title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
829
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
| tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Choices | Does our behavior move us toward or away from our goal? It’s a simple question that when used consistently, can help us understand where we are in terms of our work and life.
Dr. William Glasser was a psychiatrist and therapist who developed choice theory. His theory states that all behavior is purposeful and it moves us toward or away from what we want in life. It’s a straightforward idea. If we want something, we simply have to look at our chain of behaviors to understand our progression toward that want.
Being creative is no different than any other want. We need to behave in ways that move us closer to creativity. We can’t expect behaviors that don’t move us toward being creative to suddenly transform us into creative individuals. It’s the long, continuous string of behaviors that move us toward being creative.
Glasser’s theory is extremely helpful because it put our wants within our control. We decide our behaviors, therefore we decide if the next thing we do is going to move us closer or further away from what it is that we want. And it’s immediately applicable. We can decide to do something today, this afternoon, within the next hour that is going to move us closer to what we want. The choice is ours. | https://medium.com/@daniel_17373/choices-51e17f4fec8b | ['Daniel Hall'] | 2019-11-15 11:41:04.836000+00:00 | ['Creativity Tips', 'Choices', 'Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Creative Process'] |
Those Little Trivial Habits | So I was listening to this book called Atomic Habits on Audible the other day which made me think about few things. Habits can make you or break you. It shapes us to a person we never thought we would be. As James clear says in his book, ‘You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems’.
After reading his book, I started introspecting and started listing my mundane trivial habits and started wondering if it’s good or bad. I don’t know how I caught these habits but it is just there leaving micro traces all along. I could not help but wonder how these things shape me as a human being.
I made a list of good, bad and neutral habits like the author asks us to do. I can’t help noticing there are some trivial habits that I have which gives me immense pleasure. These habits are very hard to identify but they leave you with utmost happiness. So here are few of my trivial habits that give me little dose of happiness that I might think is good for me (please feel free to point out the bad ones).
Writing lyrics of my favourite song
I started this habit long back when I wanted to fill in my time alone. I used to stay in the hostel and was missing my family. This helps me when I’m sad or depressed.
To-do list on the paper like old school style
I always had the habit of writing down the things I have to do during the day. It was pretty normal when I was a child since it was pre digital era. But I still need it on a nice paper even when we have thousands of tools and devices to do that. I feel the habit of writing is good but the need for the fancy paper is kind of an extravagance. But again I’m a little old school.
I have been using the theme of famous Illustrator Alicia Souza. I get the printout from the shop and paste it on my wall.
Making a vision board
Making my vision board has been my favourite thing so far. It gives me a proper perspective of what to do in the year ahead and it is absolutely fun to do. I paste my favourite quotes and the things that reminds me of my goals.
Making my bed everyday morning
I don’t know how it affects you but it is the positive start in the morning for me. Having a wrinkle free and dust free bed is one of the highlights of my day and it absolutely lightens my day.
Eating fruits in morning
Eating fruits in morning before the breakfast has been considered very healthy in Ayurveda. It’s common practice in my home to eat lot of fruits before a proper Indian breakfast. It has worked marvelous for me since I’m a overeater in morning.
Meditation or prayer
This is not one of the trivial habits. But I want to include it because it affects my inner well being a lot.
I was brought up in a religious home. My mom and dad prayed everyday and they made us do it too. Once I moved out of the house, I lost that habit and my life felt a little haphazard to be honest. Due to pandemic, I have returned home and I’m compelled to pray and meditate with my parents, I have got my peace of mind again. Meditation and prayers can do wonders to your well being and it’s always awesome to do it. | https://medium.com/@sanchithasr/those-little-trivial-habits-1fbf176c208b | ['Sanchitha Sr'] | 2020-11-24 04:37:52.667000+00:00 | ['Lifehacks', 'Habits', 'Everyday Life', 'Lifestyle', 'Atomic Habit'] |
Drawing up Real time Risk Weighted T&Cs for Merchant Banks | The Cards and payments industry, by dint of sheer operational complexities and significant extraneous stimuli, has always posed special challenges for driving AI actionability.
This extreme complexity stems from the interdependence between various players in the value chain.
Attempted a rough mapping of some of the larger players and their key operations within the industry.
It makes sense to understand this complex value chain. An overly simplistic transactional flow could look like this:
One of the key problem statements I have repeatedly heard some Acquirer and Processor clients raise in the past few years is that of finding a smart, yet expeditious way of acquiring merchants, and making optimum risk-weighted offers to them. The intent is to help expand the acquirer’s market to onboard the maximum number of merchants, while ensuring ‘bad cases’ are filtered out or priced appropriately.
That would entail risk neutral pricing and T&Cs.
But first, it is important to understand the components of the T&C price. This would comprise two key components — Price for “services” and Premium for any risks undertaken by the acquirer.
Pricing of services needs to factor in cost of services such as ‘transaction authorisation’, ‘collection of sales slips’, ‘clearing of transactions to associations or issuers’, ‘helping in settlement of transactions’, ‘reporting’ and other case specific. Risk premium is estimated using various metrics and models to ensure coverage of a broad spectrum of events and market triggers as depicted below:
The key unknown factor for building the personalized T&C is individual level risk scores for each new merchant.
Net risk indexes are created for each new prospect based on identified risks as well as potential of business.
The latter would include indicators such as monthly transaction amount processed, average card transaction value, industry (ex Travel industry normally witnesses higher chargebacks than stable business like FMCG), outlook of the country a business operates in, demand and growth projections for the merchant etc
Various T&C structures can be designed in real time using AI models to recommend the most optimum contract that represents adequately covered interests of both Merchant and Acquirer.
Our solution flow is depicted below:
The process runs on an AWS TPU environment and is built using some native AWS services and Python/Dash programming.
The key outcome is to generate a real time risk weighted T&C for each merchant who signs up, expediting the offer process. Additionally we linked the offer with the closest available ‘advisor’. This allows for interventions in case of counter questions by merchants.
Some of the additional questions answered through this application, for the same project, included the following:
PS: Visuals and workflows are sanitized for all proprietary data and outputs; and meant to be emblematic.
#Risk #Cards #Payments #RiskPricing #Pricing #MerchantRisk | https://medium.com/@tanushree-datta/drawing-up-real-time-risk-weighted-t-cs-for-merchant-banks-e1b89222aba9 | ['Tanushree Datta'] | 2021-07-25 11:24:39.194000+00:00 | ['Merchant Acquiring', 'Cards And Payments', 'Hyper Personalization', 'Risk', 'Pricing Model'] |
Does Love at First Sight REALLY Exist? | Did you know that it only takes a fifth of a second to fall in love?
This means you can bump into a stranger somewhere and almost immediately fall in love at first sight with them.
Ah, love at first sight.
From Snow white and the prince falling in love the moment they saw each other, to Ariel wanting to give up her tail as soon as she saw Eric. This concept is commonly seen in fairytales or rom-com movies, as it is simply so fantasy-like that it’s hard to believe it can really happen in reality.
If you ask people whether they believe it, you’ll likely receive a mixed bag of answers. Some may and might even say they’ve experienced it, while some may simply not. Besides, can people really have an intimate connection in a snap?
Do you believe that love at first sight exists?
Or perhaps, have you experienced it before?
But how do you know it’s love at first sight?
Here are some possible signs:
1. You feel queasy when meeting or talking to them.
Butterflies in your stomach? It isn’t just a metaphor. It certainly happens whenever you’re falling in love.
Falling in love activates a part of your brain which causes a physiological response. So, while love is mostly a brain activity, it has a direct impact on your digestive system. The butterflies in your stomach can be a result of excitement or nervousness from meeting someone you really like.
Not only that, you would know if you might be falling for the person or that they are special to you, if you feel a lot of things. Your heart speeds up, you may start feeling hot and most especially you’ll have a smile that simply won’t leave your face.
2. You want to know everything about them.
But not in a creepy, stalker kind of way, of course.
Rather, you have this genuine fascination about the other person. You want to get to know them, their thoughts and opinions about different matters — it especially is serious, if you care about whether your opinions match.
This is commonly an indication that you might be falling for them.
Having this sincere curiosity about someone is a good sign that you want more connection with them. Curiosity leads to asking more questions, which then leads to an intimate conversation. Less curious and invested people are more likely to stick to small and uninterested talks.
3. They’re the only person you see
Ever notice in movies, that when the character finally meets their love interest it’s as if the world around them fades away until all they see is that person?
Well apparently, that also happens in reality.
But it doesn’t literally make all the other people disappear, it’s just that you will tend to focus on that person and that person alone.
You might want to maintain eye contact to either consciously (or even subconsciously) flirt with them. It could also be that you’re simply paying close attention to them in general. When it comes to attraction, eye contact is important, and being attentive to the other person is a giving indicator of interest.
4. You’ll feel very comfortable and familiar in their presence
According to Psychologist Donna Novak, we feel an overwhelming sense of comfort and familiarity towards what we’re interested in. So, when you see someone you instantly like, it’s very common to feel as if you’ve already met before.
That means when you interact, nothing feels forced.
It’s hard to connect with someone new because you’d feel nervous around them. But couples that have been together for a longer time feel completely relaxed and can freely be themselves. When you experience love at first sight, your meeting may feel like the latter. Things will feel familiar and you won’t have trouble just being yourself.
But, is love at first sight really love?
Reason tells us that love at first sight is actually just lust or infatuation at first sight. There’s no way to believe that an intimate and committed love can immediately blossom between people, especially if they have never met or spoken before.
The attraction and interest developed with “love at first sight” can instead be associated with the Halo Effect: a cognitive bias wherein our overall impression of a person will affect how we feel and think about them.
For example, if they came to your date looking very presentable and acted very elegantly — overall a very good-looking person, then you would think that they are also overall kind and perfect despite not knowing them that much yet.
This means that affection when you fall in love at first sight is purely based on physical attraction. It may still be considered love, but not the type of love that marriage or any long term relationship requires.
Despite this, it doesn’t mean that it can’t have its chances of playing out and turning into something more. So, while you might feel so sure about your emotions, you still need to take time after the first meeting to really get to know the person.
So, is love at first sight really possible?
Overall, it really depends on your psychological state of mind.
If you believe in love, are open to falling in love, and if you already have a preconceived notion of what you like then love at first is a possible thing for you.
The final verdict really depends on you.
If you feel an extreme attraction towards a person, no matter when within the process you feel it, then you should definitely approach them and get to know them better. See if the spark is more than just a one-time thing.
Just because it initially started as physical attraction, doesn’t mean it can’t develop to something more genuine. Love needs time to develop.
If you believe in love at first sight, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t real. It can definitely happen if you believe it. | https://medium.com/@yuliamelnykofficial/does-love-at-first-sight-really-exist-2b4b99dd65f2 | ['Yulia Melnyk'] | 2021-07-06 03:57:33.714000+00:00 | ['Dating Advice', 'Love', 'Dating', 'Relationships'] |
alt157 Walt Disney Quotes That Inspire Your Creativity | Unless you are coming from another planet, you know Walt Disney as his original creative work of art and business strategy. His unique working style of creativity inspired generation after generation and created a lot of memories for his fans.
By Houman Asefi
If you are running a business, it is a matter of success or failure to innovate and use your inner creativity to take your business forward.
No matter what industry you are in, or you are a startup vs. established business, creativity and innovation must be the heart of your business. Your survival depends on it.
And of course, who will be the most original business innovator of all time? Indeed, Walt Disney.
Let’s get some nuggets of wisdom from the greatest brand maker of all time.
“A man should never neglect his family for business.” — Walt Disney
“The worst of us is not without innocence, although buried deeply it might be.” — Walt Disney
“Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgment, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence.” — Walt Disney
“Fantasy and reality often overlap.” — Walt Disney
“The important thing is the family. If you can keep the family together — and that’s the backbone of our whole business, catering to families — that’s what we hope to do.” — Walt Disney
“There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.” — Walt Disney
“Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards — the things we live by and teach our children — are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.” — Walt Disney
“You reach a point where you don’t work for money.” — Walt Disney
“You can’t just let nature run wild.” — Walt Disney
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney
“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” — Walt Disney
“Do a good job. You don’t have to worry about the money; it will take care of itself. Just do your best work — then try to trump it.” — Walt Disney
“The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” — Walt Disney
“A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive.” — Walt Disney
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney
“All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” — Walt Disney
“Why worry? If you’ve done the very best you can, worrying won’t make it any better.”
“First, think. Second, believe. Third, dream. And finally, dare.” — Walt Disney
“Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it’s done right.” — Walt Disney
“The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.” — Walt Disney
“All you’ve got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you’ll find people who are eager to fill your head with information.” — Walt Disney
“Everyone falls down. Getting back up is how you learn how to walk.” — Walt Disney
“Never get bored or cynical. Yesterday is a thing of the past.” — Walt Disney
“Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually, it implies some risk — especially in new undertakings. Courage to initiate something and to keep it going, pioneering and adventurous spirit to blaze new ways, often, in our land of opportunity.” — Walt Disney
“People often ask me if I know the secret of success and if I could tell others how to make their dreams come true. My answer is, you do it by working.” — Walt Disney
“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage.” — Walt Disney
“Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource — the minds of our children.” — Walt Disney
“Adults are interested if you don’t play down to the little 2 or 3-year-olds or talk down. I don’t believe in talking down to children. I don’t believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talking in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching.” — Walt Disney
“Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.” — Walt Disney
“Childishness? I think it’s the equivalent of never losing your sense of humor. I mean, there’s a certain something that you retain. It’s the equivalent of not getting so stuffy that you can’t laugh at others.” — Walt Disney
“I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether he be six or sixty. Call the child innocence.” — Walt Disney
“I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.” — Walt Disney
“I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things.” — Walt Disney
“Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children’s approach to life. They’re people who don’t give a hang what the Jones’ do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought — sometimes it isn’t much, either.” — Walt Disney
“You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.” — Walt Disney
“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” — Walt Disney
“It’s a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young.” — Walt Disney
“Animation offers a medium of storytelling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.” — Walt Disney
“Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.” — Walt Disney
“Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.” — Walt Disney
“In our animation, we must show only the actions and reactions of a character, but we must picture also with the action. . . the feeling of those characters.” — Walt Disney
“I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters — to make them personalities.” — Walt Disney
“I think a good study of music would be indispensable to the animators — a realization on their part of how primitive music is, how natural it is for people to want to go to music — a study of rhythm, the dance — the various rhythms enter into our lives every day.” — Walt Disney
“I think you have to know these fellows definitely before you can draw them. When you start to caricature a person,you can’t do it without knowing the person. Take Laurel and Hardy for example; everybody can see Laurel doing certain things because they know Laurel.” — Walt Disney
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” — Walt Disney
“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.” — Walt Disney
“When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.” — Walt Disney
“Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.” — Walt Disney
“I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a mouse.” — Walt Disney
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” — Walt Disney
“I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the Park (Disneyland). I want to feel they’re in another world.” — Walt Disney
“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.” — Walt Disney
“We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster — closed and forgotten within the first year.” — Walt Disney
“Disneyland is a show.” — Walt Disney
“I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible because dreams offer too little collateral.” — Walt Disney
“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney
“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.” — Walt Disney
“We allow no geniuses around our Studio.” — Walt Disney
“Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.” — Walt Disney
“We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.” — Walt Disney
“At first the cartoon medium was just a novelty, but it never really began to hit until we had more than tricks… until we developed personalities. We had to get beyond getting a laugh. They may roll in the aisles, but that doesn’t mean you have a great picture. You have pathos in the thing.” — Walt Disney
“I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are made to go through emotions.” — Walt Disney
“I wanted to retain my individuality. I was afraid of being hampered by studio policies. I knew if someone else got control, I would be restrained.” — Walt Disney
“My greatest reward is that I have been able to build this wonderful organization.” — Walt Disney
“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” — Walt Disney
“I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.” — Walt Disney
“I believe in being a motivator.” — Walt Disney
“I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with ‘expressing’ myself with obscure creative impressions.” — Walt Disney
“I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.” — Walt Disney
“I am corny, you know? But I think there are just about 140 million people in this country who are just as corny as I am.” — Walt Disney
“I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man.” — Walt Disney
“When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artists to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn.” — Walt Disney
“I don’t make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures.” — Walt Disney
“I have never been interested in personal gain or profit. This business and this studio have been my entire life.” — Walt Disney
“Money doesn’t excite me, my ideas excite me.” — Walt Disney
“Most of my life I have done what I wanted to do. I have had fun on the job.” — Walt Disney
“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.” Walt Disney
“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.” — Walt Disney
“I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.” — Walt Disney
“I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.” — Walt Disney
“I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.” — Walt Disney
“I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.” — Walt Disney
“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.” — Walt Disney
“I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with ‘expressing’ myself with obscure creative impressions.” — Walt Disney
“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.” — Walt Disney
“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” — Walt Disney
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney
“All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.” — Walt Disney
“When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.” — Walt Disney
“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.” — Walt Disney
“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage.” — Walt Disney
“I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.” — Walt Disney
“Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C’s. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and the greatest of these is Confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.” — Walt Disney
“We allow no geniuses around our Studio.” — Walt Disney
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” — Walt Disney
“I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.” — Walt Disney
“All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” — Walt Disney
“He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.” — Walt Disney
“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” — Walt Disney
“Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.” — Walt Disney
“I never called my work an ‘art’ It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.” — Walt Disney
“I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.” — Walt Disney
“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.” — Walt Disney
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney
“Laughter is America’s most important export.” — Walt Disney
“People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.” — Walt Disney
“Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children’s approach to life. They’re people who don’t give a hang what the Jones’ do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought — sometimes it isn’t much, either.” — Walt Disney
“The era we are living in today is a dream of coming true.” — Walt Disney
“There is more treasure n books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main … and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.” — Walt Disney
“Your dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.” — Walt Disney
“Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards — the things we live by and teach our children — are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.” — Walt Disney
“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.” — Walt Disney
“Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource — the minds of our children.” — Walt Disney
“You reach a point where you don’t work for money.” — Walt Disney
“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.” — Walt Disney
“I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a mouse.” — Walt Disney
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” — Walt Disney
“I have no use for people who throw there weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.” — Walt Disney
“Adults are interested if you don’t play down to the little 2 or 3 year olds or talk down. I don’t believe in talking down to children. I don’t believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching.” — Walt Disney
“A man should never neglect his family for business.” — Walt Disney
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” — Walt Disney
“When we consider a project, we really study it–not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.” — Walt Disney
“I believe in being an motivator.” — Walt Disney
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney
“We did it [Disneyland], in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster — closed and forgotten within the first year.” — Walt Disney
“Girls bored me, they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.” — Walt Disney
“All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them” — Walt Disney
“There is great comfort and inspiration in the feeling of close human relationships and its bearing on our mutual fortunes — a powerful force, to overcome the “tough breaks” which are certain to come to most of us from time to time” — Walt Disney
“I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life… it’s money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.” — Walt Disney
“You can’t just let nature run wild.” — Walt Disney
“When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.” — Walt Disney
“The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” — Walt Disney
1.https://www.keepinspiring.me/walt-disney-quotes/
2.https://addicted2success.com/quotes/50-inspirational-walt-disney-quotes/ | https://medium.com/@houman.asefi/157-walt-disney-quotes-that-inspire-your-creativity-78b5c8c84f36 | ['Houman Asefi'] | 2020-12-26 09:43:21.450000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Quotes', 'Walt Disney World', 'Innovation'] |
The Crime of the 20th Century | “A superman … is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.” — Nathan Leopold in a letter to Richard Loeb.
It was characterized at the time as “the crime of the century,” one that inspired multiple movies, plays, and novels, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The crime involved one of the most famous lawyers of all time in Clarence Darrow. It involved a philosopher’s influence in Nietzsche, and the killing of a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks.
The crime
Bobby Franks — From NFLJ on Wikipedia Commons
On May 21, 1924, Bobby Franks was clubbed to death with a chisel by two young men who rented a Willy-Knight automobile. The two men were named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both of whom hailed from very wealthy Jewish families in Chicago. Leopold, 19, and Loeb, 18, were very intelligent and had “remarkable academic records,” according to Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen in Crimes of the Century.
According to Geis and Bienen, after they killed Franks, they wrapped his body in a blanket and put it on the floor of the back seat of the car. They drove to a restaurant in Hammond, Indiana, named the Dew Drop Inn, and had a hot dog and a beer. They started to ride around until it got dark and then carried the body two hundred feet to put him near a railroad in Wolf Lake, an obscure area 20 miles south of Chicago.
At some point, the two of them argued about whether to use sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid to cover up their murder. Wolf Lake was a marshy and remote area where the two of them thought no one would find the body. Water would run over the body constantly, and so the two of them thought that the body would decompose. Leopold and Loeb decided to used hydrochloric acid to burn his face, penis, and a scar on his body.
To make matters worse, they addressed a ransom letter titled “Dear Sir” about the futility of calling the police, that demanded money from the Franks family lest they kill Bobby. The letter would be signed “George Johnson,” and would be evidently written by someone very literate.
They thought it was an elaborate plan. They would call Jacob Franks, Bobby Franks’s father, and a multimillionaire, and inform him that Bobby was safe, but would be killed if he informed the police about the boy being missing. They would later send a delivery letter that demanded a cash ransom of ten thousand dollars in twenty and fifty dollar bills.
Further instructions dictated for Jacob Franks to go to a payphone, enter a taxi, and board a train headed for Michigan City, Indiana. He would then have to find a message in a train car that would tell him to go to a rear platform of the train. At a specific location the train where he saw a “CHAMPION” factory, he was supposed to to throw the ransom money off the train.
Ransom Note — From the Chicago Daily News, Public Domain
It was an elaborate scheme, but it fell apart when Bobby Franks’s body was discovered by a work crew member. Jacob Franks initially didn’t believe that it was his son, but an uncle of Bobby went to the morgue, identified Bobby’s body, and called Jacob Franks just before he left the house to give the ransom.
Early suspects were the teachers at Bobby Franks’s private school. One of the teachers later won a lawsuit against the city when his fingers were crushed during the interrogation. Loeb, as a matter of fact, helped the detectives try to find the killers and supplied them with several leads.
Next to Bobby Franks’s body, however, was a frame spring of glasses that had been patented by a Chicago eyeglass store: Almer and Coe. They had only sold three glasses with the type of frame, and one of the people they sold it to was Leopold, who bought them to relieve his headaches.
“Psychiatrists, amateur and professional, later would claim that the dropped glasses were a giveaway sign of Leopold’s desire to be caught,” Geis and Bienen wrote.
When Leopold was interrogated, he denied being the culprit, insisting that he dropped the glasses when he was leading a bird-watching group, as an expert ornithologist who had published multiple papers on bird-watching. Leopold, however, would not get so lucky when Loeb was taken to the station. Loeb told the police everything, with the important detail that he drove the car, while Leopold killed Franks. He claimed that the initial plan was to knock Bobby Franks unconscious and for both of them to strangle him together so they could share the blame. But Leopold did not follow the plan.
Leopold would later confess that Loeb was the killer and Leopold was the driver. Their two confessions would corroborate most of the details of the killing, with the exception of who actually killed Franks.
The motive
Six months before the murder, in fact, Leopold and Loeb had robbed Loeb’s fraternity house, carrying two revolvers and chisels wrapped in tape. They stole $75 in cash, several watches, and a typewriter, but found the crime too tame.
As to why Franks himself was selected as the victim, Leopold and Loeb said that it was a “pure accident” because another boy had been selected for the murder. That boy was 11-year-old Armand Deutsch, the grandson of one of the richest people in Chicago. But Deutsch was not killed because Leopold and Loeb could not locate him — he had been picked up from school by a chauffeur to go to a dentist’s appointment.
Deutsch, 60 years after the murder, would reflect on the luck of not getting chosen on that day:
“When one measures the number of my dental appointments against the number of days in the school year, the odds against me were so formidable that no self-respecting Las Vegas gambler would have made a book on it. While not partial to dentists, since then I have always viewed the breed with an understandable tolerance.”
However, there was a lack of a sensible motive. All three families of Loeb, Leopold, and Franks were wealthy, of high social standing, and Jewish. According to Geis and Bienen, the local Jewish community found a small silver lining in the fact that the boys chose a Jewish victim since if they didn’t, one writer noted that “righteous public indignation, combined with Ku Klux Klan leadership, might have resulted in race riots.”
Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer who went toe to toe with William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, would represent Leopold and Loeb. He said that they killed Franks “as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience,” making sure to differentiate that there was no motive behind the murder.
Leopold and Loeb were both extremely intelligent young men — but Leopold especially is known as the most intelligent killer in history. While Loeb graduated from the University of Michigan at 17 years old, the youngest ever, Leopold obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and then anticipated transferring to Harvard Law School. Leopold, however, was smarter — with an IQ “so far above the regular scale that it was impossible to attach a precise figure to it” — estimated to be between 210 and 220. Loeb, by comparison, had an IQ of 160.
Despite his intelligence, Leopold had trouble socially. The two of them would make friends with a professor at Northwestern University, William Byron. Leopold dedicated his prison autobiography to Byron, but Byron would note that Loeb had the most charming personality of all the intelligent students he had ever taught, a claim that Leopold corroborated:
“He seemed to have an inborn knack of making friends, of winning everyone’s affection.”
Leopold, in particular, however, would be interested in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, in the concept of the Ubermensch. He believed that he and Loeb were transcendent supermen who possessed superior intelligence and aptitudes to the general population. Because Leopold believed himself and Loeb to be part of the Ubermensch, he told him that the two of them would not be liable for the crime and would be “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men.”
The trial
Clarence Darrow — From the Library of Congress, Public Domain
The families of Loeb and Leopold would hire Clarence Darrow as their attorney, who was the most famous criminal defense lawyer in the country. The case was labeled by newspapers as a “million-dollar defense”. Darrow, who was 67, did not appear competent given the way he dressed and the unorganized manner in which he arranged his suitcase, but, according to Geis and Bienen, had a “razor-sharp mind”.
Darrow, to everyone’s surprise, had the two of them plead guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping for ransom, both of which had the maximum punishment of the death penalty. He believed that the jury would be “irretrievably hostile” to the defendants and chose instead to have an aggravation or mitigation hearing that dealt with the judge’s sentence. He chose to try to persuade the judge — instead of being given the death penalty, Leopold and Loeb should receive life in prison.
Numerous psychiatrists chose to testify that Leopold and Loeb were strange, immature, and not legally responsible because of their mental conditions. They demanded that the two of them were “not guilty by reason of insanity”, and these arguments soon drew the attention of William Randolph Hearst, editor of the New York Journal, who offered to pay Sigmund Freud to examine Leopold and Loeb. Freud declined with the excuse that he was too sick to travel.
One psychiatrist on the defense team, James Whitney Hall, would say:
“Within five years Leopold will go crazy…Loeb will follow, though his lack of reaction will buoy him up for a while.”
Hall was wrong, since the two of them would remain sane for the rest of their lives. Darrow would have 102 witnesses come to the stand, and only cross-examine two of them. He would speak for 12 hours over two days pleading for mercy for the killers — all in a courtroom that reached 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Darrow would later say that “I have exhausted all the strength I could summon.”
His speech in those twelve hours is commonly known as “masterful” and has been called the finest of his career. In it, he decried the inhumane punishments of capital punishment and the American justice system against two very young men. In the speech, he appealed the judge’s humanity:
“We placed our fate in the hands of a trained court, thinking that he would be more mindful and considerate than a jury…I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love. I know the future is on my side. Your Honor stands between the past and the future.”
He then went on to criticize the cruel nature of capital punishment in the case of Leopold and Loeb:
“You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past… I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”
Darrow’s defense would be successful, noting that only one person was hanged in the previous ten years in Ilinois — and that person was 40 years old. He ended by reading a poem from Persian poet Omar Khayyam, as well as saying that “ to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.” Darrow’s long speech would be successful.
Two weeks later, the judge would give Leopold and Loeb life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, plus 99 years for kidnapping. | https://medium.com/crimebeat/the-crime-of-the-20th-century-28352511895a | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-12-03 17:41:45.233000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Psychology', 'Society', 'History', 'Philosophy'] |
Chromecast With Google TV Review: A Worthy Rival to Roku and Amazon Fire TV | Chromecast With Google TV Review: A Worthy Rival to Roku and Amazon Fire TV Clydedonahue Aug 6·3 min read
The TV ambition of Google is brewing for a long time. Starting in 2013 in the era of streaming television, the company launched its first Chromecast. It relied then on your phone, tablet, etc., to supply the videos. Android TV, which came in 2014, added an interface and TV-specific apps but failed to match the popularity level of some of its rival streamers like Amazon, Roku, and Apple. The all-new 50$ Chromecast with Google TV is the search giant’s best effort that you can purchase.
What is new in this
From the earlier 35$ Chromecast, the latest 50$ gives you remote control, high-end streaming services like 4K resolution, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atoms. It has a single unified home page that allows you to choose from different apps and integrates Google Assistant better than ever. These upgrades have been done to compete with Roku’s Streaming Stick Plus and Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K, which it does extremely well. It is not as simple or rock-solid as Roku, but it is certainly more capable for voice.
The Chromecast comes in 3 colors like snow white, sunrise pink, and sky blue. The dongle plugs into your TV via HDMI, and it tucks away behind your TV, so its color does not matter.
The remote is good. It is the as same thickness as the Roku remote and feels comfortable in hand. There is a Google clicker feature at the top, which is a four-way directional pad. It also has a dedicated button for Google Assistant differentiable from other buttons. Netflix gets a dedicated button. Apart from that, other regular keys are like a normal remote should have.
A helpful assistant
By holding down the button on the remote, the assistant can be summoned, and it is much more responsive than its other competitors like Alexa, Siri, and the Roku’s unnamed assistant. You can also go to the station even without saying the station’s name and just the object name, which provides a much simpler and easy viewing experience.
Dolby Vision and Atoms
Like the Fire Stick 4K, the Chromecast also supports the Dolby Vision and Atoms, but it is very difficult to find the apps that support both features. It does not come with a list that provides the app name.
The picture quality is sharp and crisp, and so is the audio.
Google TV: Cross-app browse, great voice search
A major improvement is that it now does not rely on your phone, tablet, or computer. By incorporating Google TV, Google is finally embracing Chromecast as a stand-alone streamer. Setting up the Chromecast is easy and fast as it does have an on-screen keyboard to enter user names and passwords. Google Tv has over 6000 apps and nearly all major streaming services.
In addition to these, there is a For You section which shows you what’s on now from the channel that you watch, resumes show that you were watching on different streaming services, and also displays movies and shows that you may like.
The software is not as snappy as Amazon’s platform as the interface could hiccup during switching apps and returning to the main menu.
Is it worth it?
It depends on which ecosystem you live in. for example, if your home is more Amazon-based, then it will be good to use the Alexa integration of the Fire TV stick. Similarly, you should use Roku’s support for your Apple Airplay and Home Kit. If you have subscribed to YouTube TV or are a fan of Google assistant, you should go with Chromecast with Google TV. It also integrates well with other Google services like Photos and supports nearly all major streaming apps. It also allows you to cast apps to form your phone, which can be considered a nice bonus.
Source: https://lifelocknofficesetup.com/chromecast-with-google-tv-review-a-worthy-rival-to-roku-and-amazon-fire-tv/ | https://medium.com/@clydedonahue961/chromecast-with-google-tv-review-a-worthy-rival-to-roku-and-amazon-fire-tv-2f837fce977d | [] | 2021-08-06 10:22:24.425000+00:00 | ['Norton', 'Setup', 'Chromecast', 'Amazon', 'Google Tv Review'] |
$288 Billion Dollar Solution to America’s Problems | American leadership has failed Americans.
American leadership has failed the entire globe.
The strongest, best country in the world has, time and time again, failed to strategically overcome the coronavirus that has plagued the country.
Let’s look at the numbers:
Over $4 trillion dollars is now being allocated to coronavirus relief. Much of these dollars are going towards people and organizations that desperately need and want them, while at the same time, much is going to frivolous places that do not even help our country overcome such a tragic, terrible issue.
What if we could learn from other countries? What if we could utilize the best in public health knowledge and expertise to overcome the virus? What if we could come together as Americans — rather than fighting the Red team versus the Blue team with the same abysmal result? What if we took a step back and realized that our country needs to take a new, different, and better approach rather than the path that we are down. Because the path that we are down is still a long way off, costly, and will hamper our future generations with debt for years to come. Furthermore, the costs are much more than the economic costs of the situation: the psychological and mental health impact of this pandemic is longlasting causing countless people to be in a fatigued, half-clouded state with senses of desperation, hopelessness, and suicide all on the rise.
What is a solution? Let me suggest a better path forward. Before I do, I want to make sure that you know that this is not a Democratic solution. It’s not a Republican solution.
This is an American solution.
This is a solution that, based on my experience learning about public health through a Masters of Public Health from The Chicago School of Public Health, allows me to view things perhaps somewhat differently than our elected Senators and Congressman. Additionally, I have the unique ability and experience of seeing the virus breakout on the ground floor as I was leaving China right when this virus was breaking out. Thanks to schooling at The University of Georgia in International Affairs and Comparative Political Economy, I’m lucky enough and have enough humility to learn from other countries on how they’ve been able to accomplish and overcome the issue; namely, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Vietnam and China.
Thanks to the leadership in these places, for instance New Zealand, they have gone days, weeks, and months without a new COVID case. They have invested far less, even at a per capita standpoint, than any American reaction to the virus. To be clear, again, in no way are their reactions to the virus able to completely eliminate it. The virus is extremely contagious, deadly, and is still spreading in many places; however, there are tried and tested public health prevention strategies that allow for America to be the greatest country in the world.
Now to the solution:
We know that the incubation period of this deadly virus is between 10–14 days
We know that if people are able to stay home, that the virus will diminish in numbers and severity
We know that the minimum people need to get through the days is minimum wage (at least) and can estimate that figure at $12 even though some states do not have minimum wage at this level
Now to the numbers:
If we estimate that there are 300 million Americans who all need to earn $12 an hour for two weeks (80 hours of working) this equates to $288 billion dollars.
Wait a second — you might ask — — $288 billion dollars? Isn’t the current bill that Congress is discussing estimated to be $900 billion dollars? And, wait a second, hasn’t there been over $4 trillion allocated by the American government in coronavirus relief spending?
Will this sort of bill gain any traction? Will our leaders, who have sadly failed us this entire year, surprise us with a 2020 holiday miracle? Will they come together, as Republicans, Independants, and Democrats for the betterment of our country and future generations?
Thank you for your consideration. If you could help spread this to your elected leaders and join me in being hopeful that America will do this, please let me know.
Patriotically yours,
Irving Steel, MPH, LEED AP
Founder, neXtmindful.com
Co-Founder, Adarev.com
Co-signed by: Dr. Bill Freeman
National Master of Public Health Program Director and Chair EmeritusThe Chicago School of Professional Psychology; Catherine D. Steel, former candidate for State House in Connecticut and member of Board of Education in East Lyme (CT) Public Schools | https://medium.com/@irvingsteel/288-billion-dollar-solution-to-americas-problems-7da6e3e03e75 | ['Irving Steel'] | 2020-12-23 15:06:50.255000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'America', 'Public Health', 'Government', 'Tough Choices'] |
FAQs | DIVX and DIVI? Which is what?
You will purchase DIVX now, using Ether sent to our “smart contract” that lives on the Ethereum blockchain. This is an “exchange token.” Your wallet will have DIVX in it and you’ll hold onto those until the Divi blockchain is launched (in early Q2 2018). At that time, you’ll download the Divi wallet software and install it on your computer. We’ll have another smart contract that you’ll send the DIVX to it. We’ll send an equal amount of DIVI to your new wallet. After a 60 day window in which people can exchange their DIVX for DIVI, we’ll send everyone’s DIVX back to them.
How can I trade/exchange DIVX?
After the token sale concludes we will work to register DIVX with several smaller exchanges such as Liqui.io, Etherdelta, and Changely. Because DIVX is an exchange token that will be burned, the larger exchanges won’t bother to list it.
When the mainnet is ready, DIVI will be listed too as quickly as possible, and as our trade volume grows, we will get listed in bigger and better exchanges.
What will happen with DIVX afterwards?
It will be burned after it’s exchanged for DIVI. As an exchange token, it will have no value.
What does DIVI Mean?
We originally took it from the word Divvy, which means “Divide up and Share.” It can also be an acronym for Decentralized Intuitive Value Initiative.
What is a Masternode?
A masternode is a program that’s on your computer, or on a cloud server you rent, that connects with other masternodes. It communicates continually with them and keeps a full copy of the Divi blockchain, constantly checking that it’s correct, and adding new blocks. By putting your coins into a masternode, you get rewarded with more newly created coins for helping to run the network.
How many DIVI are required for a Masternode?
Divi is the first to offer a 5 Tiered Masternode system. The levels of ownership are:
1000 Coins — Level 1: Copper
3000 Coins — Level 2: Silver +5%
10,000 Coins — Level 3: Gold +10%
30,000 Coins — Level 4: Platinum +15%
100,000 Coins — Level 5: Diamond + 20%
If I have 3000 coins, what’s better, 3 copper masternodes or 1 silver masternode?
A silver masternode requires the same number of coins as 3 coppers. But the chance to win a block award it 5% better. However, 3 copper masternodes gives you 3 chances to win the lottery blocks, compared with only one for silver. But you’ll need 3 IP addresses. So there are pros and cons to each.
What is Proof of Stake and Proof of Work? Why is PoS better?
The Proof of Work “consensus” algorithm requires people to search for the answer to a complex mathematical puzzle, and it takes massive amounts of calculations (and electricity) to do it. Whoever finds the answer first gets to write the transactions into the next block, and they get coins as their reward for doing that. That’s bitcoin’s method. Proof of Stake just requires you to prove you have a certain amount of coins. So they sit in a wallet (or in our case they can be in multiple wallets for better security) and not much electricity needs to be used other than a bit to communicate with the network from your computer.
When do you estimate the alpha platform will be ready?
Although the protocol is currently under development and in pre-alpha state… we try not to speculate on the exact dates too much, as development can be pretty unpredictable. That being said, our roadmap is on track for an early Q1 2018 pre-alpha test.
Is there a limited supply of tokens? How many will there be after the Tokensale?
We are capping the crowdsale at 100,000 ETH and the only tokens in existence will be the ones created in the sale. Due to the varying exchange rates of DIVX to ETH it’s hard to predict what the “cap” would be. We estimate around 60–80 million.
What are the varying rates of DIVX to ETH during the Tokensale?
Public Sale Phase 1: 30% Bonus. 1 ETH = 650 DIVX
Public Sale Phase 2: 15% Bonus. 1 ETH = 575 DIVX
Public Sale Final Phase: No Bonus. 1 ETH = 500 DIVX
Have you gotten your smart contract audited professionally?
In fact, we have gotten 3 separate contract audits to ensure the validity and security of the code. Details can be found here: https://goo.gl/HrQ36D | https://medium.com/diviproject/faqs-111db90addf4 | ['Divi Cryptocurrency'] | 2017-10-25 21:15:03.108000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Token Sale', 'ICO', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Rhonda, Maybe | Rhonda, Maybe
Image courtesy of Matt Artz, Unsplash
Rhonda
is not her real name
and I feel
bad that I don’t remember
it, but then I’m getting to an age
where I forget a lot of
people’s names.
She is the only
woman
of African-American ancestry
with whom I ever made love/had sex
(I’m at a loss to say
with certainty,
how much of each ingredient
went into
what we were doing,
at least for me.)
I was twenty years older than her
and she clearly had to
talk herself into
going to bed with me;
my efforts at persuasion
wouldn’t have made it work
without her finally chipping-in.
Her skin was dark and
beautiful, her features
pretty.
And she was still
nursing her toddler
(Andrew was his name)
that another white guy,
long gone by the time I met her,
had fathered.
Her breasts
were large
and as we did it
they began to leak
heavily.
I found it
off-putting in a gross,
sexist way — and this
even though,
I’ve always been a
boobs man.
Come to think of it
she was also the first and only
nursing mother I recall
ever being with,
or at least
the first and only one
who had such a wet reaction.
We were together just a few
weeks.
I was a loser poet, not
much $ to speak of,
and she was writing
half-hour ‘scripts’ for future episodes of
Star Trek even though
the show had been cancelled
years before
and there didn’t appear, back then,
to be any
big screen stuff coming
(in other words, she was nuts).
A few weeks,
after we’d parted ways,
a break-up without any drama
and absent much discussion about it,
she phoned me one evening
out of the blue,
and asked if I’d give her my
Visa card number so
she could pay for a pizza for
Andrew and her,
their dinner that night.
I hesitated a little
and finally asked that she only use the
card for just that one
purchase.
Image courtesy of Markus Spizke, Unsplash
She promised she would.
So I gave her the number.
She was a poor single mom
alone in the world
with her half-white baby,
and we had broken-up
shortly after that afternoon
when I’d nearly drowned
in her leaking breast milk,
so she had, in many ways,
to my liberal mind,
every right to seek
direct reparations
in an immediate
manner.
After all,
my family, on my dad’s side,
were proud white Alabamans.
So,
again,
I gave her my credit card #.
The days passed,
turning to weeks
and months;
I never heard from her again.
And she never made another
charge to my credit card.
If I look back on this with some surprise
at her keeping her word
does that make me racist?
If you were surprised when
this story ended the way it did,
does that make you racist?
Does my starting all of this
by identifying Rhonda by race
say anything?
I mean, was her race of any
consequence/importance/significance
to the rest of what happened?
Does my not even remembering her
real name matter?
I don’t know if ‘we’
(our nation/community/world)
have a long
ways to go
when it comes to racial
equality
and seeing ‘others’
fairly . . .
Image courtesy of Sushil Nash, Unsplash
. . . But I’m pretty sure
that I still do.
**************************************
Wikipedia & Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Trueman
All my books can be found on Amazon.com, of course, and at many other places including Latahbooks.com. The poem Rhonda Maybe is in this book: | https://medium.com/@ttrueman/rhonda-maybe-7b657cd73e67 | ['Terry Trueman'] | 2020-12-20 18:02:43.354000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Justice', 'Trust', 'Love', 'Racism'] |
Driving Healthcare Transformation Through Emerging Technology | In today’s digital world, people handle the majority of their business and personal needs online. Increasingly, people expect to handle healthcare needs digitally as well. Spurred by new public demand, healthcare is rapidly moving into the digital age by applying the same advanced analytics, Big Data, machine learning and consumer applications that retailers have used successfully for years.
As is often the case, the federal government–led by the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and others–has been at the forefront as a catalyst or user of these techniques.
