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Incredibly well thought out, well written and poignant. | Incredibly well thought out, well written and poignant. Powerful article. Fortunately, Biden won without such promises…though I agree, it would have helped, possibly in down-ticket races. I see only two weak links: 1) these massive government programs will require at least some Republican support. Based on our election results, I am skeptical at best that those votes can be won and 2) Is the Democratic Party going to grow bigger balls to stand proudly, confidently and assertively to defend and promote such a wide ranging initiative? I’m not feeling that one either. Thanks for the great article none-the-less. | https://medium.com/@laresistanceamerican/incredibly-well-thought-out-well-written-and-poignant-54fe25532c8c | ['American Resistance'] | 2020-12-09 16:35:51.742000+00:00 | ['Rural Voters', 'New Deal', 'Urban Voters', 'Infrastructure', 'Democrats'] |
Explore a Museum of Memories with ‘Inheritance’ (Q&A) | No Proscenium (NP): Can you tell us a little about yourselves and your backgrounds?
Katya Stepanov (KS): I am a multidisciplinary artist — someone you might call a “hyphenate.” I was born into a newly independent Belarus four days after the collapse of the USSR and immigrated to Teaneck, New Jersey when I was a year old. Despite growing up in America, my Russian upbringing is a significant part of who I am and shapes my work as an artist.
During my final year in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama, I studied abroad at the Moscow Art Theater. Expressing myself in my native tongue as an adult gave me a new sense of belonging I’d never experienced before, however I was also able to recognize the aspects of my personality and behavior that were distinctly “American.” The theatre I was exposed to in Moscow made me realize that I wanted to do more than perform. I wanted to write, to direct, to design in different mediums and to tell stories still untold, including stories that accurately depict Russian culture and the real bi-cultural experience. At the time, Sleep No More had just opened and the idea of immersive theatre was relatively unknown, but I knew I wanted to create experiences where the traditional boundaries between performers and audience, stage and reality could dissolve.
With classmates at Carnegie Mellon, I created my first immersive company, In the Basement Theater Co in 2011. Upon graduation, we were awarded the Arts @ Renaissance Artist Residency, where we created our first immersive experience, The Lady in Red Converses with Diablo. Since then, I have performed in regional theatres across the country, including the Cincinnati Playhouse, Barrington Stage, and the Contemporary American Theater Festival. I have also worked as a designer, director and producer. Last year my longtime collaborator Jesse Carrey and I co-founded Rebis, an immersive storytelling studio focused on creating audience-driven interactive narratives.
‘The Lady in Red Converses with Diablo,’ photo by Graham Swindoll
My current focus is The Inheritance Project, a storytelling platform for people to explore their inheritance, share stories and hear the stories of others. We define inheritance as ancestry, culture, beliefs, social conditions, traits and perspectives received from past generations. I believe that by confronting the stories we inherited and the ones we tell ourselves, we can become the authors of our own story and deepen our understanding of one another and ourselves. As the company’s founder, I believe that if we are inviting people to share the stories of their inheritance, I must begin by telling my own.
Inheritance is the story of my inheritance as a Russian-Jewish immigrant, which audiences can explore and engage with through immersive theatre. We hope that future stories told on the platform will also become adapted into unique works of their own.
Christy Casey (CC): I started working in immersive experiences during college. For me, the most exciting moments of immersive experiences were when I got to engage with actors and feel like I was entering another world. I knew that I wanted to create work that gave audiences the chance to explore fictional realms. I was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to spend a year working with the Interactive Deep Dive, a think tank lead by Jeff Wirth dedicated to creating experiences where participants play the protagonist in the narrative, and to train in the performance techniques that make those experiences possible. I’m excited to incorporate those techniques to engage the audience for Inheritance.
NP: What, in a nutshell, is Inheritance about?
Katya: Inheritance is an investigative journey into identity. A museum of memories greets visitors as they move from room to room, exploring Katya’s Russian-Jewish inheritance, and learning to examine their own.
Are we who we claim, or are our identities defined by our inheritance — our cultural upbringing and social conditions outside of our control? Guests’ perspectives evolve as they become characters in my life and bear witness to my experience as a Russian-Jewish immigrant growing up in America and trying to find belonging amidst contradicting cultural ideas of self-identity, happiness and success.
The show contains two parts: a performance where guests get to step into my Russian-Jewish upbringing and an interactive exhibit. The exhibit will invite guests to explore inheritance in an interactive, hidden soundscape revealed in fragments of personal and cultural history — tales, relics, songs and poems embedded in the space. In the absence of a narrator, guests must reach their own conclusions: What does it mean to inherit an identity and can we be the authors of our own story?
NP: Why did you create this experience? What inspired you?
Katya: A life-long process of self-inquiry made me realize how powerful the exploration of inherited identity could be for others. I realized that if I was about to ask millions of strangers to share their stories of inheritance with me through The Inheritance Project, sharing my story first could help illuminate the challenge of deep self-reflection and inspire others to do the same. I believe that my story is woven into the fabric of other’s stories, and that they are woven into the threads of my own. I am inspired by the power of vulnerability. I believe this experience will encourage others to open up — sharing their stories and embracing perspectives that may differ from their own.
My identity is complicated. I don’t have memories of living outside of the States, but the fact that I am Russian and an immigrant is an essential part of my identity. I was raised by Soviet-Russian parents and didn’t learn English until I went to elementary school. I don’t feel “American,” whatever that means, but trying to explain my identity to people has been a struggle my entire life. I always joke that I am a “Russian in America, and an American in Russia.” When I make this joke, I realize time and time again that the struggle to communicate this complicated thing we call “identity” resonated with a lot of people. So now I’m sharing my journey and inviting others to embark on their own.
Wildrence
NP: How is the venue incorporated into the Inheritance experience?
KS: When I first walked into Wildrence, I felt like I was walking into a set from my imagination. I am grateful that I am able to create this experience somewhere that feels like a true home for this story. I have told them in person, but it feels like their design came out of a dream. Jae Lee and Yvonne Chang (the co-founders of Wildrence) agreed, and decided to join our team as Creative Directors for both Inheritance and The Inheritance Project as a whole.
It is a gift to design this show with the designers of Wildrence. Yvonne and Jae are able to take each moment of the show and give it the best home. Each room has become a different world in our story. As we jump from the idea of tangible inheritance to intellectual inheritance to emotional inheritance, we move from a Soviet waiting room to my grandmother’s apartment to a library of Jewish history and eventually arrive in America — an all white room symbolizing the formation of identity in a land of freedom and erasure.
The venue will come to life in the second act when guests are given new audio technology — Bose “sound glasses” which use a built-in gyroscope to track the audience to deliver an individual soundscape as they explore. If they pick up certain objects or sit in certain seats, a previously invisible world of sound will emerge around them, supported by the interactivity of the original design.
CC: It’s hard to believe Jae and Yvonne didn’t design Wildrence specifically for this production. For those who aren’t familiar with Wildrence, it’s a space on Canal street designed to host immersive experiences. The space includes a foyer and kitchen remarkably reminiscent of a Soviet apartment. There’s also a library and an open white room that create the perfect environment for the audience’s intellectual and emotional exploration of inheritance and to accommodate the more poetic, abstract aspects of the performance.
During the first half of the experience, the audience members are greeted as guests in babushka’s home. They will witness site-specific performances from the cast and be invited to engage with the performers in certain moments. The second half of the show is a living museum, where guests can interact with the physical space and make their own decisions about how they want to explore it.
NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kinds of choices can the participants make during the experience?
KS: I’ll let Christy speak more on this as the director of the piece, but as the creator, I believe stories have the most impact when they are felt in the first-person. To facilitate that, the audience is incorporated into the action of the memories around them without having to perform themselves. Scenes emerge fluidly around them and they are guided by actors through the first act as witnesses to my story of inheritance. In the second act, guests have more agency to explore the experience on their own. In smaller groups, they will have the chance to explore each room and unearth soundscapes, stories and objects with hidden meaning. They will be able to choose what they are most drawn to exploring on their own.
CC: The audience’s involvement is more an exploration than a binary choice. The first engagement occurs before they arrive when they are asked to answer, “What does inheritance mean to you?” At the end of the experience, they’ll be asked the same question and invited to share it with future audience members on our Inheritance Wall. Throughout the performance, guests are treated as family friends in the space and will have several opportunities to engage with the performers, but the level of engagement will differ for each person based on their willingness to participate.
Guests may become part of a Shabbat ceremony or help trace the lines of Jewish inheritance through history. Those who would rather observe, have that option as well. During the second half of the show, the audience will be split into smaller groups and have more agency over how they explore each room. In each room, there will be several different engagements for audiences to discover. Specifically, we are working with Bose AR technology to create spatially-triggered audio-driven experiences that will weave the live experience with a pre-recorded soundscape.
NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?
CC: Audiences will not be asked to participate in actions that involve sexuality, violence, or situations typically associated with consent and safety in immersive theatre, but we will ask audience members to engage in a process of self-exploration that is vulnerable, and that can bring up feelings of discomfort, which is an essential component of growth. Sharing personal stories is an invitation, never an obligation.
We provide the tools to explore, but. it’s up to each person how deeply they want to dig. Self-reflection, however, is an ongoing process. We believe most of that digging will happen in the days, weeks and months after the show.
Having said that, there are physical and emotional situations every audience member must be comfortable with. Audience members should be comfortable going up and down stairs, being in crowded rooms, receiving hugs given with familial energy and hearing stories that deal with sexual assault, domestic violence and addiction. We have a limited number of tickets for every performance reserved for individuals who are physically unable to stand for the duration of the performance to make the show as accessible as possible.
NP: Who is the ideal audience member for Inheritance?
KS: The ideal audience member for Inheritance is anyone who seeks to grapple with their inherited identity, immigration experience, how trauma is transferred epigenetically from parents to children or who is curious about their own inheritance. While the show will have particular resonance for anyone who is bi-culturally Russian-Jewish and American, it also invites a conversation about our cultural ideals and what it means to be “American” and “White.” If you’ve lived in America for several generations, you may not think much about your ancestors or feel that you have a clearly defined culture.
Whiteness is too often assumed to be the “default” in America. Some assume it doesn’t have ancestry attached to it, but it does.
I believe anyone who is willing to think outside the box and confront their relationship with their inheritance and self-identity would have a rewarding experience.
CC: Inheritance is a story about Russian-Jewish heritage and grappling with an immigrant identity that’s difficult to categorize, so it will resonate with people who can relate to that experience. But at its heart, Inheritance is a story about reconciling the parts of our identity that we’re handed down — or that were imposed upon us — with the parts of our identity that we choose for ourselves. The two are so intertwined that they can be difficult to parse. We all have pieces of our inherited identity that we love and things that we wish weren’t there. Whether your view of your inheritance is positive or negative, understanding the behaviors and beliefs that shaped us before we were able to discern them for ourselves — perhaps even passed down genetically, as with the inheritance of trauma — empowers us to more fully embrace who we are and who we want to be.
There’s no specific person the show is catered towards, but I can tell you who it’s not for: It’s not for people who are looking for an escape or light-hearted entertainment. It is for people who are willing to be challenged, to explore their identity and to take a deeper look at the person they see in the mirror.
NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?
KS: I hope participants will walk away from this experience with a deeper understanding of how inheritance informs our behavior and perception of our identity. I hope they will leave with a better understanding of what a bi-cultural existence looks and feels like outside of the reductive depictions of immigrants in American media and television.
In today’s social climate, there is a tremendous emphasis on identity and the choices you make to culturally identify. If your family is native to the land you were born, you may not have to consciously ask yourself what you identify with, but how many of us can say this is true of our families? The percentage of people born in the country of their actual inheritance is growing smaller and smaller, and with mass immigration and refugee movements across the world, the question of identity is becoming increasingly important.
Ultimately the question comes down to what stories we believe about our family and ourselves? I believe if we’re able to examine the story of our identity and the story of our inheritance, we will be able to consciously choose how our identities. I hope participants will leave with a greater sense of connection to their inheritance story, and that they will be inspired to contribute their story to The Inheritance Project platform. The more we share stories with one another, the more opportunities we have to find connections where there were once divisions.
CC: I think any good piece of art leaves you with meaningful questions to grapple with. That’s my hope for this piece. Not confusion or cliffhangers, but questions that beget more questions because the ideas you’re examining are so nuanced that they don’t have a clear or immediate answer. It’s each individual’s journey to wrestle with the impossibly complex layers that shape who they are and how they see the world.
If there is one thing I want the audience to take away from this piece, and really any piece I work on, it’s that your perspective is not the only perspective: your truth, your beliefs, your expectations, are not shared by everyone. On the other hand, there is something that ties us together by virtue of our humanity. Hopefully, this glimpse into Katya’s story, the stories of the other performers and the stories shared through the Inheritance Project platform will help us recognize the assumptions we’re making about ourselves and those around us and foster more humane, human connections with each other. | https://noproscenium.com/explore-a-museum-of-memories-with-inheritance-q-a-fc5dec126e10 | ['Kathryn Yu'] | 2019-05-07 19:38:51.953000+00:00 | ['Feature', 'NYC', 'Interview', 'Immersive Theatre'] |
Americans Are On Our Own, and We Know It | Americans Are On Our Own, and We Know It
We keep on going, because we have to.
Yesterday I came across a heart-breaking tweet from a nurse who described admitting a 5-year-old who’d “coded” for an hour before her parents finally brought her to the hospital. The nurse bewailed the parents’ ignorance and dropped a couple of sailor words while pleading with people to take the pandemic seriously and stop with the Christmas parties.
The conservative, conspiracy-barbed backlash against her was so severe that she had to delete the tweet.
They were outraged at her bad language.
In case you don’t know, “coded” means the five-year-old was in serious or critical condition. Read the rest of the thread, and you’d see the family knew their child was sick for days. Nobody wanted to leave their precious holiday gathering to take her to the ER.
As a parent, this horrifies me — the idea that someone would put their selfish need for baked ham and eggnog ahead of their own flesh and blood. That said, it doesn’t surprise me anymore. Millions of Americans are sacrificing their families in the name of freedom and tradition. The rest of us sit back and watch with bewildered awe at their reckless judgement. We tell ourselves we don’t know what they’re thinking.
Let’s be honest, we know. It just makes absolutely no sense. It never will. We’ve given up trying to reason with them.
We’re leaving them alone. | https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/americans-are-on-our-own-and-we-know-it-d2ecdaeddca8 | ['Jessica Wildfire'] | 2020-12-30 12:07:14.606000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Coronavirus', 'Politics', 'News', 'Society'] |
Battling Cliché Overuse | Cliché overuse has me all bent out of shape. I’ve been complaining about it ‘till I’m blue in the face. No more. Been there, done that. I’m taking the gloves off.
Actions speak louder than words, so I plan to think outside the box and work my fingers to the bone to raise awareness of cliché overuse.
You may think I’m not playing with a full deck, or have a chip on my shoulder, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.
And you might say I’m beating a dead horse, but if I can get even one person to stop overusing clichés, it will be worth it all.
Some people may call me a dreamer, or tell me to stop rocking the boat, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
And I plan to keep on keeping on, and go the extra mile, cause it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
I won’t rest until I’ve taken the bull by the horns and shown him the door. All’s well that ends well. You can bank on it.
No need to thank me. It’s all in a day’s work. | https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/battling-clich%C3%A9-overuse-728821b75adb | ['Mark Starlin'] | 2019-01-13 20:27:12.407000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Words', 'Life', 'Humor', 'Cliches'] |
Working on an Open Source Project as a Team | Working on an Open Source Project as a Team
Reflecting on our experience contributing to open source project Reactime
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash.
Now that our team has launched Reactime version 7.0, we have some time to reflect on our experience contributing to an open source project. Our team was incredibly productive despite working across multiple time zones and exclusively communicating virtually. The most important aspects of our successful team dynamic were pretty simple: empathy and communication.
More concretely, here is how we put these into practice.
Before diving into a project, we discussed everyone’s individual goals and searched for an application that we were all passionate about and would enjoy working on. We all love using React to build applications and wanted to deepen our understanding of the JavaScript library. Reactime was the perfect open source project for us to do that.
Our approach to it was pretty simple. At every stage, our main focus was the experience of the user, the user of our app, and the developer who would want to contribute to our extension. We wanted to improve the performance of the extension itself to make it easier for developers to spot bugs in their applications and to easily identify performance bottlenecks. | https://medium.com/better-programming/working-on-an-open-source-as-a-team-50b61b85bb55 | ['Becca Viner', 'Caitlin Chan', 'Mai Nguyen', 'Tania Lind'] | 2020-12-15 16:23:09.717000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Open Source', 'React', 'Programming', 'Women In Tech'] |
How To Find Cheap Flights in 2021? My Top 11 Tips | 1. Cheap Flight Tips 2021 — Booking in advance?
Do cheap travel tips, booking logic and best practices from the post Covid world apply in 2021? The jury is still out with regard to whether you save money by booking well in advance in 2021. Even if you are looking for cheap flights to Hawaii, from what we’ve seen over the last few months there are some interesting last minute deals to be had. This has always somewhat been true as empty flights need to fill up seats and sometimes they will discount a few days or week before if the plane is not yet full.
The point here is if you have a bit of flexibility try to book a ticket — for example flights to Costa Rica — well in advance with cancellation insurance or free switching and keep an eye on tickets that pop up a few days before your flight, you might be able to find a deal here!
2. Be as flexible as possible with your flight dates
A lot has most likely changed over the last year due to Covid and what made sense one or two years ago in terms of booking on a Tuesday or a specific day isn’t necessarily true anymore. We at bookflights.io suggest to take a look at a calendar one or two months out and see if you can notice any patterns developing in terms of when the cheap flights are. Triangulate your ‘insights’ by using Google flights, Skyscanner, Book Flights (us!), etc.
Just enter your arrival and departure cities — like ‘one-way ticket to Hawaii’ — start by looking at one-way fares and don’t enter a return date. In that way you’ll be able to see an entire month of prices — rinse and repeat for your return flight. We suggest mixing it up and using a combination of APP’s and different websites to arrive at a ‘reasonable fare’ the location you’re trying to get to.
3. Use a VPN do and if possible incognito mode on your browser
There’s no question that airlines offer a cheaper prices for people in countries other than the G8 countries or countries with a high GDP. If you’re able to use a VPN (virtual private network) and change your browsing location — for example if you live in the US and change the server to Mexico or Peru — you might get a 20 to 30% discount. You might also try changing the currency (i.e., non USD, GBP, Euro, etc.) if you do not have a VPN, sometimes this can work.
If you’re not into getting a VPN you can always clear your cache and cookies in your browser — my colleague recommends this as one of the top tips for cheap flights. By opening an incognito window in your browser and searching ‘flights to Tokyo’ the aforementioned should already taken care of. You might also try switching devices as well — i.e., toggle between tablet, laptop and mobile.
4. Flying global — book local!
The majority of flight aggregators will not list local airlines in the top results. Try surfing to the local airlines website directly to compare prices like ‘flights to Thailand’ if you cannot find the place you’re looking for on the aggregator website. As they all have affiliate relationships and partnerships with the major airlines typically you can find some interesting deals even if you’re flying to multiple destinations on the same trip.
5. Join fare alert subscriber lists or set up on google alerts
Follow and subscribe to budget airlines social media accounts like SpiceJet, Air Asia, GoAir, etc. There are also several city specific groups you can join that regularly publish updates from all of the airlines — for example the ‘Vancouver YVR’ community is pretty popular and you can set up automatic emails on a daily or weekly basis to make sure you are aware of flight deals.
We suggest doing in general Google search to look for these type of groups and try to join a few per your most traveled destination — cheap flights to Germany is one of our favorites! It’s really amazing what you can find and in some cases you can even join chartered flights were people sometimes even groups of nationals will charter a flight from one country to another — there are some pretty cool deals to be had if you can find the right group!
If you are super budget conscious you might even start looking at conferences and trade exhibitions websites as they might have relationships with airlines to fly their participants and guests at a discount rate. The latter is a bit of a longshot but we have heard instances where this was possible and savings of up to 20% or so were provided as long as you use their code when booking the flight.
6. Booking at midnight — really a tip for cheap flights in 2021?
We have heard reports from the field that sometimes big savings can be hard if you book at midnight or during the early hours of the morning. Although we don’t recommend going to sleep too late as it’s fair to say a good nights sleep is important, if you’re using the VPN trick you might find a way to hack this without having to stay up late.
We have not found a lot of evidence in terms of why this tip potentially works for finding cheap flights, but one of the thoughts is that airlines, at least local ones will update their affairs at midnight and in some cases the first few flight listings are discounted to improve search results for that flight.
If you guys have any suggestions please feel free to drop comments in the comment section, we’d love to hear from you and will do our best to share your insights with our community. I will be searching flights to Toronto in the coming weeks, so any suggestions would be great!
7. Book tickets to ‘cheaper’ destinations — top tip for cheap flights 2021!
If you’re looking to book a flight to Milan you might try booking a flight to Turin first. The rationale here is that you might save 20 to 30% if you book to a location close to the actual destination you’re looking for as there might be a premium on your end destinations. Given that Milan and Turin are fairly close — about a two hour train or car ride — you might save big and also have a chance to spend half a day in another city!
So to start this type of search, you would begin by searching for the cheapest places to travel using the budget slider on most of the online travel sites and then go from there. During our research any other tips for getting cheap flights in 2021 articles mentioned this, so there must be something to this! Can you combine the things we have mentioned so far in this article, absolutely yes and you might find some interesting cost saving combinations. Share with your friends and family and tell them what works best.
8. Join flight points plans
People will always tell you to be smart about how you book your flights so that you can optimize your flight points and reap these rewards.
Given that travel will get back to normal shortly it will be interesting to see how the airline companies will honor past points and incentivize their loyalty schemes going forward.
It’s fair to say that this practice will continue, so keep an eye on which airlines and travel groups are offering the best points deals. You might even find there’s some amazing in intensification schemes for new customers, keep an eye on this!
9. Good old-fashioned research
Nothing beats good old-fashioned research for finding tips for cheap flights in 2021 — or even in 2133! If you’re really determined to find a cheap flight you will and it just takes a bit of time. As mentioned previously in this post, you could end up finding an interesting combination of tips and tricks that have the end result of big savings. If you do please do share with the community here as we would love to hear what types of combinations work.
We recommend using a combination of different devices and VPN locations to optimize your potential for finding cheap flights and hotels. By using a VPN you can avoid having to stay up until midnight or the early hours of the morning to book a flight as well as you can get the benefit of booking from a cheaper location on the ideal day.
10. Join some industry associations or groups
It may come as no surprise that people that often fly to their home country — for example nonresident Indians, expats, etc. — or techies that fly to CES Las Vegas on a yearly basis are always looking for deals. By joining some of these groups and social networks — NB our colleague suggests this is probably the top tip for cheap flights in 2021 and going forward — you are doing yourself a favor as they almost always have daily if not weekly or monthly suggestions on how to find cheap flights and good deals typically from one city to another. In some cases as we have previously mentioned you might be able to find a chartered flight with you can join.
11. Remember Cheap Flights Tips in 2021 — and all will be good!
As you’re beginning to plan your next vacation or a business trip have Faith that the airline and travel industry will rebound and most likely will rebound very strong.
Think about all of the pent-up demand and general interest in traveling once restrictions begin to loosen. Some people tell us that prices will actually go up well we think the opposite is true.
The 2020s will definitely be the golden age of travel as people realize that life is short and you don’t actually have to work in one place anymore you can be a digital nomad were traveling hobo and still pay the bills. So long story short I have faith that one of the largest sector in service industries on the planet will rebound strongly and will most likely incentivize people to help with the recovery. This could translate into generous points and discounted rates for frequent fliers and or discounts across the board.
Thanks for reading our cheap flight travel tips 2021 article…
We hope you enjoyed this article and please do you subscribe on our YouTube channel and check out site — bookflights.io — from time to time as we try to find the best deals for you provide the most up-to-date information on travel and tourism in the places we love!
Again, if you have any suggestions or tips For finding tips on cheap flights in 2021 and beyond, we would love to hear from you as our community members are the best sources of information and any of the tips above were sourced from comments and discussions with our team, travel writers and first-hand experience living in traveling on the road. | https://medium.com/@bookflightsio/how-to-find-cheap-flights-in-2021-my-top-11-tips-56d6fe7f7a4b | ['Emily Styles'] | 2021-05-05 10:28:36.229000+00:00 | ['Travel Tips And Tricks', 'Discount Flights', 'Flights Booking', 'Travel Tips', 'Cheap Flights'] |
Designing a Year In Review | How we brought life to the page
After being supplied with the illustrations we would be utilizing for the year in review, I started to imagine how they could be brought to life. We decided that having all the illustrations animated would be too busy, so I was tasked with animating only six of them. Since all of our statistics from the year were focused on our customer’s websites, the illustrations showcasing them were mostly menu items.
My initial approach for this type of animation is to separate the files out into layers in Illustrator so they are easier to manipulate in After Effects. When doing this it is important to envision how the animation should function so you know exactly how to divide up the file. For example, I imagined that an appropriate animation for the salad illustration would be to have it toss itself. For this, I had to separate the toppings of the salad from the lettuce and the bowl. Then all that was left to do was animate the ingredients tossing up and falling down at different intervals in a seamless loop. | https://medium.com/bentobox-design/designing-a-year-in-review-4e7ae6256714 | ['Kayla Scheidel'] | 2020-07-02 20:06:36.731000+00:00 | ['Animation', 'Restaurant', 'Design', 'How To', 'Year In Review'] |
Mouse-free data science. Detect your cat’s prey with a Raspberry… | Detect your cat’s prey with a Raspberry Pi and a Google Coral Edge TPU
Photo by Author
My neighbor Emma has a real love for animals. A little hedgehog family shows up frequently in her garden. She buys special hedgehog food that is highly appreciated by those heart-melting little guys. She has set up four feeding places with daily refills. In a recent conversation over-the-fence, Emma proudly told me about the large appetite of her animal friends and I congratulated her. But as I walked from the garden into my house it dawned on me … Emma’s special hedgehog food may well be a welcome nutritional supplement for the local mouse community.
Video by Author
For months our two out-door cats carried dead, living and partially living mice into our home at night. Dead prey found on the carpet in the morning quickly took a ride down the ceramic subway in our bathroom, that was not the big deal. What impressed me more was the agility of the living species. Some tried to settle under our couch. It would take an average of 45 minutes for my wife Lisa and me to locate and chase these little rodents out of the house. Our cats started to reach a high score of four mice per night and our dismay at the increase of rodents found in our living room was not acknowledged at all by our cats. They seemed to consider this as a necessary exercise to train our poor mouse hunting skills and enjoyed delivering more and more “gifts” every night in order for us to do so. The unwelcome roommates left urine stains on our parquet floor and ate parts of our tablecloth as they prepared for a new long-term stay inside of our living room furniture. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the rodent started to nibble holes in the cat food bags.
Lisa and I started to think of a preventative approach. The first discussion circled around a nightly curfew to prevent our animal surprise gift baskets. We decided to replace our old pet door with a smart cat flap including a programmable curfew allowing our cats to leave the house at night but preventing them from re-entering before the morning. We abandoned this approach after the first night. Having woken up to the sound of our cats knocking their heads against the locked flap door, causing us to feel miserable about our egocentric behavior. This smart cat flap was not smart at all.
While I do not consider myself as a nerd, Lisa observed that I devoted (in her terms) “a disproportionate amount of time on a technical pursuit in order to develop a solution”. The plan to create a smart-er cat flap that prevents cats unwanted gifts turned into an “idée fixe” that received a subdued smile from my wife.
Photo by Author
My second approach involved a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a motion sensor and an infrared camera. Over a timeframe of four months I selected 1532 night vision images of our cats entering our cellar window and uploaded these images to an AWS S3 bucket. 415 out of the 1532 images were images with prey. I created a mobile app that displayed notifications when a cat entered the house and allowed me to label the images “with-prey” and “with-out prey”.
Video by Author
I used YOLO to train an object detection model and triggered the cat flap API which was reverse engineered by rcastberg. The object detection took c. 2–3 seconds, in addition I needed to take into account the duration for the cat flap API call which took c. 2–12 seconds. The cat’s trip down the cellar window takes c. five seconds. Moving the object detection to an edge TPU based on Google Coral with a TFLite MobileNet V1 SSD, reduced the inference time to 7ms and helped to collect enough data to calculate a prey detection score with a very good prediction precision. However 8 out of 10 detections resulted in the cat flap locking after the cat had already passed through. At least now I knew when to start the mouse hunt.
Photo by Author
I tried to shorten the delay with a by-pass to the API service of the cat flap. Then I tried to connect my Raspberry to the cat flap via ZigBee. This was a proprietary encrypted protocol. I saw on Github that a bunch of experts (definitely not nerds) keep cutting their teeth on that issue. If someone at Sure Petcare reads this: your product is awesome, I like the mobile app, I would love to have a way to communicate with the Connect Hub locally with a documentation of the API.
I decided to take the easy route and soldered a relay on the lockout button of the cat flat. This reduced time-to-lockout to below 1 second. Tada!
Photo by Author
This whole pursuit was a continual process that took more than seven months. The source code to create and run the model on your Raspberry is available on Github. | https://medium.com/@gerrito333/keep-your-home-mouse-free-with-an-ai-powered-cat-flap-a67c686ce394 | ['Gerrit Bojen'] | 2021-03-22 07:56:51.113000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Cats', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Raspberry Pi'] |
How To Decouple Data from UI in React | Approach A. Custom Hook
Let’s create a custom hook — useSomeData — that returns the properties someData , loading , and error regardless of the data fetching/management logic. The following are 3 different implementations of useSomeData .
With Fetch API and component state:
With Redux:
With Apollo GraphQL:
The 3 implementations above are interchangeable without having to modify this UI component:
But, as Julius Koronci correctly pointed out, while the data fetching/management logic is decoupled, the SomeComponent UI is still coupled to the useSomeData hook.
In other words, even though we can reuse useSomeData without SomeComponent , we cannot reuse SomeComponent without useSomeData .
Perhaps this is where Render Props and Higher Order Components do a better job at enforcing the separation of concerns (thanks again to Julius for highlighting this). | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-decouple-data-from-ui-in-react-d6b1516f4f0b | ['Suhan'] | 2020-12-21 16:47:14.382000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'React', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
5 Books to Read to Be a Better Entrepreneur | The image of entrepreneurship in modern media is flashy, slick, and smooth. However, reality cannot be further from the truth.
On the contrary to popular belief, it is not as easy as going to the office and running numbers in a fancy, glassed chamber with soothing air conditioning. That part comes way later in the game.
But it starts with the fight for survival and the struggle to lift your (own) weight at the same time.
If you are a budding entrepreneur, you know what I am talking about.
If there is something guaranteed in a business venture, it is not success or failure — it will be stress. The very fabric of entrepreneurship comprises a hefty dose of chaos, unrest, and uncertainty. Therefore, you must put a special effort to keep yourself intact.
And what better way there is to do so better than reading books?
In this story, I’m listing up to five impeccable books that will not only help you to keep it together but also give you enough substance to be a better entrepreneur. | https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/5-books-to-read-to-be-a-better-entrepreneur-9d596f3cafd1 | ['Anirban Kar'] | 2020-11-09 06:54:44.622000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Reading', 'Books', 'Self Improvement', 'Startup'] |
Let’s br Blunt with Montel | A cannabis lifestyle and interview show, “Let’s Be Blunt” explores the intersection of cannabis, activism, health, and wellness. Hosted by Montel Williams, the podcast works to bridge the gap between common cannabis knowledge and in-depth research, while also giving high-profile guests a chance to “be blunt” about their lives, what they’re passionate about, and what they believe in.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMGyFAMo_k-0Q7Ui9DXCCmQ?view_as=subscriber | https://medium.com/@letsbebluntwithmontel/lets-br-blunt-with-montel-64b16a4441d8 | ['Montel Williams'] | 2020-12-12 13:32:03.026000+00:00 | ['USA', 'Cbd', 'Thc', 'Cannabis', 'Montel Williams'] |
A Cruel Irony | A Cruel Irony
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels
I’m no saint. Ex-convicts rarely are. The best society can hope for is that we don’t “do it again.” But compared to a man named Eric Schneiderman, I’m confident that our Maker would judge him much more harshly than He would me. And exactly why does that matter? Because Eric Schneiderman is a piece of shit who prosecuted me for a crime considerably less egregious than his.
For non-New York State residents — or just New Yorkers who don’t keep up with the news — Eric Schneiderman was our State Attorney General— and the lawyer under whose watch I was prosecuted for conspiracy and promotion of prostitution.
My actual crime with respect to the seven-person conspiracy under which I was indicted, consisted of my taking photos of the madam’s girls, designing their website, and instructing the phone girls on how to add new photos and schedules to that blog.
You could hardly call me a pimp for being a webmaster and photographer for a couple of whorehouses, given that the only payment I accepted from the boss was free sessions with my photo subjects. The law said that I had to “profit” from the sale of sex. Does getting paid in blow jobs count as “profiting?” Hard to say.
In the end, I pleaded guilty to save tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees once the State offered that I didn’t have to serve any state time for my crime once I’d been sentenced to a year on the federal level. (Yes, it was a tag-team/gang bang type of affair.)
Whether it was fair and just for the State to take me to task for photographing hookers and designing a website is besides the point. Let me tell you about the big cahuna DA, who is the subject of this rant!
Scheiderman was a man-about-town with the ladies. No, he wasn’t like Eliot Sptizer, disgraced Governor of New York, in that hookers weren’t his thing. His toxicity far eclipsed Eliot’s or mine.
In a New Yorker Magazine feature, Ronan Farrow revealed the social life of the man who would prosecute me. Eric had been accused by no fewer than four girlfriends of smacking them around sometimes during sex — and sometimes during intercourse of the verbal variety. Or to put it more descriptively — and in the street vernacular — Schneiderman was alleged to be in the habit of “smacking his ho’s around.”
And this was the fucking asshole who thought the taxpayer should spend well into six figures prosecuting me and an operation which coerced nobody into anything. In fact, every participant in that organization was a willing and eager member.
Specifically, Farrow wrote that one woman claimed Schneiderman smacked her so hard during an argument that she bled from her ear and went to the doctor to be checked out.
Another, an Indian woman, swore that he called her his “brown slave” during sex. A third said he’d asked her to fill her Adderal prescription so he could have half!
And finally, a fourth reported that he would drink over a bottle of wine on party nights! Not that drinking wine is a crime, mind you. But wine and drugs? That could be a pattern.
Faced with these accusations, Schneiderman’s incredibly weak response was that he did dabble in “role play.” How’s this for role play, mother fucker? You’re making me out to be a pimp when in truth, I’m a photographer and webmaster!
The idea that a State Attorney General who smacks his ho’s around — calls one his slave while he’s stroking her down — and asks another to provide him with prescription drugs, has the temerity to judge me for taking photos of hookers and designing a website, and oh yes, purchasing the website domain on behalf of a madam who didn’t know how to do that, is a cruel irony worth writing about. Especially when it happens to you.
I am now out of prison, off probation, and like everybody else, more or less sequestered due to the pandemic. I tell people exactly what I did to suffer 7 years of prosecution, prison, and probation time. I’m not proud of what did. But I’m not ashamed either — especially the part about helping girls make a living in their chosen profession by providing effective, targeted and intelligent advertising services.
And what about Eric? What’s he up to now that the world knows exactly what kind of piece of crap he is? Get this. He’s a “meditation teacher!” A fucking meditation teacher!
Hey Eric! Meditate on this you fucking hypocrite. I’d like to smack you around! How’s this? Meet me in Unit 5 South, MCC federal prison. Or 8 South in the Tombs. Or EMTC on Rikers Island. We’ll “talk.” | https://medium.com/doing-time/a-cruel-irony-4d12f83fb101 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2021-01-01 16:27:31.577000+00:00 | ['Eric Schneiderman', 'Prison', 'New York State', 'Criminal Justice', 'Memoir'] |
Which one is a better down jacket? Ghost Whisperer/2 vs Cerium SL | Photo by Scott Gummerson on Unsplash
After doing a thorough research on this subject, I thought it would be useful to share my findings with you. Those who want to buy a good down jacket for this winter season usually ask the question; Ghost Whisperer / 2 or Cerium SL? Which one is better down jacket. For this reason, before choosing one, my advice is to decide for what purpose you will use it.
I strongly recommend you to just visit the source I used. Camparest.com has a lot of graphs, pictures, pros and cons for the outdoor gears. They have side by side comparative analyisis of the product. I used their entry as a reference for my post.
Now, let’s compare them side by side:
Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer/2
-Pros: Ghost Whisperer/2 is lightweight, compact, warm for its size. It has effective hydrophobic down.
-Cons: It has no hood cinch and no chest pocket
-Weight of the jacket is just 8.5 oz
Ghost Whisperer/2 down insulation is 800-fill RDS®-certified.
I would suggest you to go and take a look at deeply to Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer/2.
Arc’teryx Cerium SL Hoody
-Pros:Arc’teryx Cerium SL is a Super Lightweight (SL) jacket. It is very stylish, and has a high warmth to weight ratio.
-Cons: it is not super durable, but this is the disadvantage of producing a super lightweight jacket.
-Weight of the jacket is just 8.4 oz
-It has 850-fill goose down
If you want to go and take a look at deeply to Arc’teryx Cerium SL Hoody, check this.
Warmth: People who compare the warmth rate of these two product stated that Gost Whisperer/2 is better than Cerium SL
Compressibility-Pacability: I do not know if there is a down jacket which will beat Cerium SL considering compressibility.
Cost: From cost stand point, both of them are almost the same. In the market place you can find Ghost Whisperer/2 at $243.71 and Cerium SL at $269.25, therefore what I can say cost is not a deal breaker while choosing.
I hope this entry is helpful for you to make the right choice for you.
