and stomachache, headache and make you binge more in your next meal. So, ideal is that take 3 main meals with 3 snacks in between daily. Snack with healthy option like fruits, nuts, seeds or other homemade foods.
Hydration is one of the most important aspect which one thinks that he/she has to drink water/fluid only when he/she is thirsty. It’s not about quenching thirst, it’s about drenching your system with fluids as store house to help other system run smoothly. It is important because it delivers nutrients to the cells, removes constipation, regulates body temperature, prevent infections, improves sleep quality, mood & cognition & supports memory functions. It is advised that one must drink 8–10 glasses of water daily. Water breaks between study timings is important.
Take out enough time to relish your food. Slow down during your meal. Eat mindfully, chew your food nicely, avoid any distraction & Enjoy your meal. After every meal one should feel more fulfilled. It will also refresh & prepare body & mind for long hours of studies.
Meals on Time habit. Always have your meals on time; a routine like everyone follows classes. Never forget your eating and sleeping schedule and never skip your breakfast.Have something within 1 hour after getting up. Eat last meal as early in the evening as possible. Have 1 cup of warm milk with jaggery & 1 tsp of turmeric powder before bedtime. It saves time and keeps your mind and body healthy.
Sleep — Never compromise on the sleep aspect. It promotes cognition and memory, facilitates learning, recharges our mental and physical batteries, and generally helps us make the most out of our days. With plentiful sleep, we improve our mental and physical health and it reduces stress and further maintains the routine that is critical for healthy routine functioning. A good night’s sleep can significantly improve mood, concentration and academic performance; It’s a tested fact. Try not to sacrifice your sleep for late-night cramming, It makes the mind irritable. Students should avoid studying until the early hours and must avail a full eight hours of sleep.
Exercise Regularly — Besides changing dietary habits one of the best stress-busting strategies is to start exercising. Aerobic exercises boost oxygen circulation and spur our body to make the much required feel-good chemicals called endorphins. One must aim for 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three to four times a week. It should not be taken as a wastage of time. Exercises keep children mentally relaxed and calm, helping them study more and efficiently. Even if a student/child is feeling short of time or overwhelmed, he/she must allow themselves breaks. By doing this, you refresh yourself and regain focus on what is required. Neglecting physical and mental health can do more harm in longer run and to the aim & concentration.
Eat well, sleep adequately, stay fit and study smart. Doing and minding all this will boost a non-stop success and requisite grades in the Board exams which every child aims for. Have trust in yourself and must remember that the best is yet to happen.
Even every parent should take the Board examination of their children as part & parcel of their test. It is the test of grit of the parent’s hard work which they have done paving way for their children, their sacrifices, their grooming and above all expectations of a good future of their children. Try to stay calm & stress free; wear smile. Plan in advance with your child for the future courses of actions and create a distraction free environment for study and be a support system to the child. Take care of them with their daily routine — Eat, sleep & exercise. Must set realistic goals and expectation anduse motivating words to them; They need your friendly support.
MUST HELP “THE FUTURE” PREPARE FOR THEIR FUTURE REALISTICALLY & MINDFULLY. | https://medium.com/@metamorphwithdibya/increasing-nutritional-psychological-quotients-of-children-appearing-for-board-examinations-a6f3704cf24b | [] | 2020-12-12 11:46:18.893000+00:00 | ['Nutrition', 'Stress Management', 'Education', 'Board Exam', 'Psychology'] |
Cuthbert’s Holy Island | Monastery Wall, Lindisfarne. Author photograph.
Like many monastic foundations in England, the church and monastery fell into disrepair and ruin after the Reformation took hold in Britain. The king suppressed the monasteries and expelled the monks. In the 1800s, the church tower collapsed, and today an isolated stone arch frames the sky, linking the weather-worn remains of two medieval columns.
Arch, Priory Church, Lindisfarne. Author photograph.
The abbot of Melrose Abbey had sent St Cuthbert to assume the post of Prior at Lindisfarne. Part of his responsibilities included reforming the life and customs of the monks in his charge, bringing their practices into conformity with the Roman practices that were displacing the indigenous Celtic ideas. Cuthbert’s reforms were not universally embraced; some of his new charges resisted Mediterranean innovations. Ultimately, Cuthbert found that the job of wrestling fractious monks was too much for him. He sought permission to step down from his position and he left the community to live as a hermit. His first hermitage was constructed on a small island that floats right off the Lindisfarne beach. Known as St Cuthbert’s Island, one can still wade out to this minute stone circle at low tide. Just as Lindisfarne is cut off from the mainland twice a day, so too would Cuthbert have been free of contact with the monks when the water raced across the marshes.
That isolation proved insufficient, and Cuthbert sailed east to one of the Farne Islands. This group of shattered stones, flung down in a group off the Northumbrian coast, ensured privacy. Cuthbert lived in splendid isolation on the rocks, surrounded by sea birds and demons, until King Egfrid appointed him the next Bishop of Lindisfarne in 685. Messages announcing the good news were sent to the island. Cuthbert failed to respond. Finally, the king himself was forced to take boat and employ his royal presence to pry Cuthbert, like a limpet, off his spray-soaked rocks.
Cuthbert reluctantly assumed the post of Bishop of Lindisfarne, and spent the final two years of his life in pastoral duties. Having received warning that his end was approaching, he boarded a boat for his beloved hermitage on Farne Island. According to Bede, one of the monks asked him when next they would see Cuthbert, and the aged bishop replied, “When you bring my body back here.” Two months later, that unhappy day arrived, and the monks returned Cuthbert’s corpse to Lindisfarne, where it was interred beside the altar in the church. As we saw in an earlier installment of this series, his body did not remain long on Lindisfarne. Today it resides in Durham Cathedral.
Lindisfarne Castle. Author photograph.
The other significant landmark on the island stands seaward of the monastery ruins. Lindisfarne Castle was built in the sixteenth century to serve as a defensive fortification against the Scots. Many of the stones that make up its walls were taken from the defunct monastery. In 1901, the castle was acquired by Edward Hudson, and he employed Sir Edwin Lutyens to refurbish it. In addition to rehabilitating the castle, Lutyens also had the idea to invert some old herring fishing boats, and convert them into sheds, which remain to this day.
Herring Boat Sheds, Lindisfarne. Author photograph.
St Cuthbert’s Way is a fine walk through dazzling country. I am not certain, however, that it ever really felt like more than an arduous hike for me. Other than Lindisfarne, and possibly St Cuthbert’s Cave, there is no real connection between the trail and St Cuthbert’s life. Even the point of origin, Melrose Abbey, was not in existence when Cuthbert began his march.
Most of what we know about Cuthbert has been filtered through the myth-making of the Venerable Bede, and then further obscured by the passage of centuries. Older pilgrimage routes, like the Camino de Santiago de Compostella, have a history that reinforces their significance. The Spanish path follows a well-worn route that has been sanctified by the footsteps of millions of pilgrims over more than a thousand years. Each town, every church and monastery, has a history, a place in an overarching story. I think that is what was missing on St Cuthbert’s Way. It is new, ahistorical, a route that has very little real connection with the life of Cuthbert.
On the other hand, it was a lovely hike, a fine way to spend four days in the British countryside. | https://medium.com/the-peripatetic-historian/cuthberts-holy-island-fd3d482c064a | ['Richard J. Goodrich'] | 2020-12-21 13:05:39.164000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'History', 'Outdoors', 'Christianity', 'Travel'] |
Mothering two beautiful souls | Becoming a mother is a dream that secretly every girl wants to live and so did I. Mine was a failed labour and an emergency C-section with my first one and I was so tired with the labour pain that I passed out way before the doctor could give me a jab. So I don’t remember seeing my firstborn properly until I was in that feeding room in the hospital.
I went down when I got to my senses and I still remember those beautiful eyes looking for me hungry waiting to be fed. My heart still stops a beat when I visualise this. Three wonderful years where I never ever raised my voice on my love and then came my second born. A boy again. I would secretly think if I would be able to share the love I had for my firstborn and how would I ever feel the same unconditional love again. Well deep down within me I didn’t want to share the love I felt for him.
But yes, you do love your children unconditionally and yes all of them and this you realise only once you have more than one. With the little baby coming in comes frustration of handling two. The sleepless nights and your demanding toddler who is going through an ocean of emotions start making you feel vulnerable.
The mother who never got impatient and snapped at her child turns into one who is always snapping almost at everyone and especially the little toddler who you think has grown beyond years and is supposed to behave like an older responsible sibling taking full care of himself alone. The snapping turns into yelling, tears, and disappointment.
I remember one day when my toddler fell down and hurt himself and I ran to the newborn because he was crying out of hunger. I even forgot to ask him if he was okay later. While going to his bed that night he told me that he’s okay now and not hurt and I shouldn’t worry. This is when it hit me and I felt like I had failed him miserably. All he wanted was love and I totally shut him out. From that day to this I have really tried to improve upon myself and he’s a much happier child and much more understanding.
Forward to 1 year from the birth of the second one, he’s an absolutely doting brother and an adorable son. To all the mommies who have had their second babies, please be patient and understanding with your firstborn. You will never know when the time flies by and they are so big that taking them in your arms and walking would become difficult. | https://medium.com/@2monkeysandme/mothering-two-beautiful-souls-be570aa98e19 | [] | 2019-08-22 06:24:43.547000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Children', 'Kids', 'Parenting', 'Mothering'] |
Notes on Showing a Parent Around Europe | In 2018, I went on a 10 day trip to Europe with my Mom. She had never been. We both had a reasonably good time and didn’t kill each other. I consider it a success.
These are my raw notes of the trip, mostly without commentary. I’m posting them because I think it’s a reasonably good itinerary for folks who have never been to London, Ghent and Paris, and because I’ve had to forward the email so many times that I just want a link. I’m not a serious expert on any of these places, but I’ve since been back to Ghent and Paris and stand by these choices.
London
Took the Eurostar from Paris to London St. Pancras. Got in Mom’s first London Black Cab to head to the Nell Gwynn House in Kensington. It was a 50 year snow storm when we arrived. Got into our apartment and then headed straight for the Victoria and Albert Museum — devoted to decorative arts and fashion from around the world. Walked around the Kensington area after and found a Spanish tapas place that snuck us in despite not having a reservation. Had croquettes, tortilla espanola, whatever bruschetta is called in Spanish with Champagne sangria and a tempranillo.
First full day in London, we hit Buckingham Palace and the mall.
Stopped at Churchill’s War Rooms on our way to Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace. Took the tube up to Tower Hill. Ate at a restaurant next to the Tower Bridge and the Thames — Mom had fish and chips. Went to the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels.
Hopped on a boat on the Thames. Saw Whitehall, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Tate Modern, and of course Westminster Palace from the water.
That night we saw Picadilly Circus, walked through SoHo tried to go to a really old pub that recently switched to all vegan food, but it was so slammed we couldn’t. But we had stumbled across London’s Chinatown on our way there, so we doubled back and had Chinese. Afterwards, we walked to Trafalgar Square where we saw the National Gallery.
The next day, we headed off in pursuit of street art and Indian food in London’s East End. Along the way we found several street markets and food halls. Given how many Indian places there are on Brick Lane we chose one essentially at random and were rewarded. We shared the vegetarian sampler menu. I ate what I thought was a green bean but was actually a really hot pepper. Afterward we continued to walk around and peruse the Sunday markets of Brick Lane and Shoreditch.
On our way back into the city, we stopped at what must be the largest, most expensive department store in the world, Harrod’s. It’s 5 stories of luxury goods from clothes, to crystals, to showrooms of fancy condo buildings. Conveniently, they also have a fancy tearoom for high tea. I got a black Indian tea and Mom got some sort of red tea. We got scones with jam and clotted cream that I must say are much better than scones in the States.
Mom wanted to go to church in an Anglican cathedral, so we headed to St. Paul’s for something called Evensong.
St. Paul’s is of course magnificent and during the service they used lots of incense, also a nice touch. The priest did a fine job, especially on the prayers of the people which she directed more toward those who work in the service of others than is usually done — at least at St. Mary’s, the church I was forced to attend growing up.
Afterwards, we walked down the street to Two Temple Place, formerly Astor House, and as luck would have it, found a brewpub. Mom had a Coke Zero and I had a flight of their cask beers. We shared fried pickles.
Belgium
On our third day, we packed up and caught the Eurostar to Brussels. Dropped our bags at Brussels Midi/Zuid train station and headed into the historic center. We went to Grand Place and as usual, it was breathtaking. We then set out to eat all the Belgian chocolate we could, starting at Galler Chocolatier. Taking a quick break from our chocolate mission, we popped into the Delirium Café where I got Mom a strawberry beer that wasn’t very sour and I had a geuze. Going back to chocolate, we found that glass covered road/mall that I don’t know the name of and hit 4 chocolatiers in a row. We then headed out to the first Pierre Marcolini whose chocolate we ate on a bench in front of some unnamed but beautiful cathedral. We then walked back through an African neighborhood to the station and luckily got on a train to Ghent almost immediately. There weren’t many seats, so I sat in one of those areas between cars, but we were on our way nonetheless.
We arrived in Ghent, figured out the tram system (something I failed to do my last time there) and after going through the main square and marveling at the Belfort, St. Nicholas’s Church and St. Bavo’s Cathedral. We then got to our 3 story medieval townhome filled with nice design details. We quickly set out for the Holy Food Market, which is a food hall located in an old cathedral and is dizzyingly lit.
We found a vegan food stall and got a veggie burger and Pad Thai, both quite good.
Afterwards, we set out across town for a place called Trappisthuisen, which is an old bar dating from the 1600s that serves hard to get Trappist beers, I had a Chimay that you can only get in two bars in Ghent and Mom got a strawberry lambic, which was more sour than the first. We then started walking around in pursuit of the bar I originally was looking for that’s on a canal. We found it, but I don’t know what it’s called.
Ghent is the most beautiful at night because the whole town is so dramatically lit including random canalside streets.
On our way home, we made sure to stop in the main square and look at the three massive, medieval structures as well as the new City Pavillion, an architectural wonder in its own right.
Our second day in Ghent, we went into all the Cathedrals. In the Belfort, we saw all of the bells and went up as far as the elevator would go, but declined to take a narrow spiral staircase something like 20 stories to the top. St. Nicholas’ was beautiful and someone was playing the famous organ inside. St. Bavo’s is really the pinnacle because inside you can see the Altar of Ghent, one of Europe’s greatest works of art (and also one of the most stolen).
We ate lunch next to the Korenmarket (an old market they’ve turned into sort of a shopping boutique with restaurants) in the plaza facing St. Nicholas’. Then we headed off to the university section of town, stopping first at the Vooruit. In the past, a site of worker insurrection and socialist organizing, today a cultural center and a nice place to drink a Belgian beer on their rooftop terrace. We then walked around Ghent University, and went into some of the buildings. I was surprised that they were lecturing in Dutch.
At this point, Mom’s legs were a little worn out (and truth be told mine were feeling the wear of 8 miles a day on average), so she opted to get a massage from a nice Belgian lady. I opted to go sit on a canal and drink Belgian craft beer at what is now my favorite bar in Ghent, Barazza.
After this, we ate at a vegan cafeteria type place that was quite nice.
Paris
Onto Paris, we stopped in Brussels briefly, but found out that the Cantillon brewery is closed on Wednesdays, so continued on the Thalys to Gare du Nord. We somewhat foolishly braved the metro to St. Germain — there were a fair number of stairs we had to lug our suitcases up. Our Airbnb host was late, so we stopped in at the first of many sidewalk cafes.
Around 4 PM we got into our apartment, up a narrow spiral staircase — luckily only one story. Inside we found a lovely flat with interesting books and art. Clearly some sort of creative Parisian lived here.
We quickly set out to try to get our bearings. We walked through St. Germain toward the Seine. We got there and saw Notre Dame to our right. The Louvre straight ahead and the Tulleries to our left. I’ve been there a few times, but I can’t imagine central Paris ever getting old. We walked across the Seine and into the courtyard of the Louvre, walking through the central courtyard and out into the plaza where the famous glass Pyramid sits.
Obviously we wanted to walk through the Garden of the Tulleries, but there were approximately 200 heavily armed national police preventing us from doing so. At least at the entrance closest to the Louvre. So we headed back to the road along the Seine and walked maybe 200 meters until we got to an entrance to the garden we could go in. I pointed out the famous green chairs and how in French parks you aren’t supposed to walk on the grass. It was rainy, so this walk was a little less impressive than it normally is.
We then arrived at the Place de la Concorde, notable for its Egyptian obelisk in the middle of a giant roundabout (probably famous for other reasons too). We crossed the Seine at this point and hiked to the Eiffel Tower, and walked up to the Trocadero for optimal viewing/picture taking.
At this point, we were worn out and done sight seeing for the day. So we took the metro back to St. Germain and headed to La Gran Epicerie — sort of like a giant Whole Foods. It’s a site of pilgrimage for forward thinking Parisian foodies. There we bought breads, cheeses (the four core French types: hard, goat rolled in ash, washed in beer and blue), meats, jams and, my favorite, lots of half bottles of wine to double the amount of wine that could be sampled. Having procured what we thought was one dinner, we headed home for a feast. Our host had left us a bottle of champagne, so we opened that as an aperitif before dinner.
The next day, we headed to the tourist office to pick up our museum passes. Luckily, this office is near the Paris Opera House, so we headed there straight away. Also luckily, Pierre Herme, one of Paris’ most famous macaron makers has a shop in between, so of course we stopped there. Mom got a pink one, lychee, I think. I asked for the best one, and it was quite good.
After a spin around the Opera, we headed back to the central city and straight to the Orangerie — a building where French aristocrats grew oranges year-round. Now it contains 8 Monet waterlilies. I thought I had seen his waterlilies before, but no. These were massive. Probably 30’ by 8’. So big they had to curve them around the room.
Next we headed to the Rodin museum, which is housed in a Hotel he lived in and on the grounds. Unlike a lot of museums, they didn’t hold anything back and the first piece we saw was “The Thinker”. I’m not sure how big I thought it was, but it was a lot bigger. In the background, you can see a beautiful building, which at the time, we didn’t know what it was, but turned out to be the Hotel of the Invalids.
We also saw Rodin’s famous “The Kiss”, along with probably 100 other works. The man was really, absurdly prolific.
We stopped at a sidewalk café for lunch. French food gets a lot of acclaim, some for good reasons and some I think for the ambiance because most cafes essentially serve diner food. Don’t get me wrong, I love diner food, but it’s not haute cuisine. Mom got a classic croquet monsieur (a fancy name for a grilled ham and cheese) and I got an omelet. Delicious both, but diner food no doubt.
We then sought out that building we could see when looking at The Thinker. It’s called The Invalides. And it looks like a giant military base with a cathedral in the middle. Because that’s what it was, or rather it was a veterans hospital. Now it’s the military museum, although there are still a lot of military people there. Inside the cathedral — this random church we ran across — is the tomb of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. I’m continually astounded by how much history you run across in Europe, but this was utterly bizarre. And we weren’t even done for the day. We paused on Avenue St. Germain for a glass of wine at a sidewalk café to avoid getting the dreaded “museum legs”. Needless to say we had walked probably 6 miles already this day.
Onward to the Musee D’Orsay, which is the museum that houses most of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in Paris. It’s housed in a beautiful, largely glass old train station. There we saw countless works by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Manet, Degas, Cassatt Seurat, and more. I’m always reminded of how overlooked Alfred Sisley is when visiting the D’Orsay.
Fortunately, our apartment was only 5 or so art gallery filled blocks away, so we went home to put our feet up for a short break.
But not for too long because we then headed to the hip Marais neighborhood, for a classic French meal at Le Potager du Marais. Well, French classics made vegan. So…not really classic at all. Mom got the “Boeuf” Bourgogne and I got the cassoulet. Both are dishes I’ve made at home. But of course, these were so wildly better, that it’s almost silly to compare them.
Our third day in Paris, we decided to focus on slightly more modern art, so we headed to the Centre Pompidou. Famous for besides being an amazing modern art museum, was also designed with all of its duct-work, electrical stuff, elevator shafts and escalators on the outside, rather than hidden away beneath walls and façade.
Unfortunately, the Modern exhibit (1940s to 1970s) was closed, so we missed a lot of the Picassos, Pollacks and Warhols that are truly stunning. We were left with the Contemporary exhibit, which is bizarre, experiential and wonderful.
But perhaps not Mom’s cup of tea. Luckily, you don’t have to treat modern art museums like temples, so we made quick work of it.
We then headed off in the direction of the Picasso museum, but not before spotting some glasses that I thought were cool and trying on a lot of pairs. Everyone in Europe is wearing these cool glasses that have plastic rims, but metal arms, and I can’t seem to find them easily in the States.
We got to the Picasso museum, which is another hotel the artist lived in (this is a weird theme and maybe the translation is wrong). We saw lots of Picasso paintings, sculptures and pastiches. As well as his personal collection paintings from friends. It’s always strange but important to remember that he was a very talented figurative artist even in media that he isn’t known for.
We then ate on a street in Marais that is chock full of vegetarian restaurants. We ate at a bento box restaurant that I guess was Japanese but was mostly just weird. But reasonably good.
Having hit the point of art exhaustion, we set out for Montmarte. We surfaced in an immigrant neighborhood full of African shops selling clothing and foodstuffs. This part of Paris always reminds me that the place has a future, rather than just a glittering but long dead past. African immigrants start businesses in Europe at ludicrously higher rates than native born folks and are a great source of economic optimism in an otherwise mediocre picture of slow decline.
Anyway, walked up into Montmarte to the funicular that takes you up to Sacre Coeur. I’d never taken it before and I must say it’s preferable to the walk. We got to the top and spent the first ten minutes just taking in the panoramic view of Paris. Then we did something I’ve never done before — we actually went inside the church. It’s nice, but I’m not sure I can distinguish between old churches that well.
We then set out walking around Montmarte and saw the only vineyard in Paris, the I Love You wall, and the Black Cat cabaret (of poster fame). Thinking Mom would know what the Moulin Rouge was and forgetting some details about the neighborhood, we set out for Pigalle. I was explaining that it used to be a red light district where Impressionist painters drank absinthe in cafes and went to cabarets as it became apparent that it is still a bit of a red light district, just sans the famous painters. Mom thought this was hilarious. Undeterred, we still walked past the studio of Toulouse-Lautrec — famed for his fondness of the neighborhood. We then continued on into South Pigalle which has gentrified and become a happening place. A bit hungry, we stopped for a pain au chocolat and an almond croissant.
In pursuit of a champagne tasting, we popped into an acclaimed wine bar. They didn’t do tastings, but did have a fine champagne by the glass, which Mom got. I got a Bordeaux and grabbed some bottles of “natural wine” for home. Natural wines are all the rage in France and thus are hard to get at home. They don’t use any additives of course, but what makes them interesting is that they use wild yeast. So sometimes they are a little effervescent, sour or barnyard-y.
We then headed home for another indoor picnic of wine and cheese. Unpasteurized cheese gets funkier as it ages in air, so the cheese had gotten even weirder. Afterwards, we headed out to get up close to Notre Dame and to pop into Shakespeare and Company. Notre Dame is of course beautiful at night. But Shakespeare and Company. What a bookstore. I always ask for French literature in translation that the French love, but Americans don’t know about. I got Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere which covers the life and times of a man who was “a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire’s butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes.”
Just a completely insane guy I’d never heard of, written up amazingly by one of France’s most celebrated authors, who I also had never heard of. I read the book in one sitting on the way home. At the recommendation of one of the clerks, I also picked up two books by Annie Ernaux — “A Man’s Place” about her father and another about her mother. I finished “A Man’s Place” on the flight home as well.
The next day was dedicated to doing more normal, less touristy things. So we headed away from the central city to Canal St. Martin. Where we proceeded to walk along the canal, looking in shops and at homeless camps filled mostly with relatively well-kempt folks who I presumed were refugees. We ate Indonesian for lunch, which Mom didn’t like too much, but I love. And then continued strolling around peering in shop windows with what seemed like every other Parisian on a sunny Saturday. We came across a Chanel store and had to go in in search of Mom’s favorite, Number 22. Which of course they had (even though Harrod’s hadn’t). The lady who helped us was imminently patient and helpful. With that great success behind us, we barely noticed that we failed to find cool glasses at a reasonable price.
We stopped for a break at the Plaza of the Bastille, and decided to head to this beer bar in the outskirts of town to see what a more middle class Parisian life looks like. And to drink beer that is impossible to find in the US. They carry a lot of Cantillon, which I knew having been there for Zwanze Day the year before. We arrived a bit before opening and so sat in a park where kids were playing ping pong and a lady was having a psychotic break. Everyone ignored her for about 5 minutes, but when all the French people left, so did we. Luckily this bar, La Fine Mousse had opened and already attracted several other beer pilgrims.