During my service as the National Coordinator for Health IT in the past administration, we focused on improving healthcare by making it better (using technology to measure and emphasize evidence-based care delivery), smarter (reimbursing providers based on the value they bring), and healthier (focusing on overall health and health status, not just treating patients when they’re sick). Technology is a foundational element of support in this work. Our goal was to help the country meet societal expectations of 21st century healthcare.
Changing Payment Models
Healthcare payers are moving to alternative payment models. These programs are not burdened with counterproductive incentives within legacy fee-for-service models; rather, providers are rewarded for keeping patients well. Payers are incenting patients to choose healthier behaviors that contribute to overall wellness and hold them accountable for poor health choices.
This shift to alternative payment models and value-based reimbursement was spurred by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adopting these approaches for the Medicare program. CMS estimates that by 2018, up to 70 percent of all Medicare reimbursements will be based on value, not merely volume. Many private payers and state Medicaid programs have implemented similar programs. Partnerships between healthcare providers and payers allow more successful value-based care paradigms to flourish, providing the best results for members and patients.
Population Health Approach
For too many years, the healthcare system focused almost solely on illness and treatments. Today, more healthcare providers are using a population health approach, assessing and addressing needs and issues preventing wellness. Many providers embrace the challenge of spurring patients and their families to action; they share information to help them reach their best health, no longer content with the assessment that patients are not properly motivated or simply “non-compliant.” This financial alignment helps ensure providers are reimbursed and incented to care for patients in new and innovative ways.
Enhanced Information Technology
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, passed in 2009, led a majority of healthcare providers to implement electronic health records (EHRs) and digital data sharing. Nearly all hospitals and 75 percent of doctors’ offices now use EHRs.
To fully capitalize on this advancement, healthcare providers and payers should support development of universal data standards and a consistent governance model. This would facilitate information flow, empowering patients, supporting better decision-making and improving outcomes. Activity has begun, but much is yet to be achieved.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s as Example
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s is an example of a payer interested in leveraging technology to achieve its core mission — to improve the health and lives of Louisianians.
The digital platform created by the HITECH act provides a basis for innovation, care coordination and transparency that did not exist before the delivery system was digitized.
The digital platform created by the HITECH act provides a basis for innovation, care coordination and transparency that did not exist before
One major effort has been to facilitate, in partnership with providers, a learning health ecosystem. In this model, data from claims, provider systems, patients, state registries and the best-available research evidence is used to tailor solutions and innovations to support high-quality, personalized care across the state. The data models are powered by the flow of information. And, they have allowed Blue Cross to foster health maintenance activities as well as identify effective interventions for motivating members and improving the quality of care they receive.
A second major effort is a digital excellence program, based on combining and analyzing digital information from providers, government, community resources, publicly available sources and Blue Cross information to not only promote high-quality, evidence-based care, but, more importantly, to predict members’ needs in advance of illnesses or catastrophes. This is done through the deployment of predictive analytics and care management teams that reach out to members before there is a crisis.
Blue Cross also uses more traditional technologies to empower and engage members like online tools, mobile apps and personal health risk tools. They also empower members at home with digital monitors and wearables; members can then focus on staying healthy. And, if well members become patients or develop chronic conditions, Blue Cross can use these additional tools to better support them. The newly deployed advanced learning systems and analytics platforms make these interventions and tools more effective and relevant. This allows for cost-effective deployment.
New Partnerships/New Approaches
Blue Cross focuses on initiatives to innovatively engage with network providers and customers using technology. The plan recently established a unique partnership with Ochsner Health System, which is headquartered in New Orleans. The two organizations are offering an innovative product, Blue Connect, which provides their mutual customers with coordinated, focused care.
Value is gained by aligning incentives and taking advantage of home monitoring, advanced analytics to target care, and creating a learning health system. Early data shows that primary care doctors enrolled in our value programs have superior outcomes (improvement of perfect care measures by 40 percent) and have saved up to 6.25 percent of total health costs over the past 12 months. More improvements are expected as the program matures. Technology supports Blue Cross’ holistic approach to health and wellness by more efficiently targeting and matching resources in the community with members in need.
Moving Into the Future
Healthcare today is a high-cost, high-pressure environment, and future success will be facilitated by the free flow of information. While providers and payers alike have embraced new technologies and artificial intelligence tools, there is still much work ahead.
The digital health system provides a promise for driving better health, higher quality and lower costs. Collaboration among patients, providers, payers, community organizations, state and federal healthcare leaders and social advocates is necessary to realize the full promise of the new digital platform.
Check This Out: | https://medium.com/@chrishtopher-henry-38679/driving-healthcare-transformation-through-emerging-technology-ace8e7a61976 | [] | 2020-12-23 13:30:01.651000+00:00 | ['Pharma', 'Solutions', 'Healthcare', 'Company', 'Business'] |
Understanding Order Books. Market, Limit, Stop loss. What’s the… | Market, Limit, Stop loss. What’s the difference?
Courtesy of https://monzo.com/blog/2016/01/08/how-does-the-wholesale-foreign-exchange-market-work/
What is an order book?
An order book is a list, typically electronic, of buy (bid) and sell (offer) orders, including the number of shares to be bought or sold. The order book is organized by price level. This helps keep track of the level of interest for a tradable instrument and shows the market depth.
The order book helps traders become more informed about the trades they make by allowing them to analyze current buy and sell activity. Using an order book to make informed decisions about trades enables investors to increase their likelihood of making a successful trade.
Market Order
A market order is an order that is placed to buy or sell a financial instrument at the current going rate of the market. For example, let's say that the current market price for a share of Apple (AAPL) is $300, if you place a buy order at the current market price then the trade will execute and buy the share for $300.
Limit Order
A limit order, on the other hand, is an order that is placed to buy or sell a financial instrument at a specific price. The process of buying and selling is then automated by the trading platform/exchange. For example, let’s say that the current market price for a share of Apple (AAPL) is $300, but according to your analysis, it would be a better buy at $298.50. You would then place a limit order at $298.50 and the trade will not execute until the share(s) can be bought at that price.
It essentially says that I am willing to buy or sell at this price, no higher, no lower.
Stop Loss Order
A stop-loss order is similar to a limit order, in that, once the price of your stock drops and hits a specified price, the platform that you are trading on automatically sells the shares for you. Or put another way, it closes out (liquidates) the position that you held. It literally “stops losses.”
Trailing Stop
With a trailing stop, the price that your share(s) are sold at is determined by a specified amount below the market price, usually a percentage. If the price increases, the stop follows the market price by this specified amount. But if the price drops, this lower specified amount will stay the same. This mechanism allows one to lock in higher-profits and limit the amount of loss.
For example, say that you buy a share of Google (GOOGL) for $1,000 and set a trailing-stop up at 10%. The trailing stop will sell your position if the price reaches $900, but if the price reaches $1,100, the new trailing stop will be $990 (10% below the $1,100).
Conclusion
Understanding how order books work is an important feature in determining the amount of interest in any given tradable instrument. Looking at an order book gives you a broad picture of the market-depth. Understanding the various types of orders and how they function is also an important part of being a responsible and successful trader.
Even though these techniques originated in the stock market, they are just as applicable to cryptocurrencies. | https://medium.com/stabletrade/understanding-order-books-orders-b297ea51acff | [] | 2020-03-20 04:41:15.355000+00:00 | ['Trading Ideas', 'Trading Tips', 'Finance', 'Knowledge', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Choosing a sexy relationship with yourself | As women, we’re raised and taught to believe that our beauty and femininity is dependent on whether a man CHOOSES us or not.
For this reason, so many single women fall into the trap of feeling less whole, less desirable, and like less of a woman as long as there’s not man in the picture.
When you feel like you’re waiting on a man to feel feminine, beautiful, and experience pleasure…
You will cut yourself off from those very qualities that you most want…
And the experience you most want of yourself and your life.
Here’s the truth…
Being a deeply sensual, feminine, and desirable woman isn’t based on a man.
It’s is a conscious choice that you get to make.
It’s based on what YOU think and feel about you.
It’s based on the experience and pleasure YOU create for yourself and in your own life.
Just as easily as you choose to see yourself as anything other than beautiful…
You can to choose to see and inhabit your stunning beauty instead.
The time you aren’t with a man is the BEST time to develop a sexy and intimate relationship with your body, yourself, and your life.
Then you get to experience all the femininity, beauty, and pleasure you want in your life.
Then you get to choose a man just because you want him — NOT because you need him.
It all starts with choosing YOU…
And then embodying the knowing that you are profoundly safe to be seen, to be magnetic, to be gorgeous, and to be chosen.
This is the deep journey of healing and self-reclamation I get to take my clients on. | https://medium.com/@salonacarlisle/a-sexy-relationship-with-you-eb06bff0c00a | ['Salona Carlisle'] | 2020-12-18 18:37:27.174000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Dating Advice', 'Singles', 'Sexy', 'Confidence'] |
Clickbait Subject Lines: You Won’t Believe the Results | “Email on the Move” by rawpixel on Unsplash
Clickbait is a pejorative term for a headline-writing technique that online publishers have been using for years to drive traffic to websites, more often than not featuring paper-thin content, in the hope of driving advertising impressions and revenues.
You only need to click on a clickbait-type headline a couple of times to realize you’ve been duped — like a fish finding itself on a hook after biting down on a juicy worm.
The thing about clickbait is that it nearly always leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The content is rarely as sensational, awe-inspiring or informative as the headline promises, and quite often, it simply wastes your time.
Note: As an ex-newspaperman, I’m constantly perplexed as to why any editor would allow their “quality” content to be sullied by clickbait-style advertising partnerships (see below). In an age when ad-blocking software robs publishers of much-needed revenue, I guess many are just desperate for the cash they generate, although I cannot help but feel it’s a rather short-term plan for a very uncertain future.
Not All Traffic Is Good Traffic
The basic premise of clickbait is that all traffic is good traffic. This doesn’t work in the world of email marketing, where long-term relationships are far more valuable than quick wins.
For an email marketing subject line to drive real success, it has to tell the subscriber absolutely everything about the email they are about to open. It’s actually very similar to a good old-fashioned (honest) newspaper headline, which tells the full story and encourages the reader to pick up a newspaper and carry on reading.
I doubt very much that you would pick up a newspaper again if its headlines had little connection to the articles or were just a front for ill-targeted advertising. It’s exactly the same with email.
The moment an email subject line tricks or misinforms a subscriber to open an email is the moment you lose that subscriber’s engagement forever. They will either unsubscribe or (worse still) never open another email from you again.
In the perfect world, your subscribers will never receive an untargeted message. However, as we don’t live in a perfect world, I would rather a subscriber not open the occasional email because the subject didn’t quite pique their interest than waste their time on misleading and highly frustrating content.
Instead of attempting to hoodwink your subscribers into opening your emails, wouldn’t it be better to just give them what they want?
This abridged post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog. | https://john-w-hayes.medium.com/clickbait-subject-lines-you-wont-believe-the-results-d07b580b81d4 | ['John W Hayes'] | 2018-07-20 09:18:14.293000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Kyvol Cybovac S31 review: This self-emptying robot vacuum can mop, too | The Kyvol Cybovac S31 is the latest in a growing line of self-emptying robot vacuums. These completely autonomous vacuums are a wonderful luxury for most of us. But if you have allergies, asthma, or another health issue that can be triggered by the plume of dust released when you empty a dustbin, they can be a lifesaver.
The S31 has a 4.3L self-emptying dustbin that can hold up to about 60 days’ worth of dust before you need to replace the disposable dustbag inside it. The dustbin doubles as the robot’s charging dock, providing about four hours of runtime per full charge.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best robot vacuums, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.The robot itself navigates using Laser Distance Sensors housed in a turret on its top. During its first run through the room it, it creates a map of the floorplan that allows you to create virtual walls, cleaning areas, and no-go zones. The dirty business is handled by a rolling brush and two spinning side brushes on the bottom.
Kyvol The Cybovac S31 can vacuum and mop at the same time. Mapping navigation lets you control where it cleans.
Setting up the vacuum is easy, but I initially had problems with its companion app. With its dustbin-dock plugged in and the robot on its charging pins, I added the S31 and successfully connected it to my Wi-Fi. After that, I was prompted to download a firmware update; but each time I tried, I got a message saying the firmware couldn’t be upgraded until the battery was charged to more than 20 percent. I left the vacuum to charge for a couple more hours, but still got the same message when I tried to upgrade.
Mentioned in this article iRobot Roomba i3+ Read TechHive's reviewSee it I found another reviewer had encountered the same problem and solved it by running the vacuum with its physical remote and then successfully upgrading. I did the same and was finally able to update the app. I had no further issues with it after that.
[ Further reading: The best indoor air-quality monitors ]I chose my downstairs level for testing the Cybovac S31, as it includes carpet, hardwood, and vinyl tile and is the highest-trafficked area of my home. The vacuum’s powerful 3000Pa of suction enabled it to get lot of pet hair off the carpet, along with dust and various other debris.
Michael Ansaldo/IDG You can set no-go zones to keep the vacumm from mopping your carpet, for example
The Cybovac S31 can vacuum and mop at the same time, so I attached the mopping module to the bottom of the robot for the entryway, kitchen, and bathroom. It holds 110ml of water and distributes it to the attached microfiber cloth as it drags along the floor. It doesn’t make enough contact with the floor—and provides no back-and-forth agitation—to remove anything more than surface grime. It’s adequate for semi-regular maintenance cleaning, but it won’t eliminate the need for your stick mop.
Once a map has been created, the vacuum cleans in a much more predictable and efficient pattern. Setting cleaning areas is as simple as tapping a button in the app and dragging a resizable box to a spot on the map. There’s a similar process for adding virtual walls and no-vacuum and no-cleaning zones. The last was particularly helpful as my hardwood entryway abuts my carpeted living room; making the living room a no-mop zone ensured I didn’t end up with a soggy rug.
Kyvol’s app isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it’s intuitive enough to get around. The main screen displays the current map, cleaning area, and duration of the current job as well as the battery level. You can start full-room or spot cleaning from here or send the vacuum back to its dock to charge. From the Settings menu, you can schedule cleanings, set the frequency of dustbin emptying, view cleaning records, monitor the usage of the brushes and HEPA filter, and more.
Selling for about $500 at the time of this review, the Cybovac S31 was priced about the same as iRobot’s Roomba i3+ (iRobot pioneered the self-emptying concept with the Roomba i7+ and the Roomba S9+). The Cybovac S31 isn’t quite as polished as that product, but it can hold its own as a cleaner against that bot, and it can mop, too. You can confidently put it on your last-minute holiday wish list.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@brandi96817040/kyvol-cybovac-s31-review-this-self-emptying-robot-vacuum-can-mop-too-11e8e08b04d0 | [] | 2021-01-10 09:59:54.295000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Surveillance', 'Cord', 'Home Tech'] |
Don’t Live Your Life by the Numbers | Photo: Jana Krause/EyeEm/Getty Images
Do you know how many posts you’ve put on Instagram? Your number of Medium followers? The number of steps you’ve taken today? Yesterday? Last Monday? Our lives are increasingly quantifiable. And the numbers can be motivating — but they can obscure the reasons why we work out, read Medium, take a walk.
In “Stop Keeping Score,” published on Forge, Paul Ollinger writes about how he’s used his Peloton rankings to compare himself to other riders. He figured out ways to manipulate his workouts to go higher and higher on the board. Going higher had replaced getting healthy as a goal. That’s because our brains will always choose the easiest path for validation. Ollinger writes, “Left to their own devices, our brains will measure success by our net worth or TikTok views, because those things are far easier to quantify than the amount of creativity, joy, and connection we experience every day.”
For Ollinger, the numbers themselves aren’t really the problem. It’s what they’re measuring. He writes, “Try this: Instead of counting the number of friends you have on Facebook, count the number of meaningful conversations you’ve had in real time this month. Rather than comparing your results against your neighbor’s efforts, set a personal goal and track your performance over time.”
In “The Thing About Numbers,” Maya Kosoff, a frequent Medium contributor, writes about disordered eating and how numbers have been both friend and enemy to her since college. She writes about her Peloton rankings, which she finds just as motivating as Ollinger, and connects that to losing 30 pounds after a bad breakup, and connects that to her time working for a website that prominently displayed every writer’s current traffic numbers. Kosoff writes, “It is impossible for me not to actively compare myself to everyone else. Not try to beat my own personal best every time, and not try to make a harmlessly gamified system into a bigger deal than it actually is.” | https://forge.medium.com/dont-live-your-life-by-the-numbers-425d65ae3206 | ['Ross Mccammon'] | 2020-11-12 22:17:58.612000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Rankings', 'Success', 'Worth'] |
Difference in Play | It’s a beautiful world. The little things matter and make the difference. I used to binge music. I would press play and savor everything. Music is beautiful. I really pressed play on so many tunes. I assimiliated and I was petty with it sometimes judging people by what they play or how much of it. Looking back now maybe I projected on people because I used it to attempt fixing things that was broken. Aye, music heals. I believed every mood should have a playlist and maybe that’s true. Professionally, I did the much good I could muster with it. Right now though I took a step back but let it be known that I am proud. I must still say I support and appreciate the beautful things about it. How could I not? I am just taking it easy in terms of what I consume. I am trying to enjoy who I am without much of it because I was really addicted to it and I made sure everyone knew. Thank God there are books my first love actually you know. But as for songs go, I went from pressing play to asking can you play me what you got? There is a big difference in that. Back then which is not long ago I hate missing out and that accumulated certain pressure I had to let off steam. I have had to devote more time and energy to the very basic of what makes me me which is writing stories, films, articles, whatever — my very first creative endeavor. Exploration is alright. But I wouldn’t give up on what’s best and most beautiful for me. I am at a point where I choose to rediscover who I am and that involves taking things lightly. I am bold to write about me because it clears my mind. For a long time I haven’t actively listened to songs. I haven’t pressed play for myself but I always enjoy whatever the next person playing. Coming from someone who argued music is the best addiction you can imagine. Maybe it is. I don’t really know but for my journaling I chronicle some stuffs. I am allowing myself to grow.
Difference in play. Right now not about music but generally about society. Each one of us is unique and that’s what makes us all special. You have to recognize you are special even when it doesn’t seem like it. We all here for a reason and we also have the right to choose. Individuality is the difference and the unit of the said society. Different names, gifts, talents, outlooks, dreams, behaviors, background, and perspective. This is the spicyness of living. It takes self awareness to recognize and do whatever thy want with who you are because if you don’t know who you really are and want to be. Labels abound out there and there are people readily out there to trap your indecisiveness.
Difference in play is also a thing about confidence. I will apply it to writing. I don’t know if I have written about it. Oh, yes, in my offline journal. Basically most stories (not all because there are no limits to creativity) fall within some recognized should I say outlines? Most often than not touching and intersecting other themes but when you bring it apart you start seeing the similarities. Question is why do we still read books and watch films? Difference in play. That extra touch. It is not just in stories, in all walks of life our uniqueness matter.
Being in tune with what matters to me as a person has been a satisfying process. Assembling lessons from life and building it up to the difference I bring and I believe in brand new. The difference is why I keep being positive knowing it all comes together after all. Since I can remember I have always treaded a different path no matter how I look at it. It ain’t always been easy. There is no apportioning of blames. I guess everyone has their own fair share of obstacles and doubts. Long ago I would battle with myself trying to fit in even when it’s clear in certain circumstances I don’t. Trying to make people like me for who I am, do, or represent. Also long time ago I have learned to hug my person and my personality. Hone my gifts and hammer at my skills. Steer my boat believing in the difference and letting it show no matter how hard it is. Also, I try to accommodate views and have always appreciated the difference the other person brings. It is who we are to ourselves that matter. It is the core that drives the other external factors and contributions. We see different and I don’t know about the next guy I am holding on to the things closest to my heart when I know I mean good. These writings are proofs of that. I recognized my difference a long time ago and worked on it, still working it, I will do my best. Listen to advice, consider situations but I ain’t letting the external circumstances dictate the play. I hug my difference. Do yours too. It’s a beautiful world. Sometimes we have to understand it’s bigger than our immediate environment and it’s all connected including perspectives you choose to neglect. | https://medium.com/@Vincent_Apunike/difference-in-play-7b1d324e7fb2 | ['Vincent Apunike'] | 2021-07-06 20:05:43.508000+00:00 | ['Reading', 'Library', 'Believe', 'Unique', 'Novela'] |
Blockchain Quantum Computer Threat & Resistance? | We sat down with our blockchain advisor, Daniel Kraft, to ask about quantum computers and what to do to make sure Divi’s blockchain is “future-proof” against them when they become available in a few years. We thought people would ask us about this and wanted to be prepared with an answer.
So we asked him: What about Quantum Computer attack resistance? Can we just double the key length? This wikipedia article makes it seem like it’s that easy: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography)
Response:
There are two different main algorithms that a quantum computer would enable:
Shor’s Algorithm: This one is the main reason why a QC would break a lot of encryption. Basically, it means that a QC is able to compute the private key to a public key quickly, for the most popular encryption systems (including RSA and also ECDSA as used by Bitcoin and most other cryptos). For Shor’s algorithm, it won’t help to double (or otherwise increase) the key size — the only weak protection from longer keys may come from the fact that it is more difficult to build a QC with many qubits (so if you have keys longer than the maximum possible qubit size at the moment, you are still somewhat safe — but that is very fragile protection).
Gopher’s Algorithm: This allows to speed up things like finding a pre-image or a hash — substantially, but not in a way that absolutely breaks things. To counteract Gopher’s algorithm, doubling the key size (or length of a hash function) is precisely what one needs.
With respect to security in Bitcoin (and thus mostly all other cryptos as well), it looks like this: If an attacker with a QC knows your ECDSA public key, then they can steal your coins — and increasing the key size won’t help. However, if you have never used an address before, the address alone *won’t* reveal your public key — as the address adds another layer of hash around the public key. So coins in addresses that haven’t been used ever are mostly safe against QCs — at least up to some practical difficulties in how to enable spending of these outputs without making the unconfirmed transaction (which reveals the public key) vulnerable to a QC attack.
I think that for now, though, worries about quantum computers are not yet really relevant; and if there would be a practical QC, then there are probably bigger problems than Bitcoin being broken — since basically all the world’s communications would become vulnerable. When a QC seems possible, it will always be possible to upgrade the protocol to quantum-resistant crypto. (BTW, there’s almost regularly a thread or two popping up on Bitcointalk asking about quantum computers — so if anyone is interested, you should be able to find a lot of good discussions about this topic there.) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1749803.0
More info: http://www.cryptomorrow.com/2017/10/21/quantum-resistant-cryptocurrencies | https://medium.com/diviproject/quantum-computer-resistance-11c419b2c639 | ['Divi Cryptocurrency'] | 2019-09-26 02:58:31.700000+00:00 | ['Token Sale', 'ICO', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Quantum Computing'] |
Digital Gold Stable Coin: Digitalized the exchange and storage of gold | The upsides of gold reduce throughout basically all aspects of existence. Gold is not only a standard steel anyway a significant one clearly. Many universal gold to be an unprecedented factor ideal for speculation. It is not any news that gold has been used by essentially all the most important enlightened bits of the arena to deal with something primary like wealth, gloriousness, accomplishment(awards, trophies), the overview maintains. Gold is not any vulnerability at the bleeding fringe of our basic population.
It will stagger a number of you to remember the fact that gold is remedial, it has the restriction that conveys alleviating vibrations to the frame to help the repairing technique. In this article, I will love to have a look at the therapeutic piece of gold.
The remedial capability of Gold
As in step with statistics, the quality of gold to the extent beneficial changed into soonest proven by means of Egyptian when a ‘mixture’ was fabricated from liquid gold. The Egyptian mentioned that gold is perplexing and that its pleasant inside the frame could assist with easing the frame of more than one diseases and except shield the frame from a couple of ailments. We in like way have it on records that the Egyptians also used gold in dentistry that’s up ’til now relevant until these days. Gold is non-toxic and suffered through the frame.
Beside Egyptians, more than one diverse nations have used gold as beneficial. See the nations beneath
India used gold in Ayurveda for healing and revival below the call of Swarna Bhasma.
In medieval Europe, gold-secured capsules and “gold waters are used to treat disquiet due to sore limbs.
Ancient Romans used gold to fix pores and skin issues.
You will similarly feel that it’s fascinating to remember that people cook their rice with a gold coin for the reviving of body mineral in China. Some Chinese diners placed 24-karat gold-leaf of their food publications of action which advocate the restorative homes of gold.
Gold has wound up being an crucial metal if now not the maximum significant steel and that is the reason everything dependent on gold is tremendous. Everything with the individual of gold emitted an impact of being critical.
Every headway that has to do with gold is an improvement for exchange. Gold has been used for one-of-a-kind headways within the distinctive phase and now we have it on the blockchain. Tokenizing gold is perhaps the first-rate thing that has befell to blockchain improvement and the crypto global free as a fowl.
Examine on as we explore the headway that uses the workable consequences of blockchain development in a blend in with the specific favorable situations of gold to cope with large issues.
Digital Gold
Digital gold is a virtual cash maintained with the aid of licensed bodily gold positioned away in association vaults. It is an errand self-ruling of marketplace condition because it has the sponsorship of physical gold. You furthermore need to remember that every gold token is same to at least one gram of 99.99% satisfactory gold.
Inviting gold at the blockchain will deal with a brilliant deal of problems past our imaginative psyche, a great deal equal to gold has shown to be so important inside the materials of such countless world issues, the ‘Digital gold’ token is out to forestall such gigantic portions of troubles challenging the crypto markets.
Digital Gold as opposed to Physical Gold
Satisfactory Liquidity open for carriers to Purchase and Sell GOLD Tokens
Not at all like physical gold wherein cash associated specialists buy gold at a higher value than regular and promote at a markdown, with the extra danger of inferior liquidity whilst the possibility has arrived to promote, Digital Gold gives exact liquidity to clients engaging them to buy and promote digitized gold at a worth proximal to current marketplace charges through the Digital Gold enterprise community or outcast exchanges where the GOLD token is recorded.
Boundless and Anonymous Transactions
On account of various regulations and tactics, monetary masters might also have their facts constrained, blocked, or trading bans set on the patron. This is unmistakable with the GOLD symbolic which licenses customers to stay secretive even as trading digitized gold unbounded.
A negligible exertion token with zero trade fee
Another key wonderful state of affairs of having bodily gold via methods for the GOLD symbolic choice is that it murders the large cost inferable from keeping bodily gold, which may additionally thump up the estimation of the gold through as a lot as 30%.
With the GOLD token, customers can flow limitless digitized tokens with out inflicting pointless fees beside the gas cost paid to orchestrate validators. Customers fee the full favorable situations of acquiring gold even as preserving up a crucial properly ways from the hitches of the physical making sure approximately models.
N.B: The Gold Platform Team issued 11,200 tokens due to the fact right now The Gold vault shops 11,200 grams of gold. 1 gram of gold = 1 gold token.
Official Website: https://gold.storage/
White paper: https://gold.storage/wp.Pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/digitalgoldcoin
Author: Name: ifemini
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2385091 | https://medium.com/@ifemini/digital-gold-stable-coin-digitalized-the-exchange-and-storage-of-gold-3a78ffc7b21b | [] | 2020-10-13 11:34:39.575000+00:00 | ['Gold', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum'] |
The path to UX maturity-A Designer’s Journey | Building and growing a design team is the biggest opportunity one can get within the entire span of a design career. However, landing up into organisations where UX is undermined as a discipline, and just considered as a checklist item, poses an enormous challenge. In this article, I want to shares a designer’s journey about the effort it takes to bring an organisation to attain the highest level of UX maturity.
Let’ understand what is UX maturity? In simple terms, it is all about giving the level of importance to the UX as a function. The maturity model assesses an organization’s UX maturity and at each stage, there are challenges which need to be addressed to move up the level.
Stage 1: No Design
A lot of time is being spent at this point in understanding the company’s operating model. To better understand this, setting up a 1x1 meeting with the business leaders and building awareness about the UX team would be a great start. These meetings are intended to build relationships between UX and business and also understand the existing product development process. Needless to say, you won’t find UX as part of the process.
These meetings also provide an opportunity to showcase what UX can offer in the project development process. Post these discussions engineering team is likely to reach out to the UX asking for small design help. This may just be an assist in aligning a button inside a UI at the correct location. But where is the team, and where are the funds to build a team.
Pick this up, wear a designers hat, this is a great opportunity. Sell your solution to the stakeholders. If you can gain confidence and the stakeholders are impressed, you are likely to get more work. Also, leave a note about funds.
Stage 2: Design as styling
Continuing the leadership connections can bring us some quick wins, but most of the projects offered to the UX are about making the UI look better. Don’t get disheartened. Keep evangelizing about UX, schedule seminars on design thinking, give talks on UX ‘s importance and ROI. Invite all the relevant stakeholders into the workshops, especially the functional leaders.
This is a baby step towards creating a design-driven organization. Since the word “UX” has just started to spread, this is time multiple engineering time will reach out for slightly larger and complex UI projects. But we need to pass the message strongly, UX team is not here to do UI, we are here to build intuitive experiences to solve the core user problems. Does UX differs from UI, of course, it does, get this concept clear with the business.
But, meanwhile supporting few UI projects can build confidence, it can quickly get you some funds to set up a team.
Stage 3: Design as Process
While the process of evangelization and meeting with business leaders is still on, and the funds have begun to roll in, its time to work on a process.
Begin building a process document, for external as well as internal teams. The requirement would be to build an engagement model for the external team. The engagement model would dictate terms between design and engineering team in building a collaborative environment.
The document will explain specifics of the project kick-off, requirements gathering, design estimation, design deliverables and integration support.
The UCD process is internal to the UX team which defines the various stages of executing a design project. A process is made to not only be on paper, pilot it, sometimes there are gaps, that need to be addressed. Begin early, and fail early.
Stage 4: Design as a Strategy
When products enterprises reach this level, they are extremely successful. We now have a dedicated budget for the UX and it is necessary to streamline the process and practice of the team.
The Design team is seen as a gatekeeper at this stage and before the market launch, all products have to pass through that gateway.
At this stage, the design team is seen everywhere, from research to strategy, from tactical to implementation.
Stage 5: This is not the end
It’s easy to attain the desired state, staying in that state is tough. Start driving for innovations and build a sustainable business model. Grow your team with a vision in mind.
Stay connected @ Linkedin | https://medium.com/designed/the-path-to-ux-maturity-a-designers-journey-f7a7f52dbad2 | ['Alipta Ballav'] | 2020-07-02 14:12:05.081000+00:00 | ['Ux Maturity', 'Ux Strategy', 'UX Design', 'User Experience', 'Design Education'] |
My Community, My Duty! | As I told about the significance of serving the community by charity in my previous article, here I again want to discuss something about it.
We live in a materialistic world, where there is an unequal distribution of life resources for almost every single person in every single community. This leads to the formation of so called elite, middle class or lower class. I am not to debate here in favor or against them, but all I care is that, being a human, we should care for ourselves and others too. We should try to solve problems and fix things around us, for our betterment.
A picture portraying life style of elite, middle and lower class people
There are less business opportunities for lower class people, due to lack of investment. I care for this and personally started thinking for its solution. Therefore, I came up with an idea of low but high successful rate and profit ratio solution.
We mostly see a small moveable stall of fruits or vegetable, usually owned by food vendors, who sell them while moving through towns or by standing by-side on road, which does not require any sort of location investment and only a small investment of 10000–15000 PKR can lead them to grow. This business can even have a profit ratio of almost more than 50%. We can start this idea with or without return policies depending upon our services.
A fruit stall
This will provide a better earning for people, and will also help the community by giving them an easy access to buy fruits. | https://medium.com/@salman-uetlahore/my-community-my-duty-e238c431de24 | ['Muhammad Salman'] | 2020-12-26 03:20:09.158000+00:00 | ['Low', 'Budget', 'Business', 'Ideas', 'Social'] |
Regtech in the EU — the path forward to better compliance | Regtech in the EU — the path forward to better compliance Trulioo Follow Sep 10 · 4 min read
Regulatory technology (regtech) seeks to provide “nimble, configurable, easy to integrate, reliable, secure and cost-effective” regulatory solutions. In the EU, the European Banking Authority (EBA) has the authority to help drive innovative regtech services and regulatory alignment. They have created a report, EBA Analysis of Regtech in the EU Financial Sector, to provide insight into the current regtech landscape and its benefits and challenges.
Regtech is now mainstream
While use varies by jurisdiction and by use case, many financial institutions (FIs) have adopted at least some regtech solutions. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) has been the most popular use case, with 75% of FIs reporting experience of using the technology. Other significant use cases include ICT security‐related, adopted by 50% of the FIs, and fraud prevention, used by 40% of the respondents.
It’s no surprise that most regtech providers are new, as the term itself was coined in 2015. The results are that 39% of regtech providers are smaller companies and have less than six FI clients. Establishing credibility with FIs is a significant hurdle. Larger regtech companies from outside the EU seem to have more traction; the survey found that non‐EEA‐based have 2.3 times more customers than the average EEA‐based provider. These non-European companies also seem to be farther along in their corporate development, with 40% already in advanced rounds of venture financing.
When it comes to actual implementation, 60% of AML, fraud prevention and ICT projects are already in production. While some regtech technologies might still be speculative, their use is well developed in many jurisdictions across the EU. Most FIs will continue to spend the same amount or slightly increase budgets for regtech.
The reason for regtech
Interestingly, the benefits the FIs see and what the industry believes don’t sync up. The most significant use, from the FI side, is the ability to improve risk management. But from the provider side, they see improvements in efficiency as the main advantage.
It seems both regtech providers and FIs need to understand better how regtech can best fit into the FIs compliance stack to improve results. Solutions that help compliance professionals better use their time provide a sweet spot that might satisfy all parties.
Both sides agree that greater accuracy, speed and data optimization is a decisive advantage.
Barriers to regtech success
The most significant barriers to ongoing regtech success with FIs are around the use of data, which makes sense, considering all the news around data hacks and ever-tightening privacy requirements. There are cybersecurity factors, as well as how best to handle data across legacy systems.
Other regulatory requirements need consideration as the legal landscape continues to change. It’s difficult to determine a future-proof technology when future requirements are still to be determined. The ongoing shift in the specifications raises the cost, increases the need for education and training and adds to an environment where the FIs often consider regtech solutions immature.
From the regtech point of view, the FIs tech stacks can lack standardization and integration abilities. Trying to implement their modern API solutions on legacy platforms can lead to slow roll-outs and performance hits. Without a holistic view of regtech, a point solution doesn’t enable all the technology’s opportunities.
Many regtech companies are disadvantaged due to their smaller size. They can’t offer a breadth of solutions. They are more susceptible to changes in regulations or the marketplace. They don’t have bargaining power when it comes to dealing with large FIs. And they have competitive pressures from numerous other regtechs, all fighting to establish themselves.
Path to regtech success
It’s important to note that the biggest barriers to success are internal factors of the organization. As the EBA analysis states,
“As the majority of identified challenges that hold back the regtech market development are linked to internal factors of FIs and regtech providers, it would be primarily for these companies to take further actions to address the challenges.”
There are concrete steps that can assist regtech in the eyes of regulators:
Improve awareness and education of regulators and supervisors to understand the capabilities and opportunities of regtech better
Look for ways to harmonize laws and regulations across the EU to simplify and speed adoption
Foster collaboration with industry and regulators by using regulatory sandboxes and other forums to demonstrate usefulness and compliance
The analysis also points to having a central database of providers or having a certification program to help build trust in regtech solutions.
Many technologies hold great promise to reduce risk and fraud and provide better compliance. Ensuring these technologies can succeed will offer robust benefits to the industry, FIs and regulators alike. Working together, understanding and overcoming the potential problems is an initiative that can appeal to all EU compliance professionals.
Learn about the EU’s biggest AML risks. This white paper explores best practices for enhancing Customer Due Diligence, Know Your Customer and Know Your Business processes. | https://medium.com/the-regtech-hub/regtech-in-the-eu-the-path-forward-to-better-compliance-486ee0452594 | [] | 2021-09-10 18:05:37.333000+00:00 | ['Regtech', 'European Union', 'Compliance', '6amld'] |
The Most Important Quality in a Police Officer | When I was a boy, my best friend, Steven, didn’t invite me to one of his birthday celebrations. He invited another friend from his school, and they went to a local carnival.
Steven and I lived near one another and were inseparable. Almost every day we got together after school to play frisbee, ride our bikes, and have fun. So naturally, I was confused and jealous when he excluded me from his birthday celebration.
My father found me sulking in my bedroom and asked what was wrong. I told him that Steven went to a carnival for his birthday with another friend, and didn’t invite me. I added that I wasn’t going to invite Steven to any more of my birthdays.
Dad sat down next to me and said, “It’s your choice, Johnny, but I think that would be a mistake. You don’t know why Steven didn’t invite you to his birthday. Maybe his friend was the one with the tickets to the carnival? You two spend nearly every day together. Perhaps he just wanted a change?”
I wasn’t moved much by my father’s reasoning, but then he said something I never forgot:
“It comes down to what kind of person you want to be, Johnny? Small people seek revenge. When they’re hurt, they want to get even. Big people take the moral high ground. They forgive. They treat others the way they’d like to be treated.”
It didn’t take long for me to get over the whole incident, and when my birthday party came around I invited Steven and had a great day. It felt good to do the right thing.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Dad’s fatherly lesson was yet another brick laid in the foundation of my character. There are many important bricks that well-adjusted people are built upon. Honesty. Integrity. Trustworthiness.
When these bricks are properly assembled and modeled by effective parents, gifted teachers, and professional mentors, they form one of the most important qualities that lead to success and happiness in life.
What is this vital quality? | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-most-important-quality-in-a-police-officer-691cb1137cbc | ['John P. Weiss'] | 2020-08-04 12:42:00.287000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Inspiration', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement', 'Life'] |
สามส่วนสำคัญ. ในการทำงานอะไรให้ได้ดี… | A member of Mutrack and Inthentic. I lead, learn, and build with vision, love and care. https://piyorot.com
Follow | https://medium.com/people-development/%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%AA%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%B3%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%8D-1db0b08d437a | [] | 2020-03-02 13:35:04.983000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Knowledge', 'Startup', 'Leaders', 'Skills'] |
Take control of your test automation with Delta Reporter | Take control of your test automation with Delta Reporter
Image taken from https://storyiq.co.nz/improve-your-crisis-management-communication
Automated testing is commonly seen as a solution to all quality issues in product development. Obviously, it’s impossible to click through the entire application manually every time there is a new release. Sounds simple: just automate the repetitive tasks and free up your time. But when you start writing automated tests, you realise — they’re easy to write, but the maintenance is a huge task, that can exceed the manual testing time. The tests keep failing, no matter how hard you try 😭. (Spoiler: it’s not that bad, we’ve got a solution!)
How did we come up with the idea of Delta Reporter
Our team faced the problem I described above. So we started to brainstorm on what can be done to reduce the maintenance time 🤔 . We made a list of issues we were experiencing: flaky tests on our side, unstable environment, high volume of deployments, inability to coordinate efforts between QA team members, black-box regression without even knowing what features were released today. The list could go on forever. We knew we needed something smart. Something that could gather all of the test data on each release, analyse the failures, collect the metrics and show the high-level and low-level information on demand. We searched the web to see if such a tool existed, but everything was either not powerful enough or too heavy to be deployed on our environments. So, we just decided to build one ourselves! 🎉
Delta Reporter Overview
So here it is: our super-fast and super-shiny tool that we have been using for over a year now.
Delta Reporter — main view
Some of Delta Reporter’s powerful features:
Real-time updates. When the test run starts — Delta Reporter is immediately updated, so you can check the test results as the tests run. 🏄
Flaky tests badge. There is this flashing red sign ❗️ letting you know, that this test failed more than 5/10 times. So you instantly know, there is a potential issue there.
Screenshots. If you are running selenium tests, you can view the screenshots and video recordings for the failed tests . Very handy, as you no longer need to go and reproduce the test yourself to figure out the issue.
Filters. For your convenience, you can filter out only Failed tests. Let’s be honest, who cares about the Passed ones 😃
Test history. There is a tab, where you can view all the historical runs of this particular test. It gives you the option to quickly check how this test behaved before.
Delta Reporter — test history and resolution features
Resolution. This is the yellow badge on the screenshot above. You can set it for each test, so when you or your colleagues scroll through the results and see, for instance, “Product defect” or “Environment issue”, they instantly know there is no need to spend time checking this failure now. And this is what we are trying to achieve — reducing the number of test failures we need to go through! And make the collaboration smooth and less painful 🐼
Charts and graphs. We know how your manager loves a good chart. Ours does also! 📈 We are currently developing a charts page, where you’ll be able to filter by the project, resolution, date, test type and many-many more options. Apart from the shiny metrics for the tops, these charts will be invaluable to the QA team, as it’s easier to prove there is a constant environmental issue or the devs are pushing too many bugs, when you have a good proof. Use these stats to highlight the issues and start improving the quality!
Another cool thing is that we can combine all the test results (unit, integration, e2e) under one “launch”. So that when there is a release, everything is there for you in one place. | https://medium.com/@oleksandra-pishcheiko/monitoring-your-automation-test-results-with-delta-reporter-7a4fdd343edf | ['Oleksandra Pishcheiko'] | 2021-06-13 09:57:13.067000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Testing', 'Test Automation', 'Quality Assurance', 'DevOps'] |
start of the brainstorm | I hate telling this story because it makes me feel small. Plus its cliche and boring but here it is. I was barely 16 and I was dating my first boyfriend. After 6 months he texted my friend and asked her to break up with me for him. Yeah, I know, he was gross and immature and the worst but either way he meant a lot to 16 year old me. I had no idea how to deal with heartbreak so I just cried and cried like a dramatic teenager for a week or so. I had a really yucky feeling in my stomach and I didn't know what it was. I started writing little fragments and emo phrases in my notebooks at school. I would add to them and edit them and look at them and doodle on them. On February 22, 2017, I wrote and posted my first poem on an anonymous Instagram account. It was about anger that it felt like waves in an ocean, very artsy and creative, I know. But no matter how cheesy or depressing my writing was, it made me feel like I got rid of those feelings/ helped me make sense of my feelings. I completely fell in love with it. I got to do something that I loved that nobody else had to know about. I used my feelings to power my writing and I let loose writing whatever I wanted. It was my little thing. My little place to be wholly me. | https://medium.com/my-lil-vessel/start-of-the-brainstorm-b35dce67308c | ['Carissa Bixler'] | 2019-01-16 23:22:20.526000+00:00 | ['High School', 'Discovery', 'Writing', 'Sad', 'Love'] |
Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2 [2/3] | Bare Metal instances and Hardware acceleration| Solutions for an organization | Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2 [2/3] | Bare Metal instances and Hardware acceleration| Solutions for an organization Uddeshya Singh Follow Nov 29 · 5 min read
“You can invest more into android emulator hosting hardware (i.e. get bare metal instances) and reap the benefits later” will be the tagline I would start with because that really is the gist of this entire post (minus some really cool demonstration scripts I’ve got for you)
This post is a part of the series Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2.