Tags: Best Down Jacket of 2021, Arc’teryx vs Mountain Hardwear, Cerium SL vs Ghost Whisperer, Best Down Jacket for Men of 2021, Best Winter Jacket for Men, Arc’Teryx Cerium SL, Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer. | https://medium.com/@jonasschneiderhere/which-one-is-a-better-down-jacket-ghost-whisperer-2-vs-cerium-sl-84e92b2f0abb | ['Jonas Schneider'] | 2020-11-30 17:06:14.897000+00:00 | ['Gear', 'Menswear', 'Hiking', 'Outdoors', 'Camping'] |
10 Ways to Overcome Life’s Challenges: The Ultimate Guide | Life is full of its ups and downs. One day, you might feel like you’ve figured everything out. Then, at a moment’s notice, you’ve been thrown a curveball. You are not alone in these feelings. Everyone has to face his own challenges. Learning how to handle challenges will help you stay focused and calm under pressure. Everyone has their own preferences for how to overcome challenges in life. However, there are some good tips and tricks that get tough to follow. Take your pick from the following list!
Introduction
A game plan can help you remain focused and prevent you from getting lost in the shuffle of life. But how do you know what approach to take if you don’t know the purpose of your challenge?
There is a general awareness and acceptance of the idea that rising above challenges makes us stronger, smarter, more evolved and efficient individuals. But we really struggle to accept the challenges with open arms and push ourselves mentally through the tough times. It is an absolute truism that the only real obstacle is what exists in your mind. We are all limited by our mental burden; Fear, doubt, all the useless unhelpful beliefs that we carry with us into our future that limit our potential. He, my friend, is our mind monkey. And it’s time to get those little fights off our backs, and off our heads.
The purpose of this article is to show you what challenges you face in life and how you can overcome them. This is a comprehensive guide, but don’t worry. I’ve tried to write it so that you can easily apply the skills to your own challenges. This isn’t a big book, but it should be helpful if you really want to face challenges head on! Use this guide as a reference as you face each of the ten challenges below!
“The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.” — Roger Williams
How do you overcome those challenges that you have encountered?
Choose a Positive Mental Attitude Whenever you’re faced with a challenge, try to remain positive. Instead of viewing the situation negatively, try viewing it as an opportunity to grow. You could learn new skills or push yourself to the limit. When you’re successful, you’ll always have the chance to be better.
Pick a Good Perspective When facing a tough situation, pick a good viewpoint. One of the best perspectives to consider is to see things from the other person’s perspective.
For example, try thinking about what could be on their mind before deciding on a plan of action. Maybe they’re going through a rough time at work and want to call it a day. Maybe they’re running low on gas and just want to get home.
1. Have a Plan
There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a tough situation without a plan to get out of it. However, having a plan to tackle challenges makes things easier. With a plan, you know what to do and when to do it. Furthermore, having a plan will help you come up with a clever strategy to bypass a challenge or obstacle.
Define and Assess your Priorities. Priorities are the foundation of any successful life. To determine what matters most in life, you need to define what “winning” means to you. Before you begin any endeavor, you need to decide if you’re going to do things for the sheer sake of accomplishment, or if you’re willing to make sacrifices. Once you determine what you’re willing to sacrifice, then you can create a plan to fulfill your priorities.
The first step to overcome a challenge is identifying what the goal is. Asking yourself what you want is a good place to start. Think about what it is that you want out of life. Once you know the goal, break it down into smaller goals that you can accomplish one step at a time.
Communicate your Goals once you know the big picture, you’ll need to fill in the details. You’ll need to get an idea of what obstacles will be in your way. It’s best to have a blueprint so you know exactly what to expect. By mapping out what you want, you’ll be able to cut back on unnecessary stress and find ways to make the goal come true.
Take action! Set clear deadlines and work toward your goal. There are many ways to overcome challenges; sometimes, all it takes is getting started.
3. Say NO to Negativity
Spending too much time on the negative thoughts and emotions can be incredibly detrimental. The worst thing you can do is allow these thoughts and emotions to take over your entire mindset.
According to the Personality Quiz, your outlook on life can affect many aspects of your personal and professional life. If you focus on all the negatives, it will weigh you down and keep you from achieving the goals you have set. Accepting negative thoughts is a great first step.
However, your work is not done there. You have to remove these negative thoughts from your mind. Eliminating negative emotions and negative thoughts can help you reduce stress. When you say no to negativity, you turn things around. You begin to see the positive in situations you might otherwise view as negative.
4. Get Social Support
Social support is the key to pushing through life’s challenges. Here’s why: — Working as a team helps us to overcome our fears and concerns about what others think. — Having people to rely on keeps us motivated and also increases our confidence.
People who love and care about you will be there for you no matter what! — Having a strong support system can help you relax in times of stress. Adopt a mindset of gratitude Some people rely solely on faith, while others rely on hope, willpower, or karma.
The important thing to remember is that you should always have a positive outlook. Here’s how you can do just that: — Keep a journal and write down a few things that you are grateful for each day. — Spend time with the people that you care about.
5. Listen to Your Body
Learn to listen to your body when it speaks. This isn’t to say you should ignore what others say about you, but instead, be aware that sometimes your body is telling you things you may not be hearing.
A good example of this is when you feel too heavy or too light. Simply go to the bathroom and see what happens. If your urine color changes to a light yellow, you might have constipation. If you think your head or shoulders hurt, take a break. Get more sleep and try to get some fresh air.
Using this type of self-awareness will help you stay well-informed on your body’s needs. Also, your body will let you know when something isn’t right. When you have a headache, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re dehydrated.
8. Surround Yourself with Positive People
Having a positive mindset will help you not only survive a challenge, but grow from it. You don’t have to be alone in your trials and tribulations. Having people in your life who support you is one of the best ways to get through a challenging period of time.
If you have a friend or family member who’s constantly giving you the brush off or staying positive about your current circumstances, it can be frustrating. You may think that they’re giving you a compliment to make you feel better, or that they’re just being honest. Don’t take things too personally.
Don’t get all upset if you don’t hear from this person. With a little time, you can learn how to deal with negative people. Do your best to remain positive no matter what they say or do.
9. Don’t Take It Personally
Emotions tend to run high in these situations. When you’re facing a challenge, this means that you’re likely to be feeling a wide range of different emotions. Some people handle this by bottling up their feelings.
Others would rather be an angry or emotional wreck in the corner. The worst thing you can do during this moment is to blame yourself for something that you could not control. Instead of focusing on the external factors that may be influencing you, think about how you can better cope with your problems.
For example, when you’re feeling a bit under the weather, it might help to get some fresh air. Go for a walk or grab a book to take with you. You could also distract yourself by playing a video game.
10. Conclusion
Learning how to deal with challenges requires time, perseverance and a positive attitude. Whatever the situation in your life, tough times will come. But, with the right mindset and practice, you will be able to overcome them every time and move forward in the process!
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all” | https://medium.com/@pathakhema100/10-ways-to-overcome-lifes-challenges-the-ultimate-guide-2dc009943d5e | ['Knowledge', 'Interesting Fact'] | 2021-06-17 18:46:06.912000+00:00 | ['Challenges In Life', 'Inspirational', 'Challenges And Growth', 'Overcome', 'Motivational'] |
Is This Guy Your Next Business Consultant? | This is a test. This is only a test.
Except, it isn’t. The Answer Guy is your best option when you need business consulting, and today we’re testing a piece of software that purports to take a new look at Search Engine Optimization. We’re testing — no surprise — for the phrase business consultant.
The software we’re using is called Squirrly SEO. It’s gotten quite a bit of buzz and today Squirrly SEO has “gone version 3.0”. Click here if you’d like to check it out (note that we get paid if you buy Squirrly).
So far, I’m not impressed. Or maybe I am. Squirrly certainly changes the way people might do SEO, and makes a couple of parts of it a lot easier. But we’ve been doing this SEO thing for a long time. So long, in fact, that we no longer sell SEO as a stand-alone service. And that covers both what’s great about Squirrly and what makes me a little bit nervous.
Unlike Yoast, the long-time Gold Standard in SEO, Squirrly automates quite a few things. For example, It’s good practice to alway include an image in your posts, and when I told Squirrly I’d be writing about being a business consultant today it helpfully dug up a few images so I neither had to hunt myself nor create one. Not only that, but Squirrly found only images that are in the public domain, and inserted the images with both title and alt tags ready-to-go.
On the other hand, Squirrly pointed to the image in the location it had originally been located at on another website, which we’ve been clear is a bad idea for SEO and because it risks your page breaking in the event the image ever goes away or gets moved.
You can see the basics of how Squirrly does its magic in this picture of those recommended images, where the green items indicate we’re doing a good job with SEO, the red is a warning, and the white represent items we haven’t yet addressed.
Yoast does most of the same things as Squirrly, but in a more manually-focused way. And (it’s “and”, not “but”) the advice from the two SEO tools differs; note that at the point immediately before I started writing the sentence you’re reading now Yoast thought my utilization of the keyword business consultant was just fine, while Squirrly thought I needed either to shorten the article or start peppering it with more instances of that “business consultant” keyword:
The differences don’t end there. In yet another example of that whole “and vs. but” thing, Squirrly looks at proximity in the way you use your keyword — and changes its recommendations as you write. So in the previous paragraph when I used “business consultant” twice in adjoining sentences it warned me that I should consider a change:
There are other differences between the Yoast and Squirrly approaches to Search Engine Optimization. But/and they seem to lead to much the same place and the issue is whether you want to be guided as you write or handle the nitty-gritty manually.
Being a Business Consultant
Comparing Squirrly SEO with Yoast underscores how much doing SEO and being a business consultant have in common. Put simply, most problems can be solved using different approaches. And as I’ve said before, very little of what we do is rocket science.
But very little is as simple as “automatic versus manual”, either. Finding that picture at the top of this article was great; still needing to edit it manually was not. For me, it feels worse to start automatic and have to switch than to always work manually.
Does this come down to consistency versus ease? As with most business decisions, yes. And that’s not even the full-stop point.
There is none.
Squirrly is a better SEO tool for people who know very little about SEO
I had a conversation with Squirrly’s CEO about this. My overall opinion is that Squirrly is a better SEO tool for people who know very little about SEO. But Yoast seems to be a better tool. Maybe. Unless Squirrly is right about that keyword proximity thing.
I could go on, but I think I’ll stop here. My guess is people who like automated things will appreciate that. Details wonks and other business consultants will see it differently.
That’s the big takeaway. People who hire us to manage their business issues are usually folks who want to offload a few processes. People who opt for Squirrly over Yoast are likely in the same place. Writing is already plenty of work; optimizing afterward is a huge pain.
Of course, you could always just offload both your writing and optimization to The Answer Guy. Drop me a line. | https://medium.com/business-change-and-business-process/is-this-guy-your-next-business-consultant-3e3862caa5eb | ['Jeff Yablon'] | 2017-04-04 18:03:11.841000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Yoast', 'Squirrly', 'Business Consulting'] |
On Depression | While I try to write something — anything — daily, I’ve found it difficult to write anything coherent lately. Obviously, this year has been difficult for all of us. I’m impressed that anyone can be creative in the midst of it all. I’ve struggled off-and-on for the past seven months of the year, oscillating between feeling energetic and unmotivated. I’ve had to force myself to focus creatively while existing in a near-constant state of un-inspiration and negativity.
See, to me there’s nothing romantic about depression. I’ve never found suicidal ideation to be sexy, have you? But in entertainment and certainly on the internet we can’t help but try to recreate our darkest moments in palatable ways for the consumption of others who may or may not relate to the particular feeling being represented. For some, such media is cathartic. I, however, have never found anything realistic out there.
How does one put words to such deep despair? To answer this question, I Googled some quotations on depression recently to see if I could relate to any of them. Two of them stood out to me, one because it felt aspirational and another because I actually related to it:
“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — Stephen Fry
“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.” — Elizabeth Wurtzel
It’s the latter half of Fry’s quotation I wish I could relate to. Sure, I’ve read a lot of books while depressed, combed the depths of my mind, and watched more YouTube than is healthy; nonetheless, I have also been immobile during those times.
And it is when I’m immobilized that I wish my depression to be purposeful. I wish all life’s woes to turn out the way a romantic comedy does. Some lazy curmudgeon finds love and suddenly abandons all cynicism and endeavors to achieve their dreams. Wouldn’t life be great if we could all work out our problems in ninety minutes or less?
Another of my bothers on expressing anything related to mental illness is coming across as gauche at best and self-indulgent at worst. Elizabeth Wurtzel, for example, was called narcissistic and self-indulgent in criticism of her trend-setting memoir Prozac Nation. To put it plainly, I don’t want that to be me. For that reason, I hardly ever address mental illness in my writing. I’ve thought about working it into a few scripts, but I find it hard to be objective about something so particular yet universal.
Underneath all of my writer’s block and frustration over representation, there is also shame… and more frustration. A vivid memory I have from a short time after I was diagnosed with depression was trying to have a candid conversation with one of my science teachers on the subject. She tried to be reassuring in all the conventional ways by telling me I’m not alone and that I could always come to her for help on homework if I’m struggling. Unfortunately, I only felt resentful of that advice. Through the pills and the therapy and the friends to talk to, the feeling that no one really gets it has prevailed.
Maybe it’s that sense of no one understanding that’s the universal bit. Perhaps the incoherence of what’s in our heads and the inexplicable feelings and the frustration and the disappointment shouldn’t and can’t be represented properly. Maybe that’s okay. Ultimately, of course, our objective is not to express what we are going through but to survive it. | https://medium.com/@tenhollywoodfilms/on-depression-a5aedf59837b | ['Elizabeth Buck'] | 2020-12-21 23:02:14.130000+00:00 | ['Mental Illness', 'Depression', 'Writers Block'] |
Marketing As A Small Business | Marketing for any business is tough and hit and miss, but as a small business it can be even harder to find the best marketing streams and know what to target. There are many ways you can get your small business noticed on and offline, what matters is choosing the right ways of marketing that apply to your business. Don’t just try things you think will work, but think about what is pertinent to your business. Here are some marketing tips to help you get started.
Go Old School
Post flyers through doors, hand them out in the street. If you own a food based service consider handing samples out with advertisement for your business. These old types of marketing are suited to businesses with a physical presence opposed to those with just an online presence. You can really make yourself stand out in the community by doing this. Take out ads in local papers and try to do something different from your competitors to get you noticed.
Use The Pro’s
You can use pro’s in Digital Marketing, just be sure to find them in your business niche. They will know exactly what works for your business and really give you that drive to get you noticed. Be wary of companies who use all inclusive packages. Analyse what is on offer and if there is something in the package you don’t want or need then take it out for a cheaper rate. It can be expensive, so if you and your small business can’t afford try not to worry too much, the next tips are regarding how you can do it yourself.
Source
Forge A Social Media Platform
Marketing on social media is a must these days. You can make a huge impact on all manner of people if you’re careful in your marketing. Create a business page on Twitter and Facebook and then begin posting insightful articles pertinent to the world today. Make them relevant to your business in some way so that you can link back to your website’s product page. Try your best not to make them spammy or alike to clickbait, otherwise you are just going to end up annoying people and discrediting your business. The more you do this the better your reputation will be and more people will know about your business.
Target The Blogs
Find relevant niche blogs. Use these blogs for guest posts. The people who frequent these blogs are those most likely to purchase from you. By posting and again linking back you can make a positive impression and get the word spread. The articles here will likely need to be better than those on social media, so do your research and remember to include links that promote your website.
Know what Works
Use Google Analytics to work out what kinds of advertising and articles are working and what aren’t. If you see one of the blogs are garnering no click throughs it may be because it is quite unpopular, so target another blog instead. Analytics will show you where your traffic comes from and is a game changer in helping you know what works and what doesn’t.
Source
[su_button url=”http://bizcatalyst360.tradepub.com/?pt=main&page=home.ebookspg" target=”blank” style=”glass” background=”#155700" color=”#ffffff” size=”1" wide=”yes” center=”yes” radius=”5" icon=”icon: briefcase” icon_color=”#ffffff”]CLICK HERE TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW TODAY! [/su_button]
Source | https://medium.com/bizcatalyst-360/marketing-as-a-small-business-dba3029969f2 | [] | 2017-03-01 12:29:48.204000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'LinkedIn', 'Google Analytics', 'Advertising', 'Marketing'] |
歇回兒，來口茶｜她說 | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/%E4%B9%9D%E4%BA%94%E5%BE%8C%E7%9A%84%E5%98%B0%E5%98%B0%E5%96%B3%E5%96%B3/%E6%AD%87%E5%9B%9E%E5%85%92-%E4%BE%86%E5%8F%A3%E8%8C%B6-7d4450dbada2 | ['王昇 David'] | 2018-08-30 15:09:46.503000+00:00 | ['Feelings', '她說', 'Life'] |
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导演: 纳瓦彭·坦荣瓜塔纳利
编剧: 纳瓦彭·坦荣瓜塔纳利
主演: 茱蒂蒙·琼查容苏因 / 桑尼·苏瓦美塔农
类型: 劇情 Drama
制片国家/地区: 泰国
语言: 泰语
上映日期: 2019–12–26(泰国)
片长: 113分钟
又名: Happy Old Year / ไทม์แมชชีน / 就愛斷捨離(台)
IMDb链接: tt11316824
时光机的剧情简介 · · · · · ·
2019年纳瓦彭·坦荣瓜塔纳利最新企划作品。
Jean要改造自己的家，多年旧物相继被清理出来。整理过程中，意外发现了属于前男友Aim的东西。虽然这些物件对自己毫无作用，但每一件所承载着那些往事，不禁令Jean思绪万千。为了找寻这些东西的出路，她做出了一个决定。。。
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就愛斷捨離 Happy Old Year w,a,t,c,h,o,n,l,i,n,e,f,r,e,e, | https://medium.com/@flushtiga/%E5%B0%B1%E6%84%9B%E6%96%B7%E6%8D%A8%E9%9B%A2-%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E7%9C%8B%E5%B0%8F%E9%B4%A8%E5%AE%8C%E6%95%B4%E7%89%88-e3eff7822336 | ['Happy Old Year 線上看完整版'] | 2020-02-15 03:20:24.076000+00:00 | ['就愛斷捨離', 'Happy Old Year', '線上看小鴨完整版', '2020', 'Taiwan'] |
Work Futures Update | Retrospective Futures | Work Futures Update | Retrospective Futures
| Innovation and Inclusion | On-sites are the new Off-sites | Women Dropping Out |
Photo by M Angie Salazar on Unsplash
Beacon NY 2020–10–17 | I’ve been exploring the new Medium but I’ve seen nothing that has made any changes to this newsletter. No new styles, no email import, and none of the other planned changes have been released. I am hoping that the Greg Satelle quote below, comes true.
:::
Quote of the Moment
The future, in retrospect, always seems inevitable.
| Greg Satelle, How The Future Is Really Built
:::
The cyclical relationship between innovation and inclusion in the workplace | Paris Will explores a critically important linkage between two threads in the workplace that aren’t braided together in many people’s heads:
[…] more inclusive companies were 1.7 times more likely to be innovative leaders in their field. This suggests that in addition to the benefits of a fair workplace, inclusion may also serve as a way to benefit and ultimately improve innovation performance. Although additional findings have also suggested this relationship between inclusion and innovation (here, here, here, and here), the underlying reason for this link may not be immediately clear. One of the major outcomes of increasing workplace inclusion is that more people are involved in workplace processes, such as the innovation process. An inclusive innovation process is often referred to as co-creation, which stresses the importance of collaboration among all members of an organisation. And when more people participate in projects involving innovation, success increases. Why does this occur? This inclusive shift towards co-creation increases innovation success, firstly, because it changes behavioural attitudes towards communication, most notably feelings of trust and acceptance among employees (here and here). When members of an organisation trust each other and feel valued, they are more likely to take risks and share ideas, which is essential to the innovation process.
:::
Are Work “On-Sites” The Future Of Your Job? | Ryan Holmes explores a new twist in the minimum office discussion (aka WFH aka hybrid work aka …):
Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai indicated that the company was reconfiguring its office spaces to accommodate what he called on-sites, i.e. days when work-from-home employees would gather together in the office. These gatherings might be for quarterly planning or an annual kick-off or to launch a new product line. The idea is they’re not an everyday thing; they’re special occasions where being together in a physical office makes strategic sense. In other words, on-sites are the new off-sites.
:::
Why Did Hundreds of Thousands of Women Drop Out of the Workforce?| Alisha Haridasani Gupta on a devastating finding about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic recession on women:
The September jobs numbers, released by the Labor Department on Friday, confirmed what economists and experts had feared: The recession unleashed by the pandemic is sidelining hundreds of thousands of women and wiping out the hard-fought gains they made in the workplace over the past few years. While the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.9 percent in September, far below the record high of nearly 15 percent in April, a large part of that drop was driven not so much by economic growth — though there were some job gains — but by hundreds of thousands of people leaving the job market altogether. A majority of those dropping out were women. Of the 1.1 million people ages 20 and over who left the work force (neither working nor looking for work) between August and September, over 800,000 were women, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. That figure includes 324,000 Latinas and 58,000 Black women. For comparison, 216,000 men left the job market in the same time period. […] “The bigger the wage gap across spouses, the smaller the labor supply of the secondary earner, which is typically the wife.” — Stefania Albanesi, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
This could take decades to turn around. | https://medium.com/work-futures/work-futures-update-retrospective-futures-34858d3318c3 | ['Stowe Boyd'] | 2020-10-17 21:26:10.759000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Minimum Office', 'Updates', 'Inclusion', 'Women At Work'] |
Employee Onboarding: How to Get Off to the Right Start | The single most pressing challenge for an organization in this knowledge economy is attracting and retaining talented people. This can be a make or break challenge for the organization and warrants careful consideration during Strategic Planning.
Starting on the right foot is absolutely essential to overcoming this challenge. Organizations, particularly HR, need to have an Organizational Culture that boasts of an effective Employee Onboarding process. In order to accomplish this, present-day HR needs to be clear regarding the challenges of modern-day Onboarding and develop a strategy to establish an onboarding process that yields a rewarding experience for the employees.
At many organizations the Employee Onboarding process follows a customary theme — a run down on “how things are done here” — with the traditional HR view that if the employee can be made to commit to the Organizational Culture from the get-go, they are easier to retain.
Such an Onboarding process does not help the new employee adjust to the company or the role, become an Engaged Employee, and meet the expectations of the organization. Experts have identified various challenges with this conventional Onboarding approach. Here is a list of 8 most frequent challenges:
Poor Socialization of Organizational Values Lack of Role Clarity Challenges with Expectations and Results Managing Change Issues with Time Management Issues with the Manager Navigating the Culture Handling Personal Transition and Relocation
By addressing these challenges appropriately, organizations can establish a rewarding Employee Onboarding experience that results in Employee Retention, quality output in the short-term, and enhanced productivity in the longer run.
Let us delve a little deeper into the challenges.
1. Poor Socialization of Organizational Values
It is presumed that Organizational Values are a thing to be imparted and accepted by the new employee. This is, indeed, essential knowledge, but it is not sacrosanct. Studies suggest acceptance of organizational values in contravention of one’s own identity may be counter-productive in that it may exhaust the employee psychologically, restrict full engagement, hinder creativity, and create work dissatisfaction. This can be overcome by allowing employee to express their unique perspective on the job from the beginning and welcoming them to incorporate what they do best in their work.
2. Lack of Role Clarity
Lack of clear understanding of one’s role is a widespread problem in organizations. After spending some time in the new organization, the employee realizes that the expectation of the role is conflicting with what the employee thought he/she accepted. Encouraging the new employee to identify the gaps in the expectation / perception and discussing it with their managers enables the employees to have a clear perspective and understanding of their roles and responsibilities, enhances employee satisfaction levels, and improves their efficiency and productivity.
3. Challenges with Expectations and Results
New employees are often unable to realize their workload. In order to meet the perceived expectation of managers or peers, they take on too much of work resulting in overload, which diminishes their performance. Informal discussions of new employees with managers and peers regarding their expectations eases the pressure and enables them to take on what is manageable and deliver quality results.
Interested in learning more about various aspects of Employee Onboarding, guiding principles, challenges, and approaches? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Employee Onboarding here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
Do You Find Value in This Framework?
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– Omar Hernán Montes Parra, CEO at Quantum SFE | https://medium.com/@mark-bridges/employee-onboarding-how-to-get-off-to-the-right-start-4217f8c801e0 | ['Mark Bridges'] | 2020-12-23 01:57:40.197000+00:00 | ['Employee Retention', 'Time Management', 'Change Management', 'Employee Engagement', 'Employee Onboarding'] |
Pledged Gold Buyers in Bangalore | As we know that gold is a good investment because it helps you to get money when there is an urgent need. However, if you pledge your gold ornaments to some financial institutions or pawn shops in exchange for money, and then if you fail to repay the amount with interest, then your ornaments will be taken away. This is the main issue of pledging the gold.
People often pledge their gold during crises to get money instantly without thinking that they will have to repay more at the time of releasing their gold because of the interest. Now, if you have pledged your gold ornaments, but cannot release the gold jewellery because you cannot repay the amount, then there are companies that can help you to get back your pledged gold. Ambica Gold Buyers is one of the best pledged gold buyers in Bangalore which helps you to release your pledged gold and if you want they can buy that gold back from you. The process of releasing pledged gold from financial institutions or pawn shops by Ambica Gold Buyers can be done as follows: first clients can come to our office and provide the slip given to them at the time pledging their gold, next on the basis of the information within the slip quality of the gold is checked.
At last, once the client is fully satisfied with our terms and conditions, then the process of releasing gold gets initiated after the KYC is completed. Thus among all the pledged gold buyers in Bangalore Ambica Gold Buyers is the most popular company that you can go for.
Visit www.ambicagoldbuyers.com for more details. | https://medium.com/@ambica0077/pledged-gold-buyers-in-bangalore-fedc06ea8d21 | ['Ambica Gold'] | 2021-04-09 13:32:09.023000+00:00 | ['Gold Buyers', 'Release Pledged Gold', 'Ambica Gold Buyers', 'Gold', 'Cash For Gold'] |
Healing From A Mother Wound Pt 4: Overcoming Emotional and Mental Burn Outs (Scroll Down for Audio Track ) | Healing From A Mother Wound Pt 4: Overcoming Emotional and Mental Burn Outs (Scroll Down for Audio Track )
Photo by Joseph Balzano on Unsplash
Dear Thoughts,
We are finally here on part 4 of Healing from a Mother Wound! This has been one hell of a process!
An American astronomer, Carl Sagan, stated,
“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
And he couldn’t have been more right! Reflecting on my past has provided me the opportunity to understand and notice the deep frustration toward my mother, women, and myself that I experience today. Plus, it allowed me to answer the question:
How has my mom’s relationship influenced my intimate relationships?
which were:
1.Emotional Trust issues. 2.The Weight of her dependency. 3.Emotional detachment. 4. Emotional and mental burnouts.
Time to keep it transparent, my beloved thoughts — here’s to Part 4: Overcoming Emotional and Mental Burn Outs.
Filling In Shoes That Didn’t Fit
Everybody experience mental and emotional burnouts; I discovered most of my burnouts derived from the expectations I created during my childhood.
Majority of my childhood, I always wondered, “What it meant to be a man?” Growing up, I heard phrases like, “You are becoming the man of the house!”; “Suck it up and be a man”; even, “Can you just be a Man.” But I had no clue.
My biological Father wasn’t present, every male my mother brought around I paid no attention to, and many of my friends’ Father, well, they worked! Plus, any Black Man representation on media was either a raper with Bitches and money, an athlete with bitches and money, or a Drug Dealer with — you guessed it, bitches and money. Excuse my language; women were heavily called that back then.
So what did I do? I fake the title! I piece together everything I knew about Manhood to assert my own. In my eyes, a man represented
“A person who problems solved rather if he knew the answer or not; they protect what’s important by any mean necessary; they make orders and do not settle; they play sports and embrace pain with no tears; They are responsible for anything his hands touched! Lastly, you guessed it, he made money and had Bitches!”
Some of these traits are excellent qualities and very needed in many cases, except calling women out their name.
However, at a young age, I miserably failed in those expectations, and having a Mother, who I admit only wanted the best for her son, did not relieve these disappointments but added to them. As I felt like I was failing as a man, there have been times in my youth, she vocalized, “I failed her.” I get it now that her tactic was meant for me to act right, but I felt like I had to prove myself for a long time.
I learned from my mother that I needed to take action when problems manifested and follow orders to be a Man. However, hardly receiving validation for my efforts, I view them as defeats, thus I collected defeated after a defeat and carried them all the way to adulthood! I forced myself to wear a fabricated shoe to assert my Manhood all the through college. | https://medium.com/the-diary-of-a-black-men/healing-from-a-mother-wound-pt-4-overcoming-emotional-and-mental-burn-outs-1e670ff63c7a | ['The Diary Of A Black Man', 'Td Bm'] | 2020-12-17 23:01:05.935000+00:00 | ['Manhood', 'Healing', 'Masculinity', 'Healing From Trauma', 'Self Improvement'] |
Basic Concepts of Programming | Basic Concepts of Programming language
PROGRAMMING:
Programming can be considered as both an art, a science. Coding is an art because of its creativity & versatility & science. There are…….continue reading for click here… | https://medium.com/@codeboks/basic-concepts-of-programming-6e1f6ae1d12d | [] | 2020-12-21 22:17:18.200000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Concepts For Beginners', 'Programming Languages', 'Coding', 'Csharp'] |
A venture studio for DeFi | A Venture Studio for DeFi
Last fall I pitched my friend Sesha with “DeFi is fantastic. Let’s apply the Flagship model to DeFi.” That model is a “venture studio,” where we do the work to create and spin out a series of protocols.
Venture studios succeed by producing extra unicorns. According to CB Insights, about 1.28% of funded companies go on to become unicorns. Idealab reports a 5% success rate, and Flagship Pioneering reports a 25% success rate.
Flagship Pioneering companies take 6–8 years to reach IPO. One of their most successful is Moderna, which stepped up to save the world with Covid vaccines. They started the company in 2010 to work on RNA therapeutics. Eight years later, it was on track for success when its IPO raised $620M at a $7.5B valuation. Eleven years later, in 2021, Moderna reported its first profit.
DeFi succeeds by increasing velocity. Many DeFi protocols reach scale and liquidity within one or two years after founding. Faster returns mean higher IRR.
Advantages of a studio model for DeFi
Good valuations
A venture studio earns a large share of each startup by founding and leading. This allows venture studio investors to get a great pre-presale price on the resulting tokens.
We are getting terrific ROI at the earliest stages. In our initial cohort of projects, we spent about $25K each on creation and validation. This process can take a long time and involve a lot of high priced talent. But, it’s not expensive. In return, we’ll get (about) an initial 50% share of a project that might have a valuation of several million dollars in a token presale.
More importantly, this process is FUN. We are rebuilding financial services on the blockchain. It’s a compelling mission. We’re able to attract industry experts that want to rebuild their financial service.
Shared capabilities create competitive advantage
A venture studio develops specialized skills and capabilities to give its launches a competitive advantage. We’re building a launch team to rapidly deliver beta implementations, and a recruiting capability to add long-term contributors.
One distinctive capability is our structure for creating and validating products with industry-focused teams.
Another distinctive capability is compliance tactics. Compliance tactics can reduce risk and expand options for US investors.
Capital to get to token sales
Token-based projects have a difficult time at the beginning of their life when they need funding, but do not have enough software to offer a system that is “sufficiently decentralized” to comply with US securities law. Many of them ignore this problem. However, it creates a risk of SEC enforcement actions if the project becomes successful.
A studio provides capital and resources to fund a development team until they can sell a token for a “decentralized” system. This ensures that projects are raising money at good valuations, with liquid tokens, rather than with cheaper equity deals or non-compliant, non-US tokens. The savings go to the venture studio owners and investors.
Improved chance of a big win
The expanding portfolio of a venture studio gives investors more chances of getting a big win. Early stage investors make most of their money from about 1% of deals that have unicorn payoffs. To get the payoff, an early stage portfolio should have at least 100 investments, and ideally will have 500 investments. A venture studio investment is an easy way to expand a portfolio into a hot category.
Our goal is to launch about 10 products per year, producing at least one $50M exit.
Lower risk for team members
Entrepreneurs take a risk by working on one product at a time. We can give them a chance to swap some of their shares into a portfolio. If we produce at least one big win, the shared portfolio will become very meaningful.
Higher hit rate
With the support of our colleagues, we can dare to dream. We can break into categories that are beyond the scope of a hackathon team. We can break into categories of DeFi for the real world that have limited competition, and increase our probability that every project can become a big winner.
The venture studio spinout model is right for DeFi
DeFi grows by spinning out protocols that have independent governance .A company like Amazon can grow by expanding the number of products it controls. It develops markets and platforms by adding products inside one company. That doesn’t work in DeFi. DeFi is open source. The Ethereum Foundation does not own the protocols that use its platform.
A DeFi team that is producing multiple products will naturally create spinouts. A venture studio model is their natural state. Some teams have created billions of dollars of value in the last year by spawning protocols, including Andre Cronje’s Yearn group, Compound, and Terra.
The mission
It’s our mission to produce DeFi for the real world, rather than for crypto traders. With the studio model, we can focus immediately on this attractive category.
About Maxos
Maxos builds DeFi for the real world. Join us on Discord to get involved with the products and protocols we are working on. If you are an accredited investor who is interested in the Maxos LLC seed round, please contact me on Discord (“Andy Singleton”), DM on Twitter (@andysingleton) or or LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/geekculture/a-venture-studio-for-defi-463f80d785d3 | ['Andy Singleton'] | 2021-06-04 19:20:10.878000+00:00 | ['Venture Studio', 'Crypto', 'Venture Capital', 'Defi', 'Lean Startup'] |
What’s the difference between business entity names, versus domain names, versus trademarks? | On the surface, the differences might not seem like a big deal, but in fact each legal entity is unique. More importantly, each has varying rights and benefits. Perhaps an example can illustrate. Take a look at Apple, for instance:
“Apple Inc.” is the business entity name. This is what denotes the legal entity, which in this case is a publicly traded U.S. corporation.
“Apple.com” is a domain name, but this denotes only one of the domain names owned by Apple Inc. Others include me.com, icloud.com, itunes.com, iPhone.com, iPad.com — the list goes on.
“Apple” is a registered federal trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The trademark denotes that the source of the goods or services sold in conjunction with the word “Apple” is Apple Inc. — and its subsidiaries. Apple owns many other federal trademarks too, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.
At first glance, a business’ entity name, domain name and trademark seem incredibly similar. All include the name “Apple,” right? But, from a legal standpoint, it’s important to point out that each is different, because the legal rights associated with each are quite different.
Let me explain. . .
Business entity name
A business entity name is generally registered in conjunction with the formation of a separate legal entity at the state level through state governmental authorities, such as the secretary of state, the state’s corporation commission, etc. Common types of business entities include, but are not limited to:
Corporations
Limited Liability Companies (LLCs)
Limited Partnerships
A business entity is a fictional separate legal person and generally enables limited liability protection from the debts of an entity for the owners of a separate legal entity.
For example, if the corporation owes $1 million and doesn’t have the assets to pay that debt, the owners of the corporation — called shareholders — are not personally responsible to pay that debt. This is true only as long as they haven’t personally guaranteed the debt and haven’t engaged in “bad behavior” to otherwise jeopardize that protection.
Although limited liability protection can be very significant, in most states, there aren’t a whole of rights associated with business entity names that enable you to prohibit someone else from using a confusingly similar name to your business entity.
Domain name
A domain name is a series of numbers and/or letters that:
may point to a website;
may point to services such as FTP; or
may be associated with email addresses.
Domain names are typically registered by ICANN-accredited registrars. Because of this centralized registration process, domain names are different from both business names and trademarks because the rightful owner of the domain name can generally prohibit someone else from using it without involving the courts.
Perhaps more surprising, however, is that almost anyone can buy your same domain name with a different top level domain, in many cases. For example, if you own the domain name your-company.com, other people can generally buy your-company.net or your-company.org.
With all of that in mind, consider that the use of a domain name can create common law trademark rights in the domain name. That’s where things get confusing.
Trademarks
In the United States, there are two types of trademarks: state trademarks and federal trademarks.
State Trademarks. State trademarks are valid only in the state or states in which they are used or registered. These are acquired when a business uses a trademark in conjunction with the sale of goods or the provision of services. But here is the surprising part: State trademarks generally don’t need to be registered at the state level before you can use them. Actually, your use of a trademark generally gives you rights in that trademark automatically.
Many states call state trademark registrations “DBAs” or “doing business as.”
Even though state registration is not generally required, there are benefits to state trademark registration. Many times, state trademarks get benefits that are not otherwise granted to trademarks that aren’t registered with the state. Still, these rights vary from state to state.
Unlike a business entity name, the standard used to determine trademark infringement is much more rigorous and involved than the standard used to determine whether a business-entity name infringes upon another business’ entity name. Specifically, courts often look at whether one state trademark is confusingly similar to another and is likely to cause confusion among the buying public.
Federal trademarks. Federal trademarks are generally considered the “holy grail” when it comes to protecting a brand. Valid federal trademarks are automatically valid throughout the entire United States, with some limited exceptions, and don’t require state registration. In addition, the rights afforded to federal trademarks are more significant than the rights associated with state trademarks.
In particular, the owners of federally-registered trademarks are granted the following rights:
The right to use the trademark nationwide
The right to file for an injunction
The right to file for monetary damages
The right to prohibit importation
At first glance, these rights may not seem that significant; however, a further examination shows that they can effectively enable one brand to prohibit any other brands from using a particular trademark throughout the United States and worldwide, according to the Madrid Protocole.
Are you protected?
