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How to Define a Reliable Blockchain Outsourcing Company? | Blockchain technology is getting more and more traction. The market shows that companies want to invest in blockchain solutions development for their business. Hence, choosing a reliable blockchain outsourcing company becomes a challenging task.
Along with blockchain popularization, a lot of outsourcing companies started to add blockchain development services on the list among other technologies, and offer it to the clients. Though, learning one additional programming language or applying a new skill is not enough to add blockchain to the list of your competencies.
In this article, we will tell the main points to focus on while hiring a blockchain development team.
WHERE TO START?
If you have never dealt with product outsourcing we recommend specifying some fundamental basics of your project before initiation or during the discovery phase. Often, those are answers to the main purpose of your project, regarding:
the main idea of your project;
the problem your project solves;
why it is better from the existing solutions;
any suggestions for the preferable concept and blockchain frameworks.
Yet, to find and hire a real blockchain guru with solid tech skills, we recommend answering those questions even before arranging the first meeting. If specified by yourself, it will help you to know exactly what you are looking for and narrow the companies’ list.
The selection of an accurate development framework is a distinctive and very important part of every blockchain-based project. This primary deals with the project’s purpose for hiring a blockchain company.
In order to understand which type of blockchain development is the most suitable for implementing your idea, let’s look deeper into the main approaches to it.
APPROACHES TO BLOCKCHAIN PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
There are two main perspectives we can define in terms of blockchain-based project development. They are crucial while choosing the right blockchain development company because each approach requires a different list of tools and skills the outsource team should have.
USING EXISTING PLATFORM
The first option is to use one of the existing blockchain systems in order to solve a problem, for example, write a smart contract on Solidity or make a comparison cycle on Hyperledger. In order to fulfill such a project, developers need to know a particular programming language and have experience in implementing similar projects.
In addition, a developer needs to understand how the platform works, its distinctive features and limitations. There are many nuances which in case of disregard, may lead to the process slowing and higher costs.
SUITABLE FOR: SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE TASKS WHICH REQUIRE FURTHER INTEGRATION INTO ALREADY EXISTING PROJECTS.
BLOCKCHAIN FROM SCRATCH
The second approach means creating the entire blockchain roughly from scratch. This type is usually used in the case of creating a “wow project”, which brings new ideas or alternative solutions to certain industries. In this case, a developer does not need to have explicit knowledge of new languages, a good command of C++ or Python will be enough.
Despite this, the second approach requires more knowledge and experience in building blockchain logic and architecture, and this is one of the most important things to pay attention to. Frequently, these types of projects provide money or asset circulation so one small consensus mistake or false node synchronization might be worth millions.
SUITABLE FOR: BIG AND SCALABLE PROJECT, OR ENTERPRISE BLOCKCHAIN THAT NEEDS A CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT OF A UNIQUE BLOCKCHAIN ECOSYSTEM.
To help you understand which blockchain framework is better for your project, check out our deep analysis of Best Blockchain Development Platforms:
Specifying your project needs and understanding which approach is a good fit considerably narrows the list of possible future vendors and saves you a lot of time.
BASIC CRITERIA TO CONCENTRATE
After understanding and writing the core insights of your project you can create a list of vendors to contact and discuss your idea. For that purpose, we prepared a list of what to ask and what to focus on while choosing a blockchain outsourcing company.
LOOK FOR COMPETENCY
It is impossible to read the book “How blockchain works” and get the system as there are a number of nuances that can be understood just after gathering considerable experience.
DO NOT HESITATE TO ASK FOR RELEVANT DOCUMENTATION IN ORDER TO ENSURE A COMPANY HAS THE REQUIRED SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE.
One of the best ways to check an IT company's activity on the market is to ask for a link to Github, where you will find all the projects description. Pay attention to the Github authors and the project release dates.
Source: Blaize Github, snglsDAO project description
You can also ask for a call with a team’s engineers directly, in order to clarify any technology uncertainties. This is your money and you have to know to whom you pay it and for what.
For those, who do not want to dive into code and strongly technical descriptions, we recommend checking the company’s portfolio on the main website. Vendors often put the most scalable and meaningful cases on this list. Therefore, while looking for a company’s portfolio you can additionally check the scale this particular blockchain company deals with.
EVALUATE TEAM CREATIVITY AND APPROACH FLEXIBILITY
After understanding and writing the core insights of your project idea, send this list to the chosen company. Do this in advance to give them some time to prepare a thorough offer for you. Ask as many questions as you can to ensure the technical engineers read your requirements and understand every small detail.
During the communication process, evaluate how many solutions are offered to you. Sometimes companies prepare a few options in order to offer a various range of cost estimation, but this is another thing. Despite ensuring blockchain company’s pricing flexibility, try to check for creativity and approach versatility.
To offer flexible approaches means to look for alternative methods of problem-solving at equal price and quality. This feature will be an advantage while dealing with big and scalable projects and become a huge plus in case of implementing a “wow” project.
The dev team might face some difficulties or pitfalls during the implementation process so obtaining such a skill will be a huge plus.
DO ASK FOR A FIXED PRICE
There are three main types of budgeting IT companies usually have on their list.
When having a well-prepared technical task in your hands, ask the company for a fixed price cost estimation even if you do not feel like it fits your project. Often companies do not offer this kind of budgeting hiding their ignorance of clear time frames and lack of relevant experience behind thus.
BLAIZE RECOMMENDATION: EVEN IF YOU HAVE AGREED ON AN HOURLY PAYMENT TYPE OF BUDGET, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR A FIXED PRICE ESTIMATION IN ADDITION, BECAUSE IT ALSO HELPS TO CHECK THE LEVEL OF CONDUCTOR EXPERIENCE. THE PREPARATION OF SUCH ESTIMATION SHOULD ENTAIL NO DIFFICULTIES IF YOU HAVE A PREPARED TECHNICAL TASK ON YOUR PART.
COMMUNICATE WITH THE DEV TEAM DIRECTLY
It would be great just to pay money and relax while waiting for a link to the repository of a finished product. Unfortunately, it works only as an advertising slogan rather than real practice.
Communication with the company’s project manager might not be enough to get deeper insights of the development process. Therefore, we recommend checking the willingness of the dev team to carry out daily calls.
If the team meets your expectations and you have agreed on the final proposal, do not be so quick to move this task to the “done” section in Trello and wait for the product launch.
We recommend you to stay in control of the future development processes and schedule work so that the development team is focused on your project solely. If there is not enough time to do it yourself, hire a product manager who will take care of this and represent your interests in the project.
Want to hire a solid blockchain development team? Connect with our CEO to see what we can offer!
CHECK FOR C-LEVEL AUTHORITY AND ACTIVITY IN COMMUNITIES
C-level (or C-Suite) authorities represent the high-ranked executives in a company. The amount of C-level executives varies from company to company and depends mainly on its size and scale. Accordingly, large outsourcing blockchain subcontractors will have a bigger amount of highly-ranked authorities to distribute the dynamic workflow.
The other thing to take into consideration is the company's activities in social media or publications in well-known media communities. As simple as it is, checking a company’s account in popular media may give you a lot of answers and help to choose reliable blockchain developers.
Blaize company&owners social media profiles
See how Blaize was awarded as the best blockchain developer by Clutch and GoodFirms.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN ALARMS OF A POOR BLOCKCHAIN OUTSOURCE?
We have just told you what to look for while hiring a blockchain development team. Yet, to be able to distinguish a reliable blockchain vendor we recommend looking at a few important features of a poor blockchain outsourcing company.
Today, you can find a rich list of companies that claim to have a dedicated and experienced team of blockchain engineers. Yet, unfortunately, this knowledge may be often exaggerated in some ways.
VERY LITTLE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS PREPARATION
We often face the situation where a customer, firstly, contacts business analysts (or) consultants in order to discuss his idea and turn it into a technical requirement (or alternatively fulfills this through his employees).
As a result, the project idea is presented in PowerPoint with numerous visual elements, moving arrows and gears spins. It looks good, so he pays money for this and thinks that everything is fine. Typically, 80% of such “technical requirements” are revised and redone by the actual dev team while preparing a technical task for the onboarding process.
Unfortunately, in some cases, the outsource contractors can just follow what is written in the initial technical requirements. This is the worst they can do because a customer will spend money on an inoperable product. Therefore, make sure your dev team prepares a technical task of high quality and makes a thorough business analysis to eliminate tech collisions.
AN EXPERIENCED TEAM OF BLOCKCHAIN DEVELOPERS IS CAPABLE OF PREPARING A TECHNICAL REQUIREMENT FOR YOU WHILE HAVING JUST YOUR IDEA AS A BASE. TURNING SUCH A TECHNICAL REQUIREMENT INTO A TECH TASK WILL NOT BE A PROBLEM IF PREPARED BY THE SAME TEAM. THUS, YOU WILL SAVE A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME.
So feel free to come just with the idea to outsource, but evaluate the competency the company has to accomplish such a task.
CLAIMING TOO MUCH EXPERIENCE
The next common example of an unsuitable company is when the company declares more than 7 or even 10 years of blockchain development experience. Such a long practice in the field is nearly impossible because it was really hard to imagine the application of blockchain technology in any industry until the beginning of Ethereum.
Well, before 2015 blockchain had not been used anywhere except for cryptocurrencies while its adaptation seemed really questionable and unrealistic. Therefore, if a certain company claims it has 7 or even 10 years of experience in blockchain development ask for Satoshi Nakamoto to be in charge of your project. The real boom and breakthrough in blockchain development began only in 2017–18.
BLOCKCHAIN AS ONE AMONG OTHERS
Another distinctive feature of blockchain outsourcing is that many companies came into this area while already providing other types of IT services. Dealing with classic development, back-end, or even front-end solutions, they simply added blockchain to the list of technologies they offer when the blockchain “hype” started in 2018.
Practically, this neither fits the first nor the second blockchain development approach we described above. Mainly because it is impossible to quickly learn high-quality programming or a list of new languages. The same as there is a very low possibility of gaining vast experience in proper blockchain architecture building within a short period of time.
HENCE, IF YOU NEED A BLOCKCHAIN, GO TO A BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY.
WHY BLAIZE IS A DEDICATED BLOCKCHAIN DEVELOPMENT FIRM FOR HIRE?
In Blaize, we provide blockchain development as a prior and basically deal with decentralized application building and blockchain ecosystems’ development from scratch.
As a solid blockchain outsourcing firm Blaize also deals with smart contracts deployment, crypto wallets design, and integration. We have vast practical experience in the field and have been on the market for more than 4 years.
To make sure of our competency, see our portfolio and Blaize Github profile. Find out more about our core values and working approaches in the About Us section.
GO SEE FOR YOURSELF! LET’S CONTACT AND DISCUSS YOUR IDEA.
CONCLUSION
In terms of advertisement, we can write that in Blaize we get 10 out of 10 in every criteria, but it will not be true. We strive to develop the best for our customers and thus constantly grow and improve our skills.
Any project is a synergy of clients’ ideas and competencies of an outsourcing company. You cannot find the perfect company, but you can find the perfect combination of both participants, then the project will be successful. We hope our tips will help you in this search.
Article source: Blaize blog https://blaize.tech/article-type/best-platforms-for-blockchain-development/ | https://medium.com/blaize-tech/how-to-define-a-reliable-blockchain-outsourcing-company-91a1964911e1 | ['Blaize Team'] | 2020-11-26 09:40:33.215000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Outsourcing', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchain Development', 'Outstaffing'] |
Top 10 Shit No One Believed in 2020 | Somebody won the election Normal exists Sure, I’ll be alive in ten years, what could go wrong? The Internet is good for you We can just walk away from the Internet, what could go wrong? We can stop the virus It was an accident It will be OK
9. Our young people can handle it
10. The people in charge care about us | https://medium.com/@annsterzinger/top-10-shit-no-one-believed-in-2020-97d7c2ec80fd | ['Ann Sterzinger'] | 2020-12-21 01:19:39.578000+00:00 | ['2020 Presidential Race', '2020'] |
Dun & Bradstreet’s Anthony Scriffignano on a life in data | Dun & Bradstreet’s Anthony Scriffignano on a life in data
Digital Bulletin speaks all things data in an exclusive interview with the Chief Data Scientist of the Year 2018, Anthony Scriffignano
Dun & Bradstreet is an organisation that sits in rarefied air; the company provides commercial data, analytics and business insight services for around 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, a group that accounts for something in the region of two thirds of the U.S. GDP.
The backbone of the company is its Data Cloud, which Dun & Bradstreet says is the most detailed of its kind. Comprising over 330 million business records, more than 120 million hierarchy members, and with 375 million data elements updated every day, it provides a depth and breadth of business information that is arguably unrivalled.
The data is used by some of the world’s leading organisations to make decisions on credit risk, vendor management, marketing and lead generation, compliance and master data management.
The man behind the numbers is the company’s Chief Data Scientist Anthony Scriffgnano, who is something of a legend in the data community. Scriffignano, who was recognised as the U.S. Chief Data Scientist of the Year 2018 by the Chief Data Officer Club, is routinely invited to provide thought leadership for senior executives and high-level government officials globally.
Anthony Scriffignano
Recently, he briefed the US National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee and contributed to three separate reports to the President, on Big Data Analytics, Emerging Technologies Strategic Vision, and Internet and Communications Resilience. In short, he is a man in demand.
All of which means that when Digital Bulletin was offered the chance to pick Scriffgnano’s brains on all things data, we jumped at the chance.
Speaking from Dun & Bradstreet’s HQ in Millburn, New Jersey, Scriffgnano says he has worked in every part of the organisation that touches data over the last two decades, “which is just another way of saying I’m old,” he jokes.
“We’ve been doing big data since before big data was a term, way before. We curate arguably the largest global database of its type, which is updated millions of times a day. It comes from hundreds of countries where there are different laws, languages and rules around data localisation,” he says.
“We have to be on top of all of that, while data regulation is changing all over the world, so our data strategy is pretty much focused on governance, compliance and quality.”
Scriffignano breaks off from the narrative, keen to address an untruth about how Dun & Bradstreet collects, processes and uses its vast records of data.
“A lot of the data that we have never gets seen outside of these four walls, but there’s a common misconception that we just buy a load of data from around the world and put it in a database and sell it — nothing could be further from the truth.
“We have to make a lot of the data through imprints, triangulation, adjudication, and we take great information from data that never gets exposed, like signals and detailed pieces of trade information that simply can’t leave the company.
“There is a huge effort that goes into making sense of data to uncover opportunity and risk, fraud adjudication, and patterns of behaviour.”
“The first thing the best bad guys will do if they suspect that they’re being watched is change their behaviour”
Score settled, Scriffignano moves on to the increasing role of disruptive technology and how it can be utilised in the field of big data. He is effusive in his belief in artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is being leveraged in the world of data, listing off a number of use cases carried out by Dun & Bradstreet.
“We are using AI to curate the data, which again looks at triangulation around the truth and can be very helpful to use conversational linguistics,” he says. “We’re also using something called semantic disambiguation, which is looking at unstructured data and trying to discern which elements of what we think are true are true, because not all data comes nicely packaged with a dictionary that tells you how to use it.
“Most of the really good stuff is raw and you have to be able to use it in that form — AI is extremely useful for that.”
Scriffignano and his team are also using AI for advanced anomaly detection in a bid to work out what the “bad guys” will do next.
“The first thing the best bad guys will do if they suspect that they’re being watched is change their behaviour. If you’re just doing simple modelling on prior bad behaviour, you’re going to be modelling on ways that the bad guys no longer behave. It’s called an observer effect,” he says.
“AI and solutions that are not improvised — so not based on the past — can be extremely helpful in finding emerging types of behaviour that might represent new maleficence. So, advanced anomaly detection is absolutely being revolutionised by not only the availability of data, but also the availability of compute power.
“Deep learning is a great example of that; it is not a super new concept, but you need an awful lot of data and an awful lot of horsepower to do something like that, and we didn’t have that available to us when these ideas were being conceived. There were examples but they were really theoretical, but the results we’re seeing now are real.”
But away from Dun & Bradstreet, companies are finding it difficult to come to terms with what could be considered — to the likes of Scriffignano, at least — pretty elementary data challenges. He riffs on a number of topics, including the challenge of aligning cloud and data strategies, but settles on data silos as an issue to drill down into.
“Companies are absolutely struggling. Almost every single day I talk to someone that has an issue where there’s a corpus of data that would help that issue, but they either don’t have access, don’t know about it or can’t see it, and the list goes on. And many times, this is in the same enterprise, which is even sadder. And this happens in corporate America, it happens in academia, medical research — it happens everywhere,” he says.
“Almost every single day I talk to someone that has an issue where there’s a corpus of data that would help”
“Sometimes siloing is a necessary evil to protect privacy or legal considerations, very often it’s just noise or the way we set up our systems, or departments not communicating very well, so a lot of siloing happens by accident.
“The challenge is that data is increasing at an immeasurable rate; data begets data, so this whole data is the new oil thing is silly, because oil does not beget oil.”
Scriffignano asks himself rhetorically: “So what do you do about it?”
He breaks data down into three buckets: the data a company has and can be seen; the data a company knows exists and can access if it’s prepared to invest time and resource; and data that is simply not accessible.
“When you’re talking about problems, you want to try to get an estimate of the size and the quality of each of those corpora of data. If we’re going to make a decision about enterprise risk and you know that there is data sitting in the office, you have to decide whether going and getting it is going to change the decision you’re going to make or not,” says Scriffignano.
“Companies can’t start the conversations saying: ‘okay, let’s bring all the data together’, there’s too much data and they don’t have time, so you have to purposefully choose the data you want, and you have to know what you didn’t use and why you didn’t use it. That is the best strategy I can advise.”
Another factor companies are struggling to get to grips with is the ever-changing landscape of data governance, rules and regulations, says Scriffignano, who draws parallels with a theory first discussed in Alice in Wonderland, no less.
“There are a number of GDPR-like regulations around the world, and companies that ignore them will find themselves in a lot of trouble,” he says.
“In computer science, there is what is known as a Red Queen Problem, which comes from Alice in Wonderland, during which Alice says to the Red Queen: ‘this is a really odd place, I’m running and running and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere’. The Queen replies: ‘That’s the kind of place this is, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are’.
“With a lot of this regulation we find ourselves in a Red Queen Problem, we can’t stop running, stop everything and assess the regulations and figure out how to comply with it and start up again, you always have to keep running.
“My advice is to be humble, because the problem you’re working on is very likely to be bigger than it looks”
“But what I would say is that everyone has been given notice. Companies need to step up what they’re doing and look at those broader issues. They need to develop a strategy that is inclusive of the regulations they are concerned about, but also includes future regulations that they know are going to come. Otherwise you’ll never get out from behind it.”
With the interview drawing to a close, Scriffignano is keen to address the future and, in particular, a new generation of graduates and employees that will solve the data challenges of tomorrow.
“We have to look forward because if we don’t we’ll just continue to have the same conversations,” he says. “My advice is to be humble, because the problem you’re working on is very likely to be bigger than it looks. Don’t be convinced that you have a view on everything, bring other people in and expand the table you’re working on.
“Secondly, be minimalistic and break problems down into chunks. You’re not going to be able to implement AI across the enterprise, it’s too big an initiative, so think about what the problem is you are trying to solve and how is AI going to address those issues, what should you solve first, then break it down from there.
“And lastly, when you’re driving ahead and solving problems, remember to pick your head up from time-to-time. I used to play water polo and while you might be able to swim faster by just keeping your head down, it does mean the ball is going to hit you in the head every now and then, which can be embarrassing.” | https://medium.com/digital-bulletin/dun-bradstreets-anthony-scriffgnano-on-a-life-in-data-69d54a2cfc17 | ['Digital Bulletin'] | 2019-09-30 13:20:46.638000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Analysis', 'Data'] |
Deep Zork — Part 2. Now that I have given some background… | Game emulation
Since I am using Python for this project, the first step was to be able to play Zork through Python. The game file I found to use was what’s known as a Z-machine file. Emulators have been made to play this format of file but none of them are written in Python. I thus had to use an executable version I found called Frotz for Windows (https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz) which runs through the command line.
To interface the program with Python I had to use the Subprocess module, piping the command line input and output so that I could read the lines of the game and write new commands to the game. To be able to read the game line by line without blocking, I had to make use of a separate thread to run the game on.
With this interface set up, I was able to both pass commands from Python to the game and read the responses and narratives given by the game.
Step one down.
Command generation
The next challenge is that of command generation. From my initial research and play-throughs of the game, I knew that Zork only accepts certain commands.
These commands fall into one of three categories:
Basic commands: commands to go a certain direction, commands to get info
Go north
Look around
Check inventory
Verb-Object commands: commands that consist of a verb and a noun or noun phrase
Take key
Open the door
Verb-Object-Prep-Object commands: commands that consist of a verb and noun phrase followed by a preposition and second noun phrase
Attack the monster with the sword
Unlock the chest with the key
By scrubbing the game file using ZTools (https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/ztools.html) and using the Spacy library to detect verb and noun phrases, I compiled a list of possible commands for each type.
Basic commands
'go north',
'go south',
'go west',
'go east',
'go northeast',
'go northwest',
'go southeast',
'go southwest',
'd',
'u'
Verb-Object commands
'open OBJ',
'get OBJ',
'set OBJ',
'hit OBJ',
'eat OBJ',
'put OBJ',
'cut OBJ',
'dig OBJ',
'ask OBJ',
'fix OBJ',
'make OBJ',
'wear OBJ',
'move OBJ',
'kick OBJ',
'kill OBJ',
'find OBJ',
'play OBJ',
'feel OBJ',
'hide OBJ',
'read OBJ',
'fill OBJ',
'flip OBJ',
'burn OBJ',
'pick OBJ',
'pour OBJ',
'pull OBJ',
'apply OBJ',
'leave OBJ',
'ask OBJ',
'break OBJ',
'enter OBJ',
'curse OBJ',
'shake OBJ',
'burn OBJ',
'inflate OBJ',
'brandish OBJ',
'donate OBJ',
'squeeze OBJ',
'attach OBJ',
'find OBJ',
'banish OBJ',
'read OBJ',
'enchant OBJ',
'feel OBJ',
'pour OBJ'
Verb-Object-Prep-Object commands
'pour OBJ on DCT',
'hide OBJ in DCT',
'pour OBJ in DCT',
'move OBJ in DCT',
'hide OBJ on DCT',
'flip OBJ for DCT',
'fix OBJ with DCT',
'spray OBJ on DCT',
'dig OBJ with DCT',
'cut OBJ with DCT',
'pick OBJ with DCT',
'squeeze OBJ on DCT',
'pour OBJ from DCT',
'fill OBJ with DCT',
'brandish OBJ at DCT',
'burn OBJ with DCT',
'flip OBJ with DCT',
'read OBJ with DCT',
'hide OBJ under DCT',
'carry OBJ from DCT',
'inflate OBJ with DCT',
'unlock OBJ with DCT',
'give OBJ to DCT',
'carry OBJ to DCT',
'spray OBJ with DCT'
You will notice that the verb-object commands have ‘OBJ’ in them as a placeholder for the noun phrase and the verb-object-prep-object commands have ‘OBJ’ and ‘DCT’ for the first and second noun phrases. Using these placeholders allowed me to easily replace them with the different nouns found in the game’s descriptions.
At this point I knew that for any given state of the game, I would simply grab all the nouns in the description and generate a list of all combinations of those nouns with the commands.
To better assist the AI in choosing relevant commands, I compiled a Word2Vec model using walkthroughs and tutorials for other text-based games. I used BeautifulSoup to scrape two different sites — https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/solutions/ and http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/ — and compiled all the instructions into a single file. I then used the GenSim library to train a Word2Vec model on the corpus.
Using this Word2Vec model I then used the similarity score on the commands to give a score to each command. I then used an exponential weight to make the difference in these scores more significant. Using these scores, when the AI selects a random action, actions that that are more likely to be valid will have a higher weight.
Reinforcement learning
The basic setup for reinforcement learning is to have an agent which selects actions to perform and sends them to the game environment. The new state of the game and the reward for the chosen action is then fed back to the agent to influence the agent’s next move.
Flow chart for RL
The state in this case is the surroundings given to the player as well as the player’s inventory. The two of these together provides the agent with all the information needed to select appropriate commands and interact with the environment.
The reward should influence “good” behaviour while penalizing “bad” behaviour by the agent. There is already an in-game score given to the player when reaching certain areas or performing certain actions. However additional rewards can help to direct the agent more successfully.
One of the most important parts of playing a text-based game is exploration. Any human player playing Zork would need to take part in exploration of the various areas and rooms to learn more about the game world and to find essential items.
Another important part is finding, taking, and using items in the game. For Zork especially, the main goal is to find and collect the various treasures so interacting with items should be rewarded.
As far as negative rewards go, taking too many turns in a game usually is a bad thing as the goal should be to get to the end as quick as possible. Thus, a small negative reward can be given per each turn to help dissuade the agent from taking more turns than neccesary.
Below are the different rewards.
negative_per_turn_reward : -1 points
- Each turn taken this reward will be added to the total reward for the round. This way, on turns where no other points were scored, the turn will be remembered as being non-productive.
new_area_reward : 2 points
- Discovering a new area or room in the game should be rewarded in order to encourage exploration.
moving_around_reward: 0.5 points
- In order to prevent the agent from staying in one room too long, a small positive reward is given each time the agent moves from one area to another that has already been visited. This also helps to encourage the agent to return to an area it previously left when it had not yet completed all objectives in that area. Providing this reward instead of the new_area_reward when the agent revisits an area will prevent it from exploiting the reward system and hopping back and forth between rooms.
inventory_reward : 3 points
- If the agent picks up an item or uses an item, the in-game inventory will change. This will be rewarded with a large number of points as finding the treasures of the game ultimately is how the agent can win.
inventory_not_new_reward : 0.5 points
- In order to prevent the agent taking advantage of the large inventory_reward, a much smaller reward will be given when an inventory change occurs that has already taken place. This will prevent exploitable situations in which the agent repeatedly picks up and then drops an item.
in_game_score_reward : in-game score
- Scoring points in the game is the best type of action the agent could take so it should be rewarded the greatest. Each time an in-game score is granted, a weight (initially set at 10) will be applied to it to show its significance to the agent.
The agent consists of a neural network — more specifically a Deep-Q Network (referred to as DQN). The architecture of the model can be seen below.
Input | https://medium.com/data-by-matt/deep-zork-part-2-c4b79fe5c240 | [] | 2019-03-31 19:17:06.005000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Reinforcement Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'Interactive Fiction', 'Data Science'] |
Cycling in Valencia — Alto de la Montaña / La Bola de Cullera | Cycling in Valencia — Alto de la Montaña / La Bola de Cullera Michael Dixon Follow Apr 4 · 9 min read
Located around 45 km to the south of the city of Valencia on the southern edge of the Albufera Natural Park, la Bola de Cullera provides incredible views over the surrounding rice fields, the Gulf of Valencia and the Cap de Sant Antoni and el Montgó.
Set to feature as the finish of Stage 6 of the 2021 Vuelta a España, this 3 km climb starts from the centre of Cullera, rearing up past the town’s Al-Ándalus castle to “la bola”, the meteorological radar station located at the summit. The average gradient of 7.5% and the final altitude of 230 metres a.s.l. are somewhat misleading, as the first 2 kilometres average around 9%, while the final stretch has eye-watering ramps of 24% make it a climb requiring strength, rather than stamina.
CLIMBS IN VALENCIA
La Bola de Cullera
Perched on a spur above the town of Cullera and overlooking the surrounding countryside and sea, the climb to the “Bola de Cullera” meteorological radar station is an easy ride south of the city of Valencia, with its popular slopes offering cyclists a short, sharp challenge that is rewarded with spectacular views, especially over the changing scenery of the Albufera rice fields.
Sierra de los Zorros in Cullera, seen from the south
Starting from the centre of the town of Cullera itself, the road up this short climb leading to nowhere in particular is mostly very quiet indeed — especially once we’ve passed Cullera Castle — and, whilst the surface is a little worn and narrow in places, is perfectly rideable and safe.
There is only one ascent, by road bicycle at least, so the road we take up is inevitably the road we take down again. It is possible to reach the summit by other routes on foot and by mountain bike.
Location
Location of la Bola de Cullera, Valencia
La Bola de Cullera is located atop the Sierra de los Zorros, one of the final spurs of the Iberian System mountain range before it submerges into the Mediterranean Sea, rising further east in the form of Ibiza. Many Valencians are somewhat fond of the idea of being able to see the island from the summit of la Bola de Cullera, but at over 140 kilometres distant it’s most unlikely that you will see it from here. At other points along the coast in certain moments of the year, perhaps, but not here.
La montaña de Cullera seen from Muntanyeta dels Sants in l’Albufera Natural Park
The summit of the climb is located around 45 pan-flat kilometres south of the city of Valencia, from where it can be reached by bike through the sublime l’Albufera Natural Park on the CV-500/502 roads.
Alternatively, it can be reached by car on the AP7 motorway and the A-38 highway. The town also lies on the Valencia — Gandia railway line, which operates from the capital’s Estación del Norte. As always, check with rail operator RENFE beforehand to make sure you can take your bike onto the train in question.
Moorings in l’Albufera Natural Park
Some 150 km to the south lies the city of Alicante, which can be reached by several toll-free highways, and of course in-between are the popular cycling destinations of Denia, Calpe, Altea, Jalón, etc., some 80 km distant.
The town of Cullera itself is a very popular holiday destination among Valencians, and can get very busy indeed during the summer season and bank holidays, whilst it is relatively quiet during the rest of the year.
Sierra de los Zorros, or la montaña de Cullera, seen from the ricefields of l’Albufera Natural Park
The mountain, with its distinctive sign spelling out the name of the town in large, white letters, is itself a significant local landmark that can be seen from a distance of many kilometres across the flat surrounding landscape and marks the natural boundary to the plain lying south of the city of Valencia.
Profile
Profile of the ascent of la Bola de Cullera, Valencia
The climb to the meteorological radar station in Cullera starts at the junction of Carrer Josep Burguera and Calle Replà San Antoni in the centre of Cullera, where a signpost indicates the route to Cullera Castle.
A little over 3 kilometres in length, la Bola de Cullera is classed as a 3rd-category climb by the organizers of the Vuelta a España (who have denominated it el Alto de la Montaña de Cullera), with an average gradient of around 7.5% and maximums of around 20% and more on its final section to the radar station.
Profile of the 6th stage of the Vuelta a España 2021 ©Amaury Sport Organisation (A.S.O.)
Whilst short, it can be classed as a difficult climb due to its steep gradients, and one which requires a certain degree of physical fitness to be climbed successfully.
Starting altitude: @2 metres
Length: @3 kilometres
Average gradient: 7.5%
Maximum gradient: @20%
Altitude gain: @227 metres
Maximum altitude: 229 metres
Difficulty: Difficult
The Climb
As mentioned, we’ve taken the start of the climb of la Bola de Cullera at a road the junction in the centre of Cullera.
The climb to la Bola de Cullera
A signpost at the junction indicates the route to Cullera Castle, which we will follow for the first kilometre or so.
Sign indicating Cullera Castle at the start of the climb to la Bola de Cullera
No sooner do we leave the junction behind than the road starts rising at a steady 8–9% through the dense residential and holiday accommodation so typical of the intense development experienced by the region as a whole in the 1960s.
The first stretch of the climb rises at around 8–9%
A scant 250 metres later we come to the first junction of note, with our destination indicated to the right.
Signpost indicating road to Cullera Meteorological Station
The gradient immediately kicks up a notch here to around 11% as we begin to leave the densely built-up streets behind us.
The skyline quickly begins to open up as we ascend the climb
One bend later and we are definitively out of the town and among the many splendid summer houses that line the first part of the climb.
Summer houses lining the climb to la Bola de Cullera
After a little under a kilometre, mostly climbing at around 9%, we come to a second junction, where the road splits between the route on the left to Cullera Castle, and the route on the right up to the summit of la Bola.
Junction of the roads to Cullera Castle and la Bola
If you have the time and the inclination to first take the road to the Al-Andalus-period castle you will not be disappointed, above all for the magnificent views of the Gulf of Valencia to the south and of the fortress itself.
The ride from the junction to the castle, which lies a little less than a kilometre away, rises at a much easier gradient of around 3%.
View south from Cullera Castle over the city, with el Montgó in the distance
The castle itself can be visited and, in normal circumstances, has a cafeteria open to the public.
The winding road ahead
Once back on the climb to la Bola, the landscape undergoes a drastic change, with now only a few buildings dotting the mountainside and the walled road winding up ahead of us.
As always with roads offering little to zero shade, care should be taken when tackling the climb during the summer months, and especially during the hours of peak sunlight.
For the next kilometre or so the road winds back and forth across the mountainside at a gradient of around 9–10%, offering spectacular views of the Mediterranean Sea and the town below.
With little to zero traffic on the climb most days, we are free to enjoy the fantastic views of the horizon without much concern beyond the effort of moving our bike.
Around 2/3 of the way up the climb we come to a signposted fork in the road, with our destination indicated to the right, and the gradient suddenly easy up considerably as we ride through a section known locally as “los toboganes”.
Finish line location for stages of Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana/Vuelta a España
It’s shortly after this sign, around a kilometre from the summit and on a section where the road widens a little, that we come to the point used in the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana in recent years as a finish line.
The spot has undoubtedly been chosen due to the impossibility of setting up a finish line at the summit itself, given the lack of space for the necessary paraphernalia, and for the same reason is also likely to be used as the finish on Stage 6 of the 2021 edition of the Vuelta a España.
View of the summit of la Bola de Cullera
After this point, the road swings round to the north for the final kilometre to the radar station which sits squarely in front of us.
Final climb to the summit of la Bola de Cullera
And so al that is left is the final climb, with its stretches at a teeth-gnashing +20%. On the positive side, it’s relatively short, if that helps……..
@trinibarca tackling the final metres of the climb to La Bola in Cullera
As seemingly happens so often on out of the way climbs, it’s the last few metres that are worst, as if the engineers and road builders, tired of labouring away up the hillside, had given up all other pretensions and simply chosen the shortest route to the summit.
The Meteorological Radar station in Cullera
Once at the summit itself, with the radar installation before us, it’s quite clear to see why neither the Volta nor the Vuelta have chosen to end stages here: there simply isn’t room for racing cyclists, never mind finish lines.
View north from la Bola de Cullera across the Albufera rice fields towards the city of Valencia
What there are, however, are magnificent views to the north, across the Albufera Natural Park and its ricefields, the true cradle of paella, to the west across the Júcar river, to the east out across the Mediterranean Sea and to the south towards the Montgó and the province of Alicante.
As mentioned, the only descent by road bike is back down the way we came to the town of Cullera below.
Once at the foot of the climb, Gandia lies 30 pan-flat kilometres to the south, with the town of Denia — and its ferry service to Ibiza — a further 30 kilometres distant. The city of Valencia is around 45 kilometres to the north, as indicated already, while to the west we can follow the banks of the River Júcar some 25 kilometres upstream to the town of Alzira, which is connected to Valencia by train.
Further information
Cullera Tourism Department: VisitCullera
Cullera Tourism Department: Cullera Castle (Spanish)
Onyour.bike Routes in Valencia: Ribera del Xúquer
Route of Stage 6, Vuelta a España 2021 — Requena — Alto de Cullera
This article first appeared in www.onyour.bike | https://medium.com/on-your-bike/cycling-in-valencia-alto-de-la-monta%C3%B1a-la-bola-de-cullera-99ea80f6db89 | ['Michael Dixon'] | 2021-04-05 19:36:00.938000+00:00 | ['Cycling', 'Valencia', 'Spain', 'Province Of Valencia', 'Cycling In Spain'] |
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An action story is similar to adventure, and the protagonist usually takes a risky turn, which leads to desperate scenarios (including explosions, fight scenes, daring escapes, etc.). Action and adventure usually are categorized together (sometimes even while “action-adventure”) because they have much in common, and many stories are categorized as both genres simultaneously (for instance, the James Bond series can be classified as both). Continuing their survival through an age of a Zombie-apocalypse as a makeshift family, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abagail Breslin) have found their balance as a team, settling into the now vacant White House to spend some safe quality time with one another as they figure out their Jujutsu Kaisen move. However, spend time at the Presidential residents raise some uncertainty as Columbus proposes to Wichita, which freaks out the independent, lone Jujutsu Kaisen out, while Little Rock starts to feel the need to be on her own. The women suddenly decide to escape in the middle of the night, leaving the men concerned about Little Rock, who’s quickly joined by Berkley (Avan Jogia), a hitchhiking hippie on his way to place called Babylon, a fortified commune that’s supposed to be safe haven against the zombies of the land. Hitting the road to retrieved their loved one, Tallahassee and Columbus meet Madison (Zoey Deutch), a dim-witted survivor who takes an immediate liking to Columbus, complicating his relationship with Wichita.
💫 ANALYZER GOOD / BAD 💫
To be honest, I didn’t catch Jujutsu Kaisen when it first got released (in theaters) back in 404. Of course, the movie pre-dated a lot of the pop culture phenomenon of the usage of zombies-esque as the main antagonist (i.e Game of Thrones, The Maze Runner trilogy, The Walking Dead, World War Z, The Last of Us, etc.), but I’ve never been keen on the whole “Zombie” craze as others are. So, despite the comedy talents on the project, I didn’t see Jujutsu Kaisen….until it came to TV a year or so later. Surprisingly, however, I did like it. Naturally, the zombie apocalypse thing was fine (just wasn’t my thing), but I really enjoyed the film’s humor-based comedy throughout much of the feature. With the exception of 202040’s Shaun of the Dead, majority of the past (and future) endeavors of this narrative have always been serious, so it was kind of refreshing to see comedic levity being brought into the mix. Plus, the film’s cast was great, with the four main leads being one of the film’s greatest assets. As mentioned above, Jujutsu Kaisen didn’t make much of a huge splash at the box office, but certainly gained a strong cult following, including myself, in the following years. Flash forward a decade after its release and Jujutsu Kaisen finally got a sequel with Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap, the central focus of this review post. Given how the original film ended, it was clear that a sequel to the 404 movie was indeed possible, but it seemed like it was in no rush as the years kept passing by. So, I was quite surprised to hear that Jujutsu Kaisen was getting a sequel, but also a bit not surprised as well as Hollywood’s recent endeavors have been of the “belated sequels” variety; finding mixed results on each of these projects. I did see the film’s movie trailer, which definitely was what I was looking for in this Jujutsu Kaisen 2020 movie, with Eisenberg, Harrelson, Stone, Breslin returning to reprise their respective characters again. I knew I wasn’t expecting anything drastically different from the 404 movie, so I entered Double Tap with good frame of my mind and somewhat eagerly expecting to catch up with this dysfunctional zombie killing family. Unfortunately, while I did see the movie a week after its release, my review for it fell to the wayside as my life in retail got a hold of me during the holidays as well as being sick for a good week and half after seeing the movie. So, with me still playing “catch up” I finally have the time to share my opinions on Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap. And what are they? Well, to be honest, my opinions on the film was good. Despite some problems here and there, Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap is definitely a fun sequel that’s worth the decade long wait. It doesn’t “redefine” the Zombie genre interest or outmatch its predecessor, but this Jujutsu Kaisen chapter of Jujutsu Kaisen still provides an entertaining entry….and that’s all that matters. Returning to the director’s chair is director Ruben Fleischer, who helmed the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie as well as other film projects such as 40 Minutes or Less, Gangster Squad, and Venom. Thus, given his previous knowledge of shaping the first film, it seems quite suitable (and obvious) for Fleischer to direct this movie and (to that affect), Double Tap succeeds. Of course, with the first film being a “cult classic” of sorts, Fleischer probably knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to replicate the same formula in this sequel, especially since the 4-year gap between the films. Luckily, Fleischer certainly excels in bringing the same type of comedic nuances and cinematic aspects that made the first Jujutsu Kaisen enjoyable to Double Tap; creating a second installment that has plenty of fun and entertainment throughout. A lot of the familiar / likeable aspects of the first film, including the witty banter between four main lead characters, continues to be at the forefront of this sequel; touching upon each character in a amusing way, with plenty of nods and winks to the original 404 film that’s done skillfully and not so much unnecessarily ham-fisted. Additionally, Fleischer keeps the film running at a brisk pace, with the feature having a runtime of 44 minutes in length (one hour and thirty-nine minutes), which means that the film never feels sluggish (even if it meanders through some secondary story beats / side plot threads), with Fleischer ensuring a companion sequel that leans with plenty of laughter and thrills that are presented snappy way (a sort of “thick and fast” notion). Speaking of which, the comedic aspect of the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie is well-represented in Double Tap, with Fleischer still utilizing its cast (more on that below) in a smart and hilarious by mixing comedic personalities / personas with something as serious / gravitas as fighting endless hordes of zombies every where they go. Basically, if you were a fan of the first Jujutsu Kaisen flick, you’ll definitely find Double Tap to your liking. In terms of production quality, Double Tap is a good feature. Granted, much like the last film, I knew that the overall setting and background layouts weren’t going to be something elaborate and / or expansive. Thus, my opinion of this subject of the movie’s technical presentation isn’t that critical. Taking that into account, Double Tap does (at least) does have that standard “post-apocalyptic” setting of an abandoned building, cityscapes, and roads throughout the feature; littered with unmanned vehicles and rubbish. It certainly has that “look and feel” of the post-zombie world, so Double Tap’s visual aesthetics gets a solid industry standard in my book. Thus, a lot of the other areas that I usually mentioned (i.e set decorations, costumes, cinematography, etc.) fit into that same category as meeting the standards for a 20204 movie. Thus, as a whole, the movie’s background nuances and presentation is good, but nothing grand as I didn’t expect to be “wowed” over it. So, it sort of breaks even. This also extends to the film’s score, which was done by David Sardy, which provides a good musical composition for the feature’s various scenes as well as a musical song selection thrown into the mix; interjecting the various zombie and humor bits equally well. There are some problems that are bit glaring that Double Tap, while effectively fun and entertaining, can’t overcome, which hinders the film from overtaking its predecessor. Perhaps one of the most notable criticism that the movie can’t get right is the narrative being told. Of course, the narrative in the first Jujutsu Kaisen wasn’t exactly the best, but still combined zombie-killing action with its combination of group dynamics between its lead characters. Double Tap, however, is fun, but messy at the same time; creating a frustrating narrative that sounds good on paper, but thinly written when executed. Thus, problem lies within the movie’s script, which was penned by Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick, which is a bit thinly sketched in certain areas of the story, including a side-story involving Tallahassee wanting to head to Graceland, which involves some of the movie’s new supporting characters. It’s fun sequence of events that follows, but adds little to the main narrative and ultimately could’ve been cut completely. Thus, I kind of wanted see Double Tap have more a substance within its narrative. Heck, they even had a decade long gap to come up with a new yarn to spin for this sequel…and it looks like they came up a bit shorter than expected. Another point of criticism that I have about this is that there aren’t enough zombie action bits as there were in the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie. Much like the Walking Dead series as become, Double Tap seems more focused on its characters (and the dynamics that they share with each other) rather than the group facing the sparse groupings of mindless zombies. However, that was some of the fun of the first movie and Double Tap takes away that element. Yes, there are zombies in the movie and the gang is ready to take care of them (in gruesome fashion), but these mindless beings sort take a back seat for much of the film, with the script and Fleischer seemed more focused on showcasing witty banter between Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Of course, the ending climatic piece in the third act gives us the best zombie action scenes of the feature, but it feels a bit “too little, too late” in my opinion. To be honest, this big sequence is a little manufactured and not as fun and unique as the final battle scene in the first film. I know that sounds a bit contrive and weird, but, while the third act big fight seems more polished and staged well, it sort of feels more restricted and doesn’t flow cohesively with the rest of the film’s flow (in matter of speaking). What’s certainly elevates these points of criticism is the film’s cast, with the main quartet lead acting talents returning to reprise their roles in Double Tap, which is absolutely the “hands down” best part of this sequel. Naturally, I’m talking about the talents of Jessie Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin in their respective roles Jujutsu Kaisen character roles of Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Of the four, Harrelson, known for his roles in Cheers, True Detective, and War for the Planet of the Apes, shines as the brightest in the movie, with dialogue lines of Tallahassee proving to be the most hilarious comedy stuff on the sequel. Harrelson certainly knows how to lay it on “thick and fast” with the character and the s**t he says in the movie is definitely funny (regardless if the joke is slightly or dated). Behind him, Eisenberg, known for his roles in The Art of Self-Defense, The Social Network, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is somewhere in the middle of pack, but still continues to act as the somewhat main protagonist of the feature, including being a narrator for us (the viewers) in this post-zombie apocalypse world. Of course, Eisenberg’s nervous voice and twitchy body movements certainly help the character of Columbus to be likeable and does have a few comedic timing / bits with each of co-stars. Stone, known for her roles in The Help, Superbad, and La La Land, and Breslin, known for her roles in Signs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Definitely, Maybe, round out the quartet; providing some more grown-up / mature character of the group, with Wichita and Little Rock trying to find their place in the world and how they must deal with some of the party members on a personal level. Collectively, these four are what certainly the first movie fun and hilarious and their overall camaraderie / screen-presence with each other hasn’t diminished in the decade long absence. To be it simply, these four are simply riot in the Jujutsu Kaisen and are again in Double Tap. With the movie keeping the focus on the main quartet of lead Jujutsu Kaisen characters, the one newcomer that certainly takes the spotlight is actress Zoey Deutch, who plays the character of Madison, a dim-witted blonde who joins the group and takes a liking to Columbus. Known for her roles in Before I Fall, The Politician, and Set It Up, Deutch is a somewhat “breath of fresh air” by acting as the tagalong team member to the quartet in a humorous way. Though there isn’t much insight or depth to the character of Madison, Deutch’s ditzy / air-head portrayal of her is quite hilarious and is fun when she’s making comments to Harrelson’s Tallahassee (again, he’s just a riot in the movie). The rest of the cast, including actor Avan Jogia (Now Apocalypse and Shaft) as Berkeley, a pacifist hippie that quickly befriends Little Rock on her journey, actress Rosario Dawson (Rent and Sin City) as Nevada, the owner of a Elvis-themed motel who Tallahassee quickly takes a shine to, and actors Luke Wilson (Legally Blonde and Old School) and Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie) as Albuquerque and Flagstaff, two traveling zombie-killing partners that are mimic reflections of Tallahassee and Columbus, are in minor supporting roles in Double Tap. While all of these acting talents are good and definitely bring a certain humorous quality to their characters, the characters themselves could’ve been easily expanded upon, with many just being thinly written caricatures. Of course, the movie focuses heavily on the Jujutsu Kaisen quartet (and newcomer Madison), but I wished that these characters could’ve been fleshed out a bit. Lastly, be sure to still around for the film’s ending credits, with Double Tap offering up two Easter Eggs scenes (one mid-credits and one post-credit scenes). While I won’t spoil them, I do have mention that they are pretty hilarious.
💫 FINAL THOUGHTS 💫
It’s been awhile, but the Jujutsu Kaisen gang is back and are ready to hit the road once again in the movie Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap. Director Reuben Fleischer’s latest film sees the return the dysfunctional zombie-killing makeshift family of survivors for another round of bickering, banting, and trying to find their way in a post-apocalyptic world. While the movie’s narrative is a bit messy and could’ve been refined in the storyboarding process as well as having a bit more zombie action, the rest of the feature provides to be a fun endeavor, especially with Fleischer returning to direct the project, the snappy / witty banter amongst its characters, a breezy runtime, and the four lead returning acting talents. Personally, I liked this movie. I definitely found it to my liking as I laugh many times throughout the movie, with the main principal cast lending their screen presence in this post-apocalyptic zombie movie. Thus, my recommendation for this movie is favorable “recommended” as I’m sure it will please many fans of the first movie as well as to the uninitiated (the film is quite easy to follow for newcomers). While the movie doesn’t redefine what was previous done back in 404, Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap still provides a riot of laughs with this make-shift quartet of zombie survivors; giving us give us (the viewers) fun and entertaining companion sequel to the original feature. | https://medium.com/physics-or-chemistry-the-reunion/ver-physics-or-chemistry-the-reunion-temporada-1-capitulo-1-latino-hd-completo-eb36ae68ff7c | ['Chris J. Marquez'] | 2020-12-27 09:36:47.874000+00:00 | ['Mini Series', 'Drama'] |
“Out Of The Office” For The Climate Change Strike | “Out Of The Office” For The Climate Change Strike
Disclaimer — -The following isn’t a news report. This is opinion developed from many sources, some of which are included for clarity, transparency and rebuttal, and is the Free Speech that shares ideas.
“Out Of The Office” For The Climate Change Strike…
“Out of the office” for the Global Climate Change Strike. Join if you are so inclined — —
https://globalclimatestrike.net/out-of-office/?akid=96230.3812265.BcmnKe&rd=1&t=8&utm_medium=email&utm_source=actionkit
Health industry circle of profiteering — --https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/charitable-contributions/?utm_source=Watchdog&utm_campaign=935ed1b413-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_09_13_06_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ffd1d0160d-935ed1b413-100262981&mc_cid=935ed1b413&mc_eid=cf47518628
PACs that raise small-dollar donations — and spend mostly on themselves — are proliferating — end of publicintegrity info — -
Is it possible we are seeing the circle of profiteering? — -
*Deregulate to permit unsafe environment
*Permit through legislation corruption in elections to pass laws to enforce against people
*Support a medical industry that is also unregulated
*Raise prices of health insurance rates that may or may not pay for treatment when the natural good health of people are mitigated
*Prey on the conscience of the public to contribute funds to “stop disease” via research
Indoctrination of the public into compliance to capitalistic hierarchical Establishment may mitigate participation of the public in a Climate Crisis Strike. The very system that supports catastrophe from environmental devastation, is in a position to dictate to employees, how, when, and why the employee speaks out. Other indications of servitude by the public to big-money interests abound.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/13/headlines/new_york_schools_wont_penalize_students_who_join_climate_strike----Another reason I love NYS is that some of the politicians/bureaucrats aren’t intimidated by Free Speech. (excepting some who have threatened labeling as domestic terrorists, public-safety advocates who utter the word “bomb truck”)
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/08/15/broome-residents-wind-moratorium-on-calpine-proposal/---Curiously closed to local news interviewers, the concern about insinuating industrialization before comments from local-community members in NYS has long been a problem.