To be polite I asked what was best and was given some sort of local stout. It was fine. But I was there to get the Cantillon I had been denied in Brussels. First, I ordered a Cantillon rose gambrinus (made with strawberries) for Mom and I to share. She didn’t completely hate it. Next up was the Kriek, a cherry sour. She hated it. Finally, was the show stopper, their Geuze. Surprisingly, Mom didn’t hate it, despite containing no fruit.
Having spent 90 euros on 3 beers, we decided to head home, where what we thought would have only been one meal became our final dinner in Paris. We got to bed early on that last night, so we could make it to Charles de Gaulle the next day without worrying.
And we did. We made it in time to have a piece of quiche and one last pain au chocolat. | https://medium.com/@andrewdornon/notes-on-showing-a-parent-around-europe-9985f8a43aef | ['Andrew Dornon'] | 2019-01-20 17:27:08.675000+00:00 | ['Ghent', 'London', 'Baby Boomer', 'Millenial', 'Parent'] |
“A vicious attempt by the antichrist (Dajjal) and Zionist forces to take over the world”. | Image by Istock
“The United States and Israel are the antichrist forces that pose the greatest threat to world peace.”
Ever since man was created, he has been fighting for the throne and crown, maybe it has been added to human instincts. And it was the habit that gave rise to the idea of creating one’s own country and land. As time went on, this passion grew along with it. The fact that the world today is divided into so many different countries and regions is a living example of this.
In the old days, when a country had to invade another country, it attacked with an Army and with heavy artillery. But now with the changing times, the style of fighting has also changed radically. Now wars are fought with the brain and modern technology. In these wars, regular troops and weapons do not attack any country. One country carries out remote control attacks inside another country. Drones are like an entire Army.
As we saw in early 2020 how drones hit their targets. Israel targeted Iran’s General Qasim soleimani on January 3, 2020, by drone. And now, recently almost two weeks ago, Israel again attacked inside Iran and targetted its nuclear scientist Mohsin Fakhri Zadeh. Both of these incidents were devastating and heartbreaking. Such incidents create hateful and provocative feelings against other countries. Behind all this, the United States is supporting Israel. Israel cannot take such bold steps without the support of the United States. The United States is baking terrorism around the world. The United States and Israel are still supporting ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and many other militants groups in Asia.
The world is sitting on a pile of dynamite right now, We cannot afford any kind of mistake, any kind of adventure, or any kind of negligence. A very simple cause can ignite this explosive world. And then there will be only destruction and piles of corpses behind, and nothing will be left. All countries of the world have to make wise decisions. All the countries that have atomic power must use their power for the welfare of poor people, not for their destruction.
There is only one goal behind all this and that goal is Greater Israel. Israel wants to go all out on this greater Israel issue, and wants all Islamic countries, especially Arab countries, to recognize it as soon as possible. Some Arab countries have been conquered by Israel through greed and some by force and threats. Israel has threatened to attack some Arab countries. Recently it attacked Lebanon’s capital Beirut on August 4, 2020. A deadly explosion that shook Lebanon’s capital. 150 were killed and more than 5,000 were seriously injured in that attack. The United States is behind all the homeless and refugees in the world. And yet Israel and the United States are constantly trying to find an excuse to attack Iran. It has been the nature of the United States to look for excuses when it wants to invade a country, such as Iraq. TK
Who will be accountable for the brutal murder of innocent children and civilians in that attack??? By doing all this, only feelings of hatred will remain in the hearts of those who survived. The fire of revenge against America and Israel will continue to burn in the hearts and minds of these survivors. Then this fire of vengeance will compel them to avenge the blood of their loved ones that have been shed so cruelly. when that happens, Muslims will once again be accused of terrorism, but no attempt will be made to find out the cause of terrorism.
“The fact is that unfortunately, the one who dies is also a Muslim and the one who is called a terrorist is also a Muslim.”
That is a fact that when any member of one’s family is killed brutally, the remnants of that family become more vengeful. The same thing has happened with these Islamic countries. Whenever they or their families were attacked, they always tried their best to take revenge. We all have the example of Afghanistan where all this oppression has been going on for 19 years. We all know very well that the United States launched a 9/11 false flag drama to invade Afghanistan. America started killing innocent children and people there, the Afghans were forced to took up arms. And then 19 years after the Afghan war, the United States is on the brink of disaster. When Afghans started fighting for their sovereignty and their rights, the world chanted the same slogan that Muslims are terrorists. Now after so many years of humiliation and defeat, the US is running away from here. According to a famous and great poet of the subcontinent, Mirza Ghalib Asadullah khan said:
Nikalna Khuld Se Aadam Ka Sunte Aaye The Lekin,
Bade Be-Aabru Hokar Tere Kooche Se Hum Nikle. We have heard about the dismissal of Adam from Heaven,
With a more humiliation, I am leaving the street on which you live…
With all these foolish actions, Israel is putting the peace of not only this region but the whole world at stake. Not only Israel but also the United States is guilty of destroying world peace.
The world has high hopes for Biden. Biden’s policy towards Iran is soft and he wants good and positive relations with it. The world believes that Biden is better than Trump because he is not an extremist. Biden will have to take some bold steps for the peace process and win the trust and confidence of the world.
An easy way to get rid of hatred, terrorism, and conspiracies here is the solution to all these problems:-
“There is only one policy and that is to live and let others live too”.
If the world wants to be the cradle of peace, then the “so-called” world powers must play their part. Countries that have been illegally occupied by other countries must be freed. They should be given the same freedom as the people of these countries want. Almost all the countries that have been illegally occupied are Islamic countries, such as Palestine, and occupied (JAK) Jammu and Kashmir by India. It is the responsibility of these “so_called” world powers to curb the growing state terrorism of Israel and India. If these steps are not taken in practice, then the desire for world peace will become a nightmare.
This world is a paradise on earth see this paradise and enjoy its beauty. It is the responsibility of all of us to make our paradise more beautiful and pleasant by planting trees and greenery in it and to do whatever we can to maintain its beauty. In this paradise, peace should be given a chance instead of hatred and conspiracies. Let’s pledge together today, that we will try to give peace a chance to get rid of the wrong policies that have only ruined the world. Leave a land for our future generations that is the cradle of love, peace, affection, and brotherhood. Our future generations may not even know the meaning of words like hate and conspiracy. We will treat those who lost their loved ones and lost their homes in these wars of hatred with great love and will win their hearts. These helpless people only need our attention and love.
It is the responsibility of the rich and powerful nations of the world to make efforts to resettle them. Create jobs and other opportunities for them. And all their losses should be compensated. If all these steps are taken, then this world will become a cradle of peace. And if these steps are not taken, then this world will look like hell. And hell belongs only to the devils, and not to human beings. It is also a bitter reality that the time it takes to destroy the world is probably ten times longer than it takes to fix it. But no matter how long it takes, we make this peace effort so that we can make this world a livable place.
“Let’s give peace a chance before it’s too late”. | https://medium.com/@nailaleo90/a-vicious-attempt-by-the-antichrist-dajjal-and-zionist-forces-to-take-over-the-world-86a49545ae26 | ['Naila Latif'] | 2021-03-03 23:35:03.493000+00:00 | ['Zionist', 'Antichrist Forces', 'Israel', 'USA', 'Terrorism'] |
What a vacation can teach you about life, happiness, and your career | Three years ago, I was having the time of my life. Managing a social media care team at an ambitious tech startup meant 12-hour workdays, quite a bit of travel, and very little sleep. It was crazy, but I was loving it.
I’d just made the switch to marketing after 10 long years in sales and tech support, and it was my first startup experience. Surprisingly, adjusting to the new workplace was easy. I was working with a great bunch of people, and even the long hours were fun. My first startup job was off to a great start!
My first startup job was off to a great start!
Fast forward 10 months and I wasn’t feeling the love any more. The daily commute was too long, and I was working late evenings on most days. We were growing fast — from 30 to 500+ people in a year — and yet, work was piling up. I’d be working in the cab on the way to the office, on my way back, and some more at home. It was exhausting.
Left with no time for family, friends, and myself, the pressure of being always-on was getting to me. I was so frustrated that I wanted to quit.
Vacation, all I ever wanted
I had to get away, so I took a vacation instead, and it changed my life. The catalyst? A family of digital nomads that I met on the beaches of Gokarna, India. Ann and Lavie were traveling the world with three kids. They were working full-time jobs, being full-time parents, homeschooling the kids, and traveling all the time! I soon realized that while it wasn’t as easy as they made it look, I could learn a lot from them. My experiences from that vacation helped me put things in perspective, reassess my priorities, and achieve a better work-life balance.
Here’s what that impromptu vacation taught me about life, happiness, and my career:
No job is worth your health, really Good mental health unlocks a new you Happiness is in the now, not the distant future
No job is worth your health, really
A paycheck is important, of course, but stressful jobs can cause harmful health disorders and more. Hectic workdays meant I got by on just five to six hours of sleep and skipped meals without batting an eyelash. Not a big deal, until I started feeling tired and depressed all day, every day. Recurring migraines made me less productive, so I put in more hours to get things done, worsening the situation. Taking a vacation gave me a much-needed break to re-assess these habits and observe how they were impacting my health.
I tried to take better care of myself after the vacation. I talked to my manager about the situation, got better at delegating work, and tried to stop letting work follow me home. Years of slouching in a chair had unfortunate side-effects on my waistline, so I followed a friend’s advice to do a little cardio every day.
Taking lunch breaks with colleagues helped avoid the temptation to skip meals. The hardest part was getting out of work on time, but by doing that I could go to bed early and get at least 8 hours of sleep every day. Surprisingly, I found myself being more productive even though I was working fewer hours than I used to.
Good mental health unlocks a new you
A healthy mind in a healthy body simply does better work. Moodswings, anxiety, and depression are invisible productivity-killers, so managing mental health should be a top priority. Good mental health gives us a sense of purpose and the ability to deal with everyday challenges — at work and at home. It’s as important as physical well-being and unlocks the best version of ourselves.
Long work hours, bad eating habits, and little sleep had turned me into a grouch with a very short fuse. The vacation was a chance to de-stress and relax, and Ann’s passion for meditation turned out to be infectious. Before long, I was meditating every day to get my thoughts in order after a long day’s work. The best part? It helped me become more self-aware, so I was now more motivated and less anxious at work every day.
Try it for yourself with apps for guided meditation like Calm or Headspace.
Happiness is in the now, not the distant future
Pursuing happiness is all well and good, but it’s important that we focus on being happy in the now. Being miserable now is not a magic bullet to future happiness; I’d been chasing a vague idea of what success might look like while losing sight of the why.
At that point, I’d been working for about a decade, transitioning from sales to tech support to marketing. I’d moved cities half a dozen times and the last move was just a year ago! This vacation was the first time I stopped to take stock and I had a lot to be happy about. But I wasn’t… and I wasn’t sure what I could do to fix it.
There was no easy or instant solution. Lavie and I chatted about how he adopted a minimalist backpacker lifestyle and gave up a comfortable job to travel the world as a freelance photographer, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I like my comforts and I love shopping too much. ;) But I did learn from them how less can be more, and I saw for myself how a better work-life balance could lead to a happier, more fulfilling life. | https://medium.com/flock-chat/what-a-vacation-can-teach-you-about-life-happiness-and-your-career-9effd11314b9 | ['Kesava Mandiga'] | 2019-12-24 14:24:37.757000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Work Life Balance', 'Life Lessons', 'Vacation', 'Startup'] |
Your Team Doesn’t Need Eleven Goalies | My answer is effectively the consequence of two beliefs about leading people:
In particular, my focus is on mastery. Autonomy will come in the day to day as I lead the team: delegating things effectively, generally treating everyone like adults, and cutting down on dumb process. Purpose will come from the company’s goals and my ability to set each person’s context within those goals. How the team is structured effects mastery far more, since the shape of the team influences how the work is distributed.
My goal is to line up the shape of the team with the shape of the work. To grow their mastery, each person needs to practice on something near the edge of their skills. They each need something challenging enough to learn from, but not so challenging as to overwhelm them.
If my team needs to make a pile of CRUD APIs, I’m not going to build a team of world class type theorists to do the work. They’ll get bored. Then they’ll leave. But someone fresh out of college, who still finds that basic sort of work a challenge? They’ll be happy to do the stuff others on the team consider drudgery. Vice versa, if my team needs to make a static analysis framework the new grad will probably be so lost that they don’t even learn much from the struggle. | https://medium.com/@matt-schellhas/your-team-doesnt-need-eleven-goalies-9b5fdd2dc7f4 | ['Matt Schellhas'] | 2020-11-04 19:24:56.218000+00:00 | ['Engagement', 'Team Building', 'Leadership'] |
How Google Designers Adapt Material | Material Design provides a set of tools and guidance to help you make informed decisions about the different UX design directions you could take when creating an app. But what happens when the guidelines don’t fit your product needs? And what happens at Google when a designer is working on a product that doesn’t quite fit the guidelines?
The Material guidelines adapt. In this article we’ll look at two Google apps — Keep and Inbox — to understand how they not only bend some of the rules, but how they help shape the Material Design guidelines as a whole.
Inbox: Exploring the typographic grid
Designing a new email web application is an extremely ambitious undertaking at Google, especially when it appears alongside an established product like Gmail. The Inbox team set out to create a denser UI as well as a unique user experience and brand identity while playing by the new Material Design rules. While the Inbox design team was putting together their initial designs, Material Design was still being developed. This presented the team with a great opportunity: The potential to establish what the Material Design web standards could be, while solving the problem of designing for dense UIs.
Designing dense UIs
The initial design for Inbox wasn’t flexible enough, as the grid only had space for seven emails on a 13-inch screen. This was far too small when compared to Gmail, which could show 16-20 emails. Tim Smith, Visual Design Lead for inbox explains:
“If you open Gmail and Inbox side by side, there is a big difference in visual density. This also turned out to be one of the greatest challenges; finding the ideal balance of content and breathing room.”
By making adjustments to the grid, row heights, and how type presented, Inbox managed to set a design standard for dense web UIs and display 12–17 emails, each inside a Material Design card. The font size and interface were also designed to change and adjust to a person’s device. For example, the subject line in an email will increase in font size depending on an increase in screen size.
Inbox was designed to fit as much information as possible even at small screen sizes, setting a Material Design standard for dense web interfaces.
Using colors, imagery, and icons to give context to the user
Inbox’s visual distinction from Gmail was handled by their use of header images, which relate to the content within bundled emails. If someone using Inbox plans a trip to the New York City, for example, they’ll be shown an image of the Manhattan skyline. Inbox also uses a vast array of icons in a left navigation drawer that are colored according to their function in the app. For example, when a user clicks or taps the green “Done” button, the background color of the header bar also changes to green, keeping the user informed of the change and context.
This use of contextual imagery is another defining characteristic of Inbox’s distinct brand experience.
Inbox will add imagery to a bundle of emails to give them meaning. For instance, plane ticket and hotel reservation emails for a trip to New York show a picture of the city’s skyline.
Designing a header bar for the web
Another challenge for the team was the design of the app bar. The initial proposal was a variable header that didn’t stretch to fill the full browser window, but instead matched the width of the content.
“We worked through about a dozen different variations of this concept until ultimately landing on the full width header bar you see today. We also worked through several prototypes to determine the best search field styling.” Tim Smith, Visual Design Lead, Inbox
Since the cards in Inbox expand and contract, this meant having to adjust the header every time the user interacted with an email. The app bar also contains a search field and a menu that displays other Google apps. This approach lets Inbox remain responsive without complicating the interface.
Keep: Adapting navigational patterns
Keep is a cross-platform, note-taking application that expands and collapses Material cards on screen to focus a user’s attention while adding notes. A modified bottom navigation bar also lets people create a new note quickly with a single tap.
Encouraging actions with empty states and motion
Empty states typically occur when there isn’t any content to show to the user. Keep uses this design pattern by giving people a blank canvas on which to draft their thoughts. The spareness of the UI encourages the user to explore different elements in the app bar search, which expands to reveal icon filters; a sorting menu that allows users to toggle between list view and grid view; and a left navigation drawer to adjust the app’s main settings. The cards expand and contract to give users context.
Keep uses empty states to encourage people to create new notes
“Motion is something we have put a lot of effort into — from the way notes animate into the stream view, to the way they transition when you open and close them.” Genevieve Cuevas, Software engineer, Google Keep
Using the right Material patterns for your app: bottom navigation vs. FAB
When redesigning the app, Keep’s team of designers and developers pored over the Material Design patterns and ended up applying components like cards which help distinguish notes from one another, a left navigation drawer that makes settings for the app easily available, and contextual menus that change to fit the context of each note — like a note with checkboxes displaying a menu to check all items in a list. Combined, these different design patterns create a clean and functional user experience that adapts depending on the context and needs of the user, a key factor in Keep’s simplicity and easy-to-use interface.
During the redesign process, the Keep team experimented with some of Material’s core navigation by testing an expandable FAB in lieu of the existing bottom navigation. For context, the bottom navigation offered a simple one-tap call to action to create new notes. The new FAB required two taps: one to expand options, and a second tap to create notes.
“When we launched the FAB, some of our users complained about losing the one-tap create note behavior.” Genevieve Cuevas, Software engineer, Google Keep
This change seemed regressive to people who previously used the app and were accustomed to single-tap navigation. Keep’s journey, testing out and ultimately abandoning core Material components like the FAB, stands as a great example of choosing the Material guidance that works best as opposed to shoehorning behavior that doesn’t fit the product.
Guides not rules
Both Inbox and Keep teams utilized the Material Design guidelines, using them to help design and develop their applications. When they came across a use case that didn’t work for their product, they adapted their designs accordingly. Material Design offers a lot of guidance, built on years of UX experience throughout Google, but it can’t cover everything. Hopefully these examples above show that you can adapt it to suit your needs while still conforming to the overall spirit of the guidelines. | https://medium.com/google-design/how-google-designers-adapt-material-e2818ad09d7d | ['Mustafa Kurtuldu'] | 2017-09-12 16:37:56.380000+00:00 | ['Google', 'Material Design', 'UI', 'Design', 'UX'] |
Do Medium Followers Really Matter? The Results | Five days ago, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I wanted to see what happens when you write an article, drop it in the open waters of Medium (meaning not in a publication), and not promote it on any Facebook groups — or anywhere else for that matter. I let it fend for itself; sink or swim.
In the months since Medium implemented the new MPP and algorithms, I had a theory I wanted to test. I thought this would be the best way to do it, and now, the results are in. Can you guess what happened?
The Audience Myth
The piece is a 1-minute read, with an average read-time of 33 seconds. Fourteen people clicked on it, but only nine scrolled to the bottom. Nine people, out of 1200 followers. That tells me that the percentage of us who actually pay attention to the emails we receive from Medium is very small, and those of us who actually really ‘follow’ the people we follow, is even smaller.
(screenshot from author’s stats)
(screenshot from author’s earnings)
We’re led to believe — mostly by our own naive assumption — that a larger following on Medium automatically means more eyes on our work; the potential of a bigger audience. Although this is true in theory, in practice, it’s a very different story.
The idea is that when you follow someone, you’re going to get an email or notification (unless you disable them) when they publish something new. But in the Medium world — and I know I can’t be the only one who feels this way — we get so many email notifications that it’s sometimes just easier to mass-delete them without even reading to see what it is.
If the vast majority of followers have adopted this habit, then the odds of having more eyes on your work has drastically diminished. I always believed a large following meant a big audience; in retrospect, I can see that it’s only an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.
We’re left with three options for getting reads;
You get featured on someone’s ‘Your Daily Read’ list, and they actually click and read. Curation; although we all know how unreliable, sporadic and random that can be. Self-promotion; the go-to and most “reliable” method, for most writers. Notice how I put “reliable” in quotation marks? That wasn’t a mistake…
How Effective Is Self-Promotion?
You work hard — sometimes for hours — pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into an article you’re extremely proud of. Now what?
You click on the little bird at the bottom of the screen and send it out into the big bad world of Twitter. You copy that link and proceed to drop it in every Facebook group’s daily share threads — if you’re into good karma, you click and read a few of the other pieces shared by writers, and you wait. And you wait, and you wait some more.
We all know from experience that we get more reads when we promote our work this way — but exactly how effective is it? From personal experience, I found that it depends on what you’re promoting. Here are some examples below to prove my point:
Here are four separate pieces of mine, all of which have been promoted on all of the Facebook groups.
(screenshots are taken from author’s stats)
Where Have All The Readers Gone is a story about Medium readership. Apparently, everyone loves stories about Medium, but this isn’t a big surprise.
Born Of A Virgin Mother was a story about myself — a vulnerable personal essay. it performed worse than my non-promoted experiment piece.
Spilling Tears is a poem. It has the same amount of reads as my experiment piece.
And the last piece, Somewhere In Ireland, is a piece of fiction — as you can see, it only received twelve reads, even though I probably promoted it as much as the Medium piece.
This tells me a few things;
People on Medium love reading stories about Medium — surprise, surprise!
— surprise, surprise! People aren’t big on personal essays unless the writer is someone like Shannon Ashley (no offence, I love Shannon!)
unless the writer is someone like Shannon Ashley (no offence, I love Shannon!) Unless you’re a known “Medium Poet” (and maybe even then?), your poetry will kind of slip through the cracks.
will kind of slip through the cracks. People may or may not have an unfounded belief that fiction doesn’t belong on Medium? I don’t know…it’s just a thought.
Is There A Verdict?
I think if I were to make an informed conclusion based on the facts above — black on white — I would have to say that if you’re on Medium just because you like to write and you want to share your words with others, regardless of the response, then poetry, fiction and personal essays are okay.
I would like to add that if you’re looking to make money with your work on Medium, you have to keep in mind what people seem to want to read: Medium articles, writing about writing, and trending topics. Oh, and I’ve also noticed that people like a good argument, so writing something that will get people riled up might also get you that cold hard cash!
As for me, despite the results of my experiment, I feel certain in my decision to keep writing what I want. I’ll write the Medium pieces, the writing about writing, but I’ll also keep pouring my heart and soul out into poetry, and allowing my creativity to shine in the form of fictional characters. | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/do-medium-followers-really-matter-85bca0c21ea7 | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2020-11-02 17:26:54.645000+00:00 | ['Followers', 'Audience', 'Writers On Writing', 'Experiment', 'Writing'] |
Bigger Than Us#116: Charging the Electrification Decade | Bigger Than Us#116: Charging the Electrification Decade
Lionel is an accomplished Product Management Leader with expertise in Operations Management, Financial Management (Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow), Lean Six Sigma, Supplier Development, Strategic Sourcing and Product Quality Management. His experience spans General Electric where he graduated from the highly regarded Operations Management Leadership Program (OMLP) and owned Profit & Loss Responsibility as Manufacturing Shop Operations Manager of a High Volume Production Facility and three Fast Moving Innovative Start Ups (SpaceX, Faraday Future & Romeo Power) where he has held various roles including Director of Procurement, Vice President of Engineering and Chief Operating Officer. Lionel holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Syracuse University and an MPS in Supply Chain Management from Penn State University.
Bigger Than Us Episode 116
This transcription has been lightly edited for readability.
Host Raj Daniels 02:22
If you are asked to share something interesting about yourself, what would it be?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 02:26
It would be that I am an avid musician. My primary instruments are percussion but I write dabbling, some singing, and some poetry so that’s something interesting about myself that I love to share. So love music outside of work.
Host Raj Daniels 02:42
Have you published any work?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 02:44
No, I’m in the in not publish any more in the background. You can hear my recordings and some of the rising stars US Steel orchestra music that’s out on iTunes or some of the other music platforms, but that’s about it.
Host Raj Daniels 03:02
And you said percussion, percussion is very broad. Anything particular?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 03:06
My specialty is drums.
Host Raj Daniels 03:09
And in drums, can you narrow down?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 03:12
Drum set, I do bongos I do congas. Timbales, you name it I do it. If you can make a beat out of it with any of your limbs, call me.
Host Raj Daniels 03:27
I have a video of my daughter when she was about seven years old with Home Depot buckets turned upside down if he’s playing on them.
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 03:33
That’s awesome. And if you Google me, I there’s actually a YouTube video of me when I was at Syracuse University, where they did a feature on me while I was in Syracuse University marching band. That’ll give you a flavor of how much I love to perform. If you just see my joy, you know, as I’m performing for the fans.