Although a business’ entity name, domain name and trademark all appear similar on the surface, they’re not. If you’re going to spend a lot of time and money developing your business and brand, it’s critical to understand the distinctions between and among these concepts and the rights associated with them. | https://medium.com/@hashamakram6/whats-the-difference-between-business-entity-names-versus-domain-names-versus-trademarks-90c3dfa2d153 | ['Hasham Akram'] | 2020-12-22 17:46:22.649000+00:00 | ['Domain', 'Business Development', 'Trademark', 'Protection', 'Business'] |
8 Essential Features should be Part of your Fintech Application Development | 8 Essential Features should be Part of your Fintech Application Development Techtic Solutions Follow Nov 23 · 5 min read
The world of fintech has always been a complex one. Filled with jargons, ambiguous terms and conditions, terminologies, and other complexities, the finance sector has always been a step away from common people. That’s why there were several agents and associates back in those days who acted as intermediaries in helping average people like us get access to financial services.
However, with the advent of technology and its allied services, it appears like the world of finance has undergone an overhaul. A renaissance or a revival of sorts has happened in this segment, where it is now called fintech — a combination of finance and technology.
Together, they are offering some of the most convenient services to people and helping them get better access to loans, credit facilities, investment options, banking services, and more. Thanks to fintech, people have regained control over their finances and requirements.
And if you notice, fintech is one of the hottest industries right now. Even a catastrophe like the recent global pandemic couldn’t shake up the industry. Instead, the fintech segment only witnessed an upsurge during these testing times. For those of you looking to invest in fintech or start a fintech company, this is the ideal time and it all starts with fintech app development.
And to help you get started, here are some of the must-have features for your fintech app.
8 Features That Should be Part of Your Fintech Application Development
1. Simplified UI
We started the write up mentioning how finance has always been complex. And as a fintech service provider, one of the first tasks on your hands is to remove any form of complexity involved in accessing fintech services.
Foreign exchanges, investments, PoS systems, and others are all complex but as part of your seamless fintech application development process, you should simplify things for your users. With intuitive user experience, navigation, educational content, and more, orient your users to the world of fintech and make way for retention in the longer run.
2. Biometric Security
While the entire ecosystem of fintech is airtight, one aspect where experts are still working on upgrading functionalities is app security. A shocking report also reveals that there is a hack occurring every 39 seconds. With money and money’s worth on the line, your app has to be more secure and airtight. That’s why we recommend integrating biometric features on your app. This includes features like:
Fingerprint access, where only the user could access and use the app
Heartbeat sensor, a futuristic integration where the heartbeat data from the user’s wearable device can help unlock the app
Facial recognition software, another layer to securing app from unauthorized access and more
Besides these features, fintech mobile app developers are also working on integrating human features like palm veins to grant access to transactions and app usage.
3. Cross-Platform Capabilities
The presence of your fintech brand’s app on a user’s smartphone should make their life easier. That’s why you need to integrate the capabilities of your app with other third-party applications to facilitate seamless payments and other transactions.
From a simple food delivery app to a real estate app, your fintech app should support transactions demanded by users. Third-party integrations could also be used to secure the app further such as the integration with Google Authenticator. For this, you could approach a custom fintech application development company to help you get this feature conveniently implemented.
4. Data Visualization
Over the years, we as users have been having superficial access to information about our transactions, expenses, and incomes. But with your fintech app, this should change and your users should get detailed charts and visualizations of any form of finance-related information they require for a specific period of time.
From charts detailing their expenses patterns to those specifying redundant expenses, your app should not only retrieve data but be able to present them in an interactive way.
5. Millennial-specific Content
An interesting statistic you should know at this point is that 3 out of 5 millennials never invest. And that’s exactly why your targeting should be aimed at millennials. Regardless of their reasons for not investing, your copy, approach, UI, and anything you add to your fintech app should also be inclusive to millennials to captivate them into the world of finance.
Despite being the generation to be online the most, their presence is still scarce in fintech and your app could change that in the coming months if done right.
6. Gamification
Who doesn’t love rewards, cash backs, deals, and personalized discounts? One of the psychological factors for the success of Google Pay is the scratch card that kindles a ray of hope among users for cash prizes. And this makes them keep coming back to the app for all their transactions.
Gamification is an interesting concept that involves reward systems and programs that make the entire process of using your app fun. Creative applications of this concept will not only help in customer retention but for acquisition as well.
7. App Tours
As part of the simplifying fintech process, your app should take users on a tour explaining the features, conveniences, and capabilities of the app. It should be quick, crisp, and concise. This will help someone who is new to the world of finance and your app get instantly oriented to both.
8. Voice Assistance
One of the rapidly deployed features in the tech space, voice assistance offers optimum convenience to people who have a smart virtual assistant installed in their homes. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of people are getting hands-on with virtual assistants for the awe and experience they offer and that’s why your app should support voice-based searches, functionalities, and results retrieval processes.
Read More: 10 Best Fintech Apps You Should Look Up to In 2021
From getting their questions answered through your bots to helping them execute transactions, voice assistance should be explored for its capabilities.
Wrapping Up
So, these were the essential features you shouldn’t overlook for your fintech app. Like you saw, fintech software application development services are quite complex. The more simple it has to appear to users, the more complexities have to be identified and resolved.
To help you roll out an ideal app people can trust in the market, you need to get your app developed from a premier fintech app development company that has been in this sector for ages. Only veterans and experts in a fintech software development company can ensure your app is secure, fully functional, and scalable.
That’s why we recommend getting in touch with us for your app idea. Call us or drop us an email and let’s get started with your fintech app development process. | https://medium.com/techtic-solutions/8-essential-features-should-be-part-of-your-fintech-application-development-9d2162f66756 | ['Techtic Solutions'] | 2020-11-27 17:34:05.139000+00:00 | ['Fintech Apps', 'Fintech Startups', 'Features', 'Fintech App Development', 'Fintech App Features'] |
Book Review — The Other Side of Her | Book Review — The Other Side of Her
Publisher: Srishti Publishers & Distributors
Pages: 192
Price: Rs. 195 INR(Paperback), Rs. 60 INR(Kindle Edition)
ISBN: 978–9387022416
Buy here: https://amzn.to/2NNQeRN
Bestselling romance writer Revati Krishna had everything that a girl could wish for — A sparkling career, a thriving fan-base and a perfect love life. However, life is not always a bed of roses… Sometimes, there appear thorns. An unfortunate car accident turns her life upside down.
To start over her life, Revati moves to a sleepy hill station where she gets entangled with a murder that happened 15 years ago.
On the pretext of writing a book, she starts investigating into the matter and finds striking evidence which otherwise could never be found. But she doesn’t know that she has put her own life in danger.
How far will one woman go to give justice to a dead girl?
The answer lies in that incident which happened 15 years ago. The incident which shall tell the world… The Other Side of Her story.
About the author:
Hari Kumar K is a bestselling author and screenwriter. Continuing with his fascination for the unknown, Hari has written 2 books and 2 films in the paranormal genre. He is one of the top horror, thriller writers of India.
My take on the book:
Revathi has all the happiness in the world — a very loving husband, a baby waiting to come into their lives, a flourishing career as bestselling author famous across the country. But life has other plans when her world turns upside down with a single car accident, as she loses her husband Aarav and her unborn baby. Revathi, in addition to suffering physical injuries is unable to come out of her grief and is diagnosed with depression by their family doctor. In an attempt to help her move on, Revathi’s sister Ruchika takes her along to her husband Vishu’s hometown, which is a quaint place in the mountains. Ruchika also gets Revathi a job in the same school where she teaches, so that Revathi can get busy and forget her past.
However, things get worse as Revathi starts hearing voices at home and at school, sees visions, hallucinates, walks into the woods in the middle of the night, gets injured to the extent of endangering her life. Instead of soothing her tense nerves, the surroundings turn Revathi insane. Cracking the mystery behind Revathi’s new state of mind as she gets pulled more and more into an alternate world forms the rest of the story.
The story starts off as Revathi’s love story and soon the mystery builds as Revathi moves to her sister’s home. The story suffers a slight slump as the new turn of events take some time to make sense and once Revathi understands the connection between the things happening around her, the story moves at breakneck speed. The story keeps alternating between multiple elements — psychological thriller, paranormal saga, horror and mystery.
Even though the second half gets predictable at places, the setting of story in the hill station, the house where Revathi stays, the school, the characters that keep surfacing from the mystery and how the past and present are tied together, keep the narration engaging. I personally would have loved a better ending with a more logical explanation and that which was inclined more towards a psychological thriller. Pick this one to read a very engaging thriller filled with good twists to keep the reader hooked till the end. No wonder this story is already made into a webseries ‘Bhram’ with prominent actors on a leading OTT platform.
My rating:
4/5. | https://medium.com/kiranmayi-g/book-review-the-other-side-of-her-39fb85632882 | ['Kiranmayi G'] | 2019-11-15 16:12:45.710000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Thriller', 'Writing', 'Mystery', 'Book Review'] |
Best Ways To Reduce Landfill Waste For Ordinary People & Their Families | Raising children while being environmentally responsible parents may be difficult.
For example, we could only comprehend your frustrations in trying to discover the finest (and healthiest) environmentally friendly children’s supplies.
Luckily, some parents have discovered the right balance between responsible parenting and self-sufficiency, most of whom you may have heard of.
As a result, we’ve reached a lot of parents who live a Clean Culture to get their answers to the following simple question:
“What is your best individual suggestion for helping parents raise their children in an environmentally responsible manner?” To our joy, several environmental parenting specialists are ready to assist (albeit with their busy lives), and we were able to compile a selection of the top eco-friendly parental tips.
So, with no further hesitation, here’s one of the greatest sustainable parenting recommendations from a few of the country’s most well-known eco-dads and eco-moms.
Ways To Reduce Landfill Waste
1. Children Should Be Involved From An Early Age
“Teach your children why it’s critical for any of them to behave responsibly and sustainably as well.” Began reading literature on ecological sustainability to your kid while he is a toddler.
He will actively participate in leading a more eco-friendly existence by working out from gardening, composting, and saving resources as he grows older. Eco-friendly lifestyle becomes a natural process if children are introduced to it from a young age.”
2. Before You Go Shopping For Children’s Apparel, Make A List.
“Bargain hunt your child’s clothing one upcoming season of time to avoid frantic buying for new goods. You must always be ready to locate what your child needs when you think properly, helping you to dodge quick trends.”
Also Read: 11 Tips Should Follow To Make Schools Eco-Friendly & Sustainable
3. Raising Nature-Loving Children Is A Good Idea.
“If you would like to develop the future generation of environmental fighters, you must raise children who respect and love the ecosystem and the species who live in it. Bring your children on nature treks or excursions.
Spend some time looking for bird feeders or observe the glowing brightly of the trees in the autumn. When your children are growing up to appreciate wildlife, they are much more inclined to defend it as adults.”
4. As A Household, Perform A Garbage Inspection.
“Managing your home trash is the first step toward a good life that’s also right for your household.” Waste audits could also contribute to your home beginning composting or establishing a community garden, getting stronger recyclers, or adjusting your supermarket shopping habits!”
Also Read: Best Compost Bins For Home In 2021 | How To Use Compost Bins
5. Employ Baby Wipes That You Can Reuse.
“Reusable wet wipes are a good place to start when converting to cloth diapers sounds arduous and expensive. They protect your child’s bottom from a variety of toxins contained in throwaway wipes while also saving you cash.”
Continue Reading… | https://medium.com/@abhaygupta390/best-ways-to-reduce-landfill-waste-for-ordinary-people-their-families-218e4d0f6790 | ['Abhay Gupta'] | 2021-12-10 15:02:30.462000+00:00 | ['Waste', 'Cleaning', 'Landfills', 'Environmental Issues', 'Reduce Waste'] |
Removing Barriers To Success Through Networking | Removing Barriers To Success Through Networking
SMLP Speaker Series
Sharing your network is one of the easiest ways to open doors for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
This year I became the Director of The Southern Management Leadership Program (SMLP). SMLP identifies promising leaders among minority, first-generation, and low-income students attending community colleges and provides them with scholarships and mentoring at The University of Maryland (UMD). SMLP plays a big role in UMD’s success and recognition, ranking in the Top 10 for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education for the sixth straight year.
This fall, we held a speaker series midweek for one hour via Zoom. The engagement was incredible! I invited successful entrepreneurs from my network that — I believed — the students would relate to most. You can’t be what you can't see. We recorded and uploaded the top tips from each speaker that encompasses all of the valuable lessons they shared with the student entrepreneurs. The students were given time to ask the speakers questions and get advice related to their respective situations. View some of the speaker highlights with their bios below:
André Blackman
André Blackman is a UMD alum and the founder and CEO of Onboard Health. He is also Fortune’s 40 Under 40 in Health Care for 2020. In this video, Blackman gives SMLP entrepreneurs advice on taking action, building community, learning how people think, self-care, and moving past the fear of failure.
Drew Evans
Drew Evans is a UMD alum and the Senior Director at Computer Futures, a leading global STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) recruitment company. For more than 30 years, Computer Futures has been connecting businesses with highly skilled IT talent. Drew oversees the technology contract recruitment division of Computer Futures, covering the East Coast and Mid-West with offices in New York City, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Before Computer Futures, Drew worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. He is a proud alumnus of UMD’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Eloy Yndigoyen
Eloy Yndigoyen is the COO and CFO for Spread The Love, a family-owned and operated all-natural food company fueling healthy lifestyles. In his role, Eloy is responsible for overseeing sales operations for the growing company and has helped build a category-leading presence on Amazon for the business. Eloy earned his Master’s of Business Administration from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Science in International Business from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Anthony Jones
Anthony Jones manages the Southeast Region Strategic Accounts for Mapbox, a location data platform for mobile and web applications startup with a $1 billion valuation. Anthony is an experienced sales professional with expertise in building organic value-driven relationships. Anthony is also the Business and Professional Development Lead for Mapbox Shades, a Diversity & Inclusion enterprise resource group. The University of Maryland alum’s interests include helping others that are less able or unfortunate uncover their hidden potential.
As the semester comes to a close with final exams and papers due, I’ve been particularly impressed with the students’ ability to adapt while learning remotely. Their resilience exemplifies everything Southern Management represents, and I couldn’t be more honored to play a small role in its success. | https://medium.com/humble-ventures/removing-barriers-of-success-through-networking-344e67453a1e | ['Harry Alford'] | 2020-12-18 02:07:30.716000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Speakers', 'Networking', 'Minority Entrepreneurs'] |
A Comprehensive List of My True Crime Articles | Man Killed Infant by Zipping Her in Backpack in Car Trunk
Child protective services had allegedly been called three times before the murder.
A Weekend Camping Trip Gone Wrong: The Bega Schoolgirl Murders
The popular camping grounds were considered “safe,” but is anywhere truly safe?
He Shot His Mother and Then Danced With His Sister
He claimed someone told him to do it — but who?
Florida Fugitive Started a GoFundMe to Flee the Country
He tried to crowdfund his escape after breaking his bail conditions.
A Japanese Telephone Dating Club Rivalry Ended in Fire
Kayoko Nakai ordered an attack on her rival’s club, which killed four people.
Russian YouTuber’s Pregnant Girlfriend Died on Live Stream
He locked her outside in subzero weather for $1,000.
Neglected Teenager Starved to Death in Home Filled With Food
After being convicted of manslaughter, his mother was released *years* early.
A Christmas Witch Hunt: The Murder of Kristy Bamu
A family holiday turned into a deadly witch hunt.
Mentally Ill Woman, Inspired by Horror Movies, Decapitates Mom
She was found not guilty of murder.
3 Teen Satanists Murder Classmate to Earn the Devil’s Favor
They thought the devil would grant them stardom if they killed a virgin.
Retired Security Guard Murders Unarmed Teen Burglars on Thanksgiving Day
He recorded the murders on a tape recorder.
Former High School Classmates Kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963
The kidnapping had a lasting effect on his father for 30 more years.
Teen Inspired by Michael Myers — Murders Mother and Sister
When he wrote his 4-page confession, he confessed to being inspired by the “Halloween” remake.
“Eccentric” Professor Mummified 26 Dead Girls and Turned Them Into Dolls
He wanted to bring them back to life.
“Fun-Loving” Grandma Murders Husband, Then Kills Lookalike While on the Run
A 10-day nationwide manhunt finally stopped her.
The Tragic, True Story Behind “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”
Both medicine and religion failed the real victim.
Her Ex’s Murder Was So Brutal It Was Called “Overkill”
She stalked him for nearly a year, then murdered him post-sex.
Florida Man Attacks With a Samurai Sword Over Missing Shrimp
He said, “I went Code Red.”
Burglar Eaten by Alligator, Resident Calls It “Poetic Justice”
A true crime story about Matthew Riggins.
Prosecutors called her a Personification of Evil
Did she commit patricide for love, money, or both? | https://medium.com/@malindafusco/a-comprehensive-list-of-my-true-crime-articles-eed44a575e0 | ['Malinda Fusco'] | 2021-03-03 10:24:40.320000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'True Story', 'True Crime', 'Crime', 'Murder'] |
[ANova Recap #4] Teaching Toolbox and Inequity in Tech | General Meeting #4 Recap
ANova Halloween pumpkin carving event!
In this week’s general meeting, we had a former ANova alumn, Christina Ong, come in as a guest speaker! Christina currently teaches computer science at Oakland Tech. During her talk, we went over different teaching strategies that take into account differences in learning styles of students. In particular, we talked about the idea of scaffolding in terms of curriculum development and teaching. The main takeaway from our discussion on effective teaching tactics is learning with the students. The processes of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are subsets of each other. We also talked about the main pitfall in the classroom, inequity, and the ways in which we as instructors can minimize inequity. We did smaller discussions about common problems run into while teaching and potential solutions to each of these problems. An example of this would be when a student makes an unclear or hesitant comment, to which a potential response by the teacher could be encouraging that student to speak up and speak through their idea, prompting further discussion about the comment among students thereafter. We concluded our general meeting by summarizing our “Teaching Toolbox”, which contains the strategies and tactics discussed throughout the general meeting and how we as instructors and efficiently and effectively implement them on a day to day basis at site.
Small Group #4 Recap
In this week’s small group, we focused on the cultural aspects of gentrification and tech. For example, we discussed elitism in gentrification: the belief that the culture that is replacing is inherently more sophisticated than the culture it is replacing — a sort of cultural Manifest Destiny. We talked about the ways in which we can abstain from replacing or changing or belittling the cultures present in the communities that we enter, specifically in regards to entering the tech space. We also revisited the topics from our last small group, discussing tech companies’ responsibilities, with regards to creating more housing in the Bay Area and their contributions to the growing inequality in the Bay Area by outsourcing their labor. We concluded our small group discussion this week by reviewing the forms of resistance we can employ to help people who are being kicked out of their homes and communities, and discussed the ways in which we as individuals are responsible for helping these communities, even if we do not personally belong to them.
Site Recap: Fremont High School
This week’s site highlight is Fremont High School, which is another new site for ANova this semester! 4 mentors go to Fremont on Tuesdays, and 3 mentors go on Thursdays. The classroom has 7 students, all of whom are juniors in high school. Because of the smaller ratio of students to mentors, the class is able to break up into groups of two to three students with one mentor, which has facilitated the teaching process for the mentors and allows for the maximum retention of content by the students. In small groups, the mentors are able to most efficiently relay the information to the students while considering the ways in which those specific students learn best, which is considerably more difficult when teaching an entire classroom of students. In this past week, the students at Fremont have been working on a dice rolling project, which utilizes a combination of the recent skills they have been developing in Python: using random numbers and comparators. While working on this project, the mentors noticed that most of the students were struggling to complete the project on their own, so in the upcoming weeks they will be reviewing the concepts that are causing the most trouble and will revisit the project in smaller portions when they feel the students are ready to tackle it again! | https://medium.com/@berkeleyanovapr/anova-recap-4-teaching-toolbox-and-inequity-in-tech-d55bbf09ad36 | ['Berkeley Anova'] | 2019-11-15 03:46:12.760000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Bay Area', 'Volunteer', 'Mentorship', 'Computer Science'] |
In our opinion: Honor our veterans | Every year, on Nov. 11, our country celebrates Veterans Day. America has been honoring its veterans around this date, in some fashion, by some name, since 1919 — the one-year anniversary of the armistice of World War I, then known as “The Great War.”
Fighting stopped between the Allied nations and Germany on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Nov. 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day a year later.
In 1938, the government passed an act that made Nov. 11 an official holiday dedicated “to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’” In 1954, after World War II and the Korean War, Congress revised the act, replacing the word “Armistice” with the word “Veterans.”
The remembrance shifted to Oct. 25 in 1971 after some governmental “confusion,” but was returned officially to Nov. 11 by in 1975.
The name and date of what is now known as Veterans Day may have changed in the 94 years since the first celebration, but the spirit has not.
Veterans Day commemorations are held throughout the country, and our local region does an excellent job of paying homage to the servicemen and servicewomen who have served, and are still serving, to protect our freedoms.
These men and women of the Armed Forces past and present risk their lives, day in and day out, so that we can live the lives we enjoy today in America. They risk their lives, day in and day out, so that we can live better lives in the future. They risk their lives, day in and day out, so that people around the world can hopefully live a life that is free like ours.
Fighting for freedom is not always a popular choice, and it may be debatable, at times, whether it’s even the right choice. But that does not, and should not, take away from the people who serve to protect our country.
Hopefully, you commemorated Veterans Day in some fashion. And hopefully, you’ll continue to honor our veterans throughout the year.
Your thoughts:
How did you commemorate Veterans Day this year? How can we continue to honor the servicemen and servicewomen throughout the year? | https://medium.com/the-tabernacle-sun/in-our-opinion-honor-our-veterans-586d55cf05c1 | [] | 2017-01-10 16:59:30.582000+00:00 | ['Headlines', 'Celebrate', 'Congress', 'America'] |
Trump or Hillary: why I just can’t. | Trump or Hillary: why I just can’t.
Written October 2016
Well I’ve done it: Jumped on the bandwagon with all the other masses of people who love to render unsolicited advice. And of all topics, I chose the ever-depressing, ever-impending 2016 presidential election.
In a nutshell: I can’t vote for Hillary and I can’t vote for Trump, and that doesn’t make me an irresponsible or apathetic American. Here’s why:
Recently a friend passed along an interesting article entitled, “I’m pro life. And I’m voting for Hillary. Here’s why.” The title definitely sparked my interest, since the abortion issue is what I would consider to be my personal “hill to die on.” (More on that in just a minute) This jist of the article was that a liberal approach to government would do more for helping the American people (especially those within the demographics that are prone to abortions) than a republican approach. In a way, I resonated with her viewpoint. It seems like republican politicians frequently push the idea of freedom from an economic standpoint: “Stop giving away our money to people who haven’t worked for it.” And liberals argue, “These people need help and it’s the government’s job to do so.” Hillary and Trump represent the extremes of these two views, and I have problems with both.
But first, let me back up and explain why the abortion issue is so central in mind when it comes to choosing where to place my vote.
Why is abortion my main issue?
There are real lives at stake here: Lives of entire communities that function without a stable nuclear family; without fathers or real men to value their daughters so that they don’t try to meet their need for love by sleeping around with guys who will immediately leave or pressure them to “get rid of it.” There are expectant women who literally have neither the time nor understanding to navigate a horrifically abused, complicated, and insufficient system in order to get the medical care, childcare, housing, and food that they truly need. And let’s also not forget the lives that are literally at stake: the children who haven’t exited their mother’s womb but are viable, living beings with faces that look like their parents’ and souls that are completely unique. A child that born into an unfortunate circumstance still has worth and still has a right to his or her life.
Many women who abort their babies aren’t doing so because they want to make a political statement about their right to choose. It feels like there is no choice but to abort. These women feel trapped, overwhelmed, and alone. When they themselves have not been treated as someone of worth, how can we expect them to value the tiny human beings inside them?
What does this have to do with the election? You can’t stop evil from happening, but the leaders in our country have a responsibly to do their best to protect American lives and freedom; and we have a responsibility to care for one another…not by shooing our neighbors off to a broken system, but by rolling up our sleeves and caring for people ourselves: adopting, educating, giving, mentoring, and actually caring in a way that involves direct and personal sacrifice of time and money.
There is a real need for women like teenage moms and single moms to have support. The system is failing them, and I honestly believe that pouring more money and red tape into a welfare system that is already broken and corrupt is not going to solve that problem. However, simply outlawing abortion is not going to improve life for those women either.
Lastly, there is no such thing as a safe abortion. Some methods are obviously less damaging than others, yes — I see what you were getting at. But it needs to be understood that an abortion does lasting damage, not only to the baby whose life never gets lived, but also to the mother who is physically and emotionally affected in deeper ways than most of them would ever expect. Nothing is ever without hope of healing, but it is truly a damaging and tragic occurrence that is so SO common. Over 55 MILLION abortions have been reported in the US since Roe V Wade (and not all states even have to report their numbers — California being one of them). That’s five times the number of people killed in the Holocaust.
So with that, let’s get back to the candidates.
Why not Hillary?
The Left has it absolutely right in identifying that there are people in our nation who need help. However, the problem with their view is that the government shouldn’t and can’t effectively satisfy the needs of all these people groups that they endeavor to help. No matter how well intentioned, the more that the government interferes with these groups of people, the more trouble that is created. For example, the article mentioned Hillary’s support for single mothers in low income areas. True, this demographic is where the majority of abortions come from. However, single mothers qualify for significantly more government welfare programs than do married parents. Also, the more you make, the fewer benefits that you qualify for. So in its efforts to care for others, the government has created an incredibly complex and easily abused system that disincentives people from work and marriage.
Republicans have it right that freedom from a tyrannical government is an essential element of human life that is worth fighting for. However, the problem with the typical republican approach is that they are trying to defend liberty for entirely the wrong reason. Yes, freedom is a God-ordained human right, but biblically the purpose of freedom has always been so that we can generously provide and care for those around us. God brought the Israelites out of captivity for that same purpose:
“I am the LORD; I have called you in righteousness; I will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you as a covenant for the people,a light for the nations to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.” (Isaiah 42)
So, if it is true that abortions have increased during republican presidency,* it’s an evidence that we have lost sight of the duty of the American people as individual free human beings to step in with the care and financial support that republicans claim the government has neither the capacity nor the rights to provide.
She is explicitly aiming at destroying human life. Yes, most abortions don’t happen at 40 weeks (especially since it’s illegal at that gestational age in most states), but the fact that the potential future president sees full term abortions as justifiable and even condones them is terrifying to me. This kind of disregard for the most defenseless beings in our nation is not something that I can support as a voter.
Hillary’s stance on this issue also demonstrates her disregard for American women. Abortions are physically destructive and emotionally damaging for the women on whom they are performed. This is true when performed at any phase in pregnancy, and even more so later on. We should be offering love, support, help, charity (from our own pockets) and encouragement for the expectant mothers in our nation, not an “easy” solution that leaves women injured and alone.
Why Not Trump?
I saw a clip of an interview with Trump where they were asking him what to do about abortion in America, and all he kept blubbering was that he “is pro life.” When the interviewer pressed him further, he stated that there should be “some kind of punishment” for women who have abortions…He missed the point completely.
Donald Trump is arrogant, selfish, dishonest, immoral, and ignorant. He repeatedly fails to be a man of his word, and his track record proves that he neither values human life (aside from his own) nor understands the issue of abortion. This combination of ignorance and apathy worries me that his list of 11 candidates for the Justice positions is worthless because he will say anything in order to get what he wants.
“In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate — look to his character. . . . When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor, he betrays the interest of his country” — Noah Webster
I can’t ignore my conscience in an effort to support the “lesser evil.” I didn’t follow my conscience during the primaries, and I regret it. I was a part of the large group of people who voted for Rubio because “he was electable.” What a waste. Now I’m realizing that I need to change my tune and actually use my right as a voter in the way that I’m supposed to. All these strategic and manipulative voting tactics is what helped land us in this debacle in the first place (well, that and the belief that government’s purpose is solve all our problems for us). I do get it that you need to vote for the lesser of two evils sometimes. But when both candidates check pretty much every box of what a president should not be, I just can’t do it.
Trump would be a terrible president. I don’t trust him and honestly don’t think I can vote for him. But that doesn’t mean that Hillary is the better choice.
So then what?
Lately I’m realizing that I have been operating under the belief that I HAVE to vote for one of the two main candidates, or else I’m not fulfilling my civic duty. However, I’m starting to realize just the opposite now:
My duty as an American (and also a believer) is to make an informed decision about voting — to honor my conscience and to make a wise choice. Just because I may not feel like I can rightly check either box on that portion of my ballot does not mean that I am choosing to be apathetic about this election and the future of our nation. It simply means that I don’t believe that I am doing my country a service by voting for either candidate.
But, I can’t stop there. If I really believe that either option will be putting an evil person in power, I had better get together a game plan for how else to counteract that evil. So, for me personally the outplaying of my civic duty is going to look like this:
1. Not voting for Hillary or Trump
2. Standing up for the causes that I fear will not be supported by the future president (whoever it ends up being). Specifically for me, that will be continuing to support and getting re-involved in volunteering at the East End Pregnancy Test + Help Center
3. Not being as ignorant about politics as I have been in years previous so that I can intelligently engage with people and hopefully make a positive impact four years from now
4. Being a neighbor and a friend to people. I believe that the government is not suited for supporting those in need. The welfare system is insufficient and abused both internally and externally. I think it’s the government’s job to guard our freedom and administer justice (through punishing evil and rewarding good), and it’s Church’s job to care for people. So, since I most likely will not like what I’m seeing come from Washington, I need to step up with eyes to see those in need, a mind to discern what to do (or sometimes not do) for them, and a heart to extend gospel-centered generosity and love to the poor and marginalized
5. Praying, praying, praying for mercy on our nation and for the leaders of our government to know the Lord and be changed by Him
Neither candidate for presidency hold a view that values women and unborn children; and Hillary’s views are particularly destructive in these areas. I don’t know what to do with my vote in November. But I do know this: it is my responsibility to be a neighbor and a friend in my community. To give to those who are in need so that they don’t have to rely on a government that doesn’t know or value them. So I’m gonna start there, and pray for mercy for our nation, opened eyes for its people, and changed hearts for our leaders.
*If you look at planned parenthoods own reports, the abortion rate has actually steadily declined since the early 1980s…so it’s kind of unfair to make the point that abortions were higher during in Reagan’s administration than they were in Clinton’s — the decline has occurred consistently regardless of who has been in office) | https://medium.com/@juliedavis_73895/trump-or-hillary-why-i-just-cant-43d021a15a52 | ['Julie Davis'] | 2019-11-14 02:15:22.126000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Abortion', 'Trump', 'Hillary Clinton', 'Us Election 2016'] |
3 REASONS TO JOIN THE CONSORTIUM DEFINING THE NEXT GENERATION OF GENOMICS RESEARCH | This week we made a huge step forward in accelerating genomics-based precision medicine in research and clinical care, starting a consortium of experts and organizations who will help to define the next generation of genomics research.
We’ve already been joined by Arizona State University, Baylor College of Medicine, Booz Allen Hamilton, Mayo Clinic, OneOme and Yale New Haven Health.
This is a compelling initiative that follows on our support of the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative. I agree with DJ Patil, Chief Data Scientist of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who says: “Unleashing the power of data through open community and collaboration is the right approach to solve a complex problem like precision medicine. Initiatives like this one will break data silos and share data in an open platform across industries to speed genomics-based research and ultimately save lives.”
So, whether you are a Bioinformatician, Computer Science Engineer, Genomics Expert in the Clinical and Research spaces working for a Provider, Pharma or a Consulting firm I urge you to join.
Here are three ways in which all of us will benefit.
First, the technology is ready to put the next generation platform for genomic storage and analytics in our grasp. Apache Hadoop and Hortonworks Connected Data Platform now make it possible to do research never before imagined, and that can save lives through genomics-based medicine. We’re committed to providing our technology and expertise.
There has simply never been a more exciting time to address diseases like cancer or arthritis, which are as urgent today as they were fifty years ago.
Genomics research is revolutionizing medicine and a key to finally unlocking the doors to these diseases. But no-one researcher or provider can do it alone. The sheer scale of the project and challenges of bringing precision medicine to life requires a united front across technology, research and healthcare.
Second, together truly means that only an ‘open’ ecosystem can make it happen. So we’re also bringing our expertise in open source communities to bear. No-one knows how to do ‘open’ better. We aim to build an open community and ecosystem that can address the challenges and opportunities.
Harnessing the potential of precision medicine demands a platform to store a massive volume of genomic information, an analytic interface and real time querying at scale. Our vision and final goal is to help develop that next generation scalable open-source platform for genomic storage and analytics, and to enable precision-based medicine. We can only do this if we focus on what those challenges are and how to address them.
I strongly believe that this open type of collaboration will create the innovation required.
Finally, by joining now you will personally be able to help define the problem space and future-state capabilities, through proven Design Thinking workshops.
Design Thinking is a proven and repeatable protocol to drive innovation, pioneered at Stanford. It’s been shown to achieve extraordinary results.
There are a number of challenges to harness the full potential, such as: lack of standardization, difficulties of open data management, the inability to capture and share organizational knowledge and best practices around Omics data, slow speed of interaction, the size & complexity of data, the dynamic nature of the data, and so on.
The consortium will lead the global effort in the design, development and release of that next generation data platform, and these associated challenges, based on input from participants via Design Thinking. It will also make multiple use cases available for patient treatment and research.
It will also leverage knowledge across multiple domains including medical genetics, programming, high performance computing and big data to ensure that organizations of any size have the opportunity to store and analyze genomics data in a single platform.
I urge you to join and to become a key part of the consortium today. We already have seen use cases emerge to enable bio conductors, next generation beacon projects and time series genomic data.
Lets do this together. Email me at [email protected]. | https://medium.com/future-of-data/3-reasons-to-join-the-consortium-defining-the-next-generation-of-genomics-research-255fcd5e5d20 | ['Vishal Dhanuka'] | 2016-06-30 17:38:03.466000+00:00 | ['Medicine', 'Genomics', 'Bigdata'] |
men's For Jackets (F MENDI, 2XL 36) | men's For Jackets (F MENDI, 2XL 36)
Brand: MAXIFOX
Check-more
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A Modern Travel Friendly Bomber Jacket with a stylish flairA jacket that can take you from a party setting to the casual ski mountains in high style. Designed to be both functional and fashionable.
Fit Type: Regular Fit
Zip-through Bomber Quilted jacket
Winterwear; warm and soft
Pattern : Solid || Neck : Regular Collar || Closure : Button On Front | https://medium.com/@shivamshukla130397/mens-for-jackets-f-mendi-2xl-36-a39b46adc7d7 | ['Shopping Center'] | 2020-12-26 02:11:30.993000+00:00 | ['Shopping', 'Shopify', 'Online Shopping Store', 'Online Marketing', 'Online Shopping'] |
Cap 13 | Jujutsu Kaisen (2020) Sub Español | El Capítulo 13 del anime Jujutsu Kaisen tiene como título “Mañana”, y su fecha de estreno es el viernes de diciembre 25 de 2020 en Japón. Además, te dejamos la sinopsis oficial de Jujutsu Kaisen cap 13 Sub Español completo a continuación:
“Junpei Yoshino, escapa de la escuela secundaria y se va al cine. no obstante, es testigo de como un compañero de clase que se estaba riendo solo con la cara deformada y la mirada muerta. Yoshino persigue al “criminal” y grita. Después de eso, el Yuuji entra al cine en la escena del incidente junto con Kento Nanami, un mago de primera clase, y allí encuentran dos maldiciones.”
Jujutsu Kaisen — Avance del capitulo 13
“Sufrimiento, arrepentimiento, humillación: en algunos casos, su acumulación en un solo lugar provoca maldiciones muchas veces fatales. Seguimos la vida diaria de Yuji Itadori, estudiante de secundaria y miembro del club de espiritismo. No cree en los fantasmas, pero su extraordinaria fuerza física es un activo valioso para las misiones del grupo… hasta que uno sale mal. Mientras se traga una reliquia para protegerse de un hechizo, Ryomen Sukuna, el famoso demonio de dos caras, lo posee. Condenado a muerte por la organización exorcista, debe encontrar e ingerir todos los dedos de Sukuna para ser libre. Y para eso, el adolescente se iniciará en el arte oculto y misterioso del exorcismo.”
>>>>>>>> One World: Together At Home <<<<<<<<
Basic protective measures against the new coronavirus
Stay aware of the latest information on the COVID-19 outbreak, available on the WHO website and through your national and local public health authority. Most people who become infected experience mild illness and recover, but it can be more severe for others. Take care of your health and protect others by doing the following:
Wash your hands frequently
Regularly and thoroughly clean your hands with an alcohol-based hand rub or wash them with soap and water.
Why? Washing your hands with soap and water or using alcohol-based hand rub kills viruses that may be on your hands.
Maintain social distancing
Maintain at least 1 metre (9 feet) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing.
Why? When someone coughs or sneezes they spray small liquid droplets from their nose or mouth which may contain virus. If you are too close, you can breathe in the droplets, including the COVID-19 virus if the person coughing has the disease.
Avoid touching eyes, nose and mouth
Why? Hands touch many surfaces and can pick up viruses. Once contaminated, hands can transfer the virus to your eyes, nose or mouth. From there, the virus can enter your body and can make you sick.
Practice respiratory hygiene
Make sure you, and the people around you, follow good respiratory hygiene. This means covering your mouth and nose with your bent elbow or tissue when you cough or sneeze. Then dispose of the used tissue immediately.
Why? Droplets spread virus. By following good respiratory hygiene you protect the people around you from viruses such as cold, flu and COVID-19.
If you have fever, cough and difficulty breathing, seek medical care early
Stay home if you feel unwell. If you have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, seek medical attention and call in advance. Follow the directions of your local health authority.
Why? National and local authorities will have the most up to date information on the situation in your area. Calling in advance will allow your health care provider to quickly direct you to the right health facility. This will also protect you and help prevent spread of viruses and other infections.
Stay informed and follow advice given by your healthcare provider
Stay informed on the latest developments about COVID-19.
Siga los consejos dados por su proveedor de atención médica, su autoridad de salud pública local y nacional o su empleador sobre cómo protegerse y proteger a otros del COVID-19.