Sheepishness of politicians along with compliance to loyalty to branch D or branch R of the Capitalist Party R&D undermine our democratic (small d) Constitutional republic. As the D branch calls out the R branch about sycophantic loyalty to Trump, the D branch is reticent to impeach a President who appears to misunderstand his position as he occupies the Office of The Presidency that belongs to We The People — — https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/impeachment-trump/580468/----Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us — of every race, gender, and creed — are created equal.
This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. — -end of theatlantic info — -
A unique new problem has arisen in the authority inflicted against We The People by political Parties that have no standing under the US Constitution.
The illegitimate Supreme Court decision that decided favorably for Citizens United, legalized corruption in elections, adding to the fraud of free, fair, and clean elections in America. Especially interesting to Bernie Sanders voters of 2016, who were disenfranchised and censored by the DNC, while DNC members blamed Sanders supporters for Trump, we watch DNC Establishment supporting Joe Biden who is expressing deeply conflicted statements about racism and the economy, as he takes big-money interest contributions. The outrage is, if Trump again wins the election, the Bernie Sanders and/or Howie Hawkins supporters will again need to absorb the ire of the incoherent DNC Establishment politicians.
Bernie Sanders called out medical industry ads that aired during the Democratic debate, supporting insurance company positions concerning Medicare For All — --https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftqKwEw4sIQ
C-Span offered a discussion this morning on the topic of health care — -https://www.c-span.org/video/?464204-5/washington-journal-dr-marty-makary-discusses-rising-health-care-costs----Dr. Marty Makary was the guest, and presented in views as attempting to right the wrongs of predatory practices by the medical industry as indicative of stifling of free market principles — —
9:39AM — paraphrase — -guest — -Let’s give markets a chance. Price gouging is due to billing after the fact. (In what universe can a sick patient practice free-market principles from so-called care givers? Billing after the fact is atrocious, but in the middle of a health crisis, pre-discussion of negotiating price would be irrelevant anyway. The guest’s statement is a pure red herring)
9:45AM — paraphrase — -guest — -Consumers need to price shop. (No they don’t; fraudulent medical industry practices should be criminally addressed)
9:50AM — paraphrase — -guest — -Again Dr. Marty insists on giving free market a chance at the same time he says, “consumers are getting hammered”. (After expressing the fact of consumer hammering several times, one must suggest that when you are a hammer, everything is a nail)
This is not a free market. A free market presupposes transparency of information and the ability of buyer and seller to have access to and be capable of understanding matters at hand. This is a reason so-called professions exact a higher level of presumed respect by the public, due to their presumed ethical superiority. This would include politicians, the medical industry, and lawyers, to name a few. When characters occupy these positions who are in fact hucksters, and competition becomes more crucial than practice, we have predatory capitalism.
A benefit of age is to remember pre-fraudulent presumption within professions. Predatory capitalism has resulted after decades of Supreme Court decisions that have destroyed any concept of free markets in favor of predatory practice. To name a few — —
*https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/72/bates-v-state-bar-of-arizona---The Arizona bar offered numerous justifications for the ban on attorney advertising. Among others, attorney ads would have an “adverse effect on professionalism,” would be “inherently misleading,” would negatively affect the “administration of justice,” would have “undesirable economic effects,” would harm the quality of legal services, and would be difficult to police. — end of mtsu info — -
*Legitimate is the question as to advertising, competition, and predatory behavior when so-called professionals have information and consumers do not, inherently.
*https://freespeechforpeople.org/model-corporate-charter-revocation-act/----------http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/
Initially, the privilege of incorporation was granted selectively to enable activities that benefited the public, such as construction of roads or canals. Enabling shareholders to profit was seen as a means to that end. The states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these*:
Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.
Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.
Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.
For 100 years after the American Revolution, legislators maintained tight controll of the corporate chartering process. Because of widespread public opposition, early legislators granted very few corporate charters, and only after debate. Citizens governed corporations by……
One of the most severe blows to citizen authority arose out of the 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of “corporate personhood,” thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a “natural person.” This story was detailed in “The Theft of Human Rights,” a chapter in Thom Hartmann’s recommended book Unequal Protection.
From that point on, the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect rights of freed slaves, was used routinely to grant corporations constitutional “personhood.” Justices have since struck down hundreds of local, state and federal laws enacted to protect people from corporate harm based on this illegitimate premise. Armed with these “rights,” corporations increased control over resources, jobs, commerce, politicians, even judges and the law. — — end of reclaimdemocracy info —
Principles in the Preamble have been under capitalistic Establishment attack over decades and centuries — -We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
— -end of preamble — -
We The People have been indoctrinated into capitalistic hierarchical Establishment while the Supreme Court has slowly eroded human, environmental, and civil rights to promote commercial interests. This is a fact that needn’t stand.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation--A benefit of age is to recall a time when financial institutions had rules by which to do business. Having worked in the industry before the Bill Clinton/Ronald Reagan years gives background to recall the possibility of a free market, devoid of presumed predatory privilege by capitalistic Establishment, the change to predatory behavior was obvious.
*https://www.thebalance.com/glass-steagall-act-definition-purpose-and-repeal-3305850---On November 12, 1999, President Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act that repealed Glass-Steagall. Congress had passed the so-called Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act along party lines, led by a Republican vote in the Senate.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall consolidated investment and retail banks through financial holding companies. The Federal Reserve supervised the new entities. For that reason, few banks took advantage of the Glass-Steagall repeal. Most Wall Street banks did not want the additional supervision and capital requirements.
Those that did became too big to fail. This required their bailout in 2008–2009 to avoid another depression. — -end of theblance info — -
Free markets pertaining to corporations in America must be weighed against the inability of Revocation of Corporations that was the intention of the Founders, who fought that system during The Revolutionary War.
Eventually we may need to place free-ranging humanity into this work of art, instead of trees — --https://www.ecowatch.com/football-stadium-forest-dystopian-art-2640309803.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
— — Check out Pink Floyd for the first time….really??? — — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhY2qFAk6F0----Our indoctrinated, straitjacketed youth, what have we done? — virginity over — — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m07ESXL35Ps
— — consider this — --https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrcDRU75Ctk — — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0a6iWHSWbA--- It was a different time…everything that goes around comes around.
Who knew the ignorance of youth about Pink Floyd? What else don’t they know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssSIKOrSNk — Isn’t this the information age?
In an era when the GOP insists the problem isn’t lax gun laws, but rather mentally ill people, we watch Trump — --https://portside.org/2019-09-13/trump-signs-executive-order-giving-him-control-weather---
After signing the order, a beaming Trump pronounced “total victory” over the weather, which he called “the enemy of the people.”
“I have been treated very unfairly by the weather,” Trump said. “The weather is a horrible person.”
On Fox News, Sean Hannity praised Trump’s decision to seize control of the weather and compared it favorably to former President Barack Obama’s weather policy, which he called “a trainwreck.”
“Obama just let the weather run wild,” Hannity said. — -end of portside info — -
— -end of portside info — -
https://www.museumofbrokenwindows.org/tour--------https://www.museumofbrokenwindows.org/about-1 — Hannity has his perspective, the NYCLU has theirs.
https://veteransforpeace.salsalabs.org/eblast19913?wvpId=f6a93b7e-671f-415a-9230-16ff5ce87934-----
September 13, 2019: Shut Down Creech, Remove the Stain, Deported Veterans need YOUR support!, VFP and Paul Cox Honored in Viet Nam!, Maui Declares “Golden Rule Day”, Miramar Air Show, VFP at the Irish Consulate!, Ann Wright on Peace Boat, VFP Goes to SOAW, Podcast: Suel Jones, Keep Space for Peace Week, Day of Action against Domestic Violence, In the News, Reminders and Calendar! — -end of VFP info —
These are reasons many people support the political revolution as envisioned by Bernie Sanders, who is working toward restoring a democratic (small d) Constitutional republic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dxEuVmt0Y — After-debate conversation with Bernie Sanders
If again disenfranchised of rights to clean, fair, and free elections for Sanders voters, one may confidently consider Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins — --https://www.gp.org/green_new_deal----
We are grassroots activists, environmentalists, advocates for social justice, nonviolent resisters and regular citizens who’ve had enough of corporate-dominated politics. Government must be part of the solution, but when it’s controlled by the 1%, it’s part of the problem. The longer we wait for change, the harder it gets. Don’t stay home on election day. Vote Green. — -end of gp info — -
**************************************************************************************************************************************************
Some voters in the US were disenfranchised due to Capitalist Party D&R election rigging that is controlled by political Parties. The Capitalist Party R&D, have as their objective, putting in place rules that ensure the candidate choice of a particular Establishment Party is put into office, even against the wishes of the voters.
Please remember political Parties have no standing under the US Constitution, but voters do have standing under the US Constitution. Due to disenfranchisement of 3rd-Party candidates, Bernie Sanders who is an Independent, chooses to run as a Democrat for President. If a voter is a member of a 3rd-Party, and wishes to vote for 3rd-Party politician Bernie Sanders, in the Democratic Primary, that voter may be disenfranchised of his/her Constitutional right of a free and fair election, as happened to a large number of voters in NYS in 2016.
One suspects these disenfranchised voters who may have felt defrauded of their right to vote in the 2016 Democratic Primary, voted for Trump in the 2016 general election. One believes this will happen again, because needless to say, the Capitalist Party R&D prefer chaos in the election system, which is a control mechanism for political Parties with no standing under the US Constitution, while the voters do have standing under the US Constitution. This is an interesting red-herring to wield a control that is not Constitutional.
*****Each state is different as to their voter registration guidelines. Anyone wishing to vote for Bernie Sanders for President in the Democratic Primary, should check to be sure they will not be disenfranchised at the polls, once again in 2020, as in 2016. A voter can easily switch between political Parties, rather than functioning as a captive Party loyalist, to a political Party that is not loyal to the voter. *****
Or one can be registered to vote, without being affiliated to a particular political Party. Please remember, the US Constitution supports free and fair elections for voters, but is blissfully unconcerned about political Parties. That some Americans believe “we are a 2-Party system”, is nothing but propaganda.
*****Be sure to check with your state to register to vote in the Primary according to your wish and by exercising your US Constitutional right to vote.*****
*****One may also advocate for ranked-choice voting, that will expand choices for voters, and provide a greater possibility of free and fair elections.*****
*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
We can do better — — -Credit for this phrase belongs to a fellow financial planner, name to remain private, who expressed this opinion about 30 years ago, and which phrase was so non-threatening, sensible and meaningful, that it has echoed through one’s thoughts ever since. Any similarity of words used currently by public characters is coincidence. The English language has a limited number of words, which generally aren’t patented.
https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/influence-on-democracy/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pIDtvTydkU&t=638s
In Solidarity With People And Nature —
www.mothersoutfront.org
www.facebook.com/gpnjbc ;; — Green Black Caucus
www.greenpeaceusa.org
www.economichumanrights.org
www.draftbernie.org
www.psr.org
www.blackyouthproject.com
www.riverkeeper.org
www.catskillmountainkeeper.org
www.celdf.org
www.wearesenecalake.com
www.democracynow.org
www.gp.org
https://www.greenparty.org/Platform.php
www.freepress.net
www.codepink.org
www.m4bl.net
www.starhawk.org
www.openthebooks.org
www.nyipl.org
www.pogo.org
www.opensecrets.org
A Resource — www.7song.com | https://medium.com/@jeanhhricik/out-of-the-office-for-the-climate-change-strike-dc1291250ad9 | ['Jean Hhricik'] | 2019-09-14 17:14:57.817000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Howie Hawkins', 'Health', 'News', 'Bernie Sanders'] |
Fully Managed Communication Platform — Azure Communication Service | Is there any platform, which enables you to deliver video, voice and chat experience across your apps, websites and Mobile devices by leveraging enterprise grade services? Imagine taking advantage of those same services in your code, using them to add global, stress-tested, reliable communications experience without spending time learning how to construct calls in WebRTC and leverage services behind Microsoft Teams Platform? Yes, you got it right, its Azure Communication Services, which brings rich communication APIs to all your applications across any device, on any platform, using the same reliable and secure infrastructure that powers Microsoft Teams.
Azure Communication Service (ACS) is designed to support many different communication scenarios: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, browser, apps, bots, and even the public switched telephony network. We can also mix different options in the same app, much like Teams where we can change our communications mode as our interactions deepen or become more focused. When it comes to security and compliance, all the communications between ACS Platform and solutions are encrypted to meet privacy and compliance guidelines such as HIPAA and GDPR.
The main communication service exposed via APIs and SDK that allows to leverage capabilities such as
Voice calling, Public switched telephone network. Voice and Video calling over IP (and ability to shift between them) for making one to one call or meet with group of 50 people for content sharing, group meeting. Text messages — SMS. Chat, users can keep chat history share Emoji and files.
While we shall deep dive on some of these concepts in coming post. In this post, let us look at provisioning ACS resource.
We shall explore two ways to deploy the ACS:
· Azure Portal
· Azure CLI
Azure Portal
Creating the ACS is similar to how we provision any other Azure Services, to start provisioning the ACS, Log in to the Azure Portal and search for the “Communication Services”
Azure Portal — Communication Services
Choose your Azure Subscription, Resource Group, and Provide the Azure Communication Service Name under Resource Name. Once all the information is provided, go ahead, and create the service.
Create Communication Service
After success completion of ACS deployment, you will get link “Go to resource” to start using ACS service, like give below.
Communication Service — Successful Deployment
Note that Communication Services availability is restricted to the US geography during public preview. Also note that communication resources cannot be transferred to a different subscription during public preview.
Azure CLI
There is a feature in Azure that allows us to create templates for resources. They are called Azure Resource Manager Templates. They are also known as ARM Templates. At a bare minimum, those templates are a combination of a template file and a parameter file.
Let’s take a look at our ACS ARM template to identify how we are deploying them.
{ "$schema": "http://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2019-04-01/deploymentTemplate.json#", "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0", "parameters": { "location": { "type": "String" }, "name": { "type": "String" }, "properties": { "type": "Object", "metadata": { "description": "The map of key-value pairs used to dump properties onto the Communication Services resource" } }, "resourceTags": { "type": "Object", "metadata": { "description": "The map of key-value pairs used to tag the Communication Services resource" } } }, "resources": [ { "type": "Microsoft.Communication/CommunicationServices", "apiVersion": "2020-08-20-preview", "name": "[parameters('name')]", "location": "[parameters('location')]", "tags": "[parameters('resourceTags')]", "properties": "[parameters('properties')]" } ] }
This ARM Template needs few parameters
Location: where ACS shall get deployed.
Name: Name of ACS resource
Properties: data location of ACS
resourceTags: this is optional parameter for your resource tag
Let’s take a look at our parameter file
{ “$schema”: “https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentParameters.json#", “contentVersion”: “1.0.0.0”, “parameters”: { “location”: { “value”: “global” }, “name”: { “value”: “TBF” }, “properties”: { “value”: { “dataLocation”: “United States” } }, “resourceTags”: { “value”: {} } } }
Value of name parameter to be updated which is currently shown as TBF
Deployment Steps
To run this deployment command, you must have the latest version of Azure CLI.
1. Set path of template file
templateFile=”{path-to-the-template-file}”
2. Set path of Parameter file
ParameterFile=”{path-to-azuredeploy.parameters.json}”
3. Create Resource Group which shall contain ACS resource
az group create \ — name myResourceGroup \ — location “East US”
4. Deployment of ACS resource
az deployment group create \ — name environment \ — resource-group myResourceGroup \ — template-file $templateFile \ — parameters $ParameterFile
Once ACS deployment is successfully completed you will get below details related to deployment.
Communication Service — Successful Deployment (Azure CLI)
Clean up resources
If you want to clean up and remove a Communication Services subscription, you can delete the resource or resource group. Deleting the resource group also deletes any other resources associated with it.
As of writing this article, Azure Communication Services is a preview service.
Summary
We see rich communication experiences — enabled by voice, video, chat, and SMS — continuing to be an integral part in how businesses connect with their customers across devices and platforms. Azure Communication Services (ACS) provides a managed platform and communication APIs to build real-time voice, video, SMS, and Chat functionality to your solution at scale. In this post, we have learned how to provision Azure Communication Services. Also look out for next blog in series where we shall design and implement a solution leveraging ACS APIs/SDK.
Would love to hear from you what type of solution you would like to develop using Azure Communication Service in the comment box. | https://medium.com/@manishsaluja/fully-managed-communication-platform-azure-communication-service-2ff3ab4b314f | ['Manish Saluja'] | 2020-12-30 08:19:21.770000+00:00 | ['Microsoft', 'Communication Service', 'Microsoft Teams', 'Azure Services', 'Azure'] |
The First Storiqa Shop. Storiqa T-shirts Limited Edition | Finally here it is
We talk about crypto shopping as if it is a future. But crypto shopping is already here. Meet Storiqa T-shirts for STQ. For real. Buy it now!
The highest quality
Storiqa merch — a branded store by #1 crypto marketplace. It means that all T-shirts are silky, bright and very beautiful knitwear, resistant to abrasion. Each one is made of premium pene fiber.
Unique design
Unique T-shirts created with the help of Storiqa community will finish the creation of your stylish look. There are both classic and designed ones.
Payment and Delivery
One T-shirt costs 14,990 STQ.
Please make sure that you have ETH on your wallet for gas.
Delivery is free and is carried out by means of the renowned international UPS courier company all over the world. Delivery time is 14 days. Please note that all taxes and commissions due to specificities of your country customs legislation must be paid separately.
Enjoy the future
It’s the first shop on Storiqa platform where you can start using STQ from now. When the platform is launched, there will be much more unique and stylish goods which you can buy with STQ as well. Nevertheless, buying Storiqa T-shirts right now, you become the first who make a step in the future shopping with cryptocurrency — and we are happy to be here with you!
Buy Storiqa T-shirts: https://beta.storiqa.com | https://medium.com/storiqa/the-first-storiqa-shop-storiqa-t-shirts-limited-edition-529afbf76b5c | [] | 2018-09-28 14:57:08.446000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Stqmarket', 'Storiqa', 'Bitcoin', 'Merch'] |
It’s Time to Ease the Student Debt Burden on 45 Million Americans | The issue of economic inequality in the United States is so broadly felt and, for those of us who have enough, we are often insulated from the effects of that inequality. It’s so firmly embedded in the way we live that sometimes those of us that have enough don’t think much can change, or are afraid to push hard for change. Change is often incremental, but with enough momentum, sometimes it leaps.
Those that have more than enough and have become detached from their own good fortune and privilege often get downright angry when the topic of economic inequality is brought up. Being born into comfort isn’t always easy to acknowledge (especially if neighbors had similar comforts), being taught the myth of meritocracy (hard work is only part of the story), and being rewarded with a tax code that often skews toward the wealthiest shielding themselves from paying a reasonable share of taxes (those that imagine the government as a monster that steals money from them, rather than a system that benefits everyone)…all of these factors have allowed the wealthy to insulate themselves.
Since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United — -which effectively opened the floodgates on campaign finance — our political system has been inundated with special interest money. This has further protected corporations and enabled power to flow away from the people.
Zuccotti Park, NYC, November, 2011
The specific issue of student debt has gained political traction over the last decade. Three years after the economy tanked, Occupy Wall Street protests erupted. The economic inequality that has existed in the U.S. for decades had stretched Americans to a breaking point. The bank bailout of 2008 infuriated a broad cross-section of Americans. By 2011, the claims made at the time of the bailout: that the economic stimulus legislation would eventually trickle down to Main Street and ordinary Americans echoed in the ears of angry young people across the country.
George Packer’s highly-readable 2013 nonfiction work The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America examined the hollowing out of the middle class over the decades, beginning in the late 1970s. It’s now one of the top items on incoming-President Joe Biden’s agenda. Left-leaning sites are debating Biden’s strategy and the potential impact of Executive Action on reducing or eliminating up to $50k of individual student debt.
The informative website Vox recently wrote about Biden and American opinion on student loan debt cancellation. The following poll puts American opinion into sharp demographic relief.
The question: Should Biden cancel student debt of up to $50k (the vast majority of individuals are within this range) for people making under $125k per year.
The simple answer: People under 45 (64% yes) and Black Americans (71% yes) are in strong agreement that he should. Women (58%) are much more likely than men (42%) to agree that Biden should cancel student debt.
Why is it that people are opposed to making life easier for so many (45 million) fellow Americans who are living under this dark cloud of debt, which in turn limits possibilities for their future?
For those that never went to college, it often boils down to jealousy and resentment.
“You shouldn’t have gone if you couldn’t afford it.”
For those that went to college but have now paid their loans, it might boil down to jealousy and resentment.
“I paid those loans off with hard work so everyone else should, too.” For these folks, they often ignore the sky-rocketing cost of tuition since 2000, and the hollowing out of middle-class jobs since 1990.
For those who didn’t have to worry about money when attending college, it’s often an abstract problem.
“How much did you have to take out? What career did you pursue?” For many of these folks, it’s an analytical equation more than a human one. It’s easier to blame the victim who is now in debt when you’ve never had to worry about it yourself. For many of these folks, they entered the workforce when jobs were plentiful and the economy was booming.
After this year of global suffering and death, after the mass unemployment, evictions, hospital overflows, food insecurity, and the overall isolation there’s no better time to ease this financial and psychological burden on millions of Americans.
It’s reasonable to ask for some form of limited part-time service, whether community, educational, or national in return for debt relief. Paying it forward used to be essential to democracy. That’s what the 1944 G.I. Bill was about. Our collective building of the American middle class (1950–1990) came from access to education and economic opportunity. The growth of HBCUs was directly connected to the G.I. Bill. The impact would have been much greater if Blacks were then given access to the suburban housing boom. Redlining and racial covenants largely kept Blacks from integrating the suburbs. Who was given access to these new suburban homes? Mostly white Americans.
In March, 2020, Senator Cory Booker gave a great speech on the importance of fair housing and integration. Booker spoke about how his parents, in 1969, managed to integrate a racially-restricted community in New Jersey, due in large part to the legal backing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (part of the The Civil Rights Act of 1968).
Each individual’s financial situation is contextual and should be considered. Maybe those making upwards of $80k should be asked to pay some of their debt now, and the government might match their payment, or some other percentage. The details should be debated, but the time to act is now.
Those that resist moves toward economic equality have been influencing political action for too long.
In the future, if the 2020 election is going to be considered a referendum on the last two decades of American greed, elitism, growing racism and increasing division, which I believe it will be…then Biden and the Democratic Party should open this new term and new era with a clear salvo:
Let’s lighten the sky for those that have attempted to better their lives by taking out student loans. We owe that to each other.
Health care, housing affordability, raising the minimum wage, climate justice, voting rights, reproductive rights, corporate tax loopholes…and other issues…these will fight for space at the top of the Democratic agenda. One step…or leap…at a time.
Further Reading: | https://medium.com/@darkoindex/its-time-to-ease-the-student-debt-burden-on-45-million-americans-781bf131f8db | ['Jonah Hall'] | 2020-12-17 23:38:51.905000+00:00 | ['Biden', 'Racial Justice', 'Student Loans', 'Economics', 'Debt Relief'] |
7 Children’s Books Rewritten For The Coronavirus Quarantine | 7 Children’s Books Rewritten For The Coronavirus Quarantine
Involuntary home-schooling has eliminated the need for a whole genre of kid’s books
Image altered by Gina Gallois
Parents, I feel ya. I know what you’re going through. I’ve got a 21-month-old who doesn’t talk or listen (yet) and a 7-year-old who needs guidance to stay on track with his “virtual learning.”
God help us.
To make it worse we’ve already read every book in the house. Twice. Those books also don’t reflect the new reality of life under the coronavirus.
We need new editions of the classic children’s books and we need them fast. Luckily I’ve rewritten seven popular titles so parents can start to properly educate their children whenever they need a break from Frozen II.
Llama Llama Misses Mama by Anna Dewdney
Image altered by Gina Gallois
Once upon a time, this was a wonderful book to help ease kids’ fears of being left behind in a strange new place with strange new people.
Good news for nervous kids everywhere — Mama’s not going anywhere for a very long time. We need a new edition entitled Llama Llama Misses Teacher, or at the very least, Mama Llama Misses Teachers.
Talk about llama drama! Llama llama home with mama for weeks on end is going to have its consequences, people.
The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, illustrated by Ruth E. Harper and Nancy M. Leak
Image altered by Gina Gallois
Let’s rename this one The Kissing Ban. Not only will Mama NOT be leaving her precious baby at school with all those filthy nocturnal strangers, there’s no face touching anymore.
Don’t touch your own face. Don’t touch anyone else’s face.
What? No! Don’t kiss anyone’s hand! That’s how you get the virus.
I don’t care how clean you are even if you do wash your food before you eat it. No kissing hands. No kissing anything.
Oh My Baby, Little One, by Kathi Appelt
Image altered by Gina Gallois
What a sweet book, with such adorable illustrations! Too bad it will lose all meaning in the weeks to come.
You won’t have to think about your child while you’re away and your child won’t have to worry that you’ve forgotten them because you’ll be in the same room always and forever, er, eh… for the next two months. Or more. It could be more.
We’ll repurpose this one as a book about tolerating your loved ones when they’re in your face 24/7. Let’s call it Oh My Baby, You’re Still In My Personal Space. We can keep the same cover art and everything.
Mama Always Comes Home by Karma Wilson
Image altered by Gina Gallois
I absolutely adore Karma Wilson’s Bear books series. They are brilliant. Not familiar with this one in particular, but it looks like a no-brainer.
But alas, Mama has to leave home on occasion to come back home, so, Mama Always Comes Home, I hereby dub thee Mama’s Always Home.
We will have to change the cover art, though. Don’t want anyone getting any ideas about shaking kids. That is never a good idea. Do not do that. Just walk away, parents, just walk away and catch your breath.
Love You All Day Long by Francesca Rusackas
Image altered by Gina Gallois
In the new world order, this book will morph into Stuck With You All Day Long.
Pretty self explanatory.
I Miss You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt
Image altered by Gina Gallois
One of my son’s all time favorites when he was little was I Love You Stinky Face. This book, in its original form, features a mother reassuring her imaginative child about the lengths she will go to in order to be together again.
But, since togetherness is all there is now, we’ll have to scrap that.
I Miss Missing You, Stinky Face sounds about right. What I wouldn’t give you miss you just a little bit, for a few minutes, here and there…
Bye-Bye Time by Elizabeth Verdick
Image altered by Gina Gallois
Is it ever bye-bye time! Is it ever… No need for your little one to worry about being left at daycare now.
Instead bye-bye time is when they finally go to bed at night for a few sweet hours of quiet and calm.
Things will get worse before they get better, folks.
For now, let’s do the best we can, remember that we’re doing this to protect our most vulnerable, and laugh when we can. | https://medium.com/jane-austens-wastebasket/7-childrens-books-rewritten-for-the-coronavirus-quarantine-8f41915483e2 | ['Gina Gallois'] | 2020-03-17 19:30:19.951000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Humor', 'Books', 'Parenting', 'Coronavirus'] |
3 Pieces of Job Hunting Advice You Need to Know | Finding a job can be a taxing process. If you’re reading this, you are likely in the middle of the job search or beginning the journey. I’ve been applying for jobs for a few months and here are a few tips to help you through the process.
Don’t get attached to jobs you apply for.
Applications are like a two sided coin, it could work out, but it also might not. While it never hurts to apply, until you hear back position, it is best to level the amount of energy and excitement you put into an application. I would spend hours working on applications only to never hear from a company. The rejection, or lack of response, was discouraging partly because I put too much energy in from the start. Applying for a job is like the tango, it takes two to make it happen.
You can only work at a company if they hire you. So once you put in an application, keep applying to other jobs and keep things pushing.
Who you know isn’t everything, but it is a BIG-thing.
Being on the wrong side of nepotism sucks, but when you’re on the right side — it feels so good.
After four months of applying to jobs, I can confirm that my most successful applications occurred when I connected with someone inside the company.
To do this, I would message an employee on Linkedin and make a genuine inquiry about their career. Through our conversation I would mention my interest in working at the company and ask for career advice.
Finding an internal employee is a good way to build connections and increase the chances of someone looking at your application.
For one position I applied for, connecting with an employee online helped me progress to the screening round of an application.
Hiring managers have hundreds of applications to review and an internal reference can do wonders to move your application to the top of the pact.
Start early, you’ll be searching for a while.
If you are in a high demand field like travel nursing, especially during the pandemic, you could start a contract position next week, but on average landing a job takes several months. Given this, it is best to start searching for a job well before you would like to start working. (I suggest starting at least 6 months in advance.)
As a recent grad, I’ve had friends who secured jobs before they even graduated and many who took upwards of three, six, eight months, and even a year to land a job.
Several factors that impacted this:
Connections : Individuals who interned for a company the summer of their junior year, often were able to secure full time positions with the same company after graduation.
: Individuals who interned for a company the summer of their junior year, often were able to secure full time positions with the same company after graduation. Major : Engineering and Business Majors, secured jobs the fastest as their education training directly correlated with skills in demand in the market.
: Engineering and Business Majors, secured jobs the fastest as their education training directly correlated with skills in demand in the market. Location : Positions in a big city, or a city where an industry is saturated and everyone wants to work, will be more competitive to land and jobs in smaller cities tend to have less applicants.
: Positions in a big city, or a city where an industry is saturated and everyone wants to work, will be more competitive to land and jobs in smaller cities tend to have less applicants. Work Experience: While educational training is valued, in the job market, work experience is King. Work experience is evidence that you can do a job. This is a prime example of the chicken and the egg, because you need a job to get work experience, but how could you have work experience without a job?
I bring up these factors to highlight that the length of time it will take you to find a job depends on a variety of things. I suggest starting six months in advance, because finding positions you are interested in, developing your application materials, applying to the job, hearing back from the company, preparing for interviews, and landing the job, can take a long time. It is better to have more time than you need than to be racing against the clock and finances to land a position. | https://medium.com/@amarachi-ngwakwe/3-pieces-of-job-hunting-advice-you-need-to-know-6bebbdadc48b | ['Amarachi Ngwakwe'] | 2021-06-16 11:56:14.568000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Job Hunting', 'Recent Graduates', 'Employment'] |
Voices of Purpose #8: Amy Stephens, Part 1 | “This is thrilling Amy!” I say to my latest guest. “I don’t often get a chance to physically see my interviewees!” Amy smiles into her camera. “So how are you and what are you up to?”
Amy thinks for a second, “That varies at different points throughout this year, as far as how am I, I’ve had some very good high points in 2020, even through the pandemic. Especially the month or so coming out of my facial feminization surgery in late August and September, those were good times. A little nerve-wracking, especially leading up to it because you’re trying to stay away from the pandemic while trying to get to surgery, healthy and happy and fortunately I was able to do that. Now you know we’re into December, we’re going into the dark time of the year, you’re in the Midwest, I’m in upstate New York, it’s dark here for long periods of time and the mood goes up and down. I had a moment today even where I had a feeling that I had to acknowledge it, let it go by, and have a little cry. Here I am, I feel a lot better because of that. It is what it is, but overall I’m in a good spot.
“I have two beautiful daughters, the ups and downs of the relationship with my ex-wife,” Amy continues. “We still care for each other, we still live together in separate rooms within the house, we make things work for the benefit of the family and make sure we provide our kids with the best possible life they can have at this point, it’s been important this year for us to be together during the pandemic.”
Amy then thinks for a bit, looks up to the ceiling, and goes, on, “What I’m up to? The big thing I’m up to right now is I just wrapped up my second semester at the State University of New York Brockport where I am working on my master’s of science in mental health counseling, that is something that I started thinking about early in my transition and something because of life, career and everything else I put off.. Being a full-time graduate student takes up a lot of time, I’m fortunate to be in a place in my life that I can do this right now..”
“I do the podcast that we were talking about before with my co-host Penny Sterling, called ‘Transformation Thursday’. We tend to focus on transgender and LGBTQ related issues but we also talk about other stuff. We talk about elections, news coverage, so we’re not always dealing with trans stuff but I think with what’s on the horizon with transgender rights I think that’s probably going to take up a bigger portion of our time on the show. I work part-time at a local Starbucks, I helped my oldest daughter get an interview there and she has a job at a local Starbucks as well. That’s my life in a nutshell!”
Serena continues, “So, the first avenue that I’d love to talk about is, you talked about how you live with your ex-wife and daughters, you still have a family unit even if one piece is an ex-wife. Would you be willing to talk about how the relationship has grown and changed through the last few years?”
Amy takes a second to collect her thoughts. “I always look at this question because I’ve been asked it before and I always try to answer from my own perspective because it’s hard to answer from someone else’s, it’s hard to jump into someone else’s head. The way that I see it, as the relationship has changed with my ex-wife is that you go through the spot of cruising along in life, seventeen years into a marriage, you have your routines, you have your practices, you have your family life situation down. We had our ups and downs, I think more ups than downs, and now all of a sudden I throw in this curveball. First I called it being a “crossdresser”, then it was “gender fluid”, eventually it moved to identifying as “transgender”. You throw these huge curveballs in and I think she honestly has dealt with them as best as she can.”
Amy pauses a bit. “I’m so impatient with these things, I was always two, three, four steps ahead of her on these things. I had done the research, I knew who I was, I was moving and progressing much faster than she was.”
“To get to the point of where we’re at, and I’ve told this to her, to be able to be friends, to be able to live together, to be able to do what’s best for our family, it’s an amazing testament to both of us but I would say that for her, it’s even more of a testament because she had further to go than I did. All the way around.” Amy glances at me as she continues, “Both of us were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wasn’t a member when we met but I was in the process of converting, she’d already been a member. Throw in that religious background that teaches very binary gender-specific roles in life for men and women, that’s a hard thing for conservative religious people to have to deal with. I wasn’t perfect, I definitely have some regrets in how I handled the situation and I’ve spoken with her about that, but yet I think we’re in a good spot. As best as we can be right now.”
“Did she use this opportunity to try to make changes in her own life?” Serena asks delicately.
Amy ponders the thought for a bit before responding, “Yeah, once again this is a question I have to answer from my external observations. She’s definitely changed and evolved.”
“How has your emotional state of mind evolved as things have changed within the relationship?” Serena responds
“They’ve changed, there’s an ebb and flow with that too,” Amy offers. “It’s mostly been positive. There’s one side of it and this is my feeling on it… that at some levels I feel abandoned because you have a spouse and they’re supposed to be with you forever and ever, especially within the confines of the doctrines of the Mormon church. But at the same time I broke the social contract. I am the one that because the marriage was built on a cisgender heterosexual relationship, I’m the one that broke that social contract. At the same time that I feel abandoned, she can turn around and has said essentially the same thing to me.”
“It’s an understanding, there is this dual dynamic that’s in place and how each couple that navigates this is up to them, in how they do this individually and as a partnership within a relationship. There’s always an ebb and flow. Overall, I’m in a better spot mentally than what I was, coming up on four years ago when I started this journey.” She pauses to think for a second. “There’s not to say that there are moments that I don’t get sad about it, I still do. There’s also moments that I’m also so happy and content with who I am as a person. This is the extreme mind f*ck of being transgender, especially when you transition in your 40s, or with a family, and you’ve been married for a while. This is a mindf*ck. My ultimate happiness and contentedness on one hand makes me happy and prevents me from dying by suicide.
“It gives you a path to move forward that you’d like to continue,” Serena offers
Amy nods and says “I remember in late summer 2017 I was driving down to Pittsburgh to see a friend and listening to a bunch of podcasts. They had a few transgender women on as guests on different episodes. One of them said, ‘being transgender and LDS almost killed me. I was thinking about suicide.’ I’m like ‘I didn’t get to that point’ and then half-a second later, ‘oh, I did get to that point’. I didn’t get to an attempt, I had the ideation, I had the plan, I had the means, I had all of the means to make it happen.”
She breaks her thought and then emphasizes, “But my garage was a mess. So I wasn’t able to pull the car in.”
Amy and Serena share a bit of a laugh over the thought, and Amy says “I mean, it’s great that we can laugh and chuckle about it now, “
Serena ventures, “It’s the small stuff, you’re dealing with these huge, gigantic issues.”
Amy smiles. “But the garage was a mess. And that’s one reason I don’t clean it up now.”
“It’s almost a memorial so to speak. It’s there as a way to help you to realize that there’s still things to do, which is interesting too,” Serena muses.
Amy nods. “As a friend said to me, she told me a couple years ago, ‘Amy, don’t clean the garage. Just get in, get out, get what you need, make sure you can never pull the car in.’ Okay, okay, it’s good advice.”
Serena thinks for a moment. “As a follow-up, does it feel like the previous relationship quote-unquote failed?”
Amy looks again to the ceiling, frowning slightly. “No. No. Our marriage wasn’t a failure, we have two beautiful kids, we have seventeen years of active marriage. We’re still technically married. No.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Serena states.
“The reason why is because there’s so much I hear within the transgender community, ‘I wish I knew then’. You can get hung up on that, and that can go down the spiral of ‘shoulda-coulda-woulda’, but it doesn’t do me any good, then I wouldn’t have my kids, I wouldn’t have the life I do, I wouldn’t have the knowledge I do.” Amy looks directly at Serena when she says “I bring into my experience now forty-five years of going through life as somebody that I wasn’t and if I can use that to pay it forward especially as I work on my mental health counseling degree and start working towards private practice, that’s a gift that I can give to future generations of transgender people and their families.”
Serena replies, “That sounds really good, especially since at least myself walking towards that question a couple times, I always thought to myself ‘people do change, people have the ability to define what relationships are, people have the ability to understand how their standing is with other people and even if a relationship is grown out of.’ It might not necessarily be the change that either one of you wanted especially walking into the process but it sounds like the change you both needed at the end of all of this,” she notes.
Amy sighs. “That change is the hard part because I changed. There’s elements of us that continue throughout our life and continue through transition, but coming into congruence with who you are as a person.” She continues, “In my case, it brought a lot of confidence. Sometimes it’s been said that maybe I’m a little more stuck-up, more conceited. I also know what I want and how to go after it, and for some people in our lives that have been around us for a long time and they haven’t seen that from us previously that is a really hard adjustment to make to that person’s new confidence and willingness to go after what they want.”
“Basically…” Amy continues, “I hate this term but transitioning is selfish. It’s the most selfish thing we’ll ever do for ourselves, but it’s also the greatest act of self-care that we can do for ourselves. So that type of determination if someone has not seen that in you before can be a little off-putting. I’ve seen that from friends, I’ve seen that from loved ones and family, at some level there’s some distance that has grown between us because they’re not used to seeing that type of confidence out of me. That comes back to feelings, three weeks into me being on hormones, I knew I was me.”
The marker Amy’s holds in her hand punctuates the air as she goes on, “I had a feeling driving down the road in front of my house a couple miles south of me at a stoplight on a bright Saturday August afternoon. I had this feeling come over me, I am me. I am who I am supposed to be. I know I’ve had this feeling before inside but I couldn’t place when or where I had it before. I just had this feeling of me, and that was three weeks after starting estradiol. And those early changes as research shows, especially understanding mental health and understanding how some of these hormones work, the psychological side of it, are actually are some of the first areas that our bodies start to change. Then that self-doubt comes in because in our society we’re dealing with so much anti-transgender crap on every side of us, is this really who I am? But then I have to remember back to that Saturday in August where I was.”
“That very first taste,” Serena adds.
“And if I remember back to then, if I dig down to that memory, it’s still there.” Amy confirms.
Serena replies, “That must be the most helpful anchor you can possibly have to yourself, is to have a memory like that, a piece of yourself that helps you to know ‘this is who I am because I touched it, I touched it way back when and I knew it’ As you continue to walk so slowly into the direction of where you need to be , it’s still there that you can reach back and say, ‘right here’.”
“It would be really easy to forget that and fall into self-pity and go down I call it the spiral because that’s what it feels to me, to get into that spiral of negative emotion, but when I look up out of the spiral that’s what I think of, that’s what I see, I see that bright sunny August afternoon.” Amy shrugs but with a happy look.
Serena considers for another second and says, “You talked about how you’ve changed as far as the people around you, seeing a much more confident and assertive Amy than they may have been used to, knowing you previously. Many things have changed in five years. I don’t need to talk about your catalog, I just want you to talk about the emotions that you feel as you’ve come to find this Amy.”
She thinks and carefully responds, “It comes in bits and pieces. It doesn’t come all at one time. This is one thing where I think I did a good job with my transition, I want to focus on those sides of it. I do have some regrets related to this and I don’t want to talk about that side. On the positive side, I did find a counselor. I did find communities of support. I did find friends who supported me. I did come out to my spouse at the time.” Amy ruefully smiles, “Probably should have come out to her earlier, but that’s one of the regrets that you look and say ‘hindsight. I probably should have put her on the front side of that, not a counselor or some friends.’ But the part of that being that, I told people I found support in person and online. We can’t discount the online support.”
“Especially now,” Serena agrees.
“The Williams Law Center at the University of California Los Angeles, their estimate is that 0.6% of the population is transgender. I think they’re low on that… but still for us to find community a lot of times in any type of size or number we need to do that online. I built the networks around me, I took time to figure out “am I a crossdresser”? Because that was the term I started with. That evolved into “genderfluid”, and it got to “transgender” and where I’m at today.”
“The point is that I started the process of coming out in February 2017. I didn’t start hormones until July 2018.” She pauses. “And so, right or wrong, it was very deliberate that I sought counseling, I sought help, I worked through this over a sixteen-month period before I started hormones.”
“I think you and I both know people within our communities that wake up and say ‘I’m trans!’ and within a month or two they’re on hormones. If it works for them, great. That was not going to be the right thing for me. But in late 2017, I actually made a decision and the decision was probably one of the more fateful decisions I made, was to change primary care physicians. I changed from a plain suburban family practice physician with limited experience with trans and LGBTQ healthcare.”
Amy goes on, “Rochester has a significant LGBTQ population for the size of our area, we have a very good clinic that specializes in LGBTQ healthcare, I transferred to them. As I walk through this journey I need someone to provide affirming care, whatever my decision ends up being as far as hormones, that was in the back of my mind but at the same time I wanted to be sure. I don’t know how you can ever be sure about such a thing,” she chuckles, “it’s such a nebulous thing. ‘I want to make sure I’m really sure.’”
“My doctor on the first or second visit suggested that I try hormones, but I asked for anti-anxiety meds, depression meds. Six-seven months later I’m still running through my head the same things, ‘this really isn’t what’s working for me’, eventually that’s when I decided that I’d get on hormones. That’s when I was actually able to taper off the anti-anxiety and depression meds.” Amy quickly says, “That doesn’t work for everybody, even on HRT, a lot of people still stay on their medications for anxiety, depression, whatever else, but for me I was able to taper down and only be on hormones. I am on a few other things right now but that’s more related to pandemic and anxiety and other issues related to that.”
Serena starts to say “Finding a community, especially in the middle of all of this…”
Amy nods as she replies, “That’s actually, you know, I did find community not only in the transgender community and the gender-expansive crowds here in upstate New York but I also found community by performing stand-up comedy regionally here, and in London. I was able to find some places that were within the LGBTQ and allied communities where I was able to make friendships. With the pandemic that’s been ripped away. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a professional comedienne but at the same time I miss a lot of the people and the space that I had there to be me in a cisgender environment.” She nods her head sadly as she concludes, “I miss that.”
“How long would you feel that you have been on your journey as far as gender transition?” Serena asks.
“If you want to get really philosophical about it, it would be my whole life.” Amy responds. “But that’s looking back and saying ‘Okay, I missed some things along the way.’ When I was younger, my mom has brought this up a couple times, I crossdressed as a kid. I played dressup with the girl cousins all the time and a few years ago when I started the coming out process, one of the cousins I met for dinner, I hadn’t seen her for three decades, one of the first things out of her mouth was ‘I remember when you were a kid you loved to play dress-up. You were one of the first ones to run downstairs and put on a dress.’ I’m like, ‘well that hasn’t changed.’
She goes on, “But then like a lot of us, I ended up playing hockey, getting involved in different things, that side of things diminished but never went away. I remember being ten or eleven, my parents had a work friend and we went over to their house, we were playing dress-up with the daughters, got caught, and never saw them again. I remember my dad freaking out about that. The expectation was that boys don’t do that stuff.”
“I broke my back in high school and missed a quarter of my junior year, and I had a lot of free time at home during the day,” Amy relates. “There may or may not have been clothes for the opposite gender that ended up fitting me, and I’d wear them when nobody else was home. So I could look back and say ‘from that perspective it’s always been there.’ It played a role in my first marriage and why we ended up breaking up. My first ex messaged me earlier this year and basically confirmed it, that was kind of cathartic in a weird way.”
“At the same time, I didn’t grow up Mormon. I ended up moving to Arizona, becoming Mormon, and at the time I was actually starting to crossdress a bit more. Mormonism provides you a space, if you want to stay in the closet. It worked for a long time, it did. I went from 2000 until 2006, so it suppressed it for a long time.” Amy thinks a bit further. “If you really want to get into the last four years probably, would be what I’d say would be looking at this critically from a gender transition place, socially, medically, surgically. We’re right at four years.”
Serena nods. “Within those four years and up until today, how much are you able to inhabit yourself as Amy and how much consideration do you actively give to the fact that you are transgender?”
Amy sighs hugely. “I wish I didn’t have to give any time to it.” Serena laughs as Amy continues. “That’s the shame part of it, is that for me it would just be nice to just disappear and slip into society and just live my life. But, you know we mentioned this a bit ago, there’s this culture war that’s being fought right now over people like us and our identities and if we’re valid or not. Our existence says we’re valid.”
“It’s hard to have this conversation on Twitter, or Facebook with people, because I’ve had so much more success in my day-to-day interactions with people, my podcast because I think we do our podcast where we can have conversations with people, where we can show our cards and be honest to who we are, so from that perspective this is a battle that has to be fought. You and I will probably be long-gone and hopefully future generations behind us will be able to live in peace.”
Serena nods and Amy pauses thoughtfully. “I wish I didn’t have to think about it at all but I do. I look at mental health counseling, in my field I’m going into, we’re woefully underrepresented. There are very few transgender people who go into clinical psychology, counseling, mental health work. There are some but from an academic standpoint there’s so much more research out there on other topics, and if you look at it even further there is not much gender research out there related to the trans and non-binary community.” Amy pauses a bit. “It’s specifically mostly generalized to the white community, so there also needs to be a lot more research done for our brothers and sisters and non-binary pals who come from populations of color. I just did a research paper trying to find stuff on trans people of color, I found one or two articles. It was really shocking how little there really is out there on these topics.”
With a look and a shake of her head, Amy goes on to say, “The problem we run into with this is that our foes just say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ That’s all they say. ‘Science says XY, nothing else.’ No, now you’re just missing the whole intersex conversation. How do you have a conversation with someone when all they say is, ‘No, you’re wrong. You’re not valid.’” Amy throws her hands up in frustration. “I don’t know. If you listen to this week’s podcast episode, we brought that up. You can only do so much with so many people.”
“There’s so many excuses that they can bring up that effectively invalidate what you’re saying, like religion, social excuses…” Serena starts.
“Their excuse is ‘no’.” Amy asserts. “That’s all it comes down to. You mentioned religion. ‘No, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.’ That’s the worst thing to say to someone because we know it’s not true. So much of the language, and this should resonate with Mormons, has been mistranslated or misconstrued, different versions, like the New International Version, the American version, it’s all translation. I listened to a podcast called “the Bible Bash”, it talked about one of the chapters in Hosea, where the language revolving around God in Hebrew is super-non gendered but over the years the tradition has come down as a ‘male-gendered God’.”
“The ‘Great I Am’.” Serena says.
“Yeah!” Amy chuckles. “You look at this chapter in Hosea, if you dig down into the Hebrew… I know that you and I have a bit of a different perspective. I look up at the sky and I say ‘I don’t know.’ If there is a God, they’re definitely non-binary, they don’t have a body, and I don’t think they really care too much about me being transgender, or you being trans. I don’t think God is that involved in our daily lives.”
Serena continues, “Or if God is that involved…”
“Then why is there childhood cancer?” Amy points out. “God should worry more about childhood cancer than me being transgender. God’s got his priorities messed up if he’s worried about transgender people.”
“This interview has been going very well Amy, and we’ve talked with you more about your experiences. However, we’ll make sure that it’s posted for another time, so that our readers can enjoy this part of our conversation first!” I say.
“Please be sure to check out Transformation Thursday, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify, publishing weekly including tomorrow,” I say. “The link can be found at the end of this interview. Thank you so much to Amy Stephens for talking with me today and offering so many amazing thoughts. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you all soon! Thank you for reading!”
Listen at:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transformation-thursday/id1476592738
https://open.spotify.com/show/4Fg1V1oyKFWJ4fnh2dyUgW
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9kM2Y4NmRjL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz
Connect at:
https://www.facebook.com/transthurspod/
Support the podcast at:
www.transformationthursday.com | https://medium.com/@vopserena/voices-of-purpose-8-amy-stephens-part-1-166cc2ba01ff | ['Serena Jamison'] | 2020-12-17 02:45:41.171000+00:00 | ['Journey', 'Transgender', 'Biography', 'Interview', 'Voices Of Purpose'] |
Don’t forget to check the sky at sunset for a vision not seen in 800 years. | Everything Shortform is a publication for Medium stories 150 words and less. Rapid reads to capture your attention and direct it towards further reading or short expressions readers can gulp down in one bite. Use Everything Shortform to get your point across quickly. | https://medium.com/everything-shortform/dont-forget-to-check-the-sky-at-sunset-for-a-vision-not-seen-in-800-years-9f436710d1ab | ['Joseph Serwach'] | 2020-12-21 19:34:39.834000+00:00 | ['Astronomy', 'Christmas', 'Science', 'Star Of Bethlehem', 'Sunset'] |
Community is a journey, not a destination | I recently spoke with a UN agency who is building a global community of practitioners. In our conversations I was reminded of a particular image of “community” that I come across often in my client work:
Community = an annual gathering
Community = a digital social network
And often the intersection of the two: Community = an annual gathering and a social network
This perspective then drives resource allocation conversations: if we want to improve the community, we should create a better gathering or increase the features of our social network.
