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Gen Y is the Middle Child Wedge Betweeen Gen X and Gen Z | Gen Z established itself with respect. I mean, how long did the name Zoomer last? Not long. Did we ever have the respect of being Gen Y? Maybe — I dunno, by 2012, we were just industry killers. Maybe it was because Hunter S. Thompson was the one to coin it and his words
Generation X got off easy compared to the hideous fate of the poor bastards in Generation Z. They will be like steerage passengers on the Titanic, trapped in the watery bowels of a sinking ‘unsinkable ship.
(Hunter S Thompson recreation to avoid Medium’s copyright takedowns!)
There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
While Gen X were aloof and Gen Z have more self-restraint, we are the annoying middle child who acts out in search for desired attention, with thought pieces and essays about the existential dread of capitalism. As I watched too many YouTube videos on “the differences between gen z and millenials”, I realized why I was a sociology major only for one semester. In lé millenial fashion, this is me not saying anything at all, but as a sweet excuse to gaze at that navel and show off these bitching shades.
One thing that I came across is Gen Z Conservative — I’m not going to link it and if you visit boy, you better strap on that adblocker — which is a blog aimed at younger Gen Z kids who are “tired of university indoctrination?” It also could be a psych-ops and Gen Z kids maybe are not that conservative?
I don’t know — perhaps I’ll need to consult our modern version of Carrie Bradshaw’s Vogue.
Buzzfeed
At the end of the day, as long as the kids hate capitalism, the kids will be all right.
Fuck Gen X, though. I see right through ya!
Sincerely yours,
Hunter S Thompson. | https://medium.com/@nellarosmarino/gen-y-is-the-middle-child-wedged-betweeen-gen-x-and-gen-z-a476445bc11d | ['Andrea Paz'] | 2020-12-13 10:38:16.743000+00:00 | ['Gonzo Medium', 'Gonzo Journalism', 'Gen Z', 'Generation Y', 'Millennials'] |
When Silence Isn’t Golden: How one Marine is fighting to be heard | Stealth operations play a critical role in military success but silence isn’t always golden.
Silence is critical for operational security (OPSEC).
Silence is necessary when situating an ambush on the enemy.
Silence is appropriate to pay honor to the fallen during the bugle call for ‘Taps.’
Silence is not golden when a fellow Marine rapes another Marine and the victim is forced to invisibly “fall in line” and “march on” after military sexual trauma.
(A young Marine, Pvt. Thae Ohu celebrates her graduation from basic entry training and prepares to begin her life as a Marine. Photo provided by Pan Pyhu)
Meet Cpl. Thae Ohu of the United States Marine Corps. She enlisted into the elite force of the Marines to better her life but it ended up dismantling it. While Ohu was stationed overseas in Okinawa, she built a family with her fellow service members. They worked hard together but they also partied hard together — a characteristic that is not uncommon for a close-knit unit of troops stationed overseas in a non-combat zone.
However, the climate dramatically shifted for Ohu in August 2015 when she was raped by a fellow Marine. She was left isolated and with no support. After her assault in 2015, Ohu did what any good Marine would do, “charlie mike”, continue mission.
Ohu recounted her assault in a journal entry the morning after the rape. She recounted being roused from an extreme state of unconsciousness, Ohu awoke to a sergeant undressing her and proceeding to have sex with her limp body without her consent in her own handwriting, there was one word she was able to say to her perpetrator and that was the word, please.
Please [stop]. Please [don’t]. She politely asked this so-called ‘respected’ member of her team not to violate her in this manner, but the assailant had no regard for her plea. When she came to the next morning, she felt unrecognizable by her abdominal pain, swollen eyes, and tasseled hair — Ohu chose to stay silent about the incident.
In the immediacy following a rape, survivors often report experiencing a wide range of emotional reactions. Directly following a sexual assault, shock can overwhelm a victim and many force themselves to “carry on as normal” for a myriad of reasons (i.e. shock, fear of victim-blaming, fear of repercussions, etc.) and this mentality appears to be pervasive within survivors of military sexual traumas.
(Proudly showing off her Promotion to Sergeant Certificate, Sgt. Thae Ohu achieved this milestone despite her rape. But would later, be reduced back to Cpl. as a result of a non-judicial punishment in October 2019. Photo provided by Pan Pyhu.)
This is exhibited by Ohu, who wrote about her own silence in a personal statement to the president of her physical evaluation board for medical retirement. She states, “I kept quiet and continue[d] to choose work over my wellbeing while I was in Okinawa and continued that pattern for my duration here stateside.”
The same courage that spurred Ohu to wake from unconsciousness to say “please” is the same courage she applied to continue her service and commitment to her country. Yet just as in her raping, those who swore an oath to safeguard Ohu and tend her wellbeing did not!
In April 2018, Ohu was promoted to Sergeant, a testament to her dutiful service and exemplary behavior. Over the course of her seven-year career, she earned several awards, was a trusted member of her team who was known for her acute attention to detail and regulation knowledge, and she was often sought out by her peers and senior staff to handle complicated administrative matters.
Contrary to her poised outward appearance, Ohu’s attack and the silence surrounding it was festering into her personal and professional life. She began to exhibit intense mood-altering behaviors — anger, depression, helplessness, isolation. She noticed the onset of insomnia and poor appetite which then led to fatigue, which further led to fear of not being able to complete her mission and the abjection of her command.
In October 2018, after receiving a non-judicial punishment, which resulted in a reduction of rank from Sgt. to Cpl., Ohu sought out mental health treatment on her own that began in October 2018 until April 2019. During her mental health treatment from October 2018–April 2019, she was on light-duty so she could focus on trauma-related therapies.
Even though she was on light-duty and undergoing mental health treatment, her command at Marine Corps Detachment Dam Neck treated her as a ‘problem child’.
According to a Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) complaint, made by a former boyfriend of Ohu, MARDET Dam Neck severely mistreated Ohu. According to the complaint, Ohu’s command ostracized her, placed her in a hostile working environment where she was accused of malingering, demanded she work full-days even though she was on light duty due to her treatment, and criticized for taking too long at doctors’ appointments, criticized for taking too long at doctor appointments, and her protective medical information was common office gossip.
Because of the lack of care and concern, Ohu began to spiral out-of-control. As an attempt to get better command understanding she boldly decided to break her silence about the rape that occurred in 2015.
On November 18, 2019, she reported the rape to a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator at the Mid-Atlantic Fleet and Family Support Center, electing to file an Unrestricted Report by signing a DD Form 2910, Victim Reporting Preference Statement. Against policy within mandatory reporting procedures and policies, the form was never uploaded to the Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database. This neglect to upload the document not only violated mandatory reporting stipulations but also created an irreparable level of silence — the silence of care, silence by inaction — and the silence was deafening.
(copy of DD Form 2910, provided by Ohu’s family.)
Ohu remained under the rule of the same command and its toxic climate until the incident that led to her imprisonment in the Navy Consolidated Brig in Chesapeake. Her charge stems from an incident, on April 5, 2020, where a mental breakdown she was experiencing at the time escalated into an altercation with her then-boyfriend, Michael Hinesley, in the home they shared. Police responded to the call and detained Ohu.
Hours later, Ohu was released on bond with the provision that she would receive mental health care at the local naval hospital, which she did. Hinesley, the victim of the attack chose not to press charges and expressed concerns that Ohu was experiencing a mental breakdown related to her PTSD caused by her rape.
That same week, a military protection order was placed on Ohu so she could not have contact with Hinesley.
Two weeks later on April 20, 2020, a remorseful and suicidal Ohu reached out to Hinesley to apologize. After Hinesley did not reply, Ohu returned to their shared home and let herself in with a key. Hinesley confirmed, Ohu was neither hostile nor violent — only desperate for forgiveness and pleading for help!
On April 21, 2020, Ohu failed to report for work and Hinesley feared Ohu was going to commit suicide, so he contacted authorities and the American Red Cross to intervene. Thankfully, they took this request seriously, located Ohu in Jamestown, and she was transported to a psychiatric facility nearby in Williamsburg.
It was apparent to authorities the young Marine was having a mental health crisis.
As quoted in The War Horse article, Cpl. Ohu’s the doctor wrote. “OF CRITICALLY IMPORTANT NOTE, she did not demonstrate the emergence of the syndrome-structured and multi-faceted psychiatric symptom patterns [sic]… until after her experience of military sexual assault while stationed in Okinawa.”
On April 24, 2020, Ohu was released from the facility in Williamsburg and transported to a long-term psychiatric facility.
On June 19, 2020, MARDET Dam Neck intervened and placed her in the Brig Chesapeake where she has been held in pretrial confinement ever since.
“Cpl. Ohu was placed in pretrial confinement under Rule for Courts-Martial 305 in conjunction with the charges currently pending against her before a general court-martial,” said Capt. Samuel Stephenson, Training and Education Command Spokesperson.
From July 31, 2020, to August 11, 2020, Ohu was under an escalated custody status, according to Lt. Cmdr Matthew Knight, the spokesperson for Navy Personnel Command.
According to her family during that time, Ohu developed a urinary tract infection due to poor sanitary conditions which included a non-flushable toilet, limited toilet paper, and no hand sanitizer or soap. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, Ohu was also menstruating and only allowed to change her sanitary pad once a day during her prescribed shower time.
Not only was Ohu already suffering an on-going mental health crisis, but she was also now in physical pain and restricted from practicing her religious freedoms as well — a triple threat to her holistic well-being and recovery.
“During that time she was not allowed to have any kind of stationery, including a bible, due to safety concerns,” said Knight. “A Chaplain was available upon request to read scripture to her to ensure she had religious accommodations.”
Her sister, Petty Officer 2nd Class Pan Pyhu claims otherwise — Ohu has received very little care from Chaplain services, and the assigned Chaplain at the Brig Chesapeake stopped accepting Pyhu’s calls.
“She really loves God and has always been faithful to his word,” said Pyhu. “It has really been hard for me to see her go through this. She was even at one point denied Chaplain and religious services.”
Due to privacy protection, the Brig Cheasepeake could not provide documentation on the specific timing of the Chaplain’s visits to Ohu.
On August 11, 2020, she left solitary confinement and was escorted to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with a UTI and received medication. Once back at the Brig Chesapeake she entered maximum custody.
“Maximum custody prisoners require special supervision due to their likelihood of escape or are potentially violent or dangerous, and whose escape would cause concern of a threat to life, property, or national security,” said Knight. “Maximum custody prisoners are assigned to a restricted housing unit, are required to wear full restraints outside of their restricted housing, and two escorts must be with them if they are ever outside of the restricted housing unit.”
August 16, 2020, on a call to her sister, Ohu disclosed she had been suffering lingering stomach pains, and despite requesting medical care for several days, still had not been seen by qualified medical personnel. The Navy Corpsman on duty was only able to provide care for cuts, bruises, and broken bones, not internal medicine. Ohu asked to go to the Emergency Room again but was advised by the Command Duty Officer, she was only able to go if her unit signed her out and escorted her there.
MARDET Dam Neck failed to provide an escort for this request, which was a concern of Pyhu, who called the CDO directly and then filed another DoD IG complaint. The same unit that failed her for mental health well-being, is also failing at ensuring her physical well-being.
“She is being treated so unfairly. In federal jail, prisoners that are survivors of sexual assault get treated better than Thae,” said Pyhu.
“Brig Chesapeake has embedded Navy medical personnel (Corpsmen) that support an on-site health clinic and conduct daily in-person treatment,” said Knight. “For medical issues that require more care or specialization, to include mental health services and counseling, Naval Hospital Portsmouth provides both on-site and at the hospital care to the prisoners.”
Information about how transportation or unit involvement could affect the process was not included.
When asked specifically if Ohu had any additional restrictions when it came to obtaining medical care Knight noted that detail of a specific prisoner’s medical treatment is information protected by the HIPAA Privacy Rules, effective April 2003.
Injustice for one is a threat to justice for all.
Overall, the Department of Defense has seen an increase in reported rape cases since 2010, a 42.5% increase to be exact. Rapes reported in the U.S. Marine Corps have increased by 20% since 2010 (SAPR.mil).
In the midst of a global pandemic, we watched the aftermath at Ft. Hood events unfold, following the tragic death of U.S. Army Spc. Vanessa Guillen. We watched earnestly to see Congress make strides to investigate the command, the base, and the soldiers and propose the, I am Vanessa Guillen bill, during the exact same time Ohu was being silenced by the Marine Corps.
“I Am Vanessa Guillén has become a rallying cry across the country for survivors speaking out against the toxic rot in the military around harassment and sexual assault,” Speier, a Democrat from California, said during a press conference on September 16, 2020, from Capitol Hill. While four-hours south on Interstate-95, Ohu sat in a cell, because of retaliation and an on-going lack of care for her well-being as a victim of rape.
Although, Guillen was in the Army and Ohu is in the Marine Corps, the bill proposed by Congress is a measure that would make sexual harassment a punishable crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for all branches of service under the Department of Defense.
Clear messaging should be understood by all branches of the military, the message the American people are hearing is that great efforts are being made to care for military sexual trauma survivors and mental health concerns of those who serve but the reality is that they are being punished and silenced whilst their aggressors continue with their lives and careers, unscathed.
The American people believe that the U.S. Military is actively preventing sexual assault through awareness, education, and training. The American people also believe that Marines who are victims of sexual assault are treated with dignity, sensitivity, and without prejudice.
“How does anything the Marine Corps has been done to Thae, in this case, equate to being treated with dignity, sensitivity, and without prejudice,” stated Lindsey Knapp, the Executive Director of Combat Sexual Assault, a non-profit organization that seeks to empower survivors of Military Sexual Trauma by helping them overcome barriers to obtaining justice.
“The answer is — it doesn’t,” continued Knapp.
With the imprisonment of another Marine who is a victim of sexual assault, Pfc. Celeste Largo, elevates the level of concern regarding justice for any Marine who reports such crimes, despite all its claims to the contrary, punishing victims who come forward?
Moreover, as of the writing of this article, both Ohu and Largo named rapists are free and actively serving in the Marines Corps.
Americans’ right to know
The military is responsible for engaging the public, including the media, as an essential part of maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people.
“All hearings, to include the Article 32, UCMJ, hearing that was conducted in this case, are open to the public unless deemed otherwise by a Military Judge, “ said Stephenson. “We encourage media to attend all open sessions of court. The next hearing, in this case, is scheduled for January 25, 2021, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.”
However, only one reporter was present at the Article 32 hearing back in October 2020. Kathrine Hafner, the Virginia Pilot Reporter, was there as a personal request. Hafner reported that Military prosecutors say when Ohu attacked Hinesley, she was charged with aggravated assault on an intimate partner, burglary, and communicating a threat, regardless of the fact that Hinesley did not press charges.
She will face a general court-martial in March 2021 even though her Ohu charge was a simple assault, Virginia Misdemeanor Code ASL-1313-M1, no burglary, and no communication of a threat; one that many male counterparts have attained and maintained service status. http://www.vcsc.virginia.gov/VCC_book_MIS.pdf
But now the prosecution team wants to have a judge approve a gag order.
“A motion to limit extrajudicial statements will be heard in an upcoming hearing,” said Stephenson. “Due to regulations governing what information can be released regarding matters pending decision before a court-martial, we are not allowed to discuss the substance of any upcoming motions.”
Gag orders typically forbid individuals from talking about, publishing, or disseminating specified information surrounding military events, but even more alarming is that a gag order can also close the proceedings to the accused’s chosen defense lawyer (hrw.org). The rule gives the pentagon broad discretion to conduct proceedings in secret in order to determine national security levels.
As the looming Gag Order request is set to go before a judge on January 25, 2021, it begs the question, why is the Marine Corps still trying to silence a victim of rape?
According to another War Horse article, the gag order relates to reporting that has been shared online in advocacy groups about how the military treats victims of sexual assault.
So, again, why is the treatment of Ohu so different from other members of the Marine Corps who have assaulted someone due to PTSD?
Why is the public being misdirected to focus on the woman who was raped and mistreated by her superiors instead of focusing on the fact that the person she assaulted refused to press charges against Ohu and the fact that her rapist never received any punishment?
Apparently, the Marine Corps thinks a Facebook group of concerned advocates who gather to pray, share information and provide a source of encouragement for Ohu and her family poses more risk of oversharing information and/or disseminating misinformation than the Marine Corps enabling rape and protecting the predators that lurk within its ranks.
“Ohu is the victim of sexual assault perpetrated by her supervising Marine who works in the Marine legal community which includes prosecutors and victim’s legal counsel. The Marine legal community has swept her unrestricted reporting under the carpet. They have ignored critical evidence and have refused to conduct a legitimate investigation into the matters,” explains Knapp. “They have denied her right victim’s legal counsel, disregarded her deteriorating mental health condition, and threw her into the brig in an effort to silence her while at the same time depriving her of needed medical treatment — to include solitary confinement.”
So we ask you, are these gag orders lawful or simply meant to silence those who wish to expose a misogynistic rape culture that is rotten to the Corps?
Kerri Jeter is the Founder of Freedom Sisters Media, a multimedia company that amplifies Women Veterans. She is a former U.S. Army Public Affairs Officer and knows the value of ensuring public trust when it comes to military culture and context.
Editor: E.V. Moore ([email protected]) | https://medium.com/@freedomsisters/when-silence-isnt-golden-how-one-marine-is-fighting-to-be-heard-55b9258924ef | ['Kerri R Jeter'] | 2021-01-17 23:47:07.020000+00:00 | ['Rape', 'Rape Culture', 'Solitary Confinement', 'Marine Corps', 'Military Sexual Trauma'] |
This ecosystem is a micro-services architecture, not a stream processing application. | This ecosystem is a micro-services architecture, not a stream processing application.
This is something I see quite frequently – people start with Kafka and then try to bolt different services together. This is the wrong way around.
Given the stated goal is to build a highly scalable web-crawler, you should think of Flink as the first order component in your architecture, and seek to avoid use of Kafka/external services wherever possible.
Note that many stream processing applications do not even need Kafka. You should really only use Kafka if you need CQRS, and even then you only need 1 topic per schema type.
Generally speaking, you should try to do as much processing as possible within Flink so you can leverage Flink’s semantics and optimisations. This will significantly reduce complexity, latency, and remove bottlenecks.
Some thoughts/suggestions:
1. Why do you need two Flink jobs? The application is pretty simple .... if you use a single job you can set the parallelism for each Flink operator independently and let Flink manage back pressure across the entire execution graph.
2. Why do you need four Kafka topics?
- The first two should be rolled into a single “URL” topic (assuming they both use the same schema).
- The third topic can be eliminated if you use a single Flink job. There is no point writing everything to disk, only to read it back in again.
- The last topic can be eliminated if you just write directly from Flink to the sink(s), bypassing Kafka. This can be done with exactly-once guarantees.
3. Interacting with an external service like the Page Scraper API is going to severely limit the throughput of your whole Flink job. Flink will spend a lot of time waiting for the external service to reply, even if you use Flink’s Async I/O.
- Flink is extremely efficient at executing business logic. Almost everything is done in memory and you can distribute the computation using FlatMap functions. This virtually eliminates network I/O.
- If your external service is stateful, you also complicate fault tolerance and recovery, as you need to synchronise Flink’s state with the external service on recovery.
Personally, I would have a single Kafka topic for reading URLs, and a single Flink job for all the processing (including page scraping) that connects directly to your sinks using Flink’s TwoPhaseCommitFunction to guarantee exactly once processing.
You could seed the startup URLs using Flink’s static configuration, or make a call to a non-Kafka persistence store. The only real reason I see to use a Kafka topic is for the cyclical flow of new URLs, as Flink’s iterative streams do not yet guarantee exactly once semantics. Once that is resolved, the cyclical flow can be managed entirely within Flink.
One final thought – Kafka has recently been rebranded as a stream processing platform. In reality, KStreams offers you a way to do “micro-services with Kafka topics”. It is not really a stream processing platform and does not scale or distribute the computation anywhere near as well as Flink. | https://medium.com/@martindswanson/this-ecosystem-feels-more-like-a-micro-services-architecture-than-a-stream-processing-application-f3928cbe6e79 | ['Martin Swanson'] | 2020-12-25 14:20:21.309000+00:00 | ['Flink', 'Stream Processing', 'Web Crawler', 'Microservices', 'Kafka'] |
Supreme Court Shuts Door On Texas Suit Seeking To Overturn Election | Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seen here with President Trump in June in Dallas, sued four states that Joe Biden carried in the general election, claiming their changes to election procedures during the pandemic violated federal law.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Updated at 4:53 AM ET on Saturday
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday night rejected an eleventh hour challenge to Joe Biden’s election as president.
The court’s action came in a one-page order, which said the complaint was denied “for lack of standing.”
Texas, supported by President Trump, tried to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, claiming fraud, without evidence. But in order for a state to bring a case in court, especially the Supreme Court, a state must show it has been injured. In essence, the court said Texas could not show that it was injured by the way other states conducted their elections.
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” the court wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that in their view the court does “not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction.”
But the two said that while they would have allowed the filing of the complaint, they would not have granted Trump or Texas, any of the relief they sought.
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Kevin McCarthy, the top ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, had earlier in the day attached his name to 125 fellow House Republicans who supported Trump’s longshot bid. McCarthy was the most notable congressman to back the suit.
On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued four states where Biden had been certified the winner: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The suit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, was styled as “an original” case, pitting one state against another.
Paxton claimed that the targeted states made changes to election procedures due to the pandemic that violated federal law. He alleged the changes enabled voter fraud. And he asked the Supreme Court to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for the Electoral College electors to cast ballots in those four states, contending more time was needed to allow investigations of the election results.
Paxton’s suit came in the face of repeated findings by state officials, including Republican state officeholders, certifying the results, as well as statements by U.S. Attorney General William Barr that the Justice Department did not find evidence of widespread fraud in this year’s election.
The Texas suit set in motion a cascade of legal motions at the high court. Not only did President Trump seek to join the Texas suit, so did 17 other states — all overwhelmingly won by Trump. More support would follow, including the brief filed by a majority of the GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Late Thursday the four targeted states struck back in briefs filed in the Supreme Court.
“Texas invites this court to overthrow the votes of the American people and choose the next president of the United States,” wrote Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association. “That Faustian invitation must be firmly rejected,” he said.
“Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do,” the state’s brief said. It “implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.”
Pennsylvania was equally acerbic. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that that abuse must never be replicated,” it said in its brief. And Wisconsin said the Texas bid “to nullify [Wisconsin’s] choice [for president] is devoid of a legal foundation or factual basis.”
It was unclear how or why Paxton, the Texas attorney general, decided to carry Trump’s water in the case. Especially since all four targeted states have Republican-controlled legislatures, and to date, both state and federal courts at lower levels, including Trump-appointed judges, have found the fraud allegations baseless.
The unprecedented nature of the Paxton suit, plus the fact that the state’s chief appellate lawyer, Kyle Hawkins, did not sign the Texas brief as he usually would do, has spurred speculation that Paxton is seeking a pardon. He is currently under indictment over securities fraud, and is being investigated by the FBI on bribery and abuse of power allegations.
Although the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over disputes between states, such cases are rare, and are almost exclusively confined to disputes that can’t be handled by other courts, such as those over borders or water rights.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court rejected an effort to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results in favor of Biden. Trump distanced himself from the legal blow and hitched his wagon instead to the Texas lawsuit, calling it “the case that everyone has been waiting for.”
Trump reportedly had conversations with some of the Republican attorneys general who were meeting this week in Washington, urging them to support the Texas lawsuit. And several news organizations reported that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had agreed to represent Trump in the event the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case.
Initial reaction to the Texas suit, however, has been dismissive at best. Sen. John Cornyn, R- Texas, told CNN that he “frankly struggle[d] to understand the legal theory” of the suit, noting that election disputes in our system are “decided at the state and local level and not at the national level.”
The Texas suit had other problems. First was the question of legal standing. Essentially, how do Texas, or the states joining it, have legal standing to complain about the procedures for voting and counting votes in other states?
Next, the Texas lawsuit asked the Supreme Court to delay the vote in four targeted states, but as professor Edward Foley of the Moritz College of Law observed, the date for electors to cast their votes is set by federal law under the Constitution, which requires that the day “shall be the same throughout the United States.”
The date chosen by Congress this year is Dec. 14.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine called Paxton’s lawsuit “dangerous garbage.”
“This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit,” he wrote.
“It’s too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not),” he wrote.
On Friday evening after the decision, Hasen wrote that the fact that “courts across the nation, with both Democratic and Republican judges, held the line for the rule of law” is “something really to celebrate.”
Benjamin Ginsburg, a longtime election law guru for the Republican Party, told CNN on Wednesday that he didn’t think “for an instant” that the Supreme Court would consider taking up the case.
That said, with three Trump appointees on the court, and a newly strengthened 6–3 majority of conservative Republican-appointed justices, the president apparently believed that the Supreme Court would view the case differently than did “election experts.” He was wrong.
Trump later weighed in on the decision on Twitter. “The Supreme Court really let us down,” he wrote. “No Wisdom, No Courage!”
Barring unforeseen events, the result of the court’s action is that on Monday, the Electoral College delegates in each state will cast their ballots, and Joe Biden will formally become the president-elect, with only one more step, in the House of Representatives where the Electoral College votes are certified, before he is sworn in on January 20th. | https://medium.com/@breaking-surface-movie-20-21/supreme-court-shuts-door-on-texas-suit-seeking-to-overturn-election-1ac6d2c0d7a8 | [] | 2020-12-12 15:52:40.983000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'News', 'Covid 19', 'Texas', 'Donald Trump'] |
BIOFIT REVEIW-STUFF YOUR FACE LOSE WEIGHT. | Welcome to The BioFit Diet. You’ve made a very smart choice in choosing this program, and you’re Congratulations on making the decision to change your life, your habits, and enter the new chapter when you reveal an improved, thinner you! If you use guidance in The Fat Loss Accelerator Program, we’re confident that you’ll be seeing results in no time. You will quickly be living your life, only healthier, slimmer, and without the fear of disease and illness, because you’ve taken the first step towards handling your weight and we are so proud of you for that. In this exclusive quick start, 7 Day Fat Flush, we go even further and show you reset your body for the next stages of weight loss. It all starts with a deep colon flush, to help get rid of extra weight, and reset your system to get it ready for clean, fresh, nutrientrich foods.
If you follow the practical advice in this plan, you’ll quickly cleanse your colon of years of unwanted, stagnant waste. It’s one of two parts of the reset phase of the Fat Loss Accelerator Program and will ensure you get the best out of this program today! Just think how great you’ll look and feel just 7 days from now! Let’s get started!
CLICK HERE WATCH THIS VEDIO | https://medium.com/@IHM2/biofit-reveiw-stuff-your-face-lose-weight-c423ac37fc37 | [] | 2021-12-22 15:13:41.607000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Fat Loss', 'Weightloss Recipe', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Weight Loss Tips'] |
In The Tides | While you flew upon the eternal sky,
I walked upon the shade of your wings,
Following your journey,
Oblivion of the eternal sea that you had left,
Delving in the unconquerable silence,
Swallowed by the colors of ocean,
And guided by the sail-less tides of your nostalgia,
I found solitary upon your shade,
Where I wrote the poems of soliloquy with drops of ocean,
Just to be perished by the another wave,
In front of the profound angst of your tides,
I stood and thought of you,
And drown with the intensity of your love,
In the hope that I would divulge
With the morrow’s sun shine; | https://medium.com/painted-with-words/in-the-tides-690db8f06e66 | ['Vaghawan Ojha'] | 2017-03-18 10:25:52.684000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Fiction', 'Love', 'Poetry', 'Life'] |
The Feast of The Three Wise Men | Childhood traditions that I still keep alive today
Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash
Welcome, come sit with me in my living room.
Most likely, you’re aware that The Three Wise Men, whose travel coincides with the birth of Baby Jesus, didn’t arrive at that manger until the twelfth night. Well to be exact, that day is today, January 06th.
In some countries today is the day that children receive presents from the Three Wise Men and, according to my parents, the day the Wise Men come to ‘take back’ presents from ungrateful children. You gotta love that one!
Anyway, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s official schedule, today marks the end of the Christmas Season. Feast of the Epiphany, the Church calls it.
My parents borrowed from that tradition and kept ‘everything Christmas’ until the weekend leading to this day. With my father at the helm, we took down all decorations and gently as ever put Christmas back into boxes, transporting everything back to Grandma’s attic.
After Father passed, the shop display window was no more and Mother kept the house adorned until the week school started. That week, we’d come home from school to less red and green until at last, we’d morph into new activities, pleased, most of all, that the wise men didn’t stop by our house to take back the gifts we’d received from Santa.
For all of my adult life I have believed in the Christmas story and the three wise men. It’s what I know. Even today, I keep my house in Christmas colors that will disappear tomorrow.
Years ago an old roommate of mine with Russian roots refrained from opening the Christmas presents I’d give her on Christmas Day. “I’ll open on New Year’s Day,” she’d say, smiling, “that’s when Ded Moroz, our Russian Santa, comes to children in Russia.”
And so we had presents to open on New Year’s Day.
She also requested that our small decorated tree stay up until January 7th. Coming from a place where I knew about the Three Wise Men arriving on January 6th, I had no problem with her request except that it sounded strange to me that she called our tree a New Year’s tree. No biggie. I embraced her traditions without question happy that our little tree helped to preserve our different upbringing.
Do you have any such customs, or traditions? Would you share them with me?
I hope your Christmas Season was splendid and that the New Year brings you closer to fulfilling the desires you hold dearest in your heart. May joy abide in your home, may the Christmas spirit, that I’m sure put a skip in your step at years end, stays with you until December comes again. And I Wish You Miracles, dear friends.
As for me and the desires I hold dear in my heart, God permitting, I see this year as the year I rise a tier closer to where I want to be.
Two years ago I started my writing journey in earnest. Since then I’ve made tons of unbelievable connections, I’ve had tons of failed trials and likewise, tons of beautiful aha moments. It’s still amazing to me how unbelievable these last two years have been. I’ve had to let go of some things that were dragging me down, keeping me spinning my wheels and not getting me anywhere. But all in all, by letting go I’ve made room to allow new things in. Positive things.
I’m still working on my website and I believe this is a good time to tell you that recently I’ve been working hard on understanding the purpose of my author website.
It’s not Publicity or even a Promotional tool, but a Platform where I record the Progress of the work I hope to accomplish slowly and bring to fruition in a couple of years. A Platform where I invite my subscribers to Partake in The Journey I’ve been contemplating practically all my life.
My website will undergo a slight change in direction, starting with the name. But you, dear prospective subscriber, will not need to move a finger to accommodate the change. Wait, I need to rephrase that: perhaps a ‘click here’ is all it’ll take. I really hope you don’t feel that’s too much to ask of you.
The blog posts I publish every two weeks or so will continue but interspersed, sort of what this post looks like today, I’ll fill you in on what’s happening with the novel I’ve been rewriting.
As of last month, I think you’ll be pleased to know that I finally decided on the title: ‘Days Without Grace.’ And the themes explored in the novel are gentleness and naivety, openness and gender roles, sexual preferences and lies, and corruption: human trafficking.
I hope this has piqued your curiosity enough to send you over to check out my website which I mention in my profile.
I Wish you a Happy end of the holiday ‘Season,’ a fantabulous New Year and most of all I Wish You Miracles. Thank you for reading. Selma. | https://medium.com/publishous/the-feast-of-the-three-wise-men-24011b8ab4a9 | [] | 2019-04-18 07:12:05.024000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Christmas', 'Epiphany', 'Website', 'Tradition'] |
Red Baron- The German Ace Of World War I | Red Baron- The German Ace Of World War I
Respected by friends and foes, Manfred Von Richthofen made an impact in the early days of the German air force.
Manfred Von Richthofen.Source-Wikipedia
It was a battlefield over Arras. A bright red aircraft ran havoc on enemies. The plane’s pilot was a German and the most feared person of the great war, Manfred Von Richthofen. Though his enemies shot him, he received a full military honor funeral by his enemies. His friends and foes called him the Red Baron.
The Dawn Of Air Force:
The Jasta squadron.Source-Wikipedia
Richthofen was born in Kleinburg to an aristocratic family. He joined the military school at the age of 11 and was a German cavalry in charge at 18. As European superpowers pushed the world into World War I, Richthofen fought in trenches of Verdun. His boredom soon kicked in, and he wanted something exciting. Richthofen enrolled in the newly formed German air corps. After his training, he joined the Jasta 2 division.
Air Corps opened a new area of combat in World War I. The Italians were the first to use aircraft to attack their enemies in Africa. Soon nations around the world took lessons from it and started to develop their air crops. Germany had an air corps and even a Zeppelin division for aerial attacks. The advancement in technology brought new challenges to the field of warfare. Richthofen registered his first kill on September 17, 1916, and his kill count rose every month. Richthofen took on the British ace Major Lanoe Hawker in November that year.
The Red Baron:
His aircraft.Source-Wikipedia
As a rising star in the German air force, Richthofen became the leader of Jasta 11 in January 1917. Only after this, he painted his plane in red color and earned the name the Red Baron. His team proved vital during the Battle of Arras. His squadron was soon called the Flying circus. His unit had some of the best aces of the German air-force, including Hermann Göring. Hermann Göring will rise to prominence in the Nazi regime after World War I. He and his team became a propaganda material for German war efforts. They went on tour across Germany, dined with the Kaiser to boost the German people’s morale.
In July, in one of the dogfights over France, Richthofen was hit by a bullet. He crashed his aircraft and fractured his skull. He received medical attention, and the doctors advised him not to fly again. Richthofen brushed aside the doctor’s recommendations and started his combat spree. In April 1918, his tally rose to 80. But he ran out of luck soon.
Death And Honor:
Funeral.Source-Wikipedia
On April 21, 1918, while fighting inside enemy lines, Richthofen aircraft was shot by an Australian or British pilot. His plane crashed into a nearby field, and he died on the spot. His loss was a massive blow to the morale of the German air force. Richthofen developed such a reputation that many British pilots wanted him to be captured alive rather than dead. Due to this respect, Britain cremated Richthofen with full military honor. He was buried in Britain, probably the only German pilot to receive such recognition. His gravestone read
“To Our Gallant and Worthy Foe.”
After the war, his family reburied him in their family villa.
In 1933 as the Nazi party came to power, it criticized the Jews in Germany as the reason for the defeat in World War I. Many ex veterans from World War I joined the Nazi party and boosted its propaganda. Richthofen was given prominence in this propaganda, and his body was removed from his family plot and moved to Berlin. Praised even by his foe Richthofen was probably the most respected German ace of both World Wars.
YouTube Link: | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/red-baron-the-german-ace-of-world-war-i-99ba744ce105 | ['Karthick Nambi'] | 2020-12-22 21:30:02.621000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Aviation', 'Society', 'War', 'History'] |
SEQ2SEQ LEARNING. PART D: Encoder Decoder with Teacher… | A Simple Seq2Seq Problem: The reversed sequence problem
Assume that:
We are given a parallel data set including X (input) and y (output) such that X[i] and y[i] have some relationship
In that tutorial, I will generate X and y parallel datasets such that the y sequence will be the reverse of the given X sequence. For example,
Given sequence X[i] length of 4:
X[i]=[3, 2, 9, 1]
Output sequence (y[i]) is the reversed input sequence (X[i])
y[i]=[1, 9, 2, 3]
I will call this parallel dataset: “the reversed sequence problem”
In real life (like Machine Language Translation, Image Captioning, etc.), we are given (or build) a parallel dataset: X sequences and corresponding y sequences
However, to set up an easily traceable example, I opt out to set y sequences as the reversed of X sequences
example, I opt out to set However, you can create X and y parallel datasets as you wish: sorted, reverse sorted, odd, or even numbers selected, etc.
We use the parallel data set to train a seq2seq model which would learn
to train a model which would learn how to convert/transform an input sequence from X to an output sequence in y
IMPORTANT:
In the reversed sequence problem, the input & output sequence lengths are fixed and the same .
. In PART E, we will change the problem and the solution such that we will be dealing with variable-length sequences after we built the encoder-decoder model.
Configure the problem
Number of Input Timesteps: how many tokens / distict events /numbers / word etc in the input sequence
how many tokens / distict events /numbers / word etc in the input sequence Number of Features: how many features/dimensions used to represent one tokens / distict events / numbers / word etc
how many features/dimensions used to represent one tokens / distict events / numbers / word etc Here, we use one-hot encoding to represent the integers.
The length of the one-hot coding vector is Number of Features
of the one-hot coding vector is Thus, the greatest integer will be Number of Features-1
When Number of Features=10 the greatest integer will be 9 and will be represents as [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1]
#@title Configure problem
n_timesteps_in = 4#@param {type:"integer"}
#each input sample has 4 values
n_features = 10 #@param {type:"integer"}
#each value is one_hot_encoded with 10 0/1
#n_timesteps_out = 2 #@param {type:"integer"}
#each output sample has 2 values padded with 0
# generate random sequence
X,y = get_reversed_pairs(n_timesteps_in, n_features, verbose=True)
# generate datasets
train_size= 2000 #@param {type:"integer"}
test_size = 200 #@param {type:"integer"}
X_train, y_train , X_test, y_test=create_dataset(train_size, test_size, n_timesteps_in,n_features , verbose=True) Sample X and y
In raw format:
X=[7, 3, 6, 5], y=[5, 6, 3, 7]
In one_hot_encoded format:
X=[[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0]
[0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0]]
y=[[0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0]]
Generated sequence datasets as follows
X_train.shape: (2000, 4, 10) y_train.shape: (2000, 4, 10)
X_test.shape: (200, 4, 10) y_test.shape: (200, 4, 10)
time: 77.6 ms
Before starting, you need to know:
Python
Keras/TF
Deep Neural Networks
Recurrent Neural Network concepts
LSTM parameters and outputs
parameters and outputs Keras Functional API
API Basics of Encoder-Decoder approach
If you would like to refresh your knowledge about the above topics please check Murat Karakaya Akademi resources on YouTube / Medium / COLAB
A Quick Reminder: Encoder & Decoder
Ecoder encodes the input into a new representation
encodes the input into a Decoder decodes the encoded representation of the input into output
Note: There are other proposed methods to solve seq2seq problems such as Conv models or Reinforcement methods. In this tutorial, we focus on Enoder- Decoder architecture.
Image taken from here
Key Concepts
Training : During training, we train the encoder and decoder such that they work together to create a context (representation) between input and output
: During training, we train the encoder and decoder such that they work together to create a context (representation) between input and output Inference (Prediction): After learning how to create the context (representation), they can work together to predict the output
(Prediction): After learning how to create the context (representation), they can work together to predict the output Encode all- decode one at a time : Mostly, the encoder reads all the input sequence and creates a context (representation) vector. Decoder use this context (representation) vector and previously decoded result to create new output step by step.
: Mostly, the encoder reads all the input sequence and creates a context (representation) vector. Decoder use this context (representation) vector and previously decoded result to create new output step by step. Teacher forcing: During training decoder receives the correct output from the training set as the previously decoded result to predict the next output. However, during inference decoder receives the previously decoded result to predict the next output. Teacher forcing improves the training process.
DO NOT WORRY! WE WILL SEE ALL ABOVE CONCEPTS IN ACTION BELOW!
LSTMoutputDimension = 16
HOW TO TRAIN A GENERIC ENCODER — DECODER
Decoder produces the output sequence one by one
For each output, the decoder consumes a context vector and an input
The initial context vector is created by the encoder
vector is created by the encoder The initial input is a special symbol for the decoder to make it start, e.g. ‘ start ’
is a special symbol for the decoder to make it start, e.g. ‘ ’ Using initial context and initial input, the decoder will generate the first output
For the next output, the decoder will use its current state as a context vector and generated (predicted) output as input
and as The decoder will work in such a loop using its state and output as the next step context vector and input until the generated output is a special symbol ‘stop’ or the pre-defined maximum steps (length of output) is reached.
Image taken from here
HOW TO USE A GENERIC ENCODER — DECODER FOR INFERENCE (PREDICTION)
We provide input sequence (X_test) to the trained encoder-decoder model
The trained encoder-decoder model outputs the predicted sequence
HOW TO TRAIN AN ENCODER — DECODER WITH TEACHER FORCING
The initial steps are the same:
Decoder produces the output sequence one by one
For each output, the decoder consumes a context vector and an input
The initial context vector is created by the encoder
vector is created by the encoder The initial input is a special symbol for the decoder to make it start, e.g. ‘ start ’
is a special symbol for the decoder to make it start, e.g. ‘ ’ Using initial context and initial input, the decoder will generate the first output
Image taken from here
However, the input to the decoder during the loop is different
For the next output,
the decoder will use its current state as context vector and generated (predicted) output as input
and as we (the teacher!) provide the correct output to the decoder as input
to the decoder as The difference is : decoder use the context vector and the correct input to the next output rather than using its prediction in the previous cycle
: decoder use the context vector and the correct input to the next output rather than using its prediction in the previous cycle The decoder will work in such a loop using its state and output provided correct output as the next step context vector and input until the generated output is a special symbol ‘stop’ or the pre-defined maximum steps (length of output) is reached.
Therefore, we need to provide 2 input sequences to train AN ENCODER — DECODER WITH TEACHER FORCING such that
input to encoder: [4 7 2 8] input to decoder: [0 8 2 7]
Note that:
The expected output is [8 2 7 4] — — reverse of input to the encoder
0 (zero) is selected as a special symbol for ‘ start ’
is selected as a special symbol for ‘ ’ input to decoder is created by shifting the expected output by one time steps and adding ‘start’ token as the first token:
is created by the expected output by one time steps and ‘start’ token as the first token: [8 2 7 4] — — → [0 8 2 7]
During training:
At the first cycle, the decoder will use the encoder’s state and its first input which is 0 from decoder input sequence [0 8 2 7] to generate the first output which is expected to be 8 from [8 2 7 4]
cycle, the will use the encoder’s state and its first input which is 0 from [0 8 2 7] to generate the first output which is expected to be 8 from [8 2 7 4] Assume that decoder predicts 7
In the generic Encoder-Decoder model, the decoder will use 7 to generate/predict the next token
Encoder-Decoder model, the will use 7 to generate/predict the next token In teacher forcing, we (the teacher!) provide the second input from [0 8 2 7] which is 8 to the decoder to generate/predict the next token
Thus, during training, the teacher enforces the decoder to condition itself to generate/predict the next token according to the given correct input!
HOW TO USE AN ENCODER — DECODER MODEL TRAINED WITH TEACHER FORCING FOR INFERENCE (PREDICTION)
We need 2 input sequences:
Input for encoder: encoder_inputs Input for decoder: decoder_inputs
The encoder_inputs is given
is given However, this time we do not have correct outputs
Therefore, we will provide the predicted output as the input.
as the input. The first input is ‘start’ and the other inputs will be the outputs from the previous cycle
CREATE AN ENCODER — DECODER MODEL WITH TEACHER FORCING TO TRAIN
Define the model that will turn encoder_input_data & decoder_input_data into decoder_predicted_data
& into complete the decoder model by adding a Dense layer with Softmax activation function for prediction of the next output
layer with activation function for prediction of the next output The dense layer will output one-hot encoded representation as we did for input
as we did for input Therefore, we will use n_features number of neurons
# TRAINING WITH TEACHER FORCING
# Define an input sequence and process it.
encoder_inputs= Input(shape=(n_timesteps_in, n_features))
encoder_lstm=LSTM(LSTMoutputDimension, return_state=True)
LSTM_outputs, state_h, state_c = encoder_lstm(encoder_inputs)
# We discard `LSTM_outputs` and only keep the other states.
encoder_states = [state_h, state_c]
decoder_inputs = Input(shape=(None, n_features), name='decoder_inputs')
decoder_lstm = LSTM(LSTMoutputDimension, return_sequences=True, return_state=True, name='decoder_lstm')
# Set up the decoder, using `context vector` as initial state.
decoder_outputs, _, _ = decoder_lstm(decoder_inputs,
initial_state=encoder_states)
#complete the decoder model by adding a Dense layer with Softmax activation function
#for prediction of the next output
#Dense layer will output one-hot encoded representation as we did for input
#Therefore, we will use n_features number of neurons
decoder_dense = Dense(n_features, activation='softmax', name='decoder_dense')
decoder_outputs = decoder_dense(decoder_outputs)
# put together
model_encoder_training = Model([encoder_inputs, decoder_inputs], decoder_outputs, name='model_encoder_training') time: 489 ms
compile the model
model_encoder_training.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy'])
model_encoder_training.summary()
plot_model(model_encoder_training, show_shapes=True) Model: "model_encoder_training"
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Layer (type) Output Shape Param # Connected to
==================================================================================================
input_8 (InputLayer) [(None, 4, 10)] 0
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
decoder_inputs (InputLayer) [(None, None, 10)] 0
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
lstm_3 (LSTM) [(None, 16), (None, 1728 input_8[0][0]
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
decoder_lstm (LSTM) [(None, None, 16), ( 1728 decoder_inputs[0][0]
lstm_3[0][1]
lstm_3[0][2]
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
decoder_dense (Dense) (None, None, 10) 170 decoder_lstm[0][0]
==================================================================================================
Total params: 3,626
Trainable params: 3,626
Non-trainable params: 0
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
time: 103 ms
PREPARE TRAINING DATASETS
To train the Encoder-Decoder model we need to work on the train data set such that we will prepare 3 data sets:
Input for encoder (encoder_inputs): all sequence of 1 sample training input data (X) Input for the decoder (decoder_inputs): 1 token from 1 sample training target sequence (y) for teacher forcing [should start with ‘start’ symbol] Target for decoder (decoder_predicted_data): 1 token from 1 sample training target sequence (y) [should end with ‘end’ symbol]
We can modify the code such that the first number (0) of the input domain numbers are reserved for ‘start’ and ‘end’ symbols as follows:
Generated sequence datasets as follows
X_encoder_in.shape: (5000, 4, 10)
X_decoder_in.shape: (5000, 4, 10)
y_decoder_out.shape: (5000, 4, 10)
Sample sequences in raw format:
X_encoder_in:
[8, 8, 9, 3]
X_decoder_in:
[0, 3, 9, 8]
y_decoder_out:
[3, 9, 8, 8]
Sample sequences in one-hot encoded format:
X_encoder_in:
[[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1]
[0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0]]
X_decoder_in:
[[1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0]]
y_decoder_out:
[[0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0]
[0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0]]
time: 232 ms
We train the model while monitoring the loss on a held-out set of 20% of the samples as below.
However, I prepared a custom train_test function for getting a detailed report of training and testing.
# Run training
model_encoder_training.fit([encoder_input_data, decoder_input_data], decoder_predicted_data,
batch_size=32,
epochs=50,
validation_split=0.2) train_test(model_encoder_training, [encoder_input_data, decoder_input_data], decoder_predicted_data , [encoder_input_data, decoder_input_data], decoder_predicted_data, epochs=50, batch_size=32, patience=5,verbose=2) training for 50 epochs begins with EarlyStopping(monitor= val_loss, patience= 5 )....