¿Por qué? Las autoridades nacionales y locales tendrán la información más actualizada sobre si COVID-19 se está extendiendo en su área. Están mejor ubicados para asesorar sobre lo que las personas en su área deberían hacer para protegerse. | https://medium.com/@jelismarmolina1201/cap-13-jujutsu-kaisen-2020-sub-espa%C3%B1ol-952f78942075 | ['Jelismar Molina'] | 2020-12-22 20:32:41.329000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Jujutsu Kaisen', 'Anime', 'Coronavirus'] |
The Illusion Of Job Security | The Illusion Of Job Security
What made me realise that nothing in this world is guaranteed.
Unless you become a midwife, undertaker or a tax collector anyway.
I’ve been in retail my entire working life. My first experience of work was at a supermarket when I was sixteen. Before long I’d moved on to bigger and better things, becoming a Barista at one of the largest coffee chains in the world, the name of which could also be used to describe the currency used in outer space. Get it?
I made overpriced coffee part-time for around three years while studying before being offered the chance at a promotion. I was successful, on the caveat that I worked full-time, and after another year I was appointed Store Manager. I loved my job. I loved my store, I loved the people I worked with and I loved (most of ) the customers I interacted with every day. But one day I realised that I’d reached my ceiling of what I could achieve, and I was sick of going home smelling like old coffee. Enough was enough.
I knew that I wanted to stay within retail, as that’s where my experience lies. But the world of retail can be a fickle mistress in this current economic climate. As I’ve grown up, I’ve seen several successful retailers disappear. Businesses which were at one point or another a key part of the UK high street have closed their doors, left hundreds of staff unemployed due to poor sales, following the rise of online shopping and the financial recession.
Nobody wants to ever be in that situation, so I decided that whatever company I applied to had to be something big, something well-established that could weather the storm of high-street struggles and make it through to live another day. I wanted job security.
This Isn’t Just Any Job
In May 2017 I submitted an application for a management position at one of the UK’s most prestigious retailers. This company started out in the late 1800s, and since then has become a cornerstone of the British shopping landscape. My parents and grandparents shopped there, and probably their parents, and their parents before them as well. The hours were less, the pay and benefits were better than my old position. There would be opportunities to progress. A few weeks later I got a call saying my application was successful. I’d hit the job security jackpot.
Or so I thought.
My Worst Day At Work
One day, probably about a year after I’d started, a text message came through on the internal work phones:
“All managers to the training room.”, it read.
Now, a message like that means one of two things. It’s either somebody’s birthday and we get to eat cake for fifteen minutes, or something has happened which is less a reason to celebrate, more reason to worry.
This time, there was no cake in sight.
We were told that the business had made the decision to cut costs. As the biggest cost in most businesses is the labour, they had reviewed the figures and deemed we had too many managers employed. We were told that we would be put through a consultation process, which essentially meant that we had to reapply for our jobs, providing evidence as to why we thought we should be kept. We would be given a score by our line managers, which would then be submitted to our regional team, who would then decide who would stay, and who would be made redundant.
My heart and those of my colleagues sank through the floor.
I felt completely deflated. The job I loved was in jeopardy. I had been so sure that this career move would mean that my job would be secure, that I could spend the next 30 years working my way up the ladder, maybe even retire early. If this company isn’t safe from the perils of the economic downturn, what is?
I had many concerns, just like the rest of my colleagues. But the two at the top of my list were as follows:
As one of the most recently recruited managers in our region, would they operate a ‘last in, first out’ policy? Was I at more risk of being let go because my short length of service meant any redundancy paid to me would be the absolute minimum?
As I was hired externally, I negotiated my salary. Which means I’m paid slightly higher than some of the other managers in the business. Would they use this as an opportunity to do a bit of extra cost-saving, get rid of someone who costs the company a little bit extra to employ?
I raised these two concerns and was assured that the process would be done anonymously. Those choosing the candidates for redundancy would not be aware of any names, as a way of eliminating any potential bias based on prior knowledge of the individual. It would be based purely upon the scores we were given, and only after potential candidates for redundancy had been selected would their names be revealed.
I remained unconvinced and was extremely worried about my position.
What happened next?
We weren’t told how long the process could take until it got started. The process of making redundancies isn’t simple, so the business had to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. Basically, it would take as long as it takes. You can imagine how motivated we all felt leaving that room, going back to do our jobs with a dark cloud of worry over our heads.
I went home that day and immediately updated my CV. I needed some sort of back up plan, as I don’t have the luxury of being able to afford to be out of work. I have two children and as I’ve already alluded to, my short length of service meant any redundancy I’d get would be absolutely minimal. Despite the assurances I’d been given, I was convinced that I was at higher risk than some of my other colleagues.
The next few weeks of work were unbearable. We were left in a state of limbo, trying to find the motivation to carry on with our day jobs, whilst also trying not to think about the looming prospect of unemployment. We waited for weeks to finally hear some more news of what was going on:
“All managers to the training room.” the text read.
For the first time in my life, I was glad there was no cake in sight. This must be some sort of news about the redundancy program, finally telling us when the process would begin.
I was half right.
I sat down in the training room, braced for the worst. What I heard instead was a team brief, stating that due to staff turnover in our region, we had dropped below our required number of managers, and as a result, managers at my level were no longer being considered for redundancy.
You can imagine the reaction from my colleagues and I.
I left that room feeling elated, but also with the feeling I’d learned an important lesson.
No matter how big the company you work for, how many clients you have, or how skilled your job role is, your job is never guaranteed.
I joined this company because I wanted to work for a huge brand, somewhere I never thought I’d have to deal with the prospect of redundancy. But I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if you’re a Barista or a Business Consultant, whether you work for McDonald’s or Microsoft. Look at the number of businesses worldwide that have declared bankruptcy in the past twenty years. Kodak, Blockbuster, Compaq, Enron were all huge brands that didn’t keep up with the changing business landscape, and have subsequently closed their doors.
So while there may be days when your boss irritates the hell out of you, or a customer pushes you over the edge after complaining because they specifically asked for no foam on their grande one-shot, non-fat, sugar-free vanilla latte. There will be days when your workplace is the last place on Earth you want to be. Don’t allow yourself to become complacent because of the size or the success of the company you work for. I used to. But now I realise how wrong I was.
Nothing is guaranteed in life. Apart from births, deaths, and taxes. But even then, we are all replaceable. Don’t take your job for granted.
Welcome to the bottom of the page, good to see you. If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more of what I have to say, you can reach my profile super quickly by clicking here. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-illusion-of-job-security-355bbcd70ef8 | ['Jon Peters'] | 2019-08-19 11:12:15.189000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Worst Day', 'Careers', 'Advice', 'Career Advice'] |
Darwin Or God? | To vote for Darwin or God?
Is a dilemma true, or faux?
Years and years of discussion.
Conflicting without compassion.
Darwinists: “There’s no God, buddies”.
Religious: “We don’t come from those monkeys”!
Both of them lose in the end,
because they both pretend;
that they discuss to go beyond,
though they do it to say “I won!”
So, the war wins,
not the warriors.
Oh, their blinkers
are notorious!
As for me,
as I observe,
there’s no dilemma
in the air.
The human realm
is indeed
the animal-realm
that proceeded.
But for this GREAT process
to take place,
divine wisdom
worked in them.
Not a divided one, outside,
but the one essence of all the alive.
The animal realm took a step
to touch the mind’s range, to go ahead.
Sometimes we see animals’ wisdom;
nature’s knowledge in them, too.
And we have their wild instincts
but not just these,
and that’s the thing.
We have the mind to manage instincts
and also to go beyond,
to understand the point of all,
to extend more
to reach the sky,
in which the Nous
is somehow the mind
“already evolved” into divine.
Let’s call it Universe, Self, God,
Nature, Energy, Substance,
or …I don’t know what.
But all of these are just One.
And, maybe we’ll understand
when the next realm we’ll become. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/darwin-or-god-ec6fdbdb8486 | ['Anthi Psomiadou'] | 2020-12-03 10:02:47.177000+00:00 | ['Humanity', 'Evolution', 'God', 'Divine', 'Religion'] |
Love or Politics? A visit with my dad | A MORAL DILEMMA
Love or Politics?
ove and PolticsPhoto by Roland Kay-Smith on Unsplash
I care for you,
I’m there for you
but I don't care for
your politics
or
your obsession with
money and power
or
your swift dismissal of
those you think
beneath you
or
your disregard for
others feelings
or
how you confuse
caring
with weakness
or
take our devotion
for granted
I know I’m annoying
buzzing in your ear,
questioning your point of view
You say -
it’s none of your beeswax!
Still,
I care for you,
I’m there for you
my love,
your politics
a moral dilemma
I can live with
Dr. Jackie Greenwood
Thanks for reading :)
Something different : | https://medium.com/illumination/love-and-politics-2283a5e359b2 | ['Dr. Jackie Greenwood'] | 2020-12-20 21:42:24.792000+00:00 | ['Illumination', 'Love', 'Parents', 'Poetry', 'Family'] |
Terraform Tooling for Small and Medium Businesses | A frank discussion of the current products in the Hashicorp ecosystem
Photo by Mimi Garcia on Unsplash
For our avid Terraform Small and Medium Business (SMB) stakeholders, I thought it would make for an interesting article to do a straightforward and honest features analysis of the current Terraform Tools space. These are my opinions on market trends and the pros and cons of different solutions currently available. This will be an evaluation of the current state (a snapshot in time) of the tools meant to make Terraform easier to use for SMB.
If you have feedback to share about this article (or are looking to discuss further), join our InfraCode Slack Community to connect and chat.
Note: The below discussion is solely my opinion of the current Terraform tooling available. I’m taking a critical, but honest approach to the tools, in the spirit of DevOps and open-source. As I noted above, I’m open to feedback and would love to hear your thoughts.
Cloudcraft and Modules.tf: A Brief Overview
Cloudcraft is a tool to allow you to diagrammatically represent your AWS cloud infrastructure. The plugin modules.tf is an open-source project maintained by Anton Babenko, meant to take the diagrammatic drawings in Cloudcraft and convert them into actual, working Terraform architecture. Anton uses the Terragrunt wrapper, supported by Gruntwork (which we’ll get to in just a minute), to make the architecture designs in Cloudcraft scalable and deliver working code.
Cloudcraft itself is a neat idea; however, their product roadmap and time to production with new features have been slow and since their most recent filing for 2019 shows only $150,000 of ARR, likely future growth of their tools may prove to be problematic. It’s very possible that either timing of their go-to-market or operational excellence was off, but I believe their core idea was strong.
The Gruntwork Suite: From Terraform Templates to Subscription Business
With 300% year over year growth in recurring revenue (now $3M of ARR) and no signs of slowing down, Gruntwork is a behemoth in the Terraform ecosystem right now, and their core focus is on SMB. Gruntwork started out with a focus on their Infrastructure as Code library all the way back in 2015. Their founder, Yevgeniy Brikman is considered to be a pre-eminent thought leader in Terraform. Throughout forums and communities, many people still refer to his initial writing in 2018, “Terraform Up and Running” as the definitive best resource for Terraform tutorials.
Gruntwork’s business initially started out focusing on consulting, by building out Terraform templates and code for customers who wanted expertise in the (at that point in time) very new system. They then turned their research, code, and credibility into a subscription business around “Reusable, composable, battle-tested Terraform modules”. A portion of their library is “open-source” in name, only to essentially prove their authority and assert participation in the open-source community. The vast majority of their code library, including the production-ready IaC is hidden behind their pricey subscription service, coming in at $800/mo for your organization for the AWS library alone, with pricing for other libraries (and likely additional custom services) hidden behind what is most likely a gateway to a more traditional Enterprise Sales Cycle. There are comparable libraries and repositories maintained in an open-source fashion, most notably “Terraform AWS Modules” on Github.
Terragrunt represents Gruntwork’s first actual endeavor into open-source with a “thin wrapper that… [keeps] your configurations DRY, [works] with multiple Terraform modules, and [manages] remote state.” In case you didn’t catch all of that, Terragrunt is essentially a suped-up File Management System for Terraform architecture to try and make your life easier. On paper, this seems good — especially when you’re first starting out with Terraform and want to make file management easy. However, there is unseen accidental technical debt when you implement Terragrunt because the architectural paradigms used are an anti-pattern at scale for most organizations. Gruntwork takes the opportunity to layer in a service-based offering for enterprises that reach an appropriate scale, with an anti-pattern that can’t easily be undone, and packages it as a further upsell.
Gruntwork is an interesting case in the IaC space. With huge cash flows and a robust business, obsolescence is a low risk as they likely will not let their product offerings deprecate any time soon. That being said, people buying into Gruntwork thinking they’re only buying into Terraform are, in fact, buying into the Gruntwork ecosystem which could incur unforeseen costs in the future.
Scalr: Recent Launch
I have a lot of things to say about Scalr, and unfortunately, most of them aren’t very good. Founded by Sebastian Stadil, Scalr raised their Series A in 2016 for $7.5 million and is a Silicon Valley company. Scalr is supposed to present an alternative to Terraform Cloud with the “Remote State” feature and RBAC and IAM policies for Terraform deployments.
They just recently launched as of my writing this article, and while there’s a lot to say about this launch, I think this (very upvoted) Reddit post on their launch announcement says it way better than I possibly could:
I suspect that Scalr cut their teeth on their Cloud Management Platform offering in a pure enterprise software sales model and this is their attempted transition into an SMB vertical, as their venture capitalists are demanding growth in their business model. With the amount of capital raised 4 years ago, OpenView (the VC firm) is likely demanding expansion, now, so they can get closer to returns on their investment. This could be predicated on the fact that the Cloud Management Platform hit saturation faster than anticipated. However, this is pure speculation on my part — so take it with a grain of salt.
For a company in the DevOps space that’s supposed to have competency and expertise in these areas of policy management and RBAC, the launch of their flagship Small Business tool having security lapses as described above is nothing short of embarrassing. It’s a branding and PR nightmare to have the DevOps community, which is super active, speak up and lodge complaints on launch of a paid version.
Furthermore, a platform with security at its core is entirely brokered on continuous and unwavering trust, so to release after “18 months of hard work” is extremely concerning. Time will tell if I’m wrong about this, but as of now, it looks like a mess.
Terraform Cloud: A Hashicorp Product
Found by scrolling down the new Terraform website to the pricing section, Terraform Cloud is Hashicorp’s productized answer to what they understand as an underserved SMB market. While I haven’t recorded particular examples quite as stark as the above Reddit post to Terraform Cloud, I think the general sentiment from a lot of the DevOps communities I participate in is that Terraform Cloud is underwhelming, and I believe Hashicorp knows that too.
With the current state of GitOps and pipelines, and the nature of IaC, managing Remote State is currently the most challenging part of Terraform for small organizations. You can count on Hashicorp’s continued immaculate execution on that particular critical feature set, as for most SMBs, continued usage of HashiCorp’s Open Source suite is becoming more and more important. Hashicorp will do everything it can to ensure that when those companies mature in their ecosystem, they’re the same companies that use Hashicorp’s services. Therefore, it’s in Hashicorp’s interests to enable small tech companies, to the best of their ability, to succeed while maintaining full operational velocity on the features that their largest enterprise customers are demanding. I don’t think it’s Hashicorp’s execution on Terraform Cloud that was lackluster. Instead, I think it’s an organizational decision to do what they can for SMB with the amount of resources they currently have — and speaks to a broader strategic roadmap.
InfraRapid: Custom Terraform Templates
InfraRapid is my company, Infracode’s, initial open-source product offering. Since I’ve taken a critical, but what I consider rational tone, for everyone else’s product, I’ll try my best to maintain transparency (a value at the heart of everything we do at Infracode) about the reality of InfraRapid and InfraCode.
I started InfraCode in June 2020 because I saw the gaps companies weren’t adequately filling in SMB around Hashicorp’s product suite. As I write about in my first post, we believe cloud-agnostic provisioning is going to be critical moving forward for organizations, specifically because of an explosion for SMBs in cloud operational complexity. As High Availability and Service Level Agreements become standard expectations because of the Cloud Operating Model, smaller technology companies providing mission-critical software are going to be expected to deliver their technology to those same standards if they’re going to win contracts.
Because of difficulty in learning Terraform and the Cloud providers themselves (as evidenced by the ungodly number of certifications available on any given platform) and a general explosion in DevOps tools, it became obvious that no small organization could possibly bring on the necessary people and resources to deliver at service expectations. The knowledge and skills gap was foreign to most of these founders, and the costs incurred on their businesses was proving increasingly challenging.
InfraRapid is our first barebones attempt at a patch fix, an Alpha open-source library to generate custom Terraform templates from YAML files. Our library currently supports generic compute resources for AWS and Azure. We plan to, as soon as possible, begin adding cloud providers and introducing more elements. That being said, our goal is to provide simple cloud-agnostic provisioning, as vendor lock-in and future costs accrued by getting stuck in their specific vendor ecosystem (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) could prove very costly. It is extremely likely that cloud providers could start using their highly differentiated service offerings on their platform to price gouge consumers who bought those tools, with the expectation that these providers would act in good faith.
InfraRapid produces templates in Terraform, so you don’t get locked into the Gruntwork ecosystem like modules.tf (discussed earlier). There are clear limitations to InfraRapid in its current state. First, the templates it produces are not robust or production-ready. Second, the architecture hasn’t been totally optimized yet, so best practices in the code generated today may not be ideal. That being said, the tool is free to use, and perhaps most importantly, produces the templates in pure HCL, leading to the least technical debt as long, as you plan to continue using Terraform, which I highly recommend you do. Because of the nascent state of the project and lack of security in our potential profitability over time, there is a chance the library deprecates at some point (although currently, it is under rapid development). With all that in mind, I currently have high confidence in our execution and suspect the library will grow quickly for the foreseeable future, and with any luck with even greater velocity than currently. Furthermore, even if we fail, the code will still be generated in original Terraform and even if we disappear, I can say with almost 100% certainty Hashicorp won’t anytime soon.
If you made it to the end of this article, firstly, congratulations. This thing is a tome. Secondly, I’d really enjoy your feedback. If you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please join our Slack and I’ll make sure to respond to you.
Thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!
👋 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/terraform-tooling-for-small-and-medium-businesses-950904dd299a | ['Raphael Socher'] | 2020-11-28 16:33:17.149000+00:00 | ['Cloud', 'Terraform Cloud', 'DevOps', 'Terraform'] |
How to Calculate Central Tendency and Asymmetry measures in Statistics and Python | How to Calculate Central Tendency and Asymmetry measures in Statistics and Python Arpita Ghosh Follow Dec 21 · 3 min read
Image by Author
In this blog, I am going to talk about Central Tendency, asymmetry and variability with hands on using Python. If you miss my previous blog about Descriptive Statistics with Python, please go to the below link.https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/descriptive-statistics-with-python-part-1-9f34e48abc05
What is Central Tendency? : In statistics, a central tendency is a central or typical value for a probability distribution.
Purpose of Central Tendency: It is a single value which is the representative of an entire distributed data. There are three main measures in central tendency, mean, median and mode.
Now we are going to in detail to know about these measures.
Mean: Mean is mostly used for measuring central tendency. It is a simple average of whole data set. Formula of calculating mean of a data set is
(𝑥1 + 𝑥2 + 𝑥3 + ⋯ + 𝑥𝑁−1 + 𝑥𝑁 ) /N
Where 𝑥1, 𝑥2 , 𝑥3 , ⋯ ,𝑥𝑁−1 , 𝑥𝑁 => r Data values , N = Total number of sample data.
Image by Author
For population data, it is denoted as μ and for sample data x bar (symbol shown in above image)
Note: Mean is easily affected by outliers.
Mean Example: Find out Mean explanation with some example.
Median: The median is the midpoint of the ordered dataset. . It is not affected by outliers. In an ordered dataset, the median is the number at position (n+1)/2. Here n is number of observations. If this position is not a whole number, then the median is the simple average of the two numbers at positions closest to the calculated value.
Median Example: If we consider the above data set, let’s find out median.
Mode: In a data set, the mode is the value which occurs most often. A dataset can have 0 modes, 1 mode or multiple modes. Normally, the mode is calculated by finding the value with the highest frequency.
Mode Example:
Python Coding for Central Tendency Measures
Now it is time for measuring asymmetry for a data set. For this context, we need to understand skewness of a data set.
Skewness: Skewness is a measure of asymmetry. It indicates the observations in a dataset are concentrated on which side.
Image by Author
The above graph has right (positive)skewness. It means that the outliers are to the right (long tail to the right). Left (negative) skewness means that the outliers are to the left.
Normally, using different software, skewness is calculated. Formula of skewness is
Image by Author
Python Coding for Skewness
Conclusion: In my next blog we will learn about variability with python coding. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-to-calculate-central-tendency-and-asymmetry-measures-in-statistics-and-python-28b2bc10407d | ['Arpita Ghosh'] | 2020-12-21 13:17:36.723000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Central Tendency', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Branches | Branches like broken
Sentences,
Fragments of birth-strangled
Spring.
Each morning: new sorrow,
Unfinished grace.
Child-in-the-rain: I am witness to you. | https://no-valis.medium.com/branches-like-broken-298e73d3c6ed | [] | 2018-10-25 22:27:00.583000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Children', 'Nature', 'Grace', 'Spring'] |
How Much Are You Really Paying for Streaming Subscriptions? | How Much Are You Really Paying for Streaming Subscriptions?
Photo by Sayan Ghosh on Unsplash
The average American has three or four subscriptions to streaming platforms, such as Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Disney+. But we can afford to because, compared to cable, these services cost much less, ranging between $4.99 and $13.99 a month.
These subscriptions don’t seem that expensive, but that’s intentional.
Quick, without doing any mental math, which one sounds more appealing?
Seven payments of $14 or a one-time payment of $98?
The idea of pulling $98 of our wallets is much harder to get behind. Even though seven installments of $14 equals $98, people are still drawn to the smaller dollar figure. It’s all pricing psychology.
Marketers make big numbers digestible by converting them into smaller monthly sums. But, in reality, you’re paying for access to something in perpetuity — or until you cancel.
I’d wager that you haven’t considered whether you’d have a Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon subscription in 15 years, but it’s fair to assume these streaming platforms aren’t going anywhere. So, how much will you pay to these companies over the next 15 years?
Let’s start with the OG streaming service: Netflix.
How much will you spend on Netflix over the next 15 years?
Needless to say, we need to make a few assumptions, as I’m not privy to the future pricing strategies and business initiatives of Netflix.
The streaming behemoth has a history of subscription fee hikes, so we’ll start there.
Over the last decade, Netflix has raised its standard subscription fee five times, resulting in a cumulative 75% fee increase since its original pricing.
In my opinion, they can only do this so many times before the benefit of higher subscription fees outweighs the loss of subscribers. As monthly fees increase, so will cancellations. I don’t know what that price point is, and I’m sure Netflix is spending millions of marketing research dollars trying to figure that out, but I’ll assume they won’t go past $20 per month.
That might sound astronomical to some and reasonable to others. It’s subjective.
So, we’ll assume Netflix raises its standard subscription fee by a dollar every two years until it hits a ceiling at $19.99 per month. Based on that assumption, you’ll pay Netflix $3,166.20 over the next 15 years. | https://medium.com/bacon-bits/how-much-are-you-really-paying-for-streaming-subscriptions-cd3e5e844885 | ['Carter Kilmann'] | 2020-12-17 17:05:58.743000+00:00 | ['Saving', 'Money', 'Personal Finance', 'Netflix', 'Amazon'] |
“Just An Inmate” | One of my patients went to the hospital with the virus. I do not expect to see him again.
To you he is “just an inmate”. What is your next excuse?
I really don’t care what your next excuse is. | https://medium.com/@russellmeyers-35963/just-an-inmate-45ffcab896a8 | ['Russell Meyers'] | 2020-12-05 07:42:27.115000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Pandemic', 'Death', 'Prison', 'Politics'] |
CACHE Gold Token certified Shariah Compliant | Fintech CACHE receives Shariah certification for its CACHE Gold Token (CGT).
The Fatwa was issued by Shariah Experts on the 6th of July 2021. It was determined that the CACHE Gold Token is a Shariah-compliant ERC20 token and observes all the necessary Shariah requirements and principles.
CACHE issued its Gold token in July of 2020, an ERC20 token representing one gram of pure gold on blockchain. The investment grade physical gold is locked in partner vaults around the world, currently with vaults in Singapore, Zurich and Dallas. Each bar of gold is publicly auditable using the company’s proprietary explorer: https://explorer.cache.gold/. Each token is also redeemable and any time from any of the vaults CACHE works with.
Shariah Experts provided their expertise for Shariah compliance for the CACHE Gold Token, and will continue to work closely with CACHE to ensure current and future products remain Shariah compliant. Shariah compliance makes CACHE’s products available to the Muslim world, and fundamentally aligns with CACHE’s views on financial products.
CACHE is the brainchild of Gregor Gregersen, the founder of Silver Bullion and The Reserve (a 15,000-ton capacity vault in Singapore, and Brian Hankey, the CTO of Singapore’s largest cryptocurrency ATM operator. Being founded by existing bullion vault operators has given CACHE an advantage, by understanding the intricacies of physical bullion management, each gold token is essentially and fungible and fractional vault receipt.
Blockchain has the potential to change the financial landscape as we know it; offering trustless systems, confidence for all parties in transactions, transparent pricing and 24/7 audibility of assets. CACHE uses blockchain technology to offer the most secure and transparent system in the otherwise often opaque physical gold industry.
CACHE uses blockchain to enable customers to access a gold product typically out of reach: vaulted gold. Where storage fees and minimum order sizes can quickly alienate smaller investors, CACHE facilitates purchases as small as 0.00000001 grams and a storage fee of 0.25% p.a. processed on-chain through smart contracts.
We want to empower our users, and enable access to physical precious metals like never before.
Link to Shariah Certification | https://medium.com/cache-gold/cache-gold-token-certified-shariah-compliant-4991129bdd77 | ['Cache Gold'] | 2021-07-15 06:13:20.427000+00:00 | ['Shariah', 'Gold', 'Goldtoken', 'Ethereum', 'Crypto'] |
The Seven Personal Skills to Develop Before Moving Abroad! | An here it begins…
If you had told me when I was a child that one day I will live overseas as a permanent resident, I would not have believed you. I cannot recall what I wanted to do with my life when I grow up but definitely, living abroad was not part of my plan. I think it even came unexpectedly as a moment of enlightenment — I would like to try to do something more challenging and continue my education abroad. My chosen destination was Germany for a simple reason — this country offered a wide variety of studying programs and there are plenty of famous research centers to choose from. In addition to that, it was also the easiest choice for me because of the language and cultural specificity that perfectly complied with my personality.
After a couple of months of non-stop searching and email “ping-ponging” I have found a program that would leave me satisfied with my choice. As soon as I graduated from university and got my master’s diploma, I confidently headed to the university’s exit marching towards my enlightened future and unique opportunity to pursue a Doctoral degree abroad! It was like a scene from a movie; you are in front of two massive doors, the next moment they open and you are moving into a room full of light… I do not exactly remember whether there was a choir of angels singing… but that is how it felt!
First thing’s first…
Needless to mention here, I had big expectations. And here comes the first rule: do not have any expectations when you are starting a new project and especially when moving abroad. The higher the expectations you have and the bigger the difference between your expectations and the reality, the higher the disappointment you will have. You can also add on top of that the different play rules you definitely need to follow, people’s perceptions, their level of education and world vision, cultural differences, language barriers, and all that jazz related to cliches that you might have not been aware of (and of course, nobody here prevented you, right?). I fully understand why so many people make a decision to come back after a trial, and I do not blame them for that!
Take it or leave it…
When it comes to moving out, you also have to be to some extent an adventurous person. Living overseas is a risk and taking them and feeling comfortable at the same time is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is definitely a get-out-of-your-comfort-zone opportunity and you should also appreciate this. It is like taking a cold shower after doing your daily workout. I love it! You might hate it, but you can still develop a feeling of being okay to do that for a health benefit! Psssst! Do not tell anyone: if you have never experienced moving abroad, you will get used to the new environment and might even enjoy it once you are settled down.
Do I actually need all these?
And here we are coming to the next important point: why you are here. Is it for studying, pursuing your dream career, or maybe you were looking for life experiences and were hungry for a change? It is your dream that should work for you as a lighthouse beacon light, enlightening your way through, full of uncertainties and issues. Trust me, you have to be prepared. Be persistent; it will make your dream undestroyable!
Passions, passions, and again… Passions!
We are all different and our personalities formed not only under rules imposed by cultural constraints but also under criteria that are going far beyond that. The latter includes the family environments we have risen in, our personal experience, gender, age, location, and a language that also shapes the way we think. The list may continue…
Globalization also plays a key role in diminishing the borders between cultures that led to a big cultural mix. No matter what, you should respect the fact that we are all different. That rule always keeps me on the safe side and spares me from having conflicts, in both my personal and professional life. It also taught me to stop judging quickly and appreciate the opinions that differ from mine. Points of you other than yours can help you to have a look at the problem from another perspective and, who knows might even help you find an answer to some of your questions more quickly.
Appreciate the difference…
Being flexible is another skill I have improved while traveling around. Weather, food, and local rules are all different. Appreciate the fact that all these won’t be like at home, and be prepared for that as well.
Who can be a better friend for me than myself?
You need to be comfortable to be in your own company… at least in the beginning, till you find new friends. The harsh reality is that no one is actually waiting for you there. The only person you can rely on is yourself. That is why it is important to be (or at least be okay for some time) on your own and enjoy your own company.
“see the world through other people’s eyes,”― Brian Grazer
Last but not least: it is inner personal curiosity. It is always interesting to learn more about the history of the country you plan to live in, boost your language skills, and learn more about another culture and customs, isn’t it? The more you learn about the country and its rules, the more you get the feel for another culture and become confident living there.
I would like to finalize this story with one interesting example from my past experience. I needed to present the preliminary results of my research in front of a scientific audience, a majority of which were Germans. Despite my nervousness and anxiety that occurred from the previous sleepless nights from working on the presentation (speaking of time-management, right?), I delivered it well. But when I was done with that, there was one surprise waiting for me. I expected hand claps or at least silence in the worst case… but, instead, I received a crushing air noise, which was triggered by about 70 people’s knuckles knocking on the tables. That was one of the cultural loud-shocking lessons I needed to learn that evening…
In the end, it is your personal experience. It is always nice to learn something new. Do not be stressed if you decide to move abroad. It is all good. Just enjoy your journey and you will never know what one opportunity can lead to…. but this a topic for another story… | https://medium.com/@helloimportunel/the-seven-personal-skills-to-develop-before-moving-abroad-9eb5e3715531 | ['Margot Benouard'] | 2020-12-22 14:55:54.292000+00:00 | ['Challenge', 'Moving Abroad', 'Living Overseas', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
Islands: We Are | Within the lifetime of today’s oldest humans, more change has happened than ever before. Consider these three trends:
· Rate of Change The rate of innovation, discovery and change to society and our world gives rise to more “knowledge potential” than in earlier times;
· Information “Overload” Too much information is often met with “headline scanning”, resulting in superficial impressions and not knowledge;
· Knowledge Communicating the gist of important and complex topics is no longer effective using traditional means.
These trends contribute to a deepening “divide” in society around information and knowledge. This includes readers who scan a headline and those who read past it and comprehend the content. All of it entails interest, motivation and critical thinking skills. But it can also be difficult to grasp content when it is poisoned by disinformation, misinformation or just poorly communicated.
Not everyone is a critical thinker, disinformation isn’t new, nor are changes to society brought on by innovation or discovery. But today, we face multiple crises that are fueled by the rate of change in our world, and yet numerous disinformation campaigns are actively undermining our appropriate response. Why today?
Before we had Internet, there were far fewer sources for information: We usually had to go somewhere to obtain printed content. Later, radio and television brought information into our homes in a new way. But it was the Internet that first made access to information immediate and more interactive, followed by a multiplication of sources to pick from. We are no longer limited to printed content, or broadcasts, or in-person conversations and debates.
We live in societies where historical cultures are fragmenting, as is our conformity in attitudes, belief and behavior. Shared culture was our underlying gatekeeper. And now we can access almost any content from almost anywhere with no gatekeeper.
It was the Internet that would destabilize every human interaction and institution: Within the span of two decades, entire industries and businesses were changed to their core. The reach of any one person, of any business suddenly became global. And, that also held true to crime, deception and disinformation.
In a single generation we have gotten here. In a free society, there is no authority who decides what is “real”, “fake” or disinformation. Such judgements are best made “in the culture”, but that takes time. They can also be based on the insight of those who are knowledgeable. But in the midst of rapid change and disruption, here we are: You either have critical skills and judgement to guide your information consumption, or you don’t. We have become islands. | https://medium.com/@vic-winkler/islands-we-are-b33af2f12a64 | ['Vic Winkler'] | 2020-12-24 16:20:50.772000+00:00 | ['Knowledge', 'Fragmentation', 'Change', 'Overload', 'Society'] |
A Beginner’s Guide to Flutter (Part 1) | This will be a 3 Part Guide
Part 1 : Building the User Interface Part 2 : Adding Functionality Part 3 : External Packages and What Next?
This guide assumes that you already have a flutter and an Android emulator running if you do not try to get it up and running first by referring to https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install.
I’ll be using Android Studio but feel free to use the Editor of your choice.
Okay without further ado, let’s get right into it.
Aim of this article
We’ll be making the default flutter app (sort of like a hello world app for flutter). Every time we press the ‘+’ button the value of the counter will increase and it will display the current Value.
Part 1: Building the User Interface
What we’ll be covering in this part
Creating your first Flutter Project Setting up a test device Running an Application on the test device File Structure Creating the UI of the Application Container Widget, Scaffold, Appbar, Floating Action Button Wrapping and Extracting Widgets
1. Creating your first Flutter Project
First things first fire up Android Studio (or VS Code) your first screen should look something like this.
Choose “Create New Flutter Project” option, now this should open up the following menu, Choose “Flutter Application” and press the “Next” Button.
In this new menu that opens up, give the project a Project Name. I just named it my_first_flutter_app.
Also, select the location where the project will be stored and the location where you have installed the flutter SDK (Try to avoid whitespaces in folder names). The Description hardly matters.
Okay now press the Next Button
We have to choose a Package name for our app.
Package Names usually have the structure com.company_name.app_name
For now, I’m giving the name “com.cse.myfirstflutterapp” but you can name it whatever you want but make it the same format.
Well that’s it you just created your first flutter project and the window should look something like this.
2. Setting up a test device
First, let’s open an android emulator to run our app.
Optional: You can choose to use USB debugging instead of an emulator. For this just enable USB debugging on your smartphone and connect your phone to your PC via a USB cable and allow USB debugging from the PC on your phone when prompted, you should now be able to run your apps on your phone in real-time. (I personally use USB debugging as it is more reliable)
If you chose to use an emulator over USB debugging click on the AVD (Android Virtual Device) manager button as shown below.
I am assuming you have already installed the emulator SDK, If you haven’t done this refer to this guide.
Okay now let’s create an emulator you can choose any option you want for your virtual device or just follow what I have done to create a Pixel 4 device.
Click on Create Virtual Device
Choose Pixel 4
Choose the Android version you want the device to run. For now, just go with the latest android version. But in usual cases we have to check compatibility in older versions of android as well.
You don’t really need to change anything in the above window, Click on finish. Now we can see our Android Virtual Device (Emulator) has been created. Run the emulator as shown below.
The emulator will now show up just switch it on as shown below. Note that it will take some time on the first run.
And voila we have got a virtual device to work on.
3. Running your Application
We can see that the new project that we created already has some code inside it. Let’s try to run this default code.
First, choose the device that you want to run your application on (The virtual device or the device you are debugging through USB).
Now click on this green triangle to run your default code.
The first run will take some time but you can see the code being executed in the bottom part of your editor on the run tab.
So the Default App should appear on your emulator feel free to play around with it and get used to it. Our aim is to recreate this app from scratch and add some more stuff to it.
You can stop the execution if you want by using the stop button.
Okay, now we need to talk about Hot Reload and Hot Restart.
3.1. Hot Reload and Hot Restart
Once your app is running we can use the hot reload button to reflect the changes you made into the code immediately.
Now on the emulator press the ‘+’ button a few times.
Now I’m gonna make a small change in the default code, Scroll down to the part of the default code shown below.
Change the text to ‘The number of time the button has been pressed = :’
Now if you press the hot reload button you get the following change almost instantaneously.
Now if instead of the hot reload button you had pressed the run button again we perform a Hot Restart
As you can see the number has been reset, this is the difference between hot reload and hot restart.
Hot restart destroys the preserved states of our app, and the code gets fully compiled again and starts from the default state. It takes more time as compared to hot reload but takes less time than the full restart function. (Definition taken from geeks for geeks and is linked below)
Hot reload will not change the state of the app. As we observed the number in the counter did not change.
Read more about Hot Reload and Hot Restart
4. File Structure in Flutter
We can see the file structure of our project on the left-hand side of the editor in the Project Window. Expand the folder called my_first_flutter_app (or whatever you named your project)
As we can see there are two folders called android and ios these contain files necessary for exporting our flutter app into each platform we will only be bothering with android for the time being. These contain native code in Java/Kotlin/Swift. But for now, we needn't bother with these folders.
Native code is stored here
We can also see that there is a folder called lib
This is where we write flutter code. In fact, the file with the default code we ran is main.dart. In flutter, we use dart files and code in the dart language. In a normal case, we will be working with tons of dart files but since this is our first app we will work with just “main.dart”.
Also, see that we have a file called “pubspec.yaml” this is a very important file but we will discuss what it does towards the end.
We have covered a lot of basics and now we are ready to build our very first app (maybe?). | https://medium.com/@deepakjogi/a-beginners-guide-to-flutter-part-1-fdf45ea423fe | ['Deepak Jogi'] | 2021-08-27 12:53:51.829000+00:00 | ['Flutter Beginner', 'Flutter', 'Android App Development', 'Android', 'Flutter App Development'] |
Do you have questions? @ Hong Kong | Understand the company first
What is the budget for this opening?