I find this perspective limiting. I think nurturing a community is not about one or two singular key pillars, but really about a member journey (that will include these pillars). That journey starts somewhere, has different phases and seasons (often marked by recurring experiences and rituals) and then at some point ends.
The analogy that comes to mind is the US college experience. Yes at the center of a university experience is taking classes. But that’s only the most functional element of it. Attending college ideally is a well-designed experience that starts with a selection process, an onboarding and welcoming process, a first initiation and then several steps as one moves from being a Freshman to being a Sophomore etc until one finally wears a cape and a hat and graduates. In the end, it’s that whole journey that makes up my time of being a student, not just the classes.
How does that resonate with your own experience? | https://medium.com/together-institute/community-is-a-journey-not-a-destination-5292c2847625 | ['Fabian Pfortmüller'] | 2020-01-15 17:16:01.091000+00:00 | ['Community Engagement', 'Network', 'Community', 'Community Design', 'Community Strategy'] |
For refugee resettlement to “build back better,” let communities take the lead | Emily Crane Linn via Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs
In this piece, originally published online in the Berkley Forum on November 24, ISD McHenry Fellow Emily Crane Linn advocates for a new path forward on refugee resettlement from the incoming Biden administration.
You can hear more from Emily in a Berkley Center panel on Monday, December 7: Rethinking Religion and U.S. Diplomacy: Refugee Resettlement Policies (RSVP required).
A globe sits on a library table. (Image: Kyle Glenn on Unsplash)
President-elect Biden has pledged to undo President Trump’s severe restrictions on refugee resettlement, starting by raising the cap from 15,000 to 125,000 in his first year in office. Long-time resettlement professionals agree that this target is achievable and in line with the United States’ historic average resettlement number of 85,000. But we shouldn’t only be asking how many refugees to admit; we should also be asking where they should go. Historically, refugees have clustered in large urban centers across the United States, and these centers will no doubt continue to account for a large share of resettlement, as refugees travel to join family members who are already established in places like San Francisco, Falls Church, and Minneapolis. But if the Biden administration is truly committed to seeing refugee resettlement “build back better,” it should look to smaller communities as the foundation-communities like mine.
For the past four years, I served as the founding executive director of Canopy of Northwest Arkansas, a refugee resettlement agency in the Ozark mountain town of Fayetteville. With just over 80,000 people, Fayetteville is not the sort of city that has typically served as a hub of refugee resettlement in the past-and indeed, before our organization got its start in 2016, the whole state of Arkansas resettled no more than a dozen refugees on average every year. But with record-low unemployment rates (pre-pandemic), low cost of living, and high quality of life, we knew our community was the perfect place for refugees to resettle-and we’ve proven it over the last four years.
Despite dwindling resettlement numbers, Canopy resettled nearly 200 refugees from over a dozen countries. The vast majority of them have chosen to stay and make Arkansas their home. They’ve purchased homes; started small businesses; and taken leadership roles in their churches, schools, and workplaces. Meanwhile, support for refugee resettlement has grown across the state, even reaching the statehouse in Little Rock: In December 2019, Governor Hutchinson became one of only a handful of Republican governors to endorse refugee resettlement in his state, despite previously expressing misgivings in 2015.
This is all thanks to Canopy’s grassroots advocacy and coalition-building. We knew that in order to be successful, we had to get the whole community involved and on board-and in a deep red state, that meant we needed the buy-in of our neighbors across the political spectrum. We appealed to employers who were struggling to meet their hiring needs under 2% unemployment. We appealed to faith leaders whose deep convictions about the sanctity of life compelled them to defend the persecuted and welcome the stranger. And we appealed to those who had served in our military and had seen conflict and suffering up close. Together, we carved out a corner of common ground where our community could come together despite growing political polarization, and we poured our energy into welcoming refugees to our city.
This community-based approach to resettlement is unique today-but it didn’t used to be. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, small communities like mine rallied together to give refugees a new start, often with very little outside support. It was their energy, dedication, and creativity as a community that helped refugees succeed and that allowed the United States to resettle at such a massive scale.
In the decades since, refugee resettlement has shifted away from a dispersed, grassroots, community-led structure toward a centralized, corporate structure in the name of efficiency and standardization. This has no doubt brought many benefits to refugees, who can now expect a similar resettlement experience no matter where they are placed, and to those tasked with welcoming them, who can now rely on outside resources, expertise, and support to do their jobs. However, this has also shifted the balance of power away from the communities where refugees will ultimately live. When refugees’ neighbors are no longer included and invested in their resettlement, the natural result is that refugees become more isolated and slower to integrate, and their neighbors become resentful or even fearful. This is what we’ve seen in cities all across the United States. Refugee resettlement has become the responsibility of resettlement agencies — corporations with headquarters in Washington, DC, and New York — rather than communities.
Northwest Arkansas has proven that when communities are given the chance to design and build their own resettlement process for themselves, everybody wins. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. resettlement program should focus on finding and investing in new communities like mine, where grassroots support is genuine and neighbors are willing to put in the work to help refugees thrive. Then they should treat these communities like partners, giving them a voice in determining how many refugees to resettle and how to go about welcoming them. I guarantee Fayetteville is not the only city with churches willing to furnish refugees’ houses, employers eager to offer refugees jobs, and citizens looking for ways to love to their refugee neighbors. If the U.S. resettlement program aims to truly “build back better,” these communities must become its foundation. | https://medium.com/the-diplomatic-pouch/analysis-for-refugee-resettlement-to-build-back-better-let-communities-take-the-lead-35c14ff6156 | ['Institute For The Study Of Diplomacy'] | 2021-01-08 14:41:08.779000+00:00 | ['Refugee Resettlement', 'Refugees', 'Diplomacy', 'Berkley Center', 'Mchenry'] |
Winter Wind | Winter Wind
Photo by Flow Clark on Unsplash
The winter wind plays
roughly with my tired soul,
tossing it across the water,
blasting it to the moon,
and smashing it to smithereens.
And yet somehow I survive
to live another day and taste
the strawberries of our love,
dripping carelessly down my chin.
You were my salvation, back
before God took control
of the universe and destroyed
His enemies with an iron fist.
I spit into the winter wind
and feel my heart freeze from
too much lust and not enough love.
Sometimes we remember only
the power of fear to punish us
and to tear our memories
from our past. May God
have mercy on my soul
and may I find forgiveness
in the coming spring breezes
and the chanting of the elves
who live in my backyard. I
hold you tightly in my arms
and cry. I dance on tabletops
to earn money to buy my way
into heaven and escape
the horrors of my nightmares
and the sins I have committed. | https://medium.com/loose-words/winter-wind-eceaa4bb209e | ['Harley King'] | 2020-12-20 15:36:11.854000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Salvation', 'God', 'Winter', 'Poetry'] |
Construct the Resource Hierarchy | Resource Hierarchy
Consider the length of ideal URI, we should avoid designing the resource hierarchy more than three-level deep. On the other hand, if an abstract concept like “sub-sub-resource” exists in your design, you may feel uncomfortable due to the long URI.
Photo by Unsplash
The resource user can exist independently without any concern, so we first put it at the root level:
- user
But how about the resource story and publication? Should they be a subresource of users? RESTful does not have clear instructions for this condition, but we can still evaluate the pros and cons of all aspects by ourselves.
Readability
One of the attractions of the hierarchical structure is that it contains more information than a flattened structure, which is also a tip that we should pay attention to when designing.
Photo by Unsplash
In the hierarchical structure, sub-resource belonged to its parent, and cannot exist outside the scope of its parent. If we follow this principle, we may be confused because of the ambiguous attribution:
- user
- publication
- story - tag
each publication belongs to a user (owner)
each story belongs to a user (author)
each story can be marked with multiple tags, but those tags do not belong to that story
Looks great! The maximum depth of the hierarchy structure is shallower than three, and no redundant item. But readability is not everything we have to consider, some practical issues may also encounter in the future.
Usability
How might the users use the webserver?
We should consider use cases as more as possible during the design process, just like converting requirements to a database schema.
If a webserver is a lack of usability, it may seriously affect the collaboration between backend and frontend or mobile apps. Some terrible problems like overly complex URI, or inefficient interaction.
Photo by Unsplash
Users may search for the content they are interested in, and the frontend or mobile app will help them send the requests. The hierarchical structure above can handle the user searching and the publications and stories of a specified user easily.
But will the user only do these operations?
As far as I am concerned, I will search the stories or publications by the keywords of prefix more often than access them under a specified user page directly. The following mechanism and recommended system also needs to search stories depend on the tag and publication?
Does our structure can easily handle these requests?
No, it can not.
We need too traverse all user resources and filter the story with a corresponding tag or publication, it almost an impossible case when the number of users exceeds a certain threshold. We had better put the publication and story resources to the root level for a better operating logic.
- user
- publication
- story - publication - story - tag
This hierarchy can execute the query to publications and stories directly without traversing subresources of all users.
Maintainability
Photo by Unsplash
A terrible resource hierarchy will result in RESTful APIs with high maintenance costs, which is also the most common complaint of back-end engineers. One of the problems we can simply avoid is redundant resources, like the publication and story above.
Because these may derivative extra API endpoints to maintain, both on your code within .py file and the text within the documents, and may leave potential risks if each endpoint’s behavior of the same resource is not consistent.
Strike a Balance and Wrap Up
After discussing many different aspects, a final resource hierarchy we would get. I prefer a flattened structure to fit the querying and searching requirements than a two-level model, of course, you can keep your design for this part with your reason.
- user - publication - story - tag
I think the searching mechanism is the backbone of the content platform and might be updated or improved very soon, so I want to keep it stay as flexible as possible. Meanwhile, the sub-resource could be removed, so does the redundant endpoints. | https://medium.com/random-life-journal/construct-the-resource-hierarchy-2615bafd447a | ['Rain Wu'] | 2020-07-21 14:29:18.583000+00:00 | ['API', 'Software Engineering', 'Web Development', 'Technology', 'Software Development'] |
Appropriate ways to Treat Missing Values | As we know most of the time of data oriented industries goes in Data Preparing and Data Cleaning. In some cases the time consumption for data preparation for data professionals can go upto 90%. Dealing with missing data is one of the most difficult parts in the data preparation phase.
They are often represented as NaNs, blanks or 0 in the data.
If the missing values are not handled properly then the results may end up drawing an inaccurate inference about the data and can produce biased estimates.
The Missing Values can be counted in each column with the command:
data.isnull().sum()
How do Missing Value occur in Data?
Missing data can be anything from missing sequence, incomplete feature, files missing, information incomplete, data entry error, data collection problem etc.
Types of Missing Values:
MCAR: Missing completely at random
The missing values are randomly distributed across all observations.
Example: A Blood Sample gets damaged in the Lab.
MAR: Missing at random
the missing values are not randomly distributed across observations but are distributed within one or more sub-samples.
Example: A child does not appear for Examination because he is sick.
NMAR: Not missing at random
When data are missing not at random, the missingness is specifically related to what is missing.
Example: A person did not take English proficiency test due to his poor English language skill.
Here are the most common methods to deal with Missing data:
1. Discard Data-
This is one of the most intuitive and simple methods.If missing value count is not large enough from a large dataset then the rows can likely be dropped by using the following command:
df.dropna()
If large number of observations are missing from a single variable then the variable should be dropped in such a case.
This is not the recommended method though as it might lead to a significant decrease in the sample size.
2. Mean, Mode Imputation-
Imputation is the act of replacing missing data with statistical estimates of the missing values.
The imputation method should be decided after considering the distribution of data: normal distribution and skewed distribution (be it right-skewed or left-skewed).
Mean imputation works better if the distribution is normally-distributed or has a Gaussian distribution, while median imputation is preferable for skewed distribution(be it right or left).
The data imputation purely depends on the datatype.
If the datatype of the column is numerical then replace the values with Mean in case of Normal distribution and Median imputatation in case of Skewed distribution. If the datatype of the column is Categorical then the Mode Imputation method is the appropriate method.
3. K-Nearest Neighbour Imputation (KNN)-
This method uses k-nearest neighbour algorithms to estimate and replace missing data. The k-neighbours are chosen using some distance measure and their average is used as an imputation estimate. One should try different values of k with different distance metrics to find the best match. The advantage of using KNN is that it is simple to implement. But it suffers from the curse of dimensionality. It works well for a small number of variables but becomes computationally inefficient when the number of variables is large.
4. Regression Imputation
This approach replaces missing values with a predicted value based on regression line.
Regression is a statistical method which shows the relationship between a dependent variable and independent variables. It’s expressed as
y = mx + b
For Example: Triceps skinfold thickness is one of the variables where we see some missing values. The missing values in this variable can be imputed by using all other variables information as predictors.
5. Filling Missing Values
One of the ways to fill missing values is to replace NA with a scalar value by the below method:
df.fillna(0)
Using the same filling arguments as reindexing, we can propagate non-NA values forward or backward:
df.fillna(method=’pad’)
Conclusion:
There are different approaches to deal with missing values which is heavily dependent on the nature of data. Therefore, the more attentively you treat the missing values the better accuracy you can expect after training your model. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/appropriate-ways-to-treat-missing-values-f82f00edd9be | ['Prerna Nichani'] | 2020-05-02 13:58:04.964000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Missing Values', 'Handling Missing Values'] |
Six Lessons Learned as a Prize Winner from the ETHOnline 2020 Hackathon | Ethereum Hackathon
Six Lessons Learned as a Prize Winner from the ETHOnline 2020 Hackathon
A month long Ethereum hackathon is extremely tiring, yet rewarding. Follow along as I recount the technical and team challenges, and what I would’ve changed about our approach. Andrew Hong Follow Nov 4, 2020 · 7 min read
Since late 2018, I’ve actively participated in various crypto conferences in NYC and played around with DeFi. I think I tried cryptozombies.io back when they had only two or three lessons, but never really got that deep into Solidity development. However, earlier this September I attended an Ethereum Dev Onboarding session after finding Linda Xie’s tweet offering to help new developers get acquainted with the ecosystem. I highly recommend watching the recording of the panel, as the web3 fullstack tools and resources the panelists suggested helped save me likely hundreds of hours of frustration otherwise (three that are absolute musts to check out for beginners are eth.build, scaffold-eth, and solidity-by-example).
Trent, one of the panel organizers, informed us all about ETHOnline (a 30 day hackathon hosted by ETHGlobal) and showed us the list of sponsors — among which were the largest DeFi projects and infrastructure providers I’d heard of including Aave, Yearn, Gnosis, theGraph, and more. My background is in sustainable finance, so I was determined to tackle an ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) related blockchain project. I quickly was able to find a team of five focused on one of the largest governance issues facing the world today: corruption in public projects and procurement.
The first slide of our pitch deck, drawing heavily from this WEF research report
Now here comes the first lesson: don’t even npm init until you’ve broken down the problem as much as you can. While we had a basic four step framework above to work from, we should have spend more time splitting out old corruption cases to better understand the patterns and issues of the bidding and project management process. Our approach relied on identifying the key players (a project owner, a bidder, an auditor, and a funder) and architecting all of the interactions between them, instead of choosing focus areas. Jumping into the code to “figure it out after the first week” was a mistake, and led to at least a few days wasted. We also tried too hard to implement as many sponsor technologies as we could to try and win bounties, instead of fitting them in only where necessary — leading to a really messy developer and user experience. Here’s where we ended up after retracing our steps:
A much cleaner framework to build off of than a feature/interaction mapped framework
Now the second mistake was probably unavoidable given we were fairly new to writing smart contracts in Solidity, but please iterate and test your contracts in small portions as you go (I like to use hardhat, waffles, and ethers). Writing your smart contracts in large chunks will end up leading to headaches such as code length limits or stack-too-deep storage errors, and then refactoring into smaller contracts becomes a struggle (though when you do, look into libraries and interfaces). The following contract flow took probably seventeen iterations, with quite a bit of wasted code in the process.
We essentially used three factory contracts: one for bidding, one for funding, and one for milestone management/escrow
Number three goes hand-in-hand with number two: it’s called a money legos ecosystem for a reason, so don’t reinvent the wheel. While it might be fun and a great learning experience to write every smart contract your project will use — it’s probably a waste of time and may have security loopholes. There is already a lot on-chain that you can build off of, and tackling the project like this makes it easy to tweak only part of your contract later instead of rewiring the whole thing. For us, we came across this issue with our escrow contract. Managing many milestones was difficult to figure out, and our initial approach with having an auditor somehow change the ERC20 allowances between the bidder and the funder for each milestone felt clunky and unreliable. Adding another milestone would require rewriting part of the contract, and adding a feature would require rewriting most of the contract. After a week of fiddling around with it, we found Gnosis Conditional Tokens to be the perfect fit to our escrow contract. If we had more time, we might have re-written the funding contract to incorporate mechanisms such as Aave Credit Delegation or Balancer pools instead of our non-flexible version. And if you aren’t already using this solidity package, make sure to check out Open Zeppelin for all your standard token contract needs.
At this point we were in week three, closing in on the end of the hackathon. Any teams still in the running at this point were in a mad dash to build out the UI, finish all the smart contract flow testing, or incorporate any other sponsor technologies with the project. Here’s lesson four: choose your technical battles wisely, and project that it will take longer than you think even with many people. Looking back, assuming two days for integrating each feature was optimistic. It takes time to understand the documentation, figure out how to implement it in your code, and also debug with others over discord. Having each team member take on a different feature/sponsor will save you time, but may lead to larger issues if someone remains stuck alone. There are a lot of tradeoffs to consider, so make sure to keep an open channel of communication and switch roles or tasks if necessary. We went from integrating seven sponsors to three, which saved us a lot of stress and also improved our quality of integration.
Now we’re onto the last few days — it was time to put together the pitch and demo video. At this point, it’s good to take a step back and look at your project holistically. What benefitted me here was creating a project roadmap, and pretending that launch was only a few months away.
Having a roadmap will make your message and project more clear to both yourself and the judges, and also help point out any logical holes in the work done so far.
Lastly, before making the video, try to walk a friend or family member who has little to no knowledge of the blockchain through your project. If you are able to get them on board and understand what you are working on, then you are guaranteed to have a strong and clear message when presenting to others. This part may be frustrating but it will help with refining the messaging in your video, as well as priming you on potential blind-spot questions that might get asked in judging.
Conclusion
Here are my key takeaways:
Plan and scope carefully and choose your focus areas based on the process to replace, not just on what might be fun to make in blockchain. Write your solidity contracts in small portions, and test as you go. It’s called “money legos” for a reason, understand composability and flexibility of your project’s flow. Chose your technical battles wisely, and budget for time spent debugging and getting help especially amongst members of your team. Know your team’s weaknesses early. Have a roadmap for the future of your project to help give the team and others a vision of what the more complete product would look like. Try to communicate your project/demo to friends and family who are outside the blockchain ecosystem to get feedback
One last piece of advice: pace yourself. Many teams start out with a bunch of spirit, but fizzle out after two weeks. Understand that members of your team may work better in sprints while others in a marathon, and adjust the work assigned accordingly. Overall, I had a blast in this hackathon thanks to my team, the event organizers, and the sponsors — can’t wait for the next one!
Also, Read | https://medium.com/coinmonks/six-lessons-learned-as-a-prize-winner-from-the-ethonline-2020-hackathon-4c291ed49738 | ['Andrew Hong'] | 2020-12-28 14:49:24.105000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Hackathons', 'Product Management', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain'] |
Week 7 : Defining Voice and Tone. It’s all about personality | It’s all about personality
In the previous post, I shared about user research — getting to know your users, the words they speak, the way they interact with your product and so on, in order to tailor your product copy to suit them and meet their needs.
This week I’m sharing a little about product voice. This voice is your brand’s identity in writing— how people recognize you, what sets you apart from your competitors, what you stand for.
The words a product uses is what communicates the product’s brand to its customers.
One of my favourite sources for building voice is ‘Microcopy — The complete guide’ by Kinneret Yifrah.
Language makes digital products more human-like, but it has to be authentic and natural.
If a company positions itself as being young and tech savvy, then the way its product speaks — via its words — should reflect that. Same if a product’s target market is children and its brand is ‘playful’, you’d expect them to use words that kids understand and relate with.
Writing copy according to a product’s voice is made possible with brand documents, content style guidelines, and other documentation that convey the product’s personality.
Product voice is not limited to microcopy though, it affects all forms of writing and communication that is done on behalf of the company.
Developing product voice
Suppose there’s no defined voice yet, or you’re creating a product voice for your portfolio,? here are some tips I picked up from UX Writers.
Vision & mission
What is the company’s vision and its values? What drives the company? The language a company adopts most often aligns with its purpose.
This vision influences the type of content put out, as well as help shape the personality of the product.
2. Personality
Memorable digital products have personalities. Imagine the product was a person. How would you describe it? Funny or serious? are they fashionable or biased towards basic comfort clothes ? are they friendly and open to everyone or do they move in close-knit circles?
Personality scale developed by Big Brand System
By humanizing products, it’s easier to decide how the product would naturally sound. This helps the copy and other content align with the product’s identity to create an authentic product voice that users can relate to. It’s based on this adopted personality that the product voice is shaped.
In building the product’s voice, what your colleagues think the product sounds like, how it should sound (based on personality), and how users perceive it, should be taken into consideration.
Tips for writing according to voice | https://medium.com/ux-writers-learn/week-7-defining-voice-and-tone-679e869a3962 | ['Uzoma Ibekwe'] | 2021-07-06 13:31:46.969000+00:00 | ['Ux Writing'] |
How to Create a Successful Affiliate Marketing Program | Affiliate marketing is often termed as one of the best online marketing programs that are available to small businesses. Why? There is no risk when it comes to affiliate marketing; you only pay after the results are delivered. Using an affiliate marketing program, you agree to pay your affiliate partners a referral fee for each lead or sale that is generated. Affiliate marketing is often referred to as partnership marketing because you are partnering with others to help sell your products and/or services.
There are many affiliate programs available on the Internet today, so it’s important to make yours stand out and catch the attention of professional affiliate marketers. Once you’ve done that, you are well on your way to a successful campaign.
Niche Markets and Partners
Claim a niche market. Don’t try to sell everything to everyone. It is the quickest way to fail in your adventure. Once you’ve claimed your niche market research and find websites that have viewers interested in your niche market. You will want to find partners that have already built traffic and would benefit from your affiliate offer. Your offer should be a win-win for both you and your affiliate partners.
Provide your affiliate partners with creative and promotional materials. You want to make their job of marketing your products or services as easy as possible. The less work they have to do and the more conversions they see, the more likely they are to promote your products or services.
Don’t rest on your laurels just because you have a few good partners; you never know when they may decide to jump ship. Protect yourself by actively recruiting new partners. You can find new partners by advertising your affiliate program on your website, listing or advertising in affiliate directories, or by contacting potential affiliates directly.
Once you get partners, you want to take good care of them. Communicate with them by welcoming them to your affiliate program send out updates on product additions or changes. Give them tips and advice on how to be successful in marketing your products. Always pay them on time.
A successful affiliate marketing program takes time to build, but with a bit of effort, it can increase your internet sales noticeably. It’s worth the effort, and it can become one of the best time and financial investments in your marketing plan.
Affiliate Program Challenges
With any new marketing program, affiliate marketing programs don’t come without their own set of challenges.
Finding Quality Affiliates
Starting an affiliate program isn’t difficult to set up, but finding good quality affiliates that can assist in driving business can be challenging. With affiliates it’s about relationships, they will only promote products and services with businesses that they trust. Many of them have been burned in the past, so getting super affiliates in your program can be a challenge, and it is also what will make or break your affiliate marketing program.
Technology
When building a program, you must find technology that will track affiliate sales accurately, but even beyond that, it must be a system that is easy to use. If it’s too complicated and doesn’t provide accurate reporting affiliates will bail.
Time Investment
Affiliate marketing is not a plug-and-play solution that doesn’t require a time investment. You need to invest time into your program to get it set up, recruit affiliates and then provide ongoing affiliate management. You’ll find that most of your time will be spent on keeping affiliates happy, resolving issues and managing expectations.
Be Clear on Tactics and Strategies
You don’t want to cannibalize your affiliate program with your own marketing tactics. Keep in mind that affiliates drive a lot of their business through search marketing. If you are both competing on the same keywords, this can often cause issues. For example, if you don’t want them to bid on your brand terms be upfront about this at the very beginning of the program. | https://medium.com/@negociosfran768/5-ways-to-create-a-successful-affiliate-marketing-program-59f31a546e1 | ['Francisco Palma'] | 2020-09-23 22:42:33.463000+00:00 | ['Affiliate Marketing', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Earn Money Online', 'Marketing', 'Earnings'] |
mStable Telegram AMA Recap | Here are the highlights of the responses provided by James, Alex and Onur in what turned out to be a lively session that covered everything from mStable’s origins to its long-term future as autonomous and non-custodial stablecoin infrastructure.
First, we asked Alex, Onur and James to quickly introduce themselves.
Alex: Hey there. I’m the lead protocol developer here at mStable. I have been an Ethereum developer since 2017 after seeing blockchain as a way to revolutionise financial tools and access. Before that I was primarily in web development. I like writing clean code.
Onur: Hi all! I’ve been working in crypto for almost 3 years now. In my previous life, I was doing scientific computing and applied math in academia.
I did R&D on validator economics with CasperLabs before I joined mStable this September. I’m super excited about DeFi and building financial applications.
James: Hi I’m James Simpson, co-founder and lead at mStable. After studying economics and politics at university in Australia and China, I worked as a management consultant in Melbourne, Australia and Shanghai. After that I moved to work as the investment analyst at a multi-strategy crypto hedge fund in Australia called Apollo Capital, then started mStable 😄
The Basics
Question: Can you describe what mStable is?
James: mStable is a non-custodial and autonomous stablecoin infrastructure protocol. mStable unites same peg assets within an AMM and generates optimised meta assets that unite the underlying, are designed to be risk minimised and also generate an outsized yield for savers.
We plan to build out mStable wherever there is stablecoin liquidity and bake in more and more use cases into the meta assets as time goes on. This is just the beginning. 💪💪
mUSD Price Stabilisation
Question: mUSD is backed to USDC, DAI, TUSD or USDT at a 1:1 ratio. Price stabilization is also a difficult problem to keep mUSD around 1$. So what happens when mUSD raises up or down away from 1$? What are the mStable’s solutions for mUSD stabilization?
Alex: mUSD deviates temporarily above and below the $ mark due to the underlying assets price deviations. At the moment the system is naturally priced just under the $1 mark because the cheaper assets fill up a larger portion of the basket. When price deviates up or down, natural arbitrage would happen on a secondary market to bring the price in line with the underlying collateral.
The AMM will produce a much more stable price once the AMM is upgraded to the ICSMM (MIP-6) due to the basket distribution being more even and thus less impermanent loss. In addition, the system will continue to cap risk of permanent loss through max weights etc.
Onur uploaded an annotated version of the AMM visualisation during the AMA.
Global Expansion
Question: What your plans in place for global expansion, are mStable focusing on any market at this time? Or focusing on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you expand on this?
James: mStable is naturally global given that it is an open, non-custodial and decentralised protocol, so in theory it is currently global.
That said, we believe there are specific markets that would benefit from having mStable’s products available to them. For example, mStable sponsored ETHGlobal and the winner of the mStable prize was a Venezuelan team that built a dApp on SAVE. Apart from that, we will be releasing a multi-language version of the dApp, landing page and governance proposals.
In terms of partnerships, the core team is working on several within DeFi, CeFi and even with other chains.
COVID-19 Impacts
Question: COVID-19 has slowed many economies around the world, but as a crypto business has it affected you negatively or positively? Secondly, are you still on track to achieve your targets as the roadmap says?
James: Thanks for the question. Covid has impacted the global economy very negatively. Meanwhile DeFi and Bitcoin have grown from strength to strength. I can’t say I know the reasons for this, but as a team I feel we have navigated the inevitable challenges a pandemic presents.
We are working hard to deliver on the roadmap. A proposal to tokenise the SAVE contract came forward after the community responded really positively to that. We are also on track to deliver our new custom built AMM for mBTC and then later mUSD as well as significant gas improvements.
Keep an eye out for these protocol improvements and their proposals as we are super excited to show them to you all.
Here are some of the MIPS:
On Liquidity
Question: Liquidity is a major challenge for decentralized exchanges, how does mUSD solve this problem?
Onur: mUSD provides one of the highest USD yields in the world so there is a natural incentive here for users to add liquidity into the protocol. Our new AMM will make this liquidity provision process even better, allowing mStable to guarantee liquidity in all major stablecoins, target different basket weights, increase composability, usage and hence swap fees — increased swap fees lead to higher returns for SAVE users, leading to higher demand for mUSD, ultimately increasing liquidity.
We also incentivize liquidity providers with liquidity mining programs. You can see the current incentives in our EARN product. One of the purposes of MTA is to incentivize adding liquidity, as well as participating in governance.
Screenshot of the EARN interface
Community Driven Decision Making
Question: What is the role of the community in the governance of the your crypto ecosystem in order to be able to call it community driven? Which members of the community can participate in the decision making?
James: mStable is governed by MTA holders who have staked their tokens to participate in the community-based proposal system. Anyone can participate in the mStable governance process by joining discussions in either the Discord or public forum. Ideas are then formalised and proposed to the community for on-chain signalling by MTA holders.
Here are the current votes open (as of 15 December 2020): https://snapshot.page/#/mstable
Ultimately, mStable is an open protocol where users are empowered. Users earn all fees on the protocol (100% of income generated on mStable currently goes to savers), all users will be able to earn MTA and MTA will increasingly move to the centre of every decision and action on the mStable protocol. We are really excited to propose staking v2 which will significantly increase MTA power and utility within mStable. | https://medium.com/mstable/mstable-telegram-ama-recap-ff5d37073ac8 | ['Derek E. Silva'] | 2020-12-17 04:02:18.631000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Ethereum', 'Defi', 'Bitcoin', 'Stable Coin'] |
Laravel — The Basics — Middleware (官方文件原子化翻譯) | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/learn-or-die/laravel-the-basics-middleware-%E5%AE%98%E6%96%B9%E6%96%87%E4%BB%B6%E5%8E%9F%E5%AD%90%E5%8C%96%E7%BF%BB%E8%AD%AF-fe2984d644be | ['Ray Lee'] | 2020-12-02 02:13:08.874000+00:00 | ['Laravel', 'Middleware', 'Documentation', 'Backend'] |
Inside/Outside | Inside/Outside
Image by Felipe Cespedes from Pexels
Daytime. Inside our room, we look at a window, not through it. The worn-out wooden frame still holds everything together after all of these years. Outside, the garden clings to life and, on the sidewalk, people walk by. We do not know who they are; we do not care. We are looking at the window.
From the living room, someone calls out our name. Ours.
We turn around, leave the room, and go downstairs. It’s time to go. Yesterday, we promised we wouldn’t fight, that this departure would flow smoothly. Why did we agree to such a compromise when this unexpected goodbye has been pushed down our throat?
Still, as they hand us our suitcase and demand their keys back, we take this bitter pill and swallow. | https://medium.com/the-short-place/inside-outside-43d452577805 | ['Gb Rogut'] | 2020-12-18 04:55:43.017000+00:00 | ['Microfiction', 'Breakups', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Heartbreak'] |
Mind-Muscle Connection: The Best Kept Secret for Increased Muscle and Strength | Do you wish you could just think about a muscle and it would grow bigger and stronger?
Well…although we can’t actually THINK a muscle into growing, our thoughts during strength training can play a critical role in the growth, development, and activation of our muscles.
Arguably, what goes through our minds while lifting weights is just as important as the actual movement itself.
As a bodybuilder and former fitness competitor I have learned first-hand the importance of establishing a strong relationship between the mind and the muscle.
This relationship is known as the Mind-Muscle Connection.
The American Council on Exercise defines mind-muscle connection as the “the act of consciously and deliberately thinking about moving a targeted muscle.” Studies have shown that this internal focus can lead to improved muscle activation, muscle size, and strength over time.
If you think about it, mind-muscle connection is essentially muscle mindfulness!
The 3 Types of Muscle
Our bodies consist of three different types of muscles: cardiac, smooth, and skeletal.
Cardiac muscles are located in the heart and function involuntarily, Smooth muscles are located in the walls of hollow organs such as the stomach and intestines and function involuntarily, and Skeletal muscles are attached to bones by tendons, are responsible for our physical movement, and function voluntarily, meaning that we have the ability to control how and when we choose to move them.
When it comes to strength training and the mind-muscle connection we are specifically talking about our ability to impact the movement and growth of our skeletal muscles.
Muscle Contraction Explained
Muscle contraction, or the recruitment of specific muscle fibers, begins with our brain.
The main neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, that is released by the brain to signal a muscle to contract is called “acetylcholine.”
Acetylcholine travels to the neuromuscular junction, the location site where neurons and muscles communicate and the place where you can technically say mind-muscle connection occurs.
At this junction acetylcholine crosses over a small space between the synapses of neurons, called the synaptic cleft, and binds to the designated muscle fiber of a muscle.
Muscle is composed of numerous muscle fibers and developing our mind-muscle connection can help increase the recruitment of those fibers when performing weight bearing exercises and improve our overall exercise performance. The more muscle fibers we can recruit during that exercise, the greater output or strength the muscle will have.
Now that we’ve learned how our minds can positively impact our strength and performance, here are 6 tips to help improve your mind-muscle connection.
6 Tips to Improve Mind-Muscle Connection
1. Warm-up Correctly
“Warming up” or getting the body ready for exercise is often associated with “static stretching” or movements performed by holding a single position, either standing, sitting, or lying down, for a designated period of time. Static stretch holding time typically ranges anywhere between 15 to 60 seconds.
Contrary to common belief, static stretching can actually decrease performance, strength, and reaction time if done prior to a workout by desensitizing the muscle and tendons which limits the recruitment of those specific muscle fibers you are trying to stimulate.
But not to worry, there is a much better way to warm-up…Dynamic Stretching!
Unlike static stretching, dynamic stretching SHOULD be incorporated into your warm-up routine.
The National Academy of Sports Medicine defines dynamic stretching as “the active extension of a muscle, using force production and momentum, to move the joint through the full available range of motion.” The goal of dynamic stretching is to increase blood flow and joint mobility and subsequently increase performance and decrease the risk of injury.
Examples of dynamic stretching movements include:
Walking lunges
Leg swings
Mountain climbers
Arm circles
Jumping jacks
2. Let Go of your Ego
One of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to strength training is lifting too much weight too soon.
I know what you’re thinking, “Jasmine, how do YOU know that I am lifting too heavy?!” Well I hate to break it to you, but it’s pretty obvious…
If you are using your body to create momentum to lift the weight, swinging your weights around, or not able to lift the weights you have chosen to use in a slow and controlled manner throughout the entire movement, you should decrease the weight that you are lifting.
Here is my mental checklist when it comes to determining whether or not it is time to increase the amount of weight, I am lifting:
Can I perform the exercise with proper form?
Can I do at least 3 sets of 15 repetitions with control?
Am I able to lift this amount of weight without straining my joints or other parts of my body?
If the answer is yes to all 3 of these questions, I will increase the amount of weight I am lifting during that specific exercise.
However, if you do not feel comfortable increasing weight, another way you can generate muscle stimulation is by increasing either your number of repetitions and/or the number of sets performed for that exercise during your next workout session.
3. Visualize to Increase Your Size
Visualization is essentially a mental dress rehearsal.
A technique in which you mentally create images or visualize yourself performing a specific exercise.
Visualization can help reduce anxiety, mitigate stress, increase focus, strengthen neural pathways, and build confidence prior to actually performing the physical movement.
4. Breathe Properly
Inhale…Exhale….
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “don’t hold your breath,” well this statement couldn’t be more applicable when it comes to strength training.
Whether you are lifting weights in a gym or lifting a heavy box off the floor, we have a natural tendency to hold our breath without even realizing it!
Failing to breathe properly when performing exercise or strenuous activities can lead to:
Dizziness,
Early fatigue,
Fainting,
Increased blood pressure,
Decreased oxygen to our muscles
Impaired performance, and
Injury to the muscle (muscle strain)
As a result of decreased oxygen supply to your brain, muscles, and cells.
When exercising, it is important to be aware and conscious of your breathing.
How to properly breathe when strength training:
Breathe OUT during the concentric phase — when you are lifting a weight
Breathe IN during the eccentric phase — when you are lowering a weight back down
5. Slow Down, Squeeze, and Hold
Slowing down your exercise movements can help increase your mind-muscle connection and your ability to properly target the muscle you are utilizing.
By slowing down it gives your brain time to feel the muscles you’re intentionally working instead of mindlessly going through the movement and only focusing on moving the weight from point A to point B — especially when it comes those smaller, and often neglected, muscles.
Squeezing and holding the contraction of the muscle during the exercise can also bring mental awareness to your muscle and help stimulate muscle growth by sending an increase of blood flow to the specific muscle. Blood functions to carry oxygen and specific nutrients that are essential for muscular endurance and growth.
Training Tip: When decreasing speed, decrease the amount of weight you are lifting. This can better ensure you successfully perform the entire movement in its full range of motion as well as control the weight you are lifting with proper form.
6. Ask your Workout Partner to Lightly Tap or Touch the Muscle you Are Exercising
This is probably one of my favorite mind-muscle connection techniques.
Have your workout partner tap on, or lightly touch, the muscle you are exercising as you are performing it. This cue serves as a friendly reminder to mentally focus on that specific muscle being exercised.
Note: This should not be a distraction, but rather aid in bringing and increased awareness to the working muscle.
Jasmine El Nabli MS, RD
Creating healthy eating and lifestyle habits without the right tools, skills, and knowledge is often seen as a daunting task, but that’s where I come in. I am here to show you that becoming the happiest and healthiest version of yourself can be done!
Through the combination of a whole-body approach and scientific research, I empower and educate individuals on how to implement small changes into their daily life that in turn lead to sustainable and lifelong healthy habits. | https://medium.com/@jasmine-elnabli/mind-muscle-connection-the-best-kept-secret-for-increased-muscle-and-strength-6cc4d001210c | ['Jasmine El Nabli'] | 2020-10-13 20:13:46.450000+00:00 | ['Strength Training', 'Workout', 'Bodybuilding', 'Fitness Tips', 'Fitness'] |
Hard conversations, hard interviews… | When I first started as a recruiter, one of my worst fears was doing interviews. At that time, I had a “mental contradictory”: Why am I not enjoying interviews if they are one of the best parts of my job as a recruiter? Meeting new people, explaining our projects to them… what’s wrong with me!
Finally, I realized what was happening to me. I didn’t know how to deal with interviews when a candidate was shy, not too talkative, rude or if I could see that he or she wasn’t honest.
After some years of experience and, what’s more important, after learning from different colleagues, I’ve acquired some techniques that help to make these conversations more fluent and in case it’s not possible (it can happen), feel confident to finish the interview with some dignity hahaha.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Let me share these tips with you!
When we do Competency-based interviews, it usually means that we have already met the candidate in a shorter first interview, those we use to screen candidates and check there aren’t red flags (required language level, salary according to the range we can offer, career expectations…). After this short interview, we have an idea of how this person could be so we can prepare the interview specifically for each candidate. However, we have to be careful to avoid prejudices.
Shy Person
It is common that these candidates normally answer with yes/no answers or with short sentences. First of all, we should try to find out, why this person is giving us such short answers.
There can be several possibilities: shyness, nervousness, she or he is not a talkative person… and this would be okay. Try to break the ice with this person, make them feel comfortable by dialoguing, not only asking structured questions! … If those are the reasons for their lack of speech, they will talk a little bit more. It usually happens that when these professionals are in a good environment and can be themselves, they become more confident.
Chatterbox
On the contrary, we can meet the opposite personality. Someone that never stops talking! Bla bla bla bla bla bla… and you don’t know how to interrupt this person. Has it ever happened to you? “I just wanted to know when the developer started to code in Kotlin and now I know how many brothers the professional has!” Hahaha!
When you want to clarify something or ask other questions because you already know what you need about a specific topic you wanted to check, don’t be afraid and interrupt them. Always with absolute respect. You can use sentences like… “Sorry for interrupting you, but I wanted to clarify what you said about…” or “Excuse me, before moving to whatever, I wanted to know about whatever…” The interview should be a dialogue, a conversation… the communication is reciprocal. I like these profiles as they are usually very enthusiastic about what they do. We only need to know how to get all the information we need, in time.
Critic/sceptic person
These professionals have the feeling they are being questioned all the time. They will probably adopt a defensive attitude and posture, and they will counter-question you.
In my opinion, these are one of the most difficult interviews as I don’t feel comfortable when I see they feel attacked. What can work is being honest and try to calm them down explaining them that it’s our way to know them better and check if both parties (he/she and the company) can work comfortably together. We want them to feel good if they join our teams. Turn the interview into a conversation instead of something that looks very structured so they can feel it is a dialogue. Make some jokes to distend the moment.
Show-off
When we think of a Show-off person, maybe we think of someone very senior but… don’t take things for granted. I’ve seen very junior developers so, so presumptuous… This kind of people think they are THE experts in their subject and that others are less experienced. In those cases, be brave and let them know that our teams are experts too and the decisions are made taking into account different opinions (also from junior developers…).
Observe their reaction, if they disagree or they explain they enjoy working on their own because it is easier and they don’t feel comfortable discussing with other experts, it’s possible that these professionals won’t fit in our culture (at least in my company). If you need someone to work on his/her own, this professional would be perfect for your position!
***
For all the interviews, it doesn’t matter what kind of professional we have opposite us (or on the other side of our screen), a very useful technique is the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). It helps the candidate to describe a concrete situation that allows us to find out about specific competences you want to check (teamwork, feedback acceptance, etc.). It is very important to ask about concrete and past examples so you can get an idea about how they perform in different moments. Take a look at the different steps , from general to more concrete:
SITUATION: start asking them to describe a specific situation. Example: Can you give an example of a situation when you made a big error at work?
TASK: Once you know the situation, ask them what their responsibility was at that moment or the tasks they were doing. Sometimes when they explain the situation, they also explain what their mistake was. If that’s the case, there’s no need to ask it again (use your Active listening skills). Example: What did you have to do? What‘s your responsibility? What was your goal?
ACTION: Ask them to specify exactly what they did when they faced that situation. It can happen that they describe what the team did. In that moment, ask them what they did as an individual. We want to “imagine” them in action! What their role was in that situation. Example: When you saw that the webpage broke, what did you do?
RESULT: We want to know how everything turned out. If the decisions of the professional were useful, if not… In any case, a bad result means that the professional did it wrongly. Sometimes, a situation couldn’t be solved due to different external factors, although our candidate made all the effort she/he could. Example: Was the webpage fixed? How did everything end?
With this technique, we can go further in depth about how they acted in different moments, which can be similar to some situations that person could experience in our company in case they join any of our teams and therefore see if they are a cultural fit.
In conclusion, it’s not always easy to do a good interview. But, if we have some tools and techniques, we can improve the quality of our interviews and in consequence, the quality of the information we get from them and advise the hiring manager to make a proper decision. | https://medium.com/@newwork-es/hard-conversations-hard-interviews-89ef8237d34 | ['New Work Spain'] | 2020-11-25 09:39:54.463000+00:00 | ['Recruitment', 'Tech', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Engineering'] |
Data Visualization | Data Visualization
Part 1
I compared Instagram and Twitter together from 2010 to the present. At first, Twitter had way higher numbers than Instagram did. In October of 2010, Twitter had about 42 searches and Instagram has 0. Around April of 2014, both platforms had exactly the same numbers. June of 2014 is when Instagram started getting ahead of twitter. Ever since then, Instagram has been increasing and Twitter has actually been declining. Currently, Twitter has 31 and Instagram has 85. Clearly, Instagram is becoming more and more popular everyday while Twitter is declining.
Part 2
The values are the same, they are just different numbers. Our brain likes to see even numbers rather than decimals because we think it will be easier to read. By creating a pie chart, it shows us the same value of the numbers and makes it easier for us to understand. Visuals are usually the best way for us to see things more clear and understand numbers and comparisons better.
Part 3
I think using pie charts is the best way to compare the two players. It is easy to understand and see the differences quickly. The colors chosen also make it better to understand and quickly compare the two. After looking at the charts, Drew Brees seems to be the better quarterback and Josh Rosen may be the worst in this case scenario. These pie charts make it easier for us to see that.
Part 4
This area chart shows the changes in US job growth from 1990 to 2017. The darker columns highlights specific years of recession including 1990–1991, 2001 and 2008–2009 recessions. This chart shows that when there is a recession period, there are lots of job losses. When the recession ends, more jobs become available. Although during the 2008–2009 recession, when it ended in 2009, jobs were continuing to be unavailable for many years after the recession. | https://medium.com/alexis-course-portfolio/data-visualization-cde35f3ff0a0 | ['Lexi Thompson'] | 2019-10-07 21:14:21.290000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization'] |
Digital Nomad Visa vs Tourist Visa, Which One Should I Apply for? — Andy Sto | Digital Nomad Visa vs Tourist Visa, Which One Should I Apply for? — Andy Sto Andy Sto Apr 13·5 min read
Digital nomadism is here to stay. That’s a fact, supported by the rise in numbers of digital nomads around the world and the legal steps countries are taking to accommodate them.
Digital nomads are people who work remotely while travelling from one place to another. All they need are their computers and good internet connections wherever they go, and they will get the job done.
Nomads usually work remotely either as freelancers, investors, entrepreneurs or as employees working remotely for their companies. The rise of COVID-19 pushed more people into the world of remote-working, creating the conditions for an even bigger surge in digital nomadism.
The global conditions, the ease of travel, the advancing digital technologies and the fact that more and more jobs can be done online, prove that digital nomadism and remote work might be the future of work. After all, who wouldn’t like to work from the beach or with a beautiful mountain view?
As a new mode of work, countries were not prepared for digital nomadism; and recently they started passing legislation to both, regulate it and benefit from it.
Why a special visa?
There are several reasons, both, digital nomads and different governments wanted to create a special visa. The main reasons are.
Covering a legal grey area: Digital nomads usually travel on tourist visas; however, most tourist visas prevent you from working; and since these laws are old, the fact that you work online and for an employer abroad, digitally, is a grey area open to interpretations. Same applies when it comes to paying taxes, which is again governed by old laws that precede the digital era. Duration: Most tourist visas allow a stay of average 90 days. While this might be enough for some, digital nomads would want to stay, on average, longer than a tourist would. However, they can’t get work visas that require a local contract and tax registration. Thus, the need for a new visa that accommodates this new reality came about. To attract digital nomads: Having a visa to cater for digital nomads and cover their needs, means the likelihood of attracting more of them is high. Digital nomads are sort of year-round tourists, who contribute to the economies they visit.
Digital nomad visas
The first country to offer a (kind of) digital nomad visa was Germany. It offered two types of visas one for freelancers and one for artists. This “Freiberufler” visa obliges you to pay taxes to Germany and it can be extended for 3 years. The artist type is only valid in Berlin.
Other countries with visas for digital nomads and remote workers include Estonia, Costa Rica, Georgia, Dubai, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Barbados, Mexico, Thailand and Australia.
There are other types of visas that digital nomads can also use. For example, Czech Republic offers a special business visa, Croatia offers a digital nomad residence permit; Portugal offers a temporary residence for freelancers and Norway offers an independent contractors’ visa.
Countries like Greece and Indonesia are on their way to offer a digital nomad visa as well.
So as a digital nomad, which visa should I apply for?
This is a rather complicated question, as there are several factors at play here. However, we can offer you a list of things you need to consider, that can help you make the best decision for your case.
1. The paperwork
The paperwork for any visa depends on the country you are applying for. Some visas you can apply for online, while others you need to apply at the embassy or consulate.
As a general rule, to get a digital nomad visa you will need more or less the same papers you use to apply for a tourist visa, along with some extras. These extras will need to testify that you have a steady income from a remote job; thus, won’t be competing for jobs with locals, and will be able to support yourself for the duration of your stay.
Some countries, like Croatia, may ask for more documents about the company or clients you work with; and maybe also a clear criminal record.
The paperwork may also differ based on your nationality, visa history and the type of work you do remotely. These factors can affect your eligibility for the digital nomad visa.
In most cases, a tourist visa will win in this category, for the ease of acquiring it.
2. Processing time
Some digital nomad visas, like that of the Czech Republic, takes between 90 and 120 days to be processed and may require applying personally in the embassy. While a tourist visa application can be done online and needs two weeks to be issued.
3. The duration of your stay
Most digital nomad visas, or visas that you, as a digital nomad can take advantage of, last up to a year. If you plan to stay for a long period and set an anchor there for a while, then go for the digital nomad one; but if you plan to hop on a plane to a new destination within 90–180 days then a tourist visa should be enough.
4. The fees
In most cases, the difference is not that big between a tourist visa fee and a digital nomad visa fee. However, in some cases the difference can be steep due to other administrative fees involved. You also need to consider the type of health insurance you need to have for each visa and any other requirements and their cost i.e. Stamps, vaccines, records…etc.
5. Taxes
Some of these visas require you to register and pay taxes in these countries, like in the case of Germany. While on a tourist visa, you don’t need to change where you pay taxes.
Some digital nomad visas however, come with a tax exemption valid for up to a year.
6. Your employer
Some countries offering visas for entrepreneurs or digital nomads require that you work with local businesses but remotely or independently. Norway’s independent contractor visa for example requires you work on a project for a Norwegian business independently.