Link to part 1 (ARM Architecture and Genymotion | Solutions for a Solo Developer)
You are at part 2.
Part 3 under draft editing.
Psst. This post with code embeddings is also available at dev.to!
Photo by Sven on Unsplash
Make your emulators Faster! 💥
Let’s pick up from where we left off and talk about making your emulators faster. In the normal t2 instances, as we know, there is a hypervisor layer on top of the instance hardware, hence abstracting the hardware layer from the emulator we want to run on it, and thus, we can’t use out good old hardware acceleration on top of it.
But what if, we take away the hypervisor layer? No, you can’t do it with a piece of code but you can definitely get it by investing some odd $4 per hour and get a machine that can run 40 emulators at once (tried and tested statistic).
How virtualization works in bare metal
That’s exactly how we pulled off a mass testing fleet with a variety of emulators all running simultaneously on a single machine. Since the hypervisor layer is stripped away, you get an emulator which is at least 10 times faster than the old armeabi 64bit models.
Isn’t it too costly? 💸
It’ll definitely take investment and on-demand instances are really costly by amazon (or really any cloud provider) as far as bare metal instances are concerned, but let’s really do the math.
some financial math :P
A high performing Genymotion PaaS setup would cost you: $ 0.7 per emulator
A bare metal instance at maximum load would cost you: $ 4.8/40 = $0.12 per emulator.
See? Simple maths. To get a profitable testing fleet, you really do need to splash the cash (hence the title, solutions for an organization)
Soo, which system image to pick? 🤔
I’ll recommend android-28’s google API version (that too x86 64-bit version) for further checking out the emulators. To get that system image, please run the following commands
$ sdkmanager "system-images;android-28;default;x86_64"
But why?
This system image has a fairly functioning Google Apps support.
Enabling root access isn’t much of a pain, a simple command (adb root) would do the trick.
You can play around with your emulator configurations and convert this AVD into whatever device you wish (I mean the identity, of course)
Enabling hardware acceleration in bare metal 🏃♂️
In any bare metal instance (let’s say m5.metal), we need to follow the old instructions which we did so far in the first post. Now follow the following commands to set up the KVM hypervisor in ubuntu 18.
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin virtinst bridge-utils cpu-checker $ sudo usermod --append --groups kvm 'echo $USER'
$ echo 'KERNEL=="kvm", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0666", OPTIONS+="static_node=kvm"' \
| sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm4all.rules
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
$ sudo udevadm trigger --name-match=kvm
and this should be it. Now you can start any emulator by a simple command
$ emulator @emulatorName
and this will automatically utilize KVM hypervisor to boot your emulator (PS, if you are using the system image of android-28 and x86_64 architecture, you should see your emulator booting up within 20 seconds).
And this wraps us our parts on how to run fast emulators, how about, we try how to maybe install, run and uninstall apps in our emulator programmatically? | https://medium.com/heuristics/deploying-android-emulators-on-aws-ec2-2-3-bare-metal-instances-and-hardware-acceleration-a33e1f8ae79d | ['Uddeshya Singh'] | 2020-11-29 14:29:03.881000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Coding', 'Emulator', 'AWS', 'Cloud'] |
Hiking across San Francisco off-road | photo: sutro tower / wikipedia
The ghost of Laguna Honda
I’ve read a few guides to crossing San Francisco off-road through parks, trails and stairs, and they all have way too much street involved. I decided to make my own route, and have the first sections worked out.
This trip is across town from Glen Park to Golden Gate Park, and starts with the Glen Park Canyon to Twin Peaks section, part of the “Creeks to Peaks” trail. I didn’t do the Twin peaks part, instead I ran the Laguna Honda mountainbike trail. These are a couple sections of a planned route to reach the ocean from the Mission District via parks, greenways, and pedestrian staircases.
The ultimate trail route I’m conceiving is a zig-zag, and includes hikes up and down multiple hills starting on street in the Mission through Noe Valley. From Noe Valley up the stairs on Billy Goat Hill, and up a dirt trail through trees to Haas Playground in Diamond Heights ridge which often windy fog-wrapped, and down the west side into Glen Park Canyon. From there, I go through up and over, down the Laguna Honda trail, hike up to the Mount Sutro trailhead, then down the North side of Mt Sutro to Parnassus and through Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach.
The start was in Glen Park Canyon, reached via the greenway from the village. I occupied a secret picnic table hidden on the hillside in the brush, drank a beer and ate chips and stretched. In the fading light, I set out and ran up the ravine along the creek, through the riparian wetland marshes, up the stairs to the trail above the rock climbers, and finally out the top and across by the turn-off to Twin Peaks.
The western sky still showed vestiges of the sunset but it was basically dark crepuscular. I followed a dirt shorcut towards Twin Peaks, then veered left off through the neighborhood on the west side of the hill, above the Juvenile Hall. This is the upper trail-head start for the Laguna Honda mountain-bike trail system. You can see the ocean at Ocean Beach, and the back side of Twin Peaks and Sutro Tower.
The new Laguna Honda Trails system is behind the Laguna Honda hospital, which threw its garbage down in the ravine for years, so it is basically an archeological dig site, replete with vintage bottles, bedpans, pitchers, and other objects which an OCD homeless person has sorted and piled along the trail.
The park is relatively unknown, and previously abandoned. I know about it because I went there with a friend back in 2000 to get vintage glass jars for wedding vases, and then later scavenging for vintage medical curiosities.
I decided to do the run without a flashlight. And I stuck to that. I’ve ridden the trail there for years, so luckily I have it pretty well memorized. And I spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid, I’m pretty good at tracking and making out trails at night.
So at this point its almost completely dark, I can only see the general features of the land and big trees. Its like Muir Woods, except in the City and without redwoods, and overgrown like it was abandoned after an apocalypse.
I creeped myself out imagining Laguna Honda’s ghosts, bones and rusted bedpans, lurking in the vines and poking up from the mud. Once I got over being creeped out by ghosts from the hospital, my main concern was slipping and falling in the mud.
The mountain bikers hade torn the trail up, and I was running in mud, switchbacks and berms. I could make out textures like grass or bush, and the slight reflections of mud puddles and slick ground. I shuffled down hills, and made my way blindly at times. I was one with nature. I was Kurtz in Africa. If you have to ask why I didn’t use a flashlight, you don’t get it. I made it through to the end, through the heart of darkness, without slipping or encountering anyone.
I emerged to streetlights at 7th Ave by the reservoir, explored an Xmas tree farm along the way, picked up some Pho in the Inner Sunset and went through the Golden Gate park by the Conservatory of flowers — the streets are closed to traffic, and groups of masked park-goers were still wandering in the street. There was a burningman-style fiber-optic light trees and an EL-wire wrapped DJ booth in the middle of the street. I stopped at a bench in the Panhandle and ate my Pho while couples with tallboys and guys on electric skateboards whizzed by. | https://medium.com/@wings/crossing-san-francisco-off-road-58f08c0249fa | ['Blake Rogers'] | 2020-12-14 00:51:23.468000+00:00 | ['San Francisco', 'Urban Hiking', 'Hiking', 'San Francisco Bay Area', 'Outdoors'] |
All References to Transgender Americans Scrubbed From Government Websites | They weren’t kidding when they said the intent was to erase us from existence.
The official websites of the United States Health Department and the Office of Civil Rights have removed all language applying to Transgender identities as the effort to delegitimize between 1.4 million and 1.6 million Transgender Americans across the nation continues.
After the initial memo leak exchanged between five separate government bodies, including the aforementioned along with the Department of Education, The department of Justice and the Department of Labor, marches and protests erupted on the streets of the US and at the gates of the White House. To quell the growing tensions between Transgender people and our allies, Donald Trump told reporters the following day that “Nothing has been decided, we’re still talking about what to do with the Transgender.” He went on to say “I’m protecting everybody.”
Of course, that was a lie. In that moment, he already knew that the intent to spearhead our removal from all protections and equal liberties was in full swing. It was only hours after his statement that the Department of Justice informed the US Supreme Court that it was now legal for employers to fire their employees solely on the basis of their trans identity, citing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include protections from discrimination, harassment or violence for transgender workers.
A coalition of 16 states led by Nebraska Attorney General Douglas Peterson had been urging the U.S. Supreme Court since September to reverse a federal appeals court decision in favor of a fired transgender funeral home worker and legislate that workers can be terminated, without legal consequence, for being transgender. He was granted his wish.
It not likely that these decisions to eradicate Transgender people from equal protections will be met with a compassionate ear even when challenged by organizations such as the ACLU. President Trump has stacked the Supreme Court Bench with hyper-conservatives that rule by the theory of religion rather than inclusion, despite Separation of Church and State, an expression underscoring the first amendment intended to protect marginalized communities from religious persecution.
These efforts to wipe references to “Gender identity” and “transgender” have been expedited over the last week as the country was reeling over a relentless succession of attempted bombings, election tampering and gun violence, thus the dialog regarding the revoking of civil rights and equal protections for all transgender people fell silent allowing the Trump administration to push them through without attracting undesirable attention.
Currently, the Department of Labor still displays its page reflecting former President Barack Obama’s executive order issued in 2014 intended to protect LGBT employees of federal contractors and subcontractors from being fired on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It is uncertain how long this will remain before it, too, is redacted.
With the redefining of sex as being only binary, indicated solely by genitalia, the first to fall will be transgender students who, under the reign of Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, have already seen their protections rolled back. Recently, we’ve witnessed the consequences of this as a transgender middle school student was refused access to both the boys and girls locker rooms during an active shooter drill wherein the teenagers were being taught protocols to seek safety in the event of a violent crisis.
DeVos has already developed a notorious reputation for targeting minority students, including funneling federal funding away from predominantly black inner city schools to wealthy, private white schools of religious persuasion that were also given massive tax cuts thanks to Trump’s new tax reform laws. She also took a devastating swipe at disabled students.
Transgender Americans will no doubt just be the first in the firing line as the Trump administration continues their assault on vulnerable minorities, assuring his base that he will indeed make America White, Christian, Heterosexual and Cisgender only.
This begs the question; Who does the eradication of trans rights serve? Whose quality of life is improved by our systemic erasure? Who in America is safer by making us more vulnerable to violence?
The answer is clear. No one. No one is better off due to transgender people being ousted from the civil rights act. It merely fuels hatred and puts it proudly on display as acts of discrimination against us skyrocket with political approval. There is no reason or rationale except to please an evangelical base whose superiority complex relies on the oppression of those they deem undeserving of rights they already have.
Ultimately, the removal of trans people from protections others possess denies us the right to thrive and leaves us without adequate representation in our body of government, without access to healthcare relating to gender dysphoria, without the ability to request justice be served on our behalf when we experience discrimination, harassment, violence or to fight any of the over 100 anti-LGBT pieces of legislation being proposed in our home country. | https://phaylen.medium.com/all-references-to-transgender-americans-scrubbed-from-government-websites-45a455259e4c | ['Phaylen Fairchild'] | 2018-10-28 05:23:19.084000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Gender Equality', 'Transgender', 'LGBTQ', 'Equality'] |
The Greatest Gift to Give Yourself This Year | The Greatest Gift to Give Yourself This Year
This is not a Resolution. It’s a Revelation.
If you could gift yourself ONE significant offering this year, what would it be?
Some would say money, while other folks would suggest youth or health.
What if I told you that ONE gift to yourself could potentially bring you all of those and more? You would think I was some kind of crazy person, involved in a cult or multi-level marketing scheme. Right?
Wrong.
The gift that I have chosen to grant myself this year is one word:
Photo by Philipp Berndt on Unsplash
PURGE.
That’s it.
Not only will this word be my new mantra this year, and for the next years of my life, but it will be the ACTION word that will drive my day to day plans and activities. I plan to PURGE my life of all things invaluable or toxic. I will rid my life and my world of anything that I have little or no use for. It is so damn satisfying.
How can PURGING help you have a better life? How will it bring happiness, health and possibly even more money into your world? I will tell you, right after I explain the reasons behind a good PURGE:
Have you ever wanted to have a good cry, or laugh until your belly hurt and tears stung your eyes? That, my friend, is a form of purging. It helps rid your body of bottled up emotions. It cleanses you of previous thoughts and struggles. Getting it ALL out of you, through a burst of emotions is not unlike emptying a junk drawer. Over time, emotions can be stifled so tightly and so deeply, that they have no escape and become compacted inside of you, rendering you exhausted from all of the extra emotional weight. The main reason for my purging is to rid myself of excess junk- be it physical, emotional, spiritual or tangible if I don’t need it, there’s no need to hang onto it.
Photo by Luz Mendoza on Unsplash
Let’s Purge and See What Happens
Within your home or office environment, there are so many “things” around you, at any given time. These things can be labeled as “clutter”. Chances are you can live without 70% of the items that you see every single day. They are dustables and knick-knacks that surround you while you perform your daily tasks. Why do we need these things to make our homes feel complete? Yes, some of them will provoke memories in our lives, or perhaps they are gifts from people you care about. But, do you NEED them, in order to live comfortably? Why not take photos of them, and purge them, instead of tripping over them or mindlessly moving them out of your way to make more space around you? Or, better yet, take a photo and SELL them, earning yourself a little seed money. You still have the memory, just less clutter.
Most of us have clothing in our closets, along with shoes, bags and other accessories, that we will never wear in the next year. What is the point of storing it, if you don’t use it? You could rid yourself of the tightly packed closets and either sell your extra items or donate them to charity. With so many apps, like Poshmark and Marketplace (On Facebook), The Real-Real, Mercari or Varage Sale, it is beyond easy to sell clothes and turn a small profit. People sell high-end items for good prices, or low-end items for minimal fees, just to get them out of their closets.
The KEY is to not replace everything you sell thereby refilling your new empty spaces. If I sell a couple of items and make money from them, I stash the money away in an emergency jar. My suggestions would be to allow yourself ONE item to spoil yourself for a job well done. You can even do this with your children’s clothing, toys, or other items that clutter their rooms, and stash the money away for their future. Every little bit counts, and seed money will grow over time.
I have one last piece of my PURGE this year, beyond the items that “stuff” my home full of clutter. That last piece is the people who no longer have any significant value to me. I know that sounds callous and rude, but hear me out.
I have been dragging around demons and skeletons of past people who have caused me damage, my whole life. As I age, I seem to have gathered a collection of these people along the path of my years. It is time to purge myself of the pain and torment they have caused, through “forgive and forget”. (As cliche’ as that sounds).
Seriously though. There have been some humans in my past who have caused me to struggle with my self-worth, my value, and my own inner peace. I have also allowed this to happen, in order to save face with myself. It is now time to shed the hard, outer skin that they have helped me grow, in order to allow my inner layer to come out and shine. I have forgiven myself for allowing others to treat me poorly and make me a victim. Now I need to forgive their actions and know that I have no control over how they treat other people. By purging them, and not giving them breath in my home, I can feel the extra weight lift from my heart and shoulders. They have no place in my small house, or in my life, so why hang onto them?
Another kind of purging is the purge of your body “gunk”. Having a bowl or two of cleansing cabbage soup, drinking green tea and lots of water, or taking liver cleanses are very effective methods to rid yourself of toxins from over-indulging through the holidays. Exercise is also a must, by purging the extra weight you are carrying. It will also help you feel more energetic, healthy and youthful. Get moving and try and cleansing diet. You will be glad you did.
Meditation is a kind of PURGE as well. It can help to tidy up your mental health and your inner voices while encouraging your mind to cleanse itself. It is much like de-cluttering your inner space, making room for more light and peace.
Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash
Purging is Good For the Soul
Ridding yourself of things and people who make life cluttered is so therapeutic. The revitalization is like a reset button, helping you to feel youthful and free. You will feel emotionally and physically “lighter”. You somehow have less responsibility and less burden when you purge yourself of unwanted crap.
I know that I will not be living in our small condo for much longer, as we search for a house to purchase. My mission is to de-clutter now, in order to start fresh in a new place. The thought of having extra storage space and shelves is exhilarating! The plan is to leave empty spaces, and not re-collect items that we won’t need, in order to fill the house.
My parents are in their 80’s and when I visit them now, they are continually trying to pawn their items off onto me. I honestly don’t want anything more. My Mother sits among angel statues, pottery, and a variety of dust-covered knick-knacks on her shelves, that she no longer has any use for. Not only do I not want the items when the inevitable happens, and they are no longer with us, but I also do NOT want to live in a space that is surrounded by “things” that do nothing. I feel anxious sitting among her cluttered home, and silently pray that they will purge before they are moved to a senior home. The last time I went to visit, my Father packed a box of clay figurines up for me to take home. They are still in that box in my garage. I simply don’t NEED them.
That’s what purging is all about- ridding your life of people and things, and emotions that are built up and causing clutter in your world. GET RID OF IT. If you feel anxious among the collections of crap that surround you, eliminate them. Sell them, give them away, donate them, or toss them.
Hoarding anything; emotions, objects, memorabilia, souvenirs, people, or anything else, is unhealthy. Collections are like magnetic forces. They are reasons to keep spending money and distracting yourself in order to find ONE MORE PIECE. I am guilty of having my own Wonder Woman merchandise collection. The main reason I add to it is for my daughter’s future. I honestly hope she doesn’t develop an emotional attachment to it all, and sells it to make some decent cash. People have added to my collection over the years, more so than I have added to it. I love it and all, but it takes up a lot of space, and collects so much dust.
Surround yourself only with things and people who matter. Feel comfortable when you breathe, knowing that you have space and peace to do so. Rid your world of anything that doesn’t help build your value. Clean the chaos from your life and you will see wonderful changes happen within your soul. Emptying your emotional closet by allowing yourself to “feel” without apology is also imperative to your purging journey.
You will be so grateful you have given yourself this gift. | https://medium.com/publishous/the-greatest-gift-to-give-yourself-this-year-178010abad6f | ['Kristina H'] | 2020-01-07 20:27:46.652000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Minimalism', 'Life', 'Self', 'Human Behavior'] |
Hazard Mapping | Talking about ethics in digital system design and engineering is the new hotness. Because the conversation is so fresh, we don’t yet have a lot of tools for incorporating an ethical dimension into the typical design practice.
I propose adding an additional overlay on the information architecture and UX documentation: hazard mapping. Borrowed from the field of risk management with common applications in occupational safety and disaster prevention, a hazard map highlights areas affected by or vulnerable to a particular hazard.
This model USGS earthquake hazard map depicts the potential shaking hazard from future earthquakes.
In the case of natural disasters, the goal is to predict hazards. In the case of occupational safety and, as I’m suggesting here, digital system design, the goal is to identify and eliminate them. We haven’t done a good job identifying and eliminating hazards because we haven’t visualized them along with all the other aspects of the design we’ve been visualizing.
Diagram of household hazards from an OSHA hazard-mapping manual.
In this OSHA training sample of a residential floor plan, the diagram is annotated with various hazards, so you can see how many and what type are in each location. (The people who made this map clearly never had dinner at my house growing up. Our dining room wasn’t that hazard-free.)
This is the key to the map above. Blue = purple.
In order to map the hazards, it’s necessary to perform a risk assessment in conjunction with the design process. This will likely be uncomfortable at first in any delivery-driven, “ship fast and fix it later” environment. Just as New Jersey suggests, it should be a participatory process that involves as many coworkers as possible. Ready.gov offers guidelines for risk assessment.
The risk assessment process from Ready.gov.
Let’s do a quick thought experiment. What are the hazards potentially associated with a website, application, or other digital system? I thought of a few off the top of my head:
This is by no means exhaustive.
Do a little cardsorting to create hazard categories and a key. For example:
And then, apply this mapping system as an overlay on any conventional design deliverables, or as a standalone document. All maps, flows, and journeys should reference the ethical dimension and note potential hazards. This will require cross-disciplinary collaboration at every stage, as well as the development of additional expertise.
I don’t think hazard maps should be too pretty.
Developing a more ethical digital design practice doesn’t require new tools, merely sustained attention and political will. Those of us involved in creating the future, owe it to the future.
I’ll be thinking about how to refine and further develop this idea. I invite you to do the same. | https://medium.com/mule-design/hazard-mapping-e0b99b7ebd29 | ['Erika Hall'] | 2019-11-21 17:59:00.630000+00:00 | ['Maps'] |
When the distractions take away too much. | I’ve been talking about it for, I don’t know, probably a year or more, and I’ve written about it no less than five times — my dreaded struggle with social media.
Mostly, it’s been an inevitability I’ve been fighting against because I’m probably one of the world’s most stubborn people. I thought I could set my own boundaries. I thought I could manage my usage, curate my consumption, easily curb my time spent on Instagram, limit my emotional reactions to engagement metrics. Ha. Wrong. No matter how I tried, I could do none of those things on my own.
The inevitability is that I would have to get strict, outside help to even begin to make a change.
That’s incredibly frustrating for me. In mostly every area of my life, I can take care of myself. I’m a self-starter. I’m intrinsically motivated. I can do things on a whim. A few years ago, I quit my three-snooze habit overnight, for Pete’s sake! It’s been making me irritated beyond belief that I can’t seem to manage, and ultimately, change, my relationship with social media to any reasonable extent on my own.
And there are layers there, cycles. Like, I wasn’t always so bogged down by it. I’ve been involved for years, and maybe even enjoyed Facebook and Instagram, had some fun with it. But the last two years have gotten progressively heavier. I’ve gone through periods of a few months here or there (honestly, it was mostly while we were living in Colorado, for obvious reasons) where I could pull back a bit, actually make it an entire 30 hours without having to charge my phone! But that hasn’t happened in far longer than I’d like to admit — even on vacation.
What that really all boils down to is distraction.
Plain and simple. It’s something to occupy my fingers and my thoughts when I am feeling blocked in the fingers or not wanting to confront more pressing or difficult thoughts. It’s something to give me a break. To disconnect, even when I’m really trying to connect. It’s a way to avoid that which I really need and want to be doing — the more meaningful stuff that requires more effort. Or, the stuff that speaks to my fears.
Dammit.
That’s frustrating in itself, that I can’t seem to stay focused for a few hours a day of uninterrupted, purposeful work. But even more frustrating, again, is the fact that I can’t seem to break that pattern on my own.
But you know what? I’m self-aware enough to recognize when it’s gone too far and I need to make a real change. I’m aware of the pattern, I’ve made excuses for it forever, I understand my layers, and I understand that at a certain point, the distractions are taking away too much. I know when I need to get help. So I did.
Last week, I signed up for Freedom. I had known of it for a while, but never used it. I tried a few other apps, but I would always, always find my way around them, through all the little loopholes, just in case. Freedom seemed like a better fit for me to not be able to do that, so I set it on my laptop and on my phone for three hours one afternoon and said a little prayer. Turns out, I needed it.
One, the app worked great, and all my distractions were quieted. I got a bunch of work done, probably 30% more than I would have had I not used an external tool to help me.
But wow, I was flabbergasted at how many times in those three hours I still tried to distract myself. I caught myself opening up browsers for Facebook and Gmail, and trying to open my Instagram app frequently. I started texting friends and my husband. I weirdly kept opening my Google calendar. I swiped over to the Google news feed on my phone to read…something.
Anything. Didn’t matter what it was, just anything to distract myself.
It made me feel desperate. It made me feel a little pathetic. I was certainly disappointed in myself, and frustrated all over again at all the time I’ve been wasting on distractions. Sure, I’ve done a lot of really great work in the past few years, but it jolted me to see just how much more impact that work (and all the rest of the work I left on the table) could have had if it wasn’t constantly letting myself get sidetracked.
Dammit times two.
It’s been about a week since I’ve been using the app. I schedule Freedom sessions every day, their length varying depending on my schedule, what I need to get done, and what I need access to for my work (real work). I’m still working through all the layers in their own ways, and the overarching theme of avoidance and distraction. I’m also still allowing myself to binge on Instagram Stories in the morning and in the evening.
But in this relatively short period of time, I’m already finding a clarity and focus I don’t think I’ve ever had, to be honest. I’m already better able to detach from the emotional side and validation of social media. I’m clearer on what work is the best fit for my professional vision, and I’m feeling more ease in doing it. I’m seeking out the social connection I need. I’m squashing fears left and right because I have less external influence to feed them. And I’m distracting and avoiding far less, even when I don’t have the app running.
That’s some big stuff! That’s serious progress (for me). Is it annoying that it’s something relatively simple like an app that allowed for that progress? Yeah, I can admit that. But I can also say that I don’t particularly care.
I needed support, I sought it out, it worked.
There’s a continued prevailing story about being able to figure everything out on our own. Being able to do everything on our own. Never asking for help when we need it. I understand it. I have lived it. But what I do not understand is how we continue to fight for it, even when we feel how much havoc it’s wreaking in our lives. At a certain point, it becomes silly, doesn’t it?
If there is something, or someone, out there that can filter out the noise and distractions and lead you to more of what you want, why wouldn’t you employ it?
It’s different for everyone, and this applies to so many things other than just social media and online interactions. But I suspect there are as many layers for all of us. And it’s likely there are as many fears lurking beneath the surface of those impulses for distraction too. But, it’s also possible that there is a surprisingly uncomplicated solution to address those layers, distractions, and patterns around them. The world often tells us to resist those solutions because it makes us weak (story for another day!), but where is that getting us?
If I’m able to see progress in one week on a decades-long pattern of dependence and distraction by seeking the support of a single app, what kind of progress do you think you could see in your patterns and distractions if you gave whatever or whoever a chance to work for you?
Now is as good a time as any to consider some outside help and take your focus back, wouldn’t you say? | https://medium.com/@kourtney.a.thomas/when-the-distractions-take-away-too-much-939d7c204bd5 | ['Kourtney Thomas'] | 2019-02-06 14:38:49.362000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Focus', 'Growth', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Bits of Glitter: The Amal Jugadi Totkay | 1. Self Talk
We should be mindful what we are talking to ourselves. All we talk about we create energy. The negative words have negative energy so make us more resonate-able to the negative frequency intern harming us. where as the positive words, Positive thoughts Let you to resonate with positive frequencies consequently making the whole universe to work for your endeavor. As we say “When you plan the whole universe get together to get you close to it.”
So like your self, Love your self, tell your self that you are amazing, you will make the whole world amazing.”
2. Get Out Of Comfort Zone
We should come out of comfort zone in order to gain success goals aren't achieved staying the comfort zone. The growth starts when you are out of the comfort zone.
According to Zoe. A. Onah,
Battles are not won in comfort zone.
3. Create New Habits
Creating new habits is always beneficial. Reflect on how you are now and what amendments do you need. And modify habits accordingly that will make you succeed.
4. Ask people for help
I am not a big fond of this totka. Its fine to ask for health but in this growing world of materialism and unfortunately selfishness which is slowly induced to the scarcity of chances getting a sincere hand, and that may cause you ending up in a huge deficit. You make yourself vulnerable to criticism and that an increase the issue. There are more around to add masala then to empath as we are grown in sympathetic world.
5. Fake it Till you make it
Yessssss, The most loved Amal Totka The most Juagadi one. Fake it tilll you make it. Or we can say “FAKE IT UNTIL YOU BECOME IT.”
A very good example related to this Is a tag behind a Rikshaw “Main bara ho kr truck banu ga” (I will be a truck when I get older.)
This doesn’t mean that he is going to turn the Rikshaw in the truck that is he is going to work that hard and earn money and become rich enough to buy the truck.
So faking provides the guidelines how you have to work hard to get to that place. | https://medium.com/@maryam-zaheer169/bits-of-glitter-the-amal-jugadi-totkay-de4c0eeef4b6 | ['Maryam Kiyani'] | 2020-12-27 06:36:05.423000+00:00 | ['Amal Totkay', '5 Rules To Success', 'Bits Of Glitters', 'Reflections'] |
Ball Pool | Date: 18-Dec-2018
Story Date — 16-Dec-2018
Place — Ball Pool @ Westend Mall, Aundh
City — Pune
A day before yesterday, Amar & Ria went to Westend Mall, Aundh so that their lovable, cute, little girl Amayra, 3 years, could spend great time at the ball pool there.
Amayra was crazy for ball pool and she wanted to go there since the morning. It was Sunday and she knows very well that on weekends we have to go out and have fun.
It was hard time for her papa to assure her that they will be going to ball pool only in the evening and spend amazing time there. Usually she sleeps for 3 hours in afternoons but that day she woke up after two hours because she was super excited to visit the ball pool.
Amar drove his family to the mall in the evening cutting through usual traffic. The ball pool is located at top floor of the mall.
Amayra was super happy to say the least. She went inside the ball pool after removing her shoes. Smiles on her face could not be compared. “Aw my girl” said Ria making a cute face. Amar loved her and Amayra the most in the world. Of course like any father/husband, for Amar, his daughter was always a priority, before his wife.
Amayra started playing, Amar and Ria took her pics and videos. After a while Amayra was completely immersed in the fun she was getting inside the pool. Barely she was looking at her parents now. Amar tried calling her couple of times but she was quite busy with her slides and jumps and falls and swimmings in the ball pool. Yes she was enjoying the inner world called ball pool completely. Amar and Ria were very happy to see her.
But then it struck to Amar. He realised something.
The ball pool has become a small world for Amayra. Something like this would happen a few years down the line. When Amayra will go for higher studies or when she will get married, she will have her own set of people. Her own set of stories, and buddies with whom she would share those stories. She would have her own life, her own space, her own zone which Amar and Ria could just see from outside and feel happy about it, but may not be “part” of it. Amayra may come out of the zone for a while and visit her parents or be with them for a while, but eventually she will go back to her zone, her own inner world and find her happiness there, find her space there, find her life there.
This is life, maybe. “Forever is a lie”, a line from a novel with the same title struck to Amar and he wished the life freezes at this very moment.
A playful day for Amayra and thoughtful day for her parents.
To be continued… | https://medium.com/@amitmehtastories/ball-pool-8d17c8f1f9dd | ['Amit Mehta'] | 2019-01-23 09:28:04.052000+00:00 | ['Father Daughter', 'Parents'] |
What are the ways of gardening for beginners? | Gardening is one of the best hobbies that people adopt in their spare time to keep them busy. It keeps a man healthy. It is a rewarding hobby. Gardening is necessary for all the being on Earth. We know that the atmosphere of
Earth is ruining day by day. So the genius people do the gardening to save them and their environment. So gardening is suggested to everyone who wants to improve his health. But there are some problems to start gardening for beginners so they should learn some methods or techniques to start gardening. Home gardening is also very famous these days because it provides fresh fruits and vegetables to one.
Techniques for gardening
Most common gardening techniques are
Organic gardening
Organic gardening is a type of gardening in which we don’t use fertilizers and pesticides. That is the most environment-friendly technique.
Conventional gardening
Unlike organic gardening, conventional gardening is a type of gardening in which we use chemical herbicides and pesticides in different amounts. The number of chemicals depends upon the types of plants.
Companion gardening
Companion gardening is a type of gardening in which we grow plants in relation to others so that we assure insects to keep away from our plants.
Biodynamic gardening
Biodynamic gardening is the same as organic gardening as we don’t use chemicals to grow crops faster. In this type of gardening, we use ancient techniques of a different culture.
What are the steps to grow a plant?
1 Firstly we should decide on an area of our house for planting
2 you should choose quality soil
3 Buy seeds from a nursery
4 Sow seeds in the soil
5 Water them timely
6 If needed, fertilize the soil
7 Make sure seed can get enough sunlight
8 Now wait for seedling
How to protect your plants from insects and pests?
No matter where you purchased your seedling or plant, pests are always there to ruin your plant. You are thinking that you are purchasing a plant from the greenhouse and there would be no pests then its wrong. There are insects or pests in every plant.
So to avoid insects there are many sprays available for protecting plants. Some of these sprays are
1 Herbal water spray
2 Neem water spray
3 Spray made of dishwashers
4 Black pepper spray
5 Alcohol water spray
6 Soap water spray
7 Chilly water spray
8 Diatomaceous spray
9 Tomato leafs
10 Oil-water spray
You should know what to grow
An individual must know what he should grow in soil. Because the quality of a plant depends upon the matching of soil with the seeds. If you plant a seed in soil that doesn’t have maximum nutrition for this type of seed, your seed cannot grow properly. For this reason, you should know the quality of your soil and you should select the seeds according to your soil. For example, if you have a sunny place then you should plant vegetables because vegetables grow best in a sunny environment. For example, you should plant vegetables so you can get neat and clean food from your home garden. Moreover, you should also plant fruits so you can get organic and chemical free fruits.
Frequently do a soil test
It is necessary to set your soil frequently. For this purpose, you should have a soil testing kit that can be bought from any nursery and from online. The soil test tells you about the pH level, phosphorous, and nitrogen level of your soil.
Soil test indicates that what you need to add to your soil such as fertilizers to improve growth. Seed starter is also a good option for better growth because they are not as heavy as fertilizers.
Label every plant
It is a good tip for gardening that even if you grow only four to five plants in your garden you have to label them properly. So you can give them nutrition as they required.
Fertilizers usage
The use of fertilizer is also a very important factor for the better growth of plants. Some types of soil don’t have enough nutrients to nurture the plant due to frequent crops so we have to provide extra nutrients by fertilizers. A gardener should know about good and accurate fertilizers.
conclusion
Plants are important for us because they are the source of oxygen and without oxygen, we shall die in mints. If we want to live a healthy life that we must grow plants for ourselves. It is not compulsory to be a farmer to grow plants instead a common man can get the principles of planting and can plant trees, flowers, herbs, and shrubs. | https://medium.com/@munibajamil321/what-are-the-ways-of-gardening-for-beginners-f658aa8761f6 | [] | 2020-12-15 11:42:47.565000+00:00 | ['Basic Steps Of Gardening', 'Ways Of Gardening', 'Strategies Of Gardeners', 'Gardening', 'Beginners Gardening Tips'] |
Bittrex Global Launches Tokenized Stock Trading | Tesla (TSLA), Apple (AAPL), and 10 other stocks now available to trade
Bittrex Global (Bermuda) Ltd. (Bittrex Global) announced that it will be listing tokenized stocks on its digital asset exchange in cooperation with DigitalAssets.AG. This product will allow traders and investors direct access to listed companies without having to use an external broker or pay additional fees. Shares can be purchased using either US dollars (USD), Tether (USDT), or Bitcoin (BTC), twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The tokenized stocks available through Bittrex Global will allow customers to purchase a fraction of a stock without needing to purchase entire shares, where the underlying risk of the tokens is derived from the tokenized company. Bittrex Global plans to quickly increase their offerings by giving its customers exposure to ETFs, indices, and additional asset classes.
“The traditional stock exchanges of the world’s financial capitals have for centuries set the terms for engagement and trading. Clearing systems are inefficient and complex and trading small volumes can be expensive and take days, all of which is totally unnecessary given the technological advances that have been made in the last decade,”
said Bittrex Global’s CEO Tom Albright.
“Blockchain technology has the potential to radically broaden access to financial services, and Bittrex Global is very proud to provide people with a portal to build their capital and private wealth in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.” “The ability to trade tokenized stocks would not be possible without the foresight and regulatory support that the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) has shown,”
said Bittrex Global’s CFO/COO, Stephen Stonberg.
“Bittrex Global looks forward to continuing its strong partnership with the BMA to develop innovative solutions as the industry grows.”
Bittrex Global’s diverse customer base can now purchase and trade the following tokenized stocks:
These tokenized stocks are available even in countries where accessing US stocks through traditional financial instruments is not possible. The tokenization of stocks is the first step towards creating more dynamic and accessible markets where securitized token offerings (STOs) can harness more mature and varied investors. Tokenized stocks can be traded alongside over 250 digital assets listed on the Bittrex Global exchange and marks a significant milestone in the adoption of blockchain technology by traditional financial services. | https://medium.com/bittrexglobal/bittrex-global-launches-tokenized-stock-trading-a1b313644483 | ['Bittrex Global Team'] | 2020-12-09 16:41:32.329000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'Amazon', 'Tokenized Stocks', 'Tesla'] |
I Was Banned From Century Club For Defending J. K. Rowling | I Was Banned From Century Club For Defending J. K. Rowling
And it was worth it!
I think it’s clear where the real hate is coming from at this point.
It all starts with a simple metaphor charm. A tongue in cheek way of saying reread Harry Potter to remind yourselves what side you should be on. Will you join Rowling’s Army?
You want a medal?
Sure would be cool if people were willing to debate me once in while on some controversial issues, but I’m such a stoic, unyielding, unemotional robot that no one wants to play with me. I demand fairness in a game dominated by baseless accusations and smears. Don’t expect me to help you if you won’t even let me discuss it.
Got kicked out of the Top sub for having too much fun. The so called Reddit elite do not like my kind. lol.
Are we starting to see the problem with one small group of socialists running all the top subs on Reddit, yet?
— just as a human being, I feel compelled to say something at this moment. Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people — Dan
You weren’t banned for defending her, you were banned for being an outright and unabashed hateful transphobe in the comments. Fully deserved and obviously expected.
People used to like me back in the 90s when I had long blonde hair, a nice smile and willingness to listen. Before I grew honest and distrustful of other peoples’ motives. That happens when you’ve been betrayed a few times… lost a few things that really mattered to you. You stop pretending.
Why can’t you just love all women, including trans women? It’s not a competition.
You go about your day just being yourself and realize that nobody likes who you really are. They only liked the version you created for them. The one that agrees with them all the time and finds the same things funny.
Not even mods are safe from the cancel culture cultists.
You should probably just stop commenting. You’re not making yourself look any better.
Soon you’re shunned. Pushed out of all the places you’ve grown familiar with. Oh you could go back… put on the mask, mea culpa, pretend again but why bother? Better to be alone and honest than popular and a fraud.
Yeah, it’s all a huge conspiracy, not like they agree that you’re a piece of shit. Glad you’re gone.
The world is screaming for acceptance but it settles for conformity. I’ve lost all sense of companionship all desire for conversation. Too disappointed, too many times.
You should probably see a psychologist.
There isn’t anything you can say to change my mind now except I love you and no one ever says that to me anymore so I know you don’t. Even the words are hollow now. I’m inhuman. Broken and repaired so many times I barely function.
Nobody needs to give TERFs the time of day. Fuck off.
So why am I smiling? Because I’m happy this way. I don’t enjoy the company of others. Prefer the solitude of my studio. I don’t like hurting people with my ideas yet I’m compelled to express them. Better to stay away and unfollow. There is nothing for you here but pain.
No one wants to debate you here. Go away.
As you wish. I don’t exist.
Cancelled. | https://medium.com/verboten-publishing/i-was-banned-from-century-club-for-defending-j-k-rowling-3e9a1358533a | ['Anthony Mountjoy'] | 2020-09-14 21:31:33.447000+00:00 | ['Century Club', 'Reddit', 'Harry Potter', 'Jk Rowling', 'Transgender'] |
How Crypto is Transforming The Gig Work Market in Africa | The Global Gig Economy currently generates $204 Billion, with a projection that this will grow to $455 Billion by 2023. The Gig Work Economy in Africa was estimated to be worth $300 Million as of 2019. With the informal sector playing a huge role in the employment level on the continent, the gig economy is a fundamental piece in the puzzle. For example, the gig economy was responsible for about 90% of new jobs created in 2018. The global gig work market is dominated by Amazon Turk and Crowdflower. GIg work refers to income-earning activities outside of traditional, long-term employer-employee relationships such as freelance work and independent contracting.
In 2020, the most popular tasks on Gig work platforms in Africa included repair, cleaning, and sales jobs offering commissions. Among the most used platforms were Lynk and Yoza in East Africa, Nomad and Secret Agent in South Africa, Service City and Lancer in West Africa, and Freelancer in North Africa.
Along with the rise of gig work platforms in Africa has been a rising trend of payment and settlement of wages to these workers using cryptocurrencies. Gig work platforms are increasingly leaning toward crypto payments due to the advantages crypto offers. The first of these is the dissolution of borders and barriers created by different fiat currencies held in different countries. Crypto payments allow gig platforms to build a global workforce of workers with seamless, affordable transfers on the Blockchain. This has the additional advantage of offering affordable talent from emerging markets in comparison to most developed markets. Secondly, the Blockchain serves as a transparent, immutable ledger of transactions between workers and work providers, acting as the single source of truth in case of disputes. Finally, crypto offers instant withdrawal capabilities for workers anywhere around the world unlike traditional channels which take days to settle.
Interestingly, crypto gig work platforms do not just offer traditional tasks such as repair and sales jobs. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have enabled the emergence of a new model of remuneration. Two examples of platforms that are using the novel crypto-based approach in gig work payments include Earn.com and Storm X. These crypto microtask platforms enable users to earn crypto through cash-backs while shopping, or while learning about other Blockchain platforms.
Crypto Gig work in Africa is elevating the state of many individuals. With over 90% of new employment created in 2018 being gig work, the role such platforms play on the continent cannot be overstated. For example, Levelapp offers refugees digital work opportunities such as data annotation to build a pathway out of poverty for them and their families. Kandaweather is another gig work platform that offers university students an opportunity to earn by launching weather balloons that assist in collecting weather data.
To serve the needs of workers who earn in crypto, there is a need for an off-ramp that allows the conversion of crypto to fiat at affordable rates for micropayments. Kotani Pay is a USSD crypto-fiat off-ramp platform that enables Blockchain protocols, dApps, and Blockchain fintech companies to integrate seamlessly to local payment channels providing them with a reliable on ramp and off ramp service to reach a wider customer base in Africa. When crypto gig platforms such as Toca make payments to their workers, Kotani Pay’s APIs enable the workers to exit from crypto and withdraw their money through mobile money providers such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa.
Looking forward, the gig work market in Africa is expected to grow exponentially. Some of the drivers of this trend include a bulging youth population, an increasing need and demand for jobs on the continent, and an increase in the rate of mobile internet penetration. With these factors in play, there is an increase in the number of peer to peer traders as the exposure to crypto rises and cryptocurrencies are used more and more as a means of payment. The number of off-ramp partners is also set to increase, and platforms such as Kotani Pay are expected to broaden the range of services they offer to meet the needs of the youthful population. | https://medium.com/@kotanipay/how-crypto-is-transforming-the-gig-work-market-in-africa-787cf3e7965 | ['Kotani Pay'] | 2020-12-22 18:05:54.049000+00:00 | ['Gig Workers', 'Kotani Pay', 'Gig Economy', 'Africa', 'Blockchain'] |
The Circle | 🌍 As 2020 nears its much-awaited end, I reflect on the lessons of this year. We can no longer afford to believe that we, as humans, are outside the laws of nature. We must begin to awaken to our place within Earth and appreciate that we are subject to her power. We are recipients of the fallout from the damage we have been inflicting on our planet from our place of imagined superiority.