Everyone are code for food, if the budget does not match your expectation. It is better to have an early return here.
2. What is the name of the company?
It is the first place to understand the company. However, If you apply to the company directly without agency you can skip this one. Do not share your resume or cv before those agencies address the name of the company. You need to know collecting those documents from the subject is one of the KPI in their job.
3. What is their domain or industry and what they are doing?
It is a straightforward question, you can evaluate that it is what you happy to work or want to have a career with. For instance, I dislike working with the Casino industry as I think they actually rob the customers. A company should be honest and confident to share their business model and their revenue model. E.g. Uber is making money with an intermediary role.
4. Why the company has this opening (turnover or new headcount)?
It might come with natural turnover or product expansion meaning it is a new headcount. As some of the company has a high turnover rate, it might be related to many factors ( working culture, long working hours or low increment, etc) Again, a company should be honest and confident to share this information with you. And you can always find the clue for it.
5. The location of the company and the working hours?
Owning a car is not common in Hong Kong, most likely you need to use public transportation daily. Measuring the hours that you can spend on transportation can help you have enough rest, time-saving, and rent a place nearby. For instance, If you are living in the countryside of Hong Kong that you might need to spend > 1 hour daily on the subway for a single trip.
6. Do they own their product?
It is not common in Hong Kong that a company owns a product. Many of the company act as a vendor and survive by how many active contracts on-hands. Vendors normally drive their development cycle by external factors such as customer budget, the committed deadline, etc. Unlike software in-house, they might not have enough resource to train you or offer better software ( good coding coverage, good documentation, refactoring phase ).
7. It is a contracted opening or permanent? | https://medium.com/@wck-alpha/do-you-have-questions-hong-kong-cc2b2a18c1e2 | ['Alpha Wong'] | 2021-03-24 05:32:15.167000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Question', 'Hong Kong', 'Job'] |
Polkastarter First Pools Sold Out In Less than 30 Seconds | We could not be happier with the community participation on the very first on-chain day of our MVP platform. Both our first two fixed swap token pools on Polkastarter sold out in less than 30 seconds. Our website survived having 10,000+ users simultaneously accessing our Ethereum dapp. Our servers managed to hold all throughout the usage peak period. Most importantly, our technology stack was able to help a great project, SpiderDAO, get closer to realizing its dreams by helping them to raise $200,000 almost instantly!
We want to thank every participant for supporting us during our MVP launch, and also our tech team who worked tirelessly over the last months to ship an attractive product as per our roadmap. We began this Polkastarter journey by saying we would deliver a minimum viable product by the end of the year, and we did it with two weeks to spare.
Minimum Viable Product In Beta
Despite these successes, we also understand that Polkastarter is a product in beta that launched just a few hours before the SpiderDAO pools were made available. With a new product like this platform, even though we have comprehensively tested it for weeks on testnet and had the FixedSwap contract audited, we have to expect that there will be unforeseen issues. The whole purpose of this period of limited rollout of the platform is to stress test the whole environment. Our experience today was to be expected. Here’s what we have found out so far.
Addressing Minor Issues
In our analysis of the sale, we concluded that some users were able to find a workaround for the max buy limit. Having said this, in the end, and fortunately, it was not a big difference and hundreds of users were able to participate in the pools.
In summary, 84 people were able to participate in the exclusive pool for Polkastarter Token ($POLS) holders and 113 on the public one. Combined, these pools were able to raise 340 ETH virtually instantly.
How The Workaround Worked And How We Fixed It
Some users were able to go directly to the smart contract and bypass the limits that we had set on the front end. We have now implemented a simple fix so that the contribution limits are now set on-chain.
This particular workaround should not be available for the next sale on our platform, which is planned to occur in two days. Again, Polkastarter is a platform in beta. We are using this launch week to stress test the platform. We intend to iterate upon the MVP with every launch until it is robust as possible.
Next Chapter: Polkadot Migration
Looking back on our first successful day, we can confirm that some parts of this process do not really depend on us. We were not able to avoid the network delays and gas wars of the Ethereum mainnet. But that’s exactly why we chose to eventually host the Polkastarter platform on Polkadot in the first place. That preference is literally in our name.
We believe that our plan to move our smart contracts into the Polkadot ecosystem via Moonbeam (link) is going to solve many of the complications we experienced today, with the added advantage of interoperability. So stay tuned for more Polkadot-related announcements in early 2021.
About Polkastarter
Polkastarter is a permissionless DEX built for cross-chain token pools and auctions, enabling projects to raise capital on a decentralized and interoperable environment based on Polkadot.
With Polkastarter, decentralized projects will be able to raise and exchange capital cheap and fast. Users will be able to participate in a secure and compliant environment and to use assets that go way beyond the current ERC20 standard.
Website | Telegram | Medium | Twitter and WeChat 👇 | https://medium.com/@polkastarter/polkastarter-first-pools-sold-out-in-less-than-30-seconds-5cb0e3aa6364 | [] | 2020-12-15 16:11:28.835000+00:00 | ['Polkadot', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Fundraising', 'Blockchain'] |
augmented-ui — Cyberpunk-Inspired Web UI Made Easy | Examples
To use augmented-ui, let’s create a div element. Notice the augmented-ui property attached to the element. These are meant to define the styling for the element.
<div class=”demo” augmented-ui=”tl-clip br-clip exe”></div>
Let’s give the div height and add some padding.
Notice the CSS variables we’re using here. The variables are provided by the augmented-ui library and are the core way of styling elements.
We should see the following appear on the screen:
Pretty neat. Let’s add a gradient border. Add the following styles to the element.
--aug-border-bg: linear-gradient(red, transparent), linear-gradient(to right, blue, transparent), black;
Here’s what we should see:
As you can see, it’s simple to build augmented style components with the library. I’m a big fan of cyberpunk, so I’m naturally excited to see what you can build with the library. | https://medium.com/better-programming/augmented-ui-cyberpunk-inspired-web-ui-made-easy-d463c0371144 | ['Indrek Lasn'] | 2019-09-19 12:24:49.562000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Design', 'Web Development', 'Technology', 'CSS'] |
Texas GOP lawmaker long infuriated by anti-maskers gets COVID-19, along with wife | Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen tested positive for COVID-19 over the weekend, shortly after his wife, Kim Bonnen, contracted the viral respiratory disease. The outgoing state legislator, a Republican, confirmed the news in a post shared to his official Facebook page on Sunday afternoon.
“2020 just keeps on giving!” Bonnen wrote. While he described his wife’s symptoms as “difficult but manageable,” the politician said his own “have so far been mild.” The pair, alongside sons Gregory and Jackson, are continuing to quarantine inside their home, and both children have undergone diagnostic COVID-19 tests in the meantime. Bonnen said his family is taking these necessary precautions as a means to “keep those around us safe” in Sunday’s update.
Bonnen underscored the importance of widespread mask use and compliance with risk-reduction protocols in Sunday’s statement. After announcing his positive test result, the lawmaker said he has not identified the source, or sources, of his family’s infections. Texas is one of a number of U.S. states that saw COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and fatalities climb rapidly this fall.
“We are unable to pinpoint our initial exposure, as we — like so many other families — made the difficult decision to celebrate Christmas with just our own household this year and have diligently followed all health protocols since March, thanks to my wife’s adamant reminders,” Bonnen’s post read. “This disease is no joke in its unpredictability and severity, so please continue to keep your guard up and your loved ones protected. Mask up and social distance, avoid large gatherings, and take care of one another.”
The Texas representative, who has served on that state’s legislature for more than two decades, often participates in the national conversation surrounding COVID-19 and how to mitigate its ongoing spread. Bonnen’s Twitter account features recurring public health reminders, including recent advisory notices from state bureaus that emphasize the importance of mask use and physical distancing during holiday celebrations.
Over the summer, the House Speaker released a forthright statement condemning public opposition to face coverings, as Texas confronted a significant spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
“I have become increasingly infuriated by so-called advocates are who ditching the mask in the middle of a pandemic as an expression of freedom and liberty, while expressly killing the freedoms and liberties we cherish,” Bonnen said in the June statement.
He went on to point out that failing to wear masks in public settings effectively ensures that restrictions on workplaces, businesses and other group gathering spaces will persist, since face coverings reduce the risks of COVID-19 transmission. Although Texas Governor Greg Abbott initially hesitated to impose a statewide mask mandate, the Republican leader ultimately implemented one at the beginning of July.
Newsweek reached out to Bonnen for comment but did not receive a reply in time for publication. | https://medium.com/@speakerbonnen/texas-gop-lawmaker-long-infuriated-by-anti-maskers-gets-covid-19-along-with-wife-6d3584762a00 | ['Speaker Dennis Bonnen'] | 2020-12-28 15:03:11.139000+00:00 | ['Dennis Bonnen', 'Covid 19'] |
Honoring Norma Jane Sabiston | NEWS AROUND THE SOUTH
On COVID-19
Alabama
The Alabama prison system, which suspended visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic, is starting a video visitation service to try to reconnect prisoners with their family and friends. [Alabama News]
Arkansas
Arkansas has reported a number of sizable COVID-19 clusters in poultry plants run by small and midsize processors, partially because the state has reported more comprehensive data than many of its neighbors. At George’s flagship facility in Springdale, AR, 290 employees have contracted the virus. One-quarter of the workforce at a Wayne Farms plant in Danville tested positive. [Facing South]
Florida
On Wednesday, Disney wrote in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that about 32,000 employees who primarily work in the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products division that includes the Florida and California theme parks will be terminated in the first half of the 2021 fiscal year, which began last month. This is 4,000 more workers than was announced in September. [Bradenton Herald]
Georgia
A new report from the National Governors Association suggests states shouldn’t just rely on the FCC to identify underserved areas, as well as use existing infrastructure and federal funding to increase connectivity in rural and low-income areas. They can begin to address inequitable access to broadband by improving coverage maps that detail where connections aren’t available or are too slow, similar to a pilot program implemented in Georgia. [Route Fifty]
Kentucky
Over the weekend a federal appeals court sided with Kentucky Govenor Beshear, ruling that the governor did not violate the Constitution when he ordered public and private schools, including religious schools, to stop in-person classes because of the coronavirus. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is responsible for the lawsuit, filed an emergency application with the high court Monday in response. [WDRB]
Louisiana
The Louisiana Department of Health yesterday adopted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recently updated guidance that allows people who may have been exposed to COVID-19 to shorten their quarantine period from 14 days to 10 days, or as few as 7 days with a negative test. The LDOE and our school leaders will continue to work alongside health officials to mitigate the spread of the virus. [KNOE]
Mississippi
A preliminary analysis of enrollment released Monday by the Mississippi Department of Education officials showed a drop of more than 23,000 students in the 2020–21 school year compared to September of the previous year. The department attributes a decline in school enrollment statewide to a drop in kindergartners and an increase in homeschoolers. [WAPT]
North Carolina
Seeing an increase of coronavirus cases over the weekend and with the state’s existing restrictions expiring this week, top public health officials have yet to commit to any changes with their approach on containing the virus. Gov. Roy Cooper said “All of our options are on the table to tighten things down,” during a CNN interview last week. One of those options might be a stay-at-home order similar to the one issued earlier this year. A decision that caused controversy with some, but did yield success in keeping case levels from rising dramatically. [WBT]
South Carolina
The Medical University of South Carolina will soon be able to bring COVID-19 testing to the community through portable pods. The sites use a shell that is usually used for portable restrooms to create a self-contained and cost-effective walk-up testing site. Thirty of these pods will be placed outside of MUSC Health clinics to safeguard the clinic and separate potentially sick patients. They will also be placed in areas around the community. [Live 5 News]
Texas
Texas launched a COVID-19 Rapid Testing Pilot Program for front line workers at small businesses. The program will help small businesses throughout the state conduct rapid tests on employees to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Through this pilot program, TDEM will provide local Chambers of Commerce with COVID-19 testing supplies that will then allocate the supplies to local small businesses that choose to participate in the program. [CBS DFW]
Tennessee
A Northeast Tennessee lawmaker has proposed a bill to prohibit any agency, executive or government from forcing anyone to get a COVID-19 vaccine. As it reads, the proposed bill would prohibit, “a law enforcement agency or governmental entity of this state or a local government, or the governor or chief executive of a local government” from forcing the vaccine on any individual. [WKRN]
Virginia
In a letter to parents, Virginia Beach Public School officials said that the region is currently at 477.7 cases per day and 10.1 percent for percent positivity, placing them in the red/red zone. Effective immediately, VBCPS says all activities related to varsity winter sports are postponed until further notice. Starting tomorrow, Safe Learning Centers will close, but students and families have access to school buildings and administrative offices by appointment only. Food service will continue at no charge to all children, age 18 and under, at all VBCPS schools, regardless of individual eligibility. [WTKR]
West Virginia
COVID-19 has impacted America and West Virginia for nearly a year, causing business leaders both large and small to reflect on changes that may be here to stay and what may return to normal as the pandemic ends. Now, employers have figured out that for some jobs, remote work is successful. [Metro News] | https://medium.com/@epunum/honoring-norma-jane-sabiston-d0b94317781f | ['E Pluribus Unum'] | 2020-12-08 17:35:10.968000+00:00 | ['Racism', 'Racial Justice', 'Anti Racism', 'Racial Equity', 'Institutional Racism'] |
How To Take India Towards An Electric Vehicle’s Future? | Electric Bikes
In the past few years, there has been a rise in the collective consciousness of people across the globe where we, as civilization, have realized that we cannot survive without our home planet: Earth. The major reason for this kind of rise is due to the increase in pollution levels and the depletion of our natural resources which is accelerated by the former. In the most recent years, there has been a development in the people’s approach towards the increasing climate change. Along with the movements for saving the ocean, protecting forests, the major one has been to swap traditional sources of fuels for alternative energy. One of the major shifts in alternative energy has been in regard to vehicles and specifically using cars and bikes that run on electricity. And leading India in this global shift is Joy E-Bike, a part of Wardwizard Group.
Before we jump into the conversation about How we can take India towards an electric future, let us try to understand why E-Bikes have increasingly become popular.
The very simple reason is the fact that E-Bikes are extremely economic in nature. They’re straightforward to operate, and if you are purchasing an E-Bike in India from one of the best e-bikes manufacturers, also known as Joy E-Bike, you are 100% going to get value for money. As of yet, the Government of India has not put a compulsion on e-bike riders to get a registration or even a license for that matter. So you basically go to a showroom of Joy E-Bike, get your electric bike, and then, you’re good to ride it!
Since their operation in the year 2016, Joy E-Bike has contributed towards rapidly increasing the community of E-Riders in India. This is one of the major reasons why ET declared Joy E-Bike as, “The Top Electric Bike Brand of 2020”. For this rapidly growing community of E-Bikers, there have to be a few things that we need in place which will help us to make sure that we are able to accommodate E-Bikes in our day-to-day transportation.
The most important factor that we need for e-bikes is to ensure that like petrol stations on an average of 10kms, there are charging stations in the same manner. This could either be done by incorporating charging stations at petrol stations itself or by erecting new infrastructure for the same.
Another thing that we need to make sure that every Indian’s next bike is an electric one is to educate them at a very early stage. Arranging talks by industry experts, environmentalists, and others at schools, colleges, universities, and other places. We must also ensure that the stigmas created by the early-on models of e-bikes are eradicated root and stem.
To encourage more and more people to produce e-bikes on a large scale, the government of India must also grand stimulus as well as concessions to the producers who intend to produce e-bikes. Till that happens, Joy E-Bike is open to collaborating with various other electric vehicle manufacturers in India through their two other OEM Plants. | https://medium.com/@joyebike/how-to-take-india-towards-an-electric-vehicles-future-4bd553f38062 | [] | 2020-11-23 05:19:26.232000+00:00 | ['Electric Vehicle Baroda', 'El Vehicle Manufacturers', 'Ev Manufacturers', 'Top Electric Bike Brand', 'Electric Vehicle'] |
No one knew if I was giving birth to a healthy baby or not. | No one knew if I was giving birth to a healthy baby or not. Ali Burns Follow Aug 11 · 5 min read
There are some things that doctors cannot be certain about (in both the pregnancy and the birth).
Photo by Hollie Santos on Unsplash
The sonographer paused and shifted the ultrasound tool. She frowned at her screen again. I was 20 weeks pregnant.
“OK” she said, in a tone which was neither comforting nor explanatory.
“His limbs look normal…” I knew there was a ‘but’ coming. “But there is some excess amniotic fluid and I just want to check his other measurements again….”
“Please visit the Fetal Medicine Department…”
This was the beginning of fortnightly scans and various tests that continued until the end of the pregnancy. I was monitored by an consultant obstetrician who was incredibly nice and good at her job, made clear by the mountain of thank you cards stacked behind her. But even with all the scans and her wealth of experience the best information they could give us was “he hopefully will not have any issues, but…he could have severe issues.”
At 30 weeks pregnant the obstetrician told me she was not happy with the baby’s scan and booked me in for an early c-section if he didn’t show the change they wanted in the next 2 weeks. According to one study the rate of false positive results for fetal malformations is 8.8%. The idea that the doctors’ cause for concern had about a 8% of being wrong was not comforting. But at the same time I still had not been given a ‘positive’ diagnosis. It was more of a ‘possibly positive, possibly negative’.
We waited. I stuffed my face with food in preparation for the next scan. I wanted to at least feel the baby’s lack of growth was not my fault even though the doctor had assured me the amount I ate would have almost no impact on the baby.
A few weeks later the consultant decided the baby had changed a little and the early c-section could be cancelled. Given the uncertainty and a previous tear from my first child it was decided I would still have a c-section anyway, but nearer the due date. It was still no clearer whether our baby would be ‘normal’ or not. I read that about 3% of babies are born with congenital defects. 3% seemed either very low or a bit too high depending on how I was feeling that day. I would love and cherish him regardless but no parent wants their child’s life to be a huge struggle from the get go.
A Dramatic Arrival
In the end, one evening at home my waters broke a week before the booked c-section. Staring in surprise at the damp patch on the floor I called the hospital. I was asked to go to the ante-natal ward. We got a friend to come and babysit our 2 year old who was immovably convinced I was going for pizza (still in denial about the imminent arrival of her sibling).
Following mixed opinions on the best birth from various doctors I decided to go for a vaginal birth. I had my daughter that way so it felt less daunting than a c-section.
I ended up being induced with some hormones and a sweep (don’t google it) performed by the doctor, with my hand held by a midwife with the most appropriate name ever — ‘Comfort’.
The induction worked, maybe too well. Within 3 hours I was in quite intense pain but it was thought that the party hadn’t properly started so I couldn’t go to the labour ward. I had not slept properly for two nights and felt my first wave of self-doubt — I wasn’t sure how many more hours I could do this without sleep or drugs.
I got over my British ‘don’t want to be a pain’-ness and got my husband to find a midwife to check down below to tell me roughly how much longer until the final event. I could hear the midwife behind the curtain telling my husband that I’d have a while to go yet. I groaned inwardly.
The midwife appeared in my cubicle and had a look between my legs. Her expression of calm confidence changed to one of controlled panic.
She silently walked out into the corridor and I heard her shout-whisper “Alex, call the lift! Jenny, come and help me! We need to get her in the labour ward NOW”.
The midwife returned and said “We need to get you to the labour ward, don’t walk and DON’T PUSH”. All I wanted to do was push. I concentrated on keeping things in — the baby as well as my growing fear.
The ante-natal ward is a sort of waiting area from which you calmly make your way to the labour ward when things start getting gritty. This process had gone a bit wrong in my case. My abiding memory is of my partner, white-faced, frantically trying to open up ancient doors which looked as old as the C19th hospital itself, in order to move my bed and then running with a midwife, pushing me along corridors to the lift.
Finally my bed, with me kneeling on top of it, was pushed into a lift. I could feel the baby coming and briefly reflected on how bad it would be if the lift broke. I put my hand down to try and keep him in which just resulted in some swearing from me and a bloody hand. The baby stayed put, perhaps put off by his potty-mouthed mother, and I was wheeled into a labour room as soon as the lift doors opened.
The end of a long wait to meet my son
To cut a long-ish story short, the wonderful and reassuring midwife handling the birth realised the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s shoulder. But for this he would have arrived in the lift or in a corridor. She untangled him, he arrived and was whisked off to be checked.
Due to luck and the midwife’s care, I tore less severely than last time. When my husband realised our son was out and I was not too badly injured down bel ow, he ran over and hugged the midwife in gratitude. Later I saw him tentatively walking over to our new baby and looking him up and down. We knew we would love him without question, but I could tell my husband was wondering whether he was alright and how hard life might be for his new son.
After a while a doctor came to give us the result of initial tests. Aside from an extraordinary mono-brow and vast sideburns level of hairiness, he was ‘without abnormalities’.
I later sent the obstetrician and team a gushing thank you card to add to their pile, not because my son had turned out to be without congenital issues but because of the empathy and cheerfulness she had displayed every time I nervously visited her for another scan. I have realised that pregnancy and the birth itself can sometimes be a bit of guessing game. But whether early on in your pregnancy or in the final dramatic moments a smile and a few kind words can mean so much. That’s one thing any doctor or midwife reading this can be certain of. | https://medium.com/family-matters-2/no-one-knew-if-i-was-giving-birth-to-a-healthy-baby-or-not-4cd795ac5c1b | ['Ali Burns'] | 2021-08-11 04:58:24.286000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Fetal Development', 'Doctors', 'Family', 'Pregnancy'] |
A Christmas Wish — Becoming Janine | Ghost of Christmas past
In this very strangest of years, Christmas time has come feeling — well, feeling more Christmassy — than any other has felt for me in a very long time.
No decorations, no parties, no fancy dress (and let’s face it, maybe not even a shower). No mad dash shopping, no lights, no tree.
I don’t know about you, but we just didn’t have the energy or capacity for any of that this year.
We are spending the holiday in isolation, after bringing a kid home from university, wearing masks in our home and eating at separate stations for the time being. Hibernating.
These are indeed strange times, destabilizing and traumatizing, and enduring longer than we expected or hoped.
And yet, I find myself feeling more love, more contentment, more joy and more peace.
I think perhaps there is a gift here, the gift of slowing down, of placing focus on what’s really important — relationships, love, caring for each other. Rekindling dreams and passions.
It’s a season for rekindling relationships, even if that’s happening on a screen instead of in person.
It’s a season for taking time to write cards and notes to put in the post; for preparing treats and meals to be dropped off curbside and contact-free; for spending time in real conversation with the people we care about the most, and with new friends and acquaintances. A season for appreciating each other.
It feels like an old-fashioned Christmas to me; it has nothing to do with the trappings, even if they are present, and everything to do with slowing down, spending time with each other, appreciating each other, holding each other closer than we have in a very long time.
It’s a season for doing all those things I couldn’t find time or capacity for in my previous beforetime life because, like most of us, I felt exhausted and depleted before the holidays ever rolled around,
All those those things are really what life is all about.
Connection. And Community.
It’s ironic that we’re managing to rediscover and create that without physical contact, with masks that cover our smiles and fog up our glasses.
If I could give you any gift this season, it would be the gift of feeling warm and safe and content, knowing that, despite all evidence to the contrary, all is well.
I wish you knew how delightful you are. Right here and now in this very moment. Just as you are.
I wish you the knowing of how incredibly resourced you already are.
I wish you the knowing that you have everything inside you to that you need to thrive.
I wish you the knowing that there is no one in the entire universe like you, that you are unique and amazing and wonderful.
I wish you the knowing that you don’t need to compete or struggle or hustle or climb over anyone to find that.
I wish you the knowing that there is room enough and abundance enough in this universe to support you.
I wish you the knowing that we hold the power to change the world together.
We have been challenged to face our fears as our health and safety and livelihoods have been threatened, to be creative and pivot while feeling the real trauma of the times that just makes me want to crawl back into bed a lot of days.
The times have caused us to recognize privilege and abundance of resources that are not accessible to everyone because of the systems that have shaped us for generations — colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy.
We can find ourselves holding all of that reality, all the hope for transformative change, all the despair and all the love, all the fear and all the joy, all at once.
It’s a lot.
It doesn’t mean there isn’t room to grow, or work to do in creating a better world. It doesn’t mean we can’t wish to gather in person and hold each other in long hugs again.
It means that we have all of it in ourselves to create. | https://medium.com/@janinebertolo/a-christmas-wish-becoming-janine-c305543d1d06 | ['Janine Bertolo', 'She Her'] | 2020-12-25 20:35:06.650000+00:00 | ['Self Care', 'Pandemic Diaries', 'Transformation', 'Christmas'] |
Meet the Bands: Count To Five | German band, Count To Five entered “Showcase your Band” portion of BandUp. Let’s dig a little deeper. 🇩🇪
Hailing from Göttingen in Germany (yes, we had to Google Maps it too) these 4 youngsters have only been together for a short period, but already have a few gigs under their belt.
Consisting of Béla (Vocals), Simon (Guitar / Vocals), Antonin (Bass), Tom (Drums) their music can be found on SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook.
We caught up with them and asked them a few questions: | https://medium.com/bandup/meet-the-bands-count-to-five-8fbd989e2e55 | ['David Potgieter'] | 2018-05-20 07:39:08.638000+00:00 | ['Rock', 'Germany', 'Music', 'Bandup', 'Meet The Bands'] |
Warren Buffett’s Unique Mindset Will Make You Insanely Successful and Wealthy | Warren Buffett’s Unique Mindset Will Make You Insanely Successful and Wealthy
In 2008 Warren Buffett topped the Forbes list of Richest People — he was the richest man globally with $62 billion. In 2009, Forbes listed him as the 2nd Richest Man in the world after having donated a massive $30 billion to charity. Now he has a rough net-worth of $85.6 billion as of December 2020.
Warren Buffett is an inspiration and somebody we can all learn from on how to live a successful and happy life:
1. Have a vision & back it up with faith
“I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.” — Warren Buffett
If you have a dream in life, you must pursue it. It’s your vision for what your life should be. What’s important is that you must first have the vision then back it up with an unbelievable amount of faith.
The people who have achieved all their goals and dreams at some point knew that they would succeed. They see it as their destiny and that nothing can stand in their way of achieving it. When you clarify what you want, you can begin to take steps towards making it a reality.
Once you have the vision, then you need to back up your dreams with complete faith. Having faith and belief gives you the persistence to keep going even during the hard times. Faith is what keeps people going until the end and forces them to get up after a failure. The road to success is deeply engraved with failure, be prepared for it.
2. Take action early
Warren Buffett took action early in life. One of the great little facts about him is that he bought his first share when he was 11, and he regrets that this was actually too late. And at the age of 14, he bought a small farm with the earnings he made as a newspaper delivery boy.
One must take action if he or she is to achieve anything in life. Some people think success in life is all down to luck, and it’s true that part of it is luck, but in life, you can make your own luck, and that’s by taking action. By taking action in life and getting started, you can create the opportunities and events that can bring you to success. Sitting around and just hoping that good times fall onto you will not work.
Through taking action early, Warren made his own luck that got him onto the road to success.
3. Do what you love to do regardless of what people say
“Don’t do what others say, just listen to them, but do what makes you feel good.” — Warren Buffett “Don’t go on brand names. Just wear what makes you comfortable.” — Warren Buffett
Many people today spend most of their time worrying about what other people think about them.
The current day mindset is focused on pleasing others and making lifestyle choices that are more in line with other people’s visions than our own. Gradually we lose our own identity and what matters most to us.
In life, you must do the things that most matter to you regardless of what people say. If you only do things to please others, you’re doing this to the detriment of your own happiness. You are the most important person there is so focus on what you enjoy in life.
Warren Buffett doesn’t spend time dining with high society in expensive suits and drinking copious amounts of champagne, no. He spends his time in front of the television, eating popcorn with a can of Pepsi. He does it because this is what he loves to do.
4. Don’t make money into God
“Money doesn’t create man, but it is the man who created money.” — Warren Buffett
Some of us seem to have forgotten that man created money, yet so many of us treat ‘money’ as our God. Money can drive men to do extremely foolish things, and some slave their lives away to get their benefits.
The secret to wealth is not to make money into God. We should not be working needlessly for money, but rather, money should be working for us. Money is a tool for creating value in the world. Warren has realized this rule, and money has flowed to him because money is his servant.
5. Appreciate what you have
“The happiest people do not necessarily have the best things, they simply appreciate the things they have.” — Warren Buffett
Despite having been able to buy any house on the planet, Warren Buffett still resides in his 3-bedroom house in Omaha that he bought after getting married in the 1950s. He says it has everything he needs, and I believe him. He realizes happiness is all about gratitude and not just about accumulating possessions.
Being wealthy starts on the inside, be grateful for everything you have right now. If you really think about it, you have more than some people could ever possibly dream of having. Put yourself in the shoes of some of the starving and homeless people worldwide — do you appreciate what you have now?
6. Give and you shall receive
There’s a universal law that says give, and you shall receive. If you want to be loved, you have to give love. If you want good friends, then you have to be a good friend. If you want wealth, then you have to give away wealth.
Warren has given billions away to charity and continues to do so every year. In 2006 he agreed to leave his enormous fortune to The Bill Gates Foundation when he passes away. Since he has always been a big giver of wealth to help those around him, massive amounts of wealth have always been returned to him.
7. Choose your own destiny and make it useful
“Let us choose the way to live our lives, be it retire young retire rich, becoming a millionaire, or living a purposeful life by serving to the goods of the humankind!” — Warren Buffett
Many people think their life is whatever is thrown at them. Life is about taking control and making it what you want it to be. The most frustrated people in the world are the people who believe they have no control over their lives. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We make our own lives, and if we want to make our lives as fulfilling as possible, we need to serve humankind as much as we can. When you do something for somebody else unconditionally, notice how you feel.
Warren Buffett is not only the greatest investor in history, but he is also the biggest philanthropist there ever was — in other words, he chose his way of life and served the good of humankind through giving. The path he chose will aid millions and millions of people who benefit from his pledge.
Warren Buffett is a person that we all should learn from. | https://medium.com/illumination/warren-buffetts-unique-mindset-will-make-you-insanely-successful-and-wealthy-31f78c204972 | ['Josef Cruz'] | 2020-12-18 07:46:43.358000+00:00 | ['Wealth', 'Happiness', 'Success', 'Life Lessons', 'Lifestyle'] |
What is Dihydroquercetin and why it might be interesting for you? | Dihydroquercetin, known in the USA and Europe as taxifolin, is a member of the group of bioflavonoids — substances of plant origin.
Flavonoids are plant pigments that are formed and deposited in different parts of the plant, and from a chemical point of view, these are phenolic compounds that can be actively oxidized (antioxidants). This property is the basis of the pharmacological action of flavonoids. Flavonoids are found in almost all plants. They participate in the processes of cellular respiration, protect plants from harmful influences and form their pigmentation. Currently, about 4000 bioflavonoids are known.
Chemical structure of dihydroquercetin
Dihydroquercetin (taxifolin) in terms of chemical structure refers to polyphenolic compounds. It is a bioflavonoid of natural origin and belongs to the group of flavanones (flavanonols). The dihydroquercetin molecule contains two asymmetric carbon atoms — C-2 and C-3, therefore, it can exist in the form of 4 enantiomers (two pairs of diastereoisomers). The main natural isomer is trans — (+) — (2R3R) — dihydroquercetin.
Dihydroquercetin production.
Previously, rose petals, ginkgo biloba stems, and grape seeds were used as raw materials for the production of dihydroquercetin (DHQ). These raw materials are very expensive, and therefore the price for preparations containing dihydroquercetin was high. One gram of DHQ on the pharmaceutical market cost from 500 to 1000 US dollars.
What is Dihydroquercetin and why might you be interested in it?
In 1960, Russian scientists paid attention to Siberian and Daurian larch. As a result of the work carried out, a pure crystalline powder of high purity was obtained at an affordable price. In 1996, the antioxidant dihydroquercetin was included in the State Register of Medicines of the Russian Federation.
Biological activity of dihydroquercetin.
The spectrum of action of dihydroquercetin is extremely wide, but today, its main property is high antioxidant activity, that is, the fight against free radicals.
From literary sources in recent years, it is known that free radicals, against which the action of dihydroquercetin is directed, are responsible for the occurrence of more than sixty diseases, including cancer, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, ischemia, diseases of the nervous and immune systems, and skin diseases.
Regulates metabolic processes at the level of cell membranes, has a powerful anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic effect Improves the condition of bone, cartilage and connective tissue, strengthens blood vessels and capillaries, helps to reduce cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood, and prevents the formation of blood clots.
Protects the stomach and liver from harmful effects, activates the processes of restoration of the mucous membrane of the stomach and duodenum. It is a powerful prophylactic agent for the main diseases of aging: cancer, cardiovascular diseases, brain diseases. By increasing the resistance of the body tissues to the damaging effect of excess sugar in the blood, dihydroquercetin reduces the likelihood of diabetes mellitus, facilitates the course of the developed forms. It has a positive effect on the nervous system and activates nervous processes. Especially valuable is the ability of dihydroquercetin to inhibit the development of tumor cells, triggering the mechanism of their self-destruction, without suppressing the division of normal cells.
Thus, the presence of even a small amount of the antioxidant dihydroquercetin in the daily diet may provide the prevention of several classes of diseases, such as cardiovascular, tumor, metabolic, musculoskeletal, and has a rejuvenating and therapeutic effect.
We are open for questions! Follow us if you are interested in Dihydroquercetin and its effects on humans’ health. | https://medium.com/@robiosdaily/what-is-dihydroquercetin-and-why-it-might-be-interesting-for-you-993783ce783 | [] | 2020-11-16 09:46:41.035000+00:00 | ['Health Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Nutritional Supplements', 'Taxifolin'] |
How to Be a Good American | How to Be a Good American
An introduction for white people
Photo: rarrarorro/Getty Images
To be a good American, you must first know America. Not the textbook version that glosses over significant periods of bloodshed and unrest, extending a limp nod to the occasional “mean” slaveowner or devoting a paragraph to the KKK. Nor is our history that myth about the magical speech that ended racism.
It’s the one that begins with colonizers taking this land by brute force. The people they stole this country from became “Savages.” The people they stole from other countries became “Black.” Today, white nationalists point to the theft of America as proof of their preordained supremacy. How does one take a story in which a bunch of Europeans get totally lost, accidentally “discover” already inhabited land, and kill off 90% of the native population with their own filth and disease — how does one spin that into a tale of racial superiority and keep a straight face?
Learning the true history of our country leads to such inquiries. But it also offers answers to questions we still grapple with today. Like, why do so many lower income white people side with the Power Whites of the 1%, instead of uniting with people who share their economic interests? Well, the concept of race was invented to prevent them from doing exactly that.
In 1675, wealthy white landowner Nathaniel Bacon launched a rebellion against his cousin, the governor of Virginia (#stuffwhitepeoplelike). Bacon’s coalition included indentured servants of Irish and African descent, as well as enslaved Africans to whom Bacon promised freedom in exchange for joining his cause (which, it must be noted, was to rid Jamestown of its remaining native population so that Bacon and other Power Whites could expand their property). While both Bacon and the rebellion died before the matter was officially settled, the threat posed by a united coalition of indentured servants and enslaved people was duly noted. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander writes:
The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.
As my friend Zaron puts it, “This was the birth of whiteness.”
Our American history is littered with evidence that whiteness is no culture or heritage, but an opportunistic tool for oppression and control. Feast your eyes on the hypocrisy of whiteness: They tell you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, but they burn down Black Wall Street when you do. They move their children and influence out of the public school system, then tut-tut and blame the culture when those underfunded schools crumble and close, when crime rates go up. They declare a War on Drugs and start a crack epidemic in the span of 15 years. They go full-blown racist when a Black man — whose mother is as white as they are — is elected to the highest office in the land (the ultimate bootstrapping, if you ask me, but how dare he though?). When they realize they can no longer win elections based on their selfish, inhumane positions, they rig the system and suppress the vote. They ask Russia for help. And they get it.
As Trump threatens “democrat-run” cities with escalated, state-sanctioned violence — at protests that are responding to state-sanctioned violence — a good American will wonder where all those crusaders for the Second Amendment are hiding. The state is murdering civilians, for protesting the fact that the state keeps murdering civilians — is this not the exact tyranny the founding fathers were talking about? Or is it only tyranny when a white person is told they can’t get their roots touched up during a global pandemic?
Perhaps whiteness’s crowning achievement is its ability to spin a story. What a brilliant country we’d have, if the dreamers behind these myths put even half as much effort into embodying the pioneering, courageous, honest, innovative, compassionate spirit they ascribe to their fairytale avatars. Instead, they paint a pretty picture of whiteness and sell it to other, more downtrodden whites: the lost ones who trade in their humanity for some abstract promise of wealth and racial superiority, the poor ones who were told their skin color was a rich inheritance in and of itself. When the color of your skin is packaged and sold back to you like a winning lottery ticket, of course you’re gonna be pissed when you can’t actually cash it in. But when this comes to pass, when the great white promise fails to transpire, skin solidarity conditions the ticket holders to look out — not up, not in — for someone to blame.
Had the concept of race been invented earlier, perhaps humans would be extinct by now — evolutionarily speaking, separation is not a survival strategy.
The irony is this: The more a white person believes his skin entitles him to the best that life has to offer, the more meaningless his life becomes. Because whiteness — from the unearned superiority it confers, to the history it distorts and the excuses it creates — requires one to deny reality, not to mention one’s own humanity. Humans are hard-wired for connection, not separation; it is telling that the concept of race as we know it is less than 500 years old. Had it been invented earlier, perhaps humans would be extinct by now — evolutionarily speaking, separation is not a survival strategy. Yet, one who buys into the promise of whiteness must indeed separate: first from reality, next from the Other, and finally, from oneself.
Stay with me. Because my intention is not to demonize those who inherited the toxic myth of whiteness and have read this far, anyway. It’s to lay out what’s been taken from all of us for the sake of someone else’s greed.