7. Your future plans
If you plan on acquiring permanent residency or nationality in the country you are applying for, be aware. Some digital nomad visas make it impossible for this to happen, like in the case of Croatia, where you have to leave for at least 6 months after 1 year of residing as a digital nomad.
Whereby to acquire permanent residency, you need to have lived there for about 5 years, almost continuously. Portugal is an exception to this rule, as a digital nomad visa can be a path to permanent residency.
Which visa would you rather apply for and why? Let us know! | https://medium.com/@andysto/digital-nomad-visa-vs-tourist-visa-which-one-should-i-apply-for-andy-sto-becaea8fb384 | ['Andy Sto'] | 2021-04-14 06:44:45.202000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Digital Nomads'] |
Guide: How to Transfer Your EOS Funds from Crypto Exchanges to Infinito Wallet | Guide: How to Transfer Your EOS Funds from Crypto Exchanges to Infinito Wallet Infinito Follow Aug 10, 2018 · 4 min read
The recent second FREE EOS Account Name Registration campaign was a massive success, bringing many new users to Infinito Wallet’s community. Users’ demand to transfer their EOS funds from crypto exchanges to our universal wallet has subsequently increased. However, some users are reporting issues moving their EOS assets from some exchanges to their free account registered through Infinito Wallet.
To help these users, Infinito team has compiled this guide to instruct users to withdraw their EOS funds from exchanges to Infinito Wallet. In this guide, we will use the largest global crypto exchange, Binance, as an example.
Step 1: From the dashboard, click the “EOS” coin. Inside, select the “Receive” tab.
Step 2: Go to Binance website and log in to your account
Step 3: Click “Funds” then “Balances” or “Withdrawals”. Here, we will introduce the steps for selecting “Balances”.
Step 4: Choose EOS or type “EOS” if you couldn’t find it on the list. Then click “Withdrawal”.
Step 5: Type your EOS Account name in the box “EOS Withdrawal Address”. Tick “No MEMO” box. Insert the “Amount”. Check again and “Submit”.
Step 6: An pop-up will appear for 2FA (2-Factor Authentication). Check and input your SMS code then hit “Submit”. Right after that, the system will send a confirmation message to your registered email address for Binance.
Note: It might be different for users who haven’t set up 2FA.
Step 7: Check your mail box and open the email titled Withdraw Request Confirmation. Confirm the information again then click “Confirm Withdraw”.
Step 8: A new page will pop out to show the message “Withdrawal Request Successful” to confirm transaction done. Your EOS will appear in your Infinito Wallet after few minutes.
Currently, most users are facing such issues on their Binance mobile app. Binance team has confirmed that their EOS withdrawal function was suspended due to wallet maintenance though their website is still functioning normally.
It should be noted that different exchanges might have varying processes and requirements to make such transactions. For users using Houbi, they will have specific terms (e.g. destination tag) that are not industry standards. If that causes difficulties for you, please contact their respective teams get prompt support. However, please practice caution when interacting with big channels like Binance as there are many fake admin accounts trying to take personal information from users, especially novices. These scammers usually ask users to send coins directly to other addresses for testing, request for your email, password, or private keys, and ask you to deactivate two-factor authentication. So once again, please be wary of such frauds!
We hope this detailed guide helps users transfer their EOS assets from exchanges to Infinito Wallet. If you are facing any other issues, do not hesitate to reach out to Infinito Team on our official Telegram channel or through Customer Support email ([email protected]) for prompt support. We hope users enjoyed our second round of FREE EOS Account Name Registration and thank you for being with Infinito Wallet!
Download Infinito Wallet
ABOUT INFINITO WALLET
Positioning as a leading universal wallet for crypto users, Infinito Wallet serves as a gateway for users to maximize usage and potentials of their cryptocurrencies. By selectively expanding our partner network, Infinito Wallet aims to build an ecosystem of practical blockchain services including exchanges, ID/KYC solutions, and other blockchain-related business services. At the same time, we help support communities of developers and businesses with an open blockchain infrastructure of technologies and compliant-ready services, so that they can seamlessly build, launch, and operate innovative products and services efficiently. | https://medium.com/infinito-wallet/guide-how-to-transfer-your-eos-funds-from-crypto-exchanges-to-infinito-wallet-a33e00e31f14 | [] | 2018-10-22 10:52:02.614000+00:00 | ['Eos', 'Guide', 'Binance', 'Bitcoin'] |
Rescue me from this poop | That time of year again, we are entering the 5th season. You do know that we have five weather season, not five, right?
They are: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and…MUD!
Snowmeggedon is not a thing of myth & legend, but it has left a ton of mess with its exit. Yesterday afternoon I had the fun experience of cleaning up the yard from two months of Stitch’s work. It reminded me of a post from a couple years ago, so I thought I’d repost. Hold your nose, and read on…
_________________________________
Friday afternoon I walked out back to take garbage to the alley. The backyard is Stitch’s bathroom, so the white snow that was still on the ground made his dog piles pretty obvious. After getting a plastic grocery bag from inside I started the wonderful task of picking up after him. Late at night when I let him out I don’t go out with him because of the Chicago cold, which is also reason enough to let things go for awhile with a “I’ll pick it all up later.” Seeing the brown/white contrast Friday afternoon — it was time to pick things up. It didn’t look like much though. Upon starting I realized it was going to have to wait a little more. Frozen poopcicles are difficult to break free. I knew 50 degree weather was coming Satrday, so I decided to leave things for one more day.
Saturday afternoon Jeannette, Baylee, and I were going to go to Lincoln Park Zoo to enjoy the first nice day in a long time. We were outside ready to go when I remembered about the backyard treasures. “Let me go and pick these up really quick, there wasn’t a lot yesterday.”
By this time on Saturday, around 1pm, most of the snow had melted. Snow that had been covering up probably over a month’s worth of Stitch’s squattings. There was a LOT! There was definitely more than what I saw on the surface Friday. I literally almost filled a plastic grocery bag. Not fun, not pleasant. Disgusting.
My little backyard experience brought the reality of sin home to me in a real way:
If I would pick up after Stitch immediately I wouldn’t have a bigger mess to deal with later.
Isn’t that just how the junk in our life is also? If I’d just deal with things, not leaving them to the mercy of lame excuses, I’d have less of a mess to deal with later.
But no — I left things. Had a huge, disgusting mess to clean up, holding back a gag reflex at times. Had to wash my hands. Made Jeannette & Baylee wait for me, missing out on part of our planned fun.
Disgusting. And experienced because I didn’t just take care of things immediately, when I knew they needed to be taken care of.
Romans 7 is a great passage to read in regards to our struggle with sin. I’d suggest you check it out, especially verses 14–25. Here’s my paraphrase of verses 24–25:
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this backyard of disgustingness? Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord! | https://medium.com/processing-life/rescue-me-from-this-poop-d928048e2d09 | [] | 2016-07-01 03:26:42.335000+00:00 | ['Mess', 'Sin', 'Wisdom', 'Living Life', 'Perspective'] |
My Problems With Marketing | My Problems With Marketing
Photo by Merakist on Unsplash
I … have a problem with marketing. I just don’t get it. I may be naive, but over a certain point needed to have a brand known to some customers, I have the feeling that marketing isn’t useful.
I know most people reading on medium love marketing strategy, business development, SEO optimization, and shit. But I can’t help it, the more I think about marketing, the more I think it’s just bad for the world…
Hear me out.
Marketing is an art. The art, not to sell , but to make people buy.
That’s important, because marketing is often label as a scientific field, and people buy it.
Marketing was able to pick up concepts from the scientific field and make them their own. Psychology, dialectic, statistics are all used and badly teach in marketing classes.
Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash
The concepts are rewritten to sounds cooler and less academic.
Dialectic is the study of speeches and how languages can convince people, it’s so old, it can be traced back to ancient Greece. The field is full of complex concepts that theorize what makes a good speech, a good text, make people believe in you or not.
And you know it under the word “copywriting”.
Marketing is this guy that read half a book once, rename all the concepts because he couldn’t remember the exact names, and seems smart because he spread his knowledge with confidence.
I hate the idea to break with a scientific field’s history just to use the points useful at the moment. It wrongly justifies the “why” company should do this or that with incomplete concepts that required years of scientific researches.
I wish marketing would focus deeply on the scientific field it uses.
Some companies resolve this point by hiring people with various background to work as specialists in their marketing department, but this only happen with big companies.
The deontology is stripped down
Psychologists have a deontological code to respect. As they learned how humans think and behave, it’s the psychologists’ duty to help their patients and more importantly, not take advantage of their position.
But marketing didn’t swear on any shitty code, so let’s take advantage of every weakness possible!
As someone that studied psychology, this is how I see the marketing department. How many times do they use cognitive bias or trigger anxiety to have people panic buying something?
The most known strategy would certainly be the “limited in time offer” and “false reduction”. They both use the psychological weakness of humans to make people feel like they are closing a good deal when in reality they bought something without thinking.
It’s a shame that a whole profession sees its knowledge used by people that don’t care about ethics and deontology.
Except to have people working in marketing swear to respect deontological codes from other profession, I don’t know how we could solve this aspect of marketing.
which leads to my last point.
Marketing needs an ethical and deontological code
Brands all want to have a good image. It’s a crucial point to develop a business. Your clients must see you as reliable and full of good points.
And that’s a problem.
Companies refuse to recognize their flaws, they refuse to recognize that their product is not the pinnacle of humanity.
Take any ads for car, it’s always displaying empty streets, empty roads, the wildness of the ride, but once you have your car, it’s a traffic jam and speed limitations.
Of course, brands won’t make negative ads showing how lame it is to have their product, but a little bit of honesty would be welcome.
Photo by Tycho Atsma on Unsplash
It’s partially what led us to Diesel gate: car brands testing their vehicle’s carbon footprints on the laboratory at 15km/h and telling customers it’s so low on emissions.
All the greenwashing is due to marketing, brand surfing on the ecologist wave to look greater.
Heck, if a neo-nazi party had enough money to put on the table, marketing could make it look like the best possible thing to have ever happened on earth.
If marketing was more honest, we would live in a cleaner world.
Marketing needs limitations : - Not use cognitive biases on customers - Be more transparent when numbers are given - Not promote product or services that are hurting the planet - Promote real innovation
Because if tomorrow teleportation is invented and the creator doesn’t have a good enough marketing strategy people will continue to buy the car and teleportation will be seen as a stupid idea.
If at this point you are hurt by the negative view I have on marketing, try to see it as a stepstone to better your marketing campaigns.
People are more willing to buy off a humble brand recognizing its flaw than a brand they, later on, discover scandals and partial lies about.
Promote greatness over money, the world will thank you. | https://medium.com/@reda-attarca/my-problems-with-marketing-2c7d65382770 | ['Reda Attarça'] | 2020-12-22 21:37:46.781000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Psychology', 'Opinion', 'Problem Solving', 'Marketing'] |
粉嶺兇殺案石廠負責人半分鐘亡 | A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics. | https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E7%B2%89%E5%B6%BA%E5%85%87%E6%AE%BA%E6%A1%88%E7%9F%B3%E5%BB%A0%E8%B2%A0%E8%B2%AC%E4%BA%BA%E5%8D%8A%E5%88%86%E9%90%98%E4%BA%A1-7c33ba70d79b | ['C Y S'] | 2020-12-22 06:21:02.060000+00:00 | ['Hong Kong'] |
Reflections on the Amal Totkay | Yes, You read it right!
Totkays have always been playing absolutely vital roles in a desi person’s everyday life.
But the ones Amal fellowship have shared, are about changing fixed mindsets to the growth or entrepreneurial mindset which you’ll definitely find appealing if you want to be more successful in any area of life, these are the following tips (Amal Totkay):
Self-talk Get out of your comfort zone Create new habits Ask people for help (and last but not the least!) Fake it till you make it
Source: sme10x.com
If we observe these tips closely, we can see that they are following a track in which our reasoning comes first then the action plan then just starting and feedback, finally it follows the last tip that is also related to mindset and reasoning.
Like I do, Do you people also wish to have some assistance in working towards self-improvements? Well, Habits will work for you in this regard!
From Amal totkay, creating good habits is a major takeaway for me, yes, it is true that making new habits require a lot of effort but, it is only for the initial stages once you’ve developed new habit you won’t even realize how positively it affects you because now it’s just a habit and you don’t need to put that effort again and again!
There are some more interesting things about these additional favorite tips of mine i.e. Self-talk and fake it till you make it.
Believe me, our brain is a very hypersensitive guy, who takes things very seriously and ends up hurting his own self!
This a fact, how you talk to yourself is a kind of brain feeding. So, please be sure of what you are feeding your brain!
Another idea worth trying is that of Faking, It really works but, you should be smart enough to know the difference between faking the mindset and faking the behavior..
In the end, I would like to share my experience of adopting some of the above tips previously, I remember from last year that I was losing my appetite for breakfast especially sometimes I pushed myself to eat but ended up vomiting, I then made a habit of drinking lukewarm water daily in the morning, which is a suggestive and proven way of avoiding stomach related issues, and to this day also, just after waking up the first thing I take is a glass of water and without forcing myself I developed a better appetite!
Closing with this wonderful quote of the author of “The Power Of Habit”
“Habits are important. Up to 90 percent of our everyday behavior is based on habit. Nearly all of what we do each day, every day, is simply habit.” — Jack D. Hodge | https://medium.com/@amna-arshad175/reflections-on-the-amal-totkay-fb85bb5a1b64 | ['Amna Arshad'] | 2020-12-25 20:55:03.268000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Amal Academy', 'Amal Totkay', 'Power Of Habit'] |
Useful functions in Unity | I’ve been working with Unity now, pushing to learn the language of C# and the program itself and it’s been quite the journey this past week. Most of the material I’ve been learning is from the Unity Learn website, but also from the “Unity Game Development Cookbook” by O’Reilly Publishing.
Here are some useful tips and functions that I will continue to reference as they will really help me out as I work on my personal project, hopefully they will help you too.
Spawning New Obstacles Every Few Seconds. Here we need to use the “Invoke Repeating” Method and call it on start, with this method we pass it, the function to call, the amount of time before spawning, and the set interval.
Here’s an example of how to use invoke repeating ( note these aren’t working examples they are coming out of my notebook, so some of the syntax and capitalization may be wrong, but nothing visual studio can’t fix!
public GameObject obstaclePrefab void start(){
invokeRepeating("SpawnObstacles", 1, 2) } void SpawnObstacles(){
Instantiate(obstaclePrefab, new Vector3(x, y, z), obstaclePrefab.transform.rotation)
}
This will instantiate a new instance of the obstacle prefab game object that we passed into this SpawnController
Another useful function to now is how to know which object that your current object has collided with is to use the compare tag and set it to the name of the object. So for example if you are trying to keep track of when your player comes into contact with your enemy. In your inspector add a tag to your object, and then use the following method.
OnCollisionEnter(Collision collision){
if(collision.gameObject.CompareTag("Enemy"){
Debug.Log("Player has collided with Enemy")
} }
What if we wanted to make our player object move horizontally how would we do that? Easy we first need to set a certain speed that we want it to move, then we just need to get the Axis from the built in Axis Finder. Then we can just transform the movement and multiply it by our horizontal input as follows
public Speed = 10f;//using public here so we can adjust in the inspector and find the perfect number!
public float HorizontalInput; void update(){
horizontalInput = Input.GetAxis("Horizontal")(1)
transform.Translate(Vector3.left)(2) * Time.DeltaTime * speed)3
}
We are getting the coordinates from the user on horizontal axis — pulling from the left or right keys .left on the Vector3 automatically sets the position and movement of the object Multiply the vector with time and speed and you have an object that moves naturally in the environment
Now your update method is programmed to keep on watching from any input on either the left or right arrow keys. If there is movement, Vector3.left, will multiply with the integer that horizontal input is providing it. Very useful method for the future!
To this point how can we add jumps with physics! ? It’s also important here to make sure that we don’t Double Jump! Let’s set some variables such as our jump force (to make our jump more realistic), a gravity modifier that we’ll make public so we can use at any time and our rigid body of our player, which holds our gravity settings!
public float jumpForce;
public float gravityModifier;
public RigidBody playerRb; 1
We are setting our variables all public so that we can reference them in the inspector and adjust our settings in the future — and RigidBody needs to be public so we can access it outside of this class
void start(){
playerRb = GetComponent<RigidBody>();
Physics.gravity *= gravityModifier
}
In the start method we are selecting the Rigidbody and setting it to the player variable — afterward we are multiplying and setting the gravity of the object to the gravityModifier, which we can edit it in the inspector.
void update(){ if input.getKeyDown(keyCode.Space 1){ playerRb.AddForce(Vector3.up * JumpForce, forceMode.Impulse 2)
}
KeyCode you can set any of the keys and they trigger upon touch, if you hold it doesn’t repeat like Get Axis forceMode.Impulse puts all the force on the object at once so it’s not spread out over time, you can see a direct impact of the space bar.
One more thing you can do is add a boolean and say that onGround is false once you press the space bar, this way you can’t double jump.
Let’s set up an on trigger event. So to set an on trigger, first you need to make sure that your ‘on trigger’ is selected on the mesh collidor and we need to apply tags similar to the onCollision.
private void onTriggerEnter(collider other){ if(other.compare_tag("powerup"){
hasPowerUp = true
} }
In this function when an object is collided with another object that has a trigger it will change the hasPowerUp Variable to true. This is helpful to use, with another object that has a trigger vs. onCollisionEnter which is used for more physics based interactions.
Lastly, let’s set up a coroutine, used as a counter, which doesn’t require the use of the update function!
IEnumerator PowerUpCountdown(){
yield return WaitForSeconds(2)
hasPowerUp = false
}
here we are using the IEnumerator and Yield statements to allow us to use the WaitForSeconds() method which is built in to Unity. When the Coroutine is called, wait for seconds, will wait 2 seconds before applying the rest of the method. We can call the coroutine in the start() method
public bool hasPowerUp = true; //public to test in the inspector private void onTriggerEnter(collider other){ if(other.compareTag("PowerUp"){
hasPowerUp = true startCoroutine(powerUpCountdown())
}
}
When we collide with the powerUp object, it is automatically set to true and then we start the coroutine, when the coroutine is finished, it sets the boolean to false, so that the powerUp is no longer active!
Those are just some helpful functions to get started, hopefully they will help you along your coding journey! | https://medium.com/@andyflatiron/useful-functions-in-unity-c88efbd00494 | ['Andy Agus'] | 2020-12-24 23:19:19.688000+00:00 | ['Unity'] |
Netflix drags streaming TV backward, and cord-cutters should take note | When today is over, it will never come back | https://medium.com/@Dominic25208968/netflix-drags-streaming-tv-backward-and-cord-cutters-should-take-note-6bad27553e9a | [] | 2020-12-20 23:33:24.829000+00:00 | ['Surveillance', 'Gear', 'Connected Home'] |
Ruby Object Oriented Programming: Single Source of Truth | PHEW! Now that I don’t have to explain Ruby OOP basics, let’s go ahead and begin talking about how associated classes can “store” and retrieve class instances from another class.
Associations and Relationships
When creating classes in Ruby, you have to consider whether or not these classes have any relation to one another. Let’s say, for example, in the same program, you create a “Headphones” class and a “Chair” class (that does chair things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). You would have to ask yourself, “Do either of these classes have any type of relationship or association with one another?”. In this example, I would bet that these have very little association.
BUT, what if we had a classes in the same program like “Uber Driver” and “Passenger” or “Artist” and “Song”? We now have a situation where one class has a relationship with another class. To make a relationship easy to understand, it is helpful to physically draw out the type of relationship. There are 2 types of relationships this article will cover: “One to Many” and “Many to Many”.
One To Many
This type of relationship is created when there is ONE class that “belongs to” another class. In our example from above, the Artist and Song classes will have this type of relationship (at its most basic level). Like I mentioned above, to see the relationship, it is very helpful to draw it out.
“Many” is illustrated by having the forks at the end of the relationship line.
In this case, one Artist has many Songs but a Song belongs to one Artist. So which class is going to house the information about the other class and become the Single Source of Truth (SSOT)? The answer is the BELONGS TO class. In this case, it is the Song class.
But how does the Song class “store” the Artist’s information? When an Artist instance gets initialized, it takes in just one argument, “name”. When a Song instance is initialized, it takes in arguments of “title”, “album”, “genre”, and “artist_instance”.
The item linking the two classes is the“artist_instance” argument for the Song class initialization.
Lets look at some examples of newly created Artist and Song instances:
As you can see, the Artist INSTANCE of “ariana” is being passed as an argument into the creation of a Song instance. The rest of the song arguments are plain old strings.
This allows us to create methods inside the Artist class to pull information from the Song class since that is the Single Source of Truth (SSOT). Take the below example: The #all_songs instance method on the Artist class is going back to the Song class and iterating through the songs and pulling out all songs related to the Artist instance being called.
For the #all_songs method, if the Artist instance of “drake” was called (drake.all_songs), it would return the Song instance of “headlines”. You are able to dive deeper and pull out just the song’s “title” by mapping over the instance.
Making any sense yet? 😬
Many to Many
We will use our earlier example of “Uber Driver” and “Passenger” as a Many to Many relationship. An Uber Driver can have many passengers throughout their day and a Passenger can have many Uber Drivers during their day as well. What is the thing that brings these two people together?…a Ride. A Driver has many passengers through rides and a passenger has many drivers through rides.
In this program, the Ride class will be the “joining class” that will link the Driver and Passenger class. Think for a second and try and recall how we linked the Artist and Song classes. We used an Artist instance as an argument when creating a new Song instance.
In the case of the Ride class, it will need both a Driver and Passenger instance passed through as an argument when being created (as well as distance for this example).
Because the Ride class belongs to the Driver and Passenger and takes in the driver and passenger instance, this class will become the Single Source of Truth (SSOT). This will allow us to access data across classes by accessing the Ride class.
So let’s say we have some newly initialized Driver, Passenger, and Ride instances. You can see that the driver and passenger instances are being used as arguments in the Ride instance and the distance is a plain integer.
The three classes will look something like the below image. The joining class, Ride, will house the related instances and be the SSOT for calling methods to find driver or passenger data from other classes. | https://medium.com/@sampassarelli/ruby-object-oriented-programming-single-source-of-truth-12b272c80c73 | ['Sam Passarelli'] | 2020-11-07 04:24:32.928000+00:00 | ['Flatiron School', 'Object Oriented', 'Ruby'] |
The Gold-Silver Ratio | You don’t have to be a bullion market specialist to understand the simple gold-silver ratio. But you can take advantage of the ratio that has historically been one of the most reliable technical indicators of when to buy, sell, or swap silver and gold. The strong “buy” signal number is 80 or above, and recently the ratio has gone above 90! Add to this the fact that we are currently in a 19 year silver bull market, and you have the right numbers to start seriously profiting in silver.
The last time we saw the ratio sitting where it is now was back in 1993. What happened next made smart investors a lot of money. Most investors today are simply not aware of the importance of this ratio, and they are missing out on how undervalued silver actually is at this point in history.
For the optimists who are believers in technical data and are hoping to see silver back at its once record high of $50 an ounce, it is time to plan for the future. The good news is that the vast majority of investors still can learn about this historical price relationship and take advantage of what has the potential to be an incredible opportunity. | https://medium.com/@daneklocke/the-gold-silver-ratio-ebabf1ee5c7f | ['Dane Klocke'] | 2020-10-09 19:27:33.547000+00:00 | ['Silver', 'Investing', 'Passive Income', 'Gold', 'Money'] |
7 ideas that influenced the evolution of web design | The first-ever published website came to the Internet on August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee created the site about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Since then, web design has evolved with innovations in technology and design.
World Wide Web project, the first published website from 1991
Defining web design
First, let’s define what web design is. Web design is the process of designing the visual look and feel of a website. Web designers focus on planning the user experience of the website, wireframe layouts, organize content and images in a way that tells a story, and design the final UI.
Evolution of web design
Web design has morphed and changed with technological advances over time. Here are a few key ideas that greatly contributed to the evolution of web design as we know it.
1995–Introduction of JavaScript
There are limitations when it comes to designing a website with only HTML. With JavaScript, the web became more dynamic. Essentially it transformed a static web page into one a user can interact with. Examples of Javascript in use are a popup window, an auto-refresh feature on your favorite social feed, or when Google auto-suggests keywords as you’re typing a question into the search bar.
An example of Javascript: Google autosuggest (source: Kent C. Dodds)
1996–Flash debuts
Adobe Flash gave web designers the freedom to create more dynamic websites by adding video, audio, and animation. These multimedia elements were packaged into a file and sent to a browser to display. Unfortunately, the user had to have the correct flash version installed in order to see these animations. When Apple decided not to include flash in its first iPhone in 2007, Flash started to decline in popularity in web design.
Adobe Flash player (Source: Shutterstock)
1998–CSS joins HTML
Shortly after the introduction of flash, a better way of structuring design came in the form of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS you can change font sizes and colors, add background colors, images, and more. Think of HTML as the content and CSS as the presentation. Together, they create a truly customizable experience on the web.
Example of CSS code (Photo by Pankaj Patel)
2000–Bringing businesses online
PayPal, the world’s leading online payment company, began to skyrocket in 2000. As more businesses started going online, there was a need for secure transactions. From Amazon to eBay and Etsy, slowly the idea of online shopping became more common.
PayPal website over the years (source)
2007 — The birth of mobile
With the launch of the first iPhone, designing for a web browsing experience on a mobile phone became its own challenge. Designers and developers had to adapt, design for a small screen, and think about things like load time. Remember life before unlimited data, when you had to pay for Internet access by the megabyte?
The biggest step to creating a better experience on mobile was the idea of column grids. 960-grid systems and the 12-column division spiked in popularity with designers. More on the importance of grids in web design later in this article.
Evolution of mobile phones (source)
2010–Responsive web design
Ethan Marcotte came up with the idea of responsive design as a challenge to the existing approach to web design. In his post, he writes “fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking.” For a designer, this meant designing multiple layouts to address the various screen sizes for iOS, Android, and tablet devices.
Responsive design from desktop to tablet to mobile (Source: Hackernoon)
2012–Flat design
Before flat design started trending, web and app design used 3D design effects, skeuomorphism, and realism. Shadows, gradients, and highlights were aggressively used and often overdone.
The stark transition to flat design from iOS 6 to iOS 7 (provided by the author)
Over time, web design became more minimal. Flat design strips away the hyper-realistic representation of objects and instead focuses on clean lines and simple areas of color. The trend began to blow up around the time of Apple’s release of iOS 7 in 2013. The new interface was simple and a stark contrast from the skeuomorphism style made famous by Apple products. | https://uxplanet.org/7-ideas-that-influenced-the-evolution-of-web-design-2f8dcc83b9f9 | ['Monica Galvan'] | 2020-12-02 22:07:36.942000+00:00 | ['Visual Design', 'Technology', 'Web Design', 'UX', 'UI'] |
[LIVE] FastComet Black Friday Deal 2020: Get a 75% Discount Now | The most awaited FastComet Black Friday Deals is live with a massive discount up to 75% off only when signed up with coupon code BFSALE75. The discount is valid only for November 30, 2020.
As you know that Fastcomet is the newest and growing hosting firm in California. When it all about affordable hosting I suggest you FastComet because of there incredible features like Good speed and 99% uptime is excellent.
Every company appears with their own Black Friday sales and here I am going to clarify to why you want to get an account, particularly with FastComet hosting services. Let’s get to know about FastComet.
What is FastComet
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Fastcomet is not an extremely famous hosting business, it is not a networking firm, but it is surely the best hosting firm out here to offer outstanding service.
More than 50,000 customers and small business people worldwide are now utilising Fastcomet’s Web hosting services.
Their FastCloud is mainly for WordPress Hosting configured. In the international market, FastComet is a well-known host supplier. They have been over for about ten years and are trusted for their hosting necessity by thousands of big and small websites.
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So make sure to grab their FastComet Black Friday sale to save up to 75% deal on their hosting plans. Well if you still have any query or doubt regarding this post let us know in the comment section below we will be happy to help you out with that. | https://medium.com/@josephbutler8899/live-fastcomet-black-friday-deal-2020-get-a-75-discount-now-598194de620a | ['Joseph Butler'] | 2021-08-08 07:06:17.783000+00:00 | ['Fastcomet', 'Black Friday', 'Black Friday Deal'] |
Leaders and Metrics and Git, Oh My! | In the realm of technology, leadership loves numbers. They’re comfortable. They’re understandable (hopefully). And, most alarmingly, they are used as a soft, warm, cuddly security blanket that seemingly communicates to leaders exactly how often their engineers are performing at peak proficiency at all times. I have a bad feeling about this…
In the search for ever increasing sources of productivity data, savvy managers have started tapping into source control statistics from GitHub and other sources as a way to condense down a developer’s engineering contributions to something easy to chart on a productivity graph. The problem with this approach is quite simple, really, and it’s something that’s been addressed in many social and mathematical contexts much more elegantly than I could ever hope to describe.
The good folks Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt were onto something big when investigating a bunch of unexpected social and economic outcomes for their “Freakonomics” books, in which experiments that seemed airtight on paper ended up rendered completely ineffective or worse due to the presence of unexpected results fueled by human behavior on interacting circumstances. Unfortunately, as software developers, we still aren’t immune to the unintended, messy effects of human psychology on evaluation by data. Those very interactions can have an incredibly profound impacts on the quality and reliability of the software we create.
Let me give you some examples. Ever since entering my role as a software engineering coach, I’ve heard countless horror stories of developers being held hostage to a number of different metrics related to source control, including but not limited to lines of code (LOC), number of commits per day/week/month, and issues resolved (velocity), among others. While each of these metrics provides a data point into how and how often a developer interacts with a source control platform, they fail to provide any indication of the developer’s productivity and their overall contributions to the goals of the organization. Why? Let’s take a look at each of a few common source control metrics in detail, and discuss exactly how they could potentially undermine leadership’s intentions of improving developer contributions and product quality.
Lines Of Code
Clearly the engineer committing the most code on a product team is the most productive, right? Well…not quite. As any software engineer can tell you, great code is measured in quality, not quantity. Often, refactoring (or rewriting) sloppy or inefficient code can actually lead to a reduction in total lines of code contributed for a particular developer. More broadly, the metric in and of itself is unclear. What constitutes a “line of code”, anyway? Literal lines of code terminated by specific characters (Source)? The number of statements ignoring formatting and newline characters (Logical)? The number of machine code instructions produced by a particular section of code (Instructions)? This can get messy, VERY quickly.
Implementing this metric as a measure of developer productivity is guaranteed to provoke aggressive changes in coding style. An engineer could be tempted to copy paste entire sections of code instead of reusing them, add unnecessary fields or methods in classes (such as unneeded getters or setters), or specifically choose implementation patterns that favor longer blocks of code regardless of whether their presence serves the wider purpose of the product. Leaders thinking “Oh, don’t worry about problems like that. The lead engineers will catch and eliminate those kinds of issues in code reviews!” should do so with caution. Any skilled engineer that catches wind of evaluation based on a metric like this is probably already halfway out the door, as it telegraphs a blatant misunderstanding at the leadership level of how software is designed and implemented.
Commit Count
Intended as a way to measure how often each team member contributes to the wider project, this metric instead encourages developers to commit code constantly. A deluge of these infantisimally small, rapid-fire commits can make discovering the source of a problem during a high-impact triage much more difficult. Teams forced into this pattern may also may run into “The Curious Case of the Moving Code,” in which functionality is refactored, refactored, and refactored again into different locations in order to pad commit count. Any developer can give you 100 commits per day if you ask them to, but doing so certainly doesn’t improve the developer’s skill or the quality of your product’s code.
I should mention that of the source control metrics I’m discussing here as toxic to an organization’s developers and products, commit count is probably one of the least egregious. The reason for this is because software developers — particularly those early in their careers — don’t commit often enough. Either they’re waiting until a feature is complete before pushing it up, or they’re petrified of Git itself. Therefore, encouraging more commits isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. I always tell the teams I coach to “commit early and commit often”, and not be afraid of making a mistake on Git. It’s called source control for a reason, and all but the most blatant of Git mistakes can be easily rolled back with a few commands (or clicks). Still, expectations around commits should be handled on a team-by-team basis and certainly not as an edict from leadership.
Issues Resolved (a.k.a. Velocity)
A velocity metric is, without a doubt, a cowboy coder’s best friend. Often a kind of ‘hero’ developer that thrives on pushing features to production as fast as possible, being empowered by the presence of a metric based on delivery can easily turn your most critical systems into a digital version of Dodge City. A culture encouraging delivery at the expense of all else leads to developers encouraged to exclude testing from ‘definition of done’ and continue to pile on technical debt. An organization built around velocity will be able to deliver features quickly, but their products will inevitably become brittle and break down, especially in unexpected conditions. I’ve seen this happen first-hand, and it isn’t pretty. Depending on the circumstances, surprise failures in brittle products due to rapid feature deployment could lead to losses of millions of dollars. YEEEEE-HAW indeed.
Measuring developer productivity is hard. I’m not saying it isn’t. What I am trying to say is remember “Freakonomics”. If you’re a leader responsible for figuring out developer performance, be mindful of the data you plan to collect and how it may impact the behavior of your engineers in unexpected ways. Not doing so could be dangerous to your engineers, your software, and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line. | https://migliaci.medium.com/leaders-and-metrics-and-git-oh-my-f468d88112f8 | ['Michael', 'Miggs'] | 2020-12-11 16:59:38.480000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Product Management', 'Git', 'Developer Productivity', 'Software Engineering'] |
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Overview
The world may know them as Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Batgirl, but not-so-typical teenagers Diana, Kara and Barbara, alongside their Super Hero friends have much more to deal with than just protecting Metropolis from some of the most sinister school-aged Super-Villains. After all, being teens is tough enough, what with school, friends, family and the chaos that comes with managing a social life. But add super powers and a secret identity to the mix, and things can get a lot more complicated.
❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream identifies the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, instead of the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies particularly to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, music CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks satisfactory bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves with a television signal. Live internet streaming takes a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio tracks interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
Streaming is an option to file downloading, a process where the end-user obtains the entire file for this content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The word “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][2][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][7][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][9][10][11][12] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[15]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower. | https://medium.com/@xafikix658/official-dc-super-hero-girls-series-1-episode-51-full-episode-3a7e74372275 | [] | 2020-12-27 14:27:26.151000+00:00 | ['Television', 'Animation', 'Sci Fi Fantasy', 'Dc Super Hero Girls'] |
The Taste of Home: Four Cartoonists on Family Recipes and Memory | Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib
By The Nib
New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look | https://medium.com/the-nib/the-taste-of-home-four-cartoonists-on-family-recipes-and-memory-27485a4098ca | ['The Nib'] | 2020-12-05 16:19:19.032000+00:00 | ['Holiday', 'Comics', 'Food', 'Family', 'Christmas'] |
The Last Jedi knew exactly what it was doing with Snoke. | The Last Jedi knew exactly what it was doing with Snoke.
Screencap: Snoke is reduced to a footnote in the history of Kylo Ren.
When I first saw it in theaters, I remember getting a grin on my face as I realized where the throne room confrontation was going. The scene generated a tremendous amount of suspense by letting the viewer in on the fact that Kylo Ren was covertly moving Rey’s lightsaber right under Snoke’s nose. Once the moment arrived, my mouth was agape and I was ready to declare TLJ the best Star Wars movie.
Rian Johnson had pulled a Game of Thrones-esque plot turn that revealed the new trilogy’s Emperor figure to have been a self-aggrandizing narcissist and poseur. With my next article, I hope to help shift the discourse around Snoke and demonstrate that TLJ provided viewers with a great sense of who Snoke was, even as it didn’t answer resolve any of the mysteries surrounding him. | https://medium.com/@mikhail-skoptsov/the-last-jedi-snoke-c3a2ff0cac3e | ['Mikhail L. Skoptsov'] | 2020-12-16 14:15:44.622000+00:00 | ['Star Wars', 'Star Wars The Last Jedi', 'The Last Jedi'] |
My Vagina Is Not Too Tight and Dry | My Vagina Is Not Too Tight and Dry
Arousal after sex abuse.
Photo by Nine Köpfer on Unsplash
CW: the content warning is about child sex abuse, rape, and the aftermath and effects on the human body after.
Every time I have sex with someone new, I get asked a few questions. “Are you a virgin?” haha, I wish. Next, followed by “Are you sure you are turned on. You don’t feel right.” I don’t know how to explain to anyone how offensive it is to be told by seemingly well-intentioned men that my pussy doesn’t feel right, but I am going to try.
Growing up, I was sexually abused from the age of 5 to about 12 years old. I have been sexually assaulted more times than I can count on my hands. Being gang-raped leaves you with a certain kind of mental scar. There was no real education after all my sexual abuse that my body would render sex differently.
I get compared a lot to other women. I am frequently told how my pussy is wrong, or I am just not in tune with my body enough. I can get myself to orgasm in 3 minutes max with my fingers alone. I may not be very wet, but I can assure you I am entirely in tune with my body.
I think sex positivity is excellent. I support people who flow like waterfalls. I want people to understand that you should not use sex-positivity for othering. Per RAINN, 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted). Statistics show there are a lot of sexual assault survivors out there. We need to talk about the aftermath of sexual assault.
For survivors of sexual assault, it is common to experience genital pain, tightness, and apprehensiveness when it comes to sex after the trauma. For me, sex is excruciating. It is not uncommon for me to bleed, have cuts, or to be dry. There are things I can do to lessen the effect of my body’s response to sex. However, anytime I consent to sex, I know I agree to pain.
If I tell my sex partner I am horny, and I want them inside me, I don’t want someone who isn’t my therapist or OB-GYN to explain to me my pussy is inept. Instead of shaming someone me for not being wet like your ex, pull out some lube. Listen to the person in front of you. They have been with their body since it was created; they certainly know themselves better than you do.
While it may be triggering for survivors to communicate their past abuse, it is crucial for medical professionals to know. I have gone to an OB-GYN for a pap smear. During the pap smear, the swab got stuck in my cervix. The doctor spent 20 minutes panicking, telling me I needed to relax because she couldn’t get it out.
At that moment, I didn’t have control over my body. It was traumatizing to have a doctor freak out while a swab was stuck inside me. I felt like I was being raped all over again.
Since that day, I found a new OB-GYN at the advice of my therapist. My therapist explained to me that people who are sexually assaulted often have trouble with arousal and pap smears. They can be very triggering for survivors like myself.
I found a new doctor and explained my history. My doctor understands how my sexual trauma manifests, and I’m delighted to say she has never got a swab stuck in my cervix. They offered full anesthesia for pap smears and IUD insertions.
Nothing is physiologically wrong with my body. I have had a lot of testing done and conversations with my doctors. I have buckets full of trauma that don’t make great first impressions. Sex is complicated. Sometimes I do get wet, but it’s rare.
To enjoy sex, I have to push through the pain. After penetration starts, I generally get wet, but it takes sex to happen first before my body can let go and be free. I love sex; it is genuinely my favorite thing. I am not ashamed of how my body performs. I am glad I can take back the power that was robbed of me.
I support people who are exploring themselves for the first time. However, I don’t enjoy men thinking that they’re my teacher, and they’re going to awaken my pussy for the first time. I don’t like the implications that because my body preforms differently, I need instruction.
I would much rather have a conversation clothed regarding sex. Sometimes I forget not everyone comes from a BDSM background where we all take half an hour questionnaires before even touching each other. There is something to be learned from that, though. Asking your partner five things they love about sex and five things they can’t stand in sex goes a long way. What does your ideal night in bed look like? Is there anything I can do more of?
If your partner can’t articulate what they like in words, ask them to show you their favorite porn. Maybe it is written erotica that gets them going. Even if you are vanilla, I think researching BDSM negotiation helps so much.
BDSM goes into a highly technical level of sexual negotiations. Where can you touch someone is common, also any triggers, and medical conditions are laid out. I know for some this may be overkill. However, it is a valuable tool for me to explain sexual boundaries. I use it for vanilla hookups all the time. So far, no one has gone running away if anything BDSM checklists and questionnaires have created more sexual satisfaction in my life.
Is your partner having a hard time but can’t say why? Make a safe word so things can stop, no questions asked. Have a partner who goes nonverbal regularly during sex? Give them a small ball to hold, let them know dropping it means sex ends no questions asked.
Life is too short for having lousy sex after trauma. I would rather have an awkward conversation thousand times over than be triggered or worse insulted because of my past. Being patient and keeping an open mind is critical. You never know what someone has been through until its too late usually. | https://medium.com/sexography/my-vagina-is-not-too-tight-and-dry-82502e6f232e | ['Beth Daily'] | 2020-08-14 19:20:19.033000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Sexual Assault', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Sex'] |
Follow, don’t lead: Why journalists make great design researchers | Seek truth and report it.
by rawpixel on Unsplash
Back in 2014, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student journalist who thought she knew everything.
When I pitched and pursued my first stories, I fixated on my interpretation of the truth. This meant I spent little time brainstorming sources to contact, and asked questions littered with assumptions rooted in this “truth.”
A few months into my first gig at the school paper, I interviewed the director of an academic initiative called the Texas English Project. His work analyzed the accents of Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott during their respective campaigns for the Texas gubernatorial race that year.
I wanted him to answer, “What implications does this study have on the race?” He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.
“[This study] can’t help you make your decision — unless all you want is a straight-talking Texan,” he told me.
My mind automatically associated a gubernatorial race with election hot takes. In contrast, his work sought to make sense of evolving accents and language mannerisms—and just happened to find Davis and Abbott intriguing enough to study.
During the interview, I broke a cardinal rule of reporting. I asked leading question after leading question.
That day, while I felt like a failure, I also discovered the value in great reporting, and the basic formula to execute on it: Follow the interviewee down their path instead of forcing them down yours.
Cool story. What about design research, though?
For those who don’t know, design teams (usually product design teams, but not exclusively) use design research to inform what they make.
Here’s how that process usually works: Design researchers immerse themselves in the world of a specific set of users through observation, interviews, surveys, data analysis, testing, the ever-so-nebulous market, and some other methods design researchers will roll their eyes at me for forgetting to mention. Then, they synthesize all of that information, usually couple that with insights, and bring all of it back to their team.
Decode this a bit, and the job starts to sound strikingly similar to that of a journalist.
Instead of interviewing users, journalists interview sources. An article, video, interactive, or podcast acts as an artifact for a journalist’s synthesized information and insights. And instead of bringing this artifact to a design team, a journalist brings it to the public.
A colleague of mine, Nikki Dunagan, started her career as a journalist, and eventually found her way to conversational design. Her day-to-day involves a fair amount of design research, and she told me it was one of the easier parts of her job to figure out.
“Knowing how to talk to people and get information out of them, unbiasedly, was an important skill to have,” she explained.
“When I first started out in the journalist world, I liked to have a plan. I’d go in with a million questions ready and prepared, and would slightly panic when my interviewees would go off script. I learned really quickly that I got the most information out of sources when I talked conversationally and went with the flow.”
She found this lesson transferred well to design research.
“The information I got from users when I just let them steer the ship was so much more valuable and honest.” — Nikki Dunagan
Agenda? I don’t know her.
Let’s be real: Everyone has an agenda. Whether you’re a journalist who wants to uncover something fishy in the government or a design researcher who wants to know why people don’t like your company’s product, you can’t help but think about how the end destination will look, and the steps you need to get there.
But experienced journalists and design researchers know the euphoria and relief of coming out of an interview where someone took them down the road less traveled—a road their imagination could’ve never stirred up.
Amanda Booth (@wordswithamanda) is a Content Designer at IBM. She’s based in Austin, Texas. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions. | https://medium.com/design-ibm/follow-dont-lead-why-journalists-make-great-design-researchers-e76b4f0ea780 | ['Amanda Booth'] | 2018-09-26 21:42:42.476000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'UX', 'User Research', 'Design Research', 'Journalism'] |
I Care, I Do Not Care | I Care, I Do Not Care
A Poem
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
By the time you got to these lines
just above the final quote
you had ceased to care
no longer running your red fingers
over the manuscript
Over in the kitchen
I had already coddled death
got out the tea bags, milk, etc.
I don’t know if I saved her
but she was trying to tell me about you
Frustrated by various orders
uncertain what to brand on your t-shirt
or legs, or what perfume to tell
everyone about your protest that
was you alone and some trees
I dented several books
on my way to bring you some food
but of course I can’t cook
so I hope cereal is up your alley
and you weren’t hoping for cigarettes
I care, I thought I told you
but then life got in the way of it
and I forgot so many things
even the definitions you had tried
to make clear long ago | https://medium.com/artrock-sexual-manifestations-queer-madness/i-care-i-do-not-care-c7e8ef7c549 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-13 14:05:43.014000+00:00 | ['Image', 'Editing', 'Poetry', 'Musing', 'Writing'] |
“Go Into Yourself” | Words of wisdom from Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.
As we approach the end of the year, I would like to recommend something to you: Every day, read a passage in the book A Year With Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Who is Rilke? Here is a brief biography via Poets.org:
On December 4, 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, the only child of an unhappy marriage. Rilke’s childhood was also unhappy; his parents placed him in military school with the desire that he become an officer — a position Rilke was not inclined to hold. With the help of his uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly gifted child, Rilke left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By the time he enrolled in Charles University in Prague in 1895, he knew that he would pursue a literary career: he had already published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, the previous year. At the turn of 1895–1896, Rilke published his second collection, Larenopfer (Sacrifice to the Lares). A third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) followed in 1896. That same year, Rilke decided to leave the university for Munich, Germany, and later made his first trip to Italy. In 1897, Rilke went to Russia, a trip that would prove to be a milestone in Rilke’s life, and which marked the true beginning of his early serious works. While there the young poet met Tolstoy, whose influence is seen in Das Buch vom lieben Gott und anderes (Stories of God), and Leonid Pasternak, the nine-year-old Boris’s father. At Worpswede, where Rilke lived for a time, he met and married Clara Westhoff, who had been a pupil of Rodin. In 1902 he became the friend, and for a time the secretary, of Rodin, and it was during his twelve-year Paris residence that Rilke enjoyed his greatest poetic activity. His first great work, Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), appeared in 1905, followed in 1907 by Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; to Italy, Spain and Egypt among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry, influenced by the visual arts. When World War I broke out, Rilke was obliged to leave France and during the war he lived in Munich. In 1919, he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was here that he wrote his last two works, the Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. At the time of his death his work was intensely admired by many leading European artists, but was almost unknown to the general reading public. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he has come to be universally regarded as a master of verse.
A few years back, I started each day with a reading from A Year With Rilke and I found it both thought-provoking and inspirational. Here is one example of his wisdom taken from Letters to a Young Poet, dated February 17, 1903:
There is only one thing to do. Go into yourself. Examine your reason for writing. Discover whether it is rooted in the depths of your heart, and find out whether you would rather die than be forbidden to write. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, have I no choice but to write? Dig deep within for the truest answer, and if this answer is a strong and simple yes, then build your life upon this necessity. Your life henceforth, down to its most ordinary and insignificant moment, must prove and reveal this truth.
I am sometimes asked by my students this question: Am I good enough to be a writer? Do I have the talent to pursue being a writer?
My response: You are asking the wrong question.
A more pertinent question to ask is what Rilke poses: Have I no choice but to write?
If the act of writing… creating a story… brings you joy, that is one thing. But equally, if not more important is if you have a compulsion to write. If a need to create lies at the core of your being. If your life would be unfulfilled if you were “forbidden to write.”
Being “good enough” or having the requisite “talent” to be a writer are important considerations, particularly if your goal is to make a living as a writer. But the odds against financial success as a writer are so enormously long, that cannot be the basis upon which you assess your potential as a writer. You must write because you love it. You must write because… well… you must.
By writing, you discover your voice. You learn the craft. You discover a process of breaking story, pounding out a first draft, then rewriting, polishing, and editing, so that you end up with something someone will enjoy reading.
How to discover if you have that need, that compulsion, that obsession to write? As Rilke suggests: Go into yourself. Reflect on why you write. What is your motivation to pick up a pen or put fingers on a keyboard and type Fade In or Once upon a time.
Here is one way to approach your self-reflection: Imagine you are very near the end of your life. Push the visualization to the extreme: You are on your death bed. Among the many feelings you have as you approach your final days, is one of them this: I regret not pursuing my interest in writing.
Lean into that moment. How deep is the pain you feel when considering the choices you will have made which led you away from writing?
If that exercise proves too challenging psychologically, try reflecting about yourself in the opposite extreme.
Imagine you are seated at your writing station. A desk in your home office. The coffee shop down the street. The public library across town. You are typing… or writing by hand… it is a story of your own creation. And you are lost in that universe.
How does that make you feel?
If it is a kind of rapture you do not feel in any other context, that should tell you something about who you are and your relationship to writing.
Want to be a writer? How much talent you have is important. But the first question you need to consider is do you have a passion to write.
The best way to answer that question is to go into yourself. | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/go-into-yourself-f9e576fd476b | ['Scott Myers'] | 2020-12-21 20:36:49.415000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Writing', 'Fiction', 'Screenwriting', 'Creativity'] |
New: A SignInWithAppleButton in SwiftUI | SignInWithAppleButton
You may indicate if you would like to be a signup or a sign-in. Here, you will be doing a sign-in:
The request scope is where you can specify what kind of information you would like to collect from the user. Currently, you are only collecting the full name and email address. Authentication is successful. Here, you will be able to get the credentials and information to store in your database. If the authentication fails, you will be able to identify the error with the provided description.
In case you would like to have a signup, just change .signIn to .signUp and run the project:
There is also .continue :
Thanks for reading! | https://medium.com/better-programming/new-a-signinwithapplebutton-in-swiftui-270122948ec9 | ['Kelvin Tan'] | 2020-07-07 15:15:07.774000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'iOS', 'Swift', 'Swiftui', 'Programming'] |
Afraid of emotional trading? You should be | Last week we talked about how being disciplined is the only way to conquer the market.