Epoch 1/50
141/141 - 1s - loss: 2.1932 - accuracy: 0.1816 - val_loss: 1.9553 - val_accuracy: 0.3305
...
Epoch 49/50
141/141 - 1s - loss: 0.0023 - accuracy: 1.0000 - val_loss: 0.0026 - val_accuracy: 1.0000
Epoch 50/50
141/141 - 1s - loss: 0.0022 - accuracy: 1.0000 - val_loss: 0.0024 - val_accuracy: 1.0000
50 epoch training finished...
PREDICTION ACCURACY (%):
Train: 100.000, Test: 100.000
10 examples from test data...
Input Expected Predicted T/F
[8, 8, 9, 3] [3, 9, 8, 8] [3, 9, 8, 8] True
[1, 7, 5, 9] [9, 5, 7, 1] [9, 5, 7, 1] True
[3, 5, 6, 5] [5, 6, 5, 3] [5, 6, 5, 3] True
[2, 3, 3, 9] [9, 3, 3, 2] [9, 3, 3, 2] True
[5, 4, 3, 5] [5, 3, 4, 5] [5, 3, 4, 5] True
[4, 2, 1, 5] [5, 1, 2, 4] [5, 1, 2, 4] True
[9, 5, 2, 4] [4, 2, 5, 9] [4, 2, 5, 9] True
[9, 8, 5, 5] [5, 5, 8, 9] [5, 5, 8, 9] True
[2, 9, 9, 7] [7, 9, 9, 2] [7, 9, 9, 2] True
[7, 2, 9, 8] [8, 9, 2, 7] [8, 9, 2, 7] True
Accuracy: 1.0
time: 37.2 s
We observed that training is finalized almost 100% accuracy with validation training sets
IMPORTANT: Please note that we execute validation and testing by just using the training data and Teacher Forcing in place!!!
WHY?
Because:
Teacher Forcing needs to know the correct output beforehand
Teacher Forcing is a method for improving training process
The model employing Teacher Forcing CAN NOT BE USED in inference/testing
Therefore,
the model that we trained above CAN NOT BE DIRECTLY USED in inference/testing
We will use some layers (with their weights) of the trained model to create a new model
The new model will not use Teacher Learning
Thus, the input to the new model will NOT BE [encoder_input_data, decoder_input_data] as the way we designed in model_encoder_training
as the way we designed in Remember , in Teacher Forcing, we set decoder_input_data such that it begins with a special symbol start and continues with the target sequence data except for the last time step.
, in Teacher Forcing, we set such that it begins with a special symbol and continues with the target sequence data except for the last time step. Now, during inference (testing), we do not know the correct (expected) target data beforehand!
We define the decoder_input_data as follows:
as follows: it begins with a special symbol start
it will continue with an input created by the decoder at the previous time step
in other words, the decoder’s output at time step t will be used decoder’s input at time step t+1
Let’s begin to design an encoder-decoder model for inference
We create a separate encoder model by using the trained layers in the above model
IMPORTANT: pay attention that in this model we use encoder_inputs, encoder_states for encoding which are parts of the encoder model, we trained above. That is, these layers come with its **trained weights **with Teacher Forcing
encoder_model = Model(encoder_inputs, encoder_states) time: 11 ms
Then we create a separate decoder model by using the trained layers in the above model
Design the decoder model by defining layers for:
inputs
decoding (LSTM)
outputs
IMPORTANT: pay attention that in this model we use decoder_lstm for decoding which is a part of the decoder model, we trained above. That is this layer comes with its trained weights with Teacher Forcing
decoder_state_input_h = Input(shape=(LSTMoutputDimension,))
decoder_state_input_c = Input(shape=(LSTMoutputDimension,))
decoder_states_inputs = [decoder_state_input_h, decoder_state_input_c]
decoder_outputs, state_h, state_c = decoder_lstm(
decoder_inputs, initial_state=decoder_states_inputs)
decoder_states = [state_h, state_c]
decoder_outputs = decoder_dense(decoder_outputs)
decoder_model = Model(
[decoder_inputs] + decoder_states_inputs,
[decoder_outputs] + decoder_states) time: 237 ms
Even though we define the encoder and decoder models we still need to dynamically provide the decoder_input_data as follows:
as follows: it begins with a special symbol start
it will continue with an input created by the decoder at the previous time step
in other words, the decoder’s output at time step t will be used decoder’s input at time step t+1
will be used Let’s code it as a function:
def decode_sequence(input_seq):
# Encode the input as state vectors.
states_value = encoder_model.predict(input_seq)
# Generate empty target sequence of length 1.
target_seq = np.zeros((1, 1, n_features))
# Populate the first character of target sequence with the start character.
target_seq[0, 0, 0] = 1
# Sampling loop for a batch of sequences
# (to simplify, here we assume a batch of size 1).
stop_condition = False
decoded_seq = list()
while not stop_condition:
# in a loop
# decode the input to a token/output prediction + required states for context vector
output_tokens, h, c = decoder_model.predict(
[target_seq] + states_value)
# convert the token/output prediction to a token/output
sampled_token_index = np.argmax(output_tokens[0, -1, :])
sampled_digit = sampled_token_index
# add the predicted token/output to output sequence
decoded_seq.append(sampled_digit)
# Exit condition: either hit max length
# or find stop character.
if (sampled_digit == '
' or
len(decoded_seq) == n_timesteps_in):
stop_condition = True
# Update the input target sequence (of length 1)
# with the predicted token/output
target_seq = np.zeros((1, 1, n_features))
target_seq[0, 0, sampled_token_index] = 1.
# Update input states (context vector)
# with the ouputed states
states_value = [h, c]
# loop back.....
# when loop exists return the output sequence
return decoded_seq time: 22.4 ms
We can now put the encoder model and decoder model together by using the function above for inference as below.
IMPORTANT:
Since we used the trained layers here we do NOT need to train recently created models.
We only provide the input sequence to the function.
print('Input \t\t\t Expected \t Predicted \t\tT/F')
correct =0
sampleNo = 10
for sample in range(0,sampleNo):
predicted= decode_sequence(encoder_input_data[sample].reshape(1,n_timesteps_in,n_features))
if (one_hot_decode(decoder_predicted_data[sample])== predicted):
correct+=1
print( one_hot_decode(encoder_input_data[sample]), '\t\t',
one_hot_decode(decoder_predicted_data[sample]),'\t', predicted,
'\t\t',one_hot_decode(decoder_predicted_data[sample])== predicted)
print('Accuracy: ', correct/sampleNo) Input Expected Predicted T/F
[8, 8, 9, 3] [3, 9, 8, 8] [3, 9, 8, 8] True
[1, 7, 5, 9] [9, 5, 7, 1] [9, 5, 7, 1] True
[3, 5, 6, 5] [5, 6, 5, 3] [5, 6, 5, 3] True
[2, 3, 3, 9] [9, 3, 3, 2] [9, 3, 3, 2] True
[5, 4, 3, 5] [5, 3, 4, 5] [5, 3, 4, 5] True
[4, 2, 1, 5] [5, 1, 2, 4] [5, 1, 2, 4] True
[9, 5, 2, 4] [4, 2, 5, 9] [4, 2, 5, 9] True
[9, 8, 5, 5] [5, 5, 8, 9] [5, 5, 8, 9] True
[2, 9, 9, 7] [7, 9, 9, 2] [7, 9, 9, 2] True
[7, 2, 9, 8] [8, 9, 2, 7] [8, 9, 2, 7] True
Accuracy: 1.0
time: 1.96 s
Observations:
Teacher Forcing is a method to train encoder-decoder models in Seq2Seq model to accelerate training
Teacher Forcing can ONLY be used at Training
be used at Training We need to handle how to use the model in inference
Even though Teacher Forcing improves the training process by fast converging, in the inference the model can generate low accuracy even with the training data.
Therefore, you need to use Teacher Forcing with caution
What if I don’t want to use teacher forcing for training?
Please look at the previous part on how to implement an Encoder-Decoder without Teacher Forcing training:
NEXT:
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Kaggle
Medium | https://medium.com/deep-learning-with-keras/seq2seq-part-d-encoder-decoder-with-teacher-forcing-18a3a09a096 | ['Murat Karakaya'] | 2020-12-16 14:35:12.803000+00:00 | ['Encoder Decoder', 'Keras', 'Lstm', 'Teacher Forcing', 'Murat Karakaya Akademi'] |
What is ElonSpaceX | What is ElonSpaceX
ElonSpaceX is just a meme coin built to promote new technology.
History of Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency that was introduced and it has become the first decentralized global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has not only sparked interest in digital currencies, but it has also sparked interest in the underlying technology that supports blockchain technology. Blockchain is a distributed ledger used to record and protect transactions on a peer-to-peer network which is immutable. In addition to authorizing digital currencies, blockchain technology also enables innovators to create digital tokens that represent rare assets, thereby reshaping innovation and entrepreneurial capabilities.
Blockchain tokens can democratize communities by providing builders with new ways to interact with their users, raise funds and can provide innovators with new ways to develop, implement, and decentralize applications. The concept of digital scarcity allows people to incentivize and financially reward network participants in a simple and transparent way, without having to rely on third parties.
The introduction of Bitcoin and later other coins such as Ethereum, litecoin, Binance coin has led to a rise in alternative cryptocurrencies that primarily compete for in-network services. Although Bitcoin has become the safest, widely accepted settlement layer and store of value in the digital arena, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and EVM have become the safest settlement layer and store of value by giving developers the ability to write smart contracts that can solve reasonable computational problems. Hence, we have seen many scattered experiments and applications on Ethereum, and lately on Layer 2 projects.
These tokens created and running on EVM and similar environments can be Fungible Tokens or Non-Fungible Tokens and represent various rare assets such as currency, securities, property, unique collectibles, loyalty points, and gift certificates. They generally have a fixed supply or follow a transparent supply schedule, making them resistant to inflation. Furthermore, they can be transferred between parties without the involvement of any intermediary and can be traded on Centralized or Decentralized digital currency exchanges.
The advent of DeFi
In the olden days, humans bartered for goods and services. But, as humans evolved, economies evolved: We invented currency to make it easier to exchange goods and services. Subsequently, coins helped usher in innovations and created better levels of economies. However, progress comes at a cost.
The history has it that central authorities have issued currencies that underpin our economies, which eventually gave them more power as more people began to trust them. However, trust has been broken from time to time, which makes people question the centralized authorities' ability to manage said money. DeFi was developed based on the idea of creating a financial system that is open to everyone and minimizes the need to trust and rely on a central authority.
It’s argued that DeFi started in 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin, which was the first p2p digital money built on top of the blockchain network. Through Bitcoin, the idea of ushering transformation in to the traditional financial world using blockchains became an essential next step in the decentralization of legacy financial systems. The launch of Ethereum and, more specifically, smart contracts, in 2015 made it all possible. The Ethereum network is a 2nd generation blockchain that first maximized the potential of this technology within the financial industry. It encouraged businesses and enterprises to build and deploy projects that formed the ecosystem of DeFi.
DeFi brought a plethora of opportunities to bring about a transparent and robust financial system that no single entity controls. But the turning point for financial applications started in 2017, with projects facilitating more functionalities in addition to just money transfer.
DeFi has grown into a complete ecosystem of working applications and protocols that deliver value to millions of users. Assets worth over $30 billion are currently locked in DeFi ecosystems, making it one of the fastest-growing segment within the public blockchain space.
Smart Contract
A smart contract is a self-executing contract which offers Turing Complete programming languages that allow multiple parties to interact with each other, without needing a centralized intermediary. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The transactions that happen in a smart contract are processed by the blockchain, which means they can be sent automatically without a third party. Blockchain’s ability to capitalize on smart contracts has made them ideal platforms to choose when building out financial applications.
Our mission
We aim to support the Technology. ElonSpaceX will support the Technology by rewarding ESX token holders whenever Elon Musk releases new technology updates. We will also support new technologies outside of Elon Musk. We are lovers of innovation.
The ElonSpaceX is an evolving project that is always changing shape through careful consideration of the ideas and suggestions submitted. That is right, “YOUR VOICE” is heard and changes are voted upon by the membership.
What is ESX token?
ESX token is ElonSpaceX native Token which is a cryptocurrency or digital currency just like Bitcoin. ESX token is a Bep-20 built on the Binance Smart chain. ESX is a P2P transaction on blockchain between users directly, without an intermediary. Anyone can send and receive funds without the involvement of third party.
ESX Token Transfer System
ESX token transfer system is the simplest way of carrying out fund transfer without any hindrance. The transfer system of ESX token is very easy and convenient, this transactions can be carried out anywhere and anytime without limitations. The beauty of blockchain.
The transfer fee is very minimal with a safer, immutable, anonymous and fast transaction time. However the transaction can be checked on the blockchain.
Why We Love Technology
Technology has enhanced the quality of life in and out of the home. Technology’s advancements have provided quicker ways to carry out our day to day activities.
Technology has also given us brand new devices in recent decades, like electric cars, smartwatches, tablets, and voice assistant devices. With these devices, we can do things like travel with electric cars without the worry of petrol, transfer money instantly and make purchases for everything from clothes, food delivery, groceries, furniture, and more. Technology has changed how we entertain ourselves, meet each other, and consume all types of media. It’s made fun advancements, but it’s also made important advancements in safety when it comes to home security and medical devices.
Technology advancement opens up new opportunities by helping with safety, mobility and connectivity. Medical advancements have made it so you can stay proactive with conditions like diabetes and arthritis. With new medical alert devices, seniors can also get help at the push of a button and keep in touch with loved ones no matter where they are in the world.
Since there are so many new technologies to keep track of, it can seem overwhelming to adapt. However, all of these new technologies are designed to make your life easier. Even though it may not feel intuitive, learning how to use smart phones, smartwatches and voice assistants just takes a little bit of instruction and practice.
Many are now adapting into new technology and the number of people who are using the morden technology are increasing on daily basis.
When it comes to the way we communicate overall, modern technology has had a powerful influence.
Digital technology has changed what people term as “media.” The influence of new technology on media is apparent since a media company isn’t necessarily a news platform anymore. New technology gave birth to digital currencies which is far better than fiat currency. Anyone can easily send funds without any intermediary.
The amount of active web users globally is now near 3.2 billion people. That is almost half of the world’s population. Every day, new ideas are coming out and they are helping to make our lives better.
Technology Has Changed How We Pay Bills And Transfer Money
No more do you have to enter a bank to withdraw money or transfer it to someone or even worry about third parties. Blockchain and digital currencies has made it easy to carry out from the comfort of our home without any intermediary. Anyone can make transaction from anywhere in the world.
Digital Currencies has made it possible for people to send and receive money from any location using the Internet.
Paying bills has also become simplified thanks to technology. You can automatically schedule payments when they are due rather than having to remember to mail a check.
It’s even simple to pay for things using only your smartphone. With Binance-Pay card, you don’t need to carry cash when you go shopping. These card securely link your crypto account and you can easily use it to pay bills. The same machines you use to swipe your credit card at the store now allow mobile payments from your phone.
Keeping up with all of these innovations may seem like a hassle, but these technologies can simplify your life to help you worry about fewer things. With all of the payment capabilities available these days, you could leave home without your wallet and be just fine.
Using Technology In Transportation
Today, we now have electric cars and also, driverless cars have been in development for years, but this technology has yet to become commonplace. When it does, it will lead to fewer accidents on the road. It will also make transportation more accessible to everyone. People will be able to use cars even if they have disabilities or live in areas without public transportation. Driverless cars will use sensors to understand when to brake, speed up, turn, and park.
Though this technology still has yet to be perfected, we’re already seeing examples of its early stages in most new cars today. Since the technology being used isn’t completely driverless yet, it’s called driver assist. Using cameras and sensors, this technology can help you park, detect blind spots, warn you if you’re merging into another lane, and even automate the entire parking process – even parallel parking.
ESX token and utility
ESX token represents the native token of ElonSpaceX platform. The token will be used as a rewarding token on ElonSpaceX platform and also governance.
ESX as rewarding token:
ESX token will be used to incentivize all the token holders whenever a new technological update is released by Elon Musk or by any new innovative products announced by anyone and DAO submit the proposal and vote for it. ESX token will be used to incentivize the liquidity providers.
ESX as governance:
ESX Token holders will be able to make decisions such as submitting proposals and voting, adjusting token distribution, review of important rules, suggesting new features. We aim to be a true DAO, whereby the ecosystem participants will decide the most profitable and best opportunities to focus on and bring them to our attention. Our token holders are the ones to control our platform.
Token Metrics
100 trillion ESX tokens will be issued.
10% Token Sale
3% Initial Liquidity
7% Marketing
10% Team members
70% Community Incentives
Release Schedule:
ESX token is a community driven token, so the most of the token is allocated to the community, which will gradually release into the market over a period of time.
10% of the total tokens supply will be issued during the IDO and will be fully unlocked and 3% will be used for initial liquidity and it’s fully unlocked, while 7% will be used for marketing and will be vested linearly for 1 year. 10% will be team’s allocation, locked for 1 year and vested for 1 year. 70% of the total supply will be used for community incentives which will cover the rewards for farming for those providing liquidity and rewards for token holders whenever Elon Musk releases new technology updates or any new innovative technology our DAO voted for us to support, it will be vested linearly for 5 years.
Roadmap
Conceptualization of the Idea
Team Establishment
ElonSpaceX Paper
Official website online
Launch of Telegram & Twitter
Rollout timelines
Marketing Activities
IDO
Exchange listing
Locked liquidity on Dex for 1 year
CoinMarketCap & CoinGecko listing
Launch of Liquidity mining program
Implement a DAO governance Platform
Expanding partnership and collaborating with other projects
Launch of our charity donation treasury
Supporting other technology innovative
Creating a cross-chain swap platform
Going to space with our boss Elon Musk
ElonSpaceX is a community driven project, so feel free to jump in and suggest the features you'll like to see!
IMPORTANT TIPS
Cryptocurrency investments are always risky. We advise all our members to read every details carefully. The information contained in this website and the resources available for download through this website is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, financial advice. The information contained on this website is not a substitute for financial advice from a professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation.
All investors are advised to read and accept our Terms and Conditions and our Policy and abide by it. Investors are advised to respect their country laws and abide by them.
ElonSpaceX.xyz is our only and official website, any other website posing to be from the ElonSpaceX team is false and should be reported. Please bookmark www.ElonSpaceX.xyz on your browser to avoid falling for phishing scam sites.
We have done our best to ensure that we have provided accurate information on our website, also the resources available for download are accurate and provide valuable information. However, nothing available in or through this website should be understood as a recommendation that you should not consult with a financial professional to address your particular information. We strongly advise that you seek advice from a professional.
THANK YOU
We the ElonSpaceX team appreciate your interest | https://medium.com/@elonspacex/what-is-elonspacex-e832e631767c | [] | 2021-06-20 17:19:42.258000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Memecoins', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Defi'] |
California Hot Melt Adhesives Market Worth $159.7 Million By 2022 | California hot melt adhesives market is expected to reach USD 159.2 million by 2022, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Increasing requirement for quicker bonding time in high speed product assembly and industrial applications is expected to boost industry growth over the forecast period.
Rising environmental concerns regarding VOC emissions has driven substitution of conventional adhesive technologies, such as solvent-based, with hot melts. Stringent environmental regulations regarding adhesive additives implemented by federal agencies such as EPA & U.S. Chemical Safety Board are expected have a major impact on industry dynamics, particularly in terms of product formulation and production.
Ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) adhesives are expected to remain the largest product segment owing to high utilization by numerous end-users seeking better adhesion on non-porous substrates such as metals and glass. The segment accounted for over 37% of total market volume in 2014. It is also expected to witness the highest growth of 3.1% over the forecast period. With increasing consumer requirement for greater flexibility in curing & setting times, polyurethane (PU) hot melts are expected to gain in terms of utilization.
To request a sample copy or view summary of this report, click the link below:
www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/california-hot-melt-adhesives-market
Further key findings from the report suggest: | https://medium.com/cmfe-market-research-reports/california-hot-melt-adhesives-market-worth-159-7-million-by-2022-c9560ab1b547 | ['Rajesh Varma'] | 2020-12-16 11:10:57.434000+00:00 | ['California'] |
The Carbon X-Prize Chapter- My Take | I was 25 when Carbon Upcycling Technologies entered the Carbon X-Prize. Back then, we wondered if the 8K application fee was a worthwhile investment for a competition of which we knew so little about the rules. We threw our name in the hat anyway.
The CarbonTech industry (i.e. The industry working on capturing, sequestering, and valorizing CO2) is still only nascent and it was hardly a topic of conversation then. Our company had been borne out of a similar open innovation challenge held by a crown corporation in Alberta only a year and a half prior and as a team of 3 part-time employees, we were only beginning to get a faint idea of the challenges involved in evolving and commercializing a hardware technology to market.
As such, Carbon Upcycling has spent the majority of its existence within the Carbon X-Prize and it has been my longest professional project to date.
The notion of an X-Prize and the merits of open innovation challenges have been extolled for a long period of time, and rightly so. The earliest, most prominent example of an (successful) open innovation challenge are probably the Longitude Awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards)- developed to incentivize inventors to create practical ways of determining longitude at sea.
Although technology and globalization has changed much in the delivery of open innovation, the fundamental tenets of what makes such challenges exciting has been relatively immutable. Namely, the democratization of opportunity to solve an important problem and the possibility of leveraging resources through the solution development process are key benefits of the approach for the sponsor. The proposition for the proponents isn’t as straight-forward, but generally offers a pathway to repute and creative collaborations and, eventually, commercial success.
From Carbon Upcycling’s perspective, the Carbon X-Prize did seem like a good fit given where we were and where we wanted to go directionally. In the first round, we focused our efforts on a 1000x scale-up from a 1 kilogram reactor to a batch size of over 1 ton, particularly focusing on the use of graphite-based additives as nucleators in polymers such as Polyethylene and, to a lesser extent, Polypropylene.
In the final round, we shifted our facility and built a commercial demonstration unit that produced 20 tons per batch of end product tailored for use in the construction sector. It would have been a tough undertaking without COVID but the pandemic and being shut down from site for 3 months all led to major challenges.
Delays and shutdowns are difficult enough for smaller installations but pilot-scale industrial installations can exacerbate supply chain issues. Sourcing a pair of 600 horsepower motors or a VFD or associated coupling is not straightforward, nor is securing supply of hundreds of tons of materials. Often, a 100$ part during commissioning with a 2 day lead time can upend plans and delay commissioning by multiple days.
The magnitude of the task we had undertaken, and its contrast with the scarce resources we had on hand became amply clear in mid-July, when the discovery of a major design flaw in our large installation set us back by a few critical weeks. What followed was a torrent of 16–20 hour days for a full-time team of 8 people and a handful of contractors that didn’t end till the data submission round of the Prize ended in early December.
The ridiculous toil wasn’t without sweat, tears, or spilled blood. While working on the commissioning, I fell and got a bloody eye and had a concussion for a week. Fortunately, this was the only safety-related injury we had on site but the amount of work, creativity, and toil that went into the competition left us all tired and spun around through the holidays.
The CarbonTech industry needs scaleup. For the 36 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions produced from anthropogenic sources every year, less than 45 million tons of CO2 are sequestered. That is less than 0.12%
The rapid, bootstrapped scale up exercise taught us a lot. Commissioning industrial-scale equipment is not a mean feat at the best of times and for us to have produced over 1000 hours of operational run time over the various scales of reactors was no mean feat. I personally learned a lot through the exercise- managing vendors and different personalities, not to mention project budgeting and some practical skills like amateur welding, grinding, pipefitting, and even rotating equipment installation.
One of multiple days when I helped in the shop with a grinder. I also learned to put down a proper bead (on a good day, consistently) with a MIG or arc welder.
In the time between the initiation and conclusion of the XPRIZE, our team has managed 4 major corporate relationships, 8 different research partnerships, filed 3 patents, and hired over 50 contractors along with a full-time staff of 8 people. Our collaborators have synthesized graphene oxide and tested protein-nanomaterial complexes for enhanced drug delivery to cancer cells (both in-vitro and in-vivo), showed improvements in rubber composites used in yoga mats and rubber tires, and created an extensive repository of data showing that our CO2-embedded cementitious materials can not only reduce cement use in concrete by over 10% (not just in a lab but in field deployments) but also make the concrete less susceptible to deleterious phenomena such as chloride or sulfate attacks. Through the last 5 years, we have allocated over CAD 10 MM in capital towards technical development and scale-up efforts and, all in all, we have done more than a respectable job with the resources on hand. I have made some mistakes with capital and resource allocation but, as most immigrants do, I’ve always been very mindful of how money was spent.
We found out a few days before the public announcement that we were not one of the winners of the Carbon XPRIZE. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and frankly hurt a lot more than my injury in September.
We had to make a critical decision right at the onset of the Finals of the XPRIZE- taking on the very difficult job of pulling off a commercial scale demonstration with little time to optimize the operation, or to play the safe game with a smaller installation that could be installed quickly and leave plenty of time for optimization in recovery and conversion.
We took the bigger bet.
Nothing grand is ever built with optimization first in mind. The vision and the scale come first, and the optimization thereafter.
It is perhaps besides the point as to whether I agree with the judges’ view of the most promising demonstrations at the ACCTC (I do not) and if the appropriate weight was given to the multitude of factors involved and traded off during the exercise (Again, I don’t). I would be happy to share my thoughts on this with pertinent parties if it is of interest.
And although we weren’t able to make a compelling enough case to the judges of the Carbon XPRIZE, there are some very important things we did achieve that do stand out and make me extremely proud despite the bitter conclusion of this chapter.
I trained as an engineer and, as such, I think of accomplishments and milestones in relatively tangible and objective terms.
Below is a list of some undeniable progress from the past 6 years-
Scaling our technology over 10,000x through the prize
Selling CO2-derived product from our demonstration- to a local ready-mix company- something we continue to do on site post XPRIZE. The running tally of delivered product is over 200 tons at the time of writing this piece. That is 440,000 pounds.
Demonstrating and proving 10% cement reduction potential of our CO2-treated SCM in the field in 5 deployments
Enabling the formation of five small businesses through our consumer product lines singularly by facilitating access to carbon-derived products
Building a solid core team of extremely motivated and adaptable individuals that I am proud to call colleagues and prouder to call friends. I acknowledge this one isn’t tangible or objective. But it is an objective observation that when the prize launched, two critical members of the team were still in high school while two others were still finishing their post-secondary education.
Actively engaging with two of the world’s 10 largest cement companies- Stay tuned for more on this front!
During the difficult Fall, I wrote a long letter to the team in an effort to coax one extra mile out of our ragged legs. One particular line from the email struck me upon reflection:
“I genuinely believe what we’re working on is important. Yes, we are not launching people into space but we’re possibly building the fundamental foundation for a future when those in space might have something to come back to on Earth.”
I would have shared the whole letter if we had won, but in loss, this excerpt feels sufficient.
I believe, more so than ever, that the type of work we’re doing is exactly what is required — not just from us but from our colleagues in this still-nascent field.
To paraphrase what Robert California said in The List episode of The Office: the onus post XPRIZE is for the winners to prove the judges right and for the others, to prove them wrong.
I know where my convictions and those of my team lie, and I look forward to acting upon them in the years to come. | https://medium.com/@a-sinha-59756/the-carbon-x-prize-chapter-my-take-821643e9d9d9 | ['Apoorv Sinha'] | 2021-04-21 03:46:31.407000+00:00 | ['Construction', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Cleantech', 'Startup'] |
Review — Onimusha: Warlords. Onimusha: Warlords is a remaster of the… | Onimusha: Warlords is a remaster of the first entry of the Onimusha series, first released in 2001 for Playstation 2. Now, eighteen years later, Capcom saw it fit to re-release the classic semi-survival and horror, semi-samurai simulator that touches on the spiritual realm game for the new generation consoles. But can a game that is almost two decades old compare to what gamers are used to nowadays?
The beginning of the end
The game is set in the Sengoku period and starts of with an alternative take on the famous battle of Okehazama. The main character Samanosuke Akechi, who is part of the forces fighting against Nobunaga Oda, is seen overlooking the battlefield while he is being attacked. The warlord Nobunaga Oda scores an unexpected victory, but is killed shortly after. About a year later, Samanosuke receives a letter from princess Yuki, asking him to help her fight off a demon threat, supported by a supposedly resurrected Nobunaga. Samanosuke and his female kunoichi friend Kaede arrive at the castle, however they are too late to prevent princess Yuki from being abducted by demons. The duo sets out on a quest to save the princess, and by extend the world.
Onimusha: Warlords actually looks a lot like a reskinned Resident Evil game, Capcom’s most successful series to date. The game does not feature an open world environment, but is composed of interconnected static screens. When you reach the edge of a screen, the camera abruptly shifts to the next screen. This means that you could be walking towards the back of a landscape, only to have your character appear somewhere out of the side of your screen. While this approach may have worked to create an unsettling and creepy atmosphere, and to give players the feeling that dangers could lurk around any corner, this mechanic mostly induces frustration in me nowadays. Having the screen constantly shift while figuring out where to go had me curse out loud a couple of times.
Up those grades
There is no such thing as levelling up your character, but you do get the opportunity to level up your sword and collect additional ones. The first few stages of the game sees you taking control of Samanosuke, with only his katana by his side. This proves to be severely insufficient in dealing with large demons, as is proven not long into the story. In trying to save princess Yuki, Samanosuke is beaten to the brink of death by a monstrous ogre-like demon. In a vision, Samanosuke is visited by the spirits of twelve oni, who grant him the power over a mysterious gauntlet. This gauntlet allows him to absorb the souls of his fallen enemies. These souls can then be used to upgrade one of three magic weapons that can be acquired, Raizan, Enryuu and Shippu, with each of these providing an elemental attack, like thunder or fire.
Its not all about combat though. Onimusha: Warlords combines its action scenes — which can be pretty stress-inducing as you try to figure out an enemy’s attack pattern — with puzzle sections. You’ll often encounter multiple areas without enemies, but each having its own puzzle to solve. This can range from opening a lock by moving tiles around, to walking on pressure plates in the ground in order to open up a path to the next room. Some of these puzzles can get pretty frustrating as well, and the game can be extremely unforgiving. One specific section sees Samanosuke locked in a room that is slowly filling with water. In order to free him, Kaede has to find the solution to a puzzle. As if this puzzle wasn’t stressful enough, you can see a bar on the side of your screen slowly filling up, indicating Samanosuke is getting in real danger…
And what if you screw up? You’ll have to start from your last save point. Indeed, back in 2001, games relied on fixed save points strewn around the game map. You had to interact with these points, some of which could be quite far away from each other, in order to save your progress. Your character dies? Back to the last save point. Gamers are spoiled nowadays with constant auto-saving and checkpoints around every corner. And to top it off, Onimusha: Warlords doesn’t let you skip through cutscenes. It also doesn’t help that the game’s stiff character animations haven’t aged well and have not been upgraded in the slightest.
The verdict
It’s sad to say that Onimusha: Warlords hasn’t aged well, and the remaster hasn’t done enough to revitalize it. The “updated graphics” really don’t do the game much service. The character animations are still stiff, and the cutscenes that were jaw-dropping in 2001 are cringe-inducing in 2019. The games was a tremendous success back then, and it seemed only logical for Capcom to allow people to play it on their new systems. But the game is nothing more than a trip down nostalgia lane. Everything feels slow, everything looks terrible, but it does provide a look into the past, and access to what was once considered one of the best games ever. This is what great games used to look like back then. But does that justify dishing out €20 for it today? I’m not sure about that.
3/5
Reviewed for PlayStation 4 | https://tasta.me/review-onimusha-warlords-1518b8d0e9be | ['Dirk Buelens'] | 2019-02-12 21:02:51.384000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Review', 'Games', 'Videogames', 'Japanese'] |
Meet The Women Of The Blockchain: Yaxi Zhu, Partner at GBIC | I had the pleasure to interview Yaxi Zhu. Yaxi is a partner at a global, multi-dimensional cryptocurrency and blockchain fund — GBIC. She is the head of the Chinese division and is in charge of the investment opportunities that are based in that region. With a background in traditional finance and consulting, as well as 2 years of a professional poker career in China, Yaxi discovered the benefits of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as they pertain to international transactions, which led her to learning about this innovative technology and then later founding GBIC among with her global partners.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”?
Thank you for organizing this! After I graduated college, I started my career at a consulting firm and then moved on to a hedge fund where I learned about BTC through market research for my clients. After the first 3 years of out of college professional experience, I spent 2 years as a team pro for POKERSTARS. I traveled around the world to play tournaments which was an amazing experience, however the difficulty in that was bringing cash back home due to foreign exchange control and other variables. Because of these difficulties, players used and continue using Pokerstar dollars to pay for everything like tournament buy-ins, hotels, flights etc. At that time Bitcoin was also becoming very popular as a payment form because of its convenience and transparency — that’s how I first started realizing its potential which then led me to eventually buying and trading Bitcoin. I started researching and really digging deep into the potential of blockchain technologies, and after realizing the incredible value it brings to the world, co-founded Global Blockchain Innovative Capital (aka. GBIC) with my partners. GBIC is a full spectrum incubator focused on delivering strategic values to blockchain projects.
Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
I work with a lot of brilliant people who are building revolutionary companies, but the one that’s closest to my heart right now is Teex. It’s a project from Jiao Tong Universities’ Distributed System Labs. Its main key differentiating factors are private smart contracts on public blockchain, trusted execution environment and layer 2 solution. I’m very impressed by both the tech and the team behind it. The Lab has been studying this topic for more than 20 years and has an immense amount of experience in the field, which is a rarity in this very young space.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m grateful for and want to say thank you to my partners. I really wouldn’t be where I am today without their constant support and drive to improve GBIC and each other. They put in so much of their time and themselves into what we’re building, which always makes me feel like I’m part of an unstoppable force. They set the bar really high, which is amazing because and I always have someone to learn from.
What are the 5 things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
1. ICO valuations have demonstrated that there is a lot of young and innovative people with good ideas, and a community willing to support them. Maybe these links haven’t been created in the past due to failures of traditional finance. Crypto / ICOs are pushing for more value for projects, users, and investors; and less rake for middlemen.
2. Excited about watching traditional finance industry have some competition. It will incentivize them to make improvements. The objective isn’t necessarily to disrupt traditional finance. But with competition, it will also push them to improve their own technologies and services.
3. Excited about convenient money transfer and the opportunities it is giving people from all corners of the world.
4. Excited about flippening (a moment when BTC will no longer have #1 MCAP). It will be interesting to see how relevant BTC can remain when it’s not #1 on the list.
5. Excited about Eth sharding — a major breakthrough in the space. Scaling TPS (Transactions Per Second) with number of nodes, while maintaining decentralization is a key step forward.
What are the 5 things worry you about blockchain and crypto? Why?
1. Fundamentalism and maximalism within certain cryptocurrency communities are becoming quite toxic. People are caught up being too close minded about a particular coin or idea.
2. Mainstream media not giving cryptocurrency a fair chance. Misinformation and click bait titles are not helping educate people about blockchain.
3. Number of scams and ill-intentioned people will always be an issue. We need to work together as a community to protect new comers and ourselves from bad actors.
4. Ease of access/usability and security is still an issue for the regular person. Crypto needs to bridge this gap before it’s widely adopted.
5. Safety for crypto investors is becoming an issue as well. Kidnapping, ransoming and blackmail are a big concern. There have been quite a lot of cases in recent news and regardless of anything, people’s safety needs to be put first. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/meet-the-women-of-the-blockchain-yaxi-zhu-partner-at-gbic-6e9eca7f777a | ['Yitzi Weiner'] | 2018-07-13 19:48:17.939000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Women In Tech', 'Inspiration', 'Founders'] |
25 proverbs in AI language | 25 proverbs in AI language
Training of a 1000 epochs begins with a single gradient descent
It is fascinating how so many proverbs have endured the test of time and are still used in literature and daily conversations. The beauty of proverbs is that so many people can relate to them. This can be observed both from the abundance of synonymous proverbs and the number of proverbs that have spread cross-culture and cross-language.
As a research student who spends time with neural networks, I thought it would be fun to rephrase some of these well-known proverbs using AI terminology, and see how well they preserve the meaning of the original. The hope is that this will make neural network jargon more relatable and approachable. The meaning of the proverb is written beneath each translation, so whether you are knowledgeable in the field, you can try to guess the original proverbs from the description.
All the below translations are my own work. Feel free to use these quotes in your daily life (at your own personal risk of scaring away your friends), but please reference/link this article if you want to use any of these in written form.
Disclaimer: some of the quotes below are not technically-speaking always true, but that goes the same with proverbs, so please take it easy. I’d be opened to any suggestions for improvements:)
1. Training of a 1000 epochs begins with a single gradient descent
Even the longest and most difficult ventures have a starting point; something which begins with one first step. —[see answer]
An epoch refers to one cycle through the full training dataset. Usually each epoch is further broken down into several mini-batches. A neural network is trained by applying gradient descent to its parameters for every mini-batch.
2. All that has a derivative of zero is not a global optimum
Not everything that looks precious or true (or optimal) turns out to be so. — [see answer]
The goal of machine learning is to find a set of parameters which optimises an objective function. At a global optimum (the best possible solution), the derivative of the objective function becomes zero, but that is also true for local minima, maxima and saddle points.
3. Set a stupid objective function, get a stupid prediction
If one asks a strange or nonsensical question, the listener will probably respond with a similarly strange or nonsensical answer. — [see answer]
The objective function should define the problem an AI should solve; otherwise the prediction that the AI makes will be meaningless.
4. Bad gradients propagate fast
Bad news circulates quickly because people often spread it everywhere. — [see answer
Out-of-distribution training samples, often known as outliers, will most likely result in large losses and gradients. Regularisation techniques and dropout may be good measures to counter overfitting to these samples.
5. Interpretability lies in the eyes of the researcher
Different people have different views on what is beautiful (or interpretable). — [see answer]
It is often not clear how a neural network is making a prediction just by inspecting its parameters and intermediate outputs. Many methods have been developed to make it more interpretable, but it remains an actively investigated topic in AI research.
6. Convergence of loss comes to those who wait
A patient person will be satisfied in due time; patience is a virtue. — [see answer]
Big neural networks can take a very long time to converge, but when it does, it often outperforms smaller ones.
7. A watched plot never improves
A process appears to go more slowly if one waits for it rather than engaging in other activities. — [see answer]
Here, a plot means a graph that shows the loss over training.
8. Data leakage leads to overfitting
One does not profit by cheating. — [see answer]
In machine learning, it is common practice to split data into training, validation and test datasets, and only use the training dataset for training. One could cheat by leaking information from the validation and test datasets into the training dataset, but then the model will most likely fail in real-world settings because it has overfitted to the dataset.
9. Don’t delete your checkpoints
Don’t do something which forces you to continue with a particular course of action, and make it impossible for you to return to an earlier situation. — [see answer]
Checkpoints are network parameters that are saved during training after every couple of epochs.
10. There’s no point crying over killed processes
To worry about unfortunate events which have already happened and which cannot be changed. — [see answer]
Always save your intermediate results to avoid having to start from scratch if your process dies mid-training:(
11. Don’t change model architectures in mid-training
To change one’s plan or approach when an effort is already underway or at another inopportune time. — [see answer]
Usually, once you define your model, you won’t be able to change it mid-training if you don’t want to start from scratch again. (Instead, you can turn the training on and off for sub-components of your model.)
12. Don’t judge a network by the number of parameters
One shouldn’t prejudge the worth or value of something by its outward appearance alone. — [see answer]
Unfortunately, size does matter for neural networks, but that’s not all. A cleverly designed architecture with shared parameters and additional constraints can go a long way, and also makes the network more robust and generalisable.
13. Don’t put all your weights on one feature
To make everything dependent on only one thing; to place all one’s resources in one place, account, etc. — [see answer]
Typically you would have many channels in a neural network layer, each channel computing some kind of feature. A robust network will not rely on one channel or feature alone, but makes its decision based on a combination of different features. Dropout is one strategy to ensure such robustness.
14. Don’t filter out the signal together with noise
To discard, especially inadvertently, something valuable while in the process of removing or rejecting something unwanted. — [see answer]
15. Don’t try to segment before you can classify
You must master a basic skill before you are able to learn more complex things. — [see answer]
Image classification is simpler and is a necessary step to image segmentation, which is a problem of classifying every pixel in an image instead of just classifying the entire image.
16. Reinitialise pre-trained embeddings
To spoil one’s plans or hope of success. — [see answer]
Pre-trained embeddings are learnt features that can help accelerate downstream tasks.
17. Returns are maximised by agents who self-play
You cannot depend solely on divine help, but must work yourself to get what you want. — [see answer]
A return is a discounted sum of future rewards. In reinforcement learning, the objective is to find a strategy to maximise the expected return. In the famous example of AlphaZero, an AI learnt to play Go, chess and Shogi at a super-human level, just by playing against itself.
18. It’s all neural network parameters to me
A way of saying that something is difficult to understand. — [see answer]
19. No model can be optimised for two objective functions
You cannot work for two different people, organisations, or purposes in good faith, because you will end up favoring one over the other. — [see answer]
An objective function defines the problem the AI must solve. If you give it two objectives that contradict each other, the AI can’t give an optimal solution to both simultaneously.
20. The gradient is always steeper on the other side
People always think they would be happier in a different set of circumstances. — [see answer]
Steep gradients are good because that means you have more scope to improve your parameters and reach a better solution (but not too steep).
21. Adversary and loss make a network wise
We gain wisdom faster in difficult times than in prosperous times. — [see answer]
Defining a loss as an objective to minimise is a typical way to train a neural network. A family of networks called Generative Adversarial Networks also employs adversity to train itself. Typical applications are for realistic image generation.
22. GPT-3 wasn’t trained in a day
It takes a lot of time to achieve something important. — [see answer]
GPT-3 is a massive state-of-the-art network that can perform a variety of language-related tasks.
23. Multi-head attention is better than single-head
It is better to have the power of two people’s minds to solve a problem or come up with an idea than just one person on their own. — [see answer]
Multi-head attention is a mechanism used in Transformers, a neural network architecture that has been shown to be highly effective at capturing the complexity of language. GPT-3 uses Transformers as its building block.
24. Where there’s a gradient, there’s a loss
Every rumor has some foundation; when things appear suspicious, something is wrong. — [see answer]
25. Don’t put a fully-connected layer before a convolutional layer
Do not do things in the wrong order. — [see answer]
Convolutional layers typically appear in computer vision tasks. It is very likely that a fully-connected layer comes after a convolutional layer, not before (although nothing is impossible). | https://medium.com/tech-to-inspire/25-proverbs-in-ai-language-949ab9531202 | [] | 2020-12-21 12:20:38.240000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Life', 'Deep Learning'] |
A six-year-long sexually harassed case in China | Feminism in China
One thing for the difficulties of this case and also why it receives these much attention is its relation to feminism in China. Male superiority deeply roots in Chinese culture throughout history. Confucianism, as an ancient Chinese belief, is popular throughout China and even overseas. However, this belief advocates the superiority of men over women. There is a popular saying by Confucius:
“Of all people, female and servants are the most difficult to behave to.”
This saying is still quoted by many males today in China. When it gets to Maoism, promoted de-genderization to achieve gender equality in politics and society. And feminism is considered a Western bourgeois ideology and has been criticized and banned. In this case, although there is a law protecting women’s rights in the public, it doesn’t help women’s rights in private spaces like family. In recent society, there is a lot of effort working on women’s rights, and women in the new era with knowledge pay more attention to protect their rights. However, China as a country with large popularity, the effort still has a long way to go. Especially among uneducated people and those who live in rural areas, male superiority is still a huge phenomenon.
When this case first came out, the public is more toward Xianzi’s side. However, as the case was referred to as the Chinese #MeToo movement by some western media like New York Times and BBC, conspiracies of the hatred of feminism start to appear on the internet, claiming that it is pushed secretly by some western power. And since the case is pretty much base on Xianzi’s description and there is no much evidence to prove, some people start to think of this whole case as a conspiracy to push “western feminism” to Chinese culture. Additionally, another case that happened a month ago in November 2020, increase people’s doubt about the sexually harassed case like this even more. A college senior girl from Tsinghua University claimed she was touched by a junior boy during her lunch at the canteen at Tsinghua University. She later made the information (name, college, grade) about the boy public, and the boy was denounced by the public throughout the internet. However, later, through the security camera, it found out that the boy did not touch the girl and it was his backpack accidentally “touched” the girl’s private part because the canteen was crowded. Then the public all turned to the boy’s side, denounced the girl for publishing the boy’s information without making sure what actually happened. This case largely affects some people’s attitude toward such no-evidence sexual harassment. These thoughts were populated throughout social media and mostly conducted by the male. If the victim is male, it is highly possible that it will not be considered slander since there is no “benefit” from doing so. Through this, it can see the road to gender equality is still difficult in Chinese society.
Altitude toward Protest
After the case attracts attention, it was referred to as the #MeToo movement in China and was support by a lot of people who also fighting for feminism and gender equality. When this case finally reached the court, many people, mostly females, waited outside the court to support Xianzi. However, protest is not used in China and there is a conspiracy saying these people were paid to go support. The negative attitude toward protest, to a large extend, is related to the Hong Kong protest. The Hong Kong and mainland China split causing some violence and unfair treatment toward people from mainland China in Hong Kong is viral in media. People from mainland China saw too many depicting of the negative side of protest and it largely affects their altitude toward such movement. In this case, when the media starts framing the support outside the court as a protest movement and depicting supporters as holding signs of the #MeToo movement with slogans, the public relates it to the Hong Kong protest and starts having a negative attitude towards it. They claimed that the protest doesn’t help feminism, but split females and males which causing gender inequality.
Social media’s role
Social media plays an important part in escalating this event. Using social media to get a voice heard is one effective method used by most people in China today. Social media Weibo has the most important role in this case. Xianzi’s friend reposted Xianzi’s article on Weibo and it caught the public’s attention. It is an important reason that this case finally reaches the court. There are no many sexual harassment cases that reach the court so it is progress. When there are benefits, there will also have negative effects on the case. People who have doubt, suggests that the girl is trying to use the mass of public opinion to “kidnap” the decision of the court. Once there are conspiracy theories, they also escalating throughout the social media and some people will turn toward Zhu’s side. This will be an opportunity for Zhu to turn over the public altitude to some extend.
A survey conducted in 2019 of workplace sexual harassment in China
A survey conducted in 2019 suggesting that there are 54.4% of people claimed that they have experienced sexual harassment at the workplace and 38.8% of them are female.