Now, it’s common in 2020 for those most committed to the whiteness project to dismiss the legitimate concerns of marginalized people and their allies. “Snowflake” has basically become shorthand for “shut the fuck up.” The implication is that caring about inequality is soft; the directive is to get a thicker skin (preferably a white one). This response to the real issue of inequality baffles me, though; it seems the Power Whites do not expect their supposedly superior foot soldiers to exhibit the same grit and resilience they demand of the marginalized. Instead, they lull them to sleep with nursery rhymes about the return of the coal industry. Maybe that’s not surprising. The foundational principle of whiteness — that the accident of your skin color makes you the most special race, of allllllll the races, in the whole wide world — sounds suspiciously like a parent assuring a hapless five-year-old of their special gifts, their — dare I say? — Snowflakey-ness.
As a biracial white-passing person, the idea that my most valuable attribute is one I have zero influence over is just a bit insulting. It’s like being given one of those participation trophies the Power Whites are always bemoaning; ironic, as they don’t seem to realize their empty glorification of whiteness is its own kind of participation trophy. One that has created a class of people so convinced of their superiority, so dependent on that dream coming true, that they fail to cultivate the actual skills needed to navigate the modern world. Then they’re expected to compete against large swaths of people who, due to their own color, were never told they were special — rather they were told and shown the opposite, in the most brutal of ways. And because those who buy into whiteness were sent out into the world high on tall tales that made them feel good, they feel threatened by those who had to do the work, double the work — those who could not afford to believe the lie.
Since its birth, the lie of white supremacy has been about protecting the economic interests of the few. The Power Whites know they merely need to pay lip service to their foot soldiers in exchange for their loyalty. You know, the little things, like dog-whistling about “thugs” and supporting the narrative that all Black people live off of government benefits even though, back here in reality, white people are the primary recipients of every social program we have. Bootstraps indeed! But can you blame the PWs for not doing more to ensure true prosperity for their most amazing invention, the white race? An economic overhaul that uplifts all loyal whites would be expensive, after all, and a lot of work. That’s not really what Power Whites are about. Besides, there are cheaper ways to ensure we don’t transcend these man-made divisions to join forces and demand laws, and a government, that actually represents the people’s will.
I’m sorry if it’s the first time you’re hearing about this. And if you believed in whiteness, it must add insult to injury that the architects of this scam think you’re too fragile to hear the truth and too incompetent to know what to do with it, even if you did. But for some deranged reason, I still think people are more capable and resilient than we tend to give each other credit for. So I will tell you what the race-baiting Power Whites already know, and have no incentive to tell you: Your white skin never made you important or special. It may have even made you complacent and entitled, easier to control and take advantage of. This may be embarrassing, even painful to admit to yourself. But it’s also so, so fixable. And I hope you try, because you’re better than that. It is human imperative to be better than that, to become more than the factory settings we came into the world with.
And because I have no economic interest at stake, I can honestly say that I think every white person intuitively knows this already. It’s just that some have invested more in the lie than others, and wrongly believe they have more to lose if they give it up. Economists call this sunk-cost fallacy: the more time, money, emotion invested, the harder it is to walk away, even when that’s the most logical course of action. It’s why white nationalists are desperate enough to trot out the same four debunked “studies” to prove their superiority, shameless enough to take credit for the accomplishments of ancient cultures to justify their indifference to human suffering. It’s why the modern conservative movement must tell themselves, and each other, that Black people are responsible for falling prey to structural racism: the traps their white ancestors created, their parents perpetuated, and they, themselves, ignore. And it’s why white people who see the truth in this, and want to help end racism, still find themselves hesitating.
Let’s just be real: Most humans cannot watch other humans suffering on a regular basis, do nothing, and not carry around some serious guilt as a result. You may not consciously think about the guilt every day. You may choose to dehumanize or otherwise denigrate those you were too distracted to help (I hope not). You may create excuses for yourself, blame the victim, or never move beyond sadness and into action. (I agree, it is sad. Imagine how sad it is when you can’t look away, when that option is not available to someone who looks like you.)
Denial of the problem may stave off one’s guilt, temporarily, but it does not fix the problem and it does not absolve the guilt. Instead, it shoves the guilt into some dark recess of the mind, poisoning your thoughts and actions without your conscious awareness. (Other people are aware of your unconscious ticks, though, for what it’s worth.) Those extremists who claim to feel nothing about the historic and current maltreatment and abuse of Black Americans? They’re the most guilty of all. When a person is in that much denial, looking honestly at how they’ve contributed to, and benefited from, the systemic abuse of Black and Brown people is likely to require the complete undoing of their identity, of the world as they know it.
James Baldwin diagnosed this in 1963 (many times, actually) in his book, The Fire Next Time:
[White people] are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.
The red pill is not quite so appetizing when it’s you who must swallow it.
I’m not suggesting white people should, or shouldn’t, feel guilty. I’m suggesting that you already do, whether you realize it or not. Whether you believe you should or not. And I extend this to non-Black and white-passing POC, who may also feel they could be doing more. I certainly haven’t been maxing out my privilege in a consistent fashion, and I do feel bad about that, which is one reason I acknowledge it here and now. So that I can let it go, and get back to the work I should’ve been doing — the work of a human being and of a good American, which is inherently anti-racist.
Another reason for this acknowledgement, though, is to demonstrate for you that being honest with yourself, when you realize you’ve failed to live up to your own values, doesn’t need to be a whole to-do. Avoidance exacerbates any problem, whether it’s the personal problem of guilt, or the institutional problem of racism. So say it to yourself (not your black friends), right now: “I feel guilty.” Taste it. Bitter at first, but that thing about the truth setting us free is real. If you want to help save Black lives, you are required to interrogate your white soul. You may not like what you find. But don’t let internalized shame or fear of fucking up stop you from doing what’s right, now. Today. The more of us doing what we can, how, when, and where we can, the lighter the burden for those who can’t tag in and out of the fight for equality.
Now, no one is asking you to get a doctorate in race studies so that you can lead the movement next week; you can find an appropriate way to get involved. This is what I hear many Black people asking you do: learn your own history; acknowledge your advantages and wield your privilege where it has the most sway (with other white people, at protests, with authority figures, at work); use your wallet to support Black-led movements that are already in motion (and to support Black-owned businesses); listen to the lived experiences of Black people and the wisdom of Black organizers, add Black voices to your feed. This is only complicated if you try to turn the movement into the backdrop of your personal redemption arc, which… don’t do that.
When coming face-to-face with your own inaction, it’s normal to want to go hard in the paint on Day One. But that’s generally not the most selfless way to contribute, and it could cause more chaos for a community already running on fumes, already more likely to bear the serious consequences of your actions. Your enthusiasm for this cause is best spent on education, and on your white friends — learn together, start a book club, talk about whiteness. Don’t perform, don’t ask Black people to grade your ally test or for other emotional labor, don’t make it about you. You will find yourself with fewer questions when your goal is to be useful, not to be seen as useful. Be humble, listen to those who are attempting to peacefully bring you into the fold, and learn to fuck up with grace.
Your enthusiasm for this cause is best spent on your white friends — learn together, start a book club, talk about whiteness.
There’s one more thing I’ve seen Black people asking of white people for a while now. I believe it is a required long-term strategy for ending racism. I also believe it is our duty to oblige, as aspiring good Americans.
Consider that what Black people have been asking for, this whole time, is not what you think it is. It’s not your rescuing. Not your pity. And believe it or not, it’s not to become co-beneficiaries of the superficial bounty of whiteness. (Real wealth? Sure. But not the hollow wealth of whiteness that is promised and never delivered.) What they want from you is something you should want for yourself: They want you to look. They want you to unpack your insecurities, your fears, your shame. To stop projecting your personal and cultural issues onto them and to learn to own them, instead. Examine them. If they don’t serve our shared humanity, unlearn them. Become more aware, of yourself and others. Again: whiteness is not a heritage, but you do have at least one — dust it off. Your people come from somewhere, and it’s not a country called “White.” And learn your American history, the real American history. Without that education, you will not understand the nature of the core problem we’re trying to solve, nor will you recognize the insidious tactics Power Whites use to obfuscate their true motives. Black people simply want you to know what they know, about race and power and America. Because once you know, there is no sitting out, and there is no other side of this fight to be on.
Do not see the request for self-inquiry as an imposition. It is an invitation: to wake up to how these lies have divided us, have convinced diverse Americans to divest of their own rich histories in favor of the culture-less void called whiteness, to trade in their humanity with little understanding of what it requires they give up and what it requires they take from others. Perhaps our current mental health and addiction crises, our race and gender and culture wars, are the obvious outcome of generations of regular people being told they’re either inferior or superior to other regular people, when it’s just not fucking true, and we know it’s not fucking true. Maybe the exhaustion and grief we feel right now is a natural response to our collective Good German Syndrome — we’re human enough to be concerned and sad, but not enough to acknowledge it or make ourselves uncomfortable. This is not our human nature, it’s white supremacy, and this shit adds up. No wonder we’re all so miserable.
My fellow, good Americans: the external world is reflecting what was building up inside of us all along. It is a mirror, and we must look. Through this process of looking, seeing, and acknowledging, we may find that the world was never what we thought it was. That we were never who we thought we were. I’m here to tell you that’s okay. Perhaps when you meet who you really are — someone who cares about humanity and life and takes action to safeguard it, someone who can transform for the good of themselves and others, a good American who is brave enough to look— you’ll have little reason to mourn the illusion. | https://humanparts.medium.com/how-to-be-a-good-american-dd8a81c63d28 | ['Stephanie Georgopulos'] | 2020-06-04 17:48:00.026000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Justice', 'Black Lives Matter', 'Racism', 'Equailty'] |
Finland & Germany repatriate women from Syrian Islamic State camps, human rights groups coax other nations to follow the suite | On humanitarian grounds, Germany and Finland have repatriated five women and 18 children from Islamic State (IS) camps in Syria. These camps are believed to house IS militants’ suspected family members.
German media conveys that three of the rescued women are under investigation to be belonging to the IS.
Past few years have seen hundreds of Europeans fleeing to join the IS militant group. They are currently in Kurdish run camps in northern Syria. These people were displaced along with others after IS was defeated territorially in March 2019 in Iraq and Syria. Majority of these people are believed to be sympathizers of the jihadist group or wives and children of the IS militants.
Human rights groups and activists have been persuading other governments to bring back their citizens from the war hit zone. The activists argue that the region puts women and children at risk of illness and radicalization. But European countries have been apprehensive about it as it is a potential security threat to the nations. The recent example of UK girl Shamima Begum brings a valid clause to the governments’ worry. The schoolgirl had joined IS in 2015 and was later stripped off her UK citizenship on security grounds.
Noting the recent repatriation of women and children, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said on Sunday that these repatriations were “humanitarian cases, primarily orphans and children who were ill and their need was deemed particularly necessary and urgent.”
One of the women who returned was arrested at Germany’s Frankfurt Airport on suspicion of being a member of the jihadist group along with other crimes. The woman is from German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and is believed to have fled to Syria to join the IS group when she was 15 years old. One other woman is also being investigated on being an IS member.
The other three repatriated women are said to be in very poor health and were “wives of jihadists”. The details were shared by Kurdish administration’s foreign relation office spokesman, Kamal Akif.
Finland is said to have repatriated two women and six children. Finland’s foreign ministry said, “Under the constitution, Finnish public authorities are obligated to safeguard the basic rights of the Finnish children interned in the camps insofar as this is possible.”
The Finnish government says, in line with human rights groups, that more the delay in rescuing children from the camps, more it will be difficult to counter the radicalization they are imposed upon.
https://www.theworkersrights.com/us-embassy-in-fiji-issues-100000-usd-relief-fund-to-support-the-state-hit-by-cyclone-yasa/ | https://medium.com/@theworkersright/finland-germany-repatriate-women-from-syrian-islamic-state-camps-human-rights-groups-coax-other-5e4911318422 | ['The Workers Rights'] | 2020-12-22 13:12:48.185000+00:00 | ['Is Group', 'Human Rights', 'Syria', 'Germany', 'Finland'] |
Guide to Deploying Applications to Akash DeCloud | Prerequisites
This guide should work for Mac users, (most) Linux users, and maybe for Windows users (see supported platforms). This guide also assumes basic command line comfortability and some familiarity with Docker.
The Docker image used in this guide is available here under the username wlouie1 , but if you want to create one yourself, you will need to install Docker and have an account on Docker Hub.
To deploy to Akash DeCloud, you will need to:
Install Akash. Choose Your Akash Network. We will be using edgenet, which is the Testnet with deployment capabilities that will reflect their next Mainnet version. Fund Your Account with Akash Tokens (AKTs), to pay for deployment. For edgenet, Akash provides an AKT faucet to fund test deployments.
Containerizing your Application
(The Docker image for the application described in this section is available here, so feel free to skip straight to the Deploying to Akash section below.)
Writing the Application
For demonstration purposes, we’ll use this web application that enables exploring UFO sightings around the world:
UFO Sightings Around the World, 1906–2014. Image by Author
Clone the application by:
cd UFO-Sightings/ git clone https://github.com/wlouie1/UFO-Sightings.git cd UFO-Sightings/
As you can see, the application consists purely of static HTML/Javascript/CSS files. If you were to start up a server locally, e.g. with the following if you have Python 3 installed:
python -m http.server 8000
then you can navigate to http://localhost:8000 and view the application.
Containerizing with Docker
Since all we need is a server to serve the static files of our web application, we can create a simple Docker image that bundles our static files with a web server such as Nginx.
Inside the UFO-Sightings directory, create a file called Dockerfile with the following content:
FROM nginx:alpine
COPY . /usr/share/nginx/html
Build the Docker image (we’ll name it ufo-data-vis and tag it as latest for simplicity; beware of the “latest” tag in practice though) via:
docker build -t ufo-data-vis:latest .
To test it, run the image as a container, with the host’s port 80 forwarded to the container’s port 80 (default port of Nginx):
docker run -p 80:80 ufo-data-vis:latest
If everything works, you should be able to view the application at http://localhost:80 .
Push Image to Docker Registry
Once we have a built Docker image, we need to make it publicly available so that the Akash deployment process can pull the image (private containers support is on their roadmap). If you have a Docker Hub account with username USERNAME , create a repository called ufo-data-vis , and then tag and push the image with:
docker tag ufo-data-vis:latest USERNAME/ufo-data-vis:latest
docker push USERNAME/ufo-data-vis:latest
..and we’re done! The Docker image representing our containerized application is now publicly available, and we can move on to deployment to Akash.
Consider the Docker Compose File
Deploying to Akash involves writing a Stack Definition Language (SDL) file that defines the deployment configuration (more details in the Create Deployment Configuration section below). The SDL documentation is here. You may notice that the SDL format is extremely similar to that of a Docker Compose file!
If we were to construct a Docker Compose file that utilizes the public Docker image of our web application, it would look something like this:
version: "3.8"
services:
web:
image: USERNAME/ufo-data-vis:latest
ports:
- "80:80"
To verify, you can save this file as docker-compose.yml under the UFO-Sightings directory, and run the container using docker-compose (make sure to stop any previously running container):
docker-compose up --build
and navigate to http://localhost:80 to confirm.
As you’ll see in the Create Deployment Configuration section, writing the SDL file essentially becomes a direct translation. | https://medium.com/coinmonks/guide-to-deploying-applications-to-akash-decloud-b35dc97e5ca4 | ['Wilson Louie'] | 2020-12-28 13:15:00.425000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Blockchain', 'Decentralized Cloud', 'Cloud Computing', 'Akash Network'] |
The Future of RPA: Tapping Into the Power of AI and Data | Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has helped businesses reduce the tedium of mundane tasks for people, giving them the opportunity to work on more rewarding tasks. However, RPA has limitations. The intelligent application of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can take RPA to the next level.
Software developers have been creating programs to automate tasks for many years, but RPA tools have democratized automation, bringing it into the reach of almost everyone. Drag and drop tools allow frontline workers to take everyday tasks and automate them.
For example, a human resource (HR) officer might receive emails each day for leave requests. They may need to open those emails, extract particular information and compile it into a report that needs to be sent to specific people. It is a repetitive task that is carried out every day and may take a couple of hours. However, an RPA tool can create an automated workflow that scans the email account, extracts the relevant data, compiles it into a report and sends the email faster without hands-on intervention. This frees the HR worker up to focus on higher value activities.
Taking RPA to the Next Step
The capacity for RPA to be applied is significant — most workers have tasks that are the same each day and are simply carried out by following a series of well-defined steps.
However, what happens when the task requires specific human input? It might be a repeating task, but there are enough variations each day, so some human intuition and knowledge is needed. RPA allows variables to be used at each step. For example, it could be used to compile a finance report and the variables could be altered to look at a different account code or financial entity. But what if the list of variables changed every day? What if the report needed to cover the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization — something that changes daily? Or if that report also needed to alert someone of a budget item that suddenly moved from under-budget to overspent?
It is relatively easy for a person to make a decision and add an extra parameter or variable to a search. AI will enable tools to learn what we want and augment queries and actions themselves. Instead of RPA routines being specific to a task, they can be more generalized and automatically adapt according to the data they are working with.
Many actions, while repetitive, require insight and consideration by a human with knowledge and experience. And this is where the next generation of RPA tools can leverage AI. Humans are very good at answering the question of “What else is important or interesting?”. AI will help RPA tools go further than simply adding more variables to a query. AI will allow RPA to take the next step and answer the question of “What else?”. In effect, the application of AI to RPA will allow these tools to expand the scope of what they can do.
Leveraging Data and AI for RPA
The emergence of GPT-3, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is a powerful technology that uses AI to leverage the vast amount of language data on the internet. By training an incredibly large neural network, GPT-3 is able to understand and generate both human and programming languages with near-human performance. For instance, given a few pairs of legal contracts and plain English documents, it can start to automate the task of writing legal contracts in plain English. This kind of sophisticated automation was unimaginable with classical RPA tools without leveraging data and state-of-the-art AI.
This demonstration of the power of data and AI leads us to a new question. What else can be improved by leveraging data using AI in RPA?
One illustrating example is sending emails in digital marketing. Marketers often send automated emails to customers and prospects. Collating a list of targets and then creating and sending the email is a common use case for RPA, but AI can be used to analyze data and optimize those messages in order to maximize the chance of a message leading to a successful conversion. By applying AI to RPA, marketers can better target their customers with personalized messages, so they are more likely to respond positively.
Next Generation RPA Will Grow From Digital Transformation
This relies on having a sufficient quantity of data and powerful analysis tools that can create models of what to send to whom and the best times. This will see closer relationships emerge between line-of-business managers and IT teams working together to identify opportunities to use RPA.
In the past, humans would analyze this data and form hypotheses about when to send the messages. With AI, you can now conduct the analysis, build the hypothesis, test it and then refine it to ensure the next campaign is more successful.
While RPA has delivered significant benefits when it comes to automation, the next generation of RPA will deliver more benefits through the use of AI and machine learning through optimization. This is not about faster automation but about better automation.
It is likely that as RPA becomes more widespread, businesses will also look at how they can source software bots quickly. Some experts posit that we will see the emergence of “Robotics as a Service” as companies look for ways to deploy RPA through subscription models and so they can access expert assistance.
With businesses undergoing digital transformation, and perhaps accelerating their efforts as they come to grips with the impacts of COVID-19 on their workforces, data is becoming increasingly important. The optimization of RPA will benefit greatly from increased digitization in businesses. As businesses develop data lakes and other new information repositories that are accessible through APIs, it is important to allow RPA tools to have access so they can be optimized.
There are some challenges though. Automation delivers many benefits, but it may not be worth automating every process. Businesses should target the repetitive processes that are most valuable as this is where the most business benefit will be derived.
There also needs to be a plan in place for people. When a task that was previously carried out by a person is automated, a new role or activity needs to be found for that person. While it is true that automation can reduce or remove mundane and unsatisfying tasks, the time that is created through automation needs to be used. Saying someone is now available for higher value work is irrelevant if there is no higher value work for them to do.
When automation is targeted and executed well, the business benefits are quickly realized. The next generation of RPA will go further by not only automating routine tasks but by finding opportunities, through the use of AI, to optimize automation and deliver better outcomes. The application of neural networks will allow RPA to go further and deliver better outcomes for businesses, large and small, as they seek to deliver greater value to their customers.
The author of this op-ed is Dr. Min Sun, Chief AI Scientist, Appier | https://medium.com/appier-blog/the-future-of-rpa-tapping-into-the-power-of-ai-and-data-3d3019d7538 | [] | 2020-09-11 07:10:20.740000+00:00 | ['Roboticprocessautomation', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Digital Transformation', 'Data Science'] |
Why You Should Care About Being Responsible | Whatever I say,
Whatever I think and feel,
Are my responses for events,
It has nothing to do with them.
It’s my ownership;
I am responsible for what I create.
People call it a response.
I call it the ability to respond.
It’s easy to see but hard to perceive,
We believe that events influence our response.
But I say, we can choose;
We have the power to select our emotions.
When we don’t consciously choose a response,
We react
We blame others for our hurt.
We hold others responsible for our sadness.
We curse others for darkening our lives.
We hate them and reject them.
But whose fault is this?
We didn’t do our job.
We didn’t choose our emotions.
We didn’t think before acting upon
We didn’t use our intellect.
We become unconscious of our potential.
Curtailing our mistakes, we become sad.
Forgetting spiritual knowledge, we become doomed.
Remaining unaware of our potential, we play sly tricks.
Dropping our emotional shields, we attack others.
Without realizing our broken ends, we pull down others.
Neglecting our happiness, we seek revenge.
Let’s live in an enlightened way.
Freeing ourselves from this bondage of dependence.
Let’s learn to make ourselves able to respond.
Let’s mold our own destinies,
By performing the right Karma,
Rather than continuing to play dirty.
Nothing comes easy, as they say;
I’ve realized that.
We need constant attention 24/7,
We need to check upon our thoughts.
If negative, we need to change them.
If positive, we need to accentuate them.
Life is not about living.
It’s about learning while living.
Life is just an experiment.
The day we stop learning, we die.
If we’re arrogant and intimidated by advice,
Kill that mentality.
We’re all humans, bound by relationships.
That’s the beauty of humans.
If we can’t learn from others’ wisdom,
We’re self-sabotaging,
And after that, we blame others for our unhappiness.
So, let’s change.
No matter how we change,
Whether by experimenting or by learning from others,
We need to change.
We need to change for good.
We need to learn well.
We need to live. | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/why-you-should-care-about-being-responsible-635ab073457a | ['Darshak Rana'] | 2020-12-13 19:11:48.788000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Advice', 'Responsibility', 'Weekly Prompts', 'Poetry'] |
It’s Absolutely Alright to Change Your Views | It’s Absolutely Alright to Change Your Views
And why you shouldn’t stop people from changing their opinions
Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels
Social media has evolved into a medium that spurs change. It helps news spread rapidly and allows everyone to weigh in with their opinions. Online platforms enable us to voice out about the issues that are close to your heart. And it is one these platforms where we are often encouraged to see things in a different light; to empathize with those who do not enjoy the same freedoms; to stand up for those who suffer from injustice.
With these online platforms also comes an evolution in the way our opinions are received. Before these platforms came about, opinions were something shared in passing. Unless one’s position was written down in books and newspapers or publicly stated on television, most opinions were quickly forgotten. You simply shared what you felt about a particular matter and that’s it. People either forget or would only bring it up in the future when you are once again talking about that issue.
Nowadays however, opinions are immortalized and spread really easily. On these online platforms, even if you delete whatever you posted, people might still have screenshots of your opinions and will be free to continue sharing them. Furthermore, opinions are no longer a private matter between friends and family. Future (and potential) employers can easily search them up. If it is deeply controversial, even the public could weigh in on the issue. Unless you only have a few trusted friends and family following your social media, you will never be able to control how far your opinion is shared.
And even though these online platforms have become such good drivers for change, the immortalization of opinions has had its negative effects. With this ability to constantly refer to old opinions, people began to develop a weird habit: holding someone’s old opinion as their ‘forever truth’.
Of course, it’s miles easier to get your opinion out in the public now. After reading about a certain issue, it is extremely easy to get your thoughts out into the public sphere. But once your initial opinions are sent out into the public, changing your opinion becomes unthinkable.
And because of the public’s habit of constantly holding one’s old opinions against an individual’s current words and actions, people have started to resist change. After all, it is much easier to defend your old position rather than constantly explain why you changed.
But this shouldn’t be the case.
The power to push for change is something that should be embraced. And the ability to share opinions is central to this power. Being able to freely share one’s opinions encourage change for the things that matter to that individual. It allows one’s voice to be heard and helps one find like minded individuals. As long as the opinion is backed by evidence and truth, no one should have to be afraid to share what they are feeling.
But discrediting someone who attempts to change their opinions defeats the purpose. In the first place, we should already expect opinion changes and not treat anybody’s opinion as their final stance of the matter.
Opinions change because we are all humans. And humans are not infallible. Sometimes we believe in the wrong things, sometimes we’re misled to think a certain way. When we make mistakes, owning up and changing your view should be the first thing to do. Maybe you believed that a certain policy would be effective and shared your opinion about it. But after seeing how it is enacted, you might want to change your stance and point out all the failings in this system. It is only by reviewing your old opinions and changing them can you learn and help improve the system (and yourself).
At the same time, opinions change because things change. The situation might have evolved. Changing time periods might have brought different beliefs into the realm of ‘acceptable thoughts to have’. Even the amount of information available changes. And when faced with new circumstances, you might no longer feel the same way about a certain issue. This is when a change in opinion should happen. If no one adapts to the changes in society, there will be no room for society to improve.
Personally, as a writer, sharing opinions is unavoidable. And every great writer I know shares their opinion boldly. But at the same time, we all have to learn to be confident when changing our minds. Changing my opinion shouldn’t require me to dissociate myself from my old ideas. Changing my beliefs shouldn’t discredit me. In fact, if anything, changing opinions should be treated as a badge of honour. In the face of situation changes, being able to adapt and reflect upon oneself is not a character flaw. It is a skill everyone should hope to have.
That’s why I’m not afraid to say that I’m wrong. You shouldn’t be afraid of owning your past opinions as well. They are there to mark your growth and show people that you’ve thought deeply about the issue. Own your opinions and back them up with facts. But if the nuances change, own the opinion changes and do it confidently. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/no-im-not-sorry-for-saying-what-i-said-20d019d1f649 | ['Jerren Gan'] | 2020-11-10 02:05:02.381000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Opinion', 'Politics', 'Change', 'Culture'] |
How entrepreneurs of social businesses can assess opportunities and challenges | Do a Risk Model for opportunities and another for challenges.
Then practice with a range of small ones for each type.
Tune up your Models by comparing the inputs and results.
Once you feel comfortable try a medium one and if that works out.
Do a large one.
linktr.ee/ericsutherland | https://medium.com/illumination/how-entrepreneurs-of-social-businesses-can-assess-opportunities-and-challenges-3717d3fc311c | ['Eric Sutherland'] | 2021-01-26 18:58:05.320000+00:00 | ['Opportunities', 'Risk Model', 'Challenges', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Social Business'] |
Cancelling Fetch Requests in React Applications | Cancelling Fetch Requests in React Applications
Using useEffect, useRef and TypeScript
Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash
The Fetch API supports cancelling requests using AbortController interface. We can therefore cancel in-flight requests in our applications without the need for including external fetching libraries like axios.
Example of the `AbortController` API
Above we can see how we can use an AbortController to cancel an in-flight fetch request.
But this basic example is not indicative of how you would use this API in your applications. Let’s instead look at a real world example.
Cancelling Fetch Requests in React Applications
We will create a React application that allows users to type in a search term. Then our application will call an API, and return a list of matching users. We will call the API on every change of our input (we won’t debounce).
If there is an in flight request while the search term changes, we would like to cancel that request.
So let’s get started with a fresh NextJS application
npx create-next-app --example with-typescript cancel-fetch
Our API
Next, let’s open up the api that our example application starts with. Open the file api/users/index.ts . We will make a few modifications to the file.
In order to simulate real network requests, we will add two second timeout before our API call is returned. This makes it easier to test that our cancellations are working. We use the query param of req to filter out users who’s names don’t include this string.
Below you can see the modifications we made to the api/users/index.ts file.
Our Application
Now that we have our API work out of the way, let’s get started with our React application.
Our application will require two state variables. One to keep track of the search term, and another to keep track of the array of users we receive from the server. We can define our state variables as follows.
const [searchTerm, setSearchTerm] = useState("");
const [users, setUsers] = useState<User[]>([]);
Now that we have our state, we can define a useEffect hook where we call our API.
Now everytime a user types into our search input, we call our API and update our users state variable with the result. Notice how we haven’t yet added our cancellation feature.
To cancel in flight requests, we will need some mutable state to hold our AbortController instance. For this, we can use a ref .
const controllerRef = useRef<AbortController | null>();
We can then set and use our controllerRef variable inside our useEffect hook.
We can modify our function as follows. Notice how the first thing we do is abort any flight requests, then we define a new AbortController, assign it to our mutable state variable, and make our new request using that controller’s signal.
We add the catch block because fetch throws an error when requests are cancelled.
Now when we type into our search box, we can see the cancelled requests in our network tab.
Cancelled requests
Now we have created a React application that cancels any in flight requests using useEffect , useState and useRef . To see the full application code, check out the gist below. | https://medium.com/frontend-digest/cancelling-fetch-requests-in-react-applications-58a52a048e8e | ['Malcolm Laing'] | 2020-10-25 08:30:11.173000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'React', 'Typescript', 'JavaScript', 'Nextjs'] |
My Funding Picks For Last Week (W49) | Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. From that list, I pick out three companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things. Click here to know about my rationale behind this weekly exercise.
Last week, 23 startups raised $501 million. While we are finally back to funding happening more frequently (almost a deal announced every 7 hours!), this is just a precursor for things to come. I would expect December to only get bigger and better as funds look at closing out this year at a high!
This week, 15 deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 11 last week), which made the cut for my weekly analysis. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked two as my favorite funding news from last week!
Name: Grip
Amount Raised: Undisclosed from Anicut Angel Fund with participation from Gemba Capital and other angel investors.
What does Grip do?
Edited from Tracxn: Grip Invest is an online platform for investing in physical assets such as vehicles, equipment, furniture, among others. It provides tools for leasing investments to corporates, availing monthly rentals, and connecting users and asset owners. Also, acts as collateral to manage overall risks and depreciation of assets.
Why do I like Grip?
Millennials and established HNI’s have become obsessed with the idea of passive income. Since the early days of making high-interest rates from banks are long gone, these new platforms will pique investor interest. As investors in LenDenClub, have investor interest the platform go up 20x in the last four months.
Therefore, if the asset risk and investor expectations get managed prudently, Grip can make logical sense in a diversified fixed-income portfolio for a millennial.
Name: ERPNext
Amount Raised: Rs 10 crore from Rainmatter
What does ERPNext do?
Edited from Tracxn: ERP next is a web-based open-source ERP software on cloud for small and medium businesses. Its solutions include accounting, CRM, HRM, project and sales management, warehouse management. The software has a Model-View-Controller architecture with metadata modeling tools that add flexibility for users to adapt the software to unique purposes without the need for programming. It provides an embedded reporting system with office suite integration along with report customization.
Why do I like ERPNext?
ERPNext is a brilliant platform that is looking at breaking the monopoly of SAP or Oracle at the fraction of the price. I believe that this is a much-needed platform. Nithin’s endorsement gives a lot of confidence in the stability of the company and the quality of the technology therefore more power to them! | https://medium.com/@showmedamani/my-funding-picks-for-last-week-w49-ffeb90aaa513 | ['Anirudh A Damani'] | 2020-12-02 12:55:34.189000+00:00 | ['News', 'Venture Capital', 'Startup', 'Funding', 'Technology'] |
7 Point Strategy Before Launching Your Brand | Today I want to talk about what you need to do to launch your brand. Now, some of you may have already launched your brand and it may or may not be going the way you’d like it to be. We are very specific and there’s a seven-point checklist of things that we believe at Brand Builders that must be in place to properly launch a brand.
1. Brand Guidelines
The first one is having your brand guidelines. This is essentially your logo, the right and wrong ways of using your logo, your font and colors. This is really the way that you are going to visually represent yourself across all platforms. So we want to have that in place first. After we have that or simultaneously what you want to do is make sure all of your copy, especially for your homepage is written.
2. Copy
We believe in using a formula or a process called the 15 P’s of writing amazing copy. This is a formula that you can use if you are writing a blog post, video content, a landing page, a registration page, a sales page, whatever it may be, even a keynote. This formula works no matter what you’re writing.
3. Website
Then we want to create your website. We want to make sure your website has a menu bar that is structured correctly and your framework includes the proper call to actions that you want to be pushing and driving people to. Your website also needs to have a blog.
4. Blog Layout
There is a way to layout your blog for not only efficiency but also for success. Part of that is where you drive people to how you visually have it set up. You’ll have lead captures — ways to get email addresses and also ways to convert people into becoming a potential customer.
5. Video Funnel
This is a four-day video funnel that is to get people to gain your trust. Learning what you’re about and getting some value that will lead them to make a decision on whether or not they want to continue doing business with you or even start doing business with you. So that might be in terms of purchasing a course or getting into coaching. It may be a membership group or buying a ticket to a retreat…whatever your primary business model is going to be. But again, we have to make sure that video funnel is set up so you can actually monetize the work that you’re putting in there and the content you’re putting out.
6. Headers
We want to make sure that your social headers fall in line. Are your banners correctly put up and is there consistency across all platforms? So before you launch, those should all be updated along with your bio.
7. Bio
Your bio should position you as an expert in this space. It is not a resume. It is not a story about you. It is truly why you are so amazing. And let’s make you sound really expensive so that people read it and go, “ I need to work with this person and I want to work with this person!”
Once all of these are in place, you’re ready to go ahead and launch.
To learn more about how to build your reputation, click here for our free video course | https://medium.com/@thebrandbuildersgroup/7-point-strategy-before-launching-your-brand-b97bcc26986b | ['Brand Builders Group'] | 2019-06-17 15:50:07.259000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Branding', 'Tips', 'Launch', 'Personal Branding'] |
Acrylic Resin Crowns Part 5 | Acrylic Resin Crowns
What is the combined, indirect/direct procedure for temporary crown fabrication? Previously fabricated ESF, a temporary crown coming from the laboratory, is relined with additional quantity of self-curing resin material into the patient’s mouth (a chair-side relining procedure), for achieving perfect marginal fit of the restoration — to the finish line and to the gingival margin.
The quantity of relining material and the contact time are minimized and the probability for pulp damage or tooth sensitivity of the patient is greatly reduced.
Regardless of the technology — indirect or combined, for the fabrication of this type ESF, the impression needs to be taken before tooth preparation.
Another option, if the teeth have been prepared already, is the dental technician makes the modeling of the restoration in wax, fabricates a duplicate stone model, and then the ESF can be fabricated using the pressure or vacuum forming device.
Another method for indirect fabrication of acrylic resin restorations is the hydro-pneumatic heat curing process in a special device.
The polymerization cycle parameters depend on the instructions for use of the company that has produced the device, but most frequently these parameters are as follows: T=90 -120 degrees, Pressure 0,3–0,7 Mpa for 11 -15min; or 0,15.76 Mpa for 5 or 6 minutes. | https://medium.com/@dominicthorncroft/acrylic-resin-crowns-part-5-de7b7355e4db | ['Dominic Thorncroft'] | 2021-10-28 08:54:30.300000+00:00 | ['Dentistry', 'Resin Crowns', 'Acrylic Resin', 'Dentist', 'Dominic Thorncroft'] |
Q#11: Categorizing Food | Answer:
This question tests your understanding of Pandas for dataframe manipulation. The first step is to create the dataframe object:
import pandas as pd raw_data = {'food': ['bacon', 'STRAWBERRIES', 'Bacon', 'STRAWBERRIES', 'BACON', 'strawberries', 'Strawberries', 'pecans'], 'pounds': [4, 3.5, 7, 3, 6, 8, 1, 3]} data = pd.DataFrame(raw_data, columns = ['food', 'pounds'])
Now there are multiple ways to add columns to a dataframe in Pandas, I will use the most simple method which is just declaring a new column name as an index in your pandas object and setting it equal to a list/array of your desired results.
Before this, lets create the conditionals, note the differences in spelling of the food objects this is a common trap and it requires that you know some string manipulation in python. In this case, we are going to force all the characters to be lowercase with the method .lower(). Let us make a list to store the results and then add the list to the dataframe. | https://medium.com/foundational-data-science-interview-questions/q-11-categorizing-food-6de7acf73789 | ['Abish Pius'] | 2020-12-16 21:11:26.859000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Cleaning', 'Beginner', 'Pandas', 'Data Science'] |
Science Says Marijuana Makes You Skinny — Seriously | No one’s denying that people usually get the munchies after smoking pot or eating cannabis edibles. All that is definitely true, so much so that many people who are ill and have no appetite or people who need to put on weight often use medical marijuana to help stabilize their body mass at a healthier weight.
But what about the rest of us who are not trying to gain weight? The myth so far has been that people who smoke pot eat more and therefore weigh more. New scientific research, however, is contradicting this popularly held believe.
According to the journal of Obesity Biology and Integrated Physiology, researchers have found that cannabis users have a lower body mass index. Basically, pot users are on average thinner than non-users. Not only that but there’s good news for diabetics and pre-diabetics: Cannabis users have lower blood glucose levels than non-users.
That’s not where the good news ends, either. Several studies show that cannabis users have a higher caloric intake on average than non-users despite the fact that they had a lower body weight. This means that using cannabis may encourage the munchies and make you eat more, but your metabolism simultaneously gets a little boost that prevents weight-gain. Who would’ve ever thought that marijuana makes you skinny?
The reason for the metabolism boost is that Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) stimulates the production of a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is a poweful appetite stimulator and is often called “the hunger hormone” in the scientific community. However, ghrelin also plays a big role in helping our bodies break down and metabolize carbohydrates.