Not only does trading discipline keep you from doing stupid (i.e. greedy, angry, reckless) things, being consistent with your strategies also teaches you a lot about how the market works. And that’s how you build up the confidence you need to make a business out of trading.
So, discipline, good. Gut instincts, bad.
Not only does trading discipline keep you from doing stupid (i.e. greedy, angry, reckless) things, being consistent with your strategies also teaches you a lot about how the market works
But there are times when your gut just won’t shut up. Actually, it happens a lot more often than you think, even to traders who seem like they have it all together. That’s because what we feel is really hard to block out.
What’s an impulse/emotional trade?
An impulse trade can happen so fast you don’t even see it coming. Something triggers your trading finger and you press trade before you have the chance to think twice about it. It just feels right.
Now you’re trading on impulse.
As long as the market is moving your way, and you see profits, you’re Rafael Nadal at the US Open. But, even if it doesn’t happen right away, eventually you’re going to take a nasty hit if you’re impulse trading. Before you realize it, your grand slam dreams are gone and your Nadal’s ball boy. But that’s not even the scary part.
Here’s the scary part.
What actually happens when you impulse trade?
A few things can happen when you let your stomach do the talking and it doesn’t work out. Probably, you’ll experience some anger. (What the hell did I just do?)
Then, once you stop kicking yourself, you may feel a little fear. (What if I keep losing? Is my career over?) One thing you’ll definitely be feeling is loss, as in all that money that’s no longer in your account.
As long as the market is moving your way, and you see profits, you’re Rafael Nadal at the US Open. But, even if it doesn’t happen right away, eventually you’re going to take a nasty hit if you’re impulse trading.
At the very worst — because, let’s face it, it can always get worse — you’ll become “married” to your trade, which means you’ll keep riding that trade out until you make it profitable. Because you can, right? Nope, you probably can’t, and you’ve just lost a whole lot more money in the meantime.
What can I do to stop making impulse trades?
You’ve already taken the first step. You know what an impulse is, so next time you feel one coming on, you can identify it and own it. If you do go through with an impulse trade, treat it like any other trade, i.e. use the risk management strategy set out in your trading plan. If you normally stop out with a 2% loss, use the same percentage to trigger your impulse trade stop loss.
Another way of cutting down on impulse trades is to pretend you’ve got to explain all your trades to your boss, a big guy who maybe smokes real Cohiba cigars and will not be very pleased to hear that you’ve been losing his money on whims. Maybe that will help you start caring more about flushing your own money down the toilet. But the best way to get over your impulse trading habit isn’t play acting or even writing a sticky note with your trade stop loss figures on it.
If you really want to conquer your gut, here’s what we do. We remove our itchy fingers from the equation completely with really good algotrading software. With smart algos, you won’t ever be in a position to trade on impulse. You won’t feel the pressure, the anger or the fear, because your algos will feel it all for you.
You: Seriously? How does that work?
Us: Come back next week, my friend, and we’ll tell you all about it.
Next week: How Tekton algotrading software can help you conquer your impulses and get disciplined | https://medium.com/@tektonalgotrading/afraid-of-emotional-trading-you-should-be-e30221326569 | ['Tekton Algotrading'] | 2020-11-16 02:27:04.100000+00:00 | ['Discipline', 'Trading', 'Emotional Trading', 'Forex', 'FX'] |
Why Digital Transformation is on top of the CFO’s mind today? | OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea
Businesses today, more than ever, expect a blueprint to success. By asking the right questions, helping with planning and offering advice along the way is the way to go.
Technology adoption is critical for an organization to evolve and increase value to customers. More than 90% acknowledge that their existing processes and systems are redundant, inefficient or lack capabilities.
Technology costs and enhancing productivity are key performance indicators on your CFO’s radar.
According to McKinsey article, the 3 most noted barriers are culture, organizational structure and governance. In my experience, culture is the most important and can make or break any transformation.
Let’s begin with an easier explanation of your organization’s digital transformation. It is simplification of back-end processes allowing for low complexity and faster adoption by the team. Leaders need to get their version of digital nailed down. What exactly do you want digital to include? Is it going paperless, analytics, business intelligence, AI tools or omni-channel to your customers? Only when the proper definition has been established, can the team rally behind the objective.
“COVID-19 has wiped off almost $500 billion of worldwide DX technology investment between 2020–2023 from pre-COVID forecast.” Eileen Smith, Program Vice President at IDC.
The silver lining is that DX transformation spending forecasts global spend to grow 10.4% in 2020 to $1.3 trillion.
Tangible benefits are operational efficiencies, improved collaboration and customer engagement. I prioritize all digital initiatives on a value/competency matrix. While it is a challenging exercise there is clear benefit of having one strategic priority. Based on my experience, set aside other initiatives that don’t directly benefit the one priority.
Value matrix measures on an X-Y basis (low to high) — external vs. internal. External value measures how important is an initiative to customers. Internal value measures how critical is an initiative to the team and partners.
Competency Matrix measures on an X-Y basis (low to high) — capacity vs capability. Capacity measures whether the team has bandwidth to see-through the initiative to the finish line. Capability measures the team’s technical knowledge to understand total risks and effectively mitigate them.
Finally, once I overlay both matrices, there will be 4 quadrants of initiatives. Quadrant 1 (top right and moving counterclockwise) is for strategic initiatives. These are actions taken for long term benefits and building a moat around the business. Quadrant 2 and 3 are for parking lot where initiatives are placed on hold or to reconsider. When there isn’t a direct connection to the strategic priority, actions should be parked here. Quadrant 4 is for those initiatives with internal and external value, that can be tackled immediately. These are sometimes called the low-hanging fruit with a quicker risk-reward.
The bottom-line here is to evaluate your priorities before embarking on this journey. Digital transformation is breaking down old habits and forming newer methods — it is not for the faint of heart.
Most companies have been working on a digital transformation strategy or are already in the middle of one. This is first of three articles to help executives with creating a blueprint for digital transformation and execute it if one is already in place. Here is a link to my next article https://lnkd.in/g3Bx_vj | https://medium.com/@dipesh.pattni/why-digital-transformation-is-on-top-of-the-cfos-mind-today-ef58594dc9d6 | ['Dipesh Pattni'] | 2020-11-26 16:23:08.269000+00:00 | ['Digital Transformation', 'Digital Strategy', 'Change Management', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Kafka Deduplication Patterns (1 of 2) | Managing duplicate events is an inevitable aspect of distributed messaging using Kafka. This article looks at the patterns that can be applied in order to deduplicate these events.
Duplicate Events
Consider the following flow where a message is consumed from a topic, triggering a REST POST call to a third party service, a database INSERT to create a new record, and the publishing of a resulting event to an outbound topic.
A failure could happen at any stage in this flow. The flow must be implemented to not mark the message as consumed until the processing has completed. This ensures that upon failure the message will remain on the topic and be polled by another consumer in the consumer group. The deduplication patterns that are applied will then determine what duplicates will occur, whether a duplicate POST, duplicate database INSERT, or duplicate outbound event.
Deduplication Patterns
Patterns that cater for duplicate messages:
1. Idempotent Consumer Pattern
Track received message IDs in the database.
Use a locking flush strategy to stop duplicates being processed until message ID is committed or rolled back.
Upon successful commit any duplicate awaiting lock is discarded.
Message ID commit happens in the same transaction as any other database writes, making these actions atomic.
2. Transactional Outbox — messages published to outbox table with CDC
Outbound message committed to the outbox table in DB in the same transaction as any other database writes, making these actions atomic.
Kafka Connect CDC (change data capture) publishes messages to Kafka outbound topic.
3. Kafka Transaction API — for exactly-once delivery semantics
Kafka’s exactly-once semantics guarantees that the three consume, process and produce steps will happen exactly once.
Important to understand that the consume and process steps could however happen multiple times.
Uses the transactional log as a centralised, single source of truth for all ongoing transactions, guaranteeing it is atomic.
It is also possible to combine the Idempotent Consumer pattern with the Transactional Outbox pattern.
The Database transactions and Kafka transactions cannot be committed atomically. While a chained transaction manager can be used to commit these using a two-phase commit, this does not guarantee both transactions will complete atomically, and resources can be left in an inconsistent state. This means it is not possible to combine the Idempotent Consumer pattern with Kafka Transactions pattern without risking data loss.
Applying The Patterns
This sequence diagram describes the flow illustrated at the top of this article.
Only once the resulting event is published is the consumer offsets Kafka topic written to. This marks the message as consumed, and it will not be re-polled by another consumer in the same consumer group. If the consumer offsets are not written due to a preceding failure, then the message will be re-polled.
The following table summaries what duplicate actions (POST request, database INSERT, outbound event PRODUCE) can occur at different failure points based on which patterns have been applied.
Some scenarios are not applicable to every pattern as the failure points can differ based on what patterns are in place. Each scenario for each pattern is diagrammed in the second part of this article.
The ‘Consume Times Out’ scenario refers to where a consumer event poll does not complete before the timeout, so the message is redelivered to a second consumer instance as the Kafka Broker believes the original consumer may have died.
Recommendations
Implementing the Idempotent Consumer and Transactional Outbox patterns together is the recommended approach to minimise duplicate actions occurring. The only risk here is a duplicate POST occurring. While the same is true when combining the Idempotent Consumer with Kafka Transactions, there are two transactional managers in play here, meaning more complexity, more things to go wrong, and more testing needed.
For each of these approaches there is nothing that can be done to completely remove the chance of a duplicate POST. It is therefore important to ensure that that call is itself idempotent, with the third party service dealing with that idempotent requirement.
Next…
In the second part of this article the different deduplication patterns are drawn out in detail for each failure scenario to show how and where duplicates occur.
For More On Kafka…
Head over to Lydtech Consulting for this and many more articles on Kafka and other interesting areas of software development. | https://medium.com/lydtech-consulting/kafka-deduplication-patterns-1-of-2-ef0371a3331b | ['Rob Golder'] | 2021-12-18 14:09:52.594000+00:00 | ['Resilience', 'Messaging', 'Kafka'] |
F*ck you and 2020 too! | For my Auntie Susie, my cousin Tina, my Uncle Paul, my Princess Whitey (my cat) and everyone else we lost this year. Whether it was directly related to COVID or not, a loss is a loss and a death is a death!
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
Lost another one to 2020
not sure if it was COVID
or God just being funny.
I hear he has a sense of humor
but I think that’s just
another f*cking rumor.
They also say he never gives you
more than you can take,
but everyone I know
is about to f*cking break.
Maybe they didn’t pray hard enough
or maybe their beliefs aren’t strong enough,
all I know is this year has been
really f*cking rough!
I think what aggravates me the most
is all the f*cking a$$holes
who still think it’s a hoax!
As if the nations doctors and nurses
cries for help are one big f*cking joke!
All they ask is that we consider the
welfare of other people and the world
replies in a resounding, “NOPE!”
I hate to wish anybody tragedy
but sometimes that’s what it takes
for people to develop an ounce of
fu*king humanity!
I know they say common sense
isn’t very common anymore,
but apparently common decency
also went out the f*cking door! | https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/f-ck-you-and-2020-too-2c2c7548a653 | ['Lyndsey Frondarina'] | 2020-12-22 19:47:58.349000+00:00 | ['Resistance Poetry', 'Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Anxiety', 'Poetry'] |
Bitcoin Price Slump Ahead, Says Analyst | Even as Bitcoin (BTCUSD) enthusiasts celebrate the setting of another price record, technical analysts are sounding the alarm on the cryptocurrency’s current rally. Miller Tabak Chief Strategist Matt Maley told CNBC that Bitcoin’s upward trend could hit a wall around the New Year. According to Maley, the cryptocurrency is in an overbought state, meaning that it has too much liquidity in its markets, and this could trigger a selloff by investors interested in booking their profits.
The analysts referenced the cryptocurrency’s high relative strength indicator (RSI), a technical analysis indicator that measures overbought or oversold conditions. A stock with an RSI of over 70 is in an overbought state. During the cryptocurrency’s price run-up in 2017, its high RSI was followed by significant declines.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Bitcoin price could witness a decline of between 25% and 30% around the New Year, according to a technical analyst.
Bitcoin is still a good asset for the long term.
“It’s [the RSI is] above 88 [as of Thursday]. That’s not quite up to the 90 level that it reached twice in 2017, but those were followed by declines of 36% and 64%,” Maley said. He added that the pandemic’s ending will result in fewer traders and less money. According to the analyst, “… maybe that liquidity becomes a little less plentiful, this stock could get clobbered like it has many other times in the past.”
That clobbering could be substantial and result in steep price declines, amounting to between 25% and 30% of the cryptocurrency’s current price, said Maley. “Again, I don’t think that really starts until early in the new year, but I do think it’s coming soon … based on this overbought condition and the froth that we’ve seen in this asset class in the last week or two,” he said.
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Another analyst, Tom DeMark, said that Bitcoin price would suffer from “pending upside trend exhaustion” that would begin a downturn in its price. DeMark also cited previous instances when similar movement has occurred. “The prior instances in which this long-term model has spoken include the precise Dec. 18, 2017, high, the precise low day Dec. 14, 2018, and then the precise June 26, 2019, high day.”
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Bitcoin Is Still a Buy
Bitcoin prices have set new records recently, skyrocketing from $20,000 to $23,000 in a single day. Those figures have brought back memories of the cryptocurrency’s 2017 rally, when it traversed the distance between $10,000 and $20,000 in less than two weeks on the back of demand from retail investors in thinly traded markets. That swinging performance was followed by a prolonged price slump that lasted more than two years.
Unlike the 2017 price jump, however, this year’s rally has been measured in comparison. Institutional investors, who were dismissive of the cryptocurrency in 2017, have also sounded out encouraging words about its potential to become a “global asset” this time. Some have also begun offering services or amassing a stash of the cryptocurrency as a hedge against uncertain economic conditions and inflation.
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All of this means that the Bitcoin market in 2020 is more mature as compared to the one in 2017. To that end, Maley said that he believed in the cryptocurrency for the long term. “I think on a short-term basis it [the rally] could continue a little bit longer, and I’m very bullish on it on a very long-term basis,” he said. | https://medium.com/@balfala352/bitcoin-price-slump-ahead-says-analyst-4c1ef2e8927e | [] | 2020-12-24 14:22:58.776000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Bitcoin Price', 'Usd', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Btc'] |
#2 Come, Let Us Worship | “The depiction of Jesus’ birth is itself a simple and joyful proclamation of the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God.”
These words of Pope Francis recall how the birth of Jesus has inspired generations of artists throughout history to evangelize through beauty. Every week the Vatican Museums and Vatican News offer a masterpiece from the pontifical collections, which are accompanied with a reflection from the Popes.
A splendid nighttime scene of the Nativity and the Annunciation to the shepherds, in which St. Joseph is depicted as an old man, shown from behind as he sleeps next to a dead tree, which alludes to his exclusion from the birth of the Son of God.
The two women near Mary — who are the midwives of which the apocryphal gospels speak — represent those people who believe (the woman who looks toward the Virgin) and those who doubt (Salome, who turns her back).
In the background an angel lights up the sky appearing to the shepherds. But the supernatural light which radiates from the Child, placed humbly on the ground, is much brighter. | https://medium.com/ave-maria/come-let-us-worship-42d75fa092cc | ['Vic Alcuaz'] | 2021-01-04 09:03:06.031000+00:00 | ['Church History', 'Culture', 'Art', 'History', 'Catholic'] |
Let’s get ‘creaturely’: A new worldview can help us face ecological crises | by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen
No farmer has ever gone out to the barn to start the day and discovered that a baby tractor had been born overnight. For farmers who work with horses, the birth of a foal would not be surprising.
That observation may seem silly, but it highlights an important contrast: Machines cannot reproduce or maintain themselves. Creatures can.
The tractor comes out of the industrial mind, while the horse is creaturely. The tractor is the product of an energy-intensive human-designed system, while the horse is the product of an information-intensive biological process that emerges from earth and sun.
The implications of this difference are rarely acknowledged in the dominant culture, but we believe they are crucial to explore, especially with new political space opened up by the Green New Deal for discussing ecological sustainability and economic justice.
In the short term, humanity needs to devise policies that respond in meaningful ways to today’s multiple, cascading ecological crises (including, but not limited to, rapid climate disruption), which present risks now greatly accelerated and intensified well beyond previous predictions. If that seems alarmist, we recommend “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” for details.
To put uncomfortable realities bluntly: In ecological terms, things are bad, getting worse faster than anticipated, leaving humanity with increasingly limited options. Everyone agrees that there are no quick and easy fixes, but we want to push further: Do not expect any truly sustainable fixes to emerge from the industrial mind.
That’s why we believe it’s crucial to discuss not only policy but the need for a new worldview, one that can expand our imaginations. The distressing realities of our moment in history need not be the end of our story, if humanity can transcend the industrial and get creaturely.
Creatures — humans, other animals, plants, and microbes — are all products of a rich, integrated evolutionary history. Unfortunately, something in our big brains has too often led us to see ourselves as set apart from the rest of the larger living world — to think of “human” as so different from “nature” that we believe ourselves to be separable from the ecosystems on which our lives depend. The Industrial Worldview, deeply rooted in this delusion, defines much of our day-to-day existence and suffocates our imaginations.
What if we embraced a Creaturely Worldview as a corrective? This would challenge not only the dominant culture but also some in the environmental movement who are committed to industrial thinking and its accompanying technological fundamentalism. The current debates about the Green New Deal might be more productive if everyone started by considering this question: Which provides a better standard for our choices, the Creaturely World or the Industrial World?
(Before proceeding, a footnote: We are not the first to ask this question, of course. In some sense, indigenous and traditional people who resisted the Industrial World have long advocated for a Creaturely Worldview. The Amish rejection of some of the products of the Industrial World reflects a faith in the Creaturely. The agrarian writer Wendell Berry, one of our touchstones in this enterprise, has spoken of the costs to people and land in the countryside with the “change from a creaturely life to a mechanical life” that accelerated after World War II. With that acknowledgement of our roots, back to the argument.)
First, remember that the Creaturely World had a considerable head start. Creatures have been here some 3½ billion years. The Industrial World has existed for only 250 years, about 14 million times shorter. By linear comparison, that’s roughly the difference between an inch and 220 miles.
We argue for the Creaturely based not just on time but more importantly on the greater creativity and efficiency of nature’s ecosystems, compared with the limited vision and mixed record of human cleverness. The Creaturely World features self-organizing renewability (remember the horse and foal) emerging from the integrated structure of ecosystems — what we might call the “natural integrities.” A tall-grass prairie ecosystem, for example, is not a random collection of species but the result of natural selection that produces species interacting with each other and with the abiotic world in ways that efficiently utilize the available resources. The Industrial World erodes those integrities, requires human attention to maintain, and is non-renewable. For the Industrial World to work, dismemberment of integrated nature is required.
The Creaturely World is information-rich; the genetic code of organisms stores enormous amounts of information. People routinely speak of living today in an information age made possible by digital technologies, but this human-generated breed of information is only a tiny fraction of what is found in the DNA of the Creaturely World. The fact that human inventions are relatively information-poor is typically obscured by our use of highly dense energy to compensate.
A perfect example is anhydrous ammonia as a source of nitrogen fertilizer for modern agriculture, the product of what energy scholar Vaclav Smil has called the most important invention of the 20thCentury, the Haber-Bosch process. Natural gas is the feedstock most often used to turn tight-bonded atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This industrial process “solved” the problem of soil nitrogen fertility and declining supplies of natural fertilizers such as guano. Unfortunately, after being spread over millions of acres of grain-producing fields, the surplus industrial nitrogen finds its way down the slopes and into the waterways until it meets the ocean waters, where it creates huge dead zones. On the way downriver, cities spend millions of dollars to get it out of drinking water, in some places failing so dramatically that people have to drink bottled water.
Haber-Bosch does its assigned job of increasing crop yields, but with a climate-changing cost: It uses fossil energy to generate the 200 to 400 atmospheres of pressure and temperatures of 750 to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit required to produce ammonia from the natural gas feedstock. In contrast, the biological process of nitrogen fixation in various plants operates at four-fifths of one atmosphere of pressure and at ambient temperature, relying on 21 enzymes that are the product of the DNA code — drawing on the natural integrities of the Creaturely World. Thus the Industrial World’s nitrogen productionsubstitutes fossil-energy for information, disrupting ecosystems’ integrities with a non-renewable process that contributes to ecological degradation, from the mining of the fuel to the acceleration of global warming.
This is an example of a larger rule: Ecosystems are far more creative than human systems. Consider a modern city, the product of the human-generated information used to build the housing, businesses, infrastructure, and transportation networks that allow millions to live in close quarters, often with exciting results (both constructive and destructive). All that excitement leads us to ignore the fact that these cities of the industrial age are made possible only through massive expenditures of fossil energy and other resources, some of which come from the other side of the planet. Meanwhile, natural ecosystems are home to a much more expansive variety of creatures living in far more complex relationships, requiring none of that fossil energy to maintain. Natural ecosystems can maintain themselves for countless millennia using only solar flows, while cities draw down millions of years of concentrated energy in a relative blink of an eye. Which model provides a standard for our future?
Here is an idea that is counterintuitive in the modern world: Highly dense energy limits the human imagination. Yes, all that fossil energy has subsidized a tremendous amount of science and art, expanding dramatically what we know about the world and building an expansive trove of stories about it. But rather than imagining how we might use that energy to build a sustainable future, we have rushed to use it in ways that enriched some quickly, impoverished others slowly, and left us facing a future that is speculative, not guaranteed. As we come to the end of the fossil-fuel epoch, as a species we seem to lack the collective imagination to break free.
Another challenge to the conventional wisdom: The Industrial World acts as if public policy is made by humans and those policies determine how we use energy, but in fact that highly dense carbon, once unleashed, sets policy and drags us along. We did not build the contemporary world by making choices about how to use energy; highly dense energy dictated the shape of the contemporary world, in which we make choices that have been constrained by the industrial mind. The choices we do make within the Industrial Worldview matter very much — we can opt for more or less destructive paths — but in the long run, it is the worldview that has to change.
Let’s pause to answer a reasonable concern: Are the two of us zealots? Do we want to give up on everything humans have ever built? Are we calling for a mystical return to the Paleolithic tomorrow? No to all those questions. Are we proposing to “let nature take its course,” and stand by while billions of people die in such a transition? Certainly not. Advocating for a shift in worldview is a plea for new ways of thinking, not a celebration of misanthropy. Rather than throwing up our hands in despair because imaginations have been so limited in the Industrial Era, we suggest that the dominant culture start identifying and attempting to follow the patterns of the Creaturely World — not an atavistic return to any particular moment in the past but rather attention to the lessons of evolutionary history.
An example is The Land Institute (TLI) in Salina, Kansas, where both of us have worked since 2015 with the Ecosphere Studies program. The term “creaturely” doesn’t appear in the organization’s mission statement, but the Creaturely Worldview informs its work.
For more than 40 years, TLI researchers and teachers have advocated for nature as the standard for grain farming, as they work to develop an information-rich agriculture that mimics the vegetative structure of an information-rich native prairie (known as Natural Systems Agriculture). As part of a larger agro-ecological movement, this project is developing perennial grain polycultures (grain crops that need not be planted every year, grown in diverse mixtures), a more creaturely approach to agriculture than the annual monocultures in industrial fields. In addition to reducing soil erosion, those perennial grains would sequester more carbon, and adding legumes to the mix sponsors biological nitrogen fixation, removing the need for the Haber-Bosch process and its accompanying emissions.
In this work, TLI staffers recognize that every day they use the products of human cleverness and industrial society — booting up computers, carrying tools to the research fields in pickup trucks, transferring pollen in three natural gas-heated greenhouses, and burning fossil fuel to warm labs and offices — all in the hopes of developing crops that can endure without all the trappings of the Industrial World and make possible a transition to truly sustainable agriculture.
The big test that’s coming: Once we have these new species and varieties, will growing them at the scale necessary to feed people require maintaining the industrial infrastructure that brought them into existence? We believe the answer is No, that their creatureliness will persist without a need for human intervention. These species could be grown by people who never touched a computer, and could be maintained without the artifacts of the Bronze and Iron ages. The Industrial World can’t say that of many, if any, of its achievements.
We realize that we cannot get to perennial polyculture agriculture without some of the tools of the Industrial World. We continue to use fossil fuels, though over time we hope we can supply more of the power for this transition period with solar and wind technology. But we cannot be naïve about “renewable” energy, and the Creaturely Worldview can help us understand why.
First, the easy part: No combination of renewable energy sources can power the existing Industrial World. Rational planning must include not only replacing fossil fuels with renewables but also dramatically reducing our consumption. If we are using renewable energy to try to produce enough electric cars to continue our current transportation system, for example, we are only digging the hole deeper, not finding ways out. An enforceable cap on carbon at the mines, the wellheads, ports of entry, and forests seems necessary, which means we’ll also need a fair rationing system.
Second, the hard part: There are limits to renewable energy technologies’ ability to replicate themselves. At the risk of unnecessary repetition: The Industrial World is not self-renewing. Working against instead of with the efficiencies inherent in natural integrities, means that a considerable amount of energy that so-called renewable technologies produce must go into mining and manufacturing the non-renewable materials required for that infrastructure. That’s a losing game. Wind turbines and solar collectors built with fossil-fuel infrastructure will not be easy to maintain or reproduce when that fossil energy is gone.
What does that Creaturely Worldview have to offer here? We can begin by scrutinizing proposals under the Green New Deal umbrella, most of which embrace “green-energy cornucopia” thinking that keeps us entranced by the industrial mind’s illusion that we can sustain unsustainable living arrangements. As even many of its supporters understand, the problem is not that the Green New Deal is too ambitious but that it is not ambitious enough. Virtually all politicians, and even many who identify as environmental activists, embrace a growth economy and techno-optimism. As difficult as it is in mainstream political circles, we must challenge those dogmas and imagine a transition to a more Creaturely Economy.
A Creaturely Worldview requires dramatic changes in social and political arrangements. One obvious shift would be reducing the size of farms and increasing the farm population, recognizing that we can better feed ourselves by relying on a sufficiency of people rather than on capital and dense energy. Repopulating the countryside would require something like a new Homestead Act, creating an opportunity to correct the extermination and exploitation of both peoples and ecosystems that was woven into the first version in 1862.
Of course there’s a clear need for short-term industrial productivity as the transition unfolds, and there may be a place for the Industrial World in our future — but only if it is clearly subordinated to the Creaturely World. Wind and solar energy are a good example of that: We’ll need them in the transition period, but our reliance on them should shrink (unless, by magic, wind turbines and solar collectors start having babies) as we get closer to the Creaturely goals.
Obviously, a Creaturely Worldview doesn’t have all the answers to all problems. A worldview doesn’t solve problems but rather shapes the way we understand questions, and guides our search for answers. While articulating a vision for the future we draw upon our imaginations, which cannot be divorced from our evolutionary history. The way we describe the future is always partly new and partly rooted in that history. With that in mind, we might think of the Creaturely World as a kind of New Paleolithic, the next step forward after the ephemeral fossil-fuel epoch has run its course.
In such a Creaturely World, there will be less of many material things that many of us (including the authors of this article) have grown accustomed to, but potentially more of the one thing the Industrial World could never produce: a sense of being at home and cherishing our origins in a universe that is not just a place but also a story.
We are but one part of that story, and our place in it should feature earth as our creator, our defender, and — with proper restoration of the Creaturely — our redeemer.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
Wes Jackson is one of the foremost figures in the international sustainable agriculture movement. Co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, he has pioneered research in Natural Systems Agriculture — including perennial grains, perennial polycultures, and intercropping — for over 40 years. He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies program at California State University, Sacramento, where he became a tenured full professor. He is the author of several books including Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture (2011), Becoming Native to This Place (1994), Altars of Unhewn Stone (1987), and New Roots for Agriculture (1980). Wes is a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.
Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men and Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully. | https://medium.com/@robertjensen/lets-get-creaturely-a-new-worldview-can-help-us-face-ecological-crises-32afd8c7a06c | ['Robert Jensen'] | 2019-04-05 16:57:24.808000+00:00 | ['Ecology', 'Agriculture', 'Climate Change'] |
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These are a portion of the top tips that a computerized advertiser can pursue to make his/her to the highest point of the advanced showcasing game. In the event that you are computerized advertiser who needs to increase an edge in the business and imprint his/her name, these tips would positively be of extraordinary help. | https://medium.com/@neshadlema/5-tips-to-succeed-as-a-digital-marketers-287b8600d1c0 | ['Neshad Lema'] | 2019-09-14 18:07:30.351000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Job Search', 'Job Interview', 'Job Hunting', 'Jobs'] |
The Dogpatch Pimp | My father; the Dogpatch Pimp. I hadn’t seen him in years. Mainly, because he was an idiot of the first order. A complete caricature of a caricature. He was a raging narcissist and an abomination of fashion and morality. Equal parts street pimp from 1970s television and Dogpatch hillbilly, he was a marriage of the ridiculous with the absurd.
He’s the family member older, more polite societies would have squirrelled away in an attic room. We, however, were forced to live with our “disgrace” in the clear light of day.
From the minute I was old enough to leave home, I’d put as much distance between us, both physical and emotional, as I could, but, somehow, he always resurfaced. An unflushable turd. He’d heard I was in town and called to have me meet him at his favorite watering hole, a hole-in-the-wall bar called The Watering Hole.
I said yes to the meeting because my grandmother had recently croaked and the possibility existed that I’d been mentioned in her will. Grandma was loaded. (She despised the word grandma and insisted on grandmother). It was rumored, grandma had tried, unsuccessfully, to take it all with her. I heard the old man had let her take her rings from her third and seventh marriage to the grave but he made sure the rest of it stayed behind. “Nothing over a carat goes in that hole!” he’d said. There was a lot to divvy up; I think she still had her first dime.
He saw me walk in and gave me a nod. He was standing next to the bar talking to a woman with bulging, almost froglike eyes. She was severely drunk. The old man never set his romantic sights too high so he might maintain his high rate of success in the boudoir. He always looked for stragglers and the infirm the herd had left behind.
Also, she was fairly top-heavy; the old man’s weakness. He’d not be able to keep his hands to himself. He’d fuck it up. He’d lost his edge with age.
Instead of walking over for a proper barfly introduction, I found a stool and sat down. I ordered a beer and noted the time. I watched the clock until there came the sharp crack of a slap. — ker-SMACK! — The sound was so recognizable among bar folk that a hush fell upon the Watering Hole. They looked about to see which one of their comrades had fallen. The silence served to frame a shrill, inebriated slur: “Don’t pinch me, sonuvabitch!” A couple seconds later the old man was sliding onto the stool next to me. He’d fucked it up.
The old man was widely known for his titty-pinching and ass-grabbing. The level of sexual satisfaction one would get copping a feel seemed to me meager, however, he reveled in the wicked acts. In his prime, he was well-practiced and slick about it; a genius of the sexual assault. As far as perverts go, he had the hands of a magician. He could finger-fuck a nun to orgasm without her knowledge. This was, obviously, no longer the case.
During the course of a lifetime, he’d developed a deserved reputation in our neck of the woods as ‘The Dirty Old Man.’ Not ‘a dirty old man’ but ‘The Dirty Old Man’ (one step below ‘Pervert in a Raincoat’). In turn, my brother and I became known/branded as ‘Sons of the Dirty Old Man.’ We were but burnt offerings for his many fetishes and perversions. We were collateral damage.
— ker-SMACK! — What a sound! She must’ve brought that slap up from the south pasture. The right side of old man’s face was glowing red. “She must be a lesbian.” I offered up the excuse so he didn’t have to.
“She should have said so before I bought her the drink.”
“She appears to be a southpaw.”
He waggled his chin from one side to the other to check its operational condition.
The old man was preposterous and puerile in every way. I regarded him as an embarrassment, but he had a much different perspective of himself. He saw himself as a class act. “Stylin’ and profilin’,” he’d often say.
He wore a brown, polyester suit — hung slack on his aging frame — beige alligator shoes, and a porkpie hat with a white silk band. You couldn’t look more like an idiot if you had three tries. He had the brim of the porkpie pushed down in what Goober and Jethro might consider naught-naught spy-style, and, in what seemed like a pornographic afterthought, he had violated it with the tail feather of a pheasant. Profanity begged an audience with the world, and the world acquiesced.
“You deserve such a fine hat,” I said.
He swept a flourish over its vaudeville finery and smiled. “It’s my reward to the ladies.” The hat definitely spoke to the ladies, it just wasn’t saying what he thought it was saying.
“You should get yourself a gold tooth,” I suggested.
His brow slightly bunched while he considered it.
“You can’t help your coonass ways, can you?” I asked. Telling him he looked ridiculous wasn’t enough. He’d brush that off. But, coonass? Coonass cut to the bone.
His lifelong nemesis had been the Lousiana Coonass. An exaggeration of a simple-minded Cajun who had once given him a proper ass-whupping over a parking space. According to the old man, the coonass had cheated during the fight by accessing his retard-strength.
Queensbury Rules: Protect yourself at all times, no hitting below the belt, and no accessing retard-strength.
Nonetheless, from that black-eye on the bayou forward, coonass became the term he applied to all who fell short of his idea of perfection. My brother and I grew up answering to the call of: “Hey, coonass!”
The entirety of the old man’s life had been disrupted by the recurrence of the coonass. His existence had been infested with them. They followed him relentlessly. Especially at work; there was at least one on every job. Sometimes, two. He found a lot of them in traffic.
My father, a designation held in place only by the biological process that finds us all on God’s green earth, was a walking-talking mortification. They say there’s no shame in things outside your own doing, but I disagree. There’s plenty of shame out there.
I’d like to go back in time and punch my grandma square in the teeth. What horrors did she visit on her child to make him so obsessed with tits and ass? She did something to cross his wires. Breastfeed too long? Bathe him well into his teens?
Still, even without grandmother’s meddling he would have turned out fucked up. Though he was reasonably intelligent, he was exceedingly damaged by the fact that he possessed no talent to achieve his dreams. He was eternally plagued with resentment and envy and those around him suffered for it.
You’ve seen him before. He’s your neighbor. The shirtless old man in boxers and flip-flops. The nearly-nude beer-belly who waters his yard with a Pabst in his hand. You’re absolutely convinced he poisoned your cat.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“I have cancer.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve used this lie already.”
“Not on you, I haven’t.” He seemed bewildered that such a technicality could get in the way of his propaganda. He’d become a lonely old man and he was desperate for the family he’d ignored for most of his life. In his despair, he’d begun telling lies about his health.
“Well, I heard about it, so it lost its efficacy. I can't unhear something.”
“Your brother told ya?”
“Yep.”
“One of these days, I will be sick. I’ll be sick and dying.” He lit a cigarette and was immediately seized by a fit of coughing.
I took a drink of beer.
“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” he coughed. Intentional or not, the way he said it sounded like a warning.
“We’re all waiting for the great and terrible day of the Lord.”
“How much do you think a gold tooth costs?” he asked.
“Less than cancer.” | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/the-dogpatch-pimp-9477cfc192a4 | [] | 2020-05-09 11:56:40.382000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Fiction', 'Drivel', 'Short Story', 'Creative Writing'] |
Building apps for editing Face GANs with Dash and Pytorch Hub | Making GANs transparent with TL-GAN
Created by Shaobo as part of a Insight Data Science project, the transparent latent GAN (TL-GAN) introduces a simple, but perfectly executed idea: shine a light on the random noise used to generate realistic faces by learning an association between the input noise and facial features like age, sex, skin tone, and whether the person is smiling or wearing glasses, hats, necklace, and more. To achieve this, the author first trained a ML model to classify images based on some 40 facial features (using labels from the CelebA dataset), which was then used this model to label hundreds of thousands of images generated by the officially-released PGGAN. Finally, a linear regression was trained to predict the features output by the ML model given the latent vectors (i.e. the random noise), and the trained weights were used to control the noise to give an output that correlated more heavily with the desired features.
Integrating PyTorch Hub with Dash
Pytorch Hub is an incredible repository of pretrained models built in Pytorch, which can all be imported and loaded in a few lines of code. For our own app, all we needed to do was to load the pggan model from torch.hub (which is included in the official PyTorch release) at the start, and start using it in our callbacks.
Traditionally, if you wanted to deploy a model loaded from Pytorch Hub, you would need to design a REST API with Flask, then communicate with a front-end built in a library like React.js. Since you are outputting images, you would then need to worry about encoding the image into string using schemes like base64, and ensure that the component for displaying the image is compatible. | https://medium.com/plotly/building-apps-for-editing-face-gans-with-dash-and-pytorch-hub-1e7026c0bc9a | [] | 2020-06-19 15:58:37.126000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Pytorch', 'Gans', 'Python'] |
How we migrated our design team to Figma | Credit Karma has one Design Systems Team in Figma with separate projects for assets, components, layouts, OS devices, and more.
Each component is divided into an individual Figma file, where everything about that component is documented in detail — all research, iterations, symbols, states, and dos and don’ts can be found here.
This approach allows for easier versioning, less risk of braking components, and more documentation per component without making it overwhelming. But it also means that designers have to link a large number of libraries to every project (one per component).
Shopify has embedded a checklist in their working files on Figma to help designers cover all the bases as they are designing on different features.
To speed up work and to keep designers aligned, some larger design organizations take it a step further and build their own plugins and extensions.
Uber built these nifty Mac OS extensions which include icons, assets, spacings, branding guidelines, and more. Updates can be sent via push notifications to the whole team.
At Agoda, we built a Sketch plugin to populate our designs with hotel names, facilities, airport codes, room photos, and more. As a part of the migration, we’re currently rebuilding this plugin for Figma.
This might not be worth the efforts in smaller teams, but in teams of 50+ designers, this can prove to be a real time-saver in the long run.
For each product, Spotify has a dedicated project where they host all their specs — the source of truth for that product. This makes for a clear separation between the live product and works in progress.
Getting a glimpse of how other design teams work with Figma provided us a wealth of ideas to explore. To be able to explore these ideas and do so in an organized manner, we decided to establish a formal working group.
Establish a working group with clear responsibilities
What started as a small team of designers from one of our product teams quickly expanded to a working group with designers from different product teams across our organization — Consumer and supply product designers working on both web and app were represented in the working group. So were designers from our design systems teams.
With designers from a wide range of products involved, we could challenge each problem from many different angles and split the responsibilities better. For some of us, this was the first time we had an opportunity to work together with other designers across different teams — exciting times!
We divided the work into the following workstreams and assigned an owner for each:
Organization and setup
Team, Project and file structure
Design System and UI libraries
Workflows
General workflows
Master file management (our source of truth)
Communication and governance
Communication channels and contact persons
Maintenance plans
We could now diverge and dive deeper into each focus area. To keep aligned and share learnings we created a private slack channel. To stay focused and move fast we had weekly syncs with clear action items and follow-ups. | https://uxdesign.cc/how-we-migrated-our-design-team-to-figma-42f7c15892ff | ['Alexander Fandén'] | 2021-01-25 11:00:30.579000+00:00 | ['Designops', 'Figma', 'UI', 'Sketch', 'Tools'] |
Why can’t I hurt you. | Why can’t I hurt you.
Make you feel the way I do
You’re not a monster
Only an imitation of one
Yet you hurt me so badly
For someone so fake
I gave you my friendship
My loyalty and trust
I told you my fears
And the things that keep
the sadness in my eyes
I’m not broken
I’m not shattered
I was never that fragile to begin with
I’m only wounded by the monster you so desperately try to be
But you’re not scary
And you yourself is not what I fear
It’s the trust I gave you
that causes my tears | https://medium.com/@ellerylane1121/why-cant-i-hurt-you-3410aa867790 | [] | 2020-12-20 17:17:17.143000+00:00 | ['Novice', 'Toxic', 'Abuse'] |
The DriveSales™ | Sales strategy for property dealers to make more deals! | The real estate market is one of the most ever-changing industry in the market. It goes through various ups and downs and Is dependent on factors like interest rates, economic conditions, and job growth, which affect it differently. To understand them effectively and come with well-designed plans to get profit, we have made a professionally researched and authentic sales strategy for you. It might not just help you cover-up everyday sales but also help in the future to expand your business effectively.
Here are the proven and highly recommended sales practices for property dealers to make more sales:
1) Identify your target market — Understand the niche you would like to work in and try analyzing people that would be your target audience. A place, individuals, firms, youngsters, or old age people need to decide which part of people you would like to work for and build plans. From constructing schools to building households, you can choose your niche and expertise in it.
2) Advertise wisely — Investing a certain amount of money for branding can be very beneficial for a property developer. As people might not be ready to invest in a firm that nobody knows and wouldn’t find trustworthy. And to bring on the brand loyalty and satisfaction of having the best in clients, you must always focus on getting better and providing the latest and premium quality infrastructure to people.
3) Have a quick responding team — Communication plays a huge role when dealing with clients, as they would often not like their calls to go dry, and unresponded a response would be necessary to stay glued to them. Have a receptionist at the call desk or more employees, to cater to the increasing deals, as not everyone would be available every time, hence increasing their existing workload, decreasing effectiveness.
4) Sponsor referrals — Referrals are effective when done with the best intentions in the most natural way. You can either hire people to build networks or encourage your existing customers to bring more people and enjoy special offers in return. And by continuing those networks, you can gain many clients by investing even the least bit of your resources and enjoying many benefits.
5) Email for follow-ups — After ending a deal, an existing contract, it’s necessary to keep in touch with those clients and be in regular contact with them. As they may like, to be connected with the changes happening in the market and be aware of new deals. You can mail them with your achievements, old blockages, and anything you feel that can impact your brand, as content marketing via emails has turned out to be very impactful and helpful in the case of real estate.
6) Leverage social media — Utilizing social media to promote your brand online and get in closer touch with your customers can help you a lot in the long run. As people from various avenues circle along with the social networks, it wouldn’t be that difficult to approach people and convince them to be part of your organization. You can choose the kind of content you would like to market or help people clear their doubts about the real estate industry and give valuable insights to them. They may not result quickly but can often help you establish your brand as something huge in the localities. | https://medium.com/@thedrivesales/the-drivesales-sales-strategy-for-property-dealers-to-make-more-deals-56102682fcd1 | ['The Drivesales', 'Making Sales Stories Promising'] | 2020-12-26 15:50:04.193000+00:00 | ['Property', 'Marketing', 'Reality', 'Real Estate', 'Sales'] |
Idiom of the day — 24-Apr-2021. Shoot your shot. Don’t worry about the… | Shoot your shot. Don’t worry about the results, just shoot your shot. Whatever happens, happens. If you don’t even try, you’re only ensuring your doom. If you try and fail, well…, good for you. At least you made an effort. You learned something. At any rate, some attempt is better than no attempt.
So, next time you hesitate applying for that 150k junior software developer role that asks for 6+ years of experience in the tech stack that was released 2 years ago, keep this in mind - it’s free to apply. If you apply, there’s a chance. If you don’t, the door is closed right there.
S.h.o.o.t
We’re gonna talk about some carbs today.
Hot potato — a controversial issue or situation that is awkward or unpleasant to deal with or rather no one wants to deal with
Example:
I don’t talk politics and religion in gatherings, I know they can be hot potatoes sometimes.
A hot potato is usually something people just pass it on because they don’t want to handle it
Origin: The term originated in the mid 1800s and is derived from the slightly older term “to drop like a hot potato”, meaning “to abandon something or someone quickly”. It alludes to the fact that cooked potatoes retain considerable heat because they contain a lot of water. Source: theidioms.com | https://medium.com/@gnz11/idiom-of-the-day-24-apr-2021-f870e7932c37 | [] | 2021-04-25 05:24:14.441000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Fomo', 'Idioms', 'Opportunity'] |
NGINX for Elasticsearch | I started configuring NGINX proxy for elasticsearch cluster and had some hiccups on the way. I thought it will be a good idea for me to document what I did.
Installing the NGINX is a simple process, you can google that based on your linux flavour.
Once that is installed, you will have to configure NGINX to proxy all the requests to the ES nodes.
My NGINX proxy config for ES is looks as below : | https://medium.com/ramps-rant/nginx-for-elasticsearch-bc9c834c7a25 | [] | 2016-04-30 13:52:19.483000+00:00 | ['Elasticsearch', 'Nginx'] |
Navigating this Narrow Bridge | How to do hard things, face our fears, and get more sleep in the new year.
Rabbi Sara Mason-Barkin, 9.18.2020
Erev Rosh Hashanah
Congregation Beth Israel, Scottsdale, Arizona
So, most of you know I had a baby this year. Thank you all for kvelling with us over the endless stream of photos, and updates on every tiny milestone. It has, indeed, been a blessing to have this little bundle of joy bringing us smiles during these unusual circumstances.
The most regular question I’m asked as a mom returning to work, is about sleep. ‘Is the baby sleeping through the night, yet?’ Many have been sweetly concerned, probably noticing me stifling a yawn, or perhaps seeing the growing circles under my eyes that are hard to hide under the glaring light of Zoom.
And the answer… is yes. The baby is sleeping through the night. The big kids do too, more or less. You know who isn’t sleeping through the night?
That’s right. Me.
Unsplash, Annie Spratt
As I’ve shared before, I’m a worrier. And boy, 5780 has been great fodder for worrying. Which worry shall we perseverate on tonight??
How about:
The challenges of raising three children in the midst of a global pandemic?
Or, whether or not to send them school in person?
Or, protecting the health of our families and loved ones?
I have tossed and turned thinking about new, creative, accessible ways to be present for my community, while trying not to fixate on fears about assimilation and potential for synagogue longevity.
I worry about the toxic anti-semitism of both the alt-right and far-left.
I worry about the pending fallout of the upcoming election.
I think about what the ‘new normal’ of a post-covid world will be?
And if we will we ever find a new normal.
And if we even remember what normal is?
Take your pick. There is plenty to fear. And I know I’m not alone awake at night, worrying.
Tomorrow morning, we will read about Abraham. We will put ourselves in his shoes, imagining the day that God decides to test him. ‘Take your son,’ God says.
קַח־נָ֠א אֶת־בִּנְךָ֨ אֶת־יְחִֽידְךָ֤ אֲשֶׁר־אָהַ֙בְתָּ֙ אֶת־יִצְחָ֔ק
Kach na et-bincha et-yachidcha asher ahavta, et-yitzchak
Your dear one whom you love, Yitzchak.
וְהַעֲלֵ֤הוּ שָׁם֙ לְעֹלָ֔ה
V’ha’aleihu sham l’olah
And offer him there as a burnt offering (Genesis 22:2).
Abraham rises early that day, rousing his son and his servants to begin the trek up the mountain.
The rabbis wonder: why did Abraham rise so early? According to medieval commentator Rashi, he was eager to fulfill God’s command.[1] The midrashic wisdom of Bereshit Rabbah counters that Abraham rose according to will, rewarded by the Holy One’s Divine powers.[2]
But I wonder… as a parent who holds a world of worries, perhaps Abraham rose early because he, too, hadn’t slept. Perhaps he, too, was restless.
Perhaps he, too, saw the world changing around him.
Perhaps he feared for his child.
Perhaps he couldn’t tame his wild thoughts long enough to sleep.
In high school physics, preparing for an assignment which required us to construct a bridge out of balsa wood and glue, our teacher showed us a video of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge: otherwise known as ‘Galloping Gertie.’ In the grainy black and white video, taken in 1940, you can see the bridge bending and twisting in the wind. Next, the bridge splinters, cracks, and falls into the water below. Our bridges were supposed to fare better than dear old Gertie when we put them under pressure.
Film Footage of Galloping Gertie: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Going into the assignment I was already hesitant about heights, and the video hadn’t helped matters. While rationally I knew that this was a history lesson and not a current snapshot, I couldn’t forget the image of the horizontal bridge going vertical, then violently breaking apart. Still today I need to take a deep, centering breath before crossing a bridge. I hold the steering wheel tightly with two hands, and focus intently until I am once again over land. Something about the heights, plus the narrow shoulder and the image of Galloping Gertie in my mind, just… freaks me out. My fear of bridges is manageable, (especially since moving from the Bay Area to the desert!) but it’s there.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov teaches: Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m’od. V’ha-ikar lo l’fached k’lal. The whole world is a very narrow bridge. The most important part is not to be afraid.
We are always on a bridge, of sorts, carefully crossing the challenging threshold of this life. Pressure is regularly placed upon us as we try not to crumble under the weight.
The world is a frightening place. And right now, it feels unprecedentedly unstable. We are dependent on strong wifi, and reliable mail service, and masks worn over the mouth and the nose. We are trusting one another to make smart choices: about social distance, and maintaining synagogue membership, and opening schools.
How many of these weighty fears can the bridge hold?
The churning waters below seem hungry.
As if they are waiting for us to tumble down, drowning in the depth of our fear.
Commentary Likutei Tinyana (48) offers another read of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s famous reflection: it does not say lo l’fached k’lal,don’t be afraid at all. Rather, [the original text said] klal yitpached sh’lo, don’t become paralyzed by fear. This is to say:
We will all encounter narrow bridges.
The most important part is not to let fear keep us from reaching the other side.
Jewish tradition teaches us about two distinct kinds of fear. According to Rabbi Alan Lew, my fear of bridges is the first kind: pachad. ‘Pachad [is] projected or imagined fear… It is astounding how often such fears become the organizing principles of our lives and how much they close us off from the world.’[3]
Pachad is paralyzing. Pachad keeps us awake at night.
Pachad makes us find another route, avoiding the narrow bridge altogether.
But there is another kind of fear that dwells within us too. Lew continues, “Norah is a very different kind of fear. It is the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to … a mixture of fear and awe… we call this bristling energy … norah…. Norah [tries] to push us open. The fear we experience … is simply our resistance to this opening.”[4]
This norah, this awe, is a surge of adrenaline.
Norah, or awe, forces us to take a risk, to make a change.
Norah makes us brave.
Norah, or awe, is what motivates us when we venture carefully into the world, masks on, hands sanitized, distance between us.