Host Raj Daniels 03:50
What led you to the drums?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 03:55
What led me to the drums was really my grandfather. He’s always had music playing around the home. And I would always be tapping. And I just loved making a rhythm. So just listening to music. And just coming forward. I said, look, I want to learn how to do this properly and be really good at it. So that’s why I’m actually known for throughout, the Virgin Islands, in addition to you know what we’ll talk about that Romeo Power. But that’s what led me into it.
Host Raj Daniels 04:24
That’s a beautiful storyline. Oh, thank you for sharing. So Lionel, since you mentioned Romeo Power. Can you give the audience an overview of Romeo Power and your role at the organization?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 04:37
I’m the president and chief executive officer at Romeo power. We are a leading-edge battery technology company. And our mission is to advance energy technology. And our vision is to end energy poverty. So really, and truly everybody that’s working at Romeo Power so hard on a daily basis, but all about making green energy accessible to all 8 billion people across the globe.
So right now, we’re really focused on the commercial vehicle market. Really, we have some great partnerships that we’ve been announcing and been talking about over the past couple of weeks since our announcement of the spec merger. So we’re really focused on gaining share in that market, while also seeding other industries such as marine, aviation and mining. So, Raj, we have a real what we say our industry agnostic product portfolio, and we really like to dive into and give our customers the most safe, most reliable, most energy-dense, and most configurable offering, no matter the industry. So that’s what we’re really about. And it’s all in the vein of again, this ending that energy poverty.
So our premise is put the best products in the hands of customers reinvest the profits into making the product even more insanely better, better than our competitors, into delighting our customers, to bring the cost down to a point where we can either do second life offerings or even some energy storage platforms, to areas that are really, really screaming for green energy.
Host Raj Daniels 06:18
So you mentioned competitors, obviously, the big ones in the room are Panasonic, Tesla. Can you share how Romeo differentiates from those two?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 06:25
So we differentiate again, just from we do the tough stuff, okay, so the reason we are focused on the commercial vehicle market is because if you’re a fleet manager, you don’t want any compromises in ROI, or profit per mile. And that’s the way we’ve always designed. So we break everything in house before it goes on road, like I said, to make sure it’s the most safe and most reliable, our configurability is second to none. So within our products, we support anything as low as 300 volts, to as high as more than 1000 volts in the same pack offering. Okay, so this really allows our customers to put their vehicles on the road, sometimes 18 to 24 months quicker than our competitors. Because compared to competitors, if you have to switch your voltage level, midstream, you’re looking at a redesign with our competitors, rather than us, we’re changing our one part, which is our current collector technology, and shipping you essentially the same product.
So those are some of the ways we differentiate ourselves, really focusing on safety, reliability, configurability, and energy density.
Host Raj Daniels 07:35
So you mentioned configurability, if I’m understanding correctly, and please correct me if I’m wrong, they can use the same chassis, but just changed the power output. Is that correct?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 07:44
Yes, change the chassis, change the voltage to support a different system level. So for example, one of our partners with the pack that we partner with them on, could support 405 volts, 805 volts, and 1000 volts, all within the same pack. We just changed one current collector, for example. And also we use the configurable mantra. So we use a strategy that we call the building block approach. So for example, we have packs as small as 30-kilowatt hours, for example. So some of our customers, they’ll say, hey, on this vehicle, I want 660-kilowatt hours. So obviously, that’s two. But on the other vehicle, I want larger than that, where there’s 120. And going so all you do is scale up and down your needs based upon the capacity building block that we offer.
Host Raj Daniels 08:39
And so when they’re making decisions regarding the different battery packs, you mentioned use cases, can you give some use cases of what kinds of vehicles?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 08:47
We supply into any of the commercial vehicle space. So our portfolio covers anywhere from a class three, all the way up to severe duty class eight. So anywhere within that realm. Why the customers love working with us is if you’re a customer, you have six or seven different vehicle platforms, for the first time really you have a one-stop shop in Romeo Power, because we support your minibusses, your school buses. If you have a severe duty trash truck or cement truck, are we up to a long haul under one roof at Romeo. we could support all of those vehicles for you.
Host Raj Daniels 09:23
And you mentioned also marine aviation and mining. Can you kind of dig deeper a little bit into those three?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 09:33
First and foremost, we worked on a battery management system because we to us that the firmware is as important or even more important than the hardware. But what we did with the hardware is we wanted to create an industry-agnostic portfolio as I mentioned in the opening, and what we did is really focused on developing our module. Our module is set up in a way where at the module level, you have a huge portion of the battery management system, you have structural integrity, for example, Raj our module can do 25 G’s in any direction at the module level, which simplifies the pack level design and also the vehicle level design.
We have the configurability of the current collector technology that I taught that I talked to you about. So, our module has eight different voltage variants that are possible with our module architecture. Also, you have integrated thermal management. So we have a proprietary thermal management technology that allows us to keep our temperatures across the entire battery pack less than 40 degrees C. It’s actually tighter than that but less than 40 degrees C is what we tell the market, our customers are delighted with how much tighter we can keep it.
So my point to you is since we put so much secret sauce and so much competitive advantage into the module that really allows us to go after these additional markets that are kind of behind in terms of the adoption. So our Orion platform, for example, the same Orion platforms that are going into commercial vehicles are already in electric vehicles, for example, that’s testing fine. And without going into marine applications, as well as some mining operations with the same Orion battery pack platform, which is the goal from the beginning.
That’s why I see this as the electrification decade because you have us at the center being the nucleus of this electrification decade. And everyone is finally ready, and right to take this thing forward as an entire value chain.
Host Raj Daniels 11:27
So let’s talk about thermal management for a moment. How is your battery pack different from the competitors I mentioned earlier, specifically around thermal management?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 11:40
First and foremost, what I talked to you about is we don’t make the battery cells, but we make it our business to know as much or more than make up the cells. So we have a battery cell test laboratory, where we’ve tested upwards of 200 cells and counting from 10 different players and counting. So we can tell you who is the best now, who is up next, and who is a few years out in terms of safety, reliability, and innovation. Okay, so we really, really, and truly start with the cell selection as the gambit. Raj, I like to say that anybody that says a cell is a commodity, they are absolutely missing the mark, they are not. They are not created equal. And the cell that you pick and put into your product is extremely critical.
But after that, from a trauma management standpoint, like I said, our technology allows us to keep that temperature difference less than 40 degrees C across the entire platform, which essentially gives the cells a home where that feeling great allows you to fast charger, a charge faster, allows you to manage the degradation of the battery over time, etc. So that’s how it really defaults. And again, that’s all integrated into our module. Technology with auto is it’s not really integrated, other than some, you know, a critical few players to…management is extremely, extremely important and is one of our key differentiating factors.
Host Raj Daniels 13:13
So I’m not an expert by any means. But I’m understanding that yours is driven via software, whereas some others might be driven via some kind of liquid cooling? Is that correct?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 13:23
It’s a combination, right. So if you ask me, oh, what’s the one thing it’s not one thing. So inside Romeo outside, we touched on the battery cells a little bit but outside of not making the battery cells. We have every other competency from the battery value chain standpoint inside of Romeo. So from the battery management system standpoint, we do that all in house. From that we write our own code. And on the hardware side, we pick our own components size. The board’s even designed the test apparatuses, before sending them out to our PCB partners. So we have a fully enclosed by the management system team, fully enclosed electromechanical engineering, structural engineering, thermal engineering, and even down to mass production. So it’s a combination of all of those things. There have been all of those competencies inside Romeo allows us to design beyond the battery. So our product offerings can walk with any power train, any integrator, any OEM, any fleet manager. And the reason we did that is because we did not want to be beholden to any one customer and anyone partner. Having those competencies inside allows us to open the floodgates in terms of addressable market and opportunity for Romeo.
Host Raj Daniels 14:46
Sounds like a great strategy. Let’s double click on aviation for a moment. Where do you think we are before we see fully electric?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 14:52
We’re a ways out from it, I’m not going to put a time a timeline on it. And the vehicle side, I call this the electrification decade. I really do believe that between 2020 and 2030, we’re going to see some amazing things on the vehicle side. Now I know in our aviation business, there’s billions of dollars being spent there from an electrification innovation standpoint, they’re a ways out. So what we’ve been doing is developing partnerships early, getting our partners standing behind our technology, and essentially growing with them from an innovation standpoint. So when they are ready to electrify the masses, we will be right there with them. So between let’s say, now and ’25 Look, you will see electrified flights, you know, test fleets doing all of that, so you will see that, so within the electrification decade, as we call it, you’ll see advances in the aviation standpoint, but mass adoption for commercialization. I think you’re a couple of your ways out even farther than the electrification decade. From what I’m seeing today.
I’ve lived needing that energy. If I had that energy, I could have read another book, I could have did something more productive, or I could run my business more, or I could get some predict productivity out. So I’m speaking because I grew up with that. I grew up impoverished from the energy standpoint.
Host Raj Daniels 16:05
It sounds like an exciting future. I recently interviewed one of the founders of Rewiring America. And he feels the same way regarding this being the decade of electrification.
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 16:15
It truly is. And especially at Romeo. Look, we have let’s talk about some tailwinds. Especially at Romeo Power, and I’m excited about as a CEO of the company. So besides the industry, agnostic market, leading battery technology portfolio, we have some key strategic partnerships that, if you allow me some time to touch on, right, so we have a great partnership with BorgWarner. So that the Wisco high growth business plan really allows us to continue optimizing our manufacturing system, get cost downs in our supply base, and really focus on getting a share in the European and Asian markets.
Then we have Heritage Environmental, which we have a battery cycling, Second Life partnership that we’re very excited about. And standing up was part of that partnership. Heritage is going to electrify a minimum of 500 vehicles with Romeo Power technology insight. So again, that’s that will give us the opportunity to work with a myriad of OEM partners to really be in this pilot program and participate in the production portion of it. So you got the recycling portion, and you have any electrification portion. And then we have our partnership with Republic Services, which is a strategic investor in Romeo Power, and the intent is to partner with them on a myriad of energy initiatives for decades to come. So we have leading-edge technology, amazing partnerships. But then as you look, you know better than most you have the regulatory tailwinds anywhere from California to 12 plus US states, to the European Union, and even China. There’s mandates that saying, look, you have to electrify especially from the commercial vehicle standpoint. And if that’s not enough, we also have the other tailwinds of the fleet managers, and or the original equipment manufacturers committed to really driving the electrification strategies forward.
That’s why I see this as the electrification decade because you have us at the center being the nucleus of this electrification decade. And everyone is finally ready, and right to take this thing forward as an entire value chain.
Host Raj Daniels 18:29
So let’s add some clarity to the three things that you said. First of all, I’m familiar with BorgWarner, because I used to be in the automotive industry about 20 years ago, but for those that are not familiar, can you share a little bit about BorgWarner?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 18:41
So BorgWarner is a multi-billion-dollar company that’s really reputable in the automotive space. They have a myriad of products and they just closed their acquisition of Delphi. But anyway, for the motor, gearbox, onboard charger, power, electronics, etc. They have an offering for okay and board one has much I don’t want to speak to speak for Fred, the CEO of BorgWarner. But essentially, they are really set up well, to take advantage of however the war shakes out. So they’re in a prime position to continue being a cutting edge ICE component provider, a cutting edge hybrid provider, and with the partnership with us a cutting edge electrification provider.
So Raj, if you look at it, just zooming out a little bit with BorgWarner closing the acquisition of Delphi BorgWarner, Delphi, which is part of one or Romeo Power, you have Romeo Power battery, technology, battery management system and packs within BorgWarner. Delphi is probably like electronics, gearbox motors, inverters, onboard chargers and off-board chargers. We have the ability to put forth a really compelling power train offering. So I think that’s something that’s being not talked about enough. But that’s part of our strategy together.
Host Raj Daniels 20:10
And for those of you listening, if you drive any European car, there’s an extremely high probability, there are BorgWarner parts in that car. And you also mentioned Second Life offerings. Can you break that down a little bit?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 20:23
Sure. So at Heritage Environmental is two things. So we have, we have a recycling partnership, which I’ll touch on real quick. More than 90% of the materials in the battery value chain today is not recycled. Okay, so we have as a strategy and a goal with our partnership with Heritage Environmental is really having that be zero percent, we want all materials, be able to be recycled, put back into the front of the process, and producing high performing battery cells, battery modules, battery packs. So we’re very excited about that.
From the recycling standpoint, Heritage Environmental has some proprietary recycling methods that they currently employ, and will continue to develop over time. So the recycling portion, that’s our partnership, and so on the second life. So we design our product with end of life in mind. Why is that important? That’s important, because as we’re with our partners, at the end of life of the vehicle, if you will, let’s say that’s what seven or 10 years, we’ll have a lot of juice if you will let will have a high percentage of battery retention, and then you get into several things. So with our offerings, we can either take that, instead of recycling it with so much value left in it, we can power some buildings, for example, we could take a bunch of commercial vehicle batteries, string them together in kind of a decentralized grid. Also, we can leave it in the vehicle and maybe do some vehicle to grid application as well.
Let’s say another example, Raj, let’s say you own a big construction firm, you’re on a job site for two to three months, and you just need a small battery bank available for some backup power, you could use the battery packs for that as well. Okay, there’s also leasing models that may come into play, because there’s so much capacity left. So my point is, when we say Second Life, it will depend, and especially the way we design our product, there’s a lot of ways that our batteries can take on a fruitful Second Life after coming out of the vehicle initially.
Host Raj Daniels 22:44
You know, I love that view regarding end of life. Is that your supply chain background that gives you that vision for end of life?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 22:51
No, it’s not my supply chain background is actually my background coming up. Growing up in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Going back to you know why I’m doing. So I started this to make sure you know, my grandmother has light every day. So one thing I’ll talk about, even today in the Virgin Islands, electricity can go off for up to 18 hours a day, even today, and that’s the US Virgin Islands, by the way. So I grew up in a world where you know, the electricity going off is an expectation. And it hasn’t got better. I’m talking about from the time I’m a kid to even now. Right? So that came from me trying to understand how can we help ensure electricity in the hands of people that need it? So whenever I talk about this, normally people think about I’m not saying you know, I don’t think it’s right.
But most people say oh, well, let’s talk about Africa, these other places that don’t have it. While I want your viewers to know that there’s an energy throughout some of the Caribbean, including the US Virgin Islands, and that’s what’s really driving because I’ve lived it. I’ve lived needing that energy. If I had that energy, I could have read another book, I could have did something more productive, or I could run my business more, or I could get some predict productivity out. So I’m speaking because I grew up with that. I grew up impoverished from the energy standpoint. And that’s where the end of life thinking came from.
Host Raj Daniels
That is really interesting. And you know, you mentioned the islands. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing several people that have done work in the islands. And one of the things that I didn’t realize initially and you know, others might not too, is just the sheer cost of energy that set the islands because they don’t actually produce everything has to be imported.
Lionel Selwood, Jr.
Yes, right, Raj. And, you know, I apologize if this stat is off, but if we stated, I am pretty sure we would be in the top three to five most expensive states in the United States of America if we were a state, but we’re a territory. So it is terrible. And that’s, that’s what’s really driving the energy poverty, the ending energy poverty, and I’m really serious about it. And everyone that walks in the door on the first day, if I’m in the facility as they’re going through their onboarding, you know, I impart and everybody our mission and vision. We’ll be busy with commercial vehicles, we got to execute continue on in the business of our partners continue being the safest, most reliable, most energy-dense, most configurable offering. But that’s not the end-all, be all. We’re all recent, and trying to get better on a daily basis. So that my son doesn’t have to sit down and talk to Raj or you know, who comes after about the same challenges that we’re talking about.
Host Raj Daniels 25:53
You know, I like that vision. And I like to play a game, you know, magic 2025, 2030. But kind of walk me through, you know, in your mind, let’s say, Romeo is able to help end energy poverty, what does that roadmap look like?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 26:13
This is a multi-generational endeavor. Okay, so let me make sure I say that. So the magic one, over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to be busy, mostly with the commercial vehicle sector. Okay. So I think more than 70% of commerce is done by truck if I’m not mistaken. So we’re really going to be focused there and performing in this sector. But like you and I talked about at the top of the program, with silently seeding, that the next frontiers, if you will, the aviation, the marine, the mining apparatuses are industries as well. So you will see us really starting those industries starting to take off with our product inside of it.
So what you’ll see over the next five to 10, as I sit as a CEO of the company, is significant market share from the commercial vehicle space from an electrification standpoint, and significant and growing share also, in what we see as the frontier industries is what we call them, which is, again, the marine, aviation, mining, etc. So you see us being busy, not only with what we have today, we have some exciting innovations that will be executed upon within the next five to 10 years that you’ll see play a hand in us continue to take market share. And as part of the internet energy poverty, as we become a self-sustaining business, you’re really good to see us be some more filling traffic efforts, as as we go over the next five to 10 years as well. So whether that’s again, taking batteries that I have in the field, and let’s say deploying it in the Virgin Islands, or deploying it somewhere that’s needed. So being really selective and pointed about advancing our vision, the mission advancing and energy technology that’s happening every day, that’s inherent innovation is what we do.
But to get the eight ball moving towards the end in energy, poverty, you’ll see us really being pointed about maybe some philanthropic efforts are standing up or energy storage business in pointed locations across the globe.
Host Raj Daniels 28:27
Now, you mentioned your grandmother earlier, and some of the challenges you had growing up. And the question I have is, how do you balance taking a multi-generational viewpoint and maintaining, you know, tactical goals on a daily basis?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 28:44
Sure. So that comes with mentality. So first and foremost, the fact that I’m talking to you, Raj, is amazing to me. So let me say, let me say that I don’t come from a place where this was supposed to happen, or I have the privilege of talking to you. As a CEO of the company, it comes from one being grounded in that fact. Okay, really thinking about? How did I get here, meaning, really standing on the shoulders of giants, I mean, anywhere from my grandmother to my wife to my mentors, right? So being grounded in that first and foremost, to be able to stand up straight and assess, but how you do it is look, you got to perform. You have to be able to connect the dots and see, okay, you’re trying to end energy poverty, the way you actually make headwinds in doing that is becoming a self-sustaining business.
The way you become a self-sustaining business is to make sure you’re claiming your strategy. Make sure you’re extremely clear in the short, medium and long term goals that need to be executed in order to reach them. So I like to say I’m always at least 10 years ahead. Okay. And that’s what I need to know and plan out. How do I get to that 10 years?
So right, something I’ll tell you is my first day in General Electric, they were going around the table. And they were saying, what do you want to be? What do you want to be? When it got to me? I said I want to be the chief executive of General Electric. I mean, seriously, it’s probably crazy at the time. And obviously, I’m not the CEO, of General Electric. But you know, what I’m the CEO of a company, I said, is the nucleus of electrification. And we’re really going to be on the leading edge of green energy accessibility. So my point to you is I set that goal. And I charted out how to get there. And nobody’s perfect, right. But you have to be able to clearly see what the playing field is, how do you get to be in a self-sustaining business? And it’s all in the vein of your multi-generational endeavor. That’s how I look at it.
Go beyond your title. First, do your job really well. Really, really well. But go beyond it. It is not enough to say that’s not my job. If that’s not my job, at a minimum, your job is to connect with the person whose job it is if you truly feel that way, and come to a common ground, how you move forward, collectively…
Host Raj Daniels 30:59
That’s a beautiful way to look at it. You mentioned GE. You’ve got some very impressive logos on your resume, GE, SpaceX, Faraday, what are some of the most valuable lessons that you’d say you’ve learned about yourself on your journey?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 31:17
I’ll give you a couple. In terms of resiliency, and adaptability is a must. So I’m extremely resilient and extremely adaptable. That’s, that’s the first, first and foremost I learn about myself on this journey. The second is impossible is nothing. So not only coming up, and just my family, my grandmother again, just jiving look, you can be anything you want to be, you just need to apply yourself. And you’re gonna make some sacrifices along the way. But it really in my professional life, it really came full circle when, you know, I worked at SpaceX. And that’s where we realize, you know, impossible is nothing. The reason that rocket lands, the way it takes off is rough because of the way it does in the Jetsons, for example. Right. So if you think about that, the first time, I mean, Elon for decades now, right, since 2000, was saying, look, SpaceX is gonna is really good to just revolutionize the space industry. They were laughing at him. But you know what? He did it.
So as I was in that environment, by an Elon run company. That’s when I really figured out that, hey, don’t say cat, take cash out of it. You need to break things into first principles, learn it and figure out how you make it better. The minute you say, can’t you put in a mental roadblock in front of what you’re trying to do. That’s not negativity, that’s not you being unrealistic. Well, you need to be realistic about is you need to look yourself in the mirror and see how much chokeholds and handcuffs you’re putting on yourself, preventing you from breaking out. So that’s one thing I learned about myself that I really believe on embody impossible, is not in.
And Raj, I’ll give you one. The importance of family, the importance of your family. And those that are closest to you is extremely critical. Okay, so many times, you forget that. You forget that the people around you are so important. Okay, so I’ll tell you, I am getting real positive, I’ll tell you a story. Because when I got the call that I would, you know, have the privilege of being the chief executive officer on Romeo Power. My wife gave me a hug. And she said, congratulations, you did it. I said, No, we did it. And I meant that we did it. Because we’re so aligned, of course, we don’t agree on everything, but we’re so aligned in what we’re trying to do, and how we’re trying to plan and the legacy that we want to leave. That’s extremely, extremely critical. So I learned that you have to take your family and those around you very, very important. Okay, so our mantra and I guess I’m giving it to the wall, is faith, family and rocket ships in that order. In that order, and that really is what I learned that mid correct. But that’s how we look at things.
Host Raj Daniels 34:26
You know, everything you just said segues beautifully into my last question. You mentioned resiliency, you mentioned being adaptable. You mentioned your faith, family and rocket ships. But if there’s some specific words of advice, it could be personal or professional that you can share with the audience. What would it be?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 34:44
Go beyond. Go beyond your title. First, do your job really well. Really, really well. But go beyond it. It is not enough to say that’s not my job. If that’s not my job, at a minimum, your job is to connect with the person whose job it is if you truly feel that way, and come to a common ground, how you move forward, collectively, that’s one.
The second is the importance of respect and team. You need to be able to talk. You’re not above anyone. So one thing that we have in our companies from on the floor, not on travel, anyone in the company and can either email me text me or call me, or give me some tough feedback. And that’s just the culture we have. Right? So humility, we’re all human. Some has more accountability than others. But keeping an open door in terms of that is extremely critical. Respect, right, just because somebody is a janitor does not mean you shouldn’t build relationship with them, make sure they understand where we’re going. And two, they can give you feedback, and you can learn. Okay, so that’s, that’s really, really incredible.
I’ll give you a couple more. Knowing what you don’t want, maybe as important as knowing what you want. Okay, so look in the mirror and try to figure out who you are, who you want to be, where you want to go. I encourage the viewers and my colleagues, my family, my friends, trying to downselect where you don’t want to go is extremely important. And the last one, I’ll say is, in this data, social media-driven world, do not let that derail you from what you’re doing. So Apple, as you know, has the screen, the screen tally of how much hours you’re spending, make sure it’s tailored towards learning, and not towards an unrealistic competition against autos, especially if you don’t know the details behind someone’s journey. Okay, so those are that’s the advice I will give a last but not least, I would see your family again, my support system is extremely critical to what I do what we do, anywhere from my son to my wife, to my friends, right? It’s very critical, my family. So make sure you’re surrounding yourself with the right people. Make sure it’s mutual, you never go into things tit for tat, you’re going to genuinely get to know people and develop together. And that’s what I would say, Lionel, I
Host Raj Daniels 37:30
think that’s a beautiful place to end off. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we go?
Lionel Selwood, Jr. 37:36
Sure, one more thing again, Romeo power, really advancing energy technology, vision, and energy poverty, we really on the leading edge of ensuring green energy accessibility to everyone. I like to make sure that people know we are the nucleus of electrification, we design the under battery pack to ensure our end customers have the most compelling product, what is on the road, in the air, on the ground, or at sea. | https://medium.com/bigger-than-us/bigger-than-us-116-charging-the-electrification-decade-bbf0ce34b3d3 | ['Nexus Pmg'] | 2020-11-20 19:38:23.530000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Energy', 'Electric Car', 'Technology', 'Electricity'] |
LeetCode Challenge: Shuffle Strings | Description
Given a string s and an integer array indices of the same length.
The string s will be shuffled such that the character at the ith position moves to indices[i] in the shuffled string.
Return the shuffled string.
Example 1
Input: s = "codeleet", indices = [4,5,6,7,0,2,1,3]
Output: "leetcode"
Explanation: As shown, "codeleet" becomes "leetcode" after shuffling.
Example 2
Input: s = "abc", indices = [0,1,2]
Output: "abc"
Explanation: After shuffling, each character remains in its position.