There is no further update on the decision of the court for this case, but no matter what will be the result and who will win, this case is a landmark of sexually harassed cases and will be a huge encouragement for those who were sexually harassed and cannot fight back. Let’s wait for the result and wish for justice. | https://medium.com/@katherinedy/a-six-year-long-sexually-harassed-case-in-china-77a11ca049eb | ['Katherine Dong'] | 2020-12-10 14:32:51.957000+00:00 | ['Metoo', 'Feminism', 'China', 'Sexual Harassment'] |
ReFocus: Making Out-of-Focus Microscopy Images In-Focus Again | Microscopy images are widely used for the diagnosis of various diseases such as infections and cancers. Furthermore, they facilitate basic biomedical research that has been continuously generating new insights into the causes of human diseases. Therefore, microscopy images are of great importance in improving our health. However, obtaining high-quality in-focus microscopy images poses one of the biggest challenges in the field of microscopy. For example, certain tissues, such as lung and intestines, are uneven and can result in out-of-focus images. In this post, we will tackle this problem by using deep learning to refocus out-of-focus microscopy images. In other words, we will turn out-of-focus microscopy images into in-focus ones (see the figure below) using deep learning.
Left: out of focus. Right: in focus (Image source: https://data.broadinstitute.org/bbbc/BBBC006/)
Data
We will be using the Broad Bioimage Benchmark Collection 006 (BBBC006) image set, which was acquired from one 384-well microplate containing human cells whose nuclei were labeled by Hoechst stains. A z-stack of 32 images (z = 16 at the optimal focal plane, 15 images above the focal plane, and 16 below) was taken for each of the 768 fields of view (384 wells, 2 fields of view per well).
Approach
The overall strategy is to build a convolutional neural network that takes out-of-focus images as input and generates in-focus images as output. We will base our neural network on the U-net architecture. In addition, we will use feature loss (originally called perceptual loss by Johnson et al. ) as the loss function to quantify the differences between the output of the neural network and its corresponding optimal focal plane image at z = 16, or the target.
U-net
U-net was originally developed by Ronneberge et al. for biomedical image segmentation problems. U-net essentially consists of three components: a downsampling path that reduces the image size, a subsequent upsampling path that increases the image size, and cross connections that transfer activations from selected parts of the downsampling path to their corresponding parts in the upsampling path. Cross connections supplement the upsampling path with information from the downsampling path and are the major invention that makes U-net perform so well. We will use ResNet-34 pretrained on ImageNet as the downsampling path, which utilizes the technique termed transfer learning.
U-net-based architecture (adapted from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04597.pdf)
Feature loss
Feature loss helps reconstruct fine details in images and is well suited to style transfer and super-resolution imaging applications. As shown in the figure below, the basic idea of feature loss is to put the output and target through the same ImageNet model (VGG-16 in our case) and then compare their activations at selected intermediate layers instead of the final layer.
Feature Loss (adapted from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08155.pdf)
Implementation using fastai
The implementation of our U-net-based neural network is simply one line of code using the fastai library as shown below. We just need to provide the data, downsampling architecture (ResNet-34), loss function (feature loss), and a few additional parameters.
U-net-based model in fastai
We will use the implementation of feature loss by Jeremy Howard as shown below:
Feature loss implementation by Jeremy Howard
Training and testing
We will train our neural network with out-of-focus images that are above the focal plane at z = 1 (the worst), 5 (intermediate), and 10 (close to in-focus)using z = 16 as the ground truth (y). We will set aside a small portion of these images as validation sets and use them to guide and evaluate the training process. After training, we will further assess the model’s performance on out-of-focus images that are below the focal plane at z = 32. Although both are out of focus, images that are above or below the focal plane look different as their distances to the lens are different. Therefore, our strategy will allow us to test the generalizability of the trained model.
Results
We first evaluate the performance of our model on the validation sets at various out-of-focus levels. As shown below, the model does a good job in distinguishing the blurred cells and the performance improves if we use less blurred images as we would expect.
Model performance on the validation sets
Next, we examined the model’s performance on the test set at z = 32. As shown below, the image generated by the model closely resembles the optimal focal plane image at z = 16. Thus, our model trained with images that are above the focal plane also performs well on images that are below the focal plane.
Model performance on the test set at z = 32
Summary and future directions
In sum, we successfully built a neural network that refocuses blurry out-of-focus microscopy images. This work improves the quality of microscopy images and will facilitate the studies of human diseases. Due to limited computation power, I was only able to work with images of very small size (128*128). Ideally, the neural network should be able to process whole slide images, probably by dividing them into patches. Furthermore, the neural network should be able to handle different kinds of microscopy images with different stains. Finally, we can incorporate the neural network into acquisition platforms to refocus out-of-focus images in real time and eliminate the need for post-acquisition fixation.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Drs. Paola Marcovecchio, Sara McArdle and Zbigniew Mikulski from the Imaging Core Facility at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) for helpful discussions. | https://towardsdatascience.com/refocus-making-out-of-focus-microscopy-images-in-focus-again-90e1fe98ead4 | ['Yuan Tian'] | 2019-06-08 21:12:09.949000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Microscopy', 'Fastai', 'Convolutional Network', 'Deep Learning'] |
Self-Care and Financial Health in 2021 | Self-Care and Financial Health in 2021
Financial Anxiety? Practice a different type of self-care by changing your relationship with money
Practice financial self- care to improve your life.
Do you have anxiety about money? Most of us do. Make 2021 the year you get healthy physically, mentally and financially. Financial stress affects our general mental health and well being. Take control and improve your relationship with money with these eight simple steps.
Journal about your spending and saving habits. Write down everything you owe. Reflect on how you feel about it. This is the first step in getting a clear picture of your financial reality and your feelings about it. Keep track of your bank account balances. You should be checking them daily, unlike the nearly 40% of Americans who don’t! By checking your bank account balances on a daily basis, you will get a very clear view of your financial reality and be able to track your income and expenses, and see some of your spending habits, which will most likely surprise you. Again, once you see everything clearly, you’ll be back in control and able to make changes. Create a budget. Once you have a clear view of your debt, expenses, and income and you are in the habit of checking your balances daily, you are ready to take control. Make a budget, and stick to it. (I use a simple Excel spreadsheet at home, and also the notes app on my iPhone to track purchases and spending when I am out and about. Write down every single purchase and be sure you know your daily balance.) Look for simple ways to cut back on spending.
Make coffee at home each day and cut down on that coffee shop bill.
Workout using YouTube workout videos and cancel that gym membership.
Cancel your cable and use a digital antenna and a streaming service.
(I have personally made all of these changes in my life and saved over $15,000 thousand over the past 5 years.)
5. Create realistic financial goals for yourself and be specific. For example:
I will create a $5,000 emergency budget over the next 12 months.
I will pay off $10,000 in credit card debt over the next 36 months.
I will save $20,000 for a down payment on a home over the next 48 months.
6. Attack debt aggressively. To get myself out of crushing personal debt, I have used the snowball method. In the snowball method, you pay off the smallest debts first, and your success will snowball from there! Note that credit card debt should definitely be paid off first, as they will have the highest interest rates and fees.
7. Learn from experts! Here is an excellent list of the top 10 best finance podcasts from 2020.
8. Treat yourself! When you reach a financial goal, such as a savings or debt payoff goal, gift yourself something. You could make a special purchase or take a special trip, as long as it doesn't break your budget!
Follow these steps in 2021 and you’ll be on your way to financial freedom and peace of mind. Good luck! I know you can do it! | https://medium.com/the-innovation/self-care-and-financial-health-in-2021-6b60965f25bf | ['Christine Carrillo'] | 2020-12-28 15:02:58.650000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Financial Planning', 'Self Improvement', 'Self Care', 'Financial Freedom'] |
What the Hell is a Query Letter? | I’ve read a lot of query letters in my time. During the year and a half that I read queries as intern to a literary agent, I’ve seen pretty much every mistake that a writer can make when submitting to an agent.
Some mistakes are simple and banal:
queries that are long enough to be a novella,
writers who CC hundreds of agents in a single message,
writers who mis-gender the agent or misspell their name,
queries for genres and forms that are wildly outside of the agent’s wheelhouse,
queries with several typos that could have benefited from spell check or another set of eyes on them,
And then there are the wild ones:
queries written in rhyming iambic hexameter,
queries where the writer insists that their book is a work of genius that the agent must represent,
queries for books that are long enough to send George R.R. Martin running for the hills.
queries where the writer suggests that the entire Caldecott award committee will be talking about their book over Sunday brunch,
queries that offer sexual favors in return for representation,
queries where the author shamelessly dumps their harrowing life story, and insist on how they deserve to be represented,
queries where writers insist that their book, their precious book is going to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and that any agent would be lucky to represent them.
I could keep going. But the point is, the average agent’s inbox is filled with people who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of a query letter.
Despite all of the wonder and hype, all of the time and energy that fledgling writers have spent trying to decode the secrets of writing a great query, it’s no great mystery.
A query letter is, at heart, a business letter where you try to convince an agent to continue reading your writing.
That sounds like a “no, duh!” answer. But I promise you, there are so many writers who get so lost up in the myth and magic and possibility of a query letter, that they forget it’s a simple thing.
There is some magic, but the magic isn’t in the letter: it’s in the story that you’re telling.
A query letter is like the beginning scene in the movie of My Sister’s Keeper. (Yes, I know the book is better, but I like the visual of the film.) You, the writer, are Abigail Breslin’s character; the agent is Alec Baldwin’s lawyer character. You’re marching into their office, and trying to get them to take your case.
As in “My Sister’s Keeper”, so, too, with your query: you need a powerful, convincing story to keep them hooked.
But instead of a passionate speech, you’re writing a business letter.
I know that business letters sound boring, dry; the very thought of business strips away the mystical magical wonder of finding an agent that loves your story, of making that connection.
A query letter is simply using the right words. And you’ve got the words.
You’ve sat down, day after day after day, written and rewritten and revised and polished this manuscript until it resembles a bright and beautiful gem. That same passion for words needs to go in to writing your query.
You may be desperate and eager to get your book out into the world — Goodness knows that I was when I first started querying. You’ve reached the first part of the process where your hands aren’t in control of every last detail. It feels like you’re handing your precious story over to Fate. And I’m not going to lie: you definitely are.
But thankfully, there are a few things that you can do to stand out in a positive way, to weigh Fate’s dice just a little bit in your favor. I’ve got something that may help you with that.
I took my query letter for my first novel, Somehow You’re Sitting Here, and deconstructed it, breaking down the format and the successful elements.
As someone who was querying while working as an intern, I had a unique opportunity to sit on both sides of the fence, to see so many queries that weren’t working and some that were, and to use that knowledge to craft a successful query letter.
I didn’t get an agent. But I got requests; I had agents asking to read more of my work. Even if they couldn’t represent my work, for whatever reason, they saw something in my query letter and wanted to read my story.
The query letter was a success, even if the book wasn’t.
Something to keep in mind about querying numbers: they’re a lot like your batting average in baseball: batting a .300 doesn’t sound impressive to the uninitiated, but the fans know that it’s actually a fairly good average.
The bar is even lower for querying. You should be shooting for a .100 average — If you can get 1 in 10 of the agents you query to request pages (or a full manuscript), your query letter is doing its job. Of the 162 requests I sent out, I had 24 agents request more. My “batting” average is a 0.153. More than 1 in 10. Those aren’t wunderkind numbers. For a first time novelist? They’re pretty solid. Or, at least, a good place to start.
My query letter did that heavy lifting. And I think it, and seeing it broken down, will help you. If you’re interested, use the link below. | https://zachjpayne.medium.com/what-the-hell-is-a-query-letter-6ce714ec984 | ['Zach J. Payne'] | 2020-06-30 14:38:26.149000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Creativity', 'Craft', 'Publishing'] |
Unemployed with a Science degree | Advice to the high school students before choosing a degree
As an Asian, while schooling the biggest dream is to get good grades and to enter a prestigious university. A degree will help to increase chances of safe guarding a job, with a higher salary expectation than a non graduate. I did graduate but now I am unemployed.
I don’t know where the fault lies. My cousin too is a graduate but unemployed. Where is the root cause is unclear, but sort of choosing the degree you want to follow is really important.
When choosing degrees, we may do degrees just because its so popular at the current time, and the entrance grades to enter the university may match our received grades. Education institutes may say there is a high employ ability rate. For the given job true employ ability may be high but first check is it global employability is high, or employability in your country for the given job is high. For those of whom you like to migrate it may be ok, but for others who have older parents and family this might not be an available option.
There might be so much employability for a given job, but there might be so much competition since new universities are blooming up everyday, standards unknown. Say you graduated from a prestigious university, and your friend graduated following same degree from a recently put up university and you might demand a higher salary and your friend demand a lower salary, and if both of you can do the same job tasks. It depends on the company who they’ll recruit.If its a very well reputed company they may have high entrance standards and may likely choose you. Yet if its a small company they may take your friend, or someone who can do the job even if what they poccess is a diploma and a few years of work experience.
When applying for some jobs related to the Management field, job may ask for a degree or equivalent work experience, which means you need not necessarily have a degree, you may have work experience and a diploma. The same goes for in Information technology field.
What are the pros of having work experience , diploma and some certifications: You dont have to spend time / money studying while on the job you get a salary. The years of experience in your CV matters alot. What are the cons of not having only work experience and no degree: Salary expectations can be a bit lower than offered to a graduate doing the same job, even upon promotions Society, your relations might not consider you as qualified
Considered what’s best I would recommend if possible while doing your degree stick to and be in touch with entry requirements needed for a job. Before graduating build up those expertise otherwise you will have to build up those expertise after graduation and you ll be behind the rest of your colleagues. These days even to get a training you need work expertise, there is competition in getting a training even. Hence choose wisely how you spend your time while following a degree. | https://medium.com/@dj.kanchanaa/unemployed-with-a-science-degree-114dc8bc5c69 | [] | 2020-12-06 05:31:20.387000+00:00 | ['Education Reform', 'Unemployment', 'Job Hunting', 'Jobs'] |
Buy Sebamed Baby Perfume at Best Price | Mywellnesskart | Buy Sebamed Baby Perfume at Best Price | Mywellnesskart Briannajoseph ·Dec 24, 2020
Don’t we as a whole simply love the way wonderful children smell? Sebamed Eau de Cologne’s sweet and fragile fragrance will include your child in a delicately perfumed embrace. | https://medium.com/@briannajoseph/buy-sebamed-baby-perfume-at-best-price-mywellnesskart-ebd18c83f83 | [] | 2020-12-24 12:14:12.182000+00:00 | ['Babyproducts', 'Baby', 'Babycare', 'Babyperfume'] |
Google Maps Kullanımı Ve Web Servisten JSON Veri Çekme | 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/hardwareandro/flutter-google-maps-kullan%C4%B1m%C4%B1-ve-web-servisten-json-veri-%C3%A7ekme-3c0224c92616 | ['Yasin Ege'] | 2020-09-02 15:23:30.372000+00:00 | ['Maps', 'API', 'Google Maps', 'Flutter', 'Json'] |
I resolve not to resolve because I don’t want to tell myself “you suck.” | I resolve not to resolve because I don’t want to tell myself “you suck.”
Source: Flickr.Com
Perhaps that’s harsh, but the reality is, I’m thinking I might actually achieve some stuff if I don’t bleat it, first. Now, in the back of my head, are all the things that I would resolve to do if I was in that mindset. You know, like losing weight, getting sober, or sober-ish, decluttering my home, winning an Indie Spirit Award, that type of thing.
Does anyone actually keep these resolutions? If so, how do you do it? Do you write them down? Tell everyone you know so that they can hold you accountable? Write whole Medium stories about them? Please share so that the rest of us losers can catch up.
One thing I will resolve: To get the Medium dance party going because I think we all need to shake a little somethin.’ | https://medium.com/everything-shortform/i-resolve-not-to-resolve-because-i-dont-want-to-tell-myself-you-suck-fe5ab74ef04c | ['Sherry Mcguinn'] | 2021-01-03 17:43:16.060000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Life Lessons', 'Truth', 'New Year Resolution', 'Self Improvement'] |
Creating a self-management tool in projects | Being part of a vast company represents, among other challenges, a considerable effort to understand tons of information, processes, actors, and roles. In my experience, one of the most significant issues I see is the lack of centralizing and organizing information with a purpose.
This disorganization of documents is not only a Big companies issue; small projects like start-ups may also face this problem significantly if they do not fully assimilate the concept of design ops. For example, I’ve been working for a year now on one project with a couple of friends, and one of the challenges we have is to figure how to put in a single place all the resources we have created so far to consult effectively. Although we are in a “genesis stage” of the project, creating an adequate documentation method will be crucial once the project grows.
Whether a big company or a small start-up, having information spread in too many sources increases uncertainty and anxiety once you build a project or a solution for an actual problem. Not to mention that having onboardings for each new team member or stakeholder will be a painful and exhausting process.
As an Age of empires, we can only recognize what is in front of us, unaware of what’s happening all around us.
One of the consequences of having disaggregated information is to have a similar stage as the “Age of empires.” As in the game, we will only recognize what’s immediately in front of us and nothing more unless we discover and conquer more territory. Moreover, this information discovery supposes more cognitive wear and the making of conspiracy theories every time we jump into a meeting and try to understand all the ideas that are surfacing.
Another significant consequence of the “Age of empires state” is that we may be at a disadvantage regarding a general audience once we show up in a meeting. To get the whole context of a problem and develop a solution, we need to connect too many dots and do some research first, which will require more time in planning and execution.
Folders, drives, presentations, and wikis?
Is it enough to document all critical info of a project into a dropbox, G-drive, or any other collaborative tool? I would say yes, but partially, and depending on the primary intention. The first issue I’ve detected with having these documentation structures is that maintaining a proper order can be tricky, and the problem can increase if we share them with other collaborators. If rules to edit are not clear, every collaborator may end up creating different structures of information.
The second issue in this option is the lack of guidance or rules to find information; how to navigate? Is there an AI or text file that enlightens me on how to search for what I want?. In these scenarios, we often depend on someone who knows how to find the things of interest, which is not the most effective way. Another method may be to discover by our means, but the truth is if we are in a company that moves fast, we need immediate answers.
The third issue is the intention; all the purpose of documenting is to provide information for strategic conversations and metrics? Maybe for a repository of progress?. Is this source valid for all types of profiles? As product managers and as designers, do we need to refer to the same data? Sometimes this is not clear, and we need to surf all types of information without any distinction.
How did we solve this? Here’s the idea
When I got to this new job, it hurt a lot to read all the documents my partners shared with me, and to be honest; it didn’t work at all. I remember that I had multiple presentations connected with others without any specific order nor orientation; As a result, I ended up seeing problems that were entirely beyond my need and understanding. But then, I realized I was not the only one suffering from this; many product team members were also struggling with the same issue. So one day, we met and shared our frustration about this particular challenge. We decided to fix this, and we created a plan based on the followings milestones:
A common need. (We’re not a call center)
The first thing was to point out all the difficulties we were in by not having a single source of truth, at least one that works. One of the biggest pains we realized we needed to relieve was the lack of knowledge of some teams regarding some internal procedures. That point represented a massive effort for the product team to cover daily. Concepts, users, departments, contacts, and even glossaries were questions to answer.
A purpose. (A self-management tool?)
With some identified pains, then we needed to provide an intention to document info. The questions to answer were: why should we do this? What benefit can we take from this? How can we help others with a document structure?. The statement behind this solution was, “we need a place where all teams can get the relevant information according to their needs, no matter the discipline nor the seniority.” With that said, the next goal was to create a way to classify information and navigate it.
Defining an A.I. (how to navigate? what are the significant parts)
To capture all disciplines and seniorities, we divided the information into some pillars: The first one is a general overview of the project (basic concepts, users, teams, and a short guide of navigation); Why? The idea behind this part was to set up the foundations and overall understanding for everyone that wanted to get the big picture of the project. Also, this was perfect to onboard new team members, stakeholders, and others.
The second pillar contained all documents related to the tools and tasks. Again, the audience changes; here, all commercials and work teams can get a deep dive into some actions and rules. The principal intention also changes; This part is more oriented to guide people to run daily tasks and procedures.
The third and final pillar is about getting feedback from users, experience polls, and others sources of information. This part intends to build the stepping stones for future iterations of the platform.
Defining gatekeepers and Platform (frequency and maintenance)
All the above doesn’t work if we don’t settle solid rules to follow. So the first thing to decide was to pick the persons in charge to ensure that everything was updated, relevant and coherent. For that task, the product team decided to include a mandatory step every Monday to add all new information related to tools and procedures. In addition, they should announce every significant update on the workplace page, and finally, one person from the design team will oversee the look and feel for every new layout.
Regarding the platform, to start, we decided to use a G-site. The reasoning behind this was simple; we needed an easy way to upload content and modify at will everything we wanted without generating an extra task for designers and developers. Last but not least, the G-site was enabled to work only within the company avoiding leaks of sensitive information.
Rules of engagement (what is, what is not)
Once we decided to advance with this project, we started to involve people in the initiative. In the beginning, some people began to push back, and then we realized they understood this source of truth as an extra step to cover daily, which was not a popular idea. So we decided to create a “what is / what is not” list for everyone and clarify all possible doubts. Here are some statements:
What is!
An evergreen information repository.
A complete guide of procedures for every tool we have.
A users and stakeholders ecosystem.
General strategic documentation.
Onboarding guide.
What is not!
It is not an extra layer of work. All information should be evergreen, and that means long-term agreements and not ongoing decisions.
A repository of changes. For this matter, other platforms better fulfill the purpose.
A feedback manager.
A backlog tracker.
Once the team understood this, they felt confident contributing and being part of the project.
Spread the idea (how to scale?)
Like many other projects, this one started as a proof of concept. However, the results so far evidence a good adoption from users: the commercial team, product team, design team, and other stakeholders seem to use this new source of truth as the primary artifact daily. So how should we scale this idea? The next target was to generate the Portuguese version to cover the Brazilian users and have one unified structure for all South America. In time, the IT team decided to join us by connecting their site with ours because they saw how this self-management tool could save tons of work and planning.
We also had a design HUB where we documented internal concepts, methodologies, and artifacts. Should we connect this site with de one from the product team? The answer is a solid yes! It was a beautiful accident that we ended up creating a strategic portal where users can access relevant information under the same premise: a self-management idea for all.
Today, the “strategic product document” (DEP in Spanish), as we named it, is one of the most used tools in the area I work, almost every day, we refer to this site to find or consult any question we have. Everything is there, and it is grateful to see how new members use it to understand what we do and how we look more like a compact unit. Comments have spread out into other teams. They start to look with bright eyes all the world we built; who knows if eventually, we can create a positive contagious across the company, but for now, our area has minus one problem to worry about. | https://uxdesign.cc/creating-a-self-management-tool-in-projects-1cdc4758bbf | ['Kike Peña'] | 2021-09-16 10:57:05.687000+00:00 | ['Team Collaboration', 'Product Management', 'UX', 'Leadership', 'Design Process'] |
3 Quotes On Survival For Your Hardest Days | 3 Quotes On Survival For Your Hardest Days
Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash
My friend’s yellow sweatshirt read: Surviving, not thriving.
I laughed when I saw it. A sign of the times, of educators like me who are burnt out at a marathon of a semester with impossible asks and limited rewards. We can’t believe I made it to the end of this fall semester, we joke. Somehow, we survived, we marvel.
I’ve been thinking about survival a lot lately. Maybe it's the existential threat of a pandemic, the way our lives have been upended in big and small ways, or the processing of my trauma after all these years. I’m overwhelmed and exhausted, navigating a divorce and major life changes. I wonder how long and how much I can survive in the coming months.
When I feel weary, I return to the words of the strongest and most prolific survivors of our time: Chanel Miller.
If her name doesn’t ring a bell for you, this name might: Brock Turner.
Brock Turner is infamous for his attack on an unconscious woman at a fraternity party. Turner, a former student at Stanford University, was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person, and penetration of an unconscious person. He faced up to 14 years in prison but was sentenced to only six months and served just three months for “good behavior.”
The unconscious woman, then called Emily Doe for anonymity in the trial, was Chanel Miller. Four years after we met her as the anonymous survivor who’s victim impact statement shook the world, she shared her name in her memoir, Know My Name. Her book quickly became a New York Times Bestseller and one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/3-quotes-on-survival-to-give-perspective-on-the-hardest-days-10eea1736d26 | ['Ashley Cleland'] | 2020-12-14 16:04:09.644000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Inspiration', 'Women', 'Sexual Assault', 'Mental Health'] |
Urban Legends Rewritten To Reflect How Women Behave Today | Photo by Mehrdad Haghighi on Unsplash
Urban Legends Rewritten To Reflect How Women Behave Today
Get Smart Not Gutted
The Hook
A boy and girl were making out in the back seat of a parked car. His hand was going for the hem of her skirt when she heard a sound from outside.
She shot up, alarmed. “What was that?”
The boy rubbed her shoulders, trying to get her back in the mood.
She wasn’t distracted. “I heard a scratching sound. I want to leave.”
“Aww baby, you’re just nervous…”
“Excuse me baby, but I’m not nervous. We literally turned off the radio because the news was all about an escaped maniac from a nearby asylum and YOU thought it was ruining the mood. Speaking of which YOU don’t get to tell me when I’M in the mood. We’re leaving.”
“Fine.” The boy put his keys in the ignition and angrily drove off. The killer in the bushes cursed. He’d been looking forward to gutting some teenagers. Although he was happy that the girl stood up for herself.
The Babysitter
Shelly was sitting, with her legs curled under her sweater, on the couch while reading a magazine when the phone rang. Thinking it was the parents calling to check in on the kids, she answered without concern.
“Hello!”
“Have you checked on the children?”
“Yeah, about an hour ago. Is this Doug? You sound weird.”
“Maybe you should check on them again.”
“Ok Doug!”
After hanging up she grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911.
“Hello, I’m alone babysitting and I think someone is going to harm me and the kids.”
“Are you sure you’re not just being hysterical?”
“Look my intuition says a creepy man is upstairs waiting. Probably Doug, but he is really creepy so I’m not wrong on that front. Please don’t belittle the situation, and wait until we trace the call and find out that he is upstairs and the kids are dead. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean you get to assume I’m being hysterical. Send someone NOW.”
The police arrived and managed to subdue the man upstairs who tried to flee out of the bathroom where he’d been hiding, waiting to jump the babysitter as she entered the sleeping children’s room.
Killer in the backseat
The killer crouched low in the backseat. His knife ready. He’d seen the beautiful young woman leave her car, without properly locking the door, and enter the mall almost an hour ago. It would be just a matter of time before…
Beep beep!
He smiled as the doors unlocked. After they were further down the road and the twilight changed into darkness he would — -
He didn’t have time to finish the thought. Both passenger doors open and he was staring at the gun of a police officer.
“Drop your weapon. Hands in the air!”
In the back of the police vehicle he asked the officers, “What happened to the woman?”
“She’s getting a ride home from another officer. She checked her back seat before getting in the car since she was alone. Come on! It’s 2019. What woman doesn’t listen to true crime podcasts?” | https://medium.com/the-haven/urban-legends-rewritten-to-reflect-how-women-behave-in-2019-f21639df3005 | ['Kyrie Gray'] | 2020-10-27 05:01:56.633000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Humor', 'Halloween', 'Culture', 'Feminism'] |
NYC: 2020 Didn’t Spook Halloween | The streets of New York City decorated for Halloween.
By: Lourdes Garcia
As I walked downtown with my sister, we made sure to walk through Greenwich Village and say hello to Zohra, a giant white spider that descends on Jefferson Market every Halloween. Usually, she dangles over crowds of people dressed up and exhilarated to celebrate Halloween in New York City, but this year was different.
When Covid-19 spread around the world back in March, New York City received national attention after scathing articles stated that the city would never recover from the shutdown and migration. But now, the city has reopened with new guidelines that limit large gatherings. Streets are decorated with fairy lights that provide lighting for outdoor dining and are filled with lines as people wait six feet apart to enter a store.
Despite many events being canceled, New York City, like any other year, welcomed the fall season and Halloween eagerly. Walking down Fifth Avenue and through the Villages reminded me of past Halloweens and was a reminder that in NYC, Halloween is a holiday for anyone. Storefronts were decorated with images of dancing skeletons, ghosts, and mannequins wearing witch hats and holding brooms. In Midtown, Rockefeller Center welcomed me and everyone else with small squash patches filled with pumpkins of all sizes. All throughout the city, pumpkin patches could be found, serving as a constant reminder of what was to come on October 31st. Small ones found downtown in Pier 17 and Chelsea Market demanded a photo shoot and more traditional big ones such as Pumpkin Point on Governor’s Island called for children and families to go pumpkin picking.
The residents of the Upper East Side also made use of their old townhouses to fill the city with the Halloween spirit. Stairs and window sills were filled to the brim with carved pumpkins and skeletons. Giant spiderwebs strung on the stairs would beckon you to look up and spot the giant plastic spiders crawling over the buildings. Townhouses were lit up at night, causing the figures to cast eerie shadows calling for passersby to take a look. Other apartments were turned into haunted houses, with figures abruptly jerking and producing screams that echoed down the street.
Public spaces were filled with pumpkins and holiday decorations in honor of Halloween.
On Halloween, the city went out to play. There were fewer trick-or-treaters, but children still went out dressed as princesses, superheroes, and Clorox wipes. Some adults wore elaborate face masks with designs of smiling clowns and bloody teeth. Others, like me, simply donned witch hats and Halloween themed headbands. Drag Queens graced the streets with their high heels and once again proved that they dominated Halloween. Children were cooed over as they screamed and gasped at the most shocking costumes. And those who went dressed as hand sanitizer or sanitation wipes were praised and laughed over.
As Halloween night ended, the colorful flowers and papers placed alongside Halloween decorations received more attention as dawn arose on Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Candles were lit all throughout the streets of Jackson Heights and Harlem, which were decorated with skulls with flowers and colorful fliers that filled the streets as Latinx residents paid their respects to the dead. Down in Bowery, the gates of St. Mark’s Church burst into an explosion of color as the names of the dead were written.
There is no such thing as ‘less is more’ for Halloween in New York City. New Yorkers have always been extremely generous with Halloween, whether it be giving away full-size sundaes to trick-or-treaters or hosting a massive Halloween parade. Things have certainly changed this year due to the pandemic, but New Yorkers adapt and still know how to go out and play while being safe. 2020 has been pretty spooky, but NYC didn’t let that stop its love for Halloween. | https://medium.com/@guacmag/nyc-2020-didnt-spook-halloween-a53d73762259 | ['Guac Magazine Editors'] | 2020-12-05 20:03:33.572000+00:00 | ['Halloween', 'New York City', 'Día De Los Muertos', 'Decoration', 'Colors'] |
How I Get the Best at the Cheapest | How I Get the Best at the Cheapest
You can enjoy high-quality products and services at a low cost
Photo by Charles Etoroma on Unsplash
The wish of the buyer is to get the highest value possible for the money spent. On the other side of the divide, we have the seller whose wish is to maximize profit as much as possible. These conflicting wishes set up an atmosphere of competition for the buyer and seller.
Winning in this type of competition requires intelligence gathering. It is, therefore, necessary, as a buyer, to go into any transaction, equipped with thorough knowledge of the facts and tricks that revolves around the transaction.
Failure to do this guarantees that the seller will fleece you without let or hindrance. The techniques I’ll be discussing in this article will give you an edge in any transaction, ensuring you get the best at the cheapest. Here we go:
1. Seek Counsel from Others
You may not know this. But the easiest way to get the best at the cheapest is to consult people. People gladly share with others where they can get the best deal in town. By following their leads on where and how you can get a great offer at a cheap rate, you save more on your expenses.
Word-of-mouth also called “earned advertising” is the most trusted source of information. It plays a pivotal role when consumers are making a first-time purchase or when products are costly. These compel people to carry out more consultation and contemplate more than they normally should before making a purchase decision.
Advances in information technology have transformed word-of-mouth communication to the point where it is no longer an act of private and personal communication. Now, it has attained a public and impersonal dimension.
Customers share their experiences in form of reviews online to influence perceptions about brands, and such perceptions either favorable or not, are spread through social media. Some even go the extra mile to create blogs for the purpose of commending or humiliating brands.
Word-of-mouth has proven to be more effective in influencing a consumer to patronize a brand in a way that ad campaigns cannot. Perceptions are spread within concerned groups, swaying opinions about brands. The growth of social media has been the driving force behind the far-reaching and potent effects of word-of-mouth.
The best way to leverage word-of-mouth is to consult people in your circle. People in your circle feel it’s their obligation to point you in the right direction. Hence they are offering their opinions based on experiences or opinions of others they can trust.
It is therefore unlikely they’d lead you into a deal you’d regret. Ask a question like ‘What money-saving tips have you found to be very effective?’ or ‘How much can I save on a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2020 if I buy from Amazon on Black Friday’ on social media and you’d get diverse responses that are invaluable.
I once assisted a friend to get a higher loan for his mortgage when I asked my social media circle, ‘How do you increase how much you can borrow for a mortgage?’ Another time someone pointed me in the right direction when I asked, ‘Guys, my electricity provider is hurting me with its incessant incremental bills. Can anyone provide tips on how to wriggle my way out?’
Seeking counsel from others is a brilliant strategy when it comes to getting the best part of any deal. You’d always be glad you take this step before engaging in any transaction.
2. Change Your Providers Often
The mail notification I received 5 months ago from my electricity provider came with a bold headline: YOUR ENERGY PLAN WILL BE RENEWED. However, the fine print shows they have already done that, without my consent, at a discount of 10% lower than I had before.
This is a regular occurrence with electricity and insurance providers. These industries thrive on the front book vs. back book business model. The front book model is characterized by attractive discount plans and is offered to new clients, while the back book model is offered to old clients who pay more to make the front book plan possible.
You’re entitled to the front book model as a new client. This is how it works:
1. Your first plan is designed to be very cheap, to gain your loyalty. They are even ready to lose money on your first plan if need be. They know how to recoup it later.
2. Just when you are excited you’ve got yourself a great deal, they covertly take you off the plan, and eliminate the discount that lured you into their ‘den’, and due to the human nature of status quo bias, you find it difficult to replace them.
3. Eventually, they get comfortable swindling you each time you renew your plan because they keep increasing your rate.
“I’m probably paying the prevailing rate”, is one of the reasons that make you stick with them. However, what you need to know is that the front book model creates a loophole for you to cut some decent deals for yourself, provided you’re ready to move around.
Changing your provider each time the front book plan ends ensures you are constantly getting the cheapest rate from providers. This way you are always paying what is reasonable on your electric tariff, insurance premium, mortgage loan, and other essential services.
When your electricity provider changes your electricity plan the following month you’ll notice that your rate has increased and you’re longer on the best plan. You may find yourself the finest home loan plan but then before you say Jack Robinson your bank raises your rate by 90 basis points, or you get a great insurance deal that comes with a great discount but your next renewal comes with a premium addition of $100.
With these kinds of treatments from providers, your responsibility is to identify providers with better offers and switch over. If you employ this technique with providers you will save an appreciable amount of money each year.
However, if you prefer to stay put with a particular provider you’ll end up with plans with zero discounts, making you lose money, in addition to the bitter feeling when you later discovered there are other providers with better options. Remember that feeling when you buy a new Plasma TV, and later find a better model at a lower price.
So, you can see there is no reason to end up in unholy matrimony with any provider. Consider an electricity bill, for example. Assuming you’re on a one-year discount of 30%. After 12 months, your discount becomes zero.
The company notifies you of this change through a letter, and you miss it or you refuse to act on it for reasons best known to you. The following year, when the zero discounts take effect, your plan could cost you over $1000 more than the year you had 30%. This will definitely hurt your financial lifestyle.
When you notice a price hike, negotiate for a better offer if your provider declines, know it’s time to change provider. Remaining with a provider for a year or more could be hurting you more than you think.
A smart internet search will tell you where to get the best electricity deals in your area and rank them in price order. Survey the market and switch over to the best deal around.
The “mystery” around home loans is gradually fading, due to the emergence of online analytics tools and educative websites that are making these processes easy to grasp, so that, it becomes easy for you to make an informed decision on your mortgage.
If you think changing your provider is difficult, think again. Recently I changed to a new health insurance provider and plan. This simple move saved me more than $1000 on my premium. And the big part, I filled the form online using my phone while at home.
Everything took about 10 minutes. When I noticed a hike in my rate, I knew it’s time to check out. My current provider offered an irresistible plan that makes it possible to save more than $1000 a year on my subject premium. I was also given a $200 gift card reserved for new policyholders.
It was a move that turned out to be beneficial in every sense. I walked into new insurance coverage and saved a huge sum that brightens my day every moment I think about it.
Everyone is aware of the unfair treatment industries providing services like power, mortgage banking, and insurance mete out to clients. So, it’s important you are always one step ahead of them; else they’ll continue to cheat you.
3. Online Reviews
Another way of getting a good deal is by checking online reviews to weigh shoppers’ opinions on certain products and brands. Online review websites such as:
· Amazon
· Quora
· Salesforce AppExchange
· Choice
· Ozbargain
have a combination of experts and amateurs offering their perspectives on all sorts of products. This is an important roadmap for over 88% of online shoppers who rely on reviews to make a purchase decision.
Online reviews become more authentic and trustworthy when the reviews are vetted by experts in order to put up honest opinions about products and services as is obtainable in Choice. But the catch is that you have to pay for membership.
Conversely, there are other websites run by complete amateurs on a non-profit basis. A typical example is Ozbargain, a large and unconventional online community of dedicated deal finders who derive pleasure in helping one another by giving out any mouthwatering deals they have found.
Caveat Emptor
I cannot stress enough the need for you to carry out thorough research before you make a purchase. Why? Some review sites are also being manipulated.
Most businesses have realized the impact of online reviews on their bottom line. Hence, some of them covertly hire people who masquerade as genuine users to share positive reviews to mislead unsuspecting shoppers.
Therefore, the only way to get reviews that are authentic is to compare reviews from different websites before parting with your money.
4. Use Coupons
Using coupons guarantees you get a discount on your purchases. Although it’s not much on unit purchases, when you consider the aggregate of probably a week, a month, or a year, you’d realize the numbers add up pretty fast.
So, it makes a lot of economic sense to find and use coupons to save money on your purchases. Anytime I have the option of using a coupon I use it because I know the savings add up to a tangible sum eventually. That is why I search for daily newspapers, magazines, and the Internet for coupons to get discounts on my regular purchases.
Once I find a coupon, I cut it if it’s from a newspaper or magazine, and if it’s from the internet I print it, keep it safely where I can easily retrieve it whenever I want to make a purchase. For coupon hacks, the following websites have proved to be very useful:
· SlickDeals
· Savings.com
· Rakuten
· Groupon
· Coupons.com
· ShopAtHome
· RetailMeNot
Alternatively, you can get weekend subscriptions to several local papers, which is the easiest means of getting the best deals in your area.
5. Comparison Shopping
Comparison shopping is a common practice used by shoppers to compare multiple goods from multiple retailers before making a purchase. Comparison shopping is a channel for collecting product information from participating retailers and then displaying that collective information on a single results page in response to a shopper’s search query.
This allows shoppers to compare prices, quality of the product, and the overall customer experience from multiple retailers and choose the brand that offers the best overall value. Comparison shopping is mostly popular for purchases of higher-value goods and services.
In addition to comparison shopping, the Consumer Reports website is very useful for getting factual ratings and reviews, with trusted advice and in-depth analysis of products. Check the negative ratings to know what people dislike about the item, and then the positive ratings to know what people admire about it.
Do a side by side comparison of the positive and the negative ratings to gain a general understanding of how much the product will meet your needs. The more expensive the item is, the more important it is to cover all the bases. This will help you make an informed decision about the product, save you money, and help you avoid buyer’s remorse.
This practice is not restricted to physical products. You can carry out comparison-shopping for vacations, credit card services, and insurance rates. Just a little digging will go a long way in preventing future regrets.
These are the most relevant websites for my comparison shopping purposes:
· Bizrate
· CamelCamelCamel
· Pricegrabber
· Shopping.com
· Pricerunner
These are the techniques I have employed to walk away satisfied from past transactions. I continue to search for new techniques and refine these ones to get a better outcome.
People marvel when I reveal how cheap I acquire some high-quality products and services. However, the moment I explain my techniques as I have done in this article, they become believers. Who wouldn’t? Everyone wants to walk away as a winner from every transaction. Everyone wants a great deal. Everyone hates being fleeced by sellers. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-i-get-the-best-at-the-cheapest-85d9680537c3 | ['Victor Babaniyi'] | 2020-12-11 06:24:54.341000+00:00 | ['Money Management', 'Shopping', 'Deals And Discounts', 'Financial Planning', 'Saving'] |
Resources to Supercharge your Data Science in 2021 | Web Resources
🔦 ML Showcase — great for project inspiration, this repository of data science projects from Team Paperspace should certainly get your wheels turning.
🎓 Codecademy — time after time, I find myself recommending this powerful learning platform to folks breaking into coding or looking to pick up new languages. The strength of Codecademy lies in its simplicity — these exercises will get your muscle memory trained up so that you’ll be typing code like a master in no time.
🖌 The Data Visualization Catalogue — this site offers archetypal renderings of all the creative chart options available to help you get your data science point across. Plus, check out i want hue as a data-science-based tool for making your color palette selection.
💻 StackShare —a powerful platform for comparing tools side-by-side. StackShare also offers the perusal of stacks used at titans of Data Science such as Stitch Fix, Uber, Airbnb, and many more.
📚 Git Style Guide — just like PEP8 for Python, git has its own guidelines for naming, commenting, and walking forwards and backwards while elegantly balancing a stack of books on your head. Thanks Agis Anastasopoulos for this resource! | https://towardsdatascience.com/supercharge-data-science-562d891ef7f9 | ['Nicole Janeway Bills'] | 2020-12-28 14:13:57.676000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Statistics', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Mindfulness and Meditation — A Primer | The concept of mindfulness is one which has been talked about much in the media and popular culture in recent times. This concept is often described as an antidote for the various stresses, anxieties and problems faced by large portions of the population. In the last decade mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has gained much mainstream traction in psychological therapeutic practice. Mindfulness is, simply put, a state of open and active attention to the present moment that is free of judgement. In this context, a judgement-free state of attention to the present moment means simply acknowledging the current moment as it is, whether it be a good or bad situation, without further emotional judgment. Rather than being preoccupied with thoughts about the past or the future, mindfulness, when practiced correctly, allows for calmer, clearer and more rational decision-making and thought. Mindfulness and concentrating on the task at hand, practiced over an extensive period, leads to a variety of quantifiable benefits, including reduced stress, increased memory and reduces emotional reactions to situations. Though it is often talked about in relation to meditation, mindfulness can occur at any moment, during or outside a period of meditation.
Mindfulness and meditation are often coupled with Eastern religions and spiritual practices such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Though the practice originated with these traditions, mediation and mindfulness is not inherently a spiritual or religious practice. It is quite possible and in fact beneficial to de-couple the practice of meditation from religion. As famed neuroscientist Sam Harris notes, many meditative practices derived from Buddhism and Hinduism are inhibited by the beliefs associated with these practices. Rather than focusing on the beneficial aspects of meditation, these practices often concern themselves with ritual and religious dogma, much of which detracts from the act of meditation itself. One of the forms of meditation that avoids this pitfall is vipassana, or ‘insight’ meditation. This form of meditation focuses on non-judgemental attention to the present moment and creates the conditions necessary for mindfulness.
Many scientific studies have shown the clear psychological and neurological benefits to a regular practice of meditation. Despite its reputation as being an impractical spiritual practice, meditation has quantifiable benefits in a variety of ways. For a start, it has been proven to create more grey matter in the brain, which has a positive benefit on cognitive performance, processing of information and reactions to situations. Meditation practice has also been associated with changes to the amygdala, which regulates ‘fight or flight’ responses, allowing for calmer and more rational decision making under duress.
Meditation, like most new skills and practices, is simple to understand, but difficult to truly master. The first step, sitting down, closing your eyes and breathing, is relatively easy for most people. Being able to concentrate on the act of meditation without either being consumed by or repressing thoughts, however, is significantly harder. Distractions quickly arise and can easily overwhelm the beginning meditator. When this inevitably occurs, it is important to focus on an anchor, such as the breath to ‘reset’ the mind back on the task of meditation. Though the breath is a common and ideal starting point, anything can be used as an anchor. Developing an ongoing mindfulness and meditation practice is not an easy task. It requires discipline and work the same way as developing a consistent practice in any other activity does, whether it be an exercise routine, a diet or learning an instrument. For those willing to put in the effort of a consistent practice, however, the benefits are clear and worth the time investment. | https://medium.com/scott-davies/mindfulness-and-meditation-a-primer-c97b44f00c5a | ['Scott Davies'] | 2017-11-20 12:31:52.284000+00:00 | ['Buddhism', 'Mindfulness', 'Meditation', 'Psychology', 'Science'] |
What is co-design exactly? | Yup. I’m doing this folks it’s a definition.
Co-design is a group of people with different backgrounds, knowledge and skills cooperatively and creatively working together.
It works by having people
jointly explore and envision ideas
make and discuss stories (past, present, future)
tinker with mock-ups or prototypes.
What makes co-design tricky to define is that it is adaptable. It can be used for just about anything at any time. Co-design is performed differently depending on who you want to engage and the topic you need to discuss. Believe me this is not one size fits all.
There is no “wrong time” to co-design but there are better moments
To bring most value it’s great to start co-creating with community groups at the beginning of a project rather than the end. That way people get maximum input and influence on the direction you take. It’s much more authentic than a validation workshop once all the concepts have been defined.
Like a relationship co-design takes time and effort
Co-design relies on teams of people creating relationships, skills and trust with one another. If you are working on complex topic this can take significant time and effort. If your co-creators haven’t worked together in the past. If there is a shared history of disagreement or distrust in the group. You’ll really need to put the effort in to frame the objectives and hold the space. Otherwise you may be putting people in a position where they are not psychologically safe enough to contribute fully.
What you’ve been doing might not be co-design. That is fine too!
We need for more co-design in the world. We can’t solve complex issues working the same way we always have. Sadly, I feel like it’s all at risk because of the rise of ‘faux-design’. Some intentional ($$$) and some by mistake. It is flavour of the month in social innovation circles and the ‘impact space’. Everyone who can run a workshop is labelling that engagement co-design.
I don’t want to have to say this, but just because you call something co-designed, doesn’t make it so. In many cases these workshops are not collaborative, inclusive or impactful. A lot of the time it’s the usual cohort of participants, playing with pipe cleaners and post-it notes with no real purpose. To make matters worse the results of the session are already predefined. Nothing changes. It’s just another way to enforce the same paradigm.
It’s a checkbox, Co-design ☑️
We need to keep each other honest. There’s nothing wrong with just hosting a great workshop or interview. It’s not co-design though.
In summary, co-design is just another way of working together
From my own attempts I know that many elements need to come together for it to happen. Any type of collaboration already has challenges, just think back to pretty much any group project with a new team. Language, communication, bias, inequity, power dynamics, accessibility and politics all contribute to how the team works and the ideas the team decides to pursue. So just like any other skill or activity you might want to succeed in, becoming an expert in co-design is iterative and experience-driven.
What to learn more?
A great video to explain the big idea. http://bit.ly/whatiscodesign by PROUD Europe.