Norah is what allows us to imagine a High Holy Day season that looks different from anything we had ever experienced before.
Norah, or awe, is what allows us to look one another in the eye with kindness, as we talk about how and why we disagree.
Norah, or awe, is what helps us make hard choices, to find solutions.
In spite of our worry, in the face of our fear, Norah, awe, guides us onto that very narrow bridge.
We need to know that we can, and we will, make it to the other side.
And there, we will find:
Constructive antidotes to anti-Semitism.
Vibrant, post-pandemic life.
Relationships still intact after a contentious election.
Resilient kids who are doing ok.
With awe, we put ourselves in Abraham’s shoes. We rise early in the morning.
We are tested, too.
Abraham holds the knife over Isaac, his son, his dear one.
He hears an angel speak.
‘Ki-yirei Elohim,’ ‘You approach God with awe.’ (Gen 22:12)
He lifts his eyes.And there is the ram, waiting to take Isaac’s place upon the altar.
Were Abraham filled with pachad, he would have frozen with fear, kept his eyes turned down, his heart kept closed to God’s message. Instead with awe, he lifts his eyes, opens his heart, and writes a different end to the story.
The rebuilt Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened in 1950. It still stands today, though it is now part of a twin bridge-complex that ushers travelers safely and efficiently between Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula.[5] It has been built with wisdom, with understanding, and with a sense of awe — a deep respect for the architecture that keeps the bridge intact as travelers make their way, safely, to the other side.
The rebuilt Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 2009. (Wikipedia)
This New Year, let’s redesign the bridge.Let’s face our fears, and our worries with norah. We can build ourselves a bed that lets us sleep like a baby.
And when we rise, ready to approach 5781,with clear minds and refreshed souls we notice: There are new possibilities waiting for us in the thicket.
The whole world is like a bridge. It is narrow. And it is rickety.
And we aren’t always sure that it can bear the weight of our burdens.
But when we summon the courage to rise above the choppy waters, we remember haikar:
We just took the first step. We just did the most important part. | https://medium.com/rabbinic-writing/navigating-this-narrow-bridge-43c36b422d1a | ['Rabbi Sara Mason-Barkin'] | 2020-09-20 06:13:01.069000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Motherhood', 'Insomnia', 'Rosh Hashanah', 'Jewish'] |
An Unexpected Addiction | It’s now December 2018, and fifteen years after sitting on my friend’s dirty laundry, I’m sitting in Jenny’s driveway. My knees are tight against my chest in my maroon winter jacket. My faithful blue beanie is on my head. The air is cold, but the stars are out. I watch them and then I watch her. Her dress is short and her eyes are wide. She’s yelling at me. She wants to know why. Why did I betray her. But I couldn’t say. I wanted to know why too.
All we knew was that I was addicted to her. In love with her, yes. But plain and simple, fully and completely — addicted.
I may have escaped the wrath of alcoholism, could toss my cigarettes without a second thought, can choose when I do or do not want to consume marijuana — but I haven’t been able to fully escape the addictive nature that permeates through my blood. And when Jenny came into my life in my mid-twenties, she became the drink I could never put down.
According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.”
Addiction is most commonly associated with drugs or alcohol, and rightfully so. Amongst addictions, substance abuse is the most destructive and hard to escape. But as the American Society of Addiction Medicine points out, engaging in compulsive behaviors falls into the same category. Gambling, for example, has been widely accepted as an addiction. And as we learn more about the brain, and dive deeper into technology and its available distractions, we’re learning that almost anything can create some sort of addiction. Gaming. Social media. Cell phones. And even love.
Steve Rose, an addiction counselor with a Ph.D. in sociology, states that “Something becomes an addiction if it begins to have significant harmful impacts on other areas of your life. In addition, the individual experiences craving, loss of control over the substance or behavior, and is unable to stop despite these harms.” He goes on to note that “Recreation is about pleasure, whereas addiction is about coping.” And while there is absolutely no comparison between an addiction to heroin and an addiction to constantly grabbing your cell phone, therein lies the key. Addiction is about coping.
But love, how could something so pure and natural become an addiction? Well, the same way anything else could. Complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences.
Helen Fisher, who holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology, conducted a series of brain studies which found that romantic love stimulates the same region of the brain as drugs and other behavioral addictions. Known as the brain’s “reward system,” it’s associated with focus, craving, rush — leading to tolerance, withdrawal, risk, relapse — all in all: obsession. And when the focus of that obsession relates to romantic love, codependency — an unhealthy reliance and attachment to another person — domineers.
It took too many years, and too much heartbreak, for me to realize I’d been dealing with codependency. I wasn’t enabling a romantic partner who was an addict — the situation most associated with codependency. But I was in a one-sided, unhealthy love affair where I placed all my potential happiness in her hands. It wasn’t that I didn’t make space for my own feelings; it was that I felt — what I thought — was entirely too much. And I smothered her with those feelings. I had little to no sense of identity outside of her, and as time went on, I had even less respect for boundaries.
It took a lot of soul searching to discover that I was seeking validation from Jenny. Validation that love was real. Validation that I mattered. Validation that I existed. None of which she could give me. Only I could do that. But I felt I was going crazy, and I wanted her to tell me that I wasn’t.
In a study of codependency in women, it found significant correlation between codependency and parental alcoholism. As it turns out, sitting on my friend’s bedroom floor relates more to sitting in Jenny’s driveway than meets the eye. | https://medium.com/illumination/an-unexpected-addiction-41962241ecfd | ['Emily Cradduck'] | 2020-12-30 19:29:40.618000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Addiction', 'Love', 'Codependency', 'Psychology'] |
V SYSTEMS Lays Grounds for DeFi to Further Blockchain Ecosystem | NEW YORK — June 2019 — V SYSTEMS, the blockchain database cloud platform by Sunny King, creator of Proof of Stake (PoS), announced plan to focus on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in its ecosystem development at a Staking ecosystem meetup happening during the Consensus conference in New York last month.
As DeFi emerged as a banner topic at Consensus 2019, industry experts revealed that more than 1,000 DeFi projects are currently under development that offer up intriguing potential to create a new economy era in the near future. Venture capital pioneers also expect the adoption of DeFi in digital assets is on the horizon. By placing an emphasis on DeFi applications, V SYSTEMS pledges to reshape traditional finance, and give blockchain an additional much needed utility.
Built by PoS creator Sunny King, V SYSTEMS is powered by the next-generation PoS consensus mechanism, Supernode Proof of Stake (SPoS), which has evolved with extremely high scalability and stability, and is practically invulnerable to 51% attack. Additionally, V SYSTEM’s core features like decentralized database can support efficient and stable development of applications for mainstream economic use cases, such as finance, data processing, exchanges and payment systems.
How V SYSTEMS is Boosting Access to DeFi
V SYSTEMS launched its mainnet in November 2018, alongside the VSYS coins, which can be used to pay for transfer transactions; its usage on the consumption of resources on decentralized applications and databases will be available soon. VSYS was first listed on exchange in January 2019, and has now been listed on more than 10 CMC top exchanges. To date, VSYS mainnet has 15 supernodes that are operated by exchanges, wallets, communities, and cryptocurrency trackers. More than 10 thousand of VSYS coin holders have been acquired to take up the role as minters through leasing their coins to supernodes, with a total staking value of approximately US$15 million. V SYSTEM’s next phase of strategic planning will expand its total number of supernodes to 30 and 60 in the future.
In Q3 2019, V SYSTEMS will release its smart contracts, and it will also introduce its own model of blockchain database, sidechain and cross-chain application development platforms in less than 2 years. In order to catalyze the development of DeFi applications in the ecosystem, V SYSTEMS has invested in more than 15 developer teams in the community to develop an array of decentralized applications, including digital asset tokenization, payment, securities and derivatives trading platforms, insurance, banking, financial database, lending, global investment, fixed rate savings, and more. With successive releases of smart contracts, the number of DeFi applications will gradually shore up, a mortgage stable coin partner with leading real estate is set to be a key project in the ecosystem, which market size is projected to hit US$1 billion.
Staking as the new prevailing trend in the blockchain industry
According to Staked.us, holders of PoS currencies can participate in staking and collect rewards of more than US$2.5 billion annually. Staking has now become a dominant emerging trend in the blockchain industry with its performant infrastructure and incentive system. V SYSTEMS — a blockchain database cloud project powered by SPoS consensus mechanism — offers an infinitely more enabling technology for blockchain to reach a global scale. VSYS coin holders can earn interests by leasing their own VSYS coins to supernodes for minting. The coin leasing process does not require any IT background and transfer of coin ownership. As Staked.us reported, V SYSTEMS’s total staking value has reached US$150 million, ranking the top six in the world.
About V SYSTEMS
V SYSTEMS is a blockchain database cloud project that aims to create new possibilities in today’s digital economy era. The project will deliver the world’s first object-oriented distributed database for general purposes, which is empowered to carry scalable decentralized applications (DAPPs).
V SYSTEMS is led by Archetector Sunny King, CEO Alex Yang and CTO Scott Nadal, who invented Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus in 2012 to challenge the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus used by Bitcoin. Supernode Proof of Stake (SPoS) consensus is Sunny King’s new innovation, as well as a major pillar that V SYSTEMS is built upon. SPoS is designed with incentives for supernodes to upgrade hardware and therefore, continuously improve the network performance to support large scale growth of DAPPs.
V SYSTEMS is going to launch the smart contract platform very soon, the blockchain application on V SYSTEMS will be focusing on decentralized finance.
For more information on V SYSTEMS, please visit https://v.systems. | https://medium.com/vsystems/v-systems-lays-grounds-for-defi-to-further-blockchain-ecosystem-6dbdb51c95ac | ['V Systems'] | 2019-07-05 03:27:32.393000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Technology News', 'Distributed Ledgers', 'Database', 'Blockchain'] |
5 REASONS TO BE VEGAN IN 2021 | It’s 2021! And now it’s high time to ditch your non vegetarian diet and opt for some vegan food. You can try being vegan for the planet, for your love towards animals or simply for your own well-being. While there are innumerable reasons to start your journey towards veganism, here are top 5 reasons to start with.
1. To stand up against animal cruelty
Animals all over the world are being slaughtered just so we can provide something good for our taste buds. Male chickens are being killed because they cannot lay eggs. The unhealthy conditions in the poultry farms can cause serious health issues to the birds including chronic illness.
And while advertisement industry tries to make you fall for the pictures of cow being our friend and happily giving away milk, reality is so much far than that. Mother cows are forcibly impregnated. And calves, who truly deserves the milk are separated from their mothers shortly after birth so that the milk can be used by humans.
We cannot exaggerate enough on the trauma our non-vegetarian diet is causing the animals.
2. For our planet
There is no harm in saying that we humans have caused some serious damage to the mother earth. While we cannot undo the hazard that has been already caused, but we sure can take conscious efforts to help the planet heal and bloom again.
Researches have proved that adopting a vegan diet can reduce your carbon footprint from food by up to 73%.
If the whole population of the planet turns vegan, we can save up to 75% of the global farmland, which is equivalent to the size of countries like US, China, Australia and the EU combined.
3. To keep a check on climate change
Climate change is the biggest problem we are dealing with as humans right now. Years and years of ignorance towards environment has brought us to face problems like global warming. But now is the time to be aware and take conscious steps towards keeping a check on climate change and being vegan can be your step 1.
Meat industry is lot more than just slaughtering animals. There is a whole process of feeding huge amounts of grain and water to animals and then killing them. Transporting and storing is again a big challenge and all these are extremely energy concentrated processes. And food production is one of the contributions to global warming. Agriculture and forestry accounts for ¼ of greenhouse gas emissions. Looking after livestock contributes to global warming by the methane gas produced by the animals.
Surely this a matter of concern but New Scientist magazine proves that each individual can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases up to 60 per cent (which are caused by his/her diet) — just by going vegan. Researches have shown that 60% of people are willing to change the amount of meat they consume; however, only 48.8% are actually intending to reduce their meat intake and only 44.4% agreed to completely change to a plant-based diet. You can add up to the 44.4% for the betterment of planet.
4. To be more healthy
‘Health is wealth’. This may sound like a cliche proverb but 2020 has surely made us realize the importance of our health. Plant based diet not just makes you feel good ethically but it also nourishes your body better than a non-vegetarian diet. Plant based diet is rich in nutrients and low in saturated fats which can improve your heart health, protect against cancer and lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.
If you are looking towards losing weight than vegan diet is your best friend. Plant based diets have been proven to help quicker weight loss. vegan diet guarantees you healthier gut microbes (good bacteria that resides in your digestive tract). The extra fiber that vegans get from the veggies and whole grain rich diet, contributes in cultivation of good bacteria.
Your body will thank you for adopting vegan diet, so in return you will have to keep a check of vitamin B12, iron, calcium, vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acids, zinc and iodine intake. As you might be missing on them.
5. To help with undernourishment
I know the title must have shocked you. How can you being vegan help with the undernourishment issue? Let’s dive into this topic.
One in ten children are born with lower-than-normal body weigh and in South Asia the number goes to being one in four children. 45% of the deaths of children under the age of 5 is due to undernourishment. As mentioned earlier, a huge number of grains and water is needed in the meat industry which can otherwise be used to feed the people who are suffering from poverty. Also the water that farms consume can be brought to the use of those who don’t readily have access to clean water.
You making a choice to eat a vegan diet has the possibility of feeding an empty belly somewhere in the world and what could feel better than that!!!
There are so many reasons to be vegan. Just stick to your reason and start the journey of being vegan. All the best!!! | https://medium.com/@kwrites1206/5-reasons-to-be-vegan-in-2021-c90710c28652 | ['Kunika Sonkusare'] | 2020-12-25 17:36:46.731000+00:00 | ['Healthy Lifestyle', 'Lifestyle', 'Global Warming', 'Veganism'] |
Reflecting On One Year Of Women’s Lives Since Boris Won With A Landslide | By Vicky Spratt
PHOTO COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES.
What a long century this last year has been. A devastating global pandemic has caused the greatest public health crisis in living memory and an economic depression on a scale not seen since the 1930s. It feels like 100 years of history, of news, of politics, of life barely contained in 12 sagging and oversaturated months with absolutely no give left in them.
Cast your mind back to this time last year when it felt like things couldn’t possibly get any heavier. In the dark, cold hours of the morning of 13th December 2019, after what felt like a lifetime of listening to Boris Johnson repeat his sonorously sombre slogan “Get Brexit Done” over and over and over again until it sunk in, he fulfilled his lifelong dream to become “world king”. Well, he came as close as he’s ever going to get, anyway. At the polls, he managed to unite the political opinion of a post-Brexit Britain — a country as fractious and volatile as any family mid-divorce. He secured not only the biggest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher in 1987 but the biggest overall majority since Tony Blair won with a landslide in 2001.
Given that 80% of women aged 18 to 24 voted against Brexit in 2016, this Tory triumph rightly prompted concerns about what a Britain that had cast itself out of the European Union might look like under the leadership of a man who not only had a history of saying racially charged, sexist and homophobic things but reportedly once boasted that he “hadn’t had a wank for 20 years” because of the extent to which he cheated on his then-wife. What did it say about the state of our nation that he had won like this? That even constituencies in what’s known as Labour’s “red wall” across the Midlands and the north of England had voted Conservative?
In 2016, 80% of women aged 18 to 24 voted to remain in the European Union.
One year on, where has it left us? Well, as anyone who’s ever dabbled in manifesting knows, saying something is going to happen doesn’t necessarily mean that it will. Brexit is still not really done. No Deal continues to loom on the horizon, where it has been, overshadowing our collective psyche, since 2016. And sadly, concerns about whether Boris could ever truly put women’s best interests front and centre continue to prove well-founded.
Nobody would blame you if you’re no longer looking at the news so, ICYMI, this week the value of the pound slid as No Deal was predicted to be the most likely outcome of negotiations at the end of this year. We have long known that Brexit, particularly No Deal, could plunge the UK into a recession. Given that we are now already in one because of coronavirus there is very real cause for concern, particularly for women. The Women’s Budget Group has explicitly cautioned that No Deal will hurt women, both socially and economically, the most.
This is because every economic analysis of us leaving Europe without a deal predicts serious economic downfall as investment ceases, inflation soars and exports become more expensive. If we have learned anything from almost 10 years of austerity it’s that when public money is tight, women — and particularly ethnic minority women — suffer most (see: domestic violence refuge closures). Estimates suggest that women shouldered 86%of austerity cuts due to the gendered division of labour, such as the fact that women are more likely than men to do low or unpaid care work.
And so, amid yet more uncertainty, the Women’s Budget Group’s warning is stark: “Cuts have already severely damaged the services that keep women safe. These services simply cannot take any more cuts and being severed from EU funding will hamper services even further. Between 2014 and 2020 the EU pledged £9.13 billion in Structural Funds to the UK, including to support women’s services. The Shared Prosperity Fund (announced by the government to replace the European Structural Funds after Brexit) misses the mark by £730 million.”
In a big year for Boris Johnson — killer virus and the arrival of a new baby — it’s hard to forget that he put more energy into defending his now-departed advisor and Vote Leave high priest, Dominic Cummings, for breaking coronavirus lockdown rules by driving from London to Barnard Castle while the rest of the nation went without seeing their loved ones, than into discussing any of the above.
Do you remember the press conference Cummings gave to shore up his “defence”? Did you watch as an unelected government advisor schooled us all in what it takes to be a good parent during a national crisis (breaking lockdown by driving hundreds of miles to check that your eyes are working, apparently)?
If ever there had been an example of the enduring need for feminist politics, it was this. A wildly privileged, powerful and, it transpired, largely unaccountable white man told the country that it was okay that he had broken the rules imposed on Britain by the government he worked for because he was a “good father”. In doing so he exploited a loophole in the rules — “the exceptional need for childcare” — which had actually been put in place to safeguard victims and survivors of domestic abuse.
Women are being more affected by the coronavirus recession globally. This has led to it being dubbed the ‘shecession’.
This was egregious enough. But when you add the context that, according to the campaign group Pregnant then Screwed, working mothers shouldered the burden of nursery closures during the first lockdown, it’s truly a national scandal. The group says the government treated women as “sacrificial lambs” at a time when the country’s economy was contracting and believes that the added burden of childcare placed on them by the coronavirus rules contributed to almost half of female job losses.
Women without children haven’t fared much better. Young women’s finances have been hit particularly hard by the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis. This is for several reasons. Firstly, as the Resolution Foundation has noted, key workers are disproportionately likely to be female, with employed women more than twice as likely to be in this group as employed men. Secondly, as the Young Women’s Trust has pointed out, young women are likely to work in hospitality and retail — two industries which have been severely impacted — and were more likely to be struggling with basic outgoings such as housing costs prior to this crisis. This isn’t a problem that’s limited to Britain. Women are being more affected by the coronavirus recession globally. This has led to it being dubbed the “ shecession”. Yet our prime minister has completely failed to address it.
And so, as one year of life with Boris Johnson in charge draws to a close, the case for women’s economic equality has never felt more urgent. His government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has been nothing short of shambolic, with U-turn after U-turn on crucial issues such as whether or not to implement mass testing, whether or not we should be wearing face masks, whether or not private landlords should be able to evict renters, whether the furlough scheme would be extended and the extension of free school meals. But surely the only thing worse than making the wrong decision and changing your mind is doing nothing at all. Boris Johnson’s government has completely failed to address the needs of Britain’s 34 million women — leaving young women in particular overlooked, ignored and forced to shoulder the repercussions of leaving the EU, something they overwhelmingly voted against — and they aren’t even sorry. | https://medium.com/refinery29/reflecting-on-one-year-of-womens-lives-since-boris-won-with-a-landslide-4fd06134c94 | [] | 2020-12-15 16:52:42.993000+00:00 | ['Boris Johnson', 'Brexit', 'Politics', 'UK Politics', 'Covid 19'] |
The Rise Of The B2B Marketplace: Our Investment In Material Bank | Imagine your most recent e-commerce experience, perhaps on a brand’s website or a marketplace like Amazon. Whether searching for a new kitchen appliance or simply browsing for a new wardrobe item, chances are you didn’t have to give much thought to the purchasing process itself. A wide selection of products in stock, rapid delivery, product display curated to your preferences, just a few clicks to checkout — these are things we’ve come to expect in our online shopping experience.
Ask any interior designer about his or her experience sourcing new materials for a project, and you’ll hear close to the opposite. Designers usually turn to outdated physical resource libraries, extensive online searching, phone calls to manufacturers, and negotiations with sales reps. It can take hours to procure samples for a single material, and the samples arrive in a disjointed stream of packages over the next few weeks.
So why is it so comparatively difficult for professionals in specialized industries to realize the same user experience we have become accustomed to in our day-to-day lives as consumers?
The e-commerce revolution began in the B2C world. Only recently has B2B commerce begun its digital transition. The gross merchandise volume of Amazon Business reached $10 billion in 2019, up from $1 billion in 2015, its first year. Still, that pales in comparison to Amazon’s B2C business, which generated over $300 billion of gross merchandise volume in 2019.[1]
Why has B2B commerce been so slow to move online? Most simply, B2B transactions are more complicated than B2C transactions, and they tend to have specific requirements by vertical. B2C transactions are straightforward — you decide to buy a book, accept the price, buy it with credit or debit, and wait for it to arrive. In contrast, B2B transactions may involve price negotiations, special payment terms, a variety of payment methods, detailed product specifications, complicated SKU proliferation, consultation with a sales rep, unique shipping requirements, and the list goes on…A retailer buying 10,000 TVs from a wholesaler is a fundamentally different transaction than a consumer buying 1 TV from a retailer.
In light of these complexities, B2B marketplaces operate best by vertical. Take, for example, the highly specialized procurement processes in medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and construction equipment. Whereas consumers in their everyday lives purchase across numerous verticals, business buyers operate in silos according to the idiosyncrasies of their individual verticals. This makes it more difficult for a B2B marketplace to achieve category expansion. Every time a B2B marketplace enters a new vertical, it faces the challenge of onboarding a new set of vertical-specific buyers and sellers.
These dynamics have led to a marketplace revolution in the B2C world while the B2B world has lagged behind. There are online marketplaces for cars, food, doctors, antiques, accountants… even celebrity shout-outs, (hi Cameo). Entrepreneurs have covered seemingly every square inch of B2C marketplace “whitespace” over the last ten years.
We believe the next ten years will be characterized by the rise of B2B commerce and platforms that support it. It will look different this time: verticalized online marketplaces will emerge, and the landscape is unlikely to be dominated by one behemoth like Amazon.
This is already happening in the construction materials market.
Today we are thrilled to announce that we are leading a Series B investment in Material Bank, a B2B marketplace for construction and design materials samples.
Material Bank enables interior designers and architects to perform complex searches and order samples from multiple suppliers from a single platform. They offer materials such as carpet, flooring, wall coverings, glass, paint, metals, woods, and other textiles. Since launching in January 2019, the company has attracted over 35,000 designers and architects and over 200 materials suppliers to the platform. Material Bank is free for designers and currently has a waitlist of more than 7,000.
Without Material Bank, designers and architects typically coordinate with individual sales reps at materials companies. This inefficient and antiquated process, while not unique to the materials industry, is rife with pain points. In contrast, Material Bank consolidates hundreds of manufacturers’ libraries in a centralized, searchable digital catalogue and guarantees overnight delivery by 10:30 AM the next morning anywhere in the U.S. The product discovery experience is streamlined and tailored to each designer’s profile, creating a highly customized user experience and superior product selection.
There are also benefits to the suppliers. Material Bank provides a stream of highly qualified leads, creating a new customer acquisition channel. The company also handles order fulfillment and returns, alleviating suppliers’ logistical burden, and produces Nielsen-like insights for the materials community, creating data intelligence that is entirely new to the industry. The platform also supports a more sustainable ecosystem by recycling samples as they are returned from designers.
This is just the beginning of a long and exciting journey for the company. We believe Material Bank can build upon its current foundation to broaden and deepen its offering over time. There is incredible opportunity to expand into new material categories, to offer new products, and to grow in new geographies. We also expect Material Bank to become more deeply embedded in the order flow over time while continuing to enhance the material discovery and fulfillment experiences for designers and suppliers.
We are proud to partner with Material Bank and the fantastic team led by founder and CEO Adam Sandow to realize this vision.
[1] https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazon-gmv-in-2019 | https://medium.com/ideas-from-bain-capital-ventures/the-rise-of-the-b2b-marketplace-our-investment-in-material-bank-5639c787ad91 | ['Merritt Hummer'] | 2020-04-30 14:44:30.123000+00:00 | ['Marketplaces', 'Portfolio', 'Venture Capital', 'Design', 'Construction'] |
Disney Plus and New ‘Muppets Now’ Boldly Take On Modern Diversity! | Ru Paul is center stage.
Photo by pan xiaozhen on Unsplash
Muppets Wikimedia Publicity Photo
I hesitantly pulled up my Disney Plus account upon receiving an email that a new Muppets series had been undertaken and its first episode released.
Original Show Stickler
Yes, I am one of those people…sometimes. I just can’t get myself to appreciate remakes, new voice artists doing old characters, and constant new show concepts of entertainment products that were perfect the first time around.
I just can’t get used to someone else doing the voices Jim Henson and his crew made famous to my generation when we were kids.
I understand that Jim Henson Jr. took over some of the voices at one time, including Kermit, of course. Many of the characters probably sound exactly the same to many of my generation, and certainly they sound normal to the new generations of Muppets fans.
But, as a singer, and voice artist, I have a keen ear for even the slightest changes in a voice.
I’ve still watched anything and everything Muppets related all my life, even if the newer voice talents might irk me a little. Certainly, they are very talented, but with my ear, I simply miss Jim Henson, and some of the originals who are no longer with us.
Back To Its Roots
All of that being said, Muppets Now tackles its original format, but with an updated modern format and its always bold representations of the times we live in. Virtual entertainment, and Ru Paul take center stage.
I’m unsure whether there has previously been an outwardly gay Muppets character, prior to Muppets Now. If not, you will meet your first.
I’m aware there have been characters in previous shows and movies who vaguely showed possible gay qualities in their personas, but you’d have to be a long-running fan to recognize which characters they were.
Following a soft start to the show, it really begins to take off with a Miss Piggy virtual “show-in-show”. The old-style slapstick humor returns full force in a scene that should have you laughing hardily, out loud.
Muppets Now bravely returns to the roots of its original show by a few of today’s major social topics. Putting gender and personal diversity at the forefront.
The show takes on the #Metoo topic without mentioning the hashtag title in Miss Piggy’s scene. Then, to my amazement and thrill, we are gifted with a Kermit interview, like the old Muppets Show, but in a typical modern sit down interview set-up.
This is when Muppets Now truly shows what this new and fun episodic creation by Disney Plus is going to represent and celebrate… All people of the world.
Kermit interviews Ru Paul, and the hysterics take over again, as Kermit, Ru Paul, and the new gay character unabashedly represent the #LGBTQ nation.
As usual, this new Muppets format, just as the original in the 1970’s did, tackles the beauty of being unique and who you really are inside, and shows the new younger (and older, I hope), that being different, or who you want to be is a wonderful aspect of being human.
Muppets Now and the long-running homo-phobic Disney are no longer afraid. Disney has been finally tackling diversity in the modern age, and in order to represent to the younger generation, they invited Ru Paul, a national idolized figure in the gender-equal fight for rights.
Ru Paul is, as always, graceful, beautiful in his words, heart, and appearance and without any attitude, or anger, shows everyone who will hopefully, and luckily, start watching the new Muppets show that being who you really are, is truly awesome and the most perfectly human form of existence, without fear.
Muppets Now Makes One Mistake
This is a short section. I have to point an error in a choice Disney makes, in the Ru Paul interview scene with Kermit and the gay character, who’s name slips me now due to my early dementia.
Kermit seemingly gets annoyed with and talks down to the gay Muppet. This kind of pissed me off. At the same time they are using Ru Paul to prove to the new generations that they are hip to what’s right in the world, and are finally “woke”, they ruin it with an old-fashioned attitude from Kermit, because the gay character is disrupting the interview and answering questions for Ru Paul.
The exchanges of this character are funny as heck, but I just couldn’t easily forgive Kermit’s attitude toward him. Surely, we have all seen Kermit give other characters the same attitude for the same type of reason. He was “ruining” Kermit’s big interview, but I still couldn’t help feeling a tinge of anger toward that choice of direction and writing in the scene.
Without a doubt, Ru Paul had to take notice of this while filming, but just as the beautiful human being he is, he takes it all on with that amazing grace that makes him so popular and someone most everyone would love to have as a friend.
Muppets Now Hits A Homerun
Despite my opinion about that one point in the entire short first episode, Disney and Muppets Now definitely hit a homerun (maybe an inside the park one, for now).
I laughed through most of the episode, and felt like I had returned to my childhood a few times with that oh so warm feeling of reminiscing about a time when a show was my only escape from a torturous life.
Thank you Disney for bringing back what the Muppets were always meant to be. A very good representation of current world views, politics, and topics with no shyness, at all.
Jim Henson would be proud! | https://medium.com/rainbow-reviews/disney-plus-and-new-muppets-now-boldly-take-on-modern-diversity-b51fcad67530 | ['Colin Munro Wood'] | 2020-08-02 15:09:22.472000+00:00 | ['Television', 'Entertainment', 'Disney', 'Diversity', 'Life'] |
The Monk Who Burned Himself To Death as a Form of Protest | The Monk Who Burned Himself To Death as a Form of Protest
An act of Self-immolation that changed the world
“Burning Monk” Thich Quang Duc burning in Saigon on June 11, 1963
June 11th, 1963 will for always be remembered as the day that truly changed history forever. This was the day monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death as a protest against the Vietnamese corrupt government which was implying very demanding and unfair laws on monks. Throughout history, many people have self-immolated for various causes, but until that moment no one was known to suicide in such a gruesome and painful way in order to protest against something or for the right of a community such as the sacred monks.
The story behind this act
Most if not all events that had taken place throughout history were influenced by a previous event, the same case is in this story too. The influential event took place on May 8th, 1963 when the Buddhist community was celebrating a special day in the city of Hue. This special day is called Phat Dan or better described as the birthday of Buddha. The streets were crowded with people from all over Vietnam who came to celebrate this special day among monks. An imperative aspect that I have to mention is that most people were waving Buddhist flags.
Ngo Dinh Diem
This aspect is very important as at the time, it was illegal in Vietnam to display a religious flag. This law was implemented by President Ngo Dinh Diem which was a Catholic. The law was implemented as he wanted to make Vietnam more prosperous by “westernizing” it. This law was never welcomed by the population of Vietnam as 90% of the nation was in fact Buddhist. As in most countries and nations, religion was a big part of the Vietnamese culture, and trying to change the culture of a nation would not make anyone happy.
On the day of the Buddhist celebration, Diem had sent armed policemen reinforced by the Vietnamese army. This turned the celebration into a full-blown protest and quick enough things got out of hand. Once the Army lost their patience they opened fire into the crowd and even vehicles were driven into the crowd. At the end of the day, over 100 people were injured and 9 had died. From the 9, two of them were children that were run over by police cars and army trucks.
The Buddhist community responding to the massacre
Malcolm Browne
Since the massacre, things have heated up in Vietnam, with many different protests happening around the country. 2 months after the massacre, the news reached Thich Quang Duc. The news reached very late as Duc was living in a totally isolated temple in the mountains of Vietnam, in fact, he spent the last 3 years of his life at this very temple. Once he got word of the massacre he knew that something had to be done in order to keep the Buddhist community safe.
On the 10th of June, 1963 the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated Press by the name of Malcolm Browne got a piece of anonymous information that something important would happen the very next day (11th of June) outside of the Cambodian Embassy. Due to the high tensions around Vietnam, Browne believed this piece of information.
The very next day, Malcolm Browne reached the Cambodian Embassy where he was welcomed by Thich Quang Duc himself as well as all the other 350 monks and nuns who took part in the protest that was about to happen. By this point, Browne was still unaware of what was about to happen.
A monk pouring gasoline on Thich Quang Duc on 11th of June 1963
Thich Quang Duc took a cushion which he placed in the middle of the street and sat on it with his legs crossed as if he was just about to go into a deep meditation. Another monk took out of Duc’s car a five-gallon petroleum canister and poured it all over Duc, making sure he was covered by gasoline. What followed was Duc bending his neck and chanting his last prayer to Buddha.
At that point, Browne realized what was just about to happen, so he prepared his camera to make sure that he would capture every moment of it and that everyone around the world will be hearing about this act.
Once Duc finished his prayer, he struck the match and the whole crowd exploded with panic. As the screams of all the monks at the crowd could be heard for miles, a monk was yelling into a microphone:
“A Buddhist priest burns himself to death! A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr!”
Thich Quang Duc corpse collapsed and burning whilst the rest of the monks praying for him in 1963
In all of this chaos, the only person which was surprisingly calm was Thich Quang Duc himself. Those who witnessed mentioned that whilst Duc was burning, he never flinched nor moved a muscle. For 10 minutes he sat in a meditating posture burning until he collapsed, conforming to the authorities, and most of the people present that he had passed away.
Aftermath
After the fire went out, the monks took Duc’s corpse to the pagoda to cremate his body. Just minutes after the cremation, the pagoda was swarmed with police which wanted to make sure that word of this incident would not make it out of the city, not of the country. However, it was already too late as Browne had already sent the pictures of the event with a letter explaining the event to the United State via what he called a secret carrier pigeon. By the next day, the image of Thich Quang Duc’s burning body had appeared on the front cover of newspapers all over the world. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-monk-who-burned-himself-to-death-as-a-form-of-protest-35008d0ed8e2 | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-07-26 11:01:00.992000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Protest', 'Religion', 'History', 'Life'] |
React Router Basics | Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash
React is a library that specializes in creating single-page applications (SPAs) that are rendered on the client side. This means the client side is in charge of handling the routing, fetching and displaying of the data in the browser rather than the server. SPAs tend to have multiple pages (routes) on them. Client-side routing gets all the needed data to render all the pages on the first page load. Navigating these pages do not require the entire page to be reloaded. An SPA can achieve this by using the React routing library React Router.
Using React Router
To install React Router, run:
npm install react-router-dom
Note that the actual component is called BrowserRouter but it is commonly renamed as Router .
<Router> tag is the base of our application’s routing. The <Route> component kind of acts like a function. The component is rendered when the URL matches the specific path . There is one problem, <Router> can only one child element. To bypass this dilemma, we wrap all the <Route> components in a <div> tag. This is what it looks like for using multiple routes.
<Navbar> and <Navlink>
To look at all the components, you can find this project’s GitHub repository here. Something to note is the <Navbar> component. The <Navbar> is not a route, but its own separate component. Since it is not a route, it will always be on the webpage no matter which route you are on.
<Navbar> is a bar at the top of the screen to easily switch between routes. Users would not know how to find these routes or what they are without some sort of functionality like this. <Navbar> uses <NavLink> tags to trigger our routing.
<Navlink> is used to define and design a declarative navigation around an application. This will cause the page to route to the specified route when it is clicked on. <Navlink> tag can also add styling attributes to the rendered element.
This is a good website to look at other examples and guides about React Router.
https://reactrouter.com/web/example/basic | https://medium.com/@chandler-hanson/react-router-basics-e93c195e94f6 | ['Chandler Hanson'] | 2020-11-23 02:32:06.313000+00:00 | ['React', 'React Router', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Flatiron School', 'Coding'] |
“The perfect moment will never come” with Irina Georgieva — Fem Founder™ | Irina Georgieva, co-founder of Enterprise League , a business platform for companies.
With 2 business degrees up her sleeve, Irina co-founded Enterprise League with the purpose of helping small businesses to directly collaborate with each other, eliminating the middleman. Irina is actively involved in setting the direction of the company and works tirelessly to ambitiously scale the business platform to every country around the world.
Can you tell our readers about your background?
I was born in Macedonia during the transition from Communist Yugoslavia. I attended business school both in Milan, Italy, and Buckingham, the UK at the University of Buckingham. Upon completing my bachelor’s business studies with first-class honours, I continued to obtain a masters degree in Service Management with a distinction.
Upon graduating I worked for several small companies in Marketing and got to experience the main struggles small businesses face on a daily basis. This experience turned out to be of key importance for starting Enterprise League.
What inspired you to start your business?
After the Communist regime collapsed, criminal privatisation of many state-owned companies took place leading to thousands of job losses. During these tough times, my father took the risk to start his own company. He adopted the latest technological innovations and started the first TV broadband company in the country.
Throughout the past 25 years, I have been a prime witness to the struggles he was facing by running a private business. I grew up barely seeing my father, as he was always away on business trips and working late hours. This truly showed the struggle and dedication it takes to start and run your own business. Moreover, it exposed the cruel reality that the opportunities are privileged to a few people with key connections.
During my time working for several small businesses, I once again experienced the challenges that small business owners face every day. That if you lack a business savvy and connected personal network, your access to valuable business partners, suppliers, and other business collaborators is extremely limited.
This experience along with the entrepreneurial environment that I grew up in, served as a major inspiration for me to want to start my own business and help small companies collaborate more efficiently.
Where is your business based?
Enterprise League is based in London. My co-founder and I work from here, whilst the rest of our team is remotely based in several European countries.
How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?
When we identified the problem that we wanted to solve, we started conducting a thorough analysis of the present solutions and how well they meet the needs of small businesses.
Once we developed a clear vision of how we can help small businesses collaborate with each other quickly and easily, without depending on the middleman, we embarked on the adventure of creating the product.
During our product development stage, we worked closely with several businesses, who we identified could benefit from Enterprise League. These early adopters gave us input on the functionalities and had the chance to test the platform first hand whilst in beta.
Thanks to such collaboration with our customers, we were able to specifically target their pain points with our solutions, thus avoiding any guesswork.
Nowadays we continue to work in partnership with several companies that act as a representation of our target market and have also turned into marketing affiliates for Enterprise League.
What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?
So far we have seen the highest rate of conversions through our word of mouth efforts. We invest a lot of our resources into our customer experience and go above and beyond to meet their needs and make sure they get a positive experience with Enterprise League.
This approach has brought us a lot of new members that come from referrals and recommendations. We firmly believe that by focusing on the customer experience we will achieve exponential growth in users and maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction.
Another great way we are raising awareness about our business platform is through our business blog. The blog is focused on providing knowledgeable and value-filled business content, primarily of interest to business owners and small companies. In order to ensure our content is of the best quality and provides actionable steps to our readers we regularly work with industry experts to create reliable and trustworthy content based on industry experience and facts.
The blog has proved to be an excellent medium to generate new organic traffic that is not reached through our other marketing channels.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
When we just started Enterprise League we faced the challenge to assemble a great team. The team that is leading the company is one of the most important key aspects that contribute to its success. In the first several months we had hirings and firings which taught us that quality people are not easy to find and it requires time to truthfully identify them.
Another challenge we faced was working with an external company. This was in the early stages when the platform was being built and we had to collaborate with an external company to tackle some items that our internal team wasn’t yet capable of doing.
Here we decided to work with a company from Poland which we didn’t have any experience with prior to this. So in order to minimise the uncertainty and risk of failing in this chapter, I did extensive research about the options we had and chose a company that offered a workshop service. This meant we can visit their headquarters to speak more about our needs in person, which made sure they understood our platform in depth and ensured their delivery to be of the expected standard. This proved to be the right approach for the situation and our collaboration was successfully executed.
How do you stay focused?
I believe there are two ways one can stay focused, by eliminating the distractions or by beating up the distractions with more important reasons why you should work hard.
I remind myself every day of our mission and the goal we are striving to achieve. I remind myself of the impact and importance our platform will have when millions of companies start using it. This fuels me to keep pushing forward and stay focused.
How do you differentiate your business from the competition?
We are extremely focused on the client/user experience. We want to build a product that will be easy to use and will deliver them with the results they require. Therefore we put the client at the center of everything we do. Our users participate in every decision we make regarding new features, updates, releases, etc. Furthermore, we work with them on a personal level to help them better navigate through the platform and easily learn how to use its functionalities to their advantage.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Prior to the pandemic, we were actively collaborating with business events, to reach our target business audience. This was the prime marketing solution for a business platform such as ours. Now we work with online events, which are still effective but lack in comparison to the conversions we used to get through physical events. Additionally, besides collaborating with events we also participate in many business related events. Here we have various members of our team that join to spread awareness about Enterprise League and its benefits to companies.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Before deciding to start Enterprise League, I spent a few months contemplating whether I am ready to do it or not. I spent time reading books, researching, doing all sorts of things to try to get as ready as possible. But what I later found out was that the perfect moment will never come. You should just take action and work on making your business idea come true. The best advice I can give is to do your best market research, evaluate your opportunities, and take action.
Additionally focus on building good habits and skills for continuous self-improvement. Strong habits will help you develop processes that work for you, stay focused, and reach your goals. Stay analytical of yourself and keep identifying ways you can improve and perform better.
What’s your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?
Slack is arguably my favorite app. It helps me stay connected with my team wherever I am and it’s super-efficient and easy to use with all their integrations.
I love reading the Entrepreneurs by Forbes, it’s their blog dedicated to entrepreneurs and small business. I regularly find inspiring stories of entrepreneurs doing marvelous things for humanity and the environment, as well as trendy news stories.
My favourite book is Principles by Ray Dalio, I love using it as a guide or a sort of workbook to help me navigate through life and business. It contains extremely valuable and actionable advice that can help anyone better achieve their goals.
What’s your favorite business tool or resource? Why?
The project management tool Asana which we use on a daily basis is my favourite way to organise our projects and tasks. It helps me maintain control and overview of all our operations as well as it aids our team to stay efficient.
Who is your business role model? Why?
I would have to say Steve Jobs. He showed to be an extremely innovative leader and a charismatic pioneer. I admire his charisma and passion to bring his vision to reality and create the largest telecommunication company in the world. His achievements are an inspiration and I believe that many entrepreneurs aspire to achieve even a quarter of what Steve Jobs managed to achieve.
How do you balance work and life?
I have to admit it is often difficult to put a line between life and work, especially since my mind is constantly thinking about what’s next for Enterprise League. I do try to limit my working hours to a certain extent and regularly practice yoga and tennis. Another way I am bringing balance is through friends and family. I have allocated my evenings to meet up with friends with the goal of avoiding work talk. Maintaining such a balance and having hours of the day where you disconnect from your business really gives me a fresh perspective the next day. This helps me stay fresh and productive.
What’s your favorite way to decompress?
Yoga is the best for me. My work is very desk oriented and getting to stretch for 30–60min gives me the refreshment I need to finish the day productively. It is great for both my mental and physical health.
What do you have planned for the next six months?
For the next six months, I expect to see Enterprise League play a significant part in helping businesses out of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Many companies will turn to the platform in search of business deals and collaborations to fill out the gaps left by their clients and business partners.
To better address this need, we are working hard to quickly scale the platform to more countries besides the UK and USA where we have a solid presence. The aim is to create the world’s go-to place where business happens.
How can our readers connect with you?
They can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-georgieva-b994815b/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/irina.geor
or email me: [email protected] | https://medium.com/fem-founder/the-perfect-moment-will-never-come-with-irina-georgieva-fem-founder-172a0a5310d9 | ['Kristin Marquet'] | 2020-12-22 16:59:12.150000+00:00 | ['Founders', 'Founder Stories', 'Founder Advice'] |
Creative Cloud: What’s Cooking? | Product teams tend to be all about launches. They develop projects in secret, then focus all their attention on the big release. But what about the middle of product development? That’s when you’re struggling to figure things out and when you learn the most.
Within the companies I know, teams increasingly want to be more “real-time” with their customers, being more transparent about what they’re developing and why, and getting feedback during the process. (Having been an entrepreneur with tiny teams and now a product leader of a large company, I try to remind people who blatantly stereotype and generalize companies that, ultimately, how a company acts comes down to its people and their intentions.)
I’d love to take this opportunity to share some of our intentions on the Creative Cloud team at Adobe, as well as a few things we are working on that could change the creative world as we know it.
Experience Design as a Platform
Today, product designers rely on a collection of loosely integrated parts to design, prototype, animate, share, test, and build digital products. Some of these products are limited to a single platform, some of them are web-only, some of them have shaky performance or limited integrations with other tools, and very few of them take all stakeholders of design into account.
At the same time, the field of experience design is going through some major changes. Design teams can no longer work in isolation, or spend their days navigating file systems and dealing with version control. They must be able to design at scale, taking more and more platforms and states of the customer experience into account and iterating faster than ever before. Modern designers prototype early and often, making rapid-fire tweaks and sometimes wholesale changes based on feedback from stakeholders.
The overwhelming challenge is how to coordinate all that design work and the different groups of stakeholders. How do multiple designers and engineers collaborate efficiently on a project? How do you collect design feedback from the wide variety of stakeholders without having comments and suggestions trapped in a dozen different email threads? How do you have teams throughout the company working on separate projects, but ensure the designs are consistent, stay in-sync, and reuse as many brand and user experience elements as possible? Those are the challenges of designing at scale.
Answering those questions is the battle right now in the experience design market. The product team that can build a true experience design platform that integrates seamless collaboration and that supports creating and maintaining design systems for efficiently sharing colors, styles, components, and assets will win in an extraordinarily competitive field.
The modern team or enterprise is as coordinated in their creativity and design as they are in their operations. Brand assets and fonts are consistent across every internal presentation and external communication. Product elements and components are aligned and updated in real-time, from websites to mobile apps to desktop software. The new XD makes this possible.
In our latest release, you’ll see some of the specifics about how we’re helping teams achieve consistency and efficiency with support for flexible and intuitive design systems. XD is being crafted by and for forward-thinking UI/UX teams that value performance, collaboration, and a fully-integrated experience with a robust ecosystem of third-party plug-ins.
In developing this release, one major question the XD team had to answer was how to share projects. Creative Cloud users are accustomed to saving their work in files on their local device and then syncing those local files up to the cloud for collaborators to see. But the team quickly realized that paradigm didn’t work with the complex sharing and collaboration needs of modern organizations. And it didn’t deliver the performance our customers wanted. Instead, the source of truth about a project always needs to be in the cloud so that all the collaborators and stakeholders can access it. So, we created Cloud Documents. With Cloud Documents, projects are automatically saved into the cloud, where everyone can view and interact with the one true version of the project, all with the level of performance we expect from modern applications.
I’m excited to see how Cloud Documents and support for creating design systems in Adobe XD change the ways design teams work with each other and with their stakeholders.
Transcending Desktop-Only Creativity
One of the most wondrous tenets of creativity is that it happens on its own terms. Whether you’re sitting on a train, walking through the woods, or sitting at your desktop, your tools must enable you to create in real-time wherever you are. Of course, professional, digital creative tools have been bound to the desktop for decades. But with recent developments in cloud computing and powerful devices like Apple’s iPad Pro, digital creativity has the opportunity to happen anywhere.
We’re taking advantage of these trends by transforming our flagship tools into multi-device systems, starting with Photoshop. This year, we will bring Photoshop to the iPad, with more platforms and devices to follow.
Bringing the full codebase of Photoshop to a device like the iPad is both a tremendous technical challenge and an amazing opportunity. Translating the deep, complicated interface of Photoshop on the desktop to a touch device gives us a chance to modernize the application and make it more accessible for new users.
Our goal is to deliver a product with the power and capabilities to enable real, professional work with much less complexity. There will be fewer dropdowns and panels and more contextual ways to access your advanced capabilities through modern touch gestures.
Like most opportunities, though, this one comes with risks. Many creative professionals have been using Photoshop for years or decades. They have engrained expectations, shortcuts, and muscle memory that help them do their jobs. What streamlines Photoshop for one user may break a much-used pattern for another.
We’re doing research and getting user feedback to guide us in this transformation, but we know things won’t be perfect at launch. We depend on feedback from our veteran users and new customers and expect to make changes based on what we hear.
Exciting Journeys Ahead
These are just a few of the upcoming changes you’ll see in Creative Cloud, but we have a long roadmap of projects that will fundamentally improve how people create. Stay tuned for some pretty exciting updates for our video products and the Lightroom ecosystem for photographers. And our newly founded 3D & Immersive product team is charting the course for a wildly creative and immersive future.
Bold journeys don’t come with maps, though. Our product teams are guided primarily by empathy with the users they serve. We’ll succeed only through the partnerships we’ve built with creative communities and with the help of the priceless feedback we receive through those partnerships. | https://medium.com/positiveslope/creative-cloud-whats-cooking-e18c4b934f17 | ['Scott Belsky'] | 2019-05-17 12:57:38.933000+00:00 | ['Design Process', 'Creativity', 'Design', 'Adobe', 'Design Systems'] |
Europe According to Coronavirus | Making sense of the information mess during the COVID-19 pandemic in good old disunited Europe
The Atlas of Prejudice started in the midsts of a Pan-European crisis back in January 2009, when Russia cut gas supplies to Ukraine and left half of the continent freezing in the middle of winter.
It was a different world back then. Russia and the West were BFFs. George Bush and Vladimir Putin used to sip Pepsi in front of the fireplace at Camp David, while Condoleezza Rice flipped pancakes in the kitchen.
I lived in Bulgaria, one of worst affected countries, since it was heavily reliant on Russian gas. At the time, speaking about politics couldn’t get you laid or elevate you into an influencer, so most of my friends across Europe had no idea what the fuss was all about. To help them make sense of my predicament, I drew a little funny map to illustrate the geopolitics behind the situation.
Fast forward eleven years and the world looks unrecognizable. Politics permeates every aspect of our lives—from identity and food to shopping and pornography. Everybody has an opinion about everything and that opinion is usually set in stone, adorned with beautifully chiseled CAPITALS!!! The word dialogue has almost lost its meaning because the only thing we’re interested in is our own precious voices.
But just when we thought things couldn’t get any better, a pandemic worthy of a medieval apocalyptic book suddenly crashed on the shores of our continent.