Example 3
Input: s = "aiohn", indices = [3,1,4,2,0]
Output: "nihao"
Constraints
s.length == indices.length == n
1 <= n <= 100
s contains only lower-case English letters.
contains only lower-case English letters. 0 <= indices[i] < n
All values of indices are unique (i.e. indices is a permutation of the integers from 0 to n - 1 ).
Solution:
Steps
1. Initialize an empty array named shuffled, which will eventually hold the characters of s.
2. Loop over the string
3. Then for each iteration, use the value of i, to push that specific character in s, to the corresponding index in shuffled, based on the current value in our indices array.
4. Convert our shuffled array to a string.
5. Return shuffled
Code (JavaScript)
Results
Runtime: 96 ms, faster than 33.74% of JavaScript online submissions for Shuffle String. Memory Usage: 40.5 MB, less than 34.70% of JavaScript online submissions for Shuffle String.
Thanks for viewing. If you have any feedback on how to improve this code, leave a comment. | https://medium.com/@willsheppard29/leetcode-challenge-shuffle-strings-3365e6b671b3 | ['Will Sheppard'] | 2020-12-16 22:36:58.623000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Data Structures', 'Algorithms', 'Coding', 'Programming'] |
We’re Dreaming of a White Christmas | We’re Dreaming of a White Christmas
Around here, for the past few weeks, everyone was talking about how they were hoping for a white Christmas.
On December 25, here in Mississauga, Southern Ontario, Canada, we got that white Christmas with a vengeance. | https://medium.com/snap-shots/were-dreaming-of-a-white-christmas-7633d998bd67 | ['Louise Peacock'] | 2020-12-26 19:53:50.595000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Snow', 'Winter', 'Photography', 'Outdoors'] |
Building Conversational AI agent — part 1 what am I solving? | Conversational AI agent illustration
Intro
At nexC, we develop a state-of-the-art solution for product understanding and conversational commerce, directly to the consumers. This series will dive into our main conversational AI technology and the road to generating the best Virtual buying expert.
Conversational AI
Though Conversational AI has long been around, it has recently received renewed attention. It’s not new anymore, according to the Smart Audio report- nearly one of 4 american owns smart speakers, and thanks to COVID-19 their adoption has increased significantly. But as we all experienced, there is still a HUGE gap between our conversational expectations and the actual experience. This gap is tremendously bigger when you compare between the well known agents — Alexa, Siri, Google assistant, to what you can find on B2B and eCommerce sites.
For most, it might sound weird, but the complexity of building a real conversational solution for a real life problem (banking, eCommerce,..) can be much harder to solve. That’s why in some of these cases the agent needs a very wide domain knowledge and experience to be relevant, creating excellent companies with a domain specific solution. There are good examples for this like KAI for banking, Luke and Dooron for realestate, and nexC for durable good.
By reading this series I’m aiming to help you understand that building an actual conversational experience is a challenging mission, but if you choose to pursue it, I will save you some time hitting the wall.
In this part, I will review a high level of types and their road to solution.
What am I building?
Like in any project we need to start by understanding the problem we need to solve. The different problems will send us to a different path of challenges and requirements to building our conversational agent.
We can usually divide it to 3 major types:
Chit-chat — conversational agents that focus on the social part of the conversation — the best example you can find is Mitsuku, but most of the solutions are much inferior to it. Informational — The agent goal is to help the user search and answer informational questions, usually related to the agent source. The most common implementation is the FAQ chatbot in websites, and the more complex ones are when you ask your smart home and she looks for it for you in Wikipedia. Task oriented — The agent goal is to commit an action. It can vary from a simple mission — get leads by collecting email, name and phone numbers, to a complex missions like scheduling a flight, or finding the right product.
Some of you will start thinking about combining them, So I will tell you this — think about your Alexa for example, it is very good in setting alarms and turning on the light, but can it order you a flight, help you find a product or specific information? [Hint: not]
Obviously, we can combine a few of them in the same visual agent, but for most, it will have different agents in the back, just like the Alexa skills and Google assistant apps.
My first 2 cents is knowing what you actually NEED to build, because trying to solve all of these issues together will throw you away to a very long journey.
Why is it important to understand the type?
The type has a direct impact on the solution, available frameworks and the development team.
To build an actual chit chat you will have to go to the deep conversational AI models — such as Facebook Blender, Google Meena, GPT2/3, Plato(by uber). You will also have to write or collect thousands of conversations to build your own chit-chat strategy and persona.
Building an informational ot task oriented, will require answering these 2 questions:
How wide do we want it to be? In informational it can be addressed as only the website FAQ page, the entire domain-knowledge, or it might even include searching over the web. What level of assistant?
level of AI Assistants
In this part the credit goes directly to the Rasa team that built a leveling chart that I found really relevant. I highly recommend to read it yourself in this link.
But I will sum it up for you. The main Idea of the levels are to measure the amount of burden on the end-user.
There are 5 levels:
Basic command — action — the end user needs to know exactly what he wants and how to write it. Basic chatbot — path based agents that follow a predefined “happy path” to guide the user throw a certain quest. Contextual agents — the user can leave the path in order to change answers or get clarification. The user needs to know his goal but he doesn’t need to follow an exact path to prevent from breaking the conversation. Consultative assistant — the user doesn’t necessarily know what he wants, and he needs the assistant to guide him through, from an unknown opening point. Adaptive assistant — understands the unwritten meaning of the text — the cues the user supplies, and adapts to personalize it to him.
Extract the conversation goal from a non-definitive sentence (image from nexC)
Each level requires a completely different team, framework and time to build. That’s why understanding what level you really need is essential. And while most of us want the challenge of building a level 5 assistant, you need to remember that the assistant needs to answer some KPI’s and a business need.
If you are building a company slack bot to inform about new registers and allow users to query data from a different backend system, then you don’t need more than a level 1 simple bot.
Budget planing
Now before you continue to the other parts, it is the time for you to decide what the complexity level is. If you choose level 1 or a level 2 with a very specific task- like lead generating, simple FAQ or company information bot, The most cost effective next step is to use one of the great almost no-code solutions. From my point of view, I would recommend one of these:
These solutions will cost you the Saas monthly subscription, a conversation designer and some level of attention from the backend team.
And these costs only goes up with the levels and the complexity(remeber the qustion about the “how wide?”). In general any custom solution will require building a dedicated team. In my experience the core elements in the team are:
Fullstack developer Backend developer Conversation designer Product manager
Now, this is only the basic. If you are building a completely independent solution you will need also a DevOps and more than 1 backend developer. And for the levels — the higher you aim the more Data scientist and data analysts you need. In other words — identifying the right problem and solution will help assess the costs, timeline, and outcome. (Much more expensive than you thought after reading “building chatbot in 5 min”)
This part was mainly about understanding the field, the problem and starting to think about the possible solutions.
The next part will review the available frameworks, their pro and cons, and for what solution they can fit. | https://medium.com/nexc-co/building-conversational-ai-agent-part-1-what-am-i-solving-785d3b7237a5 | ['Gal Lellouche'] | 2021-01-03 18:18:05.734000+00:00 | ['Conversational', 'Chatbots', 'Conversational Commerce', 'Chatbot Design', 'Conversational Ai'] |
finding balance between the past, present, and future | finding balance between the past, present, and future
I’ve always been a dreamer. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had a huge imagination for my future. I dreamed of being a business woman living in a big city with big goals and big plans. I dreamed of proving to everyone that I could do it, all by myself. I still want these things. I even want the little things. I have goals of getting that amazing “beach bod” and finally gaining control over my all-over-the-place emotions and becoming a minimalist. It’s good to be goal-driven. It’s good to have aspirations. However, sometimes I set too many goals for myself at once, and sometimes those goals are just not attainable. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in what I should be doing and where I should be and who I should be that I forget to appreciate who I am. I forget to appreciate that I am trying my best to reach my own standards of greatness and that I am consciously recognizing where I’ve gone wrong. I forget to appreciate that I’ve gotten better at listening and that I’m learning how to be vulnerable and that I always try to do the right thing. I forget that I’m surrounded by people who love me regardless of my faults and don’t see me the way I see myself. And, even worse, I try to forget my past. I get so consumed by regret that I sometimes pretend that the person I used to be never existed at all. I dwell on the things I shouldn’t have said and should have said and should have done but didn’t do. So, how will I ever appreciate my future if I can’t appreciate my past and present? How will I learn to love myself later when I can’t seem to love myself now? It’s a vicious cycle. We put ourselves in a position where we can never be at peace because there is always something missing. Yet, as soon as we attain that missing something, something else seems to go missing again. So, I write myself lists. I write down what I love about myself. I write down what I will love in the future. I even write down what I loved in the past. And no, I’m not content. Knowing me, I probably never will be. But, I’m trying (to get better and to appreciate the process when I get worse) and think that’s worth something. | https://medium.com/@skytoyne/finding-balance-between-the-past-present-and-future-342ff433dbde | ['Sky Toyne'] | 2020-12-22 17:34:18.577000+00:00 | ['Performance', 'Balance', 'Perfectionism'] |
Expand and contract | Canary-releasing or zero-downtime/blue-green deployments are made easy by the tools and techniques we have today. Running a second instance of a service is a piece of cake. Especially in the cloud. But aren’t we forgetting something?
Canary-releasing and blue-green deployments have something in common: They require two versions of the software to be up and running at the same time.
It’s not just a matter of running multiple instances of software somewhere. You’ve got to think about backward compatibility, too! One of the instances will break if it’s dependency isn’t compatible.
What’s the most common shared dependency? The database! Blue-green deployments and canary-releases require your database to be backward-compatible. Use a pattern called Expand and Contract, or Parallel Change to get it sorted!
A practical example:
Assume we’re running a web store and the team is going to build the following story:
To receive my purchase when I’m not at home
As a customer with an office-job
I want to have my purchase sent to the office instead of my home address
Let’s assume there’s a database that contains a table with orders and the table already contains addresses. The current data structure looks like this:
Image 1.) The current data structure
Say we’ll solve the user story by storing two addresses instead of one: The delivery address and the billing address. Meaning the “old” address column in the database will be dropped, and two new columns will appear. This will be the new data structure:
Image 2.) The new data structure
The problem
These data structures aren’t compatible. The current version of the web store depends on the address field. Deploying the new data structure will drop that field, causing the current version of the web store to break.
As a result, neither blue-green deployments nor canary releases will work. It requires two versions of the same software are “up” simultaneously. In this case, the newer software is incompatible with the current database, and visa versa. If the “newer” database is “up”, the current version of the software will be “down”, and visa versa.
Backward-compatible schema changes
Implementing a new database schema in a backward-compatible way is done using multiple releases:
Image 3.) Changing a database-schema the backward-compatible way
Let’s apply it: We’re introducing the “BillingAddress” and the “DeliveryAddress” field, and we’re dropping the “Address” field.
Step 1.) Deploy the new schema
The first thing to do is to deploy the new schema. The old schema needs to remain intact and should be considered the source of truth. Assume the data in the new schema is incorrect or missing in Software Version B.
In the example of the billing address, that will result in the following data-structure:
Image 4.) Introducing the new columns, but leave the current data structure intact
Assume we’ve got canary releases. 10% of the users will be routed to the newest version of the software, 90% will be routed to the current version of the software.
In that case, for a given amount of time, Software Version A and Software Version B will be running simultaneously. Both versions will update the database simultaneously. As a result, 90% of the records in the new schema will not have (correct) values.
The version of the software that introduces the new schema should be writing to it, but not read from it.
Step 2.) Start using the new database schema
With the new schema in place, the next version of the software can start using it.
Software Version C has the same data structure Software Version B has. But there’s a difference: Version C depends on correct data in the new schema. Software Version C will consider the new database schema to be the source of truth.
If we don’t migrate the data from the old schema into the new schema in Release 2 (as shown in Image 3.), then Software Version C will not work. It depends on correct data in the new schema.
To make Software Version C compatible with Software Version B, Software Version C needs to keep the data in both the old- and the new schema up to date. Software Version B. does not “trust” the data from the new schema yet, so it depends on the data in the old schema.
Step 3.) Stop using the old schema
Next, focus on removing the old data structure. To get there, the first step is to stop using the field. As a result, this is what Software Version D looks like:
Image 5.) Stop using the old database fields
We can’t drop the columns from the old schema yet, because Software Version C needs to be able to keep it up to date.
Step 4.) Drop the old schema
After Software Version D stopped using the old database schema, it can finally be dropped. Software Version E will have the following data structure:
Image 6.) Drop the old fields
The downside
Using this method to change database schema’s is great. It makes things like Canary Releases possible. But there’s a downside.
Don’t use expand-and-contract if you’re not releasing often. Changing the database schema takes many releases. If you’re not releasing every month, a change to a schema takes half a year before you know it.
Summary
Modern progressive delivery depend on having multiple versions of the software “up” at the same time. To be able to do so, their dependencies need to be compatible. The database is the most common dependency.
Making changes to a database-schema can cause previous versions of the software to break. To prevent that, use a practice called expand and contract. Use multiple releases to create the new schema first, use it in the next release, stop using the previous schema in the next release, and drop it in the next.
Last, but not least: Release frequently!
Thanks to: | https://medium.com/vx-company/expand-and-contract-d5635e31776e | ['Albert Starreveld'] | 2020-08-20 14:35:14.728000+00:00 | ['Canary Release', 'Database', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Blue Green Deployment', 'Progressive Delivery'] |
BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE FIRST DATE WITH A TRANSGENDER WOMAN | BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE FIRST DATE WITH A TRANSGENDER WOMAN transsingle ·Nov 8, 2020
After your long quest for a transgender girlfriend, at last, proves to be fruitful, your best course of action ought to be to ask her out on a date. Obviously, you need to ensure that you dazzle her during the first date however, this is additionally the most effortless chance to wreck things. To boost your chances of a second date, you should do some pre-date arranging and planning. Getting things directly during the principal date will absolutely impress your transgender girlfriend. The following are some significant hints that will assist you with having an effective first date with a transgender woman….[here] | https://medium.com/@datingtranssingle/before-during-and-after-the-first-date-with-a-transgender-woman-345df7ae875f | [] | 2020-11-08 17:07:35.295000+00:00 | ['Ftm Dating Site', 'Gender Identity', 'Dating A Trans Woman', 'Online Dating', 'Transgender Dating Site'] |
How to Think About “Smart” Contracts | The Road From Legalese to Code
Summary: Before we can decide whether smart contracts are going to bring significant change to business and law, we first need to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing.
The term “smart contracts” gets tossed around a lot lately in the context of blockchain and related technologies. As an attorney, I’m often asked what the term means, and whether smart contracts represent a big shift in the future of contracting.
The short answers are: (1) it depends; and (2) sort of.
The Backdrop
It does seem that everyone is talking about smart contracts. People tend to line up on one side or the other: Either smart contracts are going to have a revolutionary impact on business, or they are doomed to fail. A recent article in The Economist took something of the latter view, for instance:
If smart contracts spread widely, you would take away much of the flexibility that smooths the economy’s functioning. Real-world institutions can adjust when things go wrong. For many years to come, and perhaps for ever, human institutions, flawed though they are, will be a smarter bet than relentless, bug-ridden code.
Compare that with a recent headline about the formation of the “Smart Contracts Alliance” by the Chamber of Digital Commerce:
Smart Contracts Alliance Aims to Help “Change the Landscape of Modern Business”
But sometimes the debate has the aspect of ships passing in the night.
A key reason for this is terminology.
Smart Contracts Defined
First, let’s ask a threshold question: What is the difference between a “transaction” and a “contract”?
A working definition of “transaction” might be “an exchange of value between two or more parties.” Now, unless that transaction is simultaneous, at least one party is always promising to deliver their part of the exchange at some time in the future. In other words, some uncertainty derives from the element of time and the ability for one party to renege on the deal. And if there’s no enforcement mechanism, this is just a bet on compliance.
The enforcement mechanism can be many things: law, risk to reputation, or even “self-help” (some guy named “Knuckles” who “knows wheres you live”).
If the enforcement mechanism is based on law, we typically require that before a purported contract is enforced, there is proof that the parties actually decided upon the value exchange. In legal terms, we make sure there has been OFFER and ACCEPTANCE. Depending on the complexity of the arrangement, and the length of time involved, we set these agreements down in writing — but ultimately this is still about proving the parties’ deal.
So, what is a “smart” contract?
Turns out, in some situations its really just a transaction, and in others it’s more like a legal contract. In fact, we can identify several different kinds of smart contracts:
Transactional instructions running entirely in code
Legally enforceable contracts at least partially expressed in code
That’s why I said earlier that it depends. It depends on context.
Smart Code — Transactions running entirely on a blockchain
Blockchain developers and engineers often mean smart code when they talk about smart contracts. Essentially these are computer programs, but when stored and executed on a blockchain people use the term “contract” because the code is self-executing: it can automatically complete a transaction by moving value from one party to another. We’ve discussed this type of “smart contract” in prior posts.
So, when these kinds of “smart contracts” reside on a blockchain, they have the following unique characteristics:
Transactional parameters that can be arranged by arms-length parties (i.e., across trust boundaries)
The program itself is stored on blockchain, and can control assets
Once programmed, neither party can renege — the code itself controls enforcement (although the parties could potentially build in safety valves that would allow for halting execution on mutual agreement)
Using our distinction earlier between “transactions” and “contracts”, these probably fall closer to a transaction than a true contract. Since by definition they are largely unstoppable after they are coded, whether they are truly a legal contract may not much matter — the value exchange is going to happen.
But assuming one party is unhappy with the result and wants to “undo” the transaction (and the other party is able to be located, and still has possession of whatever has been exchanged), presumably enforceability would be determined by looking at the traditional legal concepts for existence of a contract: Was there consideration, offer, acceptance, mutual assent?
If the only terms the parties agreed upon were just defined by the code itself (as opposed for instance in communications preceding the deal), then even i a court can find a contract it is unlikely that the court could ever find a “breach” since the code can only execute the parties’ terms faithfully. This is an argument that has been discussed at length in connection with TheDAO, the autonomous blockchain-coded investment vehicle created in April that raised over $150 million, but which contained a flaw that a user exploited to drain nearly a third of the value (until the Ethereum hard fork, but that’s a story for another post).
Was this exploitation of TheDAO a contract breach or, if the “code is the law,” was the flaw in essence a part of the “terms” of the deal? In the case of TheDAO, there was not even a true counter-party to the transactions when users contributed their cryptocurrency to the project — they were “contracting” with a distributed software program. It seems unlikely that a court would easily find a traditional breach of contract in this instance, although there are other legal claims that an investor might have brought, as explained in a great article by Drew Hinkes.
In any event, this type of smart contract is really just a way of saying that parties have agreed to an irrevocable series of events that will take place upon the occurrence of certain conditions.
Coded Legal Contracts
When lawyers talk about smart contracts, we’re often talking not about pure code, but about standard legal contracts with provisions that can be reduced to code (especially on a blockchain). Usually these provisions will be the “executable” part of the contract: The part that sets out what the parties have to do in order to complete the deal.
To take a simple example, I agree to create a new app for you called “Tao of the DAO”, which provides relaxation tips to users whose digital currency has been lost in unfortunate online schemes. You agree that once the app is delivered and you have approved it, I will earn 10% of the purchase price for every download by a user. After 10,000 downloads, my percentage goes up to 20%.
Obviously, your approval of the app is not something that could easily be coded, unless the “approval” was simply hitting certain technical benchmarks. If things like aesthetics matter to you, you’re simply not going to hand over that portion of the contract to the code, you’re going to want to review the final app yourself.
However, we might well commit the payment aspects to code, especially if the process of purchasing the app by a user is handled using a blockchain-based system: The user pays his or her money, and the money automatically moves to our respective wallets/accounts in the correct percentages.
Under this scenario, you and I would enter into a traditional contract that might have many other terms, including dispute resolution, warranties, indemnities and the like. We would be agreeing in the larger contract that the code would control execution of the payment provisions.
Such a contract is likely enforceable, so long as the overarching agreement demonstrates offer and acceptance, etc.
A Continuum
One way to view these two different categories of smart contracts is just to see them along a scale, from existing legal contracts, to legal contracts that are partially reduced to code, to transactional terms completed reduced to code. Which type we chose will depend on a variety of factors, and in particular on balancing the need for efficiency and speed with the need to cover all contingencies.
Another key issue is simply how much and which parts of existing legal contracts can actually be reduced to code. That’s an issue we intend to discuss tomorrow in another post.
Going back to that second question that we started with—do smart contracts represent a big shift in the future of contracting — my answer is “sort of” because to the extent we are talking about self-executing code on a blockchain between arms-length parties, then yes, this is something quite new and different, and may challenge existing legal conventions. But if we’re talking about traditional contracts being reduced to code, those fit pretty neatly into existing legal structures and while I think we’ll see a major acceleration of reducing contractual provisions to executable code, that’s not as much of a game-changer, purely from a legal perspective, as the first category.
Although it’s going to be an interesting ride either way.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Note: I am very indebted to an article by Josh Stark in which he distinguishes what he calls “smart contract code” from “smart legal contracts”; although others have covered similar ground, I found his article one of the clearest conceptual pieces on smart contracts to date.
As always, the opinions expressed on this blog should not be taken as legal advice. | https://medium.com/creativeblockchain/how-to-think-about-smart-contracts-f527eee2ec85 | ['Lance Koonce'] | 2016-08-10 13:25:44.739000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain'] |
10 reasons to practice Stand Up Paddling (SUP) for an Entrepreneur | I had written a similar article on the benefits of Yoga in the context of entrepreneurship. Far from me the idea of only promoting the activities that I love, but here I would like to convince you of the dimensions particularly suited to the entrepreneurial adventure that I perceive in the practice of Stand Up Paddle, my passion for several years.
Set yourself a course, a destination.
Each SUP outing is an opportunity to set a goal: a direction to take, a stage to reach, a place to cross. An obvious parallel with the management of a company or a project: at the mesh of the year, quarter, month, week, or even the day, the ability to set targets to overcome or to achieve goals for yourself and your teams remains one of the first qualities expected of the entrepreneur. Without forgetting, however, that the path is always more important than the destination ... Combine solitude and serenity.
It is almost a shame for an entrepreneur like me, who has built his business activity on the concept of collective intelligence and collaborative innovation, to highlight this aspect. Even if we have associates, partners, managers, colleagues, clients that we adore and are very close to us, the path to entrepreneurship is paved with solitary moments of taking a step back and making decisions that it is a question of welcoming and crossing with serenity. Lifting your board to fix it on the roof of your car, driving to your favorite spot, getting in the water, taking a break to rehydrate, sailing, then coming back for a rewarding shower, are all opportunities to tame and appreciate these moments that are both solitary and pleasant. Keep the balance
Even more than for an employee, the balance between private and professional life is particularly unclear and often problematic for an entrepreneur. But several other daily dimensions are a question of balance: between performance and well-being for oneself and our teams, between investment, innovation and profitability, between loyalty and employability of talents, between activities internalization or subcontracting, between short-term management and long term strategy, etc. Maintaining and challenging your balance on a simple board, at a standstill or at full speed, in flat water or rough seas, in a straight line or during a turn, makes Stand Up Paddle a great school of balance. Accessibility
Whatever the activity of your company, the accessibility by most to its product, its service, its technology should be one of the obsessions of the entrepreneur: to make it accessible to everyone (whatever his age, his gender, nationality, state of shape, height, weight, level, etc.) in its design, way to use, price, context. This is the case of SUP which offers access to such wide use to everyone, at sea or on a lake, alone or with others, for a simple ride, surfing a wave, intense training up to to a race in an international competition. The taste for performance
After some practice, as often in sport, we find ourselves hooked by the desire for performance in SUP. We are interested in the technical characteristics of our equipment (the board, the paddle, the fin) and the next equipment we dream of. We get caught up in the game of longer and longer rides, increasingly difficult conditions or even extremes, a feeling of speed, a search for the efficiency of our paddling strokes, the speed and mastery of our turns, etc. The entrepreneur is a competitor at heart and the field of SUP offers him a whole universe to express his thirst for improvement, progress and evolution. Go the distance
As mentioned, the choice of distance is one of the key components of a good SUP session. We adapt it to its current condition, to its current desire for performance, to the time we have to devote to it that day. Once planned, the time has come to stick to it. The entrepreneur is also exposed to this challenge of good distance management. How to set a trajectory that is both ambitious and realistic, distribute your effort as well as possible from start to finish, use your energy frugally and efficiently, avoid getting too enthusiastic at certain times while keeping the goal in mind in the end, sometimes resist the temptation to give up, often feel that it seems longer than expected… so many sensations to experience that are conducive to strengthening the qualities of the entrepreneur. Resilience
We talk a lot about the importance of this quality these days, and especially since the health crises of 2020. This ability to recover from a traumatic event and to start again in a positive dynamic is fundamental in the entrepreneurial journey. The diversity of situations provided by the practice of SUP, with sometimes difficult weather conditions (cold or heat, wind, rough seas), unforeseen fatigue, unexpected cramps or stiffness, disappointing falls, techniques still not mastered , etc. are all opportunities to prove your individual resilience. But even more than our only personal resilience, it is that of our teams and the Company entity that we will need to strengthen over time. Thank you in advance for the memories of these moments offered by our sessions on the water that we can draw on to better withstand those endured by our dear enterprise. The strategy of small steps
“Just one more stroke!”. Just one more stroke! Sometimes, the moment is no longer for intellectualization, for analysis, for taking a step back, for strategy, for discussion ... it is time for action, in its purest and simplest form. A paddle stroke beautifully embodies this basic yet powerful act. Just one more stroke, straighten the paddle forward, get the paddle in the water and exert the effort to kick-start your board, then exit it with the right timing to prepare for the next stroke. I like this focus on this small step that will help us so often to get through difficult times. A small step which seems so insufficient in theory and which nevertheless remains the very essence of the entrepreneur's approach. Frugality and humility.