💞 If this pandemic has taught us anything, may it be that as a species we are far from immortal. We are intricately connected to one another and to all life, and we must act accordingly. | https://medium.com/the-pom/the-circle-be8cfdc21151 | ['Vixen Lea'] | 2020-12-21 16:53:22.144000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Environmental Impact', 'Awakening', 'Poetry', '2020'] |
Cap Table 101 | 1. KEY CONCEPTS
Before we dive into what a later stage cap table looks like, here are 5 key concepts to understand:
1.1 Common vs Preferred Shares
Common shares — impart the most basic rights, privileges and preferences to those that hold them, including the rights to disclose company performance or to exercise a degree of control over operations. Typically held by founders, employees and angels.
Preferred shares — impart additional rights on top of those provided by common shares, generally giving priority to security holder for company returns in a liquidation event.
Figure 2. Ownership by stage (Source: Capshare)
1.2 Participating Preferred vs Non-Participating preferred
Participating preferred shares — receives their full investment amount AND pro-rata share of remaining ownership in a liquidation event.
Non-participating preferred shares — receives their full investment amount OR a pro-rata share in the liquidation amount.
Figure 3. Participating Returns vs Non Participating Returns
1.3 Convertible Notes
Convertible Notes (a.k.a. convertible bonds) — are debt agreements with the option to purchase equity at a discount in the following round. These are generally seen in seed/ series A rounds where there is a larger risk of the start-up not succeeding. A typical conversion carries an interest rate ~10% and discount for the next round of ~20%.
1.4 ESOP
Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) — provides employees with an ownership stake to align their interests with the company. ESOP gives employees a right to purchase shares in a company at a fixed price, and is generally distributed as part of an employee’s remuneration package. As an incentive mechanism, ESOP is a powerful tool to use early on in a company’s life time, especially when they have limited cash flow.
1.5 Dilution
Fully diluted % equity — Often in later stage cap tables, a fully diluted % equity column exists to illustrate the ownership structure should all convertible notes and options on the cap table have been exercised. On raises, founders are usually first to give up their equity for capital, hence diluting their stake in their start-up.
Anti-dilution — a standard provision in investor shareholder agreements that prevent their stake from being diluted after new shares have been issued. Also considered a pre-emptive / protective/ pro-rata measure.
Full ratchet dilution — In a case where an investor with the protection of this clause has paid a higher price per share in a previous round (say $10/share at 20% stake), the clause would allow that investor to maintain their stake in a subsequent round by converting their shares ($5/share, doubling the amount of shares) at the price paid in the previous round. This provision can impair raises at higher valuations as certain investors may hold a disproportionate amount of shares, especially if the clause is used in an early round.
Weighted average dilution — This is an industry standard clause that protects the initial investor by taking into consideration for the difference in number of shares issued to a new investor at the current rounds price, versus the price of the previous rounds, and the degree of dilution incurred by the raise. | https://medium.com/the-ouroboros-effect/cap-table-101-b0a9fcec0653 | ['Kevin Lu'] | 2020-06-16 06:15:11.533000+00:00 | ['Cap Table', 'From The Team', 'Startup', 'Founder Advice', 'Venture Capital'] |
The Recruiter’s Take On Your Resume | We are part of the IHRA and our resumes are certified by the association and during our interaction with the recruiters in the same forum, we have gathered a few insights which would help you when you draft your resume. The reality with most recruiters is that they claim that they spend 6–7 seconds between the time the resume appears on screen to them moving to the next one. This means that you as a job seeker have less than 10 seconds to show them what you’ve got. This is where many of the job seekers fail because they try to show everything about themselves on their resume. This makes the resume cluttered and fails to serve its intended purpose. When the resume lacks purpose, the recruiter does not have the clarity on the positioning of the applicant to the role at hand.
On the other side, we also found that the resumes that the recruiters spent more time on had the following:
A clear profile summary that gave them an insight into the applicant’s profile and it also defined the potential the applicant came with. The resumes where there were extensive and futile career objectives written which were no different from the zillion other resumes, they have read were the ones to be rejected first.
A neat flow of content in an organized manner with titles to each section that guided the recruiter to the required information. A resume written with a clear thought flow achieves this because they go from the most important to the less important ones and the unwanted ones are usually avoided.
The keywords that the recruiter always looks for on the resume is placed in a way that it meets the eye. Most recruiters claimed to have looked for more than one keyword on a resume. It usually is a set of keywords that they scan and the pattern followed is the primary keywords followed by secondary ones. The resumes that had these keywords placed in similar order were convincing for these recruiters.
The resumes that had all of the above and a validation in terms of data were the ones that were most preferred by the recruiters. This gave them the confidence to move it to the next level of the selection process because they were confident of the candidature.
Do keep these pointers in mind when you are writing your resume. Pay attention to what you are writing and look at it from the recruiter’s end. If you are confident that the recruiter reading you resume will have the same perspective as you do, then you are good.
We specialize in creating some of the best resumes in the Indian and international markets. Over the years, we’ve drafted thousands of resumes catering to every industry and role out there. In case you feel that you need assistance in getting your resume drafted, you can reach us at 0091 7838195810 | [email protected] | www.resumewriterindia.in | https://medium.com/@sharan_suresh/the-recruiters-take-on-your-resume-471116548898 | [] | 2021-11-24 05:18:03.440000+00:00 | ['Cv', 'Recruiters', 'Resume', 'Resume Writing Tips', 'Resume Writing'] |
Chiune Sugihara: The Japanese Schindler Who Saved Over 6,000 Jews | Chiune Sugihara: The Japanese Schindler Who Saved Over 6,000 Jews
Another forgotten hero from World War II
Chiune Sugihara
Most people know about Oskar Schindler and how he saved 1,200 Jews from being murdered. But not many people are aware of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese businessman who, just like Schindler, used his power and status to save Jewish lives. According to the Times of Israel, in 1940, Chiune Sugihara was vice-consul in Kaunas, the then capital of Lithuania. The city had a large and prosperous Jewish community of about 30,000 people. Kaunas’ population was supplemented between 1939 and 1940 by thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in German-occupied Poland.
After the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in 1940, the population of Kaunas remained trapped, unable to leave the country, even as the Germans advanced on the Soviet line. Chiune Sugihara became aware of the dire situation of the Jews, trying to find a way to help them. Jewish refugees could not leave Lithuania to travel east through Soviet territory without visas. Many wanted to get to the Dutch Caribbean, Curacao, and Guyana, but to get there safely needed a visa for an East Asian country.
Japan was used as a transit country
Sugihara immediately saw a way to help them, using his homeland, Japan, as a transit point. Visas issued by Sugihara allowed them to pass through the Soviet Union, then into Japanese territory, then into the Caribbean. When all foreign diplomats were ordered to leave the city, he asked to stay another 20 days, writing to his superiors in the Japanese Foreign Ministry to approve his plan. According to historian Yutaka Taniuchi, the Japanese authorities flatly refused to issue visas for Jewish refugees unless they guaranteed that they would not stay in Japan.
This was impossible for Jews to do, which removed the possibility of obtaining visas. Chiune Sugihara wrote to his superiors three times, begging them to help him. When he was refused, he was left with a big dilemma: to follow orders or follow his conscience?
Going against his own Culture
Japanese culture clearly prioritized hierarchy and discipline, and for Sugihara to break the orders of his superiors was an extremely serious matter. He risked severe punishment if he abused his position and acted contrary to orders.
An original Visa approved by Sugihara from 1940
Every day, hundreds of Jewish families appeared in front of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, begging Sugihara to help them. With the help of his wife, Sugihara began issuing visas. During August, Sugihara and his wife created and distributed transit visas for these families. Even though visas normally take months to process, they issued about 300 visas per day, an extraordinary amount. Sugihara worked almost non-stop, determined to help every person that came to him.
On September 1, 1940, Chiune Sugihara was forced to leave Lithuania by train to Berlin. Even at the station, he continued to write visas for the crowd that had gathered near the train.
At the last moment before leaving, he gave his stamp to one of the Jews waiting at the station, which allowed him to issue visas for the remaining families. The last words for the crowd were: “Please forgive me, I can no longer write. I wish you all the best.”
It is not known for sure how many people Chiune Sugihara rescued, but it is estimated that he issued about 6,000 transit visas. Many of these were for families, thus the number of people he saved was most likely considerably higher.
One year after his departure, the Germans conquered Lithuania. Jews in Kaunas who failed to obtain visas from Sugihara were deported to concentration camps, where many of them died.
Chiune Sugihara, his wife Yukiko (right), his sister-in-law Setsuko Kikuchi (left) with their two eldest sons, Hiroki and Chiaki
After leaving Germany, Sugihara was consul general in Prague (Czechoslovakia) from March 1941 until the end of 1942. From 1942 to 1944, Chiune Sugihara was in Bucharest, Romania. After Soviet troops entered Romania, Sugihara and his wife were then deported to a prison camp.
In 1946 they were released by the Japanese government, which left Sugihara without a position or title. He was transformed from a government official to an ordinary man with a precarious financial situation. However, he never regretted his decision to help the Jews of Lithuania. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/chiune-sugihara-the-japanese-schindler-who-saved-over-6-000-jews-d570727df63d | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-08-16 20:01:00.996000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Culture', 'Holocaust', 'History', 'World War II'] |
Buck Breaking: The Use of Sexual Violence Against Enslaved Men as Punishment for Wrongdoing | Buck Breaking: The Use of Sexual Violence Against Enslaved Men as Punishment for Wrongdoing
Trigger Warning: buck breaking may have been the worst form of punishment
Drawing of enslaved men being flogged in front of their children (Source: Wikipedia)
We’ve all watched movies, seen pictures, and heard stories of how terribly slaves were treated. But, the story of how sexual violence was weaponized and used by slaveowners against slaves is often forgotten. Yet, slaves — including men — were often sexually violated to keep them in line or as punishment against those that dared to rebel.
What is buck breaking?
Mainly utilized by slave owners in the Caribbean, buck breaking was used against male slaves who were seen as defiant. The process involved the slaveowner forcing the enslaved man to lower his pants and bend over a tree stump to ensure that his buttocks were propped up into the air. The enslaved man would then be flogged severely. This would weaken him so that he would not be able to resist the rape that followed. The white slaveowner would then proceed to rape the slave several times.
This form of punishment was worsened by the fact that it would be done in full view of all the other enslaved people, including the slaves’ family and friends. In an addition to being sexually violated the slave would also be publicly humiliated. This public punishment would instill fear in other slaves and thus prevent any further rebellion.
Enslaved men who were victims of this vile punishment often ran away from the plantations or killed themselves as they were unable to deal with the humiliation that they had suffered. It was often too difficult for them to integrate back into a society that had watched them being emasculated in front of their wife, children, and friends.
Buck breaking as a form of punishment grew amongst slave owners in the Caribbean. White men were able to travel from plantation to plantation raping male slaves. The punishment became so widely implemented that sex farms developed from the practice. These sex farms allowed multiple slaveowners to gang-rape male slaves as punishment for any supposed wrongdoing that they committed.
The massive popularity of the practice suggests that buck breaking may have been utilized as an outlet for homosexual slaveowners to act out their sexual desires on men, without attracting the stigma associated with being gay. Homosexuality during this era would have been shunned but shockingly raping male slaves as a form of punishment was acceptable. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/buck-breaking-the-use-of-sexual-violence-against-enslaved-men-as-punishment-for-wrongdoing-897647489732 | ['Justannet'] | 2020-11-28 06:02:43.785000+00:00 | ['Racism', 'Sexuality', 'History', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Equality'] |
Introducing Collector Score | Following last week’s announcement, we want to give you an insight on the Collector Score we are working on. This feature is designed to make the collecting on Starly even more exciting, adding an element of treasure hunt — rewarding the most persistent collectors.
Your Collector Score will be the sum of all the cards you own, buying and selling cards having an immediate impact on it.
Every card will have a score based on the rarity class and serial number, price category also having a smaller significance impact on the final score. The scores for customized collections will be calculated on a per case basis, following the same pattern.
Card score overview
For example, if you own a Rare card with serial number 7, your card score is 102. This number then will be multiplied by the price category coefficient that is 0.7–1.4 for the sales prices we have had so far.
There will be ongoing perks and benefits for higher ranking Collectors. Amongst other things, they will include an access to exclusive drops, occasional airdrops in form of packs and $STARLY tokens, as well as an active involvement in the decision making process — forming Starly DAO — voting for сollections to be launched and featured, new features, and a lot more.
Collector Scores will also serve as the basis to calculate the $STARLY tokens airdrop to our Community — you might want to hold on to your best ranked cards — your lowest serials is gold! We will provide more details shortly.
This is still a work in progress and your opinion matters, so feel free to share with us your thoughts or suggestions on our social media!
Twitter / Discord / Telegram Chat | https://medium.com/@StarlyNFT/introducing-collector-score-75dbe682e897 | [] | 2021-12-28 18:25:41.638000+00:00 | ['Starly', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Nft Collectibles', 'Collectibles', 'Nft'] |
Here’s How Pulp, Paper, and Packaging Will Change | Source : The Manufacturing Outlook
The paper and therefore the forest-products industry as an entire are growing. Although at a slower pace than before — other products are filling the rift left by the shrinking graphic-paper. The packaging is growing all round the world, along side tissue papers and pulp for hygiene products.
FREMONT, CA: The year 2015 saw universal demand for graphic paper drop for the primary time, and therefore the fall within the marketplace for the products over the past five years has been more prominent than even the foremost pessimistic forecasts. The article outlines the changes happening across the industry.
The paper and therefore the forest-products industry as an entire are growing. Although at a slower pace than before — other products are filling the rift left by the shrinking graphic-paper. The packaging is growing all round the world, along side tissue papers and pulp for hygiene products. albeit a comparatively small market thus far , pulp for textile applications remains growing. Besides, a broad search for new tools and uses for wood and its components is occurring in several development centers and labs.
The paper and forest-products industry isn’t fading — far from it but is changing, morphing, and developing. One would argue that the industry goes through the foremost considerable transformation it’s seen in many decades.
Changing Industry Structure
The structure of the industry landscape is altering. The changes aren’t remarkable individually, but the buildup of developments over the future has now received a period where they’re making a difference.
Consolidation has been a critical think about tons of segments of the industry. the large have now become bigger in their selected areas of focus. At the collective level, the foremost extensive paper and forest-products businesses haven’t grown much, and a number of other others have reduced in size. The firms have focused their efforts on fewer sections. Therefore, concentration levels in specific segments have generally increased.
In some sections like North America, coated fine paper and containerboard, ownership concentration, as determined by conventional approaches to drawing segment margins are reaching new levels. The occurrence makes it difficult for businesses to seek out further acquisition opportunities, which might be accepted by rivalry authorities.
News source : Here’s How Pulp, Paper, and Packaging Will Change
Challenges Manufacturers Face During Horizontal and Vertical Integration
Source : The Manufacturing Outlook
For horizontal and vertical combination to impact resource competence, supply chain management need to be included within the network.
FREMONT, CA: Two of the essential factors for production during a smart factory are horizontal and vertical combination . within the interconnected smart factory, horizontal combination warrants machinery — IoT equipment and engineering processes work together effortlessly. vertical combination makes sure production data is employed at higher managerial levels when making staffing, marketing, and other decisions.
Horizontal and vertical combination Challenges
Even though horizontal and vertical combination can simplify production and facilitate smarter business decisions, the shift can pose some unique challenges related to:
Lack of Communication
Horizontal integration believes that a factory has equipment and software capable of gathering production data and sharing that information with other systems. Businesses will got to either buy new IoT-enabled equipment or modify existing tools to facilitate interconnectivity to start incorporation. Tactics for IoT enabling legacy systems comprise retrofitting them with sensors and connecting Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to the web employing converters.
Knowledge Silos
Knowledge silos happen when a factory’s information systems are unable to share data with each other , trapping data in one a part of the equipment, organization, or production process. If the architecture is already compatible and relatively new, businesses can eliminate knowledge silos by integrating current systems, setting them up to share information freely. In other cases, firms may need to attend to incompatible architecture before they will distribute production data with the remainder of the corporate .
Asset Management
Upon integrating machines, data systems, and devices within the smart factory, one must still supervise the assets to assure productivity and security. Executing continuous network monitoring and picking industrial software with robust security measures can aid in asset management.
Supply Chain Management
For horizontal and vertical combination to impact resource competence, supply chain management need to be included within the network. Even it’s the networking with external clients or integrating the in-house supply chain, enterprises got to leverage data-driven technology to ensure smooth collaboration and sound decision-making.
News Source : Challenges Manufacturers Face During Horizontal and Vertical Integration
Check Out : Twitter | LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/@lexabaker8019/heres-how-pulp-paper-and-packaging-will-change-81e8592ee26 | [] | 2020-03-06 06:13:53.198000+00:00 | ['Manufacturing', 'Paper', 'Integration', 'Technews', 'Technology'] |
Hip Hop: From the Streets to the Stage | Relatively speaking, hip hop is a very new style of dance. It began in the 70s to accompany the new wave of hip hop music. The streets of “both New York City and California”, hip hop found its beginnings (Blackwelder). Although many diverse races have contributed to the hip hop style, “African Americans and Latin Americans” are some of the biggest contributors (Fuller).
Break dancing was the first style of hip hop that became popular. It was “originally performed to Funk and Rock ‘breaks’” where the upbeat music would allow dancers to freestyle and “‘go off’” (“The History of Hip-Hop Dance”).
Break Dancing
After the 80s, breaking began to die down and we entered a stage of the more well-known hip hop freestyling. It incorporated a bounce to the beat of the music and could take simple grooves and turn them into something unique and entertaining to watch. Most of the moves were made up on the fly, hence the word “freestyle”.
Hip Hop Freestyle Battle
The 1990s helped give hip hop a boost as the popular music videos of the decade featured hip hop dancers. The style really took off, however, with the “the advent of the internet — specifically YouTube” which found hip hop videos taking a large prominence (Blackwelder). Hip hop then hit a wide audience and gained massive popularity which brought it into dance TV shows such as So You Think You Can Dance (Fuller).
Ice Ice Baby features Hip Hop dancing
Hip Hop number on So You Think You Can Dance
Now hip hop has earned a spot as a main style of dance that studio dancers train with to perform on the stage. Hip hop has truly had quite a journey from its humble street beginnings to the stage for formal dance competitions. | https://medium.com/@429eam09/hip-hop-from-the-streets-to-the-stage-31fe60e141aa | ['Evelyn May'] | 2019-12-01 18:03:53.990000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Dance', 'Hip Hop', 'Origins'] |
Book Review | Sapiens | In the book “Sapiens”, the writer discusses the history of humans from the very beginning to the present day. Harari discusses different aspects of human history and explores the circumstances that result in making our world as it is today. He highlighted the questions that have not yet been answered, and highlighted theories that other historians and writers usually avoid discussing it. According to him humans were at the time an animal with no significance, now they become the most powerful community. How do they become the most significant creatures on earth?
Harari raised questions like why humans rule the world, are humans the only reasons for the extinction of other species, why men are dominant and rule the world, and why European empires succeeded and others collapsed? From invention of fiction to the discovery of ignorance, Harari writes about the pros and cons of the major historical events. He, according to me, always speaks in favor or speaks against something with evidence and logical reasons. However he never prove that any certain happening was good or bad for humanity rather left for readers to decide for themselves
I like and recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history as well as biology and psychology. Sometimes I feel like it’s less about human history and more about biology and psychology. Other than biology and psychology, Harari discusses lives of humans in times such as in agricultural revolution, where people live and settling down in villages and other topics like capitalism, emergence of science and imperialism in Europe etc. The writer explains whether the events happening in the past were beneficial for humankind or proved harmful and have lasting effects on human population. With every passing time human beings continuously inventing and improving technology to make their lives more better and easy but they never remain satisfied, no matter how much they progressed. | https://medium.com/@salmanmaken57/book-review-sapiens-a27071c403fd | ['Salman Maken'] | 2020-12-16 07:06:07.589000+00:00 | ['Evolution', 'Sapiens', 'History', 'Book Review', 'Psychology'] |
An Outside Look at Election Fraud | I voted.
I’m not telling you who I voted for, but it wasn’t Biden.
Unlike basically everyone, I don’t really care who won, nor do I really care what happens with the court cases and election fraud accusations that are going on right now. As someone who doesn’t care, I figured it might be instructive for folks who do care who wins to get an outside perspective on the case that the election was stolen. So if do you care who won, this article is for you.
Time Honored Tradition
Bitching about losing and claiming an election is illegitimate and suing and recounting and re-recounting and involving the courts in the election process is a bipartisan time honored American tradition, and was going to happen this cycle no matter who won. It happened last election cycle, it happened in 2000, it happened other times too. Just let it happen. It’s part of what we do around here.
In 2016, the Democrats kept insisting that the election was illegitimate but couldn’t articulate why, eventually settling on “Russian interference” as the story they told themselves, which was so mathematically impossible it was laughable. That led to all the “not my president” stuff.
In 2004 the Democrats insisted that the voting tabulation in Ohio was crooked because the CEO of the company that provided the tabulation machines promised to deliver Ohio to Bush.
In 2000 Gore lost by about five hundred votes in Florida, entering us into a great morass of what exactly qualified as a ‘vote,’ and suddenly everyone in the country had to figure out what the heck a “Hanging Chad” was. We should all be thankful 4chan wasn’t around then.
(to be fair, he conceded and then unconceded and then conceded again)
1960 may very well have been decided by fraud. There’s a lot of fascinating deep research on this one, which is the root of the “Dead People Voting Democrat” meme.
My point here is not to bash Democrats for being hypocritical for not wanting Trump to do any recounts. I live in a state that I expect to be recounted. I only bring these examples up to point out that (1) fraud happens, (2) recounts happen, (3) people scream about this crap all the time, and (4) we should have expected it one way or another.
Mathing The Dilbert Guy
Scott Adams, a man who’s fame was at least doubled or tripled by his successful prediction of Trump’s 2016 win and his lengthy articulation of why, has become by this point a favorite among conservative pundits. He tweeted the following today:
To believe Biden will be sworn in as president in January, one must believe at least one unlikely thing: 1. Despite being brainwashed to believe Trump is Hitler, Democrats in key cities did NOT attempt a large-scale voter fraud to save the country, or. . . 2. Democrats did commit major voting fraud to remove “Hitler” but for some strange reason all the geniuses looking for indications of it can’t find any confirmed evidence and there are no whistleblowers, or. . . 3. Democrats WANTED to commit major fraud to get rid of “Hitler” but there is no practical way to do such a thing and hope to get away with it, or. . . 4. Democrats didn’t REALLY think Trump was so bad that it was worth cheating to remove him. Remember, it’s still #2020.
I think this is a fantastic thought experiment, and when we run some mathematics on it, I think we land on a blend of #3 and #4.
Here’s the AP map, stolen from Google, on November 8, 2020:
When 538 did their election forecasting, they ran 40,000 simulation runs. Trump won ten percent, Biden won 90 percent, and they stuck up a fun little graphic showing 100 sample runs you could click on. Here’s the sample run that turned out to be correct, if the AP map above doesn’t end up changing over the next month and a half.
You can see in this graphic that Trump did better in real life than the average simulation, but not good enough to win. You should go to that page and play with their web tool a bit, hovering over the different simulations, and return back. That’s important for the next step in the discussion, because we are going to examine the case for fraud critically.
I am sure there was fraud this election. I don’t see how there couldn’t be fraud, and Scott Adams makes a clear case why we should expect there to be fraud. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, I think he’s sort of a used car salesman who fell ass first into the presidency because Hillary Clinton was truly horrible. But I know people who are absolutely sure he’s Hitler, and if you think someone’s Hitler, you’d be willing to do anything up to potentially violence to get him out of power. But the level of fraud necessary to create these election results would be of such an incredible scale it belies the imagination.
Let’s say a time traveler from the Two Term Trump Future knows the 2020 election map turned out like this:
That map is a lot like what we were seeing before a lot of the mail in ballots got counted. Let’s say the time traveler hops into his Wayback Machine, meets the Democratic National Committee in a secret bunker in Area 51, and puts together a plan to flip the election. He would have to flip Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Here are the margins in those three states:
You’d need a little over 70,000 ballots to flip those three states from Trump winning each by 1 vote to get what we see. But in the Two Term Trump Alternate Future from which our spaceman time travelled back, Trump probably didn’t win those states by one vote. He probably won them by some larger margin, say for instance the margin we see Biden winning them by. They’d have to stuff 140,000 ballots in those three states, not just 70,000.
But this fraud scenario has a crucial tool that the Democrats don’t have — it has a time traveling spaceman that tells them exactly which states to flip. A centralized fraud effort in the real world, lacking any alien interference, would have to span any number of other states to be sure they successfully flipped the states they needed to flip. If we use 538’s predictive model from the prior link, we can look at other states that they projected might go red in a Trump win, where the Democrats might also try to run fraud. Some of those had Maine and New Hampshire red, so add those to the list. Some had Wisconsin and Michigan. Some had Nevada. A couple had Minnesota. The most pro-Trump model in the grab sample had everything listed here. Not only that, you’d have to figure they’d try and get Florida at least, since every Trump win scenario had Florida.
The actual operation would have had to try and provide a blanket percentage of fake votes across all those states, to ensure they covered enough ground to net the important ones. This is what that model looks like, with our current results:
Let’s walk through this. If the Democrats were crafty enough to pull off a massive voter fraud scheme that kinked the vote counts in those ten states by 0.65%, then they would have flipped Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania (barely), and Wisconsin. That fraud scheme would involve stuffing over a quarter of a million fake ballots into envelopes. But again, they wouldn’t know that 0.65% was their target, so they probably would have shot for 1%, which would be an operation totaling almost half a million fake ballots. In such an operation, one out of every fifty Biden votes in those states would be a fake vote.
Iowa
During the Iowa caucus of 2020, the Democratic Party couldn’t even figure out how to count their own votes for two days. They hired some crony to develop an app who’d apparently never even coded before, because the code was as if someone was following a basic computer science tutorial. It was rife with security flaws, hard-coded API keys, and god knows what other sort of bugs. There were over one hundred precincts with incorrect results. It is impossible for me to believe for one moment that the sorts of people who would make mistakes that egregious could have orchestrated a ballot fraud initiative of the sort of magnitude necessary to change the outcome of this election.
Was there fraud? I bet there was. I bet there were Democrat true believers who slept well on November third knowing they did their part to bring down the Great Nazi Evil of Donald Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out there were pro Trump people doing similar stuff. But unless the CIA was involved, and running the fraud effort, there’s no way that whatever fraud is eventually found could have given Biden the election. He won by too much. I doubt even the CIA could pull it off.
Biden is the president, and unfortunately we’re going to have to grind through weeks if not months of disbelief, and possibly even some identified instances of real voter fraud, before we settle on this fact. But it is a fact, whether that fact makes you happy or sad. | https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/an-outside-look-at-election-fraud-87bdba723e73 | ['Bj Campbell'] | 2020-11-09 12:06:01.022000+00:00 | ['Voter Fraud', 'Elections', 'Politics'] |
A list of tools you will need to “play” with data | Now that is out of the way, let’s go straight to the tools needed to “play” with data.
Anaconda
Anaconda is a distribution of Python & R programming that aims to simplify package management and deployment. With Anaconda, you won’t have to keep downloading packages you might need to work with Python as they’re a lot and so Anaconda has all those packages and more to make your life easier.
Jupyter Notebook
This is an open-source web application that enables you to create and share documents that might contain live code, visualizations & narrative text. Its uses are: data cleaning and transformation, numerical stimulation, statistical modeling and many more. You can interact with any code that you write in Jupyter. To know how to use Jupyter, is to know ease lol.
Google Colab
This is basically Jupyter notebook under Google servers. There are a few added features on here but you could do the same things you can on Jupyter and more.
Tableau
Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. It is a very powerful tool used in the Business Intelligence Industry. In simpler terms, it is a visual analytics engine that makes it easier to create interactive visual analytics in the form of dashboards.
Power BI
Power BI is also a business analytics service, by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for users to create their own reports and dashboards. It truly is simple enough trust me.
Matplotlib
This is an amazing visualization library in Python for 2D plots of arrays. It’s a multi-platform data visualization library built on Numpy arrays. Matplotlib consists of various plots like line, bar, scatter, etc.
Numpy
Numpy is also a library in Python. Numpy is used to work with arrays as it provides a powerful N-dimensional array object. It does so by overriding the lists in Python with its lists because numpy lists are faster.
Pandas
Pandas basically allows you to interact with data as csv files, databases etc. It is used for data manipulation and analysis which is built on top of Python. It makes use of data as dataframes (DF).
In order to acquaint your self with data these are my personal recommendations. In my upcoming blogposts, I’ll be introducing tips and tricks on how to use these tools to interact with data. | https://medium.com/@ememandy/a-list-of-tools-you-will-need-to-play-with-data-cd80f8945345 | ['Emem Andy'] | 2021-03-09 13:03:26.882000+00:00 | ['Anaconda', 'Matplotlib', 'Data Visualization Tools', 'Python'] |
Supporting Coinfirm in the fight against money laundering in the virtual asset world | Supporting Coinfirm in the fight against money laundering in the virtual asset world Maximilian Spelmeyer 1 day ago·4 min read
I am very excited to announce that SIX Fintech Ventures co-led the 8.0m USD Series A funding round of Coinfirm together with FiveT Fintech. We are joined by our friends and existing investors MiddleGame Ventures, Blockchain Valley Ventures as well as the new joiners Mission Gate Ventures and CoinShares.
The need of anti-money laundering compliance for virtual assets
Unkown Source
Money laundering is a huge global cross-border problem. Money laundering is one of the most significant and long-term negatively impacting factor of economic growth as it destroys legal certainty and trust of market participants. The annual sum of money being laundered globally is estimated by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime between 2–5 percent of global GDP, which indicates a range between 843bn USD to 2.2tn USD. In comparison, an estimated of “just” 2.8bn USD in dirty funds were laundered through cryptocurrencies in 2019. The traditional financial system is still the bigger “imposter” but crypto is not innocent. As key money laundering risks include dubious sources of funds, anonymity of beneficiaries and suspicious activity patterns such as high transaction frequencies and size, virtual assets are very much predestined by their traits to hold the risk of money laundry. The rising global adoption of virtual assets (the global number of crypto wallets has grown by 400% in the past four years (191m as of 2020)), and increasing engagement of institutional investors and enterprises will drive the amounts to new spheres.
Regulators around the globe require companies active in the financial sector to have formal processes and policies in place preventing money laundering and financing of terrorism. Those requirements are in place to prevent criminal activity and also to uphold the stability and integrity of financial markets. Across the globe, different AML regulations exist, like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations, AMLD5/6 in Europe, FinCEN’s BSA in the US and AMLA in Switzerland. Most of these regulations also apply to any entity active in the virtual asset ecosystem, which provide access to the market and deal with crypto currencies or other type of tokens. Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) must comply with the regulatory anti-money laundering and terrorism financing requirements. In this regard, “Know Your Customer” processes and continuous transaction monitoring are two key measures for regulated players to implement.
Overall VASPs, as well as other market players, must increase their efforts against money laundry.
Fighting money laundering in the digital asset world
In my previous article on our investment in Keyrock, I highlighted the momentum and trend around digital assets. We believe that virtual assets will become an integral part of the financial service industry.
Our main hypothesis for this investment is that a tremendous potential of value lies within the market entry of large institutional investors and enterprises. To join the virtual asset ecosystem and further drive the maturity of the segment, those institutional players require a regulated infrastructure and high-quality services. Of course, the latter embodies a discussion point to the many crypto enthusiasts championing decentralization and trust via open ledgers in place of regulations. But without operationally excellent and trustful infrastructure, institutional participants will be reluctant to enter the industry. A starting point to reduce controversy in the virtual asset space is to reduce AML risks tied to transactions and wallet accounts. This is where the likes of Coinfirm come into play, providing AML and KYC processes to their customers.
Why we believe in Coinfirm
Coinfirm’s clients all share comparable requirements, such as the mitigation of client regulatory risks, insights into counterparties of crypto transactions as well as automated and live detection of suspicious activities.
In this regard, we were very impressed by the company’s products, which include real-time blockchain analytics that automatically evaluate wallet addresses for suspicious behavior and enable enhanced due diligence on asset provenance. Coinfirm’s slick design facilitates the case management and evidence collection for its customers fighting money laundering attempts. Finally, our conviction was further fueled by Coinfirm’s standalone ability to detect stolen funds throughout laundering attempts such as mixing or layering. As roughly 7 bn USD worth of cryptocurrency was either stolen or acquired by scams in 2020, this feature cannot be neglected.
With this product suite coupled to impressive execution skills, it is not surprising that the company achieved two-digit MoM growth. As this year’s projections were already achieved and having a filled pipeline, Coinfirm is set for an exciting end of the year.
During our investment process, we were thrilled to find in Dr. Mircea Mihaescu a seasoned entrepreneur and executive. His previous experience as COO at the digital bank Moven and as innovation director at IBM will be key in accelerating Coinfirm’s global growth. With experts in the topic of AML such as Pawel Aleksander and Jakub Fijolek at his side, we are convinced that the company will be able to continue its exciting growth journey.
Finally, I am excited to join the board as an observer and work along Coinfirm’s team and our co-investors to grow and scale the company.
As always, a big thank you to everyone that helped making this investment happen! | https://medium.com/@max.spelmeyer/supporting-coinfirm-in-the-fight-against-money-laundering-in-the-virtual-asset-world-806aecd7fe4e | ['Maximilian Spelmeyer'] | 2021-09-16 08:43:23.186000+00:00 | ['Compliance', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Regtech', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital'] |
Key Phrase Extraction & Applause Prediction | *Auto ML tool for performing ML techniques on raw data files of medium online article
Best Project Award Winner in Machine Learning @IIITD 2019–2020
Abstract — With the increase in the availability of content over the internet, it is very difficult to get noticed. It has become an utmost priority of the blog writers to get some feedback over their creations to be confident about the impact of their article. We are training a machine learning model to learn popular article styles, in the form of vector space representations using various word embeddings, and their popularity based on claps and tags.
Motivation
Today’s world is full of online content and a lot more is produced each day. Medium is one of the top platforms for spreading information and knowledge about almost any domain in society. It is abundantly used to publish content, articles on computer science domains such as ML, AI, Data Engineering, etc. Getting popularity over internet.
2. Introduction
Article writing and gaining popularity is a difficult task. The problem comes for the new authors who don’t have much idea about how to get popularity. We have developed intuition into making an interesting and interesting Medium article. Instead of purely relying on a guess theory, we wanted to test our theory using data science and machine learning. As a Data Scientist, we have always been curious about creativity and automation. Also, we believe that our article and hard work on this model combines both faces of science to predict the best Medium article. We introduce our work and further work Platforms like Medium have their own metrics to evaluate the content by allowing readers to clap to show their appreciation. Also, these platforms offer provision to add a few Key-Phrases that best provide the subject of the content.
Now, it becomes a necessity for the writer to get some assistance for the best possible key-phrases to get the articles ranked up and tentative popularity of the new article. Our aim in this project will be to train a model on the Medium.
3. Literature Survey
Key phrase extraction is a big field and a lot of people have worked on it already. We have many pre-trained models like Bert and pke rake etc. that help to extract the key phrases. Although we have many advancements in text classification, this whole problem of article performance problem is explored by only a smaller group of researchers. pke is an open-source python-based keyphrase extraction toolkit. It provides an end-to-end keyphrase extraction pipeline in which each component can be easily modified or extended to develop new models. pke also allows for easy benchmarking of state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction models, and ships with supervised models trained on the SemEval-2010 dataset. [1], [2]. Sahrawat et al. [8] have used neural network models such as bert and bi-lstm to extract key phrases from scholarly articles as a sequence labeling task solved using a BiLSTM-CRF, where the words in the input text are represented using deep contextualized embeddings.
4. Dataset Used
The dataset that we used for this project is being scrapped using selenium in the form of JSON strings from the official Medium website. So far, we have over 2574 articles of diverse popularity. We are collecting more data but since the annotation verification takes time so will conclude this in the final presentation. For pre-processing, we removed all the Non_ASCII characters and the white-spaces or special characters. then we converted the digits into their English equivalent. followed by spell correction and lemmatization.
Our data had a lot of new articles having zero claps so we removed those to avoid misdirection. and finally took doc2vec embeddings to get a numerical document vector.
5. Data Scraping
Web Scraping also called “Crawling” or “Spidering” is the technique to gather data automatically from an online source usually from a website. While Web Scraping is an easy way to get a large volume of data in a relatively short time frame, it adds stress to the server where the source is hosted. We scrapped the data from the medium using selenium. Data mining or gathering data is a very primitive step in the data science life cycle. As per business requirements, one may have to gather data from sources like SAP servers, logs, Databases, APIs, online repositories, or web. Tools for web scraping like Selenium can scrape a large volume of data such as text and images in a relatively short time.
Selenium is an open-source web-based automation tool. Selenium is primarily used for testing in the industry but It can also be used for web scraping. We’ll use the Chrome browser but you can try it on any browser, It’s almost the same. [5] We scrapped the by following steps:
Search URLs of articles with the given set of tags to capture domain related articles only.
Scrapping the useful data from each webpage.
Saving the scraped article data in json object.
6. Pre-processing
The steps for natural language preprocessing are taken up to convert each sentence into equivalent processed word representation [1], [2], [7], [8].
The techniques used to process each word are:
Punctuation Removal: ‘.”,?~!<@#$%&*) Whitespaces Removal:
\t \a Non-Ascii Characters: non-keyboard, emoji Tokenization: ‘hello’, ‘world’ Number conversion: 1 to ‘one’ Stop-word removal: the, are, is Spelling correction: thro, teling, forgt Word segmentation: haveto, whynot Lemmatization: mice to mouse Expanding abbreviations: I’ve, can’t Scaling: [1, 90,99] to [0.1, 0.9, 0.99]
Text data is not suitable to feed into ML models, so we used Glove and doc2vec combined with sequences obtained by the text_to_sequence method from Keras’ tokenizer.
8. Feature Extraction
After generalizing the length of the questions, we are left with long vectors with a lot of relevant information (be it more or less). Since the length is directly proportional to the vocab size, as mentioned in Zip’s law [10], [11], it is crucial to extract interesting features only. We tried PCA and LDA feature extraction[12]. Word embeddings also helped and finally got 23 top features to apply ML algorithms. More or fewer features than 23 lead us to the reduced performance of our model. That’s why we are only capturing the most relevant information with this set of features only. Dimensionality reduction also helps to visualize the top data components for better understanding, as shown in Figure 3. For extracting the features out of textual data of blog articles we have used doc2vec which will be able to generate a vector for corresponding documents(a complete article). We used RFE with chi2 to finally rank features on the basis of their importance.
9. Proposed Model
We tried several approaches and combinations to reach the final set of conclusions. However, the pre-processing steps for all remain the same. Pre-processing differs for regression tasks and keyword prediction tasks.
9.1 Applause Prediction
We have used Linear Regression for regression over the claps and we also proposed the use of KNN to find the closest similar data points to our test document in vector space. Regression gives MSE i.e. we calculated the deviation of the predicted results from actual ground truth results. This is to get the factor of claps at each document. The initial MSE we got was around 13000 which was huge while using a Doc2vec as the features. Using KNN for regression we will be able to reduce MSE further to approx 4000 and an accuracy of 37%.For this, we have around 2345 medium articles.
We slightly modified our task from a regression on claps to popularity score predictions as we are unable to reduce the mse further.
We tried to scrap more data. So the final dataset size is now 7421 articles. We updated the label values on the range of 1–5 in which 1 being the least popular and 5 being the most. The score assignment has been done with the help of the applause counts. So its become the multilabel classification task with five classes in which we are able to get the accuracy of 48%.For a binary classification task of popular non-popular and popular where we have assigned labels not popular for a number of claps under 50 and popular otherwise we were able to get the accuracy of 94%.
In Applause Prediction using linear regression and knn we were able to reduce our loss around 4000 mse.
Which is still huge! Right? So we slightly modify the task to get the popularity score prediction of a given article. We divide the applauses into five buckets of the score(1–5).
Then we further try to experiment by assigning just two labels 0 and 1 for popular or non-popular respectively.
9.2 Key Phrase Extraction
BIO-Tagging Scheme
9.2.1 Deep Learning Models
Deep Learning has been proven to solve many hard problems. We have planned to use deeply learned models like RoBERTa to get optimized results for our model final prediction for the article being popular or not. We are planning to use BIO-Tagging to represent each document for keyphrase extraction. It is a common format the similar kinds of NLP tasks such as NER. And later using deep neural networks to predict those BIO tags as labels.
Deep Learning Models (Best)
10. Performance Improvement
What Improved our Performance, and why?
TfIdf: performs better than doc2vec as it captures sublinear relationships. Stop-words: In our case, stop words are worthless as simply misdirect the classification as they occur very often in every document. Dimension Reduction works: our vector representation has a lot of features and feeding that to a model increases time and hides essential information. Adding features: Selected word embeddings give us 23 sufficient features. Adding or removing features reduces the performance as the relevant information gets compromised. scaling the feature helps to get better accuracy especially in case of svm. Smote: Smote helps resolving the data imbalancing.Which in turn helps in performance. Converting the task : Converting the task of applause prediction into 1–5 score classification. As Classification models are able to get better decision boundaries than regression models’ best fit line.
Model Architecture and Background Story
What didn’t work, and why?
Spelling Correction: Most of the questions didn’t have any spelling mistakes. It is assumed that the user is aware of the language. Scaling: Vector representation of questions is already scaled. Further scaling doesn’t help anymore. All embeddings: Embeddings usually capture most of the information. Combining gensim embeddings doesn’t solve the purpose. Adding features: Selected word embeddings give us 23 sufficient features. Adding or removing features reduces the performance as the relevant information gets compromised. Reducing Vector size: It improves the training time but at the cost reduced performance. Increasing epochs: Increasing epochs for doc2vec training fails to give any better features. Varying Regression: Changing naive regression to lasso,ridge aur elastic fails to give better performance. Hyperparameter Tuning: As data itself is biased, so hyperparameter failed to improve performance to a significant extent.
11. Results
For the regression task, we used linear regression to draw a linear decision boundary and estimate the claps of new articles. Also, we propose the use of knn in terms of document similarity to find k nearest documents to the new document in multidimensional vector space and take an average of those document claps. Tuning the hyperparameters showed a lot of improvement. We are planning task-specific fine-tuning for both of these tasks.
11.1 Applause Prediction
The results are obtained after passing the model through rigorous task-specific fine-tuning. Kernel, activation, depth, smoothening parameter, number of iterations, overfitting and underfitting regularizers are a few to name.