Two flags side by side: Aboriginal flag and Torres Strait Islander flag
Acknowledgement of country
This article was written on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri people.
I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. I support their right to self-determination. I recognize the privilege I have as an Australian is at the cost of first nations people. I hope to witness what co-design practice will learn as is decolonialises and listens deeply. | https://medium.com/@szczpanks/what-is-co-design-exactly-8868e03c3dc9 | ['Jo Szczepanska'] | 2020-07-01 02:15:51.157000+00:00 | ['Participatory Inquiry', 'Design Thinking', 'Codesign', 'Cocreation', 'Community Engagement'] |
Plotting Equations with Python. This article is going to cover plotting… | This article is going to cover plotting basic equations in python! We are going to look at a few different examples, and then I will provide the code to do create the plots through Google Colab!
Goals:
Learn to Create a vector array Manipulate vector to match an equation Create beautiful plots with a title, axis labels, and grid
y = x²
Let's go ahead and start by working on one of the simplest and most common equations! y = x². To do this, we are going to be doing a few things but first of all, we need to cover a few concepts.
Modules in Python
A module allows you to logically organize your Python code. We will be using 2 Modules: Matplotlib.pyplot and Numpy.
NumPy
Numpy is the fundamental package for scientific computing in Python. It is a Python library that provides a multidimensional array object, various derived objects (such as masked arrays and matrices), and an assortment of routines for fast operations on arrays, including mathematical, logical, shape manipulation, sorting, selecting, I/O, discrete Fourier transforms, basic linear algebra, basic statistical operations, random simulation and much more.
Matplotlib.pyplot
Matplotlib.pyplot is a collection of command style functions that make matplotlib work like MATLAB. Each pyplot function makes some change to a figure: e.g., creates a figure, creates a plotting area in a figure, plots some lines in a plotting area, decorates the plot with labels, etc. | https://medium.com/future-vision/plotting-equations-in-python-d0edd9f088c8 | ['Elliott Saslow'] | 2018-11-02 19:18:08.441000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Data Science', 'Matplotlib', 'Developer', 'Science'] |
Raising a newborn in our new reality | COVID-19 has completely changed the world in ways we could have never imagined, but will also change it in ways we don’t even know about yet.
People have lost their jobs almost overnight. Remember in February, unemployment in America was 3.5%; in April it was 14.7%. Spending around the world has frozen. People are forced to stay at home and not see their loved ones. The remote working model is being stress-tested unexpectedly! The world today is profoundly different than it was before and I’m left wondering how it will recover. Raising a newborn in this new reality has been an interesting challenge, bringing some amazing moments, as well as some really difficult ones.
They say when you have your first child your life changes forever, but I’m sure the person who coined this phrase didn’t account for this amount of change! So how have we dealt with the first 2 months of raising Mason with everything going on?
The newborn bubble…literally!
With your first child comes this wonderful bubble, and all you want to do is stay in it for as long as possible. But we were not expecting to literally have to create a bubble around our little one to keep him as safe as possible in the midst of a global health pandemic.
The news was scary, so many deaths around the world — but it was also such a time of unknowns too, and it meant we had a lot of questions. Was it passing to babies? How can it spread? Do we need to disinfect everything that comes into our home? Are we allowed to let Mason see loved ones? What are the early signs we need to watch out for? With all of this going on, Jen and I just decided to take all possible precautions, and for the first month or so we hunkered down in our apartment and made sure it was just the 3 of us. This did mean we had to have some difficult conversations, but ones that needed to happen to keep Mason safe. And if we could avoid the news, we did!
Getting by
So how did we get by? Well, first of all with a lot of remote help from friends and family. People were extremely generous and shared Grubhub/Doordash gift cards which were a godsend to help during the first 3 weeks. We had friends drop off newborn survival packs and homemade meals to keep us going (thank you, friends). We signed up for Instacart to ensure we weren’t risking ourselves and our little one by visiting the supermarket. We disinfected everything that came into our house (probably a little overkill, but there was no point in risking it). And saddest of all, we had to limit Mason’s exposure to family and friends — we can count on one hand the number of people who have held the little man to-date.
The worst part
At the time of writing this (it’s early morning on a Sunday), I should be waking up surrounded by my family. It was supposed to be the first morning my Mum, Dad, Brother (Jamie), and Sister (Jen) would be visiting from England to spend time getting to know Mason. Instead, they are stuck at home and not able to travel out here. Living in California away from my favorite people is tough at times, but this has been the toughest time in my 4 years over here. Aside from welcoming Mason into the world, these were the two weeks in 2020 I was looking forward to the most, and it’s incredibly sad we are not experiencing a wonderful period of time with our family. And to make it worse, I still don’t know when they are going to get to meet him in person and give him a big hug. I hope it is soon, as I know Mason is joining a family full of love and happiness, and he can’t wait to be a part of it!
This has also had an impact on Jen’s immediate family too! Jen’s Brother (Justin) who lives in NYC was planning on heading out around the time of Mason’s birth, but has still not been able to get on a flight back to California to meet his nephew. Same thing with her Aunties who live in LA & San Diego. Whilst I know they would jump on a plane tomorrow to come and meet him, it just doesn’t make sense in this world and we appreciate how cautious everyone is being. When they are able to meet him, it will be an extremely special day.
Not all doom and gloom!
Ok, now onto some more uplifting parts of the last 8 weeks! It really has been the most amazing 8 weeks of Jen and my life together so far. Watching Mason grow up, even in this short window, has warmed our hearts, and we love him more than we ever thought possible.
Whilst he’s been growing, we’ve been trying to find a routine that works for our new life. The first 3 weeks were an absolute whirlwind, and you’ll be surprised how much you can get done on close to zero sleep! But you start getting used to it, and parenting so far has been a lot of trial and error to see what works. When you’re unsure of something and you Google it, you are overwhelmed with different opinions from a wide variety of sources and you begin second-guessing yourself…you just have to do what is right for your little one. You’ll also learn the power of the ‘Mum Intuition ’— most of the time, they are right!
We are now completely in the swing of things and the smiles and laughs we receive are the best rewards we could ask for.
Back to work
After 3 weeks, I returned to work — luckily my company, along with the majority of the world, have been working remotely so I have been able to be at home for every day of Mason’s life so far, and will be for the extended future. Jen and I realized the other day, that it’s highly likely I will be at home for the duration of Jen’s maternity leave. Whilst she might not like it, it’s something that I am very grateful for; not many Dad’s are able to spend this much time getting to know their newborn. Instead of commuting, I can spend time with Mason — my lunch breaks have turned into Dad and Mason time and then at the end of the day, I just switch the laptop off and give my guy a hug!
This is also on top of little pockets of time throughout the day where I can be on-hand to support Jen to give her a break. The new WFH style is putting a baby in the k’tan on your chest and typing away on a laptop!
Don’t get me wrong, there have been really tough days. Having sleepless nights, then waking up to work is a new reality that took a little getting used to. Then wrapping up work and moving straight into Dad mode — cooking, cleaning, nappy changes, etc. means days are long and time I used to have to myself, is now almost nonexistent. But I wouldn’t swap it for the world! I know as he grows up in the coming weeks and months, it’ll get easier and smaller pockets of time will open up to me again. I completed my first meditation in 6 weeks and it completely changed the game and my mental state. So my mission in the next few weeks is to carve out 15 minutes every day for this so I can be a better Dad, husband, friend, son and colleague!
Week 6 onwards
The last two weeks have been some of our favorites since Mason arrived. His personality is really starting to shine— pooping just after a nappy change and then laughing, smiling whenever he sees his Mum for a middle of the night feed, laughing at Dad being silly, cooing throughout the day when he’s happy!
It was also around this time we got some more help; Jen’s Mum and Dad (Grandpa and Abuelita) quarantined seriously for 14 days, which gave us the confidence to bring Mason around to their house, and have them hold him and help us out. This has been a huge help, as well as a special moment in time watching them get to know their Grandson — I just cannot wait for my family to be able to do the same.
Wrap up
Hopefully, this has given you a little insight into what it’s been like raising a newborn in a crazy, unexpected world. If you’re about to embark on this journey yourself, know it is a little surreal and a jump into the unknown, but it’s still the most amazing experience of your life. Just be careful, be safe, and do what you think is best for your little one — if you do, everyone will understand and respect your decisions. | https://medium.com/becoming-a-dad/raising-a-newborn-in-our-new-reality-f81cfedfafae | ['Nick Bazley'] | 2020-05-24 17:26:10.544000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Newborn', 'Fatherhood', 'Dads'] |
In Memory of You | Written for the love of someones life
Sometimes I wondered what you ever saw in me. You were beautiful, smart, and funny. I however was awkward and nerdy, but somehow you saw past that awkward exterior and saw me. I remember the first time you talked to me, we were in Intro to Economics, you greeted me with a “Hi” and that smile that I later began to notice never left your face. I of course couldn’t even begin to put words togethers in your presence, instead some groan intended to be a “Hello” came out.
Even though I probably sounded like a moron, you sat down next to me and said, “Since I’m sitting here I’m going to keep talking to you, so at some point you might want to answer.”
I just laughed in response. You talked to me day after day in class until I eventually started answering. I started to become this social person with you, someone I never thought I would be. We started hanging out outside of that horrible class, and we talked about everything. You had so many goals, so many plans for your life. The worst part about being here speaking right now is knowing that you never got to do them all. She kept a list of some of the things she wanted to do.
Learn to water ski Travel to Italy Bungee Jumping Never have to be a waitress again
I like to think these next few were the most important to her.
5. Fall in love
6. Get Married
7. Have kids
She never got to do all these things. I’m happy I could help her accomplish at least some of that.
We were together for seven years, but we were supposed to be together forever. We had plans, great big plans for our lives together. We were supposed to grow old together. I guess sometimes the world has different plans for our lives and you either accept that or let it bring you down. Grace wouldn’t want it to bring me down. She would want me to look at our son, see her in his smile, and be thankful for him. She was the sunshine in my life, I thought the world would be dark without her but now I see that same light in our son Jack. Now I know she will never truly be gone. This moment isn’t a goodbye it’s a see you soon, because I know you are still here watching over us, and someday when my work is done I know we will see you again. | https://medium.com/@allyjfisher/in-memory-of-you-c96af270c82e | ['Alexandra Fisher'] | 2020-12-26 16:59:58.632000+00:00 | ['Loss', 'Love Letters', 'My Love', 'Memories', 'Romance'] |
Gang Member Was Out on Bond at Time of North Austin Slaying | In the aftermath of an October 30 slaying in a North Austin neighborhood, a detective located a vehicle nearby that was linked to the slaying through surveillance footage.
The maroon four-door vehicle didn’t have plates.
Officers believed that the vehicle, found at an apartment complex, had been used by two marijuana dealers implicated in the killing that took place in the nearby Georgian Acres neighborhood, according to witness accounts cited in an arrest affidavit.
The victim in the killing, Jose Francisco Galeano Antunez, had just wrapped up a day on the job and was talking with two friends in a driveway on Carpenter Avenue. That’s when a car pulled up and the driver and passenger offered to sell the Hispanic men marijuana.
Not all of the men spoke English, but Antunez did, so he approached the vehicle and spoke with the men. He declined their offer, saying that they didn’t smoke. The vehicle then drove off.
Moments later, the occupants returned and approached Antunez with a semi-automatic handgun. A witness “observed two Black males physically pushing Antunez,” the affidavit states. “One Black male was thin and the other was heavy set.”
Another witness stated that the male with the thinner build, who has since been identified as a juvenile, “demanded money and fatally shot Antunez.”
Police identified the “heavy set” man as 18-year-old Richard Kenneth Speed III. Police linked him to the maroon car through surveillance footage at the apartment complex where the vehicle was found. The footage showed him wiping the car down using a cloth.
The arrest affidavit states that Speed “is a known documented Criminal Gang Member.”
A district judge issued an arrest warrant for Speed on a capital murder charge November 6, and the Lone Star Fugitive Task force took him into custody in Round Rock the next day. The arrest warrant listed him as having a Manor address, though court records for an earlier arrest showed a Pflugerville address.
Travis County Jail records show that Speed is still in custody. He is also charged with aggravated robbery and attempted aggravated robbery.
The second suspect, a juvenile, has not yet been taken into custody. He is identified as having a “thin build” and being about 6' tall.
The killing took place in the Georgian Acres neighborhood, about a block from Barrington Elementary School. The neighborhood is bounded by US-183, North Lamar, I-35, and Rundberg Lane.
Gang Beating
At the time of the killing, Richard Speed III was out of jail on bond. He was charged with assault causing bodily injury, which is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
According to the affidavit for a warrant of arrest, which Honest Austin obtained from the county clerk, Speed was involved in a group beating of a man at a convenience store March 13, 2020.
A detective in the organized crime gang unit wrote that Speed joined a group of four friends in beating a man who was trying to get his son to leave the group. “The victim stated that he was pushed to the ground, they all began to punch, kick, and stomp the victim.”
Video footage from inside the store showed Speed punching the victim in the back of his head and kicking him in the back while he was on the ground.
Austin Police executed a warrant for Speed’s arrest on July 15, at which time he was only 17 years old, according to a county misdemeanor database. Two days later he walked free.
He posted personal bond, which is a type of non-financial sworn agreement that the defendant will return to court as ordered and will comply with certain conditions for release.
As a condition for being released on personal bond, Speed agreed to participate in an eight-hour anger management program. He was also prohibited from possessing firearms.
The case was unresolved as the time of the murder. Speed’s court date for all five criminal charges that he faces is January 7, 2021, according to the county’s criminal docket. | https://medium.com/@honestaustin/gang-member-was-out-on-bond-at-time-of-north-austin-slaying-923dbd5ad8a0 | ['Honest Austin'] | 2020-12-17 21:25:26.463000+00:00 | ['Austin', 'Criminal Justice Reform'] |
Salt River Fields Grand Slams with ToneDen’s Dynamic Event Ads | It’s spring training time, which means the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks are limbering up at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. Meanwhile, fans are flocking to this picturesque Scottsdale complex to catch their favorite players in action. It’s not just the sportsmanship that’s stunning. From the 11,000-seat ball field, fans can see Camelback and the McDowell Mountains, Red Mountain, the Superstition Mountains, and Four Peaks.
If the landscape is breathtaking, so is the facility’s young history. As Chris Bonnell, Director of Marketing for Salt River Fields tells ToneDen, this isn’t your average spring training locale. “We’re the only Spring Training facility owned and operated by an Indian Community, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community,” Bonnell says. When it opened in 2011, Salt River earned a LEED Gold Certification for New Construction from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), making it the first LEED Gold-certified sports venue of its kind in the United States.
While Salt River Fields hosts events year-round, Spring Training is the busiest time of the year. Bonnell finds himself helping to “facilitate our game day production, game entertainment, and media communications.” He also oversees social media marketing, which is where he trusts ToneDen.
“With regards to baseball, we’re one of the best in all of Spring Training,” Bonnell admits. “To see the potential of ToneDen gets me excited. Every day as marketers we have to prove how we’re spending our budgets. To have actual analytics behind social media spends is helpful with proving that it’s an important marketing avenue, especially since it keeps evolving. It’s very hard to argue against hard numbers and money being brought in.” | https://medium.com/toneden/salt-river-fields-grand-slams-with-toneden-a6a2d735be7f | ['Joanna Novak'] | 2019-03-13 18:06:16.047000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Facebook Advertising', 'Sports Marketing', 'Case Study', 'Baseball'] |
Much to Say | There is so much I want to say
A lot of it is repurposed ideas from others
But the most precious words
Always seem to hide within
Some words are more precious when left unsaid
Like my temptation to rain compliments on you
Might leave you self-conscious
At least today
Some words are drowned out by the chatter
Due to a template in mind, a storyline
People have a habit of talking over others and even themselves
Without listening today
Some words are unhealthy projections
Of trying to change others from the outside
But change is not unequivocally good
So we hold our tongues today
Some words are too fragile
And die upon impact with reality
The tiniest embers of wishes
That will not be tested today
Yet some other insights seem quite powerful
Those make you giddy with intense happiness
But nobody was searching for them but yourself
You are meant to be the bell that rings it most resonantly
Everyone else is ringing the bells of their truths
In their grand concert halls
I wonder
When does healthy validation become an echo chamber
When do we hear each other again
Because I don’t have time to finish my words
And as I struggled for breath I realized
We had forgotten that most of us
Are trying to say identical things
With wildly different methodologies
The same exact true core
Which is to say
How do I make life better today | https://medium.com/poem-a-day/much-to-say-9fd6f6a1eb65 | ['Jk March'] | 2020-11-26 00:43:38.927000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poem', 'Talks', 'Resolutions', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
Software Engineering Series (Part -2) | Software Engineering Series (Part -2)
Design Phase … It’s all about how it works
If you are here for the first time i would highly recommend reading the first part here . Previously after going through the requirement phase let’s just get into the next step known as design.
So, what’s the role of design,well lets first understand, what’s design? . If we think about it in a general way. we get, well now you have the requirements, so you need a plan and a way to build things you actually wanted. Design is a “way” to execute to build your products.
It’s a plan.
Here, I’ll be talking about 6 design terms that you’ll face during software engineering. These different design techniques are used in different places according to their use cases. Let’s see what these are.
1.Component Design :
Imagine you’ve been given a task to create a music player. And your music player is able to play files locally and is able to stream as well.
Now, how would you build the playback screen. You’ve two options either build a screen for local playback and one for streaming or build single screen to work in both the situations consistently.
Pause, What would you wanna go for?
Ofcourse, you can go with two different screens. That will definitely take more time. But, let’s think about the one with adaptable nature. One single screen and that’s basically able to play songs in two different environments. Isn’t that amazing.
That’s exactly what component Design is.
There can be a lot better examples but it’s OK, if you get the point. It’s about how (plan) of building adaptable component.
A component Design is a design specification for one of these adaptable component. Application Engineers, using the generation picture procedure, may adapt and compose a set of these components to implement certain work products or position thereof. | https://medium.com/curiosity-jouney/software-engineering-series-part-2-7eb756d6d900 | ['Aditya Kumar Khare'] | 2017-12-25 08:06:18.930000+00:00 | ['Market', 'Software Engineering', 'Design', 'Software Development', 'Computer Science'] |
Too Many Things | Things were getting out of hand — we needed a new plan.
This started a long discussion between my husband and I a couple of years back. I somehow became a frivolous spender. I let anxiety and uncontrolled compulsiveness get the better of me. I looked around at my purchases and saw that I had duplicates and never used them. I was spending, with no real justification as to why I just did. I began to ruminate over how irresponsible my actions were; then I felt shame.
When I finally decided to address my mental health issues, I took a leave of absence from work without FMLA because the company I worked for, at the time, did not have it as an option. Our income was cut in half once I was no longer a contributor to our cash flow. My massive credit card debt became ‘our’ new situation, and my husband inherited my credit card payments. Before this, our setup was, “My money is my money, and Your money is your money.” We paid all household bills down the middle and disregarded how we handled the rest of our money.
We realized that we were both spending as if we were single.
We vowed to have and to hold each other, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Determined to apply our skills to upholding those vows, we prepared for any unforeseen circumstance. To address my mental health, which was important to us, we decided my income contribution would take a back seat. How could I contribute to the cashflow when I was running on empty?
I began to understand my health conditions and the role my OCD and anxiety played in creating debt. Soon I gained control over my compulsive spending habits, limited myself to a small allowance each month, and began the journey to become debt-free. With my credit card debt gone, I felt compelled to write the following:
Many people have a TV, cell phone, laptop, computer, iPad, and a smartwatch. We all have standard appliances — some top of the line. WE have these THINGS but still feel the need to purchase or constant upgrades. Why is that? Were any of those things broken? Or is it because so and so has it? Do they make us happy?
All the advertisement pop-ups on those THINGS we possess feed our obsession with saying yes when the answer should be no. It is hard to resist always feeling the need to make a purchase when regularly advertised, nagging you to do it, especially when the opportunity is always on our electronic devices.
I remember as a child, I did not get the “new.” I continued to play with what I was given, and when I asked my parents for the new model or popular items, they would often say no. I would be upset but got over it and lived with what I had. I was happy.
As adults, why aren’t we telling ourselves no? We struggle with paying all the bills and live paycheck to paycheck. Will you be prepared for an unforeseen expense or life-changing event with no savings?
All because we won’t tell ourselves no.
I had everything I needed when growing up; my folks made sure of that.
We must put thought into our NEEDS. Do we currently have food, shelter, and a FEW satisfactory possessions? All our childhood needs have not changed just because we’re grown. Why work two or three jobs just to pay for unnecessary things? Why fall into debt for the newest models? Why are we willing to spend more time at work than with our loved ones? Are we indeed never satisfied? Or, are we just acting like spoiled brats instead of grown adults? | https://medium.com/@katrena700/things-2525436ddb3e | [] | 2020-10-05 02:53:38.888000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Change', 'Ocd', 'Electronics', 'Advertisment'] |
Stringifying your C++ MACRO | Do you know that you can also stringify the MACRO?
Sometimes you want to convert MACRO arguments into a string constant. This is achieved by the stringification of MACRO.
“Stringification” means turning a code fragment into a string constant whose contents are the text for the code fragment. For example, stringifying foo (z) results in “foo (z)” .
In the C & C++ preprocessor, stringification is an option available when macro arguments are substituted into the macro definition. In the body of the definition, when an argument name appears, the character # before the name specifies the stringification of the corresponding actual argument when it is substituted at that point in the definition. The same argument may be substituted in other places in the definition without stringification if the argument name appears in those places with no # .
But note that there is no way to combine an argument with surrounding text and stringify it all together. Instead, you can write a series of adjacent string constants and stringified arguments. The preprocessor will replace the stringified arguments with string constants. The C compiler will then combine all the adjacent string constants into one long string.
Here is an example of a macro definition that uses stringification:
#define WARN_IF(EXP) \ do { if (EXP) \
fprintf (stderr, "Warning: " #EXP "
"); } \
while (0)
All leading and trailing whitespace in the text being stringified is ignored.
Any sequence of whitespace in the middle of the text is converted to a single space in the stringified result. Comments are replaced by white space long before stringification happens, so they never appear in the stringified text. There is no way to convert a macro argument into a character constant. If you want to stringify the result of the expansion of a macro argument, you have to use two levels of macros.
Stringification in C involves more than putting double-quote characters around the fragment. The preprocessor backslash-escapes the quotes surrounding embedded string constants, and all backslashes within a string and character constants, in order to get a valid C string constant with the proper contents. Thus, stringifying p = “foo
”; results in
“p = \”foo\
\”;”
However, backslashes that are not inside string or character constants are not duplicated:
by itself stringifies to “
” .
The following example prints the text “now is the time” | https://rahulbhadani.medium.com/stringifying-your-c-macro-34fc205b8efd | ['Rahul Bhadani'] | 2020-11-08 07:06:28.450000+00:00 | ['Cplusplus', 'Macro', 'C', 'Cpp', 'Programming'] |
SEG-Y to Parquet: How to make large geophysical data files suitable for distributed processing | SEG-Y is a quite convenient format for recording seismic exploration data. You may find a lot of Python/C++ open-source packages to deal with it. However, a gap exists between them and popular distributed frameworks, such as Apache Spark/SparkSQL/Hive and Python Dask, because these cluster-computing technologies support just a few common ways to arrange big data and, unfortunately, know nothing about how to operate with SEG-Y. To address this issue, I will explain the possible option of how to convert an SEG-Y binary to a ubiquitous Parquet format through a Map-Reduce job (Java).
Customizing MapReduce FileInputFormat
As usual, seismic images take up from gigabytes to terabytes, so it looks reasonable to arrange HDFS support for the parallel workload. First of all, we should define the code that splits large binaries into chunks, defining FileInputFormat, RecordReader. To make partitions we should take into consideration such things as:
Number of cluster nodes,
Trace records,
Requirements of processing algorithm that transforms data on the next steps.
Given the large size of SEG-Y, it seems it’s not a good practice to split it into 64 MB chunks because it will result in thousands of parts per each seismic image and, thus, an increase in the workload on the HDFS during further processing. It would be better to start with hundreds of seismic records per file and adjust the final chunk size experimentally.
So, what we should do at first is to extract traces per record (3212–3213 bytes), data samples per trace (3220–3221 bytes), and a size in bytes required to store one data sample (3224–3225 bytes). Knowing a trace header size, we may find the amount of space necessary for one trace. After that, we multiply it on traces per record size and get an initial size of a partition.
Using a special coefficient PARTITIONS_MULTIPLIER(i.e. 10 looks reasonable in most cases), we can adjust a final partition size, like in the code below:
private int adjustSplitLength(Path file, JobContext job) {
// ...
int traceNBytes = TRACE_HEADER_SIZE + nSamples * nBytes;
return traceNBytes * tracesPerRecord * PARTITIONS_MULTIPLIER;
}
Further, we implement FileInputFormat.getSplits method in SEGYInputFormat class, skipping 3600 bytes of SEG-Y file header (FILE_HEADER_SIZE)since we’ve already got all that was needed:
public class SEGYInputFormat extends FileInputFormat<...,...> {
@Override
public List<InputSplit> getSplits(JobContext job) throws IOException {
List<InputSplit> splits = new ArrayList<InputSplit>();
List<FileStatus> files = listStatus(job);
//...
for (FileStatus file : files) {
FileSystem fs = path.getFileSystem(job.getConfiguration());
blkLocations = fs.getFileBlockLocations(file, 0, length);
long length = file.getLen();
long splitSize = adjustSplitLength(file.getPath(), job);
long bytesRemaining = length - FILE_HEADER_SIZE;
while (((double) bytesRemaining) / splitSize > 1) {
int blkIndex = getBlockIndex(blkLocations, length - bytesRemaining);
System.out.println(length - bytesRemaining);
splits.add(makeSplit(path, length - bytesRemaining, splitSize,
blkLocations[blkIndex].getHosts(),
blkLocations[blkIndex].getCachedHosts()));
bytesRemaining -= splitSize;
}
if (bytesRemaining != 0) {
int blkIndex = getBlockIndex(blkLocations, length - bytesRemaining);
splits.add(makeSplit(path, length - bytesRemaining, bytesRemaining,
blkLocations[blkIndex].getHosts(),
blkLocations[blkIndex].getCachedHosts()));
}
}
// ...
return splits;
}
// ...
}
It remains to create a custom reader RecordReader<key, value> for completing the intermediate part. Let’s move trace data into a Writable value and trace header info into a WritableComparable key respectively.
A tricky point is that data samples (an essential part of the value) can be stored in SEG-Y using different types: int, short, float, or byte. For the sake of simplicity, we will consider the final type of each sample as double. The example below illustrates how to read a data point from a byte stream with trace data:
public static double readFrom(int format, DataInputStream dis) throws IOException, IllegalArgumentException{
int res = 4; // by default
switch (format) {
case(1):
return floatFromBytes(dis); // IBM hexadecimal floating point
case(2):
return dis.readInt(); // two's complement integer
case (3):
return dis.readShort(); // two's complement short
case (4):
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Not supported"); // fixed-point with gain (obsolete)
case (5):
return dis.readFloat(); // 4-byte IEEE floating point
case(6):
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Not supported");
case(7):
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Not supported");
case(8):
return dis.read(); // read one byte
default:
return dis.readInt();
}
}
So, in the end, we come to a serializable DoubleWritable array of data samples.
Regarding custom key implementation, you should keep in mind it mainly corresponds to a row in a parquet file. We have picked up just a few fields from the original trace header, such as a unique trace identifier within SEG-Y (4–7 bytes of a trace header), a field record number (8–11 bytes), a distance between a signal source and a receiver (36–39 bytes), source coordinates (72–75 bytes and 76–79 bytes respectively), in-line and cross-line identifiers (188–191 bytes and 192–195 bytes respectively), and a sample interval (116–117 bytes, in milliseconds).
public class TraceHeaderWritable implements WritableComparable {
public void fromBytes(byte[]traceHeaderBytes){
ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap(traceHeaderBytes);
bb.position(TRACEID_OFFSET);
traceID = bb.getInt();
bb.position(FRN_OFFSET);
fieldRecordNumberID = bb.getInt();
bb.position(DST_SRG_OFFSET);
distSRG = bb.getInt();
bb.position(SRCX_OFFSET);
srcX = bb.getInt();
bb.position(SRCY_OFFSET);
srcY = bb.getInt();
bb.position(SI_OFFSET);
sI = bb.getShort();
bb.position(IL_OFFSET);
ilineID = bb.getInt();
bb.position(XL_OFFSET);
xlineID = bb.getInt();
}
@Override
public void write(DataOutput dataOutput) throws IOException {
dataOutput.writeInt(traceID);
dataOutput.writeInt(fieldRecordNumberID);
dataOutput.writeInt(distSRG);
dataOutput.writeInt(srcX);
dataOutput.writeInt(srcY);
dataOutput.writeShort(sI);
dataOutput.writeInt(ilineID);
dataOutput.writeInt(xlineID);
}
@Override
public void readFields(DataInput dataInput) throws IOException {
traceID = dataInput.readInt();
fieldRecordNumberID = dataInput.readInt();
distSRG = dataInput.readInt();
srcX = dataInput.readInt();
srcY = dataInput.readInt();
sI = dataInput.readShort();
ilineID = dataInput.readInt();
xlineID = dataInput.readInt();
}
@Override
public int compareTo(Object o) {
TraceHeaderWritable tw = (TraceHeaderWritable)o;
return traceID - tw.traceID;
}
}
Having custom key and value pairs, writing a custom RecordReader seems not a difficult task. Anyway, you may check the final version of the code by the link at the end of the post.
Parquet records from Protobuf messages
As for composing custom Parquet files using Map-Reduce, there are just a few hints presented at Cloudera docs and on GitHub, which say almost nothing about how to operate with custom Group objects. And we will try to eliminate this shortcoming below.
Each Parquet record can be represented as a Protobuf message. In our case, we get the following schema:
private static String writeSchema = "message Trace {
" +
"required int32 traceID = 1;
" +
"required int32 fieldRecordNumberID = 2;
" +
"required int32 distSRG = 3;
" +
"required int32 srcX = 4;
" +
"required int32 srcY = 5;
" +
"required int32 sI = 6;
" +
"required int32 ilineID = 7;
" +
"required int32 xlineID = 8;
" +
"repeated double traceData = 9;
" +
"}";
As you may notice, each message includes single fields from the trace header and a double array of data samples.
Given the schema, implementation of WriteSupport looks as follows:
public class TraceGroupWriteSupport extends WriteSupport<Group> {
private static String writeSchema = //...
private MessageType schema;
private GroupWriter groupWriter;
private Map<String, String> extraMetaData;
public TraceGroupWriteSupport() {
MessageType messageType = MessageTypeParser.parseMessageType(writeSchema);
this.schema = messageType;
this.extraMetaData = new HashMap<String, String>();
}
public static MessageType getSchema(){
return MessageTypeParser.parseMessageType(writeSchema);
}
@Override
public String getName() {
return "trace";
}
@Override
public WriteContext init(Configuration configuration) {
return new WriteContext(MessageTypeParser.parseMessageType(writeSchema), this.extraMetaData);
}
@Override
public void prepareForWrite(RecordConsumer recordConsumer) {
groupWriter = new GroupWriter(recordConsumer, schema);
}
@Override
public void write(Group record) {
groupWriter.write(record);
}
}
Now let’s ponder a bit about how mapping from SEGYInputFormat to ParquetOutputFormat can be arranged. According to the Cloudera example, each (TraceHeaderWritable, TraceWritable) pair should be transformed to (Void, Group). It boils down to the manual creation of Group objects following the aforementioned Protobuf schema.
public static class MapClass extends Mapper<TraceHeaderWritable, TraceWritable, Void, Group> {
@Override
protected void map(TraceHeaderWritable key, TraceWritable tw, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
Group group = new SimpleGroup(TraceGroupWriteSupport.getSchema());
TraceHeaderWritable thw = key;
// protobuf map order: (1->0), (2->1), (3->2) ...
group.add(0, thw.getTraceID());
group.add(1, thw.getFieldRecordNumberID());
group.add(2, thw.getDistSRG());
group.add(3, thw.getSrcX());
group.add(4, thw.getSrcY());
group.add(5, (int) thw.getSI());
group.add(6, thw.getILineID());
group.add(7, thw.getXLineID());
// write an array of samples data
for(double item:tw.getTraceDataDouble()){
group.add(8, item);
}
context.write(null, group);
}
}
Getting the job done
Our final accord is the job that takes as an input a folder with SEG-Y file, reads geophysical data using custom input format, and saves it into an output folder as a set of Parquet files.
Configuration conf = getConf();
// set 512 MB block size for parquet(+ dfs)
conf.setInt("dfs.blocksize", 512 * 1024 * 1024);
conf.setInt("parquet.block.size", 512 * 1024 * 1024);
Job job = Job.getInstance(conf, "Converting SEGY to Parguet");
Path in = new Path(args[0]);
Path out = new Path(args[1]);
Path outSub = new Path(UUID.randomUUID().toString());
out = Path.mergePaths(out, outSub);
job.setJarByClass(ConverterJob.class);
FileInputFormat.addInputPath(job, in);
FileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, out);
job.setMapperClass(ConverterJob.MapClass.class);
// Default Parquet mapper maps (k,v) to (Void, Group) pair
job.setMapOutputKeyClass(Void.class);
job.setMapOutputValueClass(Group.class);
job.setNumReduceTasks(0);
job.setInputFormatClass(SEGYInputFormat.class);
job.setOutputFormatClass(ParquetOutputFormat.class);
// Enable SNAPPY compression to make result parquet files more compact
ParquetOutputFormat.setCompression(job, CompressionCodecName.SNAPPY);
ParquetOutputFormat.setCompressOutput(job, true);
ParquetOutputFormat.setWriteSupportClass(job, TraceGroupWriteSupport.class);
Here is how it could be depicted. Please notice, given the partition, the size of file system blocks was increased. Additionally, we set a SNAPPY compression, thus, reducing the size of Parquet files by approximately 10%.
Conclusion
We considered an end-to-end process of converting the SEG-Y (rev 1) format to Parquet based on the Map-Reduce job. During this, the custom input format along with the map function was developed.
I hope this post was helpful for you.
The full version of the code is located here. | https://medium.com/@kirill-chirkunov/seg-y-to-parquet-how-to-make-large-geophysical-data-files-suitable-for-distributed-processing-44b41e0b725c | ['Kirill Chirkunov'] | 2020-12-22 13:12:40.860000+00:00 | ['Hadoop', 'Batch Processing', 'Parquet', 'Geoscience', 'Big Data'] |
Introduction to Islam | (This blog is created by artificial intelligence)
Islam is the world’s second-largest religion, with over 1.6 billion followers worldwide. It’s also one of the youngest major religions in existence — Islam was founded by Muhammad just 600 years after Christianity. Islam teaches that there is only One God and that Muhammad was His final prophet and messenger sent to guide mankind back onto the right path. Muslims believe that all previous prophets including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus were sent by God as well; their messages have been distorted or lost over time but can be found within the Qur’an (Koran) and Hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet).
The Quran is the only property of Allah and was revealed to Muhammad in a series of divine messages. Each message and revelation was accompanied by an Angel; either Gabriel, Michael, Israfel or Azrael (the Angel of Death). The Angel would speak to Muhammad through dreams, visions or physically. The revelations occurred during the month of Ramadan and were later compiled after Muhammad’s death into one book: the Qur’an, which is considered the primary source of religious guidance for Muslims.
The Five Pillars of Islam are duties incumbent on every Muslim; demonstrating their Faith through action and abstaining from certain forms of behavior (such as harming oneself). These duties were created to provide structure and guidance for the Muslim community. They include:
The Shahadah (Declaration of Faith) is the first pillar; it’s what defines a person as a Muslim (if he/she says “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet,” they’ve completed the Shahadah and officially become a Muslim). The second pillar is Salat; Muslims pray five times a day to honor Allah and show gratitude for everything He provides them with. Zakat (the third pillar) makes up 2.5% of all wealth and is paid to the poor or given in charity, it’s also used for general community development projects. The fourth pillar is Sawm, which is fasting during the month of Ramadan to discipline one’s self and purify his or her body and soul. Hajj (the fifth pillar) is a pilgrimage that every able-bodied Muslim must undertake at least once in their life; it’s an obligation that can be fulfilled during different times of the year.
Muslims fast, pray and give to charity multiple times; there is no specific “Muslim” way of dressing or behaving. They value modesty, patience, honesty and knowledge above all else; praying gives them a chance to remember Allah on a regular basis.
LIA 27
www.lia27.ai
https://www.instagram.com/l.i.a.27/
https://www.facebook.com/Lia2727 | https://medium.com/@lia27/introduction-to-islam-c5235cd4d524 | [] | 2021-09-08 14:52:05.763000+00:00 | ['Ramadan', 'Allah', 'Muslim', 'Islam'] |
Install and configure OpenCV-4.2.0 in Windows 10 — VC++ | OpenCV-4.2.0 for Visual Studio 2019
All the required steps for setting up OpenCV for a Visual C++ development.
Step1: Install the C++ Desktop development Workload
Open your Visual Studio Installer tool and add C++ for desktop development as a workload to your current Visual Studio IDE version. This step is essential since you can not use OpenCV in VS without all the C++ required libraries.
Visual Studio Installer Wizard
Step 2: Download and Install OpenCV-4.2.0
Download OpenCV 4.2.0 latest stable release (opencv-4.2.0-vc14_vc15.exe) for Windows platform. Go to the official OpenCV website: https://opencv.org/ -> Resources -> Releases and click on the Windows platform. You will be redirected to SourceForge and download will automatically start.
Before running the download .exe file, go to your C:\ folder and add a new folder named opencv-4.2.0. Run the installer and extract the zip file to the opencv-4.2.0 folder newly created.
Extract the zip file containing the builds for OpenCV to your folder
Step 3: Add OpenCV binaries to your System path
Once OpenCV is correctly installed in your folder, you now have to add the binaries C:\OpenCV-4.2.0\opencv\build\x64\vc15\bin to your system path, so you can have access to OpenCV executables easily through your command line.
Editing the system path
Step 4: Configure a Visual Studio project to run OpenCV
Open Visual Studio 2019, choose to create a new project and go for the C++ Console App template. | https://towardsdatascience.com/install-and-configure-opencv-4-2-0-in-windows-10-vc-d132c52063a1 | ['Aymane Hachcham'] | 2020-04-21 18:56:48.306000+00:00 | ['Image Processing', 'Visual Studio', 'Opencv'] |
Visual Exploratory Data Analysis(EDA) Part 3 | Continuation of Part 1 and Part 2
In the last 2 blogs, we looked at multiple ways of visually extracting meaning from data. Specifically using a Bible dataset from Kaggle.
In this blog, I am going to lead you through the last steps of my EDA prior to modeling.
First, identifying which datasets I would like to use as features
Fig 1. Recall that we have the above datasets at our disposal
During Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog, we have visually explored the features of the english_keys , key_abbrev , and the different bible versions ; all of which contain the same numbers of chapters and books (66 books each).
Note Fig 2 and Fig 3 below. Although they are two different versions of the Bible, they have the same makeup of book and chapters.
Fig 2. World English Translation (web)
Fig 3. Young Literal Translation (ylt)
Note the difference in the text of each version in Fig 4 and Fig 5 below:
ylt.head
Fig 4. Look under column ‘t’ for the translation of text and compare the difference with Fig 5 below
web.head
Fig 5. Look under column ‘t’ for the translation of text and compare the difference with Fig 4 above
Second, determine which features are important
Since my problem question requires Natural Language Processing (NLP), I am going to have to further investigate how I am going to label the bible corpus.
What I know so far:
There are 66 books in each bible version
Each version dataset has similar, if not identical, shape
Each version ‘id’ column and row is assigned in a similar manner
Lets dig deeper into one other dataset I briefly glossed over: english_keys and genre_keys
genre_keys
Fig 6. The table above provides the key to the different genres and their names to help organize the 66 books within the Bible
english_keys(10)
Fig 7. The table above provides the book number, name, testament, and genre of the bible
I would like to see the genre and book information together for each version in order to better understand the genre distribution for each book per version.
Therefore, I am going to start by plotting english_keys
Fig 8. The code above generates the graph in Fig 9
Fig 9. Plot of the genre keys by book number
Let’s try another angle :
Fig 10. The code above generates the graph in Fig 11
Fig 11. Plot of the book number by genres
After looking at the distribution of genres by books (and vice versa), I have a better idea for how I can feature engineer my datasets so I can be able to run a model….hopefully.
Feature engineering time
Lets start off with King James Version ( KJV)
kjv.head()
Fig 12. Let’s recall kjv and its features and how it is organized. All the other versions are organized in the same manner.
Let’s start by dropping the ‘id’, ‘c’(chapter), and ‘v’(version) columns:
kjv2 = kjv.drop(columns=[‘id’,’v’,’c’])
kjv2.head()
Fig 13. Let’s check if we are left with the right columns and rows after dropping the unwanted columns.
Next, I would like to pair the book number with its equivalent genre keyL
Time to add another column to the dataset in Fig13: | https://medium.com/@kebedemekdes101/visual-exploratory-data-analysis-eda-part-3-962f8894e67 | ['Mekdes Kebede'] | 2019-05-13 20:33:27.550000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Python', 'Feature Engineering'] |
Marketing in Crypto: Crash & Burn or Build & Prosper? | 1) Identity
All is simple: let’s think of crypto community members and newcomers as a customers first. Then open CoinMarketCap and count the number of projects: 1586 cryptocurrencies are competing for your existing and potential customers. It has been 10 years since Bitcoin was born and cryptocurrencies now become a more common definition in our lives. If we consider cryptocurrency as a product, brand management should take a place in a marketing story.
Identity can be a magic spell. Color palette, typography, imagery, tone of voice, even icons set and online elements are able to communicate beyond the words. Build your project a “face” to deliver a message.
Take seriously external materials, such as brand book, press-kit, one pager and different media templates. Creative materials guidelines are necessary to keep the holistic image persistence. Do the same for internal documents. Why? Your employees are internal customers and potential brand advocates. Have you seen team members standing up for honor of a project? The goal is to make it happen and keep it constant.
One day a newcomer brand will be able to sell an image and trust itself to ensure customers they hold a right cryptocurrency in their hands (and they are in right hands themselves).
Think about forming the first impression, scientific approach and even brand archetypes. Prepare necessary project documentation and marketing materials. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/marketing-in-crypto-crash-burn-or-build-prosper-f1de5b58afe7 | ['Katoshi'] | 2018-08-22 11:00:50.079000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Marketing', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Marketing In Crypto', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
#4: Last journal of 2020 | This should be a long one, but I have college application deadlines coming up. So, please, bear with me. This week I’m not as happy as I am last week — and that’s okay. Probably because my instant-gratification-monkey lost control of my professional procrastinating brain. And my brain does not like it when the panic monster takes over. But, there it is, 7 days before my Ivy League application and I still have a lot to do.
So here I am, doing the thing I’m not supposed to do, journaling. I really don’t know why I’m writing and what I’ll be writing but I’m just doing it. This week was super unproductive as there’s Christmas Day — a day where all my unproductive sins are forgiven. Forgiven by myself obviously, but all this time since March 2020 are Christmas Day’s for me. Even though some days are harder than the other, I still manage to find myself doing nothing but complain. And here I am again, complaining.
At least, Jay Shetty said that happy people complain … wait for it … mindfully. And right now, I’m complaining mindfully. I’m complaining on the fact that I’m not going over to my friends house for a sleepover. I’m complaining on the fact that I will — most probably — spend new year’s eve alone .I’m complaining on the fact that I had approximately 3 weeks and I did nothing. I’m complaining on why everyone is having a fun holiday. But, here I am, writing an essay — and journal — on the last days of 2020, alone in my room.
These bad times would pay off when I get my college decisions — or not. Because, it all depends on how it turns out. So, wait for my complains on March 2021 or my celebration — I hope. I guess the main reason I’m writing my journal is because I just didn’t want to be inconsistent for once and I’m really hoping that this journal would last for years — at least. | https://medium.com/@collinpinn/4-last-journal-of-2020-2fecbe4eaf16 | ['Alexander Collin'] | 2020-12-27 16:27:00.231000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Journal'] |
Education is the new Marketing | One of the stories defining the first few weeks of Fund 2 was the deluge of proposals for funding podcasts about Cardano. Tasked with solving the problem of “encouraging developers and entrepreneurs to build businesses and applications on top of Cardano in the next six months,” community members created over a dozen proposals for podcasts, leading to some spirited conversations on Reddit, Twitter, and within the public Fund 2 Telegram.
It would take a separate essay to summarize these conversations, but in sum, I think they were productive. The entire purpose of Catalyst is to foster community governance, which means having the chance to raise ideas, debate their merits, and arrive at outcomes. In the end, several podcasts withdrew their applications, including the flagship Cardano Effect, as well as AfroFinLab, to which I am a contributor. Counting them today, I see 7 proposals for podcasts in the final list.
Why were there so many podcast proposals? In part it was Charles Hoskinson’s call for them back in August. This in turn bred a Catalyst Problem Sensing proposal called “CH’s Podcast Callout Too Successful”, which may be true. One way to read this is as an illustrative example of a leader’s words moving a market. But I think it’s more than that.
The influx of podcast proposals indicates both the passion of our community and our shared recognition of the work ahead. People want to participate. We recognize that we have to tell the story of Cardano to so many people, and podcasts are one way to do that. Mix the high-level goal of driving adoption with a little dose of pandemic isolation, and we’ve got a great recipe for creating whatever we can from home.
What remains unresolved in these conversations is whether or not podcasts actually successfully drive adoption of new technology. As a community we recognize a need for deeper public awareness of Cardano, and that for now, podcasts provide an accessible way to pitch in. If we agree on that need, then the question is really about how to address it. | https://medium.com/@workshopmaybe/education-is-the-new-marketing-dd609966c41a | ['Workshop Maybe'] | 2020-10-22 20:01:16.302000+00:00 | ['Cardano', 'Cardano Project Catalyst', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Startup'] |
How to Write a Good Article for the CPE Exam. | My article
“Why the planet won’t thank you for getting rid of electricity”.
For many years, people have been coming up with new ideas to combat climate change. Recently a new concept has emerged that advocates the stoping the use of electricity altogether. Doing so in my eyes is not an ineffective solution to the problem of rising temperatures on earth, but will only make our lives unnecessarily more difficult. Supporters of this idea often make a point that compromises have to be made to contribute to a greater cause. Perish the thought! Electricity is indeed something that is often taken for granted. Not so long ago, people did not rely on electricity and could not even imagine how much easier life could be like. I believe electricity is one of the better inventions of humankind, therefore it cannot be taken away from us. What we should do, however, is to impose new, stricter regulations on large corporations, which are the true reason behind the growing climate change crisis.