As the COVID-19 tsunami devastated Southern Europe, people rushed online in search for data, so they could instantly gratify their thirst for easy explanations, preferably confirming long-held prejudices. My Facebook feed was clogged with questions. Are Italians dirty? Does Madrid have so many victims because Spaniards are careless and fuck bareback? And is the difference in mortality rate between Germany and Italy a definite proof that the Arian race will inherit the Earth?
Hopefully, the current crisis will change our arrogant attitude towards expert opinion and roll back a decade of misguided entitlement. Because the complexity of the problems we face far outstrips our individual imagination, while the data we’re constantly immersed in is worth nothing without thoughtful analysis.
Meaningful answers require time. But until we figure a way out of this, let’s take a moment to have a laugh. Every crisis, no matter how severe, deserves a satirical map. | https://atlasofprejudice.com/europe-according-to-coronavirus-b11b6f502779 | ['Yanko Tsvetkov'] | 2020-05-21 17:41:03.029000+00:00 | ['Political Humor', 'Mapping', 'Maps', 'Political Satire', 'European Union'] |
Napokon videopoziv i na Whatsapp-u | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/sidrome-freelance/napokon-videopoziv-i-na-whatsapp-u-263a69967c3 | [] | 2017-01-11 10:08:49.216000+00:00 | ['Društvene Mreže'] |
The Dark Side of YouTube | Recently, Shawn James from the channel, My Self Reliance, explained to his viewers that he was moving, despite building his own home and outbuildings on land he bought several years ago. One reason was due to the thousands of acres surrounding his land being bought up by developers, meaning his once quiet solitude was going to change dramatically. The second reason was because of his neighbours.
Shawn James and Cally via myselfreliance
Shawn, who has 1.6 million subscribers on his main channel, had to call the police on numerous occasions because of a nearby resident targeting him due to his YouTube channel. The neighbour would record sounds and play them back through loudspeakers to interfere with Shawn’s filming and his sleep.
“These people are targeting me specifically because of my YouTube channel. They were harassing me to the point that the police threatened them with criminal harassment…”
The neighbour also set up equipment across the road from Shawn’s driveway and recorded the movements of him and his family. Shawn still doesn’t know what they’ve done with this footage, but the equipment was eventually stolen, for which he was blamed.
They’ve also tried to turn viewers against him online over the years and have threatened him. The final straw for Shawn James was when the neighbours made vulgar comments about his daughters online. After this, his wife and daughters moved out of the cabin and he will soon be following them.
The police ended up threatening the neighbour was criminal harassment, but the damage was done. What was once a quiet place to live for the man who craves privacy after spending years in the city, has become a warzone and he’s not prepared to stay.
The life he lives with his dog, Cally, is one that some people crave, and survival channels have become increasingly popular over the years. However, the man who spends most of his uploads building outhouses and chopping firewood is an unlikely target of internet and real-life abuse.
Sadly, he’s not the only one.
Rob Hefner took to YouTube to tell the viewers on his channel, Little House Off Grid, that one of his subscribers had called the local code enforcement office to complain about his new structure.
An inspector paid Hefner a visit on his Missouri land and explained that there had been complaints about him dumping sewage into a nearby creek. Hefner agreed to the inspection and the check showed that he wasn’t disposing of anything into the water.
The inspector told Hefner, who has 40,000 subscribers, that a viewer in California had contacted their office because he had seen a video of the YouTuber dumping waste. The video doesn’t exist, and the claim was false, but still had to be followed up.
More recently, the local sheriff came by to tell Hefner that someone else had complained about his property. Another subscriber had contacted local law enforcement about the building permits obtained to construct Hefner’s property. This time, however, the subscriber was from Tennessee. According to the YouTuber, his build was above board and due to the size of the home he was building, he didn’t need specific permits. It appeared he has done his due diligence. | https://bettermarketing.pub/the-dark-side-of-youtube-c0e42bbb3466 | ['Josie Klakström'] | 2020-12-05 13:03:18.716000+00:00 | ['YouTube', 'Content', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Marketing'] |
Continuously Deploy a Static Website With Azure Pipelines | Introducing CI/CD
Deploying applications can be a tedious task, with people historically having to write their own scripts if they wanted to avoid long, manual processes. Every project and every organisation runs on a different infrastructure, so for a long time, there was never an easy way to automate these processes. For each deployment, the same processes would have to be repeated and so it took up a lot of time. Fortunately, the widespread adoption of cloud computing and investment in DevOps, has changed this. Now it is easier and cheaper than ever, to fully automate with CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous deployment).
The deployment process
Step by step
To begin, we need to break down the deployment process step by step. This makes it clear exactly what you need to do and in what order. Sometimes deployments require one step, while others can require tens of steps. Combined, all the steps will make up a pipeline.
For a static website
When deploying a static website, at its core, the process seems very basic. Files simply need to be copied to the correct location on the host machine. Various protocols are available to do this, whether it be SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS or whichever else. The protocol used will depend on your hosting provider.
Most likely you will be using a static website generator, so will want to prepend steps to transform your input into your output files. The tasks required for this depend on your tech stack. At a generic level, the tasks involved will include installing dependencies, navigating the file system and running tool-specific commands.
Azure Pipelines
Pipeline anatomy
Azure pipelines is a high-level, extensible, cloud-native platform, designed for fully automating code integration and deployment. Azure pipelines offers both build and release pipelines, with build pipelines originally intended for continuous integration and release pipelines for continuous deployment. Build pipelines have evolved and been optimised for both continuous integration and deployment, with them being rebranded as multi-stage pipelines, while release pipelines are now a legacy feature.
When creating Azure pipelines, you specify stages, in which you define executable jobs, which are made up of one or more tasks. This is a way of sectioning your pipelines, so that you can respond to different outcomes for each stages of your pipeline. Azure pipelines comes with hundreds of pre-configured tasks and allows you to run custom scripts, or even create your own task extensions.
It might also be worth mentioning that you can set up different environments for your builds and run them on different machines. It is easiest to run builds on Azure-hosted machines, but if you want you can set up agents to run them on your own machines.
Agents
Azure pipelines agents are installed on the machines that run your builds and releases. It is useful to understand how agents are setup, so that you can correctly define your pipelines.
Job agents for build pipelines run a build in a numbered directory $(Agent.BuildDirectory), that by default contains three subdirectories: \a $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory), \b $(Build.BinariesDirectory) and \s $(Build.SourcesDirectory). Agents have predefined variables, which can be referenced from your build pipelines, including the variables listed to reference these directories.
Agents are set up slightly differently for classic releases. They contain a numbered directory that is prefixed by an r, with the only subdirectory being \a $(System.ArtifactsDirectory). Likewise with build pipelines, classic release pipelines also have a set of predefined variables.
Stages and jobs
Whether you opt to use multi-stage pipelines or classic releases for deployment, you need to decide how to structure your pipelines. Stages are meant as a high-level grouping of work, with jobs being a unit of work that run on a machine. Therefore, it is common to separate your pipeline into stages such as Build, Test and Release, while jobs might be Transform Files, Upload Files to Network or Notify Users of Updates. As well as standard jobs, Azure pipelines has special deployment jobs.
Artifacts
In Azure pipelines, each job runs on a different machine, so often files need to somehow be transferred between stages and jobs. This is most easily done with artifacts, which are a set of tasks for transferring files in your builds.
A pipeline in practice
Structuring our pipeline
For a static website, we want to take the code in our source control repository, then transform that into a set of files that are ready to deploy. After that, we want to deploy these files to our web host. It is logical to group this in to two stages: build and release. The build stage is likely to only require one job, as building your project and transforming your input files is one unit of work. Deployment jobs are meant to run through your entire deployment, so your release stage should also require one job, as most likely you will only have one deployment target.
Setting up the pipeline
If you do not have one already, create an Azure DevOps organisation and project. Navigate to the Pipelines tab in your Azure DevOps project, then select New pipeline.
You will need to connect to your source control repository as the first step to setting up your pipeline. Next select a pipeline template; it’s easiest to start off with the Starter template. Once you have done that, you will be presented with the pipeline editor. Azure pipelines are configured in YAML, though Azure DevOps contains a handy assistant which honestly makes things 10x easier! For each task you use, take a look at the documentation if you are struggling to understand the configuration required.
The pipeline definition contains a trigger, which is the branch that is monitored for changes, to begin a new build. Likely you will want to keep this as master. A pool is also defined, which specifies the agent machines to run on. Pools can be defined at the root, per stage or per job. Be aware that if deploying to Azure, some tasks are windows-only.
You may notice that the template contains definitions for steps, but not stages or jobs. This is because if you only have one stage and one job, you do not need to explicitly define them in the pipeline. Start off by removing all the steps and define the stages and jobs that you have planned out. I also like to define the artifact name(s) as variables, for the artifacts that I will be creating to transfer files between each stage.
trigger:
- master pool:
vmImage: 'windows-latest' variables:
ARTIFACT_NAME: DevelopMomentumWeb stages:
- stage: Build
displayName: Build
jobs:
- job: Transform
displayName: Transform Input - stage: Release
displayName: Release
dependsOn: Build
jobs:
- deployment: DeployToStorage
displayName: Deploy to Azure Storage
Stages will run in parallel, unless they are defined as having a dependency on another stage. You are able to define conditions for each stage to run. The default condition is that their dependant stages completed successfully.
The Build stage
Having connected your repository, for standard jobs, the agent will copy your code into the \s directory and set that as the working directory. Therefore, the first thing you need to consider is the installation of build dependencies. Azure-hosted agents already have a lot of software installed, meaning you might not need to define any steps for this. You can view the included software by clicking the links in the agents table on the Microsoft documentation.
In this example, I’ll be building a static website using .NET Core and Statiq, therefore I need to perform the CLI commands dotnet restore , dotnet build then dotnet run . Azure pipelines comes with a task DotNetCoreCLI , which I will use. For each task, I need to provide the project path, which can be placed in a variable. Statiq only outputs files if the working directory is set to the directory containing the input folder, so this needs to be defined in the task. Something that I didn't realise at first, was even with the working directory defined, the project path in the DotNetCoreCLI@2 task must be defined relative to the \s directory.
- job: Transform
displayName: Transform Input variables:
project: 'src/Blog.csproj' steps:
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
displayName: Restore
inputs:
command: 'restore'
projects: $(project) - task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
displayName: Build
inputs:
command: 'build'
projects: $(project)
workingDirectory: 'src' - task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
displayName: Generate
inputs:
command: 'run'
projects: $(project)
workingDirectory: 'src'
Now we need to publish the artifact, which is the output folder that Statiq generates. Generally, artifacts should be staged before being published, which involves copying them to the \a directory. You should do this with the CopyFiles task, which takes the source and target folders as parameters. Publishing artifacts can be done with either the PublishBuildArtifacts or PublishPipelineArtifact task, yet it is recommended to use pipeline artifacts, as they are intended as a replacement to build artifacts.
- task: CopyFiles@2
displayName: Copy
inputs:
SourceFolder: '$(Build.SourcesDirectory)/src/output'
Contents: '**'
TargetFolder: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/output' - task: PublishPipelineArtifact@1
displayName: Share
inputs:
targetPath: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/output'
artifact: '$(ARTIFACT_NAME)'
publishLocation: 'pipeline'
The Release stage
The build stage is now defined and so we can look at the release stage. We’ve defined a deployment job, which is currently missing an environment and a strategy.
Multiple environments can be useful when creating responsive, large-scale applications, though in this case we do not have to worry about them. We just want a single empty environment, which we can get by providing any environment name.
To finish, we need to define the deployment strategy, which is a process that can contain the following hooks:
preDeploy - used for resource initialisation
- used for resource initialisation deploy - performs the actual deployment
- performs the actual deployment routeTraffic - configuration to serve updated version
- configuration to serve updated version postRouteTraffic - meant for health monitoring / user notifications
- meant for health monitoring / user notifications on: failure - to perform rollbacks
- to perform rollbacks on: success - meant for clean up
There are three different deployment strategies, though the only one you need to be concerned about is runOnce . This strategy is the simplest of the three, as it runs each stage of deployment one time per build.
jobs:
- deployment: DeployToStorage
displayName: Deploy to Azure Storage
environment: developmomentum-production
strategy:
runOnce:
In my example case, the website needs to be deployed to Azure Storage, which involves deleting the old files then copying the new files to the storage container. The website uses Azure CDN and Cloudflare as a DNS provider, both of which cache the website. These caches need to be cleared on every deployment, so that traffic is served correctly.
variables:
AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT: developmomentum strategy:
runOnce:
deploy:
steps:
- task: AzureCLI@2
displayName: 'Delete Existing Files'
inputs:
azureSubscription: 'Pay-As-You-Go (8df2aaab-fa1b-4031-9a60-43ebee006b38)'
scriptType: 'pscore'
scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
inlineScript: 'az storage blob delete-batch -s `$web --account-name $(AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT) --auth-mode login' - task: AzureFileCopy@4
displayName: 'Copy Files to Storage'
inputs:
azureSubscription: 'Pay-As-You-Go (8df2aaab-fa1b-4031-9a60-43ebee006b38)'
SourcePath: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/$(ARTIFACT_NAME)/*'
Destination: 'AzureBlob'
storage: '$(AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT)'
ContainerName: '$web' routeTraffic:
steps:
- task: PurgeAzureCDNEndpoint@2
displayName: 'Purge Azure CDN Endpoint'
inputs:
ConnectedServiceNameSelector: ConnectedServiceNameARM
ConnectedServiceNameARM: 'Pay-As-You-Go (8df2aaab-fa1b-4031-9a60-43ebee006b38)'
ResourceGroupName: developmomentum
EndpointName: developmomentum
ProfileName: developmomentum
continueOnError: true
- task: tfx-cloudflare-purge@1
displayName: 'Purge Cloudflare Cache'
inputs:
username: '[email protected]'
apikey: '$(CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY)'
zonename: developmomentum.com
continueOnError: true
In my definition, I’m using an Azure CLI task, which takes an inline script. Scripts and script based tasks can include variables and Azure pipelines will automatically convert them into environmental variables, which will be passed into the script.
I’m using a couple of extension tasks for cache purge, which can be found in the task assistant. These tasks need to be installed before you can use them in your pipelines. I’m also defining that the cache purge steps should not disrupt the pipeline, even if they fail.
The Cloudflare cache purge task requires an API key, which must be kept secret. You can define secret variables by adding a variable in the Variables menu, selecting Keep this value secret.
Secret variables cannot be passed into scripts. For this reason, Azure CLI authentication cannot be done using keys. Each Azure subscription I have defined is a reference to a service connection that has been set up.
Authentication
Service connections allow your pipelines to authenticate with external applications. Setting up a service connection in Azure DevOps is easy. In your project, navigate to Project Settings, then select Service connections. Create a service connection by selecting New service connection and going through the wizard.
External permissions
With a service connection set up, you may need to configure permissions in your external service. I am running an Azure CLI command against Azure Storage, which requires the service connection to be granted the permissions to delete files from Azure Storage.
Azure products manage permissions with Access control (IAM), which allows you to assign roles to various entities in Azure. With role assignments, you can give your service connection whatever permissions are needed.
Committing the pipeline
With the build pipeline now defined, you can save it, which will commit the azure-pipelines.yml file to the root of your repository. I recommend selecting Create a new branch for this commit, as you might need to tweak your initial configuration, which is better done on a separate branch. You'll then be able to run your build pipeline.
Common deployment targets
Deploying to Azure
Being an Azure branded product, Azure pipelines has incredible integration with Azure. There are so many native tasks and deploying to Azure is easy. Instead of going into too many details, I will point you towards reading the documentation for the specific tasks, which is extensive.
Deploying to AWS
Azure Pipelines has great support for deploying to AWS, via the AWS tools extension. Installing the extension for your organisation will make a bunch of AWS tasks available for your pipelines. The user guide for the extension contains a task reference, which goes into details regarding the parameters available for each task. | https://medium.com/swlh/continuously-deploy-a-static-website-with-azure-pipelines-fce6442a590b | ['Adam Shirt'] | 2020-06-11 12:20:42.601000+00:00 | ['Azure Pipelines', 'Azure Devops', 'Azure', 'DevOps', 'Software Development'] |
A small monad library for dart/flutter project 🎯 | I will introduce with simple words what monad is? and how can we use it through my library either_option in flutter project? It targets mainly readers who are unfamiliar with this concept, or who want to see how we can do it in an imperative object oriented language. We will focus on two monads: Either and Option
Common practice : example 1
Imagine we want to fetch an url with an id to get an User details
If user is not found or response from server is not 200, we return null at line 10. We now want to consume the result
we check that the instance isn’t null at line 5 before accessing its properties… We can do two trivial remarks:
In getUser function, we are not precise about kind of error that happens when we try to fetch user. Simple null is return We hold a detail about possible null instance and add a guard
if(user!=null){ ... }
each time we will try to consume and use user instance else get a runtime error.
Common practice : example 2
We can instead of returning null throw an exception in getUser function and in main function add a try {…} catch block.
Here remarks are :
We are not precise about kind of error that happens when we try to fetch user We must read the content of getUser function body to know where exceptions are thrown. In case of important project maintained by many developers, these details can be difficult to follow
A better solution
We modify the previous example by using an abstraction Either from either_option library. We put error value in an instance of Left and success value in an instance of Right
So now to consume result we can use for example fold method and say what to do with value in case of Left or Right:
Here we have fixed issue from previous example:
We are precise about kind of error that happens when we try to fetch user We don’t need to read the getUser function body to understand its behavior All informations about the getUser function are resume in the type signature We are safe from runtime error because we don’t use null and don’t throw any exception
Either used in this solution is a monad.
Why Monad?
Initially, a monad is an abstraction which come from the functional programming paradigm. This abstraction encapsulate data and allows easy composition of functions applied to those data. In practice we use it for error handling, concurrency management, IO composition and others in a totally safe way.
This concept could be used in Dart/flutter to built more reliable programs. We will don’t go deeper about theoretical stuff under monad but bring a simple exposure and how we can use it easily.
Examples of monads
Option<A>
Option represents a value of one of two possible types. By convention we consider missing value as an instance of None and expected success value in an instance of Some.
Either<L,R>
Either represents a value of one of two possible types. By convention we put missing or error value in an instance of Left and expected success value in an instance of Right. It’s like an Option, but with a more general and specific on kind of error.
What is a Monad?
Basically, a monad is a generic class, simple container (or wrapper type) where we can put an element into and satisfies some properties.
Besides, it is an immutable generic data structure that offers the three following methods:
a type constructor: from a type A return the monadic type M[A]
Example : A is int, M is Option and Option.of is the constructor
final Option<int> value = Option.of(10); // Some(10)
a map method: from a monadic type M[A] transform A to an another type B and return the monadic type M[B]
int doubleValue(int value) => value*2; Option<int> mapResult = value.map(doubleValue); //Some(20)
a flatMap method: from a monadic type M[A] transform A to a monadic type M[B] and return the monadic type M[B]
Option<int> tripleValue(int value) => Option.of(value*3); Option<int> flatMapResult = value.flatMap(tripleValue); //Some(30)
Implementation of monads
Option<A>
Unfortunately, Dart doesn’t have pattern matching. A solution to avoid using if…else instruction to know if we are a None or Some instance and what to do is to define an abstract fold method:
Z fold<Z>(Z Function() onNone, Z Function(A a) onSome)
And now concretes type Some and None implementation
see full implementation here
Either<L,R>
Unlike Option’s implementation, Left in Either may contains a value so we use 2 intermediates objects call Projection to project Either instance on the Left or Right and play with them
And finally Right and Left definitions are :
see full implementation here
Hope you appreciate this little article. In a next article we will expose by examples a flutter project with use of either_option | https://medium.com/@cb.yannick/a-small-monad-library-for-dart-flutter-project-e49b71205bd0 | [] | 2019-07-15 09:12:41.688000+00:00 | ['Flutter', 'Functional Programming', 'Dart', 'Monads'] |
Hypothetical Economics: What Would an Extraterrestrial Invasion Mean for the Global Economy? | An Alien Invasion? Really?
As it turns out, scientists at NASA say that the likelihood of identifying intelligent life in our universe within the next decade is not as improbable as many believe it to be (McFall-Johnsen 2019).
Jessie Christiansen, a NASA scientist, told Business Insider that, with regards to building the instrumentation needed to identify intelligent life, “There’s high confidence that once we build these instruments, we’ll be able to find signatures of life if they’re out there” (McFall-Johnsen 2019).
Now that’s it’s been established that the idea of foreign life being discovered is real, the question is how likely is it to affect us?
An astrophysicist at the Alder Planetarium in Chicago, Lucianne Walkowicz, told NBC that, “There’s a possibility that if we actively message, with the intention of getting the attention of an intelligent civilization, that the civilization we contact would not necessarily have our best interests in mind,” (Boyle 2017).
Saying that there will certainly be an extraterrestrial invasion on Earth isn’t the most accurate recapitulation of what scientists have been saying. However, it’s important to consider that we don’t know all the facts.
At the end of the day, no individual on Earth is capable of perfectly predicting the likelihood of an alien invasion, even given the current plethora of available resources and information to provide a legitimate background. Until more thorough evidence of extraterrestrial life is brought forth, all that can be done is prepare for the possibilities and examine the current evidence.
While it isn’t exactly probable, it doesn’t necessarily make it impossible. | https://junioreconomist.org/hypothetical-economics-what-would-an-extraterrestrial-invasion-mean-for-the-global-economy-316a9f71f4b9 | ['Nava Tavasoli'] | 2021-04-12 00:32:55.726000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Science Fiction', 'Consumerism', 'Space', 'Aliens'] |
Day 3: Cleanup — Identify Visitor Source | I was reading up on using Lambda, Node and DynamoDB and found some samples with much cleaner/easier code.
So first I will clean up some of my the code from Day 1 and Day 2.
Goodbye Express, Serverless-HTTP
The next part is blatantly stolen from the post below. If you need to know why please read the post below. All credits to Van Huynh
Create a file called src/utils/request.util.js for our request utility.
For now, the request utility will contain a single function that will accept some parser function and return a new function that uses it to parse some text we pass to it.
src/utils/request.util.js
Create another file called src/utils/response.util.js for our response utility.
src/utils/response.util.js
The withStatusCode response utility function is similar to the request utility, but instead of parsing text, it will format data into text. It also contains addition checks to make sure our status codes are within the range of allowable status codes.
Then we’re creating a factory as we keep instantiating DynamoDb with the same options:
Using those new utils our index.js looks like this
That’s right. No more express, body-parser or serverless-http. So remove them and make sure to uninstall
npm remove body-parser express serverless-http --save
More cleanup
I had some inconsistencies in serverless.yml. Using track instead of page for table names. Fix that in serverless.yml
Quick sls deploy to get everything deployed. We did rename a table so the page events will be empty 🤨
—
Allright. Ready to do some new stuff. 😎
So what we want to do is two things today:
Store the identify() calls together with anonymousId so we can map visitor sessions (pages, tracks, …) to real users Run page() calls through some external library and detect what type of traffic it is (search, paid, social,…)
Streaming DB inserts
Because I have my own dataset with historic segment events I think I might import the old historic archive later. For that reason, I have decided to use streaming to launch a 2nd Lambda function after the record is inserted. This way I can safely batch import old page events and know they will be handled by the same processing logic.
Let’s register two new functions and set up the streaming link in serverless.yml
Hit sls deploy
In some cases, I had to erase my deployment sls remove or even sls remove -f because some changes to the tables (setting up the streaming) could not be completed.
Don’t forget to export BASE_DOMAIN after that to point to the new deployment.
Processing Identify calls
Every time an identify is stored (Day 2) another Lambda function is automatically called. Let’s add the code (in /processIdentify.js ) to store a mapping (userId to anonymously)
processIdentify.js
Two new files come with that too. The first one is a model to keep our Lambda handler clean and DRY.
The second file is to deal with the fact that DB events come with a special (marshalled) format. As we need the original event we need to unmarshall it. Read about it at Stack Overflow.
After that deploy that function only.
sls deploy --function=processIdentify
Now try to hit your segment endpoint with a new identify event
http POST $BASE_DOMAIN/events < events/identify.json
In a new tab monitor the output
sls logs --function=processIdentify
After that, you will see that a new record was written to the user mapping table. Mine (with the example event) looked like this: | https://medium.com/solving-marketing-attribution/day-3-cleanup-identify-visitor-source-ea8bfd1f658c | ['Gijs Nelissen'] | 2020-05-07 07:55:31.832000+00:00 | ['Lambda', 'Attribution Modeling', 'Dynamodb', 'Marketing', 'Experiment'] |
Smart cities could make people feel better. Literally. | How do we design smart cities to ensure the health of its citizens?
Cities may make the brain more susceptible to mental-health conditions, notably depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. A study from 2011, published in the magazine Nature, shows that city inhabitants have a stronger reaction to stressors than those living elsewhere. The study shows that the agitation that city-dwellers experience can be linked to public transportation delays and traffic jams. It also shows that urbanites are less able to cope with negative emotions than people living in rural areas. In research from 2010, Peen, Schoevers, Beekman, and Dekker demonstrate a strong correlation between urban life and poor mental health.
Although it’s challenging to determine precisely how a complex environment such as a city affects the brain, scientists are investigating the differences in the way that people living in cities and rural areas process stressful situations.
More than two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050, so mental well-being in cities is becoming increasingly important. Mental illnesses already represent the world’s largest health burden after infectious diseases, and the costs in lost productivity, disability claims, and treatment is rising. In Germany, the number of sick days for psychiatric-related illness doubled between 2000 and 2010. According to some estimates, up to 40% of disability claims for work absences in North America may be related to depression.
Given these considerations, how is it possible to create smart, human cities that enable people to live well-balanced lives suitable to their own needs? For a start, cities must function as a service to citizens, putting the people that live, work, and visit them at the center of the design. This may mean that certain long-established urban priorities need to change.
“We know that nature can reduce stress,” says Simone Stavenuiter, Senior Designer, Experience Design at Signify, formerly known as Philips Lighting. “The obvious thought is to create more greenery and parks in cities, which of course would be ideal.” Stavenuiter believes there may also be other solutions that can have a positive effect on the mental and emotional well-being. “For instance, by creating light effects in public spaces that mimic certain natural scenes and that allow us to just stand still for a moment or give us a sense of joy — this can reduce stress.”
“It seems that cities may be making us sick.” Jane Boydell, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London
One challenge facing smart city designers is to determine how data and intelligent systems can help transform cities into havens of well-being and mental and emotional health. “On the one hand, data could help us understand what is happening with regards to mental and emotional discomfort,” says Ramon van de Ven, User Experience Designer at Signify. “On the other hand, we can design solutions that can contribute to the prevention of mental or emotional discomfort and illnesses. As long as we keep placing humans and their needs at the center of our designs, and not only focus on cost or time-effective technical solutions, it is merely a matter of time before we solve the problem.” | https://medium.com/@maartenkpieters/smart-cities-could-make-people-feel-better-literally-f12ad02d3595 | ['Maarten K. Pieters'] | 2020-01-03 15:15:20.773000+00:00 | ['Human Centered Design', 'Innovation', 'Lighting', 'Co Creation', 'Smart Cities'] |
The Electoral College Will Pull Through for Biden, but the Damage Has Been Done | The Electoral College Will Pull Through for Biden, but the Damage Has Been Done
There’s no telling how successful the next power-hungry incumbent will be in taking advantage of Trump’s groundwork
Supporters of President Trump walk and pray around the Pennsylvania State Capitol. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Donald Trump and his allies have spent the past six weeks hell-bent on ignoring reality, but electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia are set to reaffirm once again on Monday that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.
Six weeks after the 2020 general election, democracy has kept chugging on unencumbered. The procedural move marks the end to any chance Trump had of pursuing a legal recourse to overturn the results of the election. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit that baselessly claimed voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. A previous attempt to get GOP-controlled state legislatures to refuse to seat Democratic electors and instead appoint Trump loyalists also failed.
Once the Electoral College votes are cast, the results will go on to Congress to be counted and officially declare a winner. And though some Republican lawmakers are likely to raise objections to the votes during the joint session on January 6 in an attempt to prevent Biden from becoming president, they won’t be able to stop the process. To consider any objection, it needs to be raised by both a representative and a senator. Then, the House and Senate need to adjourn, debate its merits, and sustain the objection before throwing out an individual elector’s vote. No Electoral College votes have been thrown out since the 19th century, and the Democrat-controlled House won’t break that precedent this year.
Trump knows how this all ends, yet refuses to concede in any way. “No, it’s not over,” he told Fox News on Sunday, peddling the same conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election he’s been spouting for over a month. Whether he truly believes his own lies or not is beside the point. His choice to delegitimize the election results — a choice enabled and aided by his own party — has caused long-lasting damage to the democratic process. The electoral process, as with all of our institutions, is rooted in people’s trust in the system. By casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election, as well as attempting to deploy executive, judicial, and legislative power to revert the results, Trump has crossed a line that we won’t be able to walk back as a country. “Once people decide that the rules are different, the rules are different,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in The Atlantic. “The rules for electoral legitimacy have been under sustained assault, and they’re changing right before our eyes.”
Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud also have literally put lives at risk. He has fueled the flames of anger in his base, railing about how electors were “committing a severely punishable crime” by casting a vote for Biden. This, of course, is not true. But thanks to his aspersions and coddling of armed right-wing extremists, states like Michigan and Arizona have had to take additional safety measures to protect electors, including police escorts and having them cast their votes at an undisclosed location. On Saturday, a Washington, D.C. march by the Proud Boys, a far-right group, to protest the results of the election ended in violence.
None of this will prevent Biden from becoming president come January 20. The constitutional ritual will work exactly as it was designed to do: as a safeguard against a tyrannical incumbent who would stop at nothing to keep power. But the floodgates have been opened, and there’s no telling how successful the next power-hungry incumbent will be in taking advantage of Trump’s groundwork. | https://gen.medium.com/the-electoral-college-will-pull-through-for-biden-but-the-damage-has-been-done-cdc0528edbc6 | ['Andrea González-Ramírez'] | 2020-12-15 03:32:22.410000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Electoral College', 'Elections', 'Democracy', 'Voting'] |
My Coat of Many Colors | Image from Wikimedia
On Sunday night, my wife and I sat down to watch Dolly Parton’s Christmas Special. Quite honestly, we don’t normally watch a lot of network television. We usually watch movies or episodes of a series on Netflix. Earlier that afternoon, however, I was watching the New York Jets play the Las Vegas Raiders on CBS, and I saw a few commercials for Dolly’s show. When I mentioned the Special later to Barbara, she said, “Let’s watch it,” and so we did. By then, too, I needed a pick-me-up because my Jets had squandered a late lead and lost on a last-second, boneheaded, defensive play. (A blog post, perhaps, for another day.) I definitely needed something positive. Little did I know that one of Dolly’s songs would take me back to a pleasant memory from 50 years earlier, to my own version of that same song.
Dolly’s song tells the story of how when she was young, she needed a new coat for the coming winter, but with 12 children in the family, her mom couldn’t afford to just go out and buy one. As a result, she decided to make a coat for her daughter, something she had done for many of her children. At that point, though, she did not have enough cloth of one color to make a full coat, so, instead, she sifted through a pile of donated rags and fashioned a “Coat of Many Colors” for Dolly.
As Dolly’s mother sewed the material together with love, she told her daughter about a similar coat from a story in the Old Testament. Dolly’s lyrics describe her coat in this way: “Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be in my coat of many colors, my momma made for me.”
Image from Wikimedia
In the book of Genesis, Joseph, the son of Jacob, also had a coat of many colors. And while Jacob’s family, just like the Parton family, had a dozen children, Joseph’s special coat was not due to the family’s poverty. Rather, Jacob gave his son Joseph “a richly ornamented robe” because Joseph had “been born to him in his old age” as the first son of his second wife, his beloved Rachel (37:3–4). Thus, in both cases, a parent gives a special coat to a child. My mom did the same for me during the spring of 1965.
At the time, as an eighth grader at St. Mary’s Institute, we were required to wear a dress shirt, a tie, and a sport coat. And quite honestly, I already had a sport coat, a gray hand-me-down from my older cousin Richie. Yes, the coat was more than sufficient, though the sleeves might have been a tad short. But I really wanted a coat of many colors because all the cool kids in our class had madras sport coats, the rage at that time. I never asked for one, though, because I didn’t think it was possible
No, our family did not have a dozen children — only six. Still, a new madras jacket from Mortan’s in downtown Amsterdam was not in the budget. I’m pretty sure my dad was oblivious to my situation because he was working overtime to keep us all fed. Mom, though, knew what was happening, and she offered, like Dolly’s mom, to make me a madras jacket.
“Really?” I asked. “You can do that?”
Of course, she could. She had created many skirts and dresses for my five sisters, so I think she cherished the opportunity to create something special for her only son, her “Prince.” | https://medium.com/@jimlabate/my-coat-of-many-colors-afe4394cc29d | ['Jim Labate'] | 2020-12-11 19:29:06.526000+00:00 | ['Gifts', 'Memories', 'Parents', 'Children', 'Nostalgia'] |
E-Cycle: The Future of E-Waste Recycling | “With great power comes great responsibility.” — Uncle Ben, Spiderman
Who knew a comic book character could hold such wisdom? Yet, this maxim stays true even in reality. Although humanity’s latest innovation, electronics, has drastically improved our quality of life, it’s not dealt with responsibly.
Every single year, 50 million metric tons of electronic waste is thrown out, and only one-eighth of that is being properly recycled. The rest?
They sit in landfills gathering rust, destroying our planet, and harming people all at the same time.
Then why doesn’t someone do something about this?
Recycling e-waste is unpopular because it’s too inconvenient. Instead of just throwing it in the trash, consumers have to go out of their way to recycle.
This problem has been overlooked for far too long. The mountains of dilapidated computers, phones, and other consumer electronics have grown too massive to simply sweep under the rug.
This issue facing humanity requires a fix that is both efficient and cost-effective. By applying the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence with the global e-waste crisis, our long-term solution provides a sustainable system to recycle e-waste.
What is E-Waste?
E-waste is defined as any electronic equipment that’s been discarded, including home appliances (microwaves, fridges), consumer electronics (phones, computers), and electronic utilities (light bulbs, batteries).
Most electronics contain many toxic materials such as lead, cadmium, lithium, barium, mercury, and arsenic that can contaminate the soil, water, and air. This can cause significant harm to humans as well as wildlife.
If the toxic chemicals contained in e-waste contaminate local water sources (rivers, groundwater) or are released into the air, they can harm people. The health risks range from kidney disease and brain damage to genetic mutations and cancer.
Current “Solutions”
Most e-waste is not recycled. Instead, it is thrown in large pits or burned. Needless to say, both of those options are terrible for the environment as it releases toxic chemicals into the soil, waterways, and air.
Some recyclers ship collected e-waste to underdeveloped areas of the world under the guise of philanthropy. Claiming that their “donations” help bring technology to developing nations, they illegally dump the trash in inhabited areas.
One of these places is the city of Guiyu in rural China. Due to e-waste contaminating the drinking water there, it has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Scientists also found that 82% of the children living there had lead poisoning.
For the small percentage of e-waste that is recycled, the process is extremely inefficient. Though electronics often contain a variety of useful and expensive minerals and metals such as gold and platinum, most processes only salvage the steel, copper, and plastic due to the outdated technology employed. | https://medium.com/e-cycle/e-cycle-the-future-of-recycling-a672a526c06f | ['Jason Liu'] | 2020-10-30 23:04:14.843000+00:00 | ['Recycling', 'AI', 'Waste', 'Electronics', 'Technology'] |
Limitations of Graph Neural Networks | On the way to more powerful GNN. Source.
There are two paradigms for graph representations: graph kernels and graph neural networks. Graph kernels typically create an embedding of a graph, based on decomposition, in an unsupervised manner. For example, we can count the number of triangles or more generally triplets of each type a graph has and then use these counts to get embeddings. This is known to be an instance of a graphlet kernel.
All graphlets of size 4. Counting the number of each graphlet among all quadruples in a graph will result in a graphlet kernel. Source: Efficient graphlet kernels for large graph comparison
The main research motivation of this paradigm was to create an embedding that preserves isomorphism between graphs, i.e. two graphs are isomorphic if and only if their corresponding embeddings are the same. Needless to say, if we have such embedding we solve graph isomorphism problem, which is, for now, known to be harder than the class of problems P. Yet, there are embeddings such as Anonymous Walk Embeddings that preserve isomorphism, of course at the cost of running time computation. Nonetheless, the main message here is that graph kernels were designed to solve graph isomorphism problem. The more graphs your embeddings can distinguish, the better your embeddings. That was the principle.
With graph neural networks the principle has changed. Instead of solving one problem, graph isomorphism, we can try to solve any given problem, such as finding the shortest path or detecting the cycles. This is quite promising as it allows us to guide our network design by the problem that it can solve. It sounds like magic: instead of using some well-established combinatorial algorithms, you can just train your network and it will find the solution for you. But it is also suspicious: neural networks are searching the solution by SGD and involve many other technicalities and what if you are stuck in a bad local optimum — how can it solve any problem then? Well, in fact, there are some limitations to graph neural networks that I will describe next.
Conditions on GNN to be powerful.
I will start from the work, How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks, that triggered a lot of research on the theoretical explanation of GNN. In particular, GNNs are compared to a well-studied graph isomorphism algorithm, Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) algorithm.
About WL algorithm.
This algorithm is quite simple to describe. You start with a graph, where each node has some color (if none, put a degree). In each iteration, each node gets a set of colors of its neighbors and updates its color in a specific way. In particular, there is an injective function that creates a new color c’ of the node from its previous color c and the ordered list of the neighborhood’s colors X. The algorithm stops after n iterations with updated coloring for a graph.
Note: it’s important that WL algorithm uses injective function as it guarantees that different inputs will get different outputs. A particular injective function that WL uses is that it creates a new color that was not encountered before for each of the input arguments. Because it operates in the categorical (countable) domain (colors) it can always create such mapping.
Injective, bijective, and surjective mappings (left to right). Source.
The main use of this algorithm is to test isomorphism between two graphs. If the final colorings are different, then two graphs are not isomorphic. If two graphs have the same final coloring, then WL algorithm outputs that they are possibly isomorphic, which means there is still a slight chance that they are not isomorphic.
This algorithm was designed in 70’s in the secret Soviet lab, when the computers still used punched cards. But since then researchers across the world have studied its properties and in particular, we know different families of graphs when WL algorithm fails. For example, for any two d -regular graphs with n vertices, the final colorings will be the same. Nonetheless, it’s a very powerful test of isomorphism and there are theorems that state as n tends to infinity, the likelihood that WL fails goes to 0. So it’s a reasonably strong algorithm.
Back to GNN.
If you studied GNN you noticed many similarities between how GNN updates nodes’ features and how WL algorithm updates nodes’ colors. In particular, GNN updates features using a message-passing mechanism.
The difference between different GNN is on which aggregation and readout functions they use. But it’s easy to understand that if aggregation functions are injective, then if WL maps graphs to different colorings then GNN will also map these graphs to different embeddings. Theorem 3 is a formal way to say this.
In other words, there are parameterized functions phi and f of GNN that if injective, then they guarantee strong power of the GNN. This should not be a surprise, as WL algorithm also requires its function to be injective and in other aspects the two procedures are equivalent.
Note here a particular way we update node’s embeddings. We get previous embedding h_v^(k-1) and a multiset of previous embeddings of the neighbors as two different arguments, and not as one argument when you merge these two together. This will be important down the line.
So, you can use GNN to decide whether graphs are isomorphic and it will be equivalent to using WL algorithm.
This is the magical part of it. GNN suddenly became equivalent to well-known algorithms. But where is the limitation of it?
About the limitations of GNN.
The main limitation from the above is that you need to have injective functions phi and f . What are these functions? These are the functions that map a multiset of embeddings into new embeddings. You can, for example, use the mean function. This function will take an average of embeddings and assign it as a new embedding. However, it’s easy to see that for some different graphs these will give the same embeddings, so mean function is not injective.
Mean aggregation of embeddings (embeddings correspond to different colors here) for nodes v and v’ will give the same embedding, even though the graphs are different. Source: How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?
But if you take the sum and transform embeddings in a specific manner it’s possible to get injective function. Here is the Lemma 5:
What’s really important here is that you can first map each embedding under the sum to a new embedding using some function f(x) and then take a sum of this and get a function that is injective. In the proof, they actually explicitly state this function f, which requires two additional conditions that X is countable and any multiset is bounded. I think both these assumptions are not strong, as anyway, we apply our GNN to finite graphs, where the cardinality of features and neighborhoods is finite. But at least we know now that if we use transformation f and then addition we can get an injective mapping.
However, there should be a specific aggregation scheme from the Theorem 3 above (condition a) which in addition to the aggregation of the neighbors, uses the previous embedding for the current node h_v^(k-1) . To include it we need another statement:
Note that here a function h takes the sum of transformed neighbors’ features as before, but in addition, adds (1+eps)f(c) and this eps is any irrational number. This way the function h is injective.
Okay, so what do we know? We know that our aggregation functions phi and f should be injective and we have the function h which is injective. If we were aiming at building powerful embeddings, then we are done. But we attempt not just to build embeddings, but to solve the downstream task such as node classification in a supervised manner. And the function h does not have learnable parameters that could fit the data (except maybe eps ).
What GIN architecture proposes instead is to replace functions phi and f with MLP and thanks to the universal approximation theorem, we know that MLP can approximate any function, including the injective function. So, in particular, the update of embeddings of GIN has the following form:
Note that the thing inside MLP is not guaranteed to be injective anymore and moreover MLP itself is not guaranteed to be injective. In fact, for the first layer, if input features are one-hot encoded, then the sum inside MLP will be injective and in principle, MLP can learn an injective function. But on the second layer and beyond, node embeddings become irrational and it’s easy to come up with an example where the sum of embeddings is not injective anymore (e.g. having one neighbor with embedding equals to 2 or having two neighbors with embeddings equal to 1).
So, GIN is as powerful as WL algorithm if MLP and the sum of embeddings will be injective functions.
But in fact, there is nothing in the training that would guarantee this injectivity and there could be graphs that GIN does not distinguish, that WL can. So this is quite a strong assumption on GIN and if it’s violated, then the power of GIN is limited.
This limitation has been later discussed in the paper Discriminative structural graph classification, where it’s shown that the size of the output embeddings should be exponential to the size of the input features in order to make MLP injective, although the analysis is done for the unbounded neighborhoods (infinite graphs). Finding an architecture that would have an injective aggregation and be sufficiently expressive for the downstream tasks is an open question, even though there are several architectures that generalize GIN to higher-dimensional WL algorithm as well to other problems; however, there are no guarantees yet that the learned GNN architecture will solve a particular task for all the input graphs. A Survey on The Expressive Power of Graph Neural Networks makes a very good job of explaining recent advancements in the theoretical explanation of the power of GNN.
Conclusion.
The studies of properties of GNN are now an active area of research (and you can check on the latest trends) and there are many open questions to tackle. The main message of this post is to show that GNN currently are not guaranteed to converge to the state that will be as powerful as WL algorithm, even though in general there is a set of parameters for GNN when it becomes as powerful. GNN can solve different problems on graphs, but so far the studies have been focused on what they can or cannot solve, and not on how it can have some guarantees of the obtained solutions, which I think will be a focus of next research papers.
P.S. I will continue to write about graph machine learning, so if you are interested, follow me on medium or subscribe to my telegram channel (which I update every day) or my twitter (which I update once a week). | https://towardsdatascience.com/limitations-of-graph-neural-networks-2412fffe677 | ['Sergei Ivanov'] | 2020-03-25 15:08:04.482000+00:00 | ['Gnn', 'Graphs', 'Gml', 'Machine Learning', 'Theory'] |
Tax Free Passive Income Through Passive Investing | Tax Free Passive Income Through Passive Investing In Multifamily
One thing we all have the same amount of is time. The same cannot be said of money. Too often there is more month at the end of the money than money at the end of the month. Most all of us work hard for our income, usually from the labor of a full-time job, and we feel like the only way to get ahead or afford the things we’d like to do is to work harder. We often are not able to enjoy the pleasures of life, the things we truly want to do or the time to spend with the people we want to be with. The choice faced seems to be a sacrifice of time to make money or a sacrifice of money to have time.
So how can you get ahead financially to buy the new house, or have the resources to visit loved ones, take the Italian vacation, save for your child’s college education, or put away extra for your retirement? And how can you do so and still have the quality of time to enjoy it all?
Passive income
Passive income is money you’re making when you’re not working or requires little to no effort to earn and maintain. It is that steady stream of cash you receive when money is working for you, not you working for money. Wealth, aka time or freedom, can be accelerated by having multiple streams of passive income. Passive income is what can build your wealth without sacrificing your time, allowing you to focus on family, lifestyle and luxury.
For some, the word passive can have a negative meaning or represent a sign of weakness or lack of involvement. When it comes to your money and your time, passive is not a bad thing. When it comes to income streams making money for you, there is an incredible power in doing so passively.
Passive Investing
There are a number of ways you can invest passively, where you are investing your capital, not your time, and not actively participating.
Savings Accounts
CD’s
Bonds
Dividend Stocks
Robo Investing
Real estate rental
Of the above mentioned, real estate is one of the best passive income strategies available. Specifically, one of the best investments you can make is passively investing in multifamily syndications.
Multifamily Syndication
A multifamily syndication is where you partner together with a group of investors to pool capital and resources to purchase an apartment building which would otherwise, most likely, be unobtainable as an individual. The group is formed as a limited liability corporation (LLC) with “General Partners” and “Limited Partners”. The general partners, also known as the sponsors or operators, organize the syndication, find the property, secure the financing, and hire or run property management. The limited partners are the passive investors. As the title implies, they do not actively participate in the management and operational execution of the property. Their involvement is an investment of money, not an investment of time. In return, the limited partners receive an equity share in the syndication along with cash flow distribution and profits.
Benefits of Passively Investing In Multifamily Syndications
You can grow your wealth without sacrificing your time.
The strengths and benefits of multifamily apartment investing are numerous, especially in comparison to stocks, bonds, and CD’s. In my ebook, Financial Freedom With Multifamily, I go into detail on the historical superiority of multifamily investments, the below-average risk and above-average returns, and the cash flow (passive income) it produces. Tax free cash flow! The new tax law of 2017 has made it that your investment in multifamily can give you a tax free return on your passive income. Not only can it give you tax free cash flow on your multifamily investment, it can also reduce or eliminate taxes on your other passive investments as well. If you or your spouse are a real estate professional, your multifamily investment even has the potential of eliminating your personal income taxes altogether! These tax benefits associated with multifamily can truly accelerate your journey to wealth.
The strength of multifamily investment over the stock market is in large part due to the incredible power that real estate provides to the investor by way of Leverage and Principal Paydown. By leveraging, or using borrowed capital through a loan to purchase the multifamily apartment, you are able to buy more with less money which raises the return of investment. At the same time, through principal paydown, the rental income from the property pays all the debt service on the loan, thus increasing the equity. How great to have people give you money to purchase a property you want while other people pay your mortgage!
Passively investing in multifamily syndications allows you additional benefits of leverage. As a limited partner, you have the leverage of access to large investment opportunities without a large capital investment. You have the leverage of the financial strength of the syndication group to successfully acquire multifamily properties, and you have the leverage of the general partners’ time and experience to manage the asset while maintaining your own time.
Multifamily syndication allows you, as the passive investor, ownership interest in a property without having to be a hands-on landlord. No finding tenants, no fixing plumbing, no repairing broken appliances, no collecting rent, no eviction notices. Once you fund the opportunity, all you have to do is relax and collect payments in the form of quarterly or monthly cash flow distributions and a lump sum payout at refinancing or sale of the property.
Become A Limited Partner
By teaming with a multifamily partnership, you can earn a tax free passive income through passively investing. You can hold ownership in a tangible, physical asset not directly correlated to the stock market with a typically larger return on investment and all with less direct personal risk.
Time is a commodity. That’s why we say, “spending time” or “time spent.” Keep your time while building your passive income streams and, ultimately, your wealth.
For additional information on multifamily apartment investing, visit us on our website and we look forward to connecting with you on the path towards your financial freedom
lg-is.com. | https://medium.com/@hudfloyd/tax-free-passive-income-through-passive-investing-661a0ede2a5f | ['Hud Floyd'] | 2020-03-04 22:43:16.244000+00:00 | ['Multifamily Real Estate', 'Real Estate Investments', 'Passive Income', 'Tax Breaks', 'Multifamily Investing'] |
First Steps of a New Python Project | The first thing I always do is setting up a development environment. There are multiple ways to do this but I’ll stick with my favourite. Conda. I won’t go into details because that’s not what this article is about. In short, create a new environment for your awesome project:
conda create --name py_my_awesome_project python=3.8
Keep it simple and only add packages when you need them. Pro tip, avoid mixing Pip and Conda when installing packages, it can cause conflicts. I suggest to make an alias for the command to activate your environment and put this is your ~/.bash_profile (or bash_rc or bash_alias ):
alias py_my_awesome_project="conda activate py_my_awesome_project"
So from now on you can just type py_my_awesome_project in your terminal when you want to activate your environment instead of the whole source activate stuff.
I will not discuss what editor to use, which extensions are useful, or how to configure them all for an optimal development experience. Nor will I discuss how to turn your project into a git repository such that everything is version controlled. There are plenty of articles on these topics scattered across the web. Just for the curious reader, I use both Atom and VSCode, I turn on autoformatting on save (with a linter according to PEP8 style), and I find Kite extremely promising. And Bitbucket is my place to go for storing my remote repositories.
Now you are ready to code! Create that main.py file! The first thing I do is write some code that has minimal functionality. For example make a class, give it some attributes, and some custom methods. Make a few instances of that class and check if they behave as expected. When you are happy, make some more classes and repeat the process. Don’t overdo yourself, don’t overthink naming or structure, you will definitely have to change that anyway. When your project is in a more mature stage, these things will be more clear as by then you will have figured out some convention.