Our era is one of complexity, of the multitude of problems, of a form of arrogance of new technologies and of those who claim the obvious solutions and the truth. SUP is just: a board, a paddle, water (for sailing and drinking). What could be more frugal ... And in its practice, the possible but recurring moments of arrogance for wanting to go too fast, too far, too hard usually end in falls, cramps or observations of one's own limits. A wonderful learning of frugality (how to do more with less) and humility (recognized quality of a new form of Leadership and Management). Respect for the environment and nature
Finally, the SUP remains above all and first of all an exceptional opportunity to commune with nature, with water. As with other water sports (surfing, sailing, swimming, diving, etc.), it is also an opportunity to confront the faults and ills of our society and in particular pollution, litter, and even certain storms we can easily link to climatic disturbances. The practice of Stand Up Paddle is thus the opportunity for this systematic and beneficial wake up call which pushes each entrepreneur to return to one of the fundamentals of the “raison d'être” of his project: to help improve the environmental situation and the sustainability of our beloved blue planet.
In short, from the Paddler to the Entrepreneur, and vice versa, there is only one board length and one paddle stroke!
Martin Duval | https://medium.com/@martin-duval/10-reasons-to-practice-stand-up-paddling-sup-for-an-entrepreneur-b6c46d35dd7f | ['Martin Duval'] | 2020-12-23 17:22:04.055000+00:00 | ['Sup', 'Management', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur', 'Paddling'] |
Colendi Weekly Update | 17–23 September | After a busy summer, we enjoy even a busier fall with many announcements about the Colendi Products, new additions to the Colendi team, and events in all over the world. In shortly, we will share all the details with you but we want to remind you of our major news that was echoed greatly by the media. The decentralized alpha is imminent and Colendi Card news only paved the way to its more adopted usage.
Colendi Card
This week marks one of the milestones of the Colendi Project, as we are finally announcing the Colendi Card, which will open the doors to the incorporation of most common payment method to the Colendi application. Decades of consumer payment habits is now available in the Colendi platform where the users can acquire their physical Colendi Card and connect it to their Colendi ID and Colendi Score.
Colendi Card is considered to be a crucial element for Colendi adaptation in the communities where the old payment habits are relatively harder to transform. Considering people’s need to microfinancing and a comprehensive ecosystem, Colendi stands out with its abundant sources of finding the financing necessary and bring the platform personas together.
“As an active part of the Colendi ecosystem, we couldn’t be more thrilled about the Colendi Card and the additional opportunities it provides for us,” said Mehmet Ozcelik, co-founder of restaurant point of sale software leader SambaPOS. “This will benefit us as it will offers better reach to our merchants as well as growing our overall merchant base with the easy-to-use Colendi Card and app.”
Financial inclusion of the next billion people is not an easy task, on the contrary it requires substantial work, exquisite analysis and a comprehensive approach that will touch the lives of many people from various cultures and backgrounds. Colendi Card fits perfectly to the business strategy to be one of the strong hands to introduce Colendi globally.
Product development
Colendi released the alpha product to the volunteering members of its community. We had already announced how you can get early access and what features it will include. Last week, we have made the announcement that we selected volunteers among our community who have shown their interest to try the alpha product. Those people already received their mails to access the Colendi Alpha Product and shared their opinions with us. Here is the recap of their sentiments and statistics if you want to find out.
We are still gathering new volunteers to try out the Colendi Alpha Product. If you are interested you may still click the link below to register.
[ut_button color=”turquoise” target=”_blank” link=”https://hi.colendi.com/earlyaccess/" size=”medium” shape=”round” ]Get Access[/ut_button]
Three integral elements of Colendi Product — Colendi ID, Colendi Score and Colendi Wallet — are introduced in the alpha product.
Colendi ID: Colendi ID is the self-sovereign digital identity that Colendi provides its users in order to include their relevant information in a private and protected model.
Colendi Score: Colendi Score is a digital score that is uniquely calculated by our protocol for each user. The protocol is trained to calculate a Colendi Score with social media data, smartphone data, transactional data, phone data and over 1,000 pieces of personal information. The algorithm then stores this score on the smart contracts of the Ethereum blockchain, meaning it becomes a decentralized Colendi Score.
Colendi Wallet: This is where users can manage their Colendi Tokens (CODs). With a Colendi Wallet, users can send and receive COD as well as oversee their transactions. On top of the existing features, users will soon be able to list the integrated merchants within the Colendi network and apply for microcredits.
Interested in learning more about Colendi’s alpha project?
Volunteering for the alpha product and helping us with Q&A testing is still an option. If you are interested, click the link below and leave your contact information. We have already sent more than 10000 members of our volunteers their access. Get in line to be one of the firsts to use the Colendi application and we will reach out and include you in our development process.
[ut_button color=”turquoise” target=”_blank” link=”https://hi.colendi.com/earlyaccess/" size=”medium” shape=”round” ]Get Access[/ut_button]
Media
- Colendi CEO and co-founder Bulent Tekmen was the latest guest of blockchainshow. If you want to know how Colendi works, what use cases we have and how will we disrupt the traditional credit scoring scene globally, check out the show:
http://www.theblockchainshow.com/93-colendi/
- Colendi proudly presented Sinan Koc, as new Colendi Adviser. Sinan has been actively involved with the Colendi project since the early days, and his skills and vision contributed a lot to the many paths taken even before this partnership. He is currently leading multiple tasks in ConsenSys and Token Foundry and viewed as one of the youngest and most talented actors in the blockchain space and Ethereum ecosystem. Please read on if you want to know more about the newest addition to our Advisory Board:
Sinan Koç is a widely respected expert and entrepreneur in the finance and fintech arena. He is currently in a leadership role with ConsenSys and Token Foundry, our two technical partners that are set to enlarge token-powered networks of future. Earlier, he was co-founder of peer-to-peer money transfer company Geld and co-founder at location-based messaging startup Radius. He holds a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as well as Turkey’s prestigious Koç School.
- Bulent Tekmen was interviewed by the Hola Cripto team who dropped by our offices to talk about Colendi. Watch now to see what Bulent told them about the Colendi Project and our vision.
Events
- On the 17th of September, Colendi CEO Bulent Tekmen attended “The Future of: Money” event in New York, organized by The Wall Street Journal.
-On the 18th and 19th of September, Colendi team met with Istanbul blockchain community in Kadir Has University campus at “Blockchainfest ’18 Istanbul” CSO Zahid Sagiroglu was also at the event as a speaker and presented Colendi Project to many new enthusiasts. We were quite satisfied with the attention we received and we are looking forward to future events for more engagement with the community.
CSO Zahid Sagiroglu
Colendi booth at blockchainfest ’18 Istanbul
Colendi Team
- Colendi team is continuing to expand to onboard some of the finest engineers in the technology and development sector. For a second consecutive week, some of the newest additions are made to the product team to pace up the R&D processes:
We are getting stronger by day with the newest additions. Contact us if you think you can also join Colendi team!
We will keep on working hard for the Colendi Project and keep you updated. Keep following us! | https://medium.com/colendi/colendi-weekly-update-17-23-september-7af96575b74a | [] | 2018-09-24 20:02:51.498000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Updates', 'Decentralized', 'Bitcoin'] |
Database Connections in Python: Extensible, Reusable, and Secure | Photo by panumas nikhomkhai from Pexels
Database Connections in Python: Extensible, Reusable, and Secure
Database Connectors
Imagine you’re a data scientist in charge of building a model, and you need to connect to a database — a pretty common task for you. How would you do it?
The easiest way is probably something like this:
import cx_Oracle
import pandas as pd cnn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
data = pd.read_sql(sql, cnn.connector)
# or do something else
(We’ll use an Oracle connection throughout the post as an example, but this blog applies to all other databases as well!)
This little code snippet seems like an obvious choice, right? This approach might get the job done, but isn’t the best way to go about it.
Why? Well, hopefully we were instructed to close any pointers or connectors after using them. Database connections are a limited and relatively expensive resource. If you’re not careful, you may accidentally hit the maximum number of connections with only one running project, but dozens of connections from historical projects.
A more careful way to deal with database connectors might be:
import cx_Oracle
import pandas as pd cnn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
data = pd.read_sql(sql, cnn.connector)
# or do something else
cnn.close()
Seems solid, right? Well, it’s better, but not quite there.
Not sure why? Consider the following: what happens if something in the middle interrupts the script? With this approach, you could accidentally reach the maximum number of allowable connections if, say, several testing scripts have database operations fail during execution. (Some other relevant questions here: what if you changed the name of the engine/connector and forgot to change it subsequent lines of code? Or if you have multiple connectors at the same time, but forget about one of them?)
If you’re really cautious and want to solve for each of these cases, you may come up with something like this:
import cx_Oracle
import logging try:
cnn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
cnn.do_something()
except Exception:
cnn.rollback()
logging.error("Database connection error")
raise
else:
cnn.commit()
finally:
cnn.close()
Now this looks good. We employ a rollback if anything goes wrong, commit if things go right, and close our connection in the end. Though this is certainly a significant improvement over our first approach, we’re still short of best practices.
Why? Well, sometimes you have to deal with multiple database connectors (in the data exploration phase, for example), and you’ll have to read from each of them on a regular basis. This might introduce some redundancy, which suggests that a reusable function might be a good fit for this scenario.
Context Managers & Decorators
The best practices discussed above remind me of Python file objects: simply initialize a connection and safely close it when you’re done, regardless of what happens in the middle. With this syntax, the file is properly closed after the block finishes, even if an exception is raised on the way. It’d be great if we could handle database connections in a comparable manner.
Though we can’t treat connecting to a database in exactly the same way, it turns out that we can use something similar known as a context manager:
import cx_Oracle class oracle_connection(object):
"""oracle db connection""" def __init__(self, connection_string=conn_str):
self.connection_string = connection_string
self.connector = None def __enter__(self):
self.connector = cx_Oracle.connect(self.connection_string)
return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
if exc_tb is None:
self.connector.commit()
else:
self.connector.rollback()
self.connector.close()
Context managers are used for managing resources. They allow you to allocate and release resources precisely when you wish. With this particular context manager, we can call database connections like so:
import pandas as pd with oracle_connection() as conn:
data = pd.read_sql(sql, conn.connector)
(Read more about context managers here. You can also make use of contextlib in the Python standard library for more context manager fun!)
If you’re ready to put your code into production, you may need a number of distinct database connectors, and consequently find that using a context manager is overly wordy. A great alternative is a decorator, which is a magical piece of code that modifies functions as opposed to objects. See below for our earlier example reconfigured as a decorator:
import cx_Oracle
import logging def db_connector(func):
def with_connection_(*args,**kwargs):
conn_str = conn_str
cnn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
try:
rv = func(cnn, *args,**kwargs)
except Exception:
cnn.rollback()
logging.error("Database connection error")
raise
else:
cnn.commit()
finally:
cnn.close() return rv
return with_connection_
Decorators allow you to change or extend a function’s behavior without really changing the function itself. You just decorate a function with one line of code above its definition to give it a whole new capability.
When designing a decorator, you need to have an inner function and a decorator function. Here, db_connector is the decorator function, and with_connection_ is the inner function that’s only defined within the decorator. When calling this decorator, the decorated function func ultimately points to the decorator’s inner function, with_connection_ . This inner function then wraps the decorated function func by doing the following:
Accepting an arbitrary number of positional and keyword arguments, allowing the decorated function to operate normally: with_connection_(*args,**kwargs) Passing the database connector to the decorated function:
func(cnn, *args, **kwargs) Making sure the database connector is handled properly by Python’s try/except syntax, like we talked about earlier in the post.
With this in place, when you want to alter an existing function to use our database connector, you can drop in a decorator just above it like so:
@db_connector
def do_some_job(cnn, arg1, arg2=None):
cur = cnn.cursor()
cur.execute(SQL, (arg1, arg2)) # or something else do_some_job(arg1, arg2)
The @ symbol syntax basically (though not literally) equates to the following:
do_some_job(arg1, arg2) = db_connector(do_some_job(arg1, arg2))
This decorator creates a database connection and passes it along to the function below it. It basically does the job of a context manager, but in an even simpler way. There are other really interesting ways to write decorators — see more here.
Photo by Jordan Harrison on Unsplash
Handling Credentials
So now you know how to set up a safe, easy database connection using context managers, decorators, and other best practices. But we’re not done yet!
Here’s a question: in any of the code above, how would you input your username and password to connect to the database? (Or rather, in this case, give the credentials to the aforementioned conn_str ?)
One idea might be to have a .py file with all necessary credentials. This is certainly better than hard-coding your credentials into a conn_str variable in each script that uses a database connection. But hard-coding credentials, even if they’re in a separate file, is never recommended.
Imagine that, in the beginning of your project, you used your personal password as credentials for a database connection. When it comes time to open-source your code, you might forget about the early days, but GitHub’s commit history certainly didn’t! Even absent any security concerns, if someone maintaining your project has to pore through all your code/data dictionaries to find the relevant snippets in which to update credentials, they will not be thrilled with your work.
In short, hard-coding credentials is unwieldy and potentially dangerous.
On the other hand, there’s another way to store your database credentials gracefully and safely: use environment variables. Whether you’re using Windows or a Unix-based system, you can always set these variables and hide them within your system, and they’re definitely more confidential than using scripts or configuration files.
In addition, when you’re deploying into a container (e.g. Docker), you can easily set your environment variables and not worry about changing them between deployments. For example, when switching from a testing environment to a production environment, all the database configurations could be different, but you can change the configuration of the container without altering the underlying code. Check here if you need a hint on how to change environment variables in your OS.
Here are our major previous code snippets with references to environment variables (see the os.environ bits):
import cx_Oracle
import logging
import os class oracle_connection(object):
"""oracle db connection""" def __init__(self, connection_string=os.environ["CONN"]):
self.connection_string = connection_string
self.connector = None def __enter__(self):
self.connector = cx_Oracle.connect(self.connection_string)
return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
if exc_tb is None:
self.connector.commit()
else:
self.connector.rollback()
self.connector.close()
def db_connector(func):
def with_connection_(*args, **kwargs):
conn_str = os.environ["CONN"]
cnn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
try:
rv = func(cnn, *args, **kwargs)
except Exception:
cnn.rollback()
logging.error("Database connection error")
raise
else:
cnn.commit()
finally:
cnn.close() return rv
return with_connection_
Photo by CMDR Shane on Unsplash
With these simple steps, you will be able to produce Python database connectors that are extensible, reusable, and secure.
_________________________________________________________________
If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars. | https://medium.com/opex-analytics/database-connections-in-python-extensible-reusable-and-secure-56ebcf9c67fe | ['Opex Analytics'] | 2019-07-25 16:13:37.591000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Engineering'] |
Reams of legal pads surround me screaming about the immaturity of impotently lazy whites who refuse… | Reams of legal pads surround me screaming about the immaturity of impotently lazy whites who refuse to grow up.
Thanks for saying this! | https://medium.com/@kayvalley/reams-of-legal-pads-surround-me-screaming-about-the-immaturity-of-impotently-lazy-whites-who-refuse-118cf47e1480 | ['Kay Valley'] | 2020-11-13 11:49:13.621000+00:00 | ['Hate', 'Hate Crimes', 'Racism', 'Whiteness', 'White Supremacy'] |
About Garage Door Maintenance | Garage door support should be fused into your week’s end plan for the day something like a few times every year. Your garage doors get considerably more use than you may get it. In an ordinary nuclear family a garage door normally is opened and shut 10–20 times every day. Please take the experience with Direct Service Overhead Garage Door Company.
Over a year that is a huge amount of opening and closings. Left un-kept up garage doors will unavoidably miss the mark causing trouble, yet possibly even mischief or harm to your vehicles, your home and even to yourself. In this manner it is imperative to perform garage door support no under multiple times each year.
Torsion Springs and Rollers
There are different mechanical pieces of a garage door that should be checked. Take a gander at the garage door rollers, torsion springs and metal areas that join the garage door to the house. Guarantee they are to a great extent securely verified and that the rollers turn effectively in the garage door tracks.
If the rollers are not turning effectively see them to choose whether they are broken or fundamentally need an oil. If they appear hurt displace them. They are ordinarily easy to oust. If they are essentially remaining a bit, apply some silicon based salve to them. | https://medium.com/@jkt6841/about-garage-door-maintenance-80314876055a | ['Md Hifjul Bari'] | 2019-03-27 05:22:05.393000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Garage', 'Door', 'Services', 'Company'] |
Salesmanship: the Good, the Bad, and the Absent | …the good… the bad… the absent.
I hear often from clients that they don’t want to annoy their friends with sales pitches. I totally get it, none of us want to be “that guy” and when you’re starting a business it can seem like it’s all your friends must be hearing from you. There’s a fine line between good salesmanship and being obnoxious.
But there’s also a problem with not being salesy enough and it’s not merely that your revenue will suffer, it’s that your customer service will also suffer. There’s a reason why people WANT to work with a sales person. Salespeople serve a very real function, and if they’re ethical and interested in the customer getting what the customer will be most satisfied with, then the customer wins. (And so does the sales person! …and so does the business!)
Think about the last time you were at a store and had a neutral or good experience with a staff person. Maybe you needed help finding something, or really appreciated the way you were greeted. When you have a question that fails to be answered by packaging or displays, turning to a sales person is the natural next step. If you don’t have that sales person to turn to, you get frustrated, and you’re likely to abandon the purchase you’re trying to make.
The Spectrum
There are two extremes to how a sales person can go wrong, and a sweet spot in the middle that is ideal. In that sweet spot, the sales person’s goal is to assist prospective customers in moving through their sales journey smoothly, and prevent the customer from abandoning their sales journey due to a trivial reason.
On one extreme of bad salesmanship, you have the pushy sales person. This person seems to think their goal is to shove customers along their sales journey and coerce them into not leaving their sales journey. While this may result in a sale, the customer often dislikes the experience and may come to regret their purchase. This leads to fewer repeat customers. This is also what most people seem to fear when they think of trying to be more salesy.
At the other end of the spectrum you have the absentee sales person. This person neglects their customer and doesn’t support them in their sales journey. This not only means they loose out on a sale, but the customer’s needs were not met and they may feel frustrated. I don’t know if people are afraid of this end of the spectrum, but they’re definitely afraid of the lack of business it results in!
Finding the Balance
So how do we strike the balance and find the middle, without overshooting to either extreme? Let’s examine a few key aspects of salesmanship, how they can be done right, and how they can be done wrong. The techniques I’ll discuss are: raise awareness, streamline, reflect, remove barriers, and trust.
Raise Awareness
One key thing a sales person does is introduce the customer to something they didn’t know. This might be a product or feature they didn’t know about, or a current sale or promotion going on. In your business, you want to make sure that people know what it is you do, and how it may positively influence them. This means you’re going to have to find ways of weaving this into conversation and you’re likely going to feel like you’re repeating yourself as you say the same thing in front of different people. (Even saying the same thing again in front of someone can be helpful since humans rarely latch on to 100% of what they hear.)
Sales people go too far with raising awareness when they are pushy with this information or insist the customer needs something when they feel the opposite. If a sales person tells a prospective customer about something the customer doesn’t care about, it’s the sales person’s role to notice the customer’s disinterest and move on to another topic or, even better, pose a question that will help the sales person better understand where they could direct the conversation. Similarly, the sales persons should notice a customer’s discomfort and adjust to improve the customer’s comfort. (This can include leaving the customer alone! It’s not “ruining a sale” to give a customer the space they need!)
Streamline
Another key aspect of good sales is to make a streamlined easy process for the customer. This could be having clear information freely available, or having a scheduling or payment system that’s easy to use. Most of my clients see this come up in instances where they need to articulate what the immediate next step is for the customer; a clear path forward and a reminder of what comes next makes the sales journey easier for the customer.
At times sales people can over do it on the streamlining. They skip steps that leave the customer feeling confused, or they neglect to correctly notice that the customer is unready to move to the next step in the sales journey. It’s easy enough to course correct if either of these happen by taking a step back in the sales journey and checking in with the customer. Applying pressure is absolutely the wrong move in this instance and will cause the customer to leave the sales journey.
Reflect
A good sales person helps the customer navigate the customer’s own unique sales journey. This is achieved by articulating to the customer what the sales person is observing. Inquisitive statements like “it seems like you’re unsure?” or “it seems like this makes you happy?” and then letting the customer agree or offer a correction. This often feels like a relief to the customer if they’ve been unable to notice this within themselves, and even if they were aware, customers are often flattered that they’re interests and feelings are being acknowledged.
The technique of reflecting goes wrong when the sales person tells the client what they want the client to be feeling rather than reflecting what’s really there. In effect this is a con. A customer who’s unsure of themselves may come to believe that’s how they feel, only to discover it’s not true after the sale is complete. While it may result in a sale today, the sales person misses out on any repeat business and any referrals. Any sales person sincerely interested in customer satisfaction is unlikely to make this mistake.
Remove Barriers
The previous three facets (raise awareness, streamline, reflect) all help support a sales person’s ability to remove barriers for the customer. A sales person who can discern the customer’s desires, and be inquisitive about the customers apprehensions, is then well poised to know what barriers exist and how to best remove them. Finding out a customer’s concerns about price, scheduling, services or products and then addressing them efficiently helps remove the barriers the customer faces on their sales journey.
Removing barriers back fires when the sales person attempts to remove barriers that aren’t there, or attempts to remove barriers but actually puts more in there place. Both of these are usually very annoying for the customer, and sometimes that leads to them not completing the sale. For example, if a customer is unconcerned by the price, but then the sales person starts describing payment plans or sliding scale, this is the opposite of removing a barrier. This is also why it’s best to give people the next most immediate action they can take. For example: “BUY NOW” button on a website, or “if you’re ready to book your appointment, I’m available next Tuesday at 10am, Wednesday at 1pm or Thursday at 4pm.”
Trust
The fundamental to any sale is trust. There must be sufficient trust between the customer and the business/sales person that the customer believes they’ll receive what they want to their satisfaction for the agreed upon price.
A sales person can think of themselves as a steward of this trust. The sales person seeks to cultivate and grow trust through honest means. The marker of the most distasteful sales people is that they manipulate trust by building it and subsequently eroding it by being dishonest or less than ethical. Building trust is straight forward; it’s as simple as saying what you’re going to do, and then doing it. Every time to say you’re going to do something and something else happens in reality, that erodes trust. Regardless of how consistent you are naturally, offering clear expectations and transparency in your process improves trust and leads to more sales and better business.
Good Sales Techniques vs. Good Person Techniques
Being a good sales person is not that much different than being a good person. In the same way that you listen, respond, volunteer information and are respectful to a friend, the same holds true for being a good sales person. In sales you’re often having the same conversation repeatedly, so it might feel redundant to you. And if you keep in mind to be responsive and respectful to your customer, you’ll never be a slimy sales person. | https://maggiekarshner.medium.com/salesmanship-the-good-the-bad-and-the-absent-24b200ae6592 | ['Maggie Karshner'] | 2019-02-28 00:47:32.428000+00:00 | ['Self Promotion', 'Sales', 'Self Employed', 'Business'] |
A open letter to the girl who gets my jersey next… | to the next number 4
The amount of times I have had to write this is too many to count and each time I have written it I’ve cried, so this is going to be rough. Anyways here we go…
I don’t know who you are yet, but I hope I get to figure out who you are by hearing from the others. This year has been hard and I’m not really ready to leave high school and leave my jersey behind for you to wear. If you haven’t heard things about me I was one of the seniors during the 2020 season, the one that got canceled. I hope you’ve heard of all the stories that have happened in my past four years. I hope whoever is coaching you tells you about all the ups and downs about my time as a Bruin. #BruWINS. I will certainly miss my time in high school, it was a fun ride. I never thought I would actually say that I miss 25s and 21s ( you will learn what those are soon). I remember it so vividly after the first fall workouts I went home and I just sat over the toilet and started puking don’t worry, things go up from there!!! I also remember being at practice and just waiting for it to be over and for me to get home and eat food and sleep but don’t waste those moments thinking about when practice is over and cherish the moments when you’re standing with your team being yelled at by the coach. I know it sounds terrible but trust me it’s those moments that will shape you as a person!