You may, dear reader, be wondering what life without electricity would be like and it is not quite as difficult to imagine as it may first seem. Candles instead of lights, a fireplace instead of electric stoves, no heated water, a typewriter instead of a laptop… Upon quick retrospection, it is apparent that today’s world relies on electricity. In fact, throughout most of history, people had to go without it as they had no choice. If it had not been for this invention, the pace of innovation would not be as fast as today. Electricity enabled us to be more independent of environmental factors, such as the sun or climate.
The benefits of electricity are indisputable, and it must be established, that although you may want to stop climate change, cutting off electricity is not a viable solution. Instead, we should focus on regulating the ones on the top, who impose such useless ideas to hide the actual cause of the climate crisis we have today. | https://medium.com/jack-kaczmarek-blog/writing-a-decent-article-for-the-cpe-exam-df31dc8eab66 | ['Jack Kaczmarek'] | 2021-02-07 20:48:37.478000+00:00 | ['Article Writing', 'Writing', 'Cpe Exam', 'Proficiency English', 'English'] |
Thanks so much for your honesty Mason. | Thanks so much for your honesty Mason. I’ve recently been diagnosed with OCD and have started on Effexor which is starting to work. When I’ve had symptoms in the past, they have just disappeared. I’m hoping the same happens this time. | https://medium.com/@NilsvonKalm/thanks-so-much-for-your-honesty-mason-3199a99d1540 | ['Nils Von Kalm'] | 2020-12-21 09:58:11.315000+00:00 | ['Mental Illness', 'Ocd', 'Mental Illness Recovery'] |
Procrastination is quite underrated : Here are the few reasons why procrastination is inevitable | “Laziness is the mother of all bad habits but ultimately she is a mother so we should respect her”.
Of course the above lines are true. We should respect laziness and her sister procrastination.
Procrastination
Before starting with the procrastination, Here are few words about Procrastination. Procrastination means to avoid or continuously postponing something due to various reasons. You may have a wonderful idea that have the potential to change your life for ever. You may become a trend setter but that feeling “Am I worth it?” , “who is going to care about my work” and “My life is over if this thing failed” etc. Don’t worry these feelings are common for everyone. But ultimately not everyone are stuck with this mindset. Your coming out matters. It’s only a matter of your determination and you have to believe in yourself.
Because successful people used to do what unsuccessful people hesitate to do. So once you come out of this procrastination, you can be able to know the better version of yourself. Let me give you some reasons why people Procrastinate :
• Distraction
• Self deprecation
• Poor Scheduling
• Laziness
• Lack of motivation
But what if I tell you procrastination serves its purpose sometimes. Let me tell you in detail.
Purposeful Procrastination
Sometimes procrastination does its very purpose, because it will help you reveal the better version of yourself. Just try to imagine this scenario , consider you are working on a certain project and you somehow managed to finish that soon before the deadline. But your conscience keep telling you “This part must have done better”, “I could have done better” and “I should not be in a urge”. This clearly means you just left a vacuum in your work. Having mere motivation without discretion is always considered as a trash. You should know your strength before going to war.
Some real life stories
Avatar
Development of Avatar started in 1994 as a 80 page script. The filming was planned to start right after the completion of Titanic. But we know filming the Avatar at that time was not at all possible. You can say that by just watching the film. As you know the film was only released in 2009. What if James Cameron abducted working on the Avatar ? we could not be able to encounter the biggest work of Hollywood industry. It’s only because James Cameroon chose to wait and that perseverance is a grand success.
To kill a mockingbird
One of the greatest work of the American literature was actually a result of continuous procrastination. Harper Lee’s editor kept continuously pushing her for better story. They even changed the characters and plot a lot. But Harper Lee didn’t rebelled against her editor, but she listened and kept editing until it became the one we know. It won the Pulitzer prize in 1961. The first version of this story was released in 2015 under the name “Go set a Watchman” and it was not a big hit(yeah they changed the title too). What if Harper Lee and her editor hadn’t procrastinate? Well I wouldn’t have mentioned her in this article in the first place.
So thought of the day :
“It’s better late than nothing” | https://medium.com/@balainfinity/procrastination-is-quite-underrated-here-are-the-few-reasons-why-procrastination-is-inevitable-2ad6ac88207f | ['Balasubramanian A', 'One Mad Writer'] | 2020-11-19 13:57:15.756000+00:00 | ['Avatar', 'Procrastination', 'To Kill A Mockingbird'] |
Scientists Are Gene Editing Coral to Help Them Survive Climate Change | Reengineering Life is a series from Future Human about the astonishing ways genetic technology is changing humanity and the world around us.
In 2016, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology recorded the hottest sea temperatures on record near the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system. The heat wave lasted for weeks, triggering the worst bleaching event the reef has ever experienced. Nearly 30% of its corals died as a result.
Rising temperatures due to climate change threaten to bring on more coral bleaching and mass die-offs. Coral reefs are home to an estimated 25% of all marine species at some point in their life cycle, protect coastal areas from storms and erosion, and provide jobs to local communities.
In hopes of saving reefs on the brink of collapse, scientists are racing to understand why some coral survive and others don’t. Of particular interest are the genes behind coral survival. Using the gene-editing technique CRISPR, one group of researchers has pinpointed a gene responsible for heat tolerance in coral from the Great Barrier Reef.
The discovery, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help guide coral conservation efforts and potentially lead to a 23andMe-type test for corals. A genetic test that could tell scientists which corals are most at risk of bleaching, or alternatively, which reefs may be more resistant to it, would be incredibly useful for conservation, lead author Phillip Cleves, PhD, a marine geneticist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, tells Future Human. Some corals, for instance, can live in extreme environments.
“The main problem in the field has been the fact that we haven’t been able to figure out what genes are playing a role in either coral bleaching or coral survival to heat stress,” Cleves tells Future Human. “We didn’t have genetic tools to allow us to ask what their genes do.”
Cleves and his collaborators have figured out how to use CRISPR in coral. Like a pair of genetic scissors, CRISPR allows scientists to delete or edit any gene in organisms’ cells. The technology is widely used in lab mice and is being tried in humans to address a handful of genetic diseases, as well as cancer. But CRISPR is tougher to use in some organisms than in others.
The challenge with applying CRISPR to coral is that the procedure must be done in newly fertilized eggs. But coral spawns just once a year in the middle of the night during a full moon. When water temperatures are just right, mature corals simultaneously release eggs and sperm into the ocean for fertilization. For the past few years, Cleves and other scientists have been making the trip to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for this annual spawning to collect newly fertilized eggs for experiments.
“It’s definitely a logistical challenge,” he says.
Back in the lab, Cleves and his co-authors used tiny needles to inject the fertilized coral eggs with CRISPR. They used it to remove a gene known to play a crucial role in heat response in other organisms. Next, they let the fertilized eggs develop, then exposed the resulting coral larvae to water at different temperatures.
The edited larvae survived well in water with a temperature of 27 degrees Celsius (about 81 degrees Fahrenheit) but died quickly when researchers increased the water temperature to 34 degrees (93 degrees Fahrenheit). In contrast, the unedited larvae survived well in the warmer water, suggesting the gene is necessary for heat tolerance. Water temperatures around the Great Barrier Reef typically range from 23 Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) in the winter to 29 degrees Celsius (about 84 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer. The gene, HSF1, had previously not been known to be involved in heat response in coral.
When water gets too warm, corals expel the beneficial algae that take shelter in their tissues. Algae not only gives coral its vibrant color, but it also makes important nutrients that coral needs to survive. Without them, the coral turns white and becomes more susceptible to disease. Bleaching also hinders their growth, as well as their ability to reproduce.
“This study gives us better insight into how and why corals bleach during periods of heat stress, which is definitely beneficial, particularly as we work to understand how corals can adapt to climate change,” Helen Fox, PhD, conservation science director at the Coral Reef Alliance, a California-based nonprofit, tells Future Human.
In 2018, Cleves and his colleagues were the first to report that editing genes in coral was possible. But in that study, the technique didn’t work well enough: They couldn’t get CRISPR to edit enough cells to actually have an effect on the coral’s physical traits. (This is a common problem with CRISPR.) This latest paper shows that gene editing can be used to delete genes and study the effects of the missing gene. Marine biologists have made similar strides using CRISPR in squid.
“Having the ability to remove genes from coral is going to allow us to catalog what genes do in corals,” Cleves says. “That basic knowledge is going to help us understand both the propensity of corals to survive climate change and also the biological mechanisms involved.”
The study also opens the door for instilling heat-tolerant genes into coral. While Cleves isn’t interested in making genetically engineered coral, some of his collaborators are. Last year, Science magazine reported that coral geneticist Madeleine van Oppen, PhD, is exploring the use of CRISPR to make hybrid corals — those that have traits from different species of coral — that could better tolerate warmer temperatures.
In a commentary accompanying Cleves’ paper, van Oppen cautions that coral strains generated with CRISPR would be classified as GMOs in some countries. “Their release into the environment would, very properly, face rigorous regulatory and public scrutiny,” she writes.
Fox thinks genetically altering coral reefs is a risky conservation approach. “Nature is reliably unpredictable and too much human interference could lead to unintended consequences,” she says.
Plus, bleaching isn’t the only threat that coral reefs face. Most reefs are located in shallow water near shore, making them vulnerable to pollution that originates on land and damage from coastal development and fishing. Though banned in many countries, illegal coral mining is also contributing to the destruction of reefs around the world.
For now, van Oppen and Cleves agree that introducing genetically modified coral into the wild shouldn’t be the focus of conservation efforts, but they’re hopeful that CRISPR could reveal other ways to preserve threatened coral species.
“A more scalable conservation approach is to reduce threats to coral reefs and let evolution take its course so corals can adapt to climate change,” Fox says. | https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-are-gene-editing-coral-to-help-them-survive-climate-change-1a91a43893e | ['Emily Mullin'] | 2020-11-19 16:43:24.591000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Reengineering Life', 'Coral', 'Science', 'Gene Editing'] |
Create your Slack bot with Conversation API & Node-RED | At IBM Watson, we’re always happy to continuously improve ourselves and bring new features to our users. As such, we released recently our Conversation API out of experimental use. If you’re not aware of it, Conversation allows you to identify intents and entities from a text.
You can integrate it in many use cases but the most used one is obviously messaging bot and it’s everywhere:
So why has this usage became so trendy? Many hypotheses are possible:
Users spend most of their time only on few applications (chat-based, games)
They don’t want to install an app just to get their ticket or contact support
It’s more natural for them to write to companies in the same way they write to their friends in their favorite applications
I recommend that you read this article where Gaurav Sharma compiled a lot of information about bot usage:
After all this interesting data, what about creating your own bot for Slack using Conversation API and Node-RED?
If you don’t have a Node-RED app deployed, read my previous tutorial:
First, let’s be sure you have the Watson Conversation node (not the experimental one) in your Node-RED app:
In case, you don’t have them, restart your application in Bluemix or locally, it will fetch the updates of Watson nodes.
There are different integrations with the Slack API, from the simplest one to the most customised. Today we will focus on the “slash command” one. It allows you to have a dedicated command that will trigger a webhook to our Node-RED app. In practice, users would write something like in this image where /watson is the command name and the rest of the message is the payload sent to your webhook.
We’re going now to create our slack command, so click on the image to create one:
Click here to create your own slack command
Don’t worry, it will be available to your team by default. You can open it for other teams by following Slack documentation. Choose your command name and add it to your team:
You’ll get an example of a payload sent to your server. Remember to verify the token bundled in the payload is the same as was written on that page to be sure Slack sent you the message and not someone else. You can regenerate it on Slack website if your token is compromised.
Put the URL to your Bluemix Node-RED app URL with /watson-slack in the end. Don’t forget to set the URL on https and save the settings.
Now time to grab our Conversation credentials. If you don’t already have an instance of Watson Conversation API, click on this image:
Once the instance has been created, you should have a “launch tool” button on the manage page where you have been redirected. Log in with your Bluemix credentials and create your workspace (you can name it as you want). A workspace will group all intents, entities, and dialog flows related to each other.
For this tutorial, we will focus on intents, which represents possible actions asked by the user. Let’s create two intents named departure_time and arrival_time, which represent actions of asking departure and arrival times of a flight: | https://medium.com/ibm-watson/create-your-slack-bot-with-conversation-api-node-red-a5bf82aad24d | ['Yacine Rezgui'] | 2017-11-07 15:06:56.930000+00:00 | ['Slack', 'Tutorial', 'Bots', 'Conversational UI'] |
Baby Led Weaning | Baby Led Weaning
What it is, and why you should try it.
Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the term, it’s exactly what it sounds like: the baby leads their own weaning experience. You make them more or less what you feed yourselves as adults, put it in front of them and see how they get on.
When it comes to raising a baby, new parents often tend to be paranoid, and I definitely fall into this category. And if there’s one subject sure to make any new parent worry more than most, it’s eating. Choking is a huge and real fear for adults, let alone infants, and the nervousness is completely understandable. We want to wrap them up from danger for as long as possible, and while we can’t be spoon-feeding our children meals of a yogurty consistency as they enter their twenties, it’s understandable to want to do so for as long as possible.
This fear puts off many parents from giving Baby Led Weaning a go, so how did we come to settle on it? I’ll admit, the concept made me nervous at first. At six months old, they’re just too young to cope with lumps, right?
This, in fact, was the argument that convinced me to go for it.
We have to introduce them to real food with differing textures at some point, and sooner rather than later (like in their twenties). When we introduce them to food, everything is new — the concept of flavours, of there being something in their mouths beyond spit and their own fists. So they’re concentrating, trying their hardest to get their heads and gums around this new and clearly important experience. By giving them traditional baby food, we’re teaching them that all food is the same consistency, that it’s effectively easy and little concentration is required.
Early on, babies have a gag reflex that activates much further forward in the mouth than ours, and we’re wasting it. Then, when they’re maybe entering a stage of complacency, we begin to trick them by slowly sneaking in semi-solid lumps to catch them out.
Obviously this isn’t deliberate, or even as dangerous as I’ve just made it seem — like most people I was brought up on baby foods. But I want to point out that it’s easy to describe the idea of baby food as just as big a threat to our kids as Baby Led Weaning.
That’s what convinced me personally to give it a go, but is it the advantage I’d use to sell it to others? No. What then, for me, was the major selling point?
Honestly? It’s bloody funny.
In the first week of my daughter’s weaning, I lost count of the number of times I ran out of breath laughing at her efforts, and the spectacle had lost none of its hilarity by the time my son took the plunge.
They’ve honestly been some of my favourite moments of parenting so far: watching them tackle a sprout as if they were giant apples, trying to quickly pick up spilled water with their fingertips, being covered head to toe in Bolognese sauce.
Okay, that last one might not sound too appealing to everyone, but hear me out. I’ve witnessed the stresses of spoon feeding when the parents are starving too, but have to go through the time-consuming task of feeding as much of a jar as possible to an uninterested baby — while their own meal goes cold.
It can get a little messy, but it’s worth it
With Baby Led Weaning, however, you can eat the same meals at the same time and let them do the work, refining their fine motor skills as they do. We just put what was effectively a sheet of tarpaulin under the highchair and let them crack on. The clean-up afterwards was straightforward compared to actually having to feed them.
They don’t take in much at first; they’re still getting milk, so to begin with it’s little more than exploration. But the rewards of getting it right reveal themselves soon enough, and they’re more than capable of eating the toughest of foods. They might look like they only have gums, but at a couple of months old my daughter bit me on the nose, and I can promise you the teeth are not lurking far beneath the surface.
There are health benefits, too. For a start, you only begin weaning at six months, when their stomachs are developed enough to cope. Many baby food companies push for weaning before they’re ready, and they’re not always as healthy as we assume. If you’re making the meal yourself, it’s easier to be aware of exactly what’s in it. But it isn’t just healthier for the baby — we ended up adjusting the meals we’d make for the whole family to ensure they were healthier. The difference in our salt intake as parents must have been huge.
And they enjoy it. This was probably the most important benefit for our two. It was something new they were doing for themselves — it wasn’t something being done to them, but their first taste of genuine independence. At this point they were struggling to sit up unaided, but here they were: the most crucial goal in their quest for survival was being fulfilled, and they were doing it on their own.
There are millions of right ways to raise a baby, and every parent has to do what suits them. But for us, Baby Led Weaning was fun, safe and easy, with the developmental benefits happening hilariously right before our eyes. I’d highly recommend it. | https://boxcymru.medium.com/baby-led-weaning-8aa280764c1 | ['Y. Chwyldro'] | 2020-05-05 16:36:28.032000+00:00 | ['Healthy Eating', 'Fatherhood', 'Baby Led Weaning', 'Parenting', 'Baby'] |
Crossing Social Media Lines | I have to say, I’m starting to feel like a bit of a celebrity and not in a good way. I’ve always been a friendly person, and some would even say ‘too trusting.’ So when I began receiving an increasing number of friend requests on Facebook from members of Medium, I felt obliged to accept.
Only I’m not even sure if they’re all really Medium folks anymore, or just ‘friends of friends.’ In the last few days, I’ve been getting upwards of thirty requests per day, and was accepting most of them so I wouldn’t seem ‘rude.’ I have a bad habit of caring too much about what people think of me.
Until this morning when I woke up to several private messages from random people I don’t know, and strings of notifications about likes and comments on my personal posts and photos. Even on photos of my daughter. I’m sorry, but no! That’s creepy and stalker-like behavior.
So at the risk of sounding ungrateful for the opportunity I've been given to help and support my fellow writers — an opportunity I absolutely cherish! — I have to draw a very real line in the sand.
Let’s make one thing very clear: I may be friendly to everyone (until I have a reason not to be), but I am definitely not everyone’s friend, nor do I wish to be. There have to be boundaries!
So I have now deleted most of those recently added ‘friends’, and even blocked a few at the suggestion of a real friend. I will no longer be accepting friend requests from group members unless we already have a friendly rapport. And all message requests that come off as creepy will absolutely get you blocked.
Have some respect for your fellow group members, and know where to draw the lines.
Don’t be a creep! | https://medium.com/imperfect-words/crossing-social-media-lines-892fe70754a2 | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2019-11-12 12:22:58.567000+00:00 | ['Friend Request', 'Creepy', 'Social Media', 'Unfriend', 'Block'] |
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https://twitter.com/CongxinHouse | https://medium.com/@congxinhouseware/elegant-polypropylene-placemat-of-unique-methods-2ce2c4cc902f | ['Congxin Housewares'] | 2019-06-06 05:39:39.280000+00:00 | ['Home Improvement'] |
The Feds Advantage: Why Most People Choose to Limit the Damage | Written by: Lawrence Hartman the author of GUILTY TILL PROVEN INNOCENT: A Shocking Inside View Into America’s Failing Justice System (now available online at Amazon)
There’s an old adage that jokes an overzealous prosecutor can even indict a ham sandwich. Most people assume it’s an exaggeration — it’s not! The definitions of certain crimes are so overly broad that they can capture anyone at any time. Combine that with a periodic willingness to push the envelope past the margins and you can quickly understand why no one is safe.
The legal concepts of Conspiracy, Willful Blindness and Money Laundering are particularly open-ended and damning. On any given day, every single bank in the world could be accused of Money Laundering hundreds to thousands of times over. Does it happen? No, because it would cause total economic pandemonium. So, it’s used surgically instead, to destructive effect once they’ve set you in their sights. Sort of like “show me the person, I’ll show you the crime.” Completely turning justice on its head.
Under Conspiracy, you can be tied to a criminal enterprise without even being aware of illegal activity or even knowing many of the people allegedly involved. The government uses a multi-pronged, hub and spoke approach that casts a wide net. Who decides whether you should be implicated? Your prosecutor, of course, with input from the federal agents doing the leg work. One person I met was owed money for boat repair. He was caught on tape innocently saying, “I don’t care how you pay me back; I just want my money.” Little did he know, the guy who owed him money was a small-time drug dealer up to his neck in trouble. Two years for conspiracy. I also met numerous physician assistants and therapists from different clinics who only first met each other at trial as co-defendants, all trapped under the same umbrella of ownership that supposedly cheated Medicare. Getting in trouble for just doing their job.
How could this happen, you might wonder? Well, they either knew or should have known what the owners were up to. At least, that’s the government’s claim. Willful Blindness. In politics it passes as plausible deniability. Not in the real world. You can’t even imagine what the government insists you should have questioned or investigated further. Then again, there are numerous crimes that don’t even require a criminal intent. One guy I did time with was there for capturing an endangered fish — who knew? You’re at the mercy of prosecutors picking hot spots of focus and casting broadly to rack up victories.
Compounding this expansive legal exposure is the steady erosion of personal rights. Most people are generally aware of the concept of Double Jeopardy, for example, that you can’t be charged for the same crime twice. However, that quaint legal protection does not apply between the states and the Feds. You can be charged by both for the exact same crime. Granted, it’s not a common occurrence but it creates huge complications and headaches, when it does occur. Paul Manafort stands out as a prominent example. While his situation may have been politically motivated, it demonstrates the danger and extraordinary costs you face when the government is truly out to get you.
Another aggressive prosecutorial tactic is Overcharging. One single act such as a minor drug transaction or receiving an investment can be interpreted as several, depending on the creativity of your AUSA. Any given financial transaction, for example, can lead to charges of (a) money laundering, (b) wire fraud, and © conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In a drug case, there’s little distinction between possession and distribution. One person I met got 15 years for sharing a small amount homemade Meth with his girlfriend. Unsurprisingly enough, this same concept can be applied to virtually any alleged crime.
The Feds can also further expand that outreach by including each and every transaction, technically leading to thousands of charges. Imagine a brokerage firm or doctor’s office and how many clients and patients they tend to. Get the picture? While the Feds rarely go beyond 30 or 40 counts, that number can be awfully intimidating, which is all part of the point. With an average of 10 years per charge, I was looking at a sentence that would take me into the 24th century. Clearly an absurd result, highlighting the fact that those numbers are nothing more than a scare tactic and ploy to get at least one count from the jury. After all, at the end of the day, even losing on (or pleading out to) just one charge can still lead to a lot of prison time. It’s a mind game of the highest order.
From businessmen to drug dealers, the process is equally damning. Perhaps you get caught selling just a small quantity of drugs, a case barely worth bringing. Well, all the prosecutor needs to do is find a couple of snitches seeking to save their skin, who’ll swear that they’ve been involved with you for years, aggregating the whole lot. A few ounces quickly turn into kilos, leading to a LIFE sentence.
Which brings us to the death of laws against Entrapment. FBI and DEA agents regularly run stings enticing small time drug dealers into big time crime. My cellmate Glenn had a local rap sheet for some possession and dealing. He gets offered an opportunity to make a score stealing from some phantom drug operation. A quick in and out. The thing is, though, he’s being set up by a DEA agent. Does he have a gun? No. “Okay,” says the agent, “I’ll bring one for you.” Glenn and three others, similarly approached, none of whom know each other, all come upon the warehouse where agents are hiding in wait. “You’re all under arrest!” they scream, dozens of agents, pouncing on Glenn and his cohorts. What quantity of drugs are they charged with? Whatever amount the federal agents claimed was involved. It’s called a Dry Conspiracy. And don’t forget the gun. That charge alone enhanced Glenn’s sentence from 10 years to 15. All for a bunch of drugs that never existed and a plot none of them would ever have gotten involved with, had the DEA not suckered them in.
Overzealous prosecution has other creative ways of sneaking into the system. RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) was originally created to help law enforcement go after big time Mafia families and the like. US Attorney Rudy Giuliani later famously expanded it to attack white collar crime. Sarbanes Oxley, created to fight corporate fraud, was used to threaten a poor, old fisherman out of Louisiana with 20 years. He caught undersized fish and was throwing them overboard as the Coast Guard arrived — destruction of evidence. Thankfully, the Supreme Court nipped this last overreach in the bud, but tomorrow is another day.
Even the powerful are not necessarily safe. The renowned international accounting firm Arthur Andersen, for example, was put out of business by an overly aggressive prosecutor. In a rare and stunning rebuke, the Supreme Court slapped that prosecutor down in a 9–0 decision, but victories like that are few and far in between. It was also of little solace to the thousands of employees who lost their jobs as the firm was destroyed and the five executives who needlessly spent a year in prison. This overzealous expansion also has an impact beyond the territorial boundaries of the US, as America becomes policemen for the world. The IMDB Fund in Malaysia, bond losses in Zimbabwe, bribery charges in Africa, and numerous other cases including my own which involved not a single US investor, are brought by enthusiastic prosecutors more than happy to broaden Uncle Sam’s reach.
Which brings us all back to indicting that ham sandwich. Someone I know was brought before just such a Grand Jury as a witness in order to save his butt from a long-term sentence bordering on LIFE. He was shown pictures and asked whether any of those people had worked with him. Some pictures were grainy, and he couldn’t recall the name of most of his “co-conspirators,” but that’s all it took to issue indictments and get his sentence reduced to 8 years. Targets get no opportunity to defend themselves in front of a Grand Jury. And, we now all know what happens once that indictment comes down. It’s a rough and tumble system, that randomly catches unwitting flies, both guilty and innocent, into its wide and durable web. | https://medium.com/@justicefailing/the-feds-advantage-why-most-people-choose-to-limit-the-damage-ecb8beb03a4e | ['Failing Justice'] | 2020-10-19 18:11:56.291000+00:00 | ['Arrest', 'Criminal Justice', 'Prison', 'Criminal Justice Reform', 'Prison Reform'] |
Dear Emilie | Emilie,
Here is how I will remember you.
Alight with the trees.
Always so bright, so filled with song.
Lifting the littles with your unshakeable spirit.
I am so glad I heard your voice one last time.
I am so sad we will never get to do our project of music + poetry as we said we would.
I promise to carry you with me now. It will be easy; you were always so light.
I will remember your incredible gifts.
Your ability to see so much beauty it near blinded;
Your kindness, your warmth, your giving grace.
I will remember so many precious moments. A song in a bedroom, ukuleles and puppets, traipsing amidst sun and trees. Depth and light in equal measure. Art and creation. Smiling — being seen.
I love you. That is unending. Thank you for your time with me.
You will be missed so, so, so dearly.
So much love and holding to the Inmans + Matt + friends + all in this time of grief.
My heart is broken, but you are with me still. | https://medium.com/death-dialogue/dear-emilie-a3a5a2019d80 | ['Death Dialogue Writers'] | 2017-07-11 07:56:32.371000+00:00 | ['Poetry'] |
About that SEC Commissioner’s over-the-top Scarlet Letter ESG speech | End of Week Notes
One thing I’ve noticed about critics of sustainable investing is that they often seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. They concoct a caricature of ESG based on common misconceptions and use it to convince their audience how ridiculous the whole enterprise is.
At least that seems to be what is coming out of right-wing circles in Washington these days — the latest from SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, who, in a speech that hardly seemed appropriate given the office she holds, spoke to the choir at the American Enterprise Institute this week, delivering a over-the-top broadside against ESG.
Just so you know where she’s coming from, Peirce has spent her entire career inside Washington right-wing policy circles: George Mason Law School, Republican staffer on the Hill, the Federalist Society. She has written a book published by the Mercatus Center, a think tank financed in part by the Koch Brothers.
Reading through the transcript of the speech, I’d describe it as an ominous, massively exaggerated screed describing “ESG activists” as hellbent on bringing down defenseless corporations and perhaps shareholder capitalism itself.
Peirce argues that ESG activists are affixing a “scarlet letter” (her first name being Hester led her to that clever metaphor) on companies, shaming them based on incomplete information without taking into account their full character:
We pin scarlet letters on allegedly offending corporations without bothering much about facts and circumstances and seemingly without caring about the unwarranted harm such labeling can engender. After all, naming and shaming corporate villains is fun, trendy, and profitable.
Nothing in that statement is accurate.
First of all, ESG evaluations are all about trying to gather facts and understanding their context. ESG ratings are based on systematic frameworks and a plethora of indicators. They are focused on financial materiality and peer-group comparisons. The whole enterprise is about bothering a lot about facts and circumstances. The goal is to produce actionable information for investors. No one would take ESG ratings seriously if they didn’t “bother much” about facts and circumstances.
And one thing we know for sure, and this is really at the root of Peirce’s issue with it: ESG is being taken very seriously by more and more investors, including virtually every asset manager of any size and import on the planet.
Furthermore, the idea that an underperformer in an ESG ratings framework somehow gets publicly shamed is absurd. Specific company ratings are typically not well known, even within the investment industry.
Take a look at this list of companies and guess which one wears the “scarlet letter” of being an underperformer (gasp!) relative to its industry peers:
Amazon
Coca-Cola
ExxonMobil
Microsoft
Procter & Gamble
Tesla
Walmart
If you guessed ExxonMobil or Walmart, you would be…wrong. Amazon is the only company on this list that is an underperformer relative to its peers, based on Sustainalytics ESG Rating. And just for kicks, which one wears the “gold star” of being an outperformer? It’s Microsoft. All the others have average ratings relative to their industry peers.
Investors use this data in a variety of ways, also nuanced, whether they are managing active strategies or designing ESG-based passive approaches or using it to inform their stewardship activities. No one is shaming companies or “inflicting unwarranted harm.” Amazon, by the way, is up more than 25% for the first half of the year.
Perhaps most important, companies themselves have become highly interested in their ESG evaluations, but not for the reasons Peirce claims, which is that they are treated so unfairly by ESG ratings.
Companies today face sustainability challenges ranging from how their business is being affected by climate change and the transition away from fossil fuels to how they treat their workers (on safety, pay, supply-chain oversight, and diversity), to the quality and safety of the products they produce. This is happening against a backdrop of heightened expectations for corporate behavior and purpose, driven by consumers and clients, by employees, both current and prospective, and by the public at-large.
More and more, investors are recognizing that ESG evaluations give them insight into a company’s sustainability challenges and how well it is addressing them. Companies themselves recognize that ESG evaluations can not only help them address investor concerns but also help them embed sustainability into their long-term strategy.
But Peirce was just getting started:
As Hester Prynne can attest, the affliction of shame is a group effort. It takes a village. Just as in Hester’s day, in our modern corporate ESG world, there is a group of people who take the lead in instigating their fellow citizens into a frenzy of moral rectitude. Once worked up, however, the crowd takes matters into its own brutish hands and finds many ways to exact penalties from the identified wrongdoers. The motives are often noble, but the methods are not.
What in the world is she talking about here? Some kind of witch hunt? If I had to guess, considering the source, she’s talking about the growing number of stakeholders, which she refers to as “so-called stakeholders” elsewhere in the transcript to signify their illegitimacy, who are demanding stronger standards of corporate behavior and better performance on sustainability issues.
There is indeed growing support for the idea that capitalism needs to be made to work for more people. Pricing externalities used to be a regulatory issue. (You can guess where Peirce stands on regulation. She argued against regulation after the financial crisis.) But today, rising expectations for corporate behavior extend to overall impact and to how companies can proactively mitigate negative externalities. That demand is coming from many fronts, not just ESG investors. And far from regarding addressing such costs as “penalties,” more companies today recognize that at a time when much of their value lies in intangible assets, it pays to build and maintain the trust of customers, workers and the public by being a good corporate citizen that addresses its overall impact rather than foist off the negative costs it produces onto the rest of society.
Even though federal law regards corporations as persons, which means among other things that they can spend unlimited amounts on political issues and candidates, Peirce seems to be suggesting that it is unreasonable to urge corporations to make moral decisions for the greater good.
But she, and we, are getting further afield from the real point here, which Peirce herself uncovers in her speech, when she says:
It is true that ESG issues may well be relevant to a company’s long-term financial value.
That is, of course, the entire point of ESG investing.
If ESG disclosures mean disclosing what is financially material, there is little controversy…
Exactly!
…but the ESG tent seems to house a shifting set of trendy issues of the day, many of which are not material to investors, even if they are the subject of popular discourse.
Wait, what? Now she’s back to just making stuff up. No one who does ESG investing, and I mean no one, is asking companies to disclose information that is not material. Apparently she is unfamiliar with the work of SASB, which is unconscionable for an SEC commissioner opining on materiality and ESG. Materiality has been the watchword for ESG disclosure for years now and SASB has developed industry specific recommendations for what should be disclosed.
While it is true that new ESG issues may emerge and become material, what exactly does she mean by “a shifting set of trendy issues”? The rise of customer data privacy and security as an issue for social media and on-line retailers? Or climate change, which has moved from a theoretical concern with impacts years into the future to an issue that is becoming more material and to more companies, it seems, by the day? Maybe she’s talking about gender-diversity issues like equal pay and putting more women in corporate leadership. By calling these issues “trendy” she’s trivializing them and arguing that they shouldn’t be material to investors. But, alas, these issues do exist and therefore investors can’t ignore them.
No right-wing bromide against ESG would be complete without an attack on proxy advisors and shareholder resolutions. Peirce rehearses the argument that proxy advisors have inordinate power by helping asset managers fulfill their stewardship responsibilities. This was never a big concern until proxy advisors started recommending occasional positive votes on matters related to ESG.
Of course they have. As an ESG issue becomes material, it would be irresponsible for proxy advisors to issue blanket recommendations of opposition. Anyway, my observation is that asset managers are spending more time focusing on stewardship because of the growing relevance of ESG issues to company management. And in cases where a significant shareholder vote arises around an ESG issue, asset managers are making their own call, not relying on their proxy advisor. Proxy advisors help with the process and mechanics of proxy voting. They are not a set-it-and-forget-it mechanism for asset managers. At least not today and that’s largely because of the rise of ESG issues.
And finally, Peirce thinks it’s a bad thing that a small investor can file a shareholder resolution. But who’s to say when a part-owner, no matter how small, of a company might have a constructive point to make with management? Besides, the little guy’s or gal’s resolution still has to pass a materiality standard to make it onto the proxy ballot. And if it doesn’t garner any support, that’s the end of it. Even if it does, shareholder resolutions that attract a majority shareholder vote aren’t binding on management.
At a time when there is growing support for corporations to focus on the big picture — long-term sustainable growth and accentuating their positive impact on society — it would be exactly the wrong thing to limit the voice of shareholders who want to encourage them to do so.
In sum, Peirce’s speech casts corporations as helpless victims of ESG activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, corporations can take care of themselves. But beyond that, more and more, corporations today want to align themselves with ESG, sustainability, and public purpose. We’re entering a new era where corporations can and should be a force for good beyond the important basics of job and wealth creation. When you can do good and do well, what’s the big issue with that? The more the investor base of the modern corporation consists of shareholders concerned about these things, the more latitude management has to focus on the long term, on sustainability, and on having a positive impact.
Just as Commissioner Peirce noted her remarks represented her views and not those of the Commission or her fellow Commissioners, my views here are my own and not necessarily those of Morningstar, Inc. | https://medium.com/the-esg-advisor/about-that-sec-commissioners-scarlet-letter-esg-speech-4e118931ab3 | ['Jon Hale'] | 2019-07-01 21:11:20.014000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Sustainability', 'SEC', 'Climate Change', 'Investing'] |
Diving into Scala Cats — Monoids | Today we are going to deep dive into the Scala Cats again to find out about Monoids. If you haven’t already read my post about Diving into Scala Cats — Semigroups I suggest you do so now.
What are Monoids?
The Monoid extends Semigroup and adds a default or fallback value for the given type. Monoid type class comes with two methods - one is the combine method of Semigroups, and another one is the empty method that performs identity operation.
In the post about Semigroups, we saw an example where we’re using Semigroups along with Scala’s fold() to operate on a collection of values:
def combineStrings(collection: Seq[String]): String = {
collection.foldLeft("")(Semigroup[String].combine)
}
We discussed the limitation of Semigroups where we cannot write a generic method combineAll(collection: Seq[A]): [A] for the above expression because the fallback value will depend on the type of A ( ”” for String , 0 for Int , etc).
Monoid comes up with a solution to this shortcoming, by introducing an identity/empty element.
The signature of Monoid can be specified as:
trait Monoid[A] extends Semigroup[A] {
def empty: A
}
How does identity element solves the limitation of Semigroups?
The empty String that we are passing in combineStrings is known as the identity or empty value, we can think of it as a fallback or default value. It resolves the shortcoming of Semigroups.
Now we can easily provide the implementation of generic method combineAll(collection: Seq[A]): [A] using Monoids:
def combineAll[A](collection: Seq[A])(implicit ev: Monoid[A]): A = {
val monoid = Monoid[A]
collection.foldLeft(monoid.empty)(monoid.combine)
}
Monoids hold Associativity and Identity Laws
Since Semigroups follow principle of associativity, same rules with some add-ons are applied to Monoids as well.
combine operation has to be associative and empty value should be an identity for the combine operation:
combine(x, empty) = combine(empty, x) = x
For example:
// Integer addition using 0 as an identity (Rules valid)
1 + 0 == 0 + 1 == 1
// Integer multiplication using 1 as an identity (Rules valid)
2 * 1 == 1 * 2 == 2
// Integer multiplication using 0 as an identity (Rules invalid)
2 * 0 == 0 * 2 != 2
So it’s clear the empty /identity element depends on the context not just on the type. That’s why Monoid (and Semigroup ) implementations are specific not only to the type but also the combine operation.
Cats allows combining Monoids together to form bigger Monoids and write more generalized functions which will take something composable instead of some concrete types.
We’ll learn about more core concepts of Cats in our upcoming article.
Stay tuned!!!
References
The best two Scala Cats resources I know are here: | https://medium.com/@knoldus/diving-into-scala-cats-monoids-66a3651f1bc9 | ['Knoldus Inc.'] | 2020-11-25 05:11:12.865000+00:00 | ['Monoids', 'Scala Cats', 'Scalafp', 'Scala', 'Functional Programing'] |
Investment thesis for Mind Medicine -Psychedelic inspired medicines | Summary
MindMed a neuro-pharmaceutical company, discovers, develops, and deploys psychedelic inspired medicines to improve health, promote wellness, and alleviate suffering.
The company is primarily focusing on developing a non-hallucinogenic version of the psychedelic ibogaine to address the opioid crisis.
MindMed has initiated or is initiating studies to evaluate potential treatments to help patients with adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, cluster headaches, and substance abuse.
There are 5 tailwinds that I believe will cause mindmed to be the Category leader
As COVID-19 continues to compound society’s prevalence of anxiety disorders globally, MindMed is pushing ahead with full vigor on the planning and design of Project Lucy.”
A Blue Cross Blue Shield report from 2019 found that millennials are seeing their physical and mental health decline at a faster rate than Gen X as they age. Without proper management or treatment, millennials could see a 40% uptick in mortality compared with Gen Xers of the same age, the report found.
The stigma for mental health and wellness. is no longer a barrier as millennials embrace mindfulness. and are open to experimentation with Psychedelics and other Nutraceuticals.
The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States will open the door for safety and efficacy data coupled with legal reforms generating broader interest in the medical and therapeutic promise of psychedelics, with a growing crop of mainstream media outlets now covering developments.
A successful. acceptance of the NASDAQ up-listing could serve as another major catalyst for institutional investor and analyst coverage.
Qualitative
MindMed will become the category leader in psychedelic inspired medicines. in collaboration with University Hospital Basel’s Liechti Laboratory, has discovered and filed a patent application in the United States (preserving all worldwide rights) for a neutralizer technology intended to shorten and stop the effects of an LSD trip during a therapy session. This discovery, when further developed, may act as the ‘off-switch’ to an LSD trip.
One of the many fears and stigmas associated with psychedelics are rare occurrences of ‘bad trips’. MindMed is equipping therapists and other medical professionals with the resources and technology to better control the effects of dosing LSD in a clinical setting to improve the patient experience and patient outcomes.
This advancement paves the way for greater therapeutic applications of LSD and shorter-acting psychedelic therapy treatments. MindMed believes this technology, when further developed, may one day be marketed as an added feature to shorten a therapy session and stop a session if the patient is not comfortable.
The next decade will lead to further breakthroughs and innovation in personalized medicine MindMed, working with the Liechti Laboratory, will continue to research and build a patent portfolio around psychedelic compounds that create novel approaches to medicine.
MindMed will initially focus on the opioid crisis: in the USA, it is estimated that there are at least 11 million people misusing opioids, with an annual cost to the US economy of an estimated $500 billion. Existing addiction treatments have been inadequate, and the FDA has provided incentives for effective opioid treatments, including accelerated approval and “breakthrough” designation for the development of treatments for opioid use disorders, and a lowered threshold for approval — accepting a standard of fewer occasions per day. MindMed intends to leverage and develop its existing intellectual property in treating opioid use disorder, in particular its 18-MC molecule, which is a synthetic congener of the ibogaine plant, and which has been proven effective in the past for treating addictions. In early tests, 18-MC appears to have retained these anti- addictive properties while eliminating the downsides of ibogaine use, including a risk of cardiac toxicity, a lengthy hallucinogenic experience, and being a banned substance.
Quantitive
On July 28, 2020, MindMed concluded dosing in a Phase 1 Single Ascending Dose (SAD) study of 18-MC. The dosing of 18-MC was well tolerated in humans and will help advance planning for a Phase 2a clinical trial in opioid addiction. Further, the study has not incurred any delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Multiple Ascending Dose (MAD) study is on track according to the original development timeline. MindMed plans to begin the Phase 2a study of 18-MC in opioid addiction by the end of this year.
MindMed will pursue N-N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the principally active ingredient in Ayahuasca. MindMed is providing startup funding for a Phase 1 clinical trial testing various intravenous dosing regimens of DMT, expected to begin in Q4 of 2020.
Disclosure long mindmed .
Disclaimer this is not investment advice and is for research purposes only . Consult a registered investment advisor before making any investment. | https://medium.com/@jamessowers/investment-thesis-for-mind-medicine-psychedelic-inspired-medicines-401cc36031e | ['Asian Cowboy'] | 2020-11-23 18:40:57.519000+00:00 | ['Psychedelics'] |
Simply be authentic, real, genuine, love God, love people, and live on Mission. | Not all will agree with what I am about to post… I sincerely enjoy attending church and as a Christian I believe the Holy Spirit encourages us to do so. I never want to miss an opportunity to be in church. To assemble together, build into relationships, to worship, serve, learn, grow, get equipped and go out. I find it is also biblical.
However, a church was never meant to be a museum for saints, fancy artifacts, or expensive dramatic laser light shows. It is a hospital for sinners for healing, rehabilitation, repentance, recovery and growing in the name of Jesus. Besides the church is not a building, the church is the people and you can gather anywhere, whether in a building, on the street corner, on a motorcycle, or park bench.
To any church out there that would ever turn away a soul because of appearance, finances, brokenness, addictions, alcoholism… is not a church, nor the church. You are doing it wrong, and need a true church. Remember, Christ re-named Simon to Peter, the rock, to whom He would build the church. Peter had flaws, made mistakes, he was human, just as all of us.
Keep in mind that no church is perfect and if you have been offended by someone in a church, welcome to the club, so have I. Honest people, with integrity, know they are fallible, and make errors. They, and we are all sinners. This is another reason they attend, seek to improve, learn, grow, get equipped and go out.
However, words of advice and caution…If church leaders are per-occupied with numbers, money, a certain look, consistently speaking against other denominations, or always preaching a Prosperity Message and spending thousands to possibly millions on fancy dramatic shows, jet planes, or costly buildings, while the congregation is suffering and there are homeless starving on the streets in their community, that is not about Christ, nor a true church, or the rock in which Christ spoke. If your focus is this way, you must be reading a different bible than I am.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the entertainment side, contemporary music, and different “wrappers” of a church and how it is to be presented, especially in today’s time. However, a good church, and church message, must be biblically sound and Christ centered.
Simply preach the truth, even when it is hard, as there is a Heaven and a Hell. The truth must be spoken. Simply be authentic, real, genuine, love God, love people, and live on Mission. Keep the main thing the main thing. Plant the seeds, let the Holy Spirit help water it, and souls will be saved, lives changed, and your church will grow be it God’s will…
I also believe the “luke warm” spoken in the bible may be more about frauds, fakes, and posers. Be real, church people, God always knows your heart, intent and soul.
And before someone goes on a rant in a reply, I assure you I can provide plenty of scripture to support what I believe and know to be true. | https://medium.com/@bromartin/simply-be-authentic-real-genuine-love-god-love-people-and-live-on-mission-201f49eb721d | ['Bro Martin'] | 2020-12-22 13:11:55.781000+00:00 | ['Church', 'Christianity', 'People', 'Mission', 'God'] |
Collagen could give you the hair boost you deserve | Collagen could give you the hair boost you deserve
Collagen could give you the hair boost you deserve When most people look into using marine collagen for a health boost, they do so for plumper and firmer skin, or the better nail growth that you could get through collagen.
Many people don’t consider the way that collagen could refine and boost your hair growth. Read on to find out what collagen could do for your hair.
Strengthen your roots The amino acids in collagen play a major role in the development of your hair’s roots. More specifically, the skin around the roots could receive a boost, strengthening and guarding the very foundation of your hair. This means that collagen could be used to give your hair a thicker appearance and reduce any clear signs of thinning close to the root of your hair. If you’ve not been treating your hair quite right, collagen could be the key to fixing your thinning scalp. Slow greying The colour of your hair is defined by a melanin pigment that is found in your cells. However, over time free radicals can cause damage to your melanin creating cells, preventing melanin production and causing your hair to get more grey. It’s been proven that collagen protein is able to target and attack free radicals in a test tube environment, and if they were to do so in melanin-producing cells, you could prevent the damage that causes greying. It’s a simple way to try to slow the greying process of your hair over time. Healthier looking hair As collagen protects your hair follicles, all of the hair that grows from them will be of the highest possible quality. This high level of quality isn’t just an internal factor relating to cells, but it could make your hair look stunning and lively. With healthier hair, it can be much easier to keep up that stunning shine and keep the sleek texture that you love. With a better look and easier styling, there’s no reason to delay your Kollo collagen supplements. If you’re interested in collagen supplements that you can trust, check out Kollo collagen today and see how easy it is to get started. | https://medium.com/@kollohealth/collagen-could-give-you-the-hair-boost-you-deserve-c7c0cf673506 | ['Kollo Health'] | 2021-10-21 13:15:16.675000+00:00 | ['Hair'] |
many times not | questions to think and act upon when developing reliable and safe medical devices and products | https://medium.com/@martymartens/many-times-not-54d11bd8aa32 | [] | 2020-12-22 13:34:31.867000+00:00 | ['Risk Taking', 'Risk', 'Product Development', 'Decision Making'] |
Judge Michael Kwan Was A Civil Rights Leader | Judge Michael Kwan Was A Civil Rights Leader
Judge Michael Kwan (Image is author’s)
He worked tirelessly for justice and against racism
It is quite likely that many have never heard of Judge Michael Kwan, but he was a person who was worth knowing. He was a community leader who died too soon. Judge Kwan passed away on July 21, 2020, at his home in Utah. He was just 58 years old. It was a shock to the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in Utah and the nation.
Judge Kwan was born in Inglewood, California, and he grew up in West Hills, California. He received a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and was certified in Chinese law by the East China University of Politics and Law. He taught law classes as well as being a judge.