Applause Prediction Performace
After including features such as authors, reading time, number of images in the article we able to reduce mse.
In the multi-class task, we will able to get an accuracy of 0.48.
In the popularity task, the final best accuracy we got is 0.94.
Loss and accuracy depend Linearly on the amount of data.
Having multiple approaches made our app reach a wider audience since not everyone wants to get into granular details as results.
11.2 KeyPhrase Extraction
For the Key-Phrase Extraction task, we initialized the Topic-Rank keyphrase extraction model and carried the preprocessing using spacy. The key phrase candidate selection happens as sequences of nouns and adjectives (i.e. `(Noun|Adj)*`). Then candidate weighting happens using a random walk algorithm. And finally, N-best key phrases i.e. highest scored candidates are extracted as (keyphrase, score) tuples.
DeepLearning has its own benefits. It may overfit sometimes but rigorous fine-tuning gave us promising results. For keyphrase extraction, Bidirectional LSTM trained over tfidf embeddings produced promising results. This task is highly unbalanced so we reported f1-score based metrics.
12. User Interface
We made an interactive web application based on HTML, python, flask, and JQuery using ajax API call to retrieve top k documents from the collection of best performing models. It has two modes of operation i.e. text and audio(7).
User Interface for Audio and Textual I/O
Text: Input from keyboard
Code Snippet for Audio Interface
Audio: voice interaction with the web app via default microphone and speakers. Users can see the top 5 results in the web app screen and allow the app to store k results in the ’temp.txt’ file for later reference. Figure 6 and 7 shows the user interface of the created web application for the query ’Our performance in cricket’ and ‘Ronaldo’ respectively.
TTS is a great tool to improve the impact of your user experience this can be incorporated in your interface with these steps.
15. Conclusion
We started with the aim to offer an end to end solution for budding researchers and let them write successful articles. This system would take in input as text and gives out whether the author is up to the mark as per the current trend. Deep-Learning has it’s own benefits. It may overfit sometimes but rigorous fine-tuning gave us promising results. For keyphrase extraction, Bidirectional LSTM trained over tfidf embeddings produced promising results. This task is highly unbalanced so we reported f1-score based metrics.
14. Future Work
The key problem in this task is that data is not linearly separable and it has a lot of overlapping. So instead of taking specific domains of medium blogs if we go for the general articles, it would be more beneficial. Another problem is that the dataset is highly skewed towards the claps 0,1 as articles with good clap count are very few. We initially proposed KNN to predict the number of claps but still after hyperparameter tuning and feature engineering we failed to get any better mse. In the regression of applause, we plan to incorporate other features with more weightage i.e. date of publishing, author name, etc. We are going to consider contextualized word embedding using deep learning models to capture the context for embedding.
15. Authors’ Contributions
Krishna Yadav (MT19039) [LinkedIn]
Data cleaning and Preprocessing Data Annotation Data Analysis and visualization Key Phrase Extraction Baseline Results Deep Learning Models Analysis and conclusion
Lakshya Choudhary (MT19067) [LinkedIn]
Data Crawler Data Annotation Feature selection LR, KNN | Parameter Tuning Baseline Results Fine-tuned ML models Analysis and conclusion
References
[1] https://github.com/boudinfl/pke.
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805.
[3] Z. Liu, X. Lv, K. Liu, and S. Shi, “Study on SVM compared with the other text classification methods,” in 2nd International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science, ETCS 2010, 2010, vol. 1, pp. 219–222, doi: 10.1109/ETCS.2010.248.
[4] https://monkeylearn.com/keyword-extraction/.
[5] https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2020/08/web-scraping-selenium-with-python/.
[6] M. S. Phyu and K. T. Nwet, “A Study on a Joint Deep Learning Model for Myanmar Text Classification,” in 2020 IEEE Conference on Computer Applications, ICCA 2020, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1109/ICCA49400.2020.9022809.
[7] T. Bi, P. Liang, A. Tang, and C. Yang, “A systematic mapping study on text analysis techniques in software architecture,” J. Syst. Softw., vol. 144, no. August, pp. 533–558, 2018, doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2018.07.055.
[8] Sahrawat D. et al. (2020) Keyphrase Extraction as Sequence Labeling Using Contextualized Embeddings. In: Jose J. et al. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12036. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_41.
[9] https://towardsdatascience.com/extracting-keyphrases-from-text-rake-and-gensim-in-python-eefd0fad582f.
[10] S. T. Piantadosi, “Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions,” Psychon. Bull. Rev., vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 1112–1130, Oct. 2014, doi: 10.3758/s13423–014–0585–6.
[11] L. Adamic, B. H.- Glottometrics, and undefined 2002, “Zipf’s law and the Internet.” Accessed: May 13, 2020. [Online]. Available: http://www.ram-verlag.de.
[12] X. Yan, J. Guo, Y. Lan, and X. Cheng, “A biterm topic model for short texts,” WWW 2013 — Proc. 22nd Int. Conf. World Wide Web, pp. 1445–1455, 2013, doi: 10.1145/2488388.2488514.
Acknowledgments | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/key-phrase-extraction-applause-prediction-7b397c7ad76d | ['Krishna Yadav'] | 2021-01-04 17:01:20.359000+00:00 | ['Data Mining', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Text Classification', 'Deep Learning', 'Machine Learning'] |
Digital Marketing is an Ultimate Way to boost-up your business | Digital Marketing Services which have helped our clients to achieve success is
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) : — Our Brandzus, digital marketing agents are expert in listing your website higher in the SERP by using keywords related to your field or business so that when a client searches online for the items and services you offer, make your website more visible to them.
: — Our Brandzus, digital marketing agents are expert in listing your website higher in the SERP by using keywords related to your field or business so that when a client searches online for the items and services you offer, make your website more visible to them. Email Marketing : — Email marketing is a tried-and-true means of communicating with existing and potential consumers. By using eye-catching subject lines, Brandzus creates attractive email to target the audience. We design attractive highlight that will provide customers with value to make their mind. We make the CTA explicit so the consumer understands what you’re offering with social media sharing icons so that your material may be shared.
: — Email marketing is a tried-and-true means of communicating with existing and potential consumers. By using eye-catching subject lines, Brandzus creates attractive email to target the audience. We design attractive highlight that will provide customers with value to make their mind. We make the CTA explicit so the consumer understands what you’re offering with social media sharing icons so that your material may be shared. Blogging: — Business blogging and guest post blogging are two main subcategories from which customers can benefit in getting detailed and important information about your business. Our digital marketing expert team create business blogging with relevant posts for your website on a regular basis through which clients can learn more about the services you provide. We have experience and knowledge for generating and maintaining website traffic for business blogging. We are also expert in guest post which encourage contact bloggers and influencers in your market to write about your service or product. We help in collecting reviews of current customers about their interactions with your business.
The basic goal of Brandzus digital marketing company is to produce sales-ready leads through our digital-marketing-services. | https://medium.com/@hiteshc2c/digital-marketing-is-an-ultimate-way-to-boost-up-your-business-5b4fc21f2777 | [] | 2021-12-23 18:28:29.120000+00:00 | ['Seo Services', 'Seo Agency', 'Digital Marketing', 'Digital Marketing Agency'] |
Consumer is BACK: A Look at 2020’s Top Tech Trends | Consumer is BACK: A Look at 2020’s Top Tech Trends
In recent years, the whispers had grown louder, and the tweets came more frequently. “Consumer tech is dead.” “There’s no innovation in consumer.” 2020 has sent an emphatic response to all of the doubts and gripes: Consumer is back.
COVID-19 has flipped our world upside down, drastically and fundamentally changing consumer behavior. While many of us were online before, now the internet is a lifeline. Almost every element of our lives, from education, to work, to socializing, has migrated into the virtual arena.
Needless to say, in 2020, some things just *hit different.* As we were all stuck at home, the year’s biggest IPO came from a travel company. And who knew we’d become obsessed with note-taking apps, see the biggest Beyoncé moment come from a collab with a stationary bike, and interact with our politicians on Animal Crossing? It’s been a long year of Quibi jokes, Slack sneakers, and LinkedIn stories.
We could all use a break before 2021 kicks off, so as we start to sit back and relax over the holidays, we present to you, the first Annual Definitive Ranking of Consumer & Tech Trends™:
While a wide range of trends have defined the 2020 consumer tech landscape, five primary themes stand out:
Sustainability, Inclusivity and Diversity
If there’s one driving theme of 2020, it should be intersectionality. Diversity and inclusion are intrinsically linked to our environment, our economy, our lives. It is not a coincidence that Gen Zs, the generation most affected by climate change and societal ills, have been at the forefront of pushing for change within the consumer space.
What companies moved the needle? In the software space, Aerial and Joro created tools that allow consumers to actively monitor their carbon footprint, and Good On You emerged as the defining arbiter of sustainability. A generation of brands including Stasherbag, Pela, Bite, Leaf Shave, By Humankind, and Dropps exploded across our Instagram feeds promoting a plastic-free, sustainable future–one that might have seemed extreme or strange in past years, but in 2020 was coated with a special kind of D2C ~sheen~.
Depop became the marketplace du jour as Gen Zs across the world used the app to resell thrifted and used wares, helping a generation of teens achieve a Billie Eilish look sustainably and on the cheap. Notably, in today’s creator economy where it is common to have not one or two but five or more sources of income, Depop selling has become a de-rigueur side hustle among Youtubers and TikTokers, even powering successful teens to six-figure salaries.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and as brands were encouraged to “pull up or shut up,” those that already had meaningful diversity and inclusion practices had a running head start. Notably, companies like Parade and Savage X Fenty exploded in popularity, while notorious stalwart Victoria’s Secret fumbled so much that its planned acquisition was cancelled.
Perhaps this year was marked more by what didn’t happen than what did. Beginning in June, we saw a slew of corporate cancellations and scandals, including at Carta, Bon Appetit, Clubhouse, and Coinbase, only to be reminded that sexism is still very much alive and well on #techtwitter.
It’s a long road towards real equity and inclusion in the tech and investment communities, but we’re optimistic about the future. 2020 has been a watershed year and it’s safe to say that these values — sustainability, inclusivity, and diversity — are no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity. We’re excited about inclusive cults over exclusive clubs and bullish on the idea that equitable, accessible platforms are not just the right moral choice, but the best business decision.
Creator and Influencer Economy
If you weren’t on TikTok in 2020, were you even on the internet? This year, the social media platform catapulted a generation of creators to online stardom. While teens like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae made headlines as the top two most followed influencers on TikTok (102M and 71M fans, respectively), their fame only signals the tip of 2020’s creator-led online boom. Today, scaling from zero to viral can occur faster than ever, with many celebrities becoming D2C commodities, cultivating relationships with their fans in a more intimate and direct fashion than ever before.
Over 50M people consider themselves to be creators and rely on an expanding number of platforms to help them monetize and strengthen relationships with fans. These include Substack (paid newsletters), Patreon and Only Fans (exclusive content), and Cameo and Pear Pop (customized appearances). Creators now rely on so many different sources of income that platforms like Stir have emerged to consolidate their finances.
While we’ve seen the rise of the custom-branded celebrity collab (Charli x Dunkin, Travis Scott x McDonalds), a more interesting offshoot of this trend is the celebrity equity deal. A growing group of influencers and stars launched their own companies, including David Dobrik’s Dispo, Josh Richards’ and Bryce Hall’s Ani Energy, and Ryan Reynolds’s Aviation Gin — which sold for a whopping $610M in June.
In one of the biggest events of the year, the company behind K-Pop superstars BTS notched a $4B IPO, allowing fans to buy a stake in the band’s future success. On a smaller scale, platforms like Indify and AmplifyX allow individuals to invest directly in musicians.
Audio
Remember the memes and jokes surrounding Apple’s AirPods when the first generation came out in 2016? Us too. Three generations later (the $549 AirPods Max were just released last week) and the only people laughing are the folks at Apple. Apple sold nearly 60 million AirPods in 2019 and is on track to sell more than 90 million this year. AirPods have fundamentally changed the audio landscape, becoming an ever-present conduit between media and consumers’ ears.
We’ve watched behavioral patterns change rapidly since Airpods’ adoption: People wear them while working, ordering in a coffee shop, sitting and talking with friends (“Oh, don’t worry, these aren’t on”), or just to convey unavailability in public spaces. We’ve even seen AirPods worn purely as a fashion accessory, with people posing for pictures in their Pods to round out an outfit.
This Apple trend aside, we didn’t fully recognize audio’s potential within consumer tech until this spring. Despite the emergence of smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and hands-free technology in recent years, we watched in awe as a16z overcame Benchmark to lead Clubhouse’s highly touted Series A financing. At a $100 million valuation, consumer VCs immediately perked their ears and began clamoring to find the next superstar in audio.
Founders are also rushing to build new startups in the space. In a time where many of us are overwhelmed with Zoom fatigue, audibly engaging with friends or consuming content is a refreshing antidote, and founders are fighting for our ears in any way they can. Synchronous audio startup Rodeo is making it easier to talk to friends, Dipsea provides erotic audio content, Marine Snow helps users make internet friends through music, and Alpe is distributing top-tier academic audio courses. High Fidelity, Betty Labs, Chalk, and Quilt are just a handful of others competing in the growing social audio landscape.
In 2021, we’ll be on the lookout for startups building around audio-first content creation, music as a social unit of interaction, audio social networks, and obviously 25 different versions of “Clubhouse for [insert interest group / demographic].” We’ve already seen demand for verticalized social audio platforms across music and sports, but only time will tell if niche communities will create strong enough standalone apps.
EdTech
With tens of millions of students from kindergarten to business school learning remotely this year, EdTech found itself as the center of attention for students, teachers, parents, and obviously VCs. Never before has education been productized as much as it is today. Consequently, never before have K-12 students and higher ed students required such tailored learning solutions.
School closures have been especially difficult for K-12 families as younger students require high levels of oversight, guidance, and engagement. The ecosystem is exploding with startups Jan Lynn-Matern categorizes as ‘enablers,’ — those that help existing institutions to become more scalable. Startups like ClassDojo, Yuday, and Seesaw are encouraging higher and more active participation from parents in their children’s learning experience, and Kahoot, the self-titled “Netflix of Education,” is designing its content around games to make e-learning more fun. Other startups, like Swing, are building marketplaces to guarantee teacher supply for millions of students.
In 2020, changes in higher education seemed more existential as students re-evaluate its value proposition. According to Jomayra Herrera, higher ed’s value prop can be broken down into three components:
1) The content and skills you learn
2) The credentials you earn
3) The brand and network you develop(the only defensible component)
Though one can argue the importance of each, remote learning experiences have convinced many that content & skills are enough. Students are realizing they can read the Canterbury Tales AND land a competitive job without saddling themselves with student loans. Abandoning an alumni network and credentials that historically have acted as safety nets, students are supplanting the undergraduate experience with gap year communities and hacker houses.
Understanding this, unicorns like Udemy, Udacity, and Skillshare are offering the skills and credentials, without the network. Others, including Lambda School and OnDeck, even include a strong brand and a network of accomplished alumni as a part of their value proposition. In short, as we reimagine the higher ed of the future, the offerings of 2021 and beyond will need to be more flexible, accessible, and cost-effective.
As innovative as the year has been for EdTech, 2020 has also introduced new shortfalls within the space and exacerbated existing ones that must be addressed. Despite remarkable progress in the past decade, the digital divide in our country is clear as over 4.4 million children still lack access to computers at home.
Gaming and the Metaverse
For those who doubted the strength of the global gaming appetite, 2020 has been an eye-opening year. Unity currently boasts a $41 billion market cap, Epic Games’ most recent round valued it at $17.3 billion, Scopely just raised at a +$3 billion valuation, and AOC took to Twitch to play Among Us in the biggest voter turnout event of the year.
We are seeing aspects of the video game experience (immersive worlds, social connectivity, virtual economies) migrate toward all areas of life: social media, investing, shopping, education, and even the workplace. While some real-life experiences are becoming gamified, games are increasingly imitating real life. One word defining tech discourse this year is the Metaverse, the idea of shared immersive, 3D online environments.
Metaverse has taken 2020 by storm, in both concept and practice, and its applications extend beyond the traditional world of gaming. Startups like Branch, Gather and Kumospace are quickly proving its utility for the future of work by creating virtual offices, and similar spatial audio and video others like Bash are offering virtual, social communities for internet friends to interact.
Other benefactors of the surge in Metaverse awareness will likely include virtual economies. Animal Crossing’s Bank of Nook institutes interest rate cuts that mimic the real world, and in the first nine months of 2020 alone, Roblox sold $1.2 billion of its virtual currency, Robux, which gamers use to purchase in-game objects, avatars, and enhancements. It also bodes well for Roblox’s community of young developers, who will collectively pull in $250 million this year, but no one is more excited about the Metaverse than Travis Scott.
In 2018–19, Travis Scott’s Astroworld tour stretched 57 shows across roughly four months; the tour covered more than 850,000 fans and netted him nearly $54 million. In 2020, Scott performed five virtual concerts inside Epic Games’ Fortnite. In a span of just 3 days, Scott’s concerts reached almost 28 million fans and earned him $20 million. Talk about efficiency.
Quickly proving its utility for publicity, monetization and brand-building, expect the Metaverse and gaming world to pull in swaths of new communities in 2021; artists, influencers, and politicians alike will build their avatars and pick up a controller …everyone is slowly becoming a gamer.
Looking Ahead
So, where are we going in 2021? We’re confident our lives will continue to be lived online, with technology playing an increasing role in how we interact with ourselves and others.
In 2021, we’re expecting an even greater emphasis on wellness, with fitness, meditation, and therapy platforms rising in popularity, and a suite of tools to help us disconnect. Consequently, privacy will be top of mind as consumers reevaluate their deep relationships with internet companies. Whether it’s more sustainable fashion, water usage, meat consumption, or travel, consumer tech will take a stronger, more active approach to healing our planet. We’re entering an era of Social Media 3.0, where we’re confident consumer social apps will prioritize inclusivity, authenticity, serendipity, and vertical alignment.
Things are finally looking up with the help of the COVID-19 vaccine and maybe — just maybe — we’ll trade in this year’s Zoom holidays for IRL hugs and celebrations in 2021. Until then, we’ll see you in a more creative, immersive, and forward-looking corner of the internet. Tasha is busy earning her PhD in TikTok psychology and Jay is still perfecting the art of the DM slide, but you can find us both on Twitter, at @natashajuliakim and @jay_drainjr.
Thank you to our incredible friends and fellow investors, Leah Fessler, Gaby Goldberg, Mark Grace, Faye Maidement, and Lia Zhang, who contributed editing, input, and thoughts to this article. | https://medium.com/@jay-drainjr/consumer-is-back-a-look-at-2020s-top-tech-trends-ece9028c1f0c | ['Jay Drain Jr.'] | 2020-12-21 16:44:23.839000+00:00 | ['Diversity', 'Year In Review', 'Gaming', 'Edtech', 'Venture Capital'] |
Real | Real
A few days ago a musician and acquaintance Mike Posner posted on Instagram a black-and-white graphic with the repeated text “nothing is real.” In the comments he wrote 12/18. In all likelihood it’s the announcement of a single or an album drop. What has followed over the next few days though has caused increasing concern from his fans as the pictures, photos, and texts in the comments have seemed really dark, full of self loathing and despair, and virtually unhinged. Even knowing that “nothing is real” it’s super disturbing. As a person puts more of their life on display for a large group of people, only a fraction of whom they actually know, that vulnerability, if it’s authentic, breeds empathy and compassion and when someone changes the direction so extremely of how they are self presenting, it’s jarring. Maybe that’s the idea. Maybe it’s somehow allowable as art, even encouraged, but for me over the last few days it’s added to the eeriness and foreboding of today.
Robert Mapplethorp created black-and-white photographs primarily in two different categories, portraiture and flowers. This self-portrait is in the collection of the Museum of modern Art and many of his photographs are both art and also found to be particularly disturbing. They are also very real. | https://medium.com/@heidizuckerman/real-a050b14c7057 | ['Heidi Zuckerman'] | 2020-12-17 00:04:11.479000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Life', 'Wisdom', 'Connection', 'Love'] |
2020: it’s all about the perspective | Photo by Gabriel Uchida (https://www.instagram.com/uchidagabriel/)
I am so grateful for 2020; the best year of my life. I got the chance of my life and I didn’t want to lose it.
Of course, I feel privileged, because, even under such unforeseen circumstances, I got the opportunity to keep working from home, as I was deeply concerned for the ones who didn’t get to enjoy the same privilege. It wasn’t easy still, with lots of adjustments and reconsiderations. Well, that’s all part of the process. Despite the difficulties, I never put my head down, and I hope you’ll never do too.
Due to the nature of my work, in the last fifteen years, I had spent a significant amount of time away from my loved ones. I never realized how much time I was gone until I sat down to look back to realize I was gone over 200 days combined just the last 5 years alone. Those were years I had traveled the least. I don’t even want to remember the years before that. With the pandemic, I saw a chance, and I was determined to capitalize on it.
I know times are difficult and the extremism in our society tends to set us apart rather than bring us together, but the change must start within ourselves. We got an opportunity to “stop” or at least “slow down” our busy lives, and we had a chance to reevaluate everything surrounding ourselves. It was about our perspective, and how we saw things. For me, it was all about the “glass half full “ approach.
In the beginning, it was the fear, about the uncertainty of what was going to happen. Shortly after, the “get it together stage”, and that’s where I started to realize this time was so precious. I get to train sports with my kids every day. No, I am not a coach, and one of my biggest weaknesses is the lack of patience, which is crucial to be a successful parent, and in this case a great coach. That was my chance, to work on something I need to do to become a better human being. Priceless daily time together with them, working on training sessions, where their fitness level got better (after all, we have logged more than 10,000 workout minutes over the course of the last nine months). That was beyond the point to me, as I was really appreciative that I got to spend precious time with them.
Later on, it came to the realization stage. We soon realized it was going to take a while to go back to our ‘normal’ lives. What’s normal, anyway? Would we ever go back to the way we used to live? Certainly, there were positive things about how we were living, but I am confident to say many of us learned a new flexible way to live our lives and there are tons of positive things we were not acquainted with before. I sure tried my best to adapt, and I managed to accomplish things professionally and personally I thought I would not be able to. What a great rewarding feeling it is to find new ways to do things.
Perhaps your view of this pandemic is different from mine, and I am fine with it as I am not leaving your life and I don’t know what you are going through. My only intention here was to bring you a positive perspective about this pandemic, as my way of thinking five or ten years ago might have been different from the one I have today. I know it sounds paradoxical to say there is a positive side of things in a pandemic, but if it wasn’t for my faith in God and thanks to the support of my wife, I wouldn’t be here today to say I learned to be careful with what I think, because our thoughts run our lives. If you think 2020 was your ‘rock-bottom’, aka, the worst year of your life, that’s okay. Just remember there is no better place to start rebuilding your life up than having a strong foundation to support it, and there is no better place to start building something up than from the bottom upwards.
In 2021, I challenge you to be the best you could every day of your life. Ultimately, like Aristotle’s once said, “you are what you repeatedly do”, so start now to think positively and be the best version of yourself. Rest assured I am trying to be the best I can be and I hope my simple word of encouragement may help you push it through. Just stand strong, have no worries, and be confident that better times will come no matter how rough the ride is, just never give up. Make a difference and be kind; it’s always about your perspective. | https://medium.com/@19dlg/2020-its-all-about-the-perspective-7bc53577b483 | [] | 2020-12-22 14:55:52.996000+00:00 | ['Positive Thinking', 'Personal Development', '2020', 'Encouragement', 'Perspective'] |
Part 2: Process and Culture | Allow me to tell you about one of my favorite experiments (…and then I’ll tell you why we probably shouldn’t have favorite experiments, but more on that in a minute.)
About a year ago, we implemented a new experiment to add a checkbox to the patient payment app to allow users to unsubscribe from receiving paper statements in the mail. The goal was to reduce paper costs and give patients a chance to signal their preferred way of communicating with us. When we reviewed the results, it was thrilling to see that more than a quarter of patients opted to unsubscribe from paper. But a few months later, we realized that the unsubscribe metric alone wasn’t showing us the full picture. Even though we had seen good success getting patients to opt out of paper, the longer term metrics revealed that these paperless patients had overall lower engagement and lower collection rates, specifically when they received bills from providers with less brand recognition. These longer term impacts (less engagement, fewer bills resolved) were more consequential and revealed that this experiment did not move the needle in a positive direction for these types of providers. Providers with strong brand recognition and mostly recurring patients, on the other hand, fared just fine and still showed consistent levels of engagement for paperless patients. Thus, we rolled out this feature broadly for these types of clients (but not to our entire patient population).
We start all of our experiments with background data analysis to lay out the problem we want to solve, as well as prioritize solutions based on expected impact, reach and effort. But this data doesn’t always give the full story. Our patient population is constantly changing as Cedar’s client-base grows and some features, like the unsubscribe checkbox, end up not delivering the expected outcome for everyone we wanted to touch.
Sometimes, that’s not easy to accept. When I worked in finance, a former mentor taught me to “never fall in love with my trades.” The lesson has stuck with me: don’t become so attached to your ideas that you lose the ability to evaluate them objectively. In our case at Cedar, we should take care not to fall in love with our designs and experiments.
Of course, this is easier said than done. So one way we can counteract emotional decision-making is with a strong process. Sharing updates and results broadly and regularly to the entire Cedar team forces us to be accountable and make tough decisions. It’s important that we never be afraid to cut designs and features that do not move our metrics in the right direction. We are all accountable to improve the patient experience.
At Cedar, the patient is at the center of our decisions. Building products that innovate with thoughtful designs and features takes a lot of people. Everybody at the company, from our patient advocates, who help patients with their questions, to our commercial and makers teams, hold some pieces of knowledge about our patients. Using the sum of this knowledge for problem solving and idea generation is crucial.
The proof is in the process.
Here’s how the magic of an experiment actually comes together: the product team raises an issue that needs to be addressed. Our data science team will conduct data analysis to get a better understanding of what’s actually happening. At that point, we assemble a cross-functional brainstorming group with participants from the product, design, engineering, data science, commercial and user success teams. In this group, we debate our hypotheses, ideate potential solutions and then prioritize them. Once we’re aligned on our approach, we’ll get the experiments running. We’ll communicate the results to the entire Cedar team periodically throughout the experiment and once it’s wrapped via our monthly internal report and all-hands events. Based on the results, we go back to the drawing board, try different solutions or personalization.
Cultivating creative problem-solving.
Building this culture of experimentation is critical and we instill this ethos in our team with rituals both big and small. Last February, we organized Cedar’s first hackathon where all employees were encouraged to participate. The event didn’t require coding skills — it was a product and design hackathon designed to spark creativity. We created teams by mixing up people from different functional areas across engineering, design, data science, marketing, customer success, partnerships and account management. It was incredible to see people from all teams contributing — from developing a product idea to the final pitches. More importantly, for a day and half, two-thirds of Cedar worked together using their own skills and background to solve problems for patients. The whole experience was an amazing training in cross-functional work.
All of the aforementioned internal structural and cultural foundations we’ve established at Cedar enable us to most effectively build a personalized experience for patients. There is another key element that we haven’t talked about yet: ethics. Ethics are the foundation that guides our decision making about what experiments to do, not do, and how to responsibly implement changes to the patient experience. It’s a critical topic and it deserves it’s own separate post. So stay tuned. | https://medium.com/the-patient-experience-studio-at-cedar/part-2-process-and-culture-243c60f99fd7 | ['Yohann Smadja'] | 2020-07-22 03:35:51.499000+00:00 | ['Patient Engagement', 'Patient Experience', 'A B Testing', 'Experiment', 'Data Science'] |
The unnoticeable rebellion underneath | It can be possible that several thoughts reside inside me but they constantly contradict each other. It eventually creates the confusion triggering me to experiment those puzzling thoughts that were left unnoticed or ignored before. This process is so subconscious that I only find out this morning and hence I feel the need to write it down.
I read the weather forecast the night before, which indicated thunderstorms might follow. For such a scenario, my instinct used to often prompt me to put an umbrella in my bag as a precaution, despite the weather would turn out gorgeous. And this time, I went out with my tote bag as usual but no umbrella inside. The summer weather became quite unpredictable. The thunderstorm drove away the lovely sun all by a sudden and swept the city without mercy. I stood at the doorway of a mall where I randomly entered just a few minutes ago, feeling surprisedly excited for the unexpected but also expected thunderstorm. I laughed. The well-planning person gave up her pattern. The rebellious me claimed the victory. What’s next? This was where the excitement mostly came. A solution to deal with the pop-up situation is needed. My focus then shifted from the crazy rain outside back to myself and my surrounding. The small concierge was setup at the doorway of the mall. A board was held there stating umbrella renting service was available. Here lain my solution, a cash deposit to the staff at the concierge and an umbrella for myself. I walked in the rain happily with the renting umbrella.
As a Chinese raised city girl, I was so typical to perceive fair skin contributing to the female beauty. Despite of the truth that I always loved being under the sun, I still didn’t feel at ease to get tanned. But the revolution just happened, I don’t remember it rooted from which particular date, I become less and less uncomfortable with the tanning skin, though I have no intention to get tanned as much as the western culture advocates, I simply accept or even enjoy that the color changes over time naturally, the cycle of tanning and whitening, the cycle of wane and reborn. Different layers of colors, light or dark, due to the varying sun exposure over time, spread over my body. I don’t opine it as disharmony, just a mark made by the nature without purposely human intervention, a gesture of natural experience. An afterthought comes into mind during my sun burn healing since last weekend.
Life sometimes is so subtle. Only until those unnoticeable rebellious thoughts gather in a big wave and start to surface, then I realize that life can surprise me by converting the old unsexy things into the new seasoning to my life. | https://medium.com/@pincozhou/the-unnoticeable-rebellion-underneath-7c77a03319c9 | [] | 2019-07-01 05:39:04.693000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Diary', 'Hong Kong', 'Life', 'Inspiration'] |
Has Corporate America found a voice? | Almost two years ago, 20,000 Google employees staged a walk-out to protest Google’s handling of sexual misconduct in the workplace, an issue that hardly provokes ostensibly opposing positions. In today’s political climate, however, companies are being forced to take a stand on issues that don’t necessarily find common ground among Americans.
When Black Lives Matter protests erupted this summer, PR teams were quick to show their support through hashtags and creative logos. Despite the broad corporate support for the movement, a recent study shows just 55% of U.S. adults express at least some support from the movement, down from 67% in June (see chart). The same study showed that only 19% of Republicans express at least some support for the movement.
BLM may not have as much support as social media might suggest [Source: Pew Research]
Companies are finding it harder to hold neutral ground even as taking a stand gets riskier and can alienate a large section of consumers. As per Sprout Social, a social media management platform, 70% of consumers say it’s important for brands to take a stand on key issues, and 55% of all consumers say they would boycott brands supporting issues that don’t align with their own views. With companies in a tight spot, many are realizing that the public fallout from staying quiet is worse than picking a position that may upset segments of their consumer base.
More than just speaking out, companies are compelled to act. Last year, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, stopped selling ammunition for military-style weapons and asked customers not to openly carry firearms in stores. While most Americans favor stricter gun laws, Walmart’s decision was seen as left-leaning, drawing muted appreciation from Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and criticism from the NRA. In an August 2019 Gallup poll, 51% of Americans said they were against a law which would make it illegal to sell or possess assault rifles. The company is likely to alienate some of them, who may switch over to competing retailers, at least temporarily.
Brands that serve specific demographics will find it easier to anchor their position on the socio-political spectrum without risking backlash. When President Trump passed an order reducing the size of two national monuments in Utah, Patagonia, a clothing company, was quick to condemn the move with a message on its website offering little room for interpretation: “The President Stole Your Land”. This message was in lockstep with Patagonia’s brand and its environmentally-conscious consumer base, and hence an easy decision. In contrast, companies that rely on the appeal of a larger base may distance themselves from a message like that.
The abundance of misinformation around Covid-19 has made corporate inaction culpable. Social media platforms censored a post from the President that compared Covid-19 to the seasonal flu and took down an anti-mask video shared by Breitbart and retweeted by the President which promoted hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus. Similarly, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have taken steps to limit the reach of QAnon, a conspiracy theory group, which has found support among Republican congressional candidates and even the President by way of his refusal to condemn it at a recent NBC town hall.
An all-too-familiar Twitter warning
Companies that may have once tried to stay neutral on divisive issues are finding it harder to shy away from picking a side. With over 158 million votes cast, the 2020 General Elections saw the largest percentage turnout in over a hundred years. 22 million more people voted in 2020 compared to 2016. If political participation is any indication of America’s widening political cleavage, companies will soon, resigning to Dante Alighieri’s affirmation, find it impossible to maintain their neutrality in times of crisis. | https://medium.com/@arnavmody/has-corporate-america-found-a-voice-d8970ad1729d | ['Arnav Mody'] | 2020-12-10 02:13:46.823000+00:00 | ['Corporate Culture', 'Social Media', 'Media Criticism', 'Politics', 'Public Relations'] |
Your Hands Were On the Knife | Your Hands Were On the Knife
A Poem About Teenage Depression
You post the amazing experiences your child is having
I feel a twinge of jealousy deep in my stomach for the happy life your daughter has
I post the laughter and fun things we find in pockets of the day
You post kudos for the successes of your team
I want to tell you that you systematically broke her down with your broken promises, misplaced accusations and attacks on her character
I post all her extra efforts to prove you don’t know her, to prove you are wrong
You post your new life raising children to be responsible adults
I want to tell you an adult can leave lasting wounds with chastising comments
I post her successes doing what you said she failed at
You post your slightly flirty pictures of yourself
I feel the rage
I post the carefully crafted and posed photos to boost her confidence that you shattered to feel better about yourself
You post what a great young man you have graduating from high school
I feel disgust and yes, maybe hatred
I post all the little extras to show you your young “man” didn’t break her
You post about loving everyone and about God’s love and mercy
I see the hypocrisy
I post a proud moment and MY love for her
And hide the scars on her arm
You confess your love to her
I see your narcissistic manipulation that defeats her
I post to remind you she deserves more
You post about your selflessness and how you give so much to others
I wonder what happened for you to give to another while leaving her behind
I post about her determination and self reliance.
You posted about how proud you were of her and what a beautiful person she has become
I felt your love for your special angel
I posted how much she loved you and appreciated you … then you were gone. | https://medium.com/@Ruggergrl66/your-hands-were-on-the-knife-1fcdf5a2e06a | ['Shelley Louise'] | 2021-08-23 01:12:35.963000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Teenagers', 'Hurt', 'Cutting', 'Suicide Awareness'] |
SelectUntilDestroyed in Angular | SelectUntilDestroyed in Angular
A custom RxJS operator to use with NgRx
When using NgRx, we rely a lot on selecting pieces of the store to build our components. Avoiding in-component subscriptions is a good thing, so we normally have containers that hold the observables returned by selectors and we use the async pipe to pass the actual data down to be displayed by the presenters.
Sometimes, we do need to subscribe to selectors, and every subscription is followed by the need to unsubscribe. Out of the box, the best way to unsubscribe from a lot of observables is as follows:
Which means that for every select store, we need to:
It would be great to group both select and takeUntil , right? We can achieve that by writing a custom RxJS operator, like this:
The downside is that in order to use it, we'd still need to define the component destroyed ( Subject ), call next , and complete on it:
If we could find a way of wrapping that Subject creation, the takeUntil , and listen to the component's ngOnDestroy to trigger the next and complete , that would be awesome. That's where ngneat/until-destroy comes into play. They provide a custom operator that does exactly what we need.
By combining untilDestroy to our custom operator and adding the expected type declaration, we can get to this:
Where we use it like: | https://medium.com/better-programming/selectuntildestroyed-custom-rxjs-operator-to-use-with-ngrx-428baf7a482d | ['João Victor Ghignatti'] | 2020-07-30 14:21:39.095000+00:00 | ['Angular', 'JavaScript', 'Rxjs', 'Typescript', 'Ngrx'] |
The Death of Innocents: Remembering the Children Killed by Police Shootings | By: James Dold
6-year-old Kameron Prescott
‘Ouch daddy. Ouch, it hurts,’ were the last words Christopher Prescott heard his six-year-old son Kameron say as he died from gunshot wounds after officers fired 20 rounds into his mobile home to kill an unarmed woman wanted on credit card fraud charges, just four days before Christmas in 2017. Kameron was killed in Texas where charges were never filed against the officers who discharged their AR-15’s at the home. Two years earlier, in neighboring Louisiana, officers gunned down six-year old Jeremy Mardis after his father had surrendered to police with his hands in the air. Jeremy’s murder resulted in a rare conviction for the officers involved after the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police called the body cam footage “the most disturbing thing” he’s ever seen. A few years before that, seven-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed in Detroit, Michigan, when she was fatally shot in the head during a midnight military-style SWAT raid targeting her uncle. Charges against the officer who killed Aiyana were eventually dropped.
7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones
Aiyana, Kameron, and Jeremy aren’t the only children that were killed in the last decade by police, though as kindergartners and first-graders they were among the youngest.
12-year-old Tamir Rice
Another young black child murdered by police was Tamir Rice who was gunned down in a park in Cleveland when police responded to a 911 dispatch where the caller identified Tamir as a “juvenile” and the toy gun he was playing with as “probably fake.” Once on the scene officers gave Tamir all of 2 seconds to respond to their command before opening fire. As quick as they were to the draw, they took their time administering first aid — nearly 5 minutes after the fatal shooting. Again, the officers were never charged. The State Attorneys General found “systemic failure” in the Cleveland Police Department and a DOJ investigation reported that officers routinely used “excessive force” and were “rarely disciplined” for such transgressions. Officer Loehmann, who murdered Tamir, had previously resigned from another department after suffering a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training. Yet somehow, he got back on a police force until he finally killed a child.
14-year-old Cameron Tillman
A few months before Tamir was murdered in Ohio, a 14-year-old high school freshman named Cameron Tillman was gunned down in Louisiana by officers responding to a report of “armed men” in an abandoned house. Cameron and the other boys had been playing with a BB gun in the house they regularly hung out at after school. The officer in Cameron’s case was never prosecuted. That same year, officer Jason Van Dyke of the Chicago Police Department was convicted of murder for the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. At least sixteen police officers were later implicated in an elaborate cover-up to justify officers killing the boy and to shield Van Dyke from arrest and prosecution. That is, they lied to protect a murderous colleague. Then there is the case of fifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was leaving a house party when he was gunned down by Dallas police officer Roy Oliver in 2017. Oliver was also convicted of murder.
Sadly, there have been too many children, especially black children, killed by police violence to recount all of their gut wrenching stories.
The question is how many children have to die before we realize it is a systemic problem fueled by a culture of “disinterested violence,” as Toni Morrison mused? How many six-year-old children have to bleed out during Christmas time or while sleeping at home during a raid gone bad until we rethink use of police force — deadly or otherwise. Perhaps more to the point: how can we be a nation that values human life when we’ve decided that the collateral damage of little boys and little girls dying is a price we are willing to pay for the alleged “safety” provided by a militarized police force.
George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky are just some of the recent examples of people being killed by police officers. A 13-year-old Autistic boy in Salt Lake City, Utah, nearly lost his life in September after he was gunned down by a barrage of bullets fired by responding officers. “Tell my mom I love her,” the boy said before losing consciousness.
13 Year Old Linden Cameron
Is this the kind of nation we want to be? Whether we are talking about adults or children, we should all be outraged and saddened by this staggering loss of life and innocence.
Mr. Prescott said the death of his son was “like someone ripping my life away (because) my son was my life.” Every time someone is killed as a result of police violence a mother and father have to live through what Mr. Prescott lived through. And that, as Aiyana’s grandmother, Mertilla Jones, put it, is something we “wouldn’t wish on anybody.”
For the sake of everyone in society it is time to reexamine the militarization of police forces, police training, and to re-think how, why, and under what circumstances lethal force should be permitted, especially in cases involving children. | https://medium.com/@hrfk/the-death-of-innocents-remembering-the-children-killed-by-police-shootings-64907195903e | ['Human Rights For Kids'] | 2020-12-22 17:04:38.145000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice', 'Children', 'Criminal Justice Reform', 'Human Rights', 'Police Shooting'] |
Shots in the Distance | 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/illumination/shots-in-the-distance-d6601b92a656 | ['Terry Mansfield'] | 2021-02-18 09:30:02.905000+00:00 | ['Cities', 'Violence', 'Life', 'Tanka', 'Poetry'] |
15 Open Source projects for JavaScript Developers | Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash
Node.js is a javascript runtime built on chrome which extends the power of JavaScript to the back end, allowing you to create server-side code.
You could fix bugs or perhaps find a new feature you think Node.js ought to have whichever you do, it’ll still count as a contribution.
Quokka.js is a prototyping playground for TypeScript and JavaScript which allows your code to run immediately as you type allowing you to see results of your coding, easing debugging, and displaying various execution results in your IDE.
TensorFlow is a browser-based JavaScript library that allows you to train and Deploy Machine Learning Models, sounds good eh?
Vue.js is a very popular JavaScript framework in the class of React, Angular and so on, chances are you’ve heard or perhaps worked with it, what better way of showing your expertise than being a contributor, sounds pretty good to me.
React.js may be the most popular framework out there, considering the fact that it’s an integral part of one of the most popular technology Stacks (MERN), React can also create hybrid apps using React Native. Another thing you should know is that React was created by FaceBook so that’s another Resumé plus if you can pull this off. | https://olamideadeleke.medium.com/15-open-source-projects-for-javascript-developers-83170976ed18 | ['Olamide Adeleke'] | 2020-11-08 13:58:31.117000+00:00 | ['Github', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Open Source'] |
Reproducibility and Risk Audit in Data Science Projects. | 1576 researchers took an online questionnaire reproducibility research by nature’s survey and more than 70% of researchers claimed that they’ve tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their experiments.
Reproducibility is the ability of another person to use the same tools and data to achieve similar results. This goal has not been achieved in data science with real-world projects and researches. Forking a repository might be achievable but when it comes to dealing with real-world data it becomes trivial. Having work that’s not replicable makes it insignificant. Reproducibility is a continuing issue within the data science community that has taken quite some time to be addressed. It’s still a challenge for data scientists to share and author models with teams and get similar results, refactoring, replacing, migrating, and transforming codes is quite hard. The crisis of reproducibility is also causing technical debt on many startups.
Reproducibility crisis faced by Deep Learning.
I re-worked a project I had done some time back, Keras model for image captions generation using inception V3, and got different results. The lifecycle of deep learning is quite chaotic this would mean reproducibility is difficult. Management of memory, tracking experiments, and envisioning output are usual complications developers face.
Reproducibility crisis has occurred due to different reasons such as;
• Changes in layers of the deep learning framework such as this could change results if ran many times on different environments, GPU drivers, and datasets such as the training and the validation datasets highly impact the outcome.