When writing more and more code you will most likely say to yourself “I can separate some chucks of code into distinct pieces of logic.” For example, this can be by separating classes into different files. After applying this refactoring in my own project, I ended up with the files belts.py, furnaces.py, natural_resources.py, plates.py and of course main.py .
I sounds like it’s time to start writing unit tests. Or make the case to continue with Test Driven Development. But I disagree. At this point I think it is too early to write tests since I have no idea if all the code I have written is even useful. I might as well have to throw it all away and start from scratch. So instead of writing tests, heavily rewriting code, and completely rewriting the tests, I prefer to postpone testing until the project is semi stable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Test Driven Development and testing is a necessary building block of a well working application. But we’ll get to that point in a later development stage. So the best thing to do now is add more code, more logic, and more functionality.
Over the next days, your project will have grown quite a bit (mine consisted of 20 small files already). And, just like me, you will have have spend most of the time rewriting instead of adding new code. Which is normal. Continuous refactoring is the key to good development. I cannot stress this enough. You have no idea how many times I renamed the same function. Or how often I restructured some code to eventually return it to its original state. But that’s the development life.
By now your project is at the stage where you might break existing functionality when refactoring or adding new pieces. So it’s time to add unit tests. When exactly to start with testing is rather arbitrary. If you start too soon, you’ll have to rewrite lots of tests. If you start too late, you will introduce hidden bugs that fly under your radar since you have no radar (unit tests). It’s up to you to get a feeling for this turning point.
How to expand your project with a testing setup will be covered in the next article of this series. | https://jels-boulangier.medium.com/first-steps-of-a-new-python-project-91f5360021ac | ['Jels Boulangier'] | 2020-11-25 10:46:36.185000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Coding', 'Python', 'Learning To Code', 'Hobby'] |
Unpredictable Leadership in The Covid-19 Crisis. | Unpredictable Leadership in The Covid-19 Crisis.
A formal and Informal View of Leadership
Unpredictable Leadership during Pandemic.
In reality each situation and each activity which involves more than one person will have a leader, formally or informally. That is how we as a society or an economy are formed. There are more examples where leadership gets practiced beyond. The leadership is a time-based or an event-restricted function while in the formally and informally cases it is a full-time 24/7 engagement. In fact a way of life. So both must listen to each other when it comes to fighting something as deadly and as pervasive as Covid-19. Tactically and operationally you choose the most optimal and efficient but when it doesn’t go per plan the cost in lives is far bigger, just that the purpose is always higher and supreme. In Covid-19, the mission of a leader is to ‘save’ lives, not to lose them.
That is why some developing countries are lacking behind in order to control the spread of Pandemic. Because too many are falling to sickness and overwhelming the best-in-the-world health systems, killing many times more than what timely, correct and uncompromising decisions would have saved. Italy, France and Spain never wished to alter their lifestyles even when the pandemic had hit. The UK conceived wrongly and then got caught up in the two approaches — lock down or herd immunity — and lost precious time. It still has a very bad mix of the two in operation and thus continues to suffer badly. In each of these cases the disease has had a free run and is dictating its own terms. In aviation terms, these nations are behind the power-curve — they have lost control of their craft for which destruction is inevitable.
In case of China, South Korea and Singapore, their decisions were correctly timed, their judgments were right and they were fearless in their decisions; hence they lost far less people and far less became victims. They still lost people but mitigated the spread and the loss. When something holds you back from the right decision, or you begin to qualify your decision against common wisdom or proven experience, you are in the grey zone. You are indecisive and losing time fast, the disease overwhelms your decision-cycle reducing you to a paralysis of mind. And you fall behind the power-curve where destruction becomes inevitable.
During pandemic, organizations around the globe have demonstrated remarkable agility, changing business models literally overnight: setting up remote-work arrangements; offshoring entire business processes to less-affected geographies; initiating multi-company cooperation with employees across sectors. In each situation, the urgency for results prevailed over traditional bureaucratic responses.
It is evident by this Pandemic that “A crisis brings out the best in leaders.They set aside trivial grievances, band together for a shared purpose, and focus on helping others. But beneath the strategic choices and genuine care is fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion. Leaders must redistribute disrupted supply chains, enable a remote workforce, safeguard essential employees, and break bad news to employees, as well as maintain their own energy so that they can continue to inspire and motivate.
Some Active Leaders are listed below who were active during this time of Pandemic.
“A crisis brings out the best in leaders”.
→ PRIME MINISTER LEE HSIEN LOONG:
In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is also winning plaudits for an aggressive testing and tracing campaign that has kept the number of infections in the country low — about 1,000 cases since the beginning of the outbreak.
→ XI JINPING’S PRESIDENT CHINA:
His strategies carried out during the outbreak in China was praised and admirable. World are not taking examples and prevention methods from Chinese leaders.
→ GERMANY’S CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL:
Germany’s Chancellor said some 70 percent of her country’s population would contract the virus — a sober warning that stood in stark contrast to pronouncements from other politicians at the time. The country now ranks fifth among territories with confirmed cases — recording more than 80,000 infections — it has a much lower fatality rate than most.
→ SYED MURAD ALI SHAH :
The Chief Minister of Sindh, Pakistan. Considering the utmost hard work of Syed Murad Ali Shah and his activeness during the current outbreak of Corona virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) appreciated him and ranked him 4th position in best leading politician, in the act of corona virus eradication.
→ South Korea’s President Moon Jae, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele:
Are also receiving praise for similar decisive and transparent action.
→ TAYYAB ERDOGAN TURKEY PRESIDENT:
Responding to the growing number of domestic corona virus cases, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled measures to safeguard the nation’s economy while advising citizens to practice social distancing.
→ In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
P.M of Israel using a state of emergency over the pandemic to authorize intelligence services to step up surveillance of the public and to close down the country’s courts and public places. | https://medium.com/illumination/unpredictable-leadership-in-the-covid-19-crisis-a0faf393dd0c | ['U.F.M Techie'] | 2020-08-10 03:41:24.205000+00:00 | ['Research', 'Leadership', 'Covid 19', 'Publishing', 'SEO'] |
Hanyu Pinyin: Learn the pun, find the fun | Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音) is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, created by the Chinese. Tones aside, there are two parts to each character — Sound (声母) and Rhythm (韵母), also known as the Initial and the Final to English speakers. Although these combinations are made up of modern English letters, they do not always sound like the English pronunciations that we are accustomed to. It is a functional system and has its merits for learners who start at a young age with no prerequisite of another language.
At the age of 7, in Singapore, I learned English and Mandarin Chinese concurrently in separate classes. In English class, the pan refers to a cooking device while in Chinese class (tones aside), the Hanyu Pinyin “pan” usually refers to the plate (盘) and it actually sounds more like the English word for a play on words, pun. Although they were both “p-a-n”, I had not connected the English pronunciations with Hanyu Pinyin, because they were equally foreign and new to me at that point.
When I took up Russian class at the age of 24, my first instinct was to read “Москва” like an English word. It is in Cyrillic but between English and Mandarin that I already knew, I instantly drew an association to the former. I read it as “Mock-bah” and soon learned that it should sound more like “Mosque-va” which means Moscow. | https://medium.com/@linzybearswings/hanyu-pinyin-learn-the-pun-find-the-fun-bea5d66fbf68 | ['Linz Lim'] | 2021-12-31 17:39:35.870000+00:00 | ['Creative', 'Language Learning', 'Chinese', 'Design', 'Ideas'] |
Year In Review: 2020 Reflections | Then the Streets Got Serious.
George Floyd happened. Protests broke out. America looked like 1968 all over again, but this time under pandemic conditions. We debated civil disobedience and the best forms of protest. People took to the streets outside our apartment and demanded much needed police reform (which should be focused on unions, not complete defunding).
Politics heated up as we neared the November elections. I had begged the Republican Party to rediscover its moral compass and soul, but unsurprisingly, nothing changed. Instead of attempting to heal the country, Trump further inflamed the culture wars and continued to convince his base to vote against their interests.
I predicted that Democrats would do well if they focused their attention on Georgia. Although Biden did not pick Stacey Abrams as his running mate, Democrats rallied around her and other Georgians and executed one of the most successful get out the vote campaigns in the country’s history. They registered some 800,000 new voters in the once deep red state. This effort undoubtedly helped turn the state in Biden’s favor.
Meanwhile, the culture wars continued to flame, and not all of it was Trump’s doing. Amy Cooper revealed her inner racist to the world, but then people took “cancel culture” to its extremes. Suddenly the term, “Karen”, was a socially acceptable moniker for a white woman behaving badly. This movement horrified me, especially considering many of the same people that were part of it were the same people calling for equality, social justice, and civil liberties for all. I stated in my article at the time: | https://medium.com/the-millennial-republican/year-in-review-2020-reflections-9dc38f0270fb | ['Sebastian Stone'] | 2020-12-28 13:57:11.359000+00:00 | ['Year In Review', 'Reflections', '2020', 'Coronavirus', 'Goodbye 2020'] |
Is Japan’s ageing population a prediction for China? | Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash
All the developments we have introduced in healthcare in the past 150 years are paying off big time. In Western Europe, we now have a life expectancy of 79 years for men and 84 years for women.
Many of the diseases that were considered deadly in the past, now can be treated.
We have access to care when needed and hygiene has improved too.
We therefore have the privilege to live knowing that we have good chances to survive if we get sick.
This is a privilege our ancestors did not enjoy.
However, it comes at a price.
The world’s population is ageing.
An ageing population is a problem because it means there is a larger portion of the population that is not productive, and also needs to be taken care of.
This can lead to labour shortages.
The ageing problem is particularly severe in developed countries, and China is no stranger to it.
The one-child policy effect
The one-child policy of the ‘80s sped up an ageing process that had already started and led to a steep decline in population growth, which now creates a bottleneck effect.
The vast majority of Chinese only-child millennials will have to take care of both their parents. That means that every Chinese couple has 4 elderly to take care of.
Sometimes these senior citizens are living in different places than where their children live, sometimes they have siblings that also need care. And sometimes the couples also have their own kids to care of, and must still cope with the demands of a stressful fast-paced job.
In other words, China finds itself with too many elderly to take care of, too suddenly, and too few youngsters to take care of them.
China tried to boost its births by removing the one-child policy in 2015.
However, the country did not see any significant population growth as a result.
A generation of one-child policy has changed child nurturing behaviour and, to a good extent, society. It is now perfectly normal to dedicate all your resources to the education of one child to give them a chance to thrive in this ultra competitive world.
The other reason is that every child has become unprecedently expensive and most people cannot afford a second one.
China’s rapid ageing will pose two key strategic challenges for the country: sustaining economic growth and providing old-age security for the fast-growing elderly population.
Japan’s ageing vs China’s
Some experts have compared China’s trajectory to Japan’s.
Japan is the country with the oldest population on Earth.
People aged 65 and older in Japan make up a quarter of its total population, estimated to reach a third by 2050.
They also went through a phase of exciting economic development after the Second World War. In the 1980s there was even talk about the potential of Japan’s economy to become bigger than America’s one day.
However, Japan’s population aged very fast, and now it is declining.
Its economy followed a similar trend.
There are different reasons for Japan’s steep ageing that we will not explore here.
We do want to highlight some aspects that will help us compare Japan’s and China’s situation.
When Japan got “old”, the country was already fully developed.
China on the contrary, isn’t quite yet fully developed. As experts put it, “China will get old before it gets rich”.
These different “entry points” to ageing populations come with big consequences.
Since Japan was already well developed once its ageing problem became important, the younger generations had a similar level of education to the older ones.
On the contrary, in China, the education gap between younger and older generations is huge.
Those who are now in the workforce are highly educated and specialized, while their grandparents were hardly educated at all.
The education gap gives hope that the younger generations will deliver strong productivity growth fo0r the country in the years to come.
In that sense, we might see China move from a workforce model that was focusing on cheap labour and large volumes of products to one that is focused on quality of service and innovation.
Indeed, in China the number of people in the workforce is falling, but working age human capital is increasing.
More broadly, the fact that China is still developing means that there is still a lot of room for growth before it plateaus, which gives confidence China will be able to sustain its economic growth in the years to come.
Immigration could also play a role in helping China to sustain its economic growth.
Japan has tried to play the immigration card already, and managed to double its foreign workers since 2013. It is still too early to see effects on population growth.
China has also started to attract foreign workers, although not as aggressively as Japan.
Culturally, both countries have a long way to go before becoming the kind of foreigner-friendly destinations that attract highly skilled expats in high numbers.
Another important aspect any country with an ageing problem must balance is pensions.
Too much emphasis on pensions means that too big a slice of a country’s resources is taken away from those areas that produce economic growth and jobs, too little emphasis means the old don’t have the means to support themselves.
In China, unlike Japan, pension promises have been kept low. This avoids allocating too much resources to the old and choking the young in the process.
So how will the elderly be taken care of?
There are different ways China is looking to solve that problem.
For wealthy seniors, the most straightforward way to spend their last years in peace and comfort is to move to a care home.
China’s care home market is booming, offering impeccable quality of service and hygiene.
It also gives senior citizens an environment where they can socialize with one another.
However, not everyone can afford to live in a care home. Typically, only retired public servants can.
More and more nurses are being recruited to take care of the increasing numbers of elderly people. But once again, turning too big a percentage of the workforce into nurses for the elderly would take away talent from other important areas.
Japan is planning to solve this problem using robots to care for their eldery.
The Japanese achieved good levels of innovation in the field of robotics to make this a goal and not just a dream.
The problem however is that senior people are still people, and they need company and psychological care just like anyone else. In this regard, robots offer no good solutions.
For a more systematic and “human” care of its elderly, China is betting hard on its filial culture, whereby it is entirely normal (and to a certain extent expected) that children take care of their parents when they are old.
Shifting the burden of the elderly on their own families is something developing countries are used to. However, things have changed since China embarked on its wild industrialization journey starting from the 80s.
The mass movements of people towards urban areas and the increased competitiveness of the job market have disrupted the filial culture, which will need revamping and more support to work on a big scale.
Conclusion
In conclusion, China and Japan’s situation are comparable but different.
The world is looking at how China is dealing with its own ageing crisis with a curious eye.
What they see is a country that is adjusting their economic model to its population’s age.
In fact, China is shifting its focus on large availability of large, cheap labour towards becoming a highly specialized and technological country focused on quality of talent.
The shift in types of job from manual to intellectual should suit an ageing population, and the improved productivity growth should ensure its workforce can support its growing senior population while still fuelling growth for the country.
Whether this approach will work in the long term, only time can tell.
(you can find a video version of this story on our YouTube channel) | https://medium.com/@currentchinese/is-japans-ageing-population-a-prediction-for-china-ff102f1db76f | ['Current Chinese'] | 2020-12-20 16:47:56.607000+00:00 | ['Japan', 'Ageing', 'Population', 'China', 'Economic Development'] |
Altered Carbon: Season Two | Altered Carbon: Season Two
30 years after the Bancroft case, a Meth tracks down Kovacs to offer him a job, a high-tech sleeve, and a chance to see Quellcrist Falconer again. Jeffrey Bricker Follow Mar 22, 2020 · 7 min read
Season 2 of Netflix’s Altered Carbon expands on the character development and world-building the inaugural season began. Only this time our hero, Takeshi Kovacs, is played by Anthony Mackie (Avengers: Endgame) with mixed results. Thankfully his trusted companion Poe (Chris Connor) returns and is given more space to explore the complexities of his character. And, of course, there’s also plenty of new characters to meet, intrigue to follow, and blood-splattering action spread across eight episodes.
Although Altered Carbon doesn’t match its own high standard for its sophomore year, the series remains one of the best of original offerings on a streaming service. But it’s not easy for a newcomer to get into the story, as Altered Carbon presents a multilayered universe of strange worlds and even stranger characters. Motives and backstories are deep and often convoluted. And it’s not helped by the ever-changing appearances of leading characters, which means it can be a struggle to keep everything straight in your head.
Set in our distant future, Altered Carbon presents a vision for tomorrow where mankind’s greatest conquest is not over the stars but over death. The technology exists to preserve a human being’s consciousness (“stacks”) and transfer them into different bodies (“sleeves”). So when someone dies, as long as their stacks are intact (imagine a hard drive for humans stored in the back of the neck) the deceased can be transferred into a new physical form. And the process can be repeated numerous time, leading to characters who look young and vibrant but are actually centuries old. Indeed, the series begs the question of whether mankind has finally evolved into a God-like form.
The possibility of immortality exists for nearly everyone. However, not all sleeves are created equal. Some are manufactured/synthetic (complete with blue blood) while others are “organic” (more akin to what we know). A fair amount of time was spent last season explaining how the technology works an what many of the rules and regulations surrounding its use are. Season 2 expands on this a little more, but one theme from last season continues more strongly… that the super-wealthy (“Meths”) can afford countless sleeves and even back up their consciousness in the cloud. Therefore, Meths truly possess the means to live forever.
That is, of course, unless someone were to both destroy their stack and their backups. Such an act would leave the nobility of Altered Carbon vulnerable to the only thing anyone’s afraid to face: true death.
This is the focus of season 2 as we find our hero, Tokeshi Kovacs (Mackie), being re-sleeved into an enhanced soldier body (think Van Damme’s Universal Soldier). As was the case before, a Meth compels Kovacs to his employment, but whereas he was called on to play detective last time, now he’s tasked with being a bodyguard.
Although he never gets the chance to explain his rationale, a rich Meth called Horace Axley (Michael Shanks) proves he’s in danger when Kovacs wakes up in his new sleeve, in a room of murdered strangers. The only familiar face is Axley who’s now very much dead for good.
From there, Kovacs goes on the run looking to clear his name after being framed for Axley’s murder, and that of the only woman he’s ever loved, the legendary Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), a one-time revolutionary presumed dead. Falconer’s reappearance disrupts the delicate balance of society and has Kovacs questioning how this can be true.
At its best, Altered Carbon is an expansive, mind-blowing visual experience for the small screen. At its worst, it’s a garbled mess of half-baked ideas and thinly connected plot points.
The first year, which starred Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad) as Kovacs, had a cyberpunk detective story feel to it. Season 2 jettisons that. This is partly due to the lack of creativity in the new locations, with much of the show now taking place in the dimly lit over industrialised streets of a colonised planet called Harlan’s World.
But some of the disappointment over season 2 rests on Mackie’s shoulders. The actor, best known for playing Sam Wilson/The Falcon in numerous Marvel Studios movies, shows a limited dramatic range in the role. Kovacs is a tortured soul with centuries of regrets pressing down on him. Kinnaman captured this human side of Kovacs far better than Mackie, who feels more like a repurposed Terminator than a man who’s become the last of his kind.
To throw all this criticism on Mackie might seem a touch unfair. The story and scripts are clearly a step down from the award-winning first season, which was like Blade Runner (1982) given a healthy dose of Kung fu action. This time the writers seem less confident about the tone they’re after, or where the story is headed. It’s not incoherent, but it’s unduly confusing and near impossible for newcomers to settle into.
Chris Connor has spent 25 years trying to catch a break in Hollywood after countless television appearances. With Altered Carbon, he’s finally found his breakout role as Kovacs’ A.I companion Poe. Projecting himself as the curator of a nostalgic hotel called Evermore, Poe (who’s made to look like famed author Edgar Allen Poe) is the faithful companion and sidekick to our hero. While he was a reluctant partner in the first season, Poe spends much of the second trying desperately to prove his worth. Flawed by a glitch (sort of a digital scar really) inflicted previously, Poe’s memory proves to be unreliable and his mistakes create more than one problem for Kovacs.
With Mackie coming up short with the dramatic punches, Connor hits home nearly every time. Both characters are forced to take a hard look inward and face some deep truths. Poe’s journey in search of Harlan’s World’s original founder, into a digital abyss he’s retreated to, provides some of the season’s most heartfelt moments. It would be a crime if Connor, a veteran TV star, didn’t finally start getting recognition for his excellent work here.
Losing two episodes for a total of eight, Altered Carbon is given less time to explore its bizarre universe and unpack more about its future civilisation. Big ideas are mostly hinted at with throwaway lines of dialogue as if everyone can’t wait for the next bruising action sequence to get underway. And that’s the biggest letdown of this latest season, really — the writers don’t seem to respect how smart the show could be.
Audiences aren’t even given a proper mystery to solve this time, either, just a thinly constructed series of plot devices that serve to provide a little coherence between the doses of violence. And there’s a lot of violence! Maybe too much. Sure, the world of Altered Carbon is one where the value of human life has been greatly diminished, but audiences deserve something smarter than what the show is now delivering. Too often situations that might’ve required a bit of thinking are resolved with villains being impaled on sharp objects and bullets sprayed everywhere.
For those who enjoyed the first season, the second is likely going to feel like a big letdown. Nevertheless, Altered Carbon delivers something more daring and original than 95% of what’s streaming today.
Cast & Crew
writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, San Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Shapker & Elizabeth Padden.
directors: Ciaran Donnelly, M.J Bassett, Jeremy Webb & Salli Richardson-Whitfield.
starring: Anthony Mackie, Chris Conner, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lela Loren, Simone Missick, Dina Shihabi, Torben Liebrecht, Hayley Law, Will Yun Lee, Michael Shanks, Sen Mitsuji, James Saito & Neal McDonough.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on March 22, 2020. | https://medium.com/framerated/altered-carbon-season-two-1614417fd3b0 | ['Jeffrey Bricker'] | 2020-03-23 18:31:01.029000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Netflix', 'Television', 'Review', 'TV'] |
LeetCode — 1247. Minimum Swaps to Make Strings Equal | 1. The Problem
You are given two strings s1 and s2 of equal length consisting of letters "x" and "y" only. Your task is to make these two strings equal to each other. You can swap any two characters that belong to different strings, which means: swap s1[i] and s2[j] . Return the minimum number of swaps required to make s1 and s2 equal, or return -1 if it is impossible to do so.
Example 1:
Input: s1 = "xx", s2 = "yy"
Output: 1
Explanation:
Swap s1[0] and s2[1], s1 = "yx", s2 = "yx".
Example 2:
Input: s1 = "xy", s2 = "yx"
Output: 2
Explanation:
Swap s1[0] and s2[0], s1 = "yy", s2 = "xx".
Swap s1[0] and s2[1], s1 = "xy", s2 = "xy".
Note that you can't swap s1[0] and s1[1] to make s1 equal to "yx", cause we can only swap chars in different strings.
Example 3:
Input: s1 = "xx", s2 = "xy"
Output: -1
Example 4:
Input: s1 = "xxyyxyxyxx", s2 = "xyyxyxxxyx"
Output: 4
Constraints:
1 <= s1.length, s2.length <= 1000
s1, s2 only contain 'x' or 'y' .
2. Description
Switch letters to make two strings are even. Return the minimum times if makes them the same. -1 if it can’t be.
3. Needs Attention
Some cases may return -1 All x and y
4. Values recommendation
“xxyxyxxyyxyyx”, “yyxxyxyyxxyxy” “xxxxxxxxxx”, “yyyyyyyyyy”
5. Reference Code (Beats 100%, 4ms)
x1, y1: What difference between s1 and s2 in s1
x2, y2: differ from s1 in s2
For example s1 = “xxxyyy”, s2 = “yyxyxx”, in s1, there are 2x and 2y is different from s2, so x1=2, y1=2. Because we need to have the same amount of x in both s1 and s2, x1 + x2/ y1+y2 must be divisible by 2. Or return -1.
s1=“xxyy”, s2=“yyxx” after first moving would be “xyyy” and “xyxx”, second ”xyxy” and “xyxy”. Each time we are switching a x to a y or a y to a x. Two x switches one time, then we will know x1/2 + y1/2. If the count of x or y is not even, we have to make them even first and do the same switching again. For example “xy” and “yx” first step is to switch to “xx” and “yy” then “xy” and “xy”.
In sum, if x1 and x2 is even, every two counts we switch once. If not, twice. That is (x1+y1)/2 * 1 + x1%2 + y1%2 | https://medium.com/@yy929058/leetcode-1247-minimum-swaps-to-make-strings-equal-fd06cd191b21 | ['Cheng-Che Hsieh'] | 2020-12-09 04:01:10.247000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Ｍedium', 'Algorithms', 'Swift'] |
Light Behind The Clouds. Light Behind The Clouds | Light Behind The Clouds
Poems From The Porch
It is quite humid this morning, something to be expected in summer, but it hasn’t been the norm this year. The air is finally still, and I feel the same stillness in me, too.
The sunlight only momentarily reached the vines that I have woven through the porch rails. It made my heart smile to see the splash of brightness on this cloudy day. It reminded me that there is light behind the clouds.
Now there is a little brown and grey bird hopping in the crepe myrtles. Did the wind take their blossoms? I don’t see them on the ground. Maybe they were lifted up and distributed elsewhere. I hope they enjoyed the ride, felt the freedom and exhilaration of flight, like I do in dreams, sometimes.
Their sojourn on the trees was interrupted by a random event, like the young family who was driving together a few weeks ago when another vehicle overcame them and started shooting at their car; or like my friends who weren’t able to breathe when they walked outside their homes because of the sparks that became raging wildfires; or like my classmate who was blown across a room in her home when an explosion shattered the windows and made the city all but uninhabitable.
What about the man who smothered under the knee of a policeman? I didn’t know him personally, but I’m thinking that he didn’t expect to die that day. And then there is my friend who has been diagnosed with ALS and my friend, his wife, who must work to keep up the insurance that pays for his care. It seems worth mentioning that we are in the midst of a pandemic and massive political strife.
There is a sense that these random events are escalating and that we, as a collective, are about to implode. Some people attribute these happenings to a disgruntled deity, creating a narrative of retribution. That feels like darkness to me, rather than the Light that I know is there. It seems that finding a reason for chaos makes it appear manageable, but it isn’t, and never will be.
Chaos and impermanence are the states in which we live. We breathe in, breathe out, pause. We pant, and we hold our breath, and we question the nature of breathing as we wait for the next inhale. All of us are control freaks. Breathing is simply a gift.
I know this, so I relax into my next breath, and I realize, in the stillness, that I am grieving. The whole world is in a state of grief, so we try to find order in chaos. Our pain is palpable, and we are crying, although sometimes the tears are shed through anger.
I wonder if the crepe myrtles are grieving the loss of their blossoms, too. I’d like to think they are because there is comfort in knowing that we are all in this together. I want to reassure them that the sun is still shining behind the clouds and that they will bloom again, but they may not be ready to hear it. | https://medium.com/a-love-centered-life/poems-from-the-porch-8ed07ef47fdd | ['Ani Vidrine'] | 2020-09-22 01:14:37.647000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Mindfulness', 'Spirituality', 'Poetry', 'Nature'] |
Pitch Predict — Part 1. Using Machine Learning to Predict the… | Using Machine Learning to Predict the Next Pitch
This is part 1 of 3 in a series of posts covering the work from a recent Data Science project at Lambda School. The project github repo can be found here. To gain some experience with Plotly Dash, I also created a dashboard app, here. Part 2 of this series can be found here, and part 3 here.
Introduction
A general description of the project and our goals
The task of hitting a baseball at the major league level is extremely difficult. Consider the benchmark for a great hitter is a batting avg of .300 — that’s only a 30% success rate. If the batter knew what pitch the pitcher was likely to throw next, his chances of success could improve significantly. Are pitchers more predictable than batters (or humans in general) realize? For a collaborative Data Science group project, based on data which encapsulates a pitcher’s prior tendencies, batter’s prior tendencies, game state, the last n-chronological pitches, and pitcher-batter prior matchup history, we set out to use machine learning models to attempt to answer that question.
This project was intended to form the foundation for further study, and potentially, an application which combines the pitch prediction functionality with real-time information about the current game, pitcher, and batter presented within an attractive user interface. Design decisions were made with this eventuality in mind, and many components were designed to be generalized and scaled with elastic resources.
Data Gathering
An explanation of where our data is from, its high level characteristics, how we store and access it, and how it is subdivided
Pitch data was collected from Statcast via the pybaseball package. Pybaseball’s statcast class allows us to query pitches by date range. After identifying the start and end dates of the 2017, 2018, and 2019* (until 8/31/19) regular seasons, we were able to load the data into Pandas Dataframes containing every recorded pitch from each regular season. These Dataframes were then subject to rudimentary data cleaning. After cleaning, the dataframes were compressed and stored in github as pickle files.
import pandas as pd
from pybaseball import statcast drop_cols = ['spin_dir','spin_rate_deprecated', 'break_angle_deprecated','break_length_deprecated',
'game_type', 'tfs_deprecated', 'tfs_zulu_deprecated', 'umpire'] #2017
df = statcast('2017-04-02', '2017-10-02')
df = df.drop(columns=drop_cols) df.to_pickle(path='pitches_2017.pkl', compression='zip')
With future project developments in mind, the data, in addition to being compressed and stored in the main project GitHub repository as pickle files, was also stored in an S3 bucket as pickle files and csv files. These csv files were then used to create a Redshift table, containing all regular season pitches from 2010–2019. This storage architecture was designed for future iterations of this project in order to scale the number of pitchers for whom models would be trained and for the creation of a real-time pitch prediction web application. For the scope of the current project, model training and predictions were generated in Jupyter Lab notebooks on AWS Sagemaker ml.m4.4xlarge instances. The project dashboard was created using Plotly Dash and hosted on Heroku.
Data Pre-Processing / Feature Engineering
Explanation of engineered features and methods
As is often the case in the field of data science, the majority of the time spent on this project was devoted to data cleaning, processing, and feature engineering. At the outset, we took a sort of high level overview of the project, and tried to layout a blueprint of all the necessary steps and how we wanted to approach transforming the raw pitch data from Statcast into the format we wanted for our input vector into machine learning models.
Clean up bad/faulty data
Without going too far into the details, we encountered a few glitches in the data here and there during the process of data wrangling and feature engineering, so we added some code upfront to try to take care of most of it. Basically this included things like weeding out a small number of games played overseas without the Statcast camera tracking system installed, replacing unknown pitch type with NaN values, and fixing the number of balls from 4 to 3 in a few cases, and a few other minor instances of similar faulty data.
Engineered Features for all pitch data:
While the raw Statcast data itself includes a large number of features, we tried to get creative and came up with some pretty cool additional features in an attempt to augment the performance of our predictive models. Since every pitcher has a unique repertoire of pitches and individual tendencies, trying to build a predictive model with data from all pitchers lumped together would be futile. For this reason, we knew that each pitcher we wanted to predict would have to be filtered from the complete dataset of all pitches. Before reaching that step though, there were plenty of features we engineered that would be applicable to all pitchers.
Game State Features
The Statcast data includes the current status of the count, (via a feature for balls and feature for strikes), but we also wanted to use the 12 possible counts as a categorical variable. We combined the balls and strikes into a string representation, where 0–0 count was encoded as ‘00’, 3–2 as ‘32’, etc. Additionally, we further mapped the count into 3 categories representing whether the count favored the pitcher, the batter, or if the count was neutral. It stands to reason that pitchers approach these situations differently, and their choice of pitch should be heavily variable based on the favorability of the count.
Next we created a feature that represented the score differential, or how many runs ahead or behind the pitchers team was. Next, using the data for baserunners, we converted the baserunner features from using the baserunner id to a binary 1/0 whether or not a runner was on each base. Also we added a feature for whether ANY player was on any base vs bases empty, and also a feature whether or not the bases were loaded. A pitcher may have a subtle difference in his tendencies when throwing from the stretch with runners on base as opposed to from a full windup when the bases are empty. A runner on first base has the potential to steal a base and advance, so perhaps some pitchers are less likely to throw as many breaking balls in the dirt that could get away from the catcher and allow the runner to advance into scoring position. Perhaps a runner on 2nd base with a clear view of the catchers pitch signals and potential to steal the sign and tip off the player at bat with a signal of their own could influence a pitchers choice of pitches. Maybe some of these tendencies could contribute to a machine learning model in making predictions.
Strikezone and Batter Swung / Chased Features
Using the location data from the Statcast camera system, of both the boundaries of the strikezone for that particular hitter based on his height/stance, as well as the dimension of the size of home plate, we created a feature that classified each pitch as in or out of the strikezone (regardless of whether the umpire called it a ball or a strike). Also, using the ‘description’ feature from Statcast, we extracted the descriptions that indicated that a batter swung at the pitch, and created a binary feature representing whether or not the batter swung. By combining these engineered features, we created a feature to represent whether or not the hitter ‘chased’ a pitch that was outside of the strikezone. We thought this would be useful later when creating our scouting report on each batter, since if a batter has a tendency to chase at certain pitch types outside the strike zone, that information may be known by the pitcher in advance of the matchup and he may be more likely than otherwise to throw certain pitch types vs that player.
def make_strikezone_swung_and_chase_features(df):
df = df.copy()
#create swung column
def swung(x):
swung = ['foul','hit_into_play','swinging_strike',
'hit_into_play_no_out', 'hit_into_play_score',
'foul_tip','swinging_strike_blocked',
'foul_bunt','missed_bunt']
return 1 if x in swung else 0 df['batter_swung'] = df['description'].apply(swung)
#initialize in_strikezone and chased features:
df['in_strikezone'] = 1
df['chased'] = 0
df['ball_high'] = df['plate_z'] > df['sz_top']
df['ball_low'] = df['plate_z'] < df['sz_bot']
df['ball_left'] = df['plate_x'].apply(lambda x: x < -0.73)
df['ball_right'] = df['plate_x'].apply(lambda x: x > 0.73)
df['in_strikezone'] = df['ball_high'] + df['ball_low'] + df['ball_left'] + df['ball_right']
df['in_strikezone'] = df['in_strikezone'].apply(lambda x: 0 if x > 0 else 1)
df['chased'] = df['batter_swung'] - df['in_strikezone']
df['chased'] = df['chased'].apply(lambda x: 1 if x == 1 else 0)
return df
Pitch Category and Null Value Imputation
Unfortunately a very small percentage (~0.4%) of the pitches in the Statcast database, perhaps due to random glitches in the camera system or some other reason, had missing values for the pitch type classification of that pitch. In order to preserve continuity of pitches on a game by game basis, rather than simply dropping all these rows from the dataframe, we decided to impute these values. Our imputation strategy was just to use the overall distributions of pitch type for a given pitcher, and make a random guess, using those distributions as the weights for the random guess. Next, we mapped different pitch types into a more general pitch type category: fastballs (4-seam, 2-seam, cutter, sinker), breaking balls (curveballs, sliders, knuckle curves, screwball), and offspeed pitches (change-up, knuckle ball, and eephus pitch).
Up Next:
Coming next, part 2 will continue with feature engineering, including the creation of batter scouting report (tendencies and success vs different types of pitches), a pitcher scouting report, game flow/trailing pitch features, and pitch tendencies from pitcher/batter prior matchup history. Finally, part 3 will cover model selection, training, and analysis of the model predictions. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/pitch-predict-part-1-7001516d9f40 | ['Josh Mancuso'] | 2020-04-14 16:31:07.145000+00:00 | ['Baseball', 'Data Science', 'Pandas', 'Machine Learning', 'Python'] |
Mastery Takes Years. But You Can Learn All You Need to Know in 8 Weeks. Here’s How. | The book takes a simple dish (chocolate chip cookies, scrambled eggs, chicken noodle soup, etc.) and cooks the same dish as much as 50 times, slightly tweaking their recipe each time.
They whisk batter for 90 seconds, then 120 seconds, then 60 seconds to find the best result.
They bake cookies for 18 minutes, 18.5 minutes, or 19 minutes and determine the tastiest cookie.
They use 10 grams of salt, then 12 grams, then 13.5 grams and learn the perfect amount, down to the gram.
After they’ve cooked the dish anywhere from 25 to 50 times, they settle on the scientifically-proven “best” result — the most ideal version of their dish.
It’s proven. They’ve done the work. You can trust them.
If you approach your goals this way, you become unstoppable.
If You Want the Fastest Results, Model Those Who Have Already Done the Work
One of the greatest parts of learning a new skill is that countless others have already learned it, made all the mistakes, and are willing to tell you the exact steps you need to do. Just Google it.
Unfortunately, most people are afraid of learning a new skill because they think it’ll take years to learn it.
The truth is, you can probably learn everything you need to know about most skills (i.e. to gain proficiency) in a matter of weeks. Think about that. Take a new skill — learning the guitar, baking, website design, juggling — and you can probably learn pretty much all you need to know in a matter of weeks (with the right training).
Let’s be clear — you’re not going to become a master. It could take years, even decades to truly master a skill.
But you don’t need to fully master a skill to benefit from it. You just need to be proficient.
See, it might take 20 years to learn how to cook the “perfect” pesto pasta. That’s an option, for sure.
But it only takes a few weeks to learn how to cook a “really good” pesto pasta.
At the end of the day, you can probably achieve the goals you want from knowing how to do something “really well.” You probably don’t need “perfect.”
Once you realize that, you can save years of your life.
The temperature to boil water is precisely 212 degrees Fahrenheit. You could increase the temperature to 230 or 250, but the water is still boiled. After 212, any extra energy is just unnecessary.
This is how you must approach skills — putting in just enough effort to learn pretty much all you need to know. There may be a couple of skills you’ll eventually need to truly master, and that’s where years of deliberate practice are necessary.
But for everything else, just learn as much as you need to. Don’t waste extra energy boiling water, it’s already boiled.
Mastery takes years. But you can pretty much learn all you need to know in a matter of weeks.
Here’s how.
The Standard Pace is For Chumps
The truth is, mastery only takes as long as you want it to take.
That’s because you control the two most fundamental virtues of mastery: repetition and intensity. If you practice something (correctly) 10x more than someone, you’re going to learn far faster than them. The same goes for if you practice something (correctly) 10x more intensely than someone.
The more you increase these two areas — repetition and intensity -the faster you can learn something.
In 2014, Scott Young (author of Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career) was a few years out of college when he decided on a unique goal:
He wasn’t going to speak English (his native language) for 12 months.
He was testing a new framework to see how much faster he could learn a difficult skill (foreign languages) than the average person.
He traveled to Spain, Brazil, China, and Korea, becoming fluent in each respective country. In a few short months, he had mastered conversational Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Korean — skills that normally take the average person years of practice.
But the most surprising part? Young discovered he could apply this new framework to learn just about anything, learning skills 10x and even 100x faster than the average person. Over the next few years, Young would earn the equivalent of a 4-year degree from MIT in just 12 months. He quickly mastered creative skills like photography by rigorous experimentation and repetition.
As best-selling author Derek Sivers once said, “The standard pace is for chumps.” When you decide to increase the quantity and quality of your effort, you can master just about anything — 100x faster, too.
For every goal you set, there is a long traditional path, and a shorter alternative. If you want to increase your results by 100x, it’s up to you to find these “wormholes” and exploit them.
In 1995, Matthew Syed (author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice) became the #1 table tennis player in England. He described the common response he heard when people found out about his Olympic-level talent: they’d say he was “talented,” or “lucky,” or had something others didn’t. Obviously, right?
Not quite. Syed explained that he had the perfect conditions around him to succeed — he had a brother who was also excited about table tennis, a great coach, and a 24-hour practice table where he was able to put in thousands of hours practice as a teenager. As a result, he was uniquely positioned to succeed.
Here’s another example. In Essentialism, Greg Mckeown described a smart individual who created several extra hours in his workday by skipping meetings. After the meeting, the individual simply asked his colleagues, “Hey, what’d I miss?” Since most meetings are largely irrelevant to many attendees, he was able to learn in 2 minutes what it took everyone else 2 hours to learn.
Look around you. What’s your “unfair advantage”? How can you find a wormhole and speed up the process? What context are you in that nobody else has access to? How can you use that to learn ultra-quickly?
Most people stick with the traditional path — it’s safer, familiar, and just about everyone’s done it that way for a long time. It seems to work.
But if you want to learn a new skill 100x faster, there are several ways to do it. And once you begin taking these “wormholes” — shortcuts that take you to mastery in a matter of months — you’ll start seeing huge increases in income, focus, and opportunities.
If You Can Endure the Pain of Evolving, You Can Have Things 99% of Other People Can’t
“Arrogant or critical people are often people with low self-esteem who are afraid of taking risks. That’s because if you learn something new, then you are required to make mistakes in order to fully understand what you have learned.” -Robert Kiyosaki
Evolving is painful.
Becoming a better version of yourself and learning new skills requires time, energy, humility, and study.
Evolving means constantly becoming a child again. You must become a young, teachable student again, over and over.
You must constantly be admitting, “I don’t know.”
There is so much you don’t know that will be revealed to you over the course of your studies and self-discovery. And the most helpful way to “grease the wheels” of this journey is to remain humble and open to correction and teaching.
The worst thing you can do is insist you already know everything.
Michelin-star chef Gordon Ramsay had a show called Kitchen Nightmares where he would audit a struggling restaurant’s food processes.
There was a particular episode where a failing restaurant was led by a stubborn and arrogant chef who refused to change his menu or learn how to cook new dishes.
Ramsey came in and began cooking marvelous new dishes for the restaurant. He prepared a sea bass dish for the owners, which they loved.
However, the chef refused to try the dish. “I already know what sea bass tastes like,” he argued dismissively. “I’ve been cooking for 38 years.”
Instead of learning a free, valuable lesson from a world-class expert, this man chose pride over growth.
The chef was later fired and replaced by a younger, more dynamic chef. The new chef was less skilled than the 38-year veteran but was more valuable because he quickly learned all the new recipes and adapted to the changing restaurant.
This is how most people react to criticism — defensiveness and immaturity.
Instead of humbly admitting they don’t know everything and gratefully accepting wisdom and teaching from experts, they choose pride and stagnation over humility and massive growth.
Evolving is painful. Most people simply choose not to do it.
But once you decide to become someone who is open to correction and teaching, you become an unstoppable force.
If you shift your mindset into being an open, thirsty mind that is hungry for knowledge (and humble enough to accept correction), you’ll become more capable than 90% of the population to achieve massive success.
“Every next level of your life will demand a different you.”-Leonardo DiCaprio
What got you here won’t get you there.
Mastering success means mastering the art of constantly becoming a better version of yourself.
This is done through slow, deliberate choices, and is sped-up exponentially through being humble enough to accept correction and teaching.
In Conclusion
A championship-winning soccer player needs to know more than just how to kick a ball well.
They must learn contract negotiations, team leadership, strengths and conditioning, nutrition, brand management, mental fortitude, public speaking, and a dozen other non-soccer skills.
They don’t need to master these skills — just the soccer skills.
But they do need to get pretty good at other skills.
This doesn’t have to take long. The more you increase your repetition and intensity, the faster you can learn new skills.
Don’t waste time trying to be “perfect” when “really good” is good enough to achieve your goals.
Mastery can take years. But you can learn pretty much all you need to know in a matter of weeks.
Ready To Level-Up?
If you want to become extraordinary and become 10x more effective than you were before, check out my checklist.
Click here to get the checklist now! | https://medium.com/publishous/mastery-takes-years-but-you-can-learn-all-you-need-to-know-in-8-weeks-heres-how-2bf4f7dae10e | ['Anthony Moore'] | 2020-08-10 12:01:02.088000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Growth', 'Anthony Moore', 'Mastery', 'Learning'] |
Perform Better Data Analysis in Python with Pandas | Perform Better Data Analysis in Python with Pandas
A Python library that can be used to better understand a dataset is Pandas.
Data Analysis
Data analysis is about asking and answering questions about the dataset.
You need to spark questions about the dataset that you can pursue to better understand it. One way to do this is by summarizing and visualizing the dataset.
Pandas
The Pandas Python library is built for fast data analysis and manipulation. The strength of Pandas seems to be in the data manipulation side, but it comes with very handy and easy to use tools for data analysis, providing wrappers around standard statistical methods in statsmodels and graphing methods in matplotlib.
Onset of Diabetes
The UIC Machine Learning repository provides a vast array of different standard machine learning datasets that can use to study and practice applied machine learning. Lets consider the Pima Indians diabetes dataset.
The dataset describes the onset or lack of onset of diabetes in female Pima Indians using details from their medical records. Download the dataset and save it into your current working directory with the name pima-indians-diabetes.data.
Summarize Data
We will start out by understanding the data that we have got by looking at its structure.
Load The Data
Start by loading the CSV data from file into memory as a data frame. We know the names of the data provided, so we will set those names when loading the data from the file.
import pandas as pd names = ['preg', 'plas', 'pres', 'skin', 'test', 'mass', 'pedi', 'age', 'class'] data = pd.read_csv('pima-indians-diabetes.data', names=names)
Describe Data
We can now look at the shape of the data. We can take a look at the first 60 rows of data by printing the data frame directly.
print(data)
We can see that all of the data is numeric and that the class value on the end is the dependent variable that we want to make predictions about. At the end of the data dump we can see the description of the data frame itself as a 768 rows and 9 columns. So now we have idea of the shape of our data.
Next we can get a feeling for the distribution of each attribute by reviewing summary statistics.
print(data.describe())
This displays a table of detailed distribution information for each of the 9 attributes in our data frame. Specifically: the count, mean, standard deviation, min, max, and 25th, 50th (median), 75th percentiles.
We can review these statistics and start noting interesting facts about our problem. Such as the average number of pregnancies is 3.8, the minimum age is 21 and some people have a body mass index of 0, which is impossible and a sign that some of the attribute values should be marked as missing.
Visualize Data
A graph is a lot more telling about the distribution and relationships of attributes.
Nevertheless, it is important to take your time and review the statistics first. Each time you review the data a different way, you open yourself up to noticing different aspects and potentially achieving different insights into the problem.
Pandas uses matplotlib for creating graphs and provides convenient functions to do so.
Feature Distributions
The first and easy property to review is the distribution of each attribute.
We can start out and review the spread of each attribute by looking at box and whisker plots
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt data.boxplot()
Box and Whisker Plots
We can see that the test attribute has a lot of outliers. We can also see that the plas attribute seems to have a relatively even normal distribution. We can also look at the distribution of each attribute by discretization the values into buckets and review the frequency in each bucket as histograms.
data.hist()
This lets you note interesting properties of the attribute distributions such as the possible normal distribution of attributes like pres and skin.
Histogram Matrix
Feature-Class Relationships
The next important relationship to explore is that of each attribute to the class attribute.
One approach is to visualize the distribution of attributes for data instances for each class and note and differences. You can generate a matrix of histograms for each attribute and one matrix of histograms for each class value, as follows:
data.groupby('class').hist()
The data is grouped by the class attribute (two groups) then a matrix of histograms is created for the attributes is in each group. The result is two images:
Histogram Matrix for Class 0
Histogram Matrix for Class 1
Feature-Feature Relationships
The final important relationship to explore is that of the relationships between the attributes.
We can review the relationships between attributes by looking at the distribution of the interactions of each pair of attributes.
from pandas.plotting import scatter_matrix scatter_matrix(data, alpha=0.2, figsize=(6, 6), diagonal='kde')
This uses a built function to create a matrix of scatter plots of all attributes versus all attributes. The diagonal where each attribute would be plotted against itself shows the Kernel Density Estimation of the attribute instead.
Scatter Plot Matrix
This is a powerful plot from which a lot of inspiration about the data can be drawn. For example, we can see a possible correlation between age and preg and another possible relationship between skin and mass. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/analysis-with-pandas-bce54d40ae57 | ['Johar M. Ashfaque'] | 2020-12-28 19:39:17.409000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Programming', 'Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis'] |
Vegan Diet For Weight Loss | Veganism, the plant-based diet that excludes meat and animal products, is booming. Since 2008, there has been a 350% increase in the number of vegans in the UK alone. The origin of this motivation is varied, but includes concerns about animal welfare, the environment and religious motives.
Many people, however, do it to have a healthier diet. Research suggests that veganism may have health benefits if it is well planned. For those who have followed a diet rich in meat and dairy products for most of their lives, embarking on a vegan diet can lead to significant changes in the body.
The first weeks
The first thing anyone starting a vegan diet may notice is an energy boost with eliminating the processed meat found in many omnivorous diets, and replacing it with fruits, vegetables, and nuts. These foods will increase your levels of vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
After a few weeks, there is likely to be a change in bowel function, either to a more regular healthy pattern or an increase in bloating and swelling. This is due to the higher fiber content of a vegan diet and the simultaneous increase in carbohydrates that ferment in the intestine and can cause irritable bowel syndrome.
Three to six months later
Some people may find that increasing fruits and vegetables and reducing processed foods can help reduce acne. At this point, however, your vitamin D stores may be declining, as the main sources of this in our diet come from meat, fish, and dairy, and it’s not always noticeable until it’s too late. Vitamin D is not well understood, but it is essential for maintaining healthy bones, teeth, and muscles. Its absence has been linked to cancer, heart disease, migraines, and depression.
A few months later, a well-balanced vegan diet that is low in salt and processed foods can have impressive benefits for cardiovascular health, helping to prevent heart disease, stroke, and reduce the risk of diabetes. As the intake of nutrients such as iron, zinc and calcium in a vegan diet is reduced, our bodies improve by absorbing them from the intestine. Adaptation may be enough to prevent deficiencies in some people but not for all, in which case supplements can fill the deficit.
From six months to several years
About a year on a vegan diet, vitamin B12 reserves may be depleted. Vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient for the healthy function of blood and nerve cells and can only be found in products of animal origin. The symptoms of B12 deficiency include shortness of breath, fatigue, poor memory and tingling in the hands and feet.
The B12 deficiency is easily prevented by eating three servings per day of fortified foods or taking a supplement. Any deficiency would nullify the benefits of a vegan diet for heart disease and stroke risk and can cause permanent damage to the nervous system and brain.
Several years later, even our bones will begin to notice the change. Our skeleton is a mineral store and up to age 30 we can add minerals to it from our diet, but after that, our bones can no longer absorb minerals, so it is vital to get enough calcium when we are young.
Read More in
https://soccacorner.org/2020/11/04/vegan-diet-for-weight-loss/ | https://medium.com/@soccacorner/vegan-diet-for-weight-loss-483d0b0839a4 | ["Socca'S Corner"] | 2020-12-24 15:50:00.407000+00:00 | ['Vegan', 'Diet', 'Veggie', 'Loss', 'Socca'] |
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