Wait! It gets even better: Scientists at the University of Nebraska, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that marijuana users had a smaller waist circumference than non-users.
In yet another study of 52,000 participants, it was reported — and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology — that rates of obesity are 1/3 lower in cannabis users versus non-users. Cholesterol levels also proved to be healthier in cannabis users as well.
So there you have it: You may be eating more after taking a few tokes but the same stuff that makes you crave all kinds of crazy foods is keeping your body from retaining fat! Now that’s reason to celebrate with a few hits, no? | https://medium.com/firsttoknow/science-says-marijuana-makes-you-skinny-seriously-f0901114ad07 | ['First To Know'] | 2019-05-17 22:09:42.009000+00:00 | ['Science', 'Weight Loss', 'Marijuana', 'Cannabis'] |
Lives in Hiding, Emotional Abuse, the Closet, and Other Concerns | The Reconnection
I was pleasantly surprised when Dinu decided to contact me again. I thought I had lost a friend for good but then here she was after five years, telling me that she was stupid and scared. Please forgive her.
Five years and many arguments after, her boyfriend had sat her down and told her she might be bisexual and finally gave her “permission” to talk to me.
As expected, after telling her of her sexual orientation, he also suggested a threesome to help her make sure that she’s bisexual.
So you stopped her from owning a part of her sexuality out of fear and then after many fights and disappointments told her it’s ok? Why did you need her to be 100% straight in the first place?
Why did you feel threatened by someone who lived at least a thousand miles away and only chatted with your girlfriend roughly once a month?
Why do you still casually joke and shame her for her attraction to women? Call her a lesbian and think it’s a derogatory term?
Can you even claim to love her?
The New Personality
As much as I was happy to reconnect with a “lost” friend, I was met with a changed version of the former friend.
The confusion our talk created was so much that I had to google signs of emotional abuse just to remind myself what it is. The details of our conversation went as below.
She tells me that he finally felt secure enough in her love for him.
My question is, what did she have to sacrifice to get there? The answer lies in her current state of being — it seems she had to break herself down to prove her devotion.
She tells me she has developed depression and an anxiety disorder. She has suicidal thoughts. She tells me she’s broken. She uses the identity of broken without question.
She tells me her boyfriend is amazing because he’s fixing her. Fixing? Broken? The friend I used to know did not speak this way about herself. Not even once.
If no hugely traumatic occurred in the past few years, then how could there be such a change in self-perception?
She asks me if I find her pretty. The person I used to know didn’t ask questions like “am I pretty?”. What kind of question is that? Maybe she should have asked these questions when she was supposed to be in her insecure adolescent phase.
She was similarly feeling unsure and lost about other aspects of her life.
What happened? Where did her self-esteem go?
In addition, she has developed a high emotional reactivity that wasn’t there before:
She was super quick to assume I don’t like her as a person anymore when I didn’t feed validating answers to all her insecure questions. She even imagined I hate her. She got a little angry, all in the span of one conversation. She showed jealousy over other people in my life, lacked boundaries, asked questions that are too familiar for someone who just reappeared in my life out of nowhere.
I could no longer recognize this person. She wasn’t like this before. Has she been emotionally abused? As far as I know, emotionally abused people tend to develop emotional instability as a result of the abuse.
Emotional abuse can even impact friendships because emotionally abused people often worry about how people truly see them and if they truly like them. — Sherry Gordon, Very Well Mind
Am I seeing things that are not there? I am sure that Dinu has changed but can I know for sure that there is something off about her relationship as well?
Is she suffering because of her boyfriend or are they suffering together because she can’t integrate the part of herself that likes other women into her current reality?
Then again, I remember that she wasn’t trying to disown her sexual attraction to women all those years prior to confiding in him. | https://medium.com/prismnpen/lives-in-hiding-emotional-abuse-the-closet-and-other-concerns-b0b5dcd854d | ['Tima Loku'] | 2020-12-13 03:51:05.677000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'LGBTQ', 'Mental Health', 'Women', 'Creative Non Fiction'] |
Ta dose crypto du lundi 26 mars — Yahoo Japon pourrait lancer son propre exchange | 21 Percent of College Students use Their Loans to Invest in Cryptocurrencies | BTCMANAGER
Bitcoin and crippling student loans, the two things which are defining the financial futures of most college students… | https://medium.com/la-bulle-crypto/ta-dose-crypto-du-lundi-26-mars-yahoo-japon-pourrait-lancer-son-propre-exchange-8d17f2b471f4 | [] | 2018-03-26 07:01:00.976000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Binance', 'Yahoo'] |
Dry skin and moisturizers: What Female Dermatologist in Delhi Says | In winter, everybody’s skin becomes dry, split and flaky. Due to these scarcely discernible differences in this season, wrinkles look progressively detectable. The skin is your body’s most delicate organ and it’s the primary force against microbes, infections, and aggravations. If the skin boundary capacity is upset, even by straightforward dry skin, it puts patients in danger for disease and dermatitis.
In view of Dr. Jaishree Noor : a Female dermatologist in Delhi here are the points how your skin becomes dry and how moisturizers work to hold water will assist you with keeping your skin all around hydrated yearlong.
Few factors that expansion the pace of trans-epidermal water loss includes sunburn and exposure to highly chlorinated water. Normal skin maladies like atopic dermatitis, psoriasis or ichthyosis can likewise increase trans-epidermal water loss. When the skin’s dampness level is under 10%, it’s a signal of dry skin.
To keep the skin well hydrated you can do a few things. Maintain a strategic distance from skin allergens that cause aggravations. They can strip the skin’s shallow layers and oils. Use moisturizer to help seal water in the skin and use a humidifier to keep home moistness levels low.
It might entice take a long, hot shower, yet your skin will be greatly improved presented with a 5-to 10-minute tepid shower. You ought to likewise abstain from utilizing too much high temp water when washing your hands — if the water makes your skin turn red, it’s excessively hot.
Washing your hands in cold water has all the earmarks of being as successful at evacuating germs as warm water and is less disturbing to skin. In case you’re using air hand-dryer, use it just until your hands are moist.
Another recommendation about skin care from a female dermatologist in Delhi comes in terms of the soaps and oils being used. An inappropriate cleanser can instigate the existing skin itching and dryness. For example, normal soaps may contain irritants aromas. Rather, wash with a scent free, moisturizer gel. You can likewise avoid winter skin problems by utilizing less cleanser by and large.
On brilliant winter days skin is more exposed to the danger sun’s UV rays. That implies whether you’re out for walk, playing in the day off, simply strolling through a parking garage on a task run, it’s essential to apply sunscreen in winter climate. Before you head outside, apply a moisturizer, wide range sunscreen with a SPF of 15 or higher to all exposed body areas.
Wearing wet garments and shoes can further disturb your skin and cause irritation. On the off chance that gloves, socks, and jeans become wet, make certain to change them as soon as possible. For how long you have no sensitivities, picking a moisturizer you like can make things easy going. If you’re consistent to skin care regime, you can get your skin hydrated well. | https://medium.com/@sumantripathi/dry-skin-and-moisturizers-what-female-dermatologist-in-delhi-says-9f6a5734bb45 | ['Suman Tripathi'] | 2019-09-14 10:20:21.340000+00:00 | ['Skincare', 'Dermatologist', 'Skin', 'Moisturizer', 'Female Dermatologist'] |
Patrick Dunn On The 5 Pros and Cons about Crypto | I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Dunn
Patrick Dunn Director of Trial Funds Society / Trial Token
Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”
We’ll I grew up in Vancouver B.C. Canada and came out of school and became a pilot throughout the west coast of Canada before getting into finance. Then I started a factoring company lending bridge financing to companies in need. I’ve been involved in cryptocurrencies and blockchain for over a year and have a passion for aviation and military history.
Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
Absolutely. We developed and built a crowdfunding platform to help people get the funding they need for legal cases where they otherwise wouldn’t be able too. Our inspiration was that We noticed a lot of people couldn’t get the funding they really needed when they were wronged and we wanted to create a platform that anyone could use to seek the justice they deserve.
What are the 5 things that most excite you about crypto? Why?
-People to have the ability to safely trade and do business over the internet without the need of a trusted third-party to verify or uphold the terms of the agreement.
-Crypto currencies that can be used throughout the world.
-The ability for anyone in any country no matter what part of the world to have a form of currency even if they can’t / don’t have a bank account
-Complete transparency in charitable funds. Simply because the transactions are completely documented for everyone to see.
-It allows everybody to have the ability to participate in different ideas and companies revolutionizing the fund raising industry.
What are the 5 things worry you about crypto? Why?
-Crypto currency volatility is a concern currently. The reason is because corporations that may want to include crypto as an accepted form of payment may be negatively effected by the downswings of some crypto currencies.
-Crypto currencies that don’t have a legitimate business behind them trying to make a quick buck are a concern potentially having a negative outlook to the industry.
-Market manipulation effecting good cryptocurrencies with a good business behind them negatively.
-Mainstream media having a negative outlook on crypto and blockchain technology when having no idea what they are talking about. People need to educate themselves on the subject before commenting.
-Government entities trying to restrict crypto currencies in certain countries.
What 3 things would you advise to someone who wanted to emulate your career? Can you share an example for each idea?
-Educate yourself everyday learning as much as you can on crypto and blockchain technology. When I started learning about crypto I watch youtube videos by Andreas Antonopoulos. Andreas explains all aspects of crypto and blockchain in a simple systematic manner. To give you an idea how respected he is, he was asked to speak on the matter in from of the Senate of Canada about Bitcoin.
-Create a business that will impact the world in a positive manner.
-Educate yourself on crypto currencies that your looking at purchasing. Don’t just blindly buy coins in hopes you can ride the wave.
Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.
Without a doubt Andreas Antonopoulos. I would love to pick his brain on what he feels the future of crypto and blockchain will have on the world.
If I had a time machine I would want to meet and talk to Howard Hughes.
Watch the full interview below: | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/patrick-dunn-on-the-5-pros-and-cons-about-crypto-e3c104baee9f | ['Charles Wu'] | 2018-06-05 17:21:02.602000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'CEO', 'Trial Funds Society', 'Trial Token', 'Bitcoin'] |
Everything We Know (and Don’t) About Trump’s Health Right Now | Everything We Know (and Don’t) About Trump’s Health Right Now
Here’s what the president’s doctors said — and didn’t say
President Trump drives past supporters in a motorcade outside of Walter Reed Medical Center. Credit: ALEX EDELMAN / Getty Images
Updated 3:50 pm 10/5/20: There were no significant changes regarding Trump’s health made public at the Monday news conference. Dr. Conley provided no additional information on the president’s medications, scans, or date of disease onset. He said Trump’s tweets are an indication of his mental status.
Donald Trump is not doing well. Or he’s doing great! Depends on whom you ask. The President’s medical team has been cagey and at times deliberately misleading about his condition, but we do have some information about the progression of his illness over the weekend.
Despite the rosy picture painted by the White House physicians, Trump — who is in several high-risk categories based on his age, weight, sex, and medical history — is currently being treated as if his case of Covid-19 is severe. In a briefing given Sunday, however, it sounded as if his condition is improving.
What are his vitals?
Fever
On Sunday, White House physician Sean Conley, DO, stated the president had a high fever on Friday, but he would not say how high it had been. Pulmonologist Sean Dooley, MD, followed up to say that Trump had been fever-free since then. Neither physician provided information about whether Trump had been given medication to lower his temperature, although the president does take a daily aspirin, which can act as a fever reducer at high doses.
Celine Gounder, MD, an infectious disease expert at NYU Langone, says the question of whether Trump has taken another fever-reducing medication, such as Advil (ibuprofen) or Tylenol (acetaminophen), is important. “If the fever came down on its own, that’s a very good sign prognostically. If the fever required medication to come down […] it wouldn’t necessarily mean he’s getting better, it would just mean he’s gotten rid of the fever,” she says.
Blood oxygen
The president’s medical team also admitted that on Friday and Saturday, Trump had an oxygen saturation under 94%, which is considered to be a sign of severe Covid-19. They did not say how low his oxygen levels had gotten, leading Gounder to speculate that it could have dipped into the upper 80s. After obfuscating about the question on Saturday, Conley confirmed that Trump had received supplemental oxygen both times. According to Conley, Trump’s oxygen levels on Sunday were back up to 98%.
Scans
The doctors said that Trump had a lung X-ray, a lung CT, and an ultrasound, although they didn’t say of which organ. Despite multiple questions from the press, the results of the scans have not been provided, but Dooley did say the lung CT was consistent with Covid-19. Gounder says this implies the president could have ground-glass opacities in his lungs — an abnormal pattern that can be seen when the lungs are sick — but this has not been confirmed.
Other vital signs
Dooley reported on Sunday that Trump’s kidney, liver, and cardiovascular functioning were “normal or improving.” Later, another member of the president’s medical team, Brian Garibaldi, MD, stated that his liver and kidney functions were normal. If the president’s health was a deductive logic puzzle, one could imply that Trump had cardiovascular abnormalities over the weekend that were now improving.
Heart function is a major concern with Covid-19 and is one of the primary causes of death from the disease. The virus can cause heart failure, heart attacks, blood clots, inflammation of the heart, and even directly infect heart cells themselves. Trump has a common, moderate form of heart disease, which puts him at high risk for cardiovascular complications from the coronavirus.
Gounder said that in addition to the information provided, she would like details about the president’s white blood cell and platelet count, as well as his levels of inflammatory markers and blood clot tests. “I think his condition is more severe than they are communicating to us,” she says. “There’s no reason not to release more details like blood tests unless they’re wanting to withhold that kind of information. If the numbers are normal, this would put things to rest and reassure people, so they’re withholding that for a reason.”
“They really should keep him in the hospital until about 10 days into his illness just to make sure he doesn’t get worse. Usually that’s when patients decompensate, and they can decompensate very quickly.”
What medications has he received?
Monoclonal antibodies
Trump received one dose of a monoclonal antibody cocktail on Friday. This experimental drug, developed by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, has shown promise in an early clinical trial, but it is not approved by the FDA for Covid-19 or any other diseases. It consists of two types of antibodies — specialized proteins made by the immune system — that prevent the virus from infecting more cells in the body. However, these monoclonal antibodies were made in a lab rather than being taken from the plasma of a recovered patient.
Monoclonal antibodies work best at the beginning of an infection before the virus has had much chance to spread throughout the body.
Remdesivir
Friday evening, Trump’s doctors announced that he had been started on a five-day course of remdesivir. This antiviral drug also works to stop the virus from spreading, and it is one of the few therapies that has been approved by the FDA to treat Covid-19. It’s an intravenous drug that is typically given to moderate to severe patients, however, Gounder says that it can also be effective in the earlier stages of the disease.
Dexamethasone
Most alarming, Conley said that because of Trump’s drop in oxygen levels, he had been started on the steroid dexamethasone on Saturday. Dexamethasone, which is only given in severe cases because it suppresses the immune system, signifies that the president has progressed in his illness. It suggests that his doctors are no longer only trying to stop the virus from replicating, but also attempting to prevent or stop a hyper-inflammatory immune response.
Several physicians took to Twitter to express their concern about the president receiving the steroid. Most pressing is the fact that dexamethasone can cause confusion, delirium, and hyperactivity.
Gounder says she would like to know what other medications Trump is taking in addition to these three drugs, particularly whether he’s been given a blood thinner or a cardiovascular medication. “I suspect that the med list we got was not a complete med list and that it was only including medications that were directly related to his Covid treatment,” she says.
When will he be discharged?
Trump’s doctors said he could be released as early as today. This prognosis looks overly optimistic for several reasons. For one, the president is on day three of a five-day course of remdesivir, which needs to be given intravenously. He’s also on a hefty cocktail of medications, all of which can have serious side effects, including liver and kidney toxicity, for which he should be monitored closely.
Also, if the timeline the White House has provided is accurate (which is up for debate), Trump is on day five of the disease. Many people who have severe cases of Covid-19 have initial symptoms, a brief recovery, and then appear to relapse around days 7 to 10 of the infection.
“They really should keep him in the hospital until about 10 days into his illness just to make sure he doesn’t get worse,” Gounder says, because that’s when patients usually decompensate. But, she adds, “What Trump decides to do is anybody’s guess.”
Update 2:40 pm : Trump announced on Twitter that he would be leaving Walter Reed Medical Center this evening. | https://elemental.medium.com/everything-we-know-and-dont-about-trump-s-health-right-now-cddbe8cdc106 | ['Dana G Smith'] | 2020-10-06 13:31:44.198000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Trump Administration', 'Trump'] |
The Unreal Engine sucks and here is why. | Unreal Engine V is coming out with a tech demo PC neckbeards didn’t like. They all thought it was cringe because it ran at 1440p at 30 fps despite it’s insane polygon counts that got plebian 15 year old 3D modelers to think that this will end low poly modelling for all eternity and we just have sculpt and everything will be fine. No. It. Won’t.
I am slightly positive for this but I am also negative for this because Unreal Engine games in the past aren’t very real.
I have come to the point where I hate Unreal Engine. I am tired of it’s petulant existence.
I for one am a video game snob. I prefer Cryengine over Unreal or In House game engines made by giant asshole corporations. Or just literally anything else because at least literally everything else would be different despite being generic.
I don’t know what it is about Unreal but I can’t stand it. The fact that it’s just “good graphics” over gameplay. That every programmer realizes that his 69 million dollar project was coded easy through Unreal’s assets. In fact we’ll disect why Unreal sucks. But before that let’s talk about why Unreal rocks or has rocked.
UNREAL ROCKS
When I was a teen I got Unreal Gold and I thought it was truly breath taking. The gorgeous 3D graphics and surround sound. The textures looked great and lighting was amazing. There is nothing like it besides Half-Life. It’s pure atmosphere. Has the shooting and gameplay aged well? Not as one would think but this game Unreal was truly inspirational.
Then there was Deus Ex. Deus Ex is an amazing action role playing game. A stealth shooter if you will. You can walk around the world.
Later iterations of the Unreal Engine has brought us games like Batman Arkham Asylum using it’s quirky colors and physics and camera to it’s advantage. You really did feel like Batman and it shows.
Of course only Epic knew how to program Gears of War and it’s an amazing Co-op multiplayer experience .
UNREAL SUCKS
GRAPHICS
Those dead eyes
Unreal Engine has some very awkward 3D graphics. Oh the models maybe complex but everything is simple. Boring even.
Unreal Engine 2 ruined Unreal 2 the awakening for our peeps
Unreal Engine 3 had horrible texture pop ins
Unreal Engine 4 has over saturations.
I am a 90’s kid and I speak for awkward 90’s CGI but Unreal Engine is just made for Fortnite and nothing else. Makes me wonder why this engine isn’t made for kid friendly platformers. Oh but please don’t.
The NPC’s are left souless and lifeless in games like Bioshock for the most part. A feeling that you are in Disneyland seeing those dummy robots talk. The shear uncanny valley.
The insane FOV that is inappropriate for reality.
The particle emitters are all the same.
The global illumination is too bright.
Motion blur and post processing is SFM cartoon level.
We are dealing with a kiddy engine no more and no less.
SOUND
Why on earth is it soo loud?
THE SOULESS WORLD
Unreal engine is made just for first person shooters and third person shooters.
Making Silent Hill games in this engine for even consoles is terrible. The environments are all low poly. The models are the only thing next gen. Downpour was a terrible Unreal game. Unreal 3 cannot do open world sandbox games with ease.
Did I also mention how the NPC’s in these games are simply automatons?
I cannot possibly stand this cardboard facade of a video game world.
Making games isn’t easy and Unreal devs need to realize that they need to put a lot more effort into a video game than just making the world shiny and smooth. It takes months and years of pure money and effort or even love to make a game right. You can even do this in Unreal engine if you just hmmmmm try with all your might or brain.
So overall Unreal isn’t a bad engine. No engine exists! However, when making a game unique you should at least try to turn down the motion blur or implement pixel based motion blur or literally anything. I find it sad that System Shock 2 is more immersive than a 2007 game. Sorry if this was too negative. | https://medium.com/@Alexander2cents/the-unreal-engine-sucks-and-here-is-why-1adf0e01eeca | [] | 2020-12-26 20:41:38.902000+00:00 | ['Unreal Engine', 'Unreal', 'Unreal Engine 4', 'Game Development'] |
Do You Want To Learn How To Make Changes To Your Site On Your Own? | Do You Want To Learn How To Make Changes To Your Site On Your Own? Rena McDaniel Feb 15, 2019·2 min read
GOOD NEWS!
Because I’m going to show you how to change different aspects of your website to make it your very own. Whether you want a new header (logo) or you want to refresh your sidebar I’ve covered it and all you have to do is sign up!
It’s totally FREE!
I’ve created the 6 DAYS TO A BETTER WEBSITE email challenge to help you master WordPress without having to hire a designer!
You’re probably wondering why I would divulge these secrets when I charge for web design services. Well, I do design websites, but I also remember how excited I was when I first started playing around with WordPress design. How proud I was when I first made changes and my site didn’t blow up! With each change, I became more confident in my abilities.
Now, you probably don’t want to become a designer like me, but wouldn’t it be nice to make a few changes without having to hire someone else to do it for you?
Now you can!
READ MORE HERE… | https://medium.com/@renamcdaniel/do-you-want-to-learn-how-to-make-changes-to-your-site-on-your-own-66d4232622e0 | ['Rena Mcdaniel'] | 2019-02-15 18:06:00.719000+00:00 | ['Blogging Tips', 'Web Development', 'Blogging', 'Blogging For Business', 'WordPress'] |
How are you thinking? | Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
Who hasn’t heard of lateral thinking? Just about each one of us- at some point we have all had managers or peers who have highlighted about “out of box thinking” and “lateral thinking “ to solve a not so rule- based problem at work.
And then came along the barrage of other thinking approaches….Systems thinking, Parallel thinking, Non- linear thinking, Art of Science thinking and Science of Art thinking, Creative thinking, Critical thinking and on and on…..
By the way for the ones who abuse and over do these concepts, Lateral Thinking is only a tool to get unstuck. After a brainstorming exercise, one should ideally go back to Vertical thinking. Bono in own book says that- we need Lateral Thinking only about 5% of the times — rest of the times, Vertical thinking is what will help us live in the world!
And then these days, you have the overdose of Design thinking- the Human centered and Empathetic thinking. Well, not only in the tech industry — where everyone wants to be/ to hire ‘design thinking’, particularly among product managers and designers. Its also the much talked about training or workshop in most of the analytics companies.
Have you wondered how these all differ? Or ever wondered which of these thinkers do you bracket yourself in?
Or do they all more or less just mean “Structured thinking “ with some glamour sprinkled on it! | https://medium.com/@gayatri-sub/how-are-you-thinking-c42f3c066f6b | [] | 2020-12-17 09:03:11.826000+00:00 | ['Thinking Out Loud', 'Thinking', 'Structured', 'Lateral Thinking'] |
Being a Programmer Is More Than a Profession, It’s a Way of Life | Being a Programmer Is More Than a Profession, It’s a Way of Life
Solving problems and learning forever
Rubik cube image
If you’re a programmer, you’re a problem solver and not only issues related to programming but problems in general. Programming teaches you to think in a particular way and to always look for the best solution possible.
The main thing is not how many programming languages or frameworks you know, the important thing is your problem-solving skills and your ability to learn continuously.
It’s not a profession for everyone. If you want to be a programmer, you always have to be willing to spend time improving and learning new things. When you’re young, this is easy, but what will happen when we get older? This is something I always wonder. Are we willing to pay the price of still keeping up? I want to keep learning forever, I think it’s a good thing and that it will always keep me active, but time will tell.
In this article, I am going to write about the way of thinking that I have developed these years when it comes to solving software problems and finishing projects successfully.
Thinking like a programmer
So, What can you do when you encounter a problem?
Understand the problem
This step, although obvious, is not always done, especially when you start developing software.
I remember when I started programming and had problems to solve. Many times I made things without knowing very well what I had to do, so I ended up wasting a lot of time.
If you’re facing a complex problem, try to explain the problem to someone, and you will realize many times that you have not understood it correctly.
“If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” Richard Feynman.
You can try the following steps; it works for me:
If you were doing something else before, clear your mind before you start.
Close all browser tabs and unnecessary programs and leave only the essentials.
Write down your problem.
Talk to the client as much as you need. Receiving continuous feedback is usually one of the most important things to solve a problem correctly.
Doodle a diagram or build a scheme.
Look for the critical points of the problem.
Split, if necessary, the problem into little parts to make them easier to solve.
Search if exists a solution for it and search how others have solved similar problems, but understand it, not only copy && paste the answer.
Another handy thing that can help you is to use a rubber duck. You only need a rubber duck and debug the code by forcing yourself to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck. And I swear it works! Because when you force yourself to explain something, you realize whether you understand it or not.
Get on with it
Once we have understood the problem, we can move on to designing the solution.
For this you need:
Organize your thoughts and develop strategies to tackle the problem.
Write the steps to solve the problem.
Think about what do you need to solve the problem.
Choose the technology (Framework, language, Database) to solve the problem but don’t get too committed to it.
Is there a design pattern that solves the problem?
Is there a lib that solves the problem?
There are any special functional or safety requirements?
Be persistent and not give up. Many times you will find problems that seem impossible to solve, or you will spend several days looking for a solution, but in the end, you will always find a solution one way or another.
Test your solution
This may seem abrupt at first, but if it’s something you get used to, you’ll see it as something natural, and it will give you other views on the problem you’re trying to solve.
Resolving the problem
Once you have decided which language or framework to use and you are clear about what you want to solve, you can start implementing the solution.
Do you know Test-driven development or TDD? This is an excellent time to start with it.
Create a test case for the problem to solve, but don’t write code yet.
TDD:
Write some code to solve a part of the problem.
Run the test until the code past the test.
Refactor the code.
Run the test.
Repeat
The purpose of this method is to make the code clearer, simple, bug-free, and facilitate the refactor of the code at any moment.
Final steps
Extract conclusions.
Refactor, always refactor the solution.
Conclusion
Learn, learn always. Read about software and other technological things: Medium, for example, is a good place for it. Read books about the software or design principles but also books that have nothing to do with development.
Solving problems is the main skill of a programmer, and learn from each problem is essential if you want to progress quickly.
Many times the problems we encounter in the software world are very similar to real-life problems, and without you realizing it, you end up applying the same techniques to the rest of the real-life problems. Being practical and not getting complicated in the end is the best.
And be patient, sometimes in real life, I take engineering to the extreme and apply it to the people I am with, and this is not good ;)
Thank you very much for reading me, it makes me very excited because my passion for writing is combined with my passion for software engineering, and that makes me very happy. Also, if the things I’ve learned during my years developing software are useful for you, I can’t ask for more. | https://medium.com/swlh/being-a-programmer-is-more-than-a-profession-its-a-way-of-life-f9b6473167e5 | ['Kesk - -'] | 2020-07-28 12:30:51.244000+00:00 | ['Programmers Life', 'Programmer', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Problem Solving'] |
Retail and Business quotes from Sam Walton | Timeless Sam Walton Quotes
photo by author, drawing by Wal-Mart
Some business advice is timeless. Sam Walton’s thoughts on business and the retail business are just that.
These quotes are excerpted from a 1997 Wal-Mart employee pocket calendar that I recently found in a stored box of stuff.
Enjoy
“If we truly dedicate ourselves to instilling that thrill of merchandising — the thrill of buying and selling something at a profit — into every associate-partner, nothing can ever stop us.” Sam M. Walton
“Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.” Sam M. Walton
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.” Sam M. Walton
“ Swim Upstream. Go the other way. Ignore conventional wisdom.” Sam M. Walton
“Day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners.” Sam M. Walton
“Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.” Marcus Aurelius
“To lower prices, we’ve got to keep finding ways to lower our costs.” Sam M. Walton
You have to be merchandise driven. Otherwise, you become like everybody else.” Sam M. Walton
“You affect markups and markdowns by the way that you merchandise. That’s why we prize our merchants at Wal-Mart.” David Glass
“We are a merchandise driven company.” Sam M. Walton
“…US workers can produce merchandise in these United States as good in value, or better, than anything we can buy offshore.” Sam M. Walton
“Doing things differently causes different results.” Tom Coughlin
“What we need in our stores is ingenuity, morality, and honesty.” Sam M. Walton
“Making people want to come back…that’s where the profits come from…people coming back over and over again.” Sam M. Walton
“Failure comes from within.” Bill Fields
“We get the best results from ordinary people doing an extraordinary job.” Sam M. Walton
“Who’s your best friend?…those that bring out the best in you. Lou Holtz quoting Henry Ford
“Develop reliability to do what you say you will do…and do it when you say you do. Don Soderquist
“To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.” Sam M. Walton
“We just don’t run well and feel good unless we are moving forward and upward.” Sam M. Walton
“No one is quite as good or quite as bad as they’re supposed to be.” Will Rogers
Never get so set in your ways you can’t change. Sam M. Walton
Control your expenses better than your competition. That is where you can always find a competitive edge. Sam M. Walton
When customers come to Wal-Mart they come to buy merchandise… not operations. David Glass
“Teach it, preach it, and prove it”, Sam M. Walton
“Merchandise needs to be on the floor, where the customers are.” Don Soderquist.
“Never give in! Never, never, never. Never- in anything great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Winston Churchill
“A good plan violently executed today is better than a great plan… tomorrow.” George S. Patton
“Exceed your customers’ expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more.” Sam M. Walton
“Let’s just work together to buy and sell merchandise better than anyone else.” David Glass
“The secret to success in life is to be ready for his time when it comes.” Benjamin Disraeli
“We need to give direction…not directions.” Larry Williams
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” George S. Patton
“The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.” Rollo May
“Good customer service is the ultimate form of good merchandising.” David Glass
“The biggest single difference between us and our competitors is that our people focus on being merchants.” David Glass
“Communicate everything you can to your partners. The more they know the more they will understand, the more they’ll care.” Sam M. Walton
“Wal-Mart’s business is 75% of people! Those wonderful associates out there in the stores and distribution centers. They’re all mission bound to take care of our customers.” Sam M. Walton
“Having the lowest prices every day is only meaningful if we have the merchandise our customers want!”
“Make it happen! Don’t wait for instructions! We need people who can see what can be done and do it.” David Glass
It also included a favorite story of the time that was repeated often in meetings:
“Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you better be running.”
Traditional retail, thrift retail, they have a lot in common. Good merchandising, teaching and empowering employees, manage expenses are a formula for success no matter the flavor.
Thanks for reading,
Tim Gebauer | https://medium.com/@timg-12150/timeless-sam-walton-quotes-2d8c7b450268 | ['Tim Gebauer'] | 2021-01-04 22:07:41.691000+00:00 | ['Retail', 'Management', 'Leadership', 'Thrift', 'Sam Walton'] |
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Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://brasil.uxdesign.cc/meu-livro-favorito-de-ux-37bccff3638f | ['Fabricio Teixeira'] | 2016-11-15 06:39:34.724000+00:00 | ['Arquitetura De Informação', 'User Experience', 'AI', 'Livros'] |
The Impact of Working Without Distractions | How Did I Manage to Do That for Six Months?
In November 2020 I participated in a Flow Working Training from Dr. Antoine Larchez, which I can highly recommend. This is where I was introduced to the concept of Flow and how Flow Working could look like.
If you are not super experienced doing this, the best way is to use a structured format to prevent your habits from drawing you somewhere else. After experiencing the flow state myself by using this format, I decided with my colleague Coco to keep doing this at least until April 2021 and see how it goes. We knew the idea is great but were skeptical whether we would be able to go through with this.
Here are 3 tips that helped to keep this idea alive.
# 1 Block Your Flow Working Sessions Way Ahead of Time and Prioritize
This is the most important one.
Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash
We decided to block 3 hours of Flow Time twice a week. In the following months, I managed to attend almost all Flow Meetings. This was not always easy, when “more important projects” want to be squeezed into your calendar on short notice. What helped me was exactly that. I decided in the beginning to prioritize the Flow Meeting very high and by blocking the time weeks or months ahead, colleagues knew when I was available and when I was not.
# 2 Invite Others to Join the Flow Working Session
This is the fun one.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
The more the merrier 😊. I held most Flow Working Sessions with other colleagues. Usually 1–4 other people. It is easier to try out something new and get used to it when you do it with other people. Besides that, it motivated me a lot to see what my colleagues achieved in only 3 hours of flow and it strengthened our spirit of working focused and just getting stuff done.
# 3 Use a Structured Format
This is the obvious one.
Flow Working Template by Jessika Bielig
I created a template in miro, so people can easily follow the steps for the Flow Working Sessions. Even though I created the template and know it by heart, I use it every time. As a visual aid, it helps to bring the group together and it makes the steps easy to understand and everyone knows what is happening next. | https://medium.com/idealo-tech-blog/the-impact-of-working-without-distractions-7ad3697badc5 | ['Jessika Bielig'] | 2021-08-09 11:45:23.385000+00:00 | ['Delivery', 'Flow', 'Focus', 'Mindfulness', 'Habits'] |
Meet Upton Sinclair, Before “Mank” | The new David Fincher movie, Mank, just now streaming on Netflix, has brought new attention to muckraking author Upton Sinclair — and only partly because he is (briefly) portayed by Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.” The film shows how Sinclair’s left-wing run for governor of California in 1934 inspired MGM’s Irving Thalberg and newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst to take drastic actions to stop him. This in turn — this is the fictional part — inspired Herman Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, with the title character based on Hearst.
Mank has sent many to asking, So who was this Upton Sinclair character? Or: Paging Bernie Sanders. There’s a good deal about all that in my award-winning book on the 1934 race, The Campaign of the Century. It was recently picked by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five greatest ever on an American election and you can read more or order here. But here’s a brief primer.
___
One of the original muckrakers, Sinclair is remembered mainly for just a single book, The Jungle, the classic expose of Chicago meat-packing, of which the author said: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He gained some renewed attention not long ago thanks to the major movie There Will Be Blood, based on his book Oil! Frequently he is confused, as he was during his lifetime, with another writer, Sinclair Lewis, often to comical effect.
The Jungle was published in 1906 when Uppie, as he was known to friends, was still in his twenties, and he wrote dozens of popular and influential books thereafter, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1943. Sinclair may not have been a literary stylist, but in his day he was a prominent figure indeed. For most of his career, he was one of this country’s foremost socialists and, according to H. L. Mencken, by far the most widely translated American author abroad. “When people ask me what has happened in my lifetime,” George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair in 1941, “I do not refer them to the newspaper files or to the authorities, but to your novels.”
Few public figures jumped from so many frying pans into so many fires, and “none has ever managed to keep so sunny and buoyant while the flames were leaping around him,” Robert Cantwell commented. No American writer converted more young people to socialism. “Upton Sinclair first got to me when I was fourteen or so,” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., confessed, in explaining how he became a lifelong socialist. Saul Bellow told a Sinclair biographer that the muckraker’s books made a strong impression on him as a youth, even though he understood right from the start that the author was “something of a crank — one of the grand American cranks who enriched our lives.”
Like Norman Mailer circa 1968, Upton Sinclair was often in the news for reasons that had little to do with writing: getting arrested (on several occasions), running for office (he lost two previous races for governor on the Socialist line), or financing films (just one, but it was for Sergei Eisenstein, and what a fiasco). His engine was forever racing. Ezra Pound called him a “polymaniac.” Accused of having a Jesus complex, Sinclair cheerfully pointed out that the world needed a Jesus more than it needed anything else.
Practically alone among the writers of his generation, Upton Sinclair “put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them,” Edmund Wilson observed. In this regard, Sinclair’s career reached its climax with his EPIC crusade in 1934, and Hollywood, Democrats in California, and the American political campaign would never be the same.
Naturally he launched that campaign with yet another book: I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books. More on, or order, The Campaign of the Century. | https://medium.com/@gregmitch/meet-upton-sinclair-before-mank-1ce57f8bad22 | ['Greg Mitchell'] | 2020-12-06 21:38:14.646000+00:00 | ['David Fincher', 'Upton Sinclair', 'Socialism'] |
Make Deployment Easy with Continuous Delivery and GitHub Actions | Learn how CD can save you hundreds of hours
Photo by jesse ramirez on Unsplash
Deployment is always a complicated and tedious task. As your applications grow, you will probably need to ship to production many times a week, and doing so rapidly is usually crucial. Luckily for you, thanks to Continuous Delivery and GitHub Actions, deploying to production becomes a trivial task!
What is CD?
Continuous Delivery or CD is the agile practice of continuously deploying to production bit size pieces of code, instead of in big chunks. This way, not only your application can grow more steadily, but it also becomes way easier to identify bugs in small commits than in massive pieces of code. CD is at its best when combined with Continuous Integration or CI.
CI parts from the same principle of managing your application changes in small, more manageable parts, but contrary to CD, CI is responsible for verifying that new changes to the code base work as intended. This way, CD will only step in to deploy new changes if they work as intended!
The beauty of CI and CD is that they can be fully automatized thanks to GitHub Actions! Every time a commit is made to the main branch, we can trigger a workflow that runs tests on our code and if they pass, our code gets deployed to production. All you will have to worry about is pushing your code to your repository and fixing any bugs that may occur.
To learn more about GitHub Actions and how to create workflows, check out my previous article on CI.
In this article, I will be mainly focused on the contents of a proper CD workflow.
Enabling CD
At the end of the day, deployment consists of logging into a server and running certain commands.
Generating SSH keys
For logging into our production servers we are going to need a pair of ssh keys: a secret key or SK and a public one or PK. To generate them, run on your local computer
$ ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa -b 4096
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/paburo/.ssh/id_rsa): name
where name stands for the name of the key pair. For the purpose of the tutorial let's set name to cd. When the command has finished, we should now have two new files on the ~/.ssh directory.
$ ls ~/.ssh
cd cd.pub
We now need to copy the contents of our secret key and save it on GitHub as a repository secret.