As I move onto the next chapter in my life #GoVols. here’s my message for YOU!! I hope you go 100%, 24/7. You don’t know when it’s over until it is. I wish I spent more weekends hitting or throwing with someone and enjoying the time on the team! It’ll become your second family. These people will be the people to go to some of your problems. They will always have your back through the good and bad. Don’t be afraid to cry in front of them too!! (I’ve done it many times). I remember when I was a freshman I always thought that last game, that last practice, that last at bat, and all those last things will never come but they finally do and for me they did sooner than I thought they would. I didn’t know I had my last game and practice until I got that horrible call in late April that said that I would not get to have my senior season. I want you to cherish every moment you can and remember all the good things that happened!! Everyone always tells you to cherish every moment and give everything you have because before you know it, it will be over. And now I have to pay admission to see you play in it and I can’t be more excited! If you see any stains on the jersey I’m sorry those are my tears from the times where I just sat on the field during quarantine. I hope you enjoy every moment you have in that jersey, it holds so many precious memories. I’m sooo ready to hear some hugeee stories about your time as a bruin. I can’t wait to come back to Brentwood and find out who wears this amazing number! The first couple weeks in fall workouts might be really hard, but please DON’T give up and make it through the season because it’s totally worth all of the pain of workouts! Wear this jersey with pride and you deserve this jersey for all of your hard work! Hopefully I met you at tryouts but if I didn’t I have a great year and ALWAYS walk on the right side of the hallway and don’t stop in the middle of the hallway! | https://medium.com/@emmac0212/a-open-letter-to-the-girl-who-gets-my-jersey-next-abb4f968dd78 | ['Emma Corona'] | 2020-12-19 23:49:34.967000+00:00 | ['High School', 'Softball', 'Sports', 'Pandemic', 'Senior Year'] |
The legacy of a broken promise | The legacy of a broken promise
Áine Kelly-Costello
Watchdog protest calling on the Government to honour the promise to ban mining on conservation land, 2017. Credit Geoff Reid
It’s a story of an extractive industry causing needless ecological and community damage in the face of alternatives. It’s the story of a broken political promise that has till now done more harm than good. And it’s the story of a campaign to preserve our country’s natural taonga for generations to come.
Between them, Augusta Macassey-Pickard and Catherine Delahunty have spent half a century campaigning to keep a gold-hungry mining industry out of the Hauraki region’s treasured native forests, parks and wetlands. They are the coordinator and chair, respectively, of Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki, the organisation driving the movement. Over zoom, I sat down with them to find out more.
This interview has been edited for flow and length.
The problem
Áine: Organising with Coromandel Watchdog, you have documented the impacts of mining on Hauraki DOC lands and beyond for decades. Your latest petition asks the Government to turn down new mining permits on stewardship land until all conservation land is fully protected. Why is this moratorium urgent? And how did we get here?
Augusta: In 2017 at the start of the last term of Government, the Government made an announcement in a thing called the Speech from the Throne, announcing there would be no new mines on conservation land. That was a day where we were all so happy, all around the country people rejoiced to hear that our beautiful public conservation land, our forests, land that is potentially land-banked for Treaty settlement — people have a range of relationships with conservation land — but conservation land was going to be protected from what is effectively one of the most destructive industries in the world.
Unfortunately, that policy has never been realised… there has been very little progress made, if any, to actually implementing that policy. The only real impact on the ground that policy has had was to warn the mining industry that potentially it was coming.
If you signal to an industry that you’re going to shut it down and then do nothing, it makes that industry fire up. Announcing that policy had the exact opposite effect of what its intent was.
Recently, Forest and Bird revealed that mining permits have been approved across more than 150,000 hectares of public conservation land since 2017. All up, that affects an area about the size of Christchurch.
So now we’re saying to the Government, look we understand that there’s difficulties with implementing this policy, we understand that there’s pushback from the industry, we understand that there’s a range of issues and concerns with the policy, but in the meantime you need to keep the intent of that promise.
So you need to put a moratorium on any further mining-related development of conservation land, until the policy is finalised, at a minimum.
Catherine: Our organisation, Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki, recognises to the best of our ability that we are in the tangata whenua lands of Hauraki. Many of these lands contain sacred taonga. There’s been a Treaty settlement which hasn’t been fully settled. There’s a huge need for respect and no further destruction until that negotiated relationship is sorted out, until tangata whenua have a say and DOC really listens.
Many people have different relationships with this land but some people have ancient, ancestral relationships that need to be honoured as well.
Left, Archeys frog, the worlds most threatened frog. Credit Ian Preece. Right, photo of river and mountains at Wharekirauponga, conservation land under a mining permit in southern Coromandel. Credit Chris Pryor.
Valuing land
Áine: One of the key arguments the mining industry is making — and gaining traction with — is that they should be allowed to mine on stewardship land. Walk me through that. How do we define stewardship land? And what should we be talking about when we have conversations on valuing land?
Catherine: Stewardship land is an artificial and arbitrary term for land that should be protected.
Augusta: Some of New Zealand’s highest value conservation land is still technically classed as ‘stewardship land’. Here in the Hauraki/Coromandel, some of our most beautiful, mature, established, well-used, well-appreciated, well-loved forest is classified this way.
The area we’re talking about on the Hauraki/Coromandel is home to the world’s most endangered frog, the tiny little Archey’s frog. They’re important to the whole wide world because they’re evolutionarily distinct. That might be something one person values. Another person might value that they’ve gone tramping in this area since they were a baby in a backpack on their parents’ back. Other people may have drunk from the stream.
Catherine: More broadly, it’s about how we value land. Even if there isn’t a rare species or a rare series of plants of high biodiversity, a lot of conservation land acts as a buffer zone for clean water and biodiversity corridors. It’s land that is healing and regenerating in a way that is very good for everything we need, from trees helping with climate change, to clean water that communities need and species that need those corridors to live in. So there is every reason to protect that land.
Betty Williams (Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Pūkenga) taught us at Watchdog everything we know about Te Tiriti o Waitangi and about relationships with this place in the Hauraki/Coromandel. And that we had a right to stand here while respecting their first right.
She said that gold has a mauri, a lifeforce itself. We were defending trees and frogs and water and she said:
‘but actually, if you look at this place, it’s full of these very special rocks and resources, and these things have a right to exist in their own terms’.
So the mauri of gold … This was very deep kōrero for us, we weren’t familiar with this. She really tried to get across to us, and to judges in the environment court, that the lifeforce of gold existed in our whenua for reasons we may not understand, and it needs to be left there. That’s why we have some amazing landforms and beneath them some amazing minerals in this area. They’re there and they’re meant to be there.
Áine: Imagine if as a country we lived by tikanga and Mātauranga Māori.
In September, Forest and Bird revealed that mining activities approved or pending around the country involve exploration for lithium on conservation areas south-west of Rotorua, drilling for coal on the West Coast’s Denniston Plateau, a possible tungsten mine near Glenorchy near Queenstown, and of course gold mining in and around the Hauraki/Coromandel.
Is all the country’s conservation land under threat from mining?
Catherine: Some of the land has partial protection under Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act. But that covers less than half of all conservation land. Apart from the Coromandel Peninsula, the areas of the country which are really under threat from mining for coal, or minerals called rare Earth elements, are the West Coast, parts of Nelson and Te Tau Ihu at the top of the South Island, Dunedin, Southland and Te Tai Tokerau.
Gold Mining’s dirty trail
Áine: In ecological terms, both gold and coal mining cause extensive and long-term impacts around the country. What kind of damage does gold mining cause in the Hauraki/Coromandel and who is responsible for cleaning up?
Catherine: In our area, the gold is found in quartz reefs. So they dig up these rock reefs and what the rocks around gold naturally contain are minerals including dangerous toxic substances like arsenic, cadmium, zinc and copper.
These are long-term persistent chemicals that stay in the environment when exposed to air, they’re meant to stay in the Earth, they’re not meant to be crushed up! It’s a very dirty industry. There’s also this huge amount of waste rock that’s toxic, gold mining is associated with rocks that leach if you expose them to oxygen. That in turn causes long-term pollution to rivers by making them permanently acidic.
To take a local example, the Tui mine, it’s a tiny gold and copper mine in the DOC land, up on Mount Te Aroha, the sacred mountain for the Hauraki people. I was involved in the government getting the budget to clean it up. Just to clean up a small mine with a tennis court size area of toxic waste — to cover that with concrete and then put lime into these rivers that are permanently acidic from the leaching — the rate-payers of this area and Government had to spend more than 21 million, just to deal with that small site.
They build these earth dams that have rocks around, and in that there’s wet slurry that gets piped from the processing plant of the mine. And then those enormous earth dams get filled up with what they call tailings which contain these toxic elements. They just sit there, and if you have any kind of natural disaster, these Earth dams tend to collapse.
They say ‘oh if we do underground mining we can just put the tailings back into the dams’. But it’s not like that, you can’t crush up rock and put it tidily back in a hole that you’re still mining.
Augusta: The climate impacts of an energy-rich industry like that are so varied. It’s everything from the vehicles that are used to the processing equipment to the transport of the semi-raw ore to the processing sites that they use in Australia. That’s such a huge range of impacts, and it all comes back to the same thing: hurting the land.
Áine: So much destruction. Are there less harmful ways to extract gold?
Augusta: Gold is an infinitely recyclable metal and we’re recycling less than 2% of our e-waste in this country. We absolutely do not need to continue to dig it out of our ground. We can be mining it from our current technology. we can mine our computers, we can mine our phones, we can mine our televisions. Other countries are doing this. A New Zealand company actually developed a type of microbe that eats the plastic away from the precious metals. They’ve sold that to the UK and Australia because the New Zealand government wasn’t interested.
Catherine: There’s only around 5200 people working in mining nationally, it’s not a huge industry. Nothing like what we need for conservation work to be done in this country, let alone mining e-waste. Also, when we read the documents of these mining companies, they’re talking about a future which involves artificial intelligence, so they’re not talking about a workforce, they’re talking about sending robots in to do this work because it’s not very pleasant. So we’re not even talking about a really job-rich industry that’s got a sustainable long-term life.
It’s a just transition issue, and Government should be working with E Tū, the union representing the mining industry workers, and working on transition.
Land and Loss
Áine: Without that happening, is there a sense of losing the essence of what it means to live in the Hauraki region for you?
Augusta: I grew up surrounded on three sides by ‘Doc land’. I never thought of it as that, I just thought of it as ‘the bush’. It’s taught me what I know about just about everything. It’s such a huge part of everything to do with me. I’ve now bought myself back to have my own child and raise him, and look after my mum. My grandparents also are buried on our whenua.
I look at these beautiful places, some of them are so ancient and hold so much life, and they’re not all cute and fluffy Kiwis and exciting rare skinks; some of them are just butterflies and trees… It’s just so special and, it can’t speak. It’s so defenceless. The idea that any company, let alone a multinational company, is going to roll in and rip it to pieces just for the sake of a little bit of money… I find it hard. I don’t really know how to put that into words.
One of the things that’s been quite shocking to a lot of people in some areas of the Coromandel is they go for a beautiful bush walk, they’re walking through native forest, it’s lovely; they come up over the brow of the hill and suddenly they’re hit with a wall of industrial noise and the stink of diesel because these companies of drilling. That in itself, you lose the character, you lose the feeling, you lose all of the associated experiential elements of the DOC estate.
Catherine: It’s always like this, the industrialisation of waste that has to be dealt with for like a thousand years, and who pays for the monitoring and protection of that? Not the mining companies; it will be us. When it comes down to it, it’s an industry which is extractive, violent and dominating, and the metals that come from it can be extracted from what exists above the ground.
People come here to the Hauraki/Coromandel from cities to regain their soul and I mean that in a really profound sense because there’s something about this place, even though it’s overcrowded now with tourists, the land is very powerful here and it speaks its truth very powerfully.
Considering that we could mine gold out of e-waste, there is no rationale for what is being proposed and what has been done. that’s why we’ve been a non-violent action organisation, a legal organisation, an education organisation, a lobbyist organisation, a media scrapper, because we have to stand for what’s left and we have to be resolute and we have to recognise that the power of the land is the most important thing that humans are lucky to live with.
Taking back power
Áine: Absolutely. So the plan for Coromandel Watchdog now is to get this temporary ban on mining stewardship land over the line. Presumably, people wanting to support should firstly sign the petition. What else can they do?
Augusta: Here in the Coromandel, a very iconic summer destination for a lot of people, we are going to be getting out about in our communities, on our beaches, and telling people about what’s happening and asking them to sign on. We’re encouraging other groups that also defend conservation land in their own patches to do the same, if they are able to. We’re encouraging people all over the country to get out. Please get in touch if you would like to help.
We’re planning to deliver the petition in late January or early February. We’d like to be sending a really clear message from Kiwis that we don’t see mining conservation land as a good thing.
How you can help
· Sign today: Moratorium on Mining Permits for Conservation Land
· Are you able to collect signatures in your area? Email [email protected] for printable copies of the petition for a moratorium on mining permits.
· Join or donate to Coromandel Watchdog.
· Support other organisations campaigning for an end to mining, including on conservation land, like Forest and Bird and Coal Action Network. | https://medium.com/@actionstation/the-legacy-of-a-broken-promise-636ee69c2ad1 | ['Actionstation Aotearoa'] | 2020-12-10 01:02:03.325000+00:00 | ['Aotearoa', 'Coromandel', 'New Zealand', 'Mining', 'Conservation'] |
Waves to host open lecture by Vitalik Buterin in Moscow | Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum and Sasha Ivanov, Waves Platform
Waves will host an open lecture by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, at 19:30 on 11 April 2017 at the Digital October Center in Moscow.
Vitalik Buterin is the founder of the Ethereum project, an idea for which he won the World Technology Award in 2014 — bypassing Mark Zuckerberg and other contenders. “When Vitalik talks about the blockchain, Stanford professors take out their notebooks and start writing”, as Herman Gref, head of Sberbank, told the forum in Davos.
Having learned about bitcoin from his father, also a developer, Vitalik decided to create his own blockchain and cryptocurrency. In 2011, Buterin and his friends founded the Bitcoin Magazine. In 2013, the first line of Ethereum was written. Leaving the Canadian University of Waterloo in the same year, Vitalik managed to secure his first grant of $100,000 from the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. Ethereum later broke the world record for raising money through crowdfunding, selling 31,000 bitcoins worth of “Ether” ($18.5 million). The platform was launched in 2015 and the market capitalisation of Ethereum is now around $4 billion, while Ether’s cryptocurrency (ETH) ranks second after only bitcoin. On 17 March 2017, the price of Ethereum reached a historic new high against the dollar, hitting $50 on the Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange. To date around 210 startups are already running on Ethereum.
At the beginning of the event Sasha Ivanov, founder of the Waves Platform, and Maria Popova, curator of the Digital October Center, will give a welcome speech. The meeting with Vitalik Buterin will take the form of an open question-and-answer session.
The event is hosted by the Waves Platform which, in collaboration with the Digital October Education Center, regularly holds educational courses about blockchain. The next course offered by Sasha Ivanov, founder of the Waves Platform, will be held on April 22 and 23. For more details visit http://edu.digitaloctober.ru/courses/blockchain-weekend/
Online translation will be available at http://digitaloctober.ru. To register, visit https://digitaloctober.timepad.ru/event/473323/ | https://medium.com/wavesprotocol/waves-to-host-open-lecture-by-vitalik-buterin-in-moscow-c51e3b6ed82 | ['Evelina Lavrova'] | 2017-04-10 07:44:03.001000+00:00 | ['Waves', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Vitalik Buterin', 'Blockchain'] |
The Dreaded Meeting Package | If you have ever served on a board, you would be familiar with the board package. This is sometimes an actual pile of paper, sent to you a week before the meeting. Or it could be a digital package that is made available on a Google drive or part of a website, that only the board members actually get to see.
If the board package contains confidential information then it is important that good security is in place over the package whether it is sent on paper or in a digital form. If there is no confidential information then it really does not matter how the package is handled, you could post it all on the website for everyone, including the meeting participants to review.
A board member who is satisfying their duty of care will take the time to read the package and consider their feelings about the decisions to be made at the upcoming meeting. They would also consider if there are any questions that they would like to ask before they would make a decision about the issues in the package. Do they want any additional information before they are ready to make a decision?
Most discussions benefit from people having taken the time to think about the decisions that need to be made at the meeting. How many times have you heard a sentence start with “I have been thinking about that…” Snap decisions may not always be the best decisions.
A board is composed of a number of people with different skills and different viewpoints. In theory then, a group should make a better decision than an individual, just because more viewpoints have been considered and more people have done the analysis. Board decisions are better when there is more time to consider. The considering begins when the board member gets the package and begins to read it and to understand the decisions that need to be made.
Care should be taken with the meeting package to include the correct amount of information. A participant may be discouraged to see a package that contains many pages and might be reluctant to even open it. Perhaps you have heard the saying TL: DR. This stands for too long, didn’t read, which is a summary of how many people feel about reading longer information. The attention span of the general public is shrinking, and board members are a part of the general public.
A standard index of the information which is being included in the package can be very helpful for people reading the package. If the information is presented in the same way each time the package is prepared then a board member will waste no time getting to the material that needs to be reviewed.
Keeping in mind that a board is providing oversight, may assist when considering what information the board needs. Can some lengthy documents be summarized? A board member will always be able to ask for more information, and anything that a board member wants will be provided to them.
The board package should strike a balance between providing all of the information that a board member needs to provide oversight to the organization without running to hundreds of pages. | https://medium.com/governance-guru/the-dreaded-meeting-package-a3c9a57aba9f | ['Debi Peverill'] | 2020-12-22 13:53:32.263000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Preparation', 'Goals'] |
I Miss Gardening | It doesn’t take much to be a gardener. I don’t mean that anyone can be great at it, no, I just mean that you have to know what needs to be done and when to do it.
So this Spring, I’m going to commit to trying to grow vegetables. I always liked growing tomatoes and bell peppers so those two will be on the top of my list. I just need to figure out when to plant them and how much sun that they need.
There is a lot of satisfaction from growing your own food. We have a small garden right now so there is not much space, but one day I hope to have a ranch so I can live like a farmer. I will keep dreaming. | https://medium.com/@darrinatkins/i-miss-gardening-9e301fee058e | ['Darrin Atkins'] | 2020-12-21 23:55:36.502000+00:00 | ['Seeds', 'Planting Seeds', 'Farming', 'Gardening', 'Planting'] |
面試攻略：開場自我介紹如何贏得印象？ | 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.
Check your inbox
Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/y-pointer/interview-3-b3bdfad1fa74 | ['侯智薰 Raymond Ch Hou'] | 2019-05-22 16:24:24.204000+00:00 | ['Interview', '職場', 'Careers', '面試', 'Work'] |
She Never Tells Me | A poem
Poet’s bedroom window
A window by my bed
Shade brought down covers the night
Bed of her own, seldom she’s in
Early riser, up on my bed at first light
Delivers a lick, sometimes two
Looks at my window, shade still covering the light
She turns to me, then back to the window
She talks without words
But I understand what she says
Shade brought up, uncovers the day
Out the window she looks
Best from my bed, better than the floor
Coffee in the kitchen, follow she must
Patiently she sits, my hand in a jar
Peanut butter or pumpkin?
Though I ask she never tells me
Gently she takes, back on my bed she lies
Peace served with coffee
Silence breaks, chaos ensues
Window to window, room to room
Chasing who knows what
What moved across her vision is gone
Molly what was it? What did you see?
Was it a squirrel, a turkey, a deer?
Though I ask she never tells me
Back on my bed she lies
Waits in silence, patience never dies
Patience rewarded, chaos ensues again and again
As the risen sun travels south
Eye lids close, ears become eyes
Silence breaks
Molly, what do you hear that opens your eyes?
Though I ask she never tells me
Still on my bed she lies, chaos soon to begin | https://medium.com/the-pom/she-never-tells-me-2626e496d303 | ['Jas Martinez'] | 2020-05-30 16:52:36.323000+00:00 | ['Pom', 'Poetry', 'Pets', 'Love', 'Dogs'] |
A girl was born in 1985 in an Indian orthodox family, a second child of her parents. | A girl was born in 1985 in an Indian orthodox family, a second child of her parents. Elder one was a girl too. Parents wanted a boy, so they planned for a third chid and their prayers were answered this time! The BOY was born.
Since starting the girl (let’s call her Sheila), faced the Indian societal differences between a boy and girl. Parents never felt they owe any explanation to the girls because it is inbuilt into this “Indian Society”. She grew up and became rebellious, asked her parents the WHYs whenever anything was allowed to the brother but not to her. Sheila got selected in her school’s Basketball team. She played at district level, but then… Dad said NO to playing because this is a boy’s game. She cried and created ruckus at home but Mom never supported her.
But Sheila was a strong minded girl, she finished college and joined an IT company which was too far from her home, as she wanted to live on her own now. She started earning good money , had her own share of struggles but never thought of leaving job and going to home.
To be contd…. | https://medium.com/@shesaidyes18/a-girl-was-born-in-1985-in-an-indian-orthodox-family-a-second-child-of-her-parents-8b9f80881c37 | [] | 2021-06-17 17:40:17.373000+00:00 | ['Indian Girl', 'Life', 'Girl', 'True Story'] |
Becoming an Assertive Business Professional | Becoming an Assertive Business Professional
A change that will be professionally rewarding
Photo by alexmillos on depositphotos
Modifying Your Professional Style
If you’ve identified your style, set your goal, and clarified methods for achieving your goal, you’re on your way to a change that will be professionally rewarding.
It’s important to realize that even if you exhibit some of the attributes of an assertive business professional now, you can always improve and strengthen them.
The following are three guidelines for modifying your current professional style:
acknowledging the desire to change, planning your change, and implementing your plan.
Acknowledging the desire to change
This probably seems obvious, but it isn’t always followed in everyday practice. It includes owning the desire and being able to articulate the benefits you can gain by becoming an assertive business professional.
For example, proactive, positive, and constructive are all traits that you might like to acquire by changing and improving your professional style.
Planning your change
This is not a radical idea, but it’s surprising how many people set a goal and immediately charge off to achieve it. In their haste, they fail to lay out a clear plan on how to get where they want to go.
To plan, take the following steps:
State the goal — Do this in clear, concise terms that another professional can readily understand. Ensure that the goal is stated in terms that can be observed and measured. For example, increase one-on-one meetings with all staff members to once per month.
— Do this in clear, concise terms that another professional can readily understand. Ensure that the goal is stated in terms that can be observed and measured. For example, increase one-on-one meetings with all staff members to once per month. Identify the action steps — The completion of a step can constitute a milestone reached. Action steps should be observable and measurable. For example, one step could be to complete the assessment plan by month’s end.
— The completion of a step can constitute a milestone reached. Action steps should be observable and measurable. For example, one step could be to complete the assessment plan by month’s end. Set a timetable — Specify a date to complete each step, and put the information on a chart you can use to track your progress toward your goal. If you miss a date, revise your plan and timetable as necessary.
— Specify a date to complete each step, and put the information on a chart you can use to track your progress toward your goal. If you miss a date, revise your plan and timetable as necessary. Plan your self-assessments — The completion of an action step or milestone is a good time for this activity. This is when you ask yourself how you’re doing in keeping to your timetable and completing your action steps.
Planning your change strategy to become an assertive business professional takes time, but it’s time well spent. Planning can ensure smooth progress toward your chosen goal.
Implementing your plan
Implementing your plan involves taking action steps and then completing a self-assessment. Ask yourself how you’re doing. Have you completed a step? Was it done on time? Is the result satisfactory? Are you ready to move on?
You don’t want to encounter surprises at every step, so this is a time to be realistic. If your monitoring indicates you are not on target or are missing deadlines, adjust your plan accordingly.
Follow the outlines guidelines to change your professional style to be more assertive.
Becoming an Active Listener
An active listener hears by paying thoughtful attention. Active listening is an essential aspect of being professionally assertive.