• The unavailability of good infrastructure to carry out this work such as enough storage and GPUs to replicate the model, opting to use platforms such as google colab and Kaggle could help curb this.
• The more you run the test set of the data, the more the chances of overfitting it and therefore, results will be unreliable. Early stopping at the best-epoch produces good results not concerning the true performance of the model if epochs which are hyperparameters are set according to the validation error.
• Lack of source control mechanisms of trained data will cause messy results. Training large amounts of data such as videos and images that are eventually fed into the model without any source control tool would mean the difficult replicability of the model.
Reproducibility Issues that could be faced by more complex models;
• With complex models, teams or individuals might not have enough resources or time for the computational of the dataset. Due to this, a subset of the test data might be used instead, the test data is therefore different from what was used on the baseline. This would cause the model to be unreliable.
• Some baselines are not well fine-tuned to handle real-world challenges, additionally, these baselines could have been badly evaluated and since the very critical hyperparameter tuning is not in the codebase, the whole process will be undependable causing a weak baseline.
• Datasets display different characteristics, hence, variations in the behavior of the model.
• Fitting training and testing set is one of the common mistakes as this would mean the features have been normalized dependently and lead to data leakage. Test sets should be exploited for testing and not pre-processing. The best way to normalize is by fitting the scalar on the training set and then evaluate both sets based on the scaler parameter.
• Most complex models don’t use random test set sampling and end up getting good results but it would have been worse, it’s important to have test sets that represent the training set, and to avoid such models that contribute to the replicability crisis.
Remediation strategies.
Reproducibility highly depends on the sequence of steps that were used to produce a certain model;
Code versioning Capturing the model’s development process or lifecycle is crucial, this means tracing all code variations. Without appropriate code versioning, others will probably not understand the outcome by reviewing the project and also at risk of losing the work history. Deepops is one of the software that could be used to manage code versioning.
Data versioning This enables data scientists to use datasets over and over again without experiencing data corruption from new data. Re-running data from traditional databases contributes to the risk of reproducibility. Software such Deepops manage data to avoid such issues.
A packrat is an open-source tool that stores package dependencies for project directories. This normally used by R users. The directory is the private library, that anytime changes are made such as installing or removing a package the change reflects on the private library. Snapshots are used for sharing private libraries through the process of restoring since Packrat doesn’t support directly sharing private libraries, but it still has extensive benefits; Packrat records the exact versions the project depends on and ensures no changes affect it hence the project is reproducible. Projects can be shared across platforms and from one computer to another. Projects are isolated from each other, hence installing or updating packages will not affect projects.
Datmo is another open-source tool that can be used to manage reproducibility by keeping work done intact and managing environments. Datmo enables one to manage interactions of the ever-changing frameworks and tools used for creating models.Datmo tracks your work, factors such as hyperparameter and pre-processing versions that normally change results obtained are kept in check hence one can easily reuse the model.
Containers as a Solution to Reproducibility.
This is an isolated environment that’s used to set up dependencies such as frameworks, code, and libraries that are used to carry out a task. Tasks such as hosting web applications that are interactive and monitoring the quality of the data. This framework aims to provide isolations between projects, rather than creating new environments for every project you can separately specify your dependencies for each project into a container, snapshot the container, and users can boot up from the image which is a standardized and isolated environment.
So, what exactly is an image? This is a snapshot of a container that can be used as a starting point for other containers. Each running container is created from another running container that originated from an image. Many containers can be launched from one container.
How containers work.
Containers store the components required to run the desired project. Components such as libraries, files, dependencies, and variables. Access to physical resources such as memory, GPU, and storage are restrained by the host OS. Therefore, the host’s physical resources will not all be used up by the containers.
Containers contain image files, these are applications’ versions that are complete, static, and ready to be executed. The images contain a base image consisting of multiple layers. The base image comprises of dependencies required for code execution in a container. Every image has a layer that’s writable and readable situated on top of static layers that are unchangeable, this means core image layers can be saved and reused on several containers, since, each container is made up of a layer tasked for customization of that specific container.
An open container initiative image contains file system layers, manifests, and configurations. The OCI image comprises a specified image that entails the information required to launch an application and a runtime defines how a file system works, these files have all data needed for runtimes and performances. Several organizations use container schedulers for the management of deployments. The containers are flexible meaning the same image executed on cloud web service during the test process can be used on an on-premise server without tampering with the application code in the container.
Docker Containers.
Docker can be used to reduce reproducibility in this case, it’s an open-source that was launched in 2013 as Docker Engine. Docker technology focuses on the needs of system operators and developers to isolate dependencies from infrastructure. As a docker user you are completely in control of the environment and aware of what has been installed. Docker allows portability of application and its dependencies hence its efficiency. Configurations in docker are tied to the project, therefore, one is completely aware of the runtime environment at all stages of development.
Why Docker containers?
Library requirements are different for every model. The Docker container isolates these projects, meaning the app will not break. For instance, you have TensorFlow 1.10 in one container and TensorFlow 2.0 is another, both running different models. Models serving different requests can be handled by docker, and if one model needs to be scaled up at a particular request that can also be performed without the app crushing.
Models with different environments such as Lang level set to ‘en_us.UTF-8’ and another at ‘c’ can work in isolated environments but different containers.
References:
Tina Bu, 2018, ‘Build a Docker Container with Your Machine Learning Model’
Jon Machtynger, 2019, ‘How to use containers in data science with Docker and Azure: Part1’ | https://medium.com/swlh/reproducibility-and-risk-audit-in-data-science-projects-cd18032c083f | ['Linda Cheluget'] | 2020-12-24 09:02:56.176000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Deep Learning'] |
We can’t afford to let online abusers silence women journalists | © UNICEF/Bruno Amsellem/Divergence Lyon, France, March 19, lockdown day 3. Anne-Lise, journalist, teleworking for TV channel Euronews with 3-year-old daughter Violette keeping close.
Death threats, rape threats, humiliating doctored photos. These are the kinds of harrowing messages women journalists around the world receive every day. For female reporters working to dispel myths about COVID and vaccines, the pandemic has only exacerbated this digital onslaught.
The abuse is targeted, designed to silence women journalists, discredit their reporting, and undermine public trust in critical journalism and facts. During the pandemic, the abuse has focused on those tackling the infodemic. That’s according to a recent study commissioned by UNESCO.
Among the many reporters bearing the brunt of this online vitriol are two courageous women I recently crossed paths with in my work on the infodemic and vaccine confidence. Both have refused to be silenced despite the avalanche of abuse they get just for telling the truth. For doing their jobs.
The first is Maria Ressa, the CEO of Filipino news site Rappler. She endured five years of violence, abuse, harassment and threats for her work debunking misinformation, at one point receiving 90 hate messages an hour on Facebook. She worries such abuse has a chilling effect on journalism.
“The easiest part is dealing with the impact of online violence and disinformation on me. I just see the impact on the world, and I don’t know why we’re not panicking,” Ressa told the authors of the UNESCO study, which was based on a survey of 901 female journalists across 125 countries.
For Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation reporter, the online abuse began during the pandemic. She received an avalanche of violent comments and harassment, much of it misogynistic, after reporting on COVID deniers and vaccine conspiracists in the UK over the past year.
Then, in a frightening spillover into the physical world, a threatening message was left for her on a notice board outside the train station she uses to commute to work. Now she says she is always “hyper-aware” on her way to work, living in constant fear of a sudden physical attack.
These are just two examples of the kind of abuse women journalists face every day. Two-thirds of female reporters surveyed said they had experienced online harassment or abuse, with those targeted due to their race, sexual orientation, and religion abused more harshly and more often.
All this hate doesn’t just cause mental and physical harm. At its worst, it can succeed in its real aim: silencing women journalists. Of those surveyed, 30% said they now self-censored online, with 1 in 5 saying they had withdrawn from all online interaction after receiving hateful content.
One thing is clear, as the pandemic rages on around the world, we can’t afford silence. We need critical journalism. We must stand with female reporters exposing the truth and debunking dangerous lies, bringing lifesaving information to tackle the pandemic and infodemic.
To do so we must make tackling online abuse against women a top priority, raise women’s voices, and build digital spaces safer for everyone. Social media platforms have a special responsibility in this. They must be held more accountable for the abuse, harassment and violence shared online.
There has been some movement. The world’s biggest online platforms, Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter, last week committing to a package of rules to tackle online abuse and improve women’s safety at the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris.
I was glad to add my name to the more than 200 women signatories to an open letter to the platforms’ CEOs, calling for them to do even more to prioritize the safety of women and girls online. We expect things to change. We will be watching their next steps closely. | https://medium.com/@melissa-fleming/we-cant-afford-to-let-online-abusers-silence-women-journalists-ded1488fb663 | ['Melissa Fleming'] | 2021-07-08 10:18:51.339000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Harassment', 'Misinformation', 'Covid 19', 'Journalism'] |
‘Six of Crows’ Book Review | ‘Six of Crows’ Book Review
A story about a band of loveable crims and a heist that’ll go down in history
Photo by Tyler Quiring on Unsplash
It took me an age to get into Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo — my own fault, really, for having a baby whose needs come before the devouring of a good book (babies are selfish like that). Plus, I tried reading it straight after finishing ‘The Shadow and Bone Trilogy’, which is not recommended because although set within the Grishaverse (the same fantasy world), the stories are worlds apart.
Shadow and Bone is pretty typical (albeit quite good) YA Fantasy that follows the path of a Chosen One trope with romantic elements thrown in.
Six of Crows is a crafty, complex YA Fantasy that has a plot more akin to Oceans Eleven (I’m going with the 2001 version here since I haven’t seen the original — I know, I know, shame on me). And yes, it does include a side of some well-written romance, but that’s not the main drawcard.
A team of characters work towards a plan to pull off the biggest heist in history to receive a massive reward that will pay off all their debts and still leave them among the wealthiest in Ketterdam.
The clever mastermind of it all, Kaz Brekker, reminds me of a cheeky Robin Hood, or a loveable rogue like Han Solo— hell, I’ve even had Ned Kelly come to mind.
What’s so great about this husky-voiced, brusque, secretive, brutal character who’s also known as Dirtyhands? He’s not only quick-witted and always two steps ahead of everyone, he’s also got plenty of flaws, and he makes mistakes — what’s that? He’s human! Kaz suffers from PTSD and as a result wears gloves because he has a phobia of touching or being touched (haphephobia). And he’s a baddie essentially fighting against bigger baddies. What’s not to love?
The story is told from five main POVs and all characters have complexities and goals, and they all show growth as the story progresses. That’s no mean feat, so props to Bardugo for bringing it all together so well.
So, who are the members of Kaz’s crew?
Inej, ‘The Wraith’ who was basically a Cirque du Soleil performer turned collector of secrets for Kaz (plus she’s pretty badass with all her knife-wielding); Jesper, gun-obsessed sharpshooter who never misses a shot (he also brings the funnies); Nina, a powerful Grisha Heartrender who’s strong, loud, confident, and unashamedly female (not to be forgotten: her skills in flirting her way out of anything); Matthias, a Fjerdan soldier who hunts Grisha and wants no part in the whole thing, but gets wrapped up in it anyway (his conflicted feelings for Nina add some great love/hate tension); and Wylan, the shy son of a rich mercher who’s got some secrets of his own (no POVs for Wylan in Six of Crows, but he’s a main character, nonetheless).
Let me just say, the banter is spot on. It’s funny without being constant and over-the-top. Made all the better when stoic, reluctant (or perhaps I should say, forced) team member Matthias joins in and manages to be hilarious without swaying from his personality.
All the elements work together perfectly to create a high-action, entertaining read that’s full of twists and turns I didn’t see coming. I ended up enjoying it so much, I’d label it one of my favourite reads of recent years.
On that note, just take a risk and read the damn book: | https://medium.com/short-b-read/six-of-crows-book-review-572dba7479e4 | ['Melissa-Jane Nguyen'] | 2020-10-05 02:34:10.285000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Book Review', 'Fantasy', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
COV Token Utility On PrimeXBT Is Now Live! | COV Token Utility On PrimeXBT Is Now Live! COVESTING Follow Dec 9 · 5 min read
After an extremely successful launch roughly three months ago, Covesting has now implemented the full integration of COV token utility into the Covesting copy trading module on PrimeXBT.
Our copy trading technology enables a peer-to-peer network where users can follow other traders (strategy managers) who battle for the top spot on the Covesting leaderboards. A five-star rating system and fully transparent metrics updated in real-time bring competition to the trading community, while allowing other platform users (followers) to make informed decisions about who to follow.
COV token implementation will encourage a more engaged community with exclusive benefits offered to those who activate its various utility functions. It is designed to be used by strategy managers to reduce trading fees, improve the success fee split that goes to followers, while a regular buyback and token burn program will ensure the deflationary nature of COV.
Since the module’s debut, we have witnessed a constantly growing interest towards Covesting as a product from the trading community and potential B2B partners. After witnessing how traders have made Covesting a regular staple of their trading experience and how appreciated the service is by its users, our team is more excited about the future of Covesting than ever before. With so many additional features planned in the coming months, we are confident that our product will continue to see high demand and wide usage as the module reaches its final form. These are exciting times ahead indeed!
Learn About The Utility The COV Token Implementation Unlocks
Covesting has since repositioned itself as a B2B software development company, and considering the success of the partnership with PrimeXBT, the decision speaks for itself. PrimeXBT was the ideal partner to debut the Covesting copy trading module on, and now is the first home to COV token utility implementation.
COV token section inside PrimeXBT platform
For full details, please check out the dedicated COV token section within the PrimeXBT dashboard, which can be found here: https://primexbt.com/my/covesting/token
In this section, the system will automatically be updated with the most accurate COV token details, such as token burn transactions, remaining token supply, recent token price, market capitalization, and more. From here, platform users will be able to see an overview all available COV token utilities and activate the ones they desire at their choosing. Moreover, users aren’t required to already have COV tokens within their balance to activate one utility or the other — they can use their account’s available BTC balance to purchase COV tokens for immediate utility activation.
COV token contract address: https://etherscan.io/address/0xada86b1b313d1d5267e3fc0bb303f0a2b66d0ea7
Decimals: 18
Symbol: COV
Key benefits of COV utility token:
Strategy Managers
● Trading Fee Reduction: Strategy managers can reduce their trading fees for one month by up to 25%, 50%, or 75% by paying a fixed amount of COV tokens. Please note that the discounted rates as well as activation fees may change from time to time.
Followers
● Success Fees Improved: The percentage split that followers earn from all profitable trades will be increased in favor of followers (by reducing PrimeXBT platform split). Full details of the current offer will be available in the Covesting COV token dashboard.
● No %1 Entry Fees: Followers from now on will encounter a fee for each single new following they make. By activating this specific COV token utility, these fees can be completely eliminated.
Holders
Covesting aims to burn up to 50% of the fees generated within its copy-trading module at regular intervals. Fees will be calculated after excluding affiliate earnings, fee discounts, and other revenue impacts. Such token burns at regular intervals largely benefit holders of the COV token, by effectively lowering the total supply in the market and enabling a deflationary attribute.
“We are excited to launch the COV token utility within the Covesting module and unlock the full potential of the platform,” commented Covesting CEO Dmitrij Pruglo.
“Now that the COV token is launched on PrimeXBT, we will begin exploring new partners to bring the Covesting module to and expand its community reach globally,” added COO Tim Voronin.
The Covesting team continues to refine the Covesting experience in every way and is continually examining ways to improve platform safety or performance. New features have a strong focus on risk management due to the nature of the platform. Our most recent additions were a maximum follower cap on initial followers’ equity and a minimum equity requirement for strategy managers to further reduce the risk associated with leveraged trading.
What’s Next For Covesting, And How To Acquire $COV
After the runaway success of the Covesting copy trading module launch on PrimeXBT, Covesting aims to provide its software solution to other third-party exchanges and trading platforms through further expansion of our white labeling services as a fintech software developer.
Currently, the COV token is available on Kucoin or Uniswap under the $COV ticker, and in order to provide a seamless experience where users aren’t required to leave the platform to purchase COV, PrimeXBT will also enable the ability to allow users to buy the necessary amount of COV tokens for immediate utility activation and to get the most out of the Covesting experience.
Please note that the COV token is not available in the United States and other jurisdictions where the transactions of ERC-20 tokens and specific cryptocurrencies such as COV are prohibited by law.
To learn more, visit the Covesting module on PrimeXBT today, and stay tuned to the Covesting blog for more details as they are available. | https://medium.com/covesting/cov-token-utility-on-primexbt-is-now-live-dcb56c7cdcf1 | [] | 2020-12-09 09:34:36.415000+00:00 | ['Utility Tokens', 'Covesting', 'Cov'] |
Modernity vs Desi Feminism | We often forget that our existence has been dated back to a time when modernity meant accepting new and healthy changes in the society. But as we moved forward with the advent of “coolness”, we made it a tag of modish colloquialism. In the name of coolness, we create chaos and nuisance in the society which affects the mindset of young generation.
#Modernity doesn’t promote unhealthy lifestyle habits
#WritersCommunity
#WritersOfMedium
#CreativeWriting
#ContentWriting | https://medium.com/@bagmibarenya/modernity-vs-desi-feminism-f2bae0397f8e | ['Bagmi Barenya'] | 2020-12-10 06:30:21.620000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Modernity', 'Community', 'Content Writing', 'Social Change'] |
When Depression Alienates People | My pulse quickens, my stomach lurches as I recoil at the sight of an all-caps subject line. Before I’ve even opened the email, I already know what it’s about.
My father is shouting in my inbox.
“ARE YOU PISSED OFF?” is how he demands my immediate attention, thus reminding me exactly where I get my bluntness from. And nope, it doesn’t sound any more elegant in French — my translation is an accurate rendition of his tone.
I’ve been avoiding his calls, which have become more and more obsessive of late, and my phone ringer is off.
I don’t pick up the ‘phone because I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to lie again and pretend I’m well.
I don’t want to have to deflect the same old questions again or launch into another plea to defend the realness of my illness.
Yes, Daddy (this is how I address him and how he signs off his emails, not Papa), I’m sick, even though you can’t see it.
My silence is a desperate act of self-preservation.
In other words, he feels I owe him a conversation whenever he calls. Or at least, that’s what my strict upbringing would have me believe. In this context, my deliberate aloofness represents the apex of disrespect even though none is ever intended.
But I don’t have the strength to play charades anymore.
I don’t have the strength to explain I’m still not getting any help because there’s still no money for it, several years down the line. And there won’t be any until I get back to work, whenever that is.
Catch 22.
How do you explain the parlous state of American health care to someone who’s only ever known the French system and therefore believes online medical fundraisers or folks losing their homes are isolated tragedies?
I don’t have the strength to try and describe to him what my daily life consists of now.
I don’t have the strength to tell him “what it is I actually do with my days”, as my stepmother politely puts it. To them, I sense I’ve become a lazy, good-for-nothing waste of space, a drain on my household’s finances.
I briefly wonder whether they may be in cahoots with my illness as both tell me the same thing. Of course not, this is ridiculous.
Alas, there’s no safety net for sick people in America, no support unless you can purchase it.
Still, I’m considered privileged because I have insurance even though I can’t afford the co-pays. Doing so would mean two humans and two felines going hungry while bills get further into arrears.
“We’re only ever one missed pay check away from homelessness,” I’m told whenever the atmosphere gets volatile, which is more frequently than is healthy.
But try articulating any or all of the above without self-combusting with shame.
To me, these days a productive day means getting out of bed, showering, reading. When I’m feeling extra, it also involves exercise, and lately, writing.
Depression has torpedoed everything.
It has downgraded me from capable, resourceful and accomplished professional back to, um, toddler. A toddler with boobs and a library card, but a toddler nonetheless.
And whenever I feel I’m finally getting somewhere trying to relay some of my distress, my father will say without the slightest hint of irony. “Oh, lovely! Glad to hear everything’s going well.”
Uh?
This, folks, is what denial sounds like.
In my father’s world, if you don’t acknowledge difficulties it means they can’t possibly exist.
Back when he was still married to my mom, this caused a lot of friction. And then she left, with little me in tow.
She didn’t feel seen or listened to. To her, no amount of joyful optimism on my father’s part could make up for his perceived lack of empathy. And yet, he was never malicious.
When it concerns matters of the heart and mind, it’s as if regular, normal communication with him were doomed to failure. I still have flashbacks of my mother in floods of tears, yelling, sobbing while he laughs at her, dismissing her as hysterical.
She could seldom get through to him and, most of the time, I can’t either.
It doesn’t help I’ve spent most of my life thousands of miles away from him, very rarely in the same country. I’m not even on the same continent anymore.
It doesn’t help reduced circumstances have prevented me from traveling back to see him since I moved to the U.S five years ago.
It doesn’t help I’m an only child and my father obviously misses me, and I him.
It doesn’t help I live in a country occupying such pride of place in the imagination of European baby boomers that, to my parents, America remains an Eldorado of sorts. (In French, we even have a phrase when things come up roses and everything is peachy: “C’est l’Amérique !” in which America herself becomes shorthand for the absolute best of everything. Granted, the phrase started falling into obsolescence from January 2017 onward, but still.)
It doesn’t help I’ve finally understood pretending I was well was not only making me worse but also perpetuating the stigma around mental health.
Self-preservation aside, I don’t pick up the phone because I don’t have the strength to break his heart. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/when-depression-alienates-people-29abcdfb080f | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-12-30 20:40:03.970000+00:00 | ['Fathers', 'Mental Health', 'Depression', 'Family', 'Memoir'] |
Why Property? Part XIII; Birmingham’s Prosperous Property Market | Birmingham’s property market is once again looking prosperous as investors flock to the area to get a piece of the latest redevelopments. A property boom has been created by the coinciding of £4 billion investments to the city’s infrastructure creating new transport links and public services. The redevelopment of New Street station and Grand Central shopping centre costing £750 million has encouraged thousands more commuters to use the area’s rail links and with the completion of HS2 in the near future Birmingham will be just a 49 minute journey to London; commuters can easily live in the Midlands yet work in the capital. People are looking to invest in Birmingham as it is ever proving itself as a ‘global city’; work continues on the new Metro system which will provide rapid transport around the city centre as well as just a 20 minute connection to Birmingham International Airport. The rise in profile of the city is supported by the moves of certain head offices from London to Birmingham, HSBC and Deutsche Bank being just some of the well-known companies calling the city ‘home’. The rising rental demand can be attributed in some part to the creation of 14,000 new city-centre jobs over the last two years, and shows no sign of slowing down before 2019.
These factors have meant that there is an unprecedented rental demand within the city centre, a demand that cannot be met by developers resulting in a ‘property boom’. As well as professionals and investors looking for property in the city centre, apartment prices have rocketed due to the high demand from the 73,000 students attending Birmingham’s 5 universities. The recently redeveloped Eastside area of the city centre is also home to Birmingham City University and therefore house hunters in the form of students. Around 10,000 of these students are from China and middle-class backgrounds meaning they have substantial budgets from home enabling them to rent in some of Birmingham’s most desirable areas.
The lack of new apartment developments in Birmingham city-centre is one reason accountable for the substantial upward curve in rental yields; developers are simply not able to keep up with demand! This is where there is a unique opportunity for investment; as markets within the UK return to their prosperous phases more developments are in construction phases. With such a high demand, investing in a Birmingham property has never seemed such a good idea, where rental yields are high and there is a thirsty supply for tenants. Claremont Property Group can help get your portfolio started; please do not hesitate to contact us on +44 121 236 3310 or [email protected] or look at our website www.claremontgroup.co.uk. | https://medium.com/@PermSaini/why-property-part-xiii-birmingham-prosperous-property-market-7699404005d | ['Perm Saini'] | 2015-10-26 12:55:52.214000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Real Estate Investments', 'Mortgage'] |
Love. | This escape, although extremely unsettling for me to look back to, provided me with an opportunity to take it all out. I dreamt, I thought, I wrote. I was oblivious to the wrong in my life; my mind and hands were too busy putting my dreams on paper. It was almost as if this idea of love had given me an end goal, a deadline to be precise. It was this ‘end’ that fuelled me to do everything I could to shorten the journey, but nothing happened. I was disappointed, but not disheartened. My faith in love continued to soldier on. It was only when as I grew up more and more, and my horizons expanded more and more till they couldn’t possibly avoid the broken mess that lay behind the worlds I had constructed, was when I realised that there was no going back from this.
I wouldn’t say it is easy to suddenly have the ability to see gaping voids in relationships or to see broken marriages being held together by threads named ‘children’ and ‘financial limitations’ because it wasn’t, it never really is, but it wasn’t as painful as realising that were no fixed goal at the end of this journey that made everything ‘worth it’. With that part of growing up, coupled with a lot of whirlpools in most of my platonic relationships, teen-me had made a decision — Love wasn’t for me. It was a beautiful garden filled with all joys and generosities but cordoned off by the jharokhas of my palace. Maybe it is amazing, maybe it isn’t; all that matters is that I would never know for sure. After all, love could be a big scam implemented through societal conditioning to encourage marriage, which in turn would help in property ownership. Plus, I am a strong independent woman who needs no partner, right?
This rhetoric settled comfortably in my head, until it actually shattered, and in the most unexpected ways possible. I had just stepped into my college and was in the middle of a protest (Yes, take that Romeo and Juliet) where I met him. Within two days, we became best friends, and 15 days after that- we were together! Everything that happened within those 15 days was perhaps all the things unlike me combined, yet everything… fit? I remember talking to my best friend of 10 years, slightly arguing rather, because I could not understand why something that felt right was so illogical for her? Well, I admit, it was illogical in general. At one point, she gave up, and she concluded her case by a single line that has stuck with me ever since —
“If you really in your heart feel that this right, go do it. Even if I say no, I know you’re going to do it anyway.”
Yeah, she has a flair for the dramatics, I still love her though.
After this amazing whatever-this-was, it took me a while to realise that this is when ‘lou’ really begins. Sure, the yearning, longing is legitimate, and it really does feel like everything nice and bright when you finally get the love of your life, but it is only when you spend time with them to cultivate a relationship where everything really starts. It really is astonishing to see how just one healthy relationship can work wonders for your emotional well-being. You put in love and effort into your bond together, and it gives you back in terms of growth. And it is true. This past year has been taught me that love isn’t wonderful because of it simply being ‘love’; it is beautiful because of the respect, understanding and comfort it brings with it. Love may start with butterflies, but it is sustained by a warm, comforting, peace.
This past year has taught me that love isn’t perfect, and that it isn’t supposed to. It has made me understand that while relationships aren’t perfect, humans aren’t too- and when I am able and ready to forgive, I should. I’ve learned that love doesn’t guarantee happiness, only I do. I have understood that both of us still have a lot of growing up to do, and a lot of worlds to conquer, and I can’t wait.
This year managed to turn a girl who didn’t believe that love was for her, into the girl who keeps slapping her love every chance she gets. I don’t know if it’s because of the magic of ‘lou’ or the magician himself.
I bet it’s the magician. He keeps getting hit anyway. | https://medium.com/@sometimesiwriteablog/love-3821e0459b98 | ['Parigya Verma'] | 2020-12-26 15:47:52.613000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Emotions', 'Romance', 'Feelings', 'Love'] |
Covid 19 is Messing With My Making Babies Smile Game | How can it work with a mask on and no babies?
Photo by Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash
There have been many losses in 2020 but perhaps the least discussed is the loss of opportunities to make babies smile.
I’m mean sure, if you are lucky enough to have a baby in your bubble you are golden. I imagine all your time is just spent sitting around making faces at her and delighting when she giggles. What else could you possibly have to do that is more important?
If like me your bubble is baby less, you are screwed. I try making funny faces at my 19-year-old college student but it never works. She is living at home taking online classes instead of living in a dorm and skipping class because she was out late the night before partying with friends.
God did not intend for parents to know where their 19-year-olds are and what they are doing 24/7. It is not natural.
I have been honing my making babies smile skills since I was a young child. Most of my practice hours have been logged at church. Delighting babies by pulling faces is the only socially sanctioned method of goofing off in church.
Trust me, as a preacher’s daughter, I know what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in church.
Acceptable: flipping through the Bible looking for the gory or dirty bits. Pro tip: the old testament is your go-to.
Unacceptable: folding your bulletin into a paper football and playing a game with your brother using the pew as the field and your fingers as goalposts.
Making babies smile is in a class all its own. It isn’t just accepted. It is actually approved. You are giving weary parents a break by entertaining their children. Fussy children distract the worshippers. You are not hiding your talent in the ground. No, you are using it to bring glory to God’s kingdom.
While it is possible if you are very good to go a little too far and cause the baby to begin to giggle audibly, even this isn’t really a problem. Happy baby sounds tend to make even the sternest church lady’s mouth twitch upward if she has any heart.
And the best bit is you never have to outgrow this silliness. You can keep making babies smile even if you live to be 100. How many options do we really have as adults to act silly and have society react with approval?
You don’t need to be a churchgoer either. Baby smile provoking is a thoroughly secular activity as well. After all, pre-pandemic, babies were everywhere. You could play this game standing in line, on the train, in the grocery store, in the stands at the pee wee football game, anywhere really.
But now? Thanks to Covid 19, good luck finding a baby to smile at out in the wild. It’s been months since I’ve seen one in the grocery store. Parents have hunkered down with their little ones, selfishly keeping them at home and away from the public all to avoid them contracting a deadly disease.
Not to mention all the best baby smiling venues and activities being closed and/or deserted.
On the rare occasion you do happen to spot a baby it is now totally unacceptable to get too close. Not only that but you are a concerned citizen who cares about other people so of course, you are wearing a mask.
How do you make a baby smile from 6 feet away with half your face covered? That’s like asking a trapeze artist to do his act with both arms and one leg tied behind his back. It might be possible for a pro but I can’t quite imagine how.
I finally got a chance to try the other day. I was ten feet away from a baby while standing in a queue. I gave her my best expressive and wriggly eyebrows and wide eyes. She eventually rewarded me with a demure half-smile.
I think it was gas. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/covid-19-is-messing-with-my-making-babies-smile-game-2a2197e117e8 | ['Mary Devries'] | 2020-12-17 19:02:57.593000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Parenting', 'Baby', 'Humor', 'Life'] |
Why Medium-sized Businesses Need a Budget for Internal Communication | Employee engagement is typically seen as something of no monetary value. Yet, neglecting this aspect of business experience can lead to serious financial consequences.
Although it presents a huge part of everyday work life, intercompany communication is usually not strictly defined as an independent operation in medium-sized businesses. While bigger companies have structuralized departments specialized for internal affairs, smaller ones typically lack the resources for this.
After some thorough examination, we managed to determine that you can actually put a price tag on internal communication (let’s simply call it IC from now on). In this text, we’ll show why and how should business owners create a separate budget for intercom processes.
Why is IC budget so important?
Let’s borrow a quote we believe hits the target with great precision:
“Creating an initial budget can be difficult, but it gets easier when organizations recognize there is more to lose by forgoing internal communications projects entirely.” — Rich Kneece for the FastCompany.
One of the main reasons why a properly defined IC budget can be greatly beneficial for medium-sized businesses is that it can guide spontaneous communication between coworkers and turn it into a valuable asset for the company. Most employees use the official IC channels to simply (i.e. unofficially) comment on their colleagues’ work. It can be both complementary and derogatory, but it always provides valuable input on how could things improve around a company. Some employees will only suggest a different brand of coffee for the office. The others will try to push the idea of making their office a pet-friendly space. And a few of them will use this channel to suggest other, possibly cheaper tools necessary for their work that could potentially save the company a significant amount of money.
All of the above are examples of unplanned work and spontaneous collaboration that every company should cherish and nurture. Developing a solid IC strategy and a budget is, therefore, a step in the right direction.
Let the numbers speak for themselves
In 2016, Poppulo (while still Newsweaver), together with Ragan Communications organized a survey to show that IC budgets are more likely to grow than decrease in the years to come, with a whopping 87% of the participants expecting the budgets to increase. The survey also showed that more than 50% of communicators agreed or strongly agreed that they do not have the right tools and resources to perform their tasks — which is one of the crucial aspects of any business, and the one that heavily influences the engagement rate within a company. Not having the right (or any!) tool to communicate is a problem that eats money and time, and should be permanently eliminated.
The same survey showed that the average annual IC budget for organizations with more than 500 employees is around $185k (excluding staff salaries). Yet, most of the participants in the study stated that their IC budget was less than $10k. This should give you an idea of how modest IC budgets (excluding salaries) could be for small and medium-sized companies that employ between 50 and 250 people.
A few things to consider before forming a budget
Here’s a checklist of questions you must ask yourself before forming a solid IC strategy:
How much employee turnover costs your company per year?
Is customer loyalty providing revenue?
How effective is your customer service team?
How engaged are your employees?
Was there any lost revenue in the last year that is a direct product of miscommunication within coworkers?
Does the quality of internal communications within your company affect the product or service quality and its development rate?
If you are not happy with your answers to these questions, you should start working on your IC strategy and budget a.s.a.p. Keep in mind that this decision will send a strong message to your employees, stating that you are ready to make significant improvements to the company infrastructure and let their voices to be heard.
Another thing to have in mind is that there is no solid IC strategy without frequent measurement of its impact on individual teams and the entire working collective. This implies regular analyses of changes in productivity, sales, and profits, survey implementation, and annual staff turnover reviews.
Where exactly does this money go?
Before forming a separate IC budget, a business owner must know where this money is going to be spent. Luckily for you, there are only two channels this budget is going to address: the tools your employees are going to use, and the people to manage them.
#1 HR managers and/or internal communication specialists
Whether you call them People Officer, Happiness Manager, Director of Employee Engagement, or simply HR, these persons are in charge of various aspects of employment within one company including recruiting, advising, and benefits management. HR Managers are usually analytically-driven persons with a degree in psychology and sociology, and thus present a valuable addition to the company. On the other hand, Internal Communication Specialists are there to convert HR strategies into quality content that is comprehensible to all employees, and to ensure that all messages arrive at the right address. They are passionate not only about project management but also about communication and developing strong written content. We’ll write more about the importance of highly-capable IC staff for medium-sized companies some other time. Now, let’s talk about the tools that make internal communication run as smoothly as possible.
#2 Investing in the right tool
On our blog, we have talked a lot about all kinds of tools you can choose to implement your IC strategy. Interestingly enough, the best IC software doesn’t have to be the most expensive one. At BlogIn, we use our very own internal company blog to handle all of our internal correspondence. We think of it as a safe place for us to share company news, exchange ideas, and archive important company knowledge. To put it simply, we believe that the best IC tool is the one that is simple to manage, the one that boosts cooperation and makes all kind of business knowledge easily shareable among our employees.
To see if you agree, you can sign up for our free trial and see how an internal blog can benefit you and your team. | https://blogin.medium.com/why-medium-sized-businesses-need-a-budget-for-internal-communication-407ebc6855fc | [] | 2019-06-20 13:35:55.963000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Office Culture', 'Knowledge Management', 'Internal Communications', 'Knowledge Sharing'] |
Where To Host A Mobile App Backend? | Is there any better place to host your mobile app backend? Well, this is a common question that often strikes mobile app developers forcefully. It is not only about satisfactory customer experience; a suitable backend hosting support for your mobile app assures a higher level of scalability, enhanced security, and better speed.
So, how to host the mobile app backend? What are the vital areas to focus on?
To host the backend of a mobile app, it is necessary to have sound knowledge in the following areas:
Server-side programming
Database management
Big data
Modern cryptography
Mobile telecommunication network
All these are a necessary part of the process-the toughest area when managing backend hosting all by you is the coding procedure. Apart from the skills, the procedure requires an extreme level of dedication and effort.
Also, it’s highly time-consuming since the process is too lengthy to consider. But if you want to manage the mobile app backend without going for many hiccups, the best option will be to rely on MBaaS providers. MBaaS stands for Mobile Backend as a Service. Once you opt for this option, a lot of time and effort gets saved in hosting management. Yes, the MBaaS provider will be handling the hosting part.
mBaaS Overview
Mobile backend as a service or mBaaS is a platform being provided to the developers for connecting the APIs and backend cloud storage with that of the frontend. Through mBaaS providers, the entire backend server work process is managed, allowing the developers to get rid of the responsibility and focus entirely on the front end development. The most common operations that you can expect from a mBaaS platform are as follows:
Scalable Database
APIs
User management
Push notification support
Storage
With the help of custom SDKs, the mBaaS providers connect the API endpoints to different frontend clients like Android and iOS applications developed through Unity, Flutter, Ionic, React Native, etc. The SDKs can also access the pre-built APIs like push notification APIs, data service APIs, login APIs, etc.
mBaaS advantages
Mobile Backend as a Service allows the developers to stop worrying about the backend server handling part and concentrate entirely on the front end designing and coding process. It is the frontend area that remains visible before the audience. Therefore, developers need to be committed to developing that part effectively to attract a higher audience. Some of the advantages that mBaaS brings to the process are:
Automatic handling of the server-side
Allowing developers to focus totally on the frontend
Gaining access to a better and standardizes coding environment
Effectively running the clone apps and testing environment
No need for boilerplate code writing
Access to features like search, data storage, and authentication
Better backup and security options
Top 10 App Backend Hosting Providers
1. Back4app
Back4app is a backend service provider, open-source in nature, and increases mobile or web application development speed. Using the Back4app platform, the backend server hosting process is managed automatically, making the task easy enough for the developers.
Developers can only focus on the frontend, and hence, the project’s overall development timeline shortens. The best part of Back4app is that it can help in customizing and optimizing every application differently. It is the most innovative feature about Back4app that makes it so popular among mobile app developers.
The database solution provided by Back4app looks very similar to a spreadsheet. As a result, developers find it easy to update, sync, and create the application data. Also, single-click export and import of CSC/JSON files are possible with this platform. Using Back4app, you can easily manage and control the database data.
2. Firebase
Firebase, another mBaaS, offers developers the opportunity to work with different services and tools for developing high-quality mobile and web applications. Firebase is a NoSQL database that stores data in JSON documents. Firebase has been developed on the infrastructure provided by Google.
Firebase promises high-level security authentication using phone numbers, passwords, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. The authentication kit from Firebase can also be manually integrated for more than one sign-in method. Firebase promises a fast hosting process for web apps. Cloud hosting becomes more comfortable with Firebase, so are services like authentication, configuration, analytics, push messaging, file storage, and a lot more. Firebase is perfectly apt for any apps you may think about. However, it works with only Android and iOS platforms.
3. AWS Amplify
AWS Amplify allows developers to focus on the front end using the best tools to develop highly scalable and secured full-stack applications without worrying about the backend process. The AWS Amplify makes it simpler to configure the backend process within minutes. Once done, only a few codes are required to connect the backend to the app’s frontend. In short, use AWS Amplify to create iOS and Android mobile and web apps faster. AWS Amplify framework features three components. These are:
Libraries UI Components CLI Components
You can use these components individually or together. The UI components and Amplify libraries are organized by use case and powered by the AWS service. Being open-source, they work perfectly with any existing front-end frameworks like Angular, Vue, React Native, React, Ionic, Angular, and iOS or Android IDEs. To maintain a serverless backend on AWS, Amplify CLI is used.
4. Kinvey
Kinvey is a mBaaS platform to make the web and mobile app development process a lot faster and easier. Kinvey platform allows developers to not only develop but also deploy apps on its serverless platform. Developers will have to put all their efforts into managing the front-end part, while the back-end server hosting part will be managed by Kinvey.
It will result in superlative performance and a better end product. Kinvey’s cross-platform capability will allow developers to use it with different applications from different platforms. Also, Kinvey allows the developers to enjoy total control over developers’ applications while ensuring the most amazing user experience to make the application more user-friendly, inspiring, and attractive. Kinvey offers the most efficient low code microservice solutions to enterprises dealing in complex systems.
Using Kinvey will allow the developers to save a whole lot of time in the app development process. There is no need to manage the server, be it worrying about the settings or accessing the code. Neither the developer has to worry about scaling and maintaining backend services or connecting to the cloud services. All will be managed perfectly by Kinvey. Another amazing feature about Kinvey is its drag and drop option that makes it easy to connect the backend services to the frontend application.
5. Backendless
Backendless is another powerful mobile backend as a service platform, designed to make the app development task a lot easier for the developers. Backendless offers the most comprehensive end to end solutions for web and mobile development process.
An excellent mBaaS solution with an open-source interface, Backendless makes it easier for the developers to manage server-side back-end tasks when developing an app. If the PRO version is availed, it allows the developers’ extra facility to run their services on their servers. Every backend task, be it data modeling, debugging, source control, mobile development, or deployment management, Backendless manages them all.
It also offers the most expressive user-defined application programming interfaces. APIs are generated automatically by Backendless. It becomes easier for developers to consume and manage these APIs for project development purposes.
6. Kumulos
Kumulos is a highly secured mBaaS platform used for the development of mobile applications and messaging services. It is trusted by millions of app developers worldwide. The demand for mobile apps has increased tremendously over the last few decades. With Kumulos, developing mobile apps becomes a lot less hectic. It is a convenient solution that promises the best of mobile app development for businesses worldwide.
With Kumulos, your mobile app development will reach a new height. Kumulos makes it easy enough to run, measure, refine, and build mobile messaging campaigns. They have to capability to engage the users by sending the right type of message to suitable people at the right time. Kumulos is somewhat different from other types of mobile app messaging platforms available. The technology is better and more customer-oriented.
7. 8Base
Another cloud-based data management and server-less backend platform, 8Base offers excellent mobile and web application development support to large scale enterprises and independent users. It is powered by GraphQL API. Handling different types of transactional and complex data requirements, enhanced security, and a truly modern feel is the specialty of this platform. The essential features that make 8Base such a popular option are listed below:
Highly secured, scalable, and redundant file storage and relational database system
Powerful yet simple data schema definition
Built-in user administration and role-based security tools
8. Parse
Facebook acquired Parse Inc. in the year 2013. The Parse framework was a product of Parse Inc. It is a highly effective mobile backend as a service framework that works as an open-source platform for different mobile and web development projects. Parse has a large community that helps in identifying bugs and providing necessary solutions to the scenarios.
Managing complex web and mobile apps can often become difficult unless being worked upon a proper platform. That is where Parse, acting as mBaaS, plays as a guiding light. It manages the backend procedure entirely. Be it cloud processing or server management, and everything is being handled without involving the developers. Such an approach makes it easy for developers to focus solely on the front end’s design and development (that’s only visible before the audience) in a better and catchier way.
With the mBaaS platform’s introduction, mobile and web app development has witnessed an altogether different approach. The entire process has become a lot easier to manage, thanks to technological advancement and dynamic server handling process, automatically backend.