$ cat ~/.ssh/cd
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIJJwIBAAKCAgEAlmBMQtfsLjOADd3mAuq5qqifiynSJzGN3dy3qJed8MCDZv7S
[...]
ty9wnmRiqhzl2wzuA7TVyq6X40IOOdPp910CFQrRMPaJPV1/y2KjMwMLF0/cdVNG
RHhuExEbTzMa+zYjDtt0nBERRiR0tiy/3fBfFOylWtyzkH4Hvz9gBYGOwQ==
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Head over to your GitHub repository, click on Settings > Secrets > New repository secret and create a GitHub secret with the contents of your private key under the name of CD_SK.
Once you have saved the secret, it is good practice to delete your private key from your computer, but be careful as you will not be able to see your key from the GitHub secret.
$ rm ~/.ssh/cd
Now we need to add the contens of the public key, cd.pub to our server authorized_keys file. First, let’s grab the contents of the public key
$ cat ~/.ssh/cd.pub
ssh-rsa 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 paburo@paburo-ThinkPad-XXXX
and now ssh into your server, which can be done with
$ ssh user@ip
where user is your user at your server, ip . From your server, open the authorized_keys file with a text editor of your liking and paste the contents of your public key at the bottom.
$ nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
CD Workflow
Now that we have generated and configure our SSH key pair for accessing our server, it is time to create a workflow that will log into the server and run commands for us.
Lets break this workflow down. This workflow can be triggered manually or every time a push or pull request is made to the master branch. Once it has been triggered it will carry out the CD job .This job will use a marketplace action made by appleboy to ssh into our server. It takes four arguments: host , the domain or ip of your server; username , the username of your server; key , the secret key we previously created; port , which for SSH connections defaults to 22 and script , which are the commands that we wish to run on our server once the workflow logs in via SSH.
The script argument may vary wildly depending on your application. In this example, you can see how I chose to deploy a Django App: I cd into the project directory, pull from the git repository, install all the requirements and restart the service in charge of my App.
Final Thoughts
And that is it! Now you can relax and breath out as your deployment process is carried out automatically every time you push your code to your repository! Continuous Delivery is a great tool on its own, but be sure to use it together Continuous Integration to unlock its full potential.
As always, feel free to contact me if you need to. All the code found in this tutorial is freely available on GitHub.
Happy Continous Deployment!
Thank you | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/make-deployment-easy-with-continuous-delivery-and-github-action-f5dde92468a1 | ['Pablo T. Campos'] | 2021-03-06 09:23:03.783000+00:00 | ['Github Actions', 'Programming', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Deployment', 'Continuous Integration'] |
Nature and Me | My sky is full of stars
But I have clouds in my heart.
My eyes are filled with mist
And I have rain in my hands.
Sunshine marks my path
While the snow falls behind.
Creation exists within me
To surround my soul forever. | https://medium.com/ninja-writers/nature-and-me-611ee550942b | ['Debbie Walker'] | 2020-10-11 16:38:44.947000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Life', 'Nature', 'Creation', 'Poem'] |
I stopped smoking cold turkey | I stopped smoking cold turkey
Photo by Lê Tit on Unsplash
Parenthood is a special magic. It’s a privilege with an expiry date and during that time you are bigger and better and stronger and smarter and the most formidable human being you could ever be. You can do this because you love someone more than you love yourself and — for a while — they really need you.
I stopped smoking on a Spring evening in London. I only smoked outside in the back garden, not in the house. My little son called for me, so I stubbed out the cigarette and brought the ashtray with me, muttering that I must try and quit one day, again.
I’d never managed to quit when I was single. When I was married if I tried to stop and was a bit ratty Husband (at that time) would say, “Oh shut up and have a fag.” Invariably I did.
Even when I was pregnant I still had a few cigarettes a week. We lived in the French countryside and I had wine too. I’m not proud, nor doing penance. It’s just what happened.
So when I breezily mentioned that thought about quitting, my five-year-old asked:
“Why do you want to quit?”
“See that brown stuff there?” I pointed to the sticky tar around the sides. “That goes into my lungs and there’s a chance I could die early. ”
Who knows what ‘early’ means to a five-year-old. It might mean next week. But when I was getting him ready for bed he held my face in his little hands, his big eyes full of tears.
Mummy I don’t want you to die early. You must stop smoking now.
Two immediate thoughts. One, if I don’t stop now, I’m telling him I don’t love him enough to try and live longer. Two, one day I will ask him not to take drugs. I can’t control that outcome, but if I don’t stop smoking, I won’t even have a leg to stand on to ask.
“Okay,” I said.
He ran to the kitchen, took my pouch of Old Holborn and rolling papers and threw them into the tall kitchen bin. In my mind I saw myself at midnight delving into vegetable peelings and worse to get to it. After years of recycling mountains of dog ends in ashtrays, how bad was digging into a garbage bin?
“We need to do better,” I said. Let’s go to the bathroom.”
I took the pouch out of the bin and together we held all the tobacco under a running bathroom tap, squishing it in our fingers until it was all wet. I can’t remember if I flushed it all down the toilet or if it went back in the bin. But the deed was done.
I was 37 and over it. I’ve never had a cigarette since nor wanted one. Today I’m 58. I love the smell of other people’s smoke and enjoy being around it once in a while. But I made a promise to my son, which was better than any promise I could have made to myself at that time.
Parenthood. It’s a superpower. | https://medium.com/@joannafunk/i-stopped-smoking-cold-turkey-a3bebbbc22dc | ['Joanna Funk'] | 2021-09-12 00:27:32.781000+00:00 | ['Self Care', 'Smoking Cessation', 'Parenthood', 'Willpower', 'Love'] |
The Real Reason Linux Users Love The Command Line | I’d get visibly upset when stumbling across all these tutorials online that use command line instructions when far easier (in my eyes) graphical approaches exist.
Why on earth were these guys showing us how to make an application executable using the command line? Why not just find it in your file manager, right click it, select “properties,” go to the permissions tab, and check the appropriate box to make it executable?
That seemed more intuitive… to me. Or maybe it was just what felt “correct” after two decades of Windows.
Making a bootable USB stick with the command line? Launching a terminal window to install a driver or encode a video with ffmpeg? ARE YOU INSANE?
That was nearly 3 years ago, and my stance has gradually shifted under the weight of experience. But my early computing days bear a striking resemblance to Oliver '0lzi' Kelly’s:
“I spent 20 years using Windows, and the only time that stands out from when I used the command line was to ping an IP address or google.com to test and diagnose network issues. In Linux I use it all the time, and I don’t even second guess it.”
That’s a quote from his recent Community Voice article right here at Linux For Everyone magazine. At the end of it, he poses a question that’s deceptively difficult to answer: Why do Linux users seem to love the command line so much?
So I pondered Oliver’s question for a while.
The Easy Answer
The easy answer is that it feels empowering to use the terminal. There’s this intoxicating geek-driven power-user fantasy satisfaction to making our computer respond instantly to our commands!
The keyboard, mightier than the mouse. Weaponized to do our bidding. Transforming words into binary, and binary into action.
It makes you feel kinda like this:
Hackerman!?
The other easy answer is that, honestly, it can be much faster.
Is sudo apt install vlc audacity obs-studio telegram-desktop steam a faster way to install those 5 apps than searching for them in a distro’s software center? Absolutely!
But it goes deeper than that. Much deeper.
I’ve come to realize the true appeal of the command line is the consistency.
The uniformity.
The reliability.
There is a certain level of comfort in that.
What 3 years of distro hopping has taught me is this: no matter which Debian or Ubuntu-based distribution I decide to use on any given day, installing software will always be the same combination of words, through the same terminal window that’s guaranteed to be there.
I don’t need to be familiar with the file browser, or know how to navigate that particular desktop environment. I just need two things: a simple terminal window, and my words.
You can apply roughly the same argument to any Arch-based system, btw.
Despite my newfound warm fuzzies for the command line, I’ll always insist on there being a GUI alternative, especially for new desktop Linux users.
But I have to wonder if their journey will eventually unfold the same way mine did. I was led to the door, and after a while I discovered the entire buffet on my own.
I won’t use the command line for everything. Especially not for any video rendering tasks! I’ll simply use it when it makes sense to use it.
Like all things Linux, I love having the freedom to make that choice. | https://medium.com/linuxforeveryone/the-real-reason-linux-users-love-the-command-line-e8043f583028 | ['Jason Evangelho'] | 2020-12-19 23:26:35.344000+00:00 | ['Linux', 'Cli', 'Geek', 'Open Source', 'Command Line'] |
Bad habits and biases, a newbie’s observations on design thinking in Japan (Pt 1): Building trust | Bad habits and biases, a newbie’s observations on design thinking in Japan (Pt 1): Building trust Bekky Bush Follow Feb 10 · 6 min read
What working in a completely different culture made me realise about my own behaviour.
Introduction
I moved to Japan six months ago and it’s been a continuous education that has grown and changed me and my world views. During the first few months I was invited to observe training sessions that focused on teaching design thinking to beginners — these were adults in a large company with little or no design experience. It was a brilliant experience. I implicitly understood the content because I have taught this topic to multiple students, colleagues and clients, but because I couldn’t understand the spoken words, I had to focus on the physical behaviours and interactions of the students and teachers. This led to new insights, some familiar to me, some from a fresh point of view, and some completely new to me. All of them will help me become a better teacher.
I decided to share these observations and insights with others, but please no hate mail; this is my opinion and only based on observations of a small sample — not to be taken as a sweeping generalisation of a country and its people. I also expect to change and develop these ideas and my viewpoint the longer I spend here and the more I learn, but there is a usefulness to observation made with the naivety of a newcomer that I wanted to capture and share.
Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash
Thank you for reading, I am not sure who will find this useful or even interesting but the audience I had in mind when writing was the person who wants to start working in design in Japan or to work with Japanese clients for the first time. I will state again that these workshops were with people who had no design experience, were complete beginners and not clients.
I began writing this and realised it’s a bit long to read in one go (TL/DR), So I am serving it up in more manageable bites.
Part 1: Trust and the importance of clear structure and instruction
In Western society, we often don’t spend enough time setting expectations and clearly explaining what will happen in workshops. The outcome is that those of us who are on the more introverted or anxious end of the spectrum can feel uncomfortable and automatically yield the floor to more dominant personalities. Expectation-setting is carefully considered in Japan and this ends up being far more inclusive to the shyest members of a group.
For example, by asking for volunteers to speak or saying “who’s next?” when sharing with each other, can create unnecessary discomfort and stress (this is when the session is in Japanese, if the session is in English people may be additionally stressed by shame around imperfect English). Instead, I found giving specific instruction works better: “We will stand in a circle, I will go first and then pass the mic to the person on my left who will speak next, then they will pass the mic to the person on their left to speak next”. It’s also important to demonstrate what will happen, as people take in the instruction in different ways. Stricter rules and well-set expectations help all participants to predict when they will need to speak and prepare themselves – this starts to reduce the disparity between introverts and extroverts.
I noticed that when giving instructions around an activity or exercise, clearly telling people when they should begin the exercise and when to stop working was important, saying to participants that they had five minutes to do a task was not explicit enough. When I discussed this point with a colleague he laughed and said he observes this in most workshops globally — I’ll be paying extra attention to this going forward! Often, my work requires me to dwell in ambiguity for a considerable amount of time and this has bled into places where it’s less helpful. Theneed for clarity here is helping me focus on being less vague again.
A study into trust in the UK versus Japan has shown that Japanese people appear generally less trusting than Westerners towards strangers (and I am fairly strange in most situations – not just in Japan). This means building trust with participants is more difficult and gives facilitators a significant challenge in creating an environment where trust is key to learning.
This discovery was found to be strengthened if the Japanese doubted that they shared any interpersonal links with the strangers in question. So, a great way to begin sessions is to find common ground and build those all-important interpersonal links though activities. The most important way to ensure you don’t destroy what little trust you have managed to build is not to spring surprises on your participants early on. Surprising people includes things like unexpectedly asking them to do something publicly. I found doing this meant that participant (and everyone else who witnessed it) would stop trusting me.
Learning in any country means being somewhat uncomfortable – you need to push people out of their comfort zone, but not so hard you break their trust. I am becoming more aware that what reduces trust here can be different from that in Western cultures. For example, asking someone to tap another person on the shoulder during a game forces a physical interaction that many Japanese people find inappropriate. This has given me pause to consider that as our teams across the globe become more culturally diverse, perhaps we should all be much more aware of individuals’ comfort levels with physical intimacy and consent? I don’t know the answer, but we need to find a way to work to maintain informed consent and still effectively interact with each other.
Precise instruction and structure also applies to all details of a workshop or learning session, including details like what stationery is used for what activity. The complexity of meanings behind the every detail in Japanese culture is multifaceted and it also ensures that if you use random colours, materials, shapes or other representations, people will question the meaning behind your choice (you should have a reason or you look unprepared — and this certainly won’t increase trust!).
If you see somebody using the ‘wrong’ piece of stationery do not say anything directly to them but rather remind the whole group “Please remember to use the felt tip pens to write on sticky notes – this makes documentation easier.” This works because it’s an instruction plus reasoning that is generalised and does not draw attention to the person making the ‘mistake’. It’s best to focus on reminding, reinforcing and rewarding great behaviour and not drawing attention to behaviour you want to discourage. This is true of all workshops globally, however, in Western workshops, I use this much more to discourage participants from derailing the tasks at hand with individual agendas or attention-seeking behaviour.
Trust can also be gained by breaking activities into much smaller steps than I might previously have used for an Australian or European audience. Smaller steps increase the likelihood that participants will be willing to take them and this naturally increases their confidence in my ability to lead a workshop. Simplifying things can reduce the nuance, but what you lose is more than compensated by the increased confidence and participation. Each step should be clearly explained and demonstrated with examples to further boost participaction. Reflecting on this adjustment, I realised I should use this approach to activities in all workshops globally. I believe that there is a significant benefit to making learning and workshops more accessible to a wider community – this approach is more inclusive to participants for a variety of reasons (e.g. neurodivergence, participation in a second language etc.) and I will be incorporating it from now on.
All this talk about trust has left me wondering, in our post-truth world where the Secretary General of the UN talks about a global “Trust Deficit Disorder”: how aware are you of the signals you’re giving to others that you’re trustworthy — and are you living up to them?
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
I hope you have enjoyed reading my newbie observations about Design Thinking teaching and workshops in Japan. This series will be published weekly.
Thank you to the teachers and participants who generously allowed me to join their learning. I apologise if I have misrepresented you in any way in this article, and for inflicting my terrible Japanese on you. Also to my patient colleagues from many places who have read, critiqued and corrected my writing over a far too long period; thank you. All the mistakes are certainly mine.
ありがとうございました | https://medium.com/design-voices/bad-habits-and-biases-pt-1-ec9149f54a54 | ['Bekky Bush'] | 2020-02-17 11:48:24.025000+00:00 | ['Design Thinking', 'Japan', 'Teaching And Learning'] |
Women’s Education Really Matters | What is Education?
Why it is important for women’s?
Education
Education is a process which allow individual to bring out every thing which he or she had in through systematic way. It is a process of learning knowledge, values, habits, beliefs and ethics.
It can be formal or in formal both types have equal importance. Formal education can be delivered through proper channel which is called Educational institutions where as in formal education process started from home inner and outer environment, media (print or digital).
In IsIam (religion of peace) education is compulsory for all men women. Allah sent Hazrat Gibrail to Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa (SAW) he said to Hazrat Muhammad (SAW) ‘Iqra’ which means to read ( Iqra-read ). Education is the third eye of a person. Every human being have two eyes to see but through education his /her third eye open by which he thinks, find the reality of his/her creation and able to find difference between good deeds and bad deeds so on. In that case education is the basic need for all of us.
Importance for women
Generation future is in women hands. So Education is most important for women to know about her rights and duties, ethics and culture, norms and values an individual,as a citizen, as daughter, as sister, as a wife and as a mother.
Difference between educated women and un educated women
Educated women can easily deal with difficulties of life she is able to tackle all kinds of behavior in a humble way. She use her educated mind to find out the best solution. Her life will be more smoothly going as compare to uneducated women, as an individual she work for her self and for her family to give them better living she knows how to manage time for work and home in great manner in that way she grow along her family and beneficial for her country in generating economy for her country. As a daughter and sister she is well aware regarding her rights and duties. She perform her duties in best way she know the value of relation very well she serve them very well. After that she is able to serve her in-laws in a humble and great way for the sake of Allah. As a wife and mother she knows the value of this relationship she gives her best to deal with it and make it easy going as a good wife and mother she maintain best relationship with her husband for her children and for their development and growth. She help her husband and children in their chores. She help her children in their studies and career selection. Her role as a good mother make her children successful in their life, career and beneficial for their country and family too by converting religion, ethics, norms, values and culture in her children.
Weather uneducated women are not able to deal with the difficulties of her life in a great manner she ruins her life and her relatives even the relations which totally depend on her which is her children un intentionally.
So for the better environment and development of homes, streets, districts, provinces and country. Women should be educated. If father, brother or husband are educated their responsibility to educate them weather she is a daughter,sister or wife. Because according to the teaching of islam it's clearly mention to gain education and spread it.
gain education and spread it | https://medium.com/@dwell_scorpion/womens-education-really-matters-b0217efbef9 | ['Amna Saeed'] | 2020-12-26 14:57:14.809000+00:00 | ['Knowledge', 'Relationships', 'Education', 'Child Development', 'Religion'] |
The best smart switches and dimmers: Lighting is the foundation of the smart home | People who invest in the future are realists | https://medium.com/@shelly00400987/the-best-smart-switches-and-dimmers-lighting-is-the-foundation-of-the-smart-home-6ef85817f4b7 | [] | 2020-12-24 01:00:05.126000+00:00 | ['Security Cameras', 'Services', 'Home Tech', 'Cord'] |
Is the expansion in US labor supply pulling down wages? | The robust US recovery has expanded prime-age employment and broadened the labor supply. But wage growth in recent months has stopped accelerating across different measures. I show that the plateauing in prime-age wage growth is not due to direct compositional effects, but due to softer rises among the continuously-employed. In fact, while compositional effects on prime-age wages are generally negative, they have been somewhat less so in the last few years. But this does not rule out other ways in which shifts in employment or the labor supply may be weighing down on wages.
More than a decade after the official end of the Great Recession, the US labor market is still expanding.
Employment among Americans 25–54 years old — “prime-age” workers — has risen by about 665,000 over the last year.[1] That’s a healthy clip, far higher than the 257,000 necessary to keep prime-age employment on pace with population growth.
What’s more, as employment rises, nonemployment is falling fastest among the ranks of Americans long thought to be the least-attached to the labor force. That 665,000 rise in prime-age employment was associated 1:1 with a 665,000 fall in nonemployment, of which 205,000 came from the disabled[2], representing almost a third of the nonemployment fall.[3]
The continued good news on the labor market seems at first glance to stand in stark contrast with recent wage developments. Average hourly earnings for all private nonfarm workers (regardless of age) over the last three months were 3.1% higher than a year earlier. That’s a passable outcome but actually slower than in the recent past; just last August wage growth was a bit higher at 3.4%. This weakening acceleration in wage growth in the face of above-trend labor supply growth, coupled with the lack of inflation pressure, is strong evidence that the US is not at full employment yet.
One possibility is that these two phenomena are in fact directly related: that at this late stage in the recovery, new workers are coming into the types of jobs that pay below-average wages, and in doing so they pull down the overall average, depressing wage growth. Economists call these compositional effects.
Notice how compositional effects might give a skewed read of labor market health. An economy that brings in low-wage or marginally-attached workers is likely one that is doing well and has strong momentum. But these very workers might lower the measured average wage and make the labor market look a bit worse on its face.
Compositional effects are a real issue to be aware of in labor market data. But a problem with blaming them for the most recent wage sogginess is that alternative measures of wage growth that adjust for compositional effects — such as the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker and the Employment Cost Index— have also slowed down.
We can see this too for prime-age workers specifically. The Current Population Survey (CPS) allows us to hone in on wages by age group. I decompose the 12-month growth in average wages for prime-age workers into two effects: wage growth among those who were continuously-employed over the year on the one hand, and the drag or boost that came from inflows into and outflows from employment (that is, compositional effects) on the other. [4]
The summary results below show that the recent deacceleration in wage growth appears to be driven not by new workers pulling down the average, but by existing workers seeing slower raises. In fact, while ongoing compositional wage effects remain negative, they have been gradually shrinking over the last seven years.
Moreover, I can go a step further and break down these ongoing compositional effects by nonemployment reason: that is, the net effect on wages from job finders from a nonemployment margin and job leavers into that same margin. The chart below takes the employment inflow/outflow effect shown above and decomposes it by these nonemployment margins.
What this shows is first that disability flows typically exert positive pressure on prime-age wage growth. That’s because while both workers who leave employment for disability and workers who find jobs out of disability tend to make below-average wages, the job finders tend to make higher wages than the job leavers did, creating a positive swap for wage growth.
More broadly, the softer ongoing compositional effects on wage growth appear to be due largely to evaporating pressure from the long-term unemployed. This makes sense: I’ve defined each of these nonemployment effects to be net of both flows into and out of employment. But unique among these categories, the net flow effect from the long-term unemployed is almost entirely from job finders, since virtually all job leavers who go into unemployment become short-term unemployed by definition.[5] So as the number of long-term unemployed Americans keeps falling, there are fewer and fewer job finders from their ranks — again, by definition — and therefore they exert smaller and smaller downward wage pressure.
But all of this doesn’t mean there still aren’t direct or indirect compositional effects on wages. As more and more marginally-attached workers find jobs, they will gradually shift the population of continuously-employed workers over time, which may affect that component of wage growth. However, the Employment Cost Index shown earlier ought to control for many of these effects as well, and it too is showing signs of slow down, though it is calculated from a survey with a smaller sample size than the CPS or the payroll survey.
There may also be a labor supply effect on wages where, as nonparticipants rejoin the labor force, there is less pressure on firms to raise wages. Wages could therefore only rise in fits and starts as labor supply expansions have a dampening effect on wage growth.
But in the meantime, to the extent job finders and leavers are affecting average wages, it appears to be a somewhat lower drag than normal. The recent wage deceleration therefore is likely driven by something else. | https://medium.com/@ernietedeschi/is-the-expansion-in-us-labor-supply-pulling-down-wages-4e94bb6523a1 | ['Ernie Tedeschi'] | 2020-03-03 20:44:36.001000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Labor Market', 'Wages', 'Employment', 'Monetary Policy'] |
Getting Things Done(The Easy Way) | This wouldn’t take up much of your time to read as you might want to know the essence of the post easy way :).
Getting things done might be difficult might be hard for some of us(including me). I always forget things I should have done, however big or small they might seem. Some people are blessed with good memory and some people just forget things to be done and there’s no way around it (sigh).
Have you ever felt that if you would have done a task, your life would be much easier at this point ?
I can feel your frustration and I can surely empathize with you :).
The ritual I do in order not forget my daily tasks is to keep a notepad. Yes, a notepad. Write everything you want to get done in a particular day according to the priority.
The most important part of this ritual is to keep on doing it for everyday.
One huge benefit of this is that you can track down your process, not only on a day to day basis but also in months and years too.
No, notepads on Phones and Tablets don’t work the same way. They are another source of procrastination, for me at least. | https://medium.com/@aahladkethineedi/getting-things-done-the-easy-way-1a146b2c0f04 | ['Aahlad Kethineedi'] | 2020-12-11 08:10:48.433000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Procrastination', 'Goals', 'Lists', 'Process'] |
Walking Across the Desert With Mike Fay | Saguaro National Park consists of two large parks on either side of Tucson, Arizona. The east is very different from the west, and both are obviously different than the city between them. Still, the same birds, bugs, pollen, wind, and water are swirling about them all. They are all part of the same story.
As part of the 2011 BioBlitz in Saguaro, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence (and University of Arizona alum) J. Michael Fay walked some 70 miles over the course of seven days on a transect across both parts of the park and the city between them, noting the first time he saw each plant species in an area, and identifying and tallying every bird he saw or heard along the way.
The photos below take you along moment by moment through open landscapes and close-up details. They show many of the park rangers and local scientists who accompanied Mike for a few miles or days at a time, and they reveal highlights of the experiences and knowledge they shared.
Learn more about Mike Fay’s philosophy of transecting in this archived post on nationalgeographic.org and in Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking.” | https://medium.com/@anderhowl/walking-across-the-desert-with-mike-fay-c62e97f0b663 | ['Andrew Howley'] | 2019-12-11 13:57:01.505000+00:00 | ['Walking', 'Nature Photography', 'Ecology', 'Nature', 'Desert'] |
Dumpster Mattress | Photo by Marian Kroell on Unsplash
The things this dumpster mattress has seen, heard, experienced.
She’s got some stories, man. There was that marathon night of nine times. She lost a little bounce after that.
She’s been moved all over the place. From apartment to apartment. Squeezed through doorways, dragged across pavement, laid up sideways for hours in that sketchy truck you borrowed from your cousin.
This dumpster mattress has been through it all. The blood, the piss, the vomit. The sweat and the spit. The cum and the shit.
She’s nestled little cats and dogs and kept the saddest of people cozy on the coldest of days.
And now, here she is, naked and dirty, springs bustin’ out, flopped over a crusty-ass garbage heap, waiting to be picked up by god knows whom, headed to god knows where.
Do you know where these mattresses go to die? This thing that held you up, supported you, gave you peace and rest without asking for anything in return.
How will she be treated in her final hours. How will she be honored for the beat-down life that she’s lived?
Dumpster mattress, you should be given a memorial service — a goddamn funeral. Buried and burned to ash and kept in a pretty urn on a dresser next to the young, cushy, memory foam bitch that replaced you. This way your ghost can hover over her and laugh as she gets trampled to pieces just like you did.
Ah, what a joyous life we lead. | https://medium.com/scuzzbucket/dumpster-mattress-c2e1dda12042 | ['Franco Amati'] | 2020-12-13 21:52:27.938000+00:00 | ['Death', 'Life', 'Scuzzbucket', 'Poetry', 'Prose'] |
COVID-19: This is Not a Drill! | Sell equities, buy gold (bullion in your physical possession), bitcoin, and ethereum. COVID-19 is the real deal. Like potential apocalypse real. Personally, I’m stocking up on dry goods in preparation for quarantines hitting North America. As soon as the morons at the US State Department chose, against vehement opposition by the CDC, to evacuate infected Americans from Japan back to California and Texas, they sealed the fate of the continent. The CDC now says it’s only a matter of time before the US dealing with a full pandemic, like China, Japan, South Korea, and Italy. Scripps Hospital in San Diego (my home town, where they released possibly infected patients from Miramar Air Base at bus stops last week) issued a memo to their employees yesterday to prepare for national shortages of medical supplies, and begin rationing virus masks. The US military is “preparing for a full pandemic” — though they claim they’re being overly cautious. Patients who have previously tested negative multiple times have tested positive up to 40 days after being put under observation, and the US is releasing suspected carriers after 14-days of quarantine (the same people the CDC didn’t even want in the country at all), all but guaranteeing the spread of the virus.
Virologists in multiple countries studying COVID-19 have tentatively confirmed that it is most likely a genetically engineered virus that was created in some country’s bio-weapons program (at least a dozen or so have them, despite international conventions — the US, China, and Israel have the most advanced bio-weapons programs). The US has implied that COVID-19 somehow escaped from China’s Wuhan P4 bio-weapons lab, which happens to be literally meters from the market where the virus was first detected. Chinese state media has implied that the US developed COVID-19, and released it in Wuhan, with the Chinese lab providing a cover of plausible deniability. Neither assertion is far-fetched, and of course, neither country can push such a claim too far without drawing attention to their own highly-illegal and morally reprehensible bio-weapons initiatives.
What makes COVID-19 different -and so much more dangerous- than other coronaviruses is that it carries HIV genetics. This mutuation is theoretically possible in nature, but the odds are basically the same as a human baby being born with functioning bat wings. The only reasonable explanation is that HIV genes were inserted into the virus, and both the US and China have previously been found to be genetically engineering coronaviruses from bats. This thing can attack your cells in the same manner as HIV, but its airborne. The other strange thing about COVID-19 is that it attacks a genetic receptor most commonly carried by Asians, making them extremely susceptible, with a rapid display of symptoms. Most Caucasians lack this receptor. In theory, that may mean that white people prove to be more resistant, however it also makes us the perfect carriers. Asymptomatic Caucasians have been spreading the virus, not realizing that they’re sick, and it’s too early to tell if white people are actually resistant, or merely taking longer to show symptoms.
The global economy was already a house of cards propped up by debt and rampant money printing. We were already staring down the barrel of a worldwide recession, but China’s economy grinding to a halt is something that we won’t be able to QE ourselves out of, even if the pandemic remains relatively confined to the Asian continent. You can’t just remove the foundation of world trade, by far the largest exporter of goods and product components, without massive blow-back. In a globalized world, there’s no hiding from the chain reaction this will cause.
The eye-rolling revelation here: after COVID-19 triggers this long-in-the-making financial disaster, central bankers will use the virus as a scapegoat and as an excuse to continue their failed monetary policies.
Relevant Links | https://medium.com/@ProfitSync/covid-19-this-is-not-a-drill-8304b3cb0792 | [] | 2020-04-06 15:46:28.341000+00:00 | ['Macroeconomics', 'Globalization', 'Bitcoin', 'Covid 19', 'Coronaviruses'] |
Why You Need to Start Talking To Your Anxiety Now | Why You Need to Start Talking To Your Anxiety Now
It might just change your life forever
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? I know. I’ve been there. As if the constant stress and fear and helplessness weren’t enough to deal with. As if you don’t already want to curl up under a blanket and let the world disappear.
Isn’t it enough just to make it through the day? Isn’t it alright to just scrape through? To navigate the troubled waters of panic attacks and dodgy bowels, of aches and sweats and sleepless nights? Don’t you do enough?
Well, no.
Because on top of all that, there’s the endless, well-meaning but overbearing advice. It comes from all sides. From the doctor who wants to medicate you, the therapist who wants to explore your past, the counselor who wants you to meditate.
It comes from your family, from your friends, from your colleagues. It comes in all forms. It comes in response to the questions you’ve asked. It comes, unsolicited, from questions you haven’t. It comes when it’s all that you want and when it’s the last thing you need.
You seek it out too. You read the books, the articles, the how-to guides. And every time you do, you’re told something new.
Try this! Try that! Breathe… Breathe slower… Breathe mindfully!
It just never stops. It’s the burden of all who suffer from issues of mental health to fix themselves. To be their own advocate. To heal. And it’s exhausting.
Overloaded and Underwhelmed
Of course, each time you see a new tip, or trick, or piece of advice, you welcome it with open arms. Of course you do, you’re desperate, you’ll try anything once! But that’s the problem.
Much of the strategies and techniques we hear about work. They are proven to work. But they only work if you put the time in. If you practise religiously day after day after day. And most of us don’t. It’s too hard. We’re too distracted. There’s another thing we’ve been told to try so we’ll give that a go instead.
Sound familiar? You are not alone. So many of us have been there. Many of us never leave.
It’s time to simplify
So, with that in mind, I want to make a suggestion. Let’s simplify, let’s pick a single strategy and stick with it. Honestly, I think if you can do that, it may not matter too much which one it is.
But here’s what’s working for me.
I’ve tried it all, because, after all, my last few years have demanded it of me — I’ve had a pretty tough ride.
But I’ve had great results from one thing in particular, especially since I decided to simplify and double down.
Talking to your anxiety
First off, this is science. It’s not something I or any one else has just made up. It’s been researched and tested. It’s widely adopted in the psychotherapy arena. So you don’t have to just take my word for it.
The idea is a simple one. By talking to your anxiety in the third person, you are doing a number of things:
Establishing distance: a key principle here is to establish that you and your anxiety are not the same thing. You can be unraveled and separated, forever. Many of us, consciously or otherwise, struggle to really believe this. Creating empathy: most people are much better at caring for others than themselves. We don’t give ourselves the same love that we give others when we need it. Creating a character out if your anxiety is a great way to develop that empathy and trick the brain into being a little kinder. Keeping perspective: although we’re generally not very good at caring for ourselves, we’re brilliant at protecting ourselves. It’s a basic evolutionary mechanism to keep ourselves alive at all costs. So when we see a threat, the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and we lose all perspective. We just want to get the hell out of there. When we think about our anxiety as another person, we’re able to assess the situation more calmly, and ultimately, avoid causing more stress than is required.
There’s a lot of neuro-chemistry going on here as well, which, if you’re interested, is worth a closer look. But that’s not for everyone, and it’s not strictly necessary either. In fact, sometimes, understanding the mechanism too well can be counterproductive to trusting it.
What you need to do
I’ve gone through a lot of advice on ways to put this into practise. But I think it’s best to keep it simple. Here’s what I found works:
Step 1: Give it a name. This is so simple, but really helps establish that third-person effect we’re going for. A therapist of mine once suggested the use of the name Amy (as short for Amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for ’fight or flight’ and, generally stressing us out) and it kind of stuck for me.
But I think a better idea is to pick a name you have a positive attachment to. Words, even when spoken internally, can have a great impact on our mental state. Negative words wind us up, positive calm us down. Pick a name that brings you a microcosm of joy each time you hear it.
Step 2: Prepare some statements. Anyone who suffers from mental health conditions knows that, when the proverbial hits the fan, rational thought goes out the window. So be prepared. Work out what you’d want to say to your anxiety in advance. Write it down. Say it out loud. Learn it by heart.
Here’s one of mine you may find useful:
”Ok Amy, I hear you. I know you’re not having a great time right now. I’ve heard what you have to say. But I want you to know that I’ve got this. I’m going to look after you and keep you safe. I love you, and won’t let anything happen. Now, calm down so I can concentrate on doing just that.”
That’s it. Keep it simple. Keep it straight. Avoid using those negative words. Put yourself in command, firmly but gently.
Step 3: Practise, practise, practise. Most mental health issues are strengthened by repetition. They reflect patterns of thought and behaviour which are hard to break. You have to treat any attempt at recovery in a similar way.
Talk to your anxiety, a lot. Talk to it in the morning when you wake up, when you’re on the way to work, while you’re sat in boring meetings or in the car, talk to it until it is a habit and then talk to it some more.
You can change up what you say, but keep the tone constant. Keep it firm but gentle. Keep it caring but commanding. You are in control. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/why-you-need-to-start-talking-to-your-anxiety-now-1a02711bc332 | ['Daniel Skomer'] | 2019-08-23 19:04:33.251000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Anxiety', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Life'] |
7 Things declare your Business’s Future. | Emails are one of the top kind of staying connected with your customers. And I list out 7 types of emails that would decide the life of your business.
This article explains the ease of sending emails for engaging customers with specific content in it in order to raise sales.
To enhance sales and get a better position in the eCommerce industry, your business needs to establish strong relationships with a wider audience and that too in a cost-effective manner. Auto-response emails are considered as valuable tools for marketing. Automated emails can be used to achieve a wide range of purposes such as registration confirmation, lead nurturing, sales alert, etc. If your eCommerce store is not using email automation, you’re missing great opportunities to make better your business. But are you wondering what type of automated emails you should send to your customers? If yes, let’s check some automated email types which you can use for your eCommerce:
Welcome message
Welcome Emails
You can send automated welcome emails to a new subscriber immediately after the registration. Make sure to include strong CTA informing them to visit your website, follow you on social media platforms or to check out your blog. It will help in increasing brand awareness along with building cross-channel engagement.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Reminders
When it comes to recovering abandoned shopping carts, reminder emails are what matters the most. Sending a series of emails at the right timings can increase the chance of the cart abandoners noticing your emails and offers you a chance to nurture them. Schedule a cart recovery email series for a week but make sure not to bombard the inboxes with your emails. Arouse curiosity in the minds of the recipient by using attractive email headlines. Offer discounts on the items left on the cart or create urgency by letting them know that only a few items are left in stock.
Post-Purchase Follow-Up
You can use email automation to make the post-purchase follow-up. Make sure to thank your customers for the purchase they have made and share tracking details of the shipment. In the same email, you can even recommend similar products. You can ask your customers to offer ratings and reviews of the products in another email.
Upsell Offers
Automated emails can be used to provide upsell offers to your customers as well as potential customers. However, make sure not to offer too many products in a single email. In the case of your existing customers, you can include products they have purchased previously along with some related products and offer the products as a combo at an appropriate price.
Educational Content
Email automation can also be used to offer educational content to consumers. Try to offer value to your customers, rather than just trying to sell the products. So, offer unique information about the products that are valuable to the customers.
Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails are very helpful to remind your lost customers about the products they have left in their shopping carts. You can send re-engagement offers based on the customer’s purchase history as it can offer better results. Use encouragement tone that makes them take the action you want. Or you can experiment with the type of re-engagement emails work best for you.
Relevant Updates And Information
Relevant updates and information about products etc. can be shared with the
customers through automated emails. You can inform your customers regarding a sale that is going to take place, about new collections, or let them know about the coupon codes they can use in their next purchase. However, make sure that you use attention-catching lines such as ‘New collection’, ‘Quick sale’, ‘Your coupon is going to expire on…’ etc. Put strong CTAs that are easily seen so that the CTR increases.
Subject — A must know for you
Hey Buddy,
Do you know 44% of salesmen give up after one follow-up?
This gives you a chance to swoop in the inboxes of these prospects and get a follow-up.
If you want to get ahead with this opportunity, do let us know.
Hoping to work with you.
Thanks
Bad Writer. (#Cold e-mails-” will get an article on this one too.”)
We can do all these 7 things automated with a lot of tools available in the market. So I will drop an article as a sequence on how to use those tools by picking one of those tools. So do follow me and get updates regarding the articles.
Thanks for reading the article. Feedbacks are always welcome. If you like it please hit the clap button and share the article. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/7-things-declare-your-businesss-future-70a8978b21d3 | ['Tej Maddimsetty'] | 2020-08-23 04:33:16.631000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Online', 'Online Marketing', 'Startup', 'Email'] |
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