The three primary elements of active listening are as follows:
projecting a positive image, clarifying why you’re listening, and keeping an open mind.
Projecting a positive image
When you communicate with someone, you need to physically convey that you care about what he is telling you. Through body language, you want others to see that your positive listening image supports interaction and communication.
You can build rapport with a co-worker during a conversation when you use positive eye contact, tone of voice, and posture.
Clarifying why you’re listening
In conversation, always clarify why you think it is that you’re listening and what it is you think you’re talking about. You want to be sure that you and the person you’re talking to are having the same conversation.
To do this, make it a point to start conversations by asking the other person to tell you why you are meeting and what you are going to discuss. Then confirm your role as the listener. That will get you off to a good start.
Keeping an open mind
Try not to be judgmental. Focus on keeping an open mind as you listen to others. That way, you’re fair to them and to yourself. Being open allows you to actually hear what the other person has to say and then react reasonably to him.
Because the active listening strategy is so powerful, it’s one you should definitely adopt. Your use of this strategy will strengthen your ability to act in a professionally assertive manner in the workplace. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/becoming-an-assertive-business-professional-8e1e4f47b56f | ['Sorin Dumitrascu'] | 2020-12-07 15:42:54.367000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Planning', 'Assertiveness', 'Implementation', 'Change'] |
Problems In The Educational System | Education is one of the most important aspects of a person’s life because it gives you a better understanding of how the world works, broadens your senses, and polish your power of reasoning and judgment. Most of all, it flourishes your intellectuality, so you do not follow anything or anyone without questioning their motive. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”– Nelson Mandela
The purpose of education is to make the person self-dependent, so they make wise decisions in their lives and distinguish the difference between right and wrong. Education builds a successful and peaceful economy because the more education you have, the more opportunities you have to serve your country. Moreover, an educated person is well aware of his/her responsibilities towards his/her society and nation, for example paying taxes and implementing laws.
Image taken from https://baylorlariat.com/
Nowadays, an educational system has many flaws and is far from achieving these objectives. All the good educational institutes are too expensive that compels many students to take loans to complete their studies. For the past few years, teaching styles have not been enhanced on a full scale as teachers use the same old methods, such as asking students to memorize formulas rather than explaining to students how the formula came into existence; it would help them understand the origin of it. Some teachers are not effective communicators and are not able to teach students on their level.
Image taken from https://opinionfront.com
Many private institutes are only developed for the sole purpose of earning a profit; while earning money is important to cover their cost and expenses, it does not give equal opportunities to lower- and middle-class students. According to Nina Lavezzo, an award winner of human rights, wrote an article, which highlighted that black students are 2 times more likely to be suspended in the ICCSD than the white students. Degree and certificates do not guarantee a stable future because there are so many people available for the job that a Master’s degree does not make you special; in fact, many graduates nowadays are unemployed; According to Pakistan’s statistics division, the country has over 500,000 graduates unemployed, Edu Advisor states that Malaysia has 55% graduates that make up the total number of employees in the country and, Zoomable Statistics shows that in June 2020 USA’s rate of unemployed graduates rose to 13.2%.
The biggest problem in educational structure is that it does not help people in real life; I mean, it does not develop a skill in an individual they are passionate about; after all, not everyone is good at math or science. Additionally, some of the things taught are a bit of an exaggeration; think about it, every country has their separate history books because they want to portray a positive image of their own country; but in my opinion, truth should not be tempered.
Image taken from https://www.animaker.com
Schools and colleges should make students strive and work hard and, only then the true meaning of education will be accomplished; otherwise, they are just making students handicapped by giving them an easy way out. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” — Margaret Mead
It will make acquiring education more fun and effective because students would not study because they have to pass an exam but because they enjoy doing it. | https://medium.com/@syedawardaahsan/problems-in-educational-system-97a6e28919c9 | ['Warda Ahsan'] | 2020-12-25 09:20:35.912000+00:00 | ['Problem Solving', 'Education'] |
Will 3D Cities Unlock Immersive Experiences? | In 2006, I attended a launch event in San Francisco for Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. The product’s main feature was 3D graphical renderings of U.S. cities, starting with San Francisco. It let you essentially fly around a city, sort of like Google Earth but in three dimensions.
The issue was that it required untenable levels of local memory and processing. For most people, it stalled out in buffering and crashed browsers. Since then, Moore’s Law has pushed the concept closer to reality for most folks, but immersive 3D mapping is still an unfulfilled promise.
In fairness, Google Earth offers 3D features. And Google Earth VR, lets users fly around cities in strikingly immersive ways. But that’s a non-starter for anyone outside of the few million people that own VR hardware (much less the compatible HTC and Oculus hardware).
There are also AR-related efforts to capture spatial maps of various locales. This is more about machine-readable data for AR cloud systems to understand surroundings and overlay content accordingly. But these efforts could also contribute to immersive human-readable 3D maps.
Trending AR VR Articles:
Geospatially Sound
3D mapping’s evolutionary path was recently accelerated with a developer tool from Here Technologies. Here was owned by Nokia before being spun out as its own digital mapping play. It develops advanced 3D mapping technology for self-driving cars among other endpoints.
One of those endpoints is consumer-facing 3D mapping. But as noted, this is a developer platform rather than a fully-baked consumer-ready product. As such, it should provide raw materials for apps to reach the market soon. It offers high-definition 3D models of 75 major cities.
Graphically speaking, Here claims that each structure in a given city is volumetrically and geospatially sound in terms of sub-meter level accuracy in size and elevation. As an additional UX perk, buildings are rendered in their real-world exterior color using the Cesium 3D format.
These maps also include several layers of data, including municipal layers (think: streets, parks) and structural layers (buildings). The latter is where things get interesting for potential use cases and monetization, such as overlaying place databases for business details, store reviews, etc.
In that sense, there could be “peanut butter and chocolate” integrations with location and places datasets from companies like Foursquare. Other potential apps include entertainment, auto-navigation and enterprise-facing tools. But immersive VR experiences could be most compelling.
Force Multiplier
Back to the issue of timing and underlying tech (a gating factor for Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D in 2006), a force multiplier for all of the above may be 5G. As we’ve examined, 5G enables not just faster speeds and low-latency, but its high-frequency signal enables millimeter-level geo-precision.
Practically speaking, any 3D mapping product is doomed if it can’t precisely pinpoint where you’re standing when using it. GPS fails in dense urban areas — one intended venue for Here’s new platform — due to misdirected/bouncing satellite signals. But 5G could resolve that.
Another technology that could support immersive 3D maps is, again, the construction of the AR Cloud. With more tech giants building spatial maps to power AR experiences, greater levels of data are created that can contribute to the construction of digital twins of major cities.
That includes Google’s internet of places, Apple’s related moves, Facebook’s Project Aria, Snap Local Lenses and Niantic’s work to crowdsource spatial mapping to Pokemon Go players. Again, these are more about point clouds that enable better AR….but could have other outcomes.
Meanwhile, Here’s developer tool engenders a broader set of user experiences that go beyond AR & VR. Because it’s a developer tool, we won’t get to see those outcomes yet. But we can look forward to lots of third-party creativity to build compelling 3D city apps in the coming months. | https://arvrjourney.com/will-3d-cities-unlock-immersive-experiences-d7ea8c8e0a4d | ['Ar Insider'] | 2021-02-05 14:57:33.090000+00:00 | ['Geospatial', 'Augmented Reality'] |
Burned Out: How Modern Life is Killing You | We’re all burning out. And it’s not just our jobs, our side hustles, the perpetual multitasking, and the always-on nature of modern life that’s driving us crazy.
According to a 2021 study, more than half of U.S workers are feeling burned out. Fifty-three percent of Millennials were already burned out before the pandemic. Sixty-seven percent say burnout has worsened during the pandemic. A pre-COVID 2018 Gallup poll reported that about one in four U.S. workers felt burnt out often or always. And by all accounts, burnout has only gotten worse since the pandemic started. Even the World Health Organization has taken notice. They say burnout is an occupational phenomenon that deserves serious attention.
What these social scientists and other theorists call burnout is not an individual failing or even a merely personal experience. The stress and exhaustion we feel is a near-ubiquitous feature of our modern world — a symptom of the modern world.
Chasing happiness has become the primary goal of life. It shows up in pop psychology with things like the science of happiness — a term that will get you hundreds of millions of results on Google. There’s also the emergence of chief happiness officers within the corporate world, it’s now an economic metric — the Gross National Happiness Index — and it’s even seeped into culture more generally in the form of social media graphics of inspirational quotes to share online and the phenomenon of life coaches.
There is a constant pressure to be happy all the time. Ironically, it may be the source of a lot of unhappiness in the world
Philosopher Byung Chul Han has been exploring this idea for more than a decade. In his spring 2021 article in The Nation, The Tiredness Virus, he grounds his theories in the very concrete reality of life in the time of coronavirus. In it, he explores how the fallout of COVID-19 has only intensified our preexisting burnout, reflecting back and heightening the emptiness of the modern world.
According to Han, coronavirus acts as a mirror. It shows us the pathological tendencies of society. The number one feature of our modern life is a peculiar tiredness or burnout. It’s a ceaseless exhaustion that for Han is symptomatic of life lived under late neoliberal capitalism.
It’s not just that work is tiring, because when your work is done, you should be able to rest. What’s different about the neoliberal world is that it doesn’t really allow for rest. Everything has, in a sense, become work. Leisure time is another opportunity to produce.
It never ends — not even when we’re sleeping. We’re shaped by the modern world to desire more. Desiring itself has become work. And whatever the object of our desire is, it is always just out of reach.
Objet petit a: Or the satisfaction we’ll never find
Capitalism produces in us a desire for desire. To understand the rationality of capitalism and its implicit logic, we can borrow a term from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and an example of it working in capitalism from Slavoj Žižek. The logic of capitalism operates according to the logic of objet petit a — the unattainable object of desire.
Imagine an object that gives satisfaction, like a bottle or can of Coca-Cola.
From the documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek.
An ice-cold Coke is the desired object. It tastes good. The sound as you open a bottle is pleasing. It makes us feel good. When we share it with a friend, we’re part of a relationship or a community. You can see and hear the actor in a commercial now, in your head, as they take a big swig and say “Aaaahhhh…”
But consider the can or bottle it came in — that is the limit. The limit is the thing that stops us from endlessly consuming. Without the container — the bottle or the can —limiting us, we’d theoretically have an infinite supply of soda. With an infinite supply, we’d no longer be able to desire it. There’d be no gap formed by the lack of Coke that would cause us to desire.
A real Coca-Cola advertisement
The container is what limits what we have. It provides the absence that allows us to desire more. When we reach the limit — the “no more” of an empty bottle — we can again experience desire. We want more Coke, or whatever it is that we believe will satisfy us.
Capitalism works as a vast and complicated network of producing and exchanging objects that cause desire. But these objects don’t ever really hit the mark. We never truly reach satisfaction or contentment or whatever happiness is.
Instead, these objects of desire ultimately only produce more desire. That desire kicks off a new cycle of production and consumption of objects that, like before, produce more desire. And around it goes.
It’s a pathological system — a feedback loop of objects that cause desire and require more objects to be produced and consumed that cause more desire. In short, capitalism is a system of desire to produce desire. And, of course, these desires are never truly fulfilled.
We all know what we see on social media isn’t real. That hasn’t stopped us from judging ourselves against it …
The more the system grows, the stronger it gets and the more pressure it exerts on us, dictating how society functions according to these unconscious structures of desire.
You can rest when you die
Our desire only leads us to desire more desire. It’s a vicious cycle with no end. Desiring for the purpose of desiring has no breaking point. Exhaustion should have a breaking point — a point of fatigue where you can take no more — but under late neoliberal capitalism, rest is an illusion. Even our leisure time is spent in this system of desire. We’re constantly desiring and producing desire — we’re always giving and giving to it. It’s exhausting.
Consider what Han writes in his article, The Tiredness Virus:
Psychological disorders such as depression or burnout are symptoms of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological signal, indicating that freedom today often turns into compulsion. We think we are free. But we actually exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse. We realize ourselves, optimize ourselves unto death. The insidious logic of achievement permanently forces us to get ahead of ourselves. Once we have achieved something, we want to achieve more, that is, we want to get ahead of ourselves yet again. But, of course, it is impossible to get ahead of oneself. This absurd logic ultimately leads to a breakdown. The achievement subject believes that it is free but it is actually a slave. It is an absolute slave insofar as it voluntarily exploits itself, even without a master being present.
Your smartphone is key to your auto-exploitation. With every swipe, it floods your brain with dopamine. Our phones are often essential tools for both work and play, and the apps on them act as substitutes for real downtime.
We all know what we see on social media isn’t real. That hasn’t stopped us from judging ourselves against it, from trying to do better, go faster, travel further, and look happier and be more fulfilled. When we’re not at work, or even when we are, we’re using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, and myriad sites to brand ourselves — to create our identity as a product for others to consume.
Using social media to curate a highlight reel of our lives, online shopping that chases the dragon of desire, and retreating into apps that boost productivity or make us more mindful — it’s all us gazing into the digital abyss, producing for it, giving to it, hoping it will give back.
There are solutions, but they require us to break out of these vicious cycles of desire that we mistakenly see as fundamental to the human experience.
The pandemic has also highlighted the downside to our always-on, digital-first work-life with its instant messaging and constant Zoom meetings — Zoom meetings about how to use Zoom, Zoom meetings about mental health and burnout during the pandemic, Zoom meetings about how we’re having too many Zoom meetings.
It’s enough to make you snap. But we never do. We just keep going, working, optimizing our selves — like zombies, we never drop.
The origins of the burnout diagnosis
The diagnosis of burnout has been around since 1974. Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger first identified it as a kind of stress associated with work — his own work. He saw it first in “helping” professions like the medical field, but eventually it was identified nearly everywhere. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen describes burnout as a state where you’ve “exhausted all your internal resources yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” Psychology professor Irvin Schonfeld calls it “a kind of depression that occurs in reaction to terrible working conditions.”
The concept of burnout was first identified around the same time as the neoliberal turn in capitalism began to emerge. That’s not a coincidence. That a new kind of work-related mental health issue began to crop up just as the nature of labor itself began to change isn’t really a surprise.
As the title of journalist Sarah Jaffe’s book on burnout suggests, Work Won’t Love You Back. This is true even when — probably especially when — you’re doing something you love. In fact, a labor of love likely exacerbates burnout.
In a weird way, doing work we truly love means we enjoy our exploitation. Loving your work leads you on a race, charging even harder and harder toward endlessly receding goalposts.
But no matter what job we do, no matter how we spend our free time, we’re giving more than we get back.
Is burnout inevitable?
So, how do we find rest? Jaffee suggests there can be relief in joining social unions, art collectives, even labor unions. Han proposes loftier things like unplugging or refusing the logic of the system entirely. It’s dubious if those solutions will ever work, but there’s still something we can learn from both Jaffe and Han.
What they’re both essentially saying is that the system — our modern life — won’t love you back. It’s an insidious arrangement that manipulates our very emotional state. It always takes more than it gives. There are solutions, but they require us to break out of these vicious cycles of desire that we mistakenly see as fundamental to the human experience. We need to question the totality of the happiness industry and the pressures it exerts on us.
The question is, is happiness a good thing, or is it a shallow goal that only serves the interests of capital and its expansion? Is there a middle path — one where happiness is still valuable but not quickly assimilated into an exploitative logic? | https://aninjusticemag.com/burned-out-how-modern-life-is-killing-us-a336b8346efb | ['Joel Nihlean'] | 2021-08-16 17:03:56.232000+00:00 | ['Work Life Balance', 'Politics', 'Burnout', 'Capitalism', 'Neoliberalism'] |
Côte-des-Neiges (Chapter VIII) | THE GLORIOUS SUNSHINE AND THE GATHERING STORM
…I had no romantic designs whatsoever. She was a member of my study group and she asked for my help. Sooner of later, I thought, I may need her help in return. From a purely transactional point of view, I concluded, I was making an investment in the furtherance of my academic goals…Yeah, right. I didn’t believe that either…
Background
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons and/or events is purely coincidental. The main character — and narrator — is Alejandro Zurita, a twenty-two year old bon vivant, studying Business Administration at Vanier College in Montréal in the early spring of 1996, just as the dot com boom and the Web 1.0 is about to start…
Author’s note: This chapter is dedicated to “Miss Animus Invictus”, for your inspiration, courage, and “middle finger to the world”. Keep on truckin’, Momma.
Oh every time the phone rings My mind goes
The same dream again. I was flying. I soared across the sky, flying the length of “Calle Primera”, first street, from the intersection of “Respaldo Luperón” all the way to “La Linea”, the train tracks belonging to the local sugar mill, “El Central Romana²”.
I saw our house, with its mismatched tin roof and slanted construction. “El Colmado Guillamo”, the corner bodega. I zoomed past “La Hebanisteria Hustrera”, the custom furniture factory at the corner of “Calle C”, or C street. I looked down at yard and cluttered loading dock area, with its half-finished pile of tables, chairs and the odd armoire.
I crossed the train tracks and stopped at “El Play” the wide open, empty field that marked the boundary between Villa Pereira, El Ensanche Quisqueya and Villa España.
I was high up in the sky, but I could clearly make out the discarded milk cartons we used to fashion our catcher’s mitts, the sticks — of various forms and length — used as bats and the old, moldy socks, filled with rags and bits of newspapers we used as baseballs.
I remember smiling at the sight of piles of chewed up and dried out sugar cane stalks. As the freight trains approached, loaded to the brim with sugar cane harvested from the bateyes, we would run alongside it, hop on board a hopper cart at a blind spot, yank as many of the tightly packed stalks as we could before the train carried us too far.
Once done, we had to jump off, tuck and roll, to join the other kids in gathering the loot. We would pile up the haul and spend the next several hours peeling the stalks with our bare teeth or a homemade knife, enjoying the fruit of our labor: sweet, ill-gotten sugar cane nectar.
The entire enterprise was not without risks, several kids, including some of my friends, had been injured or even killed — pulled down to the undercarriage by the train’s downdraft. An arm or a leg would get caught by the side flange, the whole body would be pulled under and crushed between the steel wheels and the steel tracks.
It could happen at any time, suddenly a piece of loose clothing would get tangled up while either hopping in or jumping out, and that was all she wrote. My father had made it very clear, under penalty of death, that I was not to go near that area. It was both a warning and a threat. One I routinely ignored.
Once hopped up on sugar, we would either play “beisbol” with our homemade gear, or if the winds were favorable, fly our “Chichigüas”, or homemade kites. These we made with coconut leaves’ stems tied together into a six-sided hexagon, and covered with a flattened and stretched out plastic shopping bag.
We would cut rags into long thin strips for the tail and used our mom’s sewing or knitting kit threads as the lines. In my dream, the corner of the field closest to the train tracks was always littered with piles of dried coconut leaves, all with their stems missing.
I looked up, trying to decide whether to turn right and fly over “El Hospital de Salúd Publica”, the public hospital and over to Villa España; or turn left and head on down to El Ensanche Quisqueya. El Ensanche Quisqueya was a sub-division built for the workers of the Central Romana and their families.
If your Dad worked at the Central Romana sugar mill in town — not the bateyes with the Haitian migrant workers — and he was a unionized, full time worker, then “La Associación Romana de Ahorros & Prestamos¹”, the workers’ union’s Credit Union would lend your Dad the money with which to buy a house — provided your family could cobble together the down payment — and, as they say, move on up from the slums.
The mortgage payments were automatically deducted from your Dad’s monthly pay cheque, along with his union dues and other payroll deductions. As long as your Dad did not get “parado”, or laid off — and your family could afford the mortgage — you all could continue calling El Ensanche Quisqueya your home, and rub the noses of the kids on the other side of the tracks in it.
I was about to head on down on “Calle Cazique Caonabo” when a bunch of other kids came out of nowhere and started chasing me. Grabbing my ankles and trying to pull me down to ground. I tried to fly higher and faster but they kept getting closer.
All of the sudden it was night and everything was pitch black. This was not uncommon since the nightly “apagones”, or blackouts were a feature of daily life on Hispaniola. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw a truck full of soldiers, bloodthirsty goons with their guns at the ready, coming to kill anyone violating curfew. I knew I had to run and hide. I tried to dig a hole on the ground but they were getting closer faster than I could dig deeper.
I had to get out of there and hide…but I couldn’t. Oh, my God, they were here. I saw one of them jump out of the truck, his face painted black, his carabine pointing menacingly at me. He was going to kill me, I was sure. Now he was running towards me, screaming, like a high pitched ring.
“Ring-ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring-ring.” Somehow I realized I was dreaming, just as he lifted his weapon to fire it at me — I willed myself to open my eyes and wake up. “Ring-ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring-ring.”
I woke up to the sounds of the house phone ringing on Candy’s side of the bed. I looked over to her, but she wasn’t there. “Ring-ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring-ring.”
“What time is it?” I thought. “Ring-ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring-ring.”
“Did I sleep in?” The bathroom door was closed, but I could see a shaft of light coming through the small space where the door meets the floor. I heard the shower running and realized Candy was already up, getting ready for work. “Ring-ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring-ring.”
I rolled over to Candy’s side, resting my head on her pillow, wisps of her scent drifting by me. I picked up the receiver, not quite sure who would be calling at such ungodly hour,
“Oui, bonjour,” I spoke, in my best, neutral, “Yes, hello. But this better be fucking important” way I tended to use to answer the phone at 6:15 in the goddamned morning.
“Alejandro? This is Derrick. Derrick Hatfield,” came the response. The caller did not need to say more. Derrick Hatfield was my boss’ boss, “Il capo di tutti i capi”, The big cohuna, or Grand Poobah.
He was a quiet, easy going man who liked vintage printed shirts, younger, voluptuous women — with more than a passing resemblance to Anna Nicole Smith — and driving second-hand, dated-but-drivable Jaguar Sedans. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but he was loaded.
“Good morning, sir. How are you?” I asked, sitting up and waking the fuck-up in a hurry.
“I’m fine. Listen,” he began. Mr. Hatfield was easy going and polite, but he spoke with the frank assertiveness of someone who knows they have more money than God and the power to compel people to do their bidding.
“Sebastien tells me you’re going on holidays for two weeks,” he continued without waiting for me to answer. “You’re taking your girl to Hispaniola for some fun in the sun, eh?” The transparent double entendre hanging in the air.
“Pinche guevón,” Dirty old man, I didn’t Say. Instead, I answered as evenly as possible.
“Umm, yes, sir. We are leaving tonight at 7:00pm, after work. We return two weeks from tomorrow, on Saturday.”
“Nonsense. Take the day off,” he said. “You stepped up to the plate when Giuseppe couldn’t Cope. You kept the place moving and got the work done without bitching, unlike the other guys,” he added with muted contempt.
“Well, that’s the job, sir,” I assured him. “To get the customers their shipment on time.” I was wondering where this conversation was going. Was I going to get promoted, handed an early Christmas bonus or was he just blowing smoke up my ass.
“Out with it, man. Get to the point!” I yelled in my head. Sensing my impatience, he quickly added,
“Be that as it may, you handled it, so take the day off,” he ordered. “Go and enjoy your trip and when you get back, bring me the receipts. Coloumbe will write you a cheque for the total, Ok?” It may have sounded like a question at the end, but it was not. Mr. Hatfield had given me an order and he expected me to follow it.
“Eh, yes, sir. Thank you!” I said, hoping that what little excitement I had managed to muster this early – and in such short notice – was enough to convince the old coot.
“Don’t mention it,” he insisted. “Have a good time and bring me a large bottle of that Brugal Añejo rhum you’re always raving about. Oh, and a box of that Don Carlos’ Double Robusto cigars. None of that Cuban ‘legacy’ crap. I want the best Dominican stuff they got!”
With that, he hung up and I was left to plan a full day of me-myself-and-I while waiting for Candy to be done in the bathroom. Suddenly I had to drop a deuce real bad, considering what I ate and drank the night before, I thought it best if done in private. | https://medium.com/the-desabafo/c%C3%B4te-des-neiges-chapter-viii-613cfd753434 | ['Juan Alberto Cirez'] | 2020-10-15 08:04:55.482000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Relationships', 'Fiction', 'Erotica', 'Music'] |
Machine Learning in Baseball | This is an interesting problem to undertake because of the renaissance that has been taking place in baseball over the last two decades or so. Data has come to play a huge role in baseball and that means that patterns and statistics that were once considered fringe are now mainstream metrics. The home run is no longer king. The era of Moneyball has supplanted Longball.
My source was Sean Lahman’s baseball data set, which ranged from the late 1800s to 2019. Since I wanted to walk this path, I needed to make sure that I chose players from the current era. Only players that made their debut after the year 2000 were included. Nineteen years is long enough for a good portion of the players in this dataset to have played a full career.