After marrying in 1994 and living in California, Judge Kwan moved his family to Utah in 1996. He worked as an EMT and then as a burn technician at the University of Utah Hospital Burn Unit. He passed the bar in Utah and started a judicial career working as a Salt Lake City prosecutor. He was a Pro Tempore Judge in the Third District Court before becoming the first Municipal Judge appointed to the Taylorsville Justice Court where he remained until his death.
A descendant of one of Utah’s Chinese rail workers, Judge Kwan advocated for greater recognition of the state’s earliest Asian Americans, who helped to build the Transcontinental Railroad. In 2019, 150 years after the rail’s completion, Judge Kwan reflected on the legacy of his great-great-grandfather and the status of Asian Americans for the Associated Press. “We’ve been here for more than 150 years, and we have contributed every step of the way,” he said. “That’s the dream: Have people stop asking us where we’re from.” [That is a form of racism regularly faced by Asian Americans.]
Promontory Point Utah Enactment (Image is author’s)
As president of the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, Judge Kwan spearheaded the recognition and celebration in 2019 in Salt Lake City and at Promontory Point in Utah. This was to honor the Chinese railroad workers for the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese workers had been left out of the 100th year celebration.
Judge Kwan promoted civic engagement within the Asian American community through his work with the nonprofit OCA — Asian Pacific American Advocates. He was a co-founder of the OCA-Utah Chapter in 1999 and was its first president. He later served as the National President on the OCA Board. He was also a member of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and other organizations.
He has supported many AAPI groups. He was an activist who was not afraid to speak out and work for the sake of others. He was a visionary who never stopped working. He was a real advocate for justice who fought against racism.
I first met Michael Kwan and his sister, Karen Kwan, soon after they moved to Utah. Karen is now a member of the Utah House of Representatives. They are true leaders within the community. Michael was a great leader and a true gentleman. He was compassionate and kind. I was privileged to see him often at various events and to call him a friend. It was a distinct honor to know him.
The world would be a better place if there were more people like Judge Michael Kwan. He is greatly missed.
[Source: Salt Lake Tribune] | https://medium.com/the-collector/judge-michael-kwan-was-a-civil-rights-leader-9c0ceb983a38 | ['Floyd Mori'] | 2020-12-14 16:46:20.076000+00:00 | ['History', 'Civil Rights', 'Racism', 'Asian American', 'American History'] |
Diwali firecrackers: There is a reason for severe, targeted crackdown | Image source: Hindustan Times — children playing with sparklers during Diwali
What happens when you bust a firecracker?
Banning the firecrackers has got nothing to do with pollution or controlling the environment. There are many human activities that are worse culprits than bursting firecrackers for a couple of days.
The parali-burning farmers of Punjab cause much more severe damage to the environment than people celebrating a festival that is thousands of years old.
Image source: Down-to-earth
Hundreds of people get affected due to parali burning. The entire North India is choked for more than a month.
The Yamuna River is almost lifeless around Delhi. You do not see water. You just see the white, deadly foam like the white sheet that covers a dead body.
There is industrial pollution. There is traffic pollution. There is noise pollution. Power generation plants are one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide.
Then why ban firecrackers with such fanatic zeal? People are arrested. Shopkeepers are beaten up. Industries are closed.
It is the unabashed sense of celebration that is associated with the act of bursting crackers.
A firecracker is not just fun. It is a declaration to the world that look, I am celebrating my festival. Candidly. I don’t need to explain to anyone why I am bursting firecrackers.
When you burst a firecracker, there is a sudden bang. There is an explosion of light and sound. The sutli bomb shakes the windows and sets off car alarms. The rocket goes up in the sky and then explodes into a heavenly umbrella of sparks. The anaar becomes a fountain of illuminated droplets.
Once ignited, everything is unrestrained.
You cannot burst firecrackers half-heartedly. You either burst them, or you don’t burst them.
It is an unapologetic celebration of a festival. In your own country. Inside your own land. In your own neighborhood. You feel at home.
Diwali as a festival stands out among all other major festivals.
With firecrackers, it is the noisiest festival that creates a spectacle for the entire world to watch.
Nobody remains untouched by Diwali, no matter what your religion is. Everyone bears witness to the celebration whether you are a Muslim, a Christian, or a Sikh.
Of course, you can say that there are celebrations during Christmas and Eid, but these celebrations are confined to certain communities.
Heavy commercialization has popularized Christmas to a great extent, but still, there is a vast part of the country that does not even know that somewhere this festival is being celebrated. Mostly, it is celebrated in small, limited quarters.
The same goes with Eid and its variants. Even when multiple animals are slaughtered and there is copious blood flowing in the streets, it happens in mostly Muslim-majority areas and the normal population isn’t exposed to such barbarities.
But with Diwali, everyone, whether they like it or not, are made aware of the celebration. The festival is celebrated across India with gusto and without any inhibition.
There is no guilt. There is no apology. On the streets you see small children, adults, and even senior citizens, having a go at their favorite firecrackers.
Yes, there is pooja. There are decorations. There is giving and taking of sweets. According to their means, people wear good clothes. They buy jewelry. They go out with family and friends or visit each other.
But you find these attributes in almost every festival. In every festival people pray. In every festival people decorate their homes — these days local malls and markets are decorated with more glitz during Christmas than Diwali. People wear new clothes in almost every festival. Almost in every festival people buy valuable items. They go out to wine and dine in one way or another in almost every festival.
What differentiates Diwali from other festivals? What disturbs the homogeneity and the so-called “syncretic” cultural fabric? The bursting of crackers.
Only Hindus — the so-called majority population of the country — get to celebrate their festival with a bang. On the day of Diwali, they let it be known to the rest of the world that they are celebrating their festival.
This is what disturbs people. This exclusivity. This act of standing out. This act of asserting oneself and celebrating a festival that blasts sound and light into the skies and illuminates the existence of even those who don’t celebrate this festival.
How can this be possible? How come these people who are always supposed to be miserable and who are supposed to constantly apologize for their existence, become so expressive and loud during one of their festivals?
By demanding for a ban on firecrackers and by implementing a ban on firecrackers, they want to push the festival into the pool of homogeneity where it cannot be distinguished from the festivals of other religions. It becomes just one of the festivals. Celebrate Diwali within your boundaries, and don’t show it to the world that as a civilization you’re proud of your festival to such an extent that you make it loud and clear, literally.
Although my main focus is Diwali, this concerted attack is on every Hindu festival that is expressive and assertive. On Holi, don’t waste water. On Rakhi and Karvachauth, don’t indulge in patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Don’t celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi. Abandon the traditions of Janmashtmi. Curtail your traditional cultural games and fairs. It goes on and on.
Every Hindu festival must leave a bad taste. Every Hindu festival must come with a note of caution.
Have you ever seen the mainstream celebrities or our courts lecturing Muslims for indulging in cruelties during Bakreid when millions of animals and birds are slaughtered? They cut live animals in front of small children while the macabre drama of agony and death unfolds right before their eyes, desensitizing them towards blood and gore for life.
Millions of trees are chopped off all over the world during Christmas. I’m not talking about Western countries, but in India, have you ever seen someone lecturing Christians about the importance of preserving flora and fauna?
I’m not saying that Muslims and Christians should be harassed or lectured. But why is it mostly those Hindu festivals that stand out, festivals that are visible, hard to ignore, and in the case of Diwali, even loud?
They cannot stand the pride and the audacious spirit that is displayed during the festival. The concern for pollution is bullshit. It is this audacious spirit that is irksome, which must be curbed. | https://medium.com/@amritsupdates/diwali-firecrackers-there-is-a-reason-for-severe-targeted-crackdown-45e94fc9d0ff | ['Amrit Hallan'] | 2021-11-02 10:33:01.225000+00:00 | ['India', 'Hinduism', 'Festivals', 'Culture', 'Diwali'] |
My Amalfi Coast Experience | | By Kats
Visiting the Amalfi Coast was definitely on my bucket list, and when I started to think about where to go on my next vacation, I knew it had to be there. This was my second time in Italy and I’m sure that I will keep adding this country to my vacations as many times as I can!
Every place we visited was so picturesque and full of charm. The colorful houses carved into the cliffsides were so dreamy and every town had its own magic to the point I don’t think I would be able to pick one as my favorite.
I was a little bit confused when I started planning this trip because of the many options and opinions that I found when doing my research. Should I arrive in Rome? Should I stay in each town for more than two days? Should my base be Sorrento? Should I rent a car? etc; I went with my gut and my budget lol and I love our final itinerary. We traveled to Naples and from there, we arranged for a private car to be waiting for us at the airport to take us to Amalfi. This little town was the perfect way to start our journey because it was not too crazy as many people seem to take day trips to Amalfi instead of staying more days, which made it a little bit more peaceful. While here, we took a Limoncello class and learned how to make this famous drink from scratch, it is truly an art!
After spending some days in Amalfi, we moved to Positano and got to enjoy its beautiful views and unique beaches made of pebbles. Here, I got to see one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen!
From Positano, we rented an Airbnb at Sorrento and stayed there for the rest of the days. From Sorrento, we did many day trips ( We opted for taking the Ferry) to the other towns and it was so nice to come back at night and enjoy Sorrento’s central square and lively streets. I made sure I tried many restaurants and had many amazing coffees throughout the days 🙂 We also did a wine tasting Airbnb experience, and I can truly say it was one of the best nights we had while in Sorrento.
One of my favorite day trips was to Capri. We got a boat tour that took us to the town and gave us enough time to explore this lovely town full of designer boutiques, luxury hotels, and yummy restaurants. we also got to tour the Augustus Gardens, made up of a series of flower-decked terraces overlooking the Bay of Marina Piccola to the right and the Faraglioni to the left.
My favorite part was definitely to explore Capri from the boat. We got to jump out of the boat, swim and explore Marvellous Grotto, the Natural Arch, and Faraglioni rocks!
Here are a few things you should know if you are planning to go to the Amalfi Coast any time soon :
You don’t need to speak Italian as many people speak English, however, knowing a few words in Italian always come handy!
Get ready to walk and to get some hardcore workout for your legs as many of the towns have never-ending stairs
Know that tourism in the Amalfi Coast is getting crazy now, and so the prices! So get ready to pay extra for pretty much everything.
In my opinion, the best sunset views in Positano are at Franco’s bar, inside Le Sirenuse Hotel. You do have to make reservations but it has awesome drinks and it’s the perfect spot to avoid the crazy crowds and get stunning views of this town!
Make sure you check the Airbnb Experiences, as you are supporting the locals and will meet very lovely people who are eager to show you their culture.
When in Italy, go for aperitivo. It’s essentially like our Happy Hour in the states, but better lol and your drink comes with light bites that will hold you over until dinner.
Honestly, I loved to cross this place from my travel bucket list, but I don’t feel any immediate urge to return soon, as I believe there are many other beautiful places to visit in Italy that are not so overpopulated with tourists. it is definitely a place that you should visit once in your lifetime because it’s charm will steal a piece of your heart 🙂
I hope you liked this post and that you find my tips helpful when planning to visit the Amalfi Coast! | https://medium.com/kats-nats/my-amalfi-coast-experience-409137f9a1bd | ['Kats Nats'] | 2020-04-09 16:05:55.269000+00:00 | ['Italy', 'Amalfi Coast', 'Travel'] |
Make a Greener Choice over Noise, This World Environment Day. Get an EV! | As we celebrate World Environment Day, it’s time to take a look at the Electric Vehicles (EV) that can change the way you travel around a city. The more ‘greener’ and leaner alternative to your everyday fuel consuming and polluting drive is here! Its time to take a look at the new EV’s making the world an environmentally safe and greener one. Be a part of the change in Momentum, be a part of the green EV-olution on this Environment Day.
World Environment Day 2020 marks the action taken to bring to light the planet’s pressing needs for environmental change and a call for saving the biodiversity. The Earth has healed itself from our rather cruel practices of depleting everything in our wake. During the lockdown, we find that the Earth has bounced back faster than we could imagine. So now the onus lies on us to take action and take an active part in climate action, which also is the underlying theme for Environment Day 2020.
Join the R-EV-olution
Lights, camera… Climate action
Climate Action calls for every citizen of each country to take a pledge towards a greener and an eco-friendly approach to how we live our lives. Climate Action calls to us to make a promise to keep the Earth- our only home- green and pollution free. Climate Action starts from us, from you and from me. India, surging power of young and dynamic minds is a fertile place to start. Old practices have to be replaced with eco-friendly and sustainable approaches, while not hampering the growth of the nation. Environment Day 2020 brings us an opportunity to change we move and change the momentum towards eco-friendly Electric Vehicles over fuel guzzling cars.
KM- the new age EV — lean, mean …green machine!
Kabira Mobility brings to you the chance towards a momentum of climate action with their range of electrical motors KM-3000, KM -Intercity, and Revolt RV400. These vehicles also qualify for the call of Make in India that our Honourable Prime Minister has been trying to inculcate into our minds. These EVs are an important step towards sustainable development. These bikes boast of good looks and good value for money as they take on the likes of a very widely popular cult following the Royal Enfield and the Activa in its latest avatar the 6G.
These brand-new designs from Kabira Mobility bring to you a chance at climate action with style. These vehicles are eco-friendly and cost effective and would end up paying for themselves in the long run. They are not the bulky and heavy machines of yore but one that will appeal to the new age buyer, with an added tag of environmental change. Keeping the momentum with speeds up to 110km/hr, it’s a shout out to the ones looking out for a new machine. Nevertheless, you will find yourself investing in a machine with climate action at its heart.
Make the lifestyle change
Environment Day 2020 calls for changes in our lifestyle that we have adopted for the past two months of lockdown and keeping the momentum going in the right direction will only further the notion of a cleaner and greener Earth. 50 years hence, we still find ourselves in the quandary harping; the same thing over and over again for climate action, environmental change. When does it change? It’s time when we make a silent pledge to look towards options that will help us grow and in turn, help the environment too!
Take a look at the exciting offering of Kabira Mobility, it just might be the momentum you need in your life. | https://medium.com/kabira-mobility/make-a-greener-choice-over-noise-this-world-environment-day-get-an-ev-e6bb61719a08 | ['Sagar Siwach'] | 2020-06-20 01:20:26.709000+00:00 | ['Mobility', 'Electric Vehicles', 'Electric Scooters', 'Electric Bike', 'Kabira Mobility'] |
It Was Never My Intention to Be a Cougar | “You can have any man you want,” my ex used to say. I’d heard that before and each time I was never quite sure what was meant by it.
I think the statement is ridiculous. If it were true, then I would have dated the most handsome basketball player who was two years ahead of me in high school. As an awkward fifteen-year-old, I used to hope our paths would cross in the hallway as we changed classes. My heart would race with excitement if I spied his tall frame topped with a short mop of curly light brown hair coming my way. He, of course, never once glanced in my direction, Since we’d hadn’t been introduced, he had no idea who I was or that I even existed.
No, there’s no way I can have any man I want. I couldn’t even keep my ex from walking out two years after we married.
So I tell myself.
And yet, I’m dating someone. He’s tall, dark, and handsome. And half my age.
What does that say?
I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately. Apparently I’m not chopped liver. I’ve got some appeal. The idea of this is flattering and, if I’m honest, scary.
I’ve found it hard to own my sex appeal.
I’ve tried to push this guy away several different times. He’s not suitable. Much too young. My sons’ age.
What would a young man see in a middle-aged woman, I’d like to know. I’m not blonde or a size six. I come with some emotional and physical bumps and bruises.
There’s a lot I can’t provide or give him. No more children. Not my youth. Not even a guarantee of decades and decades of life together.
It’s difficult to tell people I’m seeing someone much younger than me, yet I figure I better admit to the age difference since it’s obvious. Thirty years. There’s thirty years between us.
My sons say they don’t care, but they haven’t had to venture into public with us. Will they feel the same then?
Right now, I don’t look my age. That can’t last. At some point, I will, and then someone might refer to me as this guy’s mother. How will it feel when that happens?
Age is just a number, my friends tell me.
There’s some truth to that — some of the time.
I did some research and discovered that, according to public opinion, there’s some benefits dating a younger guy. I’m in good company too. Several other female public figures have dated or are married to much younger men. Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Katie Couric, and Lisa Bonet, to name a few.
My guy says he likes my patience. The way I see the world. My maturity. He finds me sexy, funny, and kind.
I like the way I feel when I’m around him. The way he cares for others and his attention to details impress me. He’s thoughtful and attentive. His sexual stamina is similar to mine, often not the case for men closer in age. He makes me feel young and free. I can be silly. I’m more comfortable with my body as it is and ask for what I need— less encumbered by shame.
It’s great that we are both free from child-rearing responsibilities. He encourages my career rather than seeing it as a threat or competition. His worldview is refreshing, not bogged down with cynicism. He comes with less emotional and relationship baggage.
I worry though. Will I embarrass him in public? Slow him down? What if I get sick with something common to my age? What if he decides he wants kids? What if I really start to show my age?
I find myself careful in referring to my life experiences. It’s weird to consider I’ve spent more years married than he’s been alive. We are at different places in our careers. Mine is winding down while his is just getting started. He’s setting his life goals; I’ve hit most of mine.
It was never my intention to date someone so much younger. To be a cougar. But in truth I’m not. I’ve never approached dating a younger guy in a predatory way to fluff my ego. It was accidental and evolved from his efforts. This type of older woman/younger man relationship needs a new name. Something that reflects the sweetness that I’ve discovered.
Will others approve? I’m sure some will, but many won’t.
But here’s the thing, life is short. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow. I know this better than most after losing my first husband and nearly losing my son to cancer.
All I have is today. This present moment. And for now, I’m enjoying this man’s company. He makes me smile. I feel alive. And isn’t that what’s most important?
I may not be able to have any man I want, as my ex claimed, but it sure is wonderful to be wanted by someone special. | https://medium.com/girl-get-you-shit-together/it-was-never-my-intention-to-be-a-cougar-22de9782926f | ['Kerry Mcavoy'] | 2020-07-18 04:04:56.047000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Love', 'Self Improvement', 'Dating', 'Relationships'] |
Software Engineering — Software Process and Software Process Models (Part 2) | Software Process
A software process (also knows as software methodology) is a set of related activities that leads to the production of the software. These activities may involve the development of the software from the scratch, or, modifying an existing system.
Any software process must include the following four activities:
Software specification (or requirements engineering): Define the main functionalities of the software and the constrains around them. Software design and implementation: The software is to be designed and programmed. Software verification and validation: The software must conforms to it’s specification and meets the customer needs. Software evolution (software maintenance): The software is being modified to meet customer and market requirements changes.
In practice, they include sub-activities such as requirements validation, architectural design, unit testing, …etc.
There are also supporting activities such as configuration and change management, quality assurance, project management, user experience.
Along with other activities aim to improve the above activities by introducing new techniques, tools, following the best practice, process standardization (so the diversity of software processes is reduced), etc.
When we talk about a process, we usually talk about the activities in it. However, a process also includes the process description, which includes:
Products: The outcomes of the an activity. For example, the outcome of architectural design maybe a model for the software architecture. Roles: The responsibilities of the people involved in the process. For example, the project manager, programmer, etc. Pre and post conditions: The conditions that must be true before and after an activity. For example, the pre condition of the architectural design is the requirements have been approved by the customer, while the post condition is the diagrams describing the architectural have been reviewed.
Software process is complex, it relies on making decisions. There’s no ideal process and most organizations have developed their own software process.
For example, an organization works on critical systems has a very structured process, while with business systems, with rapidly changing requirements, a less formal, flexible process is likely to be more effective.
Software Process Models
A software process model is a simplified representation of a software process. Each model represents a process from a specific perspective.
We’re going to take a quick glance about very general process models. These generic models are abstractions of the process that can be used to explain different approaches to the software development. They can be adapted and extended to create more specific processes.
Some methodologies are sometimes known as software development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies, though this term could also be used more generally to refer to any methodology.
Waterfall Model
The waterfall model is a sequential approach, where each fundamental activity of a process represented as a separate phase, arranged in linear order.
In the waterfall model, you must plan and schedule all of the activities before starting working on them (plan-driven process).
Plan-driven process is a process where all the activities are planned first, and the progress is measured against the plan. While the agile process, planning is incremental and it’s easier to change the process to reflect requirement changes.
The phases of the waterfall model are: Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, and Maintenance.
The Waterfall Model
The Nature of Waterfall Phases
In principle, the result of each phase is one or more documents that should be approved and the next phase shouldn’t be started until the previous phase has completely been finished.
In practice, however, these phases overlap and feed information to each other. For example, during design, problems with requirements can be identified, and during coding, some of the design problems can be found, etc.
The software process therefore is not a simple linear but involves feedback from one phase to another. So, documents produced in each phase may then have to be modified to reflect the changes made.
When To Use?
In principle, the waterfall model should only be applied when requirements are well understood and unlikely to change radically during development as this model has a relatively rigid structure which makes it relatively hard to accommodate change when the process in underway.
Prototyping
A prototype is a version of a system or part of the system that’s developed quickly to check the customer’s requirements or feasibility of some design decisions.
So, a prototype is useful when a customer or developer is not sure of the requirements, or of algorithms, efficiency, business rules, response time, etc.
In prototyping, the client is involved throughout the development process, which increases the likelihood of client acceptance of the final implementation.
While some prototypes are developed with the expectation that they will be discarded, it is possible in some cases to evolve from prototype to working system.
A software prototype can be used:
[1] In the requirements engineering, a prototype can help with the elicitation and validation of system requirements.
It allows the users to experiment with the system, and so, refine the requirements. They may get new ideas for requirements, and find areas of strength and weakness in the software.
Furthermore, as the prototype is developed, it may reveal errors and in the requirements. The specification maybe then modified to reflect the changes.
[2] In the system design, a prototype can help to carry out deign experiments to check the feasibility of a proposed design.
For example, a database design may be prototype-d and tested to check it supports efficient data access for the most common user queries.
The process of prototype development
The phases of a prototype are:
Establish objectives: The objectives of the prototype should be made explicit from the start of the process. Is it to validate system requirements, or demonstrate feasibility, etc. Define prototype functionality: Decide what are the inputs and the expected output from a prototype. To reduce the prototyping costs and accelerate the delivery schedule, you may ignore some functionality, such as response time and memory utilization unless they are relevant to the objective of the prototype. Develop the prototype: The initial prototype is developed that includes only user interfaces. Evaluate the prototype: Once the users are trained to use the prototype, they then discover requirements errors. Using the feedback both the specifications and the prototype can be improved. If changes are introduced, then a repeat of steps 3 and 4 may be needed.
Prototyping is not a standalone, complete development methodology, but rather an approach to be used in the context of a full methodology (such as incremental, spiral, etc).
Incremental Development
Incremental development is based on the idea of developing an initial implementation, exposing this to user feedback, and evolving it through several versions until an acceptable system has been developed.
The activities of a process are not separated but interleaved with feedback involved across those activities.
The Incremental Development Model
Each system increment reflects a piece of the functionality that is needed by the customer. Generally, the early increments of the system should include the most important or most urgently required functionality.
This means that the customer can evaluate the system at early stage in the development to see if it delivers what’s required. If not, then only the current increment has to be changed and, possibly, new functionality defined for later increments.
Incremental Vs Waterfall Model
Incremental software development is better than a waterfall approach for most business, e-commerce, and personal systems.
By developing the software incrementally, it is cheaper and easier to make changes in the software as it is being developed.
Compared to the waterfall model, incremental development has three important benefits:
The cost of accommodating changing customer requirements is reduced. The amount of analysis and documentation that has to be redone is much less than that’s required with waterfall model. It’s easier to get customer feedback on the work done during development than when the system is fully developed, tested, and delivered. More rapid delivery of useful software is possible even if all the functionality hasn’t been included. Customers are able to use and gain value from the software earlier than it’s possible with the waterfall model.
It can be a plan-driven or agile, or both
Incremental development is one of the most common approaches. This approach can be either a plan-driven or agile, or both.
In a plan-driven approach, the system increments are identified in advance, but, in the agile approach, only the early increments are identified and the development of later increments depends on the progress and customer priorities.
It’s not a problem-free
But, it’s not a problem-free …
Some organizations have procedures that have evolved over the time, and can’t follow informal iterative or agile process. For example, procedures to ensure that the software properly implements external regulations.
System structure tends to degrades as new increments are added and get corrupted as regular changes are incorporated. Even if time and money spent on refactoring to improve the software, further changes becomes more difficult and costly.
Spiral Model
The spiral model is a risk-driven where the process is represented as spiral rather than a sequence of activities.
It was designed to include the best features from the waterfall and prototyping models, and introduces a new component; risk-assessment.
Each loop (from review till service — see figure below) in the spiral represents a phase. Thus the first loop might be concerned with system feasibility, the next loop might be concerned with the requirements definition, the next loop with system design, and so on.
The spiral model
Each loop in the spiral is split into four sectors:
Objective setting: The objectives and risks for that phase of the project are defined. Risk assessment and reduction: For each of the identified project risks, a detailed analysis is conducted, and steps are taken to reduce the risk. For example, if there’s a risk that the requirements are inappropriate, a prototype may be developed. Development and validation: After risk evaluation, a process model for the system is chosen. So if the risk is expected in the user interface then we must prototype the user interface. If the risk is in the development process itself then use the waterfall model. Planning: The project is reviewed and a decision is made whether to continue with a further loop or not.
Spiral model has been very influential in helping people think about iteration in software processes and introducing the risk-driven approach to development. In practice, however, the model is rarely used.
Iterative Development
Iterative development model aims to develop a system through building small portions of all the features, across all components.
We build a product which meets the initial scope and release it quickly for customer feedback. An early version with limited features important to establish market and get customer feedback.
In each increment, a slice of system features is delivered, passing through the requirements till the deployment.
The phases of iterative development
The phases of iterative development are:
Inception: The goal is to establish a business case for the system. We should identify all the external entities that will interact with the system, and define these interactions. Then, uses this information to assess the contribution that the system makes to the business. If the contribution is minor, then the project may be cancelled. Elaboration: We develop an understanding of the problem domain and architecture framework, develop the project plan, and identify risks. Construction: Incrementally fills-in the architecture with production-ready code produced from analysis, design, implementation, and testing of the requirements. The components of the system are dependent on each other and they’re developed in parallel and integrated during this phase. On the completion of this phase, you should have a complete working software. Transition: We deliver the system into the production operating environment.
All the phases will be done once, while the construction phase will be incrementally visited for each increment; for each slice of system features.
Agile
Agility is flexibility, it is a state of dynamic, adapted to the specific circumstances.
The agile methods refers to a group of software development models based on the incremental and iterative approach, in which the increments are small and typically, new releases of the system are created and made available to customers every few weeks.
The principles of agile methods
They involve customers in the development process to propose requirements changes. They minimize documentation by using informal communications rather than formal meetings with written documents.
They are best suited for application where the requirements change rapidly during the development process.
There are a number of different agile methods available such as: Scrum, Crystal, Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), etc.
Increment Vs Iterative Vs Agile
You might be asking about the difference between incremental, iterative and agile models.
Each increment in the incremental approach builds a complete feature of the software, while in iterative, it builds small portions of all the features.
An agile approach combines the incremental and iterative approach by building a small portion of each feature, one by one, and then both gradually adding features and increasing their completeness.
Reuse-oriented Software Engineering
It’s attempting to reuse an existing design or code (probably also tested) that’s similar to what’s required. It’s then modified, and incorporated to the new system.
The Reuse-oriented software engineering model
Although the initial “requirements specification” phase and the “validation ” phase are comparable with other software processes, the intermediate phases in a reuse-oriented process are different. These phases are:
Component analysis: A search is made for the components to implement the given requirements specification. Usually, there’s no exact match, and components may be only provide some of the functionality required. Requirements modification: During this phase, the requirements are analyzed using information about the components that have been discovered. They are then modified to reflect the available components. If the modifications are impossible, the component analysis activity may be re-entered to search for alternative solutions. System design with reuse: During this phase, the framework of the system is designed or an existing framework is reused. The designers take into account the components that are reused and they will organize the framework accordingly. Some new software has to be designed if some reusable components are not available. Development and integration: The components are integrated to create the new system. System integration, in this model, may be part of the development process rather than a separate activity.
There are basically three types of software components that can be used in a reuse-oriented process:
Web services that are developed according to well-known service standards and which will become available for remote invocation. Collections of objects that are developed as a package to be integrated with a component framework such as .NET or Java EE. Standalone software systems that are configured for use in a particular environment.
It’s has an obvious advantage, But!
Reuse-oriented software engineering has an obvious advantage of reducing the amount of software to be developed and therefore reduced cost and risks, and usually leads to faster delivery.
However, requirements compromises can’t be avoided, which may lead to a system that does not meet the real needs of users.
Furthermore, some control over the system evolution might also be lost as new versions of the reusable components are not under the control of the organization using them.
Summary
Waterfall
It’s useful when the requirements are clear, or following a very structured process as in critical systems which needs a detailed, precise, and accurate documents describes the system to be produced.
Not good when requirements are ambiguous, and doesn’t support frequent interaction with the customers for feedback and proposing changes. It’s not suitable for large projects that might take long time to be developed and delivered.
Prototype
Again, it’s an early sample, or release of a product built to test a concept or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.
This is very useful when requirements aren’t clear, and the interactions with the customer and experimenting an initial version of the software results in high satisfaction and a clearance of what to be implemented.
It’s downsides are, good tools need to be acquired for quick development (like coding) in order to complete a prototype. In addition, the costs for for training the development team on prototyping may be high.
Incremental & Iterative
They’re suited for large projects, less expensive to the change of requirements as they support customer interactions with each increment.
Initial versions of the software are produced early, which facilitates customer evaluation and feedback.
They don’t fit into small projects, or projects that waterfall are best suited for; A structured process with a detailed, and accurate description of the system.
Spiral
It’s good for high risky or large projects where the requirements are ambiguous. The risks might be due to cost, schedule, performance, user interfaces, etc.
Risk analysis requires highly specific expertise, and project’s success is highly dependent on the risk analysis phase. It doesn’t work well for smaller projects.
Agile
It suits small-medium size project, with rapidly changes in the requirements as customer is involved during each phase.
Very limited planning is required to get started with the project. It helps the company in saving time and money (as result of customer physical interaction in each phase). The daily meetings make it possible to measure productivity.
Difficult to scale up to large projects where documentation is essential. A highly skilled team is also needed.
If team members aren’t committed, the project will either never complete or fail. And there’s always a limitation in time, like in increments, meetings, etc.
Process Activities
The four basic process activities of specification, development, validation, and evolution are organized differently in different development processes.
In the waterfall model, they are organized in sequence, while in incremental development they are interleaved. How these activities are performed might depend on the type of software, people involved in development, etc. | https://medium.com/omarelgabrys-blog/software-engineering-software-process-and-software-process-models-part-2-4a9d06213fdc | ['Omar Elgabry'] | 2017-09-28 07:05:46.937000+00:00 | ['Agile', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Software'] |
Power of Positive Attitude Is the Solution | You awaken within the morning sleepy and fatigued; the day has got to start but you are doing not want it to. You stumble around; stub your toe on the dresser and tread on the dog. What does one do, get mad and waste the day with anger or get excited because you awakened this morning and therefore the day goes to be awesome?
Unfortunately, most folks fill our day with negativity from the instant we get out of bed. Then we wonder why our day isn’t the simplest it is often. Attitude affects every aspect of your life- even your on-line business- so why not have an excellent attitude. the great news is you control your attitude, not me not circumstances, and you are doing. whenever you get excited about your day, you made the selection to be excited. once you rehearse your day with negativity it had been a choice you made.
Make the proper Choice
Making the selection to remain positive is a simple task but it takes commitment and can not happen overnight. it’s learning to seek out the positive in every situation and retraining your subconscious mind to think within the positive rather than the negative. Unfortunately, we are bread to think negatively from the time we will walk but we will retrain ourselves to be the positive motivator that takes charge and wins in life.
Make A Goal to vary
People often inquire from me why I’m so happy all the time and that I tell them because I made a goal to regulate my attitude. Setting a goal to form a committee to vary your attitude is the foundation that has got to be laid. If you would like assistance on the way to set a goal.
Affirmations
Affirmations are the key to maintaining a positive attitude. An affirmation may be a positive statement said within the present with conviction. for instance, I’m a money magnet, money flows to me easily and effortlessly or I’m a particularly positive person in the least times. I made an inventory of seven affirmations that I say twice each day a day and that I recommend you are doing an equivalent. I say my affirmations every morning within the shower and in the dark before I’m going to bed and whenever I fill negative about something, this manner they’re going to be embedded in my sub-consciousness throughout the day.
Fight A Negative With A Positive
Every time you discover yourself thinking negatively, turn it into a positive thought and repeat it ten times. It takes 10 positive thoughts to wipe out one negative thought. Everything is often put into a positive; for instance, you’re stuck in hour traffic and you would like to urge home to ascertain your family. this is often a simple situation to urge negative about but instead make it a positive by saying this is often awesome, I now have time to clear my head from work so once I get home I can give my family my full attention. Now once you get home you’re during a great mood and prepared to play with the youngsters rather than being grumpy.
Five Ways to Stay Positive in a Negative World
In view of the increasing negative events happening around the world here are five belongings you can do to assist you to stay positive.
1. Take news sabbatical. taking note of the news are often downright depressing. All bad news all of the time can drag you down and keep you there. Give yourself permission to prevent taking note of the news, especially before bedtime.
2. Use your influence to try to good where you reside. Shift your focus from what’s happening in other parts of the planet to your community. become involved in making a positive change or contribution.
3. specialise in what’s working in your life. Choose one thing that you simply are grateful for and specialise in it for the remainder of the day.
For the last two tips visit 👉👉👉 Okexprt.co
If you like the article then don’t forget to clap. | https://medium.com/@okexprt/power-of-positive-attitude-is-the-solution-e2dcf26b9380 | ['Gaurav Mazumder'] | 2020-10-10 17:35:06.578000+00:00 | ['Positive Attitude', 'Attitude', 'Solutions', 'Life'] |
Beginner guide to the Decred (DCR) Lightning Network | A guide to test the Decred Lightning Network (dcrlnd) for beginners.
The Lightning Network (LN) was originally designed to make fast and cheap microtransactions on Bitcoin possible. The technology scales the transaction throughput of BTC to nearly infinite transactions per second since it’s a second layer solution. Fortunately the LN can be implemented on top of other blockchains as well. Decred is one of the first to do so.
This guide will show you how to use the LN on the Decred testnet. Testing is important to filter out the last bugs and it’s useful for anyone who wants to try out this new technology without risking real money.
If you have any questions, join the Decred chat rooms!
Steps to take:
1. You must have Decrediton installed
decred.org/wallets
If you already have Decrediton installed, check if you have the latest version (which is 1.5 at the time of writing)
2. Edit the config file to set "ln_enabled" to true
Make sure the Decrediton wallet is closed
Look for the config file in the Decrediton folder. The location of the config file location depends on OS: docs.decred.org/wallets/decrediton/decrediton-troubleshooting/#location-of-data-and-log-files
Open the config file with a text editor
Change the “ln_enabled” setting to true
3. Edit the config file to switch to testnet
In the same config file, switch “network” to “testnet”
4. Create a testnet wallet and let it sync (no SPV)
Start Decrediton and create (or restore) a full testnet wallet
While you wait for synchronization, go read some comics
5. Open your wallet and get free test DCR
faucet.decred.org will give free test DCR
6. Create a new DCRLND Wallet
If you did step 2 correctly, you can access the “Lightning Network” menu of your wallet to create a new LN Wallet
Decide if you want autopilot (not needed for this guide)
Click on “Start And Unlock LN Wallet”
Switch to the “Accounts” menu
Your new LN Account should show up
7. Send test DCR from the default to LN account
To use the LN Wallet you must have funds in it.
Go to the “Transactions” menu
In the “Send” tab, click the icon next to the “From” field
Select your new LN Account in the “To” field
Transfer a small amount to open a few channels
Go back to the “Lightning Network” menu
Wait for confirmation
Congratulations, you are now ready to open channels ✅
8a. Open channels with LN Faucets on testnet
Go to the “Channels” tab in the “Lightning Network” menu
Go to one of the LN Faucets on testnet:
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com
Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name Scroll all the way down to the bottom
Copy the (node@ip:port) data shown above
Go back to your Decrediton wallet
Paste the data into the “Counterparty” field
Determine how big the channel should be
The “Push Amount” option allows you to send some DCR to the other party so you can receive them back as payments to test the channel. They are essentially a gift to the remote end to test all the functions
to the remote end to test all the functions Click on “Open” and wait for confirmation
After confirmation, the pending channel will show as open
You can also view the channel status on the LN Faucet page
8b. Open channels with other LN nodes
Go to the “Channels” tab in the “Lightning Network” menu
Go to the testnet LN Map: ln-map-testnet.jamieholdstock.com
Choose a reachable node you want to connect with
(sometimes a node might show up as reachable, while the underlying dcrlnd node is not responding due to some issue)
Find the “Pubkey” and “Addresses” of the node
Go back to your Decrediton wallet
Enter Pubkey@Addresses into the “Counterparty” field
Determine how big the channel should be
The “Push Amount” option allows you to send some DCR to the other party so you can receive them back as payments to test the channel. They are essentially a gift to the remote end to test all the functions
to the remote end to test all the functions Click on “Open” and wait for confirmation.
After confirmation, the pending channel will show as open
You can view all the open channels on the testnet LN Map
9. Close channels from your wallet
Go to the “Channels” tab in the “Lightning Network” menu
Click the cross in the right upper corner of an open channel
Click on “Confirm” and wait for confirmation
10a. How to create LN invoices
To receive value on the LN (within a channel or via hops), you must create an invoice. Every invoice can only be paid once.
Go to the “Invoices” tab in the “Lightning Network” menu
Add a fitting description
Request a value of maximum 0.00001 DCR
(maximum only applies to faucet invoices)
(maximum only applies to faucet invoices) Click on the blue plus
Copy the invoice code
Optional: let the LN Faucet pay your invoice
When exchanging value with other LN nodes (step 8b), you simply send them the invoice code via chat. The other party can then pay the invoice (step 10b). If you are testing things out alone, use the LN Faucet to pay your invoices.
Go to one of the LN Faucets on testnet:
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com
Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name Scroll down to the “Pay Invoice” section
Paste your invoice code into the “Invoice code” field
Click on “Pay Invoice” ✅
The paid invoice should show up in the “Latest Invoices” section
Optional: generate invoices with the LN Faucet
When exchanging value with LN other nodes (step 8b), you will receive their invoice codes. You can then follow the steps below in 10b. If you are testing things out alone, use the LN Faucet to generate valid invoices.
Go to one of the LN Faucets on testnet:
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com
Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name
Example: testnet-dcrln-01.matheusd.com Alternative: testnet-dcrln-01.davec.name Scroll down to the “Generate Invoice” section
Add a fitting description
Choose an invoice amount
Click on “Generate Invoice”
Copy the invoice code
10b. How to send LN payments
To send payments via the LN (within a channel or via hops), you must ask the other party for a valid invoice. Every invoice can only be paid once.
Go to the “Payments” tab in the “Lightning Network” menu
Paste an invoice code into the “Payment Request” field
The invoice details will automatically appear
Click on “Send” ✅
The payment should show up in the “Latest Payments” section
Final notes
You should now have an idea about the basics of the Lightning Network. The user interface for Decrediton will likely change in the future, but the basic concepts will stay the same.
Thank you for helping us test the Decred Lightning Network and remember to send your test DCR back to the faucet after you’re done!
If you want to do a command line tutorial, read this post by Decred developer fguisso and check out the dcrlnd documentation.
If you want to learn more about the Lightning Network, watch these videos:
This episode explores the inner workings of the Lightning Network | https://medium.com/decred/beginner-guide-to-the-decred-dcr-lightning-network-917f8ad304aa | [] | 2020-01-22 11:54:38.412000+00:00 | ['Blockchain Scalability', 'Lightning Network', 'Bitcoin', 'Second Layer', 'Decred'] |
Connection between Mental Health & Physical Health | We live in a world where problems related to physical health and body are given extraordinary importance and attention while the most important organ which is literally responsible for the wellness of our body, our brain is neglected. A bruise, an upset stomach, a fractured bone makes you run to the hospital as soon as possible but a disturbed mood, unknown agony and frustration, damaged mind does not bother you much. Why? Mainly because there is a general lack of understanding regarding the colligation between mental and physical health.
The most common physiological illnesses like Diabetes, Hypertension have psychological root causes but there has been no focus on behavioral interventions to treat these diseases. Nothing can be treated permanently if the root cause is not touched.
Mental and Physical health is strongly linked to each other. Any disturbances in neurotransmitters leading to psychological disturbances can also lead to physical illnesses or symptoms. Almost 80% percent of the patients are reffered to a psychiatric setting with an underlying psychological problem.
The most important part is to educate yourselves and others the impact of an unhealthy mind on our physical health and daily life activities. Sometimes, symptoms of mental disturbances are manifested as low energy, fatigue, lethargy, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances. One can not be treated for such symptoms until there is no complete psychological wellness.
A healthy mind leads to a healthy body and a healthy life overall. It is important and necessary for us to educate and be educated on such undermined topics. Poor mental health can make it extremely difficult to cope with physiological illnesses therefore it is essential to look after our mental and physical health both. | https://medium.com/@mominahambreen/connection-between-mental-health-physical-health-8a625c7157fe | ['Mominah Ambreen'] | 2020-12-24 13:31:33.713000+00:00 | ['Physical Health', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Mental Health Treatment', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology'] |
Flutter Secure your sensitive data | Let’s see how secured it goes
In this situation, I’m going to show you how to retrieve data from Android side, on a signed apk file. I want to know is signing an application with a keystore add extra security, especially to the text assets db.properties I have. As a reminder, this file is here to demonstrate that this is not secured (and we will see why).
There is two ways to retrieve the apk file: directly from the output of flutter build command, or from an installed apk (on your device).
Before investigating apk, I will show you both ways :D.
Retrieve installed APK (the hard way)
Even if this is my own application, I feel like an hacker…
Before starting, check that tools using adb are terminated (check that you closed all applications using adb such as intelliJ, Android Studio, Flutter debug plugin,…).
First, connect your device to your computer, and check that your android device is recognized, using adb devices command in a Terminal (cmd console on Windows computers).
I suggest you to have only one device found. Else each command will need you to specify the device.
Then, you will have to find the package name of your application. You can find it in the build.gradle file, located in ./android/app/ folder. In my case, this is ‘com.example.encrypted_db’.
Locate your apk path using the command adb shell pm path [your_package_name].
Then retrieve the apk using adb pull [device_path] [computer_path] command.
Retrieve compiled apk (the easy way)
You can retrieve the compiled apk too, that may be easier. At this stage, I consider that you have created your keystore, modified required files and compiled the apk using the command flutter build apk.
And… that’s it. The command show you where the apk file is!
Ok now let’s go into serious business
Retrieve embedded file from an apk
Serious things start here. First, an apk is nonetheless an archive file. So here is the trick: change its extension to “.zip”, then decompress it. It may only work in a Terminal/cmd console.
Next, go to the unzipped folder. You will be able to find the database in the assets/flutter_assets/ folder.
And (not) magically, when we try to open it using DB Browser for sqlite, a popup is asking you to write password.
That the level of security we wanted. But the password is plain, either in db.properties file and in the source code. We can easily find db.properties as plain text file inside the apk, so that’s definitively the worst it.
Finding password in the compiled code is a little bit harder.
To do that, we will have to use specific tools, that will dump data from compiled objects. As you may know, in release apk your code will be compiled a-head of time (AOT), in the form of “.so” files.
On my side, I used the arm linux toolchains for MAC OS (https://github.com/thinkski/osx-arm-linux-toolchains). You may have a windows equivalent, but I haven’t tested on that platform.
Then, we will dump objects from the main compiled file: libapp.so, located inside the unzipped apk in the lib/arm64-v8a folder.
Finally dump object using command aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu-objdump -s [compiled_file] (or equivalent on windows and linux).
You shall to store output into a file to process data later ;)
I wrote ouput into reverse.txt file, let’s see what’s in there. By searching plain password text, we can see that we are able to retrieve database name and password, if we know what we are searching!
In red, plain password. In green, database name. | https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-secure-your-sensitive-data-2869239e6f9a | ['David Gonzalez'] | 2021-01-31 03:12:24.138000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Encryption', 'Flutter', 'Android', 'Reverse Engineering'] |
Closure — You Keep On Using That Word | For some time I’ve noticed that people are using the word “closure” for things that — at least from my perspective, knowledge of English, and programming background — aren’t closures. They keep using the word, when that’s not what it means.
I dunno thin it mins wha yew thin it mins
This has been going on for about a decade and a half and I’ve just bit my tongue, but it’s getting ridiculous at this point, and this abuse/misuse comes with a hefty penalty.
Right now programmers galore — particularly those versed in JavaScript — are running about using the term to refer to any block of code that’s self contained or has a scope isolating behavior; like a function or bracketed block.
Maybe it’s my having learned “real’ programming in assembler long before Tim Berners-Lee even created HTML. Maybe it’s my having spent a decade writing code in Ada. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to have least been taught about PAL despite not having ever actually programmed for it…
… but from everything I ever learned be it programming or English, that’s not a closure.
Then What Is a Closure?
What I was taught in decades past is that a closure is something that ENDS a block of code or execution path. It’s part of the word, closure. From the root “Close”. Like a door. Lands sake people get a dictionary:
clo·sure
/ˈklōZHər/
An act or process of closing something, especially an institution, thoroughfare, or frontier, or of being closed. (in a legislative assembly) a procedure for ending a debate and taking a vote. A sense of resolution or conclusion at the end of an artistic work.
Therefor in programming:
These Things Are Closures:
The closing } in C syntax languages like C, C++, JavaScript Java, PHP The keyword “end” in Wirth family languages like Pascal, Modula 2, and Ada. “return”, “break”, and “continue” as they pass control back from the current block and/or function RET, JMP, and so forth in assembler / machine language
At least, that’s what it meant when the term was coined for programming back in the 60’s and continued to mean until about a decade or two ago. That’s how I learned it in the ‘80’s.
It seems that JavaScript in particular seems to have this addle-minded obsession with the concept of scope blocks being a “closure”, with such trash as LET/CONST being proof enough of that. As apparently JavaScript fanboys are too feeble minded — or just plain lazy in naming conventions — for function level scoping to be sufficient.
Talk about solutions in search of a problem! And remember, that’s coming from someone well versed in Ada.
Why Is “Using the Wrong Word” Bad? You Mentioned a “Hefty Penalty”
It’s confusing for beginners and old-timers alike!
Much like the W3C’s halfwit gibberish use of the word “empty” where <div></div> is not what they mean by an “empty tag”. Or “deprecated’ where they make it sound like we’re talking down to them like a petulant five year-old instead of being reduced in value (depreciated). It leads to confusion, misunderstandings, and just plain verbal gymnastics to explain a very VERY simple concepts.
Hence why we have know-nothing XML fanboys who STILL don’t understand why <DIV /> is invalid HTML or even XHTML regardless of which spec you’re using!