9. Heroku
Heroku is a mBaaS platform, cloud-based, and popularly used for different mobile and web development projects. With Heroku, the deployment and development of applications have become simple and easy. Using Heroku, the backend server and hardware-level programming are managed efficiently. Those who use Heroku can now focus solely on managing the frontend part while this mBaaS platform manages the backend. With this cloud-based service provider, users will enjoy the highest level of experience.
Heroku works effectively with different platforms, be it Android, Windows, iOS, or Blackberry. It is simple and easy to use. Businesses with specific situation handling will find Heroku to be extremely useful. If you are a startup venture or handling smaller projects, Heroku’s free service options can be availed. However, those with complex and advanced level business needs will have to opt for the paid tiered service packages for the best results.
Heroku is based on DYNOS, a managed container system that features a compelling ecosystem with data services being integrated for running and deploying modern, high-end apps. Heroku supports Scala, PHP, Go, Clojure, Python, Java, and Node.js to name a few.
10. Cloudflare Workers
Application development has gone through a massive change of late, thanks to introducing different BaaS service providers like Cloudflare Workers. There is no need to configure load balancers, auto-scaling, and other unnecessary stuff using this tool. You need not have to pay for the capacities you don’t use.
Cloudflare Workers automatically route the traffic and get the load perfectly balanced across different servers. You, as a developer, can concentrate intensely on the frontend development services. With Cloudflare workers, it is now more convenient to store your static assets. The key-value data store promises low latency level and highest level security with enhanced performance.
It is easy enough to simultaneously access the assets while working with the codes and the transformation process through APIs for page modification purposes.
Conclusion
This article explained the benefits of hosting a mobile app using a back-end as a service platform and highlighted the best ten back-end hosting platforms for a mobile app. | https://medium.com/@george-51059/where-to-host-a-mobile-app-backend-8c98f2ce56d6 | ['George Batschinski'] | 2021-01-03 12:17:55.893000+00:00 | ['Backend', 'Host', 'App', 'Mobile'] |
Creating a Human that Never Existed | What would you do with a humanoid robot? Get it to go to work for you? Create the next trillion-dollar company? Or take over the world?
(Un)Fortunately, our technology isn’t advanced enough to create those robots. But we can definitely make progress toward it! One start is the physical appearance of the robot — and with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) we can create hyper-realistic faces.
Take, for example, the image below. There are 3 humans and 1 generated human. Which one is it? (Scroll slowly)
Which one is the fake human?
So which one is it?
Are you confident?
I lied. All of them are fakes! The images were so realistic that you couldn’t even tell! That is the power of GANs!
Whoa there — Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What even are these Generative Adversarial Networks? | https://medium.com/swlh/creating-a-human-that-never-existed-65d046fe8cb3 | ['Dickson Wu'] | 2020-11-14 06:01:42.731000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Gans', 'Programming', 'Neural Networks'] |
BootstrapVue — Button Groups and Toolbars, and Calendar | Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash
To make good looking Vue apps, we need to style our components.
To make our lives easier, we can use components with styles built-in.
In this article, we’ll look at how to add button groups and toolbars to group buttons.
We also look at how to use the calendar to let users select dates.
Button Group
Button groups let us group a series of buttons together.
To add a button group, we can use the b-button-group component.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-button-group>
<b-button>Button 1</b-button>
<b-button>Button 2</b-button>
</b-button-group>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have the b-button-group component with b-button components inside.
Vertical Groups
We can make the group vertical by adding the vertical prop:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-button-group vertical>
<b-button>Button 1</b-button>
<b-button>Button 2</b-button>
</b-button-group>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
Then we make the buttons arranged vertically.
Dropdown Menu
We can add dropdown menus inside our button group.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-button-group>
<b-button>Button 1</b-button>
<b-dropdown right text="Menu">
<b-dropdown-item>foo</b-dropdown-item>
<b-dropdown-divider></b-dropdown-divider>
<b-dropdown-item>bar</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown>
</b-button-group>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have a dropdown menu on the right of the button with the b-dropdown component.
We have b-dropdown-itemn and b-dropdown-divider components inside.
Button Toolbar
A button toolbar is similar to a button group.
It groups multiple buttons together.
Also, we can use it to group multiple button groups together.
We use the b-button-toolbar component to create a button toolbar.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-button-toolbar>
<b-button-group class="mx-1">
<b-button>apple</b-button>
<b-button>orange</b-button>
</b-button-group>
<b-button-group class="mx-1">
<b-button>banana</b-button>
<b-button>grape</b-button>
</b-button-group>
</b-button-toolbar>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
The mx-1 class make the groups spaced apart.
We apply to the button groups to add a margin between them.
We can also add a dropdown menu inside a button toolbar as we do with button groups.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-button-toolbar>
<b-button-group class="mx-1">
<b-button>apple</b-button>
<b-button>orange</b-button>
</b-button-group> <b-dropdown class="mx-1" right text="menu">
<b-dropdown-item>foo</b-dropdown-item>
<b-dropdown-item>bar</b-dropdown-item>
</b-dropdown> <b-button-group class="mx-1">
<b-button>banana</b-button>
<b-button>grape</b-button>
</b-button-group>
</b-button-toolbar>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App"
};
</script>
We have the same classes to keep them apart.
The text prop sets the text for the dropdown button.
b-dropdown-item have the dropdown items.
Calendar
BootstrapVue has the b-calendar component to create a calendar.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-calendar v-model="date" @context="onContext" locale="en-US"></b-calendar>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App",
data() {
return {
date: new Date()
};
},
methods: {
onContext(e) {
console.log(e);
}
}
};
</script>
We have the onContext method to get the selected date value when the calendar is clicked.
date is the model, which we bind to the calendar with v-model .
Disabled and Readonly State
We can disable the calendar with the disabled prop.
Likewise, we can add the readonly prop to make it read-only.
The difference between them is that disabled removes all interactivity, but readonly will disable selecting a date, but keep the component interactive.
So if we have:
<b-calendar disabled locale="en-US"></b-calendar>
then we disable the whole calendar.
If we have
<b-calendar readonly locale="en-US"></b-calendar>
Then we can navigate through the calendar but can’t select anything.
Date Constraints
We can limit the date range that can be selected with the min and max props.
For instance, we can write:
<template>
<div id="app">
<b-calendar v-model="date" :min="min" :max="max" locale="en-US"></b-calendar>
</div>
</template> <script>
export default {
name: "App",
data() {
return {
date: new Date(),
min: new Date(2020, 0, 1),
max: new Date(2020, 11, 31)
};
}
};
</script>
Then we can only select dates that are in the year 2020.
Photo by Victor Malyushev on Unsplash
Conclusion
We can use the calendar component to let users select dates.
The selectable date range can be limited.
Also, we can group buttons with button groups and button toolbars. | https://medium.com/dataseries/bootstrapvue-button-groups-and-toolbars-and-calendar-bbe78f312fe9 | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-06-29 08:32:16.388000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Technology', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Web Development'] |
The Danger of Humanizing Algorithms | The Danger of Humanizing Algorithms
Misleading terminology can be dangerous. Machines are actually not learning
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash.
To many, 2016 marked the year when artificial intelligence (AI) came of age. AlphaGo triumphed against the world’s best human Go players, demonstrating the almost inexhaustible potential of artificial intelligence. Programs playing board games with superhuman skills like AlphaGo or AlphaZero have created unparalleled hype surrounding AI, and this has only been fueled by big data availability.
In this context, it is not surprising that the public, business, and scientific interest in machine learning are unchecked. These programs can go further than beating a human player, going so far as to invent new and ingenious gameplay. They learn from data, identify patterns, and make decisions based on these patterns. Depending on the application, decision-making occurs without or with only minimal human intervention. Since data production is a continuous process, machine learning solutions adapt autonomously, learning from new information and previous operations. In 2016, AlphaGo used a total of 300,000 games as training data to achieve its excellent results.
Every guide out there about how to implement machine learning applications will tell you that you need a clear vision of the problem it has to solve.
In many cases, the machine learning applications are faster, more accurate, and time-saving, therefore — among other benefits — shortening time-to-market. However, it will only address this specific problem with the data given.
But is this learning in correspondence to the way humans learn? No, it is not. Not even remotely. | https://medium.com/better-programming/the-danger-of-humanizing-algorithms-a9a0e1a5c8e6 | ['The Unlikely Techie'] | 2020-08-19 14:11:04.343000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Programming', 'Data Science', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
A Conversation with Food for Peace Director Trey Hicks | Talk a bit about your work on the Hill and how that has figured in to your role as Director of Food for Peace.
Prior to joining Food for Peace I was a Senior Professional Staff Member on the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. I was the lead on foreign assistance for the committee as well as the lead oversight investigator.
There are a lot of historic changes within USAID, and during my time on the Hill I got deep in the weeds on humanitarian policy, particularly the food aid side. One of the bills that I helped with on the committee was the Global Food Security Act (GFSA), which included authorization of the entire International Disaster Assistance (IDA) account. This is the main account used for funding humanitarian assistance along with Title II legislation in the Farm Bill.
It’s a subject I worked on very long and hard to get to that place where it was enshrined into law. Not only IDA writ large, but also the Emergency Food Security Program (EFSP) component which created a permanent account for fully flexible food assistance.
What are your initial views of Food for Peace and food assistance now that you’re on the implementation side as opposed to the legislative side?
Well, there’s a lot more behind the curtain than I ever imagined. Seeing it firsthand really reinforces my faith in the program and the team that puts food assistance into action.
Over the years, I had developed a good rapport with [Food for Peace] senior leadership, working on some of the bills and policies related to food aid reform. But seeing firsthand how much thought and attention goes into every single decision — it renews my faith in the program and what the people here [at USAID] really do. Down to the very nitty gritty details. The team takes this seriously and tries to run the most efficient ship possible, because every dollar we save through improved efficiency helps to save more lives.
You noted that this new role has allowed you to see another dimension to food assistance. What has come as the biggest surprise?
It’s an entirely new experience and has all been a bit of a shock. Even after 13 years on the Hill, I guess the biggest shock is learning to navigate this bureaucracy with so many moving parts. I’m trying to figure out how everything currently works, while simultaneously keeping an eye on the future to determine how everything will work when we stand up a new Bureau.
You alluded to the new Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which was recently approved by Congress as part of USAID’s Transformation. What are some of the main benefits of bringing together the Office of Food for Peace and the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) to form a new bureau?
The importance of a unified leadership and voice on humanitarian issues cannot be overstated. We have partners that are involved in all aspects of humanitarian programming and they often have three different agreements across U.S. Government humanitarian offices, each with a different set of expectations and relationships to manage.
Having a centralized point for a given emergency helps streamline the supply chain and simplify the logistical burden to a degree. With that comes savings. Reducing overhead and associated costs means we’re freeing up money that can go into programming. So again, every dollar we save can actually go to saving lives. It’s good governance and it makes sense given our common goal.
What are some of your other priorities for 2019?
I’d like to bring back humanitarian diplomacy. At the international scale, I feel in some ways that humanitarian actors are kept to the periphery. We need to remind various countries of our role and to create a space so we can effectively provide for those that need assistance. There needs to be a greater emphasis on that. I also want to ensure that the humanitarians on the ground — our amazing partners — are taken into account. There needs to be a very distinct feedback loop from the ground up to make sure the implementers and policy makers are in harmony. It’s important that we never get too Washington focused; the operations here [in Washington] always need to be field and beneficiary focused.
What would you say is the biggest challenge in providing food assistance today?
The majority of current emergencies are man-made and driven by conflict. There’s a lot happening on these fronts, and it can be a challenge to be in the middle of a political battle when your job is focused on humanitarian work. It can definitely be a tricky place to navigate.
In terms of the donor community, the United States is a leader and there’s a focus on getting other donors to table, rightly so. It’s often referred to as “fair share” and I agree with that sentiment. We’ve been working to get other donors involved and have had some successes. South Korea is one, for example; they were actually an aid recipient and have now matured into a donor. It really exemplifies what the Administrator means by “The Journey to Self-Reliance”. Again, this is all part of humanitarian diplomacy. Things are changing but there is definitely room to bring more people into the fold and increase contributions.
What are you currently reading?
I’m consumed with reading — a lot of sci-fi. Currently I’m reading a series called The Mandle Files by Peter Hamilton, about apocalyptic post-warming England. It’s…it’s interesting [laughter].
Thanks, Trey. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
When I left the Hill I was asked what I would like to do. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and it was this. I love being here at USAID with Food for Peace. I love the staff. I love the work.
About the Author
USAID’s Office of Food for Peace saves lives and tackles chronic hunger and poverty through U.S. food assistance. Expressing the generosity of the American people, we bring help and hope to ordinary people in desperate situations, and have reached more than 4 billion people with food assistance since 1954. Follow Food for Peace on Twitter @USAIDFFP. | https://medium.com/@USAIDFFP/a-conversation-with-food-for-peace-director-trey-hicks-8cf093f0d833 | ['Usaid Food For Peace'] | 2019-08-15 14:42:33.281000+00:00 | ['Humanitarian Aid', 'Humanitarian', 'Refugees', 'Food Assistance', 'Food Security'] |
Tango of Obsession | Welcome to Lit Up -The Land of Little Tales. Here you can read and submit short stories, flash fiction, poetry - in brief, your own legend. We're starting little. But that's how all big stories begin.
Follow | https://medium.com/lit-up/tango-of-obsession-ceb53896c417 | ['Dermott Hayes'] | 2019-11-13 09:07:17.402000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Poetry', 'Obsession', 'Anger', 'Life'] |
Unboxing GENDERs. An exploration of their nurture. | Background: I wrote this article, in June 2020, during the Pride month, after an invitation of a dear friend and colleague to participate in a global research publication about gender. The official digital and printed book is expected to be released in November. Till then, below you can already read my piece.
Through this article, we will dive into a brief, yet momentous trail about Gender Identity, uncovering its diverse orientations, why we need to stop talking about tolerance, and how by re-constructing our concepts, we can make inclusivity a reality, where each individual can have the opportunity to thrive and pay it forward.
Credits of picture: Erik Mclean, pexels.com
Oh, Gender, My Gender. [1]
Let’s start with the basics. Gender is a social construct. Gender is often confused with sex.[2] Gender is a significant part of our Identity.[3] Gender is often perceived in most countries around the world within the duality of man/woman and often, people use mistakenly the terms male/female, which are describing the sex assigned at the birth of someone, as linguistic words that can describe also the gender of an individual. There are many definitions out there and even more perspectives, experiences, and life stories.
I am focusing on the second ones and will be sharing mine with you. Within my work as an LGBTQIA+[4] Spectrum educator, I have encountered with more than 600+ LGBTQIA+ people, in the last 6 years, mostly young generations between 16 to 30 years old, from international and intersectional backgrounds and countries, whose personality colors and individual beauty in all aspects is undeniable, a heartwarming inspiration and without any doubt, a learning source.
I am, myself, part of this colorful spectrum, a mostly non-binary and in-between genderfluid individual, who didn’t have any references while growing up, as to how come I would feel so different from my other peers in regards to how I was experiencing my gender, its expression, my body, and my romantic and sexual attraction towards other people. There were no educational programs provided within the school curriculum, or even an open environment to feel safe to talk about my experience, without the fear of being judged, bullied, isolated, and disowned by my peers and family.
Imagine living your life with this constant fear and the un-comfortability of being who you are, thinking that something is fundamentally wrong with yourself, and the closest references to you, being those conforming norms, that keep insisting on defining womanhood, and manhood girlhood and boyhood, as a puzzle game between the commercialized choice of pink and blue color — while the rest of the spectrum of colors is kept aside living on a deserted island as if they have committed a crime for even existing in the world.
And then imagine those colors every day doing the work and building the so much necessary bridge to reach the other side, with the intention to reunite with pink and blue, after all, they are all part of the same species and family — but then on the other side, you have pink and blue, who while they share the same intention, though, are trapped, almost imprisoned, within some of their constructors’ closeted ideology of what is normal, and what must be the norm that everyone has to follow in order to fit in and succeed in life.
Credit for the picture: Yasin Yusuf, unsplash.com
Re-constructing the norms
As human beings, we are the ultimate creators of our life, shaping our cultures (personal, and collective ones), and our societies, the norms to which we are living, and co-living. Many of those norms, are not serving us anymore, and for a long time now. We are living in a world where we cannot anymore talk about gender, and gender equity, as something that it’s a matter and life-issue only between men and women because it’s not. Somehow it seems to me, we are all aware of that, yet some of us, deliberately choose to ignore that, thus undervaluing many of our fellow beings’ lives. We are excluding a spectrum of identities such as trans men, trans women, genderfluid, non-binary, gender-neutral, agender, third gender people, and many more.[5]
We cannot talk about gender (identity) and put our concepts on the play, without listening and acknowledging the stories and experiences of so many people. No one has the right to choose the label for us, and state how we are supposed to be, look and behave, yet we do that, within the cultural contexts that we grow in, that include religions, traditions, etc.
We continue regenerating the stereotypes of centuries and with everything unknown and different within our mirror view, we let the fear take the first stage — which translates to behaviors that encourage hate-speech, prejudices, discrimination, phobias (homophobia, biphobia, transphobia) of everything and every one different, violence, hate crimes, and more harmful actions. Think about it. Fact-wise, I share with confidence, that each one of us knows at least one person in our lives, who has suffered or currently as you read, experiencing such traumatic situations.
As the social creators and crafters of the concept of gender, it’s time we re-construct it and start using the language that describes and includes all the spectrum and person’s identities. The words man and woman, only express a part of the world and we need to shift our language and act on our inclusivity. It’s not enough to talk about how we can be inclusive, if we do not take an action upon it, from the smallest to the biggest.
Even more, one’s work starts from the within, from oneself — becoming self-aware, educating ourselves, leaning towards people who have a different background than us, and listening to their stories, with the intention to empathize and understand, opening our horizons to the unlimited human possibilities that exist. One’s work continues with changing the roots of outdated narratives and growing new seeds, which then can support and impact the creation and/or update of policies and laws, that will finally ensure without question the fundamental human rights of those who are constantly being on the side of marginalization and oppression, experiencing an enormous vulnerability, which based on factual events, most of the times cost their lives.
Credit for the picture: Harry Quan, unsplash.com
When good enough, is not enough anymore.
At the end of the day, one can make the assumption, that we all want to be valued, respected, and recognized for who we are, lead and live enriching lives filled with happiness, freedom, and love. And that is exactly why we need to stop talking about tolerance.
Based on the Oxford definition of the word “tolerate”, its first meaning is described as “allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one dislikes or disagrees with) without interference”. Let’s take a moment to digest and comprehend what we actually mean when we use this word. As you continue reading, I invite you to pause and think of moments, people, and events in your life, that you have experienced tolerance, both as a giver and receiver.
Now, if you happen to feel uncomfortable recalling those past memories for whatever reason, know that your emotion is valid. This is part of the practice of looking within ourselves, becoming aware and acknowledging that tolerance, while it’s something that we all do in our lives in different contexts, consciously or unconsciously — yet it should not be a glorifying attitude of how we treat and co-live with our fellow beings. It has been our “good enough” getaway for decades, which looking at the world’s reality right now, it doesn’t serve us anymore — its role has expired. Simply, in our context of diversity and individuality, it is not enough anymore to just tolerate. We can do better than that. We need to be willing to choose to do better than that.
As Jane Elliot, Diversity Trainer and Human Rights, activist and advocator has stated in one of her interviews, “I found out that tolerance means to put up with or allow me to be. I don’t need your allowance. And I don’t need to be tolerated. I want to be valued, recognized, and appreciated. We’ve got to change it from tolerance because the powerful can tolerate, the powerless have to wait to be tolerated.”[6]
Credit for the picture: Nicholas Swatz, pexels.com
I am concluding my narrative, with a reference to another source connected to tolerance, that was not only enlightening to my reflective journey on my personal attitudes towards diversity, but it was and still is an important asset for inclusively educating, learning, and unlearning. It is a tool that I am using in my educational programs with the youth to discuss, reflect, and re-evaluate the behaviors, which we act upon and receive from other people.
I am referring to the “Riddle scale”, (also known as Riddle scale of homophobia)[7], in which there are eight terms/values that characterize negative and positive levels of attitudes of homophobia, yet, it is also used to describe attitudes towards difference and people of diversity. On the negative part of the scale, the order from the lowest to the highest is repulsion, pity, tolerance, and acceptance. On the positive part, it continues similarly with support, admiration, appreciation, and nurturance, as the highest. We are all familiar with those attitudes one way or another, and we even express them towards our own selves, which is another story to cover.
Based on the Oxford definition of the word “nurture”, its first meaning is described as “to care for and protect somebody/something while they are growing and developing”. And it’s second meaning states “to help somebody/something to develop and be successful”. Nurturance within the scale context, “assumes that LGBTQIA+ people are indispensable in our society. People on this level view LGBTQIA+ people with genuine affection and delight, and are willing to be their allies and advocates.”
I believe this assumption and its realization is our breakthrough moment for dismantling systems of discrimination and oppression, that keep hurting our communities worldwide. A simple shift of our perspective from viewing another person as a threat to our existence, because of their gender identity, sexuality, skin color, national origin, or more, to actually “seeing” and nurturing them — is what our society needs at large — moving to a culture of nurturance, where no one is left behind and everybody gets a sit on the table to play their part in growing and developing our humanity in more sustainable ways.
Credit for the picture: Austin Cha, unsplash.com
Glossary Index
Definitions of some of the main terms used in the article, taken by the ILGA-EUROPE Glossary and the LGBTQIA Resource Center.
Sex: “The classification of a person as male or female. Sex is assigned at birth and written on a birth certificate, usually based on the appearance of their external anatomy and on a binary vision of sex which excludes intersex people. A person’s sex, however, is actually a combination of bodily characteristics including chromosomes, hormones, internal and external reproductive organs, and secondary sex characteristics.”
Gender identity: “Refers to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, and mannerisms. Some people’s gender identity falls outside the gender binary, and related norms”
Transgender: An adjective used most often as an umbrella term and frequently abbreviated to “trans.” Identifying as transgender, or trans means that one’s internal knowledge of gender is different from conventional or cultural expectations based on the sex that person was assigned at birth. While transgender may refer to a woman who was assigned male at birth or a man who was assigned female at birth, transgender is an umbrella term that can also describe someone who identifies as a gender other than woman or man, such as non- binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, no gender or multiple genders, or some other gender identity.
Trans man: A person may choose to identify this way to capture their gender identity as well as their lived experience as a transgender person.
Trans woman: A person may choose to identify this way to capture their gender identity as well as their lived experience as a transgender person.
Genderfluid: A person whose gender identification and presentation shifts, whether within or outside of societal, gender-based expectations. Being fluid in motion between two or more genders.
Non-binary: A gender identity and experience that embraces a full universe of expressions and ways of being that resonate for an individual, moving beyond the male/female gender binary. It may be active resistance to binary gender expectations and/or intentional creation of new unbounded ideas of self within the world. For some people who identify as non-binary, there may be overlap with other concepts and identities like gender expansive and gender non-conforming.
References
1. ILGA-Europe Glossary, terminology, (2015) https://www.ilga-europe.org/resources/glossary
2. Power ACTiON Booklet — Create, Act, Empower, (2018) https://pubhtml5.com/pzkz/aycu
3. Jane Elliot’s quote about tolerance, (2017) taken from an online video interview, given to Black Nouveau show, produced by Milwaukee PBS, part 2 of the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJuG26-4XUQ&t=3s
4. The Riddle Scale (1973–1974), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddle_scale#:~:text=The%20Riddle%20scale%20(also%20known,discriminatory%20attitudes%20regarding%20sexual%20orientation.
and one of the many resources available online: http://sga.fsu.edu/safe_zone/PDF/The-Riddle-Scale-Handout.pdf
5. LGBTQIA Resource Center, (2020) https://lgbtqia.ucdavis.edu/educated/glossary
References notes:
[1] Rework of the famous poem “Oh Captain, My Captain” (1865) by the American poet Walt Whitman.
[2] Sex: See the definition of the term at the Glossary Index.
[3] Gender identity: See the definition of the term at the Glossary Index.
[4] LGBTQIA+ Spectrum: The initials stand for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and + (all other forms of sexual and gender expression). The initialism LGBTQIA+ emphasizes the diversity of sexuality and gender identities. When referring to LGBTQIA+ Spectrum, we acknowledge the wide range of aspects that relate to the term, such as community, culture, human rights, gender, and sexual diversity, social movements, etc. [Active Rainbow, Power ACTion Booklet]
[5] See the definition of those terms at the Glossary Index.
[6] This quote is taken from the online video interview that Jane Elliot gave at the Black Nouveau show in 2017 from Milwaukee PBS productions. I recently discovered in May 2020 this interview, while researching about anti-racism resources and the #Blacklivesmatter movement. [Find the link in the References section]
[7] The Riddle Scale is named after its creator, psychologist Dorothy Riddle. It was developed in 1973–1974 while she was overseeing research for the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gays and Lesbians. It was/is a psychometric scale that measured the degree to which a person is or is not homophobic. Riddle’s analysis was one of the first modern classifications of attitudes towards homosexuality. The scale since then has been adapted for educational purposes to describe a continuum of attitudes of any form of diversity.
Mini Bio of the Author
Cathy is a life explorer, a passionate learner, a dreamer-achiever, an initiator, a soul traveler, and a global citizen, a poet, and a Rainbow ACTor. Among her professional identities, already for the past 9 years, she is a devoted educator, a youth worker, a trainer, a facilitator, a project designer and writer, a mentor, a coach, and a Human Rights and LGBTQIA+ Spectrum activist and advocator. She is the proud Founder of the Active Rainbow Educational Platform since 2014, and the co-founder and one of the board members of its first organization in Latvia. | https://medium.com/@manousaki.cathy/unboxing-genders-an-exploration-of-their-nurture-c58f3fead887 | ['Cathy Mk'] | 2020-10-12 11:47:48.215000+00:00 | ['Nurturance', 'Perspective Shift', 'Gender Identity', 'Lgbtqia'] |
How to Make the Most Delicious AND Healthiest Hot Cocoa | Hot cocoa is without a doubt, one of my favorite beverages. The rich, chocolatey liquid hits the spot every time. I’ve noticed that the best hot cocoa is usually found at small artisan chocolate shops. This cocoa just seems to taste…more chocolatey. It’s usually not painfully sweet either, which I appreciate.
If you have ever wanted to make professional-quality hot cocoa at home, then I have some good news. It is very doable and easier than you might think. All it takes is some good quality milk, a 100% cacao unsweetened chocolate bar, a bit of cocoa powder, a whisk, and a small pot (recipe at the end).
I don’t add sugar to this recipe because I think it’s already rich enough. If you are the kind of person who likes sweeter hot cocoa, then this recipe might not be for you (but feel free to adjust the sweetness to your liking).
This is a simple heat, mix, and pour recipe, but there are a few critical notes to consider before getting started. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/how-to-make-the-most-delicious-and-healthiest-hot-cocoa-3fac46fabb7c | ['Brandon J Eudy'] | 2020-12-23 01:57:57.224000+00:00 | ['Chocolate', 'Cocoa', 'Milk', 'Healt', 'Nutrition'] |
My visit to Earth | Standing at the edge of the red cliff, I took a deep breath. I did not want to jump but life had left me no choice. 7 Days ago, I was normal and everything was fine. I was heading toward earth to meet my grandparents. I wanted their blessing before it was too late. The ravishing beauty of Tamghas and the tall trees of Resunga, the place I was born welcomed me to “Gulmi”.
Earth was not the same anymore after the Covid-19 pandemic. The lockdown was never lifted. The politicians fed us false hope. After 5 years of struggle, our planet was declared not safe to live anymore in 2025. I was completely petrified and scared. Me wanting to live a little longer decided to go far distant from the earth.
In 2030, I had moved to planet Kepler to complete my Master’s degree. Sincere gratitude to Elon Musk who helped me with such an affordable spaceflight. My parents also had left earth to live on Kepler. But my grandparents did not want to leave earth despite several appeals. They wanted to live on this planet which looked like a Blue marble with white swirls. Many people left earth, only a few stayed, my grandparents were some of them.
After all these years, I was about to visit back to my planet Earth where I was born and brought up. I was looking forward to seeing the changes and major throwbacks along my memory lane. I was excited to meet my grandparents. After a few days, I finally made it to their house. As soon as I got inside I could hear a voice which was longing for my arrival. The voice said “ Welcome back home, Aishwarya. I have been waiting for you for years.
I was terrified and started shivering. As I turned around, I saw a man.
I was scared but soon those enchanting brown eyes hypnotized me with an irresistible charm. Curiously, I asked him “Are you looking for someone?” He then replied, “Yes, It’s you.”
The intensity in his voice, made me feel as if it was written on stars that we would meet on this fateful day. I again asked him “But, Do I know you?” He smiled and replied, “ I am Samuel.”
Then, I saw my grandparents. I ran towards them and gave them a big hug. It appears after Coronavirus outbreak, conditions of living were no longer suitable in Europe and was no longer considered safe. That’s why People started to migrate to Nepal and Sameul was one of those migrants.
He used to help my grandparents and in return, they treated him like a son and sometimes told stories about me and my parents. It seemed like he knew every bits and piece of my childhood.
Samuel was a tall, young, and handsome gentleman. The creamy brown skin and the luscious eyes seemed much captivative about him.
Later that night I could not sleep. I thought to myself. Life on earth is not bad. Maybe I should stay back.
Next morning, I woke up and saw the reality of things: Earth had healed itself from the pollution. The air was fresh and therapeutic, Rivers were flowing with pristine water. The trees had outgrown the big corporations, greener had prevailed over concrete.
Half of the glaciers had melted; half of Nepal was submerged underwater. I took a boat ride with Samuel and went scuba diving together. He was my sweetest treasure and I was his other half. Everything seemed surreal and tranquil.
Meanwhile, I could hear a tone something like “tu-du-dun-dung ”(Iphone’s default ringtone). It went on and on for a few minutes. I ignored it. Then again, I could also hear a voice from the distant. It said “Chito uthnu chaina. 11 baje samma sutya sutyai cha”
Yes, my fellow readers! It was my mom and she seemed pretty annoyed. Nervousness kicked me out of my bed and guess what? It was still year 2020.
P.S. Special thanks to Prashant Shrestha for his amazing mentorship. | https://medium.com/@aishwarya.sapkota/my-visit-to-earth-8057ed3c75b0 | ['Aishwarya Sapkota'] | 2020-05-15 19:14:54.379000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Earth', 'Covid 19', 'Médium', 'Tall Tales'] |
2021 NBA Coach of the Year Candidates | Monty Williams — Phoenix Suns: From exciting new additions in Chris Paul and Jae Crowder to the continued development of DeAndre Ayton, Mikal Bridges, and Cam Johnson. What’s most impressive is the entire team’s buy-in and foundation Coach Williams has established in Phoenix. If the Suns make the playoffs I find it hard to believe any other coach wins the award.
Brad Stevens — Boston Celtics: Yet to take home the top coach of the year honors, Coach Stevens might be able to put together a solid argument this season. It’s well known the Celtics are more than set on the wing with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. But what remains to be seen is how healthy Kemba Walker will be. How the Celtics coach manages the point guard position with or without Kemba available (with Jeff Teague and Payton Pritchard) along with how the team adjusts with Tristan Thompson anchoring the paint will be huge if the Celtics are to take the next step.
Steve Nash — Brooklyn Nets: It was only a few preseason games, but there’s a decent chance Nash is in consideration for the award in his first year at the helm. How he is able to navigate the job while dealing with Kyrie’s media debacle, managing KD’s workload in his return to the court and how he elects the distribute minutes between LeVert/Dinwiddie and Allen/Jordan. If he’s able to maintain the core’s trust, keep the players happy within their roles and of course win games he’ll attract attention especially if the Nets are able to lock in home court advantage finishing top 4 in the Eastern Conference.
Doc Rivers — Philadelphia 76ers: The Brett Brown “Trust the Process” era is over. Not only did the 76ers bring in a well established coach to hopefully help get them over the hump, but they also brought in shooters (something the team has desperately lacked the past few seasons). Time is of the essence in Philadelphia as patience is wearing thin. How quickly Coach Rivers is able to adjust to his new roster, incorporate the new shooters within the offense, and if he can properly weather the storm/eliminate much of the Ben Simmons for James Harden noise will be imperative to the 76ers success this season. That’s a tough ask, but if Rivers can pull it off he’ll be in the conversation.
Ty Lue — LA Clippers: While much of the Clippers issues must be solved and sorted out within the locker room amongst the players themselves Lue does slide over a seat as the head coach with some new factors to consider. With Luke Kennard on board, how much does that affect Lou Williams time? Same can be said for Serge Ibaka being added to the mix as the young Ivica Zubac had came on strong for the Clippers at the end of last year. What 5 players get Lue’s nod during crunch time? The Clippers have a very strong roster filled with a lot big personalities. After a very embarrassing collapse in the playoffs, Lue has one of the tougher jobs in basketball after being tabbed the trusted leader to resolve the internal problems and generate the quick solutions. Anything short of a Western Conference Finals appearance would be a disappointment. | https://medium.com/@rossgeiger/2021-nba-coach-of-the-year-candidates-d7afc39aeb99 | ['Ross Geiger'] | 2020-12-20 15:52:22.130000+00:00 | ['Basketball', 'Sports', 'Brooklyn', 'Los Angeles', 'NBA'] |
Blockchain and the Insufferable Millennial | I went to the Crypto Funding Summit in Los Angeles on January 24, 2018, and while it was sparsely attended, there were a lot of good speakers and a number of interesting vendors exhibiting and giving their ICO pitch.
I was there representing one of the professional big name publications that I write for (I’m not going to put the name, because I’m going to get a bit controversial here) and I made it a point to talk to each vendor at the event to find out what they were doing, hear about their use case, play a little devils advocate to get them to justify their utility and reason for doing this. I had wonderful conversations with all the companies, great people, some of the ideas made a lot of sense, a few were going to totally crash and burn in my opinion. There were about 5 companies there that had something to do with medical information in one way or another. One of them was the last company I talked to, and I’m not going to post their name, because I don’t want to give them any free promotion, but the young man and woman in their booth were the absolute worst people I have ever encountered at any kind of trade show in decades of going to trade shows across sporting goods, music and technology.
These two people appeared to be in their early to mid 20’s and dressed with plenty of flair. I didn’t get their names, so I’ll refer to them in this conversation re-enactment as Douchebag Millennial Male (DMM) and Fawning Millennial Female (FMF):
SG: Hi, I’m with ****** Magazine, tell me about what you’re doing here.
DMM: Putting medical records on the blockchain.
SG: Cool, so give me some details, do you have partnerships already? How do the records get on there? Do I, as a patient explicitly do it, or give permission to my provider to do it or they do it without me knowing?
DMM: Yes.
SG: Yes what?
DMM: To all of it.
SG: Ok, can you give me some details? Walk me through it.
DMM: With our system, you can get to your medical records anywhere in the world at any time.
SG: Ok, nice, but that wasn’t really an answer to my questions. Why is there a need for your token?
DMM: To get instant access to your personal records at any time.
SG: Ok, so I’m a regular Joe and I want to get to my medical records. Are you saying that I have to install your mobile app, open a crypto exchange account, take pictures of my ID and send that to them and wait to get validated, then get my bank account connected to the exchange, send my money in, buy your token, get some sort of wallet integration, and then I can get my medical records?
DMM: Yes, it sounds very simple to me.
SG: Are you being serious right now?
DMM: For sophisticated millennials, this is trivial, we all already live like this.
SG: Let me give you a little advice, your style of delivery isn’t particularly pleasant and is going to alienate people.
DMM: That’s your opinion.
FMF: Yea, that’s just your opinion.
SG: You realize that if even a small number of companies are successful at all these tokens out of the number that are trying, it will require the average person to walk around with thousands of different cryptocurrencies to perform their daily tasks?
DMM: No, that won’t happen and it doesn’t matter to us.
SG: <laughs a lot> Ok guys, I’m gonna just leave you out of my article because you are so unpleasant and you are making me play 20 questions to find out any details and you have been very insulting. <starts to walk away after leaving materials on their table>
FMF: <yells at my departing back> OH YEA? WELL, THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP!!!
SG: <laughs even harder>
The rest of the conference was overall very interesting and enjoyable. Tip to millennials, this is not a winning strategy. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/blockchain-and-the-insufferable-millennial-9c454f8e8962 | ['Shawn Gordon'] | 2018-11-29 02:40:33.068000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Insufferable Millennial', 'Blockchain Startup'] |
SHOULD I DATE A NON — BELIEVER? THAT IS THE QUESTION. | Hey guys welcome back to my channel today I’m gonna be talking about why youshouldn’t date a non-believer or a non-christian if you’re a Christian yourself the Bible says not to be unequally yoked and this is not just like another command or another rule that we have to follow it’s for our own good and God says it for a reason so I wanted to share those reasons with you and just share some thoughts that I have as well.
So if you guys are interested in reading this post, let’s go ahead and get on into it so I’ve dated a few non-believers like in high school and stuff and now I look back and see what I have with Kyle and I’m just like what was I thinking I was not thinking aboutdating in the right way I noticed a lot of Christians just think to casually of dating and God doesn’t want us to do that.
He wants us to be very intentional about dating and only dating somebody that you see potential and marry so alot of the guys in my past.
I never really saw potential in marrying I really just thought, oh this is a nice guy like we can have fun tonight.
Of course like I probably thought about marriage but it wasn’t like oh my gosh like I can really see some great qualities in this guy or he is somebody I really want to marry.
So once I found Kyle and once I became obedient and broke up with the old guys that I dated I feel like gods really blessed me forbeing obedient to him before you get into any dating relationship.
I think it’s really important to pray and ask God seek His wisdom in what to do and if you should be entering into this relationship honestly.
I wish I neverdated in high school I wish Kyle was my only boyfriend notthat I didn’t learn anything but it was really just a waste of time until I met Kyle and saw some really great qualities in him I feel like all the other guys were just waste of time.
I think a lot of girls like myself think oh I can lead him to the Lord like if he’s not a believer he’ll become a believer after they date me but that’s so not true that never works for any of my boyfriend’s I had one boyfriend like come to church with me and like say he accepted Christ and all this but really I don’t think really had that true relationship with him I think he really was just saying it so that I would like him or whatever andI wouldn’t break up with him if you’re dating with the intention of marrying hopefully you wouldn’t be dating a non-believer because God says not to here are a few reasons why getting into a reallyship or marrying a non-believer is not really good for your soul at all.
So thefirst one is your values goals and motivations are completely differentfrom the other person if you love Jesus as a believer you’re motivated by Godthat’s why you live that’s everything you live for it’s to serve Jesus if you’re dating a non-believer.
They have their own selfish desires inmind which is just the world I mean if you don’t have God why would you notjust look after yourself and do everything to like gain self-worth in this world because you don’t have a creator higher than you to say hey this is what you’re supposed to be doing.
so you guys have totally different motivations you’re looking towards eternity while the other person is looking towards temporary things and so I think that is just so important to realize that that’s not gonna work in a relationship when you guys both have different mindsets and different values and things that motivate you so that’s the first reason the next reason is for a lack of true intimacy if you don’tshare that same passion in your heart for the Lord the true intimacy will never be there what’s that newness and excitement wearsoff you’re gonna long for that deeper connection and someone to relate withwho has a like mind as you do so that lack of true intimacy will definitelycause problems in your relationship so what a lot of people think is oh I’llmarry them now change them later and so they’re not Christians now
But I’m sureonce we get married they’ll see how I AB see how much I love Jesus and hopefullychange and God will work it out and maybe that might be true that mighthappen but I know that’s not the case for a lot of people so in the beginningyour spouse or your boyfriend or whatever might go to church with youmight really support you but say like no that’s not for me but still really besupportive but as you go on in marriage or on in dating that support and thatdedication to like uplifting you and whatever you believe in is slowly gonnafade away and that will really damage your relationship so reason number fouris competition your spouse or your boyfriend or whoever is gonna constantlyfeel like they have to one-up you or feel like they’re happywithout Jesus or prove to you that you don’t need God so that competitionbetween each other to try to prove like no I’m right no I’m right no I’m rightit’s gonna be a really damaging and just will cause a lot of fights in therelationship so just looking for a spouse or a boyfriend that has the samevalues and beliefs as you do is gonna make the relationship so much smootherthe last reason is compromise if you’re in a relationship with a non-believeryou are probably going to have to compromise your face his friend group orher friend group and your friend group is gonna be totally different this groupof friends loves the world your group of friends loves the church and loves Godso those two groups combined don’t really mesh well together just becauseyou have different values different morals and beliefs and so when you putthose two together they’re not gonna have fun they’re not gonna enjoy theirtime together both of you will feel held back by the other which will cause a lotof bitterness and resentment between you two so I would highly recommend notgetting into a relationship with a non-believer if you are a Christianbecause you are just gonna be totally separate and how you operate and whenyou offer it with someone who has those same beliefs as you do you guys life isso much easier it goes so much smoother and you’ll just have a happier healthierrelationship in marriage and in dating one of the biggest takeaways from thisvideo is I really want you to be intentional about seeking God’s wisdombefore getting into it relationship I think that is so important if you seeany red flags that you’re kind of uneasy about I would definitely talk to Godabout it and see what he wants to do he’ll tell you he’ll let you know inyour heart so if you guys have any questions make sure to leave them in thecomments down below. | https://medium.com/@soobiechau/dating-unbeliever-should-i-date-a-non-believer-that-is-the-question-dff3a1ea521d | ['Soobie Chau'] | 2019-12-22 04:12:51.408000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Dating Advice', 'Christian Living', 'Christian Dating', 'Dating Tips'] |
UNPIVOT multiple columns into tidy pairs with BigQuery and a SQL UDF | We don’t want multiple columns, each for one date. We want to have (date, value) pairs. Since this problem seems so common, I wrote two BigQuery persistent UDFs to solve this:
fhoffa.x.unpivot()
fhoffa.x.cast_kv_array_to_date_float()
Let’s review how they work.
Unpivot with fhoffa.x.unpivot()
Just give unpivot() a full row, and the regex of how the name of each of the columns to unpivot look.
With the Apple tables:
SELECT a.geo_type, region, transportation_type, unpivotted
FROM `fh-bigquery.public_dump.applemobilitytrends_20200414` a
, UNNEST(fhoffa.x.unpivot(a, '_2020')) unpivotted
Unpivotting Apple Mobility Trends
With the JHU tables:
SELECT province_state, country_region, unpivotted
FROM `bigquery-public-data.covid19_jhu_csse.confirmed_cases` a
, UNNEST(fhoffa.x.unpivot(a, '_[0-9]')) unpivotted
Unpivotting JHU tables
That’s so much better, but we are not done. How do we transform these values into dates and numbers?