The first step was to clean the data. There is a lot of information that couldn’t be of good use and were dropped — including birthplace, death place, and birth year.
The data came in several different files. The main dataset contained the biographical information while the salary, pitching, batting, post-season batting, post-season pitching, fielding, and awards were all appropriately named for their contents. The goal was to average the first three years of statistics and isolate the fourth season salary. This fourth season would presumably be the product of arbitration.
The process was done in a series of steps listed below:
Data Cleaning EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) Modeling
1. Data Cleaning
First, I want to talk about the helper functions that I will be using through import. Importing my own functions has been a pet project of mine. These are specialized but I am working more and more on creating generalized functions that I can use over and over again.
The first function was to gather the mean for the first three years of statistics. The second function is the isolation of the fourth year salary. I use them when processing the data. You can find them here.
I found the fourth year salary by player. This was going to be the target variable I modeled for later on.
When using this groupby command, if the player does not play a fourth season then the salary will be entered in as a zero. We can easily filter out players that would not have made it to arbitration that way.
The next step was to create features for both pitchers and batters based on their statistics. This included things like slugging percentage, walks + hits over how many innings pitched (whip), etc. These are much more comprehensive statistics that are popular in baseball to explain a player's importance. Since they are based on other statistics, there may be correlation issues in the future that we may have to fix.
Then I aggregated the players by statistics. I had both pitchers and batters so I did both. Here is an example of the batters.
The code above looks at each of the continuous variables and creates a mean of the first three years of a rookie’s career. This cuts down the observations to a third. This was repeated with all of the continuous variables for pitchers as well.
Next, we start on the categorical variables. This includes awards, height bins, position, and handedness. We use dummy variables and one-hot encoding in order to accomplish it. This process just means that we assign an integer value to the positive case in each variable. A ‘1’ if the person is left-handed vs right-handed or for the position — this also means having an explosion of variables.
After this action, the data set has an entry for each player that debuted after 2000, played at least four seasons. It also has the average number for each of their first three year statistics as well as an indicator that they won an award and other vitals like batting and throwing hand.
2. EDA
During the data analysis portion of the project, it is now a prerogative to look through the data for trends, patterns, or a deeper understanding of the target variable. The first step can be to take a look at the distribution for the salaries of players by position. Since this has nine possible categories, we will use a box plot.
Salary Distribution by Position
According to the plot above, the salaries are very similar. The outliers tell a tale on their own — outfielders and pitchers are much more likely to have prolific arbitration outcomes. We can do more analysis and see if hits per game play any part in this outcome.
Hits Per Game Distribution byPosition
From this graph, we can see that catchers rank towards the bottom in hits per game on average. However, the rest of the positions are much less clear, so we need to continue looking. Let’s take a look at the side of the plate batters hit from.
Count of Left vs Right-Handed Batters
From this graph, we can see that left-handed batters are available at a premium. This graph does not tell us much more than that so let’s delve deeper and take a look at the mean salary for left vs right-handed players.
Mean Salary by Handedness
From here we can see that the salary average is pretty close to the same for the two categories. Now, we can conduct some statistical tests. Let’s first do an overall correlation test. This graph will tell us which of the features are telling us the same information and will throw off the linear regression models.
Correlation Heatmap
As we thought, there are major sources of correlation in the features. This is to be expected because some of the features are based on the original data set columns. We are going to use a Ridge or Lasso model for feature selection so let’s move on.
Next, we begin the statistical tests. Firstly, we have to make a change in our data set. We do this because of the distribution of the salary. We need to get the distribution as close to a normal distribution as we can. For this technique, we log transform the salary feature. After the transformation, the distribution looks like this:
Log Transformed Salary Distribution by Handedness
3. Modeling
Since we are going to be using the model to try and find the features that have the best explanation of the target variable, we will be using R² as our metric. This means that the features explain a certain percentage of the variance of the target variable. The modeling process is mostly a standard procedure of preparation for this project. Our first step is to separate the pitchers from the batters. The intrinsically different positions and statistics would only throw each other off during a model.
The first step is the test, train, split for both pitchers and batters. After that, I ran a scaler on the different portions. It is important that this be done after the split so that the train and test sets do not have any interactions or affect each other in any way.
Batters
In the end, we ran four models for both pitchers and batters. The final scores for the batters look like this.
Final Batter Model R² Scores
The best performing model was the Lasso CV (cross-validation) model that helped with feature selection. The coefficients that survived the punishing test of importance are shown in the following graph.
Feature Coefficients for Batters
Next were the pitchers. The Lasso CV model did not work as well for the pitchers. Instead, it required a standard linear regression model with a little bit of tuning. The scores are shown here.
Final Pitcher Model R² Scores
The feature importance is described in the graph below.
Feature Coefficients for Pitchers
Looking Forward
The basis of this project was to identify the most important features of a salary arbitration for a rookie’s fourth year. This project was done very early in my data science career and as such, I would change a few of the routes I took.
Firstly, I would increase the data set to include more of the baseball statistics seen in-game. These include but are not limited to pitch velocity, strike zone location, and arm strength. Another perspective to look at the data is to look at trends over time vs averages.
This would mean looking at how a player improved or declined over their first three seasons rather than taking all of the seasons at equal weight. | https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-in-baseball-bbe91af05db7 | ['Paul Torres'] | 2020-12-15 03:47:19.143000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Linear Regression', 'Data', 'Machine Learning'] |
The Tattooed Prisoner and Little Netta | The Tattooed Prisoner and Little Netta
The scene is called Joker’s Social Experiment. The Joker is the chief architect of a scenario in which people are on boats trying to flee a city. He ironically is the reason they are fleeing the city in the first place (because he threatened to destroy it). There are two boats featured in the scene and the Joker gives each boat a detonator to destroy the other or else he’ll blow them both up … and they only have a few minutes to determine a course of action. What an experiment! To The Dark Knight movie writers: Bravo — WOW!
During the experiment the Joker and Batman are in a tower battling each other as people in the boats contemplate blowing each other up. In my first blog, Please Throw your Detonator out the Window, I focused on the boats representing the positions people have on issues in our society and the detonators as words we use and things we do that set off divisive bombs of negativity and hate which ultimately lead to destruction. While the title encouraged us to throw our detonators out of the window, if you read the entire blog, I ended with encouraging us to instead use our detonators to set off Fruits of the Holy Spirit bombs of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in our conversations and interactions with one another, no matter which boat(s) we may consider ourselves in.
I now turn our attention to four characters in the scene, the actions they took, and how they relate to our lives today.
The Joker is an agent of chaos. He supplies the bombs and detonators to people on boats, enables them to make a choice, and if they don’t comply he takes action himself to blow things up. He directly (or indirectly through his supporters) sets things in motion that put people against each other and even within themselves. The really wild part about the Joker’s actions is that he does things just because. In the movie, Alfred mentioned some people just like to watch the world burn, and the Joker himself said he’s like a dog chasing a car who wouldn’t know what to do with it if he caught it. This is destructive behavior. Let’s not be like the Joker.
Joker, The Dark Knight
Batman is trying to stop Joker and appears to be one of the heroes in the scene. He claims to do things in the name of righteousness and goodness, but deep down he too is doing it for sport and is destroying the city and others in the process. He has no rules, no jurisdiction, considers himself to be above the law; does whatever he wants because he thinks he’s right and that his means are justifying the end (e.g. the technology used to track Joker). But who is holding Batman accountable for his actions? Who is calling Batman out? Batman can’t just do whatever the hell he wants. This is destructive behavior. Let’s not be like Batman.
L. Fox with Batman’s sonar technology based computer system that can spy on the whole city, The Dark Knight
Now, let’s talk about the guy (I don’t know his name) holding the detonator in the boat of civilians. He thinks his life is more valuable than the life of prisoners on the other boat; he thinks he’s good and other people are bad and therefore feels they deserve to die. He’s arguably the most evil and dangerous in this scene because his “would be” actions were not random; they were calculated and he used reason and logic to justify destroying others because he felt his own life mattered more than others. Let’s not be like this guy.
Guy on civilian boat, The Dark Knight
Now we arrive at the Tattooed Prisoner. He’s the one who literally and figuratively diffuses the situation and ruins Joker’s Social Experiment. He’s the one thinking about others ahead of himself. He’s the one who does the thing no one else has the courage to do in throwing the detonator out of the window. His selfless behavior is something we should all model in our everyday lives. Let’s be like the Tattooed Prisoner.
Tattooed Prisoner on prisoner boat, The Dark Knight
When I think of the Tattooed Prisoner’s selflessness I can’t help but be reminded of the memory of my late cousin, Little Netta, and the story of her selfless actions when she celebrated her sixth birthday. She was born December 27, 1974 (two days after Christmas) and at her sixth birthday party she gave away her gifts to children after learning they did not receive gifts for Christmas. Simply amazing.
Little Netta is the nickname of Jeannetta L. Robinson. She was the granddaughter of Ms. Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson, and great-granddaughter of Claretta “Mother Freedom” Simpson, community leaders and co-founders of Career Youth Development, Inc (CYD), a non-profit, multi-service, social service agency that offered more than 30 programs to Milwaukee’s poor families to help them through drug addiction, gang activity, parenting, academic challenges and many other challenges for over 40 years. CYD’s slogan was “Love in Action” and it could not better summarize the philosophy of Ms. Simpson-Robinson, Ms. Simpson, and the kindness of Little Netta through her actions.
Little Netta and Cheryl Robinson
On April 4, 1984 Little Netta and her mother, Cheryl Robinson, were tragically murdered. My grandmother, Ms. Simpson-Robinson, decided to create an annual event in Little Netta’s memory called Lil’ Jeannetta Robinson’s Toys for the Children that Santa Forgot but God Remembered through Your Gifts of Love. She loved long titles! The first event was held Friday, December 27, 1985 (on what would have been Little Netta’s 11th birthday), and continued for 28 years. The event provided toys to approximately 20 children in its first year and grew to providing toys to more than 2,000 children annually.
Ms. Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson
Ms. Claretta “Mother Freedom” Simpson
I share this background with you because my dad, brothers, and I have decided to once again honor the memory of Little Netta by planning to bring this event back next year to help children. You can consider this entire blog an official SAVE THE DATE for December 27, 2021. We’ll be leaning on God and the love and support from the entire community to execute on our vision. I have a vision for the event being something that ultimately takes place nationwide, but we’ll start one event in one city (Milwaukee) next year and go from there.
Little Netta’s compassion toward others at such a young age serves as an example for all of us.
Let’s be like Little Netta. Happy Birthday, cousin.
-Mike Brown | https://medium.com/mike-bs-reflections-and-words-of-encouragement-and/the-tattooed-prisoner-and-little-netta-925d7d048836 | ['Mike B.'] | 2020-12-27 12:35:57.659000+00:00 | ['Toys', 'Children', 'Selflessness', 'Compassion'] |
Etherisc’s crop insurance initiative in Kenya earns support from Ethereum Foundation | We are very happy to announce that the Ethereum Foundation has decided to support our project aimed at providing crop insurance to smallholder farmers based on blockchain technology in cooperation with ACRE Africa. Etherisc received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support Program, which exists to provide both financial and non-financial support to projects and entities within the greater Ethereum community, in order to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem.
As announced in our blog post on November 14th 2020, Etherisc was able to start with the development of innovative parametric crop insurance built on top of our “Generic Insurance Framework” (GIF) with ACRE Africa thanks to the financial and technical support from Chainlink.
The grant from the Ethereum Foundation is a crucial element to complete the financing for the first phase of the project in Kenya.
Opportunities in emerging markets
The Ethereum Foundation’s Executive Director, Aya Miyaguchi, highlighted the potential of blockchain technology in the area of inclusive finance when discussing the project cooperation during her keynote speech at EthOnline this October. The Ethereum Foundation is seeing opportunities in emerging markets as an important part of their scaling strategy to reach the next billion users. The use case we are building with ACRE Africa can make a valuable contribution to these goals. | https://blog.etherisc.com/etheriscs-crop-insurance-initiative-in-kenya-earns-support-from-ethereum-foundation-4f951df1db86 | [] | 2020-12-14 16:02:27.021000+00:00 | ['Acre Africa', 'Defi', 'Insurance', 'Etherisc', 'Ethereum'] |
Collaboration and Productivity. Collaboration can lead to new products… | Business Case: Collaboration has its proven benefits. It can lead to new products, new processes and innovative ideas. But can too much become a hindrance? We looked into quantifiable measurements of collaboration, such as total number of emails and meetings, to better understand their effect on the productivity of a hardware manufacturer’s sales team.
Details: An automated hardware manufacturer noticed the sales team of over 200 salespersons had uncharacteristically uneven results. They sought out their people analytics team to boost/increase sales and productivity.
Purpose: Detect patterns, recommend actionable solutions based on data
Methods: Correlation, regression modeling, scatterplots and histograms
Step1 — Business Question:
Why are attainment results uncharacteristically uneven across the sales department? Any solutions to increase sales quota attainment?
Description of Data Set:
Figure 1: Data dictionary Part 1
Figure 2: Data dictionary Part 2
The data we have on whether or not quota is attained is from the Sales Department, so this is where the following analysis will be focused.
Let’s look at the workforce architecture of the sales team…
Frequencies of Employment Level in Sales Department:
ggplot(df_sales, aes(factor(level),
fill = factor(level))) +
geom_bar()
Figure 3: Levels in Sales Department, and relative # of employees
Most of the sales department is made up of “Junior IC” level employees, followed by “Support” and “Senior IC” employees.
Next, we look at the median quota results (% of attainment), by level of employee. The box plots display the minimum, maximum, median, and first and third quartiles.
Figure 4: Level of employees and attained quotas
Highest performers include the Senior Executive, Directors and Executives. Managers and Junior IC level employees could learn from Directors or Support, on relevant sales tactics that work, in order to increase quota attainment. If executives focused some of their efforts on improving their Junior IC employees and Managers, there is a likelihood of added quota attainment and employee growth.
Step 2 — Correlations Between Variables in Data Set:
Figure 5: Measuring the strength of various correlations between variables
Highest Correlating Variables in data set:
Centrality and emailcount— 0.70
Centrality and emailcount_int — 0.83
Emailcount and emailcount_int — 0.89
Emailcount and emailcount_ext — 0.87
Meetingcount and centrality — 0.59
Meetingcount and meetingcount_ext — 0.93
Meetingcount_int and meetingcount_ext — 0.89
Insights: These three factors — meetings, emails and centrality are all highly correlated with one another.
Mild Correlation:
Attainquota and emailcount — 0.28
Attainquota and meetingcount — 0.36
Attainquota and centrality — 0.35
Attainquota and meetingcount_int — 0.37
Insights: In order to understand the effect of collaboration on attainment % of quota, we look into email count, meeting count and centrality.
Part 3 — Visual Analysis: Histograms and scatterplots to explore the hypothesis and data categories/points
Histogram of Employees and their Sales Quota % attainment:
Figure 6: Histogram of sales quota attainment
Email Count and Attain Quota % (color coded by level of employee):
Figure 7: Attain quota % and email count, color coded by level
Here, we notice that the relationship between email count and quota attained is not linear. After a certain point, the quota attained % decreased with additional email count. This shows that emails/collaboration may help achieve goals up to a certain point, but excessive email amounts could hinder productivity and progress.
Part 4 — Data Subsets — Non-Linear Relationships
We create data subsets to more accurately depict non-linear relationships.
Attain Quota % and Email Count, with Data Subsets:
ggplot(data=model_1, aes(x = emailcount, y = attainquota)) +
geom_point(col = "blue") +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", formula = y ~ x, data=subset(df_sales, emailcount<7500),
se = FALSE, col = "coral") +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", formula = y ~ x, data=subset(df_sales, emailcount>=7500),
se = FALSE, col = "darkgreen") +
theme_classic()
Figure 8: Attain quota % and email count, subsets of collaboration effects
Centrality and Attained Quota:
Centrality (the measure of how central the employee is to the flow of information within the organization) produces a similar result. This data too, was separated into subsets, to more accurately depict the non-linear relationship between quota attained and network centrality.
ggplot(data=model_1, aes(x = centrality, y = attainquota)) +
geom_point(col = "blue") +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", formula = y ~ x, data=subset(df_sales, centrality<0.30),
se = FALSE, col = "darkgreen") +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", formula = y ~ x, data=subset(df_sales, centrality>=0.30),
se = FALSE, col = "purple") +
theme_classic()
Figure 9: Attain quota and centrality, subsets of collaboration effects
This clearly depicts the negative effects of quota attainment with increasing centrality within the organization. (Higher centrality means employee is more central to data flows of information with networks.)
Then we included centrality squared in the data set, as a quadratic relationship, to achieve a better model fit.
Attain Quota OLS Linear Regression Model:
Figure 10: Regression analysis of effects on attained quota %
Interpretations on the coefficients:
Centrality — significant, the likelihood of attaining quota goes up.
I(centrality²) — significant, the likelihood of attaining quota goes down.
meetingcount — significant, the likelihood of attaining quota goes up.
Scatterplot of Interior Meeting Count and Attained Quota %:
Figure 11: Meeting count — interior and attained quota %
After 1,000 meetings, there appears to be a tapered slope of productivity in attaining quotas. This is consistent with the centrality and email count variables. (Note: Many sales employees attained their quota without meeting with interior departments.)
Conclusion:
An increase in collaboration may lead to increased productivity, but only up to a certain point. Too much collaboration will likely lead to a decrease in productivity, due to lost time obtaining objectives.
Based on the insights from this analysis, I can recommend a few solutions to increase quota attainment. There may be opportunities to improve individual sales processes through more structured sales protocols.
Further analysis of higher performers could shed light on why their sales processes produce better results. The team could use data analytics to better predict which customers are more likely to purchase, based on historical data, and allocate more time to those customers. That information can be summarized and reported to all other sales employees. This may be one path to improving quota attainment and increasing sales department-wide.
For further analysis, additional data I would like to have is quota attainment for the other departments, not just sales. I would run an additional analysis to see if centrality, email and meeting count impacts other (non-sales) departments and their ability to reach their objectives.
Sources: Polzer, Jeff T., et al., (2018). Sarah Powers at Automated Precision Products, Harvard Business Review. | https://medium.com/@lisalondon/what-is-the-effect-of-increased-collaboration-on-productivity-7a180b6f125a | ['Lisa London'] | 2020-12-21 22:33:19.739000+00:00 | ['Regression Analysis', 'Collaborative Consumption', 'Meetings', 'Salesforce Productivity', 'Productivity'] |
Diary Session September 3, 2020 | Diary Session September 3, 2020
Oh, I just remembered I was supposed to up my game…Let’s move that to tomorrow, please.
I worked out today and I did not die this time around. It went well.
Mostly spent my day reading and working. I am reading “The Bezos Letter” by Steve Anderson.
By the way, my workspace is a bookstore and I read books free of charge (yeah, I was born lucky). Nike is the manager of the bookstore (Nike from yesterday’s story). Since we are going to be together, let me give you more background gist.
The name of the bookstore is RovingHeights and the owners are gracious to allow me to work there. The owners are the Eyinades (Dotun, Adebola and Tobi). I am closer to Adebola (popularly called Miss — a fast version of Mrs — Bola). She has this beautiful hearty laugh that makes her sound like a child — she is sweet! I love that woman!
Nike works with two other ladies, Ibiso and Mitchelle. I cannot describe Mitchelle because I don’t even understand her. Ibiso is something else…maybe I will talk about her someday.
I had two content calendars to write today so I spent my day coming up with content ideas and captions.
I did not engage in a weird habit (daily calls to one of my nonsense friends) today because I was too busy to even remember his existence. Called him later at night because there was something I wanted to share with him. And I regretted that call because the idiot just ended up annoying me.
I slept after that call, excited to run again tomorrow!
See you tomorrow! | https://medium.com/@moboluwaduroobadeyi/just-another-day-84aa0b78e4e4 | ['Moboluwaduro Obadeyi'] | 2020-09-04 21:44:24.607000+00:00 | ['Diary', 'Personal Growth', 'Diary Writing', 'Personal'] |
Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener review: A budget price makes this system worth the setup hassles | Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener review: A budget price makes this system worth the setup hassles Rachael Dec 24, 2020·4 min read
Bringing your garage door into your smart home isn’t the simplest process, nor is it the cheapest: Many smart garage door systems—our top pick, the Chamberlain myQ, notwithstanding—will run you $100 or more. And then there’s the hassle of climbing around on a ladder in your garage and dealing with some often janky wiring.
Meross doesn’t do much about the installation headaches—in fact, it’s one of the more labor-intensive openers on the market, for reasons I’ll explain shortly—but it does help out greatly when it comes to price. At a mere $40, it’s the second cheapest smart opener on the market, after the $30 myQ.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart garage door controllers, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product. Christopher Null / IDG Less-than-articulate installation instructions like this might challenge novices.
Like all of Meross’ products, the initial presentation of the device is decidedly understated. A plain white box contains all the individually packaged components, with nothing but a QR code to direct you to setup instructions and the Meross app. You will need those instructions.
All smart garage door openers have compatibility limitations, and Meross’ is no exception. Like all the other wired openers I’ve tested, Meross’ does not work out of the box with newer, more secure openers and requires a special accessory in order to do so.
Meross doesn’t actually sell this accessory; you are directed to email the company to obtain one directly (for free) if the app’s compatibility checker determines your opener isn’t compatible.
As such, it’s probably worth downloading the app and plugging in your garage door model information before you even purchase the product in order to save yourself an extra trip up the ladder in your garage. I ended up installing the device on a slightly older Liftmaster that did not need the accessory. The other two openers in my garage, however, would have required one.
[ Further reading: A smart home guide for beginners ]While Meross’ installation instructions are far from perfect, hardware setup is similar in most ways to other smart garage door openers. The opener plugs directly into wall power, and two bare wire leads connect the Meross opener to terminals on the back of the garage door motor, either through screw posts or spring-loaded connectors. Meross throws you for a twist, however, in its choice of door sensor technology, which is used to tell the app whether the garage door is open or shut. While most smart openers use a wireless sensor that mounts to the door and can sense whether it is upright (door shut) or horizontal (door open), Meross instead relies on a two-part magnetic sensor similar to the type used in a home security system.
Christopher Null / IDG A simple in-app animation tells you when your door is in motion.
That’s an interesting idea—except the sensor must connect to the Meross opener via a long wire. You snake this wire along the track, much like you do with the infrared sensors used to determine whether the door opening is blocked, and carefully position the magnets somewhere on the door.
Getting this all situated isn’t the simplest process, because if the sensor wire hits the chain, it can easily rip the whole thing apart. Meross doesn’t provide any accessories to make this easy, so bring some binder clips to make the process a bit cleaner. (Gloves are also a good idea, since the track can be quite oily.)
The good news is that the lack of a wireless door sensor takes one potential trouble spot out of the equation, and the MSG100 need only communicate with your router via Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) in order to maintain its connection. Setup through the Meross app was quick and error-free in my testing, after which I was able to use the app to freely open and close the door.
Alexa and Google Assistant are both supported, letting you use your voice to operate the controls, and the MSG100 also supports both Samsung SmartThings and IFTTT. A different version of this product (model MSG100HK) supports Apple HomeKit, but it was not available at press time.
I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful additional features in the app, including an “overtime reminder,” which pushes a warning if the door is left open for a user-configured length of time, and the “overnight reminder,” which alerts you if the door is open after hours (at a time you set). You can also set the door to close automatically after it’s been open for a set time, or close at a certain time of day. My only complaint with the app is that it can be slow to respond—opening the door can take 5 to 10 seconds of “thinking” in some cases—but that’s a minor issue. All activity is logged in the app, and push notifications are also sent to your phone for just about everything.
Meross’s installation is more onerous than most smart garage products, but for just $40, one might feel able to tolerate a bit of a headache. If MyQ’s opener doesn’t work for you, this is our second-best recommendation.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@rachael85175516/meross-smart-wi-fi-garage-door-opener-review-a-budget-price-makes-this-system-worth-the-setup-200d9e4e0825 | [] | 2020-12-24 21:36:42.717000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Entertainment', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Cord'] |
Magic Leap による セマンティクス（後編） | 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/japanese-magic-leap-fans/magic-leap-%E3%81%AB%E3%82%88%E3%82%8B-%E3%82%BB%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B9-%E5%BE%8C%E7%B7%A8-634b720d405d | ['Sadao Tokuyama'] | 2020-12-25 03:16:25.948000+00:00 | ['Object Recognition', 'Magic Leap One', 'AR', 'Magic Leap', 'マジックリープ'] |
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