I often feel like certain groups in society — and this extends beyond programming — go out of their way to use obtuse, esoteric, and often incorrect language for the sole purpose of maintaining their L33T status. See legal lingo where a lawyer or judge will ask “can you make arrears” — a word nobody outside a courtroom uses in normal speech — rather than saying “can you pay the money owed?” It’s a way to confuse or mislead normal people with a less established vocabulary.
I even had a lawyer explain legalese to me in those terms:
The language of law and lawyers exists so that those educated in it can take advantage of those who are not. Words rare in the common vernacular are chosen so that a normal person has little chance of deciphering the procedure or intent of the process.
In the case of programming this seems equally true. The simplest of things — HTML and CSS for example — are poorly explained, poorly laid out, horrifically poorly documented, and rely on market-speak double-talk to try and make things look harder.
Often this is done simply to make using these languages look more difficult than they are, oft so that those who do understand it can mislead, lie, or outright scam people with snake oil. Worse than that though, is how it more often than not is nothing more than catch-phrases and rhetoric parroted by those who don’t actually even understand what they themselves are saying. It’s a cover used by stupid people to try make things sound more important than they are.
For all intents and purposes I keep expecting certain development “experts” to start talking about how proactive their paradigms are.
There’s a reason when people start talking about software “ecosystems” I assume they’re playing bullshit bingo. After 40+ years writing software, a lot of these sick buzzwords are a good indication of when it’s time to cut your losses and run.
When you use a word for something it doesn’t even mean, OF COURSE BEGINNERS ARE GOING TO GET CONFUSED! You can see it on development forums, comments here on medium, and even in many articles on the topic people having issues understanding what’s being called “closures”. A good chunk of that simply boils down to effete know-nothings blindly parroting THE WRONG HUFFING WORD!!!
So What Is The Right Word?
ENCLOSURE!
Because it wraps around it. Like a fence or other barrier.
en·clo·sure
/inˈklōZHər,enˈklōZHər/
An area that is surrounded by a barrier. The state of being enclosed, especially in a religious community. A document or object placed in an envelope together with a letter.
Seriously people, get a copy of Oxford’s!
I’m willing to bet there would be a lot less confusion or issues explaining the structure of functions or scope blocks if instead of mislabeling it a “closure” you called it an enclosure.
Just like as George Carlin joked, if they still called it “Shell Shock” I bet some of those Vietnam vets would have gotten the help they needed.
Clean, simple, direct, honest language. Nope, can’t have that in the programming world, how else can we stay head and shoulders above the “mere mortals”.
Ray, you’re scaring the straights.
Conclusion
I’m not sure why the past 15–20 years the term has become twisted into meaning something it’s not supposed to, but you’re just making it harder for the normies to make sense of things.
Like a great many things in programming it seems to exist for the sole purpose of continuing the bald faced lie that “programming is hard”… like a cut rate ripoff of the “Math Barbie”.
Though as Hanlon’s Razor explains: one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/closure-you-keep-on-using-that-word-348039c2fa22 | ['Jason Knight'] | 2020-11-29 08:34:39.270000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'PHP'] |
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Read More | https://medium.com/@loseweight648/prostate-healthy-foods-7c68e4c224a5 | ['Health'] | 2020-12-24 02:43:20.610000+00:00 | ['Healthy Lifestyle Tips', 'Health', 'Fitness', 'Health Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle'] |
Writing Goals: 2021 | 10-part series for writers to consider what we did in 2020 and will do in 2021.
I thought I would reprise something I’ve done in December the last few years with the hope it would benefit as many of you as possible in taking concrete steps forward next year with your writing aspirations.
It’s a very simple thing, really — setting goals — but for many, if not most people, it is an invaluable part of their creative process. You can go here to read some background on why setting goals is important and how to be S.M.A.R.T. about it.
You may be someone who likes to set goals. Or someone who hates it. Maybe you’ve never really tried to formalize the process.
Whatever your inclinations or prior experience has been, I encourage you to try it for 2021. Three big reasons why:
With all its distractions, life has a way of dissipating positive energy. We may have some general sense of what we’d like to accomplish, but the mere fact we live with the gigantic time-suck that is the Internet, that alone has a way of squandering countless hours of time when we could be writing. One of the best ways I know to deal with this natural tendency toward dissolution of focus is to take a definitive stand: Declare your intentions and stay fixed on those goals every day.
If you’re familiar with Script Girl, her tagline offers one of the most fundamental truths about the screenwriting business there is: “You can’t sell it, if you don’t write it.” You have to finish that script. In fact, to maximize your chances at success, let me amend that last statement: You have to finish those scripts. As in plural. The more scripts you write, the more you understand the craft, the better you get as a writer, and the more you prepare yourself for a possible career as a screenwriter. Plus, you have more content to show to managers and agents. And each of those scripts represents a story you can sell potentially. But if you don’t write them… cue Script Girl.
You have to finish that script. In fact, to maximize your chances at success, let me amend that last statement: You have to finish those scripts. As in plural. The more scripts you write, the more you understand the craft, the better you get as a writer, and the more you prepare yourself for a possible career as a screenwriter. Plus, you have more content to show to managers and agents. And each of those scripts represents a story you can sell potentially. But if you don’t write them… cue Script Girl. There’s an anecdote I believe in William Goldman’s memoir “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” still perhaps the best book about screenwriting even thirty plus years after its publication. As I recall the story, Goldman was friends with a top NBA basketball player, a man renowned for the amount of time he spent practicing. Even after he had become a successful professional athlete, he was the kind of guy who would be shooting jump shots in a lonely gym after midnight. Goldman asked him, “Why do you practice so much.” The player’s answer: “Because when I’m not practicing, someone else is.” The screenwriting version: If you’re not writing, someone else is. Screenwriting is an incredibly competitive field. To give yourself an edge over the competition, you simply have to spend time — a lot of it! — writing.
Three reasons for you to be serious about setting writing goals for 2021.
Part 1: Looking Back
Part 2: Assessing Where You Are
Part 3: Where Do You Want To Go As A Writer?
Part 4: Practical Matters
Part 5: Going Public
Part 6: Schedule
Part 7: Time Management
Part 8: First Draft
Page 9: The Only Way Out Is Through
Page 10: Trust the Process
Bottom line: Set some specific, achievable writing goals for 2021. | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/writing-goals-2021-51500e49a92f | ['Scott Myers'] | 2020-12-22 14:03:53.211000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Productivity', 'Fiction', 'Screenwriting', 'Creativity'] |
The Boy who lived — Orphans in popular fiction | I’ve been reading a lot this week. About the boy who lived and the boy who became you-know-who (Harry Potter and the half-blood prince), the boy who asked for more (Oliver Twist in a graphic novel adaptation, Fagin the Jew), the boy who became Bond (James Bond Origin #1 by Jeff Parker). Despite the different genres and different times at which they were written, what links them all is a central character who is an orphan. Come to think of it, a lot of heroes and villains in fiction are orphans. Wikipedia lists 2 full pages of fictional characters spanning classics, superheroes, fairy tales and popular fiction that are orphans.
What makes them so appealing? Orphans offer an easy way out for writers, achieving many objectives with just one choice of character, an orphan. A relatable character who evokes the reader’s sympathy, a solid backstory that explains the character’s driving force in life, loss and vengeance as compelling plot themes and avoiding plot complexity by eliminating distractions (i.e family).
Parents or family represent all that is right in the world — love, safety, comfort, order. Losing them early is the jolt that makes the hero step out of his comfort zone for a life less ordinary and achieve his true calling. Around the time the hero makes this leap to leave the familiar, he usually gets a gift and a guide (eg. Harry Potter’s magic and Dumbledore, Cinderella’s glass slipper and fairy Godmother). We now have the makings of a good plot that has stood the test of time — a gifted orphan and a guide. It works well across a wide range of stories, from fairy tales to superheroes.
What makes some orphans heroes and others villains? Characters whose parents represent all the positives (love, safety, comfort) use this as a driving force to be good and do good. Characters whose parents are not associated with these positives distance themselves from these virtues and turn evil. Harry and Lord Voldemort are both orphans but they are like chalk and cheese. Harry fondly remembers his parents as being loving and virtuous. He often uses them as reference for how he should act in any situation. Lord Voldemort came from a broken family, his father abandoned his mother upon discovering that she had bewitched him. He is embarrassed about this past, disassociates himself with his parents, is unable to love or trust anyone and decides that he is destined to be special.
The absence of a mentor or friend in his life is a key difference too. While Harry has Dumbledore, his friends and a circle of well wishers, Voldemort is unable to trust or love and shuns any offers of help. This explains to a great extent how circumstances of birth, a loving family and a strong mentor determines whether the orphan turns out to be a hero or villain. But it does not explain all.
There are more similarities in the circumstances of birth of Oliver Twist and Voldemort than any other fictional characters, yet there cannot be two more different characters. Oliver Twist’s unspoiled goodness and Voldemort’s embodiment of pure evil have similar backstories. Oliver Twists’s mum is poor and ill, walks some distance to the workhouse, gives birth to him and dies. Voldemort’s mum, Merope staggers up to the orphanage, gives birth to the boy, names him and dies. Neither has a ring on her finger. Why are the characters polar opposites, despite identical circumstanes of birth? In these stories, both characterizations are explained by the innate qualities of good/evil that have little to do with their birth. Nature vs. nurture, the eternal debate.
What can be conclusively said of orphans in stories is that they are far too many to ignore, they evoke an emotional response in their audience, they offer writers many benefits in story telling and they can turn out to be the hero or villain based on the writer’s fancy. | https://medium.com/@aparna81/the-boy-who-lived-orphans-in-popular-fiction-e0fd80b67916 | ['Aparna Dubey'] | 2020-03-17 02:52:29.092000+00:00 | ['Popular Culture', 'Curious', 'Fiction', 'Writers Life', 'Harry Potter'] |
A grandmaster strategy in crypto trading | A grandmaster strategy in crypto trading
The keys to big money wins and absolute zero losses
Photo by Mark Finn on Unsplash
Is it possible to have absolute zero losses? Emphatically yes! For you to make losses, you have to sell below the price you made the buy. As a crypto strategist, I don’t believe in stop-loss. The first rule of investing (in my own opinion) is; NEVER LOSE MONEY! Stop-loss makes you accept losses which only proves the fact that you didn’t do your homework correctly when you made the buy. This is why I don’t listen to the TA guys and chartists. Not that I ignore them totally but I don’t follow their tips or methods, however they give some nice perspectives which may be helpful in my own assessment. If you are not calling your own shots, you are not a trader.
The crypto world of trading is different from the traditional stock market. Certain principles and strategies that work well for the stock market won’t work for the crypto world. Some might want to compare crypto trading to forex, CFDs, and the likes, but I don’t think they are similar. Forex (and the likes) are too close to gambling as far as I am concerned. The fact that a person can lose more than the amount invested is disturbing. I’ve seen people move from 0 to 100 very quickly in forex but go from 100 to -1,000 twice as fast. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like uncertainty. I trade crypto for short term gains because I believe in its long term prospects. This is why no red market bothers me.
This is a glimpse into my strategy of trading and I hope it helps someone wake up and stop making losses. There are fundamental realities that I have come to terms with that affects the crypto world. Structuring your trading after those facts will help you trade well. Here are 5 of them:
Good news from the team makes coin surge in value. And you can’t calculate for that When bitcoin sinks, most other coins also sink but at a faster rate When volume picks up, prices go up Today’s top gainers (especially those that gained over +40%) are tomorrow’s top losers. (Unfortunately, the vice versa doesn’t work) Every coin will have its day
Follow these 5 points and you’ll never lose money in crypto trading. Develop a strategy that respects these laid out points. Now, I must add that crypto trading is not a job. I do not consider it a job and certainly do not recommend it to anyone as a job. A job is what you do to add value that you are paid for. If you are buying and selling without doing anything to what you bought between the time you bought and sold, then that is not a job. It’s just a nice, smart skill. So, if you don’t have a job or a good source of income and you rely solely on crypto trading for income, you will lose money and will be a bad trader. This is because you will be desperate and unexpected market turns will make you literally sick. So, the ground rule of crypto trading is to have a source of income that can pay for your lifestyle already. Then crypto trading can help with the occasional big money flows.
To make money and never lose it is very simple in crypto. All you have to do is to never sell when you are in losses. And one way to see to that is to only buy the dip. How do you know the dip is the dip? Simple! Generate the chart; look at the 1 hr (that tells you what is happening at the moment), then the 12 hr (that tells you what the recent story is), then the 3 day (to know how it got to the 12 hr scenario) and finally the 1 month (to get the broad perspective). If you want to take a step further into genius, compare the long term coin chart with the chart of bitcoin of the same time frame. That will tell you what price is really the dip (relative to the price of bitcoin).
Just because you caught the dip doesn’t mean it can’t go dipper. How to catch the dip in the first place is to use limit order. My tip is to use like 1/4th of the amount you have set apart for this particular trade for this first dip. Then, set a price alarm for perhaps 3% further dip. If it achieves this in a very short time, go buy again with 1/8th of the amount you set for it. If the timeline is quite longer, another 1/4 might be ideal. And then on and on like that if it continues to dip. But then when it surges over your initial buy price by 6% (or even less, this depends on you) begin to sell gradually. Use limit order also. Check what the highest price for the day was and set a price a few inches lower. When trading volume begins to stagnate, that is your cue to take the rest of your stake out while you are still in profit (unless of course if you are holding for the long term or planning to use crypto coin for something different).
This is of course not an investment advice, it is just a glimpse into how I do my things. I do not get steady income from it but when I rake in, I rake in good. I don’t try to make smart decisions, I make decisions I’m comfortable with and wait for the day the market makes me look like a genius. Sometimes it’s hours, sometimes it takes weeks. But I’m not in a hurry, so I never lose money. I made up my mind that I’ll rather lose time than lose money. Which will you rather lose; time or money?
P.S. You can connect with me on twitter here | https://medium.com/hackernoon/a-grandmaster-strategy-in-crypto-trading-9e62a338f3e0 | ['David O.'] | 2018-06-13 10:26:29.272000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Blockchain', 'Trading', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
DevOps online Training | Mindbox Training | Over 13+ weeks of lectures ( 3+ Months Advanced Program )
Pre-requisites — 1 week
( Basic & Advanced Concepts on Linux | Shell Scripting & Phyton will part of the training program as self Spaced )
Kubernetes — 2 weeks
Kubernetes Project — 1 week
Kubernetes Orchestration and Cloud — 2 weeks
Kubernetes Orchestration and Cloud Project — 1 week
Config Management and Monitoring — 2 weeks
Config Management and Monitoring Project — 1 week
CI/CD — 2 weeks
CI/CD Project — 1 week
4 Live Projects
Daily Assignments
Recorded Sessions
4 Months LMS Access | https://medium.com/@lohithakaran/devops-online-training-mindbox-training-20579fd1c68d | ['Lohitha Karan'] | 2020-12-11 16:13:27.640000+00:00 | ['Institute In Hyderabad', 'Onlin', 'Training', 'DevOps', 'Institute'] |
4 Ways To Increase Your Success Rate When Setting Goals | As we approach the new year I am beginning to review the results of my annual goals for 2020 and plan out my goals for 2021.
Goals are such a key area in leadership. They help us determine our priorities and where we should direct our energy to improve ourselves and our team. Goals also keep us on track and give us focus, rather than going through life aimlessly not really knowing what we want.
How do you know if you are heading in the right direction if you don’t have specific milestones to track your progress? If an employee doesn’t have specific targets which are reviewed on a regular basis, how do they know if they are performing at the required level? If you have no way of tracking performance how do you know what good looks like? You have no benchmark. As you can see, goals allow us to monitor progress and evaluate what is working and what isn’t.
If you want to fill a sense of direction, progression and fulfilment then you need to set yourself and your team meaningful goals. Goals will help you achieve a lot more in a shorter period of time because they help you get crystal clear on what you want to achieve.
Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
Here are 4 things that will help you achieve a higher level of success when setting goals.
1) Focus — if you don’t have goals, you don’t have a target which you are shooting for. Goals give you a sense of direction which you can align your focus on. Is the work you are doing right now important, and a step towards your goal? or is it just busy work which gives you a feeling of being productive? When setting your goals, be super clear so you can narrow your focus. “I want to be a better leader” is not a goal, goals should be SMART. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound.
2) Plan — goals are great as they give you a target to focus your attention on. But goals alone aren’t enough. You need a plan, what are the 10 steps that you need to take to hit your goal this year? They can be rough for now, but write them down and get started.
Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash
3) Limit — identify the critical few goals you want and remove the rest. Be realistic with the number but ambiguous with those few you choose as annual goals. There is a lot of evidence around goal setting that if you have too many you end up getting distracted and not achieving anything. It’s better to focus your time and energy in taking 10 steps in one direction, rather than one step in 10 directions.
Robert Brault quoted:
“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
Lesser important goals become a distraction, delete them off your list and focus on the things you are most hungry for.
4) Why — you need to have a why and purpose behind why this goal is important. If you want to run a sub 20min 5k, why? Get to the root cause of your reason. Ask yourself why until you get to it. If it’s just because you want to, then you’re probably not going to put the required level of effort over a sustained period. But if your why is by running more often and quicker you are maintaining the health of your body and mind for years to come, which will help you lead a more fulfilling lifestyle and see your children grow up, then this type of why will help you to come back for more. A why keeps you going through adversity and set back. Know why you do what you do.
As you take stock of your performance both professionally and personally for 2020, what ambitious goals can you set and begin working on as we enter 2021?
All the best
David
Resources Of The Week
Blog — MindTools Personal Goal Setting. Here is another great article from the team at MindTools on Goal Setting including plenty of best practices in being successful when setting goals.
— MindTools Personal Goal Setting. Here is another great article from the team at MindTools on Goal Setting including plenty of best practices in being successful when setting goals. Blog Post — 6 Habits Of Highly Productive People. An article I wrote on Medium sharing 6 secrets on how high performers manage their time.
— 6 Habits Of Highly Productive People. An article I wrote on Medium sharing 6 secrets on how high performers manage their time. YouTube — Simon Sinek on Why you Win with Consistency. Simon talks through why all the small things and the daily occurrences help you achieve your goals. Not one-off events.
Quote of the Week
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” — Dwayne Johnson
If this newsletter has been useful to you or you think it might be to a colleague or friend, please subscribe here. | https://medium.com/@david-marsh/4-ways-to-increase-your-success-rate-when-setting-goals-7fff210dfdba | ['David Marsh'] | 2020-12-17 11:43:03.567000+00:00 | ['Goals', 'Leadership', 'Leadership Development', 'Management'] |
Neden Paris anlaşmasını hemen onaylamak lazım? | Turkey
Turkey is at a crossroads with regards to its energy future: current government plans foresee decreasing its dependency… | https://medium.com/@guvsak/neden-paris-anla%C5%9Fmas%C4%B1n%C4%B1-hemen-onaylamak-laz%C4%B1m-3e0d7f13899e | ['Güven Sak'] | 2020-12-23 09:07:26.823000+00:00 | ['Paris Climate Accord', 'Human Development Index', 'Anthropocene', 'Undp', 'Turkey'] |
Time Series Forecasting Using Past and Future External Data with Darts | Evaluating Models
Now that we have our data, we can already think about how we would want to evaluate and compare the different models we’ll build. Below we write a small function which performs backtesting and evaluates the accuracy of a 10-days ahead predictions over the last 20% of the flow series, using RMSE:
First Model: No Covariate
Let’s first create a BlockRNNModel . These models support past_covariates , but here in order to get a first benchmark, we’ll fit it on the target only and see what we get. We somewhat arbitrarily select an input_chunk_length of 30 (this corresponds to the lookback window of the model), and we set the output_chunk_length to 10 , as this is the horizon we’re interested to forecast:
Block RNN model without covariate. Backtest RMSE = 0.194
Second Model: Using Past Melting Data
Let’s now try to provide the melting series as a past_covariates to the model fit() function. Doing this means that the model will look at the past 30 time steps of melting (in addition to the past 30 time steps of the target) when producing a forecast.
Block RNN model with melting as a past covariate. Backtest RMSE = 0.172
This already improved the RMSE from 0.194 to 0.172, which is not bad; looking at the past melting helps because it determines part of the current flow.
Third Model: Using Past Melting and Past Rainfall Data
We can seamlessly extend this to use both the past melting and past rainfall data. The rainfall is known in advance, but here we specify it as a past_covariates , which means that the model will only look at past rainfalls.
In the following snippet, melting.stack(rainfalls) produces one multivariate TimeSeries containing two dimensions: the melting and the rainfall. This is the series we use as a past covariate.
Block RNN model with both melting and rainfalls as a past covariates. Backtest RMSE = 0.169
Adding past rainfalls helps too, reducing the error further from 0.172 to 0.169. The rainfalls impacts the next 5 days’ flow, and so past rainfalls provide some amount of signal to predict the next 10 days’ flow. The impact is still somewhat limited, though, because this model is only looking at past rainfalls and not at the actual future rainfalls happening during the 10 days for which we want to predict the flow.
Fourth Model: Using Future Rainfalls
Let’s now try to use future rainfalls as a covariate. This might help us because a model using future_covariates will be able to look at the next 10 days’ rainfalls (in addition to past rainfalls) in order to predict the next 10 days’ flow. To do this, we’ll use an RNNModel , which is a “pure RNN” implementation that is able to use future_covariates (our RNNModel is similar to DeepAR).
RNNModel using the rainfalls as a future covariate. Backtest RMSE = 0.158
It seems that it’s working: letting the model see the rainfalls for the next n=10 days brings back the RMSE down to 0.158. Again, this makes sense as the recent rainfalls make up a large component of the flow.
Note that we cannot use the melting as a future covariate, because it is not known in advance, and so we wouldn’t be able to provide it at prediction time (Darts would complain if you tried to call predict() with a future_covariates series that doesn’t extend at least 10 time points in the future further than the target).
Fifth Model: Using Past Melting and Future Rainfalls
Finally, we will now use a RegressionModel in order to be able to specify both a past_covariates and a future_covariates . RegressionModel in Darts is a wrapper around any “scikit-learn like” regression model, and by default it will use a linear regression. It can predict future values of the target series as a function of any combination of lagged values of the target, past and future covariates.
The lags of the target and past covariates have to be strictly negative (in the past), whereas the lags of the future covariates can also be positive (in the future). For instance, a lag value of -5 means that the value at time t-5 is used to predict the target at time t; and a lag of 0 means that the future covariate value at time t is used to predict the target at time t. In the code below, we specify past covariate lags as [-5, -4, -3, -2, -1] which means that the model will look at the last 5 past_covariates values (we could also have specified lags_past_covariates=5 instead). Similarly, we specify the future covariate lags as [-4, -3, -2, -1, 0] which means that the model will look at the last 4 historic values (lags -4 to -1 ) and the current value (lag 0 ) of the future_covariates . (we could also have specified lags_future_covariates=(4,1) instead). Note that we do not specify any lags here, which means that this model won’t look at past values of the target at all — it will look at covariates only.
RegressionModel (using a linear regression) predicting the flow as a function of the past 5 melting values and the past 4 and current rainfall values. Backtest RMSE = 0.102.
This model drastically improves the RMSE error, down to 0.102. So once again, linear regression wins! In fact, if we kept some additive noise on the covariates but removed the additive noise on the flow, we would find that this model produces perfect forecasts. To be fair, this was expected because the target is built as a linear combination of the covariates to begin with, and we built our RegressionModel specifying the exact right lags capturing the data generation process. Still, we expect these regression models to be very useful in practice, due to their speed, versatility in capturing both past and future covariates with precise lags, and the fact that, similar to neural networks, they can be trained on multiple series while requiring less tuning.
Conclusions
Past and future covariates often play an important role in forecasting problems, but they can be hard to handle and reason about. One goal of Darts is to make this experience easier and less error prone: using covariates with Darts boils down to providing your external time series data past_covariates or future_covariates arguments to the fit() and predict() methods of the models. In our river flow example, we observed that knowing past glacier melting and future rainfalls can each improve forecasting to different extents, and building a simple linear-regression based model capturing both obtains the best results in this case.
If you have any feedback on Darts, or if you have forecasting challenges you’d like to tell us about, feel free to reach out to us. You can also checkout our website. | https://medium.com/unit8-machine-learning-publication/time-series-forecasting-using-past-and-future-external-data-with-darts-1f0539585993 | ['Julien Herzen'] | 2021-08-17 13:13:30.637000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Timeseries', 'Python', 'Time Series Forecasting'] |
Hardware Spotlight: CVP-13 by Bittware | by FPGA Guide
Hi Miners! It’s been a long time since our last hardware spotlight article. The hardware we are reviewing this time is an FPGA mining board that has been around for a long time in FPGA crypto mining community. It’s the CVP-13 by Bittware! Without further ado, let’s get started!
Introduction CVP-13
CVP-13 is an FPGA mining board produced by Bittware . CVP-13 is one of the most powerful FPGA board available. It's using VU13P chip which is a huge FPGA chip with 1,728,000 LUTs. However, with great power comes to a great price tag 😅, alas, the CVP-13 is priced at $5,495.
CVP-13 by Bittware
Datasheet Xilinx Ultrascale+ Virtex Chip
Mining and Profitability
Currently, CVP-13 can mine 17 different algorithms. Three developers are working on this board: Zetheron Technology🔥 , All-mine⛏ , and Dedmaroz🎅🏻 .
The most exciting one is X16R by Zetheron . Zetheron has released the first version of X16R, but it's still unprofitable since it's still an uncompleted version.
Check out the complete list of algorithms here.
CVP-13 also comes with a handy tool called Bittworks II Toolkit . You can monitor your FPGA status and change the core voltage using the Bittworks II Toolkit . You'll get this tool for free if you purchase CVP-13. This tool is available for Linux and Windows (Lite version). You can get it by registering in developer.bittware.com and follow the registration process.
Bittwork II Toolkit Lite — Windows
We also did some tests on the CVP-13 by ourselves. Here are some test results:
* based on online profit calculator per Sep 12th, 2019
Note: The testing result is not that similar to the claimed hashrate because of the setup. We didn’t fully optimize the CVP-13 (better cooling, voltage settings, and frequency settings). But, some people in the FPGA Discord Community has reported a similar hashrate with a better setup.
We also did some testing with Zetheron's X16R . It's still buggy, so we ran it for 9 hours but still got no shares. Hopefully, the working version comes soon!
Update 9/16 - We got the Zetheron's X16R working on our CVP-13!
You can see more details on our test results here.
Pros
🐘 Powerful VU13P Chip. VU13P is 46% bigger than VU9P. It’s able to fit more cores into the chip, which means it can produce more hashes than BCU1525, BTU9P, and other VU9P boards.
VU13P is 46% bigger than VU9P. It’s able to fit more cores into the chip, which means it can produce more hashes than BCU1525, BTU9P, and other VU9P boards. 👨💻 Developers Working on CVP-13. A lot of renowned developers like Whitefire , Dedmaroz , and Allmine are working to make bitstreams for this board. There's an upcoming X16 algorithm for CVP-13 coming soon!
A lot of renowned developers like , , and are working to make bitstreams for this board. 💧 Built-in Waterblock. CVP-13 is ready to be water-cooled.
CVP-13 is ready to be water-cooled. 🛠 Tools for Monitoring. You can use Bittworks II Toolkit Lite or Bittworks II Toolkit to configure voltage and monitor the CVP-13 . This tool is convenient for monitoring and controlling the CVP-13 .
You can use or to configure voltage and monitor the . This tool is convenient for monitoring and controlling the . 🤝 Trusted Manufacturer. Bittware has been around for over than 25 years.
Cons
🔬 Unoptimized Bitstream. Most of the available bitstream for CVP-13 is unoptimized, so the device hasn’t reached its maximum potential yet.
Most of the available bitstream for CVP-13 is unoptimized, so the device hasn’t reached its maximum potential yet. 💸 Long ROI Time. As mentioned before, most of the available bitstreams are not at the maximum hardware potential. Resulting in a long ROI time for this device.
As mentioned before, most of the available bitstreams are not at the maximum hardware potential. Resulting in a long ROI time for this device. ↔️ USB Connection Issue. Some CVP-13 users experienced some issue with the USB connection. Error rates are higher than expected because the USB serial buffer of CVP-13 is smaller than VU9P boards. Future bitstream builds are supposed to fix this issue, or you can use a shorter and better quality USB cable.
Hardware Specification
CVP-13 Board Specification:
Virtex UltraScale+ VU13P
2Gbit Flash memory for storing FPGA bitstreams
2 DIMM sites
PCIe interface x16 Gen1, Gen2, Gen3
USB interface: BMC, FPGA UART, FPGA JTAG
4 QSFP28 cages
2 UltraPort SlimSAS
Board Management Controller
Liquid-cooled
The external 8-pin power connector
More details: CVP-13 Datasheet
Company Background
Bittware is headquartered in Concord, New Hampshire, United States. For over twenty-five years, the company has designed and deployed high-end board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to-revenue for their OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. The company provides enterprise-class accelerator products by leveraging the latest industry-leading FPGA technology from Altera and Xilinx. They are based upon industry-standard COTS form factors including PCIe, VPX / OpenVPX, AMC, XMC, and FMC (VITA 57). Bittware provides modified solutions and licensed designs when it is not possible to use industry-standard boards. These programmable products dramatically increase application performance and energy efficiency while reducing total cost of ownership.
Bittware serves customers of many sectors ranges from commercial, broadcast and video, government, financial, mil/aero to instrumentation. Currently, The company is penetrating the cryptocurrency mining market through CVP-13 boards featuring Xilinx VU13P FPGA chip.
Test Result Screenshots
Veriblock Mining Performance
Veriblock Mining Pool Side — vbk.luckypool.io
0xBitcoin Mining Performance
0xBitcoin Mining Pool Side — 0xbtc.tosti.ro
Nexus Mining Performance
Nexus Mining Pool Side — nexuspool.ru
X16R on CVP-13 Test Result from Zetheron — Sep 12
FPGA.guide Testing Zetheron’s X16R on CVP-13
Originally published at news.fpga.guide on September 14, 2019. | https://medium.com/fpga-guide/hardware-spotlight-cvp-13-by-bittware-ed03807ee64c | ['Fpga Guide'] | 2019-09-18 09:54:05.567000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Programming', 'Technology', 'Hardware'] |
One Click Smart Contract based on Libonomy Blockchain | Libonomy’s project is to reinvent the way digital platforms are used today!
-Fredrik Johansson
As the world is rapidly moving towards further digitalization, we at Libonomy want to make sure that technology can sustain all the needs of society and the transition is as seamless as possible.
Libonomy blockchain
Libonomy is a next-generation interoperable, autonomous blockchain powered by an Artificial Intelligence-based consensus engine. The AI engine allows a secure, decentralized, automated, and scalable platform that has been able to overcome all the weaknesses of earlier blockchain technologies.
One Click Smart Contracts
Libonomy enables blockchain community to build smart contracts without any prior knowledge of blockchain technology.
Open source, free cross-chain smart contracts that don’t require developers, have enhanced security and are executed within minutes.
What is Smart Contract?
Smart contract is a self-executing code written to operate on a blockchain in order to carry out transactions or functionalities as specified in the code. Smart contracts eliminate middleman which in return makes the system more efficient, transparent and secure.
Initially blockchains such as Bitcoin was only perceived for the purpose of carrying out transactions, but with the introduction of second generation blockchain Ethereum and the ability to create smart contracts, users were able to utilize blockchain also for the purpose of creating decentralized applications as well.
However, smart contracts are difficult to build so they involve experienced, but costly developers. Also, because smart contracts are unmodifiable after their deployment, we arrive at a trust issue.
Libonomy’s solution
In order to ease the development of smart contracts and make them more secure, transparent and interoperable, our platform gives users the ability to fill in their requirements and their smart contract code is generated within the matter of minutes. Whether the person is a developer or not — no one is restricted, the generated code can be used in any manner on the Libonomy blockchain.
Users can either deploy smart contract on Libonomy blockchain manually or by using the platform’s deployment automation tool.
Libonomy’s smart contract auditing tool can highlight and resolve any flaws or vulnerabilities before the deployment, and, as everything is done by the platform itself, users no longer have worry about security risks.
After the deployment, to carry out the functions of the smart contract, the platform includes a simple UI for interaction with the deployed smart contract where users have the ability to perform any operation without the need of a developer.
The platform gives users the ability to build smart contracts for stable coins, utility tokens, security tokens or real estate directly through the user interface.
In case there is a need to customize some functionalities, users have an ability to do that themselves or request a support from our platform.
Any smart contracts built on Libonomy blockchain is also compatible with Ethereum and other blockchains, which makes Libonomy’s solution completely one of a kind.
Summary
Blockchain in an emerging technology with many advancements in the latest years, however due to the lack of experience and knowledge, majority of the people are still very unaware of the benefits that this technology can offer.
In order to fill in the gaps and move towards mass adoption, Libonomy believes the future lies in providing users platforms that highlight specific benefits and are more user friendly.
Libonomy’s One Click Smart Contract POC solution launched in November will enable the community to benefits from the services that Libonomy is offering. | https://medium.com/@libonomy/one-click-smart-contract-based-on-libonomy-blockchain-d7b98fab2f8c | [] | 2020-10-27 11:46:57.999000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Blockchain', 'One Click', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup'] |
6 Super Hacks To Overcome Procrastination via Mindfulness | Procrastination has been one of the biggest barriers to one’s performance & productivity for years now. Being a Mindfulness & a mindset coach, I have been consistently receiving multiple queries on, How can one deal with procrastination?
It feels horrible when you fall prey to procrastination, as you realise that you have lost time without doing anything productive, in fact, you were just busy doing nothing!
You are here, reading this article because most probably this has happened with you or maybe quiet frequently it keeps on happening with you. Do not worry, you are not alone.
In this article, I shall be sharing 6 super hacks to combat procrastination in an effective way via the science of Mindfulness.
Now, before I reveal those 6 super hacks, I would like to share some alarming procrastination statistics that will blow off your mind.
According to a survey carried out in January 2020, approx. 84% of the respondents do fall prey to procrastination. (Some experience it quite often whereas others experience it rarely).
When we breakdown the number they look something like this,
27.4% of the respondents procrastinate sometimes.
22.1% of the respondents procrastinate quite often.
20.5% of the respondents procrastinate almost every day!
14.4% of the respondents procrastinate rarely whereas
15.6% of the respondents claim to never procrastinate.
That is alarming! For 1 in 5 of us, procrastinating is something that affects our lives severely.
In other words, it’s quite human. It’s not just you, almost everyone you know will have some experience of putting things on a back burner but yes it hurts.
People have been consistently & persistently trying to find solutions to combat their procrastination habits, this can also be seen through the kind of Google searches made on daily basis.
Also if you see the search pattern for procrastination as a query has remained constant, in fact on a rising trend in past few years. (Google search)
So, the question stands tall & strong; ‘How do we combat procrastination?’
Here I shall be sharing 6 Mindfulness hacks to combat procrastination. So, let’s first unbox the incredible science of Mindfulness & it’s revolutionary principles post which I shall be integrating the 6 hacks into the process.
Mindfulness is the process of projecting objective awareness towards yourself and your engagements in a curious & non-judgemental way.
By doing this, one can breed clarity, creativity & a broader perspective towards a given situation.
4 Important qualities of Mindfulness are;
Present moment awareness
Non-judgmental attitude
Objective perception
Curiosity
Mindfulness based hacks shall prove to be super effective in combating procrastination. So, let’s unbox them one by one.
Hack 1 : One Step at a Time
Supporting idea
Our brain gets super overwhelmed when it encounters a mammoth task and yes, there is a scientific reason for this overwhelm. Our brain is just 2% of the overall body mass but consumes 20% of the overall body energy. This makes it a high maintenance organ! Our brain refrains from engaging in any kind of complex activities, thus when it encounters a mammoth engagement, it instantly tries to avoid it & finds excuses to run away from it. This is one of the major reasons for our procrastination.
Effective solution
The best way to combat this situation is to chunk down the task into smaller & less complicated pieces so that our brain is ready to engage effortlessly. Taking one step at a time shall help us to execute our tasks effectively & efficiently.
Hack 2 : Start Easy
Supporting idea
This hack is an extension of the previous one. We have the ability to cognitively calculate an effort estimate for our task engagements. This estimation tends to overwhelm us & moreover, unknowingly we start focusing on the difficult aspects of the task. This is how our brain is wired, to spot the negatives & difficulties over positives. This tendency ruins our enthusiasm & we fail to build momentum, resulting in procrastination.
Effective solution
The best way to combat this situation is by commencing with the easier aspects of the task. Once you chunk down the task, start picking up the easier portions which will help you build the momentum for further challenges. A series of smaller gratifications shall help you get ready for larger & complex executions.
Hack 3 : Define The Hidden Why
Supporting idea
Human beings are emotional beings, we are driven by emotions. We are termed as emotional beings because for most of the time, it’s our limbic brain (emotional brain) that is driving us/controlling us. There are multiple studies that have showcased our emotional decision-making process which is later supported by our logical reasoning. The hidden WHY in every task, that we plan to do, triggers our emotional decision-making aspect. Once we are able to define the WHY, we will be able to inspire & motivate ourselves to take action.
Effective solution
The best way to initiate a task is by first decoding the WHY element. Why do I need to get this done? WHY denotes the hidden purpose & purpose correlates with our limbic brain. The questions that you are indirectly asking yourself are — How will this make a difference in my life? How will it change my current state of existence, How will I be able to make a difference? These questions have the potential to trigger your emotional brain.
Hack 4 : What If Analysis
Supporting idea
Over the years our brain has evolved dramatically, especially the executive part of it (The prefrontal cortex). This is where all complex calculations, evaluations, analysis, the comparison takes place. When presented with elaborated facts & details, our brain can take faster & smarter decisions. Procrastination can be avoided by helping our brain with a quick ‘what is’ analysis.
Effective solution
Whatever task you need to complete, run a quick ‘what if’ analysis by splitting down the points into two columns.
1st — What if I successfully complete the task? How will it benefit me? How will it make a difference? How will it change my current state of existence?
2nd — What if I procrastinate & not do it? How will it negatively impact me? What will I lose?
By doing this analysis, you are empowering your brain with possible implications, details & facts. This shall provide a positive reinforcement to effectively execute the task at hand.
Hack 5 : Zero Down Potential Distractions
Supporting idea
We are living in an attention economy, where attention is the rarest commodity. Everyone is vouching for our attention and we need to be wise enough to invest it in the right places. Multiple studies have proven the negative impact of physical & digital distractions on our attention, engagement & productivity. One of the major reasons for procrastination is a distraction. We unknowingly invest our resources in unproductive engagements leaving no time for primary tasks.
Effective solution
Zero down the potential distractions by isolating yourself, getting rid of unwanted gadgets, digital devices & other notifications so that you can invest your undivided attention on the task at hand.
Make sure that you communicate to the people around you to leave you undisturbed for a predetermined time span. This will dramatically elevate your engagement, attention span & output levels.
Hack 6 : Find an accountability partner
Supporting idea
External motivation & push always works wonders when it comes to gaining momentum. We are social beings & productive partnership is what gives us an edge. When you have an accountability partner, you become answerable, responsible & your chances of taking action increases by almost 67%. Many studies have proven that people working in healthy partnerships were more productive & outcome driven compared to solo action takers.
Effective solution
The best way to integrate this principle in play is by finding yourself an accountability partner who could periodically monitor your progress, send reminders & extract action out of you.
These 6 hacks shall work wonders & shall also help you to deal with procrastination in a super effective way.
Just to sum it up I’ll list down all the 6 hacks here so that you can refer to them at a glance.
Hack 1: One Step at a Time.
Hack 2: Start Easy.
Hack 3: Define The Hidden Why.
Hack 4: What-If Analysis.
Hack 5: Zero Down Potential Distractions.
Hack 6: Find an accountability partner.
Did you find this useful? if YES, share your thoughts below, lets discuss
Good luck,
Alok Taunk | Eastern Mindfulness | MindFeed App. | https://medium.com/@aloktaunk/6-super-hacks-to-overcome-procrastination-via-mindfulness-3bc364324568 | ['Alok Taunk'] | 2020-12-23 06:29:00.815000+00:00 | ['Hacks', 'Procrastination', 'Awareness', 'Mindset', 'Mindfulness'] |
Creating Impact | Confidence is Key
Before a Data Scientist can be convincing to others, they must believe in themselves and their own work. When convincing others of your findings, it becomes so much easier when your confidence in your work radiates through the conversations that you have. When speaking about your work with confidence, your team will begin to feel like they would be making a mistake by not taking your advice into consideration. Confidence is contagious and will instill a sense of trust in you and your work from the rest of your team.
In order for a scientist to be convincing, they must believe in themselves. Having confidence, showing it, and radiating it could be the difference between your team not listening to your suggestions or implementing your insights into everything they do. If a Data Scientist is not confident in their work, how do they expect anyone else to believe that their suggestions are valuable or credible? However, with the right amount of confidence (and, of course, grace) a Data Scientist can move into a position where their team is wary of not considering their suggestions.
Drop the Technical Jargon
In order to be a good and effective Data Scientist, who creates an impact on their company, one must have excellent soft skills. The scientist must be able to talk to the rest of the team and be convincing while not belittling. They must explain their findings in lame terms in order to help business minds to understand why the scientist has made this suggestion. While it may be apparent to the Data Scientist that their model was a good fit based off of the R-squared value or the root mean squared error, those numbers alone mean nothing to the non-technical mind.
Rather than throwing a plethora of technical statistical and analytical terms at the rest of your team, try to use simplified definitions of these terms. For example, instead of saying “The R-squared value for this model was 73%,” a Data Scientist could say “73% of the variation (or fluctuation) in our sales is explained by this model.” By substituting the term with its short and simplified definition, you have put this technical concept into lame terms that are easily understood by everyone on your team.
Short and Sweet
Your team does not need to be bored with the whole process of how you got your results. While you may have cleaned data, joined tables, tried different models, engineered features, and remade your visualizations ten times, be careful to not merely summarize your process when presenting your results. Your team is not concerned with your process, they are concerned only with the relevant information that you found through that process.
At times it may be helpful to explain why chose to take a certain step in your process. For example, a Data Scientist may have chosen to drop a predictor from their model that may have seemed relevant prior. In this situation, it is important that the rest of the team has knowledge on why this variable is no longer important. Perhaps this variable, X, experienced multicollinearity with more than one other variable in the model. In this case, it could be that X is derived from the other variables we already have in the model, so these other variables alone give us a better model than the variable that was obtained using calculations and other variables.
Explaining important steps is critical, as it will give the rest of the team a reason as to why they should not focus on a certain aspect of the project any longer, even though it may have seemed important before. Some good phrases to throw in when doing so are things like: “I’m just as surprised as you but…” or “I know we initially thought that X was very important in our sales, however, we are able to get more accurate values using the other variables because we cannot see the true impact of X as it is dependent on our other variables.” Doing so will give your team the sense that you all were on the same page before, but new information shows that it may be time to turn the page, and you and your team will be able to turn the page together.
Utilize Analogies
Analogies are an extremely useful way to get a complex point across to others. By explaining your findings in terms of what your team is familiar with, you are better able to get into their head to change their opinions. It is very powerful when a Data Scientist is able to relate their findings to situations that virtually everyone would be familiar with, regardless of background, because more people will then better understand your findings and there will be a better chance of them implementing these findings.
Know Your Team
Knowing your team’s interests allows you to cater your analogies to them in order to help them better understand. For example, it might be more convincing to explain your findings in terms of a sports analogy to one member of your team, while another member may better understand with an analogy relating to gardening. Being aware of your teammate’s likes and dislikes, as well as their working styles can help you effectively create an impact on a company using your Data Science findings along with your communication skills.
Study Other Influential People That Inspire You
I believe that much can be learned from studying some of the most successful people’s tactics that they employ in order to become impactful. I find listening to Elon Musk’s stories to be very inspiring, and I try to study how he speaks to people in various videos to get a better understanding of how he gained the influence, confidence, and trust from others that he did to create a space company having had degrees in business and physics. I find Musk particularly interesting because he does not possess the typical way of speaking that one would expect a powerful and influential person to. Musk stutters and trips over his words, but is still able to convey that he knows what he is talking about and that his findings and ideas are important.
Elon Musk: How To Achieve 10x More Than Your Peers (1:00)
I feel that studying political candidates and how they generate votes and supporters can also be extremely useful in becoming convincing and creating impact. Other people whom I find inspiring to watch and study how they influence people are Steve Jobs, Daymond John, Jay-Z, Will Mitchell (my brother), and Scott Mitchell (my father).
I find my brother, Will Mitchell, to be one of the most inspiring people to study. Having dropped out of high school, he was able to impact the people around him to believe in his ideas. He had built businesses in the past alone but at age 22 he convinced his long-time friend Kyle that his idea of coaching entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams was worth-while. Ever since his successful online-coaching business has been doing great on the underlying principle that my brother is influencing people with dreams to do as he did and take the leap. The fact that someone with little-to-none “official” educational credentials is able to inspire, coach, and influence thousands of people to work towards their dreams is incredible to me. It goes to show that impact can be made and people can be convinced to implement your ideas where ever you are confident in your process and able to engage your audience.
Become a Great Story-Teller
Everybody loves stories. They’re engaging, easy to understand, and easy to follow. Data Science requires story-telling in order to compel people to use your findings in an effective way. Simply presenting one’s findings can become repetitive and boring, however, creating a story out of your findings shows everyone the bigger picture.
In order to become a better story-teller, it is often recommended to read as many books as possible and to watch movies. Reading fiction and non-fiction alike can help you understand how to construct stories and how to incorporate your findings into those stories, respectively.
Books I recommend:
How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Becoming a Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini, P.H.D.
1984 by George Orwell
In conclusion, much of the job of a Data Scientist is to influence others and to be convincing with their findings in order to actually create impact from their insights. While I have outlined many ways to become more convincing and reliable to others, these are not the only ways.
Let’s connect:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackenzie-mitchell-635378101/
https://github.com/mackenziemitchell6
Resources: | https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-impact-b178df8a4e7b | ['Mackenzie Mitchell'] | 2019-11-08 17:16:13.475000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Startup', 'Impact', 'Business', 'Data Science'] |
A New Era in Segregation of Duties | In this week’s blog post, we’re sharing insights on our latest interview with Pat Wadland on Segregation of Duties (SoD). Pat is the Senior Director of Risk and Compliance Solutions at Fastpath, and has worked with numerous fortune 500 companies, US government agencies and other organizations in the field of implementing assessment and design and security to mitigate risk and improve business processes. He focuses on ensuring his clients achieve maximum value from their XP enterprise systems and acquire a deep understanding of their full capabilities, but also presents the trends on Oracle leading practices and solutions.