Cast arrays with cast_kv_array_to_date_float()
We can re-cast our unpivotted columns with cast_kv_array_to_date_float() .
What’s even more “infuriating” when casting these columns to dates is that they use different formats for encoding dates. You don’t have to worry as the UDF can take the date format as an input too.
For example, with the Apple tables:
SELECT a.geo_type, region, transportation_type, unpivotted.*
FROM `fh-bigquery.public_dump.applemobilitytrends_20200414` a
, UNNEST(fhoffa.x.cast_kv_array_to_date_float(fhoffa.x.unpivot(a, '_2020'), '_%Y_%m_%d')) unpivotted
Unpivotting and casting Apple Mobility Trends
And with the JHU tables:
SELECT province_state, country_region, unpivotted.*
FROM `bigquery-public-data.covid19_jhu_csse.confirmed_cases` a
, UNNEST(fhoffa.x.cast_kv_array_to_date_float(fhoffa.x.unpivot(a, '_[0-9]'), '_%m_%d_%y')) unpivotted
Unpivotting and casting the JHU tables
See? These results look way tidier than the starting tables.
Bonus: The covid19_usafacts.confirmed_cases table
Once we have these 2 UDFs, applying them to other tables becomes really easy:
SELECT county_fips_code, county_name, state, state_fips_code, unpivotted.*
FROM `bigquery-public-data.covid19_usafacts.confirmed_cases` a
, UNNEST(fhoffa.x.cast_kv_array_to_date_float(fhoffa.x.unpivot(a, '_[0-9]'), '_%m_%d_%y')) unpivotted
Unpivotting the`covid19_usafacts.confirmed_cases` table
How-to
Check my previous post about Persistent UDFs in BigQuery:
The source code for these 2 UDFs is:
AS ((
# https://medium.com/@hoffa/how-to-unpivot-multiple-columns-into-tidy-pairs-with-sql-and-bigquery-d9d0e74ce675
SELECT
ARRAY_AGG(STRUCT(
REGEXP_EXTRACT(y, '[^"]*') AS key
, REGEXP_EXTRACT(y, r':([^"]*)\"?[,}\]]') AS value
))
FROM UNNEST((
SELECT REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(json,col_regex||r'[^:]+:\"?[^"]+\"?') arr
FROM (SELECT TO_JSON_STRING(x) json))) y
)); CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION fhoffa.x.unpivot(x ANY TYPE, col_regex STRING)AS ((SELECTARRAY_AGG(STRUCT(REGEXP_EXTRACT(y, '[^"]*') AS key, REGEXP_EXTRACT(y, r':([^"]*)\"?[,}\]]') AS value))FROM UNNEST((SELECT REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(json,col_regex||r'[^:]+:\"?[^"]+\"?') arrFROM (SELECT TO_JSON_STRING(x) json))) y));
AS ((
# https://medium.com/@hoffa/how-to-unpivot-multiple-columns-into-tidy-pairs-with-sql-and-bigquery-d9d0e74ce675
SELECT ARRAY_AGG(STRUCT(SAFE.PARSE_DATE(date_format, key) AS date, SAFE_CAST(value AS FLOAT64) AS value))
FROM UNNEST(arr)
)); CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION fhoffa.x.cast_kv_array_to_date_float(arr ANY TYPE, date_format STRING)AS ((SELECT ARRAY_AGG(STRUCT(SAFE.PARSE_DATE(date_format, key) AS date, SAFE_CAST(value AS FLOAT64) AS value))FROM UNNEST(arr)));
The secret motor behind this function: Transforming a whole row into JSON with TO_JSON_STRING() and then doing a REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL over it.
Historical note
My previous solution to UNPIVOT in BigQuery has received than 5k views on Stack Overflow:
Next steps
Once I write documentation for these functions, and we settle on their definitive name — I’ll submit them to our shared repository with community UDFs ( bqutil ).
Want more?
Check Google’s public dataset program, featuring an increasing collection of COVID-19 related datasets in BigQuery:
I’m Felipe Hoffa, a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. Follow me on @felipehoffa, find my previous posts on medium.com/@hoffa, and all about BigQuery on reddit.com/r/bigquery. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-unpivot-multiple-columns-into-tidy-pairs-with-sql-and-bigquery-d9d0e74ce675 | ['Felipe Hoffa'] | 2020-05-07 18:51:55.466000+00:00 | ['Sql', 'Data Science', 'Bigquery', 'Data Engineering'] |
Alias | I’m not the apostrophe between I and m
Nor am I always the I in my every poem
“I” is an alias I adopt
To infiltrate the darkness
And expose its secrets to the light.
Yet “I” is not my only cover:
I sometimes strut in She’s shoes too
When my too-tight ones hurt my feet.
I tend to also ally with We
To keep myself company
On this lonely page
And occasionally become You
To call myself out
Or find me
In you.
But unless I explicitly
Unmask myself as I,
Assume I’m the other
“I” talking
Because “I” is a voice
I speak through for those
Muted by circumstance;
The surface of a mirror
I hold before you to show you
The darkest recesses of your soul;
A wound I slice into my flesh
To bleed from another’s pain;
A rope I climb down
To follow our demons to hell
And you are my tether
To emerge unscathed;
A beggar’s bowl I pass around
To solicit sympathy for
Another’s tragedy.
So next time I bemoan
My insignificant existence
Or reference my junkie parents
Who sold my Yorkie
To buy more blow,
Feel sorry for “I”;
Not me. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/alias-978398ac453b | ['Abo. Akoto'] | 2017-11-14 14:03:32.389000+00:00 | ['Empathy', 'Disclaimer', 'Poetry', 'Identity', 'Self'] |
That’s a nice service. Be a shame if it… went missing. | Graph from Kiali
That’s a nice service. Be a shame if it… went missing.
So, as part of ongoing learning I am developing what would have to be the most complex wedding website in the history of man. It is a golang powered, multi-service, JSON → gRPC transcoded istio mediated REST API consumed by an Angular frontend service, and I had a bug with CORS.
Network diagram (ish)
It started out actually a bug on CORS. The API is transcoded from REST to gRPC by the excellent gateway written in Golang and forwarded on to the service. This worked fine with $ curl , but when it came time to implement it in a browser the browser has set up Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers as a means to prevent cross site scripting. I hadn’t implemented these. I did, pushed it to prod and the problem went away.
Sometimes.
The problem being, the page would sometimes 404 on the options request.
Debuggery
Theory 1: I can’t develop well
The simplest theory is that when implementing the CORS component of the application I missed some request property in the routing stack that the browser fired off.
However, after looking for this awhile I used the “copy as curl” feature of Chrome to reproduce the issue outside the browser so I could manipulate the request more easily.
And it worked:
-X OPTIONS \
-H 'Host: api.
-H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0' \
-H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \
-H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' --compressed \
-H 'Access-Control-Request-Method: GET' \
-H 'Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization' \
-H 'Origin:
-H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
-H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' \
-I curl ' https://api.tld.com/v1alpha2/check-in' -X OPTIONS \-H 'Host: api. tld .com' \-H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0' \-H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \-H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' --compressed \-H 'Access-Control-Request-Method: GET' \-H 'Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization' \-H 'Origin: http:// tld .local' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \-H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' \-I
access-control-allow-origin:
access-control-allow-credentials: true
access-control-allow-methods: GET,POST,PATCH,PUT,DELETE,OPTIONS
access-control-allow-headers: Content-Type,Accept,Authorization
date: Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:40:38 GMT
server: envoy HTTP/2 200access-control-allow-origin: http:// tld .local access-control-allow-credentials: trueaccess-control-allow-methods: GET,POST,PATCH,PUT,DELETE,OPTIONSaccess-control-allow-headers: Content-Type,Accept,Authorizationdate: Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:40:38 GMTserver: envoy
That was the bizarre part
Theory 2: Envoy is not propagating CORS requests
Another theory while debugging was that Envoy was somehow not propagating the CORS requests. To address this, I introduced the CORS configuration to Istio such that Istio should return CORS headers appropriately.
While this worked (the above is generated by Istio and not the app), the 404 persisted
Theory 3: There’s a bug in Chrome
The next theory was perhaps this was a chrome specific bug. Indeed, in switching to Firefox the issue didn’t initially present.
However, after a few minutes it presented differently.
The OPTIONS request now worked! Hooray! However, the authentication server started to 404. Reloading the page caused the authentication server to respond correctly, but the api server to 404.
Live tweeting the fixing.
Theory 4: Envoy is not delimiting load balancing requests
The last theory was that the connection was being reused across multiple domains, and that sharing the connection was causing ${SOMETHING} wrong with the istio/envoy combination.
The necessary background is that both api.tld.com and login.tld.com both resolve to the same IP:
$ dig api.tld.com +short
35.205.247.239 $ dig login.tld.com +short
35.205.247.239
They are additionally sharing an SSL certificate with SAN extensions.
$ openssl s_client -connect andrewhowden.com:443 -showcerts | openssl x509 -noout -text
DNS:andrewhowden.com, DNS:api.tld.com, DNS:login.tld.com, tld.com, DNS:pgp.andrewhowden.com, DNS: X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:DNS:andrewhowden.com, DNS:api.tld.com, DNS:login.tld.com, tld.com, DNS:pgp.andrewhowden.com, DNS: www.tl.com , DNS: www.tld.com
That means in principle, the connection can be reused. It took a little while to reach this conclusion, and when I did reach it I looked for ways to verify it. It turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to verify whether this connection is being shared — chrome://net-internals shows two connections, one prefixed with a pm/ :
Not the actual net internals (bug is fixed), but an example.
The “fix”
I had previously done some research on how TLS works, and both connections require TLS. They must negotiate an ephemeral symmetric key, but they can reuse the same key for both connections as TLS is ~ TCP and not HTTP.
So, to force different connections I gave them different certificates — without the SAN extension. Different certificates means different public keys, and a symmetric key that could not be shared across the the two connections.
No more connection reuse!
The issue immediately went away. At the time it was ~11:30PM, and kind of could not believe it.
Learnings
Like many bugs this one was me discovering that a conceptual model of how things worked (that is, separate connections per domain) did not work as I imagined it did.
Having done the theoretical reading beforehand about TCP and TLS I knew in principle what could be the problem and, despite not being able to “prove” that my theory was correct pushing the “fix” was harmless if there was no bug, and fixed it if there was.
So, the process was just:
Investigate Hypothesize Alter Repeat
Additionally, I was debugging this late at night and on a personal project. Late at night meant I was tired, but a personal project meant that the worst person I could disappoint is me. The tiredness contributed to an inability to think creatively about the problem, but there was also no stress of getting it fixed — I could only disappoint myself (and wifey).
Rediscovery
While writing this post, I found not only that I was not the first to discover this, but that there is a “better” fix. I will implement this … at some point.
Additionally, it turns out that the sharing of connections is part of the specification of HTTP/2.
In Conclusion
Bugs are hard. Debugging them is interesting, and requires some combination of previous research, creative thinking and stubbornness.
❤ | https://medium.com/@andrewhowdencom/thats-a-nice-service-be-a-shame-if-it-went-missing-caf7a9e73040 | ['Andrew Howden'] | 2019-02-01 10:18:52.300000+00:00 | ['Istio', 'Cors', 'Debugging', 'Envoy', 'API'] |
Event-driven workflows with AWS Lambda | One of Prefect Cloud’s major features is an expressive GraphQL API. You can query, filter, and sort for any information about your workflows, from run histories to internal DAG structures. You can also take actions via GraphQL mutations. This post provides a walkthrough of setting up an AWS Lambda function for triggering Prefect Cloud flow runs using the Cloud GraphQL API.
If you want to dive right in, all code from this post is available in this public GitHub repository.
The basic setup
Suppose we want to run an ETL job anytime new data lands in one of our S3 buckets in AWS. Instead of setting up a long-running polling process to watch for changes, we can instead create an AWS Lambda function which is called anytime a PUT event occurs on the bucket. (This scenario is merely one of many that could justify an AWS Lambda, and nothing we present here is unique to this particular trigger!)
Setting this up is as simple as:
creating a new Lambda function with Python 3.6 runtime
setting the appropriate trigger event
copy / pasting the following code snippet for your Lambda function code:
Template for an AWS Lambda function which triggers Prefect Cloud flow runs; code available at https://github.com/cicdw/prefect-cloud-lambda
The only configuration required for this to start working immediately are the following three environment variables:
PREFECT__FLOW_ID : the ID of the Flow you wish to run with each event
: the ID of the Flow you wish to run with each event PREFECT__CLOUD__API : the API URL for Prefect Cloud ( https://api.prefect.io )
: the API URL for Prefect Cloud ( ) PREFECT__CLOUD__AUTH_TOKEN : a Prefect Cloud API token
Enhancements
Depending on the nature of the triggering event and the workflow, Prefect allows you to take this much further than simply creating a Flow Run.
Parameters
Prefect allows for parametrized workflows as a first-class pattern. Parameters are a special type of task whose output can be specified at runtime (this pattern is supported because Prefect allows for data to be exchanged between tasks). The only requirement for parameters is that their output be JSON serializable objects. In our current context, we might want to send information about the triggering event as a parameter to our Prefect flow. For example, this would allow us to have a single flow that could process information coming from many different buckets — simply provide the bucket name as a parameter!
Example of altering the GraphQL inputs to pass parameters
Idempotency keys
There are situations in which we expect an event to result in multiple, duplicated triggers. For example, perhaps we have a flow that responds to any and all actions performed on an S3 bucket and we want to consider groups of actions which occur in a short timeframe as a single triggering event. Prefect allows for users to hedge against this scenario through the use of “idempotency keys” on flow runs. When provided, Prefect ensures that one and only one run is created per key. Just as with parameters, providing an idempotency key is simple:
Example of altering the GraphQL inputs to pass an idempotency key
Flexible Start Times
When creating ad-hoc flow runs, there is no requirement that your flow should begin immediately. Users can create ad-hoc runs far in the future if their use case requires it. To do so, simply provide your desired scheduled start time as an ISO formatted timestamp:
Example of altering the GraphQL inputs to pass an altered start time
Conclusion
Here we have presented all of the pieces users need for triggering workflows in Prefect Cloud through AWS Lambda. As you can see, this is as simple as making an authenticated POST request to the Cloud GraphQL API — anywhere you can make such a request can serve as a trigger for Cloud flow runs! | https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/event-driven-workflows-with-aws-lambda-2ef9d8cc8f1a | ['Christopher White'] | 2019-11-04 18:23:49.330000+00:00 | ['Workflow Automation', 'AWS', 'Python', 'Etl', 'Prefect'] |
Ktor in Server-Side Development: The Basics | Get Started With Coding
In the application module, we need to implement features like authentication, login, security, define routes, like we’re going to do in this example, to simplify handling endpoints, etc.
We need to start adding routes to the service inside the module function using the routing lambda function to define the endpoint’s behavior. Routes are nothing but a feature to simplify request handling. Have a look:
Ktor routing declaration
get Request
To keep things simple, we will add a route at the root path using lambda’s get function. In the lambda block to respond back, we can use Ktor ApplicationCall .
Inside the get function, we will respond with a simple text by invoking the respondText function on the call object. We need to pass the message and content type, as shown below:
Ktor get request
To test this implementation, hit the run button beside the main function, and then you’ll see the following log inside the run tab in the bottom panel of the Intellij. Have a look:
Now, click on the URL (http://0.0.0.0:8080) or type localhost:8080 in your browser; it should show the “From Ktor” message. Have a look:
post request
Now that we’ve implemented get request successfully, let’s build a simple post request in which we’ll read the request body and respond with the request body and “received data” string. Have a look:
Ktor post request
Here we have to use the receive function with expecting type on the Kotr ApplicationCall object. We have to concatenate the response with the “received data” label and send it back using the respondText function.
To test this, click the run button beside the main function. After successful execution, open the terminal tab in the bottom panel of the IDE and run the following command:
curl -X POST -d “sample data” localhost:8080
If you’re facing any problems, try changing the URL from localhost:8080 to http://http://0.0.0.0:8080/. This shows the output in the following line. | https://medium.com/better-programming/ktor-in-server-side-development-the-basics-81ce4bbba878 | ['Siva Ganesh Kantamani'] | 2020-10-15 21:05:39.801000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Server Side', 'Kotlin', 'Ktor', 'Software Development'] |
My Child Is An Early Bird — Can I Do Something About It? | Photo by Shirota Yuri on Unsplash
Early morning wakings are one of the toughest sleep problems to fix, if not the toughest. If you’re wondering why, it’s because after a decent night’s rest your child has got more energy to fight sleep in the morning. And the truth is, all of us come up into lighter sleep phases in the last hour of our sleep, preparing to take up for the day.
Remember, however, your child is waking early only if he is not getting the right amount of night rest for his age and his body. In other words, if your child sleeps from 7 PM to 6 AM, it’s a perfectly reasonable schedule for him, even though it might feel early to you.
We can’t ask our children to sleep more than 11 hours at night. Their bodies are usually rested after this much sleep, and they won’t be able to do more.
Also keep in mind the following fact: if your child is waking even at 10/½ hours, if he is rested and energetic in the morning and makes it easily till his naptime, then he’s getting enough rest for his body.
Problems arise if your child sleeps from, say, 7 PM to 5:30 AM. In this case, you’ll need to push the bedtime later by 15-minute increments, then watching to see if your child can sleep later in the morning, A word of caution, though: Making the bedtime later can often have the opposite effect of causing your child to wake up earlier. This is the reason why things need to be done in small steps.
Here are some other ideas to try if your child is an early bird:
• Make sure that your child’s room is very, very dark.
• If there are any sounds that could be waking him — such as garbage trucks, barking dogs, sprinklers — put white noise in the room and make the volume loud enough to protect him from these sounds
• Remove all stimulating toys from your child’s crib or bed, which can be distracting once the sun enters his room.
• If you are checking in on your child within the last hour before his wake time, your interaction may prevent him from returning to sleep. Don’t check on him if it’s less than one hour till his wake time.
• Make sure the bedtime is not too late for your child’s age. Adjust the bedtime earlier by 15-minute increments, and watch what happens in the morning. In doing so, you will allow your child to sleep later, as he is less overtired at bedtime. If he does wake earlier, return to your previous bedtime. If moving the bedtime earlier has no effect on the wake time, you may want to consider using the earlier bedtime anyway to help your child get the right amount of night sleep for his age.
• Make sure your child is not hungry. If you have a child under 12 months and have newly begun to wean feedings, you may want to slow the process down to give him more time to adjust. Moreover, be careful to ensure that you are offering the breast or bottle more often during the day to help him transition his previous nighttime feeds to the daytime, so he won’t be hungry going down for sleep at night.
TO LEARN MORE CLICK HERE | https://medium.com/@Reborntosuccess/my-child-is-an-early-bird-can-i-do-something-about-it-e2f4d46bb06a | ['Shimon Ben Zikri'] | 2020-09-01 16:18:44.656000+00:00 | ['Baby Sleep', 'Early Morning', 'Children'] |
How to Improve Your Beginner Drawing Skills | Do you want to come out of the pandemic with a new skill? I most definitely do!
Do you find yourself incredibly bored from watching everything online? I know I was!
Here are some quick drawing tips I use to improve my drawing skills during my off-time.
Use a chart to get the proportions right. Put a grid on what you want to draw, and reference the individual grids throughout your drawing process. Track your progress. Try to draw what you see!
Tip: start with a general outline
2. Have the following tools: a sharpener, some sharp pencils, an eraser with pointed edges, and a ruler. You do not need fancy tools to start, just start!
3. Use another piece of paper or glove guard to prevent smudging. I tend to drag my right-hand when drawing, so I have to be mindful of lifting my hand.
Example of an artist drawing glove
4. Have persistence in finishing the majority of the drawing to make it look somewhat complete. If you have perfectionist tendencies, you either can spend all your time on one masterpiece, or you can opt to do what I do. I highly recommend having a list of things you want to draw to encourage you to stop spending too much time on one drawing. As a beginner, feeling burnout is common, so finish as much as you can, and get exposure to new drawing techniques to slowly improve your skills.
An incomplete drawing
5. Be in an environment where there is good lighting and the surface you draw on is flat, smooth, and hard. I prefer to be sitting on a chair, rather than laying down in bed to draw.
Photo credits to @lishakov on unsplash.
6. Don’t focus on what you can’t do, focus on getting it done to the best of your ability. Get inspired by following different artists’ work online.
Same flat, different styles! Search for different styles that inspire you to be more creative.
7. Practice when you can and as often as you can!
Photo Credits to @corinnekutz on unsplash.
8. Put something in the background to zone out. I recommend playing your favorite music playlist, a podcast, or an audiobook in the background. If you have a highly self-critical narrative going on in your mind, having something in the background to focus on can help get you in the zone.
Photo credits to @cdx2 on unsplash.
9. Stretch and beware of neck and hand cramps. Have snacks and stay hydrated. As a beginner, make it leisurely or else you won’t stick with it!
Photo Credits to @adeolueletu on unsplash
10. Have fun! This isn’t meant to be a torturous process! Good luck everyone!
Photo Credits to @bernardhermant on unsplash
Let’s hope and pray that the pandemic will go away and we all emerge with some kind of new skill to share with the world! | https://medium.com/@heka105/how-to-improve-your-beginner-drawing-skills-feecadc95e8f | ['He Ka'] | 2020-11-25 17:03:22.798000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Tips', 'Sketch', 'Beginner', 'Inspiration'] |
Benfica has the first 5G stadium in Portugal | NOS announced that it provided the Sport Lisboa e Benfica stadium with 5G coverage, allowing supporters and the entire collaborative structure of the club to take advantage of the most disruptive characteristics of this new technology.
In practice, this means that the more than 65 thousand fans who fill the Estádio da Luz, when this becomes possible after the end of the limitations imposed by the pandemic, will have access to a mobile internet on average 10 times faster, with higher speeds at 1 Gbps.
This innovation will also increase the capacity of the network, making it possible to process a larger volume of data within the stadium. NOS explains that, before the pandemic, with the presence of the public, the average volume of data per game exceeded 1 Terabyte, and it is expected that with the 5G this number will double or triple, depending on people’s adherence to the technology.
There are also plans to transform the experience of those who watch Benfica games through immersive access to content, thanks to the combination of 5G with technologies such as virtual or augmented reality.
Follow us on social media: Instagram; Facebook; Twitter; Youtube. | https://medium.com/@ineews/benfica-has-the-first-5g-stadium-in-portugal-6ce0c24bf0e9 | [] | 2021-04-13 11:40:58.059000+00:00 | ['5g', 'Internet', 'Empresas', 'Companies', 'Benfica'] |
Why You Shouldn’t Limit Yourself to One Niche | Why You Shouldn’t Limit Yourself to One Niche
You are not a one-dimensional person, so don’t be a one-dimensional writer
Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash
I write across many different topics. I don’t take much stock in the appearance of it because I know it doesn’t matter much. But there’s one reason I got so many tags: I don’t stick to one niche. I write outside my comfort zone of topics. I don’t consider any topic off-limits and am willing to explore with my writing.
I see a lot of advice that urges people to write what they know and in a niche they’re familiar with. However, I do the opposite. I write across various niches and a plethora of topics. I go against the grain, and there are pros and cons to doing so: People who are my loyal readers have no idea what to expect in my next article. I wonder sometimes whether I’m shooting myself in the foot by not having that consistency.
But that’s part of the beauty, isn’t it? Writing across various niches puts my readers out of their comfort zone, but above all, it puts me out of my comfort zone. Some people like predictability, while others embrace the unpredictability.
A lot of people ask me how I know so much. The truth is I don’t. Some articles, before I write them, involve significant research on a topic. The research is always a learning experience for me. The writing is always an experience where I have fun and learn. It’s more about the experience of writing than about the checklist task at the end of the day.
Just because you know nothing about something doesn’t mean you can’t write about it. And research helps you learn and build credibility in something you’re inherently not knowledgable about. You don’t have to be a historian to write about history. You don’t have to be a licensed psychologist to write about psychology and mental health.
But when you don’t have the credibility, you have to learn yourself. No one wants to read too much about someone’s personal speculation about finances, stocks, or cryptocurrency, especially if they’re an amateur. However, if it’s clear that you’ve done your research, you’re more credible, even if you’re not an expert.
Personal experience has credibility because, well, you experienced it. But a personal essay is a genre where it’s difficult for others to extrapolate from your experience. What worked for you in overcoming trauma, for example, probably isn’t a one-size fix-all for everyone. The “this worked for me and it’ll work for you” type of advice is slowly but surely becoming another pet peeve of mine.
As for staying in one niche, here’s the thing about the problem with restraint: You’ll never be an expert on everything. There will always be someone smarter than you, better than you, and more accomplished than you. Within my sphere of runners, I’m slow. I have many friends that have broken 15 minutes in the 5k, and I haven’t (15:36)— that’s the bar that I compare myself to. But does that stop me from writing about running? No.
As a person, you’re not one-dimensional, so why follow advice across the internet on why you should be a one-dimensional writer?
Writing across multiple niches is a sign of growth. It’s a sign of a willingness to experiment. I would not have done nearly as well as a writer if I didn’t experiment with satire, or delve into researching true crime and history, or start writing more personal essays. These are experiments that have only been beneficial for me because I knew that there was no harm in trying to experiment. After all, what is there to lose?
For example, I know absolutely nothing about cryptocurrency. I’ve invested in Bitcoin once or twice and made money out of sheer luck, but I know nothing. That’s not going to stop me from writing about it and learning more.
And then there’s this perception that everyone only wants to read something written by the experts. But that’s not true. In some fields, especially American politics, distrust of experts is pretty high. Of course, that distrust comes often with a mixed connotation in politics, but every field has an establishment and gatekeepers. Take religious experts — it’s difficult to trust the Church when it’s mired in scandals and reckonings.
And so the writing world would do better with more opinions from people who aren’t experts and aren’t gatekeepers. People are different, and there’s a variety of opinions and perceptions in any field. Some people say that democracy is not a good thing because it promotes tyranny by mob rule and the majority, but in a marketplace of written content, I believe democracy is a good thing.
We shouldn’t treat readers like children. Push outside your comfort zone and write about things you’re not the most comfortable with because it offers you a window into a new world of writers and readers. Not only does it diversify your writing and content, but it helps you network with an audience that previously didn’t engage with you, as well as with writers and editors that previously didn’t engage.
I hear advice all the time to avoid politics and religion, but I have largely ignored it when I write. I have had people use every profanity in the playbook in negative comments about my stances on both topics. But because I write across a variety of niches, some of those people would read a piece on another topic, like a satire, and say, “Wow! This was really funny!”
It baffled me that they didn’t realize I was the exact same person they cursed out two days ago on the internet, but it taught me one thing: There is a population of readers who don’t care who the author is. They care about the product and the content. For a lot of people, the product matters more than the packaging and the brand, and always does and always will.
When I write across various niches, I strike out. A lot. I make mistakes. I err on the side of caution more when I know little about business, finance, or the economy. I’ll try and do it on occasion, but I tend not to because those aren’t topics I’m particularly passionate about.
I still want to say that most of my success here has been attributed to luck, but writing and diversifying my work has been very helpful. And it’s helped me grow my confidence as a writer. I never thought I would write satire, and then I did. I never thought I’d write about history, and I did. For what I don’t know and can’t discover through research, I try to be upfront and tell my readers.
If you don’t know something, restraint is not always the best policy. Diving into that unknown is. | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/why-you-shouldnt-limit-yourself-to-one-niche-a5b18f434a20 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-09-26 02:55:21.726000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Ideas', 'Creativity', 'Nonfiction', 'Writing'] |
Latest Tech Gadgets Entrepreneurs Want To Make Their Lives Easier | Latest Tech Gadgets Entrepreneurs Want To Make Their Lives Easier
Developments in the tech industries have revolutionized our life. Every time a new gadget is invented, our lives are impacted. Almost every entrepreneur is so busy with their work that they can’t even notice the amazing gadgets that are invented for them. These gadgets can ease your mind and daily work. These gadgets have the power to change your life and can make your life more comfortable. The most important benefit of using these gadgets is that they will save you time.
If you’re an office entrepreneur or working from home on a laptop, then these gadgets are for you. They can be used on laptops, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used on a desktop, computer, or mobile device. These gadgets have amazing features and cheap prices compared to their features. I have compiled a list of 3 gadgets which will ease your work, mind, and will save you more time.
$269.99
Entrepreneur using Trio Portable Monitor
A trio is an amazing gadget for laptops that has dual portable monitors. The screen size of each monitor is 12.5 inches and has a resolution of 1080p. It is more useful for study, video calls, and showing presentations at the office. It can also be rotated up to 270°, which makes it more perfect for a presentation. Both screens have USB connection wires. When you plug them in, they do not need any driver installation. The settings you apply to your laptop screen will automatically be applied to these monitors, such as brightness and contrast.
You might be thinking trio monitors are useful, but hard to carry. However, that’s not the case. They are so lightweight they don’t give your laptop a thicker look and are easy to transport. You can also detach the monitors easily if you don’t need them. The monitors don’t need to be attached to laptops; they can also be set both apart on the table. You can also set them vertically or one vertically and the second horizontally.
$99.00
Mokibo Touchpad Fusion Keyboard
Mokibo is a slim and unique keyboard that has touch sensors installed inside. This keyboard cannot only be used for typing but can also be turned into a large touchpad. Like other touchpads, this keyboard has scroll features. The keyboard has soft buttons, which means it will not reduce your typing efficiency. It also has bluetooth and can pair and connect to 3 devices at the same time. The keyboard has a battery of 590mAh, which can be used up to 60hrs after a full charge.
$249.00
PrintPen Portable Printer
PrintPen is a mini portable printer that allows you to print on any rough or smooth surface. PrintPen is powered by its app where you can get predesigned mockups. You can also design something on your own and see it in reality. Because it is portable. you can print your design anywhere, be it for shoes, car rims, walls, mugs, or t-shirts. You don’t need to be an expert to use it, it is extremely easy to use.
The inks of the printer are available in red, black, and navy blue, which are skin-friendly. It takes about 1 second to print your design and weighs 250g, which is easy to carry anywhere. Entrepreneurs can use it to print the barcodes or logos on their products. One ink box can print 3,500 prints, which means each print costs $0.01.
Any one of these gadgets are great gifts for entrepreneurs or smart investments for yourself. They will not only save you time but will also give you amazing results. These gadgets may look like ordinary gadgets, but they have the power to change your life and save your money.
Have any more gift ideas for entrepreneurs? Let us know down in the comments.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.
This article originally published on GREY Journal: https://greyjournal.net/hustle/work-tech/latest-tech-gadgets-entrepreneurs-want-to-make-their-lives-easier/ | https://medium.com/greyjournal/latest-tech-gadgets-entrepreneurs-want-to-make-their-lives-easier-490c68524f5b | ['Grey Journal Staff'] | 2021-11-30 15:06:56.091000+00:00 | ['Featured', 'Holiday', 'Gadgets', 'Cap Ukhanwasifgmail Com', 'Gift Ideas'] |
Launching a macOS Instance in AWS | The Non-Technical Part
AWS Re:Invent is always a super exciting time of year for all of the cloud nerds, myself included. AWS always tends to save their huge announcements for Re:Invent, and this year was no different.
During today’s keynote address, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced that AWS would be bringing macOS capability into their EC2 fleet, allowing AWS users to launch macOS instances in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.
This change allows Apple developers the ability to utilize the unlimited flexibility of the AWS Public Cloud, no longer needing to worry about physical infrastructure to host. Less worry about maintaining physical infrastructure means more innovation, and as an Apple consumer, I couldn’t be more excited.
The Technical Part
If you want to spin up your own macOS EC2 instance playground, you can follow the below instructions, and in no time, you’ll have a fresh macOS instance.
First, log into your AWS Account. Once you’re there, you’ll want to open EC2.
EC2
Once you are inside the EC2 console, you’ll want to launch an instance by clicking “Launch Instances”
Launch Instances
Once you have clicked launch, you will be brought into the AWS Marketplace, where you can choose your instance image, known as an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI. Here is where we will select macOS. At the time of publishing this article, macOS Catalina and Mojave are right at the top, as shown below.
macOS
Once you have selected your AMI, you’ll select your instance type. At this time, there is only 1 instance type that supports macOS, and that is mac1.metal.
Instance Type
From here, click “Review and Launch” at the bottom, and boom! You have a macOS instance ready to go!
Conclusion
As an enormous AWS fanatic, and pretty savvy Apple user, I couldn’t be happier that AWS has expanded its cloud offerings to the Apple sphere. I think this is an excellent move, allowing AWS to further expand their cloud market share, as well as allowing Apple devs to utilize the cloud and bring their applications to anyone, anywhere, any time.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please feel free to check out my other Medium articles, and to visit my LinkedIn, where I am active and always willing to chat about all things AWS.
👋 Join FAUN today and receive similar stories each week in your inbox! ️ Get your weekly dose of the must-read tech stories, news, and tutorials.
Follow us on Twitter 🐦 and Facebook 👥 and Instagram 📷 and join our Facebook and Linkedin Groups 💬 | https://faun.pub/launching-a-macos-instance-in-aws-1ccc25fda261 | ['Thomas Gallagher'] | 2020-12-07 16:32:48.557000+00:00 | ['Cloud', 'DevOps', 'Apple', 'AWS', 'Mac'] |
My ideas on ‘self-love’ | Photo by https://unsplash.com/@contentpixie
It doesn’t matter how loud you are, something silent and soft is going to make you quiet one day.
All the hurt you carry inside you as it belongs to the broken bones of soldiers in the war across the world is going to make you want to heal your wounds one day.
All the cold, numb pain you sip in the morning, once out of the bed.. Like it doesn’t matter how who leave you anymore is going to make the sky rain down someday
And the thought you have every day, that the world will be better without you in, just want to let you know that it doesn’t matter useless or used you feel at this hour
~It doesn’t matter who loves or hates you this morning
~It doesn’t matter who pretend to care or not to care for you every time you need
~It doesn’t matter what others like or dislike about your eyes, face, and body
You should know, that someday or sometime you are going to be grateful for choosing to stay
You are going to make yourself kind and proud
And even you don’t end up doing anything great, know that the love you give yourself somehow is saving the world that feels you have failed… | https://medium.com/@ahalarul/my-ideas-on-self-love-cadce864501 | ['Blank Voice'] | 2020-12-16 03:18:59.708000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Writer', 'Courage', 'Self Love Courage', 'Self Love In Blackness'] |
Equal Citizens March 2019 Update | By Lawrence Lessig
There could be only one subject for this monthly update: HR1.
As I’m sure many of you saw, the House of Representatives passed the most important (small d-) democratic reform package in fifty years — with public funding for congressional campaigns, gerrymandering reform, automatic voter registration, and strong new ethics regulations to govern Congress. The bill is an astonishing reaffirmation of the basic commitment of a representative democracy. And that it passed and was made a priority marks enormous progress in our fight.
Because some of you will remember what was called a quixotic campaign just four years ago: When I decided to try to make reform a central issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, I was convinced by many that the only way to fix this democracy was to bundle many reforms into a single package. Mine was close to HR1 — HR1 is stronger in some respects (automatic voter registration), and less ambitious in others (vouchers would be an even better public funding mechanism). But many didn’t see the need for the bundle, and few saw the need to make it a priority. Obama signaled the importance of a bundle in his final speech to the nation; he also signaled its importance. It is so incredibly encouraging to see the party follow his lead, and propose a series of changes that if enacted would move us far down the road to a representative democracy.
The real hero in this story is Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD). I met Sarbanes for the first time just after my book, Republic, Lost (2011), was published. He was at that time just beginning to think about how to make reform possible. For many years, he worked to craft the core (and most important, in my view) reform in HR1 — public funding for congressional campaigns. And his team has worked tirelessly to convince the Democratic leadership to take the bill up, and to make it a priority.
Some in our community have criticized the Democrats for pushing the reform without Republican support. As Nick Penniman wrote in Real Clear Politics,
the legislation was not crafted with any input from Republican lawmakers, and while it has the support of the entire House Democratic caucus, not a single Republican co-sponsored or voted for it. Leadership is more than the art of devising good ideas. It also entails building coalitions around solutions so they can be turned into reality. The public is sick of “messaging bills” and symbolic maneuvers the two parties keep devising to try to jolt their bases or corner the other party into looking bad, all just to win a few competitive seats every two years.
I don’t think this is fair. Nick knows that Sarbanes has worked tirelessly to recruit Republicans to the cause of reform. And while groups like Represent.US and Take Back Our Republic had found in the states plenty of grassroots Republicans keen for reform, DC Republicans have united against the idea of equal citizenship. Not a single Republican voted for this reform package, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block the bill from even getting a vote in the United States Senate.
There comes a time when we have to tell it like it is. DC Republicans are not reformers. That’s not to say that Republicans are not reformers. It’s not to say that conservatives are not reformers. But rather than pretend that this is a problem of process — of failing to “craft[] with any input from Republican leaders” — we should state openly: there was plenty of “input” from Republican leaders. That input was clear: No way.
This is a hard truth to acknowledge, but we should acknowledge it and figure out how to address it. This is not the only failure of leadership in the DC Republicans today — even if, in my view, it is ultimately a much more significant failure. What must happen now is for Republicans in the states to begin to elect Republicans to Congress who can begin to say openly and honestly that they too want to reform this corrupted democracy, by assuring that every citizen is represented equally. That may well be, as Mitch McConnell called it, a “power grab.” But it is a small-d democratic power grab — for a democracy, not for one party.
The Democrats in DC have done their part. It is now on all of us — not as Democrats, or as Republicans, but as citizens — to rally America to elect a Congress that could now carry through. That will only happen — and should only happen — if Republicans are part of the mix. It is time for those reformers to step up.
This blog post was adapted from Lessig’s monthly email update. To receive these emails, click here. | https://medium.com/equal-citizens/equal-citizens-march-2019-update-a40e3b0c0200 | [] | 2019-03-18 14:19:55.103000+00:00 | ['Democrats', 'Republicans', 'Politics', 'Hr 1', 'Democracy'] |
Auto-Tagging Questions on Seedly with Deep Learning | Out of the 30 over categories, each question would on average be labelled as 3–5 categories. This imbalance thus makes it difficult to evaluate the accuracy of the system. For example, let’s say there are 30 categories and the system would label a question 1 if it is in that category and 0 if it is not. Given a particular question that belongs to only 5 categories, if the system only labels 4 out of 5 of these categories correctly and proceeds to correctly label the remaining 25 categories correctly, how accurate would you say is this classification? Some possible ways to see this are:
1. having 29 labels out of 30 that’s correct (96.7%),
2. out of the 5 that was supposed to be labelled as 1, 4 were correct (80%). This is also known as Recall
3. out of the 4 labels that were labelled 1, all of them were properly labelled (100%). This is also known as Precision
But if you use the conventional Accuracy metric, this would be considered a 100% incorrect classification.
The first way mentioned above (the one with 96.7%) represents a metric called the Hamming Loss which looks at the number of labels that are correct as a whole. However, it would not make sense if only 3–5 categories are labelled as 1 on average. That would mean that even if we had all labels be 0, we would roughly get an evaluation value of 25/30 (83%) or higher. Which may seem fantastic given the value but is not truly representative of what we want to evaluate, which is how good the system is in predicting the right categories to label as 1.
Precision and Recall resonates more with how we want to evaluate our system. Recall combats the intuition of labelling all categories as 0. It looks at the categories that should actually be labelled as 1 and compares them to the predicted labels of those same categories. Hence, if we had all 0’s, the Recall would evaluate to be 0%. On the other hand, Precision combats the flip side of having more category labels as 1. It simply looks at all labels that are labelled as 1 and compares them to the actual categories that should be labelled as 1. Hence, if we label all 30 categories as 1, with only 5 categories actually being 1, the Precision would evaluate to be 5/30 (16.6%) only. Thankfully for us, there is a metric called the F1-Score that makes use of both Recall and Precision.
Source: Qualtrics
Basically, the equation shows how this F1-Score metric takes the Precision and Recall into consideration. Only when both of these values are 100% would the F1-Score be 100% as well. The converse is true as well, where if either Precision or Recall falls short, the F1-Score would be compromised. As mentioned in the introduction, our system managed to achieve an F1-Score of 90%!
Ease of Deployment
Programming is not a skillset that everyone has. Therefore, the need to package the system in a way that made it easier to use and understand seemed like an obvious step in our project. This then required quite some code cleaning and organising to fit them into various forms of ‘packaging’. I honestly enjoyed this process as it felt pretty therapeutic, anyway here are 3 iterations of the ‘packaging’ for this auto-tagging system.
In this image, you can see how raw the codes are in general and if you have no experience in programming, this probably looks mind boggling to you. Even if you do know how to code though, cleaning this up and organising it better would definitely help as well.
Source: My own code
In this next image, the working codes are crammed into a single package/module, as you can see on the left. This package/module can be executed to tag questions using just a few lines of code, as seen on the right. It is evident that everything is so much more clean and easier to use in general! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/auto-tagging-seedlys-questions-with-deep-learning-2ba597986200 | ['Jao Ming'] | 2020-05-19 16:25:39.557000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Finance', 'Reflections', 'Data Science'] |
First of all, this uncertainty adds to all the doubts about how the death penalty is applied to… | First of all, this uncertainty adds to all the doubts about how the death penalty is applied to anyone. The truth is, there are always mitigating circumstances. Nothing happens without a cause, and the more science gets involved the more things will be explained about what caused that behavior. It will make culpability much more difficult to define.
I have read about two cases in Texas. One was a White man who had a brain tumor and he was not held responsible for the results of his violent temper. I thought was the correct decision. But the Black man who suffered multiple brain injuries from violence when he was a child was held to be responsible for his actions. His brain was probably more damaged than the man with the tumor.
You mentioned DNA testing, which is currently used to help identify who was at a crime scene. But in the coming years I expect that a person’s DNA profile will be used to explain his behavior. There are some studies that show that people with the MAO-A version of a certain gene have a predisposition towards antisocial acts. Of course, environment plays a big role in how that gene gets expressed. But genetics can be used to partially explain a person’s actions.
All of these sciences can certainly muddy the question of how responsible any of us are for most of our actions. Most behaviors are the result of a complex interaction of our genetics, family of origin, community culture, our general health and some random factors. Yet, consciously, we feel we made the decision to smack that guy in the mouth.
Or maybe, as @ Where Angels Fear said, the devil made us do it. | https://medium.com/@therapistmumble/first-of-all-this-uncertainty-adds-to-all-the-doubts-about-how-the-death-penalty-is-applied-to-fc0f3a49d97d | ['D J B'] | 2020-04-23 00:16:11.069000+00:00 | ['Free Will', 'Genetics', 'Personal Responsibility', 'Brain Science', 'Justice'] |
Subsets and Splits