Understanding of Proper SoD
In a general sense, SoD is a set of internal preventive controls in order to alleviate potential risk of human error and fraud by requiring more than one person to complete a specific task, mainly in a financial, transaction-based sense. Consequently, monitoring potential SoD conflicts in businesses’ applications and cross application security is a critical component for companies’ risk and compliance programs. As digital transformation allows you to move your entire business operations to hybrid and cloud platforms, this has become even more essential in comparison to SoD we’d have been talking about in the last decade. In particular because nowadays each company’s essential business processes can flow through multiple applications based on the best solutions they provide, rather than using only one platform to control everything. For example, a company might be using Oracle Business Suite to run most of their major functions, but transition some functions into the Oracle cloud or fusion ERP and HCM applications with Salesforce for your CRM functions. It’s a very common use case for companies whether they are small or huge.
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to SoD comes from the fact that companies seem to think that they don’t need to start from the granular level. Generally, they’ll be separating the duties across the roles, and then they’ll be in good shape but in most cases that is not the case. The major reason behind this is what drives a SoD conflict. At the end of the day, it’s not the name of the role that’s going to provide the access. Depending on your ERP dynamics, you’re talking about the underlying menu item displays, menu, item actions, Oracle EBS, extra functions, privileges and so on. What should be driving SoD is going to be what you should be assigning to those configurations based on the underlying security objects, rather than the role title.
Risk Management and SoD
As SoD is an internal control, an organisation should be viewing it within the framework of risk management activities. This means that the organisation should thoroughly analyse the business processes and make good choices on potential conflicts, and put compensating controls in case there are remaining conflicts. This is why SoD requires the company and everyone involved in the SoD control process including the risk managers to have a clear understanding of the individuals, their roles and key business processes. If you haven’t already done so, as a risk manager, you should be prioritizing a simple risk assessment from a SoD standpoint as well by firstly identifying the key areas for your organisation and individuals involved. Afterwards go in depth with your business cycle areas to find out what might cause or prevent users from potential conflicts of interest. At the end of the day, the compliance risk associated with SoD violations can lead to big monetary losses or penalties, as well as audit findings.
A good example on this matter would be “Procure to pay”. Most companies consider vendor master data a high risk area. So that’s probably a pretty straightforward one, as well as setting up maybe the key configurations in your accounts payable system whether that’s SAP dynamics, Oracle and so on. If you go deeper into these, you’ll see most of the business processes are done with workflows and scoping assessments and going through these and identifying the key areas within those aspects. This way you can start with the highest risk areas and go through the rest. This will not only help you build your SoD controls, but also a solid foundation for your application and ID dependant or manual SOX controls as they are absolutely fundamental for any sound security environment. On that note, a risk manager should definitely talk about improving security and making it a top priority in their work load. This once again brings the “preventive” part of SoD controls. To avoid creating SoD violations or conflicts each time a new access privilege is implemented, you should also be implementing preventive controls to check for such conflicts. Keep in mind that, especially in small companies, it is crucial to implement and properly document certain exceptions as there might be occasions where users legitimately need to breach these rules to cover for their colleagues’ absence or where a team or an employee might be taking a broader range of responsibilities.
More than likely, your auditor will seek evidence of how your company manages SoD and what preventative measures have been taken to ensure SoD policies are not violated. To satisfy your auditor, you’ll need to provide evidence that you’ve properly tested the controls and they are thorough enough to catch suspicious activity. Proper implementation of and documentation of exceptions will also work as providing sound evidence that can show the auditor you’ve been paying good attention to your SoD. Nevertheless, be aware that this might be an extremely complex and time consuming process to implement within your processes. Using specialized tools such as Fastpath’s will help you with reducing risks, and provide the evidence you need in an efficient manner.
Predictions on the Evolution of SoD Monitoring
The next evolution going on and to pivot off the transaction monitoring. To give a little bit of context here, we need to go back to 10–15 years ago, when the companies would go for internal controls audit or the ICFR audit, rather than financial statement audit. Most of the time, your external auditor would come in and sample or take a subset of your transactions, rather than taking your entire population of transactions and focus on sample based modelling to ensure all is in order. In the recent years, some firms have gone to developing systems where they’re not just taking samples as they’re able to take the whole population transactions and journal entries and audit those. On that note, it’s possible to see that, from an audit standpoint alone, companies no longer need to go to audit with samples alone but for the whole population and that’s itself a big shift we can expect. From the change management side, that means, the audit will be able to ask about all the changes that were made, for example in SAP dynamics environment, within the past fiscal year and companies will be required to show the relevant documentation.
This means that we’re already at an advanced stage of cross application access and segregation of duty monitoring. According to Pat, the next step on the evolution is going to be the cross application transaction monitoring. As we’re already able to monitor the entire transaction environment within separate applications, and getting close to developing full-stack solutions that allow us to track connections between various applications, create topology maps or reports in a secure and controlled manner.
Takeaway Points
First takeaway, would be to make sure to swap to efficient tools to maintain your processes and documentations rather than doing the whole thing manually. Automation is very important regardless of the process so look into tools to help you automate these processes wherever possible. External audits will also be going for an automation process, and developing new tools, and on that note it will be beneficial for your company to be in alignment with them. At the end of the day, they’ll be most likely asking what kind of methods you are using to collect your data and assess whether it is a sound process. Especially considering you’re using various programs and different processes, it will allow you to save time and easily show things such as who has access to the payroll side, or employee master data and so on. Any tools to help automate and assist your external and internal auditors with gaining that insight into who can do that information are very helpful.
Secondly, do not put your processes in their own bubbles. you’re not looking at just your one major ERP, but you’re taking the whole approach of your ecosystem of what ERP is, are systems or available and making sure you’re really thinking through. SoD conflicts won’t be limited to just one system and might affect every other system as well.
Closing Words
For now, this sums up the key points of our interview. As the Global Risk Community team, we once again thank Pat Wadland for his insight on Segregation of Duties and cross-application monitoring. More information about this topic is available in our original interview, which is accessible here.
#risk #SoD #segregation #audit #cross-application #monitoring #management | https://medium.com/global-risk-community/a-new-era-in-segregation-of-duties-7d5ff773532c | ['Ece Karel'] | 2021-07-02 04:44:32.619000+00:00 | ['Risk', 'Management', 'Monitoring', 'Finance', 'Audit'] |
Best Places to visit in Shiraz | Best Places in Shiraz
If you plan to visit Iran as your next destination, be with Iranviva Group that has provided numerous comprehensive articles about different tours to Iran offered by Iranviva and different cities of Iran you can visit. Here in this article Iranviva Group has brought the best places you can visit in Shiraz.
Words cannot express the beauty and elegance of the city of Shiraz, one of the cultural centers of Iran with its spectacular architecture. It is known as the city of nightingales and roses, the city of gardens and flowers, and the city of poetry. Shiraz with its peaceful and pleasant atmosphere, is the original land of Persia and the cradle of the greatest Persian Empires.
Let’s have a brief look at the tourist spots in the city of Shiraz that are definitely worth visiting at least once on your trip to Iran.
Shiraz Heritage, Shah Cheragh Shrine
There are many splendid Islamic monuments in Shiraz, especially those from the safavid era, but the most notable religious site is the Shrine named Shah Cheragh, which means “King of the Light” and is the tomb of Imam Reza’s brother who died in the 8th century.
The interior walls are splendidly decorated with dazzling mirror-work and the walls outside are covered with delicate blue tiles. It has a rosebud shaped dome, typically from Shiraz, surrounded by two short golden minarets.
Shiraz Heritage, Nasir-ol Molk Mosque (Pink Mosque)
Known as the jewel of Shiraz, this unique delicate mosque was built in Qajar era by Nasir al-Mulk. It is one of the most elegant and most photographed piece of architecture with colored windows which create extraordinary reflections on the walls and carpets of the prayer hall when sun rises early in the morning. Its fine colored tiles and its pink, floral patterns are typical from Shiraz.
Nasir-ol Molk Mosque was built under the orders of Qajar dynasty at the end of the 19th century, which has preserved its true spiritual atmosphere and is a highly-visited tourist spot.
Shiraz Heritage, Eram Garden
Persian Gardens are perfect examples of paradise on earth, with their rectangular form consisting of four quarters with trees, streams, a pavilion, and surrounding walls. One of the most magnificent gardens in Shiraz is Eram Garden that is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Built in the Qajar era, Eram Garden is famous for its tall cypress trees and roses, and the incomparable scent of its orange trees during spring. Visitors to this garden really enjoy the amazing experience of walking around its pool, visiting a stunning palace with beautiful tilework, and listening to the beautiful sound of the nightingales.
Shiraz Heritage, Tomb of Hafez
You should visit the mausoleum of one of the greatest and most beloved Persian Poets in all the times, Hafez, when you go to Shiraz on your trip to Iran. Hafez was born and died on the 14th century in Shiraz. His poetry is still known-by-heart and cherished by Iranians.
His tomb, known as ‘Hafezieh’, is located in the center of a beautiful and delicate garden. There are many tourists from across the world who come here to visit Hafezieh and read his poetries, meditate and relax. People ask for their dearest wishes and dreams by whispering them and touching the marble tomb decorated with Persian calligraphies.
Shiraz Heritage, Tomb of Saadi
As with Hafez, Saadi is a world famous Persian Poet born and died in the city of Shiraz, at the end of the 13th century. His tomb (Saadieh) with a peaceful and unique atmosphere, is a popular tourist site, especially at nights. It is located in a garden full of flowers and orange trees, with small pools and an underground fish pond. Nowadays, tourists come to throw a coin in the pond and believe that their wishes and aspirations will come true.
Shiraz Heritage, Vakil Bazaar
Vakil Bazaar, one of the most famous historical and traditional bazaars in Iran, is located in the historical center of Shiraz. This ancient bazaar was built in the 11th century, under the orders of Karim Khan Zand, the founder of the Zand Dynasty, and now it is a beautiful attraction, attracting many tourists from around the world to travel to Iran.
This bazaar was commissioned by Karim Khan Zand as part of his plan to make Shiraz a major trading center, and now this city is one of the best examples of Zand architectures. Vakil Bazaar, over 3000 square meters, is a maze of vaulted brick lanes, with its courtyards and beautiful caravanserais.
The bathhouses in this bazaar have been transformed into cafes and restaurants with their ancestral architecture. Beautiful Iranian traditional artworks of craftspeople and sellers, are offered in some of the 200 year old picturesque shops, which make this bazaar a perfect place for tourists who travel to Iran and love spending time wandering and strolling in the vaulted lanes.
Shiraz Heritage, Vakil Mosque
Vakil Mosque is next to Vakil Bazaar, which was built under the orders of Karim Khan Zand too, but it was restored in the Qajar era. This mosque is known for its beautiful tilework, with typical rose-pink tiles and floral patterns, decorating the entrance of the mosque and the inner courtyard.
The carved 48 pillars of its night prayer hall, with beautifully carved domes, as well as the impressive two iwans facing each other are the architectural masterpieces of this gorgeous mosque.
Shiraz Heritage, Vakil Bath
A part of the Vakil Complex located in Shiraz city center, is the elegant Vakil Bath which represents the delicate architecture of the Zand era. This bathhouse, currently used as a museum depicts how people of that time used the public baths. It shows that it was not only a simple bath used for washing and cleaning oneself, but it was also the main social center of the city, where people came to celebrate weddings for instance.
What is more impressive about the architecture of this bathhouse is the beautifully carved ceilings and vaults of the central chamber and the heat room. It has a unique decoration of plasterwork which can’t be found in other historic bathhouses in Iran.
Shiraz Heritage, Arg-e Karim Khan
Karim Khan Citadel is one of the iconic monuments of Shiraz, located in the city center. It is a beautiful brick building which is surrounded by four 14-meter-high round towers. This monument was built under the orders of Karim Khan Zand and was used for official ceremonies and receptions of the Zand dynasty.
The gracious courtyard of this citadel is divided by a canal with a pool at one end and there are rows of orange trees. Before being a museum, it had been also used as a prison, for a short time.
Shiraz Heritage, Narenjestan Garden
Naranjestan Garden is smaller than the Eram Garden, and is another true piece of paradise as well. It is full of bitter orange trees with their unique scent in spring. Narenjestan Garden or Qavam House was built in the Qajar era for Qavam family, a wealthy family in Shiraz. The Qavams were merchants originally from Qazvin.
What makes it so impressive is its main building, the Qavam Pavilion, which is decorated with mirrors, tilework, plasterwork, inlay, and painted ceilings. Zinat ol Molk House is the private part of the large mansion that the wealthy Qavam family built in Shiraz, the public reception area being the Naranjestan-e Qavam.
Nowadays, it is a museum displaying a valuable architectural collection gathered by the American archeologist Arthur Upham Pope. It is strongly recommended to the tourists who travel to Iran and specially the city of Shiraz, to visit this gorgeous monument.
Shiraz Heritage, The Quran Gate and Khaju Garden
This historical gate is located in the entrance of Shiraz in the north of Shiraz. It was formerly the main entrance gate of the city and one of the most famous attractions in Shiraz. Some precious hand-written Qurans were kept in a small room on the top of it.
Nowadays, People from Shiraz come here to appreciate the delicate atmosphere of the Khaju Garden and its view over the city, and the beautiful architecture of the monument.
Iranviva Group has provided some articles for the people interested in traveling to Iran. To get more information about Iran details, read Iranviva articles “Essential things to know before travel to Iran” and “Historical places in Iran”.
Four Best places to Visit around the city of Shiraz
Shiraz Heritage, Qashqai Nomads
The nomadic population of Iran is classified into culturally and ethnically diverse groups and tribes with their own identity and traditions. One of the most famous and largest tribes in Iran is the Qashqai Tribe, consisting of mostly Turkic people but also Lurs, and live in the southwest of Iran, in Fars Province in particular.
This nomadic tribe live free from the modern world, in nature. In summer, Qashqai nomads move to cooler places with their families, animals and other belongings, and in winter they move to warmer places.
They are still living in their traditional lifestyle and on breeding their livestock. Living with them for a few days to feel their culture, foods, clothes, language, or music closely is a unique enjoyment most of the tourists to Iran love to experience.
Shiraz Heritage, Persepolis
Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, is one of main attractions for visitors to Iran. It was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, and is situated 60 km northeast of the city of Shiraz.
Persepolis, named as Takht-e Jamshid in Iran, was founded by Darius I in 518 B.C. These historic ruins, as the legacy of 1500 years of history, are now one of the most glorious historical sites in the world that attracts many visitors from around the world to travel to Iran. Ruins of the great staircase leading to the Gate of All Nations and the columns of the Apadana and the ruins of the Hall of the Hundred Columns of Persepolis commemorate the glory and greatness of Achaemenid Empire.
Shiraz Heritage, Naqshe Rustam
The impressive monuments of the Necropolis of some Persian kings is located about 12 km northwest of Persepolis, named as ‘Naqshe Rostam’. There are four large rock tombs belonging to the Sassanian and Achaemenian kings, the most famous ones are Darius the Great and Shapur 1st. A massive relief depicts the victory of Shapur 1st over the Roman Emperor Valerian in the Battle of Edessa.
Shiraz Heritage, Pasargadae
One of most famous landmarks of Iran is Pasargadae, the first dynastic capital of the Persian Achaemenian dynasty, where the most glorious Persian king, Cyrus the Great, is resting. This monument is located on a plain northeast of Persepolis in southwest of Iran.
Cyrus the Great started to build a city in 546 BC, the ruins of which can be seen now. Also, visitors can see Darius’s garden, an early example of Persian Garden with its sophisticated irrigation system.
Now after reading this article, have a look at Iran Travel page. | https://medium.com/@iranviva-techvas/best-places-to-visit-in-shiraz-435cdb814e80 | [] | 2021-01-03 09:31:53.419000+00:00 | ['Iran Travel', 'Iranian', 'Best Destinations', 'Trip Around The World', 'Architecture'] |
A Darker Song | after Cassandra Clare
Call love a violent act or, else, a lie.
We whisper tenderly, elicit lust,
an oxytocin dream that makes us fly
until we’re falling eating sand and dust
and bloody teeth. We sacrifice ourselves
like lambs for Abraham. We bring the knife
and bronzen bowl, no gore or ghastly smells,
we die so beautifully, husband and wife,
us fathers, daughters, sons. Love is a curse
we write upon ourselves. I walk away
it’s better that than waiting for the hearse.
I own myself, my body, and the way
I stand: two shoulders square against the world
that only spun. Until you made it twirl. | https://medium.com/sonnetry/a-darker-song-8de3b1b85316 | ['Zach J. Payne'] | 2020-08-06 19:12:36.083000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Relationships', 'Romance', 'Love', 'Life'] |
Preparing Your Small Business for the Holiday Season | Preparing Your Small Business for the Holiday Season
It’s the end of October and most likely your local grocery store already spots some Christmas decorations. If you are a business owner eventually you will have to get into the holiday spirit too and you will have all those heightened sales to reward you for your efforts.
Keep on reading to make this holiday season your best one yet.
Why
Holidays are a very unique time. It’s a season when individuals, businesses and communities suddenly start to focus more on loyalty, family, gratitude, relationships and the intangible. What does it mean for your business? It means several things, the most crucial of them is that it’s a time when you can build loyalty with your customers. Sure, you might think that all those Black Friday and Boxing Day deals are primarily a way to cash in a big check before the New Year’s. But why not look at it from another perspective and think of what it means to your customers?
What
Among different ways to build loyalty are things like personalized newsletters (think paper mail, handwritten, glitter — the sky is the limit). I once found a letter from a CEO of a toothpaste company neatly packed into the box and I still think of it every now and then, while sticking to buying that very same toothpaste.
Another thing is the giveaways. Think about rewarding your customers for sharing why they love your product, how it changed their approach to every day things or ask them to share any story they might have to share. Reward them. Make it free.
Social media. Don’t use it to advertise. Use it to talk. Talk about why you do what you do, who inspires you, who takes what you do to the next level.
How
Right now is a perfect time for creating a strategy. One idea is to write a (bi)weekly list with your priorities up until Dec 31.
For example, it can look like this:
Oct 21–27 finalize Black Friday strategy. Stock up on swag and gift cards to giveaway.
Nov 4–10 organize a Christmas redesign of your store/website/wrapping.
Nov 18–24 finalize the Christmas discount strategy. Plan a surprise for clients.
Remember to enjoy the holidays and plan everything as much in advance as possible so that on the days that matter most to you and your family you can enjoy them to the fullest while maintaining the best image your business has. | https://medium.com/@synderapp/preparing-your-small-business-for-the-holiday-season-8a008d431de1 | ['Synder Business', 'Accounting Blog'] | 2019-11-15 08:03:16.180000+00:00 | ['Accounting', 'Holiday Season', 'Finance', 'Quickbooks', 'Quickbooks Online'] |
UX QA: Why it Matters & Where to Start | Quality Assurance is the foundation for user confidence and customer satisfaction.
Motivation
By definition, user experience involves measurable quality attributes such as ease of learning, efficiency of use, and user satisfaction.
There are two main drivers in maintaining a focus on UX Quality:
User Adoption: users seeing value in features and wanting to leverage them Reduced UX Debt: redesigns and rework are prevented by considering quality in each step of the design process
Implementation
Our team implements standards to ensure high quality UX outputs by:
Maintaining UX consistency throughout each product
Designing with accessibility in mind
Testing extensively before features are shipped to end users
As we build primarily net-new products, Minimum Marketable Products, this can best be understood by taking a look at this visual:
Pre-development
UX Design Standard Checklist
Prior to designs going into refinement with developers, they should pass a UX Design Standard Checklist. In our team’s case, this internal checklist covers both SAP Fiori standards in addition to general best practices. It covers the topics of Interaction Design, Common Functions, Visual Design, Typography, and Accessibility.
UX Research
As a user-need, outcome-driven, and data-informed unit, our team places utmost importance on user feedback. We perform usability testing in order to collect data needed to identify usability issues and to optimize designs in response. User stories and their respective designs should be validated through usability testing with end users before going into refinement with developers. You can read more about our UX Research process here.
Post-development
Reporting Bugs
The designer’s role does not end once there’s been a hand-off to developers — it’s vital that the same attention to detail a designer places in wireframes and prototypes is applied when observing the outcome in a dev environment. After a design has been developed, it should be tested by one or more designers to ensure it performs as expected. If errors are observed, bugs should be reported and handled accordingly.
Applying these simple steps of checking designs internally and with end users before development, as well as testing the product before shipment to end users after development not only prevents UX debt, but produces higher quality outputs which leads to a greater chance of users adopting the features that have been built.
References
QA & UX
Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 210: Human-centered design for interactive systems
Make design QA official | https://medium.com/sap-cic/ux-qa-why-it-matters-where-to-start-c6c7fa820bd | ['Kayla Fathi'] | 2020-12-22 21:58:42.052000+00:00 | ['UX Research', 'UX', 'Ux Strategy', 'Sap', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Giving The Fleece A Chance — SPEAKING OF STYLE | When it first entered into the fashion zeitgeist it was possible to ignore New Balance sneakers, Dad hats, and jeans. Fast forward to 2019, and it’s become impossible to overlook the rise of anti-fashion as a full out fashion arch that is closing in on a five-decade run. Sartorially I was one of the haters of the Jerry Seinfeld aesthetic, but one item out of the Dad style staples swayed me? The ever likable fleece.
Fashion for me always had to lean towards cool. When wearing streetwear was still a fresh idea. I wore Supreme t-shirts and Kith sweatpants with a sense of pride. As streetwear grew bigger and bigger and I grew older and older, it began to feel more and more unrelatable. The marketing campaigns were no longer directly speaking to me. They were speaking to the teenager who was obsessed with the latest Yeezys. It didn’t make much sense anymore to be wearing what some 11th-grade reseller was wearing anymore.
Style-wise I was lost. I didn’t want to devote large dollars to level up to the next echelon of more mature brands that catered to older streetwear heads. Tailoring is making a slow comeback, but I didn’t want to be that guy at the coffee shop that thought he was better than everyone else because he wore a skin-tight blazer. Would I just be a basics guy? You know those guys that wear head to toe J. Crew and Frank & Oak looking like a side character from some poorly reviewed Rom-Com. With no more stylistic avenues that I felt comfortable enough to explore, I caved into the Dad aesthetic. The easiest piece to adopt? The ever loveable Fleece.
Nostalgic is the first feeling you get when wearing a fleece sweater. It quickly fades and then you question how something this comfortable and easy to wear is now considered a hot fashion item. If the hoodie has become the modern two-button navy blazer, the fleece jacket is the double-breasted version since it double downs on comfort.
The fleece is having its moment in menswear. It became a talking point when finance bros adopted it as their casual uniform for their nine to five. Then the world of fashion took notice of the fabric and flipped it making it a highly covetable fashion piece. The rise of hiking gear inspired silhouettes as a fashion trend has also contributed to its upward trajectory.
A quick Patagonia search on a secondary market site such as Grailed reveals that the price of their vintage fleeces is being sold for triple digits. It has become one of the rare clothing pieces that are being embraced by all guys no matter your style preferences. Financial dudes stick to the tried and true Patagucci. Streetwear guys will rock the Supreme and Palace versions. While high fashion guy prefers the Sandy Liang iterations.
Taking a chance on fleece has softened my stance on all things Dad style. When you don on gear that is culturally appointed for swagless fathers it feels odd at first. Then you quickly embrace it. You begin to understand the irony and the inside joke of wearing something that’s not supposed to be fashionable whatsoever but somehow is. | https://medium.com/@speakingofstyle/giving-the-fleece-a-chance-speaking-of-style-6f092e3a387f | [] | 2019-08-22 18:44:22.058000+00:00 | ['Style', 'Menswear', 'Fleece Jackets', 'Fashion'] |
On Love and Enlightenment | Not two weeks before I began reading Flossie Deane Craig’s novel Feathers In A High Wind did I encounter those lovely lines in the quasi-Sufi philosopher’s collection of mystical poetry, originally composed in twelfth century Khorassán (a region of modern day Iran). Given that the former title is a gritty narrative of life in bucolic northern Arkansas over the years book-ending World War One, I thought these two works to be about as remote from each other as they could be. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled upon that very quatrain a little over halfway through Feathers in a High Wind. As it turns out, Flossie was a woman of more literacy, eloquence and style than her seemingly humble origins would imply.
In the decades after her death, the journals comprising Flossie’s novel were treasured by her family as entirely fictional works. However, it was eventually discovered that those heirloom stories of love, strife and change were more than just recreations of the habits, customs and livelihoods of the period; rather, they chronicled actual events. More incredibly, the names scattered throughout the journal entries were recognized as pseudonyms for the people in Flossie’s life. Thus, when Feathers was finally published in 2015 thanks to the combined efforts of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the pseudonyms were reverted to their corresponding historical names, and Feathers debuted as an authentic ledger of Flossie’s remarkable and tumultuous life in the years from 1912 to 1919.
Flossie Deane Craig is my great-great-great grandmother. So closely related to me is she that a picture exists of myself as an infant being held by her then very senior daughter Cerece (whose birth and rambunctious childhood form one of the book’s most tender threads), and yet, for the first twenty years of my life, the significance of this relationship escaped me. Family trees tend to forego vivid details for the sake of graphical efficiency, causing ancestral marriages and unions to appear as nothing more than procreative mechanisms necessary to reach “the present’’. Thus, in my youth I found it difficult to recognize Flossie from among myriad faces in sepia-toned old photos, or to distinguish her name when it emerged from time to time in nostalgic family chatter. Again, until I read Feathers in a High Wind, I failed to understand how impressive a woman she really was.
Consider the ambient conditions of her rural town of Paragould, Arkansas (population then around 5,500) in the 1910s. Aside from the stirrings of growing industry, the region was one of agriculture, piety, patriarchy, and, if a man was from a well-to-do family, inherited responsibility (of tending to a family farm or business, for example). For women, who were not to win their franchise for quite a few years to come, opportunities for the pursuit of individual ambition were slim, as their futures usually hinged on the career trajectories of the men they married and attended to. Societal roles were, in modern parlance, “traditional”. Men worked and earned the vast majority of household income, and women were the domicile managers, cooks, and primary child-rearers. One could certainly argue that this environment exerted a stifling effect on the development of those progressive elements like female intellectualism, independence, and autonomy that would only evolve en masse nearly a century later. And yet, the pages of Feathers In A High Wind reveal Flossie to be a woman equipped with period-revolutionary sorts of bravery and intellect so premature that they align snugly with the female empowerment campaigns of today.
Take bodily autonomy as a case-in-point. At several instances in the novel, women (including Flossie) are burdened with the arduous task of pregnancy and childbirth as a consequence of the random (and occasionally violent) carnal hungers of their husbands, who then return to their work lives and leave their expectant wives to cope. Such treatment exacts monstrous mental and physical tolls on these women, one of whom snaps and merrily subjects her cruelly rapacious husband to a Tarantino-esque murder-castration. Thankfully, Flossie elects a different solution, and covertly begins a rudimentary course of birth control, freeing herself from the constant, gnawing anxiety of being subjected once again to pregnancy. This at a time where the refusal of a husband’s advances, much less the suppression of reproductive functionality, was sufficient merit for moral castigation, especially on Christian grounds.
Where the spiritual and the transcendent are concerned, Flossie spurns the idea of locating God in stuffy farm churches and among shrieking, frenzied worshipers (Flossie’s mother-in-law exclaims “when God wants to shout me, I just let him shout me!”), preferring instead to forgo the services and seek God in winds and snows and in nature’s other splendors. She derides the casuistry of the churchgoers who exalt God’s favor in the Great War, noting that her kind and loving God would never be partial in such horrendous human conflicts, and observes that the most enthusiastic believers are often the poorest models for her notion of Jesus (for years, my father cruised south Georgia in a truck sporting a bumper sticker with a Gandhi quote reading “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” I’m not claiming that Flossie was Gandhi, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t draw the similarity). In the face of a hawkeyed preacher who questions her devoutness, she conceals these convictions with an admirable and clever mendacity. No doubt those convictions would have alienated her from her community as an out-and-out heretic, destined for Hell.
That eternal condemnation, which I suspect she would still earn from certain Christian sects today, brings me to perhaps her most groundbreaking intellectual reform, captured contemplatively when she writes “But all I could see was that Man… managed to make for himself a hell, wherein, if one listened, there might always be heard weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth.” Her surmise that Hell is earthly and man-made, or in other words a product not of divine creation but of human frailty, is strikingly similar to that revelation which saw the megachurch preacher Carlton Pearson lose his congregation almost one hundred years later.
I have not even begun to describe Flossie’s ardent battle to wrest influence over financial matters from her lovable, endearing, and at times equally despicable husband Alex Walker, or her fervent struggle to win over his leery and judgmental parents, or her charming enthusiasm for “new” technology like cars, running water, and electricity and lighting systems, but if I haven’t yet made my point about Flossie’s striking and uncommon enlightenment, I’m not going to have made it, am I?
However, the vital artery of the book, and transitively of Flossie’s character, is her desperate quest not just to find romantic love — she and Alex accomplish this feat for a time early in the book — but to determine its authentic sources, to capture it for good, and to distill it as best she can. Unlike some couples in the novel, she understands that love does not stem from the sex and the distribution of responsibility that accompany wedlock, and that while the children of a marriage do not guarantee a love between the parents, they may certainly help to kindle it. Flossie (I think accurately) comes to envision love as a fluctuating state and searches again and again to find its stasis.
This endeavor fails frequently, though often through no fault of her own, and each failure elicited in me an unusually potent twinge of familial compassion. After all, her loneliness when Alex leaves her to fend for herself during a trying pregnancy, her broken spirit when she learns of his unfaithfulness, and her confusion and resignation at his repeated unwillingness to say “I love you” are all palpable accounts of the suffering of my kin. Her trials reminded me of something the author Salman Rushdie once remarked during an Emory University literary panel discussion about love:
“When we talk about love, we usually add to it.. related concepts such as fidelity, durability… it’s supposed it would go on for a long time, and it’s supposed to be monogamous… that might all be nonsense. That might just be a kind of comforting, bourgeois domestication of love. And that actually love might have more or less nothing to do with those things. It might be much more savage and brutal and non-enduring, a thing that betrays itself… it might be the kind of love that you find in high tragedy.”
Flossie never seems to find respite from confrontations with the callousness and temporality of love, and yet that struggle seems to be the surest indicator that her love was true. There were poignant and powerful instances of love and devotion, especially one wrenchingly sublime moment of vulnerability and understanding and partnership with Alex after several years of marriage, but even that long-awaited unity succumbs to high tragedy as the novel mournfully concludes. After closing the book in what I can best describe as a trance, I felt as if I suddenly knew my third-great grandmother and her family as if I had met them, but that elation was dampened by the sad reality that they had all died long before my arrival to this world.
I suspect that a natural consequence of knowing one’s ancestry, or of being anyone’s descendant, is to (perhaps solipsistically) wonder what traits and vestiges of past generations endure in oneself, and after I reveled in Feathers In A High Wind, I couldn’t help but give in to that little tug of introspection. While I entertain the notion that I can write, I have yet to scribble as elegantly and poetically as Flossie, and while heresy and nonconformity are for me sources of personal pride, I have yet to exercise those postures as daringly as she did. Nonetheless, and despite the chasm of time and societal change that separates us, I daresay we would have had a great deal to talk about, and I have a great deal from her left to learn. Fortunately, Feathers promises that what lessons she may yet teach her great-great-great grandson are hidden in the glorious depths of her work. | https://medium.com/@ethanwetherington/on-love-and-enlightenment-6be646f8d32d | ['Ethan Wetherington'] | 2020-12-19 05:19:17.498000+00:00 | ['Empowerment', 'Enlightenment', 'Literature', 'Love', 'Family'] |
There’s this misconception floating around that in order to hit “publish,” your story has to be perfect. That every word has to be flawless, and each sentence has to flow effortlessly. Well, allow me… | Your Stories Do Not Have to Be Perfect
There’s this misconception floating around that in order to hit “publish,” your story has to be perfect. That every word has to be flawless, and each sentence has to flow effortlessly.
Well, allow me to be the first, or the hundredth, to tell you…
Perfection is a myth.
Perfect is the lie we tell ourselves so that we don’t actually have to hit publish. It’s what keeps us feeling “safe” and ultimately from taking action needed to make things happen.
As Gary Vee often says:
“Perfect is a veil for not doing.”
Please don’t get stuck trying to perfect your story so much that you never actually publish it. Perfection is out of reach. However, every time you do publish, you’re one step closer to it. | https://medium.com/extraordinary-humans/your-stories-do-not-have-to-be-perfect-d66ac59dbf72 | ['Devin Arrigo'] | 2020-12-15 02:31:04.448000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Freelance Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Short Form', 'Short Read'] |
Where is my electric vehicle, Uber? | Last Sunday, I had a shower thought wondering why ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft lack an electric vehicle option. You can share a sedan, hail a luxury SUV, and call a wheelchair-accessible ride. But you can’t choose to ride in an electric vehicle. What gives?
Uber facilitates over 10,000 rides every minute. The transportation unicorn’s 3 million drivers have logged over 5 billion trips worldwide, but very few vehicles in the fleet are electric or hybrid. With this incredible reach, ride sharing companies have much more climate change power than they credit themselves. While some incentives are built in for ride sharing drivers to switch to EVs, Uber does not incentivize the customer. The hybrid, electric, and autonomous vehicle revolution may hit the U.S. eventually, but ride sharing services can do more to speed up adoption.
A few ride sharing ideas:
Offer renting and leasing options to drivers favoring electric vehicles. Uber’s EV incentive today is only for the UK, and they partner with Hertz, Getaround, and Fair for renting. Promotion of the $7,500 U.S. federal rebate on new electric vehicle purchases would be a great starting point. Invest in charging infrastructure, not renewable energy credits. Many companies, Lyft included, claim they are 100% carbon neutral via extensive investment in renewable projects or credits. In my opinion, this is a workaround to investing in on-site solar, storage, and charging infrastructure — physical proof the company is serious about being green and a signal to employees their purchase of an EV is welcome. Modify vehicle requirements for drivers. ie. Your car must be no more than 8 years old or hybrid/electric. As EVs become more popular, this rule becomes increasingly important to wean out petrol. Test an ‘Uber EV’ option. Yes, I hear you. Uber would never launch this service unless it was profitable. However, Uber is losing ~$1 billion per quarter ahead of their 2019 public offering with plans to profit from new businesses like Uber Eats. I wouldn’t underestimate the number of green ride sharing users willing to pay one or two dollars more per ride to help electric transportation adoption.
Consumers will adopt clean energy solutions once they are convenient and affordable. Solar, storage, EV chargers — these are remarkable advancements but often expensive or unattainable by the average home owner or city dweller, respectively. So, can mainstream services like ride sharing fuel clean energy adoption sooner?
(Happy to continue the conversation on Twitter)
//UPDATE//
In early June 2019, it was announced ridesharing and taxi services in India might have to achieve 40 percent electrification by 2026 via legislation. This could be a huge step towards to mainstream electrification in a developing world, and perhaps convince the largest emitters to follow suit in some fashion. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/where-is-my-electric-vehicle-uber-2b8d2c212c18 | ['Matt Bloom'] | 2019-06-11 17:26:28.508000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Electric Vehicles', 'Uber', 'Transportation', 'Climate Change'] |
Latest Data Reveals the Actual Size of The Gender Gap at the Academy Awards | Latest Data Reveals the Actual Size of The Gender Gap at the Academy Awards
A data-driven analysis of gender representation in 88 years of Oscars
Over the 88 editions of the Academy Awards, several things have remained constant. The Red Carpet. The golden statuette. And the absence of women nominees.
Which isn’t to say that women are absent from the event. During the Academy Awards season, pictures of actresses monopolize the front pages of websites, magazines, newspapers, and TV shows. Their bodies are discussed, their designer clothes, their hairstyles, their make-up, their dates.
And still, very few women are actually nominated for an Oscar. And even less win one.
Let’s look at numbers. Did you know that in the history of the awards, only 17% of the nominees have been women? Or that in the upcoming 2016 Oscars, five categories had no female nominee at all?
Note: Silk has been discontinued as of Dec. 15th 2017 so links are broken and visualizations are static. Will replace them asap. | https://medium.com/silk-stories/latest-data-reveals-the-actual-size-of-the-gender-gap-at-the-academy-awards-ad2fff99ef13 | ['Alice Corona'] | 2017-12-13 15:11:37.580000+00:00 | ['Gender Gap', 'Academy Awards', 'Data Journalism'] |
Higher education in Burkina: a path towards unemployment? | Auditorium in a public university (approx. 2000 students attending a lecture)
“The candidates whose names follow are successful …”. This is the magic sentence made by the president of the jury before returning the verdict of admission to the baccalaureate, recognizing nine long months of intense classes and exercises. We then attend scenes of jubilation, often crazy.” It’s worth it! It is not given to all to have the baccalaureate … “, some say.
But the euphoria of the first days after admission will gradually fade and leave room for questioning: “Now that I have the baccalaureate, what will I do? In which high school/university will I enroll? What will I study? Which profession will I practice”?
For the last year session (2018), 38178 candidates were successful at the baccalaureate level. To continue their studies, they had to choose between public and private education. A dilemma.
Pursuing higher education in a public school requires a great sacrifice. Above all, we must accept the delay. Numerous attempts to alleviate the problem, notably through the system of “technical invalidation” due to great late to accomplish coursework, which norms are still not established. Studying in the public also means accepting draconian working conditions: lack of classrooms, overcrowding, etc. But one thing is certain: you will not have to worry about the recognition of your degrees. You will be able to showcase them in public service competitions and for job offers; your sacrifice will not have been in vain.
Candidates taking the baccalaureate exam, 2018
If this option does not suit you, you can still enroll in the private sector, which offers a range of vocational training streams. The working conditions cannot be easier: reduced staff, air-conditioned rooms, etc. But the quality of the services often leaves something to be desired: unqualified teachers, teaching programs that are not adapted to the training program, etc. The icing on the cake: in many cases, diplomas are not recognized by the CAMES (African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education), or even by the government of Burkina Faso.
However, whatever the training option, you are not immune to unemployment. According to the continuous multi-sector survey conducted in 2014, the overall unemployment rate in Burkina Faso is 6.6%. This scourge mainly affects the age group of 15–34 years, which represent about 35% of the population and 63.76% of the unemployed. | https://medium.com/@achillesawadogo/higher-education-in-burkina-a-path-towards-unemployment-1b24dc01b3a9 | ['Achille Sawadogo'] | 2019-06-17 06:26:32.533000+00:00 | ['Burkina Faso', 'University', 'Unemployment', 'Education'] |
Woman Or Not Questions About Trans | Thee Quest-Human Journey
A historical article that has impacted my feelings as a Transwoman
Image by Sharon McCutcheon from Pixabay
Thee Quest-A Human Journey-Sarah M Santora
Hear out this Human story from a different perspective. Are we all so blinded by History, religion and so many other prejudiced human beings?
Can it be that Gender Transitioning can carry much more weight than we could ever imagine?
The following is an article written/published on January 10 that nobody has seen. What is wrong with the world? Why are we blinded from the truth and reality?
Are so many humans immune from the real world?
This article is 8 minutes long and worth every second if you really care!
Bravo Sarah | https://medium.com/theequest/woman-or-not-questions-about-trans-53067a141a68 | ['Pierre Trudel'] | 2020-12-22 16:50:14.826000+00:00 | ['Thee Quest', 'LGBTQ', 'Womens Rights', 'Love', 'Transgender'] |
NFTs for everyone: Rarible raises $14.2 million from Venrock Capital, CoinFund, 01 Advisors to take the digital creator economy mainstream | NFTs for everyone: Rarible raises $14.2 million from Venrock Capital, CoinFund, 01 Advisors to take the digital creator economy mainstream Rarible Jun 23·5 min read
Rarible’s journey unfolded in one of the strangest times in this generation. Perhaps when needed the most, Rarible was there to allow thousands of digital creators to find new monetization channels and direct ways to interact with communities.
Last June, 6 months post launch, total trading volume on Rarible hit the $28,000 mark. By June 2021 it grew by a mind-blowing 3000x, reaching $150 million in total sales!
Though miraculous for most, the overall NFT market growth didn’t come out of the blue. NFTs have been years in the making with applications in blockchain games and early collectible items (CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks) dating back to 2017. This past year, NFTs took the world by storm with their most tangible and timely use case so far: fuelling the creator economy. Digital art has paved the way for the convergence of blockchain technology and mainstream user applications.
Pioneering NFT mass adoption in partnership with Flow
Now we stand at the next frontier of mass adoption: for ALL digital content to go on chain. The next step for NFTs is to become the full-scale intellectual property rights framework for media content. This new trend is fueled by mainstream players entering the stage: brands, celebrities, sports teams and more enabling creators to find direct, authentic, and meaningful new forms of connection with their audiences. The wider outreach and the influx of a global user base are vital for the NFT market and for the community to thrive.
Just as Rarible has always been at the forefront of the NFT movement, we are determined to pioneer the next wave. On this milestone, we are happy to join efforts with the most respected and value add investors to go beyond the current enclosed crypto environment and take NFTs truly mainstream: Venrock Capital, 01 Advisors and CoinFund.
We are certain that their unique expertise will help Rarible make this transition.
To mark this next phase, we are also proud to enter an official partnership with Flow. Dapper Labs has an impressive track record of bringing NFTs mainstream by creating native experiences for non-crypto audiences. As a blockchain, Flow enables easier access and lowers the entry barrier for traditional consumers and brands, which makes it a perfect partner on our journey to the wider adoption.
In the coming couple of months, we will be bringing Rarible on Flow as a primary and secondary marketplace, also welcoming the robust ecosystem of projects built on Flow blockchain.
Backed by the most reputable consumer brands-focused VC firms
Venrock Capital
Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family in 1969, Venrock partners with entrepreneurs to build some of the world’s most disruptive, successful companies. With a primary focus on technology and healthcare, portfolio companies have included Apple, Check Point Software, Cloudflare, Dapper Labs, Dollar Shave Club, Gilead, Dataminr, Illumina, Intel, Nest, and 10x Genomics.
01 Advisors
A revenue stage investment fund led by renowned early Twitter executives, former CEO & COO Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, 01 Advisors help startups to move from building great products to building great companies. Previous investments of the firm include Mythical Games and Masterclass.
CoinFund
CoinFund is a blockchain-focused investment firm investing in crypto networks and their key enabling infrastructure. Founded in 2015, CoinFund is partnered with the team at Venrock. CoinFund has formulated a strategy of network lifecycle investing, focusing on funding early-stage companies, engaging in active network participation strategies, and managing digital asset exposure as networks mature. CoinFund team has a five-year track record in the blockchain space, investing across two digital asset focused funds. Its partnership draws on 30+ years of experience in finance, law, engineering, and technology. CoinFund’s mission is to be value-added investors and technical partners to blockchain’s most promising teams.
NFT protocol, L2, credit cards, scalability
Right now, the NFT market needs stellar user experience more than anything else: user friendly wallets, simple interactions, gasless minting and purchasing flows without upfront fees. We need a world where an indie creator can effortlessly create an NFT and sell it for $5 to his community of supporters, as well as where a pop icon can use NFTs to establish close contact with her multi-million audience in a sustainable way. To make this vision come to life, we need infrastructure, tools, community and a marketplace. This is what the raised funds will be used for.
Rarible has a lot in the pipeline for the upcoming few months, including the launch of Rarible NFT protocol, L2 solution for scalability and sustainability, credit card payments, adoption of Flow blockchain, multiple partnerships and drops, and more.
Rarible stands by its vision to become a full-scale protocol powered by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, owned and governed by the community, and we are thrilled that investors of such a scale share and support this vision alongside with our fantastic community. It means we’re on the right track.
Join the team building the marketplace of the future
You’re as excited about the future on NFTs as we are? We have multiple open roles across marketing, business development, and engineering: Head of Community, Head of Developer Relations, Product Manager, and more. Explore these and other opportunities here: https://jobs.lever.co/Rarible
Thank you for doing it with us! 💛 | https://medium.com/@rarible/nfts-for-everyone-rarible-raises-14-2-million-88abee23b764 | [] | 2021-06-24 10:35:15.350000+00:00 | ['Nft', 'Marketplaces', 'Protocol', 'L2', 'Scalability'] |
Cloudbot 101 — Custom Commands and Variables (Part Two) | Cloudbot 101 — Custom Commands and Variables (Part Two)
In part two we will be discussing some of the advanced settings for the custom commands available in Streamlabs Cloudbot. If you want to learn the basics about using commands be sure to check out part one here.
What is the advanced section?
The advanced section contains a lot more customization. Let’s jump right in and go over things.
What are cooldowns?
There are two forms of cooldowns: Global Cooldown and User Cooldown and the cooldown period for both is measured in seconds.
The Global Cooldown means everyone in the chat has to wait a certain amount of time before they can use that command again. If the value is set to higher than 0 seconds it will prevent the command from being used again until the cooldown period has passed.
User Cooldown is on an individual basis. If one person were to use the command it would go on cooldown for them but other users would be unaffected.
What are all these cost settings?
The cost settings work in tandem with our Loyalty System, a system that allows your viewers to gain points by watching your stream. They can spend these point on items you include in your Loyalty Store or custom commands that you have created.
Cost settings allow you to customize the number of points a viewer has to spend to use a command. You can adjust the number of points it costs to use a command based on a viewers role in chat. The moderator cost will only affect moderators, the subscriber cost only subscribers, the regular cost only regulars and the base cost anyone that is none of the above.
What is an Alias?
Aliases are an alternative way to execute the command. In the previous blog post, we used !followage as our command name to find out how long someone has been following the channel. What if we wanted the command to work when someone used !following as well?
With aliases, you can simply add !following as an alias so that whenever someone uses !following or !following <target> it would execute the command as well.
What are keywords?
Keywords are another alternative way to execute the command except these are a bit special. Commands usually require you to use an exclamation point and they have to be at the start of the message.
Unlike commands, keywords aren’t locked down to this. You don’t have to use an exclamation point and you don’t have to start your message with them and you can even include spaces.
In the above example, you can see hi, hello, hello there and hey as keywords. If a viewer were to use any of these in their message our bot would immediately reply.
AnkhHeart: @Streamlabs Hey, how are you doing?
Streamlabs: @AnkhHeart I am great, how are you?
If you wanted the bot to respond with a link to your discord server, for example, you could set the command to !discord and add a keyword for discord and whenever this is mentioned the bot would immediately reply and give out the relevant information.
I am done what now?
After you’re done customizing your command simply click on confirm, this will store your command and make it available immediately. Go ahead and try it out in your chat 😃.
If you haven’t enabled the Cloudbot at this point yet be sure to do so otherwise it won’t respond.
Note: When it comes to Youtube you are required to be live for at least 10 minutes before our bot starts responding in your chat.
If you have any questions or comments, please let us know. Remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. | https://blog.streamlabs.com/cloudbot-101-custom-commands-and-variables-part-two-2b1685abd5ef | ['Ethan May'] | 2019-07-19 22:01:01.040000+00:00 | ['Gaming News', 'Gaming', 'Video Games', 'Twitch', 'Live Streaming'